The complement to the brilliant strategy is the thankless work of lower-leverage detail...... An organization with feet on the street and alert and regular attention to detail can build more trust and develop better relationships than one that hits and runs.
There are good habits, and there are bad habits. Seth Godin in this blog post talks of some good habits to acquire. Little things like writing thank you notes.
I read somewhere you had to pick between the panels, two out of four allowed. So I showed up early for registration. Ends up you did not have to pick. So I went to all four. Well, there was a Seth Godin speech to begin with. I did that. And Chris Dixon spoke after the panels were over. And there was the social/networking part to cap it all. All in all it was a half day affair. It was a few trips between floors one and five for me. I got to take in half of each panel.
Image by Lachlan Hardy via FlickrThere are two major controversies raging in the blogosphere right now. One is to do with The Angel List. The other is to do with our own Fred Wilson's blog post about marketing. Fred has started a s_itstorm by suggesting the best tech startups don't need marketing budgets. In fact, that is how he spots a great tech startup when he sees one.
The Angel List controversy I am sanguine about. I don't see two sides to the argument. There are many ways to invest. The Angel List is just one of them. Efforts like The Angel List have surely democratized the investment climate for the early stage startups. But there are old school holdouts with proven track records who think the process at The Angel List is too diluted. You can't really find nuggets of gold there.
I have said before that I don't expect an iconic company like Google, Facebook to emerge out of Y Combinator. But Y Combinator has been a great entrance to the scene. The majority of startups are not going to go IPO. And Y Combinator works great for such middling efforts.
I just read a whole bunch of blog posts by Seth Godin. He casually calls himself the best business blogger in the world and I believe him. I once emailed him (and he emailed me back; that does not make me special, he emails everyone back) about adding a comments section to his blog. He did not say it, but I think his attitude is, if you want to talk to me, email me directly. But now his blog posts come with the Like button. I dig that. It's good to be able to share.
Seth is a thinker. He challenges. I doubt he would be a great manager of a restaurant, for example. But we got plenty of those. We don't have enough people of the Seth Godin kind.
I really like Seth's writing style. It is so direct and obvious and simple. So when he says something profound, it does not feel complicated but rather obvious. Seth will say the darndest things.
I put out a blog post called Seth Godin Looks Like A Movie Star and my blog's traffic fell off the cliff for the next few days. I am going to work to build it back up starting from today.
Seth Godin poured some water on Twitter saying the reason he does not want to get on Twitter is because he would rather continue being the best business blogger in the world. He can't be the best Tweet, but that he is already the reigning business blogger.
The guy is a great business blogger. He pours out pearls of wisdom. His blog posts read like fables. And the grand claim, if not factually true, is absolutely great marketing. His marketing tips have been more believable to me in the aftermath.
His blog is a nice one to keep up with. It is inspiring. And recently I had an email from the guy. I said how come your trackback thing is not working? Trust me, if I knew how to fix it, I would fix it, he said. Then he got me talking to his techies.
It felt like getting a picture taken with a movie star.
I really like his emphasis on out of the box thinking.
Learning from Singer More now than ever, success today is no guarantee of success tomorrow. ..... I bet you can list a dozen "critical" industries that will be as relevant to life in 2020 as Singer is to our world today. ...... Hiding isn't working, and neither is whining. The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. Circling the big domino They try to launch worldwide and beat Google. They try to get an endorsement from the Prince of Denmark. They try to break out with a feature on a major blog. They try to act like Coca Cola from the first day. And they try and they try and they try until they get so frustrated, they quit. ..... A few brands pick out tiny dominos instead. And topple them. And they do it again. Spotto! On the road to mediocrity Spectacles Two ways to build trust What works is someone walking the walk while they talk a good game. ..... their lack of spin and hustle hit exactly the right tone Circles of Convenience convenient approaches rarely break through or generate extraordinary returns Scalejacking The internet is about who, not how many. The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000. ..... "Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)" Ignore everyone else. What's off the table?Big marketing breakthroughs always come from doing something that everyone else says is off the table. You matter Textbook rant assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice. ...... In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it's foolish to give me definitions to memorize. ..... I've never seen a single blog post that says, "wait until I explain what I learned from a textbook!" ..... This industry deserves to die. Ruby slippers How big is your farm? Should Hugh swear so much? The irony, as most multimillionaire authors will tell you, is that it's art that creates the commerce, not the other way around. Direct and useful project feedback I'm not talking about annual reviews (which are stupid) ..... (Not criticism, feedback). Guy #3 Tough! if you're a little tougher than people who are ready to give up, or you are a little more creative than people who are stuck, you'll break through. Graduate school for unemployed college students Start, run and grow an online commun
ity. "Why am I here?" Harvesting You're boring When smart people are hard to understand Learning from the MBA program We didn’t do this at all at when I was at Stanford. We spent a lot of time reading irrelevant case studies and even more time building complex financial models. ........ The act of defending your work in writing became a habit, and once it was a habit, the quality of everything improved. ...... There's not much I'm going to tell you that's not in my blog posts or books. Out of boundsNike isn't allowed to make a computer ..... once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow. Thinking about the compromise I know people with $50,000,000 in the bank who still don't believe that they have enough, who still grind away at a job they don't like trying to earn another penny. .... No right answers, but some good questions.
Mark Penn says in his famous Wall Street Journal article that at 100,000 unique visits per month, a blogger hits 75K in income. There is a suggestion that there is a direct correlation between how much traffic you get and how much you make as a blogger. So how do you go about increasing traffic for your blog?
There are three kinds of traffic:
Search Traffic
Referring Sites
Direct Traffic
If you focus solely on content creation and engage in no other marketing effort, all your traffic is going to come from search engines. If you become inactive for any length of time, you are still going to get residual traffic. Most of that likely might be search engine traffic, except if you get residual traffic of the other two kinds from your previous marketing efforts.
It is fundamental that you use Google Analytics or a similar tool to see how much and what kind of traffic you are getting. The tool also tells you of the keywords people use to feed the search engines to end up at your site, and what pages they visit. This helps you discover your niche, and to create ever more content for that particular niche. For me right now that seems to be Android.
More specifically "donut android" and "cupcake android." For those two phrases my blog for now shows up on the first page of Google search results. That is prime real estate. The reason I have to hone in that niche makes sense at many levels to me.
When I write new blog posts on Android, content creation and marketing are not two different activities. They are one and the same.
Android is no cottage industry. It is not some sub sub sub topic. It just might end up being the top technology news for this year.
Android so totally fits into my IC vision and my startup. The more I learn about Android, the better for me. I don't mind getting paid to learn. (Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures) I plot every day to go back to working on my startup full time. Android is fundamental to the IC vision. The ground - operating system - itself has to move for the vision to become reality.
I feel lucky that the topic in technology that I find most fascinating right now is also my blog's prime niche according to Google Analytics. And I got told of that niche right after my first Android blog post. I find that amazing. My respect for Google's algorithms grew. And when Google gave me the number two spot after my first Donut Android blog post, my respect for the search engine really grew. (Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android)
Search engine traffic I think is the best kind, but working on the other two does not take away from your search engine traffic, quite the opposite, so don't ignore the other two either.
If I am a tech blogger, it makes sense that I visit TechCrunch, for example, or Mashable. And if I am going to visit anyways, why not participate in the comments sections? It takes but a few seconds. And because your name gets hyperlinked to your blog, those comments sections start sending a little traffic your way. What is there to complain?
Contrary to the stereotype, blogging is a social activity. You have to belong to blogging and online communities around your interests. You have to forge friendships in the blogosphere. And forging friendships with bloggers who are not so big name increases your chances of them putting you on their blogrolls. After traffic, those backlinks are what jack up your google rank. Those backlinks are key. And content creation alone will not do the work for you, especially during the early stages when you are still wondering how you hit 1,000 page hits a day.
Twitter is micro-blogging. And there is another: that would be the comments sections of other blogs. Got to participate.
Twitter is another great place to socialize. Don't just have a list of people you follow and followers. Got to make some time and visit their profile pages and respond to some of their tweets. These are real living, breathing people. Get to know some of them, or many of them if possible.
And there is direct traffic. Feedburner lets you put a box at your blog that gives visitors the option to subscribe to your blog with their email addresses. Seth Godin claims that mailing list is how he gets most of his traffic. But he probably became a star blogger first. But before you become famous and other people know you, when you are a small fish blogger, there are people you know. Once in a while it is okay to send out emails to people you know sharing a blog post or two with them. Look Ma, no hands!
Focus on great content creation.
Find your niche, and create great content for that particular niche, but also constantly be diversifying. You don't want to go out of business when one rainy day Google revised its algorithms and your blog ended up in Siberia.
Blogging is a social activity. Be in a habit of visiting other blogs and participating in their comments sections in meaningful ways.
Strive to generate a band of loyal visitors, people who want to lap up every blog post you put out because, oh, you are just so wonderful.
This is a great blog post by Jeff Jarvis, someone I got to meet in person on February 3 at the Diller building. (NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09)
Davos 09: Open Bank full disclosure of performance and compensation. ...... a means to confirm that customers understood what they were buying ...... Bankers are in fortress mode ...... eimagined retail, education, and government. ....... obert Scoble, who has been arguing that the way out of our mess is to start a million companies ....... Shimon Peres, who made a forceful argument that the future will be secured with investment in technology (including biotechnology) and education (which he as much as said was the next thing to come after the internet wave). ........ giving trillions of dollars to the incumbents, to people like that sneering banker ....... We should, instead, be investing our money in entrepreneurs and technologists, the people who will change old industries, reimagining them under new rules with new people ..... need to look at replacing rather than just repairing these broken institutions .... We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future. Scenario For News news - on both the content and business side - will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative. ....... provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together ........ open the process of news in blogs ...... Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. ....... less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation. ....... nvestigations matter more than ever ....... Do what you do best and link to the rest ........ covering a niche deeply ....... The old syndication model will die ..... he wire-service model is in jeopardy ..... any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms ........ EveryBlock will organize data; Outside.in will organize geo content; Daylife will organize news; Publish2 will organize links; Digg will help the crowd curate; Clickable will help sell ads; Google will serve ads; YouTube and Brightcove will serve videos ......... algorithms mining newly transparent government documents ........ Seth Godin’s prescription for The New York Times ..... Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site? The Link Changes Everything The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads. Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy
Jarvis is an imaginative optimist.
Instead of seeing job losses and folding companies and wrecked futures and dislocations he sees capitalism's creative destructions. Historic parallels still apply. What is happening right now to the economy seems to happen once every 70 years, has happened four times in a row now. After each such crisis the economy has come out better than ever before. Jarvis is suggesting the same is about to happen all over again. He is focused on the impending good news.
Not all the observations are his, he borrows as freely as he expounds. But they together are a great narrative to these wildly depressing times for the most. Many jobs are lost forever. But new, better jobs have to be created, and people need to be helped to transition to those new jobs.
What are some of his observations, and that of others he mentions?
The market is rightly bringing down the artificially high prices on a host of things.
An old building is being brought down so a new building can take its place.
This fundamental restructuring is to the economy but also to society. How we relate to each other is changing.
Many jobs lost now will never return. "In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." (New York Times)
Not just jobs, entire sectors of the US economy might disappear.
Newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast media, all are experiencing upheavals.
A lot of retail is going online.
Business travel will for the large part be replaced by more efficient communications.
Dirty energy will "shrivel."
Real estate construction will decline.
Health care and education will see reinvention and growth.
Jarvis emphasizes creating platforms and networks. He talks of "a network of spaces for independent work (the inverse of Starbucks: good with space and services, OK with coffee). Add payroll, insurance, hosting, and all sorts of services."
He wants to "rethink the auto industry in the image of the computer industry: disaggregating the car so we can reaggregate it from many new suppliers."
"Every one of the collapsing industries listed above will be replaced - in a different image, at a different scale - and that presents opportunities."
The promise is a new economy, a new society, a new world. Help people see through the transition.
Credit will have to flow again, spending will have to grow again. But they will go in new directions.
But right now we are in the destruction part of the cycle. Let the creation begin as soon as possible.
Jarvis has done a good job of describing where we are now and we are or should be going, but he has not done a good job of connecting the two. How do we help people with the transition? How to minimize disruptions? How to move people from lost jobs to better paying jobs?
Image via WikipediaNYU Stern Entrepreneurs Exchange 
Image by Lachlan Hardy via FlickrThere are two major controversies raging in the blogosphere right now. One is to do with The Angel List. The other is to do with our own Fred Wilson's blog post about marketing. Fred has started a s_itstorm by suggesting the best tech startups don't need marketing budgets. In fact, that is how he spots a great tech startup when he sees one. 
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