Google’s Tech Support Care Package – for Parents Will you be home for the holidays? Don’t worry. This season, you won’t have to play the role of personal tech support to your parents. Search giant Google recently unveiled an online “tech support care package” at TeachParentsTech.org, anticipating instances in which tech-savvy users are asked by their moms and dads to help out with a long list of basic – but nonetheless taxing – tech support issues. The site, built by Google to “help keep tech support a family business”, allows users to select any number of simple instructional tech support videos to send to their parents. The videos are organized according to categories, which include The Basics, World Wide Web, Communication, Media, and Finding Information. And while these video packages won’t cover all the questions and issues that computer beginners may have, they do provide instant help – without users having to spend hour after hour explaining to dad what – Read the full article
There’s a high-potential marketing platform that’s slowly and surely attracting corporations, small business owners, advertisers, and marketers alike. Observers say that this is a big one – an avenue through which one can reach a good portion of billions of consumers. It’s called SMS. You know: text messaging. No, you’re not reading an article from our 1998 archives. This is 2010 all right, but you know what? In the age of tablet computers, flashy apps, smartphones, and social media, SMS marketing has indeed become one of the most viable and important platforms for businesses today. Here are some numbers: An estimated 3.5 billion text messages are sent and received every day. 57 percent of all cell phone subscribers use SMS on a regular basis. According to the New York Times, 97 percent of text messages are opened, and 83 percent of these are opened in less than an hour. Despite the explosive growth of smartphones and mobile technologies like the – Read the full article
The first book that I have been wanting to read for months is 4 hour work week. I downloaded it from audible (see previous post) and have already listened to 2/3 of the book since downloading it yesterday. It is extremely intriguing as he describes the process of outsourcing his life. I am going to try and outsource some small tasks to India. You can use sites such as elance to find reviews of companies or these virtual assistants. They can do everything from submit you to directories for SEO, research plans for a birthday party to responding to all your email for you. These “VA’s” are not only polite, efficient and better with a computer than most americans, they are college educated. You can find a VA for $2-15 per hour. The latter would be for graphics, technical knowledge or web programing. But what if you could hire someone to find and order your christmas gifts, pay your bills – Read the full article
There are enormous benefits to communicating with your customers via E-mail rather than over the phone. Most customers prefer E-mails to phone calls any day of the week. Put yourself in their shoes. Would you want to receive a call at 10 a.m. from a company you recently did business with? Chances are that most customers are at work when you try to call them, and they may get off work after your business closes. So, they have to go out of their way to return your call. This can be especially aggravating to customers when the phone conversation will be about an error on your part. If you’ve been having some trouble with your computer system or shipping and realize you won’t be able to deliver a product to a customer on time, let them know by E-mail. Most customers prefer to receive an E-mail from your company and would rather skip playing phone tag with one of your – Read the full article
A potential pitfall for many new Adwords advertising is simply the false pretense that Google’s default Adwords settings are in the best interest for all advertisers. That’s simply not the case. Here are a handful of tips that can take just minutes but provide a significant lift in your online advertising campaign performance. 1. Review your location and language settings Google defaults each new campaign to target theUnited StatesandCanada. If you don’t ship internationally, this is a clear opportunity to narrow your targeting. If you are a localized business serving a specific area there is further opportunity to narrow in your focus by targeting a specific state, city or even specific mile radius surrounding your business location. Advanced Tip* If you are targeting multiple countries, set up separate campaigns for each country. Each geographic area will perform differently due to variances in search behavior. Separate campaigns will provide you much deeper insight into each location’s performance and allow for smarter decisions – Read the full article
Who knew the power of blogging would explode like it has? It seems like everyone has a blog now, from stay-at-home moms to chefs to local business owners. Blogging is a powerful Internet marketing tool for local businesses as it gives you a new, yet subtle way to promote your company. Think of a blog as a way to communicate to the local community without all the business jargon. The point of a blog should be to put out information only. Write about relevant topics that relate to your business and give important facts that people want and need to know. Avoid being a salesman in your blog or people won’t read it. But provide an invaluable resource that people trust and you will build credibility within your community and generate more traffic. 5 hidden benefits of blogging for local business Change your perspective. Blogging forces you to examine your industry from all angles, not just as a provider of – Read the full article
Over the course of the last few weeks, we have been handpicking a bunch of WordPress themes that we hope will help you come up with the best and most efficient design possible for your WordPress site. Recently, we created a list of wedding WordPress themes, which is great not just for wedding suppliers, but also for those who want to keep an online chronicle of all nuptial-related things: photos of the bridal dress, the official wedding video, albums and accounts of the bachelor party and bridal shower, that sort of thing. Today, however, we get a little bit more serious. By that, we mean we’ve created a selection of the top WordPress themes for professionals – whatever the industry, wherever the location, no matter the size. If there’s anything that unifies these simple WordPress themes together, it’s a design philosophy that inspires pros to get things done. Functional, feature-rich, elegant, and versatile, these professional WordPress themes aren’t going to – Read the full article
Link building is a great tool to help the popularity of your blog or website (in the eyes of your audience) and gain authority (in the eyes of search engines). This is all assuming you go about it the right way, though – buying links will only work so far, and if you always go for the low-hanging fruit of spammy blogs that automatically accept your articles, you’re more likely to be penalized than helped. Relevancy While it is definitely possibly for you to post on a completely irrelevant blog and link back to your website in your author bio – it is ultimately best to focus on the relevancy of the topic of the blog – writing about your green products on a green lifestyle blog. More often than not, unfortunately, that kind of serendipity doesn’t happen too often. Most people will focus on niches that are more tangentially related – for example, if you maintain a guide to – Read the full article
