Contributed Post | Mike McRitchie | Resume and LinkedIn Profile Writer | Telecom Marketing Content Writer

Optimize Your Website

July 30, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Clicks To Conversions

Like we said in the opening paragraph, the people you attract to your website aren’t always going to be customers. Some people might just be browsing, which is where conversion rate optimization comes into play. Conversion rate optimization aims to increase the amount of people who take a desired action. So, the importance of understanding what the potential customers have come to do is so important. If you want this to be successful, you need to gather data about what you need to optimize, who you should be optimizing for, and where to do it. Once you have this data, the rest should be pretty much simple. There is software that you can use that will do the work for you for a fee, or you can follow guides about how to do it yourself, such as this one. Once you have optimized your website, your clicks to conversion rate should increase tenfold.

The Checkout Process

Soooo many companies mess up in this area. Just because the conversion has happened, and a sale is being made, it doesn’t mean that the whole process is over. The checkout process is one of your biggest opportunities to make more sales, or funnel more customers to a different part of your website. If you check out this samcart review, you’ll find just one example of a system that will work so well for your company. It’s a smart process that puts sales funnels into your checkout process, making offers that upsell another product. It’s a great way of being able to make more money, making products more appealing, and keeping the attention of your customers. Don’t let the last sale be their last, funnel them to your other products!

Content Optimization

The content on your website is so important to the traffic that you’re going to have flowing through. It allows you to be more search engine friendly, which will make marketing techniques such as SEO more appealing to your company. You need to be doing things like creating a keyword based title, to build a page theme. You can create meta-tags, and submit your website to directories. There is plenty you can do if you know what you’re doing!

So, do you feel as though you can better optimize your website!?

5 Things You Need To Be Doing For Your Team

July 26, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

As a business owner, you put all of your trust into your employees to do the work that you’ve assigned to them so that your business can run how you see fit. But have you ever sat back and thought about how much your team actually does for you? Many business owners fail to acknowledge this information and end up taking their members of staff for granted, which can result in people looking for new jobs and leaving you stuck for staff. To prevent this from happening to you and your business, take a look at the things you need to be doing for your team so they are happy and work to the best of their abilities.

Supporting Your Team

Praise them

One of the most common things that bosses and business owners forget to do is praise their staff for their hard work or achievements. When you’ve worked hard to resolve a problem, or to get a project done on time, it’s really disheartening when you don’t get any thanks or praise. Make sure that you’re aware of the work that your staff are putting in so that you can praise them for the hard work that they’ve done, and what they’ve achieved in such little time. Doing this will make your team feel appreciated and fuel them to work harder and with as much passion.

Take the blame

Another massive faux pas that bosses make is not taking blame for mistakes that have been made because of them. Just because your role is higher than them doesn’t make you any less available to blame. As Afterburner Inc explains here, being able to take accountability for the mistakes that you’ve made or caused shows great leadership, and will encourage others to do so when they have made a mistake. We’re all human and are likely to make mistakes from time to time, and being able to take the blame so that you can resolve it shows strength.

Give them refreshments

Many workplaces don’t allow food or drink on site to keep up reputation. While it’s understandable that you don’t want to see your staff stuffing their faces or guzzling down coffee on your shop floor, everybody should be entitled to some sort of refreshment during a long shift. Make it so that your staff are able to nip out to grab a drink in the staff room, and have a vending machine available so that on their breaks, they’re able to get something to eat and revitalise themselves. A refreshed member of staff will work harder than someone who is hungry and dehydrated.

Back them up

If you work in the retail industry, or in fact any industry that deals with customers face to face or on the phone, then you’re subject to a few disgruntled customers coming in or phoning to complain. The problem that many employees face is their boss not backing them up in a sticky situation. Train your staff to deal with these customers, and make sure that if you’re needed to back them up, that you are. Many bosses make the mistake of going back on their word and saying anything just to please the customer. Don’t make the mistake of going against the training you’ve given to your staff.

Be compassionate

Everybody has personal issues that will crop up from time to time, and while you don’t want every single bit of drama dragged into the workplace, there are some circumstances which simply cannot be helped. The death or sickness of a loved one, or even injury to the member of staff are perfect examples of times that you need to be compassionate, especially if said member of staff is a loyal member of the team. Learn to establish when someone is being genuine, and when someone is simply trying to get a day or two off work, and you will be able to keep your team happy and hardworking!

Your team is the backbone of your business, and if you follow these 5 things and carry them out you will find that your team is hardworking, tight knit, and also willing to help the business out whenever possible.

The Tricky Task Of Expanding A Home-Based Business

July 26, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

If you run a business from your home, you will already be aware that there are a number of challenges which you just don’t have to deal with if you run it in a more conventional setting. When it comes to trying to grow and expand the business, you will find once again that there are quite a few things which you need to pay attention to to make sure that it goes as smoothly as possible. The truth is that expanding a home business is much more difficult in many ways than expanding a normal business. In this article, we are going to look at some of the things you will need to deal with in order to make sure that it goes as smoothly as possible. As long as you have thought about the following, it should all go to plan much more easily.

Creating Space

Probably one of the harder elements is knowing how to actually create the necessary extra space when required, as you probably feel you have a limited space in your home already to begin with. In fact, you should be able to create some extra space so long as you don’t mind using your imagination a little bit. You could relocate your office to a new garden shed, for instance, or you might even want to think about moving home in order to accommodate your business. Of course, that is a big step, and one which you only want to take if you are really sure it is time to do so. In that case, however, you will be able to expect great things from your business as you will be allowing it a much better chance of growing. In any case, you will want to think long and hard before creating space in this way, as it affects your life in other ways and the lives of those around you as well.

Employing People

Perhaps you have come to realise that you might not be able to run your business entirely on your own. If that is the case, you should seriously consider thinking about employing at least one other person. You might have this image in your head of a home-based business just having one person running it, but there is nothing that says that you can’t hire someone to give you a hand. If your business is expanding, this might actually be necessary, and in any case it is something you should think about in order to make sure that you are on the right track. Do bear in mind, however, that the moment you hire even only one person, you immediately need to start dealing with a number of employment-based issues which you don’t when it is only you. You might, for instance, find that you need to start thinking about outsourcing some of your tasks to human resources companies, as they will be aware of what actually needs to be done and by what date. As long as you are doing it all above board, however you might find it especially exciting to have someone working with you, and it could mark the beginning of a new phase in your business’ life.

Increasing The Marketing

In some ways, marketing from home can seem a little incomplete or difficult to get to a proper level, but actually when you consider both outsourcing and the internet you should realise that you can do pretty much anything in terms of your own marketing here. If you are looking to expand your business, that will almost certainly mean that you need to increase your marketing, so make sure that you are thinking about that if you want to be able to make your business grow. The ways in which you might choose to market your home-based business are varied and many, but any digital marketing if open to you, as is the possibility of outsourcing your marketing to a firm who can do it all for you. In any case, remember to increase it when you are trying to expand, as otherwise you might not actually get the necessary customer base in to make it worth your while. That would only result in a failure for your expanding business, so it is best avoided if at all possible.

As long as you consider the above points, you should be able to expand your home-based business without too much trouble. It can be difficult to know that you are doing everything necessary, but it’s something which you should bear in mind and pu a lot of thought into before you act, so that you can be sure that you are really doing the right thing.

Buying vs Leasing: The Ultimate Budget Battle

July 26, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Nearly every growing small business knows that one day it has to come out of the spare bedroom and migrate to an actual office space. The big question that these businesses shall face is whether they should spend the money buying an office premises, or whether they should spend their money renting a ready to go space. There are a lot of pros and cons to leasing or buying space, and it can be difficult to decide what to do. ultimately, you have to think about what is going to be the better decision for your business and what will suit your budget the best.

You can make this decision with some input from others, but when it comes to your budget it’s got to come down to cold, hard facts. Here are those facts and in the form of pros and cons on whether you should lease or buy your office space.

Buying Pros:

You can make changes as you see fit. If you don’t like the layout, you can call in the experts at Hin Chong Lift Installation services and get the entire office made more accessible or changes in its layout. You are not limited to the changes that you make beyond your own budget issues.
The costs in a buy are more fixed. There is no landlord to tell you that the rent is going to change and suddenly start costing you more money.
Owning the office doesn’t mean you’ll be using the whole thing; you could choose to rent out desks to freelancers and earn yourself a little bit of an income.

Buying Cons:

One day, you could grow beyond your own expectations and end up being forced to sell your office space, which can throw up some difficulties in itself if it doesn’t sell in time.
As with buying a house, buying an office has some upfront costs that you may not expect to be paying. This can include maintenance costs and appraisal costs, on top of a large down payment for the deposit.

Leasing Pros:

You can choose to rent an office space in a prime area to build your business up. If you can’t quite afford an inner city lease, you can move a little to outskirts and still find a lot of customers to sell to.
You won’t have any cash tied up in the mortgage of a large office space, which can be crippling. You will, therefore, have more free cash to use.
Leasing gives you far more freedom as your business increases or decreases to move where you like; you’re not tied down.

Leasing Cons:

Leasing can come with rent increases that can be rather crippling to the budget. You don’t need to stick to that, though, as you can move on if you want to.
Leasing leaves you without any equity for a future retirement pot.

There’s no right or wrong here, as it’s all dictated purely by circumstance. Choose wisely and don’t be afraid to hunt around for the best option for your business.

5 Reasons Why Blogging Is Here To Stay

July 25, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Blogging

The term blog is easily one of the most popular words uttered every day, probably even in the same breath as Google when referring to searching for something online. It doesn’t come as a surprise that blogging is probably the most widely used form of content marketing today. However, we must first ask ourselves what a blog is. A blog is simply one’s personal site. Others have labeled blogs as the modern version of a diary where one shares content about what they are most passionate about.

The law of the universe dictates that people are bound to outgrow certain things and habits. It is no wonder that some have started to question the ability of the blogging industry to withstand the test of time. Rest easy if you’ve wanted to start your own blog for the longest time but hesitated because you felt too many people are doing it already. Blogging is more alive than ever and here are five reasons that back up that statement.

1. Love for Blogging

As earlier mentioned, human beings love to share information and especially information on matters that they are very passionate about. According to WebsiteBuilder.org there are 1.5 billion blogs in existence today all over the internet. If you compare this figure with the total number of internet users worldwide it means that nearly a third of internet user’s worldwide blog. This number is only going to grow because the number of internet users increases exponentially on an annual basis. Additionally, the statistics also state that a half of the top 200 fortune 500 companies have a public corporate blog.

Furthermore, 6.7 million people use blogging sites to blog while 12 million people blog via social media. Information is power and that is why the love for blogging is at all-time high.

2. Huge Impact on Businesses

It’s no secret that businesses are leveraging the benefits of blogging so as to stay ahead of the competition. Any online marketing strategist today will point out the fact that blogging is the most important tool for content sharing. A business’ brand awareness automatically increases once they appear on a blog or have their own blog. Experts at Website Builder state that 70% of potential customers learn about a company through articles as opposed to ads on the web. It is also worth noting that companies that own a blog receive 97% more links to their site thus increasing traffic and serving as a brilliant search engine optimization strategy.

This automatically translates to more visitors to their websites and more sales with 92% of companies who blog several times a day acquire at least one client from the blog. Using the statistics from Website Builder SMEs allocate 42% of their marketing budget to content marketing. Return on investment is also factored in with SMEs that blog getting 126% more lead growth than those who don’t. Online business have perhaps been the biggest beneficiaries of blogging.

Potential clients will obviously feel more confident about a product have reading about on their favorite blog. The statistics also show that 51% of blog readers are also online shoppers with most customers having been swayed by recommendations that they read on a blog. In fact, most businesses are advised to make at least one blog post at least once a week on the same day.

3. Sharing Content

The beauty with blogging is that its foundation isn’t professional expertise or being tech savvy, it relies on interests, passions and the inquisitive nature of human beings. Content has to stay simple, interesting and exciting! Blogs on cooking, sports, politics and entertainment are some of the most popular topics out there. This does not in any way mean that one should limit themselves to those particular topics alone.

The key is to find your niche because out there is your audience who are most likely interested in the same thing as you. Statistics collected by Website Builder show that 94% of people who share blog posts think that it could be informative to others.

4. Make a living off your blog

Freelancers and professional bloggers will tell how they managed to make money simply from being consistent on their blogs and slowly building an audience. Display advertising is still among the most commonly used techniques of online marketing. Several blogs have taken advantage of this and sold space on their blogs to different businesses and people seeking to promote their own sites or products. Writing recommendation articles or reviews about other people’s products or items is also a great way of deriving income from your blog. Additionally, there is also affiliate marketing, promoting offline businesses and many more that we shall look at some other time.

5. Readership

While true that people do indeed love blogging, the same goes for readership. Our friends at Website Builder offer us certain statistics to back this claim up. 23% of time spent on the internet is on social networks and blogs. They also tell us that 77% of all internet users read blogs. It is narrowed down further to students who have been noted to spend most of their time on the internet reading blogs. Additionally, people tend to read about 10 blog posts per day. With readership at an all-time high there is absolutely no way that blogs can become obsolete, at least not any time soon.

Now Let’s Infer!

We are sure of one thing, people around the world are always going to be interested in something. The beauty with blogs is that they can always be tailored to suit the interests of the particular audience. It has been said that with advancements in technology the blogging industry might be revolutionized in future. However, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that while the way in which we blog may change the existence of said blogs cannot be questioned.

Finally, starting a blog is one of the easiest things to do today with several blogging sites available all over the internet, some even free. With that in mind, don’t rest on your laurels, your audience is out there waiting to listen to you.