Nights Out for Cause can Recharge Your Batteries

Plenty of things can change in a week and I find it easy to forget I need to do things besides work when deadlines are looming, but I made sure to take time out for some important events last week. Thanks to some great events that carried celebration through the weekend, I hit the ground running on Monday.

New Plugins for Financial Advisors Released!

Last year, we had the opportunity to work with one of our clients to put together a site that did a great job explaining financial planning in plain English. I stress those last few words because most of the financial advisors I've met in my life think that throwing out big words is better than a client who understands what's going on and the strategy involved. While creating that site, we created some prototype financial calculators (with plans to put some more together over time). On February 19th, we released the refined version of those calculators, easily installed into any Joomla Web site.

Web Week: The Biggest Challenges for Ecommerce Businesses

Getting an ecommerce site up and running is anything but a small feat. There's products information, descriptions and photos, pricing considerations, not to mention the typical stuff you need for a Web site (policies, company profile, awesome landing page). It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of launching and forget to plan for the things that come after.

Marketing Week: Being Effective with Email Marketing

When it comes to email marketing, there's plenty of good information from a lot of sources about how to your email should indulge the customer to get a click. I recently came across a great article that was a bit different. I wanted to share that could change how you go about your email marketing.

Last Month in Security News

It seems like there's a data breach at some large company nearly every day. I'd rather my readers be informed, but I don't want to dwell on the events themselves. In our third series to launch in the new year, we'll be summarizing some of the events and let you know about fixes that may apply to you. You may already be aware, but it's important to stay on top of fixes for both your home and work computers to prevent problems. So, last month in security news...

Music Week: Tunes for the Productive Audiophile

I'm a music nut. I love all genres and I'm often slow to answer my phone because I need to mute the music streaming out of my tablet station behind me in my home office. This may not have much to do with business, but does everything have to? This is a new monthly blog segment in which I'll be talking about non-business things and how they link to your business.

Web Week: What's on the Horizon for Small Business?

It's no surprise that technology is on everyone's mind, particularly small businesses who face a unique challenge. In order to stay relevant, they need to update their technology, but often that means bootstrapping a solution better suited to large enterprises or costly custom development. Neither is appealing to small businesses who often have small technology budgets. The solution lies in MVP.

Marketing Week: Expert Predictions for 2016

This week, we'll be holding our first training workshop to help small business owners entrepreneurs with their email marketing. During the rise of social media, you may have heard "email marketing is dead". Well, I assure you it's not - and many experts agree with me.

Last Chance to Sign Up

This is the final week to sign up for our first training workshop. We'll be teaching small business owners and entrepreneurs how to build or increase their email marketing list without adding more tasks to their plate. Interested in email marketing in 2016? We'll help you get started and build your list or grow your existing list doing the same things you're already doing - networking with other business owners.

You can register online at www.tektalk.co.

Something New is Coming!

Many small businesses get overwhelmed when faced with all the components necessary for a successful marketing plan. They hear about SEO and social media and email marketing, but it's daunting (and expensive) to implement a complete marketing solution or to break it up into manageable pieces. To help our fellow entrepreneurs out, we are now offering hands-on workshops which break up the marketing into something less daunting.

Crafting a Technology Platform to Drive Your Business

In my previous blog, I talked about how we updated our client's technology platform and increased their site's visibility and conversion. Marketing was just one aspect of that project and it all tied together with necessary upgrades to address new regulations and reporting in the mortgage industry. We needed to meet a specific deadline to update the forms their platform generates.

Increasing the Visibility of What You Have to Offer

I don't often blog about our accomplishments, but I wanted to this time. We recently rolled out an update for one of our clients, coordinating major upgrades to their technology platform (the application itself that drives their business), deployment process (how we get that application to their servers), and an entirely new marketing site. Needless to say, it was a big deal and we've learned something about marketing and technology.