Author: Evan Hoeflich

Saving Money For Retirement – Treat Your Finances Like a Full-Time Business

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Saving Money For Retirement Tips

Although this is mainly a marketing blog, from time to time I do enjoy writing articles related to personal finance, saving money, investing and retirement.

It’s always been a passion of mine and a topic that I’m deeply enthusiastic about.

Partially because so many people work so hard at their jobs or running a business but have nothing to show for it.

What’s the point of working 40-80 hours per week and having little or no money tucked away in savings or investment accounts?

To me it’s insanity.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial expert or professional, this is just my personal opinion on this particular subject.

If you read my article on paying yourself first, this money saving technique is what really allows people to get ahead financially and break bad habits like spending their paycheck as soon as they receive it.

When it comes to saving money for retirement, we need to start thinking long-term and how we can make our money work for us…Rather than “you and I” working for money for the rest of our lives.

Again, we need to start making money work for us.

I’m not going to get into specific investments vehicles in this blog post when saving for retirement but I do want to go over a mindset/strategy that I use to save way more than I spend.

Giving me additional freedom and security.

When Saving Money For Retirement, Treat Your Finances Like a Full-Time Business

Most people approach saving money for retirement with very little intensity.

They keep putting off saving for retirement because it seems so far away.

Little do they know that the earlier they start, the more their investments will compound over-time and the less they will have to save in the future (compared to someone who starts later).

Unfortunately, most Americans do not start early enough nor save enough money for retirement.

One tip that I’m going to share with you right now really revolutionized the way I thought about saving money for retirement and personal finance in general.

Here it is…

Once I started treating my finances like a full-time business, I started making major progress.

Eventually your investments should make you enough monthly income that this will replace the need for you to work a job.

So why wouldn’t you take this as seriously as you can and treat it like a business?

For me, this meant really being intentional with the money I earned.

It also meant being more organized:

  • I started to create excel spreadsheets that would track all of my savings/investments, net worth, side business income, personal expenses and more.
  • I started utilizing the right applications on my phone to be more linked into my finances.
  • I created goals and money saving strategies each month to hit certain benchmarks.
  • I generated monthly reports for myself to track my progress and ensure I was heading in the right direction.

Now some people may think this is overboard or obsessive, but I look at it as being prepared and being able to have options in the future.

If you do nothing, you will have nothing when retirement rolls around.

Another important point to make is that “retirement” doesn’t have to be at the age of 65.

The more you save at an earlier age, the earlier you can retire.

There are many blogs and stories out there of people retiring in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s…It’s possible and just this realization alone may be enough to kick you into high gear.

Take your finances into your own hands, be smart with your money and you may be pleasantly surprised with the progress you make over the next few years.

Was this information helpful?

Are you taking your finances and saving for retirement as seriously as you should be?

Marketing and Growth Strategies for Small Businesses

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Growing Small Business

Every marketer’s goal is to help a business thrive in the market. It’s important that you’re updated of the latest marketing trends. It doesn’t mean you should be jumping on all of them. It’s your job to scrutinize each trend and find out what works well for the business you’re handling.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the tried and tested marketing strategies that can help your business flourish. These tips can be especially valuable for small business who have limited resources to invest.

1. Market your business through email

Email marketing is not new. In fact, smart marketers have applied this tactic for quite some time now. Many of us use email nowadays so it only makes sense to market your business in a platform that people hold dearest to their hearts, their inbox.

Invest in email capturing methods on your website. It’s not enough that a user visits your site. If you can get their email address, you can continue sending your marketing messages through email.

The ideal amount of exposure in their inbox along with targeted email messages will help turn those subscribers into paying customers.

2. Get on social media

If you’re not on social media yet, now is the time to jump on it. No, I’m not kidding. You should really get on it. Your customers and prospects expect you to have one. It’s not just to get information about you but to communicate with you. Most online users will turn to social media to raise their queries and issues with businesses.

Aside from customer support, social media is a way to keep your followers updated about your business. Got a new product launching soon? Announce it on social media. Or if you’re running a promotion, social media is one platform where you can spread the word spread quickly.

Identify that platforms that your audience uses the most and get an account for those social media sites. There’s no point being in all of them when all your customers really just use, let’s say, Instagram or Facebook.

Managing social media takes time and you only want to spend yours in platforms that bring you the best engagement.

3. Create graphic design for your business

In this social media age, images are everything. The popularity of platforms like YouTube and Instagram reinforces the fact that we humans are visual creatures. We like to look at things. It’s not enough to market your business using chunks of text. You have to attract people with images.

A good place to start is through graphic design. It’s a medium that allows you to be creative and express your brand’s personality. Using tools like Canva or PicMonkey, you can create marketing materials such as flyers, posters, and stickers for your business that will help drive growth. Don’t know how to create a flyer design? Most print vendors will have their own in-house graphic designer. But you can also hire

4. Invest in mobile marketing

Smartphone use has spiked over the past few years. It’s evident in the hordes of people you see in public that stare at their phone longer than they do their food. Kidding aside, mobile marketing is essential since it caters to a large number of people who use their smartphones to communicate, surf, and buy.

For your business to grow, mobile marketing has to be on top of your list. Some businesses have even taken it as far as creating an app of their own since it’s more efficient to use. However, this is not a requirement. If you’re just starting out, you only need to make sure that your site is mobile friendly. Make your site responsive to every device, minimize pop-ups as much as possible, and make buttons actually clickable. These are just some basics things to keep in mind with mobile marketing.

5. Facebook ads

Facebook maintains itself as the most used social media app in the world, with over 2 billion active users all over the world. If you’d like to get more visibility for your business, it’s worth looking at Facebook ads.

Facebook has billions of data on its users allowing businesses like yours to target ads on audiences that matter the most. You’re not going blind on this one. You’ll be able to filter who gets to see your ads and tailor your marketing messages based on who sees it.

In Conclusion

At the end of the day, you get to decide what is best your business. Be selective in the strategies you invest in and spend time only in those that have proven to deliver worthwhile ROI.

Do you have other growth strategies you can recommend? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

My SMX East Experience (2018) – SEO & SEM Conference In New York City

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SMX East Conference

I was fortunate enough to attend SMX East in New York City this week for a special three-day SEO conference (although, I was only able to make it to two of the days).

This was the first time I’ve ever been to this particular event and I’m very grateful for the experience.

If you’re an SEO specialist, geek and enthusiast like I am, this is the conference to be at.

There were many reputable and influential speakers presenting/teaching and people who came from all over the country to listen in.

Simple to say that there was a lot of good SEO energy at this event.

It really was an awesome experience and I made sure to fill up my notebook with as many notes as I possibly could.

Below I will very briefly break down the two days of my SMX East experience.

SMX East Day #1 – Workshop with Eric Enge

The first day I was in an 8 hour workshop on the subject “Hardcore Technical SEO Tactics & Techniques” presented by Eric Enge.

To say I was blown away by Eric’s knowledge and expertise is an understatement.

He had 14 modules laid out for us and was able to get through them all for this full-day workshop…and in great detail.

Although some of the subject matter was familiar to me, there were definitely topics that I knew very little about.

This is to be expected when you’re learning from one of the top guys in the industry.

One of my favorite parts about Eric’s workshop was him talking about the recent Google Algorithm updates.

There is a lot more involved in some of these recent changes from Google that I was unaware of.

I also really liked how we dove deep into the technical side of SEO which can truly have a large impact on your or your client’s website(s).

Things like canonical tags, meta noindex tags, duplicate/thin content, website speed and much more…

Furthermore, there was really useful information regarding YouTube SEO as well that really got my gears turning…Certain ranking factors that Eric brought definitely set off a few light bulbs in my head!

I can’t go into too much detail on what I learned that day because that is what the workshop is for…And quite frankly, it’s not possible to sum up everything that Eric went over in a single blog post.

However, if this at all interests you, you should really consider attending in 2019.

Eric is a true professional and man does he know his stuff!

SMX East Day #2 – Presentations & Booths

Day #2 of SMX East we were free to attend whichever presentations were going on that day.

It seemed like every 15-30 minutes there was a new one starting.

We could also walk around the conference where there were various booths set up of different SEO companies related to the SEO industry.

Many of these booths were companies whose SEO tools I use on a daily basis, so it was really interesting to venture over to those and chat with the team.

I also listened in on a few excellent speakers that day both in the common area of the conference and then in individual rooms/lectures.

Again, some of the top specialists in the digital marketing industry were speaking directly to us sharing their years of experience and expertise with the group.

Truly an incredible couple of days and an education that I could not have gotten anywhere else.

I can’t leave out too that breakfast, lunch and snacks were served both days I was there, which was very nice.

All in all, as stated above, this is an experience I am so grateful to have been able to be a part of.

If you have a chance to attend SMX East in the coming years, it’s a no-brainer and well worth the money/time invested.

I went in there with a lot of SEO experience already under my belt and am overwhelmed (in a good way) with how much I actually learned from the event.

There is always more to learn and especially when you’re being taught by some of the best people out there.

Have you attended SMX East in the past?

What was your experience like?

Bloggers: Improve Your Productivity by Improving Your Work Environment

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Improve Your Productivity As A Blogger

Being a blogger is super-exciting – you get to write about numerous cool topics that you are interested in and often have a chance to choose whether you want to do your job from the comfort of your own home or an office. However, since creativity is your main tool, you need to put a lot of effort into nurturing it and your work environment can have a strong impact on it. Therefore, we are now discussing different tips and tricks for improving your productivity by upgrading your work environment.

Let’s take a look.

Don’t let technology distract you

work at home blogger

 

First things first, in business and life, technology can be your best friend and worst enemy. So, it’s crucial to learn how to make good use of all those fun gadgets and apps without letting them distract you and have a negative impact on your productivity. For instance, try to keep your phone on silent and flip it upside down. This way, you won’t check it every five minutes when the screen lights up and this will help you to stay focused much longer. Additionally, you may like playing video games when taking a break, but you can’t have your PlayStation in the office since it will pose a huge temptation and encourage you to slack off.

Let the light in

Let Light In Blogging

 

There is nothing worse than working in a poorly-lit room since your brain naturally shuts off due to the lack of light and you can easily end up suffering from serious headaches. Therefore, you should immediately open up your curtains and let the sunshine in. Just make sure to turn your computer screen in the opposite direction so that you aren’t annoyed by the reflections. Furthermore, you need to invest in a quality table lamp since a ceiling light is often not enough and if it’s behind your back, it will just cast shadows all over your work surface. Lastly, remember that apart from making your office comfy, it will be helpful to create daily and monthly plans and to start every day by completing the most challenging tasks first. This will be extremely stimulating and help you finish all your work successfully.

Improve the air quality

Improving Air Quality

 

Having to deal with pesky allergens while writing can be extremely hard and significantly hinder your performance. Therefore, it’s crucial to start working on improving the air quality immediately. You can begin by airing out your office regularly and bringing in some greenery as well. All those different potted flowers and exotic dwarf trees will serve as great decoration and enrich your air with oxygen. Additionally, opting for a quality HEPA air purifier will definitely make your life much easier. Owing to it, you won’t have to worry about dust, pollen, mildew and odours ever again.

Bring in comfy furniture

Home Office Furniture

 

No matter whether you work from home or an office, you need to pamper yourself with a cozy chair which will provide enough support for your back and allow you to sit longer in one position. This is also very stimulating for those bloggers who work from home since having a real office chair can help them get in the right work mood instead of just spending time in a laidback environment that will spoil their creativity and readiness to give their 100%. On top of that, investing in a height-adjustable desk would be a super-smart solution, especially if you are a tall person who usually has to sit hunched over their laptop all the time. You can even try out a standing desk for a change, especially if you like brainstorming while moving around your office.

Add a personal touch

Blogging From Home Office

 

In order to be able to be fully productive, a person must feel relaxed and at peace. One of the best ways to achieve this is by adjusting your work environment and adding a personal touch to it. For instance, you can place a photo of your family on your desk, or hang some posters with your favorite natural scenery or a city skyline. This way, every time when you feel blue, you’ll have something to give you a boost of energy and help you continue your work.

Choose the right colors

Choose The Right Colors For Office

Last but not least, colors can have a huge influence on our brain and help us stay focused and energized. Of course, these rules may differ from person to person, so it’s important to experiment with different tones until you discover what works best for you. In general, earthy shades are considered to have a calming effect on people, so if you function better in a peaceful atmosphere, think about painting your office in a nice light beige or mint green nuance. On the other hand, adding a few fiery elements can help you regain your energy and boost your imagination. In case you feel that you lack those, feel free to paint an orange accent wall or spice up your office look by introducing a few red accessories as well. Just try not to overdo it since too many bold shades can be extremely distracting and make it hard for you to stay concentrated and immersed in your work.

As you can see, improving your work environment can be fun and absolutely beneficial to your productivity. You just need to discover what suits you personally and not be afraid to go for it. After all, it’s better to invest in your office space now, then to let your work constantly suffer due to the lack of creativity and innovative ideas.

If you haven’t started your blog yet, what are you waiting for? You should take a look at this!

Business Growth: Tools Every Company Can Use to Increase Business Opportunities

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Business Growth Tools

As a business owner, one of your missions is to look out for new opportunities to grow your company. However, most of us look outside the organization rather than inside. But what if you could actually start that growth from tools that you might already be using?

In this article, we’ll explore several tools that will not only improve your team’s productivity but also widen the window of opportunities for your business.

1. Pocket

It’s hard to resist the allure of Related Articles. One minute, you’re reading a piece about business strategy, and the next thing you know, you’re in a rabbit hole of articles which aren’t so related anymore.

We live in the age of distraction. Keep your eyes on the prize and learn how to block out distractions. Thankfully, there’s tools like Pocket which lets you save articles and pages that you can view later. Share this with your whole team, not because you want them to procrastinate, but because you understand that everyone has the capacity to get distracted. Pocket can be that friend that will help them keep those useful articles and documents for later.

2. Salesforce

Increase your sales team’s productivity with Salesforce. Using this tool, you give each team member the power to close deals like never before. Not just that, but Salesforce also allows you to manage your existing customers, partners, distributors, suppliers, and more. It also helps you keep track of your marketing efforts from a wide variety of platforms including web, social media, mobile, and email. Use it alongside an inventory software so you can keep track of every team member’s sale and item that you sell.  Whatever size your business may be, you can definitely benefit from Salesforce.

3.SurveyMonkey

Surveys are not dead yet. In fact, they are much easier to conduct now with the help of technology. Send surveys to your customers and prospects and find out how your business is doing. Using SurveyMonkey, formulate questions that get to the heart of the issue and find out the best ways to improve your business. You will be amazed by the insights you gain straight from your customer’s mouth.

4. Sprout Social

Manage your social media with ease and find new prospects for your business using Sprout Social. It goes beyond collecting data as it helps you create real connections with people who already love your brand. Being a social marketer becomes easy when you can effortlessly view the progress of your efforts in one clean dashboard.

5. Crazy Egg

Google Analytics only gives you so much information about your site. Take it a step further by finding out how your website visitors are interacting with each page. Using Crazy Egg, you can get a heatmap that shows where your visitor’s mouse are hovering and clicking when they visit your website. This gives you a good idea of what elements in your website attracts your customer the most, and which ones don’t. You can then optimize your pages accordingly making sure each part serves a purpose to the user.

6. MailChimp

Take advantage of your list with the help of an email marketing tool like ConvertKit. It goes beyond emails and lets you create elaborate drip campaigns tailored to each customer. Segment persons based on factors of your choosing, send them targeted messages, and increase your opportunities for sales.

7. Unitrends

Before any kind of unexpected disaster happens, your business should already have a data recovery plan. This is when you plan for the worst and ensure that all your information is stored somewhere that you can access later should anything happen.

Unitrends is a backup and recovery service that allows you to secure your company’s most important data. In this day and age where almost everything runs on big data, it’s essential that your business is able to retrieve its assets even after a disaster or accident has occurred..

8. Office 365

A product of Microsoft, Office 365 lets you perform your company’s most important tasks in one platform, whether it’s email, file sharing, or online conferences. No need to switch back and forth between different office tools when you can access it all in one interface.

Which of these tools are you already using? Do you have others that you can recommend? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Author Bio:

Damien Clarke…Born and raised in an urban lifestyle of Johannesburg. I traveled around a bit, exploring South East Asia, Canada, Mauritius, and a few other wondrous places. My passion for writing is only overridden by my wanderlust. Finally, settling down in Cape Town, South Africa and making a living doing something I truly am in love with. I specialize in travel, technology, B2B, and fitness articles with a bit of leisure on the side.

Blogging Report (September 2018) – Nice Bounce Back After Google’s August Algorithm Update

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Blogging Report (September 2018)

Blogging Report (September 2018)

So if you read my August blogging report by any chance, you know that Google rolled out a core algorithm update which actually caused some shake up for many webmasters.

I also saw a slight dip in organic traffic myself (month-over-month)…Nothing dramatic, but enough to make me take some strategic action in September.

Just to re-iterate, Google does multiple core updates throughout the year, but this one seemed to be a bit more impactful than normal.

I combated some of these organic traffic fluctuations by publishing 7 quality blog posts in September.

A few of these were my own and a few were guest posts written for my website by other bloggers/content specialists.

Being consistent with your content generation efforts despite what is going on in the SEO landscape never hurts.

That was my big push for September to rebound from the month-over-month decreases I saw in organic traffic.

There was other SEO work I put in place as well which we will discuss briefly below.

For now, let’s get into some of the traffic data for September 2018.

Organic Traffic (September 2018)- 155 Visits

I was happy with my organic traffic in September considering I saw a rebound when comparing it to the month prior.

You’ll also see below that it’s up 761.11% when comparing year-over-year!

Organic traffic came in at 155 search visits in September.

Let’s look at a few more metrics:

Month-Over-Month Increases

  • Organic traffic is up 14.81% when comparing month-over-month (155 vs. 135).

Organic Traffic

 

Year-Over-Year Increases

  • Organic traffic is up 761.11% when comparing year-over-year (155 vs. 18).

Blogging Report for September

 

Year over Year increases

 

 

 

The blue line in the chart above highlights this year’s data and the orange line highlights last year’s data.

These year-over-year increases are really solid and to think that I’ve grown my organic traffic by 761% in just 12 months is fantastic.

Now we are still dealing with small numbers and I’m aware of that, but regardless this is still substantial growth.

Income (September 2018) – Just under $3K

I don’t generally report on income on my blog, but it may be worthwhile to do so moving forward.

And also, September was a profitable month for me, especially considering I only had 155 organic visits to my website.

Total income came in at just under $3,000.

The bulk of this was from a high-ticket affiliate sale and the rest was a combination of sales for my email advertising business and lower priced affiliate products.

The best part about this is that, these were organic sales…meaning these people found my website through Google search.

This goes to show you just how important SEO and generating laser targeted traffic is.

It also demonstrates the power behind blogging and passive income. I put in the work up front, and now my website works for me 24/7 while I’m free to do other things.

Work Completed In September 2018

To help produce this kind of traffic growth, I pushed both the content generation and link building work hard in September.

I also did some routine SEO maintenance to clean up any technical errors.

Below is a quick list of what I accomplished.

  • I published 7 blog posts to my website in September.
  • I wrote 2-3 guest posts for other authoritative websites in my niche…These all contained a link back to my website.
  • I cleaned up a handful of 404 errors (broken links) by them to the closest relevant page.
  • I also fixed a few unnecessary redirect chains.
  • I networked with another popular blogger in my niche and was featured on his website and also obtained a backlink from that relationship.

In order to build upon this momentum, in October I’ll be publishing more quality content, building additional quality backlinks and continue to network with other authoritative bloggers.

I am also working on a new funnel for my website, which will be part of the workload in October.

To sum everything up, once you get to a certain point with your website, the on-going focus should really be new content in combination with link building.

This one-two punch is incredibly effective when it comes to generating more traffic and gaining more exposure within the search engines.

It’s not always super exciting but it works.

You can see the video version of this blog post here.

Please also make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can follow my progress.

How have your results for your blog been?

Are you seeing success with any specific strategies?

5 Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know

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Entrepreneurial Resources

A lot of people tend to oversimplify the idea of owning your own business in order to make it more appealing as if it weren’t already. Provided that they already work in the field in which they want to start an independent business, they assume that they’ll automatically know what to do on their own. This, nonetheless, isn’t necessarily true. You see, there are several entrepreneurial secrets that you might not have heard so far. Here are five of them.

Income and cash flow are not one and the same

The first thing we need to clarify is the fact that while your business may be doing great on paper, you might still experience some cash problems for a prolonged period of time. This is due to the fact that most of your clients may be using the credit payments method and these account receivables just aren’t coming fast enough. To avoid this from becoming a problem, you should dedicate yourself to the issue of cash flow. Incentivizing cash payments is one way to do so, whereas selling some of these invoices might be a great temporary solution.

Doing what you love is not enough

Don’t get us wrong, having a passion for something that you do is great, however, it’s not necessarily enough. Unless you pick a niche that’s profitable enough, you risk entering into a business world under unfavorable conditions. Think about it, how long are you likely to love doing something that’s losing you money? On the other hand, if you’re too passionate about something, it might become quite hard to look at the thing objectively.

Keep things in writing

You wouldn’t believe just how hard it is to keep track of all things that take place around you once you become an entrepreneur. In the early stages of your business, the workload might not be that great, which is why it might seem easy to keep all the promises that you’ve given to your clients and employees.

The problem is that this creates a habit of trying to memorize things you don’t have to. To make the matters worse, this will make you stick to this technique long after it’s no longer possible for you to keep track of everything on your own. Instead, try typing everything that goes around or even take a more traditional approach by getting a planner and/or journal.

A mentor can be indispensable

There’s only so much you can learn from guides, manuals and courses – the rest comes down to experience. Now, due to the fact that 8 out of 10 small businesses fail, it becomes more than clear that the trial and error methodology might not be the safest route for you to take. This is where a mentor can come in handy. By advising you on what to do in any given situation, you can get a more efficient way of reacting to the new set of circumstances.

Never stop learning

They say that it takes doing something for about 10,000 hours in order to master it. The problem, however, lies in the fact that the business world is incredibly volatile, which means that in just a couple of years, you might end up sitting on a ton of outdated data, skills and business practices. For this reason, you can never afford to put a halt to your learning process. Courses, seminars and various online learning resources are a great source of knowledge. Still, the bulk of it needs to come from experience.

Apart from these general tips, there are also some industry-related secrets that you may have to figure out on your own or learn from your mentor. Either way, the very knowledge of these five secrets may substantially improve your chances of making it where most others fail. As the last, unofficial, piece of advice, you need to arm yourself with patience. So many entrepreneurs stray from the right path simply because they aren’t seeing results fast enough. Perseverance is the name of the game.

Author Bio:

Diana Smith is a full time mom of two beautiful girls interested in topics related to finances and latest business technologies. In her free time she enjoys exercising and preparing healthy meals for her family.

 

 

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How to Manage a Remote Team for a Fast-Growing Digital Business

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Manage a Remote Team

With the dawn of the digital age, more and more aspiring entrepreneurs are abandoning the old brick-and-mortar business models in search of online business success, and for a good number of reasons at that. Not only does leading a digital business eliminate overhead costs associated with running a company, but most importantly, it opens up a world of networking opportunities – it allows you to tap into the global talent pool and hire the best of the best in the industry.

However, managing a remote team is not an easy task, especially for a fast-growing company. There are numerous risks and common pitfalls of remote team management you should be wary of, so let’s take a look at the five effective ways to lead a digital workforce that will propel your brand forward.

The importance of honesty and transparency

The millennial workforce is not easy to please, and if there is anything modern employees won’t tolerate in their work environment, it’s dishonesty. A surefire way for your team members to leave you high and dry in the most crucial of times is to keep them in the dark, demanding that they do their job without asking too many questions.

This is a red flag for the modern employee, and they will not hesitate to leave you in search of a company where they will feel appreciated. In order to avoid this, while building a strong, co-depended team, you want to set a foundation of honesty, transparency, and freedom of communication. This will also portray a trustworthy image of your brand, which is extremely important in the digital realm.

Make regular meetings a priority

Many online entrepreneurs and business leaders fall prey to one common pitfall when leading a remote team: unstructured face-time with their employees. While regular email communication is important, you should make regular face-to-face meetings with your team members a priority if you want to create a trustworthy bond, boost productivity, and resolve any issues promptly.

Meticulous team management through scheduled meetings should be one of the pillars of your growth strategy, and nowadays it’s easy to gather your employees in a single spot using a digital office space. With numerous video call apps at your disposal that can support numerous interlocutors at a time, you should have no problem leading productive weekly meetings with your team.

Emphasize workplace diversity

In the modern business world, workplace diversity is not just an option, it’s an imperative. Not only for the creation of a trustworthy brand image that the public will respect, but also for the creation of a crack team of professionals hailing from every corner of the world.

Remember, the best talent in the industry could be hiding anywhere, and you can find it through professional disability employment services, who are providers of skill training for people with disabilities. Companies like this help these people find a job and can get you in contact with some of the most skilled workers in your niche. By employing people from a variety of backgrounds and skill sets, you will be able to build a diversified team of professionals and uphold a reputation of a modern, trustworthy brand with a winning company culture.

Build a positive company culture

Having a strong company culture with clearly-defined values the employees and global audiences can relate to is extremely important in the modern digital world. Fortunately, you can easily build yours by defining your company’s values, putting them into context and communicating them with your employees, and just having fun in the workplace. Remember to avoid micromanaging your employees and to give them adequate autonomy over their work in order to build a company people actually enjoy being a part of – in turn, this will boost cohesion in the team.

Boost productivity with the right software

Last but not least, there can be no long-term productivity in a remote team without proper team-management software in place. A digital entrepreneur understands the importance of having workflow software on deck in order to monitor their team’s performance at all times, have a single platform where everyone can upload their work and communicate, and just act as a team working in a real office space. Couple such software with a strict work schedule and deadlines and you will have no problem keeping your team members in check.

Leading a remote team is definitely not an easy task in the modern business world, especially for a fast-growing company that needs the support of all its employees. By implementing these tactics, you should have no problem boosting productivity across the board and setting the stage for long-term success in the industry.

Author Bio:

Lauren Wiseman

Lauren Wiseman is an entrepreneur, currently based in Melbourne and a regular contributor to bizzmarkblog.com. She assists clients in growing their personal and professional brands in a fast-changing and demanding market environment. Covering finance and investment topics, Lauren strongly believes in holistic approach to business.

Do you lead a remote team?

If so, which strategies do you use to manage them?

 

4 Financial Tips All Business Owners Should Follow

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Business Finance Tips

How well does your business manage its finances?

If you’re like most business owners, you are always looking for areas where you can improve, and trying to find new ways of generating profit. But to achieve financial bliss for your company, there are some things you can’t overlook. Here are 4 essential business finance tips you should follow to manage, evaluate and improve the financial state of your business.

1. Crunch Your Numbers Regularly

When business owners don’t have a clear insight into the financial state of the company, they are unable to stay on top of how much cash is going in and out of the business. So, it’s important to keep your accounts and books in order from day one.

If you feel particularly financially inept, automate the process with bookkeeping software solutions like Quickbooks. The program is very simple and easy to use to manage overhead business expenses, record all transactions, send invoices and calculate returns.

If you have the capacity, you can also hire a bookkeeper, or put an outside bookkeeping firm on retainer. But, whether you do it yourself or you use someone else, make sure to regularly set aside enough time to complete these tasks and keep your business finances manageable.

2. Keep Track of Cash Flow

What business owners fail to realize is that their cash flow can change every quarter. When it comes to revenue streams, a business can experience major spikes and significant losses in just two quarters depending on their industry.

For example, if your company manufactures swimwear, you can expect a surge in business during Q2 and Q3 (from April to October). For accounting businesses, they generally see a significant increase during tax season.

In order to manage finances effectively, you will also need to understand how sales cycles affect your business. If you do most of your work B2B, your sales cycle can last a few months. It’s necessary then, to secure extra capital in your business accounts, so your business can operate at normal capacity during these periods.

3. Invest Your Earnings

A business has to reinvest its earnings to be able to achieve growth and become successful. Having a zero balance on your accounts isn’t a bad thing, because you are investing profit in key areas of your business process to scale it and expand your operations. It’s a much better option than piling up cash because at one point it will become unsustainable since you won’t be able to keep up with demand.

However, business owners have to make smart financial investments to keep their business afloat. This means monitoring the financial market, keeping track of gold price and its effect on currency, and realizing what areas of the business process can bring the most significant financial gains.

For example, if you want to increase sales, investing in market research is a great way to discover an untapped market which can be exploited. Or, you can increase the marketing budget of your company and attract more customers by improving brand awareness.

It’s never to early to start investing. Invest in just one or two areas, check the performance and progress, and if one investment doesn’t start bringing in returns after six months scrap it and start over.

4. Pay Taxes on Time

Paying taxes on time is an important aspect of maintaining a good financial balance for your business. It can help you secure business loans and stay on good terms with the IRS, not to mention the possibility of claiming a tax deduction.

Hiring a tax professional to take care of all your federal and state taxes ahead of time is a great way to ensure your business doesn’t get fined and comes with a lot of benefits. Among other things, your business will improve its credit rating, get a smaller tax bill, and become more eligible for various government subsidies.

Use these financial tips to help your business achieve a positive balance. Stay on top of cash flow, pay taxes on time, and invest your profits in various key areas that can help your business grow. That’s all your business needs for financial health and future success.

Author Bio:

Diana Smith is a full time mom of two beautiful girls interested in topics related to finances and latest business technologies. In her free time she enjoys exercising and preparing healthy meals for her family. Follow Diana her on Twitter and Google+.

 

 

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Six Most Dangerous SEO Techniques to Avoid

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Common SEO Mistakes

The practice of SEO is quite common among business owners today, even though very few frequently re-evaluate their SEO strategies.

Tactics that might have worked in the past may not yield any positive results today. Several practices of SEO might attract you unmerited penalties from search engines, and compromise your ranking in the SERPs. The following are six of the most dangerous SEO techniques that you should avoid in 2018:

Unnatural links

Most webmasters understand the importance of link building when it comes to attaining higher search engine rankings and increasing organic traffic. However, the links you build to your website must be of the highest quality, and from legitimate sources.

Unnatural links generally involve stuffing backlinks bought from illegal websites. These are incredibly spammy and low quality links that can really negatively impact your SEO. Some webmasters take the extra initiative of hiding the links so that the audiences do not see them. Whichever way, Google and other search engines have become stricter in observation of these types of practices, and are known to heavily penalize websites that engage in this behavior.

Keyword stuffing

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of using identified keywords with the aim of reaching as many people as possible by ranking at the top of the search engines. However, like unnatural links, keyword stuffing is distasteful to search engines, not to mention, audiences.

Overusing key terms in your copy not only looks like you are trying too hard to make your article relevant but it also makes your content look poorly-researched and untrustworthy. Instead, you can determine various positions to use your keywords, like titles, metadata, image captions and descriptions, and strategically within the copy.

Further, you want to opt for long-term keywords, not only for the fact that they are more descriptive but also in the way they help in minimizing cases of keyword stuffing.

Unpleasant interstitial ads

Truthfully, pop-up ads can be very annoying, especially to mobile site users who have a small screen surface to work with. Even though ads are an income strategy for websites, it is wise to cut down on unpleasant interstitial ads.

Most people using the internet fret from sites heavily mounted with ads in the fear of catching a virus or attracting hackers to their devices and accounts. Therefore, the wrong use of unpleasant adds increase your bounce-rate, which equates to the rate at which people exit your website after a visit.

If you must use ads, assign them to a small portion of your website, in such a way that the user has enough room to keep scrolling on content that interests them. Remember you should also be keen to ensure a smooth and pleasant user experience, including optimizing page load speed.

Duplicate content

Since there is a high value for content in terms of SEO, it tends to get overwhelming for website owners to constantly develop high-quality and exciting content. As the pressure mounts, it is common for webmasters to generate duplicate content, sometimes similar to previous information on their websites, and other times similar to other content owners.

Either way, Google finds this as a way to manipulate search rankings, and this will directly impact your organic results. In fact, if you check the keyword rank tracker at serpbook.com, Google displays the original content as the source of information, which means the duplicate material may not make it to the SERP.

Furthermore, you risk landing into copyright issues for the reasons of plagiarism and stand the chance of tainting your reputation online. Aim to increase the quantity of content your share by working to remain consistent with your posting frequency, and also, ensure you stick close to originality, with a flair for your brand’s identity.

Article spinning

In a bid to run away from duplicate content, webmasters indulge in article spinning, which is a black hat SEO practice. The idea here is to manipulate a piece of work to come up with a rewritten piece of content that seems to be different from the original one, to impress search engines.

The truth of the matter is, search engines love fresh content, and article spinning is stale and can get your websites flagged as spam, or otherwise penalized on SERP. Also, the use of article spinning software produces low-quality content that is an unreadable version of the original content.

Remember, whether you change the terms and phrases used in a copy to generate a different article or duplicate it as it is, it passes out the same idea, and this does not add any value to your target audience.

Comment spamming on blogs

Commenting on other people’s websites is a great way to remain relevant online, increase your brand’s visibility, form relationships with other webmasters, as well as increase audience engagement. However, comment spamming is a technique that webmasters use to build up a comment section with feedback and links pointing back to their websites, which is a means to manipulate their search rankings.

Today, Google has changed its algorithm to punish such acts. The translation here is that the comments you post on blogs should be informative and value-adding, instead of generic messages. If correctly done, it can be an ideal source of backlinks (although no-follow), therefore, avoid unevaluable comments like ‘great post.’

The practice of SEO is one that is engaging and demanding of commitment to put up with the continuity of bettering your website. However, you must tread carefully when operating online, because your reputation is always at stake, and the internet never forgets.

Author Bio

DaynaMaycon Diniz Lopes is the content manager of Serpbook. Serpbook is an online platform that gives you information about everything you need to monitor, automate and report on your keyword rankings. It also provides you with local and global SEO rank tracking in real time for Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

 

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