I tried to use Evernote for well over 1 year. I would bookmark random things, try to get used to their interface, try to tag things or keep my thoughts organized and just had a hard time using it for some reason.

Then along came Clipboard…and the rest is history.

Here’s Clipboard’s brief intro to their service:

I know this isn’t an expansive post, I just had to get it out there that I’m an avid fan of Clipboard.com. Their UI, intuitive feel, easy bookmarking, hashtag organization and more just make it a winning tool that I’ll use for the long haul.

The post Clipboard.com Review appeared first on james zolman.

Then I tried my hand at email marketing. I thought I did OK, but not as good as I could have because I was trying to use a command-line tool and had to spend a lot of time learning to do that vs actually marketing by email.

I learned a lot during this 5 or 6 month experiment. One of the things I learned was that I needed to have a few junk email addresses so I could see what is getting caught by spam filters at Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. Then I would simply try to avoid those tactics. I would also watch for spam that passed those filters and duplicate their format to get Inbox’d a lot more. Everybody that is into email marketing should do that, even if they are using a clean, home-grown list and are white-listed.

Inbox’ing is important because nobody checks their spam folder for promotions/offers/marketing material, right? But if you get into their Inbox, you could be delivering an important message and require a read or at least a glance. This is called an ‘open’. This .1 second glance is all you get to grab their attention and get them to buy!

High volume email marketing is exciting. There are a lot of black-hat email marketers out there. These are typically called spammers. There is honestly a difference between a clean high volume email marketer and a spammer…barely. High volume email marketers strive to maintain a clean list of email addresses while a spammer might scrape the web for email addresses to add to their lists, no permission necessary on the user’s part.

I used to post my email address publicly on all of my websites. They would get hit with hundreds or thousands of spam attempts every day. Luckily, Google Apps would catch 99%+ of those and put them in the Spam folder. It was still annoying and a waste of time to have to delete or see 10+ spam messages coming through to my Inbox, only to be deleted by me after I reviewed their code to see how they Inbox’d my Google Apps account.

I still get a lot of spam at a legacy email address, but I found a little secret to avoiding spammers that you might find useful too. I simply hide my email address in plain sight. @ symbol and all.

I read about this trick years ago and am totally bummed out that I can’t seem to find my source. This individual or company tested a variety of techniques for putting email addresses in privacy policies and contact pages. This technique was one of the most foolproof, usable techniques in this study and I have been using it ever since. If you know the study I’m referring to, please tweet at me so I can update the post with that study.

Here’s the trick – email address isn’t real but the concept is simple:

info@<span style="display: none;">my-name-is-inigo-montoya-you-killed-my-father-prepare-to-die</span>jameszol.com

It’s easy, right? Just drop the display:none; span into any part of your email address. Put whatever you want where I put “my-name-is-inigo-montoya-you-killed-my-father-prepare-to-die”. And scrapers rarely ever find it or spam you.

Here’s how it looks live:

info@my-name-is-inigo-montoya-you-killed-my-father-prepare-to-diejameszol.com

The beauty of this is that it is usable from a user standpoint, even if they have javascript disabled. You should be able to copy and paste the visible portion without a problem. Or a user can simply type the address to send a note. Scrapers be damned.

I have been using the email address on my privacy page for quite some time now and my Google Apps spam box hasn’t had more than 100 spam messages/month, and most of those are subscriptions I signed up for but got annoyed at their frequency and forgot my password so I couldn’t change those email preferences. Into the spam folder they went.

I hope you find this trick useful and you avoid getting a lot of spam in the future!

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Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong.

-Ken Danagger (Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, Chapter 1, Page 725)

It takes a lot of time to train a newbie to be as good as, or better than, you think you are.

Or you really are awesome.

In that case, it simply takes a lot of time to train anybody to be as good as, or better than, you.

It also takes a lot of time and money to let somebody earn their stripes in your shop.

I used to hire and train people to produce the quality results I was looking for. It was great. The ability to help shape somebody to be better than me was an experience I wouldn’t discount or trade for any other hiring experience. The problem is that I feel that I have only been a real benefit (via training) to 1 or 2 people in my lifetime as an Entrepreneur…out of dozens of employees or contractors who I have worked with.

My fail rate at benefiting the people I train is staggering.

Over the last 2 or 3 years, I have been selfish in who I hire. How so? By trying to hire people who are masters of their craft. These people are already better than me at their specific trade and they require little to no training on the quality I expect when working with me.

I benefit them by paying fairly, and they are a benefit to me by providing top tier services and results.

By hiring up, my fail rate at benefiting the people I work with has dropped significantly because they are worth (and paid, imo) a premium.

The upside to hiring up:

1. More insight. Smart, talented experts go beyond expectations by offering to connect you with the right person, make great book recommendations, answer general business questions from their perspective, and more. They are a value-add to you and your company over and above what you hired them for – while they still execute their job description duties nearly flawlessly.

2. Better/cleaner/faster execution. Everybody makes mistakes. The people you hire up simply make fewer mistakes and move faster than ordinary hires or trainees.

3. Surrounding yourself with smart, talented people inevitably helps you become smarter and more talented too. I don’t consider myself incredibly talented or smart or ahead of the curve…but I feel like I am all those things when I surround myself with those types of people. It’s refreshing, in a sense, to have conversations with people smarter than yourself.

The downside to hiring up:

The genius group I hire has to converse with me, the lowest common denominator per se, and help me grow into something better than I am today.

That shouldn’t be too much of a downside for them because I am happy to pay quite well for the right people to be on my team.

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This blog has a few quirks that I want to share:

1) No onsite comments. I would love to host the ongoing discussion elsewhere. Just not at my house. The best discussions about the things I plan to write about happen outside of the home at bars or restaurants or in the social sphere.

2) No analytics or onsite site-wide stats counters. My brain is full of data because of my career-choice. This will be my zen zone in a way. I can write or share, and I don’t have to think about the popular vote or what visitors are reading or where they are coming from. I’m just glad you’re here. I’m honored that you’re here. I won’t put a number on you and tuck you away as a unique or returning visitor, branded or nonbranded, etc. At the same time, I will likely use external measures to learn about this site. And I’ll probably write about it.

3) …

4) Profit.

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