5 Reasons to Use Cloud Technologies in Your Business

Modern technologies like cloud computing is rapidly changing the way of traditional businesses. With proper utilization, cloud technologies can improve the whole business operation and bring your better results. How does that happen? I will discuss that in today’s article.

More Flexibility

Cloud services are especially appropriate for businesses which are growing fast. At those instances, the companies will need more bandwidth and other technical support to back up their increasing customer demands. Fortunately, cloud services make it very easy to scale up your business operations with a few mouse clicks.What’s more, it is also possible to scale down when things are going low. This level of flexibility provides a real edge over the competitors who are still relying on the traditional methods.

Reliable Disaster Recovery

All is well when everything is going smooth. But what happens when something goes wrong? What do you do when you lose an important file or can’t find the necessary records in times of emergency? In order to deal with these situations, every business needs a reliable disaster recovery plan. When using the traditional methods, this is an expensive and tiring process. But you can use cloud tools to keep a solid disaster recovery plan. These tools will keep multiple backup of your files and allow you to restore previous versions of any file.

More Competitiveness

In this age of competition, every business wants to outsmart its competitor and provide better, smarter solutions to its customers. Among the various ways of doing that, using cloud technologies is the best and most efficient way to get an edge over your competitors. Since you will have instant access to the necessary files, you will be able to take faster decisions, implement the changes quickly and enjoy better productivity. With instant collaboration, you can share the documents with other stakeholders.It is also possible toget multiple collaborators in the same file.

 

 

 

Better Document Management

Every business needs to deal with a large amount of documents every day. When you have an efficient document management policy in place, controlling the whole process will become a lot easier. The traditional system requires using email to transfer the files. This method doesn’t allow multiple people to work on the same file simultaneously. There are also higher chances of conflicts in the file name, format and content. Using a cloud-based document management system is the perfect solution to address this problem.

 

Simpler Accessibility

An efficient business workflow requires you to ensure a simple but effective document accessibility system. You need to make sure that the latest updates of your business documents are instantly available to all the relevant parties. And the easiest way to do that is to use cloud tools. These tools allow you to store your files in the cloud and make them accessible to your team members. What’s more, you can assign role-specific access for more confidential files.

 

Concluding Remarks

So, these were the most important benefits of using cloud technology in your business. Are you using any such technology in your business? If yes, let me know if the comments. And if you are planning to introduce a cloud service into your business anytime soon, don’t forget to share your idea by leaving a comment below.

How to Increase Business Productivity by Using Modern Technology

It is a well-known fact that your business success depends on the productivity level of your employees. A successful business needs to be dedicated, productive employees who are capable of executing the business plans. Luckily, various modern technologies can help in increasing business productivity. In today’s post, I will discuss how to use technology to increase business productivity.

Establish an Open Environment

Having an open, communicative environment is a primary requirement of increasing overall business productivity. You should create an open system which encourages your employees to convey their thoughts directly. Otherwise, you may miss valuable insights or practical tips coming from them.

The system should encourage your employees to express their opinion about the current or future plans, how to improve them or better ways to achieve your business goals. 

You can use online messaging solutions like Slack or create an internal messaging system. You can also establish a reliable document workflow to ensure accountability. At the bare minimum, using emails could also work as the way to establish the open environment.

Connect Your Employees

Building a great team is the most effective way of creating a successful business. When the team members have a wonderful relationship with each other, they will be more dedicated and enthusiastic about the business. This is more applicable to businesses which have remote employees. In that case, you can arrange regular meet-ups, virtually or physically.

The traditional corporate environment is not supportive for creative work process. Instead, your goal should be to create a flexible work environment where each team member receives the proper attention. When the employees will realize that the company cares about them, they will be more caring about the company too.

Motivate Your Employees

Motivation is a critical determiner of success. Unless you have the necessary motivation, you will never be able to reach your goals. The same principle applies to your employees too. With the proper motivation, your employees can be more dedicated and professional in their work.

One way to motivate the employees is to keep track of their current skills and create opportunities to acquire new skills or hone the existing ones. Other potential ways include promotion, transfer to other departments, assigning new duties etc.

Monitor Employee Progress

Along with providing motivation, it is also necessary to keep track of your employee progress. Especially if you have broader goals like adopting a paperless approach, you need to make sure your employees are headed towards the right direction.

Some proven ways to get the best performance from your employees include providing them with new challenges and helping them achieve the target.With various online tools, you can easily keep track of the individual performance of your employees. Everyone likes to be appreciated. If you can help your employees get more appreciation, it will definitely make your business successful.

Bottom Line

Ensuring maximum employee productivity is a must for any growth-oriented business. The tip mentioned above will help you achieve that goal. Are you applying any of these tips already? Let me know in the comments.

Follow These Tips to Ensure the Best Document Workflow

The term workflow has different meanings to different people. However, most people think of workflow as the complete way of work in their company. A perfect workflow includes all the steps of the total work process. However, document workflow is a bit different than the traditional workflow.

A document workflow includes steps like creating the document, revisions, signatures, updates and so on. Due to the diverse scope, most people find it hard to ensure the perfect document workflow in their businesses. Below, I will share some expert tips to ensure a solid document workflow with the help of document management systems.

Recognize the Current Workflow

Most business owners tend not to provide that much importance to creating a document workflow. As long as the tasks are getting done, they don’t mind the absence of such a workflow. While this may work with the traditional way of business, it is obsolete in the modern business world. In order to compete with new startups and to attract new customers, you absolutely need an established workflow for your documents. To do this, you need to create a list of the different types of documents used in your business. And then, keep track of the life cycle of each of these document types.

Identify the Problems

At this stage, you have a clear idea about the types of documents used in your business and how they move from one stage to another. Now it is time to find out the problems or potential issues. Is there any step where the documents get delayed? Or maybe there are some steps which could be done in a faster way. Your goal is to find out any loophole which slows the process and how they affect your company. This will be extremely useful in planning and creating a new document workflow for your business.

Connect the Dots

At this point, you know exactly what the problems are in your existing document workflow. This is the perfect time to find out the solutions to each of these problems. Depending on the position of the problems, there could be multiple ways to find a solution. In some cases, it might be possible to eliminate a step in order to make the process simpler. And in some cases, you may have to add more steps to make the workflow better. Regardless of the type of problems, you should find working solutions and note them.

Plan a New Workflow

Finally, this is the point where you can sit down to create a new workflow and also plan how to integrate it with your chosen documentmanagement system. However, that doesn’t mean you have to get rid of your existing workflow and create a totally new plan. Rather, it is quite possible to retain some steps of your old plan and find better alternatives for the rest. The ultimate target is to create a plan which will be easier to coordinate with the document management system you choose.

Final Words

Establishing a reliable document workflow will significantly improve the overall efficiency of your business. With such a system in place, you will find it easier to track the various stages of your projects and be more confident in your business operations.

Top 10 Most Loved Marketing Technologies

According to recent research, the number of new marketing technologies doubled since last year. Favorite marketing technology moments in this Infographic:

 

Courtesy of: Marketing Technology

How to Make Your Small Business Website More Visible

These days, whenever we need to know any information, the first things most of us do is we tend to perform an online search. We go to Google and type the search query to get reliable answer from relevant websites. As we want to know the information fast, we often tend to check out the first few search results.

As a result of this tendency, it has become an almost compulsory fact for any company to be within the first few results for the relevant search queries. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in handy. Companies can ensure better search engine rankings by applying some proven SEO techniques. Below, I will share the most effective SEO techniques every small business website should follow.

Optimize Your Pages Properly 

 

The process of getting your desired search engine ranking starts with optimizing your webpages properly. A well-structured webpage provides all the relevant information to the search engines and help them represent the pages in a proper way in front of the general audience. 

You should have a clear idea what search queries your customers generally use. And those search queries should be present within the webpages and visitors should be able to find out the information they are looking for. If you believe you haven’t added the necessary amount of content yet, apply the ‘noindex’ attribute to your pages. Remove the attribute only after ensuring the content is rich enough to satisfy your audience.

Write Unique Title and Meta Descriptions

 

Writing unique title tags and meta descriptions for each of your pages is another curial task for ensuring better search engine visibility. Search engines use the title tag as the headline of your page in the results page. And the meta description is displayed right after the title, to provide the visitor with a quick idea about the page content and what to expect. 

These two things determine how your pages look like in the search result pages. In order to attract the maximum amount of visitors, you should provide optimized title tag and meta description for your pages.

SEO 101: Basics for Small Business

 

 

Optimize Your Website

 

Most modern websites use a lot of images. And being a business website, you probably have to use more pictures than others. You need to provide pictures of your products, services, physical facilities, team members, location, events, and so on. With all these different aspects, your website will end up having a lot of images. There are two things here – you need to optimize your images for the search engines and the web browser. 

For the search engine, you should provide appropriate title, alt, and captions for each of your images. This will help the search engines index your site properly. For the web browsers, you should optimize the size of your images. Using larger images will increase the page loading time, which could have a negative impact on your visitors.

 

Other Factors

 

SEO is such a vast topic that you can’t cover all the necessary aspects in a short post like this. However, let me give you a list of the other things that are absolutely necessary for improving the search engine visibility of your small business website –

• Check out the 404 errors,
• Produce quality contents and make them shareable,
• Add structured markup in your website,
• Maintain a strong social media presence,
• Keep your competition in check,
• Make Use of Google local listing,
• Ensure a mobile-friendly user experience,
• Utilize the available webmaster tools,
• Track your performance over time and
• Keep track of the overall SEO trend. 

 

Over to You

 

In this age of competition, you need to do everything you can to stay ahead. And increasing the visibility of your website is an excellent step in that regard. Follow the guidelines provides above and you should be seeing improvements gradually.