One of the goals of every business is to make money. Sometimes turning a profit is a secondary or tertiary goal, but it’s always there and is always a motivating factor in every decision made by the people who run the company. How do you increase your profits, though? You can do it by cutting costs, certainly, but that can result in poor support or inferior products. Many companies would have a hard time remaining ethical and cutting costs, too.

If you run a business selling wheelchair accessible vans, you don’t want to potentially sacrifice any quality in order to make more money. What other options do you have if you’re a company that provides mobility to the disabled? You can increase your visibility and consumer awareness. By making your advertising efforts more focused and efficient, you can essentially cut down on the money you have to spend making potential customers aware of your existence.

Branding is the key issue here and everything from email newsletters to billboards and even search engine optimization (SEO) are used to support this single issue. It may seem odd to say that SEO is primarily concerned with branding, but it’s true. Even when you’re not engaging in keyword branding, you’re still working to build brand awareness and reputation. Once you realize that SEO is part of the branding process, you can form a more focused, driven SEO strategy that will aid you in the process and help you achieve your desired result: higher levels of consumer awareness.

Why Brand?

Your brand is how consumers identify your company, service and product. It’s encompassed by your logo, motto, name and the relations those aspects have to your customers and anyone else associated with your company. Regardless of what you do, you have a brand. If you don’t care to manage it, then you have no control over whether your brand is positively or negatively regarded. By developing a specific strategy for branding you can help guide consumers’ awareness of your brand and ensure that people associate it with a positive experience and an excellent product.

What Does SEO Do?

When you develop an SEO strategy, you’re also working on your branding. When searchers see your website consistently ranking at a high level in Google for their searches, they’ll begin associating you as a knowledgeable, quality company. Their trust in Google’s ability to weed out inferior products and companies is near absolute, which is why most searchers click on the first three search results.

How Do You Brand?

By utilizing branding keywords and gearing your SEO toward service-oriented keywords, you can ensure your business’s name stays at the top of results and that consumers begin to draw an unconscious correlation between your industry and your company specifically. By focusing your keyword choices on only the ones that will strengthen your brand in your niche, you reduce the potential keyword pool and make it easier to rank. Once you begin ranking on your chosen branding keyword you can branch out into supporting phrases with the strength of your brand driving your SEO tactics the entire way.

The Internet World is growing at rapid pace. On average, more than a billion new pages are added to it every day. To give you an idea of how big world wide web is, this Infographic by GO-Gulf.com covers some really interesting facts about websites that we use on day-to-day basis.

In 60 seconds, there are 98.000+ tweets, 695.000+ Facebook updates, 600+ new YouTube videos and 168 million emails sent. ,

As 2011 ends and 2012 begins, we wish you a merry Christmas and happy holidays and a happy new year. If you wonder, you can follow Santa on Christmas Eve on Google Maps.

With 2011 drawing to a close and 2012 just around the corner, businesses may be a little worried about what the New Year holds for them. Indeed, many are predicting that 2012 will be a difficult year. Due to the ongoing economic crisis in Europe and ongoing worries about a double-dip recession, it should be obvious that these worries are well-founded. However, with a little preparation and understanding of successful business and marketing strategies, you will weather 2012 like a champ, and you may even flourish a little.

So what can I do?

The first thing to remember is to not, under any circumstances, freak out about these predictions. This may lead to a decrease in spending and fewer new hires, which will play right into these naysayers’ diabolical plans. Indeed, a recently released report by a group of University of Massachusetts economists suggests the current unemployment crisis could be solved if America’s largest banks and non-financial companies would cough up some of the $3.6 trillion in cash that they have been hoarding over the last few years.

“There is no reason that the US needs to remain stuck in a long-term unemployment crisis, Robert Pollin, lead author of the report and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, said in a statement. “Getting the banks and corporations to move their hoards into productive investments and job creation requires carrots and sticks—policies such as a new round of government spending stimulus as well as taxes on the banks’ excess reserves—that can both strengthen overall market demand and unlock credit markets for small businesses.”

Okay, what next?

After you are able to breathe a sigh of relief and stop worrying about things over which you have no control, it’s time to focus on the things that you do have control over, in order to strengthen your company and ensure that your year is productive and profitable.

Like it or not, the Internet is here to stay. The stats from this past Cyber Monday only serve to prove that this medium is not only highly effective for marketing, but that it can literally make the difference between a successful year and one that is not-so-successful. Learn to use every aspect of the Internet, in order to gain a toehold in the virtual marketplace.

And how exactly do I go about doing that?

Here are five places on the Internet where you should focus your attention in order to have a stellar 2012.

1. Social media sites, which were originally dismissed as being a frivolous waste of time, have really helped small businesses. Not only do they offer consumers a way of spreading the word about your business in a new-fangled word-of-mouth manner, but some sites like Facebook now offer advertising. If you were going to plan a weekend trip to the Windy City and were looking at Chicago hotels and events for your itinerary, would you choose one that you had never heard of, or go with the one that your Great Aunt Rhoda raved about on her Twitter account? You get my point.
2. Blogs are important, whether they are your own or someone else’s. By starting your own blog, you give consumers an insight into your business, and also open the floor for discussion and/or constructive criticism about what’s working and what’s not. By reading others’ blogs—particularly “mommy blogs” and those sites geared toward consumers—you are able to hear what consumers are saying, in their own words, and can strategize accordingly.
3. Google is more than just a way to pass the time or find directions to the theatre. By using white hat SEO tactics, you can increase your site’s visibility and brand recognition; this is done by raising you in the search results, which equates to more revenue for your company. The key is to learn everything there is to know about white-hat SEO and Google’s various algorithmic updates, in order to avoid angering the Google gods (hint: think relevant, quality content over spammy junk).
4. As I previously mentioned, Google and Facebook now offer advertising that is affordable and far more efficient than traditional advertising methods. In addition, email marketing is the new way of targeting consumers that doesn’t involve wasted paper, expensive postage, and annoyed consumers. Each of these methods is better able to target the specific demographic that you desire than previous methods.

Learn everything you can about web design and HTML code. This way, you can create an aesthetically-pleasing, intuitive site that will lure customers in and keep them there. There are multiple guides on the Internet for doing this, or you can hire a professional. Whatever your choice, be sure that your site is always at its best.

Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a new idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself.

Innovation and creativity are essential for sustainable growth and economic development. In today’s competitive economy, innovation becomes main driver for sustainable growth both for individual companies and for entire countries.

In this infographic from Good Magazine, the world map shows what percentage of Thomson Reuters’ “Global Innovators” list is headquartered in each country. In this list, Thomson Reuters names World’s 100 Most Innovative Companies. The U.S. leads, with 40 percent of that list’s companies based here. It’s followed by Japan (with 27 percent), France (11 percent) and Sweden (6 percent).

The most innovative industries on Thomson Reuters’ list were electronics and semiconductors, followed by chemical manufacturing, computer hardware, consumer products, machinery and telecom equipment.

In the mobile operating system war, Apple’s iOs still dominates Worldwide but Android gained significant momentum in the last year. Android app downloads passed 10 billion mark and Android has become an important platform for developers.  Android is already the world’s most widely-used operating system. The operating system now spans more than 400 devices on 231 mobile carriers in 123 countries, Google says, and the sheer number of eyeballs landing on Android screens is making the platform more appealing than ever.

Android has a volume advantage over iOS but it has an important disadvantage:

Fragmentation. Its open nature means dozens of manufacturers and more than 200 carriers globally can distribute Android phones. So different versions of the software on phones with different screen sizes, user interfaces, and capabilities all operate in the wild at once. Android users can choose from Google’s official Android Marketplace, carrier app stores, and other independent venues—each with potentially different rankings, reviews, and standards. While consumers get more choice and developers more opportunities to share their apps, the overall experience is inconsistent and potentially complicated.

In order to make it easier for Android developers to get started with creating robust applications, the Android team announced an Android Development School site: Android Training. The tutorials, or classes, are very well put together, with splits into logical steps to make them flow well, along with sample code you can utilize to “do your homework.” Thanks to Google, all the content is free and waiting for Android developer candidates.

It’s been more than four years since Apple introduced the iPhone at the end of June, 2007. iPhone wasn’t the world’s first smartphone, but it totally flipped the mobile industry upside down. Since then, smartphones have evolved from an expensive luxury to a common tool. After iPhone, Google’s Android came and powered other manufacturers against Apple and has helped smartphone market grow. But as much as the mobile industry has grown and changed since then, it’s just getting started. In 2011, the mobile space saw profound growth and a vast array of new wireless innovations and services emerge.

Nielsen’s “State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report” provides a snapshot of the current mobile media landscape and audiences in the U.S. and highlights the potential power of mobile commerce in the near future. So what’s coming? Matt Galligan, co-founder of SimpleGeo says “In my opinion, the ‘future of mobile’ is the ‘future of everything’ “ .

Key findings From The Report:

• The majority of 25-34 and 18-24 year olds now own smartphones (64% and 53% respectively);
• The majority of smartphone owners (62%) have downloaded apps on their devices and games are the top application category used in the past 30 days;
• The number of smartphone subscribers using the mobile Internet has grown 45 percent since 2010;
• 87 percent of app downloaders (those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days) have used deal-of-the-day websites like Groupon or Living Social;
• Younger groups text the most. In Q3, teens 13-17 sent and received the most text messages (an average of 3,417 each month).

In my opinion, the future of mobile will largely be defined by creative entrepreneurs and companies that leverage the device capabilities in new and interesting ways. The next few years will be about thinking of the phone as a networked sensor. New technologies like NFC and GPS on phones and applications like Foursquare and Square will shape the future of Mobile.

We expect to see huge growth in the Smartphone and Mobile markets in the next years. Since then, I suggest Internet entrepreneurs to consider Mobile and Smartphones markets seriously to invest in time and money.

Here’s one more surprise from Google to celebrate holiday season. Type ‘let it snow’ in Google search, and you’ll see snowflakes falling down the page. Don’t miss out the opportunity to write your name in the frost. Enjoy and have a good holiday season

Apple has announced that 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store in less than one year. Now, there are estimately 10.000 apps on the Mac App Store.

Developers are happy with Apple’s App Store Enviroment. Mac developers set the prices for their apps, keep 70 percent of the sales revenue, are not charged for free apps and do not have to pay hosting, marketing or credit card fees.

Apple’s most popular App Store is iPhone App Store but Mac App Store is valuable for developers, too. Mac App Store solves marketing and distribution challenges of software firms and give them more chance to focus on development process instead of marketing. “In less than one year we’ve shifted the distribution of djay for Mac exclusively to the Mac App Store,” said Karim Morsy, CEO of algoriddim. “With just a few clicks, djay for Mac is available to customers in 123 countries worldwide. We could never have that reach through traditional channels.”

It was December 2008, when I first wrote about trendwatching.com’s Global Consumer Trends of the next year report. trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated trend firm located in Amsterdam, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. Reinier Evers; a trend watcher, a presenter and and an entrepreneur founded trendwatching.com in 2002 in Amsterdam. trendwatching.com is an innovative trend firm. What makes trendwaching.com unique is its source of information. Traditional trend reports rely on public surveys and direct sales datas. But trendwatching.com’s source of information is its network. The 2012 version of the popular report has been released.

Let’s look at 12 predicted crucial trends for 2012 from this report:

1. Red Carpet
2. DIY Health
3. Dealer-Chic
4. Eco-Cycology
5. Cash-Less
6. Bottom of The Urban Pyramid
7. Idle Sourcing
8. Flawsome
9. Screen Culture
10. Recommerce
11. Emerging Maturialism
12. Point & Know

In just its second year, the Small Business Saturday initiative managed to pull 103 million customers through the doors of small business establishments. This Thanksgiving weekend frenzy surpassed the projected number of 89 million and showed that the bourgeoning “shop local” movement is gaining traction in a real, measurable way. What’s most interesting about the push to shop local is how much of its success hinges on social media marketing; this is particularly interesting considering the two industries developed almost directly alongside each other, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity.

Small business has almost always relied on word of mouth to succeed. There are very few national TV spots and building-side ads trying to pull you into Daydreams Comics in Iowa City, Iowa or Homespun Crafts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Unfortunately, word of mouth for a lot of businesses can only go so far. Social media is essentially a rebirth for word of mouth in a digital age. Platforms like Facebook allow small bookstores to broadcast events to an always ready audience, reaching them on their cell phones as well as computers. Twitter is used by many “pop up shops” and mobile businesses to let consumers know where in the city the business can be found that day. Given the incredible success social media has had on small businesses this year, how should these businesses proceed moving forward?

Word of mouth has always been an important part of marketing, both because it is free and because, almost always, the words are going to a person from someone in their life that they trust. This gives credence to the brand and service, as well as giving confidence to the overall purchase decision. If you’re looking for what to do in Chicago, for instance, you are more likely to take the advice of a person you know and trust who has experienced it than from a kid who once saw a movie about Chicago and thought it was okay.

The massive shift to digital has opened up new avenues of marketing, which are ultimately cheaper and hold lots of promise for small businesses who have limited advertising budgets.

Google AdWords Express

In an effort to give small businesses a bit of an edge in catching the attention of customers, Google launched a service called Boost, which would later become AdWords Express. The idea here is that you register your business with Google and when someone searches for stores in your area, you stand out from the usual suspects (read: international corporations show up as red tabs and you show up as a blue tab that automatically sets you apart).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is emerging from the dark shadow of its past to become a massive force in Internet marketing. Large corporations use it to boost their rankings in search engines, but smaller business can use SEO to deepen their potential customer base. SEO is beneficial for one simple reason: people can’t go to your site if they can’t find it. Targeting keywords specific to your business and location will help more people find your site and hopefully walk through the doors of your storefront.

Mobile Marketing

After this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are considerably more smartphones and tablets out on the market. That number is growing as people move away from stationary computer setups toward mobile Internet devices. Companies like Groupon have launched local services that allow small business owners to create offers and deals in real time and beam them to cell phones of customers who could be in your neighborhood. Your deal that day might win you a new regular customer.

The shop small revolution has a lot of support behind it in the shrinking world. People are starting to reject the convenience afforded by huge corporations and re-invest in their communities by shopping small. The movement will likely grow in the coming years and businesses looking to harness the increasing public enthusiasm for “small shopping” will have to evolve their marketing methods with the digital methods cropping up and leverage them to succeed in the current economic landscape.

Google announced that Android app downloads have passed the 10 billion mark in a short time. Thanks to Android users around the world, Android Market exceeded 10 billion app downloads—with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month.

Apple just passed 10 billion app downloads in January. But thanks to the fast growth of the sale of Android phones, Google’s app downloads are growing fast. The first billion installs took 20 months, the second billion installs took another 5 months, and the third billion took only 2 months. The next billion took only about 7 months.

With these numbers, Android is already the world’s most widely-used operating system. To celebrate this milestone, Google partnered with some of the Android developers who contributed to this milestone to make a bunch of great Android apps available at an amazing price. Starting today for the next 10 days, we’ll have a new set of awesome apps available each day for only 10 cents each.

TIOBE Software has released its programming community index for December 2011. The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

According to TIOBE, the most popular programming languages right now are Java, C, C++, C# and Objective-C.

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.

Engadget reports Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao robot has already received a few upgrades from both the company itself and other developers: features like a 1.6GHz Atom processor and dual HD cameras that promise to allow for better face and object recognition even in poor lighting conditions. What’s more, while robot’s outward appearance hasn’t changed much, it has also received a number of software upgrades, including Nuance voice recognition, an improved walking algorithm, and a number of other measures to cut down on unwanted collisions.

Interested developers will finally be able to get their hands on a bot of their own quite soon. To do so, they’ll have to sign up and quality for the just-launched Nao developer program, which costs €3,600 (or roughly $4,800) and will initially be limited to just 200 participants. That hefty price does naturally include the robot itself, along with a complete software suite, and “privileged access” to Aldebaran Robotics’ source code.

The holidays are more than just eggnog and present-opening. This season can give entrepreneurs the opportunity to do great things with their business. Here are some business strategies that will help make your holiday season not only joyous, but lucrative, too:

-  Holiday Deals

The holidays are here, why not stock up on some office supplies while everything is on sale? You can use Dell coupons on a brand new set of office computers or hit up cyber Monday deals on a new iPad to keep your business more organized.

-  Network

Holiday parties aren’t just for socializing. Social, industry events bring entrepreneurs together and allow them to build relationships. Forget LinkedIn or business contact referral groups. Holiday parties allow you to introduce yourself and your business in a laid back environment.

-  Solidify Relationships

Many entrepreneurs see the holidays as a chance to create a tradition with clients. This tradition breeds loyalty, which can help you really keep a client for the long haul. Give your clients holiday gifts, like a bottle of nice champagne, to thank them for their business throughout the year.

-  Reach Holiday Bargain Hunters

During the holidays, people are in spend mode. Take advantage! Develop a marketing strategy that can tap into the holiday bargain hunters. Go mobile with your marketing so that you can catch bargain buyers on the go. Try in-store texting by asking shoppers to text an item number on a product to a short code for a 15% discount. You can also create a campaign which asks customers to text something like “SALES” to a short code, which then sends them promotional texts for a holiday weekend.

Take advantage of the holidays this season to help your business grow. When January rolls around, you’ll be happy you did.

Perhaps there is no better way to gauge the impact the Internet has had on our lives than with the emergence of Cyber Monday—the Monday following Thanksgiving and Black Friday—when people log onto countless retail websites in their quest to find holiday deals. Gone are the days when it’s necessary to camp out in front of stores at ungodly hours, only to stampede through the doors and wrestle fellow shopper for the hottest video games and electronics. Instead, it is now possible to get all of your holiday shopping done while sipping coffee in your pajamas and watching daytime television.

This year, shoppers spent a record $1.25 billion on Cyber Monday, up more than 20% from last year and surpassing early estimates. Some 10 million people took advantage of this day of online deals, setting a new record. Buyers averaged nearly $125 in spending, and 10.8% of consumers used a mobile device to access businesses’ websites (up 3.9% from 2010).

What does this mean for retailers?

In short, this year’s Cyber Monday shows retailers that Internet shopping, particularly when there are deals to be had, is here to stay and growing in popularity. While spending was up for this day and Black Friday this year, the jump in online sales indicates that this day of spending is really starting to catch on.  Accordingly, in order keep up with this demand, merchants need to continue offering online coupons and deals, and maintain online visibility and brand recognition (more on this later). By using the Internet to their benefit, businesses will stay competitive in this increasingly online world.

Additionally, because so many transactions were conducted on mobile devices, it may behoove retailers to create smartphone apps in order to lure customers to their sites on a regular basis. Whether it’s to sell items, educate consumers about the products and/or services they offer, offer help in finding physical store locations, provide ready access to customer service, or what have you, by staying up-to-date with trends, businesses can get a leg up on their competition.

What does this mean for marketers?

In the ever-changing world of marketing, few things are ever black and white. However, it should be apparent by now that marketing strategies that place an emphasis on the Internet will be successful.  Whether it’s email marketing strategies, SEO techniques, or any of the other sundry options available to marketers, the point is to get online and stay there. By experimenting with different techniques and strategies, you can pinpoint what works best for your clients and what doesn’t, which will not only benefit them, but you as well.

As with any marketing strategy, the key is quality over quantity. Whereas black hat techniques have given SEO a bad name, and Google’s algorithmic updates have demoted some well-known websites, proper use of SEO strategies—such as the use of keywords—can actually work in tandem with Google updates to boost your clients’ online visibility, and establish and maintain brand recognition.

How can I use this year’s cyber lessons to my benefit?

Below are five tips for implementing the lessons of this year’s Cyber Monday into your overall sales and/or marketing strategies:

1. Stay up-to-date with what’s going on online! Whether you’re scoping out your competitors’ deals, learning about how to create new apps, or learning how to design an aesthetically pleasing, navigable website, being Internet-savvy will always work in your favor.
2. Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses…be the Joneses! In other words, if you are mimicking strategies that have already proven to be successful, then you remain one step behind your competition. Be the leader, rather than the follower and your sales will reflect it.
3. Listen to what consumers have to say! This can be accomplished by reading blogs that are devoted to shopping, deals, and the like, such as “mommy blogs”, and sites dedicated to couponing, shopping, and and other money/spending-related subjects. By reading what consumers think about various sales and money-saving ideas, you will better understand consumer trends, and will be able to target your audience more effectively.
4. Be liberal when it comes to sales! Despite the recession, when many businesses had to tighten their belts in order to survive, this past week’s sales shows that consumers respond overwhelmingly to a good deal. While it may be true that you will make less on any given item, it is also true that more items will sell, and your customer base will grow exponentially as a result.
5. Think outside of the box! By coming up with creative new ways to approach consumers, you are sure to capture their attention and keep it. It’s easy to ignore advertising that is humdrum, but something that is at once unique and catchy will garner you the brand recognition you need to stay ahead of the game.

Even though the recent recession is already beginning to be referred to in the past tense and consumer spending is up, people are being more thoughtful about the money they are spending. By placing emphasis on customer-oriented sales and marketing strategies, rather than outdated ideas that are no longer effective, you can be assured of continued success, regardless of the economy.

Whether you’re designing a website for personal use or to help build your business, you undoubtedly understand the importance of showing up in search results—the higher, the better. Whereas this was once accomplished with “black hat” tactics like keyword stuffing and spammy links, Google has made most of these tactics ineffectual at best.

Google’s Panda Update was unofficially aimed at “content farms”: “We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. […] As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.”

In essence, Google can now read at a 10^th grade level and is able to differentiate original, quality content from poorly written content with irrelevant links. When you add to this the newest algorithm update, tentatively called the Google Fresh Update, which rates pages based upon how fresh and up-to-date the content is, along with how often the page is updated, it becomes apparent that having your page rank highly in Google is no easy feat.

So what can be done to improve your site’s chances of success?

The first step to creating an effective website is to be sure your page is aesthetically pleasing, and that the words flow well. The best way to do this is to create a rapid prototype of sorts of your page, in order to be sure that it is easy to navigate and that all of the links are in working order.

By “rapid prototype”, I mean a tangible recreation of your page that can be seen from all angles, and moved around if necessary, without having to constantly rewrite code. Some do this with charts or graphs, while others prefer the more rudimentary Post-It notes on a whiteboard. Whatever your choice, by viewing your page in this manner, you will be able to spot flaws that may drive potential consumers away.

Once you are certain your site has met these standards, then it’s time to start taking the various Google algorithm updates into account. Is your content well-written and error-free? If there are links that have been placed in your text, are they relevant, or might they be construed by Google as spam, thus lowering your standing in rankings? If your forte is not writing, then it might behoove you to find someone to write your on-page content for you, in order to ensure maximum success with Google.

In addition to that, have you had the same page design and on-page content since your site first went up in 2005? The Fresh Update will demote your page for this! Take the time to re-do your page whenever you start to feel the itch for something new. Also, stay up-to-date with news that is related to your product or page, and add fresh, relevant content whenever you can, in order to rank as highly as possible.

Finally, once you are certain your page is at its best, request that Google recrawl your page in order to have the changes you have made noted accordingly. This way, you don’t have to wait to start seeing the fruit of your labor (even though this is a slow process that requires patience).  Over time, you will start to notice that your site is gaining traffic and rising in search results.

Andrew Clancy is a talented videographer who lives in New York. He shot and edited this video as a lyrical interpretation of New York City. He says on his blog:

Living in New York I’d grab my Canon 7D, or S95, and shoot footage of what was going on around me. It seemed like a never ending project and you could stay filming life in New York for a long time Eventually I put the camera down and started to edit. Here’s the end result, it’s a bit rough and ready but that’s life in the Big Apple I guess. Turn up the volume on this one for the beautiful song ‘We Don’t Eat’ by Irishman James Vincent McMorrow.

Enjoy watching the amazing views of New York City and listen to the wonderful background music.

A Year in New York from Andrew Clancy on Vimeo.

Every college student knows that performing well in school requires time management skills. Making time to study, learning to balance school with a job or other activities, and taking initiative are all necessary to succeed in higher education. And many successful students carry their time management habits with them into the workplace.

Developing and maintaining those habits, however, can be a challenge—and for marketing professionals, the time management skills that you may have learned in college can make the difference between a well-executed project and a rush job. Remembering the lessons you learned in school can help you prioritize tasks, manage several projects at once, and organize research effectively.

First things first

When you were a college student, it probably took a while to adjust to the new classes you took each semester, but once you figured out things like which courses required intense study time and which professors were helpful, you were able to prioritize your classes. Prioritizing is an essential approach to marketing: finding out what consumers are talking about, what products and concepts are popular, and which trends to follow can give you an edge on the competition.

To stay on top of your high-priority tasks, make a to-do list and update it throughout the day. Or you can use one of the many productivity apps available, like Evernote, to keep you on schedule and to help you shift projects as needed. Learning to prioritize can help you decide which projects to pursue and even encourage you to start trends of your own.

The truth about multitasking

While learning to handle more than one task at a time is critical to being successful both in school and in the workplace, the concept of multitasking has been overhyped. Chances are that when you were plugging along in college, studying and reading e-mail and listening to music and chatting with friends, you were actually “serial tasking,” going from one task to another quickly and repeatedly. It still requires skill, but it’s certainly not the same as doing several things at once.

How you handle multiple tasks is also tied to how you prioritize; no one can do it all, but being able to handle multiple tasks is still an important element of time management. What you think is multitasking might actually hamper your ability to be productive—and that results in lost time overall. Make a list of the tasks you think you’ll be able to transition between easily—things that can be done without much concentration or that don’t take much time—and group them together. Do the larger tasks one at a time, when you can focus.

The power of good research

Spending a little extra time on research can save you both time and effort in the long run. For assignments like term papers or group projects, some college students do the minimum amount of research, then end up having to return to the library (or the Internet) several times throughout the project.  College students who have experience with online education or who enrolled in an online degree program are aware of how useful the Internet can be, both for answering quick questions and deeper, more detailed research. For marketing professionals, the Internet and social media sites can be a treasure trove of information about trending topics, popular concepts and products, and new types of marketing tactics. Take a leisurely stroll around online and gather any information you think might help you, no matter how small. By compiling a large amount of research up front, you can spend more time concentrating on your work.

Many adults say that college is nothing like the real world: there’s no pressure and no sense of urgency. Of course, those adults might have forgotten their college experiences. But marketing professionals can use their college experiences to be successful and innovative at work.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Office automation has helped many businesses save time and money on performing actions that would normally take hours or even all day.  Inventory management software is no exception and can integrate many functions of your business.

Proper implementation of inventory management software can help cash flow will run smoothly, especially when credit is involved. While it is best for a company to pay its debts in a timely manner, sometimes this is not possible when accounts are not reconciled properly.  Even with good sales numbers, a cash account is not balanced if the inventory numbers are not in sync.  If there is more than one location where sales are conducted, having precise numbers is especially important.  Whether you have 10 or 100 pieces of a product makes a big difference when it comes to the direction of cash flow.

Cash flow is often overlooked as managers focus on profitability.  While profit is certainly important, you can certainly record a profit without having any cash in the business – especially with a business to business model.  Typically customers pay for product 30-45 days after you send it to them.  But your suppliers may want to be paid immediately or within 30 days of you receiving raw materials from them.  This means that you are paying out cash for supplies well in advance of receiving cash for the products you sell.  This is especially problematic for growing companies.

There are tactics that can help with cash flow – especially with a good view of your inventory.  For slow-moving items you may offer them at a discount as part of a promotion.  While you may have to settle for less profit – at least you are turning assets into cash more quickly.  By getting data that is accurate, you can also make arrangements to ensure that your company never runs short of an item.  You may want to arrange for suppliers to hold stock of popular goods so that you can arrange to have them shipped to you on short notice.  This increases both the likelihood of making a sale and the speed that you can generate cash as you are shortening the time between paying suppliers and getting paid for product.

There are many business self-help websites that give helpful information on using inventory management software.  Much of the software that is on the market now is compatible with standard office suite applications such as Microsoft or Corel.  Getting and maintaining a system may take time and effort but the feeling of knowing the numbers in your company’s accounts will make for better business relations. Both customers and vendors will be happy to do repeated business and this can help to grow your company over a period of time.