The explosion of mobile device usage in the past few years has made it important that all small businesses claim their Google Places listings, and today's announcement of Google Hotpot is yet another reason for you to explore location-based services if you haven't already.
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With the amount of tweets that have been posted, it is surprising that most people that create an account abandon it within 2 weeks. Why does this happen?
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Yesterday Dave touched on Google's Newest Feature, Google Instant Preview, and how it affects your website. As he pointed out, the design of your site can make or break an organic click-through. Why click on a drab, uninviting site when there are plenty of search results that go to pretty ones?
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This week Google rolled out yet another feature for their search engine called Google Instant Preview, which lets you take a sneak peak at a website before actually visiting it from your list of Google results. There have been extensions for web browsers, such as Mozilla's Firefox, that provided this exact functionality, but now it works across all modern browsers and is supported by Google natively. With that said, you may be asking yourself an important question:
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Inevitably most small businesses that we meet or talk to think of excuses not to blog instead of reasons to blog. Most of these are the same businesses that feel like they should get involved with social media, but only because they hear Facebook and Twitter on TV or from other businesses telling them they should, not because they actually see the value. Needless to say, these businesses are not generally successful at either. Let's take a look at some of the common excuses and why they are wrong.
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A recent article posted online by eMarketer shares some very interesting data for small business marketers. Their article states that more undergrads have a mobile web device than a desktop computer.
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The most common argument print publications have agains the huge success and adoption of blogging is that, in their eyes, blogs lack the professional journalists necessary to properly research unique and creative content. Well, this weekend we had a great example of why that isn't at all the case, as one culinary magazine was actually caught lifting content from blogs without any accreditation.
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If I had a nickel for every time we've heard the following statement...
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A common theme we see with small businesses is that they come to us wanting to work on the website, not their web marketing. Anymore, it's just as important to focus on the off-site elements of your website as it is the on-site elements. What I mean by this is that the whole concept of inbound marketing relies heavily on using external tools like Facebook, Twitter, a blog and email marketing to drive traffic to your main website. SEO will get you well on your way, but these other channels are the glue that fills the holes in your lead generation efforts. Lead generation will only happen if your website is a workhorse! You can drive traffic from all walks of the web, but unless your website is the true workhorse that it should be, you won't reap the rewards you have the potential to. To understand what I mean by calling your website a workhorse, ask yourself the following about your site: Do you effectively use Calls to Action throughout your site? Do you have a strategy for capturing ...
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This is the 4th and final post in my Small Business Takeaways from IMS 2010 series. If you missed the first 3 posts in this series, check them out below:
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If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?
Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.
