When we hear the words “business leadership” and “management in business” most likely we have associations with business and personnel. Interestingly, in the minds of many, the concept of “leader” evokes a cool and positive attitude than a “manager.” Although business is not an exact science, let’s try to objectify these subjective concepts to understand these characters and their contribution to the business.
Business leaders and managers are not positions with job descriptions; they are more of a role. A role is a life or work position comprising a set of functions performed by a person. But leadership is helpful for everyone. Such characteristics show the person as intelligent. So, it’s important to develop leadership skills from a young age, especially if you want to be a manager in the future.
How college students can develop leadership skills
Students need to develop leadership skills, which will help them in the future. There are many courses about fundamentals of business management, but also principal rules for leaders. Here are some tips for students who want to become leaders:
Get out of your comfort zone and be a critical thinker
Challenge yourself to improve and remember. The more work you take on, the more you learn. Good leaders can anticipate potential problems before they happen. To be a leader, the student should learn to think critically. To this, he can try to read books or free essay samples. There are many free essays online so that every student can research papers.
Students can even try to write their essays to see their strong sides. But not every person has the appropriate writing skills to write a leadership experience essay sample. Nowadays, it’s not a problem because the student can find a leadership experience essay written by any famous leader and use it as an example. Also, such practice can help to develop writing skills and give motivation.
Learn how to listen and provide feedback
Listening effectively to employees and customers is essential to being an effective leader. Also, it’s vital to motivate and positively influence others. A natural leader should encourage and empower them and be their support system.
Common traits of leaders
A business leader is someone who is followed to do something with him. If there are no followers, then there is no leader.
Unites by common values and principles
Values are unspoken rules beyond job descriptions. It’s about a pattern of behavior and choice. What is good and what is bad. The presence and clarity of values, and most importantly, their implementation, first of all by the leader, allows you to form a strong corporate culture and company to attract customers and partners close in value.
Gives energy
Thus, a leader who sits hunched over has little chance of leading someone to follow him, even if he has a good vision. It does not mean that you have to jump around and talk all the time loudly. So, energy will not be enough for a long time. Be a constant source of the power of intelligent confidence, warmth, openness, support, reliability, and continued forward movement. A leader must also be able to recover from giving back.
Supplies ideas and constant search for new opportunities
A leader must bring new ideas and not let the company stagnate and get bogged down in routine, even when things are going well. For this, he reads, communicates, expands his horizons, is interested in everything, and is not afraid to ask questions.
Shares knowledge
A leader sincerely shares his business knowledge and is not afraid to do so. Think of the great Eastern sages who have thousands of disciples. It works in business too.
What does a manager do?
A manager is an employee of the organization whose main task is to manage other employees, as well as critical resources of the organization. Here are manager’s main functions:
Planning
Together with the leader and the team, he makes a detailed plan to achieve that beautiful distant vision that the leader vividly sees.
Organization, management, and control
It will make it possible to organize a clear order of execution of the drawn-up plan and prompt correction of actions in case of deviations. And this is all constantly working with the team, step by step, measuring intermediate results.
Leaders, as a rule, do not like it very much because it is not so interesting for them. They start to get bored and neglect these functions. It often leads to the fact that great intentions are not realized. So, the team continues to follow the leader for a while, and everything falls apart. But business leadership and management are related jobs.
Conclusion
People with leadership qualities are often active, proactive, get along well with others, can take responsibility, are persistent, organized, and able to control their behavior, desires, and emotions. Of course, everyone can become a leader. You have to go for this goal. Start developing leadership skills; you won’t notice how people will follow you to listen to your ideas.
Leaders, as a rule, do not like it very much because it is not so interesting for them. They start to get bored and neglect these functions. It often leads to the fact that great intentions are not realized. So, the team continues to follow the leader for a while, and everything falls apart. But business leadership and management are related jobs.
But what differentiates bad from a good leader? A good leader is one that constantly questions, reflects and self-evaluates with one goal in mind – to serve their team in the best way possible. Poor managers, on the other hand, can be swiftly recognised by these bad-boss signs.
If you’re in a leadership role, being aware of the bad leadership qualities can help you recognise some of them in yourself. Because there is always room for improvement and if you diligently work to eliminate your poor leadership qualities, in due time you’ll be a better leader for your subordinates.
10 most common poor leadership qualities
Unfortunately, bad leadership qualities are very common in the business world. This often happens due to people being promoted to roles that they cannot fulfil. Or because a business owner can’t understand that being the owner doesn’t make you a quality leader by default.
The following are the most common poor leadership qualities you should not adopt if you want to become a good leader.
Poor communication skills
Poor communication skills are one of the first poor leadership qualities to watch out for. Bad communication can destroy an organisation and the relationships among its people, and the number of issues that can emerge are endless. It can create misunderstandings, bottlenecks, failures, and dissatisfied customers and employees.
If a leader cannot effectively communicate the company’s goals, vision and strategy, the company will never achieve its mission and will miserably fail. Good written and verbal communication is a must for any leader.
No adaptability
It is no longer possible for one management style to fit with every situation or person. Adopting a non-adaptable and inflexible style is a typical poor leadership quality. Authoritarian bossing around is no longer welcomed and accepted by the employees and it also limits the company’s ability to progress and evolve.
A good leader must understand how and when to adapt their management style. Being flexible is no longer an option, rather it’s a must if you want to create a successful company.
Micromanagement
Micromanagement is up there among the worst poor leadership qualities. It is a highly inflexible approach and never delivers results to be proud of. Leaders that tend to micromanage their employees are doomed to failure as this doesn’t work in the long term. With micromanagement, you are essentially limiting the growth of your team.
It is rather much more beneficial to give your employees ownership of their processes and projects. With little guidance, you can make it clear to them what the goals are and why are these important. This will challenge the employee and motivate them to outperform their past efforts and improve their skills. By eliminating micromanagement you’re opening the door to growth and evolution.
Avoiding conflict
This is one of the bad leadership qualities as it leads to conflicts and serious situations to emerge in the company. Avoiding conflict merely postpones the inevitable and leaves room for issues to escalate. If there is conflict within your team or even departments, a good leader deals with it straight away. They know that it is impossible to please everyone and are comfortable with making hard decisions, as it is a crucial part of their role as a leader.
Lack of ambition and vision
Lacking the ability to think forward is a bad leadership quality a good leader cannot afford to have. This signals that the leader is happy with the status quo and shows that the company is lacking the ambition to achieve a vision and other more challenging goals.
This poor leadership quality is the one that stops progress and makes the company stagnate. When growth and progress stop, the future is clear, it only goes downwards from thereon.
In contrast, a good leader would be forward-thinking and always ready for change and improvement. A good leader acknowledges that innovation and constant evolution is the way to achieve even higher successes and inspire employees.
A know-it-all attitude
No one can know it all, this attitude is yet another of the poor leadership qualities we must strive to eliminate. A good leader should accept that they cannot know everything and be open to find the right people for the right situation or project. It’s a poor leader’s quality to act as if they are the smartest person in the room or act as if they are always right.
Moreover, this type of attitude demoralises employees and leads to business failure. Good leaders know that they cannot do everything themselves and are open to ask for advice and opinions. They know the advantage that comes from having a large talent pool and rely on the knowledge of other people.
Lacking customer focus
The lack of customer focus can sink a business. If a leader doesn’t acknowledge their customer and what their needs are then it is highly likely that the company will quickly fall behind their competitors that do that. Thus a good leader must be customer-focused, know who they are serving, what they need and how to fulfil their needs. Remember, the customer is king and you must always strive to deliver the best experience in order to gain high customer satisfaction.
No accountability
Bad leaders embody one of the poorest leadership qualities and that is lack of accountability or ownership. Good leaders understand the value of taking responsibility for their actions. They don’t blame others and don’t claim credit for the team’s success and achievements.
Great leaders show accountability to their team. This is a noble quality that makes leaders human and shows their confidence and strength. If a leader is not accountable to their team, then they risk losing the trust and confidence of their people. This is one of the worst outcomes a company may have as it threatens to destroy its entire mission and achievements.
No sense of priority or focus
Lacking focus is another example of bad leadership. A leader who is missing focus and sense of prioritization will fail to adequately allocate resources in an effort to achieve the company’s goals. These leaders fail their team and their company. Companies led by such leaders face a high risk of failure as there is no clear focus and intention to achieve the company’s goals.
Good leaders must constantly double-check that the decisions they are making correlate and are aligned with the goals in order to effectively achieve the company’s goals. They know when and how to prioritize depending on the current situation of their organization.
Inability to create a company culture
Companies with a clearly set company culture are able to empower and uplift their teams. If you’re striving to become a good leader you must not fall victim to this poor leadership quality. A good leader will recognise the value of the right company culture and will seek ways to support it.
By developing the right culture for your organization you can easily focus your efforts on recruiting talent that will be in sync with your culture. Be careful who you hire as that is the first step in disrupting the harmony of your company culture. Good leaders create their company culture by design and poor leaders let it create itself. Having control over the culture inevitably helps you control the atmosphere and work environment.
Lessons we can learn from bad leadership qualities
Bad leadership qualities threaten the success of a manager, their team and the company. In order to be successful in their role as a leader, managers need to adopt a flexible management style, open and honest communication, clear vision and focus, support the company culture and stop micromanaging.
It is not easy to eliminate all the poor leadership qualities we mentioned above, especially not all at once. So our advice is to constantly evaluate yourself and identify ways you can improve your leadership style. By tackling each of these bad qualities one by one you are sure to achieve progress and growth.
In today’s digital age, it’s essential for businesses to have an online presence in order to reach customers. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) has become an essential marketing strategy for businesses looking to expand their brand exposure and grow their business. If you own your own business or are planning on launching a new business, you must be considering different marketing strategies that help you stand out from the crowd.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving the visibility of a website in an organic search result by increasing the site’s ranking for relevant keywords and improving the overall quality of the site’s content.
In other words, SEO is a marketing strategy that helps entrepreneurs attract potential customers by increasing their website ranking in search results.
SEO helps you generate more leads and sales by bringing more traffic to your website. The main goal of SEO is to increase your website’s visibility in search engine results.
Here you’ve two options: either hire a B2B SEO agency or hire a bunch of SEO individuals to implement the below-mentioned SEO strategies.
By hiring a B2B SEO agency, you’ll have peace of mind that your business’s SEO job is being carried out in an organized way by an experienced SEO agency.
You’ll definitely choose an agency that is into this business for years and has an outstanding portfolio. Just like this B2B SEO agency in the Netherlands, many B2B SEO agencies who are into this business for years have set up a portfolio that speaks out their achievements.
By hiring SEO individuals, you’ll be sure that the individual is a specialist of a particular SEO task and will do it perfectly. For instance, an SEO content writer can look after your content marketing strategy—one of the SEO strategies mentioned below. Similarly, each specialist performs their respective task.
SEO strategies entrepreneurs need to be aware of
Here are six SEO strategies that business owners can use to achieve growth.
Build high-quality content
One of the best ways to boost your website’s visibility and increase traffic to your site is by producing high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.
Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of producing content that is too promotional. This can actually work against you by scaring off potential customers.
By replacing promotional content with informative and helpful articles, you attract more customers and improve your website’s SEO ranking.
If you want to create high-quality SEO content, here are some things you should keep in mind:
Research your target audience and create content that resonates with them. To do this, you must understand your audience, what problems they are facing, and what they would like to see from your business.
Include your value proposition and educate your readers about your product or service.
Avoid being too promotional in your content, as this will hurt your SEO.
Include your keywords in your content, but do so naturally and don’t overdo it.
Create regular and consistent content. This will help you establish a consistent content strategy and will keep your readers engaged.
Solve your readers’ problems. People are more likely to buy from you if they are educated about your product or service and have solved their problems.
Build quality backlinks
Backlinks are the links that point to your website from other websites. These are essential ‘votes of confidence from other websites, and they help your website gain more authority and rank higher in search engine results.
When creating backlinks for your website, it’s important to make sure that they are coming from high-authority sites.
When you create content and link it back to your website, you are receiving backlinks that help your SEO. The more backlinks you have, the more authority your website has. This is because search engines view your website as more important when it has more backlinks. It is important that the links are relevant to your business. For example as a SaaS business, you want to ensure you’re obtaining SaaS links of high quality.
Video marketing strategy
Since video marketing is such a great way to generate leads and sales for your business, making videos is a great strategy for increasing the visibility of your website in search engine results.
When making a video marketing strategy for your business, keep the following tips in mind:
Stay relevant. Make sure that your videos are related to your business and target audience.
Include your call-to-action in the video and make sure that it is obvious what you want your viewers to do after watching the video.
Create regular and consistent video content. This will help you build a consistent video marketing strategy and keep your viewers engaged.
Include your website URL and encourage your viewers to visit your site.
Leveraging paid advertising strategies
Paid advertising is an effective way to grow your business. If you have a limited budget, paid advertising can help you reach a larger audience and make more sales.
Paid advertising includes using things like sponsored content, social media ads, and paid search engine results to grow your business. When you make a budget for paid advertising, make sure that you choose the right channels for your business.
Develop a responsive website
A responsive website is one that is designed to be viewed on all devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets.
Having a responsive website helps you improve your SEO and make it easier for people to find your website. It also makes it easier for people to convert once they’ve arrived at your site.
When choosing a web design company, make sure to choose one that is committed to creating a responsive website for your business. Making your website responsive helps you gain more website traffic and improve the overall user experience of your site.
Make your website user-friendly
Making your website user-friendly helps your SEO by improving the load time of your site, making navigation effective, making it accessible to all users, and much more.
When making your site user-friendly, here are some things to keep in mind:
Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly
Use your main keywords in the URL of your website and in your page titles
Create an easy-to-navigate site
make sure that it loads quickly
Include lots of fresh and quality content on your site
Make contact with your visitors as easy as possible
Conclusion
As an entrepreneur, you know that marketing is essential for attracting new customers and driving more sales and leads. In order to reach more people and maximize your marketing efforts, it’s important to invest in SEO. This is a great way to bring more traffic to your website, and it also helps you rank higher in search engine results.
Everyone wants to create content that ranks for a specific keyword perfectly. SEO writing is the only way that can help you produce content that people search for on Google.
But when it comes to SEO writing, things become harder to accomplish.
As you know, nobody enters on the second page of Google search. Each of us reviews the first ten results of the SERP only. Moreover, we tend to click on the links from the top five positions.
But what happens to the rest of the content?
This content falls at the edge of the earth and it will never get an opportunity to be read by your target audience.
Oppositely, writing SEO optimized content will help you boost your traffic and get more potential leads to your website.
To be able to create such well-optimized content, you might need a powerful team of professional writers. You can build your personal in-house content writers department or hire a freelancer who would satisfy your content objectives.
For instance, here is the progress of Visme blog for the past few years. We have grown our blog from ~800 to ~488K monthly visits.
To create SEO content you must understand what people are searching for on Google. Consequently, you must align your content per your audience’s needs.
You might wonder how to write content with SEO in mind?
To help you out, review the following three steps that you should consider before starting the process of writing.
1. Explore keywords with traffic potential
You should start by reading the content that people write within your business niche. It will help you identify the main (seed) keyword people type on Google. Yes, choosing the right keywords is important but it doesn’t mean you must read content from your competitors to identify them. You can think by yourself what would your target audience type on Google to find your service.
Let’s say, you write a piece of content for a website that sells sports nutrition. Your seed keywords would be “sports nutrition” and “sport supplement.”
The next step is to identify keyword phrases and questions that would be based on your seed keywords. You can use Keywords Explorer tool and review a few reports.
The first report is “Questions” which suggests to you all possible questions that contain seed keywords.
The same analysis you do with your seed keywords using “Phrase match” report. This report lists the queries that are sorted by the monthly search volume.
2. Identify search intent
Google chooses what content to show people according to their search intent. Search intent is what the person wants to find behind a query. In other words, you must understand all possible “why” and “what” that your content must cover to satisfy a user’s needs.
To make sure your content goes in line with the search intent of your target audience, you should fulfill the next three conditions:
Choose the correct content type
The most straightforward way to understand what type of content you should put money on is by exploring the top positions on Google. It will tell you what type of content ranks well and you should take it into account.
For example, if your target keyword is mainly used across interrogative queries like “what is the difference between organic and paid search“, you will get such content types as blog posts, articles, or videos.
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However, if your target keywords don’t have informational intent, you won’t rank for blog posts. You will rank for video content or attract your target audience to your product pages.
Think about content format
It won’t be hard to understand what content format you’re willing to create. There are a few standard formats to choose from – listicle, how-to guides, expert roundups, etc.
Work on exploring content angle
Content angle reflects the purpose of your content. To put it simply, you must understand what message you want to send. To give you a clear idea of what it means, let’s analyze this very post per these three aspects.
1) Content type is “blog post”
2) Content format is “guide”
3) Content angle is providing concrete actionable tips on SEO writing for the beginners
Keep in mind these nuances and move forward with implementing the next tips.
3. Proceed with the determination of subtopics
You already have your target keyword. You know what type of content you’re going to write. You know in what format content will be created. Plus, you decided what angle content will take.
What is the next step?
The next step is to figure out subtopics for your future writings. Three ways will help you here. Let’s review them:
Analyze your competitors’ content
Must admit that this is a cool idea to analyze content created by the competitors. Just type your top priority query on Google and review the top pages it suggests. Afterwards, review the outline for each post paying attention to headings. For instance, this post on explainer video covers different subtopics that you could cover in your content as a separate topic.
Review “People also ask” section
“People also ask” section can provide you with more topic ideas. These are the variations of what people might also be looking for on Google based on your primary keyword.
Explore what your competitors might rank for
If you want to be ahead of your competitors, you must explore other possible keyword ideas and topics they rank for. One of the best ways to do this is by using Content Gap tool. Just paste your competitors’ URLs and hit the “Show keywords” button.
Review the results and compare them with each other. Focus on those keywords that are used by all the competitors you’re analyzing.
Once all the preparations are done, you can start writing the post. Nevertheless, continue to read and you will find out five SEO writing tips.
SEO writing tips
It won’t be hard to guess that SEO writing aims to create content that would rank high on Google and attract traffic to your website. Consequently, without knowing some SEO tips you won’t be able to write optimized content right off the bait.
Here are five tips that will help you drastically.
Create a perfect title
Without a proper title tag, you won’t get neither traffic nor CTR from your target audience. Hence, review the titles of the pages from your competitors and think about how you could write the better one.
You must use a target keyword in the title tag + keep in mind search intent you have identified at the beginning stage. Try to make every title tag unique that would make people never bounce back from the page.
Short URL
If you want to create SEO-friendly content, you should start with the URL of the post first. Basically, any URL must be simple and easy-to-read. It must include a primary keyword and you should keep it short.
Work on featured snippets optimization
Being featured in “featured snippets” is a wonderful opportunity for your content to be easily noticeable by a target audience. To be able to optimize your primary keyword snippet, you must understand the exact format that would meet the requirements of a future featured snippet. Afterwards, create content accordingly.
Internal links
Internal links are one of the on-page SEO elements you should never ignore. Plus, these links are good for user experience. Remember, you can’t cover everything in one topic. All additional subtopics related to the main topic can be covered in separate posts on your blog. Internal links help your target audience to navigate on your blog reading information from other articles thereby.
Add images
Images make your content more engaging for your audience. It helps people to absorb information visually. Just imagine if you read this very guide without images and screenshots. I bet you would leave it without compunction.
Conclusion
Summing up everything mentioned in this post, SEO writing is not about using the right keywords, ranking, and traffic. These elements are just a part of the game. The main course of the process is creating readable content that would help the audience to solve the problems.
As a bonus for your efforts, you get traffic to your website and ranking positions.
Hope you found this piece of content useful for yourself and you are aware of what SEO writing is.
As the labor market has become more complex in recent years, every business needs to follow this phenomenon and acclimatize to the new upcoming trends. That means that companies may have different types of employees working for them at the same time.
Understanding all the types of employees that could be utilized, can help you to recruit the best employees in the field in which your company’s interest is, and it will save you a lot of time, money, and energy by avoiding trial and error during the hiring process.
Types of employees to consider for the next hiring position
Here are the eight most common types of employees that every company need to be aware of in order to maximize their efficiency
Full-time employees
Full-time workers are those that work an average of 40 hours per week or 160 hours per month. Usually, they get a contract completely covered with health and retirement benefits as well as vacation and paid time off.
This type of employee is crucial for every company because they are dedicated to the company, and are not employed anywhere else. In this way, employers can completely trust their employees and involve them in the company’s day-to-day operations.
Part-time workers
Part-time workers are a little bit flexible because they usually have reduced scheduled hours compared to full-time workers, and they are usually paid by the hour rather than by the salary. These workers continue to be considered full-time employees of the company, but may not be eligible for the same benefits package.
These types of employees are beneficial for a company because they can work as freelancers offering their services via outsourcing. In this way, the company has many benefits too like filling a position that doesn’t require a full-time worker and reducing the costs of paying full-time benefits.
Seasonal employees
Seasonal workers are people employed in temporary contract or part-time employment to assist a company for a certain period in the year with a pre-determined end date. Usually, this type of employee is paid by the hour and they are not considered permanent workers and don’t have employment benefits.
Seasonal jobs can have many advantages for job seekers and business owners.
This type of employment allows immense freedom for both sides, like a flexible workforce, no overtime work, and less risky hiring.
Leased employees
Leased workers are types of employees who are hired by a staffing agency and “rented” to a company to do a specific job. Seasonal workers usually work this type of job in which they are dispatched for a specific time period.
Although still considered employees, lease workers are included in the employment agency’s salary and receive all benefits through the agency and not the company where they do the job.
Contractors
Contractor workers or better known as contractors are workers who only work full-time for one client or a company. The contractor’s payment is pre-determined and may be paid during or after the worker has done his job.
Small businesses can benefit from hiring these types of employees because they can reach a wider pool of talents on the labor market where can find and hire a highly skilled worker for a certain project, and save time, money, and energy.
Independent contractors
These workers are also called freelancers, subcontractors, or self-employers. Independent contractors can be a single worker or a group of workers hired by a company to perform work or services. They can work on a permanent contract, on a single project, or on an as-needed basis.
They don’t have employment benefits from the company where they work, instead, they are responsible for paying their own taxes and benefits.
Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to hire and manage independent contractors, thanks to contractor management software from providers such as Remote. With their platform, you can easily onboard, pay, and manage local and international contractors. Remote helps you stay compliant, too. Regardless of where your contractors are located, their software allows you to create and manage payments and invoices with just a single click.
Interns
Interns are usually young people who work for a company with a flexible working schedule and they either get paid for the work they do or they work for free or partial payment in exchange to gain experience.
Internships are very beneficial to both sides, students looking for a job opportunity to prepare for careers after high school or college and companies who look for skilled talents to hire as full-time employees.
Consultant
When things get tough and an extra hand is needed, consider hiring a consultant. This employee type is a self-employed person who offers professional advice in their area of expertise. They may specialize in education, law or marketing and provide companies with expert advice in an attempt to help the company improve in these specific areas. Consultants provide their services on a temporary basis but may be utilized repeatedly by a company based on the organization’s consulting needs.
Conclusion
As a business owner, recruiter, or hiring manager – understanding the classifications of employees and different job titles can aid you in determining which type is best for your company in terms of staffing requirements and productivity.
