четверг, 19 марта 2015 г.

On developing a habit of writing every day

Yesterday I decided that I need to write every day. The goal should not be the certain amount of blog posts per week. The goal should be just writing, say, a paragraph of text every day. What I do with this text later, is not important. What’s important is that I write every day. With this goal in mind I created a text file on my Mac in which I’ll be writing every day. Even though the texts in this file are not necessarily meant to go to my blog I think the frequency of my blog posts will increase just because I write every day.

Another thing I’d like to mention is that when you write for a blog you may find yourself struggling to figure out what you should write about. Not all of the things you can write about are going to be appropriate for your blog. When you write for yourself, this problem doesn't exist. Writing only for my blog for the past month I found it hard to develop a habit of writing every day. From now on I’ll be trying a new approach. 

среда, 11 марта 2015 г.

One big mistake I made on G+

The main reason I’m on G+ is that I want to create a marketing platform for my products (which are nowadays my apps for iPhone and iPad).

As my products may change with time I figured that I should promote a profile with my name on it instead of a business page. That way I could build my marketing platform now in order to use it later for advertising whatever products I’ll have in the future. And I will never have to change my profile name. If, on the other hand, I had a business page called, let’s say, ‘KG’s apps’, I could only use it for promoting my apps and nothing else. So, in order to have more freedom in future I chose to create a profile instead of a business page. That turned out to be a mistake.

First of all, I could have created a business page with my name on it, and it would look almost exactly like a profile page. Secondly, not so long ago, when I started thinking about my content strategy and the ways to automate content curation, I found out that ‘Buffer’, the most convenient way to schedule posts on G+, can only work with Google pages, not profiles.

There is a not so convenient way to schedule posts on Google profiles, though. You can do it with a help of DoShare Chrome plugin. The catch here is that it only works when your computer is on. That would be OK with me (my computer is on all day long), but the problem is that my target audience is in the USA (people from USA buy much more of my apps than people from other countries) and I am in Russia. That’s a big time difference. So, in order for it to work I’d have to keep my computer turned on during night time. That’s too much trouble for me.

I already spent 2 months promoting my G+ profile and accumulated more than 3500 followers. Now I’m going to start from scratch with my newly created business page. That sucks! But I figured that, without the ability to schedule my posts, in the long run I will lose much more than 2 months of work.

The moral of the story: if you plan to use G+ for your business, even if you don’t know yet, what that business will be, don’t use a profile. Use a page. Don’t repeat my mistake.

UPDATE 2015-03-17
I started promoting my business page with my name on it, but soon found that having the profile and the page with the same name is confusing. So I renamed my business page and dedicated it entirely to my Stream Journal app. I think, in the future, when I have other products, nothing will prevent me from promoting them through this page, even if I'm not able to rename it again.