This week's issue of Business in Vancouver featured a segment on the Small Business BC expert videos.  These short segments produced by Riiplay.tv were designed to allow some of the speakers at Small Business BC to share some bite-sized chunks of knowledge in video format - knowledge that is normally disseminated through the many seminars offered by Small Business BC. …

The seminars at Small Business BC have been going very well with attendance up from the winter.  Recently, I delivered seminars to fairly full rooms at Waterfront Station in Vancouver joined by a number of video conferences attendees from cities like Prince Rupert, Langley, Ashcroft, Kelowna and Saskatoon.  One of the attendees emailed me asking some great questions about link…

Small Businesses need Twitter. It’s just that simple. But in saying that, there are still a number of businesses, both big and small, that have opted not to create an account. Reasons for this range from “we don’t understand it” to “we don’t think it would add much value to our business”. Regardless of why you and your business have…

One of our specialties at Yardstick Services is maintaining blogs for our small business clients. Many small business owners don’t have a full understanding of why maintaining an active blog is an important aspect of their internet marketing strategy, and how vital it can be for the growth of their business. Here’s a quick breakdown as to why we think…

As the world continues to go digital, the traditional tools of business are slowly but surely becoming impractical and obsolete. Thanks to computers, the internet and a world chock-full of software developers, systems are now available that are allowing small-businesses the opportunity to replace their expensive and high-maintenance management tools with stream-lined solutions. We at Yardstick have started relying more…

Over the past few months, I've delivered a number of seminars at Small Business BC about how small businesses can get great websites.  Inevitably, I get asked questions about the level of results or return on investment a new website can expect.  It's a really tough question to answer because I always get the sense that the people asking this…

Flash has become a very contentious piece of technology of late. This is primarily because of some decisions made by Apple to not adopt or allow Flash applications of any sort on the iPhone and iPad. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has been publicly expressing his reasoning for this decision - "Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks,…

Just a quick post from me this time, as this is something I've been meaning to get on the blog for a while. As a web developer, I'm always on the lookout for a fast and reliable source of image files for our small business clients' websites. Flickr is a great resource for free and commercially usable images, but trolling…

It's been a bit since I wrote an article but fortunately team members Brendon and Tristan have been picking up the slack. Tristan is working on a great series of blog posts about social media.  I'm watching the metrics closely while also following the success of people like George Moen of Blenz coffee who just had a great launch party…

This installment of Social Media Marketing for Small Business is a list of 10 tasks and routines for a small business owner to use, in order to effectively apply a social media marketing strategy. In part 1 we summarized 3 applications - Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - and your homework was to simply register with the services and become a…