Apex Gifts And Prints LLP: September 2021

Thursday 30 September 2021

The Ultimate Guide to Succession Planning

At one of my first jobs out of college, my manager admitted that my professional growth "wasn't a priority." I knew I wasn't in a leadership role that required succession planning, but the admission still stunned me. Without support for career development, I wound up leaving the company.

This situation may seem dramatic, but it points to the importance of having a succession plan in place. Of course, senior leadership roles take precedence because these can create a larger vacuum if the position is left unfilled. But succession planning can (and should) extend to all leaders across a company.

Developing a succession plan can set your company up for smooth transitions when leaders resign or accept a promotion. It can have a major impact on employee morale and can position your team to skillfully handle future business challenges.

But you don't want to wait until you absolutely need a successor. At that point, you're scrambling and may choose the wrong person. Let's look at the ins and outs of succession planning so your team is prepared for any transition.

What is succession planning?

Succession planning is a strategic process for identifying high-potential employees and taking steps to prepare them for future leadership positions. It helps your business develop and retain the talent pipeline so you can quickly fill vacant leadership roles.

Some succession plans look ahead 12 to 36 months for when a leader retires, steps down, advances, or leaves. Others, including CEO succession plans, look years into the future to secure the next several generations of leaders. We'll cover the specifics of C-suite transitions later on. But all succession planning has similar benefits for thinking ahead and identifying what you want in a successor.

Why is succession planning important?

In the Global Leadership Forecast 2021 report, 11% of surveyed organizations said they have a "strong" or "very strong" leadership bench — the lowest reported in the past decade.

The benefits of strong leadership are apparent. It improves employee turnover, ensures the execution of goals, and contributes to the company's survival. So if a crucial leader leaves, a succession plan can help ensure the role is filled and your company continues to thrive. But that's not the only upside.

Benefits Of Succession Planning

Finding and developing people for future leadership roles allows you to promote from within. These employees have organizational knowledge and internal relationships that outside hires lack.

Letting employees know that you're investing in them is a huge morale boost. It can also increase motivation and loyalty to the company.

Training employees for leadership roles forces you to identify the skills, knowledge, practices, and relationships needed for each role in your succession plan. This can attract new talent, retain current employees, and keep you competitive.

Hiring for highly specialized roles isn't easy. Succession planning helps you find people with unique competencies when it comes time to replace the current employees.

Currently, leaders looking to develop skills outside of their daily work want more coaching and development assignments, in addition to assessment and formal training. Succession planning is the perfect way to formalize training for both present and future leaders.

Succession Planning Best Practices

Succession planning isn't simple. But if you consider these best practices as you choose successors, your company will be well-equipped to manage transitions and unexpected changes.

Formalize a Plan

The earlier you set a succession plan, the better. You don't want to risk a leadership vacuum that leaves teams feeling unsupported. That can quickly waterfall into an entire team or department leaving, especially if the leader is particularly strong and has a close relationship with their direct reports. Once you have a succession plan, write it down. Then, make it clear there's a plan in place for when the inevitable transitions happen.

Stay Dynamic

Volatility is common at every company. People move cities, find new jobs, and retire. Your succession plan should be able to adapt to change. Instead of creating a plan and only revisiting it when the time comes to fill a role, see the plan as an evolving process that needs to be constantly updated.

Evaluate Talent

Part of a fluid succession plan is taking the time to assess employees' interests, skills, performance, and opportunities. This can be done through 360-degree feedback, weekly check-ins with managers, informal training, or tools like the nine-box grid. The goal is to get an idea of people's strengths and weaknesses, career goals, and growth opportunities so you know who may be the right fit for leadership roles.

Communicate Openly

Communication builds trust, which makes it easier to set expectations and ensure everyone is on the same page. As you build a succession plan, have honest conversations with employees. Find out where people want to be, and tell them where they're currently at. The whole point is to make your plan a reality, and successors will appreciate your openness when the time comes to offer them a role.

Make Diversity and Inclusion a Priority

Companies with women in leadership roles experience almost 50% higher profit and share performance. And since women, especially women of color, have been most affected by the pandemic, it's wise to consider gender ratios in any succession plan — including the 2SLGBTQI+ communities.

Succession Planning Example

When asked, a whopping 61% of organizations said they didn't have a direct report who could step into their CMO role tomorrow. That's a bad sign for C-suite succession plans. Without a strategy to replace leaders, a company can quickly go downhill.

To avoid chaos, here are a few examples of how succession planning can play out:

McDonald's Smooth CEO Succession

How does a multi-billion dollar company thrive after losing two CEOs in one year? They had a concentrated effort to develop high-potential employees and created a backup plan for their succession plan.

Coca-Cola's Failed CEO Succession

The repercussions of a poor succession plan can affect a company for decades. See the implications of Doug Ivester's term as CEO and the stakeholder concerns that caused his resignation after two years.

Succession Planning Steps

Image Source

1. Make a plan for your plan.

This step is all about defining the goals of your succession plan and aligning with everyone involved. For some companies, this will mean meeting with your board to outline strategic priorities. For others, it will require meeting with senior leaders to define what you're looking for in a successor.

You'll be ready to move on to the next step once you:

Define the roles, skills, core competencies, and experience required for a successor.

Gather information and feedback on the above from your team or experts within your network.

Forecast your company's needs. Consider turnover trends, retirement dates, compensation strategies, and management training.

Update your job descriptions and any leadership models to reflect the information you've gathered. You want to be clear about your expectations before looking for candidates.

2. Identify potential candidates.

Using the succession profiles and job descriptions you've created, you're ready to seek out candidates. Make sure your approach is easy to repeat and introduces as little bias as possible. It can be helpful to get support from the HR team, who can share the tools needed to engage candidates and help facilitate the process.

To identify candidates, you can:

Look for leaders who develop others, follow through on projects, take action to support the company vision, and have strong leadership skills.

Get insight into each candidate's goals, disposition, and potential by holding interviews, creating surveys, and setting up focus groups.

Ask people for ideas on how to improve succession and leadership to get buy-in and discover who's engaged with the process.

3. Inform candidates.

There's a great debate on whether or not companies should let employees know they're succession candidates. But informing people of their potential will not only motivate them—it will prevent them from wondering about their future with the company. A great candidate may jump ship if they're in the dark and think they can find a better opportunity elsewhere.

Instead, communicate your intentions about the positions, people, and planning. Just keep your expectations incredibly clear on the included roles and people involved.

4. Set up professional development efforts.

Your company likely has programs in place for onboarding and training employees. But development is about creating opportunities for people to get experience beyond their current role and skillset. This is especially important for team members who can get caught in a specialist silo.

Once you identify candidates who you want to develop, you'll want to figure out the specific skills and knowledge they'll need to move to the next level. This often involves an individual development plan, continuous feedback, mentoring or coaching, formal training, and open conversations between the employee and their manager.

5. Do a trial run.

As potential successors accelerate their growth, they'll become true contenders for leadership roles. This is the ideal time to start trial runs to test their knowledge and expose them to various aspects of a position. Exposing candidates to real-world situations can highlight what effective leadership looks like and give them insight into overall company goals.

There are a variety of ways to get candidates involved, just choose the method that makes the most sense for the role.

Job shadow a senior leader to learn about their day-to-day tasks

Take on responsibilities when their manager is away

Invite them to sit in on higher-level meetings

Bring them into discussions on strategy, execution, or company forecasting

Involve them in the hiring process for junior candidates

Give them more responsibility on projects or involve them in cross-functional work

6. Adjust your hiring strategy.

Eventually, the time will come when you extend an offer to a potential candidate. And you'll need someone else to fill their role. Luckily, the successor can use their new leadership skills to help interview or train the person filling their position. This can be an employee a few levels down or a new hire.

That's why it's important to adjust your hiring strategy to account for successor's roles. Without them, your plan won't go as smoothly and their team will likely be scrambling to fill the gap.

7. Implement the plan.

Succession planning is a complex process with multiple short- and long-term layers. But eventually, it will be time to make the transition. Make an announcement and celebrate the succession. This will show employees that your company prides itself on strong leadership and has a plan for everyone's career development.

Sometimes, a more gradual transition is needed. Family businesses often struggle with smooth succession planning because of familial relationships, emotions, and intertwined histories. In this case, a clear succession plan based on business needs is exceptionally crucial to ensure the company's continued success

CEO Succession Planning

Only one in three CEOs rank their company's leadership quality as "very good" or "excellent." That's a low score for such a high-stakes business priority — especially considering the majority of CEO successors are internal hires.

Harvard Business Review (HBR) ranks CEO succession as "arguably the most important decision a board can make." Replacing a CEO needs to involve a long-term, well-devised plan that's linked to both short and long-term company priorities.

CEO succession planning can follow similar steps to employee succession planning, but there are specific considerations for this top-level role. HBR outlines the following tips for developing a CEO successor:

A candidate's competencies, personal attributes, and experiences need to be connected to business priorities. A charismatic senior leader may seem like the top pick, but a company may need a successor with expert-level technical skills in addition to social skills.

Think several generations ahead instead of focusing on the immediate successor. Succession is a long game, so you want to position it as a continuous process to develop top talent.

Identify seven potential CEOs in your company across all generations. This can take the stress off of each CEO transition and help keep your talent pipeline top-notch.

Train CEO candidates through a combination of on-the-job experience, executive coaching, education, mentoring, and cross-functional training.

Developing talent to take on the CEO role will require time and effort from high-level stakeholders. But it's absolutely worthwhile to prevent the vacuum this leadership role can leave if succession is poorly managed.

If a board is involved in the process, HBR recommends using board meetings to combine strategy sessions with talent development. That way, stakeholders can make sure strategy changes reflect the skills needed for potential successors.

Employee Succession Planning

Succession planning extends to employees in all roles across a company. Viewing it this way, rather than saving succession plans for senior leaders, helps you identify high-potential employees at all levels. You can then take steps to develop them into leaders who are able to take on additional responsibilities when a role opens up.

When looking for successors, keep an eye out for employees who are interested in learning new skills, are comfortable with change, can adapt to uncertainty and new leadership, and can manage various work environments. All potential successors should be motivated and engaged in the process because they have a chance to grow their knowledge and take on more challenging, rewarding roles.

When you see a path for an employee's growth, they'll see it too. So the next time a key leader steps down or a new director position is created, you'll know just the right people to recruit for the role.

source https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/succession-planning

In this blog you will find out about SEO news, tools and tips from different SEO companies and experts, which will helps you to grow your business.

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source https://www.facebook.com/108818354838599/posts/123192156734552/

How’d You Make That Flipping Awesome B2C Content for AARP?

AARP targets a huge audience – people in the United States over 50. But that doesn’t mean they don’t focus on niches too. The editor-in-chief of Sisters From AARP (and 2021 B2C Content Marketer of the Year) shares how they do it. Continue reading →

The post How’d You Make That Flipping Awesome B2C Content for AARP? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

source https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/09/award-winning-b2c-content-aarp/

Enterprise SEO: Everything You Need to Know

SEO. While this is a strategy we've been aware of for a while, did you know that 89% of marketers say SEO is successful?

And since more than 50 percent of all website traffic comes from organic search and 93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine, it's not surprising.

However, what do upmarket companies, with thousands of web pages and keywords, do when they're in the maturation phase of implementing SEO?

Instead of focusing on the small business and mid-market SEO strategies, they'll need to begin focusing on enterprise SEO.

In this post, let's review what enterprise SEO is, what tools to use, and what it looks like in practice.

What makes enterprise SEO different?

The main difference between small business/mid-market SEO and enterprise SEO strategies is that the tactics for larger organizations need to be scalable for thousands of web pages.

While a small business or mid-market company might have a few pages, or a couple hundred, larger organizations have thousands of web pages on their site. And it makes sense that the strategies that work for a small number of pages might not necessarily work for larger sites.

Why is enterprise SEO important?

Enterprise SEO is important because strategies that work for smaller businesses won't work for larger ones.

One of the main strategic differences between the two is that small businesses usually aren't targeting highly competitive, short tail keywords, while larger enterprise organizations are.

Additionally, larger companies need a specialized enterprise SEO team to keep track and maintain organic rankings. At smaller companies, the person in charge of SEO is usually also the content marketer and might even be in charge of social media.

When you're targeting more competitive keywords, and have thousands of pages on your site, you need a dedicated team working on your SEO, instead of one jack-of-all-trades that's spread too thin.

If you've worked at companies and felt like SEO just wasn't working for you, it's probably because you didn't have a dedicated team with experts when your company needed it.

Enterprise SEO will benefit large organizations because their SEO issues will be more complex due to the number of web pages on the site, the number of backlinks already acquired, domain authority already acquired, etc.

As a larger site, enterprise companies usually have great brand authority. But that means you can't undermine that authority by deleting or redirecting pages that have acquired backlinks and high page authority. You also need to keep this content up to date and fresh. And as you can imagine, the larger the company, the harder that is.

Ultimately, enterprise SEO needs to be smarter, scalable, and more sophisticated.

Now that we know why enterprise SEO is important, let's discuss some of the more sophisticated strategies you'll need to implement as a larger company.

1. Maintain page speed.

One of the technical SEO elements that becomes more complex with larger sites is maintaining page speed.

First, you'll need to test your website speed with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to see how quickly your website loads for users.

Then, to improve the page speed of individual pages you can compress images, reduce redirects, and cache your web pages.

2. Group content in subdomains.

Another strategy for enterprise SEO is to group your content into subdomains.

A subdomain is a type of website hierarchy under a root directory, but instead of using folders to organize content on a website, it kind of gets a website of its own.

This subdomain is still closely associated with the root directory, but it will usually have a separate content management system, template, analytics tools, and more.

See the image below to get an idea:

This is helpful for enterprise SEO because subdomains can house a lot of content that would be difficult to manage all on one website.

While some SEO experts believe that Google's crawlers could confuse a subdomain for an entirely different website from the main domain, others say its crawlers can recognize subdomains as extensions of parent domains.

Essentially, subdomains lead to a better user experience, which could result in better engagement rates, therefore improving your SEO. Ultimately, you'll have to decide what works best for your company and have your enterprise SEO team discuss what would be best.

3. Refresh old content, but protect domain authority and backlinks.

One of the challenges for enterprise SEO teams is keeping content up to date, accurate, and refreshed for current industry standards.

However, you don't want to delete old content that has high page authority and backlinks. Instead, you'll want to refresh your content, while balancing the line of adding new information, without taking away secondary keywords that content is ranking for.

With an enterprise company, refreshing content is a delicate process. But it also needs to be scalable for your SEO team to find out which pages need to be updated and what would make them more competitive. The entire point of enterprise SEO is to have a process that's scalable.

4. Quality content creation at scale.

Of course with SEO, quality content creation is one of the most important components of your site.

Again, on an enterprise level, this needs to be scalable for your SEO team to find new keywords to rank for and handoff to a content creation team.

Usually, your enterprise SEO team will choose target keywords and give writers guidelines on how to make the post competitive, whether that's including secondary keywords, tips on image alt-text, including snippets, etc.

To implement enterprise SEO, you'll need a team that is dedicated to creating content instructions and doing keyword research at scale.

5. Strategic keyword selection.

As we've been talking about, keyword selection becomes more difficult the more you've written about a topic. Sometimes it can feel like you've said everything there is to say.

That's why you need a dedicated enterprise SEO team to conduct regular keyword research and content gap analysis to find new topics to write about.

6. Automation.

So we've talked a lot about doing things "at scale." But how can you do that? One of the best ways for an enterprise SEO team to scale its processes is to use automation.

Automation can help with SEO tasks like keyword research, identifying problematic areas on your site, monitoring the quality of backlinks, analyzing title tags and meta descriptions, and more.

Additionally, you can use workflows to simplify project management. With larger organizations, you might have several locations with distinct websites and SEO needs. This means that your SEO teams should be using the same workflows so the process is scalable.

7. Don't forget about technical SEO.

Besides page speed, there are more technical SEO elements that your enterprise SEO team will need to manage.

This means that your SEO team will need a scalable process for using 301 redirects, eliminating technical issues that hamper crawlability, etc.

8. Link building.

Again, one of the most important elements of SEO is link building. On an enterprise level, this becomes more complex (as does everything, I suppose).

The more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google. You can use outreach strategies to find unlinked mentions and request to turn the mention into a backlink.

Additionally, you can always do cold outreach as well if you find articles where your site naturally fits. As a larger company, you'll have the benefit of already having brand authority and recognizability.

9. Internal pillar/cluster content linking.

Another SEO task that will need to be done at scale is internal pillar and cluster content linking. Your enterprise SEO team could either find these internal links for your content creators during the keyword research process or could advise your writers to link to the pillar and any necessary internal content.

10. Create templates for your pages.

When creating new pages for your site, SEO plays a large role. That's why your team can create templates that your developers can replicate over and over again in line with enterprise SEO needs.

So, now you might be wondering, "What does this look like in action?" Let's look at some examples below.

Enterprise SEO Examples

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a great example of enterprise SEO because while we might not have the same amount of employees as other big tech companies, we have over 35,000 pages on our site.

Additionally, our site ranks on the first page of several hundred thousand keywords, and in position 1 for over 30,000 keywords.

Because of the number of pages and keywords we target, this means that we need a highly specialized, dedicated enterprise SEO team to focus on backlinks, comarketing, technical SEO, and to protect our domain authority.

With enterprise SEO, we need to be careful about updating keywords on content that has high domain authority while keeping our content fresh and updated.

2. GitHub

GitHub has an estimated 81 million pages on its site. And the impressive part is that it ranks in position 1 on Google for over 80,000 keywords.

This means that the company is able to manage its site in bulk and focus on maintaining old pages, while still earning links to reinforce its organic rankings for hundreds of thousands of keywords.

3. Microsoft

Enterprise company Microsoft has more than 8 million pages on its site. With several varying products, it's no surprise that the company ranks on the first page for over 1 million keywords. Additionally, it ranks in the number 1 position for over 450,000 keywords.

A major difficulty with Microsoft's enterprise SEO is that the team is targeting very different types of keywords because of the variety of products. And they need to protect their domain authority across several industries from business tools to video gaming consoles.

The Future of Enterprise SEO

For large organizations, enterprise SEO is the future. To protect current domain authority and backlinks, while keeping content fresh and updated on thousands of pages, you'll need a dedicated, sophisticated team of experts.

This means an enterprise SEO team will focus on strategizing how to enhance content, working on comarketing, attaining backlinks and protecting those backlinks, and more. The more pages your site has, the harder and more complex it becomes to maintain your SEO.

source https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/enterprise-seo

How’d You Make That Flipping Awesome B2B Content for Salesforce?

How did Salesforce go from pausing all marketing to launching an award-winning content initiative just weeks into the pandemic? It wasn’t easy, but a fortuitously timed content revolution paved the way. Read the inspiring behind-the-scenes story. Continue reading →

The post How’d You Make That Flipping Awesome B2B Content for Salesforce? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

source https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/09/award-winning-b2b-content-salesforce/

Why you should stop using tags

Tags are very popular. On Instagram, we add tags to our posts to help people find them. However, using tags in that way on your WordPress site is devastating for your rankings. Even if you think that you’re not using a lot of them, make sure to read this post. In it, I’ll explain how tags work and why using way too many can severely damage your rankings. After that, I’ll tell you how they should be used (because they’re not bad altogether). Finally, I’ll give you some tips on how to clean up your site if you’ve accidentally used too many tags.

What happens on your WordPress site when you add a tag?

Tags should be used to categorize your posts. To make it easier to find a certain article in the big pile of posts you’ve written. Tags in WordPress are like categories. Be aware that with every one you add, WordPress will create a new page: a tag page. All articles that have the same tag, will be bundled there.

So for every tag that you add in WordPress, you’re adding a new page to your site. And the content on this page is often very thin. It only contains a link to the articles you’ve used the tag for. At Yoast, we regularly encounter sites that have thousands of tag pages and only hundreds of blog posts.

What happens to your rankings if you add too many tags?

Every tag you add inevitably leads to an extra page Google needs to crawl through. That’ll make crawling through your website more difficult. And, to make matters worse, every tag leads to a thin content page. A page Google really dislikes. If you have more tags than posts, you’ll have more ‘bad and thin content pages’ than you have high-quality content. And Google hates thin content. Sites with a lot of thin content don’t rank well. Thus: if you’re using too many tags, your rankings will drop.

How should you use tags on your website?

Think of your tags as a closet and think of your posts as pieces of clothing. Of course, you understand you can put your clothes in a closet. That makes sense. It’ll clean up your room. It does not make sense to add more closets to your room than the number of pieces of clothing you own. You’ll end up with empty closets that take up a lot of room. You should never have empty closets. So, if you have around 90 posts, limit the number of tags to about 30. Try to keep your tag to post-ratio under 1:3.

I understand why you want to use tags differently for Instagram. On Instagram, they’re used to search through Instagram posts. They’re used to search through your Instagram posts, but also to search through the posts of the billions of other users on Instagram. It makes sense to add more of these kinds of tags because you’re adding your post to a group of other posts about a certain tag. Tags on your website, however, are only used within your website. It does not make sense to use those tags as you use them on Instagram. In fact, if you use tags like that, your posts will be harder to find on Google.

But what about my internal search?

Some people use tags to make sure that people can find their posts via the internal search of their site. That kind of makes sense, as the native internal search engine of WordPress is not that good. Solving that problem via tags is not the answer though. You should make sure to set up a good internal site search. Please set up an improved internal site search with Algolia in Yoast SEO Premium. It’ll give you great internal search functionality, without getting on Google’s bad side by creating a bunch of thin content.

What to do if you’ve added too many tags

If you have added a lot of tags to your website, you’ll need to get rid of these pages. The best thing is to delete and redirect these tag pages to something useful. If there’s only one blog post in a certain tag, you could just redirect it to that blog post. That will greatly reduce the number of tag pages. If you have a big site with lots of tags, this will be a lot of work. But you really need to clean it up in order to keep ranking (or start ranking). Delete and redirect those tag pages. At Yoast, we’re currently working on a new workout that helps you clean up your tag pages. This will help you clean up your site and optimize your site structure. Check out our current workouts to get an idea of what they can do for you.

Read more: How to optimize your categories and tags for Google »

The post Why you should stop using tags appeared first on Yoast.

source https://yoast.com/why-you-should-stop-using-tags/

Tuesday 28 September 2021

7 ‘Secrets’ of Award-Winning B2B and B2C Content Marketing Programs

We asked 2021 Content Marketer of the Year finalists for a peek behind the curtain of what makes their content marketing programs successful. Here are their seven tips. Continue reading →

The post 7 ‘Secrets’ of Award-Winning B2B and B2C Content Marketing Programs appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

source https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/09/secrets-award-winning-content-marketing-programs/

20 Success Lessons From the Top Marketing Blogs

Are you hoping to take your blog to the next level? Well, there are several strategies that make the top marketing blogs in the industry successful.

In this post, we’re going to dig into the finer details of these top marketing blogs. With each one, we’ll inspect a particular aspect you can emulate that makes the blog thrive.

Let’s get it started!

1. Content Marketing Institute Blog – Success Focus: Editorial Calendars

One of the first parts of building a strong content marketing campaign is getting your team on the same page and coming up with a content strategy for the weeks, months, or years ahead.

The more topics you cover and the more writers you bring on board, the more important it is to create an editorial calendar.

Through my experience with the Content Marketing Institute blog, I know firsthand that staying on track and on schedule is of utmost importance to the organization.

You don’t have to look past the main page of the blog to realize that content is being published regularly, that many authors are featured, and that a variety of topics are covered, from marketing automation to optimal strategies for raising your conversion rate.

2. Copyblogger – Success Focus: Headline Use for Organization and Guidance

A blog without headlines can turn into a nightmare for the reader. The person eventually leaves the page, never to return.

Copyblogger understands the importance of targeted, detailed headlines. This holds true both for the creation of blog post titles, such as Why Lazy People Make the Best Content Marketers, and for the subheadings.

Take it from them: headlines should play a large role in content marketing strategy.

The aforementioned post is roughly 1,100 words in length. With six subheadings, readers are given additional guidance an average of every 185 words or so. This helps organize the content and move the conversation along, all while keeping the reader’s attention.

3. ConversionXL – Success Focus: Provide In-Depth Content

While length is important, length with top-notch quality is what you are after. This is where the ConversionXL blog excels. Your content strategy should be built on the idea that you need to produce quality work.

Its post on human behavior (originally written in 2016 but updated in 2020) is an excellent example of this. As you scroll through the post, it contains more than words. Every section tells a story. Every section provides actionable advice. Furthermore, the primary content partners nicely with blockquotes, headlines, screenshots, videos, and images.

4. Convince & Convert – Success Focus: Using Images the Right Way

Images are a big part of a successful blog, but only if used in the appropriate manner.

An image should complement the content. It shouldn’t be added for the sake of taking up space.

Convince & Convert knows when to add images, when to leave them out and how to avoid “image overload.”

In a short post, such as this one, there are only three images. Move onto their longer posts, however, and you can expect the number of images to reach 10 or more.

Don’t just use images: use images the right way.

5. Moz – Success Focus: the Use of Case Studies

If you understand the importance of publishing unique, useful content, you should realize that case studies can be your best friend.

Moz takes this to a whole new level, publishing case studies that are works of art.

For example, this case study outlines the importance of title tag rewrites for SEO.

The use of case studies allows for greater depth, screenshots with examples, and a strategy for readers to copy.

6. TopRank Marketing – Success Focus: Social Marketing, Social Proof

You may understand the power of social media marketing, but that doesn’t mean you are making life easy on your readers and taking advantage of every strategy that is available to you.

TopRank makes it easy to share content socially, thanks to a list of social icons displayed prominently above each title.

Even more important is the number to the left of the icons, which displays the total number of shares. The bigger the number, the more important the content appears. This can also prompt other readers to share the content, knowing that their peers have already done so.

7. Econsultancy – Success Focus: Link to Useful Content

Don’t be stingy when it comes to linking to useful content. If it can help the reader, it’s worth a link.

If you want to mimic a blog that does this well, check out some of the work by Econsultancy.

They scatter links throughout, including such as in this piece about Facebook’s new smart glasses. Along the way, there are a variety of internal and external links, all of which support the content and/or provide the reader with another avenue to learn more.

8. Neil Patel – Success Focus: Comment Interaction

It’s one thing to write and publish a blog post. It’s another thing entirely to interact with your audience. Remember, the primary purpose of each post is to teach your audience something, and content marketing as a whole is about engaging with the audience that buys your product.

If you are successful in providing quality information, more and more comments will show up on your blog. You can either ignore these or you can get involved.

In my Neil Patel blog, I do my absolute best to respond to every comment, even those that do not ask a specific question. Even after a post is published, it’s important to continue to provide quality content. Answering comments allows you to add more value, while gaining the trust of your audience.

9. Social Media Examiner – Success Focus: Varied Content within a Niche

There’s only so much you can say about a particular subject, right? Well, Social Media Examiner proves this theory wrong.

By taking a broad approach to your niche, but without losing focus, there is always more to be said. Things change, new trends arise, news happens, and so forth.

Just in the past five days (preceding September 21, 2021), Social Media Examiner has covered how to grow your Instagram following, how to create YouTube in-stream ads, how to partner with YouTube micro-influencers, and more.

Broaden your scope to keep your content calendar full and to avoid boring your audience.

10. Search Engine Watch – Success Focus: Use a Multi-Author Approach

In the early days of your blog, before it gains traction, you may be the only writer. There is nothing wrong with that. Heck, this strategy can generate results even after you hit it big.

However, there are times when a multi-author platform works best, and this is what you see on Search Engine Watch (among many other top marketing blogs).

The benefits of a multi-author approach are varied, including the ability to publish more content, unique viewpoints, and the option to leverage the audience of each writer.

11. Brian Solis – Success Focus: An Authoritative Voice

Authority is something that is earned, not given. There are things you can do to speed up your growth, such as proving your authority in each post you publish, just as there’s more than one marketing strategy out there that might work well specifically for you.

Brian Solis does a nice job of proving personal authority works by taking a unique view on topics that are anything but mainstream.

For instance, you won’t find many blogs with titles such as “The Augmented Workforce: How Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, And 5G Will Impact Every Dollar You Make.”

If you want to be an authority on your subject, don’t tackle the same topics and issues as the competition. This isn’t a rule that applies solely to online marketing. It can be implemented in every niche imaginable.

12. Buffer – Success Focus: Be Tran

Statistics validate your content, enhance trust between you and the reader, and give your audience confidence that you know your stuff. They also enable you to see if your content marketing efforts are helping you reach your goals.

Many posts on the Buffer blog are full of good statistics. For example, in one transparent post, they discussed their pay gap in an article called “2021 Pay Analysis: How We’ve Lowered Our Gender Pay Gap From 15% to 5.5%.”

Engaging and use of stats? Enough said.

13. Ignite Social Media – Success Focus: The Proper Use of an Introduction

Ignite Social Media has taken to providing a short introductory description of the content, giving the reader a clear idea of what’s to come.

Here is an example:

Social media marketing is unlike any other. It’s the only form of marketing where the target audience is able, and even encouraged, to talk back to the brand. When you hire a dedicated social media marketing agency, they’ll be able to guide you toward the strategies and tactics that help brands win at social media.

But how should you choose a social media agency to ensure you are working with one of the best? Below are a few secrets that separate high-performing social media agencies from the pretenders. Hear the six secrets directly from our CEO, Jim Tobin.

Providing this in the intro gives you an opportunity to hook the reader.

14. MarketingProfs – Success Focus: Be Unique

It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man show or part of a bigger digital marketing team, a unique approach sets you apart from the crowd.

The MarketingProfs blog has a different layout from other blogs. There is an intuitive category filter list in close proximity to the content.

These subtle changes can make a big difference.

15. Social Media Today – Success Focus: User-Centric Titles/Descriptions

The user-centric approach of Social Media Today is a thing of beauty. Every post includes something in the title, description, or tags that specify who the article is for.

For example:

“TikTok Shares New Holiday Guide to Assist With Strategic Planning,” which is a title clearly aimed at social media content marketers working on their holiday campaigns; this is underscored by the “content marketing” tag that accompanies the article.

This type of personalized, user-centric strategy is not easy to master. However, once you know how to write for your audience, the end result is more engagement and a greater sense of accomplishment.

16. Search Engine Journal – Success Focus: Multiple Content Types

There are times when a reader is intrigued by a post but doesn’t want to digest every last word. This is why scannable content and multiple content types are important.

Search Engine Journal does this well. Most of its blog posts are able to be scanned in a fast and efficient manner.

Consider this post on helpful SEO animations. The post contains many headlines, a video version you can register to watch, images, infographics, and slides.

When you write content that can be easily scanned and interacted with, you can connect with a larger audience. Posts on this popular blog will furnish you with a number of excellent content marketing tips to help you hone your overall content strategy.

17. KISSmetrics – Success Focus: Use Listicles

List posts, such as this one, are easy to scan. Better yet, people love sharing list posts on social media.

There are many types of listicle posts you can write. KISSmetrics is good at these.

18. Unbounce – Success Focus: Make Your Blog Home Page Sleek and Attractive, Including Sidebars

Unbounce uses thumbnail images that are sleek and cohesive colors. It makes the blog’s home page look professional and organized, which can earn audience trust.

It also makes great use of an easy, intuitive sidebar that fits right into the sleek design.

19. John Chow – Success Focus: Push Your Services Smartly

Your blog is a place for sharing ideas, helping your audience, and building your authority. It is also a place to generate business.

When it comes to product promotion, John Chow knows what he is doing.

Before you ever reach the latest blog posts, are offered to sign up for his WordPress installation service or have him help you start a blog. Can you imagine what his conversion rate might be?

Don’t push your products and services so much that your audience is scared away. As long as you make the information available in all the right places, potential customers will find it.

20. Jeff Bullas – Success Focus: Offer Additional Materials

Jeff Bullas doesn’t go overboard with his approach, but it’s effective.

Early in his blog posts, you see this box:

By offering free additional materials, you can draw in repeat blog visitors (returning to see what else you may offer, for example), and you can increase your conversions by showing off the kinds of marketing services you can provide.

FAQs About Marketing Blogs

What do the top marketing blogs do well?

The top marketing blogs have great content, a solid SEO foundation, are well-written and easy for novices to understand, and are helpful for other marketers as well as for businesses that want to do their own marketing and are learning how from the blog.

What are some of the top marketing blogs?

Marketing blogs that get huge amounts of traffic are Neil Patel, Search Engine Journal, Unbounce, and CopyBlogger.

What kind of topics should marketing blogs cover?

Marketing blogs should cover topics like content marketing, email marketing, SEO, paid advertising, landing page creation, how to create quality content, how to manage marketing campaigns, social media marketing, emerging marketing apps and technologies, tools that can be used for marketers or businesses doing their own marketing, and other similar topics.

Is blogging a form of digital marketing?

Yes, blogging is a form of digital marketing, particularly if you’re using your blog as a content marketing tool.

Lessons from 20 Marketing Blogs Conclusion

If you are a marketer with plans to create more content, now is the time to learn from the best.

These successful digital marketing blogs know how to wax poetic about a number of topics associated with content marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, email marketing, marketing automation, and more. Many of the inbound marketing and other digital marketing tips presented in these top blogs should help you strengthen your marketing campaign and achieve success.

Did I miss any other top-notch digital marketing bloggers on this list?

Who is your favorite content marketing blogger/strategist? Let me know in the comments below.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/33-things-to-learn-from-33-top-marketing-blogs/

The Challenges of Managing Remote Teams and Tools to Help

The benefits of having a remote or partially remote team are striking and have become much more apparent in the last year. Studies show that remote workers are generally more productive, healthier, and happier than their office counterparts. At the same time, employers can experience 50% better retention and save $11,000 per remote work, per year, on average.

It isn’t easy to see why any manager wouldn’t want their team working remotely with all these benefits. However, some challenges have left some companies feeling unsure if they are ready to embrace a permanent remote workforce.

Fortunately, advances in automation tools can help ease the burdens on managers of remote teams. Read on to find out what challenges you may face as a remote team manager and how you can reduce the burden using automation.

Challenges of Managing A Remote Team And Creative Solutions

There will be different challenges for different industries. But, of course, every business and even every team within a company will have its own unique obstacles to overcome when it comes to managing remote workers.

There are a few key areas to be aware of. Here are some of the biggest frustrations of remote team managers and our favorite automation solutions.

Training and Onboarding

Providing effective training to new hires is one of the biggest challenges to managing a remote team. Some managers complain that when training new team members, they simply can’t judge the focus of the new remote hire over a screen, and it is harder to tell if they are really “getting it.”

A manager could sit down with a new hire in an office setting and watch them complete a task. The new hire could easily ask questions as they go, and the manager could observe their expressions and methods to make corrections before they become bad habits.

As a result of not seeing all of the nonverbal visual cues an employee might give during training, the onboarding process takes a lot longer, and managers are struggling to find the time.

Another challenge that can arise happens when training a group of new employees. Because everyone moves at their own pace, training a group over zoom or another video conferencing platform can prove very inefficient because some trainees will finish training tasks earlier than others and could spend hours of time simply waiting for the rest of the group to catch up.

Tools that can help: Automated Task Dependencies and Learning Management Systems (LMS)

If you have many new hires that must go through more complex or rigorous training, there are many cloud-based learning management systems that include automation.

Programs such as AbsorbLMS, Cornerstone, and Docebo will allow you to create an entire training program complete with tasks, materials, certificates, and more.

You can even create a training program that incorporates other departments and “gamifies” the training with awards and certificates so that employees are motivated and engaged with the material. With your training almost entirely automated, you may even spend less time training new hires than if they were physically in an office with you.

Additionally, when new employees can learn at their own pace, take quizzes along the way to make sure they understand the material, and receive fun incentives to complete assignments, training might be more effective than ever.

Tracking

With your team working from home, it can be challenging to know whether people are distracted, letting things fall through the cracks, or even sleeping on the job.

In some industries, it won’t matter when the work gets done as long as it gets done, but remote team managers still need an efficient way to keep track of all tasks, projects, and deadlines so that nothing is missed.

Employees may need to be awake and alert during working hours to answer occasional calls from clients and co-workers in other organizations. So how can managers in both of these situations keep track of everything without spending their entire day chasing down each individual remote worker or having workers waste hours filling out tedious reports?

Tools that can help: Activity Tracking, Repeating Reminders, and Form Automation Software

It is well known that you can use team collaboration software such as Slack to send out repeating reminders. So why not use this feature to send team members a weekly (or even daily) reminder to submit a recap of what they’ve accomplished, what they’ve been working on, or what their goals are?

Combine this with a form automation software such as Hubspot or Prontoforms. You can allow your employees to quickly and easily input updates on their day or week, and you can see the data all neatly displayed in an intuitive spreadsheet without wasting time on formatting.

Suppose you are concerned that employees may not be as alert as they need to be during business hours. In that case, activity tracking and sales automation software such as Pega can automatically track and monitor activities, emails, and even assignments given to other staff without employees entering any information. This way, your team can focus on the most critical work.

Collaboration

For busy teams, collaboration is always a challenge. Although the ability to work independently is essential for remote teams, hyper-independence can lead to disunity and problems that end up costing the company time and money. If you deal with different time zones and work around individual schedules, collaboration can become an even more significant challenge. It is essential for managers to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

The best way to do this is by implementing workflows that incorporate checks and balances between team members. This is easy to do with the right automation tools.

Automation Tools that can help: Project Management Software, Calendar Integration, and Recurring Meetings

Project management software platforms allow users to efficiently work on tasks collaboratively. For example, most platforms such as Asana will enable you to organize tasks and projects so that users with access to a particular project can see all tasks within the project, who is working on them, and how much progress has been made.

If a review of a document is necessary, it can be assigned to another team member automatically with a deadline set based on logic commands. When you add in Calendar integration, team members will be able to see at a glance which of their co-workers have availability to collaborate on projects, even if they are in different time zones.

Video conferencing platforms such as Zoom will allow managers to effortlessly schedule repeating team meetings. For example, when integrated with Slack, you can automatically send out reminders through the team collaboration software with a zoom link.

Final Thoughts

Businesses have been using automation for years to free up employees and managers from the monotonous, repetitive, and tedious aspects of their work to have the time and energy to focus on the complex, creative work they were hired for.

Excitingly, advances in automation technology have allowed for nearly limitless opportunities and ways to use the software. Now, with remote work at an all-time high, it is the perfect time to assess possible time and energy drains, pain points, and extra stress that has been brought about by the transition to a remote workforce.

Once you’ve identified these, it will be easier to find an automation software or feature to help your remote teams be productive, efficient and fulfilled.

Image Credit: rodnae productions; pexels; thank you!

The post The Challenges of Managing Remote Teams and Tools to Help appeared first on ReadWrite.

source https://readwrite.com/2021/09/27/the-challenges-of-managing-remote-teams-and-tools-to-help/

What is SEO? An explanation for beginners

The pandemic made it necessary for many businesses to focus on their online presence. But even way before that, we saw a steady rise in everything moving online. So, perhaps, you want to get on board and have decided to quickly set up a website for your business. Or, you’ve decided to revive your existing website. Great! Now what? One of the ways to get (and keep) people on your website is with SEO. Chances are you’ve already encountered this term somewhere. But what does it actually entail? In this post, we’ll explain what SEO is and how you can get started!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. It’s the practice of optimizing your web pages to make them reach a high position in the search results of Google and other search engines. This means that people will be more likely to encounter your website when searching online. SEO focuses on improving the rankings in the organic – aka non-paid – search results. If you have a website and you want to get more traffic, there’s no doubt about it: SEO should be part of your marketing efforts.

Google’s search result page for the term ‘neptune planet’

In the image above, we see the first few results when someone searches for the keyphrase ‘Neptune planet’. In this case, Wikipedia is the first result and this means that their page on Neptune ranks #1 on this search term. The idea behind SEO is that when you optimize your page to become the best result, you can climb those rankings and become one of the first results that people see. Which will get you more clicks and traffic to your site!

Although this example only shows us organic results, this isn’t always the case. Depending on the search term someone uses, there can also be some ads at the top, or a rich result, or a few products by Google Shopping. There are a lot of different possibilities, and what Google shows can also depend on what it knows about the searcher (the country they live in, for example).

Google’s algorithm

How high each result ranks is determined by Google’s algorithm. And although parts of Google’s algorithm remain secret, years of experience in SEO have given us insight into the most important ranking factors. These ranking factors can be divided into two categories:

On-page SEO factors

The ranking of your pages is partly determined by on-page factors. On-page SEO factors are all the things on your website that you have a direct influence on. These factors include technical aspects (e.g. the quality of your code and site speed) and content-related aspects, like the structure of your website or the quality of the copy on your website. These are all crucial on-page SEO factors that you can work on.

Off-page SEO factors

In addition to on-page SEO factors, your rankings are also determined by a few off-page SEO factors. These factors include links from other websites, social media attention, and other marketing activities that happen off of your own website. Although not impossible, these off-page SEO factors can be more difficult to influence. The most important of these off-page factors is the number and quality of links pointing towards your site. The more quality, relevant sites that link to your website, the higher your position in Google will be.

Another off-page factor that plays a role in SEO is your competition relating to the niche of your particular business. In some niches, it is much harder to rank than in others. The competitiveness of your market therefore also has a major influence on your chances of ranking.

Holistic SEO

At Yoast, we practice ‘holistic SEO‘. With holistic SEO, your primary goal is to build and maintain the best possible website. You don’t try to fool Google but invest your time and effort in a sustainable long-term strategy. Working on improving your pages and having a high-quality website will improve your chances of ranking. Because Google wants to offer its users the best results to their search query and the best results are the ones that have great content, but are also user-friendly, fast, and easily accessible.

Ranking well in search engines like Google asks for an extensive SEO strategy focused on every aspect of your website and its marketing. The technical side, the user experience (UX), the content on your website: all need to be top-notch. To keep ranking well in Google, you should develop – what we call – a holistic SEO approach.

How can we help you get started?

At Yoast, our mission is to make SEO accessible for everyone. That’s why we have a few plugins that can help you with that, like our popular Yoast SEO plugin. We have a free and premium version of this plugin. One of the main advantages is that it helps you create high-ranking content. Our free SEO and readability analysis gives you detailed suggestions to create copy humans and search engines enjoy!

The premium version of our plugin will help you get to that next level and optimize your content for synonyms and related keywords and boost your site structure with our internal linking suggestions. You’ll also get access to all of our SEO courses, where you can learn vital SEO skills that you will be able to apply immediately!

Go Premium and get access to all our features!

Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!

Get Yoast SEO Premium ▸Only $89 USD (ex VAT) for 1 site

Conclusion

SEO is the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results. At Yoast, we believe that holistic SEO is the best way to rank your pages because you focus on optimizing every aspect of your site.

Don’t use any black-hat SEO tricks, because eventually, this will have negative consequences for your rankings. Instead, practice sustainable SEO, with your user in mind, and you will benefit in the long run. Read more on how to rank high in Google or if you use WordPress, make sure to check out our ultimate guide on SEO in WordPress:

Read more: The ultimate guide to WordPress SEO »

The post What is SEO? An explanation for beginners appeared first on Yoast.

source https://yoast.com/what-is-seo/

How Advertisers are Navigating iOS 14's Mobile Tracking Changes

It's been several months since Apple's iOS 14 update went into effect and the dust has begun to settle. One of the main questions has been, "How are advertisers handling the mobile tracking changes?"

Earlier this year, we talked about how this change could impact advertisers, but now, we want to follow up. Have any new strategies evolved? What have advertisers been doing to reach their target audiences?

In this post, we'll discuss how advertisers have navigated the iOS 14 mobile tracking changes and give you a few tips on how to have continued success with social media and online advertising.

Wait, what happened with the iOS 14 update?

To summarize, at the beginning of 2021 Apple released a new update that would impact the way that advertisers reach their audience. With the iOS 14 update users needed to opt-in, or give permission, to an app to track their activity outside of the platform.

So, why were advertisers and marketers concerned? Well, a lot of ad campaigns target audiences based on their behavior online. If an app can't track that information, ads will become less personalized, and in turn, could be less effective.

The concern for marketers was that they wouldn't be able to deliver their ads to people based on certain activities, like if they'd visited their website, for example. This meant that ads would likely have smaller audience sizes and less accurate reporting.

Additionally, with this update advertisers are only allowed to use up to eight conversion events from a single website domain. This means if you run a campaign and track several different conversion types (like Lead, Landing Page Views, Purchase) you'll now be capped at eight at any given time.

Now, you might be wondering, "What have advertisers been doing?" Let's discuss it below.

How Advertisers are Navigating the iOS 14 Mobile Tracking Changes

While the iOS 14 update has made advertisers jump through some more hoops in setting up their ad campaigns (getting domain verification and aggregated event management), the update ultimately hasn't been the death of retargeting or Facebook ads.

Of course, there have been changes. So far, it looks like more than 90% of users are opting out of data tracking. This is more than industry experts were predicting.

So, what have advertisers been doing?

1. Diversifying ad spend.

The main story of how advertisers are navigating the latest iOS tracking update is diversifying ad spend.

This means companies have shifted some ad spend that was previously allocated to Facebook to other platforms like Google because of the remarketing features and the ability to target users based on search intent.

2. Reporting Facebook success with Google Analytics.

While some money is still being used to advertise on Facebook, there are different ways of reporting.

Companies have begun using UTM parameters on their site's URLs to generate data tracked by Facebook to Google Analytics. This means you can use Google Analytics to track some of the activity on your Facebook ad campaigns.

3. Using owned data for lookalike audiences and retargeting.

Strategies such as using lookalike audiences or retargeting an email list have continued to drive results. With privacy updates becoming a norm for the big tech companies, marketers will need to begin focusing on owned data to inform their campaigns.

With your owned data (such as an email list), you can target lookalike audiences or retarget those very people.

Keep in mind, you can still use the old method of retargeting campaigns because not all of your audience is on iOS devices. You can still use the channel as a cost-effective way to see some return on ad spend (ROAS).

4. Using other Facebook advertising options.

Besides these new ways of approaching ad campaigns, some advertisers are investing in other ways to reach audiences on Facebook.

For example, you can use the messaging objective to create a lead-generating chatbot on Facebook Messenger. There are options to retarget users who reach out to you on messenger and start conversations with new leads who click on an ad of yours.

Additionally, Facebook has another strategy that advertisers have explored: the Facebook lead ads (in-app lead form).

While using your own landing pages is definitely the preferred method, in a cookieless world, using lead forms on Facebook can help you generate leads and capture first-party data.

The iOS 14 mobile tracking changes have made Facebook ads less effective, but there are still ways for advertisers to target their audience and generate leads on the platform.

source https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-advertisers-are-navigating-ios-14

Monday 27 September 2021

Token Offerings from Employers Won’t Fix the Labor Shortage

Workers today are displaying discontent with their jobs at unprecedented levels. In late July, for example, protesters in St. Louis congregated in an otherwise bustling drive-thru of a local McDonald’s. They were there to demand the corporation pay them at least $15 per hour — about $5 more than the current minimum wage in Missouri.

Worker discontent isn’t a problem unique to my home state, though. From Charlotte, North Carolina, to Detroit and Houston, workers are going on strike for better pay, benefits, and working conditions. And who can blame them?

As many of us transitioned to remote work during COVID-19, employees in low-wage, low-opportunity jobs like fast-food workers had to hunker down.

This often meant pulling longer hours under dangerous conditions with little to no hazard pay or sick leave.

The Hiring Problem

Walkouts aren’t the only issue employers are battling, though. As fast-food chains expand locations to match consumer spending, hiring can’t keep pace. “Help wanted” signs abound, but the restaurant industry was still 1.2 million employees short in March.

The internet has no shortage of pro-business pundits blaming the labor shortage on unemployment benefits. Stimulus payments, they’d like you to believe, have incentivized people to stay home and collect from the government.

Beyond further stigmatizing minimum-wage workers, this line of thinking is just plain wrong.

Missouri, for instance, was one of the first states to end federal aid, yet our labor market remains sluggish at best. And even though a quarter of Americans earned more money from unemployment than they would’ve by working — one-third still struggled to cover basic expenses like food, housing, and medical services.

When people can’t pay basic living expenses — it says a lot more about American employers than employees.

Done With Dead-End Jobs

The workforce needs a reboot, and it will take a serious culture shift among employers. Instead, many have turned to token offerings like signing bonuses and free iPhones in attempts to lure workers back. But these kinds of solutions simply won’t work because the problem extends far beyond incentivizing employees.

During the pandemic, many people realized that doing the same low-wage, low-skill job every day was no longer going to cut it.

The dead-end job has to die for people to reenter the job market.

We need to first examine the current skill sets of American workers and then determine how to equip them with more in-demand skills — something workers desperately want. A BCG study found that 68% of workers would retrain for a new role, but that willingness was closer to 70% for occupations hit hardest by the pandemic. Most people, however, can’t afford to get a second college degree or pay thousands for a training program. This is where employers can step in.

Upskilling in Practice

Last year, for instance, Amazon announced it would invest $700 million to upskill 100,000 employees (about one-third of its workforce). Similarly, Comcast created a program to upskill its customer support staff into software developers to fill open roles.

Programs like these are built to provide upward mobility, helping adults move from lower – to middle – to higher-skill work. When that blueprint is replicated throughout the market, it creates a more fluid and vibrant workforce. Offering a one-time material perk like a free phone won’t make a company a better place to work — and it certainly won’t create a self-sustaining talent pipeline.

Time to Prioritize Upward Mobility

There’s no returning to a pre-pandemic U.S. workforce. While it was once possible to make a living working in a fast-food restaurant, that hasn’t been the case for some time now. In St. Louis, for example, an MIT analysis shows the living wage for a single, child-free adult is $14.23 an hour. That number doubles with even one child in the household.

Upward mobility has stalled, and it simply doesn’t exist in most cases.

It’s no wonder the resignation rate was 2.4% in March. The writing was on the wall before COVID, though: A January 2020 report found that a lack of career progression was the top reason people were quitting their jobs — followed by low pay.

It’s Up to Employers

The gap we see between unemployed Americans and the rising number of open jobs tells us that employers aren’t offering workers what they require.

We need to build a workforce that opens up new opportunities for those just entering the market and regularly moves people into higher-skilled jobs — a career escalator if you will.

Employers who consistently and strategically move employees along a learning path, generating long-term success for them will reap great benefits for themselves as well.

Image Credit: tim mossholder; unsplash; thank you!

The post Token Offerings from Employers Won’t Fix the Labor Shortage appeared first on ReadWrite.

source https://readwrite.com/2021/09/26/token-offerings-from-employers-wont-fix-the-labor-shortage/

Sunday 26 September 2021

NFT Use Cases – A Complete NFT Use Case Walkthrough | [UPDATED]

Non-fungible tokens have been a trending topic for some time in the digital community. Business magnets and crypto audiences are invested in getting to know the beneficial factors of non-fungible tokens. NFTs popularity has skyrocketed in the past few years, likely due to the Covid-19 outbreak — we were invested completely into the world of digital media.

NFT is ruling the digital world domain. It’s the new explosive arrival into the digital media world, where musicians, artists, cinema, etc., all varieties of personalities are interested and can benefit from this innovative domain.

Non-fungible tokens have amplified the functioning of business models in terms of profit where NFTs are super flexible. Moreover, they can be applied to any field due to their popularity and flexibility among business domains.

Here’s a quick insight into the introduction of NFT development platforms.

What is an NFT?

Non-fungible tokens, also commonly known as NFTs, are digital assets, and they provide certification for the ownership of the digital asset that the user is purchasing.

These NFTs are built on a blockchain network that secures the transaction details — and to dive into the concept of NFTs, the difference between fungible and non-fungible assets is a must.

Fungible assets can be traded on equal terms, where the value remains the same.

For example, if a person trades a 10 rupee note for a different 10 rupee note from another person, the value of the fiat cash remains the same.

On the other hand, non-fungible assets are unique and non-identical; they cannot be traded on equal terms.

For example, a person owns a sports card of an athlete that was released 20 years ago. However, another person owns a sports card of that same athlete that was released a few months ago — the trade between those cards cannot be initiated as the cards possess non-tangible factors, such as the release year, the rarity of the card, and the sports moment that merged with the card.

This physical concept is converted into a digital form, and it is called Non-fungible tokens.

The Non-fungible token has opened the doors of opportunities for business entities and digital content creators. As a result, digital content has become a great platform for creators to showcase their talent and monetize their digital work.

These non-fungible tokens can be volatile and represent anything that has the ability to be digitized, including fungible and non-fungible assets. These non-fungible tokens are traded in decentralized exchanges and also in their special exchange platform called the NFT marketplace.

The high-quality, beneficial features of the non-fungible tokens have made this platform is flexible and can be implemented into varying domains. As a result, the complete NFT use cases vary drastically around different business fields. The most common NFT use cases are the real-estate domain, music domain, art domain, sports domain, etc.

Common Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Use Cases

NFTs in a Real-Estate Domain

The main primary beneficial factor of NFTs is the integration of blockchain technology.

The process of proving and validating real estate ownership is really frustrating and very tedious in real life. This is because multiple middlemen are involved, such as banks, real estate agents, negotiators, and government officials. In addition, the involvement of middlemen costs is a huge commission taken from the real-estate owner.

With the application of NFTs — the purchasing of real estate and the transfer of ownership can be a direct two-party involvement process, as it should be — and is where the NFT use case is applied.

Since NFTs are built on blockchain technology, the data and ownership of real estate are recorded and stored securely; thus, manipulation and replication of data is impossible.

Most importantly, NFTs exists in a decentralized environment; thus, it eradicates the involvement of intermediaries, removing high commission fees, and making the transaction a direct transfer of ownership between the respective two parties.

NFTs in Digital Art Domain

Piracyhas been a real issue in the domain of digital artworks. Many talented artists post their digital creations on the internet, and they are easily replicated and sold. Even worse, the ownership of the artwork is claimed wrongly and sold by someone else.

To rectify these issues, non-fungible tokens are introduced into the domain of digital artwork.

NFT manages a digital ledger known as a blockchain, where the ownership of the artwork is stored securely.

The digital ledger process eliminates the threat of plagiarism and theft. NFTs distribute the proof of ownership and take action against copyright infringement.

The arrival of NFTs in the artwork domain has been a great motivating factor for digital artists to express their talent and monetize their digital work.

NFTs in Sports Domain

Many sports leagues and companies have partnered with the NFT development sector. They have utilized the salient features of NFTs to their advantage — the creation of the sports NFT marketplace development platform is a good example.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) has developed its own NFT marketplace development platform known as NBA Top Shot. The breathtaking NBA moments are digitized as a digital collectible and sold on this special NFT marketplace.

Creating the NBA Top Shot platform has generated a massive sum of revenue for the NBA league. — and security for the creatives behind the collectibles.

Nike Just Did it

Additionally, top shoe companies like Nike also have adopted the concept of NFTs, by introducing CryptoKicks. The NFT method allows shoe enthusiasts to purchase the physical shoe and also gain access to the NFT form of the shoes. Armed with the NFT — the user can edit and customize the shoe and produce a real-life shoe product.

NFTs in Online Gaming Domain

The online gaming realm is one of the most rapidly growing industries in the world. The concept of NFTs is not new for the gaming domain, as they already have experience in trading and purchasing digital assets in the game. However, those assets cannot be monetized.

The non-fungible tokens allow the gamers to monetize their in-built purchased digital collectibles by playing NFT based games.

In the NFT based online gaming platforms, the in-build purchases are represented in the form of NFTs. Therefore, by purchasing these digital assets, they can be traded in any NFT marketplace development platform.

NFTs help gamers are more motivated while playing NFT games by producing rare digital collectibles. NFTs are scarce in nature, and this idea of providing rare gaming NFTs makes the gamers more motivated and gravitate towards the field of NFT.

NFTs in Memes

The growth of NFTs and social media has risen parallel to each other in the past few years. The social media domain gave birth to an entertaining concept called memes.

Memes are one of the most interesting NFT use cases. The memes posted on social media sites can be converted into NFTs, by minting them in any NFT marketplace development platform.

NFT minted memes have been a great opportunity for meme creators to monetize their entertainment work. Since the memes are minted into NFTs, they cannot be replicated or manipulated, as they are developed on the blockchain. It verifies the ownership of the digital collectible for the purchasers.

NFTs in Certificates and License

NFTs in Certificates and Licensing are useful for verifying authenticity and ownership of the certificates during a job intake or university admission process. However, the respective committee can only check and authenticate the certificates submitted by employees and students to a certain limit.

To eliminate these issues, and provide a complete authentication of the certificates, NFTs are implemented in this domain. This NFT use case consumes very little time compared to the traditional way of verifying certificates and authenticating them. The same NFT application is also applied for license verification and registration process.

NFTs in Ticketing Industry

The ticketing industry has always faced huge obstacles. The involvement of scalpers has been a massive problem for years. The scalpers buy online tickets of the respective show in bulk and sell them to the audience at a very high rate. The mere scalping act questions the authenticity of the ticket.

The only way the audience attendee can verify the ticket’s authenticity is by reaching the concert or live event directly.

The introduction of non-fungible tokens into this industry has benefited tremendously for the ticket sellers. In addition, NFTs help the audience to verify the authenticity of their bought tickets and eliminate the inconvenience caused by scalpers.

NFTs in Fashion Industry

Counterfeiting of assets is a huge hindrance in the fashion industry. There are numerous sales of counterfeit products that have been sold to customers. Now, thanks to NFTs — this obstacle is eliminated.

NFTs verify the ownership of the product bought by the customer. The NFT verification provides the details about the place of manufacture, and the details of the previously owned owner of the product. The NFT application also increases the welfare of employees in protecting customers.

NFTs in Marketplace Development

The rapid development of NFTs has paved the way for developing their own decentralized exchange, called the NFT marketplace.

The NFT marketplace is a special marketplace where the trading of digital assets like NFTs takes place.

The massive popularity gained by non-fungible tokens has encouraged business entities to create their own NFT marketplace development platform. The new methods of gaining profit have proven to be very effective for business entities in the digital world.

Conclusion

The complete NFT use cases are very marveling because, in all industries, the main hurdle is the falsification of authenticity.

It’s clear that the NFTs have been a game-changer for many industries. NFTs, help business entities to rise up in their respective domains and claim the monetary benefits of what is theirs in the first place — its personal property. Without the use of Non-fungibles — a huge cost has been paid by businesses. By implementing non-fungible tokens, everything has changed, where the verification process is done effectively quickly and enabling industries to boost their profit.

In the near future, NFTs are expected to take over almost every industry. This system is still growing and very flexible; thus, it can adapt to any type of business and provide assistance. The enormous popularity of NFTs has paved the way for bridging the gap between digital world business and physical world business.

Image Credit: Provided by the author; thank you!

The post NFT Use Cases – A Complete NFT Use Case Walkthrough | [UPDATED] appeared first on ReadWrite.

source https://readwrite.com/2021/09/25/nft-use-cases-a-complete-nft-use-case-walkthrough-updated/

Saturday 25 September 2021

The Importance of Employee Handbook

Most corporate employers have an employee handbook, but many do not realize how important it is for their company. On the other hand, smaller businesses often don’t have a company handbook when they definitely should have one.

An employer’s handbook can be a great resource in the event of any disputes that arise between employees and management.

In addition to outlining policies on topics such as break times, dress code, and benefits, the book should also provide information about things like workplace safety and harassment prevention. Employees need to know what they’re getting into when they start a new job — so having a comprehensive employee handbook can help them understand what is expected of them at work.

When hiring someone new or transferring from one position to another within your company, it’s always best practice to offer a copy of the employee handbook before going over any other paperwork with the employee. This is a good time to go over the handbook with them and answer any questions they might have about the policies outlined in it.

Anyone that has been working for your company should already have a copy of the handbook.

What is an Employee Handbook?

An employee handbook is a set of guidelines and policies that govern the management and conduct of employees and management within a company. For example, the handbook typically sets out the organization’s expectations and values and information on how to dress or what to do in emergencies.

It also details disciplinary procedures for staff who disobey the policies, including warnings, sacking, and criminal prosecution. But, most commonly, it’s the managers, executives, and lawyers who write the handbook.

Why is an Employee Handbook important in a business setting

An Employee Handbook is important in a business setting. It provides employees with the guidelines and policies that govern their employment. The handbook usually sets out expectations, such as how to dress or what to do in emergencies.

It also includes disciplinary procedures for staff who disobey the policies, including warnings, sacking, and criminal prosecution. This helps everyone understand what is expected of them. It also makes it easier to fire (and hire, too!) people by clearly outlining the rules. Again, this reduces an organization’s liability.

How does an Employee Handbook affect an organization?

An Employee Handbook allows companies to communicate with their employees. It helps the company protect itself from legal liability by clarifying how the company or business wants its staff to behave in certain scenarios. In addition, a handbook can provide a reference point for managers on disciplinary procedures, while maintaining consistency throughout the organization.

For example, it can help managers decide whether to warn an employee before disciplining them, or if they should be immediately fired. It also helps employees know what is expected of them and how their behavior affects the workplace. On top of procedural information, the handbook can help with employee engagement, motivation, and burnout prevention, even in the toughest industries.

What an Employee Handbook should include

An Employee Handbook should include:

What the company expects from the employee in terms of dress code and conduct

An employee handbook needs to include what the company expects from the employee regarding dress code and conduct. It sets the expectations for employees. If a company doesn’t set out expectations, then confusion can arise. Confusion can happen when an employee starts asking questions about what is allowed or not allowed in the workplace.

A handbook keeps information clear and concise by providing a reference point for managers on disciplinary procedures.

The handbook helps maintain consistency throughout the organization. It also clarifies to employees what is expected of them and how their behavior is monitored in the workplace.

How to handle emergencies or disciplinary procedures when an employee is not following rules outlined in your handbook

Employees will now know what an emergency is, how they should report it, and who they can and should contact in the event of an emergency. The handbook should also have how disciplinary procedures are handled.

Whether or not workers are allowed to work from home

The employee handbook can help to prevent misunderstandings for most of the company or business issues.

The handbook will answer questions about whether or not workers can work or keeping when they go home. For example, if a specific team does not allow for working from home — or taking equipment home — it should be noted in the handbook.

The company might also want to specify if there is a need for an employee to travel. It’s also worth stating if there are any restrictions on job-related activities outside of office hours. These questions are very pertinent in many industries.

What technology is prohibited in the workplace

Defining what tech is allowed or not allowed at work can help ensure that employees abide by company policy. It can also help to demonstrate that employers are reasonable. Also, this paragraph might make the employee feel like they will still have some freedom outside of work hours.

Medical leave and paid vacation policy

An employee should know the employer’s policies when it comes to medical leave and paid vacation.

Knowing and understanding policy can help employees feel more confident about their work environment if they know that the employer considers other aspects outside their work hours.

The handbook can also provide general information about what is not allowed in the workplace — including social media or other non-work-related tasks outside of office hours.

How to file a complaint

Employees need to know who they can contact when there is a problem with the workplace.

If an employee or lower management doesn’t know who to speak with or how to file a complaint, it can affect their work performance and morale. Therefore, the handbook should include a step-by-step process of what-to-do-when scenarios. With these explanations in place and plainly written, employees can feel confident knowing somebody listens to their concerns and, ultimately, addresses them.

Apart from filing a complaint, your handbook should note how to give employee feedback and where.

Code of conduct

Employees should know their company’s code of conduct and what the consequences are if they violate it. In addition, a code of conduct may assist an employee in feeling that the employer is sensible by setting standards for treatment and professionalism.

Antiharassment & antiretaliation

One of the crucial aspects of an employee handbook is to include information on anti-harassment and antiretaliation.

All employees should know that they are free from harassment or retaliation when it comes to their work environment. This information makes people feel more confident in their workplace and, in turn, makes them more productive in their tasks. An employee will also feel like they don’t have to worry about anything with regards to their job security because employers consider these things in an employee handbook.

What benefits does your organization offers, such as health insurance or alternative work arrangements

Having information about health insurance, savings plans, and alternative work situations can be important because an employee can make a subjectively bad decision when it comes to their work situation.

For example, they might decide not to take a promotion or accept an offer of employment because they are disqualified for the benefit the company offers. Therefore, it’s beneficial to have this information in the handbook so that employees don’t have to ask about these questions, thus causing extra stress about these types of decisions.

All questions are right there in the Employee Handbook where they should be.

Any additional disclaimers

When drafting an employee handbook, it is important to include any disclaimers that you deem necessary. For example, some organizations may choose to include a disclaimer about their commitment to the environment. Others can have a disclaimer about certain situations.

Most beneficial in the Employee Handbook is a declaration of company values and an acknowledgment or assertion about their commitment to treating people with honesty and respect. Some companies may wish to give examples of how to follow the company’s set of values.

Just about anything that fits with your company values can be listed in your Employee Handbook.

How to make your Employee Handbook easy to read and understand

It’s necessary to include explanations that are easy to read and understand so that the employee handbook isn’t hard to follow.

If your Employee Handbook is too difficult to read — or too long — people will either not read it or they will only skim through the information and might miss some important details.

You can also categorize some of your rules into different sections so that people only have to look at specific parts of the handbook instead of reading the entire thing.

It’s also important to make sure that it is easy on the eyes. You can use bullet points, headings, subheadings, and images to make your employee handbook easier to read. Any part of your handbook that helps with readability issues will help your people comprehend the rules more efficiently.

You will want your employees to be able to follow along with your organization’s policies in the easiest way possible, and you can give examples in your handbook.

What to do if someone violates the rules of the handbook

When someone violates the rules of the handbook, management must reprimand in some way. If possible, try to help the employee understand why they were wrong and what they should do instead. Some examples should already be in your handbook as an illustration of what you expect in behaviors.

When a leader or manager can explain what went wrong and how to correct the behavior, this procedure is helpful for both management and employee. It shows that you’re willing to work with them to improve themselves for the future. It also might be helpful to offer an alternative action so that this doesn’t happen again in the future.

Finally, the Employee Handbook is a living document

As your company grows and changes, it’s important to make sure you’re updating your employee handbook accordingly. This includes:

Adding new services or products.

Highlighting specific company values that haven’t been mentioned before.

Changing benefits associated with prospective employees joining the organization.

Digitizing the handbook is also a good idea. Digitization will make it easier for the employees to read it. You can also have a digital copy for new employees to check that they have read the information in the Employee Handbook as part of their onboarding process. This process will save many questions and issues down the road.

Conclusion

We hope that this article has given you some useful insight into the importance of having an Employee Handbook. An employee handbook can help your company clarify its policies for employees. Answer any questions your employees might have about their work environment or daily tasks. An Employee Handbook saves a lot of time and prevents many uncertainties on both sides — it’s a great thing to have as a staple in your business.

Image Credit: provided by the author; wavy bus single; freepik; thank you!

The post The Importance of Employee Handbook appeared first on ReadWrite.

source https://readwrite.com/2021/09/24/the-importance-of-employee-handbook/

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