Have you been hearing about the benefits of content marketing, but don’t know where to begin? Though content marketing has been around for ages, it has only recently gained fame and attention! According to content marketing pioneer and expert Joe Pulizzi, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” (Click here to visit his content marketing blog.) There is a wide variety of methods that can be used and combined together to create a content marketing program. One piece of the content marketing puzzle is article writing. When done correctly, article writing can have an impressive impact on your marketing efforts. Here are some of the ways it can impact you. (Stay tuned for our next blog post, which will be about how to begin article writing.)

SEO Benefits

The main SEO benefit to article writing is that you can write about subjects pertaining to your Web site, and then have back links within the article that go back to your Web site. By doing this, you gain links back to your site that are relevant, and Google loves relevance! Also, a link is like a vote of popularity to Google. So writing relevant articles with links to your site provide Google with another reason to like you, and your site’s rank in the search results will be improved over time.

Additional content distribution

When you submit your articles to free article submission sites like www.ezinearticles.com, the articles become highly indexable with the search engines. Therefore when people are out searching the Web, and they search for the words that are included in your article, your article might come up as a result for them to click on. Once they read your article, they can click on the link you provide and will be taken wherever your link brings them (most likely to a page on your Web site). In addition, people can take your article content and publish it (with a special citation listing you as the author and also the publisher). If you have a popular article, it can be published on many Web sites, giving you exponential traffic to your site.

Article writing can be beneficial to your Web site traffic and can also be an integral part of your content marketing efforts! Stay tunes for our next post, which will be about how to get started in article marketing.

April just so happens to be “Records and Information Management Month,” a holiday created in 1995 by the ARMA International, which is a professional association that emphasizes the significance of document and information management, and its impact on business worldwide. In honor of Records and Information Management Month, here are two ways to keep your accounting and/or payroll software records safe.

Menu level security

Menu level security allows you to password protect databases, set up additional users, and track transactions entered by each user. You can also limit access to menu selections, so that an employee can only access the screens you allow. Using menu level security helps keep your data safe, while allowing employees access to the screens they need to perform their job.

Create and test backups often

Everyone keeps bugging you about making sure you get backups often. Don’t you wish they would just quit bugging you? Well, they are right. We are a software company providing support to our customers nationwide, and we see the unthinkable happen far too often: customers losing their data, partially or totally. The reasons for the loss of data are varied, but the inability to recover that data is due to the lack of a backup, or a backup that was never tested and doesn’t work. Just like so many other things, most businesses think it won’t happen to them. But it can. So take your backup and test it often.

Oh, and happy Records and Information Management Month!

Managing payroll for multiple companies is a big task. And the more locations you manage the bigger task it becomes. Whether it’s paying employees, managing employee information, running reports by location, or the multitude of other payroll functions you must handle for multiple locations, you need a way to stay organized, accurate, and timely. Here are some ways your payroll software can help.

Unlimited Companies

If you manage the payroll for multiple companies, it’s crucial for you to have the ability to keep track of them separately. Many payroll systems allow for just one company, some have a limit for the number you can manage within the system and others allow for unlimited companies. Due to the variations in payroll systems, be sure you choose a system that can grow with your company and handle all of the different companies for which it manages payroll.

Track Data by Location, Department, Project, etc.

Tracking the payroll data for different companies can be a helpful tool. For instance, maybe you want to compare the labor costs by department or by location. Setting up and tracking that information in your payroll system makes it easy to pull reports at any time to do the comparisons you require.

Direct Deposit with Publish Pay Advice

Managing the payroll for multiple companies means you may not be near enough to some of the companies to deliver physical pay checks to employees. This issue can be solved by paying employees via direct deposit, and delivering their pay advice or ‘stub’ electronically via e-mail and that is accessed securely on the internet. This eliminates the need to print anything at all, which also saves money on paper, ink, time stuffing envelopes, and more.

Multiple State Tax Filing

Having multiple companies typically involves employees in multiple states, and therefore you must be certain your payroll software can handle that, since not all systems do. The best way to be sure your system processes multiple state tax filing, is to implement a system that can handle the tax forms for all 50 states! Even if you don’t require it now, chances are you will down the line.

Import Time Electronically

To streamline the entry of pay for multiple companies, importing time directly from an electronic source can be helpful. A digital time clock, for example, allows you to import the time and populate the hours directly into your payroll software program, reducing errors by eliminating the double entry of information. Other ways to capture time include hand-held time capture devices and online time entry.

Customized Reports

No two businesses are alike, and that’s why each business has its own way of running reports. With different companies, the ability to run reports the way each company desires can be extremely helpful. Customize payroll reports to the exact specifications each company chooses, and then save and name them for easy access whenever you want to run them.

Check Designer

Each company’s payroll likely requires different check designs or styles. One way to handle this is to use your payroll system’s check designer to create and save appropriate check designs for each company. Many designers will allow you to add, delete or edit fields of information and even add a logo. You can go step further and print checks on blank check stock using MICR encoding. The MICR function also allows you to print a custom signature from a file on pay checks, especially helpful in the case where the person signing is not always nearby or available to sign pay checks.

I recently attended an annual meeting of an organization that deals with financial standards, and how information should be tracked and analyzed for their particular industry. It’s amazing how many different ways accounting rules can be interpreted and applied, even though there have been generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for scores of years. One of the important things for this, and many other industries, is the ability to do comparative analysis with their peers. In order for this analysis to be meaningful, it is important that everyone be keeping records in a similar way, so they don’t end up comparing apples to oranges. So when people have differing ideas on how to do things right, it makes for interesting “discussion”.

We have similar issues within our own software products since we provide solutions to so many different kinds of industries. What works well for one company, might need to work differently for another. That raises some challenges when it comes to designing software. We are fortunate to have a wide range of knowledge within our organization, and try to make our software flexible enough to handle many complex scenarios. We often call on our customers to provide input during the design of features, and appreciate their willingness to share their knowledge, as well.

Please keep providing us with your input, and we’ll do our best to supply products that meet your needs.