Often people will be tempted in by companies that offer them a free website. There are a number of companies out there that allow you to design your own website for either a very small monthly fee or even for free. You may wonder what the catch is with these sites and if they are ok to use. Although some of these sites can give people a cheap way of having an online presence, they are not very good if you are serious about competing online. They often are made using a basic template than can only have a few small amendments made to it. You usually have to create the website yourself using a drop and drag function. The problems start when you have issues with the site not displaying as it should on one browser or you cannot get an element to fit exactly where you need it to. Unless you have coding experience the chances are you will not be able to fix a lot of these issues yourself. You may then have to pay for their programming team to rectify it for you or try and hire your own. Even if you do hire your own, they may not be able to have the access to the code that they need to change.

Advertising can be expensive, but it is often needed in order to bring in results. You need to ensure that you are advertising your business in the right way and on the right platforms in order to get the most return on your investment. Some avenues of marketing will work better for some industries than others but often it is a bit of trial and error to see where’s best to invest.

If you have spent the time to create great content then it makes sense to distribute it across as many different platforms as possible to get the most exposure. You can of course do this manually but to save time you can invest in software that will allow you to do this automatically. Software such as Hootsuite allows you to connect all your social media accounts in one place. You can then share your content instantly and manage your profiles though one dashboard.

A coordinated campaign can help to achieve results by targeting a wider audience, but also attracting the attention of the same people in various places. Catching the eye of an individual on Facebook and then again on Twitter, can reinforce the message that you are trying to convey.

Social media is a great way to advertise new or existing businesses. There are several social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram an LinkedIn. All of them have different ways in which they work meaning you may find some work better for your business than others.

When it comes to social media marketing, try and start off with a plan of what you want to do. Some of the social media platforms offer paid for advertising but you may decide to start off with a free profile and then build on it from there.

Having a social media marketing plan will allow you to easily keep track of what you are going to do and what you have planned next. This will also help when it comes to evaluating how successful something was. Some of the social media sites such as Facebook give you information as to how many people you have reached and how many have interacted with your post. This can be useful to help determine what content gets the best reaction. You can then use this information to tailor your marketing plan going forward. IF you do decide to do paid for advertising through the social media sites, be sure to do your research and make sure that you are setting them up correctly.

A website can be a fantastic marketing tool. It can really make a huge difference to how successful a business is, especially during these times when many businesses have had to revert on online trading during Covid lockdowns.

Some people have a website created but then leave it for months, even years, believing that they have all the information on there that their visitors will require. Although this may be the case, the search engines like to see new content added that may be useful and that is relevant to your business. Search engines such as Google like to see that new content is added to the site on a regular basis. This ensures that the site is relevant. It will really help to improve your rankings on the search engines and push you higher up the results.

So how do you go about adding content without clogging up your main navigation? There are a few ways to do this but some of the most popular ways that work well are to have a blog, news or case studies section. This allows you to add new content, daily if you wish, without over complicating the main site.

If you have created a directory website then marketing is very important and needs to be done with care. There is no point in having a directory site where people can list their business is you have no traffic to the site but there is also no point in having traffic to a site where there are no listings. You need to ensure that the two things are done alongside each other. Ideally you want to get a good number of businesses signed up to start with. You can then set the site live and start to attract traffic. Once the businesses can see that they are getting enquiries through their listing on the site they are more likely to continue with advertising. You may even want to offer them the first month for free.

Sometimes directory listing websites can appeal to small businesses that maybe do not want to go to the expense of having a full website. Allowing them to have an online presence on your site can work wonders for their business and give them another way to attract customers. You do need to think carefully about what forms of marketing are going to work best. If you have a big budget you may try and do a bit of everything, such as social media marketing, TV or radio ads, cold calling, Google AdWords and organic search engine optimisation.

If you are in the process of designing a new website then there are certain factors you need to consider in order to ensure that your website is a success. Below are a number of simple, common mistakes that you should try and avoid when it comes to planning out your new site:

1. Not knowing what you want

This may sound obvious, but so many companies jump in to having a website built without really considering what it is they want it to do. It may be that you want to bring in leads or possibly sell your goods online – these two goals will require very different websites so you need this information before you start.

• Going with the cheapest site

Prices for websites vary drastically depending on who you use and what you want but be wary about always going for the cheapest option. You’re in business and want to be cost savvy but opting for free or really low cost websites comes with it’s limitations and you often come up against barriers rather quickly.

• Going for the most expensive website quote

Same as going for the cheapest, going for the most expensive is also often not a good idea. Bigger agencies may have larger overheads and therefore will charge a higher hourly rate for their expertise. This doesn’t necessarily mean they will offer you a better service though.

Marketing is vital to help any business survive and grow but with so many different places to invest your money, you need to make sure that you are getting a good return on your investment.

You may find that some marketing avenues do not directly bring in sales but do help to build your brand up over all or get your company recognised. This may help to increase sales further on down the line and also increase the likely hood of returning business.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is done in order to attract organic visitors to your website. Organic visitors are visitors that have found you on the search engines and not through social media or Pay per Click.  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is mostly done on page and should increase your rankings for certain terms on the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you find that your website is not showing up for your major search terms then you need to go back and look at your SEO.

There are a number of different theories as to how exactly you do this and although Google will give you details of the sorts of things, they look in their algorithm and what they penalise against, their specific ranking algorithm is strictly confidential.

If you have an established website which is specific to a certain country, town or city, you may wonder if it is ok to clone the site to be used for another area. There are a number of ways in which you can do this, but you do need to ensure that you think carefully about how it is going to work to avoid finding yourself penalised for duplicate content. Google has recently announced that their algorithm is even wiser now at being able to understand where there is a need for duplicate content and ignoring it. For example, if you sell a certain product and want to list it on multiple different sites, then it may well have the same description across all sites. This is not necessarily a bad thing and shouldn’t affect your rankings. You do need to ensure that the other pages on the site are changed as and where needed. So for example the home or about us page should be completely different as the content on these pages should be relevant to that specific brand or location. This will also help improve your SEO for local search terms.

Your SEO (search Engine Optimisation) is very important when it comes to launching a new site. You need to try and make sure that you include location-based search terms on your website to help the site get found on the search engines such as Google and Bing. You may decide that you want to do Google Adwords to quickly get your new site ranked for the local area. With Google Adwords, you are able to set up a radius or areas where you want your advert to show. This means that you will not waste clicks from people outside of your target audience.

Rewriting the content for the site can be a mundane task, but it is very important as not only is that what people will be reading when they land on your site but it is also what the search engines will be using to rank your website. Ideally you should hire a copywriter who is fluent in SEO and online marketing to re-write your content for you. They will be able to read your existing website and have a quick interview with you to allow them to create some SEO friendly conte to use on the new website. Although copywriting services are not cheap, they usually are worth paying for to get the right wording on your site.

With the UK slowly coming out of the third lockdown, many businesses are hoping that they may start to return to some sort of normality later this year. Lots of businesses are still able to only run at part capacity. They may have staff working from home, had to close business premises and shops and have furloughed some staff members so not able to deal with queries and orders as quickly as before.  During this time, lots of businesses decided to cut down on their marketing as they couldn’t cope with demand or were not able to offer al the products and services they usually would. But when is the time to star  ramping up the marketing again? Start too early and you may find that you disappoint people if you cannot keep up with demand, leave it too late and you may miss out to competitors.

You need to assess the situation on a regular basis, often week by week. You may want to start doing a bit more advertising now and as the rules and regulations about reopening and restrictions become clearer, adjust your marketing to suit. If you are looking at doing paid for advertising but are not quite ready to start yet, then you could set up all your campaigns meaning you literally just have to hit the button when you are ready to go.

When it comes to launching a new product, you need to plan ahead of time to ensure that it is prevalent when the product is available to sale. You will need to put it on your website as soon as possible as it could take a few weeks for it to be picked up by the search engines. Often, when it is first indexed it may be quite low down the search results, which will make it harder to get traffic to the site.

Ideally if you want to ensure that your product advertising has time to be picked up, you need to start your marketing a few months prior. On your website, create a page with as much information as possible and make sure you put a launch date on if the product is not available to buy now. You may want to put a count down on. Some companies allow customers to pre order items so they know who much demand there may be for the item. A good way to collect data is to ask people to register to receive updates. This will allow you to collect their email but be sure to get their permission to contact them about other news and offers that may be of interest to them.