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How do courier companies deal with cold weather

Running a courier company is a lucrative business opportunity which is not without its own set of challenges. Apart from keeping time, working like clockwork and detailed planning one of the major challenges you could be faced with is dealing with the weather. The blazing heat in summer, rain in the monsoon and the cold in winter, each season presents its own set of challenges.

courier service — Image by flgr / Flickr

How do you deal with the challenges posed by cold weather? Here is a list to help you and your employees cope with the vagaries of winter…

Keeping Your Vehicles in excellent condition

Your vans, cars and other vehicles help you get around and deliver the goods (literally). You should regularly check your tyres, oil and water. This will prevent you from getting stuck with a break down in the cold.

Getting a screen wash is an essential when you work outdoors in today’s air and environment. Keep it topped up. Going without ensuring that you have a full tank of gas could be something that you would want to avoid. A good move also is ensuring that road salt is applied to any surfaces exposed to the elements.

A smooth and trouble free commute will help you deliver the goods on time in any weather!

Stay on Call

Keep cell phone woes at bay. Keep your cell phone fully charged, and because batteries have a life of their own and die without much warning, it is always a sensible thing to carry a second battery and your battery charger.

Ensuring Your Employees Stay Warm and Safe

A courier company is work force driven and it involves using people at all stages including delivery. This is why your employees must remain safe and warm. Here is a checklist you need to hand over to them and tell them to ensure that they use it:

Blankets and warm clothes: Blanket to keep warm becomes necessary if you happen to over use your auto’s heating system. Not only do people suffer in the cold but you will also put an enormous strain on your vehicle. Blankets and warm clothes are absolute life savers in such a situation.

In case you are trapped overnight in a snow storm or worse a sleeping bag a useful item. Keeping your body temperature high enough to stop you from freezing is important and the good thing is a sleeping bag doesn’t take much room.

Shovel: Carry a shovel just in case you get trapped in by the snow. For courier jobs that take you delivering goods in the colder zones, when snow falls while you are taking a short break or grabbing a bite you might come out to your van and find it surrounded by deep snow. A shovel will come in handy.

Food and Supplies: Spare food and drink supplies are always to keep you warm and alert.

Cold weather is often challenging for your on-the-road staffs, but with proper precautions, you can be sure that your business is up and running, even in winter.

Using Kiosks to Develop Small Business

Kiosks have been around since 1977. Since then, kiosks haven been used globally for interactive photos and internet portals. You’ve seen how the kiosk helps larger businesses. Airlines, grocery stores, and other retailers use them to help cut down on employee costs and processing times for customers. The companies spend less and customers save time. It’s a win-win situation. You may have thought that kiosks are meant for big businesses with a large clientele, but kiosks can be just as helpful for small businesses. You don’t need a high-volume flow in order to take advantage of the kiosk’s many perks. Here are several ways that small businesses benefit from kiosks.

1. 24-hour services without employees

If you wish you could provide services for more hours of the day, consider the kiosk as a way to meet customer needs for longer hours and your need to cut back on employee hours. A kiosk could be used to help customers with making orders or payments without any human help.

2. Vending works just fine

If your company sells standardized products, consider a vending machine. If you’ve seen iPhones sold in kiosks at the airport, you’ve seen that even high-priced items can have their place in a vending machine.

3. Be in two places at once

If you’re on the brink of opening a second location but just can’t quite meet the budget requirements, you may consider setting up a kiosk instead. A kiosk could open up a clientele demographic by being available in an area that’s not close to your original location. Even if you sell larger items, you can still take mail or delivery orders through the kiosk. You cut back on rent, employee, and insurance costs.

4. Address routine procedure needs

If customers need to consistently manage their accounts, kiosks can address those needs and make your services more convenient than the competition’s services.

5. Share advice with clients

You don’t have to train your employees to have a Ph.D. in your product. Instead, invest in a kiosk that can be set up in your store. For example, multiple U.S. wine stores use wine advice kiosks to inform customers on wine purchases. Customers are able to scan a bar code from wine bottles that reveal the details of the wine — food pairings, seasonal information, and background can be accessed. You can even cross-sell other products, which makes it possible to cross advertise with other businesses. Especially if you have several product choices, a kiosk can help consumers feel confident in their selections.

6. Job applications

If you have too much on your plate with customers, partners, and you have limited employee help, you can use the kiosk as a built-in HR department. The kiosk can take job applications and help to keep records.

7. Receptionist replacement

Just look at how many grocery store customers prefer the self-service check-out lines. People are less and less interested in dealing with a human face. Humanists may take this personally, but technology marches on. If you could provide the services of a receptionist without the price of receptionist’s salary, you could save a lot of money. Since customers are more and more comfortable with computers, this is a real possibility.

Today’s economy invites small businesses to get innovative and it rewards innovation. Think outside the box by getting your own box. The kiosk system is just getting tapped into and you could be the next beneficiary of technology’s benefits.

About the Author: Haley Brown writes for several business sites. Check out Phoenixkiosk website to get information on desktop kiosks for your business.

Living the Solopreneur Life

You have a great idea for business and you decide to strike out on your own. But your dream isn’t to build a conglomerate with hundreds or even thousands of employees. Your dream is to work for yourself. Becoming a solopreneur is the way to realize your dream of going into business for yourself.

Independence

When you are a solopreneur, the vision for your company is your vision. You don’t have to run each idea by a board of directors or gain the approval of stockholders. If you don’t like the direction your company is taking, you can change it.

While you may need to appeal to customers or clients to gain their business, you choose the means and strategy that you employ to do so. In fact, you even choose which potential clients or customers you choose to target. If for some reason certain customers or clients become more trouble than they’re worth, you can drop them without the need to justify your decision – except to your bottom line.

solopreneur
Image by Mikael Altemark

Flexible Schedule

A common misperception is that solopreneurs snooze until noon and lounge around all day in their jammies once they’ve made it out of bed. Anyone who actually works as a solopreneur knows better. In fact, one danger facing many solopreneurs is that they are nearly always working.

Nonetheless, one of the great advantages of becoming a solopreneur is the freedom to dictate your own schedule. Of course, you need to be accessible to customers or clients, but your actual work schedule is your own. If you need or want to take time out to run an important errand or just enjoy a beautiful sunny afternoon, you can do that, without making up an excuse to your boss.

Making It Work

It may seem ironic, but every solopreneur needs help to make his or her life work. Going it alone in business doesn’t mean doing it all by yourself. Knowing when to get help is one mark of a savvy solopreneur.

If you’re a writer and savvy about the web and social networking, it may make sense for you to create and maintain your own website and social networking presence. On the other hand, if you are a nutritionist, your time and efforts may be better served by concentrating on attracting and keeping clients – and contracting with a professional web designer and one or more social media experts.

Clerical tasks may be another area where delegation is a wise strategy for a solopreneur. Virtual assistants can take care of tasks ranging from writing correspondence to maintaining your schedule. Contracting the services of a virtual assistant need not involve paying someone full time; many virtual assistants have several clients for whom they only work a few hours per week.

Isolation is another problem faced by many solopreneurs. Find an organization that addresses the type of work that you do and attend meetings and networking events. Take your computer to a coffee shop or to the library to work for a morning or an afternoon. Take advantage of the flexibility and freedom of working solo to meet a friend for lunch or surprise your partner with a romantic dinner.

On the other hand, you may also need to be firm with family and friends who believe you’re freely available to run errands for them. Kindly but firmly remind them that your working hours are just as important as their time in the office or at school. Sweeten the message by reminding them that the sooner you’re finished with your work, the sooner you can enjoy their company.

For Further Reading

The Five Rules of Solopreneur Success
inc.com/marla-tabaka/the-5-rules-of-solopreneur-success.html
How to Become a Successful Solopreneur
chasethepaper.com/2011/how-to-become-a-successful-solopreneur/
International Virtual Assistants Association
ivaa.org/
Three Strategies to Help Solopreneurs Tackle the work/Life Tug of War (and Enjoy More Life!)
selfgrowth.com/articles/3-strategies-to-help-solopreneurs-tackle-the-worklife-tug-of-war-and-enjoy-more-life
What Is a Solopreneur?
freefrombroke.com/what-is-a-solopreneur/

About the Author: Guest post contributed by Stacy Pruitt, a freelance finance writer. Stacy writes about entrepreneurship, advanced trading and forex indicators.

How to Use Twitter Hashtags – 4 Simple Tips

You might think that businesses are so ‘au fait’ with Twitter as part of their marketing strategy that they’ve got nothing new to learn – right?

Wrong.

The fact of the matter is, they still aren’t maximising the potential of their tweets. You know why? Because they don’t get #hashtags.

Image by joe0153

A Twitter hashtag is essentially a keyword phrase or topic with a hash sign in front of it to identify it, and it works by connecting users who are talking about the same topic so their tweets appear in the same stream. Hashtags are searchable in Twitter search so users can easily find the topic they’re interested in – if it’s popular enough it will be deemed ‘trending’.

But what you really need to know is how you can use them to boost your Twitter profile.

So here are some simple, actionable ways you can use hashtags to your advantage and move your Twitter marketing forward:

Be Original

When creating your hashtag you’ve got to be original both to stand out and to ensure your chosen hashtag hasn’t already got a lot of activity around it. The easy way to do this is by using the Twitter search engine to check out the number of hits your hashtag gets. If it gets too many you’re better off selecting something different – it will mean less competition and you will run a lower risk of people outside your target market detracting from the conversation.

Don’t Saturate

Pace yourself! It’s important to tweet your hashtag regularly, but don’t swamp your followers with it -people will start to ignore it and it could be perceived as spam which is totally the opposite of the desired effect.

Put it into Context

This might sound obvious, but let your audience know exactly what your hashtag means. You could choose to create a hashtag with a self-explanatory name, explain what it means in a tweet, or provide a link to a page with a more detailed article or description – particularly good for events and products.

Add value

Ideally you want to give your followers something valuable with your hashtags. This most often applies to when you are using hashtags to advertise an event like a webinar, competition or product release. Make sure you decide on a single hashtag to represent your event early on so you can use it throughout the event promotion. Choose a hashtag that’s got a bit of pizzazz to grab attention – keep it short and snappy.

Remind your followers of the event regularly – and by that I mean several times daily. However mix it up with tweets on other topics and keep it light-hearted not pushy. Make sure people are aware that using your chosen hashtag will mean everyone can track anything related to that event easily – demonstrate its value.

So if you’re one of the many entrepreneurs who aren’t sure how hashtags can help their marketing campaigns – these tips are a sound starting point for you. Get to grips with these simple basics and you’ll be well on your way to being a hit hashtag success!

About James T Noble: James makes small businesses bigger. He’s worked with some of the world’s largest brands and companies to market their products and services online – including Disney, Microsoft, 20th Century Fox, Virgin, Coca Cola, MTV and many others. Find out more and read business growth tips at http://www.JamesTNoble.com

Writers vs. Industry Experts: How to Make Sure You Hiring Both in Your Writer

It is no secret that guest posting is becoming more and more popular for businesses. While marketing the content on your own website is important, it’s also important that you have content spread out across the web by contributing guest article. Doing so offers several very large benefits:

Your content is put in front of the eyes of a new audience interested in your industry.
You get to show off your expertise through great articles.
You will form connections with other companies across the web.
Your article will likely get extra promotion if it is posted on a site with a greater following.
You will get a backlink for your article; thus improving your SEO.
If you create a partnership, you could likely get content from other websites. This will help cut down on the workload for you while bringing a new audience (the audience of the author or the company where the author came from) to your site.

hiring a writer

Because contributing guest articles does offer so many features, more and more companies are starting to hire full-time writers. In the majority of cases these writers work from home and are given a certain number of articles to write per month or per quarter. It’s also important that if your company is going to hire writers you’re hiring writers that can write about topics related to your industry. This then begs that inevitable question: Am I hiring someone who is a good writer, someone who is an expert in my field, or someone who can do both?

The Writer’s Your Company Needs and Why It’s Tough to Find Them

Most company owners will tell you that hiring is one of the most stressful aspects of running a business, especially if you’re still in the startup stages. It can be tough to interview for a position that you yourself don’t know much about, and this is the boat that many companies are in when it comes time to hire writers to contribute guest posts because the professions is still fairly new.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad writers our there. Everyone wants in on the guest-posting phenomenon because it usually allows you to work from home—and writing is easy. Anybody can write a page or two about a topic because all they have to do is Google it and find some information, right? Wrong. It is this mentality that has made hiring great writers difficult for businesses.

Even if you can manage to find someone who really is creative and can really write, you need to make sue that they can write about your industry. You don’t want your writer simply spinning articles—you want your writer out there showing new audiences that your company has original ideas and can analyze top industry news.

How to Make Sure Your Writers Know What to Write and Not Just How

Below are a few steps to ensure that you have this type of writer representing your company:

1. Experience Matters When It Comes to Writers

It can be very difficult for someone right out of college to understand how to write blog content and to understand fully a subject matter, making experience important. For example, college graduates usually graduate with an English degree, making him/her a great writer, or a business (or any industry) degree, making him/her and expert in the field. However, you can absolutely take a college graduate and give them a chance to get that experience. It is highly recommended that you hire them on as an intern or freelance writer first to see if a). He/she actually likes the work or b). He/she can handle both the writing style and the content.

2. If You See a Great Article, Do Some Research on the Author

Many guest contributors don’t actually work for a company, but are simply freelancing or trying to gain visibility for his/her own personal website. Therefore, if you see an article that you think is great, spend some time doing research on the author. Read the byline to see if the writer already works for a company, and then find him/her on social media. If you see that he/she has written several articles like the one that caught your eye, reach out and make a connection!

3. Give Topics/Websites That Require a Writer to Read the News In Your Industry

As a full-time writer myself, I know that one of the most difficult aspects of the job is coming up with great topics. If you’re hiring someone new to the business and they aren’t overly familiar with your industry yet, tell him/her what you want them to write. This will force your writer to read the news and begin to find websites that offer great information. Let them know where they can find the authoritative voices online.

4. Talk With Experts In the Field about Great Writers

Any business that has gone through hiring guest contributors before will understand how difficult it can be to find good writers. Talk with them and see if they know any freelancer writers who might be interested in doing work for you. This will be a bit more difficult because companies typically don’t want their writers writing for the competition, but it’s usually worth a try!

5. Make Sure the Writer Has Experience With Internet Writing.

Internet writing is very different than other types of writing because you need to focus on SEO, promotion through social media, blog style, and target audience. Although this is not going to guarantee that a writer is an expert in your niche, it will guarantee that the writer understands how online content works.

Have you hired writers to guest post in return for backlinks to your site? How did you make sure that you had someone who could write as well as someone who understood the buzz in your industry?

About the Author: Amanda DiSilvestro is a graduate of Illinois State University. Although she graduated with an English Education degree, she found herself working as a full-time blogger at Highervisibility.com, nationally recognized as one of the top seo firms in the country. Connect with HigherVisibility on Twitter to learn more!