I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. I was wrong.
One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul. " It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. And now I'm supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. But instead it's 8PM and I just woke up. I didn't want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey. In early 2012 I was 26 years old and burnt out. I thought the internet might be an unnatural state for us humans, or at least for me.
My plan was to quit my job, move home with my parents, read books, write books, and wallow in my spare time. My goal would be to discover what the internet had done to me over the years But for some reason, The Verge wanted to pay me to leave the internet. Technology, Change and the Hybrid Marketer. "The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.
" - Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman For those familiar with Arthur Miller's classic Death of a Salesman, the above statement is an apt way of describing the depth of the technology and digital landscape as we see it today and the role of the traditional digital salesman compared to the rise of the hybrid marketer -- confusion yet opportunity. Death of a Salesman is not so much a story about the life of a traveling salesman as it is a story of the changing social and economic pressures on the nuclear family.
The play's protagonist, Willy Loman, is a symbol of the past, and like the traditional media salesman, is at risk of becoming obsolete. The idea that a human being should become obsolete, that it is even possible, could be read as a social critique by Miller on the increasing mechanization synonymous with that era but also draw a parallel with the technological change in today's digital marketing ecosystem. 1. The list goes on... The Season of our Discontent Marketing. Crap: the single biggest threat to B2B content marketing. All the surveys show the same trend: 90% of marketers plan to spend a lot more on content this year than they did last year.
(God knows what the other 10% are planning). It doesn’t take America’s Next Top Model to tell you that this adds up to a big boatload of content coming our way. As consumers and buyers, we’ll all be targeted by a tidal wave of eBooks, blog posts and infographics. Let Me Wave my Magical Content Wand. It usually starts something like this: Hey!
Everyone I know is on Instagram! We should start an Instagram for the company! The suggestion in itself isn’t wrong per se, it’s just not made with much of an understanding of how these social platforms work. It takes less than 5 minutes to set up an Instagram account (if you have an iPhone or an Android). People who rarely use social networks love platforms…even when they, themselves, admit to not having enough time to use them. But what people who don’t use social networks much fail to understand is that picking a platform means that you need to create ongoing content for that platform. Creating content for a brand (company, organization or individual) is like running a news room…but even more complicated because it needs to be interactive.
Wordpress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records. Working on developing a core of WordPress classes for Clark College and preparing for the next “Introduction to WordPress” college course in a couple weeks, I’ve put together some statistics on WordPress you might find helpful – and stunning.
WordPress continues to break records set by others, but more often lately, break records set by itself. As of 2011, estimates are that 25% of all websites are published with WordPress. As of March 2012, WordPress is on 72.4 million sites in the world. WordPress.com hosts about half of them. As of a moment today, WordPress 3.3, the latest version, has been downloaded 12,179,538 times, continuing to break previous version records for downloads and upgrades. WordPress is an Open Source web publishing, content management system platform. In July 2011, WordPress 3.2 was released and had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever in the history of WordPress. Who Uses WordPress? The WordPress Community.
Blogging for your business is worth it even if you get no traffic. I used to blog out of guilt. Every now and then, my investors would sternly suggest I blog more. I’d grumpily obey and then point to the flat traffic graph as clear evidence of blogging’s fruitlessness. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy of fail. I’ve written previously about my first month of serious blogging in terms of performance & initial thoughts. A couple months on, I now see a clear ROI — even if you have no traffic.
My process Posting used to take me 4 hours. Capture every ideaDon’t wait for good ideas – shipping regularly creates qualityDon’t obsess — publish posts on the 2nd draftWatch realtime analytics and heavily polish only the posts which start to take off Blogging makes money, sort of, eventually. Cookie law: the gnarly truth.