Category: Internet Marketing

Creating A Waterfall Content Strategy

jamesg Leave a comment

It can be difficult to produce consistent content. Sometimes there are simply no ideas to produce fresh content, even if you have a great marketing plan in place. It would be wonderful if you could ensure those creative weeks came just as consistently as the need to produce new content did. There is a way to ensure you will always have a bevy of original content even if your creativity is blocked. Here’s a plan from James Carbary to help you do this.

Begin With a Solid Structure

Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of VaynerMedia, gave advice in a recent video (below) and one thing stood out in particular: you need a structure when you create content.

Vaynerchuk can churn out lots of content on a weekly basis. He can do this partly because of his two YouTube shows where he asks the audience to ask him questions via social media. He doesn’t have to speculate about what the people want- he simply asks them.

DailyVee is another way Vaynerchuk receives his waterfall content. It is a documentary style video of 15 minutes or less in which he gives daily advice and commentary about what’s going on in his world. It is invaluable to any B2B executive.

What do you do if you don’t have the budget to make videos such as these? There is a realistic way to use his strategy.

“Content on Content on Content” Strategy

Vaynerchuk uses the content he receives from his videos in several different ways. In his article, Content on Content on Content, he writes,

“I’m about to get real meta on you: the article you’re about to read was made from a video, that was made from the making of an article, that was originally based off a video.”

He continues,

“When you have something at the top, use it as a source to create other content.”

Vaynerchuk believes that this is the framework for real content strategy. The two video shows have allowed his team to do several things and here are a few:

  1. LinkedIn published posts
  2. Facebook video
  3. Blog posts from transcripts
  4. Specific answers from some videos are edited into shorter videos and posted on another channel.
  5. Medium articles
  6. Quotes are turned into infographics and memes for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
  7. Instagram stories & Snapchat

In essence, they have created a framework that has produced a consistent flow of excellent content.

What is Waterfall Content?

Industry insider and founder of Sweet Fish media James Carbary defines waterfall content as, “Content created inside a defined structure that can fuel an entire content marketing strategy.” Carbary uses it at Sweet Fish and with their podcast B2B Growth Show. As a result, they saw a 300% growth in revenue in the first quarter of 2016.

Some leads they have received has grown exponentially, and it has also allowed them to establish the kind of credibility that is much sought after in their industry. It has also enabled them to foster meaningful relationships with ideal clients as well as industry insiders and influencers.

How you can implement this approach using a waterfall content strategy at your business.

Picture a waterfall: an avalanche of water pours over the edge of a cliff, and it splashes down furiously to make a tremendous impact on the flowing river beneath. That is a powerful image, but consider this: the source of this big, powerful waterfall is a single river or stream.

That river is the source of your waterfall content. It is simple and not very exciting, but if it is handled in the right way it can lead to an avalanche of content that significantly impacts your content marketing strategy. The waterfall content strategy all begins with a podcast.

Carbary says that for Sweet Fish, the “waterfall” content is from their podcast the B2B Growth Show, an interview-based show where they speak with B2B sales and marketing executives. They use the interviews to create a variety of content for multiple platforms, and this creates an impact that extends far beyond that of one podcast.

How Waterfall Content Flow Works

Let’s take the following hypothetical scenario to reveal how waterfall content strategy works. Securely is a venture-backed SaaS startup that provides cloud security solutions. Joe is the CMO of Securely. One of their best customers is the CTO of a mid-market tech company named Megan. Joe wants to make sure his content team created content that attracts CTOs like Megan.

However, Joe is not a CTO, he’s a marketer, and therefore he doesn’t understand which topics will be most engaging for CTOs to attract them to his product. Joe’s creative team has started to run out of creative content ideas.
Then Joe decides to create a weekly podcast in which he interviews CTOs. This show reveals to him what CTOs care about and what industry topics are relevant to them. By doing this, Joe finds the river in the waterfall scenario, and he does it without any guesswork involved.

Now every interview that Joe’s show does becomes a resource for any other CTO, Securely’s ideal clients. Securely’s content strategy is now focused on exactly what CTOs want to talk about. Joe creates the podcast and can go straight to the source without his creative team having to guess about anything.

How Do You Do It?

So how do you pull something off like Joe did? Again, it all begins with a podcast. There is a process to this, and it works time and again in a variety of industries.

To do this. First you need to find guests. Most of the guests will be ideal clients, so you will want to start working with your sales team to find them. Use the best fit accounts from your customer list and begin from there. You can also use a data provider like MountainTop or a prospecting tool like LeadFuze to find them if you can’t get them from your sales team.

Now it’s time for outreach. You’ll want to send a brief email asking someone to be a guest on your show. Remember to focus on them. You should focus on why you think they would be ideal for your show. You should also put a link to your show, website and social media in the emails. Lastly, make it easy for them to respond.

Now you need to produce the Podcast. There are several parts to this process. First, you need to record the interviews and Skype is great for that. You can record the Skype calls with Call Recorder (for Mac users) or Pamela (for PC users).

After doing this, you’ll need to edit the audio so that you will need an audio engineer. They will edit the interview, add the show music and the standard intro to each episode.

Copywriting

You should send the original cut of the video over to a copywriter. Make sure your copywriter takes care of the following:

  1. Headlines. There should be 3-4 for every episode. You can then use these for social media posts.
  2. Episode summaries. This will be used on iTunes, but you can also post them on your website.
  3. Quotes. The copywriter should pull memorable quotes from the interview which will be later turned into graphics to be used on social media.
  4. Blog posts. This is an important one. Since more people read articles online then tune into podcasts, it is important that you have a version of the interview up online available for people to read. Use this 12-part checklist as a guide to writing readable and shareable blog posts.
  5. Graphic design. Your graphic designer will use each headline to design something for each podcast. They can also create graphics from quotes from the interview.
  6. Uploading. Once you have everything complete from above, it’s time to upload your podcast to iTunes and your website. There are several details (spacing, image placement, click-to-tweet links, etc.) that you need to keep in mind each time you upload and episode. You will need an administrator that is detail-oriented to be in charge of this process.

Follow Up

There are four stages to the follow-up process:

  1. “Your episode is live!”
    When an episode goes live make sure to send the iTunes and website links to the featured guest. The guests will send it out to all their social media contacts, thus increasing your audience.
  2. Repurposed into a blog post.
    Go live with your blog post that contains the written interview one week after the episode airs. Make sure to let your guest know about it and send them the link. This will send traffic to your website.
  3. Working together
    Two weeks after the guest’s episode has gone live, it would be wise to email each guest to open up a dialogue about starting a working relationship with them.
  4. Stay in touch
    Make sure to stay linked in and connected with each guest after they appear on your show. You should try to nurture a lasting relationship with each guest. This article is helpful as it goes into depth about this subject 23 different ways to cultivate relationships with your podcast guests.

Turning a River Into a Waterfall

Now that you understand how to produce a podcast you have your foundation for your waterfall content strategy. The podcast is the river but how do you turn it into a waterfall?

You need to use the interview and podcast to produce all types of content such as the ones outlined above. You need to use it to produce graphics, blog posts, tweets, etc. to utilize the waterfall content approach. You need to also follow these three steps:

Dig Thorugh Your Source Material

One great interview with an industry insider is your source material. If you have one important guest talk about hot topics, it produces a flood of content. The guest also benefits as well because it adds to their eWOM (electronic word of mouth) and brand.

Try to schedule industry influencers and insiders for your show, and you will reach all of their social media followers when they spread the word about the show on social media. In fact, connecting with their followers brings us to step 2.

Expand Upon Your Content

Your target audience will get a lot out of your podcast. However, the key to the waterfall content strategy is to expand the content from this interview. You’ll need to get it to various news outlets and social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. There are a variety of online magazines and blogs that may want to use the interview to do a feature piece. So basically, keep utilizing the media and the internet to spread the content from one interview out to as many people and platforms as possible.

Types of Micro-Content

There are five more types of micro-content that can come directly from your podcast if you have the resources.

  1. 1-2 minute video clips. You can use the best audio clips from the interview set with your podcast graphics to produce short videos which can be published on YouTube or Facebook.
  2. Use Facebook Live or Periscope during the recording. You can use these to record live videos from your interviews and allow the audience the ability to post direct questions to your guests.
  3. Anchor. It’s like Twitter, but with audio only. The platform gives you the ability to post micro audio clips (2 minutes or less) into a newsfeed similar to Twitter. Once the Skype call with each guest ends, you can share it as content for Anchor.
  4. Snapchat & Instagram Stories. Use photos from the interview to engage with your audience. These platforms allow them to share their social handles (personal and company) to their followers.
  5. Instagram images. Have your designers reformat images from the show for Instagram. Add the link from each corresponding interview to the post.

So Many Benefits

As you can see, there are endless benefits to a waterfall content strategy.
To sum it up: waterfall content all derives from an interview-based podcast which allows you to:

  1. Establish leadership in your industry
  2. Foster important relationships with potential ideal clients as well as industry insiders and influencers
  3. Add depth to the existing relationships with current clients and customers
  4. Drive more leads to your website
  5. Access all kinds of content ideas that do not have to be thought up by your creative team
  6. Reach your target audience with content on topics they will be interested in
  7. The ability to utilize a variety of social media platforms
  8. Provide great content to your sales team which can enhance their resources
  9. Expand your reach on social media by tapping into the followers of your guests
  10. Access to a wider internet audience

Resources

Conclusion

A waterfall content strategy is the best way to consistently produce quality creative content. Waterfall content all comes from an interview-based podcast so follow the steps from above to get started.

Getting the most out of advertising with Facebook

jamesg Leave a comment

Let’s face it, whether you accept and embrace the fact or not, social media is making a larger impact on our world every day. It’s more than just posting selfies and liking photos and statements of friends, it is now a common way of increasing business and expanding your name and product.

 

Facebook is by far one of the most popular social media platforms and offers more potential and options concerning advertising than you may realize. Facebook is no longer just something the kids are doing.

 

page-post-engagementThe Director of Search and Social with DealerOn, Greg Gifford, recently gave a presentation to help inform and educate those in attendance at Brighton SEO. During the presentation, Gifford gave a descriptive evaluation of the options Facebook has to offer when it comes to advertising and how they can be used to increase business.

 

During the presentation, Greg discussed how Facebook was once known as “the drunk guy who showed up late to the party and annoyed everyone.” Things have changed as Facebook is now considered “the cool mofo that everyone wants to party with in social advertising.”

 

This happened by Facebook using its popularity to develop an advertising platform that is both cost-effective and productive. Due to the fact that almost everyone has Facebook on their mobile device and uses the app in order to pass time and stay in touch, it simply makes sense to have your brand advertised and available through the platform. We will start with the basics and work our way through the available types of advertising made possible through Facebook.

 

Page Post Engagement

 

This is one of the most popular types of ads on Facebook. This will help increase the reach of your content while working with both published and unpublished posts.

 

Page Likes

 

This is another option that is popular with Facebookers. However, the popularity of this option is not always demonstrated by its success. If proper engagement and targeting methods are not being used, money may end up being wasted by building an audience that isn’t focused on your purpose or goal. Before investing too much in this type of advertising campaign, make you are being as productive as possible with your comments and the likes and shares of the page.

 

Clicks to website

 

If one of your main goals is increasing the traffic that visits your website, this can be a productive type of advertising. It is also a great way to drive your audience to a specific landing page or begin promoting a certain campaign.

 

Website conversions

 

conversion-optimizationThis option requires the installation of a tracking pixel to the site in order to determine the number of your sites visitors that ended up making a purchase as a direct result of a Facebook ad. This option is a great way to generate both leads and e-commerce.

 

App installs

 

This is a great option and opportunity for any brand looking to promote an application. It can lead users directly to their app store, making the ad both effective and productive.

 

App engagement

 

This will allow you to take the promotion of an app to the next level.. You can use app engagement in order to connect with users who already own the app, in effort to increase the engagement of app users.

 

Offer claims

 

Once you have made an offer available through your facebook page, this type of ad will give you the ability to drive more users to your Facebook page, giving you an opportunity to increase the number of participants.

 

Video Views

 

Video is now a dominating trend with Facebook users which makes this option both attractive and popular. This type of ad will assist video producers to promote the content they have created directly to the audience that is most relevant to the video.

 

Local Awareness

By using a set location to advertise on mobile devices, you can build the local awareness of your brand and can help a local business become more successful than local competitors. This is a great way to build the name of your business in the community you are in and can lead to not only new visitors but also repeat customers.

Digital Marketing Done Properly in the New Age

jamesg Leave a comment

I suppose it’s coincidence that this post appears almost exactly one year after Blue Bugle went sort of inactive. Today, the blog doesn’t enjoy as many readers as it once used to. This unfortunate thing is due to my hectic schedule in my new day job as senior content writer for an organization called MSys. This job gives me more opportunities to explore the separate aspects of the digital marketing domain. In the past, all we used to do was promoting our blog posts through social media at random thereby trying to gather as many visitors as possible. You never studied the prospects, the market, or the social channels you promote your stuff to.  Most of the SEO companies out there prided themselves in creating spammy blog comments to create links to client websites. Needless to say, most of these plans never worked or had less positive impact. Now, if you follow the same spammy activities, you are sure to get a ban at best.

I had to come up with a new marketing plan for MSys that incorporated careful study of the market, ways to approach customers in a more efficient manner, ways to promote our site on search engines, and ways to promote our stuff to social media. This plan involved several steps, and it somehow taught me new ways to become effective in search engines and social media. This post is an afterthought of this marketing plan.

Let’s take a brief look at how digital marketing emerged in the last decade. This is essentially a brief history of SEO and SMO too. First of all, the basis of digital marketing is a website. Today, a company cannot survive without a website, can it? Even small-time bloggers like us have prolific websites; so, a company does indeed need a website. It has to be properly designed for clients to get an idea of what the company is into.

Website Design

In the ‘90s and the first part of the last decade, you simply cannot find really good-looking websites unless they belong to the biggies. Go to the (random018) and look at some of the websites they had back then. I wanted to see the transition, so I took a look at a really well designed modern website and went back to the beginning of the millennium to see how it used to be. Here’s it. I am sure everybody would agree Apple has a really good-looking website. Here is its site back in 2000—Feb 26 to be exact (the date is visible right above that hot news ticker).

See how awkward the website used to be back then. It’s quite apparent that the design standards have changed drastically in the last few years. Today, the most important part of web design is responsiveness. The main reason why a website has to be responsive is because it gets viewed on all kinds of devices today. One of your customers views your website on his iPhone, while another group views it on a tab twice the size, like the iPad. A website has to scale up properly to display without anomalies on all kinds of devices. It is one of the primary requirements of digital marketing today.

It’s also important that the website be rich with content, multimedia elements, and interactivity. Interactivity is one aspect that the web has quite evolved on. Technologies such as JSON, Java, and Python have been behind those buttons, text boxes, and tabs.

The point is, such unprofessional, ad-studded websites could work back then, but they no longer can. Professional websites look cleaner and simpler today, and most of the startups have such long, filling landing pages, which are such a pleasure to look at. They also load faster. So, the first thing of digital marketing: you need a website that conforms to the best professional standards today. It also has to be properly updated based on the changes in industry standards.

Social Media Presence

Before we check about the search engine optimization part, let’s check out the social media. It has recently become the most important aspect of digital marketing. Back in 2000, do you know which social networks were popular? Probably the first ever social network was Friends Reunited, which started operations in 1998 in the UK. Then in 2000, another social network started operations; you may have heard about it—Friendster. Friendster is the precursor to all these other social networks—MySpace, Orkut, and Facebook. In 2003, briefly MySpace became the most popular social network in the world, and it stayed so until Facebook surpassed all social networks by 2007.

Then the refinement of social media happened, which proved to be a very useful thing for digital marketers. For instance, instead of having three social networks—Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook—for the same thing, we have only one that caters to all needs. And Facebook is far more feature-rich than it used to be. It’s also being developed continuously. Twitter came then, and it soon became the social network for celebrities.

Then it was time for social networks for specific purposes: LinkedIn branded itself as a professional network; while you could share any stuff on LinkedIn, this branding somehow forced professionals to share professional stuff on LinkedIn. Then Google+ became the social network of choice for all sorts of businesses and online content creators. Google Authorship is something you need to read and research about. There are also specialized social networks such as GitHub for programmers and DeviantArt for artists. As a first step of popularizing yourself on social media, identify all the social networks where you can make a presence for your company, and then start working to create a stable presence.

Content Marketing

For digital marketing, content is the most important aspect, is it not? Creating and sharing useful content may be a difficult thing for a small organization with one or two content writers. How can then such an organization excel in content marketing?

One way is analyzing the requirements. Why do you do content marketing? For most marketers, it is to generate more social followers and website traffic. Now, you simply ask the question. What sort of content is especially important to gather followers? The simple formula is analyzing your potential clients and their requirements. In case of my company, the clients are looking for a vendor in storage and cloud sectors. We simply have to identify those clients and share some content already published by them through our social channels. These activities should prompt those companies to follow us. Another aspect that will help you directly network with the decision makers of any company is sharing the content published by the decision makers through your social channels. Also, try to come up with conversations with these people—constructive criticisms may be one way to go.

By sharing others’ content, you have two major benefits: you keep your social media profiles rich with content; you gather interest from the actual content creators, prompting them to follow you. This, however, doesn’t create any traffic advantage to your own site, so it has to be done sparingly and with careful planning. In general, it goes without saying that every piece of content that you create on your website has to be properly shared on your social profiles.

When you create content, give maximum care. There is a way to come up with unique content. It’s research. Unique content is the staple food of digital marketing. Even today, article marketers are creating thin content by copying or rewriting content from other websites. This practice will only get you in the radar of the search giant. So, refrain from this. The recipe of creating unique content is research and asking the right questions. Come up with a unique topic and a unique perspective on that topic. This will give you the incentive to write well. Also important are the grammar, punctuation, and style of your writing. Present your articles with multimedia and interactive elements on a well-designed, approachable website. This is the key to successful content marketing.

Smartphone Marketing

Today, mobile marketing has to be smarter after smartphones surpassed feature phones. There is a large number of mobile marketing tools you can find. Android and iOS devices are with millions of people—millions of prospective customers. Simply speaking, mobile marketing is one of the cornerstones of success today. Identify the best tools you can use for your marketing requirements. A few of them include Swipely, MailChimp, Yelp, Foursquare, etc. You also have the capability to target your potential users through social media apps for these mobile platforms. You need a full-fledged plan to target the smartphone users better.

Search Marketing

Now, SEO is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. Every website is planned and built to make it rank high on Google. There are a number of on-page and off-page factors that you do to make a website relevant for a search query. This post doesn’t go into the details of these aspects. Only one thing is important when it comes to SEO. Look at your website and ponder whether it’s the best website for a search query that you are targeting. Every time a person searches for a particular keyword, a few websites come up on the first page of Google. Most of these pages provide maximum information and relevant content to the searcher. When this happens, the searcher is likely to stay longer on the website, check out other pages, and share the content on social media. These activities can be facilitated by improving three major aspects of your website: the loading time, the content structure, and the design.

In SEO as well as paid search marketing, you have to present a well-designed, content-rich website, because otherwise Google will never let your site rank on its search. Some people may think they can come up with a spammy website and pay Google to rank it on paid search results. It’s simply not going to happen, because for paid search also, Google has a number of content and structure guidelines which must be followed.

Conclusion

It’s easy to do digital marketing if you follow three important principles: provide value, do not spam ever, look at your work from your prospective customer’s perspective. The third rule of thumb will give you a huge number of opportunities to improve your online presence. The design aspects, social media content, descriptions, keywords, etc., can be tweaked much better in this way.

Online Job Startups: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Sooquini, TaskRabbit, etc., What You Need to Know

jamesg Leave a comment

[Note: First of all, we are redesigning the format of Blue Bugle. We have not been active for more than a month now. In August, we did not have even one post going. There have been quite a number of technological advancements in that month. We covered none of them, but none of our regular readers missed us still. The reason being, there are no regular readers; probably! We have been trying hard to develop readership by posting honest reviews of products and good advice to smartphone and tablet buyers that you can get nowhere else. Not even on professional technology blogs. Still, we are not gaining readership, because we have been posting only what people feel they can find elsewhere. If they do, there is absolutely no need for Blue Bugle to exist.

Hence, we are changing. From now on, you will get blatant entries on what we really think and know. We are going to be ruthless to anybody that rips you off. We are going to show you what you need to do. We are restructuring the posts. No longer will there be product reviews. No longer introductions, news stories that you find elsewhere, or how-to content that you just don’t need. We will be coming up with things that you can discuss near water coolers. Okay?]

 

A little while back, Amazon, the online retailer-turned-technology company has come up with an idea of fulfilling the chores of people through crowdsourcing. That startup is called Mechanical Turk. It’s still operational. In this service, you can find all kinds of jobs that any average person can do. The payment you can get from the HIT you complete (HIT is a job, expanded as Human Intelligence Task) can be anything from a cent to 23 dollars.

Amazon mechanical Turk

 

What you see is a screenshot of the Mechanical Turk HITs list, for the day. The highest payment offered today is for an audio transcription service, and that is 23 dollars. And yet, in the home page of Amazon Mechanical Turk, there is this slogan floating about, “Make Money (by working on HITs)”.

The payment for each job is undeniably puny and ludicrous, even for a person from the third world. I have no idea who works on these jobs and “makes money”. As one might surmise, the middleman always profits without risk; Amazon does exactly that. What about the job poster and the worker that gets paid? Well, it’s an entirely different story there.

When a person like you or I try to find a work, we look at the options available in the market. Job market is so competitive, and there never is a shortage of competency. There are people who are willing to work for less, but essentially, their skills may not be all that productive. I know of several American small business startups that outsourced most of their work to the inept workers from other countries to save money and get there quickly. Their tactics have more often than not backfired.

In essence, a job is done well when the worker is knowledgeable and experienced. A knowledgeable and experienced worker has to be paid appropriately for his services.

You know well how more important quality is than quantity. Once, there was this US entrepreneur, who started up a small business about coaching higher executives. The entrepreneur then hired an inexperienced person to build links into his website. The payment was far less than usual, and the worker was as inept as anyone. He simply built links from Blogspot blogs and all of those links turned out to be of absolutely no value to the entrepreneur. In the end, his website simply remained there, without achieving any traffic. All he did was lose some money albeit very little money to a worker half the world away.

If you want good quality services, come out and pay well for them. Hire experienced people from good sources of work.

Shun Amazon Mechanical Turk.

If you are a skilled worker, shun Amazon Mechanical Turk, or at least the lowest paying tasks over there.

Sooquini & TaskRabbit

Sooqini logoSooqini

came into existence in London in 2012. This is a tasks marketplace where you can post your tasks and the payment involved. Also, people can offer various tasks and the price for each. Although it is available only in the UK currently, it may be rolled out to other parts of the world soon.

TaskRabbitTaskRabbit is a perfect American counterpart of Sooqini. The service is active in these parts of the
US: Atlanta, GA; Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, TX; Boston, MS; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, Orange County, San Francisco Bay Area, CA; NYC; Philadelphia, PA; Portland, ME; Seattle, WA; and Washington DC.

Both of these services are for completing errands—dog walking, cooking, gardening, researching, fixing your AC, etc. Workers can commute online as well. As many other online job systems, these services offer certification for workers, and also allow you to set your own payment terms. Since it is better regulated than some others like mTurk, both the job poster and the worker can get better deals over here.

Things to Consider

 

When you take up a job with any online service, here are the important things to consider. When you try to hire people online to reduce business costs, here are some of the important things to consider.

  • Do not work for less than minimum wage if you are qualified enough to command what you want.
  • Small business owners, if you would like to survive, hire people with experience or the people who know what they are talking about. You can really get good deals with them too at affordable rates.
  • Workers with experience, show off your work and abilities by starting a blog or a website to showcase your talent. You can get more information about starting websites from CreatingSites.org.
  • If you are just in there to make some quick bucks, don’t spam the Internet.
  • Use the social media to your advantage. For business owners and professionals, it’s LinkedIn I am talking about. Twitter doesn’t hurt either.
  • Small business owners, depend only on professional services from professional companies at affordable rates, rather than hiring inept workers from third world thereby saving a ton of your money. Also, be prepared to pay what it takes to bring in talent.
  • Always look for testimonials from your clients. Take in feedback, and display the feedback on your website. If it’s a negative feedback, find what you did wrong and rectify it.
  • Middlemen, create opportunities that are good for both the workers and the job posters. Amazon, close down Mechanical Turk.

 

Conclusion

 

As said above, it is much better for you to find tasks if they pay well. As the minimum wage goes up, if you are a good worker and you know it, you should know that you can command the regular salary. Nobody should have to work for less than minimum wage just because of the competition. It only helps the skilled experienced and non-experienced workers if you command good salaries.

Also, the small business owners, the Internet will be so much better and spam-free if you stop hiring inept people.

Which Are the Best VOIP Software Applications for Your Computer?

jamesg Leave a comment

Simply speaking, VOIP has become a means to make calls from your PCs to all kinds of devices. Here is a list of short reviews of the best of VOIP software programs out there.

6. Vonage

Vonage VOIP

 

In the large field of VOIP software, Vonage (also UK edition) is already quite a bit known. It is also one of the best services out there. The Vonage VOIP plans start at 9 dollars per month. The system has a box known as Vonage box that works with your broadband modem in order to bring unlimited calling worldwide.

There are a lot of included and add-on features for Vonage service, including call management, voicemail, simultaneous ringing on five phones, enhanced call forwarding, virtual numbers, Fax, extra lines, toll free numbers, etc.

5. Nextiva

nextiva

Nextiva

is a VOIP software program with business focus. It is feature-rich with quite a number of features listed here. You can also buy VOIP software phones from Nextiva at affordable prices. Nextiva has a number of plans at affordable prices.

Nextiva’s NextOS VOIP software makes it possible to conduct business easily. The company offers customer support features through its telephony service and that makes the VOIP program quite attractive to business customers out there.

4. eVoice

eVoice

eVoice

VOIP solution has been around for quite some time. This piece of VOIP software also has almost all the features provided by the others mentioned. They include toll free numbers; call management functions; voicemail; apps for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, etc.; multiple extensions; speed dial; texting; web conferencing; etc.

You can get US and Canada local numbers with eVoice VOIP program. The pricing starts at 9.95 USD per month. The excellent features and affordable price tag make eVoice an excellent VOIP software application.

3. PhonePower

PhonePower

 

Here is another piece of VOIP software that is excellent and feature-rich. PhonePower has these features—long distance (outgoing) to various countries including Canada, Puerto Rico, etc., toll free number, caller ID, voicemail, SMS, call return, call transfer, call blocking, email, virtual phone number, mobile app, etc.

The service also provides VOIP hardware that can be connected directly to your broadband modem.

PhonePower is hence a great all-in-all VOIP software solution.

2. Ring Central

 

Looking for another VOIP software application? Here’s Ring Central. This is a cloud-based business telephony system with these major features—toll free numbers, local numbers, caller ID control, Softphone (call management from the computer itself), unlimited texting, voicemail, MS Outlook integration, call management features (forwarding, answering, intercom, etc), cloud-based PBX, conferencing, internet FAX, etc.

The major features of this VOIP software program are listed here.

Ring Central plans start at $ 19.99 per month and are perfect for businesses. This makes Ring Central our second best VOIP software application.

1. Skype

Skype VOIP

Skype

, a Microsoft product, has been around for a long time before Microsoft acquired the service. It is not only available for all sorts of Windows PCs, but also Android, Apple iOS, Linux, OS X, Symbian, Windows Phone, etc. Windows Live Messenger is also merged with this VOIP software. By 2012, about 34 percent of the VOIP software market is in Skype.

The application has all sorts of features, including calls to landline and mobile phones, caller ID, SMS, Voicemail, chatting, Skype online number, video-calling, screen sharing, etc.

Skype also has a portable version that you can take anywhere with you.

Conclusion

 

You can see there are a huge number of VOIP software programs out there. Among them, it is difficult to spot the best. This list may help you in your search.