The technical aspects of search engine optimization can seem mysterious, especially for content marketers. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The 15 areas below cover the major areas.
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The CIO of Verizon Business Markets, which is Verizon's small business segment says that "We have to humanize technology." What Rajeev Chandrasekharan is talking about is Verizon's push internally to modernize the customer experience and to make it less frustrating.
The Verizon Business Markets CIO says that they are modernizing and becoming more customer-centric with the help of Salesforce CRM and other tools. Their goal is to ensure that the customer's concerns and information follow the customer regardless of who at Verizon the customer is talking to.
Rajeev Chandrasekharan, CIO of Verizon Business Markets, recently discussed how they are reimagining the customer experience at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco:
Our industry is seeing a lot of need for transformation and if you really look at it there are three different pillars. One is we're engineered for scale and not for speed to market. We do something well and we are big and now that whole equation is changing with needing to get to the market quickly with products. The second aspect is we’ve been around for a while and use different kinds of technologies and we need to refresh them so we need to start using some of the cooler capabilities that exist.
Lastly, there's a lot of pressure on us with all the other industries, the digital unicorns, trying to provide this amazing customer experience and it's not good enough now just to provide service or be a commodity. The intersection of those three needs is creating a need for a huge digital transformation.
My role here in Verizon Business Markets is while we launch new products try to build digital business and try to leverage all of this technology and customer experience while we penetrate newer customer segments.
Generally, when you do a digital transformation there's a lot of work and a lot of investment and the question companies always have is how much is it worth to go change everything that I've done? Luckily for us since we have multiple business units we pick the small business unit and said we see a tremendous potential here for new products and for penetration of the market so the investment is well justified. So go, do not compromise on things, drive this digital mobile first omnichannel thinking to the extreme and build something that's like a beacon for all the other business units to follow.
We've taken this to a place where revenue is going to be generated and when you have a promise of being able to grow the top-line it's easy to justify all the work that goes into it. The other aspect is we've got a lot of buy-in from the top on trying to do things differently, so we've tried to put together a few rules of how we want to operate. We call them the big rules. Then build on that, where we're trying to make sure the whole organization is saying, don't fall into the trap of doing things the old way and make sure we focus on these big rules. Culturally and then opportunity wise Verizon Business Markets, the small business segment, becomes a fantastic place to try out this concept and we're going all-out.
This is a customer-centric digital transformation. We started with the customer, we looked at the product research, we looked at the capabilities and then we decided what platform we wanted and what processes we can change. We also challenged ourselves by saying that we need to break our own rules and do something different. For example, if you're going to get into a house differently and you can't get to through the window, you can't build another door, you can't break in and you have got to use the key, then different about it? We challenge ourselves to break those rules.
That customer in mindset is what we are struggling with and that's the one thing I would say that we didn't have, the digital native aspect, the customer-centric aspect as much. We have that in our service, in our network, and in our products, we have amazing stuff. When we top it off with this we're going to be in a good place.
I think we have amazing products and services so innovation is constantly going to happen there. The two things that I see is operations are going to become digital with artificial intelligence and those sort of new age technologies, which is very important for you to be competitive in the marketplace or you're not going to survive against your competition. Then, the most important thing is the way you go to deliver capabilities to a customer.
We have to humanize technology. The customer is basically saying what do you think, what do you say, what do you do, and we then turn it into some garble technology talk. We need to operate as a digital entity and make the customer feel like we as a company are doing one-on-one personal services for you in think, say, and do.
We're giving you intelligent recommendations, executing your orders, and we are communicating with you effectively. That is going to almost take you back to the olden days of manual stuff which were one-on-one but without the human and instead with technology. That is the sweet spot for us going forward.
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The Salesforce AppExchange is where companies can find third-party applications that run on and integrate with the Salesforce platform. David Schmaier, CEO and Founder of Vlocity, a Forbes Cloud 100 Company, says that Vlocity is the fastest company ever built on the Salesforce AppExchange and the Salesforce platform.
Companies leverage Vlocity Industry Cloud apps to extend the power of the Salesforce platform.
Vlocity CEO and founder David Schmaier discussed his companies amazing rise in an interview at Dreamforce:
Vlocity is the single fastest company ever built on the Salesforce AppExchange and the Salesforce platform. The app exchange has 4,000 companies that do basically everything you can do possibly with the world's number one CRM platform and cloud platform Salesforce. What we do is we build five industry verticals on top of the Salesforce platform; communications and media, insurance, healthcare, government, and our newest addition is the energy business. We take what our regulated businesses and we make them digital.
I came to my first Dreamforce in 2013 and I was looking around for opportunities. Some friends had built a company called Veeva, which is the biggest company ever built on the Salesforce platform and they do pharmaceutical and life sciences CRM. I came to Dreamforce to find the next Veeva and when I found was astonishing. Back then there were around 2,700 companies on the AppExchange and I saw CPQ, CGI, Middleware and Document Management, but no other industry vertical applications.
There was only one back then and yet it was the largest company ever built on the Salesforce platform and the only one to go public. You didn't need to be a Ph.D. in computer science to figure out that there was an opportunity to build another Veeva, a bigger Veeva, which we call Vlocity.
We named the company Vlocity because we're fast, but we try and we're trying to improve the agility of our customers. A good example of this is last night we were with New York Life Insurance which has rolled out about 18,000 users of Salesforce and Vlocity in about a year and they do it all in a mobile-first way.
Before they would go in and talk to you about life insurance in your kitchen with pen and paper and now they just tap on their phone to sell life insurance. We've taken the whole process and made it mobile first and made it digital so they can connect with their customers in a whole new way. That's the kind of capabilities that we provide for people. We call it digital, we call it agile and it's all available now on the mobile device.
We're announcing two new mobile products. The first is a visual studio where I can point and click and drag and drop and I can put in a companies logo and I can build high fidelity rich mobile apps and I can deploy them really really fast versus having to custom build them. We simplify the development process and allow you to point-and-click and put your colors and your branding and your logo and roll out very high fidelity mobile apps.
The second part is we're coming up out with a new app for consumers so that when I want to browse my bill or look at my usage or add devices or buy the new iPhones that just came out I can do that all from a branded consumer mobile app that's that comes out of the box and ready for use. We're doing a lot of things in the mobile-first area.
I'm excited about Salesforce’s big announcement this week where Einstein and Siri are now best friends. We were in parallel working on these mobile apps and because our software's all built 100% native and additive on the Salesforce platform all that great work Salesforce is doing with Einstein and Siri we get for free.
Now we can ask Siri questions about paying the bill or understanding usage or adding the new iPhone and I can do that all through the voice capabilities that Salesforce has added to the platform. The platform keeps getting better with analytics, with Einstein, now Einstein meets Siri, and we're just thrilled to be part of this great ecosystem.
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One of the greatest values of data visualization tools is being to connect different types of data tables to calculate results, illustrate trends, or discover outliers. Relationships between your tables are necessary to create these connections.
Relationships in Power BI have multiple configurations, including cardinality and cross-filter direction, which determine the way that your tables connect and interact with each other.…
The post How to Join Many to Many with a Bridge Table in Power BI appeared first on Seer Interactive.
Google Analytics comes with a lot of great out of the box features, and allows you to easily:
To do these analyses, you naturally use some of GA’s standard dimensions to find what you need.…
The post What to Do with 200 Custom Dimensions in GA360 appeared first on Seer Interactive.
Digital marketing is changing and adidas is working to make it integral in connecting with their customers and to really change their lives in a positive way. Joseph Godsey, Head of Digital Brand Commerce at addidas, says that "The beauty is with digital is we can create relationships at scale."
The company is reaching out and connecting with customers in a personalized way via their app that they launched last year and have recently announced major new features.
Joseph Godsey, Head of Digital Brand Commerce at adidas discusses the company's new digital marketing strategy at Dreamforce:
We spend a lot of time really listening to consumers in focus groups and through lots of studies in order to really understand what their needs are and how we can serve them better, particularly using our digital channel. It started really with our core belief as a company that through sport we have the power to change lives.
Then we asked ourselves the question if digital is a focus and clear priority for us how does digital actually bring that core to belief to life? The beauty is with digital we can create relationships at scale. We can really connect with the consumer and match their needs using digital in a way that we could never do before.
When we talk about interacting with the consumer we look at how we can make a difference in their game, in their life, and in their world. We look at how we can hit home on all of those fears and then ultimately in digital create an experience that's premium, connected, and personalized.
Premium is about inspiring love for the brand and desire for the products. Connected is about taking all the touch points that they can interact with us in a physical or in an online environment, and there are a lot, that we're actually seamless and really interacting with them in a consistent way. Personalized, because in our brand there are so many sports to talk about, but I need to talk with you about what's relevant for you, not what's relevant for someone else.
I can’t just blast out a communication anymore and hope that it's interesting for you. I need to respect the interactions we've had together across any touch point and make sure I bring what's relevant to you in that particular context but also what's interesting in terms of your profile. We really want to create that relationship that creates value and meaning that hits home on what's most interesting for the consumer.
We have some exciting news that we'll talk about during Dreamforce this week which is about a new membership program that we're launching in the US and then later will expand that in other countries. It gives us the ability to really engage and hit home on what's most interesting for a consumer. They might be looking for value, they might be looking for experiences, or they might look to actually give back and be part of broader causes. Depending on what's most interesting to them we can expose that in our ecosystem and reward them for those interactions but also give them the chance to interact as well.
I think to be relevant in today's world with the proliferation of brands and experiences that are out there we have to have something that's really meaningful that consumers will come back to again and again. They have to also see how we are represented as a brand and have a way to interact and connect with that as well. We're looking across all the experience to have something that's sticky and makes it seamless and easy to use. If you want to buy something you can do it quickly and easily but we also make the experience a positive one.
We launched the app last year and we've now rolled it out in 18 countries which is a very small space of time for a massive global rollout but also expanding the features and the capabilities in the app. It's a great example where we really tried to change the paradigm and how we develop things because when we initially launched the app we put out there a starting point, we had a very clear strategy how the app would enable us to create a connection with the consumer to be even more personalized. For instance, with the newsfeed, they can really surface what's personally relevant for that consumer where we can talk with them about new releases and new things that are coming.
At the same time, we only launched it as a starting point, so almost like we put out the very first version of a car. We wanted consumers to give us feedback in mass. We did consumer testing to build the app extensively but when you really get it out there and people start using it they tell you what's really interesting and what they want more of. Through that experience we realized some of the things that we might prioritize in our backlog, actually, we need to elevate some other topics that are more important to the consumer.
I think for us ultimately with our digital strategy the first part is how do we create that ever-tightening relationship that has meaning and value from a consumer perspective and really hits home on those three pillars of premium, connected, and personalized. How do you really surface that in a meaningful way?
Take something like a product description. How do we really have the product descriptions and offerings so that if you're interested in sports we will help you find exactly the product that you need for the sport that you're interested in? We will also educate you and bring you back at different points in time to help you find out what you need when you need it, or with an engagement program. Ultimately, like the membership program, that it has something that's sticky, that you can give back to something, even more, you can participate in events and experiences.
For us, a lot of it’s really deepening those experiences but also exploring new technologies and new areas. Omnichannel was kind of the original wave which happened and I said it was the freight train that came past us a couple of years ago. Now we're also looking at what those next freight trains are, whether it's technologies like blockchain or experiencing picking up a new channel. For example, we're working extensively with Salesforce on automation, how we can automate consumer experiences. Take something as simple as a consumer service interaction. How do I make it so easy for you, no matter if you talk with us via Messenger, WhatsApp, online, or in the app itself, that we can respond to those questions fast and easy but not have to have thousands of agents all the time on the call?
I would say the interesting complexity but also the opportunity comes from that connected sphere. How do you connect all of those different things that are relevant? If you participate in one of our communities how do we also reward that interaction through a membership program? How do we build that seamlessly into a sales or commercial experience as well? That's really part of that opportunity and that multi-year journey that we're on and really expanding.
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What if going to a store was easier than shopping online where you could just walk in and pick up your purchases and walk out with payment happening all in the background?
You have heard about Amazon's cashierless stores, Amazon Go, and their plans to open thousands of those stores in the coming years. Now there are startups that intend to bring this concept to all stores by providing a software platform and a technology solution to retailers.
Zippin Co-founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri talked about the technology behind his new checkout-free solution in a recent CNBC profile:
At Zippin, our mission is to banish checkout lines for good. You can simply walk in, check-in when you enter, pick up whatever you want, and simply walk out. If there was somebody that actually was able to follow a customer around the store and see what they were picking and just took a note of that information and then when they walked out simply just gave them a bill, it would be very convenient for the customer.
We use overhead cameras that look straight down and get a bird's-eye view of the entire store. That allows us to uniquely identify customers and we use that information to also understand which items they're picking from the shelf and which ones they're putting back. This information is paired with sensors that are on the shelf that worked with the cameras to accurately identify which products cart picked.
As we've seen in the online world where ecommerce customers can actually see which product you've clicked on how long you actually considered it or whether you put it in the cart or taking it out, there will be retailers that will be responsible in the way they use that information.
In addition to supermarkets and grocery stores, we're also getting a lot of interest from hotels, airports, stadiums, and commercial buildings. For the first time, this technology allows you to operate a store more cost efficiently. We expect more of these smaller stores to appear in residential complexes and office buildings where there was nothing other than just a vending machine and some salty snacks before.
Our next step is to actually take the technology to an existing retailer and implement it in their stores. I would say five to ten years you should expect every store will be checkout free.
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South China Morning Post CEO Gary Liu recently gave a Ted Talk explaining the staggering growth of the Chinese internet and how it is rapidly changing millions of lives for the better. What’s especially fascinating is how impactful their internet growth has been for the Chinese migrant workers and the poor and how this is only the beginning.
There are still 600 million Chinese offline, their wages are rising too which means their spending power is a huge opportunity for internet startups.
South China Morning Post CEO Gary Liu talks about the impact of 772 million Chinese that are now on the internet:
Once every 12 months, the world's largest human migration happens in China. Over the 40 day travel period of Chinese New Year 3 billion trips are taken as families reunite and celebrate. The most strenuous of these trips are taken by the country's 290 million migrant workers for many of whom this is the one chance a year to go home and see parents and children they left behind.
Travel options are very limited with plane tickets costing nearly half of their monthly salary, so most of them choose the train. Their average journey is 700 kilometers, the average travel time is over 15 hours and the country's tracks now have to handle 390 million travelers every Spring Festival.
Until recently, migrant workers would have to queue for long hours, sometimes days, just to buy tickets often only to be fleeced by scalpers and they still had to deal with near stampede conditions when travel day finally arrived, but technology has now started to ease this experience. Mobile and digital tickets now account for 70% of sales, greatly reducing the lines at train stations, digital ID scanners have replaced manual checks expediting the boarding process, and artificial intelligence is deployed across the network to optimize travel routes.
New solutions have been invented, China's largest taxi hailing platform Didi Dache launched a new service called Hitch which matches car owners are driving home with passengers looking for long-distance routes. In just its third year Hitch served 30 million trips in this past holiday season, the longest of which was further than 1500 miles. That's about the distance from Miami to Boston.
About a year and a half ago I moved from my home in New York City to Hong Kong to become the CEO of the South China Morning Post and from this new vantage point. I've observed something that is far less familiar to me, propelling so much of China's innovation and many of its entrepreneurs is an overwhelming need economy that is serving an underprivileged populace which has been separated for thirty years from China's economic boom.
The stark gaps that exist between the rich and the poor, between urban and rural, or the academic and the unschooled, these gaps form a soil that's ready for some incredible empowerment. When capital and investment become focused on the needs of people who are hanging to the bottom rungs of an economic ladder that's when we will start to see the internet truly become a job creator.
Because of the country's sheer scale and status as a rising superpower, the needs of its population have created an opportunity for a truly compelling impact. When explaining the rapid growth of the Chinese tech industry, many observers will cite two reasons. The first is the 1.4 billion people that call China home.
The second is the government's active participation, or pervasive intervention, depending on how you view it. The central authorities have spent heavily on network infrastructure over the years creating an attractive environment for investment at the same time they've insisted on standards and regulation, which has led to fast consensus and therefore fast adoption.
The world's largest pool of tech talent exists because of the abundance of educational incentives. Local domestic companies in the past have been protected from international competition by market controls. Of course, you cannot observe the Chinese internet without finding widespread censorship and very serious concerns about dystopian monitoring.
Yet the Internet has continued to grow and it is so big, much bigger than I think most of us realize. By the end of 2017, the Chinese internet population had reached 772 million users. It's larger than the populations of the United States, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, France, and Canada combined. Also, 98 percent of them are active on mobile and 92 percent used messaging apps. There are now 650 million digital news consumers and 580 million digital video consumers.
The country's largest ecommerce platform Alibaba now boasts 580 million monthly active users. It's about 80 percent larger than Amazon. On-demand travel between bikes and cars now account for 10 billion trips a year in China. That's two-thirds of all trips taken around the world. So it's a very mixed bag the internet exists in a restricted, arguably manipulated from within China, yet it is massive and has vastly improved the lives of its citizens. Even in its imperfection, the growth of the Chinese Internet should not be dismissed and it's worthy of our closer examination.
As the Chinese Internet continues to grow, even in its imperfection and restrictions and controls, the lives of its ones forgotten populations have been irrevocably elevated. There is a focus on populations of need, not of want, that has driven a lot of the curiosity, the creativity, and the development that we see. There's still more to come.
In America, internet penetration has now reached 88 percent. In China, the Internet has still only reached 56 percent of the populace. That means there are over 600 million people who are still offline and disconnected. That's nearly twice the US population and an enormous opportunity.
Wherever this alternative fuel exists, be it in China or Africa or Southeast Asia or the American heartland we should endeavor to follow it with capital and with effort driving both economic and societal impact all over the world. Just imagine for a minute what more could be possible if the global needs of the underserved become the primary focus of our inventions.
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The European Union is on the prowl again in a likely attempt to win cash and concessions from Amazon. This is another investigation in a long string of investigations into American companies designed to extract big cash payments.
European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, indicates that the issue is the possible use of third-party seller data by Amazon to determine which products it might decide to produce and sell itself, thus competing and presumably putting out of business the other sellers of that product. Vestager admits that there have been no formal complaints from resellers but they "have people" coming to them and asking questions about this issue.
European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager discussed their investigation on CNBC's Closing Bell:
It's too early to have a concern but we like to understand how this is working because Amazon has this dual role, they host a lot of little guys and enabling them to do e-commerce which is a great thing, at the same time they're a big guy in the same market. How do they treat the data that they get from the little guy? Does that give them an advantage that cannot be matched or how to understand this?
We have concerns from the marketplace and we have seen this also in a sector-wide inquiry so so we're very interested to learn also in deep detail how this works.
One thing is to enable the little guy to do business. It's another thing that once you have enabled it and you see how it works in the marketplace basically you take it and because you're a big guy you do large scale so you can sort of occupy that marketplace yourself. We have people coming to us with concerns but no formal complaints have been filed from third-party sellers.
We have already had one Amazon case on eBooks, on German and English spoken eBooks. We saw that Amazon was saying if you as one of our suppliers do something innovative, if you lower your prices or something like that, you always have to give us the same benefit and that, of course, made it very difficult for the eBooks market to innovate.
If you always have to give Amazon whatever you have then of course that puts a lid to innovation. That we solved in a settlement actually covering ebooks in almost all segments.
It's important that the price point is right because for many people on a low budget, of course, low prices is of the essence and enabling choice is a great thing. We also want to see that innovation is thriving because being a customer in an innovative marketplace is, of course, better than being a customer in a non-innovative marketplace.
This is what we're trying to understand how does this work and of course, it may turn out that we have no further questions to be asked but that remains to be seen.
We've had a very good meeting today with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons and others from the FTC, and we didn't discuss in any detail these questions. What we discussed is our cooperation which is actually very good because we exchange views, but we don't try to walk in each other's shoes.
Of course, we expect a change of behavior because the decision is a cease-and-desist decision, you have to stop this and you cannot put anything in its place that has an equivalent effect. This is about enabling choice for the ones who produces our phone so that that maybe you can have a phone that carries other apps when you have the out-of-the-box experience.
That is important for us to see this change in the marketplace to show that those who actually have the skills maybe to do another operating system from the Android open source code that they may be able to do that. The fine will have to be paid and then of course it is for Google to decide if they will appeal the case or not.
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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently talked about the upcoming White House meeting which Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint are all expected to attend. The FCC Chairman says that it’s vital that we eliminate the local regulatory hurdles that are currently preventing 5G from being implemented in the US.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai via CNBC’s Squawk on the Street:
We want America to lead the world in 5G just as we led the world in 4G. That, of course, takes private sector initiative but also requires government to set the stage in terms of getting the tools for the industry to use out there into the marketplace.
First, we want to outline a cross-government strategy, not just the FCC, but the entire Trump Administration is going to be on the same page in terms of asserting US leadership in 5g. We hope to learn from the industry is what are some of the necessary building blocks for 5g? We want America to be the home for innovation and investment for the next generation of wireless connectivity. We need to know what policies are needed in order to promote US leadership and I'm hoping it'll be a very productive exchange.
I think there's a strong case for optimism about it being sooner. We already see some of the nation's biggest companies doing 5G trials and cities like Indianapolis. We see a lot of investment and innovation in some of the tech sectors but there's also a reason to be concerned because we see a lot of the regulatory barriers to 5G deployment in terms of the infrastructure that is needed to get out there into the marketplace.
These regulations are holding back the case for a 5G deployment. That's part of the reason why the FCC has been focused on what I call our 5G Fast Plan - Facilitating America's Superiority in 5G Technology. If we get the spectrum out there, incentivize infrastructure deployment, and modernize our regulations, I'm confident that we can hasten the day when Americans can turn to 5G just as they've come to rely on 4G.
We want to set the table so that every company, big and small, and regardless of where they happen to be trying to put deploy these 5G services, will be able to do so at scale in order to serve American consumers.
By far the biggest barrier is the domestic regulatory barriers that we face. For example, it takes one to two hours to install a small cell on a utility pole that's necessary for 5G. In some cases, it can take a year or two years to get the regulatory approval for deploying that small cell. That by far is one of the greatest barriers to getting the wide-scale deployment of 5G technologies in the future.
Additionally, the spectrum that is necessary to get out into the marketplace has been a barrier. We've been working aggressively to fix that and we've already teed-up over the next year or so more spectrum for the commercial sector use then all of the mobile broadband providers today hold combined. I think those building blocks domestically are much more important for 5G in order to be deployed at scale.
China saw the success that the United States had in 4G and they want to claim that success for themselves. When it comes to 5G we want the United States to be the haven for innovation and investment not just out of some parochial concern but because we truly believe in a free and open Internet and the power of innovation and in the importance of the private sector leading this revolution. We think that this market-based approach is a superior one.
We, of course, don't want to cede the mantle of wireless leadership to any other country and our concern is that if China is the first mover in 5G that they will be able to draw some of that capital, some of that talent, and ultimately some of that innovation to their shores.
I think about some of the applications here in terms of precision agriculture and telemedicine and the Internet of Things and all kinds of other applications we can't even conceive today. All that could be on tap if we make the right decisions here in the United States and I think that's going to be a boon for American consumers and for our Internet economy.
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If you’ve visited our Team page recently, you likely have noticed some new faces. That’s because WebDevStudios (WDS) has added four new people to our crew: Haris Zulfiqar, Frontend Engineer; Dave Bonds, Backend Engineer; and Allen McNichols and Chrispian Burks, both who are working as Support Technicians at Maintainn, the WordPress maintenance and support arm of WDS.
Even though we work remotely, our WDS family is close-knit. We even stay in touch after hours and on the weekends, sharing food pics and tidbits about life events. So when we add new faces to our team, we get super excited. And we’re especially excited about introducing you to our new teammates. Get to know them now!
Haris Zulfiqar
Haris’ interest in web development was sparked by an interest in learning how online games were created, which then led him to a programming forum. His pursuit of knowledge led him to the creation of several websites just for the fun of it, which eventually led him to earning his first income online. After several years of experience as a freelancer working on WordPress, he created several commercial WordPress themes including Avada, the most popular WordPress theme on ThemeForest, before eventually landing a career as a full-time web developer.
Dave Bonds
Dave discovered WordPress in 2008 and fell in love with web development and open-source software. Prior to that, he created his first website all the way back in 1994 and ended up starting his own computer repair business in 2003. But it was after his discovery of WordPress that he went on to become the first employee at Agent Evolution–a leader in the WordPress real estate space–then became Director of Web Design, and finally CTO and minority owner in the company. It was there that he met and worked with WDS Director of Engineering, Greg Rickaby. Dave has been a fan of the work WebDevStudios has done for years.
Allen McNichols
At eight years old, Allen took apart his first computer and put it back together. It was an IBM Clone 286. In 1997, a call came in from a relative in Washington who had managed to delete her entire hard drive and could not get her computer to boot from the CD-ROM. Over the course of about two hours over the phone, Allen was able to walk her step by step through getting it back up and running with Windows 95 reinstalled. He was only 13. Suffice to say, Allen is destined for a great future by combining his skills for technology and helping others. Prior to joining WDS, Allen worked as phone support with IDX Broker and later filled the role of support technician for Agent Evolution.
Chrispian Burks
Chrispian has done a little bit of everything in IT including running PC support, running an ISP, co-founding the blog network 451 Press as well as communities for writers Lit.Org and WritingForums.com. He started using WordPress back when it was b2/Cafelog, and for all the sites on the 451 Press network (just over 500 of them) and wrote tools to help integrate with phpBB, DirectAdmin and custom provisioning code as well as some small plugins related to advertising and running the network. WordPress has been his go-to content management system ever since. He especially loves how easy it makes building new projects for fun and for clients.
Working at WDS is a rewarding experience that includes remaining actively involved with the WordPress community, interacting with great clients, and establishing nurturing friendships and lifelong memories. If this is a company culture you would like to be a part of, check out our Careers page and submit an application today.
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An internal link is a hyperlink pointing to a page within the same domain. Internal linking is crucially important for both website rankings and usability:
*This has never been officially confirmed by Google (unless I missed the announcement) but we’ve seen web pages doing considerably better once we add internal in-links pointing to it, so let’s say this one is an educated theories backed by multiple experiments.
Now, the question is however how to use internal links correctly. Let’s see…
I won’t repeat what Rand said in this Whiteboard Friday video because I agree with most (all?) points. But let me recap:
Surprisingly, given the amount of weight SEOs put on internal linking, there are not many tools that allow you to see internal structure clearly. Yes, there a few powerful crawling solutions including this free one as well as one of my favorite ones Screaming Frog.
But there’s no easy way to analyze how each specific landing page is linked to throughout the site.
Jet Octopus solves that problem by introducing Linking Explorer feature. Crawl your site using Jet Octopus and open the Linking Explorer section (Behind “Explorer” link in the navigation). From there you can provide the URL of your (or your competitor’s) landing page to see how exactly it is linked to from other pages on the site.
I love the section of the report that shows in-linking anchor text. This gives you a great insight:
Apart from anchor text, there’s a more beautiful way to signal Google of your internal structure by linking: Schema.org
Some of Schema.org properties have been confirmed by Google as impacting the way they interpret websites (at least the way the page look when listed in SERPs). Others are presumably helping, because, as confirmed by Google, structured data in general helps Google understand websites better and it may even be a ranking factor.
So when using internal linking which Schema.org properties can be implemented?
Google says marking up breadcrumbs using Schema.org is one of the enhancement tools that could positively influence your website’s organic visibility and engagement (i.e. click-through)
[Indicate the position of each URL in the site’s hierarchy using BreadcrumbList]
There are a variety of WordPress plugins allowing you to easily implement the markup, including this one.
Even though Google’s authorship has been discontinued (meaning authors are no longer highlighted in search results), that experiment revealed two things:
That being said, making their life easier never hurts, so marking up internal bio links using Schema.org/author is a smart idea.
Another way to stand out is search is getting intro those search carousals. Officially, Google supports list format for the following content types: Recipe, Film, Course, Article. However, as they confirm, this list is ever growing, so marking up your product lists is not a bad idea.
[Here is an example of a list from a single website shown in a carousel]
Reviews get huge SERPs visibility. It’s one of the oldest rich snippets Google has been experimenting with and today Google supports a variety of types, including “including businesses, products, and different creative works such as books or movies. ” Here’s a solid collection of WordPress plugins for each supported type depending on what it is you are doing. All of the plugins in that list are Schema.org-based.
Google recommends using schema.org/URL whenever you want to point them to the page with the full review.
Again, whether Google is currently supporting a certain Schema.org type or not, it’s always worth thinking “What else should I do to help them understand your site easier”
Besides, Google has stated it many times that they are working on supporting new and new schema properties including FAQ and HOW-to (just recently). So whenever you are working on creating or editing pages, consider Schema.org properties that make sense there. For example, you can:
What internal linking tactics are you using to maximize your website’s organic visibility? Please share in the comments!
How big of an impact content marketing can create isn’t new, but how we think and talk about it is constantly evolving. Ultimately, the ongoing concern is how to keep your content current and valuable for your audience.
To do this well takes time and money, but in today’s digital age, there is help: machine learning. This subset of artificial intelligence is impacting almost every industry, including automobile (self-driving cars), advertising (spam detection), finance, retail, etc., but content marketing is one of the most exciting potential use cases for machine learning.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are fascinating in that they benefit every facet of content marketing. Specifically, through advanced machine learning technology, the process of creating content marketing strategies becomes easier.
In this article, I’ll walk you through how AI and ML are transforming content marketing.
Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence where computer algorithms are programmed to learn on their own from new and large sets of data (“Big Data”) in order to perform certain actions. These self-driving systems adapt and change their actions based on historical data and patterns, and the more crucial information they gather, the more accurate they become.
Through Big Data, machine learning can analyze data, create insights, and help build a personalized strategy, which means that content marketers will have a better chance of creating valuable, effective, and/or personalized content that’s easy to find on the SERPs and can get more engagements.
Machine learning can perform beyond simple content creation; it can enable marketers to better use that material for more impact. For example, ML tools can analyze both competitor strategies and user behavior to determine the best approach to engage with potential customers.
Learn More:
Machine learning algorithms can be used effectively for better productivity. Repetitive, mundane or time-consuming tasks like keyword analysis – collecting the highest search volume keywords with the lowest keyword difficulty – can be done quickly by intelligent automation.
This means that you will be able to focus more of your time and energy on content writing. As long as you provide the underlying information, which requires knowing the procedures, the mundane part can be done by ML. And you can optimize this procedure for better results by using the right data-powered CMS (content management system), such as Scoop:
Content marketing tools help with optimizing and manage the creation, curation, distribution, sharing, monitoring and sourcing of content. These tools also help businesses to plan, track and manage activities.
With a traditional content marketing strategy, creating customized content for different demographics to satisfy specific customer search intent is a huge effort.
These days, personalization is a hot trend in digital marketing and with the help of ML technology, you can gather very precise data about your audience. Based on user interaction with content, machine learning algorithms can foresee what kinds of subjects they are interested in. Therefore, you can better understand your customers’ needs and provide specific solutions for them.
Based on the user’s behavior, the machines will categorize the audience into groups and predict how these groups respond to specific events. It encourages you to make personalized content for every stage of the buyer’s journey and is an important feature for one-to-one marketing.
Here are some tools for targeted and personalized content:
To write in-depth and valuable content, finding the search intent of the audience is the crucial element. AI gathers important data like trending topics and popular search queries on the search engines and predicts the future (at least content-wise!) of your audience.
Content writers can go through many, many articles to find the best topic ideas to write on and figure out how to write it better than their competitors. It usually takes a lot of time. In this case, machines can help you find trending and quality content that is getting the highest social engagement in real time, providing insight into which topics are useful for a specific audience.
Through TFIDF, computers can also comprehend the subject of each article and when blended with Latent Dirichlet, writers can create better content than even the top-performing articles.
Digital marketing success depends on gathering and analyzing the results and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It is an essential factor to enhance your content marketing strategy.
The use of data tracking entirely depends on predicting the future based on historical behavior – which is what ML computers are trained to do, based on real-time data.
Sometimes you might miss an important keyword in your content optimizations. Or your article could be an exceptional fit as a backlink on another writer’s article – that you’re unaware of. With these kinds of data-based recommendations, computers can help elevate your content marketing strategy.
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A content marketing strategy should always be based on analysis rather than guesswork because creating an article that nobody is interested in reading is just a waste of time. Your budget can then be spent on more important things because of this improved work processes.
Machine learning can deliver instructions to create a data-driven strategy and help ideate good content. As computers can do repetitive tasks quickly and efficiently, that frees you up in terms of both time and money spent. For example, you won’t need to use as many tools to find the best keywords or create content or analyze performance, etc.
There are some great tools that allow you to perform the whole creation procedure within one single platform, such as Curata:
Curata uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to learn user preferences and find high-quality content. Once Curata finds the best content that matches those preferences, the system will automatically organize and contextualize it, and then publish and promote it. Curata offers data-driven insights to measure the impact on your audience so you can improve your content strategy accordingly.
Machine learning algorithms can understand the English language and provide guidelines to improve content, like detecting the passive voice or excluding clichés. They can also accomplish more advanced tasks.
Natural Language Generation (NLG) has the ability to translate data into human language so machines can comprehend the connection between data and text. Though some tools are designed to create content with just one click, they have their limitations: with automated content generation, the emotional touch is missing.
Automation plays an important role in allowing small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to stay competitive in this age of cutthroat competition. It has the capability to present specific content to targeted audiences and has been a distinct advantage for boosting ROI and reducing costs.
By implementing resources in a system that automatically oversees things like promotion, user management, planning, and more, small businesses can ensure better productivity, and increased revenue, and can save an incredible amount of time.
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With this feature, machines can recognize the content in images and videos. Some companies have already started experimenting with AI and video, and the results are quite exciting.
In 2016, IBM Watson made the first-ever “cognitive movie trailer” with AI for 20th Century Fox’s upcoming suspense/horror film Morgan. The machines analyzed the film, extracted the top action scenes as well as the quieter character moments, and created the trailer automatically. The outcome is exciting:
IBM Watson also generated last year’s U.S. Open match highlights for the first time. IBM used machine learning algorithms to teach their supercomputer, Watson, how to choose impactful moments from the match.
For instance, in the below image, the player Juan MartÃn del Potro raising his hands after winning a match represents the sort of moments Watson was taught to search for.
Below is a simple flowchart that clarifies how IBM Research was able to generate highlights from full match video footage using AI:
There are some automated cameras available in the market to produce this kind of video content. GoPro has developed a smart application called QuikStories which takes your GoPro 5 film and rapidly creates a shareable video.
Although this camera focuses on a particular type of user (those who use action cameras), the application has a lot of promise for things to come. Another alternative is SoloShot (a robot camera operator), which also offers automated editing tools.
Learn More:
Machines are incredible for gathering information and helping writers ideate, create, share and analyze more useful content for their targeted audiences. But don’t worry – although I am sure that using machine learning to create valuable content will be the standard soon, for now some human interaction is still required!
The post How Machine Learning Is Transforming Content Marketing appeared first on Single Grain.
In “How to Increase Click-throughs on Organic Search Listings,” I addressed the importance of compelling messages in organic snippets. In this article, I will dig deeper. I will explore how ...
The post Change Organic Search Snippets to Drive Motivated Buyers appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Target, Macy's and other retailers are already gearing up for the upcoming holiday season and the accompanying shopping madness. Insiders are anticipating a good season, thanks to consumer optimism and low unemployment. But can retailers find enough seasonal workers to fill their needs?
Target is aiming to hire 120,000 seasonal employees while Macy's plans to bring onboard 80,000. The Gap is reportedly looking for around 65,000 part-time workers. Meanwhile, delivery carriers are also looking for more workers in anticipation of the upcoming surge in online shopping. FedEx is hoping to sign up 55,000 extra hands while UPS will have room for 100,000 employees.
Unfortunately for retailers, finding extra employees won't be easy. The US job market is very worker-friendly at the moment, thanks to the record low unemployment rate. Job seekers now have more options and can afford to be picky about who they want to work for.
[Image source: TalkMarkets]
Because of this, a lot of businesses have implemented some strategies in the hopes of seducing seasonal employees. For instance, some retailers are offering customized incentives or hiring HR contractors. Others businesses are opting to give better training to their existing workers instead of hiring additional ones.
As a small business owner, you'll also need seasonal employees. However, the hiring strategies used by their large enterprises might not be effective for you. But that doesn't mean they can't compete. If your small business needs more workers for the holidays, here are a few strategies to help you fill your roster.
One of the best sources of temporary employees is through your current staff members. Tap into your team's network and ask for their help in looking for new teammates. The holiday season can be brutal and most small businesses won't have the luxury of replacing unreliable workers at this time of year. You'll have to hire trustworthy people and the best way of doing that is via personal referrals.
Implement an employee referral system for your small business. This will give you a consistent pipeline of candidates while keeping current staff happy with their referral incentives. Plus, employee retention tends to be higher with referred applicants.
Monetary incentives are often not enough to get a worker interested, especially in today's labor market. However, customizing your job offer and the perks that come with it can get you a nibble in the job pool.
Seasonal workers have a different motivation for taking on the job. They might need extra income for school, the position could be an internship they need, or maybe they have family commitments to meet. This also means a conventional schedule or payday might not cut if for them. Your new hires might ask to be paid daily or want the option to give you their preferred weekly schedule. Being flexible with your worker's schedule or incentive structure will go a long way in helping you to fill your job openings in time for the holidays.
College and university campuses are a great hiring ground for seasonal workers. Many students don't return home for the holidays and the majority look forward to earning money and getting some work experience during this time.
Businesses are also ensured of employees that are energetic, enthusiastic and well-educated. The holiday season is also an ideal time for students to work part-time or as interns as their position comes with a definite end date. It's a win-win situation. Boost your odds by advertising on campuses and posting on college job recruitment websites.
A job fair is one of the most efficient ways of sourcing contract workers. However, an event like this takes time to plan and organize. But when executed properly, you can connect with numerous candidates in a short period of time.
Join annual job fairs several months ahead of the season you want to hire for. This will give you enough time to select the best candidates and train them. Spread the word by advertising at local colleges, newspapers, and news stations. Make sure you also post your requirements on your website and through online job boards.
Don't limit yourself to conventional job pools or postings. There are numerous organizations or programs that you can reach out to for job placements. For instance, why not get in touch with organizations that work with ex-cons or the handicap?
A temporary HR contractor can also help fill your job openings. Recruiting is time-consuming and most many small businesses aren't able to outsource, interview and process applicants. An HR contractor can manage your staffing requirements so you'll have more time to focus on other critical tasks. What's more, an HR company knows how to select the best candidates for the job. And if you're lucky, your seasonal hire could become a permanent asset to your company.
Businesses hire millions of seasonal employees every year. While it's more challenging for small businesses to catch the attention of these workers, you can still do it. You'll just have to think outside the box and come up with creative tactics. Asking for employee referrals, being flexible with incentives and tapping college students are just some ways to secure hires and be productive during the holiday season.
[Featured image via Pexels]The post How to Find Seasonal Employees For Your Small Business When Unemployment is Low appeared first on WebProNews.
Amazon 4-Star is Amazon's first retail store focused on selling Amazon's products. The first of presumably many stores just opened in the Soho area of New York City and of course has made a big splash in the media. But what's special about this store and what makes it a unique shopping experience?
Amazon Physical Stores VP Cameron Janes answers that question in a Bloomberg interview:
What is uniquely different is that we really built this store around our customers. It’s a direct reflection of our customers, not just what they’re buying, but really what they’re loving.
Everything in the store is rated 4 star or above by our customers, is a top seller or is the newest trending on Amazon.com. Our goal is that customers can walk into this store and pick up anything and know that it is going to be a great product because customers online have already said so.
The average rating of products in this store is 4.4 stars and collectively we have about 1,800 products in the store and they earned 1.8 million 5 star reviews. These are really high-quality products that our customers love. The product with the most customer reviews in Amazon 4-Star is actually the Fire TV Stick with Alexa voice remote with over 197,000 customer reviews and it’s rated 4.4 stars.
Whenever your working offline you can’t have the endless aisle that you have online. When you are working offline you really have to curate and that’s actually what Amazon 4 star is all about. We have a highly curated selection from some of the top categories, the most popular categories on Amazon.com. We’ve got devices, electronics, kitchen, toys, home, and all of these hit that 4-star selection bar that we think is so important.
Here at 4-Star what we are trying to do is create an experience where customers can come in, browse, have fun shopping find products they love. With all of these experiences, we are trying to find more ways to connect with our customers. Of course, customers love to shop online, but a lot of customers love to shop offline as well. What we can do with these experiences is create a new type of shopping experiences and help them discover new products.
Another thing you can do in offline that you can’t do online is that customers can come in and touch the products themselves. Certainly, with our device category, customers can come in the store, play with the Fire TV, they can read on the Kindle, they can interact with the Amazon Echo and Alexa products and see how those products work in first person and make a more confident buying decision.
Our focus here is on connecting with customers and if customers come in here and discover products that they love, we know they will come back and over time that can be something big. That’s really what we are focused on today.
The post What is Uniquely Different About the New Amazon 4-Star Store? appeared first on WebProNews.
