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Power Words and Marketing to Pleasure and Pain
Being human means we have psychological instincts that cause us to take certain actions. When we are happy, we smile; when we are sad, we cry. These instincts also apply to purchasing goods and services. Studies show that people are more likely to buy something based on their emotions rather than information alone.
International receptionists’ day the important prospects of the role
National Receptionists’ Day was first launched in 1991 in the US to celebrate the role of professional receptionists.
The New Invaluable Social Media Image Sizes For 2020 Infographic
The Free New DesignCap To Make Graphic Design Easier
Make Graphic Design Much Easier
Speed up your creative process to make striking graphic designs for your business, event, social media, and more.
15 Things You Should Know Before Blogging in 2020 [Infographic]
Blogging in 2020 is a different world than blogging in the past. The internet has changed a lot since the far-off history of 2011, the start of the modern blogging era.
Is Podcast Marketing Right For Your Business?
Podcasting is a great way of getting awareness for your business. As podcast listeners are increasing year-on-year, is podcast marketing right for your business?
20 Call-To-Action Phrases
Conversion optimization has always been a hot topic in internet marketing. To be honest, all of us already know the best call to action phrases or marketing techniques out there! Yet, here you are, reading through this post in hopes of improving your conversion rates.
What are you missing? There may be a lot of ways to improve your conversion rates, but we cannot stress it enough; targeted call to action phrases work, and it has been proven.
Are freelancers the new prey for money laundering scammers?
When, a seemingly great opportunity comes your way, with nothing to lose you are going to follow it through aren’t you? This is what happened to us at Virtu@dmin; read on for all the details and how to NOT let it happen to you, a freelancer or not.
Freelancing as Virtu@dmin for a few years now, predominantly transcribing, I was very excited to receive a message on the freelance platform Truelancer, on the 4th October 2017. A person by the name of ‘Catlin Tracey’ claiming to be on the hiring board of a very well know global insurance company sent me a direct message me to inform me that my profile had been thoroughly reviewed and selected for an interview via Google Hangouts. (I have been invited to send a proposal for many jobs, but either they are for silly money or the job is awarded to someone else.)
I duly was on Hangouts at the time they wanted me to be, which was approximately 15-20 minutes later, of the mind I had nothing to lose. My partner said to me just end the conversation if they want you to pay out any money. In fact, after being interviewed on Hangouts, I was successful, earning $20 an hour whilst training, $35 an hour once the training was complete. I wasn’t to pay out any money, they were, in fact, to pay me, for software.
Having spent a lot of time researching this, the pay and type of questions they asked, there was nothing on Google (where I did my research) to suggest this was a potential money laundering scam.
I made notes, looked up the software I would be using and still nothing. (Although at the time of writing, Monday 13th November 2017, Truelancer have now deleted all the messages and a note to say, “Note: Kindly do not reply to this client. It was a Spam message”.) Shame they were not quick enough to do that back at the beginning of October when I was contacted. The profile had been active on there for approximately 3-4 months at the time of being approached.
Offer Letter
After being successful in my interview, I was sent an offer letter by email the next day, for what I thought was one of the biggest leading global insurance companies. I signed and emailed back to this guy, as requested.
Warning
So, if you are a freelancer and registered on freelancing platforms like Truelancer, and you get approached by a message directly, offering you this fantastic job opportunity, it is a money lanundering scam.
How do I know this? Well, as advised by the guy on Hangouts, (all of our conversations were on Hangouts, so another thing to watch out for) he said they would be paying money into my bank account for me to download software from a vendor they deal with directly.
He/they paid the money into the bank account as advised, but it all changed from downloading software to collecting office equipment and I had better have enough office space. The instructions were to withdraw a large sum IN CASH and pay into their vendor’s bank account. This is when alarm bells were rining loudly.
Upon advising him that we would have to order this sort of money he/they began to panic, and then requested we do it online, into a different bank account because this vendor was not accepting online payments at this time!
My partner (and partner of Virtu@dmin) and I knew then that this was indeed what appeared to be money laundering, and as I did a lot of research into the insurance company he ‘so-called’ represented, phone calls confirming they did have not that person working for them, the email addresses did not exist we have gone to the authorities.
Conclusion
As the jobs for life have virtually gone now, and in the UK having zero-hour contracts, and many part-time positions, that do not pay a living wage, more and more people are turning what skills they have to freelancing.
As a freelancer, getting work is hard, I/we have been freelancing enough years now to know how up and down it can be. Obviously, the more skills you have, the more freelance opportunities you can apply for.
Because of the insecurity in freelancing, the ‘not knowing’ of how much you will earn from one month to the next, I believe now that criminals and fraudsters are targeting freelancers to ‘clean’ their dirty criminal money. From one vendor not accepting online payments at the moment, to another bank account with all the details,including BIC and IBAN details, it became obvious what was going on. We simply do not want anyone, freelancer or not, to get stung by this new trick of theirs.
* For more information about money transfer scams please see this post from the Financial Conduct Authority.
Email Cheat Sheet for Businesses
*This is a guest post and infographic written by Erik Bullen of MageMail.
Email programs are becoming more automated, more personal and more efficient than ever before. With 4 billion email accounts worldwide and counting, smart marketers are using new strategies and tools to enable businesses to utilize the full power of email marketing.
Personalize
People are more savvy than ever and know how to identify spam or irrelevant emails, making personalized emails more important than ever. More than simply including a person’s name, personalized email considers consumers interests, age, location andbuying behavior.
Mobilize
The majority of account holders now open emails on a mobile device, be it a phone or a tablet. Ensure your emails are mobile friendly. A poorly designed email on mobile will lose the interest of your target audience and have a negative effect on the brand.
Testing
This is a great way to ensure the efficiency of your email campaigns. There are tools that can test the full range of email content from the subject heading to the contact details. The results can be very useful in boosting your open and click through rates and revenue generated per email.
We’ve compiled this ‘Email Cheat Sheet’ infographic to help you get the most out of your email programs. Remember, the average ROI on email marketing is $44 for every $1 spent - unrivalled by all other marketing methods.
Email Cheat Sheet
Author Bio:
Erik Bullen
Erik is CEO of MageMail. He also mentors startups using programs such as
MassChallenge and Techstars. He often geeks out and writes about innovation,
ecommerce, emerging tech, leadership, and SaaS.
Twitter: @ErikBullen
Guest Posting and Link Building: My Warning
On Thursday 25th May 2017 Matt G Southern a well-known and respected writer at the Search Engine Journal published the article “Google Issues a Warning About Guest Posting to Build Links“.
I began to read the article hoping that an issue that happened to me recently would be mentioned, but it wasn’t. This article is also a warning, but of a different kind when accepting guests posts onto your website for the purpose of forming genuine, respectful links.
However, as already stated in the published post by Matt Southern, the posts can be misleading and the links are in fact spammy. This was what was quoted yesterday directly from Google.
Google has issued a warning to remind site owners about the dangers of publishing content on other sites for the purpose of building inbound links.
The company doesn’t frown on guest posts or syndicated posts in general, but lately there has been an increase in spammy links stuffed into these types of posts. That’s the reason behind this sudden warning from Google.
Distributing content on a large scale when the main intention is to build links back to your own site is strictly prohibited under Google’s guidelines on link schemes.
But what if there is another reason that people are approaching small businesses to guest post? I, from experience, can tell you there is.
Is Guest Posting What it Seems?
I have been approached by email on several occasions over the years I have had my website asking if I accept guest posts. Surprised at this as Virtuadmin.uk to be perfectly honest doesn’t have a tremendous amount of traffic, so together with other SEO (search engine optimisation) publishing guests posts is an ideal way to gain genuine backlinks to improve my SERPs results myself.
The person that contacted me introduced themselves to me as a “Content Writer & Editor” full of praise for my website and to quote in their opening statement “I am a business content writer and I chanced upon virtuadmin.uk“.
I am no website designer, personally, I feel that my website is somewhat amateurish but enjoy the challenges of attempting to improve it to what I consider a professional standard (not there yet but trying!); I am not a website designer but an experienced touch typist and transcriptionist!
Emails were sent back and forth, not very frequently, once every two weeks or so. They would send an email to say they were working on my article and would email once it was ready for review and any edits I would like.
When the final article came back, I read through it very impressed, suggested some edits to the post, which were duly done.
In the meantime of waiting for the finished article to come back and then be published on this website, I decided to do a bit of research into the person that had contacted me. I usually do this when I get requests to accept guest posts or infographics.
My Shock
I was horrified to discover the person that had initially contacted, maintained communications with me so professionally, written such a brilliant post I couldn’t wait to publish it, was my biggest competitor.
Just to be sure of my facts, I looked for information on the person on the professional alternative to Facebook, LinkedIn and Tweeted the company directly to ask if they had a content writer of that name, to which they replied they had and gave me their email address!
This company did not just provide the service in the niche area that I am working solo as a transcriptionist and typist, but many other types of administration duties that can be outsourced and carried out online. They are very established, very large. In my mind, if someone chanced upon the article upon my website, I always reference guest post at the beginning, therefore technically I would have been sending business to them.
Personally, I just can’t help wondering for a company so large why are they trying to take out small-time work-from-home Mums like myself? It’s not just that, why the underhanded way in which they approached me, not even volunteering the information of who they worked for as a Content Writer and Editor!
My Warning and Advice
My warning to anyone that is trying to genuine improve their website rankings without the budget of hiring SEO experts or other tactical ways of achieving page one on Google SERPs, if you are approached out of the blue, just like I was, be polite, the might be genuine but check them out.
How? Firstly, Google or Bing is a great start. If it is a common name like the person I was researching, narrow the results down with the details you have. Location, their job, email address, alternatively LinkedIn.
Even with minimal information, I only had a name, email address and job title, for example, but believe me, you can research the person concerned, you can find out who they are that has contacted you to make this request it.
Hopefully, unlike my unfortunate experience, they are equally a small-time business or stay-at-home Mum or Entrepreneur looking to make genuine backlinks because you share a common niche area.
An easy account of how important transcripts are for videos
With video broadcasting becoming more and more popular it is projected to claim more than 80% of website traffic in 2019, so the question is how do you get your video to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) above everyone else’s?
How To Increase Your Video SEO The Affordable Way
Hiring a professional and affordable transcription service like Virtuadmin will give you a valuable transcript for your video providing accessibility, indexing and higher search engine results.
How to Run A Business While Travelling For Six Months Every Year
Thank you to Start Blogging Online for their guest post/infographic on Virtuadmin.
A lot of successful business owners would suggest that running your business while far from your actual business location is effective. Even if you are far away, you can still keep things running. It is just a matter of time management and division of tasks.
As the owner, you can make major decisions or think of creative ways to boost your business. You can leave someone to manage the day to day activities in your store. The point is for you to not get burnt out. If you are affected by the pressure of running the business well, everything else could fall apart.
Making the business work while you are away is easy. The difficult part is being away from your family. Of course, you can’t bring them with you. They also have to go to school or work. To solve this problem, divide your time within the year.
Perhaps, you can spend 6 months away from home and 6 months at home. This also helps you manage the business in different locations. While you are home, make the most of your time and spend it with the people you love. Make up for the time that you are away from home.
Just be positive. It can be done. It is even easier than running the business on location at all times. For more tips on how to make it possible, check out the infographic below. It provides useful information that you can also try.
