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How to Encourage Teens to Get Jobs and Save Their Own Money

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StrategyDriven Professional Development ArticleInstead of allowing your kiddo to laze around the house this summer, encourage your teen to get a job and save their own money instead. How so? Here are a few methods for talking your teen into taking on responsibilities and making their own cash this summer.

Encourage Your Kids to Search for Local Part-Time Jobs

Older teens, around 15 and older, can apply for part-time jobs. Check bulletin boards, encourage them to look at reputable online resources for hiring positions, and take them to fill out applications at local grocery stores, fast food restaurants, or retail shops. There are plenty of places that would be happy to hire a teen for the duration of the summer, on a part-time basis.

Or, for Younger Teens, Set Up a Chores and Rewards System Around the House

If your teen can’t apply for a job outside of the home yet, set up a list of daily chores and offer a rewards system for around-the-house help. Sure, they have the average chores that they should be doing anyways, such as cleaning their room, making their own breakfast, and doing their laundry.

Make it a Rule to Set Back 30-Percent of Each Paycheck

When your kiddo gets a job, even if it’s doing chores at home, you should implement a 30/70 rule. They should put 30-percent of their paycheck into savings, like a lock box or bank account, and then they can keep 70-percent for whatever they need, want, etc.

Help Older Teens with Resume, Job Prospects, and Goals

Older teens need to get a little more serious about job prospects and cash management in general, so help them make a resume for their part-time applications. Then, help them pinpoint both short-term and long-term job goals. For example, where would they like to work as a starter job? But where would they like to end up, career-wise, in the long run? You could even suggest recruitment agencies Boston for start-up opportunities in a plethora of niche markets.

Yes, your teen probably works hard in school, but a part-time summertime job will ensure their summer is productive. AND they still get some summertime downtime when they get home.

Why a Company Blog Should be Incorporated into Your Marketing Strategy

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleAs a business owner, you’re open to any and all tips to aid in the growth of your business. But, if you haven’t started your company blog yet, you may want to reevaluate your marketing strategy.

A company blog has influential benefits, such as improving your website authority and raising awareness of your brand, which in turn produces loyal readers which translate into customers. A major component in the success of your business is the marketing plan that you’ve implemented. Optimize it by introducing well-written, professional, informational, and engaging content that’s sure to take your company to the next level.

Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

Regularly publishing fresh, updated content containing your relevant keywords will boost your SEO and help you rank higher for those keywords in Google. In addition to rankings, your engaging and informational content will attract new readers and land them directly on your page. If you utilize you call-to-action properly and effectively, those visitors will be converted to leads, hopefully generating loyal and happy customers.

Establish Authority and Grow Your Backlink Profile

A blog gives you the chance to establish yourself as an expert in your field. For example, I create the blog content for a cubicle manufacturer and office furniture supplier, Skutchi Designs. “Cubicle specialist” is how I refer to myself in the blog. I am building my credibility for related topics in this field. People will begin to trust my blog and writing and specifically search for our site when they have a question or are looking for a product related to office spaces.

As your blog gains traction and becomes a more popular, reliable source, you’ll find yourself gaining natural backlinks from sites in related industries as well. This will only increase your site’s authority more and help you rank higher, driving even more visitors to your site.

Spread Brand Awareness to Reach a Larger Potential Audience and Customers

As you continue to publish content of exceptional quality to your blog (hosted on your primary domain), you’re spreading awareness of your brand. Using Skutchi Designs as an example again; someone who has never heard the name “Skutchi” before may be searching for tips on cubicle organization. They come across the blog post, “25 Office Cubicle Organization Ideas,” and click on one of our cubicle organizers I suggested in the post, then decide to buy. The blog content just converted a stranger looking for a solution into a customer. If they’re happy with the product, they’ll become a loyal user of our blog, website, and products.

The trick is to create content that people are genuinely interested in. Through some keyword research, you’ll discover what topics in your industry people are searching for. If you can develop great content, your blog and website will expand and gain popularity through likes and shares and backlinks from other sites or industry leaders. Your goal is to develop trust and relationships with your customers and influencers through the use of your company blog.

Ultimately, a blog just makes sense. It’s a free and effective way to grow your business, spread brand awareness, establish authority, and acquire new customers. Give yourself a boost above your competitors by establishing yourself as the most credible and trusted source in your industry and grow your search traffic naturally.

Best eCommerce Marketing Tips

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleAre you currently dissatisfied with your ecommerce business venture thus far?

Maybe you haven’t achieved the levels of success that you know you can reach. Or maybe your little ecommerce shop is bursting with customers and you’re ready to take things to the next level.

Whatever your reasoning may be, just know that there are powerful marketing tips that make it more than possible to grow your e-commerce site by leaps and bounds.

Let’s take a look at our best recommendations for 2017 and beyond.

Create a Powerful Content Marketing Plan

Whether you realize it or not, content marketing is one of the best ways to gain additional exposure for your ecommerce business.

But coming up with a plan might not be that easy.

As you will learn, or even already know, there are a few different ways to approach content marketing. The most effective way that I’ve personally come across is through blogger outreach.

Putting a customized blogger outreach plan into effect will be time-consuming and you’ll have a lot of moving parts.

Instead of leaving things to chance, and potentially creating a system that fails, I recommend using time-tracking software like Clockspot to track everyone working to help implement your plan. This includes tracking the projects of staff writers, freelance writers, project managers, virtual assistants, and anyone else involved in your content marketing strategy. Also, you might want to check some the best live chat software to help your team stay organized.

Why content marketing?

For starters, this is an excellent way to build backlinks to help improve search engine optimization. And once you start ranking in the search engines for your most valuable keywords, customers will find your products a lot easier.

Second, content marketing helps you become an authority in your niche.

By putting out high value content all over the Internet, potential customers will see that you and your company know what you’re talking about. This will help make you an expert in your industry.

Do yourself and your ecommerce site a favor and harness the power of content marketing through blogger outreach sooner rather than later.

Create an Automated Email Marketing Campaign

If you ever want to have an effective e-commerce business, you need to begin incorporating powerful strategies for your ecommerce business.

For many successful ecommerce owners, they look at email marketing as the bedrock of their strategy because it’s a great way to influence your customers to buy the product that they recommend.

Through email marketing, your customers will receive regular marketing messages from you. If you automate this system, they will be in regular contact, hear about excellent products that you recommend, and if you write your emails persuasively, you can convince them that your recommendations are worthy of their time and attention.

Consumers like opening emails, especially transactional ones like welcome emails or cart abandonment emails. That’s the bottom line and it’s never going to change. They look forward to getting emails in their inbox.

So do not hesitate to build up a big mailing list.

Make sure your emails contain helpful information about your products. Answer questions and concerns that your customers might have. And always remember to recommend and sell your products.

To automate your email marketing campaign, make sure you have access to a top email autoresponder. It costs a little bit of money, but it’s a worthy investment that will pay for itself tenfold over the long run.

Diversify Your Social Media Platforms

Right now, you may have a strong presence on one or two social media platforms. And that’s perfectly okay for the moment.

What happens if one of those platforms falls out of favor? You’re going to lose access to a major part of your customer base.

Instead of leaving yourself vulnerable, diversify the social media platforms you post on. By building a strong presence on multiple platforms, you’ll be insulated in case one or more eventually falls out of favor.

Keep Track of Your Productivity Time with Helpful Software

It’s also important to mention the in order to get things organized, you would also need to check out what are the best tools out there that will help you maintain things tidy. Whilst there’s so many apps out there, it’s very hard to suggest a specific software generally, as every business is subjective. Aside from time monitoring, website running and data organizing, there are also packages that will be useful especially to developers, applications that test quality and errors of your app, which basically points out red barriers you need to keep in mind in order for things to run smoothly. See more in this source: https://stackify.com/what-is-load-testing/

Needless to say, if your project runs about application development, these kinds of apps built from devs to devs, are something you, as a developer, definitely must have.

Conclusion

Building an ecommerce business is hard and it takes time and dedication. But if you use these tips, you’ll be on the right path to success for many years to come.

Leadership Inspirations – Be a Great Person

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StrategyDriven Leadership Inspirations QuoteKeep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, the really great make you feel great too.

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
American author and humorist

Top 8 Languages You Can Learn to Strengthen Your CV

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StrategyDriven Professional Development ArticleYou can be absolutely brilliant in your field of work and yet miss out on the most lucrative career opportunities abroad, just because you don’t know the right language. Now, what if you are not the absolute best in your field? Most of us are not and that’s okay, but what it means is you probably can’t afford to miss out on any opportunity that could come your way, including that lucrative offer outside the country. As a student, it is important to add as many useful skills to your repertoire as possible because you will probably need them all down the line to broaden your career in this extremely competitive world that we all are trying to work in.

However, a foreign language is something that most of us cannot just learn without some guidance from an experienced teacher. The good news is that you won’t really have to leave your room after a busy week at college or work to go to your foreign language class because you can find a tutor from your laptop using a website such as Superprof. Home tuition is great, but if you would rather take your language classes face-to-face, that option is also there, and the best part is that you will almost always find tutors in any given location on this website. It’s the more time-efficient and cost-effective way to learn just about any language in existence. You can also use a language app such as Duolingo if you have less time to work with a tutor. You can do this anywhere – for example when you’re sat on the train – and it will send you reminders to ensure you keep up with it. Both of the options mentioned above are great ways to learn a language and strengthen your CV as a result.

Here are eight important languages that would very likely help you improve your life.

Mandarin

Most people get it wrong when they are asked what the most spoken language in the world is because they end up saying English or Spanish. However, the right answer is Mandarin (including all the various dialects) because China has the world’s largest population and everyone speaks Mandarin there. Given that China is right now one of the largest markets for just about everything and it’s growing bigger with each passing year, learning Mandarin is definitely a sure shot way to boost your CV and increase your chances of landing a job in a multinational company. After all, it’s a very tough language that in spite of being spoken by over 16% of the world’s population, is hardly spoken by anyone in the English-speaking nations.

Arabic

Arabic is one of the six languages officially adopted by the UN and about twenty nations use Arabic as their national language. However, the completely foreign nature of the language is one of the prime reasons as to why dealing in the Middle-East is a lot more challenging than it should be for businesses originating from other sections of the world. The wealth in the Middle-East has drawn the attention of several multi-billion-dollar companies from all parts of the globe over the years and if you know Arabic, then rest assured that it will instantly put you ahead of the competition when appearing for an interview for one of those companies.

Spanish

The second most spoken language in the world is Spanish and if you plan to work in any of the South American or Central American countries, you will probably need to learn Spanish before going there. In Europe, there’s Spain that you need to consider as well. A lot of native English speakers who know Spanish end up as English teachers in the US, where there’s a big demand for such jobs. While one may argue that the same logic applies to all the other languages as well, Spanish-English teachers are the most in-demand English teachers in the West.

French

Writing French is a lot easier than pronouncing it because there are visible similarities between English and French, but as far as the pronunciation is concerned, it involves a different phonetics altogether. From the perspective of building a career outside the UK, learning the French language could come in very handy since France is one of the premier places to work in within the European Union. Aside from France itself, there are a number of regions around the world which use French as their first language.

Russian

The Russian language is another very important and widely spoken language within the EU territory. The main reason behind the widespread nature of the language is because a number of the independent nations in the region only came into existence after the Soviet Union broke down. While the politics might have changed, Russian is still the dominant language in areas such as Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. If you ever need to work in Russia or the nearby locations to boost your career prospects, learning the language would make you more acceptable to the 250 million+ Russian-speaking population there.

Sign Language

Learning sign language, or at least the basics of it, is a life skill that should come in handy in more than just one situation. Even just from a professional perspective, it opens you up to a whole new range of job opportunities such as teaching disabled children, acting as an interpreter at a number of government and private agencies, and working as an audiologist. If you are a therapist or a counsellor, learning sign language is particularly important as it will allow you to communicate with and provide help to people who are mostly unable to express their feelings in any other way.

English

If you were born and brought up in the UK, English is possibly not something that you will ever have trouble with. Then again, not everyone who lives in the UK was born there. If you happened to have migrated here from some other country where English was not the first language, then this could be a very big problem. While English may not be among even the top three most spoken languages in the world, rest assured that it is the language of the internet and the easy to learn nature of the language has also made it more internationally accepted than any other tongue in the world. Almost everywhere in the modern world, most people understand at least a few common English words, but despite Mandarin being spoken by over 16% of the world’s population, it is very unlikely that you will find too many people in the UK that understand a word of it! Therefore, take some time out to learn a bit of the English language and if possible, master it. Learning English will also make it easier for you to learn other languages such as French and German.

Latin

The final entry on this list is a somewhat controversial one because some people are of the opinion that Latin is a dead language and there’s no point in learning it. While there’s some truth to Latin being (almost) dead, that’s precisely why you should consider learning it. While you won’t be holding business seminars in Latin, knowing this rare but extremely potent language instantly makes you a member of an elite group. However, what makes Latin the most useful language to learn is the fact that if you have a good hold of it, you will be able to learn other languages such as Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian quite easily and much faster. Latin is the parent language from which a number of these modern languages have evolved and it is also the most complicated one of them all.

Communication is one of the keys to success in work and life in general and learning even just one of these languages is like getting one of those keys for yourself.