“The customer is always right” and “Put clients first”- These are common practices ingrained into our workplace culture and taught to us at a young age. Richard Branson is flipping the script. The self-made entrepreneur who founded the Virgin Group has become famous for his unorthodox practices. He says, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”
Consider this: Americans spend close to 33 percent of their day working. Shouldn’t they be enjoying that time? And, more importantly, shouldn’t it be your job as their employer to make sure they are?As business leaders, we’ve been taught to put customers first, but maybe it’s time to reappraise that philosophy. If employees are unhappy in their work environment, how can they possibly charm the socks off patrons? Why would they go the extra mile? There’s even a direct correlation between the level of your employees’ productivity and their level of happiness: The happier they are, the more creative (and productive) they become.
Office morale is the key to improving productivity and office communications. This is why every Friday here at Get’n Social we do team lunches. No sad sandwiches at our desk. Some deliberation goes on as to where we want to venture out to for our afternoon meal. Our company is experienced an abundance of growth, we have added four new team members in the last 6 months. We get to know each other outside of our professional roles and build new relationships.
We have a few rules to keep our Friday lunches enjoyable for everyone:
Encourage Non-Work Conversations
While it may be tempting to chat about the report that is overdue, or the client deadline coming up, a happy hour is a time for relaxing and socializing.
For one thing, sharing social experiences with your coworkers can make it a lot easier to communicate about actual work Try to find something to talk about unrelated to your job. You may find that you have more in common than you thought. Plus, do YOU really want to talk about work? Neither does anyone else.
Spend a little time talking to everyone. Ask them questions about themselves and really LISTEN (and try to retain the information). Circulate around the room. If it’s a sit-down thing, speak to people all around the table. Not only is it good for you to make connections with a diverse group of people, but it also makes you look like a fun, awesome, friendly person. And by the way, if you look like a fun, awesome, friendly person? Chances are you pretty much just became one.
Freelance, start-up or fortune 500 company. We all can be forgetful or get overwhelmed. Project management is important because it defines a plan and organizes chaos – projects are naturally chaotic. It also establishes a schedule and plan and encourages teamwork.
Great project management means much more than keeping project management iron triangle in check, delivering on time, budget, and scope; it unites clients and teams, creates a vision for success and gets everyone on the same page.
As a team, we have gone through our fair share of content management programs. It comes down to personal preference and how your team operates but if you’re looking for a new system, read on!
Monday.com
monday.com is a task management tool your team will actually enjoy using. Filled with entertaining task features you can personalize, it makes it fun and easy for everyone to collaborate, focus on what’s important, and get more done at work. It’s the first visual tool of its kind and shows you exactly where things stand at a single glance. Finally get rid of painfully long email threads, cut down on meetings, and experience the satisfaction of turning things green when they’re done. You feel a real sense of accomplishment when all task are green or watching your lama farm grow
In a small company, like our, with many freelancers on board, it helps create a board that they can choose whom they share it with. Other people in the company will not be able to see the board unless it has been shared with them.
17hats.com
When you first enter 17hats each time, you’ll be taken to the Overview section, which some might call the dashboard. This is a great place to get a general summary of all the things going on.
There are several sections that describe the different things going on. The first thing is a 3 day summary with all the events and to do items, plus a general forecast. To the side, there is another section with the daily forecast with more details like the temperature and sunset time
Setting up custom workflows is what allows you to automate your business processes. And we all know how central this is to our sanity. 17hats suggests that you create a workflow for each of the 3 stages of a project: pre-sale, during delivery and post-sale, and then create one or more phases within each of these workflows. Typically, phases will include to-do items (which are really reminders), action items (where using templates is super powerful) and pause items (when you are waiting on a reply from your client). Once you understand the logic behind workflows, setting them up is simple and straightforward
For sure, the number one most useful addition to 17hats is the continued development of their workflows feature. It’s important to keep in mind that 17hats is project based at its core with everything else supporting the smooth flow of projects that you do for your clients.
Trello
If your emphasis is on visual task management, you’ll find Trello’s movable boards highly efficient.
This project management software works best for creatives and software development teams, which require agility in project planning and monitoring. It’s generally offered for free so teams and individual users, including freelancers, can utilize the system. Users may upgrade to a premium plan (starting at $9.99 per month for each user) to access more customization and additional features.
It is a very straightforward and simple PM solution. While this is an excellent quality, there may be circumstances when it can’t handle complex projects that require analytics or customized reporting. Nonetheless, Trello is a good add-on to project management solutions without boards.It’s easy to use, has a cheap monthly cost and no learning curve
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is most famously known for the ability to pre-plan and schedule outposts, but it is so much more than that.
The rise of social media has been nothing short of meteoric. It is common for individuals and businesses to have a presence (social media profile) on more than one social networking site.
Be it for personal profiles, celebrity profiles or business profiles, the social media objective is to have more likes and followers. And, to achieve this and to be able to manage multiple social media profiles, there is a growing need for a one-stop platform or tool.
This is where social media management tools like Hootsuite comes into the picture!
Anyone (and we literally mean anyone) can start off by registering for a free account with Hootsuite to explore its various features. Once you have registered for the free Hootsuite account with your preferred mail id and password, you can select the different social networking sites with which Hootsuite can integrate to view, schedule and post messages.
These sites could include Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube or LinkedIn. It is important to note that Hootsuite is accessed directly from your web browser and you do not need to install any software on your system.
At first, the Hootsuite dashboard may look a little complicated. But, once you start browsing around and taking a look at what it offers, you will realize that most of the features are self-explanatory.
The main layout of the dashboard gives you the opportunity to open tabs for your different social media profiles for easy viewing. For each tab, you can set an “auto refresh” interval for every two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes or 30 minutes.
You can use it to integrate email for less clutter, and If you have a team working on the Hootsuite dashboard, you can assign different streams and different messages to the team members. The “Assignment” section enables them to check the messages assigned to them or to assign messages to others.
If you aren’t fortunate enough to have a graphic designer in-house or cannot hire one- fear not! We asked ours to help lead you in the right direction and get your creative juices flowing.
Start with the basics, color, and color theory. Color is what catches the eye. Learn what colors work together to compliment each other and what moods they generate. For example, studies have shown that bright orange is the best color for encouraging people to click, whereas red comes in second.
Complementary colors lie directly across from each other on the color wheel. They bring out the best in both colors and create a very dynamic look.
Analogous colors fall close to each other on the wheel. If you want your logo colors to be harmonious, these will work well together.
Triadic colors draw from three equal sections on the color wheel. Pick these for a stimulating and bold effect.
In sticking with the basics to start, if your logo will feature any sort of text, focus on typography. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, and adjusting the space between pairs of letters.
Before you move to your design programs, put pencil to paper. Sketching and conceptualizing. This is the single most important part of the design process. Instead of searching for various logo ideas on your computer screen, try drawing your logo ideas on paper. Drawing is a great method that will allow you to fully hash out your ideas simply because it is easy to draw various design elements without being constrained by your computer. You can erase, sketch, and let your ideas flower without any limitations. This usually leads to great logo designs.
Lastly, make sure you have an understanding of your company and how you want others to view your brand. As yourself, “Why are you here? What do you do, and how do you do it? What makes you different? Who are you here for? What do you value the most?” Conduct research on the industry itself, its history and competitors. Problem-solve first, design later. Follow trends not for their own sake but rather to be aware of them: longevity in logo design is key.
Affiliate Marketing is exactly what you think it is.
On one end of the marketing arrangement, an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. On the other end, this is the process of earning a commission by promoting someone else product or service. By using an affiliate link, a specific URL that contains the affiliate’s ID or username. In affiliate programs, advertisers use affiliate links to record the traffic that is sent to the advertiser’s website. This action is all part of an affiliate program.
This can be done through popular blogging networks, Instagram influencers, or any way you can send an affiliate link. Think- podcaster leaving a link or telling you to use certain code at checkout for a discount. Or your favorite youtube letting you to “swipe up” to see where they got their new “favorite” product.
For a real-life example check out your favorite movie information center, Jamie Spencer, IMDB.com
The huge online movie database IMDb.com, has information on thousands of films, actors, and producers. So there is a great opportunity to link out to merchants who can sell the items that are being researched on the site–specifically DVDs or streaming video. On each movie page within the site, the right sidebar includes a link out to Amazon. This is done in an automated way as the link takes referrals to a search page within Amazon displaying results for the movie title or Actor.
Now to get started you will need to follow these 3 tips:
Vet All Affiliate Programs-
There are so many programs out there that will do most of the grunt work for you. But make sure you aren’t throwing your money around.
Find your Target Audience-
Marketers design strategies to meet the needs of the target market and use media channels and other touch points to best reach the purchaser.
SEO is the Key-
While affiliate links will pusher consumers and buyers to you, you can still generate traffic organically. So be sure to fill your site with valuable and engaging content!
