Video, Video, Video

Video

Video

Video

http://youtu.be/_y_SMItzxVc

Takeaways

• It took me less than 5 minutes to record, edit and upload this video
• I used the iMovie app - $4.99 from the app store to:
  • Edit the length of the movie
  • Add a fade in at the beginning and fade out at the end
  • Add the title
  • Add some background music
• I didn’t worry too much about lighting, I wanted to show how quickly and easily this could be done
• The longest part of the process was adding the transcript and additional information such as title, description, tags etc on YouTube.

Over the coming weeks I'll spend a little more time on set up - lighting, camera position etc.

Bottom line - if I can do this, there's no reason you can't.

If you’d like to get started with video, reply to this email and book a session.

Who's on your team?

Shit

Happens

Things rarely go to plan

Often time there’s nothing you can do about it; someone gets sick or starts acting irrationally, unexpected costs appear, new laws come on the books, that kind of thing, but other times, it’s your fault; you get ill, you get it wrong, you misjudge the task at hand or even worse, have no idea how to deal with it.

How good is your network?

When the shit hits the fan, that’s when you need good people – the operative word here is PEOPLE. You can have all the Twitter followers in the world and Facebook friends up the wazoo, but when you need help, you’d better have a network of people you trust who will do what they say they can do.

What’s the priority?

Are you focusing on Tax right now, maybe dealing with business insurance, are you under attack and need help, or a different kind of help, does your brand need work or maybejust your writing?

Most of the people reading this list run their own businesses, we all know there’s never enough time or energy in the day to do everything. How you choose to spend your time and who you spend it with directly affects your bottom line.

I’m on your team

When you’re ready to focus on growing your business again, reply to this email and book a session.

Will return next week

Popular

Past

Issues

Screw the Guru

SEO Heresy!

WTF are Personas?

Why you need an Editorial Calendar

WTF Jelly Bananas!

You will get hacked

Unless

You...

Change your password

The majority of attacks aren’t from some arcane hacker technology – they come from hackers guessing your password; well, not exactly guessing it, but running a cracking algorithm. If your password is less than 6 characters and sounds like the pet name you gave your first crush – this is bad.

Your website is your business and it needs a serious password. Your password should contain letters, numbers, at least 1 special character (!) and be as long as possible; yes with passwords length actually is important.

Which sites?

Ideally everything you access online should be secure but I realize it’s a pain to have a long and difficult password when you’re accessing Email and Facebook all the time. These sites are the bare minimum you should change:

• Wordpress - where you log in to write your posts
• Host - where your website is hosted: Bluehost, HostGator, etc
• Registrar- where you bought your domain name: GoDaddy, Dotster, etc
• Twitter - it’s really embarrassing to get hacked on Twitter!

Update your Wordpress installation

Next to password guessing, the biggest hack is from crackers exploiting out of date files on your website. Most people on this list run Wordpress installations and although Wordpress now accounts for over 15% of the top 1 million websites on the planet – if you don’t keep it up to date – you’re inviting the hackers in.

The Wordpress core gets updated every couple of months and along with that so do the various plugins. Upgrading is a simple 1 click process but if you haven’t updated your site for a while, you might be vulnerable.

Backup your database

If I built your website you should receive a weekly backup of your website’s database by email. There’s a simple plugin that will automatically take care of this, if you’re not getting it, contact me.

I write from experience

I just spent two weeks getting a rather nasty hack removed from one of my servers; the hacker got in through a vulnerable file on a site that was no longer being updated by the site owner. Once in, the hacker edited the file to allow them to automatically inject encrypted malware into every site on the server.

Aside from the time it took to diagnose the problem (days) it took 7 straight hours yesterday to clean everything.

Are you protected?

For existing consulting clients I update plugins and Wordpress and apply general Wordpress security hardening. This won’t guarantee that you don’t get hacked – indeed, banks still get robbed – but it will dramatically reduce the likelihood.

If you’d like to take an hour to make sure your site is well protected and your passwords suitably secure, reply to this email and book a session.

Be the Plate Spinner

It's

About

Time

Everything takes time

Facebook personal and business pages, Google+, LinkedIn groups, Pinterest pins, Quora questions, Twitter, your blog; if you could just find the time to do all of them you & your content would be everywhere and the clients would be rolling in.

You can’t do everything at once

Unless you can afford a dedicated digital marketing resource, the reality is that you can’t be everywhere. Instead of spreading yourself too thin and having a poor presence across all platforms, pick one and see how it works for your business.

Be the plate spinner

A plate spinner doesn’t start by spinning everything at the same time; she focuses on one plate, setting it up and getting it spinning correctly and then moves onto the next one. The energy required to maintain a spinning plate is far less than that needed to establish it.

Editorial calendar?

If you’re working with an Editorial Calendar (if not why not?) you could allocate a network to each month & build your platform presence around your monthly theme.

If you would like to know how to do this, reply to this email and book a session.

Why curation is good for your business

Production

Authority

Network

Content Marketing

This is about putting your message in front of customers when they are looking for your services.

By regularly producing great content you establish yourself as an authority and grow your reach as people are willing to share your message with their network.

Being Regular

New content ensures that there is always something to share with your network; if you’re not publishing you are less visible.

Mediocrity sucks!

Poor content actually damages your business as it reduces both your authority and your network as people stop listening to you.

A great blog post can take hours to put together and sometimes you just don’t have the time or the inspiration; how do you stay relevant and visible while keeping your production standards high?

Curation to the rescue

Curation in this context is the act of publishing someone else’s content. While initially this might sound counterproductive, it’s actually a genius move for a number of reasons:

1. You don’t have to write it
2. There are lots of tools to help with this
3. It takes 30 seconds to publish across your footprint
4. It stimulates your network and grows your authority

Here’s a bit more detail on Curation from a previous newsletter

The catch

Curation only works if what you publish is great; never re-tweet, share or publish an article that you haven’t read. Curation saves you the time of having to create new content and format it for publication; it doesn’t save you the time spent on taking in information and staying up to date with your market.

If you’d like to learn how to do this, reply to this email and book a session.