Tools have the power to either make your life simpler, or more complicated, depending on what you choose.

That is why making the right choice is important.

Here are my top tips on finding what tools are right for your blog or business.

Start by defining your needs.

Most people look at price or features, and just assume if the price is low and the features are numerous, they will be set. But that’s not always the case. A tool could have 1,000+ features, which is pretty awesome. But if you are only going to need three of those features, then there’s no sense in

• A) paying for things you don’t need or
• B) not choosing a tool that is awesome at the three features you need and instead choosing one that is so-so at a 1,000+ features.

Let’s say that you’re evaluating email marketing software. Your requirements are that it integrates well with other tools that you use, it offers a wide variety of templates that are mobile friendly, it allows you to preview emails before you send them, and it helps you create great forms and squeeze pages.

While there are tons of platforms to choose from, you’ll likely go with GetResponse because of their 100+ integrations, responsive email design, inbox preview tool, web form builder, and squeeze page generator.

Once you have defined your requirements, making a choice about what tool to go with will be much simpler.

Compare your top choice with some alternatives.

Just because you only found one tool that fits your needs, doesn’t mean it’s the only tool out there. There are great sites like TopAlternatives.com that can help you find the top tools for specific needs. For example, in their SEO category, they break down tools with specific functions.

This can help you discover a few great alternatives so that you can jump into the next step. They offer alternative tools for building a website, customer satisfaction, design, ecommerce, email marketing, mobile, optimization, SEO, social media, time management, usability, visual  marketing, and business communication.

Try before you buy.

Whether you end up trying to decide between multiple tools with the features you want, or just one that seems to be perfect, be sure to try it before you buy it. Most tools will offer some form of free trial, usually ranging from seven to thirty days. Here are my recommended free trial tips.

• Don’t sign up for a free trial until you are ready to actually use it.
• Set a reminder in your calendar to visit the tool each day until the trial ends.
• Take into consideration the ease of use of the tool you are trying. If it’s difficult, you won’t want to use it on a regular basis, which will lower its value for your business.
• Know how long you have and when/where to cancel if you decide against a particular tool (include a reminder in your calendar for the last day to cancel).
• Plan to evaluate the results of using a particular tool the day before you need to decide to commit to it.

Remind yourself to regularly use your tools.

Once you have made the commitment to the right tools for your blog or business, don’t let them sit stagnant while they auto-debit your credit card. Set them up so you can easily remember to use them on a daily basis. If they are web applications, for example, create a folder on your bookmarks bar for your tools and put your username next to each so you can easily get to the login pages and remember how to login. Below is my list of top tools…

If there’s certain times you want to check a particular tool, such as taking a daily look at all of your dashboards in Cyfe to review your analytics, then you’ll want to set a calendar reminder to do so. What I like to do is grab a link to the first dashboard I want to view (like my ultimate social media dashboard)…

You don’t have to do these specific things, but you should make it a point to regularly use your tools.

Review, and review often.

If you find you’re not regularly using a particular tool based on difficulty or lack of usefulness, then it might be a sign you need to choose something new. Or, at the very least, time to cancel your account and save some money until you find something new.

Finding the right tool is key to business productivity.

For this, you might want to set a monthly or quarterly reminder to review all of the tools in your toolbox to see if you are still using them and still getting what you need out of them. If not, go back to the beginning of this post and start the selection process over again. This will ensure that you are always getting value from the tools you choose for your business.

How do you find great tools for your blog or business and then ensure you are always using them?

Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

CEM (short for customer experience mapping) has been a popular topic for well over 6 years for big companies interested in understanding a customer’s “relationship” with their services and products. However, small to medium companies have just started to notice the importance of having this incorporated into your business process.

According to Zeemo,

An engaging user experience is ultimately the most important aspect of your website, as your customers can and will leave your site if it doesn’t meet their standards.

This is why mapping your customer experience is so important.

Not to mention startups in the “app zone”, whose breakthrough relies mostly on how early-stage users interact and feel about the product/service they are testing or using. Today, we’re going to take note on 3 elements that can be added to the mix when creating a customer experience map.

The Must Have Elements

An experience map is a detailed visualization of your customer’s journey, the opportunities that rise for both your business and products/services to meet customer needs not only on the spot, but also in the long run, and the guiding principles behind actions and behaviors. Questions that can help you understand the processes behind a user’s action, include:

• What are the top reasons why my customers would need my product or service?
• What are the top benefits for using my product/service?
• How does my product/service integrate in the moment, i.e. offering my customers an improved experience online/offline/both ways?
• Does my product/service integrate in the bigger picture, long-term? Why/Why not? If Yes, then How?
• What are customer behavior or mindset patterns which my product/service can cover or respond to?
• Is my customer acting based on pre-defined principles? What are those? Can these be addressed or integrated in my product/service?
• Is my product/service sustainable? Does it allow a connection/bridge between customer experience and customer satisfaction?

You can find more about the anatomy of a customer experience map here, along with clear examples such as Rail Europe’s CEM process. Now, if you follow the best practices of CEM, you can only get so far. Here’s how to take the entire process one step forward.

#1. Monitoring Customer Satisfaction Across All Channels

Customer satisfaction is a key player in designing products or services that solve problems, create a space for customers to enjoy and use, and trigger customer loyalty in the long run. Nowadays, your social media staff and community managers play a bigger role than in the past. Here’s why: customers are humans and there is a certain emotional link between your service or product and their needs. Sometimes, as providers, we fail to completely deliver and meet expectations. And this is human, as well. That is why as businesses, we need processes and human force to handle the failure.

An angry customer will be more understanding if, for example, someone from your staff will patiently listen to his/her worries, complaints, and offer a win-win solution, in a timely manner. Knowing the key principles behind proper damage control can save your company’s future. These are: responsiveness (speed and time), reaction, damage control, patience, protocols and explanations at hand, problem solving procedures, standard and customized processes, call to action, open door policies.

And learn from other brands’ mistakes (such as Pokemon Go’s fiasco, although they managed to recover, to some extent, according to this article).

#2. Monitoring Feedback

Nothing new here, however many businesses ignore customer feedback. Just having a good survey form on your website and a competent community manager that gathers all feedback from customers isn’t enough to gain valuable insights about your products, features, and services, and the way they impact your customers’ lives. Another idea is to use a VoIP call center solution that provides robust report allowing you to see your customers’ feedback after they called your customer support team.

You shouldn’t collect customer feedback at a superficial level.

Many customers tend to forget, or do not have the time, or simply are not used to leaving feedback and stating their mind. That is why you must always pair up with a third-party service to collect more insights, and put them to better use.

Delighted, a feedback monitoring tool, has become very popular among startups, mid-sized companies and Fortune500 brands. Among these, Uber, PeoplePerHour, Tedx, Slack, and others use it to collect instant feedback and rate their products and services. The tool sends out a message to the users, asking them to rate the brand/product/service on a scale from 1 to 10, in the email body. And then opens an additional web page where the user can explain their pick. Feedback is collected and delivered in real time to the brand’s board. Delightful!

#3. Crunching User Website Data to Understand Online Patterns

The customer experience map is strongly related to your website’s functionality and the user’s activity patterns, not just to the human, personal journey aspect. Ideally, you would want to get to know and understand your audience at a deeper level. Besides having a solid website or channel that runs on usability and responsiveness across all devices/environments, you also need access to data related to the user’s online activity prior or post usage of your product or service. It’s way easier in the case of apps, for e.g., to collect user data right from the app itself, analyze it and report findings strictly related to your product. Google offers the option to export data and stats if your app is in the Google App store.

If your products/services do not come in the form of apps, then your website becomes the first environment to facilitate the contact and interaction between them and the customer. They don’t say a website is a company’s business card, for nothing!

While data extracted from your website may fail to directly address all customer experience segments, it will help in predicting certain behaviors or trends in close relation to your service or product. Pivot tables provide a simplified way to gain first hand access to customer patterns and do not require super advanced knowledge of data analysis. If you are not familiar with PowerPivot there are plenty of online articles like this one.

Takeaways

Come what may, we live in a time where businesses need to walk the extra mile to achieve success. In the business world, there is such thing as “competition”, and the only way to win a top spot is to provide something different, better, more functional, more accurate to your customers.

This means gathering data from the inside (starting with your website user data), analyzing it, finding patterns, building your product based on those patterns to meet customers’ expectations.

Remember that feedback isn’t just “active listening”, as everyone talks about, but also input collection and implementation to meet customer satisfaction. Happy customer experience mapping!

Image source: Pixabay

Social media has become the top way for brands to increase awareness of what they’re doing, from promoting new products to interacting with customers. Experts encourage entrepreneurs to regularly post high-quality content in the hopes followers will share it across their own networks.

This means spending hours developing insightful updates, linking to your own great blog posts, and sourcing images from stock photo sites.

After putting all of this work into your content creation efforts, it can be even more disturbing to find your information posted on another site. It may even be a competing business’s blog or an industry magazine. Even if the site credits you as the author of the work, using your content without compensating you for it is a violation.

“There are several situations where social media content can be stolen,” says Robert May, founding attorney at The May Firm. “Increasingly publications are using social media posts as part of their news stories, as seen here. When they get permission first, it isn’t a problem.

Unfortunately, less professional sites fail to get that permission. Sometimes a site uses an original photo or copies a blog post that has been linked on social media. In more extreme instances, a business owner may find a fake account has been set up using his own name and likeness.”

Whatever the type of theft, it’s important to act quickly to make sure the content is removed. Here are a few steps you should take if you find your social media content has been stolen.

Step One: Make Contact

Before doing anything, send a friendly email politely asking that the content be removed. Don’t use forceful language in this initial contact. Simply state the action you would like to have taken as a result of the letter. If you want the content removed, ask politely that they do so within a certain number of business days.

If you are agreeable to being compensated for your content, state the price and offer removing the content as an alternative. Hopefully the offender will remove the content and send a letter of apology for the inconvenience. If not, wait the stated number of days before taking further action. If the content was posted on a site by an employee of an organization, take your complaint further up the chain before checking into outside options.

Step Two: Check the Terms of Service

While you’re waiting, carefully review the terms of service on the social media site where your content was originally posted. Facebook allows you to report copyright infringements using this tool, while Twitter’s tool is here.

Both are products of the Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in 1996 to protect copyright holders from online theft. You may also want to check into the policies of the website where the content is posted, since they’ll have their own copyright infringement notification procedures.

DMCA Takedown Notice

In addition to the tools offered on various social media sites, copyright holders can also have content taken down using a DMCA Takedown Notice. You’ll need to determine the Internet Service Provider hosting the site where the content is posted and direct your letter there.

After an investigation, you’ll often find that the content is removed without having to wait for the person who posted it to respond. DMCA charges for the service through its site, but you can craft a letter for free using the instructions provided on the National Press Photographers Association site.

Contact an Attorney

When other recourse has failed to bring action, it’s time to contact a lawyer. Although attorneys will charge an hourly fee to help with copyright infringement, often content can be removed through a cease and desist letter. Such a letter packs a heavy punch when it comes from a law office.

If for some reason that letter doesn’t achieve results, however, an attorney can go through the courts to have a cease and desist order placed on the content, which requires that it be removed.

Having your content stolen can feel like a violation. Fortunately, there are actions you can take to let offenders know that you won’t allow your photos and text to be used for free. By having tools in place to use in the event your content is stolen, you’ll be prepared to take action if it ever happens.

Image by Pavlofox from Pixabay

According to the U.S. Census Bureau figures, some 5.6 million mothers, or nearly 1 out of 4, have opted to abandon their jobs to be with their kids. More and more are preferring the stay-at-home option after childbirth.

Women who take care of their kids full-time are more likely to get depressed, however.  While they love their kids to bits, they feel that a life doomed to changing diapers day in and day out is a waste of education and talent. Besides, letting the husband be the sole breadwinner during a shaky economy seems not a wise option.

The solution: Keep your sanity and dignity, as well as the streams of income flowing by being a stay-at-home but working mom. The following are just some of the many work-at-home options you can choose from:

1. Freelance writing. Do you have a way with words? Many businesses pay good money for content writing. There are many freelance writing websites you can sign up for, like Elance,  Odesk, and Guru.

2. Customer service. There is a huge demand for virtual employees to handle in-bound customer calls which can be routed directly to your computer via the Internet. Virtual customer service agents are paid by the hour and keep a specific work schedule. Training is also paid.

3. Medical transcription. If you type fast and have excellent spelling and grammar, you can try working as medical transcriptionist.  There are training programs available online for this line of work with focus on honing your English skills, knowledge of human anatomy and pharmacology, and ability to take dictation from health professionals.

4.  Data entry. A data entry job usually requires some form of data being converted into another form, like a list of people’s name and addresses in Word document being transformed into entries in a spreadsheet.

5.  Online teaching or tutoring. Online teachers and tutors may teach a variety of subjects, ranging from elementary to college levels. A teaching certification or experience is usually required to qualify for this job.

6. Bridal and wedding consultant. A bridal wedding consultant performs a variety of tasks including planning the schedule for the wedding and the rehearsal dinner,  connecting the couple-to-be with the right vendors, creating the budget and the bridal registry, etc.

7. Selling arts and crafts online. If you love crafting, why not create a website showcasing your creations? Just make sure you have quality photos because your customers will be judging your work based on these images. Try beaded jewelry, hand-sewn bags, dolls, ceramics — the possibilities are endless.

8. Cake decorator/designer. If you have taken a course in baking and cake decorating, this home-based work option may appeal to you. You can start by offering your services to friends, neighbors, or former officemates.  Make sure to make a portfolio of your best designs.

9.  Dog daycare. If you love dogs, this job should come easy to you. You get to pat, groom and interact with multiple dogs at the same time and get paid for it! In the U.S, dog owners pay as much as $30 per dog for a few hours’ stay at the daycare center.

There are many more online business ideas that make money. Experiment! You may even come up with your own idea.

Take the leap!

The first step in building a successful home business is coming up with a solid plan of action.

You don’t necessarily have to develop an actual business plan in the traditional sense (though it would probably help), but it is very important that you have your goals, promotional strategy and costs mapped out clearly for use as a personal reference.

Put away at least three months’ worth of money, and get ready to be your own boss.

Stay-at-home businesses are a great way to transition into self-employment. Just remember that to be your own boss, you also have all of your boss’s responsibilities: you’ll need to keep work coming in, keep pay going out, and keep your clients happy.

Finally, you’ll need to keep yourself happy and stress-free. That’s the most important thing!

Welcome to all and thank you for your visit ! ツ from Pixabay