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Featured Tech

Three Great Apps for Collaborative Working

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It can be a huge task trying to choreograph a team that are often working from different locations. With the advent of remote working, it’s not hard to suddenly find…

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It can be a huge task trying to choreograph a team that are often working from different locations. With the advent of remote working, it’s not hard to suddenly find that you have twenty different iterations of the same file in different states in your inbox. Likewise, two users simultaneously updating different versions is a similar complaint we hear all too often from frustrated business managers.

However, there are apps designed specifically to make working as a collaborative team much easier, no matter how far away you are from each other. Today, we’re going to look at three particular apps which we think will make managing projects for your team much easier.

Evernote Business

Evernote Business is basically an enhanced version of their premium personal service, designed to allow teams to work together more fluidly. As well as the ability to have in-app discussions, shared work presented in order of the most relevant updates first, and easy user management, the app is built on top of a fundamentally sound design to make utilising these functions as intuitive as possible.

In fact, those of you who use it with teams of more than 25 people will even get a personalized service from Evernote, helping you to get the most out of the service. User management is particularly easy, while the included TLS/SSL encryption with two-step verification means that your work is always as secure as possible.

Dropbox

Everyone’s favourite tool for seamlessly backing up their files to the cloud provides many features that will benefit large teams working on the same files. It’s designed to work fluidly across all major operating systems (including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android), while everyone who signs up will immediately receive 2.5 GB of free storage space indefinitely.

While that might not sound like a lot of storage space, we guarantee that it will take a long time to fill up if you stick to using it exclusively for word documents, PDFs, and compressed images. Dropbox is a great place to start for those teams that don’t need all the bells and whistles of the other services on this list, but just want to easily keep each other updated with which files they’re working on.

Salesforce

While Salesforce is really only going to be useful to sales teams, it’s safe to say that those who work in the field will struggle to find a more useful, purpose-designed service.

It is in fact several apps which can be integrated together to provide a seamless working environment. These include The Sales Cloud, which is the company’s own CRM app. It has a lot of really useful features, including sales leader-boards, and it provides instant access to all of your top leads (each of which can have their own personal page with their contact details and links to their social media profiles).

Likewise, the social.com service from Salesforce is incredibly useful for maintaining your ad campaigns on any major social media network. You can use analytics to tailor your ads to appear for certain target demographics at a specific time, and it will automatically identify and prioritize your higher-performing ads over time, meaning that you will be getting the best returns from your campaigns.

Lastly, The Service Cloud enables you to manage your company’s customer relations in one unified place. There’s a lot of great bespoke features here, including the ability to natively Facetime any of your customers who require assistance, as well as the ability to immediately escalate urgent situations.

So, hopefully this list will help all of you looking to make a shift into the field of collaborative working. Remember to keep checking back for more great articles like this, as we’re sure to be discussing more apps which you can use to help your business grow!

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Marketing

SEO Tricks to Boost Your Business’ Online Presence

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The world of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can, at first glance, seem to be almost hopelessly complicated and mercilessly fickle. However, it’s not as much of a dark art…

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The world of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can, at first glance, seem to be almost hopelessly complicated and mercilessly fickle. However, it’s not as much of a dark art as many small business owners might initially believe.

While few of us have the luxury of hiring dedicated staff who can manage our business’ web presence on a day to day basis, you will be relieved to know that not all hope is lost; in fact, by incorporating the tips that we’ll be sharing with you today, you can be on your way to boosting your online relevancy right away—sometimes without needing to spend a dime (just a little of your time will do!).

Use Relevant Hashtags on Twitter

You may already be a maverick when it comes to using the micro blogging site, but without proper foresight, all of your hard work will be going to waste. For example, you might be using hashtags to try to make your messages concise and easily understandable to people who happen to see your messages flash by on their screen.

However, by doing some prior research and seeing which tags people are already using, you will be able to potentially grow your audience significantly. So, next time you think about using “#hairstyletips”, do some research on your competitors first; it may be the case that they’re using “#easyhairtricks”, and by incorporating this into your tweets, you’ll become exponentially more visible.

Post Good Content on Your Blog

Your blogs don’t have to read like poetry in order to help your online presence grow. In fact, keeping things simple and sticking to what you know can often be a much more effective way to get seen online.

Put your heart into what you’re writing; is the topic itself interesting? Are you providing the right amount of information, so that it can be skimmed quickly but also providing worthwhile information? By breaking your posts down to smaller paragraphs, and adding some appropriate images, you can make them significantly more readable for those who stumble across them.

Link to Websites You Respect

Even if you’re not getting any traffic from others linking to your site, make sure to link (with moderation!) to sites that you genuinely respect and which relate to your field. By doing this, Google will consider it as a factor when performing its search algorithms. Over time, it can greatly increase your ranking on the search engine.

Use Well-Produced Videos

This may be the most expensive tip on this list, but it could also earn you the greatest rate of returns. Having well-made videos by someone who knows what they’re doing to promote your business can dramatically improve the way others see it.

You can get in touch with local film-makers to get a ball-park figure of how much you’ll need to spend, but many freelancers in the industry will charge a reasonable rate to help you out for a day or two. Likewise, they’ll take care of all the editing work that you don’t want to be involved in, so that all you’ll have to do is upload the video to your YouTube channel and slowly watch the number of views increase!

Mastering SEO is, as you might expect, an arduous slog and will likely result in an epic quest that grows arms and legs along the way. However, it is fascinating; what you essentially learn is a guide to mastering the internet! If you don’t want to do any of the above, though, you can always just hire a web designer who specializes in SEO to help you boost your web presence. Remember to keep checking back for more great posts you can refer to to take your business to the next stage!

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Real Estate

Flip a Home in These States and Make a HUGE Profit

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According to a 2016 report by ATTOM Data Solutions, house flipping is once again proliferating among property managers following its sharp decline after the 2008 financial crisis. In fact, the…

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According to a 2016 report by ATTOM Data Solutions, house flipping is once again proliferating among property managers following its sharp decline after the 2008 financial crisis.

In fact, the report showed that from 2015 to 2016 alone, the number of houses flipped (i.e. sold for the second time in a 12-month period, usually with no-one actually moving in to the residence) rose by 3.1%; that means it’s at its highest level since 2006, with 193,000 homes and condos being flipped.

So, you might be wondering about how to get started with house flipping yourself and – while it is an extensively intricate topic to really cover in a comprehensive sense – we thought we’d take a look at a few of the states providing the most lucrative flipping opportunities in today’s post.

San Jose, California

San Jose is an amazing city to live in, and the rich are shelling out significant sums of cash to get on to the property ladder in the area. This has provided a lot of eating for house flippers, who managed to receive an average of $145,000 for all of their flips in 2015/6.

In fact, out of 110 metro areas studied, it was ranked as the joint number one place to make a profit for those looking to flip a home.

Boston, Massachusetts

The capital of Ma is a great place for families to move to. Highly regarded for its schools and culture, it has been recognised over the years for its lauded intellectual reputation. In fact, Mark Twain once said of the city:

“In New York, they ask, ‘How much money does he have?’ In Philadelphia, they ask, ‘Who were his parents?’ In Boston they ask, ‘How much does he know?”

Such is the desire to live in the city that, like San Jose, it has become a great place for house flippers to buy and sell property; flippers there made an average of $140,000 in profit in 2016.

San Francisco, California

It may often be dull, dreary, and wet, but San Francisco still manages to lure millions of visitors both domestically and internationally every year. In fact, just like its fellow California county, San Jose, San Francisco flips averaged $145,000 over the one year period.

Daren Blomquist, the senior Vice President over at RealtyTrac (a company devoted to providing information which puts together analytics for house-flipping transactions across the states), discussed this during an interview. “That’s a big one”, he said when talking about San Fran. He noted that it’s particularly “hard to flip in those [Bay Area] markets”, but also that – for those who manage to make it work – “you get a big bang for your buck”.

Avoid Like the Plague

For those of you who were wondering, the bottom of the list was occupied by many of the states you’d expect; the worst place to flip a home, though? Detroit.

“You’d have to do about seven flips in Detroit to equal one flip in the Bay Area”, said Blomquist during the same interview.

Nevertheless, there are countless opportunities in any state to start growing your income using house flipping. Equipped with the necessary knowledge and funds for investment, you can start to see massive returns, and we definitely recommend it to anyone out there who’s interested in trading.

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Tech

Awesome Apps for Managing Your Finances

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We live in an age of constant stimulation; if you’re not being told exactly what to buy by the television, internet ads, blogs, and YouTube videos, then you it’s just…

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We live in an age of constant stimulation; if you’re not being told exactly what to buy by the television, internet ads, blogs, and YouTube videos, then you it’s just as likely that you’ll be consumed by work or addiction to online technology.

With this fast-paced lifestyle, it’s not hard to lose track of what’s going on in the background; namely, the state of our own personal finances. Thankfully, there’s a slew of great apps out there which we can use to keep tabs on how much we’re spending.

Today, we’re going to look at a selection of our favourites for doing just that.

You Need a Budget

Also known as YNAB within its community, this app is pretty spectacular. Its goal is to help you visualize your finances, so that you can stop living on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis. In fact, its emphasis on assisting you in tackling your debt and dealing with unexpected circumstances is a breath of fresh air in the free-flowing world of app releases; because, when all things are considered, the only thing better than an original app idea, is an original app idea that helps you to drastically improve your standard of living.

Instead of allowing users to set their own disposable spending limits, YNAB analyses your funds by gathering information about your regular income and expenditure, and then creates a budget around that. This means that, instead of merely having saving goals, you’ll be living within the most realistic income of all – your actual earnings! Genius.

Acorns

Another great tool for helping you to build your own nest egg is Acorns. By helping you to develop good financial habits, this simple app can let you start making the steps you need to build up a considerable nest egg.

How does it do this? Well, every time you make a purchase using a bank card which you’ve pre-configured with the Acorn app, it will round the amount to the next-highest dollar. By investing the difference between the price of your purchase and how much is actually deducted from your account into low-cost exchange-traded funds (and you can actually tell the app how risky you want your investments to be), you’ll start to see your rate or returns significantly grow.

After all, who doesn’t want to find an extra $500 or $1,000 in their investment account at the end of each year? We’re serious guys – try this one!

Microsoft Excel

Yes, it’s ghetto, but it gets the job done. In fact, in the years before the proliferation of genuinely useful mobile apps for managing finances, I used to manage all of my expenses using a fairly straightforward Spreadsheet I put together in Excel.

Even with the most rudimentary formulas, you can tally up how much you’ve been spending, how much has come in to your bank account, and identify those sinks where you’re spending too much money and take the necessary action needed to close them up.

Of course, there are countless ways to manage your personal finances using today’s mobile technology. In fact, for those of you who are really into it, you can combine several different tools to create a kind of monolithic, terror-inducing master method for saving money. However, for those of you who just want to save a little, any of the above options are going to get you on the right track starting today.

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