Business Advice

Simple Tactics To Ensure Patients Give Your Dental Practice Positive Reviews Online

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It does not take much insight to know that a dentist getting negative reviews has a considerable disadvantage over a dentist with almost all positive reviews. The reason for someone posting a negative review of a dental practice may not always relate to the dentist’s work. Still, it could relate to other matters, such as long appointment wait times or a lack of attentiveness from the dental receptionist.

Dentists from candlewooddentalcentre.com.au know that their dental practice and its viability greatly depend on their skills and expertise and how these influence a patient’s opinion of them. They also know that most of these opinions tend to appear online on websites such as Google in the form of reviews and testimonials, so ensuring your patients have a positive experience is essential.

This boils down to the fact that a dental practice needs positive reviews, and it is often the case that it will be deserving of them due to the high levels of service given by all who work there. However, suppose that dental practice does nothing to encourage its many satisfied patients to post positive reviews. In that case, they will never be published, which is even more unacceptable than getting negative reviews.

Doubtless, dentists are highly skilled and dedicated to looking after their patients to the highest degree. Similarly, receptionists and other staff, such as dental nurses, may also pride themselves on their professionalism, patient care, and service level. It is passed on to others who hear about it via positive reviews.

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Online Business

How Local Dental Practices Can Use SEO To Boost Their Rankings On Google

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One of the disadvantages that small businesses, including local dental practices, is they often do not have the resources, including the financial resources, to compete with larger businesses that have corporate funding and investors behind them. This is at its most obvious when you consider the amounts large businesses have to spend on their marketing compared to smaller, local businesses.

If you have a local dental practice, it might be that some of the dental practices that operate in your area come under the umbrella of corporate dentistry and it, therefore, means that they have far greater amounts to spend on marketing themselves to gain new patients. What that can mean is through the natural reduction in patient numbers through those moving away or passing away, you may struggle to replace them.

You do not need to be a business guru to fathom that, if your dental practice’s patient numbers are reducing, its revenue, profitability, and even sustainability are all at risk. This creates the need to seek other ways to compete within your local marketplace and, thankfully, there are several, but the most effective is often search engine optimisation, aka SEO.

SEO is the practice of optimising a business website so that it can rank highly on search engines when internet users are searching for the product or service that this business offers. For example, if someone has just moved into your town and is seeking to register with a dentist from Dental O So Gentle for dental implants, you want your dental practice’s website to be one of the first they see when the search results appear.

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Business Advice

How To Ensure You Choose The Correct Actuarial Service For Your Financial Needs

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7 Steps Of Investment Planning For Business Owners

Any time when you are assessing and planning your finances will often mean you turn to experts and professionals for advice and help, such as an accountant or tax advisor, and in many scenarios, you may also require actuarial services from a company such as actuary.com.au.

Not everyone is aware of or even understands what an actuary does, so here are the basics. The simplest way to describe what an actuary does is to say they are a risk assessor. However, how they undertake that role is at a far higher level of detail and analysis than that of most risk assessments.

The reason for that is that the risks they evaluate relate mainly to financial risks, and therefore the accuracy of the risks they determine is extremely important. How actuaries determine risks includes looking at data, researching past events, creating mathematical models to evaluate risks, and calling upon their knowledge and experience to produce their conclusions.

They can then provide those conclusions to their clients which can include both commercial enterprises and individuals. Whether you are a business owner and fall into the first category, or a private citizen and are in the latter, choosing an actuarial service should be done with care, given that you may make several important decisions based upon their work. To assist you with that decision, here is some advice on how to choose the correct actuary for your financial needs.

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SEO

10 SEO Tips Every Business With A Website Should Follow

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7 Steps Of Investment Planning For Business Owners

One of the many aspects of marketing that confuses lots of business owners who have websites is search engine optimisation aka SEO. SEO is the means of optimising ranking factors related to your website so that Google moves your website’s ranking upwards, and ideally to page #1 of their search results.

The benefit of doing so is that the amount of organic traffic that you can acquire by being on page #1, and especially the top 3 positions of that page, is way more than you could ever hope to achieve if ranked on any other page. Data shows that for any given search term the traffic generated from page #1 is 95% of the total, with just 5% for all the other pages, so you can see why being on page #1 is essential.

You can gain first-page rankings in several ways and the option many business owners opt for is hiring an SEO agency who have experts in optimising websites for higher rankings. Their expertise is considerable, however, they do not work for nothing, and not every business is currently able to cover those fees, even if they know it would massively increase the traffic to and revenue from their website.

If you are in a similar position, it does not mean you cannot rank on page #1, it just means you have to do much of the SEO yourself. Some of it is straightforward, so if you want to get started, here are 10 SEO tips to improve your website’s rankings.

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Online Business

10 Business Books Every Lawyer Should Read

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10 Business Books Every Lawyer Should Read

Throughout their life and career, lawyers read copious amounts, whether they are family lawyers, divorce lawyers or commercial lawyers etc. Lawyers not only have to read countless books to gain the necessary qualifications to work within their profession, but their daily work schedule also requires them to read legal documents, interview transcripts, case law, and new legislation as it is passed.

That they read a lot is not in question, but what we want to consider here is what other reading material family lawyers should read. In particular, we are going to suggest several books which we recommend they read, not specifically concerning family law, but more applicable to the running of their family lawyers business. Several of these ten books are business-related but there are also personal development books offering excellent guidance.

Book #1 – The Personal MBA: Master The Art Of Business By Josh Kaufman:  Regarded as one of the most comprehensive business books ever written, it includes advice on marketing, business strategies, negotiation, and goal setting.

Book #2 – Like A Virgin: Secrets They Won’t Teach You At Business School By Richard Branson: Who better to take business advice from than someone whose business exploits have made him a billionaire? In this book, which is effectively an autobiography, Richard Branson shares the secrets of his phenomenal success.

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Online Business

How SEO Can Take Your Business to New Heights of Success

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When it comes to digital marketing, a crucial aspect for the imminent success of a website, business, or e-commerce store is the SEO strategy. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the actions and steps that improve the visibility of a web page or website in the search engine’s unpaid results. This is also known as organic or natural SEO.

SEO incorporates technical elements and creative elements that improve search engine ranking, boost traffic, and drive awareness. Let’s look at ways SEO helps drive business success online that can translate to real-time growth!

Traffic Potential

When your website, its pages, content, Meta data, and other elements are optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you will be awarded a higher ranking. Depending on the keywords used, your website or web pages may make it to the first page of search engine results. As a result, your visibility increases, which increases the potential of traffic.

Let’s say that you recently posted a blog on ‘How to Start a YouTube Channel’. Now practically speaking, your goal is to get this post on the first page of search engine results. Provided that you use the right keywords, Meta data and write a quality post, your post will stand out online and climb the search engine rankings ladder naturally.

Now when someone wants to start or know more about starting a YouTube channel, they will likely click on your link. If your content is relevant and exciting, expect the post to be shared on social media networks, which is widely regarded as the most qualitative measure of the success of a post. Over time, if you produce quality posts and optimize them for search engines, your website can leverage increased traffic and user activity, opening revenue-earning opportunities through advertisements and affiliate marketing.

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Business Advice

5 Advantages Of Advertising Your Business Using PPC Ads

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5 Advantages Of Advertising Your Business Using PPC Ads

One of the huge benefits that the internet has given businesses is a means to create a digital marketing campaign that does not require an advertising budget. Although there may be costs associated with having a digital marketing agency create and implement such a campaign, thereafter the organic traffic which is created and visits their website, is bereft of any ad costs.

That model might suit lots of businesses, however, just as in the offline world, the online world also offers paid advertising opportunities to businesses. A recent digital marketing survey showed that the amount spent on online paid advertising is almost the equivalent of 1 billion Australian dollars annually and that online paid ads account for over 60% of the total of all advertising expenditure

So, it is clear paid ads play a significant role in the digital marketing plans of businesses, and if your business is not currently using online pad ads, we appreciate there could be many reasons for that. You could be a new business, you might have tried previously but saw zero return, or you simply may have never considered the benefits of paid advertising before.

We hope to correct the latter, and also provide some positive reasons for other business owners to at least consider online paid advising, and in particular, pay per click (PPC) ads also known as Google Ads, which are by far the most popular online paid advertising model. The simple premise is that you create an ad, and only pay whenever someone clicks on it. The PPC advertising model has several advantages, and below we have highlighted the five which are most relevant.

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Business Advice

Why An Employer Supporting Employees With Drug Addiction Benefits Their Business

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Why An Employer Supporting Employees With Drug Addiction Benefits Their Business

As an employer, you will be aware that there are many actions that you can take that benefit your business, but one such action which may not have been at the forefront of your thoughts is the help you provide to an employee who requires drug rehab. Discovering that an employee has a drug addiction, such as an ice addiction, either via an internal investigation or by that individual approaching you and admitting they have a drug addiction throws up many questions,  ​which can include,

  • How long has their drug addiction existed?
  • Have they been taking drugs on the business premises?
  • Has it affected their work?
  • Are there other employees who may have a drug addiction?
  • Do I need to replace this employee?
  • Can I help this employee?
  • How do I help this employee
  • Is there a cost to the business?

One question that is not on that list, but is probably the main one to answer is “What Do I Do Next?”. This is what most employers will have going through their minds when drug addiction blight one of their employees. Presumably, your business will have a drugs policy that is available in employee handbooks. In most cases, you should refer to that policy for your next step.

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Business Advice

How Incentives Can Boost Customer Reviews Of Your Landscaping Business

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How-Incentives-Can-Boost-Customer-Reviews-Of-Your-Landscaping-Business

Before any landscaping business start panicking having read the title of this post, we must stress from the outset that what were are not talking about here is paying clients for reviews. That practice has long been frowned upon to the extent that many governments are considering making it illegal for a business to pay someone for a positive, and patently false, review of their products or services.

So, if not paying clients for reviews, what do we mean when say incentivising them? What we referring to is giving customers a reason or an encouragement to write the review by giving them an incentive, and this includes a financial one. Note, there is a huge difference between an incentive such as a special offer or promotion, and simply paying for reviews.

Customer Review Incentivisation

Many products and services are reviewed by people who are first given them for free, so this practice is well-founded, albeit it still has its critics. A prime example (no pun intended) is Amazon where there are so-called professional reviewers who write unbiased reviews on products that they are sent free of charge.

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Business Advice

Why Using Online Accounting Services Can Positively Impact A Landscaping Business

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Why Using Online Accounting Services Can Positively Impact A Landscaping Business

Businesses that hope to be profitable must recognize the many online services and applications that can help them, including landscapers who run their businesses.  Landscaping experts from intreeglandscapes.com.au advise that although much of their work is done in the offline world, and specifically in gardens, that does not obscure the fact that they can run their business more efficiently and thus help to make it more profitable if they take advantage of the many online business services that exist.

One such service that not just landscapers but every type of business can benefit from is online accounting. We have to add this is not where you have an accountant sitting online and manually completing your accounts. The online accounting we are referring to is software that can be accessed directly via the internet and into which you input all the financial data necessary to complete your accounts.

If you search online for “online accounting”, you will see page after page of results showing how popular it is. However, when choosing an online accounting service for your landscaping business, we recommend you take the time to research the ones that appeal to you most to ascertain if they provide what you need, are user-friendly, and the fees charged are reasonable.

As for why a landscaper would want to use online accounting, here are five simple but highly desirable benefits.

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Branding

5 Benefits Of Branding Your Dental Practice Effectively

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In the commercial world, branding plays a huge role in the way in which a business develops and is perceived, and that concept applies as much to Joodnalup dentists as it would any other type of business. It might not at first seem that the world of tooth extractions, dental implants and fillings is one in which marketing, and especially branding, would have much focus, however, if any dental practice is to remain successful, its owners must consider it.

The reason we say that is in any industry or market sector, the norm is that those businesses which put some emphasis upon marketing themselves are the ones that are the most stable, the most profitable, and have the best opportunities to expand. Those that pay scant attention to their marketing and branding are the ones who struggle and in the worst cases, go out of business altogether.

That scenario applies to dental practices and dental businesses, and what makes it all the more remarkable that many dentists do not focus on effective branding is that branding can generate so many benefits for it. Below are five of the most important of those benefits, and they are important as they can directly and positively impact its revenue and thus its long term profitability.

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Business Advice

7 Online Tools And Services That Can Massively Improve Your Landscaping Business

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7 Online Tools And Services That Can Massively Improve Your Landscaping Business

For any Sydney landscape architect reading this, when the word “tools” get mentioned your first thought is doubtless of those tools which you use for the construction and maintenance of the landscaping designs you are responsible for. However, when it comes to running your landscaping business, we doubt a lawnmower, cement mixer or power drill will be what you need.

As important as those tools are, the sorts of tools we are referring to are the ones that allow landscaping business owners to more effectively, run, market, and manage their business. Here are seven such tools and services we believe will enhance any landscaping business plus specific examples of each type.

Project Management – Examples: Asana, Trello, Podio

No matter how big or how small any landscaping project is, it will be better run, and more likely to achieve all its objectives if it is managed using project management software. With this, everything you need to organise work, such as checklists, role allocation, deadlines, and relative contact details, for example, can all be accessed on a single platform.

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Business Advice

Why Dentists Should Opt For Custom Web Design Versus A Website Template

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Why Dentists Should Opt For Custom Web Design Versus A Website Template

Given that over two-thirds of their target audience is likely to be active users of the internet, it is abundantly clear that dentists should have a website to give them an online presence and to help promote their dental practice. How to have a website built can differ, but not every way is suitable if a dental business wishes to attract new patients and be able to expand.

First, we advise dentists to not use the “Do-It-Yourself” approach. Dentists are experts at oral health not building websites, and just as you would never ask web designers to fill cavities or give dental implants, dentists are best served not building their own websites. It might seem a cheaper option, but it will take longer, and the results will almost certainly be suboptimal.

Another option is to buy a template to either try to build a website or to ask a freelancer to build it. Now, there are lots of excellent freelance web designers, but even here, the result is not going to be as good as if you follow the path that we suggest. That is to have a custom website designed and built by a professional web design agency. Here are 7 reasons why custom web design beats using a template every time.

It Is Unique: Why would you want a website for your dental practice that looks the same as others? Better to have a unique website that can be created for your objectives in a style and with functions that you believe will augment your website’s effectiveness.

You Can Brand Your Dental Practice: A huge benefit of a custom web design is that it can match and augment your dental business’s branding. By using brand-specific colours, logos, graphics and fonts, the whole website can make your brand stronger.

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Finance Advice

7 Steps Of Investment Planning For Business Owners

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7 Steps Of Investment Planning For Business Owners

As a business owner, you know as well as anyone that success requires careful planning and a process being implemented and followed that makes sense. If we take that same principle into the world of investment planning, a financial planner will almost certainly be telling their clients that to realise a decent return on their investment, the same need for planning and a logical series of steps is just as important.

To take that a stage further you need to consider how you, as a business owner, might wish to take the same sound principles you follow when running your business and apply them to your investment planning. The solution is simple and that is to follow the seven steps we have outlined for you below.

Evaluate Your Current Financial Position And Determine How Much You Have Available To Invest

Investment planning is going to be pointless if you do not know your starting position and by that, we mean knowing where your finances are currently. This will involve knowing what income from your business you can set aside for investing, what assets you may wish to sell to realise additional funds, and also what money you have available in saving accounts, for example.

Set Your Short, Medium, And Long Term Financial Goals

Numerous personal development quotes relate to not having goals and the problems that can create, and they equally apply to financial investing. That is a cue for you to take time to consider what you believe your short, medium, and long term financial goals are. By doing so, when you get to the point of choosing specific investments,  these goals will mean you make better choices.

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Business Advice

4 Types of Commercial Deep Cleaning Services And How They Can Benefit Your Business

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4 Types of Commercial Deep Cleaning Services And How They Can Benefit Your Business

If you have ever discussed the cleaning needs of your business premises, it has most likely to have been done with a commercial cleaning company. Whilst using in-house cleaners that you have to employ directly can be sufficient, for business owners who want the best for their commercial premises, hiring the professionals to clean them regularly invariably produces the best results.

This brings us to discuss the different types of commercial cleaning that are available to businesses. At the basic level, you have cleaning that is regarded as routine which tends to be the regular daily cleaning that takes place. What this entails will differ between business types and types of premises, but most likely it will include vacuuming, dusting, wiping surfaces, and thorough cleaning of specific areas such as the toilets.

Another level of commercial cleaning that commercial cleaning companies are often employed to carry out is deep cleaning. The term ‘deep’ does not refer to deep pile carpets or the basement offices, but instead to the intensity and the thoroughness of the clean. If we were to give you an analogy it could be compared to the spring clean that people do in their homes, where every nook and cranny is cleaned.

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Business Advice

Fire Protection Equipment You Should Have In A Commercial Property

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Fire Protection Equipment You Should Have In A Commercial Property

If you own or manage any type of commercial property then much of the responsibility to ensure it is safe falls on your shoulders, which is why one of your tasks, if you have not already done so, will be to speak to your local fire services company. They will be able to advise you on the regulations regarding fire safety and what the minimal requirements are with regards to fire protection equipment on the premises.

Of course, you always have the option to go above and beyond the minimum requirements and invest in additional fire safety and protection equipment. Not only does this greatly increase the fire safety levels in your premises, but as an employer, it demonstrates that you take the welfare of your employers seriously.

There is a long list of possible options, so we must stress that the ones we highlight are merely our suggestions and do not constitute any kind of definite regulatory advice or minimum legal requirement, both of which you must ascertain for yourself with regards to the commercial premises you are responsible for.

Fire Extinguishers

The type of property and the commercial activity which takes place will determine which types of fire extinguishers you need, and in particular what is necessary for the materials that are predominant inside those premises. As a minimum, you will have a red-banded water extinguisher which is suitable for most fires involving paper and wood.

You might choose to expand the types of fire extinguishers to include a Black Co2 extinguisher for electrical fires, and also the number of extinguishers, especially if the property has more than one room.

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Online Business

4 Cleaning Tips To Prolong The Life Of Your Office Carpets

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4 Cleaning Tips To Prolong The Life Of Your Office Carpets

Let’s face it, office carpets can be expensive, especially as they cover much larger areas of floor space compared to domestic carpets. In addition, they often have to endure large amounts of foot traffic, to the extent that the amount of carpet cleaning they require is significant too, so hiring a commercial cleaners would be advised.

With all of that, it is little wonder that office carpets can wear quickly, and no sooner does it seem you have just bought an office carpet, then you need to fork out more to replace it.

With this in mind, we thought it would be useful to provide those of you responsible for the cleaning and maintenance of your office carpets with some top tips that can help prolong the life of your existing office carpets. Here are 4 of those top tips.

#1 Produce A Cleaning And Maintenance Plan

Either randomly cleaning certain office carpets, or assuming that all areas of your office carpets require the same amount of cleaning is a haphazard way of going about it and does nothing to maximize the life of your office carpets. Instead, you should create a plan which takes account of the amount of foot traffic each area of the carpet has.

You should create a cleaning and maintenance plan for each area marked red, amber, and green based on those foot traffic levels and clean them accordingly with red receiving the most attention and green the least, This means each area receives the appropriate amount of care and helps keep the carpet wear more even.

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Online Business

Selecting a Web Design Service

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Web Design Service

Selecting a Web Design Service – Things to Consider
Here are a few things to consider before you hire a web designer. Being one of the strongest tools for business, your website needs to be designed keeping in mind all the essential details of your company. Therefore, it’s important to put in some efforts and do your research when choosing a designer for your website. You might consider buying a website instead of getting one designed for you. However, this is quite risky. So getting your new responsive website designed by a professional is very important.

Let’s have a look at some of the main points to consider when selecting a web design service to make your website attractive.

1. See If The Web Company Is Experienced Or Not

The first thing to check is the capability of the company you are considering to hire with your website’s design. This will be determined by the quality  of their past work. An established company with a work experience spanning over several years is an obvious choice in this regard. However, there are certain advantages of hiring a new company as well (they will be more eager to win you over as a customer and will be willing to go the extra mile). However, it is safer to go with someone who has worked on similar projects in the past and have a track record of successfully meeting deadlines and customer expectations.

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Online Business

Common Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

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Common Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

Website Design experts, www.slinky.net.au, tell us that websites are now clearly the most clear ‘digital handshake’ that a business can make with their customers and potential customers. But because they are still new for a lot of business owners, the focus on them isn’t as great as it could be.

And that means that many websites and businesses are making simple, but avoidable mistakes in their web design. Ironing out these errors can go a long way towards:

  • Having a more effective website
  • Driving more leads
  • Getting more calls and appointments, and,
  • Ultimately, winning more work and growing your revenue.

To show you some of the ‘quick wins’ you can get on to today, we’ve created a short checklist to work through with your own website.

Be Clear in What You Want

We once reviewed one of the best pieces of business website writing we’d ever seen. It was interesting. It was insightful. It was even funny. But it went from being a 10/10 to a 7/10 for one reason: it didn’t have a call to action.

Every business has a call to action. It might be scheduling a free quote. It might be making an appointment to talk on the phone or via video chat. Or it might be scheduling a trial. But so many pieces of website writing lack this element.

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eCommerce

The Cost and Issues of Setting up An Ecommerce Business

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Setting up an ecommerce business is a tough task, one which involves a lot of effort and detailed technical knowledge from professional web designers to make sure that you are able to offer a great user experience to customers and ensure good sales volume. With the trend of online buying reaching its pinnacle in the industry, you would definitely want to be at the top of your game and offer a user friendly ecommerce service to online customers to have them coming back for more!

But while an ecommerce start-up involves a lot of work and planning, there are a lot of costs and expenses linked with the job as well. While every business has a budget, the technical aspect of an ecommerce enterprise necessitates you to have a very clear idea of what you intend to spend for setting up a start-up in the competitive industry.

Besides the costs, there are a number of other issues which you should resolve beforehand, before you set up your ecommerce services. Following are a few essential costs and issues that are linked with your ecommerce start-up.

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Business Advice

Team Building Ideas That Do Not Require A Lot Of Time

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Team Building Ideas That Do Not Require A Lot Of Time

One of the most common reasons why those who lead teams give for not implementing any team building ideas is that they do not have enough time. This is truly unfortunate and a missed opportunity to create teams that are bonded and will go the extra mile for their teammates, regardless of the scenario.

The question must be that if you are a team leader who does not believe they have the time for team building, how much of an advantage is that giving to your competitors whose team leaders, managers, and coaches have managed to found the time for building their teams?

The answer to that is a huge advantage, but it need not be that way. The fact is that even for those of you who genuinely have few opportunities to build your teams, particularly with regards to time, there are several team building ideas you can still employ. At most these require no more than 30 minutes, and in some cases can be done in less than 10. Do you think you can spare just 10 minutes to make your team a better one?

We hope so, and so here are some quick team building ideas from www.teamworksdevelopment.com.au that do not require a lot of time…

Better Or Worse

Time: 20 minutes

Split the group into teams of four or five people and then show everyone four very different objects. One example would be a drumstick, a frying pan, a baseball cap, and a cuddly toy. Now you give them a scenario and ask the teams to rank each of the objects in the order that they would be the most useful and why.

The scenarios can be as silly and weird as you like so ‘You are saving the world from an alien invasion’, and ‘You are alone in a train carriage with an escaped gorilla’ are perfect as they require high levels of creativity to resolve.

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Starting a Business

How To Involve Your Staff In An Office Relocation

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Office Relocation

Office relocation is typically something which occurs due to a business changing. Whether your office relocation is due to downsizing, expansion, or a part of your business strategy to be located nearer to your customers it is important to make sure your staff are involved, well informed, and that their input is taken into consideration.

For this, you need to establish open communication to get their opinions regarding the relocation and anything related to it. Get them involved from the beginning by asking them their thoughts about what new offices you should move to. The more you take their suggestions into consideration they more committed and helpful they will be when the relocation with the help of experienced office relocators – actually takes place.

In addition, the more your employees are involved in the relocation, you may even see greater levels of productivity leading up to it, their new office. It is highly likely that you end up getting some amazing ideas about how to further improve your office structure, layout, and organisational activities.

Another way to involve your team is to assign them tasks. Assess their strengths and assign their roles with respect to their skillsets. There are many tasks, such as supervising IT transfer, telecommunication setups, the layout of the office, setting up new filing systems. They may not physically do each of these themselves, but if they can oversee them, it will improve the relocation as whole.

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Starting a Business

How to Register Your Business

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Register your Business

Starting a business in Australia has become easier than ever. Economic growth and saturation of the market has allowed Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) to make the process easier for potential business owners. However, before incorporating your business and registering the name, you need to make sure that you are eligible to start, operate, and manage a business in Australia.

There are four business structures in Australia that you can choose from when starting your online business, namely sole trader, partnership, company, and trust. Generally speaking, a person is automatically disqualified from starting and managing a business if the person:

  • Is bankrupt
  • Is convicted for offences under s206B of the Corporations Act
  • Is convicted for offences under s32(1) of Business Names Registration Act

Once you have checked if you are eligible to start a business, and understand employment laws for business – the next step is to register the business name. Remember that managing a business while being disqualified to do so is a criminal offense. If you have any questions, contact a qualified criminal lawyer

Register Your Business

Once you have found out all the information related to starting a new business in Australia, the first step towards doing so is to register a company name. The company name allows you to hold exclusive rights to the name you choose in Australia without having to file for registration in each state.

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Online Business

What is SEO?

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What is SEO

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of attracting traffic from the ‘editorial’, ‘natural’, ‘organic’ or ‘free’ results from search engines.

According to SEO Perth, SEO developed into a marketing discipline and focuses on how to create more visible non-paid search engine results. To drive (online) traffic, improve result rankings and increase the awareness in search engines both, creative and technical aspects are involved.

While in some cases, it matters how other websites are linked to you on the web. In some cases, SEO involves making sure that the structure of your site is such that the search engines are able to understand it.

Search engine optimisation is not merely creating websites that are understood by the search engines. They also have to make the website better for their users.

Search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo currently drive the highest percentage of web traffic. And these are still the most popular method used by internet users to navigate, despite there being traffic directed from social media.

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Business Security

Are Alarm Monitoring Systems Useful for My Business?

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Alarm Monitoring Systems

Businesses across Australia are turning to high-end alarm monitoring systems to secure their premises and reduce the risk of vandals and other intruders damaging assets or property. There are countless options available, but they all have the same purpose – to notify you or your security company when something’s wrong at your place of business.

However, a lot of businesses still underestimate the importance of alarm monitoring, and they tend to suffer as a result. With this in mind, we decided to put together this short guide outlining what alarm monitoring systems are, why they’re useful and why you should seriously consider installing one, in your business place, if you don’t already have one.

What Are Alarm Monitoring Systems?

To put it simply, an alarm monitoring system is any type of security system that includes ongoing monitoring to ensure your office is protected. In their simplest form, these involve simple security systems with motion detectors that are linked to a smartphone app or website. If an intruder or other issue is detected, you will receive real-time notifications.

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Legal Advice

4 Things to Think About When Making a Position Redundant

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unfair dismissal claim

One of the most important employer rights in Australia is the right to make a position redundant when it’s no longer needed. However, this has to be done carefully and within the scope of the law to ensure you don’t end up facing unlawful or unfair dismissal claim.

Unfortunately, redundancy can be a slightly complicated topic. Because of this, we’d recommend consulting with a lawyer or other legal professional if you’re considering making a position redundant. On top of this, we’ve put together the following list of the top four things to consider when making a position redundant to help you get started.

  1. Make Sure You Consider Redeployment

One of the major things you have to think about when you’re making a position redundant is whether or not you can redeploy the affected employee within your company. If at all possible, you have a legal requirement to offer affected employees another position, even if the position is significantly lower in the company hierarchy and pays much less. If you don’t you will likely end up facing an unfair dismissal claim.

  1. Provide Support Where Possible

If possible, you should provide support to employees who are going to lose their job due to a position being made redundant. While some people may prefer to be left alone, others will appreciate support in the form of:

  • Being allowed time off to attend job interviews.
  • Being assisted through some sort of redundancy program.
  • Providing help searching and applying for a new position.

Again, the better you treat people who are going to be made redundant, the less likely unfair dismissal claims are to arise.

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Online Business

3 SEO Mistakes You Could be Making

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SEO Mistakes

If you run or manage a website of any shape or form, you’ve probably heard of SEO. If you haven’t, you need to do some research and get familiar with at least basic SEO techniques, otherwise your search engine rankings will suffer.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of some of the most common SEO mistakes that inexperienced web developers and website owners tend to make. These can range from small mistakes that are easy to fix to large problems that could be severely impacting your site’s performance, and include:

  1. Failing To Use A Professional SEO Agency

Unless you have significant SEO training and experience, I’d always recommend at least consulting with a professional agency to make sure that you have a viable SEO strategy. Doing this should help you make sure that you’re getting the most out of your website.

Ultimately, SEO professionals can be expensive. However, the fact that they know exactly what they’re doing and how to do things will certainly work in your favour. If you try and take control of your own SEO, you will probably make mistakes, will be inefficient, and will take a lot more time to do things than you should.

A professional SEO agency who know all the SEO quirks won’t do this, and using one will free up your time, allowing you to take care of the things that you’re good at.
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Online Business

How Does Your Drug Rehab Social Media Strategy Impact SEO?

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Drug Rehab Social Media Strategy

Being active on social media is essential for the long term success of your drug rehab. Many potential clients will search for drug rehabs on Facebook and Twitter before contacting someone, which means that it is crucial for your social media pages to make a good first impression.

However, being active on social media goes beyond this. Some people will argue that your social media marketing and presence doesn’t affect your SEO rankings, but I disagree. In fact, I’d say that being active on platforms like Facebook and Twitter is one of the most efficient uses of your time. There are a wide range of ways that your drug rehab social media strategy can impact your SEO and your search engine rankings, including:

A Good Social Media Strategy Can Drive Traffic To Your Website

Google takes a lot of things into consideration when determining your search engine ranking. Visitor behaviour is just one of these things. If you can drive relevant, interested people to your website through your social media profiles, your SEO efforts will almost certainly be positively impacted.

Advice about SEO from Google suggest, interested visitors who click through from social media will be more likely to spend more time on your website, reading and engaging with the content that you have to offer. This will lower your bounce rate and increase your visitor retention time. Both of these things will help improve your SEO rankings.

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Legal Advice

Social Media Marketing For Law Firms

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Social Media Marketing

Family lawyers throughout Australia and the world are having trouble finding clients in an increasingly competitive environment. Although different marketing efforts – like social media marketing – can be effective, it is very important for you to understand how to use them properly before you start.

If you try and start marketing your law firm on social media without understanding what you’re doing, you will find that you are wasting your time, that you don’t get a whole lot of results, and that you may even end up building a poor image for your company.

Start By Creating Social Media Profiles

The first thing that you need to do when it comes to marketing your law firm on social media is to build strong profiles or pages. Make sure that you have a presence on the most popular platforms – including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Make sure that you are consistent with your branding between platforms, and make sure that they all link back to your website and to each other where possible.

Post Interesting Content

One of the things that makes social media such a great marketing medium for law firms is that is allows you to get your name out there and to gain exposure. When done right, social media marketing can give you an advantage over your competitors – something that every lawyer wants, right?

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Legal Advice

Big Data and How It Affects Hiring

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Big Data Hiring

The hiring landscape is changing rapidly and corporate lawyers are feeling the impact. The environment is complicated and so are the tools that employers use to sift through mountains of resumes.  Time is short for most recruiting professionals and finding the best candidates has become increasingly competitive.  Often, it’s the first employer to find a candidate, and make an offer, that is able to recruit top talent.

So employers are rapidly turning to vast data stores and software to assist them in culling out the chaff and leaving only the desirable candidates behind.  Some refer to this as the “Big Data” movement.

What is driving the move to Big Data?  First, most candidate assessment tools are extremely old and outdated.  The software is based on decades-old assumptions and  processes and don’t take into account the way candidates want to find jobs and the way the modern workforce communicates and lives.

Additionally, the modern workplace has changed and the metrics we’ve typically used in the past to assess performance have changed.  Technology has changed what jobs demand, the work hours people choose, where they work from, etc.  Tradition tools aren’t equipped deal with these changes.

With recruitments, come dismissals. If you think you may have had an unfair dismissal, speak to your lawyer.

The workforce has changed as well.  Generations of workers have come and gone since recruiting tools were updated and the present generation operated on very different values, assumptions, and goals that workers in past eras.

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Finance Advice

What Types Of Super Funds Are Out There?

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Types Of Super Funds

When it comes to super, a lot of people don’t really know how their funds are being managed. Although most decent accountants can advise you on what you should be doing with your super, it is important to have a decent understanding of the Australian super system.

Although it is very difficult to access your super before you retire, you can choose how and where it is invested. If you have a substantial amount of super, then you should definitely consider looking into the types of super funds out there. Choosing one which suits your personal situation can cause your super account to grow substantially over time. Some of the more popular super fund options include:

My Super:

My super is a government run superannuation program designed to become the default fund for people working for new employers. It has relatively low fees when compared to most other types of funds, making it a good choice for people with low super balances. However, it only provides basic insurance cover and one investment plan.

Industry Super Funds:

Most industry super funds were developed by trade corporations or members of a specific industry to provide super investment services to workers in that industry. Most industry super funds work on a not for profit basis, which means that your fees are generally small. A lot of larger industry super funds are now open for public investment, and some people argue that they have higher returns than other types of fund. Note that investment options are usually limited to a few choices with industry funds.

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Legal Advice

How Lawyers Evaluate Contracts?

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Getting a lawyer’s insight before signing a contract is essential; whether it is a legal employment contract, a real estate contract, a license agreement, lease agreement, or mortgage. Many times, people overlook the basic details, and at times, even the contract and the country’s law contradict each other. To avoid problems like these, commercial lawyers can assist you in evaluating your contracts.

Following is how lawyers assess a document to make sure that the employer or any other contractor is not being extremely strict and putting your rights at stake, either during or after the employment.

Important Clauses
Before signing a contract, you need to make sure that it is stating all the important points and clauses that the employee discussed with you during the meeting; see this doc Australian Contract Law Reform. An effective contract highlights all the major details. For example, in some contracts, there is a mention of the time period it is applicable for and whether the contract is enforceable or not.

Additionally, when it comes to it, the document should mention clearly about exchanging certain items in place of others, as necessary. Formation of the contract cannot take place if the exchange is not valid or equal. This can also include a situation when the services that a person is providing are greater than their salary or at no salary at all. In this case, there is a lack of consideration, which makes it an illegal contract.

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Online Business

Everything You Need To Know About Internet Advertising

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Internet Advertising

Digital marketing is a complex field that involves both paid and free marketing strategies. Internet advertising is probably the most common form of paid digital marketing, and it comes in many forms.

Some types of internet advertising are very simple and involve little to no technical understanding. However, others are much more complicated and require someone with a lot of experience or training to get the most out of them. Understanding the types of internet marketing that are out there is the first step on the road to a successful business: choosing the right advertising streams for your needs is the second step.

Why should you use internet advertising?

A huge percentage of the world’s population use the internet every day, and this number is increasing rapidly as more and more people gain access to the internet, especially in developing countries.

It therefore makes sense to use some sort of internet advertising to promote your business. If you don’t, you are probably missing out on a potentially huge market. You may find it hard to compete with similar businesses who do use internet marketing strategies, and may have trouble building a successful enterprise.

What kinds of internet advertising exist?

With the help of experts, Cheap Web Design Perth, we found that there are a number of different types of mainstream internet advertising methods, including:

Search engine marketing (SEM):

Search Engine Marketing involves the use of very targeted keywords and short ads, usually placed at the top of search engine results. These are designed to drive interested people to your website, and are very useful for selecting the right audience, especially when used with large search engines like Google.

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Online Business

The Key Areas to Focus on in a Web Development Project

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Web-Design-Latest-Trends

Whether you are an amateur at web design and development, or someone who has been playing in the field for a long time, you’ll need a few pointers that are like a miniature checklist. This will help you focus on the key areas that need to be taken care of when you are developing a website. Some of them are pretty obvious, while the others are sometimes forgotten in the course of a typical web development program. Anyway, here are the nitty-gritty details of the important things that need to be attended to.

Browser compatibility – When you are developing a website for a client, it is important to make sure that the site is compatible with most of the commonly used browsers. Sites that are incompatible with popular browsers will only result in drastically low traffic for your client’s site, and that is not something you want on your hands.

The background templates –Pretty often, developers focus too much on the elements in the foreground and pay little attention to what runs behind it all. Having a user friendly background that is easy on the eyes seems like a small thing, but it contributes greatly to how popular the site gets with time. Obviously, people will not linger too long on a webpage that strains their eyes.

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Online Business

Two Major Web Design Mistakes To Avoid

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Web Design Mistakes

If you ask for web design advice from anyone who either has or has had a website they’ll tell you lots of things you should have on your site. Some of it will be correct but some advice will so wrong that if you follow it, you could harm your website and its usefulness permanently.

Here are two major web design errors that you must avoid completely when you design your website.

#1 Forgetting Why You Have A Website

There are literally thousands of business websites on the internet that seem to have no purpose whatsoever…don’t let yours become another one. It seems crazy that a business would pay a web designer to design them a website, only for that site to have no discernible reason to exist other than to showcase their skills built from web design tips.

When you sit down to plan the design of your website, the first question to answer is what goal or goals do you want the website to achieve for your business. If it’s a simple one-page sales letter or video, then the obvious purpose is sales.  Some single page sites might have the alternative goal of gaining email subscribers.

If branding is of paramount importance above all else, then branding should be prominent throughout the site. Your site might be a blog where you share information to build trust and eventually customers. A larger corporate site may have information on the company, with product ranges and services fully explained in order to generate leads.

Whether it is any of these or one of the many other reasons why you’d want your business to have a website online, when you come to design it, make sure that purpose is fully accommodated its design and structure.

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Online Business

Social Media Marketing – Marketing to a Brand New World

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Increased used of the internet, changes in consumer behavior, perceptions, brand preferences and lifestyles have all impacted the manner in which businesses used to operate. Nevertheless, internet marketing entails much more than just getting your website up and waiting for the world to beat a path to your door.

It becomes extremely hard for us to understand sometimes how our life has changed until we pause for a second and take a deep look at how different our life is from what it used to be ten or may be five years ago. Social media, in recent years, has impacted our lives more than anything else.

This global transformation that has taken place over the past few years because of advanced social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook might have been unimaginable for most of us at the beginning of this decade.

With the dramatic evolution of the internet, traditional communication methods have largely been replaced by the latest communication techniques including social media networking and marketing. Social media in today’s world has revolutionized the way in which businesses promote their offerings to their customers.

It is an undeniable truth that a number of businesses in recent times venture into social media marketing with hopes of getting a good return of their investment. The expectation is that customers will be attracted in droves and that the benefits and revenue generation will be phenomenal. The immense power of social media can be used to communicate with millions of web surfers who search the internet every day to look for products and services to satisfy their needs.

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eCommerce

How to Decide on the Best eCommerce Platform?

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The multimillion-dollar eCommerce industry is growing by leaps and bounds in Australia. When it comes to making the online business, a success an online business owner needs to take many things into consideration. And one of the most important aspect of any online business store is picking the right eCommerce platform.

People starting an eCommerce business may feel overwhelmed by the different types of online platforms that seems to offer the same services. However, the platforms differ in terms both in terms of price and functionality. Here we will take a look at the most popular eCommerce platforms that offer the best deal for online businesses.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform that does not require you to purchase a separate web hosting platform. The big upside of the eCommerce store is that the availability of add-on apps that greatly extend functionality of the online store. However, a downside of the eCommerce platform is that it offers limited ability to customize the interface.

Magento

Magento has been considered the best online platform for eCommerce sites. The online platform is used by major e-commerce companies due to greater flexibility in customizing the site. The only drawback of this platform is that creating and customizing the site requires hiring a professional website designer which adds to the cost of operating the store.

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Legal Advice

Important Legal Issues to Consider For Protection of Your Startup

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As an entrepreneur engaged in a startup, there are several issues that need to be resolved in the early days of establishing your company. Failing to do so may involve complicated legal issues where you will need an experienced criminal lawyer or corporate lawyer especially in terms of copyright and patents, where even partnerships especially, can go wrong.

One of the biggest real life examples of copyright litigation was faced by Mark Zuckerberg himself in the Zuckerberg vs. Winklevoss faceoff regarding the rights of Facebook. Though Zuckerberg himself walked away with the company, still the payoff to those who litigated against him including his partner, won a considerable amount of compensation.

However, not everyone can be lucky enough to own a company worth millions. With such factors in mind, it is imperative to take note of the legal aspects of a startup where every loose end should be tight enough to protect you from any chance that litigation lawyers will pursue you for copyright claims.

Here’s what you need to do:

 Make a clear-cut agreement with your partners

An initial co-founder agreement will ensure you do not face any copyright problems from disgruntled co-founders. A partnership can go wrong, it happens. This is why you need to be firm in the beginning. A co-founder agreement should contain the following clauses:

  • Percentage rights of individual members
  • Designations of members and extent of responsibility
  • The limitation of rights of a member resigning from the partnership
  • The rights of remaining partners to buy shares from a resigning member

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Legal Advice

Pros and Cons of Buying Off the Plan

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Buying Property

Property lawyers will tell you that buying property off the plan means you are putting down a deposit for a property that is not yet built. This happens most often when a property developer buys a big acreage of land that he intends to subdivide into smaller blocks and build homes on, then sell. To get the money for that, he advertises the plans, which allows prospective buyers to choose one of many blocks in an area they like.

There are pros and cons of buying off the plan that should be carefully considered before going ahead.

Pros

There are several advantages for this type of purchase.

  • You only have to pay a deposit to start with and no more until the home is built.
  • This allows you to put off getting a loan if the interest is high, but you think it might fall in the next few years.
  • It may allow you to save up more so you don’t have to get loan, or can get a smaller one, thus saving some costs.
  • You may get to have a say in which finishes are used for your home, since you are the buyer.
  • It can allow you plenty of time to sell your own home, or to become more stable financially.

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eCommerce

Key Features That Your Ecommerce Website Should Have

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You may have setup a complete ecommerce website for your online business in Australia, but are you sure it has everything you need for next year? Here are some must-have features that can help you improve the business by making things more efficient:

Firstly, maintain an innovative, fresh, and engaging online presence. This is not something you have to look at annually, but on a daily basis, because ecommerce is a very competitive market. In recent years, the Australian ecommerce industry has not only served as a significant tool for revenue growth, but has encouraged consumers to spend beyond their limits. In the next year, there is going be an increase in overseas and local retail purchases by an estimated amount of $25 billion. Therefore, if your website doesn’t appear engaging, others will make sure theirs does.

Another important requirement is to keep your ecommerce processes competitive. You must try to cover all likely aspects to make sure that your customers can access your products and services. For example, The Iconic Magazine is not just available in hard copies, but is available online as well, making it accessible for mobile users too.

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Branding

Why The Right Brand Design Is Important For Your Business?

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Brand-Design

Do you know the relative importance of your brand? Do you know why it is essential to have the right brand for your business? If you think that the connection between brand and business has just been exaggerated, then think again! The importance of a brand cannot be stressed enough based on what it can do to ensure the success of the business. Because your brand is the first image of your business!

Playing Show And Tell With Your Business Brand
Isn’t it every business’s dream to have their customers absolutely adore what they have to offer? Well, the question is how do you achieve it? By making your brand the face of the business, and telling and showing customers your products through your brand; of course.

To have a brand which is the face of your company, you need to make sure that it brings your values and business commitment to the fore. Statistics share that around 81% of the decision makers regard their business brands to be critically important in driving purchases.

This signifies that customers pay great importance to brand perception. If yours is a brand design developed by experts who have infused your business value into the design, then you will be able to drive sales in the market.

Remember. Brand design is not just a logo, shape or a set of colours. It is a set of values, memories, commitments, goals and expectations, which are given a pictorial representation.

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Finance Advice

Salary Sacrificing vs. Paying Down the Mortgage

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Salary Sacrifice

Many financial planners agree that salary sacrificing is an excellent way to save and avoid paying high levels of tax, at least on some of your income, but is it really better than paying down your mortgage?  Andep Financial planning advice usually offers many ways to save money and reduce your costs; but whether this is one of them will depend on your specific circumstances.

For instance, if you are in a very high tax bracket, it can certainly pay you to salary sacrifice, especially if having done that, your income is then in a lower tax bracket level.  But it is not always the best thing to do as far as making the most of your dollars goes. It absolutely depends on your individual circumstances, which is why it is best to consult with a financial advisor; one who works independently of any company such as a bank.

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Legal Advice

What You Need To Know About Commercial Leasing

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If you have found the best property for your commercial premises, then you must now be considering signing a lease for the property. But do you know what a commercial lease is, and are you familiar with the different clauses which outline the importance of the document?

According to commercial law experts, the clauses in the lease highlight the rights and obligations of both the tenant and the landlord, and any discrepancy and negligence can result in breach of contract by either one of the two parties.

Your Commercial Lease – What Is It?
It is very important for you to recognize the importance of a commercial lease, as it is a legally binding contract. It is essential for both the tenant and the landlord to understand the different terms and conditions given in the contract before signing up the contract.

It is also important that both the parties recognize their obligations and rights, so that all disputes can be avoided, or easily handled if any should arise. Since most lease clauses are quite complicated, it is important to seek the help of an expert who can advise you on the matter.

You need expert legal help, before you,

  • Occupy any leased property
  • Pay any deposit or any other form of monies
  • Make commitment to take, lease or buy on any work which might affect your lease obligations
  • Sign a lease contract

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Legal Advice

The Importance of Business Contracts

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Business-Contracts

If you own a business you will have to sign a lot of contracts. There are many different types of business contracts and commercial lawyers are needed to ensure you are not signing something that will adversely affect your business or your ability to run it.  People agree to contracts in all their daily buying without even realising it. Such contracts are not signed, but include a clause that by doing business with the company you agree to the terms of the contract.

This can be as simple as setting up a bank account or buying a book online. It is in place when you purchase groceries or go to the doctor or dentist.  Most people don’t even read these contracts and it doesn’t really matter most of the time. It simply protects the business in some way.

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Online Business

4 Reasons Why Web Design Is Important For Your Business

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Web-Design

Web design is certainly a magic wand. All you need to do is wave it and your desired results are right in front of you. With the increased use of online media and ecommerce businesses, the concept of web design is gaining popularity and familiarity in the business world.

Not only people have begun paying attention to website’s designs but they have equally adhered to take steps in making the website more functional and effective. As Paul Cookson, a famous entertainer and author, has said:

“Great web design without functionality is like a sports car with no engine”.

The website design has a direct impact on moods, decisions and actions of your readers. With an effective web design, you can drive a lot of consistent traffic to your site. Not just this, there are many more advantages of web design for your business; four of them are discussed below in detail.

1. Increased Number of Visitors
A web design with effective and impressive features will ultimately attract visitors. If you’ve more symbols and figures rather than content on your site, people will instantly get your message without reading long paragraphs. Having their questions answered, they’ll prefer your website the next time they’re in search of anything related to your business. This will guarantee you consistent visitors.

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Legal Advice

Facts About Estate Planning

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Estate-Planning

If you have assets then you will need to plan for their distribution after you die. Having a consultation with a family lawyer will ensure that your estate planning is done correctly so it is legal and no one can step in to challenge or change it. You have a right to leave your assets to whomever you want, but the law says you have a duty to your family to support and maintain them, so they should not be left out.

That said, you can still leave gifts to charities and people who are not related by blood, at your discretion.

Step children cannot Contest a Will, but other family members may. If you leave out some family members but not others, those who are not included can challenge the Will. Even if people are included, they can still challenge the Will if they think they should have been left more. These are the people who can challenge your Will.

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Online Business

Top 3 Ways To Get More People Following Your Business Pages

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Business Pages

Social media is one of the most important advertising mediums for removalists and removalist businesses such as in the modern world. It allows a removals business to connect with potential clients, to offer special deals and to book jobs in an easy, streamlined manner.

However, it can be very hard to attract new followers to things like your Facebook and Instagram profiles. Removalist profiles are not something that people follow without a good reason to, which means that you have to give them that reason. Try and make your social media pages attractive and engaging by providing content that people can relate to.

Here are my top 3 ways for getting more people to follow your removalist social media pages:

  1. Post Relevant, Engaging Content

People use social media for a number of reasons. It lets them stay up to date with modern events, it provides a relaxing, humorous break from modern life and it helps them to discover new things that interest them.

As a removalist business owner, you need to try and create posts which people are going to be able to relate to and engage with. Use clever memes, share relevant news or web articles and above all, do your best to reply to comments and questions in a timely manner.

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Legal Advice

How is Commercial Property Rent Calculated?

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If you are looking to lease a property for commercial reasons, it is wise to consult with your lawyers & solicitors well before you sign anything. They can ensure that the lease is drawn up properly so that you know exactly what you will have to pay. And they can add clauses to protect you from many potential problems. So how exactly is rent for a commercial property calculated? Several things are taken into consideration.

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Online Business

The Tool Of Converting Curious Consumers Into Paying Customers

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uspacenetwork.com the-tool-of-converting-curious-consumers-into-paying-customers

Any business means purely for selling and getting profit via that. This is the basic need and is a must for any business. The question arises that how to attain this. Oxygen Marketing say that there are various necessities to do that. Here are few to help you in getting customers and changing them into final profit.

Step 1: Create website
Nowadays the Internet is a promising medium to let people know about your business. For getting best out of your business, it is the necessity to have a business website. It is better to get it done by professionals. They know best how to create a top-notch website to attract customers. It is a must to have for any business.

Step 2: Awareness
First most is that you should be able to reach customers and this can be done by various means. As soon as you can do that then only you can plan for something else. SEO is quite significant and helpful in this. Once you understand how to be at the top of SEO list which is free of cost, then other steps will become trouble-free.

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Starting a Business

How To Keep Customers Satisfied And Get Good Reviews From Them?

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online-reputation

Customer satisfaction is the key to the success of any business. When customers are not happy with the brand, they not only leave the brand, but they also spread a bad word for it, which ends up ruining its online reputation. Therefore, every business that wants to be successful needs to keep its customers satisfied. Happy customers talk well about the brand and spread a good word about it amongst others.

Below are a few tips that businesses can use to keep their customers satisfied and get good reviews from them.

Keep Customers Satisfied

Respond to Customer Queries
Customers don’t hate anything more than a brand that doesn’t care about their opinion and queries. Even if the product was not satisfactory, they will not get turned off by it as much as they will feel bad about the brand not caring about them. Therefore, if a business wants to keep their customers happy, they should reply to every customer query. By answering their questions, businesses will be able to improve their image and make customers feel valued.

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Legal Advice

Top 5 Legal Issues in Social Media

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The present age is the age of social media, where all small and big businesses are run through the use of social media.

Is your business protected against potential legal complications you could face while promoting your products and services through social media? Are your employees aware of these issues ways to steer clear of infringing upon laws? It’s high time you were aware of the top five legal issues in social media.

Many people operate their businesses solely through the internet, using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., as their primary medium of communication. While effective, this approach does come with its own set of risks. The gains it nets are proportionate to the legal issues your business might be exposed to if not taken care of properly on time.

1.     Revealing Confidential Information

The most common yet the most dangerous legal issue with regard to social media, is the disclosure of confidential information. Often times, the secrets of your business or some valuable information regarding shares and policies may be leaked out by the employee or any other party with information.

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Legal Advice

Common Legal Mistakes Made By Small Businesses

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Obstructions and hurdles in business is one thing. But, failure in business due to small legal mistakes and failing to get the correct legal advice is sheer foolishness.

Whether large scale or small, a business is a business and needs to be operated as such. You have invested a lot of your money and time into strengthening it. And once it is established, you reap long-term benefits out of it. The point is, not all small scale businesses reach their desired positions in the corporate environment. Faced by lots of hardships, your efforts to establish a small scale business mostly end in vain due to lack of attention to detail and responsibility on your part.

Small businesses can turn profits faster than large scale ones. But because you think of it as just a small business, you tend to avoid important legal formalities and ultimately lose your business.

Here are some of the most common legal mistakes committed by small businessmen.

Not Entering Into a Proper Legal Contract with an External Party

Many small businesses enter into agreements without having advice from lawyers, any legal stamps or signatures by other party. People think that signing a formal contract is just a waste of resources. However, whether internal or external, a legally binding contract is very important. You may ignore the need for legal stamps in internal contracts, but when signing a paper with an external party, legalities must be invoked.

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Branding

What Mistakes You Should Avoid When Naming Your Business

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Company Branding

Naming your business is the moment where all your motivation and excitement reaches its absolute pinnacle. You start with a hazy idea for a business which gradually grows into a more detailed and comprehensive design and you then determine how you will manage different operations and management functions. Once you start work on your business plan, you start thinking about the best name for your brainchild. What group of alphabets will sum up all your services and values in a perfect way?

It is hard to choose a name for a business as it becomes the identity of your enterprise. A name which is difficult to relate to or remember can be a disaster, while the right name can be the perfect brand you had always wanted. So how do you make the right choice? By avoiding any major mistakes while choosing a name for your start-up!

Make sure that you don’t make any of the following mistakes while choosing your business name.

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Legal Advice

Legal Challenges and Hurdles In the Way of Small Businesses

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Survival of the fittest is what we are expected to focus on, in today’s fast moving Australian business community. Having a business and running it successfully combines different ingredients together. Therefore, a small business has to face many challenges and overcome innumerous hurdles on a daily basis. There is a never ending list that should be taken into account while talking about challenges and hurdles, but legal issues also take top priority. Few of the major legal problems associated with small businesses are listed below.

Choosing the Right Legal Structure

Not only do you have to make a choice of what exactly you are offering to the people, but also, it is immensely significant to choose the right legal structure. This decision can either make or break you in the anticipated difficult times of your business. This also directly affects your personal liability, amount of taxes your business will have to pay, and the entire future development of your business and its legal implications.

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Legal Advice

Ways to Avoid Any Business Legal Issues

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If you have put in a lot of thought, time and money in trying to set up your new business startup in Australia, then it makes sense to do your homework and avoid making any legal errors which can pour all your efforts down the drain!

Remember, a legal blunder will not only create a mountain of paperwork for you, it can also lead to case hearings and even penalties, subjected by the authorities. You might also end up damaging the company reputation, driving away customers at a time, when you need them the most. So, what is the best strategy to deal with this problem? The foolproof way to avoid any chance of a case hearing or getting penalized for a legal violation is to make sure that you go by the book and don’t leave out any legal responsibility at all.

Prepare to set up a business which conforms to all legal liabilities and thus, avoid any legal issues in the future. This simple strategy will take some effort as you make sure that all your legal obligations are met.

Following are some important points to keep in mind, which will help you avoid fines and penalties;

Register Your Business and Avoid All Trademark Infringements
When you choose a name for your company, make sure that it is not registered by any other enterprise. Get your company name registered after making sure that it is available for use, and you are not getting involved in the act of trademark infringement.

Once your name is registered, get trademark protection for yourself.

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Branding

Great Logo Design Tips for a Business Startup

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As a startup, you will likely consider whether you want to spend valuable resources and time on a logo design. A logo may cost as little as $5 to even hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a unique brand appeal. The essential goal of a logo is after all, to create a perception around the business, which is why creating a good logo in the beginning, is a good foundation for branding prospects.

When it comes to logo design, you have a wide range of options to getting it done as there are freelancers and creative design agencies that readily provide this service. However, if you want to incorporate your element into the logo, then follow these tips for a great logo design that becomes the foundation of your brand!

Focus on Simplicity

Simplicity doesn’t necessarily have to mean a stagnant logo that looks elegant, but nothing more than that. A simplistic logo could have some moving pieces, like the old Apple logo with the rainbow colours. To create a simplistic logo, focus on the colours and what emotions they are associated with. If your brand wants to focus on elegance, then grayscale and solid colours are good to work with.

On the other hand, if your brand wants to create a powerful and authoritative image, then dark red, green, yellow, and gold can work to perfection. In any case, make sure that your logo is simple and easy on the eyes as doing so will make it easy for people to remember it for a long time.

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Legal Advice

Are debt collectors crossing their limits?

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Dealing with bankruptcy is a stressful process, and with debt collectors nagging you again and again, it becomes even more nerve-racking and traumatic. Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) was passed in order to keep the debt collectors at bay, and guard you from the unnecessary harassment. If you are being bullied by debt collectors then it’s high time you make use of your rights.

Covered Debts
Debtors can opt for Fair Debt Collection Practices Act if they owe; household, family, and personal debts. It also includes debt on personal credit card, mortgage, medical receipt, and car loan.  Debts that were acquired to accomplish a business are not a part of this act.

An individual can also limit the payments applicability to a specific debt when the collector tries to gather more than a single debt. The collector will then apply your debt payments to your selected debt. Similarly, if a debtor thinks they do not owe a particular debt, the collector cannot impose the payment to it.

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Legal Advice

How to Handle Business Trademark Issues

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If you are planning to set up a new business in Australia, there are a hundred and one things you will need to sort out before you can inaugurate the business. One of the most important things in this long list is a business trademark.

The name, brand, and logo of your business all need to be trademarked if you want your business to have its own identity in the industry and with the customers. If you don’t apply for a trademark, then there is a high chance that another business might use your logo or name and launch their own company, without any legal ramifications whatsoever. They could easily get a trademark and you might be charged for trademark infringement all because they registered it before you did.

Such are the technicalities of trademark registration. If someone uses your business identity and you didn’t bother to go to the trouble of getting it registered, you could be losing loyal customers who would unsuspectingly opt for your competitor’s services with the same name as you! And to rub salt into the wounds, you can’t file for trademark infringement since you didn’t have the brand and logo registered in the first place.

The only way to make it a win-win situation and ensure that your customers are not swindled away by anyone else is to register for a logo and business brand. Think it’s difficult? There are indeed a number of procedures involved and you can get answers to your questions below,

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Online Business

Top 10 Places to List Your Business

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Gone are the days when you had to trawl through large volumes of phone books just to locate the local contact details of a business. Now, every business is where you want it to be, right in front of your target market, making it easy for them to reach out, view your offerings, and browse through them to become a loyal customer in the process. How? By being online!

The internet has made it possible for everyone to access and learn about your business. But are you making it any easier for your customers to find you on the internet? Have you listed your business on the places which will get you great customer exposure and subsequently increase conversions? Customers now conduct searches about companies on different online directories, so if you have your business listed on the top online directories, there is a high likelihood of you being able to expand your market share owing to the improved visibility these listings offer.

If you don’t know how to go about it, then read on to know the top 10 places where you need to list down your business and ensure an increase in your market share.

1. Google

If your business is not listed here, then you are invisible to more than half of your customer market! Such is the popularity of Google as an online search directory that everyday around 6 billion searches are conducted on the portal.

You can register to get a business listing for free, and get a chance to be visible to a large chunk of the target market.

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eCommerce

Who are the Top Ecommerce Superstars in Australia?

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There’s no doubt that many successful online businesses exist in Australia that can boast about having the biggest cut of the cake. However, with so much competition, staying ahead of the game has never been tougher than it is now.

The Forrester analyst group reported in October that at least a third of the total number of online ecommerce businesses plan to invest in improving their technology for 2016. Thus, there will be more online spending options, multichannel retail strategies, mobile solutions, and back office integration next year. This means that there will be more benefits for consumers in terms of variety and easy access to services.

Our list of ecommerce superstars in Australia include market leaders, established and leading players in the ecommerce market, and rising stars of the Australian ecommerce arena.

#1: Appliances Online

This online store began as a simple online store and today, is a multimillion-dollar business. John Winning started it singlehandedly, but today, it has 80 employees and it has proved that Australia has great potential for online retail businesses. The website sells white-goods (domestic electrical items). In the past year, the number of customers using this platform has doubled with more than 150,000 online buyers.

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Online Business

14 Tips to Help You Get That Promotion

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Getting a promotion in some businesses, whether it be as a consultant giving business advice to clients or as a property manager managing clients’ property – it takes a great deal of effort and sometimes a younger person seems to sail effortlessly over you, leaving you feeling somewhat unappreciated – and you may even worry about becoming redundant due to your age.

Here are some more tips to ensure the next promotion is more likely to be yours.

  • Always dress well and appropriately. This may mean upgrading your wardrobe on a regular basis to ensure you are not dressing in an old-fashioned way without realising it. Choosing good quality clothing is also important. You may find a $5 top on a special, but it won’t look very special after the first wash. Every businesswoman and man should wear clothes that are of good quality.
  • Grooming is an important part of your image. Taking care of yourself will help you to look young and fresh all the time. Applying moisturiser at night will help to keep your skin in good condition so you look younger.
  • Grooming also includes hand and nail care – and foot care. If your feet hurt you’ll end up frowning and those wrinkles will eventually stay in position. Besides which, you’ll end up walking like an old person.

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Online Business

Start That Online Business You Have Always Dreamed About

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Online-Business

If you are anything like the average modern day man or woman, this is how a typical weekday in your life would look like – you wake up, get prepped up and all set to get to work, spend the next ten to twelve hours working from a desk, and get back home exhausted. And all the while, there is this tiny spark of an idea that is fluttering inside your head. But you are too scared to fuel it and let it grow into a fire. Well, here is the right amount of inspiration for you, and it’s just enough to inspire you to fan the flames and get your online business up and running; because here is why it is such a great idea.

  • You get to follow your passion – This is undoubtedly the biggest perk of starting an online business. Passion is the most important thing in life, and for various reasons, most people do not get to follow theirs. If you can manage to shake off the initial fear and take the big leap, you can fly.
  • You have more time on your hands – Yes, yes, we know that starting your own online business needs a lot of effort, commitment and late night working hours. But the upside to this is that you can pick your own hours, and create your own schedule. In other words, you get to work when you are at your creative best, instead of sticking to a rigid schedule.
  • You earn scalable income – Too often, the biggest complaint in a day job is that people work for more than they are paid. With an online business of your own, you get to actually control how much you earn depending on how much of an effort you put in. And the best part is that you earn revenue that is proportional to the investment you put in, in terms of time and commitment.

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Legal Advice

What is a Non-Compete Agreement and How to Implement It?

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A non-compete agreement or clause is a lawful contract, in the form of writing, between the boss and the worker. It is applicable after the employee leaves their current job. The necessary terms and conditions within this contract include a prohibition to work in the same industry or with a firm which is competing with the organization, for six months to 2 years, following the end of the employment.

Although a non-compete agreement is for the protection of the company’s clients and other private information which is not accessible to everyone; at some places, it is disapproved of, because it stops an individual from earning a living for themselves in the field of their choosing. For this reason, the court system closely analyzes legal disputes arising from non-compete agreements also called as covenant in restraint of trade.

Benefits of a Non-Compete Agreement

Non-compete agreement works in the favor of the employer because it forbids the ex-employees from giving out important confidential information to the competitors that will facilitate them in earning more profits. This information includes; list of clients, business plans, company’s secret of success, and industry experience and knowledge, etc.

The employees can benefit from this agreement by getting some reward which can be; a job, monetary payment, or promotion, in return for signing the clause.

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eCommerce

Why an Ecommerce Business in Australia is a Good Idea in 2015?

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According to the predictions for the retail ecommerce market, based on stats collected since 2009, we are seeing retail sales increase by 14.4%, which equals to approximately 10 billion dollars. In Australia, ecommerce sales have increased to 17.3% and account for more than 4% of the total retail sales. By the end of this year, this figure will rise by an additional 4.5%.

Based on these facts, by 2017, the world will see a double-digit increase and retail sales will increase to approximately 14.52%. This will stand for 5.6% of Australia’s retail sales. Today, Australia stands in the middle of the ecommerce market when compared to Asia-Pacific countries like India, Indonesia, China, Japan, and South Korea.

An interesting fact is that the highest number of customers for the ecommerce market in Australia are the second highest recorded in the Asia-Pacific region. EMarketer predicts that by the end of 2015, 79.4% of the total number of internet users in Australia will use ecommerce websites to purchase things. The leading country will likely be Japan, which may have approximately 82.0% internet users. Australia is a little further down the list, mainly because of its comparative population size of digital buyers.

However, investing in ecommerce businesses in Australia is a good idea because it has a crowded ecommerce market with international competitors. In fact, the country showed the highest number of retail customer visits during a week of study. Sites like eBay have also recorded the highest number of visitors, followed by Amazon, and then other ecommerce websites, like AliExpress.

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Legal Advice

Tips to Lease the Right Business Property

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Getting a property lease for your business is quite different from finding a home to rent. Whether your business is new or needs more space to accommodate the growth, you should know that the market is working in favor of business owners when it comes to commercial real estate. Hopefully, these 7 tips will help you lease the right business property for the long term!

  1. Compare Rent Against Amenities

You may be getting a commercial lease at cheaper rates, but if there is inadequate space for common areas like meeting rooms, hallways, elevators, and restrooms, then you may have to invest extensively in renovations. Also remember that commercial lease agreements will have an annual percentage-based rent increase, so don’t invest in a property you can’t sustain for the long term.

  1. The Use Clause

The use clause is incorporated in lease agreements to define activities the tenant will engage in on the property. Make sure that you negotiate a cap with the landlord on the rent increase in order to avoid any unmanageable costs or costs that are not controlled by you.

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Starting a Business

How to Choose the Right Name For Your Business?

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Choosing a name for your business is every bit as important as trying to ensure services to customers in the industry, and even more so! Since your business name is the identity of your service, it will be the name with which the market and customers will identify you. If the name is unrelated and seemingly irrelevant to the product or service you offer, then the customers will find it hard to remember, and your name will eventually be forgotten.

Remember, in an industry which is highly competitive, a name which is difficult to remember or relate to a service, is bad enough to drive away customer traffic of existing customers. This is why, if you don’t choose the right name for your business, you run a high risk of losing customers who have the potential to become loyal clients.

Do you want to know what your business name should be? Keep the following points in mind while deciding an appropriate name for your business. Read more on branding

Reinforce Key Elements of Business Value
Make sure that your potential customer doesn’t have to think twice, to understand what you have to offer. Ambiguity or vagueness in a name can prove catastrophic for the business. Make sure to have combinations of words which give the customer an idea of the value you offer.

Experts discourage the use of number strings and symbols displayed as a business name, as it might confuse the target market about your product or service portfolio.

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Starting a Business

What Challenges Does an SME and Business Start-up Face In Australia

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If you have planned out everything for your new start-up; then are you ready for the challenges which lie ahead in your endeavour? There are many things to take care of in your new business, but you also need to be ready for any possible challenge which may come in your way.

Do you know what challenges you need to be ready for, and what do you need to do to tackle them? Following are some challenges that every business start-up has to face in their initial days.

Will To Persevere
The first set of problems is demanding enough to get a new business owner thinking. Many start-up owners begin to see quitting as a viable solution as compared to the problems of huge bills, negative customer reviews and unstable operations.

The key solution to deal with this challenge is to persevere and keep working hard.

Harbor Unrealistic Expectations
It is important to analyse the due demand for your business product and garner realistic expectations. Project your initial revenue with a clear idea of the realistic situation. Setting unrealistic expectations can prove to be problematic for the business in the long run.

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eCommerce

The Future of eCommerce Business in Australia

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Majority of Australians have already made the switch to digital superhighway in buying goods and services. Recent survey results from Australian Digital Economy E-commerce Trends and Statistics Report highlight the fact that people are increasingly buying goods and services online.

At the moment Australians still lag behind UK and US when it comes to online shopping. This means that there is great scope for start-up firms to build a strong base and capture untapped market.

eCommerce start-up firms stand to gain a lot from changing trends in the digital arena. Below we take a look at some of the upcoming trends that will change the way eCommerce is conducted down under.

Shift of Focus to Mobile eCommerce
Mobile eCommerce in Australia is going to increase in popularity in the coming years, Small business eCommerce retailers will be incorporating technologies that provides improved customer experience for mobile users. Some the technologies that is expected to make headway in Australia include NFC redeemable coupons, QR codes, and free Wi-Fi.

In addition, it will become increasingly important for eCommerce retailers to ensure that the shopping cart, online payment and layout are all optimised for mobile users.

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Branding

Protecting your Online Business from Infringement Online

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It’s not very easy to build up a reputation for online businesses that reverberates with shoppers and increases the value of the arrangement of products and administrations. Sadly, a few companies- – purposely or unintentionally – can encroach on another online business’ brand and trademark, conceivably prompting real misfortune or disarray among purchasers.

Be that as it may, with cautious readiness and steady checking, online businesses can shield their brand and their business from damage.

Building a Brand
Maybe the most ideal approach to safeguard your brand is to verify you aren’t taking somebody else’s. Yes, a good point to start with.

So before building value in a brand, research to verify you aren’t unintentionally venturing on another person’s toes. Some big companies have been known to sue little companies on the simple assertion of brand infringement. Forthright research is the best protection against being blamed for infringement. In this, a quick Google search can do a lot of good. Nowadays, most businesses have a profile online. You can look up for your company name online and gather some details. If it matches with that of others, take a step back, and build your brand around some other terms – prevention is always better than cure.

Watch Out for Competitors
Effectively screen the market for indications of brand infringement. In the event that your slogan is a registered trademark, for instance, scan for the expression on well-known web crawlers, including Bing or Google. Visit contender sites to ensure that your adversary isn’t duplicating your hues, images or visual outline.

The more advance the competition grows, the harder it is to put a stop to it. Try to put this you’re your routine observation before they turn out to be sufficiently huge in the form of your lawyer’s fee.

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