As an online business, you have probably lost customers because the shipping costs were high. Even though you were tempted to lower the prices, you probably couldn’t do so, because you needed to protect your profit margin.

Ecommerce is not easy, and almost every online entrepreneur has faced a similar issue. But don’t worry; you can effectively reduce the prices to satisfy your clients while maintaining the profitability of your business.

Keep reading to learn more.

1. Consider Zone Shipping

Zone shipping is an affordable technique for transporting goods to the same zone. The carrier collects different individual items whose destination is the same.

Upon arrival at the common destination, the items are sorted, grouped individually, and then shipped to the individual destinations.

For instance, if the goods’ source is Ohio and the destination zone is Florida, you will accumulate all Florida items to be shipped together.

From there, they can be transported to the various parts of Florida depending on the buyers’ locations. There is only one trip for this technique, and this means that you can save on the back and forth costs for the initial shipping.

However, this method can only work for the less urgent goods that you can store for an extended period as you accumulate the others.

2. Utilize the Best Packing Practices

Packing is a key determinant of your shipping costs. Unless you want an experience-based packing, you can reduce your overall shipping costs using a few smart packing practices.

The first smart idea is to utilize the packaging services provided by your carrier. When you pack on your own, you will exceed the dimensions and your carrier might charge you more.

The carriers’ packaging is tailored to reduce costs, and you can save substantial amounts by utilizing the service.

Another smart packing idea is to use the smallest boxes possible so that the items can fill well. You might also consider the lightweight parcels which don’t add massive weight to the package.

Lastly, you can recycle your packaging materials to cut the costs of buying new bags every time. Recycling will not only help you cut costs but also reduce your garbage collection.

3. Ask Your Carrier for Discounts

You should have excellent negotiation skills for not only shipping but also for the other aspects of your business. When signing for a short term or long-term business deal with your carrier, ask them to reduce shipping costs for you.

Most carriers don’t have fixed costs. The fees are usually open for negotiations, and you can strike a great deal if you negotiate well.

In return, you may promise to become a loyal client and work with them for an extended period.

Before you negotiate, compare what other carriers offer so that you don’t demean your carrier’s services. Also, provide the right packaging basics, including weight, dimensions, and destinations.

4. Use Air Delivery in Urgent Situations Only

Air delivery is costlier when compared to ground delivery. To cut costs, you should only use it to transport perishable goods or items with urgent needs.

Otherwise, you will be wasting money by using air express to transport durable goods that are not urgent. Likewise, you may use FedEx or UPS ground services instead if zone 2 air express deliveries.

Always consult with the buyer before shipping. If they accept the ground delivery, then you will save a lot of money.

5. Use Third-Party Shipping Services

Third-party services can help you cut the shipping costs. They provide a wide array of shipping options, meaning that you can choose the fittest for your business.

Furthermore, since their work is to ship only, they have a rich knowledge of the shipping processes. They know many carrier firms too, and they can negotiate on your behalf for incredible rates.

The standard third party shipping services are aggregators that require you to sign on their platform before working together. You can track the delivery processes, and you can also get better deals if you become a regular client.

Note that many carrier service providers might require you to prepay to qualify for discounts. If you can, you should consider this offer mainly if you intend to transport similar items with the same weight.

6. Consider Flat Rate Shipping

The flat rate shipping plan provides a standard rate for all the deliveries you will make, irrespective of sizes or weight.

Besides helping you cut shipping costs, the flat rate tactic can win you more clients. The method is, therefore, crucial to new businesses that are still building their brand.

Your clients will be motivated to buy bulk goods because, after all, the shipping fee is the same. You can test this technique’s efficiency by identifying a common area where you ship your products more often.

7. Educate Your Customers

The last important method for reducing shipping costs is to educate your customers. If you inform your clients on the shipping costs to expect, they will make informed decisions, and probably, they will not abandon the cart at the last minute.

Only 22% of online merchants mention the shipping costs on the homepage. Remember that buyers hate hidden charges, and the last thing they would like to know is that they have to pay specific fees.

So, if you offer shipping charges, these tips can help you reduce the charging costs:

• Provide a shipping calculator
• Create pick up points for your goods to cut the transport costs and avoid inconveniencing your buyers

Be transparent with your customers on how to transport the goods. Discuss everything, too, so that you won’t have to incur extra shipping costs covering up for information you didn’t provide. In the long run, you will win your clients’ trust while still lowering the costs.

Reduce Your Shipping Costs Today!

As an online merchant, you should try the strategies which give you a competitive advantage. One effective strategy is to reduce the shipping costs to attract more clients without affecting your profitability.

So, follow the above tips and adopt others that promise lower shipping costs.

Find more informative guides like this one from my blog. Besides business, you will learn more tech and lifestyle tips to apply in your home or business. Please read them to know more.

User Experience or UX tries to identify how a user feels when they visit a site.

How do they respond to the content and structure? What are their goals and ambitions? Does their experience match their expectations? Is it better? Or worse.

UX is difficult to determine because it deals with emotions. But a bad experience is easy to spot as traffic drops, orders decline, and reviews get one star.

Every trick in the book is needed to get users to like a site enough to return and tell their friends. With that in mind, here are 5 hacks that can help to improve a website user experience.

They’ll not only help users enjoy their visit but can also improve search rankings in Google.

1. Mobile First

According to Google, 59% of shoppers think that being able to shop online on their mobile devices is important.

Surely all smartphones can browse websites? What’s that got to do with UX?

The real issue lies with how the phone’s web browser displays the pages.

Ever visit a page on your mobile to find you had to pinch and zoom to use it? The content was laid out for desktop monitors. Text was so tiny you needed a magnifying glass to read it.

A mobile-friendly site offers an alternative design that specifically caters to small screens.

This mobile-first approach is even commended by Google. The search engine giant even gives sites that offer a mobile-friendly experience a higher place in their results.

Mobile users find it easier to navigate and consume content if everything fits within reach of their thumb.

Yet, that doesn’t mean flooding the screen with all the bells and whistles of a desktop experience. The key to a good UX is a balance between whitespace and useful content.

To check if a web page is mobile-friendly, use this free tool by Google.

Google analyzes the content for different screen widths, usability checks, etc. and gives a green light if everything’s okay. If not, the site requires some adjusting to make it work on a smaller device.

2. Longtail Keywords in Headings

When a user Googles something the words or phrases that they enter are called keywords.

The best SEO services use those keywords within the content of each web page. And one of those essential elements is the heading tag.

A heading or header tag gives a brief summary of the content below it, just like in the traditional press.

It should entice viewers to continue reading yet should be accurate and not misleading. Users and search engines hate being lied to. And if Google spots a site trying to spam headings they could bar them from their results!

Unlike short one or two word phrases, longtail keywords include four or five words. And they’re key to getting the right traffic and a better experience for the visitor.

Instead of using a heading like ‘Car Insurance Premiums are Rising’ to tie with the short keywords ‘car insurance’, make it local.

Using the longtail keyword ‘car insurance in Los Angeles’ will produce a more relative heading. Visitors in that region see content that matches their local needs and Google responds by ranking it higher. That’s a win-win for everyone!

3. Make Contact Easy

Most sites include a contact form for users to submit their queries. But modern web browsers offer so much more to enhance the experience.

For example, WhatsApp offers several options for site owners to use their service directly from a web page.

Create a link with https://wa.me/yournumber and replace the last part with a WhatsApp registered phone number. When a mobile user clicks the link, WhatsApp opens with a blank message ready to send.

To link directly to an ordinary phone number, use the HTML anchor tag and add ‘tel:yournumber’ to the href attribute.

<a href=”tel:yournumber”>phone our site</a>

Pressing the link opens the phone app with the number ready to go. Site visitors will love how easy it is!

4. Lazy Loading Images

A common UX gripe is slow-loading websites, especially those with lots of images. A simple hack to speed things up is to incorporate lazy loading into the site design.

Lazy loading only loads images that the user can see. They may never scroll down to see the other 50 pictures so lazy loading excludes them.

Pages will zoom even on slow connections. Content gets cached or stored within the browser so the next time they visit the pages appear instantly.

Google rewards sites that have fast loading times.

You can use their free PageSpeed Insights tool to see if your site meets the mark. If Google thinks your site’s too slow it’s guaranteed that your visitors will too.

WordPress users don’t need to worry, though.

The current version of WordPress includes lazy loading as standard. Just update to release 5.5 and enable the feature and you’re all set.

5. Catch Missing Pages

If a user arrives at a missing page their browser presents them with an ugly ‘Page not found’ error.

Missing or incorrect URLs are an automatic turnoff to most but with a little tweak they can actually become useful.

The hack is to use a custom 404 page. The number relates to a web standard error for a missing page. But the good news is that site owners can create their own content.

For example, the website examines the missing page title then produces related results that do exist off those keywords. Some sites even make a joke of the problem by including witty cartoons saying they’re sorry.

How to improve a website user experience? Include fun and engaging 404 pages and let your mistakes work for you.

Improve User Experience and More at Action Life

Now you now 5 secret hacks to help improve user experience on a website. Combine them with SEO techniques and you’ll also rise up Google’s rankings.

If you’d like to learn more about how to improve website experiences then visit our technology section.

Articles range from integrating social media to photo editing. We also have great information on business and finance to help your eCommerce website improvements.

Remember to visit our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages and let us know what you think.

Do you want to increase your brand’s online presence?

With over 30 million small businesses in the USA, it’s important to keep yourself relevant. It’s easy for customers to lose track of your brand forever once you get lost under all the other brands trying to make a name for themselves.

One way for your business to stay relevant is by having a good business website for your customers to visit. You will need good small business web design ideas to pull this off without a hitch.

Read on and let us help you with your business website. Learn what you can do to create a website with professional web design.

1. Create a Website Compatible to Mobile Devices

Making your website compatible with mobile devices is important because most Americans own a smartphone nowadays. Most of them use these devices to access the internet. This means that making your website mobile-compatible is essential for giving the majority of your audience a good experience with your website.

You can optimize your website for mobile devices by adjusting the resolutions. Using resolutions that are popular with mobile devices is a good way to do this.

Doing this is a great way to raise your organic search rate, too. This is because Google and other search engines rank mobile-compatible websites higher on their results page.

2. Keep Your Website Simple

If you’re designing a website, it’s always tempting to put as many visual elements as you can. These can increase the engagement that visitors can get from your website. However, having a lot of these elements can make others lose their engaging effects.

This is because of engaging the audience, it distracts them, instead. It tires the eyes of the customers and can even make some people dizzy. It’s a surefire way to increase your website’s bounce rate, decreasing your SEO score.

Keeping your website clutter-free is a good way to keep your audience engaged. This is also with them not being too distracted by other elements.

Use only relevant elements for your website to keep things simple. Doing this ensures that your customers will know what your brand is about as they enter your website.

3. Choose a Reliable Web Host

Choosing a hosting service allows your website to be on the internet in the first place. Without a good web host, no one can visit your website and check your content. So, choosing a good web host is among the first things you should do when making a business website.

While choosing one, you need to make a checklist of what you should look for. The cost, reliability, and customer reviews will tell you all about the web host you’re considering.

The cost should be within your budget to prevent your brand from going bankrupt. Checking their price list is the first thing you should do to see if you can afford their services.

The reliability is harder to find out, but you can learn about it by checking customer reviews. You can see if they complain or praise the host from the reactions of their customers.

4. Make it Easy for Your Customers to Engage With You

Customer engagement is the most important aspect of any business website. Keeping in touch with your audience is a surefire way for you to improve your relationship with them. Doing this is also a great way to get the loyalty of your customers.

You can do this by adding a simple comment section on your website. This allows them to ask any questions they have to your brand. This also allows them to have direct communication with you.

5. Use Plugins to Personalize Your Website

A great way to establish your brand identity is by personalizing your website. Doing this is important because you need to leave a mark for your customers when they leave your website. A memorable website will always leave an imprint on the customer’s mind.

This is important to keep them coming back to you. Having a loyal customer ensures you make a profit no matter what. With all the competition you will face, this is more important than most businesses think.

You can personalize your website by adding plugins to it. This allows you to install features that can enhance your business. A good example is by giving your customers a checkout option after they buy your products from your store.

6. Don’t Overload Your Website

While plugins are great for customization, it’s important to keep them to a minimum on your website. This is because too many plugins can cause your website to load slower.

Slow page loading times can cause your SEO score to drop by a lot. This is because search engines know that slow loading times can cause customers to leave as soon as they arrive. This is why page loading time is the biggest factor in SEO.

A good small business web design will use only essential plugins. This ensures pages load fast while giving you your needed features.

7. Create Content

Creating content is the best way to ensure the success of your startup website. It raises your SEO score by ensuring that your website is always active. Search engines always remove inactive websites from the SERP.

It also establishes you as a professional in your field. This is because you will provide information to your customers for free. Make sure that any content you release will be relevant to your brand.

For example, if you want to know how to start an HVAC business, create content revolving around the subject. This lets customers know that you know your stuff, increasing their trust in you.

Use These Small Business Web Design Ideas Today

Give yourself the upper hand and make a business website for your customers to visit. These small business web design ideas help you make a functional website for your brand. Go and make your website today, or if you need help, use car title loans as startup funding to hire a professional!

Want to know more about web design? Knowing how to make a good business website helps you create an excellent environment for your visitors. Check out more of our blogs and guides to learn all you can learn today!

What does a salesforce consultant do?

That’s a question you might asking if you trying to decide to hire a salesforce consultant or a Salesforce admin. When it comes down to it, a Salesforce consultant has more to offer.

They often have more expertise on how to improve your use of Salesforce. They can tell you what features your business should be utilizing to help you improve your conversion rate. They can also tell you what you can be doing on Salesforce to better connect with your leads.

Here’s are 7 reasons to hire a Salesforce consultant and how they can help your business.

1. Salesforce Consultant Know All About the Updates

If your business doesn’t stay on top of Salesforce updates, it can hurt your business.

You need to know about Salesforce patches as well as the latest updates to know if your internal team needs to make any changes.

A Salesforce consultant can tell you how your business is affected and what changes you need to make in your business to reflect any changes in Salesforce. Staying on top of any changes in Salesforce is crucial for lead generation and how to stay in touch with your leads.

A Salesforce consultant can also provide insight on how to optimize the platform after any updates are made.

2. They Know Your Industry

Another reason to hire a Salesforce consultant is that they know your industry. They know your competitors and how to optimize the functions on Salesforce to give you the best results in your industry.

If you’re unsure of how to use Salesforce that benefits you, your customers, and helps you outshine your competitors, a Salesforce consultant can help.

That’s also why it’s important to look for Salesforce consultants that know your industry specifically. They know exactly how to optimize your leads and convert more sales.

3. They Know Your Target Market

A Salesforce consultant should also know about your target market and the leads you are trying to nurture. They should know the demographic of your target market.

The consultant should also have past success with other industries in helping them generate more leads and drive in more sales.

Given a Salesforce expertise in your market and their knowledge of your target audience, they can give you some insight on how to change in Salesforce when it comes to optimizing leads.

4. They Can Save You Time and Money

A Salesforce consultant can also help you save time and money. They can help you optimize your leads at a faster rate than your internal team can.

A consultant can give you exact directions on what you need to integrate Salesforce with and how to nurture your leads. Ultimately, hiring a Salesforce consultant can cut the time in half that it would take your internal team to do within Salesforce, which would help you save on resources.

5. They Can Teach You and Your Team Something New

Salesforce consultants don’t just leave you high and dry after they optimize your business for Salesforce. They can also teach your employees something new.

With their experience, a Salesforce consultant can also teach your internal something new. This is especially important after the Salesforce consultant is done with their job.

You want to make sure your internal team is equipped to handle new challenges. You want to makes sure your internal team can maintain the optimization brought on by the consultant.

The more your internal team learns from the consultant, the more your team can help with lead nurturing and optimize features on Salesforce that isn’t properly being used.

6. Higher Quailty Leads

Another benefit of a Salesforce consultant is that they optimize the features of Salesforce so you can have higher quality leads.

They know how to create a seamless communication process between the marketing and sales teams so everyone is on the same page. A Salesforce consultant can also explain lead scoring.

They can explain how a lead scoring system works within a sales funnel and how to increase the quality of the leads in the scoring system.

7. Better ROI

Lastly, a Salesforce consultant can help you elevate your ROI. With higher quality leads coming in and your Salesforce platform optimized, you should notice an uptick in sales and conversions.

You’ll notice that things are done more precisely and accurately.

Overall, these 7 reasons should tell you why you need a Salesforce consultant. You don’t want to guess or spend countless hours trying to figure out what to next on Salesforce that can waste your time and money.

Instead, you should hire a Salesforce consultant who knows everything about your industry, your leads, and how to optimize them.

In the end, you’ll have a better ROI when you hire a Salesforce consultant.

This Salesforce consultant can also help you get started on everything you need to know to elevate your business.

Now You Know Why You Need a Salesforce Consultant

A Salesforce consultant can ultimately help you save time and resources on optimizing your leads and marketing campaigns. You don’t have to guess what to do next when a Salesforce consultant can tell you exactly what to do.

In addition, a Salesforce consultant is a smart hire because it benefits your entire team. They know what to do after the consultant has taught them something. If you want to improve your conversions and have a higher ROI, a Salesforce consultant can help you achieve that goal.

If you liked this article, you can check out more like it by visiting our website.

As statistics show, the state of management in corporate America is bleak.

More than half of managers are disengaged from their job, possibly because 58% of them never received management training. This leads to many problems in the workplace, including low morale, high turnover, increased legal problems, and wasted resources.

In short, a bad manager can negatively impact your business in a major way.

Fortunately, becoming an effective manager is possible with the right training and tools. With the right motivation, you can turn a manager who is prone to bad decisions into a valuable member of your team.

If you are a manager or want to improve your executive team, here are the common mistakes in management to avoid.

1. Hiring the Wrong People

As a manager, it’s important to hire the right people for the positions you are filling. While you may like or connect with a certain applicant, if they don’t have the qualifications or skills for the job, hiring them will create more problems.

Not only is hiring the wrong person costly, but it also disrupts the workplace, results in low employee morale, and slows production. Make sure you are hiring the right person to avoid these problems.

2. Not Providing Feedback

Part of a manager’s job is to provide feedback to their employees. Feedback is valuable, it helps your employees improve and results in better productivity overall.

Unfortunately, many managers do not provide feedback, or the feedback they provide is not actionable or constructive. This causes employees to feel unsupported and unsure of their performance.

You should be providing construction feedback regularly. Focus on what the employee has done well, along with what the areas they need to improve.

3. Making Friends With Your Employees

Many managers make the mistake of becoming friends with their employees. This is a mistake because it can cause you to be biased with how you treat your employees, and how you distribute assignments for employees.

Building friendships can also cause resentment within your team, both toward you and the employees you are friends with. While being friendly is fine, make sure you keep a professional distance to avoid problems within your team.

4. Being Reactive Instead of Proactive

A common mistake many managers make is being reactive instead of proactive. This includes failing to plan for the future or anticipate problems that can happen in the workplace. Being reactive leads to making poor decisions when problems arise, which usually makes the situation worse for everyone involved.

Instead of failing to plan, you can create a connected workplace to not only handle problems better but to also avoid many common problems in the workplace. If you are interested in creating a connected workplace, you can read more here.

5. Not Setting Clear Goals or Expectations

Have you have ever been lost without any tools to help you find your way? This is how the average employee feels when their manager doesn’t set clear goals and expectations. This is a common problem, especially when managing remote teams.

As a manager, making sure your employees succeed is your responsibility. Your employees need to know what’s expected of them and they need milestones, or goals, to help them along the way. Otherwise, they are are going to feel overwhelmed and their productivity will suffer.

Meet with your employees and create goals and a plan for success. Give your employees all the support they need to reach their goals.

6. Taking Yourself Too Seriously

Being a manager comes with a lot of serious duties and responsibilities. To be good at your job, you have to be focused and serious, however, many managers take themselves and their jobs too seriously.

Not only do they take things too seriously, but they also expect their employees to do the same. This is a mistake because even the most dedicated employee has a life outside of work. Expecting them to make the job their top priority is not only unreasonable, but it also will lead to your employees disengaging and eventually, quitting.

Find a balance between being focused and committed and creating a positive and healthy environment at work.

7. Micromanaging

Micromanaging is one of the most common problems with managers in corporate America. Many managers feel as if they need to control and monitor every aspect of their employee’s work. They do so by hovering, checking in constantly, having too many meetings, requiring several progress reports before deadlines for assignments, and more.

Micromanaging your employees results in a host of problems, including loss of control, loss of trust, lack of creativity and innovation, and significantly decreased productivity. When you micromanage, your employees feel smothered, as if they are losing their autonomy, and as if they are not a valued member of the team.

Ultimately, micromanaging leads to high employee turnover and all of the costs associated with having to consistently staff your company. You can avoid micromanaging by hiring the right employee, trusting your instincts and their abilities, and reasonably monitoring their progress.

8. Not Delegating

Trying to do everything by yourself is noble but it’s also a waste of time and resources. It’s also a mistake many managers make.

As a manager, delegating is part of your job. You have to trust that your employees can handle tasks on their own and contribute to the team. While it might be hard to let go of the control, you have to learn to delegate so your time is free to manage and work on the business instead of working in the business.

These Are the Mistakes in Management to Avoid

By avoiding these common mistakes in management, you can have a more productive team overall.

Start by hiring the right people for the job. Avoid micromanaging, not providing feedback, or letting your ego get in the way of your decision-making. Set clear goals and expectations for your team, be proactive, and take feedback as constructive criticism. Ultimately, know that you are a manager, not a friend, and your employees work best when they feel valued and heard.

Follow these tips to improve your management skills.

Don’t forget to browse our site for more tips on running a successful business.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an essential tool when it comes to running a small business.

Along with helping you build brand awareness and a more user-friendly website, it can also help you find new customers and rank higher in search results. Here are five SEO tips for small businesses.

1. Learn About Links

Leveraging SEO to improve your small business can seem overwhelming, but there are plenty of tips for do it yourself SEO. One great place to start is with links on your site.

Linking out from your site to other trustworthy sites can help with link building. That site might in turn link back your business, or share your post with their audience, increasing your reach and customer awareness.

Remember, too, to check your website for any broken links, and remove any pages that don’t load quickly and slow your site down.

2. Get Reviews

When it comes to improving your SEO, getting customer reviews can go along way. Try encouraging customers to leave a review after they patronize your business — you can even incentivize this by offering a discount on their next visit.

Reviews can help improve local SEO visibility, which can encourage new customers to check out your company. Just don’t forget that responding to reviews — positive and negative — is another crucial part of success for a small business.

3. One of the Most Important SEO Tips for Small Businesses? Get a Google My Business Account

Among the most crucial SEO tips is creating a Google My Business account for your company. This account lets your manage your Business Profile on Google, which is what shows up in Google Maps and local search results.

By completely filling out this profile and keeping things like business hours updated, you can improve your business’s local ranking on Google.

4. Make the Most of Your Blog

While you don’t want to create a blog just for the sake of having one, it can be a useful tool. Creating content allows you to incorporate keywords and help you rank on Google for your target terms.

Posting regularly is an important part of having a blog, but remember to focus on quality content over quantity. You can also link back to older related content in your new posts.

5. Improve Pages on Your Website

One of the most important SEO tips for small businesses is to optimize website pages. This means adding things like titles and meta descriptions and make sure you’re following best practices.

Incorporate targeted keywords where it feels natural, but remember not to overstuff content with keywords.

Tackle SEO Now

When it comes to running a successful business, SEO is a crucial tool to increase awareness, improve search engine ranking, and bring in new customers.

From optimizing your website to creating a Google My Business account, there are plenty of SEO tips for small businesses that you can follow.

For more helpful takes on business, finance, and other topics, explore the rest of our site.

Has an independent contractor been injured while on the job at your business? More than 15.5 million workers in the United States are independent contractors.

An independent contractor can have many different benefits to your company. There is a risk if they suffer an injury while in their work capacity for your business.

Read on to learn the answer to the question, ‘Are independent contractors covered by workers’ compensation?’

Independent Contractors vs. Employees

An independent contractor is different from an employee under the laws of your state. They are also treated differently under the federal tax code in the United States.

Business owners don’t pay social security or employment taxes for independent contractors. Instead, you compensate them with an hourly rate of pay. At the end of the year, an independent contractor must use Form 1099 to file their taxes.

Employees of a company often have health insurance, retirement plans, and other benefits. Independent contractors don’t have that same luxury. They are on their own for insurance and are responsible for their own taxes.

This limitation on benefits for independent contractors includes a lack of insurance coverage.

Workers’ Compensation and Independent Contractors

Business owners in any industry must be familiar with workers’ compensation. That’s because you need to be sure you have the insurance coverage to protect your investment.

Companies have workers’ compensation insurance to cover them from unexpected injuries to employees. This insurance can cover employees’ medical expenses. It may also pay for lost work time as a result of the injury on the job.

For example, let’s say you own a roofing company with employees. One day on the job one of your employees falls off a ladder and injures their back. As a result of this injury, they have medical treatment from a doctor and miss three months of work.

You may need to make a claim under your workers’ compensation insurance to pay for these costs. Since independent contractors are not employees though, they aren’t covered under these plans.

Insurance Coverage for Independent Contractor Injuries

Although an independent contractor is not covered under workers’ compensation, they can still sue you after an injury.

In the example above, you may be at risk of a lawsuit from that independent contractor. For example, the independent contractor may allege you were negligent in operating your company. He may also claim that his injuries are a result of your negligence.

You should have commercial liability insurance coverage for contractors. That way you have the coverage you need if an incident arises in your business.

Wrapping Up: Are Independent Contractors Covered by Workers’ Compensation?

When asking, ‘Are independent contractors covered by workers’ compensation?’ the short answer is that they aren’t.

Despite this lack of coverage under that form of insurance, it shouldn’t discourage you from utilizing the services of independent contractors at your business. Just be sure that you speak with an insurance agent or other professional about how to best protect your company.

Check out our blog post section for other great tips and tricks to help you operate a safer and more efficient business!

Your business marketing strategy is not drawing in as many customers as you would like, but you’re not sure what to do.

What if you knew that taking advantage of a phenomenon called social proofing could elevate your business?

But, what even is social proof?

In short, it is the psychological principle that validates products, services, and businesses through widespread or authoritative social approval. This social proof definition is not a new concept, but it has reached a new level of relevancy in a world surrounded by social media.

It’s time to get your business on board. Read on to learn all the basics to take advantage of social proofing and market your business on a new level.

Social Proof Examples for Beginners

You’d be surprised how often you pass by examples of social proof in your everyday life.

Social proofing promotes a group mentality, so if the people you follow or surround yourself with like it, you are more apt to like it too.

You can see it in trends like TikTok dances, matcha lattes, and high-waisted jeans. You learn to like these things because you have seen other people liking them, and it persuades you to try it out as well.

Where Do You See Social Proofing

Social proofing is reaching new heights in marketing, thanks primarily to social media. When wondering how to promote your own business through social media, consider these options.

Reviews

Reviews are the old-fashioned and simple way to build social proof. Encouraging past clients and customers to write positive reviews will increase your average ratings on review sites.

Reviews are what people will refer to when deciding what plumbing service to use, which restaurant to go to, or what kind of skateboard to buy. It is the easiest way to bring traffic to your site through former customers.

Social Media Influencers

This is where social proofing on social media has really taken off. People who run accounts with large followings can make a living off connecting with a mass of followers from around the world.

Through these connections, social media influencers have developed a bond of trust with their followers. And their followers look up to them for advice, support, and entertainment.

So when influencers create sponsored posts for a business or product, they are acting as an authoritative reference on that product or service.

Their followers see the sponsored post and will support that company or service, simply because they trust that the person they’re following is an inherently good source.

Follower Count

For your business’ social media accounts, something as simple as advertising how many customers you’ve served will help build trust with future customers.

This is also called magnetic marketing. By showing how many people rely on and trust your services, your business becomes more attractive to new customers.

Even simple interactions, like responding to customer comments on social media can improve the perception of your reliability as a business.

How to Include Social Proofing in Marketing

The powers of social proofing can be subtle, but they are crucial to your business marketing strategy. By taking advantage of the flexibility and expansiveness of social media, your business can find the spotlight.

Discover the best way for your business to use social proofing, and enjoy the influx of new clients eager to give your business a try.

Are you looking to boost your conversion rates?

Getting your audience to your site and looking at your content is hard enough. The last thing you want is to lose a sale at the final hurdle. But simple conversion mistakes could be letting sales slip through your fingers.

Read on for 10 conversion optimization tips to help you boost your sales.

1. Visuals

Nothing turns visitors off faster than coming face to face with a massive text wall. Break up your written content with visuals to make it easier to take in.

The images and visuals you use (like videos and diagrams) have to serve a purpose. So always keep them highly relevant to your content. They should be about more than improving readability and decreasing bounce rates.

Also, work out if a part of your content could is better off presented in image form. Look at your landing pages with higher and lower bounce rates, and use what you’re doing right.

2. Regular Testing

It’ll be impossible to improve conversion rates if you’ve not set the benchmark. Regular testing lets you track performance and form strategies that work.

First, you should identify your top pages. You can use Google Analytics for this. Use your top pages for your benchmark and see where users are leaving your site. Are your lower-performing pages missing something that your top pages have?

This helps you make improvements across the board and unify your pages. Which helps increase traffic and user flow throughout your site.

3. Remove Form Fields You Don’t Need

Having too many required fields can scare people away from filling out a form. It’s actually one of the best ways to kill your conversion rate. So, only mark fields that are actually essential for your goals, and remove the rest.

If you’re not getting all the lead info you need, your signups might be high, but your close rates will be down the drain. So you need to balance getting what you need, without overwhelming the user.

4. Add Social Proof and Credibility to the Website

One of the most powerful conversion mechanisms to use on your site is social proof. It establishes credibility and builds trust with prospective customers. It’ll also create FOMO (fear of missing out) for your website users.

To do it, show users how many people are happy with your service or product. This can be the final push for a user’s decision to buy from you once they get to your site.

Provide client testimonials, reviews and ratings. Any industry endorsements, display them for users to see. Show off any positive press and social media praise wherever you can.

5. Create Urgency

Add a timeframe to a proposition or offer, it induces people to make decisions quicker. Offering limited-time discounts, limited product availability, or exclusive deals creates urgency.

It puts you at an advantage over the competition in this age of comparison shopping. This is because it prevents buyers from shopping around or stalling their decision.
All it takes is a few strategically-placed notices of discounts and special deals. Or an email campaign to make them feel like VIPs.

6. Be Concise With Messaging

Your brand message on your site has to be concise and clear. Keep your headlines straight to the point and effective.

You need a simple, powerful brand message that appeals to the short attention span of your users. You need to convince users that further research on your service or product is worth it.

Being clear, concise, and on point with your messaging will resonate on an emotional level. So, avoid blocks of texts, getting too deep or going off on tangents/muddling things up.

7. Improve Site Speed

Improving your website speeds will help boost your conversion in many ways. You will bring in big SEO (search engine optimization) results from search engines. This, in turn, will drive more visitors to your site. More visitors means potentially more conversions.

Users that do visit your site also stay longer and will have a more positive experience of your business. Even a 1-second delay could decrease conversion rates by 7%! So, don’t challenge your users with slow load times.

8. Use Ad Targeting

Targeted ads are crucial to any successful advertising campaign. But you have to put it in front of the right people at the right time to close the sale. Here’s how you can target your ads:

Demographics

What are your demographics? Look at certain locations, age ranges, genders, and device types. And target your ads to those demographics you resonate most with.

In-market

Show ads to users that have searched similar products/services to yours. They might be looking to buy, or have bought before so could have an interest in your ads.

Custom Intent

Use keywords that relate to your target audience, through custom intent audiences. It also lets you add URLs for apps, YouTube, or websites that might be of interest to your audience.

The trick is making sure you are targeting the right audience. Experienced marketing strategists like Media Shark can help ensure you reach who you need to.

9. Improve Store Navigation

Smooth, easy website navigation is important to the buyer journey through your website. The faster they can find what they want, the more chance there is that they’ll buy.

We’ve all shopped online, only to visit a site they can’t work out, or find what they need. The navigation bar might be full of unneeded content, CTAs, or menu items that don’t belong there.

Make sure your website’s navigation is easy to use and takes users where they want to, fast. Declutter any navigation bars, and boost that user experience – it’ll boost your sales.

10. Add Live Chat to Your Website

Most users when they reach your site will be on the fence. There are questions or lingering doubts that prevent them from taking the purchasing leap.

In these cases, live chat tools are the perfect way to help convert. Like a pop-up, a chat message box will appear and users can interact and ask whatever questions they have. It will have an immediate boost to your conversion rate!

Conversion Optimization Made Easy

So there you have it! If you follow these conversion optimization tips, you’ll be sure to boost your sales.

Focus on making things as easy as possible for your users. Anything from sight navigation, to asking questions, to signing up should be a breeze. Be clear, concise, and know your audience. And most importantly give them a reason to choose you.

If you found this article useful, check out our other blog posts.

If so. Then you could benefit from learning about lean manufacturing. While this concept may have been born in an automobile assembly line, it now encompasses every industry around the world.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what it means to make your organization lean. We’ll go over every aspect of the process and show you how you can incorporate it into your organization. You will find improved workflows, decreased waste, and increased value to your customer.

Keep reading to learn more about lean manufacturing and how it can help your company today.

What is Lean Manufacturing

We’ve come a long way since Henry Ford first came up with the idea of creating an assembly line of production replacing the much slower and less efficient bespoke process.

Today, every industry across the globe turns to various experts to make their production line even more efficient. Many hours are spent analyzing the data to eliminate all waste in the manufacturing process. This obsession with eliminating wasting and increasing efficiency is called lean manufacturing.

Any company or organization that produces a product or service can benefit from incorporating lean processes into their workflow. However, lean doesn’t stop at improving efficiency and production. Instead, it is a mindset and cultural shift for everyone in your organization to eliminate waste.

Waste can have many faces and look different across various industries. Poor communication, poor organization, and unnecessary work are all considered waste in lean manufacturing.

The lean process requires total buy-in from every party involved in the process. From management and executives to the engineers and operators everyone involved must understand the lean process and agree to participate.

Understanding what lean entails also includes understanding what it is not. Lean is not working fast and keeping busy. Lean doesn’t mean creating mass amounts of products that nobody wants to buy. It doesn’t matter that you quickly and efficiently built 500 widgets when the market is demanding gadgets.

In a nutshell, when manufacturing a product or service, the lean framework encompasses your organization creating a system for your workflow. Then figuring out how you can improve upon it. And lastly, continuously improving upon your design and workflow until you can ensure zero waste.

Lean Manufacturing Principles

The lean manufacturing practice and concept is now being applied to numerous industries and product management spheres everywhere. This process of continual improvement and drive for complete lack of waste now spans work and management circles in every field and profession.

These five principles have been identified as the process of pursuing lean in other industries and professions. Follow these principles and you will see the improved workflow in your organization as well.

Principle 1: Identify Value

Value can be difficult to identify. It can vary by what the market demands and what the consumer is willing to pay. Market research is invaluable when it comes to discovering what the customer wants.

Then your challenge is to produce that product or service efficiently enough that you can offer it at a price your consumer can afford while also still turning a profit. You will then create your process and system for how to produce the product or service that your client wants and is willing to buy.

Principle 2: Map the Value Stream

Next, you will look for ways to improve your workflow. Look for waste, look for inefficiencies, look for how you can add value for your customer.

The value stream map shows in a visual format how you get your product from the production process to the final delivery to your customer. Not all of these steps will add value to the process. Your challenge is to find the steps that don’t add value and then eliminate them.

Additionally, waste can happen when you add features to your product that your customer doesn’t want or need. The ultimate value doesn’t mean your product has one hundred features. Value means that your product has the exact fifty features your customer wants.

Don’t add features your customer doesn’t want or need. Anything more is waste.

Principle 3: Create Flow

Once you know the exact steps to your workflow, you need to track that they’re getting done.

From Gantt charts to Kanban boards everyone has their way of creating a workflow process. In reality, it doesn’t matter as much how you plan or track your flow but rather creating and following your plan. It doesn’t matter if you work in two-week sprints or track milestones, to maximize efficiency you must create a workflow for producing your product or service.

Your end goal is for the value-added steps in your workflow to get done seamlessly and without delay or waste in the process.

Principle 4: Establish Pull

While creating large batches does get many products created quickly, it doesn’t do you any good to create products nobody wants and you can’t sell. Don’t allow product to sit on the shelf for months on end. This is a perfect example of waste.

As mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter is you create a thousand products in the perfect system without waste if they aren’t selling. Only create the correct number of products that will sell in the current market demands. Limit inventory and you will limit one of the biggest forms of waste in the production cycle.

Instead, use the pull method to start production when the client or market demands it. This uses less capital and requires less overhead, thus improving production.

Principle 5: Seek Perfection

As mentioned earlier, one of the main tenants of lean manufacturing is to improve upon your process. Never be satisfied with your current production levels, always be on the lookout for ways you can improve and eliminate more waste.

From idle workers to unused stock or inventory there are plenty of examples of waste within any manufacturing process. To seek perfection you must seek a process with zero waste.

This fifth principle will be a continual process and will never be fully done. You will work to seek perfection every day. And you will find yourself continually searching for ways to improve your process, increase productivity, and eliminate inefficiencies and lost production.

Tracking and Reporting With OEE

As in everything in business, tracking and reporting are vital to continual improvement. Without these imperative numbers, you risk your business falling behind the competition and eventually going out of business. Don’t let this happen to you, track your reports every month.

One metric that is integral to the lean manufacturing framework is the OEE, or overall equipment effectiveness score.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a number that is represented as a percentage. It shows how often your production line is meeting your productivity goals. You should be aiming for 100% productivity in your manufacturing line, however, most companies find they are operating at or around 60% most of the time.

There are several methods for calculating this score. The simplest method is to multiply the number of pieces you need are manufactured and ready to ship by the ideal time it takes to manufacture one piece. And then divide that by the total time the production asset was scheduled for production.

Generally speaking, setting a goal of 85% is the most reasonable for long-term maintenance, so the average of 60% leaves room for improvement. A good software program can track your metrics and show you where you can work to improve your productivity numbers.

A quality OEE tracking software will help you track this score and look for ways to improve. Lean manufacturing leans into the idea of utilizing your tools to continue to pursue perfection in your process. A software program like this can be an invaluable tool in your toolbox to work towards lean success in your workflow.

You Can Get Lean With OEE

The lean framework is a process and mindset for your team and organization to embrace efficiency. Many managers tout efficiency when they actually mean is that they want everyone to work hard and look busy.

But lean manufacturing is more than this. It is a cultural shift in your workplace to eliminate waste and inefficient workflows. It is a mindset and collective agreement to continually improve upon the process and deliver value to the customer.

When you do this you will find your product competing and succeeding in the marketplace. Your bottom line will improve and correlate with your lean workflow as there will no longer be extra steps, extra inventory, or wasted downtime.

For more great information about this and other topics, check out the rest of our blog.