This morning I found a package from Laurie Shook of Social Media Dallas. You know the feeling when you get an unexpected gift from a old friend? That’s how I felt. Laurie had taken the time to collect quotes from various Social Media Dallas members, print them out and stick them in a Scotty Vest. This vest has many pockets, …
How To Go From a One-Man Show to an Agency
If you’re still running the show all by yourself, you’re working hard but not working smart. Maybe it’s time for you to hire people and become an agency.
Why your personal brand is more important than your company.
A long-time friend of Content Factory, Leonard Kim, constantly inspires us with his personal branding insights. I recently sat down with him to learn how he became a personal branding leader: What inspired you to work in your industry? I tried a few different projects in the meantime until one day it dawned on me: I had already figured out …
Now Scammers Are Selling Influence
The latest wave of SEO spammers are now selling “influence”– to get your articles on high power sites, create that content for you, grow your followers, and drive high levels of fake engagement. See this chart as an example of what it costs for a posting on each site. “TAT” is turnaround time. We write for most of these sites and know …
Don’t Make Me Chase You
Don’t make me chase you– because every step that I take doing so is a step back from making progress. We’re not in grade school anymore, and playing tag over email isn’t very much fun. When you say you’ll do something and then don’t, it makes me feel like you did so with your fingers crossed behind your back. We’re …
So I decided to give LinkedIn ads another spin. Here’s what happened.
LinkedIn recently released Sponsored Updates, allowing us to hit the newsfeed. We love Facebook, but also test our business strategy across multiple channels. The current stigma tied to LinkedIn ads is that they can work, but only for B2B. Our latest experiment was a sponsored post for a Social Media Club Dallas event. The goal of the ad was to drive …
How to determine your goals and build your personal brand.
We talk a lot about the importance of personal branding- so much that we’ve made it into a guide. But we get this question a lot: What IS personal branding? In a nutshell, your personal brand is your journey to complete your goals, and has your WHY at the nucleus. That is your personal brand– the thing people will go “YOU are …
Why you can’t automate your campaigns
We get hit up by software vendors daily who promise automated nirvana. Connect their tool and it can then do all the work for you– meanwhile, you sit on the beach with your arms folded behind your neck, watching the profits roll in. Your pina colada is in your left hand, while on your right hand is your phone with …
7 Hidden Reasons Why Companies Fail at Facebook Advertising
We’ve seen so many companies who are competent at traditional PPC get destroyed when trying to do Facebook advertising. Let’s cover the most common mistakes and how to solve them: Keywords are not interests: You have keywords on Google versus interests on Facebook. In the former, someone is actively searching for something and is expressing immediate intent. In the latter, …
The world needs a MILLION Aarun’s– you do, too!
You’ll never really be good at something you don’t love. So fine tuning your personal branding is about clarifying the things you’re passionate about. And nothing is a better indicator of passion than where you spend your time, whether you’re paid for it or not. Aarun Rumbaugh (I call him the BOSS), is 21 years old, 6 foot 4 inches …
How to avoid fear and get things done
The biggest problem we have faced as a company is flakiness— smart, well-meaning people who for whatever reason can’t seem to show up on time, turn their stuff in, or do simple tasks. Why? It’s because of fear. Overcoming fear becomes harder as you get older, just like changing old habits. This is a recurring theme with people who have …
Why are there SO MANY ad networks? How to start YOURS!
Here’s an article that was in the works from July of 2009 that never saw publication. While people are no longer building ad networks (that game died 5 years ago), understanding how networks behave is critical if you want to make money via optimization (arbitrage between the supply and demand– the publisher and the advertiser). Tactics like scrubbing don’t work …