Recently I celebrated with a few other contractors my first official year of being a freelance digital marketer. It’s been over a year and I’ve seen some crazy things happen. The largest one being that I intended to be a freelancer, and now I’m running a virtual digital agency. (Connex pays/represents 5 contractors, I happen to be the salesman, account manager and one of the contractors :)
I try to live my life with no regrets, and I do not regret leaving the best job I’ve ever had, however the road, the journey this first year has not proved to be easy. I’ve made many mistakes and my failures have become brighter, louder and more annoying to me.
So if you want some background on me quitting my job last year or the second company I started in the past year check those posts out, or the inspiration for this post, but if you want to know a fraction of the lessons I’ve learned in my first year read on.
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Yesterday Facebook announced some major changes to Facebook Pages. A Quick hit list of some of the things that changed:
- Page layouts now appear like the new profile layouts (pictures at top, “tabs” in the left column under pic)
- Admins can be publicly displayed
- Page Admins can comment on public users timeline and other pages’ walls
- Lighbox for Picture viewing
- FBML is going away March 11. Welcome iFrames
This post is aimed at the non developer (or dare I say the web developer not familiar with developing on Facebook) in an effort to give the bare minimum of what is needed to get your first custom “tab” via iframe deployed.
How many companies does it take to make a serial entrepreneur?
In my last post I introduced the idea of a bulk club buying software, my partner and I took that idea to Startup Weekend West Michigan. A team of 13 was formed and viola we were off to the races. 50 hours (24 programming hours) later and we had a functioning website, brand, name, and realization of market viability.
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reCAPTCHA was my CAPTCHA of choice, and easy to implement in php. However a new captcha for marketers has arrived and I think I’m in love.
Either that or I’m about to make you all hate me. We’ll see :) Continue reading »
You did what?
Yup, I quit the best job I’ve ever had. For one of the best agencies in Grand Rapids. My last day as an official employee of ddm will be October 15, next Friday. And no I did not quit with a whiteboard and a mass email like Jenny ;)
Why did you quit?
I have heard a lot of people give lip service to having their family as a priority. I have been watching myself fall into the same trap,
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This is a tip or a technique I use everyday to monitor keywords about me and my clients. There are tools which do actual sentiment analysis and all kinds of other listening, but I just want to be reminded to read the conversations.
I also like to keep my inbox small. So I trick myself and have content by keywords delivered to my inbox, that way I’m forced to read it or make a conscious effort to ignore it. Not signing into a listening application can cause problems… unless it delivers emails of conversations.
This technique will focus on listening to twitter, however there are plenty of RSS feeds out there to use this method of “subscribing”
Gathering your RSS Feed
Simply head over to twitter search and type in a query, I’ll use “elephants” as mine… however I recommend you visit the Advanced Search page to develop a better query like “elephants -peanuts -from:Elleph” This will give you this page as a result http://search.twitter.com/search?q=elephants (or http://search.twitter.com/search?q=elephants+-peanuts+-from:Elleph) And in reality you can use these URLs in most RSS to Email tools, however I recommend going one step further and locating the actual RSS feed.
In the Twitter Search Results page you should see a link saying “Feed for this query” (as seen in the image below) right click on this link and choose copy link address or link URL. This is the actual RSS feed url that we’ll use in the next step.
Finding an RSS to Email tool
There are a few options, and some have come and gone over the years, so I’ll recommend two searches, and two currently functioning tools. First off, searches:
One of the current tools I use shows up in spot number one for both of those searches… Feed my Inbox. The next sections will explain what to do with each of these tools
Feed My Inbox
Arguably the best tool out there for taking an RSS feed and dumping the results to email, Feed my Inbox makes it quite simple, when you arrive it asks for a feed url (which we got from step one) and your email address, that’s all it needs to start emailing you the tweets you care about. (or blog postings youtube videos etc). You can also login to customize more settings, but the basics are here for you.
Notify.me
Taking the RSS to inbox one step further Notify.me allows you to have it send an SMS, IM or Email. Which is very handy for the more important keywords you want to pay attention to. Once signed in you can turn on and off notifications with a simple click and add feeds by pasting the URL (from above) to add new feeds.
Simple
These are two tools, and one technique that I use on a daily basis to keep me informed of conversations around my keywords… this is how I can appear to be online all day long while actually enjoying a life offline.
Remember, Automate the simple stuff, do the conversations and relationship manually.
