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Local Advertising: Devising an Online Strategy That Suits You

Experts squawk about Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, YouTube, designing websites, and a whole litany of online and social media possibilities, but not all of them make sense for every single business. When it comes to local advertising, small business owners must seriously consider how to concentrate their efforts. While we all must utilize the internet and social media to some extent, what will be most effective for one owner, may be a waste of time for another. By reflecting on some key issues, devising a successful local advertising strategy becomes less about what everyone else says and more about what you truly want and need. Before you embark upon any online advertising initiatives, you must decide whether you are going to do it yourself, delegate someone in house, or out source it. All of these are perfectly valid options, but you need to consider whether you have the technical expertise, time, and money to support your decision, whatever it happens to be. Initially, it may be difficult for you to gauge your resources and exactly what this undertaking will require

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Local Advertising: Devising an Online Strategy That Suits You

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Facebook finally files IPO

It pays to have friends, especially as Facebook finally files its long awaited IPO. Reports have been swirling for months over Facebook’s looming IPO and it’s finally happened. The company filed initial public offering papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday evening. In the filing, Facebook, which has more than 845 million users across the globe, indicated it was seeking to raise $5 billion – making it the biggest IPO by a web company since Google in 2004 and could place the company’s value as high as $75 billion (

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Pinterest catches up to social networks with referral traffic

Pinterest is the fastest growing referral site on the net, eclipsing the likes of YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+, according to new stats released by Shareaholic. “According to our findings based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google Plus, Linkedin and YouTube combined,” head of marketing Janet Aronica wrote on the Shareaholic blog . The virtual pinboard lets users gather and organise things they find on the web, sharing them with other users on the site. Users can add photos to their own pinboards, as well as browse other users and discover new things based on interests including clothing, food and interior design. “Pinterest grew from 2.5 per cent of referral traffic in December to 3.6 per cent of the referrals in January. That’s impressive growth from just owning 0.17 per cent of the traffic back in July,” Aronica said. In just six months, the invite-only site has jumped ahead of Google+, MySpace, Reddit YouTube and LinkedIn – coming up against traffic driving titans like Facebook and StumbleUpon

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Pinterest catches up to social networks with referral traffic

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SEO Tips for E-commerce Sites

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t easy for any website, and e-commerce sites have some unique SEO challenges to overcome. These tips will help you tackle your e-commerce site’s SEO so you can rank higher in search engine results and get more visitors, customers and sales for your online store. 1. Create Unique Content on Each of Your Product and Product Category Pages Interesting, unique content tells Google a page is valuable, and helps it rank higher.

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SEO Tips for E-commerce Sites

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Major tech companies join forces to stop phishing

Some of the biggest tech enemies have set aside their differences in the name of stopping phishing. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and eleven other email providers, social media properties, email security companies and financial institutions have announced a broad new alliance to combat email phishing known as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance – or, DMARC for short. The goal of DMARC is to create new email standards to help stop spammers from tricking email and web-users into providing sensitive information, like credit card numbers and bank account details. To date, phishing has been relatively easy to do. Spammers simply simulate data in an email so that it looks like it came from a legitimate sender. Most phishing messages are caught by users’ spam folders, but many people still open emails that look real – leaving their personal and financial information vulnerable to theft. “One of the worst experiences for a user is being phished,” Adam Dawes, a Google product manager and DMARC representative said

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Major tech companies join forces to stop phishing

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Best Free Business Cloud Apps You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

The title might sound a bit presumptuous, but the writers at Cloud Nation worked hard to compile a list of cloud applications that most folks who don’t spend time in the cloud aren’t familiar with. All of these cloud hosted applications are free, but some of them do use the freemium mode of app distribution. In other words, the apps’ core features function forever for free, but extra premium features are available with subscription or other pay-as-you go plan. Mail Chimp : Are services like Constant Contact becoming too expensive?

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Best Free Business Cloud Apps You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

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Optimizing Your Business Facebook Page for Maximum Hits and Return Visits – A SPN Exclusive Article

With a user base of more than 750 million, Facebook is a viable social media marketing platform which cannot be ignored. Every business has potential customers on Facebook. So, to increase your brand presence, you need to optimize your business Facebook page and generate traffic for more business. To implement your Facebook business strategy effectively, you need to follow a few regulations. Using Targeted Keywords to Optimize Your Facebook Page Optimizing your page for keywords is the first step to raise your brand visibility. Use keywords which are sure to draw in customers who may not know the brand name but need your product

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Optimizing Your Business Facebook Page for Maximum Hits and Return Visits – A SPN Exclusive Article

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Social Media – Part of Your Web Strategy?

It depends on what you are trying to achieve with your site, but for many sites, the answer is increasingly ‘YES’. Social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter for the purposes of this article) have become increasingly pervasive. Recently I read that one minute of every eight spent on the Internet, is spent on Facebook. If the purpose of a web site is to communicate, then identifying where other people are – is a good start.

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Social Media – Part of Your Web Strategy?

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Facebook Timeline gets appy

Following the roll-out of Timeline, Facebook has unveiled some 60 news apps to help users ‘tell their story’. Users who have upgraded to Timeline will now be able to add the new apps to their pages, telling their network of friends what they are reading, thinking, watching, and cooking, among other things. “Timeline apps are for the activities you want to share with friends. You choose when to add an app, and you decide who can see it,” director of platform Carl Sjogreen wrote on the Facebook blog . “After you’ve added an app, you can always remove posts directly from timeline, and you can also edit your settings from your personal Activity Log.” Companies included in the launch of the new wave of apps include Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, eBay, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Monster, Foursquare, Kobo, Ticketmaster, GoodReads, Autotrader, Polyvore and Living Social. “Soon, there will be apps for all types of interests, as more apps will launch over time.

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Facebook Timeline gets appy

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How To Measure The Return On Investment For Social Media In Marketing

“ROI on Social Media? What bloody ROI?” It’s only the first week of January 2012 and already I’m hearing the same refrain as 2011! “How do we calculate the ROI on social media in marketing?” When you begin using social media in your marketing strategy or as a stand alone campaign, it is hard to determine how those numbers of followers and ‘likers’ stack up against delivery of a return on investment. We have clients who ask us this regularly so here’s some clarity for you. Measuring social media ROI is very difficult for a few reasons. The first is that it is very hard to use social media trackers for individual sales and the second is that social media is not a direct sales channel, it’s a relationship marketing tool.

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How To Measure The Return On Investment For Social Media In Marketing

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