Top 10 Tips to Look Professional on WebCam [#Infographic]

Are you a busy recruiter or life coach who regularly conducts interviews or interacts with clients via webcam? 

Maybe you're starting a new online business and deep-engagement video will be your main content marketing strategy in 2015. 

In all of these scenarios, having a crisp, clear and vibrant presence via web cam may be critical to your success!  

Here's a great infographic I found that was posted recently by digital marketing expert: LindsayKolowich
Here are 10 practical tips you can start applying right now for an immediate improvement in how you look to your prospective customers or new hires via webcam: 






Header Images Courtesy of: JobsDB 

4 Reasons Online Reviews Could be Critical to Your Digital Marketing Success [#Infographic]

Check out this infographic from WebRepublic.com on the digital marketing power of online revues.

There are some really surprising insights. For example:

Did you know:

• A 4.5 star out of 5 sells better than a 5 star rating by up to 3x? 

• Products with positive reviews get 200% more sales?

• Having more positive reviews creates a higher organic SEO ranking? 

• Consumers who read reviews on mobile devices are 127% more likely to buy then if they read reveiws on their PC or laptop? 

                                                                                                                                                       




Top image courtesy of: pixabay.com  

31 Content Marketing Tips to Increase Blog Traffic [#Infographic]

Blogs that have more than 100 high quality posts and that post fresh content 15-30 times per month see 500% more targeted search engine traffic on average. 

Combine high frequency deep engagement blogging with an extraordinary value proposition and you've got a blog that will generate leads and revenue for your business. 

But where do you get all that great content from? 

Do you have a working content marketing plan for your business? Are your audience getting value enough from your blog posts to make them share your blog contents?

Blogging based on a strong content marketing strategy means you have to  plan, prepare and research the article. before writing. 

You still have to edit and be sure that the article is readable before posting. It has to be of  serious and immediate value to your target audience. Only then will they share it.

 I found a great content marketing infographic to help you shape your content marketing strategy. You'll find these tips very useful when creating content for your business. 

There are 5 Steps that break down into 31 tips. 

These are the 5 steps: 

• Planning And Research

• Writing

• Optimization

• Making It Shareable

• Promotion

Now, let’s take a look at each step one after the other to highlight the most valuable tips for each step.

Content Marketing Means Planning and Research

Planning and researching begins with finding keywords relevant to your chosen topic. One that people are searching for on Google and other search engines. To achieve this you can:

• Use Google Keyword Planner to get relevant keywords people are searching for:

• Search Twitter for popular topics that are related to your keyword. Your focus should be on those ones getting the favourites and highest retweets

• Do a Google search with your keyword to know other pages ranking for the same keyword based on Google’s suggestions that pop up as you type your keyword ideas

• Now create a list of compelling points you want get across on your blog post.

Writing Your Content

To make your blog post easy to read follow these steps:

• Make short paragraphs. Break up every 2-3 lines or every 75-100 words

• For every 500 words of text, include an image (the most shared posts have an average of 1-2 high quality engaging images per post)

• For easy reading use sub headers to break up your article

• Create a compelling headline with at most 55 characters

• Use bullets and list were necessary

• Spell check before posting

Optimization is Key

You have to optimize your content for search. This includes stunning visual optimization of your social media accounts. 

This for better ranking on the search engines. Here are some basic but critical SEO points to note:

• Post article of 1000 to 1500 words in length or more 

• Place your keyword into your blog title for easy identification by search engines

• Include your keyword in an H2 header

• Place your keyword at the beginning of your title for optimal results

• Make It Shareable

The more you share your high quality content on social networks the more popular it becomes. And the more traffic you get to your blog. This can mean more sales if you’ve written and extraordinary value proposition. 

Make It Really Easy to Share

Want more social shares to increase the social signals on your blog? Here are some tips: 

• Create an attractive custom graphic that shows the title of your blog. This will increase shares on Pinterest and other social networks

• Use click to tweet to include tweetable quotes and stats in your blog

• Create an infographic relevant to your topic and be sure to include it in your post

• Include videos or slide share presentation

Promote Your Content

To get more people to see your blog post you have to socially promote your blog. It may be the blog as a whole or a particular blog post. 

But focusing on promoting a particular post will give rise to reaching your target audience based on your #keywords. Use the following content promotion techniques to promote your blog posts:

• Send an update to your email list for instant traffic. Be sure to include a link to your blog post

• Share your blog post on Facebook

• Share on Twitter with your custom blog title graphic included

• Pin to relevant Pinterest boards to get more exposure

• Share your blog post on your Linkedin personal profile and company page

• Share to relevant Facebook groups

• Use Facebook adds and Linkedin sponsored updates to run targeted adds

• Install a social sharing plugin on your blog for easy sharing

• Consider other places like Reddit, Digg, Myspace and the likes. But you must understand how these sites and their communities work before posting your content. To avoid making wasted efforts posting on them. 

• Share your post on Google Plus profile and relevant communities

Check out the amazing infographic that inspired this post. It's from the content marketing masters at TopDog.com : 





                                                                                                                                                         top image courtesy of: http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/mediabesteding-hoeveel-tijd-besteden-we-aan-tv-lezen-internet-en-andere-med

The Top 40 Most Unbelievable Company Perks! #Infographic

Can you imagine getting a paid a $2000 travel bonus to visit any where in the world you want? How about a month long company trip every year to an exotic location? 

At the very least: Shouldn't your birthday be paid vacation day? 

No I'm not kidding! According to Entepreneur.com these are just some of  coolest examples of real employee befits offered by real companies. 

Check out these 40 incredible company perks from the world's leading employers: 



                                                                                           
Header Image Courtesy of: http://www.tinyhr.com/blog

10 Critical Reasons Teams May Be The Real Secret to #EmployeeEngagement in 2015! [#Infographic]

                                                                                               [No it's not Disney Land for Adults it's Google's Zurich Office!]

No question! Active employee engagement is literally a business gold mine!  

 And it turns out that team-targeted interventions may represent a unique competitive advantage for leveraging higher levels of employee engagement and discretionary effort! 

 But first: Let's look at why you need to adopt deep engagement best practices into your organizational culture and design in the first place!

 I love how Bloomberg recently isolated and graphically summarized the pure ROI of employee engagement from the Gallup data. Take a look:

The critical leadership message? Building a deep engagement culture results in a: 

•      22% increase in profitability,
•     A 21% boost in productivity,
•     A 41% reduction in product defect rates,
•    A Whopping 147% jump in earnings per share! 

    
The critical message for Human Resources professionals? An deeply engaged workforce results in a:

• 65% reduction  in employee turnover 
• 37% decrease in absentee levels; and a
• 50% decrease in workplace accidents:
  

Take a look at this powerful graphic from Bloomberg and then lets take a fast look at how leveraging your team effectiveness and basic organizational design may be powerful tools to help you build a deep engagement culture:

 


Here's a wonderful infographic from WeekDone.com that looks at employee disengagement form the perspective of some major and in some cases deeply surprising sources of team under-performance: 



I find #1 a bit shocking. And the research sources for this stat are pretty strong too:



That 26% of "engaged employees would leave their current roles for a mere 5% increase in pay. 


What I like about this insight is that it is a mere 5% in increase. This speaks to the powerful way employee engagement moderates the employee compensation motive. 


It it's still there when your employees are engaged, but only not as strong as in disengaged and actively disengaged employees.




The message for Business and HR Leaders?:


That building a small but clear pay increase potential into your  behavior based performance management system or gamification initiative may represent a substantial reservoir of untapped employee motivation. This may be a key untapped lever for moving your team's engagement level from disengaged to actively engaged more quickly and efficiently. 


Key here as with all incentives is that access to the extra 5% is linked to clearly defined individual and team based performance goals.



I was more surprised by #2. In fact I disagree. It seems to fly in the face of the state of the art in physical organizational design:



That employees in open office set ups experience 62% more sic days.  



I wonder what the organizations surveyed in these organizations meant by open work spaces? 


I mean just look at the revolutionary open workspace design phenomenon known as workplace humanization taking place at top employer Google!  


#3 Brings us back to Google and for very good reason. It's true that teams under-perform sometimes to the point outright team dysfunction for lack of personal and professional development.  


 Google formally designs work roles so that 20% of work time is strategically allotted to "personal projects."


Can you imagine having one full work day per week to peruse the professional and personal development goals that you know are essential to your success as an employee? Can you imagine the teaming and leadership skills that might result? 


#4 through #10 address the meat and potatoes of team effectiveness vs dysfunction. 



The bottom line? Teaming is a teachable set of skills. In fact, there are a hand full of well tested and clearly defined team learning, communication and collaborative problem solving process, that just about any group of employees can learn. 




Essential teaming skills include:

•  How to run a highly effective and productive team meeting
•  Pre-emptive conflict management,
• Iterative, action-based team leaning,
• Leadership Sharing.

What's critical here is that the team skills are properly trained, practiced and built directly into the formal work role. 

Once team members learn and master those skills, team leaders, managers and the senior leadership team need to create cultures that support and nurture those skills. 


In my experience, the vast majority of disengaged employees are highly responsive to team-based interventions. 



#7 May be the most important team insight:  

In my view, the second biggest sources of team under-performance and team dysfunction is a lack of clearly defined performance goals. #1 is a lack of the oh so important trust factor that needs to exist between team members and team leaders. 




Check out: The number one reason organizations are hemorrhaging top talent



Finally #10 is huge. Time wasters like email overload and social media distraction need to be addressed and proactively managed so teams and individual employees can do their jobs.


Most managers and team leaders don't full get how important this goal is.


For example:

Did you know that employees at several top companies are reporting that 57% of work interruptions come from social media tools and switching between applications!  


Anyway, take a look at this great infographic from WeekDone.com   I found it thanks to the content marketing masters @ UndercoverRecruiter.com   

 

top image from: Business Insider: Google Post




You're Probably Here Thanks to Twitter! 

Need an Amazing Twitter Community Made up of Thousands of Real, Passionate Re-Tweeters?

Don't Have Time to do all the Social Media Work? Here's how we'll Build Your Amazing Business Twitter Account Fast: 

“David is a true expert in social media. He not only helped me achieve my Twitter goals, but he also provided a vast wealth of information on building a meaningful social media experience with my market." 

- A Very Happy Elance Customer.

The Top 21 Ways to Fail Your Next Job Interview in 90 Seconds or Less! [#Infographic]

You finally got the call to be interviewed for your dream job. You know there will be dozens of other candidates competing for the position.  

 "Winging it" is not an option. Use every spare moment between now and the interview to really learn everything you can about the organization, its core business strategy and its culture. 

Do you know who founded the company? Do you know its vision and mission statements?  

Also, make sure to find out everything you can about the major tasks and responsibilities that define the position you're applying for. 

What concrete examples of work and volunteer experiences do you have that fit the new work role and company culture? What are the top work challenges faced by this new team you're joining? 

Did you know that there are 11 dangerous yet all to common non-verbal errors that thousands of hiring managers surveyed say are major sources of almost instant new candidate rejection?   

Do you know the 10 most common errors leading to interview failure? 

Here's a great infographic from ClassesandCareers.com  that outlines the top 21 job interview errors and how to avoid them: 




 

Need an Amazing Twitter Community Made up of Thousands of Real, Passionate Re-Tweeters? 

Don't Have Time to do all the Social Media Work? Here's how we'll Build Your Amazing Business Twitter Account Fast: 

“David is a true expert in social media. He not only helped me achieve my Twitter goals, but he also provided a vast wealth of information on building a meaningful social media experience with my market." - Elance Customer


Top Photo Credit: gage131 via Compfight cc

20 of the Most Surprising Facts About the World's Most Powerful CEOs

 

 

 

 

 

Highly effective business leaders need to know how speak in a way that precision guides teams of all types and sizes. Yet as importantly they must be incredibly skilled at reciprocally communicating with, engaging and meaning-making with their employees at the person to person level . As Jeff Boss put in his recent leadership post at the Entrepreneur:

"The difference between speaking and communicating with people is that the former tells people what to think and how to feel, whereas the latter creates meaning through self-discovery. If you want to sustain your value both as a leader and as a founder, you must be able to communicate -- and instill - value."

 

Leaders are also veracious in how they consume, digest and implement high value leadership development books and strategies as they carefully regulate the influx and output of the valuable organizational resources they control.

For instance, what wouldn't any real or aspiring CEO do to get their hands of on the #1 business book from Bill Gates recently divulged Top 6 List of must reads?

Turns out the book: “Business Adventures” by John Brooks has been out of print for decades now! Here's an original copy on Amazon.com for only 3500.00 US!

 But there’s more to being or becoming a high performance CEO than just being a deep-engagement communicator and strategic consumer of business books.

Turns out that you also have to have been working at the same incredible company you now lead (79% of the time) for years and have your bachelor’s degree from outside of the US in most cases.

You also have to have completely mastered and demonstrated the fine art and science of high performance marriage -as a husband!

Are you surprised? Here's a very interesting infographic based on research out of the Harvard Business Review recently shared by Laura Montini of INC. fame. Take a look for yourself!

 

Top image courtesy of: Viedea Captial Advisors

How to Build a Powerful, Money-Making Personal Brand in Social Media Fast! #Infographic

This is a really helpful infographic on how to build your personal brand via social media.

It provides very clear, very simple and truly value adding tips that you can start applying right now in your personal or business social branding strategy.

Is you're goal is to build a vast community of passionate re-tweeters on Twitter? Do you want to create a daily YouTube video blog with thousands of views per day to connect with new customers for your business? Are you in the process of crafting the ultimate deep engagement LinkedIn account?


Bottom line: you're going to have to master the art and science of active social engagement.

Put simply you need to build a personal brand that people can really connect with. Yes blogging is a critical success factor, so is creating a focused value proposition.

This infographic clearly and simply states these facts along with the rest of the A-Z of effective personal branding:

Infographic courtesy of:  Feldman Creative.

How to Create The Ultimate Deep Engagement #Linkedin Profile for 2015! [#Infographic]

Want to completely dominate Linkedin this year? Need to get to the first page on Linkedin Search? 

Well, It's all about how you create and optimize your profile. I'm going to let this extraordinary infographic from leading social media expert Melonie Dodaro speak for itself! 

Here's literally everything you need to know about how to create a "Kick-Ass" Linkedin Profile:

Do you need deeply engaging content for your blog or website delivered fast? Let us write often same-day, high quality original articles for you. Check out what our customers are Saying! @ Person 2 Person Advanced Social Media and Content Creation.

Top Image courtesy of Jurgen Appelo  
Infographic courtesy of: Melonie Dodaro

10 Essential Social Media Lessons for Your Business in 2015 [#Infographic]

Did You Know: that 41% of traffic to Ecommerce sites comes from Pinterest compared to 37% from Facebook - yet only 10% of brands have a strong Pinterest focused social marketing strategy?

Did You Know: infographics are liked at a 400% higher rate than presentations and 2300% more than documents on SlideShare? 

Did You Know: Twitter out performs Facebook for direct conversion to sales rates? 

Check Out: The top 10 reasons why and how social media is a critical success factor for your business from CJG Digital Marketing: 

MarcelaPalma via Compfight cc

The Very Good and Surprisingly Very Bad Habits of Very Smart People:

What do Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and Beethoven all have in common, besides very, very high IQs? Well it turns out that it may be some very good and some very bad habits! 

 For example, smart people often share some very good habits in common like goal setting, avid reading, self-discipline and "metacognition" or thinking about their own thinking. 

 But major geniuses also share some less attractive habits that are as bad as they are surprising! 

Check out this great break down of everything you need to know about the good and bad habits of smart people from Online-PHD-Programs.ORG :

15 Critical Reasons Not to Buy The IPhone 5S or 5C

Thinking of buying a New Iphone? Here are 15 important reasons why not to choose the 5S or 5C models: