How To Remain Drugs-Free Whilst Working Online From Home Business Advice

How To Remain Drugs-Free Whilst Working Online From Home

For anyone entering drug rehab, emotions can range from fear to anger, from nervousness to gratitude for those who are thankful that they have finally found a pathway to escaping their drug addiction. Those who become addicted to drugs and speak about their experience of drug addiction will each point to one or more triggers that they recognise as the starting point.

Some will have childhood traumas, others may have been in abusive relationships, some may simply have been mixing with the wrong crowd as teenagers and some will cite the stress of their jobs that ignited their drug-taking. This will often have been as a result of things happening in their workplace, but what of those who work from home?

You might be shocked to learn that working from home can be the trigger for someone starting to take drugs. Given the recent past when many of us had no choice but to work from home due to Covid-19, there is no doubt that the number of those working from home falling into a spiral of drug-taking has increased.

Now, you might be someone who has dreamed of a job that allows you to work from home and cannot think why anyone would turn to drugs working from the comfort of their lounge. However, despite its many positive aspects, working at home form also has downsides, and dealing with these downsides can be the trigger.

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Web Design

5 Web Design Failings That Can Reduce The Number Of Leads Your Website Generates

Is your website designed to generate leads for your business? We ask that because lead generation is one of the most common goals that any new web design is supposed to achieve. This is in contrast to websites that are purely designed to showcase and boost a business’s brand, or eCommerce websites where the obvious objective is to generate sales of products.

Coming back to websites that are designed to generate leads, you must have a great position or enticement for anyone to enter information on your website. This can range from a detailed quotation form where they enter multiple pieces of information to a simple opt-in box where they enter their email address.

Regardless of how simple or how complex the means of them moving from a visitor to lead is, there are core web design principles that apply to both. There are also several mistakes that you can make within your web design that can impair the lead generating function of your website and in the worst cases render it null and void completely. Here are five of the biggest web design failings that Slinky Creative can help you avoid within your web design.

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Business Advice

5 Critical Web Design Features That Ensure Your Family Lawyers Website Attracts New Clients

Are you happy with the number of new clients your family lawyers business is attracting? Whether you are or not, we are sure that you would not say no to having more clients. After all, they are the lifeblood of your business. Attracting new clients can be done in several ways, with the most common being to market your family lawyers business to bring visitors to your website who then call you or leave their details so you can call them.

That all sounds great, but what happens when, despite excellent marketing in place, the number of leads generated is insufficient? There are several causes for this, including not targeting the correct audience with your marketing, but, invariably, the real culprit is a poorly designed website.

Your website is most likely the first aspect of your family lawyers business most potential clients see. As with anything related to business, if the first impression they have, thanks to your website, is good, then that is positive. But what if that first impression is poor. Additionally, what if your website is confusing, its navigation is complicated, or nothing that induces them to contact you? The result is, they leave.

Sadly, that is a scenario that countless businesses suffer from including family lawyers. This means no matter how much they spend on it or how effective their marketing is, the ROI is minimal due to poor website design. If any of this rings true for you, the good news is it can be rectified by ensuring some core web design features are present within your website.

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Email Marketing Business Advice

3 Reasons Why Every Wills Lawyer Should Be Using Email Marketing

For many business owners, and that includes wills lawyers too, email is something which they use to send and receive communications with respect to the day to day running of their business. They see it as a necessary communication tool, and no more. Unfortunately, this means that they are missing out on an opportunity to use email to grow their business, by using it as part of their marketing strategy.

If you are also one of those business owners who have not yet starting using email marketing, then it is time to seriously consider it, not least, because many of your local competitors will be. When we are talking about using email marketing, we do not mean that you should simply start emailing random prospects with loads of sales and promotional messages. This is nothing more than spam, and using it is not only can tarnish your reputation.

Instead, the email marketing we are referring to, is planned, and conducted professionally, and whilst it should ultimately benefit your wills lawyers business, you should also have the aim that the emails you send to your email subscribers are going to benefit them too.

We could write an entire book in the many ways email marketing can be used, and the vast array of different emails you might send. However, if you approach it with the attitude that you want your email to inform, enlighten, help, and even entertain your email subscribers, you are already halfway to your email marketing campaign producing positive results. As for why you should be using email marketing, here are three of the most important reasons.

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Best way to build backlinks Online Marketing

What is the best way to build backlinks to my website?

Link building is one of the most important SEO services that you can take if you would like to improve your search engine ranking. Basically, you need to do what you can to get authority websites to link back to your site.

Doing this will help Google see your website as an authority source in your niche, which will also make you rank better.

However, link building can be difficult, especially if you don’t know where to start. With this in mind, I’ve put together a short list of the best ways to build backlinks to your website. These include:

  1. Guest Post

Guest posting is one of the best ways to build high-quality backlinks to your website, especially if you have a decent budget to throw at your SEO efforts. Basically, guest posting involves writing a high-quality content with a link back to your website.

Sometimes, guest posting is free. The owner of the website that you’re posting to may be happy with getting free content, especially if you write well.

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5 Ways to Ensure Your Office Relocation Goes Smoothly Business Advice

5 Ways to Ensure Your Office Relocation Goes Smoothly

Whenever an office relocation takes place it is in everyone’s interests that it goes smoothly. That includes you, your staff, your customers, and even the removalists who help you to make the move as it gives them one more satisfied customer. There are many things that can go wrong during to an office relocation, some of which may be out with your control, however, the vast majority of office relocations should go without a hitch.

There are several key actions that you can take to make sure that if your business is considering an office relocation, and if it goes ahead, it will be successful. Here are 5 ways in which those actions can be implemented and ensure, with the help of Perth Removalists, your office relocation goes smoothly.

#1: Choose Your New Location With Care

The new premises are often taken for granted when the logistics of an office relocation are being planned but given that they are going to influence the move’s success in a big way, they deserve a high level of thought and consideration.

For a start, your new offices are where your staff will be spending at least 8 hours every day so want them to be ones that you know they will like. Other elements such as access, the distance from your present location, and closeness to suppliers all need to be carefully considered when choosing your new location.

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What Criteria Do I Look For When Choosing A Web Design Company For My Restaurant? Web Design

What Criteria Do I Look For When Choosing A Web Design Company For My Restaurant?

If you require a new website for your restaurant, then it can be somewhat daunting trying to work out how and where to go about it. The specialists at www.slinkywebdesign.com.au advise that when choosing a web design company, you make sure that they are experienced and can meet 5 core criteria that will ensure your restaurant’s website is a success.

#1 Skilled Designers

When talking about website design, that does mean that it has to be an artistic masterpiece, and in fact, the phrase, ‘less is more’ is very apt in these circumstances. Remember, when someone lands on your website, you want them to be looking to discover what food your restaurant offers or to see some reviews from previous diners. If they are distracted by garish colours and over-the-top graphics, they will most likely click away.

Proper web design ensures that a website is welcoming, attractive, and matches both the branding of the restaurant and the type of restaurant it is. For example, the design of an Italian restaurant’s website will look somewhat different from that of a burger bar.

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Digital Marketing Online Marketing

What Is Digital Marketing And Why Is It Important

The modern world has become dominated by technology and technological advancements. At the same time, the business world is becoming more and more competitive. The rise of a global market means that small local businesses can have their market dominated by overseas companies and corporations.

This means that effective marketing is extremely important if you want to have a successful business. You have to show people why they should use your services or buy your products, and why you are better than your competitors. Digital marketing is a great way to do this.

What is digital marketing?

Basically, digital marketing is any sort of marketing which involves the use of a digital medium. Any kind of marketing which uses the internet is automatically defined as digital marketing, but the definition can also be expanded to include things like radio and tv advertising.

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Does Your Legal Practice Need Digital Marketing? Online Marketing

Does Your Legal Practice Need Digital Marketing?

The legal profession is one that is very much dependent on gaining clients thanks to recommendations and referrals from existing clients, but to rely solely on this is a mistake. Marketing specialists would point out that many legal practices benefit hugely from digital marketing and as such gain many more clients than their competition.

Whilst gaining clients is undoubtedly a major benefit, it is not the only advantage that your legal practice can gain if it were to have a digital marketing campaign created for them. A digital marketing strategy is also essential for those legal practices who might be struggling or that have failed to see any significant upturn in the number of new clients from their current marketing efforts.

If this sounds a bit like your legal practice then these, and the other reasons below are why you need digital marketing from an expert digital marketing agency.

You Do Not Know Where Your Online Audience Is

Whilst there are some sectors where it is blatantly obvious where potential customers and clients can be found online, in the case of the legal sector, that might not be so. With a professional digital marketing campaign, your online audience can be identified, and the online properties and websites where they can be found can be targeted as part of that campaign.

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Basic SEO Online Marketing

Basic SEO For Small Businesses

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, carries with it a mystique that many business owners believe belongs to some type of secret society. Others believe that website sites get ranked highly in search engine results using a combination of voodoo or Harry Potter magic.

In fact, SEO is not magic and is in fact based on algorithms which rely more on programming and logic than they do on any kind of wizardry. The reality is, rather than everything being kept a secret, Google and the other search engines publish lots of updates and advice that tell the online world what they are looking for when it comes to ranking websites.

For the search engines, their number one priority is to make the results they produce when someone enters a search term the most relevant they can. This is achieved by special programs called ‘bots’ visiting every website that exists, to establish what that site is about. To help this process search engines tell businesses, web designers, and SEO consultants what will help optimise a site in terms of its relevance to a search term.

There are two categories of optimisation which can be undertaken and these are ‘on-page optimisation’ and ‘off-page optimisation’. On-page refers to all the actions and optimisation you can perform within your website, and off-page are the actions which occur on other websites throughout the internet.

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Design Myths Web Design

Do Not Believe These Design Myths

If you are a web designer, there’s a chance that you have heard quite a few design myths over and over again. Whether it is from your friends, your parents, or the clients you work with, there are plenty of myths to go around. Sometimes designers will even agree with them! Note that this doesn’t always make it true.

Let’s debunk a few of these myths and get the better answers:

Myth: Design is an Artform
Not really. Design is design and there isn’t much else do it. by Professor Nigel Cross in his book, Designerly ways of knowing, as he defined design as the following: “Everything we have around us has been designed. Design ability is, in fact, one of the three fundamental dimensions of human intelligence. Design, science, and art form an ‘AND’ not an ‘OR’ relationship to create the incredible human cognitive ability.”

This means that you can’t really define what design is, which also means that you can only use the world “design” to define it.

Myth: Design is all in the Tools
When you design, you use tools. This means that most people think that all you have to do is learn how to master the tools and you will be able to be a designer. This isn’t really the case. You have to learn how to think and feel like a designer and then actually do the work. There are certain parts of design that you just can’t “learn” your way through if you want to be truly great.

That doesn’t mean that people can’t become designers or grow in their skills.

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Internet Business Consultant Online Marketing

It Makes Sense To Employ An Internet Business Consultant When Starting An ECommerce Business

Starting an eCommerce business can be exciting and in the long term, very rewarding financially if it is setup correctly. If not, it can become a costly nightmare which is why it makes sense to employ an internet business consultant when starting your eCommerce business.

The first thing they will be able to advise you on is which platform to use for your online store. For example, if you want to start with one or two private label products they are most likely going to recommend Amazon. If you want to have a much bigger range of products, then Shopify is an option. Beyond these two there are several other excellent eCommerce platforms that could be more suited to your business and this is why a eCommerce SEO consultant’s advice is important so that you get this right from the outset.

The alternative is that you plough ahead and pick an eCommerce platform only to discover several months down the road that it is unsuitable for you and by that time you will have invested a lot of time and money that will have been wasted unnecessarily.

The next way that an internet business consultant can help you is in relation to choosing products and sourcing them. You may know what sorts of products you want to sell, or it could be that you want to target a specific niche but aren’t sure yet what products your store will have for sale.

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WordPress Mistakes Web Design

WordPress Mistakes That You Need to Avoid

A lot of beginning web developers build their first website on a content management platform like WordPress. WordPress is easy to use, very affordable (or even free in some cases) and comes with a huge range of add-ons and plugins to improve your new site.

However, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong with WordPress websites, as many novice developers have found out. If you want to build a decent, functioning website, then you need to make sure that you avoid the following common mistakes that inexperienced WordPress users often make:

1. Not backing your site up

Backing up your website is absolutely essential, especially if you’re using a cheap hosting provider. Basically, backing up your website involves creating a copy of all your site’s content, including written content, images, videos and more. This can be done with various plugins or through dedicated website backup platforms. Many hosting providers also offer back-ups.

2. Using too many plugins

Although plugins can be extremely useful, and will make your life as an inexperienced web developer extremely easy, they can also slow your website down dramatically. It’s important to make sure that you only use plugins which are useful and which actually offer measurable benefits for your website.

3. Not optimising for mobile users

A huge percentage of internet browsing is now done on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. This means that you need to make sure that the website has a design for people who use mobile devices, otherwise you will find that your bounce rate is higher than it should be. The best tip for mobile web design is to make sure that your website is fully optimised and fully responsive.

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Social Media Followers Online Marketing

6 Ways To Get More People To Follow You On Social Media

When it comes to online marketing for lawyers and law firms, social media is one of your most powerful tools. If you own, run, or simply manage the marketing for a law firm, you need to be aware of social media best practices.

One of the most important things when it comes to social media marketing is gaining followers.

The more followers you have, the more people who will see your content, and the more exposure you will have. However, getting more followers can be difficult at the best of times.

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Adwords Marketing Online Marketing

Effective Ways To Make Adwords Marketing More Profitable

Millions of words have been written about Google’s search engine and how SEO can get you to the top of the first page. Often it is a much harder than you are led to believe and in a lot of cases virtually impossible. Thankfully, here is another way to get your website on the first page of Google’s search results and that is by using Adwords marketing.

Adwords is Google’s paid advertising platform and it is paying advertisers whose results you’ll often see at the top and on the right-hand side of the search results. Please note when you use Adwords and even though you are paying Google, there is still no guarantee you will be on the first or even the second page. To achieve this, and to get the best return on your investment. there are some simple rules you should follow when using Adwords marketing.

Before you do anything, you should first learn as much about Adwords as you can by reading the information Google provides about how it works. This is especially important as it will ensure you don’t fall foul of any of Google’s policies, which could result in your account being banned.

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SEO Best Practices Online Marketing

Tips For Keeping Up To Date With SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an essential part of any successful website. Without undertaking some specific actions to optimise your site for search engine crawler bots, there is very little chance of you appearing highly in search engine rankings. This means that you will receive very little organic traffic to your site, and you may find it difficult to obtain a decent audience.

However, if you ask SEO guru Peter Brittain, it is important to note that SEO best practices change regularly as different search engines update their ranking algorithms. It is therefore essential to perform regular maintenance to make sure that you continue to rank highly for your targeted keywords, especially if you depend on high volumes of organic traffic for your business to succeed.

Below are some of our top tips for staying up to date with the latest SEO best practices, each of which should help you keep at the top of your SEO game.

  1. Follow Some High Authority Blogs:

High authority SEO blogs are usually a good place to get the most up to date and correct information about SEO best practices. Find website which has good reputation, which appears to update their SEO information regularly, and which has a consistent high readership.

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Off Page SEO Online Marketing

A Beginner’s Guide to Off Page SEO Practices

Even the most amateur website designer should be familiar with simple on page SEO practices such as keyword density, keyword placement, and the use of html formatting. However, many people aren’t aware of the fact that the things that they do elsewhere on the web can also influence their SEO ranking.

If you aren’t using off page SEO practices yet, then you need to seriously think about what you are doing. You will usually be able to dramatically increase your websites ranking through a few simple actions, including:

  1. Build a good reputation:

If you have a good reputation, people will be more likely to talk positively about you and your website in other places on the internet. Believe it or not, search engine crawler bots collect data from places like reviews sites and forums to determine the perceived value of your website to your viewers. Building a good reputation can help you get decent reviews and and enhance the offline and online visibility of your website. This is especially important if you are selling a product or a service, as a poor reputation will effectively cripple you.

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Joomla Extensions Online Marketing

5 Joomla Extensions To Boost SEO For Your Website

One of the biggest challenges for any website owner using the Joomla CMS platform who wants to increase the number of visitors to their site is improving that website’s ranking within the search engines. There are several ways to do this but one of the most effective is with the use of search engine optimisation or SEO as it is commonly referred to.

According to SEO Experts, SEO Sydney there are many SEO activities which can be done externally to the website such as increasing the number of backlinks to the site, but there are also several which need to be undertaken within the site itself. To improve the effectiveness of this on Joomla websites the use of an SEO extension or plugin is recommended. There are dozens of these to choose from but here are 5 that have proven to work very well.

JoomSEF: The ‘SEF’ in JoomSEF stands for ‘Search Engine Friendly’ which is what this extension will do for your website’s URLs. It basically rewrites them so that they are more easily recognised by the search engines and more understandable by individuals when they see the URL. JoomSEF optimises your website’s metadata including its metatags, handles redirects such as 301 and also connects your site with Google analytics.

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Digital Marketing Agency Online Marketing

How A Digital Marketing Agency Can Help Get Your Brand Established

No matter how big or small your business currently is, or if you are only just starting a business, the importance of having a respected and powerful brand is crucial. You could try to do this yourself, but as with many functions within your business, the wisest way to develop your brand is by enlisting the help of a digital agency.

Not only will a digital marketing agency have the resources in terms of skilled marketers and branding experts, their experience of working with other businesses is a massive advantage to you. Their experience allows them to take what they have learned working for previous clients and implement it when working for you, which includes avoiding any branding mistakes that may have happened in the past.

To employ the services of a digital marketing agency you must first ensure that their credentials and track record are congruent with the standards you would expect. Remember that their task is to position your company and its brand in the best possible light, so the last thing you want is for the agency who are doing that for you, to have a less than stellar reputation themselves.

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Online Business Web Design

Why Planning Your Web Design In Advance Is Essential For Every Online Business

As a business owner, you should be aware that good web design is essential for your business whether it sells physical products or services. Your website is the storefront to an audience of thousands of potential customers and just like any brick and mortar store it must look professional and welcoming.

Excellent web design is about more than just making the home page look appealing, and if you want your website to be effective then planning its design and functionality is essential. There are three main web design factors to consider.

#1 What purpose does your website serve?

This crucial question is what poorly designed websites completely fail to answer. Knowing the main purpose of your website in advance and ensuring the design and functionality of the site match that purpose, will give you a huge advantage over your competitors. Some questions and possible answers to consider prior to designing your website:

  • Is it a corporate site? Should be visual with easily recognisable company branding and colours.
  • A Content site to provide information? Text must be easy to read, with simple navigation.
  • Single product sales page? Easy to skim, with focus on fonts and colours.
  • Is it an e-commerce site? Requires a shopping cart and an easily navigated product catalogue.

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