SEO in 2013

After penguin update on 23rd May, 2013, it is realized that lot of changes will be visible in SEO. An SEO expert said that the local places listing, Google authorship and Google + page is playing a vital role in ranking. The websites that regularly update their website wither by posting events or by posting news/ blogs, get crawled time to time and will provide new content to the users. The new content will attract previous visitors to visit the website again and again.

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Technology

Home Based Business With ACN

Home Based Business With ACN

Create a home-based business with ACN by offering the essential products and services consumers and businesses use every day. Connect friends and family with essential services in some of the fastest growing industries, including Digital Phone Service, traditional Local & Long Distance, High Speed Internet, Wireless Services, Television, Home Security and Gas and Electricity.

Telecommuting "debunked"

But how much work are they doing back in the office?

Surprise! Telecommuting doesn't work. Or maybe it works too well, and telecommuters end up putting in far more hours than their office-bound coworkers. Or maybe both. It kind of depends on who you talk to. One thing is for certain: The shining future where we all happily telecommute to work from the comfort of our homes is far from a reality.

I freelance from home full-time now, but for several years at my last "real job" I telecommuted two days a week. I can vouch for the fact that all of the studies Slate cites are true, but in different ways.
 
The first problem with studying how well telecommuting works is that few jobs - if you really dig into the cold hard facts - have a baseline for productivity. Most employers don't know, and probably don't WANT to know, how little their employees are actually doing on a daily basis. It is shocking how little work gets done in an office. You realize this if you work from home on a piecework basis. 
 
Let's say I had a task that I knew would take me about four hours to complete when I was in the office. Inevitably if I took it home, it would only take me half that time. Sometimes less. Why? Because I was actually working on it, while my coworkers were updating their Facebook status, harvesting their crops in Farmville, standing outside smoking, flirting in the hallways, leaning on each other's cubicle walls discussing last night's sports game - basically doing anything but actual work.
 
Oh and let's include "attending meetings" on that list. Once you start working for yourself, you realize how much time is wasted in meetings. 
 
It's a staggering amount of time-wastage, frankly. And it's unfair to hold telecommuters up to some arbitrary threshold of productivity.
 
The other factor is that telecommuters know that they are on a short leash. You feel pressured to produce more, in order to justify working from home in your sweatpants. Working from home is the carrot; the threat of being pulled permanently back into the office is the stick. 
 
Combine that with the knowledge that instead of doing work, your coworkers are interacting with each other and thus building the social relationships that will help them get ahead. And what you have is a recipe for telecommuters working themselves to the bone, just to prove that they deserve to work from home. 
 
It's a broken system, and I hope we can find better ways to fix it than having the boss spy on every telecommuter's computer.

Don't be afraid to sell yourself

Marketing and building the brand that is you.

I wrote a post about sales skills on the Money Fest blog and this is what motivated me to do something similar here. Life is all about your ability to sell. You can have a great product and a wonderful market, but it is the selling part that is so crucial.

One of my first jobs out of college was sales. I want to say here that I hated it and would not tell most of my friends what my real job was. An ex-girlfriend found out somehow and ridiculed me for being a 'salesman.' I was considered a math genius and as an economics major from a top school, I had expected great things out of myself after graduating.

A few months in a tough job market and nothing productive happening with my highly selective job search, I decided to give it up and give sales a try. It wasn't really a choice as I needed to pay the bills every month and there was no other way.

I hit the ground running and was given a lot of encouragement and tips from a veteran. I have to say that dreaded sales position taught me a lot and I have already shared the business side on Money Fest. Here on this blog, I want to stress a couple of relevant things.

Keeping up with current affairs is very important and this can require considerable investment in time and money. My ultimate, personal career ambition is to manage a hedge fund and knowing about the ascent of Japanese stocks despite the Yen declining and tech stocks performing well this week, it is vital to portray not only my expertise but passion. Moreover, I want to look the part and that is why you can see me dressed in an Armani suit on occasion looking at Schwab stock tips on my iPad 3.

I also have my share of role models. It is important to have various people to gain inspiration from. You could see me on a Sunday afternoon reading carefully something like this that allows me to develop that tunnel vision.

I want to end by saying that we need to address the wants, needs and desires of our employers or future employers. I also feel that you might want to check out this 'Working at Home Talk' blog to really accelerate your career by giving more options and a better chance to build skills and experience in what you want to do.

Want to work for the next Facebook?

The Startup: The hottest thing going

Working at a startup is one of the best ways to get really rich with the wonderful stories of employees making lots of money in an IPO. The key to attracting the attention of a startup is to have soft skills and hard skills such as programming.

There has to be a feeling that anything can be done regardless of the shortage of resources. A go getter who has an entrepreneurial nature will be highly effective in a startup. Since you aren't going to be working for an established firm, you set your own rules. This can be a good and bad thing. The important thing is to be supremely confident in the knowledge you have that will make you a startup star.

One of the procedures to gain insights about what ticks in the Valley is to go onto LinkedIn and have a good look at the skills of the people working at startups across the country. Having a good knowledge of mid and large cap Internet companies such as Netflix, Vistaprint, Zillow, Pandora and Yelp will be extremely helpful. Additionally, reading up on blogs to find out as much as you can about Silicon Valley success stories will work well.

Being a skilled employee in a startup means that you should be able to do business development and software development at the same time. The shortage of workers with necessary skills and the less number of individuals willing to take the plunge at a startup means that any diverse skill set will be much sought after.

The skills is one thing. Marketing these skills to prospective employers and actually finding them is the hard task. Websites such as TechStars Boston and Sequoia Capital will definitely help in this regard.

Talking to friends that you made in college who struck you as having brilliant ideas is another way to getting a piece of the startup pie.

The rules not in the manual

Tips on how to find out about them before you stub your toe on one

In my experience in the world of working nine to five is that the manual they give you when you’re hired does not give you the whole shebang rules-wise, because there are company rules, and then there are company rules.   The ones they don’t tell you about until you stub your toe on them even though you’ve carefully read through the manual.   They can run from the mundane such as not being able to take a break in certain areas of the store to the downright insidious, like not being able to talk about spending your wages at a non-union store when you work at a unionized establishment during job shifts at the latter.     

   

The best way to prevent that from happening to you, especially in this current economic climate where any job you can get is gold, is to ask questions.   

Whether you are at an interview, on your orientation, or your first day on the job, ask questions in order to find out as much as possible rather than blindly trust in what you are told or what the manual says.

Say you come across a regulation saying all employees have to do this that or the other and you can’t find it in the employee handbook.   You could trust it blindly and obey just as enlightened, or you could ask just to make sure you and your employer are on the same page.   You might get managers who hem and haw when you ask, but don’t let it deter you.   You have a right to know why things are the way they are so you can adapt to your new work environment.  Or you could simply ask a knowledgeable co-worker as you get settled in something like “Okay, so just what are the rules around here the manual does not list?”  

No matter what questions you have to ask, doing so will pay you big dividends in avoiding needless headaches at work.

Tips to staying on task

How to be more productive at home.

Working at home is generally less stressful than working outside the home.  However, it does have its own set of challenges.  For me personally, I find one of the hardest challenges to be staying on task.

At home, there are so many things to distract me from being productive.  There are the house chores that are begging for attention.  Then there are the leisurely activities like talking on the cell phone or watching the shows on TV.  It can be very hard for me to even get started on my writing on certain days.

Even after I have already settled into position at my laptop, there are still plenty of things to distract me from what I have set out to get done.  There are the unanswered e-mails and the notifications from Facebook.  Then there are also the celebrity gossip websites and the many forums that I enjoy skimming through.  All of these things can cause me to lose focus, and make it harder for me to get my writing done.

After working from home for a while, I have learned how to stay on task and be more productive with my writing.  I have learned to schedule in breaks to allow for me to spend some time doing fun activities.  Then once the break is done and over with, I can focus on my work without much of an effort. 

Also, I often make promises to myself.  For instance, I would promise myself that once I have written at least half of what I needed to write for the day, I would give myself permission to login to the forums that I frequent.  That way I can avoid spending the whole morning doing nothing but reading post after post.  Plus knowing that I can do more leisurely activities later gives me more motivation to do my work faster.

Unexpectedly good jobs report

What do the numbers say?

President Obama wasted no time to tout the jobs report in a campaign and he must be wanting to get past the poor debate performance on Thursday. As a result, the unemployed rate dropped sharply.

The unemployment rate is not the best measure as it does not take into account discouraged workers in its calculation. Still, this is positive news because it is true that the economy has been steadily adding more jobs. Yet, Mitt Romney was quick to point out that a lot of people are simply staying at home and the unemployment rate should really be higher.

Even though the unemployment rate is far away from its desired level, there is sufficient evidence to show that the U.S. economy is indeed making progress. The Friday job numbers for September did instill some fear in the Republican camp with some going as far as saying that they were rigged in the hoping of changing the fortunes of the upcoming presidential election.

But voters can be assured that this is definitely not the case. Still, I want to know the size of the labor force. If the unemployment rate were to be reduced to six percent it would require 375,000 jobs to be added every month for as long as three years.

This is a difficult task for any administration and it could be attributed to a fall in the demand for U.S. exports that is responsible for the $600 billion trade deficit we currently face. Mitt Romney wants to tackle China's undervalued currency and look at other alternative oil reserves. These policies could create as much as five million jobs. The U.S. needs efforts like this for a prosperous future.

Nonetheless, economists are trying to take a good look at the numbers and see what the future holds.

Job talk

Mitt Romney promises 12 million new jobs in RNC speech.

This blog has mostly focused on getting back to work from an individual perspective. There has been that one instance on referring to the macroeconomy. In keeping with current events, I want to talk about jobs from a macroeconomic perspective. There will be a lot of talk about jobs as the presidential race enters its homestretch.

Why has the Obama administration been unable to properly address this issue and is Romney's plan realistic? Romney has been something of a flip-flopper and has scaled down his more ambitious jobs plan. But even the current one of 12 million new jobs comes to about 250,000 new jobs a month which is a bit out there given that the U.S. economy created 163,000 jobs in July.

There will be a lot of focus on jobs and the economy as both campaigns have a lot of cash to spend with Romney having the advantage there. Romney's successes at Bain Capital are both an advantage and a disadvantage as the Obama campaign has painted him as a profit driven, job-killing businessman. But I think that this is not true as being a businessman is a different job to being the President.  

Romney has a lot of facts that can be used against President Obama with a lot of the new jobs being created since he came to office being low-paying. This is contributing to the shrinking of the middle class.

The Federal Reserve is hoping to stimulate growth through a process known as QE - quantitative easing. Keeping interest rates low by funding asset purchases like bonds will increase borrowing and spending that can reduce the unemployment rate of 8.3 percent.

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