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Do you have to complete a piece of writing but are putting it off? A report, a blog article, or a letter? Are you finding that the moment you sit down to write, your mind seems to go blank? Crap! Writers block! What can you do about it?
Although, the term writers block is popular, this feeling of blockage and mind blanking is not specific to writing, but of any creative feats. Other examples include, brainstorming for a new business, dancing, musical performances, music composition, painting or photography. I’ve personally experienced this during my photography work, blanking out as I stand in front of a client waiting for me for direction. I call these Creative Blocks, where your mind just comes up empty and you feel lost. It’s purely mental.
Through practice and observation, I’ve gotten pretty good at getting past these blank moments, and this article shares some insights for unlocking your creativity. Throughout the article, I will be using writing as the example, but keep in mind that it is equally applicable to any creative activity. Read more: http://bit.ly/KM38du
Via Martin Gysler
Whether you love Google or love to hate Google, you have to admit one thing. Google offers a lot of free tools to use with the convenience of being able to access them with one login. Marketers in particular should take advantage of these tools to get more out of their search engine and social media marketing experience. The following are some of the top Google tools marketers should embrace from A to (almost) Z! 1. Google AdSense Ever created a niche website for linking purposes, affiliate marketing, content development, or another reason that never panned out? If the website gets even a moderate amount of traffic, and you have no other use for it for the time being, why not earn a little income off of it using Google AdSense? By simply placing some ad code in the header, content, and sidebar of the website, you can earn some passive income. The amount you earn will depend on the topic of the website and the amount of visitors it receives. Read more: http://bit.ly/LyxGvt
Via Martin Gysler
With the connection of AdWords to Google+ Pages via Social Extensions, Google is enticing advertisers to build a presence on the site. As expected, Google continues to advance its efforts to make Google+ a success as it further integrates the social platform into its core products to encourage adoption and increase activity. With the recent connection of AdWords to Google+ Pages via Social Extensions, Google is enticing AdWords advertisers to build a strong presence on the social site. By enabling Social Extensions, consumers will be able to see all recommendations a brand has received, whether they are viewing a paid ad, a search result or your Google+ Page. There are currently two types of Social Extensions: Personal and Basic. Personal shows you the number of people within your Google+ Circle who have +1’d your landing page or your Google+ Page, while Basic shows how many people across the web have +1’d your page. Read more: http://bit.ly/KUBskC
Via Martin Gysler
Since long time you would like to start your own business, but it's the lack of finance is holding you back. Here's an article that will give you the information needed to make it through the bootstrap. An amazing post for everyone who want create their own startup. [note mg] Bootstrapping a startup refers to starting a small business by funding it yourself or through customer receipts -- without getting any external investment. Companies that go the bootstrapping route have their own set of challenges to overcome. This topic covers the latest news and trends on bootstrapping a startup, including best practices for success. Bootstrapping a Startup is part of Business Exchange, suggested by Anita Campbell. This topic contains 894 news and 374 blog items. Read updated news, blogs, and resources about Bootstrapping a Startup. Find user-submitted articles and reactions on Bootstrapping a Startup from like-minded professionals. Read more: http://bit.ly/LtituQ
Via Martin Gysler
Startups.We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters. Whatever you’re working on now, the half-life of innovation is so rapid now that your product will soon be out-of-date. Your existence is irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation. Your ability to keep up is dependent on having a great team of differing skills. Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do. The nature of the Internet and global knowledge is such that even if you’ve stumbled on to a super interesting area of innovation there will be many teams tackling the same problem at exactly the same time. If you develop something novel that catches a spark you’ll have the world gunning for you over night. In this globally connected world product leads disappear in nano-seconds. Read more: http://bit.ly/J6aoLM
Via Martin Gysler
When everything’s a priority, how do you maximize your productivity and continue getting things done? We asked eleven entrepreneurs about their strategies for staying on top of mounting piles of work, focusing on what’s important, and otherwise holding on to their sanity while building a company. Outsource, outsource, outsource
Everything may be a priority, but you are not equally brilliant at everything. Eliminate the unnecessary tasks and outsource your weaknesses so your time and focus is directed to where you’ll make the biggest impact for the business. Read more: http://bit.ly/JRdkjb
Via Martin Gysler
Even if this list is from 2011, you'll find a lot of interesting tools for today. [note mg] If you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need monitoring tools. Before you get out your credit card and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you get a taste of what is available and if you need paid services. I have collected 48 free social media monitoring tools. In the Group A are the services that I use regularly or seem interesting to check out immediately. The Group B is an alphabetical list of tools for you to play with. Here we go:... Read more: http://bit.ly/IDzrqr
Via Martin Gysler
To be a freelancer is sometimes a hard job. It need a lot of qualities and perseverance to be it for long time... What I like in this post, is that it speak not only about the advantages but also about the disavantages. [note mg] With more and more workers turning to freelancing, you may wonder whether you should freelance. Are you ready? What is the best path to take to become a freelancer?
In this post, I’ll identify five different routes people take to freelancing. I’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Path 1. Right After College Faced with a weak job market, many new graduates turn to freelancing to find employment. There are some positives and negatives to freelancing right out of school. Here are three advantages to freelancing right out of college:... Path 2. After Working for Someone Else Path 3. As a Part-timer Path 4. Job Loss Path 5. A Need for Flexibility Read more: http://bit.ly/JJl6IQ
Via Martin Gysler
Getting quoted, giving speeches and writing articles are great ways to market your business. As we measure the degree of damage, or more precisely, reduced revenue and increased costs from the downturn, advertising spending tends to be one of the first cuts owners make. Yet this may be a great time to expand marketing to take a share of the market away from your competitors. The key is marketing without little or no money through efforts like community engagement, referrals or sending a press release to local media. Another method is becoming a recognized expert who is called upon by media and other outlets to speak, write and lend your expertise. Read more: http://bit.ly/HYGw8U
Via Martin Gysler
Find out how Ifttt can help simplify your social media marketing. Connect your online accounts to create triggered events with if this, then that feature. Are you looking to simplify management of your social activities? If so, then Ifttt is for you. Don’t be put off by Ifttt’s crazy name. This is one handy tool that you should definitely know about. Ifttt stands for “If this, then that,” which is a very basic way of explaining the site’s whole premise. With very little effort on your part, Ifttt will connect your online accounts and services to create triggered events. After setting a trigger from one service, you can create a task to be activated automatically when the trigger goes off.
Via Martin Gysler
This question should interest every entrepreneur and someone who is active in one way or another on social media. These different options will give you the necessary support. [note mg] Imagine that you’ve spent years building a business and growing a website. You launch a promotion to email a list of potential customers with exciting new opportunities to save lots of money by doing business with you. Did you email too many people, or did you email the wrong people? Did someone turn you in as a “spammer” to one of the many spammer blacklist organizations out there?
Everyone hates real spammers, and the last thing you want to do is get labeled as one. That’s one kind of blacklist. The other kind is worse – the search engine blacklist. That’s the one that is basically a death sentence for your site because Google and other search engines stop crawling your site or even listing it in search results. No blacklist is good to get, because ISP’s and many content filtering services access Internet blacklists to figure out not only what email to block, but also what websites to block or to mark as potentially dangerous.
How do you know you’re on the Google List or any other database of blacklisted sites? Read more: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-ways-find-google-list-blacklisted-sites/
Via Martin Gysler, ABroaderView
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are great for building your brand -- but how do you find new customers? That's seems be the question from everyone in business! [note mg] We all know social media is an important tool for brand awareness and customer acquisition — but how exactly are you supposed to convert random Twitter and Facebook users into real-life customers? Well, that depends. Different brands have different challenges when it comes to customer acquisition: “If you’re our customer, you’ve signed up for a year-long service, unlike the Starbucks of the world, where you can be a customer by coming in for a cup of coffee one day,” says Lisa D’Aromando, social media community manager at Equinox. Whether you’re a clothing shop, a restaurant or a subscription service, you must tailor your strategy so that it makes sense for your brand. That said, there are a few universal ways to help your company attract new faces on the social web... Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/03/29/customer-acquisition-social/
Via Martin Gysler
Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse. Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you're taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you're driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn't?... Read more: http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/03/the-magic-of-doing-one-thing-a.html
Via Martin Gysler
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Content marketing can be an extremely complicated, time-consuming, and expensive proposition! So I came up with content options for the time-starved! Let’s face it. Content development can be a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive proposition! So I started thinking about this in the context of my friends and small business customers who simply can’t afford that kind of effort. It led to this idea: micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content when you don’t have time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook. Let’s examine ideas about using micro-content for your social media strategy, assuming you are testing the water and only have 15 minutes a day to devote to this activity. Hey, I’m up for a challenge! Preparation Like any marketing initiative, you must have a firm idea of your strategy, selling points, and target audience... Read more: http://bit.ly/LEiFKi
Via Martin Gysler
I was recently reading Steve Pavlina’s: 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job and noticed that this guy knows what the hell he’s talking about. For this, I feel that it’s very important that I share his article with you just in case you might think like I used to. I too believed that security came with working that “9-5″ and hustling my ass off hoping for a minuscule raise. Sounds familiar right? When I decided to start Circle One Communications, LLC in January 2008 I knew I was taking on a major risk. I also knew that most people wouldn’t understand. Steve along with other successful online marketers seemed to be the only people who understood my downright disdain for being a sheep in a work force that taxed the employee for the benefit of corporate profits. I can relate to the employee mentality for maintaining stability but at the same time… Read more: http://bit.ly/KNyoX1
Via Martin Gysler
Yahoo!Launches Axis: A More Visual, Social, and Portable Browser... a great tool to discover on another way what you search. [note mg] Yahoo!’s got a brand new search tool that will follow you from your desktop all the way home. Launched Wednesday night, Yahoo! Axis is socially connected, spatially redesigned, and has some unusual features that definitely make it worth a test drive. See a demo and screenshots here. If you’ve got an iOS tablet or smartphone, you can download Axis as a stand-alone browser. (Sorry, Android users!) There’s also desktop plugin that works with HTML5-enabled browsers including Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. Read more: http://ow.ly/beLFl
Via Martin Gysler
Hire for passion and commitment first, experience second, and credentials third. You don’t want to be simply a stepping stone on an employee’s journey toward their own passion. Several years ago I was in the Thomson Building in Toronto. I went down the hall to the small kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee. Ken Thomson was there, making himself some instant soup. At the time, he was the ninth-richest man in the world, worth approximately $19.6 billion. Enough, certainly, to afford a nice lunch. I looked at the soup he was stirring. “It suits me just fine,” he said, smiling. Thomson understood value. Neighbors reported seeing him leave his local grocery store with jumbo packages of tissues that were on sale. He bought off-the-rack suits and had his old shoes resoled. Yet he had no difficulty paying almost $76 million for a painting (for Peter Paul Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, in 2002). He sought value, whether it was in business, art, or groceries. Read more: http://bit.ly/MI5das
Via Martin Gysler
Are you ready for the fight? Recessions are created for people who want follow this trend... why wouldn't you make your own trend and start your own business? An excellent post with some interesting insights and examples. [note mg] Recessions are the perfect time to start a business: FedEx, Microsoft, Burger King and even GE were started during the recessions the U.S. has experienced over the last century and a half. If you’ve been thinking about starting a new business, the fact that the economy is down should not stop you. In fact, there are many reasons why the national economic situation should encourage you to start a new business now. You Have Motivation... Read more: http://bit.ly/L9RTWH
Via Martin Gysler
Sometimes what helps us to be successful in our professional lives is not such a great idea in our personal lives — competition is a quality that comes to mind. At the same time, we all have a limited amount of time each day to do the things that we want to do.
So for the sake of saving time and energy, I’m sharing a list of tips that will help you be successful in both life and in business.
1. Add Value
No matter what you do and where you go, you can’t go wrong with adding value. Simply put value is anything that people are willing to pay for. In your professional life, the more value you can offer the more money you can make. In your personal life, more value translates to closer relationships and strong personal growth. The best way to add value is to find the intersection between what people are willing to pay for and what service or product you can offer that is aligned with your values, strengths and goals. Read more: http://bit.ly/KqnTcb
Via Martin Gysler
Maybe you want create your own infographic, here 10 tools to support you to do it. [note mg] Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean. Who can resist a colourful, thoughtful venn diagram anyway? In terms of blogging success, infographics are far more likely to be shared than your average blog post. This means more eyeballs on your important information, more people rallying for your cause, more backlinks and more visits to your blog. In short, a quality infographic done well could be what your blog needs right now. Read more: http://bit.ly/K0s4LL
Via Martin Gysler
So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years: 1. Ignore everybody. The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the biz card format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn’t I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest i.e. cutey-pie greeting cards or whatever? Read more: http://bit.ly/IeXQ4d
Via Martin Gysler
4 new social media productivity tools reviewed and analyzed. Each can save you considerably time and hassle when you're producing or curating content. As Jay mentioned in his post yesterday, there’s a serious influx of information out there, plus an increasing urgency to get things done better and faster. It can be overwhelming to stay up on what’s happening in the world while also tending to your day job. Between our new newsletter, the One Social Thing, and the handy tools below, we hope to give you enough time- and sanity-saving techniques so you can go home at 5pm, be with your family, and even take up a hobby.
While a few of these tools can be used solely as a creative outlet, they can also serve as a way to harness creative energy that can be put toward your content marketing efforts so you can maintain a cohesive, high-quality, and consistent strategy.
Read more: http://bit.ly/IBydM1
Via Martin Gysler
Nowhere do the mistakes, poor practices and questionable judgement of individuals, organizations and brands get exposed with such glee as they do in the sphere of the social web. It’s no wonder some CEOs or senior decision-makers entrusted with the stewardship of brands break out in a cold sweat at the simple mention of the words “social media.” Mark Schaefer wrote a great post about Negativity Bias as it relates to the social web and how this phenomenon has created a playing field rife with PR land mines for anyone active in the space. Schaefer sparks dialogue at the end of his post by posing the following question: “In a world where Negativeity Bias is gasoline on a viral fire, and one misstep can overwhelm years of positive work cultivating raving fans, why would anybody take a risk on the social web?” Read more: http://bit.ly/HYPJHs
Via Martin Gysler
A very interesting comparison of several measurement tools and what they really measure. [note mg] For marketers, PR professionals and customer service teams, personal influence measurement tools can save time and help facilitate business decisions. Tools such as Klout, PeerIndex, Kred and TweetLevel are being used by brands to rank the relative importance of customers and prospects, prioritize customer service responses, and identify groups of influencers to target with perks and product sampling promotions. But what are these personal influence measurement tools really measuring? Are they really an effective way to understand which of your customers are more influential? It is easy to understand influence as a concept; if you can get other people to do something, you have influence. But it’s not at all easy to define how you would measure influence. As Nathan Gilliatt has pointed out, there is no such thing as a “unit of influence” – an observable, measurable event that reflects influence. Read more: http://therealtimereport.com/2012/04/03/influence-what-are-tools-like-klout-really-measuring/
Via Martin Gysler
A comprehensive article on the subject and perfect for a Saturday or you've maybe a bit more time to read ... :) [note mg] Link building isn't really link building. It's relationship building. Links are just the proof of the relationship, as are the tweets, likes, sales… relationship building is link building. Your social graph is your linkerati. Tom Critchlow encapsulates this with one of these Distilled Pro Tips: Here's a few tactics and strategies to build and leverage relationships that lead to links, likes, sales and more. Outreach is for tomorrow. Relationships are for life. Let's go!... Read more: http://mz.cm/Hx9RWB
Via Martin Gysler
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