It is tough to sell these days – even tougher if you try to do it online. It’s not just the similar businesses and stores in the neighborhood you would suddenly be competing against. Take it online, and you’re competing against the whole world. But times are changing, and often your online presence is critical to the success of your company. That’s where the customer base is obviously moving towards. In the US alone, ecommerce totaled over $200 billion in sales. In running an online store, one of the important first steps is finding the best ecommerce solution for your business. At Lakeshore Branding we use Magento, a versatile open-source cross-platform content management system that aims to handle all aspects of building and maintaining your ecommerce site. It is dubbed as the “platform for growth” for businesses looking to take it online and to the next level. We agree. What’s best about Magento is its robust set of features, scalable – Read the full article
Recently, Google rolled out another one of its search engine innovations: the Google Social Search. The announcement was made in conjunction with the company’s new partnership with social networking giant Twitter, which should help users find more up-to-the-minute, real-time data – including tweets – in Google search results. Google Social Search, however, is something independent from the Google-Twitter collaboration. Contrary to what some people might think, Social Search is not real-time search. What the new service does do is help users find content published by people in their social circle – and then see this kind of content included in search results. “Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates, and tweets,” as explained by Google in the official blog entry announcing Social Search. “This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person.” It is this relevant, social web of – Read the full article
Ecommerce is evolving. It’s certainly growing. By the year 2012, ecommerce sales in the US alone are projected to reach $335 billion. As the online customer base continues to grow, so will the number of online stores. Needless to say, it’s an increasingly fierce competition. In order to keep up and ahead of the pace, it is critical that businesses serious about growth in the ecommerce industry should find the best ecommerce solution for their companies. Enter Magento. Called the “platform for growth”, Magento is an open-source enterprise-level content management system whose flexibility, scalability, and robust feature set have been acclaimed by experts in the ecommerce industry. It’s the fastest-growing ecommerce solution in the market today, and with 750,000 downloads, the platform is bound to only grow bigger. Magento’s usable interface, analytics and reporting capabilities, SEO-friendliness, and catalog management tools have been praised by businesses, retailers, wholesalers, marketers, developers, and design firms. But what makes the ecommerce platform truly special – Read the full article
The search wars have just been taken to a whole new level. The catalyst? Social media. With the phenomenal popularity of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, both Google and Microsoft will now be integrating real-time updates into their respective search engines. In separate announcements made yesterday, October 21, Google said it has reached an agreement with Twitter to include real-time updates – “Tweets” – in a new Google feature called Social Search; meanwhile, Microsoft has signed deals to get full feeds from both Twitter and Facebook. Google cited the fact that “an entirely new type of data has emerged… not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.” The agreement with Twitter means search results will now include up-to-the-minute data and real-time observation from a stream of Tweets, so that users “will find tweets from – Read the full article
LinkedIn is not Facebook. It’s not Twitter, either. You don’t use LinkedIn to post 140-character statuses about your business or to officially like someone’s new online video. What you can do, however, is use LinkedIn to grow your small business and make it more profitable. And isn’t that your priority? As a business-oriented social networking site with more than 50 million registered users spanning 170 industries, LinkedIn is an online real estate for professionals big and small. It is truly a business networking site with the average user having $109K in income and 41 years old. If you’re unsure how to use your LinkedIn profile to gain a business advantage, you can follow these tips below: Brand your profile: As a small business professional, you want to be easily found by the people who matter – as well as by the most frequently used search engines. Make sure that you customize your LinkedIn profile by changing the default link into – Read the full article
When I come across articles like the one posted on TheStreet.com last week, I can’t help but get excited. Titled “Business Owners Question Social Networking” the article quotes some research that finds that a majority of small business owners haven’t seen value from social media, and that most don’t even use it themselves. A key section of the article reads: Among the 500 small-business executives surveyed, 76% said social networking hasn’t help them generate leads or expand their companies in the past year. And 86% said they don’t turn to these Web sites for business advice or other information. The majority, 61%, depend on big search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, for business advice and information. Only 13% use social networking sites and only 10% rely on expert blogs. So why on earth would I be excited that small businesses don’t use social media and haven’t seen value from it yet? Opportunity. Plain and simple. For me, there is – Read the full article
Internet marketing is generally broken into three areas- Research, Implementation and Tracking. Research includes using tools such as wordtracker, SEO Book or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. There are dozens of keyword tools to choose from but we like these because they are very easy to use and they supply the information that help us make good keyword decisions. These tools help you analyze what you believe the keyword list to be and modify it to maximize the potential website traffic. Simple things like making keywords plural has have significant increases in traffic or variations in phrases such as “online marketing” vs “Internet marketing.” While you may think that both phrases sound the same, you may think that maybe one or the other has a higher search volume- but you may be surprised to learn that “Internet marketing” has about 2.5 times the search volume of “online marketing.” Based on your objectives you would target the word that converts better for – Read the full article
The last few days I utilized the new search engine Bing. I was skeptical at first of the new Microsoft product but was quickly impressed with the raw power of this new “decision” engine as they are branding it. I took notes in search results compared to yahoo and Google and I am going to share some of my insights into what I discovered (and opinions) 1. Bing has a better image search, I like the pop out feature to see the image a bit larger as well as the amount of images that are returned on the first page. It looks like they use “citations” to determine the image and do not have as much focus on alt and title tags. As webmasters have used images as an opportunity to put more keywords into the meta data, Google images has become less relevant. 2. Bing is showing favor to major websites, they are not showing site links except for – Read the full article
