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Fun with Branding: Social Media Tips

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I decided to come up with five easy to follow tips that EVERYONE on social media needs to follow to better represent their brand. The brand can be a business or for you yourself personally because you are your own brand. This isn't just for social media, but a set of five easy rules for life too.

A lot of people want their social media presence to be impeccable and think the only way to achieve that is by living life virtually and putting the best version of themselves out online. The general public will see that as a fake and you still have a life to live. Unless you are making money from the internet, please do not treat it as a job onto itself. You have far better things to do.

Making unique content is important. This does not mean to not post the same core content on your Twitter as you did your TikTok and Instagram but it does mean not to copy what others are doing with the exception of trends. Posting trends is a great way to get more followers on your video platforms. I am even leery of the Pinterest posts that say "365 Blog Post Titles to Get You Started" because of how many others may use the exit same name and idea. Be original and if you can't be original, at least be creative in your subterfuge and originality will ensue from that. Every once in a while I will post something others are suggesting, such as "post your work area on social media." the get mixed results and I feel mike a dancing monkey when I do it without the reward of some peanuts in the end and I only do it if I haven't posted anything in a while or to break up monotonous postings like when I did 15 days from Monday to Friday for three weeks of my various social media outlets and how to follow me. It got boring less than half way through yet they were scheduled for 1PM every day still and I hadn't gone anywhere with exceptional food or views at the time to show pictures of as a way to break it up a little bit.

This tip was inspired by LinkedIn, but works with anything social really. LinkedIn is nothing more than a dick measuring contest between professionals. Don't get me wrong, I love LinkedIn and love measuring my own dick, but part of a proper dick measuring is honesty. If you are just adding someone so you can sell them something, just be upfront about that and don't try acting like you are old buddies.

Engaging, topical, educational, informative, and funny are your five main motivators for people to engage with you. Think of a dog at a party. If you are having a party and a golden retriever came in, EVERYBODY would love the dog more than anyone else. The dog would make a bunch of friends and be more popular than the most popular person there, because dogs are fun and engaging. If you can teach people something and they enjoy learning, they will follow you for more. IF you are informing them of a news event, people will follow you for more. How many news outlets do you follow on Twitter? Comedians also have huge follow numbers on social media. Have you ever wondered why?

Gary Lee often tells people to "be authentic." Though I generally appreciate what he has built and have learned a lot from him, I find it humorous that "be yourself" is his sage-like advice and it works because so many people don't think to just not lie to people or try to make themselves seem to be of greater importance. Because of my current job, I fly a lot. In the last six years I have been on more than 300 flights including connections, which became a way of life during and after the COVID-19 scare. I've flown a lot. I have sat in every row from the mouth to the asshole on a number of different flights. So I love when I am online and you see the woman with her Gucci handbag and sunglasses acting like a roll model to the next year's cast of Sugar Babies posting pictures of how successful she is and she posts a picture out of the window on takeoff...behind the wing when my broke ass even gets to sit forward of that. She is trying to show herself to be more successful than she is, playing on people's lack of deductive reasoning that she is sitting in the cheap seats. Guys do it too and all the time too. There is huge money in renting a Lamborghini for the day in Miami and taking pictures of people posing in front of it by the beachfront so guys can be posers on their social media and Tinder profiles. both men and women try to mimic people they can't afford to be even though they still have something others could learn from. Authenticity is so very important and sadly will set you apart from the crowd.

I always enjoy writing these and sharing what I know or have researched with others and I hope people get something out of my postings. I personally get something out of coming up with infographics like I did here for my social media shares and now I am writing blog pieces on them so it gave me extra content that is evergreen.

Please like this if it helped you, share it with a friend who can benefit from it and / or tag that friend so they can see it. Share on your social and please tag me at @TheMichaelBeebe on all things social or use #TheMichaelBeebe or #MichaelBeebe. Also, if you got something out of this, please follow my social. There’s a lot of it! If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email at Discussion@TheMichaelBeebe.com.

 

For more from Michael, please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com. Thank you!

Branding with King Dyngus

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Dyngus Day is three weeks away from today and it’s one of my favorite holidays for a number of debaucherous  reasons and I wanted to talk about an idea I had and wrap it into another thought to answer a common question. What is branding? Branding is a marketing function to get people to know your product where marketing is a function to get people to buy it. Branding is the “why” and marketing is the “how.” Branding builds loyalty and / or create value. So what are your brand values? 

 

I love Dyngus Day! It is one of my favorite days of the year. It is often called “Polish Mardi Gras” since Mardi Gras is the day before Lent starts and Dyngus Day is the day after it is over and you can go back to all the bad things you couldn’t do for the previous 40 days. In Poland it is a holiday of joyous festivities and in the US it is sponsored by beer companies in various regions that celebrate it. Not everyplace celebrates it and that saddens me because everyone is Polish on Dyngus Day! I ended up being in Los Angeles on Dyngus Day one year and I know it’s not wide spread there but obviously the Polish restaurants will celebrate it. No. I called every Polish restaurant in LA County…all three of them. One was closed for the day when I called, one answered and said they are closed on Monday’s and when I asked about Dyngus Day she seemed to have no idea what I was talking about and the third was permanently closed but Google had not been updated yet. So I had a Long Island iced tea at a Mexican restaurant in Barstow and wept a tad for society.

 

I currently use the URL and hashtag of TheMichaelBeebe as my primary brand and moniker but I am thinking of creating a secondary brand for myself called “King Dyngus” or “KingDyngus” for the hashtag and username I would post under for that site. The goal is to talk about Dyngus Day and create an area of exchange for Dyngus-related activities around the United States. My life’s work would be summed up by being able to find a local pub crawl on the day after Easter anywhere in the country. I think this all says more about the trajectory of my life than anything else, but it’s fun and celebrating Dyngus Day has become part of my personal branding. 

 

I would have information about what cities offer Dyngus Day celebrations and allow various people to blog about things they have done on Dyngus Day, like the girl dancing topless in the bar or the guy pissing in the planter on the sidewalk and no one cared because it was Dyngus Day. Dyngus Day can be wild fun or a family-friendly celebration of endless Polish food. South Bend and La Porte are some twenty miles apart but in South Bend most Dyngus Day activities focus on activities for various clubs and organizations around town to raise money and in La Porte we have a shuttle that takes us from bar to bar and the bars on the route, I have heard, can earn as much as one-third of their yearly income on that day. Neither town does a parade like Cleveland or Buffalo do and some even have a Dyngus Day Queen. Both La Porte and South Bend use it to kick off political season with politicians doing from event to event because part of our local tradition is to get the politicians drunk so they can’t lie to us for once and the May Primary is roughly a month after. 

 

I find the differences in celebration methods interesting to say the least which creates an overall macro brand and marketing locally is the micro activity…just as in the general branding-marketing relationship. Branding is the macro and marketing is the micro.

 

I sincerely hope this clears up any and all confusion you have over the differences between marketing and branding and exactly what a brand is. I hope I defined a brand pretty well here.

 

Please like this if it helped you, share it with a friend who can benefit from it and / or tag that friend so they can see it. Share on your social and please tag me at @TheMichaelBeebe on all things social or use #TheMichaelBeebe or #MichaelBeebe. Also, if you got something out of this, please follow my social. There’s a lot of it! If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email at Discussion@TheMichaelBeebe.com.

 

For more from Michael, please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com. Thank you!

Fun with Branding: Tha v. The

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For my 2021 holiday messages, I posted a “Merry Christmas” plus a unique half moniker of “Tha Mikester.” The use of “tha” dates back to something a friend used to call me so I used it to be cooler. The problem is, half of my friends thought I simply misspelled “the.” Now it does go off brand slightly since I’m @TheMichaelBeebe across all social media plus my website so it was my fault for trying to change the branding. Lesson learned and I no longer have permission to go against my own brand, which means my branding is noticed even with a rather small following so that’s a good feeling. 

 

What is permission and who gives it? Permission is a social concept for brands based on what people envision in that brand. A towing company tows cars. Since they work with people having a shitty day with their ride, tire changes, lockouts, and battery jumps are obvious services they have permission from their customers to perform. How do you know if you have permission? Because people call you and ask for it. That’s your poor man’s market research right there. So what happens when said towing company creates a metal structural support for wood framed homes? Unless they create a new company to sell and distribute them, they sit in boxes. You don’t have that permission. 

 

Follow your dreams, but create separate LLCs or at least a DBA to promote the side business. 

 

Anyway, don’t break your branding image because people will notice, but to break from your branding you have to create an unified brand first. 

 

Please like this if it helped you, share it with a friend who can benefit from it and / or tag that friend so they can see it. Share on your social and please tag me at @TheMichaelBeebe on all things social or use #TheMichaelBeebe or #MichaelBeebe. Also, if you got something out of this, please follow my social. There’s a lot of it! If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email at Discussion@TheMichaelBeebe.com.

 

For more from Michael, please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com. Thank you!

Everyone Needs Their Own Website

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If you are selling ANYTHING, you need your own website. A website will be the quarterback for your branding outreach and it will create higher conversions and can help serve as a sanitized life résumé that you control plus it will push you higher in search results. Blog on it and tell people your thoughts. It’s great for so many different things. When I say “selling,” sometimes that means you are the product. Make that product stand out.

I am TheMichaelBeebe.com because some motherless panty waste is cyber squatting MichaelBeebe.com but I do have the dot net version and…I don’t love having a dot net. I know they convert just fine now that it’s 2023 but I still have the old school “eww gross” response when I think about being a dot net instead of a dot com. Gag me with a spoon! My primary moniker is the same using both the hashtag and the name for all of my public social media. I do use a personalized email address at the dot net out of pure vanity though and egocentrism. The personal identifier really helps boost your searchability online. Staying active with updating information on your website and posting blogs helps keep your search ranking high. 

 

Blogging is important. Each blog piece you post could be popular and help you rank higher in search results. Both your website and the individual blog piece on your website could rank in Google. That gives you two entries. If the blog piece is picked up on other sites, it could be a duplicate of the original and be listed independently of your website blog piece. That’s three hits on you from one search.  The goal in this section is to push your arrest record of the public intoxication charge you caught in college to the bottom of search results. Let people see you in a good light and you control your narrative. So now you’re wondering what you should write about for your blog. Unless you’re Kanye West, whatever you have to say that you can speak with authority on is the answer. Politics, technology, and basket weaving are all fine topics if you know what you’re talking about. The goal is to have a lot out there with decent substance so try not to alienate people with extreme views on topics. We are going to assume you are the product we are selling here. Why are you selling yourself? To get more views on YouTube videos, to gain more subscribers to your OnlyFans account, to sell more books. The final goal matters less in the overall need for it, but have a clear goal stated so you know how to lay out your website and it’s purpose. I like job searching because if you’re an author, people are still hiring you (by buying your book) to tell them a story and if you sell blinds, people are hiring you to help them make a wise choice on their blinds. My blog focuses on several areas that I feel I can discuss compliantly. Mainly they are travel, website design, social media, business management, poker (draw poker, not that Texas crap for people who can’t play cards), marketing, entrepreneurship, cryptocurrency, and politics somewhat. Politics divides people so much that I tend to shy away from it as much as I can unless I have something going around in my head. If you want politics to be part of your brand, then by all means, go for it.  I’ll delve into some philosophical and esoteric thought exercises on occasion, as well, if I am trying to figure something out. I am not actively looking for a job, but I’m not saying I’d turn the right job down. So this slowly helps increase search rankings for your name and your name starts popping up in certain topics. So your blog helps you establish credibility on a topic or topics. 

 

Sending people to your website helps with conversions to sales because the person gets a truer sense of who you are and it’s easier to buy from a buddy. If you’re an OnlyFans girl, this is key to you. Let people know you. Become the illusion of girlfriend material. I point them out because sex workers (of every level) already know this. It’s their entire job and there is no business that would suffer from being more like a sex worker when it comes to customer relations and customer retention. With that said, if you are letting OnlyFans manage all of your distribution of content plus merchandise, you are leaving money on the table. Bring them in to your bedroom, your website, and you will control their entire experience, including your OF content they purchase. You can always redirect them back to your OnlyFans content or to your Amazon Author page. It’s really all the same.

 

Restaurants need online menus and reservation services. Doctors need online scheduling and patient testimonials. Car dealers need online financing options and inventory information. Websites help facilitate all of that. 

 

There is no downside to having your own website, if for no other reason than to be cooler than your friends and pass out pens at the bar with your name and URL on them. Your website is an essential part of your brand and its importance cannot be overlooked. 

 

Please like this if it helped you, share it with a friend who can benefit from it and / or tag that friend so they can see it. Share on your social and please tag me at @TheMichaelBeebe on all things social or use #TheMichaelBeebe or #MichaelBeebe. Also, if you got something out of this, please follow my social. There’s a lot of it! If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email at Discussion@TheMichaelBeebe.com.

 

For more from Michael, please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com. Thank you!

Fun with Branding: Link in Bio

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Stop using “Link in Bio” on your social media. Link Tree is a great idea but falls short for your engagement. You have a website. Create a page for your posts links that way you are directing people to your website instead of some other company’s. This drives traffic to where you want it and helps keep, people on your site. 

 

Basically the first thing you do with Link Tree is find people who are interested in you…and send them somewhere else. Keep them engaged in your website. Obviously if you’re sending them to follow on other social they will leave your site, but create your own “link in bio” pages for that so you can set it to open in a new window for social media redirections or Amazon book sales. 

 

The concept is really pretty easy. 

  1. Create a new set of pages. 
  2. Do not add them to your primary menus. 
  3. Create a different menu for these pages specifically.
  4. Embed links to pages you want to focus on. 
  5. Optimize for mobile devices. 

I build on WordPress so it’s rather quick and easy but play with it and make sure you’re using a responsive theme. Most people build their website to reflect what looks best on a computer and though responsive (formatting changes to suit the screen size), it can be cumbersome to view on mobile devices. Think of information overload. Consider your link in bio page to be Cliffs Notes or a series of elevator speeches. You want quick and informative and since it comes from apps on a mobile device, the link can be named whatever you want since they simply click on it. Mine is TheMichaelBeebe.com/link-in-bio since most people reference that phrase due to Link Tree’s popularity. Use it to your advantage but let people also see your name in your own URL. Any decent website designer can build it for you in just a few hours. Most entrepreneurs today know how to build on WordPress so it should be an easy job for most people who already have their own website. 

 

I should do a companion piece titled “Everyone Needs Their Own Website” and if I ever do, I’ll turn that last part into a link so if it’s blue, it’s been updated (I did write it and it will be available after 9 AM on January 30, 2023). If you are selling ANYTHING, you need your own website. It will create higher conversions and can help serve as a sanitized life résumé that you control plus it will push you higher in search results. Blog on it and tell people your thoughts. It’s great for so many different things. When I say “selling,” sometimes that means you are the product. So make the product stand out. 

 

Please like this if it helped you, share it with a friend who can benefit from it and / or tag that friend so they can see it. Share on your social and please tag me at @TheMichaelBeebe on all things social or use #TheMichaelBeebe or #MichaelBeebe. Also, if you got something out of this, please follow my social. There’s a lot of it! If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email at Discussion@TheMichaelBeebe.com.

 

For more from Michael, please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com. Thank you!

LinkedIn 301: LinkedIn Part 3

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My last piece, LinkedIn 201: LinkedIn Part 2, gave some good beginner advice, but today I need to focus on some more intermediate concepts. This is what will get you really noticed among your peers on LinkedIn.

 

 

View

LinkedIn offers a really cool option that lets people see who have viewed their page. Use this and see who all has looked at you. View them back. They will know you checked them out, but so what? That’s the idea here. That shows interest in them and they like being noticed as much as you do. With that, look at their skills. If you know them and have an idea that they posses the skills they say, endorse them. Either way, make sure you look any anyone who has looked at you. This is not a dating site where you want to be coy about who you’re looking at, but job searching is a lot like dating too. Sometimes you don’t want to be caught looking at the person because there will be a never-ending conversation about hair or them trying to sell you something (that goes for dating or sales people both). Either way, you never know who tomorrow’s customer or human resources executive will be. Get seen!

 

Share

One statistic I saw said that people should share something weekly on LinkedIn. I don’t know if that is the case, but I talked about the toggle switch in LinkedIn 101. By now, that toggle should be switched back to “on” from its default position and your connections will see your activity any time you have any. Have some! It gets you into their line of sight that many times. The numbers that seems to be the most common are two and three. Share or post between two or three times a week, though with this site, I’d suggest only two (that is personal opinion). You can share pictures, websites, posts, or just a quick status. Make sure they are professional! No one gives a shit about your photos of your trip to Tahiti. One thing I don’t like is that you don’t have photo albums. I want to set my Thirsty Thursday Tip of the Week photos into my personal LinkedIn page, but I don’t want to go back and add the first ten right in a row. I will do so, but with the toggle turned to off so other’s don’t see them added. I wish they added photo albums so things like my T3 could be separated from the future political cartoons HoosierPoliticsToday.com will host and I would also like to add.

 

Post

I separated this part because it’s so important. Every time I post a new piece on FullTiltBusiness.com, I use a plugin that automatically posts it to the business pages for the site on Google+ and Facebook and then my personal LinkedIn page. This embeds as a post. You also have the “publish post” option on your LinkedIn page incase you want to write a piece from your own blog. The casual passerby won’t notice if the post you did was written in LinkedIn directly or posted from an outside source, so don’t worry about that. Posting is important. It creates a link to an idea and people love ideas, especially when they are hiring you. A résumé doesn’t always shoe the ideas behind who you are on paper, but posting does; it can tell a company if you are a good fit for a potential job or not or if your views fall in line with the views of the company. As you can see from my LinkedIn account, I have recently founded a small corporation. With the potential exception of teaching college level again or working in radio again, I am not “job hunting” now, but promoting me and trying to get connections who will, in the future, be interested in the newly formed company and what we will be offering. So why bring that up? Unless you are directly involved in politics or religion and want to make a career path out of one of those two areas, DO NOT post anything about either on LinkedIn.

 

Acting as an intermediate overview, I hope this gave a good follow-up to LinkedIn 201 for everyone and it gave some ideas of things to try tonight. Now get back to work; it’s a weekday.

 

Connect with me on LinkedIn by clicking HERE.

 

For more pieces like this please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com.

Increase Your Facebook Presence

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One issue many businesses have is increasing their Facebook presence. First, people think Facebook matters and it actually does, but it should only be used as one piece of your social media campaign. With that said, I hope to give some insight on how to grow a Facebook presence on the cheap. Yes, I will be breaking one of my cardinal rules in my advice and that means you may have to spend a few dollars. As my readers all know, I am one cheap bastard and I hate spending money on social media. My tips are geared around a frugal method on increasing your presence, but I will spend some of your money in this one as a potential option.

 

This was originally written as a short answer on a Facebook page to a friend of mine running for a city council seat. He wrote on his personal page that he only had 53 likes on his election page and that was out of his 200 or so friends. Actually, a 25% follow-back rate isn’t too bad for personal sharing only, but we need to look more into how to grow a Facebook presence quickly and easily.

 

The Meetup

Meet up with a couple friends at McDonald’s (or anywhere with wifi). Since this was written for a political campaign, I suggested McDonald’s as a way to be seen. Politicians need people to see them doing stuff in public and McDonald’s has so many people that come there on a regular basis that it just makes sense. Also, with the age of the people who sit around McDonald’s in the morning, it seems to have your potential voters right there. If you want to do this for a business, do so in a private place if you wish so as to keep this a secret. Have them bring their laptops and make them temporary administrators. This will allow them, like anyone, to invite people to your page. The difference is, when people get the invite it will say “Bob Smith wants you to like his page.” It becomes a personal endorsement from them and their friends view it as being an active partner in your campaign. Their friends will have a greater likelihood of liking your page than the standard invite from friends that says, “Bob Smith invited you to like a page.” There is a psychological component at play here and the only real difference is “his” verses “a” and that difference personalizes it for potential future likes.

 

Spend Money

Here it goes. If you spend about $25 or so, you can use the “promote my page” feature to get likes faster. Once you hit 50 likes, you can promote your page on Facebook. This is an advertising method that increases growth quickly. I recently saw one Facebook page spend $50 and added over 1,500 likes in five days after setting a maximum daily limit of $10. A month later, her engagement with her audience was phenomenal and she said it was well worth the money. You can target your advertisement to various groups and locations based on age and geography.

 

Pictures Sell

Okay, you wont actually make money with pictures. It’s more of a figure of speech, but pictures work. Add pictures and infographics slowly. An infographic is a picture with words that explains or inspires the viewer, like my Thirsty Thursday Tip of the Week. By Facebook default, hey stay in the newsfeed of fans longer than just a text update and increase the odds of your friends sharing your page’s post.

 

Share Bomb

We all know about the Ron (now Rand is doing it) Paul Money Bomb. They try and get supporters to get a little bit of money to them in a twenty-four hour period for usually a specific need. The share bomb is the same idea. Message your friends, arrange a share-bomb day, and have everyone share it at different set times throughout the day. Pick Tuesday to Thursday from 9am to about 6pm. Those are the most viewed times for Facebook and the times and days with the greatest interaction with Facebook users. Convince your friends to share a special post with their friends. Have them add it to groups, other pages, and with all of their friends on their Facebook walls.

 

A Share Deal

In a society, we all need to work with other people. Business campaigns are no different. You need others to promote for you and help raise awareness of your product and maybe you can help them. Mutual shares for each other’s pages can be beneficial for you and for them. They endorse your product and you endorse theirs. No, this shouldn’t be done with businesses that are in direct competition for the same product and customer, but take a supplier for instance. If you have a restaurant selling a specific brand of hot dog, work with the supplier to promote your Facebook page as you promote their product line. It can give you some new ideas on products to carry and they can get some new likes for you. This is the same for political campaigns; work with businesses. You need businesses to support you if you are a pro-business candidate. Some who publically back you will be willing to share your page on their site and you can talk up their business on yours. It’s good business for them to get new likes and it’s good for you to get that kind of exposure.

I really hope this gave some good insight for businesses and politicians to use in the future. This is not an exhaustive list of ways to increase your Facebook presence, but it’s a damn good start.

 

For more pieces like this please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com.

Personal Efficiency

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Why did you go into business for yourself? I bet it wasn’t as a means to avoid your family and miss your friends. At a certain point, “daddy has to work” or ” mommy is bringing home McDonald’s” just doesn’t cut it and you need to scale back your time at work. How do you do that? Why should you do that? Does your family really “understand” why you’re not home?

 

Let’s go with the last part first. Does your family really “understand” why you’re not home? Absolutely not! For a little while they will, but eventually they will want to see you more than your cash flow and resent you for not being there. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine, but don’t be shocked if they grow more and more distant from you over time. Let me play out a scenario for you. You work all the time, but you have two kids. Now your two kids want for nothing. You teach them work ethic by always being at work. You make the kids study and send them to college and give them an opportunity you never had. Now they graduate and get jobs where they put in the same work load you did. You retire and want to spend time with your family but it’s too late. They are gone, resentful that they never really felt important to you (if it’s true or not doesn’t matter as much as their perception of the truth), and they are just as busy as you were; missing every holiday. You can say how proud you are of them, but you know you wish they would come visit. Turnaround is a real bitch.

 

I’m not proposing being home constantly, working from home (which I couldn’t do long-term) or anything radical. Every entrepreneur needs to establish a work-life balance. This can be established by observation of key distractions at work and asking the key questions of how to fix them.

 

Establish a Process.

The first recommendation I have is to look at your routine tasks that have a set process that repeats. How much time do you spend repeating the same task on a daily basis? Generally this task can be broken down by various methods. When I’m working on FullTiltBusiness.com, most of my work is now automated. With the exception of the writing of pieces like this one (which is generally written on my iPhone while I lay in bed or while I wait for waitresses to bring food out), I generally spend thirty minutes a week on Full Tilt Business. Sometimes I know that isn’t possible and need to put a specific amount of time into growth of something or designing a new section, but I generally only do 30 minutes a week. Thirsty Thursday Tip of the Week (T3) is automated on Facebook. Facebook posts directly to Twitter. I post myself to Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and the FTB LinkedIn business page. That takes fifteen minutes. That’s Thursday. On Monday my blog posts. I use an interface that posts to Tumblr, Facebook (which automatically posts directly to Twitter), Tumblr (when the interface works), Google+, and my personal LinkedIn page. I manually post to Tumblr (when automation didn’t work), Pinterest, and the LinkedIn business page. I share it on my personal Facebook and Google+ accounts and I am all done. It’s not worth it to me to hire a virtual assistant to handle all of those tasks. With VA’s working for as low as$2 an hour, the price is there, but I can’t justify spending $1 a week for these routine tasks. Do you have to repeat the same process over and over again? Does bookkeeping take up half your day? It might be a faster and more efficient use of your time to email scans of your daily receipts and email them to a virtual assistant in the Philippines to work on organizing for you. You create the process and they can duplicate it and you can’t even find an illegal to work for the wages they work for over there.

 

I know it was a long preceding paragraph, but the concepts of the duplicating of a process and using a virtual assistant are potentially two sides of the same coin.

 

Outsource.

Moving on, what are the other things you can or need to do? How about a lawn service? As a hypothetical, let’s say you have a lawn service and you’re doing well. You have a couple crews and they are working all the time. You have employees out there working and you’re making good money, but you have to be the boss. So why do you have employees? With all the independent contractors doing that work, why not work with one to represent your company and go out to do the work for you? Let them handle all the human resources crap of the crew they run and you just make your same profit. Now you can be on the phone for the day and make your contacts with clients without pushing a lawnmower yourself. Most importantly, you can reduce your overhead from keeping a full sized garage full of lawn equipment to just keeping an office space.

 

Website.

Using the same lawn care service as an example, how can a website help you? We all know websites are fantastic marketing methods, as are social media accounts, but what more can a website do? How about booking customers? With various types of simple widgets and low-cost paid services, your business can accept scheduled jobs and set prices automatically. Customers can pay with credit cards online and the money is directly deposited into your account, minus their fee. This benefits everyone involved. While you’ll make slightly less money per client, you are not limited by the number of contractors you have that bring their own equipment and you won’t run out of storage space.

 

With maximizing productivity as your main goal, you can have it all. You can have the business everyone knows, the family life you dreamt about, and extra time to go golfing.

 

Why did I write this piece for today? On April 21 I bought the domain name HoosierPoliticsToday.com, which is designed to be a political blog emanating from the great Hoosier state. On May 1, I will be forming Beebe Digital Media, Inc, as an entirely new venture, which is owned by my holding company and will feature a large scope of associated websites. I needed to remind myself of this more than my readers, but I think my readers will appreciate the information from here.

 

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LinkedIn 101

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According to Alexa, LinkedIn is the number thirteen site in the world and number nine website in the US. With the number of job-seekers, it’s no small wonder why, but LinkedIn is more than just job seeking. LinkedIn is the modern, more professional version of comparing penis size. Your friends and colleagues post something new so you feel the need to out do them. Your buddy from college learned Spanish and added it to his, so you learn Japanese. It seems like a lot of competing, but it’s really motivational for individuals.

 

 

So who uses LinkedIn? Everybody! It’s used mostly by job-seekers across the board to look good in front of human resources people, but it really lets people show their entire résumé online. Artists can show work, writers can show off their latest pieces, and businessmen can talk about their latest accomplishments. It is literally business bragging.

 

Personal Information. 

When you set up your account, make sure to add your photo. Even if you’re ugly, set the photo up. People like to see who they are talking to. Add all contact information you want to give out. This includes email addresses and phone numbers. This allows people who already have your contact information to find you easier and add you. These are friends and colleagues. Being popular is very important on LinkedIn. I’ll explain why friends are important later.

 

Résumé Section. 

Be thorough. Add your full job history, dates, responsibilities, and anything else it asks for. This gives your work history and human resources people look at it to see if you are a good fit. Even if some of your work history isn’t relevant to the job you are seeking, it may prove handy to show how well-rounded you are.

 

Endorsements. 

LinkedIn will ask you about specific job skills. Add them. If you know PowerPoint, let LinkedIn know about this. As you add these skills, they will pop up to allow your contacts to endorse you and you endorse them. One tip I need to throw in here is you should never endorse a skill that you have not directly observed. With that, text all your buddies on LinkedIn and have them endorse your skills after you endorse theirs. Don’t endorse every skill they have, but just ones you have directly observed. It shows who all endorsed a skill to any third-party who views your page, so it’s a red flag if it’s the same person endorsing every skill you claim to have. Make sure you have all skills listed, even skills that aren’t associated with your current because you never know who will see your profile and what they may be interested in.

 

Other Stuff. 

LinkedIn allows for other bragging rights beyond skills and will constantly ask you about these areas. Have you returned to college? Have you learned a new language? Are you published or a contributing author antes here? Add as much as you can about yourself and LinkedIn will give you just about every possibility you can think of. They also include links for portfolios, so artists and writers, take note. That works for you.

 

Premium. 

I don’t use the paid premium version and throughout my pieces, you’ll see I mostly only talk about free methods to use social networking, but there is a premium upgrade service and from my understanding, if you’re looking just to find a new job, it’s completely worth the price, so I give it an untested recommendation. I believe in the product that LinkedIn is that much.

 

Final Tip.

In your settings there is an option that has a toggle that allows your updates to show up in the feeds of your friends. While building your page, toggle it to the off position. Everything you do will show up to your entire contacts list and they will get annoyed with you as you make updates while building the page. After you are done setting it up, then toggle it back so your updates show up in the feeds of your contacts. Now when you get that dream job of yours, they will see it, but they won’t see every change you make. Ask yourself if you’re changes will just start to piss off your contacts and if the answer is “yes,” toggle it to the off position and back on once you’re done with upkeep-style changes.

 

I rank in the top 39% of my LinkedIn connections. It’s a nice feeling since I was never studious enough in high school or college to rank that high and I’ve taught myself and had others teach me many things which I excel at. I know I need to do some more work on my personal LinkedIn Page, but I’m happy with my current rankings since I’m not a job seeker currently.

 

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Pinterest Strategies that Work

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I love Pinterest. Now I am not a middle-aged housewife with a pill and gin problem or a middle-aged woman who still wears flip-flops and posts about wine all the time, yet denies she has a drinking problem. I am a guy and I have found Pinterest as one of the best ways to get your point out to the masses and I have some awesome tips for my readers in this piece. Anyone wanting to send information out en mass should read this about Pinterest. This piece started as a project after I gave a good friend of mine advice on how to market a product she is selling with the bulk of orders being online, so thank you Deb for inspiring this piece with our text message conversation.

 

First, what is Pinterest? Pinterest is ranked by Alexa as the thirty second website in the world as of this writing. That’s not bad for a company that was also launched five years ago this month. Happy fifth birthday, Pinterest!

 

Name Optimization. Come up with a searchable name for your business Pinterest account. The name for the Full Tilt Business account on Pinterest is “FullTiltBiz” and when you go there, you will actually see the page labeled as “Full Tilt Business.” This REALLY helps with your search results when people do a Google search for your business’ name. These will increase your actual meta score and bring your search ranking higher and move you up a few pages on Google when people look up your business name.

 

Push and Pull. This is a great method for using Pinterest and I will probably dedicate an entire video tutorial to it down the line. I call it the “Push and Pull” method, but there isn’t a “Pull” in this one. The Pull is a Twitter thing and I will explain that in a similar piece when I discuss Twitter later. Anyway, follow people! Go to sites similar to yours and follow their followers. If you are a marketing company, follow the followers of your competition. You should expect about a 25% to 30% follow-back rate. Follow similar companies to your competition. If you are promoting your marketing group, follow the followers of bloggers that are similar and deal with the same types of issues and give similar advice.

 

Posts. So what should you post? Links and pictures. Links for your website will get out and circulate. Make sure that your website has pictures to Pin and you will be a hit. My website has a rather generic look to it (intentionally), so it’s bland with the same picture used multiple times, but my recommendation is that you have a different picture on each page so when you Pin an item, they all look different. That helps people of varied tastes open your pin and read it. Blogs are the exact same. The next area is pictures. These are popular. Pictures can be regular pictures or infographs. An infograph is just a picture with words on it, similar to my Thirsty Thursday Tip of the Week (T3). Click that link to take a look. Anyway, infographs get around. They will get pinned and re-pinned over and over again. The pictures also increase the time your Facebook’s business Page is posted in the general newsfeed. I will also discuss this a bit more in depth in another, later piece that is just about Facebook. Anyway, people love pictures and that is what Pinterest is mostly about, pictures and websites with pictures.

 

Geotag. If you are working with Pinterest on your computer, you will have an option to add locations to any and every post you make. This is a must-do if you have a location that your website is “from” or another piece of advice is to geotag pictures into large, metropolitan areas that are either of interest to your viewers. The geotag is a location and people on Pinterest love looking at things tagged near them.

 

The Source. Type https://www.pinterest.com/source/fulltiltbusiness.com/ into your browser when you are signed in to your account. Where it says “fulltiltbusiness.com” put your own business URL in there. That will show you every link that has been pinned from your website. The one thing that is a must is to verify your website on Pinterest, which is an easy process that you can find while setting up your Pinterest account originally. When you go to Pinterest.com, set up a “business page.” The page will ask for your business URL and there will be three options for verification to your website.

 

Downfalls. What are the downfalls to Pinterest? You know there has to be a few. You can only follow 300 people in any given hour. You can’t just spend the entire day following person after person, but you can stagger your sessions out. In theory you could still follow 7,200 people in a single day and with a 25% follow-back rate, have 1,800 new followers based on that 24-hour period. Not everyone that will follow you back will do so immediately, but that is about the number you can expect after a week. So if you religiously follow people every hour and split the task up with a trusted friend when you need sleep, you could have 12,600 followers after a week of doing that method. The other problem isn’t that big of a deal, but the Pinterest website sucks when you try following people en mass from a list of another’s followers, but both the iOS and Android apps work amazingly for this task.

 

This should conclude a quick overview of the biggest and best uses of Pinterest for your social media campaign. I will probably write an entire piece on Search Engine Optimization for Pinterest down the line and do some video tutorials as well on the topics covered.

 

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