how to get as a college graduate

Incomes for educated workers are growing fastest in these metros

The news coming out of dusty border city El Paso, Texas, is usually pretty grim. The metro suffers from 9.5% unemployment, declining high-school graduation rates and inadequate infrastructure. But a closer look reveals an employment picture that, at least in one way, is improving. In the past four years, incomes for college graduates there have steadily grown more than any other major metropolitan area.

Several factors, like increased border patrol activity requiring jobs in intelligence and other white-collar work, and recent expansions of both Fort Bliss, one of the country's largest military bases, and the local University of Texas campus, have boosted pay for educated Texans. Couple that with El Paso's relative protection from the battered housing economy and it's easier to see why pay is inching up.

"Under most circumstances, it would be surprising for El Paso to rank so highly on any type of income gauge," says Tom Fullerton, economics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. "But there has been some really fortunate timing in terms of expansion in the local economy."

Indeed, it's not always the most affluent or economically robust cities where incomes for professionals have jumped the most, according to data provided by Seattle-based Payscale, an online provider of employee compensation data with a database of 18.5 million employee profiles. Median pay rose in El Paso by 19.4% to $49,100 since 2005, handily outpacing the 8% national growth for college grads.

Closely following El Paso are Bakersfield, Calif., an oil town packed with engineers, where incomes are up 18.5%; Omaha, Neb., a national center for large insurance carriers like Mutual of Omaha, which saw an 18.4% jump; and Virginia Beach, Va., home to U.S. military bases including Naval Air Station Oceana, where the median rose 17.3%.

This list offers a different view of the economy than the national jobs landscape with which Americans are all too familiar: 15.4 million are unemployed, 135,000 jobs are lost each month and incomes for many are stagnant. But in some urban areas where growth industries like government, health care and education are prevalent, college graduates have seen modest, but steady, income growth.

Behind the Numbers

Payscale.com studied the compensation of college graduates for which it had data--about 1.5 million people--in the 100 most populous Metropolitan Statistical Areas (regions defined by the U.S. Office of Management and budget that the federal government uses to collect statistics) in the country. It ranked metros on the compounded income growth between December 2005 and December 2009 to arrive at the cities where Americans are getting richer.

Metros in the top 10 are scattered throughout the Northeast, Midwest, South and Hawaii, showing that income growth has more to do with what you do than where you live. Incomes in the best-performing metros are heavily influenced by the dominant industries there--and in particular, whether those industries pay well for college graduates.

Bakersfield, Calif., suffers from a 14.5% unemployment rate and a sharp loss of housing industry jobs. But the engineering profession has a strong presence there, as do the oil and gas extraction industries, all of which require highly skilled workers.

"Bakersfield has a high unemployment rate, but what we're seeing is not affecting college grads," says Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis at Payscale. "So if you have a college degree and you're working as a petroleum engineer, you're doing fine."

A city like Phoenix, whose economic fortunes have changed dramatically for the worse in the past three years, is a surprising member of the top 10. But the tumbling housing industry, while it cost many building jobs, had less of an impact on college graduates. Some of the few jobs that remain are top-earning ones. Cynthia Kroll, senior regional economist at the Fisher Center of Real Estate and Urban Economics at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, compares it to the trimming of low-wage jobs in Silicon Valley after the dot-com bust early in the decade.

"When the crash comes, and you lay off 75%, you tend to keep the higher-paid jobs. So your salary base goes up," says Kroll. "It's not that highly skilled people don't also get laid off, but the mix is going to be weighted toward the more experienced, more skilled workers that you're going to need when growth comes back."

Cities like Charlotte, N.C., benefit from one of the country's strongest industries, and one that counts highly skilled workers among its ranks: Education. Charlotte is home to a half-dozen universities, Johnson & Wales University among them.

These trends are another indicator that the country is in the midst of a significant and in many places painful transition from a manufacturing economy to one driven by service and technology jobs. The change has mixed implications for educated workers. Jobs have been lost in industries that were often unionized, which raised salaries, and fewer union jobs may drag incomes down on the whole.

"As those industries have shorn jobs, the proportion of families with middle incomes has declined," says Douglas Hall, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Institute at the Economic Policy Institute, an economics-based think tank in Washington, D.C. "Manufacturing's role in the economy has changed, and we haven't wrapped our heads around what the implications are."

The lack of strong regional patterns in the metros becoming richest reveals more than anything how varied local economies are. Only a close look at the mix of industries in every city, and its political and economic underpinnings, explains the direction in which incomes are moving.

"Bakersfield and El Paso are really different from Virginia beach and Honolulu. That in itself is interesting" says Kroll. "It may well be a different story in each place."


Cities Where Americans Are Getting Richer


© Walter Bibikow/GettyImages


1. El Paso, Texas

Median Pay, 2005:$41,100

Median Pay, 2009:$49,100

Median Pay Trend:19.39%

Unemployment Rate:9.5%






2. Bakersfield, Calif.

Median Pay, 2005:$51,300

Median Pay, 2009:$60,900

Median Pay Trend:18.52%

Unemployment Rate:14.5%





© Thinkstock/GettyImages


3. Omaha-Council Bluffs, NE-IA

Median Pay, 2005:$45,500

Median Pay, 2009:$53,900

Median Pay Trend:18.39%

Unemployment Rate:4.8%





© Anne Rippy/GettyImages


4. Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC

Median Pay, 2005:$44,500

Median Pay, 2009:$52,200

Median Pay Trend:17.28%

Unemployment Rate:6.5%





© Joseph Sohm-Visions of America/GettyImages


5. Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA

Median Pay, 2005:$44,800

Median Pay, 2009:$52,500

Median Pay Trend:17.27%

Unemployment Rate:5.7%

Source: Payscale.com

Knowing the market needs of a niche

If this is your first visit please please read marketing niche 1, for better understanding of this post.

Still on how to select a good niche.

Market needs of the niche:

Every niche has it's own unique needs. Let say your desired is cheating spouse, this niche could have various needs like love, care, affection, sex and so on. Knowing the need of a niche gives you the right measure to know your weight in the niche. In plain english, the more the number of solutions you have to offer to the needs of a particular niche the stronger and more popular you become in the niche and the more your website visitors turn to your loyal customers.
In the above example of cheating spouse, let say their unique need is unsatisfied sex life. Then all you've to do is give them solutions on how to have a satisfied sex life. This is easier said than done, it can only be done through bloging, this is because a blog has a characteristic of interactiveners where you can talk to your audience directly. Create a blog where solutions to this needs are posted on a regular basis, let them know you for a particular type of writing pattern this 'll give you more loyal and trust worthy than just writing in a random manner. write professional articles within 15mins now. Most importantly also give your blog visitors quality solutions.
The best way to dominate and become an authority in a niche market is by giving solutions to thier needs. So make it a point of duty to give enough quality solutions to the needs of the market niche you're in.

Niche marketing

A niche is a smaller part of a bigger market on which a specific product is focused on. Niche is the most important part of online marketing, cos this is where the real money is on the internet. This's because it's easier to be a master a small market than a larger one. For example, it's easier to market a car stereo on the internet than marketing the car itself. This is because their are more competitors in the car market than the car stereo market. So the secret is always to look for the smallest part of any niche you know very much about.

How to select a good niche

obviously there are things you look out for when selecting a niche, but most internet marketing newcomers tend to ignore them. These are:
- niche market research report
- graphs showing demand and profitability of niche market
- price range of niche market
- market needs of the niche
- production method of niche market
- geographical need of the niche market

i'm going to explain the first three for now due to time and tiredness.

Niche market research:
business on the internet today is all about keywords. Customers enter keywords on search engine when they need something. This is what niche research is about, doing a proper niche research gives you the right keyword phrases for both demand and supply in that particular niche. They are tools that can do this for you.

Graphs showing demand and profitability of niche:
this graph is commonly called the yellow tail graph. This is a theoretical part of niche marketing that is worth knowing, cos with this excellent decisions can be made when choosing a niche. The long tail is a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities. This technique is what is used by major online stores and businesses like Amazon. In plain english, it is the strategy of selling many hard-to-find items to relatively low number of customer per item. The total sales made from this is what is called the long tail.
From the power law of economics, this long tail section contains over 80% of that particular niche, while the head is about 20%. When internet marketing is considered we can imagine the long tail as the uncommon niches or keyword phrases that internet users query search engines with and is actually where 80% of internet sales are made.
In conclusion your knowledge of the long tail graph is what differentiate between an internet marketing guru and a newbie. If you're interested in knowing more, visit wikipedia.

Price range of the niche:
believe it or not shopping on the internet is like your routine shopping in which you make budget for. Choosing a price range for your niche depends on the kind of people your niche marketing campaign is focusing on.
Take for instance, if my niche is used shirts which cost within $10- $15, i'll be expecting an affiliate share of $1- $6. Whereas if i was marketing car stereo with price range of $100- $180, then i should be expecting an affiliate share of $10- $180 or more depending on the affiliate company. Merely looking at these examples, your human instinct will tell you to go for high price range niches and that is where you make your first internet marketing error. This because those high price range niche market have being highly populated that breaking into them is an unrealistic task. My advice is for you to in for the low price range niche market. Be focused don't be tempted, it might take a while but you'll certainly have your slice of the internet marketing cash.

Watch out for part 2.