tech

Offering a wide range of payment systems is important for businesses these days. There are more ways to pay for goods and services than ever before and it can be frustrating for customers when you don’t accept their preferred method of payment. So, you need to make sure that you are set up for things like contactless and mobile payments. However, a lot of businesses focus on new payment options but neglect the old-fashioned methods, like paying over the phone. 

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Most young people think that paying over the phone is an outdated way to do things and there is no need for businesses to offer this option anymore. After all, isn’t it easier to make a direct card payment or use mobile payment apps? It might seem that way, but there are actually a lot of benefits to paying over the phone and some people still prefer that option, so your business should offer it. Here’s why phone payments are still an important option to include.

The Older Generation May Prefer Them

Young people are used to technology and they will usually use the most up-to-date payment methods. However, a lot of people in the older generation do not necessarily trust things like contactless payment and they might not be confident using an online payment form. They prefer to do things the way that they have done in the past. Offering a phone payment option makes them feel more comfortable and can increase your sales with this demographic. 

Phone Payments Build Trust

There are a lot of scammers online, so people may feel uneasy about putting their card details into a website that they don’t know. This can be a big problem when taking your business online and it may affect sales. But phone payments can help build trust and give people an option that they feel more comfortable with. It gives you more legitimacy if they can speak to a person on the phone, so people will be less concerned about getting scammed. 

They’re Easy To Integrate

Businesses sometimes avoid using phone payments because they think that it takes a lot of work to set up and involves using a completely different system, but that isn’t the case. If you use an integrated virtual terminal system, you can accept payments via mail or phone as well as taking standard card payments. All of the payments are taken on one centralized system, so it’s easy to track payments from different sources. This makes it quick and easy to set up phone payments. 

It Increases Customer Interaction

Customer interaction is important for building relationships and getting repeat customers. Connecting with people online is a good way to form those relationships, but it’s not a substitute for more direct contact, like speaking over the phone. Taking phone payments gives you a great opportunity to increase customer interaction and demonstrate amazing customer service. 

Even though phone payments have been around for a long while, that doesn’t mean they are obsolete. If your business doesn’t accept payments over the phone, you could be missing out on these great benefits.

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Working from home is a challenge and requires you to adjust your management technique, especially if you’re in control of a sales team. 

Fortunately, making it work is easier than you think. In this article, you’ll learn some of the techniques that you can use to improve the efficiency of your remote selling team, even if you’re all working away from the office. 

Invest In Shared Resources

Don’t assume that every member of your sales team knows how to work from home. Many won’t. 

It’s a good idea, therefore, to invest time and energy into creating shared resources that everyone can use quickly and easily when they need them. Set up a Google Docs account and make important instructional articles publicly available. These storage systems make it easy for remote workers to access the information they need at any time of day, regardless of their time zone. 

Improve Trust In Your Relationships

It can be difficult to establish trust with a remote team. When they can’t observe you physically, they can find it hard to build a connection with you. 

The trick here is to improve communication between team members as much as you can. As a sales manager, you have to lead from the front. Your interactions should set the standard for the rest of the team. 

Where possible, implement group Zoom conversations every morning. Ask team members to all make short contributions that benefit other members. Where possible, encourage cross-chat, for instance, between senior sales reps and new recruits. 

Be Clear About Your Expectations

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Sales reps like it when managers set expectations. Research shows that they are much more likely to feel engaged in their work. 

Make sure that each rep has a sales quota and then use software to track their performance. Make it clear what results you expect on average so that each member of the team can strive for excellence. 

If there’s a problem with a sales rep’s performance, you’ll need to hop on a video call with them to figure out whether there is a way to resolve the problem. Be clear on your ground rules for calling cold prospects and how sales reps should be representing your brand. If possible, create a system that allows you to record calls to ensure compliance to protect your brand. 

Use Team Communication Tools

Sales reps shouldn’t be isolated, even if they’re working remotely. As in other sales situations, they should have other reps around them, showing them the ropes. 

It’s sometimes a good idea to get sales reps to “shadow” more senior members of your team. This way, they can observe the sales techniques that work, and those that don’t. 

You can also schedule meetings that allow your team to get involved in your sales strategy. You could have sessions in which you brainstorm new sales ideas. 

Make sure that you have a chat app that sales reps can use to talk to each other throughout the day. This can help to replace those essential chats that employees have besides the watercooler in a real office.

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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.

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!