As you may know from my last post, I have been contributing to Forbes lately and writing about cloud security, technology, innovation and things like machine learning. It is a great network of various sites (or sections of the main Forbes site) all run under the Forbes banner separates by topic areas, such as my specialty: innovation. You can view a contributing writer’s profile (here is mine) and see how many views each article they wrote has gotten.

I have also just quit working in a startup gig I started that has been going on for the last four months for a company called Fakturownia.pl or InvoiceOcean.com. It was an interesting experience and I have learned how to create Google Ad campaigns (both search and visual) as well as some online marketing practices. If you look at the blog on InvoiceOcean UK (the branch I was hired for or specialized in), you can see some of my writing (the last 8, or so, blog posts are under my byline). Here are a couple:

• What Sort of Invoice Service Do You Need
• How Invoices Are Becoming More SaaS-Based and International in Scope

The problem was that I have little experience in selling specialized financial software and how to attract people to it when it is so niche and they wanted to spread to English-speaking countries where their applications were not always aligned with those countries financial systems (sales tax for instance was not shown or implemented). It was still an interesting experience though and I met some good people at the company. I am still open to working with them if they need more translations of their websites (I edited their entire .co.uk and later .com versions of the sites, social media content, or blog writing among other things.

The sales were not happening no matter how many sign ups they were getting as they came with a free 30-day trial with no credit card required each time. Also, it was a specialized invoicing software mostly focusing on B2B interactions as regular users could just use something like Paypal invoices for free or even templates widely available online. I explained the problems with trying to launch software that may have been successful in one region onto a completely different region without mentioning any specific companies here and what I’ve learned works or Doesn’t.

Here was one of the display ads I created for the US Google Display network:

I used some of my other work I’ve done recently as variations for the ads. These were mostly images I created with no, or little to none, text on the images themselves, but those I added via Google Ads editor and would display them as Dynamic Ads:

One of the other things I did and someone in the office suggested I do in running a Google campaign was link to one of my popular blog posts — which actually compared to product to some of the biggest competitors in the UK and US — and ran a campaign from it.

I’ve also learned how to utilize Google Analytics to my advantage and track things like site visitors from various sources (social media or referrals for instance) among many other useful tools:

Now I will be focusing on my writing for Forbes and potentially other outlets as well. I have actually written quite a bit of content since my last post about the position and here are some articles of mine worth noting:

• Cloud Storage Providers Worth keeping An Eye Out For In 2019
• Be Careful Buying iPhones Abroad As They May be Fake (Personal experience)
• Robots & Automation: Manufacturing Hurdles Or Assets?
• SaaS Business Models Analyzed

Oh and I also recently have set up a Dribble account for my graphic design work in case you are interested and this is something I will continue to improve and hopefully land some paid positions sometime down the line with.