Weekend Foodblogging: A Crispy Secret
We love the crispy crunch that fried foods have, don’t we? We also do not love all the calories, fat, and other unpleasant stuff that comes with fried foods, right? Here’s a crispy quesadilla secret that can transform nearly any sandwich into a crisp, golden, delicious wonder with virtually no extra fat, gobs of oil or butter, or other stuff that you’d prefer not to eat all the time. Here’s a way to get the crispy crunch without the oily punch.
Start with your average store-bought tortillas, whatever will fit comfortably in your non-stick frying pan. Grab some decent shredded cheese. Have a cutting board, large knife, clean towels, plate, frying pan, cooking spray, and spatula handy. If you have other pre-cooked ingredients you normally put in quesadillas (onions, shredded chicken, etc.), have that all ready as well. Put a towel down on the cutting board and have the knife nearby. Put another towel on the plate. Mise en place, or everything laid out in advance, is vitally important to making this work well, so make sure all supplies are ready.
Spray the pan lightly with the non-stick spray. If your pan is not non-stick, spray not so lightly. Turn on the heat to medium-high; on a scale of 1-10, it should be around a 7. If you have one of those weird stoves like I do where the burner knobs are numbered 1-6, go for about 4 1/2. Put down a tortilla, grab a handful of shredded cheese and spread it out quickly and evenly over it, quickly put in any other fillings you like,then cover with another tortilla.
Cook the quesadilla like this for about a minute, shaking every so often. Flip it over at the minute mark and check to see if it’s lightly browned. With quesadillas and sandwiches, it’s okay to pick them up and check them more frequently than, say, eggs. Dark brown or burned means your pan is too hot. Unchanged in color means your pan isn’t hot enough. Cook both sides until they’re lightly browned.
Now here’s the secret. Grab a smaller handful of cheese and sprinkle it very quickly and evenly around the pan itself. You don’t need much – just enough to add a little cheese all around. Put the quesadilla on top of this cheese and cook it for 15 seconds or so, shaking frequently.
If you do it right, the cheese should turn a medium brown to golden brown crust on the outside of the quesadilla. Lift it out of the pan, put down another handful, and cook the other side the same way for about 15 seconds or until the cheese looks like the picture above.
When done, move the quesadilla to the towel-covered cutting board and cut into quarters, then move it to the towel-covered plate. The enemy of all things crispy and delicious is steam, moisture buildup that changes crispy to mushy within seconds. That’s why we cut and plate on towels, so that the towel absorbs the moisture and keeps the quesadillas crisp and delicious.
You now have quesadillas that are covered in a golden, crispy cheese crust that, depending on the cheese you use, is likely to be much healthier and more nutritious than a batter-fried food. It delivers wonderful flavor and crunch without the bad stuff that comes along with deep fried foods. The best part? This dish is dirt cheap to make. You can plate up 5 full quesadillas or 20 wedges for about $5, depending on how inexpensive tortillas and cheese are near you.
Take the cheese crust idea to things like tuna sandwiches and other dishes where you want crispy but not oily. You’ll be amazed at how you can make crispy and delicious without oil and grease.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Taking action that matters
For those who enjoy but occasionally miss tempests in teapots, Kenneth Cole tweeted this out yesterday:
The reaction was swift and merciless inside the social media fishbowl:
So how much of a difference did a massive amount of outrage make to the people who are responsible for running Kenneth Cole? None. How do we know this? Check out their stock price:
The stock finished neutral for the day from tweet to market close. The shareholders of the stock are the driving force behind any publicly traded corporation. They influence the board of directors (who are usually the largest shareholders as well) who in turn hire, fire, and otherwise oversee the operation of the company’s management.
If the tempest in the teapot had made any substantial difference, you might have seen increased volume in the stock and even a small hit to the share price as worried stockholders would have dumped it in fear of reduced revenues. Instead, the firestorm appears to have had no discernible impact on shareholders – volume actually dropped and the share price held steady, which means the PR gaffe will largely be forgotten as soon as the next shiny object comes along.
If you were legitimately upset by Kenneth Cole’s actions as a person and as a company, did you do any of the following?
- Sell any shares of KCP stock that you owned in it
- Encouraged others to sell off their shares of KCP?
- Contacted any retirement plans that you participate in to see if they held KCP stock on your behalf, and if so, asked them to divest it?
- Cancelled any pending purchases you had and encouraged others to do so?
If not, then you didn’t exert any influence over the folks in charge of Kenneth Cole.
There’s an expression from musician Jewel that I love dearly:
No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from.
When it comes to companies, politicians, and anyone behaving badly, there’s a good chance that in America and most other capitalist nations that money is the foundation of strength for many organizations, right or wrong. If you want to make real change, if you want to exert real influence, you have to understand the financial angle behind the scenes that enables or disables an organization to take action.
Here’s another example, something floating around on Facebook.
This leads to a petition operated by a political action group. Petitions are fine and good for demonstrating that a lot of people want to say something for or against a position, but at the end of the day, if the politician who sponsored the legislation feels no impact, the petition is largely meaningless except to help people feel better. If you were for or against this legislation, did you do any of the following?
- Donate money to the legislator’s re-election campaign or the opposing party’s candidate?
- Donate money to the national party of the legislator or the opposing party?
- Dial up the political action committees in the geographic area to ask what support you could lend for or against the legislator?
The uncomfortable truth is that protests of any kind online are largely insubstantial if they’re not accompanied by some form of tangible action, and material or financial support for or against something is the most expedient way to ensure that your voice has a little more leverage. While it may make us feel good to sign a petition or press the Like button or the Retweet button, we don’t change anything. Only when we have some skin in the game, some resources on the table, are we going to start moving the needle as rapidly as we want.
Next time something stirs you up, take a moment to step back and ask how you can leverage the influence you have to not only say something, but to take tangible action, to no longer lend your strength and resources to things you wish to be free from.
Full disclosure: I do not own any position in the KCP stock.
Final note: please do not comment on the individual issues raised in this post. Other places are doing a fine job of debating the merits of the above current events. Focus comments instead on the process of taking action that matters and putting resources in the game. Comments about the specific issues will be deleted.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Do welcome popups work?
I’ve had a welcome popup running on my blog since the end of November last year. For a long time, I debated the wisdom of installing it on my web site. After all, I personally don’t like them much on other sites I visit, but I had to remind myself of the cardinal rule of marketing: I am not my customer.
Reactions to it were and are mixed. Some people like it. A few people hate it. Most people ignore it.
The bigger question is, does it work?
The short answer is: yes.
The longer answer involves looking at some data, which I pulled from my Blue Sky Factory Publicaster account. Prior to installing the welcome popup on this site, I was averaging about 30 signups to my personal newsletter per month, give or take. Once I installed it, that average went up to 133, and is currently trending at 250 per month. That’s a 733% increase in subscribers. What’s more, you can see immediate changes in the data the day the popup was installed:
Now I know what you’re saying in your head: yes, that’s nice, but how do you account for an increase in the blog’s popularity? After all, number of signups should increase as more traffic comes to a blog, so this doesn’t prove anything, right?
If this data was all I had, you’d be correct. I cross-referenced my monthly absolute unique visitors to subscribers and created a ratio of subscriber signups to absolute unique visitors. If I were a commercial web site, this would be my lead conversion ratio.
It’s quite apparent that once the popup was installed, it started to convert a much greater percentage of traffic to my web site into subscribers for my newsletter.
Does this mean that you should immediately run out and install a popup on your web site or blog? Not necessarily. If it conflicts with your personal or professional brand, then by all means, pass on it so that you can remain consistent with your brand.
Is it worth testing? Absolutely, especially if one of your goals is to build up your database or drive some actual sales. Remember to avoid the same mistake I make from time to time: there’s a very good chance that you are not your customer. Not everyone’s audience will react the same. Test it and see how it performs. In my case, the numbers are incredibly compelling, despite my slight personal dislike for the marketing method; for this blog, the method works incredibly well.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Do you have a welcome page?
Those of you who have been following me on Twitter over the past 6 months have seen me tweet out the start of every day with something like this:
Good morning friends! Some pithy short comment about life today here. New friend? Welcome aboard: http://cspenn.com/w
This short URL takes you over to my welcome page, which gives you some idea of who I am, what I do, where you can find me, and some selected pieces of content that give you an idea of what I write about. I’ve been doing a welcome page since August, and on the page I explain why it exists: it’s a tour, a welcome mat of sorts to help introduce new friends to me.
Every day, a few people go read it when I start the day with it, between 20-30 a day. As web analytics go, that’s not exactly lighting the world on fire, right?
Except when I looked in the aggregate stats yesterday, those few visits every day by brand new people add up significantly, making it the 7th highest trafficked page on my site overall and having a bounce rate a full 20% lower than any other page on my web site. People come to it, read it, and find their way to other content I’ve written, which is exactly its intended purpose. Here’s the kicker, the part that makes me very happy: the next page that people go to is my public speaking page. If I were a business (in the sense of a full time commercial enterprise) and a welcome page was funneling new traffic, new visitors straight to my sales page, I’d be delighted beyond measure at this kind of performance.
Here’s the secret of the welcome page, the secret sauce that makes it work. It’s not enough just to have one. You have to draw new attention to it regularly. By tweeting it out daily, first thing, almost every weekday without fail, it gets some traffic. Not a ton, but it doesn’t need a ton, and those who have already been to it don’t have to return to it. That’s the secret. By keeping the format of the first Tweet of the day regular consistent, new people get a welcome and old friends get a familiar reassurance. New people get introduced to me every single day and learn what I do (and some hire me to speak), while not offending familiar friends who have already seen it.
Here’s the secret that makes it easy for me: by using a static URL that’s very short (cspenn.com/w), I remember it without having to think about it, instead of something like a bit.ly/omfgwtfistheshortcodethatthispagewasyesterday273. I don’t ever have to think about what my welcome page’s URL is; by keeping it so short and familiar (and unchanging), it’s easy to publish daily.
Should you have a welcome page for your business or personal site? That’s entirely up to you. If you can make the commitment to start every day by drawing attention to it, by keeping a constant, small flow of eyes and minds to it, then I would say yes, you should have one. If you can’t make that commitment, then I’d say it’s not a bad idea to have one, but don’t expect the same kind of performance that you’d get out of it.
Do you have a welcome page? Are you bringing new people to it every day?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Minimizing Shatterpoints
Over the last month and change, we’ve talked about what shatterpoints are and how to measure them. They are key performance indicators in some cases. Once you know where your greatest risks are and can accurately measure them, it’s time to do something about them.
Generally speaking, there are three ways to handle shatterpoints: ignore them, reinforce them, or mitigate their impact.
Ignoring things is a very popular but woefully ineffective approach. It’s the approach that almost everyone from the Fortune 500 to the Mom & Pop shop takes, and it works as long as nothing goes wrong. However, if you’re reading this blog, chances are you want a little more insurance than just burying your head in the sand.
Reinforcing shatterpoints takes the approach of strengthening a weak area or making a strong area as durable as possible. In architecture, these are support beams. In human resources, these are administrative assistants and personal assistants who reduce some of the operational strain on a person. In marketing, these are the FUD principles: spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about other strong things at other companies so that your strength appears stronger. Reinforcing shatterpoints is especially important when you’re a one-trick pony, because until you can diversify, all your eggs are squarely in one basket for a competitor to kick over.
Mitigating shatterpoints takes a different approach. Instead of shoring things up or strengthening your existing strength, mitigation approaches organizational shatterpoints by reducing their impact on the organization. When we talked about Google Analytics pie, diversifying your traffic sources is mitigation. Yes, you still absolutely need to have organic search, but by bringing in other forms of traffic, you mitigate your dependence on just search traffic. Instead of focusing just on out-marketing your competitors in PPC bidding, you open up a social media marketing program. Mitigation comes with its own risks: it’s easy to get distracted and away from your core competency as you try to reduce reliance on any one shatterpoint.
Let’s tackle one of the most common shatterpoints that nearly every organization has: the one employee who knows too much. This person is an asset to the company, a great strength, a go-to person for everything and always delivers. You need this person in your organization and can’t imagine doing business without them. In Seth Godin’s terms, they’re a linchpin. They’re also a shatterpoint. What would happen to your organization if they left? Got hit by a bus? Quit? Would your organization survive and thrive or collapse?
Reinforcing the shatterpoint means making sure they’re well paid enough to never seriously consider leaving. It means making sure they’ve got as much support as they need so that they can continue to deliver maximum value. Mitigating the shatterpoint means making sure that you capture all of their knowledge, have multiple people who can do the job or at least provide coverage of all aspects of the job, and know all of the inputs and outputs of the position now so that you can ensure dependencies are met.
Ultimately, the goal of minimizing shatterpoints is to reduce your risk. As long as you have core strengths, core competencies, and areas of excellence, you will never remove risk entirely, nor should you.
One final thought: the concept of shatterpoints and linchpins as above indicates a fundamental conflict of interest between employee and employer. The employee’s goal is to become that shatterpoint on which the organization’s security rests, while the employer’s goal is to mitigate that as much as possible. How do you balance that conflict?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Book Me to Speak
Got an event coming up? Learn why you should book me to speak!
• Download my 2012 speaking kit
•Book me to speak now!
Get Marketing White Belt
Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, and get better at marketing right now!
Blog Delivery
Things I recommend:
I recommend:
for Wordpress themes like this one.
I recommend:
for Twitter audience building.