Search
Get in Touch
Home Blog Page 110

Blogging for Your Business

I was featured in a recent roundup of business owners at CEO Blog Nation. We’d been asked how we use blogging to help our businesses and the variety of responses was intriguing. When I started my own business a number of years ago, I was told that blogging was good for SEO but I was never told why. As a result I launched a blog on my business website, wrote a couple of posts, and then quickly ran out of ideas. But just how can blogging help a business? There is no one correct answer to that question. Read on to find out more.

Blogging for Business not Blogging as Business

The use of blogging to help a business, and ‘blogging as a business’ are two different things. In the latter case the blog is the focus and everything revolves around growing traffic to the blog in order to increase its readership. As a business owner, however, the blog on my business website is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a result, driving traffic to my business blog, or indeed to my website as a whole, isn’t the ultimate goal.

It’s essential for my business website to have high visibility, rather than high traffic. But that high visibility is only of genuine significance in the local area which I service, which in my case is in Brisbane, Australia. In fact, in order for my business to succeed, I require little more than 200 unique visits each month, assuming these convert at a satisfactory rate into paying customers.

The comments of business owners in the roundup at CEO Blog Nation encapsulated an imaginative range of approaches. Several were using blog posts as a traffic funnel to their website. Some were using them as an educational resource, providing useful rather than promotional content. One was using her blog as a stepping-stone between social media and email. Another uses their business blog to address specific problems their customers might have, and to provide fresh insights into their industry.

I was particularly impressed by the response of a company called Milestone Localization who said that almost 90% of their organic traffic lands on blog pages. They were achieving this by doing extensive research on keyword difficulty and search volumes before writing their posts.

Blogging to Demonstrate Expertise

As far as the roundup at CEO Blog Nation goes, the following was my own response to the question.

“The posts are written with clients and potential clients in mind and are designed to showcase what I offer. They will often elaborate on services mentioned elsewhere on the site and demonstrate my ability to address the client’s issue. The spin-off is that Google wants to provide expert, authoritative and trustworthy (E-A-T) solutions to search queries. By regularly producing content that embodies these values, my business garners favour with Google and my website ranks better as a result. Providing expert content that scratches where people are itching is a win-win for all concerned.”

As well as blogging on my business website, I also write regular content for various business and technology sites around the web. The purpose of these posts is also to demonstrate my expertise in my field. Because the blog on my business website is subservient to my business, I’ve made the decision that it’s more beneficial for me to promote my website through quality content distributed around the web, than it is to promote my own blog. Having said that, some of the posts I have published elsewhere might also be suitable for readers of my own blog. The target audience for the blog on my business website is primarily current and potential clients.

Republishing Posts

The difficulty with publishing posts on one’s own blog after first publishing them elsewhere, is that it potentially creates issues with duplicate content. Such issues can have an impact on SEO, not because search engines penalise duplicate content as such, but because they can be confused about which version is the original.

It is possible to repost previously published material without causing issues with duplicate content. In order to do so, you could ensure that the page where the content is reposted is not indexed. However, a better approach is to use a canonical tag in the code of the reposted page to tell the search engines that the content was originally posted elsewhere, and to specify the URL of the master copy.

Unfortunately, in my case I’m unable to use either of these methods. My website is built using the popular website builder Wix and their blogging functionality doesn’t permit the use of canonical tags with individual blog posts. I’d imagine there might be more flexibility when using WordPress, which is a true blogging platform rather than a straightforward website builder.

Another way to overcome the duplicate content issue would be to try to ‘hide’ the blog posts in question from the search engines by use of the robots.txt file. This isn’t a satisfactory solution though, as any links to the blog post from elsewhere on the web (or internally from your website) will result in it being discovered and probably indexed.

In an ideal world, I would be able to index my unique posts, whilst leaving the previously published posts unindexed. In this way the unique posts would still have the potential to generate relevant local traffic.

What’s the Purpose of the Blog for Your Business?

It might seem counterintuitive and even ludicrous to not want certain blog posts to be found by search engines. After all, most of us want our blog posts to be read by as wide an audience as possible. However, this brings us back to the variety of different reasons for having a blog on a business website. If, as in the case of Milestone Localization, your blog is there to be the primary traffic funnel to your website, then clearly you would want all your posts to be indexed and to rank well on Google.

The other extreme would be where you don’t need to have any of your blog posts indexed or discovered because they are mainly there for consumption by existing clients. In the case of my own business blog, it isn’t primarily designed to be a traffic funnel to my site. Rather it’s a feature of the site which gives potential clients confidence that my business will be able to service their needs.

Conclusion

Business owners use blogging in all sorts of different ways. The roundup at CEO Blog Nation featured 25 entrepreneurs and it makes interesting reading. If you are a business owner, the most important thing is that you have a clear strategy for how blogging should help your business. Then design your posts accordingly, and review your outcomes regularly, to determine whether you’re achieving the results you desire.

This article was written by Norm McLaughlin, founder of Norm’s Computer Services, a local computer repair and IT support business in Brisbane, Australia.

Why You Should Use an Email Verifier

The history of modern email usage and services dates back to the 1960’s during the infancy of the internet. Today a staggering 269 billion emails are sent each day globally, with just over 3.8 billion email users worldwide.

For internet marketers, email is an important way to communicate. Find out how an email verifier can help your marketing efforts and your bottom line.

Email verifiers are important, but many marketers still don’t understand if they should use an email verifier or not. Email verifiers help you get rid of spam and can be useful for your business.

Real customers start with real emails, and using email verification is still the most effective way to ensure that quality data is collected. When you validate email addresses, your email marketing becomes more effective, improves fraud prevention, and increases your ability to protect your sender reputation.

Email is still one of the most preferred and effective communication channels, and most people check their email on a daily basis. Unfortunately, only 10% of the collected email addresses are accurate, this incorrect data is mostly caused by human error.

What’s an Email Verifier?

Email verification is the process where an email address is verified to check if it is active without having to send a message. Many users find this practice to be very beneficial as it helps to reduce both programmatic and harsh bounce rates from email campaigns while protecting the reputation of their outgoing mail server.

The Email Verification Service can be used to perform such verification in bulk to save time and manual effort with API integrations to automatically parse entire mailing lists to prevent fake registrations and invalid data.

There are many reasons why companies would like to receive email confirmation nowadays. 

5 Reasons to use an Email Verifier

By carefully considering the variety of email verification options, you can choose the best email tester for your business. 

  1. Non-existent domains – When a company closes or changes its domain, the email addresses associated with the non-existent domain also become inactive. In such cases, email verifiers can help you remove email addresses that belong to a non-existent domain to lower your bounce rate.
  2. Job changes – People change jobs over time. In such cases, the old domain either becomes unavailable or is redirected to another person’s email address. Checking email addresses helps determine when people quit their jobs.
  3. Syntax errors – Syntax errors are errors made when registering email addresses. Examples include any spelling errors and unintentional spaces included in the email address. Email syntax checking helps identify these erroneous email addresses.
  4. Spam traps – Spam traps emails are email addresses that do not belong to any real person. They are created to catch spam emails. Such spam traps should be avoided since they might get you blacklisted, which will result in poor delivery and poor sender reputation.
  5. Improves ROI and saves money – The biggest benefit of checking email is the amount of money your company can save by cutting down on marketing costs. Every email sent represents money wasted, so every marketing message sent to non-existent or inaccurate email addresses is money wasted. 

The email validation process begins with validating the syntax of the email address. Next, the verification tool checks if the domain name is correct. Once that is found OK, advanced technical processes begin. They ascertain the validity of the email addresses. After the verification process ends, the tool will display results.

Think about the benefits of email verification that can bring your business. Here are the main benefits of email verifier tools:

  • Reduces email bounces,
  • Ascertains accuracy of your data,
  • Saves money,
  • Shows accurate campaign insights,
  • Improves customer engagement,
  • Increases campaign ROI.
  • Protects sender reputation.

How Email Verification works

While many people have heard of, or may have used some of, email verifiers, not everyone clearly understands the technical aspects of the service. Now is the time to learn how to validate email addresses to keep this list clean, improve deliverability, and reduce bounce rates.

There are many technical nuances to how email verification tools work. Email verification usually involves checking your mailing list for spam traps. It identifies any issues and possible problems before they’re caught by ISPs or ESPs. The next thing that happens with email verification is that the provider checks the format of your emails. The next step of the process is domain verification. The final step of the process is individual mailbox validation.

The general idea is that each email tester performs validation according to the developers’ algorithms. How are email addresses verified by Snov.io? We use a 7-tier verification process to check email addresses:

  1. Syntax check,
  2. Check for gibberish,
  3. Checking domain existence,
  4. MX record verification,
  5. Comprehensive domain verification
  6. SMTP Authentication (Ping Email Address),
  7. Check an email for free.

Snov.io Email Verifier is a tool that clears your email list from invalid emails. You can use Snov.io Email Verifier for free on a free account. Snov.io verifies most email addresses, including custom domain emails. Snov.io doesn’t verify emails from unverifiable domains.

Conclusion 

Email verification is one of the best solutions to deal with the proliferation of inaccurate or abandoned email addresses. Email verification should be used to keep your contact list up to date with loyal subscribers or interested potential customers for the best email marketing results.

The benefits of checking email are numerous and significant, from cost savings to better analytics, from dramatically reduced email bounces to fewer complaints. Successful marketers know this and always try to use clean lists.

Canva Business Model- How Does Canva Make Money

Introduction

Visuals form an integral part while communicating any given information. A creative and impactful graphic can do a better job in conveying complex messages when compared to words. Even someone who didn’t get formal education can understand the gist of the information through a graphic.

Images are easy to understand. From educational institutions to tech giants, every institution and organization includes images to tell its story.

Visual storytelling has always been and will continue to be a powerful tool to persuade and move people. With meme marketing and moment marketing on the rise, the relevance of using images as a marketing tool rose. After all, creativity always wins the hearts.

About Canva

Canva is a graphic design platform where users can create social media posters, simple graphics, and visual content of different sorts. It provides simple tools to make creative posters and infographics for both personal and commercial purposes. For people who don’t have extensive photo-editing knowledge, Canva is a handy software for creating creative graphics. 

Canva has a unique feature called drag and drop interface where users can add their pictures and attest to the custom Canva templates. This platform hosts around 50,000 free templates designed by professionals. Users can make the best use of the drag and drop interface to create their custom graphic with just a few clicks.

The templates are unique and categorized into different segments. They can be used as Zoom background, email banners, Instagram posts, invitations, book covers, etc. From basic edits to adding simple vectors, the features of Canva help create the best designs with little effort. In case someone doesn’t know how to use the features, Canva offers free tutorials about how to get started and make the best use of this platform.

How Canva works

Canva is a web application for creating graphics with simple design tools. From cropping to designing templates, this application is a beginner-friendly tool for newbies. The edit options for fonts, color, background, texture, brightness, adding filters, etc., make the whole editing process simple.

Also, users can create a personalized brand kit that helps them maintain uniformity in the visuals they create. This means users can use the same visual styles (Fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc.) for all their designs.

The pre-designed templates and drag and drop features make Canva an all-in-one design tool. Unlike the traditional Photoshop software, Canva is a web application with multiple features. It is a SaaS application that lets users create visual content. Furthermore, the design tools are simple and easily understandable.

How Canva Makes Money

Canva is a contributory solution to the digital revolution happening in the 21st century. It is needless to say that Instagram and Facebook are ruling the communication channels worldwide.

From simple messaging to running marketing strategies, these apps have been playing a significant role in changing the online dynamics. But what makes these platforms a big hit? What is it that changed the scenario over years? The simple answer is visual content. 

Be it the memes we share or the pics we pin on Pinterest- visual content takes the sure-shot. Almost every organization has been increasingly investing in meme marketing, creating relatable content, comics, and simple graphic images.

With the in-demand of moment marketing, there has been an increased demand for creating the graphics within no time. The urgency and relevancy of Canva made this platform a popular choice among designers to make the whole process a simpler and faster way.

Canva adopted a freemium business model where users can access the pre-built templates and design their creatives. However, there are some additional features that users can unlock by taking a Pro subscription. Let’s dive deep to understand how Canva makes money.

Canva Pro

Canva Pro is a premium subscription that offers additional features like advanced fonts, vector options, etc., which are not available with the free trial. This plan makes the work of a Graphic designer much simpler. Along with fonts, vectors, and other features, Pro users get the additional tools mentioned below

  • 500+ advanced fonts
  • Brand kit
  • Premium animations and vector images
  • schedule social media content on seven platforms. 

Along with these features, Pro users get priority support and unlimited folders to save their graphics. Also, users can get access to 75+ million premium stock photos and 100 GB of cloud storage.

Design school

Design school is a premium Canva academy where users can understand how Canva works and enhance their design skills. On this platform, there are online courses curated for beginners and Canva users.

These self-paced courses are beginner-friendly and free-of-charge. However, physical classes start from USD 5 for students. The courses are curated and taught by Canva employees and experts.

Canva Print

Canva Print ships is an exclusive merchandise printing service offered by Canva for its users. With this service, users can print designs on merchandise like T-shirts, posters, flyers, etc. The cost of printing varies based on the amount of merchandise quoted, location, delivery location, etc.

Canva for Business

Canva for enterprise is a premium membership for enterprises to enhance their creative productivity. With this subscription, creative teams of enterprises get access to team dashboards where they can:

  • Manage teams
  • assign tasks
  • grant access rights
  • collaborate
  • create team folders

Canva for business helps the team to manage tasks seamlessly. A dedicated account manager and priority support will be assigned for each team subscription.

Conclusion

Canva made a huge success with little publicity and more word of mouth. The key to this platform’s success can be attributed to its empowering content and solution strategy. Besides focusing on monetization, Canva invested in building a knowledge database and user-friendliness. These attributes in the long-run helped Canva to get more love from users across the world, and helped them in building a loyal customer base.

How Talent Management Software is Impacting the Healthcare Industry

In the healthcare industry, things like hiring top candidates, identifying training gaps, assessing employee performance and staying on top of finances are more than just a competitive advantage. These factors can determine patients’ treatment experiences and quality of care. Therefore, you should review all talent management software thoroughly before committing to one program. Here is what you should know:

Hiring for Skill and Experience

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 46% of HR professionals say that high-skilled, full-time medical positions are some of the most difficult to fill. The healthcare industry is facing a talent shortage, which will only grow as the demand for more healthcare professionals rises and as older professionals begin to retire. In order to avoid this issue and ensure that you hire only top-notch employees, you can use healthcare talent management software to streamline the hiring process and narrow down the top candidates.

Finding the best talent is beneficial for any business, but when it comes to healthcare, good talent management software is now essential for identifying the absolute best candidate for a position. Using talent management applications and applicant tracking software to properly search for the most qualified candidate ensures the hiring of the most skillful, capable, and experienced employees possible. 

Keeping Track of Training

Talent management software not only allows hiring managers to assess employees’ skills and training history. It also allows them to assign courses and training that actively target specific individual deficiencies. An individualized approach to training is much more likely to benefit all employees rather than just a select few.

Talent management software also helps top-performing employees grow their competencies and advance their careers rapidly, which is vital in today’s healthcare industry. Furthermore, tracking employees’ skills and experiences and comparing them with their real-world applications produces better healthcare workers and benefits your organization, the professionals’ careers and the quality of patient care. 

Finally, using talent management software to track training information not only supports the growth of employees’ careers and perpetuates good patient experiences; it will also ensure that your organization meets compliance requirements and safety standards.

Monitoring Performance

Frequent performance assessments are crucial in the healthcare industry. The consequence of not tracking employee performance and addressing problems right away can hurt an organization’s reputation and its patients. Fortunately, talent management software makes it easier to assess employee performance, so that any issues or deficiencies can be addressed immediately. 

Tracking performance also gives healthcare organizations insight into widespread inadequacies, which can help hiring managers revamp onboarding and training processes. Finally, the software allows HR managers to identify promising candidates for promotions or specialized programs, which can help boost productivity.

Talent Management Software: Essential for Success in the Healthcare Industry

As the healthcare industry makes rapid advancements in providing top patient care, medical organizations and facilities must ensure that they hire staff well-equipped to navigate in this environment. Hiring the most capable and promising employees is more important than ever, as is keeping healthcare organizations compliant and patients safe. 

The good news is that talent management software has helped the healthcare industry make great strides in recent years. As it evolves, it can further improve patient experiences and streamline the hiring process in the healthcare industry.

Coursera Business Model- How Does Coursera Makes Money

Introduction

Getting access to the course material and course methodology of premium institutes has never been an option until recent times. E-learning and online education platforms transformed the learning ways of students worldwide. From basics to advanced topics and subjects, the content is now just a click away. The digitalization of course structures has been helping students across the world to learn at their own pace.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is one such course plan where learners from different parts of the world can sign up for the most-happening and relevant courses offered by top-ranked institutions.

Although MOOCs are self-learning modules, learners- ranging from college students to experienced professionals, can stay updated with the advancements in their respective fields. The courses are affordable and flexible. Even working professionals can complete the course modules based on their availability and schedule.

About Coursera

Coursera is an online education platform that offers an exhaustive catalog of course modules or MOOCs, specialized education, degrees, graded certificate courses, etc. Unlike the other tutoring platforms, Coursera doesn’t produce or create educational content for users. Instead, they tie-up with universities and organizations to launch the courses and educational content. 

Founded in 2012 by two Stanford professors, Coursera has been the trusted and popular choice for learners to upgrade their knowledge. Their commitment to transforming the learning experience made this platform a leading global online learning platform.

Currently, Coursera has a partnership with more than 200 top-ranked Universities and organizations. The flexibility, affordability, relevancy, and graded assessments make this platform a reliable source of online education.

How Coursera Works?

Coursera offers diverse educational content in the fields like Data science, finance, management, etc., in partnership with several universities and organizations. The course structure comprises hands-on projects and job-ready certificates that give learners an edge in the job market.

Around 76 million learners, 100+ Fortune 500 companies, and more than 6,400 institutions (both educational and government) use Coursera as a platform to access quality education. 

Coursera offers access to guided projects and courses for free. However, if one wishes to get a certificate for the same, a nominal amount has to be paid after completing the course.

Paid courses:

The course videos are pre-recorded modules that learners can access during the course running. In case the course module is a weekly recurring module, the learners can watch the videos only during the proposed schedule. Mostly the course modules are broadly categorized in the branches mentioned below:

  • specialization courses
  • MasterTracks
  • Professional certificates
  • University degrees (limited)

Most of the courses on this platform are specialized courses with graded assessments and quizzes. These are micro-credentials with insightful videos and text recommendations. Specialization courses help beginners and mid-level professionals to learn a new skill or advance their skillset.

While Master tracks and Professional certificates are in-depth specialization courses, they have specific prerequisites that a learner should abide by. Whereas for specialization courses, in many cases, there are no prerequisites or pre-course work.

For working professionals or lateral learners, Coursera offers accredited University degrees in selected courses at both Masters and Bachelors level. As mentioned above, Coursera has partner Universities like HEC Paris, Harvard University, The University of Colorado, etc. Interested stakeholders can register for a specific course and get the certificate after completing the discussed assignments.

Coursera hosts more than 3,000 quality educational content in collaboration with respective institutions. Learners can get access to varied instructor-led courses and hands-on projects at a go.

How Coursera makes money

Although the platform, on the whole, aims at giving quality education at affordable prices, Coursera monetized some courses based on credibility and rigor.

Coursera works in collaboration with global partners across 140 countries. Since its inception, this platform has been growing by partnering with diverse organizations, launching innovative programs, and adapting to the employability needs. Learners can master in-demand skills and build their profile at a very affordable price.

Now that we discussed why Coursera is the trusted education partner for leading global Universities- let’s understand the revenue streams through which Coursera makes money.

Specialization courses

Specialization courses are pay-and-learn courses that are curated for enhancing an individual’s knowledge in their relevant field. From Data Analytics to Marketing, Coursera offers certificates for beginners and professionals alike.

The course duration spans from two or three months depending on the curriculum rigor. Although this is a specialized course, users can access the modules for free until the program actively runs.

However, in such cases, users cannot obtain a professional certificate. For getting a verified certificate and lifetime access to course modules, Coursera introduced a subscription-based model.

Through this subscription, learners can pay a monthly fee starting from USD 39 (price varies based on the course) for getting lifetime access to the course module and get a certificate after completing the graded assessments.

Professional certificates

Professional certificate courses are advanced-level courses that help professionals to scale up their career in their respective field. Even Professional certificate courses run on a subscription-based model where users can access the course content.

The subscription cost starts from USD 39 to 89. These courses demand a commitment of 3 months to 6 months.

Coursera Plus

Coursera Plus is a Premium subscription where learners can access over 3,000 courses at a go. The subscription costs USD 399 annually. With this subscription, one can open doors to unlimited learning at their own pace. Although learners can access course content and modules of all the courses, this subscription is limited to Professional and Specialization certificates.

University Degrees

Coursera in collaboration with top global Universities offers world-class fully-accredited Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Generally, earning a degree from the leading Universities is costlier and time-consuming. The degree courses from Coursera are comparatively affordable and affordable.

The curriculum is designed in such a way that even beginners can understand the topics effortlessly. Also, people who wish to restart their careers can go for these courses as they are self-paced. On average, these courses require 12 to 36 months of time commitment to complete.

MasterTrack certificates

MasterTrack certificates a Masters-level certification, which includes real-world case studies and hands-on projects. In contrast to the traditional Masters’s degree, the course content is more comprehensive, experimentative, and short. The duration of the program is generally 5-7 months based on the course. The course subscription starts from USD 2000.

Coursera for Business, Government, and Campus

Coursera offers a transformative skill development course methodology in collaboration with leading Universities worldwide. Coursera for Business is a specialized subscription for organizations, where employees can get access to over 3,800 classes listed on Coursera.

Along with access to course modules organization gets additional benefits like enterprise plans, API integrations, and skill transformation plans. The subscription varies based on the size of the teams, organization, and requirements.

For smaller organizations, Coursera offers a Team subscription that starts from USD 400 per year.

Coursera for Government and Coursera for Campus aims at providing on-demand skills and world-class training at affordable prices. To know more about Coursera for Government, refer to this link. 

Conclusion

The success of Coursera lies in its affordability and flexibility. Once a learner understands what it offers, there’s no looking back. If you wish to read the business models of various leading organizations, refer to this link. 

1...109110111...168Page 110 of 168
client-image

Learn, Earn, Save, Grow Money with Postling

Learn & Earn

Grow & Tech

Company

© Zeen.com | All rights reserved |2020