Last week, I introduced a business man – let’s call him Pierre – and the two reasons he gave me for not having a web site:

I responded to his mistake #1 last week.  Here are my thoughts about Reason #2.

OK: Pierre gets business from word-of-mouth advertising. So he has a Marketing Plan and it’s called Referrals. Great! Referrals are fantastic, and are the …

As business owners, most of us realize the importance of being “top-of-mind” in our customers’ eyes, and we use e-mail newsletters to tell them about new products or information they may not be aware of. Many businesses that use e-mail newsletters to market to their customers however, miss a huge opportunity to help their own online marketing efforts.

E-mail Newsletters Can Help Your Web Site

Online marketing is often referred to as “search engine optimization” or “SEO” or “internet marketing”. The idea is to get your Web site so it shows up in Google’s index of results on the search engine results …

I’d like to thank Debbie Fried (@DebbieFried) for pointing me towards this video of Don McMillan’s “How Not to do PowerPowerpoint” stand-up routine. It was fun to watch and reminded me of the conversations I had with our own Scott Stiefvater as he was preparing for MB/I’s “Avoid Causing Death by PowerPoint” class.

If That’s Bad, What’s Good?

Well, whenever someone asks me what I think a PowerPoint presentation should look like, I can’t help …

As Twitter continues its meteoric rise towards becoming the largest, easiest vehicle for mass personal communication, advertisers and marketers continue to experiment with how the social media tool can be monetized and/or integrated into their campaigns.

Three concerns in particular have driven these experiments: Cost, Impact, and Disclosure.

Cost

As anyone with a Twitter account can tell you, Twitter is a free service.  It costs you nothing to set up an account, and there is no charge for posting to Twitter.

However, there is another price associated with marketing through Twitter, and its coin is time.

If you wish to grow a successful Twitter presence …

Excuse me.  I couldn’t help noticing that strange and interesting plant.

• Little Shop of Horrors

Unfortunately, we do not all work at Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists.

Putting a strange and interesting plant in your window (or on your website) will not drive web traffic all on its own.

If nobody passes your window, then no one can see what’s there, nor can they tell their friends and acquaintances.

What you need is an integrated strategy that both uses your website as an asset and uses your other assets to draw attention to your website.  Here are some things to consider before working on your strategy:

• Do …
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LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… once only visited for personal use, these sites are now being used for business purposes. We all hear about them and see their icons everywhere. And, we feel out of touch or like we are dropping the ball if we don’t have profiles on all of them.

It is true that social media sites help business. But how? Most of the case studies we read about are about big business and their bigger than life social media campaigns. How can small business benefit?

The truth is—at least our opinion of it—that there are no step-by-step rules to follow …

Most small businesses know their business. They also excel at explaining how their business operates and probably have a supporting brochure that tells that story. This knowledge creates operational excellence. But, growth potential is found in identifying why customers buy, who is buying from the company, and how to connect with them; this is a reoccurring question for even the most passionate business owners. A marketing strategy is a foundation built on the answers to these questions, a strategy for success. Building a strategy can be simplified if it is broken into small components.

Moving past operational deliverables, a …

An important thing to remember when you go looking for your online market is that nobody can tell you more about your audence than your audience itself. With that in mind, here are five ways to …

You’ve been there… eyelids growing heavy, mind wandering, sitting through another boring business presentation. And what happens when it’s your turn to speak? Chances are you are committing some of the same presentations sins as everyone else. One of the greatest of these sins is the misuse of presentation software like PowerPoint.

Slides laden with bulleted text are not ingredients for a powerful presentation. But many of us don’t know any better. The templates provided by the software seem to beg for bullets and text and slide titles and logos and clipart. What were meant as tools to make …

Flash, well known for its elegant moving images and animations, is the application of choice for creating beautiful websites. But many web developers have scrapped the idea of using Flash for business websites because text that is created in Flash is not always easy to recognize by search engines like Google. Search engine optimization has been, and continues to be, a priority for many businesses. So many web developers have gotten into the habit of settling for two alternatives: the less elegant look of a completely HTML site or a hybrid in which only some of the site elements, …