Mister Rogers was a neighbor to millions of kids around the world. We could always count on going to "the land of make believe" while he taught us the value of caring and love in every episode. But what does that have to do with local SEO services and why should you care?

Typically a nightmare is something that you wake up from, maybe involving dinosaurs chasing you or falling from a tall building. In our industry, those nightmares are a bit different and often happen between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. involving websites crashing and spammy SEO tactics. Yet, we still LOVE our job despite these little hiccups.

A friend of mine sent me a 2 minute video to watch that was well-made and really interesting - but it made me think about the power of persuasion when combined with quality video. I started to wonder if I was getting taken advantage of by companies that I buy stuff from - even when I’m really happy with what I have most of the time.

Take a look at the short video below and then see if you agree with any of my thoughts. Not all of you will care, but some of you might want to talk about it. Just a little food for thought.

Great question. If you are a small business or just starting out, it can seem like when you buy SEO services a la carte, you will get the secret sauce that will boost your website to the top of searches thus flooding your business with customers. But unfortunately it is not all that easy.

Is your website NOT doing its job? Is it not pulling its weight in generating leads and helping your sales? For your business to thrive in the digital age and to compete with other businesses online, your website needs to be the hub of your internet marketing and possibly most of the marketing you do for your business. But it can’t stand alone in the big online world and there are internet marketing solutions that can help.

If your website is the only asset you have online, it's like a business flier on a wall with 10 billion other fliers…not going to impact anyone.

It’s happening - the numbers from Nielsen are showing that TV watching is going down and the number of subscribers to online streaming services is going up. One of the popular services, Hulu, may be making a marketing move that will not only please its customers but will bring in more revenue. The billion dollar a year company might be going ad free. But as a business owner, why should you care about this weeks’ business marketing news?  

With almost everyone having access to the internet at every waking moment through their smart phones and mobile devices, reviews of businesses through social media are at an all-time high. Reviews can really make or break your business. Online reputation is something social media marketing companies take very seriously and watch closely. If you don’t have a company doing this for you, here are some stats about reviews that might blow your mind.  

Some professions require little to no explanation.Think of that section on a form: Occupation __________. If the blank space is filled in with waitress, you know that person serves people their food. If it’s filled in with firefighter, you know they put out fires. If it’s filled in with preschool teacher, you know they’re teaching kiddos their ABCs. But if you read the fill in the blank this way:

Occupation: Content Marketer

Place of Employment: Content Marketing Agency

Then people look at you with raised eyebrows. If you’re a small business owner, you may have heard about content marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing, etc., and you’re wondering if you should in fact be hiring the services of an agency for your business. Content marketing isn’t just a buzzword:

When running a local business, one of the most important ways to get exposure is through local internet marketing. But how exactly do you do this? What if you don’t want to only pay for ads, how do you optimize your site to show up locally when the right people search for your business? Check out an excerpt from the article below:

Every once in a while I get a hankering for Taco Bell. My craving usually hits when I’m stressed, pressed for time, don’t have much in the fridge, or conveniently forgot the healthy salad I made the night before. Not long ago, my content marketing plan was kind of like my desire for Taco Bell – unhealthy.

Although sometimes a necessarily evil, I know that Taco Bell isn’t the best thing for me – so why do I give in? Because it’s become a habit of sorts. It’s an easy grab and go alternative to a healthier choice. My writing used to be like that too. I got into the habit of a grab and go style of writing until I took the time for the healthier alternative – making a plan.

Email. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to communicate to a mass audience, and the majority of people still check their emails first thing in the morning. Your business probably has a marketing strategy for email, but is that strategy helping you or hindering you? Let’s learn how to segment your list to create a targeted email marketing strategy!

Kentucky Fried Chicken, better known for short as KFC, is widely known across the United States as a fast food restaurant that serves up [big surprise here] fried chicken. After 21 years of not showing his face, KFC’s mascot is back and has been reaching TV screens across the country.

So you are the CEO of an inbound marketing agency. Congratulations and welcome to the cool kids club. We know what great work you can do with inbound and we also know how much energy and effort goes into every task that we complete. To help make your life easier, here are 5 different tools that you need.

Meet Linda, A Small Business Owner…

Linda owns a small business. She outsources a lot of the marketing to companies that do things she can’t, and she trusts that they are doing their jobs correctly. The problem is that she only has so much money in her budget for marketing, and is almost maxed out. She’s paying someone when she needs improvements to her website, an agency to manage social media marketing, a content writer to write for her site and blog - and she knows that she could get a lot of free traffic and more leads if she could only rank higher on Google. Linda has been looking into cost effective SEO services and wonders that even if she can afford them in her budget, will they be worth it? Should she add SEO (search engine optimization) services to her current marketing mix? Will they really be cost effective?

So, Here at Half a Bubble Out we work on anything and everything to do with marketing and advertising, but most of our staff’s time is spent focusing on Content Marketing. We love crafting and promoting the great content our clients write or we write for them. It is the commonality that brings our staff together, makes us laugh and cry together and is it is also the focus of our confessionals.

You finally get the approval to talk to your boss about potentially buying digital marketing services for the company. You want to be prepared and sound informed about this specific type of marketing. So here are a few basics that your boss wants to know.

Facebook announced that it will begin to roll out new user preferences that will give Facebook users the option to customize and personalize their news feeds more so to their liking. On July 9, 2015, Facebook announced the change, which will be rolling out to all devices in a new update during the coming weeks.

Looking for some expert advice when it comes to email marketing for your business?

Well, you’re in luck! I’ve interviewed our on-site email marketing consultant who has been knee deep in email marketing work for the past three years. She lives and breathes email marketing and can sure teach us all a thing or two. Soak up this knowledge folks, because it’s hard to come by, especially when it’s free!

Work is not supposed to be something we endure so we can get a paycheck to pay for fulfillment in life. Work is supposed to be part of that fulfillment. Finding a job that allows you to achieve happiness more than 50% of the time takes a while to find. Many people don’t ever find it because they remain lost in understanding the gifts and abilities they have to contribute.

I was recently in a meeting where our client brought up the idea of adding a short video to her blog posts. With a slight – possibly reluctant – smirk on her face she asked us what we thought of this idea. Like each of our clients, she wants her business to get found online by potential customers. We’ve been helping with this process by creating a holistic inbound marketing strategy, part of which includes blogging, organic SEO services, downloadable eBooks, and email campaigns. I smiled at our client and said I thought it was a great idea, something worth trying at least, for many good reasons that I just happen to come across in the recent article below.

You can’t ignore social media any more if you want your business to reach modern consumers. One of the common questions businesses have when hiring or evaluating their social media agency is “what exactly should be measured?" Is it more than just setting up a profile and seeing if anything happens? We would say yes, and it is essential to track the effectiveness of your social media accounts through measuring these 5 things:

We love inbound marketing! Woo! Wait, we love outbound marketing! Oh no, can we love both, inbound and outbound marketing? If we love outbound marketing are we cheating on inbound?

Have you checked your email yet today? Let me guess there were about a dozen or so spam emails that you didn’t want to have anything to do with. But why not? I am sure there were a few of those emails that could have been helpful, so where did these companies go wrong?

Most businesses understand the benefits of email marketing but know little about personalization of those emails, which is interesting because emails that are personalized generate 6 times higher transaction rates than those emails sent that aren’t personalized. Do I have your attention now? Let’s dive in and take a closer look.