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Using Analytics to Drive Your Online Marketing Strategy

by Casie Gillette SEO Manager at Grasshopper Do you know who is coming to your website?  Who is buying your product?  Where they are coming from?  What they like and dislike? Analytics are an extremely valuable asset when it comes to your website and your online marketing efforts. The more informed you are on where [...]

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Be Realistic When you set your Measure of Success

All of us plan for success in our businesses. That IS the goal after all. To be successful. But how exactly do you determine IF you have succeeded? Regardless if you are a start up or an established business, you need to establish, right up front, during your business planning process, what success will look [...]

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Due Diligence is Necessary When Hiring Consultants

“Being big egzpurt, I am.” Just because someone bruits themselves this way doesn’t mean you should simply take them at their word. It saddens me that I have to be mistrusting of people, but as one of my favorite aphorisms says, “Just because you’re not paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” We start our [...]

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Precise, Accurate Estimates are more than Guesses

When you are in the midst of creating your business’ planning forecasts, do you use Guess, Estimate, Accurate and Precise interchangably? I don’t. I believe there are very distinct differences in these words — they are not synonymous. Here’s how I see them. Guess: Pulled out of thin air. “Oh yeah, sure, no problem, easy-peazy! [...]

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Does your business have a disaster recovery plan?

That is a scary question for lots, if not all businesses. We spend so much time focused on getting our businesses started, and then successfully running our businesses, that we give very little thought to disaster recovery planning. Really, planning for disaster sounds like we are betting on failure. Betting against ourselves. Yet we think [...]

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Pay Attention when your Business Plan says NO

I’m sure almost everyone is familiar with the story that Thomas Edison discovered 99 ways to NOT make a light bulb. That’s 99 no to reach 1 yes. The point here is that a negative result, proving something didn’t work or was not so, is just as valuable as a positive result. Sadly, scientific research [...]

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Establish a Records Retention Schedule for your Business

All of us know, or should know, that we need to save and safeguard our business records. When we start up it’s easy to hang on to every document, receipt, invoice, and business record. But after a few years we find that all these records we’ve been keeping are taking up more floor space in file cabinets [...]

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Social Media Marketing: The Marketing Skills you can learn from Obama

I was fascinated by the analysis of the Obama campaign. In many ways, Obama’s campaign and its success is a big, bright, “LCD sign” of the times. New media has come of age in a very public way. Most people seem to agree that the campaign used a number of techniques to capture an audience and [...]

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