You know you’re supposed to blog to help bring traffic to your website. However, it’s important to have a plan about what you’re going to blog about, what format everything will be in, and to understand what your goals are. Without knowing the point of your blogging you won’t be successful. 1. Your Blog Should Be on Your Website Don’t create a blog separate from your website. Your blog should be on the website you’re trying to promote. You want to bring traffic to your most important asset, so most of the content that you create should be right on your own website. That includes blog posts, articles, videos, graphics,…

Whether you like it or not, Google owns most of the share of search engine traffic. Therefore, it’s important to pay attention to whatever Google is doing, including Google+. Google+ seems to want to be the Facebook, Twitter and Skype all rolled into one. And, it’s succeeding. But, the reason you need to be involved with Google+ is that Google Search is going to rank your involvement with their social media higher than they would someone else’s social media tools. Google Features to Use in Your Business Google Adwords – Linking the two together with social extensions is an important way to ensure that all your plus 1s are linked…

You hope your website conveys certain values and ideas to your audience such as: You’re a professional You can do what you say you can do You care about your audience’s needs But, so often web design is sadly deficient in projecting these ideas. Business owners make mistakes designing their websites by not looking at their websites from their audience’s perspective. Before designing a website for your business, consider the following factors: Who Is Your Audience? You should be intimately aware of exactly who your audience is. What do they like? What is their age, sex, and other demographics? How does this knowledge affect what type of website you need…

So many times businesses offer discounts to new customers, forgetting about the customers they already have that are loyal to them. One way to combat this problem is to create a customer loyalty program. There are many ways in which you can do this, and the methods vary depending on whether you have an online business or a bricks and mortar business. Let’s go over some easy ways to create a customer loyalty program. 1) Punch Card – If you have a bricks and mortar store, one of the simplest methods for creating a loyalty program is to set up a punch card system. Each purchase you punch the card…

If you are writing a book to increase your influence and get the word out about your business or service, you might consider using paid reviews as a way to promote it. But are literary reviews worth it?

If you’ve been doing the same thing in terms of marketing for a while, it’s probably a good idea to revamp your marketing plan in order to increase sales. As technology changes, so do marketing methods and needs. In fact, every time you create a new campaign you should be revamping your plan based off the metrics from the last marketing campaign. Analyze Your Marketing Metrics You’ve got to look at the numbers. As to what numbers to look at, it depends on your goals for your marketing campaign. Each campaign will have different goals so you’ll have different metrics to review for each different plan. But, the important factor…

Improving productivity is a necessity for a contractor who services multiple clients. Without a system in place that establishes good workflow, it can be really difficult to keep up momentum and take on enough clients to earn a good living. But, if you can establish a good workflow for the type of work you perform you will be able to take on more clients, work faster, smarter, and make more money. Develop Package Rates One of the best things you can do for your business is to try to develop, as much as possible, package rates for your work. Then, you will avoid, most of the time, having to track…

Due to the fact that more consumers are using digital devices to access websites and information, it’s become more imperative than ever to build all your websites to be responsive. You have just a few moments to convince your website visitor to answer your call to action, so you don’t want to mess up your chances with a website that is not designed responsively. Responsively designed websites have three things in common: 1. Fluid layouts – The layout and elements on the page get larger or smaller depending upon the browser, within minimum and maximum limits. 2. Media queries – Using CSS style sheets, the responsively designed site will call…