Technotip.org - Part 29

Dan Schawbel’s Me 2.0 – Book Review

Its one of the most complete book ever written about Personal Branding – which explains everything from finding our passion to the entrepreneurial conquest, and the ways to fight back when things go wrong.

Me 2.0 Build A Powerful Brand To Achieve Career Success – by Dan Schawbel.

Dan Schawbel is a leading voice in the area of personal branding, and he is the author of Me 2.0 as well as the publisher of both the award winning Personal Branding Blog and Personal Branding Magazine.

So he knows what he talks about in his book Me 2.0 so is a goto person/authority in Personal Branding niche.

In his own words and voice – about Me 2.0

Table of Contents
The book is very well structured, logically divided into parts and chapters for easy understanding.

Introduction
Part I: The Rise of Personal Branding
Chapter 1: The Brand Called YOU!
Chapter 2: Millennials Enter the Workforce
Chapter 3: Introducing Commander YOU!
Chapter 4: The Many Aspects of Personal Branding

Part II: Command Your Career in Four Steps
Chapter 5: Step 1 – Discover Your Brand
Chapter 6: Step 2 – Create Your Brand
Chapter 7: Step 3 – Communicate Your Brand
Chapter 8: Step 4 – Maintain Your Brand

Part III: Now You Have Command
Chapter 9: Your Entrepreneurial Conquest
Chapter 10: Life-Changing Results
Acknowledgments
About the Author

As you heard from Dan Schawbel himself in the above video – Me 2.0 includes a precious, proven four step process for discovering, creating, communicating and maintaining your personal brand.

The main take away message from this book is – “Every individual can create a brand for himself similar to that of a big corporate, using Internet(social media, social networking, blogging etc).”
Dan also teaches how we can make use of YouTube and other social media sites to endorse ourselves to the world at least cost, if not for free.

We all know how people have started searching for their own name in search engines – commonly called as Ego Searching! or Ego Surfing! Its been evident that more and more people are using this method to know more about what others are talking about them and their company – in 2007, 47% searched for information about themselves online, compared to 22% in 2002 and the numbers are only growing.
Dan shows ways to control the results and to use it to our advantage – in professional as well as personal life.

Me 2.0 stress on being authentic and transparent, and a word of caution for those who try to create a false image, to fit others expectation. As it would cause more damage later, than the short term success.

And the Passion
It advices to take up the niche in which we are passionate about, so that the work becomes more enjoyable and we become more productive, because people find their greatest enjoyment, not when they’re passively mindless, but when they’re absorbed in a mindful challenge – in which they are really passionate.

To help beginners, Dan also gives some blueprints and some self assessment methods to find out our passion and to stick to it and find a job which suits our passion.

It also outlines most of the methods using which we can promote our brand and also cautions not to over do it, as it may annoy the person we are pitching or the audience we are targeting.
It contains valuable information about the marketing strategies, proper timing and the target audience – which may help any business to promote itself strategically.

It also gives many real life stories as examples/case study to prove Dan’s point. All the stories come with some important lessons to learn, which are outlined for us – for effective understanding. It also contains quotes from successful people which inspires us and keeps the attention going to read more.

Recession and bad times – Graduation, Competition, Job, promotion, entrepreneurship
With the recession and bad times going on for job seekers, Dan gives effective plan to stand out from the crowd. He emphasizes the importance of Internet to create the personal brand to achieve career success and business success.
In his own words:

I’ve seen many individuals embrace their own passion, in the workplace and socially, through the power of personal branding. They are excited to wake up each day with the confidence to live the life they always wanted to live – and that is exactly how I want you to feel.

Some of the things which caught my attention – in the book:

It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know. With personal branding, this phrase changes to “Its not whom you know, its who knows you.”
Entrepreneurship is more tied to imagination than age or education.
Don’t live your life in the passenger’s seat. Take command of your life – be the commander YOU!
Dan Schawbel: Before, I would wake up every morning and say to myself, “I want to make the largest impact in the least amount of time.” Now I say, “I want to help others avoid the mistakes I made and find real success and happiness in their lives.”

The Book covers, some other effective and important topics like:
Personal Branding ToolKit.
Personal Press Kit.
Pitching the main stream media and ways to make main stream media search for you.
Maintaining the Relationship.
Reputation Management.
Importance of Networking.
Tips for effective networking.
Developing Confidence in ourselves.
Tips for making our resume stand out from the crowd and compel the recruiter not to ignore your resume.
How online life can be a positive or even a negative thing for our recruitment and in achieving our dreams.
Identity theft and its consequences.
and many more..

Conflict with the Dot Com Mogul Lifestyle
While reading some chapters about how to dress and behave – if you are a easy going blogger who follow Dot Com Mogul Lifestyle, then you may feel the suit and dress sense things as lot of work! But hey, to be practical, it all still matters in corporate world. Ofcourse, things may change in the future(as Dan himself points out in the book, to catch up with the latest trends in your industry and not to lag behind), and may be allowed to wear jeans and t-shirt at workplace(as Google Inc and some other companies allow.)

Personal Favorite
Your Entrepreneurial Conquest and the Life-Changing Results are my favorite chapters, as it inspires to apply what we have learnt from the book and helps boost the confidence.

I recommend this book to everyone, and I think its a must have for students and employees, and even for recruiters.

At $11.53 available at Amazon, its a bargain to such a valuable resource available out there. You must simply grab a copy yourself or present one for your teenage child or a coworker, and they will thank you for the book.

Good Reason(s) To Use Socialize Feature Of Feedburner – and a Caution!

There is a option, in the “Item Selection” called Item limit. If you are posting multiple posts(8 posts) at once, then there is no problem. But if you post one or two (or less than 7) article(s) per day, then you must select the Item limit accordingly. We can use keywords to filter some of the tweets. i.e., Depending on keywords specified, feedburner decides whether to tweet or not to tweet about a particular post.

Feedburner announced socialize feature some days back – i.e., Tweet Your New Blog Posts from Feedburner, automatically.

If you have not yet activated this feature, and you are using some plugin to do this for you – then take 20 seconds off and enable this little handy feature.

Plugin’s consume bandwidth and need to be updated whenever there is an update available. If you don’t take time to update, then you are at some security threat.

So do not think of doing it some day, do it now itself and save lot more time later.

How to enable socialize feature
Click on Publicize tab. On the left side, you can see list of features, and you can also see “Socialize Publish to the social web” option. Click on it and the rest is self explanatory

The interesting thing here is, Google has started using its own URL shortner. And this may be the only disadvantage, as you might already have your favorite URL shortner or built one for your custom use across all your network’s of sites.

Google may soon start showing stats for the click through rate and the performance of the shortened URL. You can get the clue about this on goo.gl.

Some benefits would be
1. Google will surly start displaying the click through rates of shortened URLs.
2. It may soon integrate goo.gl into its analytics and hence we can get a detailed report of the performance of the shortened URLs.
3. Reliability and Speed matters: We have seen some of the popular URL shortners being unreliable due to its downtime, so we can expect reliable service from Google.
4. Socialize feature comes with lot of option to customize the tweets according to our needs.

Select Account
Formatting Options
Post Content
Hash Tags
Additional Text
Item Limit
Keyword Filter
Preview

Interesting option
We can use keywords to filter some of the tweets. i.e., Depending on keywords specified, feedburner decides whether to tweet or not to tweet about a particular post.
This feature will come in handy for those, who hesitate to promote their own content frequently and who do not want to tweet irrelevant tweets.

Caution!

Duplicate tweets — be aware! and avoid before embarrassment
There is a option, in the “Item Selection” called Item limit. If you are posting multiple posts(8 posts) at once, then there is no problem. But if you post one or two (or less than 7) article(s) per day, then you must select the Item limit accordingly.
If you post only one article per day and you select the Item limit as 8, then the previously published articles will be tweeted again. i.e., you will be tweeting 7 articles published on your blog recently, other than the one you published on that day. This may annoy your followers. So be careful not to ignore this option.

Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers and nOobs

Being a blog concentrating on social media, blogging, it would be good to have some resources for newbie bloggers or people who are interested in knowing more about blogging, social media and online money making(basics).

Two years ago, I never knew the difference between a domain and hosting. Twitter and FaceBook were far from my thinking. Blogging was far from imagination. Never knew there will be so many people reading blogs more regularly than News Paper, and Tweet more often than they send a text message(SMS – texting) or Call to anyone!

Looking back those days, feels like great memories of ignorance 🙂 Unfortunately, I have many many and many friends who don’t know about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, web-publishing etc. They still think having a live website requires a great deal of knowledge, money and influence. Actually, a friend of mine asked me – how to get permission from BSNL to launch a website. hmm..I got confused for a while, so as to what he was asking. But soon realized, BSNL being a well known Internet service provider in India, many people think that the whole internet and all the websites and everything is controlled by them. Not a bad logic though. And some still think internet is owned by Google.
When I try to tell about the advantages of Twitter and tell them to start using it to their good – the last question they would ask me is, Is Twitter your website? lol…. how good, if it was 😉

Some years back, most news papers, tv News and some online publications tought us how internet is being used to scam people and for betrayal. It has so stuck in the minds of people that, they never dare to do an online transaction. And some people think Google too as a scam, because of various Google Cash Cow like scams. So I think writing about what to trust and what not to, would surly help many people in making right decision.

Not that I know many things. I am still learning and would love to share whatever I learn with like minded nOob friends!

So without hurting the regular readers, I have thought of writing about very basics of internet tools, blogging, Content Management System, how and why etc on this blog on Sundays.

So you got it — most of you may skip reading Technotip.org on Sunday and Saturday.

This post will be used as a document for later reference. Because I am sure, many people will ask what the hell I am writing on the blog. So I can point to this and can tell them that they can skip reading on Saturday and Sunday.

But it would be great, if you can come and help everyone with your valuable comments. Hope you remember your student days, where we learn a lot of complex things and we will be asked some questions related to basics of the subjects and we sometimes giggle to answer it. No one knows everything. So everyone’s comment will add value, even though its a basic thing.

And feel free to(actually I will be privileged) send any of your nOob friends to our blog.

Publish Guest Posts Under A Separate Username

Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense..

Create a user called Guest and then publish all the guest posts under that user name. This approach may help in multiple ways.

1. You can get all the guest posts from few clicks(under dashboard) — See all the posts published under the username Guest.
2. Visitors can see all the guest posts by clicking on the link Guest(if its clickable and displays all the articles published under the username Guest).
3. Visitors/readers confusion as to who wrote the article would be reduced to a certain extent.
Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense to your readers. This way you can eliminate a certain degree of confusion and add more clarity(and good usability). People will be knowing, whether its written by you or a guest writer – before clicking on the read more link.

Showing Authors Photo, Bio and a Link – using a smart plugin
Another nice way to show credit to guest writers is to show their bio, a small image and a link to their website/twitter a/c at the end of the article, in a well structured manner. Did you just say its a tedious job? No its not. There is a good plugin called Author Image, which can do the job for you. It creates a widget that you can insert in a sidebar, or much about anywhere and you can also add author’s description in addition to his/her image.

Who should care for it ?
If you are receiving 1 or 2 guest posts per month, then managing guest posts will not be a big challenge. But once your blog is out there for some more years and you blog consistently, you will start receiving a lot of guest post requests, so you will certainly need some strategy to manage them effectively. So keeping things organized from the beginning is smarter then messing up with things later.

What strategies do you follow to maintain/manage guest posts.

Take Your Site To Clinic – Dr. Google!

Note: This Clinic is provided by Google India and is only for Indian Webmasters.

There is no mention in the blog post by GoogleIndia that only Indian webmasters are allowed to submit their sites. But it can be clearly understood, because its announced on Google India Blog. And in the registration form, its clearly mentioned that the Clinic is open only for Indian webmasters.

What’s it all about ?
Search Quality team at Google will analyze websites submitted to the clinic and has planned to offer constructive advice on accessibility and improvements that can lead to better visibility for your website in Google’s search results.

So how do I submit my site and how much would it cost!
You can submit your website/blog to the clinic for free. And the submission will be open from Jan 6th to Jan 20th , 2010. Also not that, not all submitted sites will make it to the analysis list. This is quite obvious, as there could be lot of submissions and Google Team will even have some other works to do!

Eligibility Criteria
1. Your site must be registered at webmasters tool. This is to ensure that, you are the actual webmaster of the website that you are submitting.
If you have not registered to webmasters tool, don’t think it as a burden. You may ignore submitting your site to clinic, but do not ignore to register at webmasters tool. Its free and very useful tool for any webmaster.
2. Your website must meet all the quality guidelines of webmasters tool.

Also note that: By submitting your site you agree to the use of your website as an example in future blog posts under site clinic banner, by GoogleIndia.

Submit your website here.

A Humble Request
If you are submitting your website/blog to the clinic OR if you feel it will help your followers in Twitter, then please make sure you Tweet about this article. Thanks.

#Indian #webmasters #only Take Your Site To Clinic – Dr. Google! @ http://tinyurl.com/y875wcp (RT)

Source: GoogleIndia

Image Rollover Effect – using Simple HTML

When visitor roll mouse pointer over a image, s/he will see a different image, when s/he moves mouse pointer out of the image focus, s/he will see the previous image. This is called RollOver Effect. This method is mostly done using JaveScript. It is used mainly on images, while building menu etc.

Yesterday I had written an article about OnlineProfits re-lauch and I had used rollover effect to one of the images there, and some people asked me how I did it(Simple Ans: See the source code 😉 ).
So here is the simple code to achieve this design effect:

<a href="Destination Address" 
ONMOUSEOVER='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseover" ' 
ONMOUSEOUT='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseout" 
'><center><img src="ImageURL-to-be-shown-by-default" 
NAME="thinkwithsatish"/></center></a>

Explaination:
ONMOUSEOVER and ONMOUSEOUT are valid JS effects. Since all most all browsers support JS, this works fine.

Give a name to the actual image to be displayed:
<img src="URL-of-default-image" NAME="thinkwithsatish"/>
I have named above tag src as thinkwithsatish. Now Refer to this name by using ONMOUSEOVER and ONMOUSEOUT commands.

ONMOUSEOVER='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseover" '

ONMOUSEOUT='thinkwithsatish.src="ImageURL-when-mouseout" '

Hope the rest of the code is self explanatory.

Code in action!:

Now you can test it by taking your mouse pointer in and out of image area. If you don’t see any changes, place the mouse pointer over the image for some time – because in some cases, it takes some time to load.

I see that, it works perfectly in Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. I haven’t tested it in other browsers. And interestingly, I saw it working even in RSS feed!

Many people use content management system software like WordPress, to publish their content. So in order to include a RollOver effect using JavaScript means – editing the header part or installing a plugin which does the job etc. So instead we can incorporate this simple coding to get the design effect.

Design Tip: This is just the coding/programming part. To get the effect on the design, you must choose such images which will have good effect on users mind. So choose the images wisely.

I am not sure, how helpful it is to you. But it surly helps me sometime to get some minimal design effects on my WordPress blog posts.

OnlineProfits.com Re-launches, And This Time There Is Something For Everyone!

The report is all about “10 Deadly Business Mistakes You Should Avoid“. You may feel – ha again, the list! But I will reveal you a secret, which only Daniel and his first set of students know. i.e., The REPORT contains many key lessons(Modified to suit the REPORT format) that were tough in the first launch of OnlineProfits training program and now YOU are getting it for FREE. What are you doing? Stop reading and grab your copy of the REPORT.

Doors of OnlineProfits.com will be open again on January 18 (Monday), 2010 — by far the most complete Internet Marketing and Online Business training program on the web.

But we know that, most people are sick of watching different online programs launch, pre-launch, re-launch etc! But you must visit OnlineProfits this time — no excuse!!

The site is re-designed and looks good and it now has a section where we can read articles mainly related to internet marketing and online business. That’s not all, the main reason I told you to visit the website is to download the REPORT.

One of the main reasons to write about re-launch of OnlineProfits is its “REPORT“. I have gone through the entire report and its Gold. You can’t miss it – if you have or want to have a online business.

daniel-onlineprofits

The report is all about “10 Deadly Business Mistakes You Should Avoid“. You may feel – ha again, the list! But I will reveal you a secret, which only Daniel and his first set of students know. i.e., The REPORT contains many key lessons(Modified to suit the REPORT format) that were tough in the first launch of OnlineProfits training program and now YOU are getting it for FREE. What are you doing? Stop reading and grab your copy of the REPORT.

business-mistakes-free-report-onlineprofits

And as an added bonus – people who signup and download the report will receive some cool stuffs from Daniel via email. I am sure, we can learn a lot.

I know many people who are very sincere at downloading things, but they never get time to go through the content. So I would suggest you atleast go through the “action points” now, and you can read the rest of the report whenever you plan to read it.

I remember these lines, when someone says ” I don’t have time – while he/she is lying on the bed”:
1. Who says nothing is impossible ? – I have been doing nothing for years!
2. I’,m so busy doing nothing that, I dont have time to do anything else!

Hey, nothing related to this topic – just remembered it while talking about people not finding time to read a valuable thing related to their business.

Now back to reopening of OnlineProfits.com
The lessons of the Online Profits training program have been produced by top experts from different fields and specializations.

Mentors:
Daniel Scocco, Michael Gray, Neil Patel, Yaro Starak, Chris Garrett, Tamar Weinberg, Hamlet Batista, Zac Jonhson, Courtney Tuttle, Nathan Rice.

List of modules (each of which contains lessons, video tutorials, case studies and interviews):
1. Introduction and Business Principles
2. Domain Names
3. Setting Up Your Website
4. Markets and Niches
5. Business Models
6. WordPress
7. Web Design for Entrepreneurs
8. Blogging
9. Keyword Research and Mini Websites
10. Online Forums and Communities
11. Online Stores
12. Web Content and Linkbaiting
13. Basic SEO
14. Advanced SEO
15. Link Building
16. Traffic Generation
17. Web Metrics
18. Social Media
19. Selling Advertising
20. Email Marketing
21. Affiliate Marketing
22. Pay-per-Click (PPC)
23. Landing Page Optimization
24. Selling Your Own Products

I am not sure about the price of the training program yet, but you can have this as a rough figure and can look at the actual price at OnlineProfits:

This launch may cost 4 payments of $98 each (so $392 in the end). It will give the members who pay in full lifetime access to the program, including the lessons, exclusive resources, content library, social clubs and private forum.

And hey, they also have 30 days money back guarantee, so do not hesitate to join and check whether its a course for you or not in that 30 days period.

And don’t forget to download this valuable REPORT at OnlineProfits.com

Google Doodle Special – Apple falls!

If you observe Google.com today, you can find a falling Apple! indicating the invention of Gravitation. The Doodle marks 366th birthday of Sir Isaac Newton.
Does this Apple Doodle(shown in above video) has anything to do with this “Browser War?”

If you observe Google.com today, you can find a falling Apple! indicating the invention of Gravitation. The Doodle marks 366th birthday of Sir Isaac Newton.

You might have also noticed that, clicking on “I’m Feeling Lucky” button sparks some crackers(virtually!) and wishes Happy New Year.

Happy Google
Google Chrome Overtakes Apple’s Safari in market share.

safari v/s chrome

Does this Apple Doodle(shown in above video) has anything to do with this “Browser War?”

Image Source: TheAppleBlog