More and more entrepreneurs are beginning to take advantage of all the Internet has to offer. For most companies, the Internet is a huge player in whether or not they will be successful. For others, it is the only player. In other words, many entrepreneurs are starting a small business that is online-only. If you run a blog or a website designed to help consumers, chances are that most of your business can be done through this online website. Before you know it, advertisers are interested and vendors want to be a part of the action. Eventually, you can have yourself a very profitable online business. Other online companies, however, get blindsided by the dollar signs and forget about the legal steps they must take in order to keep that money. After all, an online company takes a long time to turn profitable. When it finally happens, it’s exciting. But it’s important to put that excitement on hold and consider – Read the full article
When we look back at the present year events that affected the SEO world, we would realize that it has been more remarkable than we would have thought it would be. This year has actually marked a decisive point in the efforts made by Google to improve the quality of search engine results that are served to the Internet users. The focus with which Google went about its task of cleaning some of the damaging and poor quality sites from the search engine indexes is pretty well-known. Unlike the gentle avatar that a Panda is considered to be, Google’s ‘Panda’ update literally sniffed out thousands of sites in a matter of couple of weeks from the web’s most powerful search engine. While many analysts saw a sort of devastation in the making for some time now, the intensity of the impact left everyone guessing about the company’s motives. All sites that were built on duplicate or re-written content were penalized. – 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
It seems that competition for valuable branded keywords is reaching an all time high, with a recent report by eMarketer, “Brands Go Head-to-Head in Competition for Search Terms,” estimating that US marketers will spend a massive $14.4 billion USD this year on search advertising. Why should you care? Because it’s your brand’s keywords that they’re bidding on. The Battle of Branded Keywords We all know that search engine optimization is based on attempting to reach a top ranking position on a search engine for a given keyword or keyword phrase. We also know that the introduction of Google’s Adwords and Bing’s adCenter offered companies a major opportunity to feature on page one results for a search term without bothering with all this; they could bid on a term and grab traffic without engaging in the arduous process of link building and on and off site optimization. Recently, however, things have developed one step further and brand managers have started to – Read the full article
It is your company’s obligation to be clear, upfront, and transparent about how you collect and store visitor information. Your website presents an opportunity to make money, but it also entails a certain level of responsibility on the part of your company to safeguard this valuable information. In today’s environment where people are more suspicious about online companies, being straightforward is in your best interest. One of the key aspects in running a website is developing a privacy policy. Writing a privacy policy is a simple step that goes a long way towards retaining visitor trust for the long term. Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing a privacy policy: Do Not Copy a Privacy Policy Off Another Website It may be easy, but it is not the right thing to do. The privacy policy is a legal document; as such, it is important to know what you’re getting yourself into before publishing one. While a blog – Read the full article
Now that you are convinced that blogging can be useful for your business, you will sooner or later face a dilemma: How often should I blog? Indeed, blogging is not a one-off thing and you will certainly have to update your blog regularly. Should you perform this form of content creation daily, weekly, or monthly? In fairness, there isn’t a simple answer to this question. Ask 10 different bloggers and you will end up with 10 different answers. I do not pretend to own the answer to this question, but what I can do is provide you with some things that you need to consider when determining your blogging frequency, and I hope that you will find these useful when it comes to making your own decision. Search engines The search engines spiders do like fresh content and posting content frequently on your blog should allow your site to get indexed better. Best SEO practices include making sure that your – Read the full article
It’s that time of the year once again: the time to make lists, review what has happened in the last twelve months, and look back at some of the year’s highlights. It’s no different here at Lakeshore Branding. As you probably know by now, we’re very passionate about all things online. And that’s why we work hard to bring you news, trends, tips, tricks, and the occasional top secrets on Internet marketing, social media, technology and apps, etc. So, as 2010 comes to a close and we herald the coming of a new year, we thought it would be a cool idea to check out Lakeshore Branding’s top 5 blog posts of 2010. 60 Awesome Small Business WordPress Themes This blog post was inspired by the small business owners who are dedicated to finding solutions to enhance their visibility online. And since we were getting a lot of questions about where they might find business-oriented WordPress themes, or how they – Read the full article
There is a multitude of ways that a company can catch the attention of their target audience. More and more, companies are turning to social media outlets to gain the attention that they need for their brands to increase in popularity. These programs can be taken even a step further through the use of mobile marketing as well. The first thing to know about marketing through mobile services is that there are laws which surround this. You are not allowed to use leads which have been purchased as you have to have permission to send messages to clients. If you do not have permission, you face legal difficulties due to the FCC anti-mobile telemarketing laws. There are ways that you can make sure to have a lucrative marketing through the mobile market and a lot of it has to deal with social media marketing. This is because when there is a good social media marketing plan, you can reach new – Read the full article
