Posts Tagged: "Marketing"

With the growing trend of online marketing for business, it has become important to have a distinct Internet presence. A blog can give help you raise your search engine ranking, get more traffic and even win over more customers. Setting up your own business blog isn’t difficult if you know the steps to take. Here are the first three critical steps, or action items, to setting up your blog, or just going down the path of setting up a website.

First, the biggest mistake lawyers make is that they primarily write for other lawyers.  That is a huge mistake.  There are only so many lawyers in any legal niche, and only a subset of them are going to be willing to read news or information on the Internet.  A smaller subset of those who use the Internet to acquire information will be willing to read blogs.  So if you are primarily writing for lawyers that means your audience is going to be kept small. Additionally, lawyers don’t typically turn into clients. So if you write like a lawyer for an attorney audience you are almost certainly missing the mark.

Social Media is not a fad. It is not something that is going to go away nor is it going to be replaced by something bigger and better. Most businesses have embraced social media and all that it has to offer. Perhaps you, yourself have taken a ride on the social media bandwagon. But, even if you have a well-established social media presence, are you really getting the most out of your online relationships? Are you missing opportunities to truly leverage your business relationships online in order to reap bigger rewards and sales in the real world? Following are 5 easy ways that you can take to utilize your online business and real-world relationships to increase your overall social media ROI.

Thanks to social media everyone has the ability to connect with like-minded individuals all over the world. But if you want to exploit social media you need to have an effective strategy. It doesn’t take an enormous amount of time each day. In fact with only 15 minutes a day, you can really make quite an impact. But like everything you hope to succeed with in life it does take planning and forethought. Here are suggestions on how you might be able to use social media to develop your brand, monitor quality, engage customers, expand upon ideas and connect with others within your industry.

Once you understand what to tweet, how to tweet and how much to tweet, you are quickly able to make excellent connections, increase your website statistics and search engine ranking, find some of your best brand advocates, and benefit quickly and efficiently from word of mouth marketing. In fact, next to YouTube, micro-blogging on Twitter is one of the quickest ways for information about you, your brand, your business, your products and your services to go viral. Before one can feel comfortable on Twitter, they must first understand the purpose of Twitter, realize the potential of Twitter and learn how they can use Twitter to meet their overall marketing objectives. Following, I will discuss and demystify 5 of the top myths about Twitter use for business and give you pointers on how you can get the most out of your Twitter account.

Whenever I write about USPTO conferences, symposia and events for independent inventors I say: “Simply stated, if you are a serious inventor you need to go to this Conference.” I really do believe that is true. You will be amazed at how much useful information you can obtain, and meeting up close and personal with successful inventors and government Officials is both educational and inspiring. It is sometimes easy to feel all alone as an independent inventor, facing a huge faceless bureaucracy as you attempt to do something that few of your friends and family really understand. These events that cater to the independent inventor help you realize you are not alone and while the USPTO is a government agency — even a bureaucracy — there are dedicated people up and down the chain of command who really care about innovation and want to help independent inventors. So be prepared to learn and be prepared to be inspired. Also come armed with ideas and suggestions. USPTO officials genuinely seem to want to hear what independent inventors are thinking and what they would find useful in the future.

Forever a PC family, IPWatchdog has slowly converted over to all Apple/Mac products. It started with iPhones, then an iPad, followed by 27″ iMacs, and now MacBook Airs. This conversion ultimately got me thinking, “What happened to the old Mac vs. PC Commercials?” Nearly two years ago I wrote an article Mac vs. PC: A Simplistic Yet Effective Marketing Strategy. You remember Mac vs. PC don’t you? The usually frazzled, often disheveled “PC” was played by John Hodgeman and the always hip, cool and technologically advanced Mac was played by Justin Long. The Get a Mac ads which started in May of 2006 and ended in October of 2009 seem to have virtually disappeared. In fact, the commercials are not even featured on the Apple Website. If you click on the “Commercials” link you are now taken to a “Why You’ll Love a Mac” page. Boring. Could it be that Apple thinks PC’s no longer have the issues that have always plagued them in the past? I doubt it. Why do you think we are moving over to “the Dark Side???” Maybe Hodgeman and Long got too big for their roles? Well no matter what the reason, I have one question, “Hey Apple, what happened to Mac vs. PC?”