Doing the urgent things instead of working on the important things.

Your blog dies if you do not do the important things.

Automation

Automation is one solution. Any routine boring tasks, automate them. The work required is quickly paid off.

For example, posting items to social media. Pick one of two times a day to post your new content to social networks.

Posting content can also be scheduled to happen and certain times.

IFTTT is a great tool to publish your content to various networks and it is totally free. You can reuse someone else’s recipe to automate things you do daily.

Macro Scripts are great things to use to automate tasks. iMacros web browser plugin is a big time saver.

Linking tools are a great way to monetize your website without going through all the work in joining networks and placing links on your site. Infolinks for example, has a plugin that will take words within your post and make them into links that you then get paid for when certain actions occur.

A medical transcriptionist working in a medical transcription outsourced environment. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Top 3 Outsourcing Needs for Small Business

Small businesses tend to focus solely on a set of skills in their niche, usually due to a lack of time, resources or man power, which means little-to-no in-house teams to perform specific skills, such as marketing, design, content creation, social media management, strategy development, etc. The list goes on, but small business owners most likely can’t keep track of everything themselves.

The solution to these overwhelming needs is outsourcing. Outsourcing and freelancing allows small businesses to not only operate properly, but to succeed in the long run.

The following are three top outsourcing needs for small businesses that assist in and determine the functionality, look and outreach of small businesses. With a combined effort, these outsourcing needs define their overall success and integration.

English: Freelance artist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Pitch Me Aims to Streamline Freelance Journalism

A great place for freelance journalist to give previews of their ideas to editors to read over is Pitchme.org.

There is a new listings site for freelancers that was started by journalist Kabir Chibber who feels some of the industry is "stuck in the 19th century." This site goes from pitch to payment.

Chibber hopes to create a space where journalists can pitch their best ideas. Editors can log in and read them and commission these journalists to write for them.

Image via Wikipedia

In today’s uncertain economic climate, it can be hard to predict what the future holds for even a fairly successful business. How many times have you heard a story where a business has been doing well, has chosen to expand, and then failed because they over-extended themselves by buying a new office, or taking on too many staff.

Outsourcing can help to prevent those problems.

It’s true that there are some areas of business where having on-site staff is a better decision, but there are other areas such as ecommerce fulfillment, customer service, and mailing fulfillment where enlisting outside help just makes sense. Why spend a lot of money on space, equipment, and full time employees when you can’t guarantee that you will even need those facilities in a few month’s time?

Link building is perhaps the most important element when it comes to successfully marketing an online venture.  One can have the nicest website, the coolest domain name, an offline marketing campaign and a killer product, but without off-site links, your website is next to invisible.  Although there are a significant number of factors involved in how search engine rankings are decided, the basic idea is that the more links a website has to it (also known as backlinks), the higher up the rankings the site will appear for a phrase.  This is a gross simplification, but having more inbound links is always beneficial.

5 Time Saving Services for Businesses

In order for businesses to maintain an edge and focus on important tasks they may need to look for alternative time saving services. Here are five such services:

Conference calls
It can be very time consuming travelling to meetings, presentations and conferences in different locations. Using a conference call service can be very productive in terms of time and costs. These services offer businesses the opportunity to hold meetings and conferences with delegates, both internally and from anywhere in the world, over the phone. All parties, wherever they are in the world, phone in to a designated number at a given time, enter a PIN number and the conference begins. Conference calls can be used to give presentations to delegates in different locations. The presentation would be shown online while the participants are able to hear the audio discussing the details. Using conference calls helps businesses to work together in a time and cost effective manner.