Can Blogging get you fired? It might… if you worked for the CIA!

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These days, downsizing or termination or being fired can happen more quickly and more easily than ever before except if you work for yourself. Recent large companies downsizing include all the big three car companies… What if you were a CIA agent and you got downsized? What could you do?

Here’s how it might go:

My name’s Weston. Michael Weston. ‘W’ to my friends. And here’s my problem – I’ve been fired. As a special operative for the CIA, I regularly take part in covert operations in friendly and unfriendly nations. Intelligence gathering is my remit.

Last week, we were attending a conference for Blogging in London. Naturally, I went undercover as an ace technology intelligence gathering expert for a private company. Using complex statistical software, we were able to gather, refine and produce top-secret intelligence reports for the CIA.

Unfortunately, my cover was blown wide open. On my blog, I had placed a link to my personal Twitter account (a front for the blog!), but it included a link to one of my ‘personal’ pages. Visiting that page, a visitor found that it was linked to my other site on Facebook, and boom! I was blown. These ‘other’ pages aren’t indexed at all. But still… A rather dumb mistake for an intelligence operative!

Now I’m out looking for a job… perhaps I’ll be the first blogger to blog about the CIA – the inside story. Of course, I’ll have to do it ‘undercover’.

Of course, this is fiction, but what if…? If you are interested in finding out how Michael Weston was fired on the new TV series, Burn Notice, visit USA Network’s Burn Notice.

Running a blog in another language: it’s a challenge

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nozkidzI recently decided to keep my business website on the Wordpress platform for a number of very sound reasons and against the advice of some people. I found that the Wordpress platform offers a tremendous number of benefits for small business websites and those starting out with their own online businesses like …

Ease of use: it’s tremendously easy to get it up and running. It’s also very easy to do basic administration for the blog without knowing much or anything about the underlying programming language.

Support: there is a huge user base out there to create themes, plugins, and whatnot. You can find answers to most questions quickly, and someone somewhere is working on a solution if one isn’t available. Also development speed is fast. We’ve moved from 2.0.7 to 2.2.0 in the space of a few months.

Web 2.0: there are quite a few ways to take advantage of the interconnectedness of the web 2.0 that static HTML sites and old style websites just lack – automatic feed creation, trackbacks, commenting, multiple authors, etc.

International: the multi-language support of the blog software makes it easy to post in several languages, including my target language: traditional Chinese.

But challenges remain, most of them not to do with the software. The biggest challenge is getting content for the website. I’ve asked a colleague to write up an irregular column for us, but that’s an expensive solution. My own facility with the written language is poor at this time, and I’ve made no progress yet, really, except to make my Chinese speaking colleagues cringe at my poor writing. I’m looking to source language learning articles from Chinese speakers written in traditional characters, but it’s hard going. I don’t know where to advertise for that.

The second problem is that the blog is published on the Internet, but our market is very much a local market area, so it’s sometimes difficult to reach out to the local population. Many of the target market are in fact older people, but who seem to have less interest in the online media than their kids and younger people in general. So, I’ve put our website address everywhere, but I suspect few people look it up. I’m thinking that people with Internet enabled mobile phones might be more likely to check it out!

So I have had to combine new media with old: I created a newsletter that is available in printed form, and online in several forms (including a PDF). Almost all of the content is created for the website or the newsletter. However it is created, it is used to get maximum effect. I’ve also added a few newsletter stations around the area where the newsletter can be picked up for free. Additional flyers, banners, posters and so on, all have their online equivalents.

It’s quite surprising but I think the offline marketing has been much more successful than the online media. But online allows us to do so much more, including video, montages, photographs, contacts, newsletters, mailing lists, etc. that I can’t ignore it. Despite that, we have never received a single query from our online website. So we really need to refine our marketing outreach! Back to our keyboards!

Driving Offline Users to your Business

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It’s quite tricky to drive offline traffic to your business if your location is less than optimal. But it can be done. A newsletter is one of the ways we’ve tried to create additional interest in our business and our blog. (Click to see the fullsize image of page 1).

newsletter

Why a newsletter?

We chose a newsletter for a number of reasons over a regular flyer:

  1. One was the we wanted to start to ‘educate’, ‘inform’ and ‘interest’ our readers in English language learning for children as much as advertise. Of course, we could not leave out the advertisements, but we put them on the inner pages rather than the outer pages so that people would have something to read BEFORE they go to our advertising. We wanted our readers to read something that was intrinsically interesting.
  2. Another was that a newsletter is a regular thing, so people can begin to expect to read it at regular intervals and we can begin a conversation with people who aren’t our customers.
  3. A third reason is that it can make our business seem much larger than it really is. With the internet, our newsletter becomes global instantly, available to billions of people worldwide.
  4. Lastly, it was able to reflect what was going on in our business much more timely than a standard flyer. Its seasonality is important, as our business is seasonal!

There were other lesser reasons, but together they made a lot of sense!

Format of newsletter

We also made the format small using A5 format but printing on A4 double sided. We created a four page newsletter that looks quite effective. You can see from the JPEG the first page. It’s difficult to get the full impression nevertheless. Of course, we can only print in b&w at the moment, but if it becomes a big enough phenomenon, other things become possible.

Putting it together

It’s not difficult to put one together but you have to have a certain mastery of the PC tools at your disposal, especially Word or Publisher (Writer or Scribus, too). Also, if you have a photocopier, you can reproduce the newsletter quite cheaply and quite effectively. Local printshops will do color reproduction but I have yet to investigate that option fully!

Distribution: Targeted is better!

Getting your newsletter out there is sometimes a problem. We built an advertising station for our newsletter, and placed it in several locations suitable for flyers. People would go there and pick up flyers themselves. Also, we sometimes distribute them on the street ourselves by hand. That works well, too!

How do you reach customers? Do you have offline media, too? What other ways are there?