Category: Digital Branding

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Design thinking relies on elements from the designer’s toolkit, such as experimentation and empathy to produce creative solutions. It focuses on making decisions based on what future customers would like instead of relying on historical data. Here are the best six tips on how to stimulate design thinking in your workplace.

Start Small

You can’t change culture and tradition overnight, so your company’s leadership will most likely be skeptical about design thinking in the beginning. Introducing this creative form of thinking in the workplace requires of you to convince the people on leading positions that it’s not just some risky way of making decisions, but an innovative approach to problem-solving.

To prove them that design thinking works and brings positive results, start with a small project with less risk like organizing a company’s party or a smaller event. Get everyone involved in the process by stimulating your bosses and co-workers to use their creativity to plan the event without heavily relying on their previous experience.

Effectively Deliver to Prove Your Point

As stated above, you can’t expect your bosses to flip their mindset in a day, so you have to back your point about design thinking with real success stories. Always do double delivery no matter what type of project you are working on – play by the rules and do things the way you are supposed to but try to involve design thinking as much as possible. In this way, you can both meet your bosses’ expectations and show them the advantages of design thinking.

Even if they aren’t keen on incorporating design thinking in the workplace, their opinion could change once they hear your proof points. Double delivery might sound like too much work, but it can actually result in double success with less effort.

Talk Benefits without Offending

Using too much negativity to prove your point can have the exact opposite effect of what you hoped to achieve. It’s hard to change social norms, so taking an aggressive approach and pointing fingers at what’s wrong won’t be of much help. Instead, talk of the benefits of design thinking and share additive comments that speak of the value of this creative decision-making method. For instance, find out which people or businesses your leaders admire, research how they like to use design thinking and present the gathered facts to your bosses.

Look for Non-Obvious Need

When people deal with problems, especially complex ones they immediately focus on finding a solution. In these cases, it’s worth to search for a non-obvious need and uncover the hidden benefits of the situation instead.

According to this undergraduate program in business design, modern businesses, especially design-oriented companies, consulting firms, design studios, and communication agencies, need professionals who are able to combine design thinking, business, technology, and professional skills together with an entrepreneurial attitude in order to come up with creative ideas and solutions. The program trains future professionals to handle uncertainties by using design thinking and incorporating innovative and non-obvious strategies.

Don’t Miss the Chance to Promote Design Thinking

To convince your bosses and workmates to try design thinking you really have to understand its value first. Design thinking is an approach borrowed from the designer’s tool kit that is about creating ideas that are both emotionally meaningful and functional. Don’t hesitate to bring up design thinking when there is some complex problem that needs to be solved.

Make sure to present these benefits to your work team explaining that through design thinking they can come up with solutions that are technologically feasible, economically viable and desirable from a human point of view.

Use Design Thinking to Inspire

Design thinking is undoubtedly more helpful for people who work in creative roles especially in the area of problem-solving, but any profession can benefit from this approach in different ways. For instance, those who aren’t in traditionally creative roles can use design thinking to connect with the target audience on a deeper level. You should stimulate the people at your workplace to think with design in mind, trying to connect them with the customers who are using their products or services, so they can see how their work makes a difference in these people’s lives.

It might take time until your co-workers and leaders are comfortable with incorporating design thinking in their businesses, but with the right presentation you can make it possible and take all the credit for bringing immensely helpful innovation in your company that could result in non-obvious solutions and breakthrough ideas.

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You sit on your desktop looking for the best online deals on fashion merchandise. What do you usually do? You merely Google the results and look for the ones that suit you. More often than not, you click on the ones at the top. Do you ever wonder what makes those sites appear at the top? Is it their popularity?

However, the main reason why they appear at the top is their optimization in accordance with the search engine. Search engine optimization has been a defining moment for the change in online advertising and digital marketing industry. Most websites prefer to optimize their content for it to appear at the top of the search results in Google. It has specific strategies which help your site grow in terms of stature.

A Brief on the Working of SEO

How does SEO make it possible for your website to appear at the top? Well, it’s not such a complicated process. Every site stands for its content, as it should. The content is the main structure which makes your website strong. In the working of SEO too, it’s the content which plays a significant role. For it to work, you would have to be well-versed with keywords and searches of your content.

What happens is, we target a few specific words from our content and use it as keywords. The experts set keywords according to the searches on Google. For example, if we see a few words which have a vast range in the search history, we can set them as our keywords. It sets up the content is such a way that Google tracks your content up whenever people use those words to search the internet.

It is mainly this strategy which works in Search Engine Optimization. Not only the text content but it also works with various other forms of content available in the web world. Going deep down the context would help us know more about how SEO event works. However, companies usually hire SEO experts such as SEO Company Los Angeles to help them out with the optimization of your content.

Working over Videos

Videos are by far the best means of boosting your web content. When you have well-framed video clippings which go well along with your website and its content, it is bound to boost your content for search engine optimization. You don’t need proof to believe how vital videos can be in capturing people’s attention. Once you go away with grabbing the attention, half of your work is over.

Statistically too, videos have seen a rise in their use over the years. Recent developments in the industry have placed videos way above other kinds of content in the market. As you scroll through videos, you get to see various types of content which unknowingly grabs your attention towards a specific product. It is this skill which you require if you wish to excel in this field.

Benefits of Incorporating SEO

Websites all over the world look to incorporate SEO into their systems. There have to be substantial reasons behind this. Optimizing your content is more important than you might think. Let’s see the benefits of SEO below:

1. Low Cost and Maintenance

SEO is unlike advertisement where you pay for your products’ advertising. It is something which comes with skill and information. You hire SEO experts to optimize your content, and you are good to go. You don’t need any extra payment over the online sources to boost your content. Some people go for illegal sources and spend money, but the effort ultimately goes in vain, as they fail to focus on their content.

One should know that spending extra money is not going to get them anywhere. It’s their effort and quality which can do so.

2. Increase in Traffic

Optimizing your content means a definite increase in web traffic. Statistically, most websites opting for SEO have witnessed a considerable increase in traffic. It’s obvious when your content appears on the top of the search results that you are bound to see an increase in web traffic. The growth would not be there overnight, but it would be steady enough to keep you guessing. You have to keep patience for the result.

3. Enhancement in Credibility and Stature

For a brand, its credibility stands on top of its priority list as it should. As a webmaster, it is obvious for you to look for a way out which helps you enhance your credibility. You can use social media platforms, your nearby sources, and other means to propagate your brand credibility, which are good ways of promoting your brand. However, SEO lets you have a look at the bigger picture.

Using SEO, when your content appears on the top of search results, your potential customers are bound to think about your brand as a high-end one. This impression of your brand on your potential customers demands a strategy. SEO helps you have that.

4. Return of Investment

Your expectations for your investments rise higher with the amount that you consider for investing in a project. With SEO, you land in an entirely appropriate place where you get more than your expectations. The effects on SEO on your web traffic are most of the times higher than what you usually expect for a certain amount of expenditure. So, the return of investment that you get in SEO is one of the best.

5. You are ahead of your competitors

If a concept becomes popular, its demand is bound to increase. With an increase in demand, the competition also increases. Considering a lot of people are already starting to look for SEO experts to expand their business online, you should not waste any time in getting started. It would make you stand with your competitors who are already in this field and give you an edge over those who aren’t.

Business is a race where you need to strive to get better every day. Don’t simply do it because everyone is busy doing it but, do it because it’s the way to go.

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Cutting videos involves more than just placing one clip after another in the sequence that you want them to be in. The exact point that you end one clip and the point that you start the next are important, as is the content of the clips, frequency of the cuts, and numerous other factors.

The impact that your cuts can have on business videos is significant. A video that is cut well will appear to transition smoothly and keep the audience focused on your message. On the other hand a video that is not cut well will be jarring to watch, and distract viewers.

Although cutting videos that appear smooth requires skill and experience, there are three important tips that you can use to get started on the right track.

Use Action Cuts and Match Cuts

Two of the smoothest types of cuts that you can use in your video are action cuts and match cuts.

To use action cuts you will need to transition from a clip that shows a particular action taking place, to a clip that shows that same action continue. Similarly to use match cuts you will need two clips that have significant similarities in terms of the action, subject, or subject matter.

Because these cuts have similar threads connecting the clips across the transition, viewers will tend to focus on them. That will make the cut less obvious, and the overall transition will be smoother.

Never Forget the Audio

While you’re focused on making sure your video is smooth, don’t forget about the audio. As smooth as the transition of your video clips may be it will still be jarring to viewers if the audio is disjointed by the cut.

In some cases you can get around this problem by using L cuts and J cuts that both allow you to cut the audio independently of the video. If you use an L cut the audio from the first clip will keep playing for a short while after the video has transitioned, whereas if you use a J cut the audio from the second clip will start playing before the video transitions.

Hide the Presence of Jump Cuts

Jump cuts are one of the most jarring types of cuts, but are unfortunately all too common when cutting videos that are shot using a single camera setup and recorded from a fixed perspective. Essentially you’ll be cutting to a point later in the same clip, and the subject will seem to ‘jump’ to a different position all of a sudden.

If you have no other option you should try to hide the presence of jump cuts in your video. One option to do that is to insert a cutaway in between both the clips, or the other is to reframe one of the clips so that it looks visually different enough – though that may affect its quality if you crop too much.

Conclusion

Try using these tips the next time you cut a business video and see for yourself the difference that they make. All that you need is a video cutter, and for example you can use Movavi Video Editor if you want to be able to quickly and easily cut your videos.

The more that you cut videos, the more you’ll get a feel for the right point at which you should transition from one clip and join the next. Unfortunately there is no shortcut for that, and it will require that you keep on cutting videos and observing how each cut affects the flow of the video.

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Drop shipping is a prevalent model of business for novel entrepreneurs, especially millennials and Gen Xers, because of the skills of internet marketing that are outweighing financial capacities. Since you do not require handling or stocking the things on sale, there is a possibility of starting a drop shipping business with minimal funds.

An e-commerce site operating the drop shipping model buys and sells products from manufacturers and third-party suppliers, who then fulfill the order. This cuts your costs of operation and frees up the time needed to focus on the efforts of acquiring new customers.

If you want to start a drop shipping business that competes with giants in the retail sector, and you are doing it on a minimal budget, use the steps below. While it does not need a lot of funds to start this business, it requires a lot of hard work.

Choose a niche

The niche of choice needs to have less focus and something you are interested in genuinely; the product range that does not have a focus on the market. In case you are not passionate about your niche of choice; you will be apt on getting discouraged; since it takes so much work to scale your drop business successfully. Below are a few aspects to consider while choosing a niche;

Look for attractive profits

While running a model of the drop shipping business, the whole focus is on marketing and acquisition of customers; therefore the work needed to sell an item for twenty dollars is the same as selling a product worth one thousand five hundred dollars. Choose a niche with expensive products.

Low costs of shipping are vital. Although the manufacturer or supplier will handle shipping in case the price is very high, it will function like customer repellant. Look for something which is affordable to ship, and this will offer you the option of providing free shipping to clients and absorbing the cost as an expense of the business to attract additional sales.

You need to make sure that the product is appealing to impulse buyer with income that is disposable. When you put your focus on driving website traffic, you will want to experience high conversion rates because the majority of visitors will never come back. The things you are selling need to trigger impulse appeal and buys to individuals with the ability to purchase immediately.

You need to make sure that people are searching for the product actively. Employ the keyword planner and trends from Google to check common terms relating to your niche. If there is no one searching for what you want to sell, you are already dead before even beginning.

Create your brand

The drop shipping business you start will have a lot of value if it is possible to rebrand what you are selling and give it your look. Seek a line or product that can be white labeled and sell it as your brand with customized branding and packaging.

Sell something which is available locally

You need to pick something that clients cannot find on the streets. In this way, you become beautiful to potential customers.

Carry out competitive search

You need to remember that you are competing with competing with other operations and retail giants like Amazon and Walmart. This is where many potential shippers miss it since they look for products with no or little competition. It is a sign that there is no demand for that item.

There are a lot of reasons why products may not have so much competition, like manufacturing and supplier issues, high costs of shipping, or poor margins of profit. Seek for items with the tournament since it is a sign that the demand is high and model of the business is sustainable.

Secure the supplier

Partnering with wrong suppliers can ruin your enterprise; therefore it is crucial not to rush through this step. You need to conduct due diligence. Many drop shipping businesses are overseas, which make communication important in terms of the ability to understand one another and response speed. In case you are not one hundred percent confident in the skills of contact of the supplier, move on with your search.

Alibaba has a tremendous online resource for identifying and communicating with potential suppliers and manufacturers. You need to make sure that you ask many questions and learn their capacity to the product in the vent the business is growing. You need to make sure that they can scale with you.

Learn from other drop shipping business entrepreneurs who have gone through this path. There are a lot of sources of information, from tech and business blogs to subreddit about drop shipping. This topic is favorite since it helps in avoiding costly mistakes to the supplier.

Constructing an e-commerce site

The easiest and fastest method of launching a website which support the drop shipping model is by use of the simple platform of commerce like Shopify. You do not require a tech background to be up and running and has many apps to assist increase sales volumes.

Even when you have a small budget that can allow you to employ a web development and web design firm to curate a custom solution, it is wise to use plug and play options in the beginning. After becoming established and some revenue is streaming in, you can then explore added customizations of the site.

Create a plan of acquiring customers

Having a great site and great product is good; however, without the clients to purchase, you do not have a business. There are many ways of attracting potential clients, but the option that is effective is starting an ad campaign on Facebook.

Conclusion

You need to track all metrics and data that is available for the growth of your business. It includes Facebook conversion pixel data and Google analytics data; if that is your primary channel of customer acquisition. When you want to track each conversation to know the origin of the customer and the path they took on the website that led to sales; it helps you to scale what is functional and eliminate what does not. You will not have to put in place a set and forget the marketing or advertising solution. You have to fine-tune current campaigns and test new opportunities, which will allow for a shift in the battle to spend or know the date of optimizing your budget.

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For whatever reason you would opt to blog, may it for business or personal matters, the main aim is to reach a vast majority of people and ensure that you resonate with most of them. Well, most people will comfortably start a blog, pay various agencies to advertise, and then they think that’s it. No, rather, in order to successfully run a blog you need various tips that would ensure you achieve great success at blogging. Let’s dive into it.

1.    Find your passion

What drives you into blogging in the first place? Or if you already have a blog, what drove you into that specific niche? In order to achieve that top-tier status in blogging, you must love and enjoy the topic that you are handling. There is much ease and comfort writing content for content you love, rather than just trying to search on what you heard by hearsay of people that writing on a certain niche pays better. Let’s say you have passion for Yoga, or cooking for instance, it wouldn’t make sense trying too hard in a poetry blog or even a travel blog that are not in your interests.

2.    Invest in Good Gear

There are certain blogs that most of us just glance and they are off to another page. Well, why is it hard for people to stick to your blog? One major aspect is the quality of content that is offered. Some blogs are covered with gibberish and fluff while also have very poor photographs that it is a complete turn off.  Investing in the right gear has the powers of making a blog look very professional. What do we mean by gear? Well, one important aspect to consider is always a camera. Blogs that involve images, like traveling, food, product reviews, and such, it is imperative that you have a very clear DSLR camera that will deliver great content. Other than that, there is the software gear like WordPress software, email marketing software, the Adobe Suite and various plugins that you will need at the end of the day to ensure your blog looks really professional and neat.

3.    Content and consistency

In order to achieve success with your blog, you need to always have content to deliver. Content that is geared to capture the attention of your audience from the first to last bit of the blog. Then, your blogs should be consistent and within a specific time-frame. If you do on a daily, weekly, on a fortnight, or the least being a monthly basis, then you need to maintain the same consistency. This keeps your audience always eager and looking forward to the next blog.

4.    User-friendly interface

One of the appealing things a blog offers is an interface that welcomes its readers. An interface that resembles when the internet was conceived has very low chances of surviving or competing with numerous of the modern interfaces that are supported or hosted by a number of web hosting platforms. Try and look out for what suits your kind of blog, so that it would be appealing for readers to get that professional look whenever they are reading your content.

5.    Gear content to suit mobile

Lastly, as the world is busy changing, more and more people stick to their phones, and it is likely that most people that will read your content are doing it at the comfort of their phone. Well then, the content that you generate should be geared to suit mobile users. People will dash to their phones between breaks, while commuting, while cranking some miles in the treadmill, you name it, but these are still the people that will look at your blog at their best convenience.  The least is to make sure that your blog content is geared to mobile interfaces too.

Author Bio: Mashum is a Blogger, Entrepreneur & Online Marketing Expert. He is the co-founder and chief marketing officer at BloggerOutreach, the company that provides Blogger Outreach Services. Mashum is the founder of Viacon.

Animated explainer videos became a smart way to explain the words of businesses or brands, and in the long run, such videos are now an essential part of marketing. An animated explainer video is a good advertising tool, which save both money and time of businesses. Other than that, it’s impossible to overemphasize the significance of powerful visuals in your business promotion.

Below are some of the reasons why you must use an animated explainer video for promoting your business:

Very Entertaining

More people love watching videos for the reason that they can easily understand everything in a short duration and in an entertaining way.

Explain Things Better Than Words

According to studies, it was proven that powerful video can stick to the minds of end users for a long time compared to a catchy slogan. As results, while videos can be used for promoting products or services of any businesses, such can explain what they could do for their customers better.

Creative

Animated explainer videos can tell a story in various ways. There’s no need of this kind of video to be grounded in reality. Just make sure that it goes well.

More Dynamic Compared to Texts and Images

Animated explainer videos can bring more interests in end users because of their dynamic nature in comparison to plain texts or static images. Majority of sales funnels these days include videos at some point throughout the process. Videos done well may pay for itself quickly.

Boost Conversion Rates

Aside from attracting potential visitors to your website, businesses can convert visitors to sales. That is what animated explainer videos may do for companies.

Spread Like Wild Fire

Animated explainer videos can be shared with other people easily through social media platforms. So, they may help spread positive points regarding your brand or product.

Clarifies Product’s Objective

Words may be tricky while describing products. However, through the use of explainer videos, it’s easier for businesses to get rid of the guess work. Other things are shown better in videos.

Provides Better SEO Ranking

People often search for simple and quick ways to understand about any products or services of brands. With videos, businesses may enjoy greater exposure and could bring better ranks on search engines. Besides, Google is the owner of YouTube.

Make More Customers Interested with Your Business

Based on the studies, it was proven that many visitors are curious to know the video details compared to reading blocks of texts to read messages. Thus, it can be said that videos may boost the interest of your target audience.

Audience Can Easily Retain the Details

In some studies, majority of individuals have high levels of retaining details when watching videos instead of listening from the information. With animated video for business, you can quickly capture the attention of both visual and auditory learners, which can provide you lots of benefits.

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Accounting and bookkeeping have changed drastically ever since the processes became automated and it changed further with the advent of cloud computing. Bookkeeping and accounting used to be so much of hard work that procrastination was rampant in accounting that hindered business growth. Business owners could not access real-time data as the accounting records were seldom updated and had to depend on guesswork to take business decisions that were often incorrect. All these are now history because even the smallest business can now use Darcy Services Bookkeeping MYOB to ensure that the bookkeeping and accounting records are up to date. Using a system for tracking income and expenses has become so easy that business owners can project future costs and revenue quite confidently.  It has greatly boosted the prospects of doing business in a better way.

Ready information in your hands

Today, no business can do without a primary business software system that has changed the ways people used to maintain accounting records. All essential information is now at your fingertips courtesy the reports generated by the system that keeps you abreast of the critical financial indicators. From accounts receivable by customers to sales and expense report as well as profit and loss by product – you are aware of everything.

Enhance the benefits of online banking

Banks are offering many benefits to its customers, and by using the accounting software, it becomes easy to harness the online benefits provided by banks. The software can coordinate with several banks and provide information so that you can quickly download transactions and reconcile the data with complete ease.

Better collection of accounts receivables

Generating sales invoice is a breeze by using accounting software that generates professional looking invoices that you can send across to customers over e-mails. The speed of sending invoices can be complemented well by requesting customers to make online payments. The payment cycle can shrink considerably depending on your ability to prevail upon customers to make timely online payments, and this can have a far-reaching effect of business profitability.  The software generates various reports and statements, and you can generate customised reports to identify customers who you consider the high risk with respect to collecting payments.

Receive payments promptly

The accounting software has provision for recording payment received via credit cards which speed up crediting the payment in your account immediately. Some software allows users to upgrade the system to synchronise it with POS (Point of Sale) system and integrate it with your cash register and credit card machine.

Bills payments made easy

By using the accounting software, you can manage your cash flow efficiently by tracking the accounts payable so that you can choose the most convenient time for paying bills. It helps to save cost as there is no fear of paying overdue interest for unpaid bills. You would be better placed to interact professionally with your vendors. Accounting software can be easily integrated with POS System.  For additional information and to Find out the best POS System for your small business.

If you are using online accounting software, you are in complete command of your financial status as you can access information any time and from anywhere.