Happy Friday! Valentine’s Day is approaching and, as it’s not my favorite holiday, I’d like to suggest we all just eat some ice cream and ignore the upcoming nonsense. In the meantime, let’s see what awesome things the Internet has for us this week, shall we?

1. Stop Asking About Your Personal Brand and Start Doing Some Work Neither online marketing nor social media is magic. To be successful, you’ll have to do some real work in addition to leveraging the Internet. It’s hard but it’s true.
2. How to Build Online Relationships We have many clients that we’ve worked with for years. But if we are ever going to lose a client, it’s likely someone who isn’t looking to build relationships, they’re looking to *sell*. As much as we say over and over again that building relationships leads to long term sales and opportunities while an abundance of sales messages on their own does not, some people don’t agree. But, I’ll always maintain the art of online marketing is building relationships.
3. 10 Ways Facebook is Ruining Your Life I think maybe the most important note here is just how much time we’re spending on Facebook. With the average user on Facebook for forty minutes a day (which equates to several DAYS over the course of a year) maybe we should all just join a gym.
4. My 30 Day Pinterest Experiment to Increase Followers This is a practical look at what can really work when trying to increase your Pinterest followers (and website traffic). A caveat though: in order for Pinterest to be successful for your site or business you will need a lot of images to use.
5. Grandparents Fail the Internet On the one hand, these are good for a chuckle. On the other, it’s really hard to keep up with technology these days. I don’t really know much about Tinder because I’ve had no need to use it for personal or business reasons….and that makes me wonder if in forty years, we’ll all be making these same sorts of gaffes.

Happy week! Hope your first full weekend in February is productive and care free. Those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.