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Which eCommerce system should you use?
I spent most of yesterday evening looking at various shopping cart systems. I wanted to ensure that I was upto date with everything out there. Shopify WooCommerce Magento Samcart Clickfunnels OpenCartCRM Order forms (Infusionsoft and Hubspot) There are a few things that I wanted to understand for myself and also for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Is it right to pay a monthly SaaS to look after your ecommerce or should you open source the software and run it in house paying only once for a setup fee? What is the benefit of having all your systems in one place …
10 Things You NEED to Know BEFORE You Build Your Website.
It is a well-known fact that every business needs a website to be successful in this day and age. For many, this is hard to face because a lot of people simply don’t have the skills to build one themselves. You do have the option, of course, of paying a developer to do this for you and paying freelancers to load your site up with the appropriate content. The costs associated with these services keep this option out of reach for many new start-ups and small business owners, however, and truthfully, even when people have this done for them, their …
The 3 Mistakes most business owners are making with their website
Click here to join the webinar Hello and welcome, my name is Steve Woody and in this short video, I’m going to show you the 3 mistakes most business owners are making with their website. This is specifically helpful if you have a website and sell either a product or a service. I’ll be hosting a webinar on Tuesday evening at 7pm GMT which will take you through the mistakes in much more detail and I’ll also talk about the solutions. You can register using the link at the bottom of this page But for now, let’s just straight into the …
How to attract customers you love by creating your Customer Avatar
There is something much worse than having no customers and that’s having the wrong ones. This is one of the main reasons why it’s so important to know who you want to do business with and why many people suffer when they try to attract everyone. I often see small business owners scrambling social media sites, begging friends and family for like and shares and desperately bombarding their database of the same few people trying to make money. Marketing yourself in business is one of the hardest things to do which is why this blog post is so important. There …
Why Saying “I need a website†is a Bad Idea for Entrepreneurs
We have all done it or know someone who has a business and at one point uttered those dangerous words “I need a website.†Only a very few lucky survivors can tell you about the magical, pain free experience they encountered after spouting such carnage-creating words as “I need a website.†The reason this is so dangerous is not because of the desire to have such a beautifully responsive, customer-loving, pleasant-to-experience, bug-free, traffic-magnetizing sales machine but more the thought process that ensues after saying it. For most unsuspecting entrepreneurs, the realisation that they need a website is adopted at an …
How to Budget for Your Website
For most people, the question really is, “How do I set a low-end budget for my website, yet yield the high-end type of results I need?†It’s not easy. After all, you really do get what you pay for the majority of the time, and when you try to dodge costs too much as you build your site, it shows. You just can’t get the kind of results that you need if you aren’t investing on your websites design and functionality. There are two things that you can do to at least begin to have a handle on this problem. …
3 Mistakes Most People Make BEFORE They Build Their Website
Building a successful website takes lots of preparation, and of course, if you’ve never done anything like this before, mistakes are going to be made along the way. That’s okay because there’s plenty of room for mistakes, but there are three crucial ones that many people make which are easy to avoid. They are: Not knowing your target audience Not having clarity as you build your website Not testing the marketplace Not Knowing Your Target Audience You simply CANNOT build your website appropriately without getting well-acquainted with the person who is going to be visiting it. On the surface, this …
Website Strategy – Why it’s so Important
It’s clear that entrepreneurs and business owners need a website in this day and age, but facing the prospect of building one can be very daunting. Most of us understand that it is important to take the time to plan your website out before you even touch your mouse or your keyboard. You must have the right website strategy in place, or you risk wasting time, energy, and money on something that might not work. That is an unsettling truth that most of us can grasp, but how are you supposed to know what to put into place, strategically, when …
The 3 common mistakes people make when building a website
I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing business owners and entrepreneurs websites. It astounded me that at least 80% of them were making some if not all of these mistakes. It’s only 3 simple things but getting this wrong can have such a negative impact on the success of your website. Transcription I want to talk to you about the three common mistakes that people make when they’re building their website. The reason that I’m doing this video is because I have seen time and time again these three mistakes. This is my way of informing you about these …
3.5 Hour Marathon of Website Reviews
I wanted to give something back to the amazing people that have been following me on Facebook. So on Friday, 25th Sept, I gave everyone the chance to submit their website link and promised to do a quick review on every link that was posted. I decided the best way to review the sites was on Google Hangouts by sharing my screen and allowing anyone who wanted to comment to get involved. Here is the recording of the session: A full list of the Domain’s that I reviewed with timesstamps are: Www.videsign.com – 4 min 45 www.london-executive.com – 8 min 15 …
What you need to know BEFORE you register a domain name
Domain names can be split into two sections New Domain Names How to register your new Domain Name Existing Domain Names How to transfer your Domain Name For new Domain names I would highly recommend that you use Namescheap you can create a new account here. The reason I suggest this is because they offer great value on new domain names, they are quick to propagate your services and they have good support that are always available. There are other services that you can use, a slightly more expensive one is Godaddy, which whilst good for domain names, I would not …
How to monitor your website uptime and check for blacklists
I am often asked by clients and friends what they can do to protect their website from attacks, downtime and things that would affect both sales and reputation. Whilst it’s important to ensure that you have a strong infastructure in place to manage your online presence its also very important to monitor your sites to ensure that they are online. [Tweet “If something happens to your website you want to know before your customers.”] There are two systems that I highly recommend to monitor your website The first is called Pingdom These guys are behind the awesome site speed checker …
Just how secure is your security?
We all know about security and like most things its hindsight that makes us realise that we should be secure. Most will not adopt better practice until they either suffer an attack or what is considered a “close call” For those that run a business you really can’t afford to wait until such a time. If you have client data stored then you also have a duty of care to ensure that this information is protected to the best of your ability. It’s not enough these days to rely on external applications to manage your data. You need to ensure …
Creating HTML Email signatures using Mac Mail
I spend alot of time online. I am very well known for finding amazing things due to my obsessive trawling of popular websites and most of my inspiration comes from taking two idea’s and merging them into one. One form of inspiration comes from a gentleman called Daniel Priestly, I highly recommend you check out his website Key Person Of Influence. It’s because of Dan that I created this video. After seeking his permission to share what I consider to be one of the best Email footers I have ever seen. I am not suggesting that you should copy what …