Entries Tagged 'Business Services' ↓

You have to wonder if we can even seduce ourselves. The strategies and methods used to seduce customers has become a craft – a carefully taught and finely-tuned craft. Continue reading →

Important sentence in the New York Times this morning: “But the branding game has changed radically, largely because of the myriad choices the Internet provides consumers and because of the economic influence of widespread Web pontificating, known as the blogosphere, which barely existed as a popular force until about four years ago.”

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Shep Hyken, CSP is a professional speaker and author who works with companies that want to develop loyal relationships with their customers and employees.

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Many of my colleagues have felt that the use of Google Adwords has not been an effective use of their marketing dollars. I’m not sure what their expectation, but my experience is different. I don’t expect Adwords to take the place of my sales people. Adwords is just another part of the mix. The more strategies in the mix, the more sales we make. While I can’t guarantee success for everyone, at least you can make some decisions based on my experience. Continue reading →

Google has become one of the richest companies in the world in just a few short years. Someone recently calculated that if you placed each dollar the company has earned end-to-end, it would reach from earth to Alpha Centauri — which for those of you who don’t know is 4.4 light years from Google’s home office (also known as the center of the universe). Continue reading →

Craig Maas’ primary focus is lighting and energy consulting, but now finds himself helping with web design and support, both web sites and blogs.

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What do you do when your email goes down? What do you do when your web site goes down? You probably pick up the phone and call your web designer or IT support person. But what if you’re that person?
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Lately, we’ve been receiving refugees from the “Land of the Broken Promises.” Often, these refugees are very tailored and well-appointed – with highly visible and successful careers and businesses – but they are refugees nonetheless. Continue reading →

“All of my dreams just fall like rain
All upon a downtown train”
Tom Waits

Jon Shallert called last week to tell me about the movement to save downtown Ellensburg, Washington. Like a lot of downtowns in rural America, its very existence is threatened by a host of economic factors. Ellensburg is about a two-hour drive from Seattle. That same day New York Senator Charles E. Schumer and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wrote a Wall Street Journal article about saving downtown New York. It’s somewhere out east. Which effort do you suppose will get more attention? Continue reading →

Sometimes we just don’t listen. Pat Foltz from Fred Pryor Seminars (www.pryor.com) told us this summer that the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (www.naw.org) had a great business newsletter called NAW SmartBrief. Being the smarty-pants we are, we nodded politely and ignored her – for a while. Now, one of their latest newsletters contains a link to that very hot search topic for small businesses – local search. Continue reading →

What’s a poor small business to do if it doesn’t have a web site? The power of what is termed “local search” is that small businesses don’t have to have a web site to be found by Internet search engines. It’s hard to get firm statistics on this, but it’s generally agreed that over half of all small businesses don’t have a web site. Local search is the answer for these businesses, but they rarely maximize their “online marketing” through this powerful medium. Continue reading →

If you watched Monday Night Football last night (I know, Monday Night is now Sunday Night – just another reason the world has become way too confusing) you watched one of the foremost actors in the world pitch a web site called yellowbook.com. Take a second to guess how much those spots cost… and you’ll only need a second, because they cost a bundle. It’s just another example of why two words – “local search” – are sweeping the world of online commerce and search engine optimization - and should be sweeping yours, too.
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