​ As a business owner do you know what people are saying about your company and what its online reputation is now or is becoming? The old saying, "No publicity is bad publicity," is just not true today. With name recognition comes consumer awareness, for better or for worse. When small business owners start out, they think the big challenge will be to get their company and their products noticed, but many have found out that the hard way that it's crucial to maintain your company's reputation ov...

​ Spam has been a problem almost since the beginning of the internet; it's created by hackers and distributed various ways in order to either create a nuisance, introduce viruses, or scam unsuspecting internet users. Of late, website owners have noticed a different kind of spam when they've gone through their Google Analytics accounts: records of numerous visits from specific websites. This traffic is false and it's meant to clog up Google Analytics data and render it difficult to understand or ...

​ Every business with a website would pay a great deal for the answer of how to get hits to convert to sales. That's what a website is there for, right? It's not a sign post, it's a way of connecting your products and services to your customer base. One of the ways that some businesses try to do this is via proactive chat. This is the term that refers to the chat boxes that appear when you click on a site or stay on a site long enough without buying anything. Does proactive chat work, and is it ...

​ Is your company's website out of date? Does it function they way you want and need it to, or is it failing to bring in traffic or actually turning away customers because of its poor set up or lack of compatibility with current tech? How can you tell when an updated website is no longer a wish-list item, but a necessary one? The following are indicators that it's past time for a change: Outdated content - If you have old coupons, sales, news, or blogs that are never updated, it gives the same i...

The hashtag has become a mini phenomenon due to the internet and social media. In fact, some people say that you can correctly differentiate between older and younger generations by showing them its symbol (#) and asking them what it is. Supposedly, Boomers and Generation Xers will call it a pound sign and Millennials and the younger crowd will call it a hashtag. Recently the Oxford English Dictionary even added the term hashtag, although they made a point of including what the technical term fo...