Week 9: WCIYP Ch10. Five ways to choose/change careers

Five ways to choose/change careers:

1. The first idea that occurs to people seeking guidance on how to choose or change careers, these days, is the Internet. For example you can use O*Net Online, a digital, online treasure house of information, and up-to-date information at that, about careers.
2. There are assessments we can take. The popular name for them, test. I’m not sure how well they’ll help you choose a new career, but you will find them everywhere: in books, on the Internet, in the offices of guidance counselors, or vocational psychologists, career coaches, etc.
3. Use the flower exercise. 
   
4. Well, let’s start with a definition: a job is a job-title in a field. That means, a job has two parts: title and field. Title is really a symbol for what you do. Field is where you do it, or what you do it with. A dramatic career-change typically involves trying to change both at the same time.
5.  Find out what the job-market will need and what’s in high demand. Unluckily this isn’t based on your needs or wishes of dream job necessarily. It not based on what you want but what the market wants. There are many sites you can visit to help with this one very helpful site is Forbes. They illustrate the “hot jobs “that are trending and in demand and from there you can research on to make an executive decision.

Job hunting will always be a difficult task, but with the right guidance it can be an easier. So take a look at these ways to find a career and do the research. Find what you rally want to do for a living and make the dream become a reality. 

Conversion Tracking

In this technological era, you can find anything online from directions to a destination to creating your very own online store. Now if you are using the internet for business purposes this is something to consider putting close attention to.

Conversion tracking is a free tool that indicates what happens after a customer clicks on your ads, website or app whether they purchased a product, newsletter sign-ups, called your business, or simply took a look at your page. Conversions are actions defined as valuable, for example someone making a purchase on your page is a conversion if that’s a goal that you are aiming for. This will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the ad, website, or app; you set your goals. The great thing about this is you can use this as a competitive advantage, allowing anyone to invest more wisely and boost return on investment.

Setting up conversion tracking has never been easier.

Step 1: Build your tracking URL

You’ll need to use the Google Analytics URL Builder to tag your URLs with custom campaign tracking parameters. Just fill out the form by inserting your landing page URL along with the rest of the campaign details.

Step 2: Use your tracking URL

Now take your new URL and use it in your campaign in place of your standard URL. Google Analytics will assume that anybody that clicks this URL is from this campaign.

Step 3: Define your goal

If you don’t have them set up already, you’ll need to create goals in Google Analytics for the conversions you want to track.

I have used Weebly to create a prototype site and track some conversions. It is very simple, my goal is to get clicks on the site and have people fill out a contact form just to get a feel of how things work. If you would like you can check it out, http://arturosolis.weebly.com and fill out the form. After getting some feedback I have been using Google Analytics and Weebly to see the activity of the site and analyze the data to possibly make changes to get better results.  

If you would like to get more information on tracking conversions, you can reach out to me or visit www.google.com for more detailed-information. 

Week 8: CASA Marketing - Ch.8 Google Analytics Certification

This may not be well known but Google offers great opportunities to learn a new skill that can be added onto a resume to find possible employment. In 2013, LinkedIn revealed that Digital and Online Marketing was a top skill that helped people get employed and web analytics is an essential skill for this type of work. In time of economic struggle or competition in business, this type of skill has direct influence on assisting a company with these issues and it’s in high demand especially with technological innovation.  

Getting certified or qualified for a certification is of great benefit for anyone in the professional world. It can be what makes you stand out from every other applicant, or simply it can enhancement your credentials. So it’s something to really consider and why not try to get certified when there is free online training. Google offers Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) and other certifications. And it has Analytics Academy that can assist you with documents on learning about Google Analytics and web analytics in general, along with YouTube videos with prerecorded lessons. If you want to get started you can start off by making a Google Analytics account and play with it as you progress with learning the system.

Now you know of this new skill, of measuring, collecting, analyzing and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage, that you can acquire for free thanks to Google and other reliable sources with a  chance of finding new employment or to benefit one’s own business. If you have any question on web analytics or Google Analytics IQ, you can reach me or look it up at https://www.google.com/analytics. 

Week 6: CASA Marketing - Ch.5 eCommerce Analytics Shopify

Shopify is a complete ecommerce solution that allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods. It lets you organize your products, customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders — all with a few clicks of the mouse. It is one of the easiest ways to launch a “real” ecommerce system to learn about tracking ROI with analytics.

You can start a 14-day trial, without access to conversion tracking, or start a plan for $29.00/mon to have full access.

To get started with Shopify, go to the website shopify.com.

Click “Get Started” and proceed to input the information requested. When reaching the question about what kind of product will be sold, after this depending on the product there might be more or less to constitute in the process. When adding a product you will need to provide a title, a description, a type, and a vendor to categorize the product along with an image to represent the product.

Now we can do some more inside work on the site. Customize navigation to per say remove link to blog, if you aren’t going to be blogging on ecommerce its best to remove so people that visit aren’t looking at outdated data or post. Add products to front page to get first instant glance at product by customers. Set up Shopify payment account to be able to get paid. To gain more control of the site with ease and have individuals get easy access to it, a plan will need to be picked for the price of $29.00/mon. Technically, Shopify is free, but to have people access the website a password would be required which is an issue when you’re trying to expand cliental. Next, we can set up prices for products. It would be a good idea to also update the content of the website to make the page more professional, by adding some descriptive material and an About Us link. Other things can be edited, but that will all depend on you personally and how you want to customize it. If you are working with digital products the files for each product will need to be uploaded to where each pertains. Physical products will obviously be mailed once an order has been confirmed. At this point the ecommerce site is ready to run and make sales.

So here are the basics to starting an ecommerce site with Shopify. If you would like to learn more you can reach out to me to my email, or this might be a helpful link: http://docs/shopify.com/manual.

Week 5: CASA MKTG Ch.4 - Reviewing Performance of Campaign

The blog is running and have promoted it through social media. We can now go to Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) and view the traffic of the website or blog.  We can view the number of sessions, page views, duration of visits, and bounce rate. Our goal with this tool is to review performance and analyze it to reach future objectives in traffic for the blog. Another fun feature of Google Analytics is we can take a look at where people are visiting from. So if someone from Poland views your blog, you will be able to find that information.

One concept in analytics is trending, looking at how things perform, overtime. The concept is that adding quality content and making some effort to promote will boost the amount of traffic.

With the help of dashboards your life can be easier. Creating dashboards can organize the performance of the blog from an amount of time in a report.

To create New Dashboard

1.      Click on Reporting at the top

2.      Then Dashboards > New Dashboard

3.      Select Starter Dashboard (name it whatever you want)

4.      Select date range

5.      Click Apply

These dashboards reports can be exported into PDF to be shared or scheduled via email.

Ok, so by this point we have an introduction of how to connect Google Analytics with a website or blog and then promote it to get traffic going. With the collected data, we analyze it and set future goals. If you need any extra help you can refer to CASA Marketing: Intro to Google Analytics or you can reach. 

Week 4: WCIYP Ch.3 - There Are Over Eight Million Vacancies Available Each Month

Job-hunting is all about human nature and in its essence is most like another human activity that we call dating. In the end it comes down to two questions: “Do you like me?” and “Do I like you?”  The second question needs to be stressed because the possible employee has just as much power as the employer in the hiring process. Here is where the applicant needs to make a decision to ask questions now and see if this job will be a good fit or just don’t ask anything to the employer and find out weeks, months, or years later that it isn’t working and quit. Hence your opinion matters just as much as the employer’s.

You are not as helpless as you think you are. There is always something that can be done no matter how challenging it may sound we will always have some percentage of control. And with that little power you can make a change for the best. Same applies to job-hunting we may feel that employers have all the power and that you can’t be picky because “there are few vacancies available” If these statements were true, we still have some control to alternate the outcome and find a job we desire.

The media here demonstrations a big role in the principle of the idea that “there are few vacancies available” The federal government releases two reports each month on the job market: a good and bad one. The media selects to publish on the bad one. The media tells us there are 252,000 jobs added to the market for a given month when in reality there are 10,176,000 jobs added for that same month based on the good report. The reason for such different results in reports that measure the same thing is: net change vs actual change.

• Net change: measures the difference between how many jobs there were available on day one of the month and the last day of the month. Since jobs are added and filled-in daily here we don’t see the real amount of jobs added to the market. We miss what happened in between.
• Actual change: measures day by day the entire month on how many jobs are added. Here we do see the real amount of jobs added to the market. The complete change is taken into account.

So if there are so many jobs available on monthly bases. Why are there so many people unemployed? To be answered as we go along. 

Week 2: CASA Marketing Ch.1 - Fun with Analytics

After reading the first chapter of CASA Marketing, my interest on digital/online marketing has significantly increased. I found it interesting how LinkedIn showed online marketing as a top skill that got people hired in 2013, but then again we do see that many companies or organizations use online marketing to increase business success. I didn’t think much of online marketing; it has always been on my mind, but I didn’t realize exactly how much in demand it is. This tool is useful more than ever because of the increase technology and computers. I would certainly like to become an effective online marketer, and more employable.

Certainly you have caught my attention for the reasons that it can open job opportunities and/or I can implement this into a company or business that I one day hope to open. I am excited for this course and what I will learn to be able to apply to my professional life. In the chapter you stated, “I realized that it would probably be a good idea to consider not just what I felt like doing, but what would be a benefit to a business or organization”. I agree and with the economic struggle we face, businesses and organizations need all the help they can get. We must look at the whole picture, not just what is in one’s self-interest.

           

            There are many web analytic tools that we said we can use such as google analytics, adobe analytics, open source analytics, and social analytics. Freshmen year I had a job with the athletics department where we use the social media to advertise and promote sporting events for the school, which falls under online marketing and social analytics. We posted up statuses or tweets to have students, family, or friends to attend home games for all sporting events and got payed for it. I thought this was pretty cool, so I look forward to this class to broaden knowledge on online marketing and open more doors for future employment.

Week 2: WCIYP Ch.1

The title for this chapter says it all; “It’s A Whole New World for Job-Hunters”. This is a big issue that we frequently hear about either from colleagues, friends, and family. The world isn’t what it used to be, we have faced many struggles that have implemented a new world. The economy has been a huge factor especially with the tipping point in 2008 with the worst financial disaster since the Great depression of 1929. Finding a job has been really difficult since then, employers ask for more from employee candidates then they have ever before. I could have told you this just based off personal experience.

            It’s a new game in the job-hunt world and now I have a better understanding to why this is. Employers have changed their behavior when hunting for employees, and we have not caught up with, nor adapted to, employers’ new behavior. We have to learn the behavior of the employer and adjust. So if on average, a vacancy receives between 118 and 250 responses or resumes for a position and they employer only wants to interview 5.4 candidates. Employer’s first concern is to go from 118 – 250 candidates down to 5.4; meaning the chance of getting a call for an interview is 2.3% - 4.6%. Which is why the length of the average job-hunter has increased, unemployment has increased, or why even employers require more education background from employee candidates. In the text they say job-hunters and employers speak different languages such as when they say “skills” they really mean “experience”. In the text we are told that we should assume that the employers’ world is like a foreign country; you must learn their language, and their customs, before you visit. In other words, adapt to the employer’s preferences.

            It’s no surprise that finding a job in today’s world will be a task and a half, but with the right guidance and tools the task can be minimized. Learn the values of the employer and use them to your advantage. Job-hunting in my personal life has for the most part been a difficult, but luckily with some connects, and luck I have managed to obtain jobs to keep me moving in life. Hopefully with this course and material covered in this book I can strengthen my job-hunting skills to find future employment where I can truly see results financially and be able to live the life I dream about.