Repeat Your Message

Repeat Your Message

Research proves messages are more effective when repeated. This does not mean that you should send the exact ad to Facebook or Twitter every day.  Change the photo, change the look, but get the same message to your customers over and over. “Repeat It, Believe It”...

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20 Reasons to have a Business Website

20 Reasons to have a Business Website

To Establish a Presence To be a part of your hometown community and show them that you are interested in serving them, you need to be on the web for them. You need to be an active participant in the latest technologies and the latest social marketing to help your...

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Does Your Business Need a Website?

Does Your Business Need a Website?

There are many uses for a business website including customer support, lead generation, educating your customers, contact information and location mapping, and most importantly ordering products and services.  But when it comes down to it, your website isn’t for you, it’s for your customers.

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How to Create “Email/Facebook/Up-Sell” Ad Campaigns

The key is to create an ad campaign that works as an “Email Ad” and a “Facebook Ad” with a primary goal of selling a product, but then also up-selling future products. When you reach out to your email marketing contact via Facebook ads also, you increase visibility, engagement and the value you bring to your current and potential customers.

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12 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Business Page

12 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Business Page

First of all, your Facebook Business Page needs to be a “Page”, not just a “Place” or “Group”. The biggest difference between these is that “Pages” have an “About” section where you put your business address and phone number, not just a short business description. Adding business info to your Facebook Business Page helps customers discover you and see what your business is about. And it makes it easier to find your Page on Facebook and with search engines.

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Social Media…Who Needs it?

Do you remember the saying “If you build it, they will come” from the movie Field of Dreams? Well that might have worked for a “baseball field in Iowa”, but it doesn’t work for the internet. In fact, you can have the most amazing, beautiful, informative website and yet get no traffic at all. It’s like printing business cards and then never passing them out.

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HOOK ‘EM with Design, WOW ‘EM with Content

Visual appeal matters a lot. My best advice: don’t try to save money on design, ever. I’ve seen time and again how a website redesign overhaul resulted in significant conversion boosts. People form their opinion about your site in milliseconds. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. (Recently Google confirmed the 50 ms number in their own research.) The first second on your website might matter more than all other seconds that follow…

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5 Easy Ways to Get More People to Read Your Blog

So you slave over an article, carefully crafting each sentence, choosing just the right words and when done, you actually sit back and chuckle at your creativity. You hit “publish”, knowing your audience is just going to eat it up. Then you wait……and what happens?……a few people read it, but no comments, no tweets, no sharing on Facebook. Where did you go wrong?

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When you don’t know what to say….

So, we’ve all heard over and over again that CONTENT on your website or blog is the most important way to attract attention from the search engines. And having engaging, interesting, new content on a regular basis is imperative.

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Need More Website Traffic? 9 Secrets of Social Sharing

So you’ve got a mobile-friendly responsive website, you’ve got great content, your SEO keywords are in place, and you still are not getting the amount of traffic to your website that you want? Your next step is Social Sharing. Having a strong social marketing strategy is a must for today’s social media driven culture. Websites that integrate social media on their website just plain receive more traffic. It’s free advertising! It would be ridiculous to not use it…

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Internet Business Directories

With today’s internet, we can find any business in the world by just Googling some vague information about it. Not only that, but we can map its location with a click of a button, go to their website, email them, call them from the computer with Skype, and read recommendations for that business from other consumers. Within 5 minutes we’ve compared 5 plumbers, their hours, prices, and distance to our home, liability insurance they carry, and read 5 recommendations, both good and bad.

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9 Things Customers Want on a Website

Series 4, Article 44

Small businesses can have more fun with their sites than large corporations. Having a personalized touch is something small businesses can do that many big businesses can’t. A small-business site needs to include something that reflects the creativity and personality of its owner. People want character. Whatever your industry, tell your story online. When there is nothing on your site about whom you are or who’s on your team, people wonder about whether you are a good company from which to buy.

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What in the World is Responsive Web Design?

Because mobile Internet usage is increasing steadily, it’s extremely important that your website is friendly for any size device on which it is viewed. Remember in years past, you would bring up a website on your cell phone and it would be a tiny version of the actual website you would see on a desktop? Then you’d have to “pinch and spread” you fingers to get it bigger and then use your pointer finger to move around and try to find what you want? Those were the years of resizing, panning and scrolling to find what you want. What a pain…

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3 Top Reasons You Need a “Mobile Friendly” Website

Did you know that 74% of the people who visit websites on their mobile phone will give up if it takes more than 5 seconds to load?(1) Back in 2013, mobile phones out-numbered PCs as the most common web access devices worldwide.(2) It’s amazing how so many websites are still not optimized for mobile. If you’re not “mobile friendly”, you are losing business!

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“Black Hat” SEO Techniques

It is never a good idea to use questionable techniques in order to get your website higher in the search engines. If you have a website, at some point you will get phone calls and/or emails from companies who promise to “get you to the top of the Google Search Engines in just one month.” I will guarantee that they are going to use “Black Hat” techniques (techniques to trick Google temporarily). You’ll see temporary results, pay them a high fee, and then they will be nowhere to be found when Google black lists your website for cheating. Be wary of companies that promise too much!

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SEO Ranking and Link Analysis

Keywords aren’t the only important factor search engines take into account when generating your site’s ranking. Just because a site uses keywords well doesn’t mean it’s one of the best resources on the Web. To determine the quality of a Web page, most automated search engines use link analysis.

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SEO, You Can’t Trick Google

In an ideal internet world, a website should go to the top of every search engine’s ranking based on keywords and content alone, right? If you put “hair salons in Monument, Colorado” into your Google search, you should get a list of just hair salons in Monument, Colorado.

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What is SEO?

It’s really tough getting your website noticed on the Web. Even if you have a beautiful, informative site about a popular subject with awesome photos and entertaining interaction, you could have a problem attracting visitors. One of the most reliable ways to improve traffic is to achieve a high ranking on search engines such as Google.

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Video is the Future of Marketing – Part 2

Video is a great way to tell your story, show the human side of your business and communicate highly complex ideas in an easy to digest manner. But while video has the power to deeply engage, it also has the power to bore the viewer to tears—and creating compelling video is different than writing, say, a compelling blog post, according to John Jantsch…

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10 Reasons to use Visuals on your Website Part 1

Using visuals including photos, graphics and videos will increase your traffic and keep your potential clients on your website longer than a well written website. Don’t get me wrong, wording is extremely important for search engine optimization, but it’s the visuals that will keep people on your website.

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How to Build a Great LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is an online resume of who you are, and who you’ve ever been. It gives you the keys to controlling your online identity. Have you Googled yourself lately? You never know what may come up. LinkedIn profiles rise to the top of search results, letting you control the first impression people get when searching for you online.

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FREE On-Line Programs…Retouching Photos

FREE online image editors are all the rage today. From among the great number of programs available, I have chosen some of the best ones below. Each has its pro’s and con’s and some are good for beginners and others for more experienced photo editors. Like I said, they’re free to use to play around with each of them and bookmark the ones with features you like!

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BEST “How to” Websites

There have always been millions of people who know how to do millions of things…..and now, because of the World Wide Web, millions of people have shared their knowledge on a million subjects in easy step-by-step instructions. The possibilities of what you can learn for FREE is endless if you just know where to look.

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How to Create a PayPal Account

A PayPal account will make it possible for you to quickly and easily make and receive payments without having to repeatedly enter credit card or banking information, or without having to wait for the sending or receiving of checks or money orders.The reason PayPal is the preferred payment method and safe option of choice for transactions for many on-line buyers and sellers (including large and small retailers from eBay to your neighborhood shops) is that it allows you to send payments securely online using a credit card or bank account without the recipient ever seeing your credit card or bank account information.

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Marketing Your Business with LinkedIn

Marketing Your Business with LinkedIn

LinkedIn goes beyond personal profiles and status updates; it’s a great resource for networking, influence relationship building, and lead generation opportunities through paid programs. Because users visit the site for purely work-related purposes, LinkedIn lends itself to making business connections.

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20 Reasons to have a Business Website

20 Reasons to have a Business Website

To Establish a Presence To be a part of your hometown community and show them that you are interested in serving them, you need to be on the web for them. You need to be an active participant in the latest technologies and the latest social marketing to help your...

read more
The Importance of Brand Awareness & Logos

The Importance of Brand Awareness & Logos

Google, McDonalds, BMW, Nike, Starbucks……when you see these company brands, you know instantly who they are.  It took many years and millions of dollars for these companies to be household names.  Luckily for local small businesses, you don’t need the 7 billion people...

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Texting Abbreviations

Texting Abbreviations

An emerging list of new-age abbreviations have begun to dominate the way social media users connect and communicate - and it is only set to get longer. The minefield of new meanings, at least according to social media marketing agency wearesocial.com.au, have grown...

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Getting Business Testimonials

Getting Business Testimonials

It’s true that more people trust peer recommendations over advertising.  It is a business necessity to start to collect, and use, recommendations and testimonials.  Recommendations and testimonials are one of the best ways to establish “social proof”.  How do you...

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Google My Business

Google My Business

Ever wonder why when you Google a business, some of them have a huge ad on the right hand side, including a photo of the business, map, address, phone #, hours, and sometimes even online reviews?  Wonder how they got that and how much it cost them?  Well, they set it...

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