Proudly Serving You As Spokal

After long hours of deliberation, cups of tea, pints of beer, name brainstorms, nurf dart games, team discussions, trips to the moon, lack of sleep and advice from our fellow entrepreneurs, we’re proud to announce that our new name is Spokal.

What Does Spokal Mean?

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We’re excited to announce that we’ll be attending the Freelance Camp Vancouver on September 15, 2012. Freelance is an “unconference style event for independent workers to connect, share knowledge and become better freelancers.” Basically, it’s a place for small business owners to connect and share successes, failures and best practices.

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Have you finished Step 1 – Setting Up Your Website and Blog yet? If not, check it out. If so, congratulations – you’re on your way to finding clients online and now it’s time to learn about SEO for small businesses.

SEO For Small Businesses 

As we learned yesterday, a blog lets you share your expertise with the world and is important to help people find you. You want to create a blog that ranks high on Google and other search engines, so when people search for something related to your business, they find you in the results. Otherwise, you’re just another needle in the haystack.

To help people find you, make sure your website, blog and content are optimized – we call this “Search Engine Optimization”  or SEO for short. SEO makes it easier for clients to find your website online through organic searches and other natural ways (it does not include paid search results), and is the key to inbound marketing for small businesses.

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Getting customers online can be confusing and leave you with more questions than answers: What should I first? Do I have to pay for ads? Which social media network is right for my business? How do I get found by customers online? 

A Great Place To Start

Your time is important – you should be running your business instead of navigating the online marketing world. So we put together a simple guide to show you how to get customers online, without paying for ads. The goal is to help clients find you so you can build relationships with them, and when they’re ready to buy, you’re top of mind. Let’s get started. [Read more…]

New To Getting Customers Online?

Have you read the intro on how to do inbound marketing for small businesses? That’s the best place to start.

How Much Time Should I Spend On Inbound Marketing?

One of the biggest reasons people don’t take advantage of inbound marketing is that it takes time.

You have to invest in it, just like you take time to train an employee – you can cut corners, but the result isn’t great.

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Stop Paying For Customers

There are many ways to find customers online. Instead of paying for advertising, like using Google Ads, try joining other small businesses that are doing “inbound marketing” – it’s cheaper and more effective.

What’s Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is how clients find you online. People are naturally searching for things on the Internet – there are over 1 billion searches on Google every month! Instead of pushing your products and services, let your customers find you. There are 5 parts to inbound marketing:

SEO: makes sure potential customers find your website
Website: where clients come to find more about you and your services
Blog: the “voice” of your company – clients will come to ask qs and learn what you do
Social Media: gives your company a personality and allows you to interact with clients
Email: use website + social media to collect emails and build relationships with customers

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We had a fantastic time at Grow Conference last week! A special thanks to Debbie and her gang at Dealmaker Media for bringing everyone together.

We were lucky enough to have the whole team participate (although there are no pictures of Dean, so we’re starting to think he never actually left his bed!)

Highlights included a behind the scenes peak at the North America Accelerator Symposium, listening to speakers like Rand [Read more…]

Everyone at netlek is getting excited for the Grow2012 Conference, which is happening this week in Vancouver. The festivities start tomorrow and go until Friday evening.

Not only will our full team be there, we’ll also be getting our hands dirty, and by that I mean working with other small businesses and volunteering. Why volunteer? Well aside from free tickets, it’s a great way to support the community and meet people.

Things kick off tomorrow night with the Launch@Grow Party. Tickets are sold out (1,000!) and some of the top entrepreneurs from North America will be there.   [Read more…]

Most of you told us you love everything about neltek…except the name. Since we built this for you, we’re changing it.

Last night the team got together for a pretty serious naming session. Dion, Dean, Alexandra and Chris where all there – the pizza and beer were flowing.

Dean pitched the name Growpher, but apparently Alexandra isn’t too keen on an animal mascot. Clearly she has never heard of the BC Lions! Chris spent most of the time laughing [Read more…]