This Week: A Web Building Tool Thrives and a Social Sharer Folds


This Week: A Web Building Tool Thrives and a Social Sharer Folds

The small business world keeps changing, from Web building platforms that continue to flourish to social tools that have outlived their usefulness. The Small Business Trends editorial team helps you keep everything in perspective allowing you to do what you do best: run your business. Here’s our roundup for the week.

Web

Wix, the Freemium Website Building Platform, Is Growing Like Gangbusters. The robust growth Wix.com showed off during its first quarter earnings call this morning was nothing short of astounding. The Isreali-based tech firm reported $28.8 million in revenue for the quarter, an 86 percent increase year over year. And that’s nothing compared to its 46 million and growing user base.

Canva: Create Social Profiles, Brochures. No Design Experience Needed. No technology will ever replace the human creativity of a designer. But a company called Canva wants to make it easier to do more mechanical tasks like layout and really make the process accessible for all. Whether it is for a brochure, a Twitter or Facebook banner, or really anything you can think of, Canva provides the tools to do the layout simply.

Heartbleed Update: Some Devices, Services May Still Have Vulnerabilities. Three and a half weeks later and Heartbleed persists. You may have thought the Heartbleed bug was behind us. Many companies were proactive about putting fixes in place. But new reports suggest that the risk of Heartbleed extends beyond computers, laptops, and tablets.

Brother Is The Latest Company To Introduce Cloud Storage. With so many cloud storage solutions already out there, you would think that there is no need for another one. But Brother International Corp seems to think otherwise. The company has launched a cloud-based file management service for small to medium-sized businesses.

Advice From Matt Cutts of Google on Title Tags, Myths, and Website Size. Recently, Head of Google Webspam Matt Cutts gave a few different videos offering quick pieces of SEO (search engine optimization) advice.

Social Media

Spread.us Goes Dark On June 1. Spread.us, a tool that allows you to send requests automatically to your Twitter subscribers asking them to share content on your behalf, has announced that they will be shutting down on June 1. An email statement from the Spread.us team gave no reason for the shutdown.

Too Much Noise on Twitter? Silence It With Twitter’s New Mute Button! Have you ever grown tired of seeing a certain user’s tweets in your timeline, but didn’t have the heart to unfollow them? This should no longer be a problem with Twitter’s new mute button!

Swarm: Foursquare’s New Social Heatmap. Chat and video calling have become important forces. And now, so has local search, including in the small business world. A newly reinvented Foursquare wants to be a part of that trend with a new app called Swarm.

Facebook’s New Insights Shares Demographics, Purchase History, More. Whether you’re buying ads or doing sponsored posts on Facebook, a new version of insights claims to provide a better idea of the audience you are targeting.

Google Launches Community and Helpouts Page For Small Businesses. Today President Obama proclaimed this “National Small Business Week.”  In honor of small businesses, the Google.com search engine homepage here in the United States has a message, “Here’s to the dreamers, doers, shakers, and makers. Happy Small Business Week.”

Mobile

School of Rock Scales For Growth, Using Front Desk. School of Rock was outgrowing its mobile business strategy. The iconic music school franchise is now operating in seven countries. There are 130 schools on the planet working under the School of Rock name. The company is a big user of mobile in its business back end and front end. But recently, the effort being put into that mobile strategy was becoming more trouble than it was worth.

Mobile App Eliminates Paper Attendance Lists at Business Events. Organizing an event is a huge undertaking. If you are looking for an efficient way to keep event overhead costs down, one app claims to simplify the process. The makers of a new free download from Attend.com say it lets event coordinators manage the event check-in process from an iPhone or iPad.

How Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 Can Help Increase Your Efficiency. Sometimes you just don’t want to type. Many of us long for the day when we can speak our thoughts into written form for others to read. If you like that idea, then this review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 is the voice recognition software for your small business.

Marketing

Twitter Chat Examines Business Signage and Visual Marketing. From the best budget sign ideas to the best techniques in holiday marketing, we covered it all in a recent Twitter Chat. Members of the Small Business Trends community discussed their thoughts on what goes into the best business signs and other visual marketing. FedEx sponsored the hour long exchange. You can follow them at @FedExOffice.

Entrepreneurship

Fishtown Pharmacy Promotes Connection to the Community. This week in our spotlight we introduce you to Fishtown Pharmacy. Located at 1802 Frankford Ave in Philadelphia, PA, the brick and mortar pharmacy employees three and just celebrated its first year anniversary April 25.

Holy Crap: A Cereal That’s Out of This World. Literally. When entrepreneurs Corin and Brian Mullins changed the name of their gluten-free, vegan organic breakfast cereal from the more genteel Hapi Food cereal to the more attention-grabbing Holy Crap cereal, sales started increasing.

Success Secrets of a 6-Year Old Ecommerce Business. How does the owner of a home-based business manage to be successful in international eCommerce, moving a half million dollars worth of product through her living room each year? With smart marketing and the right kind of help, that’s how. Nicole Snow of Darn Good Yarn has grown her business from nothing in 2008 to a successful international business in six years.

Services

GoDaddy’s International Push: A Goal to Serve Very Small Businesses Everywhere . GoDaddy, a technology provider serving millions of very small businesses, has been on an aggressive expansion kick since 2013. And it’s most recent expansion announcement is for geographical products and services. GoDaddy recently added localized products and support in 14 new languages.

Quantify Lets You Shop For Your Next Business Consultant Online. If your company has a problem and needs expertise your staff doesn’t possess, one option is to go to a consultant. Similarly, if you have expertise that might be useful to a small to medium-sized company, becoming a consultant could be the ideal business model for you. Up until now, finding the consultant your company needs at the right price could be a challenge.

Operations

A Quick Guide to What You Should Be Doing NOW for the Affordable Care Act. Between the time President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010 and today, there have been a number of adjustments and changes to its implementation. One thing hasn’t changed, however. As of 2014, Americans, including solopreneurs and employees of small businesses, are required to carry health insurance as individuals.

6 Pillars are the Foundation of Small Business Success. “Small business success happens here.” This was pretty much all over banners, handouts, programs, marketing materials and infused into conversations at the Infusionsoft ICON14 annual conference. To this company and community, it’s a mindset, a lifestyle and a mantra.

IRS Tax Collections. Now that April 15 has passed, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is busy processing tax payments. So it’s a good time to consider historical patterns in the amount the tax authority collects, as well as the fractions that come from different sources: business income, employment, estate, excise, gift, and individual income taxes. The IRS reports that it collected nearly $2.

How the Business Phone Has Evolved to a Mission Critical Platform. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1875, it must have seemed magical. For the first time since humans started walking the earth 200,000 years before, you could talk with someone without needing to be anywhere near the person. Yet, by our lifetimes, most of us were taking the phone for granted. That all started to change over the past decade.

Reading Photo via Shutterstock

1 Comment ▼
One Reaction
  1. My favourite of all posts you’ve listed for this week is Holy Crap! Makes me smile just thinking about the name – has a playful and feel-good element to it. 🙂