Category:
Small Business
There’s a lot of hype in the social media realm over the dozens of new tools and dashboards that help you keep an eye on what people are saying about your company. Indeed, online reputation monitoring and management is quickly becoming a must-have for your marketing strategy. It is every business owner’s dream to be able to keep tabs on their brand name. Now, they can swoop in and clean up after a dirty situation. Likewise, they can reward or thank people for good mentions. Social media is growing at an enormous rate, but it still makes up only a relatively small portion of the Internet. There are billions of websites and blogs that also like to talk about things. Many of those sites have a reach comparable to or larger than the social mentions that are happening around your brand. Reputation monitoring goes beyond social media: you should be monitoring the whole Internet. Before you spend money on expensive – Read the full article
Receiving organic traffic via the search engines is a wonderful thing – especially given that it’s free. However, problems can arise if you rely solely on search engine traffic. Your website may rank well today, but what happens if you wake up tomorrow and your site’s rankings have suddenly dropped? What if you suddenly can’t seem to get new visitors? Will you be able to communicate with most of the people who’d previously visited your online business? Stay Connected You would be very wise to diversify your traffic sources for your website and, more importantly, find a way to keep in touch with the visitors that you have attracted in the first place. One way to do that is by offering a free product, such as a report or an exclusive E-newsletter to anyone who visits your site in exchange for his or her E-mail address. Be mindful, though, that a freebie that has little value will only encourage people – Read the full article
Did you know that 20 percent of all searches on the Internet are for specific locations or businesses? Search giant Google did, and that’s why they changed Google Local to Google Places and began to display – for every search query that may be locally or geographically influenced – the local information for businesses, maps, and directions in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Right now, Google displays seven Places results for every search, as well as a map on the right side of the SERP that shows exactly where these seven places are. Obviously, Google Places pages help customers search these maps for local information while finding businesses within their area that are relevant to their search. Meanwhile, for small businesses, mom-and-pops, stores, offices, and other organizations with a physical address, Google Places is a unique local search tool that can drive and direct those who are searching to those who have something to offer or sell. Leverage this – Read the full article
We all get it from time to time: blogger’s block. Like we’ve completely run out of ideas for our blog or website. Like we’ve completely run out of time. Drinking gallons of coffee to no avail; staring at a blank screen for hours; pressing “Save Draft” over and over when, sadly, there isn’t really any “draft”. And with the onset of this “writerly” disease, we wonder: will traffic go down? Will readers soon unsubscribe? Will my online presence suffer from this inability to generate creative, engaging blog content? What about my business? Have I turned into a vegetable? It’s a scary thought, especially considering that one of the best ways to gain visibility, name or brand recognition, and search-engine love in this information-crazy world is to write or blog as best as you can. Calm down. Throw your worry about your writing room window. And beat blogger’s block by following these great tips below: Keep an idea journal. You never – Read the full article
Are you ready for 2011? As the Internet transforms, so should you. The rate at which technology evolves only means that, no matter how far along you’ve come with your Internet marketing program, there will always be something new to explore. There’ll always be something new to add to the mix. It is in this light that Lakeshore Branding takes a look at a number of online marketing trends expected to take off next year. We present this hoping that you’ll turn these expectations into opportunities – and the opportunities into tools to drive your business. HTML5: As the next major revision of the HTML standard, HTML5 is expected to emerge next year – and beyond – as that which will change the chemistry of the World Wide Web. Under development for much of the last few years, HTML5 will nonetheless continue to usher in the next generation of web development and programming. It will be supported by more browsers, – Read the full article
There’s a high-potential marketing platform that’s slowly and surely attracting corporations, small business owners, advertisers, and marketers alike. Observers say that this is a big one – an avenue through which one can reach a good portion of billions of consumers. It’s called SMS. You know: text messaging. No, you’re not reading an article from our 1998 archives. This is 2010 all right, but you know what? In the age of tablet computers, flashy apps, smartphones, and social media, SMS marketing has indeed become one of the most viable and important platforms for businesses today. Here are some numbers: An estimated 3.5 billion text messages are sent and received every day. 57 percent of all cell phone subscribers use SMS on a regular basis. According to the New York Times, 97 percent of text messages are opened, and 83 percent of these are opened in less than an hour. Despite the explosive growth of smartphones and mobile technologies like the – Read the full article
A business today needs to be mobile. Your customers are using their cell phones to access business information. If you aren’t easily accessible on their mobile phones then they’re going to start overlooking you in favor of businesses that are. Here are the tools that you need in order to go mobile with your business: Reinvent your website for the mobile platform. You may have a really amazing Flash website with a lot of interactive features that looks terrific on a desktop computer. However, that’s not going to work correctly on most mobile phones. You need to also have a mobile version of your site. (Lakeshore Branding has a list of really sweet tools here.) Each different mobile platform offers a browser WebKit to help optimize sites for the web. It’s worth it to work with a professional who is knowledgeable about making your website ready for mobile devices. Do local search engine optimization. Doing SEO for your website means taking – Read the full article
Twitter has become an incredibly popular social media darling, such that every time we talk about it, we can’t help but gush about how the microblogging service/social networking tool/greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread might positively impact our business. (We know; we’ve been guilty of this gushing, too. Look at our Twitter articles.) But what about the other end of the spectrum? The other side of Twitter’s double-edged sword? Or is it even possible that this acclaimed social media tool for business is indeed a double-edged sword? What if Twitter isn’t going to be – shucks! – good for your brand or business? Let’s look at the ways that this can happen. Ladies and gentlemen, your top six reasons NOT to use Twitter. Your targets don’t tweet. Just because everyone else is using Twitter doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Wait: is everyone really using Twitter? Maybe you’re in the industrial vibrators and compaction tables business. Or maybe you’re into diesel calibration or something. In – Read the full article
