You Get to Choose Where You Work

To be able "to choose where you work", there are five steps that job hunters have found to be tremendously helpful

Step 1:You Need to Find Out What Careers or Jobs Your Flower Points To.
To find out what careers or jobs will best pursuit you, you will need take a look at a few of your best "expertises". Instead of choosing just one expertise, you should try to combine the three of them.  Combining more than one expertise will give you more career options. If you just chose one expertise you would be limited your options, making it harder for you to land a job. Once you have picked your top three "expertises" you should jot down everything that people may suggest to you. Whether you like the suggestions or not, it will help you with brainstorming.
 The following image will show a more in-depth flower that will help you find out what career or job that your flower may point to.







Step 2: You Need to Try On Careers Before You Decide Which Ones to Pursue
Like trying on clothing, jobs may not always look as good to you when you see them up close and personal. In order to find a job that is one that you would really like to do, you need to talk to people who are already doing that type of job.The LinkedIn website would be very helpful to finding people that do similar jobs to the one you may want. Once you are able to locate them, there a few questions that you should think about asking. These questions are: "How did you get into this work"?, "What do you like most about it?", and "What do you like least about?". These type of questions will give you a better idea of what that certain job requires and what people may like or dislike about it. If you do find out that you do not like what that job would offer, it may be helpful to then ask if they have any ideas as to who else you could talk to about your special interests and skills, and what type of careers use those skills.

Step 3: You Need to Find Out What Kinds of Organizations Have Such Jobs
Before you start thinking of certain business where you would want to work, it would be helpful to think of all kinds of places where one might get hired with the interest and skill set that you have. Thinking of every possible place will allow you to create a lot more options for yourself.  Every possible place would include the following places:

• places that would employ you part-time
• places that would employ temporary workers
• places that would employ consultants
• places that would employ volunteers
• places that you could start up yourself

Step 4: You Need to Find Names of Particular Places That Interest You
When you are interviewing workers about their jobs or careers, someone may mention actual names or organizations that have certain kind of workers, and what's good or bad about the company.  This will be important for you when you start searching for jobs because it may give you some insight to places that you may want to work. The best way to find particular places that may interest you will be the yellow pages, LinkedIn, and search engines. For a successful job-hunt you should choose places on your interest in them, not based on open vacancies. Vacancies can open up at any instant so do not wait for them. To create a manageable number of targets you should make sure to not have too many names or too few names.

Step 5: You Need to Learn as Much as You Can About a Place Before Formally Approaching Them
Eventually, you will be able to find some careers that you would love to do. You have found these careers by interviewing people who do them and and researching names that offer them. The next step for you will be researching each place that offers the type of career you would love. You will want to know what kind of work they do, their style of working, their culture, what goals they are trying to achieve, and how your skills and knowledge can help them. You will be able to find this information by asking different people such as friends, neighbors, and people at the organization or in similar ones. This is important because it will give you a personal perspective of the company. You will also want to search the internet for this information and anything that you can find in print.

You Need to Understand More Fully Who You Are

As you may have understood from the last few blog posts, job hunting is not an easy task. Doing your best to more fully understand who you are could help you find a job, and the following seven answers will inform you why it works so well.

1. By doing homework on yourself, you will learn to describe yourself in six different ways and it will allow you to approach multiple job-markets.-Becoming someone who is different skills and experiences has become very important. Being someone who is identified by only one job-title will not work any more because it limits you to only one market. You need to be someone who has multiple skills because it will allow multiple job markets to be open to you instead of only one.

2. By doing homework on yourself, you will be able to describe exactly what you are looking for-Doing this will allow your family, LinkedIn contacts, and friends to better help you with your job search. You will now be able to describe what kind of job you want and what kind of setting you are looking for. This will allow them to be able to help you a lot more.

3. By ending up with a picture of a job that would excite you, you will most likely end putting more energy and determination into your job-search-Previously, your job-hunt probably felt like a duty that you were required to do. Now, you will be dying to find the jobs that would like and become determined and persistent in finding them.

4. By doing this homework, you will no longer have to wait to approach companies until they say they have a vacancy-Once you are done with the "homework", you can choose places that best match who you are, and you will approach them through someone who knows both you and them.  This person is known as a "bridge-person".  More often then you may think, a bridge-person is able to help create a job for someone.

5. When you are facing other competitors who are equally experienced, and equally skilled as you,  for a job you want, you will stand out because you will be able to describe what is unique about you and what you can bring to the table that others cannot-Having good traits is what will make you stand out from the competition. If you have done the homework, you will be in good shape when you have to inform a business what you can bring to the table that others cannot.

6. If you are thinking about a career-change after you inventory yourself, you will be able to see what new career or direction you want for your life-This may be an option, but please first consider finding out who you are and what you love to do. Often times you can put together a new career by using what you already know and can do. It may even turn out that the knowledge you may need to pick up can be found in one or two year college. It could even be found simply nby doing enough informational interviewing.

7. Unemployment is an interruption is people's lives.  However, interruptions are opportunities, to pause, to think, and assess where we really want to go with our lives-Although it may seem like unemployment has interrupted your life, the parachute approach explains that it really can be an opportunity. The parachute approach says that this interruption should allow you to do an inventory of who you are and what you love to do, before you set out on your search for work.

What to Do When Your Job-Hunt Just Isnt Working

In my last two What Color Is Your Parachute blog posts, I talked about tips for interviewing, and secrets of salary negotiations. Tips and secrets are great tools to help land a job you may want, but sometimes tips and secrets still are not enough. Many people go to interview after interview and continue to get the same answer: No. It would be easy to give up after being told no so many times, but that is not the answer. This is your career and you should NEVER give up. In this blog post I am going to give you tips on what do if your job hunt just working.

In What Color is Your Parachute, Boles first talks about the two ways to hunt for a job. The first way is described as the traditional way, and the second is the "parachute way". The traditional way is described as the way that mostly everyone does it and how it's always been. The traditional way involves creating a resume, posting the resume, and sending out a ton of resumes. If that doesn't work, the next option is to send out even more resumes and hope that you receive some responses. The traditional way is described as the old and wrong way, and Boles suggest you should adapt to the "parachute way".

" The Parachute Way"

The parachute way is described as the new and correct way to hunt for a job. The parachute way starts by beginning with yourself instead of the actual job-market. This allows you to figure out who you are and what you most want to do. Once you have figured that out, you then decide which organizations best match you, and do not wait until they announce that they have vacancy. You should approach them anyway you can, specifically through a person, not a resume. The best person would be someone who knows you and someone who knows them. This approach is definitely harder than the first approach because is requires more work for you to do. It is not really easy to reflect on who you are and where you are going to go with your life. The parachute is your next option best option if the traditional approach has not been working for you, and you are in need of landing a full time job.

Fun with eCommerce Analytics Part II

In Week 6's Google Analytics Blog, I talked about eCommerce and how to create a Shopify account. In this blog, I am going to talk about Adwords and how they relate to Google Analytics. Like Google eCommerce, Adwords are billion dollar industries. Adwords give you the ability to track conversions, which means that you can trace things all the way from an ad through the purchase. Tracking conversions is what makes Adwords so important. If you are looking to be an online marketer, adwords is something you must learn about.

Getting Started with Adwords 

So now that you understand what Adwords allow you to do, I am going to give you a guide on how to get started with Adwords. To start and Adwords account, go to www.google.com/adwords. There are
 links on the homepage such as "Success Stories" and "How it Works". Those links may be helpful to you if you want some insight before creating an account. When you are ready to get started, click "Get started now". Once you have put your information in and created your account go to Tools > Conversions, and then click Conversions. This process is going to allow you to set up a connection between Adwords and the eCommerce site you have created. Setting up this type of connection will allow you to track what's going on in your eCommerce site. This is useful because it will allow you to see how much of your spending $ on Google resulted in making $ in revenue on your eCommerce site.

Once you have clicked the conversion button and set up a connection with your e-commerce site, you can pick a conversion name, and then click save and continue. The next step is to click "the value of this conversion action may vary".  Click that option allows you to set different prices. Once you have done that, you must set the conversion category to Purchase/Sale and check to make sure the markup language is set to HTML. The last step is to click "I make changes to the code". This will allow you copy and past the code that will be generated into your website's HTML.

Connect Adwords to Shopify

To connect Adwords with your Shopify account, go in to Shopify's settings, and click checkout. Then paste your HTML code into the "Additional and content and scripts" area and click save.  For more information on this you can click the following link: http://docs.shopify.com/manual/your-store/dashboard/google-adwords.

Secret of Salary Negotiations

In my last "What Color is Your Parachute?" blog post, I gave a few different tips that could help someone when he/she is interviewing for a job. In this blog post, I am going to talk about "secrets" of salary negotiation. Boles discusses six secrets of salary negotiations in What Color is Your Parachute, however I am only going to talk about of couple of his first three secrets in this blog post.


Salary Negotiation Secret #1
Boles's first secret is to never discuss the salary until the end of the interview process, when/if they have definitely said they want you to work for them. He summarizes the first secret by stating that it is not in your best interest to not discuss salary with a possible employer until all of the following conditions have been fulfilled:

• they've fully gotten to know you and you've fully gotten to know them
• you have found out exactly what the job entails
• it is your final interview at that place, for that job
• you've decided that you really want to work for the company
• they have given you a feeling of we want to have you work to us and/or we got to have you work for us

Salary Negotiation Secret #2
Boles's second secret is based on uncovering what the most amount of money an employer is willing to pay to hire you. It would be easy if an employer were to mention from the start of the interview the top figure they are willing to pay for the position, but most employers never do. Employers know the top figure they would pay for you but they are hoping they can get you for less money. The employer will usually set a range, for example $18-$30. $30 is the most the employer can pay to higher you but they are hoping to get you for $18 an hour. You should try to negotiate the highest salary the employer is willing to pay you within their range. The employer's goal is to save money by hiring you for a lower salary, so you should have your own goal of bringing home the most money possible. As Boles's stated, there is nothing wrong with either goals.

Salary Negotiation Secret #3
The third negotiation secret given by Boles states that you should never be the first one to mention a salary figure. In the interview process, salary negotiation is eventually going to come up. The theory is that whoever mentions a salary figure first generally loses. Inexperience interviewers may not be aware of the theory, but most experienced ones usually very aware of it. Experienced interviewers will try to get you to mention a figure first by asking "what kind of salary are you looking for?". When/if they try to ask you to name a figure, you should have a counter move ready. For example, Boles's counter move from What Color is Your Parachute? is: "Well, you created this position, so you must have some figure in mind, and I'd be interested in first hearing what that figure is." Boles's counter move he listed would be an excellent counter move because it would force the interviewer to first mention a salary figure.

Sometimes it may be hard to know the "best" time to "talk" salary, but these secrets have given you a better understanding of how and when to negotiate your salary.

Fun with eCommerce Analytics

In this blog, I am going to tell you how to get started with a Shopify account. Creating a Shopify account is one of the easiest ways to set up a "real" eCommerce system to help learn about tracking ROI with analytics. Tracking ROI is at the core of Google' success, and it is argued that tracking ROI is a trillion dollar skill because of much revenue Google helps businesses make. In addition, conversion tracking is an exciting skill to trace and it is an important skill. Companies will like to see that you have experience with setting up an eCommerce site and generating analytics.

Steps to setting up a Shopify site

To get started, go to their website shopify.com and click get started. There is an option that allows you to do a free 14-day trial, but in order to do the conversion tracking you are going to have to pick a plan and spend approximately $29.95 a month. $29.95 may seem like a lot of money, but given the impact it could have on your career or business, it could be worth it. Once you pick a plan, the next step is to enter your e-mail address, a password, and a store name. Your store name could be anything you want it to be but it would probably be best if you relate the name of the store to your product. If you are having trouble thinking of a name, you can start off using your initials. Once you have decided on the name, choose the online store check box and click next.

The next step will be choosing where you want to sell your product. You can choose to sell it through an online store or through a retail store/popup shop. Once you decided on where to sell your product it will allow you to enter your name and address information.



Lastly, you will have to describe what you will sell and answer if you have the products ready to sell. When giving details about the product, the website asks for a name, description, and to provide a type and vendor to categorize the product. In addition to describing the product, adding an image will be helpful because it will draw attraction to it.

You can find the rest of the steps to building a shopify account from http://www.amazon.com/CASA-Marketing-Intro-Google-Analytics/dp/1517041678. The paperback costs $24.99 or you can view the book off of a kindle for free if you have kindleunlimited.

Facebook Ad

Today, I am going to inform you about my Facebook Ad that I recently created. In previous blogs I gave some information about Facebook Ads and listed five steps on how to make one. I also talked about how they are a great way to track how many website clicks you are receiving. The website I used to track was my blog: http://ericrubel.blogspot.com/.

My objective for my Facebook Ad was "Clicks to Website". There were many other objectives that I could have chosen, but getting "Clicks to Website" was the required objective for the Ad. I created my Facebook Ad on September 23rd and had it set to run from September 24th through September 29th. In addition to picking the number of days to run the Ad, I had to pick the amount of money that I wanted to spend on it. I chose to do a lifetime budget and I spent $20 on the Ad with a cost of result at $1.05. The location that I chose to target was just the state of Illinois. I could have picked a bigger target, but I thought it would be cool to only look at how many people I would target from the state I live in. In addition to the geographic target, I had to select  an age range. The age range I selected was anyone 18 years of age or older. Lastly, I had to pick certain interests to target my Facebook Ad to. Since this blog is mainly about Google Analytics and Digital Marketing, I selected these two interests.

Results

My Facebook Ad officially stopped running on September 29th at 11:43 am. I ended up reaching 2,639 people, and received a total of 19 clicks. My Ad was displayed on the right desktop column, and the audience that I reached was 53% female (10 clicks), and 47% male (9 clicks). As the graph shows below, I received the most clicks on September 27th with a total of 10 clicks for that day (click on the picture to see a bigger version of the graph). I have never ran a Facebook Ad, so this was cool for me to see how many people I could reach and target from a Facebook Ad based on the money I spent, and the people I chose to target.