theCLIKK – Today: content that drives awareness and engagement, six WFH tips, and a Google Bomb.

Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years:

• Keep regular hours – Get up at the same time you did when you went to the office. Actually, this is good advice on the weekends too. Win the morning, win the day.

• Don’t work in bed – It’s a trap. Get out of your pajamas, take a shower, shave (<< fellas), put some decent clothes on and get to work.

• Set up a work station – Everyone will tell you this. Set up a regular work station and get after it. Use a desk if you can but a kitchen table works too. Working from the beach? When it’s beach time, I want to be drinking a frozen beverage and soaking in some sun. When it’s work time, I want to be at my work station.

• Get a second (or third) monitor – This holds true in the office too but you may not have extra screen real estate at home. Buy a second monitor (a cheap one if you have to) so you’ve got the space to make some things happen.

• Invest in software – Invest in some good meeting software like Zoom so you can share screens, files, and hold meetings remotely. Slack is our IM app of choice.

• Live it up – Go for a walk or a workout or catch up on The Witcher during the work day. Actually, I tried The Witcher and couldn’t get into it. Is it just me?

PDFs ARE NO SMALL MATTER: We all use this portable document format (hint: “PDF”) on a day-to-day basis, and in all sorts of contexts. So it’s a little funny that we’re stumped when we encounter any kind of PDF-editing needs (most of us don’t have Acrobat and never wanted to). You could find scattered sketchy tools on the Googles—or you could install a free Chrome extension called SmallPDF which can convert files to and from other common formats, compress PDF file sizes, and split PDFs into pieces (or merge PDFs together).

THE VIRTUOUS EXIT: There’s a bit of an “exit dilemma” for startups and new companies once they get off the ground: either they sell and allow their hard, maybe-meaningful work to be scrapped for parts, OR they go public with an IPO and permanently chain themselves to Wall Street shareholders. Nathan Schneider, a professor at UC Boulder, proposes a third option: sell it to the users. He calls this idea “exit to community,” or E2C for short, and it’d be like the tech equivalent of an employee-owned company. Schneider admits that this might need some policy intervention, but it doesn’t seem like we’re far off—and E2C offers speculative solutions to traditional exit problems, solutions which will only become more valuable in time.

WANNA CHAT? LinkedIn is rolling out a new ad format called Conversation Ads that gives advertisers “options for multiple customized calls-to-action such as product education, webinar sign-ups, or eBook downloads. Here’s what a Conversation Ad looks like:

Yesterday we talked about the types of content that work deep in the funnel when a prospect is getting close to the purchase.

Today, let’s talk about the exact opposite.

What kind of content should be produced to drive awareness for your business, products, services, or cause?  What content should be produced to attract the people that have no clue who you are or what you sell?

Remember that content like Customer Success Stories, Product Demos, and Webinars are great at the bottom of the funnel when you want to close the deal. But these same types of content are nearly useless when trying to attract brand new prospects. I mean who wants to watch your Customer Success Story before they even know who you are?

To bring in fresh meat prospects, create educational, informational, or inspiring content and broadcasting it as widely as possible through:

• Blog articles (Like this from OfficeVibe)
• Podcasts (Like this from ZipRecruiter)
• Video (particularly on YouTube) (Like this from Lowe’s)

These content types are great at driving engagement but are much less effective at closing deals with prospects who are close to buying.

To do content marketing right, make sure you’re using the right type of content for the job.

Google can, in fact, be gamed. No, we’re not gonna tell you how… you think we want to get smoted? (Smitten?)

We will, however, tell you what one version of it is called: Google Bombing. And you’ve probably seen it done, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.

Here’s an old Google Bomb that targeted Bill O’Reilly. Look at the search query that Bill is ranking #1 for.

Google Bombing means, more specifically, getting a specific page to rank in the top spot for a particular search term so that it’s the first thing people see when they Google that search term. As you might imagine, the intentions of a Google Bomb might range from pranks and humor to misinformation and propaganda.

Here’s the latest Google Bomb targeting the mascot symbol of the Democratic Party — which is usually a donkey.

‘WHICH CAME FIRST’ ANSWER: The Kindle.

The younger you are, the likelier this is to surprise you: the Kindle pre-dates the iPad by more than two years. The first Kindles were sold in November 2007 and the first iPads were sold in April 2010.

Nowadays, we think of the iPad as the Primordial Tablet, or at least the first good and popular one—and we think of contemporary Kindles (like the Fire) as cheap-if-still-decent iPad knockoffs, not realizing that Amazon has priced them so low for an endgame reason.

At their core, Kindles were always e-readers—which are, technologically, far simpler than any iPad. Another thing easy to forget now: Amazon.com originally specialized in books. The Kindle was part of Jeff Bezos’ mission to get ahead of the curve; all the way back in 2004, he called on the Amazon team to design the world’s best e-reader before the competition could.

Enjoying theCLIKK? Click HERE to sign up now!