Today we had the water turned on for our new office. This sounds like a simple ordeal to have done. The week before as we had it scheduled we found out that it had been seven years since water was on. This raised a flag so we looked over all the pipe by feeling every inch we could see and it was relatively all new with shut offs, etc. We set all the shutoffs to closed so that we could test each section one at a time. When the city turned on we had leak number one and it was in a wall. Five hours later and that was fixed. Water back on and good. Turned on the next shutoff valve and another leak (again in a wall). Repeat this four more times. Have you ever felt overwhelmed with your website, social media, or SEO as we did with our water today? We will go over some ways to ease that feeling so that you can grow your business with today's article.

Initial thoughts are that paying to be seen and move up will garner you the best engagement and increase in sales. That is not always the case. We have several friends that pay for advertising to grow their business. They are reasonably happy talking with them. At random we listed out our social media maintenance plan contracts and asked them for a number between one and XX. They chose a number and we pulled up the results of that client. We will not be sharing the name of the clients but luckily for our comparison they are in the exact same field. They are located 15 miles away from each other in different towns. Both towns have less than 20,000 people in each town and average within a few hundred dollars the median income according to the last census data.

Believe it or not there is more than one type of search engine optimization (SEO) out there. Most people that are trying to sell your business on SEO mention that they handle SEO. We find that interesting as part of our conversations with SEO we ask "what type of SEO are you referring too". More often than not we here "SEO". There actually are three core pieces to optimizing for SEO. In this article we'll go over those three pieces.

In September 2014 we moved into Zoseco Co-working in the heart of downtown Valparaiso Indiana. We did this even though in Northwest Indiana co-working was a new business model. In fact, we had never heard of co-working or what the true benefit would be to proving out our business. We had been running with no issues (other than no real meeting space) from our house for a half of year and were growing every month. We heard about Zoseco at a Valparaiso Chamber of Commerce meeting which is held the first Wednesday of every month at 7am (yes people get up at that crazy hour to talk business). We would love to have you join us at one of these great morning networking events.

When it comes to getting the word out about your great website you need to be found. Sure your marketing materials, even your social media, will link to your website. What about the search engines? They still play the biggest factor in getting your website found. This is where on-page SEO can increase the success of your website. In this article we'll cover the factors that influence the search engines to further improve your SEO success.

As we add more social media maintenance plans it is always good to look and see what you will receive from having a social media account manager. When it comes to working with any business it is good to set rules and expectations for the entire social media process.

Promoting and growing your business is crucial to the success of any business. There truly is no business not in the business of making money. Even not-for-profit need to generate money to stay in operation. When you have a website and want that website to generate sales businesses often turn to eCommerce sites to bring in money into their business. Today we will discuss how to get people off your eCommerce sites (yes really) and into physical locations and get your products offline (in the real-world).

We have had a project named "Project Sugar" because it is such a sweet deal. Today we are offering it to everyone. All too often we hear about clients be charged a virtual arm and a leg to get an eCommerce site up and running. Today we are going to change that. Our clients now can receive a basic eCommerce system that comes with the proverbial kitchen sink. Our clients will receive a full-featured eCommerce system starting at just $495.

Working with one company that came on board with us to help them go from Northwest Indiana to a system that could better expand nationwide. One would think any eCommerce platform would work. In fact, they are presently using an eCommerce platform that is promoted as being for nationwide use. They found it to be slow and unfriendly as they've grown over the past year. The search engine aspects are less than desirable, and customers have been complaining about the difficulty the system is to use.