1.  

    Typography 101: What Small Business Owners Need To Know

                                 

    The old saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” is sometimes hard to overcome in the business world. How you present yourself aesthetically is important, no matter how solid your business plan is.

    It’s become crucial for companies to have a presence on the web, whether it’s a simple landing page, a blog or some social media profiles. And while content and products you’re offering should be valuable to your audience, the design of your site or blog can play a big factor in keeping your fans engaged. No one will stay on a poorly designed website.

    However, not every small business owner can hire a graphic designer at a moment’s notice. It can be expensive, and depending on the size of your business, it may be unnecessary. But never fear — there are small things you can do to improve the overall look of your web presence.

    “One step that a small business owner can take is to look at other sites that they think are well done,” says graphic designer Emily Caufield. “Take notice of the style, font choices and overall aesthetic of the site, and try to make similar choices when it comes to choosing what is best for their own.”

    If you’re on a tight budget and don’t already have a designer, there are several great themes on WordPress that are free, and plenty of premium themes that require a small, one-time fee. The blogging platform’s customizability makes it user-friendly, while allowing room for creativity.

    One thing that’s often overlooked, even if designs are in the works, is the font used to represent your company. Remember, the easier it is to read, the longer people will stay focused on what you’re trying to tell them. This applies to not just the content, but from a design perspective as well. Learn how to pick the right font — and how to avoid one that will turn off your possible customers.

    What font do you use for your website? Let us know in the comments below.

    Choosing the Right Font

    When crafting the proper typographical look for your company, Caufield suggests sticking with two fonts: a display or decorative font for headers and a font for body copy.

    “The display font can be more fun or bold, something that adds personality to your site,” says Caufield. “Usually this type of font works well larger — for headers or call-outs — but is probably not very legible on screen at smaller sizes.”

    For the rest of the copy on your site (or any stationery and promotional copy, really) it’s best to go with a simple, clean and legible font. Caufield recommends something like Arial, Helvetica, Verdana or Trebuchet.

    “It is also nice to choose a font that has a family — this gives you the option of using the bold, medium, thin and italic versions of your typeface,” she says.

    Setting the Tone With Your Font

    Believe it or not, the type of font you go with can be very expressive — it sets a mood for the story you’re trying to tell. When choosing a font, think about what your business does and who your audience is.

    “A bank website is going to use a typeface that is clean and simple, because their customers would not feel confident handing their money over to an establishment whose entire website was in Comic Sans,” says Caufield, adding that a company in the business of throwing kids birthday parties or something of that nature has more room for fun fonts.

    “In [that] case, choosing to not use a youthful and playful font might actually hurt their business,” she explains.

    What to Avoid When Selecting a Font

    After polling numerous designers, one thing is certain: Comic Sans and Papyrus are two fonts that are advised against for business websites.

    Normally, it’s better to go with something classic and timeless rather than something flashy. Think of a font like you would an outfit for an important event, such as the dress you wore to high school prom. It’s always best when you can look back on it and it still feels fresh and authentic.

    “It’s sometimes smarter to choose a font that is going to stand the test of time versus something that is going to fall out of favor in a year,” says Caufield.

  2.  

    Scams…

  3.   Digital Marketing: 7 Tips for Generating Fresh Ideas We’ve all been there: You’ve had a raucous weekend, and now it’s Monday morning, time to drag yourself into work. If you have a certain kind of job, it’s no big deal. You can coast a bit, maybe surf the web and take a few extra trips to the water cooler until you feel up to really working. But if your job requires you to be creative — and perhaps you’re getting paid a decent amount to come up with ideas — then you don’t have that option. In that case, you have to start coming up with ideas even though you’d rather be lying on your couch eating Cheez Doodles. What to do? Mashable checked in with some digital innovators and a few professors who study creativity to get some tips on how to get the upper hand on the muse. Below are seven suggestions. 1. Take a Break From the Web Heresy, you say? According to experts who study creativity, to get in touch with the muse, you have to first do the mental equivalent of cleansing your palate. “Clear your head for a few minutes,” says Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School. “Maybe take a walk someplace. Get yourself out of whatever mindset you’re in.” Rex Jung, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, also says the answer is to disengage. Jung believes that web time spent in “knowledge acquisition” is an essential part of the creative process, but at a certain point, you have to walk away from your PC and maybe leave your smartphone behind, too. “You have to take your frontal lobes offline for a bit to allow for those new ideas,” he says. Michael Lebowitz, the founder and CEO of digital ad shop Big Spaceship, says he often uses this “take a step back” approach. “Often it’s as simple as spending a few minutes internalizing the challenge at hand, and then doing something else entirely,” he says. “Taking a walk is easy enough, but if there’s time, reading something on a different subject, going to a museum or [doing] anything that actively stimulates your mind and senses really opens things up. Also, sleep. Never underestimate the power of sleep.” Image courtesy of Flickr, GuideGunnar 2. Expose Yourself to New Ideas, New People So what do you do after you’ve untethered yourself from your PC? Amabile says it’s a good idea to strike up a conversation with someone — inside the office or out — who you don’t know very well. “The more random the person, the better, because it will force you out of whatever mindset you’re in,” she says. A corollary of this is to expose yourself to people with expertise outside of your usual professional ambit. Advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, for instance, has a rule, articulated by co-founder Alex Bogusky: “Anyone who’s looking for inspiration from other ad agencies is in the wrong building.” Scott Prindle, executive creative technology director at Crispin, says he likes to pair up people from different backgrounds and see what they come up with. “I find so many creative ideas come from mixing and matching,” he says. “Like putting a video game designer on the MetLife account.” Image courtesy of Flickr, adpk 3. Find an Easy Way In Though common sense might tell you to tackle the hardest part of your problem first, Amabile says that the opposite is true. “Think about an aspect of the task that most interests you and use that as your entry point,” she says. For Prindle, the best entry point often comes during consumer research. The best ad campaigns, Prindle says, come from uncovering what exactly arouses emotion in consumers who interact with the brand. For instance, Crispin created a program called “Pizza Tracker” for Domino’s that let customers track the status of their orders. Prindle says that idea came about by witnessing the “tension and facial expression” of consumers who were wondering what was going on with their pizza. “It was a 30-minute black hole of despair,” says Prindle. “I always look at, from a human level, where does the tension exist?” Image courtesy of Flickr,Steve Snodgrass 4. Avoid Brainstorming in Large Groups There’s a lot that scientists don’t know about creativity, but one thing they all seem to agree on is that brainstorming sessions involving large groups of people is a bad way to go about soliciting ideas. “If you have four or five people trying to brainstorm at once, it’s going to lead to a lot of talking in circles because so many people are going to be trying to be polite,” says Jung. Amabile agrees: “I haven’t done any research on this, but I’ve read the literature and it seems pretty clear that with large groups, people feel inhibited.” Crispin’s solution is to put together teams of two. The idea isn’t new. In fact, in advertising, there’s a long history of two-person teams, often a copywriter and an illustrator, nowadays maybe a copywriter and a programmer, bandying ideas back and forth. The same holds in the arts as well: Ever wonder why songwriters often work in two-person teams — Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richard, Rodgers/Hammerstein, Goffin/King? That said, Amabile says that brainstorming in a large group can work if it’s done digitally, rather than in the flesh. A chat room, for instance, might be a more welcoming place for new ideas than an actual room. A low-tech variation on this is “brainwriting,” in which people write their ideas on a piece of paper, anonymously, and then throw them in a pile. Image courtesy of Flickr, sludgegulper 5. Revisit an “Old Favorite” Though new people and new ideas are essential for getting into creative mode, it’s also a good idea to revisit things that inspired you in the past, like books, movies, places and artwork. For Sam Ewen, CEO of guerrilla marketing firm Interference, that means, among other things, the book at left, an out-of-print title about the PR industry. 6. Use the Jerry Seinfeld Trick No one wants to be known as a hack, but there are days that you’re not feeling all that creative and you have to do your job anyway. At such times, it helps to focus on getting something — anything — done. As Amabile notes, even great artists were known to produce some dross — sometimes a lot of it — in the service of their art. Beethoven, for instance, is known for his great work, but produced a lot of mediocre stuff as well. “The thing is, you really do have to persist,” Amabile says. “You may or may not come up with a great idea, but in studies of people who have produced a a high level of creative work, they might not be higher in ability, but they are higher in persistence.” A good example of this is the British author Anthony Trollope, whose iron work ethic will be explored in the next slide. Another is Jerry Seinfeld, who came up with a system called “Don’t Break the Chain.” The idea is simple: Mark an X in your calendar for every day you achieve your creative goal, whether it’s writing something new or coming up with a workable idea. Then, maintain that day after day, so you put pressure on yourself not to “break the chain.” Image courtesy of Flickr, Alan Light 7. Use the Ernest Hemingway Trick So you’re on a roll, but it’s getting late. What do you do now? How about the Ernest Hemingway trick. To avoid facing a blank sheet of paper in the morning (this was in typewriter days), Hemingway used to write the first paragraph of his next scene and then sign off for the day. Anthony Trollope, the British novelist, used a somewhat similar technique: Trollope would rise at 5:30 every day and then put his watch in front of him. When he reached three hours, Trollope would go off to his job with the postal service. If he happened to finish a novel within that time, Trollope would take out a fresh piece of paper and start on the next one. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

    Full image link →

    Digital Marketing: 7 Tips for Generating Fresh Ideas

    We’ve all been there: You’ve had a raucous weekend, and now it’s Monday morning, time to drag yourself into work. If you have a certain kind of job, it’s no big deal. You can coast a bit, maybe surf the web and take a few extra trips to the water cooler until you feel up to really working.

    But if your job requires you to be creative — and perhaps you’re getting paid a decent amount to come up with ideas — then you don’t have that option. In that case, you have to start coming up with ideas even though you’d rather be lying on your couch eating Cheez Doodles.

    What to do? Mashable checked in with some digital innovators and a few professors who study creativity to get some tips on how to get the upper hand on the muse. Below are seven suggestions.

    1. Take a Break From the Web

    Heresy, you say? According to experts who study creativity, to get in touch with the muse, you have to first do the mental equivalent of cleansing your palate. “Clear your head for a few minutes,” says Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School. “Maybe take a walk someplace. Get yourself out of whatever mindset you’re in.”

    Rex Jung, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, also says the answer is to disengage. Jung believes that web time spent in “knowledge acquisition” is an essential part of the creative process, but at a certain point, you have to walk away from your PC and maybe leave your smartphone behind, too. “You have to take your frontal lobes offline for a bit to allow for those new ideas,” he says.

    Michael Lebowitz, the founder and CEO of digital ad shop Big Spaceship, says he often uses this “take a step back” approach. “Often it’s as simple as spending a few minutes internalizing the challenge at hand, and then doing something else entirely,” he says. “Taking a walk is easy enough, but if there’s time, reading something on a different subject, going to a museum or [doing] anything that actively stimulates your mind and senses really opens things up. Also, sleep. Never underestimate the power of sleep.”

    Image courtesy of Flickr, GuideGunnar

    2. Expose Yourself to New Ideas, New People

    So what do you do after you’ve untethered yourself from your PC? Amabile says it’s a good idea to strike up a conversation with someone — inside the office or out — who you don’t know very well. “The more random the person, the better, because it will force you out of whatever mindset you’re in,” she says. A corollary of this is to expose yourself to people with expertise outside of your usual professional ambit.

    Advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, for instance, has a rule, articulated by co-founder Alex Bogusky: “Anyone who’s looking for inspiration from other ad agencies is in the wrong building.”

    Scott Prindle, executive creative technology director at Crispin, says he likes to pair up people from different backgrounds and see what they come up with. “I find so many creative ideas come from mixing and matching,” he says. “Like putting a video game designer on the MetLife account.”

    Image courtesy of Flickr, adpk

    3. Find an Easy Way In

    Though common sense might tell you to tackle the hardest part of your problem first, Amabile says that the opposite is true. “Think about an aspect of the task that most interests you and use that as your entry point,” she says.

    For Prindle, the best entry point often comes during consumer research. The best ad campaigns, Prindle says, come from uncovering what exactly arouses emotion in consumers who interact with the brand. For instance, Crispin created a program called “Pizza Tracker” for Domino’s that let customers track the status of their orders. Prindle says that idea came about by witnessing the “tension and facial expression” of consumers who were wondering what was going on with their pizza. “It was a 30-minute black hole of despair,” says Prindle. “I always look at, from a human level, where does the tension exist?”

    Image courtesy of Flickr,Steve Snodgrass

    4. Avoid Brainstorming in Large Groups

    There’s a lot that scientists don’t know about creativity, but one thing they all seem to agree on is that brainstorming sessions involving large groups of people is a bad way to go about soliciting ideas. “If you have four or five people trying to brainstorm at once, it’s going to lead to a lot of talking in circles because so many people are going to be trying to be polite,” says Jung. Amabile agrees: “I haven’t done any research on this, but I’ve read the literature and it seems pretty clear that with large groups, people feel inhibited.”

    Crispin’s solution is to put together teams of two. The idea isn’t new. In fact, in advertising, there’s a long history of two-person teams, often a copywriter and an illustrator, nowadays maybe a copywriter and a programmer, bandying ideas back and forth. The same holds in the arts as well: Ever wonder why songwriters often work in two-person teams — Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richard, Rodgers/Hammerstein, Goffin/King?

    That said, Amabile says that brainstorming in a large group can work if it’s done digitally, rather than in the flesh. A chat room, for instance, might be a more welcoming place for new ideas than an actual room. A low-tech variation on this is “brainwriting,” in which people write their ideas on a piece of paper, anonymously, and then throw them in a pile.

    Image courtesy of Flickr, sludgegulper

    5. Revisit an “Old Favorite”

    Though new people and new ideas are essential for getting into creative mode, it’s also a good idea to revisit things that inspired you in the past, like books, movies, places and artwork. For Sam Ewen, CEO of guerrilla marketing firm Interference, that means, among other things, the book at left, an out-of-print title about the PR industry.

    6. Use the Jerry Seinfeld Trick

    No one wants to be known as a hack, but there are days that you’re not feeling all that creative and you have to do your job anyway. At such times, it helps to focus on getting something — anything — done. As Amabile notes, even great artists were known to produce some dross — sometimes a lot of it — in the service of their art. Beethoven, for instance, is known for his great work, but produced a lot of mediocre stuff as well. “The thing is, you really do have to persist,” Amabile says. “You may or may not come up with a great idea, but in studies of people who have produced a a high level of creative work, they might not be higher in ability, but they are higher in persistence.”

    A good example of this is the British author Anthony Trollope, whose iron work ethic will be explored in the next slide. Another is Jerry Seinfeld, who came up with a system called “Don’t Break the Chain.” The idea is simple: Mark an X in your calendar for every day you achieve your creative goal, whether it’s writing something new or coming up with a workable idea. Then, maintain that day after day, so you put pressure on yourself not to “break the chain.”

    Image courtesy of Flickr, Alan Light

    7. Use the Ernest Hemingway Trick

    So you’re on a roll, but it’s getting late. What do you do now? How about the Ernest Hemingway trick. To avoid facing a blank sheet of paper in the morning (this was in typewriter days), Hemingway used to write the first paragraph of his next scene and then sign off for the day.

    Anthony Trollope, the British novelist, used a somewhat similar technique: Trollope would rise at 5:30 every day and then put his watch in front of him. When he reached three hours, Trollope would go off to his job with the postal service. If he happened to finish a novel within that time, Trollope would take out a fresh piece of paper and start on the next one.

    Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

  4.  

    6 Turnkey Tools for Content Distribution

                        

    It’s never been easier to become a publisher, but being a publisher ain’t easy.

    Today, the scarce resource in the publishing world is not infrastructure; it’s audience. To compete for reader attention, bloggers are finding they not only have to produce better content, they also have to figure out a way to get it in front of people.

    Content discovery engine Outbrain composed a haiku on the subject, and though I hate cliches, this one rings true.

    “If you wrote a blog
    And no one came to read it
    Did you write a blog?”

    Fortunately, tools are emerging to help publishers reach new audiences. Though getting more readers won’t be much help if your content sucks, the following five solutions can help publishers build an audience with the push of a button.

    1. Outbrain: Headline Distribution

    Outbrain is a lot like Google Adwords for content. Publishers provide an RSS feed of their content or submit individual links, and Outbrain produces headlines at the bottom of stories on major media sites under the label “Sponsored” or “Related” posts.

    Publishers pay a few cents per click, and Outbrain’s marketing team claims the relevancy of the traffic generates 44% higher pageviews per session than search or social media referrals. Outbrain’s network spans some of the largest publishers on the web, including CNN, Fox News, Hearst, Mashable, MSNBC and Slate, says Lisa LaCour, Outbrain’s VP of marketing.

    “Unlike many of the other lower-cost paid distribution outlets, Outbrain’s network contains many impressive premium sites like the NYTimes.com, CNN.com, etc., plus a number of well sought after blogs,” says Scott Slatin, president of Rivington Media, which works with a number of ad-supported publishers. “To get placement on these types of sites for less than $0.10 a click is something that no other paid distribution partner can match.”

    Outbrain recently launched a self-serve platform to allow small businesses and blogs to distribute their headlines with ease.

    Charlie Baker, founder of Palimedia, which handles reader acquisition and paid syndication for several global brands, says, “The Outbrain script allows a publisher to reach out beyond its own network of properties to reach users on the Outbrain network in a highly automated fashion. In many cases, I can do more with Outbrain because I don’t have to play by some of the rules Google and Facebook forces on its advertisers.”

    2. SimpleReach: Suggested Story Distribution

    SimpleReach helps publishers find and expose the content that will drive the most traffic through social channels, according to its president, Bryan Birsic. Its primary product, The Slide, is a tool that surfaces the most shared – and most likely to be shared – content a publisher has in its archives, and encourages users to share it. It also allows publishers to distribute their most social content across other publishers’ sites.

    “In working on The Slide, SimpleReach realized that social signals were increasingly and overwhelmingly important in determining the content that drove the most traffic to publishers,” says Birsic. “Setting yourself up for success as a publisher must begin with a fierce focus on taking advantage of social channels.”

    3. ARC: Newswire Distribution

    An acronym for “Access, Reach, Connect,” ARC Engagement Platform is an “all-in-one” tool for automatically distributing text and multimedia content across social networks, top 100 video sites and about 6,000 media outlets, according to PR Newswire.

    “[It] works as a complement to their news release capabilities,” explains Joe Pulizzi, CEO of Content Marketing Institute.

    For those publishers wanting a press release-style distribution strategy, ARC appears to provide flexibility, allowing users to dynamically update content once distributed.

    4. Zemanta: Link Distribution

    Zemanta is a link distribution engine cleverly disguised as a text editor plugin. The consumer-facing side of Zemanta’s software analyzes the content of blog posts-in-progress and suggests relevant photos and links for authors to add on the fly.

    Publishers, Pulizzi explains, “can plug into [Zemanta’s] network of bloggers to promote relevant content for them to link to.”

    For example, if a blogger is composing a story about snow cones, a publisher who wants to distribute that blogger’s snow cone content can pay to promote the posts through Zemanta’s suggested, “sponsored” links.

    “About 75,000 bloggers actively use Zemanta,” says Tin Dizdarevic, Zemanta’s director of marketing.

    5. TubeMogul OneLoad: Video Distribution

    TubeMogul calls itself, “the most powerful video distribution and tracking solution available.” Whether that’s hyperbole or not, the service is free, flexible and powerful enough that social video baron Gary Vaynerchuk plugs it relentlessly in his book Crush It.

    In short, OneLoad allows users to upload a video once, then automatically distribute it across a wide network of popular social and video networks. Users can then track their videos’ success (or lack thereof) across those networks using TubeMogul analytics.

    6. StumbleUpon: Paid Social Distribution

    For inexpensive and hopefully viral pay-per-click content distribution, the standby for many marketers and publishers is StumbleUpon, a social network that serves users page after page of “random” content from around the web. Cost per click starts in the pennies and goes up from there, depending on volume and category.

    The traffic comes from StumbleUpon’s website or browser toolbar; therefore, readership is less predictable and more bounce-inclined than other sources, but it’s about as turnkey as turnkey can get.

    With distribution tools like these, publishers like can worry less about reach and more about producing quality content.

    “The real key to content distribution is to create great content that people want to engage with,” LaCour says. “Once you do this, the distribution methods you choose will support its growth.”

  5.  

    10 Easy Customer Engagement Ideas for Small Business

                          

    Business and technology writer Efraim Turban defines customer service as “a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction — that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

    While customer experience means different things to different people, it is generally about the sum of all the interaction a customer has with a brand or company. That’s a significant difference from customer service, which generally focuses on a single transaction.

    All of which begs the question, how do you create a customer experience that sets you apart from the competition and keeps customers coming back? Luckily for you, I recently asked a group of successful young entrepreneurs those very questions.

    1. Our Customers Are Our Models

    At Sweat EquiTees, we make sure to feature our customers as best we can. After all, they are our life and soul. Since we sell clothing to entrepreneurs, we have our customers send us photos of themselves in their shirts, and then we feature them as “model entrepreneurs” on our website. It’s a fun and engaging way of promoting our customers and showing off our products.

    - Benjamin Leis, Sweat EquiTees.

    2. Hold a Virtual Party

    Everyone loves to attend parties, even more so if they don’t need to dress up and drive somewhere. I’ve held virtual parties where I’m on camera interacting with people via chat, giving away fun tips, making jokes and answering customer questions. Why not make learning fun? I should mention it was Halloween and I was a wearing a witch’s hat!

    - Nathalie Lussier, Nathalie Lussier Media.

    3. Put the Spotlight on Customers

    We like to write about the attendees to our events and their companies on our blog. This makes them happy because we’re spreading the word about their activities. They also feel more engaged and involved with our company in between events, and feel part of a larger community.

    - Tim Jahn, Entrepreneurs Unpluggd.

    4. Put Money In Your Clients’ Pockets

    Once you know who your clients are and what they do for a living, connect them to people who need their services. You can make virtual introductions, but this also works offline. There is no greater compliment you can give a customer than referring someone to their business. If you put money in your clients’ pockets, they’ll keep putting money in yours.

    - Robert Sofia, Platinum Advisor Marketing Strategies, LLC.

    5. Call Your Customers

    Call me old-fashioned, but what could be more engaging than a one-on-one phone call? Try calling some of your customers, even if it wasn’t part of your agreement or the package you sold them. If you spend 10 minutes getting to know a customer, you’ll learn some incredible things about why people buy your stuff. You can also win a fan for life. If you just have to keep things online, use Skype!

    - Corbett Barr, Insanely Useful Media.

    6. Geocache Scavenger Hunt

    I’ve set up a geocaching scavenger hunt for some of my clients to work together as teams and integrate my product while on the hunt. Geocaching uses GPS coordinates to find destinations or hidden objects. This generates a lot of buzz and is a great way to shake-up traditional marketing methods. If you have a product or service, introduce it as a geocache to make some curiosity.

    - Vanessa Van Petten, Science of People.

    7. Use YouTube

    YouTube videos are some of the easiest, least expensive ways to create a fun, engaging experience. Use a Flip video camera, which has easy editing software, to record testimonials from your employees and clients. Upload videos of your team doing unique or entertaining things. Be sure it’s tasteful and your clients will like it.

    - Nick Friedman, College Hunks Hauling Junk.

    8. Solicit Participation With Contests

    Engage your customers with trivia, contests or promotions which require a public response to participate. For example, I ask musicians to share their stories on social media. The best stories shared win free digital distribution to get their music on iTunes, Amazon, etc. The goal is to get the conversation going to reach friends of friends. Costs are minimal and ROI is great.

    - Lucas Sommer, Audimated.

    9. Make Yourself Accessible

    People love feeling like they have access to you whenever they want. If I’m emailing my mailing list, I always try to add a line that says “Anything I can do to personally help you out? Just hit reply.” I always get a lot of responses, and build a much deeper bond with my audience and customers.

    - Sean Ogle, Location 180, LLC.

    10. Show Your Fans Some Facebook Love

    We really love the relationship that we have with our fans and potential customers, so we like to show the world. Every week on our Facebook page, we highlight one of our fans as “Fan of the Week.” This is fun because their love for our company is displayed to our fans, and that person will then share it with their own network.

    - Andrew Saladino, Just Bath Vanities.

  6.  

    9 Ways to Improve Customer Communication on Your Website

                          

    If you’re like most business owners, getting leads online is the main reason you created a website in the first place. Sure, you may have a stellar SEO campaign, a beautiful design and an über low bounce rate, but without a well-planned contact strategy, you can’t turn those pageviews into conversions.

    Online conversions aren’t just for ecommerce websites. In fact, most businesses use their websites to initiate one-on-one conversations. By personally engaging a contact, you are more likely to turn that contact into a customer. So, what’s the trick?

    First, you need to understand that most people don’t want to give their phone numbers or email addresses to yet another website — the thought of spam is horrifying. And it’s not just privacy hawks who shy away from contact forms; most websites only achieve a 2-3% conversion rate. Furthermore, people don’t want to have to worry about waiting for a return phone call to address their problems or questions. They want to get the answers they need with as little effort as possible.

    Follow these nine tips to make your website design and customer service more approachable, and thus, gain the trust of more customers.

    Go with the Flow

    Website usability is built on convention. Follow tried and true design strategies to ensure that your users can move through your site as easily as possible. Remember, the less effort, the better.

    • Use the words “Contact Us.” It may sound boring or generic, but the phrase works. (There’s a reason exit signs don’t use the words “leave” or “depart.”) People don’t read your site — they scan — and they’ve been trained over time to instantly recognize those two words.
    • Place contact info and phone number at the top, right corner of the page, where it’s expected.Also, make sure to include your phone number as an HTML, not an image. That way, a mobile user can tap the phone number link and launch into a call immediately. When mobile browsing eclipses desktop browsing in two years, nearly everyone will need that instant access. While you open yourself up to potential spamming, the benefits certainly outweigh the risks.

    Make It Easy

    A user must already overcome an internal battle in order to share her personal contact information. Your job is to remove as many obstacles as possible so that she makes the leap.

    • Keep contact forms simple. While it may help to get a full profile of your visitor by asking pre-qualifying questions, it can be very intimidating for that user. Ask for as little information as possible and require only that person’s name and email address. If you seek other information, such as phone number and address, make it optional.
    • Create one-column form fields for quick contact. It helps to put form labels directly above form fields. Usability studies show that users who filled out these types of forms saved time by only having to move their eyes vertically, not laterally.
    • Don’t be afraid of large input boxes. While considered a design trend, large input boxes are not only more fun to fill out, but also force you to limit the number of fields on a contact form.
    • Give visitors a clear action button. Because people read from left to right and top to bottom, place the final action button in the lower-right of the form. Give the button plenty of weight with a standout color.

    Be Reassuring

    Trust goes a long way with online clients. People fear that their contact information will get dumped into a huge database that marketers can access at will. By making your contact form unique, fun and reassuring, your user will know there’s a human on the receiving end and, therefore, be more likely to share.

    • Have some fun. Nothing eases people’s worries better than good humor. Why not spice up your contact form with some personality? Not only will it give your users a laugh, but it will also make your contact page more human. Consider a witty introduction or quirky photo.
    • Make a promise. Tell your users that their information is safe, that you won’t share it with any third party. Place this promise right next to the submit button; that way they’ll experience a nice aftertaste upon opting in.

    Offer Instant Chat

    Instant chat has been around for quite some time, but has traditionally only been used by the customer service departments of large Internet companies. Now, many low-cost services enable your users to reach you instantly wherever you are.

    • The future is instant. Perhaps the lowest website threshold is instant chat. It requires the user to supply little, if any, personal information and allows you to provide quick and personal customer service. Consider giving one of these services a chance.

      • LiveChat: Unlike other services, LiveChat offers a range of innovative features and third-party integration modules. You can use Facebook to gain access to your users’ social media profiles, Skype to elevate the chat into a phone call and Join.Me to perform a screen share. LiveChat also offers a free trial that makes trying this service a no-brainer.
      Olark: Another promising contender, Olark features a beautiful and seamless user experience, great reporting tools, CRM and Helpdesk integration, and it works with just about any IM client. Plus, you can live chat with a customer straight from your mobile phone. While not as feature-rich as some of its competitors, Olark is an efficient and inexpensive solution that fills the needs of most businesses.

  7.  

    Full image link →

  8.  

    SMS Marketing is going to dominate the marketplace! Text Zoom to 21777 to find out more!

    Source: mymobilezoom

  9.  

    The Power Of The Mind: How To Train Yourself To Be More Successful

                                      

    Leadership tycoon Warren Bennis once said, “We seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven’t devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.”

    There is a wealth of information at our disposal today on the latest discoveries in brain science. While we enjoy reading about these findings and expanding our intellect, how many of us actually apply these concepts?

    We can either drown in this information or turn it into a lifesaver by extracting its practical knowledge. This article offers several important tips based on discoveries in brain research that can help us improve our personal and professional lives, as well as help others in our sphere of influence.

    Use visualization to learn a new skill

    Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to continuously create new neural pathways. When we repeat a skill that we are trying to master, we strengthen the neural networks that represent that action. The same happens physically in the brain whether we perform the action, or simply visualize it—Your brain cannot tell the difference between an action you performed and an action you visualized.

    In a Harvard University study, two groups of volunteers were presented with a piece of unfamiliar piano music. One group received the music and a keyboard, and was told to practice. The other group was instructed to just read the music and imagine playing it. When their brain activity was examined, both groups showed expansion in their motor cortex, even though the second group had never touched a keyboard.

    Albert Einstein, who is credited with saying that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” used visualization throughout his entire life. Why not take advantage of what we know about brain plasticity and take the time to add visualization as part of your rehearsals of anything you are trying to master, such as delivering a flawless presentation?

    Achieve your goals by keeping your mouth shut

    This idea was popularized by Derek Sivers, a professional musician, in his presentation at TED. As he explains, psychology tests have proven that when you tell someone your goal, and they acknowledge it, you are less likely to do the work to realize that goal. This is because your brain mistakes the talking for the doing—that is, the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings tricks your brain into feeling that the goal has already been accomplished. The satisfaction you experience in the telling removes the motivation to do whatever it takes to actually make it happen.

    Heed this information and keep your goals to yourself. It might just spur you to work harder to achieve an important goal.

    Smile to improve your mood

    The Facial Feedback Hypothesis indicates that facial expressions representative of an emotion trigger changes in your body that are similar to those that happen when you experience the actual emotion. For example, your brain cannot tell the difference between a posed smile or a genuine smile. A posed smile will elicit, physiologically, the same pleasure or happiness response as a genuine smile. Your facial muscles cue your brain to experience that positive emotion. Taking notice of this, consider how this information can help you to regulate some of your emotional reactions by controlling your facial expressions.

    Try this the next time you are in a bad mood: Instead of frowning, which reinforces a negative mood, consider smiling. Research has shown that by doing so, you are likely to experience a more positive mood.

    Understand the physiology of emotional pain to develop empathy

    Research at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University discovered that social or emotional pain is as real and intense as physical pain. The same brain networks are activated when a person experiences a physical injury as when they go through a painful emotional experience. Your brain cannot distinguish between physical and emotional pain.

    “While both types of pain can hurt very much at the time they occur,” says Kip Williams, Ph.D., “social pain has the unique ability to come back over and over again, whereas physical pain lingers only as an awareness that it was indeed at one time painful.” Consider for a moment that when we hurt someone emotionally, it may very well be the equivalent of breaking one of their bones. We can create a better world in our sphere of influence just by being mindful of this thought and using it to help develop our empathy towards others.

    Lower your stress level by managing your thoughts

    There is ample research proving that your brain cannot tell the difference between a real and imagined threat; the physical response is the same. In 
    Mystic Cool: A Proven Approach to Transcend Stress, Achieve Optimal Brain Function, and Maximize Your Creative Intelligence    , Don Joseph Goewey provides a powerful tool—called the Clear Button—to thwart fearful thoughts and stop the escalating stress. This 10-second strategy works because it creates a distraction from the primitive brain where fear resides. Care to test it out? Follow these steps.

    1. Imagine that there is a button in the center of your left palm; imagine that this button, when pressed, will send a signal to your brain to stop the fearful thinking.
    2. Press the button with your right hand as you become aware of your breath.
    3. Take three easy breaths counting them out.
    4. Imagine a different color for each number.
    5. As you exhale, relax in the present moment.

    Parker J. Palmer, founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal once said, “Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.” In other words, knowing is not enough. We do ourselves and others a great disservice when we don’t decide to act on the gift of knowledge. It’s the difference between hording information and developing wisdom.             

  10.  

    4 Essential Facebook Page Apps to Improve Communication With Fans

                          

    The number of Facebook applications can seem a little overwhelming at times. While Facebook doesn’t share an exact number, an independent website called AppDatamonitors trends for over 100,000 Facebook applications, which is a lot to sift through.

    As a business, trying to determine which of those apps can help your organization can be daunting. To get you started, here are four essential Facebook apps that allow you to better reach and communicate with your audience, as well as save you time for all those other things you have to do.

    1. Tweets to Pages — Display Your Twitter Feed

    Tweets to Pages, which has 1.2 million monthly active users, will create a tab on your Facebook Page that displays a timeline of your company’s most recent tweets. This is a great feature for providing additional, real-time information to Facebook users who don’t have a Twitter account and for avoiding the annoyance your fans would feel if you were to constantly stream your tweets to Facebook as wall updates. The app is very easy to set up, and the free version allows you to adjust the number of tweets that show on the Tweets to Pages tab.

    If you want to upgrade to the paid version, you can better control your content limits, choose a color scheme, add a banner and allow comments on your tweets.

    2. Static HTML: iframe Tabs — Create a Custom Landing Page

    Static HTML: iframe tabs, which has 61.8 million monthly users, will simplify the process of making a custom landing page by automating many of the steps. Forget about creating a developer account and your own application — this app provides copy and paste textboxes for your custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It also offers checkboxes to remove the scrollbars and to enable Facebook’s FBML. If you want to incentivize Likes on your Page, the application enables you to “like-gate,” and show different content to those who have and haven’t “liked” your page.

    It’s worth noting that you will still need to host your own files, and you won’t be able to remove the scrollbars for any design over 520 pixels wide and 800 pixels tall.

    3. ContactMe — Add a Contact Form

    ContactMe, with 180,000 monthly active users, adds a tab on your organization’s Facebook Page with a contact form. This allows anyone visiting your Facebook page to easily get in touch with you at the very moment when they’re most interested.

    The biggest advantage of this app is its customization options. You can choose whether you’d prefer to show your company’s contact information or social media icons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Skype. You can also adjust, add, remove, reorder and require specific fields through a simple user interface on contactme.com. And of course, there’s a paid option to remove the ContactMe branding, offer a custom success message and receive text message alerts when someone submits the form.

    4. RSS Graffiti – Automatically Post Updates

    RSS Graffiti, with 1.5 million monthly users, allows you to automatically post wall updates any time there’s a new item in one of your specified feeds. For example, if you publish to a company blog every day, RSS Graffiti can automatically post an excerpt of the article with a direct link onto your Facebook page’s wall. That saves you the time and effort of creating a new wall update every day to distribute your company’s content.

    Just like ContactMe, the customization options for this application make it stand out. You can automatically post more than one RSS feed, adjust how the post looks when published, schedule how often the feed is checked, and specify how many posts should be published per check. And most importantly, with all these options and more, the configuration interface is still easy to use and intuitive.

    Do you use any of these apps on your business’ Facebook Page? Do you use other ones? Let us know in the comments below.

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  12.  

    3 Reasons VoIP Phones Make Sense for Small Businesses

    You are a small business, therefore, you need an easy way to communicate with your customers and vice versa. Picking a phone system that you can rely on is a complicated, tricky business, and not really something you want to hassle with at the end of the day.

    Ultimately, the choice comes down to two options. A traditional phone system relies on phone lines that are connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), on circuits operated by Private Branch Exchange (PBX) equipment. Secondly, a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider transmits your voice over the Internet as data. Ultimately, you have to judge what’s best for your company and, more importantly, what gets the job done most efficiently.

    VoIP has a number of benefits over traditional, hard-line phone systems, and its statistics are impressive. Last year the FCC reported that use of VoIP increased 21%, to over 30 million VoIP subscribers in the U.S. alone.

    But what are the real reasons behind its popularity? Here, I hope to target a few of the lesser-known reasons why VoIP can be useful for small businesses.

    1. No More Wonky Phone Switches

    In the past, running your business over a traditional phone system required a phone switch — a closet full of physical phone lines and hardware to run it. You had to hire a technical support person to manage all your company’s phone lines, and to fix the switch or support hardware when things went wrong.

    Not only are phone switches and their maintenance expensive, but they are also slow and difficult to fix. Your system could be down for a significant amount of time before a technician arrives to diagnose and fix the problem – all the while losing productivity.

    With VoIP, the system is the phone switch. The provider’s network transmits voice data over the Internet (like email and web data), and replaces the switch entirely.

    Why is this important? Aside from more space in your office, VoIP gives you a host of features that are difficult to access using a traditional hard-line system, for instance, making calls from your computer or laptop, and forwarding calls to your mobile phone. New features like these are easily integrated into your VoIP system as they become available, and don’t require any new hardware installs or complicated tech support manuals.

    2. Better Remote Customer Support

    Old-fashioned office phone lines are supported by old-fashioned companies built on legacy phone systems that are 30 to 50-years old. These companies operate on business models that were developed for last-century markets. This makes it difficult to respond to the needs of your business quickly and easily. Customers of traditional phone companies often complain about complicated or time-consuming customer interfaces and un-integrated service offerings.

    VoIP vendors are next-generation service providers built on the most up-to-date systems. They are hip to web-based software, and can respond to changes in the market more quickly than traditional phone companies.

    VoIP vendors have web-based customer support, as well as over-the-phone help. The VoIP customer service model can eliminate the need for a technician’s visit, and can minimize delays in problem-solving. Customers love how quickly and easily they can get VoIP up and running for their businesses, and are astounded by the difference of service, compared to what they’ve come to expect from traditional telecom providers. With the proper network and the right provider, it can be as easy as plugging an Ethernet cable into your VoIP phone.

    3. More User-Friendly for Employees

    Remember struggling to forward a call on your traditional phone system? Have you ever forgotten your password to access your work voicemail remotely? Did you master call-forwarding, sending calls to your mobile number when you were away from your desk?

    Traditional telecom providers offer these features, but they are difficult for your employees to figure out. Your employees are web and mobile savvy, and dealing with complicated phone interfaces frustrates them to no end.

    VoIP technology is integrated into systems that you and your employees are already using, like the web and mobile devices. Management portals that are customizable to your business provide a simplified interface to administer your communication needs.

    Call forwarding is much easier (no more crazy codes and # signs) with integrated find-me, follow-me features that allow your employees to get incoming calls at different locations, on different phones. Employees can access their voicemail from email or have it sent to their mobile phones. No longer do they have to remember their passwords when they call their work voicemail.

    Some VoIP customers have found it effective to train a few employees on the administrator features and then provide instructions so the entire staff can manage their own account settings. These user-friendly features are more aligned with the values that today’s mobile, agile workers have come to expect.

    With cutting-edge functionality, easy-to-use features and an enhanced customer support experience, VoIP is especially suited to the needs of small business. VoIP systems are flexible enough to respond to the needs and changes of your small business, and will bolster your business communications and productivity alongside the systems that you and your employees are already using.

  13.  

    6 Ways Brands Can Earn More Exposure on Tumblr

    With 29 million blogs (more than WordPress at last count), and at least as many millions of posts every day,Tumblr is a force of nature in the Internet ecosystem that cannot be ignored. That massive audience means opportunities for businesses to find fans and build brands.

    Here are six tips for kickstarting a Tumblr strategy that will grow your presence on the platform.

    1. Use Tumblr Curation as a Compliment to Original Content

    The short-form, fast-paced nature of Tumblr lends itself well to content curation. The platform is optimized for creating collections of bite-sized media.

    With the click of a button (the “reblog” button to be precise), you can instantly post someone else’s Tumblr content on your own. Businesses can leverage this to create their own curated resource for all of the interesting things they observe in their niche.

    Of course, curation works best when accompanied by original content, or when a slant or opinion is appended to the curated work. This is why many businesses choose to use Tumblr as a supplementto a longer form WordPress or Typepad blog on their own domain as part of a stock and flow content strategy.

    2. Like and Comment on Good Content From Tumblr Blogs in Your Space

    “Liking” and commenting on relevant Tumblr content may seem like a subtle gesture in comparison to reblogging, but there are a few ways it gets you exposure to new audiences.

    Every time you “like” something another Tumblr user has posted, your name and link get put in tiny letters at the bottom of that post. This can lead targeted users to your Tumblr page. If you reblog a post and add your own comment to it in your reblog, your update on the original post’s feed gets more real estate. It’s a great way to get incremental exposure.

    When you add relevant comments on posts, you foster relationships and goodwill, which often translates into followers.

    Keep in mind that what goes around comes around. Being helpful, thoughtful, and friendly goes a long way. Being self-serving will only get you unfollowed.

    3. Self-Link Original Things You Post

    Whenever you author an original post on Tumblr, include a link back to yourself as the source. This little “watermark” will get reposted and shared every time another user decides to reblog your post.

    This not only turns into valuable links back to your tumblelog, but it also gets your brand name spread further out into the Tumblr ecosystem. Branding plus backlinks is a powerful combination!

    4. Tag Your Posts Exhaustively

    Every post you tag goes into the general Tumblr archive for the tags you specify. If you post a photo of a hurricane and tag it with related words like “storm” “tropical storm” and “hurricane,” your photo will appear in all three of those tag streams. It’s yet another great way for your brand to be found.

    While your goal should be to tag your posts as extensively as possible, remember to keep the tags relevant. Anything that can trigger an alert in readers head to indicate that you may be “gaming” (or worse, “spamming”) the system can mean unfollows. Good behavior and etiquette wins out in social media in the long run every time.

    5. Repurpose Highlights From Your Other Blogs

    Tumblr is a fantastic way to squeeze more life out of original content. For example, if you run a longer-form blog on your own domain, take the best excerpt or quotation from each new post and repost it on your Tumblr.

    Many brands will cross-post photos from Instagram, or take the most popular updates from theirTwitter or Facebook accounts and repost them on Tumblr. Different audiences tend to hang out on different social platforms, and the real-time nature of Twitter and Facebook make the likelihood of your audience seeing your dual update unlikely. And if your updates are interesting, your readers won’t bat an eye if they see it twice.

    6. Create a Meme-Based Tumblelog

    Tumblr has become the classic platform for launching incredibly focused theme blogs. This lends itself well to humor, but it’s often just creative in nature. From tumblelogs dedicated to things that are polka dotted to ProPublica’s “Officials Say The Darndest Things,” Tumblr makes meme-creation easy. It’s a common strategy for businesses and news organizations to create a Tumblr as an entertaining outlet on the side of more serious content.

    As with any social media platform, success in building a following boils down to being interesting, being consistent, and being social. Curation, commenting, quoting, tagging, watermarking, and riffing are mainstays of social content, and when leveraged well, they can build you a big presence on Tumblr, Twitter, and everything in between.

    *Source

  14.  

    3 Ways to Improve Your Company’s Social Media Architecture

    While the pressures on large organizations to use social media have gone up, creating a social media presence has reached one-click simplicity. The result is a sprawling mess.

    Take one look at the social media footprint of any large brand and you find dozens of social sites that lie abandoned with no active engagement. Many are redundant, fracturing the same potential audience into separate, so-called “communities.” And the bigger the organization, the bigger the problem. In one recent project, my company found our client had close to 150 Facebook pages, more than 65 YouTube channels and 100 Twitter feeds. Recent data from the Altimeter Group confirms the issue, with the average organization maintaining 178 social accounts.

    This is unsustainable and counterproductive.

    The solution is a “social media architecture” — a structure that brings harmony, utility and durability to the diverse elements of an organization’s social media presence. Here’s how to build it.

    1. Visualize Your Social Media Footprint

    A proper footprint uses a few data points (site name, platform, size, recency of moderator activity) to visualize your social media presence. Below is a generic example of an organization’s social media footprint on Facebook. The graphic below shows community (by page name), size (by size of dot) and recency of moderation (green is recent, yellow is not very recent and red is inactive).

    Click to enlarge
    Click to enlarge

    Without diving into details, big green dots at the center are good, indicating larger communities with active client moderation. Red dots anywhere (no moderation activity in 60 days) are bad.
    Immediately, this allows the organization to begin having serious discussions that no Excel sheet will provoke. Any spread of red dots creates a conversation: Are we abandoning our customers with on/off campaigns? Are we fragmenting the same communities across multiple resource-intensive efforts? Are there big green dots in the center that can represent best practices or serve as great places for valuable content from other parts of the organization? Are there any patterns to the successful sites?

    Visualization is the first step in recognizing you have a problem.

    2. Creation, Consolidation & Closure of Social Media Properties

    The social web is driven by groups of like-minded people gathering together to connect and share information — “communities,” as they are commonly known.

    Whenever a company assumes its own organizational structure is the defining logic for what constitutes a community, you see the problem right away. Every product line warrants a Facebook page, every marketing campaign deserves a Twitter account, a new YouTube channel and so on. As a result, an organization’s social media presence becomes a mirror into the structural divisions of the organization itself.

    The current explosion of corporate social media accounts splinters like-minded communities into dozens of smaller groups, which in turn decreases the potential of that community to generate value through sharing and connection. Instead, a company should create a clear, prescriptive checklist that answers these three questions:

    • What warrants creating a new social account?
    • What minimum resource commitments are required to service a social account?
    • What are the criteria that will govern closure of a social media account?

    The effectiveness of your checklist will be derived from adhering to the principles above and developing it in a spirit of cooperation within your organization. No one appreciates being handed a checklist and told that this is his new measure. Employees will be much more willing to own a checklist when they see it as a result of fair process and their valued input. Cross functional workshops are a great way to get this done. If you put these three questions above into a structured conversation, you might be amazed at the agreements (and the checklist items) that come out of the discussion.

    3. Formalize Your Link & Like Structure

    Envision the social web, with its constellation of sites and platforms, as one distributed website (albeit a more dynamic one), where your brand is spread across a vast, disconnected set of pages. Establishing your link and like structure is a basic exercise in information architecture that defines how people will navigate (link) to find the communities where they belong (like).

    A proper link and like structure formalizes the purpose of each property (the community you are serving, the audience needs you are addressing, and content you are producing) and its relationship to other properties (i.e. how content will flow between sites). A proper link and like structure allows your organization to make the most of its content — repurposing it across formats (text, video, tweets, etc.) to optimize its utility and lower your operating costs.

    We Need Social Architecture Now More Than Ever

    The decentralized nature of social media is its greatest strength. Anyone can participate. Everyone has a voice. This is also the greatest challenge for brands that must manage the inherent conflict between empowering their own organization to participate while still maintaining continuity and quality of customer experience. The current sprawl represents a great waste of energy and resources. As organizations continue to invest in social media, and the market continues to demand a “social media strategy” articulated in every board room and annual report, the terms of success will move from isolated pages and campaigns to connectedness and coordination. For that, we need social media architecture.

  15.  

    5 Online Learning Resources To Help You Run Your Business Better

                                   

    If your Web travels are anything like ours, it seems like every day someone is pitching a new online tool that’s going to “triple productivity!” or “help you scale your business quickly!” or “make doing payroll more fun than 10 barrels of monkeys!” OK, maybe not that last one. Payroll is never that fun.

    But again, if you’re like us, you rarely get around to implementing that tool. Why? Because you take one look at the site, shake your head in confusion at the seemingly extensive steps to get started, and go back to canoodling with the Excel spreadsheet you rode in on.

    Or, perhaps you actually do try and get started, but the FAQs don’t shed much light on how you actually use these tools. So you sort of try to teach yourself, and everything you end up doing seems like it might be correct. But it also seems like your efforts might lead to the eventual implosion of your site, because, well, you don’t really know what you’re doing.

    What’s an entrepreneur to do? As with learning any other skill, practice helps, but so does good instruction. Check out these resources that can help you develop skills you need to run your business so that next time, you know how to get the job done right.

    1. Grovo

    This New York-based startup won hearts at last September’s New York Tech Meetup with a charming, quirky video featuring their team. It was a fitting introduction, given that their main product is, in fact, approachable video content. Specifically, the site boasts a fairly broad catalog of video tutorials on a variety of personal and enterprise Web tools, from topics as advanced as in-depth Google Analytics functionality to simpler lessons on things like getting started with Facebook. And even if you are fairly skilled at using the tools you encounter on a daily basis, Grovo might be able to expose you to new ones. “For a lot of people, it serves as a discovery platform,” co-founder and CEO Jeff Fernandez says.

    2. Codecademy

    For coding newbies, just familiarizing yourself with the general syntax in an approachable way can be a good place to start. Codecademy, a startup founded by two Columbia undergrads, makes getting acquainted with programming a little bit more fun by adding in novelties like badges for completing certain levels. Right now, the site covers the basics of JavaScript, but in the coming months they’ll be expanding to include more advanced lessons and eventually other languages. Co-founder Zach Sims, a current student at Columbia who taught himself JavaScript in order to work on the site, describes Codecademy as “one of the first times it’s been fun to learn how to code. We start you off slowly and move on to more advanced topics at your own pace.”

    3. Khan Academy

    Khan Academy boasts quite a large library of videos, but most of us are (thankfully) past the time in our lives where we need to be practicing how to factor a trinomial. But for the entrepreneurs in the audience, there’s an entire section of video tutorials devoted to topics that many of us do come across, such as accounting and raising rounds of funding. The founder and president clearly have a penchant for learning themselves—between the two of them, they hold seven degrees from MIT.

    4. E-Business Now

    The SCORE Foundation has a whole suite of tools and services that they offer to small businesses, but E-Business Now is a particularly accessible one—the instructional video workshops are available on-demand at no cost. The lessons start out at a basic level designed to familiarize small business owners with the value of leveraging technology. Some of the later lessons, though, provide a good overview on topics like cash flow management. Even a tech savvy entrepreneur might be able to use a refresher on nitty-gritty like the different types of payment options out there.

    5. Think Vitamin

    If you’re the “I watched a video and now I totally get it” type of learner, this one might be for you. They cover some pretty heavy stuff (what is “graceful degradation,” anyway?) as well as intro-level lessons. The elegance level is high, which aesthetes will appreciate, but at $25 or $49 a month, you need to be pretty sure that you’ll get enough use out of it to justify the price tag.

    With a seemingly unending list of useful skills out there, getting started can feel overwhelming. According to Fernandez, having a clear plan of action can help. “It’s very very important not to bite off more than you can chew,” he says. “Understand the tools that are available to you, start using them and set reasonable metrics.” Sims, too, suggests that setting parameters is one of the keys to successful education—and execution. “Pick a definable project you’re looking to learn to create,” he says, “and then learn the skills you need in order to make that happen.”