Blogs and social media can be effective marketing tools for small town businesses, but they take planning to make the most of. This is true for small businesses and for tourism groups. Don’t let important events, holidays, and tie-ins sneak up on you. Use your calendar to connect your social efforts to the real world….
Educator Kevin Honeycutt of Inman, Kansas, (population 1300) is working with other locals to create a “New Billboard”: a combination QR code, Foursquare tour. If you can’t see the video, click through to Small Biz Survival. The basic idea is to draw in visitors from the highway, and use tools like QR codes and Foursquare…
Three local stores in Alva, Oklahoma, are cooperating on a sale. Cheers to The Etc. Shoppe, Schuhmacher’s Gifts, and LaDEEda. Have you cooperated with other local businesses for a joint promotion? New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the Guided Tour. Like what you see? Get our updates.
QR codes are everywhere, or so it seems. Most suffer from one or more of the 7 QR code mistakes that can kill your promotions. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, I saw one tourism campaign that actually avoids all those mistakes: The GR Tag Tour. The signs are posted on existing sign posts, with enough…
Another report from the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies Conference, about the holidays “shop local” campaign that any business can participate in, called Shift Your Shopping. The facilitators were Laury Hammel, Sustainable Business Network Boston, and Joe Grafton, Somerville Local First. The goal is to get people to understand that shifting their shopping matters….
Have you ever varnished something, the old-fashioned way, with a brush? Did you try hurrying the job by slathering on a thick coat? It makes a sticky mess, and doesn’t make for a good finish. Instead, the pros do lots of thin layers, maybe dozens. And the results are much better, shiny and smooth. First…
By Jon Swanson I write blog posts five days a week. A post that I wrote three years ago, and reposted a year ago started getting a lot of traffic about three months ago. In fact, about three times as much traffic in the last three months as in the nine months before that. It’s…
Our friend Heather Thomas of Destin Florida Boat Rentals has been looking for ways to make her website “copy-proof.” See, other boat rental companies can say they offer the same services or the same tours, but of course it isn’t the same. How could she better show off her uncopy-able qualities? How can you add…
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