What to expect from McDonald's earnings

McDonald's Corp. is scheduled to announce its second-quarter earnings before the market opens on Tuesday. Here's what you need to know:

EARNINGS FORECAST: Net income of $1.39 a share is expected, compared with $1.26 a share a year earlier.

SAME-STORE SALES AND REVENUE FORECAST: Analysts are expecting McDonald's to post a 3.6% increase in global same-store sales for the quarter, with a 3.2% increase in its critical U.S. market. The company is expected to report revenue of $6.3 billion, compared with $6.5 billion a year earlier.

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WHAT TO WATCH:

-- WHAT'S NEXT? McDonald's has gotten a nice boost from its all-day breakfast launch, but that was so 2015. While the company is trying to keep the drumbeat going with an expansion of the all-day breakfast menu, investors are eager to hear what else McDonald's has up its sleeve. The company is testing various things in different markets, including Chicken McNuggets without the artificial preservatives and bigger and smaller Big Macs. A Dallas franchisee's test of Quarter Pounders made with fresh beef has generated the most excitement, because switching to fresh beef could be a game-changer for McDonald's. But franchisees also have expressed concern about the company's ability to pull it off without posing food safety risks and adding too much complexity to a system designed to store frozen food.

-- THE ECONOMY: The restaurant industry is in a slump, with economic uncertainty and terrorist attacks giving consumers the jitters. And with commodities deflation, grocery prices are getting cheaper, but high labor costs have pushed restaurant prices higher. To keep customers coming, McDonald's has to get its value proposition right. It has experimented with various value menus as it has moved away from a dollar menu. Investors will be looking to hear how its 2 for $5 deal has done and whether it has any plans to tweak the price and offerings.

-- DIGITAL: McDonald's has generally been behind other chains when it comes to technological innovation, but it may have scored a win by quickly piggybacking on the Pokémon Go phenomenon. McDonald's Japan last week announced it will soon collaborate with the maker of the popular augmented-reality game in a deal that will make McDonald's restaurants a destination for game-players. Some analysts expect the partnership could extend to other markets, making McDonald's more attractive to the young people it's trying to win back.

Here’s all the money in the world, in one chart

Ever wonder how much money there is in the world?

The answer is complicated, which you might expect, but not because of the difficulty of tallying up all the rather large numbers. Rather, it’s more about which parameters are used to define “money.”

“The amount of money that exists changes depending on how we define it. The more abstract definition of money we use, the higher the number is,” said Jeff Desjardins, an editor of Visual Capitalist, who put together an infographic to answer this question.

For purists, who believe money refers only to currencies such as bank notes, coins, and money deposited in savings or checking accounts, the total is somewhere around $80.9 trillion.

But for those preferring a broader interpretation, including digital currency bitcoin, above-ground gold supply, and funds invested in various financial products like derivatives, the amount is in the quadrillions.

This is what a quadrillion looks like written out: 1,000,000,000,000,000.

Funds invested in derivatives alone total $1.2 quadrillion. In fact, there is more money in derivatives than in all the stock markets combined, which is a comparatively paltry $70 trillion. The U.S. accounts for roughly half of the global market cap thanks to companies like Apple Inc. AAPL, -1.64% Alphabet Inc.GOOGL, -0.63% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.10%

Investment in commercial real estate, often the most visible symbol of wealth, pales in comparison to stocks or derivatives at $7.6 trillion.

As for money owed by every single person and country in the world, the grand total is $199 trillion, with some 29% of it borrowed since the 2008 financial crisis.

The U.S. is responsible for nearly one-third of that global debt, while Europe follows at 26% and Japan at 20%. China, for all the criticism about its debt-fueled economic growth, owes 6% of the total.

And despite the attention bitcoin has received in recent years as an alternative currency, it clearly has a long way to go. The value of all bitcoin in circulation is estimated at $5 billion, a proverbial drop in the bucket.

The Source Code for Vine was Accidentally Made Public

The source code for Twitter's six-second video app Vine was accidentally revealed online, The Register reports.

A security researcher who goes by the username "avicoder" published a blog post about his discovery. He says that he found a subdomain on Vine's website which led to him discovering Vine's entire source code available for download.

The source code for apps and programs is usually a closely guarded secret as it shows the inner working of exactly how an app functions, and public exposure is a big security risk.

Avicoder reported his finding to Twitter, and it was removed within five minutes. He was later paid a $10,080 bug bounty for finding the code. Twitter declined to comment on this story.

4 Ways CEOs Can Create an Effective PR Strategy

While companies have marketing executives whose sole responsibility is to manage the image of the company in the public -- including earned media and paid advertisement -- a CEO should also be prepared to get involved in this aspect of the company's success.

Successful companies like Apple and Tesla have CEOs who are very apt in taking charge of their companies' PR strategy.

No one knows your company better than you do. This is why Elon Musk doesn't let the dust settle before he chips in on any incorrect press statements regarding any of his companies or products.

As a CEO, how do you ensure that your PR strategy is effective, and doesn't cause unwarranted catastrophe for your company? The following are ways CEOs can help their companies maintain an effective PR strategy.

1. Be involved in the process.

One mistake many CEOs make when it comes to executing PR for their company is going MIA in the critical stages of their company's PR strategy. Being involved in the very early stages can help ensure that the framework on which your company's PR strategy is formed reflects your company as an industry leader.

Aside from dedicating a competent person to take charge of your PR strategy, getting involved will ensure your strategy is effective and wins you good publicity. As the CEO, you can be active in your company's PR by reviewing the template your marketing executive has designed to help your company get the right attention. Noting the areas you think there can be improvements will ensure that the right attention is drawn to your company in the press.

While a hands-off approach gives the marketing executive a sense of control over their role in the business, the presence of the CEO in the planning stages will stimulate a successful campaign.

2. Let your voice be heard.

Establishing yourself as an authority in the industry is a must for every CEO. An effective PR strategy will always take care of this. Your strategy should be designed so that any media attention your company gets enables the CEO to demonstrate their thought-leadership.

As a digital PR professional myself, I encourage my clients to always let their expertise show through contributions and sources when we manage their digital PR. CEOs should also learn to become familiar voices in their industry.

When I work with companies to create digital PR, I design campaigns that allow the top executive(s) of the company to be the first point of discussion. This is very important. This ensures that not only is the company being projected positively, but the CEO is also building a strong reputation as well.

3. Create your media.

Owned media is a powerful PR asset. Relying on earned media or PR to demonstrate your thought-leadership is not 100 percent foolproof. Apart from the fact that earning media attention takes a lot of hard-work and will often cost you a lot, owned media is the only way to truly project your company the way you want it to be perceived.

An important role owned media -- such as your company blog -- can play in helping you drive effective PR campaign is to create more awareness about your internal operations. Media representatives and PR companies can rely on your company's blog or website to better understand what your company is all about. This is especially important for startups that need to direct the focus of their audience.

4. Involve experienced professionals.

When your company is in the early stages, getting the attention of the media can be tough. Hiring a PR agency can be costly, but you might be left with no other option at this stage. Letting an experienced professional PR company handle your PR when your budget cannot accommodate an in-house team will take a lot of weight off your shoulders.

Related: How to Choose the Best PR Firm for your Company

Most PR agencies already have existing connections with the press and can leverage this relationship to help your company gain more publicity. This will eventually pay for the cost involved in using their services.

Why It's Only the Top of the First Inning for Entrepreneurs

While Brian Halligan was helping venture-backed startups with their go-to-market strategy, they started to notice something curious: Customers had gotten really good at blocking out interruptive marketing and sales tactics. The tried and true tactics of old (direct mail, email blasts, cold calls) simply weren’t effective anymore.

Conditioning to ignore advertising has only gotten worse since then. Look at how noisy and ineffective Twitter has become. Ad blocking software on computers and mobile is the norm; DVRs skip commercials; does anyone click on Google Adwords' sponsored links? The list goes on.

There's still plenty of time and space for traditional advertising. After all, if you have money, it's the quickest way to buy attention. Social media mogul Gary Vaynerchuk has often said, "Traditional advertising isn't dead per se, it's just overpriced." But if you don't have much budget, inbound marketing, a term most give Halligan credit for coining, is the arguably more effective alternative.

Halligan met Dharmesh Shah as a graduate student at MIT in 2004. During the early development years, Shah’s blog OnStartups was seeing massive growth in traffic. They'll admit, “We were surprised. How had this tiny blog with no budget generated more traffic than companies with professional marketing teams and way bigger budgets?” They said it felt like a modern-day David versus Goliath.

So after many meetings, coffee and the occasional Belgian beer (a shared favorite of theirs) they came to the simple observation:

“People don’t want to be interrupted by marketers or harassed by salespeople. They want to be helped.”

Halligan and Shah realized it was time to make the marketing and sales process human. Time to treat buyers like people, not numbers on a spreadsheet. Time to build an inbound community and help people achieve their business goals in a more personable, empathetic way. They called it HubSpot. 

The company grew from $255,000 in revenues in 2007, the year the software was released, to $15.6 million in 2010, according to Boston Business Journal. It started out targeting companies of one to 10 employees, but "moved steadily upmarket to serve larger businesses of up to 1,000 employees," according to Forbes.

HubSpot filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 25, 2014, for listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HUBS.

Click play on this episode of Behind the Brand to hear more from Halligan about the implications of technology on marketing.

The Ecommerce Marketer's Guide to Improving Search Rankings

Based on data, organic search traffic is clearly one of the largest referral sources for most websites. There are more than 100 billionsearches each month on Google alone, for example, and that works out to an average 2.3 million searches per second.

A certain share of those searches can be traced back to consumers looking to make a purchase or seeking information to help them complete a purchase.

Justin Butlion of Yotpo has described research he's conducted to uncover how much organic traffic the average ecommerce business receives. "When I analyzed the traffic sources of the 18,000-plus stores in Yotpo's database, I noticed that 30.5 percent of all traffic was coming from organic search on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines," Butlion wrote on the Kissmetrics Blog.

"There is a constant debate going on regarding the relevance of SEO for online businesses, but 30 percent is significant, so it still needs to be a focus for any online business owner."

If organic search can account for fully a third of your revenue, if not more, what can you do to grow that?

Search optimization is a deep ocean, but here are some core areas where you can take action right now to improve your organic search visibility and win over a greater share of those 100 billion-plus monthly searches.

1. Craft unique, optimized descriptions.

Don't settle on default product descriptions generated by the manufacturer. While this makes the process of uploading content easy, it's considered duplicate content, which makes it next to impossible to improve search rank for category and product pages.

Increase your odds for better visibility by crafting unique product descriptions optimized for keywords related to the product and how customers will use it. Make sure you include the value proposition and impactful benefit statements, which can help increase visitor-to-customer conversions.

"Value proposition is the number one thing that determines whether people will bother reading more about your product or hit the back button," wrote Peep Laja, founder of ConversionXL, for his book, How to Build Websites That Sell.

2. Don't forget about image optimization.

Images and photos should be optimized with targeted keywords. For products, keywords should be specific to the product name, make or model and manufacturer.

Image optimization includes the image name or file name as well as the alt tag associated with the image. Depending on the design and layout of your store, you might also consider optimizing brief image descriptions for each product photo.

In a post for Search Engine Journal, Jean Dion wrote, "That file name is part of the data Google examines and, in the absence of other valuable data, that file name might be used as the image's snippet in search results."

These actions can help your images appear in relevant image searches, which can drive additional organic traffic back to your product pages.

Related: Why Local SEO Is About to Become Even More Important

3. Create valuable content in different formats.

Content marketing is widely considered to be one of the fastest and most reliable ways to build organic traffic for any website, including ecommerce sites. But it can't be just any kind of content. In order to gain referral and follow-through traffic, and get those readers into your funnel, you need to provide significant value.

While high-value, 10x content on a blog is a good starting point for organic traffic, you also want to engage your audience on different fronts. Here are some ways you can leverage great content everywhere to build visibility and referral traffic:

• Use videos on your site, and product pages, but also host those videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
• Create interesting and engaging photos that can be shared on social platforms, or put up/shared on Pinterest.
• Source content from your audience, including testimonials, stories, pictures of products in use and even customer videos to improve trust and social proof.
• Guest blog and then promote your content, using services likeQuuu.co and Notifier, to increase social reach and referral traffic.

As Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi says, "If we only talk about ourselves, we'll never reach customers."

4. Set up your analytics.

Make sure you've set up Google Analytics and that you're checking your metrics. Watch for referral traffic sources you can leverage and monitor to ascertain where traffic is landing. This shines a light on content you can repurpose to improve organic visibility and traffic.

Your demographic and cohort reports will also provide insight into your audience so you can better understand how to craft your content, understand what they're looking for and determine the type of searches they might be doing to find products like yours.

5. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly.

In 2015, Google released an update designed to give mobile-friendly sites a boost in search results. Those sites not optimized for mobile use saw small-to-significant drops in search visibility.

Having a mobile-friendly site doesn't just impact search visibility.Thirty percent of mobile shoppers abandon a transaction if the experience isn't optimized for mobile. So, update your mobile experience. Otherwise, you stand to lose a significant amount of revenue.

Related: SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

Google provides a testing tool to help you ensure your site has a mobile-friendly design.

Think You Have What It Takes to Make Our Top Company Cultures List?

Entrepreneur, along with CultureIQ, a culture engagement platform, is excited to announce our second-annual Top Company Cultures list, a ranking of high-performance cultures.

We are looking for companies that strive to be their very best by encouraging employees to take their career to the next level, fostering innovation, surpassing expectations and getting results.

The list defines a high-performance culture in relation to 10 qualities including innovation, communication, support and agility. (Here is afull list of all the qualities.)

Those companies that make our list not only receive validation for their standout culture but also many other benefits. The accolade can be used as a tool to recruit top talent, build brand awareness and boost morale. Plus, your business will also be part of the exclusiveEntrepreneur community. Your company will be associated with the largest entrepreneurial platform of its kind, and may have the opportunity to be featured in follow-up posts and contribute to the online publication.

Last year, the companies featured on our list spanned 23 states and represented an array of industries including publishing, healthcare and technology. The winners were Elite SEM, a digital marketing agency, for our large-company category; Bounce Exchange, a company that provides behavioral-automation software, for our midsize category and church-staffing company Vanderbloemen Search Group for our small-company category. Other notable companies included MailChimp, HubSpot and Anytime Fitness corporate.

"FlexJobs was so honored to be recognized as a Top Company Culture. It was a great boost to our team and total validation that our efforts are being received with as much intention and care in which we mean them, says FlexJob's Carol Cochran, the director of people and culture. "Most of our leadership team added the award to our signature lines in order to let everyone know how awesome our environment is!"

The submission is completely free, and all participating companies will receive a complimentary overview of how your company scores across the 10 culture qualities (Here is the full methodology). You also have the opportunity to upgrade with CultureIQ to receive your detailed survey results and employee comments. (This will not affect your scoring or ranking).

Requirements:

• Company must have at least 25 employees
• Company must have been founded before Jan. 1, 2015
• Company must be headquartered in the United States (If you are a global company, we will only survey your U.S. employees)
• Primary contact must use the company's email address to sign up
• *Franchises should only count and survey their corporate employees

The last day to apply for the list is Sept. 5 and the list will be published on Nov. 1.