Results for: business website

Websites have gained much popularity in the marketing industry today. Brands are keener on building their name and growing their audience through websites. They’re even more popular because of social media, where its links can be attached. For starters, check out websites that will teach you how to create a WordPress website, for example:

• godaddy.com
• org
• com

Building a brand entails you to do more – to work hard for it. It’s more than just your name, your logo, your advertisements, and more so, your product. Here’s how to build your brand through the non-traditional medium – a web design:

Don’t Forget Your Brand Logo

Firstly, and most importantly – put in your brand logo! When a user opens your website, make sure that your logo is the first thing they can see, recognize, and remember. Take note of the following tips:

• Put it in the center-most portion or on the top-left side of the page.
• Don’t hesitate to include your logo on the sidebar, header or footer. Make it subtle but clear.
• Remember one word: VISIBILITY.
• Make sure your logo isn’t too small (or even too big) when it appears on your website.

Put it on the topmost portion of your homepage, and design your site in such a way where even if the user navigates from one tab to another, your brand logo is still visible.

Study And Do Your Research

Search for other websites that are offering the same products as yours. If you don’t know where to start with your web design, you can get inspiration from them. However, don’t imitate! You can also research on the strengths and weaknesses of their websites and learn from it, to have a draft and an idea on how to go about with your web design.

Make A Detailed Plan

A branding plan is much like your business plan. Think of your brand – its face and image, the products that you’re trying to sell, your goals, your vision and your mission – and how you can integrate this all in your website’s design. The overall style of your website should be coherent with your brand so that it is easier for users to remember your brand. Don’t be afraid to state your company’s vision and mission on your website’s homepage as this will make your target market feel your purpose more. By opening the homepage of your brand’s site, your viewers will immediately have an overview of what your company is, and what it seeks to sell and achieve. Most importantly, photos of your products should be apparent on your website. Avoid putting them over busy backgrounds and utilize that white background instead.

Determine Your Brand’s Target Audience

When you know the target audience of your brand, you’ll know how to set the tone on your website. Be very specific. If your target audience is the socialites, then perhaps you can design your site to be more sleek, polished and elegant. If you’re reaching out to the hippies – go for bright colors, street lingo in your text and all those bold fonts that you can use.

When you have your target in mind, you’re sure that your website is relatable to them.

Be Consistent

Have an overall theme that’s visible through your web design which also correlates to your brand. For example:

• If you’re trying to sell wellness products, you might want your web design to have a cold, calm and relaxing overall feel.
• If you’re an online grocery shop, bright colors like yellow will entice your users to buy more, as that color has been psychologically proven to trick people into making them feel like they’re hungry.
• If you’re a clothes company, complement the type of clothes (and season) that you’re selling: red for autumn/fall, dark colors for winter, bright colors for spring, etc.
• If you’re selling gadgets, be neutral with your color scheme: remember that men (which forms a majority of your target market) prefer blacks, grays, and whites.

Maintaining your consistency will make viewers remember your website (and your product as well) more. This can, in turn, put you on the top of search options, too.

Use Colors Strategically

The color of your web design should match the overall theme of your product and the message that you would like to convey. When trying to sell children’s toys, use bright kindergarten colors like red, orange, yellow, and green – or think of a rainbow! You need something your users can easily relate to your brand, website name, and products.

Play With Fonts

Using simple fonts will make your viewers focus more on the places that you’re trying to promote. This will make your website function well. If you are a brand whose focus is on travel, your fonts have to be clean, bright and easily understandable. Use fonts wisely. Don’t overuse your choice of fonts – or make too many changes. Headings should all use the same font, so as with subheadings, title topics, etc. The fonts that you use should also match the logo of your brand.

Incorporate Your Mission-Vision Statement

When viewers open your brand’s website, see to it that your mission-vision is visible. This statement will give your target market an overview of what your brand is about and what it needs to achieve. Your web design should be able to incorporate this in a clear and clean way, usually at the leading portion of your website, right next (or below) to where your logo is.

Add-In Images and Other Multimedia

Without images, your website will be dull. No one will ever be interested in opening a boring page. More importantly, users are interested to see some photos of your products. If your brand focuses on homeware, it’s a plus to post pictures on your site of how these products are used in your home or space. Be sure, however, that the photos you post have relevance to your products. Don’t go crazy about posting images just for the sake of doing so even if they have no connection at all to your brand.

Make Your Website Easy To Use

Focus on building the functionality of your web design. Make sure your website’s design is functional and easy to use – even for the not-so-tech-savvy users. Even your grandmother who has just started using the internet should be able to navigate through your website. When your viewer searches for an item on your “search” option, do make sure that they find what they’re looking for, and that your website will load the correct product. Always make products and information about the items that your brand is selling readily-available. Even more important to remember (in marketing your brand) is to enable users to switch search immediately from one product or another (or go back quickly to a previous item they have viewed) without having to scroll through seemingly endless options.

With all these in mind, do remember that building a brand takes time, whether it be through traditional means or through more up-to-date mediums like your website. It doesn’t just happen in the blink of an eye. Branding is very important, and a well-designed website will help you. Put in all the hard work that you can and reap the products of your hard work later on – and that is a well-established brand.

Photo credit: https://pixabay.com/en/digital-marketing-seo-google-1725340/ 

Most businesses are taking to the digital world to help get their products and services out to the people that they are marketing to. But with everyone on the World Wide Web blasting information out to the world, it can be very challenging for a company to get noticed with all the competition.

This is where SEO agencies can help. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, refers to the practice of optimizing digital content so it gains prominence over others when certain keywords or terms are run through a search engine. A website is ranked based on the authority and authenticity of the content, with link building services a popular way to increase backlinks and improve ranking. Certain algorithms of search engines like Google and Bing can be very tricky to navigate; SEO agencies help by removing the burden of optimizing content so that their clients’ websites will rank higher on search results.

While websites like BestSEOCompanies.com can help with choosing an SEO agency that will provide results for your business, it’s also important to get your hands dirty and do a bit of research when choosing the best SEO company that you are confident will bring you the results you need. A lot of dubious SEO companies will make offers that are too good to be true just to get you onboard, and will then under-deliver or give results that aren’t what you signed up for.

Here are a few red flags to look out for when finding an SEO company for your business:

Pricing

How much an SEO company will ask you to pay for their services can be a direct indicator of the quality of work that they will do. If an SEO company has a very low price point for the services they want to provide you, you’re most likely getting poor quality work that will either have very little effect on your search engine rankings or worse, get you punished or blacklisted by the search engine.

Conversely, an SEO company with a high asking price might also not be aware of the conditions that they operate in; there are a lot of SEO agencies that provide high-quality work at reasonable market prices. It’s best to shop around and make a comparison so you can determine the average price for the amount of work you need done at the quality you want to have.

Timeframe

One thing businesses have to understand about SEO is that results do not show up in a matter of days. The indexing process takes a longer time than say, a week. Thorough research has to be done on the content that you provide, and the keywords that your target market uses regularly.

Additionally, search rankings done by Google, for example, are done on a periodic basis. The search ranking schedule alone should tell you that any SEO company who says that they can make your website land on the first page within two days to a week is probably overselling their capabilities or is unaware of how search engines work

Content

Reputable SEO companies will actually provide you with a few samples of the work they do based on previous client submissions. When examining their body of work, be on the lookout for content that has too many links. Overlinked articles will actually be penalized by search engines and will result in lower rankings or potential blacklisting.

It would also do well to ask about the quantity of the work that they submit to search engines. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have all advised that over-submission of a site to search engines can actually decrease your search ranking. So be wary if a company makes claims relating to the quality and quantity of the content they submit.

Guest posting and SEO (search engine optimization) digital marketing have become relatively common nowadays in the blogosphere. In our world today, both of these have become crucial in driving traffic to your website and business. Guest posting and SEO digital marketing are excellent strategies to build traffic, establish your brand, and boost search engine rankings.

Assuming you’re already aware of guest posting and SEO digital marketing as online strategies, are you also informed of their benefits? Both of these methods are actually useful for any business in all industries. If done correctly, guest posting and SEO digital marketing can lead to unique hits or traffic to your website or blog allowing you to reach more potential customers. If you’re into e-commerce, blogging business, or just any activity that requires marketing on the internet, you may want to consider training in guest posting and SEO digital marketing. In this article, benefits regarding a guest post and SEO digital marketing training course will be discussed.

1. Effective Guest Posting and SEO Digital Marketing

By joining this type of training course, you’ll be able to make use of more effective guest posting. Guest posting is as simple as having someone else write material on your site — or vice versa. Guest posting works both ways for the site owner and writer. Site owners receive more content to publish, while writers get to feature their content to a new audience. Doing guest posts correctly, you’ll be able to reap the benefits by having more views and traffic.

For SEO Digital Marketing, a training course will guide you on which relevant keywords to choose by having a clear website and quality content. Main goals will be:

• A user-friendly website
• Easy navigation
• SEO keywords
• Optimized tags and title tags

This course will also teach you to pay attention to details like keyword themes and relevant links to build more web traffic.

2. Guest Posting and SEO Digital Marketing Strategy

Next question you’re probably asking yourself is how posting can earn you traffic. A training course will teach you which ways your guest posting can influence traffic. These include:

• Direct referrals
• Social traffic
• Organic traffic
• Name recognition
• + more

These are key strategies that can make your website reach its optimal level.

As for SEO, this makes your website easy to find, navigate and categorize. By helping out customers easily browse through your site, you drive more people to your business and online platforms. Factors that come into play are the selection of right keywords, behavioral marketing, mobile advertisements, banner advertisements, social media marketing, and others. This course will train you on how to achieve just that and more.

3. Increased Rankings

Guest posts earn backlinks that can help you rank higher on Google, which in turn, creates more traffic to your website. SEO will also help you gain higher website ranks in the SERP (search engine result page) by performing well on social media marketing and digital marketing. The perfect guest post and SEO digital marketing training course will help you position yourself as a well-respected blogger as well. The course will teach you how to create the buzz that gets other people curious to look at what your site has to offer.

Digital marketing is a never-ending process, and you must be equipped enough to handle the ever-changing behavior and trends of your target audience — all of which will be taught in the training course. Numerous factors that will affect your site’s popularity and the time viewers spend on your page will be discussed in the training. Be the top ranking webmarketing123.com website by signing up for training today.

SEO and guest post best practices are constantly evolving — and a training course is the best way to stay on the top of the game. Has this article given you a more unobstructed view of the benefits of SEO digital marketing and guest posting? Digital marketing can be challenging and entail a great deal of work, but once you learn the ropes, developing strategies will be a walk in the park. You’ll have a well thought out optimization plan and traffic acquisition strategy once you take a training course if you’re up for it.

It’s frustrating for e-commerce marketers like you to blast emails regularly and still get low to zero conversions. No matter how much effort you exert, it doesn’t seem to work. What’s wrong?

Let’s look at the numbers first. A Statista report showed that e-commerce made up to $2.3 trillion in sales and is predicted to hit $4.5 trillion in 2021. It also represents almost 10% of U.S. retail sales and is expected to grow by nearly 15% annually. E-commerce also influences up to 56% of in-store purchases.

It should go without saying that e-commerce is taking the Internet by storm. This also means that the competition is becoming stiff, and a sound strategy is a must. Sending out generic emails to your contacts doesn’t work anymore. First, you must understand where your customers are coming. From here, you can use an e-commerce marketing funnel to help you map out your email strategies in a way that you’re targeting the right customers with the right message and at the right time.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/laptop-technology-ipad-tablet-35550/

What Is an E-commerce Marketing Funnel and Why Is It Important?

A marketing funnel illustrates the journey customers go through as they interact with your business, from the first time they learn about your brand to the exact moment they become paying customers. The different stages of the customer journey distinguish the problems customers are trying to solve at that point in time. By adopting this model, you can craft targeted email marketing strategies for your e-commerce business to keep customers engaged and moving in their journey until they take your desired action.

Read on to know how each stage of the customer journey differs and how you can use your email marketing automation software to create a successful e-commerce marketing funnel.

Top Funnel: The Awareness Stage

It begins with the top funnel where potential customers become aware of your e-commerce business and how you’re relevant to their problems. It’s your first contact. At this point, the goal is not to sell your products or promote your business but to ‘attract’ them with relevant information. Here, you are identifying potential customers who have problems you can address. Potential customers, on the other hand, become aware of their needs by showing interest in your e-commerce business.

To meet this objective, use these email marketing strategies for your top funnel:

• Capture contact information, including email address, through sign-up forms on your website.
• Offer free content such as guides, cheat sheet, and checklists which potential customers can download in exchange for their email address.
• Invite your website visitors to subscribe to your newsletters, weekly updates or daily deals.

Once you have their contact information saved in your email marketing automation software, it’s time to educate them and tell more about your e-commerce business.

• Create a welcome series where you can introduce your e-commerce business and your service, but try not to sell hard.
• Educate them with helpful blog posts to make them realize the need for your products. It can be tips, hacks or guides. Explore your options.
• Familiarize them with your brand story as well as your mission and vision. Make them know that you can offer solutions to their pain points.

Middle Funnel: The Consideration Stage

At this point, potential customers are already aware of their problem and are looking for ways on how to solve it. In short, they are considering their options, and you want to be on top of their list without being too pushy. This is where you take your nurturing game a notch higher.

Do this with the following strategies:

• Teach them tips or ways they can solve their problem.
• Use their email and website activities to give proper recommendations.
• Show them testimonials from happy customers to solidify your credibility further.
• Provide comparison guides to highlight your best features.

Bottom Funnel: The Decision Stage

Now that it’s clear to potential customers that a purchase has to be done, they move to the decision stage. What they need here is a more compelling reason to make a purchase. So it’s time to put your best foot forward and give them some push to finally take action and convert into paying customers.

Implement these strategies to motivate them to click on your Buy Now button:

• Give special discounts on their desired item to make them feel that they are getting more value from their money.
• Offer freebies or free shipping to entice them.
• Use a countdown timer to give a sense of urgency on your expiring promo.
• Provide more detailed product descriptions highlighting the specs so they can appreciate the fact that they are getting more.
• Write and design a compelling CTA and make sure that the placement in your email is easily noticeable so they won’t miss it.
• Use different psychological triggers such as loss aversion, reciprocity, and authority.

Understanding the marketing funnel and knowing how to apply it to your e-commerce business can help you come up with targeted strategies. Again, customers are at different stages of the buyer journey, so use your email marketing to design an efficient e-commerce marketing funnel. Many advanced email marketing automation software today are built with features you can use to set up workflows and strategies for each funnel stage. Use them wisely!

Kimberly Maceda

Kimberly Maceda is a Content Writer for ActiveTrail. She writes for some top online marketing sites and blogging advice on email marketing and marketing automation. ActiveTrail is a leading provider of professional-grade email marketing and automation software for growing businesses.

Photo credits: https://pixabay.com/en/ecommerce-shopping-credit-card-2607114/ 

Are you in the market for an e-commerce solution? If so, you’ll definitely love this short WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison. I also think you’ll agree creating an online store is a challenging feat. Turns out you can create an online store easily, and in this post, we help you to choose the better e-commerce platform for your needs.

We break down the post into sections such as features, pricing, and support among other things. By the end of it all, you will pick the right platform for your online store. Do you lean towards WooCommerce or Shopify? Let us know that in the comment section at the end.

Without further ado, let us weigh anchor and sail.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Basic Overview

WooCommerce is a plugin that you install on your WordPress-based website. It allows you to add powerful e-commerce features to any WordPress site. On the other hand, Shopify is a subscription-based e-commerce service. You don’t install Shopify; you simply sign up.

WooCommerce requires that you have a WordPress site first. Shopify doesn’t require you to have a website first; it’s a cloud-hosted e-commerce platform. While WooCommerce comes with a long (and often times arduous) configuration process, creating an online store on Shopify is a breeze.

Setting up a site on WooCommerce requires that you’re familiar with web-related things, even though it’s easy stuff once you get the hang of it. Things are a bit tidier with Shopify; setting a store on the platform is akin to signing up for a blog at, say, Blogger.com, or getting an email address at Gmail.com. Well, sort of.

All the same, both platforms come with enough features to launch a highly successful online store, whether big or small. Also, allow me to mention that the e-commerce platform that you end up picking from this comparison post boils down to personal preference and, of course, your needs.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Features

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that ships with enough features to create a basic online store. If you need more features, however, you can count on the wide range of free and premium WooCommerce add-ons.

Out of the box, WooCommerce ships with a ready-to-use cart, a checkout page, shop and a “my account” area where buyers can track orders and view their profiles. On top of that, it comes with five default methods of payment but you can add more.

Other than that, WooCommerce comes with an intuitive admin dashboard that makes managing your online store as easy as A, B, C. And thanks to a dedicated Products menu, you can sell digital and physical products on your e-store like a boss.

In terms of store design, WooCommerce is compatible with most if not all WordPress themes, such as the free BuddyBoss theme, since it’s just a plugin. There are, however, WordPress themes that are specifically made for WooCommerce. As such, designing the perfect e-commerce store is a theme or a developer away.

Shopify, too, shines in the features department what with a slew of nice e-commerce-centric features. Since it is a dedicated e-commerce service, you can expect all the features you need to build small and enterprise-level stores. You also get a free sub-domain (you can add a custom domain later) and free SSL certificate.

On top of that, Shopify comes with a good number of free and premium extensions that allow you to add some nice features to your store. Still, Shopify is incredibly easy to use no matter your experience or coding knowledge.

In the design department, Shopify features hundreds of themes. Well, the number of themes available for Shopify fades in comparison to what’s available for WooCommerce. All the same, the themes are professional and specifically designed for e-commerce.

An intuitive quick-start wizard helps you to set up either, but Shopify’s onboarding process offers you much more convenience. It takes fewer steps and effort to set up a store on Shopify, something we can’t say about WooCommerce.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Performance and SEO

On the web, content is king. Without amazing content, you cannot expect your store to perform well money-wise and on search engines. However, the quality of your content is only one of the more than 200 SEO ranking signals.

Nowadays, page load speed is an important SEO ranking factor. Now, this is where things get tricky, with some users claiming WooCommerce outshines Shopify and/or vice versa. Well, I root for Shopify here because it has dedicated servers that guarantee great speeds and uptimes.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have WooCommerce. The page load times you’ll record on WooCommerce depends on a couple of factors, the most important being the host you choose. Go for dirt-cheap hosts at your own risk – because, come on, what kind of performance do you expect from a host that charges a $1 buck per month.

In terms of performance and SEO, Shopify outshines WooCommerce since Shopify’s engineers do a great work of maintaining the servers for you. You just focus on the business side of things, unlike WooCommerce where you are in charge of site administration among other things.

Both platforms come with great SEO-related features, but that speed thing we just mentioned can be a deal breaker for WooCommerce stores, especially if you end up with a poor host. The chances of getting poor speeds on Shopify are slim.

Photo credits: https://pixabay.com/en/ecommerce-online-shopping-e-commerce-1992280/

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Pricing

As we’ve already mentioned, WooCommerce is a free plugin. However, to add more features, you will need extensions and these don’t come cheap. Your costs can quickly rack up depending on the extensions you choose, and this applies to Shopify as well.

To run a basic e-commerce store, though, you need about $29 bucks a month whether you choose WooCommerce or Shopify. But depending on the time commitment you put towards setting up a store, Shopify is the cheaper option in my opinion.

Besides, Shopify offers you a free 14-day trial to test the waters. You just need a paid plan to start selling. With WooCommerce, you need to find a web host, buy a domain name, set up WordPress, install SSL and then install the e-commerce plugin, before selling.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Support

WooCommerce is open source, meaning you can get help on the support forums at WordPress.org. On top of that, you can sign up on the official WooCommerce site to get support. Shopify, on the other hand, is a commercial e-commerce solution. You get professional 24/7 support via email, chat or phone.

Final Words

Whether you go with Shopify or WooCommerce, running a successful online store is all about providing great value to your users. Endeavor to provide amazing products and user experience, and you’re golden no matter the platform you choose.

WooCommerce has a steeper learning curve compared to Shopify, but once you get used to either of the platforms, the cost, and effort required to run your store depend on the features you need. Shopify is for the entrepreneur who wants to hit the ground running. WooCommerce is perfect for the businessperson who isn’t afraid to play around with myriad settings.

Between WooCommerce and Shopify, which platform do you feel is the better option for your business? Please let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.