Social media can be extremely profitable for businesses or individuals, and while it is easy to think so, it is not the solution to all your problems. Social media is highly ineffective if you don’t work first on the core aspect of your business: your products. More and more, I have to explain the benefits of a social media strategy and a strong presence on the Web, but it can sometimes be hard as I think a web strategy can be highly ineffective if the products or the services a business have to offer aren’t worth talking about. The good news is that your products don’t necessarily need to be uniques for people to talk about them: sometimes, a unique offering just does the trick. (more…)

About 10 years ago, a young company called Google completely changed the game. With their PageRank algorithm, Google found a way of automating what Yahoo! was mainly doing by hand: indexing Websites and finding the most relevant websites by analyzing their backlinks. Now, this is all history and Google is part of our daily life: most people use Google everyday. The most important part of this is that Google also found a way to monetize its search service by providing very targeted ads to the users. Now, Google is without a doubt the most profitable business in the Web industry. Google killed it, with a search engine. (more…)

I want to share with you guys the funniest search keywords I’ve seen in a while. Last week, I was checking my stats on StatCounter during the day and I noticed this particularly funny piece of stat:

Let’s do a quick breakdown of this search. (more…)

The worse way to progress and learn new things is to work on your own. Everybody has something to share that can benefit you in one way or another even if you don’t think it can be profitable to you at first. This mean that just by simply listening to people, you will get new ideas and learn about new things that can definitely be profitable to your business. When listening is not enough, asking is extremely powerful. Most people are willing to help and will help you if you just mind asking for advices. Twitter is an extremely powerful platform for this because you can get in touch with so many interesting people and with just a simple DM you could end up with a skype or gtalk username. (more…)

I recently tested IntenseDebate on my other blog because I have a crazy post with over 900 comments that needed a decent comment system. I had the choice of course to go with WP 2.7 threaded comments or with a third party plugin, but honestly I didn’t want to spend a day tweaking the CSS and all that to make it work properly. Also, I wanted to introduce “reputation”, so that people could rate comments. On top of that, I had the problem that I couldn’t possibily fit 900 comments on one single page, they had to be splitted on different pages. All of that my friends, is IntenseDebate. (more…)

I would like to share two videos featuring two well-known persons: Seth Godin and Steve Jobs. The first video is an interview with Seth Godin in which Seth talks about when to quit and why choosing the right moment is extremely important. It is of course related to his book “the dip” that you might have read, but even though you did, it’s a great video.

The second video is a speech from Steve Jobs in which he talks about a lot of things and it is somewhat related Seth’s interview. There’s a part in the video where Steve talks about the fact that he never graduated from college, but what looked like a bad decision at the time, turned out to be one of the best decision in his life: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect looking backward”. (more…)

Personal branding is going to be huge in a couple of years as everyone is at least very good at one thing and also because it is going to be even easier than today to start a blog, run your own TV show and things like that. This post is going to be more a discussion and some thoughts about whether or not businesses and companies will have to deal with personal branding and if it will be an issue for them.

The impact of social media and personal branding

With social medias and personal branding, each and everyone of us is an “expert” in a field. If not an expert, you’re talking/blogging about something you feel comfortable with. Some are extremely lucky, have a day job they really enjoy and blog and tweet just for fun. On the opposite, some have a boring day job or a job they hate and this personal branding/blog stuff is what keeps them alive during the evening and at night. It is for some, just like a double life: working as a regular receptionist during the day and running a popular show on the web at night. (more…)

The most common question I get when I explain to people what I do online or blog about is: “Why do you give away your tips and tricks? Doesn’t that give you more competition because everybody knows how you do things?”. It is easy to think this way, but the reality is that sharing your tips and tricks is not a problem, most people are watchers, ideas gatherer or simply don’t really care about what you say. (more…)

It’s really strange and interesting at the same time how things can happen. This morning I woke up and thought about branding yourself or your website and how much I like talking about it. This led me to ask myself an important question: “Am I full of shit?”. This is a very honest question to ask and I think you should ask yourself very often as you can look at things from a different angle. What that made me think of is: “What if I stop advertising what I am or my brand? Could it be possible to have no brand, still bring visitors and have a certain feeling of success?” (more…)

I’ve been thinking about this for over a week now and it really obsesses me. Do you sometimes have the feeling your online journey won’t bring anything good to this world? I am not talking about blogging or running a website for a purpose or to give tips and tricks on a specific subject, I’m talking about building websites or blogs on a subject you have absolutely no clue about just to get money through AdSense or whatever affiliate program? (more…)