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In such a fast-paced digital era, entrepreneurs need to remain on top of their game. Allow me to enlighten you with the “Top 5 Powerful Tools for Entrepreneurs” that I use.

They can help you organize your entrepreneurial lifestyle. There are a number of productivity tools for entrepreneurs you can invest your time in and ensure that your business grows exponentially.

Enjoying an organized email inbox or a swift website experience was never this easy.

With the abundance of such tools and services, you can prioritize your efforts and focus on doing the work that really matters to you.

You can ensure you’re meeting your business goals by streamlining your priorities. Many among these tools are available for free, so you do not have any reason not to give them a shot. Let’s begin.

Top 6 Powerful Tools for Entrepreneurs

1. Trello

Trello is a great project management tool for entrepreneurs. It is a free tool that displays a work board of cards to allow you to organize your to-do priorities with ease.

You can create your own to-do lists and divide the tasks into cards accordingly. By default, every project or task consists of three work columns labeled as To Do, Doing, and Done.

[Editor’s note: You can rename the columns to anything you wish and add as many as you wish. I’m sure there must be a limit, but I haven’t ever hit it and have boards with dozens of columns.

The beginning of the video in this post explains How to Use Trello.]

Easily drag your cards from one column to the other ensuring maximum effectiveness. You will also be able to add comments, upload files, and create checklists on your work board.

Feel free to use this versatile app for carrying out and managing your different tasks. For example, you can:

• organize multiple projects at the same time
• write a book
• create an online course while tracking its progress.

Trello offers a bird’s-eye view on every project that you’re working on, ensuring that you remain efficient while enjoying complete control.

2. Office Online

Office Online is an essential business tool. Starting from $6 per month, I feel it is the best complete package tool for office work.

Their word feature is by far the best text pad I’ve used. It is a great tool when you’re working on a single project with multiple team members. My favorite feature among many is its advanced accessibility.

You can access your office tools such as slides, docs, excel sheet, online storage, etc., from any location at any time on any device.

Office Online offers an easy-to-use interface and you can enjoy complete control of who can view or edit your content. You have the authority to control the accessibility and privacy of your content.

Authorized team members can proofread and edit the content for everyone else to see. You can chat with each other as well as add or remove comments.

You will also be able to see who is working on the project in real-time which makes it one of the best tools for entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, I use Office Online for all my projects, plans, and proposals. It is a very convenient tool that allows me to share inter-team as well as intra-team information.

Office Online auto-saves your work so you do not have to worry about losing your content. It comes with 1TB additional online storage.

3. Bizzabo’s Event Management Platform

Bizzabo’s event management platform is an intelligent personal assistant that helps entrepreneurs to schedule and keep track of their meetings and appointments.

With the assistance of X.Ai, you can increase your productivity and focus effectively on the efforts you need to put in to meet your business goals.

This personal assistant ensures that your emails do not remain unanswered. It allows you and your team to reach an agreement concerning meetings or discussions.

X.Ai searches for the best suitable time based on everyone’s availability for a team meet-up.

Moreover, correspondence that comes in from clients can also be processed automatically. Set up meetings for you with them while you focus on being an awesome entrepreneur.

4. QuickBooks

Another great tool for entrepreneurs, QuickBooks is a popular accounting tool that allows entrepreneurs to keep track of all their income and expenses.

It offers an easy-to-use interface where you can swiftly send invoices to your vendors and suppliers.

QuickBooks ensures the monitoring business transactions with ease. You can automate daily expenses. Moreover, you can also auto-fill parts of your taxes with just a few clicks.

5. InFlow

InFlow is a desktop-based inventory management tool for entrepreneurs that helps them track inventory.

You can fill your customers’ orders, reorder stock, generate purchase orders, and develop customized reports as well.

InFlow is a popular choice when you’re looking for effective tools for entrepreneurs. Its flexible design allows it to fit well with many different businesses and industries.

5. TimeCamp

TimeCamp is a time tracking software and an employee hour calculator. It allows measuring employees’ working time in multiple ways: with a desktop app that works in the background, with a mobile app, browser plugin, or by filling timesheets manually. No matter which way you choose, you can ensure the working hours are tracked on the dot.

With its accurate time tracking and attendance data, it’s great to support payroll. A wide range of preset custom reports helps analyze the employees’ effectiveness and projects’ performance.

What’s more, TimeCamp ensures both teams and freelancers the project management features. Its clear project structure with tags makes the daily time and task management flawless, with time entries assigned to the accurate project or task. Users can also invite Guests to their account and show them their time results with billable/non-billable hours as proof of work.

Besides being a comprehensive time management suite, TimeCamp also helps teams estimate the time of projects and track the resource consumption in ongoing projects.

Another feature that both teams and freelancers can find useful is invoicing. Users can generate invoices and send them straight to their customers.

Summing up, TimeCamp eases the pain of daily time-related company processes. Based on time tracking data.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a wholesaler, retailer, or a manufacturer, InFlow will ensure you manage your inventory with ultimate ease.

6. Visme

Visme is an easy-to-use visual content creation and collaboration platform. With Visme, you can get ready for your meetings by creating beautiful presentations, pitch decks, reports, sales decks, videos, etc.

The best part is that it includes a drag-and-drop editor and a library of hundreds of templates, photos, and animated characters.

Combining simplicity with flexibility, Visme allows entrepreneurs to create engaging visual content to deliver their messages clearly to their audience.

It has a collection of native integrations, so you can connect Visme to other tools you already use. It is also great for team collaboration since you can create, store and collaborate while maintaining brand consistency across your whole team.

In Summary

These above-mentioned five tools for entrepreneurs are essential for your business. Every businessman should have them in their arsenal for success.

There are plenty of other productivity tools available for entrepreneurs, however, many among them come at a high price and have a difficult interface.

I personally use these tools daily to manage my tasks. They allow me to remain on top of everything. They never fail to enhance my workflow and improve my processes.

Using these powerful tools will certainly add value to your business. You and your employees can help each other grow your business in amazing ways.

Infographic added 3/14/21 – not from original author.

Originally published 6/18/19; updated 12/5/21 to remove an outdated tool name and add new tools; updated 11/15/22 to add a tool.

Whether you’re a photographer, writer, designer, accountant or programmer, if you earn your living as a freelancer, you probably love the fact that you’re far more in control of your schedule than the average office worker.

The best time to start freelancing is now. Parents can encourage their kids to get experience and make extra money as teens. It is a lot easier to get started when you don’t have to support yourself!

Many of the typical gifts parents give a 16-yo are perfect for generating income and gaining skills. For example, that list includes a vlogging kit and an instant digital camera – perfect for working online.

Freelancer Challenges

That being said, if you’re like many professionals, your two biggest challenges are finding new clients and dealing with the feast-or-famine cycle of work.

So while freelancing can definitely improve your daily quality of life, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically a solution for filling up your bank account. If you’re just making the leap into the freelance world, you may be especially susceptible to the financial pitfalls that often accompany this style of work.

Because significant financial challenges are a common reality of working as a freelancer, let’s look at some proven strategies for dealing with them:

Set a Budget

Although it’s a fairly simple approach, one of the easiest ways to get on the right track with keeping your income and expenses balanced is to set a budget.

By actually sitting down and writing out exactly how much you need to spend each month, you’ll know what you absolutely have to generate in revenue each month. Additionally, having this target will allow you to see what you can put into savings once you cover your expenses for the month.

Save as Often as Possible

This ties into the previous point. By creating an actual budget for yourself, you can help keep your spending under control and focus on saving as much as possible.

Even though saving may not seem like a priority, the reason it’s so important is if something unexpected happens, you’ll have a cushion that can help get you through that time.

If you want a tool that makes it easy to budget and will also help you maximize how much you save each month, check out Mint.com. Provided by Intuit, this tool makes it easy to see exactly how you’re spending your money.

You can use that information to create a realistic budget, as well as see areas where you may be able to cut back and then encourage saving.

Don’t Count Cash Until It’s in Your Account

One of the biggest mistakes that new freelancers have is spending money that they don’t actually have yet. Even though it’s still a bad habit, this is something you can get away with when you work for a stable company as a full-time employee.

However, when it comes to working for clients, payments don’t flow nearly as consistently. While working with reputable clients means your chances of getting paid are very high, it may take as many as several months after sending an invoice to actually receive a payment.

So if you use a credit card because you think you’re going to have the funds to cover that purchase in a week or two, you may end up accruing several months of interest before you’re actually able to pay off that balance.

Have a Backup Plan

There’s always a chance that one bad turn can snowball into a disaster. If that happens, you need to have a plan so you’re not plunged into financial ruin. If you own a car, knowing that you can get an auto title loan from TitleMax.com should be exactly what you need to weather this rough path.

Avoid Getting Too Caught Up in a Major Win

If you land a big client and then receive a sizable payment from them, it’s easy to get so caught up in the excitement that you spend a considerable amount of money celebrating.

While it’s great to give yourself a pat on the back, don’t let this victory send your spending into overdrive. Given that a major client may not be around forever, it’s important to not let this skew your spending activity.

Keep Your Pipeline Full

This ties into the previous point. Even though it’s easy to set back and coast once you have a good mix of clients, you never know when one or more may disappear.

Since that’s simply one of the risks of being a freelancer, you should always dedicate at least a small percentage of your time to prospecting and networking.

While you may not have any space to take on new clients right now, at least having communications with people will ensure that if needed, you’ll be able to reach out to an existing group instead of starting back from square one. 

Originally published 10/25/13; updated 5/28/22 to replace missing image and improve formatting for mobile devices.

The foundation of an effective marketing plan is to map out your keyword strategy.

This has taken on a new meaning with the latest development of Google’s search engines in terms of how they assess and rank your website.

Search intent is the major element behind the development of your inbound marketing strategy.

Choosing a specific keyword and repeating it in your content is no longer required to optimize your pages.

Search engines read your entire site to assess the value it provides as a response to a specific search query.

Focus on Search Intent Not Keywords!

Group keywords together that have the same search intent. This will give your pages the optimization needed through latent semantic indexing.

Most noteworthy, this method of assessment has been in practice since the Hummingbird update in 2013.

Google has continually improved the level of sophistication in determining the intent of search queries and assessing which websites provide the best solutions.

List Your Keywords, Key Phrases and Top Search Terms

Starting your strategy is as simple as writing down a list of keywords that are being used to describe your offerings.

Collect the data necessary to provide accurate comparisons when you are finished.

A keyword tool necessary to complete this part of keyword research. Free keyword tools are available online such as Ubersuggest.

You will find the best and most useful software on sites like SEMrush and Ahrefs.

The keyword tools on these sites provide additional metrics such as:

• the number of organic clicks
• top performing pages of your competitors
• the keywords your competitors are ranking for in the SERP’s

Complete a Technical Assessment to Filter Your Top Choices

The standard set of values you will need to make comparisons are the monthly volume of traffic, keyword difficulty and cost per click.

You want high commercial valued key phrases with a high volume of traffic and low keyword difficulty.

Three things to consider regarding the stated value of traffic for any keyword are the:

• organic clicks from the traffic of that keyword
• percentage of clicks that are generally awarded to each position
• fact that your website will rank for similar phrases with the same search intent.

Identify search intent

You should identify search intent in the first phase of your keyword research because it defines the motivating factors behind users who are performing the query.

Perform the search yourself to see how the results page is displayed. This is the first clue to identifying search intent.

You want to take note of the layout of the page in order to assess the type of content that is effectively ranking at the top of the page.

The potential displays on the first page of results include the:

• featured snippet
• video carousels
• shopping carousels
• advertisements
• local listings

Organic results typically follow these other types.

Strategically Target By Type of Results

If the top first page has a video carousel, it would be wise to create and rank a video to compete for that specific search term.

If there is a featured snippet, you will need to match and create a better response as a solution to the search query.

The way you create your content depends on the way the results are being displayed as a response to the keyword search.

The number of organic clicks plays a crucial role in the effectiveness the search term has on your website.

Further investigation of a first-page result may lead you to realize that although a search term may have a high volume of traffic, there may be a large percentage of “clickless” traffic that exists.

If a featured snippet can adequately answer a search query and there is no reason for a user to click on to find more information, that particular term will be useless for getting traffic to your website.

Let’s take the example search “How many kids did Brad and Angelina adopt?”

That search may get 100k searches but the organic clicks may only be around 4k.

94% of people will not get past position zero on that particular search because the answer found in the snippet satisfies their search intent.

Provide Solutions to Search Demand

Once you have an effective grouping of keywords, build content that satisfies the search intent.

To get a better insight on what content your page should include, search forums to identify the problems people are experiencing.

Write down the questions asked and include every question in your article to increase the value it provides to visitors.

Evergreen content is highly recommended to provide your site with a steady long term stream of traffic.

Evergreen content has no expiration date and will continually contribute to the value your website provides.

Your best content will teach your readers how to learn a specific skill or about a specific event, subject, or strategy.

Examples of evergreen content include:

• case studies
• interviews
• round up articles
• how to guides
• best of lists
• checklists
• top strategies
• historical highlights

Write about anything relevant to your audience that will not become dated in the foreseeable future.

Evergreen articles improve the onsite search intent optimization of your website.

When you have long-form content it takes readers longer amounts of time to read through the article.

In fact, it may take a visitor a few attempts at digesting the entire piece of content if it is long enough.

Encouraging return visits and increasing the length of time visitors are spending on your website are direct ranking factors.

Return visitors and increased time-on-site will improve the competitive position of your website.

Focus on Content That Doesn’t Expire

It will contribute building traffic to your site as time goes by and it moves up in the rankings.

Your evergreen article acquiring new backlinks through increased sharing improves your offsite search engine optimization.

If your article is truly answering search intent and providing value there is a strong likelihood that people will share their findings.

This in turn creates more traffic through the links they share with others.

Targeted keyword research enables the curation of content that is able to effectively answer search intent.

Using evergreen articles is one form of structuring the content of your site to include multiple keywords and phrases.

Publish what will adequately respond to demand and outperform competing pages that rank for similar search terms.

Incorporate these two pillars of success to develop a website that ranks highly in the search engine result pages.

Sales are essential for any business to succeed, but even the greatest salesperson won’t sell a thing without any leads to sell to. With billions of people online, there seems to be no shortage of leads and, sure enough, there are plenty of companies out there offering to sell you a B2B prospect list with thousands of potential leads.

But is this the best way to fill your sales funnel? What other B2B lead generation strategies should you be trying out? Here at Reply, we help our customers automate every step of their outreach process, including their prospect lead generation. Here are some of the best lead generation techniques for B2B we’ve identified…

Know your leads

The first step for effective lead generation is knowing what your ideal leads look like. Even if you wanted to outsource all your lead generation, you still need to have a clear picture of your leads if you expect to get any kind of result.

And if you’re even thinking for a second that your product/service is for everyone, you’re a) wrong and b) going to make lead generation a million times harder than it should be.

No product/service is for everyone. Even if you’re selling something everyone needs, like water, you’ll see different offerings for different people, from no-frills to luxury branded water.

This follows through to your B2B online lead generation. What does your ideal customer look like? What’s their job title? What industry do they work in? What’s their budget? What’s the biggest challenge they’re facing relating to your service?

Avoid the temptation to create these buyer personas off the top of your head, based off your assumptions and preconceptions of who your ideal customer is. Instead, base these on actual data, from research and interviews with your existing customers. If you don’t have any existing customers, talk to the people who use a product/service similar to yours.

Trust me, this kind of information will make any lead generation much more effective.

Outbound lead generation strategies

When it comes to startups and any other businesses in their early stages, it’s worth focusing on identified outbound lead generation best practices. These are likely to give the best results in the quickest time, compared to inbound strategies.

As we’ve already mentioned, there’s no shortage of sites willing to sell you lists of leads. However, not all lists are equal—some sites will happily sell you information that’s incorrect and/or out of date.

If you choose to buy a list of leads, ask for recommendations from others in your niche. Look for sites that regularly verify their data and guarantee a high delivery rate. When you’ve found a trustworthy site, use the information from your ideal customer profiles to narrow down your search.

Another option is using a lead scraper, to extract contact information for potential leads from websites and social media or, with a little investigation, you can manually build a list yourself. Either way, it’s important to clean up your data and verify it.

An incorrectly formatted CSV file can ruin a perfectly good list while unverified contact details can wreck your sender domain.

Nurturing your outbound leads

In our post on lead generation for b2b startups, we explained the next step after you’ve built your prospect list is to nurture and qualify those leads. When you reach out to them, there’s always going to be a certain amount of resistance, even suspicion:

“Who are you? How did you get my email address? Is this spam?”

To prevent this, it’s your job to nurture those leads so that your outreach comes across as natural and as non-spammy as possible.

This involves getting to know your leads as individuals, beyond the general information in your ideal customer profiles. What’s unique about them? What do you share in common? Is there someone you both know? Have they or their company been in the news recently, or published a piece of content you enjoyed? What were their latest posts on social media?

Use these touch points to personalize your outreach. You can still use sales automation software like Reply with custom variables, so you can have automatic lead generation while still keeping things personal.

Still, no matter how personalized your first email is, don’t go in hard asking for the sale. This will rarely work and may put off your prospects before you have a chance to nurture them. Instead, ask a question (such as ‘how do you deal with X?’) and show sincere interest. Your goal with the first email is to get a reply, not a sale.

Bonus tip: Connecting with your leads on social media will not only give you valuable insight but also means that when you reach out to them they’ve heard of you and you’re not a complete stranger.

Inbound lead generation strategies

While you may want to focus on outbound leads for your B2B startup, that doesn’t mean you should ignore inbound lead generation. Inbound strategies are usually cheaper to implement, and while they may take longer to start working they have the added benefit of leads qualifying themselves.

One of the most popular methods is content marketing. The idea is to provide valuable content that’ll help your ideal customer. Use the information from their profiles, particularly relating to the challenges they’re facing, to come up with original, useful and interesting content.

The content itself can take many forms, including blog posts like this, podcasts and videos. I also recommend creating a lead magnet, in the form of an especially useful piece of content (such as an ebook, tutorial or webinar) that can be downloaded in exchange for the lead’s email address.

Each has their own advantages and disadvantages, but the most important factor is what format your ideal customer prefers content. If you’ve done it correctly, your prospective leads will be lining up to hand their email address over in exchange for more content.

Lead generation is essential for B2B startups, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. By using outbound strategies, nurturing your leads, and complementing this with inbound methods, you’ll have a list of qualified leads ready for your sales team.

Links are still important for your site’s SEO. Read the post to discover how to get backlinks for your website in 2019.

Running an online business and focusing on SEO, you’ve faced wide discussions on how backlinks impact your website’s ranking.

The only conclusion you should make after reading all the opinions on this topic is that backlinks do have a positive effect on SEO.

Sadly, knowing of the backlinks’ importance and being able to build a high-quality link profile isn’t the same.

Without a doubt, buying links on forums or other resources isn’t a good idea at all.

But how can you build authoritative backlinks not being a top influencer in the niche?

In this post, I’ll give seven tips to how you can build a trustworthy link profile for your website.

Why Backlinks are Important for SEO

First of all, external links leading to your website help search engines discover new pages.

To master how it works, you need to understand the process of crawling before your site is ranked in search results:

Crawling is a process of detecting and collecting new and updated pages to add them to the search engines index.

A crawler is a search robot systematically browsing the Internet and comparing URLs found with those which already exist in the index.

Sometimes, it takes too long for your page is found by a crawler. So, make sure you place links to your content on other sources related to your subject.

Moreover, when a search robot has found your page, it should determine how the page should get ranked in search results.

For this purpose, a crawler not only analyzes the content you post but also evaluates the quantity and trustworthiness of pages which link to your website.

As backlinks are sure to matter for SEO, it’s time to answer the most important question: How to build an authoritative link profile to improve your ranking?

1. Find sources: Analyze your competitors’ backlinks

To get trustworthy backlinks isn’t enough to just find some random websites. Looking for all the relevant ones to your site sources manually is quite a time-consuming process.

Relevance is critical. If your site is about Dental SEO, you don’t want to be getting backlinks from a fashion site!

The best solution to this problem is conducting competitor analysis. SEO tools such as Serpstat and Ahrefs will provide you with all the necessary data on your rivals’ link profiles.

I’ll go with Serpstat: enter your competitor’s domain into the search field, choose the search engine you rank for, and see the comprehensive analysis of their backlinks.

Click on Referring domains and Serpstat will provide you with a list of all the websites which link to your competitor’s site.

Select those with a high Serpstat Trust Rank score as it evaluates the trustworthiness of the source for search engines.

2. Guest posting

Once you’ve identified your potential backlink sources, you should think of the ways of making them link to your website.

The first and the less complicated one is to guest post on the blogs you’ve selected.

Here are the essential steps to guest blogging which will help you build effective backlinks:

• Familiarize yourself with the blog subject.
• Discover the most popular topics. You can use Buzzsumo: enter the domain and see the most shared posts on the blog. It will help you come up with the idea of your post which provides an actual value for the visitors.

• Create an article addressing subjects of interest of the blog target audience.
• If you want to promote an informational blog, add a link to one of your articles connected with your guest post subject or to some infographic you created for your blog.
• If you promote the service or the product, attach a link to your website and show how it can solve the audience’s problem.

Blogs usually have the section with the main requirements for people who want to publish their articles there. Follow these rules to increase your chances for your topic to be posted.

3. Link to other websites

It may sound controversial but, by promoting other websites, you can promote your site as well. Just make sure you link to authority sources.

So, how can outbound links influence your profile? Pretty simple.

When a link from your website brings some remarkable profit to the others, there are huge chances their owners will notice it while analyzing increases in their traffic.

Consequently, they may visit your site and decide your post is good enough for linking to it (especially, considering the fact that their company is mentioned in the article).

4. Mention big brands or celebrities

This paragraph is kind of a lifehack. Mentioning famous people or brands, you get an opportunity of going viral.

For instance, running an informational blog, you can publish the results of a survey for the best marketing strategy ever.

The competitors may be such brands as Nike, Coca-Cola, KitKat, etc.

People will vote for their favorite brands and share your pole on other sources.

If you’re lucky enough and your rating will gain extreme popularity, these giant companies may also notice you and link to the voting on their websites or social platforms.

Of course, these giant companies are just examples. Mention successful companies or personalities in your particular niche, and you’ll see they’ll get engaged with your idea.

5. Stay active on social media platforms

Although your social media presence doesn’t influence your ranking directly, it still matters.

Firstly, social networks are one more source where people can discover your new content or even find out that your brand actually exists.

The higher your brand awareness is, the more chances people will trust your articles and link to them in the future.

So, make sure you created social accounts for your business and:

• Added a link to your website;
• Attached links to every new piece of content in your social media posts.

6. Broken link building

What is it? It’s a practice of identifying broken links (those which don’t work anymore) on other sources.

Then, creating posts on the same subject as dead content was and suggesting website owners replace those links with your new ones.

The good news is that people will happily agree to your offer as broken links are harmful to their websites.

The not so good news is that it’s quite a labor-consuming process. Fortunately, if you know how to use SEO tools, you’ll quickly cope with this task.

I’ll go with Ahrefs: enter the domain of the source you want to place your link on, go to Outgoing links > Broken links.

Here is a list of its pages which contain dead content:

Let’s make sure it works. You can see the anchors of each broken link. It’ll help you identify it on the page where you want to suggest new content.

Now go to the post, which is the closest to the subject you used to write about, and find the backlink you want to replace.

Here’s a screen capture showing an example of a broken link:

If you could click on the anchor, you would see… Oops, nothing.

I guess it’s a sign you should start writing a new post.

7. Testimonials

The next tip is mostly about how not to spoil your link profile. Testimonials are extremely useful if you want to increase the authority of your website.

Keep in mind that your reviews section may become a place for other websites to place their links.

If these links lead to spammy sources, the trustworthiness of your site will be doubtful.

To avoid it, use ‘rel=nofollow’ for links in your testimonials. It’ll inform search robots they shouldn’t follow such links and index them.

To Sum Up

A high-quality link profile is a key to building the authority of your website.

As Google claims that trust is one of the ranking factors, consider that the quality of your backlinks is much more important than the quantity.

When working on earning links, make sure you collaborate with trustworthy and relevant websites.

Message from Gail, Founder of GrowMap: 

I’m adding this video to the end of this post because I want my readers to understand what Serpstat is:

Freelance writers, how much money are you leaving on the table?

When completing writing projects, you tend to charge for writing, editing and revising only. You don’t fully consider all aspects of completing a project. Unfortunately, you are leaving a lot of money on table – literally and figuratively.

Also, when you are hired for writing services, you are not just writers. You uncover and collect information through research and interviews to provide a comprehensive story.

You are artists who bring thoughts and ideas to life. You are geniuses who connect concepts to make them relatable. You are also editors who organize information to ensure that the final draft is easy to read and easy to understand.

You are consultants, business partners and experts that should be charging for your time, knowledge and expertise.

If you are not charging for all of the services you provide in a project, you are leaving money on the table. How much you’re losing is unknown, but you’ll have an idea after reading about the nine services you should be charging for.

Ways Freelance Writers Leave Money on the Table

1. Brainstorming & Conceptualizing

Brainstorming is the process of generating ideas, selecting different angles for your articles, and developing outlines. You should allocate at least an hour to this activity, even if the project seems relatively simple.

One useful tip is to use an online whiteboard tool to write down and organize all the ideas.

You just never know where your creativity will take you.

2. Background reading

When starting new assignments, you have to read previously published information for two reasons:

1) to learn more about the company you’re serving and 2) to determine if the data is relevant to the current project. Annual reports, website content, newsletters and other company reports are just a few documents you can read to gather information you need.

The reading time will vary depending on your reading speed; the simplicity or complexity of the documents you’re reading; and the number of pages included in the documents.

3. Research

You will almost always conduct research in your projects, even if you’re just confirming dates, times and places. It is a time-consuming, but necessary aspect of writing.

In addition to charging for the actual time you use to conduct research, you should also charge for reading, organizing, and summarizing your findings.

One task writers tend to overlook and not charge for is searching for free photos, videos, and other multimedia to accompany articles. Expect to spend at least 15 minutes doing this.

4. Interviews

Like research, conducting interviews is very time consuming. First, you have to schedule the interview which could take time due to busy schedules.

You also have to compose relevant questions to ensure that you’re capturing the essence of the message.

Then, you have to conduct the actual interview and transcribe the notes from the interview. Lastly, you have to creatively weave content from the interview into the story.

5. Additional Revisions & Edits

I have seen writers include up to two revisions in their contracts for no extra charge. However, that should cover only minor changes.

If the clients want to make major changes after the approved completion of the project or if they want to change directions mid-project, you need to charge accordingly and revise the contract to reflect the changes.

6. Related Expenses

Related expenses include charges for e-mail and internet services, paper and ink, and all other charges incurred during the completion of the project.

Internet and e-mail services are used to communicate with clients. Paper and ink are used to print the project. You may even have to use envelopes and postage.

7. Additional Meetings & Consultations

You will have one meeting with the client to determine the direction and expectations of the project. However, if multiple meetings are required, you can bill clients for your time only or for time and travel.

Be sure to document this in the contract. Lastly, conversations exceeding 10 minutes are consultations, so be sure to charge for them.

8. Aggravation

 One writer charges extra for aggravation “just because”. He doesn’t wait for something to happen; he charges automatically based on previous experiences.

The aggravation could be caused by the client or unexpected glitches that occur during the course of the project.

9. Promotion

Many times, clients may ask you to promote blogs posts, press releases and newsletters. Yes, you will do it…for an additional fee. Writing and promotion are two different services and you should charge the client for the value of each one.

For example, you may charge $300 to write press releases and $1,000 to send it to media outlets. Or, you can charge $250 for a blog post and another $150 to promote it.

Are you charging for writing, editing, and revisions only when quoting rates for your writing services? If so, you are leaving money on the table. Now is a good time to review your rates for services, sweep that money off the table, and take it to the bank.

Your Turn

Which of the above services are you not charging for now but can boost your boost your line? Let us know in the comment section below.

Have you ever felt that your email marketing tool is not delivering enough results for your marketing campaigns? If yes, then you are in the right place.

Email marketing is so crucial in inbound marketing that more than 95% of professional marketers use it. Email messages are already considered a great way to interact and communicate with people.

Once you have the email addresses of people who really love your product, you can easily convert them to repeat customers.

Heck, you can even use emails to promote your affiliate offers and earn a hefty commission per sale.

If you don’t have their email address, you can use an email finder tool like Hunter.io to find or verify one.

But to capture leads and to do all sort of personalization, I will guide you in choosing the best email marketing tool that will skyrocket your startup’s conversions.

The biggest problem that startups face is that they are unable to get people to open their emails. Most people hate spam and sometimes they even unsubscribe on the follow-up mail.

So let me tell you the exact features to look at when you are choosing an email service provider for your startup.

1. Personalization

Personalization is crucial to your email marketing campaign. Emails that include personalization enjoy a 75% higher open rate.

So why not choose an email marketing tool with great features for better personalization? Some of the best email marketing tools in this field are:

• MailChimp
• ConvertKit
• Aweber

They require nothing rather than a simple and short email verification.

2. Simplicity

When it comes to email marketing, the most common thing that people expect is simplicity. Because the more simple the tool the better is its usability.

Everyone is not an email marketing expert so the best choice is to choose a tool that can be used by everyone.

This is the exact reason for the success of the email marketing tool ConvertKit. There are a whole lot of tools in the market but still, ConvertKit came in and succeeded.

Why ConvertKit?

ConvertKit is a tool which is super easy to use compared to tools like Infusionsoft or HubSpot. This is why ConvertKit makes over $10 million a month in earnings.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Check out the ConvertKit reviews on G2Crowd. Reviewers said, “Perfect for when you’ve outgrown MailChimp” and “Convertkit – The worlds BEST email marketing service for bloggers. Period.”

3. Open Rate

Most people get confused with the open rate. The open rate is the ratio of emails sent to the number of emails opened.

However, there are only a very few service providers that do not offer a proper open rate. So you are safe here.

Your open rate rarely depends on the email service provider. It primarily depends on your subject line and even on the value of the email you send.

4. Proper Templates

Templates are really important for your emails. Responsive templates are really essential as today nearly 75% of email messages are opened on mobile phones.

So a responsive template is really important. It can help you send proper emails in bulk with high open rates and deliverability.

5. Statistics

We live in the generation of data and the more you understand your customer’s behavior, the more of them you can convert.

Choose the email marketing tool that shows you everything about your customer data.

Your customer data can help you improve and target your email messages and even avoid unnecessary cancellations.

The better you help your subscribers with their challenges, the more they will love your emails and take them seriously.

6. Proper Segmenting

Segmenting your emails properly is really important. You must segment your emails to send each person exactly what they are interested in receiving.

There are a lot of ways to segment emails. You could use different forms or different lead pages. Segmenting your emails also helps you to convert more people and avoid spam.

Let’s sum it up. If you find all these features in one email service provider then the email service provider is right for you.

You can research more online reviews and customer responses. Choosing the best email service provider is not a tough job.

Ensure the email provider you choose offers a proper opt-out. That is it. Now it’s your turn, let me know which email tool you like the most in the comments below.

Link building is critical if you want to organically improve your website’s rankings. We could spend time guessing what could be “the next big thing” in link building strategies.

Instead, I am going to show you the top five link building strategies that are currently effective and should work even better in 2018.

Check out the top strategies below and leave your comments in the comment section. The killer link-building strategies are:

• Internal Links
• Citations and Brand Mentions
• 2018 Jacking

So let’s get started.

Internal Links

Internal links are the most powerful link-building tactic you should use. Well-known websites are already using this strategy. For example, Wikipedia has strong internal links, and Wikipedia pages are in top positions for most generic terms.

What Are Internal Links and Why Are They Important?

Internal links take you from one page to another page within a website:

Image source: Advanced Web Ranking

In the above image, Link #1 is an internal link, i.e., a link from one page to another page within the website. Link #2 is an external link, which is a link to a page on a different domain. Link #2 takes you to Unsplash’s site to give credit for the image.

There are four reasons why internal links are important for your website:

1. They help users to navigate websites.
2. Internal links spread link juice and help you to rank better in search engines.
3. Adding internal links boosts page views and improves usability through call to action anchor text.
4. Smart internal linking helps search engine bots to easily crawl and index the deeper pages of the website.

Citations and Brand Mentions

We all know that building local citations is an essential building block in order to rank higher in the search results. Moreover, we all know how time-consuming it can be to create citations manually.

A local citation is the combination of the three terms nicknamed “NAP”: name, address, and phone number.

Benefits of Local Citations

There are a number of benefits to local business citations when it comes to local SEO rankings. Local listings:

1. Can appear on the first page of local search results.
2. Give you qualified leads and help to improve your rankings.
3. Help you beat your local competition.
4. Improve your visibility on major local search results.
5. Increase traffic to your business.
6. With local citations, you can easily attract new customers.

To find local citations sources, you can head over to this comprehensive list of 160+ Business Listing Sites with High Domain Authority (DA)

You can also find city-specific and keyword-specific citation sources by using the following commands.

City-Specific Citations:

• (city) business listings
• (city) business directory
• (city) directory

Keyword-Specific citations:

• (keyword) business listings
• (keyword) business directory
• (keyword) directory

Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are the future of link building. Brand mentions are when someone refers your product or services to others via his/her blog or website.

Google has made it clear, being mentioned by others is the only way to do SEO properly.

Head over to a nicely written post on How to Increase Your Rankings by Building Brand Mentions by Neil Patel.

2018 Jacking

Users always prefer to check the latest and most updated post. So add the current year or add some call to action terms to your content titles. By doing so, you can maximize your chances of hitting the first page results in search engines.

Suppose we have two posts with the following titles:

1. “5 Link Building Strategies to Focus on in 2017”
2. “5 Link Building Strategies to Focus on in 2018”

It is obvious that users will give preference to the post with the most recent date in the title. Also, use the following phrases (call to action terms) in your post titles. Do not forget to add “2018.”

• Top
• Discover
• Free
• Get
• Try
• Greatest
• Fastest
• Newest
• Oldest
• Most Expensive
• Easiest
• Unbelievable
• Best

Blog Commenting

There are many ways to build links. Building links from blog comments is one of the easiest ways, but it is also very time-consuming.

To find quality blogs, you can use the following advanced Google operators:

• “add new comment” + “your keyword here”
• “leave a comment” + “your keyword here”
• “leave a reply” + “your keyword here”
• “post a comment” + “your keyword here”
• “your keyword here” + “leave a comment”
• “your keyword here” + “comment here”
• “your keyword here” + “add comment”
• “powered by WordPress” + “your keyword here”
• “your keyword here” + “you may use these HTML tags and attributes”
• “your keyword here” + “post a comment”
• “notify me of follow-up comments ”
• “your keyword here” + “notify me of new posts”
• “comments on this entry”
• “sign in to comment on this entry”
• “log in or register to post comments”
• “you must be registered and logged in to leave comments”
• “this blog uses premium CommentLuv”

Head over to this post if you want to know more about how to do the blog comments in the right way: 11 Powerful Link Building Techniques to Gain the Most Engagement

Blog comment links are very effective, and some of the blog commenting benefits are:

• Some blogs have a high domain authority (DA) score, and a high DA benefits your search engine ranking.
• Even if a blog backlink is nofollow, the search engines will still find and index your website. More importantly, consistently commenting will improve visibility, establish credibility, and build your relationships with bloggers.

Link Building Strategies: Conclusion

Link building is crucial to any SEO campaign. Thankfully, we can still rely on a few link-building techniques that will work in 2018.

I hope you will implement all of these link building strategies in the right way so that you will move ahead of your competitors.

What’s your experience with these strategies? How have they helped your SEO? Share your views in the comments section.

Want more SEO tips? Check out Namecheap’s new Easy SEO for Small Businesses.

With more and more advertisements on social media, advertisers must compete for viewers’ attention in the most effective ways possible. One proven way is through YouTube marketing.

Many people have very little time on their hands. So resorting to YouTube videos to learn about various products and services seems to be the way most people find out information.

Not only is YouTube an economical way to get the word out about your product or service but it’s also well received by millions of viewers worldwide. YouTube offers a fast and often interesting way for viewers to engage with your ad.

Let’s face it. Most website users do not like to read. Any time they can get information in an easy, yet effective way, they’re going to choose that method every time.

YouTube videos have resulted in a spike in revenue as more viewers have gravitated to this form of marketing. Below are some ways that you can use YouTube videos to ramp up your sales.

Driving More Sales Through YouTube Marketing

So what does YouTube mean for you as a business owner? For starters, you might be interested to know that people process YouTube videos 60,000 times faster than they read text, according to marketing experts.

Marketers who jump on the bandwagon are experiencing more success with YouTube videos than with text alone.

YouTube Ads and Social Media

Another important fact you might be interested to know is that YouTube ads do very well on social media platforms. Take Facebook, for example. Each and every day (since June 2014), Facebook users view 1 billion YouTube ads.

Of those people, 65% use mobile devices, such as iPhones, Androids, or even tablets. What do these stats mean for you? Simply by making YouTube videos part of your marketing and advertising strategy, you increase the chance of people viewing your advertisements.

Shareability

YouTube videos are also one of the most common types of advertisements people share online. That’s great news because marketers who do use videos experience an increase in their revenue.

Their revenue increases roughly 49% faster than marketers who don’t use videos. This leads us to our next point about the impact of YouTube video channels.

YouTube Channels

Another very important marketing strategy that you should be aware of for driving more sales is the use of YouTube channels. Not only do these channels build credibility but they also significantly increase your conversion rate as you build brand awareness and customer loyalty.

Using a YouTube channel allows you to diversify your overall approach when using YouTube for advertising. Having your own YouTube channel is a great way to get plugged into your target audience.

You can increase user engagement by allowing users to leave comments and reviews, ask questions, and obtain feedback from you, the expert.

YouTube channels are a great way to build a following. They also help you to continue to meet the needs of your audience members by finding out what those needs and wants are as you interact with them

Implementing SEO Strategies

Not only can you use keywords when creating site content but you can also use relative keywords as a part of your video titles in the descriptions as well. Relative keywords are a great way to get high rankings in the search results and drive more traffic to your YouTube video or channel.

Other Reasons You Should Be Using YouTube Videos

1. Large Viewer Base and Platform

Although YouTube is not the only platform for video marketing, the YouTube platform seems to be the most sought-after platform worldwide.

Billions of viewers (over 1.3 billion) use it each and every day. Thus YouTube is one of your strongest bets for launching your video ad campaign.

2. Staying Power

YouTube offers one of the largest amounts of staying power in terms of how long visitors remain on the YouTube platform.

Even when using mobile devices, a typical viewing session could last for over 40 minutes. That’s great when you’re trying to capture your audience’s attention and engage users for long periods of time.

3. Low Bounce Rate

Another great aspect of using the YouTube platform to launch your videos is that it has a very low bounce rate.

This means that once users have clicked through to your landing page or website, they become engaged. They spend a much longer time on your website after they have arrived due to your YouTube ad.

4. High Mobile Web Traffic

YouTube generates the largest amount of mobile web traffic on the web. In fact, YouTube and Facebook alone account for at least one-third of all mobile web traffic worldwide.

YouTube is leading the pack against leaders such as Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram. So many people are now turning to their mobile devices for their web experience.

That’s all the more reason to make YouTube videos part of your overall content development and advertising strategy.

5. Competitive Advantage

Another great quality of using YouTube videos is that doing so provides you with something of a competitive advantage. Within your industry, you gain an edge over those who don’t take the time to create YouTube videos.

6. Surpassing Mainstream TV

Surprisingly enough, YouTube videos have actually surpassed mainstream TV in terms of popularity. That’s because viewers are seeking entertainment as well as answers to questions they have.

7. CTA

As with other advertising tactics, you can also provide a call to action in your YouTube video. This CTA is a great lead-in to your landing page, website, or blog.

Greatest Take Away

One of your greatest takeaways should be that a YouTube marketing strategy will drive more sales because more people will turn to you for a variety of reasons.

YouTube a great and economical way to build your brand. But it also puts you in a position to become the expert in your industry. After all, you are providing your audience members with engaging and compelling information that they actually need.