Guest Post | Mike McRitchie | Resume and LinkedIn Profile Writer | Telecom Marketing Content Writer

Working in your Golden Years: 3 Things to Know

October 7, 2021 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Now that you’ve retired, it’s time to decide what type of retirement you want to have. You can keep working, spend more time with family, or take a step in a completely new direction. There are so many opportunities after retiring.

If you’re thinking about going back to work or finding a new job, here are some things that you should know:

How to Polish Your Resume

Unless you’re just continuing employment into retirement, you’ll probably need to do some interviewing. In that case, it’s time to grab your resume and update it with your latest experiences.

Include the last 10 years of your working experience on your resume. Anything older is less likely to be relevant to the position that you’re applying for.

Don’t be afraid to make your resume tailored to you because employers are looking for a good fit for both the position and the company. This goes beyond the basics criteria of making sure that you have the skills to complete the job. Job-related interests, personal projects, or volunteer work give your interviewer a well-rounded idea of who you are.

How to Account for Social Security and Medicare Benefits

The two motivations for working through retirement are usually financial need or boredom. If your motivation for working past 65 is purely financial, you need to know how it affects your social security and Medicare benefits.

If you’re retiring earlier than your full retirement age and decide to supplement your side-hustle or other employment income with Social Security benefits, your monthly social security checks might be reduced.

Benefits are reduced depending on your age and how much you earn, so you’ll need to check out resources from the Social Security Administration to make sure that working post-retirement is financially worth it for you.

Working can also affect whether or not you should disenroll from Medicare Part B. While you can keep your private insurance and enroll in Medicare, having both may not be worth it for you.

However, if you’re working at a small company with less than 20 employees, you are not eligible to disenroll from Medicare Part B. If this is the case and you delay Medicare Part B enrollment, you’ll incur fees every year you delay receiving this healthcare benefit.

How to Fill Time if Full-Time Work Isn’t For You

You may decide with all these variables in mind that working full-time through retirement isn’t for you. If this is the case, consider other methods of earning money, such as part-time work, freelance gigs, or starting your own business.

Volunteering throughout your retirement is also a great way to gain skills and give back to your community. You can continue to enjoy your freedom in retirement and work with local organizations that are important to you..
There are many resources out there to help you decide how to spend your time in your retirement. Most of us decide to go back to work, so you’ll probably need some help brushing up on your job search skills. Check out the visual below for more tips about working after you retire.

Why El Dorado Is a Great City to Run a Business In

September 29, 2021 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Then you’re trying to build a business, location matters. El Dorado, California, is a rapidly growing suburban complex with a population of 50,547, according to the 2020 Census estimates. That rapid growth is one of many reasons El Dorado is a great place to start or relocate a business. Mike McRitchie shares how you can start.

El Dorado Is Close to Big Cities

Many high-quality workers are eager to move to El Dorado because it’s conveniently located in the Sacramento – Roseville – Arden Arcade metro area. This means it’s easy to travel to the bigger cities for shopping, day trips, or a night out.

Health Care Is Accessible

Health care costs in El Dorado are lower than the national average. This is important for those who are thinking long-term about starting a family or establishing a home. It’s also easy to find physicians and specialists in the area.

The Cost of Living Is Low

Business and residential rentals in El Dorado are plentiful because of the area’s relatively low cost of living. Affordability makes a huge difference for business owners because it means your overhead is lower, and if you’re paying a reasonable salary, your employees will be happier, too. It’s much easier to retain talent when they can afford a comfortable lifestyle.

Even early-career professionals have a chance of homeownership in El Dorado. In addition to the green grants, affordable housing funding, and VA loans that have gotten a lot of attention in recent years, there’s the CalHFA program that offers financial assistance to get on the housing ladder.

El Dorado Is Full of Fun and Culture

Families and young professionals want to live in an area where they can enjoy a good work/life balance. El Dorado offers lots for people to do when they’re not at work. Some of the most popular activities in the area include:

Outdoor fun at Promontory Park
Shopping at the El Dorado Hills Town Center
Escape Games at The Game Room Adventure Cafe
Tastings at the Dry Diggings Distillery

There Are Many Networking Opportunities

Business owners will find many opportunities to network with like-minded people in the local area. Networking can offer ideas and support. Whether you’re starting a business in El Dorado or relocating, that support can be invaluable. Some of the main networking opportunities include:

Local Educational Institutions Are Strong

For a business to thrive, it needs a talented and well-educated workforce. There are several high-quality colleges in or close to El Dorado, including:

Folsom Lake College
DeVry University
Sierra College
Roseville Gateway Campus

Get Your Business Off to a Good Start

The California state government provides lots of guidance to help entrepreneurs start a business in the area. This includes a free “starting a business” checklist that covers company formation, licensing, permits, and taxes. This list makes it easy to cover all of the important legal points of running a business in El Dorado.

El Dorado Is a Great Location for Business Owners

If you start a business in El Dorado or decide to relocate there, you’ll find yourself in a community of enthusiastic entrepreneurs. The quality of life, cost of living, and government support available make El Dorado a good choice for motivated business owners.

6 Super Tips for Women to Ensure a Secured Financial Future

September 23, 2021 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Women are experts at managing the household and saving money. But they are often caught up in the collective well-being of their family. They rarely secure their financial future with life insurance or retirement plans. But if you are a financially enlightened modern woman who understands the unpredictability of life, you’ve come to the right place!

These are the 6 financial tips for women on building a bright financial future for themselves.

Manage Income & Expenses Through Budgeting

It is vital to create a monthly budget for financial planning. Make a detailed list of your expenses, including groceries, EMIs, childcare expenses etc. Check if you can cut down on any payment to make room for extra savings for your future. If you are working, try to increase your income.

As a housewife also, you can find opportunities to earn via your education and talents. To increase your cash flow and limit your expense is the primary requirement for ensuring a secured financial future.

Create an Emergency Fund

A financial emergency can cause an imbalance in your income and expenditure equilibrium. An emergency fund is required to combat unforeseen expenses like a vehicle breakdown, home repair, medical emergencies etc. If you are prepared for such unexpected events, your financial planning won’t get disrupted.

Ideally, you should have an emergency fund that can provide for your 6 months of living expenses. However, you can curate your emergency fund according to your individual needs and lifestyle.

Have a Financial Plan & Goal

Women should have clarity regarding their financial goals and plan accordingly. It is crucial to have the clarity of vision to secure a financial future. Based on your financial goal, you can create an investment and saving portfolio. Try to make it as versatile as possible. You can create a mix of FDs, gold, equity, real estate etc.

To do that successfully, every woman needs to educate herself and her partner about market trends, various financial instruments, and investment options.

Invest in High-return Schemes

There are various high-return saving schemes from government and private players to help you shape your financial future. One of them is the Sukanya Samriddhi Yojna scheme which encourages financial investments for women from early childhood. Inquire about this scheme if you have a daughter. Other schemes are NSC, PPF, KVP, monthly and yearly deposits in the post office.

Chit fund is also a type of high return scheme which is based on collective saving. You can now start a chit fund within your circle through various online platforms.

Get a Term Insurance

Term insurance not only secures your financial future. It provides security to your dependents and kids as well. This financial safety net works for your whole family in case of any unfortunate incident. There are various kinds of term plans. A term plan with a pension after the retirement age is considered ideal by many financial experts.

Some term plans give you your premium back after a certain age, and some don’t. There is a difference in interest rates in such cases. Weigh in all available options carefully.

Make a Retirement Fund

Whether you are a working woman or a homemaker, you must plan for old age. A wise and systematic investment for your retirement empowers you to enjoy the same lifestyle without compromising in your later years. It’s ok if you can make only a small contribution monthly towards a secured financial future in your golden age.

What matters is these contributions should be consistent and well-planned. You can invest in schemes like term insurance and later in senior citizen’s savings scheme of government.

Final Thoughts

It’s time to break the misconception of only the man of the house being responsible for securing the financial future of the family. As a woman, you are perfectly capable of making wise and smart financial decisions for yourself and your family. Start grooming and educating yourself now!

Author Bio:

Aatish Khanna works with the Content Marketing team at Money Club – a digital chit fund platform that makes saving, borrowing, and investing your money more efficient. He writes on topics to help his readers understand processes so they can make better financial decisions. He’s the go-to person that his family, friends, and colleagues turn to for all their money matters. He loves to play board games and aspires to one day build his one finance-related board game and app.

What Does The Future of Ecommerce Look Like?

September 21, 2021 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

2020 was an unprecedented year for all businesses, especially retail. As more businesses shifted to online channels, the future of eCommerce looks brighter than ever. Each year, we see more and more eCommerce businesses emerge, allowing entrepreneurs the opportunity to finally sell their products without having to set up a physical retail location while providing them with benefits such as a remote workforce.

In this article, we’ll discuss where eCommerce is heading and what you can expect in the future.

Voice Assistance

With Alexa, Cortana, and Google Home taking over the world by providing consumers with convenience, you can expect to see changes to the way people shop online. Voice shopping is already popular among those with Alexa and Amazon accounts. As soon as you realize you’ve run out of something, you can ask Alexa to purchase it for you without having to lift a finger.

Voice shopping will continue to become more popular as more people adopt this technology into their homes. Instead of only allowing consumers to purchase from large marketplaces like Amazon, eCommerce stores can integrate voice assistance with their stores to provide customers with better options and even more convenience.

Omnichannel Commerce

Many shoppers use multiple channels during their shopping process. For example, let’s say someone is looking for comfortable workout shoes. They would likely start with a Google search and end up on a few different websites, from the brand’s Facebook pages to their eCommerce websites. With voice assistants and smartphones being used daily, omnichannel shopping will become more prevalent. eCommerce businesses need to optimize their websites and social media pages so they can sell their products where they can reach their customers, including Facebook and Instagram.

While eCommerce brands already know the benefits of using social media to market their brands, they might not be using the recently added commerce component that can facilitate shopping on each platform. Rather than asking a customer to leave their scrolling behind to purchase something on a website, shoppers can shop from an Instagram post without leaving the platform, making shopping much more convenient, which increases sales.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Customer experience is everything in the retail world. Without providing customers with a great experience, you’ll likely lose out on a sale and even future sales. eCommerce businesses have a great opportunity to provide an enhanced customer experience with Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI can be used to recommend products based on the customer’s shopping, browsing behavior, and past purchases, while AR allows customers to view how a product would look in real life before deciding to make a purchase.

While many businesses can opt to use both AR and AI, you might be better off prioritizing one over the other. For example, if you sell weight-loss medication and services, you might choose to prioritize AI so you can learn about your audience while providing them with a personalized experience on your website. In this case, AI could help you in the form of a quiz that not only captures important information you need to know about potential customers but gives them valuable information based on their answers.

More Payment Options

Designing an eCommerce website with a great user experience means the good experience should begin with a shopper’s first click to the website and end with their purchase. With multiple payment options, you can get more purchases and provide convenience for shoppers.

Without multiple payment options, you may be losing out on valuable customers. For example, your eCommerce store should always allow people to pay with a card. What you may not know is more people are opting to use digital wallets like Google Pay along with PayPal to make checking out quicker.

Dynamic Pricing

eCommerce stores need to price their products correctly, but pricing them dynamically means you can sell products at the right price to boost sales and make a profit. Dynamic pricing software allows business owners the tools to learn about market prices, demand, and production values in real-time, which can help them update their pricing.

Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce is increasingly popular as fewer people hop on desktops and laptops to shop, do research, and communicate with their friends. Fewer people than ever use laptops and desktops at home when they’re away from their jobs because their mobile devices can do everything a laptop can do.

Abandoned cart rates are high for eCommerce sites that aren’t responsive or mobile-friendly, so it’s important to make sure you work with a developer that can make the mobile shopping experience convenient.

Better Data Collection and Analysis

Online brands need to collect data on their customers to learn about them and find ways to get them through the sales funnel. Collecting data can help eCommerce businesses better target their customers and retain them. Data will only continue to grow eCommerce sales in the future because marketers will be able to make more strategic decisions using real data instead of guesses.

B2B eCommerce

B2B businesses are finally undergoing the necessary digital transformation they need to stay relevant. B2B businesses will continue to think about their online presence and ways to understand their buyers. They will even begin taking relationships and purchasing online. For example, a business that sells products to a retailer may create an eCommerce portal for customers that allows them to purchase their inventory online instead of through email or a salesperson.

As more and more B2B companies move online, they’ll also begin building an online brand narrative with content marketing, customer engagement, and more.

The Future of eCommerce

As technology advances, eCommerce companies will have to determine which advancements will help their businesses grow. While there are a lot of emerging trends in this industry, you’ll need to prioritize them based on the needs of your customers. For example, if your customers are asking for a better way to check out, you’ll need to allow them multiple payment methods instead of jumping right into AR.

Depending on the size of your organization, you won’t have time to capitalize on every future trend, so make sure you determine which ones are right for your business based on the industry and your goals. For example, B2B businesses that sell refrigerators to retailers likely won’t have as much success selling products on an Instagram post as they would enhancing their customer experience.

As always, make sure you listen to your customers. If you’re not sure what they need from you, send them a survey so you can make their shopping experience better and use that information to grow your business.

Matt Casadona

Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys San Diego life, traveling, and music.

6 Important eCommerce Metrics To Track for Your Business

September 1, 2021 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Metrics are important for understanding your marketing strategy, overall business, and customers. The most successful eCommerce businesses base their decisions on the statistics they have available to them. eCommerce business owners need to know how their store is performing at all times and how to use this information to scale their business.

Most Important eCommerce Metrics to Track

When it comes to eCommerce, there are thousands of metrics that you can track, but it’s important to determine which ones are most worth your time so that you can efficiently grow your business with the right insights. Here are the most important metrics you should be tracking.

Sales Conversion Rate

The purpose of your eCommerce business is to sell products, which means that your website needs to convert. Your eCommerce conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors who make a purchase. This metric directly impacts your revenue, which means it should be on the top of your list of metrics to track. Take a look at your current conversion rate so that you understand your baseline. You can also set goals for yourself. Depending on your industry, your conversion rate can be as little as one percent or lower.

Almost all analytics tools can tell you your conversion rate, but you can find it yourself by dividing the number of people who make a purchase from your website by the number of people who visited your website.

There are other types of conversion rates you might want to pay attention to that don’t have anything to do with the purchase of a product, such as signing up for a newsletter. It’s important that you determine which conversions mean the most to you.

Improving your conversion rate isn’t always easy, but it is possible depending on a number of factors. Make sure that you’re always testing out new ways to improve your conversion rate so that you can find the right one.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total that you earn from a customer over their life. For example, if your online store sells body pillows and you earn $10 over ten transactions from a typical customer, your CLV is $100. Knowing your CLV lets you know how much you can spend to acquire new customers and how much you should spend to retain them.

To increase your CLV, it’s important to increase your average order value and build long-term relationships with your customers to prompt repeat orders.

Revenue by Traffic Source

All traffic to your website isn’t equal. Some sources send visitors who are more likely to be customers, which means that some traffic sources will be better for your business than others. For example, if you spend the time and money on optimizing your website for search engines, social media advertising, Google advertising, and email marketing, you may be interested to know which one of these sources helps you make the most sales.

Let’s say that you pay an SEO agency $2,500/month to optimize your website to rank on the first page of Google, $5,000/month on Google ads, and $5,000/month on influencer marketing. When you determine your revenue by traffic, you may find that organic traffic from Google brings in 80% of your sales, while influencer marketing brings in 10% and Google ads bring in 10%. From this example, you’d be able to see that the investment in SEO was worth it, but you may want to change your influencer marketing strategy.

Hot Tip: Save money on influencer marketing by only working with influencers with a high engagement rate that shows that their followers are real people.

Email Subscription Sign-Ups

Also known as a micro-conversion, email opt-ins are another metric that can help you determine the success of your eCommerce website. Email marketing is a necessity in the digital age, which means that you need to keep in contact with consumers who sign up to receive emails. Remember, these customers typically sign up in change for a percentage off of their initial purchase. They also expect that some, if not all, of the emails you send them will be about sales and new products.

The good thing about email marketing is that you do not depend on another platform like Facebook. Instead, the people who want to hear from you opt-in to do so. It’s important to get as many prospective customers as possible to sign up for your emails, even if they don’t buy your products. Those who sign up are interested in your products but not ready to make a purchase, which means that you can put them in a funnel that ultimately leads them down the path to making a purchasing decision.

When using email marketing, make sure to track your total opt-ins and where they came from. You might be collecting emails through social media as well as your website.

You can track email opt-ins in multiple ways, including using the built-in analytics in your email marketing platform or setting up a conversion goal in Google Analytics.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is how much it costs you to acquire a new customer. Your customer acquisition cost must be lower than your CLV in order for your business to make money. To calculate your CAC, divide your total marketing spend by your total number of customers. You can also calculate your CAC by traffic channel from Google Ads to organic social media.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

If you ever wonder how many people add items to their cart and then exit your website, your cart abandonment rate will tell you. Some of the revenue lost by abandoned carts is recoverable by setting up email automation that reminds customers that they abandoned their carts, making them more likely to pick up where they left off. Lowering your cart abandonment rate should be a huge priority since you can target customers who were already interested in your products.

The Bottom Line

As a business, it’s important to track metrics to measure the overall growth of your company and to ensure you’re investing in the right resources. Not measuring metrics can cause you to spend money on tools and services that aren’t doing your business any good. Use the six metrics above to help you.