Tag Archives: online advertising

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Why You Should Freelance, Even When You Have A Job

It’s the age old entrepreneur’s dilemma: “I have a job, but I also want to be my own boss/found a company/pursue my passion. Of course, I also don’t know that I can give up the security of a full time job in order to pursue my dreams, what do I do?”

This question is posted in the subreddit for startups probably every single week, and many more times across forums and blogs dedicated to internet marketing and entrepreneurship. Everyone wants a magic answer, or the nudge they need to tell their boss where he or she can stick it, as they strike out on their own, destined for great things. The truth, however, is something that no one really wants to hear: you should do both.

At least in the beginning, the best balance is to sacrifice other areas of your life to pursue your self-employment goals while at the same remaining secure in your employment. Believe it or not, the reasoning for this extends beyond the financial. Often, one of the things people realize when they start pursuing both options at once, is that there is amazing potential for the cross pollination of skills between both pursuits. Skillsets you develop when working on your own and with more freedom and choice of tasks may teach your new skills that boost your on the job results. Likewise, your current role will likely offer you skills and expertise that you can carry over to your freelance and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Additionally, many people can use this lifestyle as a stress test to figure out how bad they want to live the life of an entrepreneur. The truth is, those that are successful in this lifestyle often work far more hours per day than those who work a 40 or 50 hour per week job. When you continue regular employment and have to come home, tired, and still pour in several hours to your own business, you’ll start to get an idea of how badly you want it. If you find yourself unable to rally from 6pm to 11pm every night, you might be getting an indicator that quitting your job to pursue what you thought was your goal could have been a huge mistake in the first place.

Now, there are exceptions to this rule, just as there will always be people who are exceptions to any mantra or rule, written or unwritten, that will ever exist. That said, many people seem to not be able self-audit and realize that it is the exception, not the norm, that someone can jump straight into their entrepreneurial pursuit, throw caution to the wind, and come out on top. Ninety percent or more of startups fail, and your own personal brand, be it for freelance, affiliate marketing, or otherwise, falls into this category.

Of course, you may just be the exception that proves this entire sentiment to be invalid in your life, so don’t take anyone else’s word for it, right?

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The ‘Weird’ Startup Investment Game You Need To Stop Playing

In the United States, we elect a president every 4 years. One candidate can serve two terms, for a maximum total of 8 years in office. Now, around two-three years through any given president’s first term, a common trend prevails: Legislative agendas generally become less ambitious, previously polarizing views are swapped out for those that are more middle of the road, and messages which were previously more laden with detail and precise figures degrade once again into campaign-esque rhetoric.

What the heck is happening? In short, another election cycle will soon be upon these presidents, and they need to start thinking more about getting re-elected than continuing to push through any work their currently tied up in.

The exact same phenomenon happens with startup founders, except that their term is a burn rate runway, and their election campaign is a quest for further financing. If you find yourself heading up a grand idea, and it turns into a company, the way of business these days is, ironically, not very business-like at all. In fact, instead of focusing on profit margins and costs of operation, most founders are focused on obscure and multi-measurable metrics like ‘growth’ and the like, aimed at figuring out they can make the numbers, any numbers, impressive enough to secure another round of funding.

If you find yourself in this exact scenario with a company that you’re heading up, it’s important that you know that, for the rainmakers who founded the biggest, most disruptive companies in the world, these thoughts never even crossed their mind. Indeed, there has recently been a reversal, in which instead of achieving something great in order to secure wealth, people are working on the premise of securing wealth in order to achieve something great. Forgive the cliché, but did Zuckerberg start his ‘The Facebook’ website in his dorm room in hopes of securing millions of dollars from Sequoia Capital? Hell no!

Founders these days who want to not find themselves with a valueless company in three years’ time, need to get comfortable with the idea that they are still running a business, they still need to act and make decisions based on the premise that if they are not profitable very, very soon, they’re out. Most startups fail. Of those that don’t fail, the vast majority will be steady, sustainable businesses that can catapult their founders into the upper middleclass, but they won’t be Facebook, they won’t be Snapchat. And they won’t be a household name. And that’s OK.

The narrative that everyone has to be a tech founder that turns the market upside down is overhyped and, ironically, not the path to its own realization for most tech world heroes. Instead, the most common path to greatness is a stellar work ethic, a mental resilience to discouragement, and a passion and drive that’s the stuff of legends. So the next time you see that some Silicon Valley hotshot just closed a $200 million C-series, just remember that there is more than one path to greatness.

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How To Create Content So Good It Goes Viral

Content marketing is nothing new, and while it’s going to evolve into new formats and platforms throughout 2016, as it always does, but it’s definitely not going anywhere. If anything, more and more people will jump on board, especially as more traditional ad formats continue to fall short or become exorbitantly expensive.

People don’t like to be sold to, and the techniques, which used to be secrets within advertising circles are now common knowledge, meaning that most people are savvy to ad techniques and ignore them all but completely. That said, just ‘doing’ content marketing is not going to get you very far. In fact, the number of blogs out there with tens or even hundreds of posts but which still have zero engagement is astonishing. The reason for this is that people love to jump on the bandwagon of content marketing, but very few take the time to learn how to do it well. If you want to know how people get hundreds of shares on their blog posts and drive real traffic, well, look no further:

1) Do it better than anyone else has

There’s a technique in content marketing coined by Brian Dean called the Skyscraper Technique. The idea is to find a topic someone else has written a good article on and which has been shared around a lot, and then write something even better. Like, really dig into it. If they wrote 7 tips on how to market on Instagram, you article has 52. The main reason people don’t take this approach is that they are lazy, or they don’t feel they have the time, but here’s a secret: Creating 14 daily blog posts will lose out to one blog post that took 14 days to create, every time. It’s simply a matter of being honest about what is good enough to be shared. If it doesn’t blow you away, it’s not going to do it to anyone else, either.

2) Promote even more than you write

Once you got an epic piece of content, your job is far from over. In fact, many people recommend spending as much as two times as much time on the sharing and promoting of your blog post than you do on actually writing it. All of a sudden, you’re only writing one blog post per month, but it’s performing better and getting you more traffic than if you’d written several fire-and-forget pieces. People don’t just find great content, especially when you’re starting out, so you have to do everything you can to put it in front of their face.

3) Reach out to those who care (and who matter)

Once you’ve got your blog post out in the world, get a hold of experts and those who have a following and who might be interested, and ask if they might be willing to share with their social channels. Now, here’s the kicker: Make sure there’s something in it for them. Working with influencers in your market is about leverage, so if that means you have to offer some free services or skillsets in exchange for a tweet, so be it.

All of this is to say that if you want to have content that performs better than average, you’ve got to be willing to put in better than average time and effort… and that’s just true of anything, isn’t it?

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4 Email Productivity Tips

Email is a major time sink. We’re talking multiple hours per day for many busy individuals, and as much as half their workdays can be spent on email for those among us with high rates of communication with clients, contacts, and colleagues.

What’s worse, people often feel like they’re being way more productive than they actually are as well when they’re working out of their inboxes. Sure, you might be wheeling and dealing on your keyboard, but the effective hours of solid work achieved when constantly checking email starts to get diminished quickly.

And even still worse than that is the fact that it’s a necessity. Regardless of where you are or what you do, email is a near universally expected communication tool and those you work with will expect you to consistently check and respond to any incoming messages.

So, how can you make your email time more productive and stop it from leaking into your day? Here are a few tips for getting started:

1) Because email is not a live messenger (though some people use it like one!), it is OK if responses are generally put off a few hours. For this reason, email productivity experts often recommend that you set 3 times throughout the day to check your email, and then stick to those times, never checking in between.

2) During your designated email check-in times, respond to every message you’ve received, right when you read it. Often, we read something, think “that’s going to take a bit to fully address!”, and then mentally note that we’ll get back to it later when we have more time. However, this forces you to read such emails twice instead of one time, and the procrastinating generally serves no helpful purpose. When you read an email, decide if it requires a response. If the answer is yes, write it then, on the spot.

3) Use shortcuts. Many email productivity add-ons (Boomerang is a popular one right now, by the way), allow you to setup shortcuts that will automatically fill in words or sentences when you begin typing a certain key sequence. If you have an opening greeting you always use, or other information that doesn’t make sense to save as a standard email signature, you can use these shortcuts to save you time. Got a long company name you have to type out constantly? Set a shortcut so that you can trigger it by just hitting two letters in a row that normally wouldn’t follow each other. You get the idea.

4) Turn off push notifications. Of course, we receive email on much more than just our PC’s these days, and the constant buzzing of a phone or dinging of an iPad can pull you out of what you’re working on and cause you to lose focus and time, even if you just check your lock screen to see who or what it was. Instead, put these items in do not disturb mode or at least turn off email client notifications when you’re in between your designated email checking times.

Stick to these, and you’ll be well on your way to shaving off minutes or even hours from your workday!

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How To Create Content So Good It Goes Viral

Content marketing is nothing new, and while it's going to evolve into new formats and platforms throughout 2016, as it always does, but it's definitely not going anywhere. If anything, more and more people will jump on board, especially as more traditional ad formats continue to fall short or become exorbitantly expensive.

People don't like to be sold to, and the techniques, which used to be secrets within advertising circles are now common knowledge, meaning that most people are savvy to ad techniques and ignore them all but completely. That said, just 'doing' content marketing is not going to get you very far. In fact, the number of blogs out there with tens or even hundreds of posts but which still have zero engagement is astonishing. The reason for this is that people love to jump on the bandwagon of content marketing, but very few take the time to learn how to do it well. If you want to know how people get hundreds of shares on their blog posts and drive real traffic, well, look no further:

1) Do it better than anyone else has

There's a technique in content marketing coined by Brian Dean called the Skyscraper Technique. The idea is to find a topic someone else has written a good article on and which has been shared around a lot, and then write something even better. Like, really dig into it. If they wrote 7 tips on how to market on Instagram, you article has 52. The main reason people don't take this approach is that they are lazy, or they don't feel they have the time, but here's a secret: Creating 14 daily blog posts will lose out to one blog post that took 14 days to create, every time. It's simply a matter of being honest about what is good enough to be shared. If it doesn't blow you away, it's not going to do it to anyone else, either.

2) Promote even more than you write

Once you got an epic piece of content, your job is far from over. In fact, many people recommend spending as much as two times as much time on the sharing and promoting of your blog post than you do on actually writing it. All of a sudden, you're only writing one blog post per month, but it's performing better and getting you more traffic than if you'd written several fire-and-forget pieces. People don't just find great content, especially when you're starting out, so you have to do everything you can to put it in front of their face.

3) Reach out to those who care (and who matter)

Once you've got your blog post out in the world, get a hold of experts and those who have a following and who might be interested, and ask if they might be willing to share with their social channels. Now, here's the kicker: Make sure there's something in it for them. Working with influencers in your market is about leverage, so if that means you have to offer some free services or skillsets in exchange for a tweet, so be it.

All of this is to say that if you want to have content that performs better than average, you've got to be willing to put in better than average time and effort and that's just true of anything, isn't it?
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Snapchat For Business – Coming To The Mainstream

A year ago, or even six months ago, Snapchat was just a tiny blip on the radar of most marketers and entreprenerus. In fact, even that might be generous; many people who weren’t in Snapchat’s hyper-engaged teen and young adult demographic may not have even heard of the platform. If you aren’t even sure what Snapchat is yourself still, now’s the day to learn.

At its core, Snapchat is a mico-messaging app in which users can send photos, videos, or text notes to each other, view them for a set number of seconds, and then those messages self-destruct and are deleted.

Unsurprisingly, the app has been largely written off by older generations as a sorry excuse for a ‘sexting’ app. Those in the know, however, have caught on to the fact that Snapchat content is extremely easy to consume for users, and both the creation and the consumption of content is quick.

People like quick. Ironically, the fact that each individual message or publication can be consumed so quickly means that many young users use the app for hours on end (“I’ll just check one more message,” “I’ll just watch one more video,” etc. and the time flies by).

The best businesses are using Snapchat as the antithesis to Youtube, or Facebook, or their business properties where posts and content are more deliberate, planned, and highly edited and targeted. On Snapchat, you can literally record a video message by holding down your thumb for six seconds – there are no fancy editing tools.

This makes Snapchat the perfect platform for letting your customers and followers in on something “behind the scenes,” which is exactly what your competitors are doing. Now more than ever, consumers expect brands to be an extension of the people running them, and getting to know those people (or at least feeling like they have) can go a long way toward building brand trust and loyalty.

Even with its off-the-cuff nature, you still should put some planning into your Snapchat strategy. First, survey your customers and find out what they want to see – this is, of course, the most direct route to content that is going to connect with them.

Often times, inside hints and tricks, or just videos from around the factory/office, which might hint at company developments or new offerings that won’t be published for some time, can help your customers feel like they’re getting something exclusive. People like exclusive.

Aim to be consistent above anything else. Uploading a Snap every few hours and adding it to your ‘story’ will mean that people see you as someone who will regularly give them something interesting to look at. If you can add 3-6 Snaps to your Snapchat story per day, you’ll be on your way to consistency, at which point you can fine-tune the content down the road.

Snapchat gives you a simple tool to see how many views your updates receive as well, so you can gauge if your followers are taking the time out of their busy days to listen to what you have to say.

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Avoid False Guru Status to Boost Credibility

Want to know what one of the fastest ways to kill your credibility is? To pretend to have it when you don’t.

It’s an unfortunate reality, but the landscape of online marketing has been invaded over the past decade by those claiming to be experts in things that they, to put it politely, aren’t. The ‘fake it ’til you make it’ bravado approach was actually wildly effective for a number of years, but the reality now is one in which potential customers are much more skeptical.

Not only are they wary of falling victim to people pretending to be something that they aren’t, they’re also realizing that much of the information that false gurus put behind a paywall is available free elsewhere on the web (indeed, the expertise of fakers doesn’t allow them to create much exclusivity based on genuine, helpful content that no one else is providing).

Enter: The transparency trend. Believe it or not, there are some people out there who are up and coming and have been killing it with their audiences even though they haven’t done a whole lot yet. Instead of pretending they’ve executed in one market or another before they really have, these players are instead simply sharing exactly what they’re going through at the time to their audiences. In a way, this approach levels the playing field and makes communications more genuine.

Over the past half decade, there has been an enormous shift from consumers wanting to be told what to do by brands, or at least being convinced that’s what they want, and their realizing that they can lead the discussion more than just have it fed to them. As a result, personal communications win, and honesty is an often sought but less often delivered trait when people go looking to something from someone else online.

For an example of the effectiveness of this approach, the Groove blog, the blog of a small remotely managed helpdesk software, has openly admitted that the number one driver of sales and awareness for their product has been their blog; the Groove blog epitomized transparency.

The company began under the premise of writing out everything they do to try and reach $500,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Ultimately, they’re a couple of years into their project, haven’t yet breached even half of their goal, and yet their posts are wildly popular. Why is this? Because the folks at Groove simply write about what they’ve done and a lesson they’ve learned each week, good or bad, success or failure.

They’re not pretending they have the software as a service game figured out, their not padding the numbers (or downright falsifying them), and they’re certainly not renting expensive cars for the day in order to take pictures with them in front of a mansion they don’t own – I’m looking at you, mid 2000’s internet marketing ‘gurus’.

So keep it honest, keep it open, and you might be surprised to find out that you actually end up making more with, well, less.

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How To Use “Help A Reporter Out” For Your Blog Or Brand

Ever heard of popular PR and journalism tool “Help A Reporter Out”? If you’re not acquainted but you have a brand or expertise to market, this quickstart guide will give you the basics.

At its core, Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, is a platform to help connect journalists with sources. Users can register as either sources or media outlets – or both. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be talking about using it as a source.

As a source, you’ll be able to sign up to HARO’s emails, which are sent out multiple times per day and include upwards of 100 stories that media outlets, from international news sites down to niche blogs, are working on.

The descriptions will call for specific experts or those with certain experiences to weigh in and share their advice, stories, and/or experiences. Clicking the reply link within HARO’s email will open up a new message window that, upon completion, will be sent off to the media outlet.

Responding to a call for sources is basically a pitch in which you can sell your brand’s story to someone who will publish a story about it. For example, you might find someone looking for B2B marketing experts for an interview. If you know about B2B products and write a great pitch to an outlet, they may publish your advice in their final piece. If this happens on a larger outlet, you can score some major exposure and credibility by being featured.

The great thing is that calls to action come in a number of categories, so even if you’re outside of the business and tech circles, there will be relevant lifestyle, fitness, travel, etc. prompts that you can respond to. You might not find anything in every email blast, but it’s easy to respond to a few relevant prompts per week.

A couple of tips:

1. Always be sure to deliver value in your pitch, and explain why the outlet’s readers are going to learn something from you. Never mention wanting your own exposure, instead focus on giving the journalist or outlet the best story and more useful information possible.

2. If a publication is listed as anonymous, try and feel out some details about the project in your first email to them to assess the value of being featured. That said, don’t be afraid of being featured in smaller projects, because these outlets are probably going to hustle to promote and squeeze every readership they can out of anything they publish.

The results of having your brand featured in a larger piece can be a huge boon for a small boon, and also help build credibility in your niche, as your input on a topic has now been published. Consistency is key with HARO; respond to every prompt that seems like a good fit, and eventually you’ll match up with someone who needs exactly what you have to offer.

Now get to pitching, good luck!

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Using “Help A Reporter Out” To Find Experts

Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, is a PR and journalism platform. Journalists or users registered as media outlets can submit calls for sources for their story ideas, and experts and brands can pick and choose to email various prompts via an email newsletter that HARO sends out several times per day.

The platform is a powerful tool for journalists, but often ignored is its enormous potential for up and coming bloggers and content producers. For example, instead of faking your expertise on a topic and risking losing credibility, you can submit a call for sources to HARO’s newsletter and have external experts weigh in with their advice and stories.

Not only can you use this to write engaging profiles of one particular brand, you can also aggregate many responses to create a large, varied, content-rich posts that offer a range of perspectives and information that would be hard to replicate with your own knowledge or independent research.

If that’s not enough of a reason to convince you to reach out to sources via HARO for your next post, consider this: Recruiting just one source to be part of your story doubles your promotion team. Get another source involved? Boom, your promotional force just went up again.

Most of the time, anyone reaching out to be featured in a story will be looking for exposure, which means they will also be happy to tweet, share, and shout out about your post once it goes live and you send them a follow-up email with a link to it.

Sounds pretty great, right?

To get started, you’ll need to make an account on HARO and register as a media outlet. At this point, you’ll be able to submit a request for sources through their online form. In this form, you’ll be able to put your contact information, along with a title and description of the project, where you can list out any special requirements, exclusions of what types of pitches you do not want, etc. Be detailed here, so that you can pre-filter the responses you receive and not have to worry about being flooded with irrelevant information.

At the same time, leave your request open and general enough that people won’t be afraid to get ahold of you if they think they can offer an interesting twist on your topic – you never know what great story you might get the exclusive scoop on.

Above, be polite to those you interact with, and always follow up with requests. If you are known to ignore incoming pitches, people might start to ignore your requests when they see them in the HARO newsletter email, effectively shutting you out of sources who may not have been right for one post, but have something great to offer down the road.

When following up with offers that you are interested in using, make sure you’re clear in your expectations and ask for any clarifications or details that may have been left out of someone’s original pitch. Other than that, enjoy your newfound blogging resource!

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Why You Should Break Away From Title Conventions In 2016

How many times have you read a lame “5 Ways to Improve Your Bottom Line!” title, clicked through, and the been disappointed to find the same old generic, rehashed information on the other side?

If you roll your eyes whenever these titles come up in your Facebook feed or from some marketer’s Twitter account, you’re not alone. Unfortunately for marketers looking to take the easy way out, millions of other people are feeling the same way and are becoming immune to the type of clickbait titles that have dominated marketing communications for way too long now.

In the near future (actually, now), no one is going to be clicking on cheesy, cringe-worthy headlines that mask lackluster, uninspired content. Instead, you should be working to standout with your titles in other ways to help draw people in without misleading them. Of course, step one is to make sure your content is up to par; no great title or thumbnail image can lead to the conversions you’re after if you don’t have great words waiting for readers on the other side. Be valuable, be useful.

Next, consider tossing out additional hyped up adjectives and adverbs for statistics. Many of the most successful content marketing triumphs to pop up in 2015 were case study types which could boast a specific change in a variable in their title.

For example, the popular Groove blog wrote an article with a title along the lines of “How we raised our traffic by 12,267% with zero advertising.” It’s just about as enticing as a marketing blog post title could possibly be because it gives you an exact statistic that you can hold the author to.

By the way, that blog post really is excellent and outlines a bunch of free traffic generation methods that the company used to, no kidding, give an insane multiple-thousand percent increase to their traffic numbers in an impressive amount of time.

You should consider also making your titles platform specific. For example, WordPress has plugins which allow you to display different title and description tags for certain social networks. For example, if you know that Facebook shows only the first 70 characters of a link title and LinkedIn shows 110, you can create custom titles that fit those exact lengths and make the most of you allotted characters on each platform.

Titles which are native (made for) a platform will without a doubt perform better in terms of clickthrough and reader interest. Futhermore, platform specific titles can help you create clever synergies between the titles and preview images shown on each network, which can go a long way toward making your homegrown marketing efforts look more professional and thought out – and that’s never a bad thing!

Basically, titles still need to deliver clickthroughs and intrigue readers, but the way in which they accomplish these goals is going to need to be more genuine and helpful going forward. Working together to eliminate crappy content and titling is just one way to make audiences less skeptical of content marketing, which makes things easier on the rest of us, doesn’t it?