David Mercer's blog

Social media, social media marketing, and social networking have been the subject of much hype, buzz and marketing budget disruption for big and small business alike.

Most businesses entered into social media marketing as a defensive strategy because they were afraid of losing out to competitors who were quicker to adapt and leverage this new platform.

Buoyed up by a seemingly endless cavalcade of social marketing experts demonstrating how their own social marketing success was evidence of how social media marketing would work for each and every business, if only they invested cash, time and effort.

"Want to know how to create a blog with awesome responsive Web design, powerful features, and an attractive design in under a day, using the excellent Drupal 7 CMS (Content Management System)?"

Drupal 7 is a powerful framework for building a range of websites, but it is particularly well suited to creating high quality blog sites. Drupal 7 can also leverage the power of the Zen theme, which comes with built in responsive Web design support for mobile browsers (something that is of vital importance to new websites).

This article will give you a step by step account of how I created Guys-Night-Out from scratch, and published the first blog post all in one day.

Mobile eCommerce (or mCommerce) shopping stats for Thanksgiving weekend, 2012, show that eCommerce software with mobile Web design is now mandatory for all eCommerce businesses.

You might be interested to learn that over Black Friday, Walmart reported that 45% of all traffic to Walmart.com came from mobile devices.

And, fully 10% of all online shopping was conducted from an iPad tablet device - with nearly a quarter of all visits to retail sites coming from smartphones or tablets.

It is becoming more important for business to monitor new trends in technology. Without insight and understanding of the latest business technologies, companies risk being left behind.

The day is fast approaching when corporations will no longer be able to maintain legacy IT systems that are good enough. Technology, and its applications for business, are now evolving so quickly that to turn a blind eye to new advances could spell disaster.

"Are you wondering what strategies your small business can use to beat big budget business, SEO and marketing?" If it seems like your small business has no chance of competing against big companies online, then you should probably read this.

Big business tends to have large budgets for Internet marketing, SEO, social media marketing, PPC, and other advertising. But this doesn't only make them more competitive. It also makes them lazy.

Instead of eagerly looking for creative and innovative ways to improve their content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), Web design, search engine marketing (SEM), and social marketing, they start following procedure.

Dominating Google search results, in a given niche, is of great value to any business. But many businesses struggle to publish great content with sufficient SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and social influence to make an impact on Google search results.

Believe it or not, so many businesses get blogging, Internet marketing, social media, and SEO wrong, that with a little bit of effort you can start generating decent Website traffic and make money online.

Blogging, Internet marketing, PPC advertising, and social media marketing sound great on paper, but they're practically worthless if not done correctly.

Corporate gifts are a great way to network, and market your business - as well as strengthen existing partnerships and business relationships.

Knowing how to come up with the right corporate gift ideas is actually a fairly important, yet often overlooked, business skill.

A thoughtful and unique business gift can let clients and customers know that their relationship with you is important.

The Apple iPad is a great mobile device, and, combined with some great iPad apps (many of which are FREE) for business it becomes a sleek and powerful mobile business tool.

The Internet is currently in the process of changing from a PC dominated environment to a mobile one (i.e. smartphones and tablets).

Businesses that want to thrive online need to take mobile marketing, mCommerce (mobile commerce), BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and other mobile business technologies and strategies seriously.

Take a peek at this list of the top 5 hottest topics for online business in 2013. An absolute must for entrepreneurs who want to get more Web traffic, rank higher in organic search, compete in mobile marketing, improve eCommerce conversions, and generally make more money online.

Search engine marketing. Mobile marketing. eCommerce. mCommerce. Social media. The Internet is a rapidly evolving maelstrom of exciting new technologies and business opportunities. But which ones are the best?

Optimizing your website for speed is a crucial part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that can lead to higher rankings in search, and more organic search traffic.

Unfortunately, website optimization is not always a trivial task, and can demand fairly intimate knowledge of PHP (or whatever), Linux, MySQL, benchmarking and profiling tools, SEO, servers, hosting, networks, .htaccess, and more.

The intellectual capital required to properly optimize a website is often not immediately available to small and medium businesses, who put their faith in the default performance of their CMS (Content Management System), and hosting service.