Business Built Freedom

Previously we have blogged about sitting mentally well with yourself in business. You need to make sure that you're pushing yourself in the right direction and doing what you can for your mind and mental state.  So many business owners put themselves down. This happens to everyone in every aspect of life, but business owners are especially susceptible. As a business owner, you are organised. You have a list, and you try and get everything done on the list, and then try and help everyone out. A lot of the time they try to help everyone, but their list is bigger than Ben-Hur. You're trying to build Rome in an hour. Rome wasn't built in an hour. It wasn't built in a day.

Read more about Mind and Mental State: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/308-it-s-okay-to-be-sad

Think About What is Actually Realistic

You need to be on top of what's realistic. When you've been in business for a while, you sometimes lose grip of reality on where other people and how other people work on a day to day basis. When you go into a normal 38 to 40 hour work week in a job you get a lunch break, a morning tea break, maybe every second Friday off and you get to talk to people during the day. In your own business, you sometimes don't have those luxuries and your responsibilities are huge. There's a saying that goes if you want something done ask a busy person to do it. Most of the time the business owner is the busiest person in the business. You get asked a lot of tasks to do. A lot of the time they want to say yes because they want to see the success of their business. But they don't gauge the value of the task before they start to execute and do it. You need to make sure that you are focusing on the right tasks in business and you're not putting yourself down when you don't achieve everything.

It Happens To Me

I'm guilty of it. I'll set a task list and I'll get to the end of the day and I'll be like okay I was working all day. I ticked three or four things off this list, but the list had eight things. I get disappointed in myself,  I put myself down and I get depressed. I will think well, why, why couldn't I have done all of them. Although we feel sometimes that we're superhuman, we're not. We're still normal people. We're still people that only have a certain amount of hours during the day and have a certain amount of resources. This is something that you need to remember. You are still stepping forward every day and every task that you do is still moving forward.

Be Kind to Yourself

Don't put yourself down when you don't achieve everything. If you decided over Christmas you were going to do something for your business and you didn't, it's okay. There's plenty of time left. You're not dead. You're still here. If you are dead, thank you for listening. Glad I got to spend the last few moments with you. I feel very special. Thank you. But you're still here. You're still in the game. So, don't put yourself down. Keep moving forward. It's okay to have to feel sad and depressed sometimes. It's okay to feel happy sometimes. That's life. It doesn't mean you have depression. It doesn't mean anything else. People say they have anxiety and they have depression. We're in a world where everything can be solved with a pill. We don't need to have this sort of stuff. Everything can be done naturally and has been done for hundreds of years, thousands of years before now. There's no reason why we need to have a magic pill to do something. People need to focus more on the happy days. No one likes the sad days, but you can't avoid them sometimes.

Overcome Your Anxieties

So many people say I've got anxiety. To a degree, everyone has some anxiety. One of the things I struggled with was doing public speaking.  Did I like talking on stage the first time? Absolutely not. I would've rather someone shot me with a paintball gun naked 100 times. I would've rather anything else happened to me than have to talk on stage. But you know what I did? I stepped out of my comfort circle and I did it. I made myself do it and now I have no problems doing it because my comfort circle has grown. People that have anxiety aren't solved with a pill. Believe in yourself and you will grow as a person.

You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone Everyday in Business

That's what you do every day as a business owner. You're able to step outside and grow as a person. You're not just doing one thing. You're able to do everything in business. You've got to recognise this, be happy and reward yourself for that. When you're doing all these things and everything is moving forward, that's a great day. If you have employees, you made the business that put food on their table. You made that. You are actually supporting your mortgage and your staff's mortgage. You couldn't have built this business without a great team behind you, and they wouldn't be there to back you up if you weren't a great boss, a great human being and most importantly, a great leader. Always be that. Be that great person.

Remember this!

If you're list doesn't get completed, it'll get completed later. But just know that you're still stepping forward with every day, in every way you're getting better and better. It's ok to be sad, but remember that this feeling will past. Focus on the positives and tackle your anxieties head-on. Believe in yourself and you will be a happier and healthier version of yourself.

Australia has just passed a dangerous anti-encryption law after there's been a compromise between the two different political giants. Now I don't normally get into political stuff because I find it boring and contradictory a lot of the time, but this is something that's going to affect every single person, especially if you're in business.

What's Going On?

In short, what the bill does is that it grants Australian police the ability to issue a notice or ensure a way of forcing a company, or a website that's operating within our borders to aid the government in hacking, implementing malware, and undermining the encryption that exists. If you refuse, you can be faced with financial penalties. Now, the way the law reads is that it's only meant to target serious offenders such as sex offenders, terrorists, homicide people, and drug offenses. I'm all for that, but the problem is, as critics have pointed out that the law could target anyone.

Why It Affects Us

As the famous Benjamin Franklin said, people willing to trade their freedom for security will receive neither, and this bill was only just passed last month in December 2018. It puts us in a bit of a funny position as a tech company, because if we were contacted by the police and asked to aid in the investigation of one of our clients we would be up to our ears in financial problems if we don't do it, and at that puts me in funny sort of spot.

How it Could Affect You

Similarly, if you guys are dealing with anyone that might be a bit how you going you will be in the same spot. Now obviously everyone that we know, hopefully, isn't doing any dodgy so it shouldn't be a problem. In saying that,  the bill has been intentionally vague and it contradicts itself multiple times. There is the chance that even if you're doing even the smallest of silly things, such as copying your competitor's information, modifying it a little bit and chucking it on your site you could be in trouble. This is enough of a reason for the government to start looking into your affairs and grabbing information from third parties. This could ultimately bring you down and you could be looking at a  $250,000 fine for copyright.

Use a VPN

This is something that's really, really important and it's not discussed publicly and it should be. What I would suggest you guys doing even if you're not doing anything dodgy, is putting in what's called a VPN, that's a virtual private network. What it does is it makes sure that all of your data from whatever the terminal that you're at, be it your phone or your computer, will send the data from that location in an encrypted form to a second location. This means it could show that you are inNew Zealand or America or something like that where they don't have this bill, and then it goes out and onwards to the world. The important reason why you'd want to do this is it means that your ISP can't snoop in on the traffic that you're doing. As I said, no one does anything dodgy here in Australia. That's why we're not the number one place that has had the most amount of illegally downloaded movies (wink wink). So if you were to be doing any of those sorts of activities, make sure that you have a VPN in place. Obviously, I'm not condoning doing those things, and the main reason we are the number one place is that our internet service providers don't stream fast enough for Netflix and other services to work reliably.

Remember the Consequences

What's important here is to know now that this bill has been passed, we as a nation can legally be spied on without any information from yourself and all the information fed to the police and the government. If you're doing everything right and everything's fine, that's great. If you're doing anything that's a little bit dodgy, you should already know all the things that you should be putting in place, but if you're doing everything right and everything's fine, you still don't want to be caught in the trap that someone makes a mistake. The government, as you know, it's prone to making mistakes and other problematic things. The government wants to get its eyes in on you and that's why this bill has been passed. Both sides of government have come together to have this passed. It's a big advantage to them, but not so much the general public.

Final Thoughts

It's interesting when we have the government spend millions and millions of dollars on sending out a pamphlet asking us to vote on marriage equality and were not able to vote on something like the security of everyone. It's a little hard to talk about, but nevertheless something that needs to be mentioned. Protect your own online security!

Numbers, general ledgers, chart of accounts, reconciliation, linking bank accounts from one thing to another and then sending out your BAS. It's something that unless you're a number freak and a super geek and really, really enjoy the accounting lifestyle, you're not going to enjoy that part about your business. We're going to talk about the best ways that you can make the bit you don't like the bit you don't mind. You still might not love it but trust me, it will be easier.

Consider This

There are lots of different packages out there in Australia for accounting and bookkeeping. There's Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB Essentials, MOYD Standard, Reckon One and Saasu just to name a few. What it comes down to is lots of names and lots of people tending to go into different directions. What I would suggest is think about what the software does and what it is that you do and how can you make them work together.

Different Choices

There are lots of different accounting packages and lots of businesses that use them. Some are old school businesses that love certain packages, while others are newer businesses that are gravitating towards different packages, and there are different reasons for choosing each of them. One of them would be if you're looking at Xero or Saasu software as a service model. You've got a good advantage there that there's not a big capital investment into the product. Now over the long term, you're probably going to end up spending more on the product, but then you're getting automatic updates, it's available anywhere in the world, and ultimately I think it's a stronger product. You've got MYOB on-premise and up until recently, QuickBooks and Reckon were the same company in Australia but they've split out and they've got two different accounting packages that are now competing with each other.

What I don’t like

In my opinion, having used MYOB, QuickBooks, and Xero, unless there's some really special case, I'm not a big MYOB fan. I see it all the time, locked file problems, multiple users over the network using it. Times where if the working file, the MYOB file gets above 300 megabytes, it breaks down and doesn't work anymore. In my opinion, MYOB is old and clunky. They should've done something with it years ago and now they're doing too little too late. That goes for QuickBooks as well. It's no better, it's the same thing just a different name.

What I like

For everything that I've been doing, I find that Xero for most businesses is the best solution and that comes down to what I was saying earlier. What do you do and what's the best thing that can work for what you do? You just need to make sure you're sweet with the government and so the way that I would suggest going is with Xero if it integrates into the applications that you use. For a long time, the application stack that we use in our business didn't allow for us to use Xero, we could only use QuickBooks and so we're limited to QuickBooks. That's what we used because it made our life easier as it had less double data entry and less chance for human intervention creating a problem and that's ultimately what we want, automation.

As soon as Xero came available, we jumped straight on the Xero bandwagon with zero regrets and most applications are doing the same thing. Your CRM tools and your marketing tools and your payment gateways, everything is coming together in a very, very sweet synergy when they're sharing data between the applications and normally Xero. The reason Xero is so popular is that it has that flexibility with what's called APIs or Application Programming Interfaces, but it's also because it's a robust system that's available anywhere that links into all of the major banks within Australia. That's right if it doesn't link into your bank it's because you're not one of the major banks, but it automates so much for us.

Price matters

To put it in perspective, we were paying $300 a month to have QuickBooks managed and that was weekly reconciliations. We moved to daily reconciliations and moved across to Xero on the guidance of our bookkeeper and the cost for us went from $300 a month down to $220 a month. The $300 was managing one company of about 10,000 transactions a year, but this move also brought on an extra two companies, so there are three companies being managed all within Xero and it was costing us $80 a month less with daily reconciliations. I was thinking how is the bookkeeper telling us to do this? It seems stupid from a business perspective, but it's so much faster than they can actually charge a set rate per month and be confident in their decision where before when we were using QuickBooks, it wasn't as easy. If we had a busy month, they had to go through a heap more transactions as opposed to Xero, which automatically reconciles.

Xero is Right For Us – 5 Out of 5

Now I know you might be saying oh but Josh, there are other products that auto reconcile as well and you can create rules and that is the case. That is why it's always to make sure you do the best thing and the best fit for you and your business. For us, Xero integrates into all of the different areas where we create invoices. It integrates into all of the different payment gateways that we use, and it lets us see and make sure that we're doing everything that we should be doing with the government. It also predicts how much our BAS is going to be very easy and know that it is up to date near exactly as to what the numbers should be.

Be Aware of This

One of the negatives to Xero out of the box is it does not let you do backups very easily and that can be a big red light for certain companies. If you can't have a backup of your data, you might be stressing out and I would be too. There are plugins for it that let you back up the data out of it and you need to make sure that you are responsible for your backups. When you're storing something in the cloud, it's your responsibility to have backups, not theirs. If for whatever reason Xero disappeared and left zero imprints on the world and zero backups for you to have, you would be up shit creek with zero paddles. That's why you need to make sure you are responsible for your backups.

Remember Sensitive Information

This comes the next part. You are storing data in the cloud, so depending on the type of company that you're working with or working for or you've created, you may have problems having other people's data in the cloud, other people's contact information and financial records in the cloud. It's your responsibility to keep your backups and it's your responsibility with the data that you've put int here so make sure that whatever you're putting in there is okay for the industries that you're in. Besides that there's the obvious, it's in the cloud, if my internet goes down I don't have access to it. Yep, that's a thing and that's becoming more and more of a problem for people and people are becoming more and more understanding of the necessity to have dual redundant line internet connections coming into their business premises.

In Closing

For now, I would say without a doubt, give Xero a whirl. It's very cheap for what it gives you and it's very easy, much easier than all the other applications. The other ones look like they've got a beautiful interface for something that was made in 1992 but not great for something that you want to be using day in and day out. You want simplicity. That's my two cents, I hope you have had some good advice out of this. Stay good!

Who remembers the days of the filing cabinet? You know that thing sitting in the corner and every so often you'd open it up and clean through it and you'd go wow, okay, there's a lot of stuff in here. You clean through it and you got it all thrown out, you got all the stuff that you needed from the last seven years for the tax man, you digitised it all, and you chucked it on the computer, but that could be just as big of a problem as what you did in your filing cabinet. Today we're going to be talking about digital clutter and making sure you're not a digital hoarder. There are so many files you can comfortably just have on your computer that you'd normally have to have cases for. Just because it's inside your computer doesn't mean that it's not taxing on your mental health as well as on your computer's system performance and your physical performance to find the files and where you've put them.

You Can Have Lots of Files.. but

It's okay to have a lot of files, but they have to be in order. I've got a lot of friends that have lost a lot of stuff along the way. I have got so many files on my system that if someone says, "Ah remember that assignment we did back in grade nine?" I can go, "Yeah I do. Here's my copy of it, and you emailed it to me, here's your copy of it." Then they go, "Whoa!"So I've got a lot of stuff but it's all well ordered. It all has its own place and because computers don't necessarily take up a lot of space and hard drive space is cheap, you're better off just making sure that you've got everything properly ordered. Most of the old stuff that I've got, such as school assignments, is nostalgic. I've just kept it just to look back and go wow, I did a crap job of writing.

Tools I Use to Help

There are a few different tools that I use which I find really sped up my process of keeping things in order. There's a tool called duplicate clean up pro. What it does is it can go through and look for any music that you have that has the same artist and the same title or any images that match. It can also find documents that are of identical sizes and then you can tick on all of them and delete them so that you're not having duplicate copies all over your computer. You can then start having a good hierarchy of where everything's kept. Now for photos and things like that, I personally keep them in a year numbered folder, so 2018/the month and then whatever the photos are in there. The only time I break away from that is if there's a longer project type. So if there's a folder on there called like mixed photos which have a renovations folder for different renovations that were done in that year. These photos aren't specifically going to be all captured in that month, but you still want to be able to see what they're all about.

Photo Finding Tool

Another tool that I've got is duplicate photo finder. What it does is it looks at your photos. Maybe you've got 10 different photos that are very similar, it'll look at those photos and say hey these look like the same photo, but some are different resolutions and some are blurrier, what would you like to do with these? Then you can just keep the good quality ones and delete the bad ones. Then start putting everything into a sensible folder arrangement so that they're easy to find. People that suffer from hoarding suffer from a mental disease, where they keep a lot of things that they shouldn't be. When you're keeping lots of things in your computer that you shouldn't be, you need to assess that for yourself and see, maybe you have a problem and you need to start resolving it.

Reorganise Your Main Hard Drive

The biggest step, once you've got everything in order, is to look at the things that you use regularly and remove all the other stuff. Put those files on to a couple of archives hard drives, put one into the safe, and keep one somewhere else, so that you've got them somewhere else. If someone said, "Oh I'd love to see that school assignment", you know that you can just plug in that drive and then find that folder as opposed to having to go through all your files and looking for it everywhere. It means the actual files you are working on all the time, you can have a very optimised approach towards looking at them. It can be overwhelming if you've been in business for a number of years to have to go through all of these different photos and documents, but setting a line in the sand, and saying everything I create from now onward is going to be orderly. Means that eventually all the stuff that isn't, you'll be able to delete or archive and then not have it interrupting your general workflow.

In Closing

These have been some little hints and tips from someone who keeps too many files himself and what I've done about it. I hope that's been useful, stay good!

Last time, we covered off on a few interesting bits and pieces around making sure your website's fast, and that was all from a coding perspective. Today we're going to talk about making your website fast in ways that you can't control.

What's the Difference in Hosting Providers?

So, when you choose a web hosting provider, your web hosting provider offers the technology to have your website go as quickly as possible. If you think about the code on your website as Michael Schumacher, he's a quick driver. He knows exactly what he's doing, but if he's chucked in a Getz, he's not going to be going that fast. He's going to be going at the speed that he can go, and he'd be very good at what he does, but he's not going to be going that fast. If he's chucked in a Model T Ford, he's still going to be the best Model T Ford driver out there, but he's going to be better off driving a Formula One car, isn't he?

You Need a Decent Hosting Site

Given that example, if your web hosting provider isn't giving you great hardware to sit on, your website is going to be loading slowly. That's something that is within your control by changing your web host, but you should be making sure that you've gone with someone who's offering decent speed. Make sure the server's local to where your audience is. So, if you're operating an Australian business in the Australian border and you need to have that business servicing only Australian customers, have the server in Australia.

Avoid the Cheap Ones

There's lots of cheap hosts out there. There's hosts that go as cheap as a dollar a month, and there's hosts that go as expensive as $700 a month, and they are primarily offering the same set of tools. The difference is, one's a Model T Ford and one's a Lamborghini. You want to make sure that you're choosing the one that you want to be supporting your business. If you have a "my dog" type of website, where you jump on it and it has a few different pictures of your dog and you send that to you and Nana and your mum every so often, that's great. Go on the dollar hosting. You could probably even find free hosting. But, if you have a website where you bring customers to you, and you want to have a good online presence and you want things to load quickly, go for something that's a business grade plan. You don't want a "my dog" plan. You're going to end up with low-quality results.

Host in the Same Country Your Business is in

If you're paying for Adwords and your website's loading slowly, you're going to have more expensive Adwords and a bigger bounce rate, so the customers that come to your site are going to bounce off quicker because the website is loading slowly. If your website is on a server that's hosted overseas, your Google position, when people search for you, will be further down for the people that are within Australia. So, your audience will be catered with a preference to wherever your server is. So if your server is in India and your customers are in Australia, and your customers search for your business, the people in India, when they search for your business, will be able to find you more easily than the people in Australia. It's also supporting an Australian business, so it's much better to keep your servers within Australia.

Ask Questions

Make sure that you're asking the questions when you're getting a plan. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If they're giving you unlimited data, unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, unlimited everything, then there's going to be a limit that they're not talking about, and that's going to be a limit in the speed that your site's loading. It could also mean a limit in the amount of requests that your site might be able to have before they cap your speeds. There's always a balance for hosting sites to continue to make money. People that charge $20 to $30 a month for hosting and people that charge a dollar a month for hosting, they're both still making money. The people that are charging $30 a month are not making 30 times the amount of money. They're using better equipment, they're using corporate grade stuff that's going to allow for your website to load faster.

How to Test Website Loading Speed

Now, it can be hard to test hosting speed, especially as a business owner. There's a few different tools out there that you can use. One of them is, you get signal.com, and they've got a tool here called Reverse IP Lookup, which lets you see what the IP address is, where your server is, and that lets you see how many people are on that same server, so that can get you an idea of how your resources are being divided on that server. That can obviously give you some insights into how fast your site can load. One of the other ones is loadimpact.com. You go to loadimpact.com and you put your website in there. It'll show you how fast your site is going to load when there's more and more people accessing it at the same time, and you need to make sure you have an optimised, fast site when you do this. Otherwise it's just going to compound the problem of a slow site loading slower, but it'll still be an impact that will give you insight into how your site is loading and performing on that machine.

Last Word

Hope this has been helpful, and if there is any other questions that people have, feel free to email through to [email protected], and we can go through those and find out how we can help you out.

Websites are one of the top ways to showcase your business online. You want to make sure your website is user-friendly, and that it has the information and message you're looking to relay very clearly. What's most important is you want to be able to appear in a search. Having the answer for your prospecting customers is fine, but having the answer doesn't matter if you don't have a voice. There's a number of great tools and tricks out there to help optimise your website, and I'm going to go through some of these now to make sure you're found in Google and your customers are able to see you.

Learn More About Business Websites!

SEMrush

The first one is the SEMrush.  What it does it that it lets you get a sneak peek into the eyes of what your competitor is doing, by seeing what keywords they're focusing on, and how they're going about marketing their business. Maybe you're a bakery and you love selling croissants and they're going reasonably well, but your competitor always seems to blow you out of the water. You're able to look online and see exactly what they're doing, and what keywords they have to get to the top of the results and have people find them locally instead of finding you. Keywords by SEMrush is very cool stuff.

Google Tag Manager

Another helpful tool is the Google Tag Manager. For it to work you need to install it on whatever website you are using, whether that be a WordPress website, Joomla website or a Drupal site. Google Tag Manager is a container to hold the code for other sites to be able to communicate through your sites. So if you're advertising on Facebook, you can have your website linked into Facebook so that when you have an advertisement go out you can be found by your customers on Facebook. Then when they go to your website, you can then be notified. You can instigate a series of events, or maybe that'll then instigate the Facebook advertising to them. We’ve found that installing the Facebook pixel inside Google Tag Manager is really important.

Google Analytics   

One of the other things that you can do to make sure that your customers are finding you and you're able to market to them appropriately is through using Google Analytics. This tool gives you an idea of how many people are coming to your website, how they're finding you, you long they're on the site for, and what is engaging with your customers. You will use this tool once they're already on your website and it is sensible to continue using that data and metrics to further your advantage with that potential customer.

Hotjar

With Hotjar, when people come to your site, you can see where they actually move the mouse, what buttons they're clicking, how they scroll on the site and how long they're taking to read articles. It gives you a lot of great analytics that could help you optimise your website for even better use. Maybe you need to have the services button a bit higher on the page, or people are scrolling all the way down to the bottom to click on contact us. This is another tool that’s used once you get them to your site.

One of the other really, really cool ways to do that is making sure that your site's optimised for Google is to use meta tags. Meta tags are descriptions and keywords that relate to the article or the information that's on your site. Meta key phrases highlight exactly what it is on your site. So if you're selling beach balls, you don't want to have a meta keyword as ball, or beach, you specifically want to have beach balls, or inflatable beach balls if that is the type of balls that you're selling. When someone searches for that on Google, that's when you're going to come up. If you use a meta keyword as just balls, if someone's searching for volley balls, or golf balls, or footballs, you're not going to come up. You need to make sure that you’re very specific with what your meta key phrases are. A maximum of around two key phrases mentioned three times per 200 words seems to be the balance that I find works well. As an example, if you've got an article on your page, using two sets of key phrases works brilliantly will generally get you higher in the Google rankings because it's relevant when Google scrapes across your site and customers then find relevant information. Your meta description should contain the key phrase, and not be too long.

You need to also make sure that with your titles aren't too long, have the service name in them, and are going to be enticing to the customer when they visit them. This could be a blog article, or it could be a service. Maybe if you're a mechanic throughout the Brisbane area, your title could be something like, mobile mechanic, Brisbane, and then include your business name. That would be the absolute shortest most basic way you're going to go about it. If you're unsure what to do, there's a tool out there called Headline Analyser that lets you see what headlines would rank well so that you know how to form your headline or your page title.

SEF friendly URLs

 So your URL is that bit in the title bar. So Google.com would be the start of the Google domain name, and anything after the .com is part of what you want to make sure is very search engine friendly for your site. So for instance, instead of having, for us, dorksdelivered.com.au/index.php? you want to make sure that if you're going to the blog, it's just dorksdelivered.com.au/blog. This makes it easy to read for humans as well as for search engines.

Have a Quick Website

The speed of what your site loads significantly impacts your ability to rank on Google. If your website loads faster, not only will you get more visitors, it'll cost you less for marketing and tyou will be going further up in the Google rankings. The general rule of thumb is to make sure that you're getting a website that's loading in under three seconds all the time. You want to have it very quick. People don't want to hang around. If people are waiting too long, they're going to just go somewhere else and go to your competitor. To make sure that it is loading fast, you need to have your hosting on a very good platform, not some cheap crazy hosting plan, and you want to make sure that it's based within Australia, or where ever the demographic of your client is.

Backlinks

Backlinks are vital to improving SEO. When you get something that you've made published with someone else they should put a link back to your site, which is a backlink. This enhances your position on Google quite a bit, because if they've got a website that has a higher page ranking, Google sees the association, and says, "well, they're an authority because they've got a higher page ranking." Therefore, some of that authority is going to rub off on you. An example of that would be if you had the industry leader decide to put a post about you and your business, and how great it is in what you're doing, their high website ranking would then rub off on yours. This would drive traffic through Google saying, "well, they know you, so you must be pretty good, you're rubbing shoulders with the right people, so let's increase your ranking." This in turn will bring in new customers for you.

Alt Image Tags       

Another tip that isn’t as commonplace is to use alt tags for your images. On your websites, you want to make sure that any of the images that you use have a description that allows for when your mouse hovers over it you can see it is relevant to what's in the image. This was = more important in the past before Google could read the information in the photo without you having text next to it, but it still adds value.

Update Your Content

The final one and the biggest one of all is to have changing content on your website. Don't be static and boring. Have new things coming up and happening. Make sure the information that you have coming up  is relevant and is new content that hasn’t existed on the internet beforehand. If you're able to do that, and you're able to be consistent with this, Google will increase your ranking. That means that if you're creating a blog, and this blog is released once every two weeks, be consistent. You can do this by writing four or five blog articles at the start of the month, and then you can schedule them out to be released every two weeks for the next eight to 10 weeks. Google looks at the changing content and goes, "okay, no one in their right mind would be making a website and just changing this stuff. There must be visitors coming here. There must be an audience that they're anticipating." Make sure that the content is relevant information and it's also containing the keywords that you're using for your target market.

Learn More About Business Websites!

Final Word

I hope this information's been useful. If you want to know more, be sure to email us as we'd be more than happy to help you guys out!

So, I hear that you guys have just created a wicked awesome product that you're looking to sell online on the latest eCommerce platform. Now, whether you've been using WooCommerce, Shopify, or any of the other platforms, something needs to be said. The costs of these platforms might seem cheap at $20 a month or so, and that is cheap for the platform. You can't go wrong. Maybe your product is worth $50. You look at this and you go through the math in your mind. You're going, okay, $20 a month for the hosting, and then you have to develop a site. You have to promote the product and you might be going, okay, well how? How? How much is it going to cost me to continue having this site up and running?

Read more about Website Cost: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/287-the-hidden-costs-of-having-a-website

How Much Does Your Website Actually Cost?

A lot of people don't look at the hidden costs of having an eCommerce site, or for that matter, any website that is built to bring in traffic. Websites can cost from hundreds of dollars a month, anywhere upwards to thousands if they are being marketed, so you have to think, what are you spending and what are you expecting to get out of what you're spending? If you have an online presence and you're doing it right, that means that you have posts going up on Facebook that are engaging your customers and engaging your potential leads. You have landing pages for your website, which are pages that are specifically geared towards answering a problem that one of your potential leads might have. You have a system where you have email campaigns that go out and talk to the customer about how to solve that different business problem, and obviously you engage with them about some of your services.

Think About a Good Google Ranking

If you want to have a good Google ranking, you're going to need to have an active blog on your website, and in extreme cases you might be doing things such as making a podcast,  a YouTube channel, or writing a book. I'm very passionate about the whole process but when you have an online store, or you have a website where you're looking to have it as the primary focus to drive revenue for your business, the costs will add up. It's gonna add up. The email campaigns and bits and pieces will be $50 to $80 a month. The landing pages will be at least $20 a month.

Other Costs Can Add Up

If you're writing the blogs yourself, that's going to be a couple of hours a week that you're spending writing those blogs, if you know exactly what you're doing. Every week you're going to have to do a vote towards doing that or hiring someone else to do that who knows your industry. Hiring someone at the minimum will be 50-60 dollars a week to have that written. If you want real quality content you are looking at the 100 dollar range to have a reasonable blog article written. Then, once you've got all these systems and bits and pieces in place, you still need people to hear about you. So then you need to be having posts going up on Facebook and on LinkedIn and on Twitter and maybe Instagram, and all these things cost time and money. A tool to help with this would be Sendable, which automatically sends out these posts to different places. It saves a bit of time but it also costs a bit more money.

Linking Your Customers

You then need to somehow keep all your customers linked between all these different systems. You need to buy into other tools that link all these together. That costs more money. It costs a lot of money operating a successful online business and online store, so don't make the mistake of pricing your product too cheaply and then realising that your marketing plan is lacking because you've done that.

Consult a Professional

If you are serious about having an online store and you know nothing about it, consult a professional and have them guide you through how to set that up. Just to set up the email marketing campaigns and sales funnels could have you looking at $10,000 including management with AdWords for three months. So just have a think about that before you start going down this path.

Final Thoughts

The Internet used to be a build it and they will come type situation. That's not the case anymore. If you're doing it and you've thought about it, there's probably someone else out there who's already done it and thought about it, and if there isn't, there will be soon. If that still doesn't happen and you haven't promoted yourself, no one's going to know about you and you'll be out of business soon. So, just don't undervalue the cost of what it costs to run a website and how much work and effort is involved to get yourself marketed properly online.

Speed up your website. Come on guys, you've got to do this! So many people that we see, so many companies that we deal with have these websites that load so slowly. Seriously, if your website loads slowly, people aren't going to go there. You're better off just not having a website at all. Imagine if you had a business card. You go to hand it to someone, but it was written on a napkin.  They would look at you and be like, "what are you handing me this for?" Man, you'd look so stupid. People hardly even use business cards nowadays, whereas your website is available 24 hours a day. Your website is at the forefront of your business that people start looking into. As soon as they find out about you, they jump on your website. They have a look. They go, "oh yeah, cool." There are some testimonials. This is how they see what's going on and how everything's working for you and your business.

Slow Websites Are Annoying!

If you have a slow website, people are going to get annoyed. It's not just potential customers that get annoyed. Google gets annoyed too. In fact, all the search engines get annoyed, and so they push you down the rankings. As I said, if you're gonna have a slow website, just have no website. At least that way it's not going to load slowly for your customers or potential prospects. When you have a slow loading website, if it takes more than three seconds to load, get rid of it. There's just no point.  You're just there, existing on the internet just having a website to say you have one. It's like having a car that only goes two kilometers an hour. It's not gonna do you any good. You're better off just walking wherever you're going.

The Magic of Speeding It Up

As soon as you start speeding up your website, you're going to notice a few things happening. If you pay for AdWords, the cost of AdWords will go down. There are a few other things that will change. Your search engine ranking will also go up. The amount of time that your customer's on your page for will go up. Just think about this. You know yourself when you're searching around on the web. If you got a website and you go, "oh., this sounds relevant," and it takes seven seconds to load, and you're going, "oh. Come on." I know it's only seven seconds, but it's all the time, isn't it? It's all we've got. If it takes seven seconds to load, and then it loads, you go, "Oh. Yeah," you already have a bad taste in your mouth.

Get a Balance

The first two seconds is critical. You want to make sure your website loads quickly. You want to make sure you implement sorts of different technologies for it to load quickly. If your customer has 15 seconds that they're going to devote to your message, if it takes two seconds for your website to load, that's 13 seconds that they're reading on your page. If it takes 10 seconds for your website to load, that's five seconds that they're gonna devote to reading what's on your page. Most people don't read very quickly, so it needs to be very visual. Unfortunately, visual sites load slowly. You need to make sure you have a balance and you have a quick loading site so that you can grab as many customers as possible. A few of the different technologies you can put in place to help speed up your website, including expires headers, image sprites, gzip, data caching techniques, and content delivery networks.

Final Thoughts

Have a fast website, or don't have a website at all. There are companies out there that will speed up your website. The general cost for this is around $800 to $1,000 for a basic site. It's money worthwhile spending because if you don't have a fast website, you're going to be losing customers.

In this modern day and age, everything comes down to marketing, and today we're going to be discussing our favourite digital marketing tools. For us, we find that as a company that deals with business-to-business we do use LinkedIn quite a bit for our marketing. We find that its quite effective and that people are conducive to getting information about a business through LinkedIn. For businesses that have a more business-to-consumer type approach, we definitely find Facebook works better. But for us, LinkedIn is fantastic.

There are other tools that we use just to support our marketing efforts. We use this fantastic tool called ActiveCampaign. It gives the ability to email out our clients, see if our clients have read the email, and can if they have clicked on any of the links. We use this to see whether we have customer engagement. From there, we can then score our customers and work out where they sit, how they feel about our services, and how engaged they are. This is really, really cool.

One of the other ones that we use is called Unbounce. Unbounce is all to do with landing pages. Now a landing page is something where you want to try and make sure that you're answering the question to whatever your client or your prospecting client has. What this tool does is that it gives you a super, quick page that has only one that's of interest on it.

For instance, maybe you're a florist, and you wanna make sure that your customers that are coming to you when they search for you on Google. They go to your landing page, and they see on the landing page something like, "Looking for flowers for Valentine's Day? We've got you covered." Then you include a little bit of information about why you're the best person to be buying flowers from, specifically for Valentine's Day. On a big day with a big rush, when a lot of companies run out of flowers, you guys don't. Or you know, whatever your point of difference is.

That is an example of what you should have on a landing page. On your florist website, you'd be talking about the different types of flowers that you have, the different arrangements and how you service weddings as well. This page is not exactly geared towards the problem that someone's asking for. Where if someone's looking for flowers coming up to mid-February, you can be pretty comfortably sure that they're going to be confidently looking for their Valentine's. That's Unbounce in a nutshell,  what a fantastic tool.

So far we've covered off on Unbounce and ActiveCampaign. Now let's move onwards to Sendible. Sendible is another really great tool. What it lets you do is that if you have a social media post, instead of having to jump into LinkedIn, jump into Twitter, and then across to Instagram, and over to Facebook,  you can jump to the one portal, write the message, click send, and it sends it everywhere as a broadcast message. You can also use it to manage any customers or any of the comments that have been made on that message. From that, you can easily respond to the comments, and manage everything in one portal. This saves you a lot of time and hassle if you are going to be using social media networks to be broadcasting any messages to your leads or clients.

The last one I'm gonna cover off on here is very unique. It's unlike any of the other tools that I've seen out there. It is known as Bonjoro. What it does is when someone engages with you on your website, it gives you an email, and says, "Hey, Joe Blog's just clicked on this link. Would you like to say hello?" What you can then do is you can click on them, and straightaway from there, send them a video. They can then get a video straight from you, a personalized video where they can see that you're a genuine down-to-earth person. You're not just a robot, and there are not 10,000 visitors coming through this site. Even if there is, you've set the time aside to go and talk to this lead. I think Bonjoro is an amazing tool, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.

These are the tools that we use on a regular basis that have proven to work for us. There's obviously many, many others out there, and there's many others that we use, but these I'd say would give you a good 80/20 rule. 80% of what you need to achieve would be within those tools there. Hope you've enjoyed this, and, yeah, stay good.

Here's a tip that you should remember for your whole career in business: Don't let price be your identifier. So many times in business, we see new people come on board and say, "oh, we know how to do this cheaper than them,". They look at their competitors and they decide to price themselves just underneath them, or even ridiculously lower in the thought that they're going to be bringing in new customers. The problem with doing this is if you're just new in business you're competing against someone who has a lot more money than you already. How? Well A, because they've been charging more and because they've been around in business longer.

Be Competitive, but not too competitive

You can be competitive on price, but you can't let it be your identifier. The reason for this is simple. If you have a product that you've seen your competitor selling for a $1,000, and you think "wow, $1,000, that only cost $200 to make! I'm going to sell it for $300, make 50% profit, be less than a third of the price of the competitor, and everyone's going to come to me." 

The problem is you know about you. You know about your competitor. Your competitor (and potential customers) at this stage don't know about you. The reason you know about your competitor is they've spent the money on the marketing.  They've been able to do this because they're charging more for their product. They have the resources for a marketing budget they're able to do that.

If you choose to sell for the lowest price you'll get to a spot and it might work for a while. You might be able to grow, you might be able to make this money, but eventually what's going to happen is you're going to break. There's going to be something you need to do. You either need to start doing marketing or you need to invest in other tools, which are going to cost you money. This, in turn, is going to drive your price up, or in the absolute best case scenario you don't need to invest anything. Everything will work perfectly fine. Just remember though that your competitor who's been charging $1,000 for a product that costs $200 probably has a bulk-buying capacity.

When they hear about you they will go, "huh, who's this? I'll blow them out of the water by absolutely smashing out more marketing and more sales." They will drive their message directly to your listeners and this will destroy your business. It happens all the time.

A Cautionary Tale From Network Video

Let's go back to a story that I remember from many, many years ago. This was when Blockbuster and Video Easy were still around. Blockbuster did $6.95 overnight rentals, so Video Easy did $6.95 overnight rentals. Everyone was happy. Then, another competitor that came in known Network Video or Go Video depending on where you're from in Australia.

This new kid on the block came in and, "I'm going to do $2.00 rentals on Tuesday." Now they had put Blockbuster and Video Easy, the two biggest stores, on notice. "Okay, $2.00 rentals. We can do that, no worries." So Blockbuster went to $1.00 rentals on Tuesday, Video Easy went to $1.00 rentals on Tuesdays. Network Video, which is an independently owned DVD chain couldn't compete with that. Everyone already knew about Blockbuster, everyone already knew about Video Easy, so when $1 Tuesdays happened they went to these businesses and they were absolutely smashed with work.

Both businesses didn't make much money on Tuesdays, but they did on the late fees, which is where they were making money at that time. What happened six months later is Network Video went bust. They were no longer in the area because they could not afford to do what they were doing. They thought they would come in and rip up the market, but all it did was came in and destroyed their business. They came in so cheap and that move put them on the radar of Video Easy and Blockbuster much sooner than what they would have liked, which ended up killing their business.

Plan Accordingly

Make sure you price accordingly but don't have price as your identifier is the key message. That's the take home from this. There are many things that you can do better than just being better on price. Being better on price ultimately means the customer's you're getting are going to be the customers that are looking for the best price. They're very price conscious people and that's not a problem, but there comes a time where being cheap is expensive.

If you're going to be dealing with people that are looking at getting your service or product at the absolute cheapest price, they are probably going to be the customers that are wanting you to spend more time with them and more resources, because the rest of their products and ecosystems all are run around the model of let's do this on the cheap. You can price yourself and position yourself differently to your competitors on the service and the value that you add to your customers.

We treat our customer network very, very kindly. We treat them like family. We make sure that anything we're doing we test and trial in our own business, and then if it's great we go and talk to them about it and let them know about how it can help their business out. They really are family. Our customers are an extension of our business and without them obviously, we wouldn't be able to survive. If you're always competing on price you won't have the money to be able to build a relationship with your customer. You won't be able to have a great business that's going to strive in the future and service your customers properly.

There Will Always Be a Bigger Shark

When you're driving prices down, there's always going to be someone that's bigger, better and more powerful that can drive it lower.  Even if it's just temporarily to blow you out of the water, they can do it.  Make sure you don't drive on price. I cannot stress this enough. Having said that, don't go and sell a prestige service where you're not offering that prestige value to the customer. Always give out more than what you take. I have read a book by a guy named Bob Burg called the Go-Giver. It is amazing and I live my life by the rules that are written in that book. It's all about giving away more than what you're receiving. 

Don't Give it Away

That's giving away more value, giving away more time, giving away more information, giving away a higher quality of service and product at a reasonable price. Don't give it away for free, don't try and undercut your competitors, but be different in more than just price. If you do, it will scream very loudly to your prospects and your existing client base.