Skillbox-Content

In this blog, I am going to be talking about content related to social media and tools you can use to do it yourself. I'll briefly summarize what you'll want to try when working with social media. The overall goal of the chapter is to introduce concepts and tools that are worth trying so that you can have some material to work with when looking at social media channels later in the chapter.

Curation vs. Creation vs. Collaboration 

The general approach recommended by the author with content is to think about these three areas.

1. Curation- When you curate content, you are finding it, sharing it, reviewing it, and commenting on it. Even if you are not creative, you can still go out and find content that is interest or relevant for a company you are working for. This would be a good way to get started. An example of this would be to find a YouTube video that relate to a particular topic and then link it or embed it to your blog post. Then, I would suggest posting your blog on social media to try to generate some traffic and awareness.
2. Creation- In the book, this is what is said to be the most fun. It will take time, but it will alos most likely result in the highest quality. Writing a blog post or posting a video on social media can be the best kind of content to share on social media because it is more unique. The kind of content you create is going to depend on the company, but you should also ask yourself who the audience is and figure out what they would most likely be interested in. Even though you are not a social media expert, it can be helpful to try to develop some basic content. You should also ask others to review your writing and videos. Overall, you should focus on what you do best.
3. Collaboration- This one is described to be the most helpful for independent business owners, and students. It can help you possibly save money, and find people you can work with. An example given is the book is that you can find someone who is a writer, offer to co-write content or do some research, so you can still get the benefit of writing skills, or their reputation. So, if you aren't confident in some of your abilities, or can't afford to hire anyone, you should be able to find people who are looking to collaborate, even if it's only a learning experience.

Starting a Blog

There are plenty of platforms available for blogging, but I would suggest blogger.com because it is the easiest to use. If you are really interested in developing social media marketing as a skill, it would be smart to create a blog and set a goal of posting on it at least once a month. All you need to do is choose a topic or tool that you are learning about, or interested in learning about, do some research, and get in a habit of developing ongoing posts. Even if you already have a blog, it would still be smart to create one in blogger because it will allow you to learn some new tools. It can also help you help a client create a blog and get them familiar with the different tools that offered on blogger.com. You can get started by visiting blogger.com and signing in with your Google Account, or you can click the "create an account" link at the bottom.

If you are interested on learning more from this chapter, you can purchase this book on Amazon. (link below)

http://www.amazon.com/CASA-Marketing-Intro-Social-Media-ebook/dp/B0103LB4HS

Reflection on Sports Fundriaising

In this post, I am going to talk an article that I recently wrote. The article I wrote was about sports fundraising. The website mentioned why people need to do fundraising for sports and what type of products are attractive to people for fundraising. Some of the products they mentioned were chocolate bars, lollipops, cookie dough, and pizza. All are great ideas that people would be willing to buy to help a kid with a fundraiser. In the article, I also talked about my experience in sports fundraising and I mentioned how I sold candy bars when I played park district baseball. I felt that giving a personal experience would better attract the attention of the readers and help support sports fundraising because of the great experience I had with it. Another idea I mentioned that would help generate money for a sports team was a fundraising event such as a golf outing. Below, I have attached a link to my article if you are interested.








http://www.rgbexchange.org/nonprofits/fundraising/fundraising-sports






Although sports fundraising is cool to learn about, the purpose of writing the article was to post it on rgbexchange.org to improve it's search rank. The website is for "non-profit organizations to leverage market dynamics and help people channel resources to where they are most effectively used". As a class, we are using this website to help understand SEO. Below, I have attached two pictures.  The first one is a picture of my posting of my article on my LinkedIn account. I posted the article on LinkedIn to allow other people to see the article and visit the website. The bottom picture is a screenshot of the SEO rank checker. The screenshot shows the rgbexchance.org search rank results. The website has not ranked any higher than it did when I last posted a screenshot of the rank checker. However, the hope is to get the website towards the top of search results whenever people type in the word fundraising. We hope to do this by writing articles related to fundraising that people may be interested.

Intro to Social Media Marketing

In each blog that is tagged as "Social Media Marketing", I will be discussing some of the major concepts that are discussed in CASA Marketing: Intro to Social Media Marketing. In this blog, I am going to be discussing chapter one which is titled: "the basics for having fun, finding work, working better".  The main concepts of this chapter center around ROI, WOM marketing, and social media platforms,

ROI

The first concept discussed in the chapter is ROI. No, it does not talk about what ROI is, but rather how not measuring ROI can have some serious consequences. In terms of social media marketing it simply means, "when a business spends money on social media marketing, what is the return on that investment". This is important because it allows a business to see if their money spent on social media marketing is giving them positive results. When social media first came out, every business HAD to have it. So businesses were just getting their brand on social media sites without measuring the effect it was actually having. That is why people were getting hired and fired so quickly. No one knew how to measure social media ROI. Having Social Media Marketing skills will help you get hired. In fact, it was the number one skill that was getting people hired in the past year.

WOM Marketing

For those of you who don't know, WOM stands for word of mouth marketing. On the internet, WOM marketing can be very beneficial to a business. However, WOM marketing can only work if the brand and the products are great. To help a business with this, one should listen to what people are saying about a company's brand and its products. Listening to what customers are saying can help a business make or keep their products excellent. That is how WOM marketing can help with social media platforms.

Social Media Platforms

There are many social media platforms, but the only ones covered in this book are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which were the top three most visited social media networks in the past year. LinkedIn is also discussed in this book for B2B purposes. In general, most companies that do social media marketing will likely have a Facebook page or Twitter account. They will use these platforms to post pictures of their products, offer promotions, and even interact with their customers. One new network on the rise is Pinterest. So one thing to keep in mind is to first learn about the primary networks, and then do research on other networks that could be on the rise. It could also be helpful to their about the types of audiences social media networks attract. An example of this would be a fashion retailer making an effort to get onto Pinterest. If you are not really aware of some of these Social Media Platforms, go to google and search them to understand what they are all about and how they can help a business.

Google Sites

In this blog post, I am going to talk about "Google Sites". Google Sites is any easy way to create and share webpages. Google describes creating a team or website to be as easy as as editing a document. Google Sites allows you to gather information, videos, calendars, attachments, and presentations all in one place. It then allows you to easily share any of it with a group or organization. If you decide that this is something that you would be interested in you can visit https://support.google.com/a/topic/14075?en&ref_topic=9197.

Google Sites key product features:

• Customize your site's interface
• Create a new sub-page with the click of a button
• Choose different page types, such as webpage
• Centralize shared information, embed content into any page
• Manage permission settings to keep your site as private or as view-able as you would like
• Search across your Google Sites content with Google search technology

When visiting Google Sites, it gives you links under Overview, Setup, and Options. The links under Overview describe what Google Sites is all about in more detail, what is required for a Google Site, and any support for it. The links under the Setup heading will allow you to turn sites on or off for users, set sharing options, restrict access to new sites, change default visibility, and turn on commenting. Lastly, some of the links under are Options are manage gadget access, edit sites at your domain, change a site URL, manage page templates, create an external website, and improve site performance. I did not describe any of theses links under the three subheadings so if you want to learn more about Google Sites, how to set it up and how it works, visit the link from the last paragraph! Google Sites also gives you the option to use a 30 day free trial. So if you think that Google Sites could help you, you can try it for 30 free days and then decide if it is really worth paying for.

Keyword Rank Checker

Digital Marketing has become very important to businesses in today's society. Technology is rapidly increasing and it seems that almost everything is becoming digital. With that being said, I am going to tell you why and how a keyword rank checker can help a company get their website on the first page of a google search result.

 SEO Rank Check can help your website both short-term, and long-term.  First, the most obvious way that this can help you is it will show you where your company website is ranked based off of a certain keyword. This is important because when people type in a word on google, they are most likely going to click the first few links that they see on the page after they click enter. To generate customer traffic to your website, you are going to want to be on the first page of a google search page. 

The Long-term strategy should be to add content, or do whatever it is possible that you can do. Write down everything you have done each week so when you go to check your results of your website you can see if and what worked best. The best tactic of website or blog is quality content. However, you need to inform people about your website so they are able to view it and see the quality content that is on there. You can try to share content and even ask people what the most important thing is that they want to know about a certain topic. You can post it to a social media site or even posting it on LinkedIn can help. The overall goal is to let people know that you have a blog or website and inform them what it is about.

How do I do this?: Below, I will list steps of an example website and keyword that you can use to see results on the SEO Keyword Rank Checker. The link to enter the example website and keyword is also below.

Keyword: non profit stock exchange

www.rgbexchange.org-sample website

npoex.strikingly.com-this is optional

http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html

The above image shows that the website is not ranked to appear on any of the top three search engines.

Conversion Tracking

Tracking a company website's conversion rate is very important. In this blog I am going to tell you how Weebly can help you gain an understanding of how to track conversions.

On Weebly, you can create a website and design it however you want. Weebly gives sample pictures and backgrounds, however you can add custom ones if you want or need to. For my background image I used a picture of a golf glove and a tee because I love to play golf. To track conversions on the Weebly website I made I created a contact form. The contact form allows someone to enter his or her first name, last name, e-mail, and any comments that they have. I was not using this as an actual website for something but just to learn how to track conversions. When people entered their name, number, e-mail, and comments, and then click submit, it would register as a conversion. When they click submit it would take them to a page that said thank you.

To track conversion rates and other important information such as bounce rate%, visits, and page views, I linked the Weebly site to google analytics. To do this, you must click admin in Google Analytics. This will all you to copy the name of your website and url so that everything can be tracked. Once you copy the website url and name, Google Analytics will give you a tracking ID to paste in the settings of your weebly account. The ID will allow all the site information to be transmitted to your Google Analytics account.

A Guide to Choosing a Career Coach or Counselor

If you feel that you need some help with landing a job, a good idea may be to find a career coach or counselor. Boles' What Color is Your Parachute is a good guide to help you with your job hunt, but if you feel that it is not enough help, seek a career coach or counselor. There are people out there like this that are willing to help you find a job that best fits you. However, these career coaches or counselors often charge a fee because it is how they make their living. The fee is usually approximately $40 per hour in rural areas however it can be much more expensive in other areas. If that price is too expensive for you there is usually some type of free or almost-free help. This help is more likely to be in a group though instead of being face to face with an individual counselor.

So now that you know there are career coaches or counselors out there and how much they cost, the next step is figuring out how to go about finding a good career coach or counselor. The first step to finding a good career coach or counselor is to find three names of coaches or counselors that are located in your geographical area. There are a few ways that you can find these names. First, you can ask your friends or family if they have ever used a career coach or counselor. If they tell you that they have and that they liked them, then you should find out their names and how to get in touch with them. The second way to find names for a good career couch or counselor is by visiting by 312 of Boles' "What Color Is Your Parachute?" to see if there are any career coaches or counselors near you. Lastly, you can try a telephone book's Yellow Pages under headings such as: Aptitude and Employment Testing, Career and Vocational Counseling, Personnel Consultants, and if you are a woman, Women's Organizations and Services.

Once you find names, it is time to compare them and figure out what questions to ask them. Listed below are five questions that you should consider asking the counselors:

1. What is your program?
2. Who will be counseling? And how long has this person been counseling?
3. What is your success rate?
4. What is the cost of your services?
5. Is there a contract up front? If so, may I see it please, and take it home with me?