Using Flickr Images for Your Blog

If you blog regularly (read too much) you will often need an image - you can use an image of your own, buy one or if you are posting a lot and don't want to be constantly buying or taking images then you can use Flickr. I read this article the other day about using Flickr Images for Your Blog and it is really helpful. Here are some really nice ones that I found as I browsed through it.

An image really captures the eye and if you edit it even slightly in Photoshop or your editor of choice it can make a difference. The one I thinks is best if you want to edit is the Attribution-ShareAlike License which llows you to edit the image as well. So here is an example the type of image that you can get on a topic even like running or even goal setting - crossing the line for example

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sportcommunities/

Photoshop Tips for Pop Art

Linkedin Revisited

I have had a Linkedin account for some time and while writing a recent post for my Getting Off The Dole blog I realised that I had not being paying as much attention to it as I should have.

Now there have been thousands of blog posts written about Linkedin but I think that it has stood the time over a lot of ther similar networks because it does what it says on the box and presents itself professionally and largely free as well.

Recruiters use it a lot and in the past 12 months I have received well thought approaches from different people on it without me networking in any way with them.  They basically found me through location and skill search.

Fixing The Boiler Will Not Get you a Job

Fixing the boiler is not part of job hunting
Cutting the grass is not part of job hunting
Nobody ever got a job hoovering the carpets in their house.
Watching daytime TV is not on the top ten ways of getting a job
Having a nice nap on the couch will not increase your network.
Sleeping late will not inspire someone to pass your CV


I have done all of the above when job hunting and believe me they are attractive and lure you into a space that you don't want to be.  Get out of it right now!

What Are The Others Doing?

When you are job hunting it is easy to feel you are alone.  You wake up at home stumble downstairs, browse the Internet.  Check for emails and there aren't any.  Cup of coffee, breakfast then stare ahead at the day.  In many cases if your spouse is working you have a list of tasks for the day related to house work, kids and ongoing house maintenance.  You start feeling like that this is the way things are meant to be and that you probably wont find a position in the workforce.

This is dangerous thinking and is like leaving the gas on and will poison your mind. It is perfectly understandable.  I recommend that you try and find a network of people who are job hunting either online and share tips and activities with them.  If one in your area doesn't exist why not set one up.  Set up a regular coffee morning and meet up and share leads and ideas.  this may sound a bit off the wall but it at least will kick start your job hunting juices again.

Major Definite Purpose

I often read and even show YouTube of Brian Tracy here and one his well know phrases is What is Your Major Definite purpose.  I think for the job hunt it is too general to say just get a job.  You need to be a little more precise and define what and where you want to be.  Does this sound like complete pretentious self help garbage?  Perhaps it does.  But if you aren't driven you will sit in your living room staring at the well or watching daytime TV and feeling sorry for yourself.  If this is your gig then off with you.

No you need to plan constantly and look ahead and get better than the other guy looking for the same job.  Be more knowledgeable have better interview skills.  For instance the other day I was telling someone about how when I was job hunting I used to dictate into a hand held old style Dictaphone and they thought that was hilarious.  If you are an interviewer do you want to speak to someone who sounds confident without sounding pushy with a level understandable speaking voice or to a mumbling fool.

No prizes there.  this is World Cup Job Hunting Competition not kindergarten.  There are 450K people out of work and a lot of them are looking for the same type of job as you.  Dig Deep.

Forget Recruitment Agencies

When you look at the job websites (and by the way job websites are useless for finding jobs - the percentages are low) then I would strongly recommend ignoring any positions that are being supplied though an agency.  Many of these agencies aren't even being contracted by the employer and are CV gathering in the hope that they can present yours to future employers and perhaps get you a position there.  During the boom years in Ireland there was a plethora of these companies but they are much reduced now.  

What you tend to see more of now is niche companies trying to fill specific areas.

So What Do You Do

All the recruitment agencies do is filter.  They do not add any added value whatsoever.  In some ways they remind me of estate agents and realtors.  They jus show the house to someone and that is all they do and they then take a percentage.  

I would recommend that you word directly with the companies.  Make a list of companies that interest you, research them, make up a phone list and ring each of them and try and get a HR contact.  Reach out to this HR contact in a very professional way and ask if they have openings through either a call or email and put a link to your online CV in your email.  Don't send them any document unless requested but they might find it interesting that you have an online presence and learn some more about you and you will be memorable.

If nothing happens with them then make a note to contact them again in 6 weeks and ask if anything has changed.   It may sound like a tiresome process but this is what recruitment agents do and you don't get any commission when you get a new position.

You can become your own agency if you think of what agencies actually do in real life.

- The form relationships with companies.
- Contact them pro-actively asking if they have positions
- Tailor CVs and send them to the companies

I am sure that you can do this as well?

Kieran

Staring Blankly Versus Learning

I read a lot.  That isn't much of a boast but I have over a hundred books on self improvement and learning.  This isn't including the books and notes from my MBA which litter my top floor office.  Learning is hard though as I have read lots but learning and using is the hard part.  he same applies on-line presence and development of the Grange Web Design business.  I have lofty goals and day to day goals.  One of my lofty goals is to spread my client base.  One of my day to day goals is to develop a richer knowledge set that will make me attractive to people so that I can sell them excellent services that they can use me to improve their on-line presence.  As I mentioned in the first space on-line presences isn't a website it is having THE PLAN

I use Evernote to track my goals and I have an exclusive notebook with a ton of notes and goals for improving what I do and how I do it.  One of these goals is doing things through a more automated method.  For instance I used to do up Word document proposals for people.  Now I do estimates and automate my proposals by having some boiler plate templates the I fill out for design, CMS and for ecommerce.  The result is of a higher quality and can be turned quickly.  I can now do a proposal and estimate in about half an hour where in the past it would have taken me a half day or more to pull together.  This frees up space to work and learn some more
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Even when doing t his I still know that I am slow and not fast enough.  We are in an age of speed.  All you have to do is be one micro second ahead of the competition and on-line presence is part of that and monitoring heat is hot in the market.

Recently the news channels were filled with news of the American lady Amanda Knox who was released from prison.  I had not heard of here until I met a friend and she mentioned it to me.  She was visibly shocked that I didn't know the slightest thing about her .  I don't know much more now.  Wouldn't it be better use of your time to read 2-3 pages of news and information about your product?  Ok pause here.  A lot of the previous sentence is littering books and internet.  If you are human you are easily distracted.  I mean you have read this so far and that is 3 minute you will never get back

It is about habit forming and forcing the habit on you.  Lets take a simple change.  For your browser instead of making the home page the news and your email make it a product information page that at least you could spend 5 minutes reading every day.  5 minutes x 5 = 25 minutes per week.  You are on the road.

No there isn't any more - I bet you wont even do that but if you do you are already beating the competition as a lot of them aren't investing in reading.  Change the page weekly.  Move on to the next topic.

Ireland is Slowing Down Are You

If we all sat in the corner complaining about our state of affairs then we would still be living in mud huts.  Despite the Irish Times headline today   that Ireland was facing a slowdown I firmly believe that now is  the time for people to grow and expand and develop. The fact however is that it isn't easy and it does involve risk.  If you had started a plumbing apprentice ship in 2000 you would have thought that you would be busy with work for the next ten years.  Now tradesmen are just scraping by.

You need to look to the future and see what it is what is going on in the market and train at least your learning and CV in that direction.  Look closely for instance at the youth of today.  What do they do?  More and more they are doing organised sports and using social media.  So is there a market for a tool for managing parents schedules easily.  Could you do something creative with Google Docs for a family so that they all know where they are  meant to be on a specific week.  You can do this already but why think of something that could be used like Teamer.net that it could be integrated into a schedule.

Sounds Too Complicated to Me

OK maybe this isn't your interest but as i mentioned in a previous post the workplace of tomorrow is going to be different.  People will be more mobile irrespective of their jobs and this mobility will be through the internet.  Many sales people never even visit the home office and can do every single piece of their work on the road in a cafe or lying in bed in the morning.  Think this is a joke.  I am writing this blog post in the shower.  Well I am not but I am writing it in my email tool and emailing it to Blogger and it will be posted straight away.  I do not have to have  a browser open Ï just create.

I Don't Use Computers

Short and simple you had better start learning.  The moire you can up skill on this front the better and not just ECDL but things like databases and crunching data and how to send mass emails using software and basic CMS usage..  The internet is going to dominate the market and it will be the first tool of choice when people log in to work in the mornings - it has been mine for many years -

Get ready and start working!

Internet Marrketing in the Twenty Second Century

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs being created every day.  And 99.999999% of them are not read by ANYONE (in fact you may be the first person reading this as I only created it today).  Leave comment I will reply!

So all of these blogs they are like secret diaries.  You might as well sit next to the toilet flushing paper down it So why is this one being born today and brought  kicking and screaming and bleeding into the fresh air.  Well I am going to use this for my  and argumentative comments on the web industry today and ask questions that I may not always agree about but may be ones that you have asked yourself.  So lets jump right in.

Like many of you I use social media and more and more I see people living on the bloody thing all day long.  I look at their profile and allegedly they have running businesses but from their social streams it is clear that they are living on the web and if I was do a time in motion study I would think they were doing f**k all during the day except staring at their screen waiting for updates.  To be successful on social media is a subtle and complex art.  Don't snigger it is.  And guess what I have no idea as to even a small percentage of how to be good at it.  But I can smell bad a mile off.  A clear indication is when people are when people are using it as a chat tool with endless one and one chats going back and forward.  I see people planning dinner and coffee dates on social.   This dries me bananas.  I DO network on social and do comment liberally on it as well don't get me wrong but I do not use it for 20 comments back and forward arranging the time and date.

In a conversation with someone the other day it has become clear to me that despite the amount of activity above the large percentage of people still do not engage in the Internet at all.  They may have smart phones (most people seem to now) but the Internet to them  is Google and nothing else.  They have not been convinced yet.  the reason for this is largely because they can not see a benefit.  My wife is a good normalised example.  She thinks Twitter and Facebook are a complete and utter waste of time.  We who use thing we are in the majority but we are actually in the tiny minority.

People who get up in the morning and work 9-5 really don't give a flying  toss about social media unless it is tons of fun or will give them a tangible benefit.   Facebook has given some of that to people in that it helps people make contact with friends and play some games.   Businesses are of course taking it on but many sign up for business Facebook accounts and Twitter then look at it and leave it as they do not know how to use them in a non-intrusive way.  This is because a lot of the advocates don't have the training and educating skills to show people and businesses how to make the best use of them.

Social Media is a Starting Point

Businesses need to understand that social media is a starting point and not an end point.  It is like a networking event.  You meet someone share interests and business and understand what each other does,  exchange business cards, promise to meet and depart.  Then a few days later you meet someone else who you think with your skills and the person you met at event you could help the prospective client.  A call to the person and there begins what could be the beginnings of a long and fruitful business relationship.

social media is only the start of the funnel - treat is as such.

Websites - To Hell With Them

the same applies with websites.  About 18 months ago I took a strategic decision to stop selling people websites unless they at least signed up to the following.

- An Internet Marketing plan
- A Search Marketing Approach
- Embracing social with a metric driven plan for engagement
- Working hard to get their brand visible on-line and off line

Now I would not be doing all of this work but using a virtual team to deliver tangible benefits that they can measure in CUSTOMERS.  Yes customers ringing and interacting.  That wonderful flash site wont do that.  People working with you including you working will deliver that for you.