The branding lesson of a small shop in Anwerp

In the last 12 months, travel played an important part in my life, hence my focus on my travel writing and photography instead of my usual social media and branding topics on this blog. However, as usual, travel gives me an opportunity to discover new social media and cultural practices, to get in touch with interesting people and use the opportunity of spending time in a new environment for finding answers to my old questions.

One of the main things I enjoy while being abroad, is to test the customer service and to notice how the companies and especially small shops are promoting themselves in a very competitive environment. 

Two months ago, I visited the beautiful city of Antwerp and, as usual, I stopped by to a small bookstore in the Jewish area, where I needed to purchase some important books that I cannot find in my side of Europe. After over 40 minutes of searching and considering how many books I can carry with me for the next hours, I decided for a couple of titles and some children books and went to the counter to pay. There, my books were checked and on the last page of each was glued a little sticker with the name of the bookstore, its address and a telephone number. From now on, when someone will have a look to my books, they will see for sure from where I purchased them and eventually, how they can have their own too.

It is a very simple and classical trick, as easy as the usual address of your blog that you add to every official e-mail exchange with your business partners or sponsors or potential collaborations. The costs of ordering the small bumper stickers are minimal and the effects are long-lasting. This is the kind of branding made with heart and without an impressive investment. You don't need to pay advertising in big newspapers or even on websites targeting your audience. Read in the family and shared with friends, the books are always carrying a little mention about your business and this can matter more than some fabulous mention in the media. At least for a medium-sized business, such a local strategy can work successfully, at least for a while and as long as your customers are happy with your products. And if the 'products' are books, consider it a partial success. 

How to plan your career switch

Everyone is talking or considering at least once the month a 'career switch' nowadays. As a travel blogger, I read regularly successful stories of people that gave up their corporate life, packed a small luggage and decided to go around the world. The main incentive is to discover yourself, enjoy the beautiful world and end up the slavery of a 9 to 5 office work, regardless hot much 0s you have in your account.

Theoretically, I cannot agree more. I am also one of those who after more than 15 years of carefully planned career - I started to see my 'future' since the last years of high-school and carefully worked my way through it - decided that freelance writing work from home and more travel - after a lot of travels before - is what makes me happy and accomplished. 

My career switch was not tremendously dramatic, compared to those who decided to become writers after a career on the financial markets or engineering. After I've read the diary of Virginia Woolf at 16, I knew that I want to spend the rest of my life writing. It took me some time till I discovered what I really wanted to write about, but I did not waste any moment of my life to learn more and read even more. And to travel. 

After a master degree and a PhD, a short career in consulting and PR and even diplomacy, that helped to get skills extremely useful for my travel writing projects, I gave up the business life and for one year I did nothing else but reading for improving my English skills and imagination. Learning to breath and realize what are my real priorities was not easy, but I wanted to succeed and this is what it happened. Doing those things that I never had the time to do before as I was always busy, working to meet deadlines or simply killing time waiting till a messy boss is reading the 100th mail on the same topic sent in less than 24 hours. 

When reading the beautiful success stories about the smooth career switch, one can really dream that everything can be done within a matter of months or even weeks. But, believe me, especially if you want to jump from a profession to another, the first positive signs can be seen only after 2 full years of intensive work. Whatever tempting leaving your cubicle now may be, be sure that you don't jump into the abyss of poverty and financial and social limitations. As long as you have some savings and some ideas for a limited amount of time of work daily, you can start planning carefully your next steps. 

I will tell you a little secret: as long as you see how things are put into motion and your work is appreciated and you feel deeply happy and grateful for your decision, nothing can stop you to continue doing better and better. You should never forget though to be genuine and work hard. Career switch doesn't mean retiring, but working double to achieve your real potential.

Those interested to start a blogging career will be interested to check my coming next eBook, available on Amazon.com in maximum 10 days!

Keep in touch with good news!

Planning and writing

When I have to chose between writing and marketing my content, I feel bothered. I love to write and bring more interesting topics for my blogs, but after a couple of years of modest blogging, I realized that without a minimal plan of marketing my content I will not reach any audience at all. It could be sad, deceiving, a reason for infinite philosophical complains and meditation, but this is the reality and denying it is one's own risk. 

As I deeply hope that sooner or later my blogging career will bring me a significant income, I need to think more than ever to marketing tips. The problem is the amount of time I need to spend from a platform to another. And another amount of time to keep in touch with the latest discoveries in terms of SEO, Google Ads, content marketing. Also, I need to be at least one hour the day present on social media, to share interesting information and to engage my audience. Lucky me that I am a fast writer and reader, but at the end of the day, I realize that my writing plan was not kept and I still have a lot of delayed blog posts.

What is to be done? What can I do in order to achieve the right balance between quality writing and the best methods for reaching more and more people. At the end of the day, when I want to start a long term collaboration, my readership and ranking will matter considerably in a favourable decision. Enough with the autistic attitude that kept me away from a big readership. I need to be seen and read and I need more and more comments from my readers. But, I also need quality...

I had coped with those rhetorical questions for a while, especially in the last days, when I realized how much I want to bring more and more travel stories on my travel blog. I feel how the words in my notebook lost their patience and made me responsible for the delay of bringing them into the online life. Meanwhile, I was too busy updating pictures on Pinterest, and participating to chats on Twitter. Plus, I needed to see how my Google+ campaign is going - excellent, with a better dynamic that in the case of Facebook. 

In the morning, up early for finishing all my writing dreams till the middle of the day, I decided to keep quiet and follow my priorities. Which are offering more quality writing content that can be later on shared over and over again on social media. In order to build a strategy, I need to have the main elements of it, isn't it? This is what I promise to do in order to avoid the negative tensions of being unhappy with myself. Thus, I will spend one day writing intensively and updating my blogs and the rest of the week running around the web and find the right audience. 

At the end of the day, everyone will be happy, I hope! 

Looking for motivation. And finding it

I am a very simple target-oriented kind of person. I like to set up objectives for the day, week, month. I work with a very straight forward agenda each day and my activity is carefully calculated for covering a lot of activities, hobbies, social obligations and network needs. As writing is my favourite pastime, I tried as much as possible in my professional life to find working opportunities in this domain. And, after a lot of work and training, I succeeded. I loved to do it so much that since I am 18, I hardly had one single month without writing and publishing something. 

All being said, I can consider myself a happy and successful person. I almost have everything I want - at least for now - and I always did almost everything I wanted to. You will rarely find in my recent life moment of deep depression because I hated my office work and my grey cubicle in the multinational company. I am simple enough to say a clear 'no' when I felt breathless because working in a domain or with people that cannot help me to grow. I am selfish but I am convinced that when I am happy with what I do I can share and help a lot of people so better move forward although the financial benefits can be a little bit more or less affected.

From time to time though, I feel the need to find out more motivation and a clearer direction for my daily activities. In nature, as in life, too much or too less are never good environments for a good work pace. For instance, as I always work intensively on Sundays, the usual 'start of the week' for more than half of the world is very often a very exhausting part of the week for me. As I travel on Sundays - with early and late work batches -, I am rarely on the road and I try - theoretically at least - to do as much as I can from my agenda. But I do not expect a high level of productivity, as the tortoise's pace is what I cope with, at least for the first half of the day. 

What I usually do in such unpleasant situations? The first impulse for my productivity is to start doing the easiest tasks from the to-do-list: answering simple mails, checking texts, editing photos, setting up the writing schedule for the day. I am also looking for topics of interest: I do have a look at the latest news about food and interior kitchen design for my foodie blog, I browse creative boards for Pinterest, I have a look on my notebooks to see if I do have organized notes for a very easy post. Once I start writing, I would love to write more and more and thus, my hunger for doing more things is revealed. Good move both for my audience and for my writing skills.  

Sometimes, I simply try to find out the best inspiration from people around me that may help me to have a fresh beginning with some of my projects. For instance, today, I was a little bit tired to think about some of my writing projects - maybe of them waiting to be took into consideration for a couple of years already. Not that I did not write properly in the last years, but due to my spontaneous nature, I often do some intensive writing and editing in the first 2-3 months of life of the project but once I do find some new inspiration, I prefer to put everything on hold for a while. In the end, I finish everything I have in mind, but somehow late. Unless I do not need to answer some very tight deadlines of a publisher - which does not happen in the last 3 years since I rather prefer to self-publish. 

The answer for more organisation was to start talking with a very organized and talented friend of mine, who is publishing almost yearly at least one book. We talked for a while, updating each other about the projects and what we want to do, or already did. A very simple conversation between old friends with a common passion. At the end of the conversation, I felt more empowered to continue what I started and eventually set up deadlines for the new ones. Being together with people with similar interests is very important. In case that you did not find yet your community, you still have a chance to get the proper inspiration while finding online communities and blogs that can offer you symbolic or even direct support for your endeavours. 

Good luck everyone and have a wonderful productive week!

See your online business grow

It is not the first or the last time when I say that I am living in the perfect possible worlds (for me). I am happy to be connected with people from all over the world and share ideas and suggestions. I love that I can use Skype for conference calls, new clients, friends and relatives. I love that it is possible nowadays to travel with the speed of light and see so many wonderful places around the world. I am also happy that nowadays with a bit of inspiration, courage and a lot of work I can publish my own books and articles and be completely independent work-wise. When I grew up in a communist country, coping with censorship, 2 hours of TV per day and frequent light black-outs I could not imagine that such a world exist, but the best in life is to expect the unexpected. 

In the last weeks, I dedicated almost all my time to my growing business of the travel blogs. Somehow, I find amazing realizing for how many time I was only concerned about writing and reading, without considering to organize a bit my time and my skills and launch something serious and clearly targeted. But it is not too late to get on the right track, even though I feel sometimes that I am centuries away from a real achievement.

The main encouragement is that I see each day how things are changing positively. At the beginning of each day, I try to find some new tools and quality communities and every two days I check the results - mainly the audience. Last week, I used extensively Google+, through the dedicated communities of bloggers and travel writers, as well as StumbleUpon (till now, only in a passive way, simply sharing my pages, without too much interaction). I see how things are improving and I feel that I am going on the right path.

The main sources of inspiration not only from the point of view of writing style, are the successful blogs: you can see, for instance, how to set up a professional media file (I am more than thousand visitors away from such an achievement, but I am getting ready), what could be the opportunities for sponsorships, what are the best networks to increase traffic, how to address different topics, what could be the opportunities for more visibility. My biggest problem right now is the look of my travel blogs (but of that one as well), especially my lack of understanding of the qualities of Wordpress. The plan for today and tomorrow is to get some crash course, unless I want to pack my articles and move to another online house. 

Another thing I should do as soon as possible is to set up a list of possible sponsorships that may help me advance some of my writing and travel projects. Usually, this is the weakest link in my professional evolution chain, but I hope that after I will have a tasty cake and a strong cup of coffee, I will be able to be more focused and bold.

The adventure continues! Keep in touch!

What are you writing for?

My blogging and writing activity goes very well, thank you for the question. It is a lot to do and explore - especially when working full time for travels and foodie blogs. But, as I said on several occasions, writing and living with the impression of doing extraordinary things it is not enough. The blogs need (a lot of) promotion and intensive networking. Sometimes, you also need also some serious resources, financial, especially first because I need to diminish my time spent with various freelancing projects and second because in some cases a little bit of advertising may help. 

Time-wise I need to learn a lot about SEO and ads and various tips how to use Wordpress as a pro. And in between I need to improve at least another foreign language I have in my pocket because I need to go as international as possible. The list is getting longer and longer each day.

However, if I start thinking mostly about what I need to do to promote my posts, I forget something the most important part of my online story: the content of my stories as such. This is why I have blogs and Facebook page and Twitter account: because I want to share stories. Being present only for the sake of the social media profile does not solve the issue of who will write my posts as good as possible to be considered by publishers and companies for getting more work and visibility. No one will go to find out interesting topics or to prepare interviews if I am stuck checking how many people unfollowed me. 

At the beginning of the online adventure, there may be a lot of time needed until getting to an acceptable level. Learning how to use some good tricks - I started to use recently Google+ and I have only good words for this decision; the same goes to StumbleUpon (hope to write more about those experiences in a separate post) - and trying to be as organized as possible when it comes to various online events - such as the Twitter chats that I love more and more instead to the lonely autistic way of posting on my own and connecting from time to time to some fellow Twitter friends. 

The objective of the next weeks is to create more quality content, end up some interesting advertising deals and learn some decent principles of using successfully YouTube. The more I write the more I want to spend more time for my articles and this is why I want so much to do what I am doing. All my work, time and valuable resources should be spend doing the single thing I always wanted to do: writing. The rest is part of the right appreciation that my (hope) quality work might obtain.

  

Using Twitter for more content

When I first joined Twitter, maybe 2 years ago, I used it mostly to satisfy my curiosity of a social media consultant in the making, without having any other secret plan than to change ideas and get the best news in real time. For a good time, this limited objective worked perfectly and the first work-related thing I was doing in the morning for weeks was to check my Twitter account and read the latest news. From time to time, I was also a news setter being among the first who launched on air some freshly pressed information. Even though I was not necessarily following a strategy, I got credibility and serious connections that brought me near an impressive threshold of 1,000 followers in 12 months.

Besides the conversations on general and generous topics and the choice of the right hashtag and some consistent #FFs, there were not too many 

However, after a while I got bored and realized that I have other priorities in life than to check my Twitter. I restricted the access and mostly abandoned it. Now I enter every 3-4 month to check if someone interesting sent me any message. Meanwhile, I decided to be more focused on a specific strategy and opened a business Twitter account. My aim is to connect with specialists and trend setters in my domain, to share my own opinions and thus, to get a good traffic for my blogs as well as to provide reliable content. 

Since I've been the last time on Twitter things changed considerably and it is not very easy to win supporters/followers unless you do something (hard, very hard) to deserve them. As I remarked on another occasion in a recent post, I feel that I really deserve every single follower as behind the entry of any new member into my virtual community it is a lot of serious consistent work. Believe me, it is not that easy to expand your audience, but compared with the 'old good times' I feel that the growth is more consistent and thus is worth the effort. 

One of the most serious ways to be considered when looking to connect with the right people on Twitter are the Twitter chats. In most cases, there are weekly's fix whose date is known days in advance. The day of the chat, one may spot at least twice announcement of the event, or even some hourly countdowns that help those interested to gather online for a more than casual discussion. It may last 30 minutes or one hour with regular questions aired every 10 minutes. Each chat has a predetermined topic that has to deal either with the latest trends of the industry or with the people sharing the same interests with you. There it is your weekly or daily - if you have enough time - to share your practises and to convince the other participants at the discussion that you really have something to say.

As in many other cases, this is only one of the many tools one should use for increasing its online audience. Do not expect dozen of new followers after every chat. You better focus on getting the best content and writing nearly to perfection. This should be the main focus of any blogger, regardless of his or her domain.