But if you’re using a personal email address, or an email hosted by companies typically associated with personal addresses (such as Gmail or Yahoo), you’re doing it wrong. 

This small but crucial detail hinders businesses in ways their owners might not recognize. Here are five important reasons why you need an updated email address. 

It just looks professional

Just like you wouldn’t show up to an important meeting in shorts and a t-shirt—your off-the-clock outfit, let’s call it—you shouldn’t represent your business with your off-the-clock email address. 

A professional email address also builds trust and credibility among customers and potential clients. Your business takes on a life of its own when it has its own email—it’s more than you just you, it’s an organization where responsibility will be taken for a customer’s information in exchange for a product or service. 

Finally, to that point, if you’re trying to project a bigger and more corporate image (as opposed to the potential reality of it just being you in your kitchen, for now), a professional email address is a good starting point. 

It helps boost your brand

Having a dedicated business email address can be a big part of your digital marketing strategy, in a few ways. 

For one, simply having a business email is an important and easy way to keep your company top-of-mind for customers and potential customers. The name of your company, not the name of some other company (such as Gmail) should be present when you hand out a card or otherwise make a connection.

Additionally, when it comes to email marketing, you’ll want to send your newsletters from a branded email address. Over 80 percent of professionals say that email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention—not Facebook, or print ads, but messages directly to email inboxes. You’re more likely to see people opening your messages and responding to them if they come from the company address rather than your personal one. 

It’s inexpensive without looking cheap

There’s a difference between inexpensive and cheap, and email addresses are no exception. 

Sure, it’s free to open a Gmail account and call it “NameOfYourBusiness@gmail.com.” But just because something is free doesn’t mean you should use it. 

Using a business-branded email address isn’t necessarily free, but it’s often close to it. If you’ve already purchased a domain name, the business email address likely comes included in the cost.

It gives you control even as you grow

It’s somewhat understandable if you thought that because your business was just you, that it’s okay to use your personal email address for business. 

But what happens when you start growing and bringing employees aboard? Are you going to give them access to your personal email? 

Giving out business addresses to employees allows you to retain correspondence and keep it going if one of them leaves the company. If they leave with all their correspondence under their personal email, you’re out of luck. Instead, set all emails that address receives to forward to their replacement; or have employees use a general address like “advertising@yourbusiness.com” so you can keep the same address alive. 

If you do come up with a standardized way to assign new addresses to new employees, such as “FirstLast@business.com,” it’ll make it easy for people to find and correspond with the right person—reducing the amount of time needed to forward emails or make connections. 

It may help your chances of obtaining credit

According to the Small Business Administration, one of the ways that lenders and creditors assess the creditworthiness of a company looking for a loan is by looking at their email address. Having a “real” domain will help convince lenders that you are a “real” business with an organized communication system. 

Having and using your business address in correspondence with lenders will go a long way towards cementing your chances of getting the loan you need to expand your business and reach your goals. 

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t be judged by our appearances, just the quality of the work we produce. But we live in a superficial world. And luckily, it’s easy enough to put on a nice shirt  and nice shoes, and/or start using a professional email address to conduct business. This small step can go a long way towards making you successful.

The post Why You Need an Updated Email Address appeared first on SiteProNews.

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve heard some combination of the above buzz phrases. 

Somehow, on top of running your business, you’re supposed to be a fountain of social media content—posting fun articles, helpful infographics, polls, giveaways, and other content to grab the internet’s attention and keep it somewhere near your website.

This is a daunting task, especially if you’re not outsourcing this role to a third-party but keeping it internal. 

If you’re nervous, confused, or just plain stumped, don’t worry. Here are five tips you can use to stay inspired, creative, and productive. 

1. Rework what you’ve already got

Let’s say you’ve come up with a great piece of content—a sprawling infographic that covers trends in your industry, or an informative brochure that you’re sending out to loyal customers to keep your work top-of-mind. 

There’s no reason for your masterwork to remain a one-hit wonder. You can rework what you’ve already created to fit different media and formats. 

Let’s say you created a brochure to send through snail-mail. First of all, you should digitize this brochure and share it on your platforms. 

But you can also give the brochure new life by pulling all the text into a blog post, which can then also be shared. Maybe you want to focus in on one key theme, or statistic, or concept, from the brochure, and turn that into a YouTube video or podcast. 

As long as you make some tweaks to the presentation and actual text so you’re not flooding your channels with the same thing over and over, you’ll find it’s easy to share your content in different formats and still find social traction. 

There’s no telling what form or formats are most likely to go viral, so best to use all of them to the fullest capability and see what happens. 

2. Find out what’s trending on top platforms

Most social media platforms have trending sections where you can see topics that are picking up steam. While some of these topics are flashes in the pan or specific to that day (we’re looking at you, #NationalHugANewsPersonDay), other trends come up consistently (such as #WednesdayWisdom) or reveal a larger trend that will be worth commenting on, such as political news or scientific discoveries. 

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or LinkedIn, you can find out what people are talking about and create content that connects you to the broader conversation. Find topics that you have a real connection with—don’t force it—and you’re more likely to be inspired to create something that resonates.

3. Get personal 

One of the great ironies of social media is that they began as ways for people to connect personally across the internet, and they’ve become, largely, avenues for corporations to push their advertisements. 

To avoid coming across as yet another business hoping to capitalize on the intimacy of the platform, consider using your social media channels as windows into your business and yourself. 

If you have something personal you want to share—a take on politics, a heartfelt memory, a rumination on feeling lazy on Mondays—don’t be afraid to let it out. 

On one hand, if it doesn’t hit home with your audience, your post will probably get lost in the shuffle (and worst-case scenario, it’s easy to delete). 

On the other hand, if it resonates with people, you hardly wasted any energy on coming up with a topic—you simply spoke from the heart (or head) and let humanity do the rest. 

Some ways to do this other than writing blog posts include sharing behind-the-scenes footage of what goes into making your product, or livestreaming an event going on at your office—such as a party, or a visiting speaker. You can either save these for later use or post exclusively to platforms where that content will disappear after 24 hours (such as Instagram or Snapchat Stories). 

4. Crowdsource

There may be no better way to find out what will resonate with your audience than by asking them directly. 

It’s easier than ever to reach out to your audience and get their opinion on what you should cover, do, or produce next. Ask them a question with an Instagram Stories poll; put out a tweet looking for suggestions; encourage feedback and comments at the bottom of your blog posts to see what people think of what you’ve already posted and what you could expand on. 

Ultimately, you’re creating content for these people and like-minded folks who haven’t found you yet. Get their thoughts and see if you can turn their questions, concerns, or compliments into a new series, or at least a funny comment exchange. 

5. Use Google Keyword Planner

When you use Google’s Keyword Planner tool, you’ll see even the slight variations that people use when searching the web.  

While you don’t want to flood your platforms with eerily similar content, it’s worth exploring exactly what combinations of keywords people are using to arrive at your site, and sites similar to yours. You can build different posts and pieces of content around these slightly different ideas to capitalize on the variations. 

For example, articles that are “How to do X” can become “Why do X” or “The best ways to do X.” As long as you provide fresh methods for how, why, and the best ways to do those things, you’re covering your bases and giving Google and social media more reasons to feature your content. 

These methods are all self-perpetuating. There will always be different trending words and topics; you will (almost) always have an opinion to share or a story to tell; you can often repurpose what you’ve created in new and exciting ways as new platforms and outlets emerge. Use these and you’ll never run out of content.

The post How To Never Run Out Of Social Media Content Ideas appeared first on SiteProNews.

Today’s websites are affordable to build, easy to customize, and simple to update if you have even minimal technical expertise. In short: there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a professionally-designed website in this day and age.

But not all websites are created equal. Certainly you see a lot of cookie-cutter sites that look nearly identical and don’t stand out to visitors at all. Even if you hire a professional website designer, you want to be able to provide input on what you want on your website. These tips will help your site stand out against the competition.

1. Secure an Easy-to-Remember Domain

Your domain name (also called URL) is like your calling card to the world. You’ll rattle it off to people you meet thousands of times throughout the lifespan of your business. Would you rather rattle off:

Teds_Fishing_Lure_and_Bait_Tackle.com

Or

OnlineFishingSupplies.com?

Keeping your domain name simple is key. That can be a challenge when so many other domain names have been registered, leaving you with seemingly little choice. Stay away from domain names with underscores or other punctuation that will be difficult to speak or remember.

Use keywords you want to be found for in your domain name, like the “online fishing supplies” example.

And keep in mind there are now more domain extensions beyond .com. You could use .info, .buzz, .business…whatever makes sense for your company.

2. Use Custom Graphics

Stock images of business people are a dime a dozen online. But custom graphics? Those stand out and get people’s attention. You can use custom graphics in a variety of ways:

• Overlay text on top of a stock photo
• Create an infographic
• Design a “follow us on social media” box for a sidebar
• Create interesting and creative images for your site

I know what you’re thinking: can I afford that? Actually, many graphic design tools are free or cheap, and incredibly easy to use, even if you’re not a designer. You can customize your design in minutes instead of spending hundreds of dollars and wasting weeks waiting for your designer to finish.

3. Use a Template…But Customize It

The great thing about web design today is that you no longer have to spend $25,000 to get a great website. There are WordPress and other website templates available for under $100 (and some are even free!) that make your website look professional.

The key with templates, however, is modifying them so that they aren’t identical to anyone else’s website. You can hire a web designer for a fraction of what it would cost to get a from-scratch website to customize your template with your brand logo, colors, images, and copy. Your designer can add sidebars and remove features you don’t need, resulting in a site that’s 100% authentic.

4. Keep it Fresh

There’s no rule that says once you have your website designed, you have to keep the copy and images the same forever. In fact, updating the elements of your website will keep people engaged and coming back.

Put it on your calendar to update your homepage when you have new promotions or announcements, or simply to revisit the web copy and images and make sure they’re still relevant once a quarter.

Your blog is a great place to continually update, and doing so will keep Google and other search engines happy. Aim for a minimum of one article a week. More is better, and will attract new visitors to your site and keep them coming back to consume fresh content.

5. Use Pop Ups Smartly

We’re all familiar with pop up boxes that appear when we first visit a website. While old pop up technology has become annoying (and still used on a lot of sites, unfortunately), we can do better than pop ups that appear every time we click a page and don’t go away when we want them to.

Today’s pop up technology is smart and non-invasive to visitors. You can set a timer so that a box appears after a certain number of seconds or once a visitor scrolls to a certain point on a page. You can set them so that they only appear on a first visit, or only on one page.

Before you discount the idea of pop ups on your website, realize that, if done correctly, pop ups can garner more than a 9% conversion rate! Whether you want to get people on your email list or to buy from you, isn’t it worth it to put a little effort into making pop ups that get results?

Having a website that stands out isn’t about spending a ton of money. It’s about making small changes that impact the impression you leave on visitors.

The post 5 Creative Tips To Make Your Website Stick Out appeared first on SiteProNews.