Email Marketing

Family Lawyer’s Essential Guide To The Benefits Of Email Marketing

Family lawyers can use many ways to promote their law practice and its services online, which is a double-edged sword because most of the confusion in the minds of family lawyers exists because there are so many options to choose from. One route that has proven to be successful is to hire the services of a digital marketing company to take care of all of your online marketing for you.

If you want to take action yourself, we highly recommend that one of the first marketing channels you utilise is email marketing. Email marketing is regarded amongst top online marketing experts as essential to their business and their clients’ companies. That means you should embrace email marketing, too, and here are some further reasons why that is the case.

Email Marketing Produces Consistent Results

We will not go as far as to say that you can predict with absolute certainty and accuracy how every email will perform; however, over time, you should see consistent results that you can rely on. These results cover the deliverability of emails, open rates, click-throughs, and, most importantly, how many subscribers move to become paying clients when you promote your services. Read more

Web Hosting

5 Signs That Your Current Web Hosting Service Is Letting You Down

For any business, one of its most important assets is its existing customers and in particular, those customers and clients that remain loyal to it. That applies every bit as much to web hosting companies as it does to any other type of business. The reason it is particularly important to web hosting companies is that once they gain a customer, by the simple fact customers tend not to change web hosting companies that often, each one generates long-term, recurring income.

That is all good and well if a hosting company is providing a great service. However, once its levels of service and the performance of its hosting start heading south, then it is difficult. That brings us to the current hosting service that you are using for your business website.

The main question to ask yourself is whether you are happy with the performance of your web hosting service. If so, then the rest of this post might not apply to you at this moment, but it will still be useful for you to continue reading. We say that because your web hosting service’s performance may start to dimmish in the future. If so, you need to know what the five main signs of that are, and if they appear, it could be time to consider an alternative web hosting service.

Sign #1: The Uptime Of Your Website Is Below Or Barely Meeting Your Web Hosting Service’s Minimum Guarantee

All web hosting services provide a guarantee as to the minimum percentage of time that your website will be live. This is generally above 99%. If you get increasing reports that your website is “down” then check your hosting stats and if your web hosts are not meeting their guarantee, it is an indicator that they are failing you.

Sign #2: The Time It Takes For Your Website’s Pages To Load Is Increasing

Page load speeds are vital for many reasons including user experience and SEO. If your hosting service is no longer able to provide servers that can load your website quickly, then the time has almost certainly come for you to switch to a faster web hosting company. Read more

Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Outsourcing Your Social Media Management To A Digital Marketing Agency

In the world of the internet and online business, any company which doesn’t utilise social media as part of its marketing efforts is giving its competitors a huge advantage. Whether the reason for not using social media is a lack of knowledge or a lack of time there is a simple solution, and that is employing a digital marketing agency to do it all for you.

The first objection that is normally raised with this suggestion is the cost, and yes, a digital agency will require you to pay a fee for their services. But just consider the ‘cost’ of not using social media.

You can be certain most of your competitors are using social media in one way or another. By doing so they are enhancing their brand and building relationships with their followers. The long-term benefit of this is massive as it creates loyal supporters who not only buy their products, they will also promote them without being asked, by sharing social media posts. Every individual who your competitors welcome into the fold via social media is a potential customer that isn’t likely to come your way. Read more

Online Marketing

Ways To Employ An SEO Expert

To those unfamiliar with SEO, from a distance, it can seem as complicated as the wiring inside a passenger jet. Firstly, it is not, and secondly, it is a lot easier to learn SEO than the electrics which keep an aircraft flying.

Nevertheless, there are lots of valid reasons why rather than learning to do SEO for yourself, you would want to outsource to someone else with the knowledge required to get websites higher rankings in the search engines.

If your company is big enough, the first possibility might be to employ someone within your business. This position would give someone the job of assessing, updating, and taking the action required on an ongoing basis to keep the company’s website ranked as highly as possible. Read more

Online Marketing

SEO Terms Which You Should Know

Whether you are new to SEO or are happy to outsource it all to a consultant or agency, there are several SEO terms which you should know and more importantly why they matter so much in the world of search engine optimisation. Without this knowledge, you are at a huge disadvantage especially when you don’t know what your SEO consultant is talking about when they are updating you.

The SEO Company advise that the first term is ALGORITHM which is another word for a formula or set or rules. Within the world of SEO, the most important algorithm is the one Google uses for its search results. Their algorithm basically dictates what helps and what hinders a website to rank highly. There is no way of ever knowing Google’s algorithm in full but many SEO experts run tests on thousands of websites to establish the basics.

A BACKLINK is a link from another website to yours and Google take notice of these when it comes to search ranking. Whilst having lots of backlinks can help, what is more important is the authority and importance of the sites that the links come from. The bigger and more powerful a website is the more power it passes back to your site when it links to you. Read more

Web Design

What Are Landing Pages And How Are They Used?

Landing pages are becoming more and more common as the internet expands. They are used for a variety of purposes, but are usually associated with some form of marketing or sales. Most landing pages are quite simple, have little content, and focus on making the viewer take a particular action of believe a particular thing. Landing pages play a huge part in modern web design. If you don’t understand them and what they are used for, then you are losing some serious potential for your website to expand.

What defines a landing page?

Generally, the aim of a landing page is to present a particular point or to sell a particular product. It is therefore important to make sure that you don’t use irrelevant content that is going to distract the viewer. A good landing page has a number of defining features, including: Read more

Web Design

3 Reasons Why You Should Use A Professional WordPress Developer

Although WordPress is extremely beginner friendly and very simple to use, it’s still easy to run into problems if you’re not careful. Creating a website with WordPress is very simple, but creating a top of the range website isn’t always as easy, especially if you don’t have a lot of web development experience.

Hiring a professional WordPress web developer is one of the best ways to make sure that you’re creating the perfect website for your business. Although professional developers can be expensive, hiring one will probably save you a lot of problems in the long term.

With this in mind, we’ve put together a short list of our top 3 reasons why you should always use a professional WordPress web developer. They include:

  1. A Professional Developer Will Focus On Both Looks & Performance

When it comes to building the perfect website, you need to consider both aesthetic appeal – the way your website looks on the outside – and performance – the way your website looks on the inside. As an inexperienced web developer, you will probably be able to nail the aesthetic side of things, but building a website that performs well is a lot harder to do.

A professional WordPress developer should have the experience and know-how to create a website that both looks good and performs well. This will set you up for long-term success in what is quickly becoming a very competitive online space. Read more

Online Marketing

4 Major SEO Challenges For Small Websites

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, can be difficult for small websites. They simply don’t have the capacity or the amount of content needed to compete with the major players in the online space, and this can lead to a number of major challenges.

Unfortunately, these challenges can cause smaller websites to suffer, ultimately leading to poor search engine rankings and low traffic. Some of the biggest SEO challenges for small websites include:

  1. Local SEO Optimisation:

A lot of small business websites don’t realise how important it is to optimise their sites for their location. Since a lot of small websites are meant to be complementary to an offline business, it is very important to target your content to people who live in your area. This means that you should use location specific keywords.

However, if you live in a major city or built up area, location related keywords can become quite competitive. This means that you may find it hard to rank highly for them, especially if you are competing against larger businesses with a bigger online marketing budget. Read more

Branding, Online Marketing

Ways An Internet Business Consultant Can Improve Your Branding

If you feel that the brand your business or company has is not as strong or effective as it should be compared to your competitors, then it is probably time for you to employ the services of an internet business consultant who specialises in company branding.

The reason some brands are not strong is often down to the fact that the business owner undertook the task of implementing the branding strategy themselves, and whilst this is laudable, in most cases it turns out to be ineffective. The reason it is ineffective is that no matter how good a business person might be, it is unlikely that they are experts in all the fields necessary to create a viable brand.

For instance, there is the crucial first step of researching within the industry or niche what sorts of branding are the most effective. This is not so you can copy another business but there is nothing wrong with taking ideas that work and basing your own branding upon those principles. An internet business consultant will either have those skills themselves or will have someone on their team who is well versed in researching brands and determining what makes them successful. Read more

Web Hosting

Why Online Security Is Important For Your Website

When it comes to creating a high-quality website which will stand up to the test of time, security is of paramount concern. Hackers are getting cleverer and cleverer every day, and you might find that they target your website if you have any sort of sensitive content.

Sensitive content includes things like your customer’s credit card details, email addresses, or even just your log-in details. Hackers take information about everything and anything that they can get their hands on, and they could lead to the downfall of your site if you aren’t careful. If you choose them wisely, your web hosting provider can make your site a lot more secure. Some providers are very good when it comes to security, others aren’t.

Just a few of the reasons why online security is important for your website include:

Your reputation will take a big hit if your site is hacked:

People don’t trust websites that aren’t secure and that are accessible for hackers. If hackers do come in and steal information from your website – no matter how insignificant the breach is – your reputation will suffer in a dramatic fashion. Read more

Branding, Google AdWords

Top 3 Reasons Why Branding is Important for Your Business

Have you ever looked at a particular font, image or shape and thought you recognised it from somewhere? Oh, that’s right, it’s from your favourite clothing shop. Ten minutes later, you’re heading to the website of that business to make a purchase, or you consider shopping there in future.

This is what branding can do for your business. It makes people aware of you and it brings them back for more. If you’re looking for reasons why your branding needs to be solid, see below.

It improves recognition

Without branding, nothing is going to trigger your business and its products and services in the minds of your customers. You are simply another business looking to make your mark on the world with no concrete business plan. The truth is, by investing in branding, you can easily improve the recognition of your business.

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Google AdWords

Choosing The Right Keywords For Your AdWords Campaign

Google AdWords has become one of the premier digital advertising mediums. Many people use AdWords marketing to deliver highly targeted ads to people who are likely to be interested in and to respond to them. However, there are a number of steps to setting up an effective AdWords campaign.

The first, and arguably most important step is to choose the right keywords for your campaign. Getting this right can be the difference between a highly successful AdWords campaign and one which wastes a lot of money. The following tip should help you choose the right keywords and get the most out of your next marketing campaign.

  1. Think like a customer:

Ultimately, you want to choose keywords which your customers will type into the Google search bar. Sure, it might seem like a good idea to choose highly popular, targeted keywords which are extremely relevant to your content. However, if no one ever uses them in a search, then you won’t get any hits on your ad. Choose keywords which people are likely to use in their daily searches. You could even consider doing some sort of survey or market research to identify the ultimate customer focused keywords.

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Online Marketing

The white, grey and black hats of SEO

The ultimate goal of many businesses with websites is to attract as many people to those web pages as possible. Most people do this through the use of SEO content, but did you know that there’s a right and wrong way to use SEO?

While it’s easy to assume any way you achieve traffic to your website is a good way, there are some methods Google does not approve of.

The worst thing you can do as a business owner is get in the bad books of the search engine giant. Below we outline the three sections your SEO content can fall into.

White hat
White hat SEO content is what all business owners should aspire to have.

After all, if you end up with black hat SEO content, your search engine rankings will be short lived and this can have a detrimental effect on your business. White hat SEO content is considered white hat if it doesn’t aim to deceive anyone. There are no ‘hard and fast’ rules but this is the gist of what is expected. The content that ranks on Google is the content your potential customers are seeing.

White hat SEO content is for your visitors to read and appreciate, with the end goal being a sale made from that visit to your website. Read more

Web Design

Starting an Ecommerce Business On Amazon

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon back in 1994 few could have imagined, other than maybe Bezos himself, that it would grow to be the eCommerce giant that it has today. As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has customers in every corner of the globe, and the good news is you can use it to build your own eCommerce business.

The reason it is possible is that a huge part of Amazon’s operation is allowing independent sellers to place their goods for sale on their website and then taking a percentage of each sale.

For businesses, the obvious advantage of selling on Amazon is being able to set up an online store without having to build a website. Another huge benefit is the ability to use Amazon’s logistics system for storage, distribution, and delivery. For anyone wanting to start an Ecommerce business will need an eCommerce web design.

If you already have products to sell making them available for sale on Amazon is a relatively straightforward process. There are some initial admin tasks as giving each product a unique Amazon code and setting up how you wish to be paid by Amazon but these are straightforward. Read more

Branding

Importance of Branding For Online Businesses

Branding is extremely important for any business, be it an SME, an entrepreneurial venture or a big corporation. Big corporations and multinationals are well aware of the importance of branding and have created and cultivated strong brands worth fortunes over the decades of their operations. It is high time that online and small business also learn the value of branding, start implementing it with meticulous care in their strategy to reap the benefits of the concept.

With the advent of online businesses and easy loans available for SMEs and entrepreneurial firms, there are a plethora of organizations out there, each trying their best to provide the best advantage to their customers. However, for customers, what matters the most is the kind of promise that the organization is making to them, and if the promise will be upheld time and again. Therefore, in totality, branding is the sum total of the perceptions that the customers have about the organizational offering. This organizational offering entails not just the product itself, but also the services, the logo and packaging, the reputational management and the kind of marketing efforts entailed to bring the product to the customers. Read more

Online Marketing, Web Design

4 Reasons Why e-Commerce is Strong in Australia

If you compare eCommerce trends across the world and focus on Australia, it’s clear to see there’s an arrow pointing in the upwards direction. In Australia, eCommerce is growing at a rapid pace and there’s little chance of it slowing down anytime soon.

So, what’s feeding the trend? What’s causing millions of dollars to be spent online rather than in stores? Below are four reasons why eCommerce is so strong in Australia.


Increasing number of social media users
Over 16 million people, or every 7 in 10, in Australia have a Facebook page.

What once used to be a means of staying in contact with friends is now a stage for eCommerce, online shopping, trading and so much more. Businesses are starting to see the benefits of advertising on Facebook rather than in more traditional avenues. This means users are exposed to a range of advertising they may have otherwise missed. The result is huge numbers of products being bought and sold on Facebook to boost what was already a strong eCommerce platform.
This is also thanks to Facebook’s ‘Shop’ section which was developed in 2015.

Businesses no longer have to rely on their website to make them money in a competitive eCommerce market. One of the most popular social media platforms in the world is now able to help. Read more

Email Marketing

How Online Businesses Can Use Email Marketing To Their Advantage

An online business has a lot of marketing tools at their disposal and it needs to find one which best compliments its marketing strategy. Online businesses can make use of social media marketing, effective SEO, email marketing, and digital marketing platforms to reach their customers. However, it is important that the business realize which platform works best for them and where their customers are much more likely to engage with them and make purchase decisions. Many online businesses undermine email marketing and deem it as an older and less efficient marketing method as compared to social media marketing and/or SEO. However, recent researches proof that email marketing is one of the most efficient and cost effective marketing tools for online businesses.

According to a research by McKinsey, email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media marketing in helping the business acquire and retain more customers. Email marketing makes the online business seem much more professional and credible and makes it easier for the client to trust the firm they are dealing with. Moreover, it is much easier for organizational offering to get lost in the social media’s news feed rather than in an inbox. By incorporating newsletters in email marketing, the customers do not only stay abreast of the organizational offerings but are also able to forge a personal connection with the online business by staying abreast of their internal environment as well. Read more

Google AdWords

The Basics of Adwords Marketing for Online Businesses

Online businesses need online marketing strategies and platforms to market their presence and offerings to the public effectively. No matter how good the product or service is, if it is not marketed or communicated properly, it won’t be able to prompt the customers to make a purchase. More and more online businesses lately have started using Adwords to market their offerings effectively. Adwords is an advertising network which is powered by Google and helps the businesses in advertising their products and services effectively on Google search results and on its affiliate websites as well. The reason more and more online retailers are now choosing to use Adwords is because it provides fast results, and ensures that the advertised content is immediately available on Google search engines.

Adwords is easy to use and online retailers and businesses can use it effectively to market their offerings. The way Adwords works is that the online business informs Google about what offerings they want to advertise on the search results as per the key words used by the customers. Then, once the advertisement is up, every time a customer uses and clicks on the advertisement, Google charges accordingly per click. However, Google charges different amounts per click and the charges vary according to the amount bade initially and according to the amount that competitors are willing to bid for the same slot and keyword. Read more

Web Hosting

What is Cloud Hosting and Should You Use It?

There are many different types of hosting out there.  Each one is generally suited to a particular class of websites and website needs. Traditional types of web hosting include things like shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting, all of these types of hosting can be performed by reputable hosting companies such as Slinky Web Hosting.

A more recent web hosting development comes in the form of cloud hosting. Cloud hosting provides attractive hosting solutions for a wide range of web designers and developers, and is growing in popularity every single day.

What is cloud hosting?

Basically, cloud hosting involves the use of a lot of individual servers connected to form one huge server. This means that the collective server’s computing power is much, much greater than any one of the individuals, and this reduces things like server downtime and slow page load speeds.

The beauty of cloud hosting is that it is scalable. Many website owners find that, after some period of time, their current web hosting service simply isn’t doing the job any more (when using traditional hosting methods). This means that they have to go through the complicated process of upgrading their hosting plan, transferring their website to a new server, and setting it up again. This can be timely and costly. Read more

Social Media Marketing

The Perks of Using Social Media for Online Businesses

Online businesses need effective marketing strategies and techniques to ensure that their brand and their offerings are presented to the customers in the most efficient way. Social media marketing has proved to be quiet a boon for online businesses as it doesn’t only help the business to reach out to their client base but also makes engaging with them quite easy. Some of the perks that social media marketing presents to online businesses are as follows:

  • It helps the online business in gathering valuable insights from the customers. Social media gathers valuable data from the customers on a daily basis and this wealth of information can be used by online businesses to gather insights about users’ buying behaviors and patterns, their preferences, their feelings and associations about the brand and other topics. These insights can then be utilized to not only tailor the business offering but also tailor the way customers are reached through social media.
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