5 Essential Tools Your Business Needs To Boost Your Online Presence

Let’s face it, if you are still not marketing your business online than you are not reaching at least 80% of your total potential customers. With the internet evolving every day and most people having internet access, you cannot afford not to market your business online. By building a good online presence and building your brand, you can reach millions of customers from all parts of the world! It’s time to get educated! Read on…


You absolutely need a website!
It all starts with your own company website. You can easily register a domain name for your website and preferably use your company name as the domain name. Showcase your company brands and services offered on your site. Give more details and information about your company and make sure your contact details are on your site for potential customers to be able to reach you.
Your website will enable you to even sell your products online. Just add a shopping cart and online payment processer on your site and you are good to go. Your website can make sales for you 24 hours a day, while you sleep!

Once your website is up and running, it is important to update it regularly. You want to encourage your website visitors to be repeat visitors and to do this you need to always have new content on your website. Whether you update your site with your latest products, latest company news, products specials, related articles, anything! Just make sure you always have fresh new content on your site to make people come back for more. You want to use your site to build a loyal reader base that will later convert into customers.

Add a Blog to your site!
A blog is a great way to add fresh content your site. You can add just about any content in a blog, preferably articles relating to your company and products. The great thing about having a blog is that it allows reader engagement and allows your readers to comment on your blog posts. This interaction will help build a relationship with your customers and increase repeat visitors.
Not only will this be good for returning customers but this will help you get new customers. The more your online presence improves, the more likely your website will start appearing in search engine results such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Just make sure your blog is easily located on your website so that your readers know where to access it. Similar to your website, make sure you add fresh new blog posts on a regular basis to your blog so there is always new content for your repeat customers.

Add Social Media to your site
Make sure that you add links to social media accounts of your company on your website. Yes, you have to create social media accounts. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Instagram. They all work in building your brand online. Create these accounts using your brand or company name so they can easily be found on these sites.

For Facebook, you will have to create a Facebook page with the same name as your company. The content on here will be similar to a blog and very simple to run. Social media is powerful as it allows people to share posts and content. This creates the possibility of information about your company going viral. Your company will be reached by more users on these platforms.

More importantly you will be reaching potential customers who are using mobile devices. As technology is evolving, people are becoming more comfortable in using their mobile devices in buying products online. By aligning your business with social media you are tapping into those customers that do not use computers to access the internet. This places you 10 steps ahead from your competitors.

Go Viral with YouTube
Like social media, YouTube has also become very social. YouTube videos get shared everywhere! From blogs, tweets and Facebook even on instant messengers. Did you know that YouTube has over 1 billion users? How many customers do you think you can reach on YouTube…Thousands!
Make sure you create a YouTube channel with your company name and upload videos on a regular basis. Upload cool videos that people will like and share. Even YouTube videos end up in search engine results. This will boost your online presence.

Email Marketing
Email marketing on its own has been a successful way of converting leads into customers. There is no reason why you cannot take advantage of this. By adding an email submit form on your website, you can easily build a database of potential customers who are interested in your service or products. You can send them regular newsletter about your latest products, special and useful information. Just make sure that you do not spam them.
Building an online presence may seem like a difficult task for any small business but by implementing these 5 tools, you will be known to the world sooner than you ever imagined!

Common Web Design Mistakes And How To Deal With Them

If you’re setting up a business for the first time you will know that there is a huge amount to think about. Because of this, you may not be giving the design of your website the attention it deserves. There are lots of mistakes that many new companies make with their website and these can turn out to be very costly. After all, your website is your online calling card: it’s what you use to present your brand to the world.

To help you find out whether you have made any of these mistakes, here are some of the most common ones and how to deal with them:

Too Much Clutter: If you have an awful lot of information to convey then take care how you do it. The content on your website should be as simple as possible for the visitor to take in. One important rule is this: never cram too much onto your home page. This is the first thing most visitors will see, so it needs to convey the essence of what you do as quickly as possible. Don’t overload it with text and images going into detail about all your products and services. All of this should be in separate pages that are easy and intuitive to navigate.

Too Much Text: This is really a continuation of the above point: when it comes to text, remember that less is more.  Try to say what needs to be said using as few words as possible (there is quite an art to this). And what text you do have should be broken up to make it easier to digest. You can do this by adding bullet points, sub-headings and placing it in columns.

Over-Use Of Videos And Music: A few well-put-together videos can work wonders for your marketing so you should never overlook them altogether. But – and this is a big but – you should avoid using them on page load. Many companies do this and it’s hard to see why. All it serves to do is slow down the load, annoy customers and probably cause them to navigate away from your site quickly. Instead, provide clear links to videos, either from your website or social media pages. It’s better to give people the choice to watch or listen to something rather than force it on them. (Look at the outcry there was when Apple decided to plonk the new U2 album directly onto all iTunes accounts without anyone asking them to.)

Pop-Up Windows: You may be tempted to use these to draw attention to a new product or get people to sign up for newsletters. All we can say is: don’t. It is annoying for visitors and will also give your website a bit of a ‘cheap’ feel. Pop-up windows have associations with spam and nobody likes spam!

Why You Should Hire A Website Designer

Every company needs a well-designed website – both in terms of how it looks and how it functions. If you’re not somebody who possesses design or web development skills then trying to do it yourself can be a waste of valuable time. With something as important as this, it really is best left to the experts. Remember that your website is the base from which you will build your online reputation so it has to create a good impression.

You may have been told that designing and building a website these days is a simple affair with all the tools that are available to you. And yes, it’s true that with enough time pretty much anyone can put one together. But whether it will be any good is another matter. To create a really impressive website that will wow your customers and build sales takes skill and experience. If you try to do it yourself it can be difficult even trying to figure out where to begin. Even something as simple as creating a link will take time, and if something goes wrong with any part of the site you probably won’t know how to fix it.

Aside from the probability that your website will be a mess if you try to do it yourself, another reason for hiring a designer is that it gives you the ability to focus on running your business. You can be making contacts and working out other practical details, safe in the knowledge that a professional is building you a site that will promote your business in a positive way. Spending unnecessary time learning how to build a website yourself in order to cut costs takes your attention away from what you do best.

Web designers will know how to make your site beautiful and visually striking – but perhaps even more importantly they will know how to make if function quickly and efficiently. This is important because if clients don’t have a good experience of using your site they are unlikely to return any time soon. A good website is a speedy website, and a skilled web designer will be able to optimise aspects such as images and other graphics as well as using file compression and many other practices to ensure nothing is slowing things down unnecessarily.

Bear in mind also that not only does your website have to look good and work well, you also need to optimise its visibility on search engines or you won’t get the visitor numbers you need. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, can be a complicated business for the novice so an added bonus of hiring a good website designer is that they will be able to take care of this for you.

Lastly, consider that, far from depleting your resources, hiring a web designer is actually saving you money long-term. For one thing, they will be able to do the work quicker than you could, meaning your website is up and running and ready to make your money sooner. Also, as mentioned above, a well-functioning site means happier customers who are more likely to come back again and again and buy more products from you.