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Cobbler's Cold Feet - 5 Clues It's Time For a New Website - It's time. The honeymoon is over. You used to feel so proud of your website, but now what...? Remember gleefully checking the traffic logs? How about just quick click through for fun? |
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Art As Marketing - What is Art today? Barely 100 years ago, Marcel Duchamp shocked the world with "ready-made" art such as a bicycle wheel bolted to a stool or a snow shovel labeled "In advanced of the broken arm". Today things are different. We live in an era of images. Instead of hiring a painter, we can buy a print from Ikea for less than $6. |
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A View from 10,000 Feet; Your Business in 2006 - Invisible Gold is 5 years old this month. Ok, well maybe 4. The date is fuzzy and you can't count the first year when I asked questions like "Do I need financial software?" or "What should the company be called?" I also work with other businesses that got started the same time. It's like friendships from raising children of the same age. Regardless, I heard a similar comment three times this week: "I really need to work on my 2006 marketing plan." |
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Achieving Balance in 2005 - Few things in life are as difficult as running your own small business. You've got freedom and responsibility, but you've also got all of your fears and bad habits. Without a commute to work or boss setting hours, you may find it hard to focus. |
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Blogs, Advertising, and the Stranger on the Bus - Have you heard about blogs yet? Just kidding, they're just the latest craze on the Internet. They played a role in the last presidential election and just this month, Newsweek is publishing a great article as their cover story (May 2nd). |
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Learn Marketing From An Old Fisherman - Business and life lessons from fishing. |
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Let's All Plan To Have a Fun Year - Are you with me? Most of us run a small business, and well, some months aren't as fun as the others. Right now it's flu season and time for cold fingers. Just going outside can be tough. |
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It's Not About the Bike - Supporting Modern Day Heroes - Pop Quiz: What do Greg Lemond and Lance Armstrong have in common? Answer: They are the only two Americans to win the Tour De France. Extra Credit: They both recovered from near fatal setbacks to achieve international success. |
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iBrand: - Creating Excitement In The Perception Economy - There is a major change going on in your market. It doesn't matter what service or product you provide; the cost of production is dropping. At the same time, the business of creating perception is getting smarter. It's time to enable your small business to compete. It's time to learn about branding. |
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Hackers at Your Door - Protecting Yourself and Your Business from Identity Theft - OK, I know you are tired of hearing about Identity Theft. I am too. It's just another modern affliction that we'd prefer to ignore. But, I own a business that accepts credit cards and figured there was more I could do to protect my clients. When the local Chamber of Commerce asked me to do a presentation, I jumped at the chance to learn more. |
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What's Your Lifetime MPG? - Invisible Gold's owner gets a new ride, and discovers a community of car "hackers". Do you know that feeling of "How did I get here"? I had it yesterday. Picture a row of 9 silver and red Honda Insights lined up with their hatchbacks open. |
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Guerilla Marketing Is Dead - Long Live Small Island Marketing - In the old days media was expensive. Print, television, and radio all involved a heavy investment in technology. Families would sit around the television starved for content and advertisers would put together big budgets for limited airtime. |
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Making a List and Checking it Twice - If there was something you could do today to increase business, would you try it? Seriously, I think I have an answer. I talk with quite a few small business owners every year and one thing always amazes me. The really successful businesses have good mailing lists, and many of the others don't know where to start. |
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Can You Really Make Money While You Sleep? - Online Marketing And Get Rich Schemes |
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What Can You Do To Avoid Online Fraud? - It's time to develop some online street smarts...here are four tips that can help. |
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Taking Better Photos For Your Website - Achieve professional results with just your digital camera and some special techniques. |
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Planes, Corn Flakes, and Automobiles - Non-Traditional Marketing - "Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way." – Edward de Bono, Maltese-born Psychologist and Authority on Creative Thinking |
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The Truth About Search Engines - Learn how to make your website stand out from the rest. |
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Why Am I Getting All Of This Spam Email? - This article discusses 10 things you can do to improve your business communications by reducing spam. |
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Understanding Website Traffic - This article introduces Invisible Gold’s traffic charts. The same concepts apply to any website, though you need to use a third-party software to get the same results. |
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Several Useful Tools - Free (or almost) Tools and Utilities |
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Online Strategies - Different Types Of Websites - This article dicusses some of the main types of websites and introduces a delivery truck metaphor. |
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Zen and the Art of Website (Technology) Maintenance - 40 years ago, a motorcycle was a relatively simple machine. Things are more complicated and change faster today. You need a computer to work on your car, an expert to tune up your computer, and a hacker to make your digital camera work. AND, all three of these will be "obsolete" two summers from now. Old rules don't apply so we're at risk of getting stranded. |
