Browsing Category

Working from Home

Leveraging SharePoint To Achieve More

SharePoint is something all businesses should use. It is one of the top business collaboration resources available today. It is a web-based platform, which integrates with Microsoft Office, and offers document management and storage. However, the product is highly configurable and can be adapted to suit your business, with usage varying substantially between firms. Not only does SharePoint provide a consistent user experience, simplifying how employees interact with business data, processes, and content, but it helps companies to meet regulatory requirements too. You can specify security settings, expiration actions, auditing policies, and storage policies in alignment with compliance regulations. 

You will also be able to simplify everyday business activities, especially when you hire a SharePoint developer to provide a custom SharePoint platform for your business. What is the crypto market cap? How can you incorporate automation? They can partner with you in all the vital areas.

They can provide custom workflows for reporting, tracking, and initiating day-to-day business activities, including signature collection, issue tracking, and document review and approval. They can also ensure access to business data is simplified, content is effectively managed and repurposed, and that all employees are connected with expertise and information. If that was not enough, effective SharePoint use accelerates shared business processes and enables you to share without divulging sensitive information, which is critical in the current day and age.

Top Features Of The Latest SharePoint

Senior SharePoint consultants can help businesses to optimize SharePoint, ensuring it is working in the best way for them. One of the ways they do this is by taking advantage of the many amazing features SharePoint has to offer. While SharePoint has been around for a number of years, new updates are released all of the time. In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the best SharePoint features that will help your business to improve its performance when working alongside a leading SharePoint designer or consultant.

There is only one place to begin, and this is with data protection. After all, it seems that a day does not go by without news of a data breach at present. With SharePoint, you can utilize the Search function while implementing custom Policy rules with the help of your SharePoint specialist. This means that you can easily trawl through your content and locate items that violate policy rules. Speaking of searching, the Cloud Search Service is another new feature. It enables end-users to search across both On-Premises and the Cloud easily, without needing to know where the content is coming from in the results. Prior to this, SharePoint users would see two blocks of results, making the experience more complicated. 

SharePoint consultants wide are also helping their clients to make the most of changes that have been made to the List View Threshold. There are a number of new features that have provided a better experience for businesses when it comes to large lists. Not only does this include the increased effective threshold, but there have also been query engine improvements and the implementation of list view auto-indexing. Durable Links is another new exciting feature, providing link integrity management for documents stored within Office Online Server and SharePoint. This has been designed to preserve the integrity and user access of documents even when they are moved or renamed. 

This merely scratches the surface of the exciting and beneficial new features that were implemented with the latest SharePoint update. This highlights why it is so important to use the services of a SharePoint consultant if you are to make the most of this platform.

How To Make Your Instagram Posts Nicer

Image Credit

Scrolling through Instagram, there can be dozens of photos that look amazing. It’s easy to wonder how you can make posts that look just as good. Creating images this nice might not be as easy as some people might think. If it was, then everybody would do it.

There can be multiple reasons why you’d want to make your Instagram posts look nicer. Some just want great-looking photos. Others want to see their follower, like, and comment counts to grow. Regardless of the reason, there are multiple ways that you can make your pictures look nicer.

While this might take a certain amount of effort at the start, things should come pretty naturally after a while.

How To Make Your Instagram Posts Nicer

Add Some Music

Adding music to Instagram posts has become increasingly more common. Coupled with some exciting visuals, these can be an interesting way to interact with your followers. But, not many people know how to add music to Instagram. As it turns out, it’s surprisingly easy.

It’s worth noting, however, that you can only use certain music. Some of the more common places to find usable music are your iTunes library, Incompetech, and Audio Jungle. While it might take a while for you to find the exact song you want, it should be easy to add to your post.

If you have Tik Tok, you shouldn’t have any problem adding music, as it should already be in your video. For other sources, it’s as simple as navigating to the editing page of any app you’re using, adding the video, and then adding the music. You should then be able to add the music.

If you want to add music to your story, it’s as simple as pressing the sticker button, selecting the music sticker, and finding the song you want to add.

Make Sure The Lighting Is Nice

Lighting can be your best friend or worst enemy when it comes to photos. In the vast majority of cases, you won’t be able to take a good picture without good lighting. While you can use light creatively to develop a specific mood, you still need to make sure it’s good.

There are different ways of going about this, depending on whether you’re indoors or outdoors. As such, you should check the lighting before ever taking the picture. Thankfully, some apps will help you brighten things up or darken them, depending on what you need.

These can only be relied on to a certain extent, however.

Use Different Editing Apps

Speaking of editing apps, these can be a lifesaver when you’re figuring out what to post on Instagram. You might have a picture that’s almost perfect but needs a few finishing touches. While there are countless editing apps out there, some are better than others.

Alongside this, some are better at specific things than others. As such, it’s recommended that you have a few of them on your phone to make sure your photos are perfect.

Try Different Layouts

There are quite a few people who have developed a specific style of photo on Instagram. A lot of them use a specific layout, which may be something that you’d consider replicating. It’s worth trying out a few different photo layouts and compositions, as this will help you develop a style.

While it could take a while to determine what compositions and layouts that you prefer, it could be worth it. Once you’ve found one that suits you and looks great, you should see a bump in interactions. That should make it worth the effort you put in. Different apps may also help with this.

Be Choosy With Your Pictures

Most people are somewhat picky with the picture they upload to Instagram. That doesn’t mean everyone does, however. If you aren’t, then you might need to be. The social media platform is quite filtered, with most people only showing off their best selves.

Taking a similar approach may be needed. While that could mean spending longer taking a picture or editing it, it will make your Instagram feed look a lot nicer. You should also see more positive engagements.

This could take a while to master, however, and is best recommended alongside trying a different layout. That way, you should see the benefits of both at the same time.

Wrapping Up

It might seem like any of the above would take a lot of effort. In reality, it can be much easier than you might think. Figuring out different things and determining exactly what you like and want to post may be the trickiest part. Once you’ve gotten that done, you shouldn’t have any issues making your Instagram posts look great.

How to Boost Awareness of Your Blog

If you feel that your blog is currently going under the radar a bit and you want to do something about that, you’re certainly in the right place. There are lots of things that can be done to make your blog more notable, easier to find and more appreciated within the particular niche in which you operate. Here are some ways to do that, so read on to find out more.

Create More Shareable Content

When you create content that you know is going to grab the attention of readers and make them want to share it, it’ll inevitably be seen by more people as a result of those shares. That’s exactly what you want, so be sure to think about how you can make content that people will want to share, either for the information it offers, how it entertains or for the humor it delivers.

Make Yourself a Voice of Authority

Making yourself an authority on your particular niche is a good way of making sure that you always remain a trusted source of information for readers. People will be far more willing to take you seriously and read your content on a consistent basis if they trust what you’re saying and know that you can be relied upon to deliver accurate content of the highest quality.

Use Professional SEO Services

Working with professionals who can help to boost your blog and make it easier to find via search engines is definitely a good idea. There are lots of companies out there that are offering very strong and reliable SEO services, and you should be sure to make the most of them if you can. Use third party services to plug the gaps in your skill set and knowledge that you feel most need to be filled.

Work with Other Bloggers

Working with other people, and in particular other bloggers, is a good way to expand your reach and ensure you can get your message across to new people. The audience of that blogger you work with might not have heard of you before, but they will have now. That’s what this is all about and why collaborating with other bloggers is so useful.

Connect Your Blog with Your Social Media Platforms Better

Connecting your blog to your social media presence can be a good way of creating a flow of traffic between those sources. You can encourage visitors to your website to visit your social media pages and click follow. And you can encourage your social media following to head over to your website. It ensures those connections are cemented and not simply forgotten after their first interaction with you.

Image Source – CC0 License

So if you’re looking to get your blog out there and read by more people than ever before, be sure to make the most of the tips and ideas that we’ve shared here today. You won’t regret doing so because each of them could help you take your blog to a whole new level.

7 Essential Data Management Tips For Your Blog

This post was sponsored by Diamond Bloggers. All opinions expressed are my own. Thank you.

One of the biggest buzzes currently in the blogging world surrounds data management. Or the way in which an organization’s management of information is structured, access, and stored. Including the creation of data policies, analyzing SEO, inventory optimization, and database management systems (DMS). All of which are integrated to help your blog run smoother each day.

Data management encompasses a variety of different techniques that facilitate your reach and utilization. The overall cohesive infrastructure of resources that define the administrative processes used throughout the lifecycle of each blog post. From conceptualization to advertising, DMS plays a huge role in the success of your blog. Sounds positive, right?

But there’s a catch. No matter how useful data analytics are, it’s important to realize that they don’t just pop up for your blog’s data. Your analytics are only as good as the data that goes into them. And your data is located everywhere: sponsored posts, affiliate links, interactions with subscribers, and third-party sources.

Blogs that struggle with disparate misinformation sourcing still must find a way to make data fit their niche and purpose.  Through aggregation, standardization, and enrichment of posting sources.

An effective IT strategy can assist in the development of better posts, higher SEO rankings, and can help to eliminate gaps in advertising strategies. This helps bloggers create comprehensive and robust technology environments that boost engagement and improve cost-efficiency for marketing your posts too!

Now if you’re looking for more ways that you as a blogger can create a solid data management foundation and a robust analytics platform for your blog, here are 7 ways to get started:

7 Essential Data Management Tips For Your Blog

Scraping your browser

 Scraping is a way to get information from a website into an Excel or sheet document. A carbon copy of your site helps give you a better glance at how your site is performing. You can hire someone to build you a scraper or you can do the job yourself with a few clicks using a Google Chrome extension scraper that works right within your browser.

Behind the scenes, scrapers also help manage and guide individual blog posts as well. As a scraper retrieves HTML elements from a page based on the rules you specify. For everything wrapped in a <a> tag. Having your scraper data at hand will help you to find missing tags and help clean up your blog’s SEO ranking. 

This information is essential in understanding other necessary blog-specific services. Including certificate automation services that enable users and vloggers to automate the process of Certificate Signing Request (CSR) generation and installation of your new certificate on your servers and configure and schedule automation activities and managed Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, the term used to manage public-key encryption, one of the most common forms of internet encryption for bloggers. Helping to keep essential, installed, and configured sensors, plug-ins, managed-PKI, and theme add-ons on your network working properly.

Using SharedCount

Using a SharedCount, or social sharing metrics gives you social sharing information for any URL that you specify. It’s a nice tool to use for your own website, especially when creating a content inventory. But it’s also super helpful for doing large-scale research and analysis about who in your niche is posting similar content on social media and how you can improve your own content and posting styling accordingly. 

Surveys

Want to know who reads your blog? Consider using Google surveys. Google Surveys, when administered to your readers in posts, on media channels, or in newsletters, help you to ascertain who reads your site, what posts they enjoy reading, as well as a wide range of demographic data they include about your respondents. You don’t just get answers to your survey questions, you can see who answered them. This will help you down the road, especially when creating a media kit or giving demographic information during pitch netters to sponsors. 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a great site for identifying influencers and for influencers to identify blogging trends. It’s also helpful for monitoring how competitors have addressed the same topic you are planning to write about. I often use the site to gather data on specific topics for my blog. Then export all of that info to a spreadsheet. This allows me to see where I can improve my blog.

Google Trends

I love to use Google trends to research keywords. This allows you to discover how popular certain topics are over the past decade in terms of their global search volume. Basically, is this topic being searched more or less around the world, or in your specific area. I then use that data to splice blog posts based on how I perceive my audience will want to know that information or if the information would be better served on live broadcasting, in a podcast, or in a newsletter. 

Facebook Advertising

Facebook gives marketers lots of control over their ad targeting. If you need to get some calculations for how many people are interested in a particular topic, simply set up a random advertising campaign and use the audience targeting feature. This will allow you to see how quickly your audience engaged in a specific product, service, affiliate link, or blog topic idea before investing vast amounts of time and money into that field. It’s a great resource tool before rebranding your blog or adding new social media features too. 

Digital Transfering Services

Using a professional digital transferring service can help bloggers and small business owners to better utilize digital data management across various departments, blogs, and fields. This can also help bloggers determine domain strategies that are no longer relevant to your blog management strategy.2

Companies can also focus fire on master data management, offering Microsoft MDM and Multi-Domain platform data services to influencers and strategies from all digital walks of life. A service that can help take your platforms to new highs for years to come.

Those are my top 7 ways to help you better address your blogging and blog marketing strategies this season by way of data policies, analyzing SEO, and database management systems. Methods that can help propel your blog and pitch to the next level. Now I want to ask, do you have any top strategies for assessing your blog data strategies? I’d love to hear about them below!

Marketing Your Business: 2021 Style!

The world is a changing place and if there is one place that is changing rapidly, it’s the marketing strategies that your business needs to keep up with. If you look at the world a few years ago, you would have seen more newspapers and billboards than websites and apps. The ways that you can promote your business and gain attention are changing, and the world is far more focused now than ever on online marketing.

Marketing in 2021 is different from what it used to be. There are plenty of ways – thankfully – that you can practice business promotion in 2021, and promotional cell phone stands are still a thing, too! Marketing has to capture the attention of the customers, potential clients and more to ensure that you appeal to everyone and earn more money for your business. So, with this in mind, here’s how to promote and market your business in 2021!

Image Source: Pexels
  • Use PPC. Google is a machine for advertising, but it would help you to have all the information and tools possible to market with it. Pay per click is going to help your business massively, especially as 85% of the revenue through Google comes from Google Ads as a platform. The growth over the past decade for Google Ads has been massive, and it’s only continuing to grow. When you use PPC, you only pay for what your consumers click on. So, if you have compelling adverts on your website, you will get the clicks through from the right customers!
  • Use Social Media. Advertising has to be able to reach your customers directly, and the best way to do it for most people is to use social media. Everyone who is anyone has social media, and from Twitter to TikTok, most people have some form of social media these days. Utilizing every social media platform you can is important!
  • Online Exhibits. With the pandemic over the past year, you may find that most of your activities have moved online. You can hold online expos to show off your business and then send out freebies to your customers afterwards if you want to continue to make an impact!
  • Email Marketing. There is a lot of talk to say that email marketing is dead, but that can’t be further from the truth. Email marketing is going to continue to make your business reach your customers as you need to. You can get into the inbox of the people who sign up on your website, which will give you a direct “in” with people who have an interest in what you need.
  • Contact Influencers. We’ve all seen the rise of the influencer on TikTok and Instagram. Hiring one of them to use and market your products will help you to make a huge difference with how many people you reach and your sales. Marketing your business is both complicated and easy in 2021 – so make sure that you get it right the first time and you will bring in the money.

Make Some Real Money On TikTok

TikTok has taken the social media world by storm in the last couple of years. It’s where the funniest videos are rotated on Facebook and it’s attracted a massive crowd of video creators. It’s become so big that it’s not just about funny videos anymore, but those with influence and it’s these videos that have led to huge careers in content creation for some TikTok users. The creators came to TikTok for fun and we’re all being exposed to things from new musical numbers to cooking and cleaning hacks – and we all buy into it!

Making money is just the cherry on top of the cake for influencers on TikTok, and there’s a reason that they are all making such great money: their content is valuable. Creators have done so well that businesses are doing the same. You can brand and rebrand your business over and over by using TikTok, and all you need to do is learn how to change your name on TikTok and you’re good to go. If you have a good idea for content you could create, then getting on TikTok is just the smartest thing that you could do with your time this year. So, with this in mind, you need to learn how you can go viral and let your business become an overnight sensation on TikTok while making some real money!

Image Source: Pexels
  • Selling an account. Did you know that people are selling products through their TikTok profiles? Bigger than that, they are also earning in a much bigger way by selling their account as a whole. Imagine growing your followers to huge numbers and selling them to a brand – that’s what is happening. As a brand yourself, you can grow your numbers and followers and give them some insight into your business behind the scenes. You can then sell that account to another business if you plan to upgrade and change things. It’s a great way to add cash to your pocket!
  • Going live. TikTok offers the chance to go live and collect donations from followers when you do it. If you’re a TikTok user, you can buy coins and then give them to others, which then build up and you can cash out. It’s a good way to have a branded flash sale – people can send you TikTok coins and you can convert those to cash money!
  • Sponsorships. As you grow your brand, you can reach out to other influencers on TikTok and have them work for you. They’ll earn an income through your brand sponsorship, and you’ll earn more because their reach could be bigger than yours!
  • Influencer campaigns. Similar to the above, you can sprinkle your products among a range of influencers around the world, and they can then advertise these to others. You can have your influencers test and use your products and then the world on TikTok will see it. Those videos are shared, again and again, further ensuring that you can extend your reach!

Small Business Owners: Put Your Team First To Grow Your Business

You’ve just launched your first business. Your team is your biggest asset. Without hard-working teams, the most successful brands wouldn’t have made it onto the market. Brands such as Apple, which we continue to associate with Steve Jobs, are made by talented individuals (plurals). It’s never just one person. Together, we are stronger and better. A brand without a team dies out. 

Therefore, it makes sense to look after your team. A lot of businesses fail to understand that there’s a high cost to pay when you neglect your team. Every month, 3.6% of workers leave their company. While this may not seem like much, employee turnover affects recruitment costs, productivity, morale, understanding customer acquisition cost, and overall team knowledge. To put it into perspective, a 500 employees company that loses 90 employees in a year, all with an average salary of $65,000, experiences an annual employee turnover cost of approximately $3,000,000. If that is a terrifying thought, you want to find ways of caring for your employees that boost your business budget. 

Create a positive environment

At a time where most companies have moved to virtual offices, you can save a lot of office-related costs when you encourage your team to work remotely. Working from home can feel isolated. Therefore, you need to make every interaction count. However, even at Zoom meetings, you can build a persona that makes your employees feel engaged and cared for. Arrange a time for one-to-ones to touch base with your team. 

Making a point to be presentable even though you’re at home can send the right message across. What does it mean to be presentable in an online meeting? It means being organized about your time and your employees’ time, ensuring there are options in place to capture information for people who are double-booked (recording), and using the best equipment for the job. Remote meetings can get unnecessarily draining when employees struggle to understand what’s being said! 

Make healthy employees your mission

Not every business provides health insurance perks to their teams. But, saving costs on insurance plans is a false economy. Sickness and absenteeism come at a cost. Additionally, employees who struggle with health invoices are likely to accumulate side hustles to pay their bills, making them less productive in the team. You can save yourself and them some troubles by choosing a budget-friendly plan, such as the MEWA health insurance plan, that has them covered. This will reduce stress and uncertainty for your team. 

You can also create a health-focus environment. Encouraging employees to take regular breaks during the day can alleviate stress and burnout risks. It also makes it more manageable for your team to keep their work/life balance and carry out errand tasks without needing to take time out of work. 

Be a mentor to them

Everyone has a professional goal. When you hire someone for a position, you need to consider where they want to be in a few years and what they want to learn. For small businesses, training costs can be challenging. However, mentoring programs are free to set up and can contribute to professional development in a positive way. Listening to your team contributes to their professional development and ensures you can keep growing talent in-house. 

We get it: Managing a budget is tricky for a small business. However, you can’t afford to cut corners when it comes to your team. Putting your team first doesn’t have to break the bank. On the contrary, it can save you a ton of money!