Last week, Ramit Sethi and I recorded a private videocast for a select group of readers. The three short videos below, all 2-8 minutes in length, describe our blogging tips and techniques, as well as an examination of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing.
He and I have both had the privilege and tactical experience of:
1) Building highly-trafficked blogs in a crowded blogosphere of more than 120 million blogs. More important, both of our blogs are well-known for action-oriented readers (For data on this blog’s readers — that’s you! — check this out).
2) Publishing books that reached The New York Times bestseller lists. Ramit’s experience is fresh and most up-to-date from his last three weeks with I Will Teach You To Be Rich, while I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been on the New York Times business bestseller list continually for 23 months, since its publication in April of 2007.
Here are some of the topics we cover in the a la carte videos:
Currencies Besides Royalties and Direct Income
Google Juice and SEO Misuse
Choosing Post Topics: From Google Keyword Tool to Stumble Upon
Post Length and Publishing Time
Tactical Redating of Posts
Regarding the plug-in I mention for keeping your best content on your homepage, the very smart Lloyd Budd at Automattic explains:
“Tweet To Beat could generate help for thousands of students in high-need public schools. My colleagues and I are cheering you on!”
-Charles Best, CEO of DonorsChoose.org
The Ethical Bribe
The gist: To benefit U.S. public school students, I will bribe the entire world to follow me on Twitter for $3 each.
I’ll also be giving away a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world and a fully-loaded MacBook Pro. But first things first… Read More
I have founded more than a half dozen companies, exited from one and currently spend my time on PhoneTag and Grid.com. I have spent over $250,000 on approximately 200 domain names because I believe that a great domain is extremely important to the success of a start-up (I learned the hard way – PhoneTag used to be called SimulScribe).
It’s especially important if you are starting a virtual business as it’s both your company name and how people will find you. My overall rules for domains are: they must be easy to spell, easy to say, and .com (no .net, .us, etc.) domains.
What I find tricky about purchasing domains is that you cannot use comparable sales (like real estate) or actual intrinsic value estimates (as you can with a car, jewelry, TV, etc.) for your negotiations. Vibrator.com sold for $1 million, I spent over $100,000 on Grid.com, yet sometimes you can find names that will be valuable for $10.
I have used my success and failure in buying domains to create a step-by-step process that should help secure the domain you want… Read More
These are not the prices I’m looking for. (Photo: hellochris)
Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
-John F. Kennedy
In December 2008, well-known marketing consultant John Jantsch asked me what my small business predictions were for 2009. This was my answer:
2009 will be the year for small businesses to get advertising at 70-90% off. Recessions mean budget cuts for larger corporations, which means advertising cancellations, just as in the “dot-com depression” of 2001 and 2002. There will be fire sales on remnant advertising, whether print, TV, radio, or online. In 2002, I bought $250,000+ of radio advertising for $10,000 because a big pharma advertiser pulled out a week before the ads were to go live. If you play your cards right, you can cut your CPA (cost-per-acquisition) in half.
The following sample dialogue demonstrates exactly how someone can buy $250,000+ of media for $10,000, and how you can reap the rewards of an advertising collapse.
If you’d rather acquire profitable customers for pennies instead of dollars, this article is for you… Read More
I like data and enhancing performance through following the numbers.
I use half a dozen tools to track metrics on this blog, and I have similarly used tr.im to track click-through on Twitter links, demographic and geographic splits, etc.. I find retweets interesting, but only to the extent that they attract meaningful attention (not just impressions), which can be approximated with clicks on embedded links. In the last two weeks, I’ve found bit.ly to be more reliable and robust than tr.im.
Below I’ve included my top-30 most-clicked Tweets from 12/21/08 to 2/13/09…Read More
Derek Sivers is a stud. I thought I’d share the conversation we had at SF MusicTech Summit. Dozens of topics covered include:
- Testing asssumptions vs. cheating
- PR and reaching out to unreachables
- Micro-testing ideas and products: from The 4-Hour Workweek to Trent Reznor
- Personal outsourcing for creatives
- Filling the void and creating meaning outside of the inbox and office
Derek is a programmer who lost his stage fright by doing more than 1,000 gigs as a circus ring leader. He is also the musician who started CD Baby, the world’s largest online music store for independent musicians. Here are some current numbers:
- 242,846 artists sell their music at CD Baby
- 4,574,622 CDs sold online to customers
- $83,590,381 paid directly to the artists
With more than 2 million digitized tracks under management, CD Baby is also the largest provider of independent music for iTunes… and it all started as a hobby.
How does it work now that it’s enormous? From Derek’s blog:
When I was the owner and president of CD Baby, it ran without me, and I hardly spent 4 hours on it in the last 6 months. It’s wonderful.
Here are a few snippets from our conversation… Read More
These are the principles I review whenever facing operational overwhelm or declining/stagnating profits. Hope you find them useful.
###
The financial goal of a start-up should be simple: profit in the least time with the least effort. Not more customers, not more revenue, not more offices or more employees: more profit.
Based on my interviews with high-performing (using profit-per-employee metrics) CEOs in more than a dozen countries, here are the 11 basic tenets of the “Margin Manifesto”… Read More
The “Art of Speed” panel at SXSW: Evan Williams, Cali Lewis, Mike Cassidy, Tim Ferriss (Photo: vantan)
I had a blast organizing and moderating the “Art of Speed” panel at the incredible SXSW conference a few months ago. It was standing room only (at least from what I could see), and I learned a ton from some of the best at creating monster hits.
Here is the recording for those of you who missed it. It’s about 60 minutes total but can be listened to comfortably in little chunks.
The description:
The Art of Speed: Conversations with Monster Makers
This session will focus on how to accomplish huge things in little time. From near-overnight IPOs and massive cult followings, to instant NY Times bestsellers and runaway viral campaigns, learn tricks from those who have created monsters of buzz, fame, and fortune… Read More
Since the success of the book, I’ve been able to see some of the worst e-mail pitches out there. Here is an example of how to do it properly, with 5 tips and good template phrases bolded: Read More
Bueller? Bueller? Quantifying results need not be boring. Keep it simple to keep it interesting… and actionable. (photo: foundphotoslj)
Total Read Time: 10-15 Minutes
Have you really seen ROI from Social Media?
Social media marketing! Twitter consultancies! Conversational communications! Oh, these are exciting times.
It seems like everyone and their grandma are getting into social media. On a whole, I think this is a good thing, but here’s the problem: whenever technology becomes fashion, return-on-investment (ROI) tends to get lost in the excitement of the latest .com catwalk.
It’s going to help “the brand”? Show me data. It’s going to drive more “awareness”? Define it, isolate it, and translate it into a sales increase.
In this post, we’ll look at some real numbers (total capital, conversions, redemptions, etc.) from my latest educational non-profit campaign, the Twitter-based Tweet to Beat, which was a follow-up to the blog and leaderboard-based LitLiberation campaign, which outraised Stephen Colbert 3-to-1 with no staff and no material hard costs… Read More
