As every business and their grandmothers are haphazardly hurling themselves onto the social media websites, the neglected corporate initiatives of yesteryear patiently lurk in the dark annals of the World Wide Web anticipating the time when high ranking execs will again begin to realize the power of the corporate blog. Just about 5 minutes after businesses began to wake up to the idea of adding a blog to their online presence, Facebook and Twitter hit the scenes, and most companies plans of improving their blogs went from being on top of the CEO’s desk to being ‘filed away somewhere.’ The result- a wealth of business websites, which possess attractively developed blogs that utterly lack any semblance of marketing strategy.

As is true with any form of marketing or content production, the best way to determine an effective presentation method is to consider the audience first and foremost. In many niches, the personal flavor, that only a blog can offer, creates a viral effect due to their friendly and likeable content. Admittedly, applying the personal touch is not the only effective method of corporate blogging, but the personal blogging method does have viral potential for connecting with former and future customers. Continue reading

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There is so much more to finding employment and creating a career today than many people realize at the get go. While many people no doubt find positions by sending out their resumes and custom tailoring their cover letters, today’s tech centric-society lends itself well to new and more appropriate forms of self-promotion. Blogging has become a hobby, career, and tool for thousands and thousands of individuals around the world. Using a personal blog to essentially brand yourself and market your skills to the professional world has fast become the approach in today’s harsh job market. Follow these four blogging tips and self-marketing basics to create a personal blog that sells your best professional qualities and helps potential employers gain special insight into your abilities.

Simplicity and Clarity

The key to a successful website of any sort is simplicity and clarity. This is true for most things, including marketing. You want to be clear and direct with your intent and purpose. With your personal blog, you should create something that carefully communicates what you wish to tell. Your writing style should be clear and to the point. Tell your readers up front what your interests are, what the purpose of your blog is, what your accomplishments are, and what you wish to gain from them reading your material. There’s no point in using fluff language or fillers. Just tell people exactly who you are and what you are doing and see how they respond. Of course, I mean all of this directness to be done in a professional manner. You must sell yourself through your blog. Be clear and simple in your intent.  Continue reading

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Buying fans or followers has somehow become a sort of a taboo whenever PR or marketing experts discuss social media strategy. It is something people regard with distrust and the act of paying someone to like your page or follow you on Twitter is something devious and wrong. As always, things are not black and white, most of the online world has an intriguing grey attitude.

Let’s face it, if you advertise your page or profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google Ads or wherever, you still pay for people to like you. When you buy social media fans, does that mean they are worse then when you pay for advertising? Maybe. It all depends on what service you’re using for your purchase, it depends on their method of getting you fans and so on.  Continue reading

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First of all, Happy New Year to you all Hope 2012 is just as you have imagined it to be and then some! Now it’s back to business..

A while back I told a good friend of mine selling career and business related products and services that December will be an awesome month for him. He’d sell more, a lot more than in the previous months. He did not believe me, not entirely. He then told me December had been an amazingly pleasant surprise.

The truth is I drew a very obvious conclusion. Whenever a year ends and a new one starts, we start reviewing our lives and somehow see the negatives, then decide to do something about it. We start working on our resumes in December, we start planning, in our head or on paper, we buy products and services to help us achieve our goals, from business to weight loss and so on.

I suspect the seasonal extended family reunions play a decisive part, that’s why most of our planning effort happens between Christmas and New Year’s Eve! We go to face our loved ones who somehow are our biggest critics as well, tell them about our lives and have them point out where we went wrong. Or they don’t, but they start talking about their accomplishments and all we have to do is compare notes and figure where we need to improve.  Continue reading

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We love the design of our blog and that of our PR agency‘s website. But that’s not all, we at Mirror Communications generally love everything our friends at QBKL release, be it our own websites, new online homes for their clients or their online CV/resume templates. When it comes to designing and developing websites, even more so when implemented on WordPress, we are what you would call QBKL’s groupies

A while back we introduced their Bold online CV/resume template. Since then it has become quite a Themeforest hit and was even included in Envato’s birthday bundle! But it was definitely time for something new from QBKL! They knew it and that’s why yesterday they released MinimalMe, a minimal HTML CV / Resume template. It pretty much is a one-page template that features a unique, clean and minimal approach. It’s easy to use and customize so that your online resume shows off the best possible business presentation of yourself and your services.

MinimalMe, other than looking awesome and being extremely easy to set up, keeps a very important aspect in mind: people like to be special. And their CVs and resumes usually strive to be accurate and convincing, but to also differentiate them. That is why this html template features 130 possible combinations of background patterns and color schemes.

Based on what your hosting packages allows for, you can choose between a fully XHTML based version and  a PHP version that comes with a fully functional AJAX contact form. If you like to dive into the code of any one page website you post online, don’t worry, the template is well documented and you’ll find it extremely easy to customize it to your liking.

More details on how to get the MinimalMe HTML CV / Resume template on Themeforest.

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