Surprisingly enough, retail sales for this year’s “Black Friday” were actually up one percent compared with last year’s annual holiday shopping day. Now all eyes turn to what is known as “Cyber Monday,” where holiday shoppers rush to the Internet to purchase all kinds of gifts for the holidays. Online shopping is now the preferred method of shopping for millions...

Today is Black Friday. With the sluggish economy, every retailer has been salivating and waiting for this day, which is dubbed the busiest shopping day of the year. I would argue that people get into more of a shopping frenzy as we get closer to Christmas. But nonetheless deals are aplenty on this day. All kinds of retailers, including Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart, all had great deals and extende...

Along with my mom, Rick Springfield was famous for saying “don’t talk to strangers.” I’m here to tell you this is completely bad advice – in the business world. If you don’t talk to (and ultimately get to know) your customers, you’re basically telling the world you aren’t interested in getting more sales. Let’s say you operate a pack and ship store in a small New Jersey town. A w...

Twitter is a resource that can greatly benefit any small business in any industry. Here we will explore what Twitter is and how you can take advantage of it for business purposes. If you’re a small business owner, or even if you work for another company, chances are you’ve found yourself at one or two networking events recently. Maybe you knew people there and maybe you didn’t. But you alway...

After you’ve set up your Web site and now you’re open for business on the World Wide Web, you’ll want to apply the same principles of traditional marketing to your online marketing. And now is a great time of the year for most businesses. Historically, if you wanted to do a special promotion for the winter holidays, like Christmas and Channukah you would design your promotion or brochure to ...

For many small business owners, marketing is somewhat intimidating. Whether you run an ice cream shop, a salon, or even a pet store, you’re quickly realizing that the business environment has changed dramatically from 20 years ago. One form of marketing you’ve probably heard about is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is directly tied to search engines, like Google and Yahoo!. When you use ...