Friday, May 27, 2016
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
8 Common Small Business Website Mistakes
November 10, 2015 Carianne King
When it comes to marketing small businesses online, it’s all about credibility. You may still be ironing out some of the details of your start up, but if you have a slick, useful website, you already have what you need to start spreading the word. However, given time and budgetary restraints, many small business owners make are prone to make mistakes when designing and launching their websites. With just a little extra know-how, however, any small business owner with any budget can market themselves online.
This infographic from Column Five Media for MyCase names some of the most common website mistakes among small businesses. The good news is: all are easily remedied.
- No call to action! 93% of small businesses don’t even post an email address where customers can write with queries.
- No mobile design! 60% of small businesses websites don’t work on smartphones and are unable to capture drive-by customers.
- No designated IT person! Ah, the big kahuna. Maybe the reason your website is inefficient is this: you haven’t hired someone to take care of it.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Transforming Government: Presenting a cloud policy framework for innovation, security, and resilience
Transforming Government: Presenting a cloud policy framework for innovation, security, and resilience
Around the world, organizations big and small are moving to the cloud to achieve more, faster. Cloud computing is no longer considered solely a transformative new generation of technology but a platform to enable ever greater efficiencies, deliver big data analytics, and empower the Internet of Things. As KPMG recently put it: “The question is no longer: ‘How do I move to the cloud?’ Instead, it’s ‘Now that I’m in the cloud, how do I make sure I’ve optimized my investment and risk exposure?’”.
While the first wave of cloud adopters has largely been from the private sector, in recent years, governments are increasingly and incrementally adopting a cloud-first approach – instructing their ministries, departments and agencies to choose cloud services whenever possible. Those countries have understood that cloud computing provides a secure, efficient and cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premises systems. In addition, they are recognizing the innovative potential that cloud computing brings, allowing them to work more closely with their citizens and deliver more intuitive e-government services.
However, the fundamentally different nature of cloud computing has meant that governments are uncertain about how to best adjust to and optimize for the distinct challenges and opportunities that cloud services introduce. Understanding how to make the right policy, operational, and procurement decisions can be difficult with any new technology, and doing so can seem especially daunting with cloud computing because it has the potential to alter the paradigm of how business is done.
To support governments as they think through their approaches to information and communication technology (ICT) policy and transition to cloud services, Microsoft has developed Transforming Government: A cloud policy framework for innovation, security, and resilience. This white paper is the first in our series of cloud security policy publications, advancing ideas and cloud security concepts about which later papers will provide more detail.
The paper presents and describes six policy principles, which seek to help government ICT decision-makers develop a framework for secure cloud computing adoption. The principles are designed to support governments as they develop cloud policies that strategically advance innovation, enable flexibility in cloud architecture choice, and demonstrate data awareness to ensure security of critical data. With the principles, we also seek to help governments evaluate risks, leverage global standards to manage those risks, and establish transparent processes for developing requirements and evaluating cloud service providers. Each principle is accompanied by what we perceive as a best practice implementation, often by governments around the world, which highlights how the principles can be practically realized.
Later papers will go into more detail on relevant international standards and best practices for data governance, mitigating cloud security risks, and structuring government policy decisions and responsibilities – building on the framework provided today and focusing on the questions that we frequently hear from government customers. Ultimately, this series of papers seeks to enable governments to take advantage of cloud computing, unlock innovation potential in their countries, and improve the security and resiliency of their services. We look forward to continuing to partner with governments as they achieve these and other ICT goals.
Top 7 most common uses of cloud computing
Cloud computing has been credited with increasing competitiveness through cost reduction, greater flexibility, elasticity and optimal resource utilization. Here are a few situations where cloud computing is used to enhance the ability to achieve business goals.
When it comes to IaaS, using an existing infrastructure on a pay-per-use scheme seems to be an obvious choice for companies saving on the cost of investing to acquire, manage and maintain an IT infrastructure. There are also instances where organizations turn to PaaS for the same reasons while also seeking to increase the speed of development on a ready-to-use platform to deploy applications.
2. Private cloud and hybrid cloud
Among the many incentives for using cloud, there are two situations where organizations are looking into ways to assess some of the applications they intend to deploy into their environment through the use of a cloud (specifically a public cloud). While in the case of test and development it may be limited in time, adopting a hybrid cloud approach allows for testing application workloads, therefore providing the comfort of an environment without the initial investment that might have been rendered useless should the workload testing fail.
Another use of hybrid cloud is also the ability to expand during periods of limited peak usage, which is often preferable to hosting a large infrastructure that might seldom be of use. An organization would seek to have the additional capacity and availability of an environment when needed on a pay-as you-go basis.
3. Test and development
Probably the best scenario for the use of a cloud is a test and development environment. This entails securing a budget, setting up your environment through physical assets, significant manpower and time. Then comes the installation and configuration of your platform. All this can often extend the time it takes for a project to be completed and stretch your milestones.
With cloud computing, there are now readily available environments tailored for your needs at your fingertips. This often combines, but is not limited to, automated provisioning of physical and virtualized resources.
One of the aspects offered by leveraging cloud computing is the ability to tap into vast quantities of both structured and unstructured data to harness the benefit of extracting business value.
Retailers and suppliers are now extracting information derived from consumers’ buying patterns to target their advertising and marketing campaigns to a particular segment of the population. Social networking platforms are now providing the basis for analytics on behavioral patterns that organizations are using to derive meaningful information.
5. File storage
Cloud can offer you the possibility of storing your files and accessing, storing and retrieving them from any web-enabled interface. The web services interfaces are usually simple. At any time and place you have high availability, speed, scalability and security for your environment. In this scenario, organizations are only paying for the amount of storage they are actually consuming, and do so without the worries of overseeing the daily maintenance of the storage infrastructure.
There is also the possibility to store the data either on or off premises depending on the regulatory compliance requirements. Data is stored in virtualized pools of storage hosted by a third party based on the customer specification requirements.
6. Disaster recovery
This is yet another benefit derived from using cloud based on the cost effectiveness of a disaster recovery (DR) solution that provides for a faster recovery from a mesh of different physical locations at a much lower cost that the traditional DR site with fixed assets, rigid procedures and a much higher cost.
7. Backup
Backing up data has always been a complex and time-consuming operation. This included maintaining a set of tapes or drives, manually collecting them and dispatching them to a backup facility with all the inherent problems that might happen in between the originating and the backup site. This way of ensuring a backup is performed is not immune to problems such as running out of backup media , and there is also time to load the backup devices for a restore operation, which takes time and is prone to malfunctions and human errors.
Cloud-based backup, while not being the panacea, is certainly a far cry from what it used to be. You can now automatically dispatch data to any location across the wire with the assurance that neither security, availability nor capacity are issues.
While the list of the above uses of cloud computing is not exhaustive, it certainly give an incentive to use the cloud when comparing to more traditional alternatives to increase IT infrastructure flexibility , as well as leverage on big data analytics and mobile computing.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Office 2016 for Mac is here!
Office 2016 for Mac is here!: Today we are taking a big step forward for Mac users—Office 2016 for Mac is now available in 139 countries and 16 languages. Based on feedback from the great Mac Office community, we’ve made major updates to each of the apps, and we couldn’t be more pleased to deliver it first to our Office 365 customers.
Contact Us To Get Started!
https://www.bubblesocialmediamarketing.com/contact.html
Contact Us To Get Started!
https://www.bubblesocialmediamarketing.com/contact.html
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Monday, March 2, 2015
Basics of Social Media
Have you been thinking about marketing your business with social media, but you feel overwhelmed and not sure how to get started? Or maybe you're not convinced that it works? This webinar will show you the value of using social media to reach your customers, how it can lead to new customers and how it drives repeat business from your current customers. We'll take a look at the 5 most popular social media networks -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest -- and help you decide what is right for your business. We'll also look at what comes next: how and what to post on social media.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Getting Started with Constant Contact is Easy!
Constant Contact lets you save time and reach your
goals by bringing all of your online marketing together in one convenient place
so you never miss an opportunity to find new customers or engage the ones you
have.
Constant Contact empowers you to grow your business:
increase sales,
engage loyal customers, get new customers, and spread your word of mouth with Toolkit.
For free consultation call: 301-466-6690
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
10 Top Tips to a Successful Facebook Business Page
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world with over 1.1Billion users worldwide. Having a Facebook business page for your business is really important and here are 10 top tips to a successful Facebook Business Page.
- Post a Relevant Article Once a Week
It is so important for your business that you are seen as a thought leader in your industry and one way to do this is to post a relevant article once a week so your followers can see you are staying up to date.
- Like, Share & Comment on Posts
Engagement is key when it comes to social media and especially on Facebook. Liking, sharing and commenting on posts are a great way to increase your visibility on Facebook.
- Check your Notifications
If you don’t check your notifications, you may be missing out on sales. If you don’t know that someone has left a question for you to answer on your Facebook page and you leave it unanswered for too long, they might even unfollow you but more importantly, won’t spend their money with your business – they will go elsewhere.
- Get Testimonials from Customers
A great way to show potential customers what they are going to get from you in a positive way is to ask customers who are loyal to you and your business for testimonials. If you can show that your existing customers trust you, your new customers will too.
- Use Photo’s/ Video’s
To get the most engagement out of your posts on your Facebook Business Page you will need to use photo’s and video’s. Posts with either a photo or video receive 50% more engagement than those without the use of images or video’s.
- Check your Mail
Some potential customers would rather send you a direct message on your Facebook Business Page regarding a product or service you are offering. Because of this, make sure you check your inbox on Facebook so you don’t miss out on sales.
- Find and Like New Business Pages
Facebook is not just a social network, it is also a search engine. Utilise this by searching hashtags on Facebook to find businesses that may have your target market or businesses you want to work with. Make sure you “like” other business pages and engage with them.
- Share Your Blogs on Your Page
Are you blogging? If so, make sure you share this on your Facebook Business Page. This is really important because you are offering great information to your community while increasing visits to your site that hopefully turn into sales.
- Update Status Daily
Updating your status is important on Facebook because your community needs to see that you are actively using social media. 85% of Facebook users expect businesses to be using social media to communicate.
- Always Mention Users with the @ Sign
If you are writing a post about a customer/business, make sure you use the @ sign to tag them in the post. This is important because you want them to know they have been mentioned by you via a notification on Facebook.
What are you doing to build your Facebook Business Page?
Warren Knight
Founder, Social Media eLearning
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Friday, August 1, 2014
Monday, June 30, 2014
Monday, April 28, 2014
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Monday, April 14, 2014
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
7 Steps to Email Marketing Success
Every so often, email marketing takes a serious hit. Small business owners claim that it’s dead. Marketers proclaim it “old-fashioned” and eagerly jump to the shiniest new marketing platform.
But, here’s the naked and unadulterated truth: email marketing works. More than that, it’s one of the most cost-effective marketing platforms available to the penny-pinching small business owner.
However, like any marketing platform, you need to follow a few simple guidelines for optimal and enduring success.
If you’re interested in creating an email marketing campaign that builds a list of interested subscribers and eventually turns those subscribers into loyal customers, here are a few rules of the email marketing game:
1. Permission is NOT an option.
It’s essential that every single person on your email list has opted-in through a form on your website. Sending unsolicited emails will only hurt your small businesses reputation. In addition, as tempting as it is to purchase that list of “one million leads,” you run the risk of creating an army of angry prospects who never officially asked to be on your email list and will promptly report your emails as spam. Therefore, build your list through permission, not spam.
2. Offer a valuable “freebie” in exchange for an email address.
When a visitor lands on your website, there needs to be a compelling reason for them to give you their email address. Unfortunately, signing up for your small business newsletter isn’t very compelling. Instead, offer something your prospects would actually pay money to receive. Perhaps a downloadable ebook, video lesson or webinar can effectively persuade your prospect to hand over their personal information.
3. Focus on quality over quantity.
Too many small business owners believe that a large list is the key to success. However, the truth is that a targeted list is the key to success. It’s always better to have 500 prospects who are excited about your products and services than 5,000 prospects who, frankly, couldn’t care less about you and your small business.
4. Deliver value.
As you build your list, it’s essential that every email that you send delivers valuable information to your subscribers. This is the key to building loyal subscribers who look forward to hearing from you. Avoid aggressive sales pitches and pushy behavior – it’s the quickest way to lose valuable prospects.
5. Get visible.
When you take advantage of the vast variety of available marketing platforms, you create more visibility for yourself and your small business. It goes without saying that when a prospect encounters you through social media, seo, press releases, podcasts and videos, they will begin to pay attention. So, get out there and get noticed.
6. Segment your email list.
Take the time to segment your list in order to send customized emails to your leads. If you have prospects who are in the “just looking” phase, send them emails that educate and inform them about your products and services. Once your prospect makes a purchase, send them emails that keep them happy and loyal customers (coupons, special offers, customer appreciation promotions).
7. Send out more emails.
Many small business owners don’t want to overwhelm their list with too many emails. However, emails sent out every day register a bounce rate of only 0.4 %. Whereas, emails sent out only once a month generate a bounce rate of 5.1% So, don’t be afraid to communicate with your prospects frequently.
Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool that should be utilized to generate leads and convert those leads to happy clients and customers.
Best of all, it’s a cost effective price tag ensures that small business owners on virtually any budget can implement into their overall marketing plan.
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