Member Since 2018
MonsterInsights
West Palm Beach, Florida Area
I'm the Co-Founder and lead developer of MonsterInsights and ExactMetrics, the two largest Google Analytics integrations in the world. I am a member of WordPress's security team and have led several WordPress security releases. I am extensively involved in the WordPress eCommerce space and have contributed (or lead the development of) every major WordPress eCommerce platform.
Hiring for a senior position at a company usually requires a lot more time and effort than hiring for other positions. In many cases, business owners may have a hard time finding the most effective way to source senior talent for their organization. You don't want to lose out on great talent, but you also need to spot the best talent out of the field of applicants, because making a wrong hire at this level can spell disaster for the organization.
17 members of YEC share effective tactics for gathering together leaders in a way that will lead to actual productivity and strategizing.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council offer some effective ways to keep users coming back to your mobile app.
Publishing powerful content is about a lot more than the words you choose to write. Your audience is the No. 1 deciding factor in your success. Turn to them as your blog evolves so you can continue publishing relevant content that gets your business big results.
Small businesses, like any business, have finances that need to be kept in order. Owners can deal with these duties to a point; however, small businesses tend to grow, and hiring an employee dedicated to keeping the company's finances in check is often a necessary next step. Luckily, many small business owners can hire someone on a part-time basis. This route carries a lot less overhead in terms of time and money compared to hiring a full-time employee, but it also comes with its own challenges. That’s why we asked 11 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:
Self-doubt can be debilitating for some individuals. If you're trying to advance your career, the belief that you’re not good enough can quickly put an end to those aspirations. It can make you feel less confident about your abilities, which in turn can make you seem less trustworthy and dependable to others. If you can't believe in yourself, will anyone else?
It's no secret that the holidays are among the most hectic times of the year for businesses. Everyone wants to close off the year well, and the holiday season makes for some fantastic business opportunities, but staff also looks forward to spending more time with loved ones and away from work.
One of the worst things for a budding entrepreneur is to realize that the problem they're solving already has a solution. The business environment has diversified a lot, but the low cost of entry has now made it easy for others to develop similar ideas.
Businesses are in an unenviable position of having to find the most talented individuals in their field and entice them to work at their organization. In many cases, finding qualified candidates has come down to creating the right ads and vetting candidates properly.
The key to building a highly effective email marketing strategy is personalization.
With the holidays approaching quickly, many are ready to set their “out of office” messages and relax and recharge. It’s important for employers to encourage this balance and promote the use of paid time off around the holidays. However, if everyone takes off at the same time, it may leave you with a skeleton crew and piles of work for when employees return, making for a not-so-happy start to the new year.
Everyone online shopper has added items to their cart, only to close out of the website before completing the purchase. This behavior has led to an average online cart abandonment rate of 60% to 80% for many e-commerce sites.
Trying to get people interested in your startup may seem like fighting a losing battle. The early stages of a startup have several challenges to getting customers involved in the business. Advertising to a large market can be expensive, and you have to figure out if your strategy will even work with your core audience. Standard marketing campaigns can be useful, but audience responses can be lackluster for something they've seen dozens of businesses try before.
Resumes are the first look that business owners get at potential hires. As a result, they must use these resumes as a basis to figure out if that person is worth bringing in for an interview or not. Each business has its own demands for potential employees and therefore looks for specific elements in candidates’ resumes to determine possible fit. How can job seekers optimize their resumes to include these essential elements? To help, we asked we asked 13 successful entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:
If you want to find success with your next big release, you must know how to build hype around your new product.
These 20 entrepreneurs discuss the best features for remote management of a displaced workforce.
A company blog isn't anything like a personal blog, yet many businesses look to individual bloggers to inform their choices on topics and content. Some strike on their own, coming up with their own ideas and fleshing them out by themselves, but the result can be just as underwhelming.
A website can be a critical marketing tool as long as you manage to keep your audience engaged. Marketing can drive traffic to your website in several ways, with video, text, or image content. But once they get there, how do you keep them there?
It's often said you only get one chance to make a first impression, and that holds true for your company website. The visual appearance and written copy on your sign-up and landing pages must be compelling enough to grab a visitor's attention and convince them to take the next step in their relationship with your brand.
Staying motivated as an entrepreneur takes a lot of effort. In several situations, business owners find themselves struggling to point themselves in the right direction, whether in their profession or in their personal life. In both of these cases, your inspiration dictates the drive you have to accomplish your goals.
[long-form emailed to Kelsey]
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council share the upcoming technology trends they're most excited about and how they plan to jump on board.
Working from home requires paying attention to many small details regarding your mental and physical well-being, with work-life balance tending to be significantly higher among remote workers compared to traditional office workers.
Being able to close a deal is a crucial part of an entrepreneur’s skill set, but sometimes, vendor agreements and partnerships can fall through due to unavoidable circumstances. Knowing that a deal is about to fall through before that actually happens can be quite beneficial for a company, as it gives the opportunity to choose its next steps in advance: pursue the agreement more aggressively, back off and let it fail, or do nothing and see if it corrects itself. However, before the business can take any action, it must be able to identify the telltale signs of a deal collapsing. To help, we asked 11 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:
These 20 entrepreneurs from YEC discuss their favorite market research tools and why you should be using them.
An effective internal communications strategy is essential when trying to build a cohesive team working together toward the same goal. Especially when it comes to announcing important news to your team, using the right internal communications approach is of utmost importance. The right communications strategy ensures the communicated message is clear and easily understood, leaving no room for error. That’s why we asked 15 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:
Remote working has taken the world by storm, as more and more businesses are looking at hiring workers and having them operate remotely. Aside from the convenience of the workers, the company also benefits from higher productivity and worker morale. However, getting those employees onboarded can be a challenging task. Businesses can't rely on the tried-and-true formulae they've used for years to onboard on-site employees and should instead adapt their techniques to cater for remote hires.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council explain which qualities a hiring manager should seek out in a senior creative director who's working on both print and web campaigns.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council discuss some of the past year's most pressing technology concerns and how we should address them.
There’s no better place to build trust as a business.
As a business owner, you know your company can't remain stagnant and stuck in its ways if it hopes to grow. That growth requires innovation and creativity, both of which are best sourced from everyone on your team.
With the sheer amount of productivity hacks and life hacks on the market today, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Even with all of these, it can be hard to figure out which ones work and which ones are just myths.
With each passing year, demographics change. Where a company's core demographic might have been millennials a few years ago, today it's shifted to Generation Z. Unfortunately, there's a marked difference in values between generations, and businesses need to revamp their marketing strategy to reach out to their newest client base without alienating their other followers.
If you're like the hundreds of content marketers out there that have invested in blog content, you want people to read it. If you've been watching your metrics for visits, you might realize that many visitors don't even bother with your blog. Sure, they might follow a social post from your media to your blog, and possibly read a single entry, but they won't engage further than that.
Social media following is an integral part of executing a successful marketing strategy. Engagement on social media is far higher than other channels. However, despite their constant presence, social media networks aren't the only way for a company to do outreach and connect to their core audience.
Sales is a challenging industry that takes a unique combination of traits and skills to succeed. When we examine the truly memorable salespeople we know, a few things become immediately apparent -- most notably, that there are certain features all successful salespeople share.
17 leaders from YEC share the tools and processes they use and why they work.
Entrepreneurs should all know by now how nerve-wracking delivering a pitch to investors can be. If you've invested a lot of your time and effort into designing a business idea, you want to get the point across to investors effectively. As with anything, practicing your delivery can go a long way toward making a steadier presentation. That’s why we asked 13 successful entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:
Despite the numerous digital communications channels available today, email is still one of the best ways to get and stay in touch with your customers. Email marketing is notorious for its high return on investment, and with nearly 4 billion active email users, there’s a huge potential audience waiting to receive your messages.
Each company gauges the contribution of its employees differently. Some focus on deliverables, while others rely on employee loyalty and worked hours to determine a worker's contribution to the business.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council explain how companies can optimize their mobile shopping experience.
Many businesses see a major shift in their success once they establish a website that lets them provide new information and tools to their customers. However, some may see even greater success if they develop a mobile app.
Once seemingly confined to the spheres of gaming and technology, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are becoming increasingly common in both personal and professional ventures. In fact, VR and AR can be used to great effect in one’s personal branding strategy, especially if it's giving your audience a deeper connection or more intimate look at your business.
Free advertising has leveled up, as there are now more alternatives to paid ads than ever.
Focus on growing as a person while helping those around you
17 professionals from YEC share the best websites for locating fresh talent.
All leaders make mistakes; just be sure to see them as opportunities for growth.
Electronic wearables were an exciting new concept just years ago. Now, they’ve slowly become the norm, with gadgets like smart watches and sleep trackers overwhelming the market.
As a budding young entrepreneur, you're likely to meet a lot of people telling you, "no." While some of these people are well-meaning, the constant negativity will eventually impact your self-confidence.
Leadership is a battle for constant improvement.
Learning from others is vital to your success.
Employees who work on small teams may need to play multiple roles to ensure everything runs smoothly. With such limited resources, you may not be able to have a dedicated full-time marketing person to help you reach your full potential as a brand. That's why we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council the following question:
It takes more than just raising your voice
The only way a business can garner new customers and retain current ones is by laying out the benefits that its product or services present to the consumer. In the past, all it took was a flashy headline and a few bullet points that punched home the usefulness of the product or service. Today's world has evolved to a point where traditional advertising no longer makes the same impact. Even newer, more modern methods of advertising are having a hard time getting traction among some demographics.
Social media is becoming an increasingly important part of every business’ marketing strategy. Making the right move with your social content at the right time can help bring positive attention and new customers to your business.
Stress is common when you’re in a management position. With countless tasks to complete, employees to manage and business operations to oversee, it’s no surprise many leaders end up feeling overwhelmed at one point or another.
You have the power to reduce the number of people who stop using your product or service.
Since the internet has permeated business to such an extent, PR crises are becoming far more common for companies. Many of those PR faux-pas are due to misuse or misunderstanding of social media interaction. However, as much as social media can be a tool to cause a PR crisis, it can also be useful in helping to manage it. Social media is still the best way to create a rapport and interact with a particular demographic of customers directly.
[long-form emailed to Kelsey]
Within any company, the ambitions of individual team members should aid the overall organization. However, it takes a leader to fuel, direct, and inspire this ambition into a way that helps both the team members and the organization as a whole. One way leaders can get their team members to realize their ambitions is by guiding them toward self-teaching and taking initiative, as a way of expanding their knowledge and skills while also seizing new opportunities within the company. To help, we asked 15 members of Young Entrepreneur Council the following:
With so many remote working teams in the world today, productivity requires utilizing tools that can connect the team through voice, chat and video. Slack rules the roost as the team collaboration software, but it’s far from being the only reliable one. Dozens of team collaboration tools have gained growing popularity over the last two months. Some of them offer similar functionality to Slack and might even be better at some things. Others are sorely lacking in utilities to help a team get organized.
In all walks of life, there will be pitfalls that plague professionals. For an entrepreneur, especially, it may occasionally feel like nothing is working out, no matter what you do. There's a saying that success only comes to those who get back up each time they get knocked down. The problem is that the saying doesn't detail how you get back up from a fall. Some leaders can find themselves falling over and over, and each time the recovery takes more out of them.
Working remotely has become the new standard in the COVID-19 era. Companies that followed a traditional in-office model have had to adjust to how they presently work, and soon have to learn how to hire remotely.
Entrepreneurs can be so busy in today's business world that they lose sight of themselves. Introspection has an essential place in an entrepreneur's mindset. Understanding one's goals and motivations can help one come to terms with what one wants out of life.
As the up-and-coming generation of consumers, Gen Z has become a hot target demographic for many brands. This generation of true digital natives is even more entrenched in the world of technology than the millennials who came before them. Therefore, companies that want to reach them need to go all-in on social media, Gen Z's preferred place to "hang out" online.
Employees flock to managers who know how to identify and solve issues.
It takes a lot of mental fortitude for an employee to approach their employer for a raise. There's no playbook for managers and business owners to know how to gauge whether an employee deserves a raise or not. The factors as to whether an employee deserves to earn more can be approached in several different ways. From the addition of value to the support they provide, each plays an integral part in determining whether a raise is warranted. That’s why we asked 10 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:
People across all demographics want to do business with brands that deliver personalized content and evolve their company based on pain points and user feedback.
Despite the overwhelming preference for digital media among modern marketers, traditional advertising methods are still being implemented today and driving great results. Newspaper, TV and radio spots can offer tons of potential for businesses looking to reach a local market -- if they're used the right way.
You might be tempted to pay for ads, but engagement will go much further if it's organic.
Accessing capital is one of the biggest challenges many new entrepreneurs face. From loans to investments, securing the proper financing is a long and taxing process, but it can be overcome. Members of Young Entrepreneur Council explained how they worked through their funding challenges.
If prompted, there's at least one employee that business owners can point to definitively and state that they are one of the most high-performing hires at the company. However, these high-performing employees sometimes go through issues that can put them off their game. For the company, this can impact performance and efficiency.
Take your content marketing strategy to the next level by getting published on someone else's website.
Time management is one of the most challenging parts of being an entrepreneur. When you're a business owner, you don't have the luxury of getting all your tasks laid out for you. You have to formulate those tasks, assign importance to them, and schedule them so that they can get done in a reasonable window, all while finding ways to keep the entire business running and growing.
You’re going to encounter customers who are no longer interested in your brand. But there are people you can still win back if you understand their goals and interests.
The world's most successful entrepreneurs are often fiercely independent and self-reliant. They have the courage to keep going when things get difficult and know how to push themselves to overcome even the most challenging of situations.
However, no one becomes a success completely on their own. Entrepreneurs also need a strong support network of peers and mentors who can offer them sage advice and wisdom throughout their journey.
Below, 10 members of Young Entrepreneur Council share the one piece of advice that has stuck with them over the years and helped them get where they are today.
Overseeing a team that's spread across the country -- or even the globe -- doesn't have to be as challenging as you think.
A leader is someone who takes the initiative and drives the business forward to fulfill its goals. Within a company, leaders are responsible for guiding and inspiring those whose departments they lead. Many leaders get to their positions after years of experience and learning what their jobs entail.
Continue refining and adding new layers of protection to your cybersecurity plan this year.
Everyone feels down from time to time -- especially when you're dealing with the stress of running a business. Those negative feelings can make you question everything.
While it's OK to feel down, the best way to relieve that feeling is to actively seek out positive thoughts. That's why we asked Young Entrepreneur Council members what they do in moments of doubt to help remind them of their potential. Ask yourself the following questions to regain your confidence during a mental or emotional rut.
Having an active social media presence is a great way for leaders to grow their business. It helps you establish your personal brand and authority, as well as reach a wider audience of potential customers. However, it also requires you to expend time and energy, which can be especially draining for an introverted or introspective business owner.
Fortunately, you can use your introspection to your advantage while engaging on social media. Below , 10 Young Entrepreneur Council members share their best tips for introverted leaders who want to stay active on social media without burning out.
As your company grows, managing both company-wide and department goals can become more and more challenging. It can feel like a delicate balancing act -- and if it's not coordinated properly, prioritizing broader company goals could come at the expense of the individual departments.
As successful business leaders, the experts of Young Entrepreneur Council have learned how to track their department-specific goals as their companies have grown. That's why we asked a panel of YEC members to share their best tips for monitoring departmental objectives. Here's what they had to say.
Look for someone who will help you grow, not hold you back.
Entrepreneurs usually have to locate a source of funds to make their dreams into a reality. Sometimes, all you have is an idea, and as good as that idea is, unless you know how to get funding, it'll remain a thought in your head. Convincing people to invest in a business is more than just laying out the positives and negatives. Finding the right pitch for the correct type of investor is crucial in securing their financial help.
Office culture doesn't stagnate, and there will always be a constant change around how a business operates. Instituting new office procedures and policies as the company culture changes may mean taking some chances. Not all new plans are guaranteed to succeed, and some of them require considerable risk on behalf of the company.
Use email marketing to increase your conversions this holiday season.
In the age of social media, a controversy -- and a potential public relations crisis -- is always lurking. It's impossible to completely avoid controversial issues and conversations if your business is on social media, but knowing how to handle them with grace and professionalism can save you from landing your brand in hot water. To help you, we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council the following question:
The world has been enamored with the use of virtual reality ever since the movie “Tron” came out in the 80s. Today's VR is a bit different from the fancy world of the silver screen, but the technology has a lot of practical uses.
There are numerous benefits for consumers, business owners and developers when AI is used during the design phase.
Influencer marketing has helped businesses of all kinds build brand awareness, prolong engagement and generate sales.
Crafting a sound business plan will always take a lot of work, but it doesn't have to be overwhelming.
Looking to add a specific skill to your arsenal to make yourself more marketable? Consider an online course.
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