Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Jacquie Lawson, an English artist has a great site that highlights her cards for sale. There are also free previews for all of her cards. They are Great!
I have been reading quite a bit lately about whether blogging is no longer growing and maybe even growing away.
This seems to all have been started by Dilbert creator Scott Adams saying that he was disappointed with his blog’s performance and would be writing less. He seems to be upset that many people are reading his blog through their RSS readers and they don’t show the ads, so he’s making less than he thought he would.
I think this controversy may brought him more readers than ever. I hadn’t heard of Scott’s blog, but started reading it and now subscribe. He hasn’t slowed down his postings yet, by the way.
I started reading many posts on this issue and I think that Jennifer Laycock may have the opinion that I like best. She says that blogging is just getting started and like all things it’s going to change. Of course it’s not a get rich quick thing, probably only was in the very beginning, but if you post good information on a fairly regular basis your blog can be one of the best promotional tools that you have.
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On my post from yesterday How Can I Say NO? I had a bad link to the article that I was writing about. Sorry about that, it’s fixed now.
After writing that post I kept seeing things all day that related to it. Mostly people asking for work done for free, most with the “opportunity” to be paid later from the profits of your own work.
When I first started this business I took several jobs on a percentage of the sales basis even though deep down I knew better. I was just starting out and had the time, but of all the freebies that I gave out only one is still paying me a little and even after a year I believe that one day it may have been worth it, but it hasn’t been yet.
I think that the problem really is that people who have to risk nothing won’t put nearly as much energy in to their promotion and marketing efforts as someone who has something to lose. Where I now do quite a bit of writing and giving away information for free, I do it for myself and not for others.
I see Wordpreneur has a good post today called “My Thoughts on Writing for Free”. I guess these things everywhere.
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As someone who has only been in business for myself a short time, about a year and a half. I find myself saying yes to requests that I probably should have said no to.
As time goes and my business grows on I do find myself “firing” problem customers and not taking every request for work just because I can. I think that my main problem may be that I don’t have any hard and fast rules for what I will and won’t do, but today I was reading ” 10 Absolute “Nos!” for Freelancers” on a site called Wake Up Later: Freelance Blog + Passive Income.
I think that I will give these a try.
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I like to write about companies that treat people well that are seen as “good”. Companies like Starbucks and Zappos that seem to treat everyone well. How their goodwill relates to great free publicity about their companies. Some people call it Social Marketing.
I have also thought about good lessons learned from what not to do.
Recently I spoke to someone who works for a manufacturing company. It’s a small company, but growing pretty fast. Because of their growth they are adding more part time people.
Recently the owner realized that they had a policy already in place that would pay most of these people for the Thanksgiving holiday. Because they were also closed the following day part timers would be paid for two days.
On the day before the holiday they had a notice posted that said in effect that the policy had changed and most of the part time people were no longer eligible for holiday pay. Some of the people who were affected by this policy had left for the day and didn’t even know about it.
I’m not saying that this company didn’t have the right to change their policy. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not sure what the rules are. I am saying that the way they went about it seems very underhanded. I believe that whatever amount of money that was saved from this policy change will be far surpassed in bad will and possibly even bad publicity. My thoughts are that if it wasn’t possible to make this change a month earlier it would have been much better to just bite the bullet and make the change for the next holiday. They could have explained that because there were so many more part time people than before the policy had to be changed and the workers would have some time to plan for it. Doing it the day before the holiday just looks so uncaring and looks are what counts.
The lesson here is to consider what you do in your business as if everyone in the world may know about it. After all I’m writing about this and even though I’m not saying the name of the company it is very possible that someone else may publish it for all to see. Then they may have to defend themselves to more than just their employees. In business today you have to be careful how that you treat people. With the ease of communication your actions may come back to haunt you in ways that you haven’t thought of.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Radiant Plumbing. Having been in the plumbing parts business myself I may look at theses sites with more of a critical eye than most visitors. This is a site that does something I think is very hard, make plumbing look fun.
You get a happy look that looks like tile so you know at first glance it’s something for the kitchen or bathroom. The navigation is right at the top and easy to use.
I like the picture of the employee (owner?) right on the first page to give them a more personal appeal.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
ZIPskinny is an site that lets you compare demographics of ZIP codes in a zip code area. The site was created as a Web development hobby project using Census 2000 data obtained from the Census website.
The site provides an interesting “first glance” at a ZIP Code are. It’s not research quality data, but there are some interesting bits of information here. Try checking for bad neighbors or finding out the neighborhood walkability.
It’s Thanksgiving here in the US and I want to wish you all a great day.
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It’s a day of gathering together with friends and family and sharing your blessings. It’s a day for being with people that you enjoy being with, enjoying a fine meal and being grateful for what you have.
It is what holidays should be like.
I have written before about Firefox. It’s my browser of choice and one of the reasons is that because it’s open source there are many other developers who are making cool plugins for it.
Today I was reading a post by Mitch Joel called “Firefox Extensions That Make Me A Better Marketer” on his site Six Pixels of Separation which is about Marketing and Communications.
He offers some good tools to check out and his readers give many more.
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One of the first things that you do when starting a website is to register your domain name. I had more than one of my customers ask me “should I sign up for one year or more?”
I have always believed that because that information is public and freely available that it would make sense to register your name for a longer period of time. Most registrars will go ten years and some even longer. I wrote an article called “Why Should A Search Engine Trust You” where I talked about that.
I told my customer that I believed that having a domain name registered for a longer period of time will help your rankings because it makes it look like you plan to keep the site around for a while, while most fly by night ones will only register for a year at a time. While the average visitor won’t know that, the search engines will.
Today I read on the Search Engine Guide an article by Jennifer Laycock called “Does Registering Your Domain for Longer Periods Help You Rank Better?” Jennifer is an SEO expert who’s opinions I think very highly of and she doesn’t think that registering for longer periods of time will help.
While neither of us know this answer for sure we both agree that it won’t hurt your rankings and that it’s very hard for a new site to get to be listed for anything but their name on Google for at least six months.
My recommendation won’t change, if you are planning to keep your site going for any period of time registering your name for a longer period of time really costs you nothing, it won’t hurt your rankings and it just may help.
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