Startup Blog

Hacking Work - 5 Tips for Marketers

Posted by Mike Volpe on 11/18/10 10:00 PM

hacking workI've been chatting with Bill Jensen, one of the authors of Hacking Work, and he was kind enough to send me a copy of the book to check out.  I enjoyed reading it.  It is a pretty quick read, and the fundamental principle that you should not be bound by rules is a great one and can inspire you to do little things to bend the rules and get more done.  In that spirit, here is a quick list of 5 hacks for marketers, 

5 Hacks for Marketers

  • Start a blog outside your IT team's control.  If you want to have the ability to publish content and do some inbound marketing but your IT team won't let you control or edit your website, just buy a domain and start blogging there.  It's not hard and IT won;t be able to take it away once you are generating traffic and leads.  (Call us at 888-HubSpot, we'll hook you up with a domain, blog, and full inbound marketing system with way less trouble that an argument with IT.)
  • Use Google Docs and/or DropBox to Collaborate.  We use both of these tools at HubSpot in marketing to help us all work from the same documents and more easily work on things together.  In fact, I live my life 100% in the cloud, I don't carry a computer from home to work.  I have a laptop at my office that I use when I am there.  I have a desktop, netbook and iPad I use at home at different times, and if I travel I usually bring the netbook.  All my email and files live on the internet, always up to date no matter where I am or what computer I use.
  • Make your own video.  There are tons of free tools to create good videos without a production company or even an expensive camera.  Use you phone to record video (many will do HD now) and edit it in iMovie (Mac) or Windows Movie Maker (PC) both of which come with the computer or can be downloaded free.  Edit the video, upload to YouTube or another free site and you are off and running.
  • Optimize Your Website for Free.  We built a free tool to give you a report about your website (www.WebsiteGrader.com) which is almost as good as a basic report that many agencies charge $500 or $100 for.  We also have frequent Website Optimization webinars where we pick websites and give you specific feedback on them.  You can't beat free advice!
  • Schedule social media posts.  I use HootSuite to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn so I can be interesting more often without having to be 100% engaged with all 3 networks 100% of the time.  You can also use TweetDeck and similar programs to do the same thing.  For folks using HubSpot, it will allow you to automatically update Facebook and Twitter with your new blog posts (which you can schedule in advance), which is something I also do.

What other "hacks" do you recommend for marketers?  Add a comment and share your tips.  I want to know what they are!

Mike Volpe

Written by Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe is a startup advisor and angel investor based in Boston.

Topics: marketing, startup marketing

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