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Weekly Links Roundup – Online Sales Tax, When to Post on Instagram, Growing Your Email List

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

For clients starting an ecommerce site, one of the biggest questions I hear is “how do I deal with taxes?” It’s been a moving target for a long time. WooCommerce has recently started offering integrated automatic sales tax calculations, which might be a very helpful thing. There are also paid tax tools like TaxJar and Avalara if you have a more complex or multi-location business setup. It is complicated for sure, but these tools can take a lot of the effort out of keeping track of taxes.

More info on the Supreme Court’s June 2018 decision to allow states to being charging online sales tax even if the seller has no physical presence in the state, and how it may heavily impact small businesses.

If you’re using Instagram as part of your business marketing mix, have you considered how the time (and day) you post impacts views? Here’s some info on the best times to post on Instagram to increase engagement.

Finally… is your email list (if you have one – which you really should!) tiny? Learn how to make changes on your site to get more visitors converted to email subscribers.

Please let me know if this information is useful to you by commenting below. And let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like to know more about.

 

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

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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 – Creating Trust, Hosting Multiple Sites, Instagram, SSL

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Not just for websites… learn how attentive UX design can help you create trust for your brand across the board (but note how important good website design is!).

How many business websites do you have? If you’re like one of my clients, you might have 6 – and hopefully they’re not using the same hosting account like his sites are! If you do this, you put all your sites at risk. If one gets hacked, all of them can easily be compromised. The best situation is one site per hosting account – learn more about why this is so. And yes, this does cost more, but there are still a very small number of decent shared hosts out there with reasonable prices if this is a big concern. It’s better to pay more than to risk all your business sites going down at once, isn’t it?

If you’re using Instagram for business (or even for fun) and are trying to actively grow your audience, check out these 10 tips to organically grow your  Instagram exposure.

Finally… I’ve written a lot recently about the increasing need to move HTTP sites to HTTPS. Here’s yet another article on how and why it’s more important than ever to secure your website.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Trustmarks, Instagram, Content Auditing, Email

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

You’ve invested in a great-looking business website full of useful, up-to-date content. What else can you do to enhance your site’s credibility? Try using these trustmarks to make your customers more confident in using your site. They include things like security seals from payment processors; using HTTPS for added security; being mobile-friendly, and displaying credible reviews and testimonials.

Do you use Instagram for business? I use it for pleasure (see my photos here) but still found this ultimate guide to Instagram hashtags required reading.

Ever done a content audit for your website? A content audit is an inventory of all the existing content on a site with the goal of determining what to keep, what to discard, and what to improve. If you’re preparing for a redesign this year, this is the perfect time. Here’s a big guide to content auditing that will walk you through the process.

And finally… if you’re thinking about starting a newsletter so you can do something with all those email addresses you’ve collected, you might be wondering which email marketing service to pick. Here’s a review and comparison of Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, and SendInBlue. Just FYI, I used Campaign Monitor for several years before switching to MailChimp and have been very happy with that decision. I have not used SendInBlue.

Friday Link Wrapup – Cyber Monday, Instagram and Popups

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

This should inspire you – read how one small business made $67k off one Cyber Monday email last year (I can hear those cogs turning now…).

The science of Instagram – what types of photos and descriptions get the most likes. Did you know that photos dominated by cooler colors like blues and greens get more likes than those with lots of reds and yellows? (I’m a new enthusiast of Instagram so this is a cool read).

Four ways to use Pinterest to support your holiday marketing efforts.

Finally – do you find popups irritating? Do you use them to build email lists? Here’s great article with some tips on how to optimize the use of popups for better results for you and less hassle for your readers.