The money supply of a country comprises all currency in circulation (banknotes and coins currently issued) and, depending on the particular definition used, one or more types of bank money (the balances held in checking accounts, savings accounts, and other types of bank accounts).
Bank money, whose value exists on the books of financial institutions
and can be converted into physical notes or used for cashless payment,
forms by far the largest part of broad money in developed countries.
Etymology
The word money derives from the Latin word moneta with the meaning "coin" via French monnaie. The Latin word is believed to originate from a temple of Juno, on Capitoline, one of Rome's seven hills. In the ancient world, Juno was often associated with money. The temple of Juno Moneta at Rome was the place where the mint of Ancient Rome was located.[5] The name "Juno" may have derived from the Etruscan goddess Uni
(which means "the one", "unique", "unit", "union", "united") and
"Moneta" either from the Latin word "monere" (remind, warn, or instruct)
or the Greek word "moneres" (alone, unique).
In the Western world a prevalent term for coin-money has been specie, stemming from Latin in specie, meaning "in kind".[6]
Money was historically an emergent market phenomenon that possess intrinsic value as a commodity; nearly all contemporary money systems are based on unbacked fiat money without use value.[4] Its value is consequently derived by social convention, having been declared by a government or regulatory entity to be legal tender;
that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries
of the country, for "all debts, public and private", in the case of the
United States dollar.
Does it seem like everyone is jockeying for a job with the Big Four? Or, maybe you've started working for one, and it's not going as well as you thought it would. Sure, you have a generous salary, but perhaps you're tired of working from a windowless cubicle or fighting heavy traffic every day.
If you're burned out by working for large corporations, a job with a small business could be a smart move—and one that could pay huge dividends for your career. Here's how.
What Is a Small Business?
A small business isn't just your local cupcake bakery with four employees. The Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a small business as a company with up to 1,500 employees that generates no more than $41.5 million in annual revenue. And small businesses employ more than 40% of working Americans.
The Advantages of Working for a Small Business
There are numerous benefits to working for a small business. Here are just a few reasons to consider a job with a small company for your next career move.
— Expand Your Skill Set
Employees who work for a small business may wear a lot of hats. You might be helping manage the ecommerce store in addition to updating social media and writing ad copy. Or, you might not only work as a UX Designer creating mock-ups of apps, but you could also be helping market the product.
Working for a small business, you'll get to try many new things to build your skill set for future opportunities.
— Enjoy More Flexibility
A large, widely-known Fortune 500 company may not be as willing to embrace remote or hybrid work, although many are shifting their views. Attempts to negotiate flexible work options can be difficult since there can be more red tape with corporate policy.
At a large company, there's a slim chance you'll ever interact with senior leaders, like the CEO. However, at a small company, you might be meeting with the CEO regularly to provide updates as the sole marketer. Or, they may hold company town halls to discuss policy changes or goals for the upcoming quarter.
This access allows you to demonstrate your value to senior leadership, which means that working for a small business could provide opportunities to grow your career within the company.
Start Working for a Small Business Today
While a small business may not come with an internationally-known name or large salary, there can be numerous benefits to working for one. A small company can provide you the valuable opportunity to learn new skills, enjoy flexible working options, and meet with senior leadership.
Ready to enjoy the flexibility of working for a small business? Since 2007, FlexJobs has provided job seekers with access to a scam-free jobs board to help them land their next hybrid or remote role. Explore the benefits of a FlexJobs membership today!
Many people think of retirement as a period in life full of baking cookies, swinging on the porch, and golfing. But for many retirees, that routine might sound like a nice vacation for a little while but becomes tedious on a daily basis.
Karen J. was one of those retirees. She didn't want to settle quietly into her hobbies after she retired from teaching. The desire to fill up some of her time and satisfy her quest for continual learning took her back to the classroom part-time.
However, it didn't take long for her to realize a traditional teaching role in a classroom was no longer an ideal fit for her retirement years. "Being inside the school working with a very limited and tight schedule, I decided I wanted more flexibility," Karen says.
Seeking a Better Work-Life Balance in Retirement
Karen also needed a job that provided more consistent incometo add to her savings and boost her hobby fund. "Not getting a salary when schools are closed, on holidays, during vacation weeks, or over the entire summer was a bit stressful!"
But Karen found that it was challenging to find a part-time job that matched her professional skills and experience on her own, which led her to FlexJobs.
Discovering New Options
Through FlexJobs, Karen was able to land not one but two part-time, flexible positions with TutorMe and Littera Education. And together, they fit her needs perfectly. Now, Karen is busy "enjoying more of life by having time for other pursuits, piano, crafts, church activities, or simply being with friends."
"I enjoy being at home because it is quiet. I can take breaks when needed, schedule work, and not feel rushed to get from one place to another by a certain time. Now, I can leave for appointments or just have additional time for my hobbies."
Beyond balancing her time, Karen enjoys staying relevant and learning new skills that align with her lifelong career. "These roles give me additional training since I am a lifelong learner and still would like to help students achieve success."
Advice to Anyone Considering a FlexJobs Membership
Like many retirees, Karen noted that it's a balancing act to fight against age bias and other stereotypes about retirees. She suggests that other retirees update their resumes strategically with a focus on communicating both their experience and desire to keep working.
And even though budgets can be tight in retirement, Karen thinks the paid membership is well worth it. She says, "Try it for three months and keep looking! FlexJobs has a LOT of jobs."
If you're ready to explore your flexible work options, FlexJobs can help. We post jobs daily in over 50 career categories, and we have an entire team of real people dedicated to verifying those jobs to ensure that our members only see legitimate opportunities. Take the tour and discover all of the ways FlexJobs can support you!
For many, the United States Census Bureau study about commuting comes as no surprise. The Bureau's report shares that the average time spent commuting back and forth to work has grown to almost 30 minutes each way. And for most professionals who work in an office setting, giving up five hours of life each week for a commute is pretty standard.
But Sara S. struggled with a lengthy commute combined with long, draining hours. She realized that something had to change. Her work life was taking a toll on her family and personal commitments and pushing her to professional burnout. It was time to take back control of her life.
Committing to Pursuing Balance
Recognizing that she needed a change, Sara looked for remote roles independently. It was only a short time before she realized she was spending more time sourcing legitimate positions than she was applying for and following up on them.
"I had been looking for a remote position for a few months and wasted so much time and energy on fake job leads." Even with the many awareness campaigns, job seekers like Sara are often overwhelmed with the number of scams targeting job seekers. Fortunately, she found FlexJobs, and her job search became streamlined and productive.
Building a Rewarding Career
Sara knew that her next role needed to do more than create balance. She was also determined that it would be a quality position aligned with her career goals. "I didn't want to step backward in my career or be stuck in a position with no growth opportunities."
Fortunately, Sara remained focused on her goals and found a perfect fit in a fully remote role with UnitedHealth Group. Now, Sara can be more present for her family without having to put her career to the side. "I found an organization I can grow with, professionally and personally."
Thriving Throughout All Areas
If you ask Sara how working remotely has affected her life, she'll tell you she's enjoying building better balance in the larger, more apparent areas of her life. "I have more time for the things that are important to me—my kids, my education goals, and my health," she says.
Now that Sara is thriving in a meaningful role supporting her work-life balance, she has become an advocate for others to make effective changes in their lives. "I have recommended FlexJobs to so many people. It was well worth purchasing the membership."
Her guidance to others looking for more work freedom? Your job search is much more than tailoring a resume and hitting "submit." Sara says, "Don't forget about the value of networking," also stating that, "A flawless resume is useless if no one ever reads it."
Create Your Own Success Story
We hear from job seekers like Sara every day, sharing the enormous impact that flexible work has made on their lives.
If you're ready to build a better work-life balance, take the tour and discover all of the resources that FlexJobs offers to support you in your job search.
Once upon a time, there was a little robot who came to a website to
try to figure out what it was all about. The robot read some words and
followed some links and thought: “Well, there are a lot of mentions of
this particular word, so the page must be about that!” She sent out a
message to the mother ship to file the page in a giant index so the page
could be retrieved whenever somebody needed to know about that word.
The robot worked very long hours for a very long time to file all the
pages into the index that she could find.
After a couple of years of filing away pages, the robot became very
clever indeed. Her boss at the mother ship trained her to read better
and faster so she could better understand what any page was about. She
could even tell when it would make most sense to show it. She even
learned how to use context to judge a piece of writing instead of just finding mentions of a particular term.
But, smart as the robot had become, her creators needed extra help to
get her to fully understand the world. The robot did not have the
capacity to grasp every single piece of knowledge and understand how all
these pages were connected.
Luckily, some clever humans created something incredibly clever
called Schema, which was a bit like a giant thesaurus for robots just
like our little hero.
In it, she found everything she needed. It told her what she could
look for to determine what a particular page was about, be it a product,
an event or even a person. She learned about different movies, books
and authors. About recipe ingredients and cooking instructions. She
found out how people relate to each other, to past events and to
abstract concepts that were always a mystery to her. Everything she read
was instantly clear to her — she was so incredibly happy!
Websites which used this Schema thesaurus helped her, and all the
other robots like her, to make sense of the world. She finally knew
everything. In return, she rewarded those sites with spectacularly
colourful listings when people looked for them. But she could only
reward those sites who implemented it well and that became a problem for
other sites who didn’t know how to use it properly.
She soon found that there was a lot lacking regarding Schema. Many
sites offered only tiny pieces of the magical Schema data and none of it
was connected to the sources that could help her do her job better. She
tried asking for help – pleading with site owners to improve the way
they used SCHEMA, but to no avail. Until, many years later, a hugely
popular plugin for the biggest content management system in the solar
system stepped in to help out the little robot.
Tentatively, she looked at the internals of the Schema implementation
of the plugin, codename Yoast SEO 11.0. “Wow, this is just what I
need!”, she said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before! This is
Schema that I can read and understand. It is complete, it shows me where
pages are and how people and organizations connect. Most importantly,
it is interconnected! I no longer have to guess where everything goes.
It’s all in a graph – a neat little package – ready for me to read,
understand and file away!”
Schema-powered structured data
is one of the hardest, most abstract pieces of web technologies to
describe, while also being one of the most important ones. I hope the
story above has made the concept a lot clearer for you. Now that you’ve
formed a mental image of what we’re talking about here, let me show you
what adding structured data to your site can lead to.
Before you read on: we’ve recently launched the Understanding structured data training course. This
course helps you understand structured data in detail and teaches you
how to improve your own chances of getting rich results. Get access to this course, all of our other SEO courses and extra features in Yoast SEO by going Premium:
We always say you should do everything in your power to help both
search engines and searchers to find out what your site is about. Using
structured data gives you superpowers in the eyes of the search
engine. Since you are labeling the most important parts of your content
or site elements and connecting them to other parts, you are making
sure that search engines truly understand your site. No longer do they
have to guess about what everything means — you can just tell them.
Getting stuff into Google’s Knowledge graph
gets a lot easier once you add relevant Schema to your site. Not only
that, other platforms like Pinterest love this kind of data as well.
With Yoast SEO 11.0, we’re not only making it easier for search
engine robots to read your site, but also to understand. We do this by
making connections and offering the structured data in a so-called graph. See the image below for a graphical representation of this idea:
We broke the code — finally, everything is connected
In this guide, we gave an overview of what you can do to improve the
SEO of your Shopify store. Of course, there’s more to Shopify — and to
ecommerce itself. Luckily, we can help you on both fronts. After the
launch of the app on January 18, 2022, you’ll find two online courses
that develop your skills in our Yoast SEO academy. Please try the ecommerce training and the Shopify training and bring your online store to the next level.
Conclusion on Shopify SEO
Shopify is a popular platform to run your online store on. Rightly so
because it is easy to use and performs pretty well out of the box. Of
course, there are many things you can do to improve your store’s
performance by focusing on Shopify SEO. Hopefully, this ultimate guide
to Shopify SEO gave you a good place to start.
Every online store needs marketing. You can do many things to get
people interested in your products and get them to your shop. In this
part of the Shopify SEO ultimate guide, we’d like to highlight some
options quickly.
Paid ads and Google Shopping
Many Shopify stores get their first customers from paid ads. Paid ads
are a great way of gaining visibility quickly. You get to carefully
target who you want your ads to appear for based on terms and outcomes
of your choosing. There’s no limit to what you can do with paid ads —
the only limiting factor being what you want to pay for those ads, of
course.
Then there’s Google Shopping,
where you can get your products noticed as well. Getting listed there
doesn’t even cost money if you’re in selected countries, that is.
There’s a Google channel app that makes connecting your Shopify store to
that boundless platform easy.
Adding your products to Google Shopping is another way to get noticed
Social media
is vast — use it to your advantage! There are a ton of well-known
platforms out there, like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but also
more niche ones, like Reddit. Get creative and find out where your
audience lives. Find out what they need and connect! Build your brand,
your voice, and push your store.
Video marketing
Buying something is a very delicate affair, and the more you can
support your customer, the better. Video is an excellent way of getting
your customers to learn more about your products. Video is booming, so
don’t forget to invest in a proper video SEO strategy. We have a ton of
great content if you want to learn how to do video SEO. And if you’re looking to add video content to your Shopify store, check out our quick guide.
Email marketing
A good email newsletter
is essential for your store. It is one of the most successful ways of
reaching people and keeping them connected to your store. You can use
email marketing to keep customers up to date with the latest products
and sales. In addition, you can also use it as part of your content
marketing strategy — getting your content noticed by the right people.
Shopify comes with a dedicated email campaign app that lets you get
started quickly. The first 2,500 emails per month are free of charge.
Designing an email is picking a template and customizing it to your
liking. You even get data to track the success of your newsletters.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing might be an option for you. In most niches,
you’ll find influencers who’d like to talk about or promote your
product. Influencer marketing is an exciting way of getting your name
out there, and it might make sense for your industry.
Offline marketing
Don’t forget old-school offline marketing for your Shopify store. If
you are a local store catering to a local audience, you have to think
about offline marketing. Think of advertising in the local paper,
printing some flyers, or doing a guerrilla sticker campaign. The options
are endless.
Your store should have great products, good content, an excellent
design, and proper SEO to make the most of it. But even then, the
chances are that you are still not getting the most out of your store.
Getting customers is one thing — getting them to convert and come back
again is a whole different thing.
Besides improving your store, you should also improve the experience a
customer has in your store. You should try to take away any bump in the
road that might keep a visitor from becoming a customer. These could be
technical things — your shopping cart loads poorly. Or it might be
related to your content — is the text on that CTA explicit enough? Can
you find ways to improve your product pages?
This is the domain of conversion rate optimization.
Start thinking about the user journey and see if you’ve missed a step
in the process. Test different setups of your shopping cart to see which
performs better. Put your product pages through the wringer. Track,
test, change and improve!
Internationalization
Expanding your online store to markets outside your country has
always been a chore. Things get complex fast, even with Shopify, getting
everything set up — from international domains to hreflang, localization, and targeting. But there’s money to be made in the world, and why wouldn’t your shop have a piece of the pie?
To make selling a more viable option for online stores internationally, Shopify recently announced Markets.
Shopify Markets takes the guesswork out of internationalization. It
comes with automatic solutions for payments in local currencies,
translation of content and interfaces, fulfillment and shipping, and
even tax and custom handling.
For SEOs, the beautiful thing about Shopify Markets is the part of
the international domain. Here, you can simply pick your proposed global
domain setup, whether you use subfolders, subdomains, or top-level
domains. A new Geolocator app helps redirect the customers to the proper
domain in their respective countries. Shopify will automatically add
the appropriate hreflang tags to the pages so search engines can also
make sense of the setup.
How to move from WooCommerce to Shopify
One of the biggest competitors of Shopify is WooCommerce — we’ve compared them both in an article on this site.
If you are looking to move from WooCommerce to Shopify, you can rest
assured, as the process of migrating is pretty straightforward. First,
you need to export your data from WooCommerce. Then, import your data
into Shopify by way of the Store Importer app. Lastly, carefully check
and review the imported data. Missing products or customers can be added
manually. Check Shopify’s store migration guide for more information.
