With the recent addition of new staff and larger contracts, my position has evolved to take on the official role of Project Manager/Facilitator.  Up until recently, I defined Project Management as inputting data into BaseCamp (a web-based project management and collaboration tool), informing staff of receipt of contract, ensuring the project had begun and noting approximate end dates. During our weekly staff meetings, I was regularly updated as to the progression of the current projects.

With larger contracts now coming in, it means outsourcing some of the work to qualified project-based contractors, performing quality management with both in-house staff and the contractors.  Read more…

StepForth is proud to announce on June 14th, our CEO, Ross Dunn is sharing his extensive knowledge of competitor analysis for online businesses in a session titled Competitive Analysis at Search Engine Strategies Toronto; Canada’s largest and most prestigious search engine and social media marketing conference.

Ross Dunn will be speaking alongside his two other esteemed competitor analyst peers Matt Van Wagner (President of FindMeFaster) and Marios Alexandrou (East Coast Director of SEO at Rosetta).

The formal description for the joint presentation on Competitive Analysis is as follows:

An essential component of any search marketing plan is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. This knowledge helps you comprehend what links to gain, ad prices to pay, content to offer and customers to seek. In this session, we take a close look at what tricks you can use with search engines to analyze your competitors’ game and also what free and premium tools are available to deep dive into their strategy. Join us for a candid discussion as panelists reveal their secrets for monitoring competitive forces and threats while sharing tips that can be successfully applied to any business intelligence effort. After attending this session, you’ll have the skills to easily discover what keywords your competitor is targeting, how much your competitor is spending on ads, and be able to identify opportunities your competitor is missing.

Read more…

Blogging is like an online cocktail party where you meet people, ask and answer questions, chat and discuss what is important to you and your site.

Some of our clients query whether Blogging is a valuable source of advertising and the answer is, absolutely. What does it do? It provides valuable inbound links and gets your site branded. Read more…

Although Chrome is relatively new it has become one of the easiest web browsers to interface with.

Kawsar Ali shares some of the top extensions for Google Chrome and for anyone using Chrome these are a worthwhile download. These extensions, “can help you increase your productivity and enable you to perform your jobs easier and faster.” I am highlighting a few of these below.

For those of you having many Social Network sites, Shareaholic converts the web page you are on into a short URL which allows you to share it across the social media sites you use to talk with your friends.

A few of my favourites are Evernote Web Clipper which will save me oodles of time as it saves the content of my clipboard along with a link back to the original page therefore I do not need to worry about forgetting to bookmark a certain page or image. Split Screen is perfect for viewing more than one page on the same window.

After reading 10 Google Chrome Extensions for Boosting your Productivity I am sure you will agree Chrome is indeed far ahead of the other web browsers.

Last night StepForth hosted the ‘WebMarketing Meetup’ at Accent Inns, Victoria, BC and though the turnout was small, the tips offered by the participants were valuable and noteworthy.

One of my duties at StepForth is Link Building and after I shared my ‘nugget’ of information the discussion revolved around the value of submitting to DMOZ. I am definitely not a link building guru but here is what I garnered in trying to answer the question:

The Value of DMOZ (Open Directory Project-ODP) Read more…

There are quite a few online subscriptions I read regularly and the one I read pretty much on a daily basis is ‘The Best Article Every Day’. The articles tend to be short and informative.

For example, today there was an article entitled; ‘15 Noteworthy Websites That Changed the Internet’ by Cameron Chapman. Pretty much everyone agrees that Wikipedia, Facebook and Amazon changed how we search for, relate to, and purchase items online. But did you know Project Gutenberg has changed the way people read, as they created the first ebooks for free and Pandora, one of my favourites, allows me to create my own playlist that reflects my personal musical interest vs listening to a pre-programmed radio station that tends to play the same songs to ad nauseam. And of course we all know Google keeps changing how we interact with the internet. Read more…

Remember the Nigerian scam messages way back when? Perhaps not so much way back when but quite awhile ago and still on occasion coming into my junk mail folder.

Scams are annoying, fear mongering, and down right rude. In 10 email scams to watch out for, Debra Shinder explains what you should watch out for to avoid being ‘duped’. Read more…