The best part about it? It’s accessible to anyone. Brett Bajcsi an IT Operations Manager is quoted in an InformationWeek article saying, “Start Small”. He says, “Keep your scope small to begin with, understand how it’s implemented and how it’s going to work, and then expand from there”. Charted below are reviews taken from pcmag.com. For a more in depth analysis of these, click here.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

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Get creative! This is a fun way to market and connect with your customers and it doesn’t have to be complicated. There are a variety of ways to disseminate your information; think Facebook, email, Twitter, website, blog, Youtube, radio, newspaper, podcasts, or letters. Then think about what you’d like to offer up –this of course should relate back to your business. Could you share articles or books, DIY project ideas, money saver ideas, tip and tricks, offer guidance to others in your industry, share interesting facts, or the latest trends? The truth is, whether your business is just starting out or you’re an old pro, if you can offer people relevant information; increased trust and sales will be close behind!

Need more ideas or help executing your own ideas? See what Twelve Oaks Group can offer your small business!

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

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Fact: Today’s consumer turns to the internet before the phone book. We go there for reviews, pricing, hours of operation, contact info, latest happenings, buying, comparison, location, videos and pictures –to name a few. If a small business is able to address even some of these key issues with their website, they will inevitably reach new customers, save time spent on the phone, and have a leg up over competitors.

Fiction: Websites need to be updated all the time. Yeah, it’s great to keep potential customers in the loop about what’s happening with your business, but this info doesn’t have to be posted to your website. If site maintenance is of concern to you, you’re better off omitting time sensitive information to avoid outdated pages.

Fact: Sometimes less is more. If you don’t have the budget or skills to create a site with all the bells and whistles, that’s not a deal breaker. Websites should be clean, informative, and functional. Simplicity in many cases will provide the user with the information they need, and will allow them to take the next step by visiting your business in person.

For more information about how a website might benefit your small biz or to get pricing info, please contact Twelve Oaks Group. It maybe more affordable than you think!

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

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When we talk about internet marketing, it might surprise you to know that there are many types from which you can choose. Many of you may already be familiar with article marketing from a previous blog post that we did. But there’s a whole big sea of methods you can use for successful web marketing. You can use one method or several to take full advantage of the various promotion options for your services or products.

According to Wikipedia, “Internet marketing ties together the creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising and sales.” Also known as web marketing, online marketing, webvertising or e-marketing, the broadness of types is extensive:

• Display advertising
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Referral marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Inbound marketing
• Video marketing
• Mobile marketing

That means there are many ways you can enhance visibility for your services and products. Twelve Oaks Group has already touched on some of these, so we’ll be careful to not tread where we have been before. We’re only going to touch on those that we feel a small business or local government agency might want to tackle first.

“By 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing — as much as they do on television today. Search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, email marketing, and social media will grow to 26% of all advertising spend as they are embedded in the marketing mix.” (Forrester, August 24, 2011)

Display Advertising

You might have heard the term banners mentioned before and the importance of displaying banners next to your written content on your web pages, in your emails or even internet messaging (IM) applications. These banners come in all sorts of sizes and shapes and can utilize text, logos, images and, quickly becoming more popular, rich media that can have audio, video and more. Display advertising is just like your newspaper and magazine ads and your TV commercials — only in an online environment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is what you do in the way of marketing that places your website higher in ranking on the major search engines like Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo! and any other search engine that is out there on the Web. By getting higher placement in these engines, the likelihood of visitors coming to your site increases tenfold.

One of the most popular types of search engine marketing is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Simply, SEO is trying to “figure out” how search engines work. What search terms or keywords do individuals type into the search bar? What are they looking for?

The major applications where you want to consider utilizing SEM are social media marketing, email marketing, referral marketing and content marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a very low cost way to promote your business. Not only does it allow you to target the group you want to focus on, but it can be used very effectively with other types of internet marketing to drive direct sales and build relationships, loyalty and trust. Email marketing allows you to either use cold lists (ones that you have not had any interaction with previously) or your own customers — previous, potential or current.

Okay, so are you still with me? I’m going to quickly mention 2 more types of marketing that a small business can focus on. Both of these are catching on like wildfire.

Video Marketing

You’ve heard of YouTube, haven’t you? Making and using videos is not as expensive as one might think. Videos can be used both as a training tool to teach someone how to do something, as well as a tool to advertise. You can then upload your videos to YouTube where you have a prime opportunity to cash in on a brand new avenue of internet marketing. Why is video marketing useful? It’s been shown time and again that people don’t remember text content as well as seeing a visual.

Small businesses are just now beginning to realize the open field of opportunity in tying video marketing in with our last type of internet marketing — mobile marketing.

Mobile Marketing

That cell phone you have can be a powerful tool to use for advertising. Just think – it’s been said that there are at least 5 out of every 6 homes that probably have a cell phone. Now think about this — it’s also been said that mobile marketing can be 3-5 times more effective than online marketing. Those are mighty telling statistics, wouldn’t you think?

There’s no doubt about it. internet marketing can pave the way to success for small business. You can choose one type or combine multiple types, and Twelve Oaks Group has the web design and consulting services that can help you succeed. Why not contact us so we can sit down together and develop a customized internet marketing strategy for your business today!

Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Nathan

Nathan Reed is a spastic online entrepreneur. Since 1997, Nathan has developed online solutions for non-profits, small business, and local governments. Nathan is the owner and founder of the Twelve Oaks Group.

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Link to Full Comparison

For those of you that manage teams with an overabundance of spreadsheets to keep everyone organized and on track, I’m sure you have found that that method can become very cumbersome to manage, as well as possibly being the cause of projects not being completed at all. I’ve only see this method used successfully once. That took a lot of work and time — time you could be spent doing something much more critical to your operations.

I’ve tried multiple solutions in an effort to become more streamlined with keeping my web design and development teams on track, and here are 3 project management solutions that I have found to be helpful:  Basecamp, Trello and Asana.

Basecamp

I’ve used Basecamp for many years and have even gone through several design updates with them. Just when I think that they can’t get any better, they come up with even a more useful update than they had previously.

Basecamp is the brain child of 37 Signals. The parent company has one of the greatest philosophies I’ve ever seen — “The basics are beautiful. We’ll never overlook what really matters: The basics. Great service, ease of use, honest pricing, and respect for our customer’s time, money, and trust.”

It’s so easy to set up your projects, assign To Dos, assign people, update files, move things around — and I could go on. Basecamp has a very attractive format that allows small businesses to know exactly where they are in any given project. Are there upcoming milestones that need to be met? How do I know if someone is late on a task?  Hey, we forgot to put Joe Blow on the project; we need to add him.

Basecamp makes it easy to answer those questions — all at an affordable rate! They’ll even give you a 45-day trial period to check it out for free. This puts Basecamp at the top of our list for project management tools for small businesses.

Trello

While Basecamp may have come in at the top, it was a hard decision to make as to whether to stay with Trello or not. Trello makes collaboration with teams a breeze with their boards and cards to help a small business manage their projects — and it’s **free**. Grab a card and move it to a different list. Add labels in a second. Insert checklists, and much more.

Do you have a hot topic that you want read right now? Assign it its own color and label — you know, like Priority or Completed. And with options like sharing, printing and exporting, small businesses starting out have all they need to make project management a breeze.

So why the switch to Basecamp? For the web services teams at Twelve Oaks Group, the switch over was due to Basecamp having more options that would fit our needs. One big decider for us is that Basecamp is more customized to meet the needs for team communication where Trello is pretty much strictly a task management tool. Basecamp also allow you to receive a daily update as to updates that have taken place the previous day which allows us to just be much more effective for our clients.

Asana

Asana’s development team built Asana to be fast and versatile and to easily cover the simplest of small business projects to the extreme of very complex projects. Asana is composed of three window panes within one. The first pane shows your workspaces, as well as the projects within the current workspace.

The middle pane contains the name of the selected project and the list of tasks associated with that project. You can then expand that pane into a third pane that described the details of the particular task like who’s assigned to it, due date and comments.

Adding tasks is a piece of cake. You just start typing the name of the task in the appropriate row and there it is.

I used Asana some time back when they were newer and didn’t have as many options. They just didn’t seem to be as intuitive as I would have liked. It appears as though things have changed for the better. Still all in all, Asana does have the features to be great at what it does — and that is to serve you quickly and efficiently.

It doesn’t matter what Twelve Oaks uses. What matters is what is going to help you when it comes to managing your projects. The question we started out with was, “Is there project management tools for small business?” The question is yes. We have listed just three that happen to be those that Twelve Oaks  has direct experience with, but there are others that may be more useful to you. The final choice is what are you going to use?

Still can’t decide which is best? Get additional information from our consulting team at (731) 337-4330. We’ll be glad to help you sort it all out.

Pam

Pam Lokker is a master writer and proficient virtual assistant, as well as being Co-owner of Borlok Virtual Assistants.

In addition, Pam is Customer Service and Content Manager for the Twelve Oaks Group.

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1) Potential customers need to have a clear understanding of what and who your business is before they will buy anything.

If your business is not self-explanatory, it’s important that you convey clear and concise messages about what you have to offer and the application of it –think elevator speech, and then where you’re going to publicize that info. If your business is self-explanatory, think about the image you’d like to convey to people and how you might set yourself apart from other businesses like yours.

2) Keep everyone on the same page.

It’s Important that businesses strive for consistency and cohesion with all publicized info. The way information is presented on Twitter, Facebook, and websites varies greatly, but because each of these platforms is so effective at relating to the customer on different levels, there is immense opportunity to enhance the image of your business. That being said, it’s important the customer doesn’t receive conflicting ideas. Social media admin need to have a clear understanding of what the short-term and long-term marketing objectives are and an overall understanding of how to put forth info and respond to comments in a way that aligns with the priorities and values of the business.

3) Maintain consistent logos, colors, and fonts.

While you may be a long way from the widely-recognized Swoosh, it’s important to remain consistent with these nuances. Some brand recognition is better than none. Brochures, business cards, website headers, etc. should all maintain the same look and color scheme.

Small-business is full of compromise. Next time you find yourself at a crossroads, weigh your options and stay mindful of your business branding. Would you like some hands-on assistance? See what Twelve Oaks Group has to offer.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

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Now that you have a small business or home-based business, how are you going to achieve success. What can you do right now that will give your small business a competitive edge? Keep your eyes on these 6 guidelines!

1.      Website

You do not need an exorbitant amount of money to have a website. As a matter of fact, you are far better off (in my opinion) to not have a website that is too complicated-looking with a surplus of widgets plastered all over. No, having a website that is pleasing to the eye will go much further to bring in clients.

2.      Social Media

Social media has become a useful advertising, networking, and communications resource for small businesses. That includes such sites as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest is starting to catch on.

3.      Search Engine Presence

Small and home-based businesses can create a strong Google presence using the same search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that the big box stores use. There are a variety of methods you can use to do this. One of the best ways is through the use of keywords that relate to your website. Whenever you use article marketing, you want to use your keywords and have those keywords apply to how people will “search” for you in not only Google, but other search engines as well.

Another excellent way to become highly rated in Google specifically is through their Google Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) internet advertising.  For small businesses that are on a limited budget, this is an ideal way to advertise within the confines of what you can spend. You basically just create your ads with the keywords and content that you want to use, your ads get displayed on Google, and your ad magnetizes customers to your site. Of course, it’s not quite that easy, but it really is an excellent program.

4.      Website Tracking

Knowing who is visiting your website and what they are looking for is all part of successful visitor tracking. Many businesses strictly rely on Google Analytics to gauge the overall success of the marketing campaigns. Twelve Oaks Group, however, prefers to take it two steps further by utilizing additional tracking sites to get a good temperature as to the well-being of our marketing techniques.

5.      Offering Discounts

Offering discounts can be a powerful lure to the customers out on the Internet. If they have clicked on one of your ads and actually ventured over to your site, why not reward them by offering them a discount or premium? For those of you that do eCommerce, offering them a

percentage off an item can encourage those would-be shoppers to actually shop around.

Offering discounts or coupons are gaining increasing popularity in the small business world. Many of those discounts often turn out to be just the enticement customers need to stay on your site awhile — and buy more!

6.      Local Search Marketing

If you are not being active on Yelp, it IS costing you money. It’s not just Yelp either. You should participate in local search marketing in order to increase visibility for your website and your brand. Recently, reports have been seen by the staff at Twelve Oaks Group that indicate that 73% of all internet searches are for local services or goods. To me, that spells out a strong reason for taking advantage of local search marketing while the iron is hot.

What I’ve offered above are just a few guidelines you can use to propel your small business on the road to success. Twelve Oaks Group has many more tips that we’ll be sharing with you in the near future. Are you ready?

Pam

Pam Lokker is a master writer and proficient virtual assistant, as well as being Co-owner of Borlok Virtual Assistants.

In addition, Pam is Customer Service and Content Manager for the Twelve Oaks Group.

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The article offers several helpful hints for getting and maintaining control over your inbox, but perhaps one of the most unknown hints lies within “The Power of the Plus Sign”.

“Say you want to sign up for a social network or need to register your email address to receive a coupon, but you don’t want to receive associated emails or notifications from those sites. Add a plus sign to your email and those messages will skip your inbox altogether.”

                                    -How To Filter Your Gmail Like a Pro

Adding the plus sign and a keyword serves as a sorting mechanism once you’ve set up your Gmail filter tool, e.g. “love.12oaks@gmail.com”, becomes “love.12oaks+shipping.confirmation@gmail.com”. The mail will still make it to you, but will be filtered to its designated spot, allowing you to find it easily if necessary and avoid the hassle of manually managing it yourself.

Efficiency is the name of the game! To see other ways Twelve Oaks Group can help you run your business more efficiently, check out our Web Services page.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

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Fast forward to March, 2011, and Yelp appeared on HubSpot’s The Ultimate List: 50 Local Business Directories. What is so notable about it is that Yelp was number 4 out of 50 with only Google, Bing and Yahoo! being ahead of them.

Now that’s mighty impressive!

The bottom line is that if you’re not active on Yelp, it could be costing your business. No, I’m not talking about signing up for a business account at Yelp; anyone that is a small business can do that. What I’m talking about is really becoming active and using Yelp to its full potential . Let’s see how.

Missed Local Search Visibility

Say you are looking for a website design company – say Twelve Oaks Group — if you are not listed in Yelp’s directory, you have missed an opportunity for a potential client to contact you — and that means you could be losing sales! Yelp had over 71 million visitors to their site in Q1, 2012. Don’t miss out!

Related to missed sales is Yelp is a way to connect customers to your small business by offering deals. A deal  is you making an offer through Yelp to buy a certificate that’s being offered by a third-party vendor. Or, you could become the third-party.

Missed Recommendations

Yelp is a great way to review businesses, as well as receive feedback from other businesses. According to Yelp, “Yelp Business Accounts allow businesses to share information with the Yelp Community. Simply put, it’s word of mouth — amplified.”

Missed Networking Opportunities

When you think about it, Yelp is a super place to network with other business. You would miss out on that rapport you can get by not:

• getting in touch with people who can be of help to you,
• collecting and updating their contact information or
• maintaining regular communication with messages to and from other businesses.

Missed Reporting

Besides the “misses” listed above, there is one more I want to bring to your attention. Everyone wants to know how their small business is doing once they sign up for a subscription to a site like Yelp. They understand this and have a way for you to track your company’s progress. If you don’t have a gauge for how your business is doing, how can you hope to improve? Yelp takes care of that with up-to-date trends and statistics.

I’ve given you quite a lot to think about, now haven’t I? The bottom line is that not being active on Yelp is costing you business. So I recommend you hop to it now and sign up for Yelp.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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According to Wikipedia, “Website visitor tracking (WVT) is the analysis of visitor behavior on a website.” In order to measure that, small businesses should look into which applications going to give you the best results.

What is website visitor tracking?

Visitor tracking (or management) refers to how many people come to your website, what pages they are looking at, what page do they come in on, as well as leave your site on, and much more.

Look at Twelve Oaks Group, for example. By looking at any one of the website tracking tools, we can determine how many visitors checked out our site on any given day, what country they were from and even what city they hail from, how many minutes they stayed on our site, did they access our site from a mobile device, and so much more. Just imagine checking out our content overview and discovering that 69.23% of visitors in the month of June so far entered our website through our Home page.

Why is visitor tracking useful to small businesses?

Visitor tracking is useful to you because the more information you can gain about your visitors, the closer you can get to satisfying their needs and requirements. What are they looking for? Website visitor management can give you a closer look at what their searching for, how many times they are searching for it and what you can do to tell them that you have the solution to what they want. This makes your content more compelling, your mailing list management for campaigns more effective, your products more visible and likely to be purchased, and your return on investment be higher. Wow! How great can that be?

In summary to this section, some questions you should want answers for regarding visitor tracking are:

1. Is your advertising and marketing working?
2. If you’re paying for ads on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest, you need to know if those dollars are well spent: do visitors from these sources stay on your site? Are they finding what they need?
3. Is your site communicating effectively?
4. By looking at the pages visitors check out, can you determine if they’re finding what they need? What do you need to tweak as far as your content? Do you need to explain further?
5. What is your bounce rate? – A high percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page needs to be addressed. You need to get those visitors to venture deeper into your site.
6. Is your home page (or your most popular entrance pages) capturing the attention of visitors?

What are some WVT tools that Twelve Oaks Group uses?

We’re only going to mention 3 website visitor tracking tools right now — and these are used by Twelve Oaks Group now — yes, it’s okay to have more than one tool to get the answers to what you need to know.

Google Analytics

Invariably, the most well-known and most widely-used of the website tracking applications is Google Analytics. Offered by Google as a free service, Google Analytics (GA) provides a wide assortment of statistics that will tell you all your need to know about your website traffic. You can also upgrade to a premium version for a fee.

Get Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. That means that once you login, you can see what’s happening on your site — right now. Google Analytics has Real-Time also with the number of visitors on the site currently, the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 30 minutes, and the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 60 seconds.

Twelve Oaks uses Clicky as well for several options that GA does not have. Since Get Clicky only focuses on real time data as a default. There is access to comprehensive history; you just need to dig a little deeper on their site in order to pull out that information.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange records your visitor’s every click, mouse movement, scroll, and keypress.

Lucky Orange is unique in that it provides you real time analytics like GA and Get Clicky. In addition, there are three more features that you may want to know about. I’m only going to give you 3 bullet points per feature, so for sure you’ll want to go check everything out.

Live Chat Software

• Chat box stays on the page and follows visitor as they browse your site for a seamless experience.
• Can watch visitors screen while chatting with them
• Add Customized Pre Chat Questions

Visitor Recordings & Live Sessions

• Watch in real time or automatically records visitor browsing sessions
• Watch every mouse movement, keypress, scroll, screen resize
• Ability to chat with visitor while you watch them browse.

Heat Maps

• Aggregate lots of click data to form beautiful heatmaps
• Click heat maps
• Mouse movement heat maps

Live Visitor Map

• Watch a real time visitor map of all your website visitors
• Animated with custom effects
• Plot line between points for neat effect

So as a refresher, why do small businesses need to set up visitor tracking for their websites? It’s all for the better to see your visitors, my friends.  You need to get a good overview of what they need, get feedback on your site’s performance and services and be able to be flexible so you can adapt quickly.

Do you need help setting up one or more analytic sites? The Twelve Oaks Group web services and consulting team can help you. Why not give us a call at (731) 337-4330.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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