How to Build up Your Career by Showing Off Your Uniqueness

April 26, 2022 by Jessy Troy Leave a Comment

You have probably read every online article and magazine tip rundown on getting an employers attention that has been written in the last several years. I know that I have.

But I have noticed that the same advice is constantly given: firm handshake, eye contact, seem relaxed but diligent, remain pleasant but not too casual, ask questions about the job, etc. What they fail to mention is how to show that you are better for a position than all of the other people using the same tactics.

That is always the problem that people forget when it comes to interviews or applications, whether in the workforce or freelance. It isn’t about impressing with confidence, at least not that alone. It is about making it clear that you have something that you can bring to the table that no one else can. In the end, what you are selling is your uniqueness.

Finding Your Unique Abilities

Being clear with someone else is impossible if you don’t first know what you have yourself. Before you present your application to a client or employer, you need to take some time to list all of those special things that make you you. What can you bring to the job that no one else can? What make you unique? What qualities do you possess that they should come to appreciate and rely on?

This can be anything that is listed as a skill, talent or personality trait. If you are dedicated, tell them so. Reliable and upbeat, tenacious when dealing with a problem, or just pleasant to work with. When listing skills, be explicit but honest. Don’t say that you can type 90 words per minute if you mean 60. Don’t say you can take on more work than is realistic. Never lie about work you never did. The trick is to impress them with real qualities you possess.

Set up Your Digital Identity

Having your own site is so important because people will be able to find you and discover everything that you do.

Namify is a great site that will allow you to generate a business name representing your expertise. The tool will also help you create your logo and define your visual brand identity.

Showing Off Your Uniqueness

Everything you say will need to be proven. Some of it will be over time (such as with your personality traits), but some can be shown easily right away. Some ways you can do this are:

References to past clients or employers.
Websites that you have designed.
Articles that you have written have ownership of or a byline attached to.
A description of a former job or project.
Screen caps, copies, prints of samples of a completed work.
Your business communication practices that includes a professional email signature and a business email address
An online or physical portfolio.
A networking profile with connected employers and clients, such as LinkedIn.
Providing a discounted or free sample in the genre of their choice.

Keep track of your notable mentions and achievements and monitor influencers in your niche. Use a solid monitoring dashboard to keep yourself motivated and updated. Cyfe can be set up to monitor your niche influencers and career opportunities: Set it up to see your dream companies’ updates on Twitter, monitor their employeers and official hashtags and more:

Read more about using Twitter for career building here

As Content Mart rightfully put it,

You only have one first chance to make one first impression that lasts a lifetime.

Filling in the Details

If you have stories of past projects or jobs that went well, have a couple of stories ready to regale them with. If it is related to the position you are applying for, all the better. Just make sure to be honest, never embellish the details, and be specific.

If you are asked to explain why a position ended, such as being fired, quitting or being laid off, be open about the details. Never point the finger of blame and be gentle with your explanation. If you made a mistake own up to it, but tell them how you learned from the experience and it will help you in your future endeavors.

Giving these details can be highly beneficial. It paints a more complete picture of who you are, and can help them to build trust while getting to know why you are the best person for the job.

Always Seek Opportunities for Personal Growth

These days you have so many opportunities for professional growth, it’s crazy! The best part is, you don’t have to leave your home to get a new degree or get certified.

Check out sites like Udemy for a variety of courses, Lynda and many more.

For a huge variety of professional online courses, Southern Cross University Online is one of the best options.

Showing You Have What it Takes

When it comes to a job in the workforce, you are usually safe with being direct about past experiences. They can fill in the blanks by speaking to people who you worked for in the past, contacting references and asking questions. But when you are a freelancing looking for contracts or minor projects, you have to show them a different way.

What you should do is come up with examples of how you worked through other projects. The areas you want to focus on are your reliability, your ability to work to deadline and how you can solve problems on your own. These are all very important on independent contracts, as you are completely responsible for everything from the beginning to the final product.

Freelance or Workforce, Show You’re Unique!

In the end, you are showing that you are special, you have what it takes to get the job done better than anyone else, and you can deliver results. This is all based on you being unique, and so you should always show how those qualities that make you you are the ones that will get things completed the right way.

If you are able to get that across, then there is nothing you cannot achieve.

Image source: Pixabay

How to Know if Your Marketing Strategy is Working

March 17, 2022 by Jessy Troy Leave a Comment

It’s easy to be impatient, but you know you can’t expect to see amazing results from your marketing strategy overnight.

Results take time, but as a small business, you don’t have a lot of time to waste. This creates a dilemma – how long do you wait things out before making changes?

Your success is riding on a steady incline on your income graph. It won’t be too fast, but it can’t be too slow. Changing up your marketing because you aren’t getting immediate results can potentially drive you into debt.

The trick is looking at the numbers, knowing what to expect, and understanding the impacts that small tweaks can make when they’re enacted at the right time.

Keep an inquiring mind

Many businesses use survey questions with their customers. Large businesses tend to offer small rewards for feedback, but that may not be feasible for your small business. Try offering one prize through a feedback based raffle.

There is a core question you want to ask to measure your marketing success, and it’s a simple one: How did you hear about us?

This one is self-explanatory. If your customers are referring to your advertising, you know it’s reaching at least some of your desired market. Get to know this market, and tailor your marketing towards this group for maximum success.

Get smart with analytics

Analytics are useless if you don’t know how to read them. These figures, especially with social media and tracked advertisement, mean the world. It doesn’t matter how many people you’re reaching if you aren’t engaging with them.

Comments and interactions are what actually signify that your marketing plan is working. Hire a reputable digital marketing agency to help you set up your analytics and figure out the reports.

If you aren’t getting an active response, it’s time to change the way you handle your interactive platforms.

A business assessment will help you re-asses what you are doing now and come up with a better plan.

Measure your plans against your goals

You’re going to have no idea whether something is a hit or a miss unless you have a direct goal you intend to use as a measurement of your success. Before you start marketing, know what you’re trying to accomplish.

Maybe you want to see a ten percent revenue increase at the peak of your marketing campaign. Maybe you want to recruit 30 new valuable customers within the first half of your ad outreach.

Keep modest goals, but always know what exactly you’re looking for as an indication that things are going according to plan.

Make sure your demographic matches your platforms

Where are you advertising? How are you advertising? Who are you advertising to? If your advertisement is geared in areas where your target customers aren’t likely to see it, things aren’t going to work out in your favor.

Using web forms to collect your users’ feedback is a great way to find out if you are giving them everything they need. There’s an easy web form builder for you use for those purposes.

Minimal response may not be the result of a slow trickle of new customers, but instead the result of your desired customers missing your advertisement entirely. Know your demographic.

Understand how they want to observe and interact with marketing. If you’re looking for customers in all the wrong places, your return is going to be as small as possible.

If you find yourself in a marketing slump, it’s time to try something different. You need to make sure your new strategy is the right kind of different, instead of merely something else.

Look at your competitors and weigh their success against yours. Marketing success is a game of innovation, so sharpen your wits and get in the game.

Image source: Pixabay

Three Strategies for Achieving Business Growth

February 17, 2022 by Jessy Troy Leave a Comment

As a small business, growth is what will make or break you. If you don’t adapt to the current economy and maximize your success, the outlook is very bleak. In today’s world, where a terrifying number of SMEs fail within the first five years, it’s imperative to take a proactive approach when it comes to securing the future prospects of your business.

You don’t have to leave the fate of your business up to chance if you’ve implemented a secure strategy that you’ll follow closely. Nothing is foolproof, but careful planning will give you the best shot at success.

Focus on customer retention and brand loyalty

You’re going to need capital to grow. Where is it going to come from? If you’re frivolously advertising, attempting to rope in as many new customers as possible, you may not see the results you’re expecting.

That’s why you need to focus on the customers you already have. Develop a loyalty program. Go above and beyond to service the customers who already recognize and value you. Creating a core set of customers is essential for a predictable profit.

Brand loyalty is equally important. New customers will be more inclined to continue their relationship with you if you incentivize their loyalty.

Those small perks do come at a minor cost, but it isn’t nearly as large as the cost of recruiting new customers. Most people are inclined to shop for value, and making it worth their while can carry you further than the best advertising campaign you could possibly conceive.

Outwit your competitors

There’s always going to be competition – you just have to make sure you’re winning. Businesses that never achieve their desired level of growth (or even worse, businesses that fold) often find themselves in that position because their competitors have an edge. If you’re providing a useful product or service, it’s not that people don’t want it. Chances are, they just like someone else’s better.

This involves a certain level of risk taking. Always keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. Understand what it is that they’re doing better than you are. You need to not only match, but exceed their best qualities.

Use marketing automation tools and innovative AI-based technology to always be ahead of your competition.

Even if it’s merely in customer service, you need to give people a reason to choose you over someone else. Growth requires constant innovation. You can’t fear what lies outside of the box – you need to make it your default to think there.

Watch your numbers closely

If you’re making a profit, that’s excellent. The problem lies in being content with the profit you’re making, and stopping there. Look at all of your numbers. Some aspects of your business can be showing excellent performance while others are subpar. Determine how to maximize everything. Hire a reliable SEO agency to help you set up your analytics and reports.

It can be as simple as replacing something with an upgraded version, or as complicated as dropping something altogether and doing a total restructure. Don’t let things get to rock bottom before you decide to take action. Always stay three steps ahead to prevent a predicament. Every aspect of your business presents you with an opportunity to move forward.

…And remember to keep a level head

As you likely already know, the best plan is one that can be adapted at the last moment. You can still be cautious while being inventive. If you see things aren’t working in a particular area, don’t be afraid to make small adaptations. Always change one thing at a time, investigate the impact the change has had, and rework your plans through fine tuning.

Image source: Pixabay

Build a Foundation that Will Grow with You

February 17, 2022 by Jessy Troy Leave a Comment

Like love, the course of running a successful business never did run smoothly.

Chalk it up to the sheer number of variables – on both a macro and a micro level – that a business has to deal with. Regardless of how much time and effort you pour into planning things out, success is never going to be linear. Instead, it’s dotted with peaks and troughs, twists and turns. And those peaks and troughs can seem magnified unless your business is agile and flexible enough to handle change with aplomb.

That flexibility and agility is rarely a happy accident, but rather the result of a concerted effort to build a foundation that is able to adapt as circumstances change and your business grows.

Here are three essential skills you’ll need to ensure your foundation is one that can grow as your business does.

Learn how to build the right team

We all know that finding the right talent is a crucial aspect of building a successful business. However, when you’re starting out and don’t have the resources and skills of an immense HR department at your disposal, it can be difficult to know how to find – and retain – the best of the best.

One thing that tends to trip up small or new businesses is the belief that the only way to attract top talent is with top dollars – something that your business just might not have yet. However, a survey by Flexjobs found that, of the 1500 people surveyed, 20% of those would be willing to take a 10% pay cut in favor of flexibility in working conditions, and 22% would be willing to forego health benefits.

Ultimately, building a great team doesn’t mean hiring those with the most prestigious qualifications, or spending big on salaries. Instead, place your energies into two areas: building flexibility into the roles you create so you can be sure to attract great talent, and hiring staff who are a good personality and culture fit. Adopt a virtual phone system to keep your team always connected, even if they are on the move. Use collaboration platforms to foster knowledge exchange.

Learn to compartmentalize

In the early days of your business, you’re probably going to be wearing a lot of hats. Depending on the nature and scope of your business, you may be salesperson, bookkeeper, marketing manager, customer service rep and director, all at once. And when you’re performing multiple roles at once, it can be hard to separate them out once the time comes to hire help.

What you need to do is compartmentalize. For each role you’re performing, determine the core activities and tasks that define that role. As your business grows, you’ll add more and more tasks to that list, which will make writing position descriptions when you’re ready to hire staff infinitely easier.

This advice also comes in handy when you, inevitably, need to work on separating your work and your personal life. If you’re juggling, say, being a parent and running your own business, you may want to take the time to write out the tasks you perform as a parent, and those you perform as a business owner. That way, you can assess whether you’re focusing on the right things at the right time.

Learn to document your processes

In almost all fledgling businesses, there’s a great deal of tacit knowledge – that is, information, processes or procedures that are undocumented. For example, you may know how to update your website, or change the outgoing voicemail message, or which suppliers can deliver at short notice.

Relying on tacit knowledge, however, leaves your business vulnerable. The director of a company I used to work for was inordinately fond of asking his employees, ‘What if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? Will anyone know how to do your job?’

It’s a valid – if morbid – point

Documenting processes, while time-consuming and frankly a little dull, is crucial to the success of your business. Keeping in-depth, up-to-date documentation on processes and procedures (you can find an easy 10-step method for documentation here) makes coping with change and growth a far less stressful experience.

It also means that, when things go wrong, you can easily backtrack and ascertain where things went wrong.

Image: Pixabay

Should Computers Have Warning Labels – The Disgraceful State Of Computer Safety

January 25, 2022 by Jessy Troy Leave a Comment

Whether we like it or not, the U.S. Government is hell bent to protect us from the bogeyman. From head to toe, food, drink and other enjoyable vice is under incessant attack from foundations and organizations to keep us safe. Smoking (and you thought it was sex?) is the most prevalent evil of all times, vilified for the last 40 years, and the sustained epitome of warning labels.

Warning labels are thought to be effective, maybe most effective in stopping a perceived well-being transgression, safety hazard or health risk. No matter if this is true or not, labels continue to be the trusted means of halting sin. With this in mind, I find it outrageous that computers and computer related products do not have warning labels.

Consider people who use computers, from the seasoned IT professional to the proverbial one-foot-on-a-banana-peel and the other in the grave, and the range of security knowledge about computers and the Internet. The only people who understand the importance of Internet security and identity theft protection are those who work in the field of Internet security.

If you think your child understands security by virtue of “all kids are de facto techno geniuses”, why do parental controls exist? Kids are less safe on the Internet than many adults. Adults are not safe because, in the words of Ron White, “you can’t fix stupid.”

Internet risks include identity theft, job loss, total loss of privacy, scamming, theft of personal documents and acne on the low end. For the absolute tech-challenged ham-handed dweeb, risks could be stalking, murder, rape, suicide and addiction. There is hardly anything in the real world that cannot be duplicated in the virtual world, in fact exacerbated online.

If this household item was a lawnmower it would be illegal. If it was thought to drive up the cost of your insurance, there would be outrage, and demand for government intervention. Yet priorities are set with little thought to the most dangerous appliance in the home.

Questions:

Like CNN, FOX and The Comedy Channel we want to know what you think. And like them, no particular reason, we just like comments.

Should computers have warning labels?
Should a license be required to operate a computer?
Should a safety class be mandatory before buying a computer?
Should safty glasses and hearing protection be required to operate a computer?

Please, practice safe computing. Tweet this, DIGG it, Facebook it, email it to everyone you know. Stop the carnage. Stop ruining my computer experience and costing me money. Call the president of the U.S. The number is 202-456-1414 This is a real phone number for the White House. They will listen to what you have to say. Keep this in mind before you call.

Image source

Why Your Company Is Chasing Too Many Bad Sales Leads

January 20, 2022 by Jessy Troy Leave a Comment

Many companies don’t do enough upfront work to qualify their new sales leads. They simply pass every single sales lead through to the sales team, even if the prospect is nowhere near ready to buy or is even a good fit for what the company sells.

According to statistics cited by HubSpot, 61 percent of B2B companies send all of their business leads directly to sales, even though only 27 percent of those leads will be qualified to count as “serious buyers.” Having too many unqualified sales leads wastes the time of the sales team and causes the company to miss out on legitimate sales opportunities. When your salespeople are bombarded with low-quality leads that aren’t a good fit for your product or service, they’re going to miss the chance to talk with prospects who are legitimately good sales opportunities.

If your company is chasing bad sales leads, the following strategies will help you better qualify your inbound sales inquiries upfront:

Create Content that Drives Sales

In B2B content creators have always keep their target DMU (decision making unit) in mind. Have you been doing the same when creating content for B2C?

Text Optimizer is a great intent optimization tool that helps you create content that meets your customers’ needs and expectations.

Text Optimizer lets you optimize content for intent

Ask Lead-Qualifying Questions

Not all sales leads are the same, so why would your company want to treat them all the same? After all, every single prospect is unique; they all have different problems and pain points and budgetary concerns, and they all have unique business needs that your solution has to address. But if your company is simply passing every sales lead along to the sales team without even asking any questions, you’re missing a big chance to learn more about the prospect.

Asking questions to qualify the sales leads is a simple step that you can take to start prioritizing and ranking your sales leads. By asking sales-related exploratory questions, you are starting to build trust and build a relationship, and you’re learning more about the larger picture of the customer’s business challenges.

Asking questions also helps you do “lead scoring” to rank your sales leads based on how likely they are to buy. This is somewhat of an inexact process, but with time, you’ll get better at deciphering the subtle clues and behaviors of prospects to see which ones are genuinely interested and which ones are just calling around to do research or get price quotes. Use an online form builder that gives you flexibility to verify your contact prior to registering is as a leader.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Asking lead-qualifying questions is a subtle process that requires some skill and savvy. For example, you don’t want to be too direct or aggressive by asking questions such as, “Do you have a budget for this purchase?” or “Are you definitely in the market for a new solution?” or “Are you looking to buy sometime soon?” These questions tend to create sales pressure and make the prospect feel defensive.

Instead of putting the customer under pressure, start by asking open-ended questions that get them to talk about their overall business situation. For example, you could ask, “What challenges are you experiencing with your current solution?” This helps get the customer to open up a bit and share their frustrations that are causing them to seek a new vendor. Or you could ask, “How is your current solution impacting your overall business processes?” This is a great question, because it helps you analyze the overall picture at the prospect’s business and evaluate how urgently they might be looking to make a purchase decision.

Every lead-qualifying question is your chance to hear more from the customer. Get them to open up about their business challenges, and then really listen to what they say.

Follow Up By Phone

Other companies make the mistake of relying too much on automated systems. For example, when you get new inbound sales inquiries via your website or online advertising, you might have an automated email reply or online intake form that asks the prospect some questions about what they’re looking to buy. These automated tools can be helpful, but you can’t rely on a fully automated lead qualification process.

Instead, call people back. Get on the phone and have a detailed conversation that allows for the “human element” of relationship building and establishing trust. Even with the great technology we have today, you still need to get on the phone and talk with your customers.

Why? For one thing, the buyers who are most urgently looking to make a decision want to hear back from your company immediately, and from a real person. Motivated buyers are probably contacting several of your competitors, and according to HubSpot’s cited statistics, 35-50 percent of sales go to the vendor who responds first.

Some prospects are never going to be the right fit for what you sell, and not everyone is a “good” customer. But with better inbound lead qualification processes – one that includes asking good questions, sorting and ranking the sales leads and following up quickly – your company can turn more of your sales leads into big sales.