Bowling for Business: 2011—Marketing in Review

For our family, 2011 marks the year our daughter, Lauren, and her fiancé, Kyle, got engaged. Atop Coit Tower in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, Kyle proposed with an extravagant engagement ring wrapped in an unassuming Taco Bell hot sauce packet labeled Will You Marry Me?

Bowling for Business: How to Use Pinterest to Promote Your Business

One of my family’s Christmas Eve traditions is a White Elephant Gift Exchange. For the uninitiated, the cruel process goes something like this: Purchase a gift worth $5. Wrap it up so it looks like a million bucks. Draw a number to determine the order you will be allowed to select one of the gifts.

Bowling for Business—KISS to Keep Biz on the Hill

Over the past three years, we’ve all watched in horror as businesses of every variety have shuttered at an alarming rate. Vino 100 in the Village, Betty’s General Store in Blue Jay and Tony’s Mexican Restaurant in Cedar Glen are a few of the most recent casualties. The good news is that the solution is just as simple as warm socks on a cold night.

Bowling for Business: Are Social Media Coupons Good for Business?

“(Using Groupon) was the single worst decision I have ever made as a business owner thus far,” she wrote, also revealing she lost $8,000 as well as the good will of many of her existing customers because of the flood of Groupon users and the exorbitant percentage required by the service provider.

Bowling for Business: Party on with Pay Per Click

In a recessed economy, where budgets are tight and maximum return on investment is critical, you don’t necessarily have to hire a professional to manage your marketing efforts. But if you go it alone, you’ll need to find a way to make sure the money you decide to spend is actually reaching the people who are most likely to purchase your products or services.

Bowling for Business: Back to Basics—Five Reasons You Should Blog

As blogs first started popping up on electronic radar, few of us understood the medium, let alone the messengers. Bloggers seemed an odd lot of whiners who never left their keyboards. Without the endorsement of major metropolitan newspapers or book publishers, they were easy to discount, mock or ignore. But it didn’t take long for blogging to go mainstream.

Bowling for Business: Getting Your Advertising Feet Wet

All too often, entrepreneurs dabble instead of committing to comprehensive advertising strategies. But, in today’s competitive market, your campaign won’t succeed if you just dip your toe in the water. Don’t be afraid to take the plunge.

Bowling for Business: Share and Share Alike

Online and in the real world, you should listen as much as you talk—carefully considering the receiver before sharing any message. This is especially important since Google has recently re-calibrated algorithms to weigh interaction in addition to quantity of raw content to rank search results. Although the X-Robots that crawl across programming code can’t subjectively evaluate content, they now calculate the value of posts and associated authors based on how people respond to them.