Tom's Top Tech Wishlist For Christmas, Blueberry Yams & PC Vs. MAC
I love creating this podcast with my co-host Tom Craig from Advanced Systems Solutions. Together we break down tech in user friendly language, help small business owners build a solid tech infrastructure for their business, AND have a great time doing it.
Our latest T2 Tech Talk Podcast is a very special Christmas edition. Tom and I break down the top tech toys for 2018 and hold rather deep discussions about world peace in the PC vs. Mac arena.
On behalf of myself and Tom Craig, we wish you a very Merry and Blessed Christmas. Thanks so much for listening and sharing, and don’t forget, buy a Mac.
Aunt Sally’s Jello Mold, Lots Of Nuts & Marketing & Tech Tips For Aspiring Small Business Owners
Looking to start a small business? You’ve GOT to listen to my latest podcast with Tom Craig. We dig deep into what kind of tech ‘stuff’ and marketing ‘stuff’ you need to start and grow a thriving business. You’ll laugh, cry, and arm yourself with some powerful information to help you plan, grow, and build your business.
Thanks so much for listening and sharing, I’d love for you to subscribe on iTunes or the Google Play store if you’re into all of that. You don’t want to miss an episode!
How Do I Get Started In Content Marketing?
Get Off Your Ass.
I get asked this question EVERY damn day. Tom, how do I get started with my content marketing? Do you REALLY want the answer? Are you sure? Sit your ass down in a coffee shop with a laptop and write. Put your ear buds in as you drive and record your voice. Turn that iPhone camera on your face while you're out for your morning walk and tell the world your stuff. Honestly. It's THAT easy.
Many become paralyzed at the thought of having to talk about themselves, or what they care about, or even what they know. I'm here to tell you this. If you're going to make it in this digital day and age, if you're looking to build your personal brand or get the world to know about your new business, you're going to have to drop the paralysis and get to the grind.
What If My Content Sucks?
You know what? It may suck. It may suck in the beginning which is why I encourage you to NOT try to force content out. Content should be about your journey, your ride, your daily grind and how you're making shit happen, NOT forced out 'stuff.' When you share your enthusiasm, charisma, passion, disdain, whatever, you light up and become animated. That's what people want online. They want to see the HUMAN in you and not the corporate bullshit speak. Be a freaking human and stand out, that's what changes everything
Youtube? Facebook Live? Medium? Podcast?
With so many channels available online it can be a real pain in the ass to determine where in the hell your content should live. Focus. Focus on who your intended audience is. Are they young? Are they older? Are they tech savvy? It's mission critical that you DO know who in the hell you need to be talking to, and then once you've got that figured out, find out what channels those folks are hanging out at and BE THERE. One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin says we need to build Tribes and be the leader. That's your mission, build a tribe of followers on these channels, feed them, nurture them, challenge them, inspire them and LEAD them.
How Do I Make Money Doing This?
And there it is. This, is the real question, and here's the real answer. Your content should NOT be intended to add dollar bills to your bank account. The whole point behind putting yourself out there is to be known, NOT to generate quick, fast cash. So, why bother? Because marketing today is about attention. It's about getting someone's attention, inspiring them, keeping them engaged and feeding them. Once you've built a following and put in the time, people want to work with you. They see the value in you. They see the fire in you. They want to work with people who inspire them. Your mission, be that inspiration.
Give To Live
If you're not willing to invest some time feeding people with your passion, stop reading this. The only way that you'll get attention online today is by being real. The only way you can be real is to simply want to give and contribute to the digital world. You do that by sharing the talents you have, by sharing your journey and by being a human being who is trying to help lift others up. Plain and simple. Give and you will receive.
Parting Advice
You may hate the sound of your own voice. You may not think you look good on camera. You may not think that you can write. Let go of all of that shit. I've been on TV over 350 times. I hardly EVER watch myself on the playback. My podcast, nope, I never listen to myself after the fact. This is where confidence comes in to play. You have to get over your self doubt and just GO. Like I said earlier, it MAY suck, but over time, you'll get comfortable in your own skin and be the rockstar that you were meant to be.
Follow Me
If you're hungry for some more advice, please follow me : Twitter: , Facebook: YouTube, LinkedIn, SmartAss Marketer Podcast
Thanks for reading, now get your ass to work.
Tom
Transformation
What Happened To My Company
When I Shifted My Hiring Practices
I've made tons of mistakes as a business owner. I've worked with the wrong clients. I've let a company bully my team for way longer than I should have. I've not always been the best at planning the future of my organization. I've of course learned from each and every one of those mistakes the hard way, but the biggest mistake I've made was hiring the wrong people. And, unfortunately, I didn't learn from that mistake as quickly as I should have.
More often than not, I've rushed into a hire. I've looked for the skillset that I know we needed to drive our clients farther, and I've done a pretty good job of finding THAT skillset. To be honest, most of the hires have been out of necessity. Perhaps a team member is moving on to another opportunity and I need to quickly react. Sometimes we've on-boarded a new client and now need a team member that possesses a certain skillset QUICKLY. I've been hiring for skillset and necessity. This has proven to be completely, 100% wrong. I've read all of the cheesy quotes, hire for character, not skills, hire for personality, not skills and during one time period at my company, I completely, and foolishly ignored ALL of that.
The Cancer
My company is fairly small. We have, at any given time 12 team members. We do have a vast network of contractors, but our core is 12. Being so small, I pride myself on knowing what's what with each team member. I look at them as family, I take the role of 'provider' to them quite seriously. I care about them. One morning I woke up to find a dreaded Glassdoor post. The post made some pretty heavy accusations. It expressed concern about transparency within the organization. It expressed concern about pay, about some paranoia, about how over-worked they are and how about how the owners, my wife and I, are cheap. It hurt. It hurt a lot and now, this post lives on online, and obviously, doesn't help the perceived reputation of my company. Rather than getting defensive, which honestly, was my first instinct, I realized that I could dig into this and learn once again. Was I being cheap? Maybe. Was I not being transparent enough with my team about financials or anything else? What did I need to revisit and pay more attention to? What I discovered next blew my mind.
After dwelling on this post for a bit, I decided to dig deeper. The thought of someone leaving an 'Anonymous' post really bothered me. I'm an approachable individual. I do tell my team time and time again to come and chat with me if they need anything, so why was this person hiding behind a veil? That's when I dug deeper. I had a cancer within my organization, and this cancer had spread already. I started poking around, and discovered a whole underground tone. A tone of negativity. A tone of US VS. THEM. A tone that disgusted, and troubled me. One example, my wife and I decided to take the team for a nice Christmas meal and I was really excited to give them each a small cash token of our appreciation. We probably invested about $1,400 that day, between the meal, the cash and the bowling that we did as a team afterwards. Granted, this bonus wasn't huge, it wasn't over the top, but to be honest, it was a sacrifice that we made for them. We did it to show some gratitude for them. It obviously wasn't enough. Posts went between these team members about how one's boyfriend get six times the Christmas bonus that she got, and it went on and on. Ouch. After digging even deeper, the messages between them got even darker and one, even went as far as to attack my youngest daughter with some snide comment. I had a problem. I had a spreading cancer. I had a cancer that if not stopped, could spread and contaminate my small business even farther. It had to be stopped.
The Cure
Some of the gang moved on to pursue other opportunities, and I had to make some difficult decisions about another that just needed to go to stop the spread. After a really challenging two or three months, the cancer was cut out. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't fun. It is partially still going on as another ugly Glassdoor review got posted even 3 months after. Obviously, these past team members had felt wronged. They had felt as if they deserved so much more. They had felt deprived in some way, shape, or form. Despite leaving for other jobs on their own accord, they decided to keep attacking. They keep attacking a company that offered them a chance right out of college, they kept attacking a company that gave them advancement, even after a few months, they kept attacking a company that tried to take care of them with benefits that my wife and I make personal sacrifices to make sure that they are taken care of. The bottom line, I took it personally, and their attacks just proved to me that I did the right thing. They are now, all gone. I obviously needed to do some team member replacement, and I thought long, and hard about what I wanted my team to look like.
Here's what I came up with. I need a team who cares. I need a team who loves other human beings. I need a team of people who don't feel as though they are entitled to getting a raise 3 weeks after they started. I need a team who isn't looking for their next vacation a month after they started. I need a team who loves to work with others and not throw each other under the bus. I need a team who knows how to respect others and understands the flow of things in a business. I need a team of solid human beings. I got them.
The New Team
Just how would I build this new team of loving human beings? Time, patience, and intentionality. I needed to insulate my company and my clients from another outbreak. I did just that, but with a whole new interview process. I took the time to write up what my expectations were of each new, and existing team member. I approached interviews completely differently. I wanted to know about them. What makes them tick. What they feel. How they feel. How they care. What they're passionate about. What they aren't passionate about. How they feel about the world around them. Do they have the ability to care about the world around them? Are they considerate? Do they have a sense of entitlement? Do they LOVE to please our clients? Are they Debbie Downers? You get the idea. I interviewed humans, not producers. I went through a few and then I found them. One, by one. Kind, humble, eager, aware of other human beings and their feelings, understanding, empathetic, caring, loving, polite, and each had an understanding how they fit into the big picture. Oh, and by the way, they had skills, and what skills they didn't have, they were more than willing to learn. I now, have a team that gels. A team that cares. A team that understands their place in the world. I love my team, and I'll never have it any other way ever again. I'm not constantly worrying about what they're saying, I'm not worried about who is going to stab who in the back, I'm not worried about who is going to go rogue, and have a temper tantrum, I'm content, and so are they. And God forbid, one of them should decide to pursue something else, I'll do it again, the exact same way. I'll hire for character, attitude, disposition, compassion, humanity, and then skills.
Walking The Walk
I caused this mess, and as a CEO, all of it was on me. I was foolish to think that hiring for skill alone would fit the bill. I was foolish to think that people would simply conform to an environment and look out for me, and the company that pays their bills. I'm an idealist. I believe in people. I trust people. I trusted some of these people way too much, AND trusted that they were looking out for the greater good of the company, and not always themselves. I don't want to stop believing in people, but I've learned that the people that I hire need to actually believe in other people as well. They have to truly care about the greater good. They have to care about others first, and then be driven to use their skills to enhance our clients needs. I've been scarred, but through the scarring have now built a killer team of amazing humans who happen to have mad skills. Through this experience, I've learned a great deal and have taken steps to improve our company culture, workloads, and more. This whole experience was by far, a tremendous learning experience and for that, I'm grateful.
We recently started working with a new organization that caters to the residential needs, and vocational placement of mentally challenged adults. I took a few team members to the site to get to know their organization a bit better last week. My team made me so proud during that visit. They were compassionate, empathetic, energized, and exhibited the love of other human beings like I never had previously expected. They were awesome, and I'm so glad, and proud to have them all. Mission Accomplished. THIS is what makes my organization tick today, and again, I couldn't have gotten here without going through a little bit of hell.
So, just a quick bit of advice, if you sense a cancer in your organization, don't hesitate like I did. Move swiftly to cut it out, and rebuild if you have to. Hire for personality, hire for culture, hire for humanity, hire for a well-blended team, THEN hire for skill, and teach whatever deficiencies exist. The payoff, in the long run is tenfold. Thanks so much for reading.
Tom
Smells, Bells, Monks & Marketing. My Marketing Journey
“If you don’t get these grades up, College won’t be an option.” If I had a nickel for everytime my parents, teachers, deans, pets, and nuns said this to me, I’d be rolling in that shiny, new Range Rover Discovery Sport I’ve been lusting over.
High school was not my thing. I was a nerd. I was not popular. I was not an athlete. I was, as the kids say today, Meh. My grades hovered around lukewarm depending on the day. I had no passion in school, until, I met Mrs. Groth. A 40 something English teacher, Mrs. Groth seemed to get me. She understood my angst. She found something in me that I didn’t know existed, a love of words. Being in her class senior year changed my life and gave me confidence in a skill that bubbled to the surface as the year went on.
Saint Meinrad Archabbey, Saint Meinrad, Indiana
I did manage to graduate Bishop Moore High School and I did manage to get accepted into a college. I’m not going to lie, there was a lot of fingernail biting, but I finally got that acceptance letter and I was off to the corn-fields of Southern Indiana to discern whether or not I was called to be a Catholic Priest. I’ll never forget my first trip to Saint Meinrad. The winding, hilly, fertilizer-infused air, the cows, the soybeans, the tractors and around that last bend of road arose this majestic monastery. Hand constructed out of sandstone by toiling Monks that looked like Jedi knights, this place was something different.
Upon my arrival, the bells tolled. A junior/novitiate monk scurried down the sidewalk with his freshly shaved corona. This college was like none other. It wasn’t a party school. It wasn’t a place to sow your wild oats. It was a place to discern, and for me, a place to write.
Learning about Blake, Milton, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Ralph Waldo Emerson started to awaken more and more within me. I gravitated toward philosophy and the classics. I would read Plato’s symposium and digest countless volumes in the cold, quiet, sandstone-lined library. I would walk up and down those aisles craving more and more brain food. I was in a writer’s paradise.
I discerned that the Catholic Priesthood was not for me. After a shit-ton of introspection, counsel and gut feeling, I graduated that fine school with a BA in English, Communications and a minor in Philosophy. Now what? What in the hell does one do with an English degree?
I scored my first gig with the Catholic Diocese of Orlando at a Retreat Center I had been working summers camps while home from school. They needed help with their marketing. I figured it out. I built a website. I figured out how to get that website found on Google, Hotbot, AskJeeves, Excite and many other archaic, now defunct search engines. Everything started to change.
People were searching for the ‘stuff’ that we were offering and finding us. I was using my words. I was creating content. I was adjusting words on that website and constantly tweaking it to pull more and more people to our little slice of retreat center heaven.
A few years later, after a few stints as a marketing director at various and sundry places, I built my own company. On Target came to life. What began as an SEO centric agency has now blossomed into a place of words. A place of storytelling. An agency obsessed with telling amazing stories.
An agency obsessed with doing it differently and helping clients stand out above all of the noise that floods the Internet daily. It’s so amazing how one person can inspire so much. I’ve been blessed by Mrs. Groth’s encouragement back in that cinder block, musty-smelling classroom at Bishop Moore. She lit the spark that has created so much. I’m so grateful that she was part of my story.
Tom Jelneck owns On Target Digital Marketing, an agency located in Orlando, Florida. He offers digital marketing consulting and services to Catholic & Independent Schools across the United States. Tom can be reached at 866-998-6886 xt. 100
Hey, B2B Marketers, Stop Marketing Products & Start Marketing To Humans
As I was PARKED in traffic this morning, I got to thinking about B2B Marketing (as one does...) I'm always asked by B2B marketers, "Tom, how can I create content around such a boring product." My answer will always be, stop creating content around your product. Start creating content for the humans that will use the product.
Start telling stories about how your product happened to change someone's life. Tell a story about how your company was created in a garage. Tell a story about a team member who innovated and created a new process. Tell a story about the impact that your product has had on a company's bottom line. When we stop focusing on the facts and start focusing on the humans, EVERYTHING changes. Make it a great day today.
Staying On Top Of Your Content Marketing Game
Armies don’t go into combat without a strategy. Sports teams don’t take the field without a playbook. And content marketers shouldn’t be publishing or executing marketing campaigns without a plan. So how do you develop a content marketing plan? Here are some simple steps:
Find the goalpost. Make sure you understand your customers, their goals and objectives, and their pain points. You can’t reach new business unless you thoroughly understand what your customers need and how your product benefits your target market.
What’s your content marketing game plan? To reach that target market, you need to establish your content themes and topics, and establish your publishing frequency. In short, you need an editorial calendar, with titles, topics, and publishing dates. Plan ahead — a quarterly calendar gives you time to jot down topics as they occur to you, research those ideas, and create outlines and drafts. Remember, content can be repurposed across a variety of channels. Press releases can become blog articles, then whitepapers, case studies, and more. Remember, though, rewriting the content for different formats is essential. Google doesn’t look kindly on copy and paste.
Scout the other team. Let your competitors motivate you. Look at what your competitors are doing on social media, in their search engine results, and in traditional media. You can see what content does well on their websites, how they’re ranking on search engines, and where they’re thriving. Then use that information to adjust your content marketing strategies.
Bring in some MVPs. Contact external experts and ask them if they’ll produce content for your site. These industry influencers give you greater visibility and often will share the content with their own audiences, boosting your reach. Yes, there may be a cost involved, but it can be well worth it. MVPs are valuable — it’s right there in the name.
Connect with the fans. It’s called “social” media for a reason. You can connect with your customers on a personal level. Nurture their needs and interests, answer their questions, and engage with them. In turn, they’ll talk about you and recommend you to others.
Rewrite the playbook. No team sticks with strategies that don’t work, and neither should you. Review your content marketing strategy regularly and figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Don’t be afraid to abandon strategies that aren’t getting results and try something new. Just keep monitoring the new strategy, too.
The pros always make things look easy, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of good content marketing. It takes careful strategy, time, effort, and, yes, money. Many small business owners don’t have the time to generate content and engage customers and potential customers on social media, and that’s where my company On Target can help. We’ll customize a content marketing plan for your business that reaches your target market and meets your needs.
The Content Marketing experts at On Target Digital Marketing can help your brand strategize and execute a solid content marketing campaign. Give us a call today: 407-830-4550.
Thanks for reading and sharing! @TomJelneck
https://ontargetwebsolutions.com
Publish Or Perish : Winning At SEO
Some very good friends of mine are college and / or grad school professors. You’ll often hear them say, Publish or Perish. Simply put, if a college professor isn’t churning out intelligent content in the form of papers, studies, white papers, findings, etc., they are typically DONE within the institution. Institutes of higher education thrive on content creation and if you’re a new professor, the best way to prove yourself is to publish and defend your brilliance, CONSTANTLY.
SEO has seen an overabundance of changes in terms of alogorithms with cute names such as penguins, pandas, tarantulas, anteaters, (I made the last two up…) etc.. The almighty Google has strived to keep its search engine results pages squeeky clean, but unscrupulous SEO types have always managed to find a way to game the results. This manipulation has caused Google to constantly refine it’s formulas in order to provide clean, relevant results to users.
So, now that I’ve painted a gloom and doom scenario, how do you truly win at SEO? You take a lesson from those professors. You publish. You publish amazing works of your brilliance that let your hungry audience know and admire your expertise. People / customers want to buy from experts, from leaders in the industry. Your mission is to not only feed your audience, but to alert Google know that your web presence has it going on. You simply do this by publishing.
Some publishing keys to SEO success:
- Create with purpose.
Build an editorial calendar based around your brands sales cycle. You know what products are hot when, you know when your audience needs one service over the other, so develop a calendar that fleshes out content ideas around those cycles.
- Create with meaning.
Be inspired. If you’re not inspired, get inspired. Visit blogs in your industry, read, listen to music, go to the gym, weave a basket underwater, whatever sparks your plugs, but write with purpose. Don’t simply write to write.
- Create with your audience in mind.
It’s not about you. The Internet belongs to the people, give it to them. Know what your audience looks like in terms of demographics and feed them what they want. If you don’t know what they want, simply ask them.
- Create it to be shared.
True SEO gold is when your content gets shared and talked about around the Internet. Make your content shareable, make it easy to be shared, make it so juicy that it begs to be shared. Include photos, videos, commentaries, styling, make it amazing.
- Create it to be engaged with.
Make it easy and lead people to interact with your content. Make sure that your blog is easy to post comments on, make sure that you ask your readers to engage, lead them and respond to them.
- Create it to be talked about.
I’m not a fan of creating controversy for controversy sake, BUT, make your titles and content remarkable / sexy / enticing. We need people to want to click, read, share & engage.
Most importantly, keep your eye on the prize. Keep writing for your users, not just for SEO. The more you put your users first, the more Google will reward you. Google, in its webmaster guidelines spells out the following and tells us exactly what they are looking for:
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”
- Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Thanks for reading / sharing. Now, get to work. Your users are hungry for your wisdom, Google is anxious to get your brilliance found.
Status Level = EXPERT.
How To Attract Media Coverage Through Digital Marketing.
So many people ask me how I've managed to become a trusted media provider of Tech & Digital Marketing content. The simple answer? I'm an expert. The more complicated answer? It took me years to finally come to the realization that I have to tell my story. I have to be comfortable enough to tell the world that I'm an expert. Once I did that, everything changed.
I'll never forget... Looking down at the caller ID in my office and seeing the Daily Buzz calling me. The Daily Buzz was a Nationwide morning program filmed live here in Orlando. They had done a Google search and found me under a keyphrase like Social Media Expert. After a few appearances on the Daily Buzz, my phone rang under. This time, it was the local Orlando Fox affiliate. They came to my offices and shot a piece on Social Media. Not long after that, I was appearing in their studios, sometimes taping 2-3 segments at a time.
This earned media coverage has been a blessing, one that I NEVER take for granted, one that helps instill confidence in my prospects, one that helps me stay on top of the ever-changing tech and digital marketing space. I've had the great fortune to appear on TV now over 260 times. As a side effect, I've also been on other media outlets and channels, have been covered in the USA Today, have been on a global station, CCTV a few times, it's been amazing.
So, how can you become a trusted expert? Well first and foremost, you have to know your stuff. Read EVERYDAY, absorb your industry, go to the networking events and hang out with smarter people than you. Read industry publications, subscribe to every bit of information that you can in order to constantly improve yourself. Next, the hard part, TELL the world that you're an expert. People want to buy from experts, they want to know that you / or your company is the absolute best. No one wants to work with a novice, ever.
9 Ways To Help Build Your Expert Status Level
- Start a blog. Keep it up. Share your thoughts, share your wisdom, share your feelings about the state of your industry.
- Keep your social media on point. Tweet and post about your industry, share your insights with substance, remind people that you are the expert in your space.
- Build your tribe. I can't stress this enough, surround yourself on social media with influencers who believe in you and your expertise. Feed them, enlighten them, entertain them.
- Build a media list. Find the right people that you want coverage from on social media. Be a real human being, don't spam them, don't solicit them, but feed them and help to make their jobs easier. Reporters need your help, they need your expertise, make it available to them.
- Be gracious. If you do get a media hit or inquiry, be nice. I can't state that enough. Try to be as accommodating as you can to help the reporter get the information that they need.
- Be thankful. After a media hit, remember to thank the media outlet / reporter, etc.. Professional courtesy goes a long way.
- Market your media hit. Don't forget to post your media hit on social media, boost it on Facebook, upload it to your website / blog, it helps to attract other media outlets and builds credibility for your company / business.
- Google is your friend. Be certain that you are keeping your blog / social media channel / youtube channel current. The media USES Google to find experts like you.
- NEVER, EVER sell your products or promote yourself during any media hit. It's perfectly acceptable to say who you are and what you do, but, this is not an opportunity to sell, EVER.
Again, the hardest part of all of this is telling the world that you're an expert. I'm actually a very shy individual and don't thrive on telling people how awesome I am. It's hard, but it HAS to be done. No one will recognize you as an expert if you don't recognize yourself as one first.
Thanks for reading and good luck out there!
Tom
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Contact Me
If I can help your business grow and thrive with expert Digital Marketing / SEO guidance, please call me. In Orlando, 407-830-4550, Nationwide: 866-998-6886.