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Articles by Stacey MacNaught
Why Is It Important To Set Realistic Goals?
As a track and field runner in school, every year I would sit down with my coach and set a series of goals for the season. Once we had set my goals for the year, we would create a training plan so I could achieve those targets. This helped me answer the main question here: “What are SMART goals?” Before I got a coach, I used to run aimlessly with no plan, no target races. More often than not, I would end up injured and find my season ending after achieving very little.
Why You Need To Take A Break From Work For Good Productivity
Learning how to avoid burnout is important for just about anyone with a job. Over time, work that we used to enjoy can become stale or overwhelming. This often happens when we move up in our career and find ourselves with more work or a routine that feels the same each day. The feelings of exhaustion and frustration that follow are typical of burnout.
How To Motivate Yourself When You Are Overwhelmed in Life
How often have you had these kinds of motivation problems? Struggling to get up early to exercise… Too tired to work on your side-business after work… Not being “in the mood” to write your forever-in-draft-mode novel… What’s even worse is that this feeling of “I don’t want to do anything” puts your goals on the back burner. And in many cases, they stay there till you gain the motivation to take action on them. But many times, that ends up being weeks, months, or even years into the future.
How to Focus on Goals and Get Rid of Distractions
Change begins with the hope of what’s possible in your life, as hope leads to a sense of expectancy. Combine this with setting short-term goals, and the likelihood of being happier and more successful moves from possibility to reality. Short-term goals, when created with well-formed criteria, offer incremental steps towards successfully achieving your bigger goals.
Marketing a business in the cycling industry - BikeBiz
Put simply, a marketing strategy is the plan of action behind achieving your goals. Making a plan will help you market more effectively. A good plan will identify a variety of activities including the content you’ll create, the medium and frequency you’ll share and the events you’ll attend, to name just a few. A thought-through and researched plan will give you clear direction and make success much more likely than a haphazard, knee-jerk reaction to marketing.
The online opportunities for IBDs - BikeBiz
By Stacey MacNaught, founder of SEO agency MacNaught Digital The future of retail is unpredictable. COVID-19 was the final nail in the coffin of many large high street brands in recent months. And it’s no secret that brick and mortar retail has been struggling in many areas for some time. So as IBDs, a solid safety net is likely to be available in the form of a performing website – a website that can generate revenue even on the days when the shop is quiet. But it comes with its challenges.
BikeBiz August edition is now available - BikeBiz
Rebecca Morley 5th August 2020 Business, Highlight The digital edition of BikeBiz August is now available – and we’re celebrating our 175th issue. This month we focus on positive evolution, innovation and ambition throughout the cycling industry, including Raleigh UK’s new chapter, the rise of e-cargo, Velorim’s National Bicycle Tyre Recycling scheme and why 3D printing could be the future of custom carbon bike building.
How to Get Your Customer's Attention With a Single Word
Most of us will answer to our names by the time we're just a year old. And even as a young child, nothing had the power to stop me in my tracks like my Mother using my name in a tone that told me I'd done something wrong. On the flip side, I also remember clearly the way she said my name when I'd done something she was proud of - a tone she still uses today when I'm well into my thirties. I'm sure it's the same for many of you.
This 2 Minute Trick Will Make You Likelier to Achieve Your Goals
How are you doing with those New Year Resolutions? If you're like most people, they'll be falling by the wayside by now. It is thought that just 9 percent of us succeed with such resolutions. In other words, 92 percent fail. And it's not just at New Year we set goals for ourselves that we often don't achieve. In 2013, I set out to write 500 words every single day for a month (even if they would never be published anywhere). I made it to day six before missing one. And then I read Cialdini's Influence.
Need Great Ideas? Ask Your Team for Bad Ones
Ideas are priceless in business. Whether it's a solution to a problem, ideas for marketing campaigns or incentives to keep staff morale up, getting ideas flowing from your team is important stuff. But it's challenging. Brainstorming is, frankly, painful at times. There are the awkward silent ones where nobody speaks up. Then there are the sessions where only one person contributes.
Amazon Is Stealing Your E-commerce Business: 3 Things You Can You Do About it
As an Amazon Prime customer, I'm one of millions of shoppers who has done the majority of their Christmas shopping on that single site this year. Well, frankly, I like the fact that my payment details and address are stored, Amazon knows what I like and what I've been looking at, I can check out with a single click and the item will be at my door less than 24 hours later. If I lived in a bigger city, I could have it on my doorstep within a couple of hours.
Want to Make More Sales? Tell Your Customers You're Too Busy to Deal with Them
Infomercials are my guilty pleasure. The marketer in me loves watching persuasion techniques at play but I also get a lot of joy from watching the more creative sales pitches for the less inspiring products. There's a real science to the scriptwriting for infomercials, with the best scripts being a smart combination of persuasive and engaging. "Operators are waiting. Please call now," was a familiar line used on infomercials for all sorts of products.
3 Simple Tactics to Uncover Insights About Your Customers in Only a Few Minutes
As a child in the late eighties and nineties, I have a distinct recollection of market research companies calling the house to try and convince either my Mother or my Grandmother to take part in a survey. If the former answered the phone, they had no chance. If, on the other hand, my Grandmother answered, she would generally indulge them. They'd want to ask a series of questions on behalf of a big business.
Eight expensive content marketing mistakes
Is your content marketing struggling for attention? When you’ve invested time, money and effort into a campaign you thought would explode, where does your post-mortem begin? It’s an issue that all involved in content marketing will face. Perhaps you’ve already got the battle scars (and the shake-inducing memories of that campaign that went wrong), or maybe your moment of terror is unfolding right now. We’ve pulled together eight of the most common mistakes we’ve seen.
4 Quick and Easy Tools to Help You Uncover Hidden SEO Opportunities on Your Website
I'm a firm believer that great SEO is an on going process that involves continually investing time into uncovering problems and opportunities. I think even amazing websites always have the space to improve and there are hidden keyword and link acquisition opportunities everywhere. A great SEO team uses a combination of tools to cut the time invested in manual and laborious tasks, allowing them to focus in analysis and coming up with solutions - the elements that require human input.
SEO in 2017: 3 Things We Should Expect
It's almost time to put the Christmas tree up, which means the arrival of the inevitable 2016 reviews and 2017 predictions pieces. What to expect from SEO will be something many practitioners in the field will disagree on. So here's what I expect to see from the SEO industry over the course of the next 12 months: I expect that we'll see mobile sites improve driven by the SEO departments or agencies behind business marketing.
The Single Word That Could Make You Instantly More Persuasive
The ability to be persuasive is incredibly valuable. I'm not just talking about in your personal life, of course. But professionally, persuasion is critical to business negotiation, to elements of HR and people management and also to team collaboration and marketing.
4 Golden Rules to Live by in your Content Marketing
There's more budget being allocated to content marketing than there ever has been. We're seeing more creative content and projects that push boundaries from a design and technical perspective. And ultimately, competition has never been as fierce for the attention of your audience. Bigger budgets is great for those of us working in this field. It allows more freedom to create compelling assets and promote them.
How Changing Your Parking Space Could Make Your Whole Work Day Better
I experiment with a lot of productivity tips and tricks. I'm borderline obsessed with finding ways to get more out of the day, but it was an accidental change that had the biggest impact over the past three months. Our morning commutes can have a notable impact on our day. A stressful start and it can put you in a bad mood before you set foot in the office. And it was a day like that when I accidentally stumbled upon a small change that would improve my days.
How a Small Group Meet Up Turned into the World's Biggest Search Marketing Conference
In September 2016, BrightonSEO welcomed 3,500 search marketers to the Brighton Conference, making it the biggest specialist search marketing conference in the world. But its origins are far smaller than the huge Brighton Centre venue the event now calls home. As with many an idea, BrightonSEO was born out of a conversation over a drink in a bar as founder and chief organiser, Kelvin Newman, explains: "Me and some other SEOs were talking in a pub.
3 Simple Tricks to Get Quieter Team Members Voicing More Ideas
Brainstorming is not the only option for generating ideas and, in fact, traditional brainstorming could be stifling the quietest people in your team. I've found myself in many a session of five or six people where only the most confident one or two actually ever speak up and share ideas. There are ways to tweak brainstorms to make them friendlier for more introverted members of the team, of course.
Cut Your Hours and Get More Done With These 4 Small Changes
Working smarter doesn't necessarily mean working longer hours. In fact, working hugely inflated hours could be completely counter productive. Many of us waste time during the working day without even realizing it. And by making small changes to cut the waste in your day and enhance your productivity, you could actually get more done in less time. Here are 4 relatively small productivity enhancing changes you can make to how you work right now.
9 SEO Interview Questions to Weed Out the Weakest
Recruiting the right SEO candidate is tough. While there are plenty of entry level candidates on the market, many with useful skills and education, finding an experienced recruit who's going to do a good job is far from easy. The magnitude of the task is increased if the hiring manager doesn't have SEO experience - as is the case in many businesses. But these are often really important recruits. Get it wrong for an in house hire and at best, you'll make little or no progress.
Forty Winks at Work: Why Napping on the Clock is Great for Business
Next time you update the fixtures and fittings in your office, you may want consider adding somewhere for your team to enjoy a nap. It may well be counter intuitive to invite your employees to spend time on the clock catching up on their sleep. But there's a surprising amount of research to suggest forty winks at work can have a positive impact on both worker and employer. As humans, we're at our most creative when we're in a state of relaxation.
6 Slideshare Decks to Make you a Better Speaker
Public speaking and presenting at conferences isn't for everyone. Personally, I get a real kick out of it and enjoying meeting like-minded marketers at conferences. But it's not without its pressures. A conference audience has demands. Hundreds, or even thousands, of people have often paid good money for a conference ticket with the expectation of walking away inspired or with practical advice they can implement back at the office the next day.
Successful Remote Workers Share Their Productivity Secrets
Remote working is more accessible to both employees and the self employed than ever before. This is largely due to an improvement in technology and tools, enabling employees and consultants to work from wherever in the world they may be with ease. For the remote workers themselves, this affords an opportunity that previous generations rarely had: to be able to travel and work at the same time. It no longer has to be one or the other. There are huge benefits for employers too.
iOS or Android: Which Platform is Right for Your App?
So, you’re developing a mobile app? You have a concept. You have done some market research and believe there’s a place for your app. You know how you’ll market it and have a solid plan to monetise it. You have the budget for just 1 native platform at this stage. So which one do you choose? If you consider just one factor in this decision, make it this one: It’s easy to look around the table in one of your company ideation sessions and take a vote based on the devices you all own.
Don't Believe the Hype: The Myths You're Being Told About Today's SEO
The SEO landscape has changed phenomenally in recent years. Since I started in the industry 7 years ago, my day-to-day activities have completely transformed. The way it was could be summed up quickly: · Get your target page in order (relevant title, keywords in the copy etc) · Acquire a large volume of (often anchor text rich) links to that page Acquiring links could often mean paying for them. And sponsored links worked.
Expose the Secret Reasons Your Users Aren't Buying with these Checkout Analysis Tools
Online shoppers have high expectations. Just ask any e-commerce store owner or marketing manager. They expect your website to be fast and intuitive on all devices, to have clear product descriptions, amazing imagery and an easy checkout process. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Driving qualified traffic to an e-commerce store is expensive business requiring significant investment and resource. So paying for visitors who never go on to become customers is frustrating.
Most Mobile Apps Suck - How to Make Sure Yours Doesn't
If you're planning to launch a mobile app to generate revenue, you won't like the look of these figures. Research from Gartner estimates that fewer than 0.01% of apps will be considered a financial success through to 2018. With an average investment of $270,000 to design, build and launch an app, it's not a small project by anyone's standards. But the reality is that most mobile apps fail. One study suggests that two thirds of apps will fail to reach 1,000 downloads in the first year.
How to Create Compelling Graphics without any Design Skills Whatsoever
In June 2016, over 56 million blog posts were published using Wordpress alone. Then there's the millions of posts on other platforms, infographics, videos, social images and other forms of content. In other words, the content landscape is completely saturated and getting eyes on your content is only getting tougher. So we take whatever steps we can to capture and captivate our audience and increasingly, making content look great is a real priority.
The SEO Secrets Your Customer Services Team is Keeping
Asking your customer services team for help with your SEO and content strategy seems counter intuitive. Why on Earth would you consult people who typically have no experience in marketing about anything to do with your digital marketing? But ask UK based travel agency, HolidayGems.co.uk, about the value their customer service team is adding to their SEO strategy and you'll hear a different story.
4 Facts Every New E-Commerce Retailer Must Know
Ecommerce revenues are expected to top $1 trillion this year. That represents an incredible opportunity for businesses to capitalise on consumers’ growing reliance on online for big and small purchases of all sorts. But getting an ecommerce website off the ground isn’t simply a case of opening your shop doors and waiting for the sales to come through.
How Winning 'The Apprentice' Helped This Entrepreneur's Business Thrive
Climb Online isn't your average digital marketing agency. Just ask Britain's version of Donald Trump. In 2014, Lord Sugar, a billionaire media mogul, invested more than $425,000 in Climb, after its founder Mark Wright's successful appearance on The Apprentice UK. More than 7.2 million people in the UK tuned in to see Wright take the crown and secure his investment. But just what impact does this ready-made audience have on a new venture like Climb? Here's what Wright had to say about it.
What Everyone Can (And Should) Learn from Apple's Staff Retention
Apple's stores are absolutely integral to its success. With over 460 of them spanning 16 countries, the brand had the highest sales per square foot of retail space of any retailer in the US in 2014. At the heart of any Apple store customer experience is the representative they deal with. And Apple ended 2015 with an impressive 81% retention rate amongst its store staff - a company record.
The E-Commerce Mistakes Costing You Your Share of $1 Trillion
Global e-commerce sales will soar past $1 trillion this year, with more of us than ever before turning to our tablets, smartphones and computers to buy almost everything we need. Yet despite the fact that that the online retail marketplace is now incredibly mature, there are common mistakes that plague huge numbers of e-commerce websites including global brands and local startups alike.
How to Make the Next 30 Minutes the Most Productive of Your Week
Constant connectivity is both a blessing and a curse for productivity. On the one hand, the ability to carry out tasks and answer work-related emails on the move, wherever and whenever, is incredibly powerful. Your 30-minute train ride to the office no longer has to be 30 minutes of staring out the window, and instead you can make headway into the day's work before you've even set foot in the office.
Persuasion Made Simple: 3 Things That Make People Say Yes
It's not just salespeople trying to close the deal who rely on persuasion skills. Convincing people to say yes in a subtle manner is essential for marketers trying to influence buying decisions and managers trying to affect the actions of their teams. Persuasion may seem like an art form and, indeed, some people are naturally more persuasive than others.
How to Generate More Than 100 New Ideas in 30 Minutes or Less
If you've ever been a part of an unproductive brainstorming session, you know just how much time this process can sap and how little return it may actually generate. All too often, brainstorming sessions involve a handful of individuals locked in a room for an hour or two throwing half-baked thoughts on the table. There are the participants who say very little--introverts who are perhaps uncomfortable laying their ideas bare for the criticism of their peers.
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