Franziska: Hi and welcome back to Basic Bananas TV.

Christo: Hey, hey, hey.

Franziska: Today, we’re coming live to you from Dale Beaumont Studio Business Blueprint and we just filmed an episode with Dale and we thought let’s ask him some questions.

Christo: Let’s pull him aside because he’s a bit of a tech tool master when it comes to business little hacks and tips, and tricks, so we thought we’d squeeze a couple out of it, and share them with you, guys, so.

Franziska: Thanks for being here, Dale. It’s your studio [crosstalk 00:00:29].

Christo: Yeah, thanks for being here in your own place.

Franziska: Yeah, exactly.

Dale: All right, welcome, looking forward to … I’ll be sharing with you a couple of hack tools which I think can really make a difference if you’re running a small business and you want to grow. The first one is actually one from Google. Everyone knows about Google Analytics, but this is one called Google Speed Test and you can just go into Google and type in Google Speed Test. It’s a tool that Google has developed that helps you measure and actually rank the speed of your website. We know that there’s direct correlation between how fast your website loads and also how much people actually will stay on your website. If you got a fast website then people are more likely to stay. Also, Google takes this information and it’s used in the algorithm in terms of ranking website, so if your website is running slow, really slow, that’s actually causing you a negative result in terms of your rankings within Google.

Christo: Awesome.

Dale: If you want to test your website, you just go to the Google Speed Test and then you click on that, putting your URL, and then it will tell you out of a hundred how fast your website is running. More importantly than that, it actually tells you if it’s, say for example, at 60 which it tells you what you need to fix on your website specifically to increase the speed, so it might say that these images are actually too big or instead you can do it like this. Then oftentimes, you just forward the link to your website developer and just go, “Hey, can you fix all of these because I want to go from 60 to 80, and here’s what you need to do.” Google Speed Test is really heavy.

Franziska: That’s great enough.

Christo: Beautiful.

Franziska: You have another?

Dale: Yeah, while you’re there you could also …

Franziska: They’re already there.

Dale: … Do this one. This one is called Google Mobile Test and it’s a similar thing. We all know how important it is to have a website that is responsive now. Meaning, it works across all different devices from everything, from phones to TVs and everything in between. You can go to Google and type in Google Mobile Test, and then you go to that website or most likely be the first one there. You put in your website and it will tell you whether your website is responsive or not. Again, this is another one of the factors that Google looks for now when it comes to ranking websites. It’s a really good thing to do. If it’s not responsive then you need to call your website developer and get your website becoming responsive so it can continue to have good rankings in the search engines.

Christo: Once again, could you be a little [inaudible 00:02:52] or a couple little tips too, obviously. If you’ve got a good high volume of percentage of your traffic which is probably going to be 35% plus, you might be missing out over there. Very cool.

Franziska: He’s got one more.

Dale: Okay, I got another one.

Franziska: 1 more, let’s see 1 more.

Dale: All right, so this one is a simple one, and it’s free which is great. It’s called visualhunt.com. Just recently, I did an interview in the studio with the guy called [Nick Bowditch 00:03:16], who as one of the only people I know I thought has worked for both Facebook and Twitter. He worked for both of those 2 big tech giants. He said something that just blew my mind. He said that if you put up a social media post with an image, you’re going to get double the amount of engagement as opposed to not having an image. He went so if I was to say, “If you’re not using an image, don’t even bother posting,” because it’s really does not going to get the sort of …

Franziska: On both Twitter and Facebook.

Dale: Twitter and Facebook. He said, “If it doesn’t have an image, just forget about it.” You obviously need to find images but if you go to the normal places where you get royalty-free photos. There’s an expense to that. Now, if you’re doing a high volume, it may be worthwhile to do it, but there’s a whole bunch of free places out there now. The one that I’m referring to which called visual pulls in images from a whole bunch of different places and there’s 350 million royalty-free images that you can get for free from that particular website, so you can just put in any keyword whether it’s food, or fashion, or business, or whatever, and there’s literally tens of thousands of images that you can find, download it, and you can use it without any type of free. That’s another really good thing as well for your social media.

Franziska: Amazing. Thanks so much. Those are awesome. I actually didn’t know about the Visual Hunt, so I’m going to check it out, so thanks so much for sharing.

Dale: It’s very cool.

Christo: Another 2 tips you implement in a matter of minutes. Get straight on to it right now so you can test your website.

Dale: Absolutely.

Franziska: Yeah, we’ll get this guy back for more or we probably [crosstalk 00:04:45].

Dale: I’ve got hundreds of these tools, so happy to share.

Franziska: That is part 1 of 50. See you next time. Thanks for watching, and thanks, Dale, for being here.

Dale: Yeah, thanks, guys.

Christo: Thank you. Thanks for being here in your own office. It’s awesome.

Dale: Okay, see you next time.