You hear people everywhere talking about the benefits of networking, both for business and personal reasons. It’s true. Networking can help expand your business contacts, generate more sales, and ultimately allow you to live a more fulfilling life. However, those that are most successful at networking have learned one important rule:
Build your network for the benefit of your network
Have you ever been to a party or event, and seen the type of person who is loud, boisterous and is always in search of the most important or well-known person in the room? They could care less about anyone but themselves. They look at the situation and ask “what can i do that is going to benefit me the most”. You don’t want to be the schmoozer. The question you should be asking is: Read more…
These last few days I’ve been out of town on vacation, and have been using Google Maps to help me find my way around. Searching for grocery stores, coffee shops, and free wi-fi reminded me how important it is to list your business with Google Maps and Yahoo Local. In case you’re Read more…
Gone are the days of having your website be a static brochure for your company. You need to be adding and changing content on a daily (or at least weekly) basis to really start to enhance your website.
By building you website on a content management system (CMS) – like Drupal or Joomla – you’ll find it’s very easy to add/change content, additional features and plug-ins that used to take serious development time are now available in easy-to-install packages, and built-in blogging software (which you should be using to regularly add content to your site for SEO) is easy to use and search engine friendly.
In this Web 2.0 world, a CMS is the ultimate tool for Read more…
I keep coming across web designers who say they provide ‘Search Engine Optimization’ by using heading tags, text links, and non-dynamic links, and decided it was time to make some clarifications.
Search Engine ‘Friendly’ involves building the foundation and features of the site in a way that the search engine spiders can comprehend. Having a ‘search engine friendly’ site does not necessarily help you climb the organic rankings, but there’s no reason to intentionally build your website without integrating these concepts.
Search Engine ‘Optimization’ as a service is more related to keywords and organic rankings, and involves both on-site and off-site work to achieve these goals.
Ways to make your website ‘Search Engine Friendly’ (easily read by a Search Engine):
- Use HTML and text to display your content Read more…
Do you use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software? If not, you could be fighting an uphill battle. There are so many things a good CRM can do for your business that it’s almost detrimental to pass it up.
Many small businesses will admit to having “that spreadsheet with some of their clients’ contact info or order history,” but this is not a scalable, reliable, or useful system compared to what’s available. A good CRM software will be customizable to your sales process (or focused on your niche, like auto sales or medical office) and help facilitate the organization and flow of your business processes.
Here are some of the things a good CRM software will do for you:
Just about every popular blog these days is set up with social bookmarking links to make it easy for the reader to share the article with friends and contacts. After reading a bit on President Obama’s blog (www.barackobama.com – after they ask you to buy the t-shirt 
), I noticed that those buttons are missing from the page.
I think it would be an excellent idea to incorporate a ’share this’ bar or a digg box plug in to make it easy for their visitors to share articles. Read more…