Tag: Business Tips

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Got to Save Money? What Can You Chop?

If your business is pulling back where can you realistically chop in your marketing plan and not get hurt?

Chop Away

Social Media – if you are paying to update Facebook,

Bright Idea Tips to Help Marketing Budgets When Times Are Tough
Bright Idea Tips to Help Marketing Budgets When Times Are Tough

Twitter and Google+ you could easily take a break to save money.

Blogging – try not to kill all your writing as the SEO juice you get from well-written blog posts helps you in the long run, but maybe consider moving from three days a week to two or from two days a week to one. Try to still keep the momentum up but maybe lower the word count or frequency.

Chop Not!

Google AdWords – don’t touch it unless you absolutely have to. AdWords is hands down the best way to generate new leads and start cash pumping back into your business.

e-newsletters – they build loyalty and repeat business. Newsletters are especially important to businesses that have annual renewals for service plans like pest control firms and HVAC firms. If you chop this, your name is not kept infront of your customers and come time to renew, they may not see the value of renewing; which will hurt your sales even further.

Need some practical sense to make the most of the budget you do have or to get AdWords to work harder for you? We’re the firm to call and chat with first especially if you are looking for honest advice you can trust with no sales pressure.

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No Comments on Your Blog What Will Google Do?

If your blog does not have comments, will you take a hit from Google in regards to organic search placement? I’ve done a little bit of research on this topic and feel that instead of worrying about comments or lack of comments, it is more important to consider your blog post bounce rate.

People are busy. Even I don’t routinely comment on blogs I read, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find reading them to be of no value.  Actually I spend 30 minutes every day reading industry blogs and news.

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is one of the few Google Partners in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area.

What I feel  Google is considering more important than the number of comments is engagement and stickiness. If your blog has no comments, but people are there longer than 5 seconds and dig deeper into your content and your bounce rate is under 70% for a blog post, you most likely are not in trouble with Google.

The types of blogs that get punished for poor performance are those that are either built for advertising links, are scraping content from other resources, or have one and two line blog posts.

If you are taking time to write a thoughtful blog on a topic that matches your main authority – even without blog comments your website  will still be consider meaningful to Google. Just take a look at the search results to know this is true as Google is showing even comment-less blog posts in their index.

What Google can monitor more closely than the number of comments back on your own site is click through and bounce rate – right from the Google.com page.

So if you don’t have comments on your blog, not to worry. Some of the biggest sites in the industry (like Copyblogger) have actually turned off commenting.

If you need to get blogging and have content worth reading, I invite you to check out our blog writing services and pricing.

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I Never Want to Move Again!

Nancy McCord
Nancy McCord – has moved, feel her pain!

This past month my life has been in a state of chaos as my family and I have moved out of our home in Maryland where we have lived 15 years.  We moved a significant amount of furniture and property on our own using UHaul and then had a moving and storage company move the rest.

My husband and I sent three kids off to out of state colleges and we moved into a two bedroom apartment from a 4,500 square foot house. Plus, I have dissolved my long held Maryland business to reorganize under the same name in Virginia. Could one person take on more than that?

But no, there is more… my husband and I are building a custom home in the Fredericksburg area and will move again at the end of November or December.

There’s been all this, on top of a very busy work month with more new customers coming onboard for AdWords services. It has been a fine balance and a crushing workload. I am looking forward to simply just “living” and working normal hours.

After all this, I have decided I am never moving again.

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My Move and MyCorporation

I will not be posting to my blog this week as I am doing my final move to Virginia. Who knew that moving could be so laborious and complicated.

Not only am I moving my residence, my office, but I am reorganizing my business into a Virginia entity all at the same time.

I have to say that I think I would be having a stroke if it were not for the kind and competent people at MyCorporation.com who are doing my Maryland dissolution and Virginia reorganization. They are handling all the details and paperwork as well as setting up my new federal EIN.

I used them before when I set up my Maryland corporation in 2008. If you are not a lawyer and do not know where to turn for help in setting up or even deciding what to do, www.MyCorporation.com is a great place to start.

I will not be set up in my new office until Friday August 28th, so there will be no additional blog posts this week. See you next week!