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
Every business shares a common goal – to survive, grow and prosper. In today’s fast-track competitive world, businesses large and small must turn to new measures in order to evolve, grow or simply stay afloat. Ecommerce website development can offer growth opportunities of enormous proportion for businesses from all sectors. This is mostly due to the advent of highly improved and user friendly web services (Ed’s note: services like our favorite, Magento) available across the web that have literally carved a place in the hearts of online users. As an online business owner, the employment of technological advances in e-Commerce website design can mean the difference between the success and failure of your business objectives. Accordingly, it is important to understand exactly what an ecommerce website is and how to get started with one. Basically, an ecommerce website is a virtual representation of your physical business. Interestingly, most business owners grow to learn that the biggest difference between an ecommerce – Read the full article
For those of you who are Google addicts like myself, you should find this piece choc-a-bloc full of Chrome apps for you to gorge yourself on. Whether it’s gaming you are looking for or an app to help your business run more smoothly, you should find something here to satisfy your taste buds. The Google Chrome Store makes me feel like a kid in a sweet shop at the best of times, and if you haven’t checked it out already you will find it hard not to after reading below. Bear in mind that you need to be using the Google Chrome browser (to enjoy these apps), so download it now and start browsing in the shop and on the Internet. Google Chrome apps for small business One of the best apps I have found on the Google Chrome Web store is the ZOHO Invoice app, which I now use religiously to process all my invoices and keep track of – Read the full article
There are ways to monitor changes and updates to your favorite websites, blogs, social networks, classifieds, and local business listings (including Google Places pages) – without having to watch the Web 24/7 or pressing the Refresh button every minute. And while RSS is today’s most popular way of syndicating content automatically, not all websites have it. (And not all users prefer it.) That’s where this list comes in: to be able keep up with what’s happening (in real-time) on any place across the entire Web; to monitor what customers and competitors alike are doing and saying; and to listen and respond to reviews and feedback as they are generated. Here are some of today’s best tools for monitoring changes to any website. Page2RSS Page2RSS is a free service that lets you create feeds for web pages you wish to follow or monitor – pages, specifically, that are static or don’t offer any RSS/Atom feeds. Page2RSS also serves as a way – Read the full article
Protecting your identity involves protecting anything that contains your personal information. And your cell phone or smart phone contains more data about you than you may even realize. Smart phones today are basically small computers, except they often do not have anti-virus protection on them. We use these devices for surfing the internet, checking bank accounts, and even making monetary transactions. The secret service has been trying to fight against identity theft and is recommending a cell phone firewall for all cell phone users to help guard against this kind of electronic hacking. People are spending more time on their phones as they are capable of doing more things. One of the most vulnerable aspects of using your cell phone is online banking. These connections are supposed to be secure, but if you are able to access your bank account by just pressing a button on your phone, then a thief who steals your phone can do the same thing. – Read the full article
Technology constantly affects the way that we are doing business. Without technology, our business is slower, less efficient, and if we chose to ignore the changes, our business could suffer dramatically. One of the best business tools that has revolutionized the way we do business is the Mac by Apple. With the Mac (iMac, iPad, MacBook, iPhone), connecting business deals, emails, and even live conferences, can happen with simplicity. The innovative design offers so many benefits to business users around the world. With a large interactive screen you can be networking, staying on task, and most importantly making money for your business with the click of a mouse. Developers know the advantages of using an iMac as a business tool, and have made some great apps to match, many of which are free. Here are the top ten FREE business apps as ranked on iTunes for your Mac! 10. Chimport Chimport is a business tool that allows you to – Read the full article
Increasingly, people are accessing the Web from smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. It’s not just the desktop and laptop anymore. This means that, as a business owner, Internet marketer, or SEO professional, you have to come up with a search engine optimization strategy that’s specific to mobile – a strategy that will help you get found online more easily and quickly. Let smartphone users and mobile consumers find you whenever they search. Here’s a mobile SEO checklist to get you started: Plan for it. Set a strategy, identify your targets, and plan accordingly. Like any other SEO campaign, successful mobile marketing takes plenty of research and preparation. Know the various mobile search engines. There’s Google XHTML, Google Mobile, Bing Mobile, Yahoo! Mobile, AOL Mobile, and abphone – among many others. Familiarize yourself with these by using your own mobile phone or tablet device. “Mobilize” your website. There are plenty of plug-ins and tools for building a mobile version of – Read the full article
Do you know that it takes just 24 seconds to improve your SEO ranking performance? Well, not really. We made that number up because the number catches attention. But catch your attention we certainly hope we did, because this SEO tip we’re about to give you can definitely go a long way in getting you more – and more relevant – search engine traffic. And yeah, they might take about 24 seconds or less to complete. What are title tags? To put it simply, title tags are the document titles required in all HTML/ XHTML documents. The term “documents” includes your website or blog. Ideally, your title tags will be used to help identify the contents of the pages of your website or blog. The HTML code that defines the title of your HTML documents follows a certain format. Let’s take the Lakeshore Branding blog – http://www.lakeshorebranding.com/company/blog – as an example. <head> <title>Chicago Marketing Blog | Internet Marketng | SEO – Read the full article
