eComXpo is NEXT WEEK!
PsPrint is a featured exhibitor at eComXpo, the virtual tradeshow for eCommerce marketers. We will be featuring in our booth our great products, amazing variety of services, and of course our affiliate program.
eComXpo will feature more than 100 exhibitors including Google, Double Click Performics, Digital River, Microsoft adCenter, LinkShare, ad:tech and more.
If you stop by on day 1 between 10am and 6pm PST you can even chat with ME! And come by for the freebies too… register to win a $200 Visa Gift Card just in time for the holidays!
When?
– October 9-11, 2007
Where?
– Online at www.ecomxpo.com from the comfort of your home or office PC
Why should you attend?
– Hear from top industry experts at keynote, feature and panel presentations followed by live Q&A on topics of interest to affiliate, search, and interactive marketing professionals.
-Network with thousands of your peers .
-See the latest offerings from hundreds of exhibitors on two show floors.
-Win great prizes such as iPods, flat-screen TVs, vacations, and more.
-Enjoy all the benefits of a top trade show for FREE, without leaving your home or office!
Click here to learn more or register.
Take a video tour online here.
Read MoreHow to Pass Down Time At Work
Having very little to do at work might seem like some employees dream, but for those of us with a little thing called Work Ethic, it’s hard to just sit around and surf the web aimlessly on company time. So here’s some things to do that aren’t so much like goofing off.
- Filing: If you’re anything like me, you have a big basket on your desk of completed forms or papers that need to be filed. If you’re experiencing an awkwardly slow day (like I am), now is the time to kill an hour by sorting and filing all those papers overflowing from your done box.
- Spring Cleaning: Pay no attention that Spring is long gone. Most people don’t keep their work area spit spot, so take the slow time as an opportunity to introduce some much needed organization into your workspace. Wipe off counters and shelves, throw away that tootsie roll you’ve been staring at since June, and make your area presentable.
- Catch Up: It seems that everyone has some low priority project or task at work that they keep in a drawer for a day like this. Knock those little menial projects out of the way now that you don’t have something more important to focus on.
- Office Gardening: If you have plants in your office, take the time to groom them. All plants need their dead branches, buds, or leaves trimmed periodically. Grab your sheers (I’m the only person who keeps garden sheers in her desk? Okay fine, your scissors then) and trim the bad spots off your lovely plant. Throw some fertilizer in there or change those spikes. Your plant will love you for it.
- Refills: Have enough paper clips? Is there a full row of staples in that stapler? Now is the time to raid the supply cabinet and make sure you’re stocked up on all the supplies you need to function smoothly. That way you’re not stopping in the middle of a huge project later on to grab another pad of paper or a pen that works.
- Read Blogs: There’s probably some blogs out there that pertain to your industry, so now is the chance to seek them out and read them. You’ll gain some good insight and it’s not really procrastinating since you don’t have much else to do. In fact, you might just read something that inspires a project idea and then you don’t have this boredom problem anymore!
- Blog: Heh… it’s obvious I’m really slow right now, isn’t it? Craft a really good blog with some good content. Or, if you have writer’s block, seek out tools that can assist your blog in getting noticed. BlogRush seems to be a good one that I just added here yesterday and I can already see some traffic. If nothing else it’s a nifty little widget to throw on your blog.
So get out there and make yourself useful!
Read MoreTop 10 Things That Improve Work Ethic
10. Have a ridiculously comfortable desk chair: The nicer your chair is, the longer you can stand to sit in it before your desk without having to get up because you’re antsy. And of course if you’re antsy and walking around the office with a general aimlessness, you’re not working.
9. Make a To-Do List: Lists are great because the simple act of making the list gives you something to do in those moments of lost energy when you don’t actually want to be working. By making a list you’ll find yourself doing something remotely work related, and you may simply motivate yourself by looking at the sheer length of a list of things you have to get accomplished! (The Tasks feature in Microsoft Outlook works great for this.)
8. Be Better Than Someone: You don’t have a lot of control over this, so pick your target wisely. Nothing makes people feel better about themselves than feeling like they’re better than someone else. Choose your target- it could be a parent, sibling, friend, or even a lackluster coworker. The smug sense of satisfaction you get from besting this person will be enough to keep you driven every day to never lose your edge.
7. Set up Google Reader or Technorati: You can tell yourself that you’re just taking time out of your busy day to keep up to date with the latest industry news, but what you’re really doing is reading a few industry blogs intertwined with Popsugar or Best Week Ever. If having your own personal interest blogs mixed in with the industry ones make it easier to remember to read blogs, do it. You may not be enriching your working knowledge as much as you’d like to think, but the industry stuff will stick and you’ll be able to bust out interesting relevant factoids in meetings and the latest celebrity gossip at the water cooler.
6. Piss off your Friends and Family: This is a surefire way to free up your time for more work at the office. If everyone you know outside of work is mad at you, that removes the temptation (or option?) to go out after work for drinks or spend your weekends poolside with the family. Who needs weekends anyway? Just lost opportunities for more work!
5. Supplies: Make sure you have the supplies you need to do your job. If you’re running out of staples, get some. If a certain program would increase your productivity 10%, ask for it and make your case. It’s much easier to do the job when you have everything necessary. Once you get into the niche where there’s not much else for you to ask for you’ll be able to apply all these tools to hone your skills and do a better job. You have to prove to the company that you’re worth investing in.
4. Money: Of course, that’s what we’re all in this game for, right? Get the jobs that get you the khakis that get you the chicks. I believe it’s probably a fact that your work ethic and dedication to the company goes up exponentially as your salary goes up. Don’t be afraid to ask for a raise every year if you’ve seriously been rockin’ at work. Be sure to do something that makes the bigwigs take note and want to give you more money and you’ll find it’s much easier to get out of bed in the morning!
3. Befriend your Coworkers: If you have a vested interest in the people around you, inherently that comes with a vested interest in how work goes for them. A job well done on your friendly coworkers’ part will often help make your job easier, and vice versa. As long as you have a mutual respect for what your coworkers are trying to accomplish and how that fits in with your goal, you will be more willing to go the extra mile on your end. Eventually your coworkers will reciprocate by making something easier for you and it will become a productive cycle.
2. OCD: OCD, or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, really helps in those tedious projects that just need doing. Spend hours late into the night working at something as boring as updating a database for formatting for the simple reason that everything HAS to be right. Not only with this give you a false motivation to get a project done, but your supervisors will gladly take advantage of this affliction of yours and praise the results!
1. Care: It’s as simple, really, as caring about doing a good job. Have some pride in what it is you produce or how it is you help the company overall to succeed. If you genuinely care about doing your job well, that’s really all you’ll need to motivate yourself and have a great work ethic.
Read MoreOne Fish, Two Fish…
Brickfish! This is a nifty little website that Anne stumbled upon. They describe it better than I can, so here’s their spiel:
- Create content for your favorite brands and bands.
- Win exciting rewards for reviewing, voting and sharing content across the web.
- Earn rewards like the chance to meet your favorite bands, clothes, scholarships and even cold, hard cash.
The best incentive to participate in viral marketing I’ve seen in some time. We’re kicking around a campaign to launch on Brickfish, and it might be ready as early as Monday! Stay tuned for more details next week!
In other news to wrap up the week, I’ve booked my flight to John Wayne Airport in Orange County for the California Associations of Realtor’s Expo next month. I’ll miss the first day of the show, but will be there staffing our booth October 10th and 11th. I figure while I’m down there I’ll see some friends in the area and enjoy a slight change of pace from Nor Cal life. The day before the show I’ll be staffing our online booth at eComXpo from the comforts of my office here in Oakland. So two shows in three days… that should be an interesting week to say the least!
Trade shows seem to be going well, customer acquisition is doing okay but could be better, and the affiliate program is pretty stagnant. We had a two and a half hour metrics meeting this morning, only half of which focused on the affiliate program, which I felt like a moron during. I guess I’ve been more focused on the quantity of affiliates than the quality, so that ends now.
We want to help our affiliates to be better affiliates. We’re also considering some BIG changes to the structure of payments, but I’m not at liberty to announce them yet. We’re going to start looking more at our affiliates individually and see what they’re doing and what is working. Hopefully this helps everyone. Me, because I won’t look like a goober when asked questions and I’ll have the answers, the affiliate, because they’ll be making money, and the other affiliates, because they can learn from the big money makers.
That makes sense, right?
Read MoreOMG!!! The sky is falling
After working on our bug fix list for a couple months now, the veep and I are finally having a meeting tomorrow to go over the list, prioritize anything that’s still pending, and then present it to the CTO.
How does PsPrint’s assistant marketing manager get put in charge of tracking all the IT problems reported to our tech department? Well, I don’t really know. But I was handed the task nonetheless. My guess it’s because of how disgustingly organized I am. So I have this handy dandy Excel log I update whenever anyone CC’s me on a support item, and I update it when I see the item’s been taken care of. It’s no big deal… takes just a few seconds out of my day a couple days a week. Although, it does make me curious about how other companies track things like this.
My last company was no source for comparison, really. With a staff of 8 people, 1 guy was in charge of all things technical. He maintained our database, he fixed things when they broke (except that one time we wanted to go all Office Space on our dying printer once the boss approved getting a new one). But with a stagnant concept of a company that wasn’t doing much to grow and was run by a glorified con-man, there wasn’t much for IT to work on to improve. So of course he had nothing but time to fix all our inane little networking and Windows Update issues.
Luckily these are all internal requests we have here… this person’s computer is acting weird, this gift code isn’t working, add such and such an email account to x distribution list. It’s not a whole lot of issues that affect our customers too badly. Even if a gift code doesn’t work, we can always apply the discount in the form of a refund. Our IT department focuses most of their energy on making the site better for customers… which leaves most the company to kind of fend for ourselves in terms of updating our computers and regular maintenance things like that. This is where it really is beneficial that we’re an online-based company. 99% of our employees that use computers for work are very computer savvy and self sufficient. I’d wager that about 80% of the office has a personal MySpace page.
Although I hate to admit it, we do get random glitches to our website. What big company doesn’t, right? But that’s part of growing and expanding as a company and business. We introduce new features or new partnerships with other companies and things don’t always work right off the bat. How many Xbox 360’s overheated and broke within a month after the first generation was released? C’mon, these things are rarely perfect from creation forward.
But that’s what makes PsPrint so exciting for me. We’re always changing, morphing, adding. Working on new partnerships with bigger and better companies. First NAR, tomorrow the world!
Read MoreAvoiding Former CoWorkers in San Jose
Sometimes it’s pleasant to see an old coworker… other times, it’s best to avoid them. Which is what I did at Search Engine Strategies last week in San Jose. I’m not necessarily proud of what I did, but I successfully avoided what could have been a rather awkward situation, so it worked out for the best.
I spent the majority of the day in the Social Media track of the conference, learning more about the inner workings of Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Wikipedia than I ever thought I wanted to know. Of course, one of the first things I did when getting back to the office was apply some of this and set up a Digg profile and a Technorati profile and an account on Del.icio.us. Since PsPrint doesn’t sell it’s content, I don’t really see Wikipedia as being that huge of an opportunity for us. But the others… well I’m shocked I wasn’t on them personally for awhile.
Now, my roots in social media lie in the likes of MySpace, message boards, and chat rooms. I’m not the seasoned internet user you’ll hear speaking at trade shows that’s been online since 1997… but that’s mostly because back in ’97 I was still writing history essays and doing math homework in High School. I’ve been online since about the time I got to college, Fall of 1999. Going away to college and having to make all new friends, I immediately found chat rooms as a place to connect with like minded people. A friend introduced me to Live Journal back in ’03 and I’ve been blogging ever since. When MySpace came around big time in ’05 I jumped on that bandwagon and haven’t looked back.
Has it really been 2 years on MySpace? How time flies. But, I digress. SES was a great show for me to attend. Very informative, and my favorite part was how organized all the panelists were. Everyone had a neat & tidy Power Point presentation that will be available online this week, so I barely had to take any notes. I’ve also decided that the next time I go to one of these shows and attend the educational panels I’m going to be bringing a laptop. Since there was really no need for me to take many notes, it would have been great to be able to surf the websites that the panelists talked about while they were talking about them. I’m all about multi-tasking, so getting some work done while learning is my ideal.
This is becoming an exciting time for me. Learning more and more about the field I’m working in and exploring social media marketing is really exciting me to be moving onward here at PsPrint.
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