Category Archives: General

Global Business Speaks English

Global Business Speaks English

Ready or not, English is now the global language of business. More and more multinational companies are mandating English as the common corporate language—Airbus, Daimler-Chrysler, Fast Retailing, Nokia, Renault, Samsung, SAP, Technicolor, and Microsoft in Beijing, to name a few—in an attempt to facilitate communication and performance across geographically diverse functions and business endeavors.

Adopting a common mode of speech isn’t just a good idea; it’s a must, even for an American company with operations overseas, for instance, or a French company focused on domestic customers. Imagine that a group of salespeople from a company’s Paris headquarters get together for a meeting. Why would you care whether they all could speak English? Now consider that the same group goes on a sales call to a company also based in Paris, not realizing that the potential customer would be bringing in employees from other locations who didn’t speak French. This happened at one company I worked with. Sitting together in Paris, employees of those two French companies couldn’t close a deal because the people in the room couldn’t communicate. It was a shocking wake-up call, and the company soon adopted an English corporate language strategy.

Similar concerns drove Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten—Japan’s largest online marketplace—to mandate in March 2010 that English would be the company’s official language of business. The company’s goal was to become the number one internet services company in the world, and Mikitani believed that the new policy—which would affect some 7,100 Japanese employees—was vital to achieving that end, especially as expansion plans were concentrated outside Japan. He also felt responsible for contributing to an expanded worldview for his country, a conservative island nation.

The multibillion-dollar company—a cross between Amazon.com and eBay—was on a growth spree: It had acquired PriceMinister.com in France, Buy.com and FreeCause in the U.S., Play.com in the UK, Tradoria in Germany, Kobo eBooks in Canada, and established joint ventures with major companies in China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Brazil. Serious about the language change, Mikitani announced the plan to employees not in Japanese but in English. Overnight, the Japanese language cafeteria menus were replaced, as were elevator directories. And he stated that employees would have to demonstrate competence on an international English scoring system within two years—or risk demotion or even dismissal.

The media instantly picked up the story, and corporate Japan reacted with fascination and disdain. Honda’s CEO, Takanobu Ito, publicly asserted, “It’s stupid for a Japanese company to only use English in Japan when the workforce is mainly Japanese.” But Mikitani was confident that it was the right move, and the policy is bearing fruit. The English mandate has allowed Mikitani to create a remarkably diverse and powerful organization. Today, three out of six senior executives in his engineering organization aren’t Japanese; they don’t even speak Japanese. The company continues to aggressively seek the best talent from around the globe. Half of Rakuten’s Japanese employees now can adequately engage in internal communication in English, and 25% communicate in English with partners and coworkers in foreign subsidiaries on a regular basis.

Adopting a global language policy is not easy, and companies invariably stumble along the way. It’s radical, and it’s almost certain to meet with staunch resistance from employees. Many may feel at a disadvantage if their English isn’t as good as others’, team dynamics and performance can suffer, and national pride can get in the way. But to survive and thrive in a global economy, companies must overcome language barriers—and English will almost always be the common ground, at least for now.

The fastest-spreading language in human history, English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people worldwide—that’s one in every four of us. There are close to 385 million native speakers in countries like the U.S. and Australia, about a billion fluent speakers in formerly colonized nations such as India and Nigeria, and millions of people around the world who’ve studied it as a second language. An estimated 565 million people use it on the internet.

The benefits of “Englishnization,” as Mikitani calls it, are significant; however, relatively few companies have systematically implemented an English-language policy with sustained results. Through my research and work over the past decade with companies, I’ve developed an adoption framework to guide companies in their language efforts. There’s still a lot to learn, but success stories do exist. Adopters will find significant advantages.

Why English Only?

There’s no question that unrestricted multilingualism is inefficient and can prevent important interactions from taking place and get in the way of achieving key goals. The need to tightly coordinate tasks and work with customers and partners worldwide has accelerated the move toward English as the official language of business no matter where companies are headquartered.

Three primary reasons are driving the move toward English as a corporate standard.

Competitive pressure.

If you want to buy or sell, you have to be able to communicate with a diverse range of customers, suppliers, and other business partners. If you’re lucky, they’ll share your native language—but you can’t count on it. Companies that fail to devise a language strategy are essentially limiting their growth opportunities to the markets where their language is spoken, clearly putting themselves at a disadvantage to competitors that have adopted English-only policies.

Globalization of tasks and resources.

Language differences can cause a bottleneck—a Tower of Babel, as it were—when geographically dispersed employees have to work together to meet corporate goals. An employee from Belgium may need input from an enterprise in Beirut or Mexico. Without common ground, communication will suffer. Better language comprehension gives employees more firsthand information, which is vital to good decision making. Swiss food giant Nestlé saw great efficiency improvements in purchasing and hiring thanks to its enforcement of English as a company standard.

M&A integration across national boundaries.

Negotiations regarding a merger or acquisition are complicated enough when everybody speaks the same language. But when they don’t, nuances are easily lost, even in simple e-mail exchanges. Also, cross-cultural integration is notoriously tricky; that’s why when Germany’s Hoechst and France’s Rhône-Poulenc merged in 1998 to create Aventis, the fifth largest worldwide pharmaceutical company, the new firm chose English as its operating language over French or German to avoid playing favorites. A branding element can also come into play. In the 1990s, a relatively unknown, midsize Italian appliance maker, Merloni, adopted English to further its international image, which gave it an edge when acquiring Russian and British companies.

The fastest-spreading language in human history, English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people worldwide—that’s one in every four of us.

Obstacles to Successful English-Language Policies

To be sure, one-language policies can have repercussions that decrease efficiency. Evidence from my research at Rakuten—along with a study I conducted with Pamela Hinds of Stanford University and Catherine Cramton of George Mason University at a company I’ll call GlobalTech and a study I conducted at a firm I’ll call FrenchCo—reveals costs that global English-language rules can create. Proper rollout mitigates the risks, but even well-considered plans can encounter pitfalls. Here are some of the most common.

Change always comes as a shock.

No amount of warning and preparation can entirely prevent the psychological blow to employees when proposed change becomes reality. When Marie (all names in this article are disguised, with the exception of Mikitani and Ito) first learned of FrenchCo’s English-only policy, she was excited. She had been communicating in English with non-French partners for some time, and she saw the proposed policy as a positive sign that the company was becoming more international. That is, until she attended a routine meeting that was normally held in French. “I didn’t realize that the very first meeting after the rule came out was really going to be in English. It was a shock,” Marie says. She recalls walking into the meeting with a lot of energy—until she noticed the translator headsets.

“They’re humiliating,” she says. “I felt like an observer rather than a participant at my own company.”

Compliance is spotty.

An English mandate created a different problem for a service representative at GlobalTech. Based in Germany, the technology firm had subsidiaries worldwide. Hans, a service representative, received a frantic call from his boss when a key customer’s multimillion-dollar financial services operation ground to a halt as a result of a software glitch. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were at stake for both the customer and GlobalTech. Hans quickly placed a call to the technical department in India, but the software team was unable to jump on the problem because all communications about it were in German—despite the English-only policy instituted two years earlier requiring that all internal communications (meetings, e-mails, documents, and phone calls) be carried out in English. As Hans waited for documents to be translated, the crisis continued to escalate. Two years into the implementation, adoption was dragging.

Self-confidence erodes.

When nonnative speakers are forced to communicate in English, they can feel that their worth to the company has been diminished, regardless of their fluency level. “The most difficult thing is to have to admit that one’s value as an English speaker overshadows one’s real value,” a FrenchCo employee says. “For the past 30 years the company did not ask us to develop our foreign-language skills or offer us the opportunity to do so,” he points out. “Now, it is difficult to accept the fact that we are disqualified.” Employees facing one-language policies often worry that the best jobs will be offered only to those with strong English skills, regardless of content expertise.

When my colleagues and I interviewed 164 employees at GlobalTech two years after the company’s English-only policy had been implemented, we found that nearly 70% of employees continued to experience frustration with it. At FrenchCo, 56% of medium-fluency English speakers and 42% of low-fluency speakers reported worrying about job advancement because of their relatively limited English skills. Such feelings are common when companies merely announce the new policy and offer language classes rather than implement the shift in a systematic way. It’s worth noting that employees often underestimate their own abilities or overestimate the challenge of developing sufficient fluency. 

Gauging Fluency

Job security falters.

Even though achieving sufficient fluency is possible for most, the reality is that with adoption of an English-only policy, employees’ job requirements change—sometimes overnight. That can be a bitter pill to swallow, especially among top performers. Rakuten’s Mikitani didn’t mince words with his employees: He was clear that he would demote people who didn’t develop their English proficiency.

Employees resist.

It’s not unusual to hear nonnative speakers revert to their own language at the expense of their English-speaking colleagues, often because it’s faster and easier to conduct meetings in their mother tongue. Others may take more aggressive measures to avoid speaking English, such as holding meetings at inopportune times. Employees in Asia might schedule a global meeting that falls during the middle of the night in England, for instance. In doing so, nonnative speakers shift their anxiety and loss of power to native speakers.

Many FrenchCo employees said that when they felt that their relatively poor language skills could become conspicuous and have career-related consequences, they simply stopped contributing to common discourse. “They’re afraid to make mistakes,” an HR manager at the firm explains, “so they will just not speak at all.”

In other cases, documents that are supposed to be composed in English may be written in the mother tongue—as experienced by Hans at GlobalTech—or not written at all. “It’s too hard to write in English, so I don’t do it!” one GlobalTech employee notes. “And then there’s no documentation at all.”

Performance suffers.

The bottom line takes a hit when employees stop participating in group settings. Once participation ebbs, processes fall apart. Companies miss out on new ideas that might have been generated in meetings. People don’t report costly errors or offer observations about mistakes or questionable decisions. One of the engineers at GlobalTech’s Indian office explained that when meetings reverted into German his ability to contribute was cut off. He lost important information—particularly in side exchanges—despite receiving meeting notes afterward. Often those quick asides contained important contextual information, background analyses, or hypotheses about the root cause of a particular problem. He neither participated in the meetings nor learned from the problem-solving discussions.

An Adoption Framework

Converting the primary language of a business is no small task. In my work I’ve developed a framework for assessing readiness and guidelines for adopting the shift. Adoption depends on two key factors: employee buy-in and belief in capacity. Buy-in is the degree to which employees believe that a single language will produce benefits for them or the organization. Belief in their own capacity is the extent to which they are confident that they can gain enough fluency to pass muster.

The two dimensions combine to produce four categories of response to the change, as shown in the matrix “Four Types of Employee Response.” Ideally, employees would fall in what I call the “inspired” category—those who are excited about the move and confident that they can make the shift. They’re optimistic and likely to embrace the challenge. But undoubtedly, some employees will feel “oppressed.” Those people don’t think the change is a good idea, and they don’t think they’ll cut it.

The reality is that without buy-in, employees won’t bother to brush up their language; without belief, they’ll lose hope. I’ve identified some guidelines managers can follow to help people along. Rakuten’s Mikitani has successfully implemented a version of this framework.

Leaders and managers can help employees move from one box to another more easily than you might expect. There are fairly simple strategies that aid the shift, typically involving some combination of a strong psychological boost and practical training. To shift employees from “frustrated” to “inspired,” for instance, managers must offer constant encouragement and an array of language-development opportunities. To shift employees from “indifferent” to “inspired,” managers must work on improving buy-in—once these employees feel invested in the change, their skills will follow.

Improving belief in capacity.

Managers can use four strategies to help people boost their belief in their ability to develop language proficiency.

Offer opportunities to gain experience with language.

Whether through education, employment, or living abroad, experience tends to give people the confidence they need to succeed in this task. You can’t change past experience, but you can provide opportunities, such as overseas language training and job rotations, that open new doors and allow employees to stretch their skills. Rakuten has sent senior executives to English-speaking countries like the UK and the U.S. for full language immersion training. Employees have also been offered weeks-long language-training programs in the Philippines. Although not easily scalable to 7,100 Japanese employees, the programs successfully produced individuals with functional English skills. Rakuten also plans to send more than 1,000 engineers to technology conferences outside Japan.

Foster positive attitudes.

Attitudes are contagious: People’s faith in their own capabilities grows when they see others around them—peers, managers, friends—having positive experiences with the radical change. The reverse is also true, unfortunately. Managers can model good risk-taking behaviors by showing that they too are trying new things, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes.

Mikitani focused his personal attention on middle managers because he knew that collectively they could influence thousands of employees. He encouraged them to constantly improve their own language skills and even offered to teach them English himself if need be. (Nobody took him up on the offer.) He also encouraged managers to support their subordinates in their efforts to develop their language proficiency.

Use verbal persuasion.

Encouragement and positive reinforcement from managers and executives—simple statements like “You can do it” or “I believe in you”—make all the difference. To mitigate turnover threats at Rakuten, managers identified talent that the company wanted to retain and tailored special programs for them, all the while cheering them on. Also, Mikitani repeatedly assured his entire workforce that he would do everything in his power to help every employee meet his or her English-proficiency goals. He made it clear that he believes that with effort everyone can adequately learn the language of business and that he did not want to see anyone leave the company because of the English-only policy.

Encourage good study habits.

Companies need to contract with language vendors who specialize in helping employees at various levels of proficiency. The vendors need to be intimately familiar with the company context so that they can guide employees’ learning, from how best to allocate their time in improving skills to strategies for composing e-mails in English. Rakuten considers language development to be part of every job and grants people time during the workday to devote to it. Every morning, employees can be seen flipping through their study books in the company’s cafeteria or navigating their e-learning portals.

Improving employee buy-in.

Shifts in buy-in call for different measures. But they don’t operate in isolation: Buy-in and belief go together. Strategies that can help people feel more confident include:

Messaging, messaging, and more messaging.

Continual communication from the CEO, executives, and managers is critical. Leaders should stress the importance of globalization in achieving the company’s mission and strategy and demonstrate how language supports that. At Rakuten, Mikitani signaled the importance of the English-language policy to his entire organization relentlessly. For instance, each week some 120 managers would submit their business reports, and he would reply to each of them pushing them to develop their language skills. I surveyed employees before and after Rakuten implemented the adoption framework. Results indicated a dramatic increase in buy-in after Mikitani showed his employees that he was “obsessed and committed to Englishnization,” as he put it. The vast majority of the employees surveyed said that the policy was a “necessary” move.

Encouragement from managers and executives—simple statements like “You can do it” or “I believe in you”—make all the difference.

Internal marketing.

Because a language transformation is a multiyear process whose complexity far exceeds most other change efforts, it is crucial to maintain employee buy-in over time. At Rakuten, the now-English intranet regularly features employee success stories with emphasis on best practices for increasing language competence. Companywide meetings are also held monthly to discuss the English-language policy.

Branding.

Managers should encourage people to self-identify as global rather than local employees. It’s difficult to develop a global identity with limited exposure to an international environment, of course. Rakuten tackled this challenge by instituting an enterprisewide social network to promote cross-national interactions. Employees now interact and engage with colleagues worldwide through the company’s social networking site.Adopting a universal English policy is not the end of leadership challenges posed by global communication. Using English as a business language can damage employee morale, create unhealthy divides between native and nonnative speakers, and decrease the overall productivity of team members. Leaders must avoid and soften these potential pitfalls by building an environment in which employees can embrace a global English policy with relative ease. In this way, companies can improve communication and collaboration.

When I asked Mikitani what advice he’d give other CEOs when it comes to enforcing a one-language mandate, he was emphatic about discipline. CEOs need to be role models: If they don’t stick to the program, nobody else will. Mikitani even holds one-on-one performance reviews with his top Japanese executives in English. “If you forgive a little,” he says, “you’ll give up everything.”

Mikitani doesn’t fear resistance. He believes, as I do, that you can counteract it—and ultimately bring about significant transformation in employees’ beliefs and buy-in. A global language change takes perseverance and time, but if you want to surpass your rivals, it’s no longer a matter of choice.

 

Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School and the founder of the consulting firm Global Matters. She is the author of The Language of Global Success. Twitter: @tsedal

Inbound Marketing Is Content Marketing – Now On Blockchain At Markethive

Inbound Marketing Is Content Marketing – Now On Blockchain At Markethive

Useful content should be at the core of your marketing. Content is the core of Inbound Marketing

Gone are the days where content means the blog posts your company writes. Instead, content marketing now includes a diverse set of content types and multiple channels to push them through. Chances are that if you’re already using social media, then you are doing content marketing to some extent.

Content marketing is accelerating at a blistering pace. By the year 2020, roughly 1.7 MB of new content will be created every second… for every living person on earth.

It’s easy to hear statistics like that and feel a sense of overwhelm – to feel like there’s no way to make your brand stand out from the crowd. But there is and I am going to show you how with this article.

 

 

What is content marketing?

To begin with, content marketing is taking any type of content (digital or physical) and purposefully sending it out to your audience.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.

Content marketing is used by leading brands. Research shows the vast majority of marketers are using content marketing. In fact, it is used by many prominent organizations in the world, including P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere. It’s also developed and executed by small businesses and one-person shops around the globe. Why? Because it works.

 

Content marketing aka “Inbound Marketing” is good for your bottom line — and your customers

Here are some key reasons and benefits for entrepreneurs and companies that use content marketing:

  • More awareness

  • Increased sales

  • Cost savings

  • Better, more loyal customers

  • Greater branding and online presence

 

Content is the present – and future – of inbound marketing

Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the “relevant” and “valuable”. That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.” 

Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?). That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.

 

Marketing is impossible without great content

Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, inbound marketing “content” should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:

  • Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.

  • SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.

  • PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.

  • PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.

  • Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.

  • Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.

 

What if your customers look forward to receiving your marketing? What if when they received it, via print, email, website, they spent 15, 30, 45 minutes with it? What if they anticipated it and shared it with their peers?

 

 

Markethive Blogging Platform

Markethive Blogging platforms broadcast out to huge portfolios of social networks, news sites, forums, and WordPress blogs.  Markethive blogs get easily indexed into the search engines, are subscribable by other Markethive members and subscription allows remote posting to their selection of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.  A content-rich blogging system with a reach into the millions across multiple social media and blogging platforms.

With Inbound Marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media which is exactly what you get and a whole lot more powerful tools, tutorials, mentoring, all integrated into a social network with selling platforms and exchanges. 

 

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Benefits 

Additional benefits include receiving MHV Coin by your readers which adds more value to bloggers who have increased subscriber levels. You are paid by Markethive, the system, for writing and publishing your blogs instantly and continuously. All part of the micropayment faucet system within Markethive thanks to Blockchain Technology. 

To be effective at inbound marketing (content marketing), it is essential to have an automated marketing system that embraces and enhances your marketing strategy. 

The best part is that it is free with Markethive. The Markethive Inbound Marketing System can be compared with other platforms costing as much as $2,500 per month. 

 

 

Join Markethive to learn what questions to ask and how to develop your strategy, where we deliver printed, video and live educational seminars to get you acclimated and up to speed.

 

ecosystem for entrepreneurs

 

 

Deb Williams

Market Manager for Markethive, a global Market Network, and Writer for the Crypto/Blockchain Industry. Also a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech.  I embrace "Change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

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Multiple Chanels How to get started on your content marketing strategy

Multiple Channels

How to get started on your content marketing strategy

Gone are the days where content means the blog posts your company writes. Instead, content marketing now includes a diverse set of content types and multiple channels to push them through.

Chances are that if you’re already using social media, then you are doing content marketing to some extent. The next step is to get a strategy in place. This guide will walk you through why having a content marketing strategy is important and different ways you can get started on your own.

What is content marketing?

To begin with, content marketing is taking any type of content (digital or physical) and purposefully sending it out to your audience. Adding a strategy to this means that you’ve thought about your goals, audiences and distribution channels.

A typical content marketing plan will answer the below questions:

  • Who is your audience? These are usually based on market segments and certain types of content will target specific segments.

  • What channels will you use?

  • What metrics will you use to measure success and ROI?

  • What resources do you have?

  • What pain points will you solve?

Types of content

There are quite a few types of content out there now with new channels being developed every year. Part of being a good content marketer is being able to learn new types and be open to experimentation. Relatively new to the scene is user-generated social media content that can be used as part of your strategy.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list to help you think about what type of content your company has access to:

  • Company blog posts

  • Branded blog posts

  • User-generated content like an Instagram post

  • Videos

  • Podcasts

  • Whitepapers

  • Case studies

  • Infographics

  • Photos

  • Webinars

  • Quizzes

  • Press releases

  • News and magazine articles

Types of channels

How will you get the word out about your content? You can publish all the white papers you want but no one will see them if you’re not talking about them. For some channels, the line between content and channel blurs. For example, email newsletters are an excellent way of promoting your branded content. But, some brands also include unique content in the newsletter’s body. There is no right or wrong way to approach this. If you find that mixing it up works for your company, then go ahead and do it.

Some common channels include:

  • Email

  • Social media

  • Pamphlets

  • Search engine ads

  • Website

The most common channel is email, with 82% of marketers reporting it as the most effective. This is not-so-closely followed by social media at 54% and website/blog at 51%.

What does this mean for you? If you’re just starting out, use this as a jumping point on where to focus your beginning efforts. Start with one or two channels and expand as you feel more comfortable.

What resources are available?

Before you start diving into all of the content possibilities, take a step back and look at what resources you have available to you. Are you a marketing team of one or ten? What skill sets are already on your team? Does your marketing budget have room to hire a professional content creator?

You shouldn’t get into producing videos if you don’t have the available skills nor the budget for a videographer. Keep in mind that time is also a resource. New content types take time to learn, experiment with and create.

Next, think about who can generate this content. Don’t limit it to only the marketing team. Your sales and support teams will know what pains the customer or business goes through, too. All of the departments should have some content ideas that can be developed.

Develop your content marketing strategy

There are many ways to get started in developing your strategy. Here, we’ll offer three ways to get started. It’s possible that you’ve done some of this work already. In that case, repurpose your previous research and put it to use here.

1. Define your goals & metrics

The start of any new strategy begins with knowing what goals you have in mind. In content marketing, multiple goals are common and are often matched with content types and channels. And for each goal, you’ll need to define metrics that are used to measure success.

For example, one of your content marketing goals may be to increase your trial signups. To do this, you’d plan on creating case studies that will be published on your website and shared via social media. The case study includes text, photos, a downloadable PDF and video. Your sales team will use the link to share success studies with potential clients and your social media team will use the different media formats to repeatedly promote the case study.

This content matrix from Ninetyblack provides a graphical guide to where content can fall. The matrix may look different for your business. Quizzes are usually designed to be entertaining and can be a useful way to spread brand awareness.

2. Audit your current content

What’s working for you now? If you already have some branded content, conduct a content audit to help you understand what has and hasn’t been successful. The audit should include the actual content links and distribution channels.

Perhaps you’ve produced a few videos but they’ve only been published to YouTube. You’ve found that the audience is receptive to the videos. At this point, you may notice that a few videos have call-to-action links in the captions that lead back to your website. These videos not only were watched but people clicked on them to learn more. This discovery could potentially lead you to add more links into your captions for more cross-channel promotions.

In a Content Marketing Institute’s 2018 trends report, B2B marketers credited content creation and strategy as the top two factors in their content marketing success. Note that for content creation, it’s specified to be higher quality and more efficient. Low-quality content doesn’t cut it anymore especially if your competition is also focused on content marketing.

If your content was mostly pushed through social media channels, performing a social media audit may be beneficial to you. This way, you can see what type of content performed well and duplicate the similarities.

3. Map your customer journey

Certain types of content work best at points of a customer journey. A helpful product troubleshooting video won’t be as interesting to a potential customer in the awareness phase as it is for someone who has already purchased. Being aware that it exists, however, may help move the decision along.

This Boston Interactive checklist shows the various content types that match a customer’s purchase phase.

Remember, though, that a customer’s journey doesn’t end at the purchase. Past the purchase point, there’s still retention and support that need content marketing, too.

Bright Vessel illustrates their version of a customer journey map, indicating where each department plays a role. This exercise makes you reflect on every customer touchpoint.

Mapping this for your brand helps you understand where your content can be best served. Once you have the map down, then your content can be further tweaked and adjusted to reflect your audience and their journey status.

Implement & review your content marketing strategy

Now that you have three ways to brainstorm your strategy, the next steps are to document and implement it. With documentation, you’ll have a way to reference and steer your future content. If your strategy was to promote your blog posts on both social media and email newsletters but you find that newsletters are receiving a lot of engagement, you may look into increasing the send frequency or creating a subscriber list for only the blog.

Many content marketing calendars are overviews of content that’s planned for the year. They’ll often list the content, type, audience, customer phase and distribution channel(s), along with the publishing dates. This all-in-one calendar type is helpful for big picture planning.

Once you’ve drawn up the calendar, you’ll still need to listen and distribute it, and this is where social media plays a big role. A social media-minded content marketing strategy incorporates both social monitoring and publishing.

Markethive helps with both of these objectives. Through the Google calendar features, you can see when content is distributed and across which channels. For well-performing posts, Markethive makes it easy to republish the content with just a few clicks.

To monitor the topics your audience cares about, you use branded keywords and search options to see who’s talking about you and to curate content for redistribution. Content marketing doesn’t have to only include branded content. It also includes content that’s published about you or industry-adjacent news. Searching for topics in your industry in Advanced Google Search helps you easily identify & curate the content that your audience cares about.

Setup Google Alerts to keep you aware when others talk about your business and industry. Like Markethive and “Inbound Marketing”. Make sure you have a Disqus account, so you can engage blogs utilizing Disqus alerts and search for industries and blogs and articles that mention you.

In the end, content marketing strategies vary from business to business. The advice given here is meant to be a framework to begin your content marketing strategy, not as set-in-stone rules. As you begin this journey, you’ll find that some strategies or content don’t work for you and that’s okay. Having both defined goals and a plan in hand will go a long way in starting your strategy.

Thomas Prendergast
CEO Founder

What Is A Bounce Rate:How Important Is It?

What Is A Bounce Rate: How Important Is It? 

What is a Bounce Rate? 

Here is an easy way to think of the website bounce rate. Think of a ‘bounce’ as someone landing on your website, not clicking on any other pages and then leaving. The bounce rate is, therefore, the percentage of people that do this, rather than stay and take a look around your website. You want your bounce rate to be as low as possible, get them to engage and take the next step down your sales funnel. 

 

There are some key factors to consider that determine your website bounce rate…

What Type Of Traffic Are You Attracting? 

Are the visitors to your website specifically looking for your company, or are they looking for information? People who are familiar with you will bounce less than those who are in information-gathering mode. If you have an eCommerce store, does your traffic have high ‘commercial intent’? Are they ready to buy or simply researching for future purchases?  

Writing really awesome blog posts can bring you lots of traffic, but this tends to be more information-seeking traffic as opposed to visitors with high commercial intent. Consequently, traffic to blog posts tends to have a higher bounce rate than traffic to your home page even if the average session duration is longer. 

This shows the blogs are good quality and all that may be needed is a prominent call to action. Another way to keep them on longer is to have lots of relevant internal links so the visitors can delve deeper into a topic that interests them. 

 

 

What Causes Artificially High Bounce Rates? 

Websites are frequently crawled by bots. Some are friendly and used to decide where to rank the website. Other bots are nasty and evil and are looking for content to scrape and load to spammy sites. Therefore the bounce rate is skewed because they are not real visitors.

 

The Sources Of Your Traffic. 

Visitors that come from Google search results tend to ‘bounce’ much less than visitors from Facebook, for example. People are in very different frames of mind when they’re in work or play modes. Paid traffic sites can have an effect on your bounce rate due to the fact they are not organic or perhaps targeting the wrong audience pulling in unqualified traffic.

Sending the wrong people to your landing page will definitely result in a higher bounce rate. The right traffic is visitors that are primed to convert because they are in your target audience. 

CEO and CMO of Markethive, Thomas Prendergast has done some excellent research on the target market for Markethive. Given the company is on blockchain and crypto-based, it makes sense to target people using the platforms illustrated in this research

The Design And Layout Of Your Website.

Sites that are difficult to navigate, confusing, or look old-fashioned all tend to have higher bounce rates than new clean, easy-to-use, mobile-friendly websites. Intrusive advertisements will not only have a negative effect but will also reduce the reputation of your landing pages. Also, auto-play videos are a strict no-no. Most people don’t like surprises or be bombarded as soon as they hit the site. 

Headlines and subheadings are helpful to visitors to scan blocks of text quickly. If they cannot spot the content by scanning the headline or subheadings, they most likely will not take the time to search your site. 

Images relating to the content make it easier to read. Text without images can be overwhelming and needs to be optimized for online reading. Writing on the web is very different than writing for written publications. Images break up the copy making it easier on the eyes. 

Note: Images need to be relevant, inspiring and entertaining but not too many or too distracting. Avoid oversized images also. Combining images with great content simply reinforces what you want to say with the visual.

The Clarity Of Your Message.

Within the first few seconds of arriving at a website, visitors will automatically scan for content and design elements that communicate Credibility and Safety. The perceived safety of the site relates to the quality of the content and the appearance of the pages. If your site communicates safety, the visitor will be encouraged to stay, explore and may even take the next step.

Grammar and spelling errors on a site are very often perceived as not credible. It’s an absolute turn off for me when visiting sites. But the credibility and safety go well beyond grammar and spelling. The quality of content must quickly communicate that… 

  1. You understand their problem
  2. You have a solution that could solve their problem
  3. They just need to take the next step 

The next step is a clear call to action. Having a clear call to action means the visitor knows at a glance what their next step should be and where it is on the page. Making it easy and not asking for too much information will definitely work in your favor. Even asking for full name, phone number and email can result in a bounce or maybe even a false lead. A simple widget connected to their email account is a one-click verified lead that most people accept and is an easy, unobtrusive way to capture them.  

If the visitor is not convinced that the site is credible, reliable and safe for any reason, they will bounce from the page within the first few seconds after arriving. 

 

The Speed Of Your Website. 

Slow-loading websites have high bounce rates and low conversion rates. It’s that simple. The golden rule is that people do leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. 

These following factors tend to slow page load times: 

  • Cheap hosting
  • Oversized images that can’t be downloaded quickly
  • Too many images will cause too many requests on each page load
  • Using custom fonts need to be downloaded for the visitor to read 
  • Too many fancy sliders and javascript effects that also must be downloaded to work. 

 

What Is A Good Bounce Rate?

As a very broad rule of thumb, you’re aiming for a website bounce rate of under 40%. Between 40% and 55% is usually okay, whilst 55-65% shows significant room for improvement. This is a very simple and broad rule of thumb. There are certain circumstances like paid and social traffic, traffic hitting blog posts and also mobile traffic tends to bounce more. This is where it might be perfectly okay to have a bounce rate higher than these figures.

 

Checklist of things to review on your landing pages…

  1. You sent the right people to your landing pages.
  2. You don’t bombard people with intrusive ads that distract from your primary call to action.
  3. Your headlines match the advertisement that promoted the landing page.
  4. Visitors can quickly find what they are looking for.
  5. Spelling and grammar have been checked out.
  6. The content provided is of high quality.
  7. It’s well designed with a clear message.
  8. The images don’t distract from the call to action.
  9. You have a clear next step for the visitor avoiding confusion.
  10. You avoid asking for too much information.
  11. Landing pages load under 2 seconds.

 

For Markethive Associates, You can find your bounce rate under Statistics either on your Profile Page or in Pages for your Widget and Capture Page stats. Markethive has made it very easy to read the analytics and keep on top of critical information that can help you improve where need to reach your end goals.

 

This service is available to all Associates, Free, and Upgraded. I find the capture pages and websites at Markethive fare very well with bounce rates and conversions. 

Conclusion

Page layouts that are simple can communicate a lot of information in a short period of time. Focus on what you really want the visitor to do on your landing page. Be sure to make all the content, images and call to action buttons are gently nudging people in that direction.

Think of each landing page as a social contact. This is where you create a first impression that encourages the visitor to get to know you better, thereby improving your bounce rate, time on site and overall conversions. 

 

ecosystem for entrepreneurs

 

 

Deb Williams
Market Manager for Markethive, a global Market Network, and Writer for the Crypto/Blockchain Industry. Also a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech.  I embrace "Change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

FOLLOW US ON…

Website: https://markethive.com 
Token Site: http://markethive.io/ 
Telegram: https://t.me/markethive_support 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/markethive/ 
Github: https://github.com/markethive /  
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/markethive/  
Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/markethive
Medium: https://www.medium.com/@markethive
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/
Telegram News: t.me/Markethive
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/Markethive
Facebook: https://facebook.com/MarketHive
Youtube: https://youtube.com/Markethive

Markethive Market Research

I did some research: Marketing Research

The recently published YouGov survey found just under 50% of millennials were interested in using cryptocurrencies as a primary form of payment as opposed to using the U.S. dollar.

Found little to any direct research of surveys on the demographics of members who engage in faucets. However, I did find that Reddit members discuss in great detail and frequency about faucets. And faucets seem to be discussed the most on Reddit.

The Reddit results
https://reddit.com


Pulling from the Pew Research poll

69% of Reddit members are male.

64% of Reddit members are between the ages of 22 to 37 (millennials)
29% of Reddit members are between the ages of 38 to 53 (generation X)
6% of Reddit members are between the ages of 54 and 72 (boomers)
1% of Reddit members are 73 or older (silent)

Looking at Alexa the top 5 countries that access Reddit are

United States 53%
United Kingdom 8%
Canada 6.5%
Australia 3.5%
Germany 2.5%

Income

30% make less than $30,000 per year
34% make between $30,000 to $74,000
35% make $75,000 or above

Device Type
Windows Desktop 36%
Android 31%
Apple IOS %17
MacOS 11%
Linux 3%

The Take away from this? Advertise Markethive on Reddit. But we can safely assume a similar demographic is found in the membership and visitors of the popular traditional faucet systems.

The following media is used primarily and almost exclusively on faucet, bounty and airdrop sites and has been researched and found legitimate for your ad campaigns.
 

Main Stream Crypto Ad services

  1. Bitmedia
    https://bitmedia.io/  Pay by impression paid from your account budget
     
  2. Coinzilla
    https://coinzilla.com/ Pay by impression paid from account budget
     
  3. Bitter
    https://bitter.io/ $1 for 1000 visits, gets excellent results
     
  4. Trafficly
    https://trafficly.io/ $1 for 1000 visits, gets excellent results
     
  5. Coinbound
    https://coinbound.io/ Conglomeration of 3rd party Crypto media sites, influencers, Youtube channels, etc.
     
  6. Cointraffic  (Alexa 16,198)
    https://cointraffic.io/ Advertiser and publisher traffic advertising network
     
  7. Propeller Ads
    https://propellerads.com/ the biggest alternative traffic sources with 1Bn+ monthly audience reach
     
  8. Hashing Ad Space
    https://www.hashingadspace.com/ Connects you with motivated buyers interested in home based business.
     
  9. ADbtc
    https://adbtc.top/  Target REAL bitcoin users. CPC starts from 5 Satoshis.  No minimum purchase required!
     
  10. Bitraffic ( Alexa 70,808)
    https://bitraffic.com/ Promote your ICO token, Casino games, Trading, Investing hyip, Crypto mining, Faucets, etc.
     
  11. Cryptocoinsad
    https://cryptocoinsad.com/ Self-serve interface, advanced targeting options and highly-trafficked Publisher sites
     
  12. Mellow Ads
    http://mellowads.com/ Leading bitcoin advertising network…welcome to simple, bitcoin Your website must be in a top 100,000 Alexa ranking,
     
  13. CoinAd (Alexa 74,203)
    https://coinad.com/ High Quality CPM Banner Advertising The CoinAd Banner platform is an impressions priced banner advertising network that makes advertising easy.
     
  14. A-ADS
    https://a-ads.com  The first crypto advertising network in the market
     
  15. AdBit (Alexa 297,116)
    https://adbit.biz/ As an advertiser you will bid against each other for a share in the adspace
     
  16. CoinMedia
    https://coinmedia.co/ Place your Ad Message to the desired websites Pay only for unique visitor views.
     
  17. ADconity
    https://adconity.com/  user friendly rich media advertising platform for advertisers and publishers with competitive pricing.
     
  18. AdPop
    https://adpop.com AdPop Network provides an opportunity to all advertisers to promote their products and services at very reasonable prices.
     
  19. Coinverti (Alexa 53,518)
    https://coinverti.com/ The only crypto advertising network you need. Trusted by more than 400 crypto related websites.
     
  20. Token.Ad
    https://token.ad/  Native Ads The most efficient ad format as visitors perceive it as website content
     
  21. BitcoinTalk
    https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5176955.0  This forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. Bitcointalk is a forum about bitcoin, initially created by Satoshi Nakamoto the inventor of Bitcoin on Nov 22, 2009 and was head administrator until almost 2011.
     
  22. Bitcoadz
    https://www.bitcoadz.io Bitcoadz is an online market place where advertisers can sell their ads to publishers who will inturn return traffic to the advertisers.
     
  23. Ad Dragon
    https://www.addragon.com/ Get your ads on top websites in your niche with marketplace advertising.
     
  24. Adshares (Alexa 192,912)
    https://adshares.net/  Adshares is the answer to negative trends in digital marketing. Lack of transparency allows intermediaries to charge high fees. Increasing centralization gives big players ability to censor unwanted content.
     

Main Stream Social Networks

  1. Youtube Ads (Alexa 2)
    https://www.youtube.com/ads/ With YouTube ads, reach potential customers and have them take action when they watch or search for videos on YouTube – and only pay when they show interest.
     
  2. Reddit Ads (Alexa 15)
    https://www.redditinc.com/advertising Reach influential communities made up of millions of people engaging with today’s most relevant content.
     
  3. Instagram Ads (Alexa 21)
    https://business.instagram.com/advertising/ You can buy, run and track ads on Instagram in one of three ways. Within the APP | Ads Manager | Instagram Partners
     
  4. LinkedIn Ads (Alexa 34)
    https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads Advertising on LinkedIn helps businesses of any size achieve their goals.

MLM ad systems delivery

Folks I DO NOT recommend these systems. These are here for your awareness and comparison. You are welcomed to join them and report how effective (or ineffective) they are building awareness, reach, quality associates, etc. I have tested 4 of them and none of those four produced anything of value. I spent $500 and ran several banner ads simultaneously in IBO and received 12 visits (according to Markthive tracking) and received zero registrations. However, IBO reported I had a grand total of 70,000 views and 5,000 click throughs. I also put the same Widget in my IBO profile page. I spent over $1000 with Apsense and got 2 registrations over the span of a month. I got similar stats as IBO, with Markethive showing a handful of connections and Apsense reporting 10s of thousands of click throughs.

  1. Leadsleap (Alexa 25,003)
    https://www.leadsleap.com/ We reward publishers and marketers to show your ads on their websites and in their tracking links.
     
  2. Apsense (Alexa 51,907)
    http://www.apsense.com APSense is an MLM business social network where people come together to share their businesses.
     
  3. MLMgateway (Alexa 45,119)
    https://www.mlmgateway.com/ MLM Gateway connects those who are involved in network marketing, providing home-based business leads.
     
  4. IBOtoolbox (Alexa 22,191)
    https://www.ibotoolbox.com Welcome to IBOtoolbox, the largest and most active marketing social network on the planet!
     
  5. ViralContentBee (Alexa 57,904)
    https://viralcontentbee.com Viral Content Bee is the social media platform helping users to promote their content to their target audience. It is a marketing tool offering a wide array of features that will boost any social media campaign.
     
  6. MyLeadSystemPRO (Alexa 81,675)
    https://www.myleadsystempro.com/ MLSP is the world's #1 trusted solution since 2008 to help you attract fresh leads daily, get sales & signups, and grow your business by leveraging the power of the internet.
     
  7. EliteMarketingPro (Alexa 129,400)
    https://elitemarketingpro.com "Finally, An Easy Way To Recruit – Rejection FREE – Without Wasting Your Time & Money Chasing Dead Beat Prospects & Leads…"
     
  8. PowerLeadSystem (Alexa 12,570,164)
    http://www.powersleadsystem.com THE MOST COMPLETE AND POWERFUL ALL-IN-ONE MARKETING PLATFORM 7 day free trial then $30 per month
     
  9. MyBEEHYVE (Alexa 3,061,298)
    https://www.mybeehyve.com/ myBeeHyve is changing the way network marketers manage contacts, connect with prospects and build their business.

The Winners

The following are considered winners because the results I got were stellar with incredible returns for the money invested. For instance with a $20 Bitter.io campaign I received over 20 registration over the 3 days it ran, and their stats were nearly identical to our (Markethive) stats.

Bitter.io
Trafficly
Hashing Ad Space
adBTC

The Losers
The following gave practically no results, engaged in deceptive robots and falsified tracking clicks reports. All are from the MLM markets.

Apsense
MLMGateway
IBOToolbox
PowerLeadsSystem

As we at Markethive engage this list in advertising, we will report the results.

Thomas Prendergast
Hive Keep Advertising and Marketing

IS CRITICAL THINKING BEING SUPPRESSED?

IS CRITICAL THINKING BEING SUPPRESSED? 

What Exactly Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

Ban Anything That Upsets The Status Quo 

Over the last few years, YouTube has made headlines with its incessant banning of videos and de-platforming of influencers’ accounts causing loss of income and online presence. Last year, Youtube de-platformed a myriad of ‘alt-right’ and so-called ‘conspiracy’ groups and removed these channels from the video streaming site. 

Youtube also started targeting cryptocurrency content creators and YouTubers who operated channels that discussed bitcoin and other digital assets. In late 2019, YouTube officials removed a massive number of cryptocurrency video channels for very little reasoning. The company typically just tells the person that the channel had “violated community guidelines.”

This week Bitcoin.com was also censored for sharing a video about their bitcoin mining pool. Bitcoin.com’s YouTube account was given one strike for allegedly “violating community guidelines”. This begs the question,  “Who or what consists of their so-called community?” 

When YouTube, the online video-sharing platform first started back in 2005, it was a community of people sharing ideas and fun videos with very little moderation and censorship. Now it’s looking more like the Ministry of Propaganda.  For the last three months, YouTube, now under the ownership of Google, has taken part in historic amounts of censorship regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki said that any videos that were in opposition to the World Health Organization (WHO) narrative of the COVID-19 outbreak would be removed.  

Subsequently, Wojcicki’s ruling was carried out as many videos were banned that portrayed another opinion or fact that went against the WHO narrative regarding the ‘official’ coronavirus data. YouTube and Wojcicki decided to shelter the public from progressive ideas and data that just may have some truth in them because it went against the authorities. 

Since the beginning of this virus and the panic it has caused, we now have proof as more research is taking place from many respected scientific think tanks, and epidemiologists are now trying to tell the public that the lockdowns were very irrational. 

Despite the proof, Youtube has banned a number of videos that go against the ongoing fear-mongering narrative. When a video was posted on Youtube that featured Dr. Daniel W. Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi from California, the video got 5 million views before it was removed. 

 

Youtube also banned a video called “Plandemic,” which featured Dr. Judy Mikovits soon after it was published on the online video sharing platform. Youtube, however, does allow videos that rebut Judy Mikovits, Daniel W. Erickson, and Dr. Artin Massihi’s narratives. The company has no issues allowing rebuttals that stay on course with the fear-mongering narrative.

Whatever the veracity of the doctors’ claims, YouTube’s censorship of unorthodox ideas in the name of protecting the public from misinformation is misguided and counter-productive. Sheltering the public from ideas, even bad ones, only makes society more susceptible to dangerous error. Knowledge is power and surely we should be able to think for ourselves and have the ability to investigate.

 

Across social media, censors have been racing to limit the flow of information that questions these new laws imposed. Facebook also conceded it had been working with state governments in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska to remove pages for anti-stay-at-home protests events that are popping up all over the platform. 

Ron Coleman, a prominent First Amendment lawyer said in a recent interview. 

“It’s the kind of totalitarian thinking and conduct that has cost millions of lives in recent world history. The fact that it’s being done by private companies and not government doesn’t change that.” 

 

The former head of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design at Rockefeller University, Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, recently told the public that Youtube had banned his video that went against the lockdown, and over-reaction narrative after it gathered more than 1.3 million views. 

Wittkowski, who holds two doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, believes the coronavirus should be allowed to create “herd immunity,” and that short of a vaccine, the pandemic will only end after it has sufficiently spread through the population.

“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he says in the now-deleted video.

Wittkowski told The Post, saying he had no idea why it was removed. 

“I was just explaining what we had…They don’t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.”

Dr. Andrew Kaufman’s videos were also removed when he spoke out against the stay-at-home narrative and the data spread by people like the epidemiologist Neil Ferguson dubbed Professor Lockdown who broke his own rule after convincing Prime Minister of the U.K. Boris Johnston to enforce the stay at home rule. 

 

YouTube’s Latest Target

Now Youtube has banned one of Bitcoin.com’s videos for sharing information about their mining pool. The video removal was based on the company’s “sale of regulated goods” policy and the video allegedly went against “community guidelines.” 

The Bitcoin.com account was given a single strike, which gives the account a one week probation period. Two to three strikes could lead to far worse restrictions against the Bitcoin.com account that merely shares information and resources about cryptocurrency solutions. 

Bitcoin.com’s CEO Mate Tokay has spoken out against the Youtube censorship in a tweet letting the company and Wojcicki know they have been immoral, irrational, and illogical. 

 

Censorship tends to manipulate reality and it has engendered evil numerous times over the course of history. Social media platforms are private companies and they can impose any restrictions they choose, but what they choose to censor seems to be agenda-driven and in line with the status quo of authoritarianism. 

 

Critical Thinking Not Allowed

YouTube seems to ban videos that allow for critical thinking. Cryptocurrency is one sector that gains grassroots attention and makes people think critically. Censorship and the fact they allow fake news and propaganda certainly unveil the true colors of YouTube that it just may not have the best interests of the global community in mind.  

YouTube has banned videos that question the ‘official’ COVID-19 statistics because people are now realizing that a virus with a 99% survival rate isn’t as devastating as we first thought. As they scurry to remove the videos as soon as they emerge, it’s too little too late as millions have already seen them and the information that may just deliver a different point of view or perhaps even the truth. 

As FEE.org explains, “Youtube’s censorship of dissenting doctors will backfire.” By taking down the videos, YouTube has limited the extent to which that social learning can happen and insulated the error from debunking. If anything, YouTube’s censorship has lent additional credence to whatever mistakes they made by feeding into the narrative that the powers-that-be fear its truth. The debunking is being drowned out by outrage over the censorship. And the Streisand Effect (how censorship can boost something’s publicity) is causing it to spread even more.

As more people realize and get sick and tired of the tech giants’ antics the more they will migrate to other platforms that do want to genuinely help people understand and change the world, giving back freedom of choice and allowing citizens to think for themselves. Once upon a time, there was nowhere else to go but now things are changing.  

 

Image credit: observatory.tec

Markethive Encourages Critical Thinking

We have a future here where we can operate on a platform of decentralized data, a platform that advocates self-sovereignty. Markethive is a next-generation Social Market Network, built on the Blockchain that has positioned itself as a complete ecosystem for Entrepreneurs. 

Incorporating its cryptocurrency consumer coin (MHV), it provides prosperous solutions for all business owners, marketers, commercial artists, etc, who require an online presence ensuring privacy, and autonomy along with no measures in place to ban you, terminate your account or censor your content.

Markethive's foundation is built upon integrity, transparency, and autonomy. As we live in a not so perfect world, there is always negativity, topics, and opinions that individuals may not agree with or even find offensive. You will have the ability to filter your newsfeed and block any, what you consider, unsavory characters, or content, remembering your newsfeed is your property. There are no corporate officials deciding for you. That gives people the right and freedom to choose for themselves who they wish to communicate with what they wish to see. There is a saying “Live And Let Live” and I consider these wise words.

 

Markethive’s Design And Vision

Markethive is a decentralized, autonomous, fluid environment which includes manifestations of intellectual achievements, social habits, innovation, music, literature, technology, commerce, and the arts. A central “hub” built using blockchain technology, is designed to encourage “reciprocal interchange” of ideas, knowledge, or skills as well as providing for exchange, sales or purchases of goods, services, and commodities. 

This premier hybrid social network includes news feeds, blogging platforms, video channels, chat channels, groups, image sharing, link hubs, resume, profile page, with additional platforms for ecommerce and digital news site. 

But more than a social network, Markethive has also delivered  “Inbound Marketing tools” like broadcasting, capture pages, lead funnels, autoresponders, self-replicating group tools, traffic analytics, CMS, and more. This is provided for free to you and what’s more, you are paid for learning and using the platform. Markethive’s focus is on the rights of the people and providing a user-friendly, rewarding solution that is so much in need of right now. 

 

Markethive Is About To Start Its Engines

Markethive is in BETA at the moment as engineers are working tirelessly to implement all facets of this monumental system that caters to the entire worldwide market of entrepreneurs. That includes small businesses, local businesses, regional businesses, global businesses, cottage industries, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, affiliate marketers, software innovators, musicians, churches, political platforms, political candidates, distributors, network marketers, innovators, and dreamers! 

The engine power that Markethive has will make this a goliath in social media, inbound marketing, cryptocurrency, ecommerce, and digital media distribution. 

Many systems within the platform are up and running now and as we near the completion of the Markethive wallet we are continuously growing as more people become aware of who and what we are and stand for. Intrinsically, Markethive gives the power back to the people. It has been built for the people, by the people and is of the people. We will reach that moment when the whole world will notice as we rise up as a giant voice of the ENTREPRENEUR! 

Join us at our weekly webinars for updates on Sundays at 10 am (mountain time) Markethive Weekly Meeting Link – meet.google

 

ecosystem for entrepreneurs

 

Reference: Bitcoin.com
 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

A BLOCKCHAIN-ENABLED FUTURE Empowerment Autonomous Trustless

A BLOCKCHAIN-ENABLED FUTURE
Empowerment Autonomous Trustless

Blockchain technology is becoming a tidal wave of innovation and practical blockchain applications are becoming more mainstream. It’s moving beyond the hype of a couple of years ago and now bearing fruit, bringing real benefits to individuals and organizations. 

Blockchain can be a tricky concept to get your head around, but to put it simply it is a tool that offers industries the ability to increase productivity and revenue, cut costs, ensure transparency and reduce wasted time and paperwork. It’s a new foundation underpinning our everyday tasks. 

The pivotal advantage of blockchain is that there is no central hub. It has the transparency of a distributed ledger combined with the cryptographic security of an immutable data chain that makes this technology an ideal instrument for any business to exchange and validate information. Blockchain is a baseline technology that can be configured in various ways to suit different purposes and accommodate individual businesses across the board. 

 

The Business Value With Blockchain

There are a few key areas where blockchain can add value to businesses and individuals, 

Cost Reduction
Businesses no longer have to pour profits into logistics, intermediaries, and administrative paper trails. The blockchain can streamline supply chains, cutting out the middleman and banishing processes that slow efficiency and eat profits.

Revenue Creation
The blockchain does away with administrative and collaborative boundaries, allowing for innovative strategies that simply weren’t viable before the advent of Blockchain technology. This is a new freedom, where distributed ledgers and cryptography pave the way for new infrastructure and revenue models. 

Consumer Impact
New business models provide the opportunity to meet the previously overlooked needs of consumers and communities. In the medical field, for example, where remote patient care and record-keeping may have been an issue in the past, blockchain advances provide ways to overcome those barriers using synchronized records and smart care devices on the network.

Freedom And Equality
Entrepreneurs, writers, and all types of creative artists are able to attain recognition, financial sovereignty, data privacy, and autonomy now that Blockchain has been utilized and is what drives the next generation social market network. Working online is at an all-time high and with the rise in social media and online marketing activity, blockchain makes it more equitable bringing true freedom for the individual. 

Blockchain Disruption

Blockchain is already making waves in financial services, tech companies, healthcare, social market network, and digital media. Below are two infographics from Visual Capitalist that were inspired by a McKinsey study researching a combined industry analysis with more than 90 distinct use cases. 

The Problem with Centralized Infrastructure

Today on the Internet, we must constantly trust one another with sensitive data, transactions, and records. Most of our interactions on the Internet run on centralized web servers, and massive amounts of user data often exist in a single database. Current databases are designed to be controlled by “trusted” admins who can read, alter, block, and even delete data. The centralized architecture of the Internet today is not only inefficient but vulnerable to censorship and targeted attacks by both hackers and internal bad actors.

The Value of Decentralization

The decentralized architecture of a blockchain is a global network of computers simultaneously running the software and validating the chain of transactions is what ensures that the transaction record is never compromised. Decentralization is critical as an architectural principle. It makes a blockchain network less likely to fail, harder to attack, and harder for bad actors to game the system.

As blockchain adoption spreads, it can become a driving force for promoting equitable societies, solving complex economic issues, and transforming how we live and work every day.

 

 

Two Practical Applications Of Blockchain

1. Smart Contracts
Blockchain and smart contract technologies function well in instances where legal contracts are required to maintain ownership rights and data privacy laws. These customizable, self-executing smart contracts on the blockchain can be easily managed by all parties. Smart contracts allow the decentralization of trustless transactions, worldwide and on a large scale. These can encompass different kinds of interaction, not only human-to-human but also human-to-machine and machine-to-machine.

 

Issues with ownership rights and royalties are commonplace within the entertainment industry. To navigate these issues, blockchain technology offers an unchangeable, traceable, real-time distribution, and reporting network for all involved. Ujomusic is one such application that is helping artists track their royalties worldwide. In the music industry, blockchain technology can bring artists and fans closer together, allowing listeners to pay micropayments to artists for listening to their songs directly.

Artists are not always paid in a reasonable time by major players who control the music industry, sometimes even waiting years to receive their earning for their work. By utilizing smart contracts, artists and studios can ensure that intellectual property agreements are met by other parties and smart contracts could be implemented that instantly pay artists once certain requirements are met.


Image credit Disruptor Daily

 

Data privacy issues, massive scale surveillance, also known as dataveillance and lack of freedom of speech in the social media realm have become a distinct problem. Markethive, a social media, and inbound marketing platform have not only addressed these issues to empower the individual, but it has also utilized smart contract technology.  

This is in the form of the Markethive Coin (MHV) which is a fungible cryptocurrency consumer coin, and the Incentivized Loan Program (ILP – Smart Contract). This enables all users to generate an income by just using the platform and the first-mover advantage of share acquisitions consisting of 20% of the company’s net revenue.  Markethive is a collaborative decentralized platform where its Entrepreneurial members can achieve viability and self-sovereignty. 

 

The Framework Of A Smart Contract 

Smart contracts help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman. Built upon the blockchain, a smart contract is usually:

  1. Pre-written logic in the form of computer code
  2. Stored and replicated on the blockchain
  3. Executed and run by the network of computers running the blockchain
  4. Can result in updates to accounts on the ledger (i.e. payment for an executed contract)

Using the Ethereum platform, smart contracts can be programmed using basic logic. On the most basic level, they can:

  • Perform calculations (i.e. calculating interest)
  • Store information (i.e. membership records)
  • Send transactions to other accounts (i.e. payment for a good or service)

But most importantly, it is important to know that smart contracts are autonomous. They are not controlled by anyone – instead, they self-execute based on a set of instructions that two parties have agreed to, which is the code.


Image credit Visual Capitalist

 

Benefits of Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are appealing for a variety of reasons:

  • Autonomy: There is no need to rely on third parties, which could be biased or not have your interests at heart.
  • Trust: Your documents are encrypted on a shared ledger, and all parties can have access to them.
  • Redundancy: Documents are duplicated many times over on the blockchain, and can’t ever be “lost”.
  • Safety: Documents are encrypted, making them near-impenetrable by hackers.
  • Speed: These contracts automatically self-execute, saving you precious time.
  • Savings: Smart contracts save you money by taking out the middleman.
  • Precision: Smart contracts execute the exact code provided, ensuring zero errors.
  • Transparency: For organizations like governments, they could add another level of transparency to dealings. Blockchain technology can set up a decentralized system that prevents any form of voting fraud or suspicious movements in the network.

The blockchain is already a disruptive technology, and with these benefits, the potentiality of smart contracts is an amazing step forward for fairer, faster, more lucrative, and trustworthy systems for the companies, organizations, and individuals who embrace it. 

2. Digital IDs
Reportedly, over 1.1 billion people worldwide still have no way to prove their identity according to the World Bank. Simultaneously, companies and financial institutions in both traditional and digital markets are being required to follow more stringent know-your-customer (KYC) initiatives.

Despite this, many providers are still not sufficiently meeting these standards; to further complicate things, regulations vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Markethive have migrated to the blockchain to securely and privately verify users. 

Blockchain’s multi-factor verification process eclipses the levels of security that traditional password protection offers. Identities are secured for the decentralized web, for example, data sharing by third party companies has resulted in intrusive advertising. Blockchain-based identification means that no third parties can access your personal data without your consent.   

The thing to be aware of is companies and platforms that claim to be blockchain-based but have a centralized identification protocol. There will be resistance from these entities that profit from the current system where people have no control over their personal data. Big companies manipulate data, so they are not very interested in decentralizing that type of information.  

The existence of blockchain-based, yet centralized ID platforms could cause confusion among organizations and the general public. However, it's likely that the advantages of the best decentralized platforms possessing enough reach will inevitably make themselves known to the masses, so that eventually a few dominant platforms will emerge. As we move forward the majority will realize the advantages of a completely decentralized system that offers security, transparency, privacy, and gives control back to the users. 


Image credit Disruptor Daily

Conclusion

The world is waking up to the impressive capabilities of the blockchain. As a foundational technology that anything can be developed and augmented on top of it, the potential applications of the blockchain go way beyond just payments or cryptocurrencies. In fact, the blockchain will revolutionize how we interact with intellectual property, capital markets, insurance, healthcare, government, social media, and internet marketing, along with many other sectors. 

Forward-looking companies that convert to the blockchain to improve the privacy and security of their data and create an environment that is unfettered from political and nefarious agendas, will be the winners on top. 

Just about every company that migrates to the blockchain and new companies launched built upon the blockchain, will prosper, as long as they deliver and make their prime agenda to benefit their customers.

 

ecosystem for entrepreneurs

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

THE ENGINE POWER OF MARKETHIVE

THE ENGINE POWER OF MARKETHIVE

Markethive is a mighty light on the mountain attracting the multitudes, the millions into our city to prepare for financial sovereignty, and be free in this world of suppression and authoritarianism. The next-generation market network is expanding daily as more and more people see the magnificent vision as Markethive progresses with the many integrations, various platforms, and money-making systems that make up the complete ecosystem for entrepreneurs. 

 

The Two Primary Engines

Markethive has two engines driving it and working simultaneously bringing millions of entrepreneurs into this safe haven which is the central hub and gateway to the internet universe. Social media and online marketing platforms or digital media sites typically only have one engine. LinkedIn, for example, only has a subscriber engine meaning they get their traffic through people subscribing to them so basically you have to log in to LinkedIn to see their platform. CoinTelegraph, a high profile digital media site, is predominantly a traffic engine. 

Both the subscriber and traffic engines’ speed and power are measured by Alexa and WorthOfWeb and in the case of Markethive, they are growing daily in an exponential fashion. Just to give you an idea the infographic below shows how Markethive has grown in the last 2 years. It consists of a combination of internal and external statistics: 

On the left is Markethive’s traffic engine where it shows 28% of traffic is coming through external referral sites which is incredible numbers. 7% search traffic and 3% social traffic is very significant along with 62% direct traffic that is coming from the subscriber engine. So the growth rate of Markethive since 2017 is a whopping 2,849%.
 
On the right are the current statistics of the subscriber engine with the members’ growth in the last 6 months now tipping 90.8K. New subscribers in the last month are up by 227%. These are all validated accounts as Markethive has negated any issues of individual members creating numerous accounts. It delivers real people into the system using OAuth, KYC, and SMS

These numbers are not static, they are always increasing but this infographic is a good indication and illustration of both engines.  

 

 

Markethive is now present in every country worldwide, in every nation with people from every race, creed, age group, professional and personal interests. With all the spectrums of all the things that many platforms use to divide us Markethive is using to unite us because what we all have in common in Markethive is liberty, freedom, economic sovereignty, and entrepreneurialism. That is our common, binding factor and is very powerful. Markethive is rising to become the world leader for entrepreneurs of every language, every religion, and every kingdom and nation.

The Markethive Reach is currently at 12.9 Million Monthly unique visitors. 64.9 Million monthly page views. Our social following is at 63.2 K and Markethive subscribers at 90.8 K and growing daily. 

 

An Engine Within The Engine

Through our social network and blogging platform, we connect with entrepreneurs, techies, crypto nerds, artists, innovators, musicians, and business professionals, both subscribers, and traffic. Below are just a few social networks (there are many more) Markethive has integrated enabling automatic subscribing and sharing and as we grow, this will create a reach into the billions. For example, If only 42% of 10 million with an average of 5000 followers subscribe to your blog, that equates to 21 billion people that you have reached and are able to read your blog. What a great engine to have within an engine! It’s coming alive with tremendous power. 

The Next Stage Will Evoke More Growth 

The Apprentice Program, which is an entry-level membership will be launching soon at a very low cost allowing members to benefit from a matching bonus airdrop of 100 MHV for the first three referrals they bring into Markethive. The Apprentice membership will also be able to buy and resell banner impressions from the Entrepreneur One members, which really accelerates the cottage industry process. 

The Apprentice and Journeyman upgrades are not money machines per se, but they do contain benefits that will become more clear to you, closer to the roll-out of these memberships. Another benefit being considered is that 50% of the price of these upgrades can be paid in MHV, and the other 50% to be paid via CC or PayPal at launch. This next stage will cause Markethive’s growth to explode even more.  

 

Money Machines And Strategies To Reach Our Audience

CPM Display
Right now we have the banners and the Banner Impressions Exchange (BIX) is part of that and projected to be delivered on May 15, 2020. Banners are still a very good source of advertising in the online world and the banners are displayed across the many domains Markethive has, resulting in maximum exposure. 

Social Newsfeed Boost
This is the only form of advertising on LinkedIn and Twitter. Unlike Markethive they don’t have banner ads or video ads, it’s all done through their newsfeed. It is a great way to market to a social media audience, and Markethive will be integrating this with the expected release in the 2nd quarter of 2020.

Newsletter Sponsorship 
Markethive is an inbound marketing and digital media platform and it is also a subscription-based social network. All members have validated email and phone numbers so this is a very effective way to raise brand a product awareness among the global subscribers. This is more expensive for people to utilize, however, Markethive is able to offer this as just another way to market your brand. Development is forecast to begin the 2nd quarter of 2020.  

Press Release
Markethive receives large traffic to its many sites along with major followers in all social media accounts and also delivers a WordPress Plugin that allows members to publish from Markethive to their WP sites and beyond. The Markethive press release system publishes to 1,700+ news sites, our social followers, all Markethive’s heavily trafficked sites, and to 15,000+ members’ WP sites. Development is forecast to begin in the 2nd quarter of 2020. 

Sponsored Articles
Sponsored articles are very similar to the Press Release service but instead of an announcement the Press release delivers, it can be an article to bring awareness on any brand, topic, news, or otherwise, you care to share. Markethive is a digital media publishing platform where many writers and bloggers, as well as Markethive’s own writing staff, publish their content creating a following, thereby attracting traffic  These articles are published to Markethive front pages, broadcasted to the Markethive social networks and Word Press distribution. This makes Markethive thousand times more powerful than other news sites and platforms. 

Gamified Video Advertising 
Markethive makes video advertising compelling, effective, and well distributed. Your sponsored video will randomly float across the members’ dashboard on Markethive. If a member catches and watches the video until the end, they will be rewarded with MHV coins and prizes.  Gamification and rewards for watching the videos and also perks for responding and sharing to their social networks do inspire people to participate making it fun and rewarding for all.

 The BIX Exchange. The 1st Of Many Money Machines And Another Engine

  

MHV To Become A Very Popular Currency

The Markethive Coin will be listed on a number of exchanges where positive relationships are currently being established. Yobit.net is most likely to be the first one that MHV will be listed, so go there and open an account, get familiar with the site, see the trading activity of a multitude of other coins and be ready for the next step on your journey with Markethive. The site gives away free coins along with games to earn more coins. 

The Markethive Coin (MHV) will also be offered for free on Yobit and upon clicking to get the free coins they will need to subscribe to Markethive where they will receive the MHV airdrop as well. 

But, before we go full throttle, Markethive will have several ways to utilize MHV ensuring its increase in value including building relationships with the various digital media sites integrating API plugins where MHV can be used to advertise, thereby creating a market place outside of the Markethive ecosystem that accepts our coin. 

This is just the first layer, the tip of the iceberg of Markethive’s vision and plans. The more money machines we produce, the more security and financial sovereignty we spread, the more uses for our coin. Ultimately, MHV will be the only transactor or form of payment for any of the services and products Markethive or the entrepreneurs within Markethive offer. 

Although everyone will be able to earn MHV on the Markethive platform continuously, there will always be the option to buy the coin from the exchanges and bring it in and utilize it for the services which are legitimate and highly sought after in the online world of business and marketing. 

What Does The Markethive Audience Consist Of? 

It’s entrepreneurs, a very powerful, vertical audience. They are people that are looking for the services that the majority of the people on the internet sell. Training, ebooks, live mentoring, software enhancements, SEO services, and tracking, etc. So essentially we are producing this tremendous target for 3rd party advertisers to want to advertise on the Markethive platform and related domains. 

No other system out there utilizes their coin that they produce to pay for advertising on their platform. They only accept other coins as a form of payment. Markethive will be the first and one where other sites and forums will take an interest in by implementing API’s to be able to transact with MHV across various platforms. 

MHV will become very popular because it represents a vertical, unique set of engines, a traffic engine, and a subscriber engine and Markethive subscribers are the world’s entrepreneurs.  So we accumulate, hold, and spend, then let the free market do the rest and watch the Markethive Consumer Coin increase in value. 

 

As CEO, Founder, and Visionary, Thomas Prendergast says,

“The true value of the coin will become apparent when we are listed in a real exchange like Yobit, Binance, Kraken, and the wallets are in place. But I can tell you no other coin has the magnitude of use and demand for real-world services. No other coin has as big a community like us. No other coin has nearly the traffic we have.”

Conclusion

No other social, marketing, or digital media company has incorporated  Blockchain technology, with its own financial economy along with every tool and portal imaginable to make Markethive an all-encompassing system that entrepreneurs and companies overall et al, will embrace when they see its power. 

Markethive is delivering a ‘state of the art platform’ to you, but it is your company. It’s been built for the community and brings self-sovereignty, privacy, autonomy to every individual with a genuine opportunity to be in control of your future, peace of mind, fulfilling your potential, creating wealth, and able to prosper in so many ways. 

With its two main engines at the helm and secondary engines such as the MHV coin and exchange as well as all cottage businesses within Markethive reaching out to all other platforms is fundamentally the core, the epicenter where we all work in collaboration ensuring everyone’s success. Markethive is its name, Entrepreneurialism is its game. 

 

 

ecosystem for entrepreneurs

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

 

 

 

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