Tag: Growth

Hiring new employees can be an exciting time. It can also pose significant challenges.

Employees can make or break your company. And sometimes, finding the right employees for your company is not as simple as posting a job opening and conducting interviews.

There are essential steps in the hiring process you can take to minimize the chance of hiring a bad egg that brings your company down. These steps ensure you have employees who will do their job well. The steps also ensure you follow all the legal aspects of hiring new employees and avoid fees, fines, and more.

To help you navigate the process of hiring employees, we created this how-to guide. Follow it and hire your next employees successfully and with as little stress as possible.

6 Steps to Hire Employees

If your ready to hire new employees, just follow the six steps below:

1. Get an employer identification number (EIN)
2. Prepare for recruiting
3. Find your candidates
4. Conduct interviews
5. Make an offer
6. Take care of the legal stuff

The Easy Parts of Hiring Employees

Don’t let the thought of hiring employees scare you. It can actually be a fun and rewarding experience.

We’ve put together the following guide to help you streamline the process. Read on to find out everything you need to know.

Choose the right job title.

When posting jobs for your company on the website, LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, or any other job board, it is crucial you choose a job title that accurately reflects the job. You also want something that entices people to click on your post.

The clickability of the job…

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Lead generation is an indispensable part of business.

If you want to have paying customers, you need to gather a reliable stream of leads.

That’s the bottom line.

But generating leads isn’t as easy as one might think. In fact, it requires quite a bit of finesse and a whole lot of time.

Reports show that 65% of businesses say generating traffic and leads is their top marketing challenge.

That doesn’t surprise us at all.

There is encouraging news though.

Marketers now have a lot more avenues to target potential customers. At the forefront of that is social media.

And if we’re talking about the highest-quality leads, LinkedIn is the clear winner.

It’s a bit shocking, we know.

You expect a giant like Facebook to be leading the pack.

Not in this case. More than 80% of B2B leads sourced from social media come from LinkedIn.

That goes to show the power of this platform.

Here’s the kicker though: many people are failing at using LinkedIn for lead generation.

They’re spending too much time in the process. And they do not see a return on that time investment.

That’s a frustrating problem to have, and we’ll show you how to fix it.

Here’s how you can generate leads on LinkedIn without wasting your time.

1. Optimize your profile for connecting

This may seem basic, but your profile matters a lot. In many cases you’ll be connecting with people you don’t know. Because of this, you need to make sure your profile is optimized as…

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In 2014, Google hit us with a penalty, and our traffic plummeted. The reason was shared duplicate content on another site. We had to perform a deep analysis and investigation into the root cause of this significant traffic dip. Today, we’ll reflect on this event and ask a new question: Does the same code solution work today?

You spend hours, if not days, writing a great blog post. The last thing you want is for it not to be seen, right?

So, what do you do to ensure it gets seen? You share it on your social media profiles, tell a few friends to promote it and then repost the exact same blog post on other sites like Medium and LinkedIn.

The question is: should you be doing this? Will reposting your content hurt your SEO or drive you more traffic and sales? You can also check you’re not making other SEO mistakes here.

Reposting can hurt your SEO if done wrong

At KISSmetrics, we let others repost our blog posts. We push out the exact same content on sites like Entrepreneur.com and Search Engine Journal.

When we first started doing this, we saw an increase in referral traffic by around 9,492 monthly visitors, and our search traffic stayed consistent. Then Google rolled out a Panda update, and this is what happened to our traffic:

The resulting dip in traffic after reposting the same content on Entrepreneur.

We lost a whopping…

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Ideally, you want to pick a reliable web hosting provider, so you don’t have to move your website. But it’s possible that you’re unsatisfied with the current web host’s quality of service or simply wish to upgrade to something better.

You might be stressed if you find yourself in this predicament, and honestly,we don’t blame you. It definitely sounds daunting. But that’s just it—it only “sounds” daunting.

In reality, migrating a website does not have to be complicated.

In this guide, we’ll give you a run through the steps required to move your WordPress website to a new host or server. But before we proceed, you should know that many WordPress hosting companies offer free migration. So make sure you ask the hosting provider as it may not be listed on the website.

6 Steps to Move WordPress to a New Host or Server

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Back Up Your WordPress Website Files
2. Import Your WordPress Website to the New Host
3. Eliminate Downtime by Changing the Hosts File
4. Create MySQL Database on Your New Host
5. Start the Website Migration Process
6. Update Your Domain Name Servers (DNS)

What to Expect When Moving WordPress to a New Host or Server

Migrating to another web host isn’t that difficult. All you need is the right guidance, which is exactly why we created this guide.

The Good

The obvious advantage of migrating your WordPress site to a new server or web host is getting better service and performance.

You can get better customer support and see an increase in size performance thanks to better hardware, load time, and uptime. You may also get access to more features like building your own theme, monetizing the website, and installing plugins, among others.

Then there’s the…

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Do you know how slow your site loads? Just a one-second delay in loading time results in:

• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction which keeps your audience from coming back.
• 11% fewer page views which means less people will know about your brand.
• 7% loss in conversions which means less money for you.

Amazon says that one second of load lag time would cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year.

So, how fast should your website load? Both mobile and desktop users expect your site to load quickly (two seconds or less). However, the average loading times for various industries in the United States don’t meet those benchmarks.

Take a look at this research from Google:

As you can see, the average website speed for all of these industries is significantly higher than the best practices line. But that doesn’t mean you should aim for 5-6 seconds. In fact, you have every reason to make your website as fast as possible.

13 Ways to Speed Up Your Website

If you can speed up your website, it will give you a huge advantage over your competitors with slower loading times. You’ll want to aim for your pages to load in three seconds or less.

That’s because many visitors will abandon your site if it hasn’t loaded within three seconds. But obviously, the lower you can get that number, the better.

Understanding why website speed is so important, it’s time to do something about it. We created this guide of best practices that will help you speed up your website.

So read carefully and make any necessary changes to your site moving forward….

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Our recommendation for the best POS system for coffee shops is Square POS  because of its free POS features, affordable paid tier, simplicity, and numerous integrations to enhance the software’s capabilities.

Running a busy coffee shop doesn’t have to be stressful. A good point of sale (POS) system will let you seamlessly manage menus and inventory, quickly process payments, and easily identify best-selling items.

In addition, many systems offer advanced features like insights and analytics, sales reporting, marketing, and customer management. And, you don’t have to break the bank to enjoy all these features and capabilities. 

The Top 6 Best POS Systems For Coffee Shops 

The best POS system for coffee shops depends mainly on your use case and requirements, which is why we explore six of the best products and where they succeed.

However, Square POS is still the best option for coffee shop owners for its transparent pricing, free advanced features, and intuitive interface. So start with Square POS for free today with $0 upfront. 

Again, choosing a coffee-shop POS is a case-by-case affair. For this reason, we’ve explored the most common scenarios and offered our opinion on which POS best fits each scenario. 

Match Your Scenario to the Right Coffee Shop POS Solution 

This section explores the most common coffee shop POS use cases. The idea is to provide personalized advice on which systems may be worth your time and money based on your most urgent needs.  

You want to accept card payments with no upfront cost  

Best Option: Square 

Square offers a free…

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Contrary to popular belief, all links are not created equally.

There are definitely links out there that you don’t want to have associated with your website. These can hurt your domain authority and negatively impact your SEO ranking.

We refer to these as dangerous links.

You should never link out to dangerous links, and you want to avoid getting any backlinks from dangerous links.

But in order to make sure this doesn’t happen, you need to be able to identify dangerous links in the first place. Otherwise, you won’t know what sites you should be avoiding.

Sometimes dangerous links are glaringly obvious. But other times it’s not so straightforward. That’s what inspired us to write this guide.

We’ll give you a bunch of different examples of dangerous links so you can be fully prepared to master your link building strategy.

Blog networks

In general, you should avoid any paid links. Google refers to these as “link schemes.”

Link schemes are defined as any links that are made to manipulate the site’s ranking or page rank by violating Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Buying or selling links falls into this category. Any money, goods, or services exchanged for links must be avoided. Partner pages that are specifically designed for cross-linking and excessive link exchanging between sites is also considered a link scheme.

If you’re caught in a link scheme, you’ll be penalized by Google, and blog networks typically put you in jeopardy of these violations.

However, we’ve seen plenty of businesses that do this unintentionally. They don’t realize that they’re getting backlinks from a dangerous link. Here’s an example to show you what we mean.

This site is called My…

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Creating a landing page these days is really easy, especially with all of the landing page tools out there. But what’s hard is creating one that actually converts well.

Why? Because you have to take into account the elements on the page, where to place them, what message your design is going to portray, and how the text is going to affect each visitor.
So, instead of telling you how to create a great landing page, we decided to use an infographic to show you the process:

Before you head off and start creating your first landing page, here are 7 things to ask yourself:

Does your landing page copy match your marketing campaign?

From your paid ads to organic search engine listings, your marketing copy should convey a similar message to the copy on your landing page.

The Obama Administration tested headline copy on their campaign’s landing pages and found that by relating headlines to previous pages and marketing campaigns, they were able to increase their conversion rate by 21%.

Just like President Obama’s team saw results with this approach, you also should see similar results because your visitors will experience less confusion when they are presented with consistent versus random messaging. In addition to that, it will help you build more trust with your visitors: you made a claim with your marketing campaign, and you delivered on it through your landing page.

Are you providing a solution?

Every visitor who comes to your landing page has a problem. Naturally, you should tell them how you are going to solve their…

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