When creating your first blog, you probably dream about having an engaged fan base that would check your site every day, waiting impatiently to read your valuable opinions or thoughts. If you were like most new bloggers, you were more than a little disappointed when barely anyone left a comment and your traffic statistics left a lot to be desired. If you still haven’t found a great way to promote your blog, try one or more of these techniques to drive traffic to your site: Blog Everyday – or Almost Everyday Google and the other search engines love fresh content. The more often you post, the higher your rankings will go. If you apply a little keyword strategy, you’ll soon soar to the top of the search page! Fresh content also keeps your fans coming back for more. If they like what they read, they’ll tune back in for the next edition. If they become disappointed by how long it – Read the full article
About a year back we compiled a list of competitive intelligence tools and it turned out to be one of our most popular posts. Well its a new year now and we thought you deserved an updated list. We went through the old list and threw out a few services that are no longer useful and added a whole bunch of new ones for you to check out. Some of the sites are more convenient than others depending on your needs. Some are free and some our expensive. Some of them directly monitor competitors’ advertising efforts while others track social media channels. Some of them offer several services and others only one or two. Heck, some of them aren’t even meant to be competitive intelligence tools, but we think each has something beneficial to offer. It was by pure coincidence that it came out to be an even 40 tools so let us know if there’s more we need to – Read the full article
Ever heard of NaNoWriMo? If you’re an aspiring novelist, it’s a safe bet that you have. The acronym stands for “National Novel Writing Month”, which is marked every November as a creative writing project encouraging participants to write 50,000 words of fiction in one month. If you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, but you have plans someday of self-publishing your own book – be it a novel, short story collection, poetry, memoir, corporate souvenir, e-book, children’s book, cookbook, picture book, guide or how-to book, vampire anthology, etc. – then you might want to read on. Of course, you can always work on finding an agent and attempt to have your manuscript edited, printed, distributed, and marketed by traditional publishers. But that takes a lot of guts – and, possibly, money. (Besides, one can only take so much rejection letters.) So in case you choose to do-it-yourself, or have no choice but to do-it-yourself, below is a list of the top five – Read the full article
Financial and environmental pressures are mounting up on today’s businesses, regardless of size. That probably explains why we’re all moving toward a paperless economy, where nothing that isn’t necessary is printed. (Hey, ink is quite expensive, too!) Not only is this movement a friendly way to reduce our impact on the environment; it’s also a way of streamlining business processes and maximizing the efficiency of our resources. In keeping up with these trends, we here at Lakeshore Branding have been reviewing products, tools, and technologies that are designed to enhance our productivity – online and beyond. In this post we’ll check out DocuSign, which takes paperless technology to another level. DocuSign is an electronic signature service that enables you to send, receive, sign, and manage all kinds of documents electronically – contacts, sales agreements, letters, invoices, financial records, etc. – so that you waste no time or paper getting things done. According to the company’s official website, DocuSign caters mainly – 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
Critics are quick to point out that the Apple iPad isn’t exactly a replacement for your laptop. More than a mobile business platform, it’s a sleek tablet device for consuming content on the Internet. This doesn’t mean, however, that the iPad can’t increase your productivity while on the go. As the Apple commercial goes, “There’s an app for that.” Below you’ll find a list of essential iPad apps for small business users of the device. GoodReader At 99 cents, GoodReader is an affordable app for viewing PDF files and important business documents in other formats – like Word, Excel, PNG, PPT, TXT, and JPEG. It also supports high-resolution images, and can even do audio and video – perfect for opening and viewing all kinds of files, regardless of size. Need to download a presentation or a report from Google Docs for offline reading? GoodReader can also do that, and can even unzip those files and folders for you. Memeo Connect – 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
In recent times we’ve seen social media grow exponentially fast. Thanks to quick Internet adoption and the advancement of mobile technologies, hundreds of millions of people are now part of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. These two sites in particular have enjoyed an incredible amount of attention, but we must understand that they form but a part of a continually evolving social media landscape. That’s why it’s important to take a wider perspective and check out which new social media and social networking sites may soon become the Internet’s new darling. Foursquare Foursquare is a location-based social networking site that’s lately been getting a tremendous amount of hype. A number of its features are parallel to Twitter (like the ability to post quick status updates wherever you are), but Foursquare sets itself apart by encouraging – and rewarding – users to explore their own cities. Here’s how it works: users “check in” by posting updates through a messaging service. – Read the full article
