For the travel industry, at least, social media is seen as more valuable than pay-per-click advertising. The World Travel Market 2011 report says that travel professionals see social media as one of the key revenue-generating channels over the next five years. As proof of this, the study found that eight out of ten travel-related businesses use some form of social media. Not only that: the World Travel Market 2011 also expects that in five years, half of all travel-related companies would be generating income and bookings on social media, rising from the current 22%. Out of those using social media marketing, around 50% do not even invest in PPC advertising, while 1 out of 5 of those who do use PPC aim to stop or reduce their spending in the next few years. It is very apparent that the travel industry loves social media. So if you are in the travel business, it is time to amp up your social media activities. Blogs – 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
Last week we published a guide on how to monitor Google Places reviews, Web updates, and content changes. It was well-received by our readers, so we’d like to build on the post and share info this time on tools for online reviews monitoring and management. Hopefully, this list will help you track online reviews of your brand, product, establishment, service, or business – and enhance your reputation as more customers talk about you on Google Places, Yelp, online directories, local business listings, and social media sites. Or, if you’ve used any of the online reputation management tools below, do let us know by leaving a comment below and sharing with us your experience. ReviewPush Texas-based ReviewPush markets itself as an “online review management tool for small to large businesses”. It offers a dashboard for monitoring / tracking reviews, protecting your brand and reputation, engaging with customers, and enhancing product offerings and promotions (such as coupons). ReviewPush features include: Continuous social – Read the full article
There are ways to monitor changes and updates to your favorite websites, blogs, social networks, classifieds, and local business listings (including Google Places pages) – without having to watch the Web 24/7 or pressing the Refresh button every minute. And while RSS is today’s most popular way of syndicating content automatically, not all websites have it. (And not all users prefer it.) That’s where this list comes in: to be able keep up with what’s happening (in real-time) on any place across the entire Web; to monitor what customers and competitors alike are doing and saying; and to listen and respond to reviews and feedback as they are generated. Here are some of today’s best tools for monitoring changes to any website. Page2RSS Page2RSS is a free service that lets you create feeds for web pages you wish to follow or monitor – pages, specifically, that are static or don’t offer any RSS/Atom feeds. Page2RSS also serves as a way – 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
Ever heard of NaNoWriMo? If you’re an aspiring novelist, it’s a safe bet that you have. The acronym stands for “National Novel Writing Month”, which is marked every November as a creative writing project encouraging participants to write 50,000 words of fiction in one month. If you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, but you have plans someday of self-publishing your own book – be it a novel, short story collection, poetry, memoir, corporate souvenir, e-book, children’s book, cookbook, picture book, guide or how-to book, vampire anthology, etc. – then you might want to read on. Of course, you can always work on finding an agent and attempt to have your manuscript edited, printed, distributed, and marketed by traditional publishers. But that takes a lot of guts – and, possibly, money. (Besides, one can only take so much rejection letters.) So in case you choose to do-it-yourself, or have no choice but to do-it-yourself, below is a list of the top five – Read the full article
Not long ago we published a blog post with essential tips on how to use LinkedIn for your small business. Since then, Facebook and Twitter continued to rise and flourish under the social media spotlight. But it doesn’t mean that LinkedIn had not gone through its own evolution, because it did. Just check out the stream of activity on the official LinkedIn blog. Or take numbers as proof: today, 80 million professionals – and counting – have signed up to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities through the social networking site. After all these new LinkedIn features and developments, we thought it would be a great time for an update. Here’s a list of tips on LinkedIn for small business – tips that may not have occurred to you just yet, but which will certainly give your online presence a huge boost. Upload that picture. Okay, we did mention this in that previous article – “brand your profile” – but judging – Read the full article
At this day and age it’s not unusual to be using multiple computers at once – one desktop at home, another at the office, a laptop, a tablet computer, even a mobile phone. But it can be quite tiresome to have to back up or synchronize all your folders and files from these computers – regardless of whether you’re using a USB disk, an external hard drive, or a stack of blank CDs. Sure, E-mailing the files to yourself might be a pretty cool idea (since everything is stored online), but when you’ve done it more times than you can take, and when attaching files takes more time than you actually have, it’s a definite sign that you should be looking for a better solution. Enter Dropbox – a service for automatically syncing, storing, and sharing files online. Launched in late 2008 for Windows, Linux, and Mac, Dropbox makes it simple and easy to access your documents from anywhere, from – Read the full article
