Jice Lavocat

When working on content marketing, adjusting the time you spend between creation and distribution can be difficult. In this posts, several experts give their best tips on how to choose a good balance.

As you start writing blog posts and distributing on various media (social media, communities, forums…) you might wonder how to balance your efforts. Most of the content planning and analysis can be done asynchronously : planning can be done much in advance, and analysis could be scheduled regularly.

Content Marketing is known for being really accessible (everyone can do it, registering a domain name for a self hosted wordpress blog is cheap) and can be quite effective if you do it properly, with a purpose and with associated metrics. However, content marketing faces one big issue : it takes a lot of time.

In this post, we’ll try to address the following question : How can a writer track time when working on a blog ? A quick search on Google didn’t bring much material to answer, so I decided to go for the creative approach. I’ll try to define some processes that might be efficient for this task, and to list some associated tools.

Hugo is a tool that I have been using for one year for generating static websites. On the contrary to dynamic websites which have a database, static websites are only made of HTML, JS and CSS. There is no scripts executed on the backend (php, python, ruby) and everything is static. In this post, I am giving you the simple deployment workflow I am using to push my sites made with Hugo to a FTP, via Codeship. Codeship is a continuous delivery platform.

(Cover photo - credit @loiclemay)

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend the E1 conference, in Toulon. This one day conference was dedicated to problem solving and the talks were oriented towards the main difficulties web entrepreneurs might have faced.

Live Broadcast

We had one track with 11 talks in French about personal experience and feedback from past projects which have faced major problems. The talks were recorded and broadcast live with our partner Bizeo.net. I guess that replays will soon be available (and I’ll try to edit this post when it’ll be the case).

For those who know me, you know that I have been terribly impacted by Google’s decision to stop promoting the authorship tag. This feature gave me the opportunity, at that time, to work toward my first startup project called Elokenz.

Google’s decision took many people by surprise, and I was very sad the day George Muller announced it on Google+.

I started to blog 11 years ago. The first blog system i used, was Dotclear, I moved to Wordpress few years after because of the large plugin and theme ressources available. Wordpress is a really good blog platform, but it updates itslef too often for me.

Few months ago, the blog moved to Ghost, a really minimalist blog system, based on nodejs. A KISS aproach to the blog, I falled in love. The only issue i had with Ghost was about the hosting dependencies, no hard to manage, but since i don’t master nodeJs, i spent too much hours to hack into.

J’ai récemment découvert l’hébergeur web Webfaction chez qui je suis en train de déplacer mes sites petit à petit. Je vais sans doute proposer une suite de tutoriels pour vous expliquer en français comment installer tel ou tel CMS sur la plateforme. Il faut savoir que Webfaction est un hébergeur dont le support technique est le plus rapide que je connaisse, mais qu’il souffre pour le moment d’une lacune de taille pour le marché français : la doc et le support est en anglais. Par contre, j’ai pu discuter avec le dirigeant de la société, et il se pourrait que cela change si la clientèle française dépasse une certaine taille critique. Avis aux intéressés {{}}

Je reprends la plume délaissée depuis un certain temps pour vous présenter un évènement auquel je viens d’assister à Marseille. Il s’agit du Web In Provence , un apéro networking dédié aux acteur du web en … Provence. L’idée était d’associer un apéro avec une conférence sur une tendance montante d’internet. Pour cette première édition, les organisateurs (Florent Hernandez et Alexandre Durain) avaient choisi comme thème le “Conception Web et Multi Device” . L’invité de cet conférence était Stéphane Martin senior product designer chez Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange (la plateforme de questions/réponses dédiée aux programmeurs créé par Jeff Atwood).

Toujours en cours actuellement, un concours mis en place par Samsung a récolté une très bonne visibilité sur la blogosphère française : Samsung Launching People. Dans cet article je vous explique comment il était possible de tricher à ce concours et comment Samsung gère la situation d’une manière intelligente.

Introduction

Dans ma série de posts pour expliquer comment tricher sur le web, j’aimerais aujourd’hui vous parler du concours Samsung Launching People. La dernière fois que j’ai décrypté une technique de triche, c’était à l’occasion de Golden Blog Awards. A l’époque, la technique était très simple puisque les votes se faisaient par un simple clic. Dans le cas de Samsung, le jeu concours a été organisé sur Facebook. Il est en général plus difficile de tricher à ce genre de concours hébergés sur le géant des réseaux sociaux.

If you never heard about the 30-days startup challenge that I am taking, then I suggest you to read the following list of articles. Today we will disclose the business model behind WordiZ, the application we are creating. By doing this, I am of course aware of confidential issues, but I have the feeling that people tend to be lazy and stealing ideas take some energy. Since I am also some steps ahead from I will describe here, the concept given is the one I wrote down 2 weeks ago, and it as slightly evolved.

If you arrive on this post by a direct link or from Google, I suggest you to read the last two posts on the 30days startup challenge : here and here.

Now, let’s go to the main topic of my article : how to design a logo for the startup. Well, it’s not going to be a nice tutorial like the ones you can find on Smashing Magazine. Here I won’t give you any method, just some tools I used to design my logo.

For those who don’t know about the 30-days Startup Challenge, please have a look at my explanation here. The post of today will explain in detail how I selected the name of the startup, and what had been achieved in the last 4 days. We are indeed already reaching day-4 and I have the feeling that many things happened.

Initial feedback

You have been almost 300 people to read the first article (and I got no comment via the blog). I exchanged many emails since last Monday, and I should say that the overall feedback is really positive and motivating for me. Thanks to the first article, 10 more people signed up to the newsletter, which is quite a good number. If you want to receive the last updates, I strongly suggest you to do the same :

I have not been writing on my blog for many months now. This was probably to learn more and more from online readings and share experience with friends. As you may know, I am still working on PhD degree (Italy//Spain) in the field of nanotechnologies. However, I recently decided to try a quick and intensive challenge. Let’s call it the «  30-days startup challenge  ».

30-days startup challenge

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Je participe actuellement à une épreuve d’élevage de sentimancho. J’aimerais vous faire partager ma passion pour cette sous-branche du référencement et vous en dire un peu plus.

Qu’est-ce que le sentimancho

Le sentimancho est le nom tiré d’une épreuve française de référencement. Le but à atteindre est de se positionner le mieux possible avec son sentimancho dans le classement d’un moteur de recherche français.

En rajoutant des textes pertinents sur son site web ou en liant des accords avec des amis, le site concours va monter progressivement et se détachera de ses concurrents. La plupart de ceux-ci se caractérisent par l’emploi de techniques “bas de gamme”, basé sur le spam et la pollution de pages web non protégées.

Since I will soon have to transfer my money from an USD ($) bank account (Wells-Fargo) to France (in EUR €), I had to look around to find the best solution. With the help of one friend, I started discovering some solutions last year ; but none of them were satisfying. I thus looked a little bit more on forums and found two interesting threads. One is unfortunately in French (google translate it if you want) , but hopefully the most interesting one is in English.