Social Media

Monday Spark: Have some distraction-free time each day.

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distracting road works noiseYou’re in a room with a fan blowing. It isn’t too noisy. Certainly not noisy enough to prevent you from working.

Or maybe there is some work been done in the street, and you hear the background noise of vehicles, generators and power tools from time to time.

But then, at some point, you turn off the fan, or the street noise stops.

What a difference. It’s only when the noise stops that you realize how it has been filling your head and distracting you. Turn off that background noise, and you feel relief.

The same kind of things happens when you spend your day with a background of constant emails and social media. It’s just a different kind of noise.

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To find the best topic for your money-making website, maybe check out your Facebook page.

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money-making websites

Last week I wrote about how you can choose a topic for your own money-making website.

If you missed it, I included a slideshow of 101 Topic Ideas. And, as I mentioned in the article, each of those 101 topics could spark ideas for several more.

But this week I want to share a different approach to finding the perfect topic for your website.

In short, check out your social media accounts – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and so on.

What are you already sharing with other people?

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In social media, don’t ignore the little guys. Or doggies.

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popcorn social media contentThis is the flip side to my previous post on social media, in which I advised that you focus just on the high-value core of your social media network.

Today I’m suggesting that while you keep one eye on developing that core, you should also pay attention to connections which don’t appear to have any immediate value to you.

How come? Why bother with people who don’t have many connections of their own, and don’t appear to offer much value?

For a couple of reasons.

First, because if you dismiss people out of hand, simply because they don’t have many followers or friends, then you’re missing out on the “social” in social media.

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Monday Spark: Reframing just a small slice of your day can make a big difference.

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reframe your dayWe tend to repeat the same old patterns every day.

We have a routine, from the moment the alarm goes off. We get things done in the same sequence. We see the day through the same set of lenses. We have our weekday lenses and our weekend lenses.

There is nothing inherently wrong about this, except that it makes it hard for us to see or do anything different or new. We get stuck in a rut, driven by fixed perceptions.

One of the most fixed events in many people’s lives is the daily commute. Watch this video and see how perceptions of a metro ride can be reframed. (And thank you, Faith Attaguile, for bringing this to my attention through your Google+ post.)

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Freelancers – Engage with the high-value core of your social network.

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social media networkingAs freelancers we can all benefit from social media. By connecting with our peers, industry thought-leaders and client prospects, we can grow our reputations, increase our knowledge and expertise, and find new clients.

However, we can also end up spending way too much time on social media sites for very little return.

We have to look at how much time we are spending on social media each day, and make sure that time is being well spent. You need to balance your billable hours against your unbillable hours.

So how should freelancers use social media, with minimal wastage?

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Online writers and copywriters: Social media IS the web.

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social media conversationMost online writers and copywriters learned their craft at a time when the web was all about static websites.

To put a date on that, let’s say the period of “come and spend time on my great website” was between 1995 and 2008. More or less.

I’m pretty sure the majority of freelancers learned how to write for the web during this period.

Is this a problem? Could be.

Before then, in the eighties and very early nineties, the Internet was around, but the web wasn’t. In other words, people were connecting through the infrastructure of the Internet, but there were no browsers. No web as we know it.

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