Does the Internet Make You Feel Lame?

There are so many inspiring, beautiful, and perfect images on the internet! A quick scan of Pinterest will offer you an array of Instagram filtered glaces at flawless manicures, adorable frosted cupcakes, and beautiful models swirling in refined evening gowns. Even if you side-step over to Facebook you’ll get cropped images of your friends hanging out and having fun, smiles all a-gleam, beautiful vacation snapshots, happy families, and glamorous self-portraits straight from the home bathroom-studio, complete with carefully applied eye-liner.

The problem with all of this is we are only seeing everyone’s BEST portrayal of their lives and businesses. We don’t get to see the part during the vacation when everyone is exhausted and cranky from the long drive. We don’t get to glace over the unedited, reject portraits taken before the good ones. We don’t get to see images of when those two best friends aren’t getting along, or when that craft project screwed up halfway. You won’t find hair tutorials on Pinterest that fall flat, or be able to sample those cute-looking cupcakes to know if they actually taste as good as they look.

This is just ridiculous.

Don’t let all of the online-perfection make you feel like your life isn’t good enough. Most of the content on the internet goes through a filter and is hazed over before being placed online. It may all look so wonderful, happy, and glamorous, but that’s because we are only seeing one side of it. People will post pictures of their wedding and their honeymoon, but not their first fight as a married couple. You’ll see sweet images of newborns, but not of in-progress labor or soiled diapers. Know that every person’s life has picture-perfect highlights, and imperfect experiences that help us grow and learn. Keep this in mind whenever you peruse the world of the internet and start to feel that sense of envy creeping in.

What’s Your Biggest Time-Suck?

If you are running a business, big or small, you’re supposed to promote the crap out of it if you want any sales. The more you promote, the more smartly you promote, the more your business will grow.

Duh. We KNOW Megan. Moving on.

Online social networks are a great way to reach new customers and fellow professionals to build connections and get the word out there. There are so many to choose from! Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, Polyvore, WordPress, Tumblr, Community Forums, DeviantArt, LinkedIn, Blogger, and so on… If you tried to use them all you would be spending all 29 hours of the day getting your social networking done and have no time for anything else.

But… there’s only 24 hours in the day, not 29.

Exactly. You can’t afford to be everywhere and doing everything, no matter how big the fuss over the new shiny social network is. Try a few out, pick your favorites, and work off of those. Keeping yourself from spreading too thin will prevent your content from going sour. You want to be reliable to your followers. You don’t want to be that person who posts something fresh everyday, to the point where your followers will start to look forward and count on your updates, only to vanish without a trace.

Pick a few and stick to ’em.

BUT. <<<<- big but here. Watch how much time you are spending with these tools.

3 hours a day spent promoting on social networks is over 2 hours too many. Time yourself. Limit yourself for no more than an hour (at MAX) to spend on all of your social networking, and that includes e-mail, blog writing, forum discussion, treasury making, ALL OF IT. You may think you are not wasting a lot of time doing your online promotion, but I bet you would be surprised just how quickly that time can fly if you started to pay attention to the clock.

But if I only get to use less than an hour, how am I suppose to get it all done?

Smart planning will allow you to manage your online promotion more efficiently. Personally, I like to write most of my status updates randomly, and keep them stored on a basic Notepad file. This means I’m working on updates without actually being on Facebook (and all of it’s distractions). So when I need to update, it literally only takes a second, as I pop open my saved document, and copy and paste the status to my networks. Less than a minute: done. If you choose just ONE DAY a week to spend your hour on writing updates for Facebook/Twitter/Etc., you can use that time to stalk up for the rest of the week. Spend your next day’s hour on writing blog posts. Schedule and save drafts to be published throughout the week. Done. Spend your next day’s hour making treasuries – if you have any teams that require team treasuries to be made, this is your time to get them done. One hour (or less), and no more treasury creation til next week. Done.

I think you get the idea.

It is possible to cover all of your marketing bases without losing all of your valuable creative time to cyber space. Next time you’re about to log on to YOUR biggest time-suck, check to the clock and start timing. Together, let’s see how much valuable creative time we can save!

Everyone is Talking about Pinterest

… and I’m finally on board! Although I’ve tried to snag an invite from the site before, when I didn’t get a free pass right away I’d kind of forgotten about it. I had let it fall by the wayside and focused elsewhere. But now, I’m glad that I’ve come back to it – with the help of Etsy opening it up to us! (You can check out their announcement about it here.)

Now that all Etsians have been invited to Pinterest, I image that the amount of content is going to explode. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. I for one, am already an addict – and I’ve only been on the site for a day! (Imagine the possibilities of after a few weeks… months… or even…. you get the idea.)

So far I’ve just been pinning things that I think are fabulous. I have an unusual Goth + Glamour + Geeky + Victorian taste, and I think it is starting to show though on my boards. Remember, this is just after a couple of hours on the site. I’m looking forward to expanding them. If you want to explore the possibilities with me, you can follow me HERE. Happy pinning everyone!