Red Kite Creative

gdpr

Weekly Links Roundup – Great Photos, Free Stock Photos, CCPA Compliance

by

The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Are you a stickler for great imagery on your website to show off your products or services to the max? Or is it just one of those things that doesn’t get a lot of attention – you either have little imagery or use photos you took on your phone? Whichever camp you’re in, the quality of your site images says a lot about your business. Learn why having great images is so important to giving a professional impression to your customers and how high-quality photos improve your credibility.

To follow up, here’s a review of 10 sources for free stock photos that have pretty good variety in their collections.

By now, you’re likely very familiar with GDPR (the European regulations that improve consumer privacy and control over personal information). Now we have the CCPA, the California Consumer Protection Act. CCPA is similar to GDPR but compliance will require you make some additional changes in your website, especially if you have customers in CA.

Many smaller business will not be impacted because they don’t meet at least one of the thresholds, which are:

  • annual gross revenues of $25 million;
  • annually buy, sell, receive, or share for commercial purposes the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households, or devices; or
  • derive 50 percent or more of its annual revenues from selling consumers’ personal information.

However, it’s still a good idea to get familiar with the new regulations because we’ll likely see more of these in the future. Learn how to make your WordPress site comply with CCPA.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Testimonials, Product Reviews, GDPR, Analytics Alternatives

by

The top website and marketing links of the week.

I always encourage clients to display testimonials on their site, if their industry allows them. Testimonials are a great way to influence prospective customers toward purchasing your products or services. And reviews let your customers speak – even if they are not always positive, how you handle negative reviews is important, too. Letting prospects see how you take care of problems is at least as important as the glowing testimonials! Learn more about why you should add testimonials and reviews to your site.

…And along that vein here’s a great guide to adding product reviews to your WordPress site. This is a comprehensive overview with a good selection of recommended plugins, and why you might want to use one of them even if you’re running an ecommerce site with WooCommerce which already has built-in reviews.

If you were in a tizzy trying to get your site into compliance with GDPR last week, you were far from alone. Read this opinion post  on GDPR from the New York Times – it might make you feel better.

Finally… if you collect traffic data for your website, did you know that Google Analytics is not the only option? That’s what I said. Learn about Kissmetrics, Matomo (formerly Piwik) and AFS Analytics. All except Kissmetrics offer a free plan as well as commercial pricing.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Ecommerce, GDPR, Instagram, Blogging, Facebook PYMK

by

The top website and marketing links of the week.

If you run an ecommerce site, you’re probably interested in increasing conversions, right? Here is a post about the 13 things your ecommerce pages need to do just that – get more sales.

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is coming up quickly. Learn how to prepare your site, even if you’re not selling or targeting EU customers directly.

Generally, it’s recommended that a business start with only one or two social media networks to start off. If Instagram is one of your go-to social media locales, or you’re thinking about using it, check out this post on how using Instagram can help your branding efforts.

Getting ready to jump into the big world of blogging? Need some help getting started? Here’s a short but fairly detailed guide to writing great content for your blog.

And finally… Still on Facebook? Here’s some scary stuff: learn how far-reaching FB’s People You May Know (PYMK) algorithm really is.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Facebook, GDPR, Email Open Rates, WordPress Launches

by

The top website and marketing links of the week.

If you’ve considered deleting your Facebook account, but can’t bring yourself to do it for one reason or another (like if you use it for your business, for example), there are still things you can do (probably? maybe?) to improve the security of your account. Take it with a grain of salt, but try taking these Facebook privacy steps if you’re not ready to go all the way.

Speaking of privacy, the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is going into effect in May and will affect you if you do business with EU countries or target their residents for marketing in any way. Learn about GDPR and how it can affect your business website.

If you do email marketing, or are thinking about starting (and you should, because it’s still a high-ROI marketing method) check out these 5 tips on improving email open rates.

Many of my clients were under the mistaken assumption that once we launched their WordPress site, all the work was done. Nope. Here are 11 things you (the website owner) need to do once your site launches (hint: if you’re our client, a lot of this has already been done for you, and the rest was explained during our training meeting).