Jim Plunkett
Once lead engineer on the cleanup of the nation’s worst hazardous waste disposal sites, Jim Plunkett entered the digital world in 1999, co-founding Vacation Harbor, a travel website much like AirB&B. As cofounder of Main Virtual Office recently rebranded US Answer and as founder of SmallBizSEO, Jim is an authority on digital lead generation and capture for the nations smallest businesses.
Latest
How Carriers Are Costing Your Small Business
In 1986 I got my first cell phone that wasn’t in a bag. It was a Motorola DynaTAC, and it cost me over $2,000. Since then, cell phones have been adopted ubiquitously by small businesses in the US.
3 Simple Steps to Getting More Customers Than the Competition
If you are like most small businesses, your website was probably designed by a local web designer in HTML, without any search engine optimization (SEO). By now you have realized that the web is more important than the yellow pages and potential customers probably not finding you.
What Do You Do After Google Voice?
Google Voice was released on the Today Show in June 2009 as a free service. Just recently though, they folded Google Voice into Hangouts, which already swallowed Google Talk (their free chat service) as part of Google’s play to unify instant messaging, video conferencing, and VoIP services into one platform.
Why You Need a Real Person Talking to Your Customers
Personalization at the small business level, especially local small businesses, means having a live person answer when someone calls. Answering service companies, which have failed miserably in the past, mostly due to technology limitations, are now poised to provide small businesses the added advantage they need in an ever increasingly competitive environment.
2 Steps to Produce Leads from Your Online Marketing
Let’s stop here and discuss the purpose of advertising and marketing your small business, which is: to produce leads. Leads are phone calls and emails from potential customers. Your job is to turn some of these incoming leads into customers.
Taking the Friction Out of Online Purchases
Internet retailers strive to reduce any “friction” associated with an online purchase, and small businesses should heed this with their incoming phone leads. In an industry rife with poor quality of service and antiquated technology, new virtual answering service companies, built on top of VOIP network with systems based in the cloud, are giving the smallest businesses high quality answering service and lead capturing capability—at prices not much higher than “virtual phone systems.”