PART 2: Successfully Selling Your Self On Twitter!

I had another brainwave on this topic and decided to make a PART 2! If you haven’t read my first post, “Successfully Selling Yourself On Twitter”, you can read it here.

I’ve decided to share two more tips with you on how to promote your personal or company brand on Twitter. Here they are:

Continued Tip #1. STAY on topic. If you want people to stay(or become) interested in your brand you need to keep them reminded. Try to keep every tweet related to your bio(or your brand or occupation).

For example, tweets like,
“going to bed, good night everyone”
or
“I’m going to work in 10 minute’s”
or
“I’m hungry, going to find something to eat”.

These are all very good, but they don’t remind anyone about your brand.
If instead you made tweets like,
“Merry Christmas from everyone at [MY COMPANY]“
or
“Re-wrote a [CLIENT'S SITE] in PHP, going to bed good night.”
or
“[this and this technology related to my business] has just released version 2.5! – http://linklink.com”

It ensures that you’re getting the word out, to some extent. Combine your personal daily activities with promoting your brand.

Continued Tip #2. Follow people in YOUR field. Try to follow people, who mainly do what you do. This way you won’t be getting a bunch of uninteresting updates. Also, there’s more of a chance that the followers of extended networks will follow you. But don’t isolate your self, people from other fields are interesting to. Chances are they might be interested in your brand and, in turn, follow you back.

I hope this helps you build quality around your Twitter network. And of course if you enjoyed this post you can always follow me on Twitter!

@ClintonSkakun

Happy Holidays: Pass this card along!

Happy Holidays! by @Armano

Please pass this along:)!!!

Why I’ll Never Retire

I’m 18 and I have my whole life ahead of me, pretty much. I’ve decided that as long as I live, I’m never going to retire. It surprises me how many people, young and middle aged, look forward to retirement once they reach 65, 70 or whatever. This is kind of sad. What’s in being old that’s so appealing? Spending the 30-40 best years of your life to end up in a rocking chair, live in a nursing home and go on cruises? I think not…

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against old people but I think retirement is just way too over rated. If I follow after my dreams, become free of financial worries and do what I love, I’ll never have a reason to retire.

-Clinton

Why People Fail Business…

Of the tons of new small businesses that are started every year, MOST end in failure. Why does this happen?

1. Excuses…

One of the reasons I personally believe that new businesses fail is the false impression people get when starting one. Yes starting a business is simple and pretty easy, however, building it and making real income is another story.

Thing is, there’s always a way to succeed if you REALLY want to. You might have your list of excuses, aches and pains, family problems, finances, school/lack-of-education… but the fact is, people in worse circumstances have gone further in tougher times. People like to give up once the going gets tough and use excuses like, “well…it was too time consuming, or there was too much competition or who ever made it in this market anyways…”. Those who inspire themselves to come up with awesome-lame excuses damage their chances for success.

2. Lack of persistence

Persistence is one ingredient of success. The ability to continue on when things seem hopeless.

3. Short lived VISION

People with a dream know what they want, and are determined to go after it. People who lack vision will always fail. Without a goal in mind the obstacles aren’t worth combating. Though if you know what you want, it makes life much more interesting, not easy, interesting and eventually better.

-Clinton

7 things to acquire as a software developer

Coding or designing computer software can be a grueling task. Especially if you’re coding for your self. Sometimes you’re unsure if the long hours you’ve put in are actually paying off.

I’ve spent a lot of time working on my own projects. Lot’s of the code I’ve written has never seen the light of day, but that’s fine because now I know what I’ve wrong. Follow these a avoid some of the mistakes that beginner coders and designers make.

1. Have a plan. Simple and obvious. A big mistake is to run with only part of an idea.

2. Motivate Yourself, set a Goal. The best way to stay motivated is to have a goal attached. Where do you want this project to be in one month from now. What you goal? One you have a goal, work toward it.

3. Regulate Progress, Get Stuff Done. Be proactive with your work. If the project is just sitting it’s going to become stale and you’re going to give up or become uninterested. Make sure your project is moving. Remember, you’re either moving backward or forward. Move forward.

4. Don’t be a perfectionist. Don’t try to fix every single defect bad practice in the first release. I wasted a lot of time on one of my social network apps trying to make it look and perform perfectly. The problem is, that revision of the app never got released. Why? Because I spent to much time on the little things. There’s an old programmer’s saying, “If at first you don’t succeed call it version 1…”. Don’t be picky. Getting the product out to the people shouldn’t be prolonged because of a few minor imperfections.

5. Be “lazy”. What I mean is, write as little code as possible and keep it DRY(Don’t repeat yourself).

6. Put functionality before design. Flashy buttons and nice colors are useless unless the functionality is there. How well it achieves it’s intended use is most important.

7. “Salvage something from every set back.” – David Schwartz. Don’t give up because you accidentally lost a 3000 line source file. Don’t trash your idea because your friend told you it’s a bad idea. Learn from your mistakes, understand what went wrong. Get feed back. Write things down. But NEVER give up. You’re the developer, make it work. Be persistent. If your software sucks, it’s ok, at least you didn’t give up. Coding is hard work, so acquire perseverance.

Activity—getting in the way of ACTION!

We’re involved in a lot of activities now days. Mainly to do with the Internet.

The question is how much of this activity is getting you somewhere?

How much of this activity is preventing you from real action? Are you busy because you’re involved in something important or are you just busy because you have too many activities on your hands?

We have to learn that our activities aren’t worth a whole lot. The reason for this is that we think simply being busy and ACTING are one and the same.

As Seth Godin put it:

Today, reading and posting and linking and networking and connecting and commenting and podcasting and linkblurbling and doseedoing online all feel like essential marketing tasks. They certainly keep you busy.
But is the activity getting in the way of action?
Is the online work you’re doing actually leading you where you want to go, or merely keeping you busy?
Dmitri calls this “imitation of turbulent activity”…

Are you wasting time on something that doesn’t benefit you?

…Instead of being on MySpace could you be reading and taking in knowledge.
…Instead of reading the news you could be driving traffic to your blog.
…Instead of using to Twitter to post links to random fun fact blog posts use it to build credibility and drive traffic.

In a nutshell, what activities are you involved in that are getting you no where and yet taking up your precious time? This time could be used to get real stuff done.

Differentiate between what’s just taking up your time and what’s helping you grow, and then eliminate what’s merely taking up your time. It will help you relax and give you clarity.