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Improving your website is something that should always be on your mind. As society changes, you need to adapt to ensure that your bounce rate doesn’t go up. One thing that you may not have tried yet is to add a brand story to your website. Here are some great reasons you should consider doing so.
Like with any other business software, keeping your WordPress site up-to-date is of utmost importance if you want to grow your business in the online marketplace. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the market that powers millions of websites globally. Apart from WordPress themes and plugins, it also offers you various in-built features that make blogging, SEO and social media integration easy. The best part, WordPress is not only easy to use and manage, but it is also simple to maintain, thereby offering tons of benefits that can help you to boost your ROI.
If no one visits your store online, does it even exist? Ignoring the existential connotations of that question, it certainly won’t bring you any money. For a website to be profitable, it must generate qualified leads or sales.
Building a fantastic website is reasonably straightforward. Getting those qualified leads or sales is where it becomes tricky. With millions of sites competing for attention, the web is like a massive, congested market.
By creating an excellent site, you’ve already taken the first steps. In this post, we’re going to go over what to do next. We’ll look at seven great digital marketing tips to help you promote your business.
Business people in all sectors rely on social media and online marketing to promote their products. Entrepreneurs as well as major corporations utilize these valuable services at little to no cost instead of or in tandem with professional marketing support. If you are wondering how to get the most out of your online marketing efforts, here are four tips that may help.
Consult an IT expert to find out if your company’s internet connection could be faster and more reliable. Although you may be used to a speed that seems adequate, when competing with other organizations that use high-speed internet and other technological tools, you may be left behind by the competition. Have a technician check your website’s graphics and display to ensure your website content is clear and accessible. You might want to compare the cost and services of local internet providers to get the best deal for your outlay.
Update Your WebsiteIf you are marketing company products on a website, update it routinely, at least every six months. Check for dead links and outdated ads that are distracting and repellent to visitors. Consider upgrading your site’s services with a more efficient order form or a window for customer feedback. Include an area that offers discounts, promotions, or news events to keep visitors returning for relevant information.
Avoid unnecessary filler on your social media accounts. Change the information often to keep it fresh and interesting to viewers. Post or tweet about current events related to your industry, the community, or the economy. Publish a blog or vlog and include guest commentaries or dialog occasionally. Updating your social media will keep it relevant and utilize viewers’ times effectively. By streamlining your social media, you will increase consumer engagement and retention.
If you are too busy to keep the website and social media accounts up to date and running efficiently, hire a part-time technical associate who can do this work for you. You can also consult with an internet marketing specialist to get advice and tips without having the agency handle the entire marketing workload. Doing all or part of it yourself if you have time would reduce costs. You may also want to occasionally meet with a social media specialist who can provide suggestions for making your posted content viewer-friendly.
The internet is one of the most affordable and effective marketing tools a company can use. Upgrade your online marketing efforts to attract visitors to your company and impress them with your business.
Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most of her time hiking, biking, and gardening. For more information, contact Brooke via Facebook at facebook.com/brooke.chaplan or Twitter @BrookeChaplan
Link building has proven to be one of the best ways to get more people to see your content. It is incredibly important and can help companies or individuals in nearly any industry.
It can help them improve their SEO, get more readers, sell more products and become an authority in their space. It essentially involves getting quality backlinks to your content, which will ultimately improve its rank on search engines.
As a small business in this day and age, using the web to your advantage is paramount. Not only are more and more consumers going through the web to find businesses and do their shopping, but there are also more web-based tools available than ever before—tools that can help grow your brand and propel your company forward. If you’re a small business owner, consider these three ways for utilizing the web.
Regardless of what type of business you run, when it comes to generating conversions on your website, it’s important to make the process as simple as possible. A user may not take a desired action if doing so involves too many steps.
While you may not have a slick digital agency auditing your customer journey, there are some things you can do on your own to reduce “friction” for the user. To do so, keep the following tips in mind:
Improve Site Speed
The number of steps required to take a particular action isn’t the only factor that prevents users from converting. If your pages load too slowly, users will leave the site. In fact, Google research has confirmed that most mobile users leave pages that take more than three seconds to load.
Review your site’s code with your developer. They may identify areas where it can be cleaned up to improve page speed.
Make Recommendations
Artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to provide users with personalized options when they visit your site. This can help you guard against the effects of decision fatigue.
Maybe you run an ecommerce shop. If your shop offers many different products, guests might feel overwhelmed. They won’t make a single purchase because they won’t know how to decide which product is worth their money. With AI, that’s not a problem. You can simply provide recommendations tailored to their specific preferences. With that being said, boosting some of your top performing products through an Amazon marketing campaign can capture the attention of a potential customer at the very moment they are considering and searching for related products. This helps remove decision fatigue from the equation.
Offer Multiple Payment Options
Don’t limit your payment options to one or two methods. Quite simply, the more options you provide, the more users you can appeal to.
Reduce Fields
With any sort of website conversion, whether it’s signing up for an email list or making a purchase, users will often be required to provide some information to complete the process.
Make sure you’re not requiring users to provide too much information. Again, the longer it takes to complete a task, the greater the odds a user will abandon it. Review all your website’s forms and look for ways you can simplify them to prevent this.
Offer Guest Checkout Options
You shouldn’t require users to create an account before making a purchase or taking a similar action on your site. While you may want to recommend creating an account, as this can boost the chances of a user becoming a repeat customer, you don’t want to prohibit users from taking action without an account. Make sure there is a “guest checkout” option for all conversions you wish to generate.
Of course, it’s also important to monitor your progress after making these changes. You need to confirm the steps you’ve taken are actually delivering results. Luckily, if you follow these tips, you’re very likely to generate many more conversions than you currently are.
Rae is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing (of course).
Launching a successful eCommerce store requires more than the ability to offer high-quality products and services to an audience in need. In order to stand out amongst today’s competition, developing a thoroughly enjoyable digital storefront is a must. Knowing how to design your eCommerce storefront to deliver a positive experience to your visitors is a great way to gain trust and loyalty among your customers.
Define your brand and the aesthetic you are going for before choosing a layout and design that is optimal for your storefront. If you want your visitors to view your storefront and brand as chic and modern, using outdated, grainy, blurry, or discolored graphics and imagery should be avoided. Align the design and imagery of your website with the brand you are trying to establish with your digital storefront.
Create a Site MapImplement a site map into your website after you create a customer success journey map. A customer success journey map can be useful to determine how you intend to entice customers, gain their trust, and help them navigate throughout your digital storefront. Using a journey map is also a great way to develop your site map to help users better navigate your website when they are searching for items, looking to create an account, or want to check out.
Easily accessible navigation is a key element involved in building any successful website, including eCommerce storefronts. Ensure that your digital storefront has a navigation bar or system in place that can be accessed via a desktop browser, a mobile browser, or even with the use of a tablet device.
When you are choosing or creating a design for your digital storefront, it is important to ensure that the layout you choose is responsive and mobile-friendly. As more individuals turn to use their mobile phones and tablets to browse the web, having a website layout that is responsive and mobile-friendly is essential. If a user visits your digital storefront and is unable to easily access your inventory, promotions, blogs, or navigation, they are much more likely to seek out an alternative online source.
Knowing how to design a thoroughly enjoyable digital storefront is a way to stand out with your eCommerce store in any market or industry. With the right design, maximize your eCommerce storefront’s online reach and your ability to generate sales.
Lizzie Weakley is a freelance writer from Columbus, Ohio. She went to college at The Ohio State University, where she studied communications. In her free time, she enjoys the outdoors and long walks in the park with her three-year-old husky, Snowball.
Having a fast website is very important these days. But many people say that even though they have performed the required tasks their websites are still slow. So here we have created a list of issues that contribute to decreasing the speed of your website. Avoiding these problems should be your number one priority to increase the speed of your website.
A Large amount of un-optimized images is usually one of the most common factors that contribute to slowing down websites. High-resolution and high-quality images can take up lots of bandwidth while loading. A common amateur mistake that is made by website developers is that they upload high-quality images and later on try to scale them down. This unnecessarily increases the size of your web page which leads to longer loading time and overall slowing down of your website.
The format of your images also affects the speed of your website. Some formats such as JPEG take up less memory as compared to formats like PNG and GIF. So, unless you are using a hosting package that supports large files and has the server power to load up high-quality images stick to lower quality JPEG images
Although Flash content is a great tool for increasing the interactivity on your website, it can also be contributing to your slow page load speed. Flash content is usually quite large in size, and the bigger the file size is, the more time it requires to load. And longer load times means slower speed.
So, eliminating flash files from your website or reducing their size can really help you improve your page speed. Another way to improve your speed is using HTML5 alternatives to your flash content.
Not Making Use of Caching TechniquesCaching is a technique in which all the most frequently used data points are stored in a cache memory. Later when these data points are accessed, they can be quickly retrieved from the cache memory. Using cache memory can greatly improve the speed and performance of your website.
Of course, advertisements are very beneficial for high traffic websites but to stay in a good position for a longer time. You cannot compromise the speed of your website for advertisements.
When your website is overloaded with advertisements the amount of HTTP requests generated is increased rapidly. This requires a lot of processing power, and as a result, it slows down your website. Especially ads like auto downloads and pop-unders take up a lot of memory and slow down your website significantly.
Choosing the proper form of web hosting is very important to maintain the speed of your website. If your website features a lot of images and flash resources you should not opt for shared hosting. VPS or dedicated hosting is the best option for larger websites that require a lot of processing power. There are many websites like Hostiserver.com and GoDaddy available on the market, which provide different kinds of hosting services at reasonable prices. So, choose the kind of hosting that suits you best.
Barbara Morgan is a how-to’s technology writer for more than a decade, hardware tester, Linux power user based in New Hampshire. She regularly posts her how-to articles at the managed hosting Europe provider – Hostiserver.com
Do you know the 59 Second Rule? An average person who knows nothing about your business and comes across your website will spend nearly 59 seconds on the site before leaving it. Unless, of course, you find the way to keep their attention for a longer time. In order to achieve that, people go for various practices to improve their website.
The easiest and the most efficient way would be to improve your website’s speed. This way, the first 59 seconds the visitors will spend getting acquainted with the web content, not waiting until uploading the images.
Therefore, we suggest you taking a look at the ways your website speed can be hugely improved, without impacting the content itself.
Lazy loading is probably the biggest trend in web design for 2018 that has been described by various sources including DesignContest. This is an ingenious design pattern that shows the images or videos only when they are needed. This way, the speed of your website will never suffer, no matter what visual content you have there.
Lazy loading is an infinite scrolling in a way. You scroll the website up to the point where, logically, there has to be a visualization to confirm the data. Here, you see an uploaded picture or the video material that will fade away when you scroll further. This gimmick helps web pages to be responsive and to interact with users with the speed that is much more increased.
You can even make it more engaging with different kinds of navigation. For example, lazy loading will look great with a floating navigation. It is a special feature on your website that makes it different from your competitors in one more special way. It helps users to explore the website and makes this process interesting, entertaining, and engaging. Due to the fact that there are truly lots of options that distinguish the way users can navigate, its diversity has no limits.
To speed up your website, it is very important to know first how long the DNS (Domain Name System) lookup takes. Every time someone is typing the website’s URL, a DNS server transfers it to the IP address and signifies its location online. At the same time, a DNS lookup shows a specific DNS record.
The amount of time a DNS lookup takes is tightly connected with the speed of your DNS provider. If it is slow, it takes users more time to get to your website (because their computers cannot locate your site in a short period of time). That is why, if your DNS is slow, you might want to switch to a faster provider. This will cause no damage to your content but will help users to get to your website faster.
A simplicity is your best friend in terms of the website design, especially if you want your site to run fast. Using simple grids and clean design layers can bring some unexpected results. There is no denying the fact that, lately, design has been aimed at surprising people. However, brevity is still the soul of wit. That is why, smooth design solutions can bring you a double benefit. First of all, they never look kitschy or extraordinary. Second of all, it takes not so much time for them to appear on your screen. Thus, if you are looking for truly sophisticated solutions to represent your business online, a simple web design can save your day.
We bet it is not the first time you hear about caching but do you know what it is in fact? Cache is a component of your hard- or software that includes some data elements of your website kept in temporary storages. This means, that, once you enable caching on your website, some components will be loaded without needing the HTTP requests to the server. As a result, the website will be speeded up with no extra efforts from you.
A great idea for those who run a blog and want it to be fully optimized. Choosing the one dimension for our photo content will help you to make the website load faster. What is more, it is profitable when you think of the general look of your site. The one-size images create an unforgettable impression where all your content is separated and sorted out.
There are a lot of features your website’s speed depends on. However, some of those features can be improved with no significant efforts. Why not to make your website better right now?
Natalie Antiuk works for DesignContest, a marketplace that conducts web design services of the highest quality. She is keen on web design combined with its usage in launching startups and marketplaces.