Insights, Ideas, Results
Most website visitors take two-tenths of a second to decide whether they are going to stay on the website or not. This is a very narrow window of opportunity for small business owners to impress visitors and encourage a sale, which is why the design of a business website is very important. Pop Creative, a Miami web design company, encourages following best practices that will help your business website stand out amidst thousands of others just like yours.
Social media access at work can be a great way to break up the day for employees. In a pressure-driven environment a little Facebook or Twitter distraction can be a quick, free and easy escape from intense routine that some employees experience in their daily 9-to-5 roles.
However, social media can also end up as a significant company expense, costing significant amount in lost productivity. The average staff member can spend up to 12% of a given day on social media sites when they should be doing what they’re paid to do.
The times when the Internet was just a haunt for geeks are over. It’s not even a novelty that in today’s world, everything is now online. The World Wide Web is now such an essential and integral part of our world that if the Internet ceased to exist tomorrow, the economy would be brought to a standstill. However, what is (relatively) new is that people are no longer limiting themselves to just passively reading and searching the web. Nowadays, anyone can actively contribute to the Internet and almost everyone does: Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Google Plus – these are just the most obvious examples. Online, the possibilities are endless and if you want your business to stand out in today’s market, you simply can’t ignore this trend.
Making an impact on the World Wide Web can be daunting for small businesses. The initial instinct is often to appeal to the largest audience possible online. However, when your brick and mortar business is located in a provincial town, small businesses can benefit better from local SEO than an all-encompassing search strategy. Optimising local search listings can help small businesses increase their online presence with limited budget.
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Most companies now use at least some level of social media to promote their business. Assuming your company uses this method of promotion, it is important to ensure that your online message is professional and consistent.
Large companies create detailed social media policies to make clear to staff exactly how their businesses can and should contribute to these online platforms. This ensures that the company creates the correct impression across all of their online presence – from blog posts to Twitter “tweets.”
Given the high visibility and spontaneous nature of social media, it is fair to say that creating a social media policy is equally important for a smaller business, to ensure that costly mistakes are not made when interacting with customers online.
Growing sales is the ultimate sign that your small business is on the right track. The day your sales become stagnant, or even worse, start declining it’s time to start getting worried. If you don’t pay attention to declining sales and start taking actions to reverse them you may reach the point of no return and hurt your business permanently.
The problem is it is very difficult to pinpoint exactly what mistakes you are making that contribute to declining sales because many times you don’t even realize you are making them. The mistakes could be happening in anywhere within your business functions – customer service, products, marketing, and competition. Many of these mistakes are strategic in nature, which means that you do not directly see them in everyday transactions, but their impact can be very large. This is what understanding reversing sales decline very puzzling.
To add to confusion, there is a considerable lag between the time you make those mistakes and when their impact shows up in the form of declining sales. That is why it is paramount to be aware of these mistakes and ensure you are taking corrective measures before it is too late. Here are 5 common sales mistakes I have noticed small business owners make frequently.
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As we herald into 2013 I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit the stories we produced in 2012 and the response we received from the readers. Here are the top 10 articles, in no particular order that got the most attention, discussion, controversy and response.
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Some restaurants are still unsure as to whether or not they want to claim their business on Yelp, the popular review site. They don’t feel like they need to pay attention to the review site while others don’t see the benefit that a review site can bring to their establishment, but a Yelp business listing can bring many advantages to your company, including the following.
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Many small business owners think of social media as panacea for all marketing and sales ills. They believe, often wrongly, that by jumping on the bandwagon of social media they will be able to improve their sales by 25% overnight. They are fooled by misconceptions promoted by the so called social media experts. I regularly get 4-5 emails every week from these experts offering me to help promote my blog and land it on the first page of Google Search for a charge!
While there is truth to the fact that every small business needs to have Internet and social media marketing strategy you have to first understand what it can and cannot do for your business and set the right expectations before jumping in. We do believe that there are selected social media tools that small businesses must use. It’s how you use it that really makes a difference. That is why I talked about social media best practices for small business owners in earlier post. In this post let’s turn the table and discuss the traps you need to watch out for when using social media for marketing purpose.
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Sponsored Post (Brought to you by RevLocal)
Here is a quick question for you. Let’s say you are looking for a restaurant to go out for evening dinner with your friends or family. Where would you turn to find out? In the old days your answer would have been Yellow Pages (remember those thick books you used to keep?). Not anymore. These days more and more people are turning to web sites such as Google Places and Bing Local to uncover local businesses. These Online business listings, along with review sites such as Yelp, are becoming the new “Yellow Pages” of the Internet age.
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