A website isn’t just a marketing tool (although of course it has an important function as one). It is something that reflects your business, tells people what you are all about and gives them the information they need. This is why it’s really important you are proud of it. Your website is something you can direct people towards, put on your business cards and any other marketing literature, so that people have easy access to it. This will help to reduce enquiries over the phone, giving people the answers they need via your website. As long as you are happy to point people in the direction of your site, you will be making your life a lot easier.

If your website is old fashioned, or has limited functionality, you may be reluctant to tell people about it – especially people you already know. A good website can save you a great deal of time, and ultimately, money.

Web designers will create the designs for your website, before it is built by programmers and developers. They will get the look and feel of your website, so it is important you like what they do. How do you go about choosing a designer?

Many designers will work for an agency. Some are one man bands, which has pros and cons – it will probably be cheaper, but may be lower quality if they don’t have input from a team, and the process may be slower. If you want to get a feel for a designer, look through their previous work and see if you like their style. You should be a little suspicious of designers who don’t have a portfolio.

Many designers will not give you a quote straight away. They will learn about your needs first. This means they are putting together a unique design for you and won’t just be using a template. The finished product will be more unique and will have more personality.

How many times have you typed an email, hit send and instantly spotted a typo or even worse realise that you’ve sent the email to the wrong person? More times than most would like to admit!

Well finally this has been recognised by one of the leading email providers Gmail. They have now rolled out a permanent feature to their email accounts meaning that you can cancel an email from being sent up to ten seconds after hitting the send button. This option, which has to be selected in the email settings, means that all emails are deferred from sending by ten seconds, giving the sender the option to cancel if they spot a mistake.

The pressure is now on the other email providers to offer the same service so let’s see who is the next to follow suit.

So if you have a Gmail account and can afford to delay your emails by 10 seconds why not give it a go, it could save the embarrassment of sending the wrong email to the wrong person ever again!

The first place to start with online advertising is to have your own website created. This can be used as a portfolio to showcase your products and services or an e-commerce site to sell online. Once you have a website you need to spread the word to gain traffic to it. There is a number of ways you can do this and I have listed a few below:

1. Social media marketing – Setting up an account on the social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be a great way to attract people to your site. Make sure that you update your profile regularly but not too much that it puts people off following you.
2. Pay per Click – Setting up adverts on the search engines and / or their search partners that when clicked will take people through to your site. This is not cheap but can give you instance traffic volume increase.

Google has recently a statement saying that as of the end of April 2015 it will be using mobile compatibility as a ranking factor in its algorithm. Statistics show that over 25% of all traffic comes from mobile users so therefore this change makes sense and has been foreseen by many web marketeers for some time now.

Making a website mobile friendly is not just about making it fit on the screen. It also includes checking that touch elements are not too close to each other and that all aspects of the site still function as they should.

If you are in doubt as to whether your site is mobile friendly, then ask your website administrator or use the Google Webmasters tool that will check the site for you. If it isn’t then be sure to get this updated as soon as possible to avoid a drop in your positioning on Google.

Moving on from our article regarding email marketing, check this post for our rundown on getting started with email marketing company MailChimp.

Before you start creating your first campaign, build up your list of email contacts, also known as ‘subscribers’. Create lists depending on clientele. So you know who to aim which campaign at easily, whilst also having a list for all of your contacts.

Next part is actually building the campaign, which can be done either with a visual editor or HTML. After you’re happy and send away, you can view how successful your campaign was by tracking your subscriber engagement. MailChimp shows when an email was open or closed, and you can also link it with your Google Analytics account for even more in-depth reporting.