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.

The load speed of your website has a knock-on effect to many areas of your website, for example; overall user experience, ad quality score, conversion rate, search engine rankings, and more.

Page speed is equally as important for desktop websites as it is for mobile/tablet versions of your website too. For instance, a mobile website that loads in five seconds earns up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than websites that take longer — up to 19 seconds.

Also, nearly 50% of visitors leave your website in an instant if it takes more than two to three seconds to load.

These stats really do highlight the importance of a fast loading website across all devices. SEO experts, developers, and webmasters are constantly looking for ways to improve the loading speed of their website because it can dramatically improve search engine rankings, conversion rate, and sales.

Thankfully, most of it can be done with the help of the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

What is the Google PageSpeed Insights tool?

The Google PageSpeed Insight tool is a free application by Google that analyses your website content and generates actionable suggestions that can make that web page faster. It reports performance on both mobile and desktop devices.

A performance score is displayed at the top of the report, which summarises the performance of the web page you are testing. Generally, a score of less than 50 is considered to be slow. On the other hand, a score of 90+ is considered fast.

Here is a sample report:

How to increase your performance score

Now that we have discussed the importance of a fast loading website, Google PageSpeed Insights tool, and the performance score that it displays at the top of the report, it is time to discuss how you can improve that score.

There are many ways to do that. Following are a few of them:

1. Code minification

Minifying your website code can have a major impact on the loading speed of your website and, hence, the performance score in the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

To understand, your website code must be compact. Unnecessary and redundant code must also be deleted.

Code minification leads to a faster and smaller server version of your file, which leads to improved speed and a better performance score.

You can use WordPress plugins like WP Super minify for code minification. To learn more about it, read what minification is.

2. Image optimisation

We all use images on our websites, and that’s good. Without images, web pages look boring, and the content seems uninteresting.

However, using images may also slow down your website.

That’s a problem that you can at least minimise with the help of image optimisation.

By compressing the size of the images (without compromising on quality), you can use more images without letting them slow down your website. You can either do it manually by using Adobe Photoshop and using a better image format (JPEG), or you can use a WordPress plugin, such as EWWW image optimizer or Smush it.

3. Displaying your content more strategically

Improving the performance score basically means providing a great user experience to your website visitors. This means displaying them relevant content as quickly and efficiently as possible.

You can improve your performance score by making the most relevant content available in the above-the-fold section, so the visitor won’t have to scroll down to see what they want. To make your web page load more efficiently, you should also create your HTML to load the above-the-fold content first before the rest of the elements on the page.

4. Compression

Compression is a simple but highly effective technique to increase the website loading speed and improve the performance score in the Google PageSpeed Insights tool report.

By using GZIP compression, you can simply compress files before sending them to your server. This allows you to increase the loading speed of your website.

5. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

If you are absolutely committed to providing the best and fastest mobile experience to your users, you should try Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

AMP pages are non-cluttered and stripped down versions of your web pages that are gaining popularity rapidly. With the AMP technology, the web pages are loaded almost instantly.

If you are interested in AMP, start with this guide. But before you jump to it, know that AMP has its own set of disadvantages at the moment.

Bottom line

The bottom line is that you will have to increase the loading speed of your website if you want to score better on the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

However, how well your website performs and the user experience it offers are much more important than the performance score at the top of a report. Follow the above-mentioned tips, and you should see a noticeable improvement.

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.

It seems like if you are not on top of everything, you are going to miss out on opportunities. That’s what makes managing the entire digital marketing landscape more difficult.

That’s when you need good tools to help you out. The right tools not only open new marketing opportunities for you but also makes you more efficient and productive.

Here are 6 free tools that may help enhance your marketing strategy.

1. Google Analytics

This one is a bit obvious, but we have to mention it nevertheless. If you are not using Google Analytics, you need to start right away.

Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track traffic and understand visitor behavior on your website. By giving you a deeper understanding of your audience and website visitors, Google Analytics opens doors for new marketing strategies and ideas to test.

For example, you can identify the most popular pages on your site in terms of traffic and engagement and then create more content similar to them. By tracking conversion goals, you can determine which marketing offers are making the most impact.

The possibilities are endless.

2. Google Alerts

Are you sure you are always on top of everything that is happening in your industry?

Searching through hundreds of news content is an option but following this manual path is inefficient and unproductive. Google Alerts automates this seemingly tedious process.

As the name implies, Google Alerts “alerts” or notifies you about anything you want. One prime example is to set up an alert for anytime someone mentions you or your business online.

This could be a backlink opportunity or a negative review.

Acting as soon as possible would be the key here, and Google Alerts can make sure that you receive an email as soon as it happens.

3. BuzzSumo

Although many interesting features of BuzzSumo are locked behind the paid plan, the free version is still excellent for content marketers.

BuzzSumo allows content marketers to quickly identify the type of content that is working best in an industry. Moreover, you can also identify the social channel that is best for sharing a particular type of content.

By using BuzzSumo, you can also identify industry influencers and open opportunities to create backlinks and acquire more social media shares.

If you rely heavily on content marketing, BuzzSumo is a very important tool for you.

4. Google Trends

Sometimes, jumping on a rising trend can be a dealmaker in online marketing. By identifying rising trends at the right time, you can establish yourself as an authority. Google Trends allows you to do that and more.

You can identify the hottest trends locally, regionally, and internationally. You can also search for specific topics, keywords, or industries over a certain period.

Depending on your marketing strategy, Google Trends can be a very crucial tool.

If you know what people are searching for the most, you can become more relevant. More importantly, if you know what people are going to search for in the near future, you can grab that corner of the internet and establish yourself in advance.

After all, the early bird gets the worm.

5. Google Insights

Your marketing strategy doesn’t end with campaigns. You also have to make sure that everything is perfectly optimized.

Google Insights give the necessary information to optimize your landing pages to ensure a higher conversion rate. Google Insights analyzes your web pages and identify the loading speed of the page requires any attention.

The best thing about Google Insights is the report that it generates. The report contains actionable steps that you need to take to improve and optimize the web page.

6. Buffer

If you are looking to automate social media sharing, Buffer is an excellent choice.

Buffer is a social media management tool that allows you to schedule social posts on different social media platforms. The reason why you need such a tool — instead of doing it manually — is that:

1. It makes you more efficient and productive, and
2. It allows you to identify patterns — the best day and time to post on different social channels.

You can use that information to strengthen your content and social media strategy, which will eventually improve the engagement rate.

Here are 5 such tips on how you can improve your brand’s online reputation.

1. Contribute to industry publications (guest blogging)

Shortlist major industry publications and try to get featured on as many of them as possible. Well-established websites and industry magazines tend to be authoritative and can play a huge role in improving your brand’s online reputation.

First, their readers trust these industry publications and the content that is published there. If your brand is featured there in any form, it’s going to help you establish credibility and authority. Furthermore, major industry publications can offer powerful back-links. These back-links not only generate a good amount of traffic, but they can also help you bring your website to the top of search engine pages — which is another excellent way to stamp your authority and build your reputation.

Reach out to the editor of a few publications and see if you can manage to land a guest post. Create interesting, useful, and high-quality blog posts to submit if your pitch gets accepted. The editing process may be exhausting sometimes, but it’s all worth it in the end.

2. Have an online review strategy

In today’s digital world where information can be found in just a couple of taps, you can’t neglect online reviews.

Having an online review strategy has become a core component of protecting and establishing your brand’s online reputation. After all, reviews are often the first thing someone sees if run a Google search for a business. It’s all there on the main page.

The problem is that unless customers are super mad and angry on you, they are less likely to leave reviews. That is why it’s important to have a proper strategy in place.

Provide great customer service and then ask for reviews. You can even initiate a reward system for people who leave reviews. It’s not an uncommon practice. Additionally, keep an eye on negative reviews and do your best to turn them into positive ones.

Reach out to angry customers and offer a helping hand. See what went wrong and where and try to fix it. Once it’s done, ask them to consider changing the review to a positive one.

All of this is only possible with a comprehensive and robust online review strategy.

3. Social networking

One of the most basic yet crucial elements of improving your brand’s online reputation is the heavy usage of social networking websites.

Make sure that you are creating regular content for social and distributing that across all your social channels regularly. At this stage, having a social presence isn’t considered anything special for a business.

However, if you do not have an active social presence, it’s going to leave a seriously bad impression on your potential customers.

You can, however, leverage different tactics to use social media more creatively. Run polls, increase engagement, organise contests, curate useful content, and create exclusive content for your social followers. All these steps can help you become more authoritative.

4. Work with influencers

As of now, you may not have an excellent reputation. However, other people have, and you can leverage it.

Working with well-established influencers can help increase your own reputation, as people start seeing you in the same category. It gives you credibility, enables you to expand your reach, and opens a cross-promotion channel that may lead to excellent new opportunities.

Most importantly, it helps establish credibility and improve your reputation.

There are several ways you can work with an influencer; co-host a webinar, do an interview, write a guest post, or even something as small as them sharing your blog posts on their social channels.

5. Monitor your online presence and reputation

If you are trying to improve your online presence and reputation, it’s imperative that you also monitor every part of it. Without proper monitoring, you may never see the results you are trying to get.

Moreover, without monitoring, you may miss out on some great opportunities. Additionally, it pays to see what others are saying about you and your brand. If it’s anything negative or false, you can respond to them and clear the air. If it’s something positive, you can leverage it.

Perhaps it can become a testimonial, a case study, or an online review (like we discussed earlier in point #2).

The opportunities are endless.