Small Business Shift

As the yellow pages slowly die off, phone book companies are increasingly pushing the Internet versions of their books – both to searchers and to small business ad buyers. Which, for a small business, begs the question: is it worth buying advertising in the Internet Yellow Pages (IYP)? Consumers & Internet Yellow Pages A recent […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Local online business listings help people find businesses – and can affect your company’s ranking in the search engines. Learn how + where to get listed.

When yellow pages ruled the Earth, businesses used crazy names, such as AAAAA Plumbers – because when you’re listed alphabetically, not much beats quintuple-A. You can get around this to some extent by purchasing ads, as most books put the biggest ads first, but the regular listings are usually alpha. Now that we’ve entered the […]

There are a lot of scams online. This makes people cautious. If they are going to buy from you, or give you their contact info, they need to overcome this caution. So you want to generate as much trust as possible. 11 Ways to Generate Trust A Decent Base – Anyone, even a scammer, can […]

In the past two days, Twitter has announced a Follow Button and Google announced a +1 Button. These come shortly after Facebook’s announcement of the Send Button in April. The 3 new buttons, of course, can be added on to the Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Google Buzz, Twitter Tweet, Stumbleupon, Digg, etc, etc, etc. They truly […]