In this article we are going to cover three areas that you can focus your efforts on for improving overall site navigation and user experience. No matter what form of navigation you use, you are always going to want to make sure you focus your efforts on creating quality content that sticks.

NAVIGATION MENU

The top navigation bar is what people are going to see right away. Be sure to include all of your best information, categories and topics in this area. It is recommend that you add a “Start Here” page to your top navigation for all of your first time visitors. You can use this page to tell your new visitors your best content and what to expect from your site.

RIGHT SIDE BAR

The right side bar area of your site can be used for a lot of things, such as social interaction, advertising, posting your best content and adding a newsletter subscriber form. The important thing is to make sure that you don’t clog it up with too much information or advertising.

FOOTER AREA

The footer area is one of the last places that your site visitors are going to see before they leave your site. Instead of posting a basic footer with your about page and disclaimer, use this area to give one last reminder to your audience and link to your best content and services that you can offer.

Putting your top navigation, side bar and footer area to full use is one of the best ways to create a web site experience that your site users will appreciate and keep them coming back for more.

Remember, you only have a few seconds to keep visitors from leaving your site, so do everything you can to put your best content in front of them and make it so they don’t have to work for it.

1) WordPress for Seo by Joost de Valk – if you want to get traffic, you need a decent SEO plugin and there few as good as this one. I make no apologies for listing 2 of Joost’s plugins, simply because they are so good and so useful. This one does basic SEO analysis of your posts, allows you to edit your meta title and description and also displays a snippet of how your listing will be viewed on Google.

2) RSS Footer by Joost de Valk – links are an important factor for your blog if you want it to grow. There is no simpler way of getting links and putting your content out there than by submitting your RSS feed to the many feed directories that are out there. However, if your RSS content doesn’t have a link back to your site, then it;s really a wasted opportunity. This plugin solves that problem and allows you to create a footer with a link which is added to all you posts that go out via your RSS feed.

3) Spamfree WordPress by Todd Lahman – there is nothing more infuriating than having to trawl through your blog comments and delete all the spam you will get. There are other plugins out there, that do the sane thing, but some require you to part with money or need a subscription. This one is simple, free and actually works.

4) Photodropper by Photodropper LLC – this is a great plugin. Everyone needs photos for their blog on a regular basis, but it can be very time consuming sifting through dozens of royalty free photo sites just looking for the right image. This plugin brings over 200million royalty free images right into your WordPress dashboard. use the search toll to find the image you want, then just drop it into your post.

5) Microkid’s Related Posts by Microkid – to help keep your readers on your site you will want to direct them to other helpful posts. This plugin allows you to find those posts quickly and insert them into the end of an article. Linking to other posts will also help ‘link juice’ flow throughout your blog.

This post was written by F Murphy at http://www.electronic-workbench.com

I thought this was a really interesting concept. The buyer persona defines what the potential customer values, wants, fears, and objects to when they shop for your product. But what happens when you get these hypothetical customer profiles wrong? You risk sending the wrong message, to the wrong audience, at the wrong time. And that’s a huge waste of time and money.

So, Vaughan postulates that behaviors expressed during the usage phase of the customer life cycle — when consumers interact with support — reveal traits relevant to buyer motivation. Here’s four ways I discovered that brands can use frontline customer service employees to refine buyer personas.

Define Your Customer’s Communication Choice

One of the first things customer service can reveal about a buyer persona is the communication channel of choice. At the opening of every service ticket, your reps should record both the persona they’re speaking with, and whether the connection was first made through email, phone, live chat, or self service.

This allows management to later pull a report by persona and identify whether they prefer one communication channel over the other. Knowing this trait helps marketing decide how they should interact with a persona during the pre-purchase or the upsell phase for current customers.

What’s Their Technical Savvy?

HubSpot client support reps tag each service interaction with a “question type.” Through this process, the company has learned that small companies tend to call and ask a lot of questions about what they should do with inbound marketing software. In contrast, enterprise buyers typically use the self-service knowledge base for functionality-related questions.

Both of these question types and the mode they used to find the answer reveals the buyer personas’ technical savvy. In response, marketing creates more how-to content and guides for small business customers, and more product documentation for enterprise customers.

Prioritize Marketing Spend

Have you customer support team tag every ticket with the corresponding persona as you define them. This allows his team to assess which personas account for the most support calls. How often does each persona call? How long does each call last?

Depending on what percent of sales that persona contributes, the company might decrease marketing investments for that profile if spend exceeds customer support costs.

Narrow list of Fears, Wants, and Values

Your marketing team should work with customer service to identify other possible support behaviors that reveal intent for your product, or realized fears from the pre-purchase stage. Let’s take crutch alternative maker Goodbye Crutches. They have a persona called “Mary the Motivated Mom.” let’s say she called customer service because she wanted to know if the scooter she bought can be disassembled because it wouldn’t fit in the trunk.

That’s a really good question. Probably a question a ton of other potential buyers have. It also reveals a concern she and many others have with your product that would be pretty handy to clear up during the pre-purchase stage. This is an example of the kind of fear marketing should work into materials for the pre-purchasers.

To record and track this data, allow space either in your customer service software or CRM to track these “fears” “wants” or “values.” Ideally you can export the information into Excel to sort and look for patterns that will help you refine your buyer personas as you gather more and more information.

Talk to Your Team

In order for this checklist to work, you need to make sure your customer service team understands the persona traits and the value of refining them. Keep a poster in the service department that provides a visual representation of your personas so they are always top of mind.

Ashley Furness is a CRM Analyst for research firm Software Advice. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising.

Now, one of the platforms that you can market your venture on is Google+. It has a variety of features that help spread the word about your products or services. And one of the best ones you can take advantage of is Google+ Local.

What is this exactly and how can it help your enterprise?

The Basics

This comes with every account on the social networking platform. It is a way for you (and other businesses) to share photos, videos, and other useful information, such as physical address and contact number. On the customers end, they can post comments and pictures as well read reviews about your establishment.

The Functions

It is a tool that helps boost the visibility of your business

There is no doubt that social media plays a huge role in increasing your company’s visibility on the Internet. This is why it pays to include relevant keywords and phrases in your page to increase its chances of being indexed by Google. In addition, this is one of the major factors of good search engine optimisation (SEO) practices.

Moreover, you can boost the possibility of landing on top of results pages through the following:

• Having your posts shared by users
• Engaging with your followers
• Having others link to your profile
• Connecting with influential brands
  • Mentioning their name in a post
  • Leaving a comment on a post they shared
  • Starting a conversation with them

Now, if you need any assistance with these matters, you can always get in touch with a company that provides SEO in Australia and other parts of the world. With the help of specialists, you can make your efforts more productive.

It allows your customers to easily find you

Let’s face it, most people perform a search through Google. This means that having an account on their social networking site increases your chances of appearing on SERPs. The likelihood of your target users finding increases if you publish keyword-rich content.

It provides better interaction with your patrons

Since your Local page is integrated with your social page, you can easily communicate with your customers on one platform, which is Google+. Once you engage in a conversation with them, you can increase social signals, which are great factors in getting a good search result ranking.

It increases high-quality reviews

A user needs to be logged in to post a review for your establishment. Through this, the chances of getting fictitious and malicious comments are minimised.

Final thoughts

Although Google+ Local has only been on the Web since May 2012, it is already an effective feature that many businesses are using to boost visibility. If you want to have an edge against your competitors or, at least, keep pace with the Internet’s constant advancement, take time to pour your efforts on it.

For those of you who have tried the service, what are your thoughts so far? Feel free to share these in the comments.

About the Author
Jonny Lis a Digital Marketing Specialist overseeing over 300 campaigns for Smart Traffic, a company that provides SEO services to help drive traffic and increase brand awareness for their clients.

We would like to always believe it is not about the price, but unfortunately, price will always be a major factor in any buying decision. Some of the most important parts of your decision making should include needs and wants and to focus on value for money, and not just price.

Step 1: You need to identify exactly what you want as project outcomes. You may have a list from ‘must haves’ through to ‘nice to haves’. From this list, you can determine what type of supplier you need.

Step 2: Identifying potential suppliers is the next step in your journey. For example, some of the questions you need to ask could be

• Do you need a web developer who can also host your site
• Do you need access to them 24/7 (what if your site went down the night before you have to present a project to a client?)
• Is it important that they can support online shopping carts
• Do they need to be able to fully code your website, or are there existing templates you wish to replicate
• Do you or your team need training, is the developer able to provide this
• Does your site need optimisation, will you be relying on customers being able to find you in search engines such as Google. If this is the case, can your developer do that for you also, more importantly, do they design the website initially to be search engine friendly
• Will you have the time to write all of the content for your web pages and regular blogs or do you need access to a competent copy writer and if so, can your developer supply this also.

Step 3: In the beginning of your journey, your potential suppliers will be in the ‘discovery’ phase. At this time, it is critical that you are open and clear about what you need and want from a website. Try to capture these requirements in a document which is available for all suppliers so they are quoting on the same scope of works.

Step 4: Take the time to truly understand the value of your website to your business. What would happen tomorrow or next month or next year if your website didn’t exist or suddenly went off the air for days or weeks? Put a real number on it. I used to do an exercise with customer service personnel when I trained them. It went something like this;

• how many phone calls do you take a day (say about 40)
• how much per annum do our customers spend with us (for that Telco then it was about $500pa)
• how many days a year do you work (47 weeks x 5 days = 235 days)
• So the influence you have on our company’s bottom line is 235 days x 40 customers x $500 pa =$4.7million every year! If they annoyed every one of those customers enough to make them leave, it could destroy a company!

So now, be critical in how you evaluate how important your website is, or could be to your business. For example, paper based directories are becoming obsolete, most business is done through Internet searches, so if you are relying on your website to be valuable, you must look to the quality and subsequent value of web design, development and hosting.

For example, each new customer you acquire has a lifetime value of maybe $50 000. If your aim is to have 30 customers cycling through your business constantly, and 1 in 10 come to you, or potentially come to you via your website, then 3 customers or $150000 revenue at any one time is a direct result of your website, would you be willing to invest a small proportion of that for a quality website?

Step 5: Evaluate the tenders or quotes. Remembering the adage of paying peanuts and getting monkeys, your suppliers are not wanting to do business with you for fun, they are in it to be successful. You would expect that there will be a range of prices due to their cost structures or ulterior motives (which may be to work cheaply for you if you have contacts they wish to make, or you are geographically convenient etc). The important point to consider first is what are they offering? Review this against each quote and create a short list of the best offers. Then consider the costs. Ensure you are measuring apples against apples, and that you understand what one will give you over the other.

It is rarely a good idea to take the cheapest quote in anything, but it is a good idea to evaluate the solutions comparing continually back to your ‘must have’ list. The value of web design is how well it achieves your business goals, not in how much money you saved at the outset.

Read the fine print

It’s okay to rely on the experts to protect you from online theft. Even so, it’s also a good thing to do what you can to protect yourself from it. No matter what kind of transaction you’re involved with and who you’re doing business with, there’s still no excuse for you to skip reading the fine print.

Conduct a background check on the firm

You don’t need to be a detective in order to conduct an effective background check on a firm. Every legitimate firm will always leave a paper trail behind it. In fact, it’s their interest to do so since it’s one way for their customers to verify that they’re the real deal. If the company you plan to do business with has no records with the Better Business Bureau or, worse, shows up with the Consumer Fraud division in your state – you’re definitely better off running the opposite direction.

Double-check every item on your credit card statement

Make it your monthly ritual. No matter how many precautions you take, there’ll always be a new way that hackers would come up with to commit online theft. In most cases, prompt reports of questionable items in your credit card statement can prevent unnecessary deductions from your account. Information from your case will also help deter similar attacks in the future.

Avoid buying from unknown websites

It’s simply safer this way. With unknown websites, their policies for returns, refunds, and client protection can still be sketchy. If something goes wrong, you won’t be able to rely on website management to help you recover lost or stolen money.

No delivery equals zero payment required

If you do not receive the item or provided the service you purchased online in thirty days, then you can contact your credit card company to withhold payment. The only exception to this is when you were explicitly informed that delivery wouldn’t be possible in 30 days.

Pay for protection

If you do business or transact online frequently, then what you’d pay for extra credit card protection would be worth it. Take the time to shop around to find out what your options are.

Protect Yourself Better with High Speed Internet

In the off chance that you do become a victim of any online scam, having a fast Internet connection enables you to respond more quickly to the situation. With fast Internet, you can also multitask online to try different solutions at the same time.

Author’s Bio:
Krystine Joy Sitjar is a freelance writer that loves to write blogs about the internet. She is also a gadget fanatic.

Storing Important Documents

Almost every family has a file cabinet filled with important documents. With cloud storage, your family can store all of your important documents virtually. Keep copies of birth certificates, diplomas, or even your credit report and income tax records. This offers safe storage with access whenever you need it.

Family To-Do Lists and Errands

One of the most convenient functions of the cloud is the ability to create virtual documents that can be updated instantly by multiple people. For a busy family this can be highly useful. You can store your to-do lists, grocery lists, chores, or errands and access them from anywhere. If someone is at the grocery store, you can add items to the grocery list while they are shopping and they will see it instantly.

Media and Entertainment Storage

Home entertainment today is highly connected to each other. From internet TV to wireless speakers and media player, your entire home can be optimized for media. With cloud storage you can store your favorite digital copied movies, music, or home videos and play them on any device you wish. If you want to hold a movie night, your internet TV can connect to your home network and access the video right from your cloud storage. You can even share your favorite movies with distant family members.

Storing Your Digital Life

Many families capture those special moments with video or photos. Even e-cards get sent out during the holidays. With the cloud you can store and access those digital keepsakes and keep them safe. Nothing is worse than losing vacation or graduation pictures when your computer crashes. This is what the cloud does best, keeps back-up copies of files safe and accessible.

Planning Special Occasions

Some of the most creative users find new ways to use the cloud. One of these ways is by keeping plans for special occasions. Whether it is a birthday party, a vacation, or a wedding, all of your plans, sites, and decorating ideas can be stored on the cloud. This allows access if you are meeting your travel agent, wedding planner, or if you are planning it yourself. Now nothing will get lost by falling out of a binder or being misplaced.

The cloud is highly adaptable and useful to every family. If you are looking for a way to keep your household in order, consider the cloud for your family computing and assure everything you need is where you can get it.

Jeffrey Stables is a tech blogger and father who utilizes the cloud for secure file sharing between family members near and far.

There are several solutions to ensuring you have the highest quality local search engine optimisation (SEO), the top 5 solutions include:

1. Claim your Google+ Local entry. Google Places used to be the feeder for Google Maps to include your business in searches. However since the launch of Google+ Local in May 2012, Google Places is in decline and Google+Local is not only showing business locations on maps, but also showing reviews and referrals. If you search for a business which one of your Google+ contacts has recommended, in theory, this business should be highlighted on your search with your friends review.  The perfect marriage of technology and personal recommendation.
2. Manage your information across the Internet. Ensure your business data listed on information aggregation sites is correct (eg Truelocal.com.au or urbanspoon.com). Sometimes you may need to find out where they source their data and have that corrected first before it can be fixed on the aggregation site. For example, many sites source from original Yellow Pages telephone directories, these can be incorrect.
3. Add local contact details: list at least a local land telephone line, especially if you don’t want ‘walk-ins’ to your business you may not want to put your full street address, at least a local phone number ensures those who want to do business with a local will feel comfortable calling you. Have a local physically mailing address listed also, this can be a PO box, but listing even that gives credibility to your local space.
4. Encourage reviews- Good and bad, they show you are transparent, real and credible. Always ask for a review, put it on your order page, invoices, Facebook etc. If you genuinely seek feedback, you provide real information for future customers which improves the chances of you being picked up locally as well as giving you an opportunity to correct issues.
5. A picture paints a thousand words- on your local site listings across the web include pictures. The sites will love you, your customers will know what to expect and everyone will benefit. You can upload different images to different sites highlighting parts of your offering which will most appeal to the target audience of each of the local search sites.

Whilst you cannot control every piece of information about your business which is available online, you can manage your local seo to maximise the outcome of local searches.

Know Your Expertise

The first thing to do before you even plug your computer is to evaluate your skills. Are you good in engineering design, products design or fashion design? Which software are you able to use perfectly? Write down these points and evaluate yourself honestly. Most people who post part-time CAD jobs online are usually looking for designers with specific abilities and qualities, so don’t blow your chances of getting a job by not knowing what you are capable of doing.

Use Keywords

Once you know your skills you can then turn on your laptop, connect to the internet, get on search engine sites and start typing. Search engines work based on keywords as you may already know and that is what you’re going to use to get your par-time CAD job. To begin your search write down the name of your job expertise or description, add the words “part time”, “cad” and “jobs” to it e.g. “part time civil engineering cad”, enter it into the search box and click on search. This is better than just typing “part-time jobs” or “part time cad jobs” that will bring up so many results that has no value to you.

Another way to search for cad part-time jobs online is to use the name of the software or program you are most familiar with, this is the best way to get search results that will suite you exactly. For example you can type “part time cad jobs AutoCAD 3d” so you can get job listings looking for prolific AutoCAD 3d designers that are ready to work on part-time basis.

Go Straight To Job Sites

If you don’t want to make use of search engines then you can go straight to online job sites like indeed, simply hired, freelancer, Elance or even craigslist to find part time jobs. If you have tried all the above mentioned sites and you still can’t find the right job then type “freelance cad job sites” or its variations to find other sites that offer such job postings or listings. The best thing however is to look for job sites in your locality or state that display nearby CAD job vacancies. You should know that many of these job sites will require you to sign up first before they can allow you to bid for jobs.

Increase Your Chances Of Getting Hired

There are thousands of other designers from all over the world looking for part-time jobs so you need to present yourself properly so as to increase your chances of getting selected. First you need a well written and properly organized resume with the most important details carefully explained. If you’re using a job site like Elance you should make sure that your onsite resume and profile page is properly filled without any false information or grammatical errors. Very important, make sure you have a sample of any of your works ready for clients who may require them. That’s one of the best ways to get above the competition.

Sam Dawson recently found part time work as a freelance CAD technician and he loves generating extra income doing something he loves.

Traffic & Ranking Analysis

There are many online tools to use to track your site’s traffic and rankings on Google. Google Analytics is a good online tool to see your website’s rankings on Google. It displays the traffic of your website and how people got to the site. Also, it shows the strongest keywords that led people to your site, which then shows which keywords you should build up for your site through SEO services.

Make sure the content you have on the site is search engine friendly, meaning that it shouldn’t be duplicate content or computer generated. All of the content on your site needs to be unique and updated frequently. The more content your site has, generally the more traffic it will get.

Plan and Write Good Content

Content is key when it comes to search engine optimization. You need to make sure your content looks legit for both users and search engines. Google will be able to tell if your content is computer generated, and they will punish your website. Make sure you write your content with proper structure, including appropriate header tags (H1, H2, H3), bullet lists, and bolded text.

Use E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is a great way to personally keep in touch with your clients. It is important that you keep your customers up to date with new products, thus allowing you to keep selling. E-mailing your clients individually builds up trust with the client, which is a very effective sales technique. You will easily be able to build strong repeat customers that will have a personal connection with you.

Get On The Social Networks

Your site will definitely fail if you are not active on social networking websites. Social networking sites allow you to reach out to a much larger audience. Social networking sites have become a necessity for businesses, and you can gain access to millions of people through online social networking sites.

PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising

Pay per click advertising is a decent way to advertise your company online. You will appear at the top of Google searches, but you must pay every time a user clicks on the advertisement. If your conversion sales rate is good, then you may benefit from using pay per click advertising. If your conversion rate is low, then it is best that you avoid pay per click advertising.

Interactive Media & Youtube

Through interactive media, you can literally tell the world what your company is and what you are producing. You can do this through podcasts or videos on Youtube. Getting mass subscribers on Youtube will allow you to send out interactive media and videos to  your new online audience. Creating a viral video is an amazing way to get your company name out to millions of people.

Build Links

Getting quality links for your site is very important in search engine optimization. The quality of the links can be more important than the quantity of links. It is better to have a smaller number of good quality links than thousands of poor quality links from pages that are full of random links.

Promote your Brand on Other Sites

Guest posting is a great way to promote your brand on other sites. You can write articles about your company, your products, or your services and post them online for other blogs to pick up. It is an easy way to build links for your site, and it attracts a larger audience this way.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Make sure your site is visually appealing and easy to navigate through. If it is easy to use, then people will consider buying your products. Make sure you have an easy-to-see checkout or sign up icon on the site to build followers. It’s important that people are visiting your site, but it is even more important that the visitors to your site are buying your product or service.

Customer Service

Having good customer service is key to helping your clients. If you put your phone number or email on the website, make sure you will be readily available to take calls or respond to emails. You need to be familiar with your company and its services so that you can answer any questions or concerns of the client.

Written by Nick Bagley, blogger and Natural Link Building Consultant from RankExecutives.com