Do you need to manage your finances as a freelance blogger better than you are doing?

Nowadays, increasing numbers of people are growing to see that blogging is a genuine career option. Something that many of us associated with individual pursuits is now serving as a source of income for many. This is great.

Blogging can be an enjoyable and fulfilling job. But you are going to have to treat it like a job and this means managing your finances while you work in this way.

Here are some steps to take that will help you keep everything above board!

But you are going to have to treat it like a job and this means managing your finances while you work in this way. #bloggingtips
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Manage Your Taxes

When you freelance, you find yourself responsible for paying your taxes and other necessary contributions, such as national insurance. When you’re employed, your employer will figure out how much tax you owe and deduct this from your wages before paying you.

But when you work for yourself, you’ll have to do this work yourself. Now, one way to achieve this is to determine which tax bracket you’re in, figure out how much tax you should be paying, deducting this from each invoice you’re paid, and saving it aside in a separate savings pot that you can use to pay your tax at the end of the fiscal year.

Alternatively, if you want to lift a weight from your shoulders, you can use the services of an accountant. An accountant can take control of your tax affairs and ensure that you pay the right amount on time.

In the majority of countries, accountants have to be professionally qualified to legally and officially deal with their accounts. Make sure that your accountant has the necessary qualifications to be recognized by the law before using their services.

When you freelance, you find yourself responsible for paying your taxes and other necessary contributions, such as national insurance. #bloggingfinances
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Reduce Operating Costs to Manage Your Finances as a Freelance Blogger 

When you work for yourself, you’re going to have operating costs. When you blog as a freelancer, chances are, you’ll be working from home. So, reduce overheads where possible.

Switch energy providers to find the best deal for your money. Alternatively, generate your own energy with choosesolar.com. Conserve energy where you can, turning off devices you’re not using and lights you aren’t using.

When buying blogging tools to work with, search for the best deals, discount codes, and promotional rates.

Furthermore, look for deals on plugins for your websites and social media schedulers and hosting. Anytime you can save money freelancing it will help you keep more of what you earn blogging.

Furthermore, look for deals on plugins for your websites and social media schedulers and hosting. #InspireToThrive
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Reassess Your Rates Regularly

When you first start out blogging, chances are you charge less, as you’re less experienced or may have a smaller readership on your blog.

As time goes on, and you improve your craft, you may want to start charging more for advertising on your blog, advertised blog posts, or other exposure you provide. Reassess your rates regularly to ensure that you’re charging the right amount for your work.

Of course, one of the big factors is time. Always remember time = money. If you are spending more time doing things for clients, you need to raise the rates or speak with them about what you are doing. Is your freelance work necessary to get the job done?  If so, you need to raise those rates to stay in business.

Is it necessary to get the job done? If so, you need to raise those rates to stay in business. #bloggingtips
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Collect Your Invoices to Manage Your Finances as a Freelance Blogger

Be sure you are getting paid as a freelancer. That is a huge step to managing your finances as a blogger or any freelancer today.

If you can’t collect the money, you may stop providing services to that client. I give my special longtime clients up to 90 days as long as they are in communication with me. It’s best to get 50% upfront if you can.

My blogging friend Donna recently stated:

Hi Lisa

Bloggers, online marketers and others who have businesses online often do a lot of freelance work.

So this is all good advice to keep them on the straight and narrow.

I find it’s especially important to get the deposit AND set a very realistic time schedule.

It’s far better to get the work done AHEAD of schedule than to be late.

Being ahead of schedule is sure to get you repeat assignments, referrals, and great testimonials.

-Donna

Manage Your Finances as a Freelance Blogger

As you can see, there are countless areas that you can focus on when it comes to managing your finances as a freelance blogger. Those outlined above are just a few examples to get you started out in the right direction.

Hopefully, some of the information will come in useful for you! What tips can you add to this blog post in the comments below? I’d love to hear more from you on this topic. 

The post Learn To Manage Your Finances as a Freelance Blogger Like a Boss appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Pinterest Pins Last!

Pinterest pins really last longer than any other social share. Have you ever checked out a referral from your Google analytics to find it was a pin from months ago or even more than a year?

Would that ever happen from a month-old tweet, Instagram post, or even on a Facebook post?

Furthermore, higher-quality pins can continue to gain repins and engagement for a year or more, making this social media platform a wise choice for long-term social engagement.

Now, the average quality pin does have a lifetime of approximately four months.

Furthermore, higher-quality pins can continue to gain repins and engagement for a year or more, making this social media platform a wise choice for long-term social engagement. #Pinterest
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Facebook Posts vs. Pinterest Pins

The average Facebook post lasts up to 3-4 hours. That’s it! Of course, it depends on the algorithm and how many followers or fans you may have at that time. A good rule of thumb is not to post more than a few times a week.

The number one reason people stop following a Facebook page is that they see too many posts from the same page over and over again.

However, you can now use the auto-scheduling right on Facebook with the Creator Studio, The Buffer or, Agorapulse. There are many tools out there for scheduling your social media posts today.

The number one reason people stop following a Facebook page is that they see too many posts from the same page over and over again. #socialmediastrategy
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A Tweets LifeCycle

Tweets last for 18 minutes on average according to data from Moz. No wonder we can tweet a lot more vs. post over at Facebook. Just be careful not to tweet too much within 18 minutes. 1x is enough.

Let’s do the math: 1440 minutes per day / 18 minutes = 80 times per day or 3.3 tweets per hour. (That would not count your conversations via Twitter or Re-Tweets.)

However, you can easily tweet a Pinterest pin to gain a little extra along the way for your pin.

Should all small business owners outsource some services? As a small business owner, you are a busy person, and you likely do not have a large staff to help you out. https://t.co/DdSbKLfGmR via @pinterest

— Lisa Sicard 👩‍💻🙂💭 (@Lisapatb) July 26, 2021

Now the better way is to save the code from Pinterest to tweet or put in a blog post to last longer.

Instagram Posts

If you prefer Instagram, the posts on that social network can last up to 2 days. What you may do, is share your Instagram posts to Pinterest. This can be done with several tools like IFTTT for example.

Of course, you can always pin right from Instagram too. Be sure to include the link back to your Instagram post.

A great way to extend your Instagram reach!

If you prefer Instagram, the posts on that social network can last up to 2 days. What you may do, is share your Instagram posts to Pinterest. #Instagram #Pinterest
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YouTube Videos vs. Pinterest Pins

YouTube is another network where your video content can last longer than most social network posts. You may get up to 3 weeks’ worth of views.

However, if it goes viral and people engage with you on the video that length will go longer.

Snapchat and TikTok

Both Snapchat and TikTok posts start to decay immediately unless they go viral. That is one of the reasons I’m not on them. Remember, we should not be on every social network.

It’s best to pick and choose the ones your audience is on and the ones you can do well with for your business or niche.

Both Snapchat and TikTok posts start to decay immediately unless they go viral. #socialmedia
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The Staying Power of Pinterest Pins and How Pinterest Pins Last!

Pinterest Pins can last for months and even years. You can arrange your pinboards to show off an old pin as your cover to get more repins.

Now, when you pin new pins and new visitors come to your pinboard, they can find old pins quickly and easily.

Not so with any other social network! The only thing that lasts longer than a Pinterest pin is a blog post.

You have more control with Pinterest vs. any other social network site. You get to choose where to place your pins. You cannot do that via Twitter or Facebook. They go into an automatic feed that is based on an ever-changing algorithm.

Search Engine Journal recommends being active on Pinterest to pin anywhere from 5-30 pins per day. I when I pin about 5 per day I get more repins and some are from months or even a year or older.

Again be careful not to pin them all at once. (You can use Tailwind to schedule them or directly schedule pins on Pinterest as you watched in the above video.)

If I see a lot from one user that I don’t like I may unfollow them. And remember the Pinterest app for mobile makes it easy, it’s one of the best social media mobile apps out there!

The only thing that lasts longer than a Pinterest pin is a blog post. #pinterestpins
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Need more reasons to pin?

Are you using Pinterest Pins in your marketing plan?

Have you found your pins from long ago still being re-pinned today? I’d love to hear from you about your Pinterest experiences.

Follow Me on Pinterest

The post Pinterest Pins Last Much Longer Than Tweets or Other Social Media Posts appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Freelancers learn how to make money as they produce services and work for others.

There are many great things about being a freelancer and working for yourself, earning your own money. However, there are some drawbacks to this too.

One huge concern for new freelancers and established freelancers alike is being ripped off and taken advantage of.  

Of course, this should never be an issue, but the disappointing thing is that it can and does happen. To help you avoid getting ripped off as a freelancer, here are some of the best ways to prevent this from happening to you.  

One huge concern for new freelancers and established freelancers alike is being ripped off and taken advantage of. #freelancing
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Make Sure You Have a Contract 

One of the best ways to protect yourself as a freelancer is to make sure that you have a signed contract with your client. That way, you are protected should anything go wrong.

Worried that you cannot print contracts out and get them physically signed? 

A great alternative is to send out an electronic contract and ask them to include an e signature on the relevant bits. Doing it this way makes life much easier.

Freelancing is doing jobs – usually over the internet, but it could be in person –
on a job-by-job basis.

According to Forbes, between 2005 and 2015, 94% of the 10 million jobs
created were either freelance or temporary gigs.

— 💥The Digital Marketing Guy💥 (@kevinsvips) July 21, 2021

Learn How to Trust Your Gut

If you meet a client (in person or virtually) and they don’t feel right in your gut, then there is a good reason for this.

Whilst those instincts and first impressions are not always correct, most of the time, they are.  Actually, they are going to help you to make decisions and protect yourself as much as you can.  

Don’t want to be ripped off as a freelancer? The important thing to remember is that you are in control.

So, do whatever you can to avoid getting ripped off and take care of your money and of your business too.  

The important thing to remember is that you are in control. #freelancing
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Get a Deposit so Freelancers Don’t Get Ripped Off 

Following on from your gut feeling, if you are worried that there is a chance that your new client might not pay you when the time comes, then get a deposit. I do this with new clients I haven’t done work with in the past.

Sure, it might feel uncomfortable asking them for this, but they should know that it is just good business sense.

If they don’t pay their bill for invoicing, you know that you are covered, even if it is not the total amount. 

Sure, it might feel uncomfortable asking them for this, but they should know that it is just good business sense. #freelancing
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Set a Realistic Timescale for Work

Of course, you will want to impress your new client as a freelancer, but the important thing to remember is that you should always be realistic with your timescales.

If it is going to take you three weeks, tell them three weeks. Maybe even four. That way, when it takes less time, you are going to impress them.  

If it takes longer, this can lead to payment disputes. It will never be good news for you or your business. Give yourself that extra time to be sure you can fulfill the workload.

Simply because the work takes time, and it can cause you much more work than you will want to do. 

For example, if my freelancers can’t do the work in time I like it when they give me a warning. The worst thing to happen is to find out the work hasn’t been done.

As a result, I can rearrange my day in advance if I know I have to pick up the slack for a day.  Life happens and we must give some slack but also run a business at the same time.  

The worst thing to happen is to find out the work hasn't been done. #freelancers
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Freelancers Learn How to Earn Quickly

Being ripped off shouldn’t be something you just get used to as a part of running a business. Even if it is more common than you may realize. It is essential to try your best to protect yourself.

However,  make sure that you are not at risk of being ripped off and picking up the pieces afterward. 

Being ripped off shouldn’t be something you just get used to as a part of running a business. #freelancing
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A Bonus Tip for Freelancers from Brandon:

Quick tip for my fellow #freelancers on @LinkedIn

Potential leads searching for you may not be able to view your contact info if they aren’t a connection (depending on your settings).

You can add your email to your banner to help them find your contact info more easily! pic.twitter.com/EbTu0Tsby0

— Brandon C (@TheContentEng) July 20, 2021

Your Turn

Have you ever been ripped off as a freelancer? It happened to me once where a client never paid me, luckily it was not for a lot of money. However, the lesson was worth the money in gold! That’s how freelancers learn the most – by experience!

I’d love to hear your freelancing experiences in the comments below.

The post Freelancers Learn How To Avoid Getting Ripped Off from Clients appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Keyword research is a vital component for every successful SEO strategy. However, keyword research is the most challenging SEO task for content and link building for many digital marketing professionals.

Using the right keywords effectively adds more value to your content and, in turn, helps in generating more organic website traffic. Unfortunately, there are several mistakes digital marketers and SEO professionals carry out during their keyword research.

Appreciating these mistakes is critical for enhancing your digital marketing strategy, which is why you should know and avoid them at all costs.

Using the right keywords effectively adds more value to your content and, in turn, helps in generating more organic website traffic. #SEO #bloggingtips
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Ignoring Searcher Intent

Many people have admitted that ignoring searcher intent is a common mistake SEO professionals make during keyword research.

Ideally, it seems unwise to create content with information your audience may not be interested in as it would not help your ranking in search results. However, this happens because many marketers are focused on generating traffic than they are on creating interactions.

This is where the concept of the searcher’s intent comes into play. The purpose of search intent is to allow users to enter a keyword in your website search bar and quickly find exact answers to what they need.

Search intent could come in various forms; navigational, informational, transactional, and commercial investigation. However, the purpose is simple: to match user searches with the right content.

Many people have admitted that ignoring searcher intent is a common mistake SEO professionals make during keyword research. #SEO
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Not Talking To Real People

Besides your SEO tools and SERPs, your keyword research needs to talk to real people. It is additionally essential to engage people who are in direct contact with your clients. Listen to their suggestions, the problems they face, and their questions.

Doing this helps you create the content and insert the right keywords. You can also use Google’s autocomplete feature to find good phrases and what people are searching for.

This is how to develop new, beneficial content and products and services your customers truly want.

Besides your SEO tools and SERPs, your keyword research needs to talk to real people. #SEO
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Ignoring Long-Tail Keyword Research

Using only short-tail keywords and developing your SEO tactics on unrealistic keywords can prevent your site from appearing in searches- and this is the case with most websites.

For example, it is almost impossible to rank in the top 10 searches for general keywords like computers or IT services if you operate a small online IT store. This is because those general keywords are very competitive, and globally-known brands will likely rank higher in search results.

Instead, consider using unique and creative long-tail keywords to stand out and build a better rank in search results. Fortunately, digital marketing expert Dave Conklin has provided more insights for enhancing your SEO efforts.

Using only short-tail keywords and developing your SEO tactics on unrealistic keywords can prevent your site from appearing in searches. #keywords
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Underestimating Actual SERPs

It is okay if you are spending time using various SEO tools for keyword analysis. It also helps to analyze your actual SERPs too. You can utilize SERP checker tools to analyze your present situation to find out your keywords ranking higher in searches, leading to increased organic traffic.

However, you may likewise find those keywords dropping too. This way, you can determine how to tailor your content with the right keywords.

Use The Best Keyword Research Tools

Learn which tools you can use to avoid keyword research mistakes for your blog or website.

Here are some FREE and paid ones to check out:

• Moz.
• Google Ad Planner and Search Console. These can be combined with your Google Analytics.
• SEM Rush.
• Ahrefs.
• Google Trends (One of my favorites!) This tool also predicts what keywords are rising, looking into the future.
• Ubersuggest by Neil Patel.
• Serpstat.
• Soovle. This one is more of a keyword scraper from various sources.
• Wincher.

Many of the above keyword research tools do come with a FREE trial. It’s best to test out a few to see which you like using the best.

Note which tip is #1 below for a successful SEO strategy 👇

Best 30 tips for a successful #SEO strategy. #digitalmarketingtips pic.twitter.com/YjPdbfNqSq

— Atul Verma (@AtulDizipro) July 17, 2021

Your Turn on Keyword Research Mistakes

Have you made any of these keyword mistakes? And what tools are you using for your keyword research today? I’d love to hear from you on this topic in the comments below.

The post 4 Common Keyword Research Mistakes To Avoid on Your Blog appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Business emails are such a common part of a firm’s infrastructure that they are greatly underestimated in some commercial circles.

Unfortunately, their full potential never seems to be realized today.

However, these systems play a critical role in how well your firm operates. And the rate of growth, and what type of impression your brand leaves on your target audience.

In boosting your efficiency, email marketing is yet another aspect of your company that is worthy of optimization.

By failing to place the right amount of focus on email marketing, you can miss out on a lot of business opportunities.

Maybe you’ve been considering email marketing, but you just need a bit more convincing. If that’s the case, then you’re in the right place.

Here are four high-impact ways email marketing can help you grow your business. Not only that, but thrive in an increasingly challenging marketplace.

By failing to place the right amount of focus on email marketing, you can miss out on a lot of business opportunities. #emailmarketing
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Mass Outreach

Emails can be used for more than simply exchanging work-related documents and chatter with employees. If your business is using email simply for internal communication, you’re missing out on lots of wonderful opportunities. Like connecting with your target marketing and growing it.

Email marketing allows you to connect with your customers and prospective customers en masse through the use of any of the amazing email platforms available today. These platforms can enable you to reach customers and clients through state-of-the-art email automation.

Hence, they can keep the conversations flowing and make life easier for your sales and marketing teams.

Newsletter updates, irresistible coupons, invites to events, free downloadable content, announcements of new product launches – the opportunities are virtually endless.

And, as you build your email lists with targeted prospects, you can reach large groups of dedicated subscribers in an instant. Then, provide them with all the exciting updates involving your business. Email allows you to build a loyal community around your company.

And you can use the metrics available in whatever platform you choose to see what’s working and what’s not. This allows you to make updates to get more targeted with your messaging and offerings as time goes along.

Benefits of Business Emails

Think about the possibilities of the benefits you can gain from leveraging email marketing. The perks are enormous – bringing your events to full capacity, moving your pipeline further along their journey to conversion, keeping your brand top of mind to increase loyalty…it goes on and on.

Mass email services mean your company will become something to talk about, and that means great things for your business. Don’t miss out on the power of these platforms. Here are a few you can consider.

• Mailchimp
• Active Campaign
• Hubspot 
• Constant Contact
• ConvertKit

Each of the above has options to build templates, set automation, build and segment lists, and so much more, with ConvertKit being the most newbie-friendly (plus they offer a free trial).

I suggest doing your research and setting up demos to learn more before determining which email marketing platform is the right fit for you.

Think about the possibilities of the benefits you can gain from leveraging email marketing. #emailmarketing
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Establish Brand Identity for Business Emails

Business emails can be an extension of your firm’s brand identity, and how you present the emails may win more favor with customers and clients. Maintaining brand consistency both visually and in your messaging can give your brand identity a huge boost in recognition, which can lead to increased loyalty.

Templates can be helpful here, providing an aesthetic framework for the message you are trying to convey.

Whether you are engaging in general marketing or kickstarting product launches, different occasions may require a different design twist to fit the moment. Therefore, there is ample room here to get creative and formulate your brand’s visual identity through email.

Some great sites will even provide you with free HTML email templates too, so take advantage of these opportunities. That way you can save money and time, all while creating something that ultimately makes your brand identity distinctive.

Professional Looking Emails

In the end, your emails need to look professional and sophisticated. If you can land that first impression, recipients may be more likely to engage with the content of your emails.

Whether you work with a designer in-house or you leverage the templates available through whichever email platform you choose, be sure to follow your brand’s style guide and incorporate elements of your brand into your online presence.

Therefore, including the messaging and visual components, so your brand is easily recognizable in every message your send.

Damage Control

If a calamity occurs that impacts operations or could impact your clients or prospects in some way, email can cast a wide net to ensure all parties are suitably informed of the incident and they have an understanding of how the issue will affect them as well as any planned path forward to fix things.

For example, companies frequently court controversy with the ads they run, misfiring on their message or even offending certain circles.

This can lead to a great deal of controversy, and in these situations, it’s critical that you have an outlet to reach out to your audience and assure them everything is going to be fine.

Hopefully, you’ll never find yourself in a similar position, but if you do ruffle some feathers with a poorly thought-out campaign, emails can be a great way to try and smooth things over at the earliest opportunity.

Be sure to craft a message that includes an apology along with how you are focused on rectifying the situation.

This can lead to a great deal of controversy, and in these situations, you must have an outlet to reach out to your audience and assure them everything is going to be fine. #emailmarketing
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Business Emails to the Rescue

Or, in another circumstance, perhaps a natural disaster impacted the shipping of your products. Rather than simply leaving your customers hanging wondering where their purchases are, you can send a detailed email explaining the situation.

You can even add a coupon or another perk in your email to help ease the mood.

Ensuring that your customers or prospects are in the loop when something goes wrong is critically important to your business.

While some will likely be upset about the situation, a little reassurance that things will be ok can go a long way. Email is the perfect platform to ensure your messages reach the right people.

Email addresses are easy to obtain, while phone numbers are a lot more difficult to get. And can you imagine if you had to call every customer on your list? Emails make it so much easier to get the message out.

Build your lists and collect customer email addresses so you’re ready to roll in case chaos hits.

Email is the perfect platform to ensure your messages reach the right people. #marketingtips
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Keeping Records for Business Emails

Sometimes issues will occur, whether internally or externally, that need to be resolved. Perhaps a customer dispute, or even an issue with an employee. When this happens, email can be a great way for you to track the progress of the issue and keep records of any related conversations.

The email could play a crucial role in this. With email, there will always be a record of the exchange. On the other side, in-person exchanges or over-the-phone exchanges often aren’t recorded, so there’s no trail of the conversation to refer back to later if necessary.

The complainant can then screenshot the offending conversation and reference it in full or in part to ensure there is an accurate resolution for the situation.

Email records have other uses too. For example, they can:

• Log feedback – Customer feedback can be super effective in helping you grow your business. You can learn so much from what your customers have to say about their experience. Emails are a great way to request insights from your customers. You can then save them so you can refer back to the comments and make adjustments to improve the customer experience.
• Expose scam addresses – Unfortunately, scam emails can damage your firm exponentially, so attentiveness here is key. If you have correctly flagged a scam emailer, you can screenshot your experience with them. Then, share it with the company and/or customers so you can limit the negative impact. Your colleagues and your customers can then block the address and remain alert for further deception. 
• Reduce instances of miscommunication – Nothing in an email needs to get lost in folders filled with paperwork, or misremembered, misquoted, or otherwise confused. Over time, all these factors can save a company from a lot of unnecessary headaches. 

Of course, businesses keep records for a host of other things, such as employee data, audit results, and a plethora of other things. 

In many ways, they can be a useful research tool that may quickly bring clarity to a firm.

In many ways, they can be a useful research tool that may quickly bring clarity to a firm. #emails
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Wrapping it Up

So, hopefully after reading through this article, you grasp the full power of email marketing. And learn how emails can help your business grow.

An email has proven to have staying power that some other forms of communication lack. With so many amazing platforms available for your company to choose from, and advances in automation technology and AI, you’re foolish to ignore the value email can add to your business.

However, as you bring email into your marketing and sales operations, be sure to maintain brand consistency. Email is just another channel in your communication flow. They include anything from your website and social media to advertising and everything in between.

So, be sure to treat it as a part of your larger strategy and not a separate thing that operates on its own.

Have you seen success with your email marketing? If so, share your stories with us in the comments!

The post Why Business Emails Are More Important Than You Think appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

If you are a blogger you know that in order to gain traction you need to optimize your brand’s visibility. Increasing brand awareness is integral to continued blogging success. Part of that awareness comes in the form of search engine results.

SEO or search engine optimization is a critical buzzword in terms of getting noticed. It involves bringing more traffic from a search engine query directly to your website.

The intent is to make your website a top-of-the-page result for anyone searching – instead of burying your site on page 2 of the search results, or beyond.

Increasing brand awareness is integral to continued blogging success. Part of that awareness comes in the form of search engine results. #bloggingtips
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Use an SEO Person or Company

A high-quality SEO Company provides SEO services to help boost your company’s chances of getting noticed online. An SEO Company will provide the following services to increase your visibility.

• They will evaluate your competition to determine where they are successful in practice and hone in on those aspects that your business can improve on. Areas, where competitors are lacking in terms of optimization, will be noted.  Hence, you can jump in and corner those opportunities with your keywords to achieve a higher ranking.

• Timely keywords are optimized and used by those making a query in the search engines.

• They will designate specific locations on your website where keywords will be searchable. This will optimize your site so that it ranks higher on a search engine query, specifically on Google.

SEO Services for Your Blog

Working with a digital marketing agency that provides SEO Services is a worthy investment. After your content marketing strategies are in place, it will be time to work on SEO. It does not happen overnight or even in one month.

• They will work on synthesizing data points to hone in on high-performing keywords.

• If you do not already have a website or if you are looking to upgrade your current site, these fall under the umbrella of SEO Services. Keywords are seamlessly placed in strategic locations throughout the website.

• They will monitor metrics to determine whether the keywords are producing results. Then, specific actions will modify optimization as needed.

Enhance Your Blog or Website with SEO in Mind

Google provides a guidebook on how to make a more rank-enhanced website. While you can take on this task yourself, it is unlikely that you have time to do so. After all, you are running your business, creating your product, or providing a unique service.

You are doing all of this while courting investors, maintaining employee positivity and productivity, and keeping your customers happy. It will be helpful to review Google’s guidebook so that you have a greater understanding of what an SEO Agency provides.

Even if you have neither the time nor the expertise to handle the SEO tasks.

Contact the best professional Digital Marketing Agency to get the results you want and the traffic you need. Ensure you engage with the experts who will help you achieve search engine optimization for a high rate of return every time.

It will be helpful to review Google’s guidebook so that you have a greater understanding of what an SEO Agency provides. #SEO
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Work with Your SEO Team

Once you do hire someone to help you with SEO for your blog, be sure to work with them! If you are going to make changes in your products or services you should let them know. They can provide you with keyword research and much more.

Analyze the different things you are doing to increase the traffic of your blog. When they are sudden drops or increases in traffic have them tell you why.

Learn from both these changes in your blog’s SEO.

Once you do hire someone to help you with SEO for your blog, be sure to work with them! #bloggingtips
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SEO for Your Blog

How are you using SEO for your blog today to grow its reach? I’d love to know more in the comments below!

The post Use SEO To Get Your Blog Noticed Among the Millions appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Looking for clever ways to reduce your marketing costs?

To get the most out of your marketing budget, the key isn’t to try and cut costs but to improve your overall campaign. You need to monitor the performance of each keyword, ad, blog post, and more. This way you can figure out how to organize your budget.

There are also several cost-effective marketing strategies you can try and free tools you can take advantage of. You can create compelling content yourself such as video or podcasts, for example, without breaking the bank.

You can then use this to really optimize your website, which is also fundamental to your success. Here are fifteen clever ways to reduce your marketing costs.

Make the Most of Free Tools to Reduce Your Marketing Costs

There are plenty of free tools available to small businesses and freelancers. You don’t need to be a professional web designer or expert in coding to build an amazing website, for example. You could take advantage of a free landing page builder and multiple platforms that make it easy to set up your site.

There are also plenty of photo and video editing tools, logo design software, and ad testing options available. Perform a quick Google search before investing in expensive software.

There are also plenty of photo and video editing tools, logo design software, and ad testing options available. #digitalmarketing
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Review Your Overall Budget 

In order to find your winning marketing strategy, you need to review your overall budget. Decide how much you want to dedicate to marketing and stick to this. This way you won’t be tempted to overspend and you can make the right plan accordingly.

If you’ve decided to reduce your marketing budget you need to assess the details of your campaigns to find out in which areas you can cut costs according to performance.

Carry Out Data-driven Research

One of the best ways to analyze your marketing campaigns is to carry out data-driven research. You can use one of the best marketing analytics tools to help you. Ideally, you should be checking recent data to keep up with the latest trends in customer behaviors.

You can then reassign your marketing budget in order to align with these. This will help you find ways to reduce costs and invest in the right areas.

Get Feedback From Your Customers

Another way to evaluate your marketing strategies is by collecting customer feedback. You can do this using various free online survey makers. It’s important to speak to your customers personally as they will give you a fresh perspective.

You can get valuable insights by putting in the effort to learn more about their needs. This will also help you to build customer loyalty as well, so it’s always a good idea to focus on after-sale support and customer satisfaction. 

Optimize Your Website to Reduce Your Marketing Costs

Your website is the first place potential customers will go to find out more about your products and services, but the key is getting them to stay there. There’s no point in spending lots on elaborate marketing campaigns if users get lost on your website and leave.

In fact, Google’s new algorithm is highly focused on-page or user experience. This means it’s worth spending time to ensure your site is easy to navigate, full of engaging content, and glitch-free.

Engagement is also a big factor and one of the metrics search engines use to rank your site. Optimizing your website is a cost-effective solution that should be prioritized.

Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Social media is a great tool as you can network and promote your brand for free. Keep your accounts updated regularly with fresh and compelling content. You can also advertise on social media as FREE is not totally free anymore.

You have to spend a lot of time on social to make it work. Remember, time=money!

Social advertising can be a cost-effective marketing strategy if you set the right budget. Here’s how to set a smart social advertising budget.

Keep your accounts updated regularly with fresh and compelling content. #socialmediatips
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Consider Collaborative Marketing

Another way to make the most of social media is to network with other businesses. You can then consider working together on a collaborative marketing campaign.

One of the benefits of collaborative marketing is that it will help you to save money. It’s also good for brand recognition. You could work with a similar business or one that matches your brand in some way to create a virtual event, for instance.

This won’t have to break the bank and you can share resources. The idea of collaborative marketing is that both parties will benefit, so it’s a win-win situation.

Repurpose Your Content

You could also repurpose your best content on social media or your website. Perform analytics to find out which content is the most successful so you can get the most out of your greatest hits. Always have a goal in mind when you’re figuring out which content to repurpose.

This could be getting links back to your website, for example. In this case, you could post a clip of video content you have on Instagram to draw traffic to your site. Repurposing content also helps to boost its SEO.

Create More Videos and Podcasts to Reduce Your Marketing Costs

Creating video and podcasts is inexpensive and you can do both by just using your smartphone. These types of content are just as effective as they are cheap to make. There are several reasons why video content is important, for example.

It’s very engaging and allows you to connect with viewers. Video is very versatile. You could showcase your talents with behind-the-scenes, educate viewers with a how-to, or even tell your brand’s story or document humanitarian work.

Be sure to use SEO for your videos so they can be found too.

Video is very versatile. You could showcase your talents with behind-the-scenes, educate viewers with a how-to, or even tell your brand’s story or document humanitarian work. #video
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Run an Email Marketing Campaign

Another cost-effective marketing strategy is email marketing. You can DIY this yourself and it can be very effective. The key is to have a subject line that will entice the recipient to open and read the email.

You can then use the body of the email for promotions, discounts, and offers. Email marketing is also good for referrals.

You could offer an incentive such as a voucher to repeat customers in exchange for recommending your brand. Here are some more email marketing tips.

Boost Brand Consistency to Reduce Your Marketing Costs

If you want to get the most out of your marketing budget, brand consistency is paramount. This means mirroring your branding, tone of voice, and message across all marketing channels. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, the in-store marketing should also match.

You can advertise the same offers in-store as you have on your website, for instance.

Here are a few more tips to boost brand consistency. People will be put off if a brand isn’t consistent in its marketing and this could have a negative effect on your reputation.

Hence, you need to use your marketing budget to reinforce brand awareness as much as possible.

If you want to get the most out of your marketing budget, brand consistency is paramount. #marketingtips
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Add a Personal Appeal

If you do carry out an email marketing campaign or another strategy to generate repeat business you need to make this personal.

In order to appeal to today’s consumers, personalization is key. You should focus on targeting profitable customers with the products and offers that appeal to them according to their preferences.

You could offer a limited offer to an existing customer, for example, based on their previous purchases. Always make an effort to address your customers by name and to make them feel valued.

Target Your Ads More Specifically

You can also refine your targeting in advertising to avoid wasting money on the wrong ads. One effective tool you can use is Facebook Ads, for example. Although you will need to pay a small fee, you can target your ads down to the last detail to ensure they go out to the right people.

This includes demographics, age, lifestyle, interests, location, and preferences. Here is a complete guide to Facebook advertising with more information.

Tighten your focus and find out the top ads that have worked for you recently. This will help you make better use of your advertising budget.

Tighten your focus and find out the top ads that have worked for you recently. #socialmediaads
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Keep it Fresh and Exciting!

When it comes to marketing you will always need fresh content to keep it exciting. Think of innovative and creative ways to promote your business and keep your customers on their toes. With the right strategy, this doesn’t necessarily need to cost a lot of money.

Some of the best marketing content could be things like a creative video or eye-catching offers and newsworthy blog posts on your social media account. Follow consumer trends and update your marketing campaigns according to common behaviors.

Shopping ads on social media like Instagram are increasingly popular, for example. Here are a few of the best marketing strategies in 2021 to give you inspiration.

Reevaluate Your Budget to Reduce Your Marketing Costs

If you really want to keep your marketing costs at a minimum it’s essential to continually reevaluate your budget. There are plenty of free budget planner templates available online to help you do this. The market is ever-changing and new trends are emerging all the time.

You need to stay ahead of the game to gain a competitive edge.

Monitor the performance of all marketing efforts and channels and this way you can find out which ones are successful and which are perhaps losing you money. You’ll then be able to ensure you get the most out of your marketing budget in the future.

Have you reevaluated your marketing budget for your blog or business? I’d love to know more in the comments about how you are reducing your marketing costs.

Monitor the performance of all marketing efforts and channels and this way you can find out which ones are successful and which are perhaps losing you money. #marketing
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The post 15 Clever Ways to Reduce Your Marketing Costs for Your Blog or Biz appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Today, the business industry is hyper-competitive, and with the proliferation of the internet and globalization, many small businesses find themselves struggling to compete.

Gaining a competitive advantage in business is more than setting the correct prices; it’s creating strategies that differentiate you from everyone else. It’s why consumers should choose you over other companies in the same industry.

Below are ways you can make a compelling value proposition and gain an edge over business rivals.

Create a Solid Online Presence to Gain an Edge Over Business Rivals

Everything and everyone is interconnected; having a unique digital presence is no longer an option for businesses. With the proliferation of the internet and social platforms, you can do more than build a website or generate ads.

It’s an opportunity to engage with the target audience through unique content.

Digital marketing is more advantageous than traditional marketing; it’s more affordable, and the results are long-lasting. Creating digital footprints enables your business to reach a broad audience; more so, you can use social media to generate unique ideas and thoughts that make you stand out.

It's an opportunity to engage with the target audience through unique content. #businesstips
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Leverage New Technology

Technology is here to make things easy for everyone, including your business and consumers. Leveraging technology like click4assistance.co.uk that many companies haven’t adopted makes you stand out, especially when running an online business.

It gives consumers a better reason to shop or get services from you rather than your business rivals.

Know Your Audience

Consumers are different, and not everyone who buys from you makes them an ideal customer. At the same time, your products/ services can’t work for everyone; if you target a broad audience, you end up converting no one.

Analyze the market to determine your audience and segment them to create and market products effectively. This way, you can find ways to reach the right people and put your efforts in the right direction.

When you’re looking to gain a competitive edge, look for areas where your audience is under-serviced. While it’s easier to look for niches where you can get a broad target audience, you can establish brand recognition in an untapped market where there’s less competition.

Know Your Competition to Gain an Edge Over Business Rivals

You can only gain a competitive advantage over your competition when you know who they are and the strategies they use. Identify their strengths, weaknesses, and what they offer customers.

This way, you can establish areas for competition to differentiate yourself from them. Also, knowing your competition keeps you on your toes; when there are changes in the market, be prompt about navigating them.

You also become fast about identifying niches in the market and satisfying unmet needs.

Knowing your competition keeps you on your toes; when there are changes in the market, be prompt about navigating them.
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Speak About Your Business

Word of mouth is a great marketing tool, especially when it comes from the business owner. Once you identify your target audience, be their go-to reference. As you create engaging and informative content, also participate in events where your target audience is likely to be present.

Let yourself be heard by speaking positively and highly about your business and the problems it’s solving; chances are your consumers will believe in you too. As you talk about your business, encourage loyal customers and employees to do the same.

Establish Your USP to Gain an Edge Over Business Rivals

Customers shouldn’t have to ask you what differentiates you from your rivals when you have a solid and unique selling proposition.

While many businesses often use propositions like brand recognition, pricing, quality, and service levels, there’s more to creating a unique statement that gives you a competitive advantage.

Think about what you have unique and special to other businesses to create a USP that immediately attracts customers.

Leverage Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is essential in differentiating you from your business rivals. Constructive input from consumers enables you to make the necessary changes and provide a better experience. Ask customers to leave feedback on your website comment section and rate their experience.

They can also leave reviews that enable prospective customers to know what to expect from you.

Creating a platform where consumers can leave feedback makes it possible for you to implement new processes and establishes trust and loyalty as they feel wanted and valued.

Constructive input from consumers enables you to make the necessary changes and provide a better experience. #InspireToThrive
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Incorporate Visuals/UX/ Designs

Visuals give your business positive attention; they back up your content and make you look more attractive. Every company is constantly working towards building an easy UX for their customers; ensure you do the same and evolve your UX constantly.

Create a killer logo, social media handles, and websites that elevate your brand. Use attractive themes and brand colors to establish yourself.

Create a Positive Working Culture

Your employees play a significant role in making your business stand out among your rivals. Many consumers also like being associated with companies that treat their workers well.

Thus creating positive working culture results in a win-win cycle that leads to development and positive growth for your business.

When you treat your workers right, you also get to attract the best talent to provide better customer service to enhance their experience.

Be Innovative to Gain an Edge Over Business Rivals

The business environment keeps changing, and so should you. Find new methods of running your business through experiments and innovations to gain an edge over other companies.

Don’t limit your innovation to technology; experiment with communication methods like tone and messaging and make simple changes like brand colors. 

Otherwise, you and your business will get stuck in a rut and not grow.

Leverage Your Content

Your business cannot survive in a competitive industry without generating content. However, you need to use content that consumers will want to engage with and relate to for you to gain an edge over your business rivals.

Share your brand story, mission, and vision with your audience, and keep educating them about your products/services through consistent posts.

Remember that you also need powerful tools to distribute your content effectively, for example, through email marketing.

Wrapping It Up on How to Gain an Edge Over Business Rivals

Although markets are competitive, having a competitive edge over business rivals provides you with more opportunities to grow and develop.

You can sustain your business with a stronger position if you improve your reliability with new technology, content, and information from customer feedback.

Additionally, create a solid online presence, dive into under-serviced niches, know your competition, and create a compelling USP that differentiates you from everyone else.

How are you gaining an edge over the competition today? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

The post 11 Smart Ways to Gain an Edge Over Business Rivals appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Would you love a winning marketing strategy for your business?

Perfecting your offer’s product or services is only half of the struggle when running a successful business. To ensure that you can continue to operate and grow, you need to make sure that you are selling a lot.

The best way to attract new customers to your brand is with a marketing strategy.

As online shopping is increasingly becoming a consumer preference, a marketing strategy is more important than ever. A successful marketing strategy is what enables small companies to compete with household names.

A winning marketing strategy is essential for any business that is operating. But, this does not mean that it cannot act like any other investment and offer businesses a high return.

Running a successful marketing campaign means having a strategy that works for you. A strategy that will continue to offer your business a high return in various ways.

What makes a marketing strategy work for you can be complex, as successful marketing strategies will use a range of different techniques. However, some universal practices and approaches will help any business create a winning marketing strategy.

Get to Know Your Ideal Target Audience

No matter your business’s size and scale or industry, the first step to creating a successful marketing campaign. It begins with a clear understanding of who your target market is.

A comprehensive understanding of your target market should underpin every single decision you make in your upcoming marketing strategy.

Any business that has been operating for even a short period will likely already have a defined target audience in place. However, getting to know your chosen target audience a little bit better is useful before moving forward.

Firstly, you should take a look at any customer data available to find out more about your existing customers. It is useful to try to determine who your most valuable customers are.

Next, you should at customer demographics to make sure that your target audience is aligned with your most valuable existing customers.

If your target audience and most valuable customer demographic are not aligned, you might want to reconsider your target audience.

Once you have established that your target audience is in line with your most valuable existing customer demographic, your next mission is to understand your target audience. A useful exercise during this process is to create a customer persona.

A customer persona is a fictional individual who embodies the primary characteristics of your target audience. Creating a detailed customer persona will help you to get to know your target audience on a deeper level.

If your target audience and most valuable customer demographic are not aligned, you might want to reconsider your target audience. #winningmarketingstrategy
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Define Your Brand Identity

Once you have gained a deep understanding of your target customer, you can begin to work on your brand identity. The term brand identity refers to the use of visual marketing efforts such as color, design, and a logo to create a clear identity for a brand in a customer’s mind.

A successful and carefully curated brand image can be hugely valuable to any company. A successful brand image can help a business to form deeper and more meaningful, long-lasting relationships with customers.

This is because your brand identity might embody what a customer aspires to be or represent how customers see themselves. Your brand identity can help you to form more meaningful relationships with customers that continue for years to come.

Not only will a strong brand identity enable you to create more meaningful and long-lasting relationships with customers, but it will also help you to define your market share.

In addition, a successful brand identity will help you to define your brand as distinct from the competition. This can help you to save money on future marketing efforts and win even more customers.

You must begin to define your brand identity as soon as you have gained a clear understanding of who your target audience is.

As Anthem Branding explains, branding sits at the core of your business message and communication funnels. This means that your brand identity will have an impact on almost all of your marketing choices.

Maintain Consistency as Part of a Winning Marketing Strategy

Apple is one of the most notable examples of a successful implementation of brand identity. There many are stories that demonstrate just how much Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, valued brand identity.

Apparently, Steve Jobs was so concerned about brand identity that he obsesses over the smallest details. Like the shade of grey used in the Apple store bathroom signs.

Of course, most businesses will not need to go this in-depth, but it is vital that your marketing is consistent with your brand identity.

You should make sure that every decision you make, no matter how small or trivial it might seem, keeps your brand identity. Maintaining Consistency will help to assure that your brand identity is as clear as possible.

This means that in marketing efforts both online and in-person, you should stay fully committed to your brand identity at all times.

Maintaining Consistency will help to assure that your brand identity is as clear and meaningful as possible. #branding
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Work on Your Website

Before implementing any digital marketing techniques, you first need to conduct a thorough review of your website design. Everything from your loading speeds to your aesthetic design can impact and limit the success of your digital marketing strategy.

When you are reviewing your business website, there are several focuses to keep in mind:

• Review loading speeds

Studies have found that the majority of internet users click off a site that takes more than three seconds to load.

• Upgrade your home page

First impressions mean everything in the business world, make sure that your homepage expresses your brand identity to start building a relationship with your target market.

• Use responsive website design

Over 50% of internet traffic is now coming from mobile devices. Make sure that you can offer the highest user experience to all traffic by using responsive website design.

• Optimize of SEO

To obtain success from your SEO campaign, you need to make sure that your website is optimized for SEO.

• Include calls to action

Make sure that all visitors follow your conversion funnel by including calls to action.

• Use intuitive website design

If a user finds your website too difficult to navigate, then they will simply click off. This will hurt both your potential sales and search engine ranking. Make sure that you are not inadvertently losing customers by updating your website design and navigation.

Add Value for a Winning Marketing Strategy

When you are looking to make your marketing efforts work for you you must focus on adding value for your customers. It is all too easy for businesses to become distracted by paid forms of advertising, such as influencer marketing and pay-per-click ads. This focus on paid advertising can quickly eat up all of your valuable budgets.

Not only does depending too much on paid forms of advertising limit your marketing potential by decreasing your budget, but it will also impact customer perceptions. Consumers have become increasingly aware of digital marketing methods used by companies.

While some forms of digital marketing might have been successful as little as a year ago, they will now offer little return, or actually end up hurting your brand image. For example, studies have found that customers view businesses that use paid search advertisements as less trustworthy and credible than those who gain organic results.

Instead of focusing your resources on paid marketing practices, you should concentrate on offering value to your customers. You have to give more time or money to add this value so plan accordingly.

A strategy that is focused on offering value to the customers can utilize many different practices. For example, creating high-quality written content, an active social media presence, with high-quality customer service.

Just like understanding your target audience and brand identity, offering value to your customers should be a principle for every digital marketing campaign.

Keeping all of these values in mind will help you to create successful and meaningful marketing campaigns that work for you.

Choosing the Right Practices

Knowing your target audience and having a clearly defined brand identity should be maintained. However, when it comes to choosing the right marketing practices, it is also important that you create a reviewing process.

This means that you should be able to back up all of your choices for marketing practices in measurable data.

A reviewing process is so important because the choice of marketing practices can be overwhelming. To ensure that your marketing efforts are continuing to offer a return, make sure that you are experiencing the results.

Keep in mind, what worked in the past may not work in the future!

When it comes to choosing the right marketing practices, it is also important that you create a comprehensive reviewing process. #marketing
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Your Turn on a Winning Marketing Strategy

While maintaining Consistency, offering value, and having a clear brand image will help you to gain more long-term success. However, to truly be sure of your success level, you need to measure success.

Therefore, make sure you review all campaigns and practices to be assured that your marketing efforts are working for you.

What else are you doing for your marketing strategy to grow your blog or business? I’d love to know more in the comments below.

The post How to Let Your Winning Marketing Strategy Work for You appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Is an online presence essential to growing your business?

Businesses that thrive over the years have a significant success story. Engagement is one of the most important factors that connect businesses with relevant consumers. 

As such, having an online strategy for your online endeavors would grow your business. The strategy would also maximize brand awareness around you.

A significant digital presence is what you need. It creates ground to link with your customers and be on the edge of your competitors.

Essentially, the approach goes beyond you and your website. It covers other factors that you can’t control, such as consumer chats and reviews on your Twitter handle and other social media pages.

You can bolster all areas that make your business profitable, and establishing yourself online would ensure it happens to maximum capacity. Following the above insight, here is why to set your right foot forward:

A significant digital presence is what you need. It creates ground to link with your customers and be on the edge of your competitors. #onlinepresence
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“Nowadays Everything Is Online,” Say, Customers

Your customers expect to see you online. Many people are up to date with the diversified technology, which gives them access to products and services efficiently and with less hassle. 

Look at this scenario: an individual needs something, and they have to decide whether to go to a random store or order the goods online and sit back. Which one sounds more convenient?

People would also want to google about a product or service online to fetch more information before purchasing anything. 

If you are not helpful with marketing strategies for online and offline presence, you’ll most likely expect or wish for more cash inflow but have less. 

People would also want to google about a product or service online to fetch more information before purchasing anything. #digitalmarketing
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Go Online To Build Your Brand’s Online Presence

No one wants to gamble with their time or money at someone else’s expense. Customers need to see everything that promotes your business as a legit one. When the consumer experience of buying from you is pleasant, you become trustworthy; hence your brand grows.

Be transparent enough for people to look at your online page any time, check consumer reviews, and connect with your circle of buyers.

Therefore, when you read reviews from your clients be sure to share them online to boost your credibility!

Increase Your Chances of Meaningful Marketing

A website has all the tools a business owner requires to operate everything modernly. Therefore, keep things customized, updated, and running to allow customers to be at per with changes in your products and services or a new product in your market network. 

Think of it as having a dynamic brochure that you can constantly change to showcase what your audience wants to see. If you aren’t sure where to begin, you can always look at Ad-on web hosting services for more insight.

Even if you didn’t have an online presence before 2020, I’m willing to bet that you have one now.

Read more 👉 https://t.co/xorVi4JWjZ#OnlineReputation #DigitalMarketing #ReputationManagement #OnlinePresence pic.twitter.com/RnYxJpilqx

— Claire Bahn (@ClaireBahn) July 7, 2021

Make Your Products and Services Accessible

Websites operate 24/7, unlike walk-in businesses that close at the end of the day. People visit online portals at any time to get insight into various products and services.

When you are part of the online network marketing, you can expect individuals to convert with your company when they love what you have to offer. 

Of course, if you are an e-commerce website only be sure to provide enough information for people to understand what your products offer or what pain points they can relieve.

People visit online portals at any time to get insight into various products and services. #onlinepresence
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Expand Your Consumer Network for Your Online Presence

Online businesses are global because the internet has zero limits. An effective establishment would make it easy for people to find you, both locally and globally. 

Build a practical Search Engine Optimization approach to draw interests from all around and check out ways to grow your online presence.

If you want to grow locally you could focus your SEO efforts on local search. For example, using Google My Business would help you grow your online presence locally in your immediate area.

What’s Next to Build Your Online Presence?

Now that you know the goodies that come with a significant digital presence, it’s time to focus on the actualization. Go beyond ambient aesthetics and ensure that the content therein is valuable.

Simply put, make everything relevant to attract your targeted traffic. In the end, you will appreciate extensive growth, credibility, and a reputable business. 

How are you building your online presence? I’d love to know more about it in the comments below.

The post Essential Tips To Build an Online Presence to Grow Your Business appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

There have been so many changes to online marketing in the last couple of years that it is hard to keep up with them. Google is issuing updates at an unprecedented rate that changes the landscape dramatically.

Which has people asking if they can still make a successful affiliate marketing website lately. The reason for the question is that Google’s recent update seems to have targeted affiliate sites that promote products from e-commerce sites.

The truth is that if you can wade through the hype, myth, and misinformation you can actually build an affiliate website and be successful. But because the landscape has changed, it is not as easy as it once was and the tips and tricks from the last few years are no longer relevant.

In this article, we will go over what it takes now to make sure you can actually make money with an affiliate marketing website.

It is not as easy as it once was and the tips and tricks from the last few years are no longer relevant. #affiliatemarketing
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Focus on User Experience

Everything Google does is to make sure that the user gets the information that they are looking for. If the user is happy, then Google makes more money. It’s as simple as that. This means that you have to satisfy the user first and Google will reward you for your efforts.

It used to be easy to manipulate Google and rank even without giving a thought to the visitor to your site. Getting traffic was far easier than it is now. If you keyword-stuffed your articles and just filled the meta description with lots of related keywords you could generally rank your article on the first page.

Now, it is far more difficult to rank if you are not taking care of the user experience. To understand how important this is to Google, look no further than the rollout of the new metric called Core Web Vitals.

This metric is used to gauge the user experience based on things like how long the site takes to load and if you can click links without them moving.

Website Pages of an Affiliate Marketing Site

One thing that drives people crazy and makes them want to leave your site is if the page shifts as you are going to click a link and click the wrong one as a result.

These are things that Google wants to track so if your site is slow and the page shifts then this is going to cause problems when ranking a post.

Besides the Core Web Vitals, you should also think about how easy it is for a visitor to navigate the site. They should be able to get the information they are looking for quickly and in a click or two.

Besides the Core Web Vitals, you should also think about how easy it is for a visitor to navigate the site. #affiliatemarketing
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Make it Whitehat for an Affiliate Marketing Site

If you’re unfamiliar with some of the common terms around affiliate marketing, there are three basic models to follow. You can go whitehat which is doing everything above board. You don’t take any shortcuts or try to game the Google algorithm.

Greyhat is something that falls into a sort of grey area, hence the name. Nothing is specifically against the TOS when it comes to Google so lots of liberties are taken. This involves things like paying for backlinks or paying for guest posts on high authority sites with a link back to your homepage.

Then there is blackhat which is doing things specifically against the TOS of Google or even some of the affiliate programs you may be in. This ranges from buying up a PBN or personal blog network to direct backlinks or traffic back to your website among many other tactics.

However, this is the riskiest way to go since Google is always refining its AI so it can sniff out the worst offenders. Usually, it is a matter of time before the site gets penalized or even deindexed.

Going whitehat is the way to make this work for the long term and assure that you can actually make a business out of this. Just focus on content marketing and generating traffic and conversions the natural way and you can still make money off of affiliate marketing.

The Money Is In the List

The biggest key to making money with an affiliate website these days is the same as it always was. You need to build a good-sized email list. Since Google can decide to do away with any affiliate sites whenever they please, having an email list under your control means it won’t matter.

Every site should provide enough value that people are willing to hand over their email addresses to receive more information and offers.

When you write a product review or there is a sale happening then you can send the people in your list to the post instead of hoping that Google will send traffic to the page.

These people are also very motivated to spend money or they wouldn’t be on your list so the conversion rate can be quite high.

Every site should provide enough value that people are willing to hand over their email addresses to receive more information and offers. #marketing
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Affiliate Income vs Ads for an Affiliate Marketing Site

Right now, ad revenue is starting to keep pace with what you could make with affiliate commissions. Instead of focusing on products, you can start building content around helpful information.

In this way, you can target lower competition keywords that will rank easier without needing to buy backlinks. Building up traffic will usually be faster and the right niche can see a very good RPM from ads.

Then, if you sprinkle some affiliate links in where they make sense you can pad your earnings that way.

This may be the best way forward since Google doesn’t have a problem with sites that run ads. As long as the ads don’t negatively impact the Core Web Vitals, your site should be able to run on autopilot and make money.

Can You Promote Your Affiliate Marketing Site on Social Media?

If you do be sure to share your blog posts with the affiliate links in them vs. just sharing the affiliate links themselves.  Now, of course, Twitter does not have a policy against affiliate links but who will click on them is the question!

People love to read the information before making any purchases. So if you promote affiliates on social media be sure to provide information in your posts. Why would someone need the product? What pain points does a product solve?

Those are the things to consider before trying to sell any affiliate products or services.

So if you promote affiliates on social media be sure to provide information in your posts. #affiliatemarketing
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Conclusion of Affiliate Marketing Sites

As you can see, you should stop listening to people who are saying that affiliate marketing is dead. It is alive and well as long as you adapt to the new reality instead of trying what used to work in the past.

There is still plenty of money to be made out there you just have to work harder to get it.

Do you have an affiliate marketing site? I’d love to know more about it in the comments below.

The post Is An Affiliate Marketing Site Still Profitable to Start In 2021? appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Every single business needs to make sure that they are catering to their customers at every turn, but when was the last time you considered translating your website for your customers’ comfort?

Yep, you’re not alone in not thinking about it. When it comes to being online with your business, you have to be as inclusive as possible: it’s why you have a sitemap to help your customers to navigate!

The internet is a global place to be, it’s not just for the country in which you’re living. When you go online, you need to know that you’re appealing to more than just the locals so that you can extend your reach.

Whether you do this with Spanish answering services or you enable your website to be translated into Japanese, you need to ensure you’re appealing to the right nations!

If your product is global, why wouldn’t you get your website translated to reflect that?

Here’s how translation can help your business to thrive.

1. Increasing Your Customer Numbers by Translating Your Website

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more you appeal to your customers, the more customers you will have.

If you have the chance to go international with your services, you need others around the world to understand what you are trying to offer them. (Of course, when you do go international you will have to be aware of tax laws, country customs, and more.)

Ensuring that you are doing this in their language is vital if you want to capture their attention.

2. Your Customers Want to Communicate with You!

If customers can communicate in their own language with you, they would be more inclined to pay for your service or product.

If they understand you, you can build better trust, and sales growth will follow as a result. This is especially true today as people don’t want to wait around for answers or information.

3. Staying Ahead of the Competition

You want to win as a business, and rightly so. The best way that you can do that is in ensuring that you are ahead of the competition with your online translation.

If your competitors are doing it, why wouldn’t you follow suit? It’s very wise to keep a track of your competition, and you can translate your online business into more languages as a result.

You don’t just have to stick to one language!

You can translate your online business into more languages as a result. #InspireToThrive
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4. Finding Yourself Online

The search engine results pages are important. Therefore, if you want to rank highly, you need to offer more on your website.

Business website translation is going to allow you a bigger choice of SEO keywords, which will make a difference as to whether people can find you online or not.

5. Better Advertising Opportunities with Translating Your Website

If you plan to translate your pages into other languages, you need to think about using a wider range of websites for advertising. You can go global with your advertising efforts.

Hence, this brings you more publicity. Ads also bring more clicks through your website by people interested in your brand.

Finally, being able to go local with your brand anywhere in the world is going to help your business to grow.

You can better appeal to customers and you can offer a wider range of services and products – and that’s vital. It will help your business to grow.

You can go global with your advertising efforts. #websitetranslation
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Your Take on Translating Your Website

Have you translated your website into other languages? I’d love to know how and if you have done this for your blog or website. Please drop a comment below so we can discuss.

The post Translating Your Website Should Be A Priority – Here’s Why! appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Considering a career change path at any point can be pretty challenging for any professional. However, there are several ways that a career change might be the right decision.

Some make the change to pursue a higher potential income. However, money is by no means the only reason to pursue a different career path.

If you’re wondering if it’s time for a change, here are some of the most common reasons professionals of all ages change careers.

The Work Environment Isn’t Suitable

There are several reasons a work environment isn’t suitable. What’s more, a work environment that ideal for one professional might not be suitable for another.

In some cases, if the work environment is hostile and you cannot function, you might benefit more from consulting a hostile workplace attorney instead of making an entire career change.

However, if hostility is not a factor in your workplace environment and you still feel its specifics are holding you back, then a career change will benefit your path to success.

What's more, a work environment that ideal for one professional might not be suitable for another. #careers
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Career Satisfaction Is Absent

Career satisfaction is a crucial factor for all professionals. If your job does not provide you with career satisfaction and you are no longer passionate about what you do, a career change might be the best decision you can make.

Or, if you feel stuck in a dead-end position that allows no growth, you should consider other career options.

If your job doesn’t allow growth, you should find a position that will constantly offer career growth as a standard.

Or, if you feel stuck in a dead-end position that allows no growth, you should consider other career options. #careers
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The Pursuit Of A Higher Salary

While money isn’t the only reason to change careers, it is a prevalent one. If your current job role simply doesn’t pay the bills or provide you with the lifestyle you are really after, you should consider making a significant change.

You may need to obtain additional qualifications, although achieving financial success is the entire reason most of us work.

So, if your job isn’t paying you an income that suits your needs and wants, it’s probably time for a change.

Work-Life Balance to Consider a Career Change

Some employers expect their employees to put in all the hours without rewarding them with suitable time off to enjoy their lives.

This is a massive problem worldwide. Younger generations may be successfully changing the pace as a new demand for work-life balance forces changes to the work environment.

So if you feel your career does not give you an ideal work-life balance, you should consider searching for a job that will. You might not even have to make a career change as you may be able to stay in the same field of work while simply seeking a new position with a different employer.

Younger generations may be successfully changing the pace as a new demand for work-life balance forces changes to the work environment.
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Tips To Consider a Career Change

Before you decide to implement a career change, you should be sure that your job role is the culprit behind your demotivation.

In many cases, finding a new job with a different employer is the answer. However, in other cases, a career change may feel inevitable.

Be sure to research your candidate job roles thoroughly to ensure you know what to expect when making a career change.

Start Your Own Business

If you really want to have the flexibility you may want to consider starting your own business. Sure, you may work longer hours but you can pick and choose those hours in most instances. There are more choices than ever before as to what you can do from working on the go or from home.

If you are unsure, you can always start that side gig part-time to test out the waters. Surely, you will learn a lot along the way on that journey. It can help you make future career choices as well.

Your Change

Have you made a career change recently? Or have you started a side gig or business?

I’d love to know more about it in the comments below.

The post The Most Common Reasons to Consider a Career Change appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Nowadays, you can make money through blogging from a whole range of sources. These sources may include paid advertisements, merch lines, and, increasingly, brand deals that earn you the label of ‘influencer.’

As social platforms proliferate and bloggers become prevalent across many of them, the influencer sideline is especially growing. Growing in its power to provide a regular income to people who, previously, had to deal with major fluctuations.

What’s more, as the pulling power of bloggers across pre-established audience bases increases, brands are keener than ever to work with such individuals.

Therefore, making brand deals an increasingly lucrative option for small and large-scale bloggers alike.

The pulling power of bloggers across pre-established audience bases increases, brands are keener than ever to work with such individuals.
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Notable Influencers

Notable influencers like Paris S. Chanel @thebirthofparisc earn as much as $1,500 from a single brand deal. However, that’s at the lower end of modern brand offerings that become more lucrative through ongoing relationships.

But, for bloggers just breaking into the influencer sphere, it can be incredibly difficult to achieve those lasting gigs. This comes down to a range of factors. Factors like returns on income for the company in question, and the impact each influencer makes when they’re working with that brand.

Here, we’re going to consider a few simple ways to increase the chances that a company will remember you as an influencer worth working with.

Always Adhere to Your Agreements

While they don’t always require contracts, most brands will make a verbal agreement about what they expect from a brand pairing.  Whether that be a certain amount of posts on a set day, or simply a mention of their products at some stage.

In many ways, the nature of an agreement like this depends on the nature of your brand deals. For example, simply products being sent to you or actually paid advertisements on your blog.

In both instances, sticking to agreements, either contracted or not, is the first, and perhaps most crucial step, towards impressing a brand for ongoing business.

As such, you must get your affairs in order and make note of key dates, and the brands that they relate to if you’re working on more than one deal at a time.

While this shouldn’t be anything groundbreaking, it does prove your reliability in a field. Where, oftentimes, influencers will either overlook or forget about brand deals that aren’t a priority to them at the time.

Choose Brands That You Can Mention Organically

Most often, companies won’t have any particular guidance on how they would like you to mention their products. But the chances are that they’re looking for more than a glaring advertisement that’s entirely out of keeping with the rest of your blog.

If they wanted that, they would’ve paid for an on-page ad! Rather, most brand deals involve the expectation that you’ll create organic content. As well as interesting content that fits naturally on your page and, in turn, ensures that company’s marketing ROI.

This is the best possible way to ensure that a brand sees the value of an ongoing relationship. It really rests on your ability to cherry-pick the brands that best suit you and your niche. Regardless of lucrative offers elsewhere that appear.

For instance, a travel blogger could easily work with a luggage brand, an airline, or even a camera company, while something like a gardening plug would be far too obvious to land.

As such, before you agree to anything, always brainstorm a few ideas and consider how you’d fit that product within your wider branding focus. 

But the chances are that they’re looking for more than a glaring advertisement that’s entirely out of keeping with the rest of your blog. #influencers
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Take Time Over Branded Content

You might be able to hash out a relatively decent piece of personal blogging in an hour, but any content relating to brands needs a little more time. Time for planning, forethought, and time spent on execution.

You certainly shouldn’t post an article rife with grammatical errors or an image with your laundry pile in the background.

Remember, these brands are paying for a service, and they expect a certain level of quality. As such, you must plan your blog posts. Then, run them through a grammar checker that can ensure your points are concise and professional.

Equally, it’s important to take well-thought, creative brand images that you run through an editor or even a photo background remover were necessary to keep things crisp and up-to-standard.

As well as impressing up front, this is guaranteed to lead to increased ROI which, really, is where the true brand deal value lies.

You certainly shouldn’t post an article rife with grammatical errors or an image with your laundry pile in the background. #bloggingtips
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Ensuring Brands Come Back

These steps are guaranteed to impress even high-end brands. Now, you can go a step above by sharing on social media without being asked or paid to. 

And, you may just find that these efforts lead to another lucrative email landing in your inbox in no time.  

The post Blogging 101: Making Sure Brands Come Back For More appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

One of the main issues with starting a small business is how to reach your audience and customers. In fact, it may be one of the most challenging parts of running a company, whether it’s online or a brick-and-mortar store.

This is because if you don’t have exposure, no one will find your business. Have you looked up a business online only to find they did not have a website or a Google My Business Page?

Fortunately, there are many ways to market your company online.

Here are some marketing tips to help your small business: 

One of the main issues with starting a small business is how to reach your audience and customers. #smallbusiness
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Use Social Media to Keep Customers Up To Date and Speak with Them

Social media has become an integral part of marketing. All over the world, small businesses are using social media to expand their reach through ads on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube and as a way to communicate with their customers.

Small businesses thrive off of this since the interaction can help turn potential customers into returning patrons and a short-term audience into lifelong readers. 

Around 77% of small businesses use their social media for marketing, sales, and customer service.

It’s a great way to keep customers up to date on your business, promote new products or posts, and even answer any questions that they might have about your services.

Just be aware that social media is not all FREE. Social media takes time and/or money! If you want to save on marketing costs check out this post.

Around 77% of small businesses use their social media for marketing, sales, and customer service. #socialmedia
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Marketing Agencies Are Helpful. Use Them If You Can

Marketing agencies often seem like a god sent to small businesses since they have the expertise to help you reach your audience, expand your customer reach, and bring them to you.

Marketing campaigns and strategies are often a great way to grow your business because these campaigns utilize different aspects of marketing that you wouldn’t know unless you have a background in marketing.

From SEO to writing compelling copy for your website, it all helps to bring your customers in and capture their attention so that you can sell them your product. There are many marketing agencies that can offer their services to you. So it’s worth getting in touch. 

From SEO to writing compelling copy for your website, it all helps to bring your customers in and capture their attention so that you can sell them your product. #marketing
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Learn SEO as Part of Marketing Tips

It’s one of the bedrocks of marketing, and in the age of the internet, where rankings and visibility matter, SEO is more important than ever.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a way to refine the website for your business, so if a potential customer searches for keywords, your website can come up.

Not only does SEO help local enterprises to reach their local clients, but it also expands internationally. Therefore, helping websites reach top rankings on search engines and pulling traffic to their website.

SEO comes in several forms: Local SEO, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO (which includes internal and outbound backlinks), and so much more. If you aren’t sure about what SEO can do for you, you can check out an SEO company that could share its expertise with you. 

Have a Blog for Your Small Business

Another way to keep your customers informed is by having a business blog. A blog will not only help keep them informed but will help the SEO of your website. That is one of the best marketing tips for your small business!

Not only that, but a blog is on your own property.

You do not have to worry about Facebook bans or being in Twitter Jail. You can post what and when you want!

Of course, if done correctly a blog becomes a lead magnet for your website. You can generate email addresses to later target.

Another way to keep your customers informed is by having a blog. #smallbusinessblog
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Conclusion of Marketing Tips To Note for Your Small Business

These are just a few tips that could help your business, and there are a lot more out there, such as learning about the sales funnel, the importance of customer experience, and doing marketing research that can help you understand the latest trends.

These tips can help you reach your marketing goals for your business in no time. 

What other marketing tips would YOU add to these? Please leave them in the comments below so we may discuss them!

The post Important Marketing Tips to Note if Your Starting a Small Business appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

If you manage a Facebook page you should really have more than 1 admin for your Facebook page.

There are several reasons for this. If you don’t want to lose your Facebook page that you have built up over the years it is imperative to have more than 1 admin for it. Or, if you are banned or locked out of your personal Facebook account which happens more and more.

I managed a new Facebook page for an account and I was the only one as the admin. Then I started to use the Facebook Business Manager for pages and decided I did not like it.

The manager was too confusing and not user-friendly. (If you are going to use the Facebook Business Manager be sure you know how to use it! It can be very tricky.)

So I went to erase my Facebook page from the Facebook Business Manager for pages and then when I went back to manage my own Facebook pages it disappeared!

Really? Yes, much to my surprise I could not get back to that Facebook page. So please learn from my mistakes here once again.

If you are going to use the Facebook Business Manager be sure you know how to use it! It can be very tricky. #Facebooktip
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6. Reasons Why You Need More Than 1 Admin on Your Facebook page

1. If you have someone that works for you as your admin on your Facebook Page they could leave the company. If so you’d lose your Facebook page unless you have made 2 people as admins.

2. In case you accidentally delete yourself from the page – it’s gone. It will remain on Facebook live but you can’t update it.

3. Facebook Customer Service – Facebook Customer Service – Have you ever tried to reach someone at Facebook? Good luck!

They do not offer any phone numbers. Ever try to email them? You get a standard answer to go to their support center. You can see the one I received after trying to contact them:

And More

4. And if you transfer your page to their Business Manager Center and don’t like it – don’t try to go back. If you eliminate yourself there, you will lose your admin on the Facebook page.

Several years ago I did this and was panicked for 2 days. Luckily the Facebook page was new, and I knew I could easily rebuild it. But wait, I knew who to ask. My great techie from Sri Lanka had the answer.  Thank you, Mayura!

5. What if you got injured or sick, and could not access your Facebook page? Making sure you have someone else you can trust would be a plus. You never know what life may throw your way.

Having someone else to manage your page in your absence is a great way to be prepared.

6. If you get banned or locked out from Facebook. This is happening more and more today with censorship. Facebook recently came out with their new policy about their fact-checkers and it is pretty severe!

Having more than 1 admin on your Facebook page protects you if you get the boot from Facebook. #Facebook
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What Was The Answer?

As you can imagine, I began searching for the answer. I asked some top digital experts and Googled it. The answers from Google provided no way to do it. Thankfully I knew who to ask. Mayura knew the answer – he was able to figure it out 🙂

Go to your Facebook ads account and from there you can get your admin to reinstate. Phew! But if I had another admin it would be have been easier. Of course, you do remember why you should use Facebook ads right? That was from my other post about why you need to use Facebook ads today.

The organic reach of just posting on your Facebook page is almost gone today. It is almost impossible to gain any traction with a Facebook page without any ads now.

The organic reach of just posting on your Facebook page is almost gone today. #Facebook
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Why Would You Get Locked Out or Banned From Facebook?

Here are the Latest Reasons Facebook tells us: (May 26, 2021)

Expanding Penalties For Individual Facebook Accounts

This excerpt below comes from their website on taking action against users.

Since launching our fact-checking program in late 2016, our focus has been on reducing viral misinformation. We’ve taken stronger action against Pages, Groups, Instagram accounts, and domains sharing misinformation and now, we’re expanding some of these efforts to include penalties for individual Facebook accounts too.

Starting today, (May 26, 2021)  we will reduce the distribution of all posts in News Feed from an individual’s Facebook account if they repeatedly share content that has been rated by one of our fact-checking partners. We already reduce a single post’s reach in News Feed if it has been debunked.

As you can see above it can become a gray area quite quickly! They go further to state: We are taking action against people who repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook.

Whether it’s false or misleading content about COVID-19 and vaccines, climate change, elections, or other topics, we’re making sure fewer people see misinformation on our apps.

Other topics? Like what I wonder? No wonder many are going over to alternative social networks.

Whether it’s false or misleading content about COVID-19 and vaccines, climate change, elections, or other topics, we’re making sure fewer people see misinformation on our apps. #censorship
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Benefits to Having More Than 1 Admin on Your Facebook Page

The benefits of having more than 1 admin on your Facebook Pages are many: One is that you have someone else to help you out when you can’t be there to work your own page.

The second benefit is having a second set of eyes on your stats and it sure is nice too as they can see things differently than you do. They may interpret things a little differently and offer some suggestions you may have not thought of.

And lastly, of course, is if you ever delete yourself as the admin by accident. Having a 2nd person as a Facebook admin could assign you back again as an admin. And accidents do happen!

Having a 2nd person as a Facebook admin could assign you back again as an admin. #Facebookpages
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Have Trust With More Than 1 Admin on Your Facebook Page

Therefore be sure to fully trust who you decide to make as a 2nd admin for your Facebook page. You really must have 100% trust in them and that they have your own best interest at heart. There could be a lot of backlashes if you did not have the right person for your Facebook admin role.

That person must be your most trusted friend, colleague, or relative to manage your Facebook page in your absence.

Hence, be sure to stay involved with them throughout the process.

What Are The Different Roles for Facebook Pages Today?

Today there are more roles than just admins for a Facebook page. You can see the chart below that explains how each one works. You may want to assign another team member or employee to a different role other than an admin.

Admin / Editor / Moderator / Advertiser / Analyst / Live Contributor – See the latest chart from Facebook on what each role plays in managing a Facebook Page today.

Note: The Facebook admin role really has full control of a page and has the ability to assign roles to others.  An analyst has the least amount of control over a page.

Consequently, did you know if you create a Facebook page you automatically become an administrator for it?

That is something to think about if you are creating pages for others. You could create it and then assign them the admin role.

Consequently, did you know if you create a Facebook page you automatically become an administrator for it? #Facebooktips
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What Other Roles Should You Consider Using For Your Facebook Page?

If you want someone else to help with your page you could assign them as an editor. They can do everything but set roles for others and admins for the page.

Ultimately another role I would recommend for a team member is a live contributor. This would allow someone else to go live on your page to increase your organic reach. You can read more about how to do this from Ryan Biddulph’s contributor post on Facebook Live. 

Your Turn

Do you have more than 1 admin on your Facebook page today? Have you used the Business Manager for any of your Facebook pages?

I’d love to know more from you in the comments below about your Facebook page experiences.

The post Why You Need More Than 1 Admin on Your Facebook Page Today appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

“Images Say A Thousand Words”

Thank you so much for the opportunity you gave me to share some of my experience with other bloggers on a topic that I know is really important but might not be as clear-cut: Why Should Bloggers Implement only WebP Images for WordPress?

I’m 100% confident that you will not only love this post but also benefit from it.

In this blog post, I’ll share how important it is to have WebP enabled on WordPress, how it can affect your google rankings, & how to enable it on your WordPress site.

So, let’s start.

What’s WebP Image Format?

The webp format is a web-based image format that provides lossy compression for images on the web.

The webp format was developed by Google and it outperforms JPEG in terms of file size, while still providing quality comparable to PNG.

(Not to mention, the PNG image format has the highest grade image quality as of now).

To be precise, WebP is way smaller than other image formats.

It is 26% smaller than the other kind, PNG.

WebP images are also 25-34% smaller at the same quality level as JPEG images.

That’s a lot.

This means if you’ve 1GB of JPEG images on your WordPress site, you can store the same amount of images in just 650MB of space on your server.

That is if you’re using WebP format instead of plain old JPEG.

To be precise, WebP is way smaller than other image formats. #bloggingtips
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7 Reasons Why Should You Make Use Of WebP Images In WordPress

1: Reduce the file size of your images by up to 50%

By converting your images to WebP format, you’ll be able to reduce the size by up to 35% for JPEGs and 50% for PNG files.

Heavy files also take time to load completely & if the size exceeds 500KB, it slows down the website entirely.

Who wants heavy files that take too much space & consume your server bandwidth?

2: Consume Less Storage Space

The second obvious reason to use WebP is that it uses less storage.

Many server companies charge their clients additionally for the upgraded storage space. 

But with WebP enabled, you can save 35% of your overall hosting costs.

3: Use Less Bandwidth

Bandwidth & storage space are 2 different things.

In simple words, bandwidth refers to a lane in which the data can get transferred from the server to your users on the web.

Suppose, if you’ve got 1GB of server bandwidth, the max amount of files you can transfer in 1 go shouldn’t exceed 1GB.

And images make the most part.

Less image size will use less bandwidth & thus save your server resources which can be better utilized in other processing tasks.

As not only images get transferred by your server, but your server also sends other important data as well.

If the image size is high, it’ll consume much of the bandwidth, giving quite less window for other files (such as text) to get transferred.

Less image size will use less bandwidth & thus save your server resources which can be better utilized in other processing tasks. #bloggingtips
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4: Image SEO & Google Guidelines Compliant

Since WebP image format is officially released by Google & they’ve also claimed that WebP is optimized for images on the web.

In Google Page Speed Insights, you also get to see a repeated recommendation that, “Try To Use WebP Images”

Thus, people using WebP versions of images rather than JPEG or PNG tend to do better in image SEO since they’re compliant with the Google guidelines.

This also helps them drive traffic to their blog not only from Google search but also image search as well.

Related: 13+ Image SEO & Optimization Tips That’ll Definitely 17X Your Blog Traffic

5: Faster Loading Web Pages

As stated, Webp lossless images are smaller in size.

They highly reduce your page loading times.

Also, a smaller file size takes less time to get transferred from the server to your client browsers.

On my personal website, when I switched to WebP from PNG, I decreased loading time by 2.5s.

Then, my page size reduced from 2MB to just 700KB, thus saving my bandwidth & decreasing my loading times simultaneously.

6: Improve Your Core Web Vital Score

Recently, Google has emphasized the Core Web Vitals & stated how much they’re important in determining your rankings.

There’s a term in CWV (Core Web Vital) named LCP (Largest Contentful Paint).

It refers to the time it takes for a part of your web page to get rendered by your browser.

Larger your file size or dimensions of the image, the more time it will take to paint that image in your browser, thus increasing the LCP & reducing the interaction time.

WebP minimizes that by reducing the file size for you.

Also, keep in mind that your image dimensions should not exceed 1024px in width & overall size shouldn’t go beyond 100Kb for a better experience.

7: Deliver A Good User Experience

Overall, with all the benefits mentioned above, it helps you minimize costs, improve performance, increase google rankings, etc., and make the user experience for your visitors highly appealing.

Therefore, the chances of your site ranking higher increases by multiple folds.

Therefore, the chances of your site ranking higher increases by multiple folds. #bloggingtips #SEO
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How To Enable WebP Support On WordPress Website To Upload WebP Images?

Sadly, WordPress by default doesn’t support uploading WebP images.

But there are 2 workarounds to it that I’ve figured out.

Either you can use plugins provided by Shortpixel or Imagify to create WebP versions of your PNG or JPEG Images & then deliver WebP images on the go.

(This will create a separate WebP version for all your images. Old ones will still be there)

This method is most beneficial if you’re running a very large site & can’t convert images to WebP manually, as these plugins can do the nitty-gritty work all by themselves without any manual work.

But for me, I’m not a plugin-oriented guy.

Why?

Adding WordPress plugins for little tasks like these on WordPress sites every now & then increases the number of plugin files (JS & CSS files) & this puts a load on your server thus reducing its performance.

It also makes your sites load slow which in turn decreases your google rankings.

I prefer the manual method over plugins.

But you can go with the above plugins if your site contains a lot of images as it’ll be nearly impossible to manually convert all the images to WebP.

Just follow the below steps & you’ll be good to go:

Step 1: Create A Child Theme First

If you’re not using a child theme already, create one using this plugin.

This won’t work without a child theme.

It’s a 2 step process & after your child theme is created, you can then delete this plugin.

Step 2: Activate Your Child Theme

Go To Appearance -> Themes -> Activate YourThemeChild

Step 3: Open Your Theme Editor

Go To Appearance -> Theme Editor -> functions.php

Step 4: Copy & Paste The Code Below Into Your functions.php file

//** *Enable upload for webp image files starts*/
function webp_upload_mimes( $existing_mimes ) {
   // add webp to the list of mime types
   $existing_mimes['webp'] = 'image/webp';
   // return the array back to the function with our added mime type
   return $existing_mimes;
}
add_filter( 'mime_types', 'webp_upload_mimes' );
//** * Enable preview / thumbnail for webp image files.*/
function webp_is_displayable($result, $path) {
   if ($result === false) {
       $displayable_image_types = array( IMAGETYPE_WEBP );
       $info = @getimagesize( $path );
if (empty($info)) {
           $result = false;
       } elseif (!in_array($info[2], $displayable_image_types)) {
           $result = false;
       } else {
           $result = true;
       }
   }
return $result;
}
add_filter('file_is_displayable_image', 'webp_is_displayable', 10, 2);
//** *Enable upload for webp image files ends*/

Step 5: Click On Save Changes

Now, you’ll be able to upload WebP images directly to WordPress without seeing any errors at all.

You don’t need to make any changes to your htaccess file or any other files after this.

This is the simplest & easiest way to enable WebP support on WordPress after adding WordPress Plugin.

Few More Tweaks & Hacks To Make Your WebP Image Load Faster

Many image editing tools or software don’t provide the feature to directly export your image as WebP files.

To counter this, you can export these images in their normal JPEG & PNG formats & bulk convert them to WebP using this free tool.

Use WP Rocket to Use Only WebP Images

WP Rocket is by far my most favorite WordPress caching plugin.

I can say that because I’ve used more than 10+ caching plugins & none of them matches the level of WP Rocket.

In WP Rocket, you also get an option to optimize & create separate cache files (not separate image files) for your WebP images to improve your deliverability speeds & optimize their file sizes as well.

Use A Push CDN Service To Host Your Images

Many FREE CDN services like Cloudflare, are pull CDN services.

Try using A Push CDN Service for better image optimization & delivery.

Before purchasing any CDN service, make sure it also allows for further compression.

Enable Browser Caching

If you have a website with 10 pages, and each page has 5 images on it – enabling Browser Caching can actually help improve the speed score!

In other words, if there are multiple requests for an image from various users at different times of day or night then your server will be doing more work to send those files.

You may not know this, but browsers cache what they see as being most relevant so even after hitting reload to get fresh content, that cached version will show up unless told otherwise.

To enable this on WordPress, I use WP Rocket Plugin & further reduce the request for images made to my server.

It’s my All In One & most favorite plugins of all time.

PRO-TIP: Clear The Entire Background Of Your Images

If you’re using a picture that has a white background, you can just remove the background of those images entirely.

By doing this, you’re not only further reducing your file size, but to your end-user, they’ll not see any difference at all as your WordPress theme background is also white.

I practice this technique on my blog website always.

General FAQ’s Regarding Use Only WebP Images

Do Modern Browsers Support WebP File Format?

In short, Yes. Mostly all modern browsers support WebP Image File.

What Is The Best WebP Converter?

ImageToWebP is the best FREE WebP Converter I found to date. It can bulk convert your images to WebP within seconds.

What’s The Best WebP WordPress Plugin?

You’ll need to install plugins like ShortPixel & Imagify that will create an additional version of your image files on WordPress & then deliver them.

However, I don’t recommend this as you’re eating up your storage space since you’re using 2 images for a single purpose.

One is being used while the other is sitting idle & eating your precious storage as well.

Conclusion: Should You Use WebP Images On Your WordPress Site?

WebP images are a great way to make your website more efficient.

They can be used on WordPress sites in conjunction with plugins like WP Rocket, which provide additional optimization for web content.

You should use the right type of image depending on what you need it for and how large it is.

This way you will have plenty of room left over for other features, such as videos!

The WebP format might be a good option if you have been using JPEGs or PNGs for your website images.

It will take some time to get used to the file changes, but there are plenty of other benefits that come with this change.

Remember:
“When Winds Of Change Blow, Some People Build Walls, While Others Build Windmills”

If you’re looking for an alternative type of image file and don’t want to wait longer than usual for the full page to load, then definitely try out WebP!

I’m 100% sure, you’ll love the changes you’ll get with it.

If you're looking for an alternative type of image file and don't want to wait longer than usual for the full page to load, then definitely try out WebP!
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Your Turn on Why Use Only WebP Images for Your Blog or Website

What are your thoughts about using only WebP images for WordPress?

Tell us in the comments below so we can discuss.

And if you’ve any doubts, regarding any topic or you’re facing any problem regarding setting up WP Rocket on your blog, just visit The Mistaken Man & let me know if you need any help.

The post 7 Powerful Reasons To Use Only WebP Images for WordPress appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

There are thousands of different providers and a wide range of services available when it comes to web hosting. Some of the web hosting services offered are critical to the operation of your site.

Others are just add-on costs and don’t add a ton of real value. Sometimes they can be obtained elsewhere for FREE.

Understanding the services your website needs is the secret to running a successful website and keeping your costs low.

When purchasing web hosting, a list of add-on services is available. Many of these services are helpful, but you don’t need to pay for them through your hosting provider.

This puts you in a difficult situation, as your hosting provider will encourage you to buy the full package.

Which services should you opt for, and which services should you pass on?

To help you make the right choices, let’s dig into the subject and learn more about web hosting and the services available to you.

Suggested Reading: What to Look for In a Blog Hosting Service in 2021 and Beyond.

Many of these services are helpful, but you don’t need to pay for them through your hosting provider. #Webhostingservices
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What is Web Hosting?

For users to be able to reach your website, you need to have two things in place: 1) a hosting service, and 2) a domain name. A web host is an organization that provides the technology and services required to access a website through the internet.

Websites are hosted on special computers known as servers; this is where all of the software and files that power the website are kept.

When a user wishes to access your website, they must enter a website address, also known as a domain name, into their internet browser.

After that, their device will get connected to your server, and your website can be accessed by them. Your content will then be delivered to them through that browser.

What add-on services are provided by a web host?

As you might know, web hosting providers will push various add-on services which you can opt for or opt-out. Some of these services can be very helpful. Others, not so much, or you’ll find they’re redundant because you’ll have access to the same functions elsewhere.

Don’t make any purchases until you have all the information you need about web hosting, so you can avoid selecting add-ons that don’t increase the value of the services you’re buying.

To help you stay on the right track, here’s a quick rundown of the various add-ons available through your web hosting services and what to expect from each.

This list can be divided into two main categories: 1) the important services, and 2) the other the optional services that can be avoided.

What services are essential?

Email-hosting

Email plays such an important role in the day-to-day operations and the promotion of a company, and this one simple service has the potential to make a significant difference for companies of all sizes.

In a nutshell, business email hosting is a service that allows you to send, receive, and store emails on a server. This is an important service that an email hosting company provides.

One of the most significant advantages of using business email hosting is that it improves brand continuity. You may also expect email hosting to include services such as spam and virus filtering, which will ensure that your emails are secure and safe.

One of the most significant advantages of using business email hosting is that it improves brand continuity.
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Domain Registration

A domain name lends immediate prestige to your company. It communicates that you mean business and assists consumers in seeing you as a forward-thinking organization that is easily accessible online. A domain name with a catchy slogan is the face of your company.

It is the path that people take to visit your website, learn more about your business, and buy your products and services. Thus, domain registration is one of the first and most important steps in establishing your online presence.

A domain name with a catchy slogan is the face of your company. #domains #branding
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SSL certificates

Thanks to the ever-reaching scope of the Internet, customers can share details through computers, mobile, and other devices very easily.

In the wrong hands, any of these devices could pretend to be your website and trick your visitors into sending personal information. This can only be avoided by obtaining an SSL Certificate from a reputable SSL provider.

SSL is the foundation of safe Internet, protecting your confidential data as it moves through the world’s computer networks. Even if your website does not handle sensitive information such as credit cards, SSL is important for its security.

It ensures the protection, essential security, and data integrity of your websites as well as the personal information of your users.

Website Builders

Website builders make it easy to manage your own website. If you want your website to be of the best quality and highest performance, you must maintain it regularly.

Visitors are always looking for new and exciting information, news, products, or features, so you must provide them with what they want.

Making changes and improvements to your website is simple thanks to both the website builder’s drag-and-drop editor and a simple, convenient interface.

Your hosting provider may sometimes offer a website builder, but if not, there are other options.

If you want your website to be of the best quality and highest performance, you must maintain it regularly.
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What hosting add-ons are optional?

Database hosting

Hosting companies risk their reputations and potential sales on the security of your records. Database hosting companies actively track all traffic to the database servers to detect any malicious activity, not just cyberattacks.

For redundancy, database hosting companies use either centralized physical servers or a cloud-based environment that duplicates all servers and internal connections. As a consequence, the database will experience no downtime.

While there is value here, this is not a service you need immediately. You can consider adding this on at a later date as your website and the amount of data involved grows. You can also use a free plugin, like the database plugins available on WordPress.

CMS hosting

CMS must be incorporated into the hosting services used. Websites offer a fantastic and valuable forum for you to share your views, suggestions, product descriptions, services, and business information.

Content management systems are a solution that allows the website owner to adjust the content and layout of the website as required.

Numerous web hosting services provide useful CMS resources. But, while your hosting provider may offer a CMS system for you, you don’t need to buy it from them.

You can use a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Wix, or several others that you aren’t required to purchase through your hosting provider.

Extra Backups

Backing up anything can seem to be a tedious process, but website backups will save your life. Backups of your website serve as a safety net and are a crucial piece of protection that is required if all other resources fail.

They create a full copy of your website files and database regularly (the normal frequency). So, the website owner can restore it to its previous state.

Backups, however, should not be the only security mechanism implemented.

While backups restore a site’s content to the most recent backup, any content uploaded in the interim will be lost.

Furthermore, backups cannot resolve the underlying issue or save the website from being infected again. You do not need to buy these through your hosting provider.

WordPress, for example, offers backups. You can use a simple plugin instead of doing this through your hosting provider.

Conclusion of Web Hosting Services

These are some of the most important web hosting services that your web host must provide to ensure efficiency. But, as you can see, you don’t need to add them all upfront. And many you can get elsewhere.

I hope this article was helpful to you. I hope you were able to clear the chaos and make the right decision for your business.

Keep in mind that the non-essential purchases are also valuable, but you don’t have to buy them through your provider. You can likely get them elsewhere at a low (or no) cost.

Still, have questions about hosting and what you should purchase? Let us know in the comments.

We love a good conversation!

The post What Add-On Web Hosting Services Do You Really Need? appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Have you ever given any thought to starting a blogging hobby? The answer might be no, but it still might be the perfect thing for you.

Or, you might have thought about it before but never got to the point where you put the idea into practice. Either way, you might need to think about it a little more before you make a final decision.

In this article, we are going to be taking a look at whether or not blogging hobby could be the right thing for you, by giving you some examples of things that make it right.

Keep reading down below if you would like to find out more.

Or, you might have thought about it before but never got to the point where you put the idea into practice. #blogging
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First, What is Blogging?

Blogging is an online journal or informational website displaying information in reverse chronological order, with the latest posts appearing first, at the top.

A blog is a platform where a writer or a group of writers share their views on an individual subject or topic. It may include graphics, videos, and other means of expression online.

So why start a blogging hobby?

You Like To Write as Starting a Blogging Hobby 

The first reason that blogging could be right for you is if you like to write. Blogging is going to require a lot of writing for you, which means that you are going to need to enjoy it.

You don’t have to type fast as long as you have the time to type up your posts every day.

If you are hoping to make some kind of income from your blog, then you need to be posting at least once per day, and building up a loyal follower base as you go.

If you like to write, then you might have tried to figure out how you could make something of this in the past but to no avail.

The good thing about a blog is that the only person that needs to believe in you is yourself, and if you do, then you’re going to succeed. Just make sure that you are writing clearly and communicating what you want to say effectively.

Starting out as a blogging hobby will be a great way to know if you want to up it as a side hustle.

Just make sure that you are writing clearly and communicating what you want to say effectively. #bloggingtips
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You Want To Share Your Stories

A lot of people find that blogging about the things they know is far easier than trying to blog about random things. This is your blog, and if you find it easier to write about what you know, then this is what you should stick to.

Don’t worry about what anyone else says at any point, you stay true to what you know you are best at. It might be the case that this turns into a travel blog, or it might be a life advice blog.

Or you may use it simply to share stories of your life that you would like other people to know.

Sharing your stories, whatever they are, could be more helpful to someone than you know. A lot of people read blogs looking for advice, or looking for people that they can relate to, so this is what you should try to offer.

Or you may use it simply to share stories of your life that you would like other people to know. #blogginghobby
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You’re Interested In A Side Hustle

Have you ever thought about a side hustle? Perhaps you need a little bit of extra money per month but you can’t get any more hours at your job? This is when you need to look into a side hustle.

You can get some extra cash, doing something completely flexible and that can work around your current job and social commitments.

You’re going to have to put in a lot of work to ensure that your blog takes off as a side hustle but it will be worth it in the end.

You can check out the Latest Deals guide on making money online if you would like some more information on making money!

You Feel As Though You Have Something To Say

The final thing that we want to mention is that you might feel as though you have something to say. Perhaps it is the case that you feel as though there are things that you really want to share because you feel as though they may help people.

Or, perhaps you are an activist and you would like to share your views on what is going on, trying to help people understand exactly what is happening and why it is important.

It can be difficult to do, but if you can manage to help people understand, your blog is going to be massively successful.

Perhaps it is the case that you feel as though there are things that you really want to share because you feel as though they may help people. #blogginghobby
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In Conclusion of Starting a Blogging Hobby

We hope that you have found this article helpful. You can now see some of the ways that you can tell if a blogging hobby may be right for you.

It’s not going to work out for everyone, so don’t feel disheartened if this isn’t a path that you should follow.

In the end, you have to do what is right for you, and if blogging is it, then we suggest that you get started sooner rather than later. 

Now, have you started your blogging hobby? Have you turned it into a side hustle or do you LOVE to write for fun?

We’d love to know more in the comments below!

The post Could Starting a Blogging Hobby Be The Right Thing For You? appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.

Hiring a business consultant may sound expensive at first.

The demand for running a business to experience steady growth, especially those small or at an early stage of development, can be extreme.

As an owner of such companies, you may find yourself playing multiple roles. The roles of finance head, IT specialist, sales director, and head of human resources all at the same time.

With so many roles to play, a business owner may quickly run out of capacity to complete all the business tasks. This can leave the owner quite stressed out!

Declan Kelly Consultancy advises that if you find yourself in such a stressful state, you can hire a consultancy firm to help you run some of your business functions professionally.

You can find different consultants specializing in other areas that your business may need help with. These may include operations, finances, strategic management, human resources, IT, and sales and marketing.

Here, at the benefits, you will enjoy hiring such a consultant firm.

You can find different consultants specializing in other areas that your business may need help with. #consultants
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The Expertise of a Business Consultant

The principal value of hiring consultants is to use their experience, knowledge, influence in the market. Their expert skills will improve your business growth.

Since constant firms work with so many clients, they may have a much broader and deeper knowledge of business styles.

As well as new technologies coming, industry challenges, and different ways of handling processes than the internal employees you may have in your business.

Objectivity

When a person is running his or her own business, they are usually attached to it very much.

However, consultants are generally not attached to the business. That way they can offer valuable remedies to business challenges.

Also, they can easily identify challenges in a business and address them properly without emotional attachment to them.

Consultants’ objectivity can be necessary where the main complications are challenging to discuss in a business that families run.

This objectivity can lower the stress levels of everyone involved in the business. If a worker heard criticism from a family member it can surely lead to a stressful situation. But if from an outsider, it would be easier to handle and rectify.

When a person is running his or her own business, they are usually attached to it very much. #businesstips
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Cost Savings of Hiring a Business Consultant

When you hire a consultant to help you with your business needs, you will only pay for the services you will need them to carry out.

A consultant can be cost-saving compared to hiring a full-time salaried employee who has the equal experience to carry out those tasks.

Further, a consultant has experience with time. They can pinpoint areas where you are spending so much more than you need to and help you cut costs.

Time Savings of Having a Business Consultant

After working with various clients, consulting firms have experience specialized in service provision, such as founder Declan Kelly, and they know the finest practices already.

Hiring a consultant means you will not have to reinvent or lose your valuable time. You will be able to learn from someone else’s mistakes in your field or niche.

Hiring a consultant means you will not have to reinvent or lose your valuable time. #consultant
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Your Turn to Discuss

Have you used a consultant before to help you along with your business? Or, as a blogger have you offered consultant services?

I’d love to know more in the comments below!

The post Why Hiring a Business Consultant Can Make Your Business Blossom & Lower Your Stress appeared first on Inspire to Thrive.