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Title: Your Essential Camp Cooking Checklist

Word Count: 512 Summary: One of the most fun things to do during a camping trip is camp cooking. Why? Because eating is one of the best things in life! Most people who are passionate about food and have flair for the sense of taste would agree with this. A grand feast of sumptuous camping meals would definitely make a camping vacation a great experience. But because cooking entails quite an effort and some equipment to bring, avoid the scenario of forgetting an important ingredient or an essential... Keywords: camping stoves, coleman stoves, gas stoves, propane stoves, dual fuel stoves, coleman camping stoves Article Body: One of the most fun things to do during a camping trip is camp cooking. Why? Because eating is one of the best things in life! Most people who are passionate about food and have flair for the sense of taste would agree with this. A grand feast of sumptuous camping meals would definitely make a camping vacation a great experience. But because cooking entails quite an effort and some equipment to bring, avoid the scenario of forgetting an important ingredient or an essential cooking utensil by creating a menu of the dishes you intend to cook for the family and from here create a checklist of things to bring. Here’s a sample of a camping cooking checklist with a few cooking tips to make your life easier. Be sure to add any personal food item or cooking utensil you can’t do without. • Main ingredients of the dishes and meals you plan to cook. It’s a good idea to measure ingredients back at home, put them in ziplock bags with labels. This will make cooking much easier and faster and save you space in your bags. It’s also better if you half cook meat or poultry at home also to save fuel in the camp trip. • Other cooking necessities like cooking oil, seasonings and condiments. • Cookware like pots, pans, frying pans that you’ll need for the meals in the menu. Don’t forget the lids because these will enable you to save a lot of cooking time since dishes cook faster when covered. • Cooking and eating utensils like spatula, tongs, grill skewers, knives, spoons, forks, plates, bowls, cups, can and bottle openers. • A Coleman camping stove. Be sure to bring one that will suit your camping needs: size of cooking you intend to do, type of camping activity and fuel preference. • Camp or barbecue grill • Lighter or matches. Even though most Coleman stoves have electronic ignition, it’s still good that you have these to use for other purposes like lighting up a grill. • Fuel for your Coleman camping stove • Large water jug, water bucket. Camping activities may drain your energy. You need a lot of water to reenergize and prevent yourself from dehydrating. • Coolers, ice chest and ice. These are important because you’d want a cold drink to quench your thirst. It’s a smart idea to bring a large block ice instead of cubes because the former last much longer. • Potholders and oven mitts to prevent anybody from getting scalded. • Thermos • Portable water heater • Dishwashing soap • Folding tables and chairs and table cloth • Heavy-duty aluminum foil and ziplock bags which serve a variety of purposes like for wrapping leftover food, for storing ingredients and many others. • Paper towels and napkins • Trash bags. Be sure to leave the camp site in a spick and span state. After a whole day of spectacular views to see, exciting and fun activities to do, the best thing to look forward to aside from a comfortable rest is a great sumptuous meal that entice your taste senses. Bon Apetite! Read the full article

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Why not try our SMS VIP Club to build a list you can contact over and over again... A Simple Marketing Strategy will have Your customers coming back over and over again. Don't miss out on this opportunity to create a marketing strategy that will put more money in your business account.

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Title: What To Serve As The Main Course For Your Dinner Party

Word Count: 306 Summary: Choosing the best meal to serve as the main course for a dinner party is often a dilemma. Hosts and hostesses want to make sure that they do not serve foods to which the guests may have an allergic reaction and when dealing with different cultures, they want to make sure the food is not offensive. For example, you would not serve pork at a meal where some of your guests practiced the Muslim religion. You would not serve roast beef or chicken if you know that some of your gues... Keywords: Article Body: Choosing the best meal to serve as the main course for a dinner party is often a dilemma. Hosts and hostesses want to make sure that they do not serve foods to which the guests may have an allergic reaction and when dealing with different cultures, they want to make sure the food is not offensive. For example, you would not serve pork at a meal where some of your guests practiced the Muslim religion. You would not serve roast beef or chicken if you know that some of your guests are vegetarian. Fish is a dish that always goes over well at dinner parties. Try a fish dish that is not common, such as halibut. The dinner party that earned me the best compliments was one at which I served a recipe called Snappy Halibut Skillet. Along with being easy to prepare, it is quite tasty. There are many variations of this recipe, but the one that my family and guests prefer is as follows. You will have to increase the recipe for the required number of guests. This one is based on a dinner party for 10 people. Ingredients 1 1/2 tsp. Thyme 2 1/2 lb halibut (allowing 1/2 lb. per serving) 1 1/2 tbsp olive oil 1 onion chopped in small pieces 1 clove garlic, minced 1 1/2 tbsp cornstarch 1 can stewed tomatoes 1/2 cup green onions Sprinkle thyme on both sides of each halibut fillet and cook over medium heat in hot oil. Test the fish to see if it flakes easily with a fork. This will tell you that it is fried. Remove the fish to a warming plate. Using the same skillet, cook the garlic and onion until they are tender. Stir the cornstarch into the stewed tomatoes and then pour the mixture into the skillet. Cook until thickened. Return the fish to the skillet and let it heat through with the sauce. Read the full article

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Title: Your Essential Camp Cooking Checklist

Word Count: 512 Summary: One of the most fun things to do during a camping trip is camp cooking. Why? Because eating is one of the best things in life! Most people who are passionate about food and have flair for the sense of taste would agree with this. A grand feast of sumptuous camping meals would definitely make a camping vacation a great experience. But because cooking entails quite an effort and some equipment to bring, avoid the scenario of forgetting an important ingredient or an essential... Keywords: camping stoves, coleman stoves, gas stoves, propane stoves, dual fuel stoves, coleman camping stoves Article Body: One of the most fun things to do during a camping trip is camp cooking. Why? Because eating is one of the best things in life! Most people who are passionate about food and have flair for the sense of taste would agree with this. A grand feast of sumptuous camping meals would definitely make a camping vacation a great experience. But because cooking entails quite an effort and some equipment to bring, avoid the scenario of forgetting an important ingredient or an essential cooking utensil by creating a menu of the dishes you intend to cook for the family and from here create a checklist of things to bring. Here’s a sample of a camping cooking checklist with a few cooking tips to make your life easier. Be sure to add any personal food item or cooking utensil you can’t do without. • Main ingredients of the dishes and meals you plan to cook. It’s a good idea to measure ingredients back at home, put them in ziplock bags with labels. This will make cooking much easier and faster and save you space in your bags. It’s also better if you half cook meat or poultry at home also to save fuel in the camp trip. • Other cooking necessities like cooking oil, seasonings and condiments. • Cookware like pots, pans, frying pans that you’ll need for the meals in the menu. Don’t forget the lids because these will enable you to save a lot of cooking time since dishes cook faster when covered. • Cooking and eating utensils like spatula, tongs, grill skewers, knives, spoons, forks, plates, bowls, cups, can and bottle openers. • A Coleman camping stove. Be sure to bring one that will suit your camping needs: size of cooking you intend to do, type of camping activity and fuel preference. • Camp or barbecue grill • Lighter or matches. Even though most Coleman stoves have electronic ignition, it’s still good that you have these to use for other purposes like lighting up a grill. • Fuel for your Coleman camping stove • Large water jug, water bucket. Camping activities may drain your energy. You need a lot of water to reenergize and prevent yourself from dehydrating. • Coolers, ice chest and ice. These are important because you’d want a cold drink to quench your thirst. It’s a smart idea to bring a large block ice instead of cubes because the former last much longer. • Potholders and oven mitts to prevent anybody from getting scalded. • Thermos • Portable water heater • Dishwashing soap • Folding tables and chairs and table cloth • Heavy-duty aluminum foil and ziplock bags which serve a variety of purposes like for wrapping leftover food, for storing ingredients and many others. • Paper towels and napkins • Trash bags. Be sure to leave the camp site in a spick and span state. After a whole day of spectacular views to see, exciting and fun activities to do, the best thing to look forward to aside from a comfortable rest is a great sumptuous meal that entice your taste senses. Bon Apetite! Read the full article

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Seven Pro LinkedIn Hacks You Might Not Have Thought Of

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Seven Pro LinkedIn Hacks You Might Not Have Thought Of

Okay, you’ve opened an account, filled out your profile, included a great head shot, and wrote a winning profile summary as well as completed everything required to reach “All Star” status on LinkedIn. Now what? Now’s when the fun starts. In this article, I’m going to show you seven great things you need to be doing consistently in order to reach “Boss” level on LinkedIn.

Numero Uno: Check in every day! Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Yet, you’d be amazed at the number of people I reach out to on a daily basis who finally, sometimes after a few months, message me back saying that they just don’t check their account that often. What a waste!

Two: Publish an article on LinkedIn’s blogging feature, called Pulse. You don’t have to be Malcolm Gladwell. Just be you and write about what you know about. Write about what you think your target audience might find interesting. If you absolutely can’t write, hire someone to write it for you once a month. That actually won’t set you back too much and it will be well worth it!

Three: Add videos or other media to your profile. Link to examples of your work. Link to your website. Have an infographic created that shows people part of the process of what you do.

Four: Follow movers and shakers! They might not actually connect with you, but follow them anyway. Share their status updates with your audience!

Five: Connect with these people and others who you think would be important to your network.

Six: You can do this one better if you have a paid subscription to LinkedIn. But, given that you have that, you need to be researching who’s looked at your profile and connecting with them and messaging them. They’ve already shown that they’re interested. Follow up with them!

Seven: This one’s going to take some time, and you might not want to do it, but in some industries, it’s going to be one of the most important things you do. Figure out who in your contacts are local to you and actually invite them out for coffee. Yep, it’s a little old school, but it works great!

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Three Important Things Everyone Notices First On Your LinkedIn Profile

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Three Important Things Everyone Notices First On Your LinkedIn Profile

The most important part of LinkedIn for an individual user is the profile. Your profile tells everyone who you are, and from there they can decide if they want to connect with you, answer your messages, and potentially do business with you. If you screw up your profile, you’re dead in the water before you even have a chance to get going. So, with that in mind, let’s talk about what people are actually looking at when they land on your profile so you can make that look as positive as possible and maximize your results from LinkedIn.

Number one is your picture. It’s trite, but a picture really does say a thousand words. LinkedIn is a person-to-person networking platform, after all. So, it makes sense that people want to see what you look like, and rightly or wrongly, will judge you by your picture. Get a good picture, preferably one where you’re dressed like a business professional.

Two is the headline just under the picture. We all want to pigeon hole people so we can understand them and figure out where they fit in our world. Your headline needs to succinctly say who you are and what you do. And, if you’re smart, it needs to say so in a language your target audience understands. If you’re in IT, then having a technically oriented headline is fine, as long as you’re trying to communicate only with people who are capable of understanding the jargon.

Three is your profile summary. Here are a couple of tips for that. First off, please user first person. Third person just sounds weird. It’s YOUR profile summary. You wrote it. Talking about yourself in third person sounds like something weird you’d see in a science fiction or horror movie. Next, don’t be cliche! Don’t use overworked phrases like “self-starter”. That’s been done so much that it just screams nothing at all! Just talk honestly about yourself. Pretend you’re explaining who you are and what you do to an intelligent and thoughtful person who’s not in your industry.

Before you do anything else, get these three things right on your profile. You’ll be glad you did!

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Small Businesses Don’t Need Social Media Managers

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Small Businesses Don’t Need Social Media Managers

If you run a small business, you’ve no doubt wondered if you need to hire someone to keep up with all the social media. After all, there’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, SnapChat, and many, many more. It’s a daunting task to think about socially selling your business’s products on all those channels and more. So, what do you do?

One idea is to hire an employee dedicated to branding and selling your company’s products and services socially. That’s the expensive way to go, though. It’s very difficult to quantify how much the efforts of that person are affecting your bottom line. And, if he or she isn’t pulling their weight, their salary, health care costs, and the taxes you pay to hire the are money flushed down the nearest Porta-Potty. A better idea might be to empower your current employees to be your stealth social media army, instead of hiring a dedicated person.

You’re going to have to incentivize this. By that I mean, if you want your employees to be spending time online talking about your business, you’re going to have to a: give them time to do it, and b: monitor what they said. And, honestly, you’re going to have to bribe them to do it. Who would want to spend time during the day talking about their place of work on Facebook when they could be liking and sharing their friends’ new cute puppy pictures?

If you can figure out how to do this, however, and if your employees are game to the idea, then you can start to get a handle on social media marketing for your business that won’t break the bank. You’ll need to have some metrics that you measure. Don’t make this too difficult. Hits on your website before and after the campaign might be a good idea. I’d average your monthly traffic for several months before the campaign starts, and then average the traffic for the same number of months after. If you actually sell through your website, then you’d want to do the same with your website sales.

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Small Businesses Don’t Need Social Media Managers

New Post has been published on https://sparetimemedia.com/small-businesses-dont-need-social-media-managers/

Small Businesses Don’t Need Social Media Managers

If you run a small business, you’ve no doubt wondered if you need to hire someone to keep up with all the social media. After all, there’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, SnapChat, and many, many more. It’s a daunting task to think about socially selling your business’s products on all those channels and more. So, what do you do?

One idea is to hire an employee dedicated to branding and selling your company’s products and services socially. That’s the expensive way to go, though. It’s very difficult to quantify how much the efforts of that person are affecting your bottom line. And, if he or she isn’t pulling their weight, their salary, health care costs, and the taxes you pay to hire the are money flushed down the nearest Porta-Potty. A better idea might be to empower your current employees to be your stealth social media army, instead of hiring a dedicated person.

You’re going to have to incentivize this. By that I mean, if you want your employees to be spending time online talking about your business, you’re going to have to a: give them time to do it, and b: monitor what they said. And, honestly, you’re going to have to bribe them to do it. Who would want to spend time during the day talking about their place of work on Facebook when they could be liking and sharing their friends’ new cute puppy pictures?

If you can figure out how to do this, however, and if your employees are game to the idea, then you can start to get a handle on social media marketing for your business that won’t break the bank. You’ll need to have some metrics that you measure. Don’t make this too difficult. Hits on your website before and after the campaign might be a good idea. I’d average your monthly traffic for several months before the campaign starts, and then average the traffic for the same number of months after. If you actually sell through your website, then you’d want to do the same with your website sales.

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Three Steps to Landing a Great Job Using LinkedIn

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Three Steps to Landing a Great Job Using LinkedIn

Normally, I write about how entrepreneurs and businesses can use LinkedIn, but I also know there are a lot of folks (as in millions) who want new jobs, and since I’m a very proficient LinkedIn user, I thought I’d take a moment and help the rest of you guys out!

So, you want a new job, and hopefully you have an idea of what type of job it is that you want. Now’s the time to harness the world’s largest and most powerful virtual network to find that job! So, here’s what you need to do in a nutshell.

Step 1: Make sure your profile is “up to snuff”. Make sure it’s completely filled out. LinkedIn actually assigns you “All Star” level proficiency on your profile when you’ve completed the whole thing. While you’re doing this, make sure the dates, etc, jive with what’s on your resume. And, especially make sure you have a great head shot. Look like the winner you are! Remember the old question…would you hire you?

Step 2: Identify the companies you want to work for, and see if you can find the hiring manager or at least the VP of whatever division you want to work in. Actually track down that person on LinkedIn and send them a connect request. Don’t use LinkedIn’s stock request, either. Make it a wee bit more personal, although don’t spam them with how great you are from the get go!

Step 3: Once you’re connected with them, message them and tell them briefly that you’re interested in working for their company. Don’t send them a long message! That’s the kiss of death! Just a few sentences are fine here. Ask if you can send over your CV or resume. Make double sure you get their permission before you forward that to them!

LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful network and can connect you with more people and businesses than you can get to in a life time of doing this. Make sure you do this plan consistently and also make sure you follow up! You’ll have that new job before you know it!

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The Importance of LinkedIn Recommendations and How to Get More of Them

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The Importance of LinkedIn Recommendations and How to Get More of Them

Social proof is one of the big keys to any kind of marketing, on or offline. Businesses have been soliciting testimonials ever since the existence of commerce. On LinkedIn, recommendations are one form of social proof, and they are very, very important. Yet, most users have few if any of them! Let’s talk about how you can get more recommendations so that you can beef up your profile and start making LinkedIn work for you and your career or business interests.

In general, you need to first give what you want to get. My Dad used to tell me that if you want friends, you have to first be a friend! That was great advice to a young kid, and it’s great advice on social media, especially on LinkedIn. But, what does this mean? Well, it means the following: If you want more recommendations, you have to start recommending people!

Here’s the deal, though. Although LinkedIn might change this, at the moment you can only recommend people who are your first tier, or direct connections. To do this, just go to their profile page, and click the “More” button. You’ll see where to recommend them. So, if you want more recommendations, you’re going to have to consistently start recommending other people.

I wouldn’t just recommend people you don’t know, though. Although that might be, since probably most of the people you’re connected with you don’t actually know that well, recommending someone out of the blue like that just isn’t, well, recommended! It looks fake, probably because it is fake. This means that you’re going to need to either sort through your connections and find people you actually know and can actually recommend, or you’re going to have to go back to step one and get more connections. Either way, if you want more recommendations, you’re going to have to do this! That’s the bad news. The good news is this…it doesn’t take many outbound recommendations in order to receive one back. And, quite frankly, you don’t need a ton. Just a few good ones!

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How to Market to Millennials on LinkedIn

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How to Market to Millennials on LinkedIn

So, it’s LinkedIn we’re talking about, right? I bet you might guess that all the users are over forty, mid-level execs, college educated—that sort of thing, right? And, if you sell products, run a business, or otherwise want to cater to a younger crowd, well you probably should go to either Instagram or Twitter. And, if you were to think such a thing…you’d be somewhat right and somewhat wrong.

Okay, you’re mainly right. But probably not in the percentages you think. Here’s a startling fact put out by Hootsuite. One quarter of LinkedIn users are ages 18 to 29. Under thirty! One quarter. One in four users are essentially millennials! Who knew, right?

Let’s say that you do run that company, or at least work for it, that caters to a younger crowd. One quarter of the half a billion users on LinkedIn are, as far as age is concerned, right in your target market. As, being that they’re on LinkedIn, they’re relatively easy to find, connect with, and message. One quarter of five hundred million (half a billion) is 125 million. That’s a lot of people under the ages of 30. Not only that, but if they’re on LinkedIn, they probably either have jobs or are at least looking for them. They’re serious about their careers. They might be exactly who you’re looking for. The only question now is how do you market to them on LinkedIn?

Well, to figure this out, let’s take a look at platforms that specifically cater to this group. How about Instagram? According to SmartInsights, about 60% of Instagram users are under thirty. So, how are businesses marketing on Instagram? It’s more than just showing pictures. Here are a few things that I see on Instagram that could easily translate to LinkedIn.

Idea #1: Make your marketing more “fun”

Idea #2: Break the rules, at least the ones that won’t get you put in LinkedIn “jail”

Idea #3: Cross promote to other platforms like YouTube and Instagram, drawing visitors back to LinkedIn

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A Few Ways To Really Alienate People on LinkedIn

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A Few Ways To Really Alienate People on LinkedIn

Alright, I’m going to just start out with my own pet peeve so you can see what I’m talking about here. Then I’ll show you some other ways to become really unpopular and annoying on LinkedIn. But to get the ball rolling in the right way, let me just unveil my number one annoyance.

Getting spammed with a five-paragraph message about something I don’t really care about!

There, I said it! And, if you’ve spent any time whatsoever on LinkedIn, I’m sure you know what I mean. (I get so much of this, I might hazard to say that a few of you reading this have been guilty of this practice! GRRRRR!)

Some days I go to LinkedIn, click on my messages and right there front and center is a huge, multi-paragraph thingy, usually about a biz op and full of meaningless hype. And, to boot, it’s from someone who’s connected with me but someone I don’t really know that well. I can just picture them sitting at their desk copying and pasting the same inane message over and over again to their entire network. Nothing screams Annoying Spammer quit like this practice!

Quit it!

Here’s another one, which is basically the same but done through email.

It’s getting an email from that same someone that I don’t even recognize saying that we’re connected on LinkedIn and that here’s the world’s most important, best offer for whatever it is, and that I can get in on the ground floor only if I act now, etc. Seriously, I get this stuff all the time. Well, not ALL the time, but enough to where it makes me cringe every time I see something like this.

My other pet peeve is the polar opposite of this. This next one happens less frequently, but it’s still hyper-annoying! It’s getting a message with the single word “Hi!” or perhaps something like “Hi, how are you?”. The problem with this is that I have to try to figure out who the person is and why they’re saying hello to me. I know what they’re doing. They think they’re getting my permission to message me and I appreciate that, but wow, just give me a short clue as to what this is all about.

So, bottom line here. If you’ve been guilty of any of the above, for Gosh sake, quit! You’re alienating and really annoying one of your greatest assets. Your network!

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A Short Course in How to Use LinkedIn for Business

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A Short Course in How to Use LinkedIn for Business

LinkedIn is the top business networking platform bar none! As of the writing of this article, there are over half a billion LinkedIn users. Unlike some other social media platforms, Twitter for instance, virtually all of these over five hundred million accounts on LinkedIn are real. They’re not fake accounts or bots, for instance. If you want more business for yourself or your company, LinkedIn is THE place to be! All you need now is to understand how to use it properly, and then you can, as they say, write your own check. So, in the rest of this article, let’s talk about how to go about using LinkedIn the right way for business.

The first thing you need to do is to get a significant number of connections. What’s my definition of “significant”? Well, it’s got to be at least over 500! 500 is the magic number on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn shows the number of direct connections you have up to 500 and then when you top that, it keeps showing 500. So, if one person has 498, it will show 498. If someone else has 6,000, it will only show 500. This is also important because the number of people you can reach via searches on LinkedIn grows the more connections you have! Bottom line, start connecting with people!

The next thing you need to do is to write your profile and especially your headline and your profile summary so that it brands you in the best light. So many people on LinkedIn have skimpy profiles! Don’t do that! Use all the space provided and fill out your profile as best you can. I’ve written several articles on the best practices when it comes to LinkedIn profiles. Use search to find them, or if you’re reading this on LinkedIn itself, just message me. I’ll point you to them.

Finally, message people consistently. LinkedIn is a person-to-person networking platform. Most people don’t realize this. It’s made to be used manually. Their API, for instance, allows of very little interfacing with the platform via software. The overall goal is to network with people the same way you would in a BNI or Chamber of Commerce meeting.

Get these three things rolling in your favor, and you’ll turn LinkedIn into a business prospecting machine the likes of which you’ve only dreamed of!

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You Should Be Doing This Monthly on LinkedIn!

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You Should Be Doing This Monthly on LinkedIn!

If you use LinkedIn actively, you need to be doing a few things monthly in order to maximize your benefits from the platform. These have to do with maintenance of your contacts and your profile, as well as making sure your profile shows you in the best light. In this article, I want to discuss this all in some detail. Don’t worry! This isn’t going to take long. A few minutes per month should do it!

Monthly Task #1: You should be exporting a list of your connections monthly. Look, if you’re spending time building up your connections, you surely don’t want to loose all this work if something should happen like you get your LinkedIn account shut down, even temporarily. Although, if you play by the rules, this shouldn’t happen, why let an asset you’ve spent time building up be in jeopardy?

Monthly Task #2: Another extremely important monthly task for you is to download your profile. Now you can do all of this at the same time. This is a handy changed LinkedIn has made recently. You especially want to download your profile summary. As you grow and change, your LinkedIn profile headline and profile summary will change as a reflection. You’ll naturally want to emphasize some aspects and deemphasize others. As you modify your headline and profile summary, though, it’s tempting to just delete the old ones. That’s probably a mistake. There’s often information or ways of saying things in an earlier profile summary that you might realize later are better than what you currently have. If the summary is deleted, you’ll have to try to reconstruct it. This is a less than ideal scenario!

Monthly Task #3: Finally, the third task I think is very important is to review your endorsements. Visitors to your profile scan your endorsements in order to quickly figure out who you are and what your skills are. Again, that changes over time. If you had a certain quality or skill four years ago and you were endorsed a lot for that skill, should it still weigh heavily in your current profile? Personally, I don’t think so. You might have changed jobs, changed rolls in your business or profession, or even changed professions totally!

Bottom line, you want to make sure your LinkedIn profile reflects and brands who you are Right now. That it shows you in the best light for your current purposes.

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What and What Not to Include in Your LinkedIn Profile

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What and What Not to Include in Your LinkedIn Profile

Every hear the phrase, “TMI” or “too much information”. Every now and then I’ll read someone’s profile where I feel like they’ve included too much. Now, frankly, it’s usually the reverse. Normally, if there’s a content problem with a profile, it’s that the user has not included enough information. Their profile summary isn’t long enough and complete enough. They haven’t included enough skills and endorsements. Or they don’t have enough recommendations. Or, given their age, their work history looks incomplete. But that’s what I usually see. Every now and then, however, I see the opposite.

When I see too much information on someone’s profile, it’s not the length that bothers me. After all a profile summary is limited to 2,000 characters including spaces. What I mean is what they’ve included shouldn’t be there. For instance, snide or defensive remarks about a former employer absolutely have no place on your LinkedIn profile! Okay, I get it. Your last boss or company you worked for were, how shall we say this, less than stellar. Call your sister, best friend or you mom up about it. Don’t spew that venom on social media. This is a sure way to never get hired for any but the lowest of the low jobs again.

Another “cardinal sin” I see vis-a-vis content in LinkedIn profiles has to do with changing careers. If you feel you were underutilized in your former career, you don’t need to say so. Just emphasize how your talents are being used in your new career and you should be fine!

The bottom line here is don’t be negative! It’s kind of like your grandmother might have said to you (I know mine did). If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it. Employers, and also potential clients, are allergic to negativity! It puts them on the defensive. Why spoil your chances at landing a new job or getting a new client just because you said a little too much on your LinkedIn profile?

[yessparetimemedia]

Is LinkedIn Facing Competition from Facebook?

New Post has been published on https://sparetimemedia.com/is-linkedin-facing-competition-from-facebook/

Is LinkedIn Facing Competition from Facebook?

On the surface, it seems that LinkedIn and Facebook are polar opposites. LinkedIn is a professional, work-based app that people use to network and find jobs. You don’t post your pictures from your latest vacation on LinkedIn, as you do on Facebook, and you don’t post information about job openings or even about information about your profession hoping to secure a job on Facebook. At least up until recently you didn’t.

Recently, Facebook has decided to encroach on LinkedIn’s territory by allowing businesses to post job openings and for job seekers to apply for jobs right from Facebook. At firsts, this capability was rolled out only in the US and Canada, but recently, Facebook opened this all up to over forty countries worldwide. Businesses and job seekers alike can use this part of Facebook in order to find applicants and jobs respectively that are local to the business.

It’s too early to tell if this new direction that Facebook is moving in will impact LinkedIn or not. But it is kind of like watching an old Japanese horror movie where two city sized monsters battle each other over Tokyo. LinkedIn has over half a billion users, while Facebook is four times that size. Either platform is used by a significant portion of the global population.

Having said that, there are some differences in how Facebook is rolling out their job capability and LinkedIn. One important difference is the following. The unity of currency on LinkedIn, if you will, is the individual. Although LinkedIn has business pages, the main interaction that’s occurring is between individual people. By contrast, Facebook’s focusing on the business itself. Another difference is that the businesses that Facebook seems to want to cater to are small businesses that will be hiring people who are already local to the business.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn are free, although there again we have a slight difference, because LinkedIn has several paid tiers, which Microsoft seems to be intent on pushing people into. Competition is never a bad thing, however, and it’s going to be interesting over the next few years to watch this all unfold.

[yessparetimemedia]

My Secret Marketing Weapon—LinkedIn Groups

New Post has been published on https://sparetimemedia.com/my-secret-marketing-weapon-linkedin-groups/

My Secret Marketing Weapon—LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups used to be hot! Then they sort of fell by the wayside. I think what happened is everyone discovered the power of groups and jumped on the group bandwagon. Virtually overnight, every group I was in got hammered by people trying to hawk something in the group. Eventually the group died, was deleted, or just became a pitch fest. A lot of marketers, me included, quit using groups as one of the main engines of our marketing efforts. Well, I’ve got something important to say about LinkedIn groups.

It’s time to come back!

You can join up to 50 groups. Given that each group might have, oh let’s say, one thousand members, fifty groups puts you in front of fifty thousand people potentially! That’s a lot of potential clients, or look at it this way, that’s a lot of people with whom you might want to connect.

There’s a lot you can do with groups. I love content marketing on LinkedIn. One of the big things I do to get more people into my world and my client’s world’s is to create and publish quality content. I publish this on LinkedIn pulse. After my content is published, I’ll write a short blurb about it and get the link to the article and then go to relevant groups and post my blurb there. I can triple the number of people who look at an article of mine just by doing that.

Another thing about groups that I love is that they’re very specific. If I want to focus my energies on a specific sub-niche, let’s use public speakers as an example, I can search for relevant groups, ask to join them, then when I’m in and can start the process of reaching out to the members and asking them to accept my connect request. By doing this, I can build a following in a very narrowly defined niche! Not only that, but I’m setting myself up to market to that niche through the group itself!