Many businesses are going green, and as a result it has become increasingly more common to deliver info packages by email, rather than use conventional mail.   In response to this trend, I’ve had a recent influx of client requests for a solution that would make it easy to include letterhead branding in documents even when emailing.

In 10 simple steps I’m going to teach you how to add a letterhead image to an existing Word document. (Assuming this is where you create the bulk of your business documentation)

This method will help you keep informational sheets up to date and looking sharp, …

Hello dear reader! In the event that you’ve come across this particular post while searching for info about SEO for your website I urge you to take a moment to check out the two preceeding posts as they will give you a good introduction to SEO, what it is, and how to use it. With that said, I’m going to dive right in and finish up with the four specific areas of your web page that you can work on to increase your organic SEO success.

Page Descriptions
The description is what gets displayed by search engines when your …

As I was saying last week, organic SEO is a very effective way of driving traffic to your site, increasing exposure to a targeted audience, and telling the search engines HOW you want to be indexed.

Of course I don’t want to mislead you. You will get indexed even if you don’t employ any kind of SEO on your site…eventually. And you’ll likely be buried among a bunch of other sites that don’t have SEO.

There are four specific areas of your page that impact organic SEO success.

Keywords & Keyphrases

The point of SEO is not to pick every keyword …

Location, location, location! More often than not, we think retail store when we think about location, but don’t forget the importance of being found online. You don’t want to be the kid who sets his lemonade stand up in the back alley and then wonders why he hasn’t sold any lemonade. (Thanks Jim!)

Depending on what type of business you are in, much of your website traffic may come as a result of the connections you make personally and through print advertising but don’t forget to make yourself easier to find for the people you don’t actually connect …

Continuing on from last week, I was detailing some things you might want to consider when looking to build a website that actually does some of the work for your business, particularly in a time of economic unrest when you want to make sure that your marketing efforts yield income.

Speaking of income, I’m sure you’ve heard the term passive income…essentially passive income refers to income you receive that involves little active participation from you at the time of purchase. If you operate a business that is primarily service based, chances are you’ve already realized that without some …

Of course, it’s no secret that we are in the midst of a global economic crisis and as such business owners are having to give greater consideration to where they are spending their dollars these days.

In my dealings with other web developers I am hearing that one of the most common challenges they are facing when approaching potential new clients is that business owners are gun shy about spending money on their business websites.

I have an entirely different viewpoint on this. Now more than ever it is imperative for business owners to take advantage of online marketing techniques. …

Not long ago friends of ours set out to revamp their business marketing message and as a part of that project they’d decided they’d update the Powerpoint presentation they often used for email marketing and were planning to put on their website.

So off they went, tweaking the message and building the Powerpoint – and in the end what they had was fun and punchy! They had chosen to use a well-known BTO song to accompany the message, and had worked some really fun photos in alongside the text areas.

Great job…just one problem – COPYRIGHT ISSUES! Without going into …

Well other than to provide a tacky counter stuck somewhere on the page to usually stand out like a sore thumb, they were originally meant as a way of tracking traffic to your website…but it really is a rather primitive method.

What does a hit counter do? It tracks the number of times a page is loaded regardless of whether it’s a new visit or just a refresh of the browser window. Some may track unique visitors but by far they do not provide enough information to evaluate what your website and marketing message is doing for you.

It seems …

How many of you have spent the time thinking up a great promotion to offer your customers or potential customers, invested the money to have it designed and printed, and gone through the fun of addressing it to everyone on your distribution list only to be left wondering how well it was received in the end?

Of course the message you send out is important, and worth a lot of thought but what I want to address is how you will know if that message has grabbed any interest and successfully converted the interest to solid sales or if it fell …

Most business owners know they need websites, but do they know what to do to make sure they serve a purpose beyond that of an online brochure?

Even though we know websites are the modern way of doing business, building credibility, gaining exposure, and distributing information, the plain truth is that in a lot of cases entrepreneurs are still ending up with websites that are really only functioning as online brochures, and don’t do much more than eat up marketing budget as hosting fees and domain renewals come due.

I firmly believe this is a result of the failure to consider websites …