(By: Jane Applegate)
​
What do you love about your job? Is it the flexibility in your hours? The work you do or who you do it for? Maybe it’s the comraderie among your coworkers or the exciting challenges you face every day. Hopefully it’s a little bit of all of the above.

Christopher Rodriguez from Maximum Real Estate Services recently became the first Oceanside Chamber member to graduate from the Public Leadership Institute (PLI) training program chartered by the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.
 
The course met once a month for five months starting this past February in San Diego and on June 21, 25 members from various local Chambers received their letter of achievement for completing the program.
 
“Even though it was pretty intense and right to the point from the very beginning, I thought it was great and just what I needed as my foundation to get involved in local government,” Rodriguez said. 

Businesses employ internet marketing strategies to maximize their organic search results to bring in more conversions. Search engine optimization helps businesses grow and maintain success. Here are a few ways businesses can benefit from SEO.
 
seo-for-business-growth
 
How SEO Can Help Your Business Grow
 
You've probably heard numerous things about SEO that may have you wondering if it's worth your time and effort. While there have been rumblings about SEO's demise, it has evolved to meet the current needs of both business owners and customers. Experts at Saba SEO, a leading SEO company in Oceanside, discuss how SEO can help your business grow by boosting your visibility, credibility, and profit potential. 

​Good help is hard to find, especially in the construction industry where long hours can equal
short tempers. But, there are things you can do to find and keep capable and committed
employees.
​
The turnover ratio in the construction industry exceeds 20%. This despite relatively high
salaries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the lowest paid construction laborers earn
respectable $16.26 per hour with construction managers topping out at nearly $100,000 per
year. As an industry that is expected to grow substantially over the next decade, there is plenty
of opportunity for growth but you have to be creative in your hiring practices in order to attract
top talent.

A landmark incident has occurred in this country and it has affected millions of people.  Richard Smith, CEO of Equifax is living the nightmare that haunts many administrators these days, especially if they are responsible for the security of people’s Personal Identifiable Information (PII).  Not only is he getting criticized for one of the biggest breaches in US history at 143 million records, but also for the delay in notification, for the possible impropriety of executives selling stock before the news broke, and for not having in place a standard set of practices to follow in the event of a breach.  After all, being in the business they are in, they should have assumed they would at some point be a target and be prepared for the reality.  If they thought they were, they grossly underestimated their vulnerability and the expectation of the public.  

On July 12th, the Oceanside Chamber held its annual Awards & Recognition Luncheon to honor over 100 local businesses for their support of the Chamber and community. Dozens of members were recognized for their Chamber membership anniversaries of 5, 10, 15... all the way up to 65 years of membership, celebrated by Orco Block & Hardscape. The Chamber also recognized the excellence of our local business community with the following awards: Small Business of the Year, Education Partner of the Year, Non-Profit of the Year, Green Business of the Year, Citizen of the Year and Elected Official of the Year. 

Content Marketing is one of the hot trends in branding these days. From creating landing pages to gather emails, creating a blog and affiliate marketing content to social media graphics and video. If created and curated properly, your content can create huge dividends for your brand.
 
The biggest response I have received from clients and others I advise is that they have a hard time coming up with ideas to even get started creating content or finding ways to leverage their brand.  

​So in this post I’ll give you three unique ways to help leverage your brand presence to your audience and create a cycle of content to lead them to your website, create a new customer, and in this post, a new revenue model for your brand. 

April is “International Customer Loyalty Month” and even though building customer loyalty should be a year-round strategy, this is a good time to plan on how you can improve on relationships with your customers.

We all know the statistics: studies show that it costs at least 5 times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Not only that, but loyal customers spend more. Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products, and spend 31% more than new customers, confirms a 2016 Customer Loyalty Statistics Research.

So, if retaining customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones, and if it’s proven that loyal customers spend more, it makes sense to work on building Loyalty with your existing customers, doesn’t it? In this article, I will give you 3 quick ways that you can beef-up your customer loyalty program during this International Customer Loyalty Month:

With the pace of technology today, the walls that minded us as creatives are opening. Gone are the days of being tied to your computer at your office or cubicle. Many freelancers enjoy the flexibility and freedom associated with their lifestyle. That still doesn’t mean that we can’t ignore our client needs and deadlines. From coffee shops to airports, technology offers us the power to create great work for our clients virtually anywhere.

When I want to get out of the house, coffee shops or bookstores can be my secondary headquarters. To produce great work on the go, there are five tools I require to help me create awesome work and thrive as a creative.
​
These are in no specific order or importance, but these tools have helped me get projects done on time, no matter where I am.

Lori Lawson is a LegalShield Director and is an ID Shield specialist.  Her company, New Line Associates is located here in Oceanside and she has been a Chamber member for over ten years.  Visit their website at newlineassociates.com.   Email her at [email protected] for a free, no obligation fifteen-minute consultation. 
​

by Quantal Langford
 
I hope everyone is having a great start to 2017. For all my entrepreneurs, leaders and creatives, are you keeping on track with strategies or goals you wanted to implement for this month? 
For me, there’s technology and online marketing strategies I am starting to implement as well as some offline strategies that I think could be huge for your brand presence in 2017.
 
1. Video Content
This is a strategy I expect many online entrepreneurs and businesses to use heavily as a part of their marketing strategy. From a recent survey, video content consumed by audiences could account for 70% of content through social media. In a recent consultation with a leadership coach, he was looking for various ways to increase his brand presence. I asked him about FB Live Feeds and incorporating more of these in his content marketing. The results have skyrocketed for him from a branding perspective. His live feeds have reach thousands of people on each live post. Also mentioning any blog articles as well as his website address to funnel his audience into his website is key.

​FedEx Ground held its official ribbon cutting at their Oceanside Facility today. Congressman Darrell Issa, along with State Senator Patricia Bates, Oceanside Mayor Jim Wood and Oceanside City Councilmembers, Jack Feller and Jerry Kern, were on hand to celebrate with numerous FedEx officials, including District Managing Director, Tim Weber and the facility's Senior Manager, Steve Hillman.

After initial meetings, hours upon hours of revisions and tweaks, you finally have the logo that best exemplifies your business and brand. Now what? Some think that if they place their logo on a website or Facebook business page, the loyal customers will come. I only wish that was true!
Much like a farmer, you have to plant and cultivate those initial seeds, with your branding and marketing before you can reap the rewards.

By Quantal Langford, Langfordesign
 
Developing a mission and purpose for your brand is what connects your brand to your audience emotionally. When your brand vision is concise, it allows you to communicate what your brand represents and how you wish to be perceived to your audience. It builds brand trust and loyalty. When that bond is sealed, through a strong inner vision of your brand, you build a tribe of followers that will buy your products and services, share your social media content and become advocates of your brand.
 
Your brand vision shouldn’t be confined to various taglines and slogans. How do you see your brand evolving in the next 5 to 10 years? Your vision should be expansive enough to reflect a company’s future growth and what the company could become. Your vision should be aspirational, to connect with employees, management, and leadership and allow the vision to encompass each individual within the company. From hundreds of employees to an employee of one, allow the brand vision to be organic, flexible and adaptable to brand strategists, marketing, creative, and leadership.

Over the past 5 years, Small Business owners have really understood that Social Media is a new way of doing Marketing in a non-threatening, non-intrusive environment. And, for various reasons, currently, Facebook has come to be the biggest channel one can pick in that arena.
 
However, while more and more businesses are getting a Facebook page, how well does yours work? And more importantly, what have you been doing with it?  

By John Moore, SonicSpider, LLC

​Small businesses really struggle with getting their services and/or products in front of potential customers. Part of that struggle is that, in our modern fast paced and attention overloaded world, it seems to take more and more to overcome the din and dross of that world and somehow, stand out.
 
The way around this is to stop chasing and start attracting.. in a sense, by standing under "THEIR" street light!
 
You do this by being the business your customer wants to find...
 
Hmm.. that sounds like a cat chasing its tail, funny but not productive. So what do I mean here with this "being the business your customer "wants" to find"?
 
You start by knowing your customer, then purposely craft what you present (i.e. your website, your brick and mortar site), what you do and how you do, it so that it intersects with that customer, their world, their needs, their desires. Being visible means standing under the same street light that "your" customer is standing under, not under some random street light or shouting from the shadows . 

by Jyotika Chand, RN
 
As a member of the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce you have some great perks.
The chamber provides a variety of benefits for members to maximize their membership and one of them is the Plates for 8 events. They are hosted by a chamber member and at a member’s venue. This is a great opportunity for the company hosting the event to market and network with everyone attending! You get to eat some delicious food and get to know other chamber members in a casual environment. No pressure. No big crowds. 

by Danielle Hass

The Stats:

• The average office employee spends 1.5 hours a day (6 weeks per year) looking for things they own but can’t find. — organized world 
• The average executive wastes six weeks annually searching for important documents lost among the clutter. — Wall Street Journal 
• The average retrieval time for a piece of paper is ten minutes; 3 percent of all papers are misfiled. This study put the cost to a corporation of recovering a lost file at $120. 
• The typical executive wastes 150 hours a year (almost an entire month), searching for lost information. For someone earning $50,000 a year, this loss is equivalent to $3,842 annually.  Forbes ASAP 

 
You may not have taken 90 minutes to find a specific pen today; but, if you give these statistics some thought, you might be surprised to find how closely they reflect your own work life.  Little minutes add up— 6 minutes trying to find the car keys, 3 minutes to find spare staples, 10 minutes searching for a document, your cell-phone, a phone number, you get the idea.  And as the minutes add up, so do the dollars lost.

​If you are completely an online business, the answer can be simple and obvious, but for most small businesses that tend to try and mix the two - not so simple and not so obvious.
 
To help you understand were your business is with respect to this question, start by answering these questions:

• If you website was down for a day, week or month, how would this affect your business?
• When was the last time you checked your website?
• How long could your website be down without it affecting your business?

 
Review your answers to these questions and then come back and try to answer main question in the title.
 
So… Is your website a part of your business?