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Twitter Chats - A Great Place To Learn
I find Twitter chats invaluable for finding stuff out, and for staying in touch with people who share my interests.
I’m also an avid business learner, so I was delighted when Best Colleges Online sent me a list of the best Twitter chats for people interested in business.
Here’s a link so you can have a look at it: 50 Best Twitter Chats For Business Students read more »
Developing Your Employees
This is a guest post from Archan Mehta.
When it comes to staff development, employees were once pawns in the hands of the company.
In the company's wisdom, employees would do well if they were sent away for a course. As their careers progressed, employees assembled an impressive list of courses they had attended. However, the learning that took place was sketchy. Not only that, it was infrequently measured by companies.
Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net 
In recent times, however, employees have needed a broad range of skills. So, picking off skills is no longer enough. Employees need to be more selective and focussed when it comes to development. Thus, companies encourage managers to examine their own strengths and weaknesses in order to develop skills for the future. read more »
Winning Over The Customer
It’s a business trend that drives me mad! So many companies have irritated me beyond belief in recent years by not rewarding my loyalty with good service and sensible pricing. It’s become almost par for the course to have to change your mobile phone, insurance and television providers every year in order to take advantage of some “new customer” special. This is another great guest post from Archan Mehta.
In an era of less that satisfactory customer service, I was intrigued by how some companies seem to buck this trend. Later, I found a phrase that finally made sense--customer loyalty.
Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net 
Most companies focus their marketing efforts on obtaining customers with little attention to keeping them. By contrast, research suggests that there is a high degree of correlation between customer retention and profitability.
Established customers tend to buy more, are predictable and usually cost less to service than new customers. Furthermore, they tend to be less price sensitive and may provide free word-of-mouth advertising and referrals. read more »
The Feature That Makes Google Plus A Game Changer
Google have had several false starts in trying to launch a social media platform, and the latest is Google Plus. It’s currently in beta, and I’ve been using it for a few days with a bunch of other people.
It’s basically the same as Facebook. You can:
- Write “posts”
- Upload images or video
- Add links to other content
- Share other people’s posts
- Comment on other people’s posts
But here’s the major difference:
Circles read more »
Shamrock Company
This is a guest post from Archan Mehta
I want to open with a pun: Charles is a handy man to have around! In that light, let's take a look at some of Charles Handy's ideas, which are interesting and capture our imagination.
Behind the changes in the way we work and perceive work is the emergence of what Handy labels "the Shamrock company."
By his own admission, there is nothing revolutionary in this concept. In fact, many companies and businesses have used the Shamrock way for several decades. Such a company is defined as "a form of company based around a core of essential executives and workers supported by outside contractors and part-time help."
The Shamrock has three leaves. read more »
Creating Regular "Huge Traffic" Days
Every Friday, and on the third of every month, we have massive traffic days on our travel blog. And that means we earn good income as well on those days. Adsense income and income from our affiliates goes through the roof.
What’s the secret?
Emails.
With over 5,000 subscribers to our email newsletter, anything we send that links back to the site gets us great traffic, so we work hard to make sure that what we send is worth people’s time.
The Friday Email read more »
Eight Boring Things You Should Be Doing All The Time, But Probably Aren't!
1/ Adding new emails to your auto responder series
2/ Going through old posts to update them and link them forward to new content
3/ Writing “Sneeze pages” grouping your content into similar topics
4/ Updating your “About” page read more »
Two Things That Will Help You Focus And Concentrate Better At Work
Up at 6AM, at the computer by 6.15, plenty to do, coffee on desk.
8AM Struggling to think of a title for this post, try another coffee.
10AM This piece of design just isn’t working out for me. Need food maybe. What’s quick? That little cake will do.
Noon Made a mistake on that car hire reservation. Drat, it will take four emails to sort the mess out. Quick cup of tea.
2PM I’ll just finish this chapter on the book, then get some food. Another coffee for now.
3PM That took longer than planned, just couldn’t seem to find the right words. Food time. What’s quick? Packet of crisps and some biscuits.
5PM I’ve spent that last hour surfing, what a waste of time, and there’s so much to do………
Social Media - Creating Opportunities For Everybody
You probably don’t know Simon Ford. But he’s a perfect example to illustrate my point.
Simon is a car nut with a passion. If he’d been born and lived in the time before social media existed that is what he would have remained.
But thanks to social media, he’s on the cusp of turning his passion into a business, and I suspect he’s also had a lot of fun doing so. read more »
Are You Generating Loads of Traffic For Facebook?
When you first set up your Facebook page, I suspect that like me, you used the "Notes" section to start importing your blog into Facebook. It seemed logical enough to me a couple of years ago to expose my blog to my friends on Facebook, and it was a useful piece of automation that would save me the time to promote any of my writing on Facebook.
But here's the thing:
Using that process to feed your content to Facebook, keeps people inside Facebook.
It literally imports your whole content there.
I have avid readers of my sites, who have never actually visited them. read more »
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