Open Enterprise Trends

How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy for Small Businesses

Hey there, small business owners and marketing enthusiasts! Pull up a chair, grab your favorite beverage, and let’s chat about something that can make or break your online presence: social media strategy. Now, I know what you’re thinking – “Not another social media lecture!” But stick with me, because I’ve got some real-world nuggets of wisdom to share that could transform your small business’s social game.

Before we dive in, let me tell you a quick story. A few months back, Slinky Digital Agency was working with a local coffee shop – let’s call it “The Daily Grind.” They made the best espresso in town, but their social media presence was… well, let’s just say it was as bland as gas station coffee. Fast forward three months, and they’re now the talk of the town, with lines out the door every morning. How’d we do it? That’s exactly what we’re going to explore today.

So, buckle up! We’re about to embark on a journey through the wild and wonderful world of social media strategy. And trust me, by the end of this, you’ll be itching to give your social presence a makeover.

Know Your Audience (Like, Really Know Them)

First things first – who are you talking to? And no, “everyone” is not an acceptable answer. You need to get specific. Really specific.

Think about your ideal customer. What’s their name? How old are they? What do they do for a living? What keeps them up at night? What makes them laugh? The more detailed you can get, the better.

For “The Daily Grind,” we realized our primary audience was college students and young professionals aged 18-35. They were health-conscious, environmentally aware, and always on the lookout for the next Instagram-worthy spot.

Once you’ve got your audience nailed down, it’s time to do some sleuthing. Where do they hang out online? What kind of content do they engage with? What time of day are they most active?

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8 Essential SEO Tips

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a term for several ways and means of getting your page ranked higher in the SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages. Why is this desirable? If you have ever searched online for something you will very likely have clicked on one of the websites that the search engines offer from their first page. And of all the choices on that first page, you most likely clicked on one of the first three.

So if you can get the search engines to show your website in that position you will get a great deal more organic or free traffic than a website that is on the second, third or other pages.

But how can you get the search engines to choose your website and put it on their first page? There are some SEO challenges you may come across, so here are 8 SEO tips to help you.

Search engines are looking for relevance. If you have great information that is not relevant to your website, it won’t show up. So make sure that the information is something that your potential customers will find relevant and the search engines will take note and act accordingly. But relevant text is not the only thing you need.

Links are an important part of the SEO process. Your website needs to have internal links – to other pages in your website – and external links. The latter should be to quality websites, not junky ones with tonnes of ads. Any links should give value to your visitors, so they should go to sites similar to, but not in competitions with, yours.

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Choosing the Right Commercial Cleaning Partner for Your Office

Choosing a perfect cleaning service for your office is not a simple decision; you are making a serious investment in the health, productivity, and image of your office environment. Office cleaning brings order and beauty to any premise,it gives off the first impression of your business. Therefore, selecting the best commercial cleaners is highly important, the decision you make here can radically affect not only the look of your office but also health and efficiency of the employees.

Understanding Your Cleaning Needs

It is important to know your particular cleaning requirements before you start using a cleaning agency. You need to look into the nature of your floor space before committing to any cleaning program; for example, does your office have high foot traffic requiring daily full clean ups or will less frequent deep cleans do? This is important to consider because it is the basis for all decisions. Adapting the cleaning service to your specific needs provides an efficient and effective way to maintain a clean and inviting atmosphere.

The Importance of Professional Experience

Involving experts with experience in the cleaning industry is encouraged as experience is tightly connected with performance. Among other things, the selection of a trustworthy office cleaning company with proven experience and a tailor-made approach to commercial cleaning is valuable, as cleaning an office becomes more specific than merely a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. This tailoring of services guarantees each part of your office is properly taken care of to the highest standards, which greatly increases the space’s hygiene and usefulness.

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Overview of the Latest Trends in Web Design

Web design is constantly evolving because the way people access the web is changing. These days, so many more people use their iPhones to connect to the Internet and these give a quite different user experience than the desktop computer due to touch technology. Even tablets use responsive technology, but these devices have much smaller screens, so a website that is designed to work well with a larger screen may not perform so well with a small one.

This is where and why many of the latest trends have come into being. Some of these trends are still evolving as web designers work to make the end user’s experience a stress-free one that will encourage them to stay on the website and become a client of the business, no matter what device they use to access the internet.

Some things can’t be changed

That said, certain functions of web design are meant to do the same thing and so cannot be changed too much. Even if they are changed to look at, they must still work in the same way. A log-in form or a checkout must still function as they always have, guiding the user easily into performing the action required of them.

Responsive design

The latest trends in web design are aimed at making the design more responsive. To that end, designs have become simpler and lighter while advances in data compression and bandwidth ensure the page loads quickly so surfers can find what they want quickly. And where the user must wait, for instance when a page is loading, the animation can be custom designed to be attractive and entertaining, at least to some degree.

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10 Essential Ways To Make Your Blog Posts More Effective

If your website has a blog and you create posts for it, it is to your credit because we guarantee many competitors will not be. However, even though you publish blog posts, you might wonder why you see very little return for that effort. Blog posts have several objectives which can be measured, such as click-through rates, the blog page’s ranking on Google, and the number of positive comments it generates.

If these, and any other way you measure your blog posts, are nowhere near where you hoped for, then it could be, despite your best efforts, that your blog posts are simply not working. There are several ways to address this, and none is particularly difficult. So, from a reputable digital marketing agency, here are ten essential ways to make your blog posts more effective.

#1 – Know Who Your Audience Is: One of the biggest mistakes we see is blog posts being written with no obvious audience in mind, and as such, they become a bland and unremarkable pieces of text. You should know who your audience is, and when writing each post, write it in a way that will resonate with them.

#2 – Create Compelling Blog Post Titles: Copywriters are paid fortunes to create magazine headlines, and there is a reason why. It is the headlines that draw in readers. That same principle applies to the title of your blog posts, so spend the time to create compelling titles that attract an audience to every post.

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5 Mistakes to Avoid with Adwords Marketing

Adwords marketing is a form of digital marketing that places your product or service in front of a person who has proven their interest by clicking on the ad. Better still, you only have to pay when they click, not if they read the ad but don’t click. Many businesses have found it a very productive way to market their goods. As with everything, mistakes can be made that affect your end result, so here are five common ones to avoid.

It is choosing a keyword that is too broad. Even though it may seem likely to attract many potential buyers, the cost will be too high to give you a good return on investment (ROI). It’s better to start with several long-tail keywords that will be much cheaper and work your way up as you get more profits. These keywords can be found in your Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools accounts.
Many people try to squeeze as many keywords into each campaign as possible. The idea with adwords marketing is to be laser targeted. One keyword for each campaign and landing page would be ideal, but it takes too much time. Instead, restrict yourself to about five keywords.
Sending visitors straight to the home page of your website. This leaves them confused as they try to find the information they expect from the ad keywords. It results in higher bounce rates and costs more. You need a dedicated landing page for each ad campaign that gives the visitor exactly what they want without looking for it.

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Making The Most Of Motivational Team Building Activities

One of the biggest benefits of team building activities is that it should give your team a huge motivational boost, and as the leader of that team you should make the most of that. Motivating a team through team building activities is of no use if the levels of motivation only stay high momentarily and drop once the activities have stopped.

What you really want is for your team to keep their motivation levels high continually, and that can be achieved if you set up and implement your team building activities in the right way. Most crucial is that you plan and consider the motivation elements of any team building exercise carefully for maximum effect. Your team building activities with Leadership Training Sydney should have these 4 critical elements which will help to motivate your team.

Fun

It does not matter whether you training a football team, a group of dancers, or a team of salespeople, for them to feel motivated, they have to enjoy what they are doing. Your team building activities should have an element of fun so that the activity is not seen as some kind of chore, or worse, a penance.

Actually, this applies to any training which you give your team, but it is especially important with regards to motivating them. Working together on a task which solidifies the team spirit, but at the same time allows them to have fun, is always going to produce better results than activities that are boring and downbeat.

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Your Own Company’s Branding

Once you have a company that is up and running and you have started to gain some traction, you know you need to get some branding done in order to take things into overdrive. If you are thinking of going about the branding for your company yourself, you might want to hold your horses and think about it again. Do you really think you can do a good job of branding your company?

Branding experts at Oxygen Marketing say while it may hurt the ego of many businessmen the simple fact of the matter is that running a company and branding a company for success are completely different things.

You should resist the temptation to do it yourself and think of a better option. In order to convince you, here are 3 reasons why you shouldn’t do your own company’s branding.

It’s A Different Ballgame

Unless you are someone who already has extensive experience branding and advertising for another company before starting your own, you probably do not have a good grasp on the concept of branding. You might be thinking that the brand is nothing more than the logo, the tag line and how your products generally look.

It is that but there is so much more to it. The branding of a company instils an emotional response from the customers when they use your products and those branding elements can make that happen. A talented branding company will immediately be able to capitalize on what emotions the products your company can instill in your customers and use that to build the brand of your company.

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5 Strategies to Help Manage the Cost of Business Litigation

When a business goes through the unpleasant mess of litigation, it will cost them a great deal in legal fees to their lawyers as well as what they have to pay the person who sues them – always supposing they win. However there are other costs that are largely hidden and often cannot be recovered, let alone even worked out because of their very nature.

The cost to the reputation of the company can bring it to its knees because such things can drag on for years. During this time the media will make a big fuss and the public tend to think, Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In other words, they convict the company in their minds and this usually translates into not dealing with them anymore.

The CEO and other management have to spend a great deal of time with their lawyers and external stakeholders – they may even bring in external risk and reputational management professionals with whom they will have to spend time. This means they are not focussed on managing their business to the extent that they should be. Under such stress, they may make poor business decision, or lose a client due to neglect. This too, has a great cost that can never be worked out.

So here are 5 ways a business can manage the cost of litigation

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Business Start-Ups And Their Links To Drug Addiction

It is the dream of many individuals to start and run their own business, and we all know many people do it successfully, but what might not be so commonly known is the link between start-up businesses and drug rehab. Before anyone thinks we are talking about someone starting an illegal drug running and supply business here, we are not. Instead, we are talking about legitimate new businesses whose owners succumb to drug addiction.

It has long been known that drug addiction is not restricted to those that might be considered to be at the lower end of the income and social ladders. The fact that someone is in a respected and professional job and is earning a six-figure salary does not preclude them from the possibility of becoming addicted to drugs from cocaine to ice addiction.

This also applies to those who wish to start a business, and given that doing so normally requires levels of entrepreneurship, intelligence, and in almost all cases the financial means to get the business off the ground, we are once again looking at a demographic that most people would not automatically consider being prone to drug addiction.

The fact is that whilst being in poverty can be a trigger for someone to start taking drugs, possibly in an attempt to find some kind of escape, equally true is wealthy people also seek refuge from their problems by taking drugs. The trigger here is not the size of their bank balance, but instead the problems, stress, and anxiety they face. The specific problems might be widely different, but the means of escape is not…drugs.

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3 Ways To Protect Your Family Lawyers Business Against Legal Action

Unique is not the right term to describe the scenario where a family lawyers business faces legal action, either from a client or another party. For those not familiar with the legal world, the assumption might be made that lawyers within any legal field, be it family law, commercial law, or criminal law, for example, never face legal action themselves, but they do, and it happens more often than many realise.

This then leads us to a situation where lawyers, including family lawyers, need to be represented by another lawyer. The specific legal speciality of that lawyer will invariably depend on what type of legal action is being taken. Whichever it is, a family lawyer must ensure that they can defend their business against any legal action and here are three ways to do so.

Prevention Is Far Preferrable To Litigation

It should hopefully be the realisation of everyone that preventing any form of legal action from taking place is a far more agreeable scenario than having to defend it, including having to go to court. Within your family lawyers business, preventative measures can cover a wide array of actions, but some to consider include:

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7 Tips For Generating Prospective Clients For Your Landscaping Business

For any Sydney landscape architect who are ambitious in terms of wanting their landscaping business to grow and expand, one of the barriers they often come up against is not knowing which ways they can effectively market that business to gain new clients. Should that include you, and you are seeking marketing tips for promoting your business, read on and you will discover seven such marketing ideas, all of which are highly effective at generating new leads for local businesses.

Social Media

Having an effective social media marketing campaign can bring you leads from multiple places online. When you consider how many social media sites there are, and how many local people will be using them, it is a marketing channel that must be utilised. The key is having interesting, amusing and even shocking or controversial content that hopefully becomes viral and gets you noticed by even more potential clients.

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How Dentists Can Use Google Ads To Increase New Patient Numbers

We doubt any dentists would say “No”, to having more patients sign up for their dental practice whether that be for regular check ups or even dental implants. Simple economic principles will tell you that when patients leave a dental practice unless that dentist has any means in place of actively seeking new patients, ultimately their business will diminish until such point it is no longer viable.

That is all relatively simple to understand, but what many dentists do not find so easy is finding a means to attract new patients. Many rely on nothing more than current patients referrals, and a standard entry in the Yellow Pages. However, the problem they face is many other local dentists aka their competition, who are more proactive, will be acquiring the lion’s share of new dental patients.

This brings us to what we believe is one of the most effective ways of attracting new patients to your dental practice and that is Google Ads. Google Ads is exactly what the suggests, and that is advertising on Google. The easiest way to see a Google Ad is to enter a search on Google that has some commercial relevance, for example, “car dealer + your town/city”.

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How To Use Social Media To Promote Your Landscape Architecture Firm

There are probably as many ways to promote your landscaping architecture firm as there are varieties of plants that you could include in one of your designs. It can be daunting trying to decide which online marketing methods to use, however, according to digital marketing specialists – one of the most effective, especially for local businesses, is social media.

Now, your experience to date of using social media might only have consisted of posting photos and memes for family and friends, or it could be you have found social media to be something that you as an individual do not wish to participate in. Regardless of what you have experienced or what you believe about social media, the fact that many prospective clients of your landscaping architecture business do use social media means you need to think past your own views.

Further to that, it will be the case that many of your closest competitors are using social media to their advantage, and anything which benefits their business with regards to finding new clients, is something that can harm your business to the extent each one of those clients your competitor has gained is a lost opportunity.

In truth, including social media in your digital marketing is not as difficult as you might think, provided you take some key steps and actions which will ensure you are using it effectively. Here are 5 of those steps.

Do Your Research First

If you do this step properly you are almost guaranteed to have a successful social media campaign. You first want to look for popular social media pages that have been created by the top landscaping companies and do not limit this just to your local competitors. Look at what type of content they are posting, and crucially, what content is getting the most interaction in terms of shares and comments. Your job is simply to emulate that content without copying it exactly.

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5 Tips To Ensure Any Google Ads Campaign Your Create For Your Family Lawyers Business Is Successful

In terms of cost, there are two options that you have with regards to promoting your family lawyers business. They are paid and free. To be honest, to call the latter free is a bit misleading because whilst you might not pay for each individual click or visitor to your website, there are costs with respect to time, and potentially to the SEO agency who optimised everything to rank your website highly on Google in order to gain those visitors.

The ‘free’ route also takes longer to see results so if you want to start gaining new clients as soon as possible then it is paid advertising that you need. One of the most effective paid advertising options online is Google Ads. Previously called ‘AdWords’, this allows your business to bid for clicks for specific keywords and if the bid is successful then your ad, and more importantly, the link to your website, appears at the top of the page.

It seems fairly straightforward and at its core it is a relatively simple concept to understand, however, the means by which you become one those top spots has a bit more to it in terms of learning and actions. Nevertheless, even this is not that difficult especially if you follow some simple rules. In addition, you need to approach the setting up of your Google Ads campaign with a plan and strategy , rather than just randomly choosing and bidding on keywords.

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4 Positive Benefits Of Relocating Your Business

If you are a business owner or manager and you the idea of relocating that business has entered your mind, we assume that the decision to move would only be if you could see positive reasons for doing so. before you start planning your move and hiring expert removalists, you must first ascertain what benefits that your business is going to accrue as a result of relocating.

You also want the positive aspects of relocating to be ones that actually benefit your business, your staff, your clients, and yourself. Simply doing it for a change of scenery, or because you have become bored with your current location is not enough reason to move, especially if your business extremely successful being located where it is at the moment and the profits are rolling in every single month.

On the other hand, if your business is not achieving the results that you are aiming for, and you believe that for this, and for other legitimate reasons, an office relocation would make a difference, then by all means plan for one. In doing so, you will be looking to see what other advantages there might be, and to point you in the right direction, literally, here are 4 of them.

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7 Ways You Can Optimise Your Family Lawyers Website For Better Google Rankings

You are hopefully already aware that there multiple ways in which you market and promote your family lawyers business. Some can bring instant results such as pay per click advertising on Google or Facebook. Others, require a long-term approach and some patience such as SEO. Of the two approaches, it is the latter which can provide sustainable traffic to your website.

One of the longer term methods of marketing your business is search engine optimisation, or SEO as it normally called. An effective SEO strategy crafted by an experienced SEO consultant, can help your website move up the rankings on Google and the other search engines, and in the best case scenario reach one of the top three positions. Once there, it will benefit from increased levels of traffic as potential clients search using keywords relating to your business niche.

To achieve all that we need to put the emphasis on the word ‘effective’ as there are countless businesses that never get close to page one of the search engine results. They may try, but the way they implement their SEO is often flawed or tries to take short cuts. That may have worked years ago, but Google has long since gotten several steps ahead of these and instead of rankings improving, they decline.

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5 Ways Employers Can Support Employees Who Have Drug Addictions

For any employer that discovers one of their employees has a drug problem, including ice addiction, it can come as a bit of a shock. It might be that the employee has already undertaken drug therapy, has gone through drug detox, and is now on a drug rehab program. On the flip side of the coin, it might be the employee has a drug addiction that currently exists and is in need of rapid support.

If the end of the drug use scale one of your employees is on includes serious drug addiction, hopefully, you are an employer who sees your role as one which provides support for them, rather than one where punishment is the only action to take. Obviously, that is your choice, and it is not for us to tell you how to run your business. all we would ask is that you consider all the options open to you.

If you want those options to include ways of supporting employees who have a drug addiction, then there are some guidelines below as to how you and your company can provide that support.

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Why Effective Website Design Means Visitors Stay Longer On Your Psychology Business Website

If your psychology business has a website, have you ever taken time to consider how well it is performing or if it is helping your business as much as it should. The reason these questions are important is that according to the web design experts at www.slinkywebdesign.com.au your Google ranking is highly influenced by how visitors interact with your website.

In addition, conversions on your website, which can include prospects leaving their details, them making a call to book an appointment, or them purchasing a product you sell, such as books and courses, will all be impacted by the design of your website.

One of the key measures which will affect all of the above, either positively or negatively, will be the length of time a visitor spends on your website. If they remain for a reasonable length of time, then that is good news, but, if they leave almost immediately, it is bad news and suggests that something is not right with your website design.

The first concern if visitors are leaving quickly is for your ranking on search engines, especially Google. One of Google’s key goals is to ensure that the search results they generate provide those searching with websites they are happy with. The term ‘user experience’ is often used by Google to identify this.

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What Are The Pros & Cons of Using AdWords For My Law Firm?

Google Adwords is a handy digital marketing resource for most online and location-based businesses. However, the merits of using AdWords as a law firm is heavily debated. Many experts argue that AdWords is too expensive to be used effectively for lawyers and law-related keywords. However, others would disagree, arguing that AdWords is a great way to drive highly relevant and targeted traffic to your website.

With this in mind, we’ve compiled a complete list of the pros and cons of using Google AdWords for your family law firm. Remember, this is our opinion – do your research before you act on any advice presented here!

Pros of using AdWords for my law firm:

The pros of using AdWords are many and include:

AdWords allows you to target relevant searches – This means that you can be confident that the people visiting your website are interested in your services to at least some extent. Unfortunately, you can’t be sure that everyone who clicks on your paid ad will become a paying customer.

AdWords can provide great exposure – Gaining exposure for your law firm can be difficult. Using Google AdWords allows you to place yourself at the top of the search engine rankings, even briefly. Suppose you can couple your AdWords use with effective SEO. In that case, you can potentially have two results at the top of the search engine results page, further increasing your assumed reliability and authority.

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Cancellation Policies And What They Should Include

One area of debate within the world of business is that of cancellations and refunds, and when we say debate, that has a wide scope and ranges all the way from a reasonable discussion to a heated argument. In the most extreme cases arguments about a cancellation or a refund have gone to litigation, and thus the business has had to ask their litigation lawyers to step in and help resolve the matter.

Of course, this can happen on both sides of the fence for business owners. Either they are the one who sold the goods and services and there is a dispute over their own refund or cancellation policy, or they are the customer of another business and they have found that their rights to cancel or receive a refund for faulty or incomplete goods and services are being denied.

These issues arise for many reasons; some are as a result of a business not making its cancellation and refund clear enough, a business not fulling its obligations with regards to cancellations and refunds, or it might be that a customer believes that they are entitled to cancel and receive a refund in all circumstances, which we hope you already know is not the case.

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7 Tips For Making Your Office Relocation As Easy As Possible

Going through office relocations can be stressful for everyone who works there, from the business owners all the way down to the office cleaners who no doubt might be thinking of what mess they might be left to clear up afterwards. The simple fact is that if you plan and prepare properly, plus use the services of a removalist company who specialise in office relocations, it should all be relatively straightforward and stress-free.

Apart from hiring professionals to help you, there are a number of other ways in which you make any office relocation easier than it might otherwise be. Here are 7 of our top tips to make that happen.

Find The Correct Premises

It still amazes us that office relocations do not work out for some businesses, simply because the new premises that the business is moving to, turn out to not be as suitable as first thought. This often happens when just one individual is making the decision, whereas if the heads of each department had some input, this may have highlighted issues that had otherwise not been thought of.

Plan Well In Advance

Planning is essential for any office relocation to be successful, and that applies to all the major aspects of the move, as well as the minor details. One idea is to place an individual in charge of the planning for each individual section or department. You will also want to create a timeline so that deadlines for things to be arranged are met.

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Why Proper Branding Can Boost A Dental Clinic’s Revenue

A dentist might not be the first profession or business that you think about when the subject of business branding is discussed, however, a dental practice or Perth Dentist can benefit every bit as much from good branding as any other type of business.

That might not seem to be the case at first, and many people question why a dental practice needs branding. After all, ‘Surely it is large multi-national companies that branding applies to?’, they may ask.

Sadly, that is exactly the mistake that many small and local businesses make, because whilst they may not operate on the same scale as a large, national, or international business, they can benefit from many of their practices.

One of those practices is branding, and if a dental practice can ensure their branding is done correctly, it can bring many benefits to it, and that includes increased numbers of new, and loyal patients.

Branding need not cost a fortune, and more importantly, the return on investment can be impressive. There are many ways in which effective branding can help any business, including a dental practice, and here are three of the most important.

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3 Business Benefits Of Having Your Carpets Professionally Cleaned

If you run a busy and successful business, it is more than likely that commercial cleaning is not often the top priority in your business diary on any given day. Not that we are suggesting that it should, however, what we would ask to consider is the benefits that having clean carpets throughout your premises can bring.

Now, we are not suggesting that having a professional cleaner clean your carpets will double your sales overnight. However, it will give you some advantages over your competitors who choose not to clean their carpets, which must be a benefit to yours.

Healthier Employees

You would be horrified by the number of bacteria and other undesirables like pollen and dust that lurk within carpets. All these undesirables, in several different ways, can be harmful to health.

Think of those who suffer from hay fever for whom pollen can cause all sorts of issues or those with dust allergies having difficulties due to the amount in the carpets. More seriously bacteria living in carpet can cause illness that leads to vomiting and diarrhea.

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Call Tracking And How It Can Benefit Your Business

With everything seemingly moving online it is easy to forget that there are still some offline business services and tools that can be of huge benefit to your company. One of them is the telephone, and no doubt there are many people reading this for whom speaking on the phone is still the number one way that you close deals and makes sales.

As with everything, modern technology can enhance how you use the telephone and make it more effective, and along with using chatbots, one of the most popular amongst business owners is ‘call tracking software’.

This enables you to track telephone calls and has other features such as recording calls, and most importantly for your marketing, that can help you monitor and assess which campaigns are working with regards to generating calls and which are not.

You can track calls from multiple sources which include your pay per click ads, social media, your website, and offline advertising such as newspapers, magazines, and even radio ads.

To give you a better understanding of call tracking, we are going outline some of the main features it has and give you more details on how they can benefit your business.

Dynamic Number Selection

Quite simply this means having an individual number for each of your marketing campaigns. This allows you track the calls coming into each of the numbers and thus you can see which campaign is generating the highest number of calls. It will also let you assess the quality of lead that each campaign is producing too.

This should enable to massively increase your return on investment for any of the marketing campaigns you are running as you can either switch off the campaigns that are not working, or at least seek to improve them by changing their ad copy for, example.

As it is also showing what the winning campaigns are, then you can increase your budget for them with a view to seeing an even greater number of calls, coming into your business.

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5 Tips for Drafting New Employment Contracts

Employment contracts can be confusing, especially if you’re a new business owner who hasn’t employed many people before. Because of this, it’s important to spend some time getting familiar with the legalities surrounding contracts and how they should be drafted.

Many employers use an employment lawyer to ensure they’re complying with their legal obligations, which is never a bad idea. We’ve also put together the following list of our top tips for drafting new employment contracts to help you get started.

Without further ado, let’s jump straight into it!

Specify What the Role Entails

For starters, it’s always a good idea to specify exactly what a job entails when you’re putting together a new employment contract. Make sure you think carefully about the key roles and responsibilities of the position and how you expect your new employee to approach them. On top of this, speak directly with said employee to ensure they’re aware of their exact role.

Explain Sick and Vacation Leave

Clearly outline everything your new employee needs to know about sick and annual leave. Include information about how many paid sick days are available and what happens if you use them all up. Is unpaid sick leave an option?

Similarly, outline everything necessary about annual leave. Consider how much notice needs to be given, what happens to unused leave at the end of the year, and whether or not an employee can be forced to take leave.

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What are featured snippets and should I be worried about them?

If you’re an SEO beginner, you might not have heard of feature snippets, and you therefore might not be optimising your website for them. However, if you’re not then you’re missing out.

Basically, featured snippet is the name given to the small entries that appear at the top of the search results. These include things like the “people also ask” boxes, and the “featured result” at the top of a search page.

If you really want to succeed when it comes to SEO, you need to make sure that you’re optimizing your content for featured snippets. Otherwise, you will be missing out on a great opportunity, and your website will suffer.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this short guide to featured snippets and the best ways to achieve them.

What Is A Featured Snippet?

To put things simple, a featured snippet is an answer that the search engine – be it Bing, Google, or another – has taken from one of the pages that rank for the search term in question.

It is usually framed by a box and positioned above the number one search result, which means that it’s a great place to be. It’s important to note that featured snippets aren’t always taken from the number one search result, which means that there’s a chance to grab one even if you’re not right at the top of the ranking pages.

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What Sort Of Records Should I Be Keeping As A Freelancer?

As a freelancer, bookkeeping can sometimes become very difficult. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t really sure about what sort of things they should be keeping records of and what is unnecessary, which tends to lead to one of two situations:

A lot of time is wasted on keeping records that simply aren’t necessary. This time could be better spent on other aspects of the business.
The records that are kept simply aren’t good enough, which can lead to problems when it comes to submitting a tax return. Most freelancers only make this mistake once or twice.

As you can see, understanding what your record keeping and tax requirements are as a freelancer is very important.

First, consider how the ATO sees you:

If you are a freelancer, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) will see you in one of two ways. If you only freelance part time and don’t earn very much, then your freelance work may be seen as a hobby, which means that you don’t have to pay any tax. However, if you earn a decent amount, and undergo the freelance activity with the purpose of making money, you will be classed as a business, and will have to pay taxes.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to decide how the ATO will see you. Usually, your activity will be defined as a hobby if it is largely for pleasure, if it makes you money to cover the costs of tools or materials, and if it is not undertaken commercially. As soon as you start doing something with the aim of making a profit or on a commercial scale, you will be classified as a business. If you are unsure, contact the ATO for a private ruling.

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Four Myths About SEO You Should Be Aware Of

Mention search engine optimisation, or SEO, to a room full of business people and you’ll see a variety of reactions, many of which will involve puzzled faces, grimacing or even a bolt for the nearest exit. It is understandable, given the vast amount of conflicting and confusing information which exists relating to SEO.

Sadly, there are some elements of this information which are likely to do more harm than good if applied to a website’s SEO strategy, and yet they appear time and time again on SEO forums, discussion groups and social media posts. Some of this information may seem to make sense at first but a look at the guidelines given out by the main search engines will show they are myths.

Myth #1: You Must Use A Dot Com Extension For Your Domain Name

Whilst dot com is desirable, according to Google it is not the case that they prefer dot com domains and rank them much higher than other extensions such as dot net or dot org. It is true that in the very beginning Google could only recognise dot coms but those days are long gone.

If you are a local company, seeking to attract local customers then it is more beneficial to select a domain with your country code such as ‘.au’ in Australia, or ‘.co.uk’ in the United Kingdom.

Myth #2: Keyword Research Is No Longer Useful

Many business owners, and sadly, SEO agencies too, seem to think that ‘they know best’ when it comes to what potential customers will search for. As a result, they optimise their websites and backlinks based on this presumption and then wonder why there has been no uplift in visitor traffic.

Continue reading “Four Myths About SEO You Should Be Aware Of”