It's Tax Season! The Best Questions to Ask an Accountant

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It's Tax Season! The Best Questions to Ask an Accountant

It’s that time of year when “accountants near me” is quite a popular Google search. But Google or the yellow pages aren’t always the best way to find the right accountant.

Before scheduling an accounting consult you want to make sure you know the right questions to ask an accountant or tax preparer.

Your Goals

Knowing what you want to accomplish by hiring an accountant can help you find the right person for the job. Some common goals of small business owners include increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, staying organized, paying as little tax as possible, and making sure all required tax returns are filed on time to avoid penalties and interest.

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10 Ways Content Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Business

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10 Ways Content Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Business

Content marketing is one of the best ways to show off your expertise, grab the attention of potential clients, and grow your business. It’s all about using information to sell your products and services rather than blatant self-promotion that nobody really wants to hear anyway.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, the amount of traffic to your website is directly related to the amount you publish on your site, with sites publishing four times per week experiencing three and a half times more traffic than sites publishing zero to four times per month.

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Maintaining Order AND Flexibility (Part 2)

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Maintaining Order AND Flexibility (Part 2)

Woohoo! It’s the final day in 12 Days of Planning a Novel. I’ve had a lot of fun writing this series and I’m a little sad it’s coming to an end, but I hope it’s helped you create an amazing novel outline that will help you breeze through writing your novel.

Today I want to talk a bit more about staying organized while still having the flexibility to make changes in your novel outline without causing yourself a lot of extra work. My last post focused on how to do this using sticky notes or recipe cards. This post is for those of you that prefer to use as little paper as possible.

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Maintaining Order AND Flexibility (Part 1)

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Maintaining Order AND Flexibility (Part 1)

Just two days left to go in 12 Days of Planning a Novel. If you’re like me, you probably have tons of notes for your outline but you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed. As you’ve been working through this series, you’ve made a lot of additions and maybe some changes. Your tidy notes now have arrows and scribbles all over the place.

Don’t worry, these last two posts are going to show you how to organize your outline while maintaining the flexibility that’s often required when writing a novel. Part 1 will focus on the physical methods you can use to do this and in the next post, Part 2, I will discuss some digital ways to do this.

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Hooks and Cliffhangers

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Hooks and Cliffhangers

If you’ve read all the posts in my 12 Days of Planning a Novel series, I really appreciate you hanging in there with me. We are so close to being ready to start drafting a novel! There’s just one last thing I want to talk about: hooks and cliffhangers. Okay, maybe that is two things!

When I really started enjoying the thriller genre, it was because of author Greg Iles. He is a master at creating hooks and cliffhangers and if you feel like you struggle in this area, I highly recommend his books. I almost never stop reading at the end of a chapter because I have to know what happened.

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Setting as a Character

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12 Days of Planning a Novel: Setting as a Character

Today I’m going to cover another tip to help beef up your outline. I know by this point, you are probably itching to get writing your novel, but unless you are a pantser, which I don’t think you would be reading this post if you are, you’ll appreciate having a very detailed outline once you start writing.

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12 Days of Planning Your Novel: Subplots

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12 Days of Planning Your Novel: Subplots

Adding subplots to your novel is a really great way to make your story more interesting as well as help you hit your word count goal. So far in this series, 12 Days of Planning Your Novel, I’ve covered figuring out what to write about, conducting research, character development, story vs. plot, starting your outline, creating conflict, and using other stories as inspiration. Let’s talk about the importance of subplots and how you can add them to your outline in a natural way.

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12 Days of Planning Your Novel: Story Inspiration

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12 Days of Planning Your Novel: Story Inspiration

At this point in my series, 12 Days of Planning Your Novel, you probably have a pretty good outline but you might be wondering if you have enough ideas to write a full length novel. Don’t worry! The next few posts in this series will provide you with a few more ways you can add scenes to your outline, so when it comes time to write your novel, you’ll have plenty to work from.

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