Want A Thriving Business? Build Up A Website For Your Business!

Having a website for your business is considered an essential role to success your business and it is a necessity to compete in today’s business environment.  An effective website can often describe your products and services, explain how customers can get in touch with you.  In competition market today, a website is a given for any successful business -- regardless of size or industry.  Without a website, businesses won’t be taken seriously and likely will decrease their chances of being found by new customers.

Last week I have attended networking meetup session for ( business network) I discovered that 43 percent of small business owners still weren’t using social media because they didn’t feel it was important to their business. I really surprised, and these statistics has pushed me to open a discussion with some of people who has SMBs and doesn't have any online business page whether in social media or a website or an Internet presence at all.

May be you have a question says; there is some businesses who are doing phenomenally well without a website, how they can do that? I agree with you, too. But I often wonder how much better they could be doing if they took the time to invest in one. And when I say “website,” I don’t mean an electronic version of that brochure they ‘have been holding out for the past 10 years. I mean a legitimate, well-thought-out site that is designed to inform, engage and convert their audience.

Based on that, I would like to list a few benefits that come along with creating a usable website for your small business. Let me know why you think it is (or isn’t) important for a SMB to have a website in 2015.

1. You stop being invisible.

I am not trying to promote the online pages, but by creating a website you stop being invisible to the people trying to find your product or service online. More and more studies in marketing are telling us about the positive effect where customers are learning to research online before buying offline. They’re typing their problems or needs into the search engine of their choice and are researching the companies that appear for those queries. If you don’t have a web presence, there’s no chance of you showing up and you never even enter into their thought process. In 2015, you can’t afford to be invisible. Am I right?

2. You help control your rankings.

The amount of fresh content, the amount of traffic your site has, the amount of getting your way in search engine optimization that can help to control your position in your site shows up and for which queries. By creating optimized content, building relevant links and creating a brand that customers want to engage with in along with how long visitors stay engaged on your site, and whether they recommend it to others - all of these are factors in SEO ranking.

 

 

3. You create another sales tool.

A website is a powerful sales tool and one that allows you to address your customers’ concerns, give them the information they need to make a decision and create compelling calls to action. I would say your website is your home turf where people can go to seek out trusted information about your company and engage with you on a more personal level. 

 

4. Enhance your business brand image to public:

Your website is an effective way to build your brand image. Not just your logo, the way your content is arranged, your layouts are setup will influence the professionalism of your business. By creating a website, you set up shop on the Internet and show customers that this is where they can come to find information about you, to read articles that you’ve written and to learn more about your company and the way of selling your image. All of these things build authority. Without a website, you’re at a huge disadvantage as a small business owner trying to speak to your customers.

5. Stay ahead of the competition and expand your customer base

A website enables you to stay ahead of and keep up with your competition. If your competition is online, they will be finding all of the customers searching for products and services in your industry. Without a website you are missing out on all that business. A professionally designed website also allows you to expand your business into new markets far beyond the local customer base that you used to reach with print ads or the yellow pages.

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Apply These 5 W's In Your Business To Double Your opportunity to Success

I have a significant insight about the strategy of establishing any small business in different industries, and today I wanted to share it with you. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

One of my friends had established a small company in XY city in Canada, his plan was to offer general cleaning and maintenance services which can compete other cleaning services companies in the market place.

After a one year he has finally come to realize there is just no way to make it work. It was heading in the wrong direction and start losing many customers. He and the business both broke, behind on his personal bills from funneling all his available cash into the business and receiving at least 3 -5 collection calls a day.

In the end of 2013, I met him in Canada and we started talking about many things that negatively impacted his business. He told me that he is not sure he can live with the guilt of simply walking away from this business that took a year to create. The shame of not being good enough or smart enough or prepared enough to make it stand out in competitive market.

I kept listening and listening without adding any comment until I raised my hand to stop him and asked him;

Me: Have you done any research or business plan before open this business? Have you applied five W's of marketing? I read from his eyes that I am asking about something doesn’t relating with his story!

Friend: I don’t know what do you mean by W’s marketing. We all do the same thing here when start small business. Everybody in the business has the same tools, the same skilled technicians and it has just turned into a battle over price, price, and price.

Me: So you have no distinguishing strategy, nothing that sets you apart?

Friend: No. which strategy you mean and what is the W’s? 

Me: Starting a business has its perks. However, there are some areas that you need to review, build a strategy before you hang an "Open" sign on your storefront, the best way to begin any business venture is research, plan, write it down and then act.

One of these strategies is Five W's: who, what, when, where, and why. 

Who? You need to understand your community – your clients, customers, and your potential customers – to succeed in your business. The better you know who they are, the better you can deliver value for them and the better you can serve businesses that want to connect with your customers or clients.

What? What makes you different? To people who might be interested in your service, or to businesses interested in connecting with your audience, you need to stand out from the crowd of alternatives. It is important to understand the details of the products you will market. What are you doing to distinguish your product from the competition? The more you seem like just another service technology or just another advertising vehicle, the less time, attention and money you will command.

When? Timeliness has economic value in any business. Creating deadlines and delivering the services on time is crucial to keeping yourself on track. Don't procrastinate! The business that can offer a services or product according to the scheduled time is on its way to success as it is considered valuable for consumers and businesses.

Where? Location is going to be increasingly important: you should figure out how location will (or won't) contribute to the success of the business. Will you work out of your home to start or will you lease office or shop?  Where will you be located and why is this good location for your business.

Why? You need to understand (and be able to explain) why someone would use your product or service and why a business would pay for any services you offer. You have to understand what Clayton Christensen calls the job that you are doing for a business or a user.

Whether you’re starting your first or your third business, expect to make mistakes and face some barriers. This is natural and so long as you learn from them, also beneficial. If you do not make mistakes, you do not learn what to do less of and equally, what to do more of.  I would say the great thing about owning your own business is that you get to decide what you want to do and what direction you want to grow in.

Before starting your own business, it’s important to take some time and reflect on what needs to be done to get a successful business off the ground. The planning stage is crucial, and will set the stage The Five W's of business for how efficiently your company operates. If the planning of your business is still in its infancy, finding your ‘Five Ws’ can be a good way to understand the basics of how your business will operate.

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How to Improve Your Next Business Engagement in 8 Steps

Nowadays, when people talk about social media, they are talking about all the ways using social media can increase their networks, reputation and the way of selling their image! On the other hand we can see most marketers are trying to use social media to increase a company's bottom line. At the end and as final outcome if we used it properly we can say social media has changed the world.
From my perspective, It’s not just about using platforms and tools for the new look and feel design of it, I think it’s important to remember how crucial the old fashioned relationship and business communications are.

In this article I would like to raise one of the most important elements which considered a key success factors in social media “Engagement”

But what does engagement actually mean? And are social media follower counts really important?

Engagement in a product or services business refers to how much people interact with a brand's social media and website. For instance, if you are selling chocolate cinnamon cake, I would say it may be tough to convince your clients or customers to share your secret chocolate sauce, a new dark chocolate product, or even a bad chocolate taste story with customers.

But, openness can go a long way in social media. Your community will feel involved in your company and appreciate the trust you show toward them. They may become interested in your story, want to get involved in your product trials, or stay in touch with updates. That hook may be what you need to generate new, long-term customers.

When I did my research via different online sources I found there are over 1.82 billion social network users worldwide; do you believe that?? That number is expected to increase to approximately 2.33 by 2017. Needless to say, being active on social media is an essential part of your marketing plan.

But active without followers like bird without wings. If you have followers on your social media channels who are engaged by your updates and realize tangible value from them your marketing efforts will be better rewarded.

I believe you have a question now and ask; how do you get followers and reach your audience over the internet? The answer is by providing them with real value and having a two-way conversation. People enjoy reading posts that offer advice, tips and tricks, but if they can then engage with the author of those posts or the company behind them, it takes their experience to the next level. Below are the most active steps that let your business, services, blog, website get more followers and engaged.

Tell a story

Perhaps the story is something as simple as how the new application that you developed on Android phones solved a memory size issue. Whatever the case, the power of a good story can’t be denied. It’s the follow-up to a story that was shared, including absorbing and responding to the reactions. It’s the action of connecting with someone that was affected by your story in one way or another and nurturing the beginning of a relationship with that person. Because of this, engagement can often unearth new stories or add to old ones, providing you with even more content.

Build trust

Building trust within your social community is considered an essential part and critical in online discussions. Building trust via social media channels is one way to build this credibility.

Respond to positive feedback

Positive feedback is your gate to pass the quiz in engagement session! It offers your brand a chance to turn casual fans and admirers into full-blown fanatics — the people we refer to as brand evangelists.

Respond to negative feedback

By listening carefully to your online community, you’ll easily spot customer complaints as they arise and quickly defuse find out a proper way to fix those situations.

 

Show your personality

Always keep in mind; you’re having a conversation, not publishing a press release. The simple act of responding like a human being will delight your community. If your brand was a person, what would you want people to say about him or her? How does your online presence reflect your answer?

Go beyond Facebook and Twitter

Though Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are still among the most popular, marketers can benefit from using social networks beyond these three.

Find, create, and share content

Producing and sharing your own content is a great way to add your voice to the conversations about your industry.

Follow back

Remember, not only is following those that follow you a kind gesture, but it will also help grow your overall following by showing potential new followers that you’re the type of brand who engages, not only broadcasts

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Do You Adopt These Frameworks In Create Your Website? I doubt

Having My Own Websites

My first website I had created was in simple PHP code. I found that there was so much work to do on that website, adding customers’ accounts, IDs PayPal, keywords and tying it all into me and not someone else. There were many errors with it and searching for some online HTML tutorials helped move forward. This PHP was my beginning journey to the world of creating website and was the foundation to teach myself about HTML and CSS.

Since this start in 2008, I have created many websites for myself; one of them was the big Medical Directory that offers healthcare online services in United Arab Emirates. As we know there are many sites offer free or paid website templates. Hosting sites offer a number of templates for you to customize. However, for all these templates, imagine how many people online are using the same template. If you do not customize it, what will make it stand out from the rest?

There is so much to learn about web design. I do not consider myself an expert, though I have come a long way. Some of my sites no longer exist, and the rest still surviving!

Furthermore, your website success mostly relies on finding the appropriate way to design it or finding a third party as such as Website Design Service Company who has the creative, innovative, highly skilled and experienced web designers. I am talking about some texts and images together to make a design or layout, but the services should provide much beyond that.

Web design for your website plays an essential role in the success of your company as your website acts as the representative for your business. On the other hand the web development is considered an additional factor to success your company’ website. I would although say It will create a negative impact on your business if the website development is handled, developed and managed by unprofessional and amateur designers.

On the other hand, web applications have gotten bigger, better, and faster, developers now face the complexity to manage in ways that serve business needs. For instance, a pure JavaScript/jQuery solution would not always have the right structure to ensure a rapid speed of development or long-term maintainability.

Projects became heavily dependent on having a great software engineer to set up the initial framework. Even then, modularity, testability, and separation of concerns may not make it into a project. Testing and reliability were often pushed to the backburner in such cases.

Go With Sass

If you start working on designing your website you need to have a solid experience in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which considered a method that can help you save time and money while also improving your visitor's experience, but recently web designers applied an extension of CSS3 which is Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) that makes CSS fun again.  Sass is a great way of writing a more terse and functional way of writing CSS. It is allowing you to write DRY code that will be faster, more efficient, and easier to maintain.

AngularJS framework

AngularJS is a superheroic JavaScript MVC (Model–view–controller) framework for the Web. It is JavaScript framework built to enhance HTML for web applications.  I would call it super heroic because AngularJS does so much for developing any website.

AngularJS directives allow developers to invent new application-specific HTML elements that are completely reusable. Angular doesn’t only help developers build a well-architectured, performance driven and effortlessly maintainable rich web app, but also delivers a rich experience to end users.

I found when researching AngularJS and going through the process of implementing an app with it, that it was going to be a great tool in making web applications.  It will require fewer lines of code to complete a task than a pure JavaScript solution using jQuery would. When compared to other frameworks, you will still find yourself writing less boilerplate, and cleaner code, as it moves your logic into reusable components and out of your view. AngularJS the overall goal was to create a platform that would help and make things easier to keep track of.

Enhance your knowledge about website designing and development. It is important that the field you want to enter should have knowledge about it. Website creation is a broad field. If you have good knowledge on it, you will enjoy better services and prevent yourself paying extra.

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Questions You Need To Ask Your Business About Web Strategy and Web Services

In world business today we notice there is intense competition on the business front, web technology and efficient communication is the need of the day. For instance, Information Communication Technology has grown by leaps and bounds for the growth of business.

This need for evolution has thrown a shadow on many sectors in information technology, as web strategist I would say, web technology brings in another need to make this information selectively observable and its visibility to be changed on the fly.

Today, in the business world, web services provide a mechanism of communication between two remote systems, connected through the network of the web services. These services are based on a set of standardized rules and specifications, making it more portable.

About a year ago I was doing my research on how to boost your business in a way that change revenue concept. I realized that no matter how good the websites your company built were, they were often failing to live up to their potential. The problem was the organizations I worked with were failing to manage the sites effectively.

Before go through into my article I have a story I faced when I was supporting one of my friends when he started his business. I once had dinner with my friend who owned an food trading company with $1.5 million in annual sales. He had asked for my help to market to his current customers in Calgary, so one of my recommendations was to create web strategy for his company website. He loved the idea, so I gave him a few details on how it would work when we had a third meeting in Trib Steakhouse. In that day I put all my questions on the table and asked him following questions; what does your website do for your business? Who looks at it? How do they find it? How does it compare to your competitors? Are people sharing your content and talking about you?

Therefore, I’ll be honest with here and say; it has been a steep learning curve. In 2013 I was doing my MBA program and I have gone through a crash course in business marketing strategy and the tools of marketing consultants which presented by Prof. Freddy Nager.  I have learned so much and discovered so many invaluable techniques.

However, I have also discovered that companies or organizations should focus on couple of things to boost their online business in a positive way which include web strategy and web strategy.

What is web strategy?

As I have discussed on my previous articles, the web is an essential part of doing and improves organization business in the market (regardless of whether you operate in the public, private, or not-for-profit sector). For this reason we have seen there are a lot of online services had built a website to generate income with very little planning; because they have an idea, worked on it and the next day they start building the website, without putting any goals or objectives for the website that meet company vision. With a strategy I hoped that we could move the web in  same direction, therefore web strategy is playing a key role in driving website to achieve company vision and snap the profit.

Simply, web strategy is like a business plan, but it is the plan for your website. In it you outline a road map for your website. You outline obstacles and challenges you expect to face, your plan to overcome those obstacles, and goals that will determine whether you’ve been successful.

What is a web service?

Web services are client and server applications that communicate over the World Wide Web’s (WWW) Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), web services provide a standard means of inter-operating between software applications running on a variety of platforms and frameworks. It is any piece of software that makes itself available over the internet and uses a standardized XML messaging system. For instance, a SEO service is considered as web services.

I believe you got the idea about those two essential elements in online business success, and if you want to get ahead of the pack, you need a personalized a clear strategy that fits with your business goals and your organizational culture. You’ll also need to figure out the right way to deploy and new web technology and use your resources to make your goals achievable. The most significant benefits associated with these two elements is the potential to bring in consumers from around the globe.

A great website is about so much more than simply design, in fact today a great looking site should be a given, making it work for you is the challenge and that's our strength.  Of course we do all the usual web related things, all the 'geeky' stuff, all the creative stuff but we do this in a business context, that's why we are different.

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How KPI Could Get Your Information Technology Sector on omg!

Performance indicators are always considered an essential point of discussion within the frame of general business management. To begin with, I would firstly define the performance indicator as a measurement tool which some sort of performance is gauged. And then come to a specific type of performance indicator which is a key performance indicator that has been identified as being critical to the performance of a business, company or organization. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) must be objectively defined in order to provide a quantifiable and measurable indication of the organizations progress towards achieving its goals.

In business if you talk in traditionally level, most organizations adopt the balanced scorecard method to measure operating performance. As a terminology it is almost the same because the goal of Balanced Scorecard is to measure, yes, the performance of your business If we look at how the balanced scorecard corresponds and based on Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton theory organizational activity can be classified into three hierarchies: strategic planning, management control, and operational control based on criteria that measured performance from three additional perspectives—those of customers, internal business processes, and learning and growth.

On the other hand, there is still a significant difference and I would say, every organization or company should develop the Key Performance Indicators matrix for each section and serve as department-specific measures of performance to help its business to understand and improve on how interact with customers and respond to their needs. 

You should ask yourself what steps need to be taken to ensure the business achieves its goals. For instance, the receptionist takes a call, provides assistance and takes orders. The florist selects or orders supplies and assembles the order. Dispatch arranges for delivery of order. Delivery person ensures delivery. 
In the example above, completing deliveries to schedule impacts lead time, which impacts stock levels, purchasing levels and customer satisfaction. Therefore, on-schedule delivery is a leading indicator of a wide range of performance indicators.

Here, I will talk about the impact of KPI in Information Technology Services areas in educational sector in terms of provide Reliability, Availability and Serviceability. These areas include IT Services Help Desk, Academic Technology, Web Technology, Network and Systems Availability. 

From web technology background, I will mainly investigate the key performance indicators of IT Web technology management @ American University of Sharjah
Web Services AUS supports the main www.aus.edu web site and several associated sub sites. Due to the increased usage of mobile devices, the entire site should be re-engineered to support a technology called Responsive Web Design.

The web and systems team also provides support for e-Learning (blackboard), banner, community website, and several other web centric applications. 

Pain and Sustain

Giving an example in simplest way is a shortcut to be understood by everyone who read the article. For instance, imagine when your body warns you with pain when you are doing something you shouldn’t. If you are lazy and you don’t like to do exercise enough and keep sitting in front of your computer for too long, you get muscle aches and pains, or a repetitive strain injury. 

That’s your body telling you to do more physical stuff, or else! You begin to learn naturally that doing something you shouldn’t equates to pain, therefore you do your best to steer clear of the discomfort and do any exercise that sustain muscle pain and keeping your body aches under control . Notice how the body gives you a taster? If you have been sitting too long in one position you get tired and achy? It’s your body’s natural “kick up the backside” to suggest that you get up and move around for a bit or you’ll suffer later on.  

Look at website KPIs as a potential taster of some real pain, the signals that you use to guide your thinking about getting out of your chair and doing something.

Feeling the pain in Your Website?

The real pain is when you spend thousands of dollars on advertising to drive traffic to your website, but then, convert very few of them to your goal. Or you spend countless hours modifying website pages, yet don’t have a clue whether any of the changes you’re making have any effect on your customers. This is what you will likely experience if you look only at bottom line results, and not the causes of those results.

In all business websites, you should identify the advertising, the products, and those areas of your site that generate the highest number of visitors and/or greatest interest over the long term. If the time spent by visitors on your website is too short, your copy, graphics, or usability are wasted and likely need to be re-written or re-designed to be more compelling.

Therefore, website KPIs should be revisited regularly and may often be valued differently by diverse stakeholders from within your organization

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