Author: Alex Street

Your website is the face of your company, your major online presence, and one of your biggest marketing tools. As such, it’s important that users have a positive experience with your site. A good experience will reflect well on you. A negative experience will have the opposite effect. Here are seven design elements that you can implement in your website to make it user-friendly. 1. Follow the hierarchy of information To make a site user-friendly, there needs to be a clear line of information on the page. One concept should lead clearly into the next, so that users can easily find the information that they want.…

When buying a new car, many people take out the finance deal offered at their dealer. They don’t usually research low rate car finance that could be available elsewhere. Unless you have bad credit and you need car finance with bad credit you can shop around for the best rates. Don’t let the salesman push you into a corner and make you sign a credit agreement you haven’t looked over. Instead, do your research and see what low finance car deals are available. How to choose the right car finance option: Hire Purchase vs Personal Contract Purchase Both of these…

Networking may well be a word that strikes fear into the core of your being if you don’t consider yourself to be a naturally confident person. It can make people feel queasy, anxious and even stressed just thinking about it; but all of this we can control if we change our thinking about networking. Trust me, I’ve done it. Why network? What is networking? So why would we/should we choose to network if it really is something we are not comfortable with? Surely it’s better to just find another way of meeting people? Well, I believe there are many benefits…

Is there anything more anathema to the intrepid entrepreneurial soul than the bureaucratic rigours of email? No one began a business saying ‘ damn, I’ma do me some emails’. Alas, there’s still a long way to go before the email is consigned to the spam folder of history. But if we can’t get rid of it now, there are a few ways to do email better. Strictly no circumlocutions (and pick up the damn phone!) In a recent email correspondence, an entrepreneur replied: “I don’t write, I do.” It was hard to fault her response. Although her point wasn’t explicitly referring to…

Imagine this: your e-commerce site is losing visitors on Black Friday or the recent record-setting Cyber Monday – traditionally the two biggest shopping days of the year. What’s worse is that this situation is totally unnecessary. You could have kept those visitors if you had just reduced your website’s load time. By neglecting something so important, you are losing a significant amount of money and will continue to lose revenue until you tackle this problem. Why Speed Matters Speed matters first because it is one aspect of an efficient, high-functioning website. Nowadays, when most people access the Internet on the go from…

Social media is an essential tool for any business in the modern world. However, as with any tool, it must be used in the correct manner if it is to work well. You have to get to know your audience and what they are looking for. Here are some effective ways to promote your business be more successful with social media: Plan your social media strategy A scattergun approach will not be as effective as planning will, so work out a social media strategy. You need to identify what your audience will be looking for, and what will grab their attention.…

It’s November, which means it’s time to get into holiday marketing mode if you have not started already. In a former life, I worked in print advertising. This time of year was our busiest (still is) and most profitable for the newspapers I worked at. Businesses crammed to get as many ads as possible into the paper and spent more money than they did the rest of the year. It seemed they saved all their marketing dollars for the last 2 months of the year. Enter social media marketing and the whole holiday marketing game has changed. Newspaper advertising (and…

What if you could transform your brand in 30 days, using the resources and skills you have as a social media marketer today? Thirty-day transformation isn’t just for bikini bods, folks–your brand can have its epiphanic moment sooner than you think. Here’s what to do. Day 1 Conduct an audit. Run analysis on where your brand stands this year vs. last year on social: By engagement level, sentiment level, and business value contributionBroken down by active social channel Conducting this audit will give you a clear overhead picture of where you are today and what your trajectory looks like. Day 2 Use the…

Owning a car is one of the most significant decisions you can make. Even for ‘budget’ models, the costs involved can dent your budget. Despite the costs involved, having access to a car improves the overall quality of life you enjoy. It is easier to commute to work, run errands, and meet social commitments when you don’t have to depend on public transportation. There are two ways to have your own car; you can either buy it or lease it. Buying a car means purchasing it from its previous owner and taking ownership of the vehicle. This usually involves making…

In the SEO world, duplicate content has become one of the top concerns. Publishing the same content on different URLs may dilute the quality and the ranking of a website. Having the same content on multiple websites causes difficulties for search engines to select the most relevant content for a given query. Duplicate content can negatively affect SEO in many ways. It Dilutes The Value And The Popularity Of Your Original Content Links pointing to your content are critical for SEO. Having identical content on the internet in several URLs reduces the number of links pointing your site. For example,…