Guided Creative – Digital Web Design & Marketing

How Often Should I Post on Social Media for Maximum Engagement?

October 10, 2024July 1, 2024 by Guided Creative

Hey there, social media mavens and digital marketing enthusiasts! Ready to dive into one of the most frequently asked questions in the social media world? Grab your favourite scheduling tool (or just your trusty smartphone), and let’s explore the art and science of social media posting frequency.

Before we jump in, let me share a quick story. Last year, SLINKY worked with a small boutique fitness studio – let’s call it FitFocus. The owner, Sarah, was posting sporadically on social media, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes going silent for weeks. “I feel like I’m shouting into the void,” she told me, frustrated.

Fast forward three months, and with a strategic social media marketing schedule, FitFocus had tripled its engagement rates and grown its follower base by 150%. How’d we do it? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to explore today.

Understanding the Importance of Posting Frequency

First things first, let’s talk about why posting frequency matters. Your posting schedule can significantly impact your social media success in several ways:

Visibility: Regular posting keeps your brand visible in your followers’ feeds.
Engagement: Consistent posting provides more opportunities for your audience to interact with your content.
Algorithm Favor: Many social media algorithms favor accounts that post regularly.
Brand Recall: Frequent posts help keep your brand top-of-mind for your audience.
Audience Growth: More posts mean more opportunities for your content to be shared and reach new potential followers.

However, it’s crucial to note that more isn’t always better. Posting too frequently can lead to audience fatigue and decreased engagement. The key is finding the right balance for your brand and audience.

The Pros and Cons of DIY Web Design

October 10, 2024July 24, 2023 by Guided Creative

Whenever web design is needed to create a new website, and in most cases, that will be for a business website, one of the choices that have to be made by the business owner is who is going to be responsible for it. In other words, who is going to design and build the website?

For the most part, there are three options: a web design agency, a freelance web designer, or the business owner, who may have some knowledge and even experience in website design, may choose to build the website themselves.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each of those options. Still, eventually, the choice will be between a “Do-It-Yourself” website design or hiring someone to do it, such as a web designer or a web design agency. This decision should not be taken lightly, especially if the website is for a business. That business’s success could greatly depend on how much revenue their new website helps generate.

For this reason, we thought it would be prudent to go through some of the pros and cons of DIY website design and highlight the main reasons why you could go for this option, and equally importantly, the reasons why you should not.

The Pros Of DIY Web Design

No Website Design Fees: One of the most common reasons business owners will decide to try and build their website themselves is that they do not have to come up with the fee to pay a web design agency or freelance web designer. It does not mean they will have no costs at all, but these are likely to be less than paying for professional web design.

3 Steps To Finding Legal Niche Keywords

April 12, 2023March 5, 2023 by Guided Creative

When trying to rank any legal sector business’s website on Google, at the core of the SEO that will be required to improve those rankings are keywords. Whether they are a single word, have two words, or are a long-tail keyword of several words, it is for these keywords that almost all your SEO efforts will be trying to rank the pages of your legal website for.

To explain why that is the case, it will help if we look briefly at how Google operates. Someone arrives on Google and types a search term. Let us use the example of “divorce lawyers in Perth, WA”. In an instant, Google will display several pages of results, called Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs.

What Google strives for with the SERPs they generate is that the web pages on the first page of results are those most likely to be what the person searching is looking for. In this case, it is websites of divorce lawyers located in Perth, Western Australia. The way the owners of those websites convince Google to place them on that first page is SEO.

What SEO will do is optimise website pages so that they are seen as the most relevant and authoritative for specific keywords. The task that often defeats legal website owners is establishing which keywords they should and can rank for on that coveted first page of Google. It is this keyword discovery process that we are about to explain in three simple steps.

Before we do so, we must highlight that effective keyword research requires tools. We are not going to endorse a specific one here, but if you search for “keyword tools” or “keyword research tools” on Google, you will see several that are recommended repeatedly by SEO experts. Trying to do all of this manually will take significantly longer without these tools, and you will struggle to acquire much of the data you need for effective keyword research.

10 Steps That Will Ensure Your Content Boosts Your SEO

October 16, 2024October 4, 2022 by Guided Creative

When you embark upon an SEO campaign, the SEO company responsible for implementing it will discuss the work with you. The majority of tasks, such as the SEO services, will be undertaken by them in full, but others may involve contributions from you and your team. One task that is often undertaken by those in the business is the creation of content. The reason for this is those within a specific business niche will be far more knowledgeable about it than those working for the SEO company.

Undoubtedly your SEO company will advise you on the most effective ways to create your content, but to give you a head start, here is a 10-step checklist that you can use to ensure your content positively contributes to your entire SEO campaign.

Determine Who Your Audience Is And What Content They Want: Bear in mind you are creating content for those who you hope will visit your website. This is why, before creating content, you must identify your target audience first and what content suits them.

10 Ways Commercial Storage Can Help A Small Marketing Business

October 10, 2024June 12, 2022 by Guided Creative

For those who own or run a small business we are sure you look for every way in which you can make your business more successful, so have you ever considered how a commercial storage facility could enhance your business? Now, you might be thinking that as your business does not have any stock, a commercial storage unit is of no use, however, even in that scenario, there are solopreneurs using storage units as their office as it is preferable to them than operating from home.

Beyond this example, there are doubtless many business owners reading this who do have inventory and who might be seeking additional ways to help their business, so, in this blog post, we are going to outline ten ways in which renting a secure storage space can do just that.

Increased Space: One of the primary and obvious benefits of commercial storage is the additional space it provides your business for storing excess inventory, equipment, and other supplies. Small businesses often face the challenge of limited space within their own premises, or at home in the case of a home-based business, so renting commercial storage provides a simple and effective solution to this problem.

Who Is The Top SEO In Perth, WA?

October 10, 2024January 3, 2022 by Guided Creative

“Who is the top SEO in Perth, WA?” is a question that different people in Perth ask for a variety of reasons. It might be someone who works in SEO and wants to know whose results they should aspire to emulate. It could be a local publication wishing to run a story on the top local SEO experts. However, the most likely group to ask are business owners in Perth looking to hire the best local SEO expert to help them improve their website’s rankings.

For that final group, and others who may ask, all the evidence points towards Peter Brittain, the owner and managing director of SEO Perth Experts and the top SEO in Perth, WA. We will uncover much of the evidence that allows us to come to that conclusion, but first, it will help if we take a look at who Peter Brittain is and why SEO Perth Experts has become the most sought-after SEO agency, not just in Perth, but in other cities in Australia too.

In The Beginning…

Given that Google had only been in operation for a mere three years, it is safe to say that when Peter Brittain started his SEO agency in 2001, he was at the forefront of what was becoming a worldwide industry worth AUD 15 billion per year. That first agency was called SEO Perth Experts, and to this day, it is the foundation upon which Peter has built an impressive digital marketing company that traverses the entire country.

The parent digital marketing agency is called Slinky Digital, and not only does it include some of Australia’s top SEO agencies, but it also offers web design, social media management, website security, and PPC advertising services, to name but a few. Add to that the fact that many of these services are not just available to Perth’s business owners, but Peter Brittain’s Slinky Digital empire also extends to cities such as Melbourne, Adelaide, Gold Coast and Sydney.

7 Ways To Ensure Your Employees Accept Your Office Relocation Positively

October 10, 2024October 20, 2021 by Guided Creative

When you are planning an office relocation, many people can help it go smoothly. Apart from yourself, there are your new office landlords who hopefully make your business feel welcome and do all they can to make your move there a success.

Another vital part of your office relocation is the Removalists Perth company you hire, and they play a pivotal role in making the move a success. And finally, there are your employees, for whom the move will make a difference to their working life, and it is true to say not everyone will be 100% positive about that.

Nevertheless, your staff can help to make the transition from your current offices to the new ones a success, before, during and after the day of the move. However, this will not happen by magic, and so here are seven ways you can turn negativity about the relocation into positivity for the benefit of your business.

Seek Employee Opinions And Preferences Before Deciding Where You Relocate: Whilst, as the business owner, the final decision relating to the relocation will be yours, it is certainly worth seeking the opinions, thoughts, and suggestions of your employees before making that decision. If they believe you have taken their thoughts on board, they will regard the relocation more favourably than if you simply dictate what is happening.

7 Ways To Ensure Your eCommerce Store Provides A Fantastic Customer Experience

October 10, 2024September 26, 2021 by Guided Creative

If you own or run an eCommerce store online, there are many ways in which you can make the experience of visiting and using your store an exceptional one for your prospects and customers. If you do, you will accrue many benefits, including increased sales and revenue, more repeat buyers, and it could even improve your rankings on Google as customers share their great experience with others online and link back to your store.

The number one priority must be to ensure that the products that you sell from your eCommerce store are top quality. There is little point in getting everything else 100% right if what you are selling is sub-standard. Beyond that objective, here are 7 other ways you can make the customer experience in your eCommerce store better than what your competition offers their visitors.

Make Navigation Throughout Your Store Easy

One of the quickest ways to annoy and lose a potential customer is if the navigation within your eCommerce is difficult and confusing. You want it to be as easy to browse your store as it would be in a store in a shopping mall. Categorise and group like products, provide links in each description to specific pages, and always provide a way for visitors to return to the main store page.

Use Only Top Quality Images

In a real store, customers can touch, feel, and see products up close, so an online store is at somewhat of a disadvantage. You can overcome that by ensuring that every product image you publish is of the highest quality. You should try avoiding generic or stock images that other store owners are using. Make your store and your product descriptions unique by taking high-quality product photos of your own.

3 Easy WordPress Templates You Can Use Right Away

April 12, 2023March 28, 2021 by Guided Creative

WordPress has quickly become the preferred Content Management System of bloggers and website owners worldwide. Its stability, multi-functionality, and ease of use make it the perfect choice for anyone setting up a new website.

WordPress users choose how to display their content by picking a “template.” A template (or “theme”) is simply a pre-designed web page that can be configured to the user’s desire.

There are a wide variety of templates on the market ranging from simple ones to those having advanced functions. If you are new to WordPress it is best to start out with a basic template that will help you learn the ropes. In my opinion, the following 3 templates are the best for getting started right away.

1. Zweig

Zweig is a simple blogging template that draws the viewer’s eye to the written content. It is a single-column template that lists one blog post after another in the center of the page. It reminds me of the classic Blogspot type of styling although it is coded with the latest standards of HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Readers can navigate the website through the spacious menu at the upper right hand of the header. They can also just scroll down on the homepage to view all the different blog posts.

You only have to do a couple of things to get this blog template started. First you’ll have to do a one-click install from the WordPress theme repository. Next, as with all WordPress templates you have to set up your menu.

This is as simple as choosing what pages will be displayed and putting them in order. The next step is just to start writing. It is incredibly easy to write blog post after blog post to begin adding content to your site.

You can also create additional “static” pages (for content that will remain the same) and choose from hundreds of widgets to add even more functionality.

10 Tips To Ensure You Communicate Effectively With Your Web Designer

October 10, 2024March 12, 2020 by Guided Creative

If you have employed a professional web designer or web design agency to create your website, then you have made a positive step towards having a website that is going to contribute to the success of your business. Using professional web designers will reassure you that the people designing and creating your website have the experience, skills, and resources to produce a website you can be proud of.

However, whilst your web design team have a huge role to play in the creation of your website, your contribution is not minimal. There are several parts of the process that you will be involved in, before, during and after your website has been designed. One of those is communicating with your web designers and its role in the success of the project should not be underestimated.

Effective communications are essential for any project to be successful where there are two parties involved, and this is particularly true when it comes to web design. So, here are 10 excellent tips to make sure that the communication between yourself and your web designers is effective.

Tip #1: Ensure You Both Know What The Final Objectives Are – Both you and your web design team must be in unison when it comes to knowing what the objectives of your website are so that when you communicate with them, the goals you discuss are aligned.

Tip #2: Be Open And Honest At All Times – Never be afraid to voice your opinion to your web designer if something is not right. As long as it is done respectfully, you should raise a concern openly than avoid it and hope it will go away…it won’t.

Tip #3: Do Not Try To Rush The Project – Professional web designers will be upfront and realistic about the timescale for completion, so trust them on it. Do not be tempted to rush the project and especially do not ask them to cut corners to save time.

A Paradox of Choice: Prioritizing Web Marketing Tactics

October 10, 2024September 12, 2019 by Guided Creative

With the endless clatter of marketing advice from blogs, consultants, and colleagues, how does the e-business know where to invest its limited resources? I’ve noticed 2 problems with a good portion of internet marketing advice:

It’s biased: If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, the SEO consultant believes that natural search is the key to your growth, while the social media guru says Facebook is the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It’s unprioritized: It’s easy to be overwhelmed by a mega-list of recommendations. I’m a fan of top 10 (or top whatever) lists, but they do have a tendency to produce unprioritzed advice that can easily swamp the small business owner.

With plethora of marketing options (e.g. email, SEO, PPC, social media) competing for your attention, how do you decide how to allocate resources? Here’s some guiding principles: (that are prioritized, of course)

Strategy before Tactics: You need to know where you’re going before you choose the vehicle to get there.

Some marketing vehicles are better than others depending on what you’re doing, and who you’re trying to reach. If you’re shooting for a 55+ audience, twitter probably isn’t the best place to start. If a consultant says you should be doing such and such, first stop to consider whether their recommendations gel with your strategy.

Joomla Cms – How it Works

October 10, 2024March 8, 2019 by Guided Creative

Many additions to Joomla make sure better performance and basic features of Joomla will help users to fast and easily build inventory control systems, application bridges, data reporting tools, and many other applications online. Joomla users will simply impress their customers by installing this superb creation. Joomla occurs to be a great open platform that anyone can make use of.

Everybody has access to it & many people contribute to the growth of this content system. Installing Joomla is free and in case you think you require this superb system then you have to follow simple instructions & get it downloaded.

You can fast look up instructions and find for yourself how simple it is to make use of Joomla.
Anybody can make use of it and gain from the features of Joomla. When you download this ideal system, you are rest assured to build all possible websites and some other applications online without lots of effort.

Your online tasks are made much easier by using Joomla. It is one great piece of modernization that is designed to make life much simpler and better for individuals. Thus, get set to make your life better with the use of Joomla.

Who Are You and What Do You Do?

October 10, 2024September 12, 2018 by Guided Creative

“Who Are You and What Do You Do?” – Is this possibly the last thought your prospect has right before they leave your website?

Too many websites have identity issues. That is, it’s too hard to figure out what the heck the site does or what sets them apart from the crowd. Simply put, if prospects can’t understand what your business does within a few seconds of arriving on your page, you’ve lost them for good.

Identity issues are more problematic when visitors arrive through certain types of traffic than others. For example, a Google searcher who lands on Amazon.com after searching for an “online bookstore” is much less likely to need assurance about what Amazon does. (even though the homepage does not explicitly say anything about selling books)

On the other hand, suppose a friend forwards a link to another friend with a vague message such as “Check out this site. I think you’ll like it!.” Unless your site clearly identifies your purpose, you’ll never get the full effect of this word of mouth marketing.

So how can you easily explain your business and unique value to first time visitors? Here are 7 easy ways:

Use a 1 line identity slogan near your brand logo: Having a one sentence definition below or beside the brand logo in your site header is priceless. The Recycled Retriever sums up their purpose with the short statement “eco-friendliness for pet lovers.” Fugitive Toys declares itself to be “an urban vinyl toy store.” It may be hard to sum up your business in a few words, but there is tremendous value in these succinct identity statements.

Joomla Development

October 10, 2024March 18, 2018 by Guided Creative

Joomla is an excellent platform for incorporating any type of website design & most. Important it is not just user friendly to developers however it is SEO friendly as well.

Joomla CMS has made a large number of sites & extensively implemented for making corporate site development, e-commerce websites, Non-profit organizations, Government websites, Small business websites, Community websites, and Personal websites endless list.

Joomla’s easy-to-use text editor makes it easy to add any pages or articles to a website; as easy as working in Microsoft Word. You can very easily integrate tables, text, graphs, & flash elements, and so on. The design of the Joomla is search-engine friendly.

The Article Manager

Very use full tool for any of the article driven websites; as the title inspires, it is the article manager with different features, such as management of articles, deletion, editing, publishing, and so on. In article parameters, you will add titles, descriptions, keywords, published dates, create dates, and so on. Not just this, but also article manager has useful features

7 Do’s and Don’ts of Website Optimization Testing

October 10, 2024September 19, 2017 by Guided Creative

WARNING: Website optimization testing is extremely addictive. Sitting behind the scenes, pulling the strings, and seeing the effect of positive change is overwhelmingly rewarding.

So now you’ve committed to testing your website. Where do you start? What do you test? While you’ll ultimately have to answer these questions for yourself, below are 7 Do’s and Don’ts to help guide a successful testing strategy.

Do Test Properly: So you tweaked your homepage, and sales shot up 50% from the prior week. Success? Not really. There are too many moving parts here to consider. Did you run a sale during the same period or send an email? In order to determine whether a new version of a page outperforms an old one, you must run both pages at the same time under the same conditions and split test them using software such as Google free website optimizer. Before you advance any further with your testing strategy, get acquainted with

Google’s powerful testing tool.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fail: In testing & optimization, failure is a success. Although you may be disappointed that the new landing page you created underperformed against the old one, had you not tested it, you would have caused unknown damage to your sales.

Joomla Web Designing

October 10, 2024March 23, 2017 by Guided Creative

Making a website look very attractive takes some days, but due to Joomla web designing now, anyone will be able to make a perfect website in a short time span. It becomes very easy to use ready to use open-source website templates. A person can make use of them to make an attractive website anytime.

A person can also look after the website by keeping complete control of that & there are many companies that give good Joomla web design.

These companies ensure that the Joomla website templates are protected by passwords, and the person accessing the website will make changes to the site.

These days there are some companies online working to serve customers with the Joomla web-designing methods. For people who are interested in this particular application can use these companies online & get themselves registered by online services.

One of the main benefits of making use of this type of web-designing method is that search engines will read the location of the Joomla websites at a much quicker speed than other types of websites. Users feel very happy to make use of the new method of Joomla web designing that makes a business successful.

Why To Use Joomla Web-Designing?

October 10, 2024March 25, 2016 by Guided Creative

By making use of Joomla website web designing services, webmasters & designers can enjoy the ease of adding web pages to their websites conveniently, like removing web pages from the website. Because of this added viability of appending or else deletion of pages from the site, Joomla CMS is more famous than those that make other familiar HTML-based web-designing tools & applications.

Those entire straightforward / HTML-based editors will make create simple products; on the other hand, Joomla is also known to increase furore amongst modern web designers. Hence, let us see why?
Joomla web-designing solution is open source, and that means users are not required to pay any of the hefty fees to license and nor are they payable for incurring any kind of registration fees.

However, most globally famous & commercial web-designing tools cannot be used unless users have made sumptuous payments to get rights. Being an open-source web-designing tool, Joomla is available through an open source as well as is available through a huge platform of online community websites. The community source of Joomla is now spanning all over the world & through local countries.

Thus, ease of availability and removal of the hassles of paying huge licensing fees that have contributed much to making Joomla a highly famous web-designing tool.

Personalised corporate Christmas

October 10, 2024December 1, 2015 by Guided Creative

To really show your customers that you care, why not get send them personalised Christmas cards this year?

It’s a great way to get front of mind, re-engage lapsed customers or delight customers by sending them a card with some festive staff photography.

You supply the tinsel and reindeer ears, and we’ll supply the photographer!

For the more shy and retiring, we have a range of corporate Christmas card templates available, or we can design something bespoke for you. Simply tell us the idea for your design, and we’ll create it for you.

Face to face is still vitally important

October 10, 2024September 19, 2015 by Guided Creative

Although we are interacting more online, a recent report (Buyersphere Report 2013) has shown that face-to-face contact is still key when making a B2B purchase.

Whilst it’s important to engage potential clients online through social media channels, the opportunity to build rapport via live interaction should not be overlooked.

The survey, which was conducted with over 500 buyers from the UK, France and Germany who had made a single business purchase of over £20k, also revealed that 1 in 3 B2B buyers attend live exhibitions – which they rated as the single most influential information source to make their purchase decision.

A quarter of buyers in the Buyersphere Report also said that their chosen supplier exhibited at more events or exhibitions than its competitors, which had an impact on their buying decision. So if your company is not exhibiting and your competitors are, you could be missing out on important sales opportunities.

GROWING YOUR BRAND

As well as generating leads and sales, exhibitions can also help to increase brand awareness to secure future sales.

Have you nailed consistency?

October 10, 2024June 7, 2015 by Guided Creative

Strong branding is the core of any decent marketing strategy: it enables differentiation against the competition and allows people to recognise products and services easily. It builds trust over time and ultimately leads to a more profitable business.

With so many more platforms through which to convey your message than ever before, from blogs, social media, apps and landing pages, it has become even more challenging to remain consistent.

‘Just Do It’ is one of the simplest, most recognisable slogans of all time – a line Nike has used for the past 15 years. Compare this with Reebok, and you’ll find that it has changed its slogan 14 times since 1987.

Branding is more than a logo design. Branding is the style, colours and images you use across all your marketing communications. In this digital world, your tone, voice and personality play an equal role. A brand has to be emotive and engaging. Remember, people establish relationships with and buy from people, not faceless companies.

YOUR BRAND CONSISTENCY CHECKLIST

1. Is your logo clearly identifiable?

Let’s start with your logo design. It’s at the heart of your brand identity. The first element of many killer logos is simplicity. Do you remember the old rainbow-coloured Apple logo? Maybe not, but I bet you have a good idea of what it looks like now.

5 Essentials to Set up a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

May 12, 2023March 19, 2015 by Guided Creative

Using free blogging platforms may seem like a great idea in the short term. Why would you want to deal with the technicalities when you only want to write and establish your expertise? However, not hosting your content can have a significant impact on your enterprise in the long run. If you are looking to grow your online business, you need to ensure that you have complete control and ownership of your blog.
Also, it is increasingly accessible these days to own your site. For as low as $10 per month, you can host your website and WordPress Blog. We present a list of 5 essential tools that you will need to set up your WordPress Blog.

1. Domain Name: Choosing a domain name is an essential step in setting up a blog. Since the domain name is directly linked to your branding strategy and cannot be changed later, it is necessary to choose a name that reflects your website’s products and services accurately. A memorable domain name helps people recall better. In fact, a domain name is just like a username for a site. The domain name must be easy to remember and catchy. This name is essential to establish your online presence.

2. Web Hosting: While a domain name is like a phone number for your site, the same is not the case with your web servers. Your site can be hosted on any server. A managed WordPress host will probably cost marginally more than traditional hosting, but your website will be kept secure and backed up consistently. It is essential to have a fast website for setting up a blog, as such portals deliver a better user experience and improve search engine rankings.

How To Create Your Own Online CV/Resume Website With WordPress

October 10, 2024December 10, 2014 by Guided Creative

Did you know that 56% of all hiring managers are more impressed if a candidate has a personal website? Sadly, only 7% of job seekers actually have a personal website. Think about the big opportunities they’re missing out on. Needless to say, having your own personal website is the best way to win over the hiring committee. By visualizing and showcasing all your work and information in one place, it’s guaranteed that you land an interview. A personal website is also a great way to promote yourself and your professional services. And it’s not just a method used by experts and celebrities either.

Have a look at Guy Gungell’s website and see how he uses the site to showcase his portfolio and services. So, how do you build a website like that? Here’s what you need -:

A domain name.
WordPress web hosting.
A quality theme.

You can get all of this for about $60 USD.

Why WordPress?

There are plenty of websites out there that allow you to create an online resume for free, so why spend money to build one with WordPress? First of all, those “free” online resume websites come with a lot of complications. You either get stuck with a boring website design that makes your resume look like everyone else’s, or you have to pay a monthly fee to publish your resume on the web. A resume tells more about a person than just qualifications and contact information. The design and the way you present your information also have a major impact on impressing your employer. With an online resume built with WordPress, you’ll not only get to set up the website easily with a pre-designed theme, but you’ll also get to customize your resume with a unique and innovative design.