Kumar Gauraw is a Personal Branding & Social Media strategist helping entrepreneurs and skilled professionals achieve personal and professional success by developing leadership and leveraging the power of the Internet, Blogging and Social Media.
[note background=”#F0F0F0″]This is a guest post by Ness Garcia from MakeAWebsite. You can circle her on Google+. [/note]
Letting high bounce rates on your website to continue could be one of the worst things to allow for your websites. The bounce rate means that there is a reason that people keep coming to your site but then leaving too soon.
That means you have some serious work to do. If you want to keep your viewers on your site longer, you have to give them a reason to stay. They need to stay on your website for a little longer to lower down the bounce rates. So, let's take a look 5 ways that will definitely help you keep your visitors.
In a guest post at my friend, Bill Butler’s website, today I shared about the power of stories and why you should share your stories. If you haven't seen that post yet, I encourage you to do so before you proceed further because you are going to enjoy this TED video much more then.
This TED talk by Rita Pierson is not just powerful and inspirational, but also applicable in every endeavor of our lives where we have to work with people. I am not a school teacher (although my parents are both retired from that profession), I found this TED talk appealing to me.
Why?
That's because of two powerful components of this TED Talk:
1. Rita, an educator by profession, shares her message through her own life story. Stories are very powerful tools we all have in plenty. We all can leverage its power if we choose to make an incredible impact and she does it very well.
Nothing annoys on social media sites, especially Twitter and Facebook, more than receiving an unsolicited message from somebody you don’t even know. Interestingly, many people send an "auto" direct message right at the moment they get a new follower.
On top of that, knowing that you can’t even delete your unwanted Direct Messages (DM) in Twitter in bulk, only adds to the pain. No wonder sending automatic DMs on Twitter to your new followers is mostly considered as SPAM.
Why is that so?
Well, if you followed me just today and we have not even interacted once, what is so private and important that I should straightaway try to get your attention through your mailbox?
I received this story in an email a few days ago. Since the email address was not known to me and subject of the email was not an indicator of the content either, I almost deleted it. But then I decided to just see the content, and now I thank God I did because the story I am going to share with you is what the email contained.
It is possible that you may have heard about this story before. But I was amazed by the story as this was my first encounter and therefore, I thought it is worth sharing with you. I am sure you will enjoy the story regardless.
I have shared my website hosting story on a prior occasion, where I told you how I decided to do it myself when a web developer from Bangalore asked me to pay an amount which I thought was too much for the job.
But I was an IT professional by background and I had a handle on technology in general already. So, when I started hosting my first website, as an entrepreneur, I didn’t have much difficulty in catching up with WordPress.
I started by hosting my first website with GoDaddy and it was great. I didn’t have any experience in SEO and therefore I had no expectations. I didn’t care how much time it took to load a page and if I recall, snigdhakrishna.com used to take about 35 seconds to load. Neither Snigdha nor I cared and as a matter of fact, no one ever complained that the website was slow.
I usually do not like sharing negative experiences here on my blog. But my experience with Sheraton Memphis Downtown Hotel and Marriott East over the last weekend caused so much pain to so many people, along with us, that I decided to share my experience with you.
By the way, this is not the only time I have seen Marriott treating people this way. I was there last May as well and this time. I had seen a similar pattern last time as well but I thought it was a mistake then.
How Sheraton Mistreated So Many People
It so happened that I went to Memphis with family to attend a weekend conference last weekend. It was a planned event and I had booked my room with Sheraton Memphis Downtown Hotel in advance, paid the money in full and received confirmation in September itself (1 month in advance).
If you have implemented any CDN (Content Delivery Network) service in an effort to speed up the loading time of your website, you might have faced this challenge. I am going to share with you the steps you need to take to ensure your website images get indexed properly by Google in spite of being hosted on a CDN domain.
Several months ago I implemented MaxCDN on my website along with CloudFlare and my website’s page loading time reduced from 25+ seconds to under 1 second. It was absolutely incredible to see the impact of this implementation on the browsing experience of my readers from around the world.
A few of my good friends are in the recruitment business and we have discussions about the job market whenever we get together. Recently, in a discussion about the job market, one of my recruiter friends told me a few interesting things about Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) which is currently dominating the recruitment industry.
I had not known about this concept before. But after I got some insights from my friend, I did some more research on this topic and decided to share my knowledge with you. May be this information will help you (and your friends) in leveraging the power of Applicant Tracking Systems in landing jobs faster.
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a software application that enables the electronic handling of recruitment needs. An ATS can be implemented on an enterprise or small business level, depending on the needs of the company. An ATS is very similar to customer relationship management systems, but are designed for recruitment tracking purposes.
ATS is widely used across industries today in the recruitment process. In this digital age, it also makes complete sense for enterprises to use digital job postings, digital job applications and automated screening to save time. An applicant tracking software is designed to do exactly that job. It helps recruiters and hiring managers to be more effective and more efficient in hiring the right candidates.
All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.
You might have seen this incredible quote from international bestselling author, Bob Burg on my homepage already. Well, this is one my favorite quotes when it comes to business development. I truly believe that long term success of your business depends very heavily on this concept.
When it comes to building trust online, things get a bit tricky. Anybody can claim to be an expert at something by establishing a website and publishing some content worth a few pages.
Well, that means the competition is very high. Establishing your credibility and building trust online in such a steep competition is a solid uphill battle. And you must win this battle or else your business won’t see much success in today’s online world.
