6 Ways to Optimise a Website

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Are you unsure how to successfully optimize your website? You will be happy to discover we have all the top tips you need to transform your site for the better. Find out where to focus your efforts by reading the six ways to optimize your website.

1. Replace Flash with jQuery

It is time to say goodbye to flash once and for all. On top of a slow load time, flash can also not be viewed on various mobile devices, so it can tarnish the user experience. We therefore strongly recommend removing it from your website and replacing it with jQuery, as it offers the benefits of flash that can be viewed on every mobile device with a faster load time.

2. Upgrade Your Website Hosting

Does your website often struggle with a downtime or slow load time? The fault might lie with your web hosting service. We therefore recommending upgrading your hosting by turning to a more reliable host. For instance, Certa Hosting make it is easy to switch your web hosting for free, and they can customize a hosting plan to ensure it compatible with a WordPress, Magento or Drupal site.

3. Utilize Your Title Tags

Transform your website as soon as today with title tag optimization, which can improve your site’s organic ranking in the search engine result pages. That’s because title tags will indicate to Google what a page is about, so it can improve your results in the search engines, which can drive considerable traffic to a website.

4. Optimize Your Content

In addition to optimizing your title tags, you should also optimize your new and existing content. For instance, include anchor text to link one web page to another, and use header tags and subheadings throughout the content. It’s also advisable to write custom meta descriptions for every web page, which will appear in the search engine results pages and could improve your rank.

5. Incorporate Your Contact Information

Customers can become easily frustrated if they need to turn into a detective to find your company’s contact details – and they will not want to fill in a form to find it. Ensure they can easily connect with your business by visibly display your business address, telephone and email addresses onto your website. Adding your contact information can also aid a local search marketing campaign, too.

6. Update Your Website’s Design

Did you know you have between 3 to five seconds to impress a visitor? If they don’t like what they see, they will quickly click away from your site and visitor an industry rival. If you have an unappealing web design with poor content and a slow load time, you can guarantee you will experience a high bounce rate – and many visitors might never return to your site again. Don’t disappoint visitors and create a clean, aesthetically-pleasing and easy-to-use website that reflects your brand.

Do you have any top tips for website optimization? Please write a comment below.

How to Run a Retail Store That Outsells the Competition

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleIf you own a retail business and you aren’t satisfied with just being part of the bunch, then you’re probably looking for some tips to go about out-selling the competition and really carving your mark in the industry. Most retailers are facing pretty strong competition these days, so the idea of outselling them all can be rather intimidating.

Before you let the fear and doubts set in, here’s a look at some tips you can start to use right away that will help you to out-sell even the stiffest of competition.

Install the Right Systems

In order for you to be truly successful in your retail business, your store needs to operate smoothly and be well-organized. Investing in a ePOS system that meets your specific needs as a retailer can certainly create that flow your business needs. For those unfamiliar with a ePOS system, it is a point-of-sale system that is meant to make selling easy from your perspective and buying easy from the customer’s perspective.

Where it used to be that a ePOS system referred to a cash register in a physical store, today it can also refer to a system that resides in the cloud for online retailers. It allows customers to go about transactions quickly and smoothly, which will make them want to return either to the store in person or your online store.

Vend is a popular example of a ePOS system that makes it possible for businesses to sell in both a physical storefront and online. The system lets you manage your inventory, your customer profiles, add items, create receipts, and of course, fill your orders. Vend provides customers with a positive experience, which means they are more likely to return to shop with you in the future.

Give Serious Thought to Your Location

If you operate a physical store front you will want to think long and hard about the location you choose. Spending time checking the demographics can really pay off, as you want to be located somewhere that gets the right traffic, traffic that will be drawn to the products you sell.

At the same time, you should check out the competition in the area. It may not be wise to set up shop where you are basically surrounded by competitors. You’ll want to try to be subjective as you look around for the perfect location and try to see how it would look through your customers’ eyes.

Find a Niche and Appeal to It

Another way you can out-sell your competition is to become an expert in one area. Find a niche and really focus on that area. Become an expert in your community when it comes to that niche so that customers will believe you are the one with the most knowledge.

If you’re unsure of what niche you could specialize in, take a look at the current trends in the industry.

Stick with Your Goal

The goal of outselling all your competition is certainly a lofty one, but when you take the right steps and you stay focused, it’s more than possible to reach the top. All it really takes is thorough research and planning, then as soon as you know what you need to do, you can put all your resources into making it happen. Remember that just because one tactic is working for your competition, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you. Thus, you need to focus on formulating a plan that suits your business and target market and stick to it.

Roads to Recovery After a Failed Product Launch

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
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Working hard, taking risks, and failing nonetheless is a part of life – and it’s certainly a part of business life. The failure tastes especially sour when you’ve fired up an entire bottle of midnight oil and invested all of your energy and resources into the launch of this product, just to see it crash-land as soon as it’s unleashed.

Although most successful businesses today have experienced a few spectacular disasters through their life, all of them managed to pick themselves up and keep pushing forward. Their failure made them robust and innovative; learn from their mistakes and bounce back after the miserable product launch as well, stronger than ever.

Analyze the situation

When you’ve put your mind into recovering and not losing hope quite yet, the first thing you should do is to gather as much data as possible. You can learn so much from the way your product or service was received – and sometimes, you might even find that it was never a problem with your product in the first place.

It may have been the marketing strategy, how you presented it to the market, and whether or not you managed to communicate its purpose properly. A business can launch an exceptional product that should have been well-received, only to realize that the target group never really understood its benefits.

Talk to your customers

Reach out to a few of your customers and find out what they disliked about the product. This is the first step to recovery and a potential recipe for re-launching it with greater success than ever. Send out a survey in a newsletter and offer some form of reimbursement for taking the time to answer your questions – such as a discount or similar, and gather as much data from this as possible.

By looking at their answers, you may find that there was, in fact, something wrong with the product that should be fixed. Maybe you find that you never reached the people who could have loved the product, and you should find room for improvement with the product launch instead. Finally, it could have been challenges around the market you targeted that kept your product from soaring.

Improve the product

With the amount of data you have and the feedback you’ve received from your market, it’s time to get back to the drawing table. Sometimes, you need to make major changes to the product or service, and many business owners before you have scrapped the idea altogether when they understood the costs. You can easily apply for some of the best small business loans to improve your product and make the money back, though, so don’t let this stop you.

Implement the changes and present the new and improved product to the ones you’ve surveyed earlier. Explain that you have considered their opinions and tried to improve it before asking them to try it out and give some final feedback.

Maybe you still need to improve it – or maybe you’ve learned from your mistakes and created something brilliantly useful.

A failed product launch doesn’t have to mean disaster, especially not when so many successful companies have failed miserably just to grow stronger within a short year. The key to success is, of course, to analyze your mistakes and learn from them the best you can, giving the market exactly what they need in the end.

Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleWhether you’re a small business owner looking for advice on how to boost your business, or a professional working for a large business wondering how to make an impact, understanding the different ways businesses can improve is important. There are a number of tips and tricks to do with marketing, sales and the more technical side to businesses that can aid growth, but in many cases, improving businesses can be much simpler than that. Here, we’re taking a closer look at the top five ways to improve your business.

Invest In Your Business

The best way to improve your business is simply to invest in it. You don’t need to have a huge budget in order to do this, and there are many low-cost ways that you can make a better working environment and a better business as a whole. For example, consider looking into sales or automating your marketing for an effective solution. If you do want to invest a little bit of cash, but don’t quite have it to hand, then consider taking out a loan from a bank or something similar to Wizzcash short term loans. This will give you a little helping hand to help you boost your business when you need it.

Set Goals

A simple way to improve your business is to know what you want to achieve, and work out how to achieve those set goals. This way, you know that your business is consistently striving towards something, meaning you will continue to improve your processes and work environment as you go.

Monitor Trends

Events around the world, no matter how big or small, could have an impact on your business. Staying up to date with your industry and even the current economic, social and political environments around you can help you to improve the way your business runs. Monitoring trends doesn’t have to be difficult either – just open your eyes and ears to your local community and this will be done for you.

Boost Employee Motivation

While getting the sales in and ensuring that all work is complete might be at the top of your list as a business owner in order to ensure that you are getting a profit, the best way to do this is through employee motivation. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of businesses, but generally, those who look after their employees will see their staff turnovers decline and see your business begin to boom. There are a number of ways that you can do this, such as regular staff events, rewarding hard-working employees, recognising achievements and encouraging personal and professional development.

Know Your Limits

One thing that many business owners tend to forget is their limits. As they are fuelled with the idea of success, they can quickly wear themselves out and hit bigger hurdles than they may have imagined along the way. Know your personal limits as a business owner, employ the right staff around you to help hold up their end of the business that they may be experts in, and manage your resources in a much better way, and your business will begin to fly.

Cashing In On Your Passion: Turning Your Blog Into a Business

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Blogging is now a huge deal in the online world, and it’s fair to say that readers can’t get enough of the ‘written by the people, for the people’ format. Their honest content and down to earth style is seen as a breath of fresh air after years of glossy magazines with airbrushed models and columns written by journalists. The companies of the world have tapped into just how influential bloggers can be, which gives aspiring writers and bloggers the opportunity to earn money doing something they love. Many have even been able to turn it into a well paying full-time career. If you’ve been blogging for a while but want to push it to the next level and start earning some cash with your passion, here are a few things to bear in mind.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
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Look Into Ways To Monetize

You can monetise blogs in a number of ways. The first and most obvious is Google AdSense, it’s completely free to set up, and there’s no hassle involved. The ads sit in your blog’s sidebar, and you get a little bit of money every time someone clicks on one. The main issue here is that unless you have a very large following, it probably isn’t going to make you a millionaire (or even enough to pay the bills) however it’s a little bit of extra income that can gained with no additional effort from you. Getting as many views and traffic to your posts as you can will bump these earnings up, so good promotion is essential. This information on Search Engine Optimization from Ignite Digital states that harnessing the power of search engines is one of the best ways to gain traffic. Along with Adsense, there are other affiliate schemes which work similarly, so do some research and find out which would suit your blog best. You usually insert a banner ad or a link within the text of your posts which earn you money for clicks, or a percentage of any sales made. The main way bloggers earn the majority of their income is through sponsored posts. These usually offer a generous payment in return for a link or mention, the only problem is they can be unpredictable. Because you have to wait for companies to contact you, you will probably find that some months you get a lot of work and others are quieter. If you plan on quitting your day job, you could do some freelance writing work from home during these times. This is useful as the work is almost always there, and you can pick and choose how many projects you take on.

Pay Tax

Once you start to earn money as a blogger, you are classed as self-employed, meaning you will need to pay tax on your profits. The exact process you will go through all depends on the country you live in- but it’s something that you will have to do. As they say, only two things in life are certain- death and paying taxes! Keep good records, if you spend any money on your blog as a business such as investing in equipment these can be deducted when it comes to tax time. Self-assessment is usually quite simple to do yourself, but you can always hire an accountant if you’re unsure.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
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Boost Your Domain Authority

Because blogging is competitive when it comes to sponsored opportunities, you need to do all you can to appeal to these companies. Domain authority is one way to go about this, this is a metric which can show how much influence your blog has online. Companies will want to work with influential sites, and so this is something you can work on. Getting backlinks from other good websites can boost this, you can do this by asking other bloggers if you can publish a guest post for them. Include a link back to your site at the end and you get a good backlink. Putting out high quality and regular content on your blog will also help with this.