“You should have an App” ”Don’t go near an App” “Go on Facebook” “Feck Facebook – its useless” “Get a mobile ready website first” “Don’t get a website they are useless” Its Friday as I type this and I am in rant mode. One of my pet hates is when clients have loads of so called advisers who tell them what they think will work for their online business. As meetings progress they have yet another sound bite from John their IT guy, Mary their cousin doing a degree in
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There is often an almost hysterical desire among businesses to get a domain name related to their business to ensure that they get found for the search term. So if you are in the hairdryer sales business you think that hairdryers.ie is the must have product related domain name to help you sell hairdryers online (it is available if you are interested). However this is not the case. Having a domain name that people can remember has some benefit but online shoppers really don’t care about your domain name. They care about the product you are
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Show me someone who hasn’t a budget and I will show you a liar. Whether it be €00 or €10,000 there is a number that is available to market your business online. It is a confusing landscape and hard (often impossible) to work out the costs and also to choose the best company and technical option that suits you.. If you do not work with the Internet and computers regularly you can be completely bogged down with terminology that people throw at you. The Fixed Costs Companies are closing everywhere
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Here are some simple tips to kick start your online visibility plan and get a step ahead of your competition. these tips can be implemented simply and allow you get a step ahead of the competition. Businesses need to be front and center thinking of how they can capture the online market every day with new ideas and approaches that engage with their customers. the joy of most of these approaches is that if they don’t work you can change direction cheaply and move on and try something different. Doing
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As businesses enter in their 4th or 5th year (or even longer in some cases) of working in difficult economic circumstances they may finally be looking to getting online with a website. There are however many options out there and it can be confusing. This may be what held a company back in the past. I have similar experiences when I speak with my mechanic. He could be telling me anything. I nod wisely as he rattles off what is wrong with the car and I hand over my card
Read more →If you work in the Irish market and want an online business then it makes sense to have a .ie. It is important to claim ownership of your business name. Many companies may not realize that for an online presence there is nothing stopping some other business from taking ownership of your brand name with a .ie extension. To avoid this you should register your business name with the Companies Registration Office, It costs €20 to do it online and €40 for paper filing so it is a worthwhile task. When you
Read more →Although we are do not have the wide range of services that the US has online it is generally only a matter of time before we follow what our US cousins do in terms of Internet adoption and add on services. Observe how we now are using Groupon more and more and that Foursquare is adding more services all the time that Irish businesses are adopting (a topic I plan to cover in a post soon). In a recent Nielsen report they reported on how people are not only using he
Read more →Lots of companies are probably waking up to their business planning for 2013 and thinking finally of establishing an online presence. The usual (and wrong) way to approach this is to fire off emails to companies along the lines of this “I am looking for a website for my business can you give me a price estimate please” I get a lot of these emails and to be honest this is not the way to go. Establish an online web presence is a project and like any project the steps are
Read more →All websites have problems and your site is no exception. Listed below are some of the most common website problems that I see every day on business websites. You may not have all these website problems but they are the most common ones. They may not have been your original designers fault though but they can be fixed easily and get your website working for you. Website Problem Number 1: No Contact Details It is amazing how many websites bury their contact details in a sub page called contact or
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