This past Thursday I was privileged to speak to the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe about how they can use blogs and social media to promote themselves and win more (paid) writing gigs.

Here are the seven tips. For more info about the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe, please scroll to the end of this post.

1. Brand yourself as if you were a brand name

If you are trying to market yourself as a freelance writer, or freelance anything, it’s important to start to look at yourself as the product that you, the business owner, is trying to sell. Yeah, that’s a lot of hats to wear, and that doesn’t include the fact that you, the freelancer, are also the accountant, administrator, and coffee-fetcher. Anyways, in order to accomplish this, you need to create “Brand You.”

Why should I brand myself?

The brilliant Gary Vaynerchuk has the answer for you (bonus: guess who’s apparently a MOT (Member of the Tribe)…note how he says Alav Hashalom about Paul Newman passing away!):

Another reason you want to do this is because Google has a long memory, and you need to control what prospective employers and others see about you on the web. You have a chance at doing this if you have a personal site built on your own domain. To see what I’m talking about, read this post from Lifehacker: Geek to Live: Have a say in what Google says about you.

So how do I do this?

At the very least, buy your name domain name now (we recommend using www.name.com – and we have no affiliation with them, they just don’t suck like some other registrars we won’t name). If you’re name is Joe Shmoe, buy www.joeshmoe.com. If that domain name is taken, add your middle initial and buy www.joezshmoe.com. If you don’t have a middle name, pretend you do and choose a middle initial to use from this point forwards in all your professional correspondence so that people will Google your name that way and actually find you. If you think it’s weird to add a fake middle initial, ask Michael J. Fox, if he regrets it. (To see why he didn’t just use “A,” the initial of his real middle name, read about his Early Life in Wikipedia. Hint – it may have to do with the fact that he’s Canadian, eh?)

If you’re not up to it, you don’t have to actually do anything with your shiny new domain name right now. So why are you buying your domain name now if you’re not going to use it? Because it can get snatched up between now and when you do want to use it by someone else, which would suck for you.

If you are up to it, I strongly recommend starting a blog that appears under your name-domain name.

But I don’t have thousands to spend on that kind of thing right now!

That’s alright, I say. Here are instructions on starting a personalized blog on a shoestring. The reason this method is good is because if your blog becomes a real success and needs to grow, you can relatively easily move over to your own self-hosted WordPress blog, like all the pros.

Starting a Personalized Blog on a Shoestring:

1. Sign up for a blog on WordPress.com. Try to choose a  name that represents you, but remember that you will be putting your new name-domain on your blog in a few steps.
2. Choose a WordPress theme that best suits your needs. You can find them under Appearance > Themes in the sidebar of your new blog’s admin section. I recommend choosing a pretty plain theme with a header area that allows you to upload your own personalized image. My sister Deena has done a good job with that on her blog, which runs on WordPress.com and you can see here: http://deenascreations.com.
3. You should go through all the other settings and choose what best suits you. To do this, go to Settings, and go through the sub-pages and modify as you see fit.
4. Map your domain name onto your new blog. First, you need to change your DNS settings for your domain name. DNS tells your domain where it should be point to, i.e. where the site that will be using this domain is sitting. First, log into your account on your domain registrar. Try to find where the DNS info is managed. It may be under Manage Domains or Manage DNS, depending on your registrar. When you do find where you manage the DNS, remove any existing nameservers and add the following:
   • NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
   • NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
   • NS3.WORDPRESS.COM
5. Now, go back to your site and click on Upgrades, and then click on the Domains tab.
   
6. Then, enter your domain name in the Add a Domain field:
   
7. At that point it should ask you to buy 10 credits in order to use your own custom domain on WordPress.com. This costs $10 per year.
8. Once it’s set up, create an About and Contact page (crucial), and start blogging your head off.

Here are some examples of people who have really succeeded in creating a brand around themselves:

Chris Brogan

Seth Godin – yes, I know his domain name isn’t www.sethgodin.com, but he’s Seth Godin for goodness sake! He can get away with it. When you reach his stature, you can too.

Suze Orman

Gary Vaynerchuk

Here are some resources on creating a personal brand:

By Dan Schawbel – who has succeeded in branding himself as a personal branding expert

Gain a Competitive Edge by Establishing a Personal Brand

10 Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired

By Brian Solis

Facebook is the Hub for Your Personal Brand

Oh, and more Gary Vaynerchuk just cuz he’s so awesome, inspiring and in your face (and did I mention he’s an MOT? What naches.)

2. Don’t forget about social media

Since blogs run on RSS feeds, it means you can promote your blog content elsewhere. This is good because it increases the likelihood that people will come across your content, which is the most important thing here. You can set up your facebook and twitter profiles to automatically pull in your blog content, and post it for all your network friends to see.

In order to do any of this automatic republishing, you need to know where your feed is. On WordPress.com, it’s at http://myblog.wordpress.com/feed, where myblog is your WordPress.com blog name, or at http://myblog.com/feed, if you’ve mapped your own domain on to your WordPress.com blog.

To learn how to automatically post your blog posts on facebook, read Publish your Blog’s Feed to Facebook.

To automatically post to twitter, first create a user account on twitter. Then, go to EasyTweets, sign up, and add your twitter account to your profile. Then, click on the RSS icon at the right-hand side of your dashboard:

Enter the feed URL (see above for info on how to find it), entry frequency that EasyTweets will check for new posts (every hour is fine), any text to add before each tweet (I don’t recommend adding any text because then it looks automated), and whether you want to post the current new item in your feed, or only start updating from new items. Press Add RSS Feed, and you’re done.

One thing that came up during our session, and often comes up, is people’s confusion as to what usefulness twitter provides. Here are some links that may help you better understand why all these people get to excited about twitter:

7 Habits of Highly Effective Twitterers: Kris Colvin

How to Attract and Influence People on Twitter — The Ultimate Twitter Resource – this is like a how-to book for twitter

Twitter Enlightenment for Business Owners

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

The Big Juicy Twitter Guide

3. Get people to stay in touch with you via RSS feeds and email subscriptions

If someone comes to your site, you want to get them to subscribe in some way to stay in touch before they leave. If you do, you can start to create a long-term connection where they consistently receive content you create, and trust grows between you. If you don’t, chances are they’ll leave, forget that you exist, and never come back.

So, make sure to prominently display the options for subscribing. Here’s a screenshot from Natan Sharansky’s new site for an example on how to do this – note how the subscription info appears very close to the top of every page:

4. Focus – so that people know what they’re getting

People subscribe to certain content because they are interested in the general topic being covered. Imagine if you were an avid car fan, and you bought Cars magazine only to find a spread about the latest hairstyles (or whatever they write about in fashion magazines). And imagine if you were an avid fashion fan and you opened the latest edition of Elle only to find a spread about axel grease (or whatever they write about in car magazines). You’d be pretty disappointed because you are paying to read those magazines because of their focus.

Same with your blog: people subscribe to it because you are writing about something they are interested in, whether it be politics, celebrities, iPhones, or cats. So stick to that 99% of the time, and your readers will stick with you.

5. Optimize for search engines

Yes, even you can optimize your blog for search engines. SEO may be perceived as a magical talent only bestowed upon special fairy beings, but there are some basic things you can do to help your blog rank better in the search engines. Here is a quick rundown:

1. Make a quick list of keywords you think people are using to find people like you. You can use all sorts of fancy keyword tools if you want, but you can also just use your brain since you know your industry. Take this list, and write it down on a piece of paper. Make a note of which terms are the most targeted, and which are less focused. You have more of a chance of ranking high for “Jerusalem car fans” than for “car fans.” You see what I mean? So while you’d probably like to rank high for car fans, it’s best to aim for Jerusalem car fans. But even so, don’t lose sight of the big vision of ranking for “car fans” because you may get there.
2. Once you’ve got your keywords, make sure to use them whenever possible in your blog titles, and in your first paragraph. However, when in doubt, make sure you are ultimately writing for humans. What I mean is, don’t stuff your title and paragraph with keywords that don’t make sense, because while you may make Google happy, you won’t make people happy, and that’s not good.
3. Tag your posts with tags related to your keywords, but also to other stuff you mention so that you may rank for those words as well.
4. Pay attention to meta keywords and particularly to your meta description, because that’s what appears under the title of your post in the Google search results.
5. Link internally. When you mention an event, term or phrase that you’ve mentioned before, link to that other post, or category if it exists on your blog.

6. Promote offsite

Aside from trying to get traffic via the web, make sure to promote your blog in other places as well, like in your email signature and on your business cards. And tell people about it whenever relevant, without being annoying.

7. Track your success

Like anything in life, if you are trying to achieve something in life, you need to track if you are getting there. As the saying goes “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” So track your site stats and feed stats. Don’t worry about seeing huge leaps in growth, but you do want to make sure there is a steady incline at the very least. You don’t want to plateau or start to shrink – that’s bad news, and if you see that you need to work to reverse it, generally by creating more content, and commenting on more blogs.

8. Bonus – accessing the awesomeness that is called humanity

“But you said 7 tips,” you say.

That’s right, I say, but I added a bonus. The bonus is about all the people you get to connect with via your blog and online activity, particularly when those people are…extraordinary (in every sense of the word).

Recently I got the following comment on this blog, and it makes it all worth it. Note the author’s name:

Author : moshe rabeynu
Comment:
I am a former male exotic dancer and am interested in establishing a “Chippendales” type establishment in Israel. What type of assistance and tax benefits does the Israeli government provide to new businesses of olim chadashim? Are there many such entertainment facilities in Israel?  I would like some idea as to how stiff the competition would be.  Do Israeli women, as a rule, like to look at males dancing in skimpy G-strings?  Are they generous tippers?  Would they put a shekel to the shmeckel?  If I hire other olim chadashim as dancers, would they have to pay any taxes on their tips?   Can I employ dancers who have not had a briss ?  I might want to hire one or two to add variety to the show lineup. Is a liquor license hard to obtain in Israel.  Do I have to bribe any officials to receive one?  To whom is it customary to pay proteksia money to start a business and keep it going and approximately how much to they ask for?  Thank you for your help.

If there were commenting Olympics, this one would bag a super-gold.

That’s all!

That’s it – 7 tips + 1 on how to market yourself using blogs and social media. Thanks to those who came to my session – it was great meeting you!

And now, a bit about the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe:

It was started 3 years ago by Stephanie Freid, a freelance writer and journalist, as a way of grouping Tel Aviv area writers together for networking and topical discussions on everything from how and where to look for jobs to tips on approaching editors to discussing what makes good journalism to deciding on filing taxes in Israel and abroad. Attendees come from a variety of writing backgrounds including technical, journalism, marketing, book writing & blogging.
Writer Forum guests have included NBC New bureau chief/author Martin Fletcher who spoke about his experiences covering world conflict and his acclaimed first book “Breaking News”, successful book author Matt Beynon Rees on taking a journalism career to the realm of fiction novel writing, NY Times writer Dina Kraft on covering conflict in Israel and why it seems to hit a nerve among so many, Pajamas Media editor Alison Kaplan Sommer on how to slot into the new era of blog writing, Israel Project Executive Director Marcus Sheff on keeping the foreign media informed and celeb blogger Lisa Goldman on how her blog propelled her into the limelight.

For more info, please contact Stephanie at [stefanella.stef at gmail.com].

Someone just wrote to me on facebook from Seattle asking me how can go about becoming a copywriter.

I wrote him back, and I thought my answers might help others, so here they are (slightly modified):

• Study English Literature. I don’t know about all English Lit departments, but in Bar Ilan we had to write a million papers proving ideas. We had to explain our hypothesis, prove it, and summarize it at the end. That’s basic marketing writing! “Our widget can help you become a better cook [intro]. Its advanced fast-forwardizer streamlines the cooking process [proof] so you will enjoy your newfound ability to create foolproof muffins in half the time! [summary]” See – Shakespeare at his best!
• If English Lit is not your thing, you have to at least have a basic knack for writing, plus attention to detail. It doesn’t matter what style you can write in: as long as you can write a decent, persuasive paragraph that has no grammatical errors in it, you’re already on the right path. What you’ll need to do is learn to match your writing to different goals, but the basics are…basic.
• Take a course in copywriting or marketing writing.
  I never took a course. But some people learn better in a classroom setting, so it might be a good way to start.
• Read up about it on the web. Buy some books. I highly recommend this route. Keep reading on the web. Copyblogger is an amazing source of useful tips for good writing. Don’t let the name fool you – what this guys has to say applies to all writing, not just blogging
• Get an entry level job, get experience, use that experience to get a better job, get better experience, get an even better job, etc. That’s the route I took.
  Focus your career path on copywriting, so even if you get a job that’s not 100% writing, if you did some writing, focus on that on your resume.
  (Writing a persuasive resume is also marketing writing…)
  For example, in one of my first jobs I started taking care of client communications and worked on their brochure content. So even though that wasn’t my job, I focused on that on my resume, and got my next better job.
• Move to Israel. There is a huge demand for good English copywriters in Israel right now from hi-tech companies and other companies that export their services. Many writers will tell you it’s not easy to make a living writing in Israel. It’s true. But if you really become a good copywriter or marketing writer, than you can apply those skills to market yourself and build up a good clientele, or get a really good job in marcom.

I hope that helps!

LessAccounting is an online, web 2.0-type of application that allows small businesses to track income, expenses and invoices. Since I am always on the lookout for tools that will make my small business life easier, I signed up for the beta and was therefore informed of the launch via email.

The website has a clean look and feel to it, and the following introductory text:

Things We Aren’t…

• We choose not to function, act or even smell like Peachtree or Quickbooks.
• Wesabe is great, we just aren’t anything like it. (But we do import from it!)
• Freshbooks or Blinksale: we invoice, just no robust calendar time tracking functionality.
• Not a robust CRM by any means, just check out Highrise by 37signals.
• If you need a sales management component that is built for a large sales teams, try Salesforce.
• We’re not an address book or a check registry.
• No Calendar here, try iCal or Google Calendar.

On the one hand, I can see what they were trying to do here. They wanted to take a different approach that would get our attention. It got my attention alright – It made me wonder why all these other applications are better than LessAccounting, and what I would be missing out on by using LessAccounting. This is especially the case since I actually use one of the services they mentioned above: Highrise. I love Highrise, so if LessAccounting isn’t as good as Highrise in the CRM department, it makes me wonder what they’re lacking in the other departments. And they keep saying they’re not robust! Why? We want things that are robust, not half-baked!

Basically, a move to differentiate themselves by saying what they aren’t will probably leave many potential customers wondering why they should bother with them.

LessAccounting can save themselves by taking the above and making it into a table with two columns labeled “Things We Aren’t” and “Things we Are.” Then they can say “We aren’t anything like Peachtree” in the first column, and then explain their advantage in the second column, which could be something like “LessAccounting is a lightweight, online application that won’t weigh you down with a zillion extra options or features you don’t need.” Then the user can see exactly why they’re not like Peachtree – it’s not just because they can’t be, it’s because they choose not to be. And they need to say that they are robust – it’s just in their own useful way. (I never used their service, but if they’re trying to sell it, I’m assuming/hoping it has its strong points.)

Tom Chandler over at The Copywriter Underground explains how this principle is not just effective in the world of writing, but also in everyday life. He describes an incident where he had to report an injury to someone’s wife, and he foolishly started off with the bad news. My kids teachers’ are all very aware of this principle, and if they ever call in the middle of the schoolday, they start off by saying, “Don’t worry, so-and-so is alright.”

Bing Crosby knew what he was talking about in his song “Mister In-Between”:

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

It was true then, and it’s true now! Use positive words that exude benefits when talking about your product so that people associate it with good things only. Sound confident that your product is useful and that people will benefit from buying it. Don’t be negative, and don’t even be half-baked – watered-down text that is In-Between can cause you almost as much damage as negative words.

Many of us have seen the English marketing material published by Israeli companies that not only is unclear, but can also be embarrassing. Thankfully, many Israeli businesses are aware of the importance of quality content in a global market, and this awareness is spreading. As a result, Israeli companies are successfully positioning themselves against global competitors.

Now if only the Chinese were more concerned with the quality of their English content…

My Shiny New (and Mysterious) MP4 Player

I recently bought an MP4 player from an online store. I decided to buy the cheapest one I could find – with a one year warranty, I figured if it lasted a year I would have gotten my money’s worth. I take pride in not paying for brand names, i.e. iPods, and anyways, everything is made in China these days so why spend more for something that probably came out of the same factory as a name brand that costs ten times the price?

When my new player arrived in the mail, I opened the package with anticipation (email is great, but there’s nothing better than getting something fun in the mail, especially books or fun electronic toys). It came in this handy box with a magnetic lid, but when I read what it said on the lid, I knew I was in trouble:

“THE EARTH MUSIC WIND LEAD BY ME”

This is one of those mysterious Chinese sentences that I’m sure many of you have seen on other Made in China products. I have no idea why they write these things, or what they’re trying to say, and no amount of deciphering by me or my family could come up with a reasonable meaning for the above sentence.

I opened the box and took out the MP4 player. It is a thin, shiny, sleek little thing. Very cute. Since I’ve never used one of these things before, and the only interface is this simple round dial that is supposed to do everything, I took out the instruction manual. But my suspicions based on the mysterious EARTH MUSIC WIND sentence proved to be more than right – I couldn’t understand a word of the manual.

First of all, it looked like it had been typed on a typewriter, and it was printed on this flimsy old-style paper, like something my Dad used to have in his office. But the text is just hopelessly hopeless. Here are some juicy excerpts:

“1.1. In general use function of product:

• Support most 99 statures catalogues in one class are of music document and the recording document broadcast.
• Support each catalogue most support 99 recording documents’ identify.

…

1.2 Fast function of the MENU key
1.2.1 At the MUSIC RECORD,VOICE, FM, TXT, IMAGE…in the SYSTEM, in addition to the special provision situation of the outside or special obsolescent, grow to press MENU key, is all to stop operate at present, return the main course list.

1.4 Trumpet
When insert the headphones, the trumpet (player) does not work…”

I kid you not.

8 Year Olds to the Rescue

I tried fiddling around with the player to figure it out, but kept getting stuck and couldn’t get back to the main menu. My 8 year old son, who was thrilled about the new addition to the family and wanted to start using it already (he was in denial about my insistence this was actually something that was for my use ONLY), helpfully invited over a few of his friends to show me how to use my new player. The boys gave me a brief tutorial, and now we’re in action.

The moral of the story: until the Chinese get their acts together on the English front, make sure you have some offspring or offspring-aged people around who can show you how to use your new toy.

For another example of the next generation outdoing us on the technical front, watch the following video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diWiXvvR8HA[/youtube]

Moreover, I advise that the genocide in Darfur must be stopped.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been out of things for a bit because I gave birth on Sunday, Dec. 31. While I was in the hospital, I received an email from Ben Yoskovitz informing me that my submission to his Group Writing Project on “What I Learned in 2006″ won a prize!

The last and only time I recall winning a prize was when I was in second grade. Our local public library had a contest where kids answered questions through some kind of treasure hunt that involved reading books. I actually won that contest and was awarded a robot eraser. They could have handed me a shoelace as a prize and I would have been just as thrilled, since I had never before won any contests, and I guess I could sense that my future didn’t hold many prizes either.

Ben says that he selected the winners randomly out of the 70 submissions, which makes me even more incredulous that I won. And this time, it’s no robot eraser: I’ve won a copy of Jon Spoelstra’s book, “Marketing Outrageously.” Reviewers seem to really like this book, and I always love a good read. So thanks Ben, and I hope to review the book once I’ve finished it.