It's a question I hear a lot of my clients asking and unfortunately there's no single answer. As always, it comes down to what your overall marketing objectives are for your business. That's the best place to start when determining whether or not you should be paying for Facebook aka advertising on the platform.

What is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means that any content you want found on the Internet (aka your website) is optimized for Google to find and place in the top SERPs. What does SERP mean? Search engine results pages. SERPs are what Google (or Yahoo or Bing) turns up when a user searches for a keyword or a keyword phrase.

I came across the best tool for writing better emails. Honestly, everyone could benefit from using this tool! One of my biggest pet peeves is the overuse of the word "just," "sorry" and other submissive language.

Starting a website for your product, service or idea can be an overwhelming feat. Where do you start!? How much is this going to cost? <- Those are typically the first two big questions that come to mind. Often, people get so daunted by those two questions alone they don't see the bigger picture and can miss some of these important steps you need to know to create a website.

Email marketing can still be one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your target audience. In fact, it yields an average 4,300% ROI for businesses in the US.

That being said, people receive hundreds of emails a day. Just take a look at your own inbox! After you've set up email captures to continuously generate new email addresses, focus on these factors to create the perfect email....

It's common practice at the end of any year to take a look back as well as a look at what's to come. What worked what didn't work for your business? What are the "trends" for 2016? What trends are no longer effective?

As I take a look back at this year, I also reflect on my years as a marketer working with small businesses. In a market that is changing at nothing slower than 100 miles an hour, it's vital to do- more than just once a year. And honestly, it can be intimidating!

A lot of businesses have struggled with social media. They have struggled to see it's importance and understand how it benefits their business. And given the way many agencies go about charging for social media and seeing how they implement it- it's no surprise.

Depending on how someone implements your social media can drastically change results. Social media is not a plug and play solution.

The key to designing a landing page is optimizing it for conversions. While there is no set formula that works for every company every time, there are some guidelines that can help get you going. The most important thing to do is get your landing page up there and start A/B testing different elements. I've come up with a quick and dirty landing page best practices guide to help get you started.

There are certain tools I use to make an effective social media editorial calendar for all of my clients. The tools you use will definitely depend on the size of your team and the amount of people who will need to have access and be able to make changes etc. For this post, we are going to talk about how to create an effective social media editorial calendar for smaller businesses in which one to two people are creating and managing the editorial calendar.