Small Business Sticker Giveaway From PrintRunner

stickers

Stickers are a great way to promote your business! On top of that free stickers have a great return on investment! You can give these out at networking events, stick them to your company car and have them available on your desk for people to freely take.

We have teamed up with PrintRunner to giveaway stickers to our readers. PrintRunner is your convenient online printing resource. Check out their custom sticker printing services.

How to enter this giveaway

Just use the widget below to enter the giveaway. Each item will count as an entry and will allow you to tweet to receive another entry daily.

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INFOGRAPHIC – How Inbound Marketing Works, From Start to Finish

inbound-marketing-process

Hubspot is the leader of inbound marketing articles, how to’s, infographics and internet marketing guides. Today they have released the “How Inbound Works! – Infographic” which analyzes the 5 steps to website success!

  1. Step 1: Create & Maintain a powerful website! (WordPress!)
  2. Step 2: Generate more traffic – Enter in Blogging, Social Media, SEO & PPC
  3. Step 3: Convert Traffic To Leads – Landing Pages, Call to Actions, Compelling forms/captures
  4. Step 4: Convert leads into sales – Lead segments, nurturing, email marketing and CRMs
  5. Step 5: Measure everything from Traffic to leads, Cost per lead, Leads to customers, and the cost per customer!
  6. Bonus Step 6: Rinse and Repeat!

Inbound marketing is no cakewalk. Marketers who are embracing inbound have a variety of different channels and tactics to master, including content creation, SEO, social media, lead generation, lead management, and analytics. It’s no wonder that marketers new to inbound end up feeling overwhelmed and wondering what to tackle first.

Luckily, our friends over at inbound marketing agency IMPACT Branding & Design recently pulled together an infographic that helps inbound marketers understand the entire inbound process from start to finish — from getting found online, to converting visitors into leads and customers, and then measuring the entire funnel. Well done, IMPACT, you captured the inbound process beautifully!

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31271/How-Inbound-Marketing-Works-From-Start-to-Finish-INFOGRAPHIC.aspx#ixzz1n39xoZwn

Do you use inbound marketing tactics to gain more clients? Let us know in the comments!

How to get up to 5GB of extra Dropbox space for free

dropbox

Its friday and everybody likes getting something for free right? Dropbox is offering up to 4.5GB of extra space, if you try out their new beta app

From their forum post [via dropbox forum]

There is a newer forum build than this one. Go get it here:
http://forums.dropbox.com/forum-build.php

Another day another build. We’re trying to snipe all the most common bugs. Keep plugging in those cameras!
During this beta period, we are also offering additional free space to test automatic uploading of photos and videos. For every 500MB of photos and videos automatically uploaded, you’ll receive another 500MB space bonus, up to 4.5GB total. [Update: To clarify, you can get up to 5GB of free space with this feature, if you count the initial 500MB space for the first photo import].

Its pretty simple! Install the app, upload your photos and videos and get more space!

Don’t have dropbox? Well if you sign up with this link you and I will both get 250mb extra, which is a great way to start! http://db.tt/E8OlxDo or goto https://www.dropbox.com

Do you use dropbox? Are you enjoying your friday?

How we shaved 3 seconds off our WordPress website load time

pingdom load time simplex studios

So how do you speed up your site? Short answer: Awesome Hardware + Caching. Long Answer see below.

Our WordPress website (simplexstudios.com) used to average between 6-9 seconds of load time. On busier days we were looking at up to 12 secs of load time which had to be addressed, immediately.

With a recent move to Firehost and the addition of MaxCDN we were able to cut our load time in half! We opted for a basic setup with Firehost itself and we are only using very basic caching within our WordPress setup.

Simplex Studios WordPress Stats:

  • 28 Plugins installed
  • Homepage size 1.1MB
  • WordPress 3.3.1
  • W3 Total Cache Plugin

Hardware & Tools Used:

  • Apache/MySQL
  • PHP5
  • MaxCDN
  • Firehost
  • W3 Total Cache

Location testing: A great tool to check your times is http://tools.pingdom.com/ See our full Pingdom test here

  • Dallas, Texas – Load time 1.89 secs (World Record!)
  • Amsterdam, Netherlands – 3.29 secs
  • New York, New York – 2.24 secs
Google Pagespeed Stats
Google Page Speed
Our next steps will be to reduce our images and optimize them more, build a responsive theme and see if its possible to but more time off our load.

How fast does your WordPress website load?

Business Pages can now add Google Plus badges

googleplus

Google Plus seems to add new features and add-ons daily. The newest the peaked our interests is the Badge editor, which now allows you to add your business pages.

You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites. You’ll also see that Google+ badges now include the unified +1 and circle count that we added to Pages last month.

Click here to create your own and if you need any help please post questions in the comments!

 

 

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