Internet Marketing Firm specializing in SEO & Social Media Marketing

If you have ever owned your own website or blog, been in charge of development for a company, or programmed in dev for a company, I’m sure you have spent and currently spend a lot of time dealing with the questions of, what’s the best platform to build X website, blog, or feature on? I know I have spend many a hour in a room with my teams trying to decide the answer to that exact question over and over again. I also know that the answer to that question can depend greatly on the skills and budget you have available as a company or individual. Is it best to use Drupal vs. Joomla, or WordPress vs, TypePad, etc.?

General, Web Design Brandon Buttars, WordPress

Tuesday morning I had the opportunity to meet with a company regarding providing search engine optimization services to them. This is a company that is on the verge of being an Inc. 500 company and I was meeting with the CEO, VP of Marketing, and VP of Development. About 45 min. into the meeting the CEO said, “So how do we get this going?” and my reply to him was something along the lines of, “If we begin working together we will start with, etc. etc.” and went on to explain our process to him. Roughly 10 min. later the CEO stood up and basically said,

General, Google, Sales and Marketing, Twitter Motivation, Persuasion, Sales and Marketing

begin rant

I read something today that made me want to vomit.  The idiot moguls behind the porn industry have a lot of balls (even if its publicity stunt) to say they need a Government bailout because their sales have been down 22%.  They say people are not wanting to make whoopie, or purchase porn cause they are to depressed during an economic downturn, which I say BS!  They are just mad at sales being down because people are willing to give it away for free these days on the Internet.

General bailout

If you’re at all like me, nothing can be as frustrating as sitting through a meeting that should have only taken about 20 min., but is still going after an hour. I really find that meetings can be one of the easiest places to waste time so I thought I should rant about this for a minute and then maybe suggest how meetings can be made more productive in my experience.

Things that drive me crazy about meetings:

1. Person in charge of meeting isn’t prepared so I get to sit there while they make small talk to fill time.

General Meetings

I cannot tell you how often I hear people tell me that they have this idea of something they want to start selling online through a website, but just don’t know where to start and where to get the product.  Just about 2 hours ago I was eating lunch with an Aunt of mine and she said that exact thing…”I want to do something that will just give me a little more income that I can sell online,” she then explained her idea to me and then said, “but I just don’t know where to start and where to get the product from.”  This is a question that can dampen the spirits of any budding entrepreneur, well guess what…I’m about to share the answer with you, the same answer I shared with my Aunt.  It’s simple, there are literally hundreds of companies out there waiting to help you that have products and will ship them right to your customer through what’s called drop shipping.

General Product Sourcing

I have been spending a lot of time lately trying to juggle business and family time with the upcoming holiday’s, as I’m sure many of you business owners are doing as well.  I’m not going away this year, so being at home and being a business owner, and a workaholic means I need to set some boundaries.  This has lead to me setting some rules and guidelines that have helped me manage the last few weeks and I’m hoping will help me really enjoy the next few weeks as I celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with family and friends, and I thought I might share my thoughts on this and see if any of our readers have any suggestions that might help, so here we go.

General Business Owner, Holidays

This is a question I get asked all the time. Today I was doing a webinar with about 40 people and I was talking with the group about strategies you can use to source products, the only problem was most of them were more interested in me telling them what to sell as compared to how to find it. So many people are interested in doing business online, but they don’t have any ideas about what they want to sell. Because of this I diverted a little bit and spent about 20 min. talking about how to qualify a product and come up with ideas. Here are my recommendation on that subject.

General, Sales and Marketing Products

Today, Cyber Monday, is the biggest online sales day of the year for many online businesses, but is it and has it really been all that this go-around?  It appears not.

Cyber Monday became known as such back in 2005 after the National Retail Federation Trade Group coined th phrase, in an attempt to define the largest online shopping day of the year.  As compared to Black Friday for traditional retailers (called such because that was the day that most offline retailers financial spreadsheets went from showing red numbers to now showing black numbers, meaning they are no longer negative).  And, as you can guess online retailers have been tentative about what they expect today in the form of gross revenue.

General, Sales and Marketing Cyber Monday

I’m sitting here watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with my family while preparing a few things for the meal tonight…and I had a thought and acted on it.

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone of our clients, and readers and followers a Happy Thanksgiving. I am truly thankful for the things I have in my life and for all that I have been blessed with. I hope and wish for the best for each of you this holiday season!

Here is one of my favorite holiday recipes that I enjoy every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hope you like it.

General

I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone of our readers, and those who may be new to the site a Happy Thanksgiving!  I hope you ejoy the time with your families and eat lots of yummy food!  I have really enjoyed reading what everyone is thankful for via Twitter this year, and I am thankful for having such amazing business partners that are like brothers to me, and totally awesome friends that I have met online and off.  You guys rock!  Please feel free to follow me on Twitter, and share more of what you are thankful for this Holiday season!

General Thanksgiving