5 Local SEO Tips for Cash-strapped SMB CEOs

Are you a small business CEO working on a shoestring budget? Are you looking to make your mark on the local SEO scene? Then here are some tips to help you cruise along the online route smoothly without stretching your budget.

Local SEO

Related: Local Onpage SEO: My 11 Point Checklist

1. Create Local Places Pages

If you want to build a local SEO presence, then ensuring that you have a local business page for all three major search engines i.e. Bing, Yahoo and Google, is imperative. True, you will have more to take care of in terms of three different listings and dashboards but it is well worth the effort in the long run.…

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How Employee Monitoring is Connected to Productivity and Profitability

As an employer, you probably find yourself tearing your hair out in frustration upon finding your employees dedicating an unacceptable amount of time to gadgets like iPhones during work hours. Every minute the latter spend on playing games, socializing, and surfing the web reduces their productivity by a considerable amount, which in turn hurts the profitability of your business.

Employee monitoring and analysis

If that wasn’t bad enough as it is, some employees may even be involved in secretly leaking sensitive information to a competitor, something that can of course make your company really bleed. This is precisely why an increasing number of companies are investing in tools to monitor their employees’ use of digital devices and the internet.…

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6 Best Tools and Apps for Business Entrepreneurs

Running a business solely from an office is a thing of the past. Nowadays entrepreneurs attend meetings, prepare presentations, and manage people from airports, cabs, restaurants, and even their couches.

Whether you’re starting your first entry-level job, own your own business, or are sitting in the C-suite of a major company, you need the right apps to complete your business tasks and keep track of your projects, both inside and outside the office.

Evernote

Create lists, save clips from the web, discuss things with other Evernote users, and work on your projects from any device. Evernote is the ultimate note-taking tool.…

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Online Marketing Versus Traditional Marketing – What Should You Choose?

Marketing a product or a service is a necessity for every single business out there. If nobody knows about a product, sales will not be generated and profit does not exist. Marketing is vital but few business owners actually have the necessary knowledge to make correct choices.

Online marketing for local business

The biggest debate that normally appears is using online marketing or traditional marketing. We can say that online marketing is rather new, although it has been used for some years now. It practically refers to using the tools that are offered by the internet in order to promote the services or products of a company.…

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5 Accounting Tips for Overwhelmed Small Business Owners

When you run a small business one area that many do not enjoy to do but is vital to the on-going operations is accounting. It can often be tedious, boring and isn’t what you imagined your time would be spent doing when you started your business.

Regardless, it still needs to be done, but there is help at hand!

Stressed out business owners doing accouting

The following list of hints and tips will hopefully help you reduce the stress and time it takes to do your accounting and make it much less of a chore.

Related: Accounting Tips for New Small Business Owners

1. Keep Records of Everything

It is extremely important to keep good records and be able to trace all aspects of the companies spending.…

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How to Choose the Best E-Commerce Platform for Your Online Store

Opening an online store gives you access to the global marketplace. If you are able to grow a successful business, you can potentially reach millions of customers, which is very exciting for entrepreneurs with lots of ambition. However, before you can reach such heady heights of success, you need to actually build a functional online store to showcase your products.

So what are your options?

eCommerce

Using an e-commerce platform is appealing to many people because you don’t need any coding knowledge. Popular e-commerce platforms provide a drag and drop interface where you can personalize your website and add or remove features to suit your personal requirements.…

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Tapping Into Emerging Markets to Give your Business Start-up a Boost

Anyone starting a small business knows that being open to trading to the widest possible markets is an essential part of having an all-encompassing view of the future for the venture. With so many emerging markets around the world and the ability to reach out and connect with them online, it would be senseless for a new concern to constrict itself to more limited operations.

The idea of tapping into emerging markets might be something that a start-up should embrace, but how exactly should you go about doing it as a new entrepreneur?

International markets

There are a number of countries and regions around the world that have “come through the ranks” to take their place as important members of the global trading economy in recent years.…

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How your Business Location Effects the Perception of your Business

Think about some of the top tier businesses in the world. Yes, any kind of business – just bring to mind the first few that spring into your head when you think ‘prestige’. You might have thought of Google, or Facebook, or any kind of dot-com company, or perhaps you thought of a financial services business that’s a real heavy hitter. No matter what kind of business you thought of I bet there’s one thing that unites them all: they have a great business address.

Virtual office location

What do I mean by that? Well, a dot-com company is going to reside in Silicon Valley or New York, and the financial company might be in Washington.…

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Why Businesses Need Faster Broadband for Harnessing IoT?

The world is running behind time now! Nobody has time and the same applies to the Internet of Things also. Everything needs to get faster to reach the top level first. Since a majority of the work done by t]he big organizations depend on faster Internet, it is important for the Internet Service Providers to deliver the demanded speed.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Higher speed requires better technology and higher costs which many organizations do not want to incur as it affects their profit margin! It is a vicious circle, indeed. With the tech advances in fibre optics and its usage in connecting high-speed broadband for business and residential customers, speed is no more a worry for the ISPs.…

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What Does Your Choice of Van Say About Your Business?

Remember Del Boy Trotter’s Reliant Regal van? That hideous yellow plastic tricycle was the anti-hero of the BBC’s Only Fools and Horses show, endlessly belching black smoke onto the main streets of Hackney. And yet the Trotter’s Independent Traders van wasn’t just a three-wheeled punchline – it was a painfully accurate reflection of what small businesses across Thatcher’s Britain had to do to keep mobile… not to mention a painfully accurate reflection on the quality of business itself.

The Reliant Regal was never a popular workhorse, but plenty of people struggled through the Eighties in clapped-out Morris vans or Mark 2 Transits with their doors tied shut using string.…

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