A study by Search Engine Watch proves that being the top search result will lead to more clickthroughs by 53%.

SEO (search engine optimization) is your ticket to boosting traffic to your website. People often choose the first result they see, which means learning how to increase your Google ranking is imperative to creating a successful website.

There are some techniques a small business owner can do to increase traffic numbers. However, hiring an SEO specialist can eliminate the stress associated with building a ranking on your own.

Read on to learn why an SEO specialist shapes the way traffic flows to your website.

1. Hiring an SEO Specialist is Better Than Doing It on Your Own

A website is only one aspect of your much larger business structure. Why not save yourself all the time it takes to craft your SEO ranking by hiring a professional?

The intelligent SEO specialist you hire will understand SEO inside and out. He or she is an expert in the field of online SEO and will know exactly how to factor in the right keywords to make sure your website is in the top search results.

As a business owner, you can hire an expert in SEO to help you out so you can focus your attention on other important operations to keep your business running smoothly. Generating sales leads will be a no-brainer once a trained expert collaborates with your business to increase your SEO rank.

2. See Better Traffic Results with Help From a Professional

Do you think your current website is not reaching out to the right audience?

By hiring a specialist, he or she can determine who your target audience is and how to attract them to click on your website search link. If your page is now ranked on the first few pages of a Google search, an expert can make adjustments to improving the ranking.

SEO tactics, such as choosing the right keywords to implement into your content, have resulted in high success rates. Convert leads into loyal customers by learning from a well-informed SEO specialist.

3. Avoid Black Hat Methods to Cheat Your Way to the Top

One final way that hiring extra help to boost your SEO rank with a specialist is to avoid making costly mistakes.

Black hat techniques are when illegal methods are used to boost the ranking of your site. Avoiding this path is something an SEO expert can ensure happens.

Keyword stuffing and spam-commenting are two black hat techniques that will make Google quickly push your website down the list.

Talk to your SEO consultant to discuss what techniques he or she will use to promote your website so these harmful tactics are not involved.

I’m Rafferty Pendery, a Tech Entrepreneur who has already helped thousands of businesses flourish through successful expansion strategies and social media campaigns.

Leaving me a message is a great way to easily reach out and learn more about the services I can provide your business today.

There are many ways to grow your business. Most of them involve doing what you can to sell more and earn more money in the process.

However, some business growth methods involve not gathering more, but giving things away. Things like your time, energy, and money can greatly benefit the people around you when shared.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but giving back can actually help to grow your business. There are many ways to give back to your community as a business, and not all of them involve donating money.

There is a lot you can do to get involved, and doing so will prove to be a very wise business decision for several reasons. If you’re wondering how giving back to the community can actually be fruitful for your business, read on.

Improve Your Reputation in the Community

Getting involved with the local community is one of the best things you can do for your business. When people in the area associate your company name with altruism and volunteer work, they will have positive feelings toward your brand.

When the day comes that your customer needs your services and they must decide between you and the competition, you want to make sure you’ve left a good taste in their mouth.

In addition, there may be a large demographic in your community that needs help, whether it’s the school system or animal shelters. If your company is the one that comes to the rescue, you will be highly regarded by everyone affected.

If you become known as the company that’s always there in times of trouble, you will come to earn the respect and admiration of many potential customers.

Build A Loyal Customer Base by Giving Back to the Community

There are many ways that giving back to the community is a powerful business tool, and the loyalty you’ll win in the process is no exception.

Some people may come to you — and you alone — for business after you have helped them out. For example, sponsoring a children’s baseball league may earn you the unyielding loyalty of all the parents on the team.

Other ways of giving back to the community also nurture loyalty and appreciation. Mentoring budding entrepreneurs for a few hours a week can make a big impact. Donating items to an organization in need will also inspire those who see your good deed to express their gratitude by becoming a customer.

Improve Company Culture

Having your company volunteer as a team is a great way to motivate and inspire your employees. Working together on a collaborative effort for the greater good will boost company morale overall, and that’s always good for the bottom line.

When getting a group of employees to help out, you may want to offer the opportunity to volunteer during work hours. Or, you could offer it as a more fulfilling alternative to meeting for happy hour drinks.

Either way, when your employees feel good about your vision and mission, they’ll feel good about working for you. You will receive the best work possible when you have earned the trust and respect of those you employ.

What happens when you talk?

Are you able to captivate your audience no matter who is listening?

Are you the type of person who has an incredible story to share and you enjoy helping people?

If you have interesting and inspiring stories along with the “gift of gab”, becoming an international speaker might be the right move for you.

Keep reading to find out how to get it done.

The Route to Becoming an International Speaker

1. Solve Their Problem

This is where the whole process starts. Look at people like Tony Robbins and Dave Ramsey. They had a problem. They fixed it. Now they’re both helping other people with their problems and making a fortune while doing so.

Ask yourself, “What problem do entrepreneurs and business owners have that I can help them fix?”

An even better question: “What problem will they pay to have fixed?”

People who own their own businesses are go-getters. If they can solve their own problems, they want to. Sometimes, there just isn’t any information out there.

You need to have that information.

2. Learn the Language

If you would like to become an international speaker, you need to accept the fact that not everyone speaks your native tongue. English is used as a second language twice as often as it’s used as a native one.

For maximum success as a public speaker, focus on becoming fluent in Arabic, Mandarin, and/or Hindi. These three languages combine to increase your potential reach by nearly two billion people.

3. Tech Up

Once you’ve started, you’re going to likely stay on the go. You’ll probably have a small team constantly needing to exchange information with you.

Immerse yourself in the tech world. It will make your life easier.

This includes everything from leveraging social media to utilizing the newest types of communication software. Having a Gmail account is probably not going to be enough.

4. Make Them Laugh

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are stressed out. They have come to you with a severe problem and are paying a lot of money to have it sorted out via your speech.

With all of that tension in the room, you can use humor to cut through it. This will help you connect with your audience, grab their attention, and help them relax.

Use a funny personal story that relates to your speech to maximize the efficiency of the joke. It could be something that affects business owners all over the world. Or it could be about your first experience in their country.

Just make sure it isn’t offensive and keep it relevant.

5. Establish a Brand

In many ways, business is its own form of communication. Don’t underestimate the value of creating your brand.

When you become an international speaker, you should learn to rely on your brand. No two languages are quite the same and often things get lost in translation.

Your brand can say everything that it needs to about what you have to offer without a word. It can also help create a level of emotional trust and authority that cannot be misconstrued in translation.

Wrapping It Up

While these are five awesome tips that can help get you started and you should be thinking about them, there is no way that we can squeeze every piece of need to know information into one blog post.

I’m Rafferty Pendery, I’m an international speaker who has helped thousands of businesses over the years. I can help you, too. Contact me today.

“Should I hire independent contractors?”

It’s a hand-wringer for many business managers. It might come up as your business experiences a sudden surge, or when the chance to bid on a huge contract presents itself.

The independent workforce now makes up over 40% of US workers, so there may be no better time to tap into that resource. But is it right for you?

While we can’t answer that question outright, we can give you the tools to understand why hiring independent contractors could be a real benefit to your company.

Give yourself flexibility

Everybody wants to be able to do everything in today’s commercial marketplace.

Partly that’s because we all want to be ready to respond to the latest changes in our industry. That could be anything from developing technology to a social media trend.

Hiring independent contractors is a great way to add that flexibility to your organization. With traditional employees, your ability to capitalize on situations is limited by the skill set of your employees and the long lead-times involved in the hiring process.

You could hire new employees, sure, but then who’s to say their skills will remain relevant to you over time?

Independent contractors are also great for managing changing business needs. You can bring on a retinue of contractors to cope with high volumes of work or a particular project without needing to find a niche for them when the work reduces back to normal levels or the project comes to an end.

Save on expenses

It’s no secret that regular employees come with a lot of requirements and expenses employers must meet or incur.

Among the considerations for a company hiring employees are:

• Providing space for employees to work. This will include health & safety considerations as well as comfort.
• HR support to deal with parental needs, ambitious or underperforming employees, requirements to show continued professional development, and other personal and interpersonal issues such as stress and disputes.
• Benefits such as health insurance, pension etc.
• Continued payment for employees outside of a usual working pattern, such as long-term sickness and parental needs.
• Compensation in the event of accident or injury
• Meeting travel and training expenses

All of these add up to a lot of expense for an employer. And that’s fine if you’re investing in your company’s future and trying to build a skilled in-house team.

But you don’t always need that. By hiring independent contractors, you can bypass a lot of these expenses while still completing work.

Independent contractors may have a higher payment per hour, but when you factor in the extra investment of time and money into regular employees, the savings soon become obvious.

You can hire independent contractors fully-trained without any of the other financial obligations to your company except their salary.

Protect your company

As we’ve covered, regular employees can need a lot of maintenance to keep them happy. What happens when the employer/employee relationship breaks down?

Lawsuits can be devastating for a company. By hiring independent contractors, you can insulate yourself from this risk.

Contractors aren’t your direct employees, so you don’t have the same legal responsibilities for them as you would a regular employee.

Here’s a selection of rights held by regular employees that you won’t have to worry about when hiring independent contractors:

• Right to form a union
• Right to sick or parental leave
• Protection from employment discrimination (except racial discrimination)
• Right to minimum wage and increased overtime payment

So hiring independent contractors can ensure your core business doesn’t become eclipsed by legal issues and expensive payouts in the event of a dispute.

Anything that allows you to focus on what you do well gives you an advantage over competitors distracted by other issues.

There are some legalities you’ll need to keep in mind. Your written contract will need to be smart to set the terms of employment. You’ll also need to consider things like the question of what happens to intellectual property created by independent contractors.

Recruit quickly

Recruitment can be a hellish process for all involved.

Timescales are long. Even after posting a job ad, you’ll often have set a closing deadline and be unable to advance before then. Following which you need to go through the lengthy and time-consuming process of interviewing candidates.

It can often take a least a month before the candidate is able to come and work for you.

And this all supposes you’ve found the right candidate and that the hiring won’t turn out to be a mistake. It’s also pretty common for new employees to change their minds and jump ship within weeks.

In some cases, you can go through all this for just a single employee.

By contrast, hiring independent contractors lets you get boots on the ground quickly. You can mass-hire, skip interviews (even if you conduct a less intensive skills check), and deploy within weeks rather than months.

Being able to deploy workers so quickly could be the difference between winning or losing a contract, or delivering a project to budget.

It can also allow you to manage harmful backlogs.

Expand your scope by hiring independent contractors

Depending on the nature of your industry, you may find that hiring more employees isn’t the best way to scale up your business. The extra overheads of regular employees may keep your company at a certain size.

Hiring independent contractors can be an effective way to break through that ceiling. You can effectively inflate the size of your workforce and the size of your company.

Knowing you can bring in independent contractors to cover more ambitious work gives you a realistic way to beat your competitors without taking dangerous risks.

Independent contractors may help you punch above your weight in your chosen industry. You may even find they help you snowball to the point where you can afford to invest in more regular employees.

So next time you see an uptick in your work or need to meet the requirements of a project, consider hiring independent contractors and feel the benefits.

For more business tips, follow my blog or head on over to my Contact Page if you need to get in touch!

Did you know that nearly 70% of all entrepreneurs start by running their businesses from their home? 

What about the fact that entrepreneurship is responsible for creating over 3 million jobs in the United States alone? 

The reality is that, no matter what industry you choose to work in, where you start your company from, or even how many employees you have, you need to have an incredible drive in order to succeed as an entrepreneur. 

Of course, drive alone isn’t enough. You also need to continually and rigorously work to refine and better your personal entrepreneurial development. 

How can you make sure you’re doing that? 

You can start by reading this article. 

In it, we’re telling you the top 7 things you can do to grow entrepreneurial development and become a better entrepreneur. 

1. Surround Yourself With Good People

The company you keep is one of the most important factors when it comes to entrepreneurial development. 

We know you’re already probably attending tons of events, talks, and other networking events in your industry. 

But keep in mind that, in order to keep developing your own skills, it’s not enough to just milk these connections to grow your business. You have to be willing to really learn skills from others on your team or in your larger industry. 

You also need to know how to delegate tasks according to what each member of your team is good at. This can be difficult, as it will often mean acknowledging your own shortcomings. 

However, the reality is that every person on your team is an asset in their own unique way (which is why it’s so crucial to hire a diverse team.) 

You want to find people who share your vision of success and who you work well with, but they need to be leaders just as much as you are. Ask yourself what you can learn from everyone on your team, and what you can teach them in return.

2. Know How To Measure Your Progress

We all want success – but unfortunately, it never comes overnight. 

Instead of focusing on one giant (often unattainable at your current phase of business, anyway) goal, you need to break it down into several smaller goals that you can actually reach. 

This won’t just hone your entrepreneurial development and keep you motivated to moving forward. 

It will also allow you to clearly evaluate whether or not the current steps you’re taking, and methods you’re using, are actually effective. 

3. Outsource What You Can

Especially at the start of your business, you need to seriously evaluate how much time you’re losing every day to tasks that, in the end, could really be done by someone else. 

As an entrepreneur, every minute of your day is incredibly valuable – and every wasted one represents a real loss.

To foster your own entrepreneurial development, ask yourself and your team to think of the tasks that can only be done by them, that could probably be done by someone else (especially down the line) and that could easily be outsourced.

For example, only you can meet and pitch your company, vision, and projections to a potential million-dollar investor. However, someone else can probably run the updates on your computer.

4. Know How To Lead

Even if you’re just starting out, we know you ultimately want to still be in charge when your company grows to a multi-million dollar empire. 

But to do that, you’re going to need to teach yourself how to be a good leader. This doesn’t just mean managing your specific team. 

It means becoming an innovative thought leader in your field of choice. 

Ask yourself: what are you continuously doing every day to make sure you know the latest news and trends in your industry? How are you incorporating that into your own management style and product/services? 

Always learn from mistakes – your own, and other people’s. Make sure those you work with feel valued, and take the time to listen to and ask for their ideas. 

5. Take Risks

Especially in today’s hyper-competitive world, if you don’ take risks as an entrepreneur, you’re never going to see the kind of growth you want – personally and professionally. 

If you’re not comfortable playing around with money, keep in mind that there are lots of other ways to take risks. 

Hire someone who thinks differently than you do. Attend an industry event with people you look up to, and make it a point to talk to them. Take on a bigger client.

Do something that your competition is afraid to. 

It’s the only way you’re going to be able to differentiate yourself.

6. Avoid Distractions

Yes, it’s true – in order to get the most out of every day, you’re going to have to schedule your time like crazy. 

This also means that you need to be incredibly protective of it. 

Especially in today’s world, it’s easy for a “quick five-minute break” to turn into a long lunch, cocktails, happy hour, and a hangover the next day. If you don’t see your time as one of the most valuable aspects of your business, you won’t make it far. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t take breaks. In fact, they’re incredibly important when it comes to keeping you productive! It just means that these breaks need to be scheduled.

Give yourself at least 5 minutes every hour to unwind. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself losing hours of time later. 

7. Always Remember Why You Started

Accepting some losses and going through some challenging times are an important part of entrepreneurial development. But often, especially if these are big losses, it can make you feel like you want to quit. 

When this happens, think back to why you started your company in the first place. What problem did you want to solve? Who would you help? What do you love about it? 

This will encourage you to push yourself through the tough times. 

Build Up Your Entrepreneurial Development With These Tips!

Thanks to these tips, you’re ready to make this the year your company hits its all-time highs! 

Looking for more ways to motivate yourself and manage your time? 

Want to know what else you can do to push yourself to grow? 

Check out the blog and website to ensure that you never let another opportunity pass you by.

Being a solopreneur is filled with challenges.

While the freedom from bosses and incompetent coworkers is incredible, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. After all, you don’t have anyone else to help pick up the slack.

It’s just you.

So what can you do to keep on top of the never-ending flood of to-do list items and keep from burning out?

The successful solopreneur toolkit

You might not want to hire a support staff, but there are a number of apps and online resources that can be just as helpful as a paid staff.

1. Evernote

One of the best parts of having a personal assistant is having someone available to write down your good ideas as you have them.

Evernote isn’t quite that good, but it is a great tool for keeping all of your notes in one place. Evernote includes a huge amount of free storage and is accessible from any device.

It also won the 2010 Webby for the best mobile app, so you know it’s good.

2. Sighted

The most important part of any business is making sure you get paid.

Sighted allows you to send and manage your invoices in one place. It allows you to work among several different currencies.

And when your business outgrows the free accounts, the premium options are still affordable.

3. Grammarly

You don’t have time to proofread. You’ve got business to do.

That’s where Grammarly comes in. Grammarly is a program that proofreads as you type, saving you time and embarrassment. There’s also

There’s also a free Grammarly extension for Chrome. Can’t beat that.

4. Hootsuite

You can’t do business these days without a social media presence. But it can be hard to manage all your separate accounts without a social media manager.

Hootsuite allows you to manage all of your social media pages from a single program, saving you time.

5. Canva

If you want to lose legitimacy fast, the easiest way to do that is to have bad design work.

Canva is a free web-based design program. It features beautiful drag-and-drop templates that allow you to create fresh graphics for all of your design work.

And all of this without hiring a designer.

6. Square

No one carries cash anymore.

And if you’re trying to get paid, that’s worth remembering. Square is a convenient alternative to traditional Point of Sales systems.

With Square, you can accept credit cards anywhere thanks to their free reader and mobile app.

7. Workflow Max

Workflow Max is the ultimate program for maximizing your productivity.

It allows integration with over thirty add-ons so you can handle your invoicing, scheduling, client management, and more from one program.

8. WiseStamp

Nothing legitimizes you as a serious solopreneur like a high-quality email signature.

WiseStamp creates a professional email signature with a variety of customizable features.

You can add your picture, link to your social media accounts, list your contact information, and more. All for a low-price annual subscription.

9. Assistant.to

Scheduling meetings can take forever if you’re doing it on your own.

Assistant.to makes it easy to organize meetups and appointments using only your email. It’s like having your own personal secretary, but without all the unsolicited gossip.

Oh, and you don’t have to pay it.

Beyond apps: more solutions for the solopreneur

These days, we are rich with free resources for every task.

But there’s only so much we can do on our own.

If you are a solopreneur that needs individualized help with organization, expansion strategies, social media, or online PR and marketing, contact me today.