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Email vs. social media: Which is better for marketing ROI?
Social Media

Email vs. social media: Which is better for marketing ROI?

Alright, marketing maestros and ROI aficionados, strap in! We’re about to dive into the epic showdown of the digital age: Email vs. Social Media – the battle for marketing ROI supremacy. It’s like watching Godzilla vs. King Kong, but with less city destruction and more conversion rates.

But first, let me regale you with a tale from the marketing trenches. Picture this: It’s 2018, and I’m working with a client who sells… wait for it… artisanal, hand-crafted snow globes. (Yes, that’s a thing. No, I don’t know why people need bespoke blizzards in a bottle, but here we are.) We were torn between focusing our limited budget on email marketing using a nicely designed email template or going all-in on social media.

We decided to split our budget 50/50 between email and social media. The result? Our email campaign generated more sales than a Black Friday doorbuster, while our social media efforts got about as much traction as a sledge on a sandy beach.

Turns out, for this particular business, email was the snow-capped mountain of marketing ROI, while social media was more of a molehill. Who knew?

So, which is better for marketing ROI – email or social media? Well, grab your favorite caffeinated beverage (or a glass of wine, I don’t judge), and let’s dive into this marketing melee!

The Case for Email Marketing: The Old Faithful of Digital Marketing

Ah, email. The dinosaur of digital marketing that refuses to go extinct. And thank goodness for that, because when it comes to ROI, email is often the gift that keeps on giving.

Here’s why email might be your marketing MVP:

  1. Direct Access to Your Audience

Email is like having a direct line to your customer’s pocket. When you send an email, it lands right in their inbox, nestled between messages from their boss and their Aunt Mildred. It’s personal, it’s direct, and it’s hard to ignore.

According to a study by Radicati, the number of email users worldwide is expected to grow to over 4.5 billion by 2024. That’s more people than the population of China and India combined!

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By Marketing Week
7 Tips For Creating SEO Content For Your Legal Blog
Digital Marketing

7 Tips For Creating SEO Content For Your Legal Blog

If you have studied SEO in any way, you will undoubtedly have come across many articles and tutorials that mention content. Content could be considered the beating heart of SEO as it is content more than anything that Google uses within its algorithm to calculate where any single website page related to legal matters is going to rank in its search results.

It goes further than that, because merely having content present on your legal website or any online real estate that you have such as social media or a legal-themed blog, is not enough to improve rankings. In fact, there is content that can actually harm your rankings. What is needed is quality content that meets many of the criteria that Google is looking for when it crawls legal websites looking for content.

The way to ensure that your content meets the requisite quality standards to boost your rankings is via how it is written. You do not need to be at the level of a bestselling author, but rather someone who knows how good content related to legal matters should be written to satisfy both those who read it, and those who evaluate its relevance and ranking score aka Google and the other search engines.

To help you understand how your legal content can be written better, and specifically for SEO purposes, here are seven tips that have come from much of what SEO experts have discovered and the information that Google occasionally provides regarding rankings and how content affects them.

Tip #1: Before you press a single key to start writing any content you must do keyword research first. Knowing what keywords will get your legal website ranked means you have sight of what words and phrases to include in your content and which are the most likely to get ranked first.

Tip #2: Use headings throughout your content because it breaks it up and makes it easier to read so visitors should stay on the page longer. Headers can contain essential keywords which are identified as such by Google via Header Tags or ‘H’ Tags as they are usually called.

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By Marketing Week
SEO Trends
Digital Marketing

3 SEO Trends You Must Be Aware Of

One thing that every SEO professional should know is that they can never rest on their laurels. Updates to Google’s algorithms and the importance of specific SEO factors change rapidly. This means what worked just 6 months ago, might not work today.

As a result of these shifting priorities for Google, and with each passing year, there are new SEO trends that web site owners and those who work within the SEO industry need to be aware of. Here are 3 which are currently, ‘hot topics’.

Structuring Website Data

You should already know that quality content has been one of the main on-page ranking factors spoken about for many years. it is still as important today as it was last year and the year before.

However, the content on your web pages is not the only thing that Google’s spiders read when they crawl your website. They also read the data that exists underneath the visible page. Plus, it is not just Google who reads your website’s data.

For example, social media sites like Facebook, and affiliate networks such as Amazon, also make use of website data for functions that they perform in relation to it.

When each one of them calls at your website, the easier it is for them to navigate the data within it the better. As for Google, the clearer a picture they have from a website’s data regarding what it is about, the more chance they will know what to rank it for.

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By Marketing Week
SEO First Steps
Digital Marketing

3 SEO First Steps Every Website Needs

For every new business, there is the excitement of bringing all the pieces together in order to start trading, and one of the most important pieces is the website.

Having a website is all good and well, but if yours fails to rank well for important searches related to your business, then you are fighting an uphill battle almost from day 1. You might choose to employ an SEO agency from the outset to deal with your SEO, and while that is certainly a wise move, not every business is in a position to do so.

In that case, you may need to undertake the initial SEO for your website yourself, and if so, there are several important first steps you need to take. Here are 3 of them that will help your website start life with the core SEO pillars in place.

Choose a Great Domain Name

It is a total myth that there are no great domain names still available, and that is especially true at the local SEO level. While lots of short domains have long gone, and ‘dot coms’ are a bit trickier to find than other suffixes, there are still many you can find and use for your website.

For local businesses think about your brand, the location, and the searches that customers looking for your type of business might type in. Use them to guide you towards choosing your domain name. A great tool you can use that only shows dot com domains that are available is leandomainsearch.com.

Keyword Research

Whether you are an SEO expert or a complete beginner, keywords are going to play a part in your SEO. For new websites, this means establishing the kinds of searches that the customers you want to attract might search for when they are on Google.

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By Marketing Week
Web Design

My Top 5 eCommerce Web Design Tips

If you’re thinking about building an online store, then you need to keep things like web design at the front of your mind. eCommerce is complicated, but it’s important to make sure that you develop an attractive, professional looking storefront, otherwise you will have trouble getting people to purchase your products.

Luckily, eCommerce web design doesn’t have to be difficult. As long as you think carefully about your site’s layout and how you want to present certain elements, you should be fine. To help you get started, I’ve outlined some of my top eCommerce web design tips in the article below:

  1. Keep Things Simple

Ultimately, everything should be designed with the user experience at the front of your mind. This means that you need to make it easy for people who are visiting your website to buy your products.

To do this, make sure that your design is simple and intuitive. Make sure that people don’t have to think before they perform certain actions, and make sure that important elements – such as buy it now or checkout buttons – are immediately obvious.

  1. Use High Quality Product Images

One of the biggest mistakes inexperienced eCommerce store owners make is using poor-quality or stock product images. The truth is that pictures like this simply don’t sell.

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By Marketing Week
5 Tips For Web Designers To Help Them Choose The Right Lawyer To Represent Them
Web Design

5 Tips For Web Designers To Help Them Choose The Right Lawyer To Represent Them

Whilst we are sure that web designers would much rather spend their time dealing with website coding and colour palettes, the fact they do so as a business means there are fewer exciting matters to attend to. One of those is dealing with the legalities related to running a web design business and ensuring that the business is protected from any legal penalties or actions.

For the most part, common sense and working to an acceptable standard will be enough to achieve that goal, but such is the potential fallout from something going wrong relating to a legal matter, and the sensible option is to retain the services of a lawyer. The adage “better safe than sorry” most definitely applies when it comes to having someone in your corner should the worst happen.

The next step is to decide who that lawyer is going to be. It needs to be someone that is not only proven to have experience and expertise in commercial law and other legislation that might apply to your business, but also someone whom you feel comfortable working with. This is especially so as you might need them to fight your case should you face a lawsuit, or be taking legal action against another party.

To help make the process of choosing your lawyer easier, we have outlined five simple and highly effective tips for web designers to ensure that the lawyer they choose to represent their web design business is the right one.

Establish The Reasons You Want To Retain A Lawyer’s Services

The first step in choosing a lawyer is establishing exactly why you want one in the first place. Do you fear others might steal your copyrights and intellectual property? Do you want protection against clients not paying? Once your reasons are established, it will help your selection process.

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By Marketing Week
Taking My Children On An Overseas Holiday
Legal Advice

Can My Ex-Spouse Stop Me From Taking My Children On An Overseas Holiday?

Holidays and trips overseas are great experiences, especially for children, however, as your family lawyers will advise you, if you are a divorced parent, packing your cases and flying off to some far off land with your children, can be a complicated matter, if not done correctly.

When we say ‘done correctly’ we are not talking about choosing the correct resort or airline, but instead, doing it correctly with reference to family law in Australia.

You see, whilst taking one’s children overseas for a holiday or to visit family, for example, is undoubtedly a positive, there needs to be a process followed to ensure that you are doing it lawfully.

This follows from the fact that in most divorces cases where there are children, there is an assumption of equal shared parental responsibility, and most parenting orders issued by the court as part of a divorce will signify this.

What it means in practical terms with regards to children, is that no major decisions can be taken regarding their lives without the agreement of both parents. These are the decisions that relate to their education, their health, and their religious upbringing, to name but three.

There are others, and one of those is any decision to take the children out of the country, whether that is for a holiday, a family wedding, or to visit their grandparents on the other side of the world.

Let’s take a look at a positive scenario and that is where you discuss the matter with the children’s other parent, and they agree that you can indeed take the children overseas with you.

In truth, the vast majority of these types of situations happen like this. After all, if the other parent genuinely has their children’s best interests at heart, why would they object unreasonably?

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By Marketing Week
Start Designing A Website
Web Design

How Do I Start Designing A Website?

Building a new website can be difficult. You will need to think about things like web design, hosting, security, and ongoing maintenance. If you don’t have any web development experience, the learning curve can be steep.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t start designing your own attractive website. I’ve put together a short guide to help you get the most out of the web design process.

The following steps will help you start designing your new website:

  1. Understand What Your Site Needs To Do

The first step on your journey to web design excellence involves defining exactly what your website needs to do and how it’s going to do it. I’d recommend sitting down with a pen and paper and sketching a basic layout for your site, noting important features such as music players, live video streams, or email signup boxes.

  1. Research Web Design Trends


Next, you need to do a bit of research into the latest web design trends. This shouldn’t be too difficult. Simply type something like “modern web design” or “latest web design trends” into Google, hit the search button, and read a few of the most relevant articles.

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By Marketing Week
Track Traffic And Visitors
Business Strategy, Digital Marketing

How Do I Track Traffic And Visitors To My Website?

There are several tools that you can use to track the traffic to your site, and data about your visitors too. You may not be aware, but if you already have a live website designed, your hosting company may have some basic tracking tools within your cPanel. One of these is called AWStats. Admittedly, it may be very basic data, but it does provide you with some very useful information.

Beyond that, some of the most popular traffic tracking tools are often paid services if you want more detailed information, although some also have a free version that provides the basics. In some cases, the services are free if your traffic levels are below a certain number. Examples of these services include W3Counter and SiteMeter.

The most popular traffic and visitor analytics platform on the internet is Google Analytics. It is a free service and allows you to analyse multiple websites from a single account. The depth and detail of the data Google Analytics provides is excellent and another benefit is it can be linked with Google Ads if you are running PPC marketing campaigns.

By Marketing Week
Web Design Tools
Web Design

What Are The Best Web Design Tools?

It’s the case that there are literally dozens of web design tools, and each one of them will have users and fans who will swear that they are the best one to use if you are designing a website. It may well be that a particular tool does everything they need, or that they find the user interface suits them

In an FAQ section like it would be impossible to explain the functions of each web design tool so below we have listed the ones that are the most popular, and generally have a very good rating based on the reviews of those who have used them. Note that not all of them build a website but may be used as part of the design process. Also, most of them are paid tools but some have free options that allow you to try them out.

  • WordPress
  • Sitebuilder
  • Divi
  • Weebly
  • Wix
  • Clickfunnels
  • Squarespace
  • Leadpages
  • Thrive Themes
  • Webflow
  • Adobe Dreamweaver
  • Sketch
By Marketing Week
Digital Marketing, Social Media

Is It Worth Using Facebook Ads In 2019?

When used right, social media advertising can help businesses generate significant amounts of income. However, like all digital marketing streams, social media marketing is very easy to get wrong.

In the past, Facebook ads were a great way to send visitors to your website and drive sales. However, Facebook advertising has become increasingly popular and competitive, to the point where many businesses are questioning whether it’s actually worth using them.

With this in mind, I’ve had a quick look at the current state of Facebook advertising in 2019.

Should I Use Facebook Ads?

The short answer is yes, you should definitely be using Facebook ads if you’re selling products or trying to drive new clients to your website. However, it’s extremely important to make sure that you’re using them right, otherwise you will probably end up throwing money away with little return to show for it.

So, to put it simply, you should be using Facebook ads, but you need to make sure that you’re doing things right.

How Can I Make Facebook Advertising Work In 2019?

Although there are numerous different things that you can do to increase the success of your digital marketing campaigns in general, there are a few things that stand out to me when it comes to Facebook.

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By Marketing Week
Website Design
Digital Marketing, Web Design

Can My Website Design Incorporate Affiliate Offers?

Of course, it can, and there are likely to be thousands of websites on the internet whose sole purpose is to promote and sell affiliate products.

If you were just starting out and were looking for a way of making money online, this kind of website could be a great first business. By selling other people’s products you wouldn’t have to deal with suppliers or customer service problems as the product owner would be responsible for them. You would receive a commission for every sale you made, and you have an almost unlimited choice as to the types of products or services you might want to promote,

If you already have a business, your website design could incorporate the ability to promote affiliate products. These would obviously need to be related to your own business, and certainly not compete with it either. It would seem strange to visitors if the affiliate products you were promoting were the same as what your own business sells.

By Marketing Week
Black Hat SEO Tactics
Business Strategy

Black Hat SEO Tactics You Must Avoid

No matter what area of business we care to look at, there will always be those who want to take short cuts. In a lot of cases, those short cuts involve tactics that either go completely against the rules or worse, they are illegal.

This is true of SEO trends, where many business owners who wish to boost their rankings have to decide whether to come out on the side of the angel on one shoulder or the devil on the other.

If, unfortunately, it is the devil then what they are considering is known as black hat SEO. These are the actions that have been ruled by the search engines, and Google, in particular, as against the rules.

If they discover a website has been breaking these rules the sanctions range from a lowering of its ranking, through to the website being completely delisted.

When a website has been delisted, it effectively does not exist as far as Google is concerned, and the chances of them ever-changing that stances are low. If they do renege, it will only be after a lot of hard work from the website owner to clean up their website with regards to the black hat tactics which have been used.

One of the problems is that many website owners are not aware of what is black hat and what is white hat. This is complicated further by so-called grey hat SEO, which are tactics that sail close to the edge and might be regarded as ‘sharp’ but not necessarily outlawed.

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By Marketing Week