StartupNation Blogs

As the “royalty” status of Hollywood stars has risen, so has their effectiveness as key influencers in consumer purchasing behaviors. Celebrity product placement is considered an “influencer-marketing” approach for helping brands increase their competiveness in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Marketers and small business owners can harness that power through strategic product placement opportunities that have [...]

StartupNation’s 3rd Annual Home-Based 100 competition
This is the quintessential ranking of home businesses and the superstar people behind them. StartupNation selects 10 Top Ten Winners across ten categories including Recession Busters, Greenest, Wackiest, Savviest in Social Media, and more. Winners receive invaluable publicity. Many winners have been featured in national TV, newspaper and magazine articles [...]

To follow up on a previous post requesting feedback on topics and offering to highlight members of the community, I learned of the BTS Blog started by Tom Blue, co founder of Lead411— BTS stands for Business, Technology and Sales.  The BTS Blog is dedicated to discussing startups, business trends, bootstrapping, tech companies, sales and [...]

Whether you are creating a new Web site or reviewing the one you already have, there are three key factors to keep in mind.
Are you guilty of these three Web site sins?
1. Visitors can’t get the information they need.
This is pretty obvious, but often overlooked. It can be enticing to use fancy videos, too many keywords, [...]

Do you really need a newsletter? Well, if you don’t have one, you are missing out on a cost-effective way to attract new business and provide loyal customers with valuable information.
Here’s how it works it three simple points:
1. Think about what your customers want.
How you can provide your customers with new and worthwhile information?
How can you [...]

With over 70% of the economic experts expecting a last quarter uptick in the economy, now is the perfect time to start preparing for the extra business.  I am a big fan of using virtual assistants to help build out my team during peak seasons.  This is an especially useful business strategy in today’s [...]

On Tuesday, we heard from David Durick of gotoBilling, www.gotobilling.com. This business experienced a 307% volume increase during the recession so I sat down with David to get his insights for other small business owners.
Here is the rest of that interview and more of David’s tips:
What kind of marketing and publicity activities have helped GTB grow [...]

Just wanted to send a quick reminder to everyone regarding the use of vanity usernames on Facebook.  As of June 13th at 12:01am EDT you will be able to create a vanity username for your Facebook profile or fan page.
Image via CrunchBase
This is TERRIFIC NEWS and will undoubtedly help with SEO ranking, name recognition, and [...]

When you’re on a bootstrap marketing budget, you can never have too many friends in media.  If you don’t have those connections now, there’s still hope.  You just might be able to win a few new media friends with the social media darling, Twitter.  Twitter has been a favorite of the media and public relations [...]

To follow up on a previous post requesting feedback on topics and offering to highlight members of the community, I learned of a company called Crossing Gaps — they help bring creative people (writers, artists, musicians, startups) online. Crossing Gaps helps them with everything from web design to marketing and monetization strategy so they can [...]