Ace that interview. An applicant’s best tool is to come prepared for the meeting. The success of landing the job is entirely dependent on how you handle yourself during the interview and how knowledgeable you are of the tasks that the position will require from you.

Here are some tips to keep you on the lead.

Know them. It is important that you know where you are heading. Do some research about the company. Check their websites, find out what it is that they do and what they are good at. A little appreciation coming from you on how well they are doing will somehow lighten the mood as you talk.

What’s the job. Read through the job qualifications. Think of your skills and past experiences and how you can help them connect you to what it is that they need. Sell yourself now, this is the best time. Do not promise something if at the back of your mind you’re already thinking about how you will deliver. Cite examples of past experiences that will strengthen your application.

Next question, please. Write down possible questions to be asked and say the answers out loud. You don’t want them catching you grappling for words to say because you did not expect them to ask questions like: ‘Why are you leaving your current job?’ or, ‘What interests you about this opening?’ or, “What are your strengths and weaknesses?’. Practice answering out loud will help you look confident during the interview.

I’m nervous. Don’t just sit there and pray that the question you are dreaded to be asked won’t come up, instead, prepare how you will answer it. Practice saying the answer to the most dreaded question out loud. Practice makes perfect no matter how nervous you are.

My turn. Prepare your own questions. It is most likely that the interviewer will give you time to ask your questions. This is a time for you to know if you would like to pursue the job. You might ask questions like, “What are the biggest challenges the person in this position encounters?’ or, ‘How will the success of the person in this position be measured?’ or “How does a typical day or week look like in this position?’.

Start with the right mindset. Relax. Don’t aim for perfection. Remember that the person doing the interview hasn’t given flawless interviews as well. It will help to bear in mind that the reason they arranged an interview with you is that they have assessed you and that you might be qualified for the role.

TEAMWORK is the key to every success. SUCCESS is the product of teamwork.

1. Commitment to the team. Strive to achieve the best for the whole team. Be there when needed and make every second of your ‘seat time’ worth it. Make a commitment to your self-brand.
2. Flexibility at all costs. A team player must be flexible. Your being part of the team does not stop when your tasks for the day are done. You toil as others work without hesitation, looking for ways to improve and adjust when needed without murmuring of exhaustion or stress.
3. Get Involved. Don’t stay in the shadows for too long. Exert effort to learn and share new ideas with your teammates in order to improve. 
4. Reliable and Responsible. An excellent team player is both reliable and responsible. You are expected to deliver a completed task assigned to you. Get tasks done, not necessarily in the order they were given but in order of priority. Unsure of priorities? Ask your supervisor.
5. Be a good listener. A team player must learn to listen first before making objections. As you listen to other team players’ ideas, think. Make sure not to gather up questions on how to trample down the idea but consider why they believe it in the first place.
6. Credit always goes to the team. Promotion is a good thing to plan but overthinking it may get you to end up losing more. Once the team is successful all the team players will be benefitted.
7. Always help. We have a description for our jobs upon getting hired but those descriptions do not set out restrictions about helping your teammates. In a team, we’re family. We can reach out if we notice one of the team members is struggling to do some tasks. Let us progress together, as a team.
8. We can both support and respect for each other. We must be careful how we treat others. Let us always check ourselves and our teammates. We must be cautious about how we act and make sure we do not make fun of another teammate’s expense. When we have fun, let’s encourage other teammates instead, to keep the friendship going. Remember that respect begets respect.
9. Problem solver, not a trouble-maker. While your superior might always have solutions for the team’s problems, that should not stop you from giving out suggestions as well. 
10. Know the red signs. A reliable team player must be able to see through the red signs. Alam the whole team if the idea you are all working on is going down the drain. Immediately back off from it, offer some good suggestions or solutions, as a good team player should.

Many companies of all shapes and sizes have been taking advantage of outsourcing their workers to the Philippines. A remarkable part of the Philippines’ outsourcing patrons is comprised of businesses in the accounting and finance field. In the last 15 years, the BPO industry has bloomed all across Asia and the two countries have become known as the pioneers in the  BPO region: India and the Philippines. This recognition makes the Philippines the principal stopping place for companies to outsource their business processing needs. 

Many countries (such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia) prefer outsourcing in the Philippines as the country has been steady in administering quality and exceptional services. In the recent upsurge of the Real Estate business in the US in 2015, the Philippines is also ramping up fast as a leading destination for finance and accounting institutions outsourcing.

But since the Philippines possesses a profusion of highly skilled workers, heavier obligations that require finance and accounting expertise are also being outsourced to the country. 

1. Cost-Effective. This is the primary reason companies outsource part of their operations. The Philippines is a very low-cost country compared to other countries in Asia and the whole world. A recent study showed that the Philippines is one of the most cost-effective locations for finance and accounting solutions. Not only is the cost of labor typically half of what it is in progressive countries, but employers also do not have to pay for office space, equipment, taxes, etc. But the low labor cost does not mean that the services offered by the Philippines are inferior to some. As I mentioned above, Real Estate businesses have already joined the bandwagon and have certified to the efficiency and capability of Filipino employees.
2. The state of English. The Philippines is recognized globally as one of the largest English-speaking nations with the majority of its population having at least some degree of fluency in the language. People choose to study a foreign language for many different reasons. For most Filipinos, studying English in the Philippines, they do so for career opportunities and job growth. English is widely used in the education field. It is considered as a major subject and is taught in the Philippines from grade one to college and is the medium of instruction in many schools. Due to the Filipinos strong command of the English language, several opportunities opened for their country. These opportunities are mainly: overseas employment, the outsourcing industry, and tourism. 
3. Workflow Strategy. There’s what we call a ‘follow the sun’ strategy. There will be a workforce behind you round the clock, doing their jobs while the rest of your world is sleeping. This means faster results equals early delivery. Outsourcing in the Philippines is very beneficial as these Filipinos are talented which means quality deliverable. It will be your offshore team that will be working for you while you are closed for the day. You will be waking up the next day with projects delivered. A study shows that the BPO Industry in the Philippines regularly ranks at the top of the service delivery quality surveys. Add this to an amazing work ethic. Filipinos are respectful by nature and it shows how they interact with clients. They also do not have any problem with regard to working under pressure for they are resilient.
4. The Workforce. The population of the pHiHighly skilled workforce the Philippines has a large young population that is growing faster than the country’s dependent children and retired workforce. The median age of this young population is 23 years old. Beyond just resulting in an abundant supply of manpower, the statistics also amount to a highly educated workforce boasting a literacy rate of 97.5%. Every year, local universities and colleges produce addition of 500,000+ to the pool of skilled and qualified workers. As per experts, the Philippines will continue to benefit from this young and talented workforce in the coming years.
5. Government Support. The BPO sector has grown to be a multi billion-dollar industry and has contributed to the country’s growth in terms of economy. For this reason, the local government made sure the industry will get strong support through regulations and incentives to choose the Philippines for its offshore operations. The Philippine Economic Zone Authority has been established to provide a venue of support to this industry as well as the Special Economic Zone. A Law called the Data Privacy Act ensures protection from unauthorized access and usage. The government also created courses to help individuals be prepared for emerging thousands of jobs in the BPO industry.

Lipa in the Digital Marketing Era

Lipa is known  for its recreational facilities and religious edifices. It is a first class city in the whole of Batangas and thriving in all aspects of city success. Malls are like mushrooms popping everywhere and the investors keep on arriving.

Industrial Parks in Bugtong and Inosluban have started to be built and in 2003, malls like Robinsons and SM have started arriving in Lipa City. The developers, seeing the opportunity of housing thousands of families, have started building homes to house the growing population due to people migrating from the provinces and nearby areas to grab the opportunities.

The birth of the digital era in the city has started when the BPOs started coming in almost in unison. When most of the BPO companies have crowded the Greater Manila, they then needed a new place to spill the progress to and the most strategic location is Lipa, given its proximity to the Capital City which is Manila.

The Growth in the Digital Economy 

People have continued to flock the City when the BPO industry flourished. Lipa has welcomed it with open arms and the companies have started hiring by the hundreds. The Digital Era has struck the city and its people which paved the way to Digital Marketing.

With a  population of more than 300,000 and 10 BPO companies including TeleTech Customer Care Management Philippines Inc., Alorica Philippines Inc., Tele-Accent Call Center Solutions Inc., Bubu IT Solutions Inc., Lasting Line Contact Center Inc., Primary Care Management Inc., Clear To Close Services Inc., SPT Business Resources Inc., Maestro Systemas Technologies and The Results Companies, Lipa has become a BPO hub.

The progress of the city when it comes to digital marketing has been going on for a few years now making people more eager to learn more about it through trainings and offered online courses.  

The continous growth of Lipa’s economy has been contributed by thousands of call center agents and BPO professionals pumping millions into the treasury of the City through their taxes. A Philippine new law has also added strength to the buying power of its citizens inspiring them to work harder.

Why BPO’s are attracting more people to Lipa City.
Many investors are eyeing this city from the south which would make it more progressive and competitive.

• Relocation: People have been coming to establish a career in digital marketing and stay in the city seeing the potential of career growth with great compensations and allowances. Some companies would offer relocation packages which entice people to come and build their future in Lipa. 

• Climate Benefits: One can truly say that Lipa is blessed not only with its cool climate but also with its hard working people. Some other factors of its success would include its strategic position being in the heart of Batangas, just an hour and a half from Manila, surrounded by neighboring towns and cities, and mountains protecting it from strong storms and its altitude eliminating the possibility of floods. 
• Reputation: Lipa City was rated the 3rd coldest in the Philippines and one of the fastest growing economy in the Philippines. The progress from the capital city of Manila is being cascaded to Lipa since 15 years ago which brought back its people and started the migration.

I’m going to give a simple and effective five step process to start attracting more attention from your ideal clients. Below are some step by step guidelines to help you attract customers rather than binge readers.

Step One: Choose a topic that focuses on money keywords.
Everybody loves to try and be creative with content, and write about something meaningful, or inspirational about their lives. But, what you need to think about is, what is the likelihood of someone reading your article and wanting to buy your product or service.A common issue I see with content production is tons of articles that hardly get any traffic or don’t ever convert into paying customers. Put yourself in your buyers shoes, what would they search for if they needed help.

Ok, here is step one:

Choose one of your main services or keywords that relate to your product. As an example, if you’re in eLearning and focus on things like professional development, or helping companies with learning and Development, you could make your subject “Learning and Development”.

Use a tool like Keywordtool.io – And type in your keyword to get ideas and see which keywords are more popular. The tool will show alternatives phrases, so, for Learning and Development it could be, “What is Learning and Development, L&D Tools, and so forth. The tool will also give you an indication of how popular your keywords are, you then need to narrow down to which keywords indicate buying interest and which do not.

• Step Two: Write a better topic than your competition.
  Now you have chosen your keyword, you need to write something that outperforms your competition. Google is looking for the most popular and relevant topic to match the search term you want to be found for. If your competition are providing great content on a similar product or service then it only makes sense that they would be number one on Google.
  
  Firstly, make sure your article is contextual and exceeds 2,000 words. Thin content or informational pages with less than 500 words don’t provide enough value and won’t be seen as an authoritative source of content.Secondly, make sure your topic is completely relevant to the search term you have chosen. That means not trying to push your bounds and cram in four other topics. Stick to one clear topic throughout.Finally, break up your article with keyword friendly subheadings relating to your topic. Let’s use the example of  “Learning and Development” You can break this article up into many different sub headings like, “What is Learning and Development, How does Learning and Development engage Employees” etc.When creating your topic I want you to Include these five tips.

  1. Include internal links to other pages based around your topic – Lonely pieces of content with no supporting articles don’t hold as much weight as cornerstone content. Neil Patel gives some great guidelines on how to do this effectively.

  2. Reference some external sources in your topic – Don’t be afraid to reference statistics, or other great topics that can help your article be a better resource for your readers.

  3. Add SEO Optimised headers to break up your content. – Doing this will not only help Google pick up more keywords on your page, but helps break up the content for the reader. Make sure you add the titles with <H2> Tags on your titles. This may need some development help, but takes minutes to do.

  4. Keep your page title short and relevant to the article. – If your article is based around Learning and Development, then make sure you choose your most desired keyphrase as your page title, like “Learning and Development Company”, rather than “Learning and development, elearning provider, UK”. Placing a large amount of keywords in a title such as in the latter example is called keyword spamming. It doesn’t work.

5. 
   5. Add images to the page and include alt tags. – Adding images to the page breaks up the content nicely and adds some weight to the page. The addition of alt tags also gives you the opportunity to add some keywords into the descriptions. The key here is to label the image to describe what the image is. Check out Mozs explanation guide here.Step Three: Create Supporting articles for your topic.
   Google crawls your entire website and looks at relevancy when determining ranking positions. If you only have one page on your website covering a certain topic, and lots of other random pages covering different topics, this will not help your overall site performance.– Check your Competitors for subjects
   Using a command in Google, you can see all of the pages that are indexed by your competitors. As an example, you can type your main keyphrase into Google and pick the first company on page one. We’re going to check this company’s indexed pages on Google for your chosen keywordOpen a new tab and type into Google: “site:co.uk [keyphrase]” – Here is an example for learning and development, site:cipd.co.uk “learninganddevelopment” This will show you all of this company’s indexed pages for that keyword, from which you can research relevant topics to give you some ideas on what you can write about.

   – Build a content pipeline

Planning content is as important as writing content. This gives you the opportunity to keep track of your content production, and visually see how your content fits into overall strategy. Here is a basic template you can use to start adding new titles too, this can be customised to fit whatever needs you have for your content production. View template here.

Using your main keyphrase you have picked, I want you to pick five other subjects on this topic and add them into a content pipeline. Using Learning and Development as an example, you could add relevant titles, such as “Learning and Development Trends”, or “How L&D will change in 2019”. So, as you can see we are staying relevant, but providing new topics to support your main article.

– Write five supporting pages and internally link them.  – Now you have the titles for your new content, I want you to write at least 800 words for each topic you have chosen. And where appropriate, make sure they link to each other.

Naturally, the articles you are writing will support each other, so link to the additional pages with words matching the topic. As an example, the Learning and Development Trends article could also have a line mentioning the <changes in L&D in 2019> This would allow for a hyperlink going to your second article. Make sure not to add more than 5-6 internal links on the page

Step Four: Promote your content with Paid Ads.
Websites with low traffic have less chance of being noticed, so to give your content the best chance, post the article on Facebook and run a paid Facebook Ad campaign.

Promoting you content with paid ads will encourage social shares, new visits from Facebook, and broaden the horizon of the readership. Which means bloggers and website owners may see this content, and reference it on their websites, which equals more backlinks and page authority.

Social media Examiner offer some helpful tips on setting this up, or you can check out Facebook’s support

Step Five: Build Relationships with website owners.
Google looks at popularity when determining a webpage’s rankings, meaning if you have a low amount of websites that mention your articles, then your popularity is going to be low. The correct terms for this is backlinks, and having great content is good, but you need backlinks to give you the best chance of getting those top page one positions.

We are going to use a very well known, laborious, but effective outreach strategy. Its called manual outreach. Below I have outlined two options for you.

Option One: The Skyscraper Technique.
The Skyscraper technique was introduced by Brian Deen, a well known SEO, so I suppose it’s only fair to share his explanation of how to do this. Check out his post here

Using a backlink tool like Ahrefs, you can see the types of companies that already link to your competition. So, start by Googling your keyphrase and pick the first person on the list.

Add the website link into Ahrefs, and on the left hand side you will see “backlinks” click this section and it will show you a list of websites that link to that page.

Create a list of all the companies who show a number of 20-100 Domain Ranking (DR) – You will see these numbers listed first to the right next to the domains.

Once you have a list, send a personalised email to every person on the list informing them that you recently posted a newer, longer, and more informational version of something they are already linking to. Try and find the editorial team, rather than just a generic email address.

Option Two: Guest Posting
The aim here is to find editorial teams that are looking for additional content, and become a guest writer. Having relationships with other websites will help quickly scale up your popularity to new articles.

Start by typing your keyphrase into Google, so an example, “learning and development, write for us” This will show you a list of pages in Google that include “write for us” so you can see what the website guidelines are if you want to become a regular contributor.

Create a list of websites that you would like to be associated with, and create a personalised email to send to each editor. Make sure to keep the email short, to the point, and give an example of what you have written previously. This will help increase your chance of a reply.  

Conclusion
I have listed above five steps that you can do yourself to start bringing in targeted traffic to your website. If you really want to get more of your ideal clients, then following these steps is a step in the right direction.

Any of my LinkedIn connections who want me to explain these steps in more detail are welcome to send me a private message.

If you’re interested more about the future of SEO and want to prepare your business for the changes happening in 2019, then feel free to download my short eBook here –