Tag Archives: Business

A Case for Marketing with Promotional Products

In today’s fast paced digital world, the best form of advertising is online and social media right?

Wrong.

In many cases, you are better off marketing with promotional products. You know, those pens/bags/shirts/mugs/other random assortment of items branded with a company’s name and logo.

Sure, you may roll your eyes a bit when you get a pen from your dentist. Gee thanks I’ve always wanted a dentist pen. But you still own the pen don’t you? And you still see that dentist don’t you?

The promotional products industry is valued to be more than $21 billion for one clear reason: it works.

There are a number of reasons why your small business can benefit from marketing with promotional products.

More Bang for Your Buck

The cost per impression tends to be among the lowest for promotional products compared to other methods of advertising.

The breakdown goes:

Newspapers: 3.2¢

Prime-time TV: 2.5¢

Targeted mobile: 1¢

Internet: .7¢

Promotional product: .7¢

For highly cost effective marketing, go with Internet or promotional products. But as the following reasons show, promotional products often edge out Internet in other arenas.

Customers View Promotional Products Highest

When ranking different forms of advertising, consumers rank promotional products as the most highly regarded form. Internet advertising came in sixth and mobile advertising came in seventh. Put your money where the consumer trust is.

Customer Generation

Promotional products help at every stage of customer generation.

For raising awareness among the target audience, promotional products lead to 22% more referrals and 14% more leads. Promotional products also help increase response rates to direct mail marketing by 50%.

Promotional products create a favorable view of the company in 76% of people.

For turning leads into customers, promotional products turn 52% of people into customers.

Promotional products help you reach your target audience, woo your target audience, and convert your target audience into customers.

Customers Better Remember Your Company

Consumers remember your company better when it shows up as a promotional product over other forms of advertising.

They say 76.1% of consumers can remember the company name off of a promotional item given to them in past year. Only 53% could remember from a TV or print ad they saw in the last month. A mere 27% could recall from an online ad.

There are a few possible explanations for this discrepancy. Customers are blasted with online ads every day, so they learn to tune them out (or install ad blocker). Customers are not bombarded with promotional products daily, so the ad stands out.

Promotional products also lead to repeat exposure, while an online, TV, or print ad does not. There, the customer sees the ad once. With a promotional product, they can see it multiple times. About 73% of consumers used the promotional product in the last week and 45.2% used it at least once a day. And 58% of consumers keep the promotional product from between one year to four years. That’s a lot of exposure, helping customers better remember your company.

A Case for Promotional Products

Choosing the right advertising medium for your company is a never ending quest. Various factors affect the “best” option at this given moment: the budget, the campaign project, the target audience, etc.

Promotional products are unfortunately often overlooked as a solution in today’s electronic world, but they should not be. Promotional products may be exactly what you need for marketing your company! That simple pen/bag/shirt/mug/other random item could be the ticket to capturing the attention (and the payment) of your target audience.

If you want assistance implementing a promotional product marketing campaign, Alpine Small Business Solutions is here for you! Just give us a call or shoot us an email to get started.

Twitter Makes Changes to Their Character Limit…Again

Since Twitter launched in 2006, the character limit has remained constant. Users could say anything they wished, so long as it was confined to 140 characters. This number was loosely based off the 160-character text message limit, since Twitter was meant to be a sort of public text messaging service.

Users have complained about the character limit restriction (while simultaneously arguing that removing the character limit would kill the platform). Ah, the fickleness of the consumer.

Twitter’s newest attempt to appease consumers and improve the functionality of their service took the form of changing how replies work.

How Twitter Replies Used to Work

Previously, a reply would involve a tweet beginning with “@username” and then the user’s message. The username character count went towards the 140-character limit. If a few users were involved in the conversation, the character total quickly got eaten up. It also made it difficult to actually see the message content since it was after a long string of usernames

The Recent Change

Now, the Twitter handle in a reply will not count against the 140-character limit. Instead, there will be a message at the top of the tweet saying “replying to…” with the list of usernames in the conversation.

The main reason for this change is user-friendliness. Removing the usernames from the word count allows users to fit more information in their message, potentially improving the quality of discussion.

Twitter’s goal is to make conversations easier to follow, allowing users to focus on the discussion of the tweets and not the lists of those in the discussion. Tests done by Twitter found this change led to more people engaging in more conversations, so it’s reasonable to believe this change affects conversations.

The Drawback

With every change, people grumble. People grumbled when Twitter’s algorithm changed. People grumbled when the Facebook newsfeed look changed. People will always grumble.

Right now, the biggest complaint people have over this change is the potential for trolling. Now that the usernames don’t count for the character limit, users can tag a ridiculous number of people in their messages. Since people can be tagged and dragged into conversations without their consent, this can become a huge annoyance rather quickly.

Future Changes to the Character Limit

In the past few years, Twitter has tweaked what counts towards the character limit. Other changes included not counting photos, GIFS, or quote tweets as part of the limit. The next logical change would be to not count URL links as part of the word count. An argument can be made that links are comparable to photos. Neither are usually meant to be the whole message, but rather a supplement to the message itself. There’s no word yet on whether this change is being considered by Twitter staff.

5 Things to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed in Your Business and Life

As an entrepreneur, life can get overwhelming pretty fast. Projects pile up, crucial staff members call in sick, clients impose unreasonable deadlines…and that is just on the work end. Somehow you also need to find time to do a grocery run, take the dog to the groomers, shuttle the kids to soccer practice, all while dealing with being sleep deprived, of course.

It is common to have periods of time of being utterly overwhelmed in your business and life. Heck, it is almost a rite of passage for entrepreneurs to face…again and again. When you feel the stress and tension headache bubbling up, get into action with these five things to do when you get overwhelmed.

Get Rid of as Many Stressors as Possible

If you have too much on your plate right now, clear off the plate! As go-getter entrepreneurs, we can find ourselves overcommitted quickly. Maybe we hate saying no. Maybe we underestimated the time commitment when we said yes. Maybe when it rains it pours and you find yourself now drowning. Whatever the reason, you do not need to resign yourself to struggling to bear the weight of everything needing to get done.

Ask yourself if everything needs to be done. Then ask yourself again. Much of what we do can be automated or streamlined. Can you batch tasks to get them done more efficiently? Is there a low-cost service you can invest in to automate these repeating tasks? Is the output on a task really worth the time and effort cost? Ruthlessly evaluate everything on your to-do list and then eliminate, automate, and streamline.

Then look at what’s left and delegate everything you can. It can be tough to hand over the reins to someone else, but you’ll be amazed at how much better you feel once you do. It’s an immediate solution to getting more off your list. Sure, you may stress a bit wondering if the person will get everything done. But reassure yourself that they will (or worst case scenario someone else can pick up the slack).

Sit Down and Write It Down

When life gets overwhelming, we often find ourselves scurrying about trying to get it done. We feel we have no time to waste, so we resist taking the time to pause and create an effective plan of attack. We launch ourselves into tasks immediately, failing to stop and prioritize. This results in us mismanaging our time and energy.

Taking a few minutes to write everything down makes a world of difference. Seeing everything in black and white makes it instantly less stressful. A list can be tackled. A list has an end point. A list means we are no longer wasting precious mental energy trying to keep track of everything in our mind. Writing it down helps us “clear our heads” and see the full picture, allowing us to more effectively strategize.

Once you make your list, prioritize tasks and attach deadlines to everything. It will help you feel less like things are hanging over your head, which helps reduce feeling overwhelmed.

Get Up and Go Out

Now that you have eliminated everything possible from your list and articulated everything you need to do, step away from the chaos for a moment. But I don’t have the time you may think.

Here’s the thing. You do.

You can spare fifteen minutes to go for a walk outside and clear your head. Nature has a unique calming effect on our bodies and our brains. Study after study shows the near healing power of being outside. Spend a few minutes walking around in nature and do not obsess over your to-do list. Focus on the sights and sounds around you, your breathing pattern, a fun memory from a recent time with a loved one, whatever it takes to think about anything other than what you need to be doing next. Clearing your head will help stop your stressed-out fight or flight mode and return your body to a healthier state, allowing you to get started on your to-do list with a focused mind.

Be Proactive in Managing Your Stress

Now that you have returned to the grind, ready to tackle your projects, it is important to proactively manage your stress. It is not sustainable for your physical and mental wellbeing to go from overwhelmed, to workaholic mode, to feeling fine for a few days, only to return to feeling overwhelmed. When our projects pile up, it can be hard for us to justify taking breaks. But breaks help refuel our energy and help make us more productive. Breaks help us get more and better quality work done in less time.

It’s important to not wait until you feel overwhelmed to take a break. It will take longer to return to a state of calm than if you instead proactively take breaks before you feel overwhelmed. There are many break time strategies, with the Pomodoro method being a steady favorite. Work for 25 minutes. Take a 5-minute break. Repeat four times and then take a 30-minute break. Repeat until the work day is done. This proactive managing of your stress will help prevent future feelings of being overwhelmed.

Practice Daily Self Care

Caring for yourself is one of the most important things you can do, both for yourself and your business! To perform at your best capacity, you need quality sleep, a balanced diet, regular exercise, and time for yourself. Journal your feelings. Get massages. Read in the backyard. Find one or two habits designed just for your self-care, not for being productive, and engage in them every day. It will help you feel better overall and fight those feelings of being overwhelmed.

Should a Virtual Assistant Have Insurance?

One nitty gritty detail about working as a virtual assistant is insurance. But how do you know which you need when there are so many choices? Errors and omissions insurance? Business owner’s policy insurance?

There are a plethora of options. There’s insurance most people get through their companies, like health insurance. There’s insurance common for people who work from home, like business interruption insurance. And there’s insurance for every scenario and disaster under the sun.

With so many options out there, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. (Or even talked into insurance you really don’t need!) But, you can be fine with minimal insurance (unless you’re running your own company). Below are the basic insurance options most likely to benefit virtual assistants.

Business Personal Property Insurance

You can’t work as a virtual assistant without your tools. Your computer, phone, and desk are some of the invaluable resources you use to get things done. But, what happens if these are stolen or damaged in a natural disaster?

Unfortunately, most home insurance policies do not cover your home business office. It’s worth a check of course (hey, maybe you’ll luck out), but odds are you’ll need to buy this separately. You can add coverage of business related property as a rider to your home insurance policy.

In most cases, this is a worthwhile investment. You can skip this one if your equipment isn’t worth much or the odds of theft or natural disaster are low.

Business Interruption Insurance

This insurance protects you if your business premises and equipment are temporarily unusable (like after a fire). You’ll get compensated for your loss of income and your operating expenses. Sometimes, the insurance covers expenses for temporarily re-locating to a new location.

This insurance is added to a property insurance policy or is included in a package policy.

You’re fine skipping this option if it’d be easy for you to work from somewhere else or get replacement equipment (like temporarily borrowing someone else’s computer). But for those who would be stuck if anything happened to their office or equipment, you’ll want to be sure to make this investment.

Disability Insurance

Accidents happen. A car wreck, illness, or other outstanding circumstance can hit you out of nowhere, and leave you unable to work.

That’s where disability insurance comes into play. Disability insurance helps you when you can’t work due to illness, injury, or accident. Hopefully, of course, those scenarios never happen! But if they do, you’ll get income replacement checks so you’re not temporarily out of a source of income.

Disability insurance is especially important for virtual assistants. You can’t rely on vacation days or sick leave to buy you time while you heal like you could in a traditional job.

If you’re in the early stages of being a virtual assistant (and making minimal income), then you can hold off investing for a bit. But, you’ll want to buy disability insurance once you start relying on your virtual assistant income. It’s one crucial step toward preparing for the unexpected in your work life.

You’ve got a few choices in choosing a disability insurance provider. If you’re married, you may be able to buy a policy through your spouse’s carrier. Also, you can get insurance from an individual provider or the Freelancers Union.

Health Insurance

Your health should be a priority in your life. Being able to afford treatment, doctor’s visits, and medications is a crucial part of that. Even if you’re a young and healthy person, these costs out of pocket add up fast. Since you’re not able to get health insurance through an employer, you’ll need to get this one on your own.

Fortunately, you have several options. If you’re married, check out your spouse’s policy. You can join the Freelancer Unions’ National Benefits Platform. You can go through a faith based health care sharing service. Check out your state’s health insurance marketplace. Look into an individual private insurance company.

When choosing a plan, keep in mind what medical services you need and what prescriptions you need covered.

At the end of the day, the insurance you need depends on where you’re at. Brand new virtual assistants can wait longer. Once you start taking in more clients and income, consider getting coverage. Insurance is a tedious topic, but it is important to know what your best options are. It’s just one of the many pieces to get into place during your virtual assistant career journey!

Maintaining Your Sanity While Working From Home

Working from home as a virtual assistant is a massive blessing. But sometimes, bad habits can sneak up and make it a curse. Suddenly, we’re frazzled workaholics with a glaze over our eyes. Suddenly, it’s 3pm and we haven’t left our bed or showered. Suddenly, we’re never fully present with our families and are always glancing at our emails.

The work from home life can be whatever you make it (that’s part of the appeal, right?) But sometimes we make it into an exhausting and draining experience- when it doesn’t need to be!

Maintaining your work-life balance while working from home takes some proactivity. Ironically, we need to set boundaries to enjoy the freedom of this lifestyle. Below are some action steps you can take to proactively make your life as a virtual assistant working from home as stellar as it should be.

Create a Regular Schedule

You’re probably thinking, Jessica that’s exactly why I don’t want to work a 9-5! I want to set my own hours and be a free soul working when I please.

And that’s great. In theory.

What actually happens when we fail to structure our day isn’t the balanced relaxed utopia we imagine. It’s a day where work sticks its tentacles where it doesn’t belong. We don’t disconnect from work, and it dominates our thoughts during dinner, during playtime with your kids, during your resting time. Before you know it, you’ve slid into workaholic habits never being able to turn off your work brain.

Creating a regular schedule isn’t about setting rigid 9-5 work hours. It’s about being intentional about separating your work time from your life time. It ensures you stay productive while working…and then leave it at work when you’re finished. When there’s no set lines between work and life, usually work takes over.

You don’t need to set 9-5 regular hours. Maybe you work in the mornings and late evenings when you’re most productive, and schedule a workout or social lunch during your afternoon energy lull. You can plan your day so it works best for you. And each day does not need to be the same. Maybe on Playdate Tuesdays you work from 8 to 10, then 12 to 6. That’s fine! The important thing is clear boundaries of your time.

And please, please, please schedule a cut off time for work! Whether it’s 5 or 8, you must have a designated “no more thinking about work” time. It’s amazing how quickly you will get drained when you lack an end working time for the day.

Designate a Work Area

Just like you need boundaries with your time, you need boundaries with your space. Find a place in your house that’s just for work. Ideally, it will be a separate room. But, if you don’t have the space for a full office, that’s okay. Maybe you can set a desk in your bedroom or the living room. What’s important is you have somewhere to go with minimal distractions.

When you’re setting up your work area, treat it like a real office. Fill it with supplies. Use a desktop calendar. Hang up photos of your family and decorate it. If it feels like a sterile box, you won’t want to work there. Showcase your personality to make it more inviting.

Designate a No Work Area

There are places in your home you shouldn’t work, like the dining room where the family gathers for dinner. Make sure there are clear areas where no work (or thoughts of work) are allowed so you can be fully present during family and relaxation time.

Take Regular Breaks

Sometimes, we get so into our flow we don’t realize we’ve been working for hours straight. The best way to fight stress and burnout is proactively, so it’s important to avoid this work grind. Schedule breaks into your day. Maybe it’s 10 minutes every hour with a half hour lunch break. Maybe it’s the Pomodoro method, where you work for 25 minutes and take a five-minute break. Play around with different strategies and find what works best for you.

Leave Your House

When you work from home, there’s a weird resistance about leaving. Maybe it’s the effort of gussying up to go out in public. Maybe it’s the drive time that could be spent working or resting. Maybe it’s Newton’s third law: an awesome virtual assistant at home will stay comfortably at home unless acted upon by an outside force.

Make sure you don’t become a hermit! You can meet up with your traditional office worker friends for lunch. Grab a happy hour with friends. Enroll in a weekly yoga class. Do something to make sure you leave your house at least three times a week.

Establish Boundaries with Your Family

This isn’t about becoming one of those scary “don’t you dare interrupt me while I’m working” work witches.

It’s about protecting the time you work and protecting the time you’re with family to make sure you’re fully present in each one.

Talk with your family members about what your work from home arrangement needs to look like. Go over when it is, and isn’t, appropriate to interrupt you at work. Go over when it is, and isn’t, appropriate for you to leave family time to go work. Make sure every family member feels heard, and is comfortable and clear with the conclusion you agree to.

Dress Like You’re Going to Work

But Jessica, isn’t one of the best parts of being a virtual assistant being able to work in PJs and sweats? Comfort for the win!

Some people (very few mind you) can work in grunge clothes without it affecting their work. Good for them!

But most of us experience a little phenomenon called “when we wear lounge around clothes, we tend to work in a lazier mindset”

Dressing for work helps shift your brain from relaxed mode into work mode. You can still rock a comfortable outfit, but try a step above the old ripped PJs.

Of course, if you’re work isn’t affected by what you wear then wear those PJs with pride!

“Wrapping Up the Year” Checklist for Small Business

A quick glance at the calendar can send a shock of stress to the small business owner…how can it be the end of the year already? With so much screaming for your attention, it can feel overwhelming. Don’t worry, with a little organization you CAN get it all done. Follow our checklist to ensure everything is wrapped up nicely by the end of the year.

Team Member Management

Conduct end of the year team member reviews. Provide constructive feedback to your team members. Praise their successes. Encourage reflection on their struggles and setbacks. Ask if they are happy with the direction of their role, and if there’s anything you can help them with. Talk with them about their life apart from work. Do everything you can to support them and ensure they feel valued, both as your valued team member and as an individual.
Team member appreciation. Even a small gesture can make a big impact. Show your awesome team member(s) how much you value them. Give a holiday bonus, a thoughtful gift, a memorable holiday party.

Client Relations

Write a thank-you note to all your clients. A handwritten card or letter helps your business stand out in a world of mass emails. Express how much you value your clients, and how you look forward to working with them next year.
Assess every client’s worth to your organization. Evaluate whether it’s beneficial for your business to move forward with every client relationship. Weigh a difficult client’s benefits against the time, emotional exhaustion, and stress required to deal with him or her. Sometimes it’s not worth the income. When the costs are too high, it’s better for you and the client to part ways.
Review financial records. Meet with your accountant to ensure your books are complete and up to date. Preliminary work now can save a huge amount of time come tax season (or in the event you get audited).
Conduct a profit and loss report. Put in writing the financial state of your business. It’ll be a good analysis of this year’s progress and serve as a benchmark when you make financial goals for next year.
Collect outstanding bills. Go through accounts and see which clients still owe money. If possible, get the payment before the year ends.
Review payroll. Make sure all accounts are covered and there are no outstanding payments. It’s easy to forget about bills such as transportation reimbursement, so double check to be sure everything’s taken care of.

Business Management

Backup all data. Save all your documents and contact information in the cloud or on an external hard drive. It’s tedious, but incredibly important.
Write an end of the year memo. This memo for your wonderful team members is two-fold. First, celebrate the past year. Highlight accomplishments and successes of the organization as a whole, and spotlight individuals who went above and beyond. Mention notable changes, like welcoming new staff members or new clients. It’ll be a good refresher for you and your team. Second, build up enthusiasm for the year to come. Talk about goals and the vision for the upcoming year to provide a concrete direction for the business.
Prioritize projects. Determine which projects need to be finished before the year’s ends. Tie up the loose ends for projects nearly completed, projects where it would be difficult to pause for the holidays, or projects for impatient clients. Set aside projects that can be easily started again after the holidays, or ones that benefit from a fresh perspective after the new year.

Self-Care

Really relax and rest. Entrepreneurs can be the worst at self-care! But burning yourself out is terrible for your health (and productivity!) Be sure to set aside time during the scramble to take care of yourself with massages, a night of Netflix, whatever you need to fully unwind and recharge.
Enjoy the holidays unplugged from work. By this point, you’ve done everything you need to do. Now enjoy your holidays!

If you need assistance accomplishing your end of the year administrative tasks, Alpine Small Business Solutions is here for you! We can handle short-term (or long-term) projects, freeing up your time to focus on other projects. Give us a call or shoot us an email today.

5 Reasons Why You Should be on the Google+ Social media Platform to Grow Your Online Business

Yes, I know…it is the next big thing…AGAIN! We have heard it several times that Google+ is going to be huge, yet you don’t use it or really even know what it is. So why do you want to be on it now?

Usually, you want to use social media outlets your target audience is active on. Not always. Insert Google+, the failed social media platform created by Google to compete with Facebook and Twitter. It comes and it goes without you ever really noticing. So why would I push you to be active on a failed platform? Sure, Google+ lacks the prevalence into popular culture that Facebook and Twitter can rightly brag about. But it offers unique benefits to marketers for growing your business, enough to justify the minimal time it takes to grow a thriving Google+ presence.

But first, what really is Google+?

While Google+ is a unique social media platform, it can be helpful to think of it in terms of other more familiar platforms. It offers an easy way to curate and organization information (like Pinterest), the option to follow anyone without needing them to follow you back (like Twitter), and the ability to create a personal profile and a business page (like Facebook). Unlike other social media platforms that are relationship driven (connect with people you know), Google+ is more interest driven (connect with people who share similar ideas/interests). What really sets Google+ apart, though, is that it’s created by Google. And Google rewards users who consume their social media platform, resulting in the biggest benefit of Google+ being its SEO benefits.

Google+ SEO benefits

Google+ improves your SEO through a few ways. First, posts that are high in shares and +1 (the Google+ version of “likes” and “favorites”) rank higher in search results. So when you publish content high in shares and +1, that content is seen more by individuals and increases the chances they check out your website, become a customer, etc.

Second, through the use of Google+ Circles (similar to friending someone or liking a page on Facebook). If an individual is logged into Google and they added you to their Google+ Circle, your content is more likely to show up in their search results.

Third, your Google+ posts are immediately indexed into search results, translating into SEO benefits quicker than if you were to post the same content on another platform.

When your content shows up higher in search results, more people can discover your content. More eyes on your content means more visits to your website, more conversions into customers, etc. SEO is a crucial aspect of business building, and Google+ is a great way to strengthen your SEO.

While SEO is the biggest benefit to Google+, it is definitely not the only benefit.

Audience Segmentation

Google+ offers a feature called “Google+ Circles” which allows you to organize contacts into specialized groups. Each time you publish content, you get the option to only share with relevant group(s). This allows you to provide solid content specialized for individual users, providing them high benefit without oversaturating their feeds.

Target Audience Finding

Another great Google+ feature is “communities.” These are similar to Facebook groups. They are created by individuals and members within communities share and engage with content. Communities are categorized into different topics, such as football or photography. Posts are organized into sub-topics (for example, in a freelance writers’ group there are topics of marketing, writing tips, and writing tools) to help users sort through the high quantity of information.

Say you are a healthy food blogger. You can join communities such as healthy recipes or vegetarian eating. Individuals in these groups are targeted audiences who may want to consume your content and use your services. You can post regularly quality content (such as recipes) in hopes of directing members of the community to your blog. It’s applying the content marketing strategy (provide quality free content to be seen as an expert in your industry and increase the likelihood consumers will use your business when they need to buy a product/service) to a highly targeted audience. As a result, your content marketing efforts are more efficient.

Improving Your Knowledge

Communities aren’t just for you to share information-you can use them to gain knowledge too! First, you can improve the relevance and quality your content. See what types of content other similar businesses post to gain new ideas for blog posts. Find out what topics individuals respond to, and tailor your content to fit that. Second, you can join communities related to content marketing, social media, and the like to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and tools.

Using Google+

Google+ offers many rich benefits to marketers who take advantage of it. If you’re really strapped for time, you can connect your Google+ account to Hootsuite and share every Facebook post to Google+ as well. If you’ve got more time, however, the recommended strategy is to treat Google+ as its own social media platform. The style of posts that resonate most with your audience on Google+ will be different than the posts that resonate with your audience on Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can take content you’ve already made (such as blog posts or newsletter copy) and share on Google+.

Ready to take advantage of Google+ but aren’t sure where to start? Alpine Small Business Solutions is here for you! We’d love to help you with Google+, or any aspect of small business building. Simply give us a call or shoot us an email today!

The Ins and Outs of the New Gmail

As usual there are always changes coming along to snarl up our comfort zone of knowing our way around a certain product or service. Well, our comfort zone has been compromised. Google is the next in line of the changes and at first it looks super great for email organization but with further inspection, the new tabbed interface is super confusing.

Google describes the new tabs as a way to “put you back in control so that you can see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read and when.”You get five optional tabs, described by Google below. Google automatically sorts your inbox into these tabs using its special algorithms (essentially matching many of Gmail’s existing Smart Labels, which automatically filter incoming messages):

Primary: person-to-person conversations and messages that don’t appear in other tabs
Social: messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, and other social websites
Promotions: deals, offers, and other marketing emails
Updates: personal, auto-generated updates including confirmations, bills, receipts, bills, and statements
Forums: messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists

You can also choose to force starred emails from all tabs to display in the Primary tab (in addition to the other tab).

The tabs do give you a convenient way to automatically sort your inbox according to Gmail’s preset categories and get notifications at a glance for when new emails come in. However, the tabbed view introduces a new, not-so-clear element in Gmail called “categories.”

When you create a filter, in addition to being able to label a message, you can now categorize it as: Personal, Social, Updates, Promotions, or Forums from a dropdown box. These, as you see, match the tabs.

The problem is, you already have labels that also match these categories. Gmail, for example, adds Social Updates, Promotions, and Forums as SmartLabels in the left menu. The “Notifications” SmartLabel corresponds to the Updates tab but SmartLabels are not the same as Categories. Gmail’s pre-designed SmartLabel filter makes it seem like that, but they’re really two different things.

How to Customize the Tabs with Your Own Filters As mentioned earlier, you can now create your own filters to categorize messages, thus putting them in one of these tabs. So if you have no use for the “Forums” tab, you can instead use it to collect messages from specific senders or keywords.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to change the tab name… at least yet. The key is to make sure the filter doesn’t overlap an existing filter that might counteract what you’re trying to do. For example, you can’t have “Skip the inbox” on a matching filter, otherwise it won’t appear in the tabs at all (since the tabs are organization for the inbox).

To customize the tabs:
1. Create a new filter for the messages you want moved to one of the tabs.
2. In the filter options in the next screen, choose the category that matches the tab for the “Categorize as” option.
3. You’ll also have to check “Exclude from SmartLabels” just in case Gmail tries to categorize your email differently. Then hit “Create filter.”
4. If you also want to prevent Gmail auto-categorizing other messages in that tab, you could also go into your Settings > Filters and scroll to the bottom for the SmartLabel Filters and disable or edit the corresponding filter. However, do this with caution, as it seems there’s no easy way to restore the built-in filter. It might be better to configure Gmail’s SmartLabels so they skip the inbox and thus skip your tabs. About.com’s Email site has the list of each SmartLabel (e.g., “label:^smartlabel_promo” for Promotions). When creating your filter, search for that “label:^” term to filter it out as you’d like.

How to Disable the Tabbed Inbox If You Don’t Like It

If you don’t like the new feature, it’s pretty easy to get a more traditional inbox back. Just click on the settings cog in the upper right-hand corner, go to “Configure Inbox,” and uncheck everything except “Primary.” This will remove the tabs and bring you back to the old, familiar, one-inboxed interface.

Thinking about Gmail’s new tabs, SmartLabels, regular labels, and filters can feel like you’re trying to solve an annoying circular reference error in Excel (this happened to me today). However, the new tabbed view might come in handy if you know how to harness it.

And as always, if this stuff makes you dizzy and you just don’t want to take the time to learn all the ins and out of the new Gmail, remember that Alpine Small Business Solutions, is your one stop shop for all your social media, Virtual Assistant, Online Business Manager and business building needs. We got your back, so give us a jingle or shoot over an email anytime we’re here to help.

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10 Pinterest Tools for Business

I am a huge fan of Pinterest and am finding that I’m using it more and more. There are a lot of skeptics out there that think it’s just for girls, or don’t see the business value, but for you Pinterest virgins out there, I really recommend you try it out.

It’s a great tool for businesses (when used effectively) and I’m seeing more engagement, sharing and traffic back as a result.

As Pinterest has grown and become more popular unsurprisingly we have seen a rise of tools that have popped into the marketplace to help manage, measure and enhance the Pinterest experience. Without further ado, here are my favorite Pinterest tools and the reasons I love them:

1. PinAlerts

PinAlerts is a very useful Pinterest tool that allows you to find out in real time whether someone has pinned something from your website. It allows you to quickly respond and say thanks to those who are promoting your work, as well as helps increasing your followers by asking your pinners to follow some of your other boards. PinAlerts is still in its infancy (aka beta version) and they have plans for more features to arrive soon, such as the possibility to broadcast the number of your repins on your website.

2. Pinreach

Pinreach helps you understand better where you stand on Pinterest and how well you’re doing, by calculating your Pinterest “score.” Another useful feature is that you can see the daily trending members and trending pins. This is great for boosting your engagement: repins, comments and increase in followers to your boards.

3. Hootsuite

Ok, I admit this one is a slight cheat as I use Hootsuite predominantly for Twitter and Facebook but I thought it was worth a mention here particularly as they have now included Pinterest tracking to their portfolio.

4. Followers on Pinterest

Followers on Pinterest is a smartphone/tablet app that costs £0.69. It’s very similar to another one of my favourite Twitter tools, ManageFlitter. You can use it to find out who isn’t following you back, track new followers, follow and unfollow users and discover new people and boards to follow. One of the most interesting features of this app is that it allows you to keep track of everyone who has everunfollowed you!

5. Pin Search

If you use Google Chrome and Pinterest, then you may find this tool very useful. It’s a Chrome extension that allows you to Google search using any picture on Pinterest. This way you can get all the information there is on a picture as well as similar pictures. A great discovery tool for Pinterest!

6. Piqora

Piqora (formerly known as Pinfluencer) is a great tool for anyone who is serious about using Pinterest for marketing reasons. You can use it to start any promotions on Pinterest, to track your results with their analytics and manage your content (including pin scheduling). Another great feature is Pinner360, that helps you identify your most influential pinners, your brand advocates as well as who engages the most with you. A very useful tool and a must for those using Pinterest for their business.

7. Pinstamatic

Pinstamatic is a great Pinterest tool that helps you make even better boards. Regular images are just not enough anymore to stand out, and with this tool you can get that extra edge over your competition. For example, you can add quotations to your board, which has a much better chance of attracting users to it as well as fun sticky notes. Another great feature is that you can share music on your boards and your friends can play them right from there – a great tool that helps you create more diverse and more fun boards. You can also use Pinstamatic to add a map to your Pinterest board, so that whenever someone clicks on it they are directed to your location on Google Maps.

8. Pinterest Right Click

Pinterest Right Click is another browser extension, but this time for Mozilla Firefox users. Once installed, it adds a “Pin Image” option to your right-click menu, so whenever you find an image that you would like to pin, you can do it very quickly by right-clicking.

9. PinBooster

PinBooster is a great tool for those who want to advertise on Pinterest. It works simply by compensating popular pinners to endorse your business on Pinterest. They can share your photos and videos and promote your hashtags and events to their followers. It’s a useful way to grow your follower base and even get some leads out of it. And if you are a great pinner yourself and have lots of followers, you can sign up on Pinbooster and actually get paid to pin.

10. Snapito

Snapito is a tool from the Pinstamatic family that has a very simple, yet useful feature. It allows you to pin your website easily, by entering its address on their website and with the click of a button you get a screenshot of the website that you can then quickly post to your Pinterest board. Another very similar tool is a Google Chrome extension called ShotPin, which pretty much does the same thing!

So there you have it a list of my 10 favorite Pinterest tools! I can’t wait for more tools to pop up so I can try them all and do a more extensive list. Until then, Happy Pinning!

And as always, if this stuff makes you dizzy and you just don’t want to take the time to learn all the ins and out of Pinterest, Alpine Small Business, is your one stop shop for all your social media needs. Give us a jingle or shoot over an email anytime we’re here to help.