October 3, 2010

Freelance Camp Toronto Wrap Up + my presentation (#flcto)

Well, it has been a busy week. After presenting at MARS (post to come soon with video) on Wednesday I was off to Freelance Camp Toronto.  Freelance Camp was operated by Erin Bury (Sprouter), Wayne Lee (Camaraderie) , Rachel Young (Camaraderie) and Jeff Waldman (FusionPoint) and myself.

What a full lunch room

Firstly, the event was a runaway success with over 260 registrations. We knew we hit success when, before announcing speaker schedules, we were at full capacity and had to take our registration form down. Thanks to our sponsors (see Freelancecampto.ca for a list) and Ryerson University for hosting us. More importantly, thanks to all of our speakers (4 tracks all day is no small feat) and attendees. Dropping into each session the discussions were deep and everybody saw value. Within the next week you will receive follow up e-mails with links to everybodies presentations and photos. We have already begun tentative talks of our next camp, most likely in 6 months time. I will post and tweet links to photos as they come in.

My talk was based on two items:

  • Social media is NOT new
  • The 7 biggest mistakes practitioners make.

The slides are bare, but on this topic I focused on how we measure clicks, views but rarely correlate anything to sales. A copy of my slides is below.

Alex Blom presenting at Freelance Camp Toronto

August 25, 2010

Freelance Camp Toronto is coming #fcto

Just a quick note: Along with Erin Bury, Wayne Lee, Jeff Waldman & Rachel Young I am organizing Freelance Camp Toronto. So far both Freshbooks and Ryerson University are sponsoring the event.

When: Sun Oct 3, 9:00am to 5:00pm

Where: Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management, Cara Commons, 7th Floor. Entrance at 55 Dundas St W

Register today so we know you are coming. We are also opening up applications for speakers which will close on September 10th.

To register as an attendee, please click here.

To submit a proposal and perhaps speak at the event, please click here.

See you all there! Come and say hello.

June 11, 2010

TechCrunch Toronto Party: Tomorrow

Just a quick reminder.

Over 40 of us Torontoinians are getting together tomorrow, the 11th of June to celebrate TechCrunch’s fifth birthday party, 7:30pm at Elephant & Castle.

Please RSVP if you intend to come on http://www.meetup.com/TechCrunch/4639/. If you have troubles with Meetup please do phone me on 647 704 5272.

If you are available to help me with last minute organizing, live streaming, videoing or taking photos it would be much appreciated.

Look forward to meeting you all.

June 4, 2010

Sorry I.E. – My readers hate you

I’ve just finished doing my weekly Analytics trawl and noticed some incredibly interesting things in my browser usage panel (stats shown are from 28th May 2010 to 4th June 2010):

  • Internet Explorer users are now a mere 3.8% of this blog. I know that around half of my traffic is from marketing help keywords and non techy sources which makes this even more staggering.
    • Compare these to May last year and Internet Explorer was over 35% of my visitors
  • Apple has overtaken Microsoft as the primary operating system of my readers. Last week Windows accounted for 3,480 unique visitors where Apple edged in at 3,505. This is not counting an additional reach of 424 from iPhone. This has been a growing trend but the first week Apple has overtaken Windows.
  • This may be due to an increased uptake in North America. Living in Canada means most of my readers are now North American, not Australia. Regardless the slow increase of Apple products has been a general trend.

Oh how times have changed. My single blog is hardly statistically significant but the numbers are still interesting. I’m not a huge Apple fan personally but I cannot deny seeing more and more Macbooks everywhere.

May 28, 2010

Startups: Get Funded with Extreme University

I’ve just returned from the Sproutup Toronto, a monthly event run  by Sprouter. Many fantastic people were met, several deals have been made, business cards were traded and I’ll certainly return  next time.

I had the pleasure of meeting both the Public Relations executive and an Associate, Suresh, of Extreme Venture Partners. They are running a Summer program for tech startups anywhere in the world called Extreme University. Applications are free but the deadline is June 4th, 2010.

Similar to Y Combinator they are looking to seed concepts and bring them to reality. There is a preference for 2+ man companies but my understanding is this is flexible. You will get free office space, $5,000 US + another $5,000 per founder and plenty of mentoring. Having seeded Bumptop which has now been sold to Google you can see they certainly know their stuff.

Click here for more information. Tell them Alex sent you. The Deadline is June 4th. After speaking for a while they seem like good people. I’ve attached a brochure they gave me with more info.


May 25, 2010

My New Business Cards

Just printed small runs of each. I’m planning on carrying 3-4 colours at all time to add to the uniqueness.

At the end of the day I settled for the Blue, Yellow and Red ones. Eliminated were Purple and Green. Would love your feedback!

The Ones I chose:


April 23, 2010

Free eBook: Social Media Workout

I have a confession to make. Supposedly I have been co-writing an ebook on all things web with @NatalieSisson. Due to time commitments I was unable to further my work with Natalie (this time). The good news is she has just released a fantastic (and free!!) eBook giving brief, bite sized workouts to improve your effiency and results in the major social media channels.

Want a taste? The Contents are below:

Workout 1: Back to Basics
Workout 2: Get Facebook Fit
Workout 3: Tone up with Twitter
Workout 4: Exercise Control Of Email
Workout 5: Lunging into LinkedIn
Workout 6:  Make Movie Muscle
Workout 7: Website Weightlifting
Workout 8: Build a Better Blog

It’s totally free so what do you have to lose? Click here to be redirected to Natalie’s WomanzWorld and get your copy.

April 17, 2010

The Hacker News Effect

I love traffic spikes, they are exciting. Some time ago I wrote about a ‘how to’ guide of mine, How to add LinkedIN contacts to Twitter, which became popular (see the entry, ‘Why I love Social Media‘). At the time I was excited about getting to number 1 on google while being bookmarked and tweeted. After writing that post traffic continued to grow and the guide has now generated over 5,000 uniques and 260 tweets for this blog. There was certainly a viral period where I was getting huge spikes in my taffic and the article has since been featured and linked by many groups, blogs and consultants.

Traffic from HN

Unique Website Visitors

In the past 24 hours I’ve had another great traffic spike, this time from Hacker News (HN). If you are not aware of HN it is operated by YCombinator, a startup incubator, and features plenty of interesting discussions and user submitted articles. The HN feed is the first I read in my RSS each morning.

It really draws strong traffic too! Last night I submitted my latest entry, Having a price is really cool for getting profits, to the community. Sitting on the ‘New’ page drew decent traffic, about a 15% increase on my normal traffic. After receiving enough upvotes I made it to the main HN feed and received a great traffic spike (and hopefully the article added some value!). I don’t think I need to tell you the percentage, the image speaks for itself.

In all honesty I’ve been a reader and occasional commenter on HN for some time but had never considered putting any of my articles into the feed. Now I’m glad I tried! The moral to this story? If traffic is down you don’t need to do anything drastic, sometimes the answer is right infront of you. Think about the sites / resources you use daily and see if they can be applied to solve your problem.

July 27, 2009

Decisions: The future of this blog?

It was a while ago now that I tweeted there would be more personal updates on this blog. As most of you already know I am about to begin a year long trip where I will be based in Canada with travels throughout most of North America.
I’m unsure to which degree I should include these in *this* blog and as always thought I would put it out to my Twitter followers, ‘What do you think?’.
Initially I was going to keep minor personal updates here so I don’t distract from the business side of this blog and to run a separate travel blog. The other side of me is saying to include regular updates under the same banner in a ‘travel’ section.
My concern with merging the two is it might get a little messy and take away from the core purpose of the blog. It could also be distracting and make the topics look unrefined. However, on the positive side this blog is mostly opinions and including more personal travel information may add the desired personal touch. It’s one of those decisions I am really unsure about, but I struggle to get past the ‘scattered focus’ criticism.
So I ask you, my Twitterers, for opinions, ideas and whatever comes into your head. Either way I am in the process of getting a custom design / optimization for this blog to move away from the ‘out of the box’ themes.

June 8, 2009

Knowing when to pull back

Sometimes the hardest thing for me, and I’m sure for many others, is to pull back cold turkey on a business which I have become emotionally or financially invested in. Thankfully that is exactly what I managed to do just a few days ago.

I was planning on purchasing a music portal. Music is a logical business extension for me and the portal was an easy start. One of my long time business partners, Aron Kerr, would also be involved. Sure we were going to spend around double the asking price to renovate the site, bring it back up to our standards, add some features and encourage the current user base (with less than 7% of it being active) to return to the website. Still, we liked the company, the script and connections were a good start and we figured that bringing back just 20% of the users would make the investment worthwhile.

Sadly, the asking price then doubled. A new buyer had joined the bidding process. Quickly we clamored back together to increase our bid – but before submitting it I decided to take advantage of the 8 hour window and sleep on it. After the heat of the moment was gone we changed strategy and ended our bidding. A small increase in price was acceptable for our plans but doubling meant that the entire nature of our strategy had changed. It was hard – we were both very emotionally invested in the company and knew we could do well with it. But with the upfront cost doubling, and us still needing to pitch in another 50% to change the site fundamentally, the company no longer held a value for us. Yes, there are still sore spots but ultimately we made the right call, buying a business while on an emotional high is never a solid idea.

Just remember, every time something changes don’t immediately adapt. Sit back and think ‘is this now something I want to be involved in?’.

What has happened on our end? We had the connections and a solid business plan, coupled with a passion. For the price we were going to spend on a poor design and an inactive user base we are now able to:

  • Get our own custom portal developed, with all of the changes we wanted
  • Have the Iphone and Facebook applications we wanted developed
  • Design the logo and website
  • Incorporate the new company
  • Make contact with the people we need to contact
  • Place 30 classified ads to attract those who read newspapers
  • Place a full colour, half page ad in Guitar World (US)
  • Run Google Adwords and Facebook Ads for a month to continue attracting customers

For the same money beforehand, we were buying 400-500 active users, a renovated website and a half built facebook application. All in all I say stepping back was well worth it.

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