Eddie Davis here, senior director of SMB Merchant Services. Happy Labor Day, everyone! I hope you're all enjoying the well-deserved day off. Today is a great day to not only relax but also to think about the things you can do to help grow your business. I've had the honor over the past year or so of writing as a guest columnist for Entrepreneur.com , Entrepreneur Magazine's online portal, and I wanted to share some of these advice columns with you.

After 10 years of preaching the merits of search engine optimization to sceptical business owners, I've found there's a new challenge in online marketing and it's a funny one. Nearly all business owners I meet think they should use social media marketing to promote their businesses, but a good number have a real aversion to using social networking channels.

People are resistant to change. We find solace in our daily routines. And because social media sites have become a part of that routine (for better or worse) even small changes to those services can effect us. So while not every change is bad, and most (if not all) will have their naysayers, some changes are just harder to swallow than others. Here are 4 recent (and very public) examples of changes that caused the respective communities to lash out.

Despite the fact is that I hang out at LinkedIn less than on Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIn is my favorite network: less clutter and more sense than anywhere else. LinkedIn is perfect for building your resume and networking for business purposes. It is confusing at times though and some of its really cool features are either hidden or unclear. This post explains the two powerful networking tools inside LinkedIn: 1.

If I were to sit in a meeting with a big client now and tell them to slash a little of their traditional SEO budget and instead spend more time optimising the top 30 SERP's for variations of their brand names, they would literally laugh me out of the room. People and big companies have only these last few years got their heads around SEO, they now know that in order to get more traffic, more sales and more revenue,

Spotlight on Search Interview: Mel Carson Microsoft Advertising If you attend Search Marketing industry conferences, you've no doubt run into the ever optimistic and charming Mel Carson from Microsoft. When I was last in London, Mel connected me with an excellent Fish n Chips that the pubs around Trafalgar Square couldn't get close to. Mel is active as an advocate of Microsoft Advertising ,

Posted by RobOusbey Today, I want to share two pieces of advice that are particularly useful to certain types of business - and will be exceptionally quick to implement. I've also created a free download that might help some people implement one of these ideas even more quickly. About two years ago, I made a recommendation to a client in the UK, and I've just seen it used by a hotel in the USA.

With Bing's recent step up to compete against everything Google they have also ramped up their webmaster tools to allow serious website owners looking to really make an impact in Bing to carry out their plan. The new Bing's Webmaster Tools have been long anticipated because they never really competed with the Google webmaster tool set before. Now things have changed. The Bing Webmaster Blog had this to say: "The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified,

Wetpaint is launching a new content network of 15 sites, dedicated to popular television shows. "Wetpaint has created a sophisticated prescriptive publishing system that taps into trending data, commentary, tweets, Facebook comments, forum topics to build a network of sites that focus on what we all love best TV," a spokesperson for Wetpaint tells WebProNews. "As you know, social media has changed how content is discovered," she adds.