Latest IT News and Information

We've just added a new "Financial Dashboard" report to our finance and accounting reports section of SpartOffice. As one client described it "It's great to be able to see exactly how your company is doing in real time!".

As well as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and client databases, the online SpartOffice system handles company financial transactions including:

• Salaries
• PAYE & NICS
• VAT Calculation
• Bank account balances
• Expenses
• Bills
• Invoicing

And with plans to handle in the near future:

• Quotes & Estimates
• Shares & Dividends

With all this money flowing in and out of your business the dashboard is a great way of keeping an important eye on the health of your company.

The dashboard saves hours of time and expense giving you instant feedback without needing to call your accountant or sift through spreadsheets and paperwork. Just one of the ways SpartOffice is empowering businesses, from sole traders to SME's. Whether you're VAT registered or not.

Get in touch to find out more and join the growing list of companies that are choosing SpartOffice as the smart way to manage thier companies.

In a perfect world you'd have a system which was securely available from any computer or mobile device in the world which would allow you to manage your business finances, track your communications with your current and potential clients, track your personal expenses and generate accountancy reports... and that's just for starters! Well Spartoffice does all this and more:

• It's online and secure so you can access it anytime and anywhere
• It's integrated so you can manage you clients and their invoices in the same place as your accountancy and payroll!
• It's intuitive and friendly. There is help and support available directly on the pages!
• It's very cost effective! From single seat licenses up to multi seat large company licenses and with NO contract or tie in!
• It's evolving! to constantly include more features driven by the users themselves!

Spartoffice is in beta testing and we're looking for volunteers! A number of businesses are already evaluating it and helping to shape it's future. What's more they're already discovering the great benefits!

When you'd like to get involved then get in touch!

Social Media Marketing... hype or hope?

There is a lot of buzz and talk about "Social Media Marketing" (SMM) which in essence is using your social networks like twitter and facebook to market your business or products. The missing part of the description is the "media" bit. This describes the "what are you using to get attention" part. This could be words, images, both or even promotional online videos and we're going to describe how to do it and what works!

Where does your website fit in your plan?

Social Media Marketing is just that, it's marketing, which means it's one small part of a much bigger success strategy. The goal of SMM is to drive either direct contact or interest to your website. The website can do so much more for you than many people realise. Once people land on your site then they are immersed in your brand and your world (unlike facebook). Some of the jobs of your website could include:

• Convincing people to become clients (client conversion)
• Generating loyalty and a "fan base"
• Selling products or even ideas
• Gathering subscribers to your mail list
• Saving you time by answering routine questions (FAQs)
• Getting you discovered in the first place (SEO)

A healthy website depends on the right ingredients

I oculdn't help myself with the food analogy. The latest website we have produced is for a fully qualified and successful nutritionist and they will explain that a healthy strong body comes from having the right stuff in the right quantities in a persons diet. Many websites are unhealthy, fat with content but lacking in focus or goals. Too much of one thing and no consideration of another. Luckily we know what we're doing at Sparticle which is probably just one of the reasons we're doing lots of new websites for small businesses who take their business and money seriously.

Blogging Strategy: To Get traffic from facebook and Twitter etc.

1. You write a briliant blog article on your website using the spartpress plugin.
2. You post a link to your blog article on your facebook/twitter/linkedIn wall.
3. People who know you visit your website, and because they know you they spend more time on your site than visitors from say Google searches.
4. They tell people about you on Facebook and share your link with their friends!

This isn't theoretical. We've been doing this for years and it's brought us clients from all over Europe! and it's really simple!

The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Benefits of Blogging with Spartpress

Each post is a page in it's own right. And we've done some IT magic in the background to make sure that when you post it is formatted and presented in a great way to get found by search engines. In fact some of our clients who blog regularly report that it drives about 25% more traffic to their site. And here's the cool thing... it's good quality traffic!

So when you visit the nutritional therapists website that we've just done, see how many of the features are designed to help her easily engage in social marketing and to further improve her SEO rankings.

We have been supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses in and around Kent and the UK by helping them establish successful websites and online businesses since 2004. So it's a great endorsement when we get repeat business and referrals from existing clients. So when HWInsync was established their Director (an existing client) contacted us and we worked closely with his new company to quickly get their website and online email marketing up and running and importantly cost effectively too!

They are one of the main retailers of FDA approved pulsed electromagnetic field therapy healing products for humans and horses. It may sound like something from star trek but this technology is real and has been in use for decades. It's finally getting out to a wider market and the guys at HW Insync really know their stuff and so there's lots of videos and images on their sites as well as up to the minute articles and research in their news streams.

The reason they can bring all this information together so easily is because they're using our website plugins which make it really easy for them to manage the content on their websites. Our spartAV gallery allows them to organise images and videos, while our popular spartpress allows them to manage their blogs, news and rss feeds all done online. When it comes to outreach they're using our spartmail.com email marketing tool.

They're a smart and dynamic company with a great product and that's why they value our services and range of products as well as our ability to deliver bespoke web based solutions.

Top websites for increased traffic this month:

Below are the top 5 websites ranked by traffic growth compared to last month. These are all websites created, managed and hosted by sparticle limited. When we build websites, whethere they are 5 pages or 500 pages we always make sure they are SEO optimised and the modules we have such as the Spartpress blog/news tool are key to driving traffic.

• Spartmedia.co.uk - up by 85%
• corza.net - up by 56%
• gbcharityevents.co.uk - up by 54%
• provocativechangeworks.com - up by 44%
• edinburghbioquarter.com - up by 18%

Using blogs to increase traffic - Social Media Marketing

When we look at the analytics for spartmedia.co.uk shown in the diagram, we see that the top five traffic sources include twitter, facebook and youtube. This is a compelling example of how easy it is to drive traffic to your site when you've got the right tools, like Spartpress, and understand effective Social Media Marketing strategies.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Here is a very simple strategy that will drive more traffic to your site.

1. Once you've got the spartpress blog tool in your site, which is very easy to get and easy to use...
2. Write a relevant, interesting and most importantly engaging short article/blog post
3. Link to the article on your website from facebook, linkedIn, twitter etc.

It's that simple! and the more you do it the more momentum your site and marketing get.

Learn how to get more business using Social Media Marketing

Over the last few years I've run a number of training courses specifically for businesses to help them leverage the power of facebook, twitter, linkedIn, youTube and other social networking sites. The next session I will be co-presenting is a morning training session on the 15th of June in Medway (more details to follow). So feel free to get in contact to find out more and watch this space for the official press release for this event.