Welcome to the “Blast Off” of my Newsletter

My worlds of marketing, photography, nature, travel and food collide

I’ve balked for years about doing a newsletter because so many of them turn me off. My “why” for doing it is NOT to pitch, but to share marketing and business trends and tips to make entrepreneur life a little easier, while showing peeks at a lifestyle of travel and entertaining. The timing of the trend to share personal stories to earn trust started to make sense.

This won’t be your typical newsletter. Delivered just once a month. Of course, you can opt-out at any time.

When do you start a newsletter? For me, it was when passions in my personal and career worlds collided. Share on X

Count on seeing one blog post and/or interview on marketing, business or lifehacks. I’ll share some of the best advice from experts I follow in a handful of special curated pieces. I’ll point out great free services, apps, Chrome extensions and more that you might find useful too.

Pivoting away from promotion, I’ll describe special places I get to see on my merry way, posting photos of places you might not think to visit and shots with permission by photographers I admire.

I see a lot of these small town venues traveling by RV. As a lifestyle, RVing offers constant opportunities to meet and learn from others. Others often have tips for must-see places (and ones to avoid). Plus, they are just neat people on similar, but different, explorations.

As a kid growing up outside D.C., I grew up with a love for all things museum. The passion serves my need to always be learning. Small county museums delight me as much as the huge collections.

And, of course, travelers get hungry, so I’ve begun posting recipes often used for gatherings of friends and family.

When I say “my merry way,” I don’t necessarily mean traveling. I’m a fan of Jorn Vangoidtzenhoven’s wildlife photography. Make sure you display images to see his shot here of snow geese.

Stunning, right? Thousands of snow geese taking off from New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Make sure to download to see this spectacular shot and click the photo to read Jorn’s story from the shoot.

As you may know, I retired to complete a book on performance marketing, steps for entrepreneurs and startups to ramp up their success profitably. Then I created a course to encourage companies to create affiliate programs. Recently, I started a series of interviews to take the book chapters further with in-depth chats about marketing and business topics. Here’s one with Jeff Gordon, CEO of BrightWise, a promotional product company as we discuss ways to impress prospects and clients that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

I plan on sharing a few trends each month that I curate from experts I follow.

Curations that I find interesting and you might too:

💡Consider swapping out your LinkedIn cover photo to correspond with events you have going on. Anne Pryor describes it as a “flashing digital billboard” and suggests ways to create yours with the free graphic site fotor.com.

💡Tips for making your email look its best on mobile phones (probably half of traffic).

💡Add your Facebook feed to your site and 9 other Facebook tips for WordPress users from a terrific source for tutorials, @wpbeginner.

Freebie:

Buy Me A Coffee offers free services to ask for donations, to create one link with many links to social media and other web pages (a.k.a. a bio link like jancarroza.bio.link such as useful at Instagram), and the QR code formatting of that bio link. See mine to the right. Often used in print materials, QR codes are handy for folks using two devices at the same time.

A Penchant for Museums:

Seen “Deadwood” on HBO? Remember Charlie Utter, sidekick to Wild Bill Hickok? Well, you can see the real Charlie Utter’s leather coat (pictured here) in Beatty, Nevada’s museum (free admission), along with a photo of Charlie in the jacket.

It turns out that Deadwood, South Dakota’s museum didn’t have room and Beatty promised to showcase it.

I love museums so much that I dug up lists of U.S. museums and put them into Google maps. I had to do it by state due to Google limitations. Click here to plan your next visit.

A Favorite Recipe:

Here’s the often requested, delightfully easy recipe for a special occasion dessert: Trifle.

What I’m up to:

My “How to Add Pay-for-Performance Affiliate Marketing to Your Mix” course is available on demand, but I will teach it again live on Wednesday, April, 6, 2022.

Before you go….

Check out Jorn Vangoidtsenhoven’s important article “Why Are We Killing (Yellowstone’s) Wolves?” If you are inclined, please share it.

See more of Jorn’s article’s on his blog. Check out his Etsy shop to see his spectacular photography for sale.

If you like what you see and want to see more, sign up here.

In coming issues:

Next time: Stay tuned for my favorite free app for productivity. Posts about marketing trends, gorgeous photos, including how-to use Google maps to visually tell stories, the saga of what I learned setting up my own affiliate program and tales off the beaten track. You’ll notice more personal segments on travel and such come from another site of mine, Dawnpilot.com. Next, I’ll share a very unusual activity that you can do at one Southwestern museum (hint: it requires a license where age doesn’t matter!).

Do you know someone who might be interested in my news? Share a link.

Affiliate disclosure: From time to time, I may recommend something I use, or that I have used with a client or someone I respect has used. I’ll let you know with aff. link notice. I may get a credit or a small spiff, but you will never pay more because I get a reward.