United Worx Blog

Many companies sell online these days. Some are very successful at what they do, and can make a large profits based on their web sales alone; others fail at this. There are few things to avoid in particular if you are considering setting up your own online business:

Poor Navigations…

You want your customers to be able to find exactly what they need and fast. The more confused they become on your site trying to find a certain product, the more likely it is they will go to another website who can provide the same or a similar service.

This might sound cynical, and it might in fact even be cynical, but the fact is that a lot of business is simply based around companies using a series of strategies in order to manipulate people emotionally into spending money or using their product.

This sounds harsh yes, but the reality is that most of our decisions as consumers do come down to emotion, and that leaves businesses with no real option other than to focus on this (because a business does need to make money).

This is highly true when it comes to getting people to make purchases of various commercial goods – many of which we buy on impulse, or even to make ourselves feel better. It’s also very true of course of something like Facebook which we use almost compulsively because basically we hope it will lead to our developing new friendships or romantic relationships.

The amount of money spent on internet advertising is forecasted to reach over £100 per user this year in the UK. Five years ago the figure was around £70 and it has been steadily rising year on year. The internet advertising industry is huge across the world, and the UK is currently coming in at fourth after Norway, Australia and the US. While SEO and organic search results remain a priority for many businesses, PPC seems to be a strong and continually growing feature of most marketing strategies. Whatever the size of your SEO and PPC budget, it needs to be one part of a much bigger strategy if your share of the estimated £4.85 billion spent on internet advertising isn’t wasted.

Whether you have a productive day or not is reliant on multiple different factors, but of course the main thing responsible is simply how you’re feeling. In short then it comes down to your psychology and if you could control this then you would find you were able to control your productivity much more closely. Here we will look at how to make yourself more productive in a number of ways by understanding how your own mind works.

It’s 2012 and the way we interact in today’s world is, without a doubt, rapidly changing. One of the driving forces behind how we interact is without a doubt the Internet. The world online changes the way we talk with others, they way we share information, and even the way we market our products and services. Since the vast majority of US households are Internet-connected with at least one device, such as a PC, it makes sense that marketing would start to focus on the web. Honestly though, how important is online marketing for businesses today? The answer is very.

The days of stuffing keywords, using black-hat link building strategies and trying to cheat the system are over. Google introduced the second Panda update in March of 2012, and many websites fell off the map, once again. This is one of many updates Google has made to the way they rank websites and they will continue to make more updates in the future.

The worst part for websites that used to rank high with flawed SEO (search engine optimization) strategies, all the other search engines tend to follow what Google does. This means they will rank lower in all the search engines and not just Google. However, there are ways to make sure you gain ranking and maintain it.

The iPad is where it’s at now for business owners and employees alike. There really is nothing that this awesome little piece of technology can’t do – but I bet you don’t even know the half of its amazing powers when it comes to your business.

So get to work using your iPad to its fullest business potential. Here are 5 apps that will change yours and your business’ life, no matter your industry.

iAnnotate PDF (For Everyone)

Everyone in business needs to have the iAnnotate PDF app. This wondrous app not only allows you to read and organize your PDF files, but it gives you the option of marking up your entire document with personal notes and highlighted sections, then lets you share your markups with anyone you choose.

Learning web design is a little like learning to play the drums – it is very easy to grasp the basics and knock out some simple rhythms, but extremely difficult to become great at. To distinguish yourself from all the others out there, you need to become truly great.

Fortunately, there are so many bad practices in web design around at the moment that simply taking the time to really learn the basics can often be almost enough to get there.

With Google’s continued updates fighting web spam and other forms of Garbage on the Internet, they have published a list of things specifically to do / not do, in order be successful with Google and be penalized. The 8th item on the list is:

“If you run an affiliate site, your site must add value to the Internet above and beyond your vendor’s site”

Here are 10 ways that you can add value to your affiliate site and thereby add credibility to your site and and yourself on the Internet.

1. Develop a Product Specific Newsletter

Many vendors offer a generic newsletter about a sale on a wide variety of products, and a “this week’s sales” general flyer, but very rarely do you see something about a specific product. If you run a site on men’s v-neck sweaters for example, you could do a newsletter on effective color combinations with the sweater + khakis, or the sweater with the right kind of tie underneath. Then expand into socks and different kinds of shoes, and what’s considered business dress vs. business casual. A weekly or twice monthly newsletter list of topics could be easily generated to with 26 topics that relate around that one product. Be specific, go for combinations, and include real life pictures.

Are you guilty of over-optimising your website? Google’s Matt Cutts recently announced that a new algorithm has been introduced that will penalise sites which have paid too much attention to search engine optimisation. While there are no clear outlines as to exactly how the search engine is going to filter out such sites one thing is clear, Google want great content at the top of the search engine results pages.

Visitors to Your Website Need to Be Put First

As a reader of multiple blogs I can truly appreciate what Google are trying to do. When I search for content I want to be shown a great website that has the information or product that I am looking for. The last thing I want is to see a page that either: