e-lifeandwork: Learn New Skills Online | Online Courses & Real-World

As layoffs continue hitting companies across the United States left and right, employees may feel uncertain about their fate in the business. Anyone can be impacted, even you. Fortunately, there are ways you can set yourself apart if this unfortunate event ever happens to your organization. Follow these tips to make yourself an indispensable employee who is essential to keeping things running smoothly within the business. Develop and Strengthen Your Transferable Skills There is a good reason why soft skills are popular in the workforce. These are skills like communication, emotional intelligence, problem solving, critical thinking and the ability to lead, none of which can be replaced by artificial intelligence.  Dave Fisch, CEO at Ladders, recommends developing and strengthening your transferable soft skills. “Not everyone can communicate well with others or solve problems as quickly and efficiently, so building on those skills will set you apart from the majority of e...

Working out your niche is about making it easier for you to market your business to the right people. Rachel Klaver is a marketing strategist, specialising in lead generation and content marketing. OPINION: One of the hardest parts of marketing is taking time to really define who you are selling to, what you are selling them, and why they need it. For a retailer the options are often easier, depending on what sort of shop you have. But for service providers, working on this type of narrowing can cause an attack of the “what ifs?” to come on. What if you decide you work with people over 40, but then you work with someone who is 35? Or worse, in their 20’s? Does this mean you need to change your niche? Or perhaps you work mainly on renovations, but you then have someone ask you to work on a new build? Do you need to add more options to your marketing? Do you need to change what you say? Working out your niche is about making it easier for you to market your business to the ri...

Julia Ponomareva is the head of International Business Development (Emerging Markets) at GetCourse. Today, skill-sharing courses and knowledge monetization are becoming increasingly popular and virtually omnipresent around the globe. Social media influencers and online personalities have figured out that the real money is not in internet fame and sponsored Facebook posts, but in launching their very own online courses and coaching programs. And indeed, I see the culture of online education consumption is emerging before our eyes. But are these skill-sharing business models only for a few vloggers, bloggers and social media stars with an army of followers? Not at all. Any subject matter experts — even without a mass following — can address their target audience with paid ads. As head of international business development at a software company that provides a platform for content creators, I know from experience that to launch a skill-sharing business, you don’t have to reinvent...

When you are just starting out in the market, it may be hard to achieve immediate recognition as the newest player on the field or compete for clients in a crowded space. To pique consumer interest in an oversaturated space, you can study behavior patterns to carve your niche, but it is going to take more than free product samples or trial membership to get consumers to support your brand and stick with you for the long haul. Below, 15 members of Fast Company Executive Board offer their advice on how to boost your brand to appeal to clients in the marketplace. 1. Get to know your market. When positioning your brand in a saturated market, you should first do some competitive analyses to learn what your counterparts are saying externally. From there, develop platforms that support your company’s narrative and focus on the white space topics that your audience wants to learn about. – Melanie Samba, Sproxxy 2. Promote your authentic attributes. Think about three to four attrib...

Every coach should have an online presence. But being a digital coach is not as easy as it seems. The biggest challenge a new digital coach faces is planning the curriculum. A curriculum should be set in a way that the students gain maximum knowledge, without a moment of dullness and at the same time stay connected. Within that connection, the concepts shared should be linked to one’s own experience to make the curriculum more profound. A coach should constantly keep their material and methods updated. The curriculum should be designed in a way that not only increases the completion rate but also provides certainty to the people signing up.  Research by Global Industry Analysts suggests that e-learning will be a $325 Billion industry by 2025. However, the industry average completion rate of e-learning courses can be as low as 5%. Nevertheless, I have cracked a methodology that has made my average completion rate 50%. With my experience, I recommend a six-step p...

Many people think that the hardest part of bringing a new product to market is the original idea or the development stage. The truth, however, is that getting your product into stores and selling it to customers is often far more difficult than you might expect. Most inventors or product developers are incredibly creative people but don’t have the knowledge or experience which is required for effective branding, marketing, and customer outreach. Convincing big retailers about the merits and potential saleability of your product can be particularly difficult as they are pitched literally thousands of products every year.  So what can you do to give yourself the best chance of success?  In this article, we will explain everything you need to know, from how to identify your target customers to how to get your product in stores that are best suited to guarantee sales.  1. Make sure your product is ready  Before you approach retailers to see if they want to stock your ...

Business Published on July 29th, 2021 | by Sunit Nandi Overview The business world is ruled by content. Everywhere you look, content is being used by successful companies on social media, on their websites and even in search engine ads. Podcasts, blogs, articles, surveys, whitepapers, reviews, case studies and infographics have all become commonplace in the stew of media that decision-makers consume on their buying journey. Content marketing, a rare phenomenon ten years ago, has taken the centre stage in the business model of many companies. But what of conventional marketing strategies such as inbound and outbound marketing, is it time to abandon them completely? Research disagrees. Instead, companies must modernize their traditional outbound marketing strategies by including content in them. For technology companies, innovation has always been essential to success, but never has it been so badly needed in the field of tech marketing. What is content marketing? L...

The past year has undoubtedly demanded pivots and change in more ways than anyone could have imagined. Businesses were catapulted into endurance mode with a singular focus: survival.  As new survival methods (and messaging) became the norm, entrepreneurs fell into a pattern of using their message to bridge the gap from unprecedented to post-pandemic. The rise of the small business, competition and an oversaturation of information make for a crowded space that calls for differentiation. In the face of a re-emerging world, it’s long overdue for business owners to approach marketing their businesses in new and inventive ways by focusing on conscious consumerism, intentional inquiry and the human experience — all without the overwhelm of what others are doing. Small business is surging, and assumptions are driving struggle  As entrepreneurship sees a surge since the pandemic, growing 24% from 2019 to 2020 worldwide, spaces have gotten more saturated. Competitio...

Published: Tues., March 23, 2021 If someone were to ask you to describe an entrepreneur, you’d probably think of someone in a suit making high-stakes deals, or a tech guru in Silicon Valley developing the latest app and getting it out on the street. Or maybe you stayed closer to home and thought of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln students who founded the wildly successful sports start-up, Hudl. You probably didn’t think of a scientist in a lab coat, someone writing a grant proposal, or a teacher working with undergraduates. That’s because we tend to think of academics as solitary thinkers who are tucked away at the bench or in the library, working long hours on a small part of a problem. This imaginary academic discovers information that other people apply to solving real-world problems. You may think that you have to choose to be one or the other, when you can take some of the positive characteristics of the entrepreneur and apply them to being a graduate student. Successf...

To say that 2020 was a year of ups and downs is putting it lightly. It was especially turbulent if you are a business owner. Your company likely had to contend with some major upheavals, stressors and challenges. In fact, 92% of small businesses reported that they had to “reinvent themselves” in order to weather the Covid-19 crisis.  But it’s a new year, and as we celebrate the deployment of the first Covid-19 vaccines, we’re all hoping that we might be seeing the faintest light at the end of the tunnel. 2021 will be another year of reinvention and, we can all hope, a better and brighter one for the growth of our businesses.   A couple weeks ago, I got in touch with social media guru Luke Lintz. At just 21, Lintz has built the incredibly successful HighKey Clout Inc., a social media, marketing, branding and technology group. We had a great conversation about how to grow your business and your customer base.  I thought I’d take the chance to share some of the insig...

To say that Covid-19 has thrown businesses for a loop would be an understatement. Yelp recently reported that, of the more than 160,000 U.S. companies that have closed since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, 60% are now shut down for good. With businesses across the country struggling to keep their doors open, scaling your company in this economy might seem like a pipe dream. Not necessarily, says Charles Gaudet, CEO of growth consultancy Predictable Profits: “While we are in a challenging environment, you will find companies in every industry having their best year yet. Those succeeding are adapting, looking for the opportunity and using data to make fact-based decisions.”  If you’d like to join the ranks of companies that aren’t letting Covid-19—or future crises—stand in their way, take these three steps to scale your business now:  1. Identify where your growth will come from.  In a strong economy and with a strong product, sales practically make themselves. These...