Welcome to the sandbox. Take a look around and post your comments. We want to learn more about you as we share information about successful strategies for marketing your business in Chicago.
Your feedback is welcome. Our website will evolve to meet our customer’s interests. Yours should too. Send along your website URL along with [...]

Paid Placement programs are the microwaves of the Internet. Google Adwords can literally thrust your website to the front of the search engines. Google provides you with a captive audience and displays a list of their selected advertisements on the top of their search page. These ads link directly to your website or landing page [...]

When I search I try to be as specific as I can be. I regionalize my search if it is applicable, and identify my search criteria by a branded search term or a product specific search key phrase. But everyone searches differently so here are some things to remember when you are looking to [...]

Your customers are your lifeblood. A happy customer is a repeat customer.  Are you taking the time to listen to what they say? Barriers to listening can be a lack of focus or as I like to call multitasking.
I am also sometimes guilty of reading emails while listening to phone messages or worse yet, during [...]

I’m blogging for a school assignment today. Instead of blogging about small business marketing, as I usually do I decided to write about a new blog I discovered. It’s called blog fun spot. I turns out that their fun is really big business. It is really a link farm of ads by Google and [...]

You have to buy this book!!!!!
Big Black Pencil is a small business marketing agency in Chicago. We learn many of our marketing strategies from the very best . Today I learned something about Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think. I recently visited his web site and thought I had uncovered a [...]

Talk to your marketing agency about how you can make your Chicago business website become more visible. There are two ways that you can improve your website visibility.
1. Have your marketing agency create a blog (web log) for your company to let people know about your products or services. Once your blog is online, you [...]

Chicago is a competitive market for small and medium size businesses. Selecting the right sized marketing agency that understands your business can give you an advantage over your competitors. Here are 10 marketing tips guaranteed to make this year’s marketing plan a success.

Create a marketing budget that you can afford. If you’re only allowing a [...]

 
You have 30 seconds to grab your customer’s attention online. Your website need to get down to business.
Successful small and medium sized businesses in Chicago know that an outdated website can be worse than no website at all.
Big Black Pencil Marketing can review your website and help you find your unique attribute and help you [...]

Many small businesses in Chicago are blogging to get business. Chicago-based marketing agencies like Big Black Pencil are helping their clients grow with user-generated content.
It supercharges your website with viral marketing shared through the use of networking through
a variety of blended medias.
Your Chicago small business blog can contribute by sharing content through [...]