The last few weeks have been an amazing experience for me as a blogger, designer and new media strategist though it’s been one steep learning curve. It all started when I quit my day job a little short of 2 months ago. I had been blogging for a while experimentally and on more of a personal level just writing about my own stuff, anything that interested me really. I never paid any attention to visitors, to rankings, search engines, all of that stuff just made little difference to me.
I think it started when I first installed the stats plugin in my wordpress and started noticing some activity based on my posting. It was all pretty tame and just a few trickles of curious onlookers. When I decided to become a true nomad and take the plunge into solo uncertainty I knew I had to start doing something more serious with my site and had to start getting serious about networking as well. That was just less than 2 months ago, so I started clicking & reading, adding plugins, modding my blog, adding facebook friends, signing up for linked in & my genius, started linking all my social networks to each other, subscribed to a whole batch of RSS Feeds, set up my own feed, wrote more content for my site, designed my new logo … Wow. I can’t actually believe I did all this stuff in such a short space of time.
In the last 9 years of my design & new media career I don’t think I have done as many significant things to get myself out there. I suppose the necessity was the mother of all these “inventions” and with my 2nd little bambino approaching I gotta get myself earning a steady income, which has been one of the low points of this whole experiment.
So I have made quite a few extremely valuable connections in the last few weeks just by commenting on blogs, networking online and basically being a digital nomad, traveling around and interacting with others who are wondering the digital spaces out there. Some interesting & intelligent people I have met along the digital way include: Dave Duarte, Adii Pienaar, Maximillian Kaizen, Rafiq Phillips, Vincent Maher, Matthew Buckland(ex college re-united), Small Potato to namebut a few. This proves to me that with just a little effort and the determination to get something done one can achieve alot in a short space of time.
I’ve started using bookmarking sites like amatomu, afrigator, muti and signed up for social networks like mybloglogs. Why am i telling you all of this and what importance could it have for you and your cause? I’ve been noticed now in ways like never before, I’m getting messages from people interested in meeting and chatting, people interested in sending business my way. I’ve gotten project offers sent to me via facebook, my sites traffic is up and some of my posts are making it onto first pages for some of these sites which is bring more traffic and interest. This means I’m slowing finding my way onto the map and all this in a very short space of time. You can do the same, but there’s a little learning curve, not a huge one, and it takes a little bit of time and effort.
Building relationships is one of the key factors in finding your way to the surface of the digital ocean out there. Doing so means engaging and offering something meaningful, adding value to people’s lives, being interesting and offering assistance. At the end of the day its people on the other end of the connection, people who choose whether to give you their time or not. They decide whether what you’re saying is meaningful, whether what you’re offering is valuable, whether the way you look is acceptable. What’s most interesting to me is that the majority of this activity I’m talking about is happening within local networks, South Africans interacting, making a noise, linking and collaborating, sharing ideas and sharing successes. The web is coming alive in SA and the growth of web users is increasing dramatically. Just recently stats have shown that the South African facebook network has doubled in the last few weeks, doubled.
Only a few days ago I received a project request from someone who randomly bumped into me on linked in and then sent me a facebook message asking me to design some logos.
If you were wondering how to get in touch with people, how to send a message out, how to make more connections and network better, how to sell your products and services and make youself known, the web is definitely by far one of the easiest and most cost effective ways, but you need a digital nomad to guide you along a little. I’m shaping myself into one of them and I’ll be glad to show you a thing or 2 if ur looking to step into the web age.
Get yourself out there, there’s a whole new world waiting to meet you.
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