The Top 10 Remote Tools For Working From Home During The Coronavirus Pandemic

Switching to a new work environment is not easy, especially if, all of a sudden, you find yourself working from home.

You can no longer have in-person conversations or collaborate with your colleagues without facing obstacles.

Don’t worry; we have some good news for you…

There are plenty of software solutions specifically designed to facilitate remote work. However, not all of them are created equal, and you can easily end up using an unreliable, clunky solution that holds you back.

We can help you cut through the clutter. Here are the top 10 remote tools for working from home, ranging from employee training software to email management tools.

Continual professional development

The COVID-19 pandemic has the power to keep us locked in, but it has no control over your motivation to continue professional development. Continuous training can boost employee engagement and retention rates.

Here are some of the best tools from the employee training software category to keep you occupied and productive.

1. ProProfs

ProProfs delivers one of the best employee training software solutions on the market. It is effortless to use. The drag-and-drop interface ensures easy course creation. On top of that, you have the option to automate course invitations and track employee response and progress in real-time.

The software comes with employee training templates that reflect different verticals so that you can launch courses even more efficiently.

Analytics and reports are there to help bridge knowledge gaps and improve the courses. Meanwhile, you can learn a great deal from the free “How to work remotely during COVID-19” course. 

2. Litmosa

Any discussion on virtual classroom software is incomplete without mentioning Litmos. This platform provides a variety of tools to enable you to stay on top of learning materials and their distribution across different channels.

If you’ve already digitized your learning materials, there is no need to recreate them. With Litmos, you can import your content and put it to immediate use.

3. TalentCards

TalentCards is excellent if you don’t have enough time to spare on professional development. This tool is built to facilitate online training through bite-sized learning materials. User onboarding is easy. You can manually add them or send out invitations via SMS or email.

There are a few gamification features built to make online learning engaging and fun. Creating cards and courses is easy, even if you have no previous experience of conducting online employee training.

Streamline project management

Project management is one of the most vital processes in a company. Working from home can potentially affect you and your colleagues’ workflow, extend project deadlines, and potentially costing you clients. Project management tools can help you improve your management practices by 33%.

Here are a few tools to stay on track with project management, even while at home. 

4. TeamGantt

TeamGantt is a straightforward project management tool. During the pandemic, your primary goal should be to stick to simple tools because they come with little to no learning curve. This tool, in particular, is an out-of-the-box solution for team and project management.

Notification system, real-time communication, task dependencies, and delegation are all included in its functionalities. Basically, you have everything you need to keep your entire team going.

5. ProofHub

ProofHub is a project management tool developed to cater to the needs of startups and small businesses. While it is an entry-level tool, it still comes with surprisingly many features. You can use it to plan and execute projects, collaborate on projects, organize tasks, track deliverables, and communicate with team members.

The interface is simple and well-designed.

ProofHub also supports integration with other apps, including Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

File sharing and collaboration on project-related documents with this tool are also easy.

Collaboration made easy

Collaboration while working from home can appear impossible. In reality, it is quite the opposite, especially if you use one of these tools. 

6. Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing app that facilitates team collaboration. Although used as a temporary virtual classroom software by many institutions, this app is so much more.

Zoom is an all-in-one video conferencing platform. You can use it to organize meetings, video webinars, enable conference rooms, or chat in real-time with your team members.

During the COVID-19 crisis, Zoom proved to be a reliable video conferencing software. It is built to support HD video and audio. More importantly, it is very easy to use and comes with affordable subscription plans.

7. Trello

Trello is a collaboration app designed around two ideas – streamlined collaboration and increased productivity. It is a user-friendly app that you can use to the full extent in under a few minutes.

You will have access to cards, lists, and boards where you can organize tasks, collaborate with colleagues, and exchange information in real-time.

Trello is fully mobile-ready, meaning you can install it on all your devices, and it will look the same and always stay in sync with the latest updates from your team.

8. Asana

Asana is one of the oldest collaboration solutions on the market. You’ll get stunned by how easy it is to use.

While it is a great tool to facilitate internal communication and collaboration, Asana can help you do a few more things, too.

For instance, you can track your employees’ work, create and organize to-do lists, and set up reminders to ensure that nothing gets past your team members. 

Keep communication channels open

Communication goes hand in hand with collaboration. After all, almost 75% of employers find it to be one of the most important things worth investing in.

The following two solutions will help you keep communication channels open at all times.

9. Mailbird

Mailbird is one of the best email clients out there. If your team relies on email communication, it is definitely your go-to solution. You can set it up to sync all your email accounts.

The user interface is entirely customizable. Don’t be afraid to rearrange different elements to speed up your workflow. 

Mailbird can also help you collaborate and communicate with your team by bringing all of them to one email client. Once you do it, you will see how easy it is to track all things related to your email efforts, including internal and external emailing. 

10. Slack

Slack is another easy-to-use communication solution. It focuses on bringing remote workers together under one roof.

Remote workers can easily lose sight of their role in a team and contribution to project deliverables. Slack will help you stay organized and keep your team members on top of the latest developments. 

Everyone onboard can track progress and identify their role in making things happen in your organization.

Slack also comes with support for creating channels to use with your clients and business partners as well. 

Wrap up

Every organization is unique, let alone a team and an individual employee. But all people who are working from home face the same challenges. The tools I’ve shared with you are designed to help you overcome these challenges and facilitate effective work from home.

Guest author: Kamy Anderson is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing on emerging technologies in the areas of corporate training and education. He is an expert in learning management systems and eLearning authoring tools – currently associated with ProProfs.

The post The Top 10 Remote Tools For Working From Home During The Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/remote-tools-working-from-home/

5 Creative Ways to Repurpose Your Old Content

Having your old masterpieces sit there in the archives gathering dust can be such a shame. After re-reading it you may find that you still agree with your opinions just as much now as the day you wrote them.

However, times may have changed and certain ways you went about proving your point may not be relevant today, so do you just let that content go to waste? No! You repurpose it.

Below we have a comprehensive guide on how to help you make use of old winners.

What is repurposing?

The easiest way to put this is – Repurposing content is recycling old content and creating something new from it.

There are also a slew of benefits that may follow repurposed content including:

• Making the most of your initial efforts – Nothing goes to waste and you can reuse your creative ideas a few more times.
• Great content won’t be forgotten – Sometimes you just forget what a great job you did and you want to remind yourself (and the world) of your innovative views.
• Get more views/reads/clicks – You may reach a wider audience, or a completely new audience altogether, and reformatting your content can do just that.
• Become a greater authority – Once you tweak, enhance, or even further reinforce your views, you’re solidifying yourself as a greater authority on the subject.
• Boost your SEO – Of course, you can get higher rankings on Google and get more clicks than ever before by taking another stab at the right keywords and maybe even some backlink action.

How to repurpose content

Once you have found an ingenious piece that you feel like sharing with the Internet one more time, it’s time to rearrange, reshape, and repurpose it. Even companies such as Preply, an online language learning hub, repurpose content.

It’s not so much their own content as it is the feedback and testimonials from their students/customers that are repurposed into blog posts.

If you want to make the most out of your repurposed ideas, you need to reinvent content that increases (or keeps) its value and relevancy over time.

Making the most out of your content isn’t just about customer loyalty, but it’s about your views and what you put forth as well. One rule of thumb to keep in mind is to always add, enhance, and enrich the old content.

Examples of repurposing content

1. Create something new from the old

Popular blog posts are popular because they contain social triggers. Have you heard of a TV spinoff show? Such as the hit teen vampire show The Vampire Diaries and its spinoff The Originals and the recent Legacies.

If you haven’t heard of these shows that’s alright because we’ll bet money there are other spinoffs you have heard of. One really easy way to repurpose ideas and written content is to look for creative ways to present new information and elaborate on that.

One great example of this is to convert listicles into more detailed and thorough articles expanding on the point. That way you add something new (more detail) into the already existing content.

You can also go in the opposite direction and transform long-winded (but well written) articles into shorter listicles. Research shows readers don’t tend to like reading long articles and scaling down the content to a few main points could garner more attention.

2. Pictures, Infographics, or Instructographics

When applicable to your content, using more pictures, infographics (step by step outline of your entire post), instructographics (similar to the former except geared more towards “how to” articles), can really step up your old piece of writing.

Pinterest is a great platform to create the above in what we call Pinterest repurposing. Instead of having your readers scan through all the titles, have the outline and what is included in the content front and center for their convenience.

You can easily convert your old blog articles into comprehensive guides by using infographics and instructographics.

3. Change the platform

Who says a blog post needs to stay a blog post? Repurposing blog posts into podcasts, posts, and content for social media repurposing books into blog posts, and anything into webinars or YouTube videos could gain more viewers and readers.

Some people prefer listening and watching over reading, and podcasts are a great way to do that. People often play podcasts in the background when they’re doing chores, work, or just relaxing. The best part is they can be played on their own time.

Listeners are quite loyal to podcasters they like, and if done well, you’ll keep them coming back for more. In order to venture down the podcast route, try condensing your top posts into smaller topics and elaborate on them.

4. Use advice, feedback, reviews and testimonials

View the above as constructive criticism and turn these valued pieces of information into a “how-to” guide, or an advice eBook on what people need, like, want, etc.

Using Q & A’s as well as FAQ’s to gather information can help you clearly see what it is people value and want through their answers.

It’s easy to capitalize on those ideas and turn them into great advice books or posts of any kind. This is especially useful in stirring up conversation on forums and threads.

Or instead of compiling all of the answers into a whole entire eBook, give yourself room down the line to come up with multiple opportunities for posts by addressing one FAQ at a time in greater detail.

5. It’s as simple as adding and subtracting

It really is as easy as that. Sometimes all you need to do to repurpose your blog is to take out irrelevant information and update it with new ideas.

Your content isn’t fixed it is fluid. Feel free to add and take away as much or as little as you need to create another compelling piece of writing.

You’re recycling ideas but adding relevancy and bringing old and perhaps forgotten ideas to the forefront again.

Try tackling the same ideas with different views or arguments. Times change, you change, I change, we all change, and so should our ideas.

This is how you grow as a content creator, and how your content grows with you.

Conclusion

Take solace in knowing that piece you wrote X amount of years ago that you put so much time and effort into can still be used to this day. That is if it’s evergreen of course.

After you have determined your evergreen content, there are 101 ways to create new spinoffs that benefit you and your audience even more than before.

It’s also a chance to dabble in different forms of content creation, and who knows, you may even discover a new niche market, a long term hobby or hidden talent you didn’t know about.

Guest author: Connie is a chief content writer at WhenIPost, guest contributor, and enthusiastic blogger who helps B2B companies reach their audiences more effectively. With an emphasis on organic traffic and conversion, she takes big ideas and turns them into highly practical content that keeps readers hooked.

The post 5 Creative Ways to Repurpose Your Old Content appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/repurpose-old-content/

4 Ways You Can Use Data to Optimize Your Facebook and Google Ad Campaigns

Data is the lifeblood of every successful marketing campaign. You know that the more data you can feed into your Facebook and Google ad campaigns from website micro-conversion events, the more accurate they will be. When your campaigns are more accurate, it drives down your cost, improves your conversion rates, and boosts your bottom line.

This is especially important when social media ad costs have been rising steadily, reaching over 13% of marketing budgets by 2020, and you’re competing for eye space with companies that have large marketing departments and an average of 3.1 people managing their social media campaigns. The trouble is that when you’re a solopreneur or running a small business, you don’t always have the means to tap into it fully.

Almost one-third of marketers still say that their organization isn’t able to extract meaningful insights about content consumption from their data and analytics, and that number rises far higher for solopreneurs and small business owners who are running their own marketing at the same time as running the company.

Using data to optimize your Facebook and Google Ads campaigns is a complex process that generally requires help from a developer. You need to add code snippets to your site in each place that conversions occur and configure them correctly to drive data to Facebook and Google Analytics. It’s a barrier that effectively makes the whole process off-limits to small business owners, who don’t have a developer at their beck and call.

That’s why it’s good to know about alternative options that make it possible to draw data from your website to your marketing campaign platforms whenever you like, without expanding your staff or going back to school to learn coding.

1. Use Oribi to draw data from custom events

Oribi is a tool that enables you to track any custom events on your website, like someone watching a video in full, adding a product to cart, or subscribing to your email newsletter, without using any code.

You can add buttons or other actions to your site, and Oribi automatically places them in the right event group and sends the data to Facebook and Google, without doing any coding.

If you make any changes to your Oribi button settings, the data will be automatically updated.

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Adding Oribi events to your Facebook ad campaigns allows you to build more powerful lookalike audiences, refine your retargeting campaigns, and improve your ad sets by analyzing key events. When you send that data to Google Ads, you’ll be able to enhance your remarketing campaigns and analyze events more deeply by keyword.

2. Set up Google Data Studio to help you visualize insights

Google itself has a useful tool called the Google Data Studio, which enables you to combine all your data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ad Manager, and Google Ads. You’ll need to use a Connector, as it’s called on the platform, to integrate your data.

Supermetrics is a popular choice for integrations with Facebook Ads Manager, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and more. Google Ads and Google Analytics are native connectors, so you won’t need an integrator for them.

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Once you’ve gathered all your data on the Google Data Studio platform, you can create a whole range of charts that make it easier for you to analyze and draw insights. These visualizations can help you to see marketing trends, spot your most profitable ads, and draw conclusions about your marketing campaigns, but you’ll still need to apply those conclusions yourself.

3. Use A/B testing tools to discover the best scheduling time

A/B testing is still a tactic that’s loved by many marketers, and it can certainly deliver a whole slew of valuable data that you can use to optimize your Google Ads and Facebook ad campaigns.

While you can run A/B tests through Google Analytics alone, there’s also a range of tools that help make it easier to set up, run, and analyze A/B tests, so it’s worth taking advantage of them.

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AdEspresso has a popular tool that helps you see which times of day your ads perform the best so that you can schedule them in advance for the optimal time. You can also use it to see which ads are driving the most clicks, impressions, conversions, etc.

Google Optimize is another option for A/B testing for basically everything, including your landing page content, email subject lines, and more. It plugs straight into Google Analytics, but you will need to either master Google Tag Manager, or find someone to help you manipulate code.

4. Create better UTM tags with a smart UTM manager

One of the biggest challenges of using data to optimize your ad campaigns is trying to establish last-click attribution. Click throughs from Facebook, in particular, can show up on Google Analytics as m.facebook.com/referral, facebook.com/referral, or other variations, making it extremely challenging to work out exactly which visits came from which Facebook ad campaigns.

UTM tagging helps you ensure that every click driven by Facebook is correctly attributed. You can use Facebook’s built-in Facebook UTM builder, but there’s still a high risk that you’ll end up with different versions of Facebook written in the tool. A UTM manager like UTM Smart Manager helps standardize all your Facebook UTM tags so that you end up with reliable, quality marketing data to drive your marketing campaigns forward.

A UTM manager can also help you out with data analysis by providing an easier to use analytics platform than Google Analytics, which often gives an incomplete picture of Facebook marketing data.

UTM Smart Manager offers an intuitive executive dashboard that displays metrics like Facebook ad spends, Google Analytics bounce rate data, click-through-rate for each ad, and more. It gathers information from both Facebook and Google Analytics into one place and automates analysis to display actionable insights, making it faster to draw conclusions that sharpen your Facebook marketing decisions. The only downside is that you’ll still need to translate these insights into action on your own.

Data has the power to transform your ad campaigns

As you can see, there are a number of ways that you can use your data to optimize your Google Ads and Facebook ad campaigns to get the maximum bang for your buck.

If you’re willing to get your hands dirty with some basic coding, you can find many more options, but there are still possibilities if you can’t code yourself and don’t have a developer at hand.

Oribi, Google Data Studio, UTM managers, and A/B testing tools all help you achieve code-free ad optimization, but some of them are definitely easier than others.

Guest author: Zac Johnson is a world-renowned blogger and entrepreneur with nearly 20 years of experience in the online marketing space and has helped his readers generate millions of dollars online. He shares his story and guidance at ZacJohnson.com

The post 4 Ways You Can Use Data to Optimize Your Facebook and Google Ad Campaigns appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/optimize-ad-campaigns/

How to Double Your Affiliate Income Overnight

Affiliate marketing continues to grow at a steady pace. In 2010, the market was worth $1.6 billion in the US. Last year, affiliate marketers made a total of $6.4 billion. The market is set to expand to over $8 billion by the end of 2022, according to a study by Statista.

Image Source: Statista

This represents a massive opportunity for savvy affiliate marketers.

It’s easy to join an affiliate marketing program and share the links on your site. You will make some affiliate income, maybe a lot. However, your conversion rates will probably be 1% or lower. Even with warm traffic from your email list, you’re lucky to get a 5% conversion rate.

To get the most out of your affiliate marketing, you need to utilize various techniques to increase the number of clicks and boost conversions. Bonuses are one such method.

Why you should offer bonuses to boost your affiliate income

A bonus is an extra product or service offered alongside the primary purchase to encourage customers to buy. Here are some reasons you should add bonuses to your affiliate offerings:

• Bonuses add value. A bonus that can be used alongside the base product or service is a significant selling point.
• Bonuses make you the favorite affiliate. There are likely hundreds or thousands of similar sites that promote the same product or service as you. But if you increase your sales through bonuses, your affiliate partners might give you preferential treatment. Bonuses will also make you the customers’ favored affiliate when they are ready to buy.
• Bonuses build a sense of urgency. Time-limited bonuses tap into customers’ fear of missing out (FOMO). No-one wants to feel like they’ve missed out on a chance to get something extra, making them more likely to click the “Buy Now” button.

Utilizing bonuses to improve conversion rates makes sense. Experienced affiliate marketers realized this a long time ago. In fact, JVZoo, one of the largest affiliate marketing platforms on the net, has built a bonus delivery system into their UI for affiliates.

What this all boils down to is pretty simple; if you give people a reason to buy through your affiliate link you’ll make more sales.

How to create an effective bonus

As with all types of marketing, affiliate marketers need to understand their audience.

Since you aim to convince the prospective customer to buy, the bonus needs to be something that will push them towards that decision. Therefore, you need to understand your typical customer, pain points, and reasons for buying the product.

A customer persona will help you do this. It is a representation of your ideal buyer. The customer persona usually includes demographic information, skills, interests, and personality:

To create a useful bonus, you must consider your audience’s goals and problems. Consider these questions:

• What problem does the customer have that I could help them solve?
• What would help them get the most out of the base product?

You should also address your customers’ fears. What is keeping them from clicking on the link? A customer’s fear might involve a lack of trust in the product’s ability to achieve the desired result, low belief in their ability to utilize the product or service correctly, etc.

Your bonus should directly address your ideal customer’s problems or fears.

What are the best types of bonuses?

There are lots of things you can offer which people will love. Free beer is certainly one option.

Ideally, though, the bonus you create will cost you something to create once, but nothing to deliver. So, while free beer is great, it’s hardly practical. The secret to eternal happiness, on the other hand, might be the perfect bonus as it costs nothing to share.

Other types of bonuses include:

• Online training. Video courses and webinars can help the customer improve their skills and get the most out of the product or service.
• Software or add-ons. Free templates, plugins, and other tools that add functionality to the product are always welcome bonuses and help the customer feel like they’re getting value for money.
• White papers or case studies. Case studies about how the product helped other customers will empower the buyer to get the most out of it.
• An eBook. An eBook about a topic related to the product can fill a knowledge gap and help the customer feel more prepared to use the product or service.

Having a single bonus will increase sales. Maximizing your conversion rate involves over-delivering on value. In the book Expert Secrets, the founder of Clickfunnels suggested that your bonus should have ten times the value of the product you are promoting. So, if you are promoting a product that costs $47, the bonus’s perceived value should be $470.

This has all been quite theoretical up to this point. Let me give you a concrete example of how to create a customer persona and relevant bonuses that fill customer pain points.

Longtail Pro Case Study

On my site, I have a review for an SEO tool called Longtail Pro. I use an affiliate link.

I hypothesized the type of customers that will buy Longtail Pro either run a website, are part of the SEO team for a business that relies on online traffic or have an agency background.

That’s a very loose customer persona.

These people use Longtail Pro for keyword research and competitor research with the ultimate goal of trying to get more traffic to a site.

Here’s an overview of the bonuses I came up with based around that customer persona and the pain points I felt people might encounter:

• A training guide for SEO content writers
• A video guide for coming up with guest post ideas
• Email outreach templates for a campaign
• List of useful free SEO tools

You can see how I’m trying to identify and fix the knowledge gaps people might be facing.

I then attached a value to each of these bonuses. The training guide for SEO content writers has a hypothetical $200 value, for example.

How to promote your bonus

After choosing your bonus, the last and most important step is to promote it. Effective promotion is essential if you want to increase sales and grow your affiliate income.

I like to promote bonuses using an exit-intent popup. Below is an example from the Longtail Pro case study. You can see how the popup sells the bonus. I’m not looking to grab the contact as a lead in this instance.

When you click on the button, you are directed to a landing page.

The landing page is just a stop-gap between the entry point in the funnel and the sales page. In this example, it comes between the review page and the sales page. If you were promoting an affiliate offer from your email list, you could send them straight to the page.

Your landing page is an essential component of the funnel. On the landing page, you introduce the product you are promoting and “sell” your bonuses. Here’s a screenshot of the landing page I designed to promote those bonuses:

That gives you a sense of how you present a bonus.

Below is a basic wireframe of a bonus page. If it’s the first time you’ve created a squeeze page, copy the basic design. You can use landing page software to create a page like this in a couple of hours.

If you click on one of those links you’ll be directed to the sales page. It’s a pretty simple model.

You might be asking yourself how much of a boost can you see from creating relevant bonuses? Short answer, a lot! Providing relevant bonuses to your audience, and significantly increasing the value of the offer, can easily result in a doubling of your conversion rate. That’s a realistic target.

How to implement this strategy on your site

If you have read the article through to this point, you’re probably thinking: “Thanks, Nico. That’s a bucket load of work.” And that’s true.

Creating relevant and valuable bonuses will require a significant investment of time and capital. You have to come up with relevant bonuses, create the product, design the sales page, make a sales video, and launch your opt-in form. That’s a good two to three days of your time.

Given the scale of the investment, take baby steps.

Start by creating a bonus page with one product for your most popular affiliate offer. Launch the page without the sales video. If more people than usual buy through your affiliate link, you’ll have proven that this strategy works.

With proof of concept out of the way, you’ll have justified that this model works.

When you know it works, you’ll have justified investing your time in improving the bonus offer. As you improve the offer and the page, you should see a little jump in your conversion rate and some more cash in your pocket. That boost will help incentivize you to optimize your conversion rates, so you make more cash.

Boosting your affiliate income with bonuses

Affiliate marketing is highly competitive. As we’ve discussed, there are hundreds if not thousands of affiliates selling the same product or service. Therefore, you need to persuade your audience to click on your affiliate links instead of anybody else’s. Bonuses are one of the best ways to achieve that goal.

But you need to offer the right kind of bonus. Always focus on your customer persona and your ideal buyer’s needs, fears, and pain points as you decide what to give away. A fantastic bonus can be the difference between an undecided lead clicking the link, and leaving your site and never returning.

Remember the golden rules of bonuses – address a need, add value to the base product, and prominently display the bonus’s value.

If you want to go the extra mile and add even more value, consider stacking bonuses. The more value you can provide, the more customers you will convince to stay on your site and click the “Buy Now” button.

By offering great bonuses and promoting them effectively, you can improve your conversion rates and quickly grow your affiliate income. Here’s to more revenue for your site!

Guest author: Nico is an online marketer and the founder of Launch Space. He helps companies develop their digital marketing strategies and make money blogging. He’s worked with everyone from Fortune 500 companies to startups helping them develop content marketing strategies that align with their business goals. Follow him on Twitter @nhdprins.

The post How to Double Your Affiliate Income Overnight appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/double-affiliate-income/