marketing Archives - Nerd Crossing Technology Services

Email for Business: Why Free Isn’t Always Better

Posted on 02/25/202602/09/2026 by Jim

With business communication now being largely digital, it is more important than ever to make sure that your email is secure, reliable, and functional. If you’re still using AOL, Yahoo Mail, or similar platforms for your business, it may be time to upgrade. Benefits of Upgrading Your Email: Match Your Website with a Branded Email Address First impressions can be lasting, and set the tone for your communication with clients, vendors, and business partners. Your email address can tell recipients a lot about you. How would you feel if you received a million-dollar business proposal from nerdcrossing@yahoo.com? Compare that to receiving the same proposal from sales@nerdcrossing.com. See the difference? Using your website domain in your email address automatically elevates you as an entity from an individual to a professional business. Nerd Tip: A branded sender email address helps route your message to recipient Inboxes rather than Spam. This is especially important if you use a bulk email platform like Constant Contact or MailChimp. These types of services now require you to assign a branded email address as a default sender to improve delivery. Additional Security Features While free platforms have some protections against spam and malicious messages, they may not be ideal for preserving privacy and protecting intellectual property. Remember: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Your free email provider could be using your information for anything from serving you more ads to training AI systems. Upgrading to a paid email solution gives you access to additional features that will help you secure your communications. These can include better spam filtering, robust encryption, attachment scanning, and link scanning. Better Customer Service Have you ever lost your Gmail password and locked yourself out of your account? Getting back into your email can be complicated or outright impossible with free email providers—especially if you don’t have recovery options set up in your account. With a paid service, you get real customer service and support lines that can help you troubleshoot issues, refine rules and workflows, and even provide recovery options so your business processes don’t come to a sudden halt when something goes wrong. What Should You Be Using Instead? There are a number of options out there for upgrading your email services. Shop around, request demos, and compare the options to make sure the one you choose meets your business needs. A few options include: MS Outlook/Exchange:A tried and true solution for long-time users of Outlook. The familiar look and trustworthy functionality makes this an easy transition into more functionality. Google Workspace:If you like Gmail, upgrading to Workspace preserves all your favorite features, while giving you access to much more. Google is an excellent platform for putting many of your collaborative business processes under one roof. Proton Mail:A lesser-known option, but no less powerful, Proton offers tiered plans for both businesses and individuals, and services that include cloud storage, VPN, password management, and more. Need Help? Are you ready to upgrade but don’t know where to start? Need help deciding which email solution is right for your business? Nerd Crossing has you covered. Our IT professionals have over 15 years of experience helping businesses meet their productivity needs. If you’re ready to dive in, we’re ready to swim! Click below to schedule a free consultation with our expert Nerds.

How to Best Utilize Social Media

Posted on 02/11/202602/09/2026 by Jim

Over the last few years, social media has grown and expanded into an intimidating beast. From Facebook to YouTube to LinkedIn—it’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to stay on top of it all. Here’s a tip: you don’t have to. If you’re struggling to juggle all the platforms at once to maintain brand awareness and advertise your business, here is how you can streamline your social media presence and increase your impact on your audience. Step 1: Prioritize Every platform has its purpose, and not all of them will fit your needs. Your first step is to identify what you want to accomplish, choose the right platform(s) to fit your needs and focus on just that. Social media is all about engagement. In terms of public image, it’s less harmful to have no page at all, than to have a “dead” page you don’t maintain. Which platform is right for you? Step 2: Streamline Maintaining multiple platforms at once can be time-consuming. Luckily, there are several tools that help you bring your social media into one dashboard where you can monitor all of your profiles and schedule posts with ease. Shop around, compare different tools and pricing, and pick the one that fits your needs. Here are a few options you can check out: Step 3: Engage If you’re using social media like a stage with a spotlight, you’re doing it wrong. Social media is all about engagement. The content you post should be tailored to elicit a reaction, whether it’s likes, comments, or reposts. The more people interact with your content, the better your results will be. And it doesn’t stop there. When people do interact, you should respond accordingly. If someone comments, Like or reply to acknowledge them. When they share or repost, offer a Like as well. You should also occasionally go outside your bubble and interact with other pages as well. This helps boost your visibility and engagement. A few tips to make your posts more engaging: Every business should have a website to help generate business. If you don’t have one, or you’d like to improve what you have, we can help! Warning: Pace Yourself! Social media can be an incredible time suck. Once you get into it, it’s difficult to come back out. This can have a negative impact on your productivity and time management. To avoid getting pulled into the black hole of doomscrolling, schedule a dedicated time slot for social media in your day, and stick to it. 15-30 minutes a day should be more than enough to log in, respond to comments, post something new, and log out. Remember: unless you’re an influencer or professional content creator, social media should be a supplement to your business, not its sole focus.

Utilizing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business

Posted on 02/06/201808/27/2021 by GiantsFan

While most businesses understand the importance of social media to build and maintain their customer base, many do not understand which social media platforms to utilize to fulfill their goals. Finding the right social media platforms is a great way to take advantage of free marketing opportunities. You don't need to purchase ads or boost posts to generate new leads. However, you do need to create posts and content that are not only calls-to-action, but informative, engaging, and appropriate for the platform itself.
Continue reading →

How to Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Posted on 12/04/201709/07/2021 by GiantsFan

There’s no point to having a beautiful website if people aren’t visiting it. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is your website’s visibility in search engine results. For example, if you’re a CPA in Concord, and someone searches on Google, Bing, etc. using the keywords “CPA Concord,” your SEO will determine where you land in the results. There are many ways to improve your SEO, and may vary based off of how your website is built. For example, if your website is on the WordPress CMS (Content Management System), there are more effective and easy methods to improve your SEO than if you have a static HTML site. Please read the below checklist to determine how to improve your SEO. You can also see how to improve your SEO on a more technical/back-end level by going to an SEO site checker, like this one here. (Please note: these are not always accurately read.) Keywords are key! Keywords are what people use to search for what they need. It’s good to pepper your website with keywords to get people to find you. There are a few ways to find keywords, but the most effective is to use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool. A great way to add plenty of keywords to your website is to create a blog about your industry. Like this one here! This is a great way to reach out to customers, prospective customers, and other people you wish to market to. Link to other pages within your website (for example: “Contact Us Today” should link to your Contact page), as well as to other quality websites. If you link to other quality information hubs, Google’s algorithm sees that and promotes you. Make sure the website you’re linking to contextually makes sense on your blog or page. Fix any broken links on your website. Often times, other websites will change their navigation, so the URLs may change and break. You can check to see if you have broken links by using this tool. However, please keep in mind that broken link checker tools are not always accurate and may show links that are on the backend, but not on your visible website. If you use WordPress, we highly recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin. If you use other CMS platforms, there are also SEO plugins like EFSEO for Joomla or Magento SEO Suite Ultimate. However, we have not tested the latter two and cannot vouch for them. Use keywords as alt-tags on your images. This is much easier to do on WordPress sites, as you can just click on the image and add it in the alternative text box. WordPress then automatically adds it to your HTML. If you have a static HTML site, you can find the instructions here. Make sure your website loads quickly. If it loads slowly and your bounce rate goes up, your SEO rankings go down. To make your website load faster, optimize image sizes, cache plugins and/or get rid of plugins you’re not using. There are also many other ways to reduce your load time. Have sufficient contact information throughout your website. Search engine crawlers pinpoint these and determine that you’re more trustworthy, which boosts your SEO ranking. Give a lot of thought to your meta titles and meta descriptions. They should include keywords and be short descriptions about the page you’re trying to get them to click on. This will be the first call-to-action that people see regarding your company. Search engines don’t rank meta descriptions, but the more people click on your site, the higher your SEO rankings get. We hope these basic steps will help improve your website’s ranking, getting you more viewers and customers! There are also many other ways to improve your Search Engine Optimization. If you have any questions about your SEO or your website, please do not hesitate to contact the Nerds. We are always here to help!

Pokémon Go-od or Bad?

Posted on 07/26/201607/26/2021 by GiantsFan

Pokémon Go has been taking the world by storm since its debut earlier this month. Even if you've never heard of the original Pokémon card game, there's slim chance that you haven't been inundated with news about this addicting new mobile app. Whatever your feelings towards Pokémon Go, there’s no denying how brilliant its creation is.
Continue reading →

Marketing Tips & Tricks

Posted on 03/16/201507/26/2021 by GiantsFan

In this day and age, marketing is growing increasingly important to small- and medium-sized businesses. Great marketing can lead to new customers, an engaged and appreciative fanbase, business referrals and partners, and much more. And though investing money into ad campaigns can lead to a steady increase in profits, not all marketing needs to make a dent in your wallet. Here, we'll discuss a few ideas to help your marketing efforts.
Continue reading →