How to Choose an IT Staffing Company
If you have made the decision to outsource some of your IT tasks to an external company then it’s important to make sure you choose a company who will look after you properly. Throughout the rest of this article we will look at some of the things that you will want to carefully think about when looking for an IT staffing agency.
The Location
You need to first consider the location of the staffing agency. Do you feel comfortable outsourcing your IT projects to a separate agency? Are you ok dealing with remote IT assistance or do you want to find a provider who is more local to your company and will be able to visit your premises? This is important to think about because not all IT tasks can be fixed remotely and may need someone to go and sort it out. If you are employing an agency who will deal with your customers then you will need to think about any language barriers which could create problems. If you are dealing with foreign customers then you might find it better to hire an outsourcing company in that country.
Continue reading »
How to Market Your Business With Facebook
Business owner, you might want to friend Facebook.
A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.
“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009). “And with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”
Start Small
5 Reasons to Kill IT Projects
A survey of IT experts revealed 43 percent of their organisations had recently killed an IT project. The study, conducted by ISACA, an independent IT governance group, highlighted the top 5 reasons these organisations named for terminating projects prior to completion.
Here’s the list, with my commentary on each issue:
1. Business needs changed: 30%
There are many conditions and situations where a business legitimately changes its requirements after starting a project. If the project no longer provides meaningful value, then it’s best to stop throwing good money after bad.
The Most Important Part of Internet Marketing
When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?
For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.
At its core, internet marketing is about these things:
* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads
Five Reasons Why You Need a WordPress Blog
Back in December, I decided that I wanted to try something new and fresh with my website. I was also getting tired of the standard websites with their uniform look and I didn’t really feel like I was getting any benefit from it. So, I did a bit of research and decided that I wanted to try a blogging platform and after a bit more research, I chose Wordpress.
Before I fully converted to the blog, I was receiving approximately 900 unique visitors each month.
- By January, one month after I converted, I was receiving 1300 unique visitors.
- By February it had grown to 2500 unique visitors
- In March, it had grown to 4000 unique visitors in the month.
That is four times the traffic I started with!
So, let’s look at the top five reasons why you need a WordPress blog:
Continue reading »
How to Use Web Analytics to Grow Your Business?
If you own a business, chances are you do. But don’t pat yourself on the back too quickly. By now it’s widely-accepted that if you have a business card you should probably have a website. It doesn’t matter what your company is selling – a website, however modest, has become a standard.
The real question is: what is your website doing for your business?
As a web marketer I often put this question to the business owners I meet. Not because I’m trying to lead into my sales pitch, but because I’m intrigued to hear the answer. Most people get a certain “deer in the headlights” look in their eyes when I ask this question. To be fair, it’s not a question we’re used to hearing. But that’s not all that’s going on here. Traditional advertising mediums – print, TV, radio, etc – are notoriously difficult to track. Sure, you’ll know how often the phone is ringing or how many people come in with a coupon clipped from the Sunday paper, but what you don’t know is how many people saw/heard your ad and whether they were interested, oblivious or, worse, annoyed. Business owners are used to this. We all know we need to advertise – it’s a necessary cost of doing business – so we buy that half-page ad in the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper, we sponsor an event or a little league team, we have a radio commercial written (maybe even with a jingle) and we hope for the best. This has been a given in marketing since the beginning. But the web, and analytics, changed the game.
Continue reading »
