Here are the top 5 posts from this week. From networking, to selling, to content and curation in 13 minutes a day.
Image courtesy of Hopefoote
1. Why you need to take 50 coffee meetings
Two-time entrepreneur turned prolific blogging VC, Mark Suster, wrote a great piece about the importance of getting out and having short meetings with as many important people as possible.
Some of his great points are that you should always be recruiting top people, even if you don’t have the budget or position available. You should also be job hunting, or at least making sure people know about your ability so you’ll never have to look for a job.
You should also be meeting with influential people regularly (like journalists, or VCs), because you’ll be able to establish a relationship over time.
2. Three things clients and consumers want
Seth Godin is an expert at getting you to re-frame problems and think about them in different ways. His post discusses how small businesses focus on utility as a selling point, while highlighting that consumers purchase for a variety of reasons… including ego.
3. Beating Google’s Panda Update – 5 Deadly Content Sins
Google’s Panda update has given original content creators a unique chance. But it’s also ruined others, dropping their organic search traffic up to 40%!
This great post from Cyrus and SEOmoz break down the big reasons why most sites get penalized. Read this and adapt while you still can.
4. The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Online Marketing Efforts
Copyblogger had a great post this week discussing digital sharecropping. This is an important but often misunderstood concept.
Basically it says that anything you invest in that you don’t own can (and probably will) be taken away at some point. That means your Twitter followers, your Facebook fans, and any other social platform for that matter.
Instead, you should be focusing primarily on your website/blog (content), email newsletter list, and reputation. These are long-lasting things that you control and will be able to reap the benefits from over time.
5. Content Curation in 13 Minutes a Day
Social media has a lot to do with sharing, referring and recommending. Content curation (or finding and passing along valuable links to articles or sites) is one big part of this. However it’s also really time consuming.
Not anymore.
Ian Lurie wrote a great piece on how to set up a system for content curation in only 13 minutes a day! How can you not afford to do that!