Bam Azizi

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Executive Decision Making

bam — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:20:34 -0400

Every business in any industry depends on the ability of it's managing team to be able to make decisive and crucial decisions but there comes a time where a true leader has to put his/her feet down and make THE Final decision. The creative and innovative cycle of any product or service is never ending. You can always come up with a better idea, perfection is at infinite.

Executive Decision making is a quality true leaders are born with. It's the ability to say enough is enough lets make something happen with what we've got or else we're going to lose our chance.

The lack of Executive decision making is truly evident in web startups. They never run out of creative ideas to do with their web sites but what they mostly end up with is not just lost chances but totally wrong products for the wrong target market.

Tell if you've done this before:

You come up with an idea that a small team around you (or a few of your friends) label it "brilliant". You spend countless hours mapping all your ideas together. You start the development process but every other week another new idea hits you and with all excitement you add it to your production queue and push off the launch date by a few more weeks. It's been a year since you started, you were suppose to launch by now but because of all the things you've added you'd need another 6 months to develop. meanwhile you're on sites like mashable and techcrunch and they have just announced a site that is doing exactly what you originally thought of doing. you start crying. you keep telling youmeanwhile most of the blogs can't seem to get enough of the competitor site even though you think their glass is half empty.

Another year passes and you're site is finally done and you're ready to launch but you no longer have just one competitor but 4 other sites have joined the niche market. you contact all of the big blogs and any PR source you can get your hands on but they turn you down and label you as "Just another [blank]", you tell your self i came up with the idea first a little under 2 years ago but now it's prime time is long over, there are enough competitors dominating the market that no matter how much publicity you even get it won't help your cause.

you've wasted 2 years of your life, you've missed yet another opportunity wave and now you've have to go through the innovation process all over again for a totally new and unique idea. The question is "are you going to learn from your bitter experience?"

if this has not happened to you still the same type of question still applies. Are you going to learn from the mistakes many sites are making today?

Executive Decision Making is all about optimizing your opportunities instead of wasting them. It involves sacrifice, it's a hard and risky decision but at least you won't waste 2 years of your life and wonder about it after.r self this site only has half of the features you're going to have.

We do so many things wrong! Why is that?

bam — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:06:06 -0400

First off, sorry for my sudden absence for couple of weeks, normally this time of the year is the craziest for me due to the nature of my businesses. I don't know why the smell of summer has this effect on people and businesses, but you won't find me complaining.
what's interesting about the societies, businesses, and people is that it's a lot easier to patch things up with temporary solutions that more problems than they fix. I seem to be noticing these flaws a lot more than i used to. I was a designer once so i know i still have the open eye to spot the little weird stuff but some of things i see are so obvious that i don't know why they haven't been fixed yet. read on and i'll let you in on some of them...

So far this year i'm finding my self fixing things more than i invent. I've always been a thinker, that's what i do best. You tell me your problems that no one seem to be able to fix and i'll give you several solution you never thought were possible. I invent solutions!

For the last few week, however, i've been working on several project in need of fixing. Not knowing anything in regards to the nature of these projects required a lot of extra work. The more i found out about these helpless projects the more i realized i might not be able to handle the load. They are all too different and located at different location, managed by totally different types of people and not to mention all vary in terms of budgets and forecasting goals.

But without getting into too much details (NDA Agreements) lets talk about the obvious problems i've encountered.

1) Gas problems, since it's very popular these days: cars use gas, a lot!! they have combustion engines with pistons that go up and down, burn fuel to propel the motion so that the car can move. but the technology is not all that different from 100 years ago, sure they've got smaller and more efficient but are you telling me there is no other way for the engine to work on gas? forget about electric cars for this topic, for now.

2) Most people are not leaders, they just don't have it in them yet they insist on being leaders simply because they've got the ambitions for it. Most of these leader-wanna-be's start their own online business you can guest where their business ends. now do tell or even help these people realize the true problems they have.

3) %99.999 of all newly launched web sites (blogs, web 2.0, web infinity...) fail, actually they never get any where even if you don't like to admit you've failed, but if you look deep enough you can figure why you're going to fail, but you never take note of that as something to avoid or to make sure to include. I can tell if a website is going to fail or succeed within 5 min of hearing about it or within 30sec of looking at it!

4) Add yours here...

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Balance of Optimism and Pessimism

bam — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:56:51 -0400

I don't care what people say but being optimistic at all times is the worst thing you can be. If you are optimistic at all times then you are in a state of fully daydreaming. In your mind the underdog always wins; web site traffic pours like thunderstorm; money grows on trees; and stock market always goes up and so on...

At the same time being Pessimistic at all times is equally worse. In your mind you have the worst luck; you can never win; there are too many other people better than you; everything you try to do the opposite happens. People who are pessimistic at all times tend to not do anything at all because they say to themselves "if i'm going to fail then why bother trying!" and my answer is always "but if you don't try, you never know!".

Here is where the balance comes in, both optimists and pessimists are only right about half of the things and in the real business world they fully compliment one another. since examples are the best way to convey a message here are a few of them:

1)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have a web 2.0 idea and when we make it and launch it, within 1 year we'll be like google"

PESSIMIST Would say
"We can never beat or match google so why bother"

BALANCE of the two results:
"It's hard to beat google, but we still have a chance to make good grounds, and what if we never get the traffic we need to make decent money so what do we have to do? lets plan this to the smallest detail"

2)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have an idea and millions of people would want it"

PESSIMIST Would say
"it's a stupid idea because nobody would want it"

BALANCE of the two results:
"What would make a million people want it? and what do we need to consider if nobody wants it? Either way lets put our target getting a 1,000 customers first then we can worry about the next 10,000 and the next 100,000 and eventual million target"

What is the BALANCE?

Balance allows you to see things in perspective, like seeing both sides of the coin, it helps you plan for the best and the worst. Knowing about the worst things allows you to be prepared in case they happen, also knowing there even worse things that could happen also gives you enough motivation to be optimistic about even the little gains. Balance allows you appreciate you gains, your efforts and your life. It's helps you avoid pitfalls and makes every mistake a step closer the ultimate success.

So go ahead and be pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. It's only good for you!

i love problems, and so should you!

bam — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:00:28 -0400

Ever wonder what this world would be like if it was all peaceful, and perfect. No wars, no chaos, no tension and no racism. I personally would never want to live in that world. It's boring, it's static, nothing interesting ever happens.

To me any type of chaos is an opportunity where we can exceed the beyond traditions and challenge the status quo. With chaos comes innovation, solutions and different wants and needs. People are no longer in the same level, they each live for a different purpose with a different perspective on life. In business and commerce there is an entire philosophy around Chaos Theory where financiers leverage off other's misfortune. Now i ask you "can you feel the chaos? are you going to do something about it?

Every meeting i go to, every pitch i hear, and every person i meet talking about their dreams of making it big online, i constantly ask myself, there are so many opportunities out there yet why are people stuck on the same type of ideas? why is it that they cannot see the silver lining with chaos? that's where the gold is!!

Internet is a big mess, nobody can organize it; it's not user friendly; we're still stuck on the stone age HTML output; as soon as one site becomes a little popular all of a sudden 100 others just like it pop out of every corner you can imagine; we read tons of news sites yet don't know who is telling the truth or what side they are on; trendy ideas come and go but the ones that make it mainstream are probably the crappiest of them all; and last but not least we've given the power of influence to a bunch of people who can't decide what clothes to wear ( Arrington, Scoble, Zukerberg, Rose,...) let alone tell us what we should follow or do on Internet. How we got here doesn't really matter, where are we going next is the question you should be asking your self.

The opportunities are all around you, find a chaotic space and make it even more chaotic this seems to be the secret to making a very popular website.

But seriously, find a problem and give it your 2 cents trying to fix it. Do NOT go after ideas that everybody else is also thinking about, no, just find a simple and easy idea and develop it, launch it and promote it. If one idea didn't work then try another one, you might go through 10, 15, 50 or 100 ideas before one really blows up, so keep trying to solve problems. Don't try to make money, money should always be just a side effect.

Solve people's problems first and they will happily give you all the money you can fit into your pockets!

Arrived at a Cross Road

bam — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:25:09 -0400

This week was a crazy one to say the leat. I found out that i've been black listed on twitter because i have too many friends and following even more people which is not ok by a small group of unknown geeks. What's even crazier is the fact that i've become even more popular because i disliked the spam label the black listing people gave me so i went on a ranting. I've been receiving twitter messages, private messages, emails and etc... reacting to my "rantings"

So here i am at a cross road. till now i've been writing about some intelligent and informative articles in which a lot thinking and research goes into and while the readership is growing at a slow pace but the reaction is simply none existent. On the other hand i start talking my heart out by rating about a silly twitter issue and i get not only a lot readership but also a great deal conversation and reaction.

My dilema is i wanted to turn this site into a very smart and resourceful site, but i also wanted to grow the traffic to beyond 100k hits per month by end of July.

I'm going to do some deep thinking this weekend. I have to figure out a way to do both. I simply do not want to lose the respect of the people who have been following me to date and would like to keep them around for many years to come.

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Art of Time Management

bam — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:31:31 -0400

You know the Cliche "Time is Money", now a days seconds are even more money. Regardless of who you are or where live there is only 24 hours per day. The art of time is about putting every hour, minute and second into productive work. So lets do it...

Due to Health lets give our bodies a 5 hour sleep period. That's right 5 hours, you are young and can do this, unless you're not then you can sleep for 6-7 hours max. The point here is that sleep is a good thing, it refreshes your body and with no activity your brain power can rest. It is important to have a great sleep while you sleep because of have i have in store for you.

So we are left with only 19 hours now, so much for 24 hours of productivity! Lets make this 19 hours really work for you. Before you jump into filling up you daily schedule with lots of tasks lets take a step backwards. Look back to the past week or so, what are the most important things you need to for the FUTURE. If you have immediate tasks and responsibilities coming up then they take the higher priority so make a list of them. Now, try to come up with a LONG list of everything you think you should be doing for today. A long list is a very detailed list in case you didn't know. Divide each task into smaller elements, for example, if you are going to write a blog post then dividing it into little tasks mean counting research, inspiration, draft write up, image creation, factualization, link baiting, to finalizing draft and publishing it. Knowing the little details allow you to dedicate a certain amount of time to each task this way if you thought writing a post would only take an hour would not end costing you 2 hours on researching alone. Keep doing this for all the tasks you have to do for the day.

Listing all the stuff in your time sheet is not enough, you have to actually stick to it and perform each of them to the second, so if you assigned yourself with 20 minutes of research as soon as your 20 minutes are up stop the research and move on to the next task. Don't worry if your research sucks, you don't expect to become extremely efficient in just one day did you???

Practice makes perfect! The first a few days are going to be rough but after that your brain and positive energy adjust themselves to your new routine. The trick is not to go back to the old you, it's like quitting smoking for 2 days but picking it up again, you won't live cancer free because of those 2 days.

When your level of efficiency picks up you'll realize that before you were spending 2 hours on research like tasks that were getting you no where to now that you can do resulting research in just 15 minutes. Now just imagine with your new level of efficiency if you had 2 hours to do tasks you normally do in 15 minutes, imagine the glorious results. This is actually how quality and innovation happens. You can apply this to almost any task you can imagine. I personally even analyze my driving, shopping, online surfing, books and magazine readings and everything else you can imagine.

I only started to really care about my time since mid last year and it has done wonders for me in terms of my performance at work, my side projects and running multiple sites and managing couple of web projects. Without managing my time i would have never been able to take care of 2 projects let alone the things i do now!

Time Management is one of those important elements that contribute to any type of success. Manage your time effectively and efficiently and you'll be managing a huge bank account!!!

here are some great resources for managing time that would help you get going:

BOOK - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

BOOK - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

BOOK - Time Management for the Creative Person

SITE - Mind Tools - Time Management

ESSAY - First Things First < Very important Essay

SITE - Time Scheduling and Time Management for dyslexic students

Software - ToDoList or something similar

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Money Talks & Walks

bam — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:42:37 -0400

It is obvious that business is about managing money. You'd be surprised to know that majority of Online Businesses, web developers, designers, advertisers and bloggers cannot manage money. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why web 2.0 sites go after funding the VC firms look into management and want to see a manager with at least MBA running things.

Managing money is about what you can, cannot and should not buy. Just because you have money doesn't mean that you should spend right away. Sometimes the biggest mistake a starup makes revolves around spending money at the wrong time towards the wrong thing.

Managing Money is about being smart and thoughtful with money, here are a few ways to be smarter with money

Expenses

No matter who you are or what you do you've got expenses whether you like it or not. Being smart with money would allow you to analyze your expenses, take out the unnecessary ones or bargain for better deals. For example, there are hundreds of options for having a cell phone plan, but researching a little about you talking habits allows you select the most appropriate plan that over time saves you money. You can apply this to cars payments, office lease, Internet and tv bills, computers equipment, starbucks coffee, lunch and dinner.

Employees

If you are working on your own then you are your own employee and not your own boss. If you are in the online business and you're making money then the chances are that there multiple employees working in that company. Most startups, as soon as they come in contact with money they go crazy with hiring thinking that the same money they're making this is going to continue to next year and year after that. Not so fast, in the online work you can be on top one months and at the bottom by years end. Never estimate or speculate when it comes to online. Keep you team small, and hold on tight to your money.

Hosting

Hosting can be very cheap or very expensive, but did you know that it doesn't matter what kind of hosting you start with for as long as it is flexible enough to grow as you grow. If you have a blog, or thinking of starting one, think for a second what is your blog going to be, if it's a hobby blog then a cheap shared hosting with $5-10/month hosting is good enough, but if you intend to really promote the site and make a bit of income on the side while holding your day job then stay away from shared hosting and go with a small Virtual Server for $30-50/month and as the traffic to your site grow so can your server resources this way you don't have to spend more that you need.

I know a few startups that before they even had a decent application on their hand they were going around shopping for servers and co-location options. As a startup stick with small, go with a small Virtual Server, this way if you hit big you can easily upgrade to fully dedicated servers and multi server with load balancing options but don't blow the money you don't have right from the get go, what if you're doesn't pick up at all, all that money wasted!!!

Marketing

Every business, website or blogs needs to be marketed otherwise how would people find out about it. But did you know that in this day and age the most effective marketing doesn't actually cost a penny? all it costs it time! in the next article i will be talking a great deal about this.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but what about creativity?

bam — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:05:41 -0400

As a designer i was trained to look past the beauty and aesthetics of any given project but for me to believe that beauty has nothing to with the attention and respect a design gets would require the entire world to be educated to look past beauty as well. For as long as people/businesses believe beauty and aesthetics equal to quality and performance who am i to go against the tide, yet i still do it because i BELIEVE!!!

I was reading couple design magazines the other day, Communication Arts and Print Magazine, each month they select a series of project dubbed as "creative and inspiring" and showcase them in their magazines. I enjoy looking at them and depending on the type of projects i have i may even get inspired by them but i couldn't help notice that from a functional and real creativity point of view almost all of the featured projects where severely flawed. Nothing is perfect in this world and i'm the first to admit that but these magazine are the primal voice in advocating real creativity yet many of the featured projects are based on beauty.

The best type of design is when you don't notice it at all!

Our biggest problem is that we don't really know what the definition of CREATIVITY is, and we can't help but to confuse it with beauty. I follow 15 web design and CSS gallery sites among hundreds of other feeds in my RSSFeed, each day i get a list of some 50 sites that are chosen by the editors of the site based on their beauty, most of them are not functional and if you look a bit deeper into their HTML code you'll also realize that everything is disgustingly put together and there is no more room for flexibility and expansion. What these gallery sites don't realize is that they are influencers and the new designs they publish inspires many other ones. In calculation if 9 out of 10 sites showcased is beauty without creativity and functionality and those 9 inspire another 20 sites to be the same then you do the math, that's right it's no wonder why this Internet is so chaotic, nobody can organize it, nobody can categorize it, nobody can help but to make it even worse than what it is now!

To me beauty is when i look at a site and say "hmmm, that's nice but how do i find the information pages" but a creative site to is when i say "i'm glad i found this useful site, lets bookmark it!"

a creative site can be very beautiful, sometimes the simplest sites that have no graphics or images are more beautiful than the ones packed with color, texture and images. It's how you use design to help people find the right material that ultimately makes you creative. Unfortunately we are creative so that people can notice our designs first, everything else is secondary!

These are the sites that keep advocating beauty for blogs rather creativity:

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://performancing.com/
http://www.copyblogger.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://cssmania.com/
http://cssremix.com
http://www.webcreme.com/

How to make a Sticky Brand Name?

bam — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:45:32 -0400

We use names to identify with People, object and subjects. Brands names are basically the names that have become popular. To come up with is rather simple, if you want to name a baby all you have to do is to go to a baby names website and pick the one you like best, but making brand names are not only tough in practice but even tougher from a scientific point of view. Brand names are in fact scientifically made, coincidentally or not.

The Logical Definition of Brand Names:

Brand Name = Name + Brand Positioning + Strategy + Marketing

Naming:

No matter what your business is everybody needs to identify you some how. But just having a name is not enough, your name should be easy to read and understand; it also has to be memorable and friendly.

Unique names tend to be special since they are new words people have never heard before and any sort of definition you give to it has the tendency to stick. The biggest problem however is unique names tend to be easy to forget unless you have the resources and money to keep repeating it until it becomes a part of natural language. It's hard to come up with unique names, you can mash up a few alphabets together but names also have to make sense. Web 2.0 sites have exhausted the idea that a misspelled word is still a unique name, in my opinion if there is a spelling error in a name it just shows the dumbness of its creators. Flickr was a clever name because it was among the first but every other similar name that came after was really dumb and since the idea was no longer unique and clever it lost its appeal.

How to find a good name?

To find a good name first make a list of keywords. By keywords i mean words that mean want your name is trying to represent. Categorize each keyword into definition groups, so if you have a whole bunch of keywords but 5-6 of them basically mean "inventive" then create a group called "inventive" and put all the keywords associated with that meaning under that group. Next find as many COOL words that are also synonymous with "Inventive" by looking into thesaurus part of dictionary, also don't forget to look into other languages to find cool translations.

When you have lots of words that seem to be cool enough start the word play. Playing with words involves mixing up words that are in the same category or in the contrasting category, manipulating words, cutting words into pieces and matching them with other pieces from other words. The list goes on. The goal is to come up with at least 50 new words.

To make sure your new names are easy to read try to read them out loud your self and ask others to read it out loud as well. If you find that you have to correct others in pronunciation then there is something wrong with that name. Forget fixing up words at this point. you have lots of names to go through. The words that pass the "read" test move on to "understandable" test.

To see if your new name is understandable, ask people to see if they can guess what the each word suppose to mean. Better yet, ask them what is the first thing that comes into their mind. Narrow the list down to those words that convey the some what original meaning.

You list should be very short by now, i'm guessing we are down to about 5 to 10 from 50. You next goal should be to narrow it down to 3. Sometimes it's a matter of taste or a hunch, no matter how you decide to narrow down the list the important thing is that you as the new owner of the name can totally relate to them name.

When you have you top 3, it's time to do some more research. If your name is going to be a global player then it has to have safe meanings in all of the popular markets. I have my own way which is a proprietary way used in the industry and i can't disclose it yet, i can't bite the hand that is feeding me. But i will give you an example, There is a clothing company in Canada and it's called ROOTS, when the Olympics was held in Australia, ROOTS was the clothing sponsor for the Canadian Team, Little did they know in Australia ROOTS means having sex. The ROOTS name was ridiculed all over the world, it was a disaster for the brand name because it was opening locations in Europe and Australia and after what was thought to be a great investment ended up forcing the company to abandon its plans and invest in only North America.

Back to conclusion, After you've done your research on all your top 3 names then now is the time to pick one. But before you pick that 1 special name consider the following:

make sure .com domain of that name is available
finalize any changes to the alphabetical structure of the name
search the trade marks database to make sure the name is available
search google to see if anybody else is using the name and what are they using it for
make sure the name has a clean, safe and trusting meaning

Now you have a name, good luck!

Brand Name = Name + Brand Positioning + Strategy + Marketing

How to become strategic

bam — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:51:30 -0400

Your success in anything you'd like to do is dependent on strategy. Strategy is not about the end result, nor is it about goals or targets. Strategy is basically about HOW you're going to get results, WHAT you need to do, and also WHEN, WHERE, WHY of everything, and last but not least WHO are you really doing it for?

So lets make it quick and sweet:

Create a road map of getting to your results first
Find the shortest distance between each step
Seek helpful link, resources and connections to help you achieve results for every little step
Measure Everything, if you don't know how your strategy is working out you won't know how to improve
Measure Twice, Cut once! don't just deploy an idea as strategy consider the pros and cons and readjust the idea then turn it into a strategic move
Listen to people, blogs, media and everything else! you don't have to act on everything they say but they can give you some great ideas
Changing strategy or approach is not a weakness so if you face road blocks then it would be a better idea to change the strategy for that process
If facts don't fit the theory, chance facts! Albert Einstein

Strategy is about clarity; it's about confidence and risk taking. To give you an idea, every time i'm driving around in Toronto, which is full of traffic, i set a strategy for my self on how i'm going to get to where i want to go in the shortest and most efficient amount of time. I basically have memorized the map of Toronto and i can visually imagine it, since i don't have a navigation system. I've done this practice so many times that now a days i do them automatically without thinking, it has become naturally apart of me.

I know the concept of strategizing for every little thing in your life is not only hard but agonizing but after a while when you get comfortable with it you'd wonder how you lived without it.

Now, as my job i have to be on top of strategy. I'm constantly doing consulting jobs for web project, businesses where some have funding and most don't, if i screw up somewhere along the development rout the whole project could go up the flames. I wasn't like this all my life, in fact when i was a teenager i could not understand the concept of time management, planning, consistency, and organization. I was a total mess, but something changed and i discovered new joys of life which were Communication Design, Branding and Strategy and they changed me forever.

Let me know your own thoughts, or if you are strategic in a different way!

Start web projects that you love to use yourself, be passionate!

bam — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:52:32 -0400

It might sound obvious that you should do what you love instead of doing it for money and fame! but i was amazed when i saw the result for a survey that started a month ago that had just recently finished.

In short, majority of new entrepreneurs and web startup developers loved working in the online environment, they loved building sites, they loved designing, they kept up with a lot of blogs and news sites, but when asked if you have a web 2.0 website, how engaged are you in the site from an average user's perspective (none admin tasks)? the answers were alarming. Only %15 were active members and contributors of their sites where as %50 had completed the project and had moved on to another project. %70 of the people with multiple sites said they checked on their older site once in while to see how it was performing, where it lacked, if it needed more features or needed a zing to boost up the traffic.

In another question close to %35, or one third, said they stopped working on the site because it failed right at the beginning, how can you come to that conclusion within the first couple of months is beyond me.

Most importantly, When asked Why they started and built that particular project, %90 of responses had to do with either reputation, money (both funding and ad revenue), and excitement.

Conclusion

Basic philosophy: If you don't love everything about the site you're building then how could you expect other to love it!

Every successful person on planet keeps telling you to live and do things in life with passion. Do the kind of jobs that you are passionate about, marry the person you are most passionate about, learn out of the passion for knowledge... etc... but when it comes to doing business projects, we might be doing the business we are passionate about but the topic of the project has no soul or passion! WHY???

If you are passionate about sports, don't make a site about business that you are not passionate about. Being passionate about the topic and content of project gives your site extra soul and character not to mention that it makes it a personal affair as well. Be passionate about all aspect of your site and everything else will come to you, trust me!

How to be newsworthy at all times

bam — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:37:28 -0400

It doesn't matter if you own a simple blog or a complex web app, to survive you need to be mentioned on other news blogs and editorial news sources as often as possible. While you might look at being mentioned on news sources as publicity, in reality what you getting is far more important; you're gaining respect and acknowledgment. So next time you're thinking about how you can be mentioned on popular sites like TechCrunch, Mashable, GigOm, CNET, Wired, or any other on constant basis think about how you can build up on your reputation first and everything else would fall into their place much easier.

important: A full featured website that has done all the needed development up front and doesn't need to do much else is unfortunately newsworthy only once. If you don't need to innovate or improve on your perfection then there isn't much else news sites can talk about other than what they have said at the beginning. Take the examples of Truemors, Pownce, and Answers.com for example, they have not done any major updates or upgrades since the last time of their world wide web coverage. They haven't even redesigned their site and as a result you don't see them being mentioned on news blogs. Why is that? well, they don't have anything news worthy.

The trick of publicity savvy and business minded innovators is to draw a very complete and solid plan but release in phases. revealing all your cards at once doesn't do you any good but having something new to show for every few weeks keeps blogs on their tails as to what you have in store for them. Though most of the things you want to do are pre-planned but a multi phase release shows that you are constantly innovating under the hood, it also shows that you are pretty serious when it comes to taking care of business not to mention that you are trustworthy when it comes to taking care of people and that makes you newsworthy on a constant basis. Take the examples of FaceBook, Apple and Google, none of the news sites can't get enough of them, not because their are brand names but because they have something new that news sites can talk about. How do you think great brands are built anyways???

Scalability, Why getting big fast is sometimes a huge problem

bam — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:40:01 -0400

When we start dreaming about our projects, way before writing a single line of code, we always imagine it being big, millions of people visiting our site, money growing on trees, businesses dying to buy us for big bucks and so on.

Here is a few reasons why you don't want to get big too fast.

With every step of growth you are going to need more support to meet the demands, whether it's content, hosting servers, employees, or something as obvious as wanting to add more people to the site. Getting big too fast means that you won't have the time or money to meet all demands. If you're site is new and all of a sudden millions of people want to access your site you would need to aquire tens of servers, optimize your site, reprogram your web site scripts, database, files and images to work on multi server setups, not to mention your bandwidth costs are going to shoot off the roof. While these are all great things from a business perspective, at the same time not being able to accommodate all of them simply means your site would have to shut down until you can pay for them all.

To be able to maintain all the costs of maintaining your site's operations you'd have to make sure the right type of advertising platform is in place, assuming that you have done your research. If you don't have an Ad platform then you have no choice but to take up bank loans, assuming that you have the credits for. Worst case, you have to sell a big piece of your business to investors, assuming you can find one in time. Selling to investors would get you all the money you'd want but you would have to give up all control and independence to strangers.

Instead if you can manage your growth...

Instead of wanting to get big in a month or two, try to get big in 6 (six) to 9(nine) months or even longer, then as you start to grow you can add the right ad platform, something better than google adsense, and update your servers gradually, update your program with patience and efficiency and have time to add features and employees to help you relieve pressure so that you can in turn focus on building a long term business. This way money comes in as you grow, so no need to give up big shares and independence, you only add servers very few at a time, your software is in constant state of growth and improvement, and employees are there to watch your back and you can keep innovating and finding more ways to sell your business to different people and markets. Everything slowly, with process in mind. Smooth Sailing!

Don't Market your Site, Campaign!

bam — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:08:15 -0400

Whether your project is a startup or small business site, you should stay away from marketing at all costs. Marketing is basically spending money to promote your site by buying advertising space, paying for editorial features, mail outs, and the list goes on. Your Marketing effort is measured by ROI - Return of Investments and since as a startup to small business your level of brand reputation is low all your marketing efforts will go to waste anyways. Instead of marketing you should Campaign. Campaigning doesn't necessarily cost money, there are a lot back alley ways to getting your name out there without needing to spend a dime!

Campaigning is much harder than marketing which is one of the biggest reasons why most businesses take the easier way out. My philosophy is "No Sweat, No Result" meaning you have to work hard, you should NOT start thinking of cheating the system right from the get go, in other words stay away from the lazy route.

To Campaign first measure your competency with available opportunities, know where you are most strong and leverage your strengths to enhance your brand by giving it personality. I know an entrepreneur who was great at public speaking, so to promote his business/brand/product he kept participating in all sorts of forums and conferences. He aligned his speeches so that he can integrate a part of his brand into them. In a way his was selling his brand indirectly and was getting paid a lot of money to promote his own business.

Focus on speed, develop a competitive instinct, know that it's a jungle out there, you either kill or be killed. In this world R&D does NOT mean Research and Development, R&D means Rub and Duplicate as soon as possible, never let your business lose it's competitive advantage to another party. Come out with a simple idea you can stamp into everyones brain then expand the idea by adding more aligned products and features. Do NOT tangent into off topic industries, for example, if your site is about cars, don't tangent off into talking about politics, but instead expand by adding motorcycles, or motor sports and so on, keep everything relevant because your existing customers are the most profitable ones.

Campaigning is time focused. you cannot expect a campaign to last you a year, most campaign run for only a few months. The beginning of a campaign is a critical time, you have to be able to come out hard and fast. To do so, Exploit the gravitational center of your industry with space and energy. Find out what drives your industry and try to be controversial, or critical and at best interesting. People love to read about controversy and cannot stand criticism while they constantly seek better benefits, and blogs love to write about what people like to read.

Forget about soft selling. Replace soft selling metrics like satisfaction, delight, impressions and gifts, with hard campaigning metrics like big benefits, revolutions and evolutions all with revenues and margins in mind. Your business should be focused on building revenue streams rather sales channels.

Don't just run an ad for 3 months while thinking you have 3 months of nothing else to do. In 3 months you should constantly update and upgrade your site, enhance the user experience, experiment with different campaign strategies, and live in a suitcase going from city to city, newspaper to newspaper, radio to radio. You have to let everybody know that you are serious about this. This is no longer the time where you can get away with BETA software and half baked business ideas. Each business idea has only one chance to make an impact, sitting around and spending money on ad dollars wouldn't get you there! It's you against the whole world!

Important things to consider before launching your online project (for web apps or blogs)

bam — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:24:32 -0400

Today Internet is extremely crowded and polluted, and day by day it doesn't get any better. Many applications and blogs start and die everyday. A project you think is brilliant is already being thought and developed by several other groups and any day now they are going to beat you to the launch platform. But don't worry too much about being the second or third site arriving to the starting lineup, the road ahead is extremely bumpy and difficult. The faith of your online project is not defined by who launches first but by who gets it right!

By getting it "right" i don't mean the perfectly designed and developed site, nothing will ever be perfect, but "Right" as in what people wanted all along; "Right" as in efficient, beneficial, reliant and easy. Getting right is a guessing game because it's hard to predict who want what and if you can fit it within that need category, but is it?

Getting it "Right" requires lots of research, asking the right group of people the right type of questions, considering their well being ahead of your greedy demands. It is about understanding that if you give people what they want they will probably give you want you've been daydreaming about during all those long hardworking hours. But there are a few other ways as well...

So How can you get it "Right"?

1- Dummy proof everything!

The purpose of your site and topic of discussion MUST be visible. If you have a blog and you're constantly writing on your blog but no one can figure what you're site is about then that's a huge problem. There are millions of blogs that seem to be talking about everything, they announce news, business mergers, parenting, child care, beauty, cars and videos and podcasts, all in one little blog with a naive notion that the larger the broadness of the topic the larger audience they are going to attract to their site. CNN and BBC can do that but then again they have billions of dollars to make sure that they can, you don't!!!
Design of the layout of a site is one those areas that MUST be dummy proof. Making it clear where navigations are located, where each menu is suppose to take you, and how people can get around your site with ease. You must make registration forms something people would want to fill out rather than something you're doing because everybody else seems to be doing it as well.

Make content easy to read, whether it's the headlines, body of the content, static pages, and etc... everything must be identifiable and understandable. The easier you can read content the more engaged people will become in your site. Content is all about typography, from line spacing, size of fonts, choice of fonts to colors and what have you. Here are a few sites that talk a great deal about design and typography: Link1 link2 link3

2- There are so many other things you probably have not considered yet!

I've read in many blogs that they didn't make the right choice when choosing a hosting company. they started with a cheap host or an unreliable one and as soon as they saw some nice traffic their site went offline. This has happened to many blogs and it keeps happening to many more so before you jump on web business make sure to chose the right host, there are several cheap and reliable hostings out there, 1and1 or dreamhost are the two that come into my mind. if you're seeing a healthy dose of traffic you can upgrade to more performance known hosting companies like MediaTemple, Peer1, Voxel, and etc.

Load time is just as important as anything else. New visitors to your site have 5 seconds or less patience time. Meaning, your site should load under 5 seconds. Several things attribute to this cause. I don't want to become too technical, but the major factors are heavy use of graphics, a large number of database calls or queries, slow web hosts, heavy use of Java-scripts, large home page size, large number of DNS calls, and the list goes on. You would need a technical help from a professional or freelance developer to solve many of these issues, so if you have somebody that is designing your site you can ask them to take care of the above issues as well.

If you're starting your own blog then there are a few choices you're probably considering, you can go with free blog apps like Typad, Blogger and BlogSpot or Open source CMS like Wordpress or MovableType or Drupal which sit on your own domain and server, or a CMS that costs money like another version of MovableType, and several others. Let me make it clear right here that unless you're trying to do extra stuff with your site, all of the above option basically do the same thing and if you can generate traffic then you are probably able to make money as well. Typad and BlogSpot live on some server off some where you'll never know, you don't own your domain and migration is hard not to mention that you can't customize all that much. Wordpress, MovableType and Drupal can be download, customized, and installed on your own domain and server, they are also expandable by adding plugins and other features. Though Wordpress, MT and drupal are free and open source but customizing costs money, you may need to hire a developer and design familiar with the program to be able to do everything you want the site to be. The costs are not that high but be prepared and do extra research.

You shouldn't start your online project with advertising and ad focused content and services. If you have a new blog or a web app and already you're site is bombarded with ads, it is a big turn off to the new users. Since you're site is very new and your traffic is very low your ad dollars don't kick in anyways, so save some face and remove those ads so the content and the substance of your site can breath and build you some reputation. Ads make sites really ugly, specially the google ones, not having ads at the beginning tells your users that you value and appreciate their willingness to visit your site and you're not just working on the site to make a quick buck but to help them in one way or the other. As your sites starts to grow and traffic is coming to your site in bunches (more than 1000 hits per day) then start adding ads, but still very slowly.

Above is a brief overview of what you need to do to be prepared to launch your website. It's basically what this site is all about. I've done many project and have built many websites and the above issues keep repeating themselves over and over when working with new clients. In early meetings i spend many hours explaining why it costs them so much to build or consult them on their web project and when i explain the factors involved then they slowly start to come around. i hope this helps you guys with your own projects.

Improving design, Ugly ReadBurner is transformed into clean elegant with simple changes

bam — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:44:48 -0400

Today it was announced that once a dying a website has re launched with a new set of offerings. Excited at first i rushed to see the new site. As soon as the page loaded i told my self, is this for 6 year kids? such ugly colors, it hurts my eyes, i can't focus on any part of the page. I was about to close the site forever that an idea crossed my thought: so many other sites are making the mistakes of this site, it's my duty to inform them!

The site is ReadBurner, about a month or so ago a few blogs wrote that the site was closing and handing the torch to RSSMEME. The idea is nothing new, nor is it interesting to people like me but none the less it's an upcoming trend and something that it will probably last for another year, lets hope so.

The current look is childish to put it nicely, the primary colors are orange and blue which should remind a lot of people the kids TV channel Nickelodeon. apparently the designer is PixelTalent, to be honest he is anything but a talent, i recommend him to go to school since he has potential! anyways back to RB, the logo is ugliest thing ever, it was ugly when 3-4 years most websites were using the style and it is ugly still. The logo needs to be changed ASAP, but it's not the topic of this discussion.

The colors Blue and Orange, though complimentary colors do work together very well on this site. The rule thumb is, for a simple site 3 colors which are made up of 2 muted soft tones + 1 high tone color (for example, grey + light muted green + RED) however, ReadBurner is using high-tone blue + hight-tone orange + grey, the sharpness of the colors put side by side compete for attention, your eyes can't figure out where to look.

so enough bashing! the site has a lot of good things going for it as well. The typography is nice and clean, no supersized fonts, clear distinction between headers, links and content. the spacing between articles is wide enough which allows for better readability. However, the count box on the right side of article is distracting with the fade effect. The fade is downwards which encourages the reader to look upwards (opposite effect). The color of the fade blends right into the background blue, it needs to stand out a bit without overtaking the hierarchy.

so i decided to change the design, since all my issues were about the color choices, the change was rather simple, i downloaded the main and changed the CSS to address some of the issues i had with colors. As you can see below by changing a few colors around the site looks more elegant, easier to read and navigate through.

Next time you design a site and you want to make it as colorful as possible please think about the eyes of us, readers, harsh colors do hurt our eyes and make us leave the site much sooner than you'd like!

Step By Step Process before Starting your own Online Project (Blog or Web 2.0+ app)

bam — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:23:00 -0400

I've been talking a lot about "everything is a process" and how you should incorporate this mentality into your every project, if you want to become successful! This article is to prepare you for the challenges a project might have, sort of like "what you should know before jumping into building you business"

Goals are a great thing have, they give you a target to achieve and motivation to achieve them but most often we disregard the challenges that we might have to face in favor of the sweetness of the outcome. The truth of the matter is if your goal is to make a $1,000,000 (1 million dollars) you won't wake up one day and have that in your bank account, the fact is you have to first make a $100, then $1,000 and over come more challenges, innovate more solutions to get to $10,000 then $100,000 and if everything works out then you achieve your first goal. It takes time and a lot of work, consistency and efficency are the absolute requirements.

But before you set a Million Dollar goal for your self, there are a few things you should know:

1- How well do you know your self?

if you want to get into business you should NOT wake up later than 7am. I'm practicing to move my current wake up time from 6:30am to 5am. The Earlier you wake, the longer day time you would have to work. Contribute the early hours to answering emails, reading the news, making comments, discovering new sites and working on your blog if you have one.
We all need to have routines, we need to be disciplined that way. Try to make plans for your entire day, hour by hour and stick to it. If everyday you tend to do different things that do not relate to each other then you are very confused. Organize you time and manage it within your abilities. After a while your routine will become natural to you and as a result your productivity will increase.
Measure how long it takes to do the basic humans needs, like how long it takes you to eat lunch, commute to work, shower, shopping, and etc. When you are aware of the minutes you spend doing everything you have to do everyday then you you can find better more efficient ways to increase your working times. Don't over kill your self, what i mean is taking a shower should take about 10 to 15 minutes at max but if you're spending an hour in shower then here is an opportunity to save 45 minutes and put it towards working on your blog, making phone calls, making new connections and finding more ways of making your business better.

2- Do you REALLY know what you're doing?

if you're going to start a blog, are you familiar with the blogging world. Regardless what the topic of your blog is about there are several key blogs working in that category already, familiarize your self with them and everything they do, the last thing you want to do is to have a blog that has the exact same topic and discussion, what you want to do is to find out where these key blogs are lacking and start your blog knowing that you're filling a gap and contributing to the well being of the category. Having a complimentary blog grows much faster than a copy blog, over time when you have a lot of traffic then you can move into other blogs' category.
if you starting your own web app (web 2.0 or semantic) project, then how well do you know the industry, you need to know how it works and how you're going to make it big. Promoting a web app has its own set of challenges and before you jumping into programming you need to consider all the roadblocks. Getting traffic is a big issue and before you assume that you're going to get a lot of traffic consider why people would want to use it and why it should become a part of their routine. The worst thing you can do when building a web app is to assume everything will workout on its own, trust me it doesn't. Always prepare with the worst case scenario in mind!
Know everything about your competition (small or large). for example, If you're going to make something that compliments DIGG but you don't know about MIXX then that's a huge problem because if you don't know what everybody in the category is doing and how they are doing it then you probably won't be able to come up with a solution that solves big problems. You also don't want to be compared to other websites, avoid "YET ANOTHER WEB APP" attribute at all cost!

3- How well do you know BUSINESS?

Business is a game, a dog eat dog world. Just because you can make a great site doesn't mean you can make a big business out of it. In business you have to know how to manage people, employees, PR people, your network and etc. If you can't manage people then you cannot attract talented people to do the tricky parts of your business, they just won't stick around. If you don't know how to make deals or negotiate to get maximum benefits then you're business won't have a chance to grow. Managing innovation, money, growth, revenues streams are a few of the other things you need to be very familiar with.

I'm not trying to scare you, but i'm trying to prepare you. remember if it way easy everybody would have done it, it's difficult and that's what makes it interesting and appealing. Now i only mentioned a few things you should know before jumping into muddy waters, there are many other things you need to consider such as choosing the right business partners, knowing your audience, optimum design, naming and branding, strategy, and last but not least knowing when you want to launch, how you're going to do it, and what you need to do to promote it. The list goes on and on, the more you know the better you will do.

Does Having a Fancy Logo Matter?

bam — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:26:10 -0400

There are a number of growing websites that either showcase fancy designed logos (logopond) or for fee they sell (pixellogo) pre-designed logo marks that you can chose. Either way fancy logos are a new phenomena in today's business and marketing world that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. There is a myth that logos can make you successful, or if you have nice logo you will recognized more than a competitor with a bad logo. To me, a registered designer and legitimate brander, logos don't mean anything, they are not worth anything and don't exactly contribute to all your success. Logos are identifers and nothing more. They are like a sport team's jersey, when you are standing in the crowd and watching the game the different color jerseys allow you to know which team is which but teams don't win simply because they have a pretty logo!

Most of the new clients i meet daydream about their project starting with a logo. Among the first things they talk about is how they want a really nice logo to with their project, meanwhile i'm still trying to ask questions about what the project is about anyways. Since my approach to any project begins with a lot of research and broad market study i tend not to pay attention to design details until every part of the project is clearly identified, even after that i don't jump into design until i know what i want the design to mean. Caring for fancy logo is like to walk into a sport clothing store, pick out a team jersey you like best without knowing what sport they play, where they are located and who plays for them, it just doesn't make sense.

There is a clear different between a fancy logo (pretty logos) and functional logos. Logos should be designed with a printing methods in mind, they also have to be web ready and be able to fit within the layout of a site, but most importantly, they should reflect who you are as a company and what you stand for with your branding and strategy. Pretty logos are dime a dozen and they changed often for their lack of functionality and the problems they cause when it comes to promoting, printing and mentally establishing them. Functional logos are cost money, they normally as a part of corporate identity package (business card, letterhead, invoice, envelope) and they also come with a guide book of how the logo should be used for different purposes.

Pretty logos can be bought online for $50 or less, even if you hire a designer they won't charge more $250. In my years i've worked on probably 50-60 corporate identity packages and the prices ranged from $5,000 to $125,000 and they are still around to this day, some have even made it big.

So before you jump into finding the flashiest, prettiest, and smartest logo idea, please answer the following questions with as much details as you can:

What is it my company does best? (industry, market, type of service, benefits)
How do i want people to see my company? (flashy, expensive, honest, legitimate, new, old, reputable)
How serious am i with this new business?
if website, What's the layout of my current site?
if website, How much information is on each page? (if too much info >> go with simple logo)
if website, How SMALL the size of the logo might become? (test to see if logo is readable at a really small size)
How many colors? (more than 3 colors and printing will be really expensive, the magic number is between 2 or 3)
when the logo is designed, Does it answer all of the above questions?

What kind of Perfectionist are you?

bam — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:25:49 -0400

Back in my university days most student’s had a catch phrase “I’m a perfectionist” and they thought they’re god designers because of it. You probably know a ton of people who like to think they are perfectionist as well, you yourself might consider yourself a perfectionist . I admit I am one as well, but my ‘perfectionism’ is very different from the rest of the perfectionist in this world, i'm the second type!

Most perfectionists think they only get one chance to make an impact, and to make sure they develop something that makes the most impact, they end up sacrificing and losing everything.

What am I talking about?

Type #1 – Perfectionists by Result

Have you ever met a designer or programmer or even a businessman/woman who always seeks perfection. They don’t release their work until they think it is absolutely perfect. You might consider these people the talkers that never do the walking! To these types of perfectionists nothing is ever good enough, they always want the best. You’ve also probably noted that they are never successful either, or you might think this dude is up to something really big and hopefully, eventually, he/she will hit it big! You also have probably noted that you cannot criticize their work or process either, they are not open to ideas, they never listen. They are so engaged into their pre-determined minds that nobody is qualified to help them out so they just don’t accept it. Also to them is innovation is something that will only be applied once at the beginning of the project.

Whether it’s a designer seeking the best logo idea, or the programmer seeking the ultimate google/facebook/flickr killer app or even the businessman/woman only going after the big deals, these people are known as “perfectionist by Result”. To them the process of getting results is always in middle of accomplishing their goals right away. They set themselves up for disaster, and are easily discouraged.

A great friend of mine, who happens to be very smart, is mostly perfectionist by result as well and he knows it. Together we tried working on several projects that never went anywhere simply because he wasn’t sure we could bring a million people to it without doing much. He was seeking that ultimate web app that would get the ripple effect, network effect, tsunami effect and global warming effect all by itself. Exactly 9 months ago we parted ways, I went touring the world and doing my own work while he went seeking his perfect project, we spoke a few days ago and he was still looking around, still nothing perfect enough had come his way!

The second type of perfectionists are not exactly the opposite of the ‘perfectionist by result’ but if you insist on putting an angel on it then they are different with a 90 degrees angel between them, the second type of perfectionists are…

Type #2 – Perfectionists who are in ‘Pursuit of Perfect’

To these people the process is just as important as the result; sometimes the process has an even larger priority. To these people results never come around, as soon as they achieve their first goal they move up the stakes and seek even better results. The way it works is that they develop something and release it even if it is not good enough, and then try to get as much feedback and criticism as possible, sometimes they release their half baked ideas with the notion that it is going to fail anyways so why not just try. After getting back all feedbacks and criticism they move on to making the project a bit better, and then they release it again to get the even more reaction. To them achieving ultimate perfection is impossible and they know it but their actual goal is to get as close to perfection as they possibly can. In a way, they are in Pursuit of Perfection and as a result perfectionists in their own way.
They constantly innovate, and as soon as they are done with one innovation they immediately seek other ways of improving and innovating the project. They are in a constant state of evolvement!

If you can remember how Flickr was 5-6 years ago or facebook 3-4 years or even Digg back in the day you see and feel how pursuit of perfection works in real life. In my many years of experience I have never seen a project be released perfect and take the entire industry by storm however I have many simple and faulty ideas get released and constantly get innovated and improved while the media can’t seem to get enough of them.

Case Studies

The case of a designer

Perfectionist by Result – A designer that only makes 1 to 3 logos that he/she thinks are brilliant designs and takes them to the client but the client says “this is not what we had in mind”, this designer will get angry, frustrated and would think to him/her self that if the client knew how to design he would have done it himself, there is a reason why I was hired and he should listen to me because of it. These types of designers get fired a lot or don’t get as many repeat business.

Pursuit of Perfection – This designer makes 10 to 20 logos and takes it around, asking from friends, family to other professional or even the client or client’s employees. What he’s looking for is not that “ONE” logo that the client would love but all the criticism and feedback he can get to improve his design. Eventually towards the end of the process he selects 3 of his logos that include what he likes, what the client would love and the industry would appreciate and takes them to the client for the final decision. the client is happy because a lot of thought and respect has gone into the design, it had been tested and polished and it’s ultimately safe and good for his business. His business is thriving because of this, the more people understand the attention that has gone into the work the more they will appreciate it and would refer you to other people. This is how Buzz start to go around.

Conclusion

We might think that people don’t notice change or improvements but the fact of the matter is they are paying close attention because people are constantly on the lookout for bigger, better things. For example if you move around the menu items in Flickr or Facebook everybody will notice, you will not be liked if you move them around for no reason, but at least it makes them wonder if something has changed in the site or not.

If you’re working on a project and always think that it’s not good enough and that the light at the end of tunnel is not visible to you, just release what you’ve got, let people help you to figure things out. What do you have to lose, really! By spending all your time and effort making something that would never be perfect all you’re doing is losing time and personal motivation. Feedback and Criticism are the 2 things you can get as quickly and as freely as you want, everything else takes too long and cost too much.

a call for big change in the blogging practice

bam — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:48:59 -0400

today was a sad day for blogging. i normally begin my day with reading all sorts of blogs and articles. It gives me a lot of energy and motivation. But today i didn't find any good blog posts to read, it was all garbage. i know the top blogs have to pump out articles to keep their audience keep visiting their site so that they can make money but this ridiculous. None of the top blogs write with passion anymore, no real information, no good will. Personally if i wanted to read heartless articles i'd go back to reading newspapers and magazines since they are better editorially written and researched.

I am PASSION blogger by choice, i don't do it for money. i believe in giving back to the community that has given me so much.

I'm seeking motivation else where, if the blogging community can't motivate me i have to find other sources to keep going. i plan to be an eternal passion blogger!

Process vs. Process - Whose way is the right way?

bam — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:31:37 -0400

i've been engaged in quite a few conversations in the last couple of weeks regarding strategy and process involved in constructing web projects. We all have different methods of practice, we do things differently based on the orientation that is most comfortable to us. Notice in none of articles so far i have tried to push for a single way of doing things but i've been trying to lay everything out on the table and let you chose your own methods.

There are a lot of blogs, magazines, and books that talk a great deal about how to build a great looking site, or a successful site, blog whatever. Everybody has his/her own way of doing things and just because they saw great results doing it their way doesn't mean it work the same for you as well.

before i launched this site, during the time i was still thinking about the design and what kind of CMS i should go with, i researched, bookmarked and printed out most of these articles (i plan to release my entire sources this weekend), and I found out that each person walked a different path that seems different but has a lot of things in common with another person but at the same each path was engineered, by accident or not, to fit each individual's unique situation.

Each article in one way or the other emphasized the process that got them to where they are now, which is a great deal of success. So while i was reading all these articles i started picking out the ideas that i liked best, i did not choose based on performance but based on my own personal abilities, I even became as brave as tweaking some of the ideas. Before i knew it i had so many plans and ideas for making a great site that i needed 10 of me to do it.

Doing everything you want to do takes time and effort and sometimes it takes so much effort that you can't psychically do it by yourself. Since i had no help i decided to divide my process into phases, i ended up with 5 phases in total. Right now i'm at phase 1, and i'm only %20 through the process.

The point is, there are lots of great articles out there, keep reading them and take notes but don't pick one and bank all your money on it. As our Wall St. friends always say "Never put all your eggs in one basket"

here are some great sites to get you started with, i promise to have a great list of articles soon.

ProBlogger - self explanatory

DoshDosh - blog and SN marketing

HipMojo - great set of blog/project articles

Will Price - about blogging and creating traffic

Smashing Magazine - blog and blog design articles

I love Typography - content in essence is typography

A List Apart - I think everybody knows this one already

Andy Rutledge - probably better than "A List Apart" wink!

Seth Godin

Brand Autopsy

Branding & Marketing

Buzz Marketing for Technology

Conversation Agent

Web Ink Now

Entrepreneur's Journey - The name says it all

BNet - Business Management Articles

Get Rich Slowly - Knowing your finances is just as important as knowing your CSS/HTML

Simple Dollar - Another finance/saving blog

Above though a lot of links are still a small fracture of my own resources for wishing to get somewhere on this internet. I know i can because i've made plans and have calculated every step of the way but this how i do things in general, also in part it's my job.

I hope this little blog article give you the hope and motivation to start researching your own next big break! remember we can only make it happen for ourselves, nobody is going to hand a successful business you have to fight for it.

how to give your content some soul

bam — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:55:58 -0400

Earlier i wrote about some of the most important elements every website should have. LINK

While visiting Seth Godin's blog i see that he has written another great article about writing like a bloger, after reading it i realized he is saying exactly what i meant by saying your content needs to have some character. I strongly suggest reading this article. Link

3 Strategic Elements every Website should have

bam — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:16:24 -0400

10 years ago i started building website, what started as a hobby and fascination turned into a healthy source of income. I put myself through design school by designing websites and the education i received allowed me to look at websites from a psychological and strategic point of view.

It is not an easy task to sell strategy with a website design pitch. Price wise is much higher and graphically it might not make much difference but of course the results are like night and day. I have a very solid track record that i'm very proud of, i have never worked on a web project that included strategy and failed!

so when i talk about web strategy in construction phase, what do i mean?

3 Strategic Elements every site should have

Characteristics
Objectives with Benefits
Focus

If you research any of the successful website you will all of the above elements in them. Similarly if you'd like to know if a project is going to fail or not all you have to do is to figure out if the above elements are available or not.

Characteristics

Content and softwares are soulless. They are just a piece of information laid out on an even more soulless canvas. Content by itself is not attractive, but we can give it a zing by giving it a little bit of attention. Content represents the voice of the author, therefore to give content soul we must setup our writing guidelines to have more personal voice embedded into our content.

Some of the blogs that you read constantly and love use the personal voice to give their content soul. When you read these blogs you can imagine the writer writing them, that's very powerful.

The design of the website should also reflect you, the owner of the site. The worst thing a designer can do to his/her client is to make any project a personal and self reflective project. If you are designing a blog for another blogger try to understand who he/she is and try to deign it to reflect them simply because they are going to be the writers of that blog and if the soul of the content doesn't match the design of the site then people wouldn't be able to trust the writer right away. This is probably the biggest reason why i suggest to every client to stay away form already design templates. Worst case scenario, if they like to go with a template try to convince them to at least customize the color to reflect their personality.

Objective with Benefits

People don't buy Concepts, they buy Benefits!

If your site doesn't offer benefits to people then there isn't much reason for them to visit your site. at the same time if your site only offers one benefit that they can take at anytime then people don't have another reason to visit your site again!

Benefits are the very reason people build loyalty to any site. They are also give your site value. So you want to strategize your site to offer benefits as constantly and as frequently as possible. The more benefits you give out the more loyal people will become and the faster you will grow.

for blogs, benefits are as simple as writing "How to" Tutorial articles, for example, how to build a logo with photoshop, or How to save money, or How to fix a car. How To's are just one example, Tip, Tricks, Secrets, Special Offers, and educational articles also serve a lot of benefits people appreciate as well.

Focus

Focus is hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain. Focus is knowing what your site is about and maintaining the same Niche Market focus everyday and every year!

It is hard, i admit, how much can you write about the same topic over and over again and not just worry about running out of ideas but also worry about boring the hell out of the audience. To avoid boring people keep revisiting the soul of your content, also revisit my Branding Article. When Choosing a Niche Topic you're actually choosing a Niche Target Market. Target market has to be big enough to make business sense but not too big and broad that it wouldn't stick. Also it is a great idea to have multiple Niche blogs to avoid boredom for yourself as well.

so before you start yet another blog, rethink why you want to start it, if it is going to be a hobby are you willing to keep it a hobby but if not

24/7 Stress of Blogging

bam — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:23:54 -0400

so i read yesterday's Ny Times article about how bloggers are driving themselves to death by over stressing themselves with writing and competing around the clock. It did not have any effect on me but rather it gave me a big small.

Scobleizer also mentioned today that it had no effect on him either, maybe for different reasons than mine. Bloggers enjoy blogging, well the big players do while the rest suffer! Sometimes the ignorance of big time blogger is really amusing.

I smiled because here is a newspaper company, OLD MEDIA, talking bad about new media. While it is an obvious fact that old media is being murdered by blogs what's funny is that a big time publisher, NY Times, is making an attempt at discrediting bloggers by targeting their health and work ethics so that less people pick up a new blog and write about something that might compete with NYTimes.

What a bunch of propaganda crap!

It is my personal opinion that while there are many blogs coming out with the intention of global success, however in the near future we will see a huge rise locally operated and targeted blogs for every city on this planet. This movement basically eliminated the need to read news papers!

My blog is a fairly new and i must say with all the trick i have under my belt i'm still struggling and killing my self to promote this blog, while my initial results are optimistic but i've still got a really ladder to climb.

I find the biggest problem bloggers have is that no matter how much traffic we get, or how much money we earn we are still apart of the hobby industry. Blogging is not exactly an established job title, and Blogs are not a respectable industry like newspapers, TV, Radio and etc.

5 Reasons why most websites FAIL!

bam — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:50:40 -0400

While success comes at a steep price for only a few websites, failure however needs no effort at all. It is easy to fail.and you never feel bad for failing if you’ve never put any efforts to begin with but what if you did and put in extra efforts and still failed. Failing is discouraging, frustrating and most often causes depression but in every failed attempt we have an opportunity to move a step closer to success.

If there is a Will, There is a Way!

Since this is not a philosophy or psychology blog i won’t get into how we fail as human beings and rather focus why we fail as website owners. It’s much more attractive and relevant.

There is a saying that 2 wrongs don’t make it right but when it comes to failure and success, 2 failed attempts could lead to success. Therefore i’m not saying avoid failing at all costs but rather look at your failures from a more positive point of view. Figure out how you failed and try fix it; figure out what failed you so can avoid it next time, keep the attempts going until nothing else fails you and boooom No Failures = Success

so what are the common thing that cause a website to fail?

5 Major Reasons for Failure

Lack of Strategy
Dependent on Buzz/PR
Forgetting People/Users
Wrong Ego
Fear of Risks

Lack of Strategy

You don’t know why your website should exist. More importantly you’re not exaclty sure who should be using your site and last but not least, your site doesn’t address the needs or serve benefits.

Having a strategy is like having an open eye vision, you know where you are and where you want to go and what strategy does is to layout the path that would get you to your goals. You can’t wake up one day and see a million people on your site but instead you have to wake up everyday and fight for people to visit your site one person at a time. It’s a Process!

Dependent of Buzz/PR

You’re too desperate to be mentioned by TechCrunch, Mashable, Wierd, Times, etc... if this is the only that you think you can become successful you might as just NOT do anything, relax and forget about the web business. But if it’s your goal to be mentioned by the above sites or companies in a year then that’s a legitimate proposition, simple go back a step and work on strategy and i can gaurantee you that you will achieve your goals but let me warn you everyday tons of websites, projects, softwares, ideas get mentioned on these sites how many of them do you became successful afterwards? not that many!

Forgetting People

You’re site need traffic, that’s the primary measure of sucess and source of income. The sucess of your site depends on the people that visit your site so WHY DO YOU IGNOR THEM?

In my experience take care of people and everything else will take care of itself. make sure you have a easy to use site layout, easy to read, easy to get around and discover new thing but most importantly easy to understand the true benefits of the site. When you serve people benefits they all of a sudden value what you’re doing and that is GOLD!

Wrong Ego

Want to be like Scoble to become successful like Scoble? Wrong Ego kills in any business. It’s ok express your opinions and wanting to stand for something but if your ego is blinding you from seeing the truth it will aggrevgate your audiece and you will lose them. Not to mention that it’s extremely hard to gain trust and respect if you have the Wrong Ego!

Fear of Risks

No Risk, No Reward! should i say more?

Be prepared for risks in this business. Being prepared allows you turn dumb risks into calculated ones. You have to be on top your game and make decision on the fly. On the internet time is something you don’t have and just like the real world time is something you will never get again.

So go do it, and do it with a bang and don’t forget to keep the above 5 things in mind.

$1,000 Reward - Name 1 THING in this world that is not designed

bam — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:09:42 -0400

Lets Make this blog post the official place for you to submit ideas. A lot of people are making suggestions at different places, this would make it a lot more organized.

Name 1 THING in this world that is not designed. What i'm looking for is an object or something tangible. While Love, feelings and etc don't fall into objects category however if you think about it a little you'll realize the process that produces these feelings are still designed.

Win $1,000 USD

Guess away!

I Hope you'd be able find the answer, and if you do i'll be happy to give the money to you, the first person who suggest the right answe in the comment section of this post wins. I'll pay the amount in either paypal or email transfer, your choice.

While thinking of winning the prize is great i hope you realize the silver linning.

You're keep thinking of things that are not designed, i hope you realize how important design is now. everything you can think of is designed, isn't that interesting?

How much credit were you giving design before and now what do you think?

3 phases of web business success

bam — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:30:20 -0400

While all projects are different from one another but there something they all have in common. To have a successful website or any other type of business you have to go through the process. If you think success goal is a million dollars you have to realize that before you can make a million you have to make your first $100, then your first $1000, then $10,000 and so on until you get to your goal. Even if you achieve your goal doesn’t mean that all if safe and you don’t have to worry anything else. With every dollar you make you add a dollar to the things you have to worry about.

Things to consider, if you’re starting a blog or have blog, there are more 125,000 blogs that come out everyday, more than 2,000 web services launch every week and many more other sites like ecommerce, corporate and portfolio sites. The biggest problem is that the internet users in general grow by only %3 to %5 a year, so all the new sites as well as the older sites compete for relatively the same piece of the pie.

Before the start of 3 Phases

Before you jump into the mayhem of getting through the 3 phases and becoming successful you need do a few things so that you can enter Phase #1.

What you need to do:

***If you’ve done all of above and now are ready to jump in then who am I to stop you so let’s get to it.

3 PHASES OF SUCCESS

Survival

Basically the survival of the fittest, the more prepared. You don’t necessarily have to have feature full or absolute perfect product to enter, as long as it’s functional and delivers what you have promised. Also you don’t to have a lot money, having money is a bonus but not the differentiator.

125,000 blog/day, what you want to do is separate yourself from majority of these other blogs. %99.99 will fail before they even enter survival phase, if you are on the same ship as them, well guess what, you will fail with them.

This phase requires you put in as much energy and resources as you possibly can. 18 hour work days are just beginning, you have to market your brains out, and sometimes you have to invent new ways of marketing and promoting your site. At the start of this phase nobody gives a crap about you, your product or services no matter how brilliant and unique it is. This is when survival of the fittest gets a whole new meaning.

Survival is also about knowing that while you’re working your butt off there are tens of other projects that are trying the same thing. If you have a new blog and dying to get a mention by other more popular blog owners then consider this, most of the popular blog owners wait out the opportunity simply because they don’t want to write about a blog that could die in a few weeks not to mention that they are constantly being bombarded with your own competitors and they can only mention a very few at a time so they rather bet on the safer projects.
Survival is not something you accomplish like passing a test. It is something you have to do day in and day out. For as long as you have competitors fighting for a piece of your traffic you’re stuck in survival mode.

Some of the site currently in Survival Mode: TechCrunch, Mashable, Twitter, Yelp, Glam, Federated Media, BlogAds, OpenID,

Some of the site downgraded to survival: Microsoft, Yahoo, YellowPages, Skype, Technorati,

Establishment

Still survival, but it’s on a different level. It’s when you have overcome all challenges and now you’re on your way to becoming mainstream. Your challenge is not about getting traffic but about keeping traffic. Innovation has become your biggest hassle, your competition is fierce and ruthless, and your server and maintenance costs are going through the roof.

It’s a great place to be! But if you’re not careful and aggressive somebody else will take your place and send you back into the first phase.

Establishment phase is like a VIP room, you may have a chance to get in but seats are limited only the best get in, but if they don’t keep at it they will be asked to leave.

Some of the site in Establishment: Google, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, FireFox, ING Direct, DIGG,

Leap

The dreamland, or could be hell. In this phase your biggest problem is the users that use your site or product. They are very demanding, they want constant innovation and if something goes wrong everybody will talk about it. I’m not going to get into this too much.
There are only a few website in this phase that I can think of. Like Ebay, Amazon, and …

NOTE: This website is mostly about the Survival Phase. In my Opinion if you are in the Establishment or Leap phase then helping you is beyond me what you need is big consulting companies like BCG, McKinsey and Bain

How i can Help you promote your site and why

bam — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:06:49 -0400

While this website is only a week old but i have achieved more traffic momentum that majority of blog do in a few months. However it's not my intention to brag about early success but rather focus on the experiences i've gained through the last 10 years of building websites, marketing businesses and products and strategizing brands and projects.

While i've been in the online business for 10 years, but only in the last few years i've been heavily involved with all sorts of different projects and business ideas. I've seen brilliant ideas fail due to bad management and lack of strategy while mediocre ideas thrived. I've seen profitable business shut down because the managers became dictators and corporate moral shattered due to internal politics, and key employees left because they weren't being appreciated. This site allows me to pass all these valuable experiences down to you.

As you can notice i also do not run advertisements on this site, i don't know what the future holds but right now my intentions are by passing on some of the experiences to you, the project owners, would get a feel for where i come from and the things i can do to help your business. My source of income is from the projects i do and hopefully this site would allow me to get consistent consulting jobs.

Introduction to Branding

bam — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:59:48 -0400

Ultimate definition of branding is that "a brand is a promise" the process of branding is building promises!

Brands are not logos, they are not ads in magazines or billboards and they are not names. Brands aren't supposed to communicate a message but rather they try to keep a consistent voice. Brands are also not suppose to persuade, that's the job of advertising, but rather try to sympathize, connect, and help.

Brand is a promise!

Foundations of Branding

Most branding projects when they begin, they already have a name, they also have productions associated with it and some are already established companies. However, in general the first that needs to be done in branding is to try to position a brand.

Brand positioning had only 4 parts, 4 questions that need to be answered precisely!

Who is the brand for?
What is the brand one of?
Why is the brand better than other ones?
*Why should people believe in the brand promise?

Who is the brand for?

Basically it’s the target market. The misconception among many business startups or bad marketers is that the larger the target market the better the brand will do, WRONG!!, in reality the broader the target market the easier the brand promise will miss its mark. What you want to have is a target market big enough so that the business would make sense.

almost every web project i get these days, the owners want to capture the entire internet, they all assume if people give it a chance they would be able to live without it, in other word everybody is going to love their product so why should they limit their product's success by narrowing the target market. The answer is simple, no 2 people are alike, if you love something i might hate it, and since we are all so different we want different things and we value different things. So the logical process is to research the market and figure out what a group of people have most in common, the more things they have in common the better we can angel the promise to cater to their needs and wants.

Getting the target market right is critical to the entire process, if you don't have a clear target market, or have doubts that the target mark would like what you have you might as well not proceed to the next questions. NO TARGET MARKET, NO BRAND SUCSESS!

What is the brand one of?

Competition, you need to know who you're competing with before you can try to penetrate the market. Also knowing who you're competition is will allow you to position yourselves above them both from value offering and product quality. The biggest trick in branding is to attack the industry from an outsider point of view. An industry outsider gets to view the whole field and is not easily intimidated to the mambo jumbo that the insiders have to put up with everyday.

Just knowing the competition is not enough, you have to research the A-Z of competition from the products they have, the way they sell and distribute, advertising method, other brands positioning, value offerings, future innovations and etc. Do a great job in identifying your competition and all of a sudden coming out with a great brand positioning is relatively easy!

Why is the brand better than other ones?

Your brand has to have something that would make it sellable. If you have a product that 3 other companies have then it comes down to some simple things like inventing a whole new target market, but if you have a product that no one has or it's a better version of all other similar products then there are 3 things your brand and product should be

Technical
Functional
Emotional

Why should people believe in the brand promise?

Every brand just like every human being needs to have a soul. The soul of a brand is its personality, characteristics, intelligence and charm. Creating a personality for a brand is a science all by itself, my prime example is Apple, and other ones might be Google or Ferrari. These are some of the brands we see as having a personality, you don't see a huge corporation behind but as something else, you somehow want to trust these companies. On the other hand take Microsoft or GM or most of the Bank Brands, they have no soul, we always see them as big corporations that control things, it is really easy to hate these companies.

Some great sites that have a lot of branding articles and have great resources about branding:

Interbrand | SagePub | Branding Strategy Insider | Other Great Articles

Process, The Deeper Look

bam — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:11:53 -0400

Process is so important that i'm going to dedicate this post to some of the examples of great processes GONE WRONG!

My victim is the beloved TWITTER, yes you read it right, TWITTER is a prime example of a great process gone wrong. As i mentioned earlier, to have great success we must take things step by step. Every little thing is made up of small details that working together make up the substance of that object. Now i'm not bashing Twitter here, in fact the opposite, twitter has a lot that we can learn from it. in the last post i mention that in order to fix something it's always easier to split the project into different key proccesses and analyse each process to figure out the root of the problem. here is what happened to me when i signed up for twitter, and what can be done to fix it!

I started my account on twitter on March 20th and it was a horrible experience at first. in fact i almost gave up. Now at that time i was starting a blog that would be dealing with user experience, branding and strategy. so it was kind of shameful that i couldn't figure out some simple stuff in probably the web's simplest site, according to many other geek sites. i was feeling dumbed down because i couldn't figure out how i can find interesting people on this site, i put in my email to add my friends, guess what!! none of my friends had an account on twitter, i had no connection and didn't know i could start one!!

Before i was about to tell my self "F*&# twitter, lets move on to something else" i decided to click on every button to see what they do, i clicked on 'Home' i saw another version of my own home page, which was very odd, clicked on 'find & follow' didn't know any names, so much for that promise, frustrated and about to give up, at last try i thought why don't i go to my Google RSS reader, go to some of the blogs that talk about twitter and use their names to add. Scoble from Scobalizer was the first dude i checked out, and walla after 2 hours i had my first friend. but as i added my friend #1 i discovered 'public timeline' which made life a lot easier, i had no idea what public timeline meant so i never clicked on it, i simply thought it had something to do with my account info since setting and help were right beside in the same font and color just like all the other menus!!

Where i think twitter failed for at the beginning was the fact that i signed up but after that i was kind of clueless, i learned a great example from one of my teachers, he said "always assume the people you're designing/building for are dumbest people on earth"

My solution is even better than the problem i ran into. it doesn't change the layout of the site, doesn't event change the styling all that much. to program it would probably take 30 seconds. My solution is visually shown on the image above. the change is not drastic nor is it layout altering. the new top menu is better organized and at the same time categorized. related menu items are kept together while the other ones are separated into another block.

Here is where TWITTER fails in the beginning, some times less is more is so little that we, the users, feel dumb for not finding them. People love twitter because it doesn't allow you to do many things, which is ironic since every single software, innovation, industrial, chemical and political company in the world wants to add more, do more, be more!

i think as a society we have become to used to the idea that everything must be so complex and that technology is complex by nature that when once in while we come across a really simple piece of software, for the life of us we can't figure out how to use it! isn't that funny!!
I admit i use Twitter for practice rather that anything else. i use to so i can get my points across in 140 characters or less with the same efficiency if i was writing a 1000 word essay.