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When holding or attending a business meeting, expectations are that things will proceed smoothly and professionally, that civilised discussions will be held and possibly only a modicum of angry outbursts would arise. Generally, things tend to happen along expected lines, but as Murphy’s Law would have it, at times things don’t always go as planned and something funny or embarrassing will happen during the meeting, and they can take many different forms. Take the following incidents for example.

1.  Imagine leaving a business meeting, returning to your desk, and a colleague from the meeting stops by to discuss an item further at about the same time you silently pass some gas.

2. Showing up to give a presentation at a meeting, and you’re wearing two different coloured shoes.

3. If the meeting room has a small table of snacks, imagine going over to it, getting coffee or tea and a sweet roll or something, then tripping over your own foot on the way back to your chair.

4. Perhaps you need to fly to a business meeting or conference, and you experience jet lag or take an Ambien on the flight and it doesn’t wear off in time for the meeting, so you go into it basically as a zombie and make no sense.

5. Maybe there’s a very important meeting you need to attend, but are feeling under the weather but think you can make it through the meeting with no trouble. Instead, you end up vomiting on someone’s shoes.

6. In some chitchat before the meeting starts,  you make a comment to a colleague that you intended to mean one thing but came out sounding completely wrong and possibly inappropriate.

7. Perhaps you are last to leave the meeting room, having taken too long gathering your things or something, and get locked into the room by mistake.

8. Taking a last-minute bathroom break before entering the meeting, and if you’re one who puts toilet paper down first, you accidentally end up walking into the meeting with toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe or hanging out the back of your pants.

9. You or someone else falls asleep during the meeting, either from lack of sleep or the person leading the meeting is very dull.

10. You forget to silence your cellphone before the meeting and it goes off, and worse, it has an embarrassing ringtone.

11. You have to give a presentation during the meeting, and the slideshow includes some “extra”, embarrassingly funny pictures that were added by mistake.

12. You manage to hurt your finger before a meeting, and it has to be bandaged. Unfortunately, the finger is your middle one and the bandage makes it stick up a little. While saying something during the meeting, you gesture with your hand and it just happens to look like you’re flipping someone off.

13. You find out during a meeting that someone is going to be let go, and without thinking you ask, “Can I have his computer?” or something similar in poor taste.

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It’s no surprise that email has become one of the main ways for people to communicate with each other. It’s easy to use and allows for attachments of photos and documents, and it’s sent and received instantly without having to wait for the postal service to send it. It also doesn’t require postage.  The ease of email is also one reason that businesses use it to not only communicate with employees and business partners but to also keep in touch with customers through email marketing and newsletters. As great as email is, the onslaught of incoming mail can quickly fill up your inbox and make it hard to sort through it to find the important emails from the ones that aren’t so important or are spam. So how does a person, especially a business person, organize their inbox to better find the important messages from the rest?

One thing is to make folders to send your emails into. It might be tempting to make a variety of different folders, but for business people, there’s really only 5 folders you really need to keep your inbox organized: “Inbox” for all your incoming email, “Today” where you will put all incoming email that needs to be done or responded to “today”, “This Week” for emails requiring your attention this week, “This Month/Quarter” for emails that need to be dealt with during the month/quarter, and “FYI” for important information that you may need to reference again at a later date. If you have other types of email you can make a separate folder for the overflow.

In general, to organize your inbox you will want to:

1. Clean it up. Keep your inbox only for what it was intended to be used for incoming email. Delete any messages you don’t need access to anymore. Don’t delete anything you may need at a later date, like receipts. File the ones you want to keep into relevant folders (make folders if you need to). Junk emails should be marked as spam or sent to the spam folder if they didn’t get sent there already.

2. Unsubscribe. If you signed up for email newsletters but don’t really need them or read them, unsubscribe from them. Also, unsubscribe from notifications from social media like or (unless you really need them). Try out unroll.me, it’s a personal favorite of mine.

3. Consolidate. If you have multiple email addresses, try to consolidate them. You might want to keep personal and business emails separate, but if you can, consolidate your various emails. Get rid of old email addresses you don’t use, or if possible, forward addresses to another. Another option would be to use one email program to check multiple addresses like Outlook or Apple Mail.

4. Auto-filter. Some email services, like Gmail, have an auto-filter option, where you can train it where to send an email and how to label it.

5. Boomerang. This is a plugin for Google and Outlook that will allow you to make an email disappear and reappear at a later date when you’re ready to deal with it. You can also schedule emails to be sent at a later time and also to set up recurring emails.

There are also some handy management tools that can help you organize your email inbox. You can find a list of some of them here.

Happy organizing and here is a neat infographic, ‘How to Prioritize Your Inbox‘ from NetCredit that gives some excellent tips:

We’ve all noticed the popularity of videos online. Everyone seems to watch them. That what makes them such a great online marketing tool for businesses. They provide an attractive way to get your message and information across to target audiences while engaging with them, and if the videos are interesting enough the viewers share them with their online community, increasing your brand’s visibility along with your information as the video goes “viral”.  But how do you go about developing a successful video for your brand?

1. Variety

First of all, you will want to create different types of brand videos. Sticking to one type of video (like a 30-second promo that has viral ambitions) will not get you very far. Different types of videos will help you reach different types of audiences. Some of the more popular types of videos use by brands are vlogs, event videos, interviews, soundless, presentations, and so much more.

2. Short Format

Short videos very popular. These are videos used on platforms like Snapchat and . They’re only a few seconds long but are great for branding and online sharing.

3. Conversion vs Brand-Building Engagement

You will want to make sure you understand the difference between these two types of videos. Conversion videos are designed primarily to drive sales. A brand-building, engagement video are used to build up your brand and engage with viewers. They’re great for getting people to subscribe to your YouTube channel, for example.

4. Accessibility

Make your videos accessible. They don’t do any good if people can’t find them to watch them, after all. So put them out there where they’re easy to find. Put them on social platforms like , Instagram, and . They’re also effective with product details pages, testimonials, email, landing pages, thank you pages, and as supporting documentation. Make sure you tag your videos properly and include keyword rich titles, captions, and/or descriptions.

5. Audience

Know your audience. This way you will know how far you can push boundaries, who you will be targeting, and which demographics you shouldn’t be targeting.

6. Story

People love stories. It makes them feel engaged and entertained. Tell a good story, and they will become emotionally invested as well, and have a good perception of your brand. So tell good stories that exemplify your brand’s story and its values and you and your products can do for the viewer.

7. Bold

It’s not enough to just have a video. To truly make your mark and gain brand recognition, you need to come up with a video that is bold, makes a statement, and stands out so that is memorable. Maybe try to lighten up a little and be funny instead of boring. Whatever you do, just make sure it works for your brand and your audience. Some truly awesome examples: , , and  among others.

8. Optimize

Don’t forget to optimize your videos for search. Get the most SEO value you can out of your video so people can easily find it during searches. Remember the importance of tags and descriptions, and enable embedding to get inbound links, and host it on your own domain.

These are just some of the tips to help you develop successful videos for your brand. You can learn more by visiting this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page.

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We all have dreams of things we’d like to do, stuff we’d like to accomplish. Perhaps it’s to write a book or run a marathon or start your own business. Whatever the goal, when we first set it, we’re all gung-ho about it and make strides. But then, something happens and we lose our motivation or inspiration. Perhaps something happens and we lose the time to devote to our goal, or we feel like we’re not making progress and start to wonder if success is out of reach. There are multiple ways to reaffirm your goal and desire. You can find them all over the place. One way is to find inspiration from others either by their quotes, stories, interviews, etc. You can easily find hundreds of quotes online, which you can print out and put where you can see them, or write them on sticky notes to put around. You can find beautiful artistic prints to remind you of something every time you look at it. You can even pin them to Pinterest for easy access. Here is a sampling of some of the many great quotes about success to inspire you and help you get motivated to succeed:

1. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

2. “Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.” – Colin Powell

3. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” – Herman Cain

4. “Put your mind, heart, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.” – Swami Sivananda

5. “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well have not lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J. K. Rowling

6. “Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” – Dwayne Johnson

7. “Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.” – Zig Ziglar

8. “Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso

9. “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure which is: Try to please everybody.” – Herbert B. Swope

10. “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

11. “Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.” – Vincent Van Gogh

12. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King

13. “If you don’t build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs.” – Dhirubhai Ambani

14. “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney

15. “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” – Mark Twain

16. “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”  – Vince Lombardi

17.  “The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.” – Henry Ford

18. “The best revenge is massive success.” – Frank Sinatra

19. “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” – Bruce Lee

20. “Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.”- Albert Einstein

Stand out from the crowd and aggressively grow your business with Aggressive Growth Marketing. The Growth Marketing Agency that provides Growth Hacking Marketing, Social Media, Guest Blogging, Email Marketing, and growth focused Digital Marketing Agency services. Call to discuss your needs today.

By now, many of you have probably seen the hilarious was giving from his home, only to have his young children interrupt it. Just for fun, here is on that interview and ! If you have kids or had kids, you can probably relate to it. Things like that can easily happen when you’re working from home. If it’s not your children interrupting you whilst you’re on the phone or in a video conference, perhaps you’ve had a pet that has managed to disrupt your work somehow. Or maybe you’ve gotten distracted by something and done something wrong like sent out a wrong email or made a funny typo. There are so many ways that working from home can go wrong in a funny way. Here are a few examples of what could possibly happen.

1. You’re on the phone, and the kids come in complaining loudly that one was doing something to the other.

2. You’re on the phone and your kid comes in to repeatedly ask for a snack or something.

3. You’re in a video conference and your kid comes, covered in paint, to show you the “masterpiece” he or she had just drawn.

4. You’re on the computer, typing up an important email, and your pet cat suddenly jumps on the keyboard, accidentally hitting a few keys and messing up what you were typing – and also inadvertently sending it.

5. You’re in a video conference and your pet cats come tearing into the room, playfully chasing each other around and knocking things over.

6. You’ve just gotten up and haven’t gotten dressed yet. You walk past your laptop just in time for a video chat session from a client to start up, and they see you still in your pajamas and hair not fixed.

7. You’re working on getting an item packaged to mail out to complete an order, and your pet dog decides it would make a great toy.

8. You’re on the phone with a client or your boss, and suddenly the dog starts barking at something outside.

9. You have the TV on in the background whilst working on the computer, and you get distracted by it and forget that you’re on the business social media page and you share your thoughts on the show.

10. You’re in a video conference and your spouse/significant other walks in, interrupting in a somewhat embarrassing way. Perhaps they say something distracting or they’re dressed sloppily.

These are just a few ideas of things that could possibly go wrong. Please feel free to share your stories of how working from has gone hilariously wrong for you.

Stand out from the crowd and aggressively grow your business with Aggressive Growth Marketing. The Growth Marketing Agency that provides Growth Hacking Marketing, Social Media, Guest Blogging, Email Marketing, and growth focused Digital Marketing Agency services. Call to discuss your needs today.