How to Redesign Your Website Without Losing Traffic or Sales

According to an Inc.com report, the average marketer will redesign his website once every two years. Judging from this information, it’s safe to assume that he won’t even have time to settle into his new design before he will have to change it again. Redesigning a website is no easy task, especially since the requirements of a great one are almost unfair: optimization for mobile devices, seamless navigability, good ROI, parallax scrolling or God knows what devilish features.

And there are so many things that could go wrong. As a matter of fact, everything that can go wrong will probably go wrong if you don’t hire a transition and planning execution SEO strategist or conduct extensive research.

You’re right to be worried about losing the SEO value that you’ve worked so hard to achieve for your site during a redesign. The good news is that you can successfully launch your new website without forfeiting SEO progress, sales or traffic, through careful planning.

The benefits of this time-consuming ordeal are hard to resist: lower bounce-rate, better engagement, increased sales and improved conversion rates. The following tips will help you redesign your site without murdering your Traffic or Sales.

•  Create a plan of attack.
• Crawl and audit your old website.
• Prevent search engines from crawling your site during the redesign.
• Create a back-up of your site.
• Check your content and inbound links. Delete unnecessary pages and use 301 redirect plans.
• Improve old content that was performing well.
• Improve non-ranking pages.
• Implement the new design and crawl your new site.
• Allow the search engines to crawl your site again.

Color Tips that Will Improve Your Website Conversions

1. Women don’t like gray, orange, and brown. They like blue, purple, and green.

In a survey on color and gender, 35% of women said blue was their favorite color, followed by purple (23%) and green (14%). 33% of women confessed that orange was their least favorite color, followed by brown (33%) and gray (17%).

Other studies have corroborated these findings, revealing a female aversion to earthy tones, and a preference for primary colors with tints. Look at how this is played out. Visit nearly any e-commerce site whose target audience is female, and you’ll find these female color preferences affirmed.

2. Men don’t like purple, orange, and brown. Men like blue, green, and black.

If you’re marketing to men, these are the colors to stay away from: purple, orange, and brown. Instead, use blue, green, and black. These colors — blue, green, and black — are traditionally associated with maleness. However, it comes as a slight surprise to some that brown isn’t a favorite pick.

3. Use blue in order to cultivate user’s trust.

Blue is one of the most-used colors, with good reason. A lot of people like blue.

Read the literature on blue, and you’ll come across messages like

• The color blue is a color of trust, peace, order, and loyalty. 
• Blue is the color of corporate America and it says, “Chill . . . believe and trust me . . . have confidence in what I am saying!” 
• Blue calls to mind feelings of calmness and serenity. It often is described as peaceful, tranquil, secure, and orderly. 

There is wide agreement in the research community on the psychological effects of the color blue. Its subtle message of trustworthiness and serenity is true. You can use this to your advantage on your website and landing pages.

4. Yellow is for warnings.

Yellow is a color of warning. Hence, the color yellow is used for warning signs, traffic signals, and wet floor signs.It seems odd, then, that some color psychologists declare yellow to be the color of happiness. Business Insider reports that “brands use yellow to show that they’re fun and friendly.” There is a chance that yellow can suggest playfulness. However, since yellow stimulates the brain’s excitement center, the playfulness feeling may be simply a state of heightened emotion and response, not exactly sheer joy.

5. Green is ideal for environmental and outdoor products.

Perhaps the most intuitive color connection is green — the color of outdoors, eco-friendly, nature, and the environment. Green essentially is a chromatic symbol for nature itself.

Apart from its fairly obvious outdoorsy suggestiveness, green also is a color that can improve creativity. Labeled “the green effect,” one study indicated that participants had more bursts of creativity when presented with a flash of green color as opposed to any other color.

5. Orange is a fun color that can create a sense of haste or impulse.

The positive side of orange is that it can be used as the “fun” color. According to some, orange helps to “stimulate physical activity, competition, and confidence.” This may be why orange is used heavily by sports teams and children’s products.

6. Black adds a sense of luxury and value.

The darker the tone, the more lux it is, says our internal color psychology. An article from Lifescript describes black as “elegance, sophistication, power,” which is exactly what luxury designers and high-end e-commerce sites want you to feel. The article goes on to describe black as the color of “timeless, classic” which helps further explain the use of black in high-value products.

8. Don’t neglect white.

In most of the color psychology material I read, there is a forgotten feature. Maybe that’s because color theorists can’t agree on whether white is a color or not. I don’t really care whether it is or not. What I do know is that copious use of white space is a powerful design feature. 

15 Startup Mistakes Everyone Should Know About

Starting a business is difficult. Launching a startup is even more challenging. Aside from facing challenge of attempting to build a company from the ground up, many entrepreneurs have little prior experience in the business world. Even when they have an incredibly awesome idea, complex problems arise, such as managing the young enterprise, handling finances and hiring employees on a budget.

Due to a lack of experience, many startups endure the misfortune of failure -- if they launch at all. Be sure to not add to their tales of disaster. Here are 15 startup mistakes to avoid at all cost:

1.      Single Founder – as a single founder you have almost zero chance of getting funding from Paul Graham. Why? It’s not a coincidence, he says, that founders who succeeded did so as a team of at least two.

2.      Bad Location – you can change everything about a house but its location. Likewise, if your startup is in a bad location, you can’t change the nature of that location. It’s easier to move the startup. Where to? Silicon Valley.

3.      Hiring Bad Programmers – knowing a good programmer from a bad one often takes being a good one yourself, or having a trusted one on your team. Exceptional programmers are always in short supply. So the odds are stacked up against hiring good ones.

4.      Choosing the Wrong Platform – how fast you can scale will determine whether your startup lives or dies once you get traction. On the wrong platform scalability will be the bottleneck. And users often don’t wait for you to figure it out.

5.      Slowness in Launching – before you actually launch you are in the dark about whether your startup should even exist. The longer you delay the launch the more you delay getting the answer. If you are afraid to know what the answer is, you might want to ask yourself why.

6.      Launching Too Early – launch too early, though, and you may be completely unprepared to handle your growth, or worse yet to present a usable product.

7.      Having No Specific User in Mind – somewhere someone will for sure be interested in your product, you just don’t know who yet? Sounds like those people may not exist. Be sure to check.

8.      Raising Too Little Money – you get what you spend on. With too little money you may not be able to flesh out your product in to its full potential.

9.      Spending Too Much – spending too much before you grew enough to have the numbers to raise the next round, and you are out of cash, which often spells the end.

10.  Raising Too Much Money – raising too much will likely make you feel like a huge success even before you made anything useful. At the end of the day it’s users, not investors, you want to impress the most.

11.  Poor Investor Management – if the choice is between making investors happy or making your users happy, always choose the users. If the user is happy your investors will make money eventually.

12.  Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit – you can always make money later. This however, cannot be said about making users happy. You need to make something they want now.

13.  Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty – you can’t solve all your problems with coding. Businesses are built on relationships. Go out and meet those people.

14.  Fights Between Founders – founder conflict is too common. Founders being ambitious people are almost bound to disagree.

15.  A Half-Hearted Effort – a lack of determination to see the startup through to the end is not rare. If you feel like you have other options in life than building your startup, you will probably mentally hang on to them.

Tips To Get More Leads From Your Website

 It is highly recommended that you bond with your leads – get to know a little about them and by doing so, you will know the right approach to take when selling to them. However, you need a strategic plan of getting leads from your website – there are many ways to do so but the top 3 effective ways are:

1. Social Media Login
2. Post Forms On All Your Pages
3. Freebies

Social Media Login – Allows you real time chat with your leads. Your readers get a one and one chat with you and this says a lot for you, meaning your leads will see that you are for real and you are what you blog about. You and your leads will get to know more about yourselves – any queries or concerns will be addressed and most likely you will be contented with whatever information received.

Post Forms On Your Pages – Being consistent on your website, blogging regularly about your products and services and posting forms on all your pages, will eventually get the attention of your target audience. They will start taking you seriously and overall, it will reflect good on you because your target audience will develop trust in your products and services.

Freebies – I like freeness, do you? Offering something free in return of getting someone’s contact information is a fair trade in my opinion. People do not give out their information just by you asking them for it – Though in most cases, people like to be told in a direct way, what to do – but giving them the choice to sign up, most likely won’t work. Freebies can be, free tutorials, gifts, give-aways, free access to live webinars and more.

In Network Marketing there isn’t any such thing as having enough leads – If you are familiar with MLM Network Marketing, then you will understand the importance and necessity of generating leads from your website. Though Network Marketing boils down to making money online, one should NOT priorities it. When you consider money the number one priority in your online business, you’ll lose focus of what’s most important – Attending to your customers need and making sure that they are satisfied with your products and services will play a great deal of good on your part. Hence, the benefits of generating leads from your website are, customers and satisfied customers will generate more sales into your online business.

Importance of Website for Small Business

These days, almost any small business should have a website. With costs being extremely low at the entry level, it's becoming difficult to imagine a reason for any company of any size not to have a website. Many user-friendly, free and open-source content-management systems are available to assist with Web design, so it is even possible to build a basic small business website without a professional Web designer.

Facebook is a great tool. It is free for a small businesses, but it is not a search engine. Because of this, most people would not use Facebook to search for a hairdresser or a plumber for instance. The majority of the public use Google when searching for things they need.

The Web has a far wider reach than any other form of advertising. While it takes time to build up enough traffic to your website to make a worthwhile impact on your company's marketing campaign, it costs next to nothing to do so. Your website will be the center of your company's online presence; through it, you advertise your business around the Web on social networking sites, forums and through pay-per-click advertising programs.

A website is online and accessible 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Because of this, your customers and potential customers can visit your site for support or information about new and upcoming products and services whenever it is convenient for them. Your website will act as an invaluable and always-available resource for information which would otherwise only be accessible during your company's business hours.

Your website can sell products at any time. Potential customers are not restricted to business hours. Instead, they can go online and purchase products whenever they want. A website with an online shop can provide a dramatic boost in sales.

How to protect your WordPress site from hackers

 Millions of websites are powered by WordPress software and there’s a reason for that. WordPress is the most developer-friendly content management system out there, so you can essentially do anything you want with it. Unfortunately, that has some downsides as well.

For example, if you don’t change your default configuration, hackers and some pesky users with too much curiousity immediately know where to log in to get into your admin area. In WordPress, you can just type in domain.com/wp-admin and it will take you right to the login screen. At that point, it’s all about trying to crack your password. The most common method hackers use is brute force, which allows them to test millions of login combinations in a short amount of time.

Do not use defaults

Do not use the default username and password you are given for both your hosting account and for your website content management system. Change your username and password as soon as you have purchased your package and installed WordPress.

Change your details even if the hosting company allowed you to enter your own details when you signed up (i.e. your username and password were not a defaults) because you cannot be sure how secure the hosting company’s servers are or who else has access to the information you entered into the system.

Have a long password and change it every 72 days

The password you choose should be over 8 characters long. It should be a mix of letters and numbers and should not feature any words. It should be a random mix of numbers and letters. Do not write your password onto anything electronic except for the small encrypted password box on your WordPress system. If you cannot remember your password because you are not Stephan Hawking, then write it down on a notepad that you store somewhere safe in your home.

Change it every 72 days because it makes a hacker’s life a little more difficult. It means the hacker has to start from square one again if he or she has a brute force program running on your website.

Use secure hosting

This should go without saying, but you should find a host that puts security as a top priority. Many free hosting packages cannot afford to spend a lot of money on security, though that doesn’t automatically mean a big and expensive company spends a lot of money on security either.

It is up to you to find a hosting package that takes security very seriously because gaining access to your website via your servers is the ultimate backdoor pass. Done correctly, by getting into your website via hacking a server, the hacker may be able to overcome almost all of your security measures with ease.

Back up your website

Let’s not forget that if someone is motivated enough to get into your website, then that person is going to do it. A 15yr old hacked NASA, a 16yr old London boy Richard Pryce hacked American military systems and was noted as the biggest threat to US security at that current time, and Gary McKinnon managed to hack the USA’s most secure military computers that include Area 51. So, if you think your plugins and security protocols are a match for hackers, then think again.

Your best defense is to backup your website and if you are hacked you can wipe the slate clean, restart your security, change all your access passwords, improve your passwords, and re-upload your website data all within one day. Manually back up your website unless your hosting company offers the service for free and doesn’t charge for the extra space the backups take up. You only need the last 2 versions of your website. Do not keep all your backup copies as they will take up space on your servers, which is space you are probably paying for.

Keep things up to date

This goes for all your technology, software, and accounts. Keep up to date with WordPress updates, and if your security plugins come with free updates you should update as soon as they are released. Do not stick with old versions of WordPress because the longer a WordPress version exists, then the higher the chances are that hackers have found a way to break into it.

Why SEO is Important for Your Business!

SEO is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted terms in the world of marketing. That’s right, folks: I said marketing. While SEO has been painted as some sort of black-magic secret that requires an internet illuminati membership to learn the ways of, at its core, it is a marketing method. SEO’s unfair characterization as a kind of alchemy over the past decade has caused many otherwise savvy business people to devalue its importance as part of a good, solid marketing plan for small, mid-sized, and large businesses.

I find this extremely unfortunate, because SEO is a very viable marketing outlet that can, in concert with effective landing pages and content, bring your business qualified leads and customers. Moreover, studies have shown that SEO can have a better ROI than traditional forms of marketing like TV and print ads. It isn’t magic, and SEO alone is not going to transform your business from a shop in your parents’ basement to a Fortune 500 company. But neither is any other single form of advertising. What it can do is provide a business visibility, branding, traffic, a high ROI, credibility, and insight into customer behavior. Let’s discuss each of these in turn.