August 2008 - Small Business Trends

Market Research Using the Google Playground

You’ve heard of Google’s search engine. You’ve heard of Google AdWords (pay-per-click ads). You’ve heard of GMail.

But have you explored Google’s technology playground, called Google Labs? “Technology playground” is the term that Google uses to describe Labs. Labs showcases new applications that Google is playing around with. One of those is Google Trends.

Using Google Trends in Marketing

Google Trends shows trends in searches. For instance, it will show whether a particular search term is becoming more or less popular over time.

Over at The App Gap I recently wrote about using Google Trends to test the growth in the phrase “cloud computing.” Here is what I discovered. The term seemingly came out of nowhere in late 2007. Growth exploded from there, as this chart shows:

Google Trends shows growth in

Growth in searches for “cloud computing” since October 2007

Aug 31, 2008 2 Shares

Join Us at Search Made Simple

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Employee Motivation for Clock Watchers

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Aug 29, 2008 42 Shares

Introducing Mark Anderson, Newest Expert

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InventBay’s National Inventors Expo

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How You Use Document Templates – Survey Results

A few weeks ago we did a survey here at Small Business Trends to find out what kinds of documents you typically print and which document templates you use.

Just over 170 of you gave us some insights and a lot of good sources of templates and tools for printing.

We’d like to share the results with you. Here is a summary of the questions and the results.

THE MOST CRITICAL DOCUMENTS YOU PRINT

First we wanted to know about the materials that are most critical to your business (that you can’t live without).

Nearly half of you print primarily documents, invoices and flyers (47%) followed by a series of other promotional types of items like business cards, photos and brochures.

The only thing that was a little surprising is the wide range of materials printed in small businesses — from photos to contracts to business cards.Â Here are the top 8 types of documents you print:

Materials printed by small businesses