Category:
Small Business
What if you could control and monitor your image across all social media? What if you could sign up for all the important social media sites out there and hear all the conversations being made about your business or brand? It sounds like a lot of work, but not if you’ve heard of KnowEm. A few months back we wrote a post that focused on this extremely useful social media service, which, as a kind of username detective, basically helps small business owners, startups, or even enterprises and larger companies check for the use of their brand, product, trademark, personal name, or username instantly on over 400 popular and emerging social networks or social media sites – including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Multiply, WordPress, MySpace, Formspring, Blogger, Posterous, and many more. KnowEm is a great brand management tool, too. You can grab your name and secure your brand before someone else does – someone who doesn’t have the authority for – Read the full article
Tracking time and invoicing clients are important office tasks that you may often wish you don’t have to do. If only, right? But regardless of whether you’re a freelancer, a consultant, a small business, or a corporation, you just have to have some form of system to keep that income stream running smoothly – plus, of course, a staff member employed specifically for the purpose of managing that system. Enter FreshBooks, a web-based accounting, time billing, cost estimate, and invoicing application that has been dubbed “the leader in online invoicing”. It’s designed to help users save time and money in performing such accounting tasks as tracking income, managing estimates, creating and sending invoices, receiving customer payments, and generating accurate year-end financial reports. It’s definitely a great concept, but does FreshBooks perform better than if you just hired an accountant or a third party? Our answer: yes. A resounding one. We here at Lakeshore Branding have recently incorporated FreshBooks into our – Read the full article
There is a multitude of ways that a company can catch the attention of their target audience. More and more, companies are turning to social media outlets to gain the attention that they need for their brands to increase in popularity. These programs can be taken even a step further through the use of mobile marketing as well. The first thing to know about marketing through mobile services is that there are laws which surround this. You are not allowed to use leads which have been purchased as you have to have permission to send messages to clients. If you do not have permission, you face legal difficulties due to the FCC anti-mobile telemarketing laws. There are ways that you can make sure to have a lucrative marketing through the mobile market and a lot of it has to deal with social media marketing. This is because when there is a good social media marketing plan, you can reach new – Read the full article
Search engine optimization may be difficult to effectively utilize, but it can be crucial to staying competitive in the Internet age. Your business is competing against other companies who are using search engine optimization techniques to increase their presence on the Internet and boost their brand recognition. It is important to ensure that people are visiting your website if you want to succeed as an Internet business, especially for ecommerce sites. If nobody visits your site, how do you expect to sell anything? To avoid this problem, here are some SEO tips to help get you started on your path to a larger web presence. Keywords are a key factor in your website’s ranking. In order to ensure that people are able to find your business, you should invest some time in figuring out the optimal keywords for your website. Work with a local search engine marketing company to find what keywords will work best for you. The keywords should – Read the full article
Something big is going to happen this October 14 to 16 in Las Vegas. It’s called the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, the first and only tradeshow, conference, and media event created for the rapidly growing industry of blogging and new media. We here at Lakeshore Branding are going to attend the event, but if that’s not enough to convince you to come and join us (it should be more than enough to convince you, though!) then here are the top six reasons why BlogWorld & New Media Expo is a can’t-miss. Money? Influence? Or both?: If you’re a small business owner, Internet marketer, e-Commerce store owner, corporate executive, online journalist, podcaster, broadcaster, or personal or professional blogger who has some form of stake in the web, then surely you’ll have plenty to gain by attending the event and learning more about the top strategies, tools, and technologies used in developing content for the web today. BlogWorld 2010 is where – Read the full article
Webinar – a neologism for “web-based seminar” – is a presentation, lecture, workshop, or seminar that is transmitted over the Web. It can be conducted for different purposes, like lead generation or marketing or training or product demonstration, but one key aspect of any webinar is that it’s interactive. As opposed to webcasts, which are pretty much a one-way thing, webinars usually let attendees comment, ask questions, and share their personal opinions to the host as well as to the other members of the audience. Webinars: who knew that technology would grow this fast and allow us to leverage these neat video conferencing tools today? Yes, it all sounds pretty remarkable. If you’re a small business owner and Internet marketer, we’ll certainly understand if you’re fascinated about what webinars can bring to the business. The question is: do webinars actually work? And will they work for any business or enterprise, regardless of size? Here are several thoughts on webinars as – Read the full article
If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you’ll know by now how much Lakeshore Branding loves Magento eCommerce. We’ve been gushing about how awesome it is, but at the end of the day, of course, it’s just our recommendation. There are literally hundreds of e-Commerce platforms and shopping cart solutions to choose from – aimed at retailers of varying sizes across a number of industries – and we thought that on this post, we’ll look at one of the notable non-Magento ones. Hey, we’re all for fairness. Established in 2006, Shopify is a hosted e-Commerce solution designed expressly for small online retailers. It’s been generating plenty of buzz recently for its ability to get startups and home-based merchants up and selling – quickly, easily, in a matter of minutes, even. Shopify boasts of a rich feature set that’s accessible via its elegant, easy-to-use interface. Almost everything is drag-and-drop, making store management a breeze. To get started, you choose a theme – Read the full article
PCI compliance refers to the set of requirements under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which mandates that all companies that process, store, or transmit credit card information adhere to these guidelines to maintain a secure payment environment. PCI DSS was constructed by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council, an independent group created by the major payment card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB). PCI DSS governs all businesses and organizations that accept, transmit, or store payment cardholder data, regardless of company size or number of transactions. Furthermore, organizations that use third-party payment card processors still have to meet the PCI compliance guidelines, even though third-party processors may cut down on risk exposure and reduce the effort to validate compliance. Small to medium sized business must satisfy a number of requirements in order to be PCI compliant. While meeting these constraints may seem tedious and difficult, the consequences of failing to be PCI compliant – Read the full article
