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.

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

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.

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

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.

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

Why you might ask? There are actually 8 reasons. You ready to take a look

1. Versatile - According to Wikipedia, ” Google Apps is a service from Google providing independently customizable versions of several Google products under a custom domain name. It features several Web applications with similar functionality.”
2. Secure – Google data centers have been engineered by top-notch security experts & FISMA certified. Added in at no extra cost is best-in-class disaster recovery
3. Gmail – What could be easier for your agency than having 25GB storage for your Gmail, less spam, and 99.9% uptime. Email security is powered by Postini. In addition, Gmail has been designed to be a powerhouse resource for convenience and user-friendliness allowing you to work from wherever you are, work faster, and use text, voice and video chat to connect with those people you need to connect with.
4. Google Calendar - Your calendar is equipped to handle agenda management, scheduling, shared online calendars and mobile calendar syncing capabilities.
5. Google Docs – Do you need to work on a document or spreadsheet in partnership with someone in your agency? No problem. Work in real time without having to deal with attachments.
6. Google Sites - Would you like to have an intranet or team-managed site for your local government agency? Google Sites is secure AND it allows you to set up sites easily without having to deal with special coding.
7. Video – Using Google Apps Video gives you the freedom and ease of use to share your videos — securely. Provide support to agency training programs or use videos to add a personal touch to staff communications.
8. Open Records Compliance – In Tennessee (where we are) all levels of government are required to retain certain electronic communications as part of the Tennessee Open Records Act. If your local government is archiving e-mails, it should be, and Google Apps has easy and affordable options that comply with the Open Records Act.

Google Apps for Government provides reliability in cloud-based apps — AND it is certified by the U.S. government. Want to customize by adding more apps? Just check out the Google Apps Marketplace.

Google Apps for Government has every app to make your agency run like a lean, mean machine — cost effectively. Need further proof  as to why Google Apps is an excellent collaboration tool for local governments? Check out Google Apps for Government and see the case studies, FAQ, the section on what voters have to say and more for yourself.

Twelve Oaks Group specializes in developing easy to manage online resources for Local Government and has multiple web services that may be of interest to you — or if you think of any questions about Google Apps for Government that you don’t have answers for, give us a call at (731) 337-4330. We’ll be glad to help you out.

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!

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

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!

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

How often have you been curious as to how a particular topic is doing on the Web, you know, is it being talked about a lot or hardly at all? There are ways to track topics, did you know that? Read on as Twelve Oaks Group shares successful ways to track topics on the Web.

Google Alerts

A popular method, and a very successful way I might add, is through the use of setting up Google Alerts. It’s very easy to set up. Start with going to Google News and put in your topic that you want to search for (like Twelve Oaks Group, for example). Now scroll all the way to the bottom and click on the link that says “Create an email alert for Twelve Oaks Group.” You can do this for any topic you want. The final steps would be to add your email address and make your selections for what’s showing. Voilà, click on Create Alert. Then depending on how often you have chosen to have the email alert delivered, you’ll get an email anytime anything new pops up in Google.

Social Media

If you would be more interested in taking the social approach, then two good options are Google+ and Twitter.

1.      Google+

Google+ is Google’s version of a social network. When you signed up for your Google account, you were automatically set up with Google+. If you were to go there now, you would type in your search topic. If you look over on the top right, you see a red button that allows you to save your search. To check your topics you saved on a regular basis, just go to your Google+ homepage, select the More drop-down list in the sub-menu where you’ll be able to see your Google+ circles, as well as your saved searches.

2.      Twitter

Did you know you can save your searches for topics in Twitter — whether or not you use the hashtag? Yes, that’s right; you can. Just log into your Twitter account, type in your search query in the search box on the top right and click the magnifier. Presto, all the tweets that relate to your search come into view like magic. To save it, click on the search icon at the top of the tweets and choose either Save Search or Advanced Search.

Now finding that topic that you just saved is not so intuitive to find. Remember where you typed in your initial search on the Twitter homepage? Click on that again, and you will see all your search topics that you have previously saved.

3.      Facebook

Some of you may be wondering if you can conduct searches for topics on Facebook. You can by searching a topic but at this point, it’s pretty hit and miss.

Niche Communities or Specialist Services

Depending on what you’re interested in, you may find niche communities or specialist services that you can get good information from. Reddit is a good site for a niche community.

Tracking topics and tracking visitors are just two ways that small businesses can get an edge on their competitors or become aware of emerging trends and technology in the business world. Twelve Oaks Group has many more useful topics planned that will help you become the leader in your industry.

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!

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

As we look at local government, there are usually 3 types of functions that local government has a prime opportunity to communicate and interact with the public — using, believe it or not, a website. It does not have to be some big, elaborate website either.

Let’s take a closer look at how local government can be behind the 8 ball when it comes to performing their functions effectively

1.      Local governments provide services.

You know the services I’m speaking of — government roles can include providing the community’s water supply, fire protection, schools, parks, and libraries — and even services to help individuals that have special needs, physically or in times of crisis. Is your entity using a website to spread the word about what you are doing or offering as local government services or about updates that each person needs to be aware of? If not, you are behind the 8 ball.

2.      Local governments encourage community improvement.

For example, if a department or agency sponsors community events such as clean-up days that will make neighborhoods more attractive and safer, help the homeless programs or senior programs, those types of local government services should be publicized. Agencies can do this by publishing a community calendar for the current month or future months. Set up sections that are specific to residents or businesses and keep each group appraised of vital information.

3.      Local governments protect people from harm.

Local government is key in making sure that their constituents are safe from harm. I mean, think about it. Government agencies are responsible for making and investigating criminal laws, as well as incarcerating those individuals that insist on breaking the laws. A local government can make good use of a website to ensure people know what the laws are and the penalties that can be imposed for breaking those laws.

Let’s take a look at some of the areas where you can use your local government website to educate, inform, and increase awareness for a variety of subjects as seen through the eyes of the City of Dyer, Tennessee.

Beginning with the layout of the Dyer site, readers can get a quick overview of the City of Dyer itself. From there, you have links to critical departments (fire, police, public works, certain boards and more). A constituent can be brought up to speed on the latest news that the City of Dyer wants people to see, as well as gain instant access to upcoming events like board meetings.

So often, people view their local government as this big, unfriendly bureau set apart from them who that doesn’t care about them. That does not — and should not — be the case. By having a website, local governments can interact with the people and keep them up to date on what’s happening. Is your local government doing this? If not, your local government is behind the 8 ball.

Twelve Oaks Group specializes in developing easy to manage online resources for local government and can help you. Contact us today for more information on how you can show your constituents that you really do care. Get your information out in front of them. There are lots of possibilities and the sky’s the limit.

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.

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

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!

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

I have to admit I was pretty skeptical that there were any accounting solutions out there that didn’t just offer a free trial that quit after a specified time. I mean come on! Not all small business owners have the funds to dish out hard cash for an accounting system. So let’s see what I discovered when I went searching for free online accounting solutions — for you — that are free.

Wave

When Wave Accounting, Inc. first opened in November, 2010, their expectations were far exceeded as to the number of people that signed up — tens of thousands even! Then in Canada in the beginning of 2012, the company introduced Wave Payroll for Canada with expectations being that the U.S. would have their own version of Wave Payroll later this year.

Wave Accounting is loaded with features. Just take a look:

• No Cost
• Easy to learn
• Secure & Private
• Online
• Easy payroll integration
• See your overall financial picture
• It’s got real accounting
• So much more

Outright

Outright helps small businesses like you streamline their accounting and bookkeeping and organize your payroll, income, expenses, and more.  Back in 2006 when Kevin Reeth & Ben Curren left Intuit to start their own business, they found themselves in the same predicament many of you may be find yourself in now — the best way to keep their financial data organized. Not an easy task, is it? Well, Outright will enable you to wipe that disorganization away forever.

• Accounting tasks on auto-pilot
• Uses same categories IRS expects
• 100% free
• Safe and secure
• Super reporting
• All online
• Ability to upgrade to paid version — at a cost that won’t burn you.

BIG4books.com

BIG4books is all about providing general purpose small business accounting software, as a FREE* service (SAAS) using the Internet. You may have heard this type of service referred also as Online Small Business Accounting Software, Web Based Accounting Software, Simple Small Business Accounting Software, and other descriptive names.

• Completely online
• Simple to use
• Delivered as SAAS
• Access anywhere, anytime
• Nothing to download or install
• Runs on secure servers with 99.9% uptime
• Full security for your data

Notes: 

*The reason they are able to run this for free is due to their having sponsors, which means that you will see advertising from the sponsors. To avoid the advertising, you would need to upgrade to a paid subscription.

Please be aware that the free (Bronze) service option has limits of a maximum of 5 customer records, 5 maximum vendor records, 5 maximum inventory limits and only 1 non-admin users. You want more, you would have to pay for it.

I’m sure there are other free online accounting solutions out there; however, I would caution you to do your research before you sign up for a service. I was quite picky in picking out the above.  Also, don’t become near sighted when you do your research. Be sure you pay attention and don’t fall for the free trial offers when you search for free online accounting solutions for small business in your search engine.

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!

More Posts – Website

Follow Me:

By now, I am sure you have heard of article marketing, right? Twelve Oaks Group saw something on the Internet the other day, so I thought I’d break down that article for you. Here is the nitty, gritty about what and why article marketing is important to Small Business.

What the heck IS article marketing?

Well, let’s say you write several articles and upload them to the Internet by submitting them to different article directories, or perhaps you outsource the writing and submitting of them to a freelancer. Article marketing is a form of advertising for your small business and is very effective for driving customers to your website.

According to Phil Stone, Internet Marketing Success Coach, in his article, “What is Article Marketing,” he indicates that there are actually three types of articles that can be used to drive that traffic:

• Articles for blog or web site posts
• Articles as press releases
• Articles sent to article submission sites

Combining these three tactics together provides small businesses with a very effective internet marketing strategy that can propel their business to increased traffic — and therefore, increased sales.

Why is Article Marketing Important to Small Business?

There are actually many benefits to article marketing; however, we’ll break it down to the 3 top reasons as to why article marketing is important to small business. Let’s take a look at what they are:

1. Visibility – Using the 3 different types of articles gives you a lot of visibility as more and more businesses read your articles. Think about it. Prior to purchasing products and services from a small business, potential customers want information on that particular product or service, right? This sets you up to being a subject matter expert. They don’t want to deal with someone that is not knowledgeable about what they wish to buy.
2. Brand Recognition – Building brand recognition takes elbow grease and time. Nothing worthwhile will ever happen overnight but you can do it. By using articles, more and more customers are going to begin to know your brand. The key to your success will depend on YOU making your content and expertise available to them where they can enjoy it in their own time.
3. Profitability – There are two sides to this. One side of the coin is that you won’t have any large expenses to worry about. As a matter of fact, you can publish articles (yes, including press releases) at many sites for free. Using this form of internet marketing can also attract additional revenue to your bottom line because it will increase your opportunities for sales. Article marketing can be used by any size business — large or small — Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Business (B2B) or Business to Government (B2G) – nationwide or global. Article marketing can prove to be an effective source of additional income to your business for years to come and be a source of potential customers for life.

Twelve Oaks Group has lots of web services and internet marketing ideas that you can use for your small business. We’d love for you to give us a call at (731) 337-4330.

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.

More Posts – Website

Follow Me: