Tag: Growth

Worried that you weren’t naturally born with the skills necessary to become a good leader? If these skills aren’t inherent to you, you can learn the leadership skills necessary to help you reach new heights in your career.

And even if you feel you were born a natural leader, you may need some help honing those skills and ensuring you’re using your power in a way that benefits you, your employees, and your company.

One of the best ways to gain skills and put them to good use is by taking an online leadership course. Courses like this will help you to become an effective leader that can drive your company to success. There all kinds of leadership courses available, and we have researched to compile a list of the best leadership courses to help you become an all-star leader.

The Top 7 Best Leadership Courses

1. CCL Leadership Development Program – Best For Most Leaders
2. Strategic Leadership and Management – Best for New Managers
3. Mindfulness Practices – Best for Reducing Stress
4. Team Facilitation: The Core Skill of Great Team Leaders – Best for Managers with Teams
5. Nonprofit Ready Leadership Training – Best Free Classes
6. Leading Teams Remotely – Best for Remote Leaders
7. Agile Leadership Principles and Practices – Best for Modern Leaders

More in-depth reviews of the top 7 leadership courses are below. Read on to learn about who it benefits, how it benefits them, and potential drawbacks. This information will help you determine which courses are right for you.

#1 – CCL Leadership Development Program – Best for Most Leaders

• Oldest leadership program on the market
• Problem solving & stress management
• Great for mid-level/senior mgmt
• Over 50,000 graduates

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Many HR managers know the pressure that comes with unexpected attrition, leave of absence, or volatile hiring swings. The need to fill an open position urgently can quickly send the HR department into a tailspin. Often, the department has to divert resources to recruiting, neglecting other crucial core duties. A contract recruiter brings the experience and expertise needed to resolve hiring challenges quickly at a fraction of the cost of onboarding a permanent recruiter.

The Easy Parts of Hiring a Contract Recruiter

The good news is that you won’t have to struggle to find a good contract recruiter. Many seasoned professionals are choosing to go their own way for various reasons. Whether it’s building professional networks, freedom, or flexibility, the talent pool is jam-packed with highly competent and experienced contract recruiters.

Application tracking software such as JazzHR makes the collaborative process even easier. The software helps with the entire recruiting process, including candidate sourcing, offer letters, and automated onboarding.

JazzHR is the perfect tool if you’re bringing in a contractor. The software offers collaborative hiring features and doesn’t charge on a per-user payment plan. You get unlimited users on all its plans. The basic plan, Hero, costs just $39 per month. You can upgrade to the higher tiers to enjoy unlimited open jobs.

JazzHR offers a free 30-day trial if you’d like to try out the software before committing.

The Difficult Parts of Hiring a Contract Recruiter

The hardest part of this process may be deciding precisely what type of contract recruiter you need.

There are two types of contract recruiters. The line between a contract recruiter and a recruiting agency that specializes in contract hiring is often blurred.

A contract recruiter generally…

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You can grow your blog in two ways:

1. Get more traffic.
2. Do more with the traffic you have.

In my opinion, you should do both even though most people focus on the first option.

Those bloggers don’t realize they’re losing a large chunk of their traffic before it even has a chance to convert.

One of the best ways to see how well you’re using your traffic is to look at your bounce rate.

The average bounce rate across all industries is about 45%. Bounce rates just for blogs are usually higher as illustrated in the image above.

But that’s just the average. Some sites have bounce rates in the 20s, while others have bounce rates in the 80s.

If 4 out of 5 visitors leave your site immediately, there’s a problem—likely multiple problems.

Compare that to a 20% bounce rate (1 in 5 visitors leaving without interacting). This lower bounce rate means that you would only need a quarter of the traffic of the other site to get the same engagement results.

There are many ways to improve your bounce rate, but in this article, I want to show you an underutilized way of reducing your website’s bounce rate and increasing all aspects of engagement.

The main problem is that you need visitors to take action to reduce your bounce rate. But people are notoriously passive on the Internet.

The 1% rule states that only 1% of forum users will actually post on a forum, while the rest will passively lurk:

We see the same kind of behavior on blogs, where typically about one visitor out of 100 will comment (depends on subject and article).

In fact,…

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How hard could it be to write a blog post? If a teenager can do it, you can too, right?

Well, writing a blog post isn’t hard at all, but writing a great blog post is very difficult. Below are 22 actionable tips on how to write a blog post that will help make your content stand out from the crowd.

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Blog On Your Passion

Blogging can be a chore, unless you are passionate about the topic. So, first and foremost, pick a topic you are passionate about.

Don’t just pick a topic that you “think” you are passionate about. Pick one that you definitely know you’ll love. It has to be a topic that you love so much that you want to constantly learn more about it.

Break With Your Old Ways

Do you remember writing term papers in high school or college? If you don’t, lucky you! If you do, writing blog posts is going to be a difficult task for you. You have to ignore all the things your professors taught you about writing.

You aren’t here to write a term paper—you are here to create a conversation!

If my blog posts sounded as if I was talking at you instead of to you, wouldn’t you get bored and irritated with me? Make sure you do the same: talk to your readers—not at them.

Know What You Want To Write About

Before you start writing the first word, you have to know what the last word is going to be. I don’t mean this in a literal sense, but you have to know how you are going to…

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In the past, I’ve told you to keep an eye out for the top marketing trends. But now I want to take that one step further and narrow that focus specifically to mobile trends.

As a business owner, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of modern marketing trends to be successful.

This guide is beneficial for marketers, app developers, and anyone else who wants to improve their business.

While I’m not saying you need to apply these trends to your own marketing, it’s important you’re aware of the new technology that’s available and surrounding you. Who knows, maybe you’ll decide to change your strategy based on this information.

I used research from previous years as well as some recent technological developments to come up with this list.

These are the top 14 mobile trends dominating the year so far. I expect these to continue trending upward.

1. Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence has penetrated our mobile world.

We’re getting one step closer to mobile devices morphing into robots and taking over the planet. Obviously, I’m kidding.

While that day has yet to come, we are seeing advancements in mobile AI. You may be familiar with some of these:

• Alexa
• Siri
• Cortana
• Google Assistant

All of these are examples of AI that may even be installed on your mobile devices right now. In addition to these popular forms of AI, mobile apps are now using software such as voice recognition to encourage hands-free use and ultimately optimize the customer experience.

AI software is used to help developers and marketers learn more about the user.

Businesses are trying to get more revenue by using this information to create relevant advertisements that target specific audiences.

2. Location-based technology

Your smartphones and tablets…

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Are you needing a simple project management tool but don’t know where to start? There are tons of tools out there that promise to help you tackle your projects, whether they’re big or small. The problem is too many choices often lead to analysis paralysis. To help with your project management quest, I’ve compiled a list of some of the best project management tools you can use that’ll enable you to crush your project goals and work quickly. Buckle in, grab your coffee, and get ready to look through the ins and outs of some of the best tools on the market.

The Top 5 Best Simple Project Management Software

1. Monday.com – Best for simple customization
2. Trello – Best for simple workflows
3. Smartsheet – Best for Gantt chart projects
4. Basecamp – Best for remote project management
5. Asana – Best for project goal setting

Now, let’s see how each of these tools measure up and what they have to offer.

#1 – Monday.com — Best For Simple Customization

• Drag-and-drop task management
• Intuitive, color-coded dashboard
• Customizable templates included
• Three plans under $20/month

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Monday.com straddles between being simple and being customizable to the needs of your team. Its intuitive color-coded dashboard lets your team easily drag and drop tasks and assignments.

Planning, tracking, and delivering each project is made easy with visual templates that make use of automations and work views to ensure you’re never missing a beat.

Project delivery becomes easy with customizable workflows and project trackers. That’s not all. Monday.com also equips you with templates you can customize to the uniqueness of your project, whether…

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Have you ever wondered how tech giants manage to develop and update numerous products in such a short time? The answer lies in Agile. Agile project management focuses on speed, frequent releases, and feedback loops. According to Vitality Chicago, Agile’s failure rate is a meager 8% compared to Waterfall’s 22%. It’s no wonder 71% of companies use Agile approaches, and the interest is stronger than ever.

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile is an iterative approach to project management that prioritizes collaboration, feedback, and response to changes during the project lifecycle. Here, the project is broken down into short developmental cycles or stages called iterations. During each iteration, team members collaborate with stakeholders to adjust and improve processes and the final deliverable.

Agile project management traces its roots back to software development in the 1990s. Software teams, in particular, found traditional project management methods (such as Waterfall) to be too rigid. Software development requires autonomy, adaptability, and flexibility as opposed to more traditional projects (such as manufacturing) with fixed processes and predictable outcomes.

The Agile methodology has since found widespread use outside of software development and can be applied to virtually any project with constantly changing objectives.

4 Tools to Improve Agile Project Management Implementation

The Agile philosophy and principles aside, there are practical tools that you need to implement this methodology successfully. The most critical tools include:

1. Project Management Software

If ever there was a cheat-sheet for implementing Agile project management, you can find it in a software suite. There are project management tools dedicated explicitly to agile software development teams. However, this software tends to target DevOps since Agile is inherently a software development approach.

Instead, we recommend Wrike, a more flexible project management tool…

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Where is your website traffic coming from?

If you’re relying on people to find you through a Google search, search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be at the top of your priority list.

You won’t be able to generate leads for your business if nobody can find you.

Did you know 93% of experiences on the Internet start with a search engine? What happens after someone makes a search?

The top result on Google has a 33% chance of getting clicked.

That means if you’re not number one on the page, you just missed out on a third of potential traffic.

What’s even more astonishing is that 75% people won’t even click on the second page of the search results.

The reason why other websites are ranking higher than you on Google is because they are making a conscious effort to improve their SEO.

Fortunately, it’s not too late for you to get started.

There are certain things you can do to increase your chances of getting ranked higher on Google searches.

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I’ve identified the top 34 ways to improve your SEO ranking. Here they are.

1. Improve your page loading speed

Your page loading time is important for a few reasons.

First of all, if your load speed is too slow, Google will recognize this, and it will harm your ranking.

But a slow website will also impact the way your website visitors engage with your pages.

As a result, those negative interactions will hurt your ranking too.

Look at how abandonment rates increase for websites with long page loading times:

How slow is…

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Entrepreneurs, sales managers, sales executives… Everyone needs a solid sales plan to drive their income, hit their targets, and scale their business.

But a sales plan is not possible without a comprehensive sales strategy—one that covers everything from your target audience to employee morale to prospecting.

Moreover, effective strategizing and creating a sales plan is easier said than done, as not only do you need to define your sales goals but also know how you’re going to reach them.

Luckily, things won’t be that hard when you have the right guidance. Read on as I show you how to create a sales plan that empowers your sales team to perform at their highest level.

What to Expect When Creating a Sales Plan

You can have an excellent sales plan to drive profits if you follow a few simple—and not-so-simple—steps.

Here’s how you can nail your sales plan template:

• Step 1 — Forecast Potential Sales and Set Realistic Goals
• Step 2 — Research Your Market and Target Audience
• Step 3 — Chalk Out Your Customer Journey and Value Propositions
• Step 4 — Start Prospecting and Developing Strategic Partnerships
• Step 5 — Track, Measure, and Adjust

The Good

Creating a sales plan can seem intimidating. After all, there are so many nuances to consider, understand, and master.

But the thing is, there are hundreds of companies who’ve already created sales plans, leaving you with plenty of inspiration. You can mix and match different ideas to build a sales plan that is straightforward, unique, and, most importantly, effective.

Better results are another advantage. Every person in the organization will know their role, what needs to be done, and how to do it. Ultimately, this will give you more positive outcomes in the form of higher sales and improved customer relationships.

The…

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Most businesses need an EIN to operate. If you’re starting a new business, getting an EIN should be at the top of your to-do list.

Think of an EIN like a social security number—but for your business.

You need a social security number to rent or buy a house, get a job, and open a personal bank account. EINs are just like that. You won’t be able to hire employees, form certain entities, or open a business checking account without an EIN.

Fortunately, getting an EIN is relatively simple. There are several different ways to do it, and you can even get an EIN for free.

Not sure if you need an EIN? Don’t know how to get one? You’ve come to the right place. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about getting an EIN for your business.

What is an EIN?

The acronym stands for “employer identification number” and is a type of taxpayer identification number (TIN). EINs get issued by the IRS to business entities like LLCs and corporations.

The primary purpose of these unique nine-digit numbers is for tax reporting. But most banks, credit card companies, and vendors will require your business to have an EIN before allowing you to open an account or working with you.

People often confuse EINs and social security numbers (SSNs) with each other, as they are both nine-digit government-issued identification numbers. But the formatting for an EIN is different from an SSN. EINs start with two digits, followed by a hyphen and then seven more (12-3456789). SSNs follow a three-two-four digit sequence, separated by two hyphens (123-45-6789).

EINs are often referred to by many different names. Here are some common synonyms for EIN that you’ll see in different contexts:

• EIN
• Tax ID number

…

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