Want to build a strong personal brand and be recognized in your industry? Learn from these 9 incredible personal brand examples and see what works for them.
Author: Franz Malten Buemann
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The 8 Best Books on Working from Home for Remote Work Employees
Remote work is incredible. Goodbye soul-draining commute, uncomfortable “business professional” outfits, and expensive takeout salads.
Hello leisurely mornings, hoodies and slippers, and delicious home-cooked meals.
But remote work is also tough. You’re hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from your colleagues; your home workspace probably lacks some of the bells and whistles of a traditional office; and your work-life boundaries can quickly become nonexistent.
To learn how to conquer these challenges — plus many you haven’t discovered yet — take a look at these books on remote work.1. Working Remotely: Secrets to Success for Employees on Distributed Teams
By Teresa Douglas, Holly Gordon, and Mike Webber
Unlike many remote work books aimed at leaders and solopreneurs, Douglas, Gordon, and Webber focus on the front-line remote worker. This book is divided into seven chapters, each dedicated to a pillar of WFH success.
You’ll learn how to battle isolation and loneliness, work well with your peers, and manage your inbox. Along with concrete tips, the authors include examples and anecdotes to bring their points home (no pun intended).2. Work-From-Home Hacks: 500+ Easy Ways to Get Organized, Stay Productive, and Maintain a Work-Life Balance While Working from Home!
By Aja Frost
On March 20th, I left HubSpot’s Boston office with my monitor and keyboard. I thought I’d use them for a few weeks, a month at the most — then we’d all be back in the office.
Of course, eight months later most of our team is still working from home … and that will be the case for years to come. Maybe forever!
This book is packed with all the advice I wish I’d had when I transitioned to permanent remote work. It covers common scenarios like maintaining boundaries between work and the rest of your life (when your office is also your bedroom or kitchen), combating loneliness and isolation, and overcoming the “out of sight, out of mind” effect. Plus, if you’re a parent, freelancer, or manager, there’s special advice just for you.
By the time you finish, you’ll know everything you need to be successful and happy as a remote worker.3. The Holloway Guide to Remote Work
By Juan Pablo Buriticá and Katie Womersley, along with contributing authors
This manual will help leaders through common remote work challenges and choices, including hiring, onboarding, and compensating remote employees; creating communication channels and setting expectations; implementing a healthy company culture across time zones; and more.
Buriticá and Womersley draw on their experience as leaders of distributed engineering teams at Splice and Buffer, respectively. Employees from Angel List, Doist, Remote.com, and other remote organizations contributed, as well. As a result, every recommendation is practical, realistic, and often backed by case studies, examples, and/or data.4. REMOTE: Office Not Required
By Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of Basecamp
If you’re looking for a manifesto on the benefits of remote work, this one’s for you. Fried and Hansson spend most of REMOTE: Office Not Required refuting the arguments against allowing folks to work from wherever they’d like, such as:You don’t need an office for collaboration
Your company size and industry doesn’t matter
Your pool of potential employees won’t shrink — it’ll growAlready believe in remote work? Looking for practical tips on how to do it well? I’d suggest other books, like Work-From-Home Hacks or the Holloway Guide.
5. Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions
By Tiffany Jana and Michael Baran
Microaggressions — or Subtle Acts of Exclusion (SAEs) as Jana and Baran call them — happen whether you’re remote or co-located.
But SAEs are harder to handle when you’re not all in the same room: You can’t drop by someone’s desk to let them know what they said was hurtful, or stop a conversation in its tracks by asking the offender to leave.
And if you’re the one who committed the SAE? The relationship damage is harder to undo without the rapport-building effects of sharing an office.
That makes Jana and Baran’s book an essential read for distributed teams. Learn how to spot, deal with, and most importantly, prevent SAEs so that everyone feels safe and included.6. Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader
By Herminia Ibarra
If you’re like me — or any of the other managers I talked to — your professional self-confidence might suffer after going remote.
Why? Because you lose a ton of positive feedback. You’re no longer bumping into your coworkers in the hall, seeing their smiles and nods when you present, hearing their cheers when you win a big account, or getting celebratory drinks after a great quarter.All the subtle signs that said, You’re doing a great job! are gone.
This book will help restore your confidence. According to Ibarra, the best way to feel like a leader is to act like one. In other words: Your thoughts follow your actions, not the other way around.
She provides you with actionable recommendations to do just that. Whether you’re an individual contributor, executive, or anyone in between, you’ll discover how to step up at work — and boost your self-esteem in the process.7. The Remote Facilitator’s Pocket Guide
By Kirsten Clacey and Jay-Allen Morris
Running remote meetings is both science and art. As Clacey and Morris point out in their introduction, virtual meetings are:More intimidating than in-person ones, as attendees feel isolated from each other and can’t read everyone’s faces
Harder to focus in; eight in ten people multitask
More dependent on the facilitator’s mood and styleTo combat these issues, the authors condensed research, personal anecdotes, and strategies into a short but powerful book. In just 153 pages, you’ll get a veritable PhD in remote meeting facilitation. One GoodReads reviewer said, “Everyone who does online meetings should read this book.”
8. The ultimate guide to remote work
By Wade Foster, with content from Danny Schreiber, Matthew Guay, Melanie Pinola, Bethany Hills, Alison Groves, Jeremey DuVall, and Belle Cooper
Zapier has been a remote-first company since its 2011 founding. Safe to say, the team has spent a lot of time thinking about common remote work issues and coming up with scalable solutions.
This guide (which is available online for free) is broken into fifteen chapters. First, you’ll learn how to hire and manage remote employees. Next, you’ll delve into building and maintaining a strong virtual culture, followed by tips on productivity, multi-time-zone collaboration, and avoiding burnout.
And, finally, you’ll discover how to get a remote job (likely easier now than when the e-book was first written) and work smarter, not harder with the remote work tool-kit.
Hopefully, this remote work reading list helps you avoid many of the pitfalls of working from home … while maximizing its benefits. -
If you don’t know you have it…
then you don’t. (Not yet.)
Cleaning out the fridge after a power failure, I found three half-empty containers of anchovies. Because they magically migrate to the back of the fridge, every time I had needed some, I ended up opening a new jar, because the old ones were invisible. Not just invisible if I had looked for them, but so invisible that it never even occurred to me to look for them.
And this is even more likely to happen with the data on your hard drive. If you don’t know to look for it, if you don’t believe it’s there, it might as well be deleted.
And of course, this applies to our lost skills, confidence and experience as well.
It’s worth putting in regular effort to remind ourselves of what we’ve already got and how it has served us in the past. -
Weekend CX Quote
“To me, customer experience is a feeling. It’s the emotions your customers undergo or navigate through or have thrust upon them by their interactions with you.” – Joey Coleman https://preview.redd.it/aflcicf6hq761.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=233703e5f2d21d13abf926f2dea7358eca028913
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Stand up and fight
One of Woodie Guthrie’s resolutions was to “Wake up and fight.”
But he wasn’t talking about being a bully. Or picking a fight at the local bar.
He was talking about changing the culture.
He was challenging himself to push back against the doubters, and even more than that, to overcome his own self-doubt.
The culture is created by all of us. It might feel as though it’s done to us, but it’s also created by us.
Wake up, stand up and fight. Make things better. -
Why “Unbounce – Landing Page Builder” is the #1 choice of Marketing Agencies, Ecommerce, SaaS and Online Marketers?
submitted by /u/Same-Influence6119 [link] [comments]
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How to automatize Lead Generation Campaigns
Hi, I would like to automatize the process between lead generation and contract signing. It can involve coding but it must be a platform that is handling most of the operations (my opinion is that there must be 10s of products/products that will be always better than custom code) The platform must connect and manage:
Ads Platform (Facebook, Google, Bing…) and its targeting audiences/lists, change bidding… Mailing platforms (Mailchimp or the platform itself must be able to send hundreds of e-mails per days which will not end in Spam) bases on conditions send emails and update databases SMS, Send SMS based on inputs for CRM / Call Center CRM (PipeDrive, Your suggestion or platform itself must be able to manage the leads/clients. I would like to avoid to use WordPress which can slow web page or Salesforce which can be too complicated/necessary to be used by our Call Center
Tracking “Marketing data” (Data from web forms; Ads campaigns data as Search term, Campaigns name, Source, ….) Tracking “Sales data” (number of inbound/outbound calls, number of emails, SMS, the status of the lead, IP of the lead…)
Call Center (Call Rail or Your Suggestion) Web page / Landing page Reporting tool (graph, alerts, weekly emails)
I have experience with custom coded which is hard to update (add new features), AutopilotHQ which seems too expensive if you have a lot of leads/big database and I got a recommendation for Hubspot. It would be really good if most of the settings are possible via diagrams (as in AutoPilotHQ). What platform would you use to solve the automatization
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Amplify possibility
“People like us do things like this.”
Social media understands this.
It also knows that people like points, likes and something that feels like popularity.
The social media companies optimized their algorithms for profit. And profit, they figured, would come from engagement. And engagement, they figured, would come from confounding our instincts and rewarding outrage.
Because outrage draws a crowd.
And crowds establish culture.
And a desire to be the leader of a crowd reinforced the cycle.
And so the social networks created a game, a game in which you ‘win’ by being notorious, outrageous or, as they coined the phrase, “authentic.” The whole world is watching, if you’re willing to put on a show.
That’s not how the world actually works. The successful people in your community or your industry (please substitute ‘happy’ for successful in that sentence) don’t act the way the influencers on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook do. That’s all invented, amplified stagecraft, it’s not the actual human condition.
Many of us have an overwhelming need to rubberneck, to slow down when we pass a crash on the highway. This is odd, as most people don’t go out of their way to visit the morgue, just for kicks. And yet…
I hope we’d agree that if people started staging car crashes on the side of the road to get attention, we’d be outraged.
That’s what happening, and the leaders of social networks pretend that they can’t do a thing about it, just as Google pretends that they can’t control the results of their search algorithm.
The shift that the leaders of the social networks need to make is simple. In the long run, it will cost them nothing. And within weeks, it will create a world that’s calmer, happier and more productive.
Amplify possibility. Dial down the spread of disinformation, trolling and division. Make it almost impossible to get famous at the expense of civilization. Embrace the fact that breaking news doesn’t have to be the rhythm of our days. Reward thoughtfulness and consistency and responsibility.
You can do this. Enough already.
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The two levers of modernity
First: If you come up with an innovation that creates value, that value is multiplied a million-fold because now you can share it outside your village.
Second: If you build a community, the network effect creates increasing amounts of value as more people use it.
And the pothole: As we race to create value, it’s easy to forget that it’s unevenly distributed. A safety net isn’t perfect, but it’s better than no net at all.
Rising tides lift all boats, but we’re not boats.
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What is a Dofollow Link?
The easier it is for potential customers to find your site in search engine results, the more traffic (and sales) you’ll generate.
As a result, there’s a kind of constant content competition underway as website owners and administrators look for ways to stand out from the crowd and improve search engine optimization (SEO).
Gone are the wild, wild west days of the World Wide Web where keyword spamming and content stuffing were the norm to drive search engine interest.
Now, brands need to focus on more tightly-controlled metrics — such as Google’s PageRank — to boost their online appeal and push their site listing closer to the first page, first result pinnacle.
While part of this effort comes down to writing relevant, accurate, and interesting content, there’s another key component: Dofollow links. With the right approach, these links can help leverage great content into higher PageRank and better search results.
Here’s how they work.What is a dofollow link?
PageRank is effectively a weighted score that uses links to assign points — the more points, the better your site rank, and the better your SEO. Often referred to as “link juice” by online marketing professionals because of their ability to “flow” through websites with the right linking structure, getting these points is a priority for any site owner.
The problem? Almost immediately after their introduction, getting points in any way possible became the strategy of many unscrupulous marketers.
The easiest way to achieve this aim? Leaving comments on the posts of popular websites that contained links back to client sites, in turn boosting their profile. The more reputable the linking site — think well-respected retailers or news organizations — the bigger the link juice boost.
By default, these links were “dofollow” — they instructed search engines to follow the link back to the originating site and boost its PageRank. To solve the growing problem of spam links the “nofollow” link was created: Site admins could add an HTML tag:… to any link on their site, which instructed search engines not to follow the link back to its destination and, in turn, not boost its PageRank.
Today, dofollow links remain an important part of SEO strategy — getting a “backlink” from a reputable site can significantly boost PageRank values and help brands stand out. The introduction of nofollow links, meanwhile, offers more control for site admins.
For example, most comment sections now include nofollow tags by default, and page creators can choose to add nofollow tags to blog posts and other articles. Changing these links from nofollow to dofollow is easy, but requires that destination site owners contact linking site admins and ask for the change.
How to Make a Dofollow Link
In most cases, no action is required to create a dofollow link. If your site is linked to by another site and they don’t choose to add the nofollow tag, search engines will naturally arrive at your page and increase your overall PageRank.
The same is true if you’re including links on your own site. For example, you may choose to add links to other reputable sites within your own content and allow search engines to follow these links.
If you’ve been asked by another brand to include their links on your page or are moderating blog comments, meanwhile, you may want to turn on automatic nofollow tags where possible or ensure that all links include the nofollow tag until you’re sure it makes sense to follow the link back.
This is especially critical if other links lead to low-quality or keyword-stuffed content, since this can reflect poorly on your own site.
Put simply? When it comes to external links from reputable sites that lead back to your page, dofollow is ideal. Links leading outside your site and linked from your own posts or attached to comments on your content should only be dofollow if the outgoing link site is reputable and relevant.
What tools are available for dofollow links?
Wondering if a link is dofollow or nofollow? If it’s on your own site, you can check the HTML code from your CMS admin page to determine if the nofollow tag is present, but what happens when the link comes from another, external site? Since you can’t see or edit their code, you can’t be certain if links are dofollow or nofollow.
In this case, it’s worth using dofollow link checker tools to determine if links will boost your PageRank or not.
Examples include:Dofollow Link Checker
MozBar
SEOquake
Link AnalyzerThe first tool is a web-based tool that checks entire pages for nofollow and dofollow links. Moz MozBar is a Chrome extension, while SEOquake is offered for both Chrome and Firefox. Link Analyzer, meanwhile, is a standalone tool that doesn’t require a specific browser. Each of these tools is free and works by following any links to your site to determine if they’re nofollow or dofollow, then reports the results.
Should I dofollow an external link?
Here, the answer depends on two factors: Where does the link lead, and what are the benefits if you opt for dofollow? Ideally, any dofollow links point search engines to content that’s current, relevant and accurate, in turn providing “link juice” for both the external site and your own website.
There may be cases where reciprocal dofollow links are a good idea, especially if you’re looking to expand site traffic and the external site has a similar ranking to your own page. Ideally, you want a mix of nofollow and dofollow links on your page to ensure search engines don’t view your content as simply a vehicle for PageRank points.
How long will it take Google to recognize a dofollow link?
While there’s no hard and fast answer here since search engine spiders crawl a significant volume of pages each day, dofollow links are generally recognized by Google within two to four days after being posted.
If your site has low traffic volumes and the dofollow links you’re creating or receiving come from similarly small webpages, it could take more time for PageRank to recognize these links. If you’re fortunate enough to receive a backlink from a highly-ranked site, meanwhile, you may see the benefit in just a few days.
Dofollow links remain a critical aspect of SEO and search ranking efforts, but must be used strategically to deliver substantive benefits.