Sign Up

Signing up for this service is relatively simple, provided you already have a Google account. Simply point your browser to http://www.google.com/alerts and login or sign up. You will then be presented with a form to fill out with a variety of options. Once you hit save, you’ll be all set and signup will be completed. You will then receive alerts at your desired time intervals (our is ‘As-it-Happens’).

Settings

Once you navigate to the alerts page and have signed in, you will see a form like the one at right. We recommend that your first Alert be for your brand name. So for us, we would enter “PogoPlus” in the search query field. We also really want to know everything that people mention about us, so we’re going to leave “result type” as everything. Don’t worry, this won’t be too overwhelming.

From our experience working with small businesses, there isn’t a whole lot being written up about them on a regular basis. Because of this, we recommend selecting “As-it-Happens” for the How Often field. On average, we probably receive about one email per week per client with this setting on. Oftentimes, these alerts are still what we call false positives – or don’t really apply to the business. But it’s nice to know the alerts are actively working.

For the last two fields, ‘how many’ and ‘deliver to’, select the results and email that work best for your business. The difference between “best results” and “all results” is in how sensitive the filter is. The “all results” is best for businesses with unique queries – in this situation that would mean a very unique name. For most other businesses, “best results” should work fine and will send you updates only when all words in your query (the whole name of your business) is present in the new online publication.

Repeat & Relax

Perhaps the best part of Google Alerts is its passive nature. After filling out the form for you business name and any other keywords that are relevant (product names, trademarks, etc), there is very little that you need to do. New alerts will come into your email box you provided just like any other message. When you get these emails, simply click the link included to see the new content. If it’s good – don’t worry about it. If it’s bad – give us a call!

Happy searching!

Perhaps the most unique aspect of the app era is its always-on ability with GPS tracking. Today, you can find specials nearby or even friends with very little effort. On a business level, you want to make sure that your business is visible in the right apps, especially if you run a retail-style business. Apps such as Foursquare have really taken off with a college audience and are growing among older demographics now as well.

These applications are location-aware and allow you to send out your location to your social audience. In this way, one user of the app has the potential to advertise your business for free to their whole social network. Of course, the average reach of one of these messages is somewhat less than an entire network, but even a low percentage can amount to close to 100 authentic views.

In even further developments, new applications are under development to alert users to popular events and specials nearby. Some mobile apps may even allow their users to “follow” businesses and opt-into push notifications. Imagine what this could do for your business on a slow day. Offer a “flash sale” without any of the “flash sale website” overhead and cost. Well, it’s coming true in the up and coming app from Frat Labs called Dope.

Mobile’s presence in the business industry of all kinds is just beginning. In our opinion, the mobile market won’t fully mature until about 2015 when high speed networks and smart phones have fully saturated the market. As it stands now, over half of phones sold are smart and able to download apps to bring users the benefits discussed here.

Don’t get left at home, turn your site and your presence mobile and stay up to date on the latest technology and the newest customers.

Sign up to be one of the first users of Dope and stay up to date on what goes on in mobile.

Social media sucks because it’s not nearly visible enough. Sure, we could overwhelm you with statistics about how much time certain demographics spend on the major networking sites but those are points are moot. Sure, people spend time on facebook but did you know that more than half of that time is spent looking at photos of their friends? So unless you business is in a facebook photoshoot (now there’s a good marketing idea!) it’s unlikely that your followers are spending all, or even any significant portion, of their time looking at brands.

So is it really worth it to have a presence on social media at all? Why is there so much hype about all of this? Well, for the brands that really understand social media and build buzz around it – it does work. And it can work big. But you’ve got to have the extra time and resources to put into it – something many small businesses lack.

That’s still not to say that smaller businesses SHOULDN’T be in the social media game, however. They just need to adjust their expectations. The media hype has led many a business owner to believe social media will bring them in significant new revenue. False. Social media sucks for that. But what it does excel at is customer retention.

Use your twitter feed and facebook friends to post your latest specials. Highlight these specials in your physical presence and make certain information exclusive to social media. Don’t just smack a facebook logo on the bottom of promotional material, either. Display your social media prowess loud and proud and make it known you’re serious about it.

If you do this and are willing to go all in, you’ll see your customer retention and engagement soar. If you’re not – and be honest with yourself about this – then it may be time to cut back. Social media can be great for small business customer retention, but only if you work at it. Otherwise, social media sucks.

Paid Search

Paid Search, also known as Adwords on Google, is a great way to make your products stand out above the crowd. Adwords allows you to focus your audience only on people in your nearby area so that only people looking to get a haircut by you will see your ad. You don’t want to needlessly spend money on marketing your haircuts to people in Denver, Colorodo after all.

Organic Search

Organic search are the natural listings found just under and to the left of the advertisements. Getting your site listed for particular keywords “organically” involves a lot more work, preparation and even some expertise. However, the results can pay off in the long run. Instead of paying for every click that your link receives (such is the case with Paid Search and Adwords), all of your hard work optimizing will result in unlimited free clicks in this space. The downside: You constantly have to monitor your organic results and searchers will oftentimes have to include the location they are searching for in the query – for example “haircuts in Waltham.”

Directory Listings

Directories are the new internet phone books. There are plenty out there but the ones you may be most familiar with are yellowpages.com, Yelp.com, Google Maps & Local, and Angie’s List. Listing your business here lends some credibility to your store and allows you to show off your good products and services. It also helps drive traffic to your website and increase your Google ranking when you include your website and add pictures with additional information to your profile.

Local Blogs

Whether you own your own blog or prefer to reach out to influential bloggers in the area, blogs are a great way to get additional links and additional attention from blog followers. Ask local bloggers for reviews and opinions and provide them with an incentive to do so (if you’re a restaurant, a free meal may do the trick!). Try it out, it could be free marketing.

Special Sites

Special Sites will give you a massive audience, but at huge costs. Group buying sites such as Groupon, LivingSocial, and BuyWithMe may be good in the right situations. If your good or services have a very high margin (75% above cost or more) a group buying site may be the way to gain a large mass of publicity. However, if your business has lower margins, as most do, you should try implementing your own, lesser discounts and coupons on sites above such as Google Places, Yelp or even in your local paper or theatrical program.

There’s plenty of ways to get noticed online and draw traffic from the sidewalks into your store. Don’t miss out on these effective ways of increasing your clientele and ultimately improving your bottom line.

It Could Work, If Conditions are Right

In certain circumstances signing on for one of these do-it-yourself plans can be a great idea. They oftentimes have a fairly solid set of basic tools and sometimes offer even more advanced functionality such as PDF viewers and flash animation. If you’re looking to quickly build a splash page or a simple site to get up and running that will require no maintenance, then this could be a good route for you.

This can oftentimes be ideal for informal groups, 1-page personal bios, or brief projects. However, for permanent and professional business solutions you’ll want to look elsewhere. And here’s why.

Lock-in

First and foremost, as a small business you don’t want to fall for all the trickery that is out there. Free web design software packages are trickery. Let’s say you build your lovely new site with 1&1′s website designer for cheap. Well, what happens when they charge a new huge fee next year that you can’t afford? What happens when you need a feature they don’t offer? What happens when their customer service is terrible, your site is constantly unavailable, and you want to pick up and leave?

The short: You need to start all over again. If you sign on with one of these website builder hosting providers, you are at their mercy. Your site WILL NOT be compatible anywhere else and you will not be able to move it. You are stuck with that company forever and your content will stay there. No ifs ands or buts.

Restricted to their feature set

Sure, some of these website builders are getting pretty tricky with some bells and whistles. But what happens when you need a cow bell and they only offer tiny dinner bells? The same could be said with any number of features. When you buy into a static website builder you are limiting to the tools which they provide. If you ever need to use something other than their select few options, you will have to start from scratch, lose everything, and go elsewhere. Now that doesn’t sound like fun.

SEO

These sites can be harder to find. Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website clean and visible to Google and the rest of the search engines out there. With a website builder, and often little knowledge of the intricate details of SEO, your website may look good but it will never be found on its own. These builders lack the enhancements to make your site appear on major search engines and your overall visibility on the web will be hurt.

Get what you pay for

If you don’t believe us, then just believe this old adage: “you get what you pay for.” Or is it “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Either way, both sayings apply. Don’t try to do something on your own that normally commands some expertise. If you don’t really understand what you’re doing, you can hurt your business more than help it.

As we like to say, your website is like your online office and is many people’s first impression of your business. You want this impression to be the best it can be. So why cheap out on your online space when you wouldn’t dream of cheaping out on your offline space? Sure, you COULD do business out of a trailer but wouldn’t you rather spend a little extra money and get an office that will really help your business to succeed? Don’t purchase the online equivalent of a trailer to do business out of. Get a real office space.

Conclusion

Building your business website with a website builder may seem like a good idea at first, but upon closer inspection it may be more trouble than it is worth. Few business people have the time or expertise to build this site in the first place, even if it is in a “easy to use” builder (yeah, just like that playhouse was easy to put together last Christmas). Instead, save yourself the time and hastle and avoid other serious pitfalls in the process. Future proof your online office by giving it a real home that is easily found and equipped with everything your business needs for success.

Don’t fall for the web builder gimmicks. Fall for a web management company who will give you more than just a beautiful website – we’ll give you an online reputation.

This is all well and good for people, but really how does this help businesses? Well, if you’ve ever heard the expression “be where your market is” then you’re on the right track. Especially if your market is everywhere – because that’s where twitter is and that’s where twitter is headed – everywhere.

Take a look at this new enhancement from Google. When you search for things that relate to a twitter handle (that’s your twitter username) it’ll try to pull that information right there and display users that data. All you’ve got to do is allow Google to connect the two and you’ve got free advertising built right into Google. Neat.

So instead of continuing to make excuses, why don’t you try making a twitter page? It takes all of 5 minutes. And if you already have one, why don’t you try putting an extra 5 minutes into it every day and see if you get any better results?

Flash is a Technology

The first thing you need to realize about flash is that it has nothing to do with flashlights, flash raves, or any other kind of flash. Flash is a technology created by a computer company called Adobe (you may be familiar with their Adobe Acrobat Reader) and is meant to power animated websites or sections of websites. It makes sites look pretty by loading it’s Flash content seamlessly so there are really no page re-loads and everything smoothly transitions together on the same page.

Because of this, Flash can often be ideal for creating games, powering movie players, and providing animation and moving graphics. Alone, Flash is not all bad and it can look pretty cool. However, Flash should be used sparingly and should not be the exclusive means of powering a website. So why the limits?

Apple Incompatibilities

So if Flash makes things look seemless and powers some pretty cool stuff, why wouldn’t you want it to power your website? Well, the first reason is that Apple iDevice products (iPhone, iPod, iPad) don’t fully support it. This means that if an iDevice user tries to view your website or a section of your site made in Flash, they may end up just seeing a blank screen and an error message. Nobody wants that to happen.

The last time we checked, Apple was a pretty big and pretty popular company. Their devices were everywhere. And we don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. For that reason alone, it may be worthwhile to avoid flash. But there are more.

It’s Old

Flash is getting old. It’s been around for quite some time now and new technologies are emerging that can easily take it’s place. There are better frameworks even, such as Silverlight, and it’s no longer necessary. The big shots who create the internet standards released a new version of the web-coding language HTML that can do the vast majority of things Flash can do.

Flash is slowly being phased out by many of its users as we progress with technology. Don’t implement an old technology now.

Social Linking

Flash technology works within a single page. That means that if you want to copy and past a link from a “page” on flash, you can’t. If all of your menus are in flash, you’re not actually changing the site’s URL you’re just changing the Flash Page. So imagine if the Wall Street Journal, your favorite newspaper of course, was all in Flash and you found a really cool article you wanted to share with your best pal Sally. There is no way to share that article with Sally directly. You’ll have to tell Sally to go to the Wall Street Journal online, click on US News, Scroll 2/3rds of the way down, and click on the headline entitled “PogoPlus is the Best Marketing Company Ever.”

Now that’s not very enticing or useful!

Search Engines Hate It

The main reason not to use Flash is because SEARCH ENGINES HATE IT. The Flash technology stores everything in its own little private area that doesn’t make sense to search engines and then displays it to the user. While the user gets a good experience, the search engines get left out and those are the guys who you want to impress!

If search engines can’t read what’s on the screen because of Flash technology, then search engines don’t know what to categorize your site as. The search engines will end up getting very little useful content form your site and therefore it will rank much lower. Just like with social linking (above) Google and other engines won’t be able to differentiate sections of the website and so your pages won’t show up in search.

How could anybody possibly find you then?

Conclusion

While Flash technology is very cool there are better tools out there to use. Nobody expects or needs flash animations anymore and since search engines can’t see them and users can’t share them – it’s pretty pointless all around.

First thing’s first. Don’t panic. Internet Explorer is notorious for causing web designers with years of experience constant headaches. Its continual switching of standards has made it a merry-go-round of sorts and getting your site to stop at the right horse is bound to have a bit of trial and error attached to it.

If you are using the latest verison of IE, currently IE9, What is most likely the case is your site is trying to display in what is called HTML5 natively. What this means, is that Internet Explorer is trying to interpret all the code that runs your website using the latest and greatest release of the HTML standard. While this may sound like a good thing, it can cause problems if your site doesn’t strictly meet the guidelines setforth by the W3C – the makers of HTML5.

If this is the case, don’t worry. The vast majority of sites don’t yet meet these new standards and many of those never will. Luckily, IE provides backwards compatibility by allowing your website to trick Internet Explorer into interpreting your website as if it was running in an earlier version of IE where the HTML standard isn’t as strictly enforced. This is called IE Compatibility Mode.

Typically, IE9 will recognize the need for compatibility mode and automatically transition to it in order to display web pages the way they were supposed to be displayed. However, this is not always the case. In situations such as these, there is a quick solution – meta tags

Meta tags are invisible background information that your website gives to the web browser. In this case, we will need to insert a meta page into the top of all of your webpages just under the <head> or <header> tag. If your website uses a CMS or has a file called a header, you can simply place the following meta tag in this document once and your whole website should begin to display properly again:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE8″>

Once you have saved your website with this added meta tag, delete your cookies from your Internet Explorer web browser (by holding ctrl + shift + delete) and reload your webpage. Presto! Your site should now be working again.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below

Your idea is just waiting to revolutionize the market, and hopefully make you tons of money. You’re on your way to the American dream. You hire an engineer to build it for you, you get PogoPlus to build out the web presence and all that’s left is a little extra marketing and you’re well on your way to being the next internet millionaire. Customers start to come in, the money starts flowing, but for some reason your company isn’t as profitable or efficient as it should be. What could be wrong?

To answer this question, we turn to an article titled: SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters by David Skok on his blog, http://www.forentrepreneurs.com. He focuses on a couple of key metrics that SaaS companies should be looking for and drills down into these key metrics. Two big take a-ways from the article are such:

1. The Cost of Acquiring a Customer must be justifiable (he chooses the metric LTV > 3x CAC)

2. The time it takes to recover the CAC should be less than 12 month

Now these aren’t hard and steadfast rules by any means, but the article brings up some valid points about why these two metrics are keys into driving profitability and growth in a SaaS company.

The cost of acquiring customers needs to be low and as hands off as possible. The less sales staff you can bring in to get a customer, the better as this will have a direct effect on your bottom line.

At the same time, you want the Life time Value of the customer to be much higher than the cost of acquiring that customer. Intuitively it makes sense. You wouldn’t pay someone $5 to get you an apple if you were going to sell it for $2 dollars. You wouldn’t spend $50 to acquire a customer if they only brought in $30 in value. But there are many underlying factors involved with how to decrease CAC and/ or Increase LTV, which the article drills into.

Being a SaaS company, you probably needed a lot of upfront capital requirements, and thus the time it’s taking you to recoup and become profitable is of upmost importance. That’s why you also need to take into account the payback period of acquiring customers. Being a capital heavy startup at the beginning means you need cash flows to be positive sooner rather than later.

The article is a great read for anyone in the SasS stratosphere and the broader and finer ideas should be taken into consideration if you are looking to make it on the next list of Inc’s 30 under 30.

Of course for the rest of us, it’s just a simple reminder to spend our money conservatively yet effectively because unfortunately – money doesn’t grow on trees.

Dave Subsidizes Offline with Online

There’s only so much you can say or do in an advertising space. To catch people’s attention you need something big and catchy, which usually doesn’t lend itself to extra details. That’s why Dave chose to draw people’s attention with these ads around the Watertown, MA area and direct their attention to the web for more information.

The web is an excellent resource for additional details and information. Don’t overload your print ads. Make the catchy and simple to drive further engagement online.

Multiple Engagement Points

After I saw Dave’s ad on the back of his Jeep, I snapped a photo to remember the web address and visited the website when I got home. In this way, I have interacted with his ad in three different ways – saw it in print, captured and viewed it on my camera, and went to his website – thus increasing its recall. The more that users intact with your ad and see your campaign, the more likely they are to remember your brand and solicit its goods and services.

Unique and Genuine

Dave’s campaign was unique. It caught my eye because it was simple, stood out, and was a unique twist on “dating websites” that currently dominate online encounters. Dave didn’t decide to just settle on a traditional dating site, but created and advertised his own in a way nobody else was doing. This will set him apart from a large crop of other bachelors and gain him recognition by a non-smoker, ethnically diverse woman (hopefully)!

His ad was genuine and his website was simple. He may not know the most about how to build a website, but he understands genuine marketing. And he knows how to drive engagement. Hopefully soon, he’ll be driving his Jeep to the wedding as well.