How to Optimize Workflow for Your Projects

  Being productive in your business and completing all of your tasks and projects is more than just working all the time. You could even say that optimizing workflow is actually more important than just working a ton of hours, which you most likely already do because you’re a business owner. The thing is, you can work tons and tons of hours every day and have low output and productivity, if what you’re doing during all those hours is not high-quality work. That is, if you’re not working on the right things at the right times, taking the long way around to complete projects, or working in a very unfocused way, then the work you’re doing is not quality work. There are many ways that you can change this, if you find that those characteristics describe you. Keep reading if you want to learn how to improve the way you …

How Elon Musk Succeeds on 4 Hours of Sleep a Night

  There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Elon Musk is an extremely important figure in our culture today. In truth, that goes for people around the world because the projects he is into have implications for improving industry and the way we interact with technology for everyone, everywhere. That unfortunately means that we are even concerned with his sleep habits. It borders on ridiculous for massive portions of the public to be worried about how a single entrepreneur is sleeping, but that is the world we live in. And that is how important this man is to the world. Musk is working on developing solutions for an incredible number of different problems that people are facing in the United States, as well as the world, as a whole. So, when that kind of a person is not getting enough sleep, it’s mainstream news and a concern for people everywhere. …

How to Write Emails That Convert

  In today’s highly competitive world, you have to explore every avenue that can potentially bring your small business more success, and that especially goes for the marketing strategies that you use. If email marketing is one of those avenues that you have never gone down as of yet, start putting it to work for your business today because it is just about guaranteed to pay off for you. The thing with email marketing, though, as is the case with any other marketing method, you have to learn how to actually make it work, so that you’re not just wasting your time on a new strategy with which you’re not familiar. That’s what we’ll be going over today. What you’ll find in this post are some practical pieces of advice for getting started with email marketing, if you’re new to it—or if you’ve already begun your email marketing campaign but …

How to Handle Employee Performance Reviews Productively

  Performance reviews. The meetings that only the most deranged person would actually look forward to but are very necessary for employers to keep everyone on track, and for employees to learn how they can improve and advance in the company. Performance reviews are kind of an interesting enterprise because, though they seem like a simple activity on the surface, they’re actually quite complex and require some delicate consideration on the part of both the employer and the employee. If you’re the one conducting the review, you can easily turn the meeting into a complete waste of time, or worse, into an interaction that negatively impacts the employee. To make these performance reviews productive and positive, it’s good to use a few specific elements, and that’s what you’ll learn from the ideas in this post.     Don’t Pull Your Punches You’re doing both the individual and the company a …

Gmail vs. Outlook vs. Rackspace: Top Email Clients for Small Business

  Email is one of the most enduring forms of communication that was born out of the Internet. Strangely, it was thought by experts to be a medium that would become obsolete as we headed into the 21st century, and they couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did we continue to use email in a professional capacity, but more applications were created that wouldn’t work without email, even today. There are a lot of different options that you can use to manage email for your small business, and beyond the standard email clients, most web hosting for websites include their own email. To make the running of your business easier for everybody in your company, however, you want the best email client you can find—one that understands what a business needs from their email. We’ve picked the top 3 email clients we’ve found, to examine them a little more …

Email Marketing Isn’t Dead, and Here’s Why

  There are plenty of people out there who are under the assumption that email marketing doesn’t work anymore, and you may be one of them. Most people believe that email doesn’t have the potential to reach and convert a target audience into customers, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It absolutely works, and if you’re not taking advantage of email marketing, then you’re missing out on a great deal of new customers and additional revenue that you could be bringing into your business by using it. By the end of this article, you’ll have a much different idea of how email marketing works and whether or not it is effective. Because Email Isn’t Dead   The first reason we have to bring up is the fact that email, in itself, is still very much alive and well. People use email for all kinds of purposes, just about everything. …

Google Voice Alternative: Talkroute is Better for Business

  Google Voice is one of those services that was created by a very large company who found and employed an elite team of very smart people, who then took a great idea built by GrandCentral, put the power and resources of Google behind it, and made it even better. What they really did was to design Google Voice in such a way that it was appealing and useful for a much bigger market. GrandCentral, the phone management service which Google bought out for themselves back in 2007, really wasn’t much more than a basic carrier with a lot of infrastructure and massive inventory of phone numbers. Google took that to use as the backbone of their new Voice app, but what they created with it was much more than what GrandCentral had. One of the problems with the Google Voice app, though, is that it only has basic features …

What Keeps Your Employees Happy & High-Functioning

  Keeping employees happy has to be one of the most misunderstood elements of running a business. Every business owner thinks they know how to do it, and most have a whole team of employees who wish they found themselves anywhere but at work. Of course, it’s a given that most of us would prefer to be living our lives instead of working at our job. That doesn’t mean that work has to be miserable or consistently difficult to get through, which responsibility falls on the owners of a business. You can make it either acceptable (and even enjoyable) for your employees to work at your company, or you can make it a place where everyone hates to be. Though it’s not all that complicated to create a satisfying work environment, it can be tough to know what moves you need to make so that the people working on your …

Using CPAdirectory, CPA Finder, & Gusto to Find a Business Accountant

  Searching for an accountant is not exactly the most fun task for anybody, but if you have a business, it’s of course essential. There are also an abundance of accountants and bookkeepers in any given area, so it helps a great deal to have tools at your disposal which can give you a platform to find the right one and narrow it down, making your search feel a lot less overwhelming. There are a few resources online that stand out, but we found a couple of the easiest resources for you to use, with large databases of CPAs who provide a range of services for all industries.   Finding a Great Accountant Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult   There are so many accountants to choose from, that it can be tough to narrow it down and choose the one that’s right for your business. That’s why the databases provided …

Treating Your Home Business Like a Real Business is Vital

When you’re running a business out of your home, just the fact that you’re working every day in that environment almost gives you the feeling that it’s not a legitimate business. Naturally, you know that it is legitimate, but the casual surroundings and often smaller scale have a way of fooling you into thinking that you can treat it as a casual endeavor, which will have a negative effect if you continue to look at it that way. It’s easy to forget that everything is just the same as a standard business, except for the place out of which you are running it. You still need funding, market research, a website, employees in some cases, and every other element that you would need if you were running your business out of a regular office space. If you don’t treat it that way, you can retard your growth and impede the …