08/12/22 Social media influencers are important expand our audience, raise awareness and inspire people to act. The influencers we need have to be related to our campaign in some. It would be useless to hire a car technician for example to promote our food giveaway campaign. We also need to check the influencer's reach potential, credibility, quality contacts and relevance.
08/11/22 Today I learned about how to execute social media campaigns. We have 7 steps that we need to take. First, we need to decide what action do we want people to take. Second, we need to decide what medias we want to promote our campaign on. Third, we need to create a content calendar. Canva and design wizard are good sites to create social media images for publicity images. After posting our content online, we need to regularly check comments from the audience and respond to them. Sharing pictures online of what happened during our promotion is also a good thing to further promote it in the future. After the event, we also need to analyze our tactics and improve approach to future campaigns.
08/10/22 Philanthropists with a past giving history, an involvement with other non profits, if their posts on social media lines with our agenda they would be beneficial to us in our campaign so we should look out for people like that. Planning our campaign can be very stressful so hiring a fundraising consultant who is familiar with our type of campaign would be good but hiring one who is familiar with some other types of campaigns will be better.
08/08/22 Today I learned about pitching on a phone. It's important to dress appropriately because the way we dress affect the way we are speaking even if the person cant see us along with smiling. It helps to build confidence as well. We need to prevent background noise because it might distract us in the middle of our pitch. We need to practice our talking points as well so that we don't fumble in our presentation which must be a very short period of time because the person might become disengaged if it is too long. Asking the person questions and waiting for them to answer would keep them engaged.
Today I learned that auctioning precious items that followers will appreciate, selling things from cashback sites, donate for a vote to do a choose a specific challenge, online concerts, gala dinner (partnering with a restaurant), game nights, charging supporters to attend a gathering or webinar or experts are also good ways to fundraise.
Today I learned about fundraising. Cold fundraising requires asking complete strangers to which the organization has no ties to to donate to a project while a warm funding requires asking donors who already have a tie to our organization to donate. This latter one is obviously easier. While fundraising, it is important to ask questions like does the person who is qualified lead have the necessary budget for our product?, does he have authority to purchase it? does he actually need the product and finally when exactly do they intend to purchase it?. Some basics things to keep in mind while writing a fundraising plan is give a backstory and a goal to our project, to tell them who we are and how is our campaign beneficial, tell them when the fundraising is happening and when will it be put to use. It can also help to tell them what inspired us to pursue this project. People dislike the use of too much numbers so it will be best to keep statistics at a minimum. Our call to action should sound urgent and have only one specific goal that the donator must look at. All this needs to be kept under 600 words.
Today I learned that it is important to always have an exit strategy when creating a business. The best time to sell a business is not when there is an increase in general (not seasonal) sale but when the sales have flattened out. To make the sale attractive to potential buyers we need to create unique content, promote it through various means like ads or social media to drive traffic, have a clean design (this is important because even if the things posted on the website are outdated, a clean design would still make it useful).
Today I learned about how one can set up paid webinars. It is important to first determine the benefit that you are offering people and then to also social media influence in order to create a market for the products
Today I learned important aspects of publishing an ebook. First, kindle from Amazon, Nook from Barnes and Noble among the top publishers for ebook, holding close to 75% of the market so it's imperative that one gets accustomed to publishing books on those platforms. Since the process can get complicated at times, book bolt is a website that can be used to simplify the process. To publish and eventually make money out of publishing ebooks, we need to first find a niche in the market. This might be based on things that we are highly interested in or that we have an expertise on. Then we have to choose the right publishing platform. Its necessary to have a presence on social media to help promote the book. Giveaways can also help to promote the books. Information in the book must also be presented in a way that is easily digestible and solve a problem for the reader like saving their hours of research that they would have put in otherwise to get that information.
I learned today about using email list to pull in customers. Pop up ads, free resources are examples of ways that one can obtain readers or customers emails. I also looked at ways of writing emails to customers. It is important to have an attention grabbing subject and then tell stories to engage with the customers emotionally. Finally, to get them to buy a product you can either place some things in the email that will hook them to click to the website. Its also necessary that one regularly updates our email lists to clear out individuals who aren't interested in our product anymore.
Today I learned a lot about how to maximize traffic to our website. This can be done by writing a good meta title and description. We can also play the algorithm to get our website on the featured snippet. It's also good to have a social media presence to promote your articles at certain times where your subscribers engage with your site the most. We can also pay influencers to write certain article for us to achieve this. It's also beneficial to link your articles in other articles either written by you or others so that google gains your trust.
Today I learned a lot about how to create a blog. I learned that to find a niche market, one needs to use plug keywords to find markets with things like google trend or amazon and other sites like that to see trends in the market. Once we find a niche market, we can either hire people to write blogs for us or do it ourselves. It all depends on our schedules. There are two types of writers that one could hire. Influencers which would rather be paid in exposure or ghostwriters who would be paid in money but have their work display under your name. Many websites like Upwork can help you find these freelancers but it is also important to test their writing skills, set up a payment method before they start working for you.
Today I filmed a 2 minute video about some of the things I have learned so far at Techie Youth about entrepreneurships and some of the basic tips that one needs to start a business. I have been having challenges uploading it onto DaVinci to edit it but I hope that tomorrow I will be able to surmount this challenge and be done with the assignment.
Today I learned a lot about using tinkercad and blender to create shapes for 3D printing.
Today I learned the importance of having a detailed plan before starting a commercial project. I learned that in this endeavor, one should take into account consumables, continuous recurring costs for the business and tooling costs, one time payments. I also learned that one needs skills, determine the channels of sales, cost of prototypes, cost of each product and the profit that will be earned from each product. I also looked into 3D printing a little bit.
Today I learned important facts about mentoring. One should have informal meetings to see if the mentor would be good for you, we should research about their work so that we can relate to them in the email that we send them. While seeking a mentor, it is important to declare in our email request to the mentor why they would be a good mentor for you. If one is able to establish mentorship, you should meet consistently with the mentor according to a set upon calendar, take notes during these meetings and follow up with them on the matters discussed., set up an end date for mentorship.
Today I leaned about the importance of time management. Some tips to help us manage our time better is to set priorities of things in our schedule, use planning tools like kanban if needed, get help from others accomplishing some tasks if needed. Stop procrastinating by hacking the Parkinson's law which states that we are more likely to procrastinate when we are given more time to accomplish a task. Multitasking has also been proven to not work so we shouldn't do it to save up on time. It's also important to consume healthy, exercise, sleep well and take breaks from time to time to help up stay healthy so that we don't fall sick which would have taken away from our productivity.
Today the majority of the things that I learned had to do with how to save money and how to negotiate for better prices. I learned that one can potentially save 100% of their income by investing in other side hustles to support a lifestyle that one is comfortable with but not too expensive and save all of the main income. Another way to save money is by buying things that will not depreciate over time like certain cars. Save up money by using a less expensive car until one can buy a more expensive one that doesn't depreciate.
Today I learned some remote work tips like taking breaks to stretch and do other things by following the pomodoro technique which tells you to work for 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break which increases after 4 sets. It is also good to make jokes with other employees to build up friendship online. Doodle is also an application to help with organizing meetings remotely. I also learned about methods to network today like how to approach someone in a gathering and how to classify connections that would be the most beneficial and which ones would be less beneficial.
Today I was able to learn some important etiquette about interviews. I learned that one should always wear a tie and suit to an interview unless we are told otherwise. We should try to interact with the workers at the office so that they can have a good impression of who we are because they will potentially influence whether we get hired or not. I was also able to link to techie youth some of my social media sites.
Today, I learned about the different payment methods that businesses use. Credit card payment methods include all in one processor hosted payment like stripe or paypal which is not very expensive and is good with low volume businesses. True merchant account providers are another method which uses gateway companies to connect your business to other processors. This assures more security than the previous method and also requires more background check. Custom pages using API integration are the most expensive of these systems because they are customized and are integrated into one's domain. There are other systems of payments for businesses like amazon or shopify. Other systems also generate payment page generators.