Online reviews can be one of your most powerful marketing tools. Whether you're running a small business, freelancing or managing a large company, your potential customers are reading what others say about you before deciding to get in touch.

The good news? You don’t have to sit back and hope for reviews. With a thoughtful approach, you can actively encourage your happy customers to share their experiences – and turn every review into an opportunity to build trust and improve your service.

In this article, we’ll break down how to ask for reviews, how to respond to them (both good and bad), and why it’s worth the effort.

We’ve been getting a lot of clients asking us lately if they should purchase the .au equivalent of their .com.au domain names. Is it worth the money? Does it add any benefit to the business? Does it protect my brand? We answer all this and more below.

Google Business Profile is a free tool that gives business owners an opportunity to showcase general information to their potential customers. This feature of Google makes it super easy for potential customers to find out details about your company in a single search query.

When it comes to running a business, many of us are experts at knowing the products or services that we sell intimately. We know them inside out because we work with them every day. Talking to customers about what we do and landing the next big project by outlining all the benefits of our services or products is a great feeling, but what if we could do it better? What if there was a way to take customers on a journey – your journey, and let them feel something about your business, not just find out information?

There is a pair of crested pigeons nesting in a date palm in my front garden. Over the past two months I’ve been watching this pair of pigeons make their nest, lay their eggs and sit on their precious white, marble-sized cargo waiting for their offspring to break out of the confines of their egg. My daughters and I often check the eggs to see how they are coming along in the hatching process (so far no baby pigeons). Whilst I’ve been watching this whole process I’ve learnt that there’s some very important business lessons to learn from this pigeon pair, and as always – the best lessons are often the simplest or the ones derived from nature. So here are my “5 business lessons I learnt from a pigeon”.