As I mentioned before, I'm not keen of producing a ton of content on social networks, or any closed 3rd party platform, as that involves granting a license to your content, contributing only to their success and expansion.

However, social media still is an important source of exposure, where your content easily reaches your friend and followers. So I went back and forth for a while as to where should I publish content that I'm creating, being nature or travel photos, or my portrait photography adventures that I'm so passionate about.

The secondary aspect that troubled me for quite a while is how do I keep my Instagram account clean and tidy. If I post a mix of everything I do or like, it will become a salad of everything. And I'm not the "salad of everything" kind of person.

Of course all the main content goes on my website, so then what do I do with social media? I tried creating a secondary Instagram account, just for the portrait photography, but then found it's hard to increase the follower base and it felt like I'm wasting precious time for nothing. Then I started publishing portrait photos together with nature & travel photos. Then I concluded that it might be sub-optimal to mix these two, as followers interested in nature photography might not be interested to see gorgeous women & man. And the other way around.

So I (re)started using a different secondary account called Chuckleberry Sin, because I liked the ring to it. So I've posted and posted and posted. And finally, after over a month of constant publishing on a daily basis, I got... 3-6 new followers. Bummer!

In the end (meaning up to today), I decided to publish them on my own Instagram account, alternating a nature & travel photo with a portrait one. And I intend to do this for the next 6 months. Then I'll draw conclusions.

Follow me on Instagram to see what I mean.

I often find myself getting involved into project, hobbies, jobs, relationships, adventures. Challenges of all types, from financial to finding time to meet with quality people. I love it and it gives me a sense of living a full life.

We gather stuff from all around, value and treasure it, buy it, receive it, gift it or sell it. It’s all a circle of matter, a flow of objects.

I keep finding myself coming back to… what do we really own? What is our treasure? And that seems to continuously be… us.

Me. You.

I am my greatest treasure.

You are your greatest treasure.

I’m excited about reading books. I’ve read about 7 or 8 books this year. And from those, 3 of them I finished in the last 2 weeks. Just because I made it a priority. I found the joy of reading, even if it’s fiction or personal growth.

And everything I read and learn is my treasure, because it’s mine and me and no-one can take it away from me.

I am writing here, because this blog is mine and no-one can take that away from me. Yes, the blog can be taken down, but nobody can take my writing away from me. It’s done. It’s out there. Someone has seen it.

Therefore, everything I write is mine. It’s still my treasure.

I realized I now have over 8 thousands professional photos that I took over the last 6 years, of which I've published less than 200.

I tried 500px, I tried Behance, I tried social media.

Nothing sticked.

But now, since I have my very own website, I think I'm going to go the extra mile and publish them here, in the Photography section.

I feel like I'm free to express beauty here, there are no community guidelines and rules, no censorship, no tracking, no cookies, no need for GDPR and regulations.

Just photography.

Enjoy!

You might have heard about the new GPT-3 language model that enabled a whole new world of AI-generated content, much closer to human quality than any previous attempt. We’ll among a lot of other AI-powered tool out there, I discovered Copy.AI, a tool that helps craft copy of all types, from sales page to social media posts.

And I was surprised to get some pretty decent results. I asked it to generate Pain-Agitate-Solution type of sales copy, and this is what I got:

Pain: Uptime is critical to your online business. It’s your store front, it’s your signpost, it’s you.

Agitate: You can lose time, money and customers if your site goes down.

Solution: Our Web and SMS monitoring service ensures that your site is up and running 24/7/365 all year round. We watch the site non-stop from all around the world and instantly notifies you if anything goes wrong. We also give you complete control over our monitoring service via our powerful control panel – so you can change your settings at any time.

Pain: Online stores with e-commerce websites running on poorly configured servers can expect a lot of technical difficulties.

Agitate: High-end online stores are crucial for any brand, therefore downtime can prove devastating to almost any business.

Solution: Learn how Monitive – an uptime monitoring service – can help you keep your business up and running around the clock.

Pain: Dealing with customers complaints about websites going down, and losing potential customers during those times.

Agitate: The thing is that not every Internet Service Provider is equipped to monitor website uptime levels for you.

Solution: That’s where Monitive comes in. There are no more excuses and no more downtime! Learn more about our services and how it works.

Pain: Visiting a website but getting an error message? Waiting 24 hours for the customer service to call you back?

Agitate: People working on the Internet should know that it is a very sensitive ecosystem. With over two billion websites online and a thousand more launched every day, every second millions of people experience failures that make their websites unavailable.

Solution: Try Monitive. We automatically monitor your website, and we immediately alert you if something happens. You can count on us to check your websites instantly from all around the world, continuously, 24/7/365. And we never sleep!

All this by feeding it the brand name (Monitive) and the following description:

An uptime monitoring service which checks the customer’s websites non-stop from all around the world and instantly notifies the customer whenever their website goes down. For online business owners.

That’s it. Click “Create”. Boom! Instant copy.

I feel like the copywriter job, and many others, will cease to exist in the not-so-far future. Including software developers. I mean, it makes sense that no human can build computer software better than an AI that has all the manuals, open source code and the complete knowledge available on the Internet.

Until then, let’s enjoy the ride and sunny days.

Started my day at 7am, to get on top of things and prepare a few Google Ads copy variation for my Ads meeting coming up soon. I see a lot has changed since I last ran my Google AdWords campaigns, now we have three headlines and two long descriptions. Moving up, I see!

Yesterday I learned that whenever your sales or conversion funnel is not working, it’s either the hook, the story or the offer. One or more of these are not compelling, suited for your audience or attractive enough for your target customers. That’s what Russell Brunson is saying in his Traffic Secrets book.

Which does make sense. You’re scrolling your never-ending timeline on your favorite social media time-consuming app once or several times a day.

Some ads catch your attention, some don’t.

For those who do, if they’re attractive enough for you to tap on them, if the story you’re reading isn’t compelling, they lost you. And if they didn’t, you finally get to the “offer”.

Which, again, if it’s not making you dream of having that already, they’ve lost you.

Now, in our scenario, they is you. Or me, to be more precise.

How do I make my funnel perfect for my target audience?

I guess I just have to experiment until I get it… just right.

Monday morning. It’s a quarter after 8. Dew drops give me the impression that it’s raining, but the sky is almost clear so I’m looking forward to a beautiful and sunny day in Lisbon.

I’ve been journaling for a lot of years. Started being passionate by writing with pen on paper, then discovered the amazing Moleskine notebooks, and finally discovered the Bullet Journal system and their magnificent dotted Leuchtturm1918 notebooks that I’m using ever since.

However, now I’m writing on my blog. This makes me go a bit beyond the mundane depiction of what happened and how I feel, providing some value to the future reader, but also pushes me to be radically honest about facts and feelings.

Yesterday I went for a walk, then read a few chapters from Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis, and I fell asleep and dreamed about creating a promotion and how would that work. I literally started dreaming about marketing. That’s where I wanted to go at.

Throughout the last 10 years, I’ve built or participated in building about 8 different online products and services. None of them got any significant traction. They all resulted in failure but with a big experience package that I cashed in and used in my next projects.

That’s why I’m completely shifting from building amazing things to learning how to tell compelling stories, identify ideal customers, create offers, build awareness and generate leads.

At least this year, my number one focus will be marketing. I will learn and read and apply everything relevant on this subject.

I am confident that if I gain at least half of the amount of knowledge I have about engineering, but of marketing, it will help me in my dream of improving peoples lives not only by providing useful tools in doing so, but also in getting actual people to use them.

That being said, I started diving head first into the following books and resources:

• Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis
• Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson
• Psychology & Marketing resources by Nick Kolenda
• SEO Sprint Course from Thrive University

Rosanna Lopez is helping me out get my marketing strategy straight. She has a huge experience in Digital Marketing and I am deeply grateful for her taking the time to help my awareness-building endeavours take shape.

I started getting active on a few communities during my breaks, just to see what people are sharing, asking or teaching:

• SaaS Products and Marketing on Facebook
• r/Entrepreneur on Reddit
• r/SaaS on Reddit

And finally, to measure the effectiveness of what I’m learning and applying, I’ve started studying Google Analtics 4, tracking ecommerce sales, setting up my funnels and tracking important conversion events. This is the only way I can measure how my experiments are performing.

It’s Saturday morning. I hear the raindrops falling on the window sill, while I take a sip of coffee. Another rainy day of Frebruary in Lisbon. It’s been almost two weeks since I stepped outside. Somehow, as careful and responsible I’ve been with hygiene, I managed to get the shiny new Corona plague that’s been going around. Around the planet I mean.

That’s fine. Luckly I didn’t have severe symptoms, besides fever, tiredness, head aches, diziness, loss of smell and taste, and - as a bonus - a pink eye. And even more luckly, I have new antibodies to enjoy life even more for the rest of the year.

I’ve started diving deep into marketing lately, as I had an epiphany one day. In the 20 years of software and web development, I got really good a building things. Which is what I’m passionate about. However, I suck at marketing the things I build. My main professional goal of 2021 is to generate business for the uptime monitoring service that I founded almost 11 years ago.

I know this will be a long journey, but I’m confident that seeing actual people using the tools that I have built, to make their lives or businesses better is a huge motivator that will ensure I’m waking up smiling and eager to do more magic. Bring in more users. Grow the very machine that I envision will bring me fulfillment.

I have never published my long term vision for Monitive (or any other revenue generating business) and I believe it’s time I make the /about page on the Monitive website truly sketch my True North, my Why and reason to power through each day.

As for this blog, I’ll use it to keep track of my adventures and my groth, business or otherwise, and to practice my writing and storytelling. Because I believe storytelling is a big compass of our lives, especially when it comes to the stories that we tell ourselves.

Nevertheless, I hope the content on my blog is a useful beacon for my readers, as I didn’t keep a blog for nearly 20 years. Didn’t feel I have something important to say. Now, after 37 years of life, I think I have some stories and knowledge to share. And that I never stop sharing.

It’s a new year, so a good opportunity to try out new organizing tools and techniques to improve time management and, of course, my peace of mind.

For this year, I’m trying out two things:

1. Workflowy

Workflowy is a very neat organizing tool, where you can create infinitely nested lists, thus organizing your whole personal and work life using just bullet lists.

Use the invite link to get 250 extra monthly items, on top of the 250 you’d get for a normal free account.

2. Calendar as a to-do list

After reading Work from a calendar, not a To-Do list and The Case Against To-Do Lists (and What to Use Instead) I decided to give it a go and see how that works. Therefore, large tasks taking more than a couple of minutes go on my calendar instead of my To Do list (for which I usually use Bullet Journal).

It is a chilly evening in late December. I’m sipping Rooibos tea from a metal cup, typing on my my 2014 MacBook, on a round wooden table. Being a bit cold in the house, I turned on the AC to help out the two electric heaters. I don’t yet know how the electricity bill will look like, but it doesn’t seem to bother me that much. Not yet, anyway.

I am very enthusiastic about my new personal website, since it’s something I didn’t have for nearly 20 years. I envision it as a nice and cozy place, with interesting and helpful information for any web wanderer that lands here.

I aim to improve my story-telling skills, including the stories I tell myself. I aim to be radically honest, to build meaningful and healthy relationships with the people I come into contact with, I aim to learn and grow. I feel that I have learned a lot, and that the time to give back is coming.

I wish to help and inspire others, just like I was helped and inspired. I think I can pinpoint a handful of advice I’ve been given throughout the years that have become a part of my inner being. They became the compass of how I choose to live my life. I will share them in time.

And last but not least, I aim to go outside the norm.

To think outside the box.

To unlearn preconceptions and society constructs.

To live a full life.

To perpetually fall in love.