Small Business Design Resources

Targeting Local Traffic

The Internet is truly a global phenomenon, allowing you to connect with customers all over the world. With a business website, you aren’t limited to local traffic the way you are with only a brick-and-mortar location. That is a huge business advantage, but it can leave you wondering how to build your local presence on such a global platform. Luckily, there are several excellent resources available to help you target local traffic.

Yelp.com is a website where customers can search for local businesses and leave reviews of their experiences, and it also offers a number of free tools for small business owners. If you haven’t already, check Yelp to see if your business is listed; if it isn’t, you can list it for free. If it is listed, claim your page to take advantage of all that Yelp.com offers small business owners: communicate with your customers by responding to their reviews, promote discounts and special events, check the amount of traffic your Yelp business page receives, recommend other businesses, and provide detailed information about your business–including your website address. With more than 26 million visitors in December 2009, Yelp.com is a great way to connect with local traffic.

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How to Make Money From Your Blog

When you develop your blog, you need to keep in mind the 4 basic principles of profitable website building. These are commonly known as CTPM. The letters stand for Content, Traffic, Pre-sell and Monetize. The four principles work for all aspects of your website business but let’s take a look at them in light of your Blog.

Let’s take a look at each of the words and how they apply to blogging.

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Q & A on “Designing Your Business Website” via Twitter Chat

Thank you everyone who joined me on Tuesday December 2, 2009 via Twitter #SmallBizChat discussing Designing Your Business Website.

If you’ve missed the discussion, you can download the transcript Designing Your Business Website Transcript

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Quick Tip: Use a Custom Domain Name for Your Blog

When setting up your blog you want to be sure to buy a domain name and a hosting account. Having a blog on a subdomain on one of the free blogging platforms such as wordpress.com or blogger.com (yourblog.wordpress.com or yourblog.blogspot.com) gives all the search engine benefits to that blogging platform. All the hard work that you’re doing in creating great content for your visitors doesn’t help your website ranking for your business if you don’t have your own custom domain.

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Using Social Media For Your Business

Flickr photo - Mouthing off by demi-brooke

Have you been following the Celebrity Apprentice? On Season 8 Episode 6, the objective of the game was to create the best viral video. A viral video is one that is emailed from person to person, thus spreading the word about your product. In this case they were advertising laundry detergent. Before the dawn of the Internet, companies spent some percentage of their advertising and marketing dollars on TV, radio and magazine commercials and depended to some extent on “Word of Mouth” advertising. People use to say that if you impress a customer, they will tell 3 other customers and if you disappoint a customer, they will tell 10 other people. Businesses often used to, and still do today, offer additional discounts to existing customers when they bring in new customers. Word of Mouth advertising is a tried and trusted fundamental cornerstone of business marketing. Read more »

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What is Blogging

A lot of websites these days use blogging as a way to draw customers. Blogging means posting a fresh article to your site every day, every week, or at some other interval that makes sense to you. Blogs can be useful to customers who may check out your website regularly to find out new information related to your product, your service or your company. New customers may be led to your site using keyword searches or by following links from other sites that reference your site, or from links you embed in other articles on your website.

The primary purpose of a blog is to provide fresh content for your website to keep your customers coming back. They want to see what new products you are offering, hear what’s new in your company, and see what additional services are available. A blog is also a great way to add fresh content to your site to keep it at the top of the search engines.

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Brand Recognition: Creating a Custom Twitter Background

When you have a business, you want your brand to be recognized in everything that you do. Having your business on Twitter is no different. By creating a custom Twitter background you will instantly stand out, bring credibility to your brand and leave a lasting impression to your visitors.

There are no set rules on how your background needs to look or what size it needs to be, but here are some pointers on what to do to keep that professional image. Read more »

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Twitter Tuesday: Free Custom Twitter Background Design

On random Tuesdays I send out a Tweet that I offer to design a free custom twitter background for one small business owner or start-up company. Follow Design Leap so you won’t miss your opportunity.

To enter: leave a comment on this post and include the following: Read more »

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Social Media Marketing Success – Three Steps on How to Maximize Your Efforts

Social Media.

Social Media Marketing.

THOSE 2 things has been written and talked about the last 2 years a LOT. But believe it or not, not a lot of small businesses or home businesses are using this powerful business and marketing “Zone” yet. Many people, because it is on the internet, shy away for it as if it were the plague.

“I am not a geek” people tell me. Well, we have “ungeeked the geek” for many small and home business owners, and made social media make sense to them

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Producing videos for your site just got a lot easier!

Producing videos is now something anyone with a computer can do.

How do I create videos to help my website? Everyone would like to know the answer to this question. First of all, use the ecard images that you can get from joining the EcardSystem.com. These ecards can be a part of your video. Make it short and to the point.

Submit your videos to the search engines, YouTube, Google and Yahoo Video directories and sit back and wait. You will begin to see all the traffic that you only dreamed of logging on to your site.

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