Denisse Lebron | MCBS Journey

Mock interviews are a great way to practice for real interviews by preparing answers to common interview questions increasing chances of landing a position. In this mock interview, I am interviewing for the position of Marketing Strategist at an award-winning content marketing agency. The position is a full-time remote position and requires leading a team of marketing managers.

Tell me about yourself is so commonly asked by interviewers and can sometimes be a really hard question to answer or even simply narrow down to the important points. I love that this task was assigned because it really gets us to practice that"elevator speech" of who and where we are professionally. This assignment also made me realize that I definitely need to practice it even more beyond this assignment and stop using "um"!

Self-evaluation is not only a critical skill in the workforce to evaluate one's own performance, but it's also important as a personal skill for growth and development. The purpose of this assignment is to evaluate ourselves and our performance during this month's course.

Since we are all just starting fresh with new websites, the purpose of this activity is to develop a strategy to gain traffic to our websites for our personal brand, whether if it is a freelance business or for credibility, as we job hunt. The three strategies I plan on implementing to boost traffic to my website are: Linking to Other Posts I love Niel Patel's approach to gaining more traffic. Each time I write a blog post, I can research relevant content from other publishers and influencers and link to it. He recommends going a step further by emailing the author of the articles to introduce myself and let them know I found their content worthy of attention. I think this two-step approach is a great method to build traffic faster. Email Marketing The second strategy is building an email list and sending out blog content to them through direct email blasts. This process can even be automated by setting up an RSS feed email campaign so that each time a new blog post is pu...

LinkedIn is a useful tool for career search. It is a database easily accessible with hundreds of companies and the ability to directly connect and message key decision makers in desired companies. The purpose of this activity is to prepare and enhance our LinkedIn profiles in order to stand out to HR managers and directors. Also, by enhancing LinkedIn profiles, we can come up in specific searches on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile

I reviewed the job scan and updated my resume by including the skills and keywords to match the job description. The only skill I did not add is Demand Generation as it is not something I have experience in. After updating my resume a few times, I was still not able to reach over an 80% match. This tells me that this is probably not the best position based on my skills and I will need to continue my job search for something more aligned to my skills. I really like this tool for this reason, however. Not only can it help you match your resume to the job description, but it can also filter jobs that are not a good fit after you first think they are. Job Scan Updated Resume Job Description

It is very exciting to find this tool as it is extremely helpful in optimizing a resume to fit the desired positions. Typically, I do this manually, but this tool makes it quick, easy and it is convenient. JOBSCAN RESULTS JOB DESCRIPTION: MARKETING MANAGER  Oversee Execution of our Conference Strategy Build and maintain an inventory of applicable conferences, trade shows, and speaking calendar(s) for our chosen conferences Promote staff conference participation by maintaining a CFP calendar and reminding staff of proposal due-dates Secure and handle logistics for scheduled conference trade shows Coordinate with our copywriters and designers to ensure booths, demos, and handouts are correctly prepared for our chosen conferences Publicize our conference activities to prospects and past attendees through email and other online promotion Coordinate with sales to invite relevant prospects to any extracurricular activities and social events Plan and organize promotional...

This project is intended to help us enhance our resumes for our career search by adding the highlights of our experience in numerical data, which stands out to recruiters. Click the image to view the resume: The measurable accomplishments I added include one of my biggest accomplishments which was an organic SEO campaign for a plastics manufacturing company. The second was my contribution to increasing subscribers to three law blogs for a client. And lastly, helping a client transition from manual back-office processes to using marketing automation and CRM software to automate a lot of processes. 

Networking is extremely important to build connections and long-term relationships within your target industry. The purpose of this activity is to begin building a list of companies and key contacts to reach out to whether on LinkedIn or an industry networking event. These relationships are important for a future career or business opportunities. Target Company List Industry Contacts Red Fork Marketing Orlando, FL Arthur Goodman Director of Operations https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurgmgoodman/ Ellipses Public Relations Oakland, CA Diana Haven President https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianahaven/

In the Lynda.com course, Creating A Career Plan, Dr. Chaz Austin discusses key strategies for planning your career. Here I discuss three strategies that I will be applying to my career planning. Designing Your Career While it's not a specific strategy he discusses in the course, something stood out to me from the "Monetizable Passion" video. In this video, he says, "The business side of designing your career." I feel this combined with short and long-term goals is extremely important. These days a lot of people do a lot of jumping around from job to job, but they are not strategically jumping around. They are just jumping. Instead, it's important to start with the end-goal and develop a strategic design of how your career should go. This way, anytime a move is made for the next opportunity, it's a strategic method of moving up towards the long-term goal. Communication I am one of those people that look great on a resume, but I am not great at ...

The Portfolio Enhancement SMART Goal project this week is intended to help us finalize our portfolios so that we are ready to showcase our skills as we move towards graduation and begin to fully emerge into the workforce with our new degrees.  My goal is to enhance my portfolio website in four ways: Increase the size of the logo in the top left so that it is more visible Update my resume file on the about page Reduce the size of the header on the subpages including About Me, Capabilities, My Work and Contact me. This way a visitor does not need to scroll down so much to get to the actual content. Update the My Work page with recent projects completed.  These four enhancements can be realistically attained by week three and they relate to my career goals in that my portfolio will have an improved user experience allowing the key points of my portfolio website to stand out to potential employers or clients. The first three enhancements will be completed by...

This self-evaluation activity is to allow us to reflect on the work we completed and our performance throughout the month. It gives us an opportunity to praise ourselves for our hard work as well as find areas of improvement with our own attitude and behaviors. This self-reflection will allows to strive to do better and prepare us for the professional world.

The purpose of this activity is to go back and refine our website projects even further by looking at the project with a fresh eye and applying feedback received from peers and our teacher. By further refining, we improve the website. BEFORE AFTER REEL DEAL TACOS: https://info633584.wixsite.com/reeldealtacos CHANGES MADE Home Page On the homepage,  I removed the text to the right and left of the logo since it was not even. I also added an organic badge on the big image of the homepage so it doesn't feel like there is empty space on the image. I removed the "Why Fish Tacos are the REEL Deal..." section and then moved up all other sections. Under the "Find Us" section, I made the text bigger so it stands out more on the page. Navigation I moved the logo to the left and moved up the navigation next to the logo in order to reduce the size of the header. By reducing the size of the header, I was able to freeze the header so that when jumpi...

The purpose of this activity is to review projects completed by our peers. It's helpful in receiving an outside perspective on the work we do and by reviewing other work, we see areas for improvement in our work.  Ricky Nosworthy Portfolio https://ricknosworthy.wixsite.com/mysite

The purpose of this activity is to begin building a portfolio for our work and prepare for obtaining employment in the Media Communications industry. Portfolio Website Are you proud of what you created here? Why? I am proud of what I have created. It's simple yet gives the right message and it's consistent with my brand. Do you understand how you'll leverage this site moving forward? Explain. Yes, as I complete my degree in Media Communications, it will be important to set myself apart and showcase my experience in order to obtain employment in the media communications industry. What area of your portfolio site do you feel is the strongest? Why? I am proud of the about page and the capabilities page. It strongly presents more about my background and the capabilities page showcases work I am capable of doing for an employer or a client. What area do you feel needs the most work? Why? The portfolio page is probably the page that needs the most work. It's im...

Like any website design, it's important to map out a plan before the design stage. The purpose of this activity is to begin gathering all of the information we need for our future portfolio website and create a plan we can implement later on when it's time to design.  My portfolio strategy is in the form of a Google Slides presentation. Click below to view the presentation: Portfolio Strategy Presentation Are you proud of what you created here? Why? I am proud of the way I have organized my portfolio strategy. I think it's well organized and easy to share. We actually use a similar method in my current employment when preparing for a design project.  Do you understand how you'll leverage this plan moving forward? Explain. Yes. The sitemap and wireframe are a plan I can easily execute when creating my portfolio site and having my content inventory also makes it extremely easy to flow through the site design process. What area of your portfo...

This activity ties into our professional portfolio and building a brand for ourselves. When creating and building a brand, it is important to stay consistent across the web and all other channels the business will use to communicate. This activity helps us build a style guide that we can follow and when creating for a business, employees and representatives can follow as well. View Style Guide Online

The purpose of this activity is to begin getting familiar with the website design process which goes along with editing for the web. It allows us to edit and organize content as well as produce web content in a manner that will be easy to understand and engage visitors. Reel Deal Tacos Website: https://info633584.wixsite.com/reeldealtacos Self-Assessment As I built the website I kept my original proposal open, so I feel I met most of the provisions outlined in my proposal I added the social media networds, on-page SEO (page titles and descriptions), and the sitemap is pretty similar to the original proposal. I originally recommended building the site on WordPress, but ultimately I built the site using Wix. This may be the only item I did not deliver as promised. I went from recommending WordPress, to starting out on Squarespace and finally ended up on Wix. SquareSpace was not as user friendly as I thought when I started building the site. I typically stick to WordPress or Weebl...

The purpose of this activity is to begin getting familiar with what a CMS is and the different website builders that are available in order to build a website for a client. I decided to use SquareSpace for the Reel Deal Tacos website. https://reel-deal.squarespace.com/ I chose Square Space because I have heard much about it and used it maybe once in the past, but it's been a long time since I used their platform. Their themes have a nice, clean, simple and modern style that fits well with a food truck business.  As I mentioned, I may have used it in the past but it's been so long I can't remember if I liked the platform. I typically tend to lean more towards Weebly and WordPress, so I probably didn't find it as easy and user-friendly as these two since I never used it again after that first time.  I decided to use it because I am always interested in learning new things and gaining experience with different CMS platforms. Working as a freelancer you can...