Articles about technology, business and marketing

5 reasons why it’s good to have a copywriter

Copywriting has been experiencing a big boom in recent years. Companies know that if they want to succeed, they need content marketing. And with this difficult task, a professional copywriter can help.   Copywriting is one of the disciplines that is often underestimated. "Everyone can write," we can hear from all sides. Many companies take the writing of articles, [..]

What are code smells in PHP? OOP approach for cleaner code

Motivation Many programmers gain too much confidence about their code very quickly with the argument “This is how I do it”. And they feel well ignoring the risks. My approach is to follow as many objective rules and best practices as possible. Programming has been improved for decades and there are many great proven concepts. We save ourselves a lot [..]

How important it is to explain "Why". A story.

We went for a shopping with my wife to a mall. We were standing at a cashier, when suddenly there was a notice: "Everyone leave the building". Even though the notice sounded quite seriously, an interesting situation happened. A few people from other cashiers started to run away. Our cashier kept sitting and doing her job. Customers in our [..]

How we did not buy a mattress - Marketing Experience

My girlfriend and I have moved to a new apartment. We needed a mattress, so we went for shopping to a big furniture dealer called Jysk. Our strange marketing experience started here. Store #1 - we don't have anything discounted The very first thing the sales person said was "Sorry, but we do not have anything in [..]

Marketing or Price? Which one wins you a deal?

A shopping experience Marketers and business people often forget how they behave in business or shopping situations. We, marketers, all know a lot of theories, best practices, statistics, and certainly we all have a lot of hopes that complicate our view of the reality. Let's have a look at how an ordinary person shops online. Then, we [..]

Why should reputation marketing replace advertising?

Is it really advertisement and social media what you need?Many clients I meet have an established business not doing that well. The most common issue is a low conversion level and low revenue. The business owners often search for marketing services that ideally do not cost too much and can make a big economic progress. It is extremely hard to [..]

Does PPC advertising work for small businesses?

You have a new business and a website. What you need is traffic, better, converting traffic. It sounds easy, but it is actually very difficult. Some say "build it, and they will come". If you open marketing blogs or older books, you will get advice to use a PPC campaign, e.g. Google Adwords. This sounds logical, however, it is more [..]

Increased traffic in Google analytics? Beware of fakes & spam!

IntroductionMany have noticed a serious problem in their Google Analytics data. Suddenly there is a significant increase in traffic reported. Not only in the Referral category, but also Direct. When you check Referrals, you will see a lot of suspicious domains. These domains do not generate any traffic at all. They simply trigger the GA tracking code. Test of Google [..]

Waiter vs Food Carrier – Marketing Everywhere

The main idea we try to teach our clients is that the correct answer to the question “Who does marketing in your company?” is “Everyone”. Keep that in mind. It is nor “the PR guy”, neither “the marketing department”. Every single employee or a contractor spreads a marketing message about your company into the world. You, as a business owner [..]

5 Secrets How To Work At Home: Build Your Brand

Have you seen the news lately? More Americans than ever before are giving up on traditional methods earning a living. Do you have a job you love that offers financial security? A recent Gallup research study surveyed 1032 adults on the satisfaction of their personal income. A mere 69% reported they were unsatisfied with their earnings. A 2012 Seth Godin [..]

Encouraging customer Feedback and why you cannot afford ignoring it

Customer feedback is an important component in business firms that are set to grow to higher levels of performance in terms of profit and revenue in the long-run. However, collecting and incorporating the right customer feedback concerning services and products provided by the firm requires concerted management systems. In order to encourage proper Customer feedback in an organization, the management [..]

Shocking experience with young people’s job applications

Recently, I was a hiring a part-time assistant. Such positions are usually attractive for young people and university students who might learn something new, gain experience and earn some money. Plus the job offers quite a good flexibility to handle all the other duties they have. I posted a job ad on the biggest Czech job portal, and the CVs [..]

Consultant's destiny and how they can help you

When I first saw this picture, I said to myself that it describes the consultant's destiny remarkably accurately. No matter how brilliant ideas you, as a consultant, might have, the main difficulty is to convince your leads or clients to listen to you. Listening is the easier part. Your client and their team need to execute the actions you agreed [..]

Customer support - the flagship of your business

In today's world of global market, it is not a problem to buy from multiple sellers whatever product or service you need. If you want it cheaper, just keep searching. For instance, creating a drop ship site is so easy, that thousands of people are trying it. Unfortunately, majority of them fail, because they are not able to differentiate themselves [..]

Don't make your clients mad even if they leave you

A few month ago, our company started to care about social media of a new client. They hired another marketing company before us, but they didn't do a particularly good job. The first task for us was to move all the social media accounts to our control. Right at this stage, the issues began. The former marketing company created a [..]

How to increase the number of connections on LinkedIn?

The answer to the question in the title might be more difficult than many LinkedIn users realize. A trivial answer might be "Press search for whatever keyword and then keep pressing Contact". This strategy not only does not work, it is even dangerous. Why? We all hate spam. Different websites prevent spam in different ways. However, spam prevention is a [..]

Hiring Freelancers For SEO - A Few Tips

If you have ever tried hiring a freelancer via oDesk or Elance, you know how difficult it might be. Tens of applicants might seem great at first glance, but after a more detailed review, you will quickly find out that the majority of them just apply for every job they see, and they don't truly care about your particular job. [..]

Are you an effective manager?

IntroductionIf you run your own firm, or you are employed as a manager in a bigger company, you need to deal with one of the most difficult business part – your employees. Humans are much more difficult to understand and control than any machine or device. Many people in a working position think that manager is a useless person with [..]

It's easier to blame the bad economy than ...

Economy "crisis" everywhereWe are bombed with the term "economy crisis" from all around. Since 2008, we got used to blame the global economy for our failures, drop in sales and less revenue. The world economy is more and more globalized, and the competition is significantly increasing. There are so many choices for each service or product that customers are forced [..]

10 Great Jobs That Need Math

We’ve all been there in school where you watch the teacher doing some massive math equation on the board and you think, ‘What the hell am I going to need math for?’ As it turns out, you need math for a lot of things. From simply splitting a dinner bill between you and your friends to basic work such as [..]

How to recognize bad SEO companies?

SEO industry has changed in past two years a lot and is changing even faster. Everybody knows Panda and Penguin updates. Recently, Penguin 2.0 was released. Moreover, google said they would update their databse regularly - on monthly basis. This has increased the speed of SEO change even more. The biggest companies like Google and Facebook work on personalized searches [..]

Best business books

Studying is an important first step of anything you do. All the topics you can imagine are covered in a great number of publications. Business is not an exception. In this article, we would like to advise several great books to start with. Most of them are legendary best-sellers. We, at our company, return to these books regularly to find [..]

Is money more important than satisfied client?

During the past weeks, we tested several services and products. We tried www.adoori.com as an advertising channel. After the first two days we were sure, that this service is completly useless and all their traffic is just bots. Google analytics shows the bounce rate over 99% and average visit time 0-3 seconds. Why in a world would anybody pay for [..]

Tools for SEO analysis

Analysis firstAll creative tasks must start with an analysis. SEO is not an expception. Ten years ago, it was possible to guess any keywords about your niche and just throw all of them into google adwords or other ad network. Today however, when keywords PPC can easily cost $10-15, you really need to know what works and what doesn't. Otherwise, [..]

"Volume" helps you win

Success during economy crisis?Have you ever thought about Amazon, its great success even during the economy crisis? If you already have tried doing your own eCommerce business with products that amazon offers, you certainly asked yourself “How in a world can they have so low prices?” Sometimes, when you contact directly the Chinese suppliers, they will offer you a higher [..]

Automated tools for SEO?

Many people think that SEO can be very easy using automated tools. You can find tens of various products/services on the Internet. However, one needs to be very careful about the choice. Trillion Twitter followers?If you go to fiverr, you can order 3000 twitter followers for only $5. Is this service worth it? Certainly NOT! Such service is violating [..]