Wednesday, May 1, 2019

5 reasons to upgrade to Jetpack Pro on your WordPress website




If you run a WordPress website and have been using Jetpack plugin to help you manage and better organize all the details of your online business, from uploading new content, managing social media to security and theme customization, you may want to consider upgrading to Jetpack Professional and here are a few reasons why.

1. Backups

Jetpack Pro makes it so much easier and less nerve-wrecking to smoothly run your website thanks to the automated, real-time backups, so you no longer need to worry about losing anything you’ve just created. Other than that, it offers unlimited storage space and one-click restores, helping you navigate “behind the scenes” of your page efficiently, effortlestly and fast, avoiding time delays caused by minor mistakes that tend to happen to all of us, as careful as we may try to be.

2. Security

We hear it all time – websites losing invaluable data due to malicious intent, hacking or accidental damage. We all think it cannot happen to us, but – why take the risk? Jetpack Pro includes the essential tools to keep your entire site backed up, spam and malware-free and their professional priority support is just a click away at all times, whichever timezone you live in. Their malware scanner together with the built-in firewall removes the necessity of purchasing additional security plugins making it even easier to keep all your data protected.

3. Website Maintenance

Whatever the size of your business, website maintenance is of extreme importance. Your website is the place where you attract new customers and keep the relationship with the existing ones. Therefore, you want it to be regularly updated, fully functioning and flowing together with changes in the trends and needs of your clients. With Jetset Pro you have access to more than 200 customizable themes and their authors who are available to offer you priority support in case of any doubts or inconveniences. Other than that, there’s a whole team of engineers in every timezone working for you and your customers’ best online experience.

4. Marketing

Marketing and revenue do not longer need to be a source of stress if you decide to invest in Jetpack Professional. With SEO preview tools, social media scheduling, PayPal payments, WordPress optimized ad network you can be sure your content will reach the right eyes at the right time, attracting more potential customers to your page. Jetpack Pro also offers unlimited use of high-speed image and video CDN which can ensure that your visitors have an incomparable user experience every time they decide to click on your site.

5. Website Monitoring

You are all calm and content with your awesome webpage attracting more and more clients who hungrily devour all that amazing new content that you upload daily… until you receive a message that your page is inaccessible from mobile devices for a week already! To avoid these kinds of situations and save yourself the time of personally checking every few hours if everything’s running smoothly, upgrade your website monitoring game! Website monitoring is crucial as it checks and verifies that the site is up and users can have the exact same experience as you envisioned them to have. Jetpack Pro covers that part of the website running as well, removing the unnecessary stress from your day-to-day and letting you focus on content-creation and more fun parts of the business.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2019

12 Online Marketing Tactics for Small Businesses with Low Budgets



When it comes to marketing or advertising your small business, a small budget seems like the end of the world. Regardless of the constrictions a low budget comes with, there are numerous online marketing tactics you can use to market your small business.
Many business entrepreneurs have come together before to drum up customers by forging new innovative methods without breaking the bank. However, many people do not know that a small budget irrespective of the fetters or limitations it imposes can be a blessing in disguise.
Not only do they help you to embrace creativity but also optimize for the best possible enactment within those restrictions.
This means you are in better shape more so when the cash starts flowing. Additionally, you will have the ability to gauge your marketing or advertising without breaking a sweat.
While there are many low-budget options for marketing small businesses, worry may consume you. This is because you do not have enough money to spend on your business. Hence, you may opt out.
However, this is not a good choice. Regardless of the constrictions a low budget comes with, there are numerous online marketing strategies you can use to market your small business. Therefore, a team of marketing experts from Essay Zoo has prepared some tactics for online marketing for small business.

Constrict up your SEO

The first online strategy you have to work on is scrutinizing or analyzing your current SEO situation. Have an SEO Analyzer tool on your website as it is a fundamental strategy in marketing your business. You only need to enter your URL to obtain in-depth, page-level SEO scrutiny.
Also, check on your site’s comparison in the competition. For a competitive evaluation or analysis, enter additional websites. And since SEO tools are free, it is better you get multiple options for your website.
Not only will they help you know and understand the number of backlinks you earn but also show you how many keywords you rank. The main components you ought to be looking for in your SEO analyzer are the keywords you rank for and their usage frequency.
Additionally, it is crucial to know if the title, description, and header tags use keywords. And Google is an efficient tool to boost your performance as it gives more weight to these factors.

Start a blog

According to WordPress, more than 400 million people read over 20 billion blog posts on their platform. And, starting a blog is an effective small business internet marketing strategy.
For a small business to have successful marketing, you need to have a lot of content and a quality blog to attract clients to your site. Do not hire a content mill to fill your site with complex keywords which do not provide value to the audience. Instead of it, you may use the help of an essay writing service to make your content looks fresh.
According to recent studies, starting a blog is the best online marketing strategy. It ought to be an option within your CMS. A separate blog on WordPress can also be useful. But, you need to ensure your contact information is always ready.

Create or join a Facebook group

Many marketers underrate Facebook groups. But, little do they know that these public forms create a platform for people with like minds to discuss and share ideas.
Contrariwise, you need to remember that many group moderators delete spam posts and people. So, to ensure you market your business on Facebook, ensure you share valuable content.
Expand your audience by searching for groups on Facebook. Scroll through the suggestions more than twice a month. Once you advance yourself, create your Facebook group. This is an effective means to grow your audience than a business profile or page.

Create an email list

Most entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses often overlook email lists. Email lists are more effective than many social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Their click-through rates are amazing as people read them more often than social media posts. And creating offers you simple templates and automatic emails whose bases are on triggering events.
To leverage the power of email marketing, you need to ensure that you create content that’s rich enough for SEO. In this article, you can read four email marketing strategies that can help your content rank highly on search engines.

Embrace Amazon satisfaction

Amazon is another internet marketing business strategy which comes with many marketing benefits after you join it. You can market your products and brand on the platform which many people visit. Your visibility on Amazon searches gets to increase.

Use Facebook Live

As a Facebook user, you can add Facebook Live to your marketing mix. “To boost the performance of your small business, the best tactic to embrace is live-streaming on Facebook,” mentioned Allen Cranston, a CV specialist at ResumeThatWorks.com. Host online parties using Facebook Live to attract an audience to your site.

Appeal to a foreign market

Do not limit your marketing strategies to local markets just because you have a small business. Instead, appeal to the foreign market. Pick up clients from these markets to boost your business performance.
Do this by picking up foreign traffic, localizing your content for foreign marketers, and writing in another language.

Air your video content on YouTube

Video marketing is a significant trend in the business world today. And using YouTube to air your content is one of the best website marketing strategies.
YouTube is the second largest SEO platform after Google. Hosting your video content on YouTube not only exposes it to a new audience but also monetizes them to create a new revenue stream.

Computerize everything

Marketing automation is the strategy many businesses are embracing today. This is because it completes many tasks faster and in an accurate manner than human beings.
Some of the marketing automation platforms you can use include Rebuyers, HootSuite, and MailChimp. HootSuite enables you to schedule and automates posts on social media across various platforms.
In the video below, JB Kellogg from Marketing 360 talks about 4 different examples of how you can use automated marketing to grow your small business.

Send free samples to impactors

The vitality of sending free samples is to entice more sales. Additionally, free samples are an efficient marketing strategy in that they sway clients to make a purchase on the basis of social media impactors.

Create a recommendation program

Another strategy for internet marketing for small business is creating a recommendation program. And the leading marketing program you ought to have for your small business is Dropbox. It has over 500 million users.
Additionally, it gives 500MB – 1GB free storage space to any individual who refers to another. It also has a gamification aspect which leads to more clients sharing and using it.

Update your business information on mapping platforms

Some people, more so travelers, use maps to locate current businesses. Hence, you need to ensure they can contact you at any time by keeping your business current on maps.
Many link aggregators and other platforms use Google Maps to gather business information. Thus, you need to ensure you update your business information on mapping platforms.
In conclusion, never presume that having a low budget for your small business is the end of the world. There are various internet marketing strategies you can embrace to boost the performance of your business.
Do not look at the restraints a low budget comes with as it can be a blessing in disguise. Instead, consider the above online marketing for small business strategies.
Also, take a look at this article if you want to catch up with the latest digital marketing trends to find more online marketing tactics for your business.
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Rides of the Wild: digital art by Frédéric Müller (don’t miss the hippo)



Put a Tiger in your tank! This vintage ad slogan by Esso could very well have been the inspiration for this digital art series by Frédéric Müller.
Müller, a digital artist based in Lucerne, Switzerland, takes inspiration from the car’s design to imagine what wild animal could be behind the wheel. He transformed the cars to morphed them into a hybrid of a “carnimal”, then played with it to create imaginary scenes.
The Swiss digital artist comes from the 3D modeling industry, a career he has been pursuing at a leading CGI company. This experience came handy when it was time to design these models and scenes with a mix of 3D creation and photography.
All the digital art you see in this post can be purchased as prints at the MAD Gallery, a Geneva-based art space that specializes in mechanical art devices.
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Monday, April 29, 2019

8 Do’s and Don’ts of Starting a Graphic Design Business



With the entire business world now moving towards the visuals, it’s no surprise graphic design companies are doing so well.


If you’ve been thinking about entering the industry and starting your own graphic design firm, it’s extremely important to get everything right from day one. And to help you get there, we came up with eight do’s and don’ts of starting a graphic design business.

Do create a good portfolio

Creating a strong portfolio is the best possible way to attract clients in the graphic design industry. It’s a chance for you to display some of your best work and get recognized by people who need the services your business offers.
However, in order to get there, you first need to do some graphic design work and create graphics you can feature in your portfolio. It’s a good idea to do some pro-bono work or come up with your own projects that’ll allow you to showcase your skills.
In terms of graphic design, we have so much to see in the coming year. Here are a few graphic design trends you can get inspiration for 2019.

Don’t expect instant success after starting a graphic design business

No matter how good you are when it graphic design, you can’t expect instant success. Many graphic design companies rely on clients who keep coming back and new clients who are referred to them by their current clients.
This means that until you build your client base and gain some experience, you shouldn’t expect that you’ll have as much income as you might’ve hoped for. This is exactly why many new graphic design businesses fail within their first five years.

Do get a loan

You can’t start a business without money, simple as that. Graphic designers now use expensive equipment and investing in the finest tools is a must if you want to stay ahead of the pack.
And the best way to obtain finances for your company is through a loan. You can now apply for a personal loan quick and easy, without shifting focus from your work.
So, even if you’ve already landed your first client, it’s still not too late to obtain finances and get better equipment.

Don’t say yes to every project

Starting a graphic design business sure is exciting and you’ll probably be ready to take any job that comes your way.
While this may be a good way to gain some exposure, it can cause you to miss out on a huge project because you’ve already said yes to a project you never thought you’d be tackling.
When starting out, it’s very important to figure out what you’ve set out to do and only take on projects that fit into your plans.

Do be authentic

We live in the age of technology and it’s so easy to browse the web and find work by other graphic design businesses you can use for inspiration. Even though doing this may seem like a good idea, it can actually only hurt your chances of succeeding.
It’s very important that you have a say in the projects you take and you just can’t do that unless you establish your own design aesthetic as soon as you get underway. Make sure your work is authentic and you’ll have nothing to worry about.

Don’t do any work without a contract

The last thing you want to happen is someone to take advantage of your lack of experience. According to the pros, some clients take work and don’t pay the graphic designer who did it. This happens even more now since the most or all communication with your clients is done through the web.
With that said, make sure you design a contract that includes all variables, key dates, and payment terms before you even start doing any work, especially if it includes using expensive equipment.

Don’t ignore social media

Social media is the perfect place for graphic designers to showcase their work. After you’ve done creating your website, we recommend creating pages on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram,and using them to attract new clients.
Just don’t forget to ask every client whether they’re fine with you sharing the work you did for them on social media. Also, it’s a good idea to share the same pictures across all platforms as there’s nothing that can replace consistency when it comes to social media.
In the video below graphic designer Charlie Lewis gives some tips about graphic design for Instagram:

Do have a mentor

Whether you lack the skill or you’re struggling to run your business, finding a mentor can turn out to be an amazing idea. Your mentor can also give you legal advice and provide you with a sense of security when it comes to running a business. According to experts, the best way to connect with people who can help you is through social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Just make sure you connect with an expert who’s been in the graphic design industry for some time and you’ll do fine.
With these tips in mind, you should be able to get your graphic design business off to a good start even if you never worked in a graphic design agency before. Put enough time and effort into it, and you’ll give your business a proper chance to succeed.
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Sunday, April 28, 2019

5 Tactics for Improving Your Website’s UX in 2019


User experience is vital to the success of any product or service and websites are no exception.
Having a good online presence is as important as having a clean and tidy storefront; a business’s website is its face. Nowadays, users are savvy about web design and have come to expect a certain level of sophistication.
As the bar rises higher, many businesses, especially small ones, can feel overwhelmed by expectations to provide a well-designed website UX. However, improving user experience is not as tough as it may seem, and even a small effort can turn into a huge advantage.
Design Advisor has noted that enhancing user experience can lead to better search rankings, more business leads and increased revenue. In the following post, we’ll help get you started by discussing five key steps that will help to improve any website’s UX.

1. Provide Engaging Content

Providing engaging content is key to a good website UX. Nowadays, visitors want more than a purchase; they want an experience. A great way to achieve this is by adopting an engaging content strategy.
Effective content strategies focus on telling a brand’s story with the aim of establishing a connection between a business and its client.
With the right strategy, content can come in any format such as a blog post, vlog, or even a separate website. Using content to establish a brand identity helps to ensure that potential clients know more about who they are purchasing from.
Familiarity increases trust; 82% of consumers are more likely to trust a business after reading their custom content.  

2. Use Layout Strategically

When it comes to styles, brutalism continues to be on the rise in 2019. Brutalism involves a raw and minimalist approach to layouts with a focus on user experience. Alternatively, a beautiful, artistic site, can go a long way in establishing your brand as a leader in the market and a true risk taker.
If you want to be more conservative, thinking in terms of how a layout can help a visitor understand the information being presented is the way to go.
Other trends that have popped up are minimalism and broken-grid layouts. These trends also highlight the importance of reducing clutter, which we will discuss later in the text in more detail.

3. Provide Information Concisely and Efficiently

Visitors go to websites with the aim of getting some sort of information. The previous statement might seem redundant, but some businesses don’t seem to understand this based on their web design.
By providing information in an elegant and structured way, you can ensure that a user gets what they came for.
Web designers today seem to be gravitating toward simpler designs. Many are implementing bullet point lists to convey information and experiencing great results.
While 55% of users look at lists without bullet points, 70% look at lists with bullet points. Providing information in a clear way is also profitable, as businesses can ensure they convey the intended message successfully and draw attention to appropriate elements.

4. Don’t annoy your visitors

Up until now, all our tips have been about things you should do. However, it’s equally as important to discuss what you should avoid at all costs when it comes to web design and user experience.
Website visitors are exposed to pop-ups, autoplay and information bombardment to the extent that makes them appreciate it when a site avoids the temptation to implement these annoying features.
When designing your web presence, steer clear from clutter, walls of text, background music and videos that play automatically. These factors certainly don’t help visitors feel at home.

5. Optimize your website

Lastly, it’s important to work on the backbone of your site; factors such as speed and mobile responsiveness have a considerable effect on user experience.
This, in turn, has consequences on revenue. For instance, high expectations when it comes to website speed mean that when a site is perceived as slow, a visitor is less likely to buy from it. In fact, slow websites are estimated to cost $2.6 billion in lost sales per year.
Things like site speed optimization and mobile responsiveness aren’t too difficult or expensive to implement, as there is a plethora of web services and tools that can help test a site’s performance and optimize any necessary features.
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4 Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs A Persuasive Website Design

The world today revolves around the internet. The internet has opened very many opportunities and small businesses are among those who are best positioned to reap the most from it. Sadly, many of these small businesses are still reluctant to put their business on the internet.
A website is one of the best marketing tools any business can get today. Everything is going digital and all businesses, big or small, need to be in the wagon. Having a website for your business is slowly becoming a necessity. Research shows that businesses having a well-managed website performs much better than those that don’t have one. Businesses that do not have websites are slowly losing revenue and reputation. No sane business owner can stand his business losing revenue day by day. If your small business does not have a website you can be sure that there are other companies offering the same services that are maintaining websites for marketing and other business purposes. The importance of any small business, having a website cannot be stressed enough. Here are 4 reasons why your small business needs persuasive website design.

1. To educate customers about your products and services.

A website can be a good tool to pass any important information about your products to your customers. With it, you can be able to address any misconceptions that your competitors are spreading about your product.
If you educate people about your products and the business niche you have ventured in, visitors will be more engaged on your site and they are even more likely to become your future clients. Information is key if you want to have loyal customers.

2. To help sell your products.

Apart from passing information to your customers, a website can also be a catalog of your products and services. Since you are operating a small business, not many people will have the chance to pass by your store to confirm the current prices. A website is a good space to showcase the current prices and other important changes for your products.
However, selling products through your website is no easy task. Hook agency small business web design says that small business websites should be built to earn customers. This means making the site mobile friendly and incorporating SEO strategies, content marketing, and social media marketing for your website.

3. To build credibility in your business.

In this era, a business that does not have a website does not appear serious in its work. You need to show proof of online presence if you want to get trust, especially from the younger clients. Have all your business information professionally written and available for your clients to see on your website. This includes your contacts, physical location of your business and any other relevant information that your clients may want to know. If you are straight with your clients through your website, it will show you mean real business proving your company as trustworthy.

4. To target a bigger market.

A website enables your business to be seen by people all over the world. You will automatically have a wider market from the moment you launch your website.
The key to any business success is good marketing and a website does just that. A well-done website will enable you to get more out of your business by serving a wider customer base and eventually generating greater revenue. This is the major goal for both small and large businesses which can be achieved using only one marketing tool – a website.
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Sunday, April 14, 2019

12 Ways To Optimize Your Website For Voice Search In 2019

Voice search is a new technology that allows you to search for things online using voice prompts. Although it has been around for 11 years, its use has only taken place recently.
It is estimated that the use of voice will reach 50% by 2020.

Positioning your business on the fast-approaching voice-first world

Smartphone adoption has skyrocketed, thus leading to significant changes in the search landscape. We are quickly getting into a voice-first world with regard to searches.
Besides, as businesses embrace ecommerce platforms in droves, you have no option but to play safe by optimizing your content, website and everything else to keep up with the changing times.
The scramble for the limited number of customers is real. And, you don’t want to miss the piece of the pie.
So how can you optimize voice search and wearable technology to gain a competitive edge over your customers?
● Come up with a good plan of action
As the use of voice for search increases, you need to adapt your business to both current and future voice search needs. That means you have to develop a strategy. You need to evaluate all the keywords you will need, your existing content and future needs. Then you need to produce new content.
● Get listed online
This is good for you if you are a local business. But if you are not, you are free to skip this one. If you are local, one of the ways to prepare for voice search is by ensuring that you have been listed online.
For one, if you are selling wearable tech products, you know that they have limited display sizes. Besides, smartphones use voice assistants – for instance, Google Assistant for Android and Siri for Apple devices.
Unlike Google text search results, the assistants can’t show up search results especially for local businesses. Instead, they show business listings first. Well, in step you are not optimizing your website.
● Research your keywords
Remember your customers will be using voice search and not keywords. That means you will have to deal with increased keyword length because of the nature of human communication.
So instead of targeting a keyword like “pineapple birthday cake”, you need to focus on something like “do you know of any reliable vendors for pineapple birthday cakes?” Voice isn’t about delivering you results options but rather it directs you to a product’s action.
If you are still stuck about it, you can invest in good SEO software to help narrow down to specific keyword string that will work for your website.
● Optimize for local search
After you have done your local listings and produced local content, you need to optimize your listing and the content for local search. Most voice searches target information about paces that someone needs to visit. For example, it could be about “best places to buy fast foods in New Jersey” or maybe “Fast food places in New Jersey”.
How to Optimize Your Website for Voice Search SEO:
● Reduce page loading time
Every smart SEO knows that page loading speed is one of the most important ranking factors out there. And, with the increased amount of digital content (including voice) online, the faster your site load will be a determining ranking factor in the future.
According to a study conducted by Backinko, websites that have simple, easily digestible chunks of content ranks better on first pages of SERPs. The same study also found out that Google (and, in extension, search engines) favored web pages with low loading times.
● Use long-tail SEO
While the use of long-tail keywords isn’t as popular as it used to be a while ago, it one of the perfect ways for optimizing your website for voice searches.
There are two main reasons why it works like a charm. One is, voice searches are made through a significantly longer string of text. Secondly, smart assistants are designed to deliver answer-like responses for all queries we make.
As a result, the use of long-tail SEO helps us optimize for featured snippets. As a result, it will always send you directly to the top of search results.
● Target your audience’s questions.
Most voice searches are in the form of questions. Think about the queries people make to Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. They are all in the form of questions. For example, “How should I bathe my dog?” Such questions. Always make sure you have the right content that fits your audience’s actions.
● Produce voice-search friendly content
Always ensure that you have produced easy-to-read, conversational content. For an automated voice to clearly read, ensure that you have something written at 9th grade.
● Produce more local content
Quite a lot of voice searches are for local content. By producing locally relevant content that caters to the local needs of your people goes a long way into improving your SEO for voice-search and wearable tech. But, your business doesn’t have to be local for you to produce local content.
You can also dish-out tons of local content that will help bring more traffic to your business despite your location.
● User experience is everything
Unlike with the regular SERPs, voice search focuses on one website for querying. Ensure that the voice assistant will be able to access all the info you need quickly. That also means your site needs to be mobile friendly, fast, and HTTPs secured.
● Use schema and structured formatting.
In one of Backlinko’s study, they found that about 40.7% of all Google voice answers came from a Google Featured Snippet. Sometimes referred to as quick answers, these answers are summaries from selected websites and often include a link to the source of the information.
For your website to be featured, you need to ensure that you are providing concise answers to the questions are mostly answered by your audience.
● Don’t relent on regular SEO
When you focus on producing great content and doing your old school SEO, you are also likely to do well in voice search too. That is why websites that have high social engagement, better rankings, and high domain authority do better in voice search.
Voice is becoming the next great sensation in the search industry. For businesses to stay on top in 2019, they must be able to perform better voice search SEO on top of the regular SEO.
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