Business Blogs: Trends, tips, and real-life anecdotes from industry experts.

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, [...]

Tory Johnson, frequent reporter on ABC’s Good Morning America show and anchor of the ABC NewsNow series focusing on careers asked for a little StartupNation love recently. One of her faithful fans, Natalie, of ChicSweets, asked for ideas about how to move her business forward on a variety of levels, especially in the transition from part-time [...]

We spend a lot of time, appropriately, sharing as much as we can at StartupNation about how to get new customers. But once you get customers onboard, what can you do to make sure you keep them?
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Our advice is to ask four key questions:

Who is my customer? This helps you understand your target market. Familiarize [...]

Today’s post covers 3 ways to find out if social media could make an impact on your company’s brand before spinning your wheels. You don’t want to start leading customers down a path if you don’t intend to commit to communication in a social world.
1)    Ask yourself, do your customers and the influencers in your [...]

Last night I attended my first baseball game of the season at AT&T Park in San Francisco. It’s tradition in most stadiums around the US to incorporate a little crowd participation on the big screens during a break in the game. Everyone has a little fun watching the KissCam, you know when couples are shown [...]

I typically focus on email marketing, since it is cost effective, it has a viral quality, and VerticalResponse happens to offer a great email solution for startups, but the following suggestions can apply to direct mail projects as well.
When designing your email campaign or your promotion mailing, from copy to layout, consider how your recipient [...]

We all think we have much bigger, deeper insight into our users than we actually do. If you think you understand your users you run the risk of overestimating what they want, you carry on bad habits, miss opportunities, don’t learn anything new or consider new ways to design.  There are very few companies that [...]

I’m attending the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas this week. The show is known for its cult following for all things interactive, from business leaders to designers, gamers to artists, film makers and musicians- they are all here (at least virtually.) I came to SXSW to be the eyes and ears for new [...]

Do you want to expand your business but spend too much time dealing with invoices, credit-card processing and merchant-account issues?
Well, for most of us, we just want to send out a simple invoice, track our activity and get paid as quickly as possible.
But all of this financial activity can be confusing and time-consuming. [...]

I just got back from my first trip to Austin, Texas. And as excited as I am to share all of the new insights I learned to help my clients with their Web copywriting, PPC, e-mail campaigns, and SEO, I learned something even more important…the value of a smile.
Now, I have never been to Texas, [...]