Guided Creative

Is Social Media Marketing Right for You?

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Is Social Media Marketing Right for You?

Social media can no longer be ignored, even by traditional marketing agencies and old-school businesses. But before you make the plunge into this powerful but often misunderstood marketing tactic, ask yourself these 7 important questions.

Can you have a conversation? I recently saw a wall comment posted to a major clothing retail chain’s Facebook page, questioning whether the company was going out of business. As of today, the comment still has not been responded to. Obviously, they are not interested in having a conversation or managing their brand reputation for that matter. If you want to do social media, make sure you have the time to listen and respond, not just push out content.

Do you have the time? Managing a Twitter or Facebook account can easily suck hours of productivity from an aimless employee charged with the task of managing it. Are you willing to invest the necessary time but able to limit fruitless, unproductive chatter? Are you able to commit to the long haul? Social media is more of a commitment than a campaign. If you start, expect to finish and stick with it for the long run.

Are you saying anything worth listening to? If you’re thinking of using Facebook updates as another channel for press releases or pure advertising, think again. Your friends and followers will quickly see through this sham. The key is to strive for interactions. If your updates contain only push content (e.g. “Come buy our new widgets!”), your followers will quickly tire. Much can be accomplished by transforming push into pull content (e.g. “Please comment with your opinion on our new widget!”)

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10 Tips To Ensure You Communicate Effectively With Your Web Designer

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10 Tips To Ensure You Communicate Effectively With Your Web Designer

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.

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A Paradox of Choice: Prioritizing Web Marketing Tactics

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A Paradox of Choice Prioritizing Web Marketing Tactics

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.

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Joomla Cms – How it Works

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Joomla Cms - How it Works

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.

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Who Are You and What Do You Do?

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Who Are You and What Do You Do?

“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.

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Joomla Development

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Joomla Development

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

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

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

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.

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Joomla Web Designing

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Joomla Web Designing

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.

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Why To Use Joomla Web-Designing?

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Why To Use Joomla Web-Designing?

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.

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Personalised corporate Christmas

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Personalised corporate Christmas

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.

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