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Social media is a great way to promote your business online. Many companies who cannot afford to have a website start off this way and if done correctly, you can gain a large amount of business from it. Often it is the businesses that deal direct with the public that find social media a massive boost to their sales but all businesses should have some sort of a presence on the sites. Below are a few tips for some of the most popular social media sites:

Facebook – Set up your profile with as much information as possible. Don’t forget to add your opening times, ways of contacting you, link to your website (if you have one) and also images.

Facebook – Encourage customers to leave you feedback and reviews on Facebook as this will help encourage other viewers to contact or purchase from you.

Twitter – with a limited number of characters it is vital to get your message across in a few words. Write down what you want to say and then tweak it to include keywords and a bit of your personality in there.

When it comes to web marketing it can be hard to know how much you should be spending. Many companies are dubious about going to a marketing agency and agreeing straight away to a large monthly spend, so how can you know what costs to expect. Often with marketing the more you put in the more you get out of it, but this is only the case if you are investing in the right areas of marketing in the right way.

For most companies spending less than a few hundred pounds a month is often pointless and you will not see much benefit from doing so. Ideally I would suggest a small company targeting local areas or more specific search terms has a monthly budget of £300 upwards. This will give the agency time to invest in improving and introducing new marketing techniques. This is purely a guideline and each agency will vary.

When it comes to marketing there are so many different types that you can do. Some are online and others are offline and depending on what you are trying to achieve and how you go about it will impact the outcome you have using either of these methods.

If you are looking in to online marketing then this is often drilled down in to on page and off page marketing. On page meaning changes / improvement made on your actually website as opposed to off page which is optimisation and marketing done away from your site in order to improve your search engine optimisation ( ranking on search engine sites such as Google) and also to increase traffic to your site directly from others.

There are many ways to do off page marketing, some of the popular being link building, Pay per Click, social media marketing and video / image sharing on sites such as YouTube and Pinterest.

If you have an existing site and want to add in extra functionality, then there are a few things that you need to consider.

Firstly you should try and advise your website programmer of all the functionality you are likely to want to add in in the near future as often changes are easier if done all at the same time, which means you should be able to save some money.

Once you know exactly what you want to to add in and you are confident that the programmer understands, then make sure that a complete back up of the website is taken. This way if anything goes wrong, you can quickly revert back to the original site. Ask the programmer if they are able to work on a local copy of the site and set the changes live when it is completed rather than working on a live site as this can cause a host of problems.

It has been known for some time in the world of SEO that backlinks do have a benefit to your website. Google stats that you are not allowed to try and gain positions by buying backlinks but still many companies do it. Google compares a backlink to a vote for your site and says that they should be acquired naturally not by paying for them. They can penalise a website for buying backlinks by demoting it on the search engine results pages or even removing it completely. This being said, many people still do it and it works. When looking for links, do not be tempted to go to a company that is offering you hundreds of links for small monthly fee. These links will often do more harm than good and should be avoided. Instead invest in a linking system that ensures all your links are on relevant sites.

When it comes to web design you need to have a certain level of trust in your web marketing company and developer. Unlike buying a car, there may be times when you spend money with your web developer or web marketing company and do not get anything physical for your money. This is because much web marketing is done behind the scenes, so you may not actually see many changes on the front end of your website.

When your marketing company makes a suggestion to you as to what they believe you need to do to take your website to the next level, you should enquire about what positive effect they believe this will have and the time scale for the results. Search Engine Optimisation, unlike some other avenues of online marketing can take a number of months for you to start seeing the benefits.

If you in any doubt as to what is being suggested to you, don’t be afraid to find out more and you could even do a bit of your own research.

Website security is of utmost importance if you want to be able to offer your visitors a safe and reliable experience. It is even more important if you have an ecommerce website where people can shop online and their personal details are being passed across to a 3rd party payment gateway or you are storing them online.

Hackers are finding new ways to access the root files of a website and make the changes they wish to day by day so as a developer, you need to be on top of your game. There are some very simple things you can do such as making all your passwords unique and as secure as possible. Adding in punctuation, numbers and capital letters will all help.

The code that you write as a developer, needs to be written in a way that it cannot be tampered with and you should make sure that you are using the latest techniques and coding language.

Many charities have little or no funds available for web design and development. As a developer I like to choose a charity each year for which I will undertake some development work for. It may be designing them a basic website, designing a logo or even promoting them of the social media sites.

Marketing is vital to many charities tying to obtain funding and online marketing plays a big part in that. Web development can be complex, but to create a simple basic static site can take as little as a few hours. This then gives many charities a platform to start marketing from and with the help of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, can easily spread the word about what work they are doing and for what cause.

If you are a web developer, I would ask that you consider if this is something you could do to help a local charity out. You may also get some publicity out of it which of course is a bonus but the feel good factor outweighs this.

If you are looking to expand your business in terms of the locations you target your products and service at, then you should consider including this in your online marketing strategy. The beauty of the internet is that people from all over the world can find your website through search engine websites and can purchase off you no matter how far away they are (if your site allows this).

If you are looking to expand in to other areas then you will need to ensure you have the correct level of highly optimised content on your site in order to allow you to compete for top positions on the search engines.

Locations pages are a great way to get you seen in new areas. Adding additional pages along the footer of your site for specific locations allows you to target the content very specifically for that area and therefore increases your chances of being found on Google, Bing and Yahoo for example.

Logos can be created and supplied in many different formats. Before having a logo created you should be aware of this and discuss with your designer to ensure that you have the correct formats.

A .jpg file extensions is essentially an image that is saved as a flat graphic and will allow you to use it on leaflets, business cards and your website but if you are wanting to be able to use the logo on a large scale such as an advertising board or banner then you will need it as a Vector or .eps file.

A vector file will turn the image in to points and is kind of like a set of instructions e.g point A to B is 10 pixels wide at 300 degrees angle. Therefore if you wish to increase the size by ten it will keep the same angle but multiple the width by ten and length by ten accordingly to ensure the image is not distorted.

Logo prices can vary from £30 up to the thousands so be aware that for a £30 logo you may only be getting a .jpg version.