Online shopping is getting more and more popular by the day. The money that?s spinning in that industry is becoming almost indecent to talk about, and all signs point to eCommerce threatening to overtake retailers in the near future.
So, if your business dealings are based on eCommerce, things are definitely looking up. Still, that doesn?t mean that you can relax. In the Internet world, things are changing fast, and it?s important to keep pace with all the changes - or you?ll soon become yesterday?s news. While product and pricing are important factors, the fact is that eCommerce relies heavily on the ability of design to attract consumers. That means that, in order to run a successful business, you need to keep up with the trends of the industry. Here are the ones that will be all the rage in 2019.
1. Flat design
The minimalist approach to web design has been popular for quite some time, and its popularity only increases. The smaller burden provides faster loading time, and the simple design makes it much easier for users to navigate the website. Fewer distractions allow the users to focus better, and since the design is not overwhelming, it is more enjoyable for most people. Flat design is one of the things that improve the shopping experience in an unobvious way, which is why it?s been consistently popular.
2. Gifs and short video material
One of the best things about gift and video is the fact that they can show many complicated ideas in a very short time. In a world of instant gratification, moving pictures are a better idea that several paragraphs of text. They are more engaging, take less time, and very often much easier to understand.
3. Negative space
Also called white space, this is simply the space on the page that doesn?t contain any text or pictures. These days, negative space is used as a means of helping the user focus on the information presented to them. It provides fewer distractions, and it?s particularly effective when combined with gifs and videos.
4. Long scrolling
Long scrolling is scrolling through infinite content that keeps loading every time you reach the end of a page. If the content is interesting to the user, it increases engagement significantly. It?s a great idea for online stores because it eliminates the need for constant clicking in order to see the products of interest. On the other hand, it can be annoying for news websites, so use this feature wisely.
5. Voice search
Voice search is gaining popularity and becoming an important part of eCommerce website development. People use different gadgets to browse, and for many of them, voice commands are more practical than typing. Therefore, it improves the user experience significantly. Make sure this feature is available for all devices, to maximize the appeal to consumers.
6. Chatbots
Many commercial websites use chatbox these days. There?s a good reason for that since they?re a very convenient tool for communication with consumers. A chatbot provides them with instant response (remember: the world of instant gratification), and it can direct them to the right contact information if needed. It saves time for you and your costumer.
7. Going brick-and-mortar
It may be a good idea to go brick-and-mortar after you have a well-established digital presence. Permanent stores are not the only option - you can also choose to set up pop-up shops and windows as a kind of marketing strategy. Usually, a good idea would be to have your store attend the events that are interesting to your target group. It also makes sense to open a permanent store in the area where you have the highest number of loyal customers. A brick-and-mortar store provides you with an opportunity to engage directly with the customers. Still, don?t forget - your store needs to be unique, and obviously connected to your brand - otherwise, it won?t last.
8. Splitting the screen
The screen is always rectangular, and after a while, it can get quite boring. Therefore, many online brands have tried to move in a different direction. Diversification of the screen sidesteps the issue of repetitiveness that is often connected to the traditional screen. Today, screens look more like magazine spreads instead of computer screens, and many other interactive features are provided. Asymmetrical scrolling, motion, and other news will keep your consumer interested and engaged - and thus boost your traffic and profit.
9. Reshaping the menu
The hamburger menu is nice and neat. It prevents cluster on the page, and it works as a means of organization. However, fullscreen menus with special effect can prove much more engaging than the hamburgers. Menus are getting less conventional by the day, and they make up for a better, more interesting online user experience.
10. Fun interactions
It seems that users enjoy fun little interactions on screen, even if they don?t really serve any particular purpose. Think about little surprises that you can leave on your page for the users to find. Hidden text or movable objects will make your website more fun, and therefore improve the overall experience. Better experience means more traffic, and that makes for greater popularity of your brand.
It doesn?t matter if you?re starting from scratch or if you have an already established online presence, the design of your page needs to follow the times. This doesn?t mean that you should blindly follow the fashion without any originality. Use fresh ideas, and combine them with the elements that you know for a fact are good for attracting customers - and pretty soon, your business will flourish.
Choosing to use your design skills to start your own freelance business is a lofty goal but can also be a rewarding career. It?s not always easy getting started, but you should find comfort in knowing that if you go about it the right way, you?ll be able to find and achieve success.
Keep in mind that this is a process and you?re unlikely to expand and grow your business overnight. It?s going to take time to prove yourself and your abilities to others and attract new clients. It may be a wise idea to continue working your day job simultaneously while you get your freelance business going before you jump in full-time.
Perfect Your Skill
You?ll be able to find more success as a freelance designer when you take the time to perfect your skill. There?s going to be a lot of competition out there, and you?re going to have to be able to win customers over by showing your services are worth their time and money. These will range depending on the industry you work in. For example, those in the engineering sector can look into obtaining their own licenses for certain work. Altium offer licensing for circuit board design, which offers you the opportunity to obtain a license for a popular design product worth checking out. With this tool, you?ll be able to quickly advance your skills so you?re prepared to handle even the most challenging projects that you may come across.
Launch A Website Advertising Your Services
You can also find success as a freelance designer by launching a website that advertises your services and introduces yourself to potential clients. Include important information such as contact details and pricing, so customers can do some digging around before getting in touch with you. Without a presence online, you?ll be missing out on a lot of potential sales and business opportunities.
Create A Portfolio of Examples
Prospects are going to want to see what you?re all about and what to expect before actually hiring you. It?s a wise idea to create a portfolio of examples of your work so you can quickly and efficiently showcase some of your best outcomes to those who are interested in working with you. Post it both to your website online and carry an iPad around with you with this information so you can show someone on the go.
Be Patient with Clients
As a freelancer, you?re in the business of working with people, so you need to learn how to be adaptable to many different personalities and requests. Be patient with clients and teach them what they don?t understand if they?re acting confused or lost. You?ll be more successful overall when you?re flexible and are willing to bend a bit to meet your client?s needs.
Proactively Market Yourself
Word of mouth referrals are going to likely be able to bring you a lot of business as a freelancer. It?s a great way to get your name out in public and secure more paying clients in the future. Ultimately, customers want to know from other customers what kind of experience they had working with you. The more positive reviews and remarks you can collect from previous customers, the better off you?re going to be in the long run.
Many businesses and individuals out there are advertising using Google. If you are, chances are you?ve created an Adwords pay per click strategy, or you?re thinking of doing so. Many people do this with a set it and forget it mindset - although this actually might not be the best thing to do.
However, before you go right into your Google advertising strategy all guns blazing, it?s a good idea to be aware of the dos and don?ts first. Read on and you?ll get some great advice on what to do and what not to do when you?re thinking of setting up a strategy of your own:
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Do Create Dedicated Landing Pages For Different Types Of Ads
It?s crucial that the audience are taken to a place where they know how to take action and why they should do it. Landing pages are essential!
Don?t Send Them To Your Home Page
Sending the clicker to your homepage is a huge waste of your advertising budget. It?s unclear what they should be doing there and they will likely leave never to return. This is why a landing page with an obvious purpose is important.
Do Learn As Much As You Can About Adwords
Learning as much as you can about Adwords when setting up this strategy is a must. You should know what quality scores are, how they affect the position of your ad, and any associated costs. Make sure you know what makes strong titles and copy for your text based ads so that they can be as effective as possible. There are many articles and videos on the subject, as well as books and Google?s own articles.
You should also research baselines for your industry. As a general rule, you should have a 2% click through rate for your ads, but you may want to change this depending on your findings. Also, make sure you are willing to experiment. Have a mindset that each ad is a test so that you can create the perfect one. You will need to pay close attention to your results so you can make adjustments.
Don?t Set It And Forget It
Setting it and forgetting it may appear to work for some, but you should really be looking at your ad performance weekly. By doing this you can take away the ads that aren't working and do more of what is working for you. However, there are ways you can make this easier. Using smart PPC automation with scripts can mean less work for you and better results overall.
Do Expect A Lower Click Through Rate For Banner Ads
When it comes to your banner ads, you should expect a lower click through rate but more views than you get for PPC ads. They are a fantastic way of broadcasting your service to a larger audience and getting a lot of people to see your ad. Using banner ads is great for brand awareness, so make sure you have a strong call to action there that encourages the viewer to click and see what you have to offer. By offering something for free, such as an ebook, you can get even more clicks.
Don?t Create A Banner Ad Without Doing Your Research First
You should be well versed in how to create a great banner ad before you actually do it. Many people will see these ads, and they can greatly impact the perception people have of your brand. It?s important to remember that banner ads and PPC ads are not created equal. They each have their place for various reasons.
Do Track Google Remarketing Differently To Your Display Network and Search PPC Efforts
Google Remarketing is like the Display Network in that you can display banner ads on participating sites. However, the big difference is that a google remarketing ad will only be shown to somebody who has been on your website previously. This makes people who look at your site more likely to use what you have to offer again. You should make sure that you track your Google Remarketing differently than you do your Display Network and Search PPC efforts.
Don?t Forget To Use Multiple Approaches In Your Marketing
Many people make the mistake of underestimating the power of using multiple approaches in their marketing technique. Remarketing will put your brand in front of somebody numerous times. Banner ads are great for your brand awareness. Landing pages encourage people to take action. Make sure you keep these things in mind when coming up with your own techniques for Google advertising and getting the results that you want!
Making a success of yourself as an entrepreneur takes a good deal of work. Not only do you have to identify your niche with great precision, and then work on optimising your product or service according to the demands of the client or customer, but you?ve also got to manage the various ?small pieces? that keep the whole thing together and ticking along.
Although it may be frustrating, making a success of yourself as an entrepreneur requires a lot of technical sophistication that doesn?t necessarily have much ? if anything ? to do with the particular service you offer.
Rarely is this as true, as when it comes to your website. Being a successful entrepreneur in 2019, requires that you have a slick, sophisticated, easily accessible, and visually appealing website. This is as true if you are a furniture restoration expert, as if you are a web-based SEO guru.
Since your website is such an essential part of your professional life as an entrepreneur of any type ? here are some basic tips for getting an effective website up and running.
Understand the purpose of your website, from the get go
Your website is ? first and foremost ? a tool designed to effectively communicate your services and products to prospective clients. Of course, you also want to communicate those services and products in a way that increases the odds of people deciding to spend some money with you.
To communicate anything effectively, efficiently, and appealingly, you have to first have a very clear idea of what it is you are trying to communicate.
The websites of many entrepreneurs end up becoming rambling catalogues of just about anything, and everything that the entrepreneur in question finds interesting about his or her life and work.
But spare your prospective clients the three-page rundown of your entire back story, the list of things you like to do on weekends, and all your professional experience in areas not directly relevant to your current business venture.
Instead, focus everything around the subject of what it is you?re trying to convey and sell with your current business. Keep in mind; you should not just think about ways of describing the services you offer or the things you do, either.
First and foremost, you should be clearly conveying the ways you in which you can help your clients resolve a particular problem that he or she might be facing. If, for example, you have an in-depth knowledge of software development life cycle, explain explicitly how this knowledge can be used to make your client's life easier, or more fulfilling.
Include professional headshots of yourself
New entrepreneurs are often so excited to get ?cracking? with their projects and business ideas, that they allow their haste to cause them to become sloppy in certain areas.
Often, photographs on newly minted websites, are extremely lacklustre due to this very reason. But understand that the photos you display on your website are not just there to let everyone know what you look like, or to present your best side.
Instead, the photographs you display on your website are meant to underline the fact that you are a real (read: accountable) person, as well as a professional. In order to get the ?professional? part across, it is imperative that you do not use a photo from your Instagram feed in order to sell yourself and your business.
Instead, any photos that you include on your website should be professional headshots, that ? at the very least ? convey the sense that you are professionallysavvy, and successful enough, to warrant having your photo taken by an expert photographer.
This may seem ?shallow? in some regard, but keep in mind that your prospective clients will not know anything about you when you first burst upon the scene. Therefore, they will seek to protect themselves by avoiding anyone whose web presentation looks overtly amateurish.
Go for a sleek, reactive, clean and professional look with your site
Carrying on from the point of ?professionalism? mentioned under the previous subheading ? having a sleek, reactive, clean and professional looking site will certainly go a long way to ensuring that you look like a consummate professional.
The best part about that, is that with the myriad number of tools and services available online, you can easily get a website professionally done up to look as good as that of a much larger company ? at a fraction of the price.
Other than just helping to safeguard your professional appearance, though, having a sleek, reactive, clean and professional site will also make the visitors experience that much more pleasurable, and effortless.
Research indicates that people do not have much patience when scanning websites, or simply when surfing the web, in general. Any mild form of resistance they encounter, is likely to send them in the opposite direction. ?Bounce rate? is one of the key analytics measured by businesses who are attempting to improve their SEO and site engagement. It refers to the amount of time that the average visitor spends on a given page.
It is not at all uncommon for the ?bounce rate? for a page to be no more than a couple of seconds.
Try and reduce, if not eliminate, as much potential frustration as you can from your prospective client's experience of visiting your website. Make sure that the site can be easily and comfortably viewed from a smartphone. Don?t have obnoxious video ads that pop up, unsolicited, and start auto-playing. Keep things balanced.
Touch on your USPs in your web writing
?USPs? are your ?Unique Selling Points? ? and refer to those things that differentiate you from your competition (in a positive sense).
No matter how able you are to paint a picture of successfully addressing a client need, the likelihood is that there will be various competitor companies in your industry who can make the same claims.
Prospective clients and customers are often mindful of this fact, and will look out for factors that can sway the balance in favour of one company, rather than another.
The better able you are to identify, and reference your USPs in your web writing, the more likely you are to convince the client that you?re the company to go for.
Monetizing your blog is something that a lot of people are looking to do, but everyone is capable of achieving. Before we get started taking a look at how you can go about making your blog profitable, it is important to note that this won?t be an overnight process. Your blog is much like a small business in that it will take time to build up a based on regular users and regular income streams. However, there are ways to get started and we are going to look at those now.
Digital Marketing
First of all, as mentioned above the process of making money through your blog requires building up a readership. One of the best ways to do that is by utilizing digital marketing tools to attract people. We are going to look at methods that require little financial input from you, but there are alternative options that you might want to look into that can help you if you want to speculate to accumulate.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is something that all websites should be making the most of and is the practice of making your site have greater visibility online, particularly in organic search results. Organic in this case means unpaid listings on the result pages of Google and co. Some SEO plans can be incredibly intricate, but to get you started we are going to look at just the basics.
One of these methods is by making the most of keywords. These are the words and phrases that search engines will look for on your website or blog when someone searches terms related to your content. You can use free keyword planner tools to help you understand what you need to include on your site. One word of advice is to avoid using too many keywords because this can be seen as spamming by the ?crawlers? search engines send out and thus be counterproductive.
Photo by pixelcreatures from Pixabay
Making Money
Turning your blog into a profit making website is going to be tricky, but so long as you persevere then there are plenty of opportunities open to you. It is possible to turn a humble blog into a website that hires staff and generates significant income, but that won?t be the dream for everyone starting out on this journey.
It?s a little bit like if you are someone interested in investments. The average personal trader is going to make small investments and gradually build up a portfolio. However, a larger business is going to want to use algorithmic trading to make much larger trades and bigger profit margins. In the same way, someone who just likes to blog about film as a hobby can make a small amount of money that will be a bonus, whereas others will be interested in taking their passion and turning it into a business with greater income that allows them to grow.
So consider investing small in your blog to start off with before building yourself up to the demands of trading your words for high sums.
