It’s kind of stressful trying to figure out ways on how to rank better in search engines. Just figuring out where your website stands, in terms of relevant keywords, is like rocket science. Like, “Where does my culinary website appear on Google’s search results pages whenever someone searches for ‘easy homemade recipes’?” Sure, there are plenty of web-based apps and tools that promise to help you do just that. But sometimes, these apps and tools are still too expensive. Or too complicated. Their interface makes you want to squint, or hide under a desk. Enter AuthorityLabs. It’s a super simple search engine monitoring service, founded in Arizona by a guy named Chase Granberry. Basically what it does is give you the data or the feedback that you need in order to rank better. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business, an enterprise, an Internet marketing company, or an interactive communications agency; AuthorityLabs is pretty scalable – and extremely easy – Read the full article
E-mail: it’s one of the earliest and most widely used forms of communication on the Internet, even in the age of Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, and social media. It can also be one of the most scandalous – and potentially one of the most embarrassing – sources of personal information, or just plain bad manners. Indeed, a lot of people can do with a little primer on E-mail etiquette in today’s world – regardless of whether they’re corresponding for business purposes, sending important information to various recipients, or marketing through E-mail. So for the sake of those who aren’t quite sure whether or not they have been misbehaving on E-mail, here are a few must-follow tips on E-mail etiquette: Keep it short and sweet E-mail marketers should be familiar with this rule. The longer your E-mail message is, the higher the chances are that your recipients are not going to read all the way through it. It’s a sad fact – Read the full article
Chicago is lucky enough to host a only a few great tech events in Chicago each year and Social Dev Camp, is one of them. The two organizers, Tim Courtney (@timcourtney) and Andy Angelos (@andyangelos) ran a wonderful event last year and we are very much looking forward to this years conference. SocialDevCamp Chicago is a summer camp for the social web. Immerse yourself in two full days of sessions with leaders of the Internet. Topics include learning opportunities surrounding building applications, working with APIs, mobile, new media strategy, and much more! They have a rockstar lineup of speakers this year for Social Dev Camp. Keynote presenters for the August 13-15 event include Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, Google Open Web Advocate Chris Messina, and Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh. In addition to technical and business track sessions, attendees can compete in the developer Hackathon—with more than $3,000 in prizes—and share practical knowledge at Unconference gatherings. Last year they had some – Read the full article
As a small business owner you may be on a job that is usually reserved for two people or more – and you may be running around more than you ought to. (Doesn’t everyone feel that way?) If only you can split yourself in two! Well, spare yourself with these helpful apps. If you have a mobile smartphone like the iPhone or the Android, you can make use of the tools and applications to improve your workflow. After all, these phones are made for more than checking your E-mail, you know. To-Do Lists Outlook Mobile has a nice, task-syncing feature for your smartphone that lets you send meeting requests, track attendance, received detailed responses, and much more. If you’re using an iPhone, there’s the very flexible Toodledo, which synchronizes your tasks without requiring Internet connection. For Android users, use Astrid, a simple task recording dashboard for mobile that lists and tracks your To-Do list. Like the two previous tools, it’s – Read the full article
Thanks to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, charity is moving beyond direct mail, newsletters, and door-to-door campaigns. It has gone “non-traditional” – and so have forms of giving. What d’ya know: social media has churned out something we may aptly refer to as ‘social good’. This came to record-setting light in the recent #BeatCancer campaign. You might have heard of it. Actually, you may have participated in it. Here’s how the fundraising effort went. For every Tweet, Facebook status update, or blog post containing the #BeatCancer hashtag, eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors pledged to donate one cent to cancer research. The campaign went viral, mobilizing raised social media users everywhere. On October 16 to 17, #BeatCancer raised significant money for several cancer charities – to the tune of over $70,000, actually – and set the Guinness World record for the most social mentions in a 24-hour duration: 209,771. Not all have set records, but more and more fundraising initiatives are – Read the full article
Google Analytics, the free web analytics solution that generates detailed statistics and reports about visitors to a website, recently announced a set of powerful new features that build on last year’s enterprise-class launch. Google says that the features – which will gradually be incorporated into Google Analytics accounts over the coming weeks – focus on three key areas: Intelligence: Google has made significant changes that enable users to understand their data better. It has launched the first phase of an algorithm-driven engine – Analytics Intelligence – that provides users with automatic alerts whenever significant changes happen in their data patterns (metric or dimension). Moreover, users can customize these alerts, so that they can tell Google Analytics what to watch for. The automatically combed data saves users time and brings to light traffic insights that users may find most crucial. Powerful options: One previous limitation of Google Analytics involved collecting visitor information for websites browsed through mobile phones. This was due – Read the full article
