Accelerate Ocala's Newsletter

Websites for Services: What do you need? How do you get it?

August 4, 2014

Q&A with Rahul Razdan, CEO of Ocoos What do you see as the unique challenges facing owners of service based businesses in marketing to potential clients? Over the years, businesses focused on products have seen enormous leaps in capability with world-class platforms such as Amazon and eBay. These platforms provide a convenient marketplace, handle all aspects of payments/commerce, and even facilitate shipping/warehousing.  Along with these marketplaces, companies such as bigcommerce, shopify, weebly have provided excellent capability for individual websites.  However, we have not seen similar advances in services. Why ?    Services are in general more complex to describe, and very often involve a two-way dialog with the customer before a transaction can be completed. Services are more difficult to manage because they often require a management of the combination of space (where will the service will be delivered?), time (customer/service provider must coordinate), and capacity...

The 4-hour Massage Therapist - Massagetherapyworld.com

July 25, 2014

  My apologies to Tim Ferriss, but I’m in the middle of reading the latest edition of The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated (affiliate link) and I’m going to share an epiphany I had: I’m going to outsource my bookkeeping. Why? Because I hate doing it, I’m not very good at doing it so it takes a long time to do it. Basically, it costs me money to do my own bookkeeping. The Balance Between Time and Money In running a business, we are constantly budgeting 2 precious commodities – Time and Money. When I first opened my business, I didn’t have many clients, so I had a lot of time and not much money.  So it made sense to do as much of the labor-intensive work as I could. I had time to spend struggling through the learning curve of all the tasks of business ownership. I designed my own fliers, business cards, brochures, newsletters, did all the bookkeeping, mailing list management, and insurance billing. I got pretty good at Photoshop and filling out CMS1500 forms. The...

Engagement Marketing Strategies from Facebook

July 25, 2014

FOR MORE GREAT TIPS ON BEING A WORLD-CLASS BUSINESS IN THE DIGITAL AGELIKE US ON FACEBOOK! In support of #‎EngagementMarketingWeek ,  We have created an educational series based on a very important, but often unknown aspect of online marketing:Engagement Marketing Cycle: Three simple steps to success - Provide a WOW Experience - Entice - and Engage! Stay in touch and we will cover how to master all three‪‬Engagement Marketing Cycle STEP-1: Provide a WOW Experience - As small business we have a unique opportunity to provide extraordinary experiences. This can be anything from remembering their names to providing an experience they just can't get anywhere else. This starts the cycle, this creates a memorable experience that stays alive in the customers memories. Everyone loves to share a great memory, and this is our opening for STEP 2 - Entice to Stay in Touch ‪#‎EngagementMarketingWeek‬Did you know that 97% of all consumer research begins online, and top 3 google...