Online referrals are starting to make an impact on local businesses, but not in the way we all expected them to. A few years ago, the buzz within the online marketing community was that social networks would become a referral engine for people to ask advice through. Facebook even attempted to create a new type of social search engine to capture that referral service. Google also struggled with the idea that the internet would become a big referral engine, and they tried to capture a piece of it through Google+.

While Facebook and Google were comp...
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I've often said that a website needs to provide customer service features that mimic the service that you offer in a store. Today, I'm going to specifically explain one of those feature you should strive for.

In-Store Customer Service

Think about the following scenarios for a moment.

Scenario 1:
A customer is shopping in your store and tells your sales associate that they like the way you've recently remodeled the store.

Scenario 2:
A customer ...
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This is part 2 of a 3-part series on Time Management. I have to thank Rod Worley with Four Grainer: Inside the Jewelry Trade Radio Show for motivating me to write this series. While I was on his podcast show, he asked me the following question: "Where are they supposed to find the time?"

Instead of writing simple direction to explain how to get things done, I decided to dive deep...
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Thanks to The EDGE Retail Academy, attendees of JCK 2015 were able to witness two presentations from Terry Hawkins, bestselling author, well-established business woman, and President of the training company People In Progress Global. I had the fortune of attending her JCK Talk titled "The Retail Revolution" on Thursday, May 28, 2015.

Terry is certainly a dynamic speaker that keeps the audience entertained and engaged while also sharing valuable infor...
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