The focus of all your marketing efforts has not changed – the classic idea to bring more customers in by good word of mouth still applies. Although when it comes to digital terms this effort may better described as good word of keyboard. The new Google maps function and Facebook Graph Search has opened up opportunities in an area that some companies fear to tread – sharing of reviews. The great review that a Facebook friend shares is something every location wants, almost as much as they fear that a…

Once someone has found your website after doing a web search you want to guide them through the different stages of interaction that will ultimately lead to the sale. This can be achieved with a coherent plan of different calls to action that is very similar to what sales professionals call the test close. Consider a heating business that wants to make people aware of a service they offer to improve fuel efficiency. They might get a potential customer onto the site with a keyword focused title or blog post…

In the early days of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) the focus for many was trying to work a keyword or group of keywords into a sentence as many times as possible. That led to some bizarre reading exploits for those interested in a certain subject and found little else except creative and not so creative repetition. The Penguin and Panda updates this past year have refocused digital marketing efforts toward content, but it is important that we don’t forget about keywords altogether. Keywords are especially helpful in titles and this…

The digital marketing efforts of many small businesses were called into question recently in an article on SEOMOZ .com. Digital marketer David Mihm posted a blog on December 19th that looks at the times people who received a deal offered through Facebook actually bought the product. He says a survey conducted by Reuters on digital marketing found that only 20% of respondents followed through on buying something when they saw it advertised by a vendor they had “liked “on Facebook. This may be precisely why Facebook is adding a two-step…

The computer service industry has long been offering redundancy and other solutions for when disaster, usually in the form of data loss, strikes a business’ computer network. A power failure while employees are entering data into your system or when customers are accessing your e-commerce web site can cost you a lot of money. The way to combat this kind of business interruption is by having a mirror server working for you at all times. The mirror server is a second server that can be connected to the primary server….

A recent News article in the New York Times by Brian Chen gives us another story of how PayPal’s aggressive approach to protect buyers has hurt one of its clients. When Jorge Espinoza, who runs a web service that bikers and runners can use to sign up for races, saw a great increase in registration fees through Pay Pal he found his account frozen. He has since been compensated by the world’s largest online payment service but it was a nightmarish experience for him and his fledgling business. There have…

The decreasing size of the daily newspaper is a good barometer of how successful print ads are these days so new marketing strategies are needed to make people aware of your products and services. Digital Marketing is the use of the internet to distribute information to promote what you do in a timely manner that is cost effective and relevant to your target audience. That last part, relevance, is something that has not changed in marketing for hundreds of years. Reaching the right people is still the marketer’s number one…

Anyone just breaking into business has many important decisions to make – one of the most important involves accepting payments from customers. One of the most popular online payment service options is Paypal but is Paypal the right choice for your small business? PayPal’s main attraction is that it keeps private information, namely bank account numbers, away from the merchant accepting it. In some instances the security of Paypal alone is enough to generate additional sales because online shoppers feel more comfortable using it. The major downside to Paypal revolves…