We all here about the benefits of shopping local but really what are the benefits and why would you want to shop local over a national brand? Being Small Business Saturday is going on now it's an appropriate time to cover why small business is important and why your supporting a local business is beneficial to the economy.

We state we're a mobile company but when events force you to work mobile you start to realize the true nature of being a mobile workforce is. Our office is in downtown Valparaiso Indiana which means we have some amazing opportunities. We are close to great restaurants, local shops, and of course are the first back on when we lose power. Well, that last statement we've learned is not always the case. We have lost power a few times and five or six hours later and the power is still off at times. This doesn't affect us though as we have built our system from the ground up for handling these types of situations.

When it comes to getting your business online having a strategic plan that is optimized to grow your business is crucial. With a maintenance plan, you can take care of not only your website, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media needs but take it to a level never thought of. There are many companies that have solutions that do one and not the other. We're going to outline our "Web + Social" plan. This is our most popular plan as it takes your business to the next level.

Many of our new clients will already have an existing website that isn't converting and the results that they are receiving are not what they want. When we inquire to what types of results they want they cannot answer right away. The reason is that there is no plan, no definition of what success is, and equally no definition of what failure is. The information is subjective and not defined which breeds the "throw it away and start over" syndrome. This thought process is not the right solution for any business.

With elections quickly coming to an end for a short period there are a few things you need to think about whether you win or lose your political office. There are certain things you need to do to be a responsible politician no matter your election outcome. Although we are talking about your website your social media needs to be thought of as well.

When it comes to being found online you need an SEO strategy to reach the maximum audience possible using solely white hat SEO techniques. We are not going to delve into white hat or black hat SEO here. We will strictly be talking tactics that we use in every blog post to achieve SEO success with content through blogging on your website. Before we even get into the article I want to be very clear that when you write do not write for the search engines to get your SEO. You want your content human readable and in a way, that is engaging and provides value to your intended audience.

We are always looking months out for preparing. We are typically scheduled out 4, 6, even 8 weeks out for our clients. The reason for this is that we want to make certain we are thinking of holidays, promotion ideas, blog ideas, social media ideas, and the individual items that are happening in the weeks ahead (e.g. New Year's Day, Trivia Day, etc.). Since content creation is a core part of what we provide to our clients with not only unique and high-quality content but aggregated content that showcases a client's unique traits we need to be thinking ahead rather than after the fact. Therefore, we are already planning for 2017. To give you an idea of what we look at we're going to look at the major items we wrote down for January 2017.

On October 14, 2014, the idea came about for a low cost and efficient eCommerce site for people in and around Valparaiso Indiana. We didn't want to charge on a per item basis whether it be a percent or a flat-fee. The goal was provide businesses the opportunity to grow without a huge overhead. The eCommerce solution we chose was called "Purchase Local" initially as we were going to focus solely within the Northwest Indiana area. Flash forward 2 years, some company growth, and "Side Walk Shop" was born. Based on the same premise of the purchase local concepts this will be nationwide with a full marketing budget and team standing behind it.

This past weekend we met with two great clients on Saturday about how together we will work collaboratively together with their website, branding, and marketing of their organizations. The first lasted several hours about our services and digging deep into the realm of what our social media offered. The next inquired why we would want to work with their specific industry as they said they were slow pay and were by design hard to work with. In this article, we're going to look back at these two meetings and see how two different approaches align well with our Valparaiso Indiana company and why it shows why our three-year building process has put us in a place for rapid growth.