Well have we got some exciting news this week for you?!? Yes, you’ll be relieved to hear that this week’s blog is not about boring old SEO stuff this time…instead, they’re letting us all out of the office!
Next week – Thursday 26th April 2018 – the GT team (well, the larger part of it) will be de-camping down to Bramhall Lane for the Sheffield Business Show. And we’re all a little bit over-excited about it to be honest. Read More
The Grow Traffic team are back in the office after an exciting night at the Rossendale Business Awards. It was a great opportunity to catch up with the local business community, meet friends and make new ones. A couple of our customers were in attendance or up for awards, and of course we got to sponsor and present an award (which was exciting!)
Now in its 38th year, the show is organised by Rotherham MB Council, and held on Clifton Park. It is a celebration of the best of Rotherham, with local entertainers, collectors, and businesses all coming together for one fabulous weekend!
Self-employment is a goal a lot of people have-just imagine not having to answer to anyone, working around your own priorities, and doing things the way your own experiences have shown you are right. It really can be a stress-free way of making a living.
But for many it is not possible to simply give up work and set up a business. There are bills to pay, after all! This is when a side-line business can be an excellent first step.
GrowTraffic are expert SEO consultants in Lancashire and Yorkshire and have seen our fair share of start-ups, and people making real money out of their hobby. Hey, we have even been there ourselves!
We’re going to share our top tips and ideas for setting up a side business.
So you have been running your small or medium business for a year or so and you’re doing well. Maybe you have a bit of money in the bank and want to branch out? Or perhaps you don’t have as much money in the bank and want to grow your client base. Possibly you have just hit that sweet spot of fluency and are craving that challenge and friction entrepreneurs thrive off. Whatever your reasons, you know it is time to grow your business. Right?
Us GrowTraffic folks are SEO consultants, which means we have helped our fair share of businesses grow online (and offline-we can’t help ourselves, we’re passionate!). We have put out heads together and come up with the 5 most important first steps to take when deciding how to grow your business.
So put down your snooker cue, grab a pint of Pale Rider, gi’or wi thesen, and read on to see what SEO actually is and why you need it for your business.
SEO and social media marketing are closely linked strategies, both aimed at attracting visitors to your website through organic means. Most social marketers will know that to do well on social media platforms requires a strong brand presence and high-quality content, which by coincidence, is also a great boon for your SEO. By putting effort into both, you can hope to simultaneously increase organic search rankings and maximise social reach for your small business. Listed here are some pointers that will help you to enjoy the best of both worlds.
For a lot of people, the word ‘freelance’ is synonymous with ‘freedom’ – and it’s not really hard to see why! We mean, you’re not contracted to work specific hours, you don’t have a set working environment and, as long as you have the right equipment, you can basically work from anywhere in the world. (As long as there’s Wi-Fi. Everyone needs Wi-Fi. Obviously.)
But with that freedom does come some tough decisions. Because, without things like a good working environment and some sort of a schedule to stick to, things can get a little bit out of hand – by that, we mean it’s easy to spend a whole day binge-watching a Netflix series rather than working. Come on, surely every freelancers done that at least once!
So, with that in mind, we’ve teamed up with Calibre Office Furniture, a manufacturer and supplier of high quality office furniture, to help you find the best place to work in. Once you get your environment right, you’ll find staying on track much easier. Read More
I’ve got a rule that I don’t do party political when I’m blogging. So I’ll try my best to remain as objective as possible whilst speaking about the Labour Party’s 2017 manifesto pledge to increase the number of Bank Holiday’s to 12 if they are elected.
The reason I feel obliged to get into this debate is because I carried out some research on this last year as part of a campaign concept creation for a certain absence management software firm, so I’ve spent many hours getting a perspective on this.
The basic premise of the campaign was to educate business owners about the benefits of employees taking time off. I believed this would facilitate the creation of a campaign that wasn’t overly sales orientated, but which was well aligned to the core functionality of the product, and which was also contrary to the prevailing machismo of entrepreneurial literature – at least enough to make business owners sit up and take notice. Read More
Well, I’ve had a rather exciting day today, so I thought I’d pen you a quick blog to tell you all about it. I know, I know; you don’t deserve me.
So, what have I been up to that’s been so important? I got a free lunch for one thing, and very nice it was too. Suitably vegetarian. Besides that – and possibly more importantly – I also got an incredibly useful mentoring session on how to make an impact in business. Plus, I met some lovely people too. What more can you ask for on a Wednesday in mid-March? Read More
I’m a little late in telling you about this – mainly because I forgot! – but yours truly has been featured in an infographic published by Invoice2Go. That’s right folks; fame at last!
Published on their website all the way back in December (told you I was a bit behind in telling you!), this nifty little infographic is part of a blog post entitled Supercharging Your Small Business: Top Tips For Starting Out, written by Chang Xing. The post features loads of useful hints and tips from small businesses all over the world…one of whom is GrowTraffic. Read More
Probably the biggest issue the internet is wrangling with at the moment is the scourge of fake news. But this got me wondering if there is some benefit of fake news to SEO and content marketing. Read More
So last week, on 9th November, we had a rather exciting evening here at GrowTraffic. After much build up and a lot of difficult judging (some may call it arguing!), it was finally the awards dinner itself for the 2016 Rossendale Business Awards, where GT were sponsoring the Creative Business category.
Held at the impressively large and well-appointed Whitworth Riverside, the evening was the culmination of much hard work by the event’s organisers, the Valley at Work business networking group, and was the perfect opportunity for Rossendale businesses to come together, let their hair down and celebrate another year’s great work. And what a celebration it was!
But in amongst all the other impressive businesses there on the night was the one that shone out the most for us, the winner of our Creative Business award in fact, the fabulous Kidult and Co. I met up with the girls earlier this week to talk about the business, their success and what it meant to win this award. Read More
It’s been an exciting week at GrowTraffic, because this week was the week of the Rossendale Business Awards where we got to present the Creative Business category which we sponsored and helped to judge.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were busy at GT HQ with our judging hats on busy working our way through the nominations for the incredibly strong category, that was full of exceptional local businesses. This was round one of the judging process and it was a tough call! Read More
Being a freelancer has always been hard work – it requires a lot of graft and dedication to pull off being your own boss and successfully running your own business – but these days the slog is potentially even harder than it was before. Not only do you still have to do all the things that you already had to do – such as all your own sales, marketing, accounts and, obviously, the actual work – but you also now have to compete against so many other people doing exactly the same thing that you do (albeit not as well, clearly).
The reason for this increase in competition is simple; the age of the freelancer has arrived. In recent years, the freelance economy has grown exponentially (so much so, that the freelance economy is now an actual thing) and there are now more freelancers than the human race has ever experienced before. But far from this being a negative turn of events, we at GrowTraffic think this is brilliant. We love a freelancer, so it’s a case of ‘the more the merrier’ as far as we’re concerned. But what exactly has happened to facilitate this sudden explosion in freelancing, and how will it affect the way we all work as a result? Read More
We’re a little bit excited here at GrowTraffic this week. Judging has finally begun on the 2016 R Awards and, as GT are one of the category sponsors this year, that means it’s all stations go here at GT headquarters! We’ve got our judging hats at the ready (Simon Dalley insisted on judging hats!) and we’re raring to go, although with such a strong category full of exceptional local businesses, it’s going to be a tough call.
But I suppose I’d best wind back a little bit first and fill you in on the story so far. Read More
We’re please to announce that the land surrounding our Bacup base is to be planted with hundreds of trees, following an award from the Woodland Trust. Read More
According to the latest search market share numbers released by ComScore on 14th August 2015, Google’s share of the US search market has dropped slightly. Before we all panic and predict the demise of the search giant though, I must qualify that statement by admitting that the fall is not significant; nevertheless, the latest figures do show a loss of ground on Google’s part, to the benefit of its two largest competitors, Bing and Yahoo.
So, let’s take a closer look at the most recent figures and statistics and see what they’re showing us about the performance of the largest search engines globally. Read More
I’ve been a little bit quiet on the old blog front recently because, to tell you the truth, I’ve just been swamped with work (which – as Simon Dalley says – is a good problem to have!) but I wanted to tell you about a fabulous event that I attended last week courtesy of Alder Grange School Sixth Form College in Rawthenstall.
As part of their Enterprise Week for Year 10 pupils, and representing GrowTraffic, I was lucky enough to be able to spend a morning with pupils as a business mentor, offering support and advice for their project on Tourism in Rossendale. Not only did I enjoy myself much more than I was expecting to, it was also really heartening to see such enthusiasm and dedication from all the students involved. Read More
Following in the footsteps of Facebook and Instagram, Twitter announced yesterday that it will shortly be autoplaying all videos by default, meaning that we can now all look forward to many more wasted hours of our lives watching cats fall down toilets or rhinos making friends with lambs. Read More
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