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Showing posts from November, 2018

Media training 101 for small businesses

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Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr

Lessons Learned From Working Remotely As an Accountant

When most people think of accountants and accounting jobs, they think of someone sitting behind a desk in an office, meeting with clients, and dealing with piles of paperwork. Working from home—without any face-to-face meetings or paper handoffs—might not seem possible. When I first looked at the possibility of finding an accounting job I could do remotely, the odds didn’t look too good. Most of the accounting jobs that were open to remote work were tax-related, which didn’t align with my current accounting experience and was not the type of job I was interested in. Considering the amount of paperwork staff accountants typically deal with and how closely I worked with others at my in-office job, I figured accounting was out of the question when it came to working remotely. Fast forward to a few years later…I came across a job opening at Zapier, a 100% distributed company, for an accountant role and knew I had to go for it! I had already set up an office at home that was a happy envir

The 6 Best Apps for Creating and Mailing Greeting Cards

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Never forget to drop another thank you card in the mail again. The best greeting card services and apps automatically send cards on your behalf, whether they're birthday cards you send to friends or family or a note of appreciation at the end of the year thanking your most important clients. Greeting card apps take the manual labor out of sending cards. With these services, you pick the cards you want to send, but you give the hard work of writing them, addressing envelopes, adding postage, and dropping them in the mail to someone else. These services still allow you to create the cards you want because you can choose from a selection of pre-made cards or designing one from scratch using your photos, logos, or other images. You can write a custom message on the inside of the card, even if you choose one that already comes with a printed message on the front. Many greeting card services also let you schedule when you want the cards to mail, too. Felt greeting card app Some gree

10 Unique Lead Nurturing Strategies for Facebook Lead Ads

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Facebook lead ads are an increasingly popular way to collect email addresses and other information from Facebook users. And for good reason: two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are active Facebook users , and lead ads are particularly effective at gathering data from these users, since they're pre-populated with users' information. Of course, as any salesperson will tell you, simply acquiring leads isn't worth much—unless you nurture them . That is, you need to turn those leads into sales. But if you follow the same strategy as everybody else, you won't stand out. To catch customers' attention, you need to try something different. Here, we'll present 10 unique ways to nurture your Facebook lead ads audience. Follow Up with a Facebook Chatbot Best for segmentation Facebook chatbots provide a powerful way to engage with your customers, and they're surprisingly easy to set up and manage. Instead of sending a 400-word follow-up email to your new leads that a

The Zapier Guide to Email Automation

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Email is essential for work—and yet, email is often not productive. Your inbox is the rare place where critical tasks, important information, news, app notifications, and personal letters all mix in an unwieldy list that is always filling up. Email apps only help so much. They simplify organizing and searching through messages, but still take our time and attention. You need a tool to handle email for you, something that watches for critical messages and makes sure you see them, sends routine emails automatically, and saves important information from emails. You need an automated email inbox. Here’s how to build one in Zapier. What is Zapier? It’s an app automation tool that connects over 1,0400 apps so you can create customized workflows. Want to get an SMS when you receive an email? Zapier could watch your inbox for a new email—and when one comes in, that would trigger Zapier to then send the SMS to you in an action step. We’ll look at more email workflows below, but if you’re n

Google Calendar Is Shutting Down SMS Notifications, Here's How To Keep Getting Them

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Google is shutting down SMS notifications for Google Calendar events on January 7, 2019; users are encouraged to use in-app notifications instead. This makes sense for most users–the Google Calendar app is ubiquitous–but there are still a few cases where SMS notifications come in handy, such as users without access to a reliable internet connection. Zapier can help if you want to keep the SMS notifications flowing. We offer simple automations called Zaps that can do just about anything to move information between your favorite apps–including sending you an SMS message when a Google Calendar event is about to begin. Let's dive into setting everything up. Note that as of right now we only support sending SMS messages to phone numbers in the U.S. and the U.K. Option 1: Get Started Quickly with a Zap Template The template below will walk you through setting up a Zap that will send SMS messages for upcoming events on your calendar. Using this template you will: Log into Zapier

20 Creative Ways to Use Trello and Organize Everything

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Trello is a terrific tool for project management and task management. The visual Kanban boards are flexible, shareable, and let you pack a ton of detail into each card. But Trello isn't just for work. You can use it to organize just about anything, perhaps your entire life. As Trello co-founder and Stack Overflow CEO Joel Spolsky explains : Some people saw Trello and said, "oh, it's Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way." Yeah, it's that, but it's also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people. Spolsky says he uses about 30 Trello boards regularly with everyone in his life. Once you see some examples of the many different ways to use Trello, you might too. If you're wondering what else you can use Tr