You need some fresh ideas on how to grow your business, right? Well you have come to the right place! We will focus on the very top 5 things you can be doing right away to start increasing that bottom line and widening your profit margins as your business grows. Let’s get right into it!

It’s time to have a dirty conversation. We try to stay on the positive side of everything, but every now and then we have to just talk about something negative. Not because we like it, but because sometimes telling the truth comes with telling a side which no one likes to hear or know about. Knowing these ugly truths, or more accurately exposing certain outright lies, and learning why they are simply not true will help your business. How? Because you will know how to avoid these scammers and those who give digital professionals a bad name. Now, while Circle Marketing is a marketing agency and handles much more than just online and digital marketing, there is a naiveté in most good-hearted and trusting business owners and managers who aren’t as proficient or aware of the latest and most effective strategies and how to tell if an online and/or web professional you’re thinking about contracting work to has really “got the goods.” We’ve all heard the horror stories of how some business got swindled by a so-called “web designer” who left them high and dry with nothing to show for the money they spent, after being promised the world…or at least a darn web site!

First thing you need to do when making a Web Video is to make a connection with your audience. Most likely, your audience will be your clients, customers, and fans. Like any advertisement or publicity campaign, know what you want to get from the video. Know what you want your audience to get from the video. Plan a series of videos to help build familiarity, trust, and a connection with your audience so they’ll want to see more videos, and remember your company when it comes time to purchase a product or service which you offer.

Organic Search rankings are the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results you achieve after you have done a great deal of acquiring back links, and have performed as much optimization on your own site as possible to improve it’s rankings. Paid rankings are when you achieve visibility in the highlighted advertising section of search engine results pages. Paid obviously costs you money when someone clicks your ad (or sometimes when a viewer sees it, depending on your set-up), but organic rankings are free when someone views and clicks your listing. While no one knows the complete search or ranking algorithms 100%, we have been able to do extensive research over and over about what has been known to positively effect rankings.

When you launch a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad Campaign, you should do split testing. What split-testing means is creating more than one version of your ads, which run concurrently. One ad will probably perform better than the others, and you can adjust a campaign accordingly, as you analyze the effectiveness of each ad version. Differences in the split test could be different messaging, different headers, different images, depending on your strategy and what you’re offering.

Facebook Timeline for Pages is coming to Facebook on March 30, 2012. Circle Marketing’s Louis Tanguay, teamed up with Broadcast Louder‘s Susan Newman to deliver the ultimate webinar on how to most effectively use Facebook’s new Timeline for Pages with the sole focus on maximizing your business and/or brand’s ROI and conversion cost efficiency.

You’re going to see strategies, ideas, and techniques in this Webinar which others simply aren’t doing yet. These fresh and new ideas, combined with the power of Facebook’s new Timeline for Pages’ abilities, makes this a must-see video for any and all small business owners and social media marketers of all sizes.

You should develop a tag line/slogan for your business and/or brand. Your tag line should be more than a catchy saying. It should be a statement and reason WHY your customers should buy from you, trust you, and do business with you either in addition to your competitors, or (hopefully) instead of your competitors. It should be different, somewhat inspirational, and reach out to the emotions your potential customers feel.

It’s a very exciting day for those who focus on the future of Facebook Brand Pages and what this means for doing business and acquiring fans on Facebook. Your Facebook Timeline Page is not a substitute for an actual website for many reasons, but it can be the most effective business tool you have other than your actual website.

Mobile Applications (or, Mobile Apps) are the newest, hottest thing. Every business wants to have a mobile app, and the future of business is going mobile. However, is creating a mobile application right for your business? Is your business the kind of business which will be able to better serve your clients and customers by giving them a mobile app?

Social Media is all the rage these days. Everyone (practically) has a Facebook page, and there are stats upon stats which would blow your mind about the frequency people are on Facebook. More than any other site in history, Facebook has been the single most important website to connect with others personally and professionally. It’s reunited long lost friends, old classmates, and even long-extinguished romantic flames (much to the chagrin of some currently ignited romantic flames). Point here is that with Facebook, Twitter, and now Google Plus, Social Media is the new “Media.”

THE GOOD, THE BAD…AND THE MEH

Google+ has been out for under 6 months now, and early adapters have been on the social network for the majority of that time. However, most of the Internet-using public is still not actively using the new social network. The following is our impression of Google’s new social network, after being on Google+ for a few months now.

Yes, that title has a lot of alliteration going on there, huh? Well, the truth is that there are usually many many more flaws in the average indie film, but what we are talking about in this post are the really big issues which is usually the difference from getting a film sold and having a film collect dust in your attic for years to come. Fix these five flaws and you’ll be on your way to selling your film!