Posts tagged skills
What Skills Every New Internet Entrepreneur Needs
Aug 17th
I had lunch with one of my favorite Internet entrepreneurs today, Mark Sawyier, the CEO of Off Campus Media. The company provides college students with apartment listings near their schools, and what started out as an idea five years ago is now a multi-million dollar business. Sawyier came to this business without any formal training in computer science, business, management, or other technology training, yet he is a natural when it comes to running a modern-day Internet business. In the short time we spent today, he came up with a few bon mots and wise thoughts that I want to share with those of you that are thinking about starting your own businesses.
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- Know your site demographics. Sawyier checks Google Analytics and other website tools daily, and understands how his search rankings and traffic patterns change and what he has to do to keep the page views coming.
- Know your business plan is wrong, and keep tweaking it in real time. Anyone who tells you that they have things figured out right off the bat is just plain lying. Don’t be afraid to make your biz plan a living, breathing entity.
- Don’t be afraid to leave town to get more money. St. Louis is not the hotbed of VC activity, and especially not for Internet firms. Sawyier went to New York City to get investment capital, and is most likely to go there for additional rounds.
- Understand your distribution channel, or how you reach your customers. Sawyier early on hired college students on different campuses to promote his service and get landlords and property owners involved in listing their properties. Having feet on the street was a good complement to gaining market share and attention, especially for an Internet business. Don’t just rely on Facebook friends and other virtual methods in building your channel.
- Take risks, innovate constantly, and learn from your mistakes. You aren’t selling soap or machine tools. If you have an online business, you need to be continually trying out new ideas and seeing how they fail, and figure out what the next tweak will be. Think of this as akin to agile management and don’t be afraid to take small risks to learn how to improve your offerings.
- Organic search is more art than science. But you need to understand how the daily tweaks that Google makes to its algorithm will influence your rankings, and what you have to do to adjust your page content accordingly. If you don’t know how to use these tools, watch some videos and learn, and more importantly, figure out what metrics and stats you need to know to be effective. As Mark has told me before, “at the end of the day, the most important thing is having a website that provides the right answers and information to the searchers.”
- It is all about your content. Moving Off Campus, his major venture, has tons of content – some 80,000 individual pages, let alone hundreds of thousands of apartment listings. But the content is relevant to one particular audience and one only: college students who want to move out of the dorm, and listings for just their immediate geographic area surrounding the campus. And because the firm is so laser-focused on this content and his audience, he can charge a higher premium for his search traffic than general real-estate want-ad listings.
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Brands Lack SEO Link-Building Skills – MediaPost Publications
Jun 29th
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Brands Lack SEO Link-Building Skills
MediaPost Publications The Covario study taps into the company's SEO Audit Score technology to measure high-tech advertisers, from zero to 100, on how well their Web sites were optimized between April and May 2011, for the keywords that define their product categories. … Covario Ranks the SEO Health of Leading High-Tech Websites Covario Ranks the SEO Health of Leading High-Tech Websites |
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IT Poll: How Do You Feel About Your Job Skills?
May 17th
Our posts on trends shaping the IT job market and the best U.S. cities for finding IT jobs were quite popular. While demand for tech workers is strong even in this so-called “jobless recovery,” some skills are in more demand than others. There is also the problem of matching your skill set with jobs, considering how many employers demand deep experience in many different technologies.
How are you feeling about your current skill set?
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Photo by Shereen M
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7 Surprising Trends That Show What Tech Skills You Need to Succeed
May 11th
IT salaries are up after a two year decline, according to CIO.com. That’s good news, considering the level of dissatisfaction IT professionals are experiencing.
Meanwhile, hiring is up as well. Dennis B. Moore has analyzed listings from Dice.com and found an overall increase of 6.1% growth in the past three months, and a 46.2% increase over the past year. Moore looked at four areas: database, applications, languages and platforms. Moore found some surprising results.
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Here are some of the biggest surprises. Keep in mind that these are just the results for one job board and may not be representative of the industry overall:
- Hadoop grew slower than other NoSQL related technologies. However, there were still more Hadoop jobs than there were jobs in every other NoSQL technology combined. Also, traditional RDBMS technologies are still the most popular, with the most jobs and strong growth.
- Demand for Oracle eBusiness Suite skills dipped. Oracle’s database, unsurprisingly, remained strong. SAP experienced the most growth in the applications area in the past three months, followed by PeopleSoft.
- Silverlight overtook Flash. Silverlight experienced 12.6% growth in the past three months, while Flash experienced just 2.2%. Silverlight also surpassed Flash in total number of jobs, with 982 job listings for Silverlight and 646 for Flash.
- Demand for iPad skills decreased by 3.5%. However, iOS demand increased by 24.9%. Moore didn’t tracked Macintosh or OSX demand in the past so he couldn’t make a comparison.
- Android had 1,019 jobs, which beat iOS’ 832 jobs. But iOS is growing faster, at a rate of 24.9% to Android’s 19.8%.
- There was an increased demand for skills in Facebook and Twitter.
- Azure was the fastest growing platform, with 80.7% growth. But it still trailed Amazon in total number of jobs 1,019 to 103.
The five programming languages with the top growth in the past three months were:
- HTML5 (45.2%)
- SAP Sybase PowerBuilder (26.0%)
- Ruby (15.8%)
- Python (15.8%)
- Silverlight (12.6%)
PowerBuilder grew quickly, but only had 155 jobs total. Assembler also experienced strong growth at 12.2% in the past three months, but only had 212 jobs. Moore didn’t rank Node.js separately from JavaScript, so there’s no indication of how quickly it is growing.
“There was such strong demand growth for all skills, that it is more useful in this category to speak about the area of weakest growth – Adobe Flash,” Moore wrote.
The top languages, by total number of jobs, were:
- Java (16,152 jobs)
- HTML (9,736 jobs)
- XML (9,651)
- JavaScript (9,618)
- C# (7,940)
Take aways:
- Microsoft professionals are doing well, with strong growth in C#, Silverlight and Azure.
- Java is still sitting pretty, as expected.
- SAP is rebounding.
- Oracle database skills remain vital, but other Oracle applications are questionable.
- Demand for CRM skills are in decline, with Siebel, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics all taking hits in the past three months.
- NoSQL is a small but growing niche.
- You can’t go wrong with HTML5 and JavaScript.
Photo by Aldo Gonzalez
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Improve Your Search Engine Optimization Skills – BusinessWeek
Apr 25th
 IndiaCompanyNews (press release) |
Improve Your Search Engine Optimization Skills
BusinessWeek Clients have been asking me to do SEO for their sites, including blogs, because they need them in the top ranks to be visible. How can I improve my SEO skills so I can market myself as an expert? —FM, Doha, Qatar Search engine optimization has become … WebpageFX Ranks #2 in Best Pay For Performance SEO Companies for April 2011 Markomm does PPC and SEO for The Roofing Company of Hampton, Virginia Quality SEO Services from Isearchsolution.com to Achieve Desired Returns |
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Seo Taiji & Lee Ji Ah: Netizens use detective skills to investigate relationship – allkpop
Apr 25th
 allkpop |
Seo Taiji & Lee Ji Ah: Netizens use detective skills to investigate relationship
allkpop by sarahsusiepak on April 25, 2011 at 8:40 am Although Seo Taiji's and Lee Ji Ah's respective legal teams aren't due back in court for a while, netizens are busily making up for lost time by digging for more details about the divorce that has quickly … |
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Internet Marketer Lists Skills Needed to Become Successful in SEO Online Marketing – Emailwire (press release)
Apr 5th
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Internet Marketer Lists Skills Needed to Become Successful in SEO Online Marketing
Emailwire (press release) COM, April 04, 2011 ) Chicago, IL – TraDigital Communications founder, Gerald Young, admits that it is the hardest task in the world to find an Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) with expertise in every phase of marketing a client's products or services … |
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