Setting Up an At-Home Office for Your Small Business

With more than 22 million self-employed workers and 543,000 new businesses opening each month, office locations have begun to shift from traditional building settings to individual homes exponentially in recent years. In fact, 52% of small businesses are now solely based from home! If you are one of these budding entrepreneurs, you should know that a properly equipped and strategically structured office can make all the difference when it comes to productivity. With just a few easy tips, your at-home office will have you feeling constructive and creative in no time. How Your Small Business Can Succeed Across the board, small businesses bend over backward to try and become profitable from their inception. However, this struggle can eventually lead to a business’s demise if proper financial and business concept planning aren’t considered. But by following these tips, especially in your business’s infancy, you’ll be well on your way to ensuring …

Online Marketing Terms, Decoded: SEO, CTR, ROI, and All the Rest

    We Americans have always loved using codes of all kinds to communicate, and maybe that’s the reason that you can’t go five minutes without hearing someone use an acronym these days.   In any technical field, and especially where it applies to online marketing and business, you will constantly come across terms and acronyms that you’re either familiar with already, or you’ve never heard of.   Even if it drives you crazy, it’s important to understand what these terms mean if you want to be able to function and communicate within the realm of online marketing. Let’s take a look at a few of them.   SEO—Search Engine Optimization If you’re mystified by this term, then you might as well accept it—you are one lost puppy. SEO represents the underlying mantra and driving force of the vast majority of online content.   In a nutshell, SEO is the …

mobile website optimization

Your Customers are Shopping from Their Phones. Is Your Website Prepared?

If you’ve ever used your phone to view a website that was not optimized for mobile, then you know how necessary this is. A website that does not function properly on mobile devices is not just irritating to the user—it will cause them to leave your site as quickly as they came. Do you know how people are finding and purchasing your product or service? On their phones, especially if you own an ecommerce site. In case you haven’t figured this out already, let me assure you that if your website is not mobile-optimized, then a great number of your would-be customers are passing right over your business. What does a poorly-optimized website look like on a mobile platform? We’ve all seen it. You log on to a site using your mobile browser, and the print is tiny—either way too small to read, or improperly sized. Then, you have to …

5 Call Menu Examples for Your Phone Tree

  This post will start with a few quick rules-of-thumb to help you create a professional and effective call menu. If you don’t have time for my rhetoric, then please feel free to skip down to the good stuff.   When labeling menu options, be concise and get to the point. Like a voicemail greeting, a good menu prompt immediately tells the caller where this option will send them and quickly states what number they should press.   Don’t be afraid to add more specific options, rather than fewer, general options. Most people are willing to wait just a little bit longer for the right prompt, and even if you only have 2 agents, you can break the menu into a bunch of specific departments and route multiple options to the same agent.   Use a calm and even tone. In the same way that callers on hold react better …

Conversion 101: Create Content that Attracts the Right People

    What is content, and what does it mean today? The word is now ubiquitously used to describe just about any media on the internet. There is an ocean of “content” on the web today, and it is growing larger every day, sometimes with little or no thought given to crafting it carefully.   The word itself even sounds empty and non-specific, which is exactly how I would describe most content that you’ll find on the internet these days, and that is just what you want to avoid when designing content for your readers.   Here are some new ways to look at how you produce your own content, that is actually made for your target audience.   Don’t be generic. Be specific, and be original. The first thing is that you don’t even really have to try to stand out when you’re writing and organizing media that is …

5 Reasons Originality is Necessary for Business

Be original, and you’ll have more fun doing your job. Think about the time when your business was just getting off the ground. Difficult as it may have been, it was pretty exciting because you either had a great new idea for a product, or you wanted to productively build on an established product or service. It was exciting to build something of your own, something that you knew could be successful because you could do it better than anyone else. One of the greatest joys of running your own business is the freedom to create anything you want. You’re not working to build someone else’s empire, but instead you are striving to make a statement about who you are, in the way you do business. If you continue to keep that kind of an attitude towards your business, then you’ll always have fun doing it—and what’s the point, if …

5 More Reasons You Should Get Up Really Early

OK, so you already know that it’s good to get up early, we all know it, and it’s no secret. So why don’t we all do it? The truth is that not all of us are wired to be early-risers—in fact, some of us are decidedly more functional or creative at night—but if you are a professional in any field, there’s no question that you should be an early riser. Here’s why: You will be happier and more productive. As stated in an article published by Psychology Today, “Early risers are happier, healthier, and more productive than night owls.” People who get up earlier generally report being in a better mood, due in large part to the social convention of the 9-5 workday that has been established in our society. What apparently happens is that there is a feeling of “finding your place”, in a sense, in addition to the …

How to Make Your Small Business Seem Like a Big Business

Your business has many different areas that need to be optimized to keep everything running smoothly. As one of the most vital elements of any business, your phone system has to be set up to handle anything your customers can throw at it. Not only can you serve your customers better with an efficient phone system, but it will also give your business a “large” feel, if it has some key features. [clickandtweet]Just because your business is small doesn’t mean it has to sound small.[/clickandtweet] One feature that gives your business a “big” vibe is a call menu, or phone tree. Also known as an auto attendant, this allows you to set up a professional menu to which you may send all of your calls. When you answer every business call on your cell phone, without a call menu, what’s going to happen? The caller will hear it ring, then …

It Takes More than a Cell Phone to Run a Business

The ability to run a business from your cell phone affords you a great deal of freedom and flexibility, but at the same time, it can add a lot of frustration. The problem with doing this is that your business calls are not being managed by any system, but it’s just you and your cell phone. Professional phone systems are set up a certain way that caters to serving customers with features like hold queues and call menus, but if you don’t have a system like Talkroute, your cell phone may not be up to the task. Here are some of the problems you may run into: The whole world knows your private number. Once you start taking business calls on your cell and giving out your number to customers, things can get out of hand pretty fast. There are not very many people who are okay with their private …

6 Ways Your Voicemail Can Make or Break Your Business

Ask yourself this: Where would your business be without voice messaging? If you can’t reliably intercept and organize your business’ voice mail, then you can’t really serve your customers. This is one of the reasons that Talkroute exists in the first place. The Birth of a New Kind of Phone System When our cofounder, Paul, was building his first company, he found that when he needed to run his business remotely, using nothing but his cell phone, the tools to do so were difficult to find. Even Google Voice couldn’t quite cut the mustard. So, he created the tools he needed. Among other things, the ability to manage voice messages from customers was crucial. After very little deliberation, Paul decided that many business owners were experiencing the same problem, and Talkroute was born. You need a professional-grade solution for a professional business. Understand that the voice mailbox on your cell …