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What North Korea’s elite use the internet for: Researchers find they visit Facebook, watch videos and look at porn sites

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

It’s come to be known as the Hermit Kingdom, with strict rules enforced upon its citizens and tight internet restrictions – but, according to a new report, North Korea’s elite leaders aren’t exactly disconnected.

Intelligence firm Recorded Future has found that high ranking North Korean officials engage in many of the same behaviours you might expect to see among Westerners, from checking social media to watching porn.

The experts monitored internet use in the isolated country for three months, and most often found it to be poorly protected, if at all, revealing unprecedented insight into North Korean leadership and elite interests.

Intelligence firm Recorded Future has found that high ranking North Korean officials engage in many of the same behaviours you might expect to see among Westerners, from checking social media to watching porn. A stock image is pictured 

Intelligence firm Recorded Future has found that high ranking North Korean officials engage in many of the same behaviours you might expect to see among Westerners, from checking social media to watching porn. A stock image is pictured

In North Korea, most ordinary citizens do not have internet access, the report explains.

Their mobile devices include only the most basic 3G services, including voice, text messaging, and picture/video messaging, and can operate only through North Korea’s domestic provider network, Koryolink.

Some, however, have access to a domestic, state-run intranet through common-use computers at universities or internet cafes, including university students, scientists, and select government officials.

And, of this group, there’s an even smaller subset who have direct access to the worldwide internet.

This is North Korea’s top tier, including the most senior leaders and the ruling elite, according to the report.

The data show their internet behaviour is, in many ways, much like ours.

These users were found to spend much of their time checking social media, including Facebook and Instagram, reading the news, and browsing Amazon.

Most of their online activity was devoted to gaming and content streaming, which accounted for 65 percent of usage.

This content primarily came from the Chinese video hosting service Youku, as well as iTunes, and various BitTorrent services.

According to the report, World of Tanks was among their top games.

Experts monitored internet use in the isolated country for three months, and often found it to be poorly protected, if at all, revealing unprecedented insight into North Korean leadership and elite interests. The graph shows hourly usage of Facebook, Google, and other sites

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Experts monitored internet use in the isolated country for three months, and often found it to be poorly protected, if at all, revealing unprecedented insight into North Korean leadership and elite interests. The graph shows hourly usage of Facebook, Google, and other sites

For those who did take measures to obfuscate their activity, VPN and VPS services were used, often purchased from well-known Western companies such as Sharktech, iWeb, Digital Ocean, Linode, Leaseweb USA, Telemax, and Touch VPN.

Less than one percent of internet activity was protected, the researchers say – and, for those that did take such measures, obfuscation was typically poor, revealing exactly what they were up to.

‘Many VPN and VPS were used to obfuscate or facilitate browsing, either from passive internet monitoring or domestic censors,’ according to the report.

‘One US VPN was used by an iPad to check a Gmail account, access Google Cloud, check Facebook and MSN accounts, and view adult content.

‘Other VPN and VPS were used to run Metasploit, make purchases using bitcoin, check Twitter, play video games, stream videos, post documents to Dropbox, and browse Amazon.’

A small number of citzens have access to a domestic, state-run intranet through common-use computers. And, of this group, there¿s an even smaller subset who have direct access to the worldwide internet. Kim Jong-Un is pictured above following a recent ICBM test-fire

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A small number of citzens have access to a domestic, state-run intranet through common-use computers. And, of this group, there’s an even smaller subset who have direct access to the worldwide internet. Kim Jong-Un is pictured above following a recent ICBM test-fire

The report offers new insight on the behaviours of North Korea’s top officials, suggesting they may have more of an internet presence than many would suspect.

While they may seem cut off from the rest of the world, experts say that isn’t necessarily the case.

‘It’s common to describe North Korea as an isolated country,’ Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an expert on North Korea and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Vice News.

‘The truth is that the North Korean regime is not that isolated. Ordinary citizens are as a result of the regime’s choices.’

[“Source-dailymail”]

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Internet

A people-owned internet exists. Here is what it looks like

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

net neutrality protest

Like many Americans, I don’t have a choice about my internet service provider. I live in a subsidized housing development where there’s only one option, and it happens to be, by some accounts, the most hated company in the United States.

Like its monstrous peers, my provider is celebrating that Congress has recently permitted it to spy on me. Although it pretends to support the overwhelming majority of the country’s population who support net neutrality, it has been trying to bury the principle of an open internet for years and, under Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, is making good progress.

I can already feel my browsing habits shift. I’m reigning in curiosities a bit more, a bit more anxious about who might be watching. I’ve taken to using a VPN, like people have to do to access the open internet from China. And the real effects go deeper than personal anxieties.

Although the fight for an open internet tends to have Silicon Valley tech bros at the forefront, it’s a racial justice issue; arbitrary powers for corporations tend not to help marginalized populations. It’s a rural justice issue, too.

The big service providers pushing the deregulation spree are the same companies that have so far refused to bring broadband to less-dense areas. They are holding under-served communities hostage by proposing a deal: roll back rights to private, open media, and we’ll give you cheaper internet. Trump’s Republican party is taking the bait.

This is not a deal we need to make. It shouldn’t be necessary to choose between universal access and basic rights. But this deal has been a long time coming, thanks to long campaigns to convince us there is no other way. It turns out, though, there is.

Up in the mountains west of me, a decade and a half ago, the commercial internet service providers weren’t bringing high-speed connectivity to residents, so a group of neighbors banded together and created their own internet cooperative. Big providers love making their jobs sound so complicated that nobody else could do it, but these people set up their own wireless network, and they still maintain it.

Of course, their service remains pretty rudimentary; the same can’t be said of Longmont, Colorado, a city 20 minutes from where I live in the opposite direction. There, the city-owned NextLight fiber network provides some of the fastest connectivity in the country for a reasonable price. In Longmont, all the surveillance and anti-neutrality stuff simply isn’t relevant.

“As a not-for-profit community-owned broadband provider, our loyalty is entirely to our customer-owners,” a spokesman recently told the local paper. “That will not change, regardless of what happens to the FCC regulations in question.”

Municipalities across the country, from Santa Monica to Chattanooga, have quietly created their own internet service providers – and for the most part residents love them, especially in comparison to the competition.

A major reason more towns haven’t followed suit is that the big telecoms companies have lobbied hard to discourage or outright ban community broadband, pressuring many states to enact legal barriers. It’s happening again in West Virginia. But the tide may be turning.

Consumer Reports has taken up a crusade against these restrictions. Colorado has one on the books, but jurisdictions can opt out by referendum. Following Longmont’s example, in the 2016 election, the citizens of 26 cities and countiesin the state opened the door to building internet service providers of their own.

Local government isn’t the only path for creating internet service accountable to its users. On the far western end of the state, an old energy cooperative called Delta Montrose Electric Association has created a new offering for its member-owners, Elevate Fiber. It delivers a remarkable 100 megabits per second – upload and download – to homes for $50 a month.

Electric co-ops once brought power to rural areas to people that investor-owned companies wouldn’t serve, and now they’re starting to do the same with broadband. The Obama-era FCC supported these efforts. Donald Trump has voiced support for rural broadband in general, but it remains to be seen whether that will mean subsidies for big corporations, whose existing customers despise them, or opportunities for communities to take control of the internet for themselves.

Whatever happens in Washington, we can start building an internet that respects our rights on the local level. What would be the best route for creating community broadband in your community?

In cities and towns, it’s probably through a municipal government, or even neighborhood mesh networks, which can swell across whole regions. Rural areas can piggyback on existing electric and telephone cooperatives, or start new co-ops from scratch.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is one of the best organizations tracking these options, and its Community Networks website is full of resources about who is doing what where, and why.

It turns out that many community-based internet providers actually oppose the form net neutrality has come to take. There are troubling reasons the idea is so vigorously supported by internet giants like Facebook and Google, who also have surveillance addictions of their own.

There is a genuine debate to be had. Entrapment by unpopular, unaccountable corporations doesn’t constitute one. Those of us who rely on regulations to protect us from our providers can’t afford to budge on letting those regulations go. But when our points of access are accountable to us, the debate about the future of the internet can get a lot more interesting.

  • This article was amended on 26 July 2017. A previous version incorrectly stated that a majority of Americans oppose net neutrality; in fact a majority supports it.

[Source:-theguardian]

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Education

What a Floormat Challenge Says About Education

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Boy coloring at table : Stock Photo

Yesterday I came face to face with a parenting failure of my own creation, illuminated by my desire for clean floormats. The encounter also highlighted the importance of a ‘new’ focus on education, so I thought I’d share.

I went to the carwash recently, and after vacuuming the floorboards, I decided to do the floormats at home so I could use the brush attachment on the shop vac to get the dog hair out. I tossed the floormats in the trunk (hatch actually, who has a trunk anymore?) and promptly forgot about them. Yesterday, my 16-year-old son asked if I had any chores that he could do for some extra money, and I remembered the floormats. I told him what I wanted to be done—clean them and put them back where they belong—and sent him to his task.

A few minutes later he showed up at the door to my office with a floormat in his hand.

“I can’t figure out where this goes.”

I turned around to look at him and I froze. A dozen thoughts and snarky comments flew through my head, including one of my standards, “I gagged down horse-pill sized prenatal vitamins for 10 months and I  get, ‘I can’t figure out where this goes’?????”  There are only four floormats in my car; two of them are identical and two are mirror opposites of each other… how hard can this be? Still stunned by the question, I continued to stare for what must have been a ‘long’ time because he finally said, “You’re not going to help me with this, are you?”

I decided to go with “I love you, honey. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

I’m a teacher and it’s summer, so I have a little time on my hands and this exchange with my only child was bothering me. My husband and I are both educators and my husband had a career in the military. We are both problem-solvers by nature and certainly assumed that we were raising a problem-solver, although I had another encounter him earlier this summer that should have been a warning to me. I won’t go into the details, but he was helping me with something in my classroom and I said, “Son, I’m going to need you to do a little better with the problem-solving…” (we live in the Deep South, so please hear me saying that with my accent in full force).

I’m stuck with this question plaguing me…how did this happen????

My concern is that this characteristic is not unique to my son – – – I see it all the time in my classroom and I’ve heard the same complaint from people in the ‘real’ world when they interact with young people. More than just another generation’s version of ‘kids these days’, this seems to be a specific and legitimate concern.

He shared that he’s had concerns about other generations of soldiers being pampered or unaccustomed to physically grueling training, but the current generation is the first that’s had trouble with the thinking part. He’s been interacting with the youth of America since the Korean War, and this is new.

I recently had the honor of dining with a group of US Army Special Forces veterans and one of them was entertaining us with tales from his work with current recruits. He commented that ‘these fellers are no good at solving problems’ (remember where I live) and this is a new frustration for him. He shared that he’s had concerns about other generations of soldiers being pampered or unaccustomed to physically grueling training, but the current generation is the first that’s had trouble with the thinking part. He’s been interacting with the youth of America since the Korean War, and this is new.

The business world is concerned too. In a May 2016 article in Forbes, 60% of managers revealed that they were concerned that their recently hired college graduates lack problem-solving and critical-thinking skills (Strauss, “These Are The Skills Bosses Say New College Grads Do Not Have”, Forbes, May 17, 2016.). Another article in Forbes cites the need for ‘agility’ in the workplace…the ability to overcome (Beaton, “Top Employers Say Millennials Need These Skills”, Forbes Jan. 9, 2017). If something doesn’t work, you have to take a step back and take a different approach, you have to think about why it didn’t work and figure out what might work…you can’t hold up the floormats and declare that you can’t figure it out. Let’s not even get started on the demands of entrepreneurship…

◊♦◊

There are probably lots of reasons why this happened, and just to exorcise that ghost, I’ll share my opinion about what those reasons are. These are digital natives…they have been immersed in technology since earliest childhood. They have literally had the world at their fingertips for most of their lives. There’s a YouTube to show you how to do anything you want to learn how to do, and finding answers isn’t hard. Then there’s the fact that they are the first victims of No Child Left Behind’s focus on standardized testing. Teachers don’t have time to spend a couple of days working on a hard problem (in any discipline) because they must get the kids ready for the test. We told you this would happen and it has. There’s no standardized test for problem-solving, critical thinking or perseverance, so teachers don’t get to teach those things anymore. Finally, consider the parenting trends for this generation. My generation of parents (and I am guilty) has pampered and coddled and helicoptered our kids into learned helplessness that’s hard to challenge.

There you have it…the ‘how did this happen’ is solved, but it was obviously not the right question.

The right question is, how do we fix this?

◊♦◊

The kids are different, the needs of the workplace are different, but the schools are largely the same. That’s where the next change needs to happen, and it needs to be deliberate. Students sitting in rows of desks that all face the front of the classroom so the students all have a good view of the teacher while she teaches so they can all write down what she says or copy if off the board…sound familiar? Some things NEED to be taught that way…most math past early middle school needs to be taught very directly and very deliberately, but other content lends itself to different approaches that allow room to develop the soft skills that our students desperately need.

There is a whole world of possible manifestations of the change that needs to happen, and it’s already happening (at different rates) all over the country. If you haven’t looked into trends in education lately, take a peek…look into ‘21st Century skills’, ‘partnering with digital natives’ and ‘learner profiles’; for a lighter view, check out ‘flexible seating’ and find out what Google Classroom can do in your local schools. If these things aren’t already happening in your local schools, go to the next school board meeting and find out why. Those floormats aren’t going to put themselves in the right spots.

[“Source-goodmenproject”]

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Education

What matters most to employees? Great workplaces or great career?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

The best workplaces excel in recognition. Photo: iStockphotoThe best workplaces excel in recognition. Photo: iStockphoto

Once upon a time, if you were fortunate to be born into the small middle class in India, your parents would force you to be a doctor or engineer. Many opted for civil services. If you were still left out, you would apply for a probationary officer’s post in a nationalised bank.

Else you were dead! Every family had a story of an educated unemployed cousin who missed the bus.

Post liberalisation in 1991, options increased. The newly formed IT and IT-enabled services (ITES) sector provided opportunity to the educated unemployed cousin who outpaced the doctor, engineer, probationary officer and the bureaucrat in terms of compensation and global exposure.

These IT/ITES professionals are all around us—in our housing society, at the mall, in the MBA institutes from where we recruit. This gives us the impression that this sector has created a huge number of jobs. While being a significant part of our GDP, and an even more significant part of our exports, the IT/ITES industry employs only about 2 million. By contrast, the direct employment in the textiles industry is 35 million.

The difference is that these 2 million are a part of the group that is reading this article—the Indian middle class. Contrary to popular notions, the Indian middle class, by global definition of wealth and income, is only about 2% of our population. So employment of 2 million out of the total 24 million middle class population (read Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report, 2015) is significant for the middle class.

Reality check. IT and ITES industries are going through manpower rationalisation. Banking and financial services will follow once the new players in the industry move beyond the start-up phase. Telecom is consolidating (read not adding jobs).

Readers of this publication are aware that jobs in the organised sector are not being generated fast and the percentage of our workforce working in the organised sector has stagnated at 8% for a very long time.

Given this context should the reader of this article be less worried about joining a great place to work and more worried about building a great professional career? What is the difference?

In the middle of 2015, The New York Times ran an elaborate article on Amazon’s work culture. The article claims that Amazon’s professional employees are well paid and work on world-changing projects, but are pushed to the breaking point in a survival-of-the-fittest climate where they tend to burn out and leave quickly.

Much before The New York Times article, the CEO and the HR head of Netflix created one of the most famous documents in human resources—the culture deck of Netflix, downloaded more than 13 million times since then. The following is an extract from this deck: “adequate performance gets a generous severance package”.

At first glance both Amazon and Netflix do not seem to be ones where one will spend a long time. Jeff Bezos built Amazon’s highly competitive environment on a concept he calls “Purposeful Darwinism”. Patty McCord, the HR head who was the co-author of the culture deck, was herself asked to move on in 2012 after serving Netflix for 14 years.

Yet, both these organisations get great talent to apply to them. In part, it is the inspiring purpose and the challenge they create for their business, and their unwillingness to settle. You may not last long here, but you would not have spent your time doing an “ordinary” job.

These organisations may not be a complete exception to the rule. With a third of the workforce in US being free agents, and the trend likely to be similar in India in the future, chances of being in one organisation for long periods of time is slim.

A key question for the reader is no longer which is a great place to work, but how to build a great career. Indeed, some organisations may not be great workplaces, but be great places to be from, from the point of view of your resume and your career!

Which company is good for me to join?

While the pre-liberalisation workforce was satisfied if they could find a job in any company at all, for a large section of middle class in India liberalisation increased the number of choices. This meant talented employees were no longer happy with just any workplace—they wanted to work with great workplaces.

A simple dictionary search of the word “great” reveals the following definition: “of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above average”. Great Place to Work® Institute defines a great place to work as one where employees trust the people they work for, take pride in what they do, and enjoy the company of people they work with.

Why should organisations invest time creating a great place to work? Apart from attracting great talent, is there any other advantage in creating a great workplace? Repeated studies over the years have confirmed that a great place to work is not just great for people, it is also great for business.

It is no fluke that recognised great places to work have consistently provided three times the shareholder returns and have significantly higher PBDIT (profit before depreciation, interest and taxes) percentages than the remaining, which is “considerably above average”.

It is fairly settled in research done by us and others—high trust cultures lead to sustained business results.

While this was the profit side of the story, what is it that a great workplace will provide to its people that will be considerably above average?

Recent studies by Great Place to Work® Institute have shown that about 74% of the workforce in great workplaces report a positive experience on matters of fair pay (not necessarily the highest pay package on paper), profit share, benefits, fair promotions and people avoiding politicking in the workplace, as against 58% in others.

A case in point is InMobi, where on discovering that the quarterly variable pay system was not differentiating high performers from the rest, they decided to do away with variable pay and added that component to their fixed pay.

The result? Workers could work more efficiently, take risks and not be worried about safe targets that would have helped them earn their quarterly bonus.

Hence, it may be worthwhile to ask the question—is it possible to have a great professional career and work in a great place to work at the same time?

The answer is yes!

What matters most to employees?

Contrary to popular notions, “best practices” alone do not explain the difference between the great workplaces and the rest. The ability of leaders and managers to walk the talk, show demonstrated caring and take sincere interest in their employees (and not just treat them as a resource) is what set the best workplaces apart from the rest.

Gemba is the Japanese term to describe the place where the real action happens and actual value is added.

Leaders at SAP Labs practise “Go Gemba” by visiting employees at their workstations and directly witnessing the work done at the heart of the organisation. Short sessions of 15-30 minutes are dedicated to each team, where members share demos of ongoing projects, showcase their work, and discuss their opportunities and challenges in day-to-day work with the senior leaders. The discussion is kept direct and presentation-free, where managers are not required to share updates on behalf of their teams.

Leaders at great workplaces understand and value the contribution of front-line and on-floor colleagues, and hence go the extra mile to listen to, thank and motivate them.

The best workplaces are fanatical about communication.

The Scooter Store, one of America’s largest suppliers of power wheelchairs and scooters, fosters transparency and honest communication through their programme—the Rumor Game. The president/CEO plays the Rumor Game during company rallies, where they allow any employee-owner to address any rumour that he or she might have heard and would like to know whether it’s truth or fiction.

With gifts in hand from the company store, leaders eagerly wait for the first employee-owner to stand up and seek clarification on a perceived rumour. By opening the floor to such straightforward, candid interactions, leaders at great workplaces successfully build a culture of honesty and trustworthiness.

Every year in India we survey 600-800 organisations. Some of the key drivers of employee engagement are pride in being a part of the organisation, career and growth prospects, and fair performance appraisal.

More than an annual activity, performance management is a continuous process of planning and reviewing individual contribution and ensuring achievement of goals.

The philosophy at Teleperformance is that targets are best achieved when there is a pull versus push factor. With this principle in mind, Teleperformance India developed a visible scorecard methodology that creates an environment of positive competition. The targets and performance achievements are visible in real-time and shared daily. Employees also know what they are expected to achieve and where they stand in comparison.

The best workplaces excel in recognition.

Job promotion is a milestone in one’s career and like any other achievement, it is best celebrated with family and loved ones first. Gabriel India came up with a heart-warming practice of announcing staff promotions by first congratulating the employee’s parents or spouse and emphasizing on the accomplishments and extraordinary efforts of the concerned employee that year. The family is then asked to surprise the employee with the news, making the announcement a very special memory for the employee.

While there are many extrinsic motivation tools, internal online portals are being used by numerous organisations today to recognise and appreciate colleagues.

Marico, for instance, has gone one step further and built a holistic recognition forum called “Maricognize”. Apart from the usual features and appreciation categories, employees have an additional option called “Make Your Own Award” where they can suggest recognitions currently not being catered to. Many such categories have been created and have gained huge popularity. Some rewards also have reward points allocated which can be redeemed later.

Seventy per cent of the members (Marico uses the term “member” for employees) received at least one recognition and have been appreciated 1.5 times on an average.

Underlying many of the above practices is a fundamental principle that leaders and managers of the best workplaces have internalised. They treat employees with the same respect they give their customers.

As an illustration, the main goal for in-person interviews at Hyatt is to ensure that candidates experience the same level of comfort and hospitality provided to guests. When candidates arrive at the property, they are welcomed and personally escorted to the human resources department. In case they arrive early, they are also offered refreshments.

This practice reinforces Hyatt’s promise of a superior guest service and establishes the right expectations from a prospective employee. Even if applicants do not end up joining, they would still talk positively about Hyatt and become brand ambassadors in the process.

What are the best workplaces looking for in the talent they recruit?

Traditionally, organisations have looked at competencies such as domain knowledge, professionalism, high ethical standards, flexibility to cope with different business situations, adaptability, result-orientation and execution ability in people they recruit.

The best workplaces largely hire for attitude and fit with culture (and train for skills). In addition to the competencies mentioned above, the best workplaces expect their people to quickly understand the global business environment, be partners in co-creating future businesses, display creativity and innovation and have maturity and emotional intelligence.

Managing one’s physical and psychological health is increasingly becoming a key prerequisite in a fast-changing workplace. gCalm, for instance, is a new online, interactive portal to help Googlers manage stress. Users learn about the science of stress, hear from other Googlers across all functions about how they manage their stress, and learn quick, in-the-moment tools called “stress-busters” to help them manage their personal stress to build resilience.

Hyderabad is one of the 38 Google locations where this programme is live and 93% of attendees report positive effects.

Does creating a Great workplace require the same effort for all organisations?

The answer is no. Our research shows that socio-economic demographics play an important part in determining the expectation levels of employees. For a similar experience in an organisation, an employee with lower expectations will be more engaged. This is the reason why some industries like IT, ITES and telecom will need more good practices than industries like microfinance, retail or manufacturing to achieve the same level of employee engagement.

Contrary to what many claim, the differences in employee engagement have less to do with age and artificial categories like GenY and millennials, and more to do with demographic differences. In fact, educational qualifications, place of origin, time taken to reach office—there are numerous variables which have an impact on engagement of employees, factors over which organisations have no control.

So why are young people less happy in some organisations?

Great Place to Work® surveys more organisations in India than any other research and consulting firm. Research shows that engagement levels of younger workforces is lower than those of older workforces. However, statistical analysis of survey data shows the key drivers of employee perceptions of a workplace do not vary from age group to age group.

For example, sense of pride, career and growth opportunities, fair performance appraisal and family or team feeling is important to all age categories, not just to Generation Y or millennials.

Cross-tabulation of age data with tenure establishes that age is not the key variable to study differences in engagement levels—tenure is more significant. Our research shows that at the time of joining, younger employees do not join with lower perceptions about the organisation. Perceptions of employees fall after the first six months in the organisation and starts increasing only after five years in the organisation.

Employees with lower tenure have had a lower opportunity to integrate and establish themselves in the organisation.

Isn’t the manager the biggest reason why people leave?

Many studies routinely identify the manager as the biggest driver of engagement and disengagement. This concept is now more than 20 years old. Consultants and engagement specialists continue to reinforce this belief.

Is this the complete truth or is it a self-perpetuating myth? Is this strong belief as relevant today as it was twenty years back?

Twenty years ago, the manager had real power over people, simply because not many jobs were available. Today’s employees, particularly millennials, have more options.

If they can switch jobs easily without the manager having any power to stop them, what would they gain by giving the manager absolute power over their engagement? What will happen if from day one employees are told that only they can drive their own engagement, managers and others can support the process (or be a roadblock at times)?

The notion that employees are at the mercy of managers seems to be one of those self-perpetuating beliefs that we should question. Most such beliefs are based on assumptions that are not questioned, leading to actions based on prejudice, which reinforces the same assumption.

To break this mindset, CitiusTech has developed a wonderful practice known as My Job My Choice. Through this initiative, young employees can share their desired job profile in the short term (three years) and their mobility preference, if any, using an online portal opened for 30 days every year. This helps leaders learn and discuss the career aspirations of employees and offer a role change based on their preferences whenever positions open internally.

Employees develop a greater faith in the organisation’s ability and willingness to align individual needs with organisational objectives, while the organisation is better equipped to retain and develop employees by being aware of their desires, creating a win-win for all. The manager is not the gatekeeper.

It is in the interest of employees to take charge of their careers and not jump ship every time they encounter a manager who is not supportive.

Studies show a clear correlation between engagement and productivity, quality and creativity. If it is so important to my career, why would I sit back and wait for my boss to engage me? What if she is herself disengaged and waiting for her boss to engage her? Where does this chain stop?

If I were a young person starting my career today, I would keep in mind the following principles:

1. My professional career can only be built by me. A great place to work is a logical first choice for anyone. Since great professional experience and exposure is critical for my future, a great place to be from is my second choice if I do not work in a great workplace.

2. Ability to learn is more important than competence in any one area.

3. The biggest driver of my engagement is me, not my manager (or mom or dad!).

4. My relationship with my manager is a relationship of mutual dependence between two adults, both of whom are not perfect. My manager is not an encyclopaedia of knowledge with infinite time and extra-sensory perception. Neither am I. My manager’s intentions might be good, but actions may not match intentions. Just like me. In short, for the clear majority of people the manager is not evil. If you empathise with your boss, his or her default reaction will be to empathise with you.

For organisations that want to attract and retain the best talent the message is clear. Start treating your people the way you treat your customers. Use every opportunity to build trust, start by walking the talk. Manage expectations and understand socio-economic demographics of your people, since that will impact their engagement.
[“Source-ndtv”]

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Education

Coaching Centres Are To Education What Doping Is To Sports

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

The question of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports can be seen in more than one way. Indeed, if doping can really enhance the performance of an aspiring Olympian and if she consumes it willingly, why should it be prohibited? We would enjoy a much longer game of football with sturdy players, clap even louder at wrestlers having hulk fights, and cheer even more enthusiastically for our gymnasts making perfect landings on one leg. The Olympic Committee will earn higher revenues with increased interest in super-natural sports, and they will save enormous resources on anti-doping tests. No member nation will be outraged at the disqualification of its athletes. This happy story is a good fit in the era of neoliberalism.

Yet, it’s probably not music to your ears. The proposal despite its merits causes a sense of moral revulsion. A possibility of letting people use something that can be bought by the highest bidder in a level playing field gives us a sense of injustice. We want to become a market economy, but not a market society. We do not want excellence to be up for sale. When it is a contest of performance, we wish to see organic results, not those manipulated by substances. We wish to be human as much as we want a better show.

Your competency in test-taking is a commodity that can be easily bought. There cannot be a larger racket of drug suppliers than the coaching industry…

In other words, we want an unadulterated meritocracy. Our awareness of the many existing natural and constructed inequalities is no justification for further commercialising success.

Let me now move away from our Olympic race to the race of higher education in India. Both are very indispensable events in the lives of their participants; for most they are the passports to security and happiness in life. Yet, the debate about meritocracy in higher education is mostly confined to the reservation quotas. The discourse about the fairness of the standard entry criteria for all communities is missing. The language of regulators, institutions and students almost presumes that our selection process is very meritocratic and those like the economically and socially backward groups need affirmative action because they lack something. Never have we doubted our knowledge of what constitutes the pre-requisite knowledge to enter institutions and haven’t questioned the hegemony of a process that may well be rigged.

Rigged, not for the many question paper leaks, but in being what they are—standardised multiple choice tests. Used by almost all colleges and universities in the country, entrance tests have become the holy cow of the Indian education system. It is unquestioningly believed that in order to score high on them, hard work has no substitute and only perseverance helps in “making the cut.” This myth of meritocracy is sustained by the low and middle income families who see entrance tests as their ladder to economic mobility. And in our desperation to seek legitimacy through them, we forget to put the tests to test.

In the context of SAT, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants argues that standardised tests—while they claim to be a measurement of a psychical property of the brain, analogous to taking a blood sample—are actually rather like the heart rate, a vital sign that could be altered through the right exercises. This is why the coaching industry thrives—because JEE, NEET, CLAT and others are tests of the art of testing, and quite different from conceptual training.

Coaching centres can help students get entry to elite institutions (the gold medal, so to speak), but the cost is sacrificing three to four years of their teenage years.

FITJEE, Bansal’s, Career Launcher, Akash et al are very similar to the drugs we talked about for the Olympics. Their use is legal, yes, but it is still a proven method to enhance one’s performance. You may not have any aptitude for the subject, but by dosing yourself on the steroids— learning the right tricks and tools—you can fool the test to be ranked higher than others more qualified than you. Your competency in test-taking is a commodity that can be easily bought. There cannot be a larger racket of drug suppliers than the coaching industry, with its epicentre in Kota.

To say such assessments are meritocratic is an insult to the word. Something as irrelevant as your gender and race can dull your performance. Steele and Aronson in 1995 demonstrated how “stereotype threat” has an evidential negative effect on academic performance. It is not because females have a lower intellectual capacity than males that they are less represented in in premier institutions but for every time that they sit to give JEE or any other exam, the dominant notion of women being bad at maths hinders their achievement.

It is not just for the manipulative results that we vilify use of drugs but the many destructive consequences they can have on the health of participants. Between the Goldman Dilemma of trading an Olympic Gold Medal for their death in five years time with the use of highly effective drugs, we seem to have made a choice. Coaching centres can help students get entry to elite institutions ( the gold medal, so to speak), but the cost of the ticket is sacrificing three to four years of their teenage years. And in many cases, it is also the loss of lifelong love for learning. Marking the right answers becomes more important than gaining the right knowledge.

Democracy must provide a diversity of personalised ways to learn, just as consumerism provides for 150 different brands of toothpaste.

When one makes a decision to bear the heavy costs anyway, the burden to succeed crushes any possibility of failure. When you know a drug will damage your kidneys and you still take it, it becomes very imperative for you to win the medal. When your parents spend much more than their financial capacity on your coaching, you cannot afford to disappoint. If due to the be-all format of the test and real deficiency of alternatives, you do not make it—the guilt could even take your life.

The agony is that the government does not wish to acknowledge how standardised tests are a broken instrument of selection. It, instead, works to exacerbate the dehumanising process by itself opening coaching centres for Adivasis and launching exclusive tablet mentoring schemes for girls. The government is a helpless party to the coaching industry itself. In fact, it keeps creating new opportunities for dope manufacturers by establishing new institutions with identical objectives, structures and admission tests.

Kamla Bhasin, the vociferous feminist, has famously asked, “Why do you place your community’s honour in a woman’s vagina?” The question remains true for education too, why do we place our intellectual reputation in unimportant institutions? Why do we not treat formal education like just another our milestone of our life’s journey? Why do we make colleges or universities central to our lives? We could flourish just as well without that medal and succeed in so many other ways. Perhaps in many cases, we do not even need to attend a higher learning institution at all. Democracy must provide a diversity of personalised ways to learn, just as consumerism provides for 150 different brands of toothpaste.

[“Source-ndtv”]

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Internet

What do Indians do on the internet?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Commuters watch videos on their mobile phones as they travel in a suburban train in Mumbai, India, April 2, 2016. With smartphone sales booming and India preparing for nationwide 4G Internet access, India's film and TV industry hopes the ease of tapping your phone for the latest release will generate profits at last, overcoming the problems of woefully few cinemas and rampant piracy. Picture taken April 2, 2016.

Exploring the world wide web. (Reuters/Shailesh Andrade)

Internet-savvy Indians are hooked to Google, Facebook, and Amazon, a report released by media management company GroupM says. An average Indian with internet access spends over 200 minutes monthly on search engine Google, the report says.

Titled Interaction 2017, the report is based on a survey of digital advertising growth forecasts in 46 markets, tracking technology developments, media trends, and consumer behavior.

Here are the top websites where Indians spend the most time. However, it is unclear what they were looking for on Google.

On average, India’s internet users spent 1.41 hours online daily in 2016. In China, the number was almost double at 3.38 hours; in the US it was 3.57 hours.

India remains an attractive market for new-age internet companies

On average, India’s internet users spent 1.41 hours online daily in 2016. In China, the number was almost double at 3.38 hours; in the US it was 3.57 hours.

India remains an attractive market for new-age internet companies waiting to exploit its large digitally connected population. After all, in 2017, some 450 million Indians are expected to be online. The country is also home to the world’s second-largest smartphone user population.

Yet, the market is riddled with challenges as internet connectivity remains poor. A bulk of India’s netizens still use less than half-a-GB of data per month, the report said.

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Online Marketing

What Is Online Marketing? The Definitive Guide To Internet Visibility

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

What Is Online Marketing?

Today, with nearly half the world’s population wired to the internet, the ever-increasing connectivity has created global shifts in strategic thinking and positioning, disrupting industry after industry, sector after sector. Seemingly, with each passing day, some new technological tool emerges that revolutionizes our lives, further deepening and embedding our dependence on the world wide web.

And why not? Human beings have always enthralled themselves into one pursuit after another, all with a means to an end of improving our lives. Clearly, the conveniences afforded by the internet are quite literally earth-shattering to say the least. Three decades ago, few could have ever imagined the present state of our on-demand-everything society, with the ability to instantly communicate and conduct business in real-time, at a pace that often seems dizzying at the best of times.

However, with all of these so-called modern conveniences to life, where technology’s ever-pervading presence has improved even the most basic tasks for us such as hailing a ride or ordering food or conducting any sort of commerce instantly and efficiently, many are left in the dark. While all of us have become self-professed experts at consuming content and utilizing a variety of tools freely available to search and seek out information, we’re effectively drowning in a sea of digital overload.

The truth? Today, rising above the noise and achieving any semblance of visibility has become a monumental undertaking. While we might prevail at searching, we fail at being found. How are we supposed to get notice while swimming in a sea of misinformation and disinformation? We’ve become immersed in this guru gauntlet where one expert after another is attempting to teach us how we can get the proverbial word out about our businesses and achieve visibility to drive more leads and sales, but we all still seem to be lost.

It’s clear that online marketing is no simple task. And the reason why we’ve landed in this world of “expert” internet marketers who are constantly cheerleading their offers to help us reach visibility and penetrate the masses is because of the layer of obscurity that’s been afforded to us in part thanks to one key player: Google. Google’s shrouded algorithms that cloud over 200+ ranking factors in a simple and easy-to-use interface has confounded businesses for well over a decade now.

Understanding Online Marketing

Google’s core algorithms and its propensity to shroud its data in layers of obscurity is not something new. However, it is critical to any understanding of marketing on the internet simply because this visibility is at the heart of everything else that you do. Forget about social media and other forms of marketing for the time being. Search engine optimization (SEO) offers up the proverbial key to near-limitless amounts of traffic on the web.

The better you learn and understand SEO and the more strides you take to learn this seemingly confusing and complex discipline, the more likely you’ll be to appear organically in search results. And let’s face it, organic search is important to marketing online. Considering that most people don’t have massive advertising budgets and don’t know the first thing about lead magnets, squeeze pages and sales funnels, appearing visible is critical towards long-term success.

When traffic is coming to your website or blog, nearly unfettered, it gives you the opportunity to test out a variety of marketing initiatives. However, without that traffic, you’re forced to spend money on costly ads before really determining the effectiveness of your offers and uncovering your cost-per acquisition (CPA), two things which are at the core of scaling out any business online.

I liken this to a paradoxical Catch-22 scenario, because it seems like without one you can’t have the other. It takes money to drive traffic, but it takes traffic to make money. So don’t make the mistake that millions of other online marketers make around the world. Before you attempt to scale or send any semblance of traffic to your offers, be sure to split-test things to oblivion and determine your conversion rates before diving in headfirst.

Gaining Google’s Trust

The biggest problem that most people have when trying to learn anything to do with driving more traffic to their website or boosting their visibility across a variety of online mediums, is that they try to do the least amount of work for the greatest return. They cut corners and they take shortcuts. Because of that, they fail. Today, if you’re serious about marketing anything on the web, you have to gain Google’s trust.

Gaining Google’s trust doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. Think about building up your relationship with anyone. The longer you know that person, the more likely that trust will solidify. So, the reasoning is, that if Google just met you, it’s going to have a hard time trusting you. If you want Google to trust you, you have to get other people that Google already trusts, to vouch for you. This is also known as link-building.

But I’m not talking about any kind of link building. I’m talking about organic link building by getting out there and creating insatiable “anchor content” on your website, then linking to that content with equally-great content that’s created on authority sites like Medium, Quora, LinkedIn and other publishing platforms. It’s not easy by any measure. Google is far more wary of newcomers these days than it once used to be.

However, if you’re going to understand online marketing, you have to understand the importance of building Google’s trust. There are three core components involved here. These three core components are like the pillars of trust that comprise all of Google’s 200+ ranking factor rules. Each of those rules can be categorized and cataloged into one of these three pillars of trust. If you want to rank on the first page or in the first spot, you need to focus on all three, and not just one or two out of three.

Trust Component #1: Indexed Age

The first component of Google’s trust has to do with age. Age is more than a number. But it’s not just the age when you first registered your website. The indexed age has to do with two factors: i) the date that Google originally found your website, and; ii) what happened between the time that Google found your website and the present moment in time.

Just think about any relationship for a moment. How long you’ve known a person is incredibly important. It’s not the be-all-end-all, but it is fundamental to trust. If you’ve known someone for years and years and other people that you know who you already trust can vouch for that person, then you’re far more likely to trust them, right? But if you’ve just met someone, and haven’t really vetted them so to speak, how can you possibly trust them?

Trust Component #2: Authority

What’s the authority of your website or webpage, or any other page on the internet for that matter where you’re attempting to gain visibility? Authority is an important component of trust, and it relies heavily on quality links coming from websites that Google already trusts. Authority largely relates to the off-page optimization discipline of SEO that occurs away from the webpage as opposed to the on-page optimization that occurs directly on the webpage.

For example, what are the quality and quantity of the links that have been created over time? Are they natural and organic links stemming from relevant and high quality content, or are they spammy links, unnatural links or coming from bad link neighborhoods? Are all the links coming from the same few websites over time or is there a healthy amount of global IP diversification in the links?

Trust Component #3: Content

Content is king. It always has been and it always will be. Creating insightful, engaging and unique content should be at the heart of any online marketing strategy. Too often, people simply don’t obey this rule. The problem? This takes an extraordinary amount of work. However, anyone that tells you that content isn’t important, is not being fully transparent with you. You cannot excel in marketing anything on the internet without having quality content.

Quality content is more likely to get shared. By staying away from creating “thin” content and focusing more on content that cites sources, is lengthy and it reaches unique insights, you’ll be able to gain Google’s trust over time. Remember, this happens as a component of time. Google knows you can’t just go out there and create massive amounts of content in a few days. If you try to spin content or duplicate it in any fashion, you’ll suffer a Google penalty and your visibility will be stifled.

An Overarching View Of Marketing On The Web

Okay, if you’re still with me, fantastic. You’re one of the few that doesn’t mind wading through a little bit of hopeless murkiness to reemerge on the shores of hope. But before we jump too far ahead, it’s important to understand what online marketing is and what it isn’t. That definition provides a core understanding of what it takes to peddle anything on the web, whether it’s a product, service or information.

When we talk about marketing on the internet, we’re talking about driving traffic or boosting visibility via a number of means. Any type of advertising done on the internet to promote any product, person, service, business or place for that matter, can be deemed as online marketing. However, to succeed in this arena, whether it’s SEO, social media, email marketing or beyond, you need to ensure you adhere to the three pillars of trust first and foremost.

Types Of Online Marketing

There are ten essential types of marketing that can be done online. Some of these can be broken down into organic marketing and others can be categorized as paid marketing. Organic, of course, is the allure of marketing professionals from around the planet. It’s free and its unencumbered traffic that simply keeps coming. Paid marketing, on the other hand, is still a very attractive proposition as long as the marketing pays for itself by having the right type of offer that converts.

#1 — Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO should be a core tactic in any marketing strategy. While it might seem difficult to understand at first, as long as you find the right course, book or audiobook, and devote your time to learning, you’ll be in good shape. Considering that there are over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s current algorithms, learning, digesting and successfully implementing good SEO tactics is essential to the success of your website or blog.

  • Pay attention to the often-overlooked on-page optimization elements such as your page speed, which can be determined by using tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom and Google’s own Page Speed Insights.
  • Leverage Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Projects (AMP) specification to ensure that you appear relevantly on mobile searches using this new lightning-fast loading spec.
  • Utilized Google’s Webmaster Tools for suggestions on fine-tuning your site’s structured data, rich cards, and other HTML improvements such as discovering duplicate title and meta tags, and so on.
  • Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and ensure that your content and your overall SEO strategies are in harmony with what the search giant is looking for.
  • Always build high quality, relevant content that’s unique, insightful and engaging, paving the way for a higher likelihood of visitors sharing that content organically and naturally.

#2 — Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Organic SEO’s flip-side offers up a paid method for marketing on search engines like Google. SEM provides an avenue for displaying ads through networks such as Google’s Adwords and other paid search platforms that exist across the web throughout social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and even video sites like YouTube, which, invariably, is the world’s second largest search engine.

By utilizing SEM, it provides you with a great avenue for getting the word out quickly and effectively. If you have the budget, then marketing on search engines for competitive keywords might be the right fit for you. But be prepared to pony up. Keywords can range anywhere from a few cents to upwards of $50 and more. The quality score for any term is reflective of what you can expect to pay for bidding on that keyword. The lower the competition, the lower the quality score and the lower the price.

However, SEM doesn’t just cover paying for clicks, but also paying for impressions. That means, for example, that every 1000 times your ad is displayed, you pay a pre-arranged amount, regardless of whether anyone clicked on it or not. While this is a less popular form of advertising, it still exists today on some platforms.

#3 — Social Media Marketing

One of the hottest forms of marketing anything online right now is through social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, amongst others. Social media provides a near-direct avenue for reaching the masses, but it most certainly isn’t a simple or easy thing to achieve saturation, especially when we’re talking about millions of followers.

In a number of recent articles, where I’ve interviewed some of social media’s rising stars such as Jason Stone from Millionaire Mentor, Sean Perelstein, who built StingHD into a global brand and Nathan Chan from Foundr Magazine, amongst several others, it’s quite clear that multi-million-dollar businesses can be built on the backs of wildly-popular social media channels and platforms.

However, getting that saturation is a frustrating process. Obviously, it doesn’t happen overnight. Based on my conversations with numerous rising stars in social media, there are a few things that should be done when it comes to gaining attention through a variety of social media channels.

  • Find your voice: decide what your message is going to be and stick to it. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Make a decision and stay committed to it. Whether it’s a topic, idea, niche, business or something else, do your best not to waver.
  • Be real and be yourself: people can see through those that try to put up a front on social media channels. Don’t try to be something that you’re not. Be real and be yourself. It will resonate with people.
  • Deliver value no matter what: Regardless of who you are and what you’re trying to promote, always deliver value, first and foremost. Go out of your way to help others by carefully curating information that will assist them in their journey. The more you focus on delivering value, the quicker you’ll reach that proverbial tipping point when it comes to exploding your fans or followers.
  • Constantly engage with others: many of the social media superstars I’ve spoken to have said that, in the beginning, they followed the popular profiles and constantly commented, shared and engaged with others. Not just on their own profiles, but by directly commenting on photos and engaging in conversations on other feeds.

If you’re serious about finding your voice and discovering the secrets to success in business, one of the best people to follow is Gary Vanyerchuck, CEO of Vayner Media, and early-stage invest in Twitter, Uber and Facebook, has arbitraged his way into the most popular social media platforms and built up massive followings and often spills out the secrets to success in a highly motivating and inspiring way.

 

#4 — Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

PPC advertising is a method of advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. As mentioned earlier, with PPC ads, you pay each time that ad is clicked on. PPC ads also exist on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook as well. However, if you’re going to engage in PPC advertising, it’s important that you determine conversion rates by using tracking pixels.

By using the Facebook tracking pixel or the Adwords pixel, you can help to define your audience and work to entice them to come back to your site. Let’s say the didn’t finish their purchase or they simply showed up and left after adding something to their shopping cart, or they filled out a lead form and disappeared, you can re-target those individuals.

Re-targeting is one of the most effective ways to market your business online, because you’re marketing to “warm” traffic, or people who’ve already visited your site. If you’ve ever gone to a website and then seen those ads following you around the internet, then you’re well aware of what re-targeting is.

When running PPC ads, it’s important that you keep careful track of the specific ads and keywords that you’re targeting. You can do this by using the Google Analytics UTM builder to create campaign URLs that you can use to track the campaign source, the medium and any keywords or terms that you might be targeting. This way, you can determine the effectiveness of any campaign that you run and figure out the precise conversion rate.

#5 — Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the art of marketing products, services or information for others. It doesn’t require that you ever house or warehouse a single thing. But it does require that you have an audience to market those things to online. Without that audience, whether it’s through search engines like Google or social media channels like Facebook, you’ll find a difficult time with affiliate marketing.

However, if you are seasoned online marketer, and you’ve built a substantial following, then marketing as an affiliate might be the right fit. Jason Stone from Millionaire Mentor has built a seven-figure business with affiliate marketing, while David Sharpe from Legendary Marketer has built up an eight-figure business by creating an army of affiliates that market products in collaboration with his team.

There are numerous repositories to source affiliate products and services from. However, some of the biggest are sites like Clickbank, Commission Junction, LinkShare and JVZoo. You’ll need to go through an application process, for the most part, to get approved to sell certain products, services or digital information products. Once approved, be prepared to hustle.

#6 — Email Marketing

For those that are not in the know, email marketing is a substantial money generator. In fact, email marketing can far outstrip standard website sales because, at least for unknown brands or websites that are not household names, clinching a sale on the first interaction often doesn’t happen.

That’s why seasoned online marketers build squeeze pages with lead magnets, webinars and sales funnels to drip-deliver value and build a close personal relationship with their email subscribers, effectively moving them up a value chain to sell them high-ticket products and services.

If you have a website or a blog, be sure that you create a lead magnet or give something else of value away for free such as a trial software to a SaaS system or anything else for that matter that people could get value out of. Exchange your free offer for the email address and drop them into your sales funnel.

Use an email marketing system like InfusionSoft, ConvertKit or MailChimp, amongst others, to drip-feed value to those subscribers while also working to move them up your value chain. Russell Bruson does a great job of explaining sales funnels and marketing virtually anything on the internet is his best-selling book, Dot Com Secrets.

#7 — Influencer Marketing

Using influencers to market your products or services is a great way to quickly saturate yourself into the marketplace, no matter what you’re peddling. However, finding the right influencer at the right price is the hard part. You don’t necessarily have to go to the top-tier influencers; you can also opt for micro-influencers (those that have 10,000 to 100,000 followers or fans).

Some influencers charge a hefty sum for a simple post on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. You can expect to pay upwards of a million dollars and more for some of the top-tier influencers. If you’re looking for mid-level influencers, you’ll likely get away with paying roughly a couple hundred-thousand dollars and up.

The really important part of influencer marketing is to find influencers that are in your niche. Be sure that they represent your target demographic audience before deciding to part ways with your hard-earned cash. It can get incredibly costly, but it can also bring you instant attention and business.

#8 — Blogging

Blogging is one of the best forms of marketing online. It’s free and it gives you a platform to build a massive audience as long as you don’t give up. While starting a blog is relatively easy, actually following through and growing the blog is nothing short of downright frustrating and seemingly impossible.

However, some of the world’s top-earning blogs gross millions of dollars per month on autopilot. It’s a great source of passive income and if you know what you’re doing, you could earn a substantial living from it. You don’t need millions of visitors per month to rake in the cash, but you do need to connect with your audience and have clarity in your voice.

#9 — Video Marketing

Video marketing is a great avenue for exposure on the internet, and utilizing a platform like YouTube to deliver value in the form of tutorials and other useful information such as courses or entertainment is a great way to grow your brand and build a presence.

While there are several platforms for doing this, clearly YouTube is the most popular for doing this. However, video marketing is also a great form of both content marketing and SEO on its own. It can help to provide visibility for several different ventures, and if the video is valuable enough in its message and content, it will be shared and liked by droves, pushing up the authority of that video through the roof.

#10 — Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of my favorite go-to strategies when it comes to marketing on the web. It’s my favorite because it’s one of the most powerful, free and organic methods that are available for online marketers no matter where they’re from. However, marketing content is difficult. So be prepared to put in the sweat equity.

My favorite style in this is article marketing. You create anchor content on your website or blog, then you build authority-content links to that content, effectively driving up the visibility. I’ve used this single strategy to rank hundreds of keywords in the #1 spot on Google, and I would highly recommend that if you’re going to learn any marketing strategy, that you get really good at this one.

The type of content you can market is wide open. Aside from articles, you can use infographics, tutorials, ebooks and many other forms of content marketing. As long as it’s done the right way, and it isn’t intentionally setup to trick or fool search engines, but rather to add value to human beings, you’ll see immense results from this.

R.L. Adams is a software engineer, serial entrepreneur, and author. He runs a wildly-popular blog called Wanderlust Worker and contributes to Entrepreneur, Engadget and the Huffington Post.

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Education

What education policies should the parties put in their election manifestos

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Protestors during a demonstration, United for Education, along Pall Mall in London, over access and quality of higher education.

Ross Sargent, parent and governor, early years centre, Cambridgeshire

All the evidence suggests the more funding the better at the early years stages, and that represents the greatest return on investment. So the first thing has to be a promise not to cut in early years. I would love to see the people who are genuinely experts in education in charge of what goes into our kids’ education – it doesn’t feel that way now – and the focus placed on the importance of teachers so they have the time to plan properly.

Alex Pearson, assistant head, the Homerton Early Years Centre, Cambridge

The main thing for us is to be given a longer guarantee for being kept open. We were given three years or the life of the government. The life of the government is now rather short so we hope it’s longer than that. But we would also like the guarantee of survival beyond 2020 so we can plan. We want some kind of commitment that early years education is valued and that there will be funding for it.

Then, maintaining teachers at foundation stage, both in nurseries and reception classes, so the emphasis is firmly placed on education and not just on care; a decent level of funding to support the delivery of 30 hours of childcare, so that it is workable for all; and funding for Sure Start and children’s centres to offer early intervention.

Also, valuing a play-based early years curriculum and doing what other countries do, which isn’t children jumping in at four and learning to read and write.

Martin Clutterbuck, head, Coombe Hill junior school, Kingston

Mark Clutterbuck

I am looking for the party that will address our recruitment and retention crisis, build more key worker housing, provide mortgage support – and make it possible for teachers to remain in the schools and areas they love, in communities that need them.

I would like to see a promise to fund schools properly, reversing the increase in employers’ contributions to the teachers’ pension scheme and national insurance. We need a government that will relieve schools of the responsibility of unfunded pay rises and remove the anomaly that means local authority schools have to pay an apprenticeship levy when many academies do not. We need a fair funding strategy that restores the budgets to 2012 levels and does not just redistribute the same diminishing pot from one needy area to another.

And I would vote for a party that puts creativity and the arts in the centre of the primary curriculum alongside science, languages and our core curriculum.

Vic Goddard, head, Passmores academy, Essex

Vic Goddard

There are only three things that need to be firm commitments by all parties. No 1: we need crystal clear pledges that the government will invest in ensuring there is an adequate supply of suitably trained teachers in front of our students. This will need a re-engagement with higher education to create the additional teachers required.

No 2: our young people deserve environments to study in that are warm, safe and help the learning process. The state of school buildings needs to be honestly audited and the capital costs factored in to ensure this basic entitlement is met.

No 3: we cannot achieve what any government, parent or young person wishes without being adequately funded. Any government needs to accept that expecting schools to continue to raise standards with less and less resources is impossible. Education has to be seen as an investment not a burden.

Keziah Featherstone, head, Bridge Learning Campus, Bristol

Keziah Featherstone

Every party should be prioritising teacher recruitment and retention. The government has missed its targets for training new teachers for several years. That, plus the relentless changes introduced to the curriculum, testing, and new GCSEs has led to a situation where heads are struggling to retain staff. We have more students than ever before, with more complex issues and a lot less money.

We urgently need a strategic policy to attract and retain high quality graduates into teaching – and there are far fewer graduates prepared to take on yet more debt by training for another year. I think the state needs to train state teachers. We need a fully diverse and representative cohort of professionals for children to look up to and be inspired by.

Madeleine Holt, founder, Meet the Parents, lobbying people to support local state schools

Madeleine Holt

I would like to see a political party put forward an overarching vision for an education system that’s fit for the 21st century. I don’t think any party has offered this kind of big thinking since 1997 and the mantra from Tony Blair of “education, education, education”.

Here is my wish list: a commitment to proper funding and to working towards a fully comprehensive education system because the most successful systems internationally have no selection; an end to rigidly linking test and exam scores to school accountability because it is turning schools into joyless workhouses instead of places of genuine learning; and an independent commission that looks at the most effective ways of nurturing a creative and questioning generation of young people because these are the attributes they will need in an increasingly automated job market.

John Tomsett, head, Huntington school, York

Underpinning the future success of our schools is sufficient funding. The government says we’ve never spent more on schools but the only reason that is true is because we have more children in the system than ever before. Costs are rising. The Institute of Fiscal Studies points out that school budgets will be cut by 8% in real terms by 2020. Post-16 funding, capital funding, high needs, mental health services – all these matter hugely and all have been cut dramatically over the last few years. If we don’t fund schools properly, rising class sizes and bigger teaching loads will make teaching as a career less and less attractive. So, fund schools sufficiently, and guarantee three-year inflation-proof budgets. Then we might have a chance of creating the school system our young people deserve.

Sally Thorne, head of history at a Bristol secondary school

I hope they pledge to keep the curriculum static for a few years, increase per-pupil funding in real terms – or at least keep it in line with inflation – and shelve grammar schools, in line with advice from seemingly everyone apart from the Conservative party.

David Boyle, principal, Dunraven School, a 4-18 national teaching school, London

David Boyle, principal Dunraven school, London

Any manifesto commitment that would align the interest of the student with the interest of the school would be fine, so that a school is able to offer the kind of curriculum its children would benefit from. For example, no expectation of the EBacc for all. And the ability to offer something vocational.

We want a national fair funding formula where no school loses funding; an end to increases in ring-fenced funding so schools are able to make use of all the resources they have; and capital projects funded appropriately – providing new places where they are required and maintaining the current state of buildings. We also want an end to the ridiculous move to reinstate grammar school education.

Tim Gartside, head, Altrincham grammar school for boys

First, a commitment on school funding to a minimum level for all schools – about £4,600 per pupil. Then, a review of funding for pupil premium and disadvantaged pupils because very large sums are going into the pupil premium and I’m not totally convinced the money is being used as effectively as it could be. Also, a restatement of the government’s commitment to establishing grammar schools in areas where they might be of benefit – in perhaps urban and more disadvantaged areas.

Shakira Martin, vice-president, further education, National Union of Students

Shakira Martin

I want the needs of students to be seen as equally important to the needs of employers when it comes to deciding the direction of further education. To make FE work for all there should be high quality local transport with discounts for all learners, including apprentices, so people can access the education they want. So much money has been taken from the further education sector. It’s time for some serious investment. Also, it’s time for all parties to commit to investing in proper mental health provision for young people.

William Baldwin, principal, Brighton, Hove and Sussex sixth-form college

My concern is that schools have been fighting funding pressures for over a decade. I don’t think the post-16 sector is going to get its voice heard.

I want a commitment to increase base-rate funding per student to at least match inflationary costs. Jeremy Corbyn has said austerity has failed, and most public sector workers would agree. So let’s look at different models. If there is investment in terms of school and college buildings, that will create jobs and put money into the economy. With the curriculum, I just want stability. I’m also not convinced a three A-level programme is an internationally competitive curriculum for a full-time student; it lacks breadth and the development of key employability skills.

Claire Callender, professor of higher education policy, Birkbeck, University of London

The focus of this election will be on Brexit. So my hope is that we can get a socially just Brexit deal, for the country and for the university sector. This would mean the government securing continuing access to EU research funds as equal partners, and the permanent free movement of academics and students between the UK and the EU. Such promises would help to ensure the vibrancy and global strength of the UK higher education sector in the long term.

Paul Wakeling, sociologist of education, University of York

For schools: abandonment of plans for new grammar schools and no further changes to institutional form; fair and proportional per capita funding, with a carefully planned transition for schools facing reductions; a return to planned, university-led teacher training; a reduction in targets and testing in favour of an approach that values teachers as partners rather than seeing them as the enemy.

For further education, this would be my priority: a substantial increase in funding and an end to tinkering with the form of qualifications and bland repetition of the “parity of esteem” trope.

For higher education: restore maintenance grants and overturn the recent changes to funding for student nurses; no further increases in undergraduate tuition fees beyond inflation; scrap selling off the student loan book; ditch the Teaching Excellence Framework; remove international students from migration targets.

Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor, University of Buckingham

First is the promise to set up a national headship college that trains school leaders, because that’s the most important problem in education at the moment – the quality of leadership.

In higher education, the Teaching Excellence Framework was long overdue but the metrics need to be improved so there is more focus on learning and student feedback on the quality of their teachers. There also needs to be much more support for the not-for-profit private sector. Then, the government needs to take the wellbeing of students and staff much more seriously, because we have an absolute mental health crisis in universities.

Martin McQuillan, deputy vice-chancellor, research and innovation, Kingston university

The reality of this election will be that it is one possible political event that could put the brakes on Brexit. The Liberal Democrats ought to promise a second referendum. Labour should do the same; they need to do something to disrupt the logic of the polls that suggest a heavy electoral defeat. Some university leaders feel burned after the experience of being seen to be on the wrong side of public opinion after the EU referendum. They will be torn between not wanting to antagonise a seemingly inevitable Conservative government and knowing that this might be the last chance to influence the Brexit debate.

Henry Riley, president, Warwick University politics society

I think for young people the big issue is going to be Brexit. I’d be supporting a party that is going to stop and think and scrutinise what the government is doing on that.

I wouldn’t want the sudden abolition of tuition fees. I don’t think it’s feasible. But I wouldn’t vote for a party that put fees up. I think £9,000 is high enough.

I would also want a guarantee that we can still get funding for European projects. Within universities I don’t think there’s a problem, really, with teaching standards – or not that I’ve experienced. Generally among students there’s a feeling that the Tories have done so much damage that we’ve got to get them out. But I’ve actually put a bet on Labour getting its worst result since 1935 – that would mean under 154 seats.

Peter Horrocks

Peter Horrocks, vice-chancellor, Open University

We need to develop a long-term skills strategy, encouraging people to study part-time to top up their skills, and to support that study with innovative financial structures such as personal learning accounts. There has been a serious drop in the number of part-time and mature learners, and that represents a tragedy of lost opportunity for tens of thousands of would-be students. We cannot allow lifelong learning to become a convenient buzz phrase to capture vague political aspirations. I would challenge politicians of all parties to make a meaningful commitment to continuous adult education.

[Source:-theguardian]

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Blogging

This is what a week in the life of a professional travel blogger is really like

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

This is what a week in the life of a professional travel blogger is really like

The world of Blogging is so new, and it seems completely alien to most people on the outside looking in.

I can tell you that as a full-time blogger myself, I tend to agree.

 

As a profession, it really is all over the place and no two days are ever the same. I guess that’s one of the things I love most about being in the Blogging industry, I am always being kept on my toes.

Today I wanted to bring you a week in my life as a blogger, a small insight into this ever-changing industry.

Monday

I spend the weekend replying to all those rogue emails that build up over the week, so Monday is of course when all the replies come flooding in and the cycle starts again.

I wish I could say that the start of my week was more exciting, but I have, to be honest, and say it’s usually spent sat at my desk with episodes of ‘Friends’ on repeat while I tap away at my laptop, breaking regularly to rush downstairs for my millionth cup of tea.

 

It’s not always all as fabulous as it may seem… Pyjamas and cups of tea are my most frequent attire!

Tuesdays

Tuesday are usually days that I spend creating content for the current week and the next.

I will sometimes book in to shoot in Manchester city centre. I usually take three or four outfits and spend the day trudging a huge suitcase of options through the streets of Manchester.

I have to say, this is definitely one the less glamorous sides to blogging. If you are a blogger living central to where you shoot, know how lucky you are!

 

If I am not out for the day shooting, I will be either editing content at home or shooting content myself pretending a tripod is a professional photographer (yes, it’s pretty much as hard as it sounds).

Editing is my favourite part of blogging, I could spend hours editing my photos – adjusting the colours, contrasts and saturation. It’s strangely therapeutic.

I spend a lot of time making sure the overall look of my Instagram is how I want it to be.

It’s an aspect of blogging that is far more important than people realise, and takes longer than you may think.

Wednesday & Thursday

These are normally days I will try and get down to London.

Living up near Manchester, I come in and out when I can. I usually try and time the days I am in London with any events I may have been invited to, whether that be launch parties or new collections.

 

This is one of the main challenges I face being a blogger from outside central London. It’s expensive going in and out of London, especially staying over, so I have to choose carefully when I go down.

I tend to shoot blog content while I am in London and fill the rest of my time with as many meetings as I can fit in with PR’s or meetings for any upcoming campaigns.

Fridays

Fridays are often spent writing up blog content with the images I have shot earlier on in the week, ranging from fashion to travel to lifestyle content.

This, alongside catching up on emails from the week is about as exciting as my Friday’s normally get…

 

Although I never switch off from my job as a blogger, because social media never sleeps.

Weekends

I tend to try and keep weekends similar to those around me, for down time and seeing friends and family. I will write here and there and do the occasional email, but nothing too much. Everyone deserves time to themselves, no matter what you do.

If I have an upcoming press trip, I will usually spend my Sunday starting to pack and figuring out what I need to do beforehand to make sure I don’t get behind. Being a Blogger, I seem to be always having to plan ahead.

I have noticed I never really switch off.

After all, it’s not exactly like social media takes the weekends off. It never stops. I post at least once on my social media, every single day. I am always thinking about what is next, what do I have to edit next, what do I have to write next.

It is definitely a blessing and curse at the same time!

One week to the next, I couldn’t tell you exactly what I will be doing, but that’s the beauty of what I do, and one of the reasons I adore it.
[“Source-metro”]

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Internet

What Is Internet Marketing? Advice From An Eight-Figure Earner

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

What Is Internet Marketing?

Credit: David Sharpe

The allure of so-called internet riches is nothing new. At every bend and turn in a gauntlet of online gurus, you’ll find internet marketers looking to hype up this supposed dream of making money online or earning passive income while kicking up your feet and letting the cash roll in. While internet marketing doesn’t quite work that way, in that you actually do have to put in the work, it isn’t too difficult to separate the proverbial men from the boys when it comes to the real online earners.

The Truth? You don’t often come across genuine individuals in this space. I could likely count on one hand who those genuine-minded marketers might be. Someone like Russel Brunson who’s developed a career out of providing true value in the field and helping to educate the uneducated is one such name. However, while Brunson has built a colossal business, the story of David Sharpe and his journey to becoming an 8-figure earner really hits home for most people.

I first discovered Sharpe years ago online. His story was one of the most sincere and intriguing tales that any one individual could convey. It was real. It was heartfelt. It was passionate. And it was a story of rockbottom failure. It encompassed a journey that mentally, emotionally and spiritually crippled him in the early years of his life. As someone who left home at the age of 14, had a child at 16, became addicted to heroin at 20 and clean four long years later, the cards were definitely stacked up against him.

That type of earth-shattering failure and pain really does a number on a person. Getting clean and overcoming those demons isn’t as simple as people make it out to be. You need to have some serious deep-down reasons on why you must succeed at all costs. You have to be able to extricate yourself from the shackles of bad habits that have consumed you during your entire life. And that’s precisely what Sharpe did.

Before Sharpe ever came into close proximity with the internet marketing field, he was a construction worker. Needing a way to make ends meet, like millions of other people around the world, he turned to a field that could hopefully pay the bills. But try as he might, he was never able to actually get ahead. Until one day, when Sharpe discovered the amount of money being made online by internet marketers, his entire mindset changed.

In the beginning, it was rough for Sharpe. No one out there should think that it’s going to be easy whatsoever. His journey took years and years to go from an absolute beginner, to a fluid and seasoned professional, able to clearly visualize and achieve his dreams, conveying his vast knowledge expertly to those hungry-minded individuals out there looking to learn how to generate a respectable income online.

What Is Internet Marketing? 

While many people attempt to understand and wrap their minds around the internet marketing industry as a whole, there are others out there that have truly mastered the field. Now, if you’re asking yourself what the term internet marketing actually means, it simply boils down to a number of marketing activities that can be done online. This includes things like affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, blogging, paid marketing, search engine optimization and so on.

There’s a lot to learn when it comes to the internet marketing field in general, and the digital ether of the web is a crowded space filled with one know-it-all after another that wants to sell you the dream. However, what many people fail to do at the start, and something that Sharpe learned along the way, is to actually understand what’s going on out there in the digital world and how businesses and e-commerce works in general, before diving in headfirst.

Internet marketing is a number of things. And true success in the field involves an immersion into several skill sets that are required if you really want to succeed at the highest level. That’s why I knew I needed to go the top of the food chain of online marketers to get an understanding of what this actually takes. And it’s important to note that while there are many hyped-up gurus out there, there are also genuine individuals that aren’t just looking to extract money from you.

That’s what kept bringing me back to Sharpe. When it comes to internet marketing, this is one of the masterminds in the industry, a high-8-figure earner who recently generated over $1 million dollars within a 60-day period with a brand new system. I knew that if I was going to help educate people about internet marketing, I had to go straight to the top. Sharpe is also one of the most relatable characters in the industry, who speaks eloquently and fluidly, able to inspire millions of people with ease.

The combination of charisma, charm and intellect has helped catapult Sharpe to the top of the heap. In a recent conversation with him, I wanted to learn what it truly took to become an expert digital marketer. And one of the most important takeaways from that phone call was that if he could do it, anyone could do it. For someone who failed so devastatingly very early on in life, to rise from the ashes like a phoenix was no easy feat.

 

However, if you’re like the hundreds of millions of other individuals that are looking to become the next David Sharpe, there are some steps that you need to take. In my call with this renowned online marketer, I dove deep the a conversation that was submerged in the field of internet marketing, and worked to really understand what it takes to be top earner. We’re not just talking about making a few hundred or thousand dollars to squeak by here; we’re talking about building an automated cash machine. It’s not easy by any means.

Still, before we get there, there’s a whole lot of information to grasp. As an online marketer myself, it’s important that I convey the truth about the industry to you so that you don’t get sucked up into the dream. While there are legitimate marketers like Sharpe out there ready and willing to help, there are loads of others that are simply looking to help part you from your hard-earned cash. Before you do anything, gather all of the information you can.

Understanding The Internet Marketing Field

Okay. Okay. There is a lot to learn. However, everyone has to start somewhere. If you’re just being introduced to internet marketing, and you’ve become bedazzled by the glitz and the glamor of the top online income earners, know that it’s not going to be easy to replicate their success. Be sure that you set your expectations the proper way. As long as you stay persistent, you can achieve your goals of generating healthy amounts of money online without becoming the victim of a scam.

First and foremost, when it comes to marketing anything online, it’s important to understand how money is made and earned. In my phone call with Sharpe, he identified several items that were well worth mentioning. Once you understand where the money comes from and how the industry works, you can then better understand how best to position yourself and your offer so that you can reap the benefits of the making-money-while-you-sleep industry.

The field is replete with terms that might confuse and perplex the average individual. What is a squeeze page? What’s a sales funnel? What’s a CPA? What’s SEO? How do you setup a good blog to filter the right type of relevant traffic and get your offer in front of eligible users? What’s a massive value post (MVP) really mean? Clearly, there are an endless array of terms, some of which you might already know or might not depending on how much you presently know about the field.

However, before learning any of that, it’s important that you get a lay of the land, so to speak. If you truly want to understand the field of internet marketing, Sharpe has some very good points. In essence there are four overall steps to really understanding internet marketing and leveraging the industry to make money online. Depending on where you are with your education, you’ll be somewhere along the lines of these four steps.

#1 — What’s actually going on online and how is money being made? 

Most people need to take a step back and understand where money is even coming from on the web. Sharpe says that, when asked, most individuals don’t actually even know how money is being made on a high level. How does Facebook generate its revenues? How about Google? How do high-trafficked blogs become so popular and how do they generate money from all of that traffic? Is there one way or many?

The answer, at its basis, is largely what I convey in a great majority of my books about search engine optimization and online marketing. It all boils down to one simple concept: add tremendous amounts of value to the world. The more value you add, the more successful you become. Essentially, you have to do the most amount of work (initially at least) for the least return. Not the other way around.

By building enormous amounts of value, Facebook and Google both became tremendously successful. They didn’t focus on revenues at the outset. They focused on value. And every single blog and business must do the same. While this might run contrary to someone who’s short on cash and hoping that internet marketing is going to bring them a windfall overnight, it doesn’t quite work that way.

This is also about expectations. Anyone that tries to sell you a get-rich-quick scheme is selling you short. There is no such thing. You have to put in the time and do the work, adding enormous amounts of value along the way. That’s the truth of the matter and that’s precisely what it takes. Once you understand that it’s all about delivering sincere value, you need to understand where the money comes from.

Any definition of internet marketing needs to come along with a definition of things associated with it such as affiliate marketing, network marketing, multi-level marketing and so on and so forth. Some of these are less legitimate than others. For example, affiliate marketing is a tough nut to crack unless you have a massive following or you understand how to build excellent squeeze pages and effective sales funnels.

For the most part, the 6-figure, 7-figure, and 8-figure-earners and up are making a large majority of their income by scaling out offers that they control. If you’re just starting out, that avenue isn’t for you. It only comes over time as you come to understand the field. As Sharpe says, most people first need to get a lay of the land and cruise through the virtual sales landscape before they dive into a massive undertaking like creating their own digital products and sales funnels.

#2 — Pick what you want to do

Once you understand how everything works, and your expectations are set the right way, decide what you want to do. Do you want to become an affiliate marketer? Do you want to be a network marketer? Do you want to become a blogger and sell your own products? Squeeze pages, which are glorified sales pages that attract people and direct their attention towards a single action of providing their email address, are created in a variety of methods. The better they are, the more likely they’ll convert.

Understand that whatever you’re going to do, you’ll need traffic. If you don’t have any money at the outset, your hands will be tied no matter what anyone tells you. The truth is that you need to drive traffic to your offers if you want them to convert. These are what we call landing pages or squeeze pages. This is where you’re coming into contact with the customers, either for the first time or after they get to know you a little bit better.

If you decide to go into affiliate marketing, understand that you will need a lot of very targeted traffic if you want to make any real money. Those affiliate offers also need to provide a high commission amount to you on each sale. You also need to ensure that the returns or chargebacks for those products or services are low. The last thing you want to do is to sell a product or service that provides very little value and gets returned often.

Going into network marketing? Understand that if you’re not close to the top of the food chain there, your ability to generate any serious amount of income will be limited. Be wary of the hype and the sales pitches that get you thinking that it’s going to work the other way. Simply understand that you’re going to have to work hard no matter what you pick to do. Email marketing? Sure. You can do that. But you’ll need a massive and very targeted list to make any dent.

There are things like solo ads that you can buy or join up with JV partners to help sell whatever it is that you’re peddling. But at the outset, you’re going to find it difficult to succeed in the internet marketing field. Ensure that you learn the right skills along the way so that you can become an effective online marketer. It doesn’t matter how slow you go, as long as you don’t stop, you’ll reach your goals.

#3 — Decide how you’ll communicate with people

The next step? How will you communicate with people. Sharpe says that you need to decide on this early on. Will you blog? Will you use social media? Will you build a list by working with solo ad providers? Will you place paid advertisements? What will you do and how will you do it? What you must realize here is that you have to get really good at copy writing. The better you get at copy writing, the more success you’ll find as an internet marketer.

By now, you’ve likely seen all the “gurus” in your Facebook feed. Some of them are more popular than others. What you’ll notice is that the ads you see that have the highest views and engagement are normally the most successful. Use a site like Similar Web to study those ads and see what they’re doing. Join their lists and embed yourself in their funnels. That’s an important part of the process so that you can replicate and reverse engineer what the most successful marketers are doing.

Sharpe, who’s presently running a company called Legendary Marketer, teaching you how to duplicate his results, is a prime example. By understanding how Sharpe has constructed his value chain, positioned his offerings and built out his multi-modality sales funnels, you’ll better get a larger grasp on things. As confusing as it sounds at the outset, all you need to do is start buying up products in your niche so that you can replicate their success.

Brunson talks about this reverse engineering in his book called, Dot Com Secrets, a homage to the internet marketing industry, and quite possibly one of the best and most transparent books around in the field. Communication is what will bridge the divide between making no money and becoming a massive six or seven-figure earner. Be straight with people and learn to communicate effectively and understand every stage of the process and you’ll prosper as an internet marketer.

#4 — Pick a niche and decide what you’re passionate about

Sharpe says that you shouldn’t dive into internet marketing until you decide on a niche and figure out what you’re passionate about. Do you want to join the make-money-online (MMO) niche? Or do you want to engage in another niche? For example, you could sell products or online courses about blogging or search engine optimization or anything else for that matter. Keep in mind that whatever you’re selling, whatever niche you’re in, that you need to embed yourself there deeply.

When deciding on your niche, you have to actually start a blog or a website that’s going to be your online hub. This is where your anchor content is going to live. Everything else will link to here. All the ads you run and traffic you drive through social media or SEO or anything else will all come here. You need a custom domain and a professional looking site if you want anyone to take you seriously.

This isn’t about off-the-shelf solutions. You need to really convey something illustrious and beautiful, then fill it with incredible MVP content. Over time, this will become a thriving hotbed of activity for you, where people will come by and check-in repeatedly to see what you’re talking about and what value you’re delivering. Keep in mind that this won’t happen quickly. It will take years. Yes, I said years.

That doesn’t mean you won’t make any money at the outset. No, as long as you configure the right free offer to capture those all-important email addresses on your squeeze pages, and you build a great value chain with excellent sales funnels, you’ll succeed. If all that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry, you’ll learn over time. That’s what internet marketing is all about. It’s a constant and never-ending education into an oftentimes-convoluted field filled with less-than-scrupulous individuals.

So be wary. Ensure that you learn from the pros and don’t get sucked into every offer that you see. Follow the reputable people online. It’s easy to distinguish those that fill you with hype and those that are actually out there for your benefit. Look to add value along the way and you’ll succeed. You might find it frustrating at the outset. Everyone does. But massive amounts of income await those that stick it out and see things through.

 

R.L. Adams is a software engineer, serial entrepreneur, and author. He runs a wildly-popular blog called Wanderlust Worker and contributes to Entrepreneur, Engadget and the Huffington Post.

[“Source-forbes”]

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