clips of logic

Someone asked if I’m using blogging as some sort of marketing strategy. The simple answer is yes. In fact, if you remember the picture below from REWORK, everything you do is marketing.

You might be blogging to talk about your personal life, to share your passion or to improve your writing skills. Whatever the reason may be, since your blog is public, you are directly or indirectly marketing yourself.

This is true for the other online presence you have like Twitter and Facebook. Marketing isn’t just about the product. It’s also about who made it, why it was made and how it was made.

I’ll encourage everyone to start a blog because it’s really free marketing. However, you need to realize that everything you post on it will affect not just your personal life but your professional life too. When it comes to marketing, everything matters.

If I’m interviewing someone, I would most definitely test their googling skills. The skill to look for information online, usually by using search engines like Google.

Google doesn’t only deliver facts from sites like Wikipedia, it also provides definition of words, perform calculations and even tell you how’s the weather outside.

As a blogger, I use Google as a dictionary. As a programmer, I use it to locate references, documentations and examples of code. As a gamer, I find strategy guides and game related articles by googling.

If one day, for some reason Google cease to exist, my productivity would plummet. But until then, I’ll keep on googling for everything and anything.

Complements or complementary goods are products that are consumed together and if either of the product’s price increase, demand for both products will be reduced. A common example would be a computer and the Operating System (e.g. Windows) that comes with it.

Because complements are consumed together, there is always this tension between the products to reduce the price of the other in order to increase demand. Dell would want Windows to be cheaper so it can reduce the overall cost of the PC while Windows would also benefit from cheaper PC which will sell more Operating Systems.

There are some products which must be consumed with another. These are called perfect complements and the simplest example would be the left and right shoe. The sales ratio between them is always 1 to 1 because you buy them in pairs.

In order to control the price and demand, many companies will try to control both ends of the complements. Twitter’s recently bought Tweetie (a 3rd party Twitter Client) to do just that. A cheaper (free) and better Twitter client will allow more users to use Twitter.

Complements can be your best partner or competitor. If you are just starting out, embracing your complements is one way to improve the attractiveness of your product. Microsoft funded most of their XBox games for that very reason. However, Microsoft is also been known to destroy their complements by bundling complementary apps directly in their products.

Many people cited their reason to buying the iPhone is for the thousands of applications in the App Store. In this case, the iPhone and the applications are complementary. If you are still interested in reading more about complements, check out these articles by Chris Dixon.

This an awesome talk by Cameron Herold at TEDxEdmonton about why we should encourage kids to be entrepreneur. I love his insight on allowances for kids. He argues that allowances train kids to expect a steady income like a paycheck. It trains them to get a job instead of starting their own venture.

Instead of allowances, he tell his kids that they can look for tasks and jobs they want to do to get paid. Then they negotiate the price for the job. This teaches them about how to look for opportunity and improve their negotiation skills. Half the profit is then channeled into a bank account and later used to invest in stocks. They are taught the importance of savings and investments at such early age.

I wish I was raised this way. Every parent out there need to watch this.