QR or "Quick Response" codes started out small but quickly became ubiquitous in the advertising world. You’ve probably seen these square black and white smudges on flyers, billboards, posters and other real life advertising platforms. For the uninitiated, these are graphics that can be scanned with any smart phone and usually contain a wealth of information about a product or service being offered.

Daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social are great tools to drive sales for your business. But, before you jump in feet first, there are some important things to consider. This point is very well illustrated with a story shared with us by one of our close clients.

With the raging popularity of Twitter, link shorteners have become a must have tool for posters trying to save some extra characters in their posts. Knowing how important Twitter is to viral marketing, YouTube has released its own url shortener with www.youtu.be links.

Did you know that Bloomland can help you can create and distribute your own customized toolbar? A toolbar is a small program your website’s visitors can install in their browser to make it easy for them to interact with you and your company.  Why would you want to do that? It is the perfect tool that provides something useful and novel to your clients while at the same time keeping your brand front and center during their surfing time.

In addition it has these added advantages:

With the rise of automation online there are many programmers out there who are creating very sophisticated bots in order to steal and use information, links and content as well as gain access to password protected areas. The answer to stopping these is a free program called Captcha or “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

Did you know that intellectual property extends well beyond patents, trademarks and copyrights? It seems that ever since the early days of the web "borrowing" content has been an integral part of web culture. Images, videos, music and written articles were always used freely by anyone building sites or looking to drive traffic to their sites. As the web has matured so has the issue of intellectual property within the community of content creators.

Bloomland is happy to announce that we took part in ESN's trade fair this past March 31st. The Vancouver Entrepreneurial Success Network puts on 2-3 trade fairs per year and they are extremely popular for some excellent networking opportunities. This was our first time at one of their events and the experience and feedback were excellent.

Social media marketing has become the most important buzz word in the industry and when Google reveals that social search will become increasingly more important in its results, it’s time for business owners to take notice. It’s important to note that social media will never completely replace traditional marketing techniques but it should occupy a prominent place in a small business owners marketing arsenal.

It may not feel like it but officially spring has sprung! What does this mean for you? Traditionally we engage in a thorough cleaning of our homes to get rid of winter junk but now it is also the perfect time for some business cleaning. It’s time to reevaluate your business processes, marketing strategies and sales cycles. It’s time to trim the fat and think about how to take your business to the next level.

Professional Remote Desktop. Does your business rely on having a lot of data being sent back and forth between your staff and your clients? We have a very easy and efficient solution for your needs. Our Remote Desktop service allows you to have a dedicated server in our data center that houses the applications you use. We can then provide multi user access so your clients can log in, update their records, provide new information and print reports without having to go through your staff. What are the advantages of this service?