Blog Your Way To Search Engine Superiority SLO County small business owners are severely behind the times when it comes to blogging.  The fact is, the days of the 5-page static website are LONG gone.  In today’s marketplace, if you’re not publishing your own content, your search engine relevance is plummeting.  Search engine optimization leads to higher profits and the best way to get there is by publishing content that is...

Need Some Inspiration?  Look No Further. One of the best ways to get ahead in life is to learn from the experts in your chosen field that came before you.  In marketing, this is especially true because human nature changes so little over time and the techniques that were successful in the past are just as successful today. In the years I’ve been honing my marketing skills, I’ve spent a vast amount of time poring through the life...

The New & Improved Mustang Daily Cal Poly’s “Learn By Doing” philosophy appears to be alive and well, as evidenced by today’s launch of the beautifully redesigned Mustang Daily website, online home to the university’s student-run newspaper. Not only is the site vastly more appealing to look at, it has many new features that should increase the site’s readership and because it was built with WordPress (our favorite Content...

Twitter Can Help You Build Your Brand To many people, Twitter doesn’t make a lot of sense at first.  How in the world can sending little 140 character messages to a bunch of people, many of whom you’ve never met, help you grow your business and build your brand? First, you have to ask yourself what it is you are trying to accomplish.  I’m a huge believer in planning things first and testing the results as you go along.  Using...

Build A Business Following On Twitter Now that you have a Twitter account for your business, it’s time to promote it and build your following. When you created your account, you should have spent a few minutes inviting your email contacts to join you on Twitter. If you haven’t, go back and do this first.  As you can see from the picture above, Twitter is growing fast and can be a useful tool for growing your online presence. Once you...

Use Twitter To Build Your Online Presence And Communicate With Your Prospects Twitter stormed onto the scene a couple of years ago, one of many players in a crowded field of micro-blogging services.  Fast forward two years and Twitter is literally everywhere.  Companies like Jet Blue and Chevrolet have successfully leveraged Twitter to build relationships with their customers, getting customer feedback and building new networks. And now...

How A Blog Schedule Can Improve Your Small Business Before fracturing my arm late in 2007, my blogging schedule was planned up to 4-5 months in advance. After fracturing my arm, it became non-existent. Sadly after nearly a year of rehab and time away from blogging, I got used to not writing every day. Writing hardly at all, actually. A few weeks ago I was looking through some of the posts I wrote back then, and it was obvious that having a...

25 Marketing Tips To Grow Through Lean Times While there is no such thing as the perfect marketing plan, there are some things you can do to continue growing, even during a sluggish economy.  Instead of throwing your hard-earned profits away on expensive display ads, implement as many of these 25 recession-proofing tips as possible and watch your sales grow overnight. Tip #1 – Work Your Past & Current Customer Lists: Depending on...

What is it that you or your business can offer that will immediately gain the trust of your prospects, requires no storage space and costs you absolutely nothing in inventory costs? Your expertise. One of the reasons you should have a blog for your small business is that it helps establish you as a thought leader in your industry. It should also help differentiate your company from your competitors. So how can you speed up this...

Building a blog for your small business could mean the difference between failure and success. No, it’s not always that drastic, but one thing is for sure… if you don’t have a blog, you are falling behind. What is a blog and what can it do for your small business? The answers to those questions are so varied, they couldn’t possibly fit in a post. Luckily, we’ve been collecting all the posts we’ve...