As a business owner you should already be familiar with branding but have you got a solid brand strategy and do you fully understand what it means? A brand is something a company or business has which is not just their logo, wording, designs, products, it’s much more. Most companies that have a brand have a branding strategy to make sure that they have a mix of short term and long term goals focusing on how they are going to build up their brand. You need to make sure your goals have specific dates or time frames in which they should be completed. You also need to make sure that any goals you set are realistic and achievable.  You need to make sure that your brand not only explains the purpose of your business but also that it differentiates you from your competitors as this is what will get you sales. With consumers always on the lookout for product or service that is not only reliable but also within their budget, price and guarantees is always a must. Once you have a recognised brand you will find it a lot easier to bring new products or services to market. Read more...

When trying to promote your small business it is important to get good value for money and obtain the best results possible within your budget. If possible, it is a good idea to have a web presence either in the form of a website or a page on one of the social media platforms because this is usually the first port of call for potential customers. If you decide to go down the route of creating a website to promote your business you could either use one of the free applications that enable you to use a template to design and create your own website or you can employ the services of a web designer. The latter will probably give your website a more professional look and will possibly be designed to contain key words that will improve the ranking of your site on search engines. Many web designers will be able to advice you on search engine optimisation if required. Should you want to concentrate on promoting your business through social media you will find that the costs are minimal, and the maintenance is much more user friendly. If you are targeting local areas for your business marketing social […] Read more...

When contemplating the best way to promote your small business you may ask yourself whether the advantages of having a website are worth the cost as a professionally designed and built website can cost anything from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand whereas to set up a business page on a social media platform is usually free and relatively simple for anyone to do. Most social media platforms have useful marketing capabilities allowing you to sell products, receive reviews and make money from advertising revenue. Visits to the pages can be tracked and analysed giving you insight into what works and what doesn’t. The reason why many businesses prefer to have a website solely for their company is control. With your own website you decide what that website looks like and the content of the pages and this is only changed or updated by you or your web designer. If you have a web presence on a social media platform, they can make changes whenever they want which may impact on your business. Should there be a breach of security on these platforms, it is out of your control and could lead to serious implications for your business. Read more...

A subdomain is an additional part to your main domain name. Subdomains are usually created to organise and navigate to different sections of your website. A normal domain would be example.co.uk where as a sub domain would be xxx.example.co.uk with the xxx’s being replaced with something such as Store.  What are the benefits of using a sub domain and do you need them for your website? You may have a section of your website that is large enough for you to create a mini standalone site such as an online store. You might want to be able to make bigger changes to this without affecting the rest of the site. If you build a shop on a sub domain you will find it easies to make the changes you need whilst keeping the other sections of the site as they are. The sub domain site will need to contain search engine friendly content and assets such as meta date which should be unique to that specific page. Once live and indexed you can actually gain better results by having a site that is completely tailored to a specific subject rather than trying to get one page ranked well on your […] Read more...

If you are thinking of ways in which you can improve your organic listings on the search engines then you may consider link building. Link building is a technique that has been done for a number of years and can prove quite successful but you do need to take car as Google strongly advises that all links to your site should be natural and not paid for. It states that if they are paid for or obvious link building for SEO purposes then they will not be counted and could actually have a negative effect on your site. Links can help towards this as they essentially count as a vote for your website and the search engines like to promote popular websites. Despite Googles suggestions many SEO companies will actually buy links in order to build this profile up. Years ago this was done by bulk buying links from other websites, not really paying much attention to the site they were coming from but SEO experts are now realising that they need to be a bit more picky about who links to their site. Ideally you want to build up as many natural links as possible, so if you are […] Read more...

When it comes to marketing there is a vast amount of different types. Some can give you very quick results whilst others may require you to be more patient to get the real benefit. Email marketing is often a way of quickly getting traffic to your site or through to a particular product page. You may send out an email flyer or advertisement and within a few hours you may already have attracted people to your site. The beauty of email marketing is that you can track it. You will be able to see how many people have opened it, clicked through and then purchased something off your site. This will allow you to establish a cost per acquisition and see if it is a worthwhile marketing tool for you to use again in the future.  Search Engine Optimisation is another form of marketing and essential to any site that wants to improve their rankings on the search engines long term. It may take a little longer to see results though and often needs to be done often to maintain improved rankings.  You may need to give it six to really start to see a benefit from it and even […] Read more...