You’ll need a website if you want to generate business and grow your brand. In this age of information technology, most of your potential customers are online.

The best way to reach out to them is to have a website where they can learn about you, your products, services, and brand. Fortunately, it’s now incredibly easy to build a business website. It doesn’t cost a lot either.

Even better, you don’t need to know anything about coding or web design. The advantage of having a website also includes free advertising. With a business website, you can benefit as well from open business hours.

You can also provide your potential customers with something valuable and relevant to their needs. In short, there’s no excuse for not having a website, given all the benefits it has to offer.

Your Customers Expect You to Have a Website

If a reason is what you’re looking for, the fact that your customers expect you to have a website is reason enough. As said before, most of your customers are now online.

More than half of them always go straight to the store or business website to look for information. It will be a big “turn-off” for your tech-savvy customers if you don’t have a site.

Save on Advertising and Marketing

Like what was said before, you don’t need any technical skills to build a website. You only need to know how to use a free website building tool like WordPress.com.

Using that, you can create a business website that will put your brand in a position to reach out to potential customers. You can have that for less than what you’d spend on a traditional marketing method.

Create Your Own Story

If it’s about a cost-effective way to reach out to potential customers, you can do that on social media channels. However, having a business website allows you to create your own story and influence the perception of the public.

With a site, you can get your message, business story, and mission to your target audience faster than by any other method. Having a website for your business can do a lot of great things for your brand.

But besides that, you’ll also need a Google My Business Listing. The Web is vast, and it will be a challenge to reach out to your customers. You can gain ground in your local SEO rankings with “Google My Business” or GMB.

A listing on GMB makes it easier for your customers to find you. It includes your business name, phone number, address, and website URL, which helps build your digital presence.

It goes without saying that you’ll need both to grow your brand.

Billions of people all over the world use the internet. When building a brand and reaching customers, businesses cant ignore internet advertising. There are lots of strategies and techniques used to make a business viable in a fiercely competitive space.

Things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and blogging are a few of the most commonly used methods to promote products and services online. Like most things concerning the internet, it has both advantages and disadvantages.

Its Inexpensive

Compared to traditional advertising, advertising on the internet is pretty cheap. Ad spaces online are far less expensive than most offline ad spaces used today. In fact, some techniques in internet marketing can actually be done for free. This makes it more efficient and cost-effective, compared to spending thousands on a 10-second television ad.

Most ad spaces online also allow you to closely monitor them and control how much you spend for them. You can find out who clicks on your ad most, and who purchases something when they do so. This can allow you have a better understanding of your customer base. You can also set a cap on how many times an individual can see your ad to limit your spending.

Everyones on the Internet

Nearly any kind of demographic to whom you wish to cater can be reached via the internet. The ubiquity of the internet is the main reason why it’s indispensable to businesses hoping to reach customers and increase sales. There are so many platforms to choose from as well that allow you to reach people more efficiently.

Having this large an audience provides so many opportunities for growth and popularity when done right. Most of these platforms like Google often operate in a way that serves people the kind of ads that they most likely will care about, making each exposure of a certain ad more impactful. Other platforms like social media rely on getting something viral and trendy to gain traction on building that brand.

Its Complicated

Due to the numerous choices one can have concerning online advertising, things can get easily complicated. Certain decisions have to be made like the methods used in serving the ad. Do you want it to just hang around the sides of certain websites? Will you have blog posts that talk about it? Are you going to use social media and certain influencers to spread the word? Are you taking steps to ensure high visibility on search engines? These are questions you have to answer if you dont want to get drowned out by the competition.

There are so many things to think about that you can easily get lost in the sheer scope and size of it. Even customers get tired of it too. Ad fatigue is common with people who are usually online, and should be something that advertisers seek to avoid.

Both offline and online advertising has its pros and cons, but the advantages of online advertising often surpass the disadvantages you will experience. Competition and complexity have never held businesses back when it comes to reaching their full potential, after all.

This article was originally published on concentricmarketing.co.uk and describes the importance of making your website easy to navigate in order to obtain a high conversion rate from visits to sales.

Effectively driving traffic to your website can take a monumental effort. Youve got to invest time in generating quality, SEO-friendly content for your blog. Youve got to manage multiple social media accounts and create catchy status updates that will get your friends and followers to repost to their friends and followers. Last but not least, youve got to show some involvement in your niche by spending time of forums and commenting on other relevant blogs.

Despite the fact that your internet marketing efforts may comprise a few hours per day, there is still more to converting a visit into a sale than just getting prospective clients to click your link. How your site looks and functions and how easy youve made it for your prospective clients to actually make use of your calls to action plays just as big a part in getting a sale as the time and effort spent driving them to your website in the first place.

Clear and Identifiable Calls to Action

Though aesthetics are important and having a pretty website is something that you should be proud of, that pretty website will do your business no good if your prospects cant figure out how to navigate it. In order to ensure a high percentage of conversions from visit to sale, your calls to action need to be easy to identify and readily accessible to your visitors.

There is a good chance that someone whos been drawn to your website has at least some interest in the product or service that you are offering. If you force those prospects to hunt and peck around your site looking for the appropriate landing page to make a purchase, youll probably lose more sales than you are getting.

If youve got a top quality product or service, dont hide it on a site that cant be properly navigated without a map and compass clearly point prospects to where they can get it and youll see more conversions.

Avoid Distractions and Speed the Loading Process

There are few instances that merit a series of seizure-inducing lights and blaring music on a landing page. If you want visitors to your website to actually stay long enough to make a purchase or enjoy some of the content that youve worked so hard to produce, dont bombard them with loud and obnoxious noises or outlandish and unnecessary slideshows of imagery as soon as your site begins to open.

When youve managed to effectively direct some relevant traffic to your site you want that traffic to be able to get an essence of what your business is about. The last thing that you want to do is completely distract, unnerve or offend incoming traffic with sites or sounds that have nothing to do with the product or service that you offer.

Another downside to large image, video or audio files is that they can slow the loading process of your page. If youve attracted a first time visitor to your site with some clever content or a solid social media update, you want to get them right into your site so they can see what you have to offer. Excessively large files on the landing page that you are sending them to will cause your site to open slowly maybe too slowly for them to wait around, costing you another solid lead.

Youve worked hard developing your product or service and youve worked just as hard driving quality leads to your site dont make the mistake of missing out on the culmination of those efforts by having a site that isnt as user friendly as it could be.

You have just installed a WordPress blog, now what?

There are many free WordPress themes around. A common mistake is to just pick a random theme from the first page of available themes, so that you can quickly move on to developing your products or textual content.

Your blog theme is the most salient part of your website. The theme is what your visitors see first, and what they will continue to see in every post, page, online comment, and indeed every word in your WordPress blog.

Choosing the right theme will enhance your blog content and make visiting your blog an enjoyable experience for your human readers. Choosing the wrong theme will diminish all of your blog content, and may cause readers to leave because of a poor user experience.

We often focus so much of our attention on search engine optimization that we forget about optimizing our blogs for our human readers.

Search engines do not click on our ads or buy our products – it is our human readers who do that. SEO will help to get more visitors to your blog, but if your blog is dilapidated, difficult to navigate, or just boring, your visitors will quickly move on to something else.

If you make a terrible first impression, it does not matter what your content is, because everyone will be gone before reading even one of your carefully crafted words.

Here are some things to look for when choosing a WordPress theme –
1. Easy to read

Font size –

A common mistake is to use a theme with fonts that are too small. Try reading really small text and you will find that your eyes tire more easily. Make things simple and comfortable for your readers. Use a large enough font size so that regular mortals can process your blog content without developing eye-strain and a headache.

Colors –

Do not pick a WordPress theme that has too many colors, or too many clashing colors. This distracts your readers, and makes your content difficult to read.

Pick a background theme that suits the content of your blog. A dark background is good for blogs that contain a lot of videos or pictures. The dark background will bring out the colors in your pictures and make them look more compelling.

However, it is easier to read text on a light background. If you are publishing mostly textual content, it may be best to pick a light WordPress theme, and just put a dark border around your blog images.

Fixed width

There are two general classes of WordPress blog themes – fixed width or variable width.

A variable width theme will expand or contract your blog based on your reader’s browser window. A fixed width theme has a predefined width that will always remain the same size irrespective of the web browser window.

Initially, it may seem that a variable width theme is superior because it can flexibly adapt itself to your reader’s environment. However, a variable theme has two big weaknesses.

a) It is difficult for human readers to process long lines of text.

You can try this yourself. Set your browser window to full screen, then activate the Classic WordPress theme which is variable width. After reading through some content in your blog, switch to the Default theme which is fixed width.

Which provided a better reading experience?

b) It is difficult to properly layout a page with variable width.

Variable width designs do not generally allow for fixed-position elements. A more complex variable width layout may run into deep design issues later on because it must be able to accommodate any browser window size.

On last check, the most popular themes on WordPress.org are all fixed-width.

2. Widget ready

Widgets are a very powerful part of your WordPress blog. Adding widgets will allow you to integrate common functions into your blog without having to write them yourself, from scratch.

For example, on my dog WordPress blog, I have a variety of widgets at the top, right, and bottom of my page. You can even add Google AdSense blocks easily into your blog using the Text widgets that come with your WordPress blog installation.

You really want to pick a WordPress theme that is widget ready, i.e. it contains one or more areas for you to add in the widgets of your choice. WordPress themes that offer a larger number of widget areas (e.g. the Thematic theme) are easier to customize and give your blog a unique look.

Remember not to visually overload your blog design with too many widgets. You do not need to fill all the available theme areas with widgets. However, a more widget-open theme will give you the flexibility to place your chosen widgets in a large number of locations.

WordPress themes that are not widget ready will be a lot more limiting unless you are comfortable creating and adding widget areas into the theme by editing the CSS and PHP template files.

3. Customizable

You want to pick a WordPress theme that will allow you to do some visual customization. At the very least, you want the ability to change the header image to something appropriate for your blog content. If a WordPress theme does not allow for any visual customization, then chances are –

a) You won’t have a very unique blog.
b) Your blog design will not really reflect your blog content.

A bland, non-unique blog, suggests bland non-unique content, and many readers may leave based on that alone.

The bad news is that most free WordPress themes only have very limited custom capabilities. Any true customization, will usually require editing of the theme CSS, HTML, and PHP code.

Other options are to purchase a custom designed theme, purchase a premium theme, or use a theme generator. These options can get expensive and do not provide a cheap and easy way to do incremental and ongoing blog customizations.

Last Word on WordPress Themes

WordPress is a great platform to use for your blogs because it is open source and you can pretty much do whatever you want with it. For example, I was able to integrate my WordPress blog with my static web-pages so that I can use WordPress to handle and filter comments for my static website. However, for a serious business with sme startup capital, I would recommend HubSpot’s CMS, as it has many purpose built tools which will give you a great head start over your competitors.

You can also edit an existing WordPress theme and make it look and do whatever you want. I have found that there is great flexibility in the WordPress system and an extremely useful API set.

If you want to start doing some WordPress theme editing, start with learning about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). With that alone, you can achieve much in personalizing your WordPress blog. Start with a flexible WordPress theme (in addition to Shiba, consider Sandbox, Hybrid, or Thematic), and create a simple child theme with just a style.css file.

A website in today’s market is probably the best investment any company can make to reach a large audience and showcase its products and services.

An engaging, informative, and user-friendly website works even better toward this goal. Hiring an experienced web design company with the experience and skills that meet your needs can be a difficult task. There are so many companies, many of which have excellent creative and technical personnel that can help create new and exciting website designs for your existing site or create something entirely new from scratch.

Make sure that the company you choose meets your needs. If you need a maui website design company that will walk you through the process, start to finish, discussing requirements, expectations, ideas, and procedures, then make sure the company you choose is willing to do this with you. Some software that the company you choose should be familiar is Dreamweaver, CoffeeCup, HTML, Photoshop, Microsoft Expression Blend 4, Aptana Studio 3, and Bluefish, just to name a few. Web designers typically work with a team of developers, content creators, and testers to bring a vision of a website to life. If you have even part of a vision for your site, make sure the company is willing to work with you on this vision.

Web design is the front end of your site, while web development is the back-end. Web development builds out your site. It is crucial that the web design company that you decide to use for your site has staff that is proficient in web development, as well as a good working relationship between the design and development teams. Developers should be able to use HTML, CSS, WordPress, Joomla, CMS, and many other languages and protocols to develop your site with efficiency. The web design company that you choose should be able to provide an effective, stress-free, and user-friendly navigational experience to the end user.

Good web designers should have a name on the market. They should have a portfolio of designs customized for each client. If you see template websites in their portfolio, this is not an indicator that the company will help you achieve a customized vision for your site. They should also have an in-depth understanding of SEO and be able to implement a few strategies to make your websites easily optimized. The company should also be able to produce a website that is compatible across platforms, making it easy for your potential customers to find your site on any device.

An SEO friendly website has the potential to draw massive traffic from a high level of online visibility which will, in turn, increase the revenue of your business. Good web designers should make your site SEO friendly. While they may not be an SEO company, there are standards that they can use to allow an SEO company to easily optimize your site to climb the search engine results list.

A professional web design company should be able to think outside the box, have a creative and hard-working staff, that will provide a delightful, user-friendly web experience to your customers.

Our review sites like yelp techniques are reliable, and our approach consists of a level of sensitivity and versatility to work within your service’ particular branding requirements. Any material we develop will be readily available for you to examine, so you constantly have the control over the material that is published about your organisation.

Among the excellent, and maybe the greatest, advantage of our reputation management services is that of the material produced in the job of restoring control of your online track record will end up being useful possessions to your public relations project, or might assist you construct one if you have not currently begun.

Whether you wish to make some unpleasant evaluations less noticeable, or if you wish to decrease the effect of a scathing post by a flippant and unhappy blog writer, we will supply you with fine-tuned and expert help, without delay and for an excellent rate. And hi, perhaps we’ll even assist boost your public relations project with quality, brand-aware material particularly created to make your company shine.

The personnel of online material supervisors will offer input into enhancing your sites, blog sites, social media material, or anything else that you or your company might publish online. You and your web groups can take the input and put it to utilize on making your site and your preferable material appear at the top of searches the internet over. At no point will we ask you to provide over control of your material to us, to make sure that you feel more secure in this susceptible time. Our objective is to enhance your service and lower the tension that can originate from attacks on your track record.

Exactly what is the most effective thing on the planet of company? We would highly argue that it is an excellent impression, and certainly, there is a long precedent of such. That holding true, handling your service’ credibility can in some cases be intimidating.

If that takes place, exactly what do you do? Well, thanks to us here at Emergency situation Reputations, you can make certain that any hazardous material that might destroy your organisation is handled promptly, effectively and by exceptionally skilled experts. Our group is readily available to handle a brand-new case whenever you must have any unfavorable info appearing in leading outcomes of the primary online search engine.

If you have an organisation, you are most likely in competitors with some other business, despite your market. Whenever that holds true, it is very important to stress any information that might trigger a clients or customer to pick your service over somebody else’s. Place into this circumstance an unfavorable client evaluation, or a penalizing blog site composed by an out of balance person not putting in the time to be reasonable from behind their computer system screen. This kind of unfavorable attention can trigger massive rifts in the chances which might exist for your service’s success.

Product Reviews Blog blogger authored this article on the topic of setting up a sales funnel.

Sales funnel is a term used to describe an Internet marketing system where website visitors are taken through different stages of a sales process. Though it is easy to plan a sales funnel, it is an entirely different proposition to design a highly effective one. Many sales funnels start with a free offer that general website visitors are lead to. This usually produces many subscribers that take up the initial offer for exchange of their email.

Once visitors subscribe, the sales funnel takes them right away to a one time offer, OTO, that is usually a low-cost product. This is where marketers sort out true buyers and freebie seekers. Most will just skip the one time offer and decide to remain as a free user. But some will invest in the offer and show that they are ready to spend money and get the information in detail.

After the funnel took the ones that bought the one time offer, it then takes them to a high-end offer that has a lot more value than the first offer. Once subscribers pay their money for the initial product, it is assumed that they are more than ready to pay more for other additional products. It is as well believed that they are in a buying mode and will impulsively buy whatever is presented in front of them.

This is how we judge how effective a sales funnel is. The conversion rate of different funnels varies as people respond to different factors on the site. That is why seasoned marketers want to test different funnel types to find out which converts very well. Conversion could dramatically increase when the site’s template changes or some words and phrases are used. Whatever is causing the conversion should always be seen as a determinant factor in the funnel.

For most online marketers, designing a highly converting sales funnel is out of reach. The sales copy, the graphics, videos and every little detail must fall in place to see better results. Most of all, the offer must be something that people in the niche are so willing to give their money for. Once that great offer is found, it is a matter of tweaking and testing until that great funnel is set up.
Marketing with a well designed sales funnel is the best method to make money online as it helps us build a subscribers list. Once this list is built, it should quickly be nurtured through frequent follow ups. A responsive list is one of the best online assets marketers can build. Once there, making money is just as easy as sending out a well designed email campaign, which could be called a Push-Button system.

Everyone is heading online to do their marketing. Not everyone is doing well so what is the secret to succeeding in online marketing. Well its all about working smart and knowing the hacks.

1. Create a Google My Business Page

This is a great way to boost your online visibility. This listing will make your business easy to find on Google Search and Google Maps. It will also allow Google+ users to easily review your business. As local business reviews increase, your search engine rankings will also improve. It would also be a good idea to add your business to the Yahoo Local listing.

2. Sign up for Online Reviews

Create a Yelp listing, it’s free and gives you access to their impressive 140 million monthly visitors. Another great review sites is Angie’s List, they charge users a small fee but listing your business is free.

3. Fire Up Social Media Networking

Find relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups which have active users. Posting on such pages will give you access to all these users. You don’t need to join a ton of these, remain focused on three or four at the most. Offer solid advice and feedback. You will build a reputation of trust and boost brand visibility among like-minded people.

Sourced from: http://www.inc.com/john-rampton/9-low-cost-online-marketing-hacks.html

The other trick that most online marketers employ is growth hacking. You can acquire traffic or employ the use of tweets.

Growth hacking is one of the most talked-about terms in the startup and marketing worlds. Some see it as a revolutionary way of shaping and accelerating startup growth, while others consider it a fancy word for marketing. I used to fall into the latter camp, but Neil Patel’s guide to growth hacking helped me see how a growth hacker’s job differs from a traditional marketer’s job.

Traffic Acquisition

1. Colibri.io

Colibri shows you where your customers are engaging online so that you can insert yourself into relevant conversations.

2. Pay With A Tweet

Pay With A Tweet allows you to give people access to your content or product once they’ve tweeted or posted about it. This is a great way to go viral in the early stages of a product launch, or to make sure your content or product spreads further across the web over time.

Sourced from: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/35-growth-hacking-tools/

You should try and play mystery shopper and in this case buy your own products. This will help you gain perspective and new insights. You will able to notice what is working and what is not working.

Be Your Customer
Use tactics such as mystery shopping your brand, getting out to talk to customers and using customer advisory boards to derive new innovations from discoverable insights and customer intimacy.

2. Get Tag Management

What if you could test a new tactic (Facebook Retargeting, etc.) within days of market availability instead of weeks? Many marketers struggle with IT delays to implement tags for analytical insights. Speed up implementation of tags with a simple, scalable, self-service marketing solution – your IT team will thank you for it.

Sourced from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gartnergroup/2015/05/27/ten-digital-marketing-hacks/#3dedbf4f78ff

Webinars are increasingly becoming the preferred method of spreading ideas, information, and tips within industries. This is because of the convenience it offers and the speed and latitude on which it can offer that information, which has the potential to garner a worldwide audience

However, for a webinar to succeed in its aim, it must be able to succeed at doing two things: attracting people into the webinar; and getting them engage and catch their interest so that get value from the seminar. This article will focus on the latter.

Here are some actionable tips to holding a successful webinar:

Present your ideas in a concise manner and the simplest and shortest way possible

Typically, the time one has to give and share ideas in a webinar is highly limited so one must make drafts, plans and breakdowns on how one can present his or her topic in an interesting and engaging way in such a short period of time. Define your topic. What is the scope? What are you supposed to talk or not talk about in the webinar? How much time should I allot to each topic? Through asking questions like these that one can make a solid and cohesive presentation during a webinar.

Have only the fastest and most reliable internet connection as much as possible

On a web based service like webinars, the last thing anyone wants is a totally unreliable internet connection, whether be it through slow internet connections or through choppy ones that get interrupted pretty much all the time. So, as much as possible and within the constraints of your budget, invest on a fast and reliable internet connection for one to conduct a web conference that essentially involves lots of people over vast and potentially international distances. Look for affordable plans and bundles that can give you such connections and if possible, test for the internet speed during the time you want to conduct the webinar.

Test the reliability of the facilities and the equipment to be used

In conducting a webinar, one must make sure that everything that is needed in the webinar, including the software, the computers, the devices like earphones and speakers, and the internet connection, must be working in full order. Test whether the chat rooms and the dials are working and no one will encounter trouble. See if the internet you have everything ready, including your slides and presentations, and your script.

Use various ways to keep your audience interested like transitions and animations

Another way one can conduct a successful webinar is through the use of visual and interactive eye candy like transitions and animations. Such methods can not only keep your audience interested in you and the topic at hand in general, but it can also make you look like a professional for making an effort to at least have a bit of creativity in your presentation. However, one must be careful of the use of such devices. Too much and inappropriate use or the use of such inappropriate devices can ruin and not benefit your presentation.

Review Webinarjam studio Audience Engagement Tools

Use as much common English as possible and minimize the use of jargon

Because you are conducting a seminar over the web, there is a potential that you will have an international audience that can come from various countries, each with their own varying types of culture, technical knowledge, and language barriers. To deal with such a variety of mindsets, one must conduct a webinar in such a way that the use of highly technical jargon and the use of cultural references like slang and country specific phrases is limited or prevented altogether. If one cannot prevent the use certain technical terms however, one must either define first such terms or make sure that the audience that will be involved in the webinar will understand such words.