The general debate when talking about career paths is always around remote and regular office work.
But there are so many other opportunities people have already taken advantage of to improve their work lives.
Freelancing, entrepreneurship, side gigs, book writing, dog walking, recording audiobooks, volunteering, research studies, or just simply crafting something and selling it occasionally.
Just think about this yourself for a second or ask a couple of your friends. Most of them will have some kind of an idea as to what their ideal “way of making money looks like”:
“I want to work on an island.”
“I am a nomad at heart so I want to spend each year in a different country.”
The thing I like talking about the most is saving money. But instead of writing a boring post on how you can set aside 60% of your income, I decided to put together a quick guide to reduce the costs when creating your digital marketing budget plan.
Here are my best tips for reconsidering how you allocate your budget for marketing this year:
Do you really need that tool?
Everyone’s paying for editorial calendar tools, social media monitoring software, and even writing optimization or reporting add-ons. A small or medium business website won’t need to spend money for these.
There’s honestly only a few tools you’ll really require to run your marketing campaigns. Google Analytics (free), Google Docs (free), Google Sheets (free), an email marketing platform like Mailchimp (free up to 2,000 contacts), the MozBar (free), and a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush. You can even do without the latter ones if you mix a bunch of other free tools like LSIGraph, Google Trends, AnswerThePublic, and SEO analyzer software like SEO Site Checkup, Alexa, SEOptimer, NeilPatel’s SEO Analyzer, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or the Google Search Console.
Did you know that a larger percentage of the marketing budget for most companies goes into paying for software and not paying the employees?
The key is to pair them all together. Don’t worry though. You only have to do SEO audits every now and then to stay updated so this won’t take away much of your time.
You can also check out my visual guide to SEO if you’re not yet familiar with the field.
Or you can just use the default SEO audit option under your browser’s Developer tools:
Artificial intelligence will inevitably be all around us one day. At work, at home, on the street, maybe even in our dreams.
Heck, it’s already everywhere.
So should marketers be preoccupied with learning all about it?
To a certain extent, definitely!
“But AI is so, you know, for techies.”
🙄 No. You’re already using it actively to begin with. So I’m sure you have some kind of understanding of how it works. You just don’t know it yet.
Fancy buzzword or not, it’s definitely not something that should intimidate you.
I don’t even need to list a bunch of benefits. Just keep this in mind: Google’s algorithm is AI itself.
Making recommendations – Nearest neighbor classifier
One central use of AI ( data mining and machine learning in this case) is for creating predictions and recommendations for your clients (done using the nearest neighbor classifier if you want a fancier term).
This type of system is commonly used to select songs, videos, movies, items, or other types of content that’s already similar to what one user is commonly searching for. The principle behind this system is that a user is more likely to click on items that are similar to previous searches, thus matching his/her interests.
Remote work is constantly advertised in job ads as a top benefit you get from your next employer.
It’s more than just a simple benefit along many others though.
It’s a way of life after all.
What does remote work really mean?
Remote work is, first and foremost, a way of work and also a way of life we willingly opt for. It refers to the ability of a person to work from a different location or timezone than that of the other team members. At all times. Not just a couple of days/week. It’s by no means just one benefit, but rather a series of advantages (of course, along with its downsides) you get to bring into your life by going for this kind of work method.
If you’re looking for real remote work benefits that result from this choice, here’s a Twitter post that details the perks of working remotely in their truest sense:
While I love writing articles, I just dread putting together the perfect introduction. I don’t believe in a universal formula that you can apply to make it easier for you to write an effective blog post introduction. However, I assume there are certain things good introductions have in common.
So I’m having a closer look at 100+ article introductions to see if there are any similarities we can learn from:
Here’s a video version of the article:
Getting people to imagine
Oh, the power of imagination. Works like a charm every time for article introductions.
Alexandra Cote 🚀 