Igniting Business Blog

Landing pages are specifically designed web pages used to enhance the effectiveness of a campaign.  Landing pages are most successful when created with certain essential elements. Clear and compelling copy, concise forms and the perfect call-to-action are three essentials elements that you must consider when creating a landing page for your small business' next marketing campaign.

Instagram has become more than just an online platform for pretty faces, selfies, and memes. The popular image sharing social media platform now has the power to help businesses showcase their products and services to reach visually more potential customers.

It seems with every passing month the technology world offers another intelligent device that is a game changer for an industry. Many of the devices making the news these days are in the realm of personal devices, such as the plethora of fitness trackers now available or other personal home devices. However, behind the scenes, many businesses are beginning to see intelligent devices that offer real value to companies, both large and small. In this post, we will explore some of the ways in which the IoT can save money and increase efficiency for even small business owners.

Promoting your business and products on social media sites means more than posting a few blogs with links to your website—it means having a comprehensive strategy.  An effective social strategy will enable you to create a bond with prospective customers based on empathy and an understanding of the problems they face and your company's ability to solve those problems.  That strategy must encompass a wide range of content, everything from informative articles and humorous anecdotes to credible product reviews and current customer testimonials. Your efforts will work best when you think outside the box.

Small businesses have a lot of risks. If your small business has an e-commerce website, it’s imperative your or your web firm performs adequate security on the website.  Here are three considerations to keep in mind when building up or maintaining your e-commerce site:

Last month, we discussed when a small business may want to use a virtual machine.  Now, with nearly everything we do becoming virtual these days, it's not surprising that PCs are jumping on that bandwagon. Virtual PCs aren't a totally new thing; ever see videos of people installing old Windows operating systems onto their computers? Thanks to software like VMWare, operating systems of all kinds can be used once more. This not only benefits those anxious to return to the past and play with older programs and applications, it also benefits small businesses. Here are some pros and cons to using virtual machines for small business purposes.

We are excited to announce Tyga McHenry has joined the Igniting Business team as a Web Specialist. Having graduated from the University of Missouri and University of Illinois, Tyga comes to us with experience working in web, marketing, advertising, and IT industries. Tyga uses her experience with the goal to help small businesses better assist their respective communities. She’s been involved in every step of the website design process from planning and mockups to wireframing and development. Serving on our web team, Tyga will play a role in the initial design of website and building out webpages. She’s excited to work alongside our clients to bring their design dreams to fruition on their final website.

One way to generate more revenue in your small business is to acquire more of your best customers.  Rather than continuing broad marketing activities that are not providing quality results, analyze who your best customers and tailor your future marketing efforts accordingly. 

In order to understand when a small business might want to use a virtual machine, it helps to define what is a virtual machine.  A virtual machine is a program that runs on your current operating system that provides a virtual environment to guest operating systems.  In other words, it allows one to simulate an operating system on a machine that physically has its own operating system.  For example, your small business may have Windows 10, but you could install Windows 7 in a virtual machine on that same computer to run your programs that are only compliant with Windows 7.

Quite simply: Yes.  Customer reviews can and do affect your small business’s search engine rankings, especially for businesses that sell their service or product locally.  Many users routinely perform searches on local small businesses. One of the best ways for a search engine like Google to determine which organization should receive a higher ranking status is through evaluating the organization's quality and quantity of relevant customer reviews.  So, whether you own a small restaurant, a local plumbing business, or an auto mechanic's shop, if you want to place high on the list of (local) searches, you do need to pay attention to your customer review collection strategy.