Design is just one of those things, isn’t it? First of all, it’s hugely relative … to a point. There are rules – alignment, sizing, consistency, contrast, etc – but even adhering to those leaves you with a near-infinite number of combinations of colors, fonts, shapes, photos, and sizes, all of which have fans and foes. What looks clean and elegant to one person can look boring and uninspired to another.

On top of that, design has to actually do something, it has a goal. Some of the best-looking web sites out there are hard to use, incompatible with various devices, and disturbingly hard to maintain. On the web in particular, looking good is just one component of a long list of requirements.

Oh, and let’s not forget to mention the pink elephant in the room here: budget. Maybe, just maybe, given an infinite budget and a due date of “at some point during your life,” perfection is possible (doubtful). But that’s just conjecture and, besides, it’s not the reality. There are limitations to how much money someone can spend, how long they can wait, and how long a designer can look at the same mock-up without ending up in an institution.

Despite these obstacles, there is a path of least resistance and it’s our job to find that path. So where do we start?

First, “I’ll know when I see it” is not a valid strategy here

I’ve read a few stories lately about how Steve Jobs worked with designers when he was alive. It sounded like complete and utter hell, all due respect. They would bring him something they spent long hours perfecting and he would dismiss it immediately. They would iterate and come back only to have it dismissed again. This would happen ad infinitum until he finally saw something that was just right and it would be shipped.

Say what you will about Apple products but this kind of design process only works when you have a few billion dollars in the bank. During your typical web project, there’s just not enough room to re-re-re-design with little guidance until something falls out of the process. You’re not Steve Jobs and we’re not making Apple money so we have to find another way.

The key is guided feedback

There are some people who come to us with exactly what they want outlined, explained, and ready to go. This type of situation is the exception, however, not the rule. Much more often, clients come to us with a vague (or missing) idea of what they want and need us to come up with something for them. This is definitely the place where a designer can shine but, without the right information to start with, we can easily end up going down the wrong road.

In the end, it’s our job, as designers, to get the information we need from you. With no background in design or web development, you probably don’t know what’s possible, you aren’t sure what will look good, and you’re not willing to write a vague novella trying desperately to get down on paper what you see in your head.

So, let us be your guide.

1) Abstract Feedback

Before we paint picture in our heads of what you want and set up specific restrictions on what you don’t, it’s important to know about what this concept is all about.

Who are you and what do you do?

Same question for individuals as for companies: what is this thing all about? This is an intentionally open-ended question and it helps me to hear someone describe it rather than just read an existing About page.

What makes you great, better than other people/companies doing the same thing?

The best sites are designed to communicate more than just good aesthetics. If you’re a fun, exciting company with a personality, your site should say that visually. If you’re an established group of professionals with a notorious attention to detail, your site should exude those qualities.

2) Additive Feedback

This is the feedback that will add up to create the backbone of what we design for you. This is describing where we can go with the sites and the kind of things that you would like to, or must, see in the mock-ups. We create this picture with the following questions:

Is there an existing color scheme, logo, or font that we need to work with?

It’s important to know what the boundaries are. If there’s an existing brand in place that is not going to change, that limits what can be done. Knowing this ahead of time is critical.

Show us a few sites, magazines, or posters with a look that you really like. Bonus points for examples in your industry or niche.

This is the classic designer question: show me a few things so I can come back and say “but you liked this one!” All joking aside, this question is meant to put you in a mindset of critically evaluating what you’re seeing to get out of “forest” mode and start picking out trees. Accompanying each of these examples needs to be some reasoning behind why it’s appealing (remember math class? show your work). Is it the color, the size of certain elements, the photography?

Which of the following words best describes the look you want – modern, classic, minimal, dark, light, loud, retro, corporate

This is a simple exercise that gets me thinking along the right lines for the site. Each of the words above should cue a picture in your mind of a piece of design you’ve seen before. We might not have the exact same definition for these words but a general sense here is more than enough.

Are there any design cues that you absolutely must have?

If you have to have red in your site, we need to know that. If there’s a font you’ve seen that really communicates something to you, show us so we can incorporate it somehow. There’s nothing worse than getting requirements after a design has been created.

3) Reductive Feedback

This type of feedback is the other side of limitations: what you don’t want. Using the picture we created above, we need to take pieces away and set limits to where we can go and where we can’t.

Are there any design cues that you absolutely don’t want?

If you hate the color yellow and serifed fonts make you queasy, let’s get that down on paper so we don’t scare you with the first iteration.

Show us a few examples of sites in your industry that you don’t like.

Similar concept as the question above. We want to pick out elements and styles that don’t represent what you do or who you are. This question can be tricky to get right because some people pick universally terrible sites to pick apart. The best kind of example here is one from an established brand or player in the industry because there is a good chance that these sites had specific design decisions made.

Are any of the following words off-limits – modern, classic, minimal, dark, light, loud, retro, corporate

Choosing words that don’t describe what you want can be just as helpful as ones that do.

Putting it all together

With the abstract, additive, and reductive feedback above, we’re able to start thinking about what this site is going to look like. There might be more questions but I see the above as a solid starting place. So, now it’s your turn:

Designers: What questions am I missing? What did I go astray?

Design clients: Is this overkill, in your mind? Are there any questions that you don’t understand?

Related posts:

1. “What is expected of a designer?” on LinkedIn
2. Working with Greatness: The Processes Behind the Production

Think of yourself at the bottom facing up...

Once the SEO bug bites, it’s tough to shake the feeling that you’re not doing something - or anything – right. There are stated, universal things one can do to improve ranking but the black-box nature of search engine algorithms makes for a tense situation, especially if you’re already ranking well for a few key terms. Combine this mysterious environment with the stories everyone has about the almighty Google fist striking a site completely off the ranking pages and you have a recipe for abject paranoia.

Trust me, I totally understand the fear. I’ve seen the penalties first-hand and have learned from my own mistakes. I’ve also seen what a misinformed and out-0f-date SEO practitioner can do to a site and it’s not pretty. It’s no wonder why some business owners are paralyzed.

But there is, in fact, a way out. It’s not through weird tricks, paid links, or slight of hand; it’s through careful analysis, modest code fixes, intelligent keyword research, coherent content planning, and regular monitoring. The plan I outline below is the road to good SEO. Following these steps correctly are guaranteed not to break anything or hurt your ranking and, in the vast majority of cases, will lead to more traffic from search engines.

I should mention… I help business’s navigate these three steps on a regular basis. If you’re interested in getting help, click “Improve Findability” here.

Step 1: Current Site Analysis and Improvement

The very first thing we need to do is understand where we’re at now. We can’t, of course, fix anything if we don’t know what’s wrong. But we also need to know what’s right. Not only that, we need to know where we’re starting in order to see the improvements we’ve made.

Most of this analysis relates directly to SEO but some of it relates back to general good practices for websites. While a few of these changes might not move you up or down on the search engine results page (SERP), they will improve your interaction with users and help you get the most out of the search engine traffic you’re getting. What I’m saying is that you won’t regret making improvements in any of the categories below.

1) Site code review

You can choose keywords and write blog posts all day but if the code of your site is constructed poorly, then you’re wasting your time. A proper code review consists of:

• HTML tag usage: The problem I see the most often is improper HTML tag usage. Maybe you’re missing a <meta> or <h1> tag, possibly a duplicate <title> or <h1>… it’s easily to get a few things wrong. If you use WordPress, then site-wide changes are fairly easy.
  
• Code validity: The HTML code on your site is a clue to how much time was spent building it. 100% validity can be tough to achieve, especially if you’re using certain modern techniques, but getting most of the way there is easy in all cases.
• Broken links: Another potential indicator of site quality is the number of broken links. Trust me: you probably have a few, it’s inevitable (I probably have a few too). You don’t need to be overly cautious about these but a regular clean-up is important. If you’re on Windows, Xenu is your savior; Mac users have Integrity (not bad and free) or Screaming Frog (very good but free version is limited)
• Page speed: Google has made it clear: the speed at which your page loads is important to users and important to them. The number and size of images, the number and size of page includes, and the total amount of code being loaded can all have a negative impact on your page speed which has many downstream effects. I find Pingdom Tools to be incredibly helpful here.
• Overall structure: Is your content in the right place? Is there 100K of HTML code for less than 4 paragraphs of text? Are you missing a DOCTYPE? Is there a bunch of ancillary components loading before your site content? There is a right and a wrong way to structure your page and it’s not hard to tell when something is wrong.

2) Analytics review

If you don’t have some kind of analytics package installed on your site (and I’ve definitely been approached to improve sites without it), then you have no idea what’s going on with your site. Step one, here, is to install something (Google Analytics is an excellent, free option) and wait a few weeks to gather data. Once we have that, it’s time to see the good, bad, and ugly.

• Keywords sending traffic: We want to see what search terms are actually sending traffic now. We’re looking for anything sending more than a handful that aren’t related to the name of your company or website. In Google Analytics (new), this is under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic.
• Pages receiving search traffic now: When we’re switching around keywords and HTML tags, we don’t want to damage anything that’s already ranking. We’re looking for pages that receive more than a handful of visits per month from search engines. Same path as the keywords above but now, at the top of that table, look for “Secondary dimension,” click that, click “Traffic Sources,” then “Landing Page.” This is now showing you the top pages that received visits from search engines and what keyword brought them there.
• Search traffic problems: We’re looking for long-term trends up or down, big drops, big spikes, and anything else out of the ordinary. What you’ll typically find is a generally flat distribution over time but if there are any big anomalies, those might be relevant. Go to Traffic Sources > Search > Overview and extend your time period out for a few months. You’re looking for drop-offs, pick ups, big dips, or big spikes.

3) Other miscellaneous checks

There are several more things we’ll want to do to make sure we understand everything that’s going on with the site:

• Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and install the necessary components. Here, you’ll want to submit a sitemap, make sure there aren’t any robots.txt problems, and look for any other red flags. Once you install this code, it might take a day or two before you get any indicators back.
• Search for “site:yourdomain.com” in Google and hope for the best. We want to know if the right number of pages are indexed (usually just a guess), there aren’t any old sections or pages live, you’re not completely missing, and other problems. Look for weird titles, bad description text, and missing pages.
• Use SEOmoz (affiliate) to crawl the site and see domain authority. This is only for those signed up with SEOmoz (an amazing SEO application) but we want to know what the authority of the site is and if there are any crawl problems. The information you can find in this tool will save you more time than you could imagine.
• Run a few more scans just to be sure. There’s nothing better than making the computers work for you. I use UITest.com for miscellaneous site information and the SEOBook Search Engine Spider test to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Hubspot’s Website Grader is also an excellent tool for finding issues on your own site.

4) Compile problems, set priority, and fix

Depending on what platform you use for your site and how tech-savvy you are, these changes will have differing levels of importance. The optimum, of course, is to fix everything but not everything is worth your time. Put all the changes together in a list and figure out the ones that will have the greatest impact on your site’s performance. IMHO:

1. Start by installing analytics and Google Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already
2. Have a look in Google to make sure your site is appearing correctly
3. Next, move to major code issues like missing DOCTYPEs, duplicate or missing page titles, and missing header elements
4. Look for and fix broken links
5. After that, the rest is just a matter of how big the problem if and how difficult it is to fix each one

Step 3: Research and Select Keywords

Now that your site is running the way it should, it’s time for the really in-depth SEO task: keyword choosing. I wrote a thorough post on choosing keyword phrases for your content which sums up everything you’ll need to know about the process. I have a few more general tips to add, though…

• Choosing keywords is one part “what’s on the page” and one part “what are people searching for.” The key is finding a balance between the two. If you choose words that people are searching for but they aren’t relevant to your content, then you’ll never rank. If you choose words that are on your page and no one is searching for them, you’ll rank but no one will see your page.
• You don’t just choose keywords one-time and you’re done. Once you’ve chosen your words you need to go back and see how each page is performing. If no one is coming for the words you’re using it could either be your ranking or the words you chose. For pages that aren’t ranking after a month or so, it’s time to do more on that page (additional content, links, etc) or change the words.
• A very common mistake is choosing a keyword for the whole site and then using it everywhere. Each page needs to have its own unique word or phrase. If you optimize for the same keyword on more than one page, you’re competing with yourself.
• This step is frustrating but don’t give up! Keep researching, switching words and phrases, and trying new things. Watch to see if you get on the first page and, if you do, make sure that keyword is in all the right places.
• Some phrases are harder than others. Some industries are harder than others. Always look to get more specific if you can, as long as those phrases are being searched.

Again, this is where to start for choosing keywords. Step 4 at the end will tell you where to place those words once you find them. You should look to do the whole process for each one of your existing content pages … static pages and blog posts alike. Make sure to keep track of what page got what keyword so you know what to look for in Google and in your analytics.

Step 3: Monitoring, Experimenting, Modifying and Link Building

This last step is the ongoing part of this whole process. Step 1 is a one-time analysis, assuming you were able to permanently correct all of the problems you found. Step 2 speaks partly to the initial research but will be repeated with what you find out here.

Explaining this completely would take way more than just a blog post so I broke it out into a few components below. All of these work together to help you monitor keyword performance, find issues, and make subtle changes to improve ranking. I have them listed in order of priority for folks that don’t have all day every day to watch their pages bounce up and down in ranking. Start at the top, find efficiencies to make it faster, and keep on top of it.

1) Watch your analytics (properly)

This, really, is the one thing you have to do. Improving site SEO is really about one main thing: driving more people to your web pages. If the people aren’t coming then there is something wrong. Look for a few things to happen:

• Your overall traffic from search engines should be increasing
• You should see the order of top content by search rearranging, hopefully with the pages you optimized at the top
• You should see a larger number of keywords appearing in your organic search traffic sources

Watch the pages that start to perform well after a few weeks and try to move the strong keywords into prime locations (beginning of titles and headers). Changes should occur within, at most, a month so optimize, wait, check, rinse, repeat.

I should note here… as your traffic from search engines increases, you might notice your overall bounce rates increasing and pages per view decreasing. This is characteristic of most search traffic: they find what they need and leave quickly. This isn’t to say that this traffic is low quality, just that they’re looking for something specific and it you don’t provide it, they’re gone.

2) Monitor ranking, links, and errors

You can do some of this in Google Webmaster Tools but the easiest, most comprehensive way is with SEOmoz (or similar). The few things that I make sure to track on a regular basis are:

• Keyword ranking: Even if you’re not getting traffic from a certain keyword, that doesn’t mean you aren’t ranking for it. Maybe you’re in position #11 and some minor tweaks will bump you to the first page. This can be done manually but it’s very time-consuming and difficult as ranking bounces around frequently.
• Page optimization: Each page ranks differently for different words. Make sure that the right pages are getting the right treatment.

You also want to make sure to check in with Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis as well as it can give you some great insight into incoming links and other attributes. Make sure you’re checking in regularly on:

• Incoming links (nice to know who)
• Crawl errors (I’ve found some scary stuff here before)
• Site speed (problems with your CMS or host?)
• Sitemap (should have a green checkmark)
• Malware (unlikely but you never know)

3) Watch your incoming requests and engagements

More comments? More post likes? More incoming calls? This, of course, is the endgame. Keep track of the number of requests you’re getting and watch for a boost.

4) Build more links

How’s that for an afterthought? As a site owner you should always be looking for ways to increase the number of links pointing to your site. I wrote a nice post on incoming links and how to build better ones here. That’s a great primer if you don’t really understand the concept of links or you’re not sure what types of links you need.

Related posts:

1. Choosing Keyword Phrases for Your Site Content
2. 5 Reasons You Should Fire Your SEO “Professional”
3. 6 steps to easy typography in any document

I just read “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and enjoyed it a lot, more than I expected to in fact. I’ll save the pontification about this “Lean” concept for another time but the main thing I got from the book surrounded collecting and using actionable information to learn about your customers and make decisions about changes and improvements. I wrote about this kind of iteration before, it’s something that drives everything I do and, before this book, I never knew there was a name for it.

But I digress. The point is that there are so many ways to gather information about what you’re doing, both online and off, that the excuses for not acquiring and using this data are getting increasingly lame. Take, for instance, Google Analytics (GA). There is a wealth of data in there, as well as a wealth of what Ries would call “vanity metrics.” You can easily dazzle yourself with the numbers and assume that the pretty blue lines going up and to the right are doing you a favor. Many times, you’re just fooling yourself. Here’s how.

Redesign it and they will come

I’ve been making web long enough to know that a site redesign is probably a mistake half the time. Often, a better use of time, effort, and money is to refresh important pages for search engine optimization (SEO) and conversions (are people doing something after they read that page). I’ve taken this to heart on my own site, mostly because it’s the right move but partially because a redesign is time-consuming. In that vein, I redesigned my “Get Help” page back in July.

This page had always been a bit of a catch-all and had some of the oldest perennial content on my whole site. I spent some time focusing my message with a great communication planner, Therese Beale, and I was ready for it to see the light of day. My idea was that I would outline what I have to offer (the first 4 things above) simply and give people a chance to buy in to the process before they even contact me by selecting an option to get started. I would get more information and they would be ready to take that next step:

I built the page, changed the link, redirected the old page, announced it on Facebook and called it a day. That was 3 months ago.

Time to check the analytics

I was thinking about conversions for another site the other day and it occurred to me that I never went back to look how that page was working. I felt like I was getting less contacts in general but didn’t have any numbers to back it up so I dove into GA for the numbers I needed.

Now, here’s where you need to be specific about what you’re trying to do. This is a page I want people to see before they hire me. The next page I want them to see is the contact page and that’s where I’m sending them with the form above. Compared to the old page, I want to know:

• Where did they go after they were on this page?
• How did they interact with this page while they were here?

What I don’t care about for this analysis is:

• How many people saw this page?
• How did they get to this page?

This page exists to convince people to move forward. Sure, I want more people on this page but the specific aspects of the redesign don’t contribute to that. How many people saw this page is a vanity metric, it doesn’t help me learn anything. In this case, it went up but traffic on the site as a whole went up as well so that’s not helpful. In fact, there are a number of different things we can count, measure, and analyze that won’t help us decide whether this redesign was a success or not.

In this case, I determined that this redesign was not a success. It was a bit disheartening to see that but it’s much better to learn something than to avoid disappointment. Here’s how I arrived at this conclusion.

Very helpful numbers

Again, to restate our goal, we want to know how people interacted with this page once they got here and what they did next. The below is a list of metrics that helped me determine that. The bold indicates the metric name and the square brackets is the navigation you use to get to that point in GA. Also, when I say “old,” I mean the page before redesign, “new” is after, both span approximately 3 months. To get the same, just follow the navigation path and get that metric for the both the old and the new time spans.

• Exits [Contact > Top Content > enter the page path in Filter Page at the bottom > "% Exit" column]: An exit is where someone left your site altogether from that page. On this page, exits are bad because I don’t have any external links I want people to go to. The old was 15% and the new was 30%. The percentage of people leaving my site after seeing this page doubled. Not so good.
• Time on page [same as above > "Avg. Time on Page" column]: This number is the time, on average, people spent looking at this page. For the most part, I’d like this to go up since you can’t get through everything in a short period of time. The new page was an average of 1 minute, 28 seconds and the new was 54 seconds. This metric should be going up but it’s going down. Again, not great.
• Bounce Rate [same as above > "Bounce Rate" column]: A “bounce” is where someone came to that page and left before seeing any other page. This kind of behavior is common with incoming search engine traffic. People either get what they need and take off (say, a helpful blog post) or don’t see what they want and bail (say, an unhelpful content page). For a page like this, we want this number to go down. The old page bounced people 50% of the time and the new 58% of the time. Not a huge difference but, once again, not what we’re looking for.

Exits went up, time on page went down, and bounce rate went up. It’s clear that this page is not doing what it should be. Still, let’s look at a few more numbers to be sure.

Somewhat helpful numbers

The metrics here are either secondary in importance to the ones above or just didn’t tell us much of anything.

• Number of people who ended up on the contact page [Contact > Top Content > enter the page path in Filter Page at the bottom > click on the Contact page > click the "Content Detail" drop down and select "Navigation Summary" > look for your redesigned page in the "Previous Pages" column on the left]: Since the contact page is the last step of the funnel before people can convert, we want people on this page more than any other. With both the old page and the new one, 6% of the views for the contact page came from the Help page. The problem is that the traffic on the Help page increased 38% overall (total site traffic also increased) so this didn’t give me much actionable information.
• Number of people ending up on other important pages [Contact > Top Content > find the page in question and click on its path > click the "Content Detail" drop down and select "Navigation Summary" > look for other important pages on the right]: So let’s say someone came to this Get Help page, read what I offer and thought “I’m not quite ready to take the plunge.” If they move on to another important page on the site, like my About page or my Portfolio, I’ll consider that a positive move. Comparing old to new, 30% went to another “funnel” page on both designs so nothing to glean from that.

Using the 5 metrics above, the helpful ones and the somewhat helpful ones, you can determine whether your page change was a success or not. In my case, everything either got worse or stayed the same so I’m going to go with no, not a success. I’ll talk about what I think needs to change in a moment but let’s briefly look at unhelpful numbers here.

Unhelpful numbers

At best, these metrics are ones that make us feel better (“vanity” metrics), at the worst we can use them to deceive ourselves and others into thinking something good has happened. Here are numbers that don’t help us here.

• Pageviews or visitors: The number of people seeing this page has nothing to do with how the page is performing. You might have changed a few keywords around or improved your search engine structure but that’s not going to tell us whether this page does the job or not.
• Number of contacts: I vacillated on this one. I counted the number of contacts that came in total and then compared that to the number of people who saw the Get Help page. In the end, the two can’t be connected in any real way since contacts could come from anywhere.
• Unique versus returning visitors: While it might be good to know if people need to come back once or twice in order to take the next step, there’s not much I can do to get accurate information from the numbers I have. Maybe someone saw it before the redesign and then after and that changed their perspective.

So, we know how to judge the page, now what do we do about this poor performer?

Take a guess, then take action

Here’s what I think is happening:

• This nice, clean page doesn’t have any clear paths forward. The green bars look nice but I don’t know if everyone is understanding what to do when they see them
• Once those are open, I think there is too much content and I don’t think it matches the tone of the rest of the site.
• The form radio buttons, the ones that took a while to put together, would work better as links. Why click twice when you can click once?

I’m going to break all the sections out and leave them on-page with links to take the next step. Rest assured I’ll be running this same analysis when I’m complete! If you have any questions or comments about my methods above, feel free to ask my in the comments section below.

Related posts:

1. Google Analytics campaign URL builder using Google Docs
2. Understanding the Basics of Google Analytics

That’s the one.

With the rain off our backs for a moment, we smiled and paused for a moment, taking in what was around us. The fruit just happened to be really good and quite inexpensive too. We weren’t looking for anything to eat but, suddenly, it all seemed very appealing.

This stand was like this wonderful little oasis in a sea of wet, loud, and unpleasant. There was a little music coming from the market it was attached to and our eyes were suddenly full of color, a stark contrast to the grey that had been following us around all day.

The best part about it? We were just suddenly, accidentally in this man’s little world. We weren’t called over or beckoned in, it was just right there at the right time. He wasn’t the only one with an awning but he was the only one that made it feel like you were all-at-once in the middle of his store. People were rushing by, just trying to make it to the next spot but, if you watched closely, everyone slowed down a bit as they passed through. Maybe they shook they hair our or brushed the beads of rain off of their coat, pausing for just long enough to recharge for a moment.

I took that picture above because this metaphor struck me the second we stopped (and I’m posting it a year later because I thought I lost the photo). This guy was doing everything right:

• He wasn’t pushy or in your face, he was just there. It was a nasty, rainy day and most people just wanted to get where they were going. He knew he had what some people wanted so he was ready when they were
• Everything was ready for you to see and buy. Outdoor markets are pretty attractive as is but that day, it looked even better.
• Instead of facing the stand outward from his market, he faced it inward, creating a little oasis. That plus the awning made it work perfectly. Even on a beautiful, sunny day his little place in the world would have been a nice change of scenery

The big take-away here? It doesn’t take much to be a welcome respite from the chaos around you. This was just another fruit stand in Paris but it’s the one I walked by (neither the first nor the last on that street) and it made an impression. You’re just another blog out there but with a little creativity and some care for the people coming through, you can be just what someone needs at just the right time.

Related posts:

1. 3 things that help me to write quality content
2. Choosing Keyword Phrases for Your Site Content

Note: I’m going to say Page (capital “P”) and I mean a Facebook page that you start, like this one, where people Like it to follow. Then I’m going to say Profile (capital “P”) and I mean your personal profile where you friend people.

It makes perfect sense in your mind, right? You have this page and you post links and photos and videos and updates. Then you go back to your personal page and post links and photos and videos and updates. Fun. Facebook puts the right things in the right places and everything is just grand.

But there are people that like the page and there are people that friend you, right? If you’re just getting started then you probably have more friends than fans. And if you have multiple admins, how do you get that link from your Page to the people you know personally?

If use Facebook even a little bit  then your first thought is probably to click the Like link. It makes perfect sense, that’s how you do it with everything else and it works great. But in this case, it not only doesn’t accomplish what you want to do, it also looks silly.

Look, I like that. Well, I posted it, I would hope that I like it.

There is actually a way to do this… a really good way. You can do this from one Page to your Profile or to any other Page you’re an admin for. Here’s how:

1.    Go ahead and post your link or photo or video or whatever on your Page as you usually would.
2.    Once it’s live, click the Share link at the bottom of the post.

3.    A window should appear with a text box asking you to write something. At the top of this window you’ll see a drop-down that says “On your own wall.” Leave that where it is to share it on your Profile or click it and select something new. “On your page” lets you post it on a Page where you are an admin.
4.    Leave the attribution (free advertising for your Page), add a pithy, sarcastic, or witty comment and click the blue Share Link.
5.    Go find your Profile and see how it is displayed.

Now, quit Liking your own stuff and get to Sharing!

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2. Website page titles – how to pick one and what they are for
3. The Drudge Report style 3 column link page template

There’s this sentiment out there that only coolest businesses can join in the fun online. You’ve got to have wild pictures of amazing year-end parties or celebrity clients you can Like. There has to be some kind of shimmer to the work you do, you have to be deserving of attention already to get any of it on Facebook or anywhere else. This sentiment goes a long way towards convincing people that they’re not “worthy” of being listened to, which leads to a big hesitation to do any kind of online marketing.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are PLENTY of people who don’t deserve to be listened to online. I don’t have to list them because we all have our own little lists of bloggers, companies, hacks, and liars that we wish would just curl up and let their domains expire. There are lots of self-centered web broadcasters out there jamming up the channels and re-syndicating the stuff that was already boring people elsewhere.

It’s not your fault

But it’s not the business or the industry or the product that makes for poor communicators, not at all; it’s the approach. Just because you’re a skydiving instructor doesn’t mean you’re interesting to listen to, at a party or on Facebook. Just because you’re an accountant or a dentist or a construction firm doesn’t mean you have to be boring to interact with online. Your industry does not determine your online destiny.

If you’re part of a business that’s not very interesting to talk about then you have a situation on your Facebook page: there’s not much to say, specifically, about what you do during an average day. A video might look like a still picture, your RFPs aren’t going to wow anyone, and your product isn’t really all that fun to look at. It might not seem that way at first but this is actually a blessing in disguise.

Ask yourself

Related posts:

1. How to “Like” your page items from your personal profile without looking silly
2. Facebook Group vs A Blog: What’s a Company to Do?

I started by thinking about the hiring processes I’ve been a part of in the past and how they differed from what I’m trying to do. I also thought long and hard about what type of person I would want representing me and working closely with my process. It was clear to me that I needed someone I could trust and someone that wanted to be doing what they were doing.

So I put together the two Universal Lists of Job Searches: requirements and desirements…. or whatever. These are the things I have to have and the things that help people to stand out above the rest. I’ll list these below with a bit more explanation for each.

The point of posting here before somewhere like Craigslist is (a) to get feedback on what I’m asking for and how I’m asking and (b) put it out there for referrals from people I know. Do you know anyone that fits the bill? Send them my way!

The Job

It’s time to get a bit more help doing what I’m doing. I’m a freelance web developer, designer, and strategy guy who is looking for someone to help me with client support and some of the minutiae of running a business. Tasks might include:

• Responding to clients and potential clients to set appointments
• Doing minimal bookkeeping stuff like expenses, PayPal exports, and invoice tracking
• Working with website administration panels to enter content, make changes, and manage certain components
• Minimal data entry, spreadsheet parsing, and scanning
• Web research and compilation

I’m not sure exactly how to structure this because I may not have a steady number of hours each week. I can do one of two things: you can turn in a time sheet every 2 weeks/month/whatever or I can pay you in advance for a bucket of hours. It’s my hope that within a year or less that I can pay you on a much more regular basis but, for the time being, it has to be as-needed. As such, I’ll assume you have another job or other responsibilities so I’m not going to be calling you at 11pm to do something ASAP; I’m not that guy and I don’t want you or I to have that life.

I’ve listed a few requirements and desirements below. If you aren’t a right fit based on the requirements below, that’s OK, just don’t apply.

Required

- Good communication skills (written and verbal) and an understanding of what good customer service is

This is self-explanatory but, unfortunately, so universal that I think people kind of ignore it. I consider myself a good communicator, written and verbal, and I know a lot of people who are the same. I have also interacted with a lot of people who are not particularly good at communicating. The difference is night and day and the impact it has on how people perceive your brand is, in my opinion, immeasurable. Having someone who can get a point across clearly, concisely, and positively is a must.

The customer service piece comes from my days working for a very large wireless telecom. I saw good customer service and abysmal customer service all around me. I practiced good customer service most of the time (in my humble opinion) and mindless robot service the rest. As soon as I saw the connection between my attitude, accountability, and tone of voice and the outcome of the call, I realized how easy it was to make my day and the day of a stranger that much better. I started teaching at that company and made it my goal to make sure the folks that I was responsible for knew that same connection. I wasn’t 100% successful in passing this lesson along but I did what I could to pay it forward to everyone I could. I still do this as best as I can and it’s critical to me to work with someone that does the same.

- Comfortable with personal technology and the web in general. This does not mean you can make web pages (see below) but it does mean that you’re not scared of technology or learning new things.

I see technology comfort at all levels; I also see technology self-evaluations at all levels as well. I would say that most people would downplay how comfortable they are with technology because they don’t want to be caught with their pants. What I’m looking for is not someone that’s a web developer or designer or anything like that, just that they are on-line, comfortable using their computer, and aren’t scared of picking up a few techniques. Bonus points if you use Netflix instead of Blockbuster, have a phone with a good browser, and know what “Yelping” something means.

- Have a good organization system and follow-through

I’ve learned that organization systems rarely translate. I can suggest a million different apps, tools, and sites that I use but, in the end, you probably have your own system that works for you. Even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else on the planet, it keeps you sane, productive, and on top of things.

I need someone with some kind of system to help make sure that things don’t fall through the cracks. Whether it’s email tags or a to-do app or a moleskin, I need someone to help me keep on top of things. If I send something to do and I have to remind you a few times on a regular basis, that’s creating more work for me. Everyone makes mistakes, me most or all, but let’s work together to keep this thing going.

One more thing… follow up is really key for me. I try to help other people remember these tasks and stay on top of their sites. This is a big part of what I do and an important reason that people come back to me. If you can help me do this better than you’re exactly who I’m looking for.

- Straight-forward and honest… just tell me if you can’t do it

This is a big one. I really don’t need some kind of superhero, I just need someone who can get things done in the time that they say they can. I like it when people underpromise and over deliver. My wife and I joke about our expectations all the time but I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind. I believe that plans should be made to direct your actions and decisions but sometimes they go off-track, get changed, or get tossed. As long as we’re on the same page about availability, capacity, and due dates, we’ll be just fine.

Desired:

- Active online and in social media somehow

Trust me, I an not trying to track anyone for any reason. But being active in social media and a regular content creator (blog posts or online reviews or comments) means you understand what I do a lot better. You might use Flickr to share pictures with people or Facebook to keep in touch. Whatever it is, if you’re online contributing to the conversation, good on you and bonus points with me.

- Comfortable with a WYSIWYG, possibly even HTML

A WYSIWYG is an HTML editor that works like a word-processor in a way. It helps you format content in a way that will appear as it should on a web page. You might have used one of these in WordPress or Drupal or in a web application that helps you create content. These things are never perfect and require a bit of finesse to use properly. If you’ve never used one before, it’s going to be a learning curve to get it right but that’s fine. If you have, that just saves us some training time.

The big things are:

• Never paste from Word
• Try to compose in a plain text editor then format on the page
• Keep it simple, stick to bullets, numbered lists, headlines, links, bold, italics, and a few others

- Know WordPress/Drupal administration

If you don’t even know what those words are, that’s OK. When I say “administration,” I just mean clicking around in the menus and changing settings. Also, I may need you to create content in the system and publish posts. Neither system is hard to learn which is why it’s not important to be an expert here. Still, we’ll save a bit of time if you know your way around.

- You don’t use Outlook

It’s OK if you do, I’m not going to judge you too harshly. This is just a mindset, in my opinion. I find Outlook to be slow, bloated, and more trouble than it’s worth. A lot of people that are very capable use Outlook but there is a better way and it’s called Google Apps. Stick with me and you’ll see the light.

- You do use a Google Account (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar)

My Google Account, including all the apps above plus Reader, Analytics, Sites, etc, is huge piece of how I stay productive. This suite of tools from Google is invaluable and it would be great to have someone that is already familiar with how it works. Gmail is less important than being familiar with Google Docs, at least in my case.

- Seattle Metro area a plus

I’m all about working virtually so even if you are in Seattle metro, I’m not going to be asking you to drive to my office (house) all the time. It would just be nice to meet you in person before we go and get all cozy together.

How to Apply

Here’s how I asked people to apply:

1) Send me your info… name, email, resume-type-thing, location, a reference or two would be nice

Just the facts, ma’am.

2) Tell me about how you fit my requirements and desirements

I’d rather not have to tease out why you’re applying for this, let’s just get all that nonsense out of the way, shall we?

3) How do you communicate best? Phone, text, email, something else?

Just good to know, I can conform to anything. I slightly prefer email because I can handle it at on my own time but I understand the need for a phone call in certain cases and texts can be a major time-saver.

4) Where are you online? Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn?

Links to profiles are great. I swear to god I’m not going to be tracking you, I’m way too busy tracking my friends and family.

5) What’s an hourly rate that would make you feel comfortable for a while?

I don’t want to set an hourly rate so I’ll let you tell me what you’d like to be paid. Hours might fluctuate up and down so keep that in mind. This is not a trick question at all, I want you to tell me what your time is worth to you.

6) When do you work the best? Morning? Evening?

Again, just nice to know, no right answer here.

So, that’s the list. and the breakdown. If you have any feedback or experiences you can share, please do let me know in the comments below. If you’re someone that’s applying for the spot, put “I read your post!” in the subject line when you answer the question above and you’ll get considered before everyone. If you want to know a bit more about who I am you can read about me and this company on my about page. I’m also open to questions directly through my contact form or in the comments below.

Thank you in advance!

Related posts:

1. Essential Hardware And Software for Virtual Employees and Contractors

Side note: The most important thing to think about before going down any of these routes is “what am I trying to do with this thing?” You could waste a lot of time starting accounts and learning platforms before you either found what you’re looking for or quit in frustration. A few questions to ask:

• Is this a public group or a private one? If it’s private, make sure the platform has the privacy controls you need and set these up first.
• What will you actually use it for? Think about what you already do, not what you think you might do.
• Would a Linkedin group work? A Facebook page? A Twitter hash? Going to the where the people already are drastically increases the chance this group will take off.

OK, on with the tools…

SocialGO

Pricing: free – $24.99/mo depending on desired features

SocialGo ended up being the one we chose for a number of different reasons, mostly because it was the easiest to use and had the best feature set for a free plan. I found the controls to be intuitive and straightforward, though the “Groups” option took a little getting used to. After an hour or so of walking through it, we seemed to be on top of all of the features. One problem was the Files section which didn’t want to load. Support was not terribly helpful (“it works fine” was the basic reply, though a word or two longer) but just put yourself in his shoes. Free support for a free product? Sounds like a blast.

spruz

Pricing: free – $49.95/mo depending on desired features

Spruz claims half a million networks created on its platform (I can only imagine) and, judging by its feature set, I can see why. Spruz is fully-featured starting right at the $4.95 plan level and allow users to create profile pages, blog entries, and paid events. The thing I love about this network is its name and the many different ways I could think of to screw it up when I tell people about it (“go to spuzz… no, spruce… no wait, spazz, that’s it”).

fridge

Pricing: free

This network is definitely trying to appeal to a younger generation both in design and in features. They offer photo sharing (wouldn’t it be funny to have a social network without that), group event organizing and even text messages. According to their features page, they even support naked pictures (scroll to the bottom). Scratch that about the younger generation.

toonti

Pricing: free

Toonti was one of the few sites that was promoting a more open group structure, something that didn’t end up fitting our needs for an internal communication tool. The sites, for the most part, look pretty similar and have all the features you might expect – blogs, photos, events, and forums. If you can take yourself seriously asking someone to “toonti me later,” then this one might just fit the bill.

groups

Pricing: free

Groups had one of the strangest interfaces right when you get there. An disappointed, crossed-arms Greek god type “greets” you with a few links to log in or sign up with your email. It took a bit to see the links at the top right that can give me (a little) more information. The featured sites look quite a bit more professional and slick than the others I’ve seen and I’d give you a link there except they decided to implement navigation that doesn’t let me do that. Worth a look if only to check out the initial landing page. Great URL, though.

grouply

Pricing: free

Group.ly’s schtick is that they are revolutionizing online groups, taking a jab straight at Google and Yahoo Groups. They offer themeing (likely just the same color changing options you’ll find on other sites), analytics (nice feature), and additional applications. Their marketing copy made me smile as it was quite over the top but what got me was the side-by-side comparison of a Group.ly group with a Yahoo group. Hey, to each their own and everything but I’m pretty sure the one on the left is a little easier to use. I’m just saying.

bigtent

Pricing: free

Bigtent is less “build your own social network” and more “bring your like-minded group together.” It’s built to be more of an internal tool, it seems, which was appealing to us for what we were trying to accomplish. It has a great feature set and seemed like what we needed but we chose SocialGo over it just based on usability. It was harder to find what we needed to do and, in the end, when you’re training non-tech types to use a system like this, it’s got to be easy. They do have free support and actually mention that their staff works on Christmas. Call me crazy but I see that as a down side. Also: talk about setting the wrong expectation. Maybe they need a lesson from SocialGo.

yuku

Pricing: free, $12/year for premium features for individual forum members

Yuku brands itself as a better alternative to Ning. They have lots of premium features to offer (use your own domain name, unlimited storage and bandwidth, free of ads) and the Official Cher Community chose them so you can’t possibly go wrong. What I noticed about the sample sites (affectionately called the “YukuVerse”) is that they were all forums so I’m wondering how much more is possible (their features page suggests more). I think what really won me over, though, was the part where they told me that making a nice page was so “dead-simple even grandma could razzle-dazzle us.” I couldn’t remember the last time I heard razzle-dazzle in a sentence but I can now.

mixxt

Pricing: free trial then 9-19 Euros/mo depending on desired features

Mixxt’s (try saying that out loud) seems pretty well featured and limits based on storage, transfer, and newsletters (that’s an interesting feature). The site is very cut-and-dry and everything you’d need to know is right there. In fact, it’s so free of fluff, I’m left without much else to say! The sample sites seem swell and since social sites succeed somewhat based on simple usability, I’d say give Mixxt’s simple stew a shot!

groupsite

Pricing: free trial then $29 – $99/mo depending on number of users and features desired

Groupsite says that it’s nestled right where “social networking and collaboration meet,” creating a parallel universe of productivity called “social collaboration” (they didn’t mention the universe part). The site itself is well-designed and if that’s a sign of things to come with creating your own network, it’s a good sign. The sample sites look good and I really appreciated the “case study” type text along the side; it’s tough to judge how people are actually using these things by just poking around on the page. No free option for this one so you’re going to have to trust that they’re something special. Oh, just kidding… it’s hidden at the bottom of the pricing page. Why even bother offering it if you’re going to hide it? Tsk tsk…

Related posts:

1. My Answers for the 7 Questions to Ask a Social Media Expert
2. Using the social technologies of the web effectively while staying out of trouble
3. Give someone a social hand and write a review

Before I jump into these, let me give you a little context and inside knowledge on what goes on behind the scenes with SEO services. There are two sets of activities I do to improve the ranking of your site:

1. Changes that are experimental in nature and need to be reviewed and possibly changed after a period of time.
2. Things that are industry-standard, Google approved and recommended; these are dead simple changes and procedures.

The first one is where the expertise comes in. It’s about finding good keywords, using them properly, and figuring out if they are doing anything once they are in place.

The second one, however, is the easy one. These are things that are not debated, the things that every SEO should be up on, things like…

• Page structure
• Meta information
• Keyword location

These pieces have changed over the years but it’s very easy to find out the right thing to do, you just have to read a little bit. And this is where my accusations start. If you don’t know the easy stuff, how can you bill yourself as an SEO provider? This part of the job is easy so it must come down to complete laziness or deception.

In the end, it’s buyer beware. But with something as technical as SEO, how do you know when you’ve been bamboozled? Let me help…

1) They offer you hundreds or thousands of links for a very low price.

A client of mine recently signed up for a service (not at my advice)  that would give him “30K back links” for $5. Sound too good to be true? It was. After less than 24 hours, the entire site was missing from Google. No pages indexed, no results found, nothing. This was a big setback for a brand new site and forced us to change gears completely to try and mitigate the damage.

Quality, helpful incoming links are not easy to get and they never will be. Automated, low-quality, possibly harmful links are easy to get, which is why they hold no value for the search engines (except, we’ve found, to figure out who to get rid of). Want great links? You can make a few yourself but the best ones come from providing something people want and will link to, it’s just that “simple.” If someone tries to convince you otherwise, time to get skeptical.

2) Your page titles aren’t just over 60 characters, they’re longer than your browser bar

The practice of cramming as many keywords as you can into a page title is so 2002. Long ago (in relative web time), you were able to just pack them in everywhere and reap the traffic of a million keyword phrases. These days, it’s all about specificity so trying to rank for 10 target phrases is not advised. If your site was built ten years ago and you still have those titles left over, you get a pass. If someone recently walked through your site to make SEO changes and you’ve got a page title that’s a mile long, you have a serious problem.

I’ve seen a range of accepted/recommended lengths for page titles and they hover between 50 and 70 characters. If you’ve got more than that, not only are you hurting your ranking for the words that are there, the rest of the title won’t be seen, read, or considered. Keep it short and put the best keyword(s) up front. If you have more to say, make another page!

3) They go on and on about meta keywords and meta descriptions

“But my SEO said to concentrate on my meta keywords!” I have heard this a few times before and, for a while, made sure it was part of my plan. Until I read, from Google, that they don’t care about the keywords tag anymore. After that, the term fell out of my vocabulary. When you’ve got an algorithm that can parse a page and figure out the keywords easily on its own, why in the word would you need someone to tell you what the keywords are? You don’t.

Meta descriptions are another story. These can be used as the text beneath the page title on search engine results pages (SERPs) and, if they have your keywords in there, they can entice people to click on your result (because, of course, showing up if only half the battle). Still, these will not contribute to you actually showing up in the ranking so you’re much better off writing it for a person who is considering whether or not they want to click on your link. Write a one-sentence summary of your page and leave it at that.

4) You’re not on the first page for your domain name after a month

A client came to me for a minor refresh of his site (same client as number 2 above). In the process, he asked me what I would recommend for improving his site.  Immediately the page titles caught my and I mentioned that we could make some positive SEO changes with a few good keywords and changes to many of his pages. He quickly told me that a “very good” SEO had just finished working on his site. Curious, I typed the keywords from his domain into Google (he has a very long, wordy domain name) and his site was nowhere in sight (besides a paid link … icing on the cake). I figured maybe the changes had been completed a few days ago. Nope. 2 months, almost to the day. That was a problem.

Ranking for keywords in your domain name is a no-brainer, especially if you’ve got a very specific domain and content that supports it. Even without a ton of incoming links, it should be pretty easy to get somewhere on the first page. If you’re working with a professional and you’re nowhere to be found, there might be an issue.

5) You’ve spent hundreds with nothing in return.

The tough thing about SEO services is that there can’t be any guarantee at all. You’re working under specific guidelines but, in the end, the black box that is Google (and others) will determine where the pages appear. Even if you succeed, your rank could be taken away soon thereafter because of an algorithm shift or a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa. Your hold on a particular position is always tentative.

This, however, is still no excuse for money spent without anything in return. I recently took over a client’s SEO strategy from a someone who “has been in the industry for a long time.” After a few hundred dollars spent, my client heard what amounted to “well, you’re doing a few things right and I’m not sure why you’re ranking so well but there’s a few more things we can do.” He then received an estimate for additional services and a confirmation that, yes, his first payment just went towards an email consisting of a few sentences and no plan of attack.

We’re not magicians but there needs to be value created for every dollar our clients spend. Even if it’s just a thorough analysis and a report, there needs to be a take-away besides an up-sell for more services. If you’re not getting suggestions, keywords, and actionable recommendations, then you’re wasting your money. I can’t guarantee a #1 placement but by the end of our session, you should feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth.

What did I miss?

Are you working with an SEO that’s just not helping? Have you fired someone and moved on to a different consultant? Tell us about your horror stories working with your web service provider!

Also:

Sounds like someone else was thinking about the same thing! A few more tips from Hubspot.

Related posts:

1. Choosing Keyword Phrases for Your Site Content
2. 5 Reasons Why I Won’t Build That For You (it’s not just because I said so)
3. Analysis, Keywords and Monitoring: 3 Steps to Improve SEO

As a quick aside…  it was great to really delve in on this topic and collect resources that people could use. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “build list, send stuff,” completely ignoring what could be a powerful asset for any company. If you take your time, have an actual strategy, and remember who is on the other end of that email, you can create a strong, engaged list that will stick with you for a long time. If you just harvest names and emails and send them the first thing that comes to mind, you put your domain at risk and throw away something potentially very valuable.

Download/view the presentation

• Text outline DOC (the outline that created the presentation above)
• MindMap PDF (I love these things!)

Posts on email marketing

• Confessions from an accidental spammer
• 6 key ways to improve your email communication
• Tooting my own horn – Email marketing presentation
• 3 MORE Important Questions to Ask Before Sending Company Email Marketing
• 3 Important Questions to Ask Before Sending an Email Campaign
• Spam: what is it? what does it do? why am I sending it? who cares?
• W3C Schools (via JCH) Beginner’s Course in HTML for Emails
• HTML emails: the last word (until everything changes again)

Other links on email marketing

• Avoiding spam filters (PDF by Mailchimp)
• Avoiding spam words in your content and subject
• Common email rookie mistakes (PDF by Mailchimp)
• Create an email marketing plan (PDF by Mailchimp)
• HTML email coding tips (PDF by Mailchimp)
• W3C HTML Validator

Related posts:

1. Tooting my own horn – Email marketing presentation
2. 3 MORE Important Questions to Ask Before Sending Company Email Marketing
3. 3 Important Questions to Ask Before Sending an Email Campaign

I should mention up-front that this is neither specifically web-related nor some subtle hint to people. This is about me getting better at managing what I do.

What I’m experiencing these days is a constant feeling of being behind, always at the edge of letting people down. This is a heavy burden for me to bear because I have an acute sense of accountability combined with a portfolio of clients that I’m committed to and enjoy helping. I find myself rushing through things instead of taking my time and enjoying the process, falling back on what I know I can do instead of taking the time to learn an advanced technique, putting off “extemporaneous” things like family, friends, and time off in an effort to catch up with something that’s running 10% faster than I am.

I’m tempted to point the finger directly at email, with a sideways glance at Skype. The Terrible Twosome of communication, these two have a way of wreaking havoc on a potentially productive period of time. But you can’t place blame on something you’ve allowed to misbehave so poorly; you can’t blame a 3-year-old for burning down a fifth house if they were never disciplined properly after the first.

No, I think the communication channels (which number about 12 at this point – 5 emails, 1 Skype, 2 Twitter, 2 Facebook, and 2 phone numbers), when taken together, just make a handy scapegoat. I’ve always been told that you can’t pin the blame for how you feel on other people, regardless of what they’re doing to you. So, in that vein, I’m going to absolve the distractions of their responsibility for my poor work habits and start working a little smarter.

How do you work smarter when you already know how

I already know how to work better, in fact I know exactly how because I do it every now and then. I turn off communication distractions for most of the day, I prioritize what needs to be completed, I eat good food at regular intervals, I get some kind of exercise at some point during the day, and I stop before my eyes have trouble focusing. If I could manage do this every weekday, I could actually take weekends off, or at least be able to dedicate them to chipping away at the new programming languages, techniques, and ideas I have floating around me in swarms.

But I don’t do this most days. In fact, I’m lucky if I get one day a week that’s well-regimented, productive for 8 hours, and doesn’t leave me feeling like I need a tall drink and complete mental disconnection at the end of the day. Most days are spent checking my email every 15 minutes, skipping between projects, tinkering with things mindlessly, and leaving me with just barely enough billable hours to cover my expenses.

So why the hell am I in front of a computer for 9 – 12 hours a day?

The “Problem”

I keep coming back to email and communication in general but there are a few “problems” occurring all at once, some of which are not problems at all but things I’m doing to create income in a very different way:

• Some of it is keeping up-to-date on current technology. This excuse only goes so far because I could do this all day every day and still not be completely up to date. Clearly, the issue is prioritizing, which I actually do fairly well here.
• Some of it is working on projects that will serve me in the long term. These are, again, projects I could put long hours in on every day and be happy as a clam but, at the moment, they aren’t generating the income needed to support us.
• Some of it is keeping the pipeline full, current clients happy, and WP-Drudge users question and bug-free. Sales is fun for me because I believe in the product (sites that I create, rebuild, or improve) and I like talking to people I know I can help. Client support is great too for the same reason as sales. The WP-Drudge project was my second foray into making something that would generate income based on previous work and the users have been a lot of fun to get to know. Put these all together, though, and that’s an immense amount of time on the phone and over email and something that would be tough to farm out.
• Some of it is boring, annoying, but satisfying and critical admin work: taxes, bills, scheduling, banking, etc.
• Some of it, of course, is good old-fashioned online goofing off. I check popurls.com at least twice a day (mostly just the Reddit headlines) and can easy follow a path out from that site to many, many others. I get sidetracked with useless organization projects on my computer (sometimes these pay off, sometimes they are a complete waste) and do silly things like take breaks (I know, what the hell?). Some days are worse than others but I’m grateful that I can’t spend half of a day screwing around on the internet like I used to.

It sounds like a pretty full day of activity and there aren’t a lot of places that could be really tightened up. But there’s a problem… I don’t finish the day with enough complete to make it worth my while to spend this much of my life in front of a screen. I’m not:

• Pushing these very important projects forward fast enough
• Writing enough, for business or pleasure
• Taking enough time off (this last Friday and Saturday were the first two complete days off I’ve spent since November and I only did that because my hard drive failed)
• Exercising enough
• Doing things that sound like fun at the time
• Reading enough
• Painting (graffiti [legal])

These are all things I really enjoy doing and things that are good for me in multiple ways but they’re being pushed aside. It would be one thing if I was grinding out 10 billable hours a day (still something that would still need to change but a better trade-off) but I’m not. My time is being siphoned off in multiple directions and I don’t have much to show for it besides bags under my eyes.

Something’s Got To Give

It’s clear that my work life needs to change fairly dramatically. I still very much love what I do and feel more confident in my output than I ever have in the past. But how I’m managing things (or not) is creating a situation where I feel like a burnout is right around the corner. Little distractions, admin tasks spread out over multiple sessions, communication channels being open all day, and a host of other things are slowly pestering me to death and I’m letting them do it.

I keep thinking some app or blog or book will come swinging to my rescue out of the trees like Tarzan but it’s just not that simple. I have quite a few systems in place and I use them pretty well. I also know when to stop using something that I I started using, ostensibly, to get everything back in track. I’m not losing track of things, I’m just not getting tangible things done often enough and I’m not taking enough time for myself. I’m fanatically dedicated to keeping my clients doing their best online and I know I can keep doing that, I just need to figure out a different way to structure things.

The Time is now

I wrote this mostly to get it out of my system. Putting things into words on a page is very satisfying for me and it helps me frame things in a productive way. It also gets my mind working on the problem with the hope that a solution will drop out of all this navel-gazing.

In this case, I don’t need a solution, I just need to remember, everyday, that I know how it’s done. It’s laying out what needs to be done for the day, assigning a priority, and turning off everything that can sidetrack my progress. It’s remembering how good a long walk feels in the middle of the day and how much more energy I have when I put the right things in my body. It’s keeping the commitment I have to my colleagues, project-buddies, clients, family, and myself by staying alert, paying attention to the little things, and creating the best that I can.

I took the first steps towards keeping this commitment yesterday and I saw where I failed and why. Today, I’ll use this to iterate again, watching for the time sinks and energy saps. Tomorrow, and each day forward will be better. As always, please let me know how I can help you better and I’ll gladly work that in as well!

Related posts:

1. My New ASUS EEE 1000H (or) How my life just got a whole lot more productive
2. Search Engine Optimization as a metaphor for life

Christoff, my dedicated chemistry and home brewing colleague, and I would like to introduce our pet project for the last couple of years, GetScientific. We set out to build “an online database of learning aids, resources, links, and guides for students and professors of hard sciences” based on our experience trying to find useful resources online during our stint as undergraduate chemistry students. The site accepts submissions in the form of links to resources on other sites as well as class notes uploaded or entered directly into the site. Once the resources have been approved, users can comment and rate these resources to make sure the best stuff gets seen by students in need.

• Here is a bit more about the site and our journey here
• Here is the launch post on the GetSci blog
• Here is the FAQ for the site

After a few fairly painful platform changes, we finally decided to build this system on Drupal, an open-source content management system that has several of the things we needed built in. As anyone starting out with Drupal knows, getting up-to-speed with this platform is fairly painful and we definitely fell into the trap of “there’s a module for that” for a long time. As we got more familiar, though, we realized much of what we wanted to do was fairly simple with a little bit of know-how and a lot of Googling.

Last week, we decided that it was time to get this site online so we put our nose to the grindstone and tackled the last few pieces of the puzzle. After a string of 12 hour days (put in during and after an artificially low amount of client tasks) ending in nightly check-up meetings, we finally got the site to a point where we were ready to show it to the world and, Wednesday night, we cut the domain over and made GetScientific.com live. This was where I lived for 4 days straight…

This site, for me, represents a lot of blood, sweat, tears, cursing, and mistakes. It also represents the culmination of a year working with Drupal, the completion of my most important personal project to date, and a strong partnership with Christoff, someone who has remained dedicated to the project and always optimistic. I am very pleased with how it turned out and really looking forward to both adding new features and populating the site with resources I’ve been waiting two years to share with the academic world.

Please give it a look and, if you’re in the sciences world, submit anything you have laying around that you think the world might want to see. We’re always looking for feedback so use the form linked from the top of the site or feel free to comment below. We want to grow this community into something great and we need your help to do it! If you’d like to stay in touch about this project or want more information, we’ve got lots of resources posted on the launch post.

Related posts:

1. Josh Can Help is alive!

What’s in it for you?

Long story short, making rational decisions about your keywords means more and better traffic from search engines. Instead of adding words that you think people are using, you’ll be adding words that they actually are using. This means you’re not stabbing in the dark with keywords and phrases that might be getting just a handful of searches per month. You’ll also avoid phrases that are more competitive than you could possibly rank for.

Taking it one step further, doing this kind of research puts you in better control of how your site is performing in general and gives you a path forward for the rest of your content. Once you see the words and phrases you’re using with numbers and ranks next to them, you’ll see the whole process differently. Keyword optimization is everywhere – email titles, Tweets, post headlines – and the more familiar you get with this concept, the better you communicate online.

Are you sold yet or what?

Step 1: What’s the point?

This is not a skip-able step because it exists to reduce the amount of work you might have to do. Before you get started searching out potential keywords, make sure you need to do it in the first place. I’m going to assume that you’re not looking to find work for yourself and I think it’s important to figure out what content deserves your time and effort.

Walk through these steps for this type of content (this is critical):

• Informative blog posts or instructional content pages
• Home page
• Product, service, or offering pages

Don’t worry about these steps for this type of content (you have better things to worry about):

• Company announcement or news posts
• Contact page
• Temporary pages (short-term offers, short-term-projects, anything that’s not going to be around for a month or more)

Step 2: Choose the Subject

Once you have decided that the page you’re working on is a good candidate for keyword choosing, now it’s time to figure out what you’re writing about. Once you’ve gotten to this point, I’m going to guess that you already have something in mind but, if not, I’ve written a few posts (here and here) on how to actually choose a subject. What we’re doing here is narrowing down your focus.

For example, let’s say you’re a personal safety advisor (hey, I actually know one of those). You write on a variety of subjects but you recently signed a contract with a social work group and want to write about the safety of social workers. You have a million things to say on the subject but want to make sure that your article is helping your search engine ranking while also educating people. The first thing to do is to come up with a list of possible phrases by brainstorming.

This isn’t just any list, though, this is a list of things that people might be searching to find your article. It’s an effort in putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, specifically the shoes of someone that wants to find you. Think: What words or phrases would I use to find this article? If this wasn’t my field of expertise, what would I tell someone to search? What words or phrases have my clients and customers used in the past to describe this part of what I offer? It might even be worth your time to ask someone outside of your industry what, literally, they would type into a search engine to find you.

Personal safety isn’t my area of expertise so I’m probably a good candidate to find keywords. To find information on the safety of social workers, I might use one of the following phrases:

• social worker safety
• safety of social workers
• keeping social workers safe
• social worker protection
• dangers of social work
• self defense for social workers

That’s a pretty solid list, probably more than we need, actually. This step does two things:

1. Solidify what you want to write about … if you can’t come up with a list of 3 or 4 specific ways to describe what you’re writing about, is it necessary to write about it in the first place?
2. Gives you a few leads for the research you’re about to do

You probably want to be planning and writing your content at this point. If you have a final draft already, that’s fine but you may need to make a few edits once you choose the actual phrase(s) you want to use. If you haven’t started then now is a good time to get at least your outline together.

Step 3: Keyword Research

This is the step that stops a lot of people in their tracks because (a) it’s time-consuming and (b) it uses tools you might not have been exposed to before. That’s not a good reason to back out now, in fact, this is the most important step because, without it, your work before and after will be wasted.

You’ll be using three applications here: your analytics software (Google Analytics being the most common but any will work. If you don’t have any of this software installed then you should probably get ahold of me), the Google Keyword Tool, and a search engine (I recommend Google not just because I trust their results but because 2/3rds of searches are done in Google and if you’re going to optimize for just one search engine, this is the place to start). Here we go…

Analytics

What you want to do is to make sure you’re not cannibalizing traffic from another page (you might find a thing or two out about your site in the meantime). You want to pick a phrase that is different enough from what you already rank for so you don’t compete with yourself.

1. Find the page that shows you what keywords bring in visitors (in Google Analytics, it’s Traffic Sources > Keywords)
2. Search for one word that shows up in all (or most) of your phrases. For the ones above, I’ll use “social.” You’re looking to cut down the number of keywords shown so, if you write about social media a lot then this is not going to work well.
3. Once you have a manageable list (less than 50 or so), scan the list for similar phrases that are bringing visitors to another page. If you have a very similar phrase then it’s probably a better idea to strengthen that page rather than write a whole new one. Search engines love refreshed pages that are already ranking so don’t be afraid to repurpose and re-write that entire page using the steps below.

Once you’ve decided that this is a new concept for your site, it’s time to pick a few keywords.

Google Keyword Tool

This is one of those tools online that not enough people use (and one that I’m surprised doesn’t cost any money [hint: they're trying to sell you AdWords (hint: that might not be such a bad thing)]). This little application will not only tell you if people are searching for the terms you chose, it will also suggest many others that might be better candidate than your original choice. Here’s what to do:

1. Go to https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer
2. In the “Word or phrase” box, paste the phrases you wrote before (there should be one per line with no extra characters)
3. The “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” check box searches for your exact phrases so leave this unchecked if you’re open to suggestions.
4. The “Advanced Options” link will open up a form to allow you to select other regions and languages, filter by devices (like phones), and set lower or upper limits.
5. Once you’ve got all the right options entered in, click “Search.” If you left the checkbox in step 3 unchecked, you’re likely to get many different keywords and phrases. The more options you put in the “Word or phrase” box, the more words you’re going to get.
6. What you’re looking for in a good keyword phrase is a combination of:
   • Low monthly searches – if you’re creating a new page and you don’t already have a lot of “SEO juice” on your site, you’ll definitely want to look below 1000 searches per month, probably also below 500. In fact, I like to pick mine from near the bottom of the list because a #1 ranking for a term with 50 searches is going to send a lot more (and specific) traffic than a #20 ranking for a term with 500 searches.
   • How well it relates to what you’re writing about - you want this phrase to be directly related to what you’re writing. Don’t chose a phrase that has good numbers if you’re not specifically writing about it. Set that one aside for your next page or post and find one that fits better.
   • Low competition or CPC – competition and CPC (cost per click) are both metrics that tell you about paid search. We’re not doing any paid search here but this is a good indicator of how valuable – both generally and monetarily – that search term is.
   • Results page – we’ll look at that with the next tool
7. Pick at least 5 different phrases and set them aside. You’re only going to use one or two of them but you want a few to pick from. Also, keep your eye out for good terms that you can use later. I find keyword picking to be a very specific mindset and once I’m there, I don’t want to waste the focus!

Search Engine (Google preferably)

The last step of this process is using a search engine to make sure you’re not going head-to-head with very tough competition. Ranking for a keyword comes from the words you chose, how well they are positioned in your structure, and everyone else who is trying to do the same.

1. Search your keyword phrase by itself in a search engine
2. Now, just look over the results. The number of results is less important than the sites that are coming up for the same phrase. The kind of sites you don’t want to compete against are (in order)…
   1. Big names like Wikipedia, About, Amazon, etc
   2. Government agencies or educational institutions
   3. A long list of sites that are already optimized for this exact phrase (you see your exact phrase appear in bold in the page titles)
3. If a couple results are tough competitors, that’s fine. You might not reach the top result but you could have a chance to reach the first page. Remember, though, that the less total monthly searches that this phrase receives (step 6 under Keyword Tool above), the more important a top 3 ranking is.
4. Finally, narrow down your keyword phrases to one (and only one) main phrase and one, maybe two secondary phrases.

You have now done far, far more than most people who decide on the words to use for their site. Congrats! The rest is downhill (especially if you’re using a content management system like WordPress or Drupal).

Step 4: Page Construction

This last step is critical but very easy. These actions will become second nature to you after you’ve done it a few times. Your main keyword phrase needs to go at the beginning (within a word or two, if not right at the beginning) in the following places:

1. Page title (this is what appears as the main link to click on the search results page)
2. Main site headline (this is the main headline that people see on the page)
3. First paragraph of content
4. Somewhere in your meta description (this is. if written properly, the text that appears below the main link on a search engine results page)
5. “Throughout” your content (just use the phrase naturally, don’t try to put it in every paragraph)

Your secondary keywords can also go in the page title (keep it under 70 characters), in the first paragraph, and throughout but don’t let them get in the way of the primary one. It’s very easy to throw away a potential good ranking for one phrase chasing after 3 or 4 different phrases.

There are other on-page SEO considerations like meta keywords (use them if you’re so inclined but they are not very important so don’t spend longer than a minute or two), headlines throughout the content (make sure these are useful for reading and organization first, then add keywords), and internal linking (if you’ve got a posts of pages on a subject you’re talking about, make sure to link there) but the 5 places above will account for any success you have with that page so concentrate on those and do the rest if you have extra time.

Nice work!

Whew! That was a bit of work, to be sure, but, with time and experience, this process gets easier and your choices get better. Not only that, your efforts will be paid off with better search engine ranking leading to more site visitors.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. 3 things that help me to write quality content
2. 5 Reasons You Should Fire Your SEO “Professional”
3. Analysis, Keywords and Monitoring: 3 Steps to Improve SEO

I’d love to hear feedback from everyone, but specifically from two groups of people:

1. People who work on the web: Developers, designers, consultants, bloggers, SEOs, etc… What’s missing here? Is the concept generally sound? Am I going overboard? Let me learn from your experience!
2. People who own or operate a website: Business owners, CEOs, marketers, novices, professionals… what confuses you the most on the web? What do you hear about but don’t understand? Where are your weaknesses? Is this list scary? Let me help you alleviate the pain!

I should say, before I drop this massive list on you, that this is not a list of skills you need to have, more like a list of things you need to consider and be able to speak to. If someone asks you “where does most of your traffic come from,” the answer should be “well, our Twitter account brings in about 100 visitors per month but the conversion rate is low. Search, however, has been increasing and that brings us leads” rather than “I haven’t the foggiest.” Understanding your site is not the same as taking over all the functions of a good webmaster; you don’t have the time for that and, if you’re doing your job as CEO/Principal/whatever well, you shouldn’t. But, you need to know the questions to ask, where your money is best spent, and when you’re being hoodwinked by a vendor. It’s my job to troubleshoot your RSS feed or build out a new piece of your site or qualify your crazy ideas (you do have a few crazy ideas, right) but it’s yours to have a vague idea of when that needs to happen.

So, without further ado, my definition of complete web literacy for business owners:

Web Literacy

Assumptions

• You have a reason to exist on the web
• You’ll find the time to do what’s needed
• You’ll be honest, straight-forward, and trustworthy

Incoming

Social

• You – visitors coming from your social efforts
• Others – visitors coming from the social efforts of others

Search

• General optimization – the basics of keywords and placement for your site at-large
• Per-page optimization – how to make each page perform better
• Link building – what are links, why are they important, and how to get more of them

Subscription

• RSS – what is it and do you need it
• Email – what it’s good for and how to get people to sign up

Referrals

• Network links – links from friends, partners, clients, etc.
• Off-site content – comments, guest posts, reviews
• Natural links – incoming links from posts, pages, and other content you didn’t create
• Profiles – identification pages on other sites like Google, Yelp, LinkedIn

Advertising

• Paid links – what they’re good for and when to use them
• AdWords – what it is and when to use it
• Exchanges – how to ask and what their value is

On-Site

Conversions

• “act” divided by “see” – the number of people who call or email compared to the number of people that could have but didn’t
• General improvement tactics – placement, color, micro-content, calls-to-action

Subscriptions

• Making it easy – how to make subscribing easy without annoying people
• Getting buy-in – why people should subscribe

Creation

• Regular content – when and how to make it
• Other media (video, audio, image) – when to use it and how to do it easily
• “static” content – what this means and what it’s good for
• Flagship content – how to make it, what to make, and how it works

Consumption

• Connecting it all – putting it all together to make it easy for your visitors
• Navigation – what this means and how to make it terrible
• Making it easy – the balance between having too much to to and not having enough

Outgoing

Social Outposts

• Choosing correctly – picking a social tool rather than using it “just because”
• Using correctly – how to get the most out of it so it doesn’t become a chore (or bite you in the ass)
• Optimization – keywords, tracking, and conversions

Outgoing referrals

• Outgoing links – how to point off-site and when
• Advertisements – who needs these and how to make them work
• F&F – give back to friends and family!

Data sources

• Separation – creating different sources for different purposes
• Formats – what does it all mean and how to use it appropriately

Tools/Tactics

HTML

• What you should know – not a lot but just enough
• What you should outsource – most of it

Analytics

• Visitors – who, why, what, and how
• Traffic Sources – what, how, and when
• Content – what, who, why, how, and when
• Conversions – who, why, and how

Design

• 80/20 – avoiding perfection like the plague
• Aesthetics vs. performance – making something work well ahead of making it look good and how to do both

SEO

• Keywords – what they are, how to find them, and how to use them
• Structure – The small things that come together for good SEO
• Links – the good, the bad, the ugly, and the hard to get

For the visual types: the mind map

Related posts:

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I should mention, this post was inspired by a great piece (guest posted) piece over at Tim Ferris’s blog about stoicism and entrepreneurship. After reading that post, I broke out the old philosophy textbook and read a little further.

A Stoic Introduction

First, a very brief introduction to stoicism via Wikipedia:

“…stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment…Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions”

Basically, a stoic understands that, in life, sh*t happens and the only control we have is how we react. Computers break, software crashes, and hard drives go bad. When these things inevitably occur, we can curse the gods, curse ourselves and others, and throw things like a child but none of these actions help the situation. Getting past anger and frustration is but a mental exercise.

But try to tell that to the woman learning CSS or the guy with an aging Windows Mobile device or the company who just lost a server array. During times like those, there doesn’t seem to be a mental exercise that can relieve the pressure. If only “mind over matter” were as easy as it sounds in a blog post.

Pre-Stoic Approach

This idea of “mind over emotions” and finding self-control where there once was none is an idea I’ve been exploring in my personal and professional life for many years. Though I took a philosophy class several years ago, I was not ready at that time to understand the benefit of stoicism and put it to work in my life. I only recently have been able to apply that term to what I assumed was a basic practice for anyone looking to find some kind of zen in their day-to-day existence.

Since the stoic approach is to move past harmful emotions stemming from conditions and experiences outside of our control, the first step is to find a reason to move past these emotions. In other words…

Find the Silver Lining

To move away from swearing at and physically destroying your computer or its I/O components (like your keyboard or mouse) when a problem occurs, you have to move towards some kind of positive outcome from your misfortune. For example:

• If you lose 5 years worth of digital pictures because you didn’t have a back-up, you’ll learn to always back-up your data in the future.
• If your printer breaks at the last possible minute and you’re left scrambling for a paper copy, you’ll learn that last-minute work like that always leads to pain and frustration.
• If your phone battery dies in the middle of a phone conversation, you’ll learn how to keep it charged.

You might look at the “silver lining” of the items I listed above and think “that’s pretty lame; I certainly wouldn’t choose to trade my digital photos for a quick tip I could read on a CNet blog.” If that’s the case, you’re missing the point. Here it is…

Know That You are Utterly Powerless

You’re just one corrupted disk away from losing everything on your computer. You’re one well-timed battery loss from losing a job opportunity. You’re one faulty circuit away from burning down your house. Morbid? Yes, but certainly important to come to terms with.

Knowing you are powerless doesn’t mean you take no precautions, however. In fact, it should clue you in to take even more precautions than those around you, especially when it involves things/stuff that cannot be replaced. You don’t have control over the sun, moon, tides, and weather but you can certainly lessen the impact of catastrophic failures.

Here’s what I recommend as the minimum you should do to guard against digital disasters:

1. Back up your contacts online: I’m always shocked by the number of voicemails I hear every year instructing me to “leave your name and number because I dropped my phone in the toilet from Transpotting.” It’s likely that your phone can be plugged into your computer and your numbers downloaded. At the very least, keep Gmail (great contact management) updated with the important ones. If you have to use Outlook, make sure to export these every month or so and save the spreadsheet to a Google Docs account. I have names and numbers from 10 years ago, only because it’s easy to keep it all around.
2. Back up your computer online: This is key, ESPECIALLY if you’re a Windows user. Viruses, hardware failure, and theft happen with disturbing regularity. By putting off creating a backup plan of some kind you’re playing with fire. Go ahead and back up on an external hard drive too if you’d like but if you have a robbery or a fire in your house, that’s not going to help much. I use JungleDisk to backup my photos, music, and archived documents. For day-to-day stuff, I can’t recommend Dropbox enough. You can get 2 gigabytes (more than you’ll need for your documents, at least) for free or 50 gigabytes for some small amount. Everything stays synced and you can hook it up to several different computers (if you have a desktop and a laptop).
3. Stay off of sensitive sites if you’re on public wifi: Don’t log into your bank account or PayPal while you’re on an open coffeeshop wifi signal. The chances of something happening are slim but it’s better not to take the chance if you can. Along these same lines, don’t assume that a password on your wifi is going to protect you.
4. Speaking of passwords, don’t use the same, easy password for all of your accounts. This is an annoying one but there are plenty of ways around it. I have an inordinate number of passwords that have to stay secure so I use KeePass. It generates good passwords for you and stores them all with some serious encryption. Use a few easy-to-remember ones for your most-accessed accounts for, for god’s sake, don’t use “123321″ on your web host!
5. Do the recommended updates on your computer: It’s annoying, I know, but make sure you always do your main operating system updates, Flash updates (very important), and Java updates. If you’re running a good anti-virus on a Windows computer (I recommend Microsoft’s own Security Essentials), keep that up to date too.

The point with taking these precautions is not to avoid the unpleasant; that isn’t possible. The point is to make it easier to say “I couldn’t control that but it could have been worse.”

Related posts:

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I should mention, this post is a bit self-indulgent but I can get over that if you can. The TL; DR (too long; didn’t read) for those who can’t is: I’m cutting back my hours with Social Media Today (SMT) slowly to take the first steps towards going fully into business for myself.

I’ve been with SMT for almost two years now. I started as a general “web guy” taking care of tech support requests and building out pieces of the site (what pieces we were limited to at the time). It was my first real web job, actually getting paid to do nothing but work on the web. It was also my first full work-from-home gig. Both of these facts have colored who I’ve become and where I’m going with my career/business/life and I’m so grateful for that.

I’ve seen SMT through several sponsors, 3 site launches (and one closure), 2 annual meetings, and one major platform change to Drupal (which I still can’t type correctly in Google [it's always "Druapl" for some reason] though I do it ten times a day). They’ve seen me through an incredible 3 months in Europe, 2 location moves (if you don’t count everything in between), and a marriage. All said and done, I think we both came out pretty even.

I’ve been thinking about this move since January. Well, I’ve been thinking about it for a while but only very seriously over the last month. It struck me that the team is twice as big as last year, the ideas flying around were twice as good, and the company was moving twice as fast. I realized that I needed to give SMT everything I had… or step down to let someone else do it. I talked to many people about it but the biggest motivator was my dad. He’s been self-employed for decades but also held a few full-time gigs in between. It was his advice (and his project) that really pushed me over the edge and made me realize it was time to make the move.

The conversation with Mark, the CTO at SMT, was as short and positive as it was difficult to initiate. I explained where I was coming from and that I would stay around as long as they needed to find the coverage. Mark was kind and understanding and wrote the following email to everyone (edited for length and content):

I want to let everyone know that Josh is looking to reduce the number of hours that he allocates to work with SMT so that he can devote more time to other projects. This isn’t a big surprise. We have always understood that Josh wanted to continue serving other clients besides SMT, and, as our own development needs have expanded, it seemed likely that we would reach a point where we would need more attention than Josh was prepared to give.

But that doesn’t make this any easier. In the [two] years that Josh has been with us, he has become central to our success. We’ve come to rely on his good judgment, good humor, and expertise in all the many tasks he handles. Speaking personally, I don’t know how I would have gotten through these last years, or how I will get through the next several, without him.

But I guess we’re going to find out. We’re going to move quickly to recruit a new Josh–or some pale imitation thereof … .

This is the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to move away from something I really enjoy towards something I expect to enjoy even more. This is also the first time that I won’t have a check appear at a specific time for a specific amount anymore. I’m scared sh*tless, to be perfectly honest, but I also know that it’s going to work out for the absolute best.

Harder than just stepping out into the unknown, though, is leaving such a dynamic, intelligent, and talented team of people and leaving behind an enormous web property that has my fingerprints all over it. We built something amazing together, something that started without me and will continue without me (at least without my daily toiling). It has been such a pleasure working with everyone there and I’m so excited to see where SMT goes, however I am involved. On that note, if you’re a talented, Drupal-familiar developer with an attention to detail and good communication skills, there’s a director of development job waiting for you at a great company. Tell Mark that Josh Can Help sent you…

So what’s to come for me now? I’m incredibly excited to start putting more of my time and ability towards some very personal projects which you’ll hear much more about as time goes on. In the meantime, a big thank you to everyone for your patience with my nightmare schedule, your support to make this transition, and your projects that keep me going. I’m looking forward to building a few really incredible things this year as well as writing more, selling more downloads, and taking more time off. Oh, and a facelift on this site. And more involvement on social networks. And maybe an ebook.

As a parting shot, I can’t help but to think about what has become my favorite quote since I heard it almost 10 years ago:

Do not fear going forward slowly; fear only to stand still.

At this point, it’s not the lack of speed that I’m scared of… quite the opposite!

No related posts.

First, though, I think it’s important to say one thing: no matter what I’m charging, I want my clients to be completely satisfied. In the end, that’s my only job. In addition to that, I’d like my clients to feel like what they paid for what they got was fair. I don’t compete on price because I don’t think that leads to value. I want to build great things and charge people the right amount.

But how to go about doing that? Here’s how I see it from a few different perspectives…

The Client

Let me put myself in your shoes, if you don’t mind. I am a client on a regular basis so this shouldn’t be too hard…

When I pay someone for something, there are two things on my mind: did I get what I needed and do I feel like I got a good value. There’s a balance here and the key is setting the right expectations. I expect to get what I need and I expect to be happy paying for it. It’s rare that you get everything you want and more but pay very little for it, especially with professional services. Unfortunately, it’s less rare to pay too much and not get what you need. But I digress…

So, I’m a client and I want satisfaction and value. In the web world, this translates to…

1. I want a website or blog or template or email that looks great, is to my specifications, and performs well. I want to have my bases covered (I’m not an expert after all) and a minimum of surprises down the road. I just want to feel like I was really taken care of.
2. In addition, I want to feel happy to be paying the amount I’m paying. Even if it’s a stretch, even if it’s a bit more than the budget, even if someone else was cheaper, I want to feel good about it.

I’m going to venture a guess, based on my experience, my opinion, and how well luxury goods do in America, that the first part of this puzzle is more important than the second to the vast majority of people. With that in mind, the concentration should be on providing the best possible product and the pricing will follow suit. Provide a great service, get overwhelmed with the response, and prices adjust accordingly.

But I’m getting away from the role-playing here. I’m a client, I want something great, and I pick someone that I think can make it for me. Now, I need to figure out if the price works. If I was able to choose between paying someone hourly or a fixed amount (a choice I offer when the situation can allow for either), I’m stuck:

• If I pay hourly, I’m not sure what my costs will be. I would expect an estimate of some kind (ballpark) and a notice if the project runs past that but what if it takes twice as long to create something usable? What if I’m stuck at my spending limit with nothing to show but a half-finished site?
• If I pay a fixed price, then I know how much I’m going to spend but will it be everything I wanted it to be? Are corners going to be cut to get it under budget? Am I going to have to push hard to get the features I’d like?

It’s a conundrum, either way you look at it. Would it make you feel better if I told you that the situation is no better for a developer?

The Service Provider

Back in my shoes (will, house shoes since I work from home) now…

When I create something, there are two things on my mind: did I create something great and do I feel like it was worth my time? There is a balance here and the key is choosing the right projects. There are fun projects that help me learn new things and there are projects that pay a lot but are arduous, boring, and tough to produce something I’m really proud of. The key to happiness for a developer is being able to find the fun, lucrative projects that challenge what we know and give us a lot of creative freedom. I want to say something sarcastic to the tune of “too bad there isn’t a fountain of those” but I have a pretty good track record so far. But, again, I digress…

So I want make clients happy while building things that are fun and making sure my bills get paid. It shouldn’t surprise you that these things are very tightly tied together. If I’m having a great time with the project and the people involved, the money that I eventually receive is much less important. Taken to the extreme, this is why I build side projects like the (Drudge Report website template or the WP-Drudge WordPress template). Sure, I sell them online but I have complete control and I build what sounds interesting (and the sales don’t quite make up for the time it took). Taken to the other extreme, I have turned down several projects that I know I won’t enjoy and I won’t be proud to display in my portfolio. I’m not interested in trading my finite number of hours on this planet just for cash; there has to be meta-compensation (i.e. pride in workmanship or design, learning a new skill, working with a fun group or person, etc).

I want to make people happy and I want to enjoy what I’m doing. During this love-fest, however, I also have rent and a car payment so I need some income. Being uncreative, I can charge one of two ways: I can charge by the hour or I can come up with an estimate and charge a fixed price. There are, of course, pros and cons to both:

1. If I charge hourly, I have a timer going and I can only make as much money as I have hours in the day. What’s the appropriate time to charge for phone calls if we talked about cars for 10 minutes? What about learning time, do I charge for that if I learned the skill for that project? I can’t charge for mistakes but what about conscious changes from one approach to another because of new found information? What’s an appropriate hourly rate that covers all bases? I do PHP development as well as Photoshop design; do those get charged at different rates? What happens when I forgot to start or stop the timer accidentally?
2. If I charge by the project, the big, huge, glaring, painful, tension-causing problem surrounds specifications. What did I agree to do for what price? If I say that I’ll build a site for $XXXX, what does that include? Should I spend 4 hours writing up exactly what I’m going to do so there is no confusion later? What about unforeseen circumstances? What about if you change your mind about something? In the end, you want what works and I want to build that but if you start changing what I’m building mid-way, are you going to understand the change in estimate? This kind of pricing rewards me for working quickly but how quick can I work while still providing a top-quality product? How many corners am I willing to cut to make sure it comes under budget? Do the projects that come in under my estimate make up for the ones that spiral out of control?

Problems abound for both methods.

What’s the right way?

Wouldn’t it be great if I just totally write the right answer down here and solved this problem for all time? Alas, Josh Can only Help so much…

I think the key to this is found between two things I said above:

• Clients want value and will often pay more for higher quality.
• Developers want to create something they are happy with, even if it takes more time.

So if the final cost is less important than the final outcome (not unimportant, just less), then it’s safe to say that the concentration should be on the work itself rather than the price, especially in places where quality work really shows.

In the end, the right answer, as usual, just depends on the person asking the question. For myself, I’ve moved more and more to an hourly system with a rough estimate up front, similar to a mechanic. I’ll let you know what I think it’s going to cost, keep you updated along the way, and notify if it goes over. I’m also working on a rate card for easily repeatable, often-requested services (installing and configuring WordPress, analytics reports, etc).

Whether you’re a client, a designer, a developer, or none of the above, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Related posts:

1. Considering a career in software, development, or digital design? Listen to the professionals at Microsoft.
2. Thoughts on conferences

I’m working with a couple of people (thanks Scott and Malcolm) who were requesting the template in the first place and they gave me a wishlist of features including:

• Advertising manager: I’ll probably just use one of the existing plugins out there and build support for it into the theme.
• Stats counter: This is something that Drudge has on his site and, if I can find something that works, I’ll add it.
• Link-by-link color settings: This won’t be too terribly hard so it will be included.
• Selective redirecting: This is the ability to still add posts to the site as well as links. This will just be determined by whether there is a link or not.
• Recurring links: I’m going to be adding this using the default links handling in WordPress to make things nice and easy.
• Theme aesthetics control: At launch, I’m going to include 4 themes: a stripped down, true “Drudge” version and three others. I’m also going to include controls for the background color, link color, and text size.
• Comments: Allow comments on the site for posted links on other sites
• Granular font and size control: Change the fonts and sizes for headlines, links, and descriptions.

I thought long and hard about how to manage links on the site and realized that the best way to do this was through the WordPress widget functionality. So I wrote a widget, my first one ever!

Basically, the links will be added to a particular category and then you add those blocks of categorized links into the column you want to display them in. The categories could be based on the content of the link or they could be more technical, like “top of 1st column” or similar.

The widget gives you a dropdown of all the categories that are on the site, the ability to hide the header, and the ability to control how many links are displayed in the block.

You can also use the other WordPress widgets in conjunction with this post listing widget. I’m guessing that the advertising plugin will create an ad widget of some kind but, if not, I’ll make sure to create one of those too.

I’m still thinking about pricing for this template but it will be reasonable, of course.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this template if it’s something you could see yourself using. What features would you need? How would you like it to look?

Thanks!

Related posts:

1. The Drudge Report style 3 column link page template
2. New custom WordPress theme and structure at JoshCanHelp

The idea of incoming links falls under this large, ethereal, very misunderstood heading of SEO, or search engine optimization. It’s one piece of the very important “how and where do I show up in search engines?” question. It can be low-hanging fruit for those just now paying attention to them and a welcome challenge to those who feel like they are running out of options to improve the number of people coming to their site.

So where to start? A quick explanation of what a link is.

What is a web link?

When I was first asked this question, I didn’t really know what to say. It’s like trying to discreetly define the word “chair.” A chair is … well, it’s a chair, like this chair right here. The definition becomes self-referential and, unfortunately, useless. So, here’s my non-circular definition of a link:

Link: a link is a pointer on one web asset to another.

A link can be an image or text or anything else you can see on a web page. You know how your mouse arrow changes to something different and you know you can click there and go somewhere else? That’s the long and the short of it.

The internet, the whole internet, is made possible by these links. In fact, the whole idea of a “web” comes from just these connections. Being able to jump between documents displayed by servers around the world is what the web is. As such, links are pretty important. Still, this is a bit too abstract of a definition for our purposes.

Why you should care about incoming links

If a link is a pointer from one asset to another, an incoming link is a pointer from an external asset to an asset on your web site (more specifically, an asset contained in your domain name). These are important for two reasons:

1. An incoming link means that people can get to a page on your site
2. Search engines see incoming links as endorsements to your site

If someone links to a page or post on your site saying “check out this great dumpling recipe” then the search engines knows that the page being linked to has information on dumpling recipes. It might seem unfathomable that search engines could know such a minuscule detail but they do and the more links that say the same thing pointing to the same place, the more they pay attention. The more of these descriptive, incoming links you have, the better your information appears to search engines and the higher your ranking is on the results page. This can become a major source of traffic when you start to rank well for words many people are searching.

Different links have different values but the short of it is this: increase the number of sites linking to you.

Good links, better links, and bad links

So you know what to do, get more links. But links come in all flavors and you want to concentrate your time and energy on getting the best kind of links.

So what kind of links to you want? Here are the best kind of links you can have:

• Text links pointing to your site with good keywords. This is the best kind of link you can get. It’s one-way (they just point to a page on your site), it has a few keywords (specific words that describe the page), and comes from a site that isn’t spam. The more text links with keywords from good domains you can get, the better. These come from having great content on your site (a regularly-written blog helps greatly) and little else.
• Links from very strong domains. A link from joshcanhelp.com is good but a link from harvard.edu is much, much better. See, not only do search engines watch the words that are used to link to you, they watch the domain that’s linking. A link from nytimes.com is “worth” more than a link from a smaller blog because nytimes.com is seen as more of an authority. Combine this with the above and you’ve got a great link.

Other kinds of links are better than nothing and still help your search engine position in aggregate but are secondary to the ones above. For these links, it’s quantity over quality:

• Links exchanged with other sites. If you’ve had a website for a while, you’ve probably gotten the email about exchanging links from a random person with their own site. For the most part, this kind of linking is unhelpful to either party but people still ask. Exchange links with friends, colleagues, and clients in or near your industry and ignore the rest.
• Links from Twitter and Twitter aggregators. These move fast, are huge in numbers, and are ethereal in relevance. Links to your site shared on Twitter are a good thing in general but aren’t going to do a lot, directly, for your search engine rank. Update 12/7/2010: Just found this great article about using Twitter to build links… looks like Twitter can make a difference!
• Links from images. I’ve read a few views on this but it looks like, in general, images that are linked to your site (i.e. images someone can click on and get to your site) are less important than text links for a variety of reasons, most centering around lack of descriptive text in the image.
• Links from site profiles, directories, and blog comments. These is the trickiest of them all but I put it under “good but not great” for a a few reasons. First, sometimes these links are marked as “no follow,” which means, simply, that it’s not going to help your ranking. Second, sometimes these sites are only viewable to people logged into the site so search engines can’t see them. Third, you don’t always have control over the text for these links so they aren’t going to be strong. Build these link whenever you can but these links, by themselves aren’t going to help much with search engine rank.

There are bad links too but, unless you’re working with an unscrupulous contractor, you won’t have to worry about these. It’s very rare to be linked to without your control and have it negatively affect your rankings. Still, if you are working with someone to help your rankings, keep your eye out for…

• Links from “link farms.” I hate this term because it sounds so 2001 but they still exist out there. These are pages and sites that exist just add links. Once search engines recognize these kinds of sites, the links become useless at best and toxic at worst.
• Unseen links stuffed with keywords. Another tactic could be text links with keywords on other sites styled so you can’t see them. Sometimes these are added to your site as well as others to create linking between sites managed by the same contractor. Like the link farms, these are scanned for and ignored, if not penalized.

Q&A from clients

This post was inspired by a emails I’ve received over the last few months. Here are a few specific questions I was asked and the answers I gave.

What is the best link-building strategy?

This is such a massive question that it’s hard to answer succinctly. Still, it’s an important one and something anyone with a website should be thinking about. Link-building can be very rewarding but also incredibly time-consuming so here are a few low-hanging fruit that you should start with:

1. If you’re reading online content, add a comment on pages that allow you to add your site link (see below for more info on this)
2. Always add your site link to online profiles you have… Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
3. Reach out to colleagues and clients to see if you can add a link to their site (suggest the text that they use)
4. Submit your site to a few free web directories

I assume the only benefit in commenting is if someone clicks onto my picture and follows it to my website.  Or is there something else taking place (with spiders etc) without requiring someone to click on me?

A link is a link is a link and, unless it’s coming from an untrusted source (see above) then the more incoming links the better. Each link, however, has a quality associated with it and this is based on the quality of the site that’s linking to you.

If you have control over the link (if you’re exchanging links or you link to yourself from somewhere else), then use appropriate keywords in the link text. If don’t have control, then just be happy with an incoming link.

When I am posting comments on other blogs what is the best way to identify myself for the biggest SEO payoff?

As for comments, usually sites link your name to the URL you added in the comment. It might be tempting to put your name as “[Keyword 1] [Keyword 2] [Keyword 3]” but that’s pretty spammy looking and you might have your comment deleted. Just use your name and, if it’s relevant (and allowed) add a link to a related blog post in the body of the comment. Be wary of looking like a link-dropper, someone who just commented to add a link to their own properties. If you’re going to take the time to leave a comment, leave a good one and the blog owner will be perfectly OK with a link back to your blog. Just leave a “great post!” followed by your URL and they won’t be (I’ve deleted these before).

Related posts:

1. Create a simple website with the Google Docs CMS
2. Choosing Keyword Phrases for Your Site Content

As I see it, there are three questions you should ask yourself before taking any steps forward with a web project:

1. Is there a need for what I want to do that isn’t being fulfilled somewhere else?
2. If there is a need, is what I’m trying to build going to fit that need in a way that people will use it?
3. If there is a need and what I’m trying to do will properly fit that need, is it built in a way that makes it easy for me to keep fulfilling that need?

These questions are the Holy Trinity of ideas on the web. Extrapolated a bit further, these are the questions anyone should be asking before making anything to sell to other people but I’m going to keep the scope with web ideas since I want to speak from my experience rather than just pontificate (I’ll be doing a bit of that too, though).

This list is not a check list (“yep, yep, yep… cool, let’s go!“), nor is it any guarantee of success (“JoshCanHelp’s simple rules to endless fame and fortune“). These questions should serve as the very minimum of research you should do before paying anyone to design, build, or otherwise create anything. If you don’t take the time to answer these questions to the best of your ability then you’re not investing your money, you’re gambling it. If you do take the time to answer these questions, you will improve your chances of succeeding greatly.

Let’s walk through these one-by-one but do please note that I use “site,” “project,” “tool,” and “app” to mean whatever you want to build online:

Is there a need for what I want to do that isn’t being fulfilled somewhere else?

This is the all-important “market research” question. First, you’re figuring out if there’s anyone out there that has a need for your idea. If you decide that there is, you need to figure out the competition for your idea and get familiar with that competition.

This is going to be the big soul-searching one. Ask yourself:

• What, exactly, are you trying to build?
• What will this site or tool be used for?
• What are you offering to people?

Answer these questions honestly, not in market-speak. This isn’t a pitch, this is an inquiry. You need to be able to summarize what you’re trying to build in a sentence or two. If you can’t do that then keep working until you can.

Once you’ve defined what you want to do, you need to do a little research. Ask yourself:

• Are there any other sites doing anything like this? If your answer is no here, look a little harder.
• What sites are doing something similar?
• If there are already sites providing this, how is this one different?
• How are we different? Same but cheaper? Premium?

You don’t need to go to business school to start the preliminary research on this and spending any money before you’re at least marginally familiar with the landscape is a big mistake. Answer the first section of questions to be clear on what you want to do, then Google your way to answers on the second one.

Second, will people want to use what I want to build to fulfill this gap I’ve found?

This is probably the hardest thing to answer because you will always be biased towards your own ideas. Of course people will use it, I really need something like this!

I’m fighting the urge to call this the most important step, partly because it’s easy to overlook or gloss over and partly because it’s hard to fix once to fix the problem once you’ve realized that it’s what you made that is failing to perform. But I won’t call it the most important step because then you might just ignore the others.

The only real way to solve this problem is get in contact with people who might be using it. Talk to 5 – 10 people in the target audience (re: the people you would expect to use this site) that you want to appeal to. Spend some time coming up with a survey and ask people. Friends, family, doesn’t matter who as long as they are the type of people that would be using this site.

A few sample questions:

• “Do you currently use a tool or website that does _____?”
• “What do you like about this tool? Dislike? What would you change?”
• “Would you use a tool if it did _____?”
• “How much would it take to make you stop using tool X and start using tool Y?”

Draw pictures, diagrams, schematics, comparisons… whatever it takes to communicate, clearly, your idea and get a sense of whether it would be worth it for someone to start using it. These are the preliminary baby steps towards user-testing your product once you have a working prototype.

Third, is this market-gap-filling tool that I’ve made easy enough to maintain and administer?

This is an easy step compared to the others. The purpose here is to be sure you’re building something that makes it easy for you to serve your audience. Remember that there are two sets of people using the site: the admins and the users. There will be many, many more users than admins but don’t fall into the trap of “it’s ok if my job is hard, as long as theirs is easy” because it’s going to suck later. It should suck for you instead of the users but the goal is for it not to suck at all for anyone.

The best way to go about this step is to list every possible way that you will be supporting the features you described in step 1 and step 2. You’re looking to create what are called use cases, the specific ways that admins will be using the site. Use something like FreeMind to organize your thoughts hierarchically or just start with a simple list of functions and branch out from there. Get it all down: from “must have” to “would be nice” all the way down it “I wonder if it’s possible to…” You’re looking for all the ways to make your life easy creating the stuff that people will come back over and over to use and see.

After that, get this list to whomever is building your site and walk through it item-by-item. They’ll tell you whether something is too hard to be worth it or an easy fix. If you find the right one, they’ll also help you figure out your other on- and off-line processes to make the whole thing work better.

Again, don’t sell yourself short on this one. Just assuming your life will be hell for a period of time while you get things figured out will only serve to stress you out and set the tone for the rest of the site (“hey, it couldn’t get much worse than this, right?“).

Recap

So, every morning when you wake up with the next big amazing internet idea, I want you to do these things, in order:

1. Calm down
2. Whittle your idea down to a few sentences that actually make sense
3. Try explaining your idea using these few sentences to someone that might use it and see what they say
4. Repeat #3 several times; listen carefully
5. Write down everything you would need as an administrator to make this idea happen
6. Email me

I love feedback so leave your comments, good or bad, below. Am I off my rocker? Speaking nonsense? Let me know.

Related posts:

1. You want to create a website but why? Make sure you can answer that question…
2. Building a homepage from a blog: Part 1: Conceptualization and Planning
3. Building a homepage from a blog: Part 2: Finalizing the design and planning out mark-up and CSS structure.