Simple Ways To Save Time And Money When Running Your Website

Running a website can be costly, regarding both time and money. That’s why it pays to use every avenue available to make the process easier. We have some simple ways to help keep costs down and make sure that running a website does take over your life (unless you want it to).

Get A $5 Logo

If you’re just beginning your website, then you are going to need a logo. What’s great is that you can have one done for as little as $5. If you take a look at fiverr.com, you will see many professional designers offering their services.

It’s recommended that you select around three different designers whose work you like. Send them all the same brief, and you can then choose the design that you like the most. This could costs you as little as $15. However, designers often offer upgrades and other deals that may cost more. If you want your logo’s source file (so that you can edit it yourself), then you will likely have to pay a bit more. Regardless, you will still be getting a bargain.

Outsource Work

Outsourcing work can help save you a lot of time, and it can also be very cost effective. If you need site upgrades, blog articles, videos, or anything else, you will find that there are freelancers to meet your needs. The major platforms to hire from include Upwork.com and Freelancer.com.

Imagine you need an article written on a topic that you know nothing about. You could struggle away for hours doing research and trying to write it yourself. However, you need to consider what your time’s worth. It may be more worthwhile to pay someone who knows the topic to write it for you.

Aim For Quality Over Quantity

If you’re trying to pump out a new post every day, then you may be overdoing it. To save time while not focus on quality over quantity. One high-quality post each week is better than seven sub-par posts.

Streamline Your Email Processes

You don’t want to be bogged down dealing with emails. Make sure you have strong spam filters on your account to get rid of the junk. You may also want to consider using Hostgator Webmail because of its effectiveness.

Consider The Time Commitment For Learning New Skills

If you want to make major modifications to your site and are considering learning HTML and PHP, then you may want to consider the time commitment. You may have to spend many hours to develop basic knowledge. It’s important to consider how much your time is really worth. You might find that it’s much more cost-effective and time-effective to hire someone to do the work for you.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, your website starts to (or continues to) be successful. Just remember, you want to make it as efficient as possible. Streaming processes, outsourcing work, and even taking some nifty shortcuts will allow you to maximize results while minimizing your time and financial commitment.

3 Technologies That Will Transform Your Business Marketing by 2020

The year 2020 was once the ideal setting for futuristic sci-fi movies, but now it’s just around the corner. As the world gets closer to a new era, people have to brace themselves for the changes technology is going to effect on the business world. In fact, your customers will often drive technology you adopt in your business.

Technology is the vehicle businesses use to understand customer pain points and expectations in a bid to create meaningful relationships that build customer loyalty. If your company can genuinely nail customer experience, you’ll realize that your younger consumers are more brand loyal than all other generations. All this requires your IT department to power these top three technologies for next-generation customer experience.

  1. Cloud Computing

Advanced security capabilities today at application, network, and infrastructure levels make cloud infrastructure more secure than your on-premises apps. In fact, 80% of IT budgets are committed to cloud solutions. Cloud computing offers you more visibility into what your users are doing.

Regarding marketing, cloud computing helps improve customer service across different channels. Additionally, cloud computing also provides an easy way of collecting business analytics, so marketing teams understand the purchasing decision-making process.

  1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

AI is now in just about everything you do. You check the weather reports via Google Home, start your car, and the Waze app predicts the fastest route to the office, and you shop on Amazon relying on product recommendations based on your past purchases. At the end of the day, Netflix suggests what you should be watching next.

AI is becoming a standard in customer expectations, in place of just offering a convenience, which is why IT leaders are making it a top priority. Debates like Bamboo vs TeamCity are driving AI use cases all over the business world. In fact, prepare yourself for an era where AI will automatically recommend products to your customers based on preferences.

Fortunately, you can use AI-powered content curation technology to engage your web visitors by showing content that’s relevant to them. Also, a business that nails voice search in future SEO strategies will gain lots of organic traffic. This is thanks to increased search traffic driven by major players like Apple, Amazon, and Google.

  1. Customer-Centric Mobile Technology

The business world today can be explained by a single phrase “mobile first.” This is why you will rarely find a customer’s first interaction with a business taking place outside of the mobile or the web. In fact, more than 50% of consumers are more than ready to switch from brands that do not provide easy to use mobile experiences.

Plus, mobile phones have become productivity tools. You can run your business via a telephone. Moreover, both your employees and customers have higher expectations from their mobile experiences in regards to user experience, performance, and accessibility to real-time data.

Your customers and employees want to see the hottest leads in real time, get real-time notifications, and gain the ability to work on docs and submit approvals without opening a computer. These are not just initial questions; they are expectations! Even more reason why your business should offer fully functional apps that are focused on the user and delivering a truly engaging experience.

Start Now

It’s up to businesses and IT to offer end users powerful cloud computing, AI, and customer-centered technology. To deliver, you need to prioritize your resources and offload some of the burden by shifting to a low-code, cloud-based platform. This will make your work easier while serving your employees and customers with a more predictive and personalized experience that meets heightened expectations.

Featured on the 302 Temp Redirect show

Thanks to Glenn Marvin of Konnector who interviewed me on his 302 Temporary Redirect Show (that’s a geek joke – a website has a 302 error code…. ).

 

5 key activities for B2B Marketing

During the show Glenn asked me what my “always on” fundamental B2B marketing activities are.  If you want to listen it’s at 18:25 through to 20:24.

  1. Database of clients, suspects and prospects.  Regularly updated.
  2. Regular communications to your database
  3. Trade shows and local in person meetups
  4. LinkedIn to recognise the names of people in your industry – and LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  5. Speaking at conferences, events and being a PR spokesperson for your trade magazine.

What the F(acebook)?!

WTF? That’s likely a thought running through many people’s minds as they hear that Facebook has just announced one of the biggest changes to the social media platform – ever.

With over 2.13 billion active users each month, there’s no doubt that this news has made a groundbreaking difference in the way that people and businesses use Facebook.

What’s the big news and what can we do about it? Below, we uncover what these changes are, how they will impact the way businesses use Facebook, and give suggestions on how you can adapt your Facebook strategy by creating meaningful content.

We will also share details of a seminar on how to stay up to date with the most popular social media platforms and their ever-changing algorithms.

So what’s changed on Facebook?

Algorithms, that’s what. Complex algorithms are what determines your unique experience on Facebook. Your news feed is catered specifically to you – based on what you like, how you interact and even search history from outside of Facebook.

When it comes to using Facebook for business, many strive to create content that resonates with their audience. Competitions, giveaways, new products – these are all important business updates that are shared on Facebook everyday. Techcrunch reports that there are over 50 million small businesses that use Facebook’s Pages app. For many companies, Facebook is one of their key business assets.

However, Facebook has made some drastic changes that will affect business pages on the platform. On January 11th, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook announced algorithm changes that may indicate the start of what Michael Stelzner calls a “Facebook apocalypse”:

  • Personal posts from friends and family will have preferences over posts from groups or pages in your news feed
  • Videos will get less views – this is because video is content consumed passively
  • Focus will be on meaningful social interactions, so comments will be valued more than likes
  • Links to external pages will get less visibility
Source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-algorithm

As you can see, this is possibly one of the biggest changes that Facebook has ever made to the platform. Zuckerberg himself has even stated that he expects the market price will drop due to these changes. On the one hand, it appears that these changes are purely to improve user experience. But, it can also be debated that these changes are a move to encourage more businesses to turn to paid Facebook advertising to get the traffic they want. And, it’s highly anticipated that Facebook advertising costs will increase following the surge in advertising campaigns.

What does this mean for businesses?

These algorithm changes will start with your news feed, but this is only the beginning. Likely, it will be an update rolled out across all Facebook products.

For businesses, there are a few changes that will invariably happen – something to take into consideration when adapting your marketing strategy to adopt this algorithm change.

For pages that thrive on short, viral videos (think LADbible), they’re likely to be affected the most. Bloggers will also see a hit in organic reach, as will pages that exist purely to share memes, quotes and ‘tag-worthy’ photos.

How to create meaningful content on Facebook

These changes all hold one key goal in mind: to promote meaningful interactions. It’s more than just getting your audience to tag their friends or liking a picture. Meaningful, by Facebook terms, involves interacting with friends, family and other users in insightful conversations.

Here is what will no longer work:

  • Asking people to comment
  • Short text posts
  • Quote graphics
  • Videos

Basically, posts that exist purely to gather likes will be phased out from your news feed.

What can you do to create meaningful content?

  • See first – prompt your audience to change their news feed preferences to see your page’s content first
  • Post less frequently, but with more relevant content
  • Start discussions on your posts that encourage your audience to talk to one another
  • Use Facebook Live to reveal exciting updates and news
  • Adopt a Facebook advertising strategy

This all seems fairly straightforward, but as Facebook continues to make these changes to more than just your news feed, it will be more important than ever to understand these each and every one of these variables that will be affected.

Ultimately, your audience on Facebook isn’t yours – it’s purely borrowed from Facebook. And now that Facebook has set the ball rolling, who is to say other social platforms such as Instagram and Twitter won’t follow suit?

Stay up to date with social media changes

We have a seminar coming up that will cover Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Snapchat. There will be an insightful analysis on the algorithms that prioritise content, and what you can do to stay ahead of the crowd when it comes to creating meaningful content.

Click the button below to secure a ticket.

Event info:
WTF Happened to your Social Media Traffic?

Date: Wednesday 18th April, 2018, 7:30am – 9am
Where: Ponsonby Community Centre, Glue Pot room – 20 Ponsonby Terrace
Cost: $30

BOOK NOW
 

Business Accelerators in New Zealand

In doing market validation research for a client, we researched the Business Accelerators who are best known in New Zealand.  Since I couldn’t find a place where they are all listed, I thought I’d create one.  [We did this before for Youth Entrepreneur Organisations in New Zealand].

The Mums Garage group have pulled together a pretty comprehensive “Startup Ecosystem Map” list which goes from pre-seed investment upwards including regional connections – highly recommend as they encourage you to submit additional resources not yet on the list.

Check out these as a starting point for your own individual needs.  And please use the comments to add others to the list.