“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half?”

If you’ve ever found yourself asking this question, you’re not alone! Today we’re excited to release Swipely “Spring 2013” to solve this problem.

At Swipely, we built a simple way for local merchants to accept payments, understand customers and grow revenue. With the Spring ‘13 release, we’ve added features to help you measure your marketing campaigns and manage your online reputation. Now you can automatically monitor online marketing, in-store revenue, and customer reviews tied to specific campaigns in one place.

If you’re a small business owner and you’ve often felt like you’re the one “doing it all”, you might be right. According to a new infographic released by AWeber, a whopping 88% of small business owners are the primary marketers for their business.

I feel like this is especially true for restaurants that are chef-owned. In the littlest big city of Providence alone, there are at least a dozen owner-chefs who have a prominent influential presence on Twitter and Instagram. It’s not just Providence though, there are lots of business owners acting as brand ambassadors through social media.

Fake social media reviews can become a small business owner’s worst nightmare.  Websites such as Yelp, Google Places, or even Facebook, can mar a good reputation at the click of a button.

The advancement of social media has resulted in a host of creative ways to damage a business name and the internet has become the arsenal for competitors, disgruntled employees and former employees.

Business technology research firm Gartner, Inc. suggests that by 2014, up to 15 percent of online social media reviews will be fake, and it’s a two-way street.

How long have you been using social media to promote your small business?

The stats tell us that 2009 was about the time that social media changed marketing for small business. It’s when they really started to take social media seriously as a marketing channel that was both cheap, and easy to manage.

With the sustained and continuous increase in social network users across the world, more and more businesses are using these platforms to connect and engage with consumers. And with the economy slowly but surely recovering from the effects of the global recession, social media is proving to be an attractive avenue for Small Business owners looking for innovative ways to market their business to a broader audience.

There are more than 60 different cupcakeries in New York City, so to try and pick the best of the best would be difficult. Since city staples like Crumbs and Magnolia need no introduction, we dug into some local favorites and some not-as-known favorites. Some don’t even have a storefront, but New Yorkers swear that ordering a dozen to pick up will have your tastebuds in happy tears (that’s drool).

As always, we hope you’ll add your favorites into the comments so that all the well-loved cupcake joints get some love!

Print advertising is a little dead, isn’t it? How many times have you spent money on a newspaper ad, or a radio spot, only to wonder how many of your new customers actually followed the trail from your ad?

We’ve offered some print-tracking tips in the past that can help you track those print efforts. The use of a “code” that’s only available in print or on-air isn’t the only way to track those visitors and see the return on your investment.

When we published our last article on how to make gluten-free diners feel safe, we got a lot of love for it from the gluten-free community. The misunderstanding about going gluten-free as a fad diet, versus a means to combat a serious disease is a major roadblock for sufferers of Celiac Disease.

In order to push the movement even further, I asked Amanda Mahoney, a gluten-free blogger who suffers from Celiac disease to come back for some additional insights.

Dealing with lazy employees is a mix of tough love and the acceptance that you might be the problem

Lazy employee? Fire ‘em!

That’s what the traditional response is when telling someone about your less-than-enthusiastic employees. But someone said this to me recently during a discussion about how to motivate lazy employees:

“Not every slacker is really a slacker, sometimes they’re just bored. And if they’re bored, the manager should challenge them with new, interesting tasks. You can’t be bored when your task-list is full.”

It’s true, you made an investment in someone, signed all the paperwork, dotted all the i’s.

I’m always happily surprised when I discover the niche blog of a cupcake shop owner, or a small paper shop. Some of the most popular restaurants out there don’t even have a website with basic information like hours or an address, never mind a full-fledged, hand-written blog.

White it’s ideal to have a blog installed right on your website and domain for an abundance of marketing reasons, don’t let that stop you from getting started. You can create a free blog on WordPress.com, which is pretty much the standard in blogging platforms.