Some readers told me they liked the life hacks section of my old blog, so I decided to publish some more.
Engage Awesome Founders by Reporting Bugs – I encounter bugs in products all the time. Actually take the time to screenshot and document the actions that lead to a bug then send it to the founder. I use my rapportive hack to find their email if I don’t have it.
This is a great beachhead for building a relationship because it indicates that you’re interested in their success. People appreciate that. Leverage this point of contact to build a relationship by continuing to add value in the form of feedback, connections, etc.
Identify Tech Talent for Hire Amongst Your Network – In the startup ecosystem, people are always looking for engineers and designers. Whether you’re personally looking or just want to help others, identifying these people can be extremely valuable. I monitor “developer” “designer” and “engineer” in tweetdeck in order to keep a pulse on this within my network. The results are lopsided in that there are definitely more people seeking talent, but I still come across talented people who are looking for jobs.
Upvote on HN Without the Ask:- Sometimes when I write a post that I genuinely think might be relevant to someone I email it to them. If you posted it to hacker news, instead of asking them to upvote it, just send the article in the form of your hacker news thread. Odds are if you have demonstrated that you’re sending someone an article your wrote to provide value instead of being a self-promotional tool, they’ll upvote it then and there without you even having to ask.
Make Your Posts Standout in Google Reader- Google reader is awesome, but it can turn into information overload which causes people to be “skimmers.” Include images and include bolded text in your blog posts to grab these type of users attention (if they use the expanded view). You might be able to capture some eyeballs that would have previously glossed over your post. I need to do a better job of this
Write A Follow-on Blog Post to Get the Attention of Someone You Want to Meet- A well done, complimentary follow up blog post communicates all the right things. Why? Because people appreciate you following and contemplating their thoughts. Secondly, this gives you an opportunity to provide new insight to something that interests them. When someone writes a post, implicitly they’re indicating that they’re interested in that topic. Only write a follow-up post if you can offer unique, quality insight. This was done extremely well recently by Jason Shen in his follow up on an AVC post.
Drive blog traffic by using an email address from your blog-For the record, I don’t do this, but I think its clever nonetheless. Some people have their primary email address set to their [email protected]. When I see this I find that I’m naturally intrigued and will go to their blog. This captures traffic that they might have otherwise been missed.
