Welcome to Matt Eastwood's knowledgebase for establishing your brand, creating an online presence and performing effective marketing.

You'll find notes and references compiled from my personal experience, seminars, literature and several excellent weblogs.

This Wiki's Contents

Whenever available, the following pages start with links to helpful tools, literature and other resources worth having, then continue with my notes.

Brand Basics

The Brand Basics section features tools, advice and methods to help you establish yourself and your business in real life, laying the groundwork for a successful, effective online presence.

Going Independent: Basic tools, strategies, principles for a business and/or freelance life. Motivation and productivity advice. Includes planning, goal-setting.
Branding: Defining your personal and professional identity, reputation, positioning yourself. Personal branding (personality). Elevator pitch, slogan/tagline.
Getting Gigs: Mostly for writers: find & hook prospects, write query and pitch letters. Which services to offer.

Relationships

Interpersonal: Real-life interaction, communication. Networking. Building trust and familiarity with prospects, clients, partners, contacts.
Community: Establishing and managing your community and business audience.

Online Presence

The Online Presence section focuses on building your web presence: it covers designing your website and blog and creating attractive, compelling content that helps you build authority and a great reputation in your field.

Website

Setup & Design: Installation, design, layout of a good website. Best practices, incl. colors, fonts, layout, interface.
Development: Coding and web dev: common bug fixes & workarounds, best practices, resources. HTML, CSS, WordPress, plugins, quality/integrity testing tools and more.
Content: How to create, style and present content that captivates and converts visitors. Privacy (GDPR/DSGVO).
Blog: Purpose, creation and maintenance of a blog. Also covered: philosophy and guest blogging.

Forum

Forum: How to set up, configure and manage a forum software, e.g. using phpBB or BuddyPress.

Web Content

Writing: Copywriting, ghostwriting, blogging, storytelling, newsletters. Covers types of articles, formatting, structuring and more.
Anatomy of an Article: How to write an article. Includes headline & subheadings, intro, transitions, body, closing.
Photography: Technical and business advice. DSLR intro, portrait photography. Other genres. Promotion.

Using Images & Visuals

One of the strongest and most consistent message across all business blogs I frequent is that visuals (including images, video, graphics, ...) are of paramount importance in your marketing.

Resources, Advice: About images, infographics, slides, graphs, quotes etc. Tools and resources for free images, editing and creation.
On Social Media: Creating and using visuals as promotional tools to engage your audience and sell on social media.

Marketing and SEO

The Marketing section covers strategies to define, establish and promote your brand and product online in an attractive, persuasive and sustainable manner. Including sales advice, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media promotion.

Marketing: From product design and building intrigue to (content) promotion, business cards and beyond.
Content Marketing: Exploring this crucial element of marketing, its implementation, current state and strategies for the future. Content promotion.
Selling: Revenue models. Planning and implementing an actual sales process: online and in real life.

SEO

SEO: Best practices and troubleshooting for on-page and off-page SEO, marketing and PR strategies to boost search engine rankings, e.g. backlinking, keyword research, online business listings.
Google: SEO using Google services, like My Business, Maps, Search Console.

Social Media

Social Media: Advice for marketing and branding on social media, and community engagement.
Social Networks: Information and advice specific to social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn & more.

Sources, Credits and Links

I started this resource archive on Google Drive for my own education in late 2013. When my documents became too bloated, I looked for a location to migrate to. I quickly realized this is the kind of information I should share with the public - why not let everybody benefit from it?

I learned a significant amount of this wiki's content from the following excellent online resources:

Brian Clark and his team at Copyblogger
Michael Stelzner's Social Media Examiner
Dan Schwabel and his team at the Personal Branding blog
Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income
Entrepreneur Chris Brogan
Carol Tice's Make a Living Writing
Pam Wilson's BIG Brand System
The wonderful people at Digital Photography School
Jon Morrow and his team at Boost Blog Traffic
Author and web designer Paul Jarvis
Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz's Smashing Magazine for web designers
Paul Andrew's Speckyboy Design Magazine
Manoela Ilic's Codrops web design/development blog
Lifestyle blogger Mark Manson

Additional credit goes to:

My business consultant Simone Hoa from Passion2Success
My past colleagues at the Frankfurter Neue Presse newspaper, especially the Taunus Zeitung division
All the friends and supporters that have helped me grow and develop my skills.
My personal experience in the fields of journalism, photography, writing, theatre and the corporate world.

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