Picture Perfect: A Blogger’s Guide to Choosing Quality Images Part 1
Creating a blog involves multiple elements. Aside from your core content, you need images to support it. Pictures add variety and interest to an otherwise text-heavy page. As a blogger, you need to be discerning on what image you will use on your site. You can’t...
The Art of Building Your Blog Reputation: Encourage Reader Engagement
Businesses have been recognizing the increasing importance of blogs over the past years. In the 2012 study done by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, it showed that 171 (34%) of the Fortune 500 companies have corporate...
The Art of Building Your Blog Reputation: Create Quality Content
Building your blog reputation is no easy task but that is not to say that it can’t be done. It takes specialization, content building, and reader engagement to back it up. In our previous post, we looked at how you can establish your expertise. Reputation is all about...
The Art of Building Your Blog Reputation: Establish Your Expertise
The blogosphere is practically a world without limits. Despite the more than 133 million blogs indexed by blog search engine Technorati since 2002, more are still being created every day. The demand for blogs has been huge as well with 77% of internet users reading...
Navigate Through Your Brain with Mindmapping
In a previous post on Beating Writer’s Block, we briefly mentioned mindmapping as a way to get ideas out from our heads and onto paper. Today, we’ll revisit that topic and delve a bit deeper into mindmapping. Many of us take notes in a linear fashion. Lists and...
A Virtual Assistant In My Hand: Apps That Help Me Stay Productive
I've often joked that my brain is stored on my phone. Compared to the amazing virtual assistants I work with everyday, I'm a veritable mess. Fortunately for me, my gadgets (and the apps I install on them) help me stay productive, and in a way, serve as my own virtual...
Be our Valentine: Get 27% off VA Services and a Full Custom SEO Gift
We're always looking for ways to spice up your life, and for the entire month of February, we've got two hot new ways to do so. Hot New Plans First up is a pair of hot new packages designed to give you more time with your loved ones. After all, you want to spend...
2013 List of Official Philippine Holidays
The Pepper bunch are a hardworking crew, and that's a good thing. On the other hand, some of us run the risk of pushing ourselves too hard, and that's not quite so good. Fortunately, every so often, the powers-that-be require us to take some time off to relax,...
Making the Most of Our VA Services, Part 2: Communicate!
Welcome to the second part of our primer on virtual assistants. Since you're here, it's a safe bet that you, like many people, you don't quite know what to expect from a virtual assistant, or VA for short, and aren't quite sure how to work with her. The simple fact is...
Making the Most of Our VA Services, Part 1: Don’t Expect Super(wo)man
For many people, working with a virtual assistant, or VA for short, comes with a steep learning curve. Most people don’t know what to expect from their VAs, and are never quite sure how to work with them. We’re not surprised by this, because just a few short years...
Finding Inspiration
No matter how much you love writing, or doing any type of creative work for that matter, it doesn't always come easy. It's inevitable - there will be times when your creative juices simply don't flow. What do you do then? We have a few ideas. Just beat it Sometimes...
Beating Writer’s Block
Writer's block sucks. Whether you're crafting a blog post, typing up an essay for school, preparing a report for work, drafting an email, or writing anything else, writer's block sucks. Yes, it sucks so much it bears repeating. Writing about how much writer's block...
Blogger vs. WordPress – Which Works Best for You?
Remember that scene in the Facebook movie The Social Network, where young Mark Zuckerberg blabbed about his bad breakup with his girlfriend online? He felt so bad and heartbroken, he even compared her to a farm animal. That was blogging back then—a whole new,...
How to Promote Your Blog in 5 Simple Steps
No matter how awesome your web design is, or how convincing your words are, it won’t really matter if you have no readers. People will need to know you have a blog in the first place. How? Here are 5 simple steps:
Typhoon Sendong: Deadliest Typhoon To Date
During the early hours of December 17, 2011, tropical storm “Sendong” (international nameWashi) struck Cagayan de Oro City, as well as neighboring cities in the southern Philippines, catching most of its sleeping inhabitants completely off guard. What would have been a merry Christmas for most families turned into heartbreak and longing for dead or missing loved ones.
Virtual Teams Series: Pros & Cons of Working with Virtual Teams
This is the 4th and final post in Pepper's Virtual Teams Series. In case you've missed the first three posts, you can check out What is a Virtual Team, How to Effectively Work with a Virtual Team, and Online Collaboration Tools for Virtual Teams. Everything has an...
Virtual Teams Series: Online Collaboration Tools for Virtual Teams
An important aspect of effectively managing virtual teams is the collaboration that goes into the work. Many online tools are available for seamless communication and coordination so that the virtual team manager is always on top of every team member’s tasks,...
Virtual Teams Series: How to Effectively Work with a Virtual Team
Communication and collaboration are two key success factors of effectively managing virtual teams, and ultimately, making the team work efficiently for you. Virtual teams are linked together by communication technologies that allow them to interact electronically by...
Virtual Teams Series: What is a Virtual Team?
Purpose, people, and links - these are the three main aspects of a virtual team. Purpose, being the most critical aspect among the three, is what links the virtual team together. This purpose is defined by individual tasks that result to a common goal. The number of...
HOT Pepper Virtual Assistant Summer Packages!!!
This summer, we want to give you time to do whatever you want. Whether you want to spend more time with your family, go on vacation, attend a conference, or simply get more sleep, Pepper VA wants to help you do it. One of our goals at Pepper VA is to help you make the...
Web Usability Series: Part 5 – Say it, and say it well
The most important element of any web page is the content. Let's face it: content is king. You can have the best designed site in the world, but if you have nothing worth reading or listening to, nobody is going to care. Worse, if you do have something worth saying,...
Claim and List your Blog in Technorati
Technorati is a real-time search engine concentrated on tracking blogs. This will not only drive more traffic to your blog, but also help position you as an authority in your respective field. So, if you’d like to get more exposure for your blog, make sure to get it...
Passion for Work
The key to success is finding what you love to do and to making a career out of it. It’s definitely easier said than done. There are people who took years taking up medicine, law or a master’s degree, putting all of their efforts and time into honing their craft, only...
Web Usability Series: Part 4 – Show me around
Hey gang, we're back, and this time we're tackling another aspect of web usability. This week's topic: navigation and information retrieval – specifically, how to make that simple and easy. Before we get to that though, let's discuss something pretty important: the...