Ever had one of those moments when you really wished you knew how to do something specific? If only there were someone you could ask…
Thanks to the social web, particularly niche blogs and expert-driven communities, it’s easy to find knowledge, insights and guidance direct from the pros, no matter what the topic area. In fact, online tutorials and how-to sites have been around almost as long as the web itself.
Here’s a run-down of more than 60 great how-to sites and guides covering everything from building a mashup to being more productive, creating a website and more.
Have a great how-to site that will teach us something new? Add it to the comments and tell us more about it!
General How-to
wikiHow – A huge collection of how-to guides edited by the community.
eHow – One of the largest collections of tutorials on the web. eHow is a 2008 Open Web Awards Blogger’s Choice winner.
How To Do Things.com – Find articles from experienced contributors on how to do just about anything.
WonderHowTo – A human-edited collection of video tutorials from more than 1700 websites.
Instructables – A community that creates tutorials on an enormous variety of topics, some practical, some not-so.
Expert Village – A collection of more than 130,000 video tutorials.
Howcast – Find how-to videos on a variety of topics. Howcast is the 2008 Open Web Awards Blogger’s Choice runner-up.
MindBites – Watch how-to videos or create your own to earn money.
VideoJug – How to videos for just about everything in life.
SuTree – A collection of how-to videos covering everything from beauty & fashion to language.
Technology How-To
Wired How-To Wiki – Get information on how to do technology-related things from linkbaiting your blog to surviving a nuclear blast.
The Java Tutorials – A collection of Java tutorials from Sun on using various components.
the How-To Geek – A collection of computer tutorials covering everything from protecting your children online to using different wallpapers on dual monitors.
How to Make Your Own Web Mashup – A short tutorial outlining the steps necessary to build a mashup.
How to Podcast – A complete, free tutorial that teaches you how to set up your own podcast.
HowtoForge – A huge collection of user-friendly Linux (
) tutorials.
PCWorld – A huge collection of tutorials for PC users.
HowToJoomla.net – A collection of Joomla () tutorials.
Screencasting: How To Start, Tools and Guidelines – A guide outlining why you should screencast and how to do it.
How to get traffic for your blog – A huge list of things to do to get traffic for your blog from marketing guru Seth Godin.
How to design a website layout in Photoshop – A complete tutorial showing you how to create your website layout in Photoshop.
Tutorialized – A collection of tutorials and how-to guides on a variety of tech-related topics.
How to design a website – A comprehensive tutorial on how to design using HTML and CSS.
How to Design a Website – A web design guide from About.com.
Good-Tutorials – A large collection of web-design tutorials covering Java, HTML, CSS, PHP (), Ruby, and more.
Video-Tutes.com – Free video tutorials for a variety of software programs including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and MS Word.
A Beginner’s Guide on How to Install Linux Software – A basic guide to installing Ubuntu ().
PSDTuts – A huge collection of Photoshop tutorials and other resources.
PhotoshopStar – How to Photoshop articles and tutorials on a variety of different techniques.
Gimp-tutorials.net – A collection of tutorials on everything from photo manipulation to text effects in GIMP ().
Tutorial Blog – A blog filled with how-to guides and tutorials on design topics.
Blog Tutorials – A blog offering how-to advice for blogging.
Noupe Tutorials – A blog that focuses on web design and development and offers a large repository of great tutorials.
CBT Cafe – The Computer Based Training Cafe offers free tutorials and how-to guides on Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and more.
Niche Blogging Tutorials – How-to blog posts from DoshDosh covering niche blogging techniques.
Productivity and Efficiency How-To
How to be More Productive – A guide from the Blog Herald that focuses mostly on how to be a more productive blogger.
How to GTD – A small collection of blog posts covering how to get started with Getting Things Done.
How to Start with GTD – A basic 10-step guide to starting out with GTD.
How To Be More Productive – A very complete guide to becoming more productive, covering everything from technology to dietary changes.
Business and Career How-To
Inc. How To Guides – A collection of business guides for just about every topic.
How To Write A Resume.org – A complete resource for writing resumes and cover letters.
How to Blog Your Way to Small-Business Success – A short guide on using blogging to promote your business.
Startup How-To Guides – A collection of business how-to articles from Entrepreneur.com.
Score – Find how-to articles on a variety of business topics from advertising to management to starting a business.
How to Market in a Recession – A how-to guide from Harvard Business school.
How to Twitter your way to marketing success – A guide to using Twitter (
) as a marketing platform.
Mashable How-Tos
HOW TO: Build Community on Twitter – Build a loyal following and engage those followers.
HOW TO: Market to Bloggers According to Timothy Ferriss – Techniques for marketing to bloggers from the New York Times bestselling author.
How to Track 500 Business Blogs in 10 Minutes a Day – A great guide for all of us who need to keep up with tons of incoming information.
How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards – A must-have guide for anyone who uses multiple social media sites.
How to Build Your Online Brand – Covers how to use social media and Web 2.0 tools to create a name for yourself online.
How to Know if You Should Fire Your Social Media Consultant – A guide to some tell-tale signs that your social media consultant isn’t all they’re cracked up to be.
How to Develop a Social Media Plan for Your Business in 5 Steps – A simple guide to creating an effective social media marketing campaign.
How to Live Blog a Conference – A guide to live blogging preparation and execution.
Miscellaneous How-To
How To Meditate – A complete online guide to teach you how to meditate in the Buddhist tradition.
How to Draw Manga – Manga University has a great collection of how-to articles on drawing different elements of manga characters.
Sushi Eating HOW TO – A complete guide outlining how to eat sushi and sushi bar etiquette.
How to Go Green – A collection of guides to green your life on topics ranging from investing and hybrid cars to workouts and weddings.
The Storque How-To – The how-to section of Etsy’s blog covers all sorts of topics from cooking to selling on Etsy.
How to Clean Stuff – Tutorials for cleaning everything from old photos to ballet flats.
Lowe’s How-To Library – A huge collection of home improvement how-tos.
PopPhoto HowTo Archive – A collection of photography how-to articles covering image editing, composition, lighting, and more.
How to Photograph… – A series of tutorials on photographing a variety of situations and subjects from weddings to urban landscapes to zoos.
Social media tools are becoming mandatory for career success. They are free advertising and give you the ability to connect directly with hiring managers, entrepreneurs and recruiters, instead of applying for jobs through job boards, which are black holes. Your digital assets — blog, podcast, and social networking profiles — are your online identity and how people discover and connect with you. You have the ability to leverage one or all of these social media tools in order to present a positive image and be recruited for a position that aligns with your passion.
In this post, you’ll learn how to conduct a situational analysis, figure out exactly what your personal brand is, select the best social media tools to connect with your audience, build your online empire and finally, market your brand for career success. In light of the launch of my new book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, we’re also giving away free copies (details at the bottom of this post).
1. Conduct a situational analysis
You can’t leverage social media for career success unless you know where you stand today. This includes taking a good look at your life, what your current responsibilities are, the amount of resources you currently have and your career position. For instance, if you have two children and a full-time job (two children is probably another full-time job), you won’t be able to spend ten hours a day building a community using social media tools. If you’re twenty years old and your parents are wealthy, then you will have more time to invest in your online brand and you may have extra cash to help market yourself. Also, you may have a strong or a weak professional network, which can either support your brand or hinder it moving forward.
When it comes to your career, you need to decide if you’re looking to go to graduate school, start a company, or get a full-time job at a company and climb that corporate ladder. These decisions will impact how you use tools to communicate what you do, who you serve, and how you want to be positioned relative to everyone else, along with your goals and mission.
2. Unearth your personal brand
Since social media tools require multimedia and written components for profiles, you’ll need to figure out your personal brand before you start building your profiles. Start by assessing what your strengths are, what you’re passionate about and then ask your network for feedback. Figure out how people describe you already and how you want people to perceive you in the future. During this time, you’ll want to stay true to yourself, remain authentic and be completely transparent because that is how people are going to relate to you.
Decide on your personal brand statement, a single picture/avatar to best represent you and fill out the typical profile fields that you will find on the majority of social networks (i.e. a summary, work experience, personal interests, etc). Your personal brand statement isn’t a job title, like financial analyst or marketing manager. Instead it tells the world two things: what you do and who you serve. After you’ve written all of this information down, you’re prepared to select the best social media tools for your branding strategy.
3. Select the right tools
Social media tools should be selected along the lines of three sets of criteria. First, the volume of the social network is an important qualification because you want to market yourself where a lot of people are already searching for people that have your expertise. Plus, social networks like Facebook (
), LinkedIn (), Twitter (
), FriendFeed (), YouTube (), Flickr (), Delicious () and Digg () have millions of users that can share your resume, profile, blog entries and more. This allows your brand to go viral and that exposure can help you land a job without applying. Second, the credibility of social networks helps you consider only the tools that have successful individuals you’d want to network with to help your career. For instance, LinkedIn is known to have many executives on it, including Bill Gates.
Finally, the relevancy of the social network, as it ties in to your career and industry, can void the other two requirements. There are social networks for doctors (Medical Mingle), real estate agents (Active Rain), and many more. You’ll want to join these because you’ll meet people just like you. Ning contains social networks for almost every vertical as well.
Aside from social networks, I highly encourage you to have your own personal digital asset. This could be either a blog or a traditional website registered under your name or the topic you want to own (with keywords). For blogging, use either Wordpress.com/.org, Blogger (), Typepad () or Tumblr (). For traditional websites, use a host such as Bluehost, Godaddy, or a free host like Bravenet.
4. Build your online empire
Now that you have all the tools in place and have filled out all your social networking profiles, it’s time to start building your online empire. This means you have to start generating a lot of content, either written, audio, video or all three. It also requires you to become a resource and a valuable contributor to your community.
You’ll have to constantly share interesting articles that you create or that you find on your topic and distribute them throughout all of your networks (the ones that you chose in step 4). The process for building your empire includes creating interesting and relevant content and publishing it, over and over again. To do this, you need to be committed, confident and passionate about what you do or you’ll end up giving up.
5. Market your brand
Marketing your brand for career success is the hardest part of the process. Most bloggers don’t even bother marketing their blogs. They believe that creating content markets itself, which is completely false and the reason why they have yet to reach a high level of success. Just having social networking profiles isn’t enough. You need to invest ten times as many hours in your marketing campaign as you do actually creating content.
There are many routes you can take to market your brand, such as being a member of a special interest group, becoming a leader in that group and speaking to organizations. Then there’s commenting on blogs in your industry, guest posting on other sites and interviewing bloggers. You can pitch bloggers and traditional journalists so that you can be a part of their stories and you can join forums, Facebook fan pages and groups to meet other people that may want your services. Regardless of the way you get your name out there, ensure it’s consistent with your brand.
6. Monitor your reputation
Whether you choose to use free or fee-based reputation monitoring tools, you need to keep your pulse on what people are saying about you all the time. The mandatory tools you need to use are search.twitter.com and google.com/alerts because you’ll be able to catch microposts (Twitter) and macroposts (blogs/news articles) citing your name.
You want to have a fast reaction time so that you can locate Tweets or blog posts that you can leverage as endorsements or find negative messages that you can prevent from spreading. Think about monitoring your reputation as an opportunity to learn more about how you’re projecting your brand to the world and take some of it as feedback to help you in your future career development.
Companies such as Zappos, Dell, and JetBlue are all known as successes in harnessing the power of social media for business. However, the aforementioned businesses sell directly to consumers. How about the business that sells products to other businesses? What if you’re a company that builds inventory software or datacenters for the likes of Walmart? Is Twitter, Facebook (), Ning, or a company blog going to be any use?
In fact, the answer may surprise you. There are business-to-business companies that are utilizing the social web to find customers, to build up a reputation, and to get the upper hand on landing the big deal. There’s a great deal that social media offers to the non-consumer business. Here are four of the best ways to use social media when you’re in enterprise:
Step 1. Build a reputation of expertise
What use is a company blog if you only have 10,000 customers, rather than 10 million? While it may be true that a B2B’s blog or Twitter () is not going to be followed by as many people, it doesn’t change the fact that it will affect the decisions of your customers. Say a potential customer becomes aware of your software solution, and goes to your website to find out more about you. How can you stand out from the crowd? By building a blog with your expertise in focus.
If a potential customer comes to your company’s website and sees an active blog with insightful posts on how your company’s product helps customers, reads detailed posts demonstrating your company’s knowledge, and comes across a few case studies, they’re going to be far more inclined to come to you for their needs.
Social media provides an outlet for displaying who you and your company are. Talking about your industry in an intelligent way via Twitter and a regularly-updated blog can raise your company’s profile and brand it as a thought leader and expert in its specific business area.
37Signals, the maker of Software-as-a-service business collaboration products, is a prime example of this philosophy in action. Their blog is regularly read by thousands of people, shared among businesses, and has even opened up another revenue stream in the form of a popular job board. Social media builds reputations.
2. Research your customers
Everyone thinks of social media as a communication tool, but not enough people think of it as a research tool. With the ridiculous amount of data produced every day on social networks, blogs, and in conversations, it should be apparent that you can learn tidbits or spot major trends by tracking the social universe.
Know what your customers are saying: If you’re trying to secure a contract from a big business, then they are probably talking to their customers via Twitter, Facebook, and more. Learn what they’re saying to their customers and read the blogs of decision makers to learn what they value and how they think.
Know what your customers’ customers are saying: Your customers don’t care about you – they care about their customers and their bottom line. If you can find behavior patterns in their customers that your product can address, your pitch will resonate more. Driving the point that their current solution doesn’t work, and then proving that with social chatter is even better.
Track industry trends: Think about the keywords that define your industry, and then track them so you know what’s changing in it. If you’re a medical company creating devices for spine fusion surgery, then you’re going to want to track any developments in spinal fusion technology. Use Twilerts and Google Alerts to track keywords by email, or create an RSS feed of new information via the Content Keyword RSS Yahoo Pipe.
Step 3. Ramp up your networking
If you are competing with another company to land a big deal, it always helps to have connections and friendships within the company you’re trying to woo. You should always be networking, because you never know when a contact can become your advocate or even the decision-maker. And that’s where social media can help.
There are a lot of things you can do to get started on the networking front. They key, though, is that you have to reach out. Otherwise, how will people know to listen? While there are literally hundreds of ways to network with potential partners, vendors, clients, businesses, customers, and decision-makers, the truth is it doesn’t matter which tool you use as long as it is one that the other person values. LinkedIn (), Twitter, Plaxo (), etc. are always great places to start, but if you can network with him or her on niche social sites, you’ll stand out just a bit more.
Step 4. Learn from others
In the end, you want to come out sharper, more knowledgeable, and better prepared than your competitors. It doesn’t matter if you have 60 or 600,000 customers, and it does not matter whether or not you sell to general consumers or Fortune 500 companies. Almost everyone is using or tracking social media and it provides you a prime opportunity to make you and your business a leader rather than a follower.
- Seek out blogs and publications in your industry and subscribe via RSS
- Network with relevant experts, including those who may only be partially related
- Follow the insights of business leaders on Twitter
- Connect with commenters on your own blog
- Make yourself very easy to find on the web – if people search for your name or your business, you should be at the top of Google (
- Keep an open mind
Don’t underestimate how much information is on the web. It’s stunning what you can learn just by reaching out. If you and your business have a strong social presence, it’s simply easier for potential partners, customers, employers, and businesses to find you. In enterprise, it’s about closing the deal and standing out; social media’s one of the easiest ways to achieve this goal.