Turning on your automatic reply saying you’re out of the office before taking leave is good email etiquette. However, they tend to be generic one-liners and are a missed marketing and PR opportunity. Your out-of-office reply will probably be one of your most-read emails; the recipient, hoping for a reply, receives one seconds after they…
It’s almost a law of nature that a modern business needs a blog as part of its website. However, just as everyone once rushed to put up a website without necessarily having clear aims in mind, many business blogs even today have little or no strategy behind them and so achieve less than hoped. A…
You have probably heard about the high-profile security breaches at companies like Target, Sony and T.J. Maxx, and at the IRS and other government agencies. What you may not know, however, is that small and midsize companies are also at risk of data breaches and hacker break-ins. If you run a small to midsize business…
According to the Radicati Group, 196 billion emails are sent daily around the world, and 109 billion of these are business emails. If you think email marketing is a thing of the past, think again. The worldwide use of emails is predicted to rise again in the next few years. Even alongside the rise…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are in business, you need to be networking. Yet there are so many networking groups available that, for the newbie, it can be difficult to spot the best networking groups and make the most of time spent with them. Just how do you get the best…
In mid-2012, then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney found himself in the midst of an embarrassing email hacking debacle. Romney formerly worked for a large financial institution and therefore should have understood the necessity of quality email security, but he was allegedly using a Hotmail account at the time. The hacker who breached the account was able…
If you haven’t jumped on the Instagram bandwagon yet for your business, that may not be a good thing. New social media outlets come out almost weekly, and they all claim to be the next big thing. Instagram has been around for a few years now, and with over 300 million users, it has proved…
It’s a common refrain in the online marketing business that “the money is in the list.” Having a large email list of engaged buyers is one of the keys to growing a business. So how do you build such a list when you are just starting out? There are five steps you can take toward…
You’ve set up an online business and are currently enjoying a reasonable sales rate. You’re marketing your venture on social media and are hoping for increased sales as the year progresses. When friends and family ask how your new business is progressing, you tell them it’s great but have a tiny voice in the back…
Chances are good that if you have done anything in business marketing, you have heard the term pay per click advertising or PPC. But do you really know understand what it is and what it can do for you? If you are curious whether or not pay per click management would be the best method…