Archives for Casie Gillette

Management Tips from the Pros: AMA Recap

AMA

One of the great things about working at Grasshopper is that each member of the team is given the tools needed to be successful and to advance their skillset. In our main office we have a library (check out some of our book reviews), hold Grasshopper University (team members teach the company something they know a lot about) and employees can attend various seminars & trainings related to their field…on the company dime. We are encouraged to become better!

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a 2-day management training seminar put on by the American Management Association. Taught by Adam Vane, a leader in leadership and conflict resolution, I received some solid advice and real world tips on working with members of your team and becoming a better manager.

Overall, there were a two main things that stuck out in my head and they both revolved around communication:

Listen Listen Listen

We all “hear” what people are saying but we don’t always “listen”. As a manager you need to listen to what your employees are telling you. This is especially true if you are a small business or startup…your employees are your insight into what’s happening both inside and outside the company. You need to listen. Here are a few ways you can listen to what your team members are saying:

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SEO Your WordPress Site

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at Boston WordPress Meetup on the topic of SEO and Wordpress. One of the questions I asked the audience before I started was how many people were using WordPress for their business site. The answer was almost all of them.

When I started thinking about it, I realized that many of our customers probably are using WordPress as well, so why not provide some tips here on how to make a WP site SEO friendly.

All in One SEO Pack

One of the great things about WordPress is that it is open source so people are always making it better and keeping it current with technology. While SEO certainly isn’t new it has become much more important over the last few years.

The All in One SEO Pack is a terrific plugin that can help improve your site and eliminate issues that can be caused through WP, including duplicate pages (the plugin blocks /tag, /author & /category) and canonicalization.

The other great thing about the All In One plugin is it allows you to set a custom title and meta description.

URL Configuration

With so many people using WP for their business website, it’s important that you can configure the URLs to your specifications. Read more »

SEO & Analytics: BFFs

seo-analytics

As the SEO Manager here at Grasshopper, a large part of my job is ensuring customers and potential customers find our site. Even more importantly, that they find our site and convert.

As a small business, you probably hear that you need to have a website and you need to be doing SEO. Yes, both of those things are true but what is the point of spending all that time if you aren’t going to do it correctly?

Here at Grasshopper we use analytics every step of the way. We know what keywords are performing the best both traffic wise and conversion wise. We also know what content appeals to our users (and the search engines) and in turn, we are able to create a better and more defined SEO/content strategy.

Analytics can offer some extremely valuable data and is vital in improving your website. But how can you use analytics to guide your SEO efforts?

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Why I Now Hate Tiger Woods Too!

tiger-woods-and-garyI tried to stay out of it. I didn’t offer an opinion on the scandal. I didn’t visit TMZ one time. What Tiger Woods does with his life is not for me to judge. But now he has really gone and pissed me off.

Well geez Casie, why has Tiger Woods made you so mad?

I’ll tell you. Tiger Woods is still bogarting the “voice mail” search results!

With real time search results, Google has put Tiger Woods all over the first page and pushed us voice mail providers down, down, down! I figured after the first couple weeks or so, it would go away, but nope, still there. Twitter results, news results, US weekly…Damn you Tiger!

So what happens when a huge news story breaks and your business happens to be effected?

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Peter Shankman Visits GH & Talks Social Media

peter-shankman

This past Thursday here at Grasshopper we were fortunate enough to have Peter Shankman of HARO come speak to us on the topic of social media. What we got was a smart, entertaining and insightful look into what social media really is and what makes it successful.

Now I could write three pages on what he covered in the 40 minutes he spoke, but I’d rather just give you the key points that resonated with me and hopefully will be the biggest help to a small business (or anyone for that matter) trying to understand social media.

The first key factor that everyone talks about, is “What is social media?“  I think Peter put it best when he said that it’s the ability for companies to:

“Screw up in a shorter amount of time to a larger group of people.“

To me, social media is one of those “everyone is doing it” type things that businesses feel like they have to do. Well they shouldn’t unless they are going to do it right.

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How a Small Business Named Grasshopper Uses Twitter

Let me start by saying, for those of you who don’t follow @grasshopper on Twitter, you should start right now. That is, unless you aren’t interested in finding great articles on entrepreneurship and small business, info on our virtual phone system or reading super awesome posts from the Grasshopper blog.

Ok, now that you are following us, here are some ways Grasshopper is using Twitter to help make our business better and our customers happy.

Monitoring Keywords

There are three main reasons to monitor keywords on Twitter:

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