Trainer, Speaker, Coach
At Search Engine Strategies I shortly met up again with Murray Newlands, a not only very smart guy and good affiliate marketing and social media blogger, but also a very nice guy. He did a ‘one minute interview’ with me, sort of like a pitch. He asked me what I was doing blogging-wise. Here’s my answer:
Thanks Murray!
Last week at Search Engine Strategies late at night in the pub Dave Naylor suddenly looked at his phone and looked sad. When I asked him what the matter was he told me his favorite football club Leeds United had just lost to Wallsall. In the First English Division. Leeds once was one of the leading clubs in English Football, being champions ‘only’ back in 1992, when Eric Cantona played in Leeds.
Dave and I talked a little about the football as I am a big Ajax-fan. Now Ajax has always been one of the leading clubs in Europe, but the last decade it has declined rapidly with the last championship in 2004. “Where are the days you could watch a game, sit back and know they will win” I said to Dave. Those days are gone. Tonight Ajax plays Juventus in the Europa League. With a 1-2 loss last week at home chances are they will be out of the cup by the end of the evening.
But as an Ajax- or Leeds fan luckily there is YouTube. The video-channel from Google. Although some Italian judges might ‘kill’ the website if they get there way with the conviction of some Google-bosses in Italy over a video, the site (for now) is a huge resource of historical material. And you can be back in those successful 90s within seconds.
Yesterday I did my talk at A4UExpo about using social media to build your brand. I talked about how I let Searchcowboys grew over the past year to where its now. It was a good session in which we actually got a couple of questions afterwards also.
If you want to see the presentation, you can! The sheets are posted below. Enjoy, and if you have any questions, drop me a line or a comment!
There are a lot of social networks on the web right now. If you want you can be ‘connected’ to the entire onliny community in no time. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo you name it. One of these social networks is Naymz. Naymz calls itself ‘next level’ of networking. Based on background and reputation people should get connected.
I was once invited by someone but never really looked at the website since. I’m sure it’s a great tool and I really believe in the ‘reputation’-thought, reputation is very important these days, but there are too many social networks I’m in. I focus on a couple of them, Twitter, Linkedin and Plaxo.
Today I landed on the site again by coincidence (well coincidence… I received an e-mail) and started clicking around the website. It looks a lot like other social networks but has one smart trigger. Your ‘reputation’ is being shown by giving you a grade. The more you ‘do’ on the website, the higher your grade. And whatever way you want to look at it, everybody wants a higher grade. So you start looking around what you can do to get that higher grade. Off course you make make new contacts and upgrade your profile, but apparently you can als get an higher grade by ‘upgrading’ to a next level.
Now is ‘upgrading’ almost never free of charge, but in this case it clearly says "Upgrade for Free!". So hell, why not, I’m not Dutch for no reason after all. And that’s where it went wrong.
Althought Naymz ‘promises’ that you can upgrade for free, this is not true at all. After one click on the Upgrade-button it immediately becomes clear that the upgrade is far from being "free". You can choose between two kinds of subscriptions: one for $9,95 per month and the other for $95,50 per year. No other choices…
At such a moment I’m finished at a website. If they would have ‘honestly’ let me know on forehand that an upgrade costs money I would have minded it a lot less, but this is actually trying to trap you into buying an upgrade. I don’t like that.
No more Naymz for me. I’ll stick with Twitter, Linkedin and Plaxo for now. If you want to connect with me there you’re very welcome to connect:
Plaxo: http://basvandenbeld.myplaxo.com
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/basvandenbeld
See you there!
* Highly sought-after professional keynote speaker, trainer and strategist
* Awarded European Search Personality 2015
* More than 15 years of web experience
* Award winning consultant, trainer and professional speaker
* Founder of State of Digital
* Longer bio here
