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).

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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.” Read More

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.

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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. Read More