Posts Tagged ‘seo’
Hunting the Executive Head Hunter
5 tips to win over an executive head hunter or management recruiter
Many job seekers find themselves overwhelmed with dread at the prospect of hunting down a new career position on their own. That’s why many people hope to hang their hats on the connections of executive head hunters to do their hunting for them in their ongoing (never-ending?) quest for the ultimate trophy career.
In order to convince a reliable executive head hunter, a job seeker has to plan his attack. A well connected executive recruiter will not take on just any person in a suit. You have to build a solid foundation well in advance of making contact.
Just like animal-hunting needs supplies, recruiter hunting requires strategy and supplies, too. Here are five tips to successfully capture the prize ? the services of an executive recruiter.
Do Your Homework
The savvy job-seeker must be well armed with knowledge ? not just about his or her interests and skills, but also in the head hunter’s interests and specialties. Yes, it helps to approach a head hunter who understands your field and has built up connections, because there is very little need for chemical engineers at an accounting firm (although chemical makers have been forced to allow accountants into their sanctums, but that’s another story).
At the same time, an executive management recruiter has no interest in your skills, even if you have won dozens of awards for the French pastries you have created.
Of course, it helps to familiarize yourself with the job market. That is the executive recruiter’s job, but it is also yours.
You will also get a lot further if you have assessed your own skills, not just your desired employment. If you clearly are not qualified for what you seek, you won’t sell yourself to the head hunter. And if you can’t sell yourself to the head hunter, he or she won’t bother trying to sell you to anyone else.
Identify Reputable Executive Recruiters and Head Hunters
Unfortunately, in the 21st century there are a growing number of conmen and scam artists who have injected themselves in the business of executive head hunters and recruiters. Therefore, as you begin your search for a bona fide and qualified executive recruiter, it is vital that you ask around.
Before you approach an executive head hunter, find out all that you can about their operations, history and experience from as many independent resources that you can access. Make it a point to find other men or women who have used their services. Find out who has actually landed jobs for other people, before placing your career in the hands of a charlatan.
Prepare a Solid Resume
OK. so this might be obvious. But it is not always done. Prepare a professional resume before you make contact with the executive head hunters on your list. Your resume is your calling card, and it will determine whether the recruiter will even want to let you waste his secretary’s time.
Line Up Solid References
Before knocking on head hunter doors, make certain that you have handy a list of professional references.
Just as you will want to know the details about any executive recruiter you approach, these professionals will want to know a good deal about you as well. They will want to be able to contact your references, men and women who can support your professional aspirations with solid testimony about your prior accomplishments, your character, your skills and even your weaknesses, too.
Make sure to ask permission from each reference in advance, so they don’t get caught off guard and say something like, “well, uh, let me see, um…you were calling about whom?”
Schedule a One on One Head Hunter Meeting
Finally, when you have all your ducks lined up, you are ready to meet the executive head hunter who will land you that ultimate trophy career. Of course, it helps to pick more than just one recruiter, and it also helps to schedule a meeting at their convenience.
There you have it. You are ready to go and hunt an executive head hunter. Job-searching couldn’t be more fun unless it came with a candy cherry on top and a complementary subscription to Laugh magazine. Happy hunting.
David Leonhardt is a Canadian website marketing strategies consultant. He wrote this article for the Directory of Executive Recruiters and Head Hunters.
Freelance Copywriters on the Internet: How to Tell the Difference Between Heaven-sent and Hack
If you’re hunting for a good freelance copywriter and have never done it before, or if you have but find yourself needing another for the first time in a while, I don’t envy you. This “brave new” e-world has turned your once straightforward search of a neatly stacked file of brochures and introductory letters into a bothersome wade through a mucky world of half-baked online listings and search results which only seem to list those freelance copywriters who are experts in SEO, or at least know what the heck it means (search engine optimization).
You: “I just need a good freelance copywriter to write this product launch brochure who’s not going leave me hanging or make me ask for another round of financing.”
Google: “Results 1-10 of 44,700 for brochure copywriter (0.17 seconds).”
And that’s not even a very popular search term. Yet, with 44,700 doors (or thousands more depending on your search) to choose from, what are the chances you’ll click the one that leads to:
? A freelance copywriter who plays nice with designers and doesn’t charge a first-born child
? A freelance copywriter who knows when and where to offer their expertise on how to communicate a message
? Creative, cliché-free, differentiating, success-enabling copy that is turned in clean and on deadline
It’s probably better than a 1-in-44,700 chance, but you’re still more likely to fall short than be wildly ecstatic about your freelance copywriter decision unless you add a few points of structure to guide you through the online chaos:
1. Look at freelance copywriters further down the list. Unless you’re specifically looking for an SEO copywriter, how high a freelance copywriter or a link to a freelance copywriter ranks in search results is not indicative of how good that copywriter may be. Search engines rank web sites according to formulas of keyword saturation in site copy, meta tags, links and other places. Not how well a freelance copywriter’s work achieved his client’s objectives. Spend some time at this. There is more to the marketing, branding and advertising worlds than the Internet, and there are many worthy and successful freelance copywriters who work in the offline world, but have only a token presence on the Net. Go ahead and look at the top-ranked freelance copywriters, but investigate the others as well. Look at who their clients are, the work they do, the brands they’ve worked on, what their site is like and testimonials from past and current clients. That should give you a good gauge. Or if you like the advertising a specific company do a search for “CompanyX AND copywriter.”
2. If you want quality, steer clear of “bidding” sites. There’s too many of them already, and more seem to be popping up all the time. The online auction is a great concept for your old fishing equipment or clunker on cinder blocks, but not for a good freelance copywriter, designer, photographer or any other “creative service” professional. Sites like Elance.com, Guru.com and their many cousins allow service providers to whore themselves out for projects in a reverse auction where the lowest bid wins. Unfortunately, there really is no winner. The freelance copywriter (or whoever) gets a fraction of the fair market value for their work and the client, unless they’re extremely lucky, will be stuck with a student, green amateur or someone who might not even speak English well-to say nothing about the copy they’ll write.
3. Seek out freelance copywriters with online portfolios. Find freelance copywriters who have some kind of online portfolio. Go through it in detail. Try to get an idea of the communications problem the freelance copywriter had to solve and get a grasp on the talent and thinking that went into creating the finished copy. Then ask yourself, “If I was in the market for something like this, would this make me more interested in learning about this product or want to buy it?” The work of a good copywriter will be obvious.
4. Judge by the work, not the product. You may have a great new product that everyone’s going to want, or an old product that everyone already has, but with a new feature or something. Now, your first instinct in finding someone who’s going to write copy to sell this product is to find someone who, if you’re selling underwater titanium door hinges, has written copy for underwater steel or plastic door hinges. Yes, too many marketers think if a freelance copywriter has only written for X and not Y, that they can’t write for Y. This kind of thinking is misguided. Again, go back to No. 3 and look at the portfolio. Gauge the talent. If they did a great job communicating something about X, you can bet they’ll be able to do the same for Y. A freelance copywriter isn’t defined by the product. He is defined by how he writes about that product.
These guidelines, along with a little “buyer beware” mentality, will help you wield the Internet as the powerful information tool it’s purported to be. You will find a good freelance copywriter.
Adam Barone is a freelance copywriter from the Boston area, who writes results – generating copy for such clients as The Timberland Company, Bank One, TJ Maxx, and other clients and ad agencies.
Visit him at http://www.adambarone.com. Subscribe his e-newsletter, CopyTHINK at adambarone.com/mailinglist/?p=subscribe .
©Adam Barone 2005. All rights reserved.
Reprint rights granted as long as the article is published in its entirety, including links.
Small / Medium Business Blog Process Outsourcing as a Website Traffic Building Service
You are a small or a medium business owner. You have a well designed business website. It is a Search Engine Optimized (SEO) website for a limited set of keywords. However, with changing rules of SEO and new competitors entering the market, your select keywords stand a slim chance of surviving the onslaught. What are the chances that your website will remain on the top when a potential customer searches those special keywords on a search engine? To make matters worse, Search engines change their algorithms without any notice and suddenly your site is no longer in top 10 results. So what is the solution?
How about hiring a Blog Outsourcing company to add a Business Blog to your website? (If you are not familiar with Business Blogs, read my earlier article here: http://ezinearticles.com/?id=50041 ).
A business blog can do the SEO magic when it is embedded to your business website. Business blogging needs discipline to write every other day to bring potential customers to your business website. If you have the time and inclination, you may write the business blog yourself. However, if you feel, you should concentrate on your business; you can outsource this task to a Blog Outsourcing Company. Here is a link to first such company: http://www.ideologicllc.com.
What are the benefits of a Business Blog?
1. Improves searchability of your business website, thus increasing the chances of prospective clients visiting your business website.
2. A Business Blog provides instantaneous Customer feedback with comments.
3. A Business Blog has a potential to become centralized knowledgebase with articles containing tips and tutorials about correct usage of the products or services.
4. You can use a Business Blog to share product development status, thus passively achieving pre-launch marketing of the product.
5. The Business Blogs can help in branding a product online.
6. Your Business blog can help in building your business reputation.
7. Believe it or not, a business blog can project you as an expert in your niche business area.
8. Business blog lets you do your own “press release” on the website.
What happens when a business blog is outsourced?
A blogger from the Business Blog Outsourcing Company meets with the business owner or representative once every month and strategically selects few topics which are of interest to the company’s current and prospective clients and prepares keyword rich articles to be published on the company’s blog either every other day or once in a week, depending on the plan selected by the company. Results can be phenomenal. Instead of select keywords for the website, each blog posting has separate keywords which are used by the potential customers searching the internet for specific products or services.
What is the justification for outsourcing a Business Blog?
It is said a business person must concentrate on expanding and improving the business. If he/she tries to do everything, then nothing gets done. So, if a task can be done by secretary, it must be done by a secretary and if a task is difficult or there is lack of time, hiring outside help maybe the best way to get that task done. Business blogging is same way. Writing is a time consuming task, so it is better left to a professional blogger or writer who can better construct the article, intersperse it with business-specific keywords keeping search engine criteria in mind.
Can a professional writer or a blogger do justice to the task of writing about a business, product or service, where he/she has no expertise? The answer is yes. This is no different from a situation where a professional writer writes articles in a magazine about various businesses, products and services. Knowledge can always be gained and then combined with the skills of a professional writer. End result is an article that captivates reader’s attention till very end and has a potential of converting a prospect to a loyal customer.
Harish Keshwani is a Strategic Blogging Consultant, Software Developer, Blogger and an Entrepreneur. He is focused on consulting and guiding small and medium businesses in setting up their blogs and managing it for them as an outsourced process.
He guides corporations of small and medium size to realize the potential of blogging for their business. With appropriate content, he helps companies to keep their customers satisfied and in close touch. He promotes blogging as a marketing and customer response tool to the companies.
His contact information is: Email: businessorati-at-gmail-dot-com Company: Ideologic L.L.C.-A Small/Medium Business Blog Process Outsourcing Company. Website: http://www.ideologicllc.com Blog: http://www.ideologicllc.com/wp
Lets Not Forget About The Little Guy
Every business has to start somewhere. What truly makes this country great is the freedom of enterprenuership that every one of its citizens have. Capitalism at its best signifies the power of a single person to reach monumental goals and turning a simple idea into a huge corporation. But in our pursuit of this glorified state, have we snubbed the little guy?
Corporate earnings are billions of dollars a year for executives and shareholders. Online companies such as eBay, PayPal, Google, and Blockbuster have crushed the little guy beneath the giant wheels of change. What would have been important to the small companies as they used to be is a far cry from the values that these corporations embrace today. Will it always be this way? Change is inevitable, but does it really take stepping all on the individuals that got them there in order to succeed? It’s as if once a certain dollar amount is reached in net revenue, the blinders go on, and the company loses touch with the little guy.
EBay, Inc. began in 1995 with one little guy’s idea on a better way to garage sale, as a way for his girlfriend (now his wife) to trade Pez dispensers online. By 2001, more than $9 billion in merchandise was sold via the auction monster. Now, eBay Inc. is the biggest internet marketplace, reporting a gross profit of $2,656,894 for 2004.
In an interview with eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar in BusinessWeek Magazine, Senior Correspondent Robert D. Hoff asks a pertinent question:
Hof: “It seems ironic that eBay started out intending to level the playing field for small businesses and individuals, and now eBay is a big corporation. How do you make those jibe these days?” Omidyar: “It sure is ironic. I like to think we’re a different kind of big company, because of the way we interact with our community. If we lose that, we’ve pretty much lost everything. If you’re starting a revolution and you succeed, then are you still a revolutionary? It’s a little bit weird, but I think we still have a long way to go, bringing the level playing field to the rest of the world.”
Interestingly, earlier in the interview, Omidyar touts his original ideals of listening to his customers, and shaping the software based on their suggestions, sometimes even the same night he received an email from a customer. But increasingly, as of late, eBay’s customers are reporting a greater dissatisfaction with the way the conglomerate is handling their marketplace. After all, it is eBay sellers that are the actual customers, because they pay all the fees, and therefore are the source of eBay’s revenue. And unless you are a Power Seller, forget about calling eBay. Their number is reserved for only the elite few who can meet their standards of maintaining so many thousands of dollars in sales per month. You’ll be lucky if they respond to your email within a week. So I wonder what makes a level playing field, as Omidyar so aptly puts it. Can eBay truly claim to not have reached it yet? Come on?
Since the company raised its prices to sellers earlier this year, though, there are defections to Overstock, Yahoo, Amazon, and other smaller auction sites. Is eBay in that much financial distress that it has to rob the sellers of their hard earned auction profits only to pay higher fees? By the looks of the profits listed earlier, we can all see they’re not struggling. According to BusinessWeek’s David Kiley:
“Ebay’s stock is trading at almost half its 52-week high despite continuing to make money. One wonders if eBay has simply become as complacent as General Motors became in the 1980s, figuring that Toyota and Honda would never amount to much, and that people would prefer a used Buick to a new Hyundai. Ebay is still a market share leader by a big margin. But investors and Wall Street tend to value a stock based on what they think future performance will be. Looks pretty bleak.”
Tiffany & Co., which has filed a lawsuit against the Internet auction giant for facilitating counterfeits, claims that eBay has a responsibility to police its auctions. Gucci, Prada, and other big names are closely watching the suit, as the ramifications will affect them as well. Originally clinging to the values of Omidyar himself, policing auctions was indeed something that they did. Now, the complacency of eBay and it’s “hands off” attitude is almost disgusting. Big mistake; the stakes are high for eBay. Other firms are watching and legal experts predict a flood of similar copyright lawsuits if Tiffany prevails. Lawyers salivate at the thought of getting a piece of the eBay pie.
“Everybody wants to see where this is going,” said Lou Ederer, an intellectual property rights expert. “How much longer can eBay hide behind their bigness? They are taking the position that they can’t monitor thousands of auctions going on all at once. But where do you draw the line? Firearms, alcohol? There are certain industries where the line has to be drawn.”
Another giant, Google, is seemingly only a bit better. Google’s search engine does not generate revenue, as there are no paid inclusions to be listed in the search engine. Rather, Google relies upon its infamous PageRank to rate the importance of sites, and how they get listed. Factors such as keyword density and placement, aging, and link popularity all figure in to the secret algorithm, called PageRank. So where does Google make its money? Google’s pay-per-click advertising, AdWords, is the major source of Google’s income. Google’s concept started in 1996 with two little guys, Larry Page and Sergy Brin. While students at Stanford University, the pair collaborated on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website. Housed with low end computers in a meager dorm room, the two college students originally sought a buyer for their technology, but no one was interested, so they decided to give it a go themselves. They got a few investors, and Google, Inc. was born. What had been a college research project was now a real company offering a service that was in great demand. The rest is history.
Now, with Google’s enormous impact on the internet, considering that 85% of all website traffic comes from search engines, people cannot fail to take notice. If your website doesn’t appear in Google, chances are you’re not getting good quality traffic. Google ranks #3, surpassed only by Yahoo and MSN, #1 and #2 respectively. Further, the corporation seeks to match its closest competitors by moving away from search engine technology and into the fields of web-based email, shopping, local searching, blogging, and even home pages, in order to steal that market share as well. When is it enough? That’s the funny thing about greed–it engenders more greed, and procreates like a bunch of rabbits.
But the search engine giant is in trouble in the courts, having lost one lawsuit already to Louis Vuitton, Inc. for trademark infringement in October, 2003, and another that the Versailles Court of Appeals, upholding the Vuitton decision, published in March, 2005. The court ordered Google to stop allowing the linking of advertisements to search terms trademarked by two travel companies by Google’s AdWords and to pay damages to the trademarked companies. According to CNN.com, “?The 20-page October 13 ruling by the court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre called into question the legality of the search system at the heart of Google’s business model.” The lawsuit will have ramifications on the validity of the pay per click advertisements, calling Google’s main source of revenue onto the carpet as more court cases ensue.
Google is in the process of removing French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP) from its Google News service, which aggregates links to online articles and accompanying photos from about 4500 news outlets. AFP sued Mountain View, California-based Google in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in March, 2005. The news agency is seeking to recover damages of at least $17.5 million from Google. AFP also asks the court to forbid Google from including its content in Google News. And the greed continues.
In other news, Blockbuster’s CEO John Antioco was ousted at the May 11th, 2005, shareholder meeting, only to reinstated to CEO two weeks later by the board when the dissident financier and corporate raider Carl Icahn voted himself onto the board, with voting rights of 10% of Blockbuster’s Class A shares, and 8% of Class B shares, only to find out that outing the chairman would cost the corporation $51 million dollars. The two other board members voted in actually had extensive media experience. The only experience Icahn has is buying shares and then being loudmouthed at shareholder meetings. So keeping Antioco on the board, and thus voiding the compensation package, seems like more of an afterthought, or even a fast recovery from what could have been a very costly second quarter. The way corporate America is set up seems to be a good way to be accountable (i.e. to the FCC and stockholders), but is a good idea for the ones with the most money making all the decisions? What’s laughable in the Blockbuster drama is that Icahn wasn’t privy to the executive contract that Antioco had, and once Icahn was informed after his election to the board, he quickly changed his tune.
Blockbuster, Inc. was founded by Wayne Huizenga, who was named Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year for 2004 and 2005. He is the only man to have created six NYSE companies, and three Fortune 500 companies: Waste Management, Inc., Blockbuster, Inc., and AutoNation. He started as a door to door salesman for a trash hauling company. From meager beginnings into the world of multi-billionaires, Huizenga’s is truly a Cinderella story, although his character wasn’t always pretty. And now Blockbuster stock is half of what it was a year ago, and keeps dropping. It seems for every mountain peak, there is the downhill slide.
What I hope to accomplish by this article is not stir up anger towards corporate America; quite to the contrary! What I actually hope to do is give each and every little guy out there the hope and light the fires of passion that you can be a success story as well. But there is a clear warning that growing beyond the bounds of reason has its consequences as well. If your goal is to gain enough wealth to be comfortable, then by all means, go for it. But if your design is to be the best, or to be all things to all people, there is fair risk to you of replacement.
Are American corporations getting too big for their britches and forgetting their roots? You bet. So hey, America, stop forgetting the little guys that made you great in the first place! The little guys like you and me, enterpreneurs with one goal in mind: to make a living, can make a difference. After all, it only takes one to rock the boat.
Jennifer E. Sullivan is an Internet Business Consultant who specializes in search engine optimization and web marketing. Her emphasis is on small to medium business marketing. She has written several web marketing articles, including “Hiring an SEO Consultant: 10 Reasons Why You Should”, “PageRank for Websites: Is There More to the Web?” and “Success for the Early Entrepreneur”. You can find more information on her services at http://www.firstclass-seo.com
Top Quick Tips for Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is very important for your website’s life. The following is several top quick tips of search engine optimization.
a. You should increase link popularity by seeking incoming and internal link.
Internal link is link within pages in your site. This can increase your pagerank.
Incoming link is link that refers to your site. You can create other sites with related topic to main site. Then cross link them using your keyword and give link back to you main site.
The other incoming link can be got by asking other related sites to link to your main site.
b. You can use TITLE tag as your first META tag, that placed after HEAD tag. If using wordpress you can use All In One SEO Pack for easily job.
c. You can avoid to use words like she, the, i, in, her, he etc in TITLE tag. These words are ignored by some search engines.
d. You can include META DESCRIPTION tag after TITLE tag. Insert your keyword in the beginning.
e. You can remove the other meta tag such as date, author etc.
f. Built your sitemap so that search engine can find all you pages.
g. Use header tag in main page and also use your keyword.
h. If you can, put keyword on the beginning of your paragraph as the first paragraph is used to descript your page by search engine. They choose it than META DESCRIPTION tag.
Those are some top quick tips for SEO. We shall write the further post.
