A New Adventure in my Career
Since 2008, I’ve been fortunate enough to work in Performance Marketing at a variety of positions, and to work at home for most of those. I’ve been an affiliate manager and, for a time with FMTC, I was running all the sales, marketing, customer service, and social media. It’s been an exciting adventure, that’s for sure. For the last 18 months or so, I have been working on starting my own marketing agency, Blinkstar Media. The time has come, however, to put that on hold for awhile and start a new adventure working in direct marketing, going back to commuting to an office every day.
Read MoreA Quick Note Regarding My Employment
I’m officially on the market.
That’s right, it’s with a sadness that I report that I am no longer the Director of Affiliate Marketing with New Edge Media. Their clients decided to go a different way with regards to Affiliate Marketing and through no fault of my own, I’m now without gainful employment. That’s all I’m really going to say on the subject.
I have to give huge props to my coworkers and boss who jumped right onto LinkedIn and gave me great recommendations. Thanks, ladies.
In the meantime, are you looking for an affiliate program manager to telecommute? Or if you’re based in the San Francisco Bay Area, work in-house? I’m your woman. I’m also open to any copywriting, blogging, web design, or other freelance or contract work until I secure a permanent position. My resume is available in PDF and on LinkedIn. A small portfolio of my graphic design work can also be found at Blinkstar Media.
I’m going back to job hunting, now…
This makes me a very sad panda.
Read MoreBlogging: The Root of all Evil?
Is blogging the root of all evil? This argument is swaying, even for me as a blogger.
On some level, I have to agree. Blogging has turned many people into increasingly poorer writers. This “First draft culture” that he describes isn’t too far off, I’m afraid. This ties into a post by Jim Kukral a couple weeks back titled Your Grammar & Spelling Is Going to Ruin Your Career. I have to agree, as grammar and spelling have ALWAYS been pet peeves of mine; even in casual conversation it KILLS me to hear someone say “more better” or “funner”!
Remember that web content doesn’t go away. Archives endure and even if you completely delete your blog…chances are cached pages will exist somewhere. So do yourself a favor and treat blogging like a real job that you’re getting paid a lot of money for if you ever want to advance your career and actually get paid to blog.
And listen to some of these points and try to straighten up & fly right, will ya? 😛
Read MoreConfidence Doesn’t Replace Hard Work
Yesterday I went to the Alameda County Fair for our annual outing. My friends and I go mostly for the shows and rides, but it’s also intriguing to see the products being sold and the animals and prize winners. This year we chose yesterday to go because of the performer – comedian Paul Rodriguez.
Our motley crew are all fans of his acting & stand-up routines, so we were excited to see him live. Don’t get me wrong, we were not disappointed, but I noticed something about his hour long act last night that got me thinking about the lifespan of a person’s career, regardless of their profession.
If you’re as big a fan of stand-up comedy as I am, you’ll notice that many performers have carefully written & structured routines. Optimized sequence of jokes & topics for the best laughs, call backs to earlier bits, and clear thought progression. Most of what I’ve seen Paul Rodriguez do in the past isn’t any different. But last night he rambled a bit and couldn’t follow a train of thought, often going back to things he’d mentioned already 15 minutes later after being done with a random tangent. He had many off the cuff interactions with the crowd, which often distracted him from his topic. While all hilarious, this is definitely the sign of someone who’s confident and comfortable with their profession; they feel that having to “wing it” is no problem because they will still get the job done. Ultimately the crowd was laughing like crazy, so most people probably didn’t notice the disjointedness of it as much as I did. Overall it’s safe for anyone to say that his job was accomplished.
But the hard work just wasn’t there. To me that shows a slacking work ethic – to not give as great a performance at your job every time no matter what the circumstances. This transcends performance art and really extends to all careers. While it’s great to be advanced in your career and confident with your skills at what you do, putting your actions into cruise control can be dangerous. If you’re not working hard and being the best you can be at your job every day, it’s going to start to show. While one little mistake can be swept under the rug, a lot of little mistakes start making the rug bumpy and get noticed in a big, bad way. A lesson should be learned that confidence doesn’t replace hard work. Of course it’s great to be confident at your job because it will help your performance, but also recognize that it took a lot of hard work to get there and it will take a lot of hard work to stay there. You cannot rely on that confidence to just “get through it” – the effort and hard work ethic still has to be there driving you to perform at your peak.
I understand the psychology of winging it, especially under the circumstances. It is just a county fair and the show was free with the $10 price of admission, so he can’t be making much off of this gig. He’s also go bigger projects he’s working on at the moment – upcoming movies, a USO trip to Baghdad, and a trip to South Africa to name a couple he mentioned. So at a certain point, delegation of resources, time, and energy is necessary to get everything done. But that’s really no excuse to let anything slack enough to be as noticeably disorganized as last night’s show. There’s a fine balancing point to multi-tasking, which is not letting anything slack and getting everything done effectively and presenting the best product (in this case, his show) you can & always putting the best foot forward.
It’s hard to get to the top. But career minded people need to also remember that it’s equally as hard to stay there. Just look at Britney Spears 😉
Read MoreTo Continue This Blog Or Not?
I’m considering whether or not I want to continue with this blog. I’m not sure that many people really read it consistently, and I’m beginning to doubt if there’s room in this space for another marketing blog from someone who didn’t even go to school for marketing. Is my perspective that unique? Not sure… so, I’m at a precipice I guess.
The blog isn’t even a year old yet, but I find myself questioning whether or not the blog is adding any value to the space or am I yet another jackass sharing their opinion with people who didn’t ask for it? According to Google Analytics, which longtime readers will see that I couldn’t even keep THAT working, I get about 61 visitors per day. 10,072 since January 1. But how accurate is this since my reporting has had fails a couple times? And does this even matter?
Unless I receive a boom of entries for the contest by Sunday, the contest has been a complete failure with not one single entry as of this moment. I thought the prizes were pretty sweet… hell I’d love to win them myself. What did I do wrong? Not put WIN A VADO! in the title? Rely too heavily on promoting it through Twitter?
Of course, this first year is a total learning curve. Find what works, what doesn’t. I can’t expect to just jump in and be the bomb. Am I being too rash? Not patient enough?
Confusing whether I’m representing my employer or myself is also weighing heavy. Am I forsaking my employer by endorsing my personal brand within my web presence?
These things weigh heavily on my mind as more and more work seems to pile on me – both at my place of employment and at home. Sure it’s building my “personal brand”, and I’ve gotten some cool opportunities from it like co-hosting the Affiliate Thing podcast and an upcoming opportunity that I’m not quite ready to announce yet, but…is it ultimately worth it?
Read MoreFired on the First Day
A little wisdom to start your weekend – remember to be grateful for what you have. A friend of mine was telling me a story earlier that made me remember how lucky I am to work for a laid back company.
He works at a small marketing firm in San Francisco and they hired a new bookkeeper. On her first day, she was 15 minutes late. The boss brought her into her office and immediately told her that it wasn’t going to work out since she was late, and that she was fired.
Now when my friend told me this part, I thought it had to be a joke to teach the new employee a lesson…turns out the boss was dead serious. She has zero tolerance for lateness, and cut the woman loose immediately.
So just reflect on what you have and be thankful that you don’t work for that woman 😉
Read More
