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Digital Branding

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

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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

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.

Digital Branding

4 Strategies to Build Brand Awareness for Your Ecommerce Business

In the digital world, when someone says “Apple,” you’re more likely to think of the brand that gave us the Mac, iPad, and Siri, instead of the fruit. 

That’s how effectively a brand name can leave a mark in our minds.

Now imagine having that kind of brand power for your ecommerce business.  

Although the journey to establishing a successful brand can be unique to each business, there are techniques you can use to get your brand to your target market successfully. 

In this post, let me share with you four strategies to build brand awareness for your ecommerce business. 

Let’s dive right in.

1. Share Your Brand Story

The concept behind why storytelling can be an excellent marketing technique is simple: people love hearing a success story. 

Your brand’s story gives your brand more depth and something your audience can connect with, which makes it an excellent element to add to your marketing efforts. 

For instance, technology company GoPro wrote on their website how the company founder Nick Woodman “started with a 35mm camera and a wrist strap made from old wetsuits and plastic scraps.” 

Now, the company has grown internationally and “has sold over 26 million GoPro cameras in more than 100 countries.”

Weaving this kind of narrative into your marketing strategy lets your audience “feel” the experience in your story, which helps build a connection and establish trust with them. 

When people trust your brand, they are more likely to come back, buy again, and tell other people about you. 

Your brand’s story can be anything. 

It can be a narrative of your product development journey, founder, or how the idea for your product was born as a solution to a problem.

People like hearing stories, and you can use that to your advantage with a narrative that gets your message and brand across to your target audiences.

2. Develop Your Brand Identity

Your product can leave a lasting impression on your customers even after they make the purchase and your brand identity shapes that impression.  

For instance, when someone mentions M&M’s, you’ll immediately think of those red and yellow button-shaped characters frequently shown in their commercials.

Through their iconic characters and marketing campaigns, M&M’s brand personality presents their product as fun, creative, and witty, plus, it’s something that people can easily relate with. 

There are plenty of ways to put a “face” to your brand, but one of the best ways to establish your identity is through your logo

If you’re on a tight budget, you can use online logo generators to help design your logo, or you can hire professional designers to do it for you.

Here’s a tip: If you want to tap into the creativity of the people on the internet, you can get your logo through design services such as LogoMyWay Designers.    

Through the service, you can run a logo design contest and select the best design of your choice. 

Your logo is also crucial for your other marketing efforts – such as using it for your ecommerce website and ads – since customers associate it with your brand and products. 

When designed appropriately, your logo can help you leave a good impression on your target audience, build trust with your potential customers, and ultimately lead them to buy. 

3. Create Interactive Content

In today’s digital age, there are many things to consider, such as building an effective business website, your customers’ needs, and the latest trends. 

More and more people prefer using visual mediums to communicate and interact. 

Thus, you need to shift your brand awareness strategies to cater to this kind of customer preference and improve how your customers interact with your brand.    

An excellent strategy to engage your target audience is through interactive content like videos.

With videos, you can create interactive and fun product demos that show your target audiences how to use your products and the benefits they can get.

For example, makeup brand FentyBeauty posts “Tutorial Tuesdays with Rihanna” on their YouTube channel, which shows viewers makeup looks that you can do with their products.

This is a great way to engage your target audience, offer them value that your products can give, and raise your brand awareness by giving them a unique experience with your brand.

Also, through videos, you can convey your message creatively and interactively that help make your target audiences feel like you’re talking to them personally, which helps you build a relationship with them.    

4. Run Social Media Contests

With social media, running a contest to boost your brand visibility can be easier now more than ever. 

Picture this.

You’re scrolling through Instagram to see what your favorite celebrities are up to and suddenly you find a post that asks viewers to “tag a friend” to win a contest. 

That got your attention, right?

From scrolling through your newsfeed, you’re suddenly interested in the brand, what the contest is all about, and what you can win.  

Now imagine applying that same strategy to your target audiences. 

With a social media contest, you can draw your target audience’s attention to your brand without being too promotional.  

It’s also a good marketing tactic because it offers the chance of getting value with the least amount of effort. 

After all, who wouldn’t want to win a contest just by sharing a post and tagging a friend, right?

You can use hashtags like #tagafriend for your social media contests, have the social media influencers your work with share the post, and run your it across your multiple social accounts.

That being said, social media contests can spread like wildfire, which makes them effective marketing tactics for your brand visibility throughout your social media accounts. 

If you want to target specific audiences or know the kind of content that they are looking for, you can use social media monitoring tools to improve your social marketing efforts.

Social media contests are also highly effective at creating user-generated content (UGC) from customers, which holds a lot of marketing power. In one study, consumers say they trust other people’s recommendations more than they believe in curated content by marketers.

That is why UGC is essential for any business’s marketing campaigns. Whenever you promote a new product or seasonal brand custom packaging, generate a buzz around it by organizing a social media contest where customers create content featuring the product.

What’s Next? 

Building your brand awareness for your ecommerce business requires more than just the strategies in this post. 

However, by employing these techniques, you are on the right track to raising your brand visibility, building trust with your target audience, and establishing relationships with your potential customers.

SaaS Branding

5 Tips To Help You Build A SaaS Business

Validate Your Idea

It doesn’t matter what kind of software product you are interested in creating, everything starts with an initial idea. It is always a bonus to be original. However, the success of your Saas business will mainly depend on the quality level of your software system as well as the market need for the product you want to develop. After all, insufficient consumer interest in a product is the main reason why 42 percent of all startup businesses fail.

Imagine that you want to launch a beacon proximity marketing platform for medium- and small-sized retail businesses. What is your plan for it? The first thing you should consider is a feature set that can help you stand out from your competitors (which includes some high-profile vendors including Beaconstack, Swirl, Moca, and Google) and get multiple use cases created for your product. The second thing you should do is determine the number of companies that actually use beacons and figure out what their pain points are (being unable to measure customer satisfaction and engagement, high volumes of sensor data, and the high cost of getting a dedicated mobile app developed, etc.). 

You should also address the concerns of shoppers: 64 percent of consumers choose not to opt into in-store tracking due to potential infringement of their privacy and message overload. You probably realize at this point that it is simply a dead-end to get hung up with proximity marketing. Is your product able to address needs such as monetization of beacon-generated information and smart asset management? Does it make sense for you to have a dedicated app created that supports your analytics platform (and try to challenge giants such as RetailMeNot)? Find it is a good idea to develop an MVP, gather feedback from customers, read our guide on SaaS KPIs, and adapt the scope if necessary. 

Develop Your Monetization Strategy

Although a majority of Saas companies prefer giving their product away for free to get a solid user base established, more forward-thinking SaaS entrepreneurs like Chris Savage (Wistia) and Tom Kuzler (Aweber) recommend that you start out using a paid plan, and then study consumer behavior, get your product polished, and then proceed to offer a freemium without running into the risk of underpricing your SaaS product. Having a small amount of paying customers (and lots of time to spend on your customer service) is an excellent way to keep advancing your business, get your product tailored to the needs of your customers and retain users.

Develop a Strong Tech Team

Let’s return to the beacon analytics platform: There are other similar Saas offerings (the joint project by Swirl and Mist, for example) that incorporate innovative technology such as virtual beacons, machine learning algorithms for analyzing sensor data, GPS tracking solutions, mobile SDKs that allow customers to connect current mobile applications with the system, and Cloud-based business intelligence apps.

Therefore, you need to develop a strong and skilled in-house team (six to eight senior and middle developers) for handling software development as well as ongoing maintenance for several months in a row – and it may take years for trails to be converted into paying customers. To eliminate or reduce insurance costs and office space and obtain access to new pools of talent, EU and US SaaS entrepreneurs frequently hire overseas software developers (with Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe heading the list of the most popular destinations for outsourcing). Also, going offshore is an excellent way to lower your software development costs (which can be an issue for startup companies that are on a shoestring budget). That said, your team needs to have a CTO – otherwise, you may have a difficult time raising enough VC capital for your business.

Keep UX In Mind When Creating High-Performance Software

Be careful with Fixed Price contract. You will most likely need to make changes to the scope of your project. The only that you can ensure cost-effectiveness and flexibility is to choose the Time and Material pricing model.

Second, it is a good idea to partner up with a leading Drupal/WordPress/IoT/mobile development services company with an impressive portfolio and then stay hands-on with the entire project. Don’t underestimate a UI design’s power: a few years ago there were three experienced nurses who failed to determine how to set a medication reminder set up properly and as a result, a patient was dehydrated to death. Your customers are non-technical people who expect user-training videos, short registration forms, clear calls to action, and contextual menus. As long as your customers are able to solve setup-related issues without having to speak with a customer support specialist, then that means you have done a great job.

Market Your Product Correctly

You should actually start to market your SaaS solution well before your product goes live. Get a good explainer video and landing page created. Launch a Facebook or Google AdWords campaign to drive traffic over to your website. Another good idea is to get several informative articles published on your corporate website as well as reputable third-party websites that highly the benefits that your product offers. It also can help to get involved with startup events and get press coverage from some leading IT portals. Spread the word as much as possible and you will be successful.   

How Can You Start a Successful SaaS Business?

You are probably thinking that it’s going to cost you a fortune to get a decent SaaS product developed and years to recover your marketing and software development expenses.

Before giving up on your SaaS business, you should read this incredible Kissmetric posts written by Ryan Shank who was able to develop a SaaS business (analytics and call tracking software) for under $40,000. In particular, I want to compliment the decision made by Mr. Shan to contract a company employed developer (instead of freelance software engineers who don’t always have the necessary PM skills and expertise to ensure your project is delivered in a smooth manner).

Then there is Dropbox. This multi-billion company took a non-traditional approach to MVP development. They created an inexpensive but highly informative and creative explainer video which helped the company grow its beta waiting list overnight from 5,000 up to 75,000 users.

As long as you are able to come up with a fresh concept, develop your software project requirements that are based on feedback from customers, and get a reliable vendor contracted for creating an MVP, then you should be able to get angle funding to raise money via Kickstarter. Then follow up using the tips provided above!

Digital Branding

3 Benefits of Shoppable Instagram Posts for Your E-Commerce Business

There are numerous features of Instagram coming up over the last few years. One of which is the shoppable posts of the photo-sharing platform, among others. The feature will take your e-commerce business to another level and boost your sales. The shoppable post option helps brands in tagging their products on sale within an Instagram post. It will make the life of online shoppers easy because they can shift from your Instagram post to your e-commerce website’s ‘Add to cart’ section with a few simple clicks. 

According to an article published on https://www.inc.com, big brands like Vogue, GS as well as Elle USA will test the tagging products option in their posts, which can be purchased via Instagram. Read on to learn about the three benefits of shoppable posts for your online store. 

1. Beneficial for small e-commerce businesses

The photo-sharing site will benefit small e-commerce brands if they use one-off and bespoke content. Make sure you post simple but appealing pictures and videos relevant to your business. Your shoppers will love viewing such posts. Apart from photos or videos, interesting or funny captions interacting with your prospects will help you grow your e-commerce business. The use of apt and related hashtags that your customers use will boost engagement level for your e-commerce business. Use not more than 4-5 hashtags! It will help in growing your community and once you realize your business objectives, including a couple of shoppable posts into your feed. It will result in a better fan following and leads. Besides, you can gain накрутитьлайки в инстаграм. What more do you want? 

2. Improves your storytelling abilities 

Shoppable posts will boost your sales, especially if you are into the beauty, food, furniture, art, crafts, and décor business. Spend some time creating attractive Instagram posts related to a context that will enhance your natural storytelling cachet. Moreover, the story will make sense to your targeted audience. You need to build a narrative with your Instagram shoppable posts. All you need to do is collect products you want to sell, brainstorm ideas, and create a narrative theme for your shoppable posts. 

Weaving a good story will drive user engagement, thus piquing consumer interest to shop for your products. 

3. Positive impact on your audience 

Instagram’s new shoppable posts feature will help you outshine your competitors in the e-commerce landscape provided you know the rules of the game. Then, determine what your potential customers want from your e-commerce website. Reap the benefits out of Instagram Stories in a creative way to produce a positive impact on your current and potential customers. Consult with micro-influencers, test with video content, including a couple of vertical video content. 

Try testing every Instagram feature to help you to expand your e-commerce business and improve the bottom line. The top brands are doing it and so can you. It will take some of your time and effort to see positive results. 

Conclusion 

Shoppable Instagram posts are the best that can happen to any e-commerce business, small or big. Make the most of this new feature to generate leads and turn them into your loyal customers. 

Author Bio

Ariya Stark is the owner of a fashion brand, and she has admitted to using her social media profiles for gaining website traffic. She also visits накрутитьлайки в инстаграм for getting more likes on her posts.

Digital Branding

10 Autoresponder Benefits For Business Marketing Strategies

These days, you should use an autoresponder for your local marketing strategies. This marketing tool will send your messages out automatically to individuals who have an interest in your business. It is also the best way to stay in contact with your customers and prospects. The key is inviting them to become subscribers for your messages about your services, products, and business. It is automatic, easy, and one of the best returns on your marketing investment that your company will ever achieve.

1. Turn anonymous visitors to your website into subscribers.

When people show up at your website for the very first time, one of the best ways to start a conversation with those visitors is to offer something valuable to them in exchange for them providing you with their email address and name. The best marketing automation software services usually recommend that this is a trial offer, a no-obligation consultation, a free report, or anything else that is of high quality and has a high perceived value. After a visitor subscribes to your autoresponder series you can keep sending them email messages for as long as you want, or until they unsubscribe.

2. Easily build long term relationships with your subscribers.

Since you are able to write automated messages ahead of time and have your messages scheduled to be sent automatically to your subscriber list on whatever date and at whatever time of day you specify, you can send a message to all of your subscribers very easily any time you want to Your autoresponder can do all of your work automatically for you on a 24/7 basis. Whenever subscribers hear from you regularly it builds that expectation that they will continue hearing from later in the future as well.

3. Allow you to do continuous marketing without needing to hire additional people.

Since your autoresponder can send out marketing messages to your customers and prospects regularly, it won’t be necessary for you to hire additional staff to do the marketing. That can save on marketing dollars and your marketing department investments will enjoy a much higher return.

4. Follow-up error-free without missing any customers.

It can be hard to follow-up with everyone you meet. However, when you use an autoresponder to send marketing messages about your products, services, and business, it won’t ever miss a single customer or prospect who has subscribed to your mailing list. They will always receive the messages that you send out to them.

5. Constant communication generates repeat sales

It is very likely that people who like doing business with you will continue doing business with your company regularly. Especially if you have services or products that they basis often. When you use an automatic messaging system to send out messages about your services and products, it will remind your customers to purchase what they need from your company automatically and regularly. An automated selling tool is the best thing that a business can have!

6. More subscribers will be led to your website or blog.

When you sent out messages to your subscribers, one of the things that you can do is direct them to your website, your blog, your video channel, or articles. These are all different channels that provide useful information on your business. If your business has things that people want, they will want to know how they can obtain your company’s offerings. They can be directed by an autoresponder message to the precise location that they need to learn more about what they know to know to make their purchasing decision.

7. Receive measurable results.

There are measuring devices built into autoresponders that will tell you the locations of your subscribers. You also will be provided with information that shows you which of your messages have been ready by the most people so you can format messages in the future in ways that get more subscribers to open them. You can determine the best time of day for sending out your message so that your subscribers read them right away. Your autoresponder will track how many new subscribers you get each day. These results can be used to determine what future messages and information you want to send out to your subscribers.

8. Ensures improved e-mail delivery.

Autoresponders have been specially designed to deliver emails on time to your entire subscriber list. Specialized autoresponder systems work a lot better compared to other types of e-mail delivery systems. That allows you to be confident that your subscribers are getting your messages delivered to them.

9. Use your e-mails to help brand yourself.

You can brand your company and yourself in the e-mails that you send out to your subscribers by adding your contact information, your tagline, your logo, or anything else you would like to emphasize about your business.

10. Allows you to duplicate your efforts very easily.

All of the above tasks can be duplicated after you have done them once for your list. You can have separate lists for different product lines, groups of subscribers, other services, or whatever other reason you might have for wanting to have separate lists for sending out messages.

Digital BrandingLocal Branding

How to Nail Your Small Business Branding 

Do you believe that branding is only meant for large corporations and companies in the world? If your answer is yes, then you will be surprised to know that small businesses need branding just as much as the market leaders. However, you should also know how to get it right. 

Remember- starting a small business is only the first step but you can take these additional steps to take your enterprise to the next level with branding:

1. Start with a Logo

One of the most important aspects of a brand is the logo- there is no question about it. You can study various examples like Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple, etc. All of them are considered top brands and they all have iconic logos. What this goes to show is that even if yours is a small and generic business, you can project it as a big and trustworthy brand by creating a unique logo. Then, once you are happy with your logo you can work on improving your brand awareness. This can be done in several ways. For instance, you may wish to Create Stickers with Cricut as this can be a great marketing tool, especially for small businesses.

2. Work on Your Relationship with Customers 

You can’t build a brand without bolstering your bond with your customers. So, learn how to build strong customer relationships online and apply methods that can help them trust you more easily. These include improving your public messaging, becoming more accessible to the customers, and providing better customer service.

3. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Social media provides you one of the most inexpensive ways to market your business. You can use it to connect to your target demographic and also open a channel for them to communicate with you i.e. share feedback and complaints. This can go a long way in establishing a brand.

4. Find Your Voice

Let’s say that you sell handcrafted wood furniture in a particular city. If you have competition, then how will you stand out? If all the businesses sell handcrafted furniture, then what makes you special? Well, branding is the answer.

By finding your unique voice, you can attract new customers easily no matter how crowded the marketplace is. There are various ways you can go about it too. For instance, you can create a brand that’s all about providing employment to the veterans, or you could be a brand that appeals to the college students who need affordable and long-lasting chairs, tables, etc. 

5. Don’t Let Your Customers Down

Small businesses often take unethical measures to fight competition which is the opposite of what you want to do if you want to create a brand. For instance, some businesses start offering subpar products or ignore the complaints of their customers which only hurts their reputation. 

Strong brands have strong customer bases because the customers take pride in being their patrons. That’s something which can only happen if you offer exceptional customer service and treat them with the best products that you can provide.

6. Never Take Your Eyes off the Target Demographic

As a business owner, you want as many customers as possible. However, you simply can’t sell to everyone. There is only a small portion of the market that you can target for your products/services. So, it’s important that your messaging, logo, slogan, etc. are appealing to the kind of individuals you want to focus on. 

Brands are important to small businesses, and there is no way around it either if you want to maintain your market position. That said, the tips shared above are quite effective and proven to work. So, apply as many of them as possible and you will see a considerable rise in foot traffic/online traffic to your store/website. Good luck!

Digital Branding

Seeing the Red Flags: How to Spot Fake Printing Businesses Online

https://www.pexels.com/photo/coward-cowardly-crime-cyber-crime-271078/

 

There is no denying that the Internet has made doing business easier, more convenient, and faster. However, the sad fact is that while you also want to ensure that all that speed and convenience also comes with safety and security issues. There are so many websites that are scams, fraudulent, or fake. The ease and speed of the Internet has given rise to so many cybercrimes that it has ballooned into a $1.5 trillion (yes, with a “T”) industry.

There are many types of cybercrimes, such as third-party content injection (where external parties can “inject” content into your system where you connect to unsecured WiFi connections), fraud ($40 brand new iPad anyone?), or most commonly, phishing.

 

What is Phishing, exactly?

Phishing is a type of cybercrime where a scammer will try to gain your sensitive information, particularly financial information, by providing false pretenses. There are various methods of phishing, such as sending out fake emails about your bank account getting hacked, or websites asking you to “validate” your account. Usually these messages have a link attached that will lead you to another website where you will enter your financial information, thus making it available to the scammer. These messages will often appear as legitimate emails from banks, online payment portals, or other financial companies, luring you into a false sense of security.

When you try to buy checks online, you are a prime target for these scammers because you will need to provide your financial information in order to complete the ordering process!

How Can I Protect Myself?

While there is no 100% guaranteed method of protecting yourself from scammers online, there are ways to avoid websites that can make you a more vulnerable target. Here are some tell-tale signs that you can look out for, and if you see even one of them, you should immediately close that window.

  1.     The URL is your first clue

You might think that a suspicious URL would be a dead giveaway, but you would be shocked how many people don’t take the time to actually check the address bar when they visit various websites. Trusted and reliable websites will have a URL that begins with “https://” and there is a small padlock icon on the right side of the address bar. Google will even do a lot of the work for you; if the site is safe and trusted, it will highlight the URL in green. If there is something suspicious about the URL, it highlights the whole address bar in red and you might even get a warning message!

There’s even a concept called “The Line of Death”, which is an idea that an Internet user should not trust anything below a certain point on your browser, as it is easy for a scammer to make the website appear legitimate. In the case of websites where you will give sensitive financial information, the “Line of Death” is as early as the address bar.

  1.     Trust seals should be available

Many companies that handle sensitive financial information for their clients will go out of their way to show that they invest in their security protocols, so you will most likely find trust seals on top of their website. These can include logos from trusted anti-virus companies such as McAfee or Norton, or even an accreditation from the Better Business Bureau. However, it is also quite easy to just copy-paste these seals into a website’s layout, so make sure to click on these seals to see if they are legitimate.

  1.     The content CAN be a red flag

In the past, it was quite easy to spot a website that was fraudulent. These websites often used stock images, the layout was cheap, and the grammar of the content was horrible. These days, however, scammers have gotten more sophisticated, and you can find fraudulent websites that are difficult to distinguish from the real thing at a glance. If you are in doubt (some websites do use generic images and content while still being actual businesses), try looking for other details such as a physical address for the business, contact numbers, a policy page, or customer reviews. Most scam websites won’t go as far these details because they simply won’t have the time, manpower, or resources to create such a detailed scam website. They want to be able to scam as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time, so they go for quantity over quality.

  1.     Google can be your best friend

Google can be a useful, if not completely foolproof, tool in determining if a website is legitimate or not. You can use their Google Safe Browsing Transparency feature. Simply copy-paste the URL of the website in question, and Google will give you an idea whether or not you can trust a website. However, the simplest way is still the most basic way: if in doubt, just close your browser and look for another website.

Legal BrandingLocal Branding

5 Inexpensive Ways to Market Your Business

Every business owner is always looking for two things: growing their business and saving money. It would be great if everyone simply came in and gave volunteer hours or 100 million people suddenly decided that they needed to buy your products.

Marketers are always trying to make sure they are at the top of their game and looking for new ways to improve their brand. Tactics are changing constantly and what may work one month isn’t going to work the next.

While you may never receive Shark Tank like exposure either, there are surefire ways where you can successfully grow and market your business without breaking the bank.

Social Media

Social media is king these days. People get their news from social media, communicate with one another and use their profiles to promote businesses and products.

The good news for you is that creating a social media page is 100% free. There’s no subscription service, up-front payment or money you have to commit. Making your business’ social media page is quite easy.

Now, you can do paid promotions for your business which are much cheaper than traditional advertising. With social media, you’ll want to make sure you’re consistently updating your page. That could be with photos, news on sales or links to your company’s website.

Just remember to keep it updated and fresh, so people won’t be trying to figure out if you’re still in business or not.

Networking

It’s a tale as old as time, but word of mouth and old-fashioned networking can do wonders for your business. You never know if that person at the convention, your neighbor or your friend’s cousin can help you or vice versa.

You don’t have to be that person who is whipping out their business card at every single minute, passing it around and making sure everyone knows who you are. You can be the kind and the cordial person who isn’t afraid to talk about themselves, up to a certain point.

Cross-Promotions

There are plenty of businesses out there who are direct competitors and others who can simply go together. Don’t you think the CEOs of Peanut Butter and Jelly love working together?

In all seriousness, cross-promotions are a great way to promote your business while helping others. If you run a tour business, you can put your information in local restaurants while you let them print their information in your tour packet.

Look for other business and workplaces that can offer you a symbiotic relationship. It also helps to have plenty of referrals out there as well!

Direct Emailing

Making a newsletter is a simple way to keep your customers involved in what is going on with any sales or promotions.

Just have customers give you their email address upon purchase or completion of services and voila! You’ve just found a surefire way to keep in contact with your customers for as long as you want.

Whether you may your newsletter weekly or monthly, make sure you’re consistent so you have constant feedback and outreach with existing customers and maybe even reach some new ones.

Giveaways

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that would turn down something that was being given to them for free. That’s why you can offer put on various promotions and giveaways with your business.

You can do it through social media or your storefront. Have people like, comment and share your latest announcement to enter into a drawing. You could be doing a buy one, get one free with your store.

Pass out items at trade shows or conventions to have your name and logo circulating out there as much as possible.

Local Media

If you’re local, one of the ways to easily promote yourself is through local media. That can be a radio, TV or the newspaper. Local news is always looking for a story, and you can all and ask them to talk about your business.

It’s an easy way to not only talk about yourself but to make sure your business is being put in front of hundreds of eyes or ears. You don’t have to go on a blazing media trail, but just having something out there will help people become aware of what you’re doing and how they can reach you.

Digital Branding

How Can SEO Executives Assist Your Business to Deliver Great Results?

Many different companies are there in the market and online to sell their products and services to the customers and earn a profit. But there are very few companies who are successful in attracting the customers and fulfilling their targets. For any type and size of the business, it has truly turned out to be intense for them to remain in the competition and survive.

What the clients and customers do before buying the products and services

The website of your organization and better ranking on the search engine pages will likewise push you to increase the volume of your deal. The clients and customers have turned out to be more intelligent. Before purchasing an item or product, the clients endeavor to look about the organization. They visit the website to get a much better idea and information about the organization. They need to know when the organization was built up, who is the proprietor, where it is located, where are the head office, the products, and services which the organization offers and the ones in which it has some expertise in giving, and so forth.

On the off chance that they get all the data which they are searching for and are happy with the reaction, at that point they will most likely buy the items from your organization. Be that as it may, on the off chance that they do not get a site of your organization, at that point they won’t think for a single second before heading off to your rivals. The SEO specialists will help you in all these matters.

Things you should know

The business organizations are pretty much aware of the fact that the taste, choice, and preference of the customers keep changing at every point of time. While at one point they love a product at the other they just don’t want to buy the same product again, and again once or twice they have used it. Aside from this the business entrepreneurs additionally realize that they have many rivals in the business industry who are putting forth a similar sort of items or products and service to the clients in the market.

As an entrepreneur on the off chance that you are additionally confronting a similar situation and actually facing the problem or finding it difficult to keep your old clients and pull in the new ones towards your organization at that point it’s a high time for you to take the assistance of a site improvement specialists (SEO). Before the situation slips out of your hand and you find it difficult to handle you can take the help of Solutionspire SEO Services.

How Can Search Engine Optimization executives assist you?

  1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) executives are professionally trained and experienced people who have good experience and knowledge in the SEO field. They can help you in many different ways and will also give you effective solutions to your problems.
  2. If you take the help of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) executives, they will work with the web developers and will help you to make an easy and attractive website. For a small, medium and big business firms, it has turned out to be imperative to use the stage of internet searcher streamlining and make a solid presence in the market as well as online.
  3. The customers are always interested in finding something interesting and unique about the company from which they buy the products and services. By giving your clients and customers all the relevant data, information and posting a few recordings and photographs on your site, you can effectively increase traffic towards the website of your company.
  4. The website of your company is a standout amongst the most significant mainstays of your organization. Posting alluring contents will keep the audiences to connect with your company easily, and you don’t need to put any more endeavors to help them what they are searching for.
  5. Attracting the new clients and gaining their confidence and trust is not that simple any longer, particularly when your rivals are likewise doing the same things. The amount which you are offering them to give the product and service, a similar value your rivals may be likewise giving them. It might likewise happen that they are prepared to give the products and services at a bit lower cost than yours. So, what you can do and the steps which you need to take by which you are going to win the trust of the new clients and hold the old ones as well.

You can do it by having a website for your organization and whose ranking should be on top of search engine pages such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Mozilla Firefox, etc. You can effectively attract the attention of your clients by making a website of your organization. At the point when the clients get a chance to come in contact with the organization, when they get a stage where they can give their recommendation and input, where they can communicate with the representatives and when they feel that they are being heard, this helps the organization in picking up the conviction of the clients.

  1. The SEO specialists will help you in remaining ahead of your rivals. Website optimization advertising is an amazing and financially savvy system to remain ahead in the business. The clients and customers look for an organization to purchase the products and services. As the clients and customers don’t have that much of time to keep scrolling the different search engine pages such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Mozilla Firefox, etc. they will simply click the initial a few connections which show up on the internet searcher. Along these lines, it is important for you to remain in front of your adversaries on the web crawler page.

So, for better results, earning profit and making a good name and reputation of your company you need to understand the points which are mentioned above. An SEO executive of a reputed digital marketing firm can help you at every stage.