July, 2009 Archive

If someone writes something negative about you on Twitter (or anywhere else), how should you respond?  Social Media Optimization gives a great illustration of how not to.

If you get an email from Kevin Hill offering to buy a domain name that you own, Andrew says stay away.

Gabriel writes in and asks: nibbledish contains around 3,000 recipes and gets around 165k uniques per month, while sparkrecipes contains nearly 170,000 recipes but only gets around 16.3k uniques per month according to quantcast.  Do you have any explanation as to why this is the case?  I would expect sparkrecipes to garner much more traffic since it's more established and it contains more recipes. It's an outstanding question.  Competitive intelligence is so crucial when analyzing any market, so I ... Keep reading »

I wrote last week about the easiest way to double your website's revenue, but I didn't go into nearly the detail that Web Usability does in their article on "30+ principles to a better web page design."  Not only is it worth a read, but it's also worth a bookmark for constantly referring back to.

I know that sounds like some get-rich-quick scheme, but hear me out.  I promise you that the vast majority of sites that I have ever worked with were able to double their revenue with 30 minutes of work (or less).  Here's how. In most cases, our efforts to increase revenue center on increasing traffic.  In many cases, in fact, that's the only method we're using to increase revenue.  We get so close to our sites that we ... Keep reading »

Somewhere along the way, most of us get to the point where our site just isn't having the success that we want it to have.  I've been there myself, and I talk to others all the time who are right in the middle of it. There are three big things that could be holding you back. Your Content is Forgettable Is your site unique and/or better than other sites in the same niche?  If not, you'll always be swimming upstream -- trying to ... Keep reading »

I've been through several phases in my business life, and nothing sums up where I am now like this paragraph from Seth Godin's latest post: Great brands and projects are built on real value and a real advantage, but great marketers use this as a supporting column, not the entire foundation. Instead, they build a story on top of their head start. They focus on relationships and worldviews and interactions, and use the boost from their initial head start to ... Keep reading »

I presented on one of the Elite Retreat mastermind calls a few weeks ago, and someone asked a question along the lines of what kinds of sites I buy or what I look for in a site.  Maybe counter-intuitively, my answer was that I like ugly sites -- but ugly sites where the ugly is only skin deep.  That's because you can see a stunning amount of improvement when you put a better face on a site that is otherwise ... Keep reading »

Are you not having the success you want to have?  Maybe you need a lifestyle change.  Chris Guthrie did.