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

Ugh! I just had a long conversation with another small business owner who was ripped off by several, search engine optimization (SEO) firms.
I hear this all the time, and it breaks my heart. As a fellow entrepreneur, I know how important it is to get value out of all the services you purchase.
How about you? [...]

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is essential if you want to get the most traffic possible to your site. However, you may be a little fearful of spending too much and seeing little results from your efforts.
To avoid any scary surprises, here are three tips to help you keep your SEO program on track:
1. Do [...]

The holidays can be one of the busiest and most profitable selling seasons of the year for small business owners. Here are 9 of the “best darn” holiday marketing ideas from small business owners across the US.

Since I’m new here, I’ll introduce myself and give you a brief discription of what we’ll be talking about.
I’ve been working with the creators of StartUpNation since 2001 when I was hired to shoot Rich Sloan doing yoga on the conference room table in the Birmingham Michigan office of the up and coming StartUpNation.  I [...]

Hi Gang,
Internet bubble? What internet bubble?
Yesterday, Groupon filed the paperwork to become a publicly traded company.  Sometime this year, you will be able to buy stock in Groupon and join the other 500 million people making Groupon stock discount jokes.
Last year, Groupon turned down a $6 BILLION offer from Google.  Laughable, right? Well guess what: [...]

Similar to our efforts on Twitter to claim the www.twitter.com/startupnation account name, we have now achieved something similar for www.facebook.com/startupnation.
As I wrote a while ago here in my blog about the Twitter squatter who was trying to extort StartupNation, there are definitely systems in place at the social media companies that support ethical companies and [...]

Small Business Public Relations – What Is It?
When many entrepreneurs think of public relations (PR), they
think about sending out a press release.
But PR is so much more…
It entails all of the communications you have with the media,
customers, employees, partners, etc.
Why Do You Need It?
By communicating with your customers and the media, you
can share your message, [...]

Just about every online retailer out there is looking for ways to utilize Facebook as a channel to enhance their online shopping experience and acquire more customers. Below are 5 useful tools that help retailers do that:
Addoway: An online marketplace for fashion, collectibles and more that integrates with Facebook’s social graph to recommend merchants your [...]

“Social Commerce” is a big buzz word these days. As many continue to talk about merging social media and e-commerce, there is no clear consensus as to what the main driver of social commerce will end up being. Many think its about finding ways to promote and sell products on Facebook, others think its about [...]

Understanding how to build an effective landing page is extremely important. Most people send their visitors to their home pages, but this is usually not a good idea. Why?

Not all your visitors are the same. If you sell a $29 book and a $5,000 coaching program, both audiences are very different from each other and [...]