Online Marketing at Canada's Web Shop

What a website is NOT (At least it shouldn’t be…)

@JosephRanseth — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:01:23 +0000

This article is Part 2 of a series on Strategic Web Design. Watch for the rest of the articles in coming weeks, or contact us about web design. In my last post, I talked about The most important question you should NEVER be asked by your web designer. It raised a lot of questions, caused a few [...]

The most important question you should NEVER be asked by your web designer

@JosephRanseth — Wed, 02 May 2012 19:22:42 +0000

This article is Part 1 of a series on Strategic Web Design. Watch for the rest of the articles in coming weeks, or contact us about web design. The most important question you should NEVER be asked by your web designer: “What do you want your site to look like?“ I know this may seem [...]

Is The Internet Destined to be Opinion based Information?

Kevin MacNeil — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:14:53 +0000

I had a professor in University that taught a class all about writing your opinion rather than regurgitating facts. Apparently he thought University students spent too much time buried in fact based text books and not enough time thinking for themselves. I won’t name the professor but his style of teaching would lend itself well [...]

Using Social Media To Find a Job at Winnipeg’s Online Marketing Agency: Canada’s Web Shop

@JosephRanseth — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:23:45 +0000

As Bob Dylan would say, The Times They Are a-Changin’, and this is just as true in the job search market as it is in online marketing. Statistics indicate that 89% of companies are using social media for recruiting but only 1 in 6 job seekers actually find work through social media. Why is that? [...]

Google officially rolls out its ‘webspam algorithm update’

Lee Waltham — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:58:38 +0000

Yesterday afternoon Google released it’s official statement in the form of a couple blog posts titled “Another step to reward high-quality sites”. Google released the official statement via their Inside Search and Webmaster Central Blogs. Google has begun to phase in a new search algorithm in an attempt to improve the user experience and cut [...]

Google Puts On A Zipper

@JosephRanseth — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:16:44 +0000

This morning Google surprised visitors with a zipper on their search page. The new doodle is in tribute to Gideon Sundback, who invented the zipper in 1913. The Swedish inventor was born exactly 132 years ago, on April 24th, 1880. While the new homepage graphic is likely to cause an uproar among the Amish, it [...]

Marketing Dream Job x2 (1 FT Position, 1 Summer Position)

@JosephRanseth — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:54:10 +0000

We are growing here at the Web Shop, and we’re looking for 2 more people to join the team! Could it be you? Plain & simple, this is an absolute dream job for someone who has studied or is studying Marketing or Creative Communications. Heck, it’s even a dream job for someone already recognized as [...]

Strategy has never been more important to your SEO plan.

Lee Waltham — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:52:54 +0000

It’s no secret that Google is constantly updating their algorithm and ranking factors to improve the quality of their search experience. More recently we’ve seen the emergence of social factors holding more and more weight and influence over Google’s rankings. There has been quite a buzz around the next big Google “update” ever since Matt [...]

The #1 Newbie Mistake Made When Doing SEO for Your Company’s Website

Omar Zulfi — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:19:18 +0000

Search engine optimization is an amazingly effective form of online marketing. Many companies, small and large, are starting to see the value in optimizing their website for Google, Bing and other search engines. There is a ton of useful information on SEO all across the internet but there are still some common mistakes made by [...]

Online Marketing: Businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.

Lee Waltham — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:51:38 +0000

My job is to work with business owners and help them develop, implement, and manage their online marketing strategies. Despite online marketing becoming more widely accepted amongst business owners and more businesses shifting their marketing spend from traditional to digital, I still come across a lot of business owners who are reluctant to believe online [...]

People Don’t Want Brands: People Want Friends

Danny Wood — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:18:07 +0000

A common thread that I see in research related to corporate use of social media is that consumers are not interested in interacting with brands on Social Media. Different statistics point to the number of brands the average user Likes on Facebook, the people’s feelings towards promotions on social media, and that no one really [...]

Leverage is the Key to growing your company

John McDonald — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 21:08:37 +0000

A lot of growing companies hire additional people on to do jobs that no one in the company has done before. This makes it difficult to assess the new employees success or failure. If you hire to leverage other employees time then you are hiring for a job that you have intimate knowledge of [...]

Foursquare Do’s and Don’ts

John McDonald — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:14:46 +0000

Ideas you can do with Foursquare: To bring in customers on your slow days – 1/2 off a bottle of wine on Wednesdays when you check in on Foursquare. As a loyalty card – receive a free room upgrade for ever 20 check ins As a bonus – Free valet parking every time you [...]

Preventing race conditions with multiple stage backups with bacula

Chris Chatelain — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:45:52 +0000

So, say you’ve got two different types of backups that need to happen. For example, collecting all of your servers’ data with bacula, and also sending all that backup data offsite for offsite storage. You don’t want a race condition happening where the offsite backup starts happening before the bacula backup finishes, for any of [...]

Pandas, Links and “White Hat” SEO

Omar Zulfi — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:53:08 +0000

SEO is a very dynamic marketing tool – it’s constantly changing. This means that effective SEO tactics and strategies are constantly changing as well. In the early days of SEO, many deceitful webmasters would optimize webpages using dirty tricks like keyword stuffing and building a plethora of spammy links – and it worked. This old [...]