While some online business-owners may prefer to do everything on their own, it’s not a realistic option. If you are serious about growing your e-commerce business, you will have to outsource or employ a member of staff to help with a number of the tasks.

Ultimately, you want your business to work for you — not the other way around.

Besides, outsourcing to a specialist isn’t that bad. It may cost you money, but the results are almost always good if you do it right. You can hire professionals and field experts to handle certain tasks, which may help you with cost optimisation, increase output, and better results.

If you have an e-commerce business that you want to scale, here’s a list of 5 tasks that you should consider outsourcing.

1. Administrative tasks

As an online business owner, you will soon find yourself swarmed by a plethora of administrative tasks. Although some of these administrative tasks may seem simple on paper, they consume a lot of your valuable time. Moreover, if you do not manage to stay on top of them, things will get out of hand very quickly. Instead of lagging behind, you should consider outsourcing these administrative tasks.

Hire a good VA (Virtual Assistant) and assign some of the following tasks to him/her:

• Preparing presentations
• Collecting important data
• Creating reports for key performance indicators and KPIs
• Managing schedules
• Handling travel arrangements
• Making important reservations
• Sorting out important emails
• Running some personal errands that can be done virtually
• File management

Remember that good communication is the key to achieving success in outsourcing administrative tasks. Hire a virtual assistant that syncs with you and has similar a thought process as you do. When things work in synergy, you yield much better results.

2. Customer success

Customer success is something that you should start on your own — at least in the beginning. There are two reasons for it:

1. First, when you outsource a lot of different tasks (as mentioned in the rest of this article), it may take a hit on your monthly budget. Handling customer service on your own for a little bit will give you an opportunity to cut some corners.
2. Second, communicating directly with your existing and potential customers will lead to a deeper understanding of your customers, their needs, and how your business is (and should be) serving them.

As your business grows, you should definitely outsource customer service. Because of your prior customer service experience, however, you will have a solid foundation to build your business on.

3. Website design, development, and maintenance

Unless you are very good at website development — and you enjoy it a lot — you should stay away from it.

Designing, developing, and then maintaining a website can be hectic and very time-consuming. Besides, you should be focusing on growing your business all the time, instead of finding out bugs in your website and then fixing them.

In today’s digital age, there are plenty of ways to find a good website developer or a web-dev team. If you hire an agency, make sure that they assign you a single point of contact. All communication will pass through that source, and that will make things significantly easier for you as an online business owner.

4. Content creation and SEO

We chose to combine these two aspects because they are closely related to each other.

You will require a lot of content. In the online marketing world, content is king. Publishing fresh, useful, and high-quality content on a regular basis is extremely important. Creating all that content requires a lot of time and effort.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is something that requires a lot of monitoring and constant effort. From finding profitable keywords to monitoring backlinks; from optimising (on-page and off-page) your web pages and keeping penalties away from your site, it is a full-time job.

You may take it upon yourself, but we won’t recommend it. After all, a good SEO strategy may lead to a ton of free website traffic. In other words, you can start cutting down on your ads and operating costs — which can eventually be the difference between a loss-making and profitable online business.

5. Graphic design

Along with content, you will also need a lot of graphics for your website. This may include featured images for your blog post, images to be shared across social channels, infographics, charts, presentation assets, etc.

As you may already know that making high-quality graphics is a full-time job. If you start doing it on your own, you will have no time left to focus on growing your online business.

Conclusion

Many people will recommend you against outsourcing to an agency or freelancer, but it does have its benefits. Without outsourcing these tasks, you will find it difficult to grow your online business.

An effective, high-converting landing page is one of the biggest assets for any online business owner. Unfortunately, and unintentionally, a lot of landing pages are designed to lose leads and lose money. With the right techniques and tactics, anyone can optimise a landing page and increase the conversion rate. A simple 1% increase in conversion rate may result in thousands of pounds of additional income — depending on your business and the volume of traffic you receive. What’s the first step to optimising your landing pages? It’s avoiding common mistakes. Here are 4 landing page mistakes that you must avoid if you want to improve and increase the number of customer enquiries.

1. Too many elements

A landing page is a standalone page with only one objective. That objective can be to get more sales, increase leads or to make customers reach out to you via a phone call or email, download of an eBook, and so on. The problem stems from trying to “get the most out of a landing page”, some end up including too many elements. There can’t be something for everyone on a landing page. It must be extremely targeted with a single objective for one type of audience. If you have too many elements, you may confuse visitors and end up achieving nothing.

2. Visitors can’t easily spot the call-to-action

What if you have only one objective but its call-to-action (or CTA for short) is muddled and hard-to-find? That’s an equally big problem. Take a look at the following landing page.

As you can see, there is only one objective and CTA, i.e., to get the brochure via email. But the CTA does not stand out at all. From the positioning, through to the colour and the size of the CTA button, everything is wrong on this landing page. The landing page needs to be designed in a way that makes the headline stand out to convey the most important message to visitors, and secondly direct the attention of the visitor to the call-to-action, once they have read the other information – visitors should not have to search for it.

3. Slow loading speed

The loading speed of the landing page is an important factor for two reasons:

1. A slow-loading website will not rank well on search engine results pages. Google is mobile-first, and because of this, the load-speed of a website is a very important search engine ranking factor now.
2. A web page that takes too long to load will result in bounced traffic. If a web page does not load within 5 seconds, approximately 74% of visitors abandon the page out of frustration. As a result, you lose traffic, credibility and, of course, money.

4. Unappealing, uninteresting, and dull headlines

All the text that goes into the landing page is valuable and must be carefully written. However, the headline has the most importance as it grabs the reader’s attention immediately and entices them to read more. The headline should have the following qualities:

• It should be interesting and very engaging
• Keeping the headline short and snappy is best
• The headline should have clear benefits for the reader
• The headline should also be well targeted, focused on the type of audience you are targeting.

How can you write interesting headlines that help with conversions and sales? Here are a few tips:

• Use the Headline Hacks by Jon Morrow to come up with interesting and proven headline ideas.
• Be mindful that some headline ideas you may come up with could be too “click-baity” (click-bait means headlines that attract people to read, but the content is either unrelated, or is trying to sell you something). If you think a headline might sound click-baity, you may have to optimise it to suit your niche and target audiences.
• Use tools like BuzzSumo to identify headlines that most resonate with your audience.
• Make sure your headline ‘does what it says on the tin’ for website visitors. For example, take a look at the following headline:

With the above headline, you would expect to be able to download 19 work-out cheat sheets – don’t offer something and then not deliver!

Analysing Basecamp’s well-crafted web page

Creating a well-optimised landing page is as much as science as it is an art. You will have to continue testing different elements to maximise results, but some principles stand the test of time. Basecamp has a particularly well-designed homepage and landing page that you should analyse to draw inspiration and get ideas. Here, take a look.

There is only objective on this page: to get users to sign up for a free 30-day trial. Notice, there are no barriers here. Visitors just have to enter their email address and click the green CTA button. It’s as easy as it gets. The headline is interesting, unique, and instantly grabs your attention. The rest of the text is concise and well-targeted. Even the text in the image speaks to the target audience and highlights the problems they face on a regular basis. It’s relatable. Moreover, the page loads in less than half a second. All the bases are perfectly covered for a high conversion rate. Let us know in the comments below what other landing page mistakes you have come across over the years.

Content readability has become an important factor in any business’s online success. The easier it is to consume content the more people would read and share a web page.

On the other hand, online users would instantly quit a web page that isn’t reader-friendly. This negatively affects brand loyalty, traffic, conversions, and search engine rankings.

Here are a few tips that will help you improve content readability and, in turn, conversion rates, traffic, and search engine rankings.

1. Improve your writing

The way you write your content has a massive impact on the overall content readability level. By improving your writing, you can raise that level.

Here are a few tips for improving your writing and increase content readability:

1. Use shorter sentences.
2. Use shorter paragraphs. Nobody likes to read a huge wall of text.
3. Avoid acronyms and technical jargon. You may fully understand the industry lingo and jargon, but your readers may not.
4. Write in active sentences. Avoid passive sentences.
5. Focus on bullet points whenever possible.
6. Use images and videos to keep it interesting.
7. Divide your text into multiple headings and subheadings for an easier reading experience.
8. Stay on point as much as possible.

2. Use writing tools

There are plenty of writing tools that may help with your writing and, therefore, content readability. In order to improve it, you should regularly use a few of them.

Grammarly, for instance, is a very helpful tool that helps you identify grammatical errors as well as improve sentence structure. Although there is a paid version, the free version also does an adequate job in highlighting and fixing basic errors.

The Hemingway App is another online writing tool that primarily helps you improve readability of a content piece.

The best thing about the Hemingway App is that it identifies sentences that are hard to read. Fixing such hard-to-read sentences can significantly improve readability and average on-page time. It also helps you identify adverbs and passive sentences that you can remove to make your writing tighter. With a score that constantly adjusts as you edit your content, it is very simple to improve your writing.

Readable is another tool that you can use to improve content readability. It measures readability on the basis of popular reading tests, such as the Flesch-Kincaid test. It also displays the count for adjectives, nouns, and adverbs to help you identify areas where you need improvement.

3. Edit… then edit some more

Because blogs often demand a lot of content on a regular basis, editing is one aspect that often takes a backseat.

That shouldn’t happen, though.

Before you publish any piece of content, it is important to do multiple rounds of editing — which goes beyond making grammatical fixes. Editing involves a few things:

• Improving sentence structure
• Removing unnecessary words, phrases, and paragraphs that don’t add any real value.
• Try to trim your content. Most of the time, you will realise that you can remove 20-30% of your content without sacrificing any important point of discussion. Do that.
• Axe the adverbs.
• Remove redundancies. You may have repeated one point a couple of times in a blog post.
• Replace technical and complex words with simple ones.

4. Make sure that the website design is immaculate

Lastly, the website design plays a tremendously important role in improving the overall level of content readability.

From white space to selection of font to font size, everything is important.

Make sure you are using an appropriate colour palette. Secondly, ensure that there is enough white space on the page.

Furthermore, select a font that is easily readable. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A simple sans-serif font, such as Open Sans can do the job. However, it should go well with the overall theme of the design, and the line spacing has to be right. Here is an example.

Conclusion

Content readability is one of those factors that may not directly affect a website’s traffic and search engine rankings. But it does have a massive indirect impact on almost everything.

More readers bring more leads and, eventually, increased profits. But that’s only possible with high-quality, better content readability, and an excellent overall user experience.

To make your life easier, we have compiled a list of all the best free and paid-for stock image websites below.

One important thing to remember is to not take images from Google Image search due to copyright infringement – always best to purchase or download stock images legally from the respective website.

Free image resources

• Pixabay www.pixabay.com
• HiResStock www.hiresstock.com
• PicJumbo www.picjumbo.com
• Pexels www.pexels.com
• StockSnap www.stocksnap.io
• Gratisography www.gratisography.com
• Unsplash www.unsplash.com
• Morguefile www.morguefile.com
• FreeImages www.freeimages.com
• GetRefe www.getrefe.com
• LibreStock www.librestock.com
• EveryPixel www.everypixel.com

Paid-for image resources

• Adobe Stock www.stock.adobe.com
• iStockPhoto www.istockphoto.com
• ShutterStock www.shutterstock.com
• Dreamstime www.dreamstime.com

In this blog, we have created a list of all the main information that you might want to include. If there is any other information you feel should be added, then always include this. There is no right or wrong to this, however your main contact information is always a must.

The ‘main’ information is usually:

• Your name as you would like it displayed (if having business cards)
• Your position in the company (if having business cards and if you would like this information included)
• Your office number
• Your mobile number (if you would like this included)
• Your full address and postcode
• Any Social Media details (please send over links to any Social Media accounts you would like included)
• Any other information you would like to include on your stationery, such as accreditations, etc.

If you are having specific items created, consider including the following information:

Business card

• Your logo
• Your name
• Your position in the company
• Your business/office address
• Your phone number
• Your mobile number
• Your website address
• Your email address
• Your social media links
• Any accreditations or registered professional organisation(s) you are a member of – this would be logo(s)

Letterhead

• Your logo
• Your VAT number (if you are VAT registered)
• Your company registration number (if you are a registered limited company or similar)
• Your registered office address (if you are a registered limited company or similar)
• Your business address (where you actively trade from)
• If you are a “trading as” business what do you call yourself? This is relevant if you are trading as something other than your legal (limited company) registered name, let us know what this is; for example: “Joe Bloggs Limited trading as Joe Bloggs Builders”
• Your phone number
• Your email address
• Your website address
• Your Social Media links
• Any accreditations or registered professional organisation(s) you are a member of – this would be logo(s)

Compliment slip

• Your logo
• “With Compliments” text
• Your VAT number (if you are VAT registered)
• Your company registration number (if you are a registered limited company or similar)
• Your registered office address (if you are a registered limited company or similar)
• Your business address (where you actively trade from)
• Your phone number
• Your email address
• Your website address

Flyer/Leaflet

• Your logo
• Key points about your business (information such as the services you offer, any unique selling points)
• Photo(s) or images you would like used on the flyer.
• Your business/office address
• Your phone number
• Your mobile number
• Your website address
• Your email address
• Your social media links
• Any accreditations or registered professional organisation(s) you are a member of – this would be logo(s)

Email Signature File

• Your logo
• Your business/office address
• Your phone number
• Your mobile number
• Your website address
• Your email address
• Your social media links

If you need any assistance with your graphic design or printing needs, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!