How to Build Your Own WordPress Blog for Your Business

With all of the focus on social media these days, some people believe blogs have become obsolete. Quite the opposite — blogs were one of the very first forms of social media, and they’re still essential to communication and effective internet marketing. Blogging is a great way of posting announcements, articles, how-tos, and so many more things that can help your business and provide your customers with important and useful information. Fortunately, blogging today has never been easier thanks to WordPress, a content management system (CMS). WordPress is designed to be quick and easy, although it also has many advanced features you can make use of once you’re familiar with the basics. This guide will walk you through the steps needed to create your own WordPress blog.

What Do You Need?

To start your WordPress blog, you’ll need two things:

• A domain name
• A web hosting account

Setting up a new WordPress blog can be done in an hour or two, depending on how computer-savvy you are. Nothing is too complicated.

Setting Up Your Blog

WordPress comes in two different forms, free and premium. It’s recommended that you try the free version first just to get your feet wet and to decide if WordPress is the right CMS for you. The free version does have a wide variety of different themes and plugins, so you’re not really losing any functionality at all.

If you haven’t registered your domain name, you’ll need to do that first. Domain names can be registered for as little as $15 a year, so this isn’t something you need a large budget for.

Next, you need to purchase a web hosting account if you don’t have your own server. Some new businesses do not, while other established companies do. This tutorial provides instructions for installing WordPress on a host server, not your own. Basic web hosting is a low cost item, although hosting with more storage and other advanced features will be more expensive. You can often save money by paying for several months or a years’ worth of hosting at once.

Install WordPress

Many web hosts already have WordPress prepared for installation. You just need to log into your hosting service and click on the install button. If your host doesn’t, you can go to the C-Panel hosting site and quickly install it. You don’t have to select a theme or layout at this point, though you might be prompted to. Once WordPress is installed, you’ll be provided with the basic admin login and password. You can then log in and view the WordPress dashboard.

Selecting Your Theme

Now you’re ready to select a theme, which is your blog’s visual appearance and layout. Your blog will originally be set to the default theme. There are thousands of free themes available online as well as some premium themes out there. Some of these themes are designed for specific industries or focus on certain things, so you’ll want to find one that fits your business.

To install new themes, go to the theme menu and click “add new.” Choose the theme you want, install it, and activate it. You can customize most themes in a number of ways.

Publish a Post

If you click “add new” under posts, you’ll go to the text editor. Here, you can type up your first post, format it, add media, and then click on “Publish.” That’s it — you’ve published your first blog!

Plugins

Plugins allow you to add new features, change existing elements, create an online shop, and much more. There are thousands of plugins out there for free. A quick online search can help you find the best plugins for your blog.

Design Tips

Here are a few things to keep in mind when working on the design of your blog:

• Your theme should fit your niche.
• Premium themes can cost as much as $200, but they can be much more customizable than free themes.
• Free themes can be great, but remember, many other blogs out there may be using the very same theme. You might not look as unique as you want to.
• Two great WordPress theme sites are colorlib and codexcoder.
• Make sure you have your company logo on your blog, preferably on the header so that it appears on every page.
• Make your design user-friendly. The look of your blog shouldn’t be so cluttered or overwhelming that the visitor can’t easily read your posts.
• Remember, you can change your blog’s theme whenever you want!

If you would like to speak to a Net-Craft.com representative to learn how we can help you start blogging and reaching new customers please contact-us today for a free estimate.

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Creating a Converting Website Checkout to Boost Your Business and

Most business owners are well aware that many customers come to their websites simply to browse. Those customers look around at what can be found, and sometimes stay and buy, while others leave with no intention to return. For those that stay and buy, the checkout process that you offer can make or break their choice to continue with the purchase. If your website’s checkout is not easy to use, you could end up with people who add things to their carts, only to abandon the cart and not come back for the items. Every eCommerce developer knows the challenge that can come with increasing conversion and decreasing cart abandonment. Here are some ways you can increase the conversion rates of your website’s checkout.

Increasing Checkout Conversion Can Be Easier with These Tips.

The first tip is to self-host your checkout. Aside from PayPal, most consumers do not like redirection to another website to pay for their items. It creates anxiety, as many do not like sharing their personal information with untrusted or unfamiliar websites. By hosting the checkout process yourself, you can keep the trust with you, and increase how many people buy from you.

Tip number two is to avoid adding hidden fees. People will often walk away from a cartful of items if you spring hidden fees on them at checkout. Make sure they know if you will be adding fees for shipping, tax, or handling. This should be easy to find so it does not come across as a surprise once they get that far.

Tip three is allowing your customers to checkout from your site as a guest. This can help inspire trust from the start if they do not need to share a bunch of personal information with you to be kept on file. This can help increase customer appreciation as well, making them feel more secure with checking out with your company.

The fourth tip is to make sure you are including all possible customers. There are going to be many customers who come to your site on smaller devices, like tablets and mobile phones. If you do not have your website or checkout ready for those visitors, then you are missing out on a good chunk of possible customers. Make sure your website is responsive to those customers so you can help keep their business.

Finally, you want to make sure it is easy to see what types of security your website has. Get covered under an SSL certificate, and put up seals that show you have security on your side. You can get a seal from the BBB, and places like TRUST2 as well. This helps customers feel at ease, helping to boost your conversion rates.

If Your Conversions Are Still Low, Consider Simplifying the Process

When you have tried the above tips, but are still struggling with conversions, you may want to look at your process. If you have numerous pages a customer has to go through, see if any can be removed. Make the checkout process as easy as possible. Focus on the customer experience, and make everything as simple as you possibly can. This can help to increase your conversions, and help boost your business overall.

If you would like to speak to a Net-Craft.com representative about your web development needs, please contact-us today.

Content Source Creating a Converting Website Checkout to Boost Your Business and

15 Tips for Improving Your Conversion Rate Quickly

Are you looking for a way to increase your website’s conversion rates and improve your ROI quickly? It’s actually not as difficult as you might think it is, especially if you know some of the tips and tricks that the experts use. Here are 15 different ways you can boost your eCommerce site’s conversion rates.

1. Ask for as little information as possible. People don’t want to fill out an opt-in form that requires them to fill in dozens of different fields. If all you need is an email address, don’t ask for anything more.
2. Have an easy-to-understand refund policy. Potential customers are more likely to make a purchase if there’s no risk to them.
3. Include real customer testimonials to further show customers that there is little risk of shopping with you.
4. Make certain the benefits of using your products and services are clear. Potential customers show know exactly what problem your products/services will solve.
5. Place conversion elements above the fold. Visitors should see them without ever scrolling down the page.
6. Send your pay-per-click ads to their own dedicated landing pages instead of your homepage.
7. Make use of a strong call to action on each page of your website. Readers should clearly understand what you want them to do.
8. Link to similar products or content on each page to keep your visitors engaged. Product recommendations are a great way to do this.
9. Include how many of each product you have in stock. People will be more likely to purchase something if they know it’s only available in limited quantities.
10. Test your call to action button. Try it in different locations, change the size, and experiment with colors. See which combination of these factors gets better conversion rates.
11. Create tunnel vision on your landing page. Remove any elements that might distract the user from clicking on your call to action. Everything on the page should focus on getting the user to complete that action.
12. Include multiple payment options to meet every customer’s preference.
13. Make sure your images are high quality and unique. Visitors are likely to recognize when you’re using generic stock photos and react negatively.
14. Instead of using a link for your call to action, use a button. Buttons stand out and are obviously clickable, especially to users viewing your page on a mobile device.
15. Use visual cues such as arrows to direct a potential customer’s attention to the parts of your page that are the most important, such as your call to action button.

By implementing even a few of these tips, you’re likely to see your conversion rates quickly improve. If you would like to speak to one of our representatives about improving your web site’s conversion rate, please contact us for a free consultation today.

Content Source 15 Tips for Improving Your Conversion Rate Quickly

5 Steps to an Effective Landing Page

You spend a lot of money on Internet marketing. The business of grabbing the attention of a potential customer and getting him or her to your website is a big one, and for some companies the budget for Internet marketing is their single largest expense. As such, you want to be sure that your landing page — the first thing a customer sees when they come visit your site — is helping you and not hurting you. Here are 5 things to take care of to make sure your landing page is an asset to your business.

Be careful with form fields

A landing page that immediately hits visitors with a lengthy request for information is going to cost you. Many visitors — particularly if they have not yet had time to read your page and be sold on your business — will simply navigate away if they are met with onerous demands for information.

Rather than starting off by asking their name, contact information, and life history, let them read a few sentences to get a feel for you. Then, and only then, should you ask for information, and even then you should only ask for the bare minimum that you need.

Give something of value

If you’re giving something to your site visitors — be it information or a physical product — it should be something worthwhile. Don’t foist junk off on them, because they’ll know it. And they’ll resent you for it. On the other hand, if you give them something they value, they will be much more likely to do business with you.

Double check your images

Your images — whether photos, illustrations, or something else — should match what you’re selling and what your business is all about. Don’t be like a drug commercial that shows happy, carefree people while a narrator reads a list of terrible side effects. The cognitive dissonance this engenders will damage your chances of making a sale.

If you’re selling legal services, don’t litter the landing page with pictures of puppies. If you’re selling puppies, steer clear of courtroom montages. You want to create a theme, and that theme should match what your business does.

Strategically position your web form

Your web form should be placed so that it does not require a visitor to scroll down to find it. This will help ensure that more people fill it out, creating leads you can follow up on. Also, make sure your web form blends in aesthetically with the rest of the page. You want your page to look professional and polished, not as if some amateur web designer working out of his or her garage slapped it together.

Test your page thoroughly

Nothing is more disastrous than spending time and effort directing people to your page, only to find out weeks later that their web form submissions aren’t going through. Make sure you test your page: submit things on forms, click on links, and so on. Make sure it’s running properly before you launch it, and you’ll save yourself time and money.

If you would like to speak a Net-Craft.com representative to learn how an effective landing page can increase conversions on your web site, please contact us today.

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Essential SEO Recommendations for Startups

It is essential for a startup to create and maintain an active SEO campaign to drawn in more visitors and develop a loyal following. SEO is an ever-changing process that requires a long-term strategy to bring your startup high-quality visitors, so below we will discuss a few SEO recommendations that are essential for building your brand and increasing your name recognition.

1. Focus On High-Quality Content

The days of overly-optimized content are over. Search engines favor well-written, natural language with descriptive keywords which help readers find relevant content. A high-quality content campaign is created by writing authoritative content that resonates with your target market and a) helps them understand your product or service or b) educates your customer with valuable information that is unique to your startup.

2. Become an Authority

Part of your content marketing strategy should be becoming an authority in your niche. If you are a welder, for example, you would want to create content that shows your readers that you know what you are talking about. In doing so, you connect with your target audience and keep them coming back to your blog time and again for more information.

3. Go Mobile

Last year, Google enforced what is now being called “Mobilegeddon” with an algorithm change. That updated resulted in many search engine changes for numerous sites. The goal of the algorithm change was to penalize sites that are not considered “mobile-friendly” and elevate those sites that were in the search engines. This is one example of how mobile usability has become a high priority in SEO, and startups can benefit from this knowledge by ensuring their sites are mobile-friendly.

4. Leverage Interactive Content

The boring articles of yesteryear are now a thing of the past. With the advent of interactive content, SEO has become more complex and interesting. Startups can benefit from adding interactive content to their site and optimizing those interactive elements. Here are some examples of interactive content you can add to your site:

• Optimized HD Videos (YouTube, Vimeo)
• Infographics
• Short Animated Videos
• List Articles with GIFs (Buzzfeed)

Startups can take advantage of new, rich content types and focus on creating quality information that your target market will return to time and again. By doing so, you can build a loyal audience and simultaneously increase revenues and conversions on your site.

If you would like to learn more about the Scottsdale SEO services we offer, please contact Net-Craft.com today.

Content Source Essential SEO Recommendations for Startups

Understanding the Process Behind the Numbers and Why SEO is a Great Deal

Businesses, at least the successful ones, understand the importance of developing and maintaining a strong presence on the Internet. Most of them opt to utilize an independent third party search engine optimization (“SEO”) firm to get this done. While they know that they must write a check each month to cover the SEO bill, many businesses don’t quite understand how it is that the bill becomes what it is. If this describes your situation, here is more information why your SEO provider charges what it does, and what goes into arriving at that number.

SEO Is More Complicated Than It Used To Be

A major factor in SEO costs is what an SEO firm has to do in order to keep your business on the front page of search results. At one point in time there were numerous shortcuts that an SEO firm could take advantage of to get ranking results.

Unfortunately, search engines have become much more sophisticated as time has passed. Search engines seek to bring in those results that will be most helpful to users. This means they work hard to identify and eliminate shortcuts in order to be sure they are providing truly helpful results. While these efforts are great for users, they make the job of an SEO firm much more challenging than it was at one time.

Today, SEO firms have a number of added areas they must address that have not traditionally been a necessary part of SEO. These areas include, but certainly are not limited to:

• Finding ways to make your website run faster and more efficiently
• Improving the experience of users who actually visit your site, as opposed to focusing on getting users to the site without considering what happens afterwards
• Researching the content that is posted on your site
• Creating text and video content to be uploaded to your site
• Finding ways to add links to your site — the more places that link to you, the more relevant search engines will consider you to be
• Engaging in marketing of various content pieces for your site

These responsibilities used to fall upon the shoulders of the website owner — if they were done at all. All SEO firms had to do was get people to the site, while it was the responsibility of the site owner to make the user experience useful. Now — because at one time search engines did not give as much weight to user experience as they do today — these activities are the province of the SEO firms.

SEO Is A Bargain Compared To The Cost Of Advertising With Other Media

If you consider the cost of advertising on radio or television, engaging in an aggressive SEO campaign just makes sense. A basic radio ad in a 250,000-member listening area starts at around $5,000 per month. An SEO campaign, on the other hand, is continuously garnering views — as opposed to a radio ad that is only played for 15-60 seconds at a time. Yet, in spite of this, a good SEO campaign is still less than the entry-level radio ad for a comparable sized audience.

Using An SEO Company Is More Efficient Than Going In-House

If you were to hire an employee to conduct your Scottsdale SEO campaign in the same manner as your Phoenix SEO company, you would have to pay him or her around $65,000 per year. That comes out to almost $5,500 per month.

In addition, you would have to pay employer withholding taxes, Medicare taxes, and other assorted costs, taking your expenditure up to nearly $6,500 per month. Then you would have to provide vacation, insurance, and other benefits, on top of paying him or her for the time it takes to learn how to adequately engage in the SEO strategies your SEO company already knows about. Viewed in this light, a monthly SEO bill of $2,500 is an absolute steal, and you don’t have to deal with the headache of managing another employee.

SEO Has A Higher Return On Investment Than Radio, Television, Or Direct Mailing

The return on investment (“ROI”) of an advertising campaign is what it’s all about. This number tells you how much money you can expect to bring in for every dollar you spend. Among all forms of advertising, no other form even comes close to the ROI of an effective SEO campaign.

Arguably, if you only have $3,000 per month to spend on marketing, that money is best spent on your SEO campaign. While it’s true that a multi-tiered campaign will bring in more customers than one that only utilizes one venue, if you are limited in your marketing dollars those dollars should be going to an SEO campaign.

Your SEO Company Does More Than Paste In Some Keywords

Perhaps because of unscrupulous SEO companies, or perhaps because of ignorance, some people think that all an SEO company will do is throw up some blogs that link to the webpage, thus driving up its ranking. Nothing could be more untrue. An SEO company will take the following steps in the SEO campaign:

• Researching content in order to determine ways your website can become more relevant (remember, higher relevancy means a higher Google search ranking)
• Creating content in order to bolster your site’s relevancy in the deficient areas identified in the first step
• Reviewing links to remove old and dead ones (these will hurt your rankings) and identify opportunities to increase the links to your site
• Building links that strengthen your relevancy

Of course, this is not an all-exhaustive list, and there may very well be other things your SEO company needs to do.

A Lot Goes Into A Good SEO Campaign

With all these things in mind, it’s easy to see why you cannot reasonably expect to get good SEO results without paying for them. Even then, you still reap more benefit per dollar spent than for other forms of advertising and marketing. So the next time you get your SEO bill, you should pay it with a smile, knowing that you’re getting a great deal!

If you would like to have an open and honest discussion about the ways organic search engine marketing may help your company achieve higher keyword rankings, please contact Net-Craft.com today for a free consultation.

Content Source Understanding the Process Behind the Numbers and Why SEO is a Great Deal

Why is it not good to hire freelance web designers?

Everything that is related to designing is an art. To create something, produce or invent is a talent and not everyone has that. The field of digital marketing is fun but tough as well. In the place like Phoenix Web development and designing professionals are not easy to find. Though you think, it is hard; you must not go for freelancers.

Below mentioned are the reasons why you should not contact freelance web designers and developers:

1. They are indecisive and quick decision taker at the same time. Many times freelancer makes you feel you are free to work on your time which will compel you to delay your work and time limits. You do not have anyone to keep you in strict schedule and update you will latest trends.They could also be quick decision takers because they have no one to talk to and they feel what they have done is correct. Thus, sometimes they take decisions in hurry, which are not good for them as well as the clients.
2. Communication is not the strong forte. They do not like to communicate because of pressure created by clients. Clients like revisal and re-revisal and with no patience, one could lose clients. In the agency, web developers do not have to directly communicate with the client which makes them stress-free of that responsibility of talking to clients.
3. It may happen that timely results may not be delivered. As they have other projects to work on, they may not be able to deliver you results on time and with accuracy. Also, due to lack of infrastructure and facilities, they may not be able to deliver what a company could.
4. The agencies do not have only one web designer or only one web developer. It may happen that freelancer web designer has lots of work and couldn't finish it. In the case of digital agency, there is more than one person who could share the work, not disappointing clients.

Hire a good agency for all your web development work. Contact Net-Craft INC. It is a Phoenix’s Web Design and Development company that will work the exact way you want, understanding your requirements.

Content Source Why is it not good to hire freelance web designers?