Archive for March, 2009
Learn & Grow Rich – Free MBA Courses Online
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‘We are like children, who stand in need of masters to enlighten us and direct us; and God has provided for this, by appointing his angels to be our teachers and guides.’
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Free Online MBA Courses
Well the Angels are now online. YouTube offers MBA and college courses FREE online NOW here. YouTube released YouTube EDU with thousands of free lectures from over a hundred universities across the country, including MIT, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and more.
Academic Earth offers more FREE education It was founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. They have identified the barriers to higher learning and found innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning creating an educational ecosystem so anyone can find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.
And when you have recovered and become rich. For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world, Stanford Engineering Everywhere. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other students. A computer and an Internet connection are all you need.
And when you finished Stanford online you can move onto MIT’s FREE 1800 (eighteen hundred) online seminars: MIT’s OpenCourseware
Local Search Outpaces Online Search
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A tremendous surge in the annual growth of local search far outpaced growth of overall Web search, according to a study conducted by comScore, Inc., a leading Web behavior research firm, and released today by the Yellow Pages Association.
Local Search Growing
The study found that local search — the practice of using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services — grew 58 percent in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches. By comparison, overall U.S. Web core searches grew at a much smaller rate of 21 percent year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008. Local searches stand at 12 percent of core searches on the top 5 portals.
“Even if the searcher doesn’t know the company or brand they will ultimately give their business to, the decision to actually make a purchase has often already been made,” Norton said. “That is a strong argument for local merchants to develop and maintain an online profile, if they haven’t already done so.”
– 75 percent of the top 100 keywords searched on Internet Yellow Pages
sites were non-branded, indicating that a majority of consumers have not
decided on a specific company or product brand when they begin their
search.
– Nearly half (45 percent) of Internet Yellow Pages and local online
directory searchers made an online purchase in the fourth quarter of 2008.
The comScore study measured real-life Internet browsing, buying and transactional activity of approximately one million U.S. Internet users who provided permission to be monitored from December 2007 to December 2008.
comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital .marketing intelligence. comScore derives its information and analysis from a representative panel of more than two million Internet users worldwide.
Read Leveraging Small Business Testimonials
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Happy customers can be grown exponentially. Read my Search Engine Journal article Leveraging Small Business Customer Reviews and Testimonials Online
Free Wifi Access Everywhere – wifi.com
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wifi.com offers free wireless access to hotspots virtually everywhere. Visit wifi.com, sigup up for free, download a small piece of software and free wifi is yours. Just do a search. You will be pleasantly surprised.
Wifi.com is building a fast-growing network of free consumer and retail wifi hotspots around the globe. You’ll no longer be frustrated by the cost of hard to find secure commercial wifi hotspots?
free wireless everywhere
Business.Gov Toolkit Offers Direct SBA Loan Access & More
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Business.gov helps small businesses understand their legal requirements, and locate government services supporting the nation’s small business community. It is an official site of the U.S. Government for resources specific to microbusinesses and home business owners. The toolkit below includes:
• A search field for information, forms, and government contacts (administrative and support)
• Access to topics of current interest to the small business community
• Access to a listing of all the licenses and permits that apply to you
• Videos featuring expert advice from successful entrepreneurs and small business owners
YellowBot Busy Local Search Engine offers Free Listings
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YellowBot is a local search site with millions of monthly visitors and a great interface for finding and reviewing places you go to in your community (and elsewhere) allowing patrons and businesses to exchange experiences.
The YellowBot team is a self described ragtag band of merry pranksters focusing on solving how local businesses and consumers can best navigate each other because local is where its at.
Businesses can register their business to get no cost traffic for FREE here.
YellowBot is a local search site growing exponentially used for finding and reviewing those local places you go to in your community with ways for patrons and business owners to exchange tips and experiences. Businesses can get FREE business listings accepting photos, videos and consumer reviews
The YellowBot team set its sights on “solving” Local search engine experiences because they don’t think anybody’s done it right yet. They want to make better sense online of places where the story of your life is unfolding. They want to help you pull it all together a bit more and share it with the world to make it easy to find the best (or nearest, or most popular or cheapest) place to do that by searching by name, by location, by keyword or by tag.
Yellowbot encourages reviews which they call stories. You’ve been there, you’ve had an experience, people that you know were there (or else you want them to know what they missed). Their framework allows your stories to intermingle with the stories of neighbors, friends, and people you haven’t met yet. When there are enough stories, a picture of the place emerges.
Yellowbot provides tools (like RSS feeds and APIs) so that you can take your reviewss, content, etc. and re-use it wherever you want. Their tagging system allows users to superimpose a ‘vision on the world’. Customers or busineses can add Personal or Location pictures (JPG, GIF and PNG) and videos (MOV, MP4, AVI, MPG, MPEG, FLV, ASF, WMV, 3GP, 3GPP, 3G2).
Consumers can create lists and share them. User lists allow you to organize any group of businesses or locations that you find on YellowBot for any purpose you can think of and add any business to that list, or even add it to multiple lists if you want. Businesses that you add to a list don’t have to be related such as a list called “Places To Check Out” and they are right there at your fingertips! They can be Public or Private. This is an easy way to share favorite (or hated!) businesses with neighborhood friends. Lists can be shared with your friends, and you get to control how much they can (or can’t!) do.
Matchpoint.com Free Listings for Local Business Search Engine
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Matchpoint.com is a local search engine used by millions of people to search for, compare and connect with businesses.
Matchpoint believes it’s an easier way for people to find and connect with local businesses. Consumers use Matchpoint.com to search for businesses in more than 3,000 service categories. Businesses both large and small utilize Matchpoint.com to meet new customers searching on-line for local products and services.
In addition, Matchpoint’s search and listings products appear on thousands of web sites in partner networks. Also available is Matchpoint Promote for business owners that want to get more exposure with better placement in Matchpoint search results as well as inclusion on related business pages.
Get started with a free listing now. Expose your local business to local buyers one free directory at a time until your business can be found everywhere.
Free Online MBA Videos for Entrepreneurs and Small Business
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Free MBA videos with an easy signup found at MBAVid.com – business video education portal
Finance, leadership, marketing and accounting are some of the categories in this video portal. The web site also allows users to socialize with brain pick with others. Groups can be created. Insights can be shared.
The site is a great self education business video portal for entrepreneurs and small businesses. It already has a great collection of MBA videos.
Small Business Optimism from Small Business Success Index
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The Small Business Success Index was conducted in December 2008 and January 2009; a total of 1,000 small business owners were interviewed by phone. It was commissioned by Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. It found terrific optimism:
Small businesses are succeeding despite the economic downturn.
* 69% of small businesses made a profit in 2008
* 7% of small businesses report that they broke even
* The majority (69%) of those who showed a profit in 2008 said it was equal to or better than the previous year
* 70% of small businesses expect their firms to still be operating in five years as opposed to being closed, sold or transferred, and of these, 66% expect to be bigger in size
Small businesses are optimistic, regardless of the current gloomy economic situation.
* 23% of small businesses believe the economy will improve in 2009
* 26% of small businesses believe it will remain unchanged in 2009
* 48% of small businesses expect a decline in 2009
Small businesses are still investing in their companies, in spite of the 48% of small business owners expecting the economy to be in decline in 2009.
* 25% plan to increase their overall business spending
* 42% plan to spend the same
* 31% plan to decrease their spend
* 23% plan to increase spending on professional development of employees
* 26% plan to increase their internet marketing budgets, including online advertising and website development
More information can be obtained from:
Reporter & Analyst Relations Contact
Susan Wade, Director of Public Relations
703.668.5057 or swade@networksolutions.com
Sponsors include:
About Network Solutions, LLC
As the leading provider of Web solutions and the pioneer of the domain name registration service, Network Solutions offers a full range of Web-related services that includes Web hosting, Web design, e-commerce software, search engine marketing, SSL certificates, e-mail services, and domain name registration. Network Solutions draws on 30 years of experience to make it simple and affordable for customers to build and manage an online presence through a one-stop Web solutions provider.
About the Robert H. Smith School of Business
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 13 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and part-time MBA, executive MBA, MS in business, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations on three continents — North America, Europe and Asia.
About Rockbridge Associates Inc.
The SBSI survey was conducted by Rockbridge Associates Inc., a leading market research firm based in Great Falls, Va. Clients include Fortune 500 ® companies, government agencies and associations. Rockbridge conducts primary research and consulting to help with product design, positioning, pricing, and customer satisfaction. www.rockresearch.com