Archive for the 'Blog' Category



Perseverance is Genius

“Perseverance is genius”

Is a great quote.

Some of you may have seen it about, in my email signature, in tags, in comments.

It is one of my favourites, along with:

“if you can dream it you can do it”

“do what I want”

There are many many more.

The point is, I use these to inspire me on a daily basis, I always have this simple poster either on the back of my bedroom door (so i see it when i close it) or above me desk (or both).

When I need to be made of rubber, this helps spur me on.

Find some quotes that inspire you, put them up, and then let them do what they do best.

Make that a New Year resolution 🙂 and that’s it for me in 2009.  I will catch you all in the new year. -Ben

December 30th, 2008

Just a reminder

To those who wonder.

How can Ben post 5 days a week?

Given his busy schedule, many meetings, and involvement with multiple projects and businesses.

I built up momentum, remember Blogging is a marathon.

I followed my blogging strategy.

Started with 1 post / week for 2 months.

Then increase to 3 posts / week for a few months.

Then September I tried a post a day.

It hasn’t been easy, certainly didn’t happen overnight, but I stuck with it.

Just thought I’d share that to remind you all since its easy to forget.

December 29th, 2008

Internet Tv Shows I want to see in 2009

Online video provides a plethora of opportunities for any budding entrepreneur.

You can do it for virtually no cost, build a small community and monetise through sponsorship or ideally associated products (created by yourself or others).

Some I would like to see (as I think you could blow these wide open) would be:

  • Lunchtime tv – tv show released every business time at lunch.  Grab the captive office audience in front of their computers.  (Integrate with thoof.com for monetisation)
  • Daily Bible Reading – Read the bible each day, break it up over the year.  Provide discussion/interpretation.  (cds, books, associated products).
  • Random Webcam – Tune into a random location via web cam and discuss interesting things about the place, ie an Amazon Web Cam? Monetise via travel books.
  • Programming – teach an audience how to code and explain logic behind it, let them converse one another.  Monetise via programming books / services.
  • Languages – bite size language instruction, same model as programming above.
  • Weight Loss – take one of these ‘systems’ and prove it, everyday with a test subject, show the audience it works.  (Sell the system).  This would be a million dollar idea.

Are you passionate about any of these? If so run with it.  Go on.  

The new year is an opportunity to start afresh.

December 28th, 2008

Merry Christmas!

I just want to wish a Merry Christmas to you all 🙂

Whatever, wherever you celebrate I hope you have a well deserved break.

Time with friends and family.

Time to reflect and….

Most of all have fun!

I shall be taking some time out myself over the break.

Blogging wise I shall be back on the 29th for a week then off again.

Thank you each and everyone of you for reading, give yourself a pat on the back its been a challenging but rewarding year.

-Ben

December 23rd, 2008

Infinite Paths to your goal

At some stage I’d love to return to university and finish the Physics degree I began. (finished in Marketing).

One of the theories I quite liked was that; for every action or reaction it created a space time warp.  

Such that for every decision you made, in a parallel universe you chose the other path.

Ultimately then the question came if you took the other route would you get to the same end result?

Which then lead into the philosophical question of fate vs controlling your destiny.

Which I’m not going to go into detail here.

However now the tone is set I want to talk about achieving goals and that multiple (often parallel) paths you can take to achieving it.

In my age group everyone is starting out in their careers often I ask how are you going to get where you want go be?  And of course there are many paths.

Technology forges infinite paths.

Yet this provides more and more opportunity.

Want to be come the most well known in your industry? You can:

  • Use twitter to network
  • Build a blog to establish credibility
  • Invest in SEO to ensure your personalised website comes up before the big names
  • Create an online social network
  • Build an online industry directory

Those are just some, technology has created them yet they all offer a different path of achievement.

There is no set path to achieving that goal or almost anything in this day and age.  By the morning a new one has opened up.  

Stop searching for the magic button and take one.

Whether it be your business direction, marketing plan or personal goals just start walking.

December 22nd, 2008

Running a Twitter Campaign

Twitter is a great platform for conversation. 

However how could you run a marketing campaign on it?

Criteria would be:

  • Remarkable content
  • Idea worth spreading
  • Of actual benefit to those who consume it

If you were to fulfill these, how could you spread the word?

Same as any strategy, plan, line up your chess pieces and execute.

My strategy would be around:

  • Have a series of tweets, to provide background information or arouse curiousity
  • A follow up tweet with the actual subject
  • Stimulate discussion tweets.

Then target 5 users in your niche to engage in it, with slightly different variations of the tweets.

An example would be:

  1. bwagy: checking out this cool video @bwagy sent me
  2. bwagy: hilarious, check out this video from @bwagy http://blog.local
  3. bwagy: what did you think? watch it here http://blog.local retweets appreciated

Of course this only works for the criteria above and with people you have solid relationships with.

It’s more of an initiative to maximise coverage of your first and second tier networks of your offering.

The next step would be to do multiple timezones within a 24 hour period to ensure global coverage.

You can then directly measure through tracking webpage visits and tweets (using search.twitter.com).

That’s what I would do if I was to try and get a message out over twitter.

This information is worth thousands to the right person so help spread it for me as its free 🙂

Update: Tweet this to share:

Running a campaign on Twitter http://tr.im/2j8k by @bwagy [make sure to add your comments when you tweet]


December 21st, 2008

Relationships

Relationships matter.  That’s why we invest in them, maintain them.

We need not forget that online whilst we have this brilliant tool, it is nothing without relationships.

Hotmail took off as suddenly anyone could have email to talk to anyone.

Skype, same story.

Facebook, same story.

Twitter, same story.

Relationships are so so important to us.  When we have established them on say Twitter we are not likely to shift easily if at all.  We place more value on them (than the actual service).

Remember this and do not forget it when your building & marketing your product.

December 18th, 2008

People like numbers

1,000,000 books sold

$25k/month

500 tonnes.

Numbers help provide a context and allows us to compare / contrast things.

Remember that and leverage it.

John Chow built his business off the back of showing people how to earn money off his blog.

Even once banned by google, he only grew, as people discussed the numbers.

Did you see how much John earned last month? its his highest month ever.

Share your numbers, especially the curious ones, with your customers.  It may be worth talking about.

December 17th, 2008

Zero

Zero is increasingly more and more of a relevant number.

The cost of building a brand online? Zero.  Input time and thought.

The cost of creating a movie?  Zero.  Input time and thought.

The cost of building a business online? ….. you get the idea.

Since costs are zero, what is the differentiator?

Passion.

Passion for your problems.  Your niche.  Your customers.

As humans we like passion.

That’s the one thing we can not have zero of…..

December 16th, 2008

The Rise of the Micro Expert

As is the power of small we are all micro experts.

We hold expert knowledge within a small niche.

Much of it we’re not aware of as it is just a way of life, for example I’ve found Iam an micro expert in:

  • Managing virtual teams across multiple countries, time zones and long time periods
  • Twitter Evangelist: the art of using twitter
  • Bootstrapped Marketing

These are just some, this isn’t a recent occurrence I suspect it has been like this for many years.

But now something has changed.

The value of this knowledge has changed.

Before it was handy to you and a few select people you ran into.

Now using the internet the global interest can be enough to build a market around.

An online tv show; a blog, a small book detailing your learnings, a series of dvds.

With this in mind you can really do what you love and make a few bucks at the same time.

December 15th, 2008

Personal Assistant

We now have connectivity virtually 100% integrated into our lives.

Through wifi, 3g, broadband we can connect for the most part of our day.

We have seen the rise of I want Sandy, the personal assisant bot.

However I think this is just the start, how about:

  • Sending a dm / txt of each item of food you consume, then get a weekly summary or calorie intake, spikes, drops, improvements.
  • Same with exercise.
  • Reminder services already exist (with Sandy) but how about people assistants, ie ‘can you ring me on the 30th to remind me to do my gst return’.
  • Research, can you research Jesse James and give me a 2 minute rundown of him, in time for my meeting.  (Tremendously helpful for when meeting a new company or networking)
  • Share all this with your friends / family.

This would be absolutely fantastic and be of huge huge value to small groups.

Project Management, running virtual organisations, charity groups.

This would be the step between basecamp and real life.

Absolute magic! Can we do it now? Yes we can.  Just need someone to do it for us…..

(btw is this the Twitter monetisation play? Possibly).

December 14th, 2008

Affairs in order

Right, I have some announcements,

  • I will be speaking on a panel at the 2nd Digital Media Summit next March on Gen C.  More info here.  I will try to get video content to share with you.
  • My blog will be syndicated onto GetFrank.co.nz once a fortnight under the Design & Inspiration section to share with their audience, am very stoked and proud to be selected.  My first post will be up soon.
  • My book The Best Ideas are Free is coming out early next year, I will have the site up and pre-orders in the coming weeks (with a bonus for all those who pre-order)

Also you can subscribe to my blog via email if you wish below:

Otherwise rss and other options available here.

December 11th, 2008

Standing on the shoulders of Giants

This is a term I learned during my uni years.

The concept is that in an academic argument you use others research & findings to back your own.

Essentially by standing on the shoulers of giants before us we leveraged our argument and made it that much stronger.

I like this metaphor and it is just as applicable in business.

Who do you have talking about you? or even better are you viewed as a giant? (such that people want to stand on your shoulders).

If not you should seek to stimulate this, how can I leverage myself / our business by standing on the shoulders of giants?

You’ll see organisations do it by showing their customers off, we work with so and so multinational or authors do it frequently by getting other great authors to write the introduction.

So how can you stand on the shoulders of giants to help you?

December 11th, 2008

Are you made of Rubber?

You need to be.

Especially if you’re operating on the edge, in a startup, paving a new path, or pushing to achieve your own goals.

There are no rules at the edge, you make them, and often there are many speed bumps or friction.

There are times when things go sour and it all falls apart, you’ve hit rock bottom.

No you haven’t.

This is just a part of the process of getting to where you need to go, you’re made of rubber, so you need to bounce back, harder, faster and higher than before.

Then keep at it.

December 10th, 2008

Job Description Marketing

Probably a couple of times a month I get a job description or two across my email, to forward to friends, field interest etc.

I always have a flick through and to be honest I don’t think they ever put enough effort into a job description.

A job description should communicate a story;

  • This is the story we want the employee to make happen in our organisation
  • The story as to why you should work for us
  • A story about the ideal candidate

Honestly if you have an uninspiring job description with mediocre (more often than not) copied/pasted descriptions your going to get average employees.

Few start ups have videos, showing the team, where you’d work, what you’re expected to do, sure I bet the results are lower but the quality would be much much higher.  That’s a story that will be perfect for one employee.

So if your looking to bring someone on board, remember its as much a marketing decision as a culture, strategy and organsiational one.

Have you ever been put off a job just by the description?

December 9th, 2008

What are you doing all the way down here? You could:
- View my about page
- Or for first timers the New Here? page
- Or maybe email this to a friend
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