Blog Articles from Fawkes Digital Marketing

If your entire marketing plan is paid marketing prepare to continually increase your paid marketing overtime. Paid marketing or pay-per-click is an effective way to reach new areas you weren't previously in or areas where you want to further grow. Paid marketing though is not where you want your marketing efforts to be spent. You need to be looking at building up the content of your website for organic (e.g. free) marketing. Free marketing doesn't mean it's free though. It means you must do things the "old fashioned way" by working for it. You need to be updating your products, your services, and start a blog.

Despite a business's best intentions, sometimes you will end up with a client or employee who does not leave on a good note. A situation like this usually doesn't go beyond hurt feelings but in some cases, the level of angst may go beyond a few choice words and turn into a situation where one angry person can threaten your online business presence. Are there steps that can be taken in situations like this? Yes, there are. Let's discuss them.

All too often we see businesses making a big mistake when it comes to the search engines beyond ignoring them or just paying to play. They are still thinking the early 2000's and the internet on how they worked before they could do a lot of "self thinking". The search engines have evolved, yet many businesses have not evolved with these changes. Google is a major force recon with when it comes to the search engines and they are not slowing down with their updates. With over 500 updates per year you need to continue to bring you're "A" game to make the search engines work for you. Paying for your search engine optimization or SEO is a short-term fix to a long-term problem.

Many of our clients, friends, and even local competitors we've been talking to over the past several weeks and they say we seem to be busy. We are and we know why and are going to tell you how we're doing in one area. That area is search engine optimization and social media. It's actually technology that gives us our edge. As software developers we think analytically to grow business. We have spent tens of thousands of dollars on tools to help our small business clients rock it. We get tools that work together that give us insights into what the internet is doing. With that information we can dig deeper than most and spot trends months before others start reacting.

We always see our clients that either we write blog posts for or write their own that they routinely perform better than sites that don't do any blog posts. There is a secret formula we have used over the years that have allowed us to get all of our clients to the first page almost always. There never is a "magic bullet" that will guarantee you page one results but following best practices, industry trends, and avoiding bad techniques you stand a better chance of being on page one. So, let's stop the talking and get to some actionable results with Google, Bing, and other search engines.

We have never been fans of sliders as we found them distracting, not helping with your call to action or sales funnel. We won't deny that having a slider can "look cool" but a website is more than just looking cool. You want to bring people into your sales funnel and buy from you. I will take a sale any day of the week over being the cool kid on the block. There's more though than just your sales funnel to think about when it comes to a slider on your homepage (or any page for that matter). Let's look at some of the drawbacks of sliders as well as how you can still have that cool kid wow factor and get rid of those drawbacks.

The world is bigger than we are or is it? That is a question I have pondered for many years. Like many, I have had more setbacks than I care to count. More than some while be less than others. Each set back has set me to a place that has put me where I am today. I have done not only good with my life but continue to strive for greatness. It has been, and continues to be, a personal struggle with the only competition I have; myself.

Email is centralized to a user where information is in a silo that only the one user can truly see. This creates speed bumps, roadblocks, and chaos within an organization. There are ways to fix this chaos by centralizing everything and making these tasks available to the entire team. Not only does this bring visibility into the eyes of everyone within the company but also brings in collaborative teamwork. When workloads for some are less they can step up and tackle items in the work queue and speed the entire process and eliminate one person from slowly down items within the system. This not only helps get projects completed more efficiently but lists start shrinking rather than growing.

The EU on May 22, 2017, past a new law called General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This law goes into effect in May of 2018. Many companies, like JM2, have already taken measures to comply with this law. Hopefully, you have been diligent in meeting these upcoming needs so that you don't get hit with fines. The EU is very much behind peoples privacy and this affects anyone that maintains any personal data about individuals. This law also affects companies in the United States! The internet is big and there are no physical boundaries for commerce. The United States is often behind when it comes to laws of personal protection and this one is very aggressive. By being in compliance today you are a lot closer to be ready for when the United States catches up to protecting consumers more.