5 Team Building Mistakes to Avoid

Business Advice / / February 17, 2020

If you’re serious about building a successful business or company, you need to make sure that you build a cohesive, functional team of employees. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds, which means that you might need to implement some team building strategies.

However, according to Team Works Development, team building can go seriously wrong if you’re not careful. In our experience, there are a few common mistakes that a lot of team leaders make, and they should be avoided at all costs. The five most common include:

  1. Assuming Everyone Is Equal

Although we shouldn’t have to say this, your employees are not equal. Everyone is different, with unique skills, emotions and learning abilities. If you assume that everyone is equal, you won’t be taking advantage of their unique traits.

Additionally, this assumption can be dangerous because it can lead to some members of your team under performing and not performing to the best of their ability. Ultimately, assuming every member of your team is equal is a sure fire way to not achieve the results you want.

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Web Design Tools

Best Web Design Tools Of 2019

Website Development / / March 18, 2020

The number of active websites on the internet is ever increasing, and there’s a rapidly growing demand for specialists in web design and web development in the modern world. It’s therefore important to current designers to be able to work as efficiently as possible to handle the workload that comes their way.

Luckily, there are a lot of website design tools out there that are designed to help make a designers life easier. I’ve crawled the web to find the best web design tools of 2019, and I bring them to you in this article. Whether you’re creating a brand new website, or redesigning a website, the best website design tools of 2019 include:

Adobe Dreamweaver

Although it isn’t cheap, you should definitely consider adding Adobe Dreamweaver to you website design toolbox. It’s one of the most powerful design tools out there, and it essentially brings everything together into one place to allow those without a lot of coding experience to put their own website together.

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eCommerce Plugins

What Are The Best eCommerce Plugins For WordPress?

Website Development / , / October 24, 2019

WordPress is, without a doubt, one of the most versatile website builders and content management systems available. It’s great for everything from personal websites to massive eCommerce stores, largely because of its customizability and the huge range of plugins it offers.

If you’re thinking about creating an online store, experienced digital agencies such as slinky.digital will tell you that you should consider using WordPress. If you do decide to use WordPress, then you should look closely at some of the eCommerce plugins available to entrepreneurs around the world.

I’ve done some research and come up with a list of the best eCommerce plugins for WordPress. They include:

WooCommerce

If you ask anyone who knows anything about WordPress eCommerce, they will tell you that WooCommerce is the best plugin on the market – and it’s completely free to get started!

WooCommerce powers almost 10% of all eCommerce website, and an unproportional number of the most popular sites. It offers a huge range of free features, with premium extensions to expand your store’s functionality.

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SEO for New Websites

SEO for New Websites on a Small Budget

Website Marketing / / February 27, 2020

For business owners who have large or even unlimited budgets, it could be that they overlook SEO and go straight to paid advertising to drive traffic to their website. Alternatively, they might employ the services of a large SEO agency and get them to undertake every ranking tactic in the book. However, not every business starts out with an endless supply of money, so what to do?

SEO Sydney Pro advise that if you are starting a new business, with a new website, and are operating with a small budget, there are plenty of actions you can take in relation to the site’s SEO and subsequent ranking. The key is that you take a logical and planned approach to this so that each tactic you employ, compliments and supports the others.

The first part of the plan should focus on setting up all the technical elements, which using automobile terminology, could be referred to as the workings under the bonnet. You should sign up for, and set up, accounts for Google’s Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools, which you’ll be pleased to know costs nothing. These tools will provide you with lots of essential data to help your SEO activities.

The next step is to create an optimized XML sitemap and submit it to Bing and Google. Before submitting this, you must ensure that your website’s ‘robot.txt’ is set to allow the search engines’ spiders to crawl your website rather than disallowing them. Another element you should have in place is that your website should have an SSL certificate so that it has ‘https’ rather than ‘http’ protocol.

If you have already started building your website and adding content, then there are two additional technical aspects of your website that you should start to implement. One is the linking structure and whilst there may not be many links and URLs in a new website, even at this stage you should be optimising internal links with regards to SEO.

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Drug Rehab’s Search Engine Ranking

5 Simple Things You Can Do To Boost Your Drug Rehab’s Search Engine Ranking

Website Marketing / / October 21, 2019

Appearing high in the organic search results for relevant keywords should be a priority for every drug rehab facility. The keywords and search terms that you focus on will depend on what sort of services you offer and how big your firm is, but there’s one thing you need to remember:

SEO is about the technical details.

Search engine optimisation is focused on boosting your website’s organic search rankings. You can create the best content in the world and have the best drug rehabilitation website on the internet, but you still won’t rank highly if you ignore the simple technical details.

With that in mind, I’ve put together a quick list of the top 5 things that drug rehabs often forget about when trying to improve their search engine rankings. They include:

  1. Make Sure Your Page Load Times Are Low

People don’t hang around to wait for websites that load slowly. Slow page load speeds are also seen in a negative light by Google and other search engines. It is therefore essential to make sure that you minimise your page load times as much as possible. Choose a fast hosting provider, make sure that you’re following content best practices, and only use plugins when they’re really necessary.

  1. Get Backlinks

The importance of backlinks can’t be underestimated. They are essential for building your website authority and therefore for SEO. Focus on building high quality backlinks through forum posting, online business directory listings, and guest posting.

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Link Building

The Importance Of Link Building For Law Firm SEO

Legal Advice, Website Marketing / , / October 21, 2019

Link building is a vital component of SEO for any online business or website. It’s no different for lawyers or law firms such as Davies Co Lawyers who are looking to improve their SEO ranking. In fact, a SEO strategy without link building is very unlikely to succeed, simply because backlinks are such a big ranking factor used by search engine algorithms.

But What Is Link Building?

If you haven’t heard of link building before, don’t worry – it’s pretty simple. In fact, it’s almost as easy as creating decent content for your own website. It refers to placing the link to your website on other high authority sites across the internet. This can be done in a number of ways, but the most popular is through guest posting.

The most backlinks that your website has from other sites, the more credible it will appear in Google’s eyes. Well, this isn’t actually completely true, because it’s a bit more complicated than this. Backlinks from other high quality sites are worth more than backlinks from poor quality sites, while backlinks from very poor quality sites could even result in penalties. It is better to have one link from a number of sites than a number of links from one sites, because every new site that links to you will increase your credibility.

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Google Updates

Google Updates and What They Tell Us To Avoid

Website Marketing / , / October 21, 2019

Google dominates the internet search engine industry, so if you want your website to be ranked as high as possible, you should pay close attention to what Google says it is looking for. Over the years Google has sought to make its results the very best they can be and in doing so, have introduced several updates in terms of what they see as a positive and negative SEO practices.

Some of these updates had a devastating effect on thousands of websites who saw their ranking plummet overnight. The majority of these were websites whose SEO optimisation techniques had become undesirable to Google. By moving these sites down or out of their results completely Google expected that the people using their search engine where seeing higher quality results.

Here are the main updates Google have introduced in recent years and what they mean in terms of SEO practices.

Panda

Released in 2011, and still part of Google’s primary algorithm, the main objective of Panda was to tackle the number of websites with low-quality and spammy type content. Specifically, it penalised:

  • Content stuffed with keywords
  • Plagiarism and copyright infringements
  • Duplicate content, especially within a website
  • Low word count pages, or ‘thin content’

To avoid any of these penalties you should always ensure that any content on your website is good quality, is original, has at least 300 words, and reads naturally.

Penguin

Whilst Panda dealt with spammy content, a year later Google decided it wanted to address the issue of dubious backlinking practices. They sought out websites whose backlinking profiles were unnatural, and which seemed to be trying to manipulate Google linking algorithm. Penguin’s main targets were:

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Apply For GST

Do I Need To Apply For GST For My Business?

Business Advice / / October 21, 2019

When it comes to tax in Australia, it can be hard to get your head around all of your obligations, especially if you are starting your first small business or something similar. Goods and services tax (GST) experts Accountants Australia advise that GST is an area of confusion among a lot of first time business owners, and is something that gets brought up at their offices regularly.

GST in Australia is very confusing. Some small businesses have to have it. Some small businesses don’t. So how do you know if you need to register for GST? Basically, it all comes down to how much money you expect your business to turn over each financial year.

Firstly, what is GST?

GST, or goods and services tax, is basically a small fee that the government puts on top of all purchases and sales in the country. It currently sits at 10% of the price of the item, which means that when you sell something, you will actually have to collect 110% of the amount that you actually want to sell it for – if your business is registered for GST. The 10% tax rate then needs to be paid on to the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

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Legal Help

Need Legal help with Starting or Running your Business?

Legal Advice / / October 21, 2019

Reliable Business Lawyers look out for your Best Interests

Every business entrepreneur is aware that starting and running a business is no mean task but they may not be familiar with the type of problems that may crop up. Hiring reputed commercial lawyers like Lawyers Perth right from the beginning helps prevent problems and reduces the likelihood of stress, confusion and heavy legal expense at a later stage. Most business owners may consider hiring a lawyer as an expense (especially when they need every dollar to invest in the business). However, the truth is that having a lawyer looking out for you can help you concentrate on other tasks without having to worry about legal implications of decisions. Business lawyers are trained in Australian commercial law and will explain to you the pros and cons of different options and business decisions. They will help you weigh the advantages against potential pitfalls and as a result, you are able to make informed commitments. A business that is unfettered by legal problems and headaches is more likely to thrive, grow and prosper.

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prevent-litigation

Tips to Prevent Litigation Against Your Small Business

Legal Advice / / October 21, 2019

Lawyers will tell you that litigation once only happened to large businesses; these days it is increasingly happening in the small businesses environment as well. It can be disastrous for any business, but even more so for the smaller one that doesn’t always have the resources to pay for it and recover. If you own a small business, here are some tips to prevent litigation happening to you.

  • Watch your mouth. Being careful what you say or write will help to keep you out of hot water. These days some people are on the defensive all the time, which means a thoughtless joke or comment can be taken the wrong way and the next thing you know you are up for slander, libel or harassment of some kind.

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Email Marketing

How To Ensure Your Marketing Emails Get Read

Website Marketing / / October 21, 2019

If you are not tracking open rates for any of your email marketing campaigns then you should be. If you did check your tracking numbers you may be shocked at how few of the emails that you send actually get opened.

There can be many reasons for this, and it can be very frustrating, spending time making sure your email is as good as it can be, only to see more than half your subscribers don’t even open it. However, there are some actions which you can take to improve open rates and one of the most effective is to improve the subject lines of the emails you send.

One of the most obvious reasons subject lines can impact on open rates is that many people simply scan the subject lines when checking their email, and if they like it they open the email, and if they don’t it gets trashed. This might sound brutal but it is the reality.

Making your subjects more appealing means they must first spark interest in the person looking at them and this interest can fall into one of three specific categories.

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ECommerce Store

Choosing a Niche For Your ECommerce Store

Website Development / / October 21, 2019

If you have decided to open an eCommerce store, is it going to be a general store or a niche store? If you are unsure what the difference is, it’s simply that a general store will sell to any market, and a niche store will focus on selling products which relate a specific subject.

An example of a general eCommerce business could be one that sells t-shirts, caps and other printed goods across all sorts of subjects such as pets, sports, types of employment and hobbies. A niche eCommerce store which also sells t-shirts etc will only sell them if they are within the niche the business targets, such as dog lovers, golfers, teachers or camping enthusiasts, for example.

The main benefit of starting an eCommerce business which targets a specific niche, rather than across general markets, is you can very easily identify those who have an interest in your niche. You will also find that people within a niche can be very passionate about it, and often buy everything they can which relates to it. This will not be the case if your products are more generally targeted.

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Leasing Disputes

Leasing Disputes under Australian law and Commercial Tenancy Tribunal

Legal Advice / / February 24, 2020

Under Australian law, as soon as an individual signs a commercial lease, he is legally bound to fulfil all terms and conditions of the lease, including the payment of rent, for the whole duration of the lease. Verbal agreements to change the lease are not binding in Australia. If a tenant and the landlord (the individual or business entity leasing the premises) desires to amend the terms and conditions of the lease, such amendments must be set forth in writing, usually with the participation of commercial property lawyers on one side and another firm representing the other side. Both the tenant and landlord must consent to any alterations in the lease. If both the tenant and landlord are completely aware of and consent to the lease conditions, there should be no disputes. Common grey areas, or the areas for confusion involve rent increases and lease renewals.

One of the reliable means of handling leasing disputes is mediation. A hearing by a special tribunal may be viewed as another way to remedy leasing conflicts and disputes. Each State and Territory of Australia has its own tribunal that specialises in handling commercial tenancy disputes. Thus, ACT Tenancy Tribunal was established in 1994 to handle disputes concerning retail premises, or premises located in a shopping centre and small commercial premises that are not located in a shopping centre. The ACT Tenancy Tribunal presently rests its decisions on the Leases (Commercial and Retail) Act 2001.[1]

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personal appearance

The Double Edged Sword of Your Personal Appearance

Business Advice / / October 21, 2019

If you are a woman in business you may have become aware that your personal appearance can be a double-edged sword. You do everything to make yourself attractive and presentable for the job only to find you can’t advance because someone thought you were too attractive and that would distract the male employees. If you’ve been in business for some years and have wondered if you should get Botox treatment for those fine wrinkles, take this into account.

Of course you want to look your best, but the trouble is that if you appear too attractive you’ll have to work twice as hard to make people take you seriously. Those with suspicious minds may have other thoughts on how you got the job in the first place or how you managed to keep it. This is why it’s good to go with what you like and don’t pay too much attention to what other people think of you.

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Business Plan

What Should be in Your Business Plan

Business Advice / , / October 21, 2019

Behind every successful business there is a comprehensive business plan. According to experienced financial planners Andep, there are many things this plan should contain, apart from your personality, including a financial planning section. This should be written by a financial advisor, or at least from information they have provided. Having a financial planner to help will show any lenders that you are serious about your business and they will be able to quickly see whether it is a viable investment opportunity for them.

Here are some of the other things that should be in your business plan: –

  • The title page is more important than you might think. By including this page your lenders will be able to quickly see what the plan is for and general information about it.

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