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empmoniitor · 3 years

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INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY| 07 TOP TIPS TO SPEND YOUR IDLE TIME DOING SOMETHING EXPEDIENT.

Sometimes after working hours, we do not feel satisfied and complete in our work. We feel like we need more time to complete, says our inner us. But what is the reason behind this shortage of time? Are we not productive enough?

No, it’s not about the productive hours. It’s about the idle time which we spend during the working hours. It’s not like we have to work like a machine without any break. But the time which we spend as idle time or break time can be utilized differently, trying to add that time in your product funnel.

Time is precious for all of us. Despite wasting it, always try to spend time with some productive activities while working during our paid hours.

So, let us take an oath to spend our idle time doing something productive. It will not only increase our productivity but also get our minds relaxed.

Let us read out together how to deal with idle time at work without being unproductive. We will also walk through some monitoring software tools to help employers identify idle employees and make them productive by the following points below. But at the beginning, let me define idle time.

WHAT IS IDLE TIME AT WORK?

Idle time is the time spent by the employees by doing nothing such as waiting for the clients or customers.

As an employee, How do you spend your break or idle time at work? By sitting idle with a cup of coffee and thinking about the time to return home? But is this going to help you increase your productive hours? Will this idle time compel your employers to give you an appreciation for your hard work? Obviously no.

So, why not spend our break time doing something productive. Let us remain active during working hours.

TIPS TO GET YOUR IDLE TIME SPEND WISELY, INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY:

1. GRAB EDUCATIONAL KNOWLEDGE:

If you do not have any work, stop wasting time by just sitting idle or hanging up with your colleagues.

You can listen to some motivational podcasts or news headlines that will cheer you up with motivation. You can also go for a new language that will help you improve your skills.

2. SCHEDULE YOUR UPCOMING WORK:

At the beginning of the day, I have a lot of things that stir inside my mind. Sometimes, I even forget to cover up a few things that need to get done for the day. So, I have maintained To-Do Lists where I note down all the work to be done for the day.

It makes me more productive and helps me complete my work in the given time. There remains no confusion about which is complete and what gets to be.

One moment…

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3. COMPLETE THOSE TINY TASKS:

There must be some work that might not be necessary, but create a bleep in your head if kept unfinished. Idle time is the best time to complete those tasks and remove them from your lists to have a few words to get focus on.

So, it is essential to make a list of pending work and current work to complete before the given time. So, creating a list is the first work. Do it every day!

4. MAKE YOUR MINDLESS STRESSFUL:

Work is necessary, but not more than your health. If you have meetings to attend, then make out some time and do nothing but relax your mind. It is necessary to keep your mindless stress to be more active and productive during working hours. So, sometimes being idle is not so harmful.

5. SHORT WORKOUT:

When you get scheduled with a lot of work, it is necessary to use idle time with some light workouts to keep you fresh and active throughout the day. Doing some idle time workout is more effective than spending idle time.

6. REVIEW GOALS:

Many people make a note of monthly goals to cover. I am one of them. It is beneficial for all the employees to make a complete note of the goals they want to achieve within a week or month. Whenever you are free and have idle time, you can see your work note and make changes to whatever you have achieved and the pending tasks.

Doing this daily will make you more confident about your work and give you more energy to be more productive. Also, you can control your mind from distractions.

7. A SHORT NAP IS ALSO ACCEPTABLE!

If you are doing all your work in a specialized manner and without any stress, then you can take a short nap to make you stress-free. So, take a short nap for yourself and re-energize yourself to increase the level of concentration.

These 07 best tips will be helpful for the employees who spend a lot of time sitting idle. If you are an employer, it is your responsibility to identify the idle employees of the company and make them more productive by following the above tips.

But here, you must have a doubt. How to identify idle employees? Will you go to every employee and see what they are doing? No, even if you think of doing it, it is impossible to watch all your employees. Here I have a solution for it. Any guess? Yes, it is the employee monitoring software.

Before you turn to use one, let me tell you about employee monitoring software? And how to choose the best one for your organization.

From the name itself, it defines its work. Employee monitoring software gets utilized to track all the activities of the employees during their working hours. It will monitor the idle time of the employees and increase the productivity of the employees that is the priority. Not every monitoring software has a complete package of beneficial features.

But if you ask me, there is one software tool that will create a magical environment in your office premises. Also, it is the solution for tracking the work of your remote employees. Without any suspense, let us move towards the software tool.

NO MORE IDLE TIME INVESTMENT BY YOUR EMPLOYEES| USE EMPMONITOR:

Empmonitor is one of the best employee monitoring tracking tools, that when installed in your systems, start to track all the activities of your employees with their device. It is a software tool with advantageous features that will never give you a chance for regret.

FEATURES OF EMPMONITOR:

1. PRODUCTIVITY REPORTS:

Want to know what your employees are doing during their working hours? EmpMonitor provides Detailed reports on the working of the employees during their productive hours.

2. HOW TO CALCULATE THE IDLE TIME OF EMPLOYEES WITH EMPMONITOR:

Idle time= available production time-actual production time.

When employees do not work or stop typing on their keyboard, EmpMonitor tracks the idle time spent by the employees, where it becomes easy for the employers to track the idle time.

3. REAL-TIME SCREENSHOTS:

When you suspect any of your employees, capture the screenshots of their screen every 15 seconds. EmpMonitor automatically captures screenshots at regular intervals set according to the owner’s choice.

4. PRODUCTIVITY ANALYSIS & MEASUREMENT:

Want to know how productive your employees are? It is easy with EmpMonitor. It measures the productivity of the employees, individuals with a detailed report.

5. WEB & APP USAGE REPORTS:

Employees cannot misuse the internet access and download apps that can cause damage to the existing files on the systems. EmpMonitor tracks the browsing history and applications used by the employees during their paid hours.

6. DETAILED TIMESHEET:

What was the time taken by the employees to complete a single task? With EmpMonitor, you can track the time spent by the employees on a particular project. Isn’t this interesting? There are more features.

7. CURRENTLY ACTIVE USERS:

Want to know which of your employees are working currently? EmpMonitor gives you reports about the employees who are working currently.

8. DASHBOARD:

An intuitive dashboard of EmpMonitor will help you monitor and manage your employees from a centralized location.

9. DEPARTMENT WISE REPORT:

To avoid confusion, EmpMonitor provides you detailed reports of your employees and their work according to their department.

10. REPORT ON DOWNLOADS:

Employees use the internet and download things during their work. You can get a detailed report on those downloads so that you can avoid malicious downloads intentionally or unintentionally done by your employees.

11. EMPLOYEE DETAILS:

You can also get employee details and their working locations through EmpMonitor.

12. EMPLOYEE WORK DETAILS WITH THE SCREENSHOT:

How your employees are working and on which tasks your employees are currently working, these all information you can get from EmpMonitor.

CLICK TO DIG MORE!

Remote Staff Management| challenges, solutions and software Why Your Business Needs To Consider Flexible Work Schedule Post Pandemic?

WRAPPING WORDS:

There is a saying that idle time is the devil’s play. So, why waste time sitting idle and having thoughts that might take you to a different circle- especially while you are in your working hours. Sitting idle may make you slow in your work ultimately, making you less productive.

So, make use of idle time by doing something productive. You can test the above points one by one and identify the positive results. And after that, you can schedule your work according to the above points written and remain more active during your productive hours.

I hope you like this article. If you have any queries or want to add any of your favorite points which I might have left, frame your voice in words and reach me through this comment box below. I would love to hear from you!

Originally Published On: EmpMonitor

#Employee Monitoring #Employee Management #Employee Monitoring Software #Employee Prdoductivity #Idle Time

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pet-diary · 6 years

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⟰Here are my 2018 New Year Resolutions!!!⟰

This year I am hoping to be really focused on building better habits in the things I want in my life. For instance, I really want to be better at drawing. I know that I have to practice DAILY if I ever want to be a ~person that draws~. I used to be a ~person that draws~, but over the past 10 years, I’ve really just let that habit fall to the wayside for other habits and hobbies, which makes me so sad! I used to love drawing! And this is something I really want to be a part of my life, a part of who I am as a person... So I decided to set some realistic goals to motivate myself into learning new styles and mediums that I would love to know how to do, while maintaining the habit of drawing daily. You can see how I did it below. Same for all my other resolutions and goals, I tried to set up plans to make them work. :) Some of my resolutions are just general and I didn’t come up with a plan for them. I just need to remember to check-in with myself every so often and remind myself to do them.

PLAN FOR ACHIEVING RESOLUTION GOALS

The template (in case you want to do it this way too):

[Name of resolution - Quick tag line so you can see it at a glance] ✨ Goal: What is the main goal here? How would it define you as a person? 🎯 Target: Specifically, what will it look like to have ultimately achieved this goal? 🏹 Aim: What steps can you take to achieve it?

ACADEMIC & CAREER // [Continue learning Japanese, gain basic everyday life language skills] ✨ Goal: Learn enough Japanese to be capable of basic conversation and writing. 🎯 Target: Study Genki textbooks + online apps or sites every week. Practice vocab in daily life. Teach Trev basics to make it more fun. Learn vocab for everyday life items and situations. 🏹 Aim: Read and practice Genki textbooks or Textfugu at least 1 session weekly, practice vocab app or other forms of study at least 30 mins daily.

CREATIVE // [Draw regularly again + Focus on practicing a monthly artist style/medium] ✨ Goal: Be a regular drawer, learn how to use different art mediums, practice favorite artist's styles. 🎯 Target: Dedicate every month to practicing a new style in art, choosing one medium and one favorite artist to focus on. Drawing something daily. 🏹 Aim: Draw at least once per day, doesn't matter how much, but ideally aim for an hour daily. Practice monthly art style for inspiration. Choose at end of month specifically who/what to focus on, print off inspiration to hang around room and be inspired by. Try to learn something about the artist along the way, immerse in artist's life/process while learning the style.

Some possible artists to study (off the top of my head):

1. Risa Mehmet 2. Faetus 3. Hospicemilk / fever-breath 4. Song__Caramel / Caramelsong0915 5. Henry Darger 6. Winsor McCay 7. Yumiko Ōshima (The Star of Cottonland) 8. Minipete 9. Guppy 10. Nao Emoto (Forget Me Not) 11. Gosho Aoyama (Case Closed) 12. CLAMP (Sakura) 13. Henriette Willebeek le Mair 14. Yuko Uramoto (The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up) 15. Tyrus Wong 16. Louis Wain 17. Eon (Super Secret)

Some mediums to study (off the top of my head):

1. Watercolor 2. Pastels 3. Ink 4. Markers 5. Crayon 6. Charcoal 7. Graphite 8. Collage 9. Paint of some kind (gouache?) 10. Clip Studio Paint 11. Color pencils

[Share photography regularly + Focus heavily on shooting/sharing film] ✨ Goal: Become listed as featured artist on Grace and Girlhood (i.e. post enough film photos to be considered film photographer). 🎯 Target: Edit and share photography every month, focus heavily on film. Post to IG, submit photos to G&G. Keep up with scanning negatives so that it's easy to post film regularly. Learn to use to continue practicing w/ diff film and cameras. 🏹 Aim: Post at least 5x monthly. Work on photography scanning/editing for at least 1 hour weekly.

LIFE // [Immerse myself in lifestyle (grad school, art, Seattle, etc), blog/vlog whole process (good & bad)] ✨ Goal: What is the main goal here? How would it define you as a person? 🎯 Target: Specifically, what will it look like to have ultimately achieved this goal? 🏹 Aim: What steps can you take to achieve it?

[Become an early riser + Go on daily walks] ✨ Goal: Wake up earlier every day, taking advantage of daylight. Have more time to spend with Trev. Become someone who goes for morning walks/runs (be that person who finds a body on an early morning jog!). 🎯 Target: Wake up early, go to bed early, make it a regular habit to become an early riser and get the most out of the daylight. Go on morning walks regularly.🏹 Aim: Go to bed around 9:30-11pm, wake up at 5:30-7am, make a coffee/tea to go, go for a walk/run, make breakfast when I get home. Wake up as early as possible!

[Cook more + Learn more Japanese & vegan recipes + Prepare bento regularly] ✨ Goal: Cook dinner more, and make bento for work/school the next day. Make rice-based recipes more often, eat healthier meals, snack healthier. 🎯 Target: Make enough rice to justify buying a new rice cooker (reward!). Go through recipe books and try more Japanese recipes. Eat healthier, make more vegan-based meals. Make bento for me and Trev with cute bento accessories, for work/school/picnic. 🏹 Aim: Make a rice-based recipe at least once a week. Plan and make meals from books and saved recipes from Pinterest (focus on vegan and Japanese recipes) every week. Make lunch for Trev and I the night before using bento accessories and online inspiration.

[Watch more anime + Read more manga] ✨ Goal: Become someone that watches anime/reads manga and web comics on a regular basis. Become more familiar with existing shows/comics. Pick up art inspiration for web comic and art styles. 🎯 Target: Watch anime regularly, read web comics everyday instead of wasting time on other stuff. Get inspiration for my web comic. Practice techniques from shows and other comics/manga. 🏹 Aim: Watch anime at least 1x weekly, instead of other things I watch. Start a series w/ Trev and add it to show rotation. Read web comics/manga at least 1x daily, check update feed for series I follow on Webtoon and other apps. Check feeds like My Anime List, Anime News Network and Honey's Anime for inspiration.

(Cutting the rest of this entry because it’s already written in the image, but wanted to include it for readability and searchabilty).

ACADEMIC & CAREER // * Continue learning Japanese, gain basic everyday life language skills * Apply for grad school * Learn how to talk about what you know, about yourself, & to talk in general * Continue fleshing out career goals

CREATIVE // * Draw regularly again + Focus on practicing a monthly artist style/medium * Share photography regularly + Focus heavily on shooting/sharing film * Start the ephemera shop! * Start working on graphic novel!! Don’t let the idea die unrealized

LIFE // * Immerse myself in lifestyle (grad school, art, Seattle, etc), blog/vlog whole process (good & bad) * Become an early riser + Go on daily walks * Be openly autistic – fuck worrying about what ppl will think anymore * Make new friends, make an effort to meet ppl, esp in grad school * Set down roots, even if you have to uproot them eventually * Continue taking the bus, be more self-sufficient, grocery shop, run errands alone * Cook more + Learn more Japanese & vegan recipes + Prepare bento regularly * Watch more anime + Read more manga * Read (for fun) at least 1 page a day * Start watching movies again, the feels can be good in the long run * Listen to music more often, get into new stuff

PHYSICAL & MENTAL HEALTH // * Maintain weight, don't go over/under healthy ideal weight * Look cute more often, even just around the house * Stretch every day, regardless of exercise * Go on weekly walks, at least 3x weekly, esp morning walks * Exercise alone or w/ Trev at least 1x weekly, aim for 2x weekly * Push yourself to do things that scare you! Esp if it’s irrational fear * Look into getting on medication to deal w/ anxiety * Maintain positive mindset, esp upon waking up & greeting Trev at end of day * Be nicer, control anger better, be more empathetic & friendly

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davidrmcqueen1985-blog · 5 years

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Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals

Happy 2019 everyone!

With my 2018 finishing with 3.8 4.0 out of 5.0 stars, I've thought long and hard about how I can make 2019 better. I've found a solution.

My 2019 theme is: live the good life. If you live the good life, how can life not be better?

Some people like to tighten their belts during economic uncertainty. I used to be one of those people in 2008-2009. But after a raging bull market since 2009, I feel it's OK for my family to start spending more on life instead of letting our investments piss away our wealth.

Besides, if panic increases, there will be lots of things going on sale. Let's first discuss my outlook for 2019 and then I'll go over my goals.

Financial Samurai 2019 Outlook

Things are uncertain, to say the least. From policy errors by the Federal Reserve to trade wars by Trump to a drastic slowdown in corporate earnings growth (20%+ down to ~7%), we are facing many headwinds in 2019.

Despite the 4Q2018 sell-off in the stock market, JP still wants to raise rates another two times in 2019 to keep inflation at 2%. There's an old saying on Wall Street: don't fight the Fed. You will get run over.

If the housing market is weakening, the stock market is correcting, and if the labor market softens given companies are now 20% less valuable on average, it's baffling why the Fed thinks inflation will accelerate in 2019.

The good news is that 4Q2018 has baked in a lot of the negatives. Valuations are now at around historical averages and expectations have been reset. And unless JP is a complete idiot for going to Princeton and Georgetown, he will probably adjust his interest rate stance if we enter full bear market territory. And let's put things in perspective, a -6.4% year for the S&P 500 is not that bad.

The question everybody needs to ask themselves is whether the equity risk premium is worth taking. If you can get a 2.45% risk-free rate of return or pay down more expensive debt (mortgage, student loans, credit cards), is it worth taking risk in equities to maybe make a potentially greater return?

My answer is no. Give me a 2.45% – 5% guaranteed return any day while the world recalibrates. The stress of trying to make perhaps a 10% return in the stock market is simply not worth the premium since there's probably an equal chance stocks will go down. The peace of mind of a risk-free return should not be under-appreciated, especially if you have more certain ways to make money.

Of course, there are no guarantees. Therefore, my plan is to keep my existing public investments just the way they are (45%/55% stocks/bonds) and use my monthly cash flow to pay down debt and invest in a 70%/30% ratio. At the very minimum, my Solo 401(k), SEP IRA, and son's 529 plan will all be maxed out. If the S&P 500 gets back to 2,800+, I will be aggressively selling down more stocks.

I'm in the “low interest rates for life” camp. Once again, I don't see the 10-year bond yield finishing over 3% in 2019. This is a risky call since the 10-year bond yield is not far away at 2.75%, and reached as high as 3.2% in 2018. But this call simply means the yield curve will continue to flatten as the Fed stubbornly continues to raise rates, leading to a recession by 2020.

Given it takes 2-5 years for real estate cycles to play out, I see further weakness all year in expensive coastal city real estate markets like San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, LA, San Diego, Boston, New York, and Washington DC. Cities with unlimited land for expansion like Las Vegas, Dallas, and Denver are likely going to continue weakening as inventory surges higher. The heartland of America will not be immune to a real estate slowdown unfortunately.

The positive in real estate is that mortgage rates will continue to stay low. With rising inventory and low interest rates, affordability will increase and bring in new buyers. There might even be a refinancing boom again. I don't see a real estate crash like the stock market crash of 4Q2018. Instead, we'll see a soft landing as prices slowly decline by another 5% – 10%.

Finally, I predict more people than ever will generate new income sources beyond their day job. Whether it is starting a website or investing in assets that are countercyclical to the stock market, people will no longer take their job security for granted.

Only the misinformed believe a large correction in stocks has no bearing on future corporate employment decisions. You must always be forward-thinking when it comes to investing.

Buckle down folks! If you do not get your finances right in 2019, you might end up losing years worth of time and effort. 2019 is not the time to be a hero. Instead, 2019 is the year to bullet proof your finances by earning more based on what you can control.

A possible scenario to be aware of by 2020 according to Nomura

Financial Samurai 2019 Goals

1) No gray hairs, no chronic pain. I've learned over the years that our body reveals our true stress level no matter what we do or what we say. My goal is to keep things like sciatica, lower back pain, TMJ, grey hairs, wrinkles, hair loss, migraines, and excessive weight gain at bay in order to live longer and feel healthier. Stress is the silent killer of our generation.

Specific activities for the year include: exercising and stretching 3X a week, taking walks with my son 5X a week, incorporating 15 minutes of meditation 3X a week, and eliminating sugary drinks. I will continue to maintain a body weight of between 165 – 170 lbs at 5′ 10″.

2) Remain unemployed until September. My son turns two in April, and I plan to remain a stay at home dad at least until then. Although, I've given myself a green light to find full-time work after two years, my ultimate goal is to remain a stay at home dad until he is eligible for preschool in September if he is mature enough to attend. If he is not, then my goal is to remain a SAHD until September 2020 for 3 years, 9 months total.

In order to stay unemployed, I need to make sure my risk exposure is appropriate so I don't stress out about losing too much money, get out of the house at least two hours a day for some me time, and attend more social functions. Activities include tennis, softball, startup gatherings, Napa/Lake Tahoe getaways, and our first family trip to Hawaii. Of course, if the bull market continues, then staying unemployed will be relatively easy.

3) Hire help for the business. After almost 10 years of running Financial Samurai with only my wife, it's time to get some help with writing. I'll be slowly looking for someone who is WordPress savvy, trustworthy, intelligent, reliable, dedicated, believes in my five core principles, enjoys writing and wants to earn some steady side hustle income. The fit has to be fantastic, otherwise, I'll just continue to operate the site as usual.

I realize many sites my size or smaller have 1-4 people, on average, working to write content and handle some of the business elements. Now that I've discovered how great it is to hire help around the house, it's only logical to hire help for our business.

4) Focus on profits. Since I'm going to hire help for the business, I want to get a return on my investment. To not get an ROI on my capital expenditure would make me a foolish businessman.

I or my new hire will write more review posts, develop more affiliate partnerships, build my blog marketing business, update my severance negotiation book, and maybe create a new Financial Samurai product. I'll still publish my usual style posts 2-3X a week. There will just be more content all around as there is no limit to how many posts and pages a website can publish.

It's going to feel great to finally start seriously focusing on monetizing Financial Samurai after 10 years. I already get the occasional flak from readers who criticize my work and don't pay me a cent. So I now plan to unabashedly take full advantage of my platform to take care of my family, especially if the economy softens.

5) Grow the Financial Samurai Forum. For four years, I was a forum junkie in college. It was one of the best ways I learned about investing and finance. But in order for a forum to grow, it needs to be nurtured. Therefore, I plan to continue posting and corresponding at least 5X a week on the forum to build the FS community.

I have a 5-year plan to grow the Financial Samurai Forum into one of the best financial forums on the web. Specifically, I want to double its traffic in 2019. The forum is geared towards people who fundamentally believe that making more money is a better way to grow wealth than mainly through saving. I want to build a community that is open-minded and always curious about new ways to get better. I'm aiming for thought diversity not groupthink.

6) Help my boy reach the following milestones by year-end. Being a full-time parent is an incredibly rewarding job because you get to teach and witness progress on a daily basis. I've discovered that through Financial Samurai, foster youth mentoring, and coaching high school tennis that I enjoy being an educator. Below are some specific goals we are looking to help him develop by 2 years 9 months.

Play and Social Skills

Sit comfortably in circle time for more than 10 minutes

Enjoy playing with the piano, guitar, and drums

Play with toys without mouthing them

Screw and unscrew jar lids and turn door handles

Build towers of more than 6 blocks

Copy a circle with pencil or crayon

Show affection for friends without prompting

Be away from parents with supportive and familiar people for 4 hours or more to prepare for pre-school

Coordination

Walk down stairs unassisted

Maintain balance while catching a ball or when gently bumped by peers

Throw and attempt to catch ball without losing balance

Walk and maintain balance over uneven surfaces

Use both hands equally to play and explore toys

Learn to pedal a tricycle

Daily Activities

Able to self-calm in car rides when not tired or hungry

Tolerate diaper changes without crying or whining

Has an established sleep schedule of 10 hours or more a night and 1-2 hours of nap time after lunch at least 5X a week

Able to self-calm to fall asleep

Able to tolerate and stay calm during dental visits

Able to brush his teeth without whining or crying 3X a day

Is potty trained before preschool starts in September

Dresses and undresses self by figuring out buttons, zippers, and straps

Communication

Is able to consistently use 3-4 word phrases e.g. “I am hungry,” “The garage door is white,” “Walk with daddy,” “Financial Samurai is the best!”

Uses “in” and “on”

At least 75% of speech is understood by any caregiver

Follows 2-step unrelated directions, e.g. “give me the ball and go get your coat”

Understands “mine” and “yours”

Says words like “I,” “me,” “we,” and “you” and some plurals (cars, dogs, cats)

Understands half of what we communicate to him in English, in Mandarin

The next 12 months is going to be a huge challenge due to his growing temper tantrums. Another challenge is staying healthy since we're all getting sick more often now as he's exposed to other kids. Luckily, my wife and I haven't been sick at the same time yet. We'll finally introduce some screen time to him after his second birthday, which should help keep him occupied during trips.

7) Spend $1,500 more a month on life. We have frugality disease. We are spending less today than we were in our late 20s, despite having a much higher income and net worth. Our estate planning lawyer sessions really made us realize we will likely die with too much.

I've been slowly spending more money on things that may improve our lives. For example, the $4,000 large jet tub I bought in 2014 has come in handy for family bath time now. The $15,000 I spent on the outdoor hot tub in 1H2017 was one of the best purchases ever. Further, I have no regrets paying $58,000 cash for a used family car in December 2016 either. Baby steps on the road to lifestyle inflation!

We will allocate the extra $1,500 in spending towards more babysitting help, more massages, bi-monthly house cleaning, and quarterly gardening. We will purchase at least economy plus tickets for all our parents to come visit. Further, if we take our first flight as a family, we will purchase economy plus tickets as well.

We are also going to regularly give to two charities all year. One will be to a center for foster kids and abused youth. Another will be for children with visual impairments. I also like supporting public park tennis initiatives.

Related: Practice Taking Profits To Pay For A Better Life

8) Pay off $200,000 of mortgage debt. Paying off my SF rental condo in 2015 felt wonderful. I don't care whether it goes up or down in value because I truly plan to own it forever. Selling my SF rental house and paying off a $815,000 mortgage in the process also felt terrific. No matter how much more I could have made investing in risk assets, I've never regretted paying off debt.

Our ultimate goal is to be debt free by 2022, when our boy is ready for kindergarten. Paying down $200,000 a year in extra mortgage debt will accomplish this goal. In a bear market, it feels great to earn a guaranteed return. But it's also important to have lots of liquidity to take advantage of opportunities as well.

9) Aggressively search for a larger house. I dodged a canon in 2018 by not buying a larger house for more money. I wrote two offers for San Francisco homes that both got rejected. I was seriously going to try and buy this one expensive SF house in a great neighborhood, but by the time I was going to put in an offer, they had accepted another offer on November 1 for asking. If I had bought the house I'd be feeling nervous today since the stock market corrected by 20% soon after. It's not unreasonable to assume to house is now worth $200,000 (4.5%) less today.

Meanwhile, the seller of the house in Honolulu I've been eyeing since 2016 gave up trying to find a buyer in 4Q2018 and rented out the house from Oct – January to short-term tenants. The original asking price was $4.7M in 2016. Today, I think there's a good chance they will accept $3.5M – $3.7M because they finally dropped the ask down to $3.98M.

I want a bigger house in SF so my parents, in-laws and sister can come visit for a longer period of time. One more bathroom and 500 sqft more of space would be ideal. However, if I move to Honolulu, I won't need a bigger house since my parents have their own house.

I anticipate there will be many more deals in 2019 given inventory will likely be up 50% – 150% in San Francisco and Honolulu. I suspect the IPOs of Uber, Lyft and others will put a -10% floor on SF prices.

10) Be a voice for at least 50% of the population. Due to the high cost of living, there are very few personal finance bloggers who live in an expensive coastal city. This makes rational sense, especially if you are a FIRE blogger. But a full 50% of the national population lives in expensive coastal cities and other big cities around the country that face slightly different challenges. Same for many big city residents around the world e.g. London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Mumbai, etc. Therefore, I have an opportunity to establish Financial Samurai as a go-to resource for big-city audiences.

It's going to be fun tackling topics such as: private grade school tuition, the feasibility of retiring early with a family in a HCOL area, forsaking wealth and prestige, the dangers of creating multi-generational wealth, featuring diverse cultural backgrounds, and more. My goal is to convince big media to provide a more diverse perspective on financial independence since not everybody can or wants to move to a low cost area of the country.

11) Be more forgiving of myself. No matter what project I undertake, I always run through the finish line. Financial Samurai's finish line is July 1, 2019 after I made a promise in 2009 to publish 3X a week for 10 years. After that, who knows the future.

The funny thing about this finish line is that it is completely arbitrary. There is absolutely no need to put pressure on myself to produce so much content, especially if I'm having a rough week or sick. Financial Samurai surpassed my expectations long ago. Therefore, I'm going to give myself four weeks where I'll just publish one post plus I'll take it easy the entire month of June, when traffic is slowest.

By giving myself a break, I hope to sleep in more regularly until 6am. For the majority of 2018, I was naturally waking up by 5am after going to bed around 11pm. But during 4Q2018 and after daylight savings, I started naturally waking up as early as 3:30am to get my writing done before my wife and son woke. This crazy early time must have been due to increased anxiety from the stock market collapse.

With more sleep and less stress, I hope to improve my overall mental health and happiness. My desire to constantly grind stems from mistakes made in high school, plenty more rejections as an adult, and an indoctrination since I was a kid that I need to try harder as a minority to get ahead in America. I know I have a really good thing going now, so I don't want to take my good fortune for granted.

12) Celebrate big and small wins. To make the hustle more worthwhile, we will celebrate all our achievements as parents, writers, and entrepreneurs. A celebration can be as small as opening a nice bottle of wine. These celebrations will also help us fulfill our goal of spending more.

Every evening I will highlight something specific I appreciate about my wife so she always feels recognized and loved. She is an incredible full-time mom who also launched the FS Forum, finalized our revocable living trust, registered How To Engineer Your Layoff and Cutie Baby with the Library Of Congress, and is responsible for all ongoing business accounting. It's clear I haven't done a good enough job appreciating her efforts over the years, which is why I'm committed to do more for her in 2019 and beyond.

Steady As She Goes

If we can grow our net worth by just 5%, I'll be happy. I'm willing to forego upside investment potential to help ensure our net worth goes up in 2019. Despite our public investments accounting for only about 30% of our net worth, it gave me the most stress in 2018. This will change.

I still have hope the Fed will slow down its rate hikes. If they do, I'm confident the economy will chug along at 2% – 2.5% GDP growth and not enter into a recession. However, there are no exciting positive catalysts on the horizon except for a trade agreement with China by end of 1Q. 2019 will likely be another volatile year.

The last two years working on FS and being a SAHD has worn me out. Given we save most of our after-tax business income by living off our passive income, I'm excited to live it up more in 2019 and use my “vacation credits” to take it easier.

If you have any tips on how to smartly inflate your lifestyle without feeling guilty, I'd love to hear them. I also want to learn how to inhale the roses more often without feeling the need to always be productive.

What are some of your goals for 2019? How do you see the stock market and economy unfolding?

The post Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals appeared first on Financial Samurai.

0 notes

kerrychelly-blog · 5 years

Text

Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals

Happy 2019 everyone!

With my 2018 finishing with 3.8 4.0 out of 5.0 stars, I've thought long and hard about how I can make 2019 better. I've found a solution.

My 2019 theme is: live the good life. If you live the good life, how can life not be better?

Besides, if panic increases, there will be lots of things going on sale. Let's first discuss my outlook for 2019 and then I'll go over my goals.

Financial Samurai 2019 Outlook

Only the misinformed believe a large correction in stocks has no bearing on future corporate employment decisions. You must always be forward-thinking when it comes to investing.

A possible scenario to be aware of by 2020 according to Nomura

Financial Samurai 2019 Goals

4) Focus on profits. Since I'm going to hire help for the business, I want to get a return on my investment. To not get an ROI on my capital expenditure would make me a foolish businessman.

Play and Social Skills

Sit comfortably in circle time for more than 10 minutes

Enjoy playing with the piano, guitar, and drums

Play with toys without mouthing them

Screw and unscrew jar lids and turn door handles

Build towers of more than 6 blocks

Copy a circle with pencil or crayon

Show affection for friends without prompting

Be away from parents with supportive and familiar people for 4 hours or more to prepare for pre-school

Coordination

Walk down stairs unassisted

Maintain balance while catching a ball or when gently bumped by peers

Throw and attempt to catch ball without losing balance

Walk and maintain balance over uneven surfaces

Use both hands equally to play and explore toys

Learn to pedal a tricycle

Daily Activities

Able to self-calm in car rides when not tired or hungry

Tolerate diaper changes without crying or whining

Has an established sleep schedule of 10 hours or more a night and 1-2 hours of nap time after lunch at least 5X a week

Able to self-calm to fall asleep

Able to tolerate and stay calm during dental visits

Able to brush his teeth without whining or crying 3X a day

Is potty trained before preschool starts in September

Dresses and undresses self by figuring out buttons, zippers, and straps

Communication

Is able to consistently use 3-4 word phrases e.g. “I am hungry,” “The garage door is white,” “Walk with daddy,” “Financial Samurai is the best!”

Uses “in” and “on”

At least 75% of speech is understood by any caregiver

Follows 2-step unrelated directions, e.g. “give me the ball and go get your coat”

Understands “mine” and “yours”

Says words like “I,” “me,” “we,” and “you” and some plurals (cars, dogs, cats)

Understands half of what we communicate to him in English, in Mandarin

Related: Practice Taking Profits To Pay For A Better Life

Steady As She Goes

What are some of your goals for 2019? How do you see the stock market and economy unfolding?

The post Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals appeared first on Financial Samurai.

0 notes

robertheiser-blog · 5 years

Text

Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals

Happy 2019 everyone!

With my 2018 finishing with 3.8 4.0 out of 5.0 stars, I've thought long and hard about how I can make 2019 better. I've found a solution.

My 2019 theme is: live the good life. If you live the good life, how can life not be better?

Besides, if panic increases, there will be lots of things going on sale. Let's first discuss my outlook for 2019 and then I'll go over my goals.

Financial Samurai 2019 Outlook

Only the misinformed believe a large correction in stocks has no bearing on future corporate employment decisions. You must always be forward-thinking when it comes to investing.

A possible scenario to be aware of by 2020 according to Nomura

Financial Samurai 2019 Goals

4) Focus on profits. Since I'm going to hire help for the business, I want to get a return on my investment. To not get an ROI on my capital expenditure would make me a foolish businessman.

Play and Social Skills

Sit comfortably in circle time for more than 10 minutes

Enjoy playing with the piano, guitar, and drums

Play with toys without mouthing them

Screw and unscrew jar lids and turn door handles

Build towers of more than 6 blocks

Copy a circle with pencil or crayon

Show affection for friends without prompting

Be away from parents with supportive and familiar people for 4 hours or more to prepare for pre-school

Coordination

Walk down stairs unassisted

Maintain balance while catching a ball or when gently bumped by peers

Throw and attempt to catch ball without losing balance

Walk and maintain balance over uneven surfaces

Use both hands equally to play and explore toys

Learn to pedal a tricycle

Daily Activities

Able to self-calm in car rides when not tired or hungry

Tolerate diaper changes without crying or whining

Has an established sleep schedule of 10 hours or more a night and 1-2 hours of nap time after lunch at least 5X a week

Able to self-calm to fall asleep

Able to tolerate and stay calm during dental visits

Able to brush his teeth without whining or crying 3X a day

Is potty trained before preschool starts in September

Dresses and undresses self by figuring out buttons, zippers, and straps

Communication

Is able to consistently use 3-4 word phrases e.g. “I am hungry,” “The garage door is white,” “Walk with daddy,” “Financial Samurai is the best!”

Uses “in” and “on”

At least 75% of speech is understood by any caregiver

Follows 2-step unrelated directions, e.g. “give me the ball and go get your coat”

Understands “mine” and “yours”

Says words like “I,” “me,” “we,” and “you” and some plurals (cars, dogs, cats)

Understands half of what we communicate to him in English, in Mandarin

Related: Practice Taking Profits To Pay For A Better Life

Steady As She Goes

What are some of your goals for 2019? How do you see the stock market and economy unfolding?

The post Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals appeared first on Financial Samurai.

0 notes

michaelyzhu1979-blog · 5 years

Text

Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals

Happy 2019 everyone!

With my 2018 finishing with 3.8 4.0 out of 5.0 stars, I've thought long and hard about how I can make 2019 better. I've found a solution.

My 2019 theme is: live the good life. If you live the good life, how can life not be better?

Besides, if panic increases, there will be lots of things going on sale. Let's first discuss my outlook for 2019 and then I'll go over my goals.

Financial Samurai 2019 Outlook

The good news is that 4Q2018 has baked in a lot of the negatives. Valuations are now at around historical averages and expectations have been reset. This doesn't mean we can't go lower. And let's put things in perspective, a -6.4% year for the S&P 500 is not that bad. If it wasn't for the huge post-Christmas rally, performance would have been much worse.

Only the misinformed believe a large correction in stocks has no bearing on future corporate employment decisions. You must always be forward-thinking when it comes to investing.

A possible scenario to be aware of by 2020 according to Nomura

Financial Samurai 2019 Goals

4) Focus on profits. Since I'm going to hire help for the business, I want to get a return on my investment. To not get an ROI on my capital expenditure would make me a foolish businessman.

Play and Social Skills

Sit comfortably in circle time for more than 10 minutes

Enjoy playing with the piano, guitar, and drums

Play with toys without mouthing them

Screw and unscrew jar lids and turn door handles

Build towers of more than 6 blocks

Copy a circle with pencil or crayon

Show affection for friends without prompting

Be away from parents with supportive and familiar people for 4 hours or more to prepare for pre-school

Coordination

Walk down stairs unassisted

Maintain balance while catching a ball or when gently bumped by peers

Throw and attempt to catch ball without losing balance

Walk and maintain balance over uneven surfaces

Use both hands equally to play and explore toys

Learn to pedal a tricycle

Daily Activities

Able to self-calm in car rides when not tired or hungry

Tolerate diaper changes without crying or whining

Has an established sleep schedule of 10 hours or more a night and 1-2 hours of nap time after lunch at least 5X a week

Able to self-calm to fall asleep

Able to tolerate and stay calm during dental visits

Able to brush his teeth without whining or crying 3X a day

Is potty trained before preschool starts in September

Dresses and undresses self by figuring out buttons, zippers, and straps

Communication

Is able to consistently use 3-4 word phrases e.g. “I am hungry,” “The garage door is white,” “Walk with daddy,” “Financial Samurai is the best!”

Uses “in” and “on”

At least 75% of speech is understood by any caregiver

Follows 2-step unrelated directions, e.g. “give me the ball and go get your coat”

Understands “mine” and “yours”

Says words like “I,” “me,” “we,” and “you” and some plurals (cars, dogs, cats)

Understands half of what we communicate to him in English, in Mandarin

Related: Practice Taking Profits To Pay For A Better Life

9) Aggressively search for a larger house. I dodged a bullet in 2018 by not buying a larger house for more money. I wrote two offers for San Francisco homes that both got rejected. I was seriously going to try and buy this one expensive SF house in a great neighborhood, but by the time I was going to put in an offer, they had accepted another offer on November 1 for asking. If I had bought the house I'd be feeling nervous today since the stock market corrected by 20% soon after. It's not unreasonable to assume to house is now worth $200,000 (5%) less today.

10) Be a voice for at least 50% of the population. Due to the high cost of living, there are very few personal finance bloggers who live in an expensive coastal city. This makes rational sense, especially if you are a FIRE blogger. But a full 50% of the national population lives in expensive coastal cities and other big cities around the country and world that face slightly different challenges. Therefore, I have an opportunity to establish Financial Samurai as a go-to resource for big-city audiences.

Steady As She Goes

What are some of your goals for 2019? How do you see the stock market and economy unfolding?

The post Financial Samurai 2019 Economic Outlook And Personal Goals appeared first on Financial Samurai.

0 notes

whitelabelseoreseller · 5 years

Text

Case Study: How a Media Company Grew 400% and Used SEO to Get Acquired

Posted by Gaetano-DiNardi-NYC

Disclaimer: I’m currently the Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva, and writing this case study post-mortem as the former VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker (Jan. 2017 - Sept. 2018).

Every B2B company is investing in content marketing right now. Why? Because they all want the same thing: Search traffic that leads to website conversions, which leads to money.

But here’s the challenge: Companies are struggling to get traction because competition has reached an all-time high. Keyword difficulty (and CPC) has skyrocketed in most verticals. In my current space, Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS), some of the CPCs have nearly doubled since 2017, with many keywords hovering close to $300 per click.

Not to mention, organic CTRs are declining, and zero-click queries are rising.

Bottom line: If you’re not creating 10x quality content based on strategic keyword research that satisfies searcher intent and aligns back to business goals, you’re completely wasting your time.

So, that’s exactly what we did. The outcome? We grew from 19k monthly organic sessions to over 100k monthly organic sessions in approximately 14 months, leading to an acquisition by Outreach.io

We validated our hard work by measuring organic growth (traffic and keywords) against our email list growth and revenue, which correlated positively, as we expected.

Organic Growth Highlights

January 2017–June 2018

As soon as I was hired at Sales Hacker as Director of Marketing, I began making SEO improvements from day one. While I didn’t waste any time, you’ll also notice that there was no silver bullet.

This was the result of daily blocking and tackling. Pure execution and no growth hacks or gimmicks. However, I firmly believe that the homepage redesign (in July 2017) was a tremendous enabler of growth.

Organic Growth to Present Day

I officially left Sales Hacker in August of 2018, when the company was acquired by Outreach.io. However, I thought it would be interesting to see the lasting impact of my work by sharing a present-day screenshot of the organic traffic trend, via Google Analytics. There appears to be a dip immediately following my departure, however, it looks like my predecessor, Colin Campbell, has picked up the slack and got the train back on the rails. Well done!

Unique considerations — Some context behind Sales Hacker’s growth

Before I dive into our findings, here's a little context behind Sales Hacker's growth:

Sales Hacker’s blog is 100 percent community-generated — This means we didn’t pay “content marketers” to write for us. Sales Hacker is a publishing hub led by B2B sales, marketing, and customer success contributors. This can be a blessing and a curse at the same time — on one hand, the site gets loads of amazing free content. On the other hand, the posts are not even close to being optimized upon receiving the first draft. That means, the editorial process is intense and laborious.

Aggressive publishing cadence (4–5x per week) — Sales Hacker built an incredible reputation in the B2B Sales Tech niche — we became known as the go-to destination for unbiased thought leadership for practitioners in the space (think of Sales Hacker as the sales equivalent to Growth Hackers). Due to high demand and popularity, we had more content available than we could handle. While it’s a good problem to have, we realized we needed to keep shipping content in order to avoid a content pipeline blockage and a backlog of unhappy contributors.

We had to “reverse engineer” SEO — In short, we got free community-generated and sponsored content from top sales and marketing leaders at SaaS companies like Intercom, HubSpot, Pipedrive, LinkedIn, Adobe and many others, but none of it was strategically built for SEO out of the box. We also had contributors like John Barrows, Richard Harris, Lauren Bailey, Tito Bohrt, and Trish Bertuzzi giving us a treasure trove of amazing content to work with. However, we had to collaborate with each contributor from beginning to end and guide them through the entire process. Topical ideation (based on what they were qualified to write about), keyword research, content structure, content type, etc. So, the real secret sauce was in our editorial process. Shout out to my teammate Alina Benny for learning and inheriting my SEO process after we hired her to run content marketing. She crushed it for us!

Almost all content was evergreen and highly tactical — I made it a rule that we’d never agree to publish fluffy pieces, whether it was sponsored or not. Plain and simple. Because we didn’t allow “content marketers” to publish with us, our content had a positive reputation, since it was coming from highly respected practitioners. We focused on evergreen content strategies in order to fuel our organic growth. Salespeople don’t want fluff. They want actionable and tactical advice they can implement immediately. I firmly believe that achieving audience satisfaction with our content was a major factor in our SEO success.

Outranking the “big guys” — If you look at the highest-ranking sales content, it’s the usual suspects. HubSpot, Salesforce, Forbes, Inc, and many other sites that were far more powerful than Sales Hacker. But it didn’t matter as much as traditional SEO wisdom tells us, largely due to the fact that we had authenticity and rawness to our content. We realized most sales practitioners would rather read insights from their peers in their community, above the traditional “Ultimate Guides,” which tended to be a tad dry.

We did VERY little manual link building — Our link building was literally an email from me, or our CEO, to a site we had a great relationship with. “Yo, can we get a link?” It was that simple. We never did large-scale outreach to build links. We were a very lean, remote digital marketing team, and therefore lacked the bandwidth to allocate resources to link building. However, we knew that we would acquire links naturally due to the popularity of our brand and the highly tactical nature of our content.

Our social media and brand firepower helped us to naturally acquire links — It helps A LOT when you have a popular brand on social media and a well-known CEO who authored an essential book called “Hacking Sales”. Most of Sales Hacker’s articles would get widely circulated by over 50+ SaaS partners which would help drive natural links.

Updating stale content was the lowest hanging fruit — The biggest chunk of our new-found organic traffic came from updating / refreshing old posts. We have specific examples of this coming up later in the post.

Email list growth was the “north star” metric — Because Sales Hacker is not a SaaS company, and the “product” is the audience, there was no need for aggressive website CTAs like “book a demo.” Instead, we built a very relationship heavy, referral-based sales cadence that was supported by marketing automation, so list growth was the metric to pay attention to. This was also a key component to positioning Sales Hacker for acquisition. Here's how the email growth progression was trending.

So, now that I’ve set the stage, let’s dive into exactly how I built this SEO strategy.

Bonus: You can also watch the interview I had with Dan Shure on the Evolving SEO Podcast, where I breakdown this strategy in great detail.

1) Audience research

Imagine you are the new head of marketing for a well-known startup brand. You are tasked with tackling growth and need to show fast results — where do you start?

That’s the exact position I was in. There were a million things I could have done, but I decided to start by surveying and interviewing our audience and customers.

Because Sales Hacker is a business built on content, I knew this was the right choice.

I also knew that I would be able to stand out in an unglamorous industry by talking to customers about their content interests.

Think about it: B2B tech sales is all about numbers and selling stuff. Very few brands are really taking the time to learn about the types of content their audiences would like to consume.

When I was asking people if I could talk to them about their media and content interests, their response was: “So, wait, you’re actually not trying to sell me something? Sure! Let’s talk!”

Here’s what I set out to learn:

Goal 1 — Find one major brand messaging insight.

Goal 2 — Find one major audience development insight.

Goal 3 — Find one major content strategy insight.

Goal 4 — Find one major UX / website navigation insight.

Goal 5 — Find one major email marketing insight.

In short, I accomplished all of these learning goals and implemented changes based on what the audience told me.

If you’re curious, you can check out my entire UX research process for yourself, but here are some of the key learnings:

Based on these outcomes, I was able to determine the following:

Topical “buckets” to focus on — Based on the most common daily tasks, the data told us to build content on sales prospecting, building partnerships and referral programs, outbound sales, sales management, sales leadership, sales training, and sales ops.

Thought leadership — 62 percent of site visitors said they kept coming back purely due to thought leadership content, so we had to double down on that.

Content Types — Step by step guides, checklists, and templates were highly desired. This told me that fluffy BS content had to be ruthlessly eliminated at all costs.

Sales Hacker Podcast — 76 percent of respondents said they would listen to the Sales Hacker Podcast (if it existed), so we had to launch it!

2) SEO site audit — Key findings

I can’t fully break down how to do an SEO site audit step by step in this post (because it would be way too much information), but I will share the key findings and takeaways from our own Site Audit that led to some major improvements in our website performance.

Lack of referring domain growth

Sales Hacker was not able to acquire referring domains at the same rate as competitors. I knew this wasn’t because of a link building acquisition problem, but due to a content quality problem.

Lack of organic keyword growth

Sales Hacker had been publishing blog content for years (before I joined) and there wasn’t much to show for it from an organic traffic standpoint. However, I do feel the brand experienced a remarkable social media uplift by building content that was helpful and engaging.

Sales Hacker did happen to get lucky and rank for some non-branded keywords by accident, but the amount of content published versus the amount of traffic they were getting wasn’t making sense.

To me, this immediately screamed that there was an issue with on-page optimization and keyword targeting. It wasn’t anyone's fault - this was largely due to a startup founder thinking about building a community first, and then bringing SEO into the picture later.

At the end of the day, Sales Hacker was only ranking for 6k keywords at an estimated organic traffic cost of $8.9k — which is nothing. By the time Sales Hacker got acquired, the site had an organic traffic cost of $122k.

Non-optimized URLs

This is common among startups that are just looking to get content out. This is just one example, but truth be told, there was a whole mess of non-descriptive URLs that had to get cleaned up.

Poor internal linking structure

The internal linking concentration was poorly distributed. Most of the equity was pointing to some of the lowest value pages on the site.

Poor taxonomy, site structure, and navigation

I created a mind-map of how I envisioned the new site structure and internal linking scheme. I wanted all the content pages to be organized into categories and subcategories.

My goals with the new proposed taxonomy would accomplish the following:

Increase engagement from natural site visitor exploration

Allow users to navigate to the most important content on the site

Improve landing page visibility from an increase in relevant internal links pointing to them.

Topical directories and category pages eliminated with redirects

Topical landing pages used to exist on SalesHacker.com, but they were eliminated with 301 redirects and disallowed in robots.txt. I didn’t agree with this configuration. Example: /social-selling/

Trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash duplicate content with canonical errors

Multiple pages for the same exact intent. Failing to specify the canonical version.

Branded search problems — “Sales Hacker Webinar”

Some of the site’s most important content is not discoverable from search due to technical problems. For example, a search for “Sales Hacker Webinar” returns irrelevant results in Google because there isn’t an optimized indexable hub page for webinar content. It doesn’t get that much search volume (0–10 monthly volume according to Keyword Explorer), but still, that’s 10 potential customers you are pissing off every month by not fixing this.

3) Homepage — Before and after

Sooooo, this beauty right here (screenshot below) was the homepage I inherited in early 2017 when I took over the site.

Fast forward six months later, and this was the new homepage we built after doing audience and customer research…

New homepage goals

Tell people EXACTLY what Sales Hacker is and what we do.

Make it stupidly simple to sign up for the email list.

Allow visitors to easily and quickly find the content they want.

Add social proof.

Improve internal linking.

I’m proud to say, that it all went according to plan. I’m also proud to say that as a result, organic traffic skyrocketed shortly after.

Special Note: Major shout out to Joshua Giardino, the lead developer who worked with me on the homepage redesign. Josh is one of my closest friends and my marketing mentor. I would not be writing this case study today without him!

There wasn’t one super measurable thing we isolated in order to prove this. We just knew intuitively that there was a positive correlation with organic traffic growth, and figured it was due to the internal linking improvements and increased average session duration from improving the UX.

4) Updating and optimizing existing content

Special note: We enforced “Ditch the Pitch”

Before I get into the nitty-gritty SEO stuff, I’ll tell you right now that one of the most important things we did was blockade contributors and sponsors from linking to product pages and injecting screenshots of product features into blog articles, webinars, etc.

Side note: One thing we also had to do was add a nofollow attribute to all outbound links within sponsored content that sent referral traffic back to partner websites (which is no longer applicable due to the acquisition).

The #1 complaint we discovered in our audience research was that people were getting irritated with content that was “too salesy” or “too pitchy” — and rightfully so, because who wants to get pitched at all day?

So we made it all about value. Pure education. School of hard knocks style insights. Actionable and tactical. No fluff. No nonsense. To the point.

And that’s where things really started to take off.

Before and after: “Best sales books”

What you are about to see is classic SEO on-page optimization at its finest.

This is what the post originally looked like (and it didn’t rank well for “best sales books).

And then after…

And the result…

Before and after: “Sales operations”

What we noticed here was a crappy article attempting to explain the role of sales operations.

Here are the steps we took to rank #1 for “Sales Operations:”

Built a super optimized mega guide on the topic.

Since the old crappy article had some decent links, we figured let’s 301 redirect it to the new mega guide.

Promote it on social, email and normal channels.

Here’s what the new guide on Sales Ops looks like…

And the result…

5) New content opportunities

One thing I quickly realized Sales Hacker had to its advantage was topical authority. Exploiting this was going to be our secret weapon, and boy, did we do it well:

“Cold calling”

We knew we could win this SERP by creating content that was super actionable and tactical with examples.

Most of the competing articles in the SERP were definition style and theory-based, or low-value roundups from domains with high authority.

In this case, DA doesn’t really matter. The better man wins.

“Best sales tools”

Because Sales Hacker is an aggregator website, we had the advantage of easily out-ranking vendor websites for best and top queries.

Of course, it also helps when you build a super helpful mega list of tools. We included over 150+ options to choose from in the list. Whereas SERP competitors did not even come close.

“Channel sales”

Notice how Sales Hacker’s article is from 2017 still beats HubSpot’s 2019 version. Why? Because we probably satisfied user intent better than them.

For this query, we figured out that users really want to know about Direct Sales vs Channel Sales, and how they intersect.

HubSpot went for the generic, “factory style” Ultimate Guide tactic.

Don’t get me wrong, it works very well for them (especially with their 91 DA), but here is another example where nailing the user intent wins.

“Sales excel templates”

This was pure lead gen gold for us. Everyone loves templates, especially sales excel templates.

The SERP was easily winnable because the competition was so BORING in their copy. Not only did we build a better content experience, but we used numbers, lists, and power words that salespeople like to see, such as FAST and Pipeline Growth.

Special note: We never used long intros

The one trend you’ll notice is that all of our content gets RIGHT TO THE POINT. This is inherently obvious, but we also uncovered it during audience surveying. Salespeople don’t have time for fluff. They need to cut to the chase ASAP, get what they came for, and get back to selling. It’s really that straightforward.

When you figure out something THAT important to your audience, (like keeping intros short and sweet), and then you continuously leverage it to your advantage, it’s really powerful.

6) Featured Snippets

Featured snippets became a huge part of our quest for SERP dominance. Even for SERPs where organic clicks have reduced, we didn’t mind as much because we knew we were getting the snippet and free brand exposure.

Here are some of the best-featured snippets we got!

Featured snippet: “Channel sales”

Featured snippet: “Sales pipeline management”

Featured snippet: “BANT”

Featured snippet: “Customer success manager”

Featured snippet: “How to manage a sales team”

Featured snippet: “How to get past the gatekeeper”

Featured snippet: “Sales forecast modeling”

Featured snippet: “How to build a sales pipeline”

7) So, why did Sales Hacker get acquired?

At first, it seems weird. Why would a SaaS company buy a blog? It really comes down to one thing — community (and the leverage you get with it).

Two learnings from this acquisition are:

1. It may be worth acquiring a niche media brand in your space

2. It may be worth starting your own niche media brand in your space

I feel like most B2B companies (not all, but most) come across as only trying to sell a product — because most of them are. You don’t see the majority of B2B brands doing a good job on social. They don’t know how to market to emotion. They completely ignore top-funnel in many cases and, as a result, get minimal engagement with their content.

There’s really so many areas of opportunity to exploit in B2B marketing if you know how to leverage that human emotion — it’s easy to stand out if you have a soul. Sales Hacker became that “soul” for Outreach — that voice and community.

But one final reason why a SaaS company would buy a media brand is to get the edge over a rival competitor. Especially in a niche where two giants are battling over the top spot.

In this case, it’s Outreach’s good old arch-nemesis, Salesloft. You see, both Outreach and Salesloft are fighting tooth and nail to win a new category called “Sales Engagement”.

As part of the acquisition process, I prepared a deck that highlighted how beneficial it would be for Outreach to acquire Sales Hacker, purely based on the traffic advantage it would give them over Salesloft.

Sales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Total organic keywords

This chart from 2018 (data exported via SEMrush), displays that Sales Hacker is ranking for more total organic keywords than Salesloft and Outreach combined.

Sales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Estimated traffic cost

This chart from 2018 (data exported via SEMrush), displays the cost of the organic traffic compared by domain. Sales Hacker ranks for more commercial terms due to having the highest traffic cost.

Sales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Rank zone distributions

This chart from 2018 (data exported via SEMrush), displays the rank zone distribution by domain. Sales Hacker ranked for more organic keywords across all search positions.

Sales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Support vs. demand keywords

This chart from 2018 (data exported via SEMrush), displays support vs demand keywords by domain. Because Sales Hacker did not have a support portal, all its keywords were inherently demand focused.

Meanwhile, Outreach was mostly ranking for support keywords at the time. Compared to Salesloft, they were at a massive disadvantage.

Conclusion

I wouldn’t be writing this right now without the help, support, and trust that I got from so many people along the way.

Joshua Giardino — Lead developer at Sales Hacker, my marketing mentor and older brother I never had. Couldn’t have done this without you!

Max Altschuler — Founder of Sales Hacker, and the man who gave me a shot at the big leagues. You built an incredible platform and I am eternally grateful to have been a part of it.

Scott Barker — Head of Partnerships at Sales Hacker. Thanks for being in the trenches with me! It’s a pleasure to look back on this wild ride, and wonder how we pulled this off.

Alina Benny — My marketing protege. Super proud of your growth! You came into Sales Hacker with no fear and seized the opportunity.

Mike King — Founder of iPullRank, and the man who gave me my very first shot in SEO. Thanks for taking a chance on an unproven kid from the Bronx who was always late to work.

Yaniv Masjedi — Our phenomenal CMO at Nextiva. Thank you for always believing in me and encouraging me to flex my thought leadership muscle. Your support has enabled me to truly become a high-impact growth marketer.

Thanks for reading — tell me what you think below in the comments!

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theinjectlikes2 · 5 years