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How to Search for Jobs without Searching Using LinkedIn

April 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I am a big fan of the 80:20 principle and today I wanted to show you a way that you can take this principle and apply it to your job search on LinkedIn.  Anything that can make your life easier and takes less time is always a good thing, Right?

I wanted to show you a way that you can automate some of your job searching on LinkedIn.  In LinkedIn, you have the option to setup saved job searches which will email with the latest job postings on LinkedIn on a daily, weekly or monthly basis depending on what you want.  To do this you will need a LinkedIn account and the rest shouldn’t take you any time at all.

Step 1: Search for jobs with the keywords you are interested in and that are in the area you are located in.  As you can see above, when you are searching for a particular type of job there is the option to click “Save” and when you do this you see the following dialogue box appear…

Step 2: When you complete this information will add it to your saved job searches in LinkedIn and select the frequency you want to receive these job postings sent to the email associated to your LinkedIn account.

Step 3: The last thing that you need to do is check your email inbox and wait for the saved job search to find positions that match what you are looking for to arrive.

I hope that you enjoyed this tip on using LinkedIn in a more effective manner so that you don’t need to spend so much time searching for that next job online

Filed Under: Lifestyle, Social Media Marketing Tagged With:

How to List Job Experience on LinkedIn

April 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When it comes to listing your work experience on LinkedIn its important to think of who will be viewing it from potential employers, recruiters, people that you’ve worked with in the past and people looking to network with you.  I’ve seen people showcase their experience many ways on LinkedIn from simply updating their title when they get promoted keeping in mind that their role may have changed entirely with their company, stating every position change they’ve had with the start and end dates for each role as they get promoted.  To understand how you might want to go about adding your work experience on LinkedIn, lets review some examples…

Updating Your LinkedIn Profile with your Latest Title

In my opinion this is one misleading way to pad your experience on LinkedIn.  Let’s say that you’ve worked for a company for the past 6 years and you started as a Sales Representative then after that you became a Sales Manager and you are now a Regional Manager.  The issue with doing simply updating your title to “Regional Manager” is that it is assumed that you have been a Regional Manager for the past 6 years when in actuality it looks more like this…

  • Sales Representative - 2006 to 2009
  • Sales Manager - 2009 to 2011
  • Regional Manager - 2011 to Current
As opposed to this…
  • Regional Manager – 2006 to Current
Their are a number of issues with this, despite the fact of ethics being called into question, the biggest issue is that if a potential employer approaches you and assumes that you’ve been a Regional Manager for the past 6 years needless to say that you’re actual experience doesn’t match up.  Honestly is usually the best policy in matters where you are marketing yourself and your skills to the world.
Updating Your LinkedIn Profile with using Job Descriptions
If people viewing your profile on LinkedIn want to know more about you there are a few schools of thoughts on how to showcase your professional experience.
  • Using Job Description from a Job Ad – This is sometimes a great way to showcase what you were hired for however sometimes the job ad doesn’t accurately reflect what you actually do on a daily basis
  • Using a Brief Write-up to Explain Your Job – If you choose to create a write-up about your current position keep it to a few concise points that nail exactly what it is that you do.  No one wants to read a novel about your current role and the idea of adding a job description on LinkedIn is to get people interested in you (your skills, abilities and experiences).
  • Using No Job Descriptions – If you aren’t looking to disclose too much information about what you do then sometimes not having a job description related to a position is a great idea.  If recruiters and companies are interested in you then they will contact you regardless for your resume
Using Yearly or Monthly Dates on Your LinkedIn Profile
If people are looking at your profile its important for them to get an understanding of how long you’ve been with some companies because it helps to tell the story of your employment experience.
One common mistake is to try to pad your LinkedIn profile by matching the end date of a previous position with the start date of a new position if that isn’t the actual case.  If you finish a job in December of the previous year and you don’t start to February of the following year as a rule of thumb don’t state that you finished in January.  Ultimately this will come out in the interview or the background check and it could call your ethics into play and cause a trust issue with your potential employer and may also result in you not getting the job.
If you are considering yearly dates try to limit them to positions you’ve held for multiple years.  To some recruiters the month and year will still be important to validate your employment with the company but if you’ve been at a company for a while, years is sometimes easier to use as a way to outline your career experience.
Finally I wanted to leave you with my 3 tips for successfully using LinkedIn as an effective marketing and self promotion tool and they are…
  1. Be Honest – This sounds like simply advice but the truth is that we should all be honest as opposed to the adage of “fake it till you make it”.  Act with integrity and represent yourself accurately so that your character is never called into question.
  2. Decide on how LinkedIn can best serve you – LinkedIn is a tool so its up to you as to how to best use it to serve your needs whether you are looking for a job or just as a way to build your network.
  3. Keep it Simple Stupid – There are a lot of people that try to include everything they’ve ever done on their LinkedIn Profile and I suspect their resume as well but the truth is that this is highly ineffective.
Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With:

How Does Pinterest Work?

April 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinterest is one of the latest social media networks that allows you to create a virtual pin board and “share all the beautiful things you find on the web.”  The social aspect of Pinterest hinges on the fact that you can follow people, their pins and boards and share across a wide range of interests.

Today let’s cover a few key aspects including how to add a pin, how to upload a pin and how to create a board in Pinterest.  In all cases of adding and creating in Pinterest it’s important to remember that all you need to do is click the “Add +” button once you’ve logged into your Pinterest account.

How to Add a Pin

In order to add a pin to Pinterest you will need to first search for images related to what you want to pin using the URL of the site and select an image to then pin and you are ready to go after adding a comment about the image you’ve decided to pin and the board you want to Pin it on.

How to Upload a Pin

Uploading a pin to Pinterest is just about as easy as simply adding a pin with really one key difference.  You will need to upload the image, video or other document that you want to pin but other than that you should be ready to go.

How to Create a Board

When you first setup your Pinterest account you are asked to select some things that you like and these create the first boards that you have access to but creating boards that are all your own is where it’s at in Pinterest.  To do this you need to name your board, select a category it falls under and decide if only you can add to it or if you will allow contributors as well.

With social media networks these days being all about sharing Pinterest offers a unique slant on what is possible and makes it easier to share things you are interested in to a wide range of people.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: ,

StudioPress Affiliate Program

March 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

StudioPress is one of my favorite affiliate marketing partners to deal with.  For those of you that have never heard of StudioPress before they are a WordPress Theme development company, they’ve developed their own framework called  ”Genesis” and they were recently acquired by CopyBlogger.  Some of the things that they offer affiliate that choose to partner with them are…

  • Regular Monthly Newsletters - Sounds great eh?  The truth is that these newsletter pack in a great amount of information about what is happening at StudioPress including recent theme releases, what themes were the best selling themes in the past month and the occasional affiliate tips to help you sell more.
  • Decent Sized Payouts - The average payout on a sale is 35% which is fairly high.
  • Products Regularly Updated and Strong Community Following - In the world of theme development, if you aren’t updating your themes then you will soon find yourself out of business.  StudioPress has managed to stay on top of this which is part of the reason why they’ve been so successful promoting their products.
From the Customer’s Perspective: As a customer of StudioPress I can also attest that they provide great customer service, something that is rare in the theme development community.  Case in point is an email that I received after requesting an update for a 2.0 version from their customer support team.  This is the email I received…

So when I looked it up…you’d spent enough at the time of your last purchase to be upgraded to Pro Plus :-) I went ahead and did that for you – so now you can get any theme at any time! You may need to clear your cache/cookies to see the new forum areas.

Pro Plus members can download the latest version of all child themes here
Thanks,

Copyblogger Media Support

What this told me as a long time customer and as an affiliate is that StudioPress and its parent company has a solid focus on making customers happy.  As an affiliate this should also translate to increased sales because…

Great Products + Solid Customer Support = Happy Customer

StudioPress is one of my top affiliate picks and you might find it worth it to check them out of you are looking for an affiliate marketing program that is well managed and pays well.

Become a StudioPress Affiliate and Make Money!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: ,

How to Add Courses to Your Education Section in LinkedIn

March 23, 2012 By 2 Comments

One thing that has long been a concern of mine when using LinkedIn is the inability to show specific courses that you’ve taken under a degree, diploma or certificate.  Recently the team at LinkedIn released  a feature that allows you to add courses to the education section on your profile in no time at all.  Let me guide you through some steps to set this up on your LinkedIn profile right now…

Step 1: Navigate to your profile and scroll to the “Education” section on your LinkedIn profile.  If you haven’t set this up you must first have a school to link the courses to.

Step  2: Click the “Add Sections” link and select “Courses” section.  This will then direct you to start adding courses to your LinkedIn profile including the name of the course, the course code and your relationship to that course (example “You were a student of University X”)

Step 3: When you are finished adding the courses that you want to add simply click the “Add Courses” button.  When you are on your LinkedIn profile page you should now see courses associated to your education and also a newly created “Courses” section.

I hope that you find this tip useful in adding courses to your LinkedIn profile whether its part of your job search, keeping your resume current or using it to highlight your skills and achievements!

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With:

How to Use Page Insights on Facebook Pages

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For those of you who’ve read my other posts about using Facebook there is a lot that you can do with Facebook these days.  It certainly has changed a lot of the years and lately with the rise of Facebook pages what really interests me is the ability to report on the reach of posts, the “virality” which is basically how viral a post that you made on your Facebook page is and a number of other data sources.  I wanted to take the opportunity to run through how you can find this on your own Facebook pages and help you understand just exactly what the metrics that are displayed mean to help you become even more successful using Facebook pages.

Step 1: The first thing that you need to do to check out your page insights in Facebook is to click on the “Admin Panel” button as seen below.

What you will notice once you click this button is that you are brought to a page that gives you an overall view of your Facebook page covering snapshots of Insights, Notifications, New Likes you’ve received, Messages and Page Tips.  Have a look at what this looks like below and we will drill down into Facebook Page insights next.

Step 2: Click the “See All” link which will allow you to drill into the Facebook page insights section.  Below shows you what the Facebook page insights reporting looks like and there is a lot of information that you can get by looking at these standard reports.

The Facebook page insights reports includes a number of which you can see along the top of the report including the Overview report which shows you 3 key metrics including Posts, Reach and People Talking About This.

The next view that you get with Facebook page insights is the Likes View which you can see above shows a demographic breakdown of the people liking your page and it can show gender and age metrics of people liking your Facebook page, Cities, Countries and Languages that are all related to the people liking your Facebook page.  Outside of that it also shows your Facebook page’s “Like Sources” and whether likes came in from Facebook Like boxes and buttons.

The Reach View in Facebook page insights includes a breakdown of demographic information similar to the Likes Report view but it also includes additional reporting about the types of reach including Paid (for those of you using Facebook Ads), Organic, Viral as well as a metric around the frequency with which people viewed posts on your Facebook page.  Check out the screenshot of this below.

Finally let’s talk about the “Talking About This” View which is probably one of the most interesting report views in the Facebook page insights reporting options because outside of the demographic reporting its also great at showcasing the more viral aspects of using Facebook pages with “Viral Reach” and “Talking About This” reporting as you can see here…

After going through each of these report views in Facebook page insights what I really like is the fact that you can really gather key insights into who is looking at what you post from age and sex to how viral the posts on your Facebook page are which if you use a Facebook page as a part of your business’ marketing strategy become very valuable analytics to gather insights from and really that is the goal of any reporting system.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With: ,

3 Things that Great Affiliate Marketing Managers Do

February 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When you are choosing an affiliate marketing program there are lots of “okay” or “good” affiliate marketing programs but what is it that make some of the rare few great affiliate marketing programs?  Well to be honest it has almost nothing to do with the products, commissions and payouts because with a great affiliate marketing manager at the helm the sky is the limit.  The true top performers in affiliate marketing do at least 3 things very well which we will get to in a minute.  First, for those of you looking for affiliate marketing programs to join once you’ve figured out that the affiliate marketing program pays well, has content and banners to place on your site the next thing to be considerate of is what kind of support the affiliate marketing manager provides in terms of support

Produce Valuable Newsletters!

By producing valuable and informative newsletters for their affiliate marketers an affiliate marketing manager can enable and help affiliate marketers that sell their products to be more educated about the products, the company and tips and tactics to increase conversion of their products.  All of which usually spells more and more sales but it also means that you’ll be able to rapidly grow your affiliate marketing channel and help your affiliate marketers which will have them coming back for more.  Let’s have a look at an example of an affiliate marketing newsletter (names and products have been changed but the structure is a winning one)

Dear Affiliate,

     I just wanted to touch base as we have seen very little activity in your account since you have joined our program. I also wanted to give you some tips on what we feel will help you bring more traffic and convert.

1) Targeted site- if your site doesn’t target our niche market then I would suggest creating a site that does or at least a section of your site dedicated to this. To convert in our industry from a non-targeted site is almost impossible.

2) Targeted content- make sure your content is targeted to the audience that is looking to buy our product. This means advice, education about the product and other types of articles as well.

3) Sell online buying – convince your viewers with good copy that they can save lots of money by buying our product online. This includes creating a guide on how to buy online.

4) Review our website or a number of online vendors explaining why our site is the best place to buy online. Convincing copy with links goes much further than just banner ads.

5) Make sure you tweak your content so it is optimized for the keywords you want to target.

You are more than welcome to reach out to me so we can work on more site specific ideas. I would be happy to provide you with a list of some “good affiliate sites” which should give some more ideas on the right keywords and content to target.

Best Regards,

Your Affiliate Marketing Manager

As you can see the affiliate marketing manager has provided tips, ideas and use cases to help their affiliate marketers sell the product with proven tactics in a simple and easy to digest format.  No complex “techie talk” just plain and simple information and education on how to effectively market products as an affiliate marketer.

Highlight Top Selling Affiliate Products!

Now that we’ve discussed newsletters and their effectiveness let’s focus on one particular piece of information that will have your affiliate marketers sing your praises.  Most affiliate programs unfortunately don’t tell you what is the best selling product for the company which is not only counter-intuitive but a sign that they really don’t want to make more money.  Here is an example of how you might go about wording this to your affiliate marketing audience…

Top 5 Selling Products
Here is a list of our 5 top selling products which include…  

1. Product X – Bestseller!

2. Product Y

3. Product Z

4. Product !

5. Product #

Click here to check out our Top 5 products for December 2011 and let us know what you think! 

As you can see by highlighting the products that have sold it tells motivated affiliate marketers what is selling and where to focus in terms of products on their sites.  Which is a true “win – win” situation for the affiliate marketing manager and their affiliate marketers.

They Help to Make Their Affiliate Marketers Better!

The best affiliate marketing managers understand that in order to empower their affiliate marketers they need to educate them about their products and make them, their websites and communications better.  When I say better I mean to say that they help them to become better affiliate marketers of their products, they provide strategic insight into running better promotions of their products and they make themselves available to affiliate marketers.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With:

How to Fix Facebook Timeline

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In a recent article that I wrote about the coming Facebook Timeline functionality the one thing that most people agree with is that if they don’t want the feature in the first place they are stuck with it.  Kind of a “So sad, Too Bad!” feature that Facebook is soon to release to all of its users.  Today lets talk about an option to help with this since there is some outrage over this feature being released.  There is a an app that has been around for a bit that addresses some of the annoyances of Facebook and currently they are releasing version 6.4 which will address the following issues…

A “Timeline” tab in the Social Fixer options – This gives you a want to customize how your Timeline page displays to everyone.

Without this you were stuck to accepting the Facebook Timeline as it exists today.  Interested in learning how to use this feature on your Facebook Timeline?  Let’s discuss how to install this in your Facebook account…

Step 1: Download and Install Social Fixer to your web browser

The first thing that you need to do is click on the corresponding web browser that you are currently using when downloading Social Fixer as you can see above.  When you choose a web browser you will see the following dialog box asking you if its okay to install it.  Click the “Install” button…

 Step 2: Make sure Social Fixer is Enabled on your Web Browser

For my demonstration, I am using Google Chrome.  If you are using a different web browser please refer to their prompts during the setup phase.

What you see in the screenshot below is that Social Fixer is enabled in the web browser.

Step 3: Go to Facebook

At the top level it really is a 3 step process to start using Social Fixer however there are a lot of options that social fixer provides in terms of how and what you want to customize in your Facebook account.  What you will see below is what you will see once you’ve logged into Facebook and have Social Fixer enabled in your web browser.

As you can see you’ve got the recommended and minimalist settings available for installing Social Fixer.

On the right hand side of the page in Facebook you’ll see the Social Fixer icon by your profile picture including the option to fix your Facebook timeline using Social Fixer.  The great thing about Social Fixer is that you can customize, restrict and edit parts of Facebook to your liking.  Enjoy customizing Facebook to your needs!

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With:

5 Ways to Tell That An Affiliate Marketing Program Isn’t For You

February 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This article is meant to help you think further when choosing an affiliate marketing program. There are tons of affiliate marketing programs out there today. Some of which are good, others are simply “okay” and a lot of them suck for a variety of reasons. I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing initiatives on this and other websites of the past few years and while there are a ton of benefits to using this business model to generate money it’s not without its share of issues. Today let’s discuss 5 ways to tell that an affiliate marketing program isn’t for you so that you can focus more of your time earning affiliate marketing income and avoid the pitfalls of selecting the wrong affiliate marketing program.

I’ve broken it down into 5 ways you can use to help in your decision to choose an affiliate marketing program to add another income stream to your website or web based business. I also provide these tips to business owners looking to get into affiliate marketing to promote their products and services to understand what will attract and what drives away affiliate marketers from bad affiliate marketing programs.

  1. Lots of Negative Feedback about the Product or Service – I’ve found from personal experience that negative feedback on products or services you promote can either help to boost sales because it’s what everyone is talking about or drive away sales because people don’t trust the product or service being promoted. I suggest doing some research about the company and their track record to narrow down your selection in products and services that you want to promote through affiliate marketing.
  2. Poor responses from the Affiliate Marketing Manager – When you are serious about an affiliate marketing program I’ve contacted the affiliate marketing manager to get a feel for what the business is about, what their best selling products are and a wide range of other questions. If you can’t get a hold of the affiliate marketing manager in a reasonable amount of time, move on. Don’t waste your time trying to get in touch with someone that doesn’t want to talk to you. There are plenty of great affiliate marketing programs with great affiliate marketing managers. Go and find them and do business with them solely.
  3. Low Commission Rates on Small Ticket Products and Services – It’s got to be worth your efforts as an affiliate marketing promoting a product or service so if you are getting 15% of a $9.99 sale it just might not be worth your time to promote it. You’ve got to be able to make decent money and with a lot of affiliate marketing programs returning higher commission rates on larger ticket products and services it just makes sense to avoid the small ones unless you know how you can make money with it.
  4. Products that don’t relate to the audience – If you are promoting an affiliate marketing program for mortgages and your website is about knitting and crafts it doesn’t make sense to try to promote products that aren’t related to the content that you website serve’s up to people. Chances are that if they came to your site for the latest knitting tips they would love to buy the best Swedish knitting needles and not a five year fixed term mortgage.
  5. Payout amount is too high or unattainable – Some affiliate marketing programs only allow you to get a payout when the amount owing is greater than a few hundred dollars. If you earn $10 a sale and your minimum payout is $200 you’ve got to understand that to get your money earned you better have a high conversion rate to see that money faster. Otherwise you run the risk of getting frustrated and not promoting their products and services because it’s too hard to reach that level. It’s interesting because it’s been my experience that the best affiliate marketing programs don’t have a minimum payout in place. You simply promote, get sales and earn commissions. End of story. So be cautious about this point especially.

Regardless of which affiliate marketing program you might choose remember to choose wisely because as I’ve said a few times in this article, there are plenty to choose from today all with their differences and some are better than others.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With:

How to Setup Timeline on your Facebook Profile

January 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Most of the people in the free world use Facebook today. It’s great to connect with friends and aqcuintances, like a whole bunch of things, look at what your friends like and now you can go back in time using Timeline. Some people out there have taken the leap and are using Timeline on Facebook.  The real question when it comes to using Timeline is to whether or not to activate it on your Facebook profile.  With certain new sources in the media and web hinting that Timeline will soon be mandatory pretty soon it may not matter whether or not you want Timeline.  For the purposes of this article I wanted to talk about some of the potiential issues that this change may cause you and some of the features that Timeline boasts to those who choose to use it.

Gotchas

Once you upgrade you can’t go back – I don’t know why software companies do this but once you enable a feature, you might check it out, decide that you don’t like it and want to turn it off.  Once you get Timeline on facebook you are given 7 days to make changes to your profile page before they become live to everyone else including setting up the feel and feel of your Facebook profile and the security that you want to have on your profile.  The thing is once you make the change its not possible to go back to the old profile view of your Facebook profile page which is definitely off putting to say the least.  Just remember this when you are clicking the “Get Timeline” green button on Facebook.

Soon Facebook will make changing to Timeline the “defacto” standard for all users but for the time being its your choice as to use it or not use it.

Nice to knows

  • Preview Your Timeline – One of the best things that you can do in my opinion is to preview timeline before adding it to your Facebook profile for the simple reason of having time to play with your Facebook profile before the changes are visible to everyone.
  • Create a Cover for your Facebook Page – When you add Timeline to your Facebook account you are given the ability to add a cover to your Facebook profile page.  Its definitely a neat option to customize the look of your Facebook page making it instantly unique and memorable for your friends, colleagues and other people that know you or happen by your site.
  • Highlight your Stories and Photos – If you are a traditional Facebook user this might not even appeal to you.  Now on the other hand if you love new technology and a new way of representing yourself on Facebook.   Its a really interesting concept because it allows you to customize a lot of how people experience your Facebook profile.

How Can I Setup Facebook Timeline?

The first thing you want to do in order use Facebook Timeline is to simply click the “Get Timeline” button on the Facebook Timeline page.  Once you do this you can go to your Facebook profile and see what it looks like and what you will also see are options to now setup the “Cover”, privacy settings on pretty much everything from pictures to likes and things about you.  By default it seems to be set to display to friends.

When you are finished making changes to your Facebook Profile now using Timeline simply click on the “Publish Now” button and your Facebook Profile will now be using Timeline.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With: ,
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