How To Integrate Your Content Into One Editorial Calendar Posted on July 6, 2017July 11, 2018 by Allie Wolff You don’t have to be a content strategist to put together a well-planned editorial calendar. Most small business owners intuitively understand what sort of content their customers want, whether it’s how-to videos for using a product or case studies about current customers. The challenge isn’t coming up with ideas. The challenge is carrying them through the development phase to publication. This involves outlining, assigning, editing, approving, publishing, sharing, and tracking. It’s no wonder then that companies hire full-time content marketing teams. Managing an editorial calendar is a job all on its own. In the world of content marketing, there are loads of outlets to share content through, but as a small business, it’s important to prioritize areas that will get your content the most traction. We recommend starting with the content marketing basics: a blog, a social media presence, and email marketing. But figuring out how to make these three tools work in sync can be tricky. What is an editorial calendar? An editorial calendar (or content calendar) helps you keep track of ongoing digital marketing projects from conception to publication. Without a calendar to keep track of your progress, it’s easy to completely forget about a blog post idea you had or eBook you wanted to get out by Christmas. Start With a Brainstorming Session Creating an editorial calendar is fairly straightforward. Detailed templates are available online (check out this AWESOME one from CoSchedule!), but you can get your feet wet by creating a barebones editorial calendar in Excel or Google Calendar. Before you fill in your calendar, jot down every single one of the content ideas circulating in your mind. This includes ideas for blog posts, tweets, Instagram stories, or email campaigns. Don’t worry about organization or flow while you’re brainstorming. Plug Publication Dates Into Your Calendar Once all of your ideas are down on paper, look for time sensitive ideas. Is there an entire campaign you want to run for Halloween? Plug the publication date – the latest date you want that content released – into your calendar. If you’re not using a traditional calendar, take a moment to review the year’s holidays. Is there a holiday that would be great for your marketing that you haven’t yet considered? Perhaps Father’s Day is a huge marketing opportunity for your business, but you completely forgot about it during your brainstorming session. Mark down a date you’d like to have Father’s Day content out by, even if you don’t yet know the specifics. Once you’ve put down the desired release dates for blog posts, tweets, or email campaigns, think about how long it will take you to create them. If it’s just you, factor in your other business responsibilities so you give yourself a realistic amount of time. If it’s someone on your staff, set a fair amount of time for them to complete a given project and then set two dates: one for submission and one for publication. How many dates you set in between (i.e. due date for first draft, due date for second draft, image acquisition) depends on your management style and the content in question. If you are a relatively small team, limit the amount of back and forth. Perform Varying Levels of Prep Work For Each Type of Content The level of advance preparation for the three categories of content – social media, blog posts, and email – varies. Social media posts should be prepared around the same time you create your editorial calendar. Write the copy, find the necessary visuals or links, and cut and paste them into your content calendar so that daily posts are almost automatic. For email campaigns and blog posts, clearly state the working title, targeted keywords, and a description of the topic into your calendar. Then mark down at least three key dates before your publication date: a due date for the outline, a due date for the final draft, and a due date for any accompanying visuals. This will keep you on track and ensure you’re creating regular content. Integrate Your Social, Blog, and Email Content Even Further Integrating your social media, your blog content, and your email marketing into your editorial calendar isn’t as simple as just plugging everything into the same spreadsheet. These channels should nourish each other, and your editorial calendar can help you make the most of all the content in your arsenal. Your weekly newsletter doesn’t have to be 100% brand new content. Select a couple of your best blog posts on the site and write an intro and conclusion. Indicate on your calendar which blog posts will be repurposed for the newsletter. The same idea applies to your social media. Once you’ve written a blog post, write different social media copy for the same article and plug it into your editorial calendar, so you can share an article in multiple ways on several different channels over the course of a few months. Your content marketing strategy shouldn’t consist of poor blog posts pumped out daily. Instead, it should focus on quality and consistency. Make a realistic assessment of how many good pieces of content you can produce in a week and then use your email campaigns and your social media presence to make the most of it all.
4 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Paid Advertising Posted on July 5, 2017June 20, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Small business owners often dismiss paid advertising as something they should focus on way, way, way down the line. It’s sacrificed in the name of saving time or saving money. But putting even a little bit of cash towards paid advertising can go a long way towards generating business and growing your customer base. Beyond revenue, it has a positive impact on the perception of your company and brand awareness. 1. Paid Advertising Reaches Your Customers Where They Are. According to a 2014 study, 81 percent of shoppers do online research before making a purchasing decision, and 60 percent start with a search engine. The path of least resistance is to advertise where they are. Newspaper ads are as good as dead. Digital marketing is the new way to get the word out there about your small business. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements, like those placed in Google’s search network, let you present your company as the answer to a consumer’s search. For instance, if we type “video agency st. louis” into Google, The Storyteller Studios is the top result for the sponsored posts. While many companies advertise on Google to reach the widest audience possible, you can also opt to advertise through other networks as well. If you know that your key demographic uses Facebook often, you can use Facebook Ads to promote your product where your prospective customers spend most of their time. 2. Paid Advertising Increases Your Company’s Prestige and Credibility. In the long term, a quality product or service will cement your company’s reputation. In the short term, there’s a “fake it til you make it” component to boosting your business’s perception in the eyes of prospective customers. When people see an advertisement for a company (especially a good ad) they instinctively assume that business has money. And if they think a business has money they assume it’s doing well, which means there are other customers. It’s a subtle way of creating social proof. 3. You Can Target Your Ads Extremely Well. Sites like Facebook and Google have access to a lot of data. This means that they have the ability to put your ads in front of the right prospects. Google won’t show an ad for new tires to someone who’s looking for spas in the area. And Facebook knows better than to show an ad for life insurance to someone whose profile says they’re a 20-year-old university student. Not only do these companies have the data to properly place your ads – they also have an incentive to. You want people to click your ad, and so do they. Since you pay-per-click, they want to make sure people are actually clicking. Additionally, they want to make sure the people who click the ads are people who are most likely to make a purchase. You’re only going to keep advertising through them if you see a return on investment. If you don’t have an extensive amount of customer data, paid advertising can use your existing criteria (i.e. age, location) to target prospective buyers. 4. You Have Access To Powerful Monitoring and Analytics Tools. Google’s AdWords and Facebook’s Ads Manager allow you to measure results and see how individual campaigns are doing. You can view demographic information on the types of people viewing your ads and use that data to more accurately target prospects in the future. You can view the devices people are using most frequently when they interact with your ad, see what time of the week or month your ads get the most response, and even customize your account to display only the metrics you’re interested in. When you’re a small business owner, you don’t have time to dedicate to monitoring and generating reports, and you probably don’t have the budget to hire a social media coordinator. Lucky for you, paid advertising tools give you access to powerful resources that help you to make insightful business decisions.
Make Your Summer Business Travel More Productive With These 6 Tips Posted on July 4, 2017October 26, 2022 by Jeanna Barrett You know the feeling: the excitement of an upcoming business trip. Daydreaming about how productive you’ll be during the trip, believing you’ll get double the work done in half the time. I kid. In reality, business travel is exhausting — disrupted sleep, lack of exercise, poor food choices and unpredictable internet connections make staying productive a lot tougher than you imagined it to be. Many times I’ve come back from business trips feeling triple exhausted and twice as behind on all of my work. After years of business travel, including monthly trips across the country when I worked for a company located on the other side of the U.S., I’ve learned a few things about improving business travel. Here are five tips to overcome travel challenges and make the most of your business trips. 1. Plan Everything in Advance Before you head out on your trip, try to check off as many to-do items as possible. Prioritize responsibilities that are more challenging to do while working remotely. Meet with your project teams to get status updates and review upcoming deadlines. Don’t forget to let everyone know about your availability while traveling — when you’re completely out of pocket and when you will be most reachable. Get to the airport early so you don’t feel rushed. Once through security, grab your coffee and find a comfortable spot to work before your flight. Download GateGuru to stay on top of your reservation. GateGuru provides all of the flight and airport information you need to manage your entire day of travel. It will notify you via push notifications of anything that affects your itinerary. Once you arrive at your destination, schedule blocks of morning or evening for solid work times when you aren’t in transit or in business-related meetings.. 2. Lighten Your Load Flying can drain your energy, so try to simplify the journey by packing the right way. Don’t check bags unless you really need to. If possible, plan your daily outfits to prevent overpacking. If you have a presentation or are sharing product samples, ship your items to your destination prior to your arrival. Don’t forget to call the hotel ahead of time to double check that they will hold your packages. 3. Don’t Waste Flight Time If you can’t confirm that your flights have WiFi, write emails so they’re ready to send when you reach a location with WiFi. Make sure you save important documents to your desktop. Depending on your seatmates, planes could also be great for practicing networking skills, such as initiating conversations, asking questions and listening. If you’re stuck at the airport because of flight delays, ensure you’ve packed your MiFi because internet connection at airports can be slow and unreliable. It also comes in handy if you’re on-the-go with spotty internet connection. If you travel for business often and don’t have a MiFi, I highly recommend purchasing one. It’s a portable broadband device that allows multiple users and mobile devices to share a 3G or 4G mobile broadband connection and basically create an ad-hoc Wifi network. You can load it up with data and only use what you need, when you need it. A side note, don’t waste additional time at the rental car companies, either. If you’re not taking public transportation, Uber, Lyft, etc., and are renting a car during your business trip, join their loyalty program. It enables you to avoid the long lines of inexperienced vacationers. Loyalty programs drop you right at your rental car and let you get on the road to your destination immediately. 4. Organize as You Go Business travel can ignite tons of new ideas and bring in new contracts that can be impossible to absorb at once. Luckily there are ways to organize the ideas and information as they come through to ensure you don’t forget them by the time you arrive back at the office. A great app for on-the-go organization is Evernote; it quickly organizes new info and will sync with other devices so you can share with your team. Another favorite of mine is Trello. You can add tasks on your phone as you remember them, and then they’ll appear on your Trello board when you fire up your desktop computer. 5. Get a Good Night’s Sleep & Avoid Jet Lag Unfamiliar hotel rooms, time zone changes or happy hours with coworkers can lead to a horrible night’s sleeps when you’re on the road. This usually compounds each day as you run around in meetings and squeeze in extra work during a short trip. To get a good night’s sleep, be sure to wind down early the first night you get in. If home is on the west coast, but you’re traveling to the east coast, try to eat early and put yourself in bed even though it might only be 7 p.m. at home for you. Avoid alcohol and LED lighting from a phone or laptop, which can negatively affect sleep. Try bringing a travel essential oil diffuser in your suitcase and lavender oil, which should relax you and help you sleep. If your sleep cycle is really thrown off, consider a natural sleep aid with herbs like melatonin and valerian. 6. Get Familiar With Your Destination Before you arrive, check out where you’ll be staying and what’s nearby. Is the conference center within walking distance? If not, what type of transportation can you use if you don’t have a rental car? Check out the nearest restaurants in case your client would like to go for a nice dinner, or you just need to decompress after a busy day of meetings with coworkers you don’t get to see often. Knowing information about the city you’re staying in before you arrive will save you valuable time when you get there and give you one less thing to distract yourself from your work. Load up your smartphone or tablet with apps that make travel easier, like OpenTable for dinner reservations and Uber for transportation. Business trips can be a great opportunity to expand your business and see a city you’ve never visited, but if you spend the whole trip stressing about basic needs, you won’t make the most out of your trip. These tips should help you focus on your goals — and avoid feeling tired, stressed and pulled in too many directions. You might even enjoy your business trip next time around.
GoSmallBiz: Put Your Small Business’s Content Marketing on Steroids With a Blog Posted on July 3, 2017June 20, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick As a business owner, you always have a lot of irons in the fire, trying to keep things running smoothly. While there’s a decent chance keeping up with a blog is near the bottom of your to-do list, it really shouldn’t be. A strategic blog on your website could be your golden ticket to reaching and converting more customers. Educational content is a marketing asset that’s available to all businesses at a low cost, making it a great leveler when you’re trying to compete with larger companies. Creating a blog packed with industry insights will not only help your business stand out in an oversaturated market, but it will also build trust and keep you top of mind with potential customers. Ninety-six percent of your website’s visitors are in research mode and aren’t quite ready to buy. They can see right through self-promotional content — they won’t trust it, and it will repel them. But if you deliver valuable content to them at every stage of the buyer’s journey, they’ll return to your site again and again. Read more of Jonathan’s article at GoSmallBiz.
7 Must-Have Qualities of a Stellar Customer Service Rep Posted on June 29, 2017October 25, 2022 by Erin Posey Customer service is a critical part of your small business. Based on this, it’s incredibly important to hire the right people for the job. Your customer service team will ultimately be the face of your company and the main point of human contact with your customers. Excellent customer service is the key to loyalty, retention, business growth and profits. In other words, your customer service reps are your business’s secret weapon. Just have a look at some of the data: 81% of companies with strong competencies for delivering an excellent customer experience are outperforming their competition. (Peppers & Rogers Group) 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. (McKinsey) 9 out of 10 U.S. consumers say they would pay more to ensure a superior customer experience. (Harris Interactive/RightNow) 7 in 10 Americans said they were willing to spend more with companies they believe provide ideal customer service. (American Express) It’s clear that delivering exceptional customer service is paramount to your business’s success. And training your reps to develop the right skills is the first step to getting there. If you want to be an excellent customer service representative, here’s where you should focus your efforts: 1. Problem-Solving Skills The number one skill you need to excel in for good customer service is problem-solving. Every other part of the job is somehow related to problem-solving abilities. Ultimately, a customer service rep’s job is to keep your clients happy. That often includes navigating through a complex set of issues and problems to find a sufficient solution. 2. Clear Communication Your team will have a hard time solving a customer’s problem if they can’t communicate the solution clearly. However, clear communication isn’t as easy as it sounds. Effective correspondence means being able to put yourself in the client’s shoes and using concise explanations to get to a solution as quickly as possible. Often, that means cutting out the jargon in favor of language that even the non-technical can understand. In addition to communicating well with customers, your customer service reps will need to be strong communicators with your team. This means following processes and protocols for entering information into your help desk software or CRM. 3. Friendly Attitude People hate to be treated like a number. The majority of people prefer to interact with a human when faced with issues. However, in today’s fast-paced society, customers are often seen as numbers on a spreadsheet. The ability to stay genuine and show clients that they really matter to your business can make a whole world of a difference in their customer experience. 4. Empathy We touched on this already. A stellar customer service rep can put herself in the customer’s shoes and understand where frustrations come from. Empathy is necessary to offer the right solution. Often when people complain they really just want their problem to be acknowledged and to see that you care. Being empathetic can ease frustrations and maintain your brand’s reputation. 5. Business Acumen This might be a bit surprising since customer service usually has nothing to do with making sales. Customer service is a business role though. While you aim to solve a customer’s issue and be their advocate, at the same time, you represent the business interests of your company. Solving a customer’s problem means finding a compromise between the two. 6. Product/Service Knowledge The best customer service representatives have deep knowledge of how your product (or service) works. Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than having an issue and ending up on the phone with someone who doesn’t understand their problem. This doesn’t mean that your customer service team should understand the inner workings of your product as well your technical team. However, their knowledge of it should exceed that of its everyday user. 7. Strong Time Management Your customer service team will likely deal with multiple customer tickets at one time. To make everyone happy will require a great deal of organization and superb time management skills. With that said, make sure your employees aren’t spread so thin that they become robots checking customers off their list. How a CRM Helps Improve Customer Service Customer service is a skillset, however, there are crucial tools that will help your customer service team bring their support skills to the next level. Having a customer relationship management tool, like BenchmarkONE, will ensure your team can keep track of every single customer. They can log their most recent interaction on each customer’s file, which helps inform and steer the relationship moving forward. Also, your customer service team can get access to customer details that will help them offer more tailored support, ensuring each customer’s needs are truly being met. Details your CRM tracks include: How your customers interact with the emails you send them What pages of your site they visit Which content they download How far they are in the buyer’s journey Their industry and business they’re associated with Their social media information Using a CRM will arm your customer support team with everything necessary to offer five-star support and care, which will lead to trust, reliability and longer-lasting customer relationships. Want to try our CRM without spending a dime? Request a free free account! How to Develop the Top Customer Service Skills This infographic from Hiver expands on a few of the characteristics we mentioned above, as well as names a few others that great customer service representatives have. Take a look! Top 10 Customer Service Skills: An Infographic by Hiver There’s a fine line between excessive and appropriate customer service efforts. The customer service reps you want on your team will possess all of these skills and become one of the most important parts of your business’s customer retention efforts.
5 Ingredients For Eye-Catching Infographic Design Posted on June 28, 2017December 29, 2020 by Allie Wolff We all understand how popular (and important) content marketing is for any business to stay relevant. But rather than constantly churning out blog post after blog post, it’s vital to throw a few new assets in the mix to keep people interested. Visual content is an incredibly easy way to do this. And we don’t just mean posting pictures on social media or including a photo with your blog post. In order to stand out, you need to create compelling graphics that serve a purpose and have a meaning. The best avenue to do this? Infographics. As it is with all other content, only the best and most unique work stands out and gets results. So, how do you create an infographic that performs? Here are a few of the vital ingredients for success. #1 Tell a Clear Story The best way to convey information is to use storytelling. Without a story, it’s just a bunch of pictures and bits of information put together. Unfortunately, that’s what most infographics are. The best ones, however, follow the basic rules for every good story. There’s an introduction, rising action, a climax, and a resolution. There also needs to be an overarching theme and a narrative. Infographic designed by UrbanFonts.com. Click the link to view the full infographic. Follow those rules of storytelling, and you’ll have a much easier time engaging your audience, keeping their attention and convincing them to share your infographic. #2 Create a Flow The purpose of an infographic is to convey information visually. That means it needs a story, as mentioned above, but that story needs to flow. Flow means there are guides to help your audience travel through the infographic. There’s certain ergonomics to how people consume visual content. Infographic designed by Simon Middleweek. Click the link to view the full infographic. There are several ways you can achieve this. You can break your infographic down, use numbers to mark each section, add a timeline or include an intro paragraph that helps your audience travel through the story. Leading them on a natural progression is more likely to keep things clear and maintain their attention. #3 Show Don’t Tell Data visualization is the foundation of every good infographic. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is a rule that applies to all visual content. Effective infographic design uses informative data and never misses an opportunity to turn that data into a stimulating visual. Infographic designed by Jing Zhang. That doesn’t mean you should turn every single sentence or piece of data into a pie chart. The art of an infographic design lies in the creator’s ability to interpret the data in a more audience-friendly way and choose the elements that should be depicted visually. #4 Have a Hook and Call to Action You can and should treat an infographic like a landing page. That means you want to grab the reader’s attention early on and use the engagement you’ve built to lead them to your call to action. Just as with copywriting, the introduction needs to be the attention-grabber. It’s what gets people to read further and move through the progression of the infographic. As you follow the flow, you build interest, deliver several ‘Aha!’ moments and provide answers or a solution. If you deliver enough value, your audience will be engaged and ready to take action. And that’s the right place to put your CTA, such as “Learn More,” “Click Here,” “Do This,” “Sign Up,” “Share” and so on. #5 Keep It Simple As the popular quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry goes: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” The best infographics convey even the most complex data in a simple way. And that’s the reason they get the most engagement. We all suffer from short attention spans, and if an infographic is overly complicated, we’ll move on to the next one. To make things simple can be the most difficult thing. To begin with, you want to limit your fonts and color palette and stick with a simple and logical hierarchy. Just as you should stick with one CTA in your emails and on your webpages, your infographic should have a clear focus and message without being cluttered up by conflicting hierarchy. Infographic designed by Creative Market. Click the link to view the full infographic. Naturally, most of us want to consume educational content in the most effortless way. And that’s the key to successful infographic design: the promise of value without much effort.
4 Website Tips For A Seamless User Experience Posted on June 27, 2017December 20, 2023 by Jessica Lunk The Internet can be a messy place. Most days you probably feel like you’re being smothered by Adwords garbage, fly-ins, pop-ups and spam emails on an hourly basis. But, listen—there’s hope. By creating a smooth, easy-to-navigate website, you can be the change you want to see in the world. You can make your little pocket of the Internet a better place—a place where customers can find the information they want quickly and painlessly. All it takes is a little analytical insight and a lot of testing. Do it right, and your customers will reward your efforts with sweet, sweet patronage. Win/win! Most user experience boils down to design. If you’re inexperienced,you may want to work with a web designer. If you’re a DIY-er, you can spearhead design yourself. Here’s how it’s done: Know Who You’re Targeting Before you dive into an extensive site redesign, it’s important to know exactly who you’re building your website for. Pin-pointing your radical buyer will help you build messaging that appeals to your target audience as well as take design elements into consideration. For instance, if your ideal buyer tends to be a mobile native, having a mobile responsive site is a top priority. Or, if your ideal buyer prefers phone over email, you want to make sure you include a phone number with the calls to action on your website. Doing your buyer persona research upfront will help you nail website design and messaging upfront. Simplify Your Website Design There once was a time when people thought websites should include as many things as possible: graphic backgrounds, gifs, colored fonts. Everything was new and exciting in HTML. We’ll call this the Internet’s preschool years, because too many websites looked like a three-year-old’s coloring book. Obviously we’ve moved on since then. Minimalism is chic. Readability is key – especially since your audience can access your website from many different devices of all shapes and sizes.As web users, we’ve evolved, and the bottom line for B2Bs is that your entire user experience on your website should be as simple and obvious as possible. You don’t want to create any proverbial pitfalls into which your customers could fall and drop off. Work with your web designer to create a clean site that puts your customer and your value proposition front and center. If you’re tackling web design on your own,be selective with what theme you might pick — WordPress has numerous options specifically designed for B2B businesses, but even if you’re working with Squarespace or Weebly, you can find a clean style that suits your business and blog. (You have a blog, right?) Clean Up CTAs Every webpage should have a specific, clear call to action (CTA) to help your website visitors understand what step to take next. For instance, if they go to your home page and love your product or service, their next question might be “How do I sign up?” or “How do I learn more?” Your CTAs should guide your website visitors down the funnel from prospect to customer. Evaluate Your Sign-Up Process Designed correctly, your website can help you capture leads and customers. Having a smooth sign-up process is key – whether they’re signing up for your email newsletter or purchasing your product. Here are a few tips for creating a clean, crisp sign-up experience that prevents fall-offs during the process: Only ask for the information you need. For instance, a name and email address is sufficient for an email sign-up, while you may need more details like company name, title, and phone number for a sales demonstration. Follow-up with an email to let sign-ups know what’s coming next – whether it’s detailing the type of content they’ll receive in their inbox, or letting them know that you’ll be reaching out with a call. Marketing automation tools can help you not only capture new sign-ups, but automate aspects of the sign-up process. With marketing automation, you can automatically add new sign-ups to your CRM database, send email autoresponders and Let Users Dictate Design An annual site redesign can seem daunting. Instead, make small tweaks every month to see incremental gains in sign-ups and customers from your website. One way to start is by using a heat map—a visual representation of where your viewers are, and aren’t, clicking. There’s a free tool called heatmap.me that you can quickly install—it’s a lightweight app (or plugin, depending on your CMS) that gathers data on a select few pages over time to show what direction your traffic is flowing. We’re also big fans of CrazyEgg which goes even further in-depth with its data. If you see that nobody is clicking on your CTA, that’s a pretty good indication that it’s ineffective. Maybe you’re seeing a lot of clicks on the “Advertise” page—you’ll want to set up a heat map on that page, too, to see exactly where people are clicking one they get there. Google Analytics offers some of this insight, but heat maps allow you to see exactly where people are clicking, not just what links they’re clicking. This will help inform where you should put links, CTAs and other graphical elements of your site. Design for People – Not Robots The problem with those early web design examples from above is that the creators tried so hard to impress users—with colors, auto-playing 8-bit music and novellas of comic sans—that they forgot it was regular human beings reading their sites. It’s not about what you like, or what you think the best design would be. It’s about what your customers are actually doing—what they’re clicking and how they’re seeing you. Make things simple for them, and a great user experience will come naturally, helping you turn website traffic into customers for your business.
6 Tips For Maximizing Your Budget As A Solopreneur Posted on June 26, 2017July 11, 2018 by Jeanna Barrett As a solopreneur running my own marketing agency, I juggle many roles — administrative assistant, accountant, hiring manager, project manager, salesperson, website designer and more. Any of these roles can rob a solopreneur of time, and time is money when you’re the only person running your business and bringing in cash flow. Not to mention it takes some time as a solopreneur to build a steady income after leaving the safety of a regular paycheck. Not only is it necessary to safeguard your cash flow when you start out as a solopreneur, but it’s important to maximize the time you have to make money. After my first year in business, I learned a ton about how to save time and money, so I could increase the profits of my solopreneur business. Here’s a list of tips you can use as a solopreneur to streamline your daily tasks, save cash and grow your solopreneur business this year: Cut Those Extra Expenses There are many options nowadays to find alternatives to things you enjoy… For example, when I first launched my business and went out on my own, I cut my $120-a-month gym membership and signed up for at-home fitness training from people like CSatt Fitness, Jillian Michaels and Kayla Itsines. The latter two both have apps, so you can build your own at-home training program and save a lot of money on a gym membership. Here’s another easy way to cut extra expenses — cancel your overly expensive cable subscription! Who needs cable when you can watch Netflix or Hulu for a fraction of the cost? You can also watch free movies on Amazon Prime if you’re a Prime member. In addition, do yourself a favor and download the apps, Billy and Truebill on your smartphone. Billy provides an easy way to track your fixed costs, like subscriptions or bills. Billy allows you to know how much you’re spending on each account every month (scary!). Truebill helps you save money on all of your subscriptions. The app automatically scans your online statements and identifies your active subscriptions. You’ll receive a monthly report that flags any changes to your subscription fees. Re-evaluate Your Living Situation Part of the reason I wanted to be a solopreneur was to do things on my own time and travel when and where I wanted. To bootstrap my business and cut-out the cost of living in an expensive city, I moved to Belize and halved my monthly rent. I went from a rent-controlled apartment at $1,700 a month to a space in Belize that was three times the size, with access to the beach, for only $800 USD a month. Cost of living, in general, was less expensive than San Francisco, from groceries to my cell phone bill and utilities. I now run a remote business from my home office in Belize. This has been a popular option for other solopreneurs too. There’s even a term for it now: being a digital nomad. This means you travel and live abroad while working remotely. NomadList is a great resource that will allow you to evaluate the cost of living in other cities across the world. Restructure Your Technology There are plenty of options in the tech world to upgrade, maximize and multitask with one or several different devices. Your smartphone, for example. I realized that at the end of each month, I had leftover data, text and minutes. Why was I paying $200 for a plan I didn’t fully use? Instead, I ditched that and purchased a pay-as-you-go plan instead. To save additional costs, you can use Skype to conduct work calls by purchasing inexpensive Skype credits. Or, you can look at tools like Join.me or Slack for free conference lines and screensharing. If you do decide to relocate abroad, this is the perfect plan to avoid high-cost U.S. cell phone bills. Utilize Your Tax Write-Offs Remember, you own your own business now, so you can write off business-related expenses (of course, always remember to consult your tax professional before doing your taxes). Your cell phone. You can write off a percentage based on how often you use your cell phone. Education. This can mean a lot of different things, such as webinars or online courses, books, references materials, etc. Gifts. No, not for you…for your clients! As a thank you for referrals, or a special occasion, etc. It’s a $25 write-off per person per year in gifts. Home office. If you regularly work from a desk in your home, you can write off a portion of your rent/mortgage and bills associated with your home, such as electricity. Local travel. Think Lyft or taxi to a business meeting or function. Meals and entertainment. Taking your client to lunch or movie. Only 50% is deductible. Software. It’s no longer limited to your computer. Cloud-based software (like Dropbox and iCloud) and apps are both deductible. And if you do decide to form your solopreneur business into an LLC, this can be even better for taxes if you choose to have your LLC taxes as an S Corp. Find Smart and Savvy Business Tools Online tools are the secret to your solopreneur success. There are endless companies who have made running a business a lot easier, saving you time and money. It’s important to set up your business technology suite to take advantage of these time and cost savings, so you maximize your business revenue. Carefully choose tools for your business that don’t come with a high price tag, or are even free. Some of my favorites are: Google Docs and Google Drive are efficient for storing and sharing documents. Trello is a fantastic project management tool. Xero is the best accounting tool (after I tried both QuickBooks and FreshBooks) Calendly is a free way to easily schedule meetings with people outside your company GatherContent is an awesome, inexpensive content production platform Pexels is a great site for free stock photography Join.me is perfect for client calls and screen shares. Slack is great for real-time messaging and file sharing. Utilize Automation and Outsourcing As a solopreneur, you MUST automate processes and outsource tasks. In absence of others helping you do your work, look to platforms or other avenues to streamline critical business tasks to accomplish your needs. Yes, outsourcing tasks can get pricey, but there are plenty of avenues to find talent and it does not have to cost you your rent money. Try CloudPeeps, a community, marketplace and platform for freelancers and businesses. You can even reach out to local colleges and universities for students looking to build their portfolios or gain experience. From an automation standpoint, if you’re looking to build your social media presence but don’t have the time to post every few hours, try a platform like Buffer or Hootsuite to help schedule and manage your social accounts. And of course, if you want to automate your email marketing and CRM efforts, try an awesome tool like Hatchbuck that allows you automate your email marketing while you work on other business tasks. Being a solopreneur allows you much more freedom than the classic 9-to-5 job, but you need to make sure you’re starting on the right foot. By crossing these six tips off your list, you’ll be saving time and money and improving your bottom line quickly.
11 Free Music Apps That Will Bring A Little Life To Your Office Posted on June 23, 2017December 19, 2022 by Tricia O'Donnell Good music can be an effective productivity enhancer. It can calm your mind and put it in focus or simply make you feel less stressed and more relaxed, making your workday more efficient. Nine out of 10 workers perform better when listening to music. According to one study, 88% of participants scored better and 81% completed their fastest work when music was playing. I know that for me, music is my workplace companion. As I sort through our small business CRM, looking for interested prospects and leads, having some tunes to accompany me makes me work faster and concentrate better. But, naturally, it depends on what type of music you listen to. If you’re in favor of music in the workplace, here’s a selection of free music apps to help you find the best music for your office. Spotify We’ve all heard of Spotify. The app (which has an easy-to-use free version alongside the premium one) offers over 30 million songs from various legendary and upcoming artists. You can create a playlist, follow other people or choose a playlist based on your mood (e.g. focus, easy listening, etc.) The free version is ad-supported, so you’ll hear a short ad every couple of songs. Pandora Another one that we’ve probably all heard of. Pandora is comparable to Spotify’s radio feature, and the two are the biggest competitors in the market. It’s a free music streaming app that allows you to choose stations based on your favorite artists and discover new music. They curate the music for you (unlike Spotify’s playlist offerings). Pandora also has a free and premium version. The free version has short ads and also limits the number of times you can skip songs. Q Q is a music sharing app from our office neighbors over at Tunespeak. The app allows you to set up your “Q” of music (from Spotify and Youtube) that you can collaborate on with friends and co-workers. Q is a great way to let everyone weigh in on the office music choices to mix things up a bit. Google Play The best thing about Google Play is that it allows you to upload your own music ad-free (similar to iTunes). You can upload up to 50,000 of your own songs alongside their music offerings. So if you already have your own tracks and want to listen to them in addition to a streaming music app, Google Play is a perfect option. Amazon Music Another Goliath that offers a music app is Amazon. Like Google and Apple, they have access to scale so you’re likely to find always the most recent albums, artists, etc. You can upload up to 250 of your own songs and have them synced across devices. It’s easy to use, has a nice interface and works on a range of devices. The Future FM Here’s something different. The Future FM is a free music platform streaming DJ mixes, live sets, from nightclubs, concerts, festivals. The original idea is to publish a long-form DJ content from the world’s best DJs. Unlike the above apps, it stands out from the pack by giving you a different music experience. It might not be right for every office, but it’s sure to keep things interesting Slacker Radio Slacker is a free music app that allows you to pick a genre you like and listen to pre-programmed streaming radio stations. It also allows you to create new playlists and stations and keep track of your favorite songs, recently played songs, and so on. TuneIn With TuneIn, you can find and listen to local radio stations and save them which is a fantastic feature for those looking for something quickly. You can also enter an artist, song or a genre and get a list of all the radio stations that artist, song or a genre. SoundCloud SoundCloud is a slightly different concept. It’s something like a social network for music, except it really is a music app. Users and DJs can upload their own original music, tracks and podcasts, you can follow them and listen to their playlists, favorite tracks or create your own. Musi Musi is a simple app where you can create your own playlists from YouTube videos and SoundCloud tracks. You can search through music and genres, find popular and trending songs and change the quality settings. The number of lists you can create is unlimited, but it’s ad-supported. 8tracks 8tracks is a free radio app that lets you listen to ad-free mixes that each contain 8 tracks. You can find popular and trending mixes, staff picks, and so on. You can also search by artist, song, genre or mood. Next time your team is hitting a mid-day slump, fire up one of these apps and mix things up a bit. You never know what a few Bob Marley tunes will do for your team’s productivity. There’s nothing like listening to some tunes while you nurture your leads. Sign up for our free plan and start converting more leads to customers with our easy to use marketing automation software.