Author Archives: marissapick

Support Ricky’s Riders During #CycleForSurvival

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#CycleForSurvival is important to me. This year I’m participating in my seventh year of Cycle for Survival on February 2, 2019.

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I’m raising money for rare cancer research. Why? For my father, Richard.

My father, Richard, was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s Lymphoma two years ago. He’s been kicking cancers ass. Now, he’s recovering from a stem cell transplant, in remission and doing well. He’s been fortunate to benefit from cancer treatment and advances, but not everyone is as lucky. I ride for my dad, but also for those who aren’t as fortunate as him.

Click the following link to visit my fundraising page and make a donation that will truly make a difference: https://bit.ly/2PqJruF

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Below are three reasons why I hope you will support Team Ricky’s Riders: 

1. Rare cancer research is underfunded, leaving people fighting these cancers with few options — sometimes none. Because of the generosity of people like you, Cycle for Survival is changing that.

2. 100% of your gift (yes, every dollar!) will fund research led by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to advance new and better treatments. All funds will be allocated within six months of the events. Cycle for Survival will share what was funded and continue to keep us updated on progress.

3. Discoveries will benefit cancer patients everywhere. Memorial Sloan Kettering treats over 400 subtypes of cancer each year and collaborates with institutions around the world.

JOIN THE BATTLE and support #CycleforSurvival

Thank you in advance for your contribution!

XOXO

Marissa

Three Important Lessons on Conquering Fear I Learned From My Son

Posted in Baby Lucas, Other by

 

Fear is only as deep as the mind allows. – Japanese Proverb

I learned a lot last week watching my four year old play and he inspired me to reflect on this experience.  I took my older son, Lucas, out of daycare and went on an adventure to the Liberty Science Center in NJ.  In the middle of the museum is a large climbing feature known as the Infinity Climber.  It’s a suspended play space that is 26 feet wide, 24 feet deep, 19 feet tall, and most importantly, it’s perched 35 feet in the air.  It’s contained by hand threaded wire to prevent any climber from falling 35 feet to the ground below and has 64 pedal-like platforms creating multiple pathways throughout the structure.  In a nutshell, it’s a blast for most who enter, but it’s daunting structure for a four year old.
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Lucas and I have visited the museum several times and he’s always been too afraid to go near the climber. As always, I encouraged him to try and tackle this seemingly massive structure. This time he went to the edge, looked around, took a step and leaped into the structure (see the above photo). In the blink of an eye, he was off to the races!  Once he took that initial step, he was climbing up and down, swinging on the pedals and conquering his fear.  Every so often, he looked and flashed a smile as he continued his way around the Infinity Climber.  I cheered him on and encouraged him to explore and have fun for as long as he wanted.  He spent nearly an hour working his way through  with only a small break for a drink of water and a high five for his mother.

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When we confront our fears, we find out how resilient we really are.  Being able to do so helps us grow and we take away valuable lessons even from a four year old taking on a climbing structure.  My family is my biggest joy in life and I couldn’t help but share this anecdote and some of the lessons I learned from someone much younger than me!

  1. Conquer your fears.  Everyone is afraid of something or other.  The only way you can go ahead in life is by overcoming your fears and conquering them.  We develop confidence when we successfully overcome adversity.  For my son, taking the first few steps in and realizing he couldn’t fall was all he needed to realize he was going to be okay.  Remember, the more challenges we face throughout our lives the more prepared we’ll be to deal with adversity in the future. Don’t wait for fear to put you in a corner, tackle it before it tries to tackle you.
  2. When forced to do so, embrace fear.  Sometimes life is scary. It’s normal to be scared and sometimes life may only give you one opportunity to say YES or to try something new.  The best things in life often happen as we approach the edge of our comfort zone.   We don’t know what we’re capable of until we find ourselves in a situation where we have no choice.
  3. Support systems are key.  Anything we’re confronted with in life, chances are someone has experiences or been through something similar.  Leaning on others and asking them how others have overcome a similar challenge can often help us to shorten our learning curve and identify and take the right actions.

I encouraged my son to explore and take a risk, highlighting how much fun he would have should he try and conquer his fear.  He needed that subtle encouragement to go to the edge and take his first step and the rest is history. If we’re able to accept that our fears are mostly made up within our minds we’re likely to take on new risks within our lives.  As long as we take on thoughtful risk, we will likely grow and be better prepared for the next challenge.

I’d love to know what lessons or advice you have for encouraging people to face fear. Please leave a comment or send me a tweet.  Thanks for reading!

Friday Motivation- Live Your BEST Life!

Posted in Other, Uncategorized by

The quality and quantity of your life is–in large part–up to you. You can let each day pass or do whatever it takes and strive to be your best self to live without regrets for as long as possible.

Be true to yourself, and be who you are.  Living your best life means living up to your potential.

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

Living up to your potential means you actually do “the things you hope to do someday” NOW instead of putting them off for some magical time in the future.

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Quote of the Day

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When you respect yourself, others will respect you.  It’s important to remain strong and capable of standing up for yourself and your beliefs when times are good or bad.

“Love yourself. It is important to stay positive because beauty comes from the inside out.” – Jenn Proske

It’s  important to take a moment and remember to love ourselves because beauty truly comes from the inside out.

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7 Predictions from Vin Clancy regarding the Future of Social Media

Posted in Guest Post, Marketing, Social Media by

On June 30, 2010, Mashable launched Social Media Day as a way to recognize and celebrate social media’s impact on global communication. And eight year’s later social media is now at the heart of all global communications plans and deeply integrated into many peoples daily routines and lives. With the constant changes to  social media and new entrepreneurs being born everyday social media is the one component that all successful entrepreneurs, influencers and businesses have learn to understand.

Known for his cutting-edge growth hacks and genius business ideas Vin Clancy went from living on welfare in the U.K when he turned things around learning how to use the internet to make things go viral.  He’s just launched his new book Ace The Game: The 100 best growth hacks in the world right now” which is a can’t miss book this year.  You can learn more about Vin by visiting his website or blog and joining his growth club to receive strategies and tips to get ahead as a marketer.

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The future of social media and how to know which social media platform is best to use for your brand or business

Envy, 

That’s what a lot of you feel when you look at brands and influencers who generate huge amounts of traffic and sales from social media.

Don’t worry, I get it too.

Now a lot of these people are either: extremely talented, have a lot of money for ads, or have grinded their way to the top of the newsfeed.  And I have the utmost respect for the vast majority of them. But saying that, there is another reason why these people/brands reached the summit of their game. It’s because they got there first.

Speed is the most valuable asset to have in this game and striking fast and hard is ideally  the way to go about things. Over the past year a lot of people have asked me what the next big social platform is going to be.

Here are 7 of my predictions in regards to the future of social media.

  1. Pinterest isn’t used to its potential and is seriously underrated for driving traffic to blogs, this won’t last forever.

    With many people struggling to drive web traffic from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to their blog many people are beginning to give up.

    Whilst I think people are seriously underating the importance of SEO, there are plenty of people I know who are KILLING IT with Pinterest. One of my ex-pupils generates 100,000 impressions a month using Pinterest a month for next to nothing.   
    I seriously wouldn’t underestimate this platform.

    There are plenty of useful automation softwares for it IFTTT, followlike, tailwind. Use these to auto-pin content and follow/unfollow people at scale.

    If you’ve got a blog or ecommerce store, and a pretty decent sales funnel, then I seriously would look at driving traffic there from Pinterest. Like I said, this won’t last forever.

  2. As Facebook throttles more and more traffic to websites, SEO will make a big comeback.

    Lots of people keep saying Facebook is killing the organic reach of pages. (I might be the first one to say this). It’s actually now been killed. Every post that a page sends out, that doesn’t have any money put behind it, and includes and external link gets seen by one, maybe even two people. What’s the point?

SEO is free (okay you might need to pay for some optimization tools, training or backlinks) but at it’s core optimizing blog posts for SEO is free.

So I reckon that more people at the bottom will be less inclined to dive into social media content marketing and more people will go back to perfecting the SEO for their articles/blog posts.

  1. Want to get the attention of high-ticket prospects through social media? Don’t waste your time, use physical and lumpy mail. This will always be effective in my eyes.  

People love receiving (cool) stuff in the mail.  Do you ever get excited about a package arriving from Amazon? I know I do!  So if you can physically send something to someone, do it.

Physical mail has a 95%-100% pickup rate, especially if it’s something large like a box.  Tip: Call up the office of your prospect (influencer/CEO) and say to their assistant “we want to send x a free pair of shoes what is his/her size?” Then buy the high ticket prospect a nice pair of shoes but only send them one. Tell them in a nice letter “Now I’ve got my foot in the door, I’ll happily give you the other shoe if you agree to go for a coffee with me”

Very cheeky and everyone wants the other shoe.

4. Learn how to grow a Twitch account, this will conquer the earth in the next decade.

This platform will be huge in the coming year, not just for gamers but for everyday folk too.  In fact, it’s huge now! The Amazon owned platform now has 100+ million unique users every month.

The channel IRL (In Real Life) has people live streaming everyday things from: painting, drawing, playing music, building things.  So why not get there first for your niche and find some new customers.  

Maybe I should set up the first live growth hacking channel before someone else does ….

5. People gave up on Facebook chatbots too quickly and no one has done them right yet. Everyone will have them eventually so make yours the best.

When Facebook chatbots came to town everyone went crazy for them, but I’ve seen less and less people rave about them.

For those of you who don’t know chatbots are essentially FB messenger broadcasts that pages can send to anyone who signs up to them.They’re super powerful with many still boasting a huge open rate.

Because people wanted to treat them like an email list they burnt out a lot of people who don’t want marketing messages in their Facebook messenger every other day.

Some of the best bots I’ve seen impart REAL value that people want in their inbox 3-5 times a month MAX.  What a lot of brands haven’t realised is that people have joined your bot it’s because they’ve trusted you.

They’ve allowed you into their inner circle that was previously reserved for their close friends and family. Don’t betray that by selling to them everyday.  (MsgHero and ManyChat are among for favourite chat bot providers)

  1. Too many businesses are always looking for the next shiny object

A lot of startups and businesses come to me and say “You’re the guy that can get traffic out of thin air using social media? Help us!” 

While there are a lot of ways to grow their traffic I always ask to see their current traffic, conversions and email list first. There’s normally a lot of things that people aren’t already doing with their current customers.

So look at your current methods before embarking on completely new strategies.

7. People are still using Twitter wrong

It’s not a broadcast network. It’s a one-to-one network at huge scale.  The half life of a tweet is so short, and the feed moves so fast, that hardly anyone following over 200 people will see your one tweet a day.

So use to either send out 24 tweets a day or just simply @ the people you want to contact instead!  There is software that will help you do this in an organic and human way (don’t go overboard), but this will allow you to scale and hit many people at once.

I reply to nearly everyone who tweets @ me and I’ve seen many a celebrity and influencer do the same. Start using it right.

That’s a wrap for the predictions (I’ll put my crystal ball away now)

So those are my predictions and observations about social media marketing in 2018.

Whilst this is the way I believe things will play out, It’s important to look back at times and check yourself before you decide to massively change course.  If it isn’t broken don’t fix it, this is also known as the “Learn, implement, review” system. This ties into you should work out which social media platform is right for your business.

To be perfectly honest it’s actually quite simple. To start with you should already know the major places your ideal customer hangs out online and that should be your starting point (if you don’t then you have bigger problems to address first!)

Most people try and go for a multi-channel approach and hit all bases. While I too recommend this, it’s very difficult to execute right from the off if you’ve got a small team or work on your own.

If you spread yourself too thin and don’t go in hard on one platform you won’t get any results.  I suggest picking one main channel to focus on, and then a secondary channel a little later down the line.

You need to then look at the competition and work out if they are having success by using this platform, then work out how you can start to attract people to your brand instead.

What do you think of Vin’s predictions, leave a comment below or send me a tweet @marissapick.



  

 

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Are we Addicted to Mobile Phones? Zenith Study finds People Spend 8 hours a day consuming media.

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After dropping my kids off this morning I headed to Starbucks and on line I started to clean up my emails when a headline popped out and caught my attention,  People Spend 479 Minutes A Day Consuming Media.  A recent article published by Media Post highlights the transformation of global media consumption over recent years.  According to Zenith’s Media Consumption Forecast the average person spends 479 minutes, or nearly 8 hours a day consuming media which has risen 12% since 2011 (Click to Tweet).

What’s even more staggering is the projection that by 2020 people will spend 492 minutes a day plugged in with 24% of this time expected on mobile devices. (Click to Tweet)

I’m not sure why I was so surprised by the headline since looking around the line everyone’s face was buried deep into their mobile phones.  We’re living in a world where we can access whatever we need on demand and are totally addicted to our cell phones.   In fact, Americans check their phone on average once every 12 minutes – burying their heads in their phones 80 times a day, according to a study from Asurion.  (Click to Tweet)

The study also found that the average person struggles to go little more than 10 minutes without checking their phone and on average people check every four minutes. The below infographic highlights additional findings from the study and covers the reality of separation anxiety for people.  The most staggering example as to the addiction of our cell phones is the the revelation that four in 10 Americans would rather lose their voice for a day than lose their phone for 24 hours. (Click to Tweet)

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I’m totally guilty, and equally addicted to my cell phone.  I love to put my phone away and have “digital-free” time with the kids before bed without any distractions.  It’s always shocking to me when my 3.5 year old son Lucas picks up my cell phone and easily navigates between apps and videos like it’s something he’s been doing his whole life.  A swift reminder that he’s downloading my behavior and even more of a need for me to put my phone down and get on the floor and play with my boys. It’s hard, but doable and very necessary.
What do you think of the statistics included within this article? Are you addicted to your mobile device? I’d love to know your thoughts, send me a tweet or leave a comment below!