Branding Success Tips For Your Overland Business

If you are a part supplier or even a full manufacturer of overland vehicles, it’s extremely important that you have a clearly defined brand for your business. Opening up an online store or simply having access to the right parts today isn’t going to get you noticed. In order to separate yourself from the competition you need to have a true brand. Here are some top Branding success tips you can use with your Overland business:

Consider your inspiration: thinking deeply on elements of your product that really inspire you or that even caused you to open up your store can be an excellent place to start. Feeling empowered thinking about your products will help you narrow into the focus of your company.

Consider market conditions: current market conditions can dictate your branding to a degree as well. Depending on the type of products that you regularly sell and the attitudes of your customers, you can work at creating a brand that is more focused in a younger generation or an older generation. Doing market research with market conditions will help you to determine which demographic you should focus on.

Attach a story/ emotion to it: with any type of branding, if a person can feel more connected to your story and feel the same way as your business creators do about overland products, they are much more likely to buy your brand. Share your story and create branded elements that work to symbolize elements of the story. Attach real emotion to your brand such as the feeling of freedom that off roading can deliver to you.

Keep some of these branding success tips in mind when you are working towards creating a brand for your Overland business. With the right branding your business can expand!

Blog Source:-

https://www.stoutewebsolutions.com/2017/04/12/branding-success-tips-overland-business/

Social Media Marketing Tips From the Pros

Social media is all about allowing you to connect with others, but businesses can also use it in order to generate customers and leads. Doing this is actually very easy and you will find the entire process to be very fulfilling. But there are some marketing tips that will make the process even more rewarding. Here are some of the best!

• Mine Twitter and you will be able to grow your audience. It’s a great marketing plan and you will see that you can easily get a lot of followers without that much of a hassle.

• See what performed well in regards to the older posts and what didn’t work. Improve on the posts that didn’t work for you with the data from those that did very well.

• Add links to visual content. You can create a lot of back links this way and this will work to your advantage.

• Try to add images to your Tweets. They will be more enticing, because people rarely focus on reading too much text. Breaking some of the tweets with text can work very well, especially if you want to express something visually.

• Don’t stick to a single format all the time. There are situations when you can opt for various format types. They can actually work very well for you, it all comes down to finding the right approach and the outcome can be worth it.

• Use hashtags. They really work at giving you the right exposure and you will be very impressed with the unique boost they can deliver to your business.

• Pinterest is one of those platforms that not all businesses use. You should, because it can deliver a resounding experience and the results that you get from it can be amazing.

• Social updates can be used to write blog posts on your website. Then you can link to them if possible. Try to harness each opportunity to generate more content. It will really pay off by the end.

• Add some text to images. This will offer them more context and people will understand what you want to express with them. It’s a distinct experience and one that will help you quite a bit. So, try to give it a shot and you will see that the audience responds a lot better.

• Make sure that you use social tools to schedule updates. It will be a lot easier to do this and the experience will be a lot better in the end. Don’t rush to send all content at once, scheduling will make the process a lot easier.

• Don’t focus on all social channels. Instead, try to focus only on one or two. This way you will get to target your audience a lot better and results will be a lot more rewarding for sure.

In the end, social media marketing is not hard to do, it all comes down to quality, precision and attention to detail. You should consider making the most out of it right away, as it can help you quite a lot. Take your time and harness each opportunity, results can be very interesting in the end.

Source:-https://www.stoutewebsolutions.com/2017/02/13/social-media-marketing-tips-from-the-pros/

Can Your Overland Business Sell Internationally?

Expanding your production or your sales internationally could be an extremely difficult decision. If you’re already doing well in your local market, the idea of growth into an international market might be very tempting for a business owner. But how do you know if you’re ready to expand and if an international market might be viable for your products?

Here are some of the top points to consider if you are interested in selling internationally with your Overland business:

Shipping: In order to sell your products internationally shipping can become an extremely crucial element of the product price. You might find that the cost of shipping, especially if your customers need products into rush can make it very difficult to compete with local suppliers. This is why so many Overland suppliers end up creating distribution centers or manufacturing arrangements internationally to sell their products.

Using the right e-commerce platform: A local e-commerce platform or selling items out of a local shop is a fairly low risk way that you can distribute your product. In order to break into some marketplaces you may need to consider a distribution agreement with local governments or even taking advantage of a local online marketplace such as the Mercado Libre which is the most popular e-commerce site in Latin America. Doing research into the best sites to list your products on and local regulations can be another hurdle to overcome.

Market research: breaking into several international markets with your product could be a great way to have a backup during slow sales periods locally. Understanding if there is a need for your product in that local market and if there is any local competition can help to determine your success when selling internationally.

Building a new network: whenever you’re going to sell products internationally you need to start working on a new network for advertising, taxing your products, distributing your products and more. While you may start off selling your products online and shipping them to a new international market, eventually it could become cheaper to set up your own distribution, a factory locally and start working with a local marketing company for advertisements in the native language.

Keep these top ideas in mind if you are trying to determine whether selling in an international market could be a great idea for your business.

Blog Source :- 

https://www.stoutewebsolutions.com/2017/04/20/can-overland-business-sell-internationally/

Why Do You Need Digital Marketing?

A lot of companies hear about Digital Marketing, but they don’t know what it is and how they can use it. Simply put, Digital Marketing is a combination of various marketing and promotional ideas designed to help you increase your company’s exposure in the online world and boost your ranking as well.

Why would you need Digital Marketing? As you can imagine, you do need all the exposure you can get, and Digital Marketing will allow you to do that without that much of a hassle. Thankfully, there are many Digital Marketing topics you can focus on, each one with its own ups and downs, as you can imagine.

Digital Marketing allows you to level the playing field because you get to access the same media channels that large companies do even if you are just a small startup. It’s a very good experience and one that you will enjoy quite a bit. Then you have the fact that Digital Marketing is very cost efficient.

Yes, you get to save a lot of money from this and the entire experience will be more than rewarding every time. It will not be easy to do that, which is why you need to have the right approach regardless of the situation. With this type of marketing, you get to have a powerful marketing channel with lots of conversions and incredible features delivered without any hassle.

Thanks to Digital Marketing, you can also acquire quite a lot of conversions. It’s very important to have this type of approach because it can give you immediate access to the ultimate experience and the process can be very powerful for sure. Then, you have the fact that Digital Marketing can indeed bring you more revenue. With its help, you can get better online exposure and that helps generate a lot more leads and customers.

It will also help you interact with targeted audiences in a much better fashion. You get to interact with them fast and easy, to the point where it will be easier to send your messages to them and generate more leads.

Digital Marketing is also suitable for those companies that target mobile consumers. There are many strategies dedicated specifically to mobile consumers that can easily pay off. As long as you have the right approach, you will have no problem generating a great experience from this and the outcome can be second to none in the end.

Yes, Digital Marketing can literally boost the power of your business, and this is why you should consider investing in it right away. It will offer you a resounding experience and you won’t have to worry about any issues either. It really shines from that reason alone, and with the right approach, you can easily use Digital Marketing to generate a lot of money for your business. You should consider using it right now, it really helps take your business to the next level! It’s not expensive and its results will definitely outweigh the costs!

Top 10 Non-Techy Things To Get More Website Traffic

If you’ve realized by now, if your website appears on page 2 when you search for your keywords, then you are not getting the relevant traffic you deserve. Most marketers consider this page a dead zone. Therefore, for you to even come close to being at the topmost spot, you really need to know what you are doing or at a bare minimum have a general understanding of what it takes to be successful.

SEO is a marketing discipline that is majorly focussed on growing your visibility in terms of organic search engine results. It involves both creative and technical skills to improve your rank, increase awareness and drive traffic to your website.

More importantly, SEO Consulting is not only about making your website search engine friendly, but it’s also about making it better for people too. This makes SEO a very vital necessity. Here are top 10 non-technical things you need to do to optimize your website.

1. Make a Plan and write it down

It sounds silly to tell you that making a plan is important to the success of your website and goals especially if you have a goal of something like, “Get More Website Traffic”, or “Increase Leads.” When we’re working with our clients we constantly suggest setting goals using the SMART goal method. What the SMART goal method gets us is actionable, realistic, and time-bound goals that you can actually achieve. So instead of having a goal of “Get more website traffic” you’d have a goal of “In the next 3 months, I want to increase my website traffic to an average of 500 unique visits a day.” This type of goal setting not only gives you a timeline to achieve your goal, sets up a specific expectation of what your goal actually it. For comparison’s sake, if you increase your website traffic on average by any number then you’ve achieved the first goal, whereas if you set a goal that is specific then you can know how much effort you put into achieving that goal and how close you actually were to being successful or if you blew the goal out of the water than you know that you can either scale back the budget for that or set your next goal at a higher level.

Here’s the important part now that you’ve set a goal… write it down and post it somewhere you will see on a daily basis. Keep focused on your goals by asking yourself if what you’re going right now relates to achieving that goal. If it doesn’t, then ask yourself why you’re doing it.

2. Niche Down

This may sound like a no-brainer but before you start any campaign to build traffic you really want to know who you want to come to your website. Niching down allows you to place focus on your campaign and build value to a specific group. The value you provide is what is going to keep people coming back. Spend most of your planning time here. Identifying the correct niche for you and your business will take you further than anything else in this list.

Niching down also helps you write targetted content and promotions that will resonate with the people you want to work with. Once you select your ideal niche, the rest of the steps become significantly easier too.

3. Get to know your competition

Now that you’ve picked your niche, your competition may have changed significantly. Get to know your competition in your niche. Once you’ve identified your niche competition, get to know how they operate. Do they have a large social media following? Do they write blog or news posts? Do they have a newsletter (if so join it)? Do they have online reviews?

Basically, figure out everything that they do well, write it down then figure out everything they don’t do well, write it down. The areas they aren’t doing so hot in are your low hanging fruit. It’s an area that you can come into swinging and if done correctly you’ll end up gaining on your existing competition. Spend more of a focus in the areas that they are slipping and take advantage of it. If it’s areas that require more funds or customers that you don’t have (reviews for example) then just be sure to circle back to that with each new customer. Make sure you shine where others aren’t.

4. Keyword Research

Next, make sure you understand keywords that people are using to find you and your competitors. Before you write any content or work on your website, make sure you understand how people will find that content. With that in mind, keywords help to gauge the demand for certain necessities.

Therefore if your website is SEO optimized, then you are sure of getting customers sooner than expected. There are different tools that will help you search for the appropriate keywords in your niche. Google Keyword Planner is one of the best keyword search tools in the business. Other keyword search tools include SEMrush and Yoast.

5. High-Quality Content (Quality over Quantity)

Here’s where most people find the most difficulty. Content is everything to your website and it’s growth. What’s more is that relevant content will get you that ranking you deserve. If you’ve never touched your website since you launched it, then you really don’t have a good base to start with.

To get the best ranking on Google, you need to give visitors a reason to come to your website. In addition, your content needs to be high quality, relevant and definitely recent. The other thing that might also affect your ranking is something known as dwell-time. This is simply the amount of time people spend on your website.

Therefore you need to have content that’s fresh, exciting and makes your visitors stick around for more. If you have great content then your dwell-time will also be great. Also, make sure you produce regular content. We recommend posting a high-quality article at least once a week. That said, quality over quantity is key. Don’t just put anything out there just because you need to get something out there. It’s better to not post anything until you have something people will want to read. Posting lots of low-quality content will negatively affect your rankings, and worse waste your time AND money. Essentially, do it right or don’t do it at all.

Determining the content that you want to write about is easier than you think. Start with answering questions that you are frequently asked. “How do I increase traffic to my website?” for example. Once you’ve written articles that will accurately answer those questions, take a moment to find questions on sites like Quora that are related to your industry. Write an article and then share a link to that article as a reply. This not only gets new eyes on your website from that site, but it also provides true value to the person asking the question. Another added benefit it if your answer is selected as the correct answer for the question you’ll not only get your reply highlighted and get more visibility for your reply, but your link will stay there pretty much forever. Which brings me to backlinks.

6. Use backlinks

This is one of the most important parts of SEO. Unfortunately, most people tend to overlook this aspect, more so than any other factors. Before you decide to go all the way and purchase links to your website, remember that it’s about quality and not quantity. Also just don’t purchase backlinks, it’s against the rules, and rarely gets you any real traffic.

The main goal when it comes to backlinks is showing Google that your website is trustworthy. This will make Google place more trust in your content, which will, in turn, increase your ranking for keywords related to your top rated content. A little tip: Each page of your website is ranked differently, which is why high-quality content with backlinks will show up more in Google searches than low-quality content (which might not show up at all).

Going about getting backlinks isn’t as complicated as you might imagine and sometimes it only takes you asking the website owner to get one. Building a backlink campaign takes time and knowledge of the industry. But you should have both of those if you’re reading this article. 

Start by finding places that your competition has links from, most of these are probably links to their homepage and doesn’t really offer up any real value to the person visiting. Take a look at the context of the page the link is on then if you have a similar article written then contact the website and see if they’d be willing to not only link to your article but to swap out the link pointing to the content you’ve written and don’t forget to ask for their feedback on your article.

Once you’ve identified all of your competitor’s links and attempted to get them to swap out their links for yours, you can start to build up your backlinks through Q&A sites like Quora, Alignable, or any other industry related blogs/forums/etc.

Depending on your niche and target demographic, you can even just comment as yourself (not your business) on related industry blogs talking about content that you’ve written. Be the first commenter and your comment is more likely to be seen by others. Again, don’t forget to ask for the writer’s feedback on your own article and don’t be afraid to link out to other places that help align your point as you’ve seen in this article. If you do this consistently enough and avoid too many self-promotion posts, you might even find that the people your posting comments on will start writing about you and your business.

7. Social Media

Social media can be tricky for some folks to wrap their heads around so if you aren’t particularly savvy on Facebook or with computers you might want to look at hiring this work out or dive in head first to make the best use of the power of social. When you join social media platforms use your name to join. This will not only build trust with the people shopping but it’ll add a personal flair to your business that so many businesses are lacking these days. The more personal you are typically the better your social campaigns will be in the long run.

Now when I say personal, I don’t mean to post loads of selfies or photos of what you’re eating for dinner but display real people using the product or service you provide. This will resonate with your niche and build trust. Utilizing social media to build trust is a great thing to do and will typically have long-lasting positive results. There are so many options when it comes to social media that we recommend chatting with someone to help identify your goals and how you can best use the power of social media. We offer a free consultation if you’re interested.

8. Google Analytics and other reporting tools

Google Analytics PrintoutSo you’re on the path to greatness and you’re beginning to implement all this great advice. That’s awesome! But how do you even know if it’s working? Adding a simple tracking software like Google Analytics to your website will allow you to view so much information about your campaigns. You can see things like where your visitors came from, how long they stayed on your site, and even which articles/pages of your website are the most popular. This is extremely important because you’ll need to know what works so you can tweak things to make the best use of your new traffic. If you write three articles and one if outshining the rest, you can gain a better understanding of why that might be using Analytics.

Another tool to consider would be Hotjar. Hotjar is a neat tool that allows you to build something called a heatmap of your page. What they do is track the clicks and screen view of your site viewers so that you can see where people are clicking or viewing. This is useful for you in a few ways. First, you’ll know if a bunch of people are clicking on something that isn’t a link or button you should probably look at why they’re clicking there. Is it an image that looks like a button or does the context imply that by clicking on it you’ll view a new page? Both things are simple fixes and increase your overall user experience and time people will spend on your article.

Basically, you won’t be able to optimize something that you are not able to quantify. Having a basic understanding of what Google Analytics and other tools can do for you and how it will help you quantify your traffic will help you not only achieve your goals but also set you up for future success.

9. Know what’s happening

Almost every week, Google’s SEO algorithms are updated and implemented. Google keeps these updates pretty shielded because they don’t want bad people to abuse the changes and truly want the search results to benefit the people searching. Take a moment when you start a new campaign to review any changes that have taken place between when you started the last campaign and now. Typically the updates are a quick read and give a general understanding of how to maximize your effectiveness.

10. Of course, it’s not all about SEO

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is vital to your website. However, this strategy also has its own fair share of shortcomings. Don’t forget your users when you optimize your website. Your user’s experience and SEO are what will determine your ranking. Building your website for real people, the very people who you want to be your customers will be your best solution. Don’t get caught up in optimizing your website for Google, make sure everything you do on your website is for your customers. In the end Google isn’t going to be buying your product or service, people are.

11. Eleven?

Oh man, I promised you the top 10 things that you can do today to get more traffic. Well here’s number eleven. If you ever feel like you don’t understand something, need help getting to the next level, or really anything just ask. We offer free one on one chat sessions to anyone looking for some advice to better their business. We also offer free daily chats via Facebook where we’ll answer questions and get you the help you need without any expectation or charge.

How to Improve Your Networking Ability In The Overland Industry

Whether you’re going to be selling parts or servicing vehicles in the Overland industry it’s extremely important that you make some business connections. Quality networking within this industry can help to bring your customers some huge advantages as well as allow your business to continuously expand. If you are just starting out and your interested in some top tips for networking, here are some ways that you can reach out in your industry and improve the abilities of your company:

Check LinkedIn: finding other people in your industry often requires a bit of help from a social network. Linkedin is one of the best new networks for professionals and by focusing on creating a great profile you can work at reaching out to other like-minded individuals within your industry. The message, meet up for coffee and connect at tradeshows with some of the people you can connect with on here.

Find Genuine Interest Events: If a new company in your industry’s opening in the area or you can go to a local business association meeting, it’s possible that you could meet up with new people in your industry and start collaborating with them. Showing genuine interest in the business that they do can be a great start and even a simple tour of a local manufacturing facility could put you in line to start getting some parts made there.

Sponsor Local Events: a small sponsorship at a local marathon, charity event or even a local golf tournament could be all that you need to start making new local contacts in the industry. Local sponsorship events are often an inexpensive advertising cost and you can forge some great business relationships here.

Keep some of these top ideas in mind as you are working at creating your business network in the Overland industry. Please Visit: https://www.stoutewebsolutions.com/2017/04/15/improve-networking-ability-overland-industry/

Strategic Plan is Just a Trip Plan For Your Overland Business

Before any adventure is taken you develop a trip plan. Learn how to adapt this process to work for you to develop a strategic plan for your overland business.

I get it planning can zap a lot of the fun out of the excitement of planning your next great overland adventure. But taking the steps to develop this plan allow for you to have a better understanding of your adventure, route, and needed repairs or accessories for your rig. In the end, creating a trip plan for your adventure allows you to become more relaxed and have more fun on your expedition because you know all your bases are covered. Creating a strategic plan for your overland business will be created in much the same way.

You might be one to grab your boots and jump in your truck and off you go. This can easily get you off course, lost, or even in a bad situation down the trail.

When you develop your plan you’re setting yourself up for a successful adventure. Similarly, when you develop a strategic plan for your overland business you’re setting your business up for success.

The Basics

In a trip plan, you start out with where you’re going. You map out any GPX tracks, maps that you’ll need, and even check on forest road closures. A successful strategic plan for your overland business is just the same except that in place of GPX tracks, you’ll have business goals and instead of road closures you’ll have a SWOT analysis to allow you to understand where you might need a helping hand or find a way around issues in your existing processes that might create a “roadblock.”

Once you know where you’re going you start to figure out how to get there. For an overland trip plan, you calculate miles and tanks of gas. For a strategic plan, you’ll calculate milestones and business goals.

Are there any points of interest that you’ll want to leave your predetermined route to see? ie. Are there any new staff you want to bring on or products that you want to launch along the way.

Preparation

Just like preparing your overland adventure you need to prepare your business. For your vehicle, it might just be a fluid and pressure check and off you go, but more than likely you’ll want to ensure you have all of that done in addition to rotating tires, checking alignments, and inspecting the brakes. Of course, you’re not going to want to wait until the last moment to get these things completed.

When developing your strategic plan for your overland business it’s often the small things that get overlooked that become a much larger issue down the road. Do you have the budget to tackle all the things you want to do? Do you have the skills to do all of these tasks or should you look for external assistance to help with some of these tasks? These are just some of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself when developing the strategic plan for your business.

Be Flexible

With any good plan, there will be things that change on the fly after you develop your trip plan. It could be a flat tire or broken part on your adventure before you even get to the first trail. These things happen and it sucks when they do, but allow yourself to be flexible will allow you to beable to work with these types of setbacks.

For your strategic plan, you might have lost a critical employee or you made a budgeting mistake which could be your set back. When these things happen to make sure you take a step back from the situation and review your initial strategic plan again. Is this set back large enough that you can no longer proceed down the trail or is it something that you might just need to accommodate for in your plan. Be flexible with your strategy as it’s not something that's set in stone it’s more a guideline to how to achieve your goals.

Learn as you go

Each new trip or strategic plan is an opportunity to improve your overall knowledge, innovate processes, and build on the experiences of the last one.

When you go through different areas of your strategic plan for your overland business make sure you reflect on your plan again and learn from what you’re doing. You’ll quickly learn the area of opportunity and ways to make it easier for you to complete that task next time.

A strategic plan for your overland business is something that will forever change with time. It’s fluid and you’ll be able to work around any obsticles in your way. The most important portion of your plan is knowing the end goal and what actions will get you there.

Without defining a clear focus to your overland business you’ll get lost in the maze of the backcountry.

Contact Stoute Web Solutions if you are looking creating website design at https://www.stoutewebsolutions.com/

Great Ways to Improve Your Web Design

Your web design will directly influence the user experience, so you have to opt for a web design that’s distinct, unique and persuasive. But how can you improve the web design, are there any methods you can use in this regard? Turns out there are quite a bit of them, it all comes down to you to pick the right ones that deliver the most value!

Try to use an intuitive navigation

If you want people to find the stuff you want to showcase, use intuitive navigation. Allow your users to get a secondary bar where they can access various portions of your website. Don’t make it difficult, instead make it simple and easy to browse. Results will be a whole lot better in the end.

Remove the clutter 

Make sure that you have a clean interface. This will attract a lot more users. You want a clean, easy to use interface, the last thing you want is a clutter.

Opt for a professional logo 

People will take you seriously if you use a professional logo. This also helps you with branding and that works to your advantage. Take your time, don’t rush and you will see that the value can be very well worth it. As long as you don’t rush, you will see that the experience can be very rewarding in the end. Try to use that, take your time and the experience will be an amazing one.

Use the right color palette

Different colors will showcase a different feel. Try to make sure that you opt for those colors that will entice people to stick to the site or maybe even convert into paid customers. Study the color variation and see which one suits your business.

Get professional images

Stock images and professional photos are very important. With their help, you will have no problem getting the best possible value. It will be very rewarding to do this, so just try to take your time, don’t rush and you will be very impressed with the outcome for sure!

Opt for the right fonts

Some fonts will work with all browsers, others not so much. Avoid rushing and make sure that you pick those fonts that are easy to read across multiple devices.

You should design every page as a landing page

Why is that? The reason is rather simple, you need to entice people to convert, to view what you sell, plus the landing page design is more appealing for most people. As a result, the process will be great and it does bring in front of a great experience as a whole. So, you should totally consider giving it a shot!

Yes, there are many ways to boost your web design, it all comes down to you to pick the right option. Don’t rush, as long as you take your time you will find that there are many benefits to be had. Just try to take your time and in the end, you will be happy with the results!

How to Create Fantastic Print Brochures for Your Overland Business

If you are in the Overland business and you need to prepare brochures for a tradeshow or even for mail outs, it can be very difficult to know exactly where to start in the process. Trade show advertising and mail out advertising can be extremely effective in this business but without the right brochure or mail out you could simply be wasting your marketing budget. Here are some top tips on creating print brochures for the Overland business that will convert.

Plan every letter: when you sit down to plan out a brochure have a clear goal in mind. Whether it’s to improve sales of one particular product, to get people to visit your website and online store or just to get some inquiry calls, knowing the focus of the brochure will help you to arrange the elements on the page. With a clear strategy you can direct the eye of the user and make sure that your objectives can be accomplished with the right call to action.

Focus on your space: there’s nothing worse than a brochure that is extremely cluttered. Limiting some of the fonts and the products that you’re going to feature on the page will help to make sure that your readers will be tempted to contact you for more information. A brochure that is extremely cluttered may just overwhelm people.

Focus on the impression: using the right materials and a professional photographer for all of your product shots will help to make sure that you make the right impression immediately. Older style brochures with images that you have taken yourself will never come across as professional. A luxury brochure will definitely get someone excited about your new product or about working with your business.

Keep some of these ideas in mind on creating print brochures for trade shows and mail outs.

Contact Stoute Web Solutions if you are looking creating website design at https://www.stoutewebsolutions.com/

How to Improve Your inventory Management in Your Overland Business

Inventory management for a major part supplier or even a manufacturer can be one of the greatest sources of inefficiency within the Overland business. Without a proper inventory management system, it’s possible that your business could simply be wasting hours every week which is magnified extensively through multiple employees and locations. Here are some top tips in improving your inventory management throughout the Overland business:

Pruning your inventory: Sometimes there’s a chance where you can identify patterns in your industry. If there are a number of parts that you don’t regularly sell there’s no reason why you should keep them readily available. Creating an area with the most sold products and potentially a warehouse with leasehold products can help to speed up the process of selling items.

Including training: There may be a number of employees that find it difficult to use your electronic inventory management system. Retraining these employees or regularly providing tutorials on these systems can often be far less expensive than scrapping the system altogether or going back to pen and paper inventory tracking.

Loss of data: Make sure that every type of inventory tracking within your business is backed up in some way. One of the best ways that you can prevent the loss of data is to use cloud-based inventory tracking which is available on multiple devices. This cloud-based solution for your Overland business will be available at all times and with minimal chance of data loss. (Pro tip: We use FreeTek Computing for our remote monitoring and backups)

Inaccuracies in data: One of the best ways that you can improve inaccuracies with your inventory tracking involves using a barcode system. Many of the top inventory tracking software today utilizes barcodes and QR codes as well as mobile phones. These can be easy to implement and they can even connect with accounting software to help with financial tracking too.

Keep these ideas in mind if you are trying to improve your inventory management solutions within the Overland industry. Please Visit: https://www.stoutewebsolutions.com/

Website Maintenance is the next Requirement for Successful Websites

Just like any software, websites require ongoing maintenance and updates, to keep the site working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your car or truck. You wouldn’t drive your car very long if you didn’t look after it’s routine maintenance, would you? Well, the same process is true for your website too. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at it’s finest.

“Set it and Forget it” – Said no webmaster ever

If you don’t have regular website maintenance services in Portland carried out monthly, you may actually be throwing money out the window. When visitors go to a website and find things wrong with it, they don’t tend to stick around long. Many website owners never check their website to see how it’s functioning. Missed or hidden website issues or downtime can lose you potential customers.

The Benefits of Maintenance

Many people don’t realize the benefits of regular website maintenance:

The website performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime is all dependant on the WordPress software and plugin functioning as they should. A quick look at just the WordPress changelog (the log of all past changes with the core software) will show the importance of this alone. Take a look at the most recent update which closed three identified security holes below. Check it out here: https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Versions

The website growth, it’s fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes is all dependent on you having someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion.

Our Maintenance Workflow

At Stoute Web Solutions we take great care to first backup the website and check the website after our updates for any issues. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert it back. Also included in our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.

Dangers of Do It Yourself Maintenance

Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you use an update from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t have a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple weeks later, it would be difficult to know what changed and how you should revert back without restoring a very old backup (and possibly losing content changes, sales orders, contact entries, you name it).

It costs more to fix than maintain

Inexperience and neglect can damage the look and functionality of your website. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try and fix it yourself, in which case you may do further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Just like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keep your website running properly

Call a Professional

Why not beal with what you know best and let us deal with that we know best? Would you try to fight that court battle without a lawyer? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your website properly you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.