Open Enterprise Trends

Call Tracking And How It Can Benefit Your Business

With everything seemingly moving online it is easy to forget that there are still some offline business services and tools that can be of huge benefit to your company. One of them is the telephone, and no doubt there are many people reading this for whom speaking on the phone is still the number one way that you close deals and makes sales.

As with everything, modern technology can enhance how you use the telephone and make it more effective, and along with using chatbots, one of the most popular amongst business owners is ‘call tracking software’.

This enables you to track telephone calls and has other features such as recording calls, and most importantly for your marketing, that can help you monitor and assess which campaigns are working with regards to generating calls and which are not.

You can track calls from multiple sources which include your pay per click ads, social media, your website, and offline advertising such as newspapers, magazines, and even radio ads.

To give you a better understanding of call tracking, we are going outline some of the main features it has and give you more details on how they can benefit your business.

Dynamic Number Selection

Quite simply this means having an individual number for each of your marketing campaigns. This allows you track the calls coming into each of the numbers and thus you can see which campaign is generating the highest number of calls. It will also let you assess the quality of lead that each campaign is producing too.

This should enable to massively increase your return on investment for any of the marketing campaigns you are running as you can either switch off the campaigns that are not working, or at least seek to improve them by changing their ad copy for, example.

As it is also showing what the winning campaigns are, then you can increase your budget for them with a view to seeing an even greater number of calls, coming into your business.

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5 Tips for Drafting New Employment Contracts

Employment contracts can be confusing, especially if you’re a new business owner who hasn’t employed many people before. Because of this, it’s important to spend some time getting familiar with the legalities surrounding contracts and how they should be drafted.

Many employers use an employment lawyer to ensure they’re complying with their legal obligations, which is never a bad idea. We’ve also put together the following list of our top tips for drafting new employment contracts to help you get started.

Without further ado, let’s jump straight into it!

Specify What the Role Entails

For starters, it’s always a good idea to specify exactly what a job entails when you’re putting together a new employment contract. Make sure you think carefully about the key roles and responsibilities of the position and how you expect your new employee to approach them. On top of this, speak directly with said employee to ensure they’re aware of their exact role.

Explain Sick and Vacation Leave

Clearly outline everything your new employee needs to know about sick and annual leave. Include information about how many paid sick days are available and what happens if you use them all up. Is unpaid sick leave an option?

Similarly, outline everything necessary about annual leave. Consider how much notice needs to be given, what happens to unused leave at the end of the year, and whether or not an employee can be forced to take leave.

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What are featured snippets and should I be worried about them?

If you’re an SEO beginner, you might not have heard of feature snippets, and you, therefore, might not be optimising your website for them. However, if you’re not then you’re missing out.

Basically, featured snippet is the name given to the small entries that appear at the top of the search results. These include things like the “people also ask” boxes, and the “featured result” at the top of a search page.

If you really want to succeed when it comes to SEO, you need to make sure that you’re optimizing your content for featured snippets. Otherwise, you will be missing out on a great opportunity, and your website will suffer.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this short guide to featured snippets and the best ways to achieve them.

What Is A Featured Snippet?

To put things simple, a featured snippet is an answer that the search engine – be it Bing, Google, or another – has taken from one of the pages that rank for the search term in question.

It is usually framed by a box and positioned above the number one search result, which means that it’s a great place to be. It’s important to note that featured snippets aren’t always taken from the number one search result, which means that there’s a chance to grab one even if you’re not right at the top of the ranking pages.

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What Sort Of Records Should I Be Keeping As A Freelancer?

As a freelancer, bookkeeping can sometimes become very difficult. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t really sure about what sort of things they should be keeping records of and what is unnecessary, which tends to lead to one of two situations:

A lot of time is wasted on keeping records that simply aren’t necessary. This time could be better spent on other aspects of the business.
The records that are kept simply aren’t good enough, which can lead to problems when it comes to submitting a tax return. Most freelancers only make this mistake once or twice.

As you can see, understanding what your record-keeping and tax requirements are as a freelancer is very important.

First, consider how the ATO sees you:

If you are a freelancer, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) will see you in one of two ways. If you only freelance part-time and don’t earn very much, then your freelance work may be seen as a hobby, which means that you don’t have to pay any tax. However, if you earn a decent amount and undergo the freelance activity with the purpose of making money, you will be classed as a business and will have to pay taxes.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to decide how the ATO will see you. Usually, your activity will be defined as a hobby if it is largely for pleasure, if it makes you money to cover the costs of tools or materials, and if it is not undertaken commercially. As soon as you start doing something with the aim of making a profit or on a commercial scale, you will be classified as a business. If you are unsure, contact the ATO for a private ruling.

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Four Myths About SEO You Should Be Aware Of

Mention search engine optimisation, or SEO, to a room full of business people and you’ll see a variety of reactions, many of which will involve puzzled faces, grimacing or even a bolt for the nearest exit. It is understandable, given the vast amount of conflicting and confusing information that exists relating to SEO.

Sadly, there are some elements of this information which are likely to do more harm than good if applied to a website’s SEO strategy, and yet they appear time and time again on SEO forums, discussion groups and social media posts. Some of this information may seem to make sense at first but a look at the guidelines given out by the main search engines will show they are myths.

Myth #1: You Must Use A Dot Com Extension For Your Domain Name

Whilst dot com is desirable, according to Google it is not the case that they prefer dot com domains and rank them much higher than other extensions such as dot net or dot org. It is true that in the very beginning, Google could only recognise dot coms, but those days are long gone.

If you are a local company, seeking to attract local customers then it is more beneficial to select a domain with your country code such as ‘.au’ in Australia, or ‘.co.uk’ in the United Kingdom.

Myth #2: Keyword Research Is No Longer Useful

Many business owners, and sadly, SEO agencies too, seem to think that ‘they know best’ when it comes to what potential customers will search for. As a result, they optimise their websites and backlinks based on this presumption and then wonder why there has been no uplift in visitor traffic.

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Finding A Top Class Web Designer

Unless you have web design skills then it is a safe bet that you need to find someone to help design your website for you. All good and well but where are you going to find such a person?

For a start, you could try simply searching for one in Google. There are two ways you can do this. The first is to enter the search term ‘web designer’ and then go through the results to see if anything catches your eye. One thing to look for here is if any of the results bring up the designer’s own website. If they do it might give you a small preview of what their design skills amount to.

The second way to search on Google is to look for a web designer who is local to you. Type ‘web designer’ into Google’s search box and add your town, city or state. It can be very advantageous using local designers especially if your business only trades locally. They might have an insight into what local website designs have worked in he past. The other advantage is you may be able to meet face-to-face which is always a positive way to build a good working relationship.

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What to Do When That Mortgage is Finally Paid Off

Many people spend a large part of their lives paying off the mortgage on their home. Those who are wise, seek the advice of a financial planner like www.andep.com.au to help them reduce the interest and get the debt paid as soon as possible. This kind of financial planning can mean you save thousands and may even be able to pay of the debt earlier. So what happens when it is finally paid off?

Apart from throwing a party to celebrate, there are many things you can do.

Go on a cruise or a trip
Buy something you always wanted
Enjoy being debt free
Keep on paying the same amount of instalments into a savings fund

After spending 20-30 years paying the mortgage off, if you’ve been able to still live comfortably during that time, paying the same amount into a savings fund shouldn’t really worry you. At least you’ll still have it as your own money rather than seeing it all go to the lender. When you consult with a financial advisor, they will be able to advise you on the best way to invest that money to grow your wealth.

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Why a Lawyer is Essential for Your Business Sale Agreement

No matter whether you are buying or selling a business, the sale agreement is the document that the whole deal will pivot on. It is essential to have your lawyer draw it up if you are selling, and if you are the business buyer you will certainly need to have the document assessed by an experienced digital agency or a solicitor to ensure everything is above board and legally correct.

There are many ways you can be scammed when purchasing a business, but a lawyer will be able to pick up on anything that is not right or even a bit suspicious and check into it. Here are some of the problems lawyers can catch.

Hidden debt. Sometimes a business owes people lots of money and when you are buying it, you can become responsible for all the debt. This can become a crippling obstacle standing in the way of those profits you expected. A lawyer can go through the document and add a clause that makes the sale legal only if there are no outstanding debts.
If you are purchasing a business, the lease is an important part of it, unless you are planning to re-establish in another location. A lawyer can look at the lease and tell you whether it is favourable or needs some clauses added to it so you can continue to trade in the way you planned.

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The Importance of Dress Sense in Business

Dress sense is not something difficult to achieve once you understand what it includes. Being well-dressed in business will help you to gain the respect and position you deserve. Some people choose to enhance their looks with Botox injections; others choose to make the most of themselves by choosing styles and colours that suit them.

Both are good choices, as Botox treatment can eliminate ageing wrinkles from your face and can also be used to prevent underarm sweating which will ruin any kind of outfit you wear. Men especially, are prone to sweating and those white or blue business shirts certainly show up the wet patches. You also have to think of body odour when you sweat excessively.

Why colours are important

No matter if you’ve bought the most expensive and elegant outfit for work, wearing the wrong colours can make certain skin types look sallow or pale and that often makes you look as if you are unwell. That’s not the impression you want to give the boss or anyone else you have to deal with in business.

Wearing colours that suit your skin type will enhance your looks and make you more attractive. Knowing you look your best gives you more confidence. When you have confidence you relate better to others and this can certainly give you an edge over the competition in the workplace. When management sees that customers are happy dealing with you, they’ll be more likely to give you a promotion or a pay raise.

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Web Design Mistakes by Small and Medium Enterprises

Small and medium enterprises make a few common mistakes when they have their websites designed for the very first time. Although an experienced web designer would point out those mistakes to you during the development stages, it is important that you know which web design mistakes to avoid as a business owner. The following common mistakes should be avoided at all costs:

Not Having a Clearly Defined Target Market

The worst thing you can do as a business owner is not define your target market in the early stages of the web design process. The colour scheme, the fonts, images, usability, and all other elements of the design are dictated by who you are targeting. If you do not tell the web designer a clearly defined target market, and tell them to make a design that caters to everyone, you will end up with a design that caters to no one.

Flashy Design and Clutter

Some business owners go for flashy designs and try to put too much information on a single page. You do not have to utilise each and every inch/cm available on the page. If the web design is not pleasing to the eye, if there is a lot of clutter and flashiness, you might lose an average user to your competition.

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How to Choose a Digital Agency

Once you have decided to get your company’s website up and running you will need to choose a digital agency to help you with the many elements that are essential for success. It is important to think carefully about what your business needs so that you can choose the best agency – one that you will be able to work with, that has the skills needed for your particular business.

Find out what they offer

Not all digital agencies offer the same things. One might only design and implement websites and not do any social – or other – marketing. Another may perform SEO but nothing else. You need a digital agency to have the skills required for your business so it is vital to speak with them first and find out exactly what they offer.

Choosing the right professional digital marketing agency is somewhat like choosing the right builder. If you want a high-end home built, you would not choose a project builder who prefers to erect cheaper homes, or vice versa. Once you have found several builders, you choose 3 and ask for quotes. So you can do a similar thing when choosing a digital agency.

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Why You Need an Experienced Property Lawyer to Lease Commercial Premises

Starting up a new business? One of the main things you need are premises from which to run it. You won’t generally want to buy such premises as that would be very costly. Leasing commercial premises is the usual way to find a good home for your enterprise. However, don’t go in and sign a lease unprepared. Unless you know a lot about leases there are too many things that can work against you. Consulting a well known lawyers list list such as www.lawyerslist.com.au and then hiring an experienced property lawyer to examine the contract and make any necessary changes is the best way to go.

A lease that is drawn up by the landlord will ensure that all his or her needs are met, but may be rather light on what the lessee needs. If you have never leased before, you will most likely be unaware of what these needs are. And often the legal language is confusing, so you may not understand exactly what is meant by some terms or clauses.

Here are some of the things that can happen when you sign a lease without really knowing what it contains.
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How to Get the Best Out of Your Adwords Marketing Campaign

Once you have decided to dip a toe into the waters of an adwords marketing campaign you will need to do everything possible to ensure success. Unless you have a large budget, you may be concerned about what adwords will cost. If your budget is low, here are some tips to help you.

Don’t aim for those high ad positions. Most people think the top three ads are the place to be as they will convert best. However, analytics show that this is not true. Often, the lower positions get better conversions. Experts have found that many people who click on the top ads do so on impulse, rather than because they are looking for something specific with the intention of following through.
Long tail keywords are your friends. For a start, they are much more specific and will attract people who actually want what you offer better than if you used a general, single keyword with a broader meaning. For instance, “Perth dentist” is a more specific keyword than “Dental Clinic”. It is much more likely to attract people who want a dentist in Perth CBD, so your ad is more targeted and hence, more successful.
Create a separate campaign for broad, popular keywords. These can be a drain on your more specifically targeted ads if lots of people click on them quickly and use up your daily budget before the other ads get a chance to show.

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Why You Need a Corporate Lawyer for Shareholder Disputes

There are many different kinds of shareholder disputes and the best way to solve them is to consult with commercial lawyers. A lawyer will be able to see things with an impartial eye and help you negotiate through what is often a painful maze to get the best outcome for you and for the company. So what kinds of disputes can happen if you own or are a director of a company?

Here are just some: –

Disagreement over the direction the company is taking
conflict of interest if you or any other director has an interest in another business
Poor performance from a director or a shareholder
Disputes can arise if the directors or board members are paying themselves high wages instead of paying shareholders
Disagreements between partners for various reasons.

If you are an owner, it is wise to be prepared to handle disputes in advance so that you can get on top of them immediately rather than letting them drag on or escalate, neither of which will do the company any good.

A corporate lawyer can set up an agreement as to the steps you will take if and when a dispute between any parties happens. Having a legal agreement will ensure that the dispute is settled quickly.

It may prevent the need – and cost of – going to court to settle. Mediation by a neutral party can ensure that a fix that is agreeable to both parties is found. This may be that the aggrieved party is bought out by the others at a fair price.

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Company Structure – Why You Need an Experienced Corporate Lawyer

Many people dream of of setting up their own business without really looking into it. While you may have special skills that would make a great business, you also need to know a lot about setting up and running it. In fact, you really need an experienced corporate lawyer to help you set the company up in the first place. Why?

For a start, there are four different business models, so which one is best for your business? What you choose can have a big impact on things like insurance, tax, asset protection and even legal costs. Rather than choose a model that suits you at the moment, you have to include your future vision for the business and ensure the model you choose will still be right for it when you expand.

Your business may even take a different track that you hadn’t thought of, into the future. If the business model is inflexible, you face all the costs and hassle of changing over to one that suits your plans better. It is a wiser course of action to be guided by a property lawyer, who will ask the right questions to get you thinking about the future of your business.
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How a Litigation Lawyer can Help You

Have you been injured at work or hurt in a car accident that was not your fault? If so, a litigation lawyer can help you. Most likely, the last thing you want to do is appear in a court of law and be questioned by lawyers who will do everything in their power to make you look bad or as if your injury is not as bad as you say it is.

That would be bad enough if you were well, but recovery from a bad injury can take many months and make you feel unable to face up to emotional struggles. The trouble is that you only have a few months to start such proceedings, after which you cannot claim any compensation. But with a litigation lawyer you can get compensation without even having to appear in court yourself.

They do everything that is necessary, from telling you which doctors to go to for assessment and examination to appearing in court on your behalf to negotiate with the insurance company the amount they believe is the right compensation. Continue reading “How a Litigation Lawyer can Help You”

Differentiating Between Branding and Logo Design

To get the best logo design for your business, it is important to know the differences between branding and logo. Some people think of them as being the same thing, when in fact, they are not. The terms cannot and should not be used to mean the same as each other. This is confusing because if you think of branding as the same as logo design you will be leaving many important elements out of the equation.

So what’s the difference?

Branding is about the identity of the business. It is the corporate image as perceived by the public that includes information about the vision, aims and goals of the company. As such, emotion plays a big part in branding.
Identity forms a part of this but consists mainly of the visual aspects from the overall brand.
A logo is a way of identifying that business by the use of an icon, thus logo design will have elements that reflect the important parts of the business. These elements may be text, colour, shape and even animation, but the design does not necessarily need to have every element.

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Why You Need a Will

Many people put off making a Will until it is too late, while others don’t think they need one. However, if you have property – and this includes superannuation – you need a Will to ensure it is distributed properly after your death. Dying without a Will only makes thing more difficult for your family and it costs a lot to have the court decide who should benefit from your assets. This cost will be taken out of your assets, so your family will get much less than otherwise.

The trouble with an old Will

You may have made a Will years ago and think that is the end of the matter, but just like many things in this life, a Will may need to be upgraded or rewritten. If you divorce and/or remarry, your current Will is no longer of any use as it is not considered valid. At least, that’s how it is in Western Australia. So a new Will must be made to take into consideration your new circumstances. Then again, if your Will was made when you were younger and you now have more children or grandchildren that have not been mentioned, you may want to rewrite your will to include them.

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Seth Godin Asks : Are you a Marketing Wallflower?

Always a favorite marketing guru around here, Seth Godin has a quick quiz with a surprisingly telling answer. Instead of trying to win over the whole world, you should aim for a select niche of customers.

True, you might have a smaller customer base as a result – but you will have greater loyalty amongst those few. Let’s take a glance at some fields where this works:

The “Twilight” fiction franchise – The majority of people just don’t get excited about vampire stories. So what? This series appealed to tween / teen girls with a vivid and somewhat macabre imagination. And now they’re rolling in the dough.
Ethnic restaurants – Sure, not everybody likes (or even understands) Mediterranean food. So what? When you want falafel, hummus, and babaganouch, you just aren’t going to get that appetite satisfied at McDonald’s.
Hot Topic – The mall-based clothing and gift franchise focuses on the “Goth” and “punk rock” demographic. The rest of the teens head for more traditional fare, but the headbangers and rivitheads all flock here.

Eight Mean Jabs at Internet Explorer

Web designers, why, oh why, do you hate poor little Internet Explorer so much? It seems almost like it did something to you. Did a web browser bully you as a kid? Oh well, whatever the founding incident was, it’s good to see you all working your aggression out with these hilarious images…

IE fails on Jeopardy – We don’t even know how it qualified for the show
Microsoft tries to make it up to us – And fails, because it fails everything.
Microsoft’s error report process – Apparently they get a lot of duplicates?
Four web browsers at a drive-thru – And I want to go to this restaurant!
Browser-tans line-up – Apparently IE is a “butterface”.
The only reasons to use IE. – …and it’s a short list.
A Spanish example – Because IE is so hated, it gets insulted in every language!
Bonus buck! – A whole website dedicated to beating the death drum for IE.

O’Reilly Webcast On HTML5

O’Reilly is putting on a webcast titled “10 things every web developer, designer (and manager) should know about HTML5 “. If you didn’t catch it in person, there’s always the YouTube archive.

But this is without a doubt one not to miss. HTML5 is sweeping the Internet. Both the desktop and mobile platforms are looking at the day when they need to upgrade their website code base to be up to date with the current web technologies.

While it’s of course true that old websites will still function in HTML 4.1 and XHTML, web owners will want to stay competitive. And adoption is happening with surprising speed.

YouTube
Why HTML5 O’Reilly Breakdowns?

OpenGL and 3D in HTML5: an O’Reilly Breakdown

What Do We Wish For From Santa Google In 2012?

Assuming there *is* a 2012, that is, what with all the hugger-mugger about the Mayan calendar and the usual end-of-the-world predictions. Matt Cutts, Google blogger, asks for our 2012 wishlist. Oh, we could think of a few – but we’re going to think really off-the-wall:

A way to invert search results. So the lowest-ranking pages show first. Hey, sometimes we want to find out what the Z-list has to say!
A way to turn off second-guessing and mutations. Dangit, there was a time when you could type in anything and Google would only show pages that contained every single one of the words you’d typed in exactly as you’d spelled them. Oh, how we miss those times.
Bring back cache-view. In fact, make it automatic for every page – when a website is down, we want to just read what we came to find out and move on.
Better image search? We know, this is a developing field. We can’t wait for the day when we can find the bloke who stole our image even when he ran two filters on it and scaled it down.
How about using regular expressions? Yes, we know, most users would scream in terror, but those of us techies would love to be able to narrow searches down by clicking a regexp switch.

Told you these’d be out there!

Will Search Engines One Day Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

We were scanning this fascinating write-up over at SEOMoz about “author/agent rank” when this thought occurred to us. See, the idea is that as social media gets more sophisticated and more data is tracked, search engines could learn how much weight to give an individual’s opinion based on their past web activity.

This is different to say a smart autoresponderinstead of a business responding to negative Facebook complaints, which while it can work automated – is a lot more personal being human written. Now imagine Google’s search database plugged into a Rogerian psychoanalysis script, similar to “Eliza“.

Maybe a conversation would go like this:

“Eliza, I’m torn over my girlfriend. We have a lot in common, but we just don’t seem to click.”

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