FastUpFront Small Business Blog

Have you spent a tremendous amount of time, effort, or money (or all of the above) trying to make Internet marketing work for your small business, but have nothing to show for it? Do you look at the web and scratch your head wondering what all the fuss is about? Do you have an “unsexy” [...]

As you go about allocating your online marketing dollars, you may wonder at some point if you should be pouring money into a Google AdWords campaign, or trying your luck with Facebook advertising. Though Facebook gets a lot of negative press- especially among smaller businesses looking for ROI on their Facebook presence- there are plenty [...]

If your online business marketing strategy includes a business blog, then you may want to consider bringing in multiple authors for your content. Now, here I’m not talking about having the occasional guest poster, though there are definitely many benefits to such a setup. What I’m referring to is a team of writers, who may [...]

It’s amazing how many small businesses (and even some of their customers) still cling on to old-fashioned, dusty, musty loyalty programs that fail to increase revenues and customer loyalty. Being weened from those cardboard punch cards and plastic loyalty cards takes some serious re-wiring.     This flies in the face of the fact that [...]

Last week, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) finished gathering feedback on its Social Media Marketing Disclosure Guide before sending it off to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The guide is meant to help businesses and bloggers comply with the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.   The gist [...]

These days a lot of attention is being placed on gaining the trust of your site’s visitors and the followers of your brand. But the Internet can be a fickle place. While building and cultivating that trust can take a tremendous amount of time and work, it can be destroyed in an instant by one [...]

Given the way people use the Internet to make purchasing decisions these days, if you own a small brick and mortar business you really need to invest in your online presence. Just make sure that investment includes Google and it’s social network G+. So I’ll stop here and say that this is not a post [...]

Despite an urge to paint email usage as out-dated and irrelevant compared to all the popular, fast-paced social media platforms out there, small business owners should not discount email as a primary marketing medium. The fact is that email marketing just works; whereas the jury is still out when it comes to leveraging the surge [...]

Conducting an online survey is a great market research tool that can give you invaluable insight into your target market’s attitudes, behaviors, and make up. But creating an effective online questionnaire or poll (even a short one) involves much more than just throwing together a few of your burning questions. It is a thought-out and [...]

When it comes to marketing a business the frequent complaint from small biz owners is that marketing rarely works or just isn’t worth the expense. For those business owners I offer the reasons below as to why that may seem to be true.   1.) You Try to Do It Yourself. Yeah, I know, you’d [...]