December 2022 - Page 9 of 9

Bimonthly vs. Biweekly Pay: 7 Key Differences

Many businesses use biweekly or bimonthly payroll cycles to compensate their employees. For the most part, employees get paid twice a month with both methods, but each has several key differences that determine if it works well in a given company or industry.

Bimonthly and biweekly payments differ mainly in their payroll processing timing. However, finer details, like efficiency and the types of employees you have, will affect which one you choose. Payroll processing software can help you keep track of your pay periods and ensure that your employees get paid correctly and on time.

1. Number of Yearly Paychecks

Bimonthly or semimonthly pay cycles give employees 24 paychecks per year, two per month. Many companies issue these payments at the beginning and middle or the middle and end of each month.

A biweekly payment cycle issues a paycheck every two weeks, so employees receive two additional paychecks per year for a total of 26. As a result, employees get three paychecks during two months of the year. If the first paycheck falls on a Friday early in the month, employees will get paid on that day, another Friday in the middle of the month, and a third Friday at the end of the month.

Gusto homepage Gusto helps everyone on your team process payroll fast and get paid on time every pay period.

The difference in the number of paychecks doesn’t affect how much your employees get paid—it just distributes that payment differently. For some people, getting paid biweekly makes them feel like they’re making more money, and it can be convenient since they don’t have to wait as long between pay cycles. With bimonthly paychecks, they may have to wait a few extra days.

A payroll processing service like

Talking Fast May Be A Sign Of Intelligence And Has Other Advantages

Talking fast may make people appear more intelligent, although the evidence is mixed — research reveals if there are other advantages.

Beware the fast-talker, the person with the gift of the gab—the friendly salesman, the oily politician—running through the ‘facts’ faster than you can keep up. Rat-a-tat-tat.

What does all that fast talking do to us? Does it have advantages?

Are we more persuaded by their apparent confidence and grasp of the subject?

Or, are we less persuaded because all the information comes at us too fast to be processed?

Advantages of talking fast

When psychologists first began examining the effect of speech rate on persuasion, they thought the answer was cut-and-dried.

In 1976 Norman Miller and colleagues tried to convince participants that caffeine was bad for them (Miller et al., 1976).

The results suggested people were most persuaded when the message was delivered at a fully-caffeinated 195 words per minute rather than at a decaffeinated 102 words per minute.

At 195 words per minute, about the fastest that people speak in normal conversation, the message became more credible to those listening, and therefore more persuasive.

Talking fast seemed to signal confidence, intelligence, objectivity and superior knowledge.

[However, another study in a different context has found that speaking slowly is linked to sounding intelligent, so the link is far from proven.]

Going at about 100 words per minute, the usual lower limit of normal conversation, was associated with all the reverse attributes.

These results, along with a couple of other studies, lead some researchers to think that speaking quickly was a potential ‘magic bullet’ of persuasion.

Perhaps we should watch out for people who speak quickly—who knows what we might agree to.

Advantages of talking slowly

By the 1980s, though, other researchers had begun to wonder if these results could really be correct.

They pointed to studies suggesting that while talking faster seemed to boost credibility, it didn’t always boost persuasion.

The effects of talking fast might not all be positive; for example, when someone talks quickly it can be hard to keep up with what they are saying, so the persuasive message doesn’t have a chance to take hold.

By the 1990s a more nuanced relationship between speech rate and persuasion emerged.

Stephen Smith and David Shaffer, for example, tried to convince one group of student participants the legal age for drinking should be kept at 21 (Smith & Shaffer, 1991).

Another group they tried to persuade the age should not be 21 (this was shortly after the legal age for drinking in the US was raised to 21).

Fast, slow and intermediate speech rates were employed and this time a telling twist emerged.

When the message was counter-attitudinal (you’ll not be amazed to hear that college students don’t like the idea they can’t legally drink in bars), fast talking was more persuasive than the intermediate, with slow talking being the least persuasive of all.

Exactly the reverse effect was seen when the message was pro-attitudinal.

When preaching to the converted, it was slow speech that emerged as the most persuasive.

The question became: why does the effect reverse…

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The Anatomy of High-Converting Sales Copy

And no, you don’t need to be a copywriter or hire one. Yet.

Can this post alone help you write your high-converting sales copy? Keep reading.

Will it feel like a lot of work? Maybe.

Will it work? Yes.

When some entrepreneurs and marketers think of writing copy, they either turn to AI or Google their way through it. Maybe they get lucky and score a free template they can copy and paste.

Unfortunately, this is lazy. And lazy effort equals sluggish results. But you’re not lazy. You’re here to peruse this article and get to work right after.

Here’s what you need to do to nail your sales copy:

Doing Voice of Customer Research

This research involves learning everything you need to know about your current and prospective clients.

So that you can learn:

Their wants
Their needs
Their frustrations
Their successes
Their motivations
Their hesitations
Past failed solutions
What they are saying about your competitors
What they are saying about your brand
What they think about themselves

If you skip this step, you’ll risk not knowing what your ideal clients are saying or how they’re saying it.

Which means you’ll risk not connecting with them on any level.

Without this research, you’ll write copy blindly and guess your way through it rather than using your prospects’ words and phrases.

And guess what… this research alone can write 90% of your copy for you.

You can do this research in many ways. You can interview some of your clients and possibly survey them.

You can also read your positive and negative reviews and sort them based on the list above. Last but not least, you can read social media comments and even forums.

At the end of this research, you want to have an organized spreadsheet with the data you collected and sorted using the bullet points from above. Use this spreadsheet to help drive your copy.

The research above will tell you what to say and how to say it. If your biggest blocker around writing copy is not knowing what to write, you’ll eliminate it after doing your Voice of Customer research.

Copywriting Is Hard, We Made It Simple…

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Structuring Your Funnel

This is where you take a step back and wireframe your funnel before you work on your assets. Start with your traffic sources (social media, paid ads, blogs, etc.) and what their last step should be (purchase).

After you plot the beginning and end of your funnel, filling in what goes in between is easier. You’ll also be able to tell how many assets you’ll need.

Let’s say you’re selling a low-ticket product. Your simple funnel could be ads > landing page to lead magnet > email sequence > purchase.

If you’re…

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Some Childhood Aspirations Come True

Some of my childhood aspirations come true. And some childhood aspirations drifted into oblivion.

I’m delighted I grew up on a farm, but milking cows cured me of any desire to be a dairy farmer. I hated the monotony of milking cows twice a day. Tractors are fun. Machinery is fun. I admire farmers and love farm life, but I imagined getting away from the farm.

In elementary school I imagined being a hermit. There’s something exhilarating about being secluded and alone. My hermit-voice is my introvert voice. I’m still a hermit today. I don’t live in a shanty with an outhouse but I enjoy my own company. My imagined self took on a new form but my childhood aspirations live on.

Some people prefer death to public speaking, but I’ve been imagining myself speaking in front of groups since I was 13. In this case, imagination became reality.

I always imagined myself successful as a leader and speaker, but my broadest impact comes from writing. I didn’t attempt writing until my 50’s. I never imagined a global reach.

Speaking and writing came together when I received my first invitation to speak to a group of church leaders. It must have been about 2001 or so. I told my wife we could make money doing this. We laughed.

Our first trip overseas happened because a group in Ireland completely changed their approach to reorganization because of an article I wrote. They were having a grand re-launch of their organization and thought I should be there. So we flew to Ireland.

And then leadership coaching came out of the blue.

I am – in many ways – the person I have been since birth. On the other hand, one thing leads to another; new aspirations find life. I am surprised that both things are true.

What were some of your childhood aspirations?

How have your childhood aspirations come true?

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5 Strategies for Employee Availability Forms

As a manager, scheduling employee shifts is likely one of your most tedious and time-consuming tasks. That’s where employee availability forms come into the picture. These forms are a vital asset for any business employing shift workers. Considering how time-intensive planning employee work schedules are, the clear and concise format of employee availability forms brings more structure, reducing shift scheduling headaches.

1. Understand What Employee Availability Forms Are And Why They’re Important

An employee availability form is kind of self-explanatory—it’s a form where employees can list the days and hours they’re available to work, as well as the days and hours they absolutely cannot work.

Think of it as a document containing basic information about each employee, along with their contact details, to make the process of scheduling shifts straightforward and headache-free.

Employee availability forms help simplify and streamline your team’s schedule. Without it, staff scheduling can be messy and time-consuming, with constant back and forth between multiple employees to check their availability and constant reviewing of schedules.

Moreover, certain shifts require employees with specific skills and character traits. If you don’t assign the right person for these jobs because of availability issues, your customers may leave unsatisfied, and your business will suffer.

Let me explain—suppose you run a restaurant and have created the perfect schedule to handle a rush hour at lunchtime with efficient and personal employees. Now, if one or two of these employees don’t turn up because of availability issues, that shift will go from smooth and easy to stressful and overworked, which can hurt your customer experience that day and potentially your restaurant’s reputation.

Implementing up-to-date and accurate employee availability forms can prevent staff unavailability and poor service issues. You’ll know who can work when and accordingly create schedules that strike the right balance between your…

8 Facts About Happiness That Improve Your Mental Health

Facts about happiness reveal the thoughts and behaviours that are proven to make people happier.

People taught the basics of happiness science consistently report better mental health, research finds.

University students who did an online ‘Science of Happiness’ course fared better mentally than their peers who did not take the course, the study found (Hobbs et al., 2022).

Facts about happiness

There is a longer description of the study at the bottom of this article, but here are the facts about happiness taught on the course, (relevant studies are linked):

It is based on the latest research into the thoughts and behaviours that are proven to make people happier.

Talking to strangers makes us happier, despite a majority of us shying away from such encounters (see: why you should talk to strangers).
Social media is not bad for everyone, but it can be bad for those who focus on their reputation (1, 2).
Loneliness is linked to a weakened immune system.
People who are optimistic tend to live longer.
Giving gifts to others activates our own reward centres in the brain—often providing more of a happiness boost than spending money on yourself (why spending money on others promotes your happiness).
Sleep deprivation impacts how well we are liked by others (people feel socially unattractive when they don’t get enough sleep).
Walking in the countryside deactivates part of the brain related to negative ruminations, which are associated with depression (As little as 10 minutes spent in nature is enough to make people feel happier).
Kindness and happiness are correlated (acts of kindness really do boost happiness).

More facts about happiness

Here are some more interesting facts about happiness, as revealed by psychological research.

9. Most people are happy most of the time

Maybe you don’t need to do anything at all to feel happy…

People are, on average, in a mildly good mood most of the time all around the world, a study finds.

Researchers have reviewed evidence drawn from many different nations — rich and poor, stable and unstable.

As long as people have not just experienced a strong emotional event, even those in poor circumstances are likely to be in a mild positive mood.

10. The mid-life dip is normal

Life satisfaction dips in middle age, after which it starts going up again beyond the age of 54, a study of worldwide well-being finds.

The dip in life satisfaction occurs around the age of 45 until 54, and is seen across many wealthy English-speaking countries, including the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia.

Professor Angus Deaton, one of the study’s co-authors, said:

“This finding is almost expected.

This is the period at which wage rates typically peak and is the best time to work and earn the most, even at the expense of present well-being, so as to have increased wealth and well-being later in life.”

11. Take a tip from seniors

With increasing age, people get more pleasure out of everyday experiences; while younger people define themselves more by extraordinary experiences, a study finds.

The study asked over 200 people between the ages of 19…

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Freelance Writing Clients: 5 Pro Tips That Help You Find Terrific Prospects

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