tools Tag

Social networks have become one of the most effective communication channels between companies and the public. In addition, it has also become a valuable source of information, since thanks to social networks it is possible to know what the public thinks of the brand or its products or services. It is precisely here that we must practice the social listening.

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In small businesses, resources are often lacking, especially at start-up. Each employee wears many hats and juggles different tasks and functions. Given the context, effective project management can help you make the most of existing resources and budgets to increase business performance and customer satisfaction.

It appears from a major survey conducted in 2018 in France by Capterra that 35% of SMEs do not use any project management software. They manage the old business, with Excel spreadsheets and emails for communication. No collaborative tools, no planning, time management, budget control and performance software.

In Germany, even 54% of professionals still work manually. Yet the offer of project management software is extremely rich and varied, as is the comparison of the best project management tools.

6 misconceptions holding back project management adoption

When SMEs are asked the reasons why they do not use specialized software to manage their projects, here are the main arguments given:

My business is too small.
Whatever the size of your business, the use of powerful management tools helps you better plan, budget and carry out your various tasks.

My expertise is enough.
Expertise is not enough to guarantee the success of a business. Among the reasons that lead young SMEs to bankruptcy, we often find poor planning, lack of capital and poor management of tasks and resources.

It is an unjustified expense.
The process of managing the implementation of a project in some cases requires a gross investment. What are you contrary? You will find on the internet three names, tips, models and tools free or at little cost.

Project management will slow me down.
Quite the opposite is actually happening. Developing a project without a well-defined scope, without context and without the necessary budget or resources, can lead to delays or blockages, and even lead to poor results.

I don’t have the skills.
It is entirely possible to acquire the necessary basic knowledge by following a “crash course” which will introduce the specific theories, tools and processes essential to project management.

I do not have time.
Following a process can actually lengthen the duration of a project. However, to use an easy analogy, if you’re building a house, you’d rather have a quality end result than a quick, mediocre or flawed one. Think customer satisfaction!

4 reasons to adopt a project management tool

To convince the skeptics, here are four points that should make them think:

Filter ideas and prioritize them
Like all entrepreneurs, you have a thousand ideas to develop your business. Not all of them will materialize. Adopting a project management tool will be very helpful in detecting gaps in the idea and purpose of pros and cons early on and investing in resources.

Channel your energies and focus your efforts
You above big dreams. And you spend a lot of time imagining how to make them. Project management can help you “break down” your long-term vision into measurable objectives. You progress more fluidly, limiting the risk of being overwhelmed or disappointed.

Manage equipment remotely
In the age of nomadic work and telework, the best place for collaborative and efficient tools that are easy to use for all team members is essential.

Reduce mental load
If you want to keep in mind all the tasks to accomplish to achieve your goals, you unnecessarily clutter your brain and you risk ending up in burnout. So, if your ability to react quickly gives you a competitive advantage, you must do so in a differentiated way to increase your chances of success and maintain your peace of mind.

Project management and the 1:10:100 rule.

Project management is proven to save time, money and energy. Indeed, even if a problem is detected, it is also the case for the company.

• A problem not solved in the initial phase costs 10x more to solve during development
• I detected a problem after the realization/delivery of the project costing more than 100 times.

There is therefore a real interest in thinking carefully and planning each project rather than acting in an emergency or in reactive mode.

Simple, effective and adapted management tools for SMEs

There are countless project management tools out there. Some are intended for large companies that have to manage more complex projects, with long development phases and complicated processes. But there is also a whole range of online tools, sometimes very easy to use, perfectly suited to small businesses.

In 2018, Capterra’s study showed that more than half of the management software used in companies was desktop software and not of SaaS Tools which rents the profit of the cloud. But that was before the Covid and the rise of teleworking. Imagine that in the meantime, a certain name of companies is making the rounds of software in the cloud in order to facilitate the sharing of information in the event of remote work, but also to optimize the monitoring of tasks and resources.

Next-gen tools like Monday, Asana, Zoho, Trello, Nutcache, and more do just that. To find your way around the jungle of software, you will find multiple comparisons and detailed analyzes of each platform or specialized tool online. Most will answer you to the main challenges faced by professionals today: meeting deadlines, adapting to changes during the project, balancing budgets and distributing tasks efficiently.

In conclusion

The choice of a project management tool is essential. It basically depends on your specific kisses. I have tried several over the years. Most offer similar functionality, but each has its quirks. This is why I recommend that you compare the options offered, select 2 or 3, then test the one that seems to best meet your needs in order to verify its ease of use and its compatibility with your business environment. .

Most project management tools offer a free version. Enjoy it. And if the util tested does not suit you, go to the next one.

While the Internet makes things more convenient and accessible in general, assuming that it is automatically accessible to everyone is quite damaging, as it leaves out those with potential disabilities or socioeconomic limitations.

Everyone, regardless of their limitations or abilities, should be able to use the Internet and access the many resources it provides. But web accessibility is not something that comes naturally, it is something designers or developers have to actively work on, so it can be overlooked.

However, with growing concerns about inclusion and equality, web accessibility is no longer something designers, developers, and webmasters can afford to ignore. If you want to expand your reach and continue to attract today’s Internet users, you need to make sure your website is designed to be accessible to as many people as possible.

But what is web accessibility and how, exactly, can you prioritize this on your website?

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what web accessibility means and give tips on how to design a website that’s more accessible to all users.

Understand web accessibility

In the most basic of definitions, web accessibility simply means designing a site that anyone can access and navigate. However, while most people assume this refers to people with disabilities, it actually refers to a much broader scope of people with varying degrees of physical, mental, and even socioeconomic limitations.

While a person’s ability to access the web may be limited by their physical, mental, or neurological impairments, it may also be limited by where they live and whether or not they have easy access to broadband Internet.

Despite this broad definition, there are four main areas of focus:

1. Visual accessibility

This refers to making websites accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. It can also include people with neurological conditions, such as epilepsy, who are affected by certain images.

People with visual impairments, for example, will benefit from content that is easier to read, such as large fonts and easy-to-see colors. They will also need content that is easier to read with screen readers and other special devices.

2. Hearing Accessibility

This refers to making websites accessible to people with hearing impairments.

For people with hearing disabilities, images are important, especially when playing videos or sounds on the website. This may mean using captions or adding descriptive text to make sure they know what is being said or played on your website.

3. Cognitive accessibility

This refers to making websites accessible to people who have learning or cognitive disabilities, or who have difficulty understanding or consuming information.

People with cognitive and neurological disabilities, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (TORCH), you may have more difficulty processing information. In this case, it is ideal to avoid having too many elements on a single page. This means creating a clear web structure with visual elements that are easy to navigate and understand.

For example, many teens already struggle with reading, but it can be even harder for them to digest content when they have ADHD or ASD. Since teens and young adults are heavy users of the Internet, it is especially important to create websites that are easy to use and understand the content.

4.Motor accessibility

Refers to people with physical disabilities who require assistive devices. This can cover a wide range of disabilities. This can include impaired motor function, loss of feeling or muscle control, amputations, and many other physical impairments.

To make sure they can also access your website, it’s important to make sure the content allows full keyboard support or can be read or navigated using a variety of other assistive devices.

When designing your website, it is crucial to keep the four categories listed above in mind. There are countless types of disabilities a person can have, so it’s important to include all four accessibility categories in your design to make sure no one is left out.

Optimize your website for screen readers and other accessibility tools

Screen readers are one of the most widely used assistive technology devices, so your content needs to be easy for them to read and understand. However, there are many other tools and devices that people with limitations will use, such as speech recognition software, braille displays, transcription software, joysticks, trackballs, head pointers, and more. It’s just as important to consider these other tools when optimizing accessibility on your site.

These tips below can help you optimize your content for screen readers, as well as many other devices and tools used by people with accessibility needs today:

detailed forms

Today, many websites have forms that people must fill out, such as registrations for email subscriptions, digital signatures, and e-commerce forms for things like name, shipping address, and billing information.

These forms can be difficult for people with disabilities and screen readers to understand. It is important to use descriptive text, such as “required” or “optional”, so that the user knows exactly what needs to be completed and where. Be sure to keep these features in mind when evaluating digital signature software or web or e-commerce forms services for your site.

easy to read text

Well-structured text with short sentences and bullet points is ideal for screen readers. The simpler the language, the better. It’s also a good idea to use larger font sizes and easy-on-the-eye colors when you can. You can test your accessibility and content using tools like Hex Naw and TextOptimizer.

descriptive links

Internal links and outbound links are also very common in website content, but imagine what it sounds like when a screen reader reads a link. If links don’t have descriptive text that easily explains what they are or what site or page they lead to, it can be extremely confusing to someone using a screen reader. So always use descriptive anchor texts when inserting links in your content.

Alt text

Just like links, screen readers, web crawlers, and other devices and tools can’t easily read images. This means that you should use alt text markup when including images of images on your site. The alt text should describe what the image is. It can be a simple one or two word descriptor, or it can be a more detailed description of exactly what is depicted in the image.

final thoughts

These are just a few of the many ways you can optimize your website to ensure it is more accessible to all users. Regardless of their limitations or capabilities or the tools and devices they use, anyone should be able to easily access, navigate and understand your website.

And as long as you design with the four main categories in mind (visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor), your website should be accessible to even more people.

One of the main reasons digital marketing is such an exciting industry is that it is constantly innovating.

In fact, it’s advancing at such an impressive rate that it’s actually unrecognizable from where it was about 10 years ago.

And the biggest motivator behind this innovation is Technology. I’m biased, but I believe our industry has the greatest number of awesome tools that drive innovation forward.

We have a huge selection of smart marketing technologies to choose from these days, so the list below is by no means exhaustive! But these are the tools that I personally use and find absolutely unique and amazing:

1. CRO Automation: Figpii

We’re not short on data these days: we get lots of data from free tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, as well as advertising platforms like Google Ads and Facebook. We know just about everything about our target customers.

But how much of this data actually comes into action? Are we actually using this data to improve the performance and usability of our website?

In most cases, the only data companies use is keyword information: we use all the tools we can to identify the keywords people are using to solve related problems or answer related questions – and we create these keywords in our content creation, on-page optimization and link building practices. .

This means that we use around 20% of all the data we collect.

figpii is here to change it, encouraging companies to stop being data-rich and knowledge-poor. The platform collects data about your site user behavior and provides automated suggestions on how you can tweak your site to boost your conversions:

Conversion rate optimization is a never-ending task, and Figpii is constantly working behind the scenes to help you improve your site and generate more conversions:

“Using a combination of your visitor data and the larger site improvement data set, FigPii suggests real changes you should make to your site.

As you implement changes, FigPii analyzes their impact on visitor behavior. Our machine learning will make further suggestions to improve your site.

2. Automation of advertising design and collaboration: Creatopy

While TV and radio ads are traditionally used by big brands, the internet has made advertising accessible to everyone.

The high number of businesses using advertisements has led to the expansion of available platforms on which you can advertise. These include each individual provider’s search, social media and display networks.

This is a huge pool of platforms to cater to, and unless you have a dedicated graphic design team, there are plenty of ads to create too.

Creatopia is here to help by offering a unique suite of ad design automation and creation tools. The platform uses smart technology to resize your tools in multiple formats that fit almost all platforms. Plus, you can add team members to create your ads together, allowing you to create the most creative and effective banners and video ads:

And yes, you can use the platform to create video ads and easily resize them using smart automation.

3. Innovative Keyword Research Analytics: SE Ranking

Traditionally, we look at keywords from our own point of view: “What is Yo want if I was looking for this.

It’s a good approach unless we have another source of information – which we do and that’s Google.

The search giant has years of experience analyzing search patterns and identifying connections between different search queries, i.e. queries that are often searched for during the same session or queries that are searched interchangeably.

As a result, in most cases Google knows exactly what each searcher is doing and even what they may want to search for next. All we need is to have access to this information.

SE Ranking Keyword Research Tool does exactly that: for each keyword in your list, it finds “related” keywords based on the number of overlapping URLs when these two queries are searched.

This way, the tool is able to provide truly relevant keywords that are usually found in a shopping journey. Here’s an example of a 100% informational search path: These related keywords show that someone searching for “content marketing” is likely to search for basic 101-type information:

4. Thematic internal links: InLinks

Internal linking is one of the most common missed opportunities because business owners and website owners rarely think about it.

And yet, internal networking is neglected by 82% of companies, according to to research.

inbound links is a semantic analysis tool that helps you improve your internal linking in the most meaningful way, i.e. based on thematic relevance.

These thematic internal links will help Google understand your page-by-page purpose and interpret its relevance in the most effective way.

5. Advanced competitive intelligence: visualization

I’m one of those marketers who strongly advocates competitive research and monitoring because we get better at learning from each other.

Most brands limit their competitive intelligence to tracking competitor rankings. Some companies even go so far as to monitor their competitors’ social media mentions.

Rarely does a marketing strategy include any other type of competitor monitoring.

Visualization is changing that thanks to their set of competitive intelligence tools. With this tool, you can monitor just about anything, from your competitors’ knowledge panel in Google to their social media profiles.

6. SEO Automation Done Right: WebCEO

Search engine optimization is something that everyone is always trying to adapt. And it’s entirely possible, if done right.

There are things you can automate (like tracking and reporting) and things that are best left out (content creation and keyword research).

WebCEO is one of those rare tools that gets SEO automation. This is Agency SEO Toolset comes with automated SEO reports, collaboration and task automation features allowing you to scale what can be scaled while focusing on more creative tasks and integrating SEO into other marketing tactics thanks to the collaboration between teams:

7. AI-based branding: Namify

Finding the right name for your business is a crucial step, and our industry has gone back and forth trying to find the right approach here.

Do we need keywords in the domain name?

Should we focus on how easy it will be to build a brand?

How can we achieve both?

Namify is the only brand name generator that uses artificial intelligence (that I know of). The business names it offers have topical relevance while being easy to remember.

8. New Content Optimization: Text Optimizer

Finally, one of the unfortunate tactics introduced by the SEO industry was to create lightweight content that was too focused on a particular keyword.

This has resulted in a lot of poor quality content flooding Google results.

Fortunately, our industry is slowly moving away from this trend, and in many ways we have technology to thank for that. There are tools that encourage you to create high-quality content by pushing you to add related concepts and research your topic more.

text optimizer is my favorite tool that achieves this goal of improving every piece of content. It uses semantic analysis to encourage you to create more in-depth content:

Text Optimizer is a great tool for creating long and lead magnets (ebooks and white papers).

Conclusion

The tools above are just the beginning of the list. There are many other innovative tools that make the digital marketing industry such an exciting place.

It’s 21st century and everything has gone digital!

We order our food online, we do our banking online, and even movies and shows have moved from broadcast to digital streaming.

That’s why it’s so important for businesses to use social media apps, where people spend so much of their day sharing their lives, ideas, and opinions.

If you don’t know how to market your business digitally, we’ve got you covered. Today we’re going to look at 13 digital marketing tools that experts use to simplify their digital marketing campaigns.

It all starts with dividing your digital marketing campaign into different categories.

Let’s start with the most important.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media apps allow people to share their daily lives, thoughts, and opinions with the rest of the world.

There are many, but the most important are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

For any business looking to get into digital marketing, social media apps are by far the most important.

#1: minimize

Sotrend is a great social media analytics tool that should be in every digital marketing team’s bag.

Using this simple tool, you can track all your social media accounts, in one place.

You can analyze the organic and paid performance of your Facebook and Instagram, and track all your KPIs, including reach, impressions, and CPC.

The tool comes with a built-in interactivity index, which allows you to view aggregated engagement metrics.

You can also generate summary reports in a minute!

If you need a simple app to track all your social media performance, then Sotrender is the answer.

#of them: napoleonchat

Napoleoncat is an all-in-one social media management tool. If you’re looking for a custom-priced media management tool, then Napoleoncat has you covered.

Why pay for 20 social media accounts and five user accounts, when you really only want 15 and three? Napoleoncat allows you to choose your plan, as you see fit.

Napoleoncat lets you take control of all your social media accounts, even TikTok! You can schedule posts, automate moderation, and print analytics in less than a minute. Their social inbox includes all linked social media accounts and passing messages. It’s easy to browse and respond if you want.

If you’re looking for the most intuitive and customizable social media management tool plan, the Napoleoncat is for you.

#3: dismal

Loomly is a great tool for small businesses that don’t have a lot of staff. It is easy to use and organize.

Loomly comes with a built-in calendar, ways to set deadlines, and makes it easy to schedule meetings as well as create new content!

Loomly’s interface is very clean, with a great color palette that’s easy on the eyes, while keeping you motivated and inspired.

It’s also a bit cheaper than most other platforms, which is a plus if your business is just getting started.

Email marketing tools

With over 4 billion email users worldwide and a staggering 293 billion emails sent daily, getting your email marketing right is an important tool in your digital marketing arsenal.

Here are some tools to help you:

#4: Moosend

Moosend is a simple and user-friendly email organizer that every up-and-coming business should use.

It’s user-friendly, but it’s a surprisingly well thought out and optimized software solution.

Running campaigns is as easy as a few clicks, with simple automation. There is no difficulty in writing scripts or commands, rather it is a simple click-and-drag automation that anyone can learn to do in 5 minutes.

Analytics are presented in an easy to read and understand way, and everything is integrated into the software.

#5: Sending Grid

SendGrid is perfect for beginners and professionals. It comes with email marketing services that come in handy in any situation.

There are many ways to set up email campaigns, including a convenient drag-and-drop system to automate emails. If you prefer the old-fashioned way, there’s also an option to code your email automation.

SendGrid offers a free small business option to help you grow your business. As your business grows, there’s an intuitive payment ladder plan.

SEO marketing tools

Keeping your website search engine optimized is important. According to Forbes, up to 71% of search traffic did not click on the 2n / A Google page. This number has increased in recent years, up to 92% of traffic not exceeding the 1st page.

#6: semrush

Semrush is one of the best-known SEO tools used by countless companies for their digital marketing work.

It helps you find the perfect keywords and brainstorm new terms for your digital content.

semrush gives you a complete overview of your keyword, the number of searches it has generated, the highest demographics, as well as variations of the keyword.

#seven: SurferSEO

SurferSEO is one of the best SEO marketing tools.

SurferSEO can generate all the analysis you need for your article, including the correct keywords, semantically related words, correct character count, as well as the correct word count for your article. It also grades your content in an easy-to-understand way.

It is able to create paragraphs that score high on SEO metrics using specialized AI only on SurferSEO.

If you want your content to appear on the first page of Google, then SurferSEO is the tool to use to get you there.

#8: Clearscope

Clearscope is the best SEO tool if you want to optimize current content.

It is mainly used for content writing, similar to SurferSEO. There is an excellent content editor built into the software, as well as a keyword recommendation tool. It will also rate the readability of your text, which is similar to apps like Grammarly, which will rate your content based on its readability, mood, and grammar.

If you’re looking to spruce up your existing content, look no further than Clearscope.

Conversion optimization tools

Optimizing your website is extremely important. Your landing page should be as optimized as possible. The smallest differences, like the color of a subscribe button, can mean the difference between someone signing up or taking the high road.

#9: optimally

Optimize focuses on creating the perfect landing page. It includes many visualization tools to help you change how your landing page looks and works.

From there, the software can run landing page experiments, allowing you to test the page against different audiences and its effectiveness.

The software is easy to use, with a no-code interface that allows for the smallest possible tweaking of your website.

#ten: Hotjar

Hotjar does exactly what its name suggests. It offers real-time analysis of your webpage. The only difference is that instead of offering a bunch of graphs and information, it shows hotspots on the screen.

It also records the number of clicks. This information gives you a real-time view and insight into how people are interacting with your website.

It keeps videos of each of your visitors, allowing you to look back and study how they use your website, where people hover, click, and, of course, where they don’t.

Graphic design tools

Having a beautiful website is important. First impressions are everything!

Social marketing and branding is all about creating your own identity. Something that people can identify with your brand. Thus, it is important to have the perfect logo, slogan and aesthetics.

Here are some graphical tools you can add to your toolkit the next time you need them.

#Eleven: look at me

Visme is mainly used to create presentations.

If you spend hours and hours collecting data, sorting it, and putting it into graphs, it might be time to start using Visme.

If you are a content creator who likes to post infographics on social media platforms, Visme makes it easy to get them on these platforms.

Another cool feature is that Visme lets you get data from other resources and add it to your chart.

#12: revenge

Venngage is similar to Visme. It is an infographic maker that allows you to easily create creative spreadsheets.

There are many different chart setups for everyone and every situation. This allows you to customize your infographics to match your brand.

If you value customization over ease of use, then Venngage is for you.

#13: Cloth

Canva is easily one of the best creative tools a digital marketing team can use. It can create any type of graphics, from album covers and graphics to presentations, logos, and even Instagram posts.

The best part about Canva is the fact that the free version already offers such variety that any up-and-coming business can use it at no additional cost.

Templates are limited in the free version, but the templates you get from the paid version are stunning and make creating any type of graphic design easier and faster.

What digital marketing tools do you use?

If you have the right digital marketing tools, nothing can stop you from running the best possible digital marketing campaigns for your business.

It’s especially important for emerging businesses that don’t yet have a lot of brand recognition to get exposure, make a good first impression, and build an audience.

Using digital marketing tools like Canva will allow you to build a recognizable brand. Using Optimizely will help you create the perfect landing page for the perfect first impression. By using Hotjar, you can optimize and analyze your website to help you see where your audience is spending the most time.

That said, one of these 13 tools will surely be the perfect fit for content marketing for startups.

I’m still not convinced that Twitter Spaces will ever become a thing, bBut Twitter itself seems confident that there is plenty of growth potential there, as evidenced by its continued push to add more elements to its Spaces offering, to drive more listeners to its Spaces tab, and to maximize the audience within its Facebook streams. Audio.

This week, Twitter rolled out another set of updates to Spaces, including permanent recordings (instead of deleting them after 30 days), the ability to save recordings after you stream, and new details within the Spaces bar at the top of your Twitter feed. the application.

First of all, in permanent recordings – After initially rolling out its Spaces recording feature to all users in January, Twitter is now extending the lifetime of those recordings beyond the initial 30-day period.

That will provide more ability to engage long-term listeners and keep your conversations alive on the app.

In addition to this, Twitter is also adding a new list of your registered spaces within your app’s settings menu, where you can play each session, delete the ones you don’t want to keep, or share a recording directly from the list.

That will enhance the functional value of Spaces chats, making them more podcast-like and more of a vehicle for ongoing promotion and audience building, though it also seems to run counter to what made audio platforms like Clubhouse They were so attractive to begin with. , in the sense that they were live chats and at the time you had to be there to see them.

But podcasts are clearly more of the angle that Twitter is now looking for, based on these example screens of another new test in the back-end of the application.

As you can see from these images (shared by app researcher Alexander Paluzzi), Twitter is also developing ‘Stations’ within the Spaces tab, which would incorporate podcasts into its audio stream, providing even more options for tuning in on-demand audio content within the app.

That could make Spaces recordings even more valuable and potentially help Spaces broadcasters translate their work into a monetizable podcast process, but do Twitter users really want to tune into podcasts from within the app? I mean, we have Spoitify and Apple Podcasts and various other options available.

Could Twitter really become a key hub for audio content like this?

In some ways it seems unnecessary, but then again the real-time nature of tweets lends itself to topical discussion, and that could make it a good hub for all these types of discussions and content, including Spaces, recordings of Spaces, podcasts. , etc.

And again, that would better facilitate the connection between the spaces and the recorded audio. It just depends on whether or not Twitter users will actually trust the app for their latest podcast content.

On another front, Twitter will now also allow iOS users to record a space when the broadcast ends, even if they didn’t press “Record” during the session.

Which also means that the ‘REC’ marker would not have been present during the session, alerting participants to the fact that this was being recorded, which could be problematic for some collaborators.

Somehow it seems that Twitter didn’t offer these options initially because they thought they couldn’t facilitate the data storage required to keep all the recordings in their databanks, but now, with so few people streaming, maybe this will be found out in actually won’t be a problem.

Sort of a ‘glass half full’ element, I guess.

Finally, Twitter too adding new details space bar in androidwhich includes additional, scrollable information about who’s hosting, what’s being discussed, who’s Tweeted in chat, and more.

That could draw more users into the session, or at least draw even more attention to the space bar at the top of the app by providing more information.

I thought again, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like Spaces is really catching on, going by the numbers of participants in the Spaces broadcast. And while the addition of podcasts could be interesting, I don’t see Twitter becoming a key app for audio content, especially as the Clubhouse-led audio trend continues to die out.

But perhaps the engagement numbers are better than they appear. I mean, you’d have to assume they are, given Twitter’s continued investment in the functionality, via Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal noting last month that the company hadn’t reached intermediate milestones in its growth plans, based on its investment in new functionalities such as Spaces, Communities and Twitter Blue.

Twitter hasn’t shared specifics, so maybe there’s more, and that’s why it’s so keen to move forward with more Spaces tools. But either way, he’s giving it its best shot at success, and it’s apparently not done with its development of Spaces just yet.

Will that eventually result in Spaces becoming a thing? Only time will tell.

In any industry, keeping tabs on competitors is crucial. Competitor monitoring helps you identify new market opportunities and threats, as well as gauge your performance against your competitors.

That being said, monitoring competitors can be difficult. The online space is constantly flooded with new companies and brands, making it difficult to keep track of who is doing what.

If you’re ready to take your competitive strategy to the next level, this article will help you get started with five competitor monitoring strategies suitable for online businesses. Each tip can help you monitor your competition more effectively so you can continue to drive your own business growth.

Read on to find out how!

Monitor competitor prices with Visualization

An essential part of competitor monitoring is tracking changes in competitors’ prices. This can be especially useful in industries where prices fluctuate often, such as in the retail sector.

Keeping a close eye on competitor prices will help you stay informed of price changes, and knowing when a price change is happening can help you understand the reasons behind it.

For example, if a competitor’s product regularly sells for $100 and then drops to $50, you can tell that the product probably didn’t sell well. And this information can help you understand how a competitor’s performance can impact your own business.

Monitoring competitor prices can also help you identify new profitable opportunities. Suppose you notice that a competitor’s product is more expensive than similar products in the industry. In this case, you can decide to be more competitive and attract more customers by offering a lower price.

An effective and very easy to use price monitoring tool is Visualping. You can simply select the area of ​​the webpage you want to track changes to – like where the price is listed on the page – and you’ll receive an email notification when the price changes.

Track mentions of competing brands with Mention

Monitoring how and where your competitors are branding themselves online can give you great insight into what they are trying to defend and how they are positioning themselves.

Observing how other brands are getting mentions online can help you identify new opportunities to reach customers. For example, if you notice that a competitor is using a particular keyword that you haven’t used before, you might be able to use that keyword to introduce yourself to new customers.

Brand mentions are also a must-have competitor monitoring strategy that will help you identify potential threats to your business. For example, if you notice a competitor talking about a new product feature that may be important to customers, you can take steps to match that feature so you don’t lose customers.

A great tool for knowing when competitors are being mentioned online is Mention.

Take control of your competitors’ online reviews with reputology

Using online review monitoring tools can help you understand what customers think of a competitor’s products, services, and customer support.

Looking at these reviews will also help you know how your competitors are impacting their customers. This information will also help you identify areas where you might be able to improve to keep your customers satisfied. It will also give you new ideas from potential customers on how to add more value to your products.

If you notice a recurring issue in your competitors’ reviews, you may be able to address that issue with your product to prevent customers from feeling disappointed.

Tracking competitor reviews can also help you identify potential threats to your business. Suppose you notice that a competitor has a lot of complaints about a similar issue. In this case, you can try to solve this problem with your own customers to prevent these criticisms from harming the image of your company.

Capture competitor newsletters with Owlletter

Monitoring how your competitors are growing their content and audience can help you identify new opportunities. You can do this by analyzing which content formats are performing best for your competitors and then trying to emulate that success with your content.

You can also use services like Owletter to capture all emails sent from your competitors’ websites to their mailing lists, rather than creating a new email address and manually subscribing to every newsletter you find. . Keeping an eye on your competitors’ most shared content can help you identify new topics to cover.

For example, you can try to provide more information on a popular topic or to solve the problem raised in this content. Whether you’re trying to create more of your own content or emulate the success of your competitors, monitoring content performance can help you find new opportunities to reach new customers.

Analyze competitors’ advertisements with Anstrex

Spying on competitors’ advertising performance can help you identify new opportunities to generate leads. Tools like Anstrex will help you unlock native, Google, Facebook, and Linkedin ads.

If you notice that a competitor’s ad campaign is generating more leads than expected, you may want to find new leads by emulating this strategy with your own ad campaign.

Watching how your competitors are reaching customers with paid advertising can also help you identify potential threats to your business. If you notice that a competitor is generating a large amount of low-quality leads with their ads, you may prefer to avoid those leads. And use different parameters instead to target more profitable audiences.

Conclusion

Competitive intelligence is a crucial part of any business strategy. Tracking your competitors can help you identify new opportunities to grow your business while protecting against threats to your performance.

The online space makes it even more important to keep tabs on your competitors as changes happen faster. But it also makes it easier when you know which tools to use. By implementing these competitor monitoring strategies, you can stay informed about your rivals to continue driving your business growth.

Almost every photo app and tool these days offers some level of beauty-enhancing capability, with a range of filters and effects designed to hide blemishes, remove age lines, refine your frame and all sorts of other visual contortions, to make people feel more comfortable sharing their selfies with an audience.

The problem is that it also contributes to unrealistic standards of beauty, with users then comparing themselves to these increasingly airbrushed and sculpted depictions, which often bear little resemblance to the real thing. This in turn changes beauty standards across the board and can contribute to negative self-perception, with research showing that 32% of teenage girls feel worse about themselves after scrolling through Instagram.

But how important is the use of beautification filters and what are the real impacts, based on key trends?

That’s what beauty brand LookFantastic set out to determine with their latest study, which looked at the top beauty trends across the web, as well as the most popular enhancement apps, to get an idea of what motivates these behaviors and why they matter. .

According to LookFantastic:

“over the past year, Google searches for “instagram filters that change your face” increased by 100% side by side Dove recently found that 85% of young girls have already changed their appearance by the age of 13.

These are startling statistics, somewhat underlining the findings noted above that come from leaked reports based on Meta’s own research.

When it comes to top beauty procedures, LookFantastic found lip fillers and liposuction to be among the most popular topics.

Focusing more specifically on TikTok, the study data shows that trends related to food and cosmetic procedures are very popular in the app.

This, again, is concerning, especially given how popular TikTok is with younger audiences. And when you also consider that many of the top influencers post their content with digital enhancements enabled, it further underscores the need for greater transparency in this regard – because if people are structuring their feeds around completely unrealistic approaches, it could hurt a lot, in many ways.

LookFantastic also analyzed the most popular beauty enhancement apps, based on Google Play Store activity.

You can see from these images how much these apps can alter your appearance – and again, it’s often impossible to know when these filters and tools were applied, which can be dangerous in terms of comparison and response.

Although efforts are being made to remedy this.

In 2020, Snapchat offered preliminary support for a proposed a new law in the UK, which would require social platforms to add tags to any published image that has been digitally edited or enhanced (the proposal is still under consideration), while Google has also removed default image editing in its Pixel devices after research has shown it can have negative psychological impacts.

TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram have also added notifiers on images where effects have been applied – although this is not a solution as such, given that users can edit their photos in other apps before uploading them. publish on these platforms.

There are alternative proposals, including advanced systems that can detect changes in an image using a deeper evaluation of the pixels themselves. But so far these have not been applied in a sensing sense in social applications – and again there are questions about the potential effectiveness of these approaches given the variable way in which Images may be rendered prior to publication.

But this is clearly an important concern, and more action should be considered. The platforms themselves need to be more involved in this area and provide solutions that can address this element – ​​because right now these are frighteningly dangerous trends that are proliferating on social media.

You can read LookFanstastic’s full report here.

What is the best part of being a freelancer and actually working? Charging of course. Money will not buy you happiness but it will surely make you smile or at least some satisfaction. In this article we will be talking about financing for the self-employed, how to price your services and how to properly manage your money.

Although enjoying money is a pleasant feeling, many times this process is not that simple and some are even having a hard time. We’ll discuss various issues many freelancers face, such as: not getting paid on time, dilemmas about whether to charge by the hour or by the project, ways to get paid, and more.

Establish a pricing system: Time vs. Project

There have been several debates and discussions about which system works best for freelancers, by the hour or by the project. The answer, as you can probably guess, is none.

There is not and never will be an answer as to why you should only charge by the hour or only by the project because each job/project has its own “personality” and details to consider before deciding how to charge.

charge per hour

Some designers just follow their own principles and only charge by the hour regardless of the type of project they are working on. They have found their perfect hourly rate and only charge for it, rejecting any project that does not meet it.

It may seem logical to do so, but this type of upload has some advantages and disadvantages:

advantage

1. It’s simple, without messing around with estimates for multiple projects.
2. Making your client’s rate public will help you save some time, the clients who contact you have basically accepted your selling price.
3. You can calculate the rate that best suits you so that you take advantage of each hour of work properly.

Cons

1. Clients who have no idea how long it takes to work on your project may not approach you.
2. There is a small chance that you are overpricing or underpricing your services in this way.
3. Clients with smaller projects may think your fee is too high for them

charging per/project

The other side of the card is the charge per project. If you are not satisfied with the “pay by the hour” system, you should definitely consider this one. Here are the pros and cons of this method:

advantage

1. You can say exactly how much you would like to be paid to do the specific job.
2. It will be easier to get “small leads” because high hourly rates often scare off clients with smaller projects on their hands.

Cons

1. An incorrect estimate will cause your work to be increased because many times, the agreed rate cannot be changed.
2. There are no constant prices when it comes to projects, which could be considered a scam by some clients.

Deal with pricing issues

There are several problems that freelancers are constantly dealing with. These are only some of them.

I get paid late

One of the most common problems is getting your clients to pay you on time. Of course, we should not generalize and say that not all clients pay on time, but freelancers will more than once have to send reminders to their clients to settle their invoices.

settle for a contract

The best way to prevent customers from delaying payments is to establish a suitable contract. There are several reasons to do it.

After signing the contract, both of you will have legal obligations, and As long as you do your job properly and follow the terms of the contract, you’ll be fine.. You will be protected by law against customers who do not pay their bills on time.

It is also common to set a late payment fee that requires your customers to pay more if they made you wait for your payment. It is a sign of a partial neglect of the contract.

Communication

Another important factor is communication between clients and freelancers. As you may have heard, communication is the key, and that’s true! It’s always nice to send friendly reminders and updates to your customers and politely asking them to pay their bills.

You shouldn’t think the worst, and you never know how easily someone can forget something in the middle of a busy schedule. The delay may not be intentional, so please do not treat it as such.

Taxes

Independent work can be considered a business, and you have to be very careful how you handle your taxes. In case you’re new to freelancing, you should know that the way you handle your taxes as a freelancer is different than when you’re collecting paychecks.

There are different forms and documents to submit and you will need to have good accounting skills or hire an independent accountant to advise you accordingly.

bill them

One great thing about invoices, no matter what service you’re using, is that most of them allow you to send a “friendly” reminder to your customer that it’s time to settle payments. That is very simple to do and it only takes the click of a button.

Tools and services

Actually, there are several tools that will definitely make your life easier. Considering the number of things involved in managing a project, tools like time trackers and automatic billing services are definitely life savers.

FreshBooks

Probably one of the most popular online services for invoicing is FreshBooks. They have a very flexible pricing system and a 30-day free trial for their service.

You can also track your work with their iOS app for iPhone and iPad, and when you run into issues, contact their excellent support team via email and phone support. Paid packages range from $19.95 to $39.95. Until now, the system already has 5 million users.

less accounting

It is a very good web application that promises to save around 80% of your time. They have easy-to-use accounting software that helps you with your accounting, no matter your level of experience in this domain. The user interface is also very easy to use and they have a very good sense of humor about things.

make some time

Here’s a free alternative to FreshBooks that works for keeping track of your time online. It offers some billing and reporting features, but doesn’t support mobile apps, although you can still run it in the browser view from your smartphone.

conclusion

Money management is a tough job, especially when crunching numbers isn’t exactly your thing. But you can always turn to these tools to make things easier. Worst case scenario, just hire a numbers cruncher to help you manage your earnings for a fee.

The keyword density o Keyword density is a term used in SEO to refer to the number of times keywords are repeated in the text of a web page. Knowing this information is essential, as search engines like Google penalize high keyword density because it means web content is not written of acceptable quality for the user. But how can you see the keyword density on the web page? We explain which tools you can use for this. (more…)