Small Business Shift

Web.com is a fast-growing (publicly traded:WWWW) behemoth in the small business web host/design/market space. About a year ago the company purchased Register.com (roughly doubling its size), and a few days ago it bought Network Solutions (tripling it on top of the previous acquisition). Coincidentally, a critical piece was written at Mike Blumenthal’s local search blog regarding a Register.com […]

While finishing my MBA, I took a class that traveled to India. One of the people we met with there was an exec at a large outsourcing firm, who was asked by another student on the trip what was the smallest project they’ll take on. He said that: … for BPO (business process outsourcing) projects […]

I’ve never really liked fax machines, and don’t find it worth keeping one around. But once in a while, you have to use one. Often this involves something which needs a signature. Making all of this cheap and easy is HelloFax. About HelloFax HelloFax is an online fax service. It allows you to upload a […]

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. […]

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 […]

One of the keys to ranking in local search are “local citations.” A citation is an appearance, anywhere on the web, of your business name along with its address or phone number. Google counts both the quality and quality of citations when ranking your business. To get started with gaining citations, check out my guide […]

Email marketing is cheap and extremely effective. But there are plenty of areas where you can make mistakes. Read on for ideas as to how you could use it, and how do it right. What’s It For? Email provides a great ROI for many companies. They’re doing things such as: Bringing People Back – Email […]

Small Business Shift has some big news. I’m launching a solution for businesses that need a great website, designed for marketing their company, at a very low cost. How does that work? WordPress Made Easy I’ve written about why I think WordPress is pretty much the best solution available for a new website. Those reasons […]