Aspiring musician? Budding young artist? Aspiring novelist? These days, it’s not enough that you have your own album, creative portfolio, or published book. You have to have a website, too. It may not seem fair to be a one-man (or one-woman) team and to have to develop your own website and market your product to your audience, but that’s just the way it is. If you’re determined to succeed, you might as well go with the flow and start building your online presence. One of the best ways to do so is by using WordPress, our favorite content management system here at Lakeshore Branding. Not only is the entire platform easy to use; it’s also fully customizable, and it evolves in accordance with today’s Web standards. Now, we understand perfectly your desire to have a website that serves as an expression of yourself (and your work), and that’s why we came up with this list of the best WordPress themes – Read the full article
If you want to make sales without chasing customers or making cold calls and do it in a way that is pleasing for you as the marketer and comfortable for the prospect, there are strategies that you can implement so that people will be calling and lining up to do business with you. In this article we will discuss 9 Strategies on How You Can Achieve Expert Status In Your Niche. We’ll begin with: Article Marketing: Writing articles and giving well-researched information to your niche and placing them on your website or social media platforms will be a great way to get started in positioning yourself as an expert in your niche. You can also distribute them in article directories as long as they are of quality such as Ezine Articles or trade publications in your niche (online and offline). Write a book: The book can be in the form of an E-book that is downloadable or it can be – Read the full article

Raising funds online isn’t easy. Thank goodness there are useful social media marketing platforms like Kickstarter and Twitter. (Check out our tips for fundraising on Twitter and our coverage of some of the most successful social media fundraisers!) But if these tools aren’t flexible enough for your charity organization, political advocacy, or religious community – and if you think you’ll need a bigger Web presence, like a website or a blog – then you might as well create your own WordPress site. WordPress is Lakeshore Branding’s recommended content management system (CMS). Why? Because it’s focused on aesthetics. Because it’s built on evolving and upcoming Web standards. And because it’s so easy to use. To help rally your cause, we compiled this list of 15 WordPress themes sure to strike at the heart of your online audience. These WordPress themes are great for non-governmental institutions, public sector groups, charity organizations, environmental organizations, fundraising events and committees, advocacy groups, political aspirants, churches, – Read the full article
The World Wide Web has billion of websites. Some of them are small (for example, most of the personal blogs), some of them are big (for example, eBay), and some of them are too big (for example, Facebook). But some of them are just very important, because they really changed the world over the last years and gave way to a number of Internet-enabled revolutions. What are these websites and how did they influence the world? 1. info.cern.ch: This is where it all began. In 1990, not many years ago if you think about it, a revolution took place in CERN and the first website on the World Wide Web was made by Sir Tim Burns Lee and browsed by Robert Cailliau. 2. Google: Some people confuse it with the Internet itself. Some people even type Google inside Google’s search box! It is considered to be the main entrance of the Internet and changed the way we search for information. It started – Read the full article
In light of the current recession and housing market downturn, real estate agents have to turn to new ways of creating and running their businesses. Social media marketing is one of the best, if not THE best way to do just that. The National Association of Realtors has a whole section of their website focused on social media for the real estate professional. The Field Guide to Social Networking for REALTORS® has eBooks, videos, and a ton of other resources to help you along the way. Facebook Ask around and you will be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of Facebook. Even if they don’t use it, they probably saw the movie last year about it! And it’s likely that most people you know are using Facebook and have hundreds of friends. A word of caution on catapulting yourself into this too quickly: mixing personal and professional can be a very slippery road. Keep your personal Facebook profile and create a Fan Page – Read the full article
Interested to write guest content for Lakeshore Branding and expand your readership? Do get in touch! We’re looking for high-quality blog articles on: Internet marketing, social media, search engine optimization / marketing, e-commerce, web design, and other Internet-based businesses, technologies, tools, and applications. Lakeshore Branding is a PR 4 blog, with thousands of backlinks (per Alexa and Majestic SEO). Published guest blog articles are also shared via the official Lakeshore Branding Twitter account. If you’ve written the article, just E-mail it along with links and images you’d like to accompany the text with. We’ll proofread and spell-check it then let you know immediately when the article is going to be up on the site. If you haven’t written the article, kindly consider the following guidelines we have for guest blog posts: Guest blog posts must be original and may not have been published elsewhere online already. All submissions will be verified before publication. The post must be grammatically correct and – 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

These days, you can’t call yourself an entrepreneur or a marketer without any knowledge of how to use the Internet to drive your business. That’s why we here at Lakeshore Branding keep pushing WordPress – because it’s an awesome tool for anyone wanting to establish themselves online. It’s a semantic personal publishing platform with focus on aesthetics, Web standards, and usability. So, whatever your title is – small business owner, online retailer, Internet startup founder, online marketer, social media guru, new media advertiser, affiliate marketer – you’ll find something valuable and unique in the way WordPress works. But to change the way WordPress looks? That’s what this list of WordPress themes is for. We picked out a number of the best business and marketing WordPress themes so that you won’t have to. With this list, we also hope you’ll be able to enhance the ease and efficiency of your WordPress experience. If you find a favorite business or marketing WordPress – Read the full article