How Google+ Local Can Improve Your Business

When it comes to your business, you are always looking for great way to help it improve. Whether it’s a new product or service, a new marketing campaign or even a new company process, there is always something you can try to make your company more successful.

Creative Commons: Image Source
Creative Commons: Image Source

One of the latest crazes that businesses are implementing is the use of online review sites such asGoogle+ Local. There are many benefits to claiming your business page on different review sites, but claiming your page on Google+ Local can greatly improve your business in the following ways.

It can help you learn what your customers think about your company, products and services.

Knowing what your customers are thinking about your business as a whole as well as your products and services is important to your overall success. When your customers leave a review for your business on Google+ Local, it can help you learn what your company is doing right and what you’re doing wrong. You can then use this information to ensure you continue to provide everything your customers love as well as try and fix the issues your customers don’t love. This will help your company remain successful.

It can help your company’s SEO strategies.

You know that having a successful SEO strategy is important for the success of your online efforts, and claiming your business on Google+ Local will greatly improve your SEO strategies. Having your business page claimed on Google+ Local will allow you to provide additional keywords about your company online. This way, when a search query is performed on your company or on the products or services your company provides, your actual website and your Google+ Local page will appear in the search engine results page (SERP). Now, your customers will be able to visit multiple sites about your business to learn more about what you have to offer, and having multiple sites with strong keywords helps ensure your online efforts are visible.

It can generate traffic to your website.

When you create your profile on Google+ Local, it’s very important that you add a link to your website on the page. You may also want to add a link to your Google+ Local page on your own website. These links provide your web visitors with an easy way to travel between sites, which greatly improves your web traffic on both pages. Plus, linking between each other provides valuable backlinks on both sites, and this is another SEO benefit.

It can generate more business.

Because Google is such a large search engine, most people use it to find the information they’re looking for. Google changed the algorithm it used to perform searches, focusing more on local results instead of general results. Because of this, companies that are using Google+ Local and have a complete profile will end up having their businesses appear in the maps section of the SERP. Since this map shows up at the top of a SERP, it gives your company a better chance of being found and earning business.

Why Your Promotional Flyer Is Going Straight In The Bin – And What You Can Do About It

You have spent a lot of money on a promotional flyer to advertise your business, you have printed it on good quality paper and you have paid a distributor to hand them out all over your city. Unfortunately, as soon as your flyer is pushed through the mail slot of 99% of doors, it will be headed straight to the rubbish bin or recycling box. All of your hard work has gone to waste to create something that will probably only used by your customers to line the bottom of their birdcages.

License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source

Why are your promotional flyers destined for the bin? Is there anything you can do about it?

Take a Close Look at Your Flyers – Are They the Best They Can Be?

Take a look at the flyers that you have been distributing and ask yourself whether you can really blame your customers for throwing them away without a second thought. Do they stand out from all of the other advertisements, or are they boring and ordinary? It can be difficult to look at your flyers objectively because you are emotionally invested in your business, but try to look at them from the perspective of someone who has never heard of your company or what you do. Would the flyer pique their interest?

Unfortunately when you are distributing flyers for your business you will have a lot of other promotional mail to compete with. Unless your flyer has a great offer or is very interesting and eye-catching, you can’t really blame most people for recycling it with the pile of other junk mail.

Tips for Improving Your Flyers

The good news is that there are a number of ways you can improve your flyers and make it more likely that your customers will pay attention to them and save them. Here are a few tips to apply to your flyers to help them avoid a one-way trip to the rubbish bin.

  • Make the largest text eye catching. The headline or the largest text on the page should be something that makes the reader look twice. Too many flyers simply state the name of the company, which won’t catch the customer’s interest.
  • Use a large and impactful font for this big headline, which will make it more readable and make it stand out in a pile of papers from across the room.
  • Most of the time, people look at images first and then read text. Use an interesting main graphic or a vibrant colour image to grab the attention of the reader. Make sure that it is obvious how the image is related to the text.
  • Follow up the headline with strong and simple points that outline what you have to offer. Focus on the benefit of your product or service for the customer… what’s in it for them?
  • Avoid too much text. People will get bored reading the flyer and you will lose their interest.
  • Include a call to action at the end. Perhaps you want them to visit your website and sign up, or request a free report, or order a free trial. A leaflet or a flyer with no call to action is a wasted opportunity.
  • Take a random sampling of all of the other common flyers that come through your door. Does your flyer look like every other one? Think about how you can make it stand out, such as using an unusual colour or printing it on a shiny or textured surface.

These are just a few of the main ways that you can make it less likely that your promotional flyer will end up going straight in the bin and instead be read by your potential customers.

About the Author: Paula Whately is a blogger and entrepreneur in London who recently had a new flyer designed for her business. With the new design in flyer distribution, London customers were calling her at a much higher rate than usual.

Old Tricks And Traditional Skills Still Vital To 21st Businesses

You would think, with this being the bright shiny and thoroughly wired 21st Century that the more traditional skills associated with the secretarial world would be thoroughly redundant. However, despite the fact that our lives are dominated by computers, tablets, Smartphone’s and a whole range of peripherals and apps that can be added to them, some traditional skills remain in high demand.  From copy typing to audio typing and transcription services, traditional skills still remain in high demand. The latter, in particular, remains a crucial part of content creation for many industries, from humble minute taking to full scale TV transcriptions. Transcription services today are also an important feature for conference organisers and transcription offers a number of significant advantages.

License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source

The Bigger Picture

Recording and filming any event was, in the past, a difficult task which required a significant number of professionals and an equally large (and cumbersome) amount of equipment. Today any event, from a pop concert to conference can be (and is) recorded on a phone and the film is often uploaded to the web in seconds. However convenient this may seem it does not replace the need for accurate and professional filming or transcription. In large conference centres where a number of speakers may be talking at one time, or where question and answer sessions are part of the presentation, both professional filming and transcription still have significant advantages.  Unlike audio or video files, fully transcribed events offer users a fast look up for significant points and sections. With transcriptions now available digitally, the simple use of the find function can take you straight to the point in a way that no amount of film footage can.

Old Skills and New Methods Combined

Post event publications of transcribed documents have a number of advantages. In terms of web publication, transcription offers a handy SEO tool. The broader the scope of your written content, the more opportunities for lead generation via search engines; again in a way which means that video content alone will not be as beneficial.  Also the more traditional print press, while happy to receive audio or visual material, will often rely on transcribed versions of a presentation or conference to make their own jobs easier and making things easy for journalists means they’ll be able to find time to fit your piece in.

Applied Technology

Although transcription is an old skill, long pre-dating the internet, the technological revolution has made the process of finding reliable transcription services easier and more affordable. Most transcription services operate online and transcribers themselves can be located just about anywhere in the world. This has driven down the costs of professional transcription and can open up opportunities for these services. This means any content you need to promote in overseas markets can be quickly made available in a variety of formats or languages. The process is speeded up to almost light speed thanks to modern technology. This gives modern businesses a greater and faster reach than in the past, making it possible for firms of any size to go global.

New Opportunities

While transcription services offer advantages to a range of industries they offer specific advantages to conference organisers in any field. Post conference transcripts can be marketed alongside podcasts as part of a full package for both attendees needing to refer back to the conference and as a valuable product in their own right to sell to a wider market. Working with a professional and established provider makes sense in this context and planning ahead will also make the process run more smoothly. Contacting a transcription service provider well in advance and involving them in the planning of the event will help you both to create a package that suits your needs which will result in a quick and efficient turnaround on the end product. Despite the massive advances in technology and the opportunities that it has opened up for business it seems that some of the oldest tricks are still the best.

About the Author: Pipa Rose is a freelance writer who has a keen interest in business. While technology has made business presentations and conferences far easier and more accessible for many, she believes that many traditional skills such as transcription services still play a crucial role.

A Day in The Life of a Wall Street Trader

If you’re interested in becoming a Wall Street trader, get ready for an action-packed career that’s full of ups and downs. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the job outlook is set to grow by about 15% through the year 2020, which is about as fast as average. Also, although the median salary is just over $70,000 per year, there are significant fluctuations depending on individual success and general market conditions. Keep reading to learn more about what you might do during a typical day of trading on Wall Street.

License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source

Getting Ready for the Day

Because you may be trading in international markets, expect to be an early riser, ready to sit at a desk on the trading floor by about 6:30 every morning. On your way to work, you might use a tablet device or smartphone to read the latest versions of financial newspapers, but as soon as the commute is over, it’s time to hit the trading floor.

What Does a Trading Floor Look Like?

If you’ve ever seen news coverage of the trading floor, your impression might be that it’s all about people yelling at each other and hoping that the markets close in a favorable way. Although these high-pressure trading floors do exist, most of them are more low-key. While working as a trader, you’ll probably notice that most trading floors are big rooms filled with rows of long desks.

Watching the Markets

Traders from the same group often sit near each other and spend their time gazing at monitors that chronicle what the markets are doing. Some traders have several monitors so they can minimize the time spent switching between different windows. As you sit down at your desk, you may have five or more monitors to watch throughout the day.

Besides keeping an eye on the monitors that broadcast news about the markets, you’ll also probably access a financial information service called Bloomberg. It’ll tell you about any stocks you’re interested in via real-time information. The prices for securities changes by the second, but Bloomberg has features that allow you to look at how stocks in certain sectors are performing. That’s particularly useful if you’re a trader who specializes in certain industries like technology or energy.

Making the Trades

Some Wall Street traders deal with hundreds of individual stocks on a daily basis. To make things easier, you’ll use a specially designed platform that allows you to place orders quickly and also look at how pending orders are progressing.

What About Breaks?

Most successful Wall Street traders go to great lengths to make sure they don’t miss any important happenings. This means limiting your bathroom breaks so they’re as short as possible and also having lunch brought to your desk by a secretary, so you can wolf it down while still staying informed of developments.

The Close of the Day

Monitoring the markets is a constant necessity, and even if you see some gains, it’s often hard to relax, due to a slight paranoia that things could change in an instant. Around 5 o’clock, your day on the trading floor is done, but if you’re serious about staying competitive, you’ll continue expanding your knowledge about the financial industry even during off-hours.

As you prepare dinner and get ready for bed, any bits of free time might be filled with the same kind of analysis you started your day with and got engrossed in all day on the trading floor, only so you can feel informed when you wake up and do it all over again.

About the Author: Author Jena Daniels blogs for business sites. Interested in combining your interest in trading with a successful business? One option to prepare for your career is to get an mba degree online from Pepperdine.

BRAND PSYCHOLOGY: Why Psychological Factors Matter

Are you inside the mind of your potential customers? When it comes to branding, you have to be. Think of branding as a Jedi mind trick. In order to do it right, you have to know what to present and how to present it, as well as why it’ll work to get people to convert. Is it easy to do? Of course not! That’s why you need to bring on a team of experienced professionals to handle your branding, logo design or rebranding.

License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source

Let’s say your spouse wants you to clean the garage out. You hate doing it. However, it was presented as an offer you can’t refuse. In fact, somehow you were not only convinced to clean out the garage, but sell your old “junk”, as  your spouse calls it, which has dashed your hopes of finishing that long-neglected project tucked away in the corner. How did it happen? That’s the type of magic you need to use to create a logo that will, in many cases, become your brand.

Every detail of your brand and logo design plays a role in its success or demise. That includes colors, design and naming. As your spouse likely did, sit down and plan out how to get what you want. Then, use the professionals to make it happen.

3 factors to remember about branding

There are three main components to remember when it comes to creating your brand. These are the most important factors to consider in terms of the psychological impact it will (or will not) have on your potential customer.

Set the standards

The first thing you need to do is to sit down and design brand standards for your logo design. In other words, you don’t want to walk into a local business print shop and ask them to design a logo for you. That’s not enough. You need to have a well-considered plan that outlines what this brand will do. Consider:

—     What it does and doesn’t tell the customer.
—     What is says about your company.
—     How it describes your service or product.
—     How it represents you.

Having a plan like this helps to give the designer more information about what you actually want and expect from this process.

Get your name right

You may have a company name at this point, but even if you do, reconsider it before you launch into logo design. Think about all of the combinations of your name, how it will be used and any questions it may put in the mind of the customer. What’s your tagline? How do you want people to instantly think of you? If you don’t know, don’t worry. If your budget allows, your logo design team can help you to create both.

Think color

Colors have meaning. When it comes to choosing brand colors, consider the following:

—      Yellows engender optimism.
—      Blues are great for gaining trust and are seen as dependable and strong
—      Reds are excitement inducers, bold and youthful.
—      Purples are seen as creative, wise and imaginative.
—      Pinks are friendly, confident and cheerful.
—      Green conjures thoughts of health, growth and peace.
—      Light colors, including grays and pastels, create calm and balanced emotions.

The factor to remember here is that every component of your brand needs to communicate a message to your audience. For that Jedi mind trick to work, you have to think about the psychological aspects of your brand’s design. That’s why having experts can help.