For the last three years I have had the idea to create, for lack of better term, dog food for people. A sort of kibble that had all of of your daily nutrients, was simple, and that could just be ‘poured out’ and eaten. It would be simple, cost-effective, and ideally not actually taste like dog food. This past weekend, I have made my vision into reality.

Michael’s Muffins were born. Each of these “muffins” contains 96 calories, 7 grams of protein, and a portion of each of your other essential daily nutrients.  They are made with 100% all natural, organic food and cost me $0.75 each to make.  I know my next batch will cost closer to $0.25 per portion.

The Food:

I wanted high protein food that followed the Paleo diet.  This means only meat, veggies, berries and nuts.

The Grocery List:

Using my favorite list making program and fit day, I put together what an ideal daily diet would require for nutrients, and then went shopping:

1. Boneless, skinless, chicken breast
2. Blueberries
3. 1 cup unsalted almonds
4. 6 Eggs
5. 4 Tomatoes
6. spinach
7. 1 Large onion
8. 3 Carrots
9. 4 Celery shoots
10. 10 Asparagus stocks

From here on in, it was simply a matter of ensuring the meat and eggs were cooked, and mixing everything together.

First, cook the chicken all the way through and then slice it into smaller chunks.

Throw it into the blender to create this lovely looking goo:

I went with 3 large carrots, about 75 grams each, and used a grater to get the pieces extra fine before throwing it into the blender. At this point, your concoction may be a bit dry.  Do NOT add any liquids! I made the mistake of adding a cup of water to the blender with both the carrots and the chicken, which made it faster to blend but watered down the muffins more than I would have liked. 

Next comes the spinach and tomatoes. These were very hard to puree, so pour the chicken-carrot mixture back into the blender with the spinach and tomatoes in order to help liquefy it.

Combine everything that’s been blended so far in a large bowl:

Now comes the celery, onion (use the grater to avoid crying!), blueberries, asparagus, and nuts. Blend them all together, creating a (very appetizing!) purple-gray colour when combined with the rest of the mixture. This mixture is heavier than the previous concoctions, so it helps the rest of the batter to thicken up.

We’re almost done! If you want to be fancy, beat the 6 eggs together and brush them over the muffins in order to help seal them.  For the rest of us, just scramble the eggs and add them to our total concoction.

Set muffin papers on your tray, and begin scooping each one full of the mixture. Everything was cooked in these, but I baked them for 15 minutes at 400 degrees F to try to make them more solid and dry them out a bit:

The oven plan didn’t work and just made the muffins soggy, so I put them in the freezer to harden up instead.

Leave them to freeze for one hour, and there you have it!

The Taste:

I really had no idea what to expect in terms of taste, but it turned out alright.  The muffins just taste like spinach with a hint of chicken. That’s it. Nothing crazy at all. The texture is a bit more annoying.  Reheating the muffins doesn’t really work, so I ended up just eating mine frozen. I am working on a fix for this small setback.

The Science: 

The goal was to make these easy to consume snacks that were very healthy and could serve as a meal replacement.

I used fit day to determine what my total nutrient values were for all of the ingredients then broke it down on a per muffin basis. From there, I needed to know how many muffins I would need to eat to get enough of all my daily nutrients. For me, it worked out to be 14 muffins. After 14, I could eat them for additional calories, protein and nutrients as needed.

The following is the information for the total batch, or a single days’ worth for myself:

The total batch (and my target daily intake) is 2392 calories, 128 grams of fat, 133 grams of carbohydrates, and 196 grams of protein. Vitamin D was the only one that didn’t hit our 100% level. It is always the hardest vitamin to get and most people do not get enough. I find it is easier to just take a 1000 IU Vitamin D supplement for the day and then just not need to worry about it.

For my Next Batch:

• Oh yes, there will be another batch!
• It will be the optimal diet for an entire week.
• Steak and fish will be used to switch up the main meat.
• I will add seasonal vegetables as they are available.
• I won’t be adding any extra water to the mixture.

Meal Replacement Shakes:

The next round is going to be in the form of a shake. The muffins, unfortunately, had no binding ingredient so they were just too liquid to hold together. When I create my weeks worth of supplement, I will bottle it and freeze what I won’t drink within a day. This will make it easier to consume and generally nicer to work with.

I will post the pictures for this much larger batch as soon as it is done!

I don’t claim to be a fashion expert, or even have a whole lot of experience with different pants. But if you are a guy, and you wear pants, you owe it to yourself to check out Bonobos. They make some of the best fitting and nicest looking pants I have ever found.

So far I have ordered three of their finely crafted, straight leg pantaloons:

Stone Cutters:  

Jet Blues: 

Graham Slackers:

These are the washed chinos. Bonobos also has a huge variety of pants for every occasion. I have never had pants that fit so well, which is their main selling feature.  The pants are not skin-tight, nor are they baggy. They are simply a nice, slim fit pant. Their details are great as well; the zipper protective cloth, quality stitching, and fun inner linings all make these pants unique. Bonobos have become my favourite pants I have ever owned.  It’s hard to get this excited about pants, but I plan on getting many more in the near future!  I’ll be sure to dive into their shirts soon as well.

Fact: we all have busy lives. Try and recall the last time you ever just sat there and said, I have nothing to do. There is this constant running list of items we keep in our head from the document at work, buying that new pair of pants or killing that spider who has been quietly setting up shop in your bathroom corner for weeks. Without keeping organized, things fall through and don’t get done. So here is my completely non-revolutionary way of making sure I get all my shit done and don’t waste my time worrying about what I have to do at any given moment.

Enter: The List

Lists are the glorious engine behind this (revolutionary?.. certainly not). Now there are a million different ways to make lists, even entire books on the best list for your life. You are here to learn about my way to list zen, so here we go.

Group Everything

First of all, I use the wonderful and completely free TO DO list maker, wunderlist. This bad boy runs on windows, macs, all your mobile devices, tablets, and then syncs itself between them all for good measure. All that for the hard to beat price of zero. I make list categories for all the big areas of my life: personal, work, projects, ideas, purchase, and bills. Nice to know I can break my entire life down into 6 simple categories.  This list is the basic level of everything that I ever have to remember and should apply for 95% of you.

Optimize Your Lists

When something comes to mind, all that I have to do is I write it down; computer, phone, anyway I can, I get it in. With wunderlist, I will usually assign it a due date so that I know it will get done eventually and don’t have to keep a separate life calendar for items.

In the morning, I switch to my today view so I know what I have to get done immediately and then switch to the 7 day outlook for knowing what is coming. Some days I knock off 10 things, others none. It doesn’t really matter because I know everything that needs to be done is in front of me and things that have due dates, will come up when they need to.

When you have a spare moment, you can check your list and see if there is anything to get done. If you are lucky and have nothing then just sit back and browse the web looking for funny cat pictures (or maybe that is a recurring item on your list).

Important: Every couple of weeks I will do a purge of items  across all of my list categories. Maybe I don’t want to purchase that $100,000 razor anymore or an idea has become obsolete. Regardless, these reviews are good to get a good scope of everything I have to do to have a mental picture of my life.

So do you have a list yet? This should help convince you if you are the stubborn type:

Benefits To The list

• I don’t ever have to think about remembering anything beyond the minute to write it on the list.
• Everything is in one convenient place for me to see what I have to do.
• There is incredible satisfaction in crossing things off a list once it is done. You don’t know this feeling until you try it. Make a list now and give it a try.
• I get more things done because, otherwise idle time is used to go through list items.

De-clutter your life and go get more things done.

The temptation to outsource social media marketing to an agency is formidable. “I don’t want to learn how to tweet or how to use Facebook”.  Fair enough. So for many businesses, it is easier to just pay a marketing agency to have them worry about it for you. I think there is a better, smarter way. If you aren’t convinced, here are 4 reasons to keep your social marketing in-house. .

Build A Real Connection

Social media, as a business tool, is about being connected to your audience in a relevant way and speaking with them not at them. Nobody knows your business like you and your employees do, so you already have all the content you could need for your marketing. A marketing agency can come up with tweets and Facebook posts veiled in usefulness but there is a lack of ‘on the ground connection’. They will always feel manufactured. Some poor kid at the agency has been tasked with looking up interesting things to write about for your flower shop and the flower industry and the feeling just isn’t the same compared to someone who spends their days working in the field (no pun intended).

You Are Overpaying

Unless you are Old Spice paying Wieden + Kennedy for the most brilliant social marketing campaign to date, you are overpaying. Everyone and their dog is a social media guru these days and they want you to believe they are worth paying $80/hour to tweet on your behalf. Little known secret here: there is no silver bullet to running successful social media marketing and they don’t have a magic tool you are missing out on.

You Need to Stay Relevant

Having an agency pre-populate your messages and broadcasts means you are always going to be behind. You won’t be able to respond to questions, comments, or breaking news in your business the way you could if you controlled it in-house. Being able to respond and adapt quickly is one of the elements about what makes going social such an exciting and useful tool.

You Have A Genuine Interest in its Success

Understanding your product or service is half the battle here. You want to be able to answer questions and talk about your business. Having that poor kid who is in charge of your account, trying to be interested in your flower business is a stretch. They just can’t convey the excitement or knowledge that someone inside the business would have.

So what are you supposed to do here? Well first, I would recommend deciding if social media marketing is right for your business in the first place (post coming soon). If it is, bravo, read on.

How to Run Social Media In-House

(Simplified Version)

1. Whatever you were going to pay an agency to run your social media, someone in-house will gladly do it for half the cost and will get double the results for you (see benefits above). Ask employees if they want to earn some extra money and you will have a lineup of people who would love to tweet and Facebook on your behalf. Many of them will have been using these services for years and know exactly the way you are supposed to use them from the personal side (which is what you want). Set goals and milestones and let them loose. ‘Social media marketing can’t just be about posting a few Facebook messages’….it isn’t. Guide coming soon.

2. Sure social media is not your core business revenue generator, and most of you reading this will have no interest in learning what it can do, but knowledge is power. I implore you to read up. Spend one hour, and read the guides provided by the big social media sites on using their service and you will know 95% of what it takes to have your business account grow and succeed with them.

Years ago I had to spend my time explaning what AdWords was to a business and why they would benefit from it. Thankfully, those days are long gone but we are now at a point where it isn’t enough to just have a basic AdWords campaign running. Here are 3 ways to increase your ROI on whatever sized ad budget you are working with.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions allow you to increase your businesses visibility on specified searches by making your ads stand out more from the rest of the competition. With this increased visibility comes a better ad CTR, and in the end, will deliver more qualified visitors to your site. If you do a search right now for your target keywords, I will bet that none of your competitors have implemented any of the three tactics below.  They are making it easy for you.

Site Links:

Site links allow you to add additional links directly into your ad unit. This is great for businesses with reservations pages or other key conversion points where they want their visitors to go and they will find useful. Not only does it increase your ads visibility, but also gives site visitors the chance to go directly to the most relevant page they are looking for.

Location Extension:

This allows you to display your Google local listing along side your ad. You will have to claim your Local listing profile first, but adding it to your campaign is easy and gives customers more information on your business right off the bat.

Call Extension:

Call extensions allow you to display your businesses phone number as additional text in the ad. Mobile traffic is only increasing each month so by adding your phone number directly into the ad, you give these searchers a number to click directly on their mobile device. Another great tool to enable when setting up a call extension is ‘Call Metrics’. This will  track key call details like calling area and call duration for you for free when someone sees your ad and calls you. Google will assign you a tool free number which then forwards to the number you want (USA and Canada at the moment) to track all of the data.

Remarketing

Whatever your site goals are, there is probably a very small number of people who end up converting for you. It typically takes a lead three visits to your site before converting for you. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to show an ad to people who made it to your site, who made it to your checkout page, and then for whatever reason ending up leaving? Maybe they had someone come to the door right as they were about to place an order with you! What rotten luck.  Remarketing allows you to market directly to people who have already been to your site and left without converting. Later on, when they are browsing their favourite blog, your ad shows up specifically to them. Because they know your brand already, they are going to be of higher value to you.

Conversion Tracking

If you are running a campaign without conversion tracking in place, you are leaving lots of money on the table. Every site has a goal they are wanting a visitor to complete. These goals could be anything from an online purchase, reaching a contact page or just signing up for your email newsletter. You are paying for the traffic, so you better know what they are doing and how much they are worth to your business. Setting up conversion tracking allows you to see exactly what campaigns, ad groups, and exactly what keywords are the most profitable for you. This allows you to cut out non converting and wasteful parts of your campaigns with ease, while increasing those campaigns that are giving you conversions.

Conclusion:

Use ad extensions, remarketing, and conversion tracking to help increase you overall AdWords ROI. Google spent the time making these tools, so take advantage!

I will create specific setup guides and more in-depth tactics for each of these in the coming weeks. I plan on making paid search into a regular topic of this site. There are lots of strategies and tactics to talk about with AdWords to ensure you are getting the very most out of it so stay tuned for the weeks ahead.

If you have any AdWords questions, just ask them below and I will respond shortly.