Land of Opportunity

Mad Vlogger Christian Brower offers a video clip of business marketing gone bad — very, very bad. In this clip an oriental restaurant attempts telemarketing. How Chris kept a straight face during the video I’ll never know.

If you’re looking for something different for your next marketing blog post, chinese restaurant telemarketing is it.

After you’ve watched the clip and had your laughs, ponder this: How could business harness the technology of video blogging.

I see useful vlogging applications for (more…)

A new database of small business grant awards to Arkansas small businesses is now available. The database lists small businesses awarded either a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant or a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant. Grant awards range from $42,750 to $750,000.

While a total of 24 SBIR/STTR small business grants were awarded in FY2003, the number of grants awarded in FY2004 (more…)

Dana VanDen Heuvel at Made for Marketing blog thinks so.

With the average visitor to a traditional website reading only one page, with less than a minute at that, and the average blog visitor seeing a scarcely more respectable 1.4 pages in about 80 seconds, “stickiness is dead” are fighting words. From my vantagepoint, I disagree — strongly.

Dana lists five reasons why “…site stickiness and visitor length of visit are no longer the ways that we should be looking at the effectiveness of our sites…” (more…)

RRS aggregators are a great way to read your favorite blogs. If you have not tried out a RSS aggregator before, now is the time.

You may have noticed the “button farms” on most blogs with buttons saying XML RSS, FeedBurner, My Yahoo, My MSN and/or Bloglines. (Mine are near the bottom of the left column on this page.) These buttons are links to that blog’s RSS feeds. An RSS feed generally consists of the name of the blog, the title of each post and a brief exerpt from each post. Some blog RSS feeds also contain (more…)

Want a free Google Gmail invite but don’t know where to sign up or who to ask?

isnoop.net offers a FREE gmail invite spooler. isnoop.net’s page offers “a place for people with Gmail invites and those who want them to come together with minimal effort and fuss.” As of Wednesday, Feburary 23rd, isnoop.net has (more…)

SBC Yellow Pages just delivered their massive SBC Yellow Pages book, advertising nearly every small business in central Arkansas. Advertising in the SBC Yellow Pages is not cheap. Many small businesses have taken loans against houses and business assets to pay for large ads in the Yellow Pages directory. Did they get their money’s worth? Experienced Yellow Pages advertisers think so, inexperienced first-time advertisers sometimes don’t get the results they were expecting.

As fate sometimes does, while my SBC Yellow Pages were being delivered (more…)

Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users has a wonderful post on the importance of one maverick within a company.

Kathy contends, while CEO’s often provide lip-service to the need for folks to think outside the box, that during that previous economic downturn it was the so called mavericks and lone wolves that were let go. Kathy points out: (more…)

Zogger at Technorat.com has found a 5-page list of the 100 Greatest Gadgets of All Time. The list was assembled by and published in Mobile PC magazine.

I own several of the top 100, including #89 (more…)

Tris Hussey is attending Northern Voice, a Canadian blogging conference. Tris has posted a sysnopsis of 16 blogging tips given by Tim Bray of Sun who gave the keynote address.

Key among these are: (more…)

Weblog trackbacks are one of the most confusing tools for the new blogger to master. Like many first-time bloggers, I made the common mistake of using the weblog trackback link to link to the article I was citing. My intial attempts to find a good quality tutorial on webblog trackbacks were less than fruitful. Few bloggers post on the subject.

Today, I happened upon Pamela Heywood’s article, “Blogs offer two-way dialog” on Online Business Journal

Pamela provides two important links: (more…)

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act was enacted to eliminate abusive debt collection practices by debt collectors, to insure that those debt collectors who refrain from using abusive debt collection practices are not competitively disadvantaged, and to promote consistent State action to protect consumers against debt collection abuses.

Anyone who has operated a small business for any length of time has had the problem of collecting on bad debts at least once.

Attorney Shane Jimson at the Virginia Law Blog has a great post on How to Minimize your Uncollected Bills.

One preventative tip that Shane shares is to (more…)

Hispanic retro-acculturation is the subject of a recent blog post at HispanicTrending that caught my eye. The article, by Suzanne Irizarry de López , Managing Partner of Multicultural Insights, a minority-owned market research company, appears as a result of impromptu group marketing by Juan G. Tornoe on Strategy, Juan Tornoe of HispanicTrending and Suzanne Irizarry de Lopez.

Sylvia writes that while “marketers have been focusing on whether Hispanic consumers are acculturating vs. assimilating,” ” many Spanish speaking consumers are increasingly (more…)

Arkansas Business has released their reknown Book of Lists. This year’s edition is packed with lists ranking the largest law firms, accounting firms, hotels, employers, banks, and the largest in just about every industry in Arkansas. Especially helpful is the inclusion of web addresses for most of the listees.

Of particular note were the Largest SBA Lenders: Arkansas Capital Corporation (29 loans, 15.9M), Arkansas Certified development Corporation (25 loans, 14.8M), Arkansas National Bank (27 loans, 7.8M) and Metropolitan National Bank (22 loans, 4.9M)

There are 25 employers listed under Largest Arkansas Employers. (more…)

Matthew Lesko’s small business grants commercial appears on Little Rock cable with regular frequency. A recent visitor to the Land of Opportunity had been searching on Google for “Arkansas small business grants.” Backtracking from my statistics, I discovered a link to “Matthew Lesko Arkansas State Small Business Grants,” just below the link to the Land of Opportunity. Mr Lesko’s link and corresponding page were laced with keywords like: Free Business Government Grants, Free Government Business Money, and Woman Business Grants.

As Mr. Lesko claims there are 60 grants available within Arkansas, I had the idea for weekly series of posts on grants. This week we present the first two grants programs for child care businesses: (more…)

Since the Land of Opportunity small business blog is about one month old, I suspect that some of you would be interested in learning what has worked well and what has not worked as well during the launch of my new business blog. First, it should be noted that I am a 10-year Internet marketing veteran and webmaster a very large small business website which attracts over 40,000 visitors each month. I already had a marketing strategy in mind albeit based on my experience with tradional web marketing and search engine optimization methods.

Strategy #1 - Content, Content, Content

The first rule of any web presence, blog or otherwise, is (more…)