Why We Love QuickBooks Self Employed

  QuickBooks has been must-have software of small businesses for a long time, but over the years, they have streamlined it and added features to make the current version even easier to use, to the point where it nearly runs itself. If you’re a business owner, there’s a very good chance that you have used QuickBooks at some point, and you’ve probably been using it ever since because there really isn’t any other accounting software out there that surpasses it. Let’s take a look at what the latest QuickBooks Self Employed software has to offer.   It’s Uncomplicated Software   The last thing you want with your accounting software is for it to be difficult to understand or navigate. Most people already hate math or at least have trouble with it, and to be forced to wade through numbers for hours would drive most business owners nuts. One of the …

Commit to Your Blog for 12 Months

Why You Need to Commit to Your Blog for 12 Months

Everybody wants to see a quick return when they invest their time into something, but that rarely ends up being the outcome. In fact, the strategy that produces an immediate ROI is seldom the best strategy because the investments of time, energy, or money that you make for your business tend to be the ones that yield significant and sustained returns. Slow and steady ultimately wins the race in content marketing, and this is widely misunderstood among marketers who go into their content campaign expecting people to flock to their business website after posting a few blog articles. This is one of the primary reasons why business owners and online marketers don’t see the conversions from content that they want. We hope to dispel here some harmful illusions people have about content marketing, so that you can have real success with a longer-term campaign. Don’t Expect Overnight Results If you’re …

Can Your Customers Break Your Phone System?

Just like when you open a new website for your business, and you’re testing the site in all sorts of different ways to make sure you can’t get it to “break”, you have to do the same for your phone system to check for any weak points that may frustrate or discourage your customers. There are a few problems that commonly occur in business phone systems, which you can easily identify and address so that everyone who calls you has a seamless experience. Don’t let these problems persist any longer because you may be losing customers every day for something totally preventable. Your Customers Should Always Be Able to Get Through Sad to say, there are a ton of small businesses who have problems with their phone systems which are easily preventable and fixable, and the owners either neglect them or are not even aware of them. Many callers trying …

Evolution of Advertising: Past to Present

Advertising has been around for a long time, much longer than most of us realize. Technically, the first advertisement occurred whenever was the first time someone told another person that they could get some item for a certain price, and it was most likely before recorded history. It’s difficult to pin down exactly when was the first time the concept was put into practice. In the beginning, it was definitely through word-of-mouth, and interestingly enough, that is still one of the most effective methods of advertising. What we’re focusing on in this article, though, is the history of advertising in the United States and how we got from the original incantations to today. The First Ads in the New World “A Brief History of Advertising in America” by William M. O’Barr notes that the first known advertisements in the would-be U.S. came before we won our independence from the British …

Shopify Review: Is It The Best Online Store Builder?

If you’re going to open an online store, or a website for any reason, you’ve got quite a few options to choose from now, as you’ve surely seen from all the different ads going around. We’re looking at Shopify today because, even though others like Squarespace and BigCommerce can provide everything you need, Shopify is one of the all-around, best ecommerce platforms that you will find and features you don’t get elsewhere. This platform should at least be on your list of companies to build your business website. Fully Customizable Website, Online Store, & Blog When they say you can customize everything, they mean it. Create everything exactly the way you want, from the bottom, up. The themes you can choose from are made by designers from Happy Cog, Clearleft, Pixel Union, and others. Your entire site will of course be mobile-optimized for customers to use it on any phone …

Guest Blog Posting Ways Generate Backlinks

Guest Blog Posting & Other Ways to Generate Backlinks

  Backlinks. They are an indispensable mechanism to get a lot of traffic to your website, and without them, it will take you way more time to break free from the nominal amount of web traffic that you gain from merely creating and then posting your content. There are a few ways that you can get other websites to link back to your site. Take a moment to look at these simple strategies to get the ball rolling.   What are Backlinks, and Why are They So Important?   To put it very simply, a backlink is a hyperlink that someone posts on their website which links back to your website. Though you can generate visitors to your site in a variety of ways, backlinks are one of the most potent ways to increase your web traffic. The best part about it is that once you get a quality backlink, …

Are Billboards a Good Option for Small Businesses?

This question actually has a multi-faceted answer, and to introduce the topic, I unfortunately have to give the always-irritating non-answer, “Well, yes and no”. I hate to start this article off with a non-answer, but by the end of this post, you will have some solid answers to the question in the headline that are actually useful for your business. In the simplest of terms, billboards are great, but they work better under certain circumstances than others. Let’s get started by looking at how they work as a marketing tool. How Effective are Billboards as a Marketing Tool? We have grown up with large signs next to the road which advertised everything from health care facilities to used car dealers. The fact that roadside billboards still exist, and increase in numbers all the time, shows clearly that they definitely work. Yes, billboards can be an effective marketing tool, but the …

Should You Be Using Slack for Your Business?

Of all the tools that pretty much any business can make use of, this is one of the most useful. All businesses need an efficient way to communicate and send information internally, which is why messaging software like Slack can change the way you do business every day. Not only will Slack nearly eliminate the need for email, but it also makes all of your communication much easier while saving your team a lot of time. Online Messaging Software for Productivity So, what is it? Slack is online messaging software that is much more than a simple instant messaging app. It is a high-powered piece of software that optimizes communication and collaboration for businesses, or any group that needs to get serious work done, for that matter. If you have ever used Skype or similar services, then you have an idea of how it works; however, Slack is more like …

Cut Landline Phone Service

Why You Should Cut Your Landline Phone Service

As much affection as we may have for them, the truth is that businesses don’t absolutely need a landline phone anymore. If you love your landline and still want to hang on to it, then of course they still work fine and you can use it with a Talkroute virtual phone system, too. Meanwhile, you can easily manage all of your calls without it, for less money and more simply. Every business has their own way of managing calls, but you may find that there’s a very strong case for getting rid of it. Many Businesses Are Eliminating Their Wired Line Phones It’s been happening for some time now. For the past 10-15 years, businesses have been gradually phasing out landlines in their offices, and that’s been accelerating in the past few years. As pointed out by Business Insider earlier this year, businesses are switching out their landlines in favor …

DocuSign vs. RightSignature: Which is Best for eSignature?

We’ve already talked about how much we love DocuSign in this blog, but it’s really a toss-up for eSignature services because RightSignature is also a very simplified, efficient service for electronic signature. If you’re not too familiar with it, electronic signatures are turning the idea of signing on real paper into a thing of the past. eSignature is absolutely secure, legally binding, cheaper, and far easier than being constantly tied down to paper signatures. We are devoting this post to compare the two best providers of these services and what they offer, so that you can make an informed decision as to which one is best for you. Data Security & Compliance Naturally, a primary concern when signing documents electronically is whether it is completely secure, so that both the sender and the signer can feel confident that no data will ever be breached or lost. Both of these providers …