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Discover the power of video marketing for small businesses. Learn about the various types of corporate videos that can enhance customer outreach and internal communications while increasing brand awareness and expanding your customer base.
Sometimes A Great Idea Is Right In Front Of You! Small Business Insights: Marketing A while back I went to my first University of Arkansas football game. It was a spectacular fall day...too warm for November 1st, that's for sure. As we made our way to the cheap seats, we made the obligatory stop at the concession stand for an $8 souvenir mug of Diet Coke and a hot dog. Once seated, we immediately took to eating our almost entirely tasteless "meal" of encased meat--it was a spectacularly bland dog. But just as the first wave of belches began to percolate in my still hungry gut it occurred to me: how was it possible that the vendors within this glorious steel and concrete shrine to Razorback pigs had missed the marketing gold that is (insert drumroll here): "Hawg Dog?" For those of you not living in "The Natural State" of Arkansas (where there is no formal recycling plan; turns out "Natural" is a [...]
Be Good To Your Customer & Respect Their In-Box! Small Business Insights: Marketing My wife recently signed up with the Kohls mailing list in an effort to secure the occasional coupon and special offer as we entered the back to school and consumer-spending-frenzied-fourth quarter. And because she's been around me just long enough, she used our mutual Yahoo email address vs. her personal account. And in case anyone wasn't listening closely let me repeat that little pearl of advice: Secure a Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail account and use them specifically for mailing lists, registrations, and similarly disposable instances. They are easy to get, plentiful and available from any machine with an internet connection. The first marketing email came in this past Monday and congratulations to them for keeping very close tabs on new sign-ups and getting right to work. As one that spent several years in retail internet marketing, I know that's important. And with retail taking it's current [...]
When A Domain Was Caught Up In A Bidding War AKA: The Good Old Internet Gold Rush Days Back in the mid-1990’s (or more fondly, “ancient times” as we know the internet ages at the same pace of a dog), I had a fine civil servant’s job in Sonoma County, CA. And like everyone else I’d found myself quite amused by the new internet and my Mac Performa (rockin’ the 4 megs of RAM, baby!). To get perspective on just how long ago this was, my co-worker Sue did a little moonlighting as a realtor agreed with me that the internet had genuine possibilities as a tool for selling houses. This was a cutting edge idea, no doubt about it. Put up the house listing, add pictures and sales information…it was pure genius. Armed with a recent dalliance with “Photoshopping” my face into famous pictures and scenes (alas, those are long lost) and emailing them to amused friends at [...]
Looking For A Company Email System? Run, Don't Walk From Accounts Tied To Your Hosting Small Business Insights: Email Any self-respecting website designer that includes hosting as a service likewise offers email accounts as well, right? That's just how things are done. I mean not only email accounts, but unlimited email accounts with unlimited storage. And a free dessert. And a ride home after the show. At The Affordable Web Guy, we've decided to not offer email accounts and here's why. The big boys do it better and we can't match the services, scope, and scale of major players like Google Suite (Gmail) and Microsoft's Office 365 (I just threw up in my mouth). Yes, it's true. While we appreciate your confidence in our top shelf personal service, we don't offer what some might consider a cornerstone feature. It's not a complicated explanation. The long-story-short answer is: We could offer free accounts but we've found them regularly unreliable and stripped [...]
Earn Your Client’s Trust & Keep It Small Business Insights: Customer Service Just about every time I turn around, there is some new piece of technology or some new buzzword-filled marketing trend, that is claiming to be the magic pill that web-based businesses have been searching for to get more sales. Just do this one unique thing, they tell you, and all your e-commerce dreams will come true. The “one thing” almost always conveniently involves spending money on a product or service that promises to be the “it factor” you’ve been missing. Can I tell you a secret? In all my decades of experience as a small business owner myself, I’ve only found one thing that really works, and it’s as old-school as it gets. What I’m talking about is great customer service. Taking care of people is the oldest practice in the book, but it works. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten contracts because, according [...]
Everybody Hates Laundry, But That’s No Reason Not To Do It Small Business Insights: Marketing A Guest Blogger post by Daniel Titus Earlier this week I was meeting with a colleague who has designed a massive site for a large and ever-evolving organization. The site has been built; the code is working; everything is ready to go, but they still haven’t launched yet. Why? Because the week before the scheduled launch date there was a change in the information—then another and another. The information can’t stay current enough for approval, so the launch gets delayed. Exasperated by it all, my colleague exclaimed, “Look, you’re always going to have changes; that’s why I have a job! You can’t wait until all of the changes are finished to do something or nothing will ever get done. It’s just like the laundry!” I thought that was very insightful. In the past, I’ve compared websites to everything from houses to dentistry, but laundry was a [...]
Making The Most Of What You HaveSmall Business Insights: MarketingPerception is reality...don’t let anyone sell you on anything else. So why not alter perception to your advantage? I pulled into my local gym the other day, noticing an ever-increasing phenomenon...a powerful indicator of human awareness, or more accurately---the lack of it.Walking through the parking lot, I neared the front entrance, noticing two women verbally going-at-it, because one had squeezed a massive vehicle into a slot way too tight, banging the other's paint job… and they weren’t alone. The nearest four rows of parking were packed, most of which were Soccer mom SUV’s stuffed into “Compact Cars Only” spaces.Furthermore, this gym is attached to a massive city park, where there are---no joking---a thousand parking spots in the area. It’s become such an issue the gym’s management has had to allocate resources toward solutions.Now, these are people who're about to physically kill themselves for upwards of an hour on any number of [...]
Making Sure Software Is Up To Date: "Set It And Forget It" Is Foolish Small Business Insights: Technical I recently secured a small project helping a fellow small business owner to update his existing website. That's right, as a WordPress fanboy I stepped up to the challenge of Joomla. Now everyone knows that the expression "It's not that hard" often turns out to be famous last words. Just as it's not that hard to replace a carburetor on your car IF you know how to do it. The same applies to plumbing, electrical work and so on, and so on. It's my goal in life to keep the services industries alive and well; let me likewise take this time to thank my sincerely dear, sweet father for passing along virtually no mechanical skill. Thanks, Pop! The task at hand was to juice-up the SEO with some on page content tweaks, title tags, and descriptions. The un-named webmaster for the website had [...]
Take Full Advantage Of Free Resources Small Business Insights: Marketing A Guest Blogger post by Josh Olswanger As a start-up business, your initial goal is to increase revenue by increasing business. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, believe it or not, it’s not always a walk in the park when deciding where to find your next customer or client. Luckily, with a great business marketing plan, you should be able to funnel your attention towards avenues that will undoubtedly increase your chances of finding new business. Hence we have the Internet. Say goodbye to yesterday when looking for a local plumber involved pulling out the yellow pages and searching around. Today’s day and age relies on a quicker, more accurate, and effective approach. When businesses of all shapes and sizes decide to put a website up, usually it is to find new business. Having a website live online is only half of the equation. How will you get customers to [...]
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