#I can keep notes from meetings and trainings and updates and general notes and daily/weekly tasks

[chaoticeddie]

attending a work training on OneNote changed my work life lmao

[boyprincessmanic]

I’m putting the entire interview I had with this scam company under the cut. I’ve redacted personal information but I just want you guys to see what happened cuz it’s pretty wild lmao 

For reference, they said they found me on Zip Recruiter but the company IMCheck Therapeutics is NOT on Zip Recruiter AT ALL that I could find.

This is a long post so be prepared lol 

Me: Ms. Olivia Walter? This is Tory LastName.

Them: How are you doing today ?

Me: I'm doing well, how are you?

Them: I'm doing just fine.Thanks for asking I believe you are ready for the interview and briefing on the job position ?

Me: I am! I would like to know more about the company. Them: Before we begin i would like to introduce myself am Ms Olivia Walter, One of the hiring manager of ImCheck Therapeutics. I would be the one to brief you about the position and the Organization.

Kindly state your full name and your current location ?

Me: My name is FirstName (preferred name Tory) LastName and I'm located in [City], Texas.

Them: Next would be the briefing about the Job and the company. I advise you read with care.Let me know when you have finished reading and understanding every line. You will be allowed to ask questions later.With each line just respond with an OK..Understood?

Me: ok

Them: Once again the name of this Great Firm is ImCheck Therapeutics.

ImCheck Therapeutics is a Marseille-based, privately-held company developing next generation immuno-modulatory antibodies acting on both adaptive and innate immunity (notably gamma-delta T-cells) for the treatment of cancer and other immune related diseases.

With a “precision medicine-based” translational approach and several established academic collaborations, ImCheck is uniquely positioned to develop the right therapy for each patient.

To-date, ImCheck is developing two first-in-class therapeutic antibodies with a plan to enter into clinical trials by 2019. Imcheck is also advancing additional discovery programs on undisclosed targets.

Me: OK

Them: Here's the company website(www.imchecktherapeutics.com). You are required to glance through the website and read more about the organization. let me know as soon as you are done so we can proceed with the interview..Okay ?

Me: OK

Them: Are you still going through the company's website ?

Me: I have been reading it multiple times so I can fully understand.

Them: Alright.Let me know when you are done.

Me: I'm ready. I think I understand.

Them: Alright Before we get started with the interview session i would like to know if you have any question at this moment.

Me: I understand the company is based in France. Are there any offices where I'm located in [City] or is this a work-from-home position? 

Them: Our office close to you will be completed estimated three months from now, so the position and job done for now is work from home on till the office is completed and (NOTE THAT) As soon as you are confirmed qualified, the company will provide you with complete office equipment to setup a mini office at home. The working hours are flexible and you can choose to work from anywhere of your choice, the pay is $40 per hour during full working hours and the training is $30 per hour and will be getting your payment weekly via check or direct deposit working 30 to 40 hours weekly, if you are employed you are going to be working as a full employee and not an independent contractor. Okay ?

Me: OK

Them: Our goal is to always have the capacity, competence and flexibility to meet our clients' needs, whatever they may be. The positions available are: Guest service representative. Administrative Assistant, IT business analyst, software engineering, Book keeping, Clerical Admin, Credit Correspondent, Customer Service, Data Entry,administrators,Secretary,Patient Access Specialist, Call Center, Office Clerk, GIs Analyst, Phone Representative, Executive Assistant, Finance and Accounting, Medical Biller/Coding, Order processing official, Project Development, Receptionist and Front desk job to create employment opportunity for the less privilege, disables and mainly to decrease the rate of unemployment in the economy. I want you to know that before you begin work, you would be trained towards it. So Which position do you prefer ?

Me: Data Entry 

Them: Here are your duties as a DATA ENTRY ANALYST :

Prepares source data for computer entry by compiling and sorting information; establishing entry priorities.

Processes customer and account source documents by reviewing data for deficiencies; resolving discrepancies by using standard procedures or returning incomplete documents to the team leader for resolution.

Enters customer and account data by inputting alphabetic and numeric information on keyboard or optical scanner according to screen format.

Maintains data entry requirements by following data program techniques and procedures.

Verifies entered customer and account data by reviewing, correcting, deleting, or reentering data; combining data from both systems when account information is incomplete; purging files to eliminate duplication of data.

Can you handle the Job duties if you are being trained towards it ?

Me: Yes! With my experience I believe I can handle the position.

Them: Impressive. Here are the benefits: Health, Dental, Life and AD&D Insurance, Employee Wellness. Paid Time Off and Holidays with Generous Company Discounts.You would be eligible to Benefits after 1months of working with the organization.

You would be eligible to these benefits after 1month of working with the company. Endorsement benefit deals opportunity are available as well.

I hope you are okay with those benefits the company are offering?

Me: Yes, absolutely.

Them: Alright This section of the interview is called question and answer section.I advice you read with care to avoid any mistake...Okay ? 

Me: OK

Have you ever worked from home or online before ?Are you currently employed ?How many hours do you intend to dedicate to this job position daily?

Me: At my previous job, I was occasionally required to work from home, and I perform well when I do. I was very recently laid off from my position due to much of my duties being automated, so currently I am unemployed. If hired, I intend to dedicate 8 hours a day to this position, or more if necessary to complete my tasks.

Them: OK Whats your clerical speed? Do you have an idea of how to use MS excel ?What is your highest educational diploma?When did you receive it?

Me: If by clerical speed you mean typing speed, I top out at 80 words per minute, 70 on average, with 98% accuracy. At my previous position I was required to use Microsoft Excel daily so I believe I am proficient in its use. My highest level of education is a General Educational Development (GED) diploma, which I obtained in 2012. 

Them: Alright What are your strengths/What are your weaknesses?

Me: I pride my strengths in attention to detail, accuracy, and a genuinely love for being as thorough as possible in my work. As for weaknesses, I have difficulty focusing at times, due to what I believe is Adult ADHD, but I work to improve myself every day and always meet deadlines.

Them: Good to know. 4)How long do you expect to remain employed with this company if hired?

4B).How hard working and productive will you be for our company when you start working with us ?

4C). Are you a people person?

Me: I intend to remain employed for as long as possible. I enjoy computer work and I know how reliable I am. I will always, from the very beginning, deliver the best quality work I can provide and do the best I can for the company. I work very well with other people, be they co-workers or clients, and people know that they can trust me.

Them: Interesting. 5)How would you like to be Paid. Weekly Or Bi-Weekly?

5B).Are you seeking for a Full time or Part time position?.

5C). Do you have legal right to work in the United State ?

Me: I have no preference for when I am paid, but I suppose if I had to choose one I am accustomed to a bi-weekly pay schedule. Ideally, I am seeking a full-time position, and yes, I absolutely do have legal right to work in the United States. 

Them: Good. 6)This company do pay employees via Direct Deposit or CHECK. Do you have an issue with getting paid via Direct Deposits or check?

What Bank Do you Operate with to see if it tallies with the company's official salary payment account and how many years have you been with them ?

Me: I have no issues with either option. My account is with [BANK], and I've banked with them since 2011.

Them: OK 7A).Kindly brief me about yourself and your last job?

7B).Do you use AT&T or Verizon,it will be linked with the company's postpaid account so we can cover the cost of the internet you'll be using ?

Me: My previous job was for a credit repair company called [COMPANY NAME], where I was hired in July 2015 to compare reports and update the database. Within 3 months I had proven myself enough that they chose to give me additional responsibilities, such as creating letters on our clients' behalf, and within the next 6 months I was given a promotion to supervisor level. During my time there I maintained a small team of people whom I helped train in our work program and distribute duties accordingly. Thanks to my nearly 3 years of experience at this position, I'm confident in my Data Entry abilities.

I, unfortunately, do not use AT&T or Verizon. My internet provider is Spectrum. 

Them: Interesting. Well you have done well so far and you seem like a perfect fit for this position. Hold  online while i send your answers to my superiors for review and consideration... okay ?

Me: Okay!

[About 15 minutes later] Them: I am back now..the result for the interview is on my desk..

Me: I hope it's good news.

Them: Tory for your consideration stand,You have a good news........................... The good news is.........You've just been confirmed qualified for this position of a DATA ENTRY ANALYST..You are welcome to ImCheck Therapeutics... You are now given a chance to show your commitment,charisma,diligence and be a productive employee.

CONGRATULATIONS !

Me: Thank you!

Them: Your employment letter will be emailed to you tomorrow morning,as soon as your working equipments are available, My superior's will reach you in person they will put you through our organization's guidelines under US Human Resources Laws and Regulations.OKAY ?

Me: Okay!

Them: NOTE: Your salary will be $40 per hour and you will be receiving your payment via direct deposit or check.

You will be undergoing a 3 days training and orientation which will commence as soon as you have all working materials,Your training is going to be done online through your PC and phone and you are rest assured that you will be paid for it.. okay ?

Me: Okay!

Them: I need you to provide the following info for confirmation Full name,state,zipcode,home address,email address,city,cell numbers and email address to enable my secretary enlist them into the Company's Register for proper documentation.

Me: [I gave them my address because I figured if they’d seen my resume they were just asking for confirmation]

Them: Alright.Your info's has been enlisted and updated.

Pay attention to this important details..When you are done reading signify by using DONE ,you will be allowed to ask questions when am done..okay?

Me: Okay 

Them: You will need some Data entry/Accounting software and also a time tracker to commence your training and orientation and also you need the software to get started with work...the work of the time tracker is to calculate your hours worked since this is an online work from home.

Here are the name's of the software's you will need to start working with BS 1 Accounting software ,myob business essentials software 2017,For Peach Tree premium 2012 US Patent Single Users Pack, simply accounting 2012 and a Time Tracker

The Organization will provide you a free Hp laptop with a fast internet connection and your W4 form will be coming along with the working materials you need to start working with.

Me: Done 

Them: The funds for the software and the Hp laptop  will be provided for you by the organization via check ..... make sure you use them as instructed for the software.When the funds gets to you i will refer you to the company's authorized vendor you are to purchase them from As soon as the check its been issued out to you i will notify you and provide you with the tracking number so you can keep track and know when it will get to you..

Me: Okay 

Them: Once you receive the check you are needed to have it deposited into your account via the ATM,inside the bank or using the Bank Mobile App,Then the funds will be made available in your account for cash out within 24hours..Then i will provide you the company's vendor information which you are to make the payment to so your working materials can be made available to you..

All we need from you is good work and trust,you will enjoy every moment working with us.

Me: Okay 

Them: This Job offers Flexible hours but you are to report online via GOOGLE HANGOUT by 8am  for your task and update on the paycheck you are expecting which is meant for the purchase of your working materials.....

Do you think 8am is a perfect time for you to report online ?

Me: Yes 

Them: Alright. Once again Welcome to ImCheck Therapeutics..

Me: Thank you 

Them: Thats all for now.Your employment letter will be emailed to you tomorrow morning. Do not forget to report online tomorrow at 8am for update on your upcoming check which is meant for the purchase of your working materials so you can begin work.Stay Blessed.

Me: Before you go, I have to admit I'm a little bit skeptical. Can you assure me that this is a legitimate offer? 

Them: I understand how you feel.I can assure you that you are very safe working with us.Like i said as soon as your working equipments are available, My superior's will reach you in person they will put you through our organization's guidelines.All we need from you is good work and trust,you will enjoy every moment working with us..Okay ?

Me: Okay. Thank you very much 

Them: I will keep you updated tomorrow at 8am via google hangout here.Have a wonderful time.

[After this conversation I began to feel very suspicious of this company. It felt like a scam, so I talked to a couple friends, both my parents, and my mom’s boyfriend, and they all gave me some advice on what to do next]

--- THE NEXT DAY ---

Them: Good morning Tory

Me: Good morning Olivia 

Them: How are you doing today ?

Me: I'm doing just fine, how are you?

Them: I'm doing just fine.Thanks for asking.I believe you are ready for today's update ?

Me: I am. I also have a few questions for you as well when you are able to answer.

Them: You can ask your question now.

Me: Yesterday you told me that there is an office in [City] opening within 3 months or so. Where is the [City] office going to be located? Is there an address? 

Them: I want you to know that the company's superiors are still delegating on a perfect location for the new office close to you in (City, TX),just to make transportation very easy for newly employed staff.As soon as the delegation is completed i will notify and provide you update on the location.The working hours are flexible and you have the chance to choose your working hours.Okay ?

Me: Do you know if the office is going to be a rented space? Is the company building a new office?

Them: The company is building a new place not rented.The address will be available after you have your working materials.Okay ?

Me: Is [City] the only city in the US that you're expanding to?

Them: Yes there are few other cities.The company's aim is to create employment opportunity for the less privilege, disables and mainly to decrease the rate of unemployment in the economy.Okay ?

Me: Are you partnered with a realtor for opening offices in [City]?

Them: The company has already take care of that,as soon as your working equipments are available, My superior's will reach you in person they will put you through our organization's guidelines.Okay ?

Me: Can you tell me what realtor you are working with for the office?

Them: That is not my department am in charge of the hiring process.Like i just said  as soon as your working equipments are available, My superior's will reach you in person they will put you through our organization's guidelines.

Me: Just one more question for now. Would you be willing to do a video call or voice call? Would any of your superiors be willing to do this? 

Them: Yes correct there will be a video call after you have your working materials just to confirm you have the complete working materials.

Me: Is there any way I could do a call before I begin work? 

Them: Yes that will be when you have your working materials before you begin work.

Me: Is there any way I could do a call before I have the materials? As early as today if possible.

Them: I can see you are not ready to work.

Me: I apologize if I seem rude, I am trying to be as cautious as possible. 

Them: I understand how you feel.I can assure you that you are very safe working with us.All we need from you is good work and trust,you will enjoy every moment working with us. [THIS IS THE EXACT SAME RESPONSE FROM YESTERDAY, COPIED WORD-FOR-WORD]

Me: Lastly, I had some trouble verifying some of the information you've given me, so I contacted IMCheck Therapeutics through the company website. Please understand my caution. I cannot proceed with giving you my personal information until I have verified the information. If what you have told me is true then you have nothing to worry about. Thank you for your patience.

THERE WAS NO RESPONSE AFTER THIS. This was definitely a scam and I have #regerts but at least I know now.

[daynamartinez22]

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 330

Click on the video above to watch Episode 330 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Right about now. All right. Welcome, everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 330. Today is the 10th of March 2021. We got almost everyone here, maybe her nominal show up here in a couple of minutes. We got a couple of announcements today some things we want to go over and then we are going to get into the questions but want to say hi, real quick. Get everyone. See how they’re doing. If you’re watching, by the way, go ahead and let us know how you’re doing. If you’re watching live, you can pop that right on the page. Say hello. Let us know what’s going on. So I’ll just go down my list here. I see Chris is first. So Chris, how are you doing today? Good. Glad to be here. Super excited.

Yeah, can’t complain. Whereas getting actually spring is almost here. Like is where it’s being really good here.

So I can’t wait to actually gonna lift the lockdowns at some point, hopefully. And it’s all outside time. Very nice. All right. Marco, how about you How you doing today? Let me see. Let me see. Let me see.

I started going off into that fake background, that fake co story comes back. It’s impossible for it to be this nice. 365. But you’ve seen it tight. It’s been actually March, February, we came to this house in February of last year, just before we got locked out. And you guys have seen it live for 52 weeks. It is what it is, man. It’s beautiful. I keep telling people, it’s the price I pay for the life I live, this is what I choose. This is not where I have to be. This is where I choose to be. If you want that moment if you want that. It’s called the POFU position of Fuck you. We do POFU Live, where we go in and we have a bunch of experts giving presentations, then there’s me giving you my mindset and not that I’m calling myself an expert. I just, it’s what I do. For both, we’ll try to get you in the right mindset so that you go and do the things that you need to do. And that you have to do. In order to be able to do the things that you want to do is funny how that works out. First, you have to do and you need to do. And then you can do whatever you want. Because you’re in that position where you can decide whatever it is that’s best for your life. So just fantastic. And we were just talking about how it is that we’re going to do it. And that’s coming.

Not only is that coming but I’ll just tease it a little bit Syndication Academy. Syndication Academy is in the can, the videos are recorded. We have 300 website updates to go through or over 300 there’s a couple of them that the syndication Academy, I don’t know what to say she’s just a fantastic director, we’ll just call her the instructor, the syndication Academy, instructor, the person who’s going to be guiding the person who’s going to be giving you support in Facebook to be in there daily, supporting the group. It’s an overhaul, it’s a complete overhaul, it’s a complete, completely different idea. The concept stays the same, you have to expand your entity, expand that footprint. let Google know everything that belongs to your entity, make it known, make it better hook it up altogether, so that the power flows the way that it’s supposed to. syndication Academy is fantastic.

Our trainer, instructor, she’s fantastic. She will be up to giving you webinar updates every month, he’ll come up to three websites.

And again, she’ll be in the Facebook group, I think it’s going to totally rock, and you guys for you guys wondering because somebody did ask me. Well, if you guys do it in syndication, Academy networks, and MGYB. Well, then why should I buy Syndication Academy? Well, I just said that we will be having 300 Well, looking through 300 websites to see how they can be manipulated, manipulated, and added into the syndication networks that we built. Our VA is It’ll take a while for them to catch up. And if we do offer the service we can offer everything that we will be adding to syndication Academy, we always had what’s most important what we think you must have, as far as that footprint goes as far as that entity, but there are others and we’re going to have fantastic opportunities like when we came across.

Now, it’s slipping my mind, but, oh boy, when we added all of the weekend and all the drive stacks, all of the folders and pro trees. Yeah, yeah. came across that and it was fantastic. And there wasn’t originally in it. It was a webinar update. And that became part of the syndication networks, or part of the ad ID, and yeah. I mean, it’s just a fantastic website. So all of those will be coming. There’s plenty of other website websites out there. So as a matter of fact, I was telling you guys yesterday one of the ones that already in the can, is a fantastic website. So fantastic semantic hub. And it’s just a really novel way to approach SEO. Yeah. Bradley coined that will be with us. She’s fantastic again and so I’m really really looking forward to working with her on expanding and making syndication Academy way better than what it is and it’s fantastic already.

Oh, Stan, I got nothing to add on to that I wanted to make sure we touched on it, it’s coming up and I just put on the Early Access opt-in so if you want to be first to be notified, there’s definitely going to be something special for people who are on the early access list. So if you’re pumped about Syndication Academy you just want to find out more you’re thinking hey this may be for me maybe for my client’s good way to make money a way to get more exposure better rankings more traffic all that hop the early access list. If you’re not watching this live and you’re checking it out on YouTube just go to semantic mastery comm slash each D questions and you can find the link there and get that all taken care of.

Let’s see as I go through here realize we haven’t said hello to Mr. Johnny come lately also known as her non How’s it going, buddy? I’m good, man. I’m banging on the door. And it’s rainy and cold outside and you guys won’t let me in, dripping wet on the outside looking in. Yeah, man. Come on. Let me in. I’m good, man. I’m happy to be here. Outstanding. Last but not least Bradley, how you doing? I’m good, man. Happy to be here. It’s freaking warm. All of a sudden, Virginia. And it’s like 70 degrees, almost 70 degrees outside. It’s crazy. It’s like, you know, three days ago, it was cold. And I had sweatshirts on and space heaters up here. And now it’s like,

oh, that time of year, man spring is around the corner. And I’m happy about it. That’s things get really busy for my tree. Contractors come springtime and stay that way all the way through fall. So I’m looking forward to this season for sure. Nice. Nice, nice. Well, Bradley, we had a cool conversation all of us did with somebody yesterday. So you mentioned the cold email mastery course that you went through. And you mentioned that on Hump Day hangouts last week, and we ended up hooking up with Daniel, yesterday and talking to him. So you might tell people a little bit about what we might end up what they might see from you and him. Yeah, we so I mentioned a really good cold email course that I picked up about, I don’t know, maybe three weeks ago now. And it was really good, and it’s inexpensive. There’s a ton of value for what you pay for it. And I’m not gonna mention it now, because we’re going to talk about it when with Daniel, I’m going to jump on a call with a video call with Daniel over the next two weeks or so. And he’s going to go through his methods that he teaches in the training and how to specifically apply it because he does email marketing for all kinds of stuff.

But he’s going to talk about how to apply his methods specifically for prospecting for clients, for consultants in for agencies. And so I think that’s going to be really valuable. It’s not going to be a live webinar, he and I are going to jump on and just him and I are going to banter back and forth. And he’ll go through some demonstrations that are all be recorded. And then we’re going to present that to you guys. Again, I picked it up for myself and I was blown away by I thought it was really, really good. Let’s put it that way. And so Adam reached out to him and got it set up. And we had a meeting with him yesterday. And he’s stoked in real cool guys a lot like Marco and that he’s not politically correct when it comes to speech and it’s great. I love that kind of instruction. And so it’s real punchy, real to the point no fluff and all that. And so I’m looking forward to having a video call with him that we can bring to you guys. For those of you that are looking to generate more clients for your business. It’s a really good strategy.

Awesome. Yeah. And I’ll just say for those of you who are listening, and again, if you’re not live, you can leave this on the replay on YouTube, if you guys have any questions about cold emailing. So b2b is what this is, right? You’re not just emailing people, you’re emailing references as an agency. If you’ve got any questions, pop them in there, you know, and if we can, we’ll work those in and get those answered, because he’s got a lot of background in that. I know Bradley. I mean, most of us, I think, have at least some experience, but Daniel certainly got a lot so that you know, just a quick met note for internal processes, we might want to post in our groups, a little survey about questions about cold email, prospecting, post them here and we can incorporate that into the video call I do within Yeah, that’s a good idea. Yeah, Bradley, just let me know when you’re gonna when you guys set up the call, and I’ll do that a couple of days before. So. Real quick. Before we jump into questions, just want to say to everyone if you’re new to SM and MGYB, I know we get new people. We see that a lot of people commenting and we love it. We know there are more people out there who just watched and that’s cool too. But if you’re wondering where to get started

The best place to you’ll hear us talking about stuff like the SEO shield and syndication networks and all this other stuff. But go to the SEO shield, comm grab that it free training, find out how you can shield your site, don’t worry about algorithm updates. And you’ll find out a little bit more about what we’re talking about why this stuff makes sense how it works, and then where you can get it. So as Marco mentioned, you can go get this stuff done for you, if you want, that’s great, go to mgyb.co, if you want to more, maybe understand the nuts and bolts or build your own team and start building this stuff out, then, of course, you know, we have the training available as well. Beyond that, if you want to find out more about getting repeatable SEO results, you can grab the battle plan of battle plan dot semantic mastery com. If you’re looking at an agency or you’re a consultant, and you want to grow and become an agency to x, your agency comm is the place to be, and then last but not least, if you’re ready to grow your digital marketing business, or for some people, they’re brick and mortar and they want to expand the online side, the mastermind is the place for you. You can find out more about that at mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. And with that, I think we should dive into the questions unless you guys got anything else.

No excited about the Syndication Academy launch. I’m going to be spending some time this upcoming weekend going through a lot of the training that SEO is recorded, you know, to provide some feedback and stuff and it’s gonna be pretty, I’m pretty excited about it. Because, you know, it’s been a few years since we’ve updated it. And this has been completely redone as Marco said, with just a ton of sites that we’re going to be expanding the foot, you know, entity footprint with. So as he’s going to be doing a training on each one of those sites, and that’ll be the monthly updates, or maybe even bi-weekly updates, depending on what we decide, because of the sheer number of sites that we have to expand upon. probably end up doing bi-weekly webinars in the Facebook group for that. So anyway, just looking forward to that, guys, if you have any questions about it, let us know. Otherwise, let’s get into questions.

Let’s do it.

got quite a few.

I think this is the newest one. We still don’t have the dates and times on here. Let me see. It should be right after I commented I think Jared Yeah, it was one Conrad is just before that. I don’t think we got to his.

Does All Of The MGYB Services Work For Non-English Sites?

Yeah, we did. Actually, you bounce. Okay. You had a call? Yeah. You had a call come in? And I answered that. But I was looking for you to reply to that one. Anyways, I said that we don’t do anything in non-English, but from what I understand applying non-English or English drive stacks to non-English sites will still benefit. Is that correct?

That was the question. I mean, yeah, Hernan and I worked on a Swedish website. Also, what we did is we actually went and had the team do it in English. And then the guy who was working as he translated it into Norwegian or Swedish, whatever it was.

So I mean, it works perfectly well. If you take the time to go then to then go in and target your language might not even have to, because what we’re looking for is relevance, the AI should be able to make the connection that is basically the same.

So yeah, I mean, the answer to that is, I don’t see why you can’t get the MGYB services, we don’t do it in your language, we will do it in English, and it’s up to you to go in. For example, syndication network, it’s up to you to go in and translate the profile, but it won’t take that long for the descriptions and everything else.

So that would be my suggestion, you go in and or you hire someone better yet, go into Upwork or something like that, and hire a translator to translate everything so you don’t have to, you can go concentrate and focus on something else.

There you go.

What Are Your Thoughts On AI Content Like Marketmuse, Frase, And Menterprise?

Alright, so Gerrards up first, for this week. He says, what are your thoughts on AI content with stuff like market news res enterprise, etc? Is it fine to use our money site with some manual editing and manually added content? Yeah, I mean, I use phrase.io is the tool that I’ve been using?

And yeah, I mean, I would, for money site stuff, I wouldn’t just, you know, use the content that it pulls back or creates without manually editing it. Maybe for link-building stuff. You could but I wouldn’t do that on the money side. I would still manually edit stuff.

But yeah, I mean, it’s I think phrases are good too. I haven’t used any others. So I don’t know. But I do actually use sprays for some of my projects as well. So what about anybody else in length is a go-to because of the way that we can relate the entity, the way that we can work with the entity and focus and I’m not going to go in-depth in that because

That’s something that was presented in POFU live. And I’m not going to share it out of purple light, but the way that he focuses the entity, not only within links but another tool.

Man, I’m slipping today because I’m presenting all of the software that we use SEO surfer or surfer SEO. So the way that that those two are used in conjunction, you can even put phrases in there. And there’s quite a few other software as a service SaaS software that you can use and really, really getting great content. Now what you get is a, or what you should be getting is a template, if it’s for your money site. And then you would use that template to write your content, I wouldn’t use what you’re given directly, I would edit it and make sure that that is hyperfocus for the bot. That’s how we do use the content. That’s how the VA was trained to use the content.

So the follow-up to that was can this be used to automate curation for our blogs the way Bradley does it? Thanks a lot. Again, I wouldn’t, you know, yes, you can use it to help kind of like, you know, augment, or supplement the blog posting for curated content, because it will actually pull in content based upon a search query or a question.

And it will pull in the top results. And, you know, so yeah, you can use that to help with curating content. But I wouldn’t use it again, not for money. So I would I use that as like, automated content production. Right, I wouldn’t do it for that, not for money site, all of the content that I, you know, for my clients is manually curated by my bloggers. So we don’t use any automated fashion. Now. I mean, you can streamline and make manual curation a lot more efficient. For example, we started doing social posting for tree contractors. And so we’ve been developing out the Feedly account, feed the pro account with a ton of content, I’ve been paying my one of my bloggers by the hour to just find and collect good content that’s relevant in all different types of categories, specific to tree services and landscaping.

And it’s crazy because, like, Feedly, has what they call, I think it’s called Leonard, meet Leonard or something like that, anyway, it’s, it’s some sort of AI system that’s built into it. And so when you like, save content articles into a content board and Feedly, then you can go through and select, you know, certain pieces of content that are in that board and tell Leo to go find content like that in overtime, it’s machine learning, right? It trick, you can train the AI inside of Feedly to go out and find content that matches what you’ve trained the bot to do. And it’s really cool because it will auto-start automatically finding content and adding it to your content boards or your pool of available content that can be used for curating. And so we’d like in just the last three weeks have amassed quite a library of content that’s categorized in specific categories, like, you know, tree services, General tree services, spring tree services, summer tree services, autumn tree services, winter, you know, and so on, and so forth through various categories. And it’s great because it’s giving us like this, basically, almost unlimited. And once you train Leo to go out and find content, similar content, it’s basically unlimited content that you can use for curating. So it makes it a hell of a lot more efficient to curate manually, when all you got to do is click into a Feedly content board and find articles that you can use for support content, for supporting content for art for blog posts. So again, I don’t do anything automated, except for perhaps finding content. Everything else is done manually, but in a very efficient manner, which is what Content Kingpin is all about. It’s still the same processes we use, there’s just Feedly has improved drastically over the last couple of years, especially with the addition of AI machine learning. So, you know, those are some of the things that I would recommend.

And yes, you can curate content and focus it on the entity and focus on the entity also, it works really well in conjunction with the Content Kingpin, all of the software that we mentioned earlier.

What Is The Best Way To Build Lead Gen Properties?

Alright, so the next question says, looking to get into lead gen and I have a nice domain I found aimed at contractors nationally, what’s the best way to go about building lead gen properties? these days? Would you just get a GMB and do a mass page? Thanks, guys. I mean, if you didn’t get a GMB, it’s still in my opinion, the best way to do Legion.

Good luck with that. It’s very difficult to get GMBs right now.

It’s really hard to do much of anything with GMBs right now. I found as far as new ones are making edits and stuff Google’s real estate suspension happy. So I would be really careful. And good luck trying to get it. I mean, I hope you can, but I know it’s been difficult to get GMBs recently or last for the last few months. So what do you say, Marco? Well, the spammed listings are not only hard to get, but hard to keep are the key. Because when you get them, as soon as you start going and making changes, Google suspends it. And then they make you show paperwork they make you re-verify, which is the whole point. I mean, their whole point they want to know if you’re in legit.

And if you can’t re-verify you can’t show the paperwork, then you can’t get it back. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense to try to recover something that you know, isn’t legitimate in the first place. makes absolutely no sense, however, are the method that you’ve always shown the Semantic Mastery way, which is going to peel box with street address still works really well. Those will sometimes get suspended. Yeah, even that, but it’s less likely to get suspended.

Oh, guys, I’m not gonna mention the companies. But be really careful when you’re using an API to publish content into your GMB to publish schedule content. Because some of those have a muddy IP. Google has tagged it with suspicious activity and it’s a really good way to get suspended. So be really careful what it is what you’re doing, what it is that you’re doing with those. To this day. The original training in local GMB process, add a manager Never Never again go back in as the owner, I stand by that. I’ve only had one, one GMB suspended with a manager. So out of all of this out of everything that we’ve been doing, the way that has worked for me, the original training in local GMB Pro, you add a manager and let the manager go in. And it’s like, well, I’m not gonna go through the whole training. But try not to make any changes once you’ve sent for the pin. Once you have that pin lie should never go in again, except for tempos, and add pictures. And that’s it. Never again do anything else no changes, because it will get suspended if you make major changes, especially the NAP category that attend any of those even slight changes. I once added a video to one of the VA added one I added a video. And it wasn’t even any it’s not anything major adding a video and they got suspended. But then again, it wasn’t something that was truly legit. It was, and as a matter of fact, the post office box was through with street address, but we recovered it, we were able to recover that. Wow. So just be really careful. Just be really careful what you do because Google is out for blood to right now. They’re suspending a whole bunch of them. And they’d rather suspend you and have you legitimize the GMB then to not suspend you and let you get away with an illegitimate or spam. GMB. That’s the way that they’re doing this right now.

Yeah, and you know, it’s interesting because I had a client or I have a client excuse me that when I plugged it into a GMB post scheduler through the API, it showed that there was like no physical address associated with the GMB and it was weird. And so, I actually reached out to GMB support and I was wondering why I was having such a hard time getting the GMB to move correctly or move like Porter respond to the things that I was doing to it like they normally do. And once I discovered that there was an incorrect back end, a physical location associated with it, or really not at all in one when I plugged in the API will show you and by the way, you can figure that out. Where the location is of a GMB by plugging it into something like right local as a geo grid search report tool now. So if you get the cid for service area business GMB URL and plug it in, it’ll show you the center point where it where it’s where Google thinks that the business is registered. And it’s interesting because this was like the way out in the middle of like, nowhere, it was weird. It was like, like in a park or some shit. Like seriously, like, like, some crazy big national park or something. There’s nothing there. No buildings ran. And so I’m wondering why it wouldn’t respond. And when I plugged in an API, that’s what revealed that to me. And that’s when I started like wrecking realizing that some GM bees don’t have on the back end and actual physical location tied or it’s incorrect for especially for service area businesses. So anyway, I contacted Google support. And they said, go ahead and change your like I got this reply back from Google support and said go ahead and add the GMB or the address even though it was a service area business. They said go ahead and add the address. But it’s likely going to end support told me this is likely going to trigger re-verification. And so I contacted the client and I said, this is what they replied. I say we go ahead, do it because the maps listings not responding the way that they should be. And I feel like we’re gonna constantly be fighting an uphill battle, they said, go ahead and do it. So I did it. And fortunately, in that case, because they have a physical location that was verifiable, all that was required, though, was the postcard, just use standard us mail verification. And within seven days or so we had the card verified, and it’s responding better, it’s still going to take a little bit of time, but it’s coming back. So if you can’t like well, Marga said, If you can’t reverify something, don’t even bother trying is really the point.

So the follow-up questions, would you just get GMB into the mass page? I don’t do mass page stuff, period. I just don’t I don’t like to do it. It’s not that it can’t work. It might work. But I’m not the person to ask her. I don’t know that we are maybe Marco can shed some insight on it. Land Solutions Network is a mass page built with WordPress like the front end was WordPress pages. Mass page builder, it’s there to the public. It’s there for people to spam to report. It gets the UCI to get leads to this day because I post them in the group whenever so one comes in, we’re in a place where I’m not working. I post one from Hawaii the other day, I posted another one from Arizona, there was some from Florida that I that Chris Pillman got Chris G got some.

So if you do it right, there’s a reason why mass-paid build can’t work. But it just requires a little bit more work than what people are willing to put in a kind of in air quotes to kind of legitimize to build.

Would The RSS Masher Cause Footprint Issues If You Use The Same Account That Has Adsense & Affiliate Codes?

Hector’s obviously I saw your old webinar about David Nelson’s RSS masher and eager to access it. Would it cost footprint issues though if I use the same AdSense or affiliate code for each site? Or set I get a separate account for each? I don’t know about AdSense? I just don’t say I don’t do anything like that. So I just don’t know. Does anybody here have an answer for him about that?

Okay.

Sorry, I can’t answer that. I just don’t know. Um, as far as AdSense, I don’t think affiliate code would cause a problem. I don’t know because again, I just don’t do affiliate stuff, guys. I haven’t even attempted affiliate marketing in two or three years other than occasionally we do a promotion for Semantic Mastery. I just do local stuff. So I suddenly he wants to use RSS masher, to push content into multiple websites. And in those multiple websites, he is going to use the same AdSense code from the same account. That’s what he’s asking, Oh, that looks like a really good way to lose your account. Well, there you go. So you have an answer. That’s what I was asking. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really it to me. That doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Yeah. And it’s not something that it does. I mean, it seems like the footprint is the AdSense code, Google picking that out?

And then you’d have a problem with Google suspended the account?

Yeah, I don’t know. There’s got to be I’m sure there’s some groups and Facebook and shit like that, that where people do a whole bunch of heavy AdSense stuff that would that would be what I suggest or even go to YouTube and do some searches, I’m sure you can find the answers you’re looking for this is probably just not the place for Hector. And it’s just not something that really any of us do. So that’s why we can’t answer that one.

What’s The Best Way To Monetize Autoblogs Safely?

He says, What’s the best way to monetize these auto blogs safely? Would it be good to buy phone-verified Gmail accounts and run them in isolated browsers for this purpose? Thanks for all the great SEO stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s good practice anyway, I mean, for example, I’m still using a browser to the old desktop version.

It still works if you right-click and open system Chrome. That’s the only way that it works. But it works. And I got, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of profiles in there. And I don’t even change IPS, like it’s all just my IP, but it keeps the browsing sessions and gross ghost browsers want another one’s called session box. That’s one that I’m looking into. If I eventually switched from browser to eventually I will probably try the session box. I know ghost browsers. Good. We’ve talked about that a lot, a little bit more expensive, but I know it’s really good. So I think it’s best practice to do that anyway to keep sessions in browsers specific to accounts and that kind of stuff. But you know, so yeah, having different Gmail accounts associated with each one of those projects. I think it’s probably a pretty, pretty wise thing to do. You asked me. Does anybody want to comment on that? No, I totally agree. That’s that would be the same thing to do. Isolate each account. Yeah. So you don’t get tagged for any sort of footprint.

Is There A Way To Get A Virtual Office Address For A Service Business To Get Citations And GMB?

Okay, next one man in the SEO says, Hey, guys got a question about citations for a business that operates in different countries like the US and Canada. I would like to secure some citations from other countries but the business doesn’t have a physical office there as they are a service business. Is there a way to get a virtual office address so I can get citations? And potentially GMB if not a GMB citations would be plenty. Thanks for your help. Um, yeah, I mean, again, I think having a GMB is great.

For many reasons, if you could get a second location for it, like in the, you know, as you said, I guess we’re in Canada, for example, if you don’t have a physical office in Canada, physical office, excuse me, or location in Canada, but you would like to build citations there as well, then yeah, you can add a second location as long as, as we just mentioned, already today, many times, if you can get a verifiable address, that’s what I would recommend. It’s, you know, it would certainly help. And then you could have two sets of citations. I would tie that to a set separate that the second GMB, I would tie it to a location page specific for that second location. In other words, you don’t want if you’ve got to GMB, right, you don’t want both GMB is pointing to the same page, like the root domain or the homepage of the site.

Because that could cause some ambiguous ambiguity, right, some NAEP issues. So it would be because it’s going to be the same company name, right. And so as long as you have only one data point, and name, address, and phone number as the same or website URL, because it’s really four points, right, we always call it an NAP name, address, and phone number, but also includes the website address. So there are really four data points. And as long as you’re not, you’re not sharing more than one data point across those four, then you can do that. So in other words, if the company name is going to be the same, which it should be, unless you added a location modifier to the company name, which you can do, but if you want to keep the company the same in both locations, that’s fine. But then you should have a separate physical address, a separate phone number for each location, and a separate web page. So if you have a primary one, that the website URL is tied to the home or the route, you know, the homepage or the routing domain, that’s perfectly fine. But on the second location, you should have the website tied to a specific location page for that location. Does that make sense? So again, you want to only have one common data point across those for the name, address, phone number, and website, or else you can create any IP ambiguous ambiguity issues, which will cause both locations to not rank as well. That makes sense. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Yeah, I mean, you can get virtual office addresses all over the US that you can rent an office and have the postcard physically mailed that to that address. There are multiple ways to do that. I mean, there’s even a Craigslist that you can use for that. I mean, Craigslist. It’s worked for me in the past that I tried. Like, not too long ago, I tried one in New York City and got a dormant to get me a verified GMB. So you can still be done because you just have to be creative about how you go and get them to kind of legitimize what it is that you’re doing. And understand that if you lose it, it’s spam. There’s nothing you could do. Try it at first, you don’t succeed, try it again.

So that would be the only way I can think I would know nothing about Canada to know how the post office works there, whether you could get one there. But you could still get someone to verify a business for you. Or those virtual offices, man, virtual offices, they work really well. Yeah, Chris Genie was he provided me or I don’t have it to share with you guys. I’d have to go search for it. But there are virtual mailbox services now that, you know, you can register a physical location, right, so to speak, and they’ll receive the mail and scan it and send you an email with the images of the mail. So you might want to try I’ve never tried that. To be honest with you. I’ve never tried it. So I don’t know if that would work or not. But you know, it’s worth a shot, right? So you might want to consider that.

Can We Take The URLs From AWS For The Images And Build Tiered Web 2.0s To Pass Juice To The Money Site?

Right, next is Phineas and Ferb. Okay. Hey, so I’m wondering if we are using AWS or another cloud provider like Microsoft, for CDN? Can we take URLs from AWS and all our images and build tiered web 2.0s to them to pass us to the money site? Or could this cause a penalty? Curious to get your opinions? You know, that’s an old tactic. Jimmy Kelly talked about that way back in I think 2000. And what was it 14 when I went to the certification, networking power certification, I think it was 2014? Anyways, he was talking about that way back then when we were doing domain authority stacking, RYS, which worked like freakin gangbusters back then it was crazy how good that worked. And that’s what we would do like subdomain manipulation and all kinds of stuff that we would do.

And that was one of the things that I remember was taught way, way back then, which was seven years ago now was taking the CDN URLs and using those like for images and files and all that and just hammering them with backlinks and pushing domain authority into the entity or the root domain at that point, we weren’t really talking about entity based SEO then. And it worked. I don’t know if that still would have much of an effect now, because I just don’t really do domain authority stalking anymore. We, we do our methods, which is about relevancy, and entity and art.

So I don’t know if that would work or not. What do you think Marco? Yeah, I don’t see why you wouldn’t. Because you’re building tiered web two dot O’s to pass link power through. So the tiered web $2 would absorb most of it. Or if you’re building it into the AWS or Microsoft, or whatever the CDN of choice is.

It would still absorb, like any of the negative.

But I mean, to me, nothing like Google, nothing works like Google. That’s why we’re in the belly of the beast, not Google doesn’t trust anything like it trust Google. So we’ll stay in there for as long as we can until we can’t, and then we’ll figure out something else. Yeah.

Hey, it’s worth a test. Yeah, sure. I mean, all of these people come, and they come with these ideas, these theories? And the standard answer is, try and see, the only way that you would know is if you try to see because if you have us, or you wait for us, in the heavy hitter club, of course, if you wait for us to try, we have a long list of things to try, because we’re already getting result. And so what we would have to do is put it on the list, because it isn’t necessary with what we’re doing right now the system that we have in place.

And how we do it, we get results time. And again, it’s a repeatable process that we’ve built, that works, period. So to build all of these different things, right now, it doesn’t make sense, because we don’t really need them. It’s nice to have them in the chamber in case something happens. And so we do have all of these other things that we could turn to if something happens, but right now, it just isn’t necessary and hasn’t been for me for quite a while. But going on six years now that we’ve been using our methods and our system and the way that we do things.

Does Your Selection Of The GMB Service Area Option Have Any effect On Geographical Search In The 3-Pack?

That’s right, so Gordon’s up what’s up, Gordon, it’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, I need your help. And two quick questions. Does the GMB service area you select in your GMB listing have any effect on the geographical search area that gets Google to show your listing in a three-pack it does to a degree.

You know, Google tightened its proximity filters. A shit year and a half ago now. Time flies, I guess it’s been a while. But it used to be that. Yeah, you could get your maps in the show in your designated service area. Relatively easy, right? If it wasn’t that difficult, especially for like, again, tree contractors typically have a very big service area, like multiple counties. And so I would list all that, right. And a lot of the times I could get for some of the GMBs that were really powered up really authoritative, they would rank three cities away, right? Like because it was, you know, might be in an adjacent county altogether, right. And it was crazy. Um, but that’ll kind of change. A year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago, whatever, whenever the proximity filters got a lot stricter or tighter, narrower, so to speak. And so now it’s a lot more difficult. Yes, it can still be done. But it takes a lot of effort. And time, cumulative effort, in other words, in order to get that to occur, and that’s what we teach it local GMB Pro. So, you know, it is possible, but it does take consistent, repeated effort in order to end in a very specific way in order to do that. So what I’m saying is, is you can put a large service area, right, and it might be relevant to that business, but Google is likely only going to show the maps listing for people that are in close proximity at the time that they search for that service, unless you can force it to, you know, Marco, I suppose, expand the centroid by doing the methods that we teach in local GMB Pro. But it’s difficult to do that. I mean, it’s not that it can’t be done. It certainly can. But it’s difficult to do that. So, you know, again, Google is going to really show the maps listing to people that are in close proximity when they’re searching, especially if there are other businesses, like if it’s a very obscure business, that there’s not a lot of other companies that provide that product or service, then yeah, you can get maps listing to appear from I mean, you know, 10s or hundreds of miles away even That’s true, but it’s very rare. If it’s a type of business that is common, then and there are multiple providers within you know, you know, there are multiple competitors, I should say, then it’s, then it’s likely that the Google My Business profile is not going to show up in adjacent towns because of the proximity filter, and that’s what I’ve been experiencing. So I typically now really just focus in on an immediate local area, at least initially, and once I start getting that to rank then we start targeting, you know, expanded areas through content marketing, GMB posts, and all that other stuff that we teach in the local GMB pro market. What do you say? activity, relevance, trust, and authority, right? The more trusted and authoritative you become, the more that the centroid will expand. How you do that is in local GMB Pro, there has to be a reason why Google will display you to someone that further away than that they should be. There has to be a reason for that proximity factor not to kick in. We did that with the DC plumber, right? It’s a case study in RYS Academy Reloaded.

But it works perfectly well here where we built such massive trust and authority into that, that it became the keyword for the niche. And so because it has that trust and authority, it gets displayed to people outside of what you would expect the radius to be from the Business Center, the way that we did it. As I’ve said before, in New York City was a bike messenger server, the way that we did it in LA is Uber drivers. And I’m not gonna say how it was done, I’m just telling you, that’s what we used to just create massive trust and authority to relate, like, create relevance between where we wanted Google, to display to people to give us impressions, to put our results in front of people to get us in the map pack in front of people. And then I mean, if you’re there one to one or two, sometimes three people start clicking on it. And then that reinforces the trust and authority that Google is giving us and creates even more. The whole process for that it’s a local GMB Pro. I won’t get into it here.

Yeah, and I’m testing. You know, I’ve talked about many, many times over the last year and a half, two years here on Hump Day hangouts about click-through spam bots, and not using them. And I’ve just been using paid traffic from Google. But I, I have started testing, Michael bows, his Viper tools recently, because he’s been getting a lot of good results from people that I know in the space. And so I’ve actually just recently started testing with that. And that’s something that I’m hoping I don’t have any results yet, but I’m hoping that I can get similar results to some of the people that I’ve chatted with about it. And that could be something I mean, you could do paid traffic, which is what I’ve been doing but you know, you can specify like certain clicks to come to for within a certain geographic area, right? From a topically relevant audience or an audience that would be relevant to you know, what you’re sending them to, and that that works to, to kind of help with that stuff, too. So I’m actually testing the tool right now. As I said, Michael’s tool doesn’t have any results to share yet but I’m hoping that it works well. And if it does, I will let you guys know for sure.

Can You Create Massive Direct Backlinks Without Using Buffer Sites?

Alright, the next question was do you have to be careful when creating direct backlinks to GMB listings as you do when doing direct backlinks to the websites, or can you create massive direct backlinks without using a very small number of buffer web 2.0 sites as tier one layer, maybe even a tier two-layer and what parts of the GMB listing should be targeted with backlinks to get the most SEO bang for the buck? Thank you very much. We hope as usual as always greatly appreciated. That seems almost like a consultation question Gordon. It gets very intricate on how things we try not to do in Hump Day hangouts is don’t discuss the How is what people pay us a whole lot of money for who can tell you what we do but that this is kind of getting into how isn’t it? I don’t know unless you want to answer because I’m not. Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t have any problem running backlinks directly to GMB stuff for tier-one entity acids period. I don’t like to run direct backlinks to the money site. But to tier-one entity assets, we did I hammer everything.

That’s my answer. Do you want to comment on that? Anyone? You can hammer that as far as I’m gonna go. Okay. And that’s what I do Gordon distances short answer. All tier-one entity assets. I don’t game. Yep. Just Hey.

And that’s why we do what we do with the SEO SEO guy. That’s why it’s called the SEO shield. Right? It’s the SEO firewall, it shields the money site. So you can do all that really nasty, off-page SEO stuff to your shield, not to the money site. But that’s the whole point. Right?

So we keep the money site procedures. The first place they’re gonna go look is the money site. Yeah, the only thing I run directly to the money site besides syndication posts, like syndication network backlinks or press releases.

And that’s pretty much it, you know, occasionally I’ll buy some guest post links.

From a really good provider. They’re expensive, though. But even then, it’s only very, very specific circumstances. Other than that, I just use the same methods that we teach. So I do absolutely nothing to the benefit, sometimes a precedent, a precedent, but I’ll usually run press releases elsewhere to one.

How Does The Google Bot Understand The Schema Through The Tag Manager If There’s No Placement In The HTML?

So BB is up with a list of questions as usual. What’s up, bb, he says, Hey, guys, you said there is a way to the schema to add schema, I guess, through the Google Tag Manager. But how the G bot understands the page that there’s no placement in the HTML, it’ll render it. So it’s a script, right, the container will display the scripts within the container in Google Tag Manager. Now, Google even says in their help files, that that is not the preferred way to display JSON LD structured data on a website, doing it through Tag Manager is not the preferred way, as per Google’s own help files or documentation. However, it still works. And there are certain circumstances where that’s the only way you can do it. So for example, I have a website, one of my sites that has a website theme that there’s no way to add code to the home page. It’s really weird. It’s the home page is like built into the theme. And there’s no, there’s just no way to add code to the home page other than through Google Tag Manager. Or if I were to hack the JSON LD directly into the theme files, which I don’t like to do. So in that case, I just added the structure data organization schema, in that case, to the container code, and Google Tag Manager, and yes, it will render. Now if you go to a view page source, all you’re going to see is the GTM Tag Manager, excuse me, the container code, the Google Tag Manager container, but that’s all you’re going to see. But when you do a structured data testing tool test on the homepage, it will render the JSON LD code on the site. So you can actually see it in Google, excuse me, the structured data testing tool. So yes, again, it’s not the preferred method, if you can add the structured data directly to the code of the site using SEO ultimate Pro, which is what I use mostly, sometimes use as a header and footer plugin. Sometimes themes will have the ability to add code to specific pages or sitewide, globally. So you can add it there, although I recommend only adding, you know, like organization schema to the homepage or whatever, just as per best practices. So but you know, in those cases where you can’t Google Tag Manager is a viable alternative, even if Google says it isn’t because it still reads and recognizes the code. And he comments on that.

No, I mean, that that’s a perfect answer because that’s exactly what it is Google, it will render on the website as everything renders as HTML eventually, right. All it is all the Google tag manager does is it sets up a JavaScript call between Google servers and your server to render the HTML. That’s all it is.

Did Your Site’s Bounce Rate Increase After The Passage Index Update?

Question number two, did the bounce rate increase in your site after the passage index update? Don’t know, haven’t looked at it. It’s not a metric that I’m typically Chase.

So I don’t know I can’t answer that. Anybody have? No, I haven’t seen any changes. So and my metric is called my metric is form fields. My metric is what’s going on in that box? Any thoughts or takeaways on the new update? No, I honestly don’t have any sorry. Usually, I don’t even know about updates until somebody like you brings it to our attention. So and I mean that I don’t stay plugged in all that shit. I don’t I just look, if I start seeing some significant fluctuations in my own properties, or plant properties, then I go in and start digging into it. But if I don’t see any major fluctuations, why bother? I’ve got other things to work on. Do you know what I mean? So I honestly, I can’t give you an answer to that. I don’t have any opinion on it.

Or for the new update that will come out in May for speed testing? No, I mean, it’s Google PageSpeed. has been, people have said, it’s been a metric for a long time, but I really haven’t seen that. It’s, but it’s good for user experience. Right. So what I’m saying is PageSpeed for an SEO metric, a ranking metric is not something that I’ve seen it really have much of an effect on.

Even though people have been saying that for years, I really haven’t seen that in my own experience. But for user experience, it absolutely makes a difference. Especially on mobile, like if it was if a page loads really slow on mobile like people get irritated in the back out and go somewhere else. And so that’s really important, I think.

But as far as like what I know, I did read someone that I guess it was the experience update or whatever they’re calling it, where it’s, it’s, it covers a number of things. PageSpeed being one of them. You know, I really don’t have a prediction on that, because I just don’t know, we’ll see what happens when it comes. Any comments on that? The whole point of entity-based worry-less SEO is that to worry about those things. And again, I’ll go back to just measuring the metrics that matter, which is the four are the form fields, steady, and are the phone call steady. And it’s the clients’ bottom line increasing that, that my job is not to worry about bounce rate or anything else like that. Unless I see a problem with any of the metrics that really matter, then I’m gonna go and see if anything has happened to affect that. And then I’m on it. But by the time I’m on that, I’m past the period, where everyone’s panicked and everyone has gone and done whatever they could to try to affect the garden themselves in trouble, maybe even sandbox, I’m going to be past all that. I’m going to be passed that point. So I’m going to let the dust settle. And then I’m going to go in and I’m going to start checking, I’m going to look at the data and see what it was that happened. And why. And then I’m gonna go into fixing it. I haven’t needed to do that literally in Oh, I did just recently, but it will it had nothing to do with the core update. But I did have to recently go in and fix something and it can’t my back, everything comes right back. And what we continue seeing since Google started announcing updates until now, when we’ve been applying these methods is Google doesn’t update, and our shit gets even better, it gets stronger. If we hit more traffic, we get better results for our clients, our clients. Sometimes, it’s 10x, sometimes going from 8k a month to 80k. Going I don’t know from 100 to 150k. I mean, those kinds of results going from seven, 8 million to nearly 30 million a month. Those are the results that we’re talking about. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care about Google. And I’m gonna stand by what I have said all along that the art of art the art of activity, relevance, trust, and authority trumps everything on the web.

What’s The Best Way To Merge Two GMBs Quickly?

Sweet. So Dee Dee is up he says, What’s up, he says brown new. He’s a mastermind member and has been for like, many years, I think since the beginning. So anyway, he says a proud new user of go I level through semantic mastery today. Thanks for all the info Bradley, you’re welcome to and great, great tool.

Let me know when you want me to cover more stuff in the mastermind about it because in fact, I’ve got I’ve been building an app in high level for my contract as my three contractors that I’m going to be selling as a SAS software, the software is a service, right. And it’s great because it’s a low barrier to entry, low cost. But super, a super valuable tool that they can use to help them get more leads from their existing web assets, manage those leads through automated conversations. And then and through like a pipeline a lead pipeline inside high level and then also solicit reviews and basically build up the reviews. So it helps us retain reputation. And it’s a really cool app, and I’ve just finished well I’m not 100% done with it, I’m gonna I’m meeting with my one of my first three contractors is going to be beta testing it for me, either on Friday or Saturday, I’m still waiting on a reply back. But this week, and so next week, it will be in use by a tree contractor so that I can start working out the bugs and stuff. But that’s going to be one of my leading products where my new agency is that app because it’s only I’m only charging $200 a month I level says you should charge 300 a month, but I’m doing it for a specific reason. Anyways. And I think it’s gonna be a really, really good tool to get my foot in the door at a low cost with contractors, right? So anyway, let me know if you want me to cover more of that in the mastermind, I’m happy to do so and I’m in fact, next Thursday when I have my next mastermind webinar.

My tree contractor who’s going to be beta testing it for me and working with me to work out the bugs, you know, he will have about a week’s worth of use out of it. So I’ll have some pretty good experiences to share with you on that point. By the way, guys, if you’re curious, go to semantic mastery comm slash high level. It’s an outstanding platform. It’s an automation platform for agencies essentially. And it’s a really, really powerful tool. There’s a hell of a learning curve, there is no question, but it’s worth putting the time and effort into learning because it can really help you to grow your business I’m using it for right now primarily prospecting for my own business and I mean it’s just great to set up all these things. Automations that just run like clockwork day in and day out to fill your pipeline full of leads. And it’s just, it’s crazy. I’ve only been running it for three weeks now. And I’ve got, you know, 6760 to 70. Some leads in my pipeline are in various stages of communication, but it’s crazy guys. It’s a really, really, really good tool. And I’m doing a ton of I’m going to be doing I’m developing training right now, that will become the semantic mastery mastermind training, like a 90 day or a 12-week program. And the high level is an integral part of that. So if anybody’s interested in that, go check out semantic mastery comm slash high level, it’s a 14-day free trial, that is our affiliate link, but then come join the mastermind because I’m hoping by, you know, the third quarter of this year, to have the training that I’m going to be rolling out to the mastermind available and ready. And once that is launched, we’re going to kind of restructure how you can even join the mastermind, the cost everything. So if any of that interests you now would probably be a good time to get in. So you’re grandfathered. Anyways, following up on that. He says I have a client that needs a merge of GMB accounts. I’ve been trying to get this done by Google for the last four months with no luck. I keep filling out the GMB form they provide and I don’t get any response Yeah, it’s weird I’m so hit or miss with Google support. Sometimes they’re really responsive like they were with that client that I just mentioned.

We contacted them about adding a physical location to a service area business they were actually really responsive in that case, but in other cases, I go three weeks without getting a reply back so I understand your frustration he says this is a legit business that moved and we do not have access to the previous listing as another company did it. Is there any other method to try to get this done that you know of? Okay, here’s one thing d I would suggest because you’re in the mastermind is post this as like asking for help in the mastermind within describing the issue. Because we there’s a lot of local Google Local Guides in our mastermind, myself included lane Clayton, Greg Greenberg, there’s a bunch of them in there that, you know, in the past, when we’ve had similar weird issues occur, we get high-level local guides to go in and suggest that it’s and after a handful of that those occur, then oftentimes the attics will the edits will go through. So let’s start a discussion in the mastermind. That’s what it’s for anyways, D and C, see, you know, we put all our heads together, we ought to be able to come up with something to help you or at least give you some additional ideas. That’s what the mastermind is for any comments on that guys? Yeah, ask Marco anything mastermind is tomorrow. Right? So just come in and ask that question. Because I do have some suggestions for you on what would work for this because someone just went through this and it was a nightmare. And the way that you’re trying to do it just filling out the form, not gonna work. They are not going to respond to that at all ever takes you’d never get anything when you fill out that form. And they don’t tell you what we’ll call you. Right right back. Never call. You never get any response and never get any emails. And I’ll give this in public.

You’re not the one that should be doing this. That GMB if it’s legit has an owner with all the documentation. That should be the person, not you. The owner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. documentation should be the one that’s initiating all of the contacts. But let’s talk tomorrow. Let’s talk tomorrow. So I can talk to you in-depth on how to how to get through this. Yeah, there you go. And that’s good advice.

You know, from the primary owner’s account, if you contact support, you might get a response. So that owner, not the manager, not never the manager.

Alright, the last question, which is great and by the way, hey, Jordan, yo, yo, yo, you pretty people. I don’t know who you’re talking to join. But

Is Local Viking Good For GMB Postings?

anyways, this last question says is local biking, okay to use for GMB posting? Or is it one to be aware of, alright? I talked about this for the last couple of months, I switched to local Viking about two months ago. But, you know, according to some crazy shit that happened last week, apparently,

I have canceled my subscription. And I’m just not going to use it anymore. I’m concerned about the API connection being a flag. I’m not saying whether it is or not, I don’t know. But I have revoked local Viking access to my GM bees. And I’m not going to continue to use it. And it’s just because it’s better safe than sorry. And I’d rather be overly cautious. And I’m afraid that that might be a flag because of some of the issues that had happened a week ago. And it wasn’t just them. There were a couple of others as well.

And so I’ve literally revoked access. There’s only one app that I’m using right now for posting to GMB. That does in it, that’s all it does. It doesn’t, it doesn’t connect in any other way other than to allow for posting and it’s called fan booster fan booster calm. There are some limitations with that app though. So and I’m only testing that across like three locations right now. All my other locations are going to be manually posted to for right now by my VA logging into as a manager to those GMB locations one at a time and posting manually, which sucks, but it is what it is. And right now I’m afraid to use any of these like SEO-based GMB posts schedulers, a social media-based post scheduler, I think is different because it’s not scrutinized the same way that the SEO tools are by Google. At least that’s my assumption. It’s logical. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But fan booster is a social media posting app. That’s the one that I’m testing with right now. And that is pretty cool. There are some limitations. But there are also some really cool benefits to that. So I mean, I’ll share more information about that when I have it. But again, just to be 100% transparent, I have canceled my subscription to local biking and it sucks because I just worked it into my processes for my team. And I had to cancel it right after we got really good at using it. Fucking canceled it. But it is what it is Welcome to the world of online marketing, right? So any comments on that, before we wrap it up, my motto is always to protect what’s making you money. always protect the better to be safe than sorry. Some of those APIs were tagged for suspicious activity. I’m not gonna say which one.

Which ones it was more than one, they were just getting heavily spam that was being used for purposes other than posting. And so I mean, it is what it is, every time that I’m gonna put myself and spammers get hold of something. It gets muddy to get dirty, Google starts looking in. And their job is simply we’re gonna get rid of it. So we’ll just knock it all out. Yeah, we just knock it all out. We don’t care. They’d rather do that. Then take a chance of letting the spammers continue spamming. That’s the same thing that they’re doing with GMB period. Prove that if it gets suspended, prove that it’s real. Yeah, that that’s it. They don’t care. They don’t care if it was real to start with. prove that it’s real. That’s it.

Yeah, and I want to thank you, Marco, again, for bringing that to my attention last week, because, like I immediately went in and revoked access and fortunately, knock on wood. I still got my assets. So anyway, thanks, guys. We’ll see y'all next time.

Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 330 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 330

Click on the video above to watch Episode 330 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Right about now. All right. Welcome, everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 330. Today is the 10th of March 2021. We got almost everyone here, maybe her nominal show up here in a couple of minutes. We got a couple of announcements today some things we want to go over and then we are going to get into the questions but want to say hi, real quick. Get everyone. See how they’re doing. If you’re watching, by the way, go ahead and let us know how you’re doing. If you’re watching live, you can pop that right on the page. Say hello. Let us know what’s going on. So I’ll just go down my list here. I see Chris is first. So Chris, how are you doing today? Good. Glad to be here. Super excited.

Yeah, can’t complain. Whereas getting actually spring is almost here. Like is where it’s being really good here.

So I can’t wait to actually gonna lift the lockdowns at some point, hopefully. And it’s all outside time. Very nice. All right. Marco, how about you How you doing today? Let me see. Let me see. Let me see.

I started going off into that fake background, that fake co story comes back. It’s impossible for it to be this nice. 365. But you’ve seen it tight. It’s been actually March, February, we came to this house in February of last year, just before we got locked out. And you guys have seen it live for 52 weeks. It is what it is, man. It’s beautiful. I keep telling people, it’s the price I pay for the life I live, this is what I choose. This is not where I have to be. This is where I choose to be. If you want that moment if you want that. It’s called the POFU position of Fuck you. We do POFU Live, where we go in and we have a bunch of experts giving presentations, then there’s me giving you my mindset and not that I’m calling myself an expert. I just, it’s what I do. For both, we’ll try to get you in the right mindset so that you go and do the things that you need to do. And that you have to do. In order to be able to do the things that you want to do is funny how that works out. First, you have to do and you need to do. And then you can do whatever you want. Because you’re in that position where you can decide whatever it is that’s best for your life. So just fantastic. And we were just talking about how it is that we’re going to do it. And that’s coming.

Not only is that coming but I’ll just tease it a little bit Syndication Academy. Syndication Academy is in the can, the videos are recorded. We have 300 website updates to go through or over 300 there’s a couple of them that the syndication Academy, I don’t know what to say she’s just a fantastic director, we’ll just call her the instructor, the syndication Academy, instructor, the person who’s going to be guiding the person who’s going to be giving you support in Facebook to be in there daily, supporting the group. It’s an overhaul, it’s a complete overhaul, it’s a complete, completely different idea. The concept stays the same, you have to expand your entity, expand that footprint. let Google know everything that belongs to your entity, make it known, make it better hook it up altogether, so that the power flows the way that it’s supposed to. syndication Academy is fantastic.

Our trainer, instructor, she’s fantastic. She will be up to giving you webinar updates every month, he’ll come up to three websites.

And again, she’ll be in the Facebook group, I think it’s going to totally rock, and you guys for you guys wondering because somebody did ask me. Well, if you guys do it in syndication, Academy networks, and MGYB. Well, then why should I buy Syndication Academy? Well, I just said that we will be having 300 Well, looking through 300 websites to see how they can be manipulated, manipulated, and added into the syndication networks that we built. Our VA is It’ll take a while for them to catch up. And if we do offer the service we can offer everything that we will be adding to syndication Academy, we always had what’s most important what we think you must have, as far as that footprint goes as far as that entity, but there are others and we’re going to have fantastic opportunities like when we came across.

Now, it’s slipping my mind, but, oh boy, when we added all of the weekend and all the drive stacks, all of the folders and pro trees. Yeah, yeah. came across that and it was fantastic. And there wasn’t originally in it. It was a webinar update. And that became part of the syndication networks, or part of the ad ID, and yeah. I mean, it’s just a fantastic website. So all of those will be coming. There’s plenty of other website websites out there. So as a matter of fact, I was telling you guys yesterday one of the ones that already in the can, is a fantastic website. So fantastic semantic hub. And it’s just a really novel way to approach SEO. Yeah. Bradley coined that will be with us. She’s fantastic again and so I’m really really looking forward to working with her on expanding and making syndication Academy way better than what it is and it’s fantastic already.

Oh, Stan, I got nothing to add on to that I wanted to make sure we touched on it, it’s coming up and I just put on the Early Access opt-in so if you want to be first to be notified, there’s definitely going to be something special for people who are on the early access list. So if you’re pumped about Syndication Academy you just want to find out more you’re thinking hey this may be for me maybe for my client’s good way to make money a way to get more exposure better rankings more traffic all that hop the early access list. If you’re not watching this live and you’re checking it out on YouTube just go to semantic mastery comm slash each D questions and you can find the link there and get that all taken care of.

Let’s see as I go through here realize we haven’t said hello to Mr. Johnny come lately also known as her non How’s it going, buddy? I’m good, man. I’m banging on the door. And it’s rainy and cold outside and you guys won’t let me in, dripping wet on the outside looking in. Yeah, man. Come on. Let me in. I’m good, man. I’m happy to be here. Outstanding. Last but not least Bradley, how you doing? I’m good, man. Happy to be here. It’s freaking warm. All of a sudden, Virginia. And it’s like 70 degrees, almost 70 degrees outside. It’s crazy. It’s like, you know, three days ago, it was cold. And I had sweatshirts on and space heaters up here. And now it’s like,

oh, that time of year, man spring is around the corner. And I’m happy about it. That’s things get really busy for my tree. Contractors come springtime and stay that way all the way through fall. So I’m looking forward to this season for sure. Nice. Nice, nice. Well, Bradley, we had a cool conversation all of us did with somebody yesterday. So you mentioned the cold email mastery course that you went through. And you mentioned that on Hump Day hangouts last week, and we ended up hooking up with Daniel, yesterday and talking to him. So you might tell people a little bit about what we might end up what they might see from you and him. Yeah, we so I mentioned a really good cold email course that I picked up about, I don’t know, maybe three weeks ago now. And it was really good, and it’s inexpensive. There’s a ton of value for what you pay for it. And I’m not gonna mention it now, because we’re going to talk about it when with Daniel, I’m going to jump on a call with a video call with Daniel over the next two weeks or so. And he’s going to go through his methods that he teaches in the training and how to specifically apply it because he does email marketing for all kinds of stuff.

But he’s going to talk about how to apply his methods specifically for prospecting for clients, for consultants in for agencies. And so I think that’s going to be really valuable. It’s not going to be a live webinar, he and I are going to jump on and just him and I are going to banter back and forth. And he’ll go through some demonstrations that are all be recorded. And then we’re going to present that to you guys. Again, I picked it up for myself and I was blown away by I thought it was really, really good. Let’s put it that way. And so Adam reached out to him and got it set up. And we had a meeting with him yesterday. And he’s stoked in real cool guys a lot like Marco and that he’s not politically correct when it comes to speech and it’s great. I love that kind of instruction. And so it’s real punchy, real to the point no fluff and all that. And so I’m looking forward to having a video call with him that we can bring to you guys. For those of you that are looking to generate more clients for your business. It’s a really good strategy.

Awesome. Yeah. And I’ll just say for those of you who are listening, and again, if you’re not live, you can leave this on the replay on YouTube, if you guys have any questions about cold emailing. So b2b is what this is, right? You’re not just emailing people, you’re emailing references as an agency. If you’ve got any questions, pop them in there, you know, and if we can, we’ll work those in and get those answered, because he’s got a lot of background in that. I know Bradley. I mean, most of us, I think, have at least some experience, but Daniel certainly got a lot so that you know, just a quick met note for internal processes, we might want to post in our groups, a little survey about questions about cold email, prospecting, post them here and we can incorporate that into the video call I do within Yeah, that’s a good idea. Yeah, Bradley, just let me know when you’re gonna when you guys set up the call, and I’ll do that a couple of days before. So. Real quick. Before we jump into questions, just want to say to everyone if you’re new to SM and MGYB, I know we get new people. We see that a lot of people commenting and we love it. We know there are more people out there who just watched and that’s cool too. But if you’re wondering where to get started

The best place to you’ll hear us talking about stuff like the SEO shield and syndication networks and all this other stuff. But go to the SEO shield, comm grab that it free training, find out how you can shield your site, don’t worry about algorithm updates. And you’ll find out a little bit more about what we’re talking about why this stuff makes sense how it works, and then where you can get it. So as Marco mentioned, you can go get this stuff done for you, if you want, that’s great, go to mgyb.co, if you want to more, maybe understand the nuts and bolts or build your own team and start building this stuff out, then, of course, you know, we have the training available as well. Beyond that, if you want to find out more about getting repeatable SEO results, you can grab the battle plan of battle plan dot semantic mastery com. If you’re looking at an agency or you’re a consultant, and you want to grow and become an agency to x, your agency comm is the place to be, and then last but not least, if you’re ready to grow your digital marketing business, or for some people, they’re brick and mortar and they want to expand the online side, the mastermind is the place for you. You can find out more about that at mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. And with that, I think we should dive into the questions unless you guys got anything else.

No excited about the Syndication Academy launch. I’m going to be spending some time this upcoming weekend going through a lot of the training that SEO is recorded, you know, to provide some feedback and stuff and it’s gonna be pretty, I’m pretty excited about it. Because, you know, it’s been a few years since we’ve updated it. And this has been completely redone as Marco said, with just a ton of sites that we’re going to be expanding the foot, you know, entity footprint with. So as he’s going to be doing a training on each one of those sites, and that’ll be the monthly updates, or maybe even bi-weekly updates, depending on what we decide, because of the sheer number of sites that we have to expand upon. probably end up doing bi-weekly webinars in the Facebook group for that. So anyway, just looking forward to that, guys, if you have any questions about it, let us know. Otherwise, let’s get into questions.

Let’s do it.

got quite a few.

I think this is the newest one. We still don’t have the dates and times on here. Let me see. It should be right after I commented I think Jared Yeah, it was one Conrad is just before that. I don’t think we got to his.

Does All Of The MGYB Services Work For Non-English Sites?

Yeah, we did. Actually, you bounce. Okay. You had a call? Yeah. You had a call come in? And I answered that. But I was looking for you to reply to that one. Anyways, I said that we don’t do anything in non-English, but from what I understand applying non-English or English drive stacks to non-English sites will still benefit. Is that correct?

That was the question. I mean, yeah, Hernan and I worked on a Swedish website. Also, what we did is we actually went and had the team do it in English. And then the guy who was working as he translated it into Norwegian or Swedish, whatever it was.

So I mean, it works perfectly well. If you take the time to go then to then go in and target your language might not even have to, because what we’re looking for is relevance, the AI should be able to make the connection that is basically the same.

So yeah, I mean, the answer to that is, I don’t see why you can’t get the MGYB services, we don’t do it in your language, we will do it in English, and it’s up to you to go in. For example, syndication network, it’s up to you to go in and translate the profile, but it won’t take that long for the descriptions and everything else.

So that would be my suggestion, you go in and or you hire someone better yet, go into Upwork or something like that, and hire a translator to translate everything so you don’t have to, you can go concentrate and focus on something else.

There you go.

What Are Your Thoughts On AI Content Like Marketmuse, Frase, And Menterprise?

Alright, so Gerrards up first, for this week. He says, what are your thoughts on AI content with stuff like market news res enterprise, etc? Is it fine to use our money site with some manual editing and manually added content? Yeah, I mean, I use phrase.io is the tool that I’ve been using?

And yeah, I mean, I would, for money site stuff, I wouldn’t just, you know, use the content that it pulls back or creates without manually editing it. Maybe for link-building stuff. You could but I wouldn’t do that on the money side. I would still manually edit stuff.

But yeah, I mean, it’s I think phrases are good too. I haven’t used any others. So I don’t know. But I do actually use sprays for some of my projects as well. So what about anybody else in length is a go-to because of the way that we can relate the entity, the way that we can work with the entity and focus and I’m not going to go in-depth in that because

That’s something that was presented in POFU live. And I’m not going to share it out of purple light, but the way that he focuses the entity, not only within links but another tool.

Man, I’m slipping today because I’m presenting all of the software that we use SEO surfer or surfer SEO. So the way that that those two are used in conjunction, you can even put phrases in there. And there’s quite a few other software as a service SaaS software that you can use and really, really getting great content. Now what you get is a, or what you should be getting is a template, if it’s for your money site. And then you would use that template to write your content, I wouldn’t use what you’re given directly, I would edit it and make sure that that is hyperfocus for the bot. That’s how we do use the content. That’s how the VA was trained to use the content.

So the follow-up to that was can this be used to automate curation for our blogs the way Bradley does it? Thanks a lot. Again, I wouldn’t, you know, yes, you can use it to help kind of like, you know, augment, or supplement the blog posting for curated content, because it will actually pull in content based upon a search query or a question.

And it will pull in the top results. And, you know, so yeah, you can use that to help with curating content. But I wouldn’t use it again, not for money. So I would I use that as like, automated content production. Right, I wouldn’t do it for that, not for money site, all of the content that I, you know, for my clients is manually curated by my bloggers. So we don’t use any automated fashion. Now. I mean, you can streamline and make manual curation a lot more efficient. For example, we started doing social posting for tree contractors. And so we’ve been developing out the Feedly account, feed the pro account with a ton of content, I’ve been paying my one of my bloggers by the hour to just find and collect good content that’s relevant in all different types of categories, specific to tree services and landscaping.

And it’s crazy because, like, Feedly, has what they call, I think it’s called Leonard, meet Leonard or something like that, anyway, it’s, it’s some sort of AI system that’s built into it. And so when you like, save content articles into a content board and Feedly, then you can go through and select, you know, certain pieces of content that are in that board and tell Leo to go find content like that in overtime, it’s machine learning, right? It trick, you can train the AI inside of Feedly to go out and find content that matches what you’ve trained the bot to do. And it’s really cool because it will auto-start automatically finding content and adding it to your content boards or your pool of available content that can be used for curating. And so we’d like in just the last three weeks have amassed quite a library of content that’s categorized in specific categories, like, you know, tree services, General tree services, spring tree services, summer tree services, autumn tree services, winter, you know, and so on, and so forth through various categories. And it’s great because it’s giving us like this, basically, almost unlimited. And once you train Leo to go out and find content, similar content, it’s basically unlimited content that you can use for curating. So it makes it a hell of a lot more efficient to curate manually, when all you got to do is click into a Feedly content board and find articles that you can use for support content, for supporting content for art for blog posts. So again, I don’t do anything automated, except for perhaps finding content. Everything else is done manually, but in a very efficient manner, which is what Content Kingpin is all about. It’s still the same processes we use, there’s just Feedly has improved drastically over the last couple of years, especially with the addition of AI machine learning. So, you know, those are some of the things that I would recommend.

And yes, you can curate content and focus it on the entity and focus on the entity also, it works really well in conjunction with the Content Kingpin, all of the software that we mentioned earlier.

What Is The Best Way To Build Lead Gen Properties?

Alright, so the next question says, looking to get into lead gen and I have a nice domain I found aimed at contractors nationally, what’s the best way to go about building lead gen properties? these days? Would you just get a GMB and do a mass page? Thanks, guys. I mean, if you didn’t get a GMB, it’s still in my opinion, the best way to do Legion.

Good luck with that. It’s very difficult to get GMBs right now.

It’s really hard to do much of anything with GMBs right now. I found as far as new ones are making edits and stuff Google’s real estate suspension happy. So I would be really careful. And good luck trying to get it. I mean, I hope you can, but I know it’s been difficult to get GMBs recently or last for the last few months. So what do you say, Marco? Well, the spammed listings are not only hard to get, but hard to keep are the key. Because when you get them, as soon as you start going and making changes, Google suspends it. And then they make you show paperwork they make you re-verify, which is the whole point. I mean, their whole point they want to know if you’re in legit.

And if you can’t re-verify you can’t show the paperwork, then you can’t get it back. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense to try to recover something that you know, isn’t legitimate in the first place. makes absolutely no sense, however, are the method that you’ve always shown the Semantic Mastery way, which is going to peel box with street address still works really well. Those will sometimes get suspended. Yeah, even that, but it’s less likely to get suspended.

Oh, guys, I’m not gonna mention the companies. But be really careful when you’re using an API to publish content into your GMB to publish schedule content. Because some of those have a muddy IP. Google has tagged it with suspicious activity and it’s a really good way to get suspended. So be really careful what it is what you’re doing, what it is that you’re doing with those. To this day. The original training in local GMB process, add a manager Never Never again go back in as the owner, I stand by that. I’ve only had one, one GMB suspended with a manager. So out of all of this out of everything that we’ve been doing, the way that has worked for me, the original training in local GMB Pro, you add a manager and let the manager go in. And it’s like, well, I’m not gonna go through the whole training. But try not to make any changes once you’ve sent for the pin. Once you have that pin lie should never go in again, except for tempos, and add pictures. And that’s it. Never again do anything else no changes, because it will get suspended if you make major changes, especially the NAP category that attend any of those even slight changes. I once added a video to one of the VA added one I added a video. And it wasn’t even any it’s not anything major adding a video and they got suspended. But then again, it wasn’t something that was truly legit. It was, and as a matter of fact, the post office box was through with street address, but we recovered it, we were able to recover that. Wow. So just be really careful. Just be really careful what you do because Google is out for blood to right now. They’re suspending a whole bunch of them. And they’d rather suspend you and have you legitimize the GMB then to not suspend you and let you get away with an illegitimate or spam. GMB. That’s the way that they’re doing this right now.

Yeah, and you know, it’s interesting because I had a client or I have a client excuse me that when I plugged it into a GMB post scheduler through the API, it showed that there was like no physical address associated with the GMB and it was weird. And so, I actually reached out to GMB support and I was wondering why I was having such a hard time getting the GMB to move correctly or move like Porter respond to the things that I was doing to it like they normally do. And once I discovered that there was an incorrect back end, a physical location associated with it, or really not at all in one when I plugged in the API will show you and by the way, you can figure that out. Where the location is of a GMB by plugging it into something like right local as a geo grid search report tool now. So if you get the cid for service area business GMB URL and plug it in, it’ll show you the center point where it where it’s where Google thinks that the business is registered. And it’s interesting because this was like the way out in the middle of like, nowhere, it was weird. It was like, like in a park or some shit. Like seriously, like, like, some crazy big national park or something. There’s nothing there. No buildings ran. And so I’m wondering why it wouldn’t respond. And when I plugged in an API, that’s what revealed that to me. And that’s when I started like wrecking realizing that some GM bees don’t have on the back end and actual physical location tied or it’s incorrect for especially for service area businesses. So anyway, I contacted Google support. And they said, go ahead and change your like I got this reply back from Google support and said go ahead and add the GMB or the address even though it was a service area business. They said go ahead and add the address. But it’s likely going to end support told me this is likely going to trigger re-verification. And so I contacted the client and I said, this is what they replied. I say we go ahead, do it because the maps listings not responding the way that they should be. And I feel like we’re gonna constantly be fighting an uphill battle, they said, go ahead and do it. So I did it. And fortunately, in that case, because they have a physical location that was verifiable, all that was required, though, was the postcard, just use standard us mail verification. And within seven days or so we had the card verified, and it’s responding better, it’s still going to take a little bit of time, but it’s coming back. So if you can’t like well, Marga said, If you can’t reverify something, don’t even bother trying is really the point.

So the follow-up questions, would you just get GMB into the mass page? I don’t do mass page stuff, period. I just don’t I don’t like to do it. It’s not that it can’t work. It might work. But I’m not the person to ask her. I don’t know that we are maybe Marco can shed some insight on it. Land Solutions Network is a mass page built with WordPress like the front end was WordPress pages. Mass page builder, it’s there to the public. It’s there for people to spam to report. It gets the UCI to get leads to this day because I post them in the group whenever so one comes in, we’re in a place where I’m not working. I post one from Hawaii the other day, I posted another one from Arizona, there was some from Florida that I that Chris Pillman got Chris G got some.

So if you do it right, there’s a reason why mass-paid build can’t work. But it just requires a little bit more work than what people are willing to put in a kind of in air quotes to kind of legitimize to build.

Would The RSS Masher Cause Footprint Issues If You Use The Same Account That Has Adsense & Affiliate Codes?

Hector’s obviously I saw your old webinar about David Nelson’s RSS masher and eager to access it. Would it cost footprint issues though if I use the same AdSense or affiliate code for each site? Or set I get a separate account for each? I don’t know about AdSense? I just don’t say I don’t do anything like that. So I just don’t know. Does anybody here have an answer for him about that?

Okay.

Sorry, I can’t answer that. I just don’t know. Um, as far as AdSense, I don’t think affiliate code would cause a problem. I don’t know because again, I just don’t do affiliate stuff, guys. I haven’t even attempted affiliate marketing in two or three years other than occasionally we do a promotion for Semantic Mastery. I just do local stuff. So I suddenly he wants to use RSS masher, to push content into multiple websites. And in those multiple websites, he is going to use the same AdSense code from the same account. That’s what he’s asking, Oh, that looks like a really good way to lose your account. Well, there you go. So you have an answer. That’s what I was asking. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really it to me. That doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Yeah. And it’s not something that it does. I mean, it seems like the footprint is the AdSense code, Google picking that out?

And then you’d have a problem with Google suspended the account?

Yeah, I don’t know. There’s got to be I’m sure there’s some groups and Facebook and shit like that, that where people do a whole bunch of heavy AdSense stuff that would that would be what I suggest or even go to YouTube and do some searches, I’m sure you can find the answers you’re looking for this is probably just not the place for Hector. And it’s just not something that really any of us do. So that’s why we can’t answer that one.

What’s The Best Way To Monetize Autoblogs Safely?

He says, What’s the best way to monetize these auto blogs safely? Would it be good to buy phone-verified Gmail accounts and run them in isolated browsers for this purpose? Thanks for all the great SEO stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s good practice anyway, I mean, for example, I’m still using a browser to the old desktop version.

It still works if you right-click and open system Chrome. That’s the only way that it works. But it works. And I got, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of profiles in there. And I don’t even change IPS, like it’s all just my IP, but it keeps the browsing sessions and gross ghost browsers want another one’s called session box. That’s one that I’m looking into. If I eventually switched from browser to eventually I will probably try the session box. I know ghost browsers. Good. We’ve talked about that a lot, a little bit more expensive, but I know it’s really good. So I think it’s best practice to do that anyway to keep sessions in browsers specific to accounts and that kind of stuff. But you know, so yeah, having different Gmail accounts associated with each one of those projects. I think it’s probably a pretty, pretty wise thing to do. You asked me. Does anybody want to comment on that? No, I totally agree. That’s that would be the same thing to do. Isolate each account. Yeah. So you don’t get tagged for any sort of footprint.

Is There A Way To Get A Virtual Office Address For A Service Business To Get Citations And GMB?

Okay, next one man in the SEO says, Hey, guys got a question about citations for a business that operates in different countries like the US and Canada. I would like to secure some citations from other countries but the business doesn’t have a physical office there as they are a service business. Is there a way to get a virtual office address so I can get citations? And potentially GMB if not a GMB citations would be plenty. Thanks for your help. Um, yeah, I mean, again, I think having a GMB is great.

For many reasons, if you could get a second location for it, like in the, you know, as you said, I guess we’re in Canada, for example, if you don’t have a physical office in Canada, physical office, excuse me, or location in Canada, but you would like to build citations there as well, then yeah, you can add a second location as long as, as we just mentioned, already today, many times, if you can get a verifiable address, that’s what I would recommend. It’s, you know, it would certainly help. And then you could have two sets of citations. I would tie that to a set separate that the second GMB, I would tie it to a location page specific for that second location. In other words, you don’t want if you’ve got to GMB, right, you don’t want both GMB is pointing to the same page, like the root domain or the homepage of the site.

Because that could cause some ambiguous ambiguity, right, some NAEP issues. So it would be because it’s going to be the same company name, right. And so as long as you have only one data point, and name, address, and phone number as the same or website URL, because it’s really four points, right, we always call it an NAP name, address, and phone number, but also includes the website address. So there are really four data points. And as long as you’re not, you’re not sharing more than one data point across those four, then you can do that. So in other words, if the company name is going to be the same, which it should be, unless you added a location modifier to the company name, which you can do, but if you want to keep the company the same in both locations, that’s fine. But then you should have a separate physical address, a separate phone number for each location, and a separate web page. So if you have a primary one, that the website URL is tied to the home or the route, you know, the homepage or the routing domain, that’s perfectly fine. But on the second location, you should have the website tied to a specific location page for that location. Does that make sense? So again, you want to only have one common data point across those for the name, address, phone number, and website, or else you can create any IP ambiguous ambiguity issues, which will cause both locations to not rank as well. That makes sense. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Yeah, I mean, you can get virtual office addresses all over the US that you can rent an office and have the postcard physically mailed that to that address. There are multiple ways to do that. I mean, there’s even a Craigslist that you can use for that. I mean, Craigslist. It’s worked for me in the past that I tried. Like, not too long ago, I tried one in New York City and got a dormant to get me a verified GMB. So you can still be done because you just have to be creative about how you go and get them to kind of legitimize what it is that you’re doing. And understand that if you lose it, it’s spam. There’s nothing you could do. Try it at first, you don’t succeed, try it again.

So that would be the only way I can think I would know nothing about Canada to know how the post office works there, whether you could get one there. But you could still get someone to verify a business for you. Or those virtual offices, man, virtual offices, they work really well. Yeah, Chris Genie was he provided me or I don’t have it to share with you guys. I’d have to go search for it. But there are virtual mailbox services now that, you know, you can register a physical location, right, so to speak, and they’ll receive the mail and scan it and send you an email with the images of the mail. So you might want to try I’ve never tried that. To be honest with you. I’ve never tried it. So I don’t know if that would work or not. But you know, it’s worth a shot, right? So you might want to consider that.

Can We Take The URLs From AWS For The Images And Build Tiered Web 2.0s To Pass Juice To The Money Site?

Right, next is Phineas and Ferb. Okay. Hey, so I’m wondering if we are using AWS or another cloud provider like Microsoft, for CDN? Can we take URLs from AWS and all our images and build tiered web 2.0s to them to pass us to the money site? Or could this cause a penalty? Curious to get your opinions? You know, that’s an old tactic. Jimmy Kelly talked about that way back in I think 2000. And what was it 14 when I went to the certification, networking power certification, I think it was 2014? Anyways, he was talking about that way back then when we were doing domain authority stacking, RYS, which worked like freakin gangbusters back then it was crazy how good that worked. And that’s what we would do like subdomain manipulation and all kinds of stuff that we would do.

And that was one of the things that I remember was taught way, way back then, which was seven years ago now was taking the CDN URLs and using those like for images and files and all that and just hammering them with backlinks and pushing domain authority into the entity or the root domain at that point, we weren’t really talking about entity based SEO then. And it worked. I don’t know if that still would have much of an effect now, because I just don’t really do domain authority stalking anymore. We, we do our methods, which is about relevancy, and entity and art.

So I don’t know if that would work or not. What do you think Marco? Yeah, I don’t see why you wouldn’t. Because you’re building tiered web two dot O’s to pass link power through. So the tiered web $2 would absorb most of it. Or if you’re building it into the AWS or Microsoft, or whatever the CDN of choice is.

It would still absorb, like any of the negative.

But I mean, to me, nothing like Google, nothing works like Google. That’s why we’re in the belly of the beast, not Google doesn’t trust anything like it trust Google. So we’ll stay in there for as long as we can until we can’t, and then we’ll figure out something else. Yeah.

Hey, it’s worth a test. Yeah, sure. I mean, all of these people come, and they come with these ideas, these theories? And the standard answer is, try and see, the only way that you would know is if you try to see because if you have us, or you wait for us, in the heavy hitter club, of course, if you wait for us to try, we have a long list of things to try, because we’re already getting result. And so what we would have to do is put it on the list, because it isn’t necessary with what we’re doing right now the system that we have in place.

And how we do it, we get results time. And again, it’s a repeatable process that we’ve built, that works, period. So to build all of these different things, right now, it doesn’t make sense, because we don’t really need them. It’s nice to have them in the chamber in case something happens. And so we do have all of these other things that we could turn to if something happens, but right now, it just isn’t necessary and hasn’t been for me for quite a while. But going on six years now that we’ve been using our methods and our system and the way that we do things.

Does Your Selection Of The GMB Service Area Option Have Any effect On Geographical Search In The 3-Pack?

That’s right, so Gordon’s up what’s up, Gordon, it’s been a while he says, Hey, guys, I need your help. And two quick questions. Does the GMB service area you select in your GMB listing have any effect on the geographical search area that gets Google to show your listing in a three-pack it does to a degree.

You know, Google tightened its proximity filters. A shit year and a half ago now. Time flies, I guess it’s been a while. But it used to be that. Yeah, you could get your maps in the show in your designated service area. Relatively easy, right? If it wasn’t that difficult, especially for like, again, tree contractors typically have a very big service area, like multiple counties. And so I would list all that, right. And a lot of the times I could get for some of the GMBs that were really powered up really authoritative, they would rank three cities away, right? Like because it was, you know, might be in an adjacent county altogether, right. And it was crazy. Um, but that’ll kind of change. A year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago, whatever, whenever the proximity filters got a lot stricter or tighter, narrower, so to speak. And so now it’s a lot more difficult. Yes, it can still be done. But it takes a lot of effort. And time, cumulative effort, in other words, in order to get that to occur, and that’s what we teach it local GMB Pro. So, you know, it is possible, but it does take consistent, repeated effort in order to end in a very specific way in order to do that. So what I’m saying is, is you can put a large service area, right, and it might be relevant to that business, but Google is likely only going to show the maps listing for people that are in close proximity at the time that they search for that service, unless you can force it to, you know, Marco, I suppose, expand the centroid by doing the methods that we teach in local GMB Pro. But it’s difficult to do that. I mean, it’s not that it can’t be done. It certainly can. But it’s difficult to do that. So, you know, again, Google is going to really show the maps listing to people that are in close proximity when they’re searching, especially if there are other businesses, like if it’s a very obscure business, that there’s not a lot of other companies that provide that product or service, then yeah, you can get maps listing to appear from I mean, you know, 10s or hundreds of miles away even That’s true, but it’s very rare. If it’s a type of business that is common, then and there are multiple providers within you know, you know, there are multiple competitors, I should say, then it’s, then it’s likely that the Google My Business profile is not going to show up in adjacent towns because of the proximity filter, and that’s what I’ve been experiencing. So I typically now really just focus in on an immediate local area, at least initially, and once I start getting that to rank then we start targeting, you know, expanded areas through content marketing, GMB posts, and all that other stuff that we teach in the local GMB pro market. What do you say? activity, relevance, trust, and authority, right? The more trusted and authoritative you become, the more that the centroid will expand. How you do that is in local GMB Pro, there has to be a reason why Google will display you to someone that further away than that they should be. There has to be a reason for that proximity factor not to kick in. We did that with the DC plumber, right? It’s a case study in RYS Academy Reloaded.

But it works perfectly well here where we built such massive trust and authority into that, that it became the keyword for the niche. And so because it has that trust and authority, it gets displayed to people outside of what you would expect the radius to be from the Business Center, the way that we did it. As I’ve said before, in New York City was a bike messenger server, the way that we did it in LA is Uber drivers. And I’m not gonna say how it was done, I’m just telling you, that’s what we used to just create massive trust and authority to relate, like, create relevance between where we wanted Google, to display to people to give us impressions, to put our results in front of people to get us in the map pack in front of people. And then I mean, if you’re there one to one or two, sometimes three people start clicking on it. And then that reinforces the trust and authority that Google is giving us and creates even more. The whole process for that it’s a local GMB Pro. I won’t get into it here.

Yeah, and I’m testing. You know, I’ve talked about many, many times over the last year and a half, two years here on Hump Day hangouts about click-through spam bots, and not using them. And I’ve just been using paid traffic from Google. But I, I have started testing, Michael bows, his Viper tools recently, because he’s been getting a lot of good results from people that I know in the space. And so I’ve actually just recently started testing with that. And that’s something that I’m hoping I don’t have any results yet, but I’m hoping that I can get similar results to some of the people that I’ve chatted with about it. And that could be something I mean, you could do paid traffic, which is what I’ve been doing but you know, you can specify like certain clicks to come to for within a certain geographic area, right? From a topically relevant audience or an audience that would be relevant to you know, what you’re sending them to, and that that works to, to kind of help with that stuff, too. So I’m actually testing the tool right now. As I said, Michael’s tool doesn’t have any results to share yet but I’m hoping that it works well. And if it does, I will let you guys know for sure.

Can You Create Massive Direct Backlinks Without Using Buffer Sites?

Alright, the next question was do you have to be careful when creating direct backlinks to GMB listings as you do when doing direct backlinks to the websites, or can you create massive direct backlinks without using a very small number of buffer web 2.0 sites as tier one layer, maybe even a tier two-layer and what parts of the GMB listing should be targeted with backlinks to get the most SEO bang for the buck? Thank you very much. We hope as usual as always greatly appreciated. That seems almost like a consultation question Gordon. It gets very intricate on how things we try not to do in Hump Day hangouts is don’t discuss the How is what people pay us a whole lot of money for who can tell you what we do but that this is kind of getting into how isn’t it? I don’t know unless you want to answer because I’m not. Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t have any problem running backlinks directly to GMB stuff for tier-one entity acids period. I don’t like to run direct backlinks to the money site. But to tier-one entity assets, we did I hammer everything.

That’s my answer. Do you want to comment on that? Anyone? You can hammer that as far as I’m gonna go. Okay. And that’s what I do Gordon distances short answer. All tier-one entity assets. I don’t game. Yep. Just Hey.

And that’s why we do what we do with the SEO SEO guy. That’s why it’s called the SEO shield. Right? It’s the SEO firewall, it shields the money site. So you can do all that really nasty, off-page SEO stuff to your shield, not to the money site. But that’s the whole point. Right?

So we keep the money site procedures. The first place they’re gonna go look is the money site. Yeah, the only thing I run directly to the money site besides syndication posts, like syndication network backlinks or press releases.

And that’s pretty much it, you know, occasionally I’ll buy some guest post links.

From a really good provider. They’re expensive, though. But even then, it’s only very, very specific circumstances. Other than that, I just use the same methods that we teach. So I do absolutely nothing to the benefit, sometimes a precedent, a precedent, but I’ll usually run press releases elsewhere to one.

How Does The Google Bot Understand The Schema Through The Tag Manager If There’s No Placement In The HTML?

So BB is up with a list of questions as usual. What’s up, bb, he says, Hey, guys, you said there is a way to the schema to add schema, I guess, through the Google Tag Manager. But how the G bot understands the page that there’s no placement in the HTML, it’ll render it. So it’s a script, right, the container will display the scripts within the container in Google Tag Manager. Now, Google even says in their help files, that that is not the preferred way to display JSON LD structured data on a website, doing it through Tag Manager is not the preferred way, as per Google’s own help files or documentation. However, it still works. And there are certain circumstances where that’s the only way you can do it. So for example, I have a website, one of my sites that has a website theme that there’s no way to add code to the home page. It’s really weird. It’s the home page is like built into the theme. And there’s no, there’s just no way to add code to the home page other than through Google Tag Manager. Or if I were to hack the JSON LD directly into the theme files, which I don’t like to do. So in that case, I just added the structure data organization schema, in that case, to the container code, and Google Tag Manager, and yes, it will render. Now if you go to a view page source, all you’re going to see is the GTM Tag Manager, excuse me, the container code, the Google Tag Manager container, but that’s all you’re going to see. But when you do a structured data testing tool test on the homepage, it will render the JSON LD code on the site. So you can actually see it in Google, excuse me, the structured data testing tool. So yes, again, it’s not the preferred method, if you can add the structured data directly to the code of the site using SEO ultimate Pro, which is what I use mostly, sometimes use as a header and footer plugin. Sometimes themes will have the ability to add code to specific pages or sitewide, globally. So you can add it there, although I recommend only adding, you know, like organization schema to the homepage or whatever, just as per best practices. So but you know, in those cases where you can’t Google Tag Manager is a viable alternative, even if Google says it isn’t because it still reads and recognizes the code. And he comments on that.

No, I mean, that that’s a perfect answer because that’s exactly what it is Google, it will render on the website as everything renders as HTML eventually, right. All it is all the Google tag manager does is it sets up a JavaScript call between Google servers and your server to render the HTML. That’s all it is.

Did Your Site’s Bounce Rate Increase After The Passage Index Update?

Question number two, did the bounce rate increase in your site after the passage index update? Don’t know, haven’t looked at it. It’s not a metric that I’m typically Chase.

So I don’t know I can’t answer that. Anybody have? No, I haven’t seen any changes. So and my metric is called my metric is form fields. My metric is what’s going on in that box? Any thoughts or takeaways on the new update? No, I honestly don’t have any sorry. Usually, I don’t even know about updates until somebody like you brings it to our attention. So and I mean that I don’t stay plugged in all that shit. I don’t I just look, if I start seeing some significant fluctuations in my own properties, or plant properties, then I go in and start digging into it. But if I don’t see any major fluctuations, why bother? I’ve got other things to work on. Do you know what I mean? So I honestly, I can’t give you an answer to that. I don’t have any opinion on it.

Or for the new update that will come out in May for speed testing? No, I mean, it’s Google PageSpeed. has been, people have said, it’s been a metric for a long time, but I really haven’t seen that. It’s, but it’s good for user experience. Right. So what I’m saying is PageSpeed for an SEO metric, a ranking metric is not something that I’ve seen it really have much of an effect on.

Even though people have been saying that for years, I really haven’t seen that in my own experience. But for user experience, it absolutely makes a difference. Especially on mobile, like if it was if a page loads really slow on mobile like people get irritated in the back out and go somewhere else. And so that’s really important, I think.

But as far as like what I know, I did read someone that I guess it was the experience update or whatever they’re calling it, where it’s, it’s, it covers a number of things. PageSpeed being one of them. You know, I really don’t have a prediction on that, because I just don’t know, we’ll see what happens when it comes. Any comments on that? The whole point of entity-based worry-less SEO is that to worry about those things. And again, I’ll go back to just measuring the metrics that matter, which is the four are the form fields, steady, and are the phone call steady. And it’s the clients’ bottom line increasing that, that my job is not to worry about bounce rate or anything else like that. Unless I see a problem with any of the metrics that really matter, then I’m gonna go and see if anything has happened to affect that. And then I’m on it. But by the time I’m on that, I’m past the period, where everyone’s panicked and everyone has gone and done whatever they could to try to affect the garden themselves in trouble, maybe even sandbox, I’m going to be past all that. I’m going to be passed that point. So I’m going to let the dust settle. And then I’m going to go in and I’m going to start checking, I’m going to look at the data and see what it was that happened. And why. And then I’m gonna go into fixing it. I haven’t needed to do that literally in Oh, I did just recently, but it will it had nothing to do with the core update. But I did have to recently go in and fix something and it can’t my back, everything comes right back. And what we continue seeing since Google started announcing updates until now, when we’ve been applying these methods is Google doesn’t update, and our shit gets even better, it gets stronger. If we hit more traffic, we get better results for our clients, our clients. Sometimes, it’s 10x, sometimes going from 8k a month to 80k. Going I don’t know from 100 to 150k. I mean, those kinds of results going from seven, 8 million to nearly 30 million a month. Those are the results that we’re talking about. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care about Google. And I’m gonna stand by what I have said all along that the art of art the art of activity, relevance, trust, and authority trumps everything on the web.

What’s The Best Way To Merge Two GMBs Quickly?

Sweet. So Dee Dee is up he says, What’s up, he says brown new. He’s a mastermind member and has been for like, many years, I think since the beginning. So anyway, he says a proud new user of go I level through semantic mastery today. Thanks for all the info Bradley, you’re welcome to and great, great tool.

Let me know when you want me to cover more stuff in the mastermind about it because in fact, I’ve got I’ve been building an app in high level for my contract as my three contractors that I’m going to be selling as a SAS software, the software is a service, right. And it’s great because it’s a low barrier to entry, low cost. But super, a super valuable tool that they can use to help them get more leads from their existing web assets, manage those leads through automated conversations. And then and through like a pipeline a lead pipeline inside high level and then also solicit reviews and basically build up the reviews. So it helps us retain reputation. And it’s a really cool app, and I’ve just finished well I’m not 100% done with it, I’m gonna I’m meeting with my one of my first three contractors is going to be beta testing it for me, either on Friday or Saturday, I’m still waiting on a reply back. But this week, and so next week, it will be in use by a tree contractor so that I can start working out the bugs and stuff. But that’s going to be one of my leading products where my new agency is that app because it’s only I’m only charging $200 a month I level says you should charge 300 a month, but I’m doing it for a specific reason. Anyways. And I think it’s gonna be a really, really good tool to get my foot in the door at a low cost with contractors, right? So anyway, let me know if you want me to cover more of that in the mastermind, I’m happy to do so and I’m in fact, next Thursday when I have my next mastermind webinar.

My tree contractor who’s going to be beta testing it for me and working with me to work out the bugs, you know, he will have about a week’s worth of use out of it. So I’ll have some pretty good experiences to share with you on that point. By the way, guys, if you’re curious, go to semantic mastery comm slash high level. It’s an outstanding platform. It’s an automation platform for agencies essentially. And it’s a really, really powerful tool. There’s a hell of a learning curve, there is no question, but it’s worth putting the time and effort into learning because it can really help you to grow your business I’m using it for right now primarily prospecting for my own business and I mean it’s just great to set up all these things. Automations that just run like clockwork day in and day out to fill your pipeline full of leads. And it’s just, it’s crazy. I’ve only been running it for three weeks now. And I’ve got, you know, 6760 to 70. Some leads in my pipeline are in various stages of communication, but it’s crazy guys. It’s a really, really, really good tool. And I’m doing a ton of I’m going to be doing I’m developing training right now, that will become the semantic mastery mastermind training, like a 90 day or a 12-week program. And the high level is an integral part of that. So if anybody’s interested in that, go check out semantic mastery comm slash high level, it’s a 14-day free trial, that is our affiliate link, but then come join the mastermind because I’m hoping by, you know, the third quarter of this year, to have the training that I’m going to be rolling out to the mastermind available and ready. And once that is launched, we’re going to kind of restructure how you can even join the mastermind, the cost everything. So if any of that interests you now would probably be a good time to get in. So you’re grandfathered. Anyways, following up on that. He says I have a client that needs a merge of GMB accounts. I’ve been trying to get this done by Google for the last four months with no luck. I keep filling out the GMB form they provide and I don’t get any response Yeah, it’s weird I’m so hit or miss with Google support. Sometimes they’re really responsive like they were with that client that I just mentioned.

We contacted them about adding a physical location to a service area business they were actually really responsive in that case, but in other cases, I go three weeks without getting a reply back so I understand your frustration he says this is a legit business that moved and we do not have access to the previous listing as another company did it. Is there any other method to try to get this done that you know of? Okay, here’s one thing d I would suggest because you’re in the mastermind is post this as like asking for help in the mastermind within describing the issue. Because we there’s a lot of local Google Local Guides in our mastermind, myself included lane Clayton, Greg Greenberg, there’s a bunch of them in there that, you know, in the past, when we’ve had similar weird issues occur, we get high-level local guides to go in and suggest that it’s and after a handful of that those occur, then oftentimes the attics will the edits will go through. So let’s start a discussion in the mastermind. That’s what it’s for anyways, D and C, see, you know, we put all our heads together, we ought to be able to come up with something to help you or at least give you some additional ideas. That’s what the mastermind is for any comments on that guys? Yeah, ask Marco anything mastermind is tomorrow. Right? So just come in and ask that question. Because I do have some suggestions for you on what would work for this because someone just went through this and it was a nightmare. And the way that you’re trying to do it just filling out the form, not gonna work. They are not going to respond to that at all ever takes you’d never get anything when you fill out that form. And they don’t tell you what we’ll call you. Right right back. Never call. You never get any response and never get any emails. And I’ll give this in public.

You’re not the one that should be doing this. That GMB if it’s legit has an owner with all the documentation. That should be the person, not you. The owner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. documentation should be the one that’s initiating all of the contacts. But let’s talk tomorrow. Let’s talk tomorrow. So I can talk to you in-depth on how to how to get through this. Yeah, there you go. And that’s good advice.

You know, from the primary owner’s account, if you contact support, you might get a response. So that owner, not the manager, not never the manager.

Alright, the last question, which is great and by the way, hey, Jordan, yo, yo, yo, you pretty people. I don’t know who you’re talking to join. But

Is Local Viking Good For GMB Postings?

anyways, this last question says is local biking, okay to use for GMB posting? Or is it one to be aware of, alright? I talked about this for the last couple of months, I switched to local Viking about two months ago. But, you know, according to some crazy shit that happened last week, apparently,

I have canceled my subscription. And I’m just not going to use it anymore. I’m concerned about the API connection being a flag. I’m not saying whether it is or not, I don’t know. But I have revoked local Viking access to my GM bees. And I’m not going to continue to use it. And it’s just because it’s better safe than sorry. And I’d rather be overly cautious. And I’m afraid that that might be a flag because of some of the issues that had happened a week ago. And it wasn’t just them. There were a couple of others as well.

And so I’ve literally revoked access. There’s only one app that I’m using right now for posting to GMB. That does in it, that’s all it does. It doesn’t, it doesn’t connect in any other way other than to allow for posting and it’s called fan booster fan booster calm. There are some limitations with that app though. So and I’m only testing that across like three locations right now. All my other locations are going to be manually posted to for right now by my VA logging into as a manager to those GMB locations one at a time and posting manually, which sucks, but it is what it is. And right now I’m afraid to use any of these like SEO-based GMB posts schedulers, a social media-based post scheduler, I think is different because it’s not scrutinized the same way that the SEO tools are by Google. At least that’s my assumption. It’s logical. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But fan booster is a social media posting app. That’s the one that I’m testing with right now. And that is pretty cool. There are some limitations. But there are also some really cool benefits to that. So I mean, I’ll share more information about that when I have it. But again, just to be 100% transparent, I have canceled my subscription to local biking and it sucks because I just worked it into my processes for my team. And I had to cancel it right after we got really good at using it. Fucking canceled it. But it is what it is Welcome to the world of online marketing, right? So any comments on that, before we wrap it up, my motto is always to protect what’s making you money. always protect the better to be safe than sorry. Some of those APIs were tagged for suspicious activity. I’m not gonna say which one.

Which ones it was more than one, they were just getting heavily spam that was being used for purposes other than posting. And so I mean, it is what it is, every time that I’m gonna put myself and spammers get hold of something. It gets muddy to get dirty, Google starts looking in. And their job is simply we’re gonna get rid of it. So we’ll just knock it all out. Yeah, we just knock it all out. We don’t care. They’d rather do that. Then take a chance of letting the spammers continue spamming. That’s the same thing that they’re doing with GMB period. Prove that if it gets suspended, prove that it’s real. Yeah, that that’s it. They don’t care. They don’t care if it was real to start with. prove that it’s real. That’s it.

Yeah, and I want to thank you, Marco, again, for bringing that to my attention last week, because, like I immediately went in and revoked access and fortunately, knock on wood. I still got my assets. So anyway, thanks, guys. We’ll see y'all next time.

Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 330 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[caron517gaming-blog]

My Main VBUCKS Lesson

'My Child Spent £150 On Fortnite'

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3 Guilt Free VBUCKS Tips

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Where To Start With VBUCKS

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[ccrpsorg]

Pharmacovigilance Training

Drug Safety Pharmacovigilance Training

Are you looking to enter clinical research through drug safety jobs? One of the first steps your employers might look for is training. If you have little prior experience in clinical research, you might benefit from certification.

Step One - Becoming a PV

You should always check current entry-level job requirements in drug safety prior to getting training.

Pharmacovigilance Jobs

Estimated Pharmacovigilance Job Salary

Entry Level Pharmacovigilance Job Salary $67,000

Experienced Pharmacovigilance Job Salary $98,000

More than 8-10 Years Experience Pharmacovigilance Job Salary $136,000

Pharmacovigilance (PV) officers collect adverse event data on drugs (Phase 4) to analyse and change warnings for the drug. A minimum of an associate degree is required to take any training course including ours.

Some jobs prefer physicians, nurses, or those with a masters degree in science. The best option for any professional is to get a masters degree in pharmacovigilance, but this is both expensive and takes up to 2 years. A second alternative to landing your first job is by getting drug safety certification.

You can even move up the ladder from simply reporting and collecting adverse effects to being the operations officer. The reality is that large pharma companies need trained officers whose role is to look for and notice issues or side effects of a drug.

Step Two - Benefit of PV Certification

Well, there is a Catch 22. You can’t get a job in pharmacovigilance without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. The

CCRPS pharmacovigilance certification offers online training for research professionals looking to show competency in drug safety monitoring.

Pharmacovigilance jobs are in high demand! You should know that certification or prior experience is needed to get your foot in the door.

We are a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing advanced pharmacovigilance training to students in all tiers of their career.

Our official website offers pharmacovigilance training courses which meet WHO-ISoP and FDA guidelines. The certification modules you complete are based on the most referenced drug safety books.

Like DIA pharmacovigilance training, we provide an online badge that allows employers to verify your certification. We can offer you certification because we are accredited by the ACCRE and main other recognizing accreditors.

Step Three - PV Training Course

Our drug safety and pharmacovigilance training course offers 18 modules:

Online Pharmacovigilance Training Course

3 Monthly Payments of $125 I 2 Monthly Payments of $225 I 1 Payment of $450

Request Scholarship by speaking to our 24/7 chat advisors

1. Pharmacovigilance

2. Basic Definitions used in Pharmacovigilance

3. Medical Dictionary For Regulatory Activities

4. Need for Pharmacovigilance

5. The History of Pharmacovigilance

6. Career Opportunities in Pharmacovigilance

7. Key Skateholders in Clinical Trial Safety

8. Good Communication

9. Pharmacovigilance Methods

10. Information Resources 

11. International Organizations and Regulatory Authorities in Pharmacovigilance

12. The Qualified Person for Pharmacovigilance

13. Individual Case Safety Report(s)

14. Signal Detection, Risk Assessment and Management (Pharmacovigilance audit training)

15. Risk Management in Pharmacovigilance

16. Vaccine Pharmacovigilance

17. Setting up of a Pharmacovigilance Centre

18. Post Approval Regulations in Pharmacovigilance

Certification provided at the end of the course.

Step Four - PV Training Center

Pharmacovigilance Training Institute

Our pharmacovigilance training course offers pharmacovigilance certification at reduced scholarship pricing. You can speak with our enrollment advisors to for assistance in pricing and scholarship.

We have trained over 1,800 clinical researchers and are excited to help you take another step towards your journey. Drug safety training can be completed online to show interest when applying to jobs.

This course can be completed in one sitting over a day. After you complete the course, you can instantly update your resume and follow our resources to

Step Five - PV Resources

Some of our favourite resources in pharmacovigilance include:

Getting Started in Pharmacovigilance Part 1

Recruiters Career Pathways in PV

This second section shares a lot of resources on how to apply and get trained in Pharmacovigilance. Note that our course offers certification at a significantly shorter time point and lower price than other courses.

Reading Resources

Cobert’s Manual of Pharmacovigilance and Drug Safety

Mann’s Pharmacovigilance

Drug Safety Data

After being certified in our course; you can apply for entry-level positions in the following roles:

Drug Safety Jobs

Drug safety or Pharmacovigilance scientist (specialist or associate)

Description: The Drug Safety Associate will provide support for Company Operations including SAE reconciliation, ICSR regulatory submissions, generation of SAE listings and data-entry of Individual Case Safety Reports (ICSRs), if required, and support other Pharmacovigilance activities as needed.

Drug safety or PV manager

Description: This position will focus on pharmacovigilance operational aspects to support global pre/post-marketing programs as well as oversight of day-to-day safety activities performed by a Contract Research Organization (CRO).

Safety or PV reviewer

Description: Serve as Medical Scientist with ability to support design, implementation, interpretation, reporting and regulatory filing of clinical studies with a focus and expertise in Patient Safety / Pharmacovigilance (PV). Have responsibility for protecting the patient safety and integrity of clinical studies.

Pharmacovigilance Quality Compliance

Description: The role of the Safety Project Manager is to plan, execute, and finalize projects according to strict deadlines and within budget. Responsibilities include coordination of internal resources to effectively launch Safety Projects, mentor new and existing clients of best practices, and management of study/enterprise accounts. The Safety PM will also define project objectives and oversee quality control through the project life cycle.

Clinical Quality specialist

Description: The Clinical Quality Specialist will be responsible for the coordination of quality metrics across the Enterprise. This position requires daily monitoring of potential core measures candidates to ensure accurate and complete documentation of quality measures; providing education throughout the Enterprise regarding quality measures to all members of the healthcare team; facilitating compliance with all disciplines; and facilitating and participating in problem-solving processes to resolve issues regarding patients, families, physicians, other departments, and staff

Medical Safety scientist/specialist/reviewer

Description: Use principles related to all phases of drug development (pre-clinical through Phase IV) to evaluate clinical data in support of pre & post approval activities; apply pharmacovigilance science, laws, &best practices to interpret data, prepare reports &meet regulatory requirements; appraise methodologies & scientific data/literature on disease states, pharmacology, clinical research & basic science/research to analyze product profile, surveillance and action for risk management; provide technical/medical writing, author scientific publications & communicates data to regulators, researchers and medical community. 

Local safety officer

Description:

Prepare and implement health and safety plans for construction projects.

Act as onsite safety representative for the duration of a given contract.

Serve as the SSHO person of contact to conduct the required site and safety analysis and observations.

Evaluate results and make recommendations as necessary for maintaining compliance with regulatory agencies.

Conduct daily safety and health inspections and maintain a written log which includes area/operation inspected, date of inspection, identified hazards, recommended corrective actions, estimated and actual dates of corrections.

Conduct weekly or daily tailgate safety meetings.

Attach safety inspection logs to the contractors’ daily quality control report.

Conduct mishap investigations and complete required reports.

Investigate and resolve health and safety deficiencies.

Must have extensive experience in the field or in a related area.

Must be familiar with standard concepts, practices, and procedures within the environmental and safety compliance fields.

Must be able to accurately establish and keep paper and electronic records concerning equipment, funds, supplies, and other property record information.

Good oral and written communication skills, reading/writing/grammar proficiency, good analytical ability, self-motivated, experienced problem solver, and moderate stress tolerance.

Clinical trial project safety associate (reviewer or specialist)

Description: The Associate Manager, Drug Safety and Pharmacovigilance will report to the Director, Drug Safety and Pharmacovigilance. This individual will be responsible for processing case data, filing of safety related documents, drafting safety narratives based on company templates and meeting safety database standards. This individual will contribute to the successful completion of safety-related goals and objectives in collaboration with the clinical development team. This role requires an individual who is able to perform at a high level in a fast-paced environment. Prior safety-related expertise, with an ability to understand and comply with general pharmaceutical industry rules, regulations, company processes, SOPs and work instructions, particularly in connection with investigational drug safety and pharmacovigilance for clinical studies is essential.

MedDRA coder

Description:

Review and analyze adverse events and determine the appropriate medical MedDRA code

Perform research and retrieve information to address stakeholder inquiries and resolve problems

Provide suggestions and recommendations on improving system- and coding-related procedures

Train other team members in MedDRA coding practices and assist other team members resolve complex issues, provide feedback to help improve quality of project deliverables

Contribute to the development of manuals, guides, SOPs, and presentations

Interface and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders

Pharmacovigilance safety and analytics reporting analyst/specialist/associate

Description:

Initial capture of all event-related information

Review reconciliation reports to identify AE information

Perform the initial triage of AEs including assessment of drug-relatedness and expectedness, coding of the events using MedDRA dictionary and the writing of concise narratives

Conduct follow-up with clinical sites and/or reporting parties to obtain all pertinent adverse event information

Assist with monitoring of compliance (regulatory reporting)

Partner with the Manager Case Management to develop case quality benchmarks and perform regular trending of quality results to identify quality trends or issues. Propose strategies for quality improvement or issue resolution to the Manager, Case Management

Review and contribute to Drug Safety Operations & Drug Safety Quality and Compliance-related SOPs, Work Instructions and job aids particularly where case quality is concerned

Work with Data Management (in-house or vendor) to assure SAE reconciliation between the Clinical Database and Safety Database

Initiate/review processes regarding workflow

Identification and resolution of case processing issues as they arise

Monitoring and problem solving of E2B exchange issues as they arise

Assist with Signal Evaluation and Risk Management (SERM) support, as needed

Assist Clinical Trial support such as safety start-up materials, as needed

Pharmacovigilance Auditor or PV Inspection readiness officer

Description: Regulatory Knowledge - Knowledge of global GVP regulations and guidances; good working knowledge of global GCP, GMP and GLP regulations and guidances. Understands the regulatory environment for global pharmaceutical companies, as well as best practices in the Pharma industry to satisfy regulatory requirements.Industry Knowledge Working knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry and the new drug development process; understands the phases, processes and techniques used in the science of pharmacovigilance.

Safety or Pharmacovigilance Physician (medical director, MD/MBBS, IMG)

Establish/enhance robust surveillance and benefit-risk processes based on clinical and scientific expertise to support Seattle Genetics’ products across the lifecycle

Provide oversight for members of the Safety Evaluation and Risk Management (SERM) group in Global Safety Risk Management

Management of physicians and scientists in the SERM group including recruitment, training, mentoring and development

Establish risk management process starting early in development. Work with clinical teams to develop risk management plans to support Seattle Genetics’ regulatory submissions

Oversee signal management and risk management of Seattle Genetics’ products on a global basis across the life cycle

Work with clinical counterparts as needed, including review clinical study protocols, development plans and serious adverse event handling

Communicate and interact effectively within and across therapeutic teams, and within functional team management as appropriate

Provide pharmacovigilance support for internal and external customers

Provide medical and scientific expertise on pharmacovigilance matters affecting the preparation and submission of timely and accurate information to the regulatory authorities

Work with labeling team to accurately portray the safety profile of assigned drugs or biologics

Provide the training, leadership and continuing education for all departmental staff

Liaise with clinical/medical counterparts across the business to provide PV expertise as needed

Contribute to preparation and review of periodic reports (PADER; PSUR; Annual IND report; 6-monthly line-listings; EU Annual Safety Report; DSUR)

Review and provide medical content, as needed, for key study-related documents, e.g. IB, ICF, SMC/IDMC Charters

Provide input to Pharmacovigilance agreements and interactions

Participate in alliance safety teams with external partner(s)

Participate in protocol development to ensure alignment with risk management plans

Safety Compliance Writer

Description: The ideal candidate will be experienced in Environmental, Safety and Health technical writing with the ability to produce high-quality documentation and/or regulatory requirements that contribute to the overall success of our products. These documents will address compliance and beyond at multiple levels within the client environment.

Other Possible Job Descriptions which qualify under Pharmacovigilance Certification:

Good PV Practices manager

GCP specialist

Pharmacovigilance vendor

Case processing specialist

Clinical trial case processing safety specialist

Post-marketing case processing safety specialist

Epidemiology safety associate (MPH)

Risk management manager

Signal management specialist

Periodic reporting specialist

Regulatory affairs safety specialist

The first step to getting a job in PV or drug safety is the show interest on your resume. Getting certification shows employers that you are interested and dedicated to this field. Enroll in our pharmacovigilance training course to get certified within a day. Payment options include: 3 Monthly Payments of $125, 2 Monthly Payments of $225, and 1 Payment of $450.

[mrlylerouse]

Downfalls of the Real Estate ISA (And How to Avoid Them)

The ISA role can skyrocket productivity and help your team generate more leads, schedule more appointments and free up agents to focus on their core business. That is, if you hire the right person for the job and if you have the right onboarding, training, technology, expectations and processes in place.

It can be daunting! But, here are the top 5  potential downfalls for the ISA role and how you and your business can prevent them. 

Not hiring the right type of ISA for your team’s needs

Opinions run the gamut on what personality type is best for the ISA role, but the most important factor is the personality type that will work for your team and your unique needs and office culture. There’s a lot that rests on hiring the right ISA for your team! 

  Here are the basics:

You need candidates that are comfortable with the rigors of cold calling since most ISAs spend 80-90% of their day on the phone.

This hire needs to be sales-oriented, work quickly, and be skilled at communicating your team’s value.

A people person! This person is often the first touch a prospect has with your brand as all incoming leads are automatically assigned to them for immediate follow-up and scrubbing.

Some teams break the role into either Outbounds ISAs or Inbound ISAs. The thinking is that certain personality types are better suited to each role (i.e. Outbound ISAs should be more driven to make cold calls, and Inbound ISAs should be more customer-service-oriented and skilled at building relationships.)

Outbound ISAs generate new leads by prospecting for FSBOs, expired listings, just listed/sold, COI, past clients, geographic farms, etc.

Inbound ISAs respond to incoming leads from internet sources and sign calls and nurture them into qualified appointments.

Here’s a sample ISA job description to get you started on the right track.

Not onboarding your ISA correctly

While it may seem as simple as “Pick up phone. Dial. Repeat.” Getting your ISA up and running is a really important step in making sure they’re successful. Unfortunately, many managers fall  victim to the idea that onboarding only involves a schedule for the first week and meeting the team. It’s much more than that! Consider the first 100 days as the entire ISA onboarding experience.

Here’s what your ISA onboarding curriculum should include:

Team introductions

scripts

tracking sheets

reporting forms

Tech training for your CRM and other systems

Regular meetings and check-ins

Goals and milestones

suggested reading (things like: The ONE Thing, The 17 indisputable laws of teamwork, etc.)

Now here’s a way to break it down for the first few months and beyond:

First 30 days:

Team member meetings and introductions (meet with each 1×1 and allow to shadow)Attend regular Sales Meeting

Watch company and/or team videos

Like and follow company social media accounts

Script training: create and practice

2 days/week role play with Sales Manager and other ISA

Meet with lender partner to understand the lending process

Schedule training and shadowing appointments with buyer specialist, transaction coordinator, etc.

Intense training on team systems and toolslike BoomTown, Mojo dialer, Dotloop, etc. As well as calendar invites, and email.

60-90 days

Navigate through all scripts and objections with ease

Continue attending team meetings and trainings

Introduce a business coach or mentor and schedule dedicated time

Begin supervised outreach and prospecting efforts

Role play open house scripts and schedule time to shadow open house

Pull MLS agent report for open house and learn how to read

Call surrounding neighbors for open house

System training: CRM training should be continued and built upon. How to register someone, transfer leads, update status in the CRM and log notes. Introduction to automated marketing and drip campaigns should also begin. The right CRM will have training opportunities and support to cover all aspects of the system.

  90 days and on

Continue regular role-playing and script practice

Begin unsupervised prospecting, etc.

Evaluate appointment tracking, call performance, and set up standards to maintain accountability

Create monthly and weekly goals for calls, appointments, etc.

Continue systems training (for software platforms like BoomTown, etc.)

Maintain monthly team meetings and mentor calls

Continuing education: consider conferences, webinars and other resources to continue sharpening skillsets

Not providing the right technology and tools for your ISA 

Power the productivity of the ISA role. Give them a system that allows for effective automated nurture campaigns, a prioritized list of daily to-dos, the power to bulk email, autodial, and text prospects, and a way to track and report their calls, contacts, and daily activities.

  Marketing Automation & Predictive Technology for ISAs

Your ISA needs to be able to employ automated email marketing campaigns, have the ability to sort and sift the database to tailor the audience for each campaign, and track metrics to measure performance and effectiveness. These are incredible time savers and can help them reach the right prospects with laser-like precision.Not to mention, with the right system, the predictive nature of the technology can even tell them exactly how to prioritize their day.

  Autodialers for ISA Prospecting

Autodialers, or power dialers, can add real oomph to prospecting time. (Especially if they’re integrated directly into the CRM so the ISA can work that database with incredible precision.)

  A Platform for Growing the Business

The combination of the ISA role and a multi-purpose platform that provides powerful lead generation with smart technology to simplify the lead management process creates more valuable conversations for the ISA and ultimately more closings for your team.

  Not perfecting the ISA/Agent hand-off

As much as the ISA role is a benefit to your agent’s productivity and efficiency, if there are not clear rules around who “owns” the lead in each scenario, trouble and tension can arise. Transferring the lead from the ISA to the agent needs to operate as smoothly as possible.

Here’s a solid order of events for the ISA:  

Schedule the appointment

Send an email to the agent that makes them aware of the new addition to the calendar

Alert the client that they will be meeting with AGENT’s Name, and what to expect

Confirm the appointment

Keep the agent accountable even after the transfer

  It’s usually best when  the ISA still maintains co-accountability for the lead. The ISA can add “to-dos” in the system even when the lead has moved over to the agent’s account so in order to check-in with the agent and keep the momentum going.

Having a script for the ISA to follow can help make sure they stay consistent. It can include messaging as simple as “since I handle the customer service side, you’ll meet with X who will show you the property. I’ll follow up afterwards and see how it went!”

Maintaining accountability and a healthy working relationship between agents and ISA is as simple has having a clear leader in place. ISAs work hard hitting the phones and scoring appointments, but not all will be qualified, and this can frustrate agents. It’s important to keep everyone communicating and working together so agents can coach the ISA if there’s a problem.

Not compensating an ISA correctly

An ISA with an appropriate compensation strategy is a motivated ISA, and an ISA without appropriate compensation is, well…not. Unfortunately there is no one-size-fits-all answer on  how to compensate your ISA. There are several winning approaches however that you can choose from for your particular team. Here are some of the strategies and  hybrid compensation models that have helped teams see success.

  Hybrid ISA: Salary + Commission

The most popular and effective pay structure tends to revolve around a low salary plus 5-15% commission. ISAs enjoy a base pay, but are motivated towards their appointment-setting goals with a stake of the commission once a property has reached the closing.

  Hybrid ISA variation: Hourly Rate + Bonus

Another variation is an hourly rate, plus a flat dollar amount per pre-qualified appointment. Keep in mind, that if you’re compensating solely based off the appointments set, or a similar metric, you might not be motivating for the long term. You want to make sure you’re getting your ISAs invested in getting the deal to the finish line, so compensating them off of closings in some manner (bonus or percentage) may be better.

  Commission ISA: Commission-Only Compensation

Some teams have seen success with a commission-only compensation structure. Commission-based ISAs may cherry-pick the “now” buyers, and as with most commission-only jobs, turnover is much higher and can cost you in the long run.

While these are the top pitfalls for the ISA role, of course as with any hiring/training/compensation strategy, you’ll need to make sure this is customized to fit your unique business needs and to complement the personality and style of your ISA. While it’s important to create solid goals and continue to work towards them, don’t consider them written in stone if something is not working!

The post Downfalls of the Real Estate ISA (And How to Avoid Them) appeared first on BoomTown!.

from BoomTown! http://ift.tt/2lmxkSo

[mrdonaldclark86]

Downfalls of the Real Estate ISA (And How to Avoid Them)

The ISA role can skyrocket productivity and help your team generate more leads, schedule more appointments and free up agents to focus on their core business. That is, if you hire the right person for the job and if you have the right onboarding, training, technology, expectations and processes in place.

It can be daunting! But, here are the top 5  potential downfalls for the ISA role and how you and your business can prevent them. 

Not hiring the right type of ISA for your team’s needs

Opinions run the gamut on what personality type is best for the ISA role, but the most important factor is the personality type that will work for your team and your unique needs and office culture. There’s a lot that rests on hiring the right ISA for your team! 

  Here are the basics:

You need candidates that are comfortable with the rigors of cold calling since most ISAs spend 80-90% of their day on the phone.

This hire needs to be sales-oriented, work quickly, and be skilled at communicating your team’s value.

A people person! This person is often the first touch a prospect has with your brand as all incoming leads are automatically assigned to them for immediate follow-up and scrubbing.

Some teams break the role into either Outbounds ISAs or Inbound ISAs. The thinking is that certain personality types are better suited to each role (i.e. Outbound ISAs should be more driven to make cold calls, and Inbound ISAs should be more customer-service-oriented and skilled at building relationships.)

Outbound ISAs generate new leads by prospecting for FSBOs, expired listings, just listed/sold, COI, past clients, geographic farms, etc.

Inbound ISAs respond to incoming leads from internet sources and sign calls and nurture them into qualified appointments.

Here’s a sample ISA job description to get you started on the right track.

Not onboarding your ISA correctly

While it may seem as simple as “Pick up phone. Dial. Repeat.” Getting your ISA up and running is a really important step in making sure they’re successful. Unfortunately, many managers fall  victim to the idea that onboarding only involves a schedule for the first week and meeting the team. It’s much more than that! Consider the first 100 days as the entire ISA onboarding experience.

Here’s what your ISA onboarding curriculum should include:

Team introductions

scripts

tracking sheets

reporting forms

Tech training for your CRM and other systems

Regular meetings and check-ins

Goals and milestones

suggested reading (things like: The ONE Thing, The 17 indisputable laws of teamwork, etc.)

Now here’s a way to break it down for the first few months and beyond:

First 30 days:

Team member meetings and introductions (meet with each 1×1 and allow to shadow)Attend regular Sales Meeting

Watch company and/or team videos

Like and follow company social media accounts

Script training: create and practice

2 days/week role play with Sales Manager and other ISA

Meet with lender partner to understand the lending process

Schedule training and shadowing appointments with buyer specialist, transaction coordinator, etc.

Intense training on team systems and toolslike BoomTown, Mojo dialer, Dotloop, etc. As well as calendar invites, and email.

60-90 days

Navigate through all scripts and objections with ease

Continue attending team meetings and trainings

Introduce a business coach or mentor and schedule dedicated time

Begin supervised outreach and prospecting efforts

Role play open house scripts and schedule time to shadow open house

Pull MLS agent report for open house and learn how to read

Call surrounding neighbors for open house

System training: CRM training should be continued and built upon. How to register someone, transfer leads, update status in the CRM and log notes. Introduction to automated marketing and drip campaigns should also begin. The right CRM will have training opportunities and support to cover all aspects of the system.

  90 days and on

Continue regular role-playing and script practice

Begin unsupervised prospecting, etc.

Evaluate appointment tracking, call performance, and set up standards to maintain accountability

Create monthly and weekly goals for calls, appointments, etc.

Continue systems training (for software platforms like BoomTown, etc.)

Maintain monthly team meetings and mentor calls

Continuing education: consider conferences, webinars and other resources to continue sharpening skillsets

Not providing the right technology and tools for your ISA 

Power the productivity of the ISA role. Give them a system that allows for effective automated nurture campaigns, a prioritized list of daily to-dos, the power to bulk email, autodial, and text prospects, and a way to track and report their calls, contacts, and daily activities.

  Marketing Automation & Predictive Technology for ISAs

Your ISA needs to be able to employ automated email marketing campaigns, have the ability to sort and sift the database to tailor the audience for each campaign, and track metrics to measure performance and effectiveness. These are incredible time savers and can help them reach the right prospects with laser-like precision.Not to mention, with the right system, the predictive nature of the technology can even tell them exactly how to prioritize their day.

  Autodialers for ISA Prospecting

Autodialers, or power dialers, can add real oomph to prospecting time. (Especially if they’re integrated directly into the CRM so the ISA can work that database with incredible precision.)

  A Platform for Growing the Business

The combination of the ISA role and a multi-purpose platform that provides powerful lead generation with smart technology to simplify the lead management process creates more valuable conversations for the ISA and ultimately more closings for your team.

  Not perfecting the ISA/Agent hand-off

As much as the ISA role is a benefit to your agent’s productivity and efficiency, if there are not clear rules around who “owns” the lead in each scenario, trouble and tension can arise. Transferring the lead from the ISA to the agent needs to operate as smoothly as possible.

Here’s a solid order of events for the ISA:  

Schedule the appointment

Send an email to the agent that makes them aware of the new addition to the calendar

Alert the client that they will be meeting with AGENT’s Name, and what to expect

Confirm the appointment

Keep the agent accountable even after the transfer

  It’s usually best when  the ISA still maintains co-accountability for the lead. The ISA can add “to-dos” in the system even when the lead has moved over to the agent’s account so in order to check-in with the agent and keep the momentum going.

Having a script for the ISA to follow can help make sure they stay consistent. It can include messaging as simple as “since I handle the customer service side, you’ll meet with X who will show you the property. I’ll follow up afterwards and see how it went!”

Maintaining accountability and a healthy working relationship between agents and ISA is as simple has having a clear leader in place. ISAs work hard hitting the phones and scoring appointments, but not all will be qualified, and this can frustrate agents. It’s important to keep everyone communicating and working together so agents can coach the ISA if there’s a problem.

Not compensating an ISA correctly

An ISA with an appropriate compensation strategy is a motivated ISA, and an ISA without appropriate compensation is, well…not. Unfortunately there is no one-size-fits-all answer on  how to compensate your ISA. There are several winning approaches however that you can choose from for your particular team. Here are some of the strategies and  hybrid compensation models that have helped teams see success.

  Hybrid ISA: Salary + Commission

The most popular and effective pay structure tends to revolve around a low salary plus 5-15% commission. ISAs enjoy a base pay, but are motivated towards their appointment-setting goals with a stake of the commission once a property has reached the closing.

  Hybrid ISA variation: Hourly Rate + Bonus

Another variation is an hourly rate, plus a flat dollar amount per pre-qualified appointment. Keep in mind, that if you’re compensating solely based off the appointments set, or a similar metric, you might not be motivating for the long term. You want to make sure you’re getting your ISAs invested in getting the deal to the finish line, so compensating them off of closings in some manner (bonus or percentage) may be better.

  Commission ISA: Commission-Only Compensation

Some teams have seen success with a commission-only compensation structure. Commission-based ISAs may cherry-pick the “now” buyers, and as with most commission-only jobs, turnover is much higher and can cost you in the long run.

While these are the top pitfalls for the ISA role, of course as with any hiring/training/compensation strategy, you’ll need to make sure this is customized to fit your unique business needs and to complement the personality and style of your ISA. While it’s important to create solid goals and continue to work towards them, don’t consider them written in stone if something is not working!

The post Downfalls of the Real Estate ISA (And How to Avoid Them) appeared first on BoomTown!.

from BoomTown! http://ift.tt/2lmxkSo

[dustinwootenne]

Project Management for Humans

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brett Harned's new book, Project Management for Humans, available now from Rosenfeld Media.

I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days). Whether I’m playing the game a lot or not, the idea of making tiny boxes fit in neatly and clearing out rows of work is ingrained in my brain. It’s the project manager in me.

But here’s the thing: What project managers do on a daily basis when it comes to managing resources or staffing is similar to Tetris, and it’s a big project management challenge that we all face. The biggest difference between resourcing and Tetris? The team members we’re trying to assign tasks to aren’t blocks. They’re human beings, and they need to be treated as such.

Your Team Are People, Too!

Let’s move away from calling people “resources,” please. We’re really just staffing projects or assigning tasks. We’re not using people to just get things done. We’re asking them to solve challenges that are presented in our projects.

Set the Stage for Organized Resource Planning

The challenge of managing a team is making sure that they stay busy and working on tasks, yet are not completely overbooked. It’s a difficult balance to find, particularly when your projects require a variety of skills at different times, which seem to change all too often.

At the most basic level, you want to set up a system for tracking your projects and your team members’ time on those projects (see Figure 6.1). A simple goal is to ensure that you can confidently commit to deadlines on projects with the knowledge that your team is actually available to do the related work. It seems like a simple goal, but it’s often a difficult one to keep up with due to changes on projects, changes in personal schedules (hey, life happens), and an influx of new work and requests. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, a simple spreadsheet could help you, particularly if you’re managing a smaller team. At the core, you want to track these items:

Projects (List them all, even the non-billable ones, or the other things that aren’t projects but end up taking a lot of time—like business development.)

People (List every person you work with.)

Estimated time (Track hours, days, weeks, etc. Make your best guess—based on your timeline or calendar—on how much each person will spend on a project or a task.)

Figure 6.1 Use a Google Spreadsheet, Numbers, or Excel to input your project and team data.

A couple of notes on how to use a spreadsheet to forecast team availability:

This should be set up on a week-by-week basis to minimize confusion (use tabs in your spreadsheet for each new week).

Always consider the “nonbillable” things that people must do (like stand-up meetings, internal tasks, sales, etc.).

The final cell contains a formula that tallies the hours for you; if the hours go over your typical limit (think of a 40-hour work week), it will turn red to notify you. You’ll want to have a good idea for just how “utilized” someone should be (32 hours/week is usually a good target).

You can input the actual hours logged in your time tracking system if you’d like. It could help with future estimating. (If you’re not tracking time, check in with your team on time percentages to get a gut check.)

Check your estimates with your team to make sure that the hours actually align with their assessment of the task (This might help with avoiding that red number!)

Communicate these hours to the entire team each week. Making sure that everyone “is in the know” will help on any project. Discussing it with individuals will help you understand effort, blockers, and possibly even different ways of working.

Tools

The landscape for project management tools is changing constantly. There are a number of tools in the marketplace for helping you manage and communicate this data. If you’ve working with a team of 10 or more, you might want to abandon the spreadsheet approach for something more official, organized and supported. Bonus: Many of these tools handle more than just resourcing!

Here’s the thing—it’s not just about numbers. The issue that makes estimating a team’s project hours difficult is that everyone works differently. There is no way to standardize the human factor here, and that’s what makes it tough. Forget the fact that no one on your team is a robot, and they all work at their own pace. Think about sick days, vacations, client delays, changes on projects, and so on. It’s a never-ending flow of shapes that must fit into the box that is a project. Be sure to have an ongoing dialogue about your staffing plans and challenges.

Match Resource Skills to Projects

Projects only slow down when decisions are not made. In that magical moment when things are actually going well, you want to make sure that your team can continue the pace. The only way to do that is by connecting with your team and understanding what motivates them. Here are some things to consider:

Interests: If you have a team member who loves beer, why not put that person on the beer design site? Maybe you have multiple people who want to be on the project, but they are all busy on other projects. These are the breaks. You’ve got to do what is right for the company and your budget. If you can put interests first, it’s awesome. It won’t always work out that way for everyone, but it’s a good first step to try.

Skill sets: It’s as simple as getting to know each and every team member’s work. Some people are meant to create specific types of designs or experiences. It not only has to do with interests, but it also has to do with strengths within those tasks. Sure, I may love beer, but that doesn’t mean that I am meant to design the site that caters to the audience the client is trying to reach.

Moving schedules: Projects will always change. One week you know you’re working against a firm deadline, and the next week that has changed due to the clients, the needs of the project, or some other reason someone conjured up. It’s tough to know when that change will happen, but when it does, how you’ll fill someone’s time with other work should be high on your mind.

Holidays: People always extend them. Plan for that!

Vacations: It’s great to know about these in advance. Be sure you know your company’s policies around vacations. You never ever want to be the PM who says “Well, you have a deadline on X date and that will conflict with your very expensive/exciting trip, so, um … no.” Ask people to request trips at least a month in advance so that you can plan ahead and make it work.

Illness: We’re all humans and that means we’re fine one day and bedridden the next. You’ve always got to be ready for a back-up plan. It shouldn’t fall on your client stakeholders to make up time, but sometimes it has to. Or sometimes you need to look for someone to pitch in on intermediate tasks to keep things of track while your “rock star” or “ninja” is getting better.

Align Plans with Staffing

When you’re working hard to keep up with staffing plans, you’ve got to have updated project plans. A small change in a plan could cause a change in staffing—even by a few hours—and throw everything else off.

Save Yourself and Your Team from Burnout

If you’re busy and not slowing down any time soon, you want to keep this spreadsheet (or tool) updated often. If you’re working at an agency, knowing what’s in your pipeline can also help you. Stay aligned with the person in charge of sales or assigning new projects so that you can anticipate upcoming needs and timelines. In some cases, you may even want to put some basic data in your spreadsheet or tool so that you can anticipate needs.

Good Resourcing Can Justify More Help

The value of tracking this data goes beyond your projects. It can help business owners make important decisions on growing a company.

No matter what you do, be sure to communicate about staffing as much as possible. If you’re in an organization that is constantly handling change, you’ll know that it’s a tough target to hit. In fact, your numbers will often be slightly off, but you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re doing everything you can to stay ahead of the resource crunch. At the same time, your team will appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to protect their work-life balance.

Stakeholders Are Resources, Too

When you’re working on a team with a project, you have to consider the stakeholders as decision makers, too. Let’s face it—no one has ever been trained to be a good client, stakeholder, or project sponsor. In addition to that, they are likely to be working on several projects with several people at one time. Life as a client can be hectic! So do everything you can to help them plan their time appropriately. In general, you should let the stakeholders know they’ll have to plan for these things:

Meetings: You’ll conduct a kickoff meeting, weekly status updates, deliverable reviews, etc.

Scheduling: You’ll need stakeholders to wrangle calendars to get folks into said meetings.

Gathering feedback: This sounds easy, but it is not. You will need this person to spend time with all of the stakeholders to get their feedback and collate it for you to make sure there are no conflicting opinions.

Chasing down decisions: There are points on every project where one person will need to make sure there is agreement and decisions can be made to keep the project moving.

Daily ad hoc email, phone calls: Questions and requests will pop up, and you’ll need timely responses.

Operations: You might need invoices to be reviewed and approved or change requests to be reviewed and discussed. The stakeholders will need to make time to operate the project from their side of things.

This is a lot of work. And just like PM work, it is very hard to quantify or plan. If you’re in good hands, you’re working with someone who has good PM skills. If not, give them the list above along with a copy of this book. But seriously, if you can assist them with planning their time, it might be as simple as including action items or to-dos for them in a weekly email or in your status report. Just remember, they are busy and want the project to run smoothly as well. Help them make that happen.

TL; DR

Managing projects is hard enough, but being the person to manage who works on what and when can be even more difficult. However, if you don’t keep track of this basic information, you’ll likely find it hard to meet deadlines and wrap up projects without major issues. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your that your team stays busy, yet not completely overbooked:

Set up a simple spreadsheet to forecast projects and hours per team member.

This data should be based on what’s included in your project scopes and timelines—be sure to double-check that.

You may want to check out one of the resourcing tools that are out there now.

Be sure to account for a number of factors that you can’t necessarily control in this process—for example, interests, skill sets, moving schedules, holidays, vacations, and so on.

Account for your sales process if you’re in an agency and stay ahead of new project requests.

Remember that you’re dealing with people here.

Want to read more?

This excerpt from Project Management for Humans will help you get started. Order the full copy today, as well as other excellent titles from Rosenfeld Media.

http://ift.tt/2h6VulK

[jeanshesallenberger]

Project Management for Humans

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brett Harned's new book, Project Management for Humans, available now from Rosenfeld Media.

I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days). Whether I’m playing the game a lot or not, the idea of making tiny boxes fit in neatly and clearing out rows of work is ingrained in my brain. It’s the project manager in me.

But here’s the thing: What project managers do on a daily basis when it comes to managing resources or staffing is similar to Tetris, and it’s a big project management challenge that we all face. The biggest difference between resourcing and Tetris? The team members we’re trying to assign tasks to aren’t blocks. They’re human beings, and they need to be treated as such.

Your Team Are People, Too!

Let’s move away from calling people “resources,” please. We’re really just staffing projects or assigning tasks. We’re not using people to just get things done. We’re asking them to solve challenges that are presented in our projects.

Set the Stage for Organized Resource Planning

The challenge of managing a team is making sure that they stay busy and working on tasks, yet are not completely overbooked. It’s a difficult balance to find, particularly when your projects require a variety of skills at different times, which seem to change all too often.

At the most basic level, you want to set up a system for tracking your projects and your team members’ time on those projects (see Figure 6.1). A simple goal is to ensure that you can confidently commit to deadlines on projects with the knowledge that your team is actually available to do the related work. It seems like a simple goal, but it’s often a difficult one to keep up with due to changes on projects, changes in personal schedules (hey, life happens), and an influx of new work and requests. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, a simple spreadsheet could help you, particularly if you’re managing a smaller team. At the core, you want to track these items:

Projects (List them all, even the non-billable ones, or the other things that aren’t projects but end up taking a lot of time—like business development.)

People (List every person you work with.)

Estimated time (Track hours, days, weeks, etc. Make your best guess—based on your timeline or calendar—on how much each person will spend on a project or a task.)

Figure 6.1 Use a Google Spreadsheet, Numbers, or Excel to input your project and team data.

A couple of notes on how to use a spreadsheet to forecast team availability:

This should be set up on a week-by-week basis to minimize confusion (use tabs in your spreadsheet for each new week).

Always consider the “nonbillable” things that people must do (like stand-up meetings, internal tasks, sales, etc.).

The final cell contains a formula that tallies the hours for you; if the hours go over your typical limit (think of a 40-hour work week), it will turn red to notify you. You’ll want to have a good idea for just how “utilized” someone should be (32 hours/week is usually a good target).

You can input the actual hours logged in your time tracking system if you’d like. It could help with future estimating. (If you’re not tracking time, check in with your team on time percentages to get a gut check.)

Check your estimates with your team to make sure that the hours actually align with their assessment of the task (This might help with avoiding that red number!)

Communicate these hours to the entire team each week. Making sure that everyone “is in the know” will help on any project. Discussing it with individuals will help you understand effort, blockers, and possibly even different ways of working.

Tools

The landscape for project management tools is changing constantly. There are a number of tools in the marketplace for helping you manage and communicate this data. If you’ve working with a team of 10 or more, you might want to abandon the spreadsheet approach for something more official, organized and supported. Bonus: Many of these tools handle more than just resourcing!

Here’s the thing—it’s not just about numbers. The issue that makes estimating a team’s project hours difficult is that everyone works differently. There is no way to standardize the human factor here, and that’s what makes it tough. Forget the fact that no one on your team is a robot, and they all work at their own pace. Think about sick days, vacations, client delays, changes on projects, and so on. It’s a never-ending flow of shapes that must fit into the box that is a project. Be sure to have an ongoing dialogue about your staffing plans and challenges.

Match Resource Skills to Projects

Projects only slow down when decisions are not made. In that magical moment when things are actually going well, you want to make sure that your team can continue the pace. The only way to do that is by connecting with your team and understanding what motivates them. Here are some things to consider:

Interests: If you have a team member who loves beer, why not put that person on the beer design site? Maybe you have multiple people who want to be on the project, but they are all busy on other projects. These are the breaks. You’ve got to do what is right for the company and your budget. If you can put interests first, it’s awesome. It won’t always work out that way for everyone, but it’s a good first step to try.

Skill sets: It’s as simple as getting to know each and every team member’s work. Some people are meant to create specific types of designs or experiences. It not only has to do with interests, but it also has to do with strengths within those tasks. Sure, I may love beer, but that doesn’t mean that I am meant to design the site that caters to the audience the client is trying to reach.

Moving schedules: Projects will always change. One week you know you’re working against a firm deadline, and the next week that has changed due to the clients, the needs of the project, or some other reason someone conjured up. It’s tough to know when that change will happen, but when it does, how you’ll fill someone’s time with other work should be high on your mind.

Holidays: People always extend them. Plan for that!

Vacations: It’s great to know about these in advance. Be sure you know your company’s policies around vacations. You never ever want to be the PM who says “Well, you have a deadline on X date and that will conflict with your very expensive/exciting trip, so, um … no.” Ask people to request trips at least a month in advance so that you can plan ahead and make it work.

Illness: We’re all humans and that means we’re fine one day and bedridden the next. You’ve always got to be ready for a back-up plan. It shouldn’t fall on your client stakeholders to make up time, but sometimes it has to. Or sometimes you need to look for someone to pitch in on intermediate tasks to keep things of track while your “rock star” or “ninja” is getting better.

Align Plans with Staffing

When you’re working hard to keep up with staffing plans, you’ve got to have updated project plans. A small change in a plan could cause a change in staffing—even by a few hours—and throw everything else off.

Save Yourself and Your Team from Burnout

If you’re busy and not slowing down any time soon, you want to keep this spreadsheet (or tool) updated often. If you’re working at an agency, knowing what’s in your pipeline can also help you. Stay aligned with the person in charge of sales or assigning new projects so that you can anticipate upcoming needs and timelines. In some cases, you may even want to put some basic data in your spreadsheet or tool so that you can anticipate needs.

Good Resourcing Can Justify More Help

The value of tracking this data goes beyond your projects. It can help business owners make important decisions on growing a company.

No matter what you do, be sure to communicate about staffing as much as possible. If you’re in an organization that is constantly handling change, you’ll know that it’s a tough target to hit. In fact, your numbers will often be slightly off, but you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re doing everything you can to stay ahead of the resource crunch. At the same time, your team will appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to protect their work-life balance.

Stakeholders Are Resources, Too

When you’re working on a team with a project, you have to consider the stakeholders as decision makers, too. Let’s face it—no one has ever been trained to be a good client, stakeholder, or project sponsor. In addition to that, they are likely to be working on several projects with several people at one time. Life as a client can be hectic! So do everything you can to help them plan their time appropriately. In general, you should let the stakeholders know they’ll have to plan for these things:

Meetings: You’ll conduct a kickoff meeting, weekly status updates, deliverable reviews, etc.

Scheduling: You’ll need stakeholders to wrangle calendars to get folks into said meetings.

Gathering feedback: This sounds easy, but it is not. You will need this person to spend time with all of the stakeholders to get their feedback and collate it for you to make sure there are no conflicting opinions.

Chasing down decisions: There are points on every project where one person will need to make sure there is agreement and decisions can be made to keep the project moving.

Daily ad hoc email, phone calls: Questions and requests will pop up, and you’ll need timely responses.

Operations: You might need invoices to be reviewed and approved or change requests to be reviewed and discussed. The stakeholders will need to make time to operate the project from their side of things.

This is a lot of work. And just like PM work, it is very hard to quantify or plan. If you’re in good hands, you’re working with someone who has good PM skills. If not, give them the list above along with a copy of this book. But seriously, if you can assist them with planning their time, it might be as simple as including action items or to-dos for them in a weekly email or in your status report. Just remember, they are busy and want the project to run smoothly as well. Help them make that happen.

TL; DR

Managing projects is hard enough, but being the person to manage who works on what and when can be even more difficult. However, if you don’t keep track of this basic information, you’ll likely find it hard to meet deadlines and wrap up projects without major issues. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your that your team stays busy, yet not completely overbooked:

Set up a simple spreadsheet to forecast projects and hours per team member.

This data should be based on what’s included in your project scopes and timelines—be sure to double-check that.

You may want to check out one of the resourcing tools that are out there now.

Be sure to account for a number of factors that you can’t necessarily control in this process—for example, interests, skill sets, moving schedules, holidays, vacations, and so on.

Account for your sales process if you’re in an agency and stay ahead of new project requests.

Remember that you’re dealing with people here.

Want to read more?

This excerpt from Project Management for Humans will help you get started. Order the full copy today, as well as other excellent titles from Rosenfeld Media.

http://ift.tt/2h6VulK

[mariaaklnthony]

Project Management for Humans

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brett Harned's new book, Project Management for Humans, available now from Rosenfeld Media.

I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days). Whether I’m playing the game a lot or not, the idea of making tiny boxes fit in neatly and clearing out rows of work is ingrained in my brain. It’s the project manager in me.

But here’s the thing: What project managers do on a daily basis when it comes to managing resources or staffing is similar to Tetris, and it’s a big project management challenge that we all face. The biggest difference between resourcing and Tetris? The team members we’re trying to assign tasks to aren’t blocks. They’re human beings, and they need to be treated as such.

Your Team Are People, Too!

Let’s move away from calling people “resources,” please. We’re really just staffing projects or assigning tasks. We’re not using people to just get things done. We’re asking them to solve challenges that are presented in our projects.

Set the Stage for Organized Resource Planning

The challenge of managing a team is making sure that they stay busy and working on tasks, yet are not completely overbooked. It’s a difficult balance to find, particularly when your projects require a variety of skills at different times, which seem to change all too often.

At the most basic level, you want to set up a system for tracking your projects and your team members’ time on those projects (see Figure 6.1). A simple goal is to ensure that you can confidently commit to deadlines on projects with the knowledge that your team is actually available to do the related work. It seems like a simple goal, but it’s often a difficult one to keep up with due to changes on projects, changes in personal schedules (hey, life happens), and an influx of new work and requests. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, a simple spreadsheet could help you, particularly if you’re managing a smaller team. At the core, you want to track these items:

Projects (List them all, even the non-billable ones, or the other things that aren’t projects but end up taking a lot of time—like business development.)

People (List every person you work with.)

Estimated time (Track hours, days, weeks, etc. Make your best guess—based on your timeline or calendar—on how much each person will spend on a project or a task.)

Figure 6.1 Use a Google Spreadsheet, Numbers, or Excel to input your project and team data.

A couple of notes on how to use a spreadsheet to forecast team availability:

This should be set up on a week-by-week basis to minimize confusion (use tabs in your spreadsheet for each new week).

Always consider the “nonbillable” things that people must do (like stand-up meetings, internal tasks, sales, etc.).

The final cell contains a formula that tallies the hours for you; if the hours go over your typical limit (think of a 40-hour work week), it will turn red to notify you. You’ll want to have a good idea for just how “utilized” someone should be (32 hours/week is usually a good target).

You can input the actual hours logged in your time tracking system if you’d like. It could help with future estimating. (If you’re not tracking time, check in with your team on time percentages to get a gut check.)

Check your estimates with your team to make sure that the hours actually align with their assessment of the task (This might help with avoiding that red number!)

Communicate these hours to the entire team each week. Making sure that everyone “is in the know” will help on any project. Discussing it with individuals will help you understand effort, blockers, and possibly even different ways of working.

Tools

The landscape for project management tools is changing constantly. There are a number of tools in the marketplace for helping you manage and communicate this data. If you’ve working with a team of 10 or more, you might want to abandon the spreadsheet approach for something more official, organized and supported. Bonus: Many of these tools handle more than just resourcing!

Here’s the thing—it’s not just about numbers. The issue that makes estimating a team’s project hours difficult is that everyone works differently. There is no way to standardize the human factor here, and that’s what makes it tough. Forget the fact that no one on your team is a robot, and they all work at their own pace. Think about sick days, vacations, client delays, changes on projects, and so on. It’s a never-ending flow of shapes that must fit into the box that is a project. Be sure to have an ongoing dialogue about your staffing plans and challenges.

Match Resource Skills to Projects

Projects only slow down when decisions are not made. In that magical moment when things are actually going well, you want to make sure that your team can continue the pace. The only way to do that is by connecting with your team and understanding what motivates them. Here are some things to consider:

Interests: If you have a team member who loves beer, why not put that person on the beer design site? Maybe you have multiple people who want to be on the project, but they are all busy on other projects. These are the breaks. You’ve got to do what is right for the company and your budget. If you can put interests first, it’s awesome. It won’t always work out that way for everyone, but it’s a good first step to try.

Skill sets: It’s as simple as getting to know each and every team member’s work. Some people are meant to create specific types of designs or experiences. It not only has to do with interests, but it also has to do with strengths within those tasks. Sure, I may love beer, but that doesn’t mean that I am meant to design the site that caters to the audience the client is trying to reach.

Moving schedules: Projects will always change. One week you know you’re working against a firm deadline, and the next week that has changed due to the clients, the needs of the project, or some other reason someone conjured up. It’s tough to know when that change will happen, but when it does, how you’ll fill someone’s time with other work should be high on your mind.

Holidays: People always extend them. Plan for that!

Vacations: It’s great to know about these in advance. Be sure you know your company’s policies around vacations. You never ever want to be the PM who says “Well, you have a deadline on X date and that will conflict with your very expensive/exciting trip, so, um … no.” Ask people to request trips at least a month in advance so that you can plan ahead and make it work.

Illness: We’re all humans and that means we’re fine one day and bedridden the next. You’ve always got to be ready for a back-up plan. It shouldn’t fall on your client stakeholders to make up time, but sometimes it has to. Or sometimes you need to look for someone to pitch in on intermediate tasks to keep things of track while your “rock star” or “ninja” is getting better.

Align Plans with Staffing

When you’re working hard to keep up with staffing plans, you’ve got to have updated project plans. A small change in a plan could cause a change in staffing—even by a few hours—and throw everything else off.

Save Yourself and Your Team from Burnout

If you’re busy and not slowing down any time soon, you want to keep this spreadsheet (or tool) updated often. If you’re working at an agency, knowing what’s in your pipeline can also help you. Stay aligned with the person in charge of sales or assigning new projects so that you can anticipate upcoming needs and timelines. In some cases, you may even want to put some basic data in your spreadsheet or tool so that you can anticipate needs.

Good Resourcing Can Justify More Help

The value of tracking this data goes beyond your projects. It can help business owners make important decisions on growing a company.

No matter what you do, be sure to communicate about staffing as much as possible. If you’re in an organization that is constantly handling change, you’ll know that it’s a tough target to hit. In fact, your numbers will often be slightly off, but you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re doing everything you can to stay ahead of the resource crunch. At the same time, your team will appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to protect their work-life balance.

Stakeholders Are Resources, Too

When you’re working on a team with a project, you have to consider the stakeholders as decision makers, too. Let’s face it—no one has ever been trained to be a good client, stakeholder, or project sponsor. In addition to that, they are likely to be working on several projects with several people at one time. Life as a client can be hectic! So do everything you can to help them plan their time appropriately. In general, you should let the stakeholders know they’ll have to plan for these things:

Meetings: You’ll conduct a kickoff meeting, weekly status updates, deliverable reviews, etc.

Scheduling: You’ll need stakeholders to wrangle calendars to get folks into said meetings.

Gathering feedback: This sounds easy, but it is not. You will need this person to spend time with all of the stakeholders to get their feedback and collate it for you to make sure there are no conflicting opinions.

Chasing down decisions: There are points on every project where one person will need to make sure there is agreement and decisions can be made to keep the project moving.

Daily ad hoc email, phone calls: Questions and requests will pop up, and you’ll need timely responses.

Operations: You might need invoices to be reviewed and approved or change requests to be reviewed and discussed. The stakeholders will need to make time to operate the project from their side of things.

This is a lot of work. And just like PM work, it is very hard to quantify or plan. If you’re in good hands, you’re working with someone who has good PM skills. If not, give them the list above along with a copy of this book. But seriously, if you can assist them with planning their time, it might be as simple as including action items or to-dos for them in a weekly email or in your status report. Just remember, they are busy and want the project to run smoothly as well. Help them make that happen.

TL; DR

Managing projects is hard enough, but being the person to manage who works on what and when can be even more difficult. However, if you don’t keep track of this basic information, you’ll likely find it hard to meet deadlines and wrap up projects without major issues. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your that your team stays busy, yet not completely overbooked:

Set up a simple spreadsheet to forecast projects and hours per team member.

This data should be based on what’s included in your project scopes and timelines—be sure to double-check that.

You may want to check out one of the resourcing tools that are out there now.

Be sure to account for a number of factors that you can’t necessarily control in this process—for example, interests, skill sets, moving schedules, holidays, vacations, and so on.

Account for your sales process if you’re in an agency and stay ahead of new project requests.

Remember that you’re dealing with people here.

Want to read more?

This excerpt from Project Management for Humans will help you get started. Order the full copy today, as well as other excellent titles from Rosenfeld Media.

http://ift.tt/2h6VulK

[pattersondonaldblk5]

Project Management for Humans

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brett Harned's new book, Project Management for Humans, available now from Rosenfeld Media.

I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days). Whether I’m playing the game a lot or not, the idea of making tiny boxes fit in neatly and clearing out rows of work is ingrained in my brain. It’s the project manager in me.

But here’s the thing: What project managers do on a daily basis when it comes to managing resources or staffing is similar to Tetris, and it’s a big project management challenge that we all face. The biggest difference between resourcing and Tetris? The team members we’re trying to assign tasks to aren’t blocks. They’re human beings, and they need to be treated as such.

Your Team Are People, Too!

Let’s move away from calling people “resources,” please. We’re really just staffing projects or assigning tasks. We’re not using people to just get things done. We’re asking them to solve challenges that are presented in our projects.

Set the Stage for Organized Resource Planning

The challenge of managing a team is making sure that they stay busy and working on tasks, yet are not completely overbooked. It’s a difficult balance to find, particularly when your projects require a variety of skills at different times, which seem to change all too often.

At the most basic level, you want to set up a system for tracking your projects and your team members’ time on those projects (see Figure 6.1). A simple goal is to ensure that you can confidently commit to deadlines on projects with the knowledge that your team is actually available to do the related work. It seems like a simple goal, but it’s often a difficult one to keep up with due to changes on projects, changes in personal schedules (hey, life happens), and an influx of new work and requests. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, a simple spreadsheet could help you, particularly if you’re managing a smaller team. At the core, you want to track these items:

Projects (List them all, even the non-billable ones, or the other things that aren’t projects but end up taking a lot of time—like business development.)

People (List every person you work with.)

Estimated time (Track hours, days, weeks, etc. Make your best guess—based on your timeline or calendar—on how much each person will spend on a project or a task.)

Figure 6.1 Use a Google Spreadsheet, Numbers, or Excel to input your project and team data.

A couple of notes on how to use a spreadsheet to forecast team availability:

This should be set up on a week-by-week basis to minimize confusion (use tabs in your spreadsheet for each new week).

Always consider the “nonbillable” things that people must do (like stand-up meetings, internal tasks, sales, etc.).

The final cell contains a formula that tallies the hours for you; if the hours go over your typical limit (think of a 40-hour work week), it will turn red to notify you. You’ll want to have a good idea for just how “utilized” someone should be (32 hours/week is usually a good target).

You can input the actual hours logged in your time tracking system if you’d like. It could help with future estimating. (If you’re not tracking time, check in with your team on time percentages to get a gut check.)

Check your estimates with your team to make sure that the hours actually align with their assessment of the task (This might help with avoiding that red number!)

Communicate these hours to the entire team each week. Making sure that everyone “is in the know” will help on any project. Discussing it with individuals will help you understand effort, blockers, and possibly even different ways of working.

Tools

The landscape for project management tools is changing constantly. There are a number of tools in the marketplace for helping you manage and communicate this data. If you’ve working with a team of 10 or more, you might want to abandon the spreadsheet approach for something more official, organized and supported. Bonus: Many of these tools handle more than just resourcing!

Here’s the thing—it’s not just about numbers. The issue that makes estimating a team’s project hours difficult is that everyone works differently. There is no way to standardize the human factor here, and that’s what makes it tough. Forget the fact that no one on your team is a robot, and they all work at their own pace. Think about sick days, vacations, client delays, changes on projects, and so on. It’s a never-ending flow of shapes that must fit into the box that is a project. Be sure to have an ongoing dialogue about your staffing plans and challenges.

Match Resource Skills to Projects

Projects only slow down when decisions are not made. In that magical moment when things are actually going well, you want to make sure that your team can continue the pace. The only way to do that is by connecting with your team and understanding what motivates them. Here are some things to consider:

Interests: If you have a team member who loves beer, why not put that person on the beer design site? Maybe you have multiple people who want to be on the project, but they are all busy on other projects. These are the breaks. You’ve got to do what is right for the company and your budget. If you can put interests first, it’s awesome. It won’t always work out that way for everyone, but it’s a good first step to try.

Skill sets: It’s as simple as getting to know each and every team member’s work. Some people are meant to create specific types of designs or experiences. It not only has to do with interests, but it also has to do with strengths within those tasks. Sure, I may love beer, but that doesn’t mean that I am meant to design the site that caters to the audience the client is trying to reach.

Moving schedules: Projects will always change. One week you know you’re working against a firm deadline, and the next week that has changed due to the clients, the needs of the project, or some other reason someone conjured up. It’s tough to know when that change will happen, but when it does, how you’ll fill someone’s time with other work should be high on your mind.

Holidays: People always extend them. Plan for that!

Vacations: It’s great to know about these in advance. Be sure you know your company’s policies around vacations. You never ever want to be the PM who says “Well, you have a deadline on X date and that will conflict with your very expensive/exciting trip, so, um … no.” Ask people to request trips at least a month in advance so that you can plan ahead and make it work.

Illness: We’re all humans and that means we’re fine one day and bedridden the next. You’ve always got to be ready for a back-up plan. It shouldn’t fall on your client stakeholders to make up time, but sometimes it has to. Or sometimes you need to look for someone to pitch in on intermediate tasks to keep things of track while your “rock star” or “ninja” is getting better.

Align Plans with Staffing

When you’re working hard to keep up with staffing plans, you’ve got to have updated project plans. A small change in a plan could cause a change in staffing—even by a few hours—and throw everything else off.

Save Yourself and Your Team from Burnout

If you’re busy and not slowing down any time soon, you want to keep this spreadsheet (or tool) updated often. If you’re working at an agency, knowing what’s in your pipeline can also help you. Stay aligned with the person in charge of sales or assigning new projects so that you can anticipate upcoming needs and timelines. In some cases, you may even want to put some basic data in your spreadsheet or tool so that you can anticipate needs.

Good Resourcing Can Justify More Help

The value of tracking this data goes beyond your projects. It can help business owners make important decisions on growing a company.

No matter what you do, be sure to communicate about staffing as much as possible. If you’re in an organization that is constantly handling change, you’ll know that it’s a tough target to hit. In fact, your numbers will often be slightly off, but you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re doing everything you can to stay ahead of the resource crunch. At the same time, your team will appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to protect their work-life balance.

Stakeholders Are Resources, Too

When you’re working on a team with a project, you have to consider the stakeholders as decision makers, too. Let’s face it—no one has ever been trained to be a good client, stakeholder, or project sponsor. In addition to that, they are likely to be working on several projects with several people at one time. Life as a client can be hectic! So do everything you can to help them plan their time appropriately. In general, you should let the stakeholders know they’ll have to plan for these things:

Meetings: You’ll conduct a kickoff meeting, weekly status updates, deliverable reviews, etc.

Scheduling: You’ll need stakeholders to wrangle calendars to get folks into said meetings.

Gathering feedback: This sounds easy, but it is not. You will need this person to spend time with all of the stakeholders to get their feedback and collate it for you to make sure there are no conflicting opinions.

Chasing down decisions: There are points on every project where one person will need to make sure there is agreement and decisions can be made to keep the project moving.

Daily ad hoc email, phone calls: Questions and requests will pop up, and you’ll need timely responses.

Operations: You might need invoices to be reviewed and approved or change requests to be reviewed and discussed. The stakeholders will need to make time to operate the project from their side of things.

This is a lot of work. And just like PM work, it is very hard to quantify or plan. If you’re in good hands, you’re working with someone who has good PM skills. If not, give them the list above along with a copy of this book. But seriously, if you can assist them with planning their time, it might be as simple as including action items or to-dos for them in a weekly email or in your status report. Just remember, they are busy and want the project to run smoothly as well. Help them make that happen.

TL; DR

Managing projects is hard enough, but being the person to manage who works on what and when can be even more difficult. However, if you don’t keep track of this basic information, you’ll likely find it hard to meet deadlines and wrap up projects without major issues. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your that your team stays busy, yet not completely overbooked:

Set up a simple spreadsheet to forecast projects and hours per team member.

This data should be based on what’s included in your project scopes and timelines—be sure to double-check that.

You may want to check out one of the resourcing tools that are out there now.

Be sure to account for a number of factors that you can’t necessarily control in this process—for example, interests, skill sets, moving schedules, holidays, vacations, and so on.

Account for your sales process if you’re in an agency and stay ahead of new project requests.

Remember that you’re dealing with people here.

Want to read more?

This excerpt from Project Management for Humans will help you get started. Order the full copy today, as well as other excellent titles from Rosenfeld Media.

http://ift.tt/2h6VulK

[waltercostellone]

Project Management for Humans

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brett Harned's new book, Project Management for Humans, available now from Rosenfeld Media.

I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days). Whether I’m playing the game a lot or not, the idea of making tiny boxes fit in neatly and clearing out rows of work is ingrained in my brain. It’s the project manager in me.

But here’s the thing: What project managers do on a daily basis when it comes to managing resources or staffing is similar to Tetris, and it’s a big project management challenge that we all face. The biggest difference between resourcing and Tetris? The team members we’re trying to assign tasks to aren’t blocks. They’re human beings, and they need to be treated as such.

Your Team Are People, Too!

Let’s move away from calling people “resources,” please. We’re really just staffing projects or assigning tasks. We’re not using people to just get things done. We’re asking them to solve challenges that are presented in our projects.

Set the Stage for Organized Resource Planning

The challenge of managing a team is making sure that they stay busy and working on tasks, yet are not completely overbooked. It’s a difficult balance to find, particularly when your projects require a variety of skills at different times, which seem to change all too often.

At the most basic level, you want to set up a system for tracking your projects and your team members’ time on those projects (see Figure 6.1). A simple goal is to ensure that you can confidently commit to deadlines on projects with the knowledge that your team is actually available to do the related work. It seems like a simple goal, but it’s often a difficult one to keep up with due to changes on projects, changes in personal schedules (hey, life happens), and an influx of new work and requests. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, a simple spreadsheet could help you, particularly if you’re managing a smaller team. At the core, you want to track these items:

Projects (List them all, even the non-billable ones, or the other things that aren’t projects but end up taking a lot of time—like business development.)

People (List every person you work with.)

Estimated time (Track hours, days, weeks, etc. Make your best guess—based on your timeline or calendar—on how much each person will spend on a project or a task.)

Figure 6.1 Use a Google Spreadsheet, Numbers, or Excel to input your project and team data.

A couple of notes on how to use a spreadsheet to forecast team availability:

This should be set up on a week-by-week basis to minimize confusion (use tabs in your spreadsheet for each new week).

Always consider the “nonbillable” things that people must do (like stand-up meetings, internal tasks, sales, etc.).

The final cell contains a formula that tallies the hours for you; if the hours go over your typical limit (think of a 40-hour work week), it will turn red to notify you. You’ll want to have a good idea for just how “utilized” someone should be (32 hours/week is usually a good target).

You can input the actual hours logged in your time tracking system if you’d like. It could help with future estimating. (If you’re not tracking time, check in with your team on time percentages to get a gut check.)

Check your estimates with your team to make sure that the hours actually align with their assessment of the task (This might help with avoiding that red number!)

Communicate these hours to the entire team each week. Making sure that everyone “is in the know” will help on any project. Discussing it with individuals will help you understand effort, blockers, and possibly even different ways of working.

Tools

The landscape for project management tools is changing constantly. There are a number of tools in the marketplace for helping you manage and communicate this data. If you’ve working with a team of 10 or more, you might want to abandon the spreadsheet approach for something more official, organized and supported. Bonus: Many of these tools handle more than just resourcing!

Here’s the thing—it’s not just about numbers. The issue that makes estimating a team’s project hours difficult is that everyone works differently. There is no way to standardize the human factor here, and that’s what makes it tough. Forget the fact that no one on your team is a robot, and they all work at their own pace. Think about sick days, vacations, client delays, changes on projects, and so on. It’s a never-ending flow of shapes that must fit into the box that is a project. Be sure to have an ongoing dialogue about your staffing plans and challenges.

Match Resource Skills to Projects

Projects only slow down when decisions are not made. In that magical moment when things are actually going well, you want to make sure that your team can continue the pace. The only way to do that is by connecting with your team and understanding what motivates them. Here are some things to consider:

Interests: If you have a team member who loves beer, why not put that person on the beer design site? Maybe you have multiple people who want to be on the project, but they are all busy on other projects. These are the breaks. You’ve got to do what is right for the company and your budget. If you can put interests first, it’s awesome. It won’t always work out that way for everyone, but it’s a good first step to try.

Skill sets: It’s as simple as getting to know each and every team member’s work. Some people are meant to create specific types of designs or experiences. It not only has to do with interests, but it also has to do with strengths within those tasks. Sure, I may love beer, but that doesn’t mean that I am meant to design the site that caters to the audience the client is trying to reach.

Moving schedules: Projects will always change. One week you know you’re working against a firm deadline, and the next week that has changed due to the clients, the needs of the project, or some other reason someone conjured up. It’s tough to know when that change will happen, but when it does, how you’ll fill someone’s time with other work should be high on your mind.

Holidays: People always extend them. Plan for that!

Vacations: It’s great to know about these in advance. Be sure you know your company’s policies around vacations. You never ever want to be the PM who says “Well, you have a deadline on X date and that will conflict with your very expensive/exciting trip, so, um … no.” Ask people to request trips at least a month in advance so that you can plan ahead and make it work.

Illness: We’re all humans and that means we’re fine one day and bedridden the next. You’ve always got to be ready for a back-up plan. It shouldn’t fall on your client stakeholders to make up time, but sometimes it has to. Or sometimes you need to look for someone to pitch in on intermediate tasks to keep things of track while your “rock star” or “ninja” is getting better.

Align Plans with Staffing

When you’re working hard to keep up with staffing plans, you’ve got to have updated project plans. A small change in a plan could cause a change in staffing—even by a few hours—and throw everything else off.

Save Yourself and Your Team from Burnout

If you’re busy and not slowing down any time soon, you want to keep this spreadsheet (or tool) updated often. If you’re working at an agency, knowing what’s in your pipeline can also help you. Stay aligned with the person in charge of sales or assigning new projects so that you can anticipate upcoming needs and timelines. In some cases, you may even want to put some basic data in your spreadsheet or tool so that you can anticipate needs.

Good Resourcing Can Justify More Help

The value of tracking this data goes beyond your projects. It can help business owners make important decisions on growing a company.

No matter what you do, be sure to communicate about staffing as much as possible. If you’re in an organization that is constantly handling change, you’ll know that it’s a tough target to hit. In fact, your numbers will often be slightly off, but you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re doing everything you can to stay ahead of the resource crunch. At the same time, your team will appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to protect their work-life balance.

Stakeholders Are Resources, Too

When you’re working on a team with a project, you have to consider the stakeholders as decision makers, too. Let’s face it—no one has ever been trained to be a good client, stakeholder, or project sponsor. In addition to that, they are likely to be working on several projects with several people at one time. Life as a client can be hectic! So do everything you can to help them plan their time appropriately. In general, you should let the stakeholders know they’ll have to plan for these things:

Meetings: You’ll conduct a kickoff meeting, weekly status updates, deliverable reviews, etc.

Scheduling: You’ll need stakeholders to wrangle calendars to get folks into said meetings.

Gathering feedback: This sounds easy, but it is not. You will need this person to spend time with all of the stakeholders to get their feedback and collate it for you to make sure there are no conflicting opinions.

Chasing down decisions: There are points on every project where one person will need to make sure there is agreement and decisions can be made to keep the project moving.

Daily ad hoc email, phone calls: Questions and requests will pop up, and you’ll need timely responses.

Operations: You might need invoices to be reviewed and approved or change requests to be reviewed and discussed. The stakeholders will need to make time to operate the project from their side of things.

This is a lot of work. And just like PM work, it is very hard to quantify or plan. If you’re in good hands, you’re working with someone who has good PM skills. If not, give them the list above along with a copy of this book. But seriously, if you can assist them with planning their time, it might be as simple as including action items or to-dos for them in a weekly email or in your status report. Just remember, they are busy and want the project to run smoothly as well. Help them make that happen.

TL; DR

Managing projects is hard enough, but being the person to manage who works on what and when can be even more difficult. However, if you don’t keep track of this basic information, you’ll likely find it hard to meet deadlines and wrap up projects without major issues. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your that your team stays busy, yet not completely overbooked:

Set up a simple spreadsheet to forecast projects and hours per team member.

This data should be based on what’s included in your project scopes and timelines—be sure to double-check that.

You may want to check out one of the resourcing tools that are out there now.

Be sure to account for a number of factors that you can’t necessarily control in this process—for example, interests, skill sets, moving schedules, holidays, vacations, and so on.

Account for your sales process if you’re in an agency and stay ahead of new project requests.

Remember that you’re dealing with people here.

Want to read more?

This excerpt from Project Management for Humans will help you get started. Order the full copy today, as well as other excellent titles from Rosenfeld Media.

http://ift.tt/2h6VulK

[joannlyfgnch]

Project Management for Humans

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brett Harned's new book, Project Management for Humans, available now from Rosenfeld Media.

I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days). Whether I’m playing the game a lot or not, the idea of making tiny boxes fit in neatly and clearing out rows of work is ingrained in my brain. It’s the project manager in me.

But here’s the thing: What project managers do on a daily basis when it comes to managing resources or staffing is similar to Tetris, and it’s a big project management challenge that we all face. The biggest difference between resourcing and Tetris? The team members we’re trying to assign tasks to aren’t blocks. They’re human beings, and they need to be treated as such.

Your Team Are People, Too!

Let’s move away from calling people “resources,” please. We’re really just staffing projects or assigning tasks. We’re not using people to just get things done. We’re asking them to solve challenges that are presented in our projects.

Set the Stage for Organized Resource Planning

The challenge of managing a team is making sure that they stay busy and working on tasks, yet are not completely overbooked. It’s a difficult balance to find, particularly when your projects require a variety of skills at different times, which seem to change all too often.

At the most basic level, you want to set up a system for tracking your projects and your team members’ time on those projects (see Figure 6.1). A simple goal is to ensure that you can confidently commit to deadlines on projects with the knowledge that your team is actually available to do the related work. It seems like a simple goal, but it’s often a difficult one to keep up with due to changes on projects, changes in personal schedules (hey, life happens), and an influx of new work and requests. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, a simple spreadsheet could help you, particularly if you’re managing a smaller team. At the core, you want to track these items:

Projects (List them all, even the non-billable ones, or the other things that aren’t projects but end up taking a lot of time—like business development.)

People (List every person you work with.)

Estimated time (Track hours, days, weeks, etc. Make your best guess—based on your timeline or calendar—on how much each person will spend on a project or a task.)

Figure 6.1 Use a Google Spreadsheet, Numbers, or Excel to input your project and team data.

A couple of notes on how to use a spreadsheet to forecast team availability:

This should be set up on a week-by-week basis to minimize confusion (use tabs in your spreadsheet for each new week).

Always consider the “nonbillable” things that people must do (like stand-up meetings, internal tasks, sales, etc.).

The final cell contains a formula that tallies the hours for you; if the hours go over your typical limit (think of a 40-hour work week), it will turn red to notify you. You’ll want to have a good idea for just how “utilized” someone should be (32 hours/week is usually a good target).

You can input the actual hours logged in your time tracking system if you’d like. It could help with future estimating. (If you’re not tracking time, check in with your team on time percentages to get a gut check.)

Check your estimates with your team to make sure that the hours actually align with their assessment of the task (This might help with avoiding that red number!)

Communicate these hours to the entire team each week. Making sure that everyone “is in the know” will help on any project. Discussing it with individuals will help you understand effort, blockers, and possibly even different ways of working.

Tools

The landscape for project management tools is changing constantly. There are a number of tools in the marketplace for helping you manage and communicate this data. If you’ve working with a team of 10 or more, you might want to abandon the spreadsheet approach for something more official, organized and supported. Bonus: Many of these tools handle more than just resourcing!

Here’s the thing—it’s not just about numbers. The issue that makes estimating a team’s project hours difficult is that everyone works differently. There is no way to standardize the human factor here, and that’s what makes it tough. Forget the fact that no one on your team is a robot, and they all work at their own pace. Think about sick days, vacations, client delays, changes on projects, and so on. It’s a never-ending flow of shapes that must fit into the box that is a project. Be sure to have an ongoing dialogue about your staffing plans and challenges.

Match Resource Skills to Projects

Projects only slow down when decisions are not made. In that magical moment when things are actually going well, you want to make sure that your team can continue the pace. The only way to do that is by connecting with your team and understanding what motivates them. Here are some things to consider:

Interests: If you have a team member who loves beer, why not put that person on the beer design site? Maybe you have multiple people who want to be on the project, but they are all busy on other projects. These are the breaks. You’ve got to do what is right for the company and your budget. If you can put interests first, it’s awesome. It won’t always work out that way for everyone, but it’s a good first step to try.

Skill sets: It’s as simple as getting to know each and every team member’s work. Some people are meant to create specific types of designs or experiences. It not only has to do with interests, but it also has to do with strengths within those tasks. Sure, I may love beer, but that doesn’t mean that I am meant to design the site that caters to the audience the client is trying to reach.

Moving schedules: Projects will always change. One week you know you’re working against a firm deadline, and the next week that has changed due to the clients, the needs of the project, or some other reason someone conjured up. It’s tough to know when that change will happen, but when it does, how you’ll fill someone’s time with other work should be high on your mind.

Holidays: People always extend them. Plan for that!

Vacations: It’s great to know about these in advance. Be sure you know your company’s policies around vacations. You never ever want to be the PM who says “Well, you have a deadline on X date and that will conflict with your very expensive/exciting trip, so, um … no.” Ask people to request trips at least a month in advance so that you can plan ahead and make it work.

Illness: We’re all humans and that means we’re fine one day and bedridden the next. You’ve always got to be ready for a back-up plan. It shouldn’t fall on your client stakeholders to make up time, but sometimes it has to. Or sometimes you need to look for someone to pitch in on intermediate tasks to keep things of track while your “rock star” or “ninja” is getting better.

Align Plans with Staffing

When you’re working hard to keep up with staffing plans, you’ve got to have updated project plans. A small change in a plan could cause a change in staffing—even by a few hours—and throw everything else off.

Save Yourself and Your Team from Burnout

If you’re busy and not slowing down any time soon, you want to keep this spreadsheet (or tool) updated often. If you’re working at an agency, knowing what’s in your pipeline can also help you. Stay aligned with the person in charge of sales or assigning new projects so that you can anticipate upcoming needs and timelines. In some cases, you may even want to put some basic data in your spreadsheet or tool so that you can anticipate needs.

Good Resourcing Can Justify More Help

The value of tracking this data goes beyond your projects. It can help business owners make important decisions on growing a company.

No matter what you do, be sure to communicate about staffing as much as possible. If you’re in an organization that is constantly handling change, you’ll know that it’s a tough target to hit. In fact, your numbers will often be slightly off, but you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re doing everything you can to stay ahead of the resource crunch. At the same time, your team will appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to protect their work-life balance.

Stakeholders Are Resources, Too

When you’re working on a team with a project, you have to consider the stakeholders as decision makers, too. Let’s face it—no one has ever been trained to be a good client, stakeholder, or project sponsor. In addition to that, they are likely to be working on several projects with several people at one time. Life as a client can be hectic! So do everything you can to help them plan their time appropriately. In general, you should let the stakeholders know they’ll have to plan for these things:

Meetings: You’ll conduct a kickoff meeting, weekly status updates, deliverable reviews, etc.

Scheduling: You’ll need stakeholders to wrangle calendars to get folks into said meetings.

Gathering feedback: This sounds easy, but it is not. You will need this person to spend time with all of the stakeholders to get their feedback and collate it for you to make sure there are no conflicting opinions.

Chasing down decisions: There are points on every project where one person will need to make sure there is agreement and decisions can be made to keep the project moving.

Daily ad hoc email, phone calls: Questions and requests will pop up, and you’ll need timely responses.

Operations: You might need invoices to be reviewed and approved or change requests to be reviewed and discussed. The stakeholders will need to make time to operate the project from their side of things.

This is a lot of work. And just like PM work, it is very hard to quantify or plan. If you’re in good hands, you’re working with someone who has good PM skills. If not, give them the list above along with a copy of this book. But seriously, if you can assist them with planning their time, it might be as simple as including action items or to-dos for them in a weekly email or in your status report. Just remember, they are busy and want the project to run smoothly as well. Help them make that happen.

TL; DR

Managing projects is hard enough, but being the person to manage who works on what and when can be even more difficult. However, if you don’t keep track of this basic information, you’ll likely find it hard to meet deadlines and wrap up projects without major issues. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your that your team stays busy, yet not completely overbooked:

Set up a simple spreadsheet to forecast projects and hours per team member.

This data should be based on what’s included in your project scopes and timelines—be sure to double-check that.

You may want to check out one of the resourcing tools that are out there now.

Be sure to account for a number of factors that you can’t necessarily control in this process—for example, interests, skill sets, moving schedules, holidays, vacations, and so on.

Account for your sales process if you’re in an agency and stay ahead of new project requests.

Remember that you’re dealing with people here.

Want to read more?

This excerpt from Project Management for Humans will help you get started. Order the full copy today, as well as other excellent titles from Rosenfeld Media.

http://ift.tt/2h6VulK

[aracecvliwest]

Project Management for Humans

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Brett Harned's new book, Project Management for Humans, available now from Rosenfeld Media.

I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days). Whether I’m playing the game a lot or not, the idea of making tiny boxes fit in neatly and clearing out rows of work is ingrained in my brain. It’s the project manager in me.

But here’s the thing: What project managers do on a daily basis when it comes to managing resources or staffing is similar to Tetris, and it’s a big project management challenge that we all face. The biggest difference between resourcing and Tetris? The team members we’re trying to assign tasks to aren’t blocks. They’re human beings, and they need to be treated as such.

Your Team Are People, Too!

Let’s move away from calling people “resources,” please. We’re really just staffing projects or assigning tasks. We’re not using people to just get things done. We’re asking them to solve challenges that are presented in our projects.

Set the Stage for Organized Resource Planning

The challenge of managing a team is making sure that they stay busy and working on tasks, yet are not completely overbooked. It’s a difficult balance to find, particularly when your projects require a variety of skills at different times, which seem to change all too often.

At the most basic level, you want to set up a system for tracking your projects and your team members’ time on those projects (see Figure 6.1). A simple goal is to ensure that you can confidently commit to deadlines on projects with the knowledge that your team is actually available to do the related work. It seems like a simple goal, but it’s often a difficult one to keep up with due to changes on projects, changes in personal schedules (hey, life happens), and an influx of new work and requests. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, a simple spreadsheet could help you, particularly if you’re managing a smaller team. At the core, you want to track these items:

Projects (List them all, even the non-billable ones, or the other things that aren’t projects but end up taking a lot of time—like business development.)

People (List every person you work with.)

Estimated time (Track hours, days, weeks, etc. Make your best guess—based on your timeline or calendar—on how much each person will spend on a project or a task.)

Figure 6.1 Use a Google Spreadsheet, Numbers, or Excel to input your project and team data.

A couple of notes on how to use a spreadsheet to forecast team availability:

This should be set up on a week-by-week basis to minimize confusion (use tabs in your spreadsheet for each new week).

Always consider the “nonbillable” things that people must do (like stand-up meetings, internal tasks, sales, etc.).

The final cell contains a formula that tallies the hours for you; if the hours go over your typical limit (think of a 40-hour work week), it will turn red to notify you. You’ll want to have a good idea for just how “utilized” someone should be (32 hours/week is usually a good target).

You can input the actual hours logged in your time tracking system if you’d like. It could help with future estimating. (If you’re not tracking time, check in with your team on time percentages to get a gut check.)

Check your estimates with your team to make sure that the hours actually align with their assessment of the task (This might help with avoiding that red number!)

Communicate these hours to the entire team each week. Making sure that everyone “is in the know” will help on any project. Discussing it with individuals will help you understand effort, blockers, and possibly even different ways of working.

Tools

The landscape for project management tools is changing constantly. There are a number of tools in the marketplace for helping you manage and communicate this data. If you’ve working with a team of 10 or more, you might want to abandon the spreadsheet approach for something more official, organized and supported. Bonus: Many of these tools handle more than just resourcing!

Here’s the thing—it’s not just about numbers. The issue that makes estimating a team’s project hours difficult is that everyone works differently. There is no way to standardize the human factor here, and that’s what makes it tough. Forget the fact that no one on your team is a robot, and they all work at their own pace. Think about sick days, vacations, client delays, changes on projects, and so on. It’s a never-ending flow of shapes that must fit into the box that is a project. Be sure to have an ongoing dialogue about your staffing plans and challenges.

Match Resource Skills to Projects

Projects only slow down when decisions are not made. In that magical moment when things are actually going well, you want to make sure that your team can continue the pace. The only way to do that is by connecting with your team and understanding what motivates them. Here are some things to consider:

Interests: If you have a team member who loves beer, why not put that person on the beer design site? Maybe you have multiple people who want to be on the project, but they are all busy on other projects. These are the breaks. You’ve got to do what is right for the company and your budget. If you can put interests first, it’s awesome. It won’t always work out that way for everyone, but it’s a good first step to try.

Skill sets: It’s as simple as getting to know each and every team member’s work. Some people are meant to create specific types of designs or experiences. It not only has to do with interests, but it also has to do with strengths within those tasks. Sure, I may love beer, but that doesn’t mean that I am meant to design the site that caters to the audience the client is trying to reach.

Moving schedules: Projects will always change. One week you know you’re working against a firm deadline, and the next week that has changed due to the clients, the needs of the project, or some other reason someone conjured up. It’s tough to know when that change will happen, but when it does, how you’ll fill someone’s time with other work should be high on your mind.

Holidays: People always extend them. Plan for that!

Vacations: It’s great to know about these in advance. Be sure you know your company’s policies around vacations. You never ever want to be the PM who says “Well, you have a deadline on X date and that will conflict with your very expensive/exciting trip, so, um … no.” Ask people to request trips at least a month in advance so that you can plan ahead and make it work.

Illness: We’re all humans and that means we’re fine one day and bedridden the next. You’ve always got to be ready for a back-up plan. It shouldn’t fall on your client stakeholders to make up time, but sometimes it has to. Or sometimes you need to look for someone to pitch in on intermediate tasks to keep things of track while your “rock star” or “ninja” is getting better.

Align Plans with Staffing

When you’re working hard to keep up with staffing plans, you’ve got to have updated project plans. A small change in a plan could cause a change in staffing—even by a few hours—and throw everything else off.

Save Yourself and Your Team from Burnout

If you’re busy and not slowing down any time soon, you want to keep this spreadsheet (or tool) updated often. If you’re working at an agency, knowing what’s in your pipeline can also help you. Stay aligned with the person in charge of sales or assigning new projects so that you can anticipate upcoming needs and timelines. In some cases, you may even want to put some basic data in your spreadsheet or tool so that you can anticipate needs.

Good Resourcing Can Justify More Help

The value of tracking this data goes beyond your projects. It can help business owners make important decisions on growing a company.

No matter what you do, be sure to communicate about staffing as much as possible. If you’re in an organization that is constantly handling change, you’ll know that it’s a tough target to hit. In fact, your numbers will often be slightly off, but you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re doing everything you can to stay ahead of the resource crunch. At the same time, your team will appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to protect their work-life balance.

Stakeholders Are Resources, Too

When you’re working on a team with a project, you have to consider the stakeholders as decision makers, too. Let’s face it—no one has ever been trained to be a good client, stakeholder, or project sponsor. In addition to that, they are likely to be working on several projects with several people at one time. Life as a client can be hectic! So do everything you can to help them plan their time appropriately. In general, you should let the stakeholders know they’ll have to plan for these things:

Meetings: You’ll conduct a kickoff meeting, weekly status updates, deliverable reviews, etc.

Scheduling: You’ll need stakeholders to wrangle calendars to get folks into said meetings.

Gathering feedback: This sounds easy, but it is not. You will need this person to spend time with all of the stakeholders to get their feedback and collate it for you to make sure there are no conflicting opinions.

Chasing down decisions: There are points on every project where one person will need to make sure there is agreement and decisions can be made to keep the project moving.

Daily ad hoc email, phone calls: Questions and requests will pop up, and you’ll need timely responses.

Operations: You might need invoices to be reviewed and approved or change requests to be reviewed and discussed. The stakeholders will need to make time to operate the project from their side of things.

This is a lot of work. And just like PM work, it is very hard to quantify or plan. If you’re in good hands, you’re working with someone who has good PM skills. If not, give them the list above along with a copy of this book. But seriously, if you can assist them with planning their time, it might be as simple as including action items or to-dos for them in a weekly email or in your status report. Just remember, they are busy and want the project to run smoothly as well. Help them make that happen.

TL; DR

Managing projects is hard enough, but being the person to manage who works on what and when can be even more difficult. However, if you don’t keep track of this basic information, you’ll likely find it hard to meet deadlines and wrap up projects without major issues. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your that your team stays busy, yet not completely overbooked:

Set up a simple spreadsheet to forecast projects and hours per team member.

This data should be based on what’s included in your project scopes and timelines—be sure to double-check that.

You may want to check out one of the resourcing tools that are out there now.

Be sure to account for a number of factors that you can’t necessarily control in this process—for example, interests, skill sets, moving schedules, holidays, vacations, and so on.

Account for your sales process if you’re in an agency and stay ahead of new project requests.

Remember that you’re dealing with people here.

Want to read more?

This excerpt from Project Management for Humans will help you get started. Order the full copy today, as well as other excellent titles from Rosenfeld Media.

http://ift.tt/2h6VulK

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How to avoid drowning in digital marketing advice in 2017

Use these 3 tools and 4 techniques to save time keeping up with digital marketing developments

Five years ago (how time flies) Dave Chaffey wrote about taming the social media fire hose. With so many tweets and Facebook and LinkedIn updates sent every minute hoping to impart advice, even if we narrow that down to Digital marketing advice it is still a never-ending hurricane of content, advice and views. How do you make sense of it all?

In a previous post on the issue staying up-to-date on social media we advised using tools like Hootsuite combined with Twitter lists, which bring channels together and allow for easier social media listening. This is all well and good for social, but what about the general vast amount of digital marketing advice posted every day? How do we digest it and take actionable steps from it? That's what we'll look at in this post.

We are always pondering this problem so it was interesting to see this post from one of our LinkedIn group members that confirmed we weren’t alone. Donna asked:

How do you avoid sinking in good content?

I'm drowning in good advice! I'm bringing my digital skills up to speed, and I've attended the Econsultancy course and downloading lots of content. Too much in fact. So how do you sort out the good, the bad & the indifferent. Any tips to help this newbie from sinking.

This challenge of too much advice is perhaps biggest in digital marketing... You could spend all day, every day reading blogs on how to improve your SEO, how to improve your productivity, how to get more leads via Social Media, and end up with no time left in the day to actually put anything that you have read into practice!

So as digital marketers, we need a way to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff, so we can get all the key info without drowning in a sea of content designed to help us, but actually doing anything but. There are a number of ways we can do this, and I’ve divided our ideas into strategies and tools. Thanks to everyone who commented on our LinkedIn discussion for their ideas, here's our summary of techniques to share your insights further - thank you!

Three techniques to avoid drowning in content

Technique 1. Find reliable providers

You should 'Sniff out' reliable providers and use these for updates on Digital Marketing rather than random Googling or glancing at social media and going with whatever comes up first or grabs your attention. This is a basic but effective tactic, and actually one of the best ways of cutting through the unnecessary content and getting straight to the gems of useful advice. We’d like to think Smart Insights is certainly one of these reliable providers and several were kind enough to say so in the discussion, but there are others that specialise in certain areas. Search Engine Land is great for news on Google’s algorithm changes, whilst Yoast is brilliant for succinct and actionable SEO news and advice. Build up a list of a couple of sites you really rate for providing advice in each of they key areas of digital marketing: Social Media, Email Marketing, SEO, Content Marketing etc. Then always turn to them to keep up with the latest news, rather than looking whatever comes up on your Twitter feed or Google search results.

Technique 2. Build a folder structure to keep tabs on your advice

Rather than just downloading a white paper here, a research report there, and a compilation of stats that looked interesting and then forgetting about them, a good strategy is to put together a file structure to make sense of all the advice you download. Saving web pages as PDF can put these alongside research reports.

This may sound like common sense, but it is often overlooked. We assume after skim reading a white paper that we’ve learnt all we need and thus there is no need to save it somewhere to come back to later. We all do this, but by doing it we are massively overestimating our cognitive abilities. After reading something in a rush we are unlikely to have taken it all in, and when a week later it comes to actually putting the advice into practice we won’t be able to remember it all. Build yourself a simple file structure where you divide into the key areas of digital marketing or RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage). That way you’ll be able to save advise you really rate and return to it when you need to be able to put it into practice.

Technique 3. Sign up to quality newsletters

Rather than searching for digital marketing news, you can have the news come directly into your inbox on a weekly or daily basis (depending on the newsletter). I would suggest weekly newsletters are usually higher quality as the editors can offer the pick of the week rather than just sending out everything they have so they can fill a daily newsletter. Somewhat obviously, we think the Smart Insights weekly newsletter is a great one to sign up to - it's free as part of Basic membership. Luckily though it’s not just us, we got plenty of people telling us they rate it too.

So, pick a few sites you think are at the top of their game for marketing news and advice and sign up for their newsletters. If you ever find yourself not using the content that is emailed to you, just un-subscribe. We use Jeff Ente's weekly Whosbloggingwhat.com to check we're covering all the latest news - it's a great place to start when it comes to using newsletters to keep up to date and will give you ideas of others to follow..

Tools for finding and managing your insight

1. Feedly 

For us, Feedly is the best alternative if you don't use Twitter lists to keep up-to-date with different publishers. Feedly is an RSS feed reader that shows you the popularity of blog articles in the categories that you select as being relevant to you (say Marketing, Tech, Social Media). It’s a great way to stay on top of marketing news by seeing what’s hot that day. Just subscribe to the sites that are most relevant for you and then look at them once or twice a day or week. We use Feedly since the categorisation is easy to use and you can see the most relevant articles based on number of views from other Feedly readers.

2. Evernote 

Evernote is possibly the best tool for managing resources once you have found articles of interest you want to return to. It’s a great place for keeping track of what you have read and ideas you may have off the back of it. Note down highlights of interesting articles and points you think you could action off the back of it. It's free unless you have a very high volume of use and it syncs your content nicely across devices.

3. Instapaper 

When you find a piece of content you don’t have time to read right now, the instapaper app can save it to your Smartphone for reading later offline. The simple text format means ads and pop-ups are removed and you just get the content you need. It is a great app for using down time. When you’re on the train and your signal keeps dropping in and out with every tunnel, you can be reading articles you’ve saved for reading offline. Better still, the paid version can create playlists of articles, which it will read to you. So when you’re on the bus home or out for a walk, you can be swatting up on the latest marketing news!

4. What’s hot in Digital 

This is a feature available in our members area for Expert members of Smart Insights. It gives our readers the latest 'must-read' developments from the month-to-date.

These include the latest major platform changes to the key Digital Marketing channels; Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. That way you’ll never miss out on any key news, but you won't have to spend hours keeping up to date.

Our inspiration for creating 'What's Hot' was interviews with our Expert members who explained how they have weekly or monthly meetings with their team or agency to review the most relevant changes to act on each month, so we developed it to support this process - that's another technique in fact!

We hope the techniques and tools here help inspire new approaches to stop you drowning in content! If you have any clever strategies or know any nifty tools to save time keeping up with marketing news then please let us know.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/how-to-stop-drowning-in-digital-marketing-advice/