Facebook: Quick Thoughts

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facebook logo 200x75 Facebook: Quick ThoughtsIt amazes me that as a tech savvy person that I’m not as social as I could be. There are so many networks out there, and I find other than dabbling in Google+ and Twitter, I pretty much only maintain my Facebook account.

It made me question a few things:

  • What do I like about Facebook?
  • Why do I keep coming back?
  • Have the changes Facebook has made had any impact on my usage?

Of course the simple answer that is often spouted by other savvy people is that other services just haven’t reached their critical mass, or that they are missing some killer feature that keeps Facebook at the top of the social media sites, but I think it is a more complex system that holds us all to the site.

In many ways, Google+ and Facebook are the same, you can find friends and colleagues, add them as people you want to interact with, share pictures, play games, and push out information about your life. Google+ has a more simplistic design and is integrated with other services that people use, but as much as they are increasing their numbers quite quickly, I don’t feel that they’ll get to Facebook levels of success with their social platform.

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Be Smart About How You Spend Money: Outsource

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This is really a life tip, but I’m going to write about it focusing on building your business or brand online.

Recently, at work, instead of outsourcing a data entry task, three people in my office split up the work to get it done. The task was simple, copy data from a PDF into an Excel spreadsheet. This really irked me because the company was spending around $75 per hour to have data manipulated and entered into a usable format. What I would have done is spend one or two hours teaching a few people in another area of the world to do the work.

I could have easily hired the work out for five or ten dollars an hour, and received close to the same results. For twenty-five dollars an hour, I could have hired between two and five people to work on the task. It would have potentially been done both faster and cheaper. I could have even hired someone to double check the work and come out ahead.

One thing that people often forget is that we live in a world economy where your money can sometimes be better spent elsewhere. Sometimes it seems like things are easier or better if we do them ourselves, but the one thing you can’t scale is how much time you have.

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Tips for Speaking at a Conference

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I have spoken at a few conferences now and each time is slightly different, but in speaking, I have learned a few simple things that you can do to make the best of your speaking opportunities. If you aren’t trying to speak at conferences and events to promote your expertise and personal brand, then maybe you should look into it, as I’ve found it to provide a great sense of enjoyment and pride.

Speaking is also great way to build up confidence, network with people, and add value to your niche’s community. Following these tips will help make it as stress and incident free as possible but remember, if they don’t like what you are saying, they can always leave, so focus on doing the best you can, and don’t worry too much about the audience.

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Raven Tools Review

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mainlogo Raven Tools ReviewRaven Tools bills itself as a powerful Internet marketing platform for agencies and professionals. I have been using Raven Tools for nearly three years now for various projects and have always been impressed by what I could do with the service, and I’m probably not even using it to half of its full potential.

What Does Raven Tools Provide?

The biggest advantage for me has been the ability to take all the things I’m tracking and generate some professional, easy to read reports to give to my boss. There is nothing better than handing a document that contains graphs, tables and scores instead of a spreadsheet that looks like something that was printed in the early nineties.

Raven Tools provides information from a variety of data sources including but not limited to MajesticSEO, SEMRush, SEOMoz, Google Analytics, WordTracker, and Calais. Subscribing to all of these separate services would be a pain, and potentially much more costly.

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Can You Make a Living From Blogging?

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A question I get asked quite often is about how much money I made as a professional blogger. I used to like to avoid the answer because I was making enough to pay the bills, but not enough to be able to buy luxury items on a whim.

Simply put, blogging was my full time job and required much more than the forty hour work weeks that people put into their nine to five jobs. When I first start working as a full time blogger, I was bringing in around $1200 per month after taxes. Unfortunately, I was probably putting in around eighty hours a week doing various tasks, and realized I was actually earning around four dollars per hour.

By the time I had been working full time for three years, I was making $2500 per month blogging. All of this income was working on blogs owned by other people, and usually my responsibilities included more than just writing. My technical skills probably allowed me to make a premium over other bloggers of the same caliber.

Back when I first started, there was a lot less competition and the market hadn’t really figured out yet how valuable content would be in terms of search, advertising and conversions. Now, despite many posts about making money online, and the growth of the industry, I feel like it is harder to get into blogging as a full time career than it was back when I started in 2005.

If you really have a passion for blogging, then I still believe you can find or create opportunities to become a full time blogger, but until you prove your value, don’t expect to be paid what you are worth. It can be a humbling experience and it may test your resolve, but if you stick with it, the rewards and dividends can be truly amazing.

WordPress.com: Does it Suck?

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A long time ago, when WordPress.com first came out, I was very split on my thoughts of the service. On one hand, I was happy to see it as an easy to use, free service that opened up less tech savvy people to the advantages of WordPress as a publishing system, but I felt as though the biggest advantage to WordPress(.org) was how extendable and easy to customize that it was.

Customization in the form of plugins was completely stripped from the WordPress.com experience. Some would say that this is ideal as it is very rare to need plugins to run a WordPress blog and it opens up security risks, but I’m not one of those people. When I first install WordPress, I have nearly half a dozen plugins that automatically get uploaded to provide me with features that WordPress doesn’t provide out of the box.

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Blogworld & New Media Expo New York 2012

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Blogworld11 200x98 Blogworld & New Media Expo New York 2012For those interested in blogging and new media as a business endeavour, Blogworld and New Media Expo back in New York for the second time and registration is live. I would suggest buying early, as hotels will probably fill up fast.

Who attends this important event?

Content creators, broadcasters, forward-thinking brands, and best-in-class online publishing services.

Until the twenty-second of February, the cost for registration is only $147 for three days of sessions, and socializing. The conference is being held at the Jacob Javatis Convention Center from June 5th through the 7th.

Curious about who will be speaking? Already the list includes Chris Garrett, Robert Scoble, Jason Falls, Zac Johnson and more.

If I was certain about the future of the company I work for, I would be finding a way to attend this event, as I have a feeling that it will allow people to network in ways that e-mail, guest posts, and instant messaging just doesn’t allow.