Results for: business website

10 Tips To Accelerate The Growth Of Your Business

Steven on November 13, 2019

Building traffic to your site is a necessary part of doing business that can be achieved by accomplishing one task at a time. Very rarely does a website become an instant hit and go from no visitors to 50k overnight.

Take advantage of traffic in the organic listings with a ranking on the first page of search results. 70-80% of people focus on organic listings because they believe they are more inclined to find credible information than the paid listings.

In fact, organic traffic represents a 5.66% more times the opportunity than a paid advertisement.

Push your site to the top of the SERP’s by incorporating the following tips and strategies that will give your website more ranking ability to drive more traffic.

Perform regular maintenance
Make your site faster
Improve mobile-friendliness
Assign your keywords
Establish search intent
Link to and from internal pages
Use alternate forms of media
Optimize for SERP features
Improve your credibility
Build an audience

Perform regular maintenance

Establish a regular routine for when you run a site audit to avoid any errors that may contribute to a drop in ranking. As time goes on, every website will begin to generate errors-especially if there is content being added regularly. Errors could be anything from indexing issues to duplicate content.

An SEO consultant will run a site audit before the start of an SEO campaign. This keeps the data on the new project accurate and relevant. Eliminate any errors that arise before the campaign starts so there is no interference with how the page is being ranked.

Here are a couple of tools you can use to create a report on the errors your site is generating:

Make your site faster

Page speed is an on-going battle and should be a regular item on your to-do list. There is always something you can do to make your site faster. Google has openly stated that page speed is a ranking factor they use so staying below the industry average (three seconds) is one way to give your website a competitive edge.

Run a page speed test on any of the following sites to get a score on the speed of your site and the details for what exactly is slowing your site down. You can use any one of the following tools:

There might be items in your report that are complicated to fix however there are changes you will be able to make to improve the speed of your site.

For example, the size of images is a major issue that slows down a lot of sites. Using a tool of your choice you can replace your images with smaller versions to speed up how fast they load.

Here a few tools to use:

For the other items on your report, you may see things like inline and minify CSS and JavaScript. These may present more problems if you’re not savvy in speaking those languages. There are plugins and CDN (content delivery network) solutions that can help to do most of the heavy lifting for those issues. We recommend checking out a handpicked collection of the best resources to learn Javascript.

Try using W3 Cache plugin, as it’s the most widely used for many of the issues that slow down the load time (minifies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) This plugin can also be integrated with your CDN.

Cloudflare is a popular choice in CDN’s and they offer a free version that is effective in improving your page speed, security, and overall website performance.

Improve mobile-friendliness

Canonical tested one million websites for mobile-friendliness and found that 24% of the website failed the test. This statistic shows the opportunity to outperform competitors in mobile-friendliness.

Image source: https://canonicalized.com/mobile-friendly-study/

Although 99% of websites made today are made for mobile devices, there are sometimes structural elements that should be addressed to make your site mobile-friendly. Test your site out on Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to get a score for the mobile-friendliness of your website.

There may be small adjustments to make that would improve the user experience and make your site more competitive.

Common issues on responsive sites include buttons being too close together or script running too close to the edges of the screen. Issues like these are small adjustments for your developer and will contribute to your competitiveness.

Assign your keywords

Every piece of content that is created for a website should start with extensive keyword research. This is to determine the best target keyword to optimize for as well as the keyword cluster to include on your page.

If two or more pages are optimized for the same keyword, it leads to keyword cannibalization. This will restrict rankings when search engines see two or more pages competing with each other.

Optimize your pages for a target keyword that includes the keyword synonyms associated with your topic. Make sure each page is optimized for a different keyword cluster in order to give it the most competitive edge.

Establish search intent

Semantic search has forced the need for deeper levels of research in order for a website to appear in a top-ranked position. Search engines are ranking pages that can best answer a query based on the content they’ve provided.

Your content must be able to satisfy the user who searches your keyword. If the content on your page leads a user to bounce from your site and continue looking elsewhere they obviously were not satisfied with what you’re providing.

The ability to satisfy search intent is a major ranking criterion that is measured through the content provided and the engagement statistics it generates. Dwell time, click-through rate and bounce rate are all measures of how much a user liked what your site offered.

Get to the source of search intent by finding exactly what users typing in your keyword want to read about. You may be offering the product they ultimately will buy but finding what content they engage in reading about your product will boost the interest people have in your content.

Search forums and social media groups to see the pressing issues and problems people face so you can write about the solutions to those problems in your content.

Link to and from internal pages

Using internal links will enhance the optimization of your pages and spread link equity to give your pages more authority.

Use keyword anchor text links to signal what the page is about and lead users to related content that they will find helpful or interesting.

Signal the importance of a page to your site can be emphasized by the number of links pointing to it from other pages within your site. Create the hierarchy of pages within your site by linking to the most important pages the most times.

Use alternate forms of media

Increased competition and a growing awareness of SEO has placed even more emphasis on producing original content that stands out from the competition. Use alternate forms of media to make your content stand out and rank higher in the search results.

People retain 65% of the information from articles with images as opposed to 10% without images. Videos are shared 12X more on social media than links and text posts combined. Podcasts are also taking off with more Americans listening more frequently (up 32% on a monthly basis) than ever before.

Use as many variations of media when it comes to differentiating your content from your competition. Use what your competitors are using AND what they’re not using to outperform their pages in every way possible.

Optimize for SERP features

For the first time ever, in 2019 Google searches have produced more than 50% zero-click searches. That means that more than half of the searches that are made on Google end up on a Google property with no click at all made to any websites.

The emergence of featured snippets, local packs, knowledge cards are all sucking away the clicks that can be made to any organic listings. If you aren’t optimized for the SERP feature that appears for your keyword, you’re losing out on targeted traffic.

One of the highest converting sources of traffic is from localized searches. 46% of all searches have local intent making local SEO a lucrative addition to driving traffic to your site.

Improve your credibility

Backlinks are still one of the largest ranking factors search engines use to determine the credibility and authority of your website. Ahrefs studied almost a billion pages and concluded that more backlinks equals a higher ranking.

Choose from a variety of methods to build links to your page. The more links you build the more authority your page receives. Get your links from credible sites within the same niche. Keep in mind that websites with higher DA will have a bigger impact on your ranking and improve your site’s authority.

Build an audience

One of the best ways to instantly get eyes on your content is to post to your social media network. If you don’t have one it’s never too late to build one.

Social signals are a ranking factor so it definitely helps to have people sharing your page, however, the real value is in the traffic that flows to your page. Increased traffic brings more potential for new clients and a higher likelihood of your page being linked to by another website.

Continue to stay active in the social media site that is best suited to your industry. If you are producing good content, your audience will build over time and become an incredible asset for traffic generation.

Conclusion

These strategies are among the most influential ranking signals that contribute to pushing your site up in the rankings. Accomplishing each strategy effectively will move the needle and get your site to the first page of results, generate more traffic and fuel the growth of your company.

Christian Carere is an SEO consultant and the owner of Digital Ducats Inc. Christian specializes in SEO services custom-designed to improve traffic and lead generation.

Digital Branding

6 Creative Ways To Market Your Business in 2020

Steven on November 13, 2019

As we head into 2020, it seems like the competition has never been tougher for businesses. With the business world becoming an ever more global market place, companies need to compete against those offering products and services not just down the road, but literally on the other side of the world.

In this context, effectively marketing your business has never been more important. In order to truly stand out from the competition, you need to do something different. 2020 is the year to truly get creative with your marketing! By moving away from the same tactics used by everyone else, you will attract more clients, build your customer base, and the sky will be the limit in terms of growing your business.

Here are 6 creative ways to market your business and take it to the next level in 2020.

1. Partner or sponsor other organizations

Sponsoring another organization or service is a technique that businesses have been doing for a very long time. However in today’s modern world where many modern forms of advertising are no longer effective, or at least less effective than they used to be, having your brand plastered in the eye of many consumers is a great way to reach them. The key here is to be creative in who you partner with – try to find sponsorship opportunities that are on-brand, very visible and a little left-of-center! Sponsorship opportunities could be for brands and products which are around year-round, or for specific events. This is also not a tactic that is limited to the big brands – smaller businesses can get in on sponsorship too, albeit on a smaller scale. Coca Cola may sponsor the Olympics, while an SME may choose to sponsor a local community event! Maid Marines (they’re maid service in NYC), utilizes this strategy to build their online presence, and put them in front of more potential clients.

2. Exhibit at Trade Shows

Trade shows are a great way to market your business. This rather traditional form of marketing can be somewhat overlooked in the context of today’s digital marketing. However, trade shows remain big business and continue to draw thousands of people to each event, of which there are many. Thus shows are a great way to reach new audiences, along with building your brand. They give you the opportunity to engage with potential customers in an in-depth way, allowing them to test products, ask questions and therefore be more likely to buy your product or service. Having an attractive display booth is essential for attracting attention and drawing visitors to your stand. Talk to a specialist like Fret Free Productions in London to get a booth which will make the most of your presence at each trade show.

3. Hold social media contests

Just about every business understands the importance of social media marketing these days. With 70% of the US population, for example, on social media, this is clearly an area that businesses cannot ignore. Over 90% of US businesses use social media, but many are still using the same tired old strategies and boring posts. One great way to engage with your followers and generate some buzz at the same time is through social media contests. There are a variety of ways to do this – picture contests, hashtag contests, caption contests, invite a friend, and so on. All the better if you can hold your contest across multiple social media platforms.

4. Create shareable content

Another way to get ahead of the social media game and stand out from the competition is by creating something truly shareable. This could be an awesome infographic, and inspiring, funny or useful video, or something completely different. This most important thing is that it is something that your audience feels compelled to share with their friends and family. This means that as your content gets shared, it will reach hundreds if not thousands of people, and have much greater reach than if it stayed simply in your own established audience. You do need to make sure that your content is branded (for example that your logo and preferably website are on your infographics) so that people learn who you are!

5. Media outreach

In the age of digital marketing, PR is far from dead – quite the opposite in fact! Now you have double the opportunity to get into the media, through traditional PR to physical publications and digital PR to online ones! A strong PR strategy can be highly effective in promoting your brand, building trust with your audience and ultimately generating more sales. The important thing here is contacts: build a network of contacts in relevant publications, and then offer them something interesting or valuable to publish! Maid Marines (they’re maid service in NYC), utilizes this strategy to build their online presence, and put them in front of more potential clients.

6. Teach your expertise

Marketing in 2020 will be all about value: it is important to offer something of value to your prospects, in order to capture their attention. What better way to give value then to share your knowledge in your particular area of expertise? There are many ways to do this, such as free blogs or guides, e-books, videos, podcasts, and in-person speaking events. From there, you can build a relationship with your prospects while showing your expertise, and they will be begging to hire you or buy your product.

Digital Branding

Types of Purpose-made Website Templates and the Various Usages of Those

Steven on October 21, 2019

A web template or website template is primarily a web page, which is pre-designed with a custom set of elements, which anyone can simply pick and simply plug-in your text or image to build a fully functional website. Unlike the need for custom coding and designing, the pre-built website templates will let anyone, even those who don’t have any knowledge of coding, to set up their professional websites.

Website templates are usually built with HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap codes and will let anyone tweak the layout to set up a unique website. There is no need to hire a professional developer or designer to construct a website. Nowadays, even many of the developers who are into professional website creation make use of these templates to prepare business websites. Website templates will let the amateur web developers build their websites quickly and easily without the need to do the coding from scratch.

Usage of these templates also lets anyone make websites at a reasonable cost, and the entire process of web development is also made less time consuming with the use of templates. The modern-day templates are also coming search engine ready out of the box, so the users can easily search for and find your products and services online. Each template available out there in the website template repositories are also self-contained. You just have to plug-in your unique content as text, images, or videos, and then tweak the layout according to your needs with drag and drop options to complete the layout and publish the website.

Various types of web templates

As discussed above, the website templates come self-contained as downloadable zip files or kind of an online web builder user interface. If you are a bit coding-savvy, then you can use an HTML code editing program also to do the customization. These could be made simply static or highly responsive and dynamic. You can configure these templates to be adaptive to the needs of any mobile or PC browsing. You can also put the file extensions as.htm, .html .php, .asp and so in. In any case, these could be built using the HTM and CSS codes. The modern-day templates are coming responsive out of the box, and the layout could simply flex to the entire width effectively for a comfortable view.

What are all there in the website templates?

Usually, you can find or include text and images (.jpg, .png or .gif formats), HTML5, CSS3 elements, jQuery, shopping carts, payment gateways, contact forms, slideshows, dynamic image galleries PDF download, video, and graphic players, embedded YouTube, etc. to point out a few. The designs and codes of the web templates may vary largely from case to case, so the users need to be very careful and picky while choosing their most appropriate website template. Ensure that you check all the functions of the template as well as the scripts, functions, and applications you need for your website. With the Designmodo free website templates, you can all add custom text, scripts, stock photos, third-party plug-ins, or anything to the template easily to create custom-built pages. The default stock images could also be replaced with the user content like.jpg or .gif images.

The website templates come as standalone zip files, including built-in scripts for multiple pages. There may have been many developers who worked behind it to create these pre-built templates and for the clients. In addition to it, the website templates can also be purchased by the clients and make use of a developer at their end to customize the layout and design. Most of these website templates can be used as a base, and using a professional to complete it will help save a lot of time and effort compared to building a site from scratch. Using website templates, there is also no restriction as to how to customize a website and what all elements to be included in it later. However, you can also have a look at the user agreement while downloading a website template to see if there are any such restrictions.

More about HTML and CSS-based designs

HTML, as well as CSS, are plain text coding languages which can be used for browsers to render the webpage designs. The latest versions are HTML5 & CSS3, which are now considered as the website standards. It is W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, which updates and maintains the standards for these.

The web templates now come in various flavors, and you need to be very careful while considering the options and choose one. You shouldn’t instantly commit to any design without scrutinizing them. It is also ideal to choose one which will be compliant with the current standards and also ply responsive on the mobile screens. Ensure that the website you develop passes the Mobile-Friendly Test by Google.

Adaptive design vs. responsive design

Adaptive web templates are similar to responsive web designs and will consist of the media queries of CSS code. The major difference in terms of adaptive design is that it targets the desktops and mobile devices separately. There could either be a separate design or another set of web pages for each device. Detection of CSS, PHP, jQuery, or ASP could be used to redirect the users from various devices to corresponding web pages. However, there could be many gray areas in adaptive design. On the other hand, responsive web design only needs one type of development. Bootstrap uses a grid-based system with which the web page gets open based on the characteristics of the browser and the device screen on which the website is open.

There are also many web builder systems offered by hosting companies and proprietary CMS providers. However, while combined with the template designs coming packed with the hosting packages, your websites may not be portable, and you will find it difficult to port it to another hosting server later. So, it is best to stay away from such hosting service add-ons, and it’s ideal to choose independent website templates, which you can seamlessly customize and personalize with code updates.

Digital Branding

Guest Posting: How To Find The Right Service Provider For Your Business

Steven on October 20, 2019

Guest posting is one of the most rewarding practices for link building and marketing for businesses from every industry. It not only helps with securing high-quality backlinks but also helps with brand building.

Let us understand first how guest posting can help your business:

It helps bring in referral traffic through contextual links
Your mention on reputable blogs and websites improves your brand recognition
You get to generate more revenue through high in-flow of targetted traffic
You can earn the trust of your audience as a genuine content creator

Having known these benefits of guest posting, you may consider it for acquiring backlinks to your website. But, the time and amount of effort required in blogger outreach and securing backlinks from influencers may seem like a daunting task.

Nevertheless, you can hire SEO reseller services to help you with your guest posting exercise.

Here’s how you can find the right fit for your business.

Start your search from Google

Your old friend Google has answers for everything. You can begin your quest to find the best service provider for your guest posting by searching for relevant terms. For example, you can search for, “list of guest posting service providers”, which would bring up a long list of agencies and SEO companies offering guest posting services.

Sort the most reliable ones

The search result would bring up thousands of companies that offer guest posting services. Obviously it gets tough to sort which one is the best out of these. Here’s a secret tip: choose the ones that rank on the first three pages. These service providers certainly understand how links work, that is why they are ranking at the best positions for the most competitive search term.

Alternatively, you also need to understand that the ones with the best reviews are the most reliable ones. Sort for the ones that have the best customer feedback and highest ratings across various business portals. Once again, Google can help you find these reviews.

Understand the benefits they offer

Apart from simply guest posting, you also need to know if your potential service provider can offer you any other benefits. For example, some agencies offer content creation and blogger outreach services as well in combination with guest posting. Having these services along with the primary task, can reduce your efforts and improve the returns for link building through guest posting.

Place your order and relax

Now that you have all the information to choose the best service provider, the last step is to make sure that their services fit in your budget. Once you have identified the service provider that satisfies all your requirements and that too within your budget, it’s time you start working with them.

At first, you should place a few orders, just to make sure that you’ve chosen the best service. Having made sure that you can rely on your service provider, you can proceed with placing your link building orders with them.

Having said that, it is important that you always keep in touch with your link building service provider to stay on top of the campaigns that are carried out for you.

Digital Branding

4 Useful SEO Tools to Help You in Your Business

Steven on October 19, 2019

There is no online business owner today who doesn’t understand the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). With the online mode becoming the preferred medium for both social and business interactions, the SEO services in Mumbai, Delhi, etc. have gained importance. According to a survey, nearly 93% of the total net users today use the online medium to get the desired information. Looking for the desired information, these users are just interested in clicking on the first few results that get displayed and hardly bother to go past them.

Thus, the focus of the SEO company in Mumbai that you have hired would be to get your business to appear in the first few listings and for that, they make use of various SEO tools. Some of the SEO tools that can help in taking your business to the next level are:

SEO Profiler

Keyword research, link building and researching the keywords used by your competitors are some of the important SEO activities. SEO Profiler is an apt tool that makes it possible to do all these on a single platform. Competitive intelligence research is very much required to gain an edge on your competitors.

This tool, besides providing all these, also offers aesthetically pleasing and detailed reporting features, which can be used for displaying the data that is generated by this tool. It is free for the 30-day trial, post which you have to choose a plan depending on whether you are using it for beginner-level accounts or for professional SEO agencies.

All in One SEO Pack

It is a feature-rich plugin, which is making its presence felt since its debut in 2007. It is used by SEO services in Mumbai, Delhi, etc. as it features automatic title optimization and meta tags, built-in API, Google’s AMP and analytics support and more. SEO beginners, as well as advanced users, find it useful. The beginners often use it with its default settings, while the advanced users override the default settings and create their own custom settings.

WPTouch

WPTouch is again a feature-packed mobile plugin for WordPress and it is also recommended by Google. It is used for creating a mobile-optimized version automatically for a website. The best part is that no code change is required for doing so.

UberSuggest

If you want to gather any data related to your domain name or keyword, you can do so for free using UberSuggest. It is a free program that tells you a keyword’s volume, suggests long-tail keywords related to your content, the average cost per click and shows which site tops the ranking for the particular keyword you have entered. By entering your URL into UberSuggest, you can get all the details about the organic traffic and keywords of your website. It also tells about the backlinks that your site has generated and other similar details.

Making use of the SEO tools helps in improving visibility and rankings on the search pages as they are designed to perform specific tasks brilliantly.

Digital Branding

Driving Website Traffic Through Social Media Needs A Strategic Approach

Steven on October 4, 2019

For most of the business websites, it seems the common goal is to drive more traffic towards their site. Yes, a nicely designed and meaningful website will be of great help but that is actually noted enough when you consider the high competition in this business world, which is highly digitized in all its aspects.

In order to get the best results and more traffic the best platform to use in social media is Instagram. This is because:

This is a primary photo and video sharing app that will help you to showcase your skill, creativity and your product in the best possible way and raise the interest of the audience and
It has the largest number of active users making it easier for you to reach out to a larger section of the crowd in an instant.

Both these features of this platform make it the most suitable platform for business and product promotion as well as raise the number of traffic.

Your profile is crucial

In order to make Instagram work for your marketing strategy, there are a few essential things that you should do. The most essential thing to do is to consider your profile and fill it up properly. This is the most important thing to do because this is the first thing that people will see when they click on your social media page.

Therefore, whether it is Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, your profile will play a significant role in your marketing success and driving more traffic to your site. Therefore, focus on:

Twitter Bio if you want to use Twitter as your business marketing platform
Facebook About section if that is what you decide to use
LinkedIn company page if that is your choice and
Instagram profile if you want to use this most popular photo-sharing platform.

It is ideally the profile that will tell the users about your business and provide info about your product or service, making it a perfect spot to drop a link that will take the users directly to your website. Therefore, your profile equates to more Instagram followers which will result in more traffic and an increased chance of conversion of traffic to your loyal customers.

Social media and traffic

According to research, using social media for business promotion purposes is considered to be the most effective in these present times because it is found to drive 31% of all referral traffic.

You can make it even more effective to drive traffic to your site and get a slice of this huge fan following by adding a few meaningful and relevant backlinks to your site that aligns with your brand. If you can raise the interest of the people with your content and images shared on Instagram, you will not only gain more Instagram followers and more likes and comments, but it will also increase:

Sharing
Discussing and
Promoting.

If people are interested in your product, they will surely click on the link in your Instagram profile and visit your site to get more information about:

Your business
About you and most importantly
About your product.

This will raise the number of traffic count to your site. Gaining further and proper knowledge, it is likely that they will end up making a buying decision, meaning you will have larger sales prospects and revenue for your business.

Promote blog content

Just like the backlinks on your social media profiles will give the users a chance to click-through to see what your business and product is all about, your blog content is another useful component that will enable them to read about it and gain further knowledge. Therefore, focus on your blog content for your business promotion as well as to drive more traffic to your site.

The content of your blog should be:

Clear
Meaningful
Informative and
Easy to read.

It should not be cluttered with too many elements such as images, graphics, and animations in it. It should not be boring so that the readers do not even get to the middle of it and leave your site. Ideally, readers should not search for the things that they are looking for. Everything should be very clear, distinct, and evitable.

Creating a meaningful content

Social media is all about conveying and sharing information. It is, for this reason, your content will play an important role in your social marketing strategy. Creating content for social media will need you to put quite a significant amount of effort, time and planning. If it is not done properly you will find that two months have passed and nothing significant has happened in terms of an increase in traffic to your site.

In order to make sure that only a few people do not feast their eyes on your content and readers do read the entire thing, you need to create 15 blog posts a week and post it on social media. You simply need to create the best one and make it a point that you keep it fresh with some tweaks done on a constant basis. This will help your content to be seen by your ideal customers.

Time it well

Lastly, if you want to see tangible results, you should not post your content any time you feel like. Time it well so that you make sure that the recent followers do not miss it or not get to see a content that you published weeks ago.

You can use a social media schedule so that you can promote your old content. There are lots of tools out there such as Buffer, Social Jukebox, and Hootsuite, that will help you to do it automatically using tools like Buffer, Social Jukebox, and Hootsuite. This will make sure that the audience reads your content whenever you post them.

Remember, using social media for your business is not easy but it is not impossible either. All you need is a little bit of effort and a meticulous plan that will help you to surge ahead.

Author Bio

Ariya Stark has been working on the importance of social media in marketing with thousands of real Instagram followers for her postings.

Digital Branding Legal Branding

Eight Reasons Your Business Should Become an E-commerce Store

Steven on October 1, 2019

Do you avoid putting your business online because you aren’t sure where to start or how you’ll handle the demand? It does take some effort to get your online store set up and manage the additional business. However, it also gives you another source of revenue, particularly during times when cash flow is a trickle.

The amount of U.S. online sales for the second quarter of 2019 was around $146.2 billion. Global studies that show around 40% of consumers bought something online. If you don’t have an e-commerce store, you’re missing out on potential profits that may put you ahead of the game. As a small business owner, anything you do to improve sales could mean the difference between success and failure.

In addition to increased potential revenue, discover eight reasons to transition to an e-commerce store.

1. Collect Customer Data

An online presence gives you a way of connecting with people in your target audience. Offer a discount, a newsletter or other content. Use this information to draw in the buyers you want most, then get them to sign up for your mailing list.

You can even target people in a specific location with your online advertising. Draw customers from your area to your online store while encouraging them to visit your physical site.

2. Put Inventory in the Cloud

No matter what type of business you run, an easily accessible inventory is a must to see what you need and what you have too much of. Small businesses can compete on an international scale with cloud computing. If you have sales agents out in the field, they can also access the inventory via the online portal and mark items sold.

Bon Bon Bon creates artisan chocolates in Detroit, Michigan. When they took their stores online, they knew they needed a highly-responsive e-commerce design to highlight their unique confectioneries. They highlight the ability to build your own box, a customized experience similar to what you’d see in a brick-and-mortar store.

3. Automate Customer Service

Customer service can make or break your store. An online presence, on the other hand, gives you a chance to automate most interactions. For example, you can add a live chat feature to your website’s product page. Most bots are automated, able to answer common queries — like a product’s best uses or ingredients — without human interference.

Train agents to deal with customers who buy online and in-store. A multi-channel customer service approach makes your brand highly attractive to young professionals.

4. Offer a Wide Variety

With drop shipping, you don’t have to worry about display space. Therefore, you can offer a wide range of products in your online store. E-commerce is an excellent place to experiment with items you wouldn’t usually carry but would like to test out. Order a limited quantity and see how they move before committing to a large volume.

Costco is well-known for its wholesale stores. However, they also have an online presence where they offer things you can’t purchase in-store. They separate offerings by the department, including a section called “Business Delivery,” where businesses can order in bulk and have items delivered.

5. Solidify Your Branding

Reaching people and making your brand a household name is difficult on a local level. Sure, you can attend local trade shows, send out coupons in mailers and advertise in your newspaper, but many people will simply overlook these efforts.

On the other hand, you can send out highly targeted digital ads, drive people to your online store and convert them into buyers. A website offers the opportunity to post articles on topics related to what you sell. After, share your expertise on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

6. Market Special Promotions

You likely offer specials from time to time, but it’s difficult to let everyone know about your promotions. With an online store, you can begin to collect emails. When you have a new announcement — BOGO sale going on! — send the ad to everyone at once.

You can also advertise specials on Facebook or Google, targeting users based on their location. This method, called geolocation, ensures only consumers within a certain radius gets the message.

Taylor Stitch offers to clothe online and in brick-and-mortar stores. You’ll find similar items in both. However, one advantage to the online store is expanded sizes and more color choices compared to what you’ll find in the physical location. Once shoppers know their sizes and how things fit, they can go online and place additional orders without the need to visit the store and try pieces on.

7. Tap into Different Needs

Some people are very tactile. They want to come into a store and touch items before buying. Other people hate getting out in the crowds and would rather shop at home. If something doesn’t fit or they don’t like it, they’ll return it to the store.

An online version of your store taps into the needs of different users and allows you to reach people where they’re most comfortable.

8. Sell More for Less

The overhead costs of online stores are far less than renting a building, hiring employees to staff a retail location and paying for utilities. Instead, you only have the cost to host and maintain your site, plus employees needed to fulfill the orders.

When you open an e-commerce store, you create a new outlet for selling goods without spending additional money. The result is more profit for your business.

E-commerce Is a Process

In the beginning, your online store may not pay for itself. However, as it starts to turn a profit, and you become smarter with your marketing efforts, you can invest more time and money into dynamic advertising geared at specific, individual users.

Your strategic campaigns will become highly-personalized and more successful. With a little effort, you’ll find your e-commerce store is a vital part of your business model.

About the author

Lexie is a branding enthusiast and web designer. She loves checking out local flea markets and taking her Goldendoodle on hikes. Follow her on Twitter @lexieludesigner and check out her design blog, Design Roast.

Legal Branding

How a Blog Influences Business Marketing Strategies

Steven on September 9, 2019

The digital world has become quite a noisy place. For brands, this means that the struggle to stay on the surface, memorable, and noticeable is now greater than it has ever been. It’s not just that other companies, your competitors that have come to take over a slice of their digital pie, it’s also about individuals who clog the internet’s arteries with the content of all sorts, making it much more difficult for people to find your content which actually delivers value.

Any brand’s marketing strategy serves to overcome these complex hurdles, and it’s never a simple strategy with a handful of approaches that delivers results. Any marketing expert will tell you that paid ads alone have no chance without the support of organic engagement, ongoing content creation, email campaigns, social media, and many other digital marketing features. This time, let’s focus on how your blog impacts your marketing outcomes and how it can help you preserve your brand’s relevance.

Build authority around your brand

When Microsoft speaks about internet security and shares their tips on how to make your online behavior safer – the entire world shuffles in its seat and listens up. This kind of authority is built over decades, and it takes time to take the throne of any given industry, and even more to retain it. You might not have the scope, or the reach of Microsoft and similar players, but your goal should nonetheless be the same, to become a leader in your field.

Blogs are a perfect tool for just that. Blogging has become a key resource for defining and refining your brand’s voice, one that lets you show the world how useful your products or services can be without directly selling them. That is why marketers use blogs to build trust in the brand’s given industry so that they can leverage that trust down to the line to increase sales, subscriptions, social media participation, and more.

Increase engagement rates

Your marketers thrive on engagement. When they spot a content piece that spikes your customers’ interest and gets them talking and discussing relevant topics, they’ll be all over your content team to deliver more, equally effective content. Why? Because ultimately, engagement on your website and on social media profiles where you share your blogs, lead to greater recognition from search engines, better SERP positioning, and more visibility.

When people start talking about and sharing your content, more people will see it, share it, and talk about it. This incredibly brilliant cycle of engagement helps your marketing team spread brand awareness through your blog posts, and increase your chances of conversions.

Boosts conversion rates

And this is where marketers truly flip of pure joy at the mention of successful blogs for any brand. All the resources you invest in a wide array of marketing tactics serve a common goal: to get more visitors to become your customers. That, however, cannot be done with the help of a single isolated blog post, no matter how successful it may be. It takes dedication, consistency, and creativity to constantly deliver blog content that shows just how relevant your brand is.

To achieve such creativity and consistency, many brands work with a reputable digital creative agency to take over their content creation needs and create a blogging strategy that will complement their entire marketing output. Only a well-rounded marketing approach, sealed with a blogging strategy, can boost conversion rates consistently and on a long-term scale. Each effective call to action you add to your blog has the potential to turn your readers into buying customers. And each time you write a gripping blog with valuable information, you slowly qualify those leads one at a time.

Inspires loyalty among your customers

Once a purchase is made thanks to all that blogging effort, you have the opportunity to use your content to transform them from one-time shoppers into loyal customers. Unlike your paid ads and other content that’s promotional in nature, your blog is anything but. It has all the potential in this world to instill trust in your readers. And when you consistently deliver content that exceeds their expectations, they will look to you for tips and advice.

Suddenly, your paid ads and your sponsored posts no longer seem so intrusive, now that you’ve earned their trust. They might even perceive them as a useful way to find out about deals and sales, contests, and freebies. Blogs are a potent tool to help give meaning and substance to all other marketing tools you choose to use.

Solve real customer problems

Your brand already exists in order to solve a problem for your customer, enhance their quality of life, or provide them with the kind of entertainment they crave. Sometimes, however, your customers need that nudge in the right direction to realize that your brand can have a meaningful role in their life. Enter: blog posts that offer real-life solutions for real-life problems related to your industry.

Not only do you build authority around your brand, but you effectively provide free advice to your readers, who will recognize the value of what you’re sharing. They will also recognize your brand’s place in the problem-solving equation and reach the conclusion on their own, without pushy sales tactics.

Blogging means playing the long game, where you reap some immediate rewards, but the benefits that come later can shape your brand into an industry leader that it aspires to be. Recognize the potential your blog has for your marketing success, and you’ll be able to use it for all other aspects of your business growth, too.

Digital Branding

Doing it Yourself or Phoning It In: How Should You do Website Maintenance?

Steven on August 28, 2019

https://live.staticflickr.com/3702/10363851703_39505e02b0_z.jpg

A great business website is not a one-off thing. You can’t just pour all your effort and resources into creating it once and hoping that it will perform at a high level continuously even if you don’t maintain it on a regular basis. In order to ensure that your website is doing its job when it comes to marketing your business, you need to perform regular website maintenance.

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is the process of regularly performing checks on your websites to monitor its performance, as well as making sure that the content is kept relevant and updated. Another key process of website maintenance is looking for any bugs in the website’s features and functionality. The main goal of website maintenance is to make sure that your website is healthy, performing properly, and there are continuous traffic and growth. It also ensures that your Google rankings are kept high.

Whether you have a small business or a large enterprise, keeping your website well-maintained is critical to ensuring that your business is healthy so that you can retain old customers as well as acquire new ones. While smaller businesses might get away with cutting a few corners here and there, this still does not mean that these companies can survive for long without proper website maintenance.

How Do I Conduct Proper Website Maintenance?

There is a list of tasks that you should perform on a regular basis in order to perform website maintenance properly. You can break these down into four time periods: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

Necessary Weekly Tasks:

Backup and Update
Check for Broken Links or Loading Errors
Checking your Key Metric Performance

Necessary Monthly Tasks:

Update Content
Check loading speed
Review security protocols

Necessary Quarterly Tasks

Review and update website design and images
Check SEO metrics
Run some test purchases
Test website on all possible browsers
Review and update advertising and marketing campaigns

Necessary Yearly Tasks

Renew the domain name
Perform a thorough user utility test

Is Website Maintenance Really Important?

As you can see above, website maintenance is a process that grows on itself so you want to make sure that you always do each step properly to prevent future problems. Luckily for you, there are new tools that come out every year that allows you to perform website maintenance properly. However, you do need to invest the time and effort into learning how to use these tools correctly and efficiently achieve the results that you want.

Speaking of which, what results do you want to achieve?

High-ranking SEO results

Any website’s goal is to achieve a high Google ranking by using the latest SEO techniques. If you use the right SEO methods to increase your website’s ranking, Google will feature your website on the top of any related search inquiries. In a nutshell, Google rewards websites with updated and relevant information with high results and penalizes outdated or security-risk websites with lower search results. Your website might even get de-indexed if it falls to a low enough ranking!

Regular Customer Attraction and Engagement

Once your website has gained traction and is regularly receiving customer traffic, it’s now important to maintain the website in order to keep the current customers and attract new ones.

Updated Security

This is arguably the most important reason to perform website maintenance, especially if you are running an e-commerce store. Since you will be handling sensitive information such as bank account and credit card numbers, you want to guarantee that your customers will remain safe from online threats such as data breaches and hacking.

Strong Business Brand and Image

If you invest in regular website maintenance, you will show your customers that you care about having a professional image. Customers often think websites that have a clean and professional design is likely to provide a better service.

How Much Will It Cost Me, or Can I Do it Myself?

Now, the most important question: how much will website maintenance services cost me? It’s actually quite easy to calculate the actual cost of website maintenance services, but it’s not only a matter of whether or not you can afford the money. The more important question here is whether you can afford to perform website maintenance tasks by yourself.

What does that mean?

Well, think of it this way: if you have a leaky pipe at home, you might be thinking of fixing it yourself. If you have the proper tools and experience, you might want to fix the problem to save the cost of hiring a professional. However, if the problem is too complicated, you might be causing more damage by trying to fix it yourself!

This is the same idea that you should apply when thinking of performing website maintenance yourself. If you have the experience and tools, you can perform website maintenance tasks yourself. However, if you don’t have experience in the latest SEO techniques, online security protocols, or updated website design trends, you should consider hiring a professional to do these tasks for you.

Digital Branding

Clean Up the Website, Maintain Stable Development Environment

Steven on August 26, 2019

Whether you are a web developer or the owner, the website represents your working environment. Situations when you have to work fast or solve some problem, soonest possible, are often and frustrating. Sometimes your income depends on it, or you are at risk to lose clients or customers because the website loads slower than usual. Problems are many.

A website can be a target of a hackers’ attack or some other unfortunate issues can compromise the quality of it. Especially in the world of web development, main tasks such as testing, debugging, and coding depends on the website’s smooth run.

Developers can hardly achieve quality and reliable results in an unstable environment while the website owners run business with a lot of difficulties. One solution, when you get in trouble with the website, is to engage outside’s developers to support, but this is also the most expensive one. However, this is not necessary and there is a simpler solution at disposal you can use on your own, anytime you need. WP Reset plugin is built to enable complete restore of original website settings while you are keeping control over the process. The plugin is fast and accurate, empowered with several fail-safe mechanisms.

Maintain the Website by Checking and Updating It Regularly

Websites change over time, become more complicated, overwhelmed with all kind of content, and most importantly, they constantly grow. If they remain unchanged, the competition will beat them. You have to be aware that working hard on your website is not enough for success.

The quality of it has to remain uninterrupted, and you can ensure that only with the proper maintenance. That means, check your website regularly, keep it updated and engaged to retain visitors. Remember that every visitor is a potential customer, and routine maintenance can be of crucial importance. If you tend to provide continuous traffic and strengthen Google rankings, your site should run smoothly all the time.

While building your website, think on the theme and plugins you will need to operate your blog or business, but do not waste your time on multiple installations of those without a clear purpose. Unnecessary tools, along with the various content you no longer need might lead to some issues which will seriously affect the work of your website and consequently your business. Keeping the website clean and simple means that you should occasionally clear out everything you no longer need.

How to Solve Website Issues?

WordPress offers a long list of user-friendly plugins which are supposed to help users by solving almost every issue. However, useful tools for image optimization or those intended to delete old posts revisions sometimes are not enough to unburden the website.

A careful checkup will show you which issue you should fix immediately, what can you do to improve the website performance, but remember that you will need days to do it manually. And why should you if there is a better solution? Sometimes, the best is to get back to default settings and start from scratch. WP Reset Plugin is equipped with standard and special features you can use at will and according to your needs while you keep the track of every change.

In that way, it is almost impossible to make a mistake and delete something you did not want to. If you are a web developer, you will prefer the command-line tool, while the other users’ choice is single-click reset. In both cases, the best is to get introduced to WP Reset plugin in-depth. It features many different options providing you multiple choices on how to clean up the website.

Complete or Partial Reset

Complete reset is not always necessary when the website slows down or shows some other failures. As the owner or developer, you know best which part of the website should you intervene in. Selective reset tool is customizable to your personal preferences enabling you to get rid of specified content, individual tables, pages, or even comments.

You can use it instead of complete reset and retain what you need. With the less than a minimum of manual work, you can refresh the website and make it more pleasant users experience. Post-reset setup is completely adaptable to your personal preferences, which means – you can keep themes and plugins, for example. It is very convenient for those who had got used to the chosen website environment. Advanced features of the WP Reset plugin are more favored by developers. In a way, this plugin has brought relief because the original WordPress installation is available as many times as needed. It shortens hours of work when it comes to testing and debugging. These processes usually need to be done fast and soonest possible which is hard if the development environment is not supportive. Having the opportunity to conduct detailed check of an active website, preserving data, and still have the opportunity to develop in a default installation is what the users of the WP Reset appreciate most. Safety is one of its best characteristics since the files remain unchanged.

Website maintenance is a serious job to be done in different forms on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. If there is a while since you have the website, you probably have the check-list considering loading time of pages, security, backups, broken links, etc. Despite your effort to do everything by the book, you will need some improvements over time, and you will need the help of plugin to avoid wasting time and the risk of losing data. Using WP Reset plugin is safe. Multiple fail-safe mechanisms guarantee that while in-house support is in charge to provide help or answer the questions considering this open-source software. WP Reset is a fast, reliable and safe contributor to the well-done business.

Proper website maintenance depends on a plan. Make it according to your needs and follow the dynamic of your website. Sooner or later you will have to clean it up, and every help will be welcomed. With such a serious approach, your website will consistently run smoothly and without any difficulties. Users experience is crucial for its success. You have already invested time and energy to build it, but remember to invest in website maintenance as well.