TechLatte: Cheryl Marquez

Digital Marketing Can Be Hard, It Doesn't Need to Be

Burning Man Gifts & Book Club

Do you ever hear your friend’s talk about an experience and think, “I want to do that too!!” And I had that same reaction when my friends were talking about Book Club, hard pass on going to Burning Man.

TL;DR

  • Find my friends at burning man, they will have lip/body balms
  • Book club read: High Achiever by Tiffany Jenkins, a true story about addiction

NOT REALLY ABOUT BURNING MAN

Assorted lip and body balms
Homemade Balms Flavors: Calm, Peppermint, Orange made by Tanya & Patricia, the metamorphic, butterfly burners

To be a fly on the wall as your friends plan for Burning Man is fascinating. You get to see the practical aspect of packing what they need to survive and the creative side of what they’ll share and wear.

The playa has a gifting economy, to help people stay moisturized, they’ve made 150 tubes of a lip and body balm with “secret messages” in the colored letters. If you are going to Burning Man, I hope you find my friends at the red lampshade creperie camp. They have surprise food gifts and these lovely balms in 3 flavors.

LET’S BUILD IT!

Probs against Burning Man principles

My ideal Burning Man experience is one I can enjoy from the comfort of home while navigating through the playa via an iPad controlling a drone or GoPro’s live streaming from my friends camelpacks or bikes. I would love to tune into different cameras and be a commentator for the artwork and experiences. To be able to turn on sights and sounds from different neighborhoods like you were flipping channels on TV. I finally understand why kids watch other kids play video games on YouTube or Twitch.

WHY BOOK CLUB?

Along the lines of living vicariously, I joined my best friend’s Book Club to be exposed to books I wouldn’t ordinary select and to explore topics that make me uncomfortable, to continue learning and growing. The first book, definitely hit my book club goals.

LIGHTWEIGHT BOOK REPORT

The book we read was called High Achiever by Tiffany Jenkins. The book was a difficult read because it dragged you painfully into the main character’s addiction and withdrawal. It brought me to a dark place and sadly, made reading incredibly unpleasant because I tend to experience the main character’s feelings as the story progresses. While it made me uncomfortable, I empathized with the struggles reading from a junkie’s point of view. Even though it wasn’t a fun read, I’m grateful for the chance to discuss such a difficult subject with intelligent women. I was impressed with how open people were with personal experiences which paralleled the book. I loved hearing everyone’s opinions and how the book affected them.

I love reading because it allows you experience life outside your comfort zone; to travel, to be rich or poor, see life through different ethnic lenses, and learn from the journey in the book.

This book taught me empathy and patience because you never know what people are struggling with. You often don’t know the pain they are recovering from or covering up. You never know how your words or actions can uplift or crush the people around you.

Eats

First Course

  • Assortment of 5 cheeses and 3 crackers
  • Spicy Fig Jelly
  • Red Pepper Jelly
  • Habanero Pork Rinds
  • Spread (ramen, Szechuan beef, flaming hot cheetos, jalepeño Fritos)

Second Course

  • Jasmine Brown Rice
  • Zoodles with Crushed Tomatoes, Corn, & Cilantro
  • Dry Rubbed Chicken Thighs

Dessert (not pictured)

  • Berry Trio
  • Homemade Whipped Cream (heavy cream, vanilla, cinnamon, & coconut palm sugar)

Technology Used

  • Samsung Galaxy S8
  • Evernote to write and edit
  • WordPress app to layout and publish

No excuses, use that little computer in your hand to blog. I wrote and edited this post after book club, while watching stand up comedy on Netflix.

If you must watch TV, create while you consume. ~Cheryl

Avoid This Rookie Mistake in JavaScript

After taking 3 months off from learning JavaScript as part of the FreeCodeCamp front end development certification program, work finally slowed down to tackle some exercises during lunch. The topic was “Multiple Identical Options in Switch Statements”. While I successfully added a case statement for each number in the range, I made a simple rookie mistake.
I jumped right in by creating all of the cases and break statements, making sure to add the semicolons where appropriate. Before adding “switch(val) {“ to start the switch statement, added that then ran the tests.
The error I got was “SyntaxError: Unexpected end of input”. I googled the syntax for a switch statement and read through the documentation on StackOverflow. Then a lightbulb lit up in my head to check if the code had closing curly braces to match the starting curly braces. You’ll see in the screenshots, how I fixed the problem to successfully execute the switch statement.
Make sure your functions have matching closing curly braces.
some(code) {
return “Did you check for closing curly braces?”;
}
SyntaxError: Unexpected end of input
Solution: Check the code to make sure all curly braces have a matching closing curly brace.

Turns out I forgot to close the switch statement, you’ll see the missing curly brace below.

Successful execution of switch statement with the multiple versions of the same option.

Lessons Learned From My First Facebook Live Stream

Over the last couple years, I’ve been talking about live streaming cooking tutorials and haven’t made it a reality until Facebook Live made it super easy. It was easy to hit the “LIVE” button and go for it. My plan was to use YouTube Live for the live stream instead of using Periscope because I wanted to embed the video on my blog, along with any notes or recipes.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES WITH YOUTUBE
After updating the YouTube app, it turns out my phone didn’t want to live stream from the app. I read that you could live stream using the YouTube Game App, including showing live game play from your mobile device, it turns out you could only live stream if you were showing a game or another app. Next, I downloaded another app whose main function was to live stream to YouTube but it took forever to initialize a connection. Then I remembered a commercial for Facebook Live which is what I ended up using.

PRO TIPS

  • Do a test run.
    • During your first live stream, set the audience to a handful of friends who will be online to give you feedback as you do your demo. They can help you frame your shot, tell you if you need to speak up, slow down or tell you how many times you say ‘um’.
    • Don’t do what I did, which was to turn on FB Live to the public without a limited test run. The good news of doing that is if you are a procrastinator, you can get your first video posted before you have a chance to chicken out.
  • If you are live streaming from your phone, Facebook Live should have the phone vertical, if you tilt it sideways, it will tilt your videos horizontally, like in the video below.

  • Make sure your audience can see what you are doing during your test run. If you are using the front-facing camera, what you see is what your audience sees, double check this before you get started or make adjustments as you go. In my second video, I thought my audience could see the kitchen island where I was preparing spaghetti squash, they couldn’t and I didn’t learn about it until I watched the playback and read the comments.
  • Read the comments as they appear so you can make adjustments and answer questions during your video. Get in the habit of responding to your viewers during your test run because this is how you engage with your audience. It makes it more fun for them and for you! The more fun you and your audience are having, the more likely they will return for future live streams.
  • If you are moving your camera rig when you are not filming, mark where to set up the tripod and lighting with painters tape to make sure you have the same angle each time you shoot, this will save you tons of time.
  • Make the videos between 2 – 4 minutes long. Until you have a ton of content, it’s easier to break your videos into segments under 4 minutes long. This gives you a chance to get all the items and talking points ready between segments.
  • Make sure you have enough lighting so you don’t cast shadows on your face and your audience can see what you are doing. My kitchen doesn’t have enough lighting so I’m ordering lights, tripods, and softboxes for my future videos.
  • If you are planning to grow your audience or embed the videos to your blog, export it from Facebook and upload it to YouTube. I’ll create a tutorial on how to do this in a separate post.

Day 2 count: 649 words

My 500 Words: A Writing Challenge

Do you ever start questioning your life when you have something big coming up? Leading up to a surgery I foolishly scheduled the day before Thanksgiving, I kept asking myself, what if today was your last, would you have done everything you wanted to do in this lifetime? Did you express love? Did you show appreciation for your family and friends? While I’ve done a lot of things I wanted to do like travel, go to concerts or sporting events, I feel like I’ve been holding back in my daily life. Not fully expressing my feelings, showing appreciation or treating everyday as an adventure like before or not making time to pursue the some of my goals.

500 Words a Day to a Better Blog

I’ve wanted to build my blog but have been inconsistent with writing because I was afraid to be judged for sharing where I fell short. Even though I would never know you were judging unless you wrote a comment. You see all these perfect people who manage to juggle everything with their families, write blog posts, take beautiful pictures, make homemade everything while exercising regularly, ugh…exhausted just thinking about it. Then as I was waiting to be admitted into the hospital, I saw this 31 day challenge to write 500 words a day. No editing, just writing and publishing to get into the habit with the hope that the daily habit will improve your writing skills in 31 days. It was the perfect challenge to push myself to write and publish regularly.

Where I Write

Cheryl Marquez – Learning how to code, lessons learned about blogging, marketing and live streaming
Bombchel – Recipes, fitness and yogi journal
Medium – Life without a car and Pokemon Go

The Hero’s Journey

One of my clients has done a great job of documenting her journey from learning to code, attending a dev bootcamp to getting a role as a junior developer on CodingOver40. While she struggles with letting go of her old identity and settles into being a developer, she has been an inspiration to women of all ages through her blog. You have to develop a thick skin when you write, live stream or share your journey with the world. When she got started, I suggested she write everyday and post a different theme for the month. One of my favorite themes was 30 days to a Dream Job. You can identify with the struggles of a job search, she let’s you in on what it’s like to have the added challenge of changing careers while you are working on your technical skills.
In hindsight, I should have done the writing challenge at the same time, so we could go through our journey’s in parallel. As I sit here, I am tempted to put together an editorial calendar but that’s not the goal for the next 31 days. The goal is to write 500 words a day to get into the writing habit and choosing which blogs to post the content I’ve written. Does this mean I’ll publish daily? Not sure, all I know is I’ll be writing 500 words a day. The content will be published on my blogs, including cooking tutorials on Facebook Live. I would love your feedback on what you would like to learn about and I would be happy to write about it. Let me know in the comments. I’m going to use any suggestions as writing prompts.

Day 1 Wordcount: 567 words

How to Upgrade to iOS 10

Sometimes, it’s too early to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone, so in the name of FOMO (fear of missing out), here are instructions on how to UPDATE your existing iPhone to iOS 10. While it’s not as sexy as the Jet Black or Matte Black iPhone 7, you will get all the emojifying goodness in “last season’s” device.

If you haven’t updated to iOS 10, you will see the handwritten notes and but not invisible ink or the fireworks, lasers or shooting stars as background images, if someone sends the shooting star background, you would only see the message appended with (sent with shooting star).

As excited as you are to update your iPhone, the first step is to back it up so you can protect your photos, apps, contacts, etc. These instructions backup to iCloud, instead of iTunes because I rarely connect my phone to the computer.

If you are out of iCloud storage, upgrade to the next level of storage options before starting the backup. While I haven’t had a chance to scratch the surface of all the iOS 10 features, it seems we’ve been excited about the updates to iMessage and emojifying texts. I liked deleting apps like compass and watch.

Buy More Storage (as needed)

50GB: $0.99

200GB: $2.99

1TB: $9.99

2TB: $19.99

My daughter and I both had to upgrade to the next level of iCloud storage for both of our devices. I have an iPhone 6s Plus and it seems to be working well with iOS 10. Had a bit of glitchiness, with the camera app not focusing until I restarted the phone.

Backup Your iPhone

If you have a ton of pictures or videos you will definitely want to back up to iCloud or iTunes. Make sure you’ve selected contacts, etc. to make sure that you don’t lose any of your other data. It’s a pain to recreate your contacts list.

  1. Connect your device to a Wi-Fi network.
  2. Tap Settings, then scroll down and tap iCloud.
  3. Scroll down, tap Backup, and make sure that iCloud Backup is turned on.
  4. Tap Back Up Now.
  5. Make sure that the backup finished: Tap Settings > iCloud > Storage > Manage Storage, then select your device.

Before you start the update, make sure your iPhone has enough battery life for the update process or plug it in to be safe. It’s not good if your phone dies during the update process and I don’t have troubleshooting steps if that happens.

Backup Your iPhone

Upgrade to iOS 10

  1. Go to Settings
  2. Tap on General
  3. Tap on Software Update
  4. Tap on Download and Install
  5. Enter your passcode
  6. Agree to the Terms & Conditions
  7. Tap on Install Update when the prompt pops up

You will see “Verifying update” then the screen will go black. Then the Apple symbol will be on a white screen with a progress bar to show you how much longer you have left for the upgrade to finish. Your phone may go black or turn off and on to complete the process.

Features of iOS 10

 

iOS 10 Features

Building an Email List from ZERO Subscribers

When you are building a business, whether you are a new health coach or small business owner, you need have to have a way to connect with your clients. You’ve read that you need to create an email list, no one tells you how to get started from scratch. They tell you how to promote your email newsletter via social media or how to build your existing email list. What if you don’t have anyone on your email list, how do you find people?

When I started an email newsletter for my food and fitness blog. I had ZERO subscribers and I didn’t know how to get started.

WHAT PROBLEM ARE YOU SOLVING?
Before you get subscribers or even start writing your newsletter, you need to plan what you will be sharing. As someone who loves food and struggles with weight, my biggest challenge is balancing eating well with fitness goals. After talking to friends and family, I realized I wasn’t the only one who struggled. Then I asked, what has prevented you from reaching your fitness goals? Their answers influenced the articles I write for my blog and share in the newsletter, both address the roadblocks, along with recipes I’ve tested and enjoyed.

Identifying the problem you are solving, helps you find out who you will be serving. What do I mean by serving? These are potential clients who could use your help. They are the people who will appreciate getting the answers or solutions you are sharing.

HOW TO GET YOUR FIRST 25 SUBSCRIBERS
The first 25 subscribers are your friends, colleagues, and family. The first 100 subscribers will be high touch, you will get in touch personally and start a conversation. They will help you shape the content you share. I went through my contacts in the phone and I sent a text to everyone who might be interested. Here’s a template of what I sent to them, you will need to customize what you will be sharing, then your call to action is “do you want it?” or “do you want to be part of it?”

YOU: “Hey __, I’m starting a newsletter where I’ll be sharing tips on how to balance being a foodie with fitness goals. Do you want it?”

FRIEND: “Sounds cool, send it to me.”

YOU: “What’s the best email address for you?”

After they said yes, I added their name and email address to a Google Sheet that I later uploaded to Mailchimp. You can simplify this by writing their name and email address into a notebook, then later type the contact information into the email marketing tool of your choice. You don’t want to use Gmail because you could be flagged for SPAM and have your account locked as your email list grows larger.

I stopped sending text message after the first 25 people said “yes” to test the initial newsletters with a smaller group to make sure I ironed out the technical issues. I also wanted to be able to text or email my friends to get feedback on what they liked and didn’t like. Each week, I would add another 25 subscribers in the same way.

Next up, importing the Google Doc email list into Mailchimp.