5 Ways to Convert Your Garage Into a Home Office

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article | 5 Ways to Convert Your Garage Into a Home Office

If you work from home or if run your own business, a garage conversion could be a great way to add a home office to your property, saving yourself the added expenses of rent or overhead.

Garages are enclosed spaces where cars or other items are stored, so they can be ideally repurposed for other uses. And because you are not actually building from scratch, you may not need to apply for planning permission, but you should confirm with your local council to be safe.

Below are some important tips to keep in mind when creating a home office out of your garage.

1. Clear the space

To create your dream office, clean and remove everything you currently have in the garage.

Find new storage options for bicycles, garden tools, car accessories, and Christmas decorations, or store them carefully in boxes that you can discreetly store elsewhere.

You should also thoroughly clean the garage before you do anything else. Make sure that there are no cobwebs or car lubricants left when setting up your new office space.

Part of clearing the space may include clearing land. You may be surprised at how much room you have in your backyard when you use a Forestry Mulching service. You may even find that you have the space to install an outbuilding for your office space. 

2. Be creative with lighting

When you change your garage space into a home office, you should be as creative as possible. Consider your garage a blank canvas to repurpose it as best as possible.

Garages are typically have the worst lighting, so make sure that your new home office is well lit.

I strongly recommend buying inexpensive lighting fixtures if your garage is not exposed to direct sunlight during business hours.

A creative way to add light into your office is to paint it with bright colours and/or use creative bright patterns. This alone gives the office a colourful and uplifting mood.

3. Make it comfortable and secure

As you are repurposing your garage into a home office, remember to make it as comfortable and as secure as possible. This means making it less susceptible to outside weather conditions. For example, you may want to replace the existing garage door with a modern insulated garage door, so that your office remains warm and cosy during cold months.

As an added advantage, a modern insulated garage door will provide extra security for your tools and equipment when you are not at the office. On the plus side, this type of door will be a strong deterrent to thieves.

Finally, you should also invest in a good heater and fan to be comfortable during all seasons.

4. Design your new space

Even though one of the reasons for repurposing a garage into a home office is to reduce the cost of overhead and rent, you still want your new office to be a great space to work in, and to reflect your personal taste.

Of course, you can simply invest in an ergonomic chair and desk, but why not take the opportunity to design a really nice home office?

Personalise your new workspace with a workstation, relaxation sofa, and an entertainment system. You can also add some practical details such as rugs, framed pictures, and throw pillows.

5. Setup and work

Make sure you have reliable and effective technologies that will make it easy to do your work.

Many households now have wireless networks, but often the wireless signal is weak or absent. To solve this problem, buy additional routers or wireless signal amplifiers to boost the network environment in your new home office.

If necessary, invest in higher-quality data storage, processing and printing technologies.

Furthermore, wire everything to keep cables clean and to have minimal interference.

Finally, converting your garage into a home office is both doable and easy. Try the tips in the article and see if you can put your garage to good use.

6 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore This Year (and Beyond!)

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, 6 SEO Trends You Can't Ignore This Year (and Beyond!)

Whether you’re a business owner or a marketing manager, you’ve probably heard about the importance of SEO for your company on more than one occasion. Maybe you’ve even already put in the leg work toward kickstarting your SEO and creating a solid plan to grow your online presence.

But, having an SEO plan in place isn’t enough. It needs to constantly be looked at, tweaked, and changed in order to fit with trends and algorithm changes. Google made headlines in 2019 with its BERT algorithm update, and the search engine shows no signs of slowing down on changing the way it promotes pages and content.

That’s just one example of how quickly things can change and how fast technology moves. If your company isn’t keeping up with it by allowing for an adaptable SEO strategy and by using quality SEO services, it won’t take long for you to fall behind in your marketing efforts.

So, what are some of the trends you need to keep up with in the world of SEO, in order to stay relevant?

1.  User-Focused Content

For years, you’ve likely focused on keyword strategy and link-building. While those things aren’t just going to disappear overnight, it’s important to start shifting the way you create content. For example, with Google’s ever-changing algorithms and people’s desire to form more relationships with businesses, rather than just be target demographics, content is going to have to focus more on user intent.

It’s not going to be enough to piece together words and phrases people might search for. Even keyword research tools may become less useful as time goes on.

So, what can your business do to keep up with the change in where content is going? Listen to your customers, clients, and followers. Focus on their questions, concerns, and comments through every aspect of their journey with your company, whether they use your product/service or not. By really listening to what people are saying about your business, you can hone in on what they’re looking for, and develop your content accordingly.

2. High-Quality Content

It’s no coincidence that the top two spots on this list focus solely on the content of your website. Content is king for a reason, after all.

Not only is it important to shift your content more toward the reader, but it’s equally important to make sure that content is readable.

What does that mean?

Simply put, if the content you’re pushing out on a regular basis isn’t easy to understand, it’s going to start to rank poorly. Google might not be advanced enough to play the role of editor yet, but there’s no doubt that day is coming, soon.

In the past, releasing new content regularly was a good tactic for boosting your rankings. While updating your content regularly is still a must-do, it’s not enough to put together poorly-written pieces just for the sake of a ranking. Instead, your mindset should be to have the best content on the web, consistently. If you don’t feel that someone on your team has the writing skills that will continue to get you noticed, it’s worth it to hire professional writers, even on a freelance basis.

3. Managing Your Reputation

As more businesses and websites compete for high-ranking spots, your reputation will start to play a big part in where you’re found on that list. Google will look at the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of a business based on its digital impression.

You should only be publishing content about things you know. With words like “fake news” trending in today’s society, it’s easy for people to be skeptical about things they read online, so you have to prove yourself as a trustworthy source of information. Always double-check what’s being published to make sure it’s accurate and true. One false statistic or exaggerated claim can end up causing a lot of damage.

Your reputation will also be scrutinized when it comes to negative comments and reviews posted about your business online. Negative comments may have deterred potential customers away before. But, now? They could turn Google off from giving your site a high ranking.

If you have other people writing for you or contributing pieces of information to your website, it’s just as important to make sure they have a solid reputation, too. Quoting someone who has been proven to be a fraud or someone with no authority in a particular subject could make your content (and business) seem just as ill-informed.

So, do your research, write what you know, and work hard to preserve positive customer experiences.

4. Focus Your Attention on Mobile

Did you know that 60% of Google searches are done on a mobile device? Or, that over 2 billion people use their smartphone exclusively to access the Internet?

If you’ve been ignoring optimizing your website for mobile, it’s time to make it a priority. Mobile search is only going to become more popular over time thanks to a society on the go, and consumers are growing used to instant gratification. If your website doesn’t load quickly on a phone or is impossible to navigate, they’re going to turn away in a matter of seconds and look elsewhere.

It’s worth it to higher graphic designers or web designers who specialize in mobile web development to make sure your site is easy to work through, even on a smartphone. It used to be the norm to create a site on a desktop and later optimize it for mobile. Now, the trends are showing us that it may be time to start flip-flopping that old rule of thumb.

5. Building Your Brand

More companies are starting to focus on paid advertising, especially on social media. There was a time where spending very little on social media could get your business heavily-noticed. Now that the practice is becoming more saturated, the ROI is reduced. It’s also likely that the cost will go up, so you’ll have to spend more to get less.

Chances are, you’re going to have to continue to spend something on social advertising, just to stay relevant. But, it shouldn’t be where you focus all of your attention. Instead, shift your goals toward building your brand and promoting brand awareness.

Both Google and Bing have made it known that linkless mentions of your business are used as ranking signals. So, the more people that are talking about your company online, the better.

When you utilize social media listening, you can pay attention to how often your brand is being talked about and what people are saying. It also gives you a great opportunity to interact directly with customers and followers of your business. When you give your business a personality by talking directly with your audience, you’re developing trust. That can help you to stand out among competitors who are simply following the normal trends with canned responses and limited social interaction.

6. Voice Search Optimization (VSEO)

By 2022, voice-based shopping is expected to reach up to $40 billion. That’s just one of the staggering stats associated with this phenomenon that continues to grow in importance. VSEO is huge among teenagers and young adults, so it’s undoubtedly going to take over the next generation of searchers.

What does that mean for your business? Since people are asking more direct questions via voice (and typically doing so using full sentences), you’re going to have to consider exactly how those questions will be asked.

What makes VSEO different from traditional search is that when someone is typing, they’re more likely to use snippets of a phrase, or just one to two words in order to get the information they want. Since searching via voice tends to feel more conversational, they’re going to use longer questions and phrases. Those same questions and phrases need to be brought up in your content in order to be seen. Think about how most questions start, with the same few words:

  • How?
  • Why?
  • What?
  • When?

If your content isn’t including those key terms or the answers to the questions people are asking, you’re going to become less relevant when it comes to your overall ranking.

So Many Changes, So Little Time

With technology changing so quickly and Google coming out with new algorithms all the time, it can feel as though it’s hard to keep up with the latest SEO trends. But, there’s one major theme that you can probably see through all of these trends: The user should be your focus.

When it comes to the content you produce, the trustworthiness of what you say, the ease of which people can view your site via mobile, and how well your brand connects with consumers, it all comes back to user experience (UX).

So, while keeping these trends at the forefront of your marketing/SEO plan will help to keep you from becoming stagnant in your efforts, the most important thing to keep in mind is how those efforts are targeted toward the people searching for you, and those who have already discovered you. That’s a “trend” that will only continue to become more important each year.

Making the Changes Your Business Needs to Succeed

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Entrepreneurship | Making the Changes Your Business Needs to Succeed | Business SuccessBusinesses need to evolve over time, whether you want them to or not. The need for change could be due to a number of reasons, from the demands of keeping up with the latest trends to trying to save money to wanting to reach new goals in terms of growth. Whatever the reason, these changes will not happen overnight. For change to be successful, a lot of hard work will be required. However, what changes do you need to make, and how can you implement them? This guide explores more.

Getting more traffic to your website

You might have built a website and found little to no success since its launch. It might be that, currently, your website is not designed as well as it could be. A poorly designed website can deter people from sticking around. Another problem you might be facing is that you are struggling to get the traffic to your website in the first place. If this is the case, then you need to implement an SEO strategy right away. However, it could be that the content you are trying to produce every month on your blog isn’t achieving the results that you want. This is likely because you are not making the most of the keywords that should be used within the content. If you are experiencing any of the above points, you should get in touch with an expert such as Cocoonfxmedia, who will be able to get you started on a tailored business plan for how you can start getting the traffic you need to your website.

Keeping regular customers

Do you have a high turnover of existing customers because you are focused so much on trying to find new ones? This can happen to many businesses when they are trying to implement a growth management strategy. However, having a steady flow of regular customers is crucial to growth management. Not to mention that trying to find new customers is much more costly than trying to retain them.

So, if you have found yourself struggling to keep your regular customers and find new ones at the same time, then you will need to address what is going wrong. Are you losing touch too quickly? Are you giving your existing customers a good enough reason to continue using your services? Common ways to keep existing customers include:

  • Offering a discount
  • Finding something that makes your business unique
  • Focusing on customer service – you need to listen to what your customers want

Bringing onboard new services/products

Are you facing a bit of a cash flow problem? Or are you struggling to make as many sales as you did the previous year? This is a common occurrence for many businesses that have been around for a long time and have almost become complacent with what they are offering. When this happens, it is time to look at making a considerable change within the business itself. You need to have a complete refresh in terms of the products and/or services you are offering your customers. Alert them to the new products that you are introducing via a newsletter or on social media; you could even offer new customers a discount.

Ways to Manage Your Debt despite Its Size

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Debt is a financial obligation of the debtor to pay the lender their principal amount back. Depending upon the size of the amount, repayment can take months as well as years, and throughout this time, one needs to manage their money to meet their ends and debts properly. If not, it may result in adding more debts, and the cycle of debt will continue to gain momentum. It’s important to have an accurate plan to repay the debt. Small debts are easy to manage, but large debts require huge amounts to be paid, and it can create an impact on the overall financial stability of the borrower. Getting out of debt demands determination and an overall change in habits and lifestyles that either got you into debt or are simply extravagant – using multiple credit cards, for instance. Cutting off expenses and increasing income is one way to see it. The more the income, the sooner the debt is cleared. Even though the debt may be higher, yet with regular installments and consistency, it can be achieved and made to disappear.

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article | Ways to Manage Your Debt despite Its Size

Confront

The first step is to identify the problem. Make a list of all the debts you have and calculate the amount. Measure the amount of debt and make a list of whatever small debts you might have. This will set the mark for your goals and help you to see your financial picture.

Snow-ball method

Debts are of various kinds, but it’s the most significant debts that break our financial cane. Once you know the debts you have to pay, start by paying the monthly required installment for each one of your debt except the smallest one. Pay as much as you can for that. The idea is to clear the small debts first and then eventually move on to the next smallest in the line. Reach out for some iva help to battle the debt fiasco if you are incapable of dealing with the situation on your own.

No overdue

Pay bills on time and don’t be late. Overdue can cause unnecessary reduction of your income which can come in useful for your debts.

Budget system

Create a budget and thoroughly research how much needs to be spent and how much income is there. This way you won’t have to bother about your bills and your life can go on in an organized manner. Be consistent in it and don’t deviate.

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article | Ways to Manage Your Debt despite Its Size

Side Job

Getting a second job can always be beneficial. Start by searching for a second job that fits your time profile with a decent salary. Various jobs available on the market will take the load off your back and give you a sense of financial sensibility.

Refrain

The activities that had you in debt must not be repeated. It will keep on adding the debt, making it much harder to reduce it. Cut your habits loose.

Emergency fund

Anything can occur at any second. You need to be prepared for it. Create an emergency fund that you will need in case there is an emergency like to pay medical bills or house repair. You don’t want to run from pillar to post when that thing happens. It’s always wise to have a damage control plan.

Reduce your expenses

You don’t have to live your life on a minimum, but you can choose to live it with more discipline. There’s always an alternative for anything you buy if it’s expensive. You have the option to reduce your interest on credit cards but prefer not using them at all. If you’re buying something, use cash. Slash your restaurant bills and cook at home, cancel the Netflix and enjoy the internet. You can exercise at home. The money you save by trimming your expenses can be used in a more productive way and at the same time will ease your nerves.

Revisit

Think of ways to accelerate your income. It can be cashing on investments or selling the stuff you don’t need, garage sales or teaching a skill that you have. The options are numerous. Be persistent in your schedule and reframe accordingly.

Conclusion

Debts are destined to be cleared, but with higher debts, the process takes a little longer than usual. To have a clear image of one’s income and expenses as well as identifying ways to trim the expenses and increasing the income can surely act as a savior in terms of debt repayments.

Tips and Tricks to Improve Sales With Cloud Apps

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Every business strives to close as many deals as it possibly can within a given period. However, not many business owners are willing to invest in upgrading their sales processes to match or even surpass their better-performing competitors.

Are you struggling with managing your customers and looking for tips and tricks to improve your sales? It’s time to embrace automation and move most of your process to the cloud technology. Doing this will help to free up time for your sales team so that it can concentrate on actually making sales.

Below are key areas where you need to focus your automation efforts when looking to optimize your sales process.

Outreach and prospecting

Let’s admit it, outreaching is arguably the most time-consuming activity for any salesperson or team. In most cases, you have to get into a lengthy back and forth exchange with prospects via email, calling, or even visiting in person before you can close a deal. This often leaves you with very little time and energy to do anything else.

However, it doesn’t always have to be this way.

All you need to enhance customer communication is to invest in a proven system that manages everything for you. A reliable customer relationship management (CRM) system like SalesLoft or ActiveCampaign enables you to manage your phone calls and emails directly in the system. In the end, you’re able to gather all the information you need in one place including records of all communications with your customers.

Lead management

Your business is booming and now you boast quite a significant amount of contacts to take care of every day of your work week. Manual management is definitely bound to get hectic at some point which calls for automation of this repetitive process.

Look for a service like Zoho CRM which helps in various lead management tasks including sorting and scoring leads. This ensures you do not miss out on any essential step when qualifying your prospects as well as prioritizing those that are closest to converting.

With such a system, you’re able to get a clear picture of your prospects based on their history with your business and all their past communication. Learn about their preferred approach and language and use these details to find the most effective way to connect with them.

Some CRM systems are also able to assign leads automatically to different sales representatives in your company based on factors like their existing workload, language, and geographical distribution. This allows your or your sales manager to focus on other more critical tasks such as coaching the reps and closing deals.

Sales reporting

For a long time, Microsoft Excel and Outlook were the most sophisticated data storage and reporting tools companies knew. Indeed, everyone that handled data in a company including accountants and managers had to prove that they had enough skills working with these tools to get promoted at their workplaces.

Microsoft Excel and related programs are still being used and considered important for certain tasks. However, we now have to accept that there are more effective tools that take much lesser time to capture, organize, and generate data reports than these two.

Are you spending too much time than you should on your data management and therefore failing to put enough effort into making sales? It’s time to re-organize your priorities.

With a tool like Agile CRM or SalesForce, you can optimize your reporting process and improve your productivity and collaboration with other members of your sales team.

Payment

You’ve probably done all the hard work of convincing your prospects that your company is the right one for the job – so, what next? Well, it’s time to sign contracts and request the agreed payments.

To make this process seamless and also prevent common payment issues arising in the future, consider using automated invoicing methods such as Zoho Invoice and Paypal. You might also want to look at other tools like Dotloop or Docusign to capture your customers’ signatures; you’ll possibly need when dealing with checks and some invoices.

Conclusion

At this point, you’re possibly wondering, ‘you’ve already recommended quite a handful of tools and systems – how do I manage them properly so they don’t end up burdening me?’

Our advice is simple – acquire a cloud-based CRM service that integrates and automatically syncs data between all your business apps and systems. Take a look at this PieSync vs. Zapier comparison which features two of the industry’s best data syncing solutions.

Automate your sales process today and watch as your business profitability grows exponentially.