How to Create a Google Account
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2013 at 2:36:13 PM EST by Richard NorrisOnce you have received confirmation that your website has gone live, the next step will be for you to create a Google account, if you do not have one already that you would want to associate with your new website. This Google account will be used in setting up your Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Your new Google account can also be linked to a YouTube Chanel and also your business Google Places listing.
Below I have summarised the steps involved with creating a Google account.
1. Click on this link
This will take you to the “Create an Account” page as shown below.
2. Fill out the Form
In the “Your current email address" field type in the email address you would like to associate with your account
Create and enter a password
Enter your location, Birthday verification code then accept the terms and conditions.
Once this is done you can click on create my account.
3. Verification
You will then receive email addressed Google Email verification; click the link within it and that will activate your account
4. Finalize
Contact SiteZero Support and advise them you have completed these steps and we will then connect your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to this newly created Google Account.
 About the Author : Richard Norris.Richard is the CEO of SiteZero , an Australian based Digital Marketing Services organization. Richard loves technology and is the Ecommerce evangelist at SiteZero. You can connect with Richard on Google + , Linkedin or at the SiteZero Facebook Page Richard Started his first Business in 1985 and entered the online world in 1998. He’s a bit like “The old man and the sea” of digital Marketing |
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Richard Norris |  |  |  |
How To Communicate Your Message Through Using Graphics
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2013 at 2:35:32 PM EST by Richard NorrisDeveloping a message through the use of graphics can be a highly effective way to successfully communicate what you want your target audiences to understand.
This method of communicating has become so successful that it has made its own industries and professions; today we call this graphic design.
Visually, humans can respond emotionally and judge a specific message through many factors such as the use of colours, letters and even the words themselves. However in order to get the attention for your message, good graphic design must be used.
It is a primary instinct of ours on how well we respond to the use of visuals. Can you remember your pre-school days?
One of the easiest forms of getting us to understand a subject matter, or to learn a lesson, was through the use of visual aids. The same principles apply when it comes to communicating a sales message. Your message has to be clear, but if you are assisted with graphical aids, you pretty much double your chances to the accomplishment of your goal.
Although the process of assigning graphics to your message may seem simple in itself, we simply must understand the psychology of how are brain reacts to certain visuals. If we look at the basics, colours have a big importance when you wish to draw an emotion from a target audience.
See down below at the colour chart to understand how colours can draw an emotion.
Colour |
Emotion |
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Red |
Power, Alert, Strength, Masculinity. |
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Blue |
Intellect, Calm, Trust. |
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Yellow |
Happiness, Confidence, Optimism. |
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Green |
Nature, Balance, Refreshment, Positivity. |
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Violet |
Spiritual, Femininity, Authenticity. |
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Orange |
Vibrance, Warmth, Passion. |
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Pink |
Femininity, Nurture, Playful |
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Black |
Glamour, Sleekness, Maturity. |
The way these colours are often used is judged on the certain target audience you are directing your message to.
For example, if I were to try and advertise a top of the line smart phone I would keep my colours fairly monochromatic with a highlight colour use of either Blue or Green; as these 2 colours promote trust and a sense of calmness.
We would use these colours as the general target audience for smart phones is early 20’s to early 40’s. The use of monochromatic colours also promotes a feel of professionalism and maturity.
With the addition of visual aids, you double your chances of achieving your goal.
Whether you use product images, before and after shots or even vector artwork, you are simply providing an extra insight and more trust into the message you are trying to communicate.
In a modern marketing world, companies may use a company mascot/identity to find a relation point for their target audience. If you have a happy vibrant character talking to an actual audience as oppose to just a slideshow flashing words your chance of conversion would be much higher as you are more appealing to your target audience.
It is vitally important to provide a professional and reliable projection of your company values.
Having a face to your product often provides such trust. Some good examples would be Ronald McDonald (McDonalds), The Paddle Pop Lion and the infamous Polar Bear from Bundaberg Rum. These are all characters with one purpose, to gain attention and to provide trust.
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You’ll see that with most modern websites, a trend with such characters is becoming more and more popular.
It is often the case Vector Art is used, as it is highly versatile to produce a character that can communicate any kind of message with multiple expressions. Not only does it add a friendly face or voice to a product/message, but also it can add a personal and fun outlook to a company, which audiences simply love.
Overall, if you are after assistance or help in communicating a few of your own sales messages, try considering the idea of having graphical aids do the talking.
Having a well-designed presence not only adds credibility to your messages, but you will also find you can gain the most important attribute from a target audience, their trust.
| About the Author : Richard Norris. Richard is the CEO of SiteZero , an Australian based Digital Marketing Services organization. Richard loves technology and is the Ecommerce evangelist at SiteZero. You can connect with Richard on Google + , Linkedin or at the SiteZero Facebook Page Richard Started his first Business in 1985 and entered the online world in 1998. He’s a bit like “The old man and the sea” of digital Marketing |
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| Richard Norris | | | |
Page Purpose – About Us
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2013 at 2:34:36 PM EST by Richard Norris
The About Us page is the most misused page on any business website.
People often just explain what their business does as well as the products and services they offer. Essentially, this is just a duplicate of the home page.
The about us shouldn’t be in any form a sales page but rather a trust building page, a page that reflects the characteristics and personality of your home page.
As I like to call it, the ‘girly’ page. Not being sexist but this page is where emotions and feelings get expressed and the reasons why you do what you do get shared to your visitors.
People do business with those that they know, like and trust. Sharing your vision and reasons for being in business are tools that allow people to trust you.
Here are some ideas for effective About Us pages:
Tell Your Business Story
Everybody loves a story. Here is a perfect oppourtunity to share your business story. Remember to incorporate emotions and reasons why you did things.
Create a Timeline
Coupled with a good graphic designer, a timeline can be an effective piece of content. It would outline the main landmarks along your businesses history.
Staff Profiles
Introduce your staff members to your visitors. Create a profile that outlines work related achievements as well as motivations. Remember also to use reasons why.
These three things are all great pieces of content for the About Us page on your business website. Experiment and find out which one works for you.
Here are some examples of effective About Us pages:
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Nike. -
Coca Cola. -
SiteZero (we had to include our own).
| About the Author : Richard Norris. Richard is the CEO of SiteZero , an Australian based Digital Marketing Services organization. Richard loves technology and is the Ecommerce evangelist at SiteZero. You can connect with Richard on Google + , Linkedin or at the SiteZero Facebook Page Richard Started his first Business in 1985 and entered the online world in 1998. He’s a bit like “The old man and the sea” of digital Marketing |
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| Richard Norris | | | |
Page Purpose – Home Page
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2013 at 2:33:57 PM EST by Richard NorrisThe home page of your business website is most likely visited the most out of all the pages on your website.
For this reason, it is important that the home page has had thought put into the content so as to deliver the best possible result.
A lot of website owners jam their home page full of information so that the multitudes can read their wonderful content.
This action is detrimental to your website success.
Having a lot of information about various subjects on your home page often makes your visitors feel lost and confused. This can be avoided by identifying and following the page purpose of the home page.
The purpose of the home page is, quite simply, to sell.
The way you go about selling on the homepage is the trick. Instead of flashing banners and heavily discounted prices, simply outline the features of your product and business and the benefits that your product and business bring to a customer.
Ask yourself the question, why would someone come to me instead of my competition.
In answering that question, there are a couple of rules.
Rule 1: The answer can’t be price.
Rule 2: The answer can’t be service.
Any business can lower their prices and any business can provide good customer service. What do you do as a business, which no other business does?
It may be what you offer as part of your service. For instance, SiteZero offers three packages around our product LaunchPad. A great way, we felt, to convey the various features of LaunchPad, was to create a comparison graphic.
At a glance you can see the features that are available with the various LaunchPad products.
Another way to convey this is via video.
As long as the content is leaning toward features and benefits the quality of the video doesn’t need to be television quality, but it can be something shot from a smart phone with HD capabilities. Just be sure to edit out any bloopers.
Whichever method you choose, you also need to have supporting text on the home page so that you can get indexed and ranked by Google and the other search engines.
Hopefully these tips have triggered some ideas. But before you go ahead here are some things that we find are best not to have on your home page:
- Opening Hours – if people want opening hours they will go to your contact us page or even give you a call.
- Irrelevant Content – keep one focus on your home page.
- Sales Pitches – This is your home page, not a sales letter or presentation. Think of your home page as being more about brand awareness and selling your brand rather than making money.
- Personal References – Take out any names that may be within your content. Yes it is personalised, but your name isn’t the business. Remember we are marketing the business brand not your personal brand.
If you have any questions, we would love to hear them. Please lave a comment below or fill in this form.
| About the Author : Richard Norris. Richard is the CEO of SiteZero , an Australian based Digital Marketing Services organization. Richard loves technology and is the Ecommerce evangelist at SiteZero. You can connect with Richard on Google + , Linkedin or at the SiteZero Facebook Page Richard Started his first Business in 1985 and entered the online world in 1998. He’s a bit like “The old man and the sea” of digital Marketing |
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| Richard Norris | | | |
Bookkeeping Tips: Staying Organised
Posted: Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 2:26:31 PM EST by MIchelle BaldiTo be an organised bookkeeper, you need to have good juggling skills!
It requires co-ordination, keeping your eye on all the balls that are up in the air. There’s also repetitiveness to bookkeeping which doesn’t have to be tedious. If complacency does set in, it becomes easy to forget all the tasks that are required in a week or a month. This is where a monthly checklist becomes an incredibly useful tool.
As a bookkeeper you are generally in charge of tasks like
- accounts payable
- accounts receivable
- cash flow maintenance
- payroll & superannuation
- submitting PAYG & BAS
- bank account reconciliation
- credit card maintenance
Just to name a few!
By putting thought and preparation into a monthly checklist, all these duties and responsibilities are accounted for, in advance, before deadlines come & go!
So where do you start?
Separate your duties into a weekly format, namely 1st Week of the month, 2nd Week of the month and so on. Now, for each week itemise the tasks that must be done. Here’s a basic example:
| 2nd week of month | Date or Deadline | Complete |
| Process wages on Monday / always update cash flows | ||
| Reconcile Credit Cards | ||
| Accounts Payable due – process manual payments | ||
| Produce P&L and Balance Sheet | ||
| Process any new jobs that arrive | ||
| Pay PAYG Tax for previous month |
Be as specific as you can.
Knowing what you are responsible for, and when it has to be done. For example, if every Monday you pay wages, put it in your checklist.
Don’t forget that every second Thursday you follow up outstanding debtors: it’s in your checklist. If in the third week of every month you have to ensure that your customers’ credit card details are up to date, slot it in.
You might have 200 recurring invoices that will automatically send on the 1st day of the month the minute you open MYOB. Remember on the last day of each month to check any recurring invoices for errors. A good idea would be to add it to your checklist.
Plan your workload for the month, so you always know what needs to be done in each week. Be flexible, add jobs or remove them as you adapt to using your checklist. Among other benefits, your bank reconciliation will prove much easier to keep up to date and you will be aware of issues like accounts that need to be paid as they become due, or whether petty cash is running low.
By having your checklist in a prominent place where you can refer to it daily, you will be aware of payroll obligations before they become due, such as PAYG tax, BAS and Super. Add these tasks to your checklist, for example:
| Quarterly Tasks | Complete |
| Process and pay BAS - this includes payment of GST | |
| Pay super for each quarter & give staff printout of quarterly super with payslips | |
| BAS & Super July - Sep - due for payment by 28.10 | |
| BAS & Super Oct - Dec - due for payment by 28.02 | |
| BAS & Super Jan - Mar - due for payment by 28.04 | |
| BAS & Super Apr - June - due for payment by 28.07 |
Keeping a checklist will see your time management skills improve. Work satisfaction is staying one step ahead rather than two behind!
What Pages Do I Need On My Website?
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2013 at 2:33:13 PM EST by Richard NorrisTo get the right result, you need the right tools.
All rights reserved by kevsyd
Before you go and buy any tools from a hardware store, you first look at what it is that you are trying to achieve.
You can determine what pages you need on your website by looking at what you want your website to achieve; your website’s purpose.
To make it easy to reference, here are some common purposes for websites as well as the pages needed to achieve those purposes.
Ecommerce Website
The goal of an ecommerce website is to get your visitors to buy your products/services.
Obviously you would need product pages, however you would need to look at what method you want your visitors to use to buy your product.
There are two ways you can get your visitors to buy from your website.
Online transactions.
This is ecommerce in its truest form. Your visitor gives their credit card details or logs into PayPal, the order is processed and they are shipped their goods. Fast, simple and gets the job done. This is used by most businesses with off the shelf products.
Order Forms
Not all businesses operate with off the shelf products. Some businesses may have strictly custom orders with no one product being the same. This is where order forms can help.
Linked from each product is a form for the visitor to fill in some basic details of what they require. They then submit the form to which the sales person responds via phone to get further details and arrange an accurate quote. Once the buyer wants to go ahead the order is processed over the phone or bank details are sent depending on what payment options are available.
These methods need to fit in to how your business wants to run and what resources are available to do either option.
Information Website
The goal of an information website is, believe it or not, to convey information, whether it relates to a business or an industry.
The main element that an information website should revolve around is a blog.
This blog should contain the bulk of the information and resources to the visitors.
If the purpose of your website is to convey information, you will find benefit in linking your blog to various social media streams as well as looking to guest blog for other businesses that have a similar target audience to yours.
Forms will also play an important role as you want to offer your visitors an opportunity to get more information about your industry.
Bonus Tip: Have extra information you can give those that ask for it.
Blog Website
Unlike a website that has a blog with one specific topic, a blog website can be talking about a variety of topics within an industry.
A blog website will be focusing around obtaining followers. This is probably not the best for corporate or even businesses but rather for sole operator consultants that thrive on networking with others.
This should be coupled with a newsletter as well to send to your followers.
These are just three examples of website purposes out there and what pages aid in that purpose. If you are unsure about what pages you need to fulfill the purpose of your website please leave a comment below or send us an email. We would love to help you identify what pages you need. Alternitively register your interest in an upcoming workshop that discusses page purpose.
| About the Author : Richard Norris. Richard is the CEO of SiteZero , an Australian based Digital Marketing Services organization. Richard loves technology and is the Ecommerce evangelist at SiteZero. You can connect with Richard on Google + , Linkedin or at the SiteZero Facebook Page Richard Started his first Business in 1985 and entered the online world in 1998. He’s a bit like “The old man and the sea” of digital Marketing |
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| Richard Norris | | | |
