This Saturday, November 26^th is the Second Annual Small Business Saturday. This is a day dedicated to supporting small businesses during the unofficial launch to the holiday shopping season. The Saturday following Black Friday is, after all, one of the busiest shopping days of the year. So if you are a small business, you will want to do what you can to take advantage of this national campaign!

To help you promote your small business there is a website with some nice marketing tools. SmallBusinessSaturday.com has tools that may be of use to your business including:

• Printable signage to put in your store window
• An email you can send to your client list promoting the day
• Content for your Facebook Wall and Twitter Feed

The idea behind Small Business Saturday is that if each customer buys just 1 item from a small business, it will have an enormous impact on small business as a whole. And consumers do want to help small, local businesses for a number of reasons: local jobs, their local economy and the uniqueness of many local business products.

So take advantage of this nationally promoted day (you have seen the commercial, right?) and some of the promotional tools available to your small business to increase sales and traffic for your business. And once Saturday passes, start planning for next year’s Small Business Saturday to drive even more sales.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that we strive to make your life easier. And none of the tips we have provided in the past could be simpler than those in this blog, which is a list of Facebook Tools that business Page admins (short for ‘administrators’) can use to get more out of their Facebook presence. The list contains some Social Media tools and apps that we feel are not used by most businesses, but should be.

The first is the Facebook Question app on your Wall. This is the quickest and simplest way to (more…)

For those of you who search in Google regularly, you may have seen some branding changes over the past week or two that offer a stark contrast to the Google that we have become accustomed to – black top navigation bar, the url above the page description on results pages, and no blue in the left nav on results pages to name a few of the changes. All of these will hopefully add to the user experience of Google, but the effects on the results that appear on the page should be minimal.

There is, however, one change we have noticed that has become more widespread for Google and could have a major impact on search traffic for some websites. And it has to do with Google AdWords. (more…)

If your business showcases products online, then you should be familiar with Google Merchant Center. If you aren’t, then you should keep on reading, As Google Merchant Center can help increase the reach and impact of your Internet marketing efforts.

So what is Google Merchant Center? It’s an online business tool that lets you provide Google with a feed of all the products you promote and/or sell online (this usually means items you sell through a shopping cart on your website). This allows specific products and product information to show up within Google Product Search, on Google SERPs with images and other Google properties. (more…)

At a recent Mannix Marketing, Inc. Facebook 101 presentation for businesses that have not yet to start a Facebook Page and business who have started, but have done little else. It went exceptionally well, but with so many businesses represented it gets you thinking about how many businesses are not on Facebook yet because of one reason or another. Some of the more popular reasons we heard were:

1. I’m not tech savvy
2. It would take up too much time
3. My target market doesn’t use Facebook
4. I started a Page but didn’t see instant results

We like to help businesses get the most out of their marketing, so (more…)