"How Brands Grow" By Byron Sharp

Most of "How Brands Grow" by Byron Sharp. was aimed at a slightly different type of company than mine but there was still a few nuggets. And the Seven Simple Rules For Marketing presented in Chapter 12 were worth the price of admission.

You can see them in the photo but basically:

1) Reach
2) Be Easy To Buy
3) Get Noticed
4) Refresh and Build Memory Structures
5) Create and Use Distinctive Brand Assets
6) Be Consistent, yet Fresh
7) Stay Competitive, don't give a reason not to buy

I will certainly be working through this list.

The 'rules' are expanded in the book with more detail and they build on information presented in earlier chapters. This list saved the book from being average with a few notes and being sent to the charity shop and is now in the marketing section in my bookcase and I will revisit and work through the book again.

I do not do all of the above.

In practical terms, my immediate interpretation is:

1. effective tagging on social media posts, syndication of content, SEO, create more content
2. online and in normal places e.g. make sure you are listed on Amazon
3. create content where your customers read, create enough content that it does not get lost in the noise
4. Create strategic content, create tactical content that refers to the strategic hooks
5. I need to use my brand assets better
6. Keep track of your core messages
7. Keep copy up to date to refer to the most up to date versions of tools and language versions. Treat pre-sales questions as failure demand and address them in the copy.

I do not yet do all of the above.

Do you?

A post shared by Software Testing Tips & Videos (@eviltester) on Apr 23, 2017 at 8:31am PDT

For social media you feed the buffer

For most of my work life I have learned to concentrate on:

• single piece flow
• release it when done

With social media I'm having to learn a new set of strategies.

• batch creation
• single piece flow editing
• buffered release cycles
• revisit to repurpose

Marketing using Instagram videos with Captions

I have been creating daily instagram videos and I’ve started to be concerned that many people will not watch them because you have to have sound and often we don’t have then when looking at instagram.

A few recent Gary Vaynerchuck instagram videos had captions on them and I found myself watching the video and following along by reading the captions. I suspect the ‘view figures’ for the video did not increase as a result, but my engagement with his content did, and that is really what counts.

So how can someone without the resources of Gary V do a similar thing?

Here’s my initial experiment.

• I upload the video into Trint
• Tidy the automated transcription
• export as a srtfile
• upload my video from my phone to my computer
• create a camtasia project
• set the Project settings canvas size to 1080 by 1080
• amend the caption font size to about 80-90
• import the srt file as captions
• export video to mp4
• use buffer to share on instagram and facebook

And voila - a ‘watchable’ instagram video without having to have sound and without needing resources on the level of Gary V.

I will iterate forward from this to streamline my process.

Oh - I had one srt file that Camtasia refused to import, so I used smisrt.com/en to conver the file to smi which Camtasia did import. I don’t know if this was an issue with Trint or Camtasia - but this is the workaround I used.

All told this probably takes about 20 minutes for a 1 minute instgram video, but I think the engagement increase will go up and that will make this worthwhile. Also I have a transcript that I can repurpose later.

Content creation realisation "only you see everything you do"

Note to self: "The only person seeing everything that you are doing is you."

Therefore:

• you can re-use content and it will be new to most people
• you can re-purpose content, to keep it alive, if it is core to your message
• you can re-promote content because people will not have seen it

If you share and create good stuff then help people find it.

Stop:

• thinking that people will tire of what you create
• keep creating new stuff
• keep reminding people about the old good stuff
• thinking that if you include content from posts in your talks that people will 'already have seen it:
• most people don't read blogs
• most people don't follow you on instagram
• most people don't read linkedin
• most people don't follow you on twitter
• most people dont ... etc.
• And... more importantly
• when you talk, you add extra value with, in your face emotional and passionate presenting because you care about the content

Every channel offers additional value even if the content is 'the same' (but the content is not the same, it is channel specific).

Re-posting and re-purposing as a content creation strategy

Efficient content marketing requires re-use and re-purposing of content.

Sometimes that means direct re-posting, but it also means - using previous content as a basis for creating new content (re-purposing).

e.g.

• I create a daily instagram video
• I try and summarise it into a ‘motivational quote’ image for instagram and pinterst
• I collate the instagram videos into a YouTube video with additional content
• I transcribe the youtube video
• I turn the transcription into a markdown file which I use to create slides for uploading to slideshare
• I transcribe the youtube video into a blog post and add links to the youtube video, instagrams and slides
• I review the blog post from a ‘management’ or ‘motivational’ perspective for one or two linkedin posts

Some of those steps are re-posting, some are re-purposing.

A quick review of content collation and curation tools for newsletter creation

One thing I’m not particularly good at, is sending out a newsletter.

I thought I’d have a quick look at some curation tools to see if they help (and yes, I know this could be considered procrastination).

Jay Abraham Interview on "I Love Marketing" podcast

http://ilovemarketing.com/jay-abraham-interview-on-marketing-and-copywriting/

•  "The other is, there could be such really quality deserving people that have such a superior product, service, concern, commitment, integrated value proposition, but they do now know how to differentiate. They do not know how to communicate. They do not know how to delineate. They do not know how to demonstrate..." 
•  "most people don’t even think about how do I create the trust that lets the prospect know that I have their best interest at heart"

Notes from speaking to experienced consultants

I was speaking to a far more successful consultant than myself a few weeks ago.

By successful I mean:

• charges more
• more shorter term gigs
• higher paid, higher profile gigs
• higher profile in the industry
• contacted by ‘budget holders’ and ‘management’ as well as ‘practitioners’

Now, he has worked for this and deserves the success.

• put himself ‘out there’ far more and far longer than myself
• built his brand
• experimented more

And there is a lot that I can reverse engineer from looking at his public profile but I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask for tips:

On pricing

• negotiate principle of least regret - price so that:
  • If they accept, I would regret taking at that price for it is too low
  • If they walk away, would I regret because I priced too high
• never drop your price after a quote
• discuss money early in the ‘can you work for us’ ‘can you come speak to us’

I think I do points one and two, so I’ve added point three into my repertoire.

I also asked about how he manages to make his travel schedule so profitable:

• put schedule online

I have now put my schedule online, and I’ve also put my current availability online on my website and on linkedin, in the hope that this leads to a sense of scarcity and as a prospecting filter to stop enquiries for “can you come work with us full time for 6 months on this low level role”.

I had thought about doing this before, but after speaking to him and seeing how much he credited gaining work from it, I added this a few days after our talk.

One thing that became clear when speaking though was that he has a much clearer idea of the benefit and value that he brings to the role. And that allows him to communicate it in a clearer and more succinct way than I do.

So I need to work on that.

Also he provided tips on creating talks and content that can attract more sales:

• talk titles based on ‘what do I think would be a good benefit’
• what 3 things would I want to talk about - simplify ‘what’ not the how - models are the how

I still have work to do on my personal marketing and branding. Hopefully this helps.

I previously asked other consultants and the advice was generally “charge more”. I think the advice above, when followed will help develop the positioning to allow charging more.

Jay Abraham on How to 10X Your Business with Lewis Howes - Massive Amounts of Free Sales And Marketing Training Material

I’ve taken value from Jay Abraham’s work in the past - particularly his book “Getting Everything You Can out of All You’ve Got” - and it is one of the books I’ve just started to re-read and revisit (again).
I was pleased to see that Lewis Howes interviewed Jay Abrahams for his “School of Greatness” Podcase.

• http://lewishowes.com/podcast/jay-abraham/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bi4X4KY1DQ&t=577s

Jay offers some really good advice on referals and repurposing and I’ll need to revisit the video again to crib some of the great sales copy ideas at the start.
And there was a really useful story about his work on Entrepreneur magazine:

• repurposed archives into ‘startup manuals’ with ‘boilerplate’ - how to recruit, how to do X
• you are the solution to someone else’s problem who doesn’t know it

At the end of the video I learned something I was completely unaware of - Jay Abraham has released most of his material for free now:

• An unbelievable amount of material in his 50 Shades of Jay section
  • http://www.abraham.com/50shades/
  • this will take a long time to work through
• Read Archives of his email newsletter
  • http://www.abraham.com/category/50-shades/
• You need to register for this… but you get access to an immense amount of training and recorded talks
  • http://www.abraham.com/radio-opportunity/
  • including the book “Getting Everything out of All You’ve Got” - which I have a paperback and CD version, and was just about to work through again.
  • and the book “The Sticking Point Solution”
  • … it just goes on

I suspect I’ll be studying this material for quite some time to come.

GMail Based CRM and GMail Linkedin Plugin

I’m still trying to figure out what I need from a CRM.

I needed to create a homegrown adhoc solution to see how I prefer to work rather than have my process dictated to me by software.

Homegrown Solution

I created a quick CRM in a Google sheet.
I have a front page which summarizes:

• contact
• when last contacted
• what to do next
• state of lead

And then each contact has a sheet with their details and a log of contacts - that seems OK but requires maintenance outside of Google.

Alternatives

Then I stumbled over this blog post from Neil Patel, "10 GMail plugins all marketing professionals should consider"

As A result, I’ve installed the Rapportive chrome extension, which augments any homegrown CMS.

And looking through the features of the other tools mentioned it seemed as though Streak provided a lot of power and seemed to offer much of the functionality of followup.cc and boomerang

I’ve installed Streak to try it out.

I still have to evaluate FullContact which I think could augment Streak as well.

And if Streak doesn’t work out then I’ll have a look at ActiveInboxHQ

Streak seems to have a lot of power and I’m slowly working through the functionality but the delayed send and boxing seem quite useful so far.

How to make blogger more responsive

This blog is hosted on Blogger.com - primarily for expediency.

• I don’t like the HTML it generates
• And I don’t like the templates (i.e. how it looks)

But other than that, it is fine.
For a while I’ve been wanting to make the blog more ‘responsive’.

• I don’t particularly like the fixed sizing
• and I don’t like the small screen formatting

I had a quick look around are responsive templates for blogger.
But:

• I didn’t really trust them
• I thought I would have to reconstruct my sidebar etc.
• It all seemed too much work

I tried using the Advanced editing on the template to add some CSS but:

• The custom CSS is added into the HTML before the Template CSS
• So the template CSS overrides your custom CSS

So, I bit the bullet:

• visit the site
• use dev tools to find the ‘key’ areas to influence
• hack around with the CSS

And I came up with this:

---

/* Minimal Hack to make blogger more responsive
     Added in the Template HTML Template Skin Section
     At the bottom
     20160902
*/

.content-outer{
     min-width:none;
     max-width:1400px;
     margin: auto;
}

img#Header1_headerimg{
     margin:auto;
}

/* push sidebar to the bottom - content break, not device break*/
@media only screen and (max-width: 900px){

.content-outer{
     min-width:0;
     max-width:auto;
     margin: auto;
}

.column-center-outer{
     width:100%;
}
.main-inner .column-right-outer{
     width:100%;
     margin-right:0px;
}
.main-inner .fauxcolumn-right-outer{
     width:100%;
}
.main-inner .fauxcolumn-center-outer{
     width:100%;
}
.main-inner .columns{
     padding-right:0;
}

img#Header1_headerimg{
     max-width:100%;
     height:auto;  
}
body{
     min-width:0;
}
}

/* End of minimal hack to make blogger more responsive
    20160902
*/

---

It isn’t pretty.
But it basically says. If the screen is bigger than 900 pixels then allow it to resize.
If it is below 900 pixels then move the side bar to the bottom of the screen and make everything fit the width.
Oh, and resize the header image to fit the screen (if I add one to this blog).
Why 900? Because.
I chose a content break, rather than a device break. And on some of my other blogs, choosing 900 seemed like the right choice.
In blogger I have to:

• go to the blog dashboard
• choose ‘Template’
• Edit HTML
• Expand <b:template-skin> ...</b:template-skin> in the editor
• and right at the bottom of this section, above the ]]> I add my ‘hack’ CSS

Just in case anyone else is still on Blogger, and wants to make their blog a little more responsive.
Feel free to adjust the max-width in the media query for your own personal preferences.

Are Linkedin Groups Still Useful for Marketing?

Are Linkedin Groups Useful?

I still read in posts from Linkedin ‘experts’ and various social media sites that LinkedIn Groups are one of the best ways to get in front of prospects and demonstrate your expertise.

Unfortunately LinkedIn groups seem dead to me.

I dropped out of LinkedIn groups a few years ago because, while they were active with discussion the discussion was:

• of very poor quality
• highly opinionated without justification
• incredibly argumentative without ‘listening’ to the other side

And I just became tired of reading it, and being on the receiving end of “that won’t work” opinions’ despite posting factual success experiences.
But, since I’m trying to figure out how to use LinkedIn for marketing I’ve gone back through the groups I subscribe to.

I evaluated my groups for value

I adopted the following strategy to evaluate linkedin groups:

• for each group I am in:
  • does it give value to me? i.e. looking over the last 50 or so posts, did they add value?
  • are my prospects in this group?

If they answer to either is “No” then leave the group.

Most were full of spam posts and no discussion

Most of the groups were filled with ‘peers’ rather than ‘prospects’ and so many of the groups were actually filled with the same ‘posts’. I went from group to group seeing the same promotional posts from people in each group.
Perhaps that marketing strategy works - publish the same post in each group, regardless of its relevance to the group. But to me it seems like spam.

• I could find no group that had any real discussion.
• I could find no group that had ‘prospects’ in it.
• I left many of the groups I was subscribed to.

How to find new groups?

I’m going to start searching for ‘prospects’ and seeing what groups they have joined.
And then, once I gain access to the groups, I can evaluate them using the ‘value’ strategy I listed above.
I remain to be convinced if LinkedIn groups will add value to my marketing strategy.

Linkedin Marketing Strategy - The Reciprocal Visit - Who’s Viewed Your Profile

One LinkedIn marketing strategy that I’ve seen mentioned on a variety of blogs is “The Reciprocal Visit” (or at least that is what I call it). How do we use that for marketing?

What is the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” feature?

LinkedIn has the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile" feature. You can see it on the ‘Profile’ drop down. And it shows you who has recently viewed your profile.

• if you have a free plan you will see the last few people who have visited
• if you have a paid plan you will see the last few weeks (or months)

If the person has made their profile public, or not viewed in private mode then you’ll be able to see information about them.

Why?

• you could send them a connection request, after all they visited your profile, they might be interested in what you sell
• they might be a potential client waiting to happen, you could research them and build a tailored ‘hi there’ approach
• it might give you an idea of the current target market your profile is written towards
• it might help you build a set of ‘personnas’ that your profile is drawn to, to create custom marketing approaches for each profile
• you might want to join some of the groups for that person, posting there might get you in front of that person organically without a connect
• there might be a shared connection who can introduce you

What is the “Reciprocal Visit” strategy?

If you visit someone’s profile then YOU will appear in their list of “Who’s viewed your profile”.
They might visit you back.
That might mean they are interested in what you have to sell if:

• your ‘professional headline’ description accurately reflects what you want to sell

Now your ‘Professional Headline’ is actually acting as a headline. And you want to use it as a ‘click through’ and read the article.
And the article now, is your “Summary”, and your “Summary” now becomes a sales page.
If you include your connection details on your sales page (sorry, “Summary”) , then they might actually find it easier to connect with you, and initiate a sales conversation.

Automating This

There are tools to help with the “Reciprocal Visit” strategy.
But be careful.
You can have your account locked for this.

• if you are on a free plan then this will be viewed as commercial use, and you’ll have to very quickly upgrade your plan (after about 50 or so views)
• if you misuse this, then your account might be locked (if you’re lucky then it will reset the next day)
• if you are on a paid linkedin plan then it advertises itself as “Unlimited Profile Views”, but it doesn’t mean that. I think you get about 800 or so before you see the “Linked in is momentarily unavailable” message

I’m still experimenting with this strategy. And to be honest, I’m technical enough that I can automate it myself, so I’ll never know what the tools are like.
I can’t say for sure that the strategy does work yet, as I’ve only just started using it.

Initial results:

I’ve only been using this strategy for 2 days, so it is really too early to say. But…
Started experimenting with it on 27th - 28th August, which was a Weekend, then 29th August (which was a bank holiday) - so not the best of days to try it. But in 2 days I have 18 profile views and my Wednesday email was busier with connection requests and emails from recruiters.
I managed to lock my account on Tuesday by clicking on too many profiles!
But my access came back on Wednesday. Phew.
I take this to mean that it is:

• worth experimenting with.
• And I need to amend my profile to reduce the number of recruiters that contact me.

Note:

• Update: And for the 2nd time. I've had my linkedin search functionality downgraded on linkedin. This time. After performing one search, and clicking 'next page' about 30 - 40 times.
• I'm not sure this is a viable strategy in any automated way.
• I'm not quite sure how recruiters are able to rely on LinkedIn because if I was a recruiter I'd be doing a lot of searching and paging, and my account would get locked.
• Currently I'm on an evaluation of the Business Plus plan which would set me back £29.99 a month. IT seems to have the same limits on searches (i.e. none - unlimited) as the executive plan at £49.99 a month. 
• And given that it is possible to avoid some linkedin search limits by using tools such as http://recruitmentgeek.com/tools/linkedin/ 
• I need to find a compelling reason to pay the cash in the next 3 weeks.
• I'll see if the 'post cool stuff to groups your prospects' are on strategy works out next

Related Links:

• Who’s Viewed Your Profile FAQ
• Difference Between Basic and Premium
• How to use the WVMP Feature
• Utilizing WVMP Feature

Marketing in Moderation for Maximum Impact

You'll want to compete. You'll want to improve.

But as with everything, you have to work in moderation:

• You have a finite amount of time
• You have a finite monetary budget for advertising

The parteo principle is a useful thing to keep in mind, they 80/20 rule:

80% of the success comes from 20% of the effort

i.e.

• get biggest bang for the buck
• repurpose your content
• get your content in front of more people

Some of this comes from skill:

• learn to write fast
• learn to plan fast
• learn to automate some processes

Some of this comes from courage:

• your first draft is good enough, don't edit, hit publish
• if you learned something its good enough, it will help someone else, hit publish
• if it reminded you of something important, even if it was obvious, its important enough, hit publish

You'll only see benefits when you go live, and you implement.

Danger zone of competitor analysis

The danger of doing competitor analysis is that you could become complacent.

If your website ever becomes 'good' and 'better than' your competitors, you might stop improving.

If your social media strategy ever becomes 'better than' your competitors, then you might stop improving.

To avoid this, also add into your 'competitor' list some big hitters. Identify and add individuals who are so high profile you could never hope to compete. Add companies with an advertising budget that you could never hope to match.

Keep improving, so that you edge towards competing with them.

If you'll never reach their level that is fine, you'll keep improving.

Use Ongoing Competitor Analysis to improve your marketing

One way I improve my marketing and web sites is by analyzing what my competitors do.

And by competitor I mean:

• direct competitors who do exactly the same
• direct competitors who sell similar products as I do
• small consultancy companies who do a similar thing to me
• consultants, who look successful, even if they do different things to me
• small consultancies and agencies who look successful

I prioritize direct competitors and consultancies, but I will analyse the work that anyone does and see what strategies and approaches I see that I'm not using.

After all, we want to be seen as 'bigger than we are' and the easiest way of doing that is by looking to see what people 'bigger than you' actually do.

Lessons learned from marketing with a guest webinar

As part of marketing and self-promotion I took the opportunity to run a webinar. This was part of a series that a tools vendor runs (They hold one or two webinars a month, since they have a bigger mailing list than I do, it was a good opportunity to get my name/face/attitude/brand out there to more people).

I've presented webinars for other companies before, this was the first one that was paid for - the money doesn't cover the time to prep the webinar but it was better than nothing. I've been asked to present 'paid' webinars before but previously the recording has always been behind a pay wall. I figure if it is going behind a pay wall then its going to be my paywall. The recording for this webinar is behind free registration wall - which I'm comfortable with.

I'm becoming more sales and marketing savvy so I negotiated some additional marketing requirements. The contract had to be amended to include these so I assume they don't normally do this.

I made sure that we had in writing, an agreement that:

• I would receive a recording of the webinar and I could use it in my own marketing (they originally wanted sole copyright of the recording)
• I would receive a list of the emails for the people who registered for the webinar
• I was allowed to send an email to everyone who registered, after the webinar with a link to sign up for my own mailing list
• I was allowed to include upsell links to discounted products in the email and during the webinar

The webinar was run through on24, which is a good, but expensive webinar software. To present the webinar we had to use the phone line. I normally use a mic connected to my PC which has great sound quality. I was a little concerned about the audio quality over the phone, but it was their request so I went along with it.

As part of the webinar I made sure that I recorded it locally on my irig mic, and also recorded a webcam session from my laptop. So I could later splice these together and create a 'high quality' replay of the webinar live stream. I created this by editing in Camtasia Studio on Windows.

For my email marketing I use Mailchimp. But Mailchimp doesn't like sending bulk emails to people who haven't double opted in. Neither do I. So I needed to find a bulk mail tool.

I don't trust email applications that would sendout bulk emails with bcc, I've received too many emails from agencies where my email address has bled out to other particpants through the agencies inability to use the email software properly - I didnt' want to take the risk of doing that.

After looking at a whole bunch, I found that Mozilla Thunderbird has a MailMerge plugin. That would allow me to setup the email list as a csv, and iterate over each email address sending an email using the MailMerge.

After a few test runs to my gmail account using 'plus' addressing. I clicked 'send' onthe mail merge that would iterate out over 1000+ emails.

In the MailMerge (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/mail-merge/) I used 'send later' so that I could review the emails before sending and could start and stop the email sending by using the "Send Unsent Messages" feature. 

After sending 600 or so emails, my web host blocked my IP address. I couldn't send emails, nor could I access my web site. I had to phone them to unblock my IP Address. But I still have 600 or so emails to send out.

I started up my trusty VPN and every 100 emails I stopped the mail client, changed VPN to a different IP address, and then re-started the email sending.

I suspect that if I do this again that I will investigate the Amazon bulk email service https://aws.amazon.com/ses

LinkedIn Tip: Images for company posts

In order to improve my marketing on LinkedIn, I conducted a bit of a 'competitor review'.

I looked at the company pages for other consultants and consultancies.

I learned more from the 'bigger' consultancies than the consultants - as you'd hope since they have marketing departments.

One observation I acted on immediately was based on one particular consultancy. For each of their posts they had an image - which is a normal social media strategy 'add an image to each post' (which I don't do here at the moment since this is a 'notes' blog rather than a traffic generation or marketing blog.

And all their images had a common theme: a photo of someone in the org, a logo, a title, etc.

And then I realised, or thought, that those images actually look like powerpoint slides.

So that's what I do now, for each company update. I have a LibreOffice presentation, and I add a new slide - because it is easy to collate multiple images, and add text etc. Plus when I export the slide it is at the correct proportions for LinkedIn thumbnails - perhaps due to their integration with slideshare?

But this makes it easy to create an image for the post, and starts to add a 'corporate' feel to my 'non-corporate' and slightly adhoc approach to marketing.

Marketing via content and getting it in front of people

One hard part of being a consultant is that 'you are the business' therefore you are your own marketing department.

Given this, I want to get my content in front of as many people as possible.

I could pay for this via advertising, but much of my content is 'value add' i.e. it doesn't sell me, it builds up authority through the authority of the content.

I would rather see it spread 'socially', i.e. people like the content and retweet it or mention it online via social media etc. But that requires that they see the content in the first place.

Therefore I have started looking for aggregation sites to feed my blog content through.

There seem to be two types of aggregation:

- we share anything in the rss feed
- curated where the moderator chooses what to show

I subscribe to many of the 'we share anything' feeds and I do put my content through those. As a reader I occasionally find it useful because I stumble across a blog I haven't read before, but there is usually a lot of low quality noise as well.

I value more the moderated feeds. And I have just submitted my blogs to a moderated feed. With the first of my posts being 'accepted' into their feed.

The statistics for that were surprising. There is a page count on most aggregated feeds. And page counts or view counts are not all created equal, so they can't be trusted, but... the page count difference between the aggregated version any my blog version were large.

At the time of writing:

- post on my site 114 views after 6 days
- aggregated version 1135 views after 2 days

It is too early to know if people are reading the article fully, or if it actually drives more traffic to my other sites, or if it will lead to increased product sales. But, it is early enough for me to look for more moderated syndication sites to feed into.

I'm doing this first before 'guest posts' or 'articles' on other sites simply because this allows me to build on work I'm already doing. I haven't considered 'guest posts' or articles on other sites yet. But clearly that is a future option for me to explore and when I do, I can compare the impact.

Take Action Now:

- Identify blog aggregation sites for your specialism and add your blog feeds to them
- Identify moderated blog aggregation sites for your specialism and if you like the moderated content that they show, then submit your site
- Look at the 'successful' posts on the moderated aggregation sites and analyse why you think they succeeded and 'spice' up your posts with those ingredients.

On hiring people to build your website, or just start with a blog

I attended a training course a couple of days ago. While I took a lot of value from it, I will not recommend it to others.

We received a lot of 'advice' on the course that did not gel with my experience.

One piece of advice was to hire someone to build your website.

While that advice will prove useful long term. It does not help you get started.

When you are starting and building your profile you should try and build content rather than gloss.

And to get started with content you can:

1. buy a domain name
2. sign up to a blogging tool
3. associated the blogging tool with your domain
4. create content

This way you build up your intellectual capital, and your profile, instantly.

You can 'gloss' it up later, if you need/want to.

On this particular course we were introduced to a web company that designs websites for small buisness to help them improve their profile. I had a look through their portfolio and lo and behold, many of the sites were simply Wordpress sites that had a custom theme and design.

Had those businesses been given the above advice, with point two replaced with 'sign up to Wordpress.com' then they could have started building their profile on a default theme. And later, hired a design team to 'skin' the website on a custom host and migrate the content.

I have one site that is entirely custom built, because I can program, and I started that site prior to the existence of blogging tools.

I also have:

1. one site on a custom hosted Wordpress instance, where I have extra 'functionality' on the server in folders under the top level domain. But I could have hosted my main site on Wordpress.com and used subdomains to point to 'other' functionality hosted on other sites
2. two sites with a front page hosted on a custom host, and the main content in blogger under a subdomain. This gives me flexibility to change the front page to whatever I want, but is a tad more hassle than it needs to be.
3. several sites as 'anonymous' blogger sites, without a custom domain, just for building content.

I've seen businesses build their brand, and indeed host their entire websites on blogger.com, and on wordpress.com.

Essentially hosted blogging platforms that allow posts, and pages.

Use these tools to:

• build content
• refine your message
• create your products and packages

Add gloss later. 

Do not start by paying people for gloss, when you have no content to glossify.


Bonus

I had a quick look online for 'how to make a professional site/blog on blogger', and found a bunch of links for templates and information:

• http://designscrazed.org/category/website-templates/blogger/
• http://www.cssauthor.com/blogger/
• http://www.templateism.com/
• http://www.blogcrowds.com/resources/blogger-templates/
• http://www.oddthemes.com/