I like VistaPrint – I’m all about the cheap and cheerful. Because I do regular print runs, I subscribe to their annoying sale emails, since once in a while I actually want to avail myself of a discount offer.

This is what this past week’s promotional mails from VistaPrint look like in my Inbox:

• 19 November: 10 great November benefits for you, Sabrina!
• 20 November: 34 FREE products + 12 discounts = get started now!
• 22 November: Save 100% 12 times over – Last 24 hours!
• 24 November: FREE! FREE! FREE! (Postage too!)

To be perfectly honest, I’m normally so blind to these near-daily missives that I really couldn’t tell you if their subject lines were substantially different a year or even a month ago. But what I can tell you is that in the present climate we’re watching everyone from banks to airlines go under, and consumers are particularly sensitive to the scent of circling vultures.

At this point I’m fully expecting tomorrow’s email to be titled FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL YOU PLEASE JUST ORDER SOMETHING FROM US!!!!!!!!!

For the record, I do not think there’s any kind of financial issue at VistaPrint. But I do think you want to be particularly careful about your sale messaging in this climate.

I actually need to print business cards. But I’m holding out for the offer that comes with the free pony.

Everyone who attended the Train the Trainers course in August agreed to offer their own free class in turn, and I’m fulfilling my promise to Damien Mulley by holding a Blogging Master Class on 2 December, 2008 in Cork. This is an excellent opportunity to meet other bloggers, learn some new blogging skills, and get your arse kicked by me without having to pay for it like normal clients do.

What’s a Master Class? It’s a term from music education and refers to a particular format for learning:

The difference between a normal class and a master class is typically the setup. In a master class, all the students (and often spectators) watch and listen as the master takes one student at a time. The student usually performs a single piece which they have prepared, and the master will give them advice on how to play it, often including demonstrations, and admonitions of common technical errors. The student is then usually expected to play the piece again, in light of the master’s comments.

And whilst I’m not pimping myself as a blogging master (there is no such thing), that’s broadly what we’ll be doing. Over the course of the afternoon, we’ll take four people’s pre-prepared blog posts in turn, and edit for content, formatting, voice and technical details like images and linking. As with a traditional master class, this will be an actual, hands-on learning experience. Unlike a traditional master class, there will be no cellos, but there will be lots of group participation.

That will take two or three hours, and we’ll wrap up with a mini-workshop on maximising and marketing your blog, because when you put that kind of effort into your posts, God knows you deserve some readers.

The workshop will cover:

• What and when to blog
• Writing compelling content
• Using categories and tags effectively
• Learning from statistics
• Promoting your blog
• Strategic linking
• Cheap and cheerful tools

Although the exercises are always good practice, this course is more geared towards business bloggers than personal bloggers, and preference for hands-on editing will accordingly be given to those blogging in a commercial capacity.

Date: 02 December, 2008
Time: 1 – 5 PM
Venue: Lancaster Lodge, Washington Street, Cork
Cost: Free. Woo hoo! Parking also free
Bring: Laptop, wifi thingie, draft blog post

So if you’d like to come along, please click here to register – I’m happy to do this with a minimum of three people and maximum of twelve, and I promise it will be fun.

And that yes, there will be fag breaks.

Update: There are three eight people signed up already, so this gig is definitely on. Woot!

So I’ve been drafted in to speak at PodCamp Ireland – Krishna De rang me up this morning to point out that if I am going to be there anyway, I might as well open my mouth and do something. I was a little surprised because I assumed that something called “PodCamp” was all about, well, podcasting – a subject about which I know next to nothing – but apparently it covers all kinds of social media. Who knew?

Anyway, Krishna suggested that I do something around design for blogs and websites, but to be honest, I can’t. I suck at talking about design. There are a lot of reasons for that, but at the end of the day I just find design very difficult to be articulate about.

So instead, after a quick Twitter poll for topics, I’m going to be presenting on How to Market Your Website or Blog (Without Making the Internet Hate You.) I have more than a month to put this presentation together, but I’m pretty sure it will break down into the specifics of conversational marketing, generating press and PR, and paid advertising.

I’ve been doing a couple of these informal presentations, so I’m also pondering getting a bit more organised about presenting materials and having downloadable slides and handouts available after each one, just so they’re more accessible to people who missed the gig or want the notes.

Realistically, that probably means a redesign. God help me.

Photo ©TheConsumerist

I spent the afternoon at the fairly wild and fabulous Cork Airport Hotel (pictures) taking part in Damien Mulley’s very generous Train the Trainers event. This day was interesting in a lot of ways, but for me a very valuable part was listening to and taking part in the back and forth conversations about content. It helped me to formalise some of my thoughts about the process of blogging.

Basically, I think there are two approaches one can take when blogging as part of a business communications strategy, both to engage readers and attract links:

1) Be a Resource

Ice Cream Ireland and Tast.ie are examples of this kind of blog. While both Kieran Murphy and Deb Hadley blog about their businesses and their experiences in ways that help keep the content varied and lively, if asked to sum up either of these sites most people would say “they’re recipe blogs.” They provide a very specific resource that helps them to pull a very specific audience.

Damien made the point that one of the most popular and link-tastic formats for resource posts is the Ten Step How To. People love this stuff; just look at all the inbound links and Twitter chatter on yesterday’s How To Demo Your Startup post at TechCrunch.

But you can’t produce that kind of post every day; it’s tremendously time consuming to create, which is why the successful blogs have that “varied and lively” content. More importantly, however, people take in a massive amount of information from scores of blogs each day. I suspect your average reader can manage maybe one or two “heavy” posts from across all of their sources in a given day. If your blog is always the blog with the big ask for time and attention, you will actually lose rather than win readers with your dense but awesome content.

2) Be Personal

This does not mean you need to share your ovulatory cycle with the internet. Rather, it means putting a lot of your personality, experiences and individuality into your blog posts. The best ways to do this are:

• Be funny.
• If you can’t be funny, be controversial or at least opinionated.
• If you can’t be opinionated, be intimate.

Again, intimate does not mean spilling your sex life online – and unless your profession is among the oldest in the world, this probably isn’t a great topic for a business blog anyway. But being intimate does mean giving readers a way to connect with you.

One of my favourite dislikeable people is Penelope Trunk of The Brazen Careerist. She gives excellent career advice, and if you skim through the entires in her blog, you’ll see that she almost always relates advice to experiences in her own life. Being fired, embellishing resumes, getting divorced – a continual litany of her personal failures peppers her instructions and lends a lot of authenticity to her posts. You learn a lot about managing your career, and a lot about Penelope.

Intimacy in this case is about the reveal, but it doesn’t have to be personal. Companies, and the individuals blogging for them, can tell stories, too – about the company, its employees, its relationships with outside vendors… all kinds of stuff.

Either way, the point is that a business blog is not about press releases, not about products, not about job vacancies. Can you name one blog you regularly read that’s about that stuff?

No, me either.

Dear Internets:

I am completely willing to admit I do not know everything. I believe in taking advice on the things I am clueless about, usually from you and your pal Doctor Google. Foolhardy, possibly; but it’s always worked for me.

This year marks a transition for me from being part-time employee and part-time freelancer to being full-time self employed. It also marks the year in which we will, at some point, be applying for a mortgage. (Yes, I am 35 years old. No, I don’t own my own house. I’ve also lived in three countries in 10 years and been broke in all of them; give me a break.)

So while getting my financial ducks in a row is a high priority, the broader world of full-time freelance is also a bit of a mystery I hope to unravel with your help.

Things mama never told me about service providers:

• Where can I find an accountant or financial adviser in Cork to do my stuff and give me advice about setting aside enough money for taxes and paying PRSI and all that jazz?
• As my previous employer will no longer be paying my mobile bill, which I’ve never even seen, I need to know which provider and plan to go with. Hint: I like to talk. I do not believe SMS is a medium in which real adults can carry on real conversations. That said I really only use my mobile when traveling in Ireland (about once a month) but can rack up several hours in calls then.

Speaking of money, down to the nitty gritty:

I have no idea what market rates are in Ireland. I design sites, I code sites; I provide consulting and strategy for online marketing and positioning; I package and brand products; I write understandable web copy that reads like it comes from humans; I do site assessments, usability analysis, and user testing.

For all of these things, I have been charging a figure that is less than €50 an hour, except for usability testing – I charge test group costs plus the same hourly for that. The people who are paying me are telling me to charge more, and I know they’re right but I have don’t know what the right numbers are.

• What should I be charging for all of these various things?
• How can I keep costs accessible for people who have fun and interesting projects but low budgets? I often like those projects; they tend to refresh my creativity and I don’t want to price myself out of ever being offered them.
• If you’re booking clients months in advance, do you take a deposit now to block out the time for them at a future date? Usually I do 50% up front and 50% on delivery or go-live, depending, but getting 50% now for something I am not going to get to for three months seems a little dodgy.
• What do you do if you’re killing yourself to stay on top of a series of tight production schedules and a client doesn’t have their bits ready for their project’s agreed upon start date? My contracts state that if they can’t deliver their clearly articulated To Do list, delivery dates will be pushed accordingly, but what if you literally do not have room for slippage?

So, dear Internets, do you have any words of wisdom and experience for me? This is my year of Getting Things Done, and I’d like to do them right.

Yours, always,
Sabrina

Here at chez moi we’re off to CreativeCamp a day early as we have plans for Friday night that will put us in Kilkenny on Saturday around noon. Given that little scheduling hitch, I have to say that Keith and Ken and the whole Kilkenny mafia have been 32 flavours of lovely dealing with me, because I have been a perpetual pain in the arse about this:

Is there public transport? Are there projectors and screens? How long do I have? Can you save slots for me? Which slots? What’s for lunch? When is lunch? Do I need a dongle? Can I have a pony?

And not a single one of them gave up and just shot me.

But that is not the end of Irish excellence today. I had two more stellar experiences today that really demand blog love.

First of all, the people at Blacknight got a name registered, DNS sorted and free sponsored hosting in place less then three hours after we faxed in a rush request for a .ie domain name. It’s for a super top secret, soon to be revealed web project Elly Parker and I are kicking off at Creative Camp. We’ve been working on it for a while, we just didn’t realise that this weekend was, uh, this weekend. Anyway: Blacknight. Awesome service.

Second of all, a couple of people have emailed me to say they can’t make CreativeCamp but are interested in my presentation on How to Blog Like a Boy. Since I refuse to read off my (very minimalist) slides, my presentation notes are the bulk of my gig and the slides are just summary backdrops. This means I can’t just make a PowerPoint download; it would leave all the context behind.

Marcus Mac Innes at Pix.ie to the rescue. I uploaded all of my slides as JPG images into an album and he entered all of my notes by hand in the first comment of each slide, one by one. Pix.ie users can’t use HTML like paragraph and break tags yet, and some of these slides have four or five paragraphs of notes and citations, so he saved my stressed out bacon. (Slides go live after Camp.)

Flicker, who wanted me to upload three test images and then wait more than a week until they’re reviewed so I can prove I’m not no longer a pornographer, can kiss my booty. Or just, you know, hire more staff.

Anyway, CreativeCamp, Blacknight, and Pix.ie all get 10 out of 10 for being outstanding, home grown examples of utterly fabulous people.

Give them your money and your love.

PS:

I have a yenta streak a mile wide. I am, in fact, an unabashed match maker. I love pairing things up, although this may be more symptomatic of OCD than a predictor of success in my backup career running a dating agency for geeks and nerds.

In any case, this week I’ve delivered a match made in heaven. I paired stock image site LuckyOliver up with color palettes site COLOURlovers with a cool, cool contest:

Pick an image off LuckyOliver, create a palette from it at COLOURlovers, and be in with a chance to win cool prizes.

Which, by the way, start with a $300 iPod Touch and end with an iTunes gift card. Bonus: all prizes can be redeemed for cash instead of McProducts so that those of us who think Macs have been rendered useless as doorstops now that they don’t weigh anything can play too.

I am a self-confessed contest whore, but I’m picky with it. All those book cataloging sites with contests where they’re offering up yet another Amazon gift certificate as a prize seem like wasted opportunities to me. Amazon will give you no love and send you no traffic. Why not pair with an online book seller who is keen to share traffic and will promote your contest with equal love and will ship £€$100 worth of books anywhere in the world to the winner?

(Despite the fact that I love craft marketplace Etsy, I was really, really annoyed when I filled out a tedious, poorly formulated marketing survey there only to find out that I couldn’t win the survey contest because I wasn’t in the US. That’s just rude.)

Speaking of crafts, promoting a new book on crafting? Buddy up with a popular yarn house for prizes, and ask people to knit or create (and photograph) book covers as contest entries. Even if you end up paying for the prize pack yarns yourself, you’ll get way more back from your partner’s traffic than you spent in cash. What’s more, that traffic is your target audience, and if you have good content, they’ll come back and stick around.

Plus, “I made this for this contest and photographed it and you can see it here”? Total blog fodder. Everyone who enters will blog about it. Viralpalooza!

So, please: go out and make friends in your niche. Share the love to spread the word. And no more Amazon gift certificates!

The internet takes a lot of crap for being all about pornography. My general response to this is that the market gets what the market wants, and it should come as no surprise that naked people like other naked people. I have zero problem with online pornography as an industry, and the proliferation of everything from college call girls to phone sex workers doesn’t bother me in the least. You work it, honey.

What does bother me is whoring by people who are not, in fact, paid sex workers.

You may be surprised to learn that the most recent example of this is near Bantry, not generally known for being a red light district. A local hostelry is running an online contest which you enter by linking to them in your blog with a particular Google keyword phrase. They are, in short, gaming Google. They don’t want your opinion or your love; they want your inbound links to improve their search engine rankings.

I don’t have a problem with the suckers people who “entered” the contest by writing about Glengarriff Lodge. I have a problem with Glengarriff running a competition that is transparent, blatant link whoring:

You write a blog post which links to our homepage using the term Luxury Self Catering. In the same blog post you link to one friend who you think might be interested in the competition.

The thing is, it looks like a neat place and is touting itself as eco-friendly and sustainable. They could get legitimate links and an authentic viral buzz off of that. I can think of at least ten places with high Google rankings that would cover this joint if told about it, deliver better Google results for a very competitive keyword phrase, and not piss off half the blogsphere in the process. Or – hey! – they could actually optimise their site for search engines, with, say, page titles and stuff.

So, I’m with CrankyPants on this one.

The only good thing I can say about the Glengarriff campaign is that while they are prescribing the single phrase you need to link with, they are not telling you what to say. So, I can tell you that I think this Luxury Self Catering campaign at Glengarriff Lodge sucks, and according to the contest rules, that’s okay. Since I’m interested in what Eoghan McCabe thinks about this campaign, I guess I’m officially entered. Fair enough.

The same good thing cannot be said about ebuzzing, who spammed emailed me this morning to let me know they’ve setup shop on the corner of Hollywood and Vine:

ebuzzing allows bloggers to earn good money by writing about things they actually like, and even to define their own price for doing so. They browse ad campaigns posted by advertisers, create content for their blog discussing things that they genuinely wish to highlight and are paid for each article.

This kind of pay-per-post scheme is not new, and as long as the company running the service has a policy in place that requires the paid posts to be flagged as such, which ebuzzing does, I generally don’t have an issue with it. In this particular case, however, there’s one little catch: they have to approve your blog entry before you post it.

We will not censor content nor pass judgement on the quality of an article you’re publishing on your blog. But we have a duty to guarantee our advertisers the consistency and integrity of their campaigns and to see to it that the briefs they issue on ebuzzing are interpreted correctly. So it is incumbent on us to evaluate whether a post is within the framework laid down for the campaign, includes the necessary elements (eg links to advertisers’ site) and conforms to ebuzzing’s general editorial policy.

Call me cynical, but I’m reading that as “we can’t censor what you write on your own blog, but we’re probably only going to pre-approve and pay you for things that our client has asked for, namely positive blog entries.”

I’m not sure which of these two practices is more odious. The only thing I do know is that I have a lot more respect for the people whoring themselves to the almighty dollar than I do for the one’s whoring themselves to the almighty Google.

It’s not often that revolutions happen in retail – one of the most entrenched, least progressive sectors out there. I mean, sure, there’s the whole web thing, but aside from that, the creation of IKEA and the invention of the January Sale, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that really makes consumers wiggle with glee.

But there is a revolution going on at Sleep Squad, a Chicago mattress retailer. Their company story and the way they’re retailing is described in a great article at Furniture Style, but in a nutshell:

You select the mattress attributes you want online, they throw a bunch of matching products into their truck showroom, and they drive to you. You lay down and test out the selections in the mobile showroom, and if you’re particularly happy with one of your choices, you buy it right there. They deliver it directly from the truck to your home minutes later.

This is, in a word, brilliant.

One aspect of Sleep Squad I find really interesting is that founder Michael Cote doesn’t come from a long line of home furnishing retailers, or anything even close. He used to head up nationwide B2B sales for T-Mobile. When he decided to get out and go retail, he surveyed households for the most common items over a particular price mark, and then cross-checked his data with an existing survey on the buying experiences that made consumers the most miserable. That’s how he chose mattresses; because, in his words, “This industry is ripe for change.”

Speaking of the need for change, I do have two criticisms of Sleep Squad, neither of which has anything to do with their product or their retail model.

First of all, their logo is pants. Well, that’s not actually true; it’s a cute rendering of a bed. But they are not selling beds, or even mattresses. They are selling a buying experience, and that buying experience is all about the truck. The truck is their market differentiator, and the truck should be their logo.

They don’t need to create an iconic image for their business; they have one already, and it is their business.

Secondly, they need an image gallery, pronto. I don’t understand, really, how this works. I have no idea how you shove up to 26 mattresses into a truck that doubles as a showroom, but I’m pretty interested. I want to know what the show room I’m supposed to lie down in looks like, before I trundle out there in my bunny slippers. And, you know, since I’m potentially going to be testing products in my nightgown, some nice, reassuring in situ photos of the sales staff I’ll be meeting in the truck would be a plus, too.

There are couple of other things they could do to help position themselves to their best advantage with consumers, but really, despite the oversights, I’m cheering for this business. This is a great way to look at a very traditional sector and do something new and consumer driven, and I love this sort of thinking.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a definite upsurge in people contacting me to ask if I’m available for some consulting hours. By and large, these are companies who want help with traffic, conversions, online marketing campaigns, issues of stickiness, or general communications strategies that do not suck.

While this is great, I always worry about wading in with new clients who want to know if I can help them.

Because the answer is usually, yes, I can work with you. But you’re probably not going to like it.

When I was more active in Second Life and doing consulting for real life and virtual-only brands, my clients always used to joke that they wanted t-shirts that said “I Survived Sabrina Dent’s Business Boot Camp” to commemorate the ordeal.

My real life clients probably think the same thing but are too scared to ask.

Here is the thing. If I’m working with you, you can pretty much assume I think something about your site, your product or your service is great. But I also assume you’re not paying me a (very reasonable) hourly fee to tell you how awesome everything is and outline all the bits that that are working really well.

I’m assuming you’re asking me in to tell you what the problems are, with your site or with your products or with your online marketing, and sometimes, even if you didn’t realise it, all of these things at once.

This is an unpleasant experience.

I’m also very focused on the bottom line. If something doesn’t work, I don’t want to know the story of how you designed that ad or developed that website feature or why you adopted a particular strategy or where your development bottlenecks are. In fact, if you persist in telling me, I may hang up on you. Because those things do not matter to the end user, and the best thing I can do to help you is vigorously maintain my perspective as an outsider to bring you unfiltered feedback.

The clients I click best with, the clients who get the most value for their money are the ones who are prepared for tough love, who are hungry for real information, who don’t have their egos tied to their products, and who sit on the other end of the phone and say “Bring it, bitch.”

These are the clients who get t-shirts.

The back of that t-shirts says “And my business is better for it.”