Social media marketing is an essential part of many businesses and organizations today – regardless of size. The Internet has grown so much more community-focused, so much more social, that if one were to truly establish and enhance the online presence of a company or brand, there’d be no way of doing it without social media marketing. Sure, to some people, sites like Facebook and Twitter are just a complete waste of time, but without social media sites like these it would be next to impossible to keep up with everything that’s happening online. This is why companies are beginning to recognize the importance of hiring social media managers, social media agencies, social media consultants and strategists. The titles vary, but one thing is clear: if – as a small business owner or an Internet marketer – you want to be able to engage the right way with an online audience and steer the conversation about your brand to the – Read the full article
SEO services have become essential to businesses acrossCanada. The days of traditional advertising are dead; phone books, radio, and even TV have proved to be expensive and difficult to measure. SEO, meanwhile, has allowed business owners to be more involved in the marketing of their firm and to measure effectiveness like never before. SEO services in Canadahave been around for over a decade now; however, business owners have just recently started to take advantage of these services. Search engine optimization services certainly are widely available, and this article is designed to help you pick the right SEO service for your business. What is SEO? SEO or search engine optimization is an activity that is carried out by an SEO expert or company to drive relevant traffic to your website so you can realize a benefit for your business. SEO services typically include: Creating engaging content for link building Social media marketing strategies Website analysis and competitor evaluation Keyword research to – 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
Thanks to our good friends over at the social media networks, individuals can create personal brands better than ever. Though you may not know it, your actions on social media accounts give the public a certain image of you. This is probably most true for those who are very fluent in social media—continually connecting and commenting with others on the web who enjoy similar websites and articles. However, a personal brand works just like anything else in life: having one can be very beneficial; not having one can be damaging, and vice versa. A good way to think about a personal brand is like a resume. In a sense, a resume is a document that explains why you are one way and not another—you’re good at math because you studied it in college; you’re a loyal employee because you stay at your jobs for over one year, etc. In other words, creating a personal brand through social media is becoming – Read the full article
It’s easier than ever to make promotional videos. A few years ago, if you wanted to have an advert made, then you would have had to search for an affordable company offering video production in Nottingham or another major city near where your company was based. The production process would require regular meetings, intense discussion, several edits, and quite a large bill at the end. Now that even personal computers are capable of video editing, it’s starting to make more sense to do the work in house. A short video production training course may not bring your work up to the standard of a professional outfit doing video production, but if you’re producing short advertisements or viral videos then you most likely won’t need the sophisticated equipment of a professional video lab. What can you learn from video production training? One mistake that many people make is to get carried away playing with fancy settings and effects with their video – Read the full article
Search engine optimization is not a new idea in online marketing. It has changed and evolved a great deal, especially over the past five years. Those in the market for a new SEO company as well as any business that hopes to continue running its own in-house SEO should understand the same thing that every successful SEO marketing company does: that failing to keep up with changes in SEO means being unable to conduct successful SEO. Two changes in the past year, Google+1 and Panda, demonstrate the pace at which search engine marketing evolves and the dramatic nature of changes that can take place. Google+1 Although it may have lost some steam since its initial wave of success, the Google +1 feature continues to have a powerful impact on the company’s search rankings. More than one search advertising expert has claimed that “search will never be the same.” Beyond using saved cookies and search history to tailor search results, with – Read the full article
In lieu of the recent news about the Facebook smear campaign against Google, it seems that Google may be poised to remain the top dog in online ad spend this year. Last week, the story regarding Facebook hiring PR firm Burson Marsteller to spread lies about Google’s new “Social Circle” went viral. The war over the social graph, a data set of information about the social networks users are connected to, is in full force. However, Google isn’t even flinching. According to Fortune, Google’s Eric Schmidt insisted that Microsoft, not Facebook, was the true competitor to Google. He said, “Facebook users tend to use Google Search. Facebook’s ads business does not displace our advertising. I’m somewhat perplexed by the obsession because I don’t think the facts support it. Things are going great for Google.” The facts may support that businesses prefer to use Facebook and Google simultaneously; however, the percentage in which they invest their marketing budgets may be a – 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
