Small Business Shift

I’ve run into businesses that have actually lost their domain name (yourcompany.com) when changing web hosting providers. This is usually because their old provider was an individual that quit the business, or the company was switching to a cheap/free host and didn’t know how do the changeover. This is bad, because you probably chose a […]

This post was prompted by discussions at Catalyst eMarketing and Blumenthals.com regarding spam reviews of moving companies. It’s a nightmare. You go to your Google Places Page, and see it covered with reviews saying that your business is overpriced, has horrible service, and is pretty much a scam. Sure, not every one of your customers […]

Facebook can be tricky. You get a whole bunch of people liking your page and content, but this can easily end up buried in their friends’ feeds. To give companies a way around this (and, of course, to make some money), Facebook created sponsored stories. These are a nice addition for existing Facebook advertisers as […]

About 2 weeks ago, Google announced their new social network, Google+. This has been covered ad-nauseum all over the internet, and I was reluctant to write about it. It’s in a limited beta, mostly filled with geeks, and no one knows if it’ll ever have great significance. And you all have plenty of business profiles […]

With the recent announcement of Google+, it looks like the number of social networks businesses have to deal with is going to continue to grow. In light of this, I’m going to review Hootsuite, a web & mobile app that makes social media account management easier. About Hootsuite Hootsuite provides a dashboard for managing social accounts. […]

Writing great title tags can be one of the quickest and easiest ways to get more search engine traffic – and can even increase the number of visitors you get from social media sites. But the websites of many small businesses ignore title tags or follow bad advice – and drive away potential customers. Read […]

Running a good blog is a lot of work (notice my slow posting the last couple weeks – to be better after the 4th). Yet I firmly believe that blogging can be well worthwhile for a small business. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits – and consider how to make them even […]

Contact forms, order forms, customer surveys, and more – forms are an important part of any business’s online presence, and something that can be difficult to create. Enter Formstack, an online service (free & paid options available), dedicated to making the creation of great forms easy. Formstack allows you to build online forms & landing […]

No matter how small your business, people are writing about you on the web. Monitoring and managing these mentions is referred to as “reputation management.” It’s important even for individuals – to the point that Google recently added a reputation management feature to its user dashboard. Read on for a quick look at reputation management, and an […]

One of the great things about running a website is that you can easily track much of what takes place on the site. But a surprising number of small businesses either don’t have this ability setup, or don’t take advantage of it. Google Analytics is a free (and great) program for tracking the activity on your […]