14 B2B Content Marketing statistics Will Help Marketers Reach the Next Level

Why we care about B2B marketing: A guide for marketers

The B2B buyer journey is evolving rapidly as it becomes more digitized, less predictable, and more complex. The challenge for B2B marketers is to support what is now largely a self-guided journey involving numerous personas on accounts and increasingly expanding buying teams. Strategies that were once traditionally B2C are now being adopted by B2B marketers.

As companies speed up the adoption of digital processes and technologies, it is likely you will soon be interacting with increasingly tech-savvy customers. As a result, you can no longer appeal to buyers using traditional tools. Marketers need a more analytical and innovative approach to selling.

This article will walk you through various marketing strategies to help you reach your target business audiences and tell you about a few of the latest trends in the industry. Key points covered include:

Types of B2B marketing

There are many different B2B marketing strategies. While companies tend to focus on B2B marketing channels that produce more leads, it may make sense to prioritize the ones that produce the highest ROI for your company. The following section lists a number of strategies that you can mold and adapt to suit your specific needs and target audience.

Email marketing

Email marketing has long been the mainstay of B2B e-commerce. It is a cost-effective and efficient way to reach potential clients and, as a rule of thumb, has the highest return on investment (ROI) in B2B marketing. It is this simplicity and high ROI that makes email marketing the cornerstone of any marketing operation. According to a study by Litmus, four out of five marketers find email marketing more essential to their operations than social media marketing.

As for B2B marketing, email marketing should be used in conjunction with other useful strategies like account-based marketing (ABM). ABM involves triaging potential accounts and optimizing your marketing strategy to target the accounts that are likely to be most valuable.

Ultimately, you need to remember that the most important element is to personalize the content for your audience. The more your clients feel valued, the more likely they are to use your services and keep coming back for more. Prioritize quality over quantity.

Everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability that your customers want and that inboxes won’t block. Get MarTech’s Email Marketing Periodic Table.

Content marketing

Remember that your content marketing isn’t restricted to written blogs; you should also focus on publishing e-books, white papers, images, infographics, GIFs, podcasts, and videos that you can share to engage and retain your audience. Webinars are not only an important part of a B2B content strategy, but excerpts can be re-utilized on websites and landing pages.

Social media marketing

Most successful businesses today have an online presence on at least one of the top social media websites. In the B2B marketing space, LinkedIn and Facebook are the most commonly used social media platforms, according to survey data from Databox.

Typically, firms use these platforms to achieve the same goals they seek to achieve through other forms of digital marketing — high engagement and advertising. However, to be successful on social media, B2B companies need to find a middle ground between creating engaging content and ensuring they don’t ruin their audience’s experience on the platform. To do this, marketers should identify the kind of content their target audience wants to see on social media platforms.

While developing and posting social media content, firms need to consider what their buyers’ collectives are after. Buyers’ collectives are groups of important stakeholders whose approval is mandatory if the company is to make any business purchases. They are an important audience that should not be overlooked while planning your social media marketing strategy.

Your social media content should also project values that align with the concerns of the buyers’ collectives of your target firms. Create content that is relevant to their needs and speaks the language of their industries.

You should also track your competitor’s social media marketing strategies and measure their success. However, while keeping tabs on your competitors is crucial, it doesn’t mean a parting of ways with original content. In order to catch buyers’ attention, your social media content needs to offer them something they haven’t seen before.

New features are making marketing automation platforms more powerful than ever. Learn about trends and capabilities of marketing automation software in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Most professionals believe that having a good content strategy is a major key to their success.

This fact is reinforced by a study by the Content Marketing Institute, which points out that an excellent content strategy if paired with good SEO practices, generates three times more leads than an investment in sponsored links.

There is no point in establishing a strategy if you don’t map out your results and don’t count on efficient planning. After all, you need to rely on pre-defined performance metrics and collect data that indicates the efficiency of the approach.

You can determine your most relevant metrics according to the characteristics of your company and your objectives in the market. But if you’re wondering about the most used indicators to evaluate a content strategy, the answer is Total Sales, according to HubSpot research.

10 Proven Content Formats That Work for B2B Brands

When we think of content, we’re often inadvertently drawn towards blog posts as the go-to format, but we’ve seen a real shift towards a wider use of different types of content in recent years. We’ll explore 10 proven content formats that are perfect for B2B brands to use as part of their B2B content marketing strategy. But tread carefully to avoid the trap of working format-first.

When you work format-first in content marketing, you’ll often find that you limit your creativity. Rather, take a story-first approach and begin by asking yourself what you want to communicate to your audience, and only then consider what the most effective way to do that is.

Blog Posts

Blog posts form the backbone of the majority of content marketing strategies, and that’s definitely the case for B2B brands. Marketers who prioritize business blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI, and this is down to the fact that blogging:

Too often, we think of a blog as being the news section on a website where posts are published in chronological order. But if you want to drive growth, you should move away from this mentality and see it as so much more. And Siege Media’s post on ” Why Your Blog is Set Up Incorrectly for SEO” is a good read for more information.

This philosophy often ends up in blogs that are created without much thought. Content is created and is never seen. The blog ends up as a graveyard, and as a graveyard that never drove value for the core business.

Your blog should be seen as so much more than a place to publish content. It should be seen as an opportunity to position yourself as industry experts, own SERPs for core topics relating to your business, and drive an increase in organic traffic.

Original Research Studies

If you want to truly stand out with your content against your competitors, you’ll need to go above and beyond what they’re doing. One of the best ways that you can do this is by publishing original research studies. Conducting your own research and publishing the findings is so powerful in B2B for two main reasons:

It’s clear that pieces like this get people talking. You can publish the findings of these studies either as blog posts, standalone assets, or even as white papers. They’re the perfect way to bring together multiple content formats.

White Papers / eBooks

It’s important that you’re layering different content formats into your wider strategy that work together to drive results. One of the hardest jobs that a B2B marketer has is getting buy-in from a whole team, not just a single individual.

Perhaps the B2B brand who has really mastered the art of using white papers to fill up their funnel is HubSpot. Their ‘ a beginner’s guide to social media’ is the perfect way to engage a company looking to get started on social for the first time and give them a wealth of actionable ideas.

Videos

In many ways, you can film a video that’s of a high enough quality to host on YouTube and use on social media with nothing more than a smartphone (or with a little bit of a budget, you can massively improve your set up and quality).

But what should you create video content around? The opportunities are endless but just as with other content formats, it pays to put together a solid strategy. You can read how to do this in our guide on ” How to Develop a Video Marketing Strategy That Drives Business.”

The power of video is that you can use it across so many different channels, including optimizing natively for YouTube to reach new audiences, as well as on LinkedIn and other social platforms. Don’t discount the power of a solid video strategy as a B2B brand.

Webinars

While you could perhaps consider webinars to fall under your video strategy, these can also be seen as a separate content format. When it comes to putting together a webinar strategy, one of the key benefits is that “most webinars are used to educate an audience about a particular topic or industry.”

B2B Content Marketing Tactics That Actually Work

It’s one thing creating B2B content, but if no one knows that it exists, you’ll be disappointed with the end results. Having a solid promotion strategy is extremely important. The good news is that there is a wealth of channels that can help you to get your content seen.

Leverage LinkedIn

As a B2B marketer, you cannot ignore LinkedIn. LinkedIn has 310 million active monthly users, with 167 million of these in the U.S. alone. Interestingly, 90 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers and 63 million are in decision-making positions, per Omnicore.

Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Platforms

Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have solid audiences for you to use to promote your content. In this guide, How to Create a B2B Social Media Strategy (Without Being Boring), you can learn how to leverage social to help you to stand out on the platform.

Paid Promotion

When we think of content marketing, we often think of it solely as an organic marketing channel. But by doing this, you could be missing out on opportunities to amplify your content to new audiences.

One tactic to consider is to leverage paid promotion across LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and YouTube. You can even use platforms such as Reddit to place content in front of your target audience to take advantage of the targeting options available.

Email Marketing

We’ve already discussed newsletters as a solid B2B content marketing format, but when it comes to using email as a promotion tactic, you need to build up your email list to have a database of people to send to.

When content ranks on search engines for core queries, it can send targeted traffic that could turn into a prospect. That’s why it’s important that every piece of content is created with the purpose of driving organic traffic and that it ranks highly on SERPs.

But to dive further into coming up with ideas for great content in the first place, use the Content Marketing Platform. Enter a topic and you’ll be served some awesome insights into subtopics to consider working into your strategy.

And lastly, use the SEO Writing Assistant to make sure that your content follows best-practice recommendations. Putting together a strategy that layers content at different stages of the funnel, and performs organically, can accelerate your growth.

Reddit

If you’re not using Reddit to promote your B2B marketing content, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity to directly engage with. Our guide to Reddit SEO gives a great insight into how you can build a solid strategy that leverages the platform for success and will talk you step by step through a proven process to make it work for your brand. It’s another avenue for amplifying your content, and one that many marketers still haven’t latched onto.

Partnerships and Collaborations

Collaborations and partnerships can help to amplify your content in a number of different ways. You should consider partnering up with supplementary, but not competing, businesses to:

The benefit here is that both parties win by being introduced to the other one’s audience, and there’s usually double the promotion efforts, too. Think about who it might make sense to partner up with, reach out, and sell the benefits.

Take the time to understand how you can effectively develop a B2B content marketing strategy for potential and existing customers using different formats of content. A good content strategy integrates many of the different topics discussed, and then you’ll stand out in the B2B content marketing space.

Study: 86% Of B2B Marketers Use Content Marketing, But Only 38% Believe They’re Good At It

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s latest survey to determine where B2B marketers stand when it comes to their content marketing efforts, 86 percent of respondents said they use content marketing, but only 38 percent believe they are effective at it.

The Content Marketing Institute teamed up with MarketingProfs and BrightCover to poll more than 1,800 marketers on a wide range of content marketing topics — including tactics, benchmarks, distribution channels and budgets.

The report included more than 25 graphs, charting everything from the number of organizations that have a content marketing strategy in place, to what distribution channels are being used, and which metrics are being tracked.

How Effective Is Your Organization’s Use of Content Marketing

The Content Marketing Institute reports 70 percent of B2B marketers are generating more content than they did a year ago, with 42 percent of respondents claiming they currently publish new content daily or multiple times a week.

Thirty-five percent of the respondents said they’re organization has a documented content marketing strategy, and 47 percent reported having a dedicated content marketing group that either functioned independently, or worked horizontally across the organization silos.

When it comes to tracking their content marketing results, the majority (33%) of respondents rated their efforts as “Neutral,” with 16 percent claiming to be “Successful,” and five percent saying they were “Very Successful” at tracking content marketing ROI.

Sources:

https://martech.org/why-we-care-about-b2b-marketing-a-guide-for-marketers/
https://rockcontent.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/b2b-content-marketing/
https://martech.org/study-21-marketers-tracking-content-marketing-results/

Statistics on Public School Vs. Homeschool

Homeschooling Statistics: Breakdown by the 2022 Numbers

As the name indicates, homeschooling means when the parents opt to provide home-based education to their kids. This was a traditional practice, but over the last few years, it has become the fastest-growing mainstream education in the US and other nations around the world, such as France, Japan, the UK, South Korea, Russia, etc.

If we observe the trend in the last few years, there is an annual homeschooling growth rate of 2%-8%. However, there has been a significant increase in those figures from 2019 to 2021. By the end of 2020, about 9 million Americans said they had attended homeschool at some point in their lives.

There are numerous reasons why families opt for homeschooling, such as the lack of their children’s progress in traditional schooling, the difference in religious and educational philosophies, lack of satisfaction with the traditional educational methods, etc. In this article, we will explore homeschooling facts and their various aspects in detail.

Is Homeschooling More Effective Than Public School?

There are chances of success of homeschooling compared to institutional schooling because this lets the children improve as per their nature and schedule. When homeschooling is well planned and organized, besides providing children scope for socialization, then it results in effective outcomes. It helps students focus on the career which interests them by preparing them for college by including extension courses. It becomes a well-rounded education that is highly effective when the homeschooled students get the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities, community sports, and community service groups.

It is an extremely important decision for the parents to choose the mode of education for their children. They consider the effects of homeschooling and the factors such as the student’s personality, style of learning, availability, etc., while finalizing this.

Homeschoolers were seen to have an average standardized test score of 87th percentile as per the National Home Education Research Institute’s study.

Compared to this, the score of those going to public school was only 50th percentile in certain subjects. Generally, standardized tests are not the best method of gauging a student’s academic performance.

A study related to the data obtained from the 2007-2008 school year by Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) shows a difference of 34 percentile

There was 39 percentile points excess in the case of homeschoolers as compared to others, in all subjects. If some parents found teaching math a challenging task, their children could not excel in it like those in public schools.

Academics

Consistently Higher Percentile Scores

While standardized test scores aren’t always the best way to measure academic achievement, studies consistently find that home-schoolers do seem to outperform public schooled students on tests such as the ACT and SAT.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) commissioned a study drawing data for the 2007-2008 school year from multiple standardized testing services. The national average percentile scores were higher in all subject areas by at least 34 percentile points, and as high as 39 percentile points. Factors such as parental college degrees, how much parents spent on education, level of state regulation, and sex of the students made little difference in the range of scores in all areas among the home-schooled children.

Analysis from a 2015 study conducted by Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute reveals that home educated students usually score 15 to 30 percentile points higher than public school students on standardized tests. This study further concludes that these results were achieved regardless of income level within the students’ families or educational status of the students’ parents.

Other recent news from the National Home Education Research Institute states that the College Board reported 2014 SAT scores for home-schooled students as being significantly higher than scores for their traditionally schooled counterparts.

Math Gap

Conversely, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education found that there was a “math gap” between home educated students and public school students, with the public school students coming out on top in this academic area. The researchers concluded that, while it was a fairly straightforward task for most responsible parents to teach reading, writing, science, and social studies, many parents would struggle with teaching a challenging math curriculum.

Success in the “Real World” of Adulthood

It is possible that homeschooling causes the positive traits reported above. However, the research designs to date do not conclusively “prove” that homeschooling causes these things. At the same time, there is no empirical evidence that homeschooling causes negative things compared to institutional schooling. Future research may better answer the question of causation.

Notes:

1. For more detail, see How Many Homeschool Students Are There in the United States? The March of 2021 estimate is based on data from state governments (e.g., Delaware, Florida, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Virginia), the U.S. Census Bureau (2021), and the U.S. Department of Education (2019). See McDonald (2020). The spring 2019 estimate was based on an estimate of about 2.5% per annum growth from estimates of 2 million home-educated children during the spring of 2010 and 2.3 million spring of 2016 in the United States (Ray, 2011). The estimate of 2.3 million in 2016 was calculated by Brian D. Ray, the author of this fact sheet, on April 7, 2016. He based it on publicly available research findings.

Sources

• Cheng, Albert. (2014). Does homeschooling or private schooling promote political intolerance? Evidence from a Christian university. Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform, 8(1), 49-68 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• Fields-Smith, Cheryl. (2020). Exploring single black mothers’ resistance through homeschooling. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham.
• Mazama, Ama; & Lundy, Garvey. (2012, August 26). African American homeschooling as racial protectionism. Journal of Black Studies, 43(7) 723–748.
• McDonald, Kerry. (2020). Homeschooling more than doubles during the pandemic: State-level data show just how dramatic the surge in homeschooling has been. Retrieved December 29, 2020 from https://fee.org/articles/homeschooling-more-than-doubles-during-the-pandemic/
• Mead, Sara. (2006). The truth about boys and girls.
• Medlin, Richard G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284-297 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• National Education Association. (2021). Rankings of the States 2020 and Estimates of School Statistics 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021 from http://www.nea.org/home/44479.htm
• Ray, Brian D. (2004). Home educated and now adults: Their community and civic involvement, views about homeschooling, and other traits. Salem, Oregon: NHERI.
• Ray, Brian D. (2004). Homeschoolers on to college: What research shows us. Ray, Journal of College Admission, No. 185, 5-11 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• Ray, Brian D. (2010). Academic achievement and demographic traits of homeschool students: A nationwide study. Academic Leadership Journal, 8,www.academicleadership.org [a peer-reviewed journal]. For a free copy, contact us.
• Ray, Brian D. (2013). Homeschooling associated with beneficial learner and societal outcomes but educators do not promote it. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 324-341 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• Ray, Brian D. (2015). African American homeschool parents’ motivations for homeschooling and their Black children’s academic achievement. Journal of School Choice, 9:71–96 [a peer-reviewed journal]. For a free copy, contact us.
• Ray, Brian D. (2017). A systematic review of the empirical research on selected aspects of homeschooling as a school choice. Journal of School Choice, 11(4), 604-621 [a peer-reviewed journal]
• Seiver, Jillene Grove; & Pope, Elisa A. (2022). The kids are alright II: social engagement in young adulthood as a function of k-12 schooling type, personality traits, and parental education level. Home School Researcher, 37(2), 1-9.
• Sheffer, Susannah. (1995). A sense of self: Listening to homeschooled adolescent girls.
• United States Department of Education. (2019) Homeschooling in the United States: Results from the 2012 and 2016 Parent and Family Involvement Survey (PFINHES: 2012 and 2016). Retrieved November 3, 2020 from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020001.pdf

About the Author

Brian D. Ray, Ph.D. is an internationally known researcher, educator, speaker, and expert witness, and serves as president of the nonprofit National Home Education Research Institute. He is a former certified teacher in public and private schools and served as a professor in the fields of science, research methods, and education at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He holds a Ph.D. in science education from Oregon State University, a M.S. in zoology from Ohio University, and a B.S. in biology from the University of Puget Sound. Dr. Ray has been studying the homeschool movement since about 1984.

Source:

https://admissionsly.com/homeschooling-statistics/
https://home-school.lovetoknow.com/Statistics_on_Public_School_Vs_Homeschooling
https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/

Careers Service

Careers in Psychology

What can I do with a degree in psychology?
The Psychology Department sponsors several activities each year for students wishing to learn more about career opportunities.

The field of psychology encompasses research and practice; through research we learn fundamental things about human and animal behavior, through practice that knowledge is applied in helping to solve human problems.

In each of the sub-fields, there are psychologists who work primarily as researchers, others who work primarily as practitioners, and many who do both (scientist-practitioners). Indeed, one of psychology’s most unique and important characteristics is its coupling of science and practice, which stimulates continual advancement of both.

These range from short-term crises, such as difficulties resulting from adolescent rebellion, to more severe, chronic conditions such as schizophrenia. Some clinical psychologists treat specific problems exclusively, such as phobias or clinical depression.

Counseling psychologists help people to accommodate to change or to make changes in their lifestyle. For example, they provide vocational and career assessment and guidance or help someone come to terms with the death of a loved one.

Until recently, the primary focus was on childhood and adolescence, the most formative years. But as life expectancy in this country approaches 80 years, developmental psychologists are becoming increasingly interested in aging, especially in researching and developing ways to help elderly people stay as independent as possible.

They consider a variety of factors, such as human abilities, student motivation, and the effect on the classroom of the diversity of race, ethnicity, and culture that makes up America.

What arrangement of an assembly line makes production most efficient? What is a reasonable workload? Most engineering psychologists work in industry, but some are employed by the government, particularly the Department of Defense. They are often known as human factors specialists.

They can, for example, help a judge decide which parent should have custody of a child or evaluate a defendant’s mental competence to stand trial. Some forensic psychologists are trained in both psychology and the law.

They identify the kinds of medical treatment people seek and get; how patients handle illness; why some people don’t follow medical advice; and the most effective ways to control pain or to change poor health habits.

They also develop health care strategies that foster emotional and physical well-being. Psychologists team up with medical personnel in private practice and in hospitals to provide patients with complete health care.

Industrial/organizational psychologists apply psychological principles and research methods to the work place in the interest of improving productivity and the quality of work life.

Many serve as human resources specialists, helping organizations with staffing, training, and employee development and management in such areas as strategic planning, quality management, and coping with organizational change.

For example, neuropsychologists may study the way the brain creates and stores memories, or how various diseases and injuries of the brain affect emotion, perception, and behavior.

Rehabilitation psychologists work with stroke and accident victims, people with mental retardation, and those with developmental disabilities caused by such conditions as cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and autism.

They help clients adapt to their situation, frequently working with other health care professionals. They deal with issues of personal adjustment, interpersonal relations, the work world, and pain management.

School psychologists work directly with public and private schools. They assess and counsel students, consult with parents and school staff, and conduct behavioral intervention when appropriate. Some school districts employ psychologists full time.

Social psychologists study how a person’s mental life and behavior is shaped by interactions with other people. They are interested in all aspects of interpersonal relationships, including both individual and group influences, and seek ways to improve such interactions.

Sports psychologists help athletes refine their focus on competition goals, become more motivated, and learn to deal with the anxiety and fear of failure that often accompany competition. The field is growing as sports of all kinds become more and more competitive and attract younger children than ever.

As a liberal arts and sciences student, the psychology major develops competence in written and oral communication, interpersonal skills, and abilities for problem-solving and critical thinking.

Popular job websites

All / Psychology related jobs

Mental Health and Healthcare related

Education and young people

Government, Social Care, Community & Charity

Commercial – HR, Marketing & related

Research & related

University & Academic related jobs (inc research assistant roles)

Graduate schemes enable you to work and train in a large organisation, usually between one to three years, with a view to progressing into a senior role over the long term. Many allow you to experience different placements within the organisation for you decide what roles you are most suited to. Many of these schemes are open to students and graduates of any degree discipline. See also our page on Graduate Schemes.

Social Work & related

Charity Sector

Education & Teaching

Criminal Justice

Health, Government & Social Care

Source:

https://www.cabrini.edu/about/departments/academic-departments/school-of-arts-and-sciences/psychology/careers-in-psychology
https://www.careers.manchester.ac.uk/whichcareer/health/optionspsych/
https://www.onlineu.com/careers/psychology

10 Steps To Begin Your Own Business

10 Steps To Begin Your Own Business

Small business owners control, manage and operate a company or organization. They can work in a variety of industries and provide goods or services for local and global customers. Learning more about this career path, including the potential advantages and traits for success, could help you determine whether this is the right opportunity for you. In this article, we provide the potential benefits of owning a small business, traits that could help you succeed and the steps you can take to become a small business owner.

More independent decisions : Small business owners make many important financial, business and marketing decisions. They often have more power and control over these decisions when owning their own business.

Unique company culture opportunities: Small business owners can design their own workplace culture and environment. This can include planning work events, designing the building layout and planning employee benefits.

More chances to meet new people: Networking is an important part of building a business, and small business owners may get the chance to connect with local professionals, investors and clients each day depending on their industry.

More remote opportunities: Depending on the industry, some small business owners can work from home or remote locations. They may establish remote options for the company or choose to complete their work from home on certain days.

Are you a business owner?

When we use the words business owner , meaning one who individually or with partners is in control of monetary and operational decision-making, we are talking about a true sense of ownership. The business owner has ultimate control over the company and decides what to delegate and to whom.

Though the image of the young Silicon Valley prodigy often comes to mind, the average age of a business owner in the US is closer to 50 years old. A business owner can earn a monthly salary and typically earns more than an average American, but he or she is not an employee and is the only one in the company who has the right to take a net profit at the end of the year or reinvest that money back into the company.

To gat her whether you are a business owner or operator, it all comes down to one question: Are you running your business, or is your business running you? To determine the answer to this question, ask yourself the following: Are you able to be strategic, or are you doing the same things over and over because you’re too busy to create an atmosphere of innovation ? Are you able to step back and see the bigger picture? Or are you caught in the weeds because your team can’t effectively run the ship without you?

How to become a business owner

If you can’t step away from your company and let others steer the course, your new goal is this : Learn how to become a business owner instead of an operator. Choose to make that shift in both your identity and your business. How? As Tony said, a business owner is the ultimate strategist.

If you ask yourself “What is a business owner ?” then you likely have some areas where you can improve when it comes to running your own company. Want to learn how to become a business owner and get out of operator mode? Here’s what it takes .

1. Wear a variety of hats

Though the goal is to build a cross – functional team that can handle most aspects of your business without you, this won’t be the case in the beginning. As a new business owner , you will find yourself answering phones and mopping the office floor in addition to making presentations and landing big deals.

You’ll likely need to learn new skills as well, like accounting and reading financial statements . A business is only as strong as the psychology of its leader, and there’s no shame in admitting that you have weaknesses. In fact, it’s essential to ask for help when you need it or even outsource some work so you have time to focus on what really matters.

2. Make personal sacrifices

A business owner will have to make some short-term sacrifices to grow their company. This could mean long hours, missed vacations and putting extracurricular activities on hold. However, the bigger picture is that this effort will help you achieve long-term goals.

Remember that there is no such thing as work-life balance – there is only work-life integration . When you’re doing what you love, your work and life are naturally integrated. And once you’ve built your business and found ways to increase profits , you can enjoy the freedom you’ve earned.

3. Invest in yourself

Think that becoming a business owner means making big bucks right away? Think again. Most new business owners end up investing any profits in their companies rather than paying themselves. In fact, the answer to “How much do you pay yourself as a business owner?” is often “Nothing” in the first few years. According to Fundera, 30% of small business owners take no salary at all, and 83% pay themselves less than $100,000 per year.

As a business owner , you may be required to invest some of your savings in the business as it grows. However, just as the personal sacrifices are usually short term, so are the financial ones. You’ll have some lean years, but when you’re doing what you love, it will be worth it. And once you grow your business beyond the infancy and teen phases of the business cycle , you’ll achieve both financial and personal freedom.

4. Focus on what’s important

When you look at the business owner definition, you’ll notice it does not include putting out fires. A business owner focuses on top-level issues like creating a positive organizational culture and developing new strategies to increase customer loyalty . You create a compelling vision for your company and inspire others to follow you through that vision.

5. Build the right team

A true business owner maximizes his or her business by leveraging not only their own ideas, but the abilities and strengths of the talented individuals around them by building the right team . You certainly need to have your own leadership skills , but you also need to strategically hire so that, over time, they can step into major leadership roles and handle the day-to-day operations of the business without you.

Ensure that you have a team you can trust with this “baby” you have poured so much love and passion into. Otherwise, your business will always be limited by what you as a business owner can personally do each day and you’ll always be stressed . If that’s the case, then you don’t have a business – you have a job. You’re restricted when you have a job that you have to be at every day, but you’re financially free when you have a business that can effectively run without you.

Does becoming a business owner seem a little overwhelming? This doesn’t mean you can’t do the things you love or be a part of the business. By all means, you can still be the operator where it makes sense to be the operator. But allow yourself and your business to thrive by making this necessary shift in your mentality.

Channel the great traits of an entrepreneur and have a vision in mind for your company. What’s your ultimate goal for launching your own business? Chances are, it was to experience greater financial freedom or to have more time to focus on the things you love, like your family, interests or worthy causes. Keep this end goal in mind as you make the shift from business operator to business owner .

Write a Business Plan

Creating a business plan will help you set (realistic) goals and figure out how much cash you’ll need in your first year. It’ll also make you think about the number of clients you need and the type of marketing required to attract those clients.

Research

Entrepreneurs need to be able to explain why their business idea will succeed. Part of this involves identifying how you’ll do things similarly to your competition and how you’ll do them differently, according to Inc.. The different part is key—it’s better to not go up against your major competitors directly but find a niche.

Use the Small Business Administration’s SizeUp tool to get a comparison to your competitors. This will help you not only sell your business idea to others, but identify and resolve any weak spots in your business idea from the beginning.

Identify Your Audience

Who are you writing this business plan for? For example, you may be writing the plan to apply for a loan. So you’ll want to lay out all your costs and projected return on investment (ROI). A lender will want practical and level-headed details, like how the loan will be repaid. Don’t promise huge profits as this can signal big risk. And make sure to outline any risks associated with your business.

Use a Template

The Small Business Administration has a business plan template that’s free to download. It’s important to have a structure to follow so you hit all the key points (and ensure you look like a pro, not a rookie). It’s also a good idea to Google business plans to see what other companies like yours have done in the past.

Register Your Business

Whether you need to register your small business depends on your location and structure. The Small Business Administration can guide you through this process. You may need to register both federally and with your state and some business structures need an agent to register. You can also register your business name locally. Registering usually costs less than $300.

Ideally, a small business owner should have enough money to cover three to six months of operating expenses before even starting their company. Operating expenses include rent, equipment and insurance.

Bootstrapping

You’ll need to rely on your own skills or learn new ones to manage your finances and run your marketing campaigns. FreshBooks has a comprehensive list of tools every entrepreneur needs. Many are free or low cost, helping you run many aspects of your business at minimal cost.

Some types of businesses work better with the bootstrapping model, including creative freelancing (writing or graphic design, for example), tutoring or working as a virtual assistant.

Larger businesses can apply for business incubators and accelerators—Entrepreneur lists the best incubators and Forbes has a list of top 2017 accelerators. These programs help businesses grow by giving guidance. They can also lend capital and offset costs by providing office space and support staff.

Funding

Small businesses that need more funds than bootstrapping can provide need to look at other options. That said, funding can be hard to secure without a track record of success. And each source has its pros and cons.

• Borrowing money. Small business loans will leave you with complete control over your company. You need a business plan, financial projects for the next five years and an expense sheet to apply for a loan. The Small Business Administration has an online tool to match you with SBA-approved lenders.
• Crowdfunding. This involves raising money from a large group of people. These people don’t get control or ownership over your company in return. Instead, they receive a gift (your product or another perk). It’s also a low risk funding option. Explore your options in this FreshBooks blog post.
• Venture capital. Only for high-growth companies. Instead of providing a loan, venture capitalist provide funding in exchange for a degree of ownership and control over your company.

Source:

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/starting-new-job/how-to-become-small-business-owner
https://www.tonyrobbins.com/career-business/are-you-a-business-owner-or-operator/
https://www.freshbooks.com/hub/accounting/becoming-small-business-owner

10 Creative Careers That Won’t Require You to Be a Starving Artist

13 great jobs that don’t require a degree and pay well

In most fields, people often have difficulty in finding employment without a bachelor’s degree, but there are plenty of jobs that you can get if you don’t have one. Some of these jobs require certifications or vocational training, but most provide in-house training too. With such an option, people can gain experience and earn a fair wage at the same time. In this article, we discuss the best jobs that don’t require a degree and give an overview of each one.

Primary duties: Personal assistants help executives manage their schedules. They’re also responsible for taking notes during meetings and helping with administrative tasks. You can become a personal assistant without a degree, but it’s necessary to possess excellent organisational skills to excel in this field.

The responsibilities of a personal assistant can vary depending on the company they’re working for. In some companies, personal assistants are responsible for handling correspondence for senior executives. In smaller enterprises, personal assistants also help with the day-to-day operations of the company.

Posting clerk

Primary duties: Posting clerks perform a wide range of duties including weighing letters, parcels and managing deliveries. They also make sure that every letter and parcel has the right stamps. Posting clerks handle bill payments and offer assistance to customers. They’re responsible for sending out deliveries, accepting packages and acting as a liaison between delivery providers and the company.

Primary duties: A real estate agent is the connection between buyers and sellers in the real estate market. They help their clients buy, sell or rent properties. Real estate professionals also offer advice to their clients about market conditions. Since they work in a commission-based job, individuals can make a good annual salary.

Real estate agents can make a lot more than their national average salary. There’s significant potential for growth in this field, especially as the pay depends on the number of successful deals. In most cases, there’s no cap on commissions.

Technical Writer

If you build up your technical knowledge, you can turn a passion for writing into a career that earns more than double the median annual salary in the United States. Technical writers are the communication professionals who create the text used to convey technical information in instruction manuals, frequently asked questions (FAQ) resources and journal articles. Most technical writers work in scientific and technical services or the manufacturing and information industries.

Being a good technical writer requires many of the skills necessary for success in other forms of writing. You have to think about your audience and figure out what they need to know to use the product safely and effectively. The role also involves doing research into the product’s design, development and use.

Writing out complex technical information in ways that are simple, accessible and easy to understand is the crux of a technical writer’s job. However, these professionals are also responsible for creating or attaining the visual elements – like diagrams, charts and photographs – that help users understand the product. Today’s technical writers may also be responsible for creating interactive presentations of technical information, including video and audio elements.

Technical writers need to draw from both communication skills and technical knowledge. That means these professionals need an education that emphasizes writing and communications but also a background in the technical subject they want to write about. In fact, many technical writers start their careers in these technical industries, often as research specialists or assistants. Aspiring technical writers are in luck – the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts opportunities for this profession to increase by 10 percent over a decade. That’s faster than the seven percent job growth expected for all occupations and much faster than the growth expected for communications professionals and authors (four percent and two percent, respectively).

The 30 highest paying jobs which do not require a College Degree:

With a salary ranging between $120 000 to $555 000, this may sound too good to be true. No academic background is necessary apart from obtaining a referee certification in the sport you want to referee. The stakes are high, but so is the return if you have the nerves for putting it all out there with no guarantees of ever gaining enough recognition to join in on this multi-billion-dollar industry!

Not your Top Gun scenario with fighter jets, white uniforms, and maverick air maneuvers but, if you want to spend most of your working day among the clouds ample opportunities are available in-flight charters, aerial photography, aerial fire-fighting to name but a few. Certification takes about 12-18 months, depending on how long it takes to accumulate your 250 flight hours. Once established, the average earnings range from $49k – $160k per annum.

Imagine spending your days dining and wining in the most excellent restaurants and hotels around the country….and getting paid for it. Master Sommeliers are the expert stewards of the food and hospitality industry. You will be responsible for sourcing wines to pair with the dishes that the establishment offers, conduct wine tastings, and offer wine recommendations to patrons.

Master Sommeliers are certified by the CMS (Court of Master Sommeliers) and may earn up to $160 000 per annum. However, before dusting off those forgotten bottles of wine in the cellar, be reminded that there are currently only 229 Master Sommeliers worldwide. If you want a taste of it, you’re going to have to work for it.

Seen the movie Pushing Tin and you have it about right. Are you cool, calm, and collected in the face of adversity with next level OCD when it comes to accuracy and detail? If affirmative, then is this is potentially the job for you to earn a six-figure salary in just a few years after starting on an entry-level salary of around $94 000. Join the curators of the sky industry by enlisting the military or completing the necessary training through the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Do you have a neck for languages…. of the IT kind that is? Computer programmers are the brainchild behind the apps, programs, and systems we take for granted every day. Coding, coding, and more coding is your daily destiny. Programmers paid dearly for their everyday engagement with binary zeros and ones at $70 000 per year.

In this job, you are in power. Power Distributors monitor and control steam input and electricity output in power plants. On the job training is common, and coursework includes electrical engineering and power production subject matter. Distributors earn average salaries of $81 000.

These individuals are responsible for organizing and storing data securely using specialized software and system architecture. Accessibility, integrity, and safety take on whole different meanings in this industry.

Locomotive Engineers need a high school diploma and a couple of certifications that can be completed while already working. Salaries bring in an average of $62 000 per annum. You will be responsible for operating electric, diesel or gas-turbine trains in the freight or passenger transportation sector.

Resource:

https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/jobs-that-dont-require-a-degree
https://www.degreequery.com/10-creative-careers-wont-require-starving-artist/
https://www.resumeviking.com/blog/highest-paying-jobs-without-degree/

A Comprehensive WordPress Tutorial

From the “Plugins” tab, you’ll be able to browse the incredible list of community- and professional-made widgets and other WordPress apps. I cannot stress this enough – there’s a widget for everything.

Did you know that around 35% of the entire web is built with WordPress? With an estimated 2 billion websites out there, that would make up around 700 million sites – absolutely insane! No wonder that WordPress tutorials are among the most sought-after!

WordPress is a very unique website creation tool – I must say, out of all of the similar tools that I have used throughout my career, WP has been my favorite, hands-down. There are many reasons why that’s the case – we’ll get into it in a minute.

Now, do keep in mind that WP isn’t exactly a website builder per se – at least not the WordPress that we’ll be talking about in this article. If you’re interested in some of the more traditional website builders out there, do check out our list of the best builders on the current market.

According to you, what is the best website builder for personal use?

For me, personally, WordPress is the best platform for building websites. But, WordPress can be overwhelming for many people that want to launch a new site and hit the ground running. When deciding on a platform for your website, take your level of "techiness" and experience learning new software into consideration. Many of the website builders available today have been designed for beginners. You can literally "drag and drop" your website together using a clean visual editor.

Table of Contents

WordPress.org vs WordPress.com

O que muda entre esses dois métodos é a própria hospedagem. Ao usar o WordPress.org, você deverá fazer o download grátis do script e hospedar o site por conta própria num computador local ou através de uma provedora de host (tipo a Hostinger).

Por outro lado, o WordPress.com toma conta de toda a hospedagem do site por você. Você não vai precisar manter um servidor da web, pagar por um site de hospedagem ou baixar um software, no entanto, ads de propaganda vão aparecer no seu site.

Você também terá acesso aos seus arquivos, pastas, bancos de dados e códigos, o que significa que você poderá modificar isso tudo como desejar. Os sites mais populares e poderosos do WordPress estão nesse perfil de hospedagem própria, que fornece maior flexibilidade e habilidade de implementar funcionalidades, códigos e design customizados.

Passo 1 – Como instalar o WordPress

Você provavelmente terá que procurar por uma provedora de hospedagem que suporte o WordPress. Muitos hosts usam diversos instaladores automáticos para tornar a instalação do WordPress um processo ainda mais simples.

Antes de continuar sua instalação, você vai precisar decidir como você pretende acessar seu website. Você deseja ter o WordPress como o seu domínio raiz (exemplo.com), subpasta (exemplo.com/blog) ou subdomínio (blog.exemplo.com)? Você só irá precisar de um passo extra se quiser configurar o WordPress como subdomínio. Na Hostinger isso pode ser facilmente feito na sessão Subdomínios.

Opção 1.1 – Instalando o WordPress pela Hostinger utilizando um Instalador Automático

Vamos começar da maneira mais rápida e simples de instalar o WordPress: o Auto Instalador da Hostinger. Os passos mostrados abaixo mostram como instalar o WordPress através do painel de controle da Hostinger:

1. Acesse o Painel de Controle Hostinger
2. Localize e abra o Auto Instalador.
3. Clique no botão Selecionar abaixo de WordPress.
4. Agora complete com as especificações do seu website:
   URL – A url onde o WordPress deve ser instalado. Se você gostaria de instalar como um domínio raiz (exemplo.com), deixe vazio.
   Idioma – Escolha o idioma do WordPress
   Nome de usuário do Administrador – Seu nome de usuário do WordPress. Você irá usá-lo para acessar a área do administrador.
   Senha do Administrador – Sua senha do WordPress. Você vai precisar dela para acessar a área do administrador.
   Email do Administrador – Entre com seu endereço de email.
   Título do Site – Título do seu site do WordPress.
   Tagline do Site – Uma frase curta explicando sobre o que é o seu site.
5. Aperte o botão Instalar.

Opção 1.2 – Instalando o WordPress manualmente

Depois de completo o download, você pode começar a postar seus arquivos do WordPress na sua conta de hospedagem. Você pode tanto usar o Gerenciador de Arquivos providenciado pela sua provedora de hospedagem ou um cliente FTP.

Não única diferença que a ferramenta que você escolher fará é a facilidade de uso. A única coisa que você deve levar em consideração é o diretório de destinação. Por exemplo, se você deseja ter o WordPress como um domínio raiz, os arquivos devem ser enviados para a pasta public_html; se você prefere um subdomínio ou uma subpasta do WordPress, faça o upload na pasta apropriada.

O WordPress armazena informações em bancados de dados. Portanto, é imprescindível criar pelo menos um. Na Hostinger, você pode criar um novo banco de dados na seção Banco de Dados MySQL. Não se esqueça de anotar as informações da sua base dados, pois você vai precisar delas mais tarde.

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Step 2: Accessing Your Website

There are a couple of ways to access your WP dashboard. The easiest route would be to go there via a button from your hosting provider’s panel – no matter your hosting service of choice, there should be one available.

Another route that you’d find mentioned in many user WordPress tutorials would be to simply enter the name of your domain into the URL bar, and then add “/dashboard” or “/admin”. So, if the name of your domain is “mywordpresswebsite.com”, it would look like so:

There isn’t really a difference between the two above-mentioned dashboard accessing routes. That said, if you want to learn WordPress, it might actually be easier to follow the latter, since you can simply access it by typing some information into the URL bar, instead of having to go and log into your hosting service panel every time.

Have you ever wondered which website builders are the best for your business?

Step 3: Get to Know the Interface

In all honesty, even today, every single time I log into WP, I get some nostalgic vibes from the homepage section. While I’ve altered it with some plugins and other widgets, the core design is still the same – classic WordPress.

At this point, you should make sure to take your time to study the actual interface that you see in front of you. As noted above, it’s probably going to change significantly as you progress with your website and install more plugins, but still – the core idea will remain the same.

The cool thing about WordPress is that, while being significantly more complicated than a traditional website builder, it does have a more clear layout than most of the current builders out there. The design choices for the WP interfaces were very simple and old-school, but also very straightforward – that’s a good thing!

All of your main attention should be focused on the left side of your screen – namely, to the list of various interfaces that you can open. With some exceptions, this is the area that you be clicking through the most.

If you want to learn WordPress “the proper way”, do make sure to not rush through the options that you see here. Every new button is going to have a few more pop-ups, so you should surely make sure to figure out where things are in the dashboard before progressing further.

Step 4: Theme Choice and Installation

While figuring out how to use WP might require a WordPress tutorial for beginners, there are some things that the CMS does have in common with other website builders out there. One of these things would have to be the theme selection.

In the “Appearance” section ("Theme" sub-section) on the left, you’ll be able to pick from a few different default themes. If you’d like to make your site more original, then you can always download new theme templates – ones created by the WordPress community. The downloading and installation processes are actually quite simple – just find the desired theme, download and apply it.

Make sure to try different themes out, and see which fits the “vibe” of your website best. You’ll be able to preview them, check how they work, and also even read some other user reviews and general feedback in the community section, too.

While it may take some time finding the best template for yourself, that’s normal – after all, there’s a pretty vast number to pick from! Do make sure to delete (rather, uninstall) the unused templates afterward – got to keep the dashboard uncluttered and working properly!

Step 5: Page Creation

Creating a specific page with WordPress is nothing like doing the same thing with a website builder. When you’re working with a builder, in the vast majority of cases, it’s going to have drag-and-drop functionality, and will abide by the “WYSIWYG” principle – in other words, you’ll be able to alter your page contents by clicking on a section, and the changes will look the same live as they do while you’re editing.

Sources:

https://www.mybestwebsitebuilder.com/learn/wordpress-tutorial
https://www.hostinger.com.br/tutoriais/tutorial-wordpress
https://www.mybestwebsitebuilder.com/learn/wordpress-tutorial
Wordpress tutorials

• style.css This file is where you add some css comments so that WordPress knows some information about your custom theme. It also holds the custom css styling that you will apply to your theme.
• index.php This file controls the html and general output of your theme. It is the main file used for outputting data on your home page.
• header.php Allows you to specify an area to hold important information about your website in the area as well as including opening , , and ,
• footer.php The footer will close out any opening tags you specified in the header area, in addition to giving you a place to call the wp_footer() function.
• functions.php Allows you to to call functions, both PHP and built-in WordPress, and to define your own functions in order to change the default behaviors of WordPress

WordPress Theme Development Tutorial Step By Step

This is going to be a fun tutorial where we inspect how to create your own WordPress Theme from scratch. In fact, we’ll begin with absolutely zero files and zero lines of code. The only way to understand how WordPress Themes work, is to really jump in at a low level and do every single thing yourself. Yes, it is tempting to avoid this because you can make WordPress do everything for you without any understanding of the code that powers it. This could be PHP, JavaScript, CSS or even the basic HTML. By the end of this step by step WordPress Theme tutorial, you will understand how everything fits together and how to bend WordPress to your will with ease.

There are so many free themes available to you when you are running a WordPress website. Beyond the free themes, you might also choose to pay a premium for professionally made WordPress themes that look great and have fantastic features. So why learn how to create your own theme from scratch? The answer is that no matter what theme you are using, there is going to come a time when you want to make simple changes to your website. Some of those changes might be able to be accommodated by a simple plugin or widget. Many times however, it makes more sense to understand what it is you want to change, how to change it, and avoid turning your WordPress website into a mess of plugins and add-ons that become unwieldy. With just a bit of foundation level knowledge, you’ll be confident in modifying your theme, or simply building your own from scratch. You’ll know which file to edit, and what code to add or modify to create your desired result.

Step 1: Create a folder to hold your theme files.

If we are going to be building themes, we need to know where the files that make up a WordPress theme live in a WordPress Installation. This is pretty easy. We know that a WordPress installation typically has a root directory named wordpress . Here is what our root directory looks like in PHP Storm.

Files

Folders

The folder that we are most interested in right now is the wp-content folder. Within the wp-content folder is a folder named themes. Do you know what this folder is for? Yep, that’s right! It is the folder that holds one or more themes that you would like to use with your WordPress website. In this themes folder we find three additional folders of twentyfifteen, twentysixteen, and twentyseventeen. These folders contain the three themes that WordPress ships with by default. Notice below that there is also a folder named customtheme. Go ahead and create that folder as well in your installation as this is where we will be creating our WordPress theme from scratch.

The Media Library

When creating or editing a post or page click “add media” which is a button found just above the content area. You can include existing media already uploaded to your website or upload new media. Try not to upload the same file more than once as it will take up extra space and add clutter. If you’ve already uploaded the file, select it from your media library!

Each theme has different menu locations. Every theme should have at least one menu location. Some themes will have several menu locations such as the main menu, top menu and footer menu. Menu locations are theme dependant, so make sure to choose a theme that supports the menu locations you need. You can however hire a developer to modify an existing theme to support any menu location.

When you navigate to appearance->menus you’ll see to the left you can choose categories, custom links and sometimes more things you can add to menus depending upon the theme and/or plugins you have installed.

Step 8: Add Some Style To Your Theme

When we visit our test website now in the browser, we can see that the WordPress Theme that we have developed step by step in this tutorial is looking pretty good!

WordPress Theme Development Tutorial Step By Step Summary

Let’s review everything that we’ve learned in this basic step by step WordPress Theme tutorial for beginners. We’ve learned how to create our first custom theme in WordPress by making our own folder in side of the themes folder of our WordPress installation. In this folder, we added different files that correspond to different sections of your website. In our tutorial, we have started with the bare minimums you should have in a WordPress theme. In the future, you would add many more files to this folder than what we have covered. Let’s review each file we created in this tutorial, and what they did for us.

• style.css This file is where you add some css comments so that WordPress knows some information about your custom theme. It also holds the custom css styling that you will apply to your theme.
• index.php This file controls the html and general output of your theme. It is the main file used for outputting data on your home page.
• header.php Allows you to specify an area to hold important information about your website in the area as well as including opening , , and ,
• footer.php The footer will close out any opening tags you specified in the header area, in addition to giving you a place to call the wp_footer() function.
• functions.php Allows you to to call functions, both PHP and built-in WordPress, and to define your own functions in order to change the default behaviors of WordPress

Sources:

https://vegibit.com/wordpress-theme-development-tutorial-step-by-step/
https://stratospheredigital.ca/wordpress-tutorial-for-beginners-step-by-step-pdf/
https://vegibit.com/wordpress-theme-development-tutorial-step-by-step/

Mobile devices

Mobile Device Management (MDM) enables IT admins to securely monitor and manage the mobile devices that access sensitive business data. It includes storing essential information about mobile devices, deciding which apps can be present on the devices, locating devices, and securing devices if lost or stolen. With the increased adoption of mobile devices, mobile device management (MDM) solutions have now evolved into Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions.

Mobile Device Management (MDM)

The core purpose of MDM is to protect the corporate network by securing and optimizing mobile devices, including laptops, smartphones, tablets, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, that connect to enterprise networks. Besides boosting the security of business networks, it also enables employees to use their own devices, rather than corporate-supplied devices, to work more efficiently and be more productive.

MDM software is part of the wider enterprise mobility management (EMM) family, which incorporates enterprise file syncing and sharing, identity and access management (IAM), and mobile application management (MAM). MDM, in the context of controlling PCs, is referred to as unified endpoint management (UEM), which enables organizations to manage all of their enterprise devices from one single location.

How Mobile Device Management Works

To further understand what is mobile device management, you have to know how it works. MDM relies on two separate components. The first is an MDM server management console, which is stored in an organization’s data center and enables administrators to configure, manage, and enforce policies. The second is an MDM agent that receives and implements these policies on users’ devices.

Policies are configured by IT administrators through the MDM server management console, then the server pushes the policies to the MDM agent. The agent applies the specified policies onto a device by using application programming interfaces (APIs) that are built into the device’s operating system.

Early MDM solutions relied on subscriber identification module (SIM) cards and client-initiated steps, which restricted scalability. But modern versions can automatically detect when new devices connect to corporate networks and apply commands or policies for them to implement.

How Mobile Device Management Works

To further understand what is mobile device management, you have to know how it works. MDM relies on two separate components. The first is an MDM server management console, which is stored in an organization’s data center and enables administrators to configure, manage, and enforce policies. The second is an MDM agent that receives and implements these policies on users’ devices.

Policies are configured by IT administrators through the MDM server management console, then the server pushes the policies to the MDM agent. The agent applies the specified policies onto a device by using application programming interfaces (APIs) that are built into the device’s operating system.

Early MDM solutions relied on subscriber identification module (SIM) cards and client-initiated steps, which restricted scalability. But modern versions can automatically detect when new devices connect to corporate networks and apply commands or policies for them to implement.

BYOD and MDM

MDM first emerged in the early 2000s to allow organizations to take control and secure the first wave of smartphones and devices—like personal digital assistants—that were being used in the workplace. The consumerization of IT that has snowballed since then, starting with the launch of Apple’s first iPhone in 2007, fueled the trend of bring your own device (BYOD), which placed more importance on effective MDM tools.

The risks associated with the BYOD trend led to organizations implementing MDM software that helped their IT teams monitor, manage, and secure all devices brought into the workplace. These MDM tools remain crucial to securing the workplace in the face of increasingly sophisticated and costly cyberattacks and data breaches.

As employees increasingly expect to be able to use their personal devices at work, organizations need to be able to secure those devices and keep their users safe. Some employees who want to use their personal devices at work will do so even if their organization does not have a BYOD policy, a practice also known as shadow IT. It is therefore vital for businesses to implement a strong BYOD policy that enables employees to use their own devices without creating potential gaps in security.

However, implementing MDM within a BYOD environment can be challenging. Organizations must balance the need to secure their applications and data with maintaining employees’ privacy, such as IT being able to see the applications that users download or tracking their location.

Advantages of using an MDM solution

With most healthcare organizations moving towards electronic health records (EHRs), mobile device use is more popular than ever in the healthcare sector. But ensuring the personal health information (PHI) stored on mobile devices is secure and complying with regulatory standards like HIPAA can be a challenge. An MDM solution can help you meet compliance standards while also ensuring that PHI remains secure from unauthorized access.

Now that many enterprises are embracing mobility, one market that can benefit greatly from the advantages of MDM is the transportation industry. An MDM solution lets businesses track shipments and vehicle locations as well as maintain a history of locations traversed. It also lets you lock down corporate devices to specific apps and/or settings to prevent device misuse and ensure maximum productivity.

The transition to the digital age has affected no industry more than the education sector. With more and more schools adopting tablet-based teaching methods, it’s essential to manage these devices to ensure they’re only used for learning. Granular restrictions let you disable basic device functionalities such as the camera, as well as restrict access to certain websites.

Thanks to features like digital signage, mPOS, and self-service checkouts, mobile devices have found their niche in the retail sector. Some enterprises in the retail industry use mobile devices built for a specific need, while others use a combination of in-house apps and certain policies on more standard devices like phones and tablets. Both specialized devices such as rugged devices and standard mobile devices such as smartphones can be managed using an MDM solution.

With most organizations in the service industry leaning towards a mobile-only or mobile-first workforce, mobile devices—especially employee-owned devices—are being used more than ever. An MDM solution helps you seamlessly manage personal devices (BYOD management) and in-house apps while also ensuring those devices adhere to your enterprise’s security standards.

The MDM solution that can help

ManageEngine’s Mobile Device Manager Plus is the perfect enterprise mobile device management tool for SMBs and large enterprises. Let’s look at some of the features Mobile Device Manager Plus has to offer to simplify MDM device management:

Mobile Device Manager Plus supports multiple methods for enrollment, irrespective of whether the device is with the user or still sitting in one of your business’ storerooms. With Mobile Device Manager Plus, you can quickly and easily onboard devices in bulk with no user action required. Learn more about Mobile Device Manager Plus’ enrollment methods. It also helps with BYOD mobile device management i.e. mobile device management for personal devices, whereby you get to manage the workspace while having zero control over the personal space ensuring corporate data security without compromising on user privacy.

Silently install both purchased and in-house apps, and predefine app permissions and settings OTA to ensure they’re ready for use immediately after installation. In addition to silent installation, you can also delete or update apps remotely without requiring any user intervention. Further, Mobile Device Manager Plus also helps you maintain licenses of paid apps. Learn more about app management.

Ensure devices are ready for use the moment they’re handed over to employees by remotely preconfiguring basic settings for Wi-Fi, email, etc. Any configuration updates can also be made OTA. With Mobile Device Manager Plus, you can easily manage your BYOD environment by controlling all corporate aspects of a device while leaving personal data alone for a good balance between security and privacy. Learn more about policy management.

Mobile Device Manager Plus provides you with a host of options for mobile security—both proactive and reactive. In addition to granular restrictions, you can ensure only devices managed by Mobile Device Manager Plus can access corporate Exchange servers. By sandboxing your corporate documents, you can ensure that mobile devices attempting to access corporate data can only do so using the MDM agent app (ManageEngine MDM) present on the device, thereby preventing unauthorized access.

In addition to simple device deployment, Mobile Device Manager Plus provides multiple settings for maintaining deployed devices, including periodic device scanning to update your device inventory; remote troubleshooting; and scheduling/automating OS updates to ensure the most secure OS version is running on each device.

Resources:

https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/mobile-device-management
https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/mobile-device-management
https://www.manageengine.com/mobile-device-management/what-is-mdm.html
Mobile devices

With a mobile application, most of the code is downloaded and stored on the device itself (think iOS and Android). These are two primary components of appsec. The security aspect of appsec then comes into play when we consider protecting and safeguarding the app — and all data it encompasses.

Situation

In a bring your own device (BYOD) work environment, users expect to be able to work from any location at any time, on the device of their choice. Moreover, users now typically have several identities, meaning that they use their devices in both work-related and non-work-related contexts. For example, they might bring a personal tablet to a business meeting and expect to access files on a team’s Microsoft SharePoint site, or they might present a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation over Microsoft Skype for Business. They’re likely to check both work and personal email accounts on their phone, and may use their phone camera to take photos of whiteboard sessions to help them remember what a work group collaborated on during a meeting. On both types of device, they’re likely to have a mix of apps, some for personal use and some for work.

But as the traditional boundaries between work and personal life blur the use of these devices, it’s critical that devices be managed in a way that is acceptable to the entire business. Data policies, such as encryption, password length, password complexity, and password duration, must provide corporate data security on all devices while maintaining the privacy of workers’ personal information.

IT must be able to identify, with certainty, who a user is and if a device should have access to corporate resources. Current trends suggest that workers change jobs and companies several times over the course of a career, so IT needs a way to account for this flux of people and devices. What should IT do if a device is lost or an employee leaves the company? What is the best way to ensure that corporate resources are wiped from a personal device that should no longer have access to them?

Why is Mobile Device Security Important? 📊

• ☑️ Kaspersky reports that it discovered almost 3.5 million malware on 1 million devices
• ☑️ An attack is launched every 39 seconds
• ☑️ Average number of attacks of 2,244 times each single day
• ☑️ More than 50% of devices used in the workplace are mobile
• ☑️ Vulnerabilities in mobile devices have increased by 42%
• ☑️ Malware attacks are likely to increase by 50% compared to the previous year
• ☑️ In 2018 alone, 75,000 mobile apps had vulnerabilities that Android had to fix
• ☑️ SDK integrated in apps was discovered to have stolen 111 million contact information
• ☑️ Hidden mobile apps represent up to 50% of transmission to remote endpoints
• ☑️ About 3 to 4 employees per 100 using their device to access inappropriate content.
• ☑️ Up to 80% of corporate owned mobile devices transmit data on WiFi networks
• ☑️ 66% and 55% of enterprises and SMBs respectively provide company owned devices
• ☑️ Approximately 4.3% of company-issued mobile devices are stolen or lost each year.
• ☑️ It is estimated that large enterprises have more than 2,000 unsafe apps installed
• ☑️ 86% – percentage of employees that access company emails through their phones
• ☑️ 70 million smartphones are lost each year
• ☑️ 60% of mobile device vulnerability derives from the client side
• ☑️ 89% of vulnerabilities can be exploited without physical access to the mobile device
• ☑️ 56% of vulnerabilities can be accessed without any sort of administrator access

This almost comes off as a redundant question. With as much as half of an organization’s computing devices now consisting of portable devices, mobile devices present peculiar challenges with regard to network security.

Now, businesses need to account for the different locations and uses of these devices as well. Especially since mobile usage in organizations has now surpassed those of desktop PCs, malicious hackers are now focusing their attention more and more on mobile devices.

Both IT departments and executive suite-level players like CIOs are fixated, for good reason, on thwarting potential threats to companies’ devices such as phishing scams, spyware, unsecured WIFI networks, data leakage. These days, most of the preoccupation centers around malicious mobile apps, or the theft or misplacement of employee mobile devices which might contain proprietary company secrets.

According to Dr. Rebecca Wynn, who heads information security for Matrix Medical Network, most enterprise security teams have gotten a fair handle on things with regard to enterprise mobility and mitigating external exposure that comes with attacks such as man-in-the-middle and malware.

However, Wynn says that data is harder to manage and protect on mobile devices because “the use of private, public apps, and company-branded apps which can leak employee and customer data in ways enterprise security doesn’t have visibility.”

A way to counteract this incident is for organizations to formulate internal policies, and sufficiently educate their employees on the potential dangers that their mobile devices pose to the organization’s interest.

The Mobile Device as a Security Threat 📉

Millennials might find it difficult to imagine, but mobile devices didn’t use to be as ubiquitous as they are today, and were nearly unheard of as a business threat. Before broadband and wireless technology exploded onto the scene, employees with stand-alone desktop computers were limited to Ethernet cables as their primary gateway access to either LAN or WAN corporate networks.

Consumer devices like the iPhone changed this calculus and ushered in the age of the mobile technology, and by extension, the mobile worker to the extent that virtually all employees now regard using a mobile device at their office as a given.

Consumers are now performing more and more daily actions from their smartphone. Everything from email to trading stocks through a top stock trading apps can be facilitated with mobile devices. With an increased mobile device capability, comes an increased vulnerability.

With this trend, IT departments were compelled to grapple with viruses that infected smartphones, like Cabir, the first virus that infected a mobile device in 2004. Hence, a new host of vulnerabilities followed the iPhone and smartphones onto the scene.

Compounding things, the current era is now plagued with threats and vulnerabilities related to Internet-of-Things (IoT). This development has challenged and burdened organizations along with their IT departments with a host of new endpoints that need to be secured.

Some organizations are approaching this issue by taking out these IoT devices from the central network and putting them in their own secluded virtual LAN with separating firewalls. The objective of these measures is to reduce the security incidents emanating from IoT devices.

Furthermore, they might disable certain functions that are infrequently used in IoT devices, say faxing on a wireless printer, to reduce opportunities for attacks. However, this action might not work for mobile devices since they need full network access to operate.

To counteract emerging mobile threats, software solutions have been designed for the enterprise space to confront and address these types of attacks. Most noteworthy among them is the Mobile Application Management (MAM). Others are the Mobile Device Management (MDM), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM).

What is the Impact of Mobile Device on Student Learning?

You might think that a mobile device only refers to the use of mobile or cellular phones within the classroom environment, usually to the distraction of students. However, in this blog, we will be talking about the use of mobile devices such as tablets, laptops, Chromebooks, mobile or cellular phones etc. to enable learning.

The impact of the mobile device on learning is far-reaching and comprehensive. To begin with, at the outset, it is the naturalization of advanced technology within the classroom context for students. This means that students who might already be embracing technology will get used to using it for learning and development purposes, instead of just games. Enhanced learning materials such as the use of dynamic visual mediums like pictures and videos and gifs are made possible through the impact of the mobile device in the classroom.

The effect of using the mobile device in student learning also has consequences beyond the school – students are using tools they will be using in their employment, thus making the future ready during their schooling itself.

But what counts as learning on a mobile device? Any time a mobile device such as a tablet, mobile or cellular phone, laptop or Chromebook is used to aid in teaching or learning of the classroom curriculum, it can be counted as learning on a mobile device. This might involve everything from reading course materials on the mobile device to playing educational games on the mobile device, to even answering examinations on the mobile device.

The use of the mobile device in the classroom can easily be integrated into the most traditional and old fashioned classroom easily, with the investment of an initial start-up cost and some training for both teachers and students.

What is the impact of the mobile device on students and student learning?

The effect of the mobile device on student’s and student learning is quite broad. With the growth of education technology and its pervasiveness within the educational ecosystem, the impact of the mobile device on student learning is meaningful. Extensive research has thus been conducted about the impact of the mobile device on student learning. Some of the more far-reaching effects of the mobile device on student learning are discussed in greater detail below:

1. Improved understanding of students

Recent research has shown that an improved understanding of materials is another impact of the mobile device on student learning. One of the key issues teachers face is that different students learn at different paces and it might be difficult to gauge this individually for each student.

The impact of the mobil e device here cannot be undersold – since the impact of mobile device usage is limited to the use if individual devices by each student, learning can also happen at an individual pace. Improved understanding for students this is a big impact of the mobil e device in the classroom and in educational institutions. It addresses a key need of teachers across the educational ecosystem.

2. Equity in access to mobile learning

One of the key things educational experts and champions advocate for is the flattening of the playing field for students through the use of technologies. It is no different for the use of the mobile device in the classroom. The students who use hardware like mobile devices, like laptops, tablets, Chromebooks etc experience the positive impact of the mobile device on student learning across the board. This means that it is creating more equitable access to learning – means every student has the same access as their fellow student to the same materials.

The need for equality in learning cannot be overstated in today’s world. It is one of the biggest signifiers of social mobility, and if the impact of the mobile device on student learning is access to more learning and thus more opportunities later in life, the impact of the mobile device on building a better world cannot be ignored. Stakeholders in the educational ecosystem must thus work towards in ensuring the impact of the mobile device on student learning is experienced by students all across of the world.

3. Empowering more proactive learning

A more proactive approach to learning is another impact mobile device has on students in the classroom according to a new study conducted on students using mobile devices in the classroom. The study demonstrated that the impact of the mobile device in the classroom for the purpose of the student had a positive impact in how proactive students became about their learning. Students taking a greater interested in learning their course material.

Proactive learning is important to build an interest in learning and education itself for students and it is an effect of the mobile device that is easily achievable for most educational institutions. All they need to do is invest in the initial costs of acquiring mobile device – anything from tablets to laptops would suffice here – to some initial time investment in training students to use them well and experience the full positive impact of the mobile device on their learning.

4. Improved conversational skills

Another academic research study has shown that another effect of the mobile device in student learning is the improvement of their intra student conversational skills. In this study, on the group of students was given a mobile device to study the impact of the mobile device on improvement in English conversational skills. Another group was just used as a control with traditional face to face teaching methods. After a period of time, when both groups of students were tested on their conversational skills, the effect of the mobile device on English language conversational skills was found to be beneficial to the students, even more so than the control group. This demonstrates that the impact of the mobile device on student learning is positive as far as improving speaking and communication skills in English goes.

5. Greater academic achievements

The very same academic research study as above also demonstrated another effect of the mobile device on student learning. Researchers in this study found that the students who were using the mobile device through their learning had higher academic achievements compared to the control group who are learning in the classroom. This means that those students that were using mobile device had better scores and academic achievements.

Resources:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/insidetrack/mobile-device-management-at-microsoft
https://tokenist.com/mobile-device-security/
https://fedena.com/blog/2019/02/what-is-the-impact-of-mobile-device-on-student-learning.html
Mobile devices

Use delta user discovery and incremental updates. When delta discovery is enabled in AD User Discovery settings, and incremental updates are selected in the collection settings, updates are synchronized more often. This ensures that licensing new users and removing licenses for disabled users occur quickly.

Situation

In a bring your own device (BYOD) work environment, users expect to be able to work from any location at any time, on the device of their choice. Moreover, users now typically have several identities, meaning that they use their devices in both work-related and non-work-related contexts. For example, they might bring a personal tablet to a business meeting and expect to access files on a team’s Microsoft SharePoint site, or they might present a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation over Microsoft Skype for Business. They’re likely to check both work and personal email accounts on their phone, and may use their phone camera to take photos of whiteboard sessions to help them remember what a work group collaborated on during a meeting. On both types of device, they’re likely to have a mix of apps, some for personal use and some for work.

But as the traditional boundaries between work and personal life blur the use of these devices, it’s critical that devices be managed in a way that is acceptable to the entire business. Data policies, such as encryption, password length, password complexity, and password duration, must provide corporate data security on all devices while maintaining the privacy of workers’ personal information.

IT must be able to identify, with certainty, who a user is and if a device should have access to corporate resources. Current trends suggest that workers change jobs and companies several times over the course of a career, so IT needs a way to account for this flux of people and devices. What should IT do if a device is lost or an employee leaves the company? What is the best way to ensure that corporate resources are wiped from a personal device that should no longer have access to them?

Solution

Microsoft Digital has been involved in mobile device management (MDM) for several years and is evolving strategies and best practices to ensure the proper balance between convenience and security as BYOD becomes the norm in organizations of all sizes.

Microsoft Digital approaches MDM a bit differently today than it did in the past. Even as recently as 2013, the focus was much more on providing access to applications. Now, however, the focus is on access as defined by certificate and profile provisioning. In the future, the focus will be on conditional access that is based on the state of the device as interpreted through the MDM system and Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

The Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Azure teams are working together to provide solutions so that Microsoft Digital can address a range of related issues: identity and access management, mobile device and app management, and information protection. The first step is to make Microsoft Digital cloud-based and enable a mobile workforce.

Identity and access management

For employees who use multiple devices for work, a key convenience—a requirement, even—is to have single sign-on (SSO) and a common identity, so that they can get their work done on whatever device suits them at the moment. A common identity enables application access management, regardless of whether those applications are on the device or in the cloud. This ensures that the user can have a consistent experience across devices and remain as productive as possible.

Microsoft Digital is delivering identity and access management by providing that SSO experience, using federation to manage access to external resources, and consistently managing identities across on-premises and cloud-based identity domains. This helps Microsoft Digital address the matter of managing access.

Developers can build applications that use the common identity model, integrating applications either with Active Directory Domain Services for on-premises applications or with Azure for cloud-based applications.

Azure Active Directory syncs with on-premises Active Directory Domain Services through Azure AD Connect. Azure Active Directory enables self-service password changes and resets, and self-service group management for internal users. It also supports multifactor authentication, so that internal users don’t have to carry around their smart cards.

Multifactor authentication provides an additional layer of security in case a device falls into the wrong hands or is used improperly. When a user attempts to log on or perform an action that is subject to multifactor authentication, the application or service confirms the user’s identity by sending a text, making a phone call, or using a mobile app. Typically, this additional authentication factor is a numeric code, such as a personal identification number (PIN), and may only be intended for a single use. The user must respond (usually within a limited period, such as 10 minutes) before the application or service allows him or her to proceed.

Credential caching enables enterprises to determine how long credentials can be cached on a device. This allows the enterprises to customize the user experience when users access applications and resources on devices. For example, enterprises can specify how long credentials pass through during logon or device registration, so that users do not have to enter their credentials so many times.

Mobile device management

Users prefer a consistent experience when they access and work with their line-of-business (LOB) apps, no matter what device they use, how often they use it, and what platform it runs. Device enrollment should be simple, and the process for finding and working with apps and other internal resources should be familiar. In addition, policies should help users feel secure that their personal data is protected on devices that they also use for work, and it should be possible to remove devices that users no longer want included in a managed environment.

Device enrollment

Users can enroll a device relatively quickly in Intune. Notably, the process is opt-in rather than opt-out. This sets a friendlier tone for the experience, because it doesn’t feel like a mandate. Users recognize the value of being able to use personal devices for work, and voluntarily enroll them.

Similarly, when users no longer want to use a device for work, they can easily remove it by using the Intune console (the web portal for information workers). For example, if a device has been lost or stolen, the user can either remove it for himself or herself, or request that Microsoft Digital do so. When a device is removed, corporate assets are automatically removed from it. Devices can be completely wiped or just selectively wiped. See the “Device retirement/wiping” section later in this document.

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Part 3: Some Other Things That You Can Do With Apple Mobile Device USB Driver Download

Get Your Apple Mobile Device Service Restarted

If in any case that your iTunes program still does not recognize your iOS device after you were able to download and as well as install the Apple Mobile Device USB Driver on your computer, then here is another option that you can try. And that is by restarting your Apple Mobile Device USB Driver. And with that, here is what you will be needing to do.

Step 3: Next is choose Properties. This can be found under the General tab. From there, go ahead and have the Startup set to Automatic. Then click on the Stop button for you to stop your Apple Mobile Device Service.

Bonus Tip: If You Are Not Able To See Your Apple USB Driver from the Device Manager

If in case that you can see your Apple Mobile Device USB Driver from your Device Manager but you are not able to see your iOS device USB driver from the list, then you can go ahead and try to fix it by doing an update on your Apple driver.

Step 3: If you were not able to find it, then you have to go to the Universal Serial Bus Controllers and then choose Apple Mobile Device USB Driver. And then right-click on it and then choose Update Driver then go to Browse my computer so that the driver software can be located and then select this folder:

After doing all of the steps above, your Apple USB driver will then be updated on your computer. After that, you can now have your iOS device unplug your iOS device from PC and have it plugin again to your PC. Once you do, check if your iOS device can now be detected by your computer.
Apple Mobile Device Service and Apple Mobile Device Support Reinstallation

Some iOS users are having trouble connecting their device to their computer. This is because Apple Driver or the Apple Mobile Device Service is not available or it is not installed properly. And because of this kind of situation, what they want to do is to have the Apple Mobile Device Support and the Apple Mobile Device Service should be installed separately.

Well, the fact is that, the Apple Mobile Device Support or the Apple Mobile Device Service is known to be one of the components of the iTunes program and that they cannot be separately installed. So for you to be able to have the Apple Mobile Device Service reinstalled on your computer, go ahead and take out iTunes and its component that is related to it and then have your iTunes reinstalled from Apple Store or the Microsoft Store.

Part 4: Conclusion

And as you can see, doing the Apple Mobile device USB Driver download is a very important thing to do since your iOS device is not able to recognize by your computer and your iTunes program as well. If you do not have the driver for your Apple device, then you will not be able to transfer any of your data from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod device.

So with that, if your Apple Driver is missing, all you need to do is to follow the methods that we have shown you above. That way, you will be able to have your iOS device be detected by your iTunes program and as well as your computer. You can choose from the methods above as to which is the one that applies to your situation. We assure you that at the end of the solutions above, you will be able to fix the issue that you are having with your computer.

Resources:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/insidetrack/mobile-device-management-at-microsoft
https://www.samsung.com/uk/mobile/
https://www.fonedog.com/tricks/apple-mobile-device-usb-driver-download.html

Beat It or Eat It: How to Overcome the Competition on Freelance Platforms

11 Characteristics of Successful Freelancers and Entrepreneurs

No two freelancers or entrepreneurs are the same, but the best and most successful do share some similar characteristics. The ability to work hard, professionalism, communication skills, persistence, passion, self-discipline and initiative are some of the most important characteristics. Here, we define 11 characteristics that will help you succeed as a business owner. It applies for both freelancers and entrepreneurs. However, you don’t need to master all of these to perfection to make it. But you do need to learn to overcome your weaknesses if you want to build a sustainable business and bring real value to your clients. It’s worth taking your time to pause and reflect before you quit your job, and ask yourself: “Can I truly see many of these characteristics in myself?” and if not: “Am I willing to learn what I lack?”

What makes for a successful freelancer and entrepreneur? What do freelancers and entrepreneurs have in common over and over above saleable skills? Let’s take a look at the characteristics of successful freelancers and entrepreneurs:

Strong profile on freelance platforms

Your profile is the first thing your potential client sees. Make sure you put a lot of thought and effort into it. Fill in as much as possible showcasing your experience and previous projects, add recommendations from your clients, case studies, success stories, etc. Clients face many risks when hiring freelancers, especially if a freelancer has no reviews on his profile, so providing as much proof of credibility as possible will help you tremendously.

Your profile picture is very important as well. A high-quality, professional-looking profile picture can go a long way. Let the photo have a friendly smiling face in the frame. Think also about adding the same image across different channels so that you will be easily recognizable by the clients who do their search.

3) Get good at networking

If you want to be a successful freelancer, learning how to network may be unavoidable. Unless you’re lucky enough to inherit a full set of loyal, regular clients from the start, you’ll need to branch out beyond old work contacts and friends of friends at some point. And that means networking.

These days, networking has many guises. You can choose to make new connections at face to face events – from local networking groups to larger national events – or virtually through social media platforms like Twitter. (Just make sure you have your elevator pitch ready!)

If there aren’t many appropriate networking meetings near you, or it’s not feasible to attend, you may find that social media is your best source of clients. With the right skills, it’s easy to quickly build an engaged following on Twitter, and showcase your expertise or talents. Learn how to schedule well-written tweets with links to your blog or website and you’ll soon find that some of your followers can be converted into new clients.

Yes, You CAN Achieve Freelance Success!

If you want to achieve freelance success, then there’s one more thing you need to do.

Hundreds of freelancers, mostly writers and editors, have proven that my 10-step process works. But if you don’t do the work, then you won’t see the results. You won’t get more freelance work. You won’t attract steady, high-paying clients. And you won’t build a stable, successful freelance business.

Work hard now; Avoid worry and even more work later

Learn More About Achieving Freelance Success by Doing the Work

Need Some Help Unlocking Freelance Success?

If you’re sick and tired of struggling and are ready to work hard, here are 3 ways to achieve freelance success.

#1. The Free Way to Achieve Freelance Success

You can learn how to achieve freelance success in this guide and in Mighty Marketer blog posts. The guide and many posts come from free checklists, templates, and other tools to help you. But you’ll have to put the process together yourself.

#2. The Easier Way to Achieve Freelance Success

Or you can get the fundamentals in one place: The Fearless Freelancer: How to Thrive in a Recession. My book covers the 10 steps in more detail than this guide and is applicable in good and bad times. It includes bonus content: free checklists, templates, and other tools.

#3. The Easiest Way to Achieve Freelance Success

The course explains the 10 steps in detail. You get assignments to help you apply what you’re learning and develop your marketing tools. And you get lots of handouts with templates, checklists, examples, and more.

In the coaching version, you get personal guidance from me, based on your business goals and challenges. I review your marketing and key course assignments. My students tell me that coaching helps them build their confidence and succeed faster.

Resources:

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/11-characteristics-of-successful-freelancers-and-entrepreneurs
https://lemon.io/2022/04/21/beovercome-the-competition-on-freelance-platforms/
https://www.talentedladiesclub.com/articles/your-10-first-steps-to-a-successful-freelance-career/
https://www.themightymarketer.com/ultimate-freelance-success/

Assessing writing skills

When we have done some analysis of the structure and likely language content of the typical texts certain learners need to write, we can design discrete-item, indirect tests of their ability to get the staging and linguistic content of the texts right before we test the ability to put it all together and write a full text.
If any of the above mystifies, try:

Assessing writing skills

1. It is often assumed that the best way to test writing ability is to get the learners to write. That may seem obvious but, particularly at lower levels, being asked to write a whole, properly staged and formed text from scratch is a daunting and challenging task which may demotivate and depress our learners. The other issue is that reliably evaluating our learners’ ability with a malformed, disorganised and inaccurately written text as the only data source is almost impossible.
2. A less forbidding and more reliable and practical approach is often to employ indirect tests which can be used to assess the underlying skills individually.
   For example, separately testing the learners’ ability to use conjunction, sequencers, pronomial referencing and so on can provide some data about how well (if at all) they may be able to deploy the items in written texts. Equally, we can separate out some of the writing skills which go into making up the holistic skill of writing and test these subskills separately.
   Example 1: If one of the target text types our learners will need to produce is a discussion of two sides of an issue (a skill often required in academic settings), then it makes some sense discretely to test the ability to use conjuncts, adjuncts and disjuncts (such as, on the other hand, seen from this angle, equally, however, making matters worse, whereas etc.). The ability to soften a point of view with modal expressions (such as it could be argued, it may be assumed, there is some evidence to suggest etc.) is also a key skill, incidentally.
   Example 2: If a key writing skill is to summarise a mass of data in clear prose (as is often required in occupational settings for the production of a summary report on research), then it makes sense to test the learners’ ability to identify key information, describe trends and make tentative predictions based on the identified trends.

The aims of the teaching programme

All assessment starts (or should start) from a consideration of the aims of instruction.
For example, if the (or one) aim of a language course is to enable the learners to do well in an IELTS academic writing examination then this will be very influential in terms of the types of assessment tasks we use and the way in which we measure performance. The backwash (or washback, if you prefer) from the examination format will almost inevitably have to be reflected in the task types we set.
If, on the other hand, our aim is to enable the learners to operate successfully in a work environment then we will set different kinds of assessment tasks and measure performance against different criteria. In this case, a priority will be to measure how accurately and with how much communicative success the learners can handle the specific register and functions required by their work context.
Finally, if we are aiming at enabling our learners to function adequately in an English-speaking environment (perhaps as an immigrant or temporary resident), then this, too, will fundamentally affect the tasks we set and the benchmarks against which we measure success. Here, for example, we might be dealing with form filling, work getting and accessing services.

These three factors are to do with ensuring reliability and validity. For more on those two concepts, see the guide to testing, assessment and evaluation. The rest of this guide assumes basic familiarity with the content of that guide.
Fulfilling all three criteria adequately requires a little care.

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Sources:

https://www.eltconcourse.com/training/inservice/skills/assessing_writing.html
https://www.wikihow.com/Evaluate-Writing-Skills

Content Creation: How to Create Great Web Content

Facebook can be used to build micro-communities via Facebook Groups or to share to a mass audience on Facebook Pages. When it comes to sharing content, questions and videos reap the most engagement.

How to Write Content for a Website in 9 Steps

How to write content for a website is one of the biggest questions new content marketers face. You might be staring at your notes and wondering how you’re going to turn it all into effective, beautiful web copy.

Well, you’ve come to the right place to learn how to write website content, including landing pages. Here we’ll break down the major steps. We’ll also show you how to use keyword research, search engine optimization, and non-copy page elements to create effective, powerful, and results-oriented web pages.

What is a content creator?

Before we dive into the content creation process, let’s start with the basics, like the content creator definition. A content creator refers to someone who is responsible for the ideation, creation, and distribution of content that connects a brand to its target audience. The goal of content creators is to create appealing and engaging content that captures the attention of users to drive website traffic, conversions, and interactions with your brand on external platforms like social. It can be informational content, but it doesn’t have to be. It can also serve to entertain in order to increase brand awareness, for example.

Digital content creators produce content across any platform or channel. Having dedicated content creators is a must for any enterprise organization. These are the content marketers that will help bring ideas to life through quality content that provides the highest possibility of ranking in SERP and increasing the number of visitors to your site.

Research and Understand Your Audience

Once you have a clear connection to why you’re making content, the next step in building out your content marketing is to understand exactly who is going to see, hear, or watch the content you create.

Effective content is not produced in a vacuum from a list of topics you personally want to write or talk about, it’s made out in the open with the involvement, feedback, and direction of your audience. The best content marketing strategy is designed to answer the most pressing questions your target audience has–to educate and transform them.

However, the only way that your content will connect enough with people to have them share it and help you reach your goals is for you to speak directly to them. You need to have empathy and understanding for their situation.

Andrea Goulet, founder of BrandVox, breaks down the process of defining your audience better than anyone I’ve ever seen–in her Skillshare class Become a Better Blogger.

Demographics are the quantitative traits, or things you can really dig into and measure. Think age, gender, location, job title, etc. For example, you might say you want your content marketing to speak to executives aged 30-45, or 20-something job seekers just out of college.

Psychographics are the things we can’t measure. Attributes like attitude, belief systems, values, and interests. So in our executive example, we could go a step further and say that our content speaks to executives who want to take their business to the next level but can’t find a way. Or maybe that they believe in hard work and doing the right thing and value family and strong morals.

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You wouldn’t start building a house without a blueprint, a sculpture without a sketch, or a company without a mission statement. So, there should be no content creation without a plan. Otherwise, you risk getting derailed from your objective.

A content strategy includes everything from brand and tone to how you will promote your content and eventually repurpose it. Let’s go over how to create your content plan, step-by-step.

Set Your Content Goals

Similar to a traditional marketing campaign, your content strategy should be centered on your marketing goals (which should, in turn, be derived from your company goals).

Your goals could range from attracting more visitors to your site to generating more leads to anything in between — as long as they’re SMART goals. An example of this kind of goal would be to increase organic traffic to the blog by 25% in the next quarter.

Create a Buyer Persona

Building a content strategy is more than considering what type of content you want to create. You first need to know who you’re speaking to, how you want to speak to them, and where to find them.

The only way to do this is to get intimate with your visitors, leads, and customers — you need to know them like you know an old friend. You should be aware of their obstacles, their pain points, their challenges, and their fears. Similarly, you should understand their best possible outcome, their dream solution, and their biggest fantasies.

Your buyer persona is the person that you want to reach with your content. This semi-fictional character serves as a representation of your target audience, i.e., the people who are most likely to benefit from your message and become customers.

Creating a buyer persona takes a bit of research, some guesswork, and tweaking. But the end result is a clear picture of the person you want to market to and someone who will happily consume your content.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the types of Content writing?

Like blogging, SEO copywriting, website content development, social media writing, technical writing, creative writing, writing about case studies and sales copy, and more.

What is a content writing job?

The job of a content writer is to construct print and digital content for businesses that deliver information or showcase the products or assistance they offer. To develop content and give content writing services that accurately mirror company ideals, content writers often explore the material they need to write each writing or product description.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy utilized to attract, engage, and retain an audience through search engines by content creation and sharing appropriate articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This procedure establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your company top of mind while purchasing.

The relevant process of marketing content sets and fosters relationships with your coming and existing customers. When your audience believes your company as a partner curious in their success and a helpful source of advice and guidance, they’re more potential to prefer you when it’s time to buy.

References:

https://blog.alexa.com/the-complete-guide-how-to-write-content-for-a-website/
https://www.conductor.com/learning-center/content-creation/
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-create-great-content-a-step-by-step-guide-to-content-marketing-that-delivers-real-results.html
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-creation
https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/how-to-start-content-writing/