Author Archive
Understanding Google’s ‘Search plus Your World’ Tool
Back in November, we told you about Google’s latest personalized search features and how you could use these social integrations in traditional search engine results pages (SERPs) to build your audience and drive additional traffic to your site. Since then, Google has dramatically expanded the reach of its personalized search results with the launch of Search plus Your World, which adds Google+ pages, posts, and pictures to search results. Let’s …
Should You Use Pop-Up Banners on Your Site?
We all know how frustrating it can be to read an article online and get interrupted by a pop-up banner asking us to buy something or join a new email list. But the fact that this archaic form of advertising continues to exist must mean that it’s effective, right? So, how do you decide whether to use pop-up banners on your website? Let’s take a look at some of the …
Want Your Blog to Succeed? Set Up a Publishing Calendar!
We recently talked about how building a business blog can help you to increase brand recognition, forge stronger customer relationships, and ultimately boost sales. However, running an effective blog isn’t just about installing a blogging platform and making a few token posts. If you want your business blog to be successful, you need to set up a publishing calendar. A publishing calendar dictates what you’ll post and when, as well …
What Are Joint Ventures and How Can They Benefit Your Business?
In the internet marketing world, a joint venture refers to two or more business owners who team up to offer complementary products or services to each other’s customers and share the profits based on a predetermined arrangement. If that sounds complicated, don’t worry. This example should help to clear things up: Suppose you own an online store that sells dog-training products. In order to grow your customer base, you approach …
3 Steps to Building an Effective Facebook Fan Page
With more than 800 million users worldwide, Facebook is here to stay. That means building a presence for your business website on this global social network almost mandatory. However, if you have yet to venture very far into the world of social media, understanding how to build and maintain your brand’s presence on these user-oriented sites can prove challenging. Let’s discuss how you can harness the power of Facebook to …
Understanding Stock Image Rights
Let’s say you’re building your company’s new website and use Google Images to find the perfect picture for your home page — the one image that somehow manages to simultaneously capture both the spirit and personality of your business in a single, beautiful frame. You save the picture to your hard drive and upload it to your site. After all, you found the picture on the internet. That means it’s …
Managing Your Business Email – Taming the Inbox Monster
Although email communication was originally intended to save time by cutting down the number of face-to-face interactions needed to accomplish tasks, most professionals find that it’s spiraled out of control – eating up far more time and energy than in-person meetings ever did! If you’re facing a serious case of email overload that’s preventing you from growing your business effectively, consider the following steps to help you tame the inbox …
Writing Effective PPC Ads for Your Business Website
As we discussed last week, pay-per-click (PPC) ads can be a great way to send a steady stream of visitors back to your website. However, it can also be an easy way to lose your shirt if you aren’t carefully tracking your budget and the ultimate ROI of your advertisements. So today, let’s focus on how to get the most out of your PPC ads by choosing the best wording …
How to Set Up a Business Blog
Although the word “blogging” is associated with personal websites in the digital world, building a business blog actually has a number of different advantages. Not only can business blogs be an incredibly useful tool in branding your business as an authority within your industry, they can also help you to engage visitors and turn them into repeat customers. Today, we’ll look at how business blogs work in more depth, as …
PPC Basics: How to Get Traffic Fast
So far on the Intuit Websites Blog, we’ve talked a lot about how to build traffic by achieving high rankings in the search engine results pages using a process known as search engine optimization (SEO). And while these techniques are incredibly valuable in terms of your site’s long term success, there’s no arguing with the fact that SEO traffic can take a long time to materialize. But what if you …