Social Media technology will one day come back to bite HR and Recruiters

Posted on January 5, 2012 by John Wilkerson

Social Media technology will one day come back to bite HR and Recruiters

I have had the joy of interviewing for new positions and/or contracts recently and am surprised with how the market has evolved the past couple of years. It has always been one of the HR black hole when submitting resumes or making initial phone calls but I am surprised with how HR and the hiring managers disappear even after a face to face interview.

This is going to be a dangerous slope for HR to continue to take due to the prevalence of Social Media. Soon someone is going to become so disgusted that they start leveraging big social sites in a way that does nothing but bash HR and Recruiters.

I don’t mention this as a bashing exercise of my own. Only that with Social Media being used by the organizations to research potential employees; it is probably a safe assumption that over time HR and Recruiters that are not responding to active job hunters will find their online persona become very damaging. And that will eventually lead to their inability to find work. Fore when they once again reenter the job market their online background search will yield the good and the bad of their handling of applicants.

It will be an interesting situation when potential employees start doing online background checks on the HR department employees as part of their job hunts. Of course all the standard liability and slander issues will exist, but some enterprising group is going to develop and add-on to LinkedIn that does nothing but log complaints about HR.

I would enjoy comments on this on my primary site so that I can post a follow up review in a few weeks. If you found this post on one of the sites that syndicates my post please feel free to leave comments on their site but I may not get to respond.

 

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If you are in ecommerce marketing you need to understand merchant processing

Posted on January 3, 2012 by John Wilkerson

If you are in ecommerce marketing you need to understand merchant processing

One of the first questions I ask during my initial consulting interview is how their merchant processing account works? I usually get a blank stare from the marketing team and they respond, “That’s accounting job.”

This if farther from the truth than one can imagine. Marketing and Sales need to understand the nuances and structure of how merchant processing works and how money moves around the web community. Case in point; awhile back I posted a job description for an ecommerce manager. The description dealt with only the capturing of new business and did not touch on the affects of how the new business would affect the company.

This may seem out of the normal scope of understand and responsibility for marketing but in actuality understanding how money moves and the new technologies of money gathering and payment portals operate is very important. My background is one of operations management, sales, and marketing. And I have learned over the years that when people understand how money is collect and moves they have a much better understanding of the Big Picture.

I come from an entrepreneurial background and an ongoing discussion in my family is do you hire a specialist or generalist? The answer to this is you hire both. When an organization is small to medium in size the generalist will have a better understanding of cross department interaction and the cause and effect issues. But when you need to get something done that is very precise and has a fixed amount of time you need a specialist.

It is without fail that when you bring in a specialist their learning curve for understanding the new business is much longer. They may produce more useable work for the assigned project but they are at more of a loss when it comes to the entire company interaction.

The reason I mention this is that even if you consider yourself to be a specialist in Ecommerce Marketing, your understanding of merchant processing is an important part of the job.

For example, when you are working with sales to package and advertise a new product line an important observation needs to be made. How will the new product deviate from the standard expected order size price?

The reason this matters is illustrated in these two examples:

Fixed charge of $.35 per transaction swipe rate and 2.5% of fixed rate:

Fixed Rate Total Cost
Swipe Rate $0.35 Per $1000
Order Size 2.50% Plus Swipe In Sales
$25 $0.63 $0.98 $39.20 40 orders
$100 $2.50 $2.85 $28.50 10 orders
$200 $5.00 $5.35 $26.75 5 orders

2.75% swipe rate $.20 fixed rate:

Fixed Rate Total Cost
Swipe Rate $0.20 Per $1000
Order Size 2.75% Plus Swipe In Sales
$25 $0.69 $0.89 $35.50 40 orders
$100 $2.75 $2.95 $29.50 10 orders
$200 $5.50 $5.70 $28.50 5 orders

At first observation it seems that all is well but when we look at the total cost for $1000 in products and how the number of transactions affects the total merchant processing charges it demonstrates the need to understand the swipe rate verses the fixed rate.

A higher swipe rate with a lower fixed rate works better for smaller order sizes while a higher fixed rate and lower swipe rate is better for higher order sizes and over the course of a year the difference really ads up.

What this leads to is if you end up changing your expected order size in a major way, effort needs to be made to understand how this will affect your loss of sale due to merchant processing charges.

As we move more and more to mobile charge transactions from our smart phones the issues become more and more heightened. If your merchant processor charges a different rate for smart phone charges and you are about to launch a new smart phone advertising program, you may be setting the company up for a higher loss on merchant fees than is expected.

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Essential tips for making your new blog search engine friendly

Posted on December 29, 2011 by John Wilkerson

Essential tips for making your new blog search engine friendly

The following steps are the basic starting point for a new blog. Many more techniques exist and can be utilized but these starter steps will get results and help you understand the process of Search Engine Optimization and how it relates to your blog.

Step One – Check that you’re in Google search

Go to Google search page and type “site:example.com” This will list your site pages that have been recognized by Google and are available to be searched via their search engine.

If Google has not placed your site in search you need to get an outside link from an established site to link to your site. Do this by identifying a high ranking blog and then commenting on a blog post from that blog. Don’t choose an old post; make it one that has been written within 5 days. Be sure to provide a link from the blog comment back to your blog.

To find a Blog to comment to, search via Google for topics that match your blogs topics and then select the blog tab at the left of the screen. This will cull all the search results to Blogs only. Then locate a blog and post that sounds good and enter the domain name into Alexa.com search. If the score comes back below 500,000 use that blog to try and get a backlink. The odds are that if the search result is on the first page of Google it probably has a good ranking in Alexa. But this is not always true.

Different opinions exist for how to measure and identify a well ranked site but the reason I mention using the Alexa score is that you may have picked some obscure topic in your search that in reality has very little written about it on the web. So if you check the other blogs location on Alexa, you have a better chance of getting success the first time.

For more reading on backlinks

Step Two – Develop your keywords and keep a handy list

All search engines will rank your blog post by identifying your keywords. It is important that you understand what your keywords should be and to use them efficiently.

Get out a sheet of paper and write down 10 words that are unique or semi unique to your industry, hobby, sport, or activity. Next do a web search for each of these words one at a time and see what comes up in the search engine. If the first few results for each word are yielding positive results then you probably found a keyword that will work for your writings.

Google Keyword Tool works well and is free. The best way to access the page is to search for “Google Keyword Tool” and then follow the link from the search result. The reason I have you doing the search for the Keyword Tool is that if you are signed into Google you may get a different link to follow than the one I would post here.

Once you have started to develop a list of keywords keep the list handy and use the words in your post. And over time when you learn more keywords, add them to your list. It may sound overly simple to keep a list of keywords on hand but you will be surprised how often you will have a memory lapse and find yourself only writing around a small group of keywords and not utilizing your full list.

Step Three – Using your keywords properly and in the right place

Every area of your blog article page has different power in how the search engines give credence to your keyword usage. If you follow this short list it will help you get the most return from your keyword usage. The list is in order of importance.

  • Title
  • Header 1
  • Header 2,3,4,5…
  • Body

Title – It is important that the title of your post includes some keywords

e.g. Chocolate cake recipe This is weak, while you do have three strong words they lack the substance for making them unique.

Try this:  Easy Chocolate cake recipe like grandma use to make

While you still have the three keywords from the first title, adding the word “easy” helps define how people think and will search for recipes. The same holds true for “grandma”

Now when a search is done for “easy chocolate cake recipe” or “grandmas chocolate cake” you have a better chance of being found.

This takes a bit of practice and understanding how people search the web. We tend to search like we speak and ask questions to our friends and family. It is important to not only use your keywords but words that define your topic in ways that live people speak, think, and will write in the search box.

My personal observation is that people who read a lot for pleasure, education, or work tend to search the web better than those who don’t. I theorize this to the fact that they think in standard structured sentences with a noun and a verb from all their exposure to the written word; whereas people who read less speak in more broken sentences with a higher use of emotional expressions such as OMG.

More reading on titles

Header 1 or H1 Tag – how to use properly

Where the title defines the topic for an entire page, the H1 tag defines the content that is just below the tag. When you open a printed book and read the title for the book on the inside cover sheet, this is the main title. Next comes the chapter titles, these are the H1 tags. They are very powerful in identifying your content and the search engines use them to help classify and understand what is on the page.

It is important to use a sub variant of your keywords in your H1 tags.

For example, these are the H1 tags for this page up to this point:

  • Step One – Check that you’re in Google search
  • Step Two – Develop your keywords and keep a handy list
  • Step Three – Using your keywords properly and in the right place

Header 2,3,4,5… or H1,2,3,4,5… – proper use and why so many

Several layers of H tags exist. As you move away from H1 they carry less importance in identifying your content. The higher numbers are still important but in reality I find that I usually only use H1 and H2 for my blog post. If I was doing a full white paper  with many pages of information I would go deeper into my H tags but in doing short blog writing, H1 and H2 are they only ones I tend to use.

My H2 tags up to this point:

  • Title – It is important that the title of your post includes some keywords
  • Header 1 or H1 Tag – how to use properly
  • Header 2,3,4,5… or H1,2,3,4,5… – proper use and why so many

Body – the real content for the blog article

This is where you put all the great information for your writings. It is where most people start by just laying out words without following any real outline. Not following an outline is fine as long as you are capable of writing long sentences and paragraphs that make since. If you question your ability to write, then read your work out loud to yourself. You will be surprised how it sounds different than when you read it with your inner voice.

The web community has an expression that content is king. This is mostly right. Great content is king but poor content just takes up space and time. You need to give thought to what you write and here is where your keyword list comes in handy.

Once you have your topic, try and write between 200 and 500 words around that topic. And as you write, use your keywords as part of your sentences. Tell a story, provide education, answer a perceived question, or just spout out your opinions; but whatever you do you must use your keywords. Not always all your keywords but you must use some of them.

A tip for writing for the web community is to not use overly long paragraphs. This is not how you were taught to write in school where all the sentences that dealt with the same concept were grouped together. The reason we breakup the paragraphs is that on the computer screen it is easy to get lost when too many sentences are placed in one paragraph.

To ease this problem, break down your paragraphs into smaller units. My personal preference is to not have more than 5 or 6 lines of text in a single paragraph.

Step Four – Tag your post

Now that you have taken all the time to create your blog post it is important that you define your post for search engines. Yes you have done this to some degree by using good keywords and H tags but one more step exists and don’t skip this step.

Your blogging software will allow you to place tags somewhere on the new post creation page. You must place good quality keywords in that little box. When you place these tag words in the box what you are doing is assigning predefined words that classify your blog post. These words will be used by the search engines to help classify the post and bring importance to the post for those tagged keywords.

My tags for this page will be something like this:

Content creation, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Blog Writing, Tips for Blogs, Keywords, Content Tags, H1 Tag, Google Search Results, Backlinks

You can see that many of my keywords are in these tags but I also used action words to help match how people will search the web. E.g. “Tips for Blogs”

Summary

These tips are not the only means to help build your blog site but they are the most important ones for new bloggers.  What we have covered is how to define your content via a quality title, proper tag usage, and how to develop keywords and use them in you content.

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199 JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

http://www.johnwilkerson.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/johndwilkerson http://twitter.com/#!/johnwilkerson

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