Now that we are full-swing into September, it’s time to recognize another Who-Do of the Month. This is a simple recognition activity that began this summer. Jeff Jackson was recognized for his efforts to create free and low-cost-of-entry professional development programs for student affairs professionals through BreakDrink.com and his emerging podcast network. Ed Cabellon was recognized for his social media education efforts and his live uStream video interview series at On the Go with Ed Cabellon.
August was a strange month, as it always is, for those who work in Student Affairs. As usual, staff went into training and orientation mode, and social networking and blog traffic slowed to a trickle of what it could have been. At the end of July, both HigherEdCareerCoach and HigherEdLifeCoach hit their highest single days of traffic, only to have traffic flattened by August and training.
Amid this comparative silence, though, I kept finding tweets and blog posts about LeaderShape at different schools across the country. There are other great back-to-school leadership programs, not to mention staff training and new-student orientation programs that likely deserve recognition. Some of these happen in August and some later into the semester. But conversations about LeaderShape did stand out. So for this week’s advisory poll for Who-Do of the Month, I’d like to get input about Leadershape, and other programs that help students kick off the academic year.
As usual, I’m offering the opportunity to nominate other people and programs, and it’s possible that something else will emerge as the right answer.
What do you think?Please take the poll, reply with suggestions and leave some comments about the feelings and rationale behind your vote. The poll closes Friday and the honoree will be announced in a blog post next week.
Today’s post is part 2 of a series about the purpose behind HigherEdCareerCoach.Com and the different ways the site and my business are evolving to meet the needs of higher ed job seekers. Consider it a rough draft “blog manifesto” or sorts.
What you need to know about me:
I believe that my purpose in life is to help others along their life and career journeys.
I’ve helped many, many people get jobs and get into grad school, and to figure out where they are going in their lives and careers.
I am mostly interested in helping educators, artists, musicians, and other creators, who keep pushing people, discussions and our culture along.
I believe that knowing your purpose is not enough. You have to find the right way to express it.And for some of my clients, the answer is to not work in higher ed, go to grad school, be an artist or a musician, but something else. If I can help point them away from a wrong turn and be okay with the alternate route, I’ll be happy with that, as well.
I got to a point a couple of years ago where I knew that I enjoyed doing this coaching thing more than the job I was doing, and that it was time to move on. There were other personal motivations, too, including decreasing my stress, spending more time with my partner and kids, and living closer to our aging parents and the rest of my extended family. I want to help people who may be similarly stuck know that it’s okay to change your plans and do something different.
Residence Life is a high burnout field, and I got to a burnout point with it. Then I got over the burnout, and was happy. And people were happy with me. And I felt like I had done what I came to Penn State to do. And I wanted to leave on good terms, because I love that place, and the people there, just like I love my family (dysfunctions and idiosyncracies notwithstanding.)
Once I set a few things in motion, before I knew what had happened, all the sudden, it was time. So I took a leap of faith. And I am happier in my life and career, and get to focus more on what I am meant to do on this Earth, and how I am going to do it. I’m read to help people explore their moments of career serendipity, so that when things come together, they can be ready to take their own leaps.
Which brings me to the whole business thing. Like I said, I have money. It’s not about money. But on principle, I can only justify following my dreams if I maintain the quality of lifestyle my family has, and have a stable enough income to retire one day. I have room to wiggle now, and to figure it out, but I really don’t want to spend my retirement (if there ever is one) living on the street.
So here are the critical points you need to know about me, my sites, and my business.
I’m not motivated by money in the strictest sense, but I do want to have a sustainable business that delivers value and creates regular income, because (like most people), I value stability and want to give that to my family. They deserve it for putting up with me!
The articles and advice you get on the blogs will continue to be free as long as I can manage to keep putting good content out there and justify the costs of hosting the sites. In some cases, I pay my writers, because this is a business, and their writing keeps your eyeballs on the page and gives my business exposure while actually providing you some value, through different perspectives and ideas. In other cases, I trade posts with other education bloggers and coaches, or accept submissions based on a particular topic (for example: Monday Morning Quarterback columns.)
Other services will cost you money. (Resume reviews, coaching sessions, webinars, publications, and eventually one or more members-only sites and coaching programs.)
I’m not outrageously priced, but I am not cheap, either. I do have “friends and family” discounts, package rates, and a variety of products and services, either currently available or in development, and I’m developing more short-term and one-time opportunities to meet the demand for low-cost services.
I will continue to have some sorts of advertising on my site and more often than not, this advertising will be for affiliate programs I am a part of, for products that I use, have used, want badly (like an iPad) or just think are good. If you buy something from a link or an ad on my sites, chances are, I will earn some money from the transaction.
I’m going to stop hinting and start selling, because I want to stay busy with the coaching, help people and support my family. In other words, it’s time to really move from being an aspiring businessman to an actual one.
I’m going to enlist your help. Why? Because I believethe assistance of my readers, professional community, and other people and websites I admire can help me improve the sites and give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t, because I don’t want to annoy you and I do want you to keep coming back.
Here are some upcoming things you will see on the sites, as a result of the “course corrections” to get my sites and my business moving forward:
I will be placing more prominent links and buttons on the sidebar to encourage people to consider working with me as a coach. No more hinting. If you are a job seeker in higher ed, I want your business. But if you only come to read, that’s cool too. But if and when you are ready, I want to be at the top of your mind. If you know me and trust me already, then that’s a good start, and I’ll take it.
You’ll continue to see e-mail list sign-up forms in the sidebar and I do use pop-up forms as well. I’ll try to give you incentives to join the list. For the e-mail list, I am linking them to some auto-responders that will deliver free e-mail mini-courses over a set period, as well as regular newsletters, and the opportunity to get “blog broadcast” summary newsletters. New subscribers who sign up at Higher Ed Career Coach are currently getting a mini-course on “Planning Your Career in Higher Education” in exchange for signing up. This autoresponder mini-course has weekly topics and exercises to help you flesh out some of the steps as you plan your career journey. It isn’t really a “self-coaching” program, but it should help you get started. This mini-course will be available for the next month or so, but will be taken down and replaced by another topic-related mini-course, probably in early October. Afterwards, it will be offered (probably with some modifications and feedback) as a paid product.
This month, I will begin offering some low-cost webinars on career topics and you will see registration widgets on the site, as well as articles about upcoming opportunities. Some of these will have set per-seat prices, and others will be offered as “Tip Jar Webinars.” This means that you pay according to the value you receive. There will be a suggested donation but if you think the seminar was useless you won’t pay anything. If you get something out of it, you’ll be encouraged to support the development of the series by “tipping” based on the length and format, number of presenters and value of the information. (Probably between $5-$20 would be an appropriate tip for most seminars)
In the next few months, you will see offerings for e-books and for a book I am contributing a chapter to, called “101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career.”The book is a cooperative book project from SelfGrowth.Com and that means I bought into the project to get published alongside 100 other career authors and to have books to use for giveaways and promotions, as well as selling them. There is a screening process, so hopefully my article won’t get rejected, now that I am telling you about it. So let me make it clear. I do realize this is a glorified ad in some ways.
I’m going to revise my affiliate advertising strategy, and the first step will be to get feedback from you about what you would prefer to see, and what you might buy. I will only continue to participate in affiliate programs for products I use, would use, want or believe in. And if you have a bad experience with one of these programs or think I should stop my affiliation with a group or company, I want to know that, because I only want to advertise products and services that readers would actually use.
Thanks for reading. I’d love your feedback about what I can do to improve the sites, focus my business strategy, and better meet the needs of higher ed job seekers. I’ll be starting later this week with a brief survey about the site features and advertising/affiliate programs.
Let’s just jump right in and get to the point. Today, I learned that I am a failure.
Well, at least as an affiliate marketer. I’m trying to decide if I really care one way or the other about this, but let me rewind a bit and give you some of the backstory that brought me to this conclusion, so you’ll have context.
You may not have even realized that I am a marketer. After all, the site is called Higher Ed Career Coach, and most of the articles you find here are about job searching in higher education, and issues related to the changing landscape of higher ed. The ads you see are pretty much relegated to the sidebar and I took off some of my more sales-ey content a while back, including my Amazon.Com widget, my “book an appointment” Tungle calendar link, and the easy links to my shopping cart and Paypal payment buttons. You might even think the site is only about free career advice.
It’s not. The whole thing is an ad. And not a very good ad, at that. Sure, the articles can create discussion, and the podcast on BlogTalkRadio can offer different insights from guests, and you’ll certainly get the occasional articles that are really about me and the business. But the real goal of this site and my other site (Higher Ed Life Coach) are really the front gates for my business, and I’m not doing the best job with the selling part of things. It’s not why I went into business. I had more idealistic goals. I went into business to help people get jobs and find balance in their lives and careers (another thing I’d failed at plenty, myself, but learned a lot from.)
But I realized a few months back that I needed to get more comfortable with selling, because a business can’t just be about ideas and motivation. It has to be about action.
So I did a couple of things. First, I joined Third Tribe Marketing (affiliate link), a site founded by Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, Darren Rowse and Sonia Simone, to try and learn how to do this without being annoying. Second, I redesigned my sites to be cleaner and to get away from Adsense ads, because their strange algorithms pull in all sorts of advertising content, and there is little you can do to truly control what ads end up on your site. It’s annoying, and I hate it. So I took a new approach, and joined affiliate networks and chose companies I have used or feel that readers can actually get some value from. But I never figured out the right way to draw attention to them, and to let people know why they are there, without being sales-ey. So people haven’t been buying.
In a recent post in the Third Tribe forum, Chris Brogan put it simply. He asked members if they were hinting or selling. And I realized I have only been hinting. And that’s pretty damn annoying, too. So it’s time I “man up” and let you know more about what I am going for with this site, with my business, and about why I participate in affiliate programs. The more you know about me and what I stand for, the better you will be able to decide how my sites and I can serve you better. And, if you can’t get past the idea that I am also looking to make money, as well as assist, enlighten, and occasionally entertain, then I guess you’ll probably be looking elsewhere for this sort of information.
It’s my sincere hope that you’ll stay on as a reader, and help me get where I am going with this. And not just for my sake, or the sake of my bank account. (Let’s just say that I’m fine in that area, for the most part, and that money is not my primary motivation for doing this. I actually believe that coaching helps people, and that I am good at helping people.There is a legitimate need for coaching in the higher ed space, and I feel that coaches need to come out of the ranks of our institutions and help others find the way. I’m uniquely qualified to do this, because I have known both great success and major failure in my career (and my life) and I love sharing what I have learned. Especially what I learned from failures.
If some parts of my life and career only happened to serve as a warning to others, then I am honestly okay with that.What value would they have as distant memories and trivia, when they could be signposts in the road, steering others in the right direction?
Monday: More on me, my business model, and where I see affiliate marketing and pa
It’s easy these days to get overwhelmed by the continuous stream of information that comes at you through social media, and e-mail. A while back, I discovered a great tool to help cut through some of the noise. It’s called Gist, and it brings your contacts into one place to give you a full view of your network, making it easy to find anyone, anytime. You see email addresses, phone numbers, work details and more, all assembled and updated automatically. You can also directly ask your contacts to provide their latest information by requesting a profile update.
I’ve been using it to help kind of take the pulse of my inbox and social network each morning, so I can prioritize my follow-up. It’s also great for getting some background on people you are meeting with each day. And it can be used in GMail (including hosted Google Apps Mail), Outlook and Lotus Notes, and works on your iPhone or Android phone.
Check it out and you’ll probably agree that Gist helps you stay organized while monitoring your mail, your calendar, and your network.
DJ Coffman, the comic artist who sketched this logo, just released his first e-book.
I guess if you’re reading this far, you must have some interest in finding out why I decided to take a break from our usual topic and what on earth I could be writing about. So thanks for checking out the post anyway. Please read along.
If you read this site regularly, you’ve seen some of the awesome spot art by D.J. Coffman. He’s the guy who did the “Monday Morning Quarterback” and “Tuesday TimeOut” logos, and hopefully we’ll have some more of his stuff featured here soon. D.J. is a talented and friendly guy I met through the Third Tribe membership site (aff. link) and a respected comic artist.
His work has been published in newspapers and publications around the globe and seen on HBO, MTV, Vh1, Late Night With Conan O’ Brien and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In 2006, he won the first annual Comic Book Challenge with his project Hero By Night which is now in development as a live action TV show.
On Third Tribe, he’s one of those people who I enjoy connecting with the most, because he’s just a real guy, doing what he loves and has always loved, trying to balance his passions with time for his family. And he’s clearly the kind of person who likes connecting with people, helping them out and learning from them. I joined Third Tribe for an opportunity to learn from people like Chris Brogan. I stay because of people like D.J. Coffman. (No offense to Chris, though, he’s the real deal, too. But then again, everyone who knows social media and marketing already kinda knows that already.)
So this break from the usual topic comes to you with the simple goal of telling you about someone who pursuing a purposeful life, and some of the amazing things he’s doing. And indirectly, to give you a glimpse of who I am and the things I care about, like doing, etc. To let the cat out of the bag, I have always loved comic books, and I have a nice collection. I spent more time in high school with comic books than with girls. I used to incessantly draw superheroes everywhere, all the time. And I would give my left arm (hey, I draw with my right) to have the chops this guy has.
Yes, I am a certified geek. And I have always done my best to support others who are, especially if they are putting themselves out there in ways that help others. D.J.’s new e-book does just that. It’s called “Cash for Cartoonists” and it’s a guide to making money as a comic artist. I know that is kind of off the beaten path, and that you probably didn’t expect to read a post on this blog about something like this.
But look at it this way… in higher ed, we talk a lot about trying to “challenge and support” our students. The biggest challenge people face in life is to be their true selves. And support (whether it be from friends, colleagues, mentors, faculty or staff) is hugely important.
I like D.J., and I want to support his art and his business. So when he announced the launch of this product, I signed up to be an affiliate right away. I don’t know how many of my higher ed colleagues out there aspire to illustrate web comics for a living, but I bet a lot of you know people who might. And if you don’t, at least you know something interesting about the spot art on this site, and the guy who does it.
We now return to our regular topic. Thanks for reading!
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
