March 2010

As a kid I always thought money would make me happy and to some extent it did. Because I have money I don’t ever cook or buy groceries, I never have to worry about paying bills, and I am able to buy almost anything I want.

Although money allows you to live a comfortable life, it won’t necessarily make you happy. When I first started making money, I realized that materialistic objects didn’t please me. The only thing that really makes me happy is helping other people.

The world of non-profits

Over the past few years I have been getting more involved in the non-profit space. At first I would just write checks in hopes that my money would help change the world, next I started volunteering my time because I realized that giving money wasn’t enough, and now I am on the path of getting you involved in the non-profit space. Because let’s face it, there is only so much I can do, but if we all push for making the world a better place, it’s more likely to happen. [click to continue…]

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Over the past few years I have been traveling on airplanes a lot. So much that I started to pay attention to the flight attendants because although they are taken for granted, they are actually pretty smart.

Here is what you can learn about business from them:

Customer service is important

When you first hop on a plane, you’ll notice that you are usually greeted. And when you are about to take your seat and put away your luggage, the flight attendant is there to help you if you need it.

In addition to that, once the plane takes off, they give you beverages and light snacks to keep you happy.

And if that’s not enough, you can request almost anything from them without even leaving your seat. All you have to do is push the “call” button and the flight attendant will come to you and ask you how they may be of assistance.

So what’s their purpose of doing this? Well if you are happy you are most likely to keep on flying on that airline, right? Happy customers means repeat customers, which means more money for the airline company. [click to continue…]

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As you probably already know, the more websites that link to your website, the higher you’ll rank in search engines. Now there are a lot of shady ways to get backward links, such as buying text links from brokers or website owners. Or even worse, hacking old WordPress blogs and adding in links to your website.

I do NOT recommend that you do anything shady as it results in short term gains and in the long run you’ll have a good chance of getting caught and potentially being banned from one of the major search engines.

So instead of going with the short-term route, here are some legitimate ways you can build links so that you can boost your search engine traffic.

Link building tactic #1: Infographics

Mint.com is notoriously known for creating good infographics. If you aren’t sure what they are, infographics represent data in a visual format. For example, I created an infographic that represented the complexity of the U.S. tax system, which made the Digg homepage and sent around 20,000 visitors to Quick Sprout within 2 days.

As long as you put in a lot of time and effort into creating these graphics, you’ll have a good chance of going viral on the social web, resulting in thousands if not millions of new visitors to your site and more importantly gaining backlinks from authoritative sites.

And if you are like me and can’t create these visual pieces of content, you can always hire firms like Column Five and Infographic World. [click to continue…]

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Running a small business isn’t easy! It’s hard to keep up with general administration tasks, stay on top of your finances, and even measure your marketing efforts. And lets face it, that’s just starching the surface… there’s a lot more that you have to do every day.

Luckily enough there are some useful web applications that not only will make your life easier, but they will also help you grow your business.

Simplify your daily life

From checking your email to dealing with employees, there are some things that you just have to do everyday. But by using applications such as Liquid Planner you’ll be able to do these things in less time so that you can focus on growing your company.

Google Calendar – keeping track of your daily meetings doesn’t have to be hard. Not only can you track your daily meetings, but you can share and collaborate your calendar with other co-workers.

Gmail – emails can pile up quickly, but with Gmail you can set filters so you don’t have to read useless emails. You can automatically filter messages that aren’t too important so that they won’t clog up your inbox.

Campfire – communication is an important factor to your company’s success. Through campfire you can communicate with everyone in one place and more importantly keep track of the conversation.

Liquid Planner – I can’t stress how important it is to get projects done on time. Liquid Planner will not only help you monitor your projects, but it will calculate the probability of you completing them on time.

Wufoo – whether it is registration forms or contact requests, Wufoo lets you create and manage forms with ease. The best part about Wufoo is that you don’t have to be technical to use it. [click to continue…]

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