Lollipop Local

I attended another networking opportunity recently, one aimed purely at women. Damsels in Success is the brainchild of Lucie Bradbury and started in Warwick but she now has 15 groups spread across the country. Lucie and the coordinator of my local group were both very personable, friendly women and I enjoyed the evening but I [...]

All businesses collect and process “personal data” as defined in the Data Protection Act 1998. When you collect people’s personal data, they need to know: Who you are, what the data will be used for and who else is going to see it. It’s not unreasonable when you view it like that. However, it’s the [...]

I was trying to find the phone number of my local electrical supplier last week but their website kept coming up with a ‘the page cannot be found’ message. When I went into the shop and quizzed the staff it transpired that they had taken their website down. Now, being an internet marketer, I was [...]

As predicted by Social Media Examiner last week, yesterday Facebook decided to realign their Business Pages with the image layouts on their Personal Profiles and change both the size and the position. From 180x180px, the squares are now 160x160px and, instead of sitting half in and half out of the cover image, they are now [...]

So just how important is Google Places Optimisation? Well, according to another SEO talking to someone who became my client, you will never get into the first position of Google Places if you have not optimised your profile so that it has achieved 100% completion. However, according to a post on Google Places Optimisation by [...]

I remember some months ago that I noticed there was a duplicate Google Places Listing for Lollipop Local. As I ummed and ahed about the best strategy for dealing with it – should I claim it or not – it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived so I thought no more about it. Until… [...]

Having spent the last few months working on how to crystallise what we do as a company into an image for the website header, the new Facebook timeline for business pages forced my hand and we had to make a decision fast. Facebook’s brief was to have a visual representation of what your Page/Brand/Product is [...]

I am indebted to SmallBizTrends for drawing this infogrpahic from Manta about small business growth strategies to my attention. Manta bill themselves as the largest online community dedicated entirely to small business and have made some major enhancements to their site to help small businesses to build their referral network through recommendations and social connection [...]

Over the last few weeks it has become apparent that there needs to be more guidance on choosing Google Adwords keywords for beginners, especially for local businesses. Too many companies just seem to pick words out of thin air and then wonder why their Google Adwords CPC bill is massive but the traffic to their [...]