Posts Tagged ‘marketing advice’

I had a post completely planned out for the day, talking about twitter and techniques for the more advanced users.

Then I read Brad Marley’s post about college degree’s. I wanted to write so many things, both agreeing and disagreeing with his point. I was frustrated because I couldn’t think of how to respond, and excited because I knew exactly what I wanted to say (I know, makes no sense, right?). Problem was, my answer was not going to fit in a comment box, nor did I want to place it in one (sorry Brad). I wanted to open it up further, I wanted to get heated, I wanted to be logical, I wanted to get creative…I wanted a lot of things (can you tell this issue is a hot button for me?). So, I finally decided the only way to properly address the topic was to write my own post about college degrees.

To start, Brad’s basic point is that while college can be good for those pursuing a field that needs a degree (doctor, lawyer, etc), college may not be the right choice for everyone. His conclusion is supported by his brother, who has a ‘can’t be taught, jene se qua, that can only be acquired by working in the field’ personality that got him a well paying job in a bad market without having a college degree.

*By the way, I’d recommend reading his entire college post though before continuing to my thoughts.*

So, here are my thoughts:

Brad is 100% right and 100% wrong.

He is right in the fact that you can not succeed as a doctor, lawyer, etc, without a degree. He is wrong in thinking college is not right for everyone. While you can succeed without college (many very successful people have), I believe that the point of college is not the little piece of paper you pay wayyy to much money for with your name on it. College can benefit anyone and everyone. I firmly believe that college is for building your character and helping you to mature and grow as an individual, and that is something that everyone needs.

I attended Cal State Long Beach and received a B.A. in Communications, and while that’s what my degree says, that isn’t what’s important. The communications classes I took, while it did improve my speaking, aren’t what makes me a hard worker and a talented writer. They are what helped make me confident enough to tackle being freelance. The experiences I had out of class were what made me stronger, more empathetic and understanding (sharing a room for 4 years will do that to a person). What it didn’t do was guarantee me a job when I graduated, but if I had expected it to, I really wouldn’t have learned anything.

Basically, I believe college is completely unnecessary to get a job, unless you need a technical/scientific degree, just like Brad states. But, I believe college is completely necessary for everyone for improving you as an individual. Getting the college degree just proves that you can stick something out and that you have dedication to achieve a goal.

Finally, I want to bring to attention that I didn’t say getting a 4 year degree at a certain type of college is necessary for everyone. I said college. “College” can mean receiving everything from an automotive technical degree (like my husband did), an AA degree (like my mother did) or a master’s degree (like my father did). College is whatever you make it…just make it yours.

What do you think (about either Brad or my thoughts)? Did you attend college? I would love to hear from someone who didn’t and is glad they didn’t or who did, and regrets it!

Social media is a fabulous tool, when it’s used right. But, because of the power and breadth of the social sphere, one mistake can be dangerous. First, lets define what I mean when I say ’social media’. Social Media encompasses blogging, twitter, facebook, linkedin, technorati, digg, etc… basically, any tool that you can use to connect and share with other indivisuals on the web.

Here are a few of the simple mistakes in social media to avoid:

1. Thinking if you delete something, it can’t be found. If you delete a facebook comment, a blog comment, a tweet, anything that is done in the online sphere, it can be found. Make sure that you wouldn’t be embarrassed about what you said if someone else found it.
2. Tweeting about everything that you do. Be yourself, be honest, but don’t tell everyone, everything. It is important to be a real person, but remember your boundaries or people will stop listening (thanks to @littlesunflowers.com)
3. Picking a name and not understanding the culture of the networking platform (from @HappyHourBoston). Your social networks should be easy to connect, but if you use your real name in some and not in others, you are losing out on that connection, not to mention search engine optimization.
4. Talking just for the sake of talking (whether on a blog, facebook, linkedin, etc). Sometimes it is okay to be silent and just read other peoples thoughts. You don’t need to comment on every blog post or write about every thought you have. Silence still is golden on the web sometimes.
5. Digging and Stumbling the same thing every one else has or worse, everything you see. Make sure that whatever you are giving credit deserves the credit. Or, find something that hasn’t been given credit yet and help them to get the credit they deserve. Pro’s like Brogan, Copyblogger and Kawasaki are going to get stumbled and dugg by everyone. Why not find someone who is less known and help promote their work?
6. A blog admin commenting on his own posts repeatedly as different users. he used his own email 4 all = same gravatar = fail (from @tonfue)
7. People not getting to know you, but always sending you messages about their benefits/charities. (@tanyaahedo’s thoughts) This is a big one of facebook, where if you are a member of certain groups, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get spammed. But it shouldn’t be that way! If people join your group, treat them right, don’t spam them daily or they won’t be there for long.
8. Some days? Logging on. (courtesy of @MikeNeumann)

Remember, social media is a tool, one with sharp edges. And although most of us think we could never make these mistakes (oh, no, not me!), they are worth being reminded of.

Social media: It’s completely safe until you use it wrong…

Have you fallen victim to these? Or have another one to mention?

1. Twouble with Twitterers: yeah, ok, so I may be this bad sometimes…

2. Redesigning the Stop sign – if a marketing team was in charge of designing a stop sign…definitely true for some of the large agencies.

3. Font Fight – for the Web Geek in all of us (first shown to me by Creative Whirlwind)

4. Hulu and Dennis Leary – bliggity blogs, facey spacey’s, tweety pages…yeah, I couldn’t help but laugh

5. Your printer is a brat – for all of us who have dealt with the evilness of a printer…

2 weeks ago (wow, does time go by fast, I thought it was just last week), I wrote about how we can change #followfriday to make it more beneficial for everyone involved. My idea had been to

only recommend one or two people each followfriday and include a little reason why. Not only does it make it easier for people do decide whether to follow them, but it is more special for those that I recommend.

Steve Woodruff took a common stand, but had gone a bit further and taken his recommendations off of twitter and to his blog. Last week, he suggested that we answer the question: “Which ONE of your Tweeple would you most want to go on a wine-testing with, & why?” I didn’t participate last week, as I was still testing out my ‘recommend less people with a reason for each’ on twitter. This week, he asked us to share with whom we would like to have an in-depth cultural conversation? This week, I decided to try it his way.

So, my #followfriday #ff2 (the new hashtag for longer followfriday recommendations) is @knealemann. He and I have conversed through twitter quite a few times, and his blog is one of my favorites to read. Unfortunately, due to the unreliability of email, the first time we tried to take our conversation off twitter, our lines got crossed and he missed a message from me, and thought that I wasn’t interested in continuing our conversation about business and life. The email thing leads me to a whole other story, but we’ll save that for another time. Anyway, Kneale is from Canada, and while not too far from California, the culture is definitely different, and one I have never experienced. I would be interested to see what the difference in business practices are – from email etiquette and office styles to commercials and marketing tactics. I would love to hear how and why he started his blog – what he has learned about it – and if the blogging groups are as prolific there as they are here. In reality, I would just love to chat with him, since after reading his work and his tweets, I think we would have a great conversation. Still not convinced he needs to be added to your twitter followers? He’s also pretty funny!

Who is your #followfriday #ff2 recommendation?

It’s the final day of the problogger challenge. Whew! No more writing after this right? Wrong. That’s why his final task is entitled the next steps for your blog. Now is when I have to make sure that I maintain stamina and keep posting as often as I have been, and with the quality (or better) that I have been.

I have tried to maintain a blog calendar in the past, but I always failed. I either forgot I had it (I tried google calendar and hated it), or didn’t want to write what I had planned and just scrapped the whole calendar. This time, I’m integrating it into my outlook calendar. Hopefully that will help me keep on track, as I will see it all day, and can add/change/edit more easily. The second thing I am doing is I am sharing my calendar with you. Why? Because it puts the pressure on me to make sure I do the post, because I already said I would. It is much easier not to do something if no one knows you were supposed to. If you tell everyone what you’re doing, then don’t, it is not only a let down for you, but you let down others as well.

So here you go, my calendar for the month of May:

I kept it small so it wouldn’t ruin the surprise with the actual topics of the post, but you could still see that I did it. If you’re like me and don’t actually like surprises and want a sneak peek, just click to enlarge the calendar. Oh, and just in case you’re wondering…yes, the calendar may change (in fact it probably will as time goes on). That’s what makes it such an awesome tool!

Do you have a blog calendar? What do you do to keep yourself organized?

With only 2 days left of the Problogger challenge, it is time to analyze the traffic to my blog. If you have never looked at analysis statistics and want to know what to look for, he gives you 17 different metrics to look at.

Analysis of my stats is one of the reasons I love wordpress – there are great plugins that make it so much easier! I use both google analytics and statpress reloaded plugins to monitor visitors, feeds, posts, etc. Why do I use both? They both serve different purposes.

If I just want to take a basic look at my stats, statpress allows me to do so without leaving my dashboard. It gives me weekly and monthly visit numbers and compares them to the prior week and month. It gives me the top visited pages, the number of visitors vs pages viewed and where they came from. I can also see prominent search terms that get people to my site and which search engines and browsers they use. Of course I can also see what sites refer people to my blog (twitter is #1, no surprise).

For a more in-depth analysis, where I can customize the comparisons, check on what links inside of a post have been clicked or which post is most popluar via rss feed, I need google analytics. It can show me seasonal trends, referral sources from months back, and I can transfer all the data into a spreadsheet. Lastly, it will also show me the time spent on my site – what pages they were on the longest and what pages they left from most often. This allows you to check those pages and see of there is a way to keep people there longer.  Of course, all of this is in addition to the stuff that statpress can do. The upside to google is that I can get way more data than statpress gives me. The downside? I have to go to google analytics’ site to see the data.

Basically, I use statpress on a daily basis, to watch for changes and trends. I use google analytics about once a week to delve indepth and see what is really going on with the traffic on my blog.

What do you use to track your stats? If you don’t track your stats, why not?

Problogger is worried about passive readers. I was too, so I asked all my readers to de-lurk. A lot of them did But problogger says de-lurking isn’t enough, your readers need to act and they must be called into action by you (okay, by me, but you get what I mean).

For his challenge today, he offers a solid list of ways to get readers to act, including asking them to donate to a charity, purchasing a product you support, writing a comment (de-lurking post covered that!), hiring you for services or even asking readers to visit someone elses blog.

So I had to think about it. I get once chance – one shot to get you to listen and ask for you to do something. But what is it that I want you to do? Well, I could use it selfishly and ask you to donate to my goal to get to BlogWorld 2009 (it’s that green widget below recommended blogs) or to ask that you send out a tweet, recommending my work to someone you know (or hiring me yourself). But I trust my readers and know that if you could help, you would be (or at least I want to believe that so I will!).

So, I decided to use my ‘ask for action’ in a way that would benefit someone else (hopefully a lot of someone elses).

Here is your call to action:

Post a link in your comment to a blog or twitter profile of someone that you respect and enjoy reading, but that doesn’t have a lot of traffic/recognition. Tell us a bit about them, and why they deserve us to visit them. Then, visit at least 1 other commenter’s recommended person.

Lights! Camera! ACTION!

Today, Problogger challenged us to write a post that solves a problem for our readers. He provides 7 ways to identify the problems that need solving:

1. Solve Your Own Problems: Well now, if I could do that one, life would be much easier ! But, I have written a few posts that are attempts at solving a few of my problems. The most recent was what do do when life changes drastically, and the best way to approach the situation.

2. Look for Questions in Search Referrals: Search referrals are the words that most often bring visitors to your site. This can be analyzed using a tool like google analytics, or my favorite, wordpress statpress. It’s like analytics without having to go anywhere other than your own wordpress dashboard. My top search terms? Creative tools, elevator pitch & creativity in business. I think I covered all of those in my last few posts…like the right tools to make you more creative.

3. Analyze Internal Searches: I don’t use a tool to cover internal searches, but here is what problogger says about them, “Another related way to find information on what your current readers problems and needs are is to watch what they search for when they are on your blog. This will show you what those arriving on your blog are still searching for once they’ve arrived. This is great because it shows you questions that they’re asking that you’ve often not already written about. There are a few tools that show you internal search keywords. One I’ve is used is Lijit.”

4. Ask Readers for Questions: Sometimes a question isn’t what you think. When I first read this, I couldn’t think of a post that I had written like that – then I remembered! I asked all my readers to de-lurk. Although it wasn’t a question they needed to answer, it was a task that they needed to do (no surprise, it got the most comments this month so far!)

5. Look for Problems on other Sites: Many of the blogs I read had posts about some thing that went wrong in their life/business/cooking, etc. It stimulated me to think about what happens when things fail – and to put together a list of the best way to deal with failure.

6. Use Social Media to Gather Questions: I’d rather use social media to gather pictures! It not only gave me great motivation and inspiration, but it was really fun to see what everyone else really likes!

7. Ask ‘real life’ Friends and Family: Most of my real life friends don’t understand my whole blogging thing – they support it but just don’t get it. But I have had a few real life conversations that helped create a few posts.

Finally – I decided to highlight one post, from when I first started blogging, that I still feel had one of the best messages I have ever written: Creating your own Everest. Where I am in my life now, it just has so much more meaning…

Hopefully, one of these posts with solve a problem you have been having – or help stimulate a creative idea for yourself!

Blogging is not about writing, it is about conversation, it is about knowledge, and about listening. Problogger points out that many bloggers forget to take a step away from their wordpress dashboard to see what is going on around them. The solution? Set up alerts to monitor what is going on in your niche! My challenge for day 10 of the Problogger’s 31D2BBB is to set up those alerts and start monitoring what is going on.

The suggestion from problogger is to monitor 2 different types of things:

1. Industry Words – these are words relevant to your blog’s niche. For example if you blog about the wedding industry you might like to monitor words like ‘wedding dress’. If you blog about Britney Spears – you’ll want to be watching for any use of her name. The key is to find keywords that highlight when stories are breaking about your industry but ones that don’t overwhelm you with results.
2. Vanity Alerts – these are keywords that are specifically relevant to you. They include your personal name, your blog’s name, company name, brand names and even URLs.

He suggests using Google Alerts, Technorati Alerts and Twitter.

A couple weeks ago, I set up a google alert for my name first recommended by Ari Herzog’s post*. It has helped me to see when people are talking about me, linking to me and using my work. I have definitely learned a lot just from that alert. I am now going to go back into google and set up some alerts for creative writing, blogging and fashion (my newest project), and creative marketing ideas. Currently, I also use tweetdeck to monitor certain things in the twittersphere – I have permanent searches running for #tworco (twitter orange county group), blog design and freelance writer (for job opportunities). I think I will leave twitter alone as it is. Lastly I am going to head to technorati and check out its monitoring system and see what I can add there. I suggest that if you haven’t get started monitoring things that interest you and will feed your creative channels. It will help with blog topics, networking and the knowledge of the new.

What alerts are you setting up and why? If you aren’t, why not? (it’s okay to disagree!)

*I am really going to have to start charging Ari for all the times I mention him…either that or finally meet him in person!

No one cares about your stupid product as much as you. It’s about them feeling badass when they use it. – Chris Brogan at the SoCal Action Meetup

So then – how do you market your product without shoving it at people? Don’t I wish I had the answer!

From what I know from being a consumer, and my experience with marketing, the best way to market a product is by giving people the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) and then letting them sell themselves on it. But, that can still be shoving your product down their throat if it’s not done tactfully and honestly. So back into the conundrum of marketing without marketing we go…but this time I am bringing along backup. In my arsenal (also known as my rss feeds) I found some great articles with advice on marketing without marketing:

Roy H. Williams of Wizard ads has a great post of ‘Never’s’ for advertising…

Oliver Blanchard (The BrandBuilder) covers a few pointers for account exec’s or “sales guys”…

Mary Schmidt, marketing troubleshooter, covers the difference between “M”arketing and “m”arketing…

Ari Herzog gives us 20 advertising and marketing strategies…

Chris Brogan reminds us to be careful what message we send…

Steve Woodruff (StickyFigure) analyzes Burger King’s  ‘daring’ marketing…

Adrianne Machina, CVO of Tornado Marketing, reminds us about consistency in marketing…

and lastly, one from my own arsenal, I ask you to question who your marketing is really for…

So, now that you have a bit of ammo of your own, do you think you can try marketing without marketing? Am I missing a great non-marketing article? Feel free to share it!