Paul Woods

So I certainly would not call myself an industry leading expert when it comes to Search Engine and Online Marketing.  But I do know enough to be dangerous.

I have had some success with my Microsoft Office tips and tricks site - The New Paperclip.  It still astounds me the power of the Internet – a few hundred simple tips I have come across over the past few years have now been read by almost 1 million people! 

The scale of it all excites me – more people in a month read my posts on The New Paperclip than most magazines in Australia!  One post alone, which took me about 4 minutes to write, attracts almost 500 unique visits per day!  Every day! 

… and the best part is, it earns a little bit of play money on the side (very handy now that our twins have almost arrived).

Speaking of the twins, with the prospect of one salary about to hit us square in the face, and a hefty mortgage to pay (as of next month, we are officially in what the experts call “Mortgage Stress“) I have been trying to diversify my online interests, put to the test some of the things I have learned, read about, or just interested in, and hopefully put into practice what I learn during my day job.

I have four projects on the boil at the moment.  One I would say is in a “shippable” state, the others  just early ideas and concepts that I will continue to develop over the next few months.

Project 1: Content Marketing – ShortcutCourse.com

This project is a spin off of The New Paperclip.  This site is focused on selling a 5 day audio course that I produced in late 2009.  The course helps people learn and gain confidence in the key keyboard shortcuts for Word 2007.  All in just 15 minutes a day.

The key lessons I have learnt from shortcutcourse.com:

1) Price matters.  At first I priced the course at USD $50.  Sales = 0.  Dropped the price to $24.95, and it started to sell (slowly, but still selling every now and then)

2) Creating your own content to sell, no matter how easy you think it is, is actually quite difficult.  But you know what, close to 100% margin thanks to the digital nature of the final product makes the effort worth while.

Project 2: Search Affiliate/PPL Marketing – BrisbaneVirusRemoval.com

This project is really my first foray into serious affiliate and search engine marketing.  So I found a highish paying affiliate program for a product I know a little bit about, in a market that has lots of vendor competition, but not much third party action… and then localised it.

What I realised from the success with The New Paperclip is that taking complicated content and making it personal, easy to read, and easy to understand can drive a lot of traffic to your site - and that is the strategy I plan to take here – but instead of Office tips and tricks, the content will be focused on helping people understand viruses, malware, spyware, and adware – and more importantly, how to remove them!

Early days yet.  Not much traffic.  But still learning lots

Project 3: Content Marketing / Online Retail - mbaSlideLibrary.com 

The concept is simple.  You are a high powered executive.  You have an MBA (or wish you did).  You don’t have the time to create your own business plans or presentations.  You run your business using PowerPoint (just like, surprisingly, many other organisations).  You would be happy to pay $$ for a complete business plan, where all you need to do is plug in the figures, not worry about how it is structured.

So, MBASlideLibrary.com is an online retail site where you can download that business plan, marketing plan, or that slide of Porters Five Forces.

Well the retail site is there (thanks to Shopify)… I just need to pull my finger out and get the content up there to actually sell (see the lessons I learned from Shortcut Course above!)

Project 4: Hyperlocal Journalism – (to be announced soon)

This one is still on the back of about 14 different pieces of paper in the office, but in the next few weeks I am going to launch a hyper local site for my suburb.  This project was been inspired by reading “Made to Stick” – there is a great story in there about a  very successful local newspaper aimed at locals, for locals – that kills traditional mainstream newspapers.  Whilst there are two or three print local rags in our suburb… print news is dead (oh no he diiiidn’t). 

And to be honest, they do not contain much news – lots of copy and paste press release content – and a lot of advertising (A LOT!).  Considering there is a proven market for a local audience that local small businesses are willing to pay money to get in front of, and that no one is doing anything like this locally, in a cost effective way (seriously, why print 11 000 copies of a newspaper when WordPress and a nurtured email list will do the job far better), I know that in 6 months I will have the media channel for our suburb.  THAT IS HUGE!

(did I mention that this old Internet thing still excites me!)

Now – across The New Paperclip and these four projects, I think I might be stretching myself a bit thin to do all really well, so I suspect I will re-evaluate around July and drop two of them.  But that is the beauty of online marketing – it is cheap to test, and cheap to enter markets (well most, apart from porn and gambling).

Are you from Brisbane and interested in discussing online marketing, or marketing in general over a coffee or beer?  Give me a shout  – paul@paul-woods.com

Later this month I am speaking at the JuiceIT road show being run by Data#3.

The concept behind the session is that your IT team (and every other IT team in almost every organisation, anywhere in the world) have a huge opportunity to increase the effectiveness of your people.  Not just increasing the productivity of your IT team and the systems you look after (like all those Virtualisation/VMware fan bois) but EVERYONE IN THE BUSINESS.

That is a BIG DEAL.  And we are not talking about significant numbers either.  There are so many things that IT teams can do to increase the productivity of the business by 1%, 2%, 5%.  That might look small to you, but to management, share holders and share markets, they are improvements that could mean millions of dollars depending on the size and scope of your business.

Think about it.  How much time do you (or your Managing Director, or your HR team, or your Sales people) spend with Outlook every day?  Chances are more than your wife, husband, kids, friends, or your television… combined. 

… and when was the last time you sat down and explored (or more likely someone told you about) functionality in the product that you have not used before??

Most of you will not remember the last time.  And, I can almost guarantee that you don’t know anywhere near as much about Outlook (or Word or Excel) as you need to know. 

My gut feeling is that you could be wasting hours a week doing things that could be done faster, if only you knew how to make the most of the tools you already have at your disposal.

In the session my colleague Joseph Mortimer and I will dive into how you can get the most out of your productivity tools (Office, SharePoint and more), the key to ensuring that you get the results you want, and more importantly how to create the context to deliver a productivity environment that ensures that you meet the expectations of the entire workforce.

So if you are in Brisbane on Thursday March 11, or Adelaide on Thursday March 25 – make sure you register to attend JuiceIT.  Our session is just one of 25 at each event, which brings together vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, HP, VMware, Toshiba, Symantec, and many many more.

Over the last couple of months I have been fairly busy on the speaking side of things.  Here is a quick look at some of the topics I have been talking about:

Negotiation

A few weeks ago I delivered a guest lecture at QUT in the postgraduate Negotating Across Bordersclass.  This was a really good session that was supposed to last 30 minutes, but ended up going for 90 as we dug into my experience negotiating in the real world – house purchases, complaining to teleco’s, pay reviews and more. 

OfficeDevCon09 – Getting Productive (and getting a return) on Microsoft Office and SharePoint

This session was delivered at the community run OfficeDevCon conference, which this year was held in Brisbane.  Great turn out (not a spare seat in the house)… although I did get some feedback that the session was “Too Interactive”…

TechEd Australia – OFC102 - Productivity for the IT Pro, and The Productivity Myth (TechEd Online Tech Talk)

Microsoft TechEd Australia rolled around again this year on the Gold Coast, and I was lucky enough to not only  be a speaker in the Office Track, but also recorded a short video on my earlier post – “the Productivity Myth” with Alistair Speirs.

This morning I received an email from Microsoft…

Dear Paul Woods,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Word technical communities during the past year.

The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."

Toby Richards
General Manager
Community Support Services

My first thought… It must be the first time anyone has said Thank you for your technical leadership”  to a Marketer!

Seriously though, I am very honoured and humbled to be presented with this award – officially for my contribution to the Word 2007 community through my little pet project – http://www.thenewpaperclip.com/.   Thank you to the folk at the MVP program at Microsoft, thank you to Alistair who I am sure is behind my nomination, and thank you to the almost 300 000 people who visited The New Paperclip last year to overcome their challenges with Office 2007.  This is for you!