As a small business owner, your marketing goals should be to inform people about your message, promote your product or service and engage your customers and audience. Why is social media important to your internet marketing strategy? It is a channel to successfully to just that: inform, promote and engage your business through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+.

Welcome to today’s blog on how to write a press release for an event that attracts views. We all want our press releases to receive a high amount of views and visitors, so here are a few techniques that could give your next press release a little boost.

You’ve probably heard of the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the multiple ways you can “SEO your website.” One way to do this is paying for link building services. It’s probably the area that is the most confusing for people and where it’s easiest to fall victim to scams if you aren’t informed.

Have you seen the books titled “_____for Dummies” on every topic you can imagine? Well they‘re the inspiration for this blog post.  As I was thinking through how we feel when we don’t have background knowledge or basic vocabulary on a subject, we tend to feel like a “dummy” even though we are brilliant in other areas. We all have expertise in one area or another, but there are also those topics we know very little about. If you own your own business or are a leader in a small company you may not have much experience with or background knowledge in SEO services for small business and that can make it very hard to follow a conversation or take the next sales call. If this feels familiar, then this post is for you!

I woke up this morning thinking about In-N-Out Burger and how its menu reflects a key piece of what defines good marketing. It’s simple…one thing. One thing, one focus, one piece of information. If you eat at In-N-Out you know what you are getting. Burger and Fries. Simple, straightforward, a single focus. Your only decision is if you want a single or a double, and if cheese and grilled onions should be involved!  While most restaurants go for the broad offering and add new menu items regularly, In-N-Out has chosen a simple, single focus. That might be the single most difficult thing to do in marketing, maybe in communication overall.

Google has once again changed the way it does something and this time it is all about keyword research, which will affect you when deciding how to add keywords to a website.  It has changed the way you and I can search for keywords by taking away the old interface on the Google Keyword Search tool and replacing it with the Keyword Planner Tool.  Change is always a bit annoying and when software is involved you never know if it is a good change or not.

Yee-haw! Your blog is written and you have that ecstatic feeling that’s a mixture of both relief and pure joy that comes after you actually sat down to write your blog and lo and behold, finished it! You might be so dang proud of yourself and confident of the pure genius you just produced that you simply click publish and move on. Whoa there, cowboy! It’s time to pull back the reins a bit because remember that feeling you also get when you don’t see results? It’s time to cowboy up and take a moment to review your blogging checklist before galloping onto the next project.

Today we’re going to talk about what makes a good website completely useless and what you can do to fix it.

Sitting here tonight, watching the first game of the NFL 2013 season, I am reminded at how many aspects of sports can teach us about life and about business. There are so many ways playing on a team and having a common goal relates to our daily lives and (for the purpose of this blog) to our small business internet marketing strategy.

For some strange reason America has become desensitized to the death of large and small businesses. It’s almost like Darwinism, in the strong surival kind of sense. According to the SBA, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years. What goes wrong? The death of these businesses is often blamed on a number of reasons including: Lack of experience, insufficient capital, poor location, poor inventory management, and low sales. The scary thing is, a lot of business owners believe their doors will never close and that these outrageous numbers do not apply to them, after all…they are special. Right?