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Decrease Your Bounce Rate, Increase Loyal Customers

/ nancyrubin

A poor bounce rate is a conundrum that a lot of businesses face. They are attracting a good amount of traffic to their website, but they don’t have many conversions to back it up. Of course, traffic means nothing if the people that are visiting your website are not interested in what you have to offer. So, where are you going wrong? Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can decrease your bounce rate in order to increase your loyal consumer base.

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Is your web design confused?

This is one of the main reasons for a high bounce rate. Does your branding reflect your business and the industry you operate in? If your web design is confused, it is going to dilute your brand identity, and it will immediately turn potential customers away. This often occurs when people work with web design and marketing businesses that have no experience in their area. If you run a law firm, for instance, a company like Foster Web Marketing would be ideal, as they cater to the legal sector and have an abundance of experience in this industry. It is so important to find designers that have experience in your niche, and check out their portfolio to see the work they have done so far.

Do you understand what your visitors are looking for?

As mentioned in the introduction, one of the biggest problems business owners face is that they have a tremendous amount of website traffic, but they can’t turn these users into customers. The main reason for this is because not all every user is your ideal consumer.  So, what happens is that someone gets directed to your page, and then they realise that you don’t offer what they are looking for, and then they leave. This is why your bounce rate is high.

To rectify this issue, you need to understand your website visitors. There are a number of ways you can do this, including:

  • Analyse onsite search trends – This is a good way to understand what your customers are expecting from your website. You can see what search terms they use, and whether your website is catering to what they want. If not, you can identify the gaps in your content and make the necessary changes.
  • Discover the highest converting pages on your website at present – You can learn what type of content attracts customers to your business by understanding the highest converting pages. You will probably find that there is a big difference between your highest converting content and your most popular content, and this signals that you need to make a change.
  • Find your most popular content – This leads on from the former point perfectly. You need to find your most popular posts and make sure they are optimised for boosting conversions.

Do you encourage new website users to opt-in to your email list?

If you don’t, now is the time to start. This is important because research indicates that to create a viable sales lead it takes six to eight touches. This is why collecting email addresses is a must. This enables you to keep in contact with your potential customer, ensuring the relationship is kept alive until they convert. Otherwise, how would you be able to encourage the six to eight touches until a sale takes place?

You need to have a careful and considered approach when encouraging people to sign up to your email list. You need to give them an incentive to do so. For example, you could offer valuable digital downloads, such as a whitepaper, cheat sheet, template, or eBook.

Do you re-engage abandoned visitors?

This is the final point to consider when it comes to your bounce rate. A lot of business owners simply give up on the users that have abandoned them after their first visit to their website. This is a big mistake, which can result in many opportunities lost. You shouldn’t give up on these users. Perhaps they simply were not ready to make a purchase from your website or sign up to your email list first time around?

You need to look for the most effective methods of re-engaging with these visitors. One of the ways you can do this is with social media. You can target people that have recently engaged with your website, creating posts that have been perfectly put together to appeal to them. You can also use on-site remarketing to appeal to abandoning visitors through targeted exit-intent popups.

All in all, reducing your bounce rate is of huge importance if you are to have a successful online presence. Use the tips that have been mentioned above to get started.

How To Start A Successful Business Abroad

/ nancyrubin

In general, becoming a successful entrepreneur takes so much hard work and can be very difficult. But, it seems as though the odds are stacked against you if you’re an entrepreneur in a foreign country.

Local investors and businesses may not be inclined to take you seriously as you’re not a resident yourself. This isn’t just talking about foreign people owning businesses in this country, it applies to anyone from here going overseas and trying to start a company too.

What I want to talk about today is how you can start a business abroad, and get taken seriously. Take a look at my advice below for more info:

Research The Foreign Market

Before starting a business in a foreign market, you need to do your research. Spend hour upon hour getting to know the market, figuring out how things are usually done, and just becoming an all-around expert. You will get taken more seriously if you know everything about the place you’re setting up a business in. If you can tell local businesses and investors information, they don’t know, that’s when you get respect. If they constantly have to fill you in and you’re always asking questions about how things are done, that’s when they don’t take you seriously.

Learn The Language

You will gain so much more respect if you can learn the language of the country you’re aiming to start a business in. This removes the need for interpreters and means you can speak with local people in their native tongue. If you’re from overseas coming here, you should try and not only learn English but also speak English with an American accent. This will get you taken seriously as you’ll speak coherently and everyone will understand you, and there’s no need to keep repeating yourself. The same goes the other way too, make sure you learn a foreign language and understand how to speak in their accent and blend in as a local. It will help dramatically, not least because it shows you respect the country and are serious about starting a company there.

Bring A Unique Idea To The Table

This final tip kind of blends in with the first one about researching the foreign market. During your research, you should be able to pinpoint gaps in the market and possible unique ideas. Often, this idea could be something that’s common in your home country but really hasn’t taken off abroad. So, you get in there and fill that gap with an idea that’s unique to this foreign country. The great thing is, you will be taken seriously as your idea has proof that it’ll be successful because it works back home. Regardless, you just need to have a unique idea at your disposal that’s never been done in that country before. It makes you seem really serious about business, and the locals will be impressed.

Whether you’re from overseas looking to start a business here, or you’re an American going abroad, use this advice to help you get started. It should help you gain more traction and get off to a winning start.

3 Ways the Internet Can Make Your Life Easier

/ nancyrubin / 1 Comment

Are you someone who uses the Internet in some capacity or another? If so, include yourself among many people nationwide doing the exact same thing.

That being the case, the amount of Internet usage of course varies from person to person.

Someone who meets a lot of people on a regular basis can use the worldwide web to get more information on them.

In conducting a background check, you learn more about each person you meet. So, are you ready to have the Internet play a role in making your life easier?

Put the Worldwide Web to Work

Remember these three ways to put the worldwide web to work for you:

  1. Searches before meeting people

As mentioned, doing online searches can benefit you in ways you might never have known before.

For instance, are you getting back into the dating world? If so, you want to make sure that the person you agree to go out on a date with is who they claim to be.

A fair number of people behind computers are not always honest with those on the other end of online dating. As a result, the latter can be victims in more ways than one.

When you do a background search of the person you are contemplating going out with, you are more informed. By knowing their name, you can plug that into the computer and start searching away.

Another example would be if you are considering rooming with someone.

As many Americans look to save money these days, the idea of having a roommate or two has picked up.

Once you have a potential roommate’s name, do a quick online search of them to make sure they check out. In doing so, you will feel better about your decision to go with them or move on to someone else.

  1. Securing your family

When you have a family to protect, you will do anything it takes to keep them safe and sound.

With that in mind, you can use the Internet in more ways than a background search to protect them. As valuable as that search is, it can’t help your child when he or she is sick or injured (see more below).

That said medical emergencies with kids do not always come at the best times of the day. As a result, you can’t always get in touch with your family doctor.

There are online medical sites offering basic tips to care for a child with various symptoms. As such, you can make them more comfortable until they can get in to see your doctor.

Such online information can also prove quite valuable in a medical emergency. Sites provide info on dealing with everything from the flu to if your child ingests poison.

By using the Internet at a moment’s notice, you could improve your child’s condition, even save their life.

  1. Knowing your rights following a vehicle accident

Unfortunately, many American families will be in vehicle accidents this year. With that being the case, it is important to know where to turn for both medical and legal help.

When it comes to the former, those injured in your family may need long-term physical rehab to recover. Countless medical facilities offering services in the rehab business are online with informative websites waiting to assist.

Once you have done some searches of those in your area, you can whittle them down. From there, decide which one best suits the needs of the person or persons requiring them.

With your legal rights, what happens if a family member is in a serious accident where the driver leaves?

With a hit-and-run accident, you could end up footing the bill. That is unless you get their license plate and/or have an eyewitness.

In a license plate lookup following a vehicle accident, you can pin down a responsible party.

When it comes to the Internet, these examples are but a smidgen of how the web can make your life easier.

About the Author: Dave Thomas covers business and technology topics on the web.

Optimizing Your Online Presence For Global Expansion

/ nancyrubin

Widening your net to land a much more international audience is a great way to grow your company and get your product, service or even just your brand into entirely new territories. However, it isn’t as simple as many would naively believe, especially when you consider you have to cater for all the nuances that come with an international audience: cultures, laws and online behaviors.

That is why we have come up with a few things you should consider when it comes to launching your global marketing strategy; the reason being these will help you successful cater to the new audiences you hope to reach.

Going Cross-Culture

If you want to be a success across multiple cultures then you need to understand the cultural barriers that you and your business will need to overcome. Of course, a great place to start is having a website that has been translated into multiple languages because this will give you a huge advantage. However, the deeper you are able to delve when it comes to understanding other cultures the more you will able to tweak your strategy to meet the different nuances. As such, we recommend you learn from people in the target audience you are hoping to reach.

Different Laws

Every country – and often every region – has different regulations when it comes to products, marketing, and sales. As such, it is worth making sure you know the local regulations on all three of these fronts before you commit to launching your online campaign. To give you some more context, doing business in Russia will mean different product laws to doing business in America with regards to chemicals used, safety standards, packaging designs, language used and quality assurances. The same goes for advertising laws. While America is very relaxed on competitive messaging, places like Germany and Belgium have much stricter regulations.

Search Engine Needs

Choosing the right search engine, localizing content and understanding how keywords are interpreted; these are areas you need to give careful consideration to. Every region uses different search engines, so you need to know which is used by your target audience in every location you are launching in. Yes, Google has the top spot in English-speaking countries, but local markets tend to be best served by local search engines. Another thing to bear in mind is translations. It isn’t enough to just directly translate your content; you need to localize the messaging and the product to each market you are looking at serving. And let’s not forget the importance of knowing what the native keywords to use are.

Website Design

You may think you have got the perfect website in terms of design and user functionality and, yes, that may well be the case for your American market. But it doesn’t mean it will be for the Russian market. Simple things like the colors you use can have a completely different meaning because they are so deeply ingrained in cultures. White in the western world means marriage and purity, but in the Eastern world and Africa, it symbolizes mourning. That’s just the start as well. You’re social media accounts will need to be setup to adapt to the different languages too, while most of the customer services do’s and don’t will need to be addressed as well. You’ll also need to make sure that your users see the cost of something in their local currency and you’ll want to save yourself the headache of having text that can’t be translated in your graphics.

Is Quality Web Hosting Important For SEO?

/ nancyrubin

Businesses should never underestimate the importance of online presence for their success. But being merely present isn’t enough. Your website has to be noticed by potential customers, and in time, its popularity will surely grow, as well as the business itself. So, what else is important other than the presence? Well, quality, of course. This includes ease of navigation and an organized and visually pleasing site. Is this enough? No. Where you decide to accommodate your blog also plays a big role, especially in a world where search engine optimization is essential for every business, that is, if you want to generate traffic. Let’s see exactly how your web host impacts your SEO.

High uptime percentage

If your website is often inaccessible for a long time due to problems with the server, the search engine spiders can notice that during one of their checkup visits. They will then record it as unavailable and move on to the next site. What does that mean? Well, your web page will probably be recorded as unreliable and your rankings will go down. As a result, your website will not be ranked highly in search results, and you will lose a lot of potential visitors. A good website host should offer at least 99% uptime.

Loading speed

In 2010, Google explicitly specified speed as a ranking factor, and this is something that has been a long time coming. Users love fast websites, and low loading speed will only chase them away to another page. Too busy servers can be blamed for this situation. However, while the loading speed does, in part, depend on the web host, it is not necessarily the provider’s fault. The coding and configuration of your website can play a significant role in the total loading speed.

IP address

What’s so special about the IP address that could impact your search ranking? Well, believe it or not, it’s the physical location of your web host. In order to get higher rankings, you should choose a web host that is located in the same country as your company. IP location can impact another SEO factor – speed. Targeting the users in the same country where the host server is located will enable faster loading times.

SSL as an important SEO factor

More and more websites are using https to protect user data in web traffic. That is why Google has marked SSL as an SEO ranking factor. Although it is still a minor ranking factor and it doesn’t have too strong an influence, it looks like it will become very important in the near future. You can move your site from http to https but it will require some changes to make your website fully operational.

Security

Poor website security can really hurt your SEO. Google will not hesitate to penalize websites which are susceptible to hacker attacks, spam messages, and fake backlinks. If something like this happens, you will probably need a lot of time to identify the fraudulent page and have it removed. This gives Google time to impose the penalty. Websites that are prone to malware are also backlisted by search engines. If you choose a reliable SEO friendly host that has security technology options available, you should be able to avoid all of the mentioned problems.

Tech support

Although tech support isn’t an SEO factor per se it can play an important role in the way you manage your website and handle challenging situations. Let’s suppose your website goes down. You’re trying to get tech support on the phone and no one is answering. By the time someone finally picks up the phone, Google has already figured out your site is down which pushes it lower down the ranking list. That’s why it is imperative to find a web host that offers 24/7 support that actually works. If your website goes down, there will always be someone to react straight away.

Although a critical factor in determining your website’s SEO rankings, web hosting is often overlooked. By making an informed decision and constantly checking your hosting quality, you will help increase your search result rankings, and ensure that users enjoy the experience of your website and always come back for more.

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Guest Author is Alex Williams is a journalism graduate, and a rookie blogger trying to find my luck. Blogs are the perfect opportunity for presenting yourself to wider audience, getting the chance to showcase my expertise and receiving recognition. I am a regular contributor at Bizzmark Blog

Let Your Website Do The Talking

/ nancyrubin / 1 Comment

When you’re operating a business, whether from an office or your own home, you need to have an online presence. It is through this that you will be able to gain custom. This isn’t necessarily just through your own website; there are so many more platforms to be used in conjunction with this, especially social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It’s through the combination of all of these that you have got the recipe for online success – it’s just about finding out the dashes and sprinkles of your own branding and personality to add to it and following it down to a tee rather than deviating off down other paths.

Make It Stand Out

There are a myriad of different ways to get your website to stand out, but the most obvious (and the one that needs the most attention) is the design of it all. If you are not too au fait with getting websites built yourself, it’s time to outsource to somebody who does. There are plenty of freelancers available online for you to get in touch with. Look for somebody who has been highly recommended by people who have used them before; there are usually websites with reviews on them that have come from trusted sources. These people are living off the recommendations that they to get their next job, and so they want to impress you. Make sure that you communicate your ideas clear and effectively to get the best job done for you. Include what you want from your website, who your target demographic is and other bits and bobs that you want added in – maybe a few online games, for example, if your site is more child-orientated. Remember: the longer that you keep the customer on your website, the more invested in your business they will be.

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Keep Them Coming Back

After the design of your website, you need to ensure that you are keeping those who have originally visited coming back. This can be for a number of reasons; those who are bloggers and are living off the revenue of their website may be wanting people back on their site so that they can generate more money via sponsored links and posts. For those who aren’t generating any money, it’s still important to keep a good presence. Whether it’s through small updates to your website, blog posts informing your customers of what’s going on with your business (even just a quick update can be enough to satisfy their interest!) or links to your social media accounts, these are all things which will keep your site active and current. The last thing that somebody wants is to head over to a point of information and find out that it hasn’t been updated in months (or in some cases years – shocking, isn’t it?). You have to keep up to demand when you’re in business and recognise that the majority of this demand is now coming from the digital side rather than in person.

How to Get Started With Digital Marketing

/ nancyrubin

The digital marketing industry is constantly changing and evolving. Nowadays, it is a competitive challenge to impress the viewers and meet their ever growing expectations. However, choosing a career in digital marketing is quite exciting and profitable. The demand for skilled digital marketers is high, due to the competitive market and a need for businesses to stand out in the crowd.

Moreover, becoming a digital marketer is difficult enough and finding a suitable job will require both wit and skill, alongside determination. As same as customers have to be impressed by marketing efforts, so do the employers need to be impressed by marketers that are looking for employment. Here are a few tips on how to get started with digital marketing.

Work on Yourself

As mentioned, digital marketing industry is constantly changing and shifting directions. What was a big hit today may as well be a thing of the past tomorrow. That is why it is important that you work on yourself and improve your knowledge and skills regularly.

Whether you graduated from marketing school or you are self taught, having something more to add to your portfolio may be beneficial in finding good employment. Additional certification or a degree in some marketing course can help you out, but it may not be necessary. Some employers like to read your biography, while some prefer to see what you can do.

Furthermore, you should always make time to update your knowledge and learn about the industry’s news by reading posts from websites that are on top of the marketing industry such as The Moz, HubSpot etc. The key for growing in digital marketing is by staying updated at all times.

Build your Online Presence

The best way to convince employers that you can build their company’s online presence is by building your own first. After all, the best way to get noticed and show your potential before employers start testing you out is by having some successful personal projects.

A good example would be to start your personal website and support it with a blog. You can pick a topic or a niche to write about or simply write about yourself. Your blog will be your pet project, so make sure you develop it well and implement different strategies to drive traffic to it. You may as well test out your SEO skills on your blog.

For instance, make sure you have fast website speed, because it is a well known fact that viewers have zero tolerance for slow loading pages and sluggish blogs. Besides, site speed affects rankings and it is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Use your skills to increase your website visibility and popularity enough to impress anyone, so when employers ask what have you got to show, you will have an ace up sour sleeve.

Learn Different Skills

In the world of digital marketing today, marketers who possess knowledge and skill in several different areas of expertise are highly sought after. However, this does not mean you have to be an expert in all aspects of digital marketing, but it is valuable to know at least the basics for all and have expertise in at least one or two.

For instance, your specialty is content marketing and SEO but you know your way around social media marketing, content writing, e-mail marketing and so on. These types of skills or variety of skills, usually referred to as T-shaped marketer by The Moz, will increase your chances of landing a good job or making a profitable career in digital marketing. You are probably already familiar with different digital marketing strategies, so don’t hesitate to hone your other skills and improve your knowledge. After all, they will be very useful to you in both landing a good job and building a name for yourself.

As digital marketing industry is improving and growing, so should digital marketers. Staying informed and updated on the latest industry news will help you keep up and not miss out on anything important. Remember, if you are looking for a good employment you should have skills to back you up.

Oscar is a writer from Sydney and one of the editors at Bizzmarkblog. He enjoys conducting research in the vast fields of business and marketing and writing about the useful insights he gathers on a daily basis. Follow Oscar on Twitter.to stay updated with his latest posts.