Essentee Blog

New Zealand is a nation of small and medium businesses - how does that affect how we use social media in our marketing?

Because we have limited budget, time and expertise it means we have to be sure our efforts will be worth it.  So for those who want to utilise social media in their marketing - what is the best way to get the biggest bang out of a small buck?

If you are a small business owner or self employed, chances are you belong to at least one business networking group.  Made up of motivated people who meet regularly they are a good way to build relationships with other business owners. Members referring business to other members are the life blood of these groups.

But in our experience, referrals in these groups tend to come from businesses who would naturally work together (for example, marketing consultants, graphic designers and web developers).

It can be hard to find ways to support all the members in your group if your businesses do not typically work together, or you don't regularly see a high number of people who are potential referrals.

Good news – there are other ways you can support your fellow group members that are quite powerful without directly or regularly referring people or businesses to them.

Everyone knows when a website has been hacked, right? It will have a message saying 'hacked by' – right? Wrong.

The scars might be invisible to the average site visitor and the owner not even know their website has been compromised. Think that little old New Zealand minding it's own business isn't a target? Wrong again.

How do you know if your website has been a victim of an attack ? How do you fix it? And more importantly, how do you prevent it having serious repercussions for your business?

Google has taken the unusual step of announcing a change to the algorithm that calculates search rankings before they actually roll it out. Unusual because they generally just implement an update.

Why have they given you notice?  So you can prepare - prepare for Mobilegeddon!

The topic of FAQs came up in a business networking meeting recently with the comment that they are good for your visibility in Google (ie SEO). 

They are, but you need to create them with SEO in mind to get the full benefit.  

The first myth on this list was going to be one about having to follow lists of do's and do not's about web design.

We all want our website to send us tons of business, right?

But acheiving this can be a frustratingly elusive goal for many business owners.

Fortunately I'm here to tell you there are proven tactics to work toward acheiving it and some of them are contained in this post.

If your website is so amazing that everyone is talking about it and telling others to go see it – well, put your feet up!.  But for most, getting more people to come to your website is one of their biggest challenges.

And sadly, “build it and they will come” only works in the movies.

It takes work, sometimes quite hard word, to get more people to visit your website.  But to make it easier - we're giving you a dozen ways to do it.

It's that time of year. The time when predictions are made and last year's are picked over to see if they came true and if not, the justifications made for why not.

Almost all websites have some kind of imagery on it. Otherwise they look a little, well....boring. And photo images (as opposed to illustrative design elements) are a great way to add impact.

But there is a right way and a wrong way. And sadly the wrong way is all too common.