image credit: maria lamar

I heard on NPR last week that 80% of children under the age of 18 have never touched a postage stamp. Insane, right? Sadly, I’m not super surprised. With email and social networks taking center stage in today’s world, snail mail has become a bit of a lost art.

What isn’t a lost art? E-mail. Believe it or not, e-etiquette does exist, and if you’re not familiar with it, it’s high time to brush up on the art:

1. Introduction
Hi, hello, howdy — however you say it, get a name to go with it. Everyone knows that ‘to whom it may concern’ is lame, but even more lame = no name. See? It rhymes. Write it down.

2. Kick-Off
Right off the bat, state your intention. A lot of people like to kick off an email with a funny anecdote. Instead, get right to the point and save the funny for later.

3. Keep it Simple
I’m a big fan of using an initial email for nothing more than to request further communication. Let’s say, for instance, you’re approaching a potential advertising partnership. Rather than catching someone off guard with an extensive proposal in an initial email, why not simply introduce the basis of your idea, then write something like “If you’re at all interested, let me know; I’d be happy to send a more formal proposal.” You’re not only giving them the option to request more information, but you’re also putting the ball back into your court, allowing for an opportunity to show that you’re organized and follow through with your requests.

4. Call to Action
End the e-mail with the next step, whether it’s a request for an e-mail back for additional information, or a simple “I’ll be in touch in a few days to follow up.” Never leave your recipient guessing re: what happens now.

5. P.S.
Here’s your chance to get fun. Now that you’ve said everything you need to say, send over a compliment or funny anecdote, or talk about this hideous snow. Whatev.

Got it? Good. Now send me a practice email and I’ll grade you.

Kidding. Sort of.

A note from Jaime:

Before you hit “Send”, it’s important to check the things that people make mistakes with most often when sending out emails. A nice rule of thumb I like to use is check your “ETA”, or:

Email (are the right people on this email?)
To: (did you address is to the right person?)
Attachments (are your attachments actually attached?)

image credit: wormwould

What do you do when you are the only face and name behind your business? How do you represent yourself online? This is a question that we get very often, and let’s explore a few of the options.

Option A: Erin
Erin represents herself as both Erin Loechner and Design for Mankind, but as one entity. She has one Twitter, Flickr, Gmail/Google, and Facebook account, simply because that’s the only thing she can handle (her own words!). She also loves connecting with old friends and family who have no idea what she does, so it’s a great way for them to see what she’s been up to.

Also, since she is a bit of a workaholic, sometimes she believes that if someone doesn’t really “get” what she does, they don’t really “get” her, because work is practically all she does (again, her own words!) So, work and personal life are somewhat intertwined for her, and this might be something that works for you if you don’t mind your blog readers or customers hearing about your outfit, dog’s recent tricks, or what you ate for dinner. She says, if your brand is who you are, then why separate it? I totally agree. This option works really well for some bloggers, artists/designers, and smaller shoppes.

Option B: Jaime
I am quite different. My brand and I are separate entities. In the beginning, I did what Erin did, but I started growing and realized that soon I would be unable to handle everything on my own anymore. That meant I needed to start separating myself from my brand, as difficult as it was. It also means I now have a handful of Twitter accounts. I manage my personal Facebook profile as well as the Design Milk Facebook page. Everything I do related to Design Milk is no longer under my own name, but under a brand name. I actually like it better keeping my personal life separate because I don’t feel a need to watch my every word, or turn people off because I’m talking too much about Beans or my gall bladder. If you’re more of a private person, or your business is growing at an exponential rate, you might want to consider this option.

Long story short, I think this leads to a greater question: How personally involved do you want to be in your brand? If the answer is very personal, stick with one account. If you’d prefer some privacy, opt for two.

For further reading, check out this article from Social Media Today — they seem to think that regardless of which option you choose above, something human and real needs to show through in your interactions. We agree.

image credit: jereitman2

So. You’re an artist, and you have a website with a complete portfolio, whether it’s through Behance, Carbonmade or whatever else you kids are doing these days. If you’re really into your artwork, you might even have a blog (which you should). But don’t start there. The key to gaining an online presence is wayyy bigger than having a simple blog address. It’s time to learn how to own your blog (yep, I said own!).

The best way to that? Get out there. Really. Get out there. Put your art, your name and your website address on anything and everything. Start with this list of over 120 websites for artists to become a part of!).

Ready? Go forth and present yourself!

Hey guys! Long time no blog — we’ll be back next year with some great new posts. But before we bid adieu to 2009, we wanted to let you know about a great event happening very soon: the Altitude Design Summit. It aims to bring together designers, design and lifestyle bloggers, stylists, photographers, artists and creatives, social media companies, and design companies to get together and talk, well, Design.

The first one is January 21-23, 2010 in Salt Lake City, UT, that just so happens to coincide with the Sundance Film Festival. This year’s summit will focus on growing communities, marketing and monetizing. What’s working and what’s not. Check out the amazing schedule of topics, speaker list, and keynote panel (did someone say DOOCE?). Yep, and Erin and I will be there speaking as well — so come join us and talk shop.

Who Should Attend Alt?

• People that love talking about design in all its iterations. What it is. How it’s changing. Why it’s important.
• Design or lifestyle bloggers who want to (finally!) meet their fellow design and lifestyle bloggers.
• People from across all the design disciplines: graphic, industrial, fashion, interior, product, textile. Plus illustrators and photographers too.
• Business Owners who make pretty things and want to figure out how to get their products on design sites.
• Advertising Agencies and Marketing firms that want help creating social media campaigns for their design-minded clients.
• Employees who would love to get credit for working while actually hitting the slopes.
• People who create inspiration boards and people who look at inspiration boards.
• Star-struck film fans obsessed with the Sundance hype who want to spend a weekend celebrity sighting.

image credit: eeva

Justine from The Etsy Business Blog is joining us today, as Jaime and I have our hands full with our first BAKERY e-course (which is going swimmingly, by the way! If you missed the registration deadline, shoot us an email and we’ll fit you into the next class!). Anyway, Justine is a social networking goddess and I’m thrilled to share her foolproof Twitter/Facebook tips with you all. Ready? Here she goes!!!

–
Running a business is only half the program when it comes to success. Social networking sites allow you to be everywhere your potential clients are and at no cost to you but time.

Here’s a basic how-to guide for Twitter and Facebook Pages, which are essential to use in order to promote yourself and drive new business in your direction…

TWITTER
Concept:
In 140 characters or less, answer the question “What are you doing?”

That may sound silly, but “tweeting” your website, business, special links and tidbits about what you are up to is a very effective way to drive traffic to your business. Etsy shop owners find that when they add a link to a new shop item, their views go from zero to twenty in less than a minute.

Set up time:
Signing up to Twitter – Under a minute
Filling out your profile – Under a minute

How to use:
Once you have your profile set up you will need to start following users. My recommendation is to follow people who follow a similar minded business. For instance, Etsy sellers should follow those who follow Etsy. If you run an entertainment business, follow anyone that follows verified celebrities.

Tips and tricks:

• You can bulk follow users with Twitter APIs such as Buzzon and TwitSeeker. These sites also give you the chance to put in keywords so you end up following only those who would be useful to you.
• Reply to tweets (using the reply arrow) in order to get users to remember you and your business.
• A new feature rolling out slowly is the “retweet” button (two arrows) which allows you to broadcast a tweet from another user. Again this builds relationships and gives you extra content to talk about.
• Do not constantly bombard your followers with links to your business. Yes that’s what this is all about but if you make it seem that way, people will get turned off. Talk about your morning coffee and grumpy toddler too!
• You cannot follow more than 2000 users unless you have that many users yourself. What you should do is when you have followed 2000 followers, wait a few days, then unfollow those who are not following you. It will purge a large number of ‘disloyal’ members and allow you to start following fresh people.
• Asking questions to your followers is a good way to get people talking back to you!
• You can drive traffic to your business on the go with mobile updates.

FACEBOOK
Concept:
Create a Facebook page and any site user can become a fan of your business and get updates from you about new products, services, promotions and events directly from you. (You have to be a Facebook member to create the page.)

Set up time:
Signing up to Facebook: About five minutes if you want to add a photo of yourself and fill out the basic information.
Creating and filling out your page: Anywhere from 2-10 minutes depending on how much content you’d like to add to your page.

How to Use:
Once you have your page set up you will need to Publish your page so it can be found in the Facebook search bar.

Tips and Tricks:

• Use the Suggest friend button on a weekly basis to increase your fan base. A lot of times people miss the first few notifications and are happy to oblige when they finally see it. The current fans will be blacked out so you will not have to spam them again.
• Post a link every day. As long as it’s relevant, people will be interested and remain a fan of your work,
• Take your page link and plaster it everywhere including your websites and other social networking avenues.
• Try installing a widget on your blog or website to visually entice new fans to your page.
• Host a giveaway where participants must become a fan of your page to be eligible to win.
• Offer exclusives to fans only with special codes in order to see if sales or new business opportunities came directly from facebook.
• Visit fan pages of similar businesses and become a fan, write a friendly wall message and include a link to your own fan page. Their fans will see it and be intrigued.
• Approach other fan page owners for cross-promotions helping you both gain new fans.

Don't be a fail whale. Image credit: Twitter.

This is a topic that we get asked about a lot.

And boy oh boy, you can definitely screw this up if you don’t know how to appropriately and effectively market your stuff using social media. Here are a few things to keep in mind when promoting down this avenue.

1. Keepin’ it real. First of all, if you’re going to sign up for Twitter as a business or even as yourself, the first rule is people like real people. They don’t like “yourwebsite_dotcom” as a username and they surely know there isn’t a company robot back there behind the scenes pressing “submit” or “tweet this”! If you’re a larger company, you should still put the real tweeter or some sort of real human being somewhere in there so people know who they are talking to. This leads me to my next unspoken rule: Interact!

2. Interact = service. If you tweet every 5 hours Monday through Friday and not one of those tweets is an @soandso talking to or chatting with one of your followers, then you are not doing your job. You need to talk to people. Since you’ve shown them that you are, in fact, a human just like them don’t ignore them; not cool! They know you’re getting their @s and DMs. This will actually have a negative effect on your business because you will be perceived as impersonal, unapproachable, or just rude. You can think of this as customer service. There is this company who got really successful by building their business on customer service, you might have heard of them, Zappos? Yep, they just sold their stock to Amazon for $847 million.

3. Pace yourself. Let’s say you tweet 10 times a week. If all 10 of those are business-related, that is just fine, but you can’t push your product every tweet. I know it seems like a great opportunity to constantly be selling your stuff, but it’s actually perceived as annoying, and can disengage followers. Try coming up with a method, like 40/60 or 25/75 regular versus promotional tweets. This will keep you from going overboard.

4. Be casual. When you tweet a product or blog post, the way in which you say it is probably going to make the most difference. First of all, don’t make it sound like a commercial. You want to appear conversational. You can simply say, “Just added XXXXXX to the shop: this was super fun to make. Wish I’d bought more material to make one for me! LINK”. Or, “I just sold XXXXXX print, and relisted it. Glad to see that people really like them!” Don’t talk prices, quantities, or boring descriptions. There is no need for details when you’ve only got 140 characters. You’ve really got to make them count. Remember, your URL will take up quite a bit, so be sure to use a URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyURL. Many Twitter clients already come with these built in to help you out.

5. Retweet. By using the retweeting function, you not only tell the person you’re retweeting that you enjoy their tweets enough to share, but you are telling your audience, “hey, I care enough about you that I think you will enjoy this article/tweet/photo”.

Those are the basics. I hope that this helps you get started! Don’t forget to follow @thinkBAKERY on Twitter!

• 5 Ways to Optimize Your Portfolio for Local Traffic
• Effective Differentiation for Freelancers
• 40 Free Fonts
• 9 Twitter Tips for Business
• 27 Best Photoshop/Web Layout Design Tutorials
• How to Do More with Less Time
• Social Networks for Creative Pros
• 10 Inspirational “How I Did It” Stories

What do you think? Enough fodder to keep you going until Tuesday…?  Happy weekend!

I couldn’t have said it any better myself, so I’m not going to. Watch this. [It's a long one, but sooo worth it. Take notes.]

image credit: jakebouma on flickr

I was just reading this great article on Facebook over on Copyblogger [awesome website btw]. I started thinking about my websites and Facebook and Google…

What the article says:

…Facebook links are invisible to Google – and therefore don’t contribute to your PageRank. Facebook links make no lasting direct contribution to your site’s SEO, and as Facebook drives an ever-larger percentage of traffic to your site, that means quality content will overshadow all other SEO techniques.

What it means:

Don’t overdo it with content on Facebook, but make sure you tease enough to keep readers coming from Facebook to your website to read your content there.

What the article says:

…as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic.

What it means:

Don’t count Facebook out as an important marketing tool. According to Hitwise, Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google. Be sure that if you are going to use Facebook that you spend some time making it worthwhile for your fans. Just throwing up a fan page isn’t going to be enough.

Dear BAKERY,

My question is this… I have been blogging seriously for about 5 months and am getting a reasonable amount of traffic, however in order to attract more readers I have been looking into (and joining a few of the) many MAAANY blogging directory type sites – i.e technorati, stumbleupon, digg, blogcatalog, weheartit…you see where i’m going. I was just wondering what your opinion of them is and if you think they are worthwhile joining and submitted your content to them.

It seems like you could spend 90% of your bloggging time not actually on your own site but submitting various posts and links to all these sites. basically do you think it is worth it? And do you think if people see your posts on these sites most of them will actually make the effort to click onto your blog?

Love,
Socially Confused

–

Dear Socially Confused,

You bring up such a tremendous point. Social networking is a beautiful curse indeed. Yes, there are certain sites that do gain considerable traffic [I'm thinking WeHeartIt, Ffffound, and Digg to name a few], and if you’re on the front page of any of those few, you will see results.

However, at what cost do you find yourself on page 1 of these sites? With Digg, you need to have literally HUNDREDS of readers recommend one particular post of yours, and the odds of that sort of situation are quite slim. Not that Abby would never tell you to reach for the stars, b/c she would, but I do think your time may be better spent in other avenues.

For instance, if you continually generate great content, the masses will notice. I’m a firm believer that hard work produces great results, and the great thing about blogging is that you don’t necessarily have to be your own fan; your readers will promote your work for you through links, word of mouth and “diggs.’”

I recommend joining a few key networking sites that you enjoy most [keep in mind usability, as some of these sites are so difficult to figure out that you won't end up using them anyway!]. I enjoy Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, and to be honest, that’s my limit. I can only focus my efforts on three “social networking” sites, which raises another note to keep in mind: if you can’t devote yourself to social networking, it’s worthless. So, keep your registers to a minimum, as not many people have time to continually market yourself online [yes, we have "real lives," too!]. Thus, my advice is to pick three that you can actually become an active member in, and focus on those.

So which sites do you choose? It’s up to you. I’ve listed my three, and I’ve chosen them simply b/c they are easy to use and I enjoy the community element. You might find something more suitable for you based on your interests.

Whatever you do, remember that good content is always the #1 goal. The rest will follow with time.

Keep up the good work!

Love,
BAKERY