Fresh Business Info – Wednesday, March 13, 2013

by Shilpi Mridha on March 13, 2013

Does Working From Home Really Work?

There’s no shortage of brouhaha over Marissa Mayer’s decision to put the kibosh on Yahoo!’s employees working from home.

7 Quick Fixes to Save You Money Today

In today’s up and down economy, it is more important than ever for consumers to do whatever they can to save money.

5 Ways Startups Are Using Vine

Startups and small businesses of all kinds are already starting to experiment with the new mobile service, creating and sharing six-second videos with their social media fans and growing Vine followers.

Value Added: Security entrepreneur unlocks secrets to profits

Washington entrepreneur Alan Kruglak has written four business books that have grossed a cool million with uncool names such as “The Entrepreneur’s Handbook” and “The Battle for Higher Gross Margins.”

7 Tips to Create Facebook Ads That Convert

Are you already advertising on Facebook – but not yet seeing the results you hoped for? If you want your ad spending to yield more fans, leads or sales, you might just need to tweak your strategy a little bit to start seeing a better return on investment.

How to Plan Your Vine Videos for Content Marketing Success

By now most of us content marketers have heard of, and probably already started using, Vine, the new app from Twitter that allows users to easily produce and share six-second videos.

How to Use Schema Markup for Local SEO

Schema.org brought about a revolutionary collaboration between the world’s top search engines to create a method that made it easier to categorize and identify important information on websites. However, local businesses are largely behind when it comes to adopting current web design and SEO practices.

13 Ways SlideShare Helps Build Your Business

One of my favorite new content marketing discoveries is SlideShare, the underappreciated content sharing platform owned by LinkedIn.

Vine: Six Steps to Using Six-Second Videos in Business Marketing

Video and marketing pros, take note. While Vine isn’t the first video app to hit the market, its simple design and integration with Twitter has been creating a lot of buzz in the business and marketing world.

Which SXSW Keynote Generated the Most Social Buzz?

Our friends at Topsy analyzed the buzz around the two keynotes and found that Musk’s generated significantly more social chatter — peaking during the time of his address at more than 2,500 tweets per hour.

List of SEO Software’s I use For Teaching SEO

If you are a regular reader of ShoutMeLoud, you know I offer many services related to Blogging, and two of the most prominent are: WordPress SEO optimization and teaching blogging & SEO to people. Usually I recommend the later one to all my clients, because learning SEO will be helpful in longer run. Though, there are many clients, who have money but no-time, they prefer to take the first route, which makes complete sense.

Hey, B2B: Grow Up and Get a Social Media Strategy, Will You?

Many B2B marketers are still avoiding social media, wondering, “When business customers do participate in social media, how can we tell whether it works?” OK, let’s put that excuse to rest once and for all.

Time For Small Businesses to Take Mobile Seriously [Infographic]

As a small business, understanding the mobile marketing landscape and how Google plans to play in that space will be critical for charting your mobile search marketing strategy in the near term.

Accounting 101 for a Growing Business

Emerging growth companies have different needs than startups, especially when it comes to accounting. If you’re not using professional software, tax expert Mark Kohler warns, you could be missing out on key information that can help you manage your business

10 Companies With The Best Reputations

In its 14th annual Reputation Quotient survey, Harris Interactive rated 60 large American companies based on six key characteristics including product quality, trust, social responsibility and how employees are treated.

10 Tax and Technology Tips for Growing Companies

As the tax deadline looms, small business owners are turning to technology to make the April 15 cutoff. Whether you use a packaged software or a tax preparer, chances are technology can make tax season a little easier for you.

Have We Found the Holy Grail of Marketing?

There are a lot of brands at SXSW fighting hard to grab attention, from GroupMe’s grilled cheese tent to Spotify’s green house to Chevy’s test drive activation.

Peter Blair Henry: How America Can Bounce Back From The Economic Crisis

I spoke to Peter Blair Henry, who is the Dean of the Stern School of Business at NYU, about his new book “Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth“.

Network Security: What Every Business Owner Must Know

Today, networks are literally running the world. Every bank transaction you make nowadays goes through a network cable. The reliability and stability of digital products sometimes lulls people into an unhealthy sense of security, and the consequences can be catastrophic especially for businesses.

Good Grammar Should Be Everyone’s Business

Today is National Grammar Day, a reminder that good grammar is instrumental in conveying ideas with clarity, professionalism, and precision. Even so, the informality of e-mail, texting, and tweeting has crept deep into company communications.

Report sees lack of social media-business alignment

Six months ago, your company charged into social media with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts, eager to cash in on the bounty of word-of-mouth goodness that happens when employees and customers sing your praises.

How I Became a #1 Blogger on Business2Community

One of the best ways to grow your brand, bring attention to your name and even increase backlinks and traffic to your sites is through the use of guest blogging.

Movement Entrepreneurs: How Today’s Social Activists Crush the Status Quo

Community organizing has come a long way since days of schlepping around soapboxes and papering neighborhoods with pamphlets.

Guest Post: Arnie Kuenn on The Convergence of Content Marketing and SEO

Over the next few weeks, we will be featuring our panel of expert speakers in a series of blog posts highlighting their passion and thought leadership on all things content marketing.

Concierge by CoolHandle Will Save Your Business

Over the years I have heard too many people complain about poor quality from vendors. We will outsource almost anything to save us money, time and energy.

The Gap Between Social Media and Business Impact: 6 stages of social business transformation

In business, social media is becoming a lot like email. Every company has it. In an Altimeter Group survey of 700 executives and social strategists fielded in late 2012, we found that 100 percent of participating enterprise organizations run to varying extents an active social media strategy.

Quickbooks Online Releases iPad App To Keep On-The-Go Business Owners Productive

There’s a huge demand from small (and large) business owners for apps that make their lives easier. App developers have risen in huge numbers to fulfill the demand. We recently ran a list of apps that can really make a difference in the traveling businessperson’s life.

Marketing Matters: The Importance of Influencers

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez stopped by Mashable House at South by Southwest to chat about the importance of relationships between marketers and online influencers.

Twitter marketing: B2B tech brands generate above average leads via social media content

As social media marketing becomes an increasingly standard practice for brands across the world, sites like Twitter must advance their ad offerings to attract wider markets.

Business Success: Power of Negative Thinking?

If you are looking for home business success, then you start to realize that there is power in everything. People believe in the power of positive thinking and everyone understands that knowledge is power. But would you believe it if you were told that there is power in negative thinking as well?

4 Reasons You Should Attend Social Media Marketing World in San Diego

Now add the waterfront San Diego Marriott Marquis hotel, an opening-night party surrounded by dinosaur relics, an evening networking cruise on Southern California’s largest private yacht and 49 expert-led sessions.

Don’t Miss Out On Location Based Marketing (Infographic)

Recent data suggest real-time location based marketing is not only becoming more popular, it may also be more effective.

SEO Brand Marketing – Looking Beyond Keywords

Over the years, I have worked for start-ups, on my own sites, on huge multi-national brands, across a variety of countries and a variety of digital channels.

Don’t Miss This Amazing Offer to Incorporate Your Business – Partner Offer

A few months ago eMinutes launched an ambitious campaign to incorporate 500 companies 100% free of charge. They are now on the home stretch and only have a few more free incorporation’s to offer! We expect these last few to go fast and encourage you to reach out to eMinutes about incorporating your business quickly.

How to Create the Perfect Unique Selling Proposition

In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know to create a highly effective, compelling USP. If this is a topic that has mystified you so far, you’ve come to the right place!

8 Ways to Grow Your Small Business

Lawyers. Bakers. Fitness instructors. Music teachers. What does your small business have in common with them? The ultimate goal of increasing revenue and profit.

4 rules for successful guerrilla social media marketing

When it comes to selling and marketing, you need to think of online brand promotion more in terms of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) where you and your social media marketing campaign are a floor broker and you need to get your clients orders in.

Writing Marketing Crap Speak Kills Unicorns (An Infographic)

It’s been going on for years. It was how I learned. It was how everyone learned. At first I told myself that it was just my job, and that it was the only style the bosses would let me write. It was what they wanted. It was the only the copy they would approve.

Infographic: The State of Social Ads

While this infographic provides some insight into each social medium’s advertising platform, I wish it would take a step further and actually discuss what works well on these advertising platforms. For example, on Facebook – advertising that drives conversation and engagement on the company’s Facebook page – coupled with finite targeting of the applicable audience – drives the highest conversion rates.
Read more: http://www.marketingtechblog.com/social-ads-infographic/#ixzz2NRql9A00

How Social Media Can Build Your Small Business

In today’s fast-paced digital world, people are constantly plugging into the internet any way possible from smartphones, computers and tablets. No longer is the internet used just for an occasional e-mail or research report.

Confronting an Under-Performing Sales Rep

There are a variety of reasons why sales managers avoid this most difficult of all conversations. Sometimes it’s just a time management issue – the sales manager has many other more pressing issues to deal with.

Improving Business Performance Requires a Better Customer Experience

This might seem like a statement of the obvious for this inaugural blog posting, but apparently that opinion may not be shared by everyone. Consequently, I thought I’d kick off discussions on this blog with an experience of what it’s like to shop for travel insurance.

Why Business Process Must Never Replace Humanity in a Contact Centre

This chain of events raises serious lessons for any contact centre manager, going right to the heart of basic principles in customer service.

Manage Your Online Presence To Get More Business Sales Leads

Getting qualified business appointments is difficult if the online reviews for your website or company are not exactly positive. Of course, getting negative reviews every once in a while is inevitable.

Banking Websites Perform Poorly on Publishing Customer Service Standards

A Price Perrott snapshot survey of major high street banking websites in the UK and New Zealand has revealed poor performance in publishing commitments to customer service standards.

Why Sales Managers Get Stuck in the Reactive Trap

The biggest time-waster that sales managers told us that prevented them from spending more time coaching reps boiled down to this – fire-fighting and daily distractions.

3 Social Media Startups to Watch From SXSW 2013

If you’ve been waiting to read about “the next big thing” in social media or tech to come out of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive this year, don’t hold your breath.

The 5 Most Common Funding Sources

If you want to be successful in business, it is crucial to determine when, where, and how to obtain the funds you need. Whether you need $1,000 or $1 million to start or expand your business, if you can’t raise this money, you can’t build the business you want.