Marketing Isn’t Free, Let’s Make Sure You Can Afford…

You might be surprised when starting a business to discover how much of your budget is actually spend on marketing. It could be a sizeable amount with many companies spending as much as twenty-five percent on marketing. If you want the most extreme example of this, look at the film industry and in particularly big blockbusters. A general rule of thumb is that marketing can double the cost of the movie. That’s why to break even, blockbusters often have to make a lot more than their recording budget and why losses can be massive. But it’s true for more than just the film industry. No matter what your business, you need to be prepared to spend quite a lot on marketing and promotion. How can you make sure you can afford these costs.

Outsource It?

It’s possible to forget marketing completely and instead get another company to complete the job for you. You can learn more about outsourcing on https://www.forbes.com. There are plenty of companies that offer this service. However, if you do choose to use an outsourcing service, make sure you pick the right company. It’s crucial that they can keep the promise of quality that you have probably offered to customers in the past. Otherwise, it could damage your business, and there is nothing that looks worse than cheap, poor quality marketing. It could just mean that the content doesn’t connect with an audience, but even an issue like this could lead to a drop in sales. So, make sure you check the previous performance of a company and think carefully before you decide to trust your business brand in the hands of someone else.

Borrow

If you need extra money to fund your marketing campaign or give your business an extra injection of promotion, you might want to consider borrowing. According to http://workingcapital.co, a short term working capital loan can be just what the doctor ordered. You’ll be able to fund a boost in marketing without getting into debt. Eventually, you will be in a position where you’ll be able to pay back any money you owe with the boost you’ll receive in profits. The trick is making sure that you spend time formulating a marketing strategy that will lead to a boost in demand.

DIY

Of course, some businesses are taking marketing in the opposite direction. Rather than spending more, they are spending less. Instead of hiring someone else to complete the promotion work for them, they are instead completing it themselves. It is possible to do this, particularly online and limit the cost of your marketing. For instance, you can run your own social media campaign. While this will take quite a lot of time, it could still be free. You’ll just have to determine whether the save is worth the loss of time that you could spend on other areas of your business.

As you can see then, there are lots of options for making sure you can afford marketing for your business. It’s simply a matter of deciding which one is right for you.

Boost Business Productivity By Freeing Your Employee’s Hands

While the end-goal for most startups and corporations is the same, mainly to increase their revenue, business-owners today choose various routes to make it there. Some of them see it as a simple equation, cutting costs to increase their income, while others are eager to try every new tool out there to make it to the top. What most of them have in common, though, is their problem with thinking long-term about their business solutions.

Sometimes, the answer to increased productivity in the office is sitting right in front of you. Those skilled employees are able to take your company to new heights if you just allow them to do their work and provide them with the right amount of tools and guidance.

We’ll get you started with it today already, so that you can enjoy the sight of an office in-sync for the rest of the week.

First: Track their time

When you’d like to give their motivation a bit of a boost, it doesn’t help to tell them to work faster. It might, in fact, prove to be quite fruitless. Let a tech tool do the talking for you, and implement it to accurately track the amount of time your office spend on each task.

It’s not really to slam the report at their desk, though, but rather to understand where you will be able to save time – and in which areas you’re already quite effective.

While a lot of people feel quite confident in telling how much time they spend on each task, research has shown that only about seventeen percent are able to estimate the amount of time they spend accurately. Maybe you fall into this percentage – but the figures show that, most likely, you’re one of us and could use a bit of help.

Accept it and gain clarity – it’s good for business.

Next: Outsource or Software

For some reason, many money-savvy business owners seem to think that by using one of their current employees to take care of some of the more mundane tasks rather than outsourcing it, they’re able to save a lot of money.

Again, we’re back to the short-term thinking; you might spare yourself the sight of expenses every month to a third party, but you’re also robbing yourself of a skilled employee who could have focused on her actual job – and even an entire team that could have helped your business in many ways.

Consider implementing a comprehensive software to gather business intelligence and take care of your payroll, for example; embedded systems such as Izenda shows ad hoc reporting integrated with your workflow, and cloud-based HR systems can improve your employee’s engagement by giving them automated feedback.

The future is now, in other words, and you’d  risk losing a lot by not taking advantage of it.

More often than not, business owners realize too late that saving time and money is not equal to taking advantage of their valuable employees. Give them room to take a few brain breaks, cut them some slack, and watch your office bloom into a happy and inspiring place to be.

Luckily, you can take advantage of these tech tools instead – they won’t mind it.

3 Mistakes That Will Permanently Kill Website Traffic

Getting your website near the top of Google’s search results is the most important thing you can do to increase traffic. Everybody knows that without good traffic, your website is useless. Google uses a number of complex algorithms to decide which sites appear where, and they will move you up the rankings for a number of different reasons, but they will also drop you down drastically if you do things that they consider cheating. In some extreme cases, they’ll blacklist you completely. Once they’ve penalized you, it’s very difficult to recover from, and it’ll harm your website traffic no end. Some things will get you dropped down a little, but some mistakes will put you right to the bottom of the pile. You won’t get told when or why it’s happened, so try to avoid these common errors.

Know The Rules

Google changes their algorithms on a regular basis, so something that might have been fine at one point could suddenly get you knocked right down the listing and you won’t have a clue what you’ve done wrong if you don’t understand the new rules. You need to check regularly to see if there are updates and then check your SEO to see if you comply. Sometimes the changes are only minor, but occasionally, they completely rethink the way that they do things. That means that something that might have worked in your favor one day might be damaging you the next.

Buying Links

Having lots of links to your site from other relevant sites is a big part of the criteria that decides your ranking. There are companies out there that will promise to get you plenty of links and increase your rank, for a small fee of course. Most of them will find you links from spammy websites that aren’t relevant. They will claim that Google will never be able to catch you out because they run the links through so many different sites. While you might get away with it for a while, you’re going to be caught out at some point when the algorithms change. The bottom line is that buying links is a breach of the rules and you aren’t going to get away with it forever.

Link Directories

Link directories can do wonders for your site, but only if you use them properly, which a lot of people don’t. If you join a directory that is relevant to your website, you will hopefully see an increase in traffic. But you need to be careful which one you join because Google will judge you based on all of the other sites on that directory. If you join one that is full of spammy links, you will be tarred with the same brush and you’ll all be collectively dropped. The only directories that you should be joining are ones that are reviewed by somebody and don’t just accept any links that are submitted. That way, you can ensure you are only surrounded by good quality links.

If you avoid these mistakes and keep up to date with the changing algorithms, you should see an increase in web traffic in no time.