We all know having a great website or eCommerce website is about providing your visitors with the information that they want at the time they are looking for that information. Your social media profile is the same. People follow you as they are interested in your products and services. You need to motivate, engage and interest your audience with what matters to them. If you want to engage and keep your fans happy on Facebook you need to have your information up-to-date, informative, and engaged.

Today we are going to talk about an item that many small businesses know they need but when you're a startup you need to save costs wherever possible. Most already have an email address from Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, Outlook.com (formally Hotmail), or use the one from our Internet providers (Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, etc.). Many will utilize these consumer email addresses as they have gone out and gotten a free website and they just didn't come with everything you needed for a business. Spending thousands for a website just to get a real email address was out of your budget (and we don't blame you).

Startups and small businesses don't have the kind of marketing power of major brand names not because they don't have great products and services but because they are new or just have not yet grown to be the big brands. This is where social media can come help. As a company in Valparaiso, Indiana you wouldn't think we would have a large presence but over the past three years we have grown from having no clients to having several hundred in 30+ states. How we have grown is a lot due to persistence but also because of our website, newsletter, and social media strategy. In this article we'll explain some of the items we have done to grow our social media presence.

We all want our website to be the best, to have content that people want to read and use on a daily basis. We want our content to go viral and overtake the world and make us billions of dollars overnight. This is hard to achieve but with some work and listening to what Google and Bing have offered over the years we can make some strides to achieving these goals by updating and improving our websites overall content.

As an entrepreneur it can become easy to get "off task". Staying focused is sometimes one of the hardest things for myself to do and can only imagine how it is for others. In this article I am going to talk about some of my major trials and tribulations of keeping on task between employees, clients, emails, and phone calls that need my attention on a daily basis. Learning what does, and doesn't, work for me has been a true blessing and something I continue to evaluate each and every day.

Hashtags started on Twitter in August 2007. Hashtags though are no longer just part of twitter but almost every social media outlet. A hashtag is a single word or a combination of words (with no space) that is preceded by a pound (#) symbol and used by the micro-blogging community to create a thread of conversations around a specific theme or topic.

Here at JM2 Webdesigners each and every day we work on search engine optimization from our Valparaiso office for clients. When we do we also help out prospective clients who want to truly rock the search engines. They want to do it low cost and with quick results. The first item we cover with any client is that SEO is a marathon and definitely not a short sprint. Like your business SEO is something that you need to train, mentor and continually work on. There are techniques (which we will not talk about as they are considered "black hat" (first topic we'll cover) that will hurt your business in the long run of this marathon and all too often we see people come to us wanting to "fix" this mistake that they've been doing for years.

Today we tweeted about how content is king. Why is content king when it comes to a website? Is this related to an ego thing to make kings feel grand? Not really. It's truly because without quality content on your site if all you have is a pretty site then you don't have a site that Google or the other search engines will feel is quality.