Category: Business

Regularly inspecting your office plumbing is one of the most important things to prevent costly and time-consuming problems. Although you might think employing a plumbing contractor for a simple inspection is too expensive, it’s certainly worth it – trust us!

If you don’t catch minor problems early, they can become significant and costly. Things like burst pipes or blocked drains can affect more than you and your business – they can also impact other businesses working in the same building.

In the rest of this article, we’ve compiled a list of the top reasons you should always get your office plumbing inspected regularly. These include:

Whether you are a business owner, a sports coach, or a leader within an organisation, you know that to be successful, the people within your group need to work together as a team. This is why team building activities have become a crucial part of any successful organisation’s progression towards achieving the goals that it has been set.

A problem often raised by team leaders and managers is that they do not know enough about team building and in particular what sorts of activities they can use to help galvanise and empower the individuals within the group to work together as one united team.

Basically, team building activities can be broken down into four distinct types, and the benefit of knowing them is you can then determine which category or categories of activity would be most applicable to the team you are working with. Thereafter, you can choose the specific activities with each category that you are going to pursue.

#1 Skill Based

This category is used where you wish to improve some specific skills of those in your team. The obvious example of where these might be used is a sports team, but it also applies to skills found within other sectors. In the business world examples would be sales skills or managerial skills, whilst some organisations might want their members to improve their speaking skills or negotiation skills.

These sorts of activities normally require an outside treating company or consultant to come in and train your team, and therefore they can require a reasonable level of investment. However. the return should be significant given that your team will have a higher skill levels than before.

When you have a website it is usually because you want to interact with others in some way, whether to sell a product or service, or just get visitors to sign up for something. According to Slinky Web Design our web design plays an important part in accomplishing this, but in some cases it does not do the job you had hoped, or does not do it as well as you thought it would. The reason could be your web design.

If visitors find navigating your website difficult, or they can’t find what they want they will soon leave. But don’t despair because there are easy ways to improve your web design so that the user experience is enhanced. Here are some tips you can implement to make your web design better.

• Link each page to the home page. Many webmasters think that visitors only come to their site via the home page, but this is not true. When visitor come via another page you need to make it easy for them to find the home page so they can take the action you want them to. Make the link back to the home page obvious and easy to see and tell them to click on it.
• Use responsive design. It is essential in this day and age when so many people connect to the internet via their iPhones or other small device. If your website is set up to be read on a desktop PC it will be difficult to read on a smaller screen.
• Ensure your navigation is intuitive. Most links are found in a line across the top of the page while secondary ones go down the left side the page. It is better to put all those links that are not so important down in the footer where they can be found but are not cluttering up space where it is needed.

Are you looking for organic ways to get more customers for your online business? You may have decided to try one of the more common forms of digital marketing, social media.  One of the most common ways is to set up a Facebook Business Page to showcase your products and get your friends – and hence, their friends – to Like it. There are varying opinions on whether it works, how it works and why it should – or shouldn’t – work for specific business models. But if you have never done it before, here are some basic principles of social media marketing (SMM) you need to know about.

• No matter what kind of business you have, ‘the customer is always right’ is an excellent adage to go by, but even more so in social media marketing. Why? Because if you try to argue with a customer, it will soon be all over the media, often to the detriment of your business. So take hasty steps to make that customer a happy camper.
• Don’t offer personal triviality. Potential customers don’t want to know what you like for breakfast. They want to know about the quality of your product and whether your company offers returns.
• Don’t be satisfied with a business page. Do a paid ad as well. It will promote your product and people that see both will trust you more.
• Take part in the community, don’t just post and run. If you befriend people, especially those that are considered influencers, you’ll have more success yourself. But be genuine and sincere, don’t just do it for selfish reasons.

• Be positive. People have enough negativity to cope with. They love to see how people rose to meet a challenge. Even just being happy and positive about little things helps.

SEO Perth Experts explains that Search Engine Optimisation is a term for several ways and means of getting your page ranked higher in the SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages. Why is this desirable? If you have ever searched online for something you will very likely have clicked on one of the websites that the search engines offer from their first page. And of all the choices on that first page, you most likely clicked on one of the first three.

So if you can get the search engines to show your website in that position you will get a great deal more organic or free traffic than a website that is on the second, third or other pages.

But how can you get the search engines to choose your website and put it on their first page? Here are 8 SEO tips to help you.

Australian tax laws can be complicated even to experienced accountants, which means that they can be nearly impossible to navigate for the average person. Sure, you might have finally figured out how to fill out your own tax return at the end of the year, but what about capital gains tax?

What is capital gains tax?

Capital Gains Tax (CGT) is tax that you pay on the sale of a property or other investment. It only applies to the profit or loss that you made on the sale, which means that you have to be careful when calculating CGT. For example, if you bought an investment property for a million dollars in the past, and then went on to sell it for two million some time later, you would have made a capital gain of a million dollars. This capital gain needs to be added to your tax return, and you will have to pay tax on it.

What is the taxation rate for CGT?

The CGT taxation rate can actually be a little bit confusing to work out. A lot of people think that you have to pay tax on the entirety of your sale. This is not the case. You will only ever pay tax on a capital gain, and you can claim capital losses back on your tax return.

If you have held an asset for more than 12 months, you will get a discount on your capital gains. Instead of adding the entire gain to your tax return, you will only need to add half of it. This means that you will only pay tax on half of your capital gains. Once your capital gain amount has been worked out, it is added onto your normal income tax return, and you will pay normal tax rates on it. The actual amount of tax you pay will depend on your total income and on what tax bracket you end up falling into.

Graphic design should be so good it pops and sizzles, but unfortunately, much is so bland and boring it slips out of our notice, along with whatever it was advertising. Not all designers have what it takes to create great design, but by taking heed of just a few tips you can edge out the competition and become the kind of graphic designer that everyone wants to work for them. So here are a few idea to make your graphic design memorable.

• Fonts are an essential element in most graphic design, but you may be unsure which to use where – and shouldn’t it all be the same in a design? Not so. Pairing contrasting fonts can really make the design special – especially if you make one font large and the other smaller. This brings out the contrast and helps to make the text appealing.
• Colour is a very important component of any graphic design. Yours will really stand out if you match the font colour to the main colour in the graphics. For an exact match you can get the 6-digit HEX code by using a colour picker tool. You can also make the colour stand out more against a patterned background if you enclose it in a semi-transparent box or shape.
• Another way to help light text stand out when placed on a patterned background is to darken the background.
• Colour saturation can increase the vibrancy of an image that may otherwise look somewhat washed out.

Has anybody else noticed the correlation between the top-paying SEO keywords and the state of the Western English-speaking economy? No, don’t skim over this, it’s very easy to understand and very startling. According to wordstream.com, the six top-paying Google adwords keywords are…

1. Insurance
2. Loans
3. Mortgage
4. Attorney
5. Credit
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim

Now, pause and consider: all of these words have a common theme. They are debt-related. No, really! They’re all financial terms covering some aspect of business related to monetary liability. In insurance, you need that to pay for damages when things go wrong, loans are what you take out when you’re going into debt, mortgages are a kind of debt with a house attached, attorneys are who you need to settle matters pertaining to all of the above…

Once you make the decision to start up a landscaping business like Lone Pine Landscapes, there is a lot to do and understand, even if you’ve worked in the area before. It is easy to get carried away with enthusiasm and make mistakes that can have your dream tumbling down, along with your cash flow. So here are 5 mistakes to avoid when starting up your business.

• Landscaping is not just mowing, although it can include that. There will be many kinds of implements and equipment that you are likely to need in carrying out your various landscaping chores. It’s important to not rush out and purchases them all, especially those high ticket items like ditch diggers. Instead, purchase the things you’ll use a lot of and sub-contract or hire the rest, at least until you can afford to buy them.  And while it’s important to have modern equipment, you can save money to start with by purchasing good used equipment.
• Not answering the phone is going to cost you money. When people do their research and pick two or three people to do their gardening work, the next step is to phone them. If you don’t answer, they’ll go onto the next one on their list. Of course it is hard to answer when you are working or driving. But you can have the calls redirected to someone else who can answer for you or hire an answering service. Otherwise, you need to leave a friendly but professional message on the phone promising to call back within a certain time such as at lunch time or during your afternoon break.