The Marketing Alternative to Social Networks
Marketing your product online has one bad rule. It’s not a rule so much as a practice. Whether it’s good or bad, I’ll leave down to you to decide. Here it is.
In order to market your product effectively online, you at least need a presence on each of the major social networks.
I’m talking social network accounts here. Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Without a doubt the most popular networks out there, and if you want to market your product you need an account for each of these networks so that you have an outlet for your product. I’m aware that you don’t need to be sitting on these accounts on a daily basis to monitor it, but it does require some maintenance. And that’s my problem. Why do you need to have an account in these networks just to market your goods? Is there an alternative?
There is and it’s probably been staring you in the face since you sat down at your desk this morning with your coffee.
It’s email.
Long forgotten as the first popular form of sharing content, email has been increasingly replaced by social network forms of communications. It is one of the last remaining forms of open communication that just works. You can send a message to anyone providing you know their email address. It doesn’t matter which email service you use, which client you use or even if it’s self-hosted. Email just works and it cuts across the borders of social networks easily. Straight to the people that matter. The people who buy and could potentially buy your product.
You might be able to reach more people by managing a separate account on each network, but do you have time for that? I sure as hell don’t.
Lately I’ve seen a resurgence in the use of email by others to market their products and services. Newsletters are an increasingly great way to market your product to others. Letting people know of changes and offers in your product keeps your customers up to date. A call to action at the end of the email is also a great way to encourage potential customers to check out your product or even buy your product.
The best thing about it though is that it’s already there.
Waiting to be used. Marketing your product starts with an email to the right person. Sometimes that’s all that’s needed to start selling your product.
No Smoke, No Mirrors
A reminder from Michael Wade that we need log our day as it happens.
How else are you going to see where your time has gone?
I Don't Have One
A reminder from Carl Holscher that opinions on everything aren’t a necessity.
For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to resolve a bug in an application I’m writing for a client. As I was testing and re-writing the component a first time, a thought jumped into my head, “I’ shouldn’t be doing it this way. It feels wrong”.
A second re-write later to the component backed by tests and my conclusions were correct, I was doing it wrong. It’s hard to explain if you’re not a developer, so I won’t go into the details, but it boils down to best practices. I initially implemented this component one way when I should have implemented it another way. It’s taken me a bit longer to get there, but get there I did.
Should I be hard on myself at the fact that I didn’t think of this initially? I don’t think so. It’s easy to be pointed in the right direction when you’re part of a team with a shared pool of knowledge. When you’re working on your own, you can’t be always switched on to the best practices for everything that you do. Practice it enough though and it will stick eventually.
Remembering the Start Page
Remember having a start page? I do.
Everytime I would open my browser, I would be faced with a billboard of widgets that funnelled in data from different sources and displayed them all on the one screen. It was beautiful. Before RSS readers took off, the start page was the go to place for all your news.
I remember my first start page, the Google Personalised Homepage. It was great. All my important feeds on the one screen. Everything I wanted to read for the day in one place. Gradually this evolved over time into iGoogle and with it came changeable backgrounds, widgets created by Google and thousands of widgets created by others. It went to a tabbed page so that you could setup multiple tabs on your homepage. Now you could categorise widgets and cram more data into your home page and you wouldn’t need to scroll down to view those widgets, you just clicked on a different part of the screen (yes, I’m failing to see the convenience in this too).
Along came time based backgrounds. These were backgrounds that would change over the course of the day. Now you didn’t need to see the same thing in your background all through the day, it would change as the day went on. You could only see this if the you didn’t have a screen crammed full of widgets.
I even tried Netvibes for a brief spell and while it as fun to try something different, I went back to using iGoogle after not using it for a week. It was just too familiar and easy to use. Also I had invested time in getting the start page setup exactly as I wanted it.
All good things come to an end though and sadly last year, Google pulled the plug on iGoogle. Online trends have moved on from start pages. Most people now open social media clients as their first port of call for the day or maybe they go straight to their favourite news site to catch up. Only the insane try and start the day by opening their inbox.
Only a few services remain now that offer the start page experience, but I don’t see the benefit in using them now. There’s too much data out there for me to consume, certainly too much to fit on iGoogle regardless of how many tabs you have on the page.
Feedbin is my new start page now with a greater focus on curated content rather than just letting any old thing in. It has multiple feeds in it like my start page had, but it’s better at letting me choose what I want to read and that’s more important now.
Where's Your Own Backup?
We IT folk love having backups of data, but what about backups of ourselves?
Carl Holscher describes more.
Switching to Annual Subscriptions
Yesterday I got a hold of my credit card statement. This is the statement for the credit card that I use for my freelance business. Web services, hosting, e-books and subscriptions all go on it. It’s not wildy extravagant. Last month I spent just under £100 on products and services for my freelance business. I can definitely cut back on a couple of services I subscribe to and choose lower pricing plans, but there’s another area where I can make savings.
Each month I pay a small amount to subscribe to a number of different services. For most of these services I’m happy to pay the monthly amount. It’s always under £10 with the exception of one. Not a lot of money, but over the course of the year those add up.
Where I’m not saving money is paying the monthly subscription amount for these services rather than the annual amount. Most online products and services offer an annual discount that means you pay less for that service over the year. You do however have to pay for the annual service up front.
As I’m trying to keep a reign on my spending, I would love to switch to paying a once annual amount for these services, but with there being a handful that I can do this with, I’d rather not do it all in the one month. It would just cost too much money in the one month.
The alternative then is to stagger annual service subscriptions. Starting in April, I’m going to switch one service a month over to an annual subscription in order to save a bit more money. I’m already using these services on a monthly basis and have done for the last two years. I’m a regular payer and will continue to do so, so why not subscribe for a year and save myself some more money?
Making annual payments for products and services will increase my monthly spending for my business at first, but over the rest of the year, I’ll see my monthly spending do down. There’s a couple of trade-offs with this plan.
The first is that I’ll be tied into that service for a longer period of time, but it’s a trade-off I can live with. I’ve used the services I’m committing to for a few years now and I don’t see me wanting to change in the next year at least.
The second is that my monthly spending projection will be hard to track given that some months will have larger one off payments. It’s not a major inconvenience but I have been so used to maintaining a monthly amount that has been consistent for the last year.
Switching to annual plans for services is a difficult choice. I suggest that you only consider those services that are critical to your business and also offer a discount over paying monthly. You might only save yourself a small amount on one service, but across a handful of services you could be saving yourself a lot more. Definitely something worth thinking about.
Fixie Friday - Sean Martin's Zephyr
via FGGT
As nice as this desk is from Stir, it is way out of my price league.