Happy New Year 2017

Each moment in a day has its own value.

Morning brings HOPE,
Afternoon brings FAITH,
Evening brings LOVE,
Night brings REST,
Hope you will have all of them everyday.

7 Tools to Make Your Job Easier

Establish new Company in 2017 and Adopt 7 Tools to Make Your Job Easier...

Nowadays, it really doesn't matter what field you're in you need to be digital. Big cabinets and stacks of paper are going out the door, and so are sloppy desktops with endless excel files. There are too many great programs out there with automated processes to warrant doing business any other way.

When it comes to running a company whether it's a company of one, or a company of one hundred and fifty organization is your best friend. From freelancers to small business owners, entrepreneurs and beyond, these are tools that can help you become more efficient, more effective, and a whole lot more successful.

1. Website: Square space

Whether you're starting a small creative agency, or a consulting business, or a real estate firm, etc., you are going to need to build yourself a website.

To be honest, the biggest pitfall new companies (and even freelancers) fall into when it comes to building a website is taking far too long to get the thing up. You can always edit it. You can always add or subtract. Just get something functional and professional up and running so you can focus on more important things (like generating leads and revenue).

If I were you, I would just pick a square space template, make it your own (upload a few pictures and edit the copy) and then move on. However, if you have the budget and really want something unique, or envision having a big site with tons and tons of content, go WordPress. But if you just need to get up a five page brochure style website, there's no need to make it complicated.

2. Email Marketing: Get Response

Every business nowadays needs some sort of inbound marketing. This means creating content on your website and directing readers to some sort of download in exchange for their email address.

The big mistake companies make here is thinking that having a form that says, "Subscribe to our Newsletter!" is enough. It's not. There is no clear Call to Action, and people are wary about giving out their email unless they know exactly what it's going to be used for.

The single best way I have found to generate potential leads for myself is two-fold:

A) Offer a free download of a workbook, an info-graphic, an in-depth PDF guide, etc.

B) Offer a free email course, so when someone gives you their email it triggers a 5, 7, or 10 day email sequence teaching them something of value.

Pretty much every email storage and automation software out there is priced based on two things: how many contacts you have on your list, and features.It's an all-in-one digital marketing platform that allows you to store emails onto different lists (based on interests), create landing pages for readers to click through to from the email campaigns you send, set up email and click through automation sequences, and even create/launch Webinars (great for engaging potential or current clients).

The whole key here is to get potential clients into your automation funnels, and then set up triggers to move them through the sales process and convert them into paying clients.

3. Business Tracking: Workflow Max

There are all sorts of different pieces of software you can use for internal tracking. There's time-tracking software, task-tracking software, forecasting software, honestly the list goes on and on.

If I were you, I'd check out Workflow Max and just keep everything in one place. The thing I like about Workflow Max is that it allows you to fill six key elements to running an effective business:

A) Track leads

B) Organize quotes

C) Track (and measure) time

D) Job management

E) Invoicing

Truthfully, if for no other reason, this type of software is most valued in two stages: organizing and keeping track of invoices, yes, but even more so time. Nothing crushes a business more than not-knowing how much leftover time there is, how much more you could be using, or worse, how overbooked and understaffed you are (which can lead to a lot of internal fires).

If you are managing employees (or even managing yourself, honestly), time is your primary asset. Just like cans of soup on the shelf are the asset of a grocery store, your employees and the services you provide through their time is your most valuable asset.

4. Work Presentation/Prototyping: In Vision

Especially if you are in a creative field, you are going to be doing a lot of client presentations--and most likely over a conference call or screen share.

Of all the tools and ways I have gone about this process, I recommend using in vision. Personally, I found it to be the most intuitive, easy to use, clean, and organized.

It allows you to upload mock-ups, prototype designs, etc., and send them as Boards to a client so they can review and comment on them with feedback. There really is no one "correct" way of going about this process, but when managing a lot of different clients I always find it more helpful when feedback and comments can be right on the designs or deliverable's themselves--instead of on a separate message board, thread, etc.

5. Internal Emails & Calendars: Gmail

There is no comparison within this category. For company and team member emails, calendars, and all-things-internal,Gmail is the way to go.

One of the most helpful things I have ever witnessed in terms of time management was the internal use of Gmail calendars at the agency I worked at, and people blocking off chunks of time for them to focus solely on their work.

If your team or company does not "Respect The Calendar," then it becomes a madhouse. Everyone fights for everyone else's time, and in the end nothing actually gets done. This is one of those things that can be incredibly annoying to implement at first, but in the end makes all the difference.

The best thing you can do is get everyone set up with a company Gmail account, have them set up their calendars, and then link everyone's calendar so that they are all shared. When someone schedules a meeting, everyone knows about it. When someone blocks off an afternoon to work on a project, everyone knows not to bother them. Establish this habit from the onset and everyone will be more productive.

6. Processing Payments: Stripe

If you are launching an eCommerce business, you are going to need a way to process payments online. Other kinds of businesses can process payments this way too, instead of asking clients to write checks or get set up with ACH payments, etc.

In my opinion, I'd go with Stripe. I mean, there's a reason why one of the co-founders just became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. It's an extremely easy platform (that integrates with both Square space and WordPress, along with many others) that allows you to process payments for goods, services, etc. Stripe does take a small % but the convenience aspect makes it worth it, in my opinion.

Now, if you are dealing with a custom website, then check out Moonclerk as an integration option with Stripe. While Stripe works great for the actual payment processing, sometimes it can get a little hairy in terms of building the actual checkout experience through your site (especially if you're one of those businesses that hires a creative shop to design you a great site, but now you want to make changes to it and you don't have a developer). And if you are not very "digitally savvy," Moonclerk also makes it super easy to set up recurring payments for your retainer clients.

Note: PayPal is an equally viable option, but from what I've seen most eCommerce businesses offer both, PayPal and Stripe.

7. Social Media: Hootsuite

If social media isn't going to be a big part of your marketing strategy, this isn't really necessary (since you can always post directly onto each platform). However, if you are going to be driving a lot of traffic via social and managing lots of different content schedules, I would highly suggest using an organization and scheduling platform like Hootsuite.

In a nutshell: The big benefit to using Hootsuite is having everything in one place. Yes, Facebook has analytics. Twitter has analytics. Instagram now has analytics. Etc. But being able to see all those analytics in one place (and with a few added caveats) can be helpful--especially when time is of the essence.

The other big benefit is the ability to schedule posts in advance. Again, most platforms allow you to handle the scheduling, but having everything in one place so you can see everything that's going out just gives you a different level of awareness as a content creator. It can be hard to keep everything separate in your mind when it's all over the place.

Of all the tools on this list, I'd say this is more of a luxury than an absolute "need." But I'll also say this: You don't know pain until you've managed multiple Facebook pages, Twitter pages, and Instagram accounts, separately. If that's the position you're about to be in (running a digital marketing agency, for example) then Hootsuite becomes an absolute necessity.

I realize this is a lot to digest and be able to integrate.

Why Publishers Shifted From Facebook

Publishers Shifted from Facebook

In the world of digital journalism, the one constant we’ve all grown accustomed to is change. I bet 
you can relate to just how frustrating it can be sitting at conferences hearing about the next, great thing, knowing chances are good it won’t even be an afterthought three years from now.

Well, change has come again for many publishers, but this time it isn’t some new social network promising the world, or a shiny new app offering untold digital riches. It’s actually a word we use every day—Google

Just like Rip Van Winkle, it appears fatigued publishers are starting to wake up from a long, Facebook-induced slumber to suddenly remember the long-forgotten importance of SEO and are redeploying their engagement resources to make a play to grow their search traffic.

Back in September, Time hired noted SEO expert Jon Hawkins as the publisher’s new vice president of growth, a high-level position that places a lot of importance on making search a larger part of their digital growth strategy. 

“We need to make sure we have a diversified amount of traffic coming in and have all areas of referral traffic growing,” Beth Buehler, the newly-named COO at health publisher Rodale, told Digiday. “So when Facebook changes its algorithm, while it hurts, it doesn’t cripple us because we still have a healthy amount of search traffic coming in.”

According to many industry insiders, Facebook’s recent decision to make articles posted by publishers less visible in users’ news feeds has been the tipping point, capping off a yearly decline in the organic (i.e. unpaid) reach of their articles.

“I’m hearing more and more recently about publishers losing traffic to Facebook’s changing algorithm and looking to Google,” said Clare Carr, VP of marketing at Parse.ly.

Facebook has only themselves to blame. The social media network has tried to play the pied piper to anxious publishers looking to grow traffic, but have only managed to frustrate newsrooms with their constantly-shifting priorities and numerous algorithm changes.

Facebook has claimed all this has been done in an effort to promoted trusted, quality content, and that as a result publishers who create quality content will more naturally find its way into the Facebook feeds of its users. International News Media Association (INMA) research also says 79 of the top 100 digital publishers in the U.S. saw traffic from Facebook decline over the second quarter of 2016.

It doesn’t help that Facebook is notoriously stingily with their data and analytics, often leaving publishers in the dark when it comes to the true effectiveness of their strategies. Back in September, Facebook was forced to apologize for overestimating the average time users spent watching their videos, in some cases by as much as 60 to 80 percent.

“Part of the reason publishers are always distrustful of Facebook or any self-proclaimed ‘utility’ is the lack of transparency in the algorithms which humans clearly tune for Facebook’s success” also If Facebook refuses to accept the responsibility of a media company, then like a utility company they shouldn’t get to secretly program who gets what water.”

The gripes publishers have with Facebook don’t end there. According to a recent report done by the INMA, more than half of respondents aren’t too thrilled with the ad revenue they generate from their content on Facebook. They’re also pretty dissatisfied about how the social media giant has been at communicating changes in their products.

“Many publishers view doing business with Facebook as a sort of Faustian dilemma: They can get rich, but they might lose their souls,” said Grzegorz Piechota, a research associate at Harvard Business School who wrote the report. “Or, to be precise, they can get access to vast audiences and make some money but risk diluting their brand and losing their direct relationship with users.”

There is a level of irony in publishers shifting slightly away from Facebook over algorithm changes, when it was those same types of tweaks that caused them to sour for Google in the first place. The difference today is Google really seems to have tightened up their quality control, making the content newspapers already published more valued and visible in their search results.

That also means it’s harder today to game Google’s results, and publishers are going to have to do more than fill their sites with “What time does the Super Bowl start?” stories if they’re going to be successful in growing their search traffic. But that doesn’t mean there  aren’t non-breaking news opportunities to grow traffic, even for local publications.

Best Practices for Mobile Publishing Success

We have seen digital publishing trends evolve a lot over the last several years, but no change has been quite as impact as the widespread shift towards mobile.    

Creating a mobile-optimized magazine that engages readers forces publishers to rethink their approach to digital publishing. Simply taking the same desktop edition and shrinking

it down for smartphones or tablets is not only cause for a terrible user experience, but it also fails to take into account the unique behaviors and requirements of mobile readers.

There are many components to creating a mobile-friendly version of your magazine that delights readers, including design, content, and functionality. To help you get started with your own mobile publication, here are a list of best practices that you should keep in mind during the planning stages.

DESIGN

Navigation Should be Easy and Intuitive

It is an undisputed truth that as screen size decreases, so too does our tolerance for bad mobile design. As a result, publishers need to make sure that they are creating a mobile-friendly version of their magazine that allows readers to quickly find the content that they are after. To ensure that everything is only one or two clicks away, it makes sense to restructure your magazine based on individual articles and organize them into category sections. This way, readers can easily jump to a specific article instead of needing to flick back and forth between pages to find what they are after.

Articles Should look Good in Portrait or Landscape Orientation

When designing for mobile don’t forget that readers will be inclined to view the magazine in different orientations. While long text articles are easier to read in portrait, interactive elements such as videos and image galleries will make better use of the available screen space in landscape. Make sure paragraph text flows and does not require horizontal scrolling. Adopting a responsive site design will ensure that your articles adapt to any device’s screen size and orientation and leave your readers with a superior mobile user experience.

Keep Clutter to a Minimum

Since you are working with limited screen real estate on mobile, it makes sense to remove anything extraneous from the design that doesn’t add to the overall user experience. Think strategically about how you organize your magazine content as well. Don’t design so that users have to scroll for flick between articles excessively to find what they are looking for. Instead, each screen view within your mobile magazine should have just one central focus. Running one article per page will promote a simple, organized magazine structure and will prevent any confusion when it comes to sharing articles.

Use Colors that Translate well Online

While it is important to use colors that match either your print edition or overall brand palette, make sure these colors look good online. Secondly, contrast is key! Avoid using pale colors for blocks of text, especially against a white background as this will lead to eye strain and cause reader frustration that could have been easily avoided.

Instead, use color strategically; to highlight important content, create order, invoke emotion, and to form a stronger brand connection with your readers. You can draw attention to important CTAs with the use of loud, vibrant colors for buttons that stand out against a minimalist background.

Pay Attention to Your Choice of Fonts

Ensure all fonts you use are practical, functional, and appropriate for their particular use. Mobile reading behavior is broader and much more fragmented than with desktop, with both on-the-go reading, and extended lean-back reading common. As a result, it is crucial that the font you use makes for easy skim reading, as well as longer reading sessions.

Steer clear of fonts that are too fine, condensed, pale, or otherwise too difficult to read on small screens as this will result in a poor user experience. Your font typeface should also maintain clarity even when used at its smallest size. When combining fonts, make sure they compliment each other. This may be a matter of trial and error, so play around with a few different choices and see which combinations are most effective.

Optimize images to keep load times short

Images will often account for the largest downloads when loading a website. As a result, simply optimizing the images in your mobile magazine will greatly improve overall site performance and save your readers from wasting all of their mobile data. Most pixel-based photo editing programs, like Adobe Photoshop, will have an ‘optimize for web’ setting built in and will allow you to play around further with the image dimensions and quality so that you can find an image setting that you are happy with.

If you are using a mobile-first publishing solution for your magazine then this optimization process should be taken care of automatically for you.

Design Your Magazine for Touch

A superior mobile magazine interface will need to do more than simply shoehorn the same desktop design into a small screen. It should take into account the physicality of mobile interaction, and the lack of precision with finger and thumb touches. When designing with mobile ergonomics in mind, avoid links that are tightly packed together as this will lead to touch errors and heightened user frustration. Also, ensure that all buttons are large enough to press without zooming in on the screen. Accommodate common mobile hand gestures such as swipe to collapse menus or to navigate to the previous/next article article.

Keep Subscription Processes Simple and Login Forms Minimal

Filling out a subscription or registration form can be tedious even on desktop. Shrink the whole experience down for small mobile touch screens and it becomes every smartphone user’s nightmare.

Make sure readers can subscribe, pay, and get access to your magazine content as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Don’t ask users to manually fill out the same lengthy forms you use on desktop. With most virtual mobile keyboards obscuring at least a third of the screen, users will not be happy if they have to spend their time zooming in and out to locate all of the form fields.

Create a logical order through sign up forms, requiring minimal free text entry. Explore easy one tap sign in methods, such as connecting with a social media account. For purchasing subscriptions, include a card-free payment option so access to content can granted motionlessly.

CONTENT

• Create Article ‘Teasers’

  A teaser is a short preview of each of your articles which aims to inform and inspire readers to click through to read the article in its entirety. To create teasers that drive reader engagement you will need to include the most important elements of each article, including the headline, the lead image, and a very brief, estimable summary of the article. The summary for each lead article can be displayed on the home page, and the summary for every article organized into each section list.

• Use Interactivity to Improve the User Experience

  Add optimized videos straight from YouTube, image galleries, and interactive maps to your articles to delight and engage readers. Make sure to keep both user experience and mobile design in mind when adding any form of multimedia. If the element is not contributing anything worthwhile to the article (whether its purpose is to be informative, entertaining, or functional) then it is best to leave it out.
  Always give the reader control over how they choose to engage with the multimedia content in your mobile edition. You can do this by avoiding the overuse of auto-play videos or audio tracks. Not only are these features highly annoying for the reader, but they are a major drain on data.

• Advertising Should be Interactive, Unobtrusive and Effective

  There are numerous creative ways for publishers to grow their advertising revenue strategy on mobile. Make sure to explore your options thoroughly to find what will work best within your mobile magazine. The last thing you want to do is drive readers away because of poorly executed advertising. Avoid over the top ads that will disrupt the user experience, or otherwise have a negative impact on your editorial content. Instead opt for banner or interstitial ads, these can be added at the top of the page or intermittently throughout your articles. Sell these spaces to your print advertisers for more exposure, or paste in ad server code from online ad networks like Google AdSense so that Google sells the ad spaces for you.
  If you are running native ads (or sponsored articles) in your mobile magazine then make sure that you set a clear line between what is editorial and what is paid content by labeling the latter accordingly. Failing to do so can result in a loss of brand trust.

• Keep Content Fresh.

  Unlike your print (or print replica) edition, when you publish your magazine as HTML articles you will quickly realize you now have much more flexibility over how you manage your published content. You can give old magazine articles new life by going back and modifying the content days, weeks, or months after they were originally published. This can include updating the ads and promotions, publishing results of polls, or adding brand new evergreen articles into the issue for improved SEO performance.

FUNCTIONALITY

• Test Thoroughly for Technical Problems

  Load the magazine on mobile devices that range in screen size, operating system, browser preference, and processing power. Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool to see if your mobile edition meets their standards. Loading time should be quick and without any lags, whether using WiFi or mobile data. Another thing to look out for when testing is to make sure that your site responds to device-specific commands and gestures, such as Safari’s back swipe on iPhone's. Identify any added content that is unsupported on mobile, such as Flash video or license-constrained media, and replace with mobile-friendly options, like HTML 5 animations and open source media.

• Include Customization Options

  Reading preferences come in all shapes and sizes. Provide users with a superior mobile experience by letting them maintain a level of control over how content is displayed or organized for them. This can be something as simple as letting readers adjust the text size or font in your articles to allow for accessibility requirements. You can take this one step further by including individualized features like bookmarks, search filters, location settings to display relevant articles or ads, or even custom language options.

• Make Articles Shareable

  Allow readers to easily share issues or individual articles to their social media account or to email them to a friend. You can do this by including mobile-friendly social sharing buttons at the start and end of each article. This can help you boost the discover ability of your content online, as well as improving your SEO performance by increasing the number of back-links to your mobile site. While you are at it, have a think about how shareable your content is too. Headlines should be concise and and attention grabbing since this is what will display in readers’ social media feeds. Remember, articles which can be shared with an image will be more effective at driving click-through than just including a headline.

• Give the Option to View the Replica Magazine

  Always give readers an easy route back to the flip-book edition of your magazine so that they can experience it in its replica format. Keep the mobile optimized edition as your default view and include a ‘View as Flip-book’ link in the menu, which will load the same issue you are currently reading in its replica format. Readers should be able to easily and intuitively switch between these different modes without getting lost.

• Incorporate Mobile-Specific Functionality

  Mobile devices have features like SMS, GPS, phone, camera, and a range of other functions that simply are not possible on desktop. Have a think about how you can leverage these features in your mobile edition to create a stronger user experience. A really easy way of doing this is by including Call Now, or Get Directions buttons to your ads to drive conversions.

These are the building blocks for a mobile-friendly magazine that engages and delights readers.
If you are a publisher who has yet to optimize your publication for mobile then the good news is that Real-view have done all of the heard work for you. 

If you are struggling to create multiple versions of your publication for each device or platform then click through to find out how Patrica, our new mobile-first digital publishing solution, can help you take on the mobile market and come out on top!

F & Q PixelMags

How PixelMags Work on Digital Publishing

There are Seven steps in According PixelMags works.

1.Upload

The process starts by simply uploading your content to our cloud based Pixel-tools. then the magic starts to happen with Content.

2. Content Analysis

This is the most important part of the process. Our automated algorithms understand the key elements and flow within your content.

3. Content Deconstruction

This allows us to extract and mark up all your elements into articles and discard everything else which non Essential.

4. Quality Control

Although PixelMags built the most efficient and accurate tools in the world, there's always the possibility of error. That's why there's a set of human eyes that check over all of your content. We will catch those unpredictable errors.

5. Content Preparation

This is where it all comes together. Every digital newsstand wants a different set of content so we prepare and bundle the most enhanced assets together for each newsstand.

6. Piracy Tracking

For security, we embed piracy markers within the content unique to each digital newsstand we deliver to, so if you do experience any piracy we can help close down the point at which your content is being stolen.

7. Distribution

We distribute it to the digital newsstands you have selected and with our new web-stand you can read it on any device.

Benefits of doing Digital Publishing

Advantages..!!!

• ► Increase Your Magazine Distribution on a global scale
• ► Deliver Content across multiple platforms and devices
• ► Lower Production and on-going publishing costs
• ► Open new Sustainable revenue channels through advertising and ecommerce
• ► Instantly Direct potential customers and traffic to your content

DIGITAL PUBLISHING

Digital Newsstands.

What are newsstands? Newsstands are the places where Pixelmags can supply your digital content. With a single PDF upload we will convert the PDF into the format preferred by each of your chosen newsstands! We will supply the content for you and then you can simply watch the money come rolling in.

Placing a focus on transforming the future of Digital publishing by changing how publishers distribute interactive branded content, PixelMags Inc. is one of the world’s fastest growing digital content distribution companies.  

PixelMags Work With.

PixelMags provide you a complete solution for magazine publishing. With a single PDF upload, you can publish your content to the largest digital newsstands (Apple, Google, Amazon, Readr, Readly) then get 100% of the revenue.Would you be available for a few minute conversation to discuss how Pixel Mags can help your Magazine for more readership on Digital Newsstands.