Archive for the ‘Small Business Web Solutions’ Category

While it may seem like “Bug season” is over in Connecticut, there are still plenty of homeowners across the country who are receiving unwanted visits from creepy crawlers. And of course there are bugs which can make their home in yours during the winter, like bed bugs and other pests. If you’re running into any of these issues then it’d be a good idea to visit the Partner’s Pest Control Blog.

Their blog will provide information, tips and guides about the pests invading your home and your lawn. It will also feature many of the pest control products that they utilize everyday.

Does your business have multiple locations? One of our favorite clients, Eagle Rivet Roof Service Corporation, has 4, 2 in Connecticut, one in Florida and one in Massachusetts.

One of our initiatives this year was to expand their local marketing. We recently got the MA roofing contractor page approved by Google and are proceeding with promotion. The Florida roofing contractor page has been online for a few months and we have gotten to #20 for “coral springs roofer“.

If you need Google Places promotion, please contact us today!

Constant Contact acts as a list manager for 3 major purposes:

• Sending email to recipients
• Conducting surveys
• Marketing events managed via email

They charge based on the number of unique email addresses they store for you, and you can send unlimited emails to those users. They handle unsubscribes and provide code to enable you to encourage website visitors to signup through your website.

For list management, you can add recipients manually or by uploading organized lists of email address with or without other contact info using a spreadsheet (CSV).

They’re support is pretty strong, if occasionally heavy handed. To maintain their high degree of successfully inboxing your emails, they will suspend accounts that have high numbers of spam reports (if a recipient marks your message as spam) as this affects the reputation of their email servers.

For email marketing, they provide a number of email and newsletter templates that can be managed pretty easily. Usually when we send a new email, we’ll copy the previous one, modify the text or HTML and then send. Sometimes it is to a new list, i.e. followup for new customers only, or it might be sent to all lists and all recipients. Some customers highly segment their lists, others just have a few major groupings.

We generally administer the accounts but clients can certainly use it themselves. The dashboard is entirely web based and their phone support is available during business hours.

They offer a free trial for 60 days, after which their pricing is as follows (as of 9/17/11)

Constant Contact Pricing Matrix

Email addresses Monthly
0-500                                     $15
501-2,500                            $30
2,501-5,000                        $50
5,001-10,000                     $75
10,001-25,000                  $150
25,000+                               Call for pricing

You can check out our press release about our latest endeavor.
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Google +1 integration is pretty straightforward, although these can often be complicated by the fact that most businesses don’t directly manage their own web content or rely on a trusted, efficient vendor to update their website in a timely fashion.
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Foursquare is a social networking service that allows you to “check-in” at various locations. You check-in using a mobile device–like a laptop or a cell phone. And every time someone checks in they receive points and sometimes badges. It’s a fun way for users to interact with their community and their friends–and also a great opportunity for local businesses to advertise. If you’re a restaurant or store and you’re interested in improving your local footprint, contact 3PRIME. We’re well versed in a wide range of local marketing techniques. Whether it’s Facebook, Google Local or Foursquare–3PRIME has the experience you need to get noticed.

And remember to visit the 3PRIME Foursquare Page.

Providing small businesses the opportunity to quickly ramp up their advertising spending, that’s Google’s latest venture.

The Adwords Mastercard overview:

• Launched & available as a “beta test” and were sent out Wednesday July 20, 2011 to select customers
• Available should favor small and medium-sized business, but might be wider
• Fairly Low 8.99 ongoing (not introductory) annual percentage rate
• Issued by: issued by the World Financial Capital Bank
• Attractive Credit Line, yet to be announced but likely based on adwords spend
• No Annual Fee

Would you consider this for your business? Would you promote a new product or product line with it just to try it out? Need a new website to advertise? Call in the Pros!

The short answer is yes FB has implications on rankings. The big question is how you use it.

1) Improve the placement of your FB page
2) Trying to use FB to improve the placement of your website.

If your goal is #1, then there are various traditional SEO activities you can do. You then need to concern yourself with what people can do once they get there.

If you are only worried about #2, then the only thing to do is to get the FB pages ranked more highly, so that the few links to your website are worth more.

In either case you’re going to be building the prominence of the FB page, but why you are doing it is the most critical question to answer. This will determine your course of action.

This is actually a windows shell extension for changing file extensions in groups.

This just saved me about an hour, and an aggravating hour at that!

Big shout out to T800 Productions, thanks for the app!

We get these fairly regularly (1 per week), and occasionally our website maintenance clients forward one to us. Who knows how much time their salespeople waste following up on fake orders, only to decide at the end that the order is fraudulent. Or worse, they ship the order only to find that the payment fails.

Review the following message and I’ll tell you how you know its a BS phishing or fake order spam in 5 seconds flat!
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