Can You Really Benefit from Trade Shows?

Trade shows seem kind of antiquated, but if you haven’t considered them as a legitimate resource for growing your business, then you’ll be surprised how helpful they can be to give you ideas and make useful contacts, to start with. That’s what we’re going to go over in this post; we hope to change your mind. For your consideration, check out the following reasons that you should include trade shows in your growth strategy. Does Anybody Still Go to Trade Shows? We don’t hear about them nearly as much these days, but trade shows and expos are still very much alive and well. No matter what industry you’re working in, you can find a trade show for just about anything under the sun. It’s quite amazing how prevalent they are, but these shows are still widely produced even today. In the 2018 CEIR Index Report published recently by the Center …

GoogleAnalytics_Talkroute

Should You Be Using Google Analytics?

  Although Google Analytics is not a new thing, there are still a lot of business owners who do not use it, and that is really unfortunate because it can give you valuable insight into who your customers are and how to reach them. Not only that, but it’s free! If you happen to be a business owner who is exploring different avenues that will help you to promote or expand your business, then it is definitely worthwhile for you to give Google Analytics a shot. Here are some points to consider about the software.   Google Analytics is a Free Tool   You’ve no doubt heard about it, and you’ve got nothing to lose in giving Google Analytics a try. Is it really free? Yes, it’s really free, with no strings attached. So, considering what you stand to gain from using it, there’s absolutely no risk to you in …

Improve Communications

How a Virtual Phone System Can Improve Communications

How easily can your team communicate with each other at work? When you take an honest assessment of the system you use for everyone to stay in touch with each other, you might very well discover that you’re wasting a lot of time and energy without realizing it. We’re going to go over a few of the most common mistakes that small businesses make in the ways that they organize their phone systems and other coms, but mainly how the phones are actually designed to complicate things instead of simplifying them. Disjointed Communication is Your Enemy Any business owner knows that all communication in your business has to be well-coordinated to be effective, and this is especially true for your phone system. Depending on how many employees you have, whether they work in a central office or remotely, and how much everyone interacts with customers over the phone. Obviously, many …

Do You Need a Human Resources Department?

  Human resources. This is the department of a business that seems more extracurricular than essential, but when certain issues arise with people on your team, HR can absolutely save you. When you’re a new business or still very small, with a limited budget, you probably consider HR to be somewhat of an extravagance. It’s more important than you might think, which we’ll show in this post, because the humans working for your business are your greatest resource.   No Business is Too Small for a Human Resources Department   The first thing to recognize is that small businesses can run into the same issues with employees as large businesses, even though they may look different in a smaller organization. Even in a business with as few as 2 or 3 employees, problems come up from time to time which could really use a third party to step in and …

Why We Love QuickBooks Self Employed

  QuickBooks has been must-have software of small businesses for a long time, but over the years, they have streamlined it and added features to make the current version even easier to use, to the point where it nearly runs itself. If you’re a business owner, there’s a very good chance that you have used QuickBooks at some point, and you’ve probably been using it ever since because there really isn’t any other accounting software out there that surpasses it. Let’s take a look at what the latest QuickBooks Self Employed software has to offer.   It’s Uncomplicated Software   The last thing you want with your accounting software is for it to be difficult to understand or navigate. Most people already hate math or at least have trouble with it, and to be forced to wade through numbers for hours would drive most business owners nuts. One of the …

Commit to Your Blog for 12 Months

Why You Need to Commit to Your Blog for 12 Months

Everybody wants to see a quick return when they invest their time into something, but that rarely ends up being the outcome. In fact, the strategy that produces an immediate ROI is seldom the best strategy because the investments of time, energy, or money that you make for your business tend to be the ones that yield significant and sustained returns. Slow and steady ultimately wins the race in content marketing, and this is widely misunderstood among marketers who go into their content campaign expecting people to flock to their business website after posting a few blog articles. This is one of the primary reasons why business owners and online marketers don’t see the conversions from content that they want. We hope to dispel here some harmful illusions people have about content marketing, so that you can have real success with a longer-term campaign. Don’t Expect Overnight Results If you’re …

Can Your Customers Break Your Phone System?

Just like when you open a new website for your business, and you’re testing the site in all sorts of different ways to make sure you can’t get it to “break”, you have to do the same for your phone system to check for any weak points that may frustrate or discourage your customers. There are a few problems that commonly occur in business phone systems, which you can easily identify and address so that everyone who calls you has a seamless experience. Don’t let these problems persist any longer because you may be losing customers every day for something totally preventable. Your Customers Should Always Be Able to Get Through Sad to say, there are a ton of small businesses who have problems with their phone systems which are easily preventable and fixable, and the owners either neglect them or are not even aware of them. Many callers trying …

Evolution of Advertising: Past to Present

Advertising has been around for a long time, much longer than most of us realize. Technically, the first advertisement occurred whenever was the first time someone told another person that they could get some item for a certain price, and it was most likely before recorded history. It’s difficult to pin down exactly when was the first time the concept was put into practice. In the beginning, it was definitely through word-of-mouth, and interestingly enough, that is still one of the most effective methods of advertising. What we’re focusing on in this article, though, is the history of advertising in the United States and how we got from the original incantations to today. The First Ads in the New World “A Brief History of Advertising in America” by William M. O’Barr notes that the first known advertisements in the would-be U.S. came before we won our independence from the British …

Shopify Review: Is It The Best Online Store Builder?

If you’re going to open an online store, or a website for any reason, you’ve got quite a few options to choose from now, as you’ve surely seen from all the different ads going around. We’re looking at Shopify today because, even though others like Squarespace and BigCommerce can provide everything you need, Shopify is one of the all-around, best ecommerce platforms that you will find and features you don’t get elsewhere. This platform should at least be on your list of companies to build your business website. Fully Customizable Website, Online Store, & Blog When they say you can customize everything, they mean it. Create everything exactly the way you want, from the bottom, up. The themes you can choose from are made by designers from Happy Cog, Clearleft, Pixel Union, and others. Your entire site will of course be mobile-optimized for customers to use it on any phone …

Guest Blog Posting Ways Generate Backlinks

Guest Blog Posting & Other Ways to Generate Backlinks

  Backlinks. They are an indispensable mechanism to get a lot of traffic to your website, and without them, it will take you way more time to break free from the nominal amount of web traffic that you gain from merely creating and then posting your content. There are a few ways that you can get other websites to link back to your site. Take a moment to look at these simple strategies to get the ball rolling.   What are Backlinks, and Why are They So Important?   To put it very simply, a backlink is a hyperlink that someone posts on their website which links back to your website. Though you can generate visitors to your site in a variety of ways, backlinks are one of the most potent ways to increase your web traffic. The best part about it is that once you get a quality backlink, …