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As many of you already know I’m in the process of compiling a book of interviews with many of the most prominent bloggers. The idea of the book is to ask every blogger I interviewed similar questions to find out what’s common, what’s different, what works, basically what it takes to be a successful blogger.
At this stage I’ve completed all the interviews and I can tell you that the answers are amazing. I’ve been successfully blogging myself for over two years now and I still learned a lot! Thank you everyone for taking the time to participate in this project and giving such great responses and advice.
The book will be sent off for editing by the end of this month.
I also initially posted a list of bloggers who had agreed to participate. This list has changed somewhat since then. A few people weren’t able to complete their interviews for different reasons, which is expected when you interview so many outstanding people. I was very honored they accepted in the first place, but I can also appreciate their busy schedules. Therefore you’ll find a few new names on the list which is very thrilling.I’m very happy and proud to announce the official list of bloggers who will be part of the book (in alphabetical order of their first names):
Quite an exciting list! Several people listed here have over a million unique visitors per month on their blogs! Most have hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month. All are of course very successful bloggers!
As soon as the book comes back from editing, I’ll post an update and let you all know when it will be available to buy from Amazon. I’m sure you’re as excited as me to see it in print!
To quote one of my favorite software development books Rapid Development:
Some people seem to think that software projects should be scheduled optimistically because software development should be more an adventure than a dreary engineering exercise. These people say that schedule pressure adds excitement.
How much sense does that make? If you were going on a real adventure, say a trip to the south pole by dogsled, would you let someone talk you into planning for it to take only 30 days when your best estimate was that it would take 60? Would you carry only 30 days’ worth of food? Only 30 days’ worth of fuel? Would you plan for your sled dogs to be worn out at the end of 30 days rather than 60? Doing any of those things would be self-destructive, and underscoping and underplanning a software project is similarly self-destructive, albeit usually without any life-treatening consequences.
This analogy is all too accurate. You cannot wish for certain things to happen. Unfortunately reality is what it is.
One little tidbit that did catch my attention however, which I’m sure many people easily overlooked, is that if you really push a schedule beyonds reality is that you might not be able to re-adjust it later. For example if you push everyone to the extreme for 30 days they might not have any energy left at the end for another 30 days, or even more as is often the case. They will be “worn out”!
It’s virtually the same as asking someone to run a 100 meter sprint and then continually moving back the finish line as they’re just about done. It might work for a 200 meters, if you’re lucky maybe even 400 meters… But once you reach a certain threshold it will have very significant negative impacts. There’s a reason why people who run the 400 meters don’t sprint the 400 meters.
Ever try to sprint a mile? What about a marathon?
Have you ever gone to a website to buy something and noticed a “coupon code” field on the purchase/checkout page?
This week I purchased a few domains from GoDaddy.com for my company LandlordMax and as I was proceeded through the checkout process I was presented with a “Coupon Code” field. Being familiar with this my first instinct was that I needed to find a coupon code online. If the field exists there must be an available coupon code.
So I went straight to search on Google for GoDaddy.com coupon codes without completing my purchase. Remember at this point I’d already decided to purchase the domains from GoDaddy, all I’m trying to do now is pay less. Why shouldn’t I? Everything in the checkout process is telling me that I can get this very same product/service for less.
Within seconds I find several GoDaddy discount coupon codes online. So I start trying them. The first one fails. Ok, let’s try this next one. Nothing. Invalid. Another. Nope. And so it goes on for a few more minutes. I’m now starting to get frustrated. I’ve already tried a dozen coupon codes that don’t work, so there’s definitely a lot of them out there. I’ve got to be getting close to finding the “good one”. So I continue looking.
I know that if I keep looking I’ll eventually find a valid coupon code and save myself some money. But I’m also tired of doing this and I’m starting to get a little frustrated. Why couldn’t they just not have hid this from me. Had I not known I wouldn’t be writing about this today!
At this point I don’t really feel like looking for a coupon code anymore. I’m also very busy and I have other important things to do. So I go ahead and make the purchase, without a coupon code. I however feel that I’m paying too much. Whether or not this is true, it doesn’t matter. I believe there is a coupon code that I’m not aware of and that’s all that really matters to me. Unfortunately perception becomes reality and so I feel jaded on the price.
Where does this all leave us? Not in the best place. Depending on the product the customer might move on to another company because too much goodwill has been loss trying to find a coupon code. They might have purchased the product and are unhappy to have paid too much. Or possibly they did find the coupon code and as a business you’re losing a large profit margin. In the best case the customer saved some extra money they hadn’t anticipated to and in the worse case the customer has moved on to another company.
What’s the alternative? Don’t show a coupon code! It’s that simple. If I don’t know about the discount than I don’t feel bad. I won’t look for it. I won’t care. I won’t be disappointed.
If you want to use coupons why not instead just make it part of the URL (the webpage address). Do something like https://www.GoDaddy.com/?couponCode=2342 If I don’t happen to come across the direct link I won’t know about the discount. And best of all, everyone who doesn’t come across the link, which I would bet is the majority of purchasers, won’t know. I won’t get frustrated trying to find a coupon code that might not exist. I’ll just pay and be on my merry way.
It’s much like going to a grocery store. I pay for my food. The customer behind me might have coupons, which is great for them, but it doesn’t affect me. The cashier didn’t just tell me that there is possibly a 30% off coupon available somewhere nearby in the store (along with a bunch of expired coupons) and that I should go look for it right now. Meaning they’ve now informed me that I’m paying more than I should which doesn’t make me happy. Although I’m aware that there are potentially coupons out there, as long as they’re not in my face I’m happy. I’m blissfully ignorant. Sometimes this can be the best thing!
** Update: For those of you who are curious, at my company LandlordMax we don’t offer any coupons or discounts on the software we sell. Therefore you don’t need to search Google for discounts, they don’t exist. We’ve made it really simple, everyone pays the same price.
As all you long time readers know, I really love to share some of the best customer testimonial we get for LandlordMax Property Management Software. Today’s comes from KK Chan:
“Your support and response time on this matter has been awesome. Am glad I bought your software.”
– KK Chan
Thank you. It’s great to receive such positive feedback as yours!
As an HD (High Definition) consumer here’s what I want from my HD player:
1. I want it to play ALL available movies. Exclusivity is the opposite of what I want. I want one player for all movies. I don’t want to have to take sides. I don’t want to buy multiple players (an HD-DVD and a Blu-Ray player). I just one one player for all my movies.
2. I want it to be affordable. HD-DVD is now very affordable, at about $250 for a basic player (I’m willing to pay some premium to be an earlier adopter but not Blu-Ray’s current premium). Blu-Ray isn’t affordable, about $1200 for the latest version. I’m ignoring the PS3 option because I don’t really want the PS3 gaming system, I just want an HD player.
3. I want to be able to rent movies from the local video rental store. I don’t want to have to buy all my movies. Where I live there are really only two major chains. Blockbuster and Rogers. Of course Blockbuster has signed an exclusive agreement with Blu-Ray. Rogers on the other hand has a 66% Blu-Ray and 33% HD-DVD selection. that means that if I want to rent a movie the odds are that I have to rent a Blu-Ray movie (and hence buy the very expensive player). And I can only rent movies from certain stores depending on which player and movie I want. The opposite of what I want again!
4. I would really like to be able to play my new HD movies on a regular DVD player For example it would be great if I can play my HD movies on my portable DVD player in the car. Only HD-DVD offers this with their combo releases.
Am I asking for too much? I don’t think so. So what’s happening? The reality is that the two formats are fighting each other instead of working together. This means that people like myself who desperately want to view movies in HD aren’t willing to spend money on an HD player because we don’t want to make the mistake of spending our hard earned cash on something that might be gone tomorrow. We don’t want to buy today’s Beta.
There are dual players coming out soon, and hopefully that will alleviate the issue. But at the end of the day I just want an affordable a movie player to play any HD movie I rent at my local video rental store.
It’s too bad these companies aren’t listening to their customers (a big mistake!), otherwise I’m absolutely convinced that they’d both have already made significantly more revenue. The adoption of HD players would be much much higher. I know I’d be buying an HD player today!
We all know about spyware and viruses, and how they affect our computers. And we all know Facebook lets you install widgets to your account. Therefore it was only a matter of time before someone created a widget to infect your computer with spyware. Well that time has come.
It might not be the first, but it’s the first time it’s come to my attention. One of the latest Facebook Widgets installs spyware on your computer.
Now before you panic, please note that for the widget to install itself you probably need to actively give it explicit permission past strong warnings! You know those really annoying but important “High Security Alert!!!” messages that a lot of people ignore. They’re there for a reason. Yet people still ignore them. When will we learn?
I guess we’ll never learn. This is social engineering at it’s best.
It’s amazing how simple things really energize and motive a team. Small simple things can sometimes be incredibly effective. A great example I’ve just read about for the umpteen time came from the latest book I’m reading called The Old New Thing. The book is about the history and evolution of the development of Windows, but importantly there’s one poignant story that sticks out. It’s also referenced in the book Rapid Development as a great team motivational example, and many others. I’ve also read this same story on countless websites and blogs. It’s become folklore. It was very effective!
To quote The Old New Thing:
During the development of Windows 95, application compatibility was a high priority. To make sure that coverage was as broad as possible, the development manager for Windows 95 took his pickup truck, drove down to the local Egghead Software store (back when Egghead still existed), and bought one copy of every single PC program in the store.
He then returned to Microsoft, unloaded all the software onto tables in the cafeteria, and invited every member of the Windows 95 team to come in and take responsibility for up to two programs. The ground rules were that you had to install and run the program, use it like a normal end user, and file a bug against everything that didn’t work right, even the minor stuff. (Of course, you had to provide the program to the person investigating the bug upon request.) In exchange for taking responsibility for ensuring that Windows 95 was compatible with your adopted programs, you go to keep them after Windows 95 shipped. If you did a good job with our two, you could come back for more.
The cafeteria was filled with Windows 95 team members, browsing through the boxes upon boxes of software like bargain hunters at a flea market. And there were the inevitable “What’d you get?” comparisons afterwards.
If Microsoft had decided to keep all the copies of the software they had just purchased for testing I can assure you there would’ve been a lot less enthusiasm in testing as many applications as possible. It would have made more financial sense, why give away everything you just purchased. Especially if you might need to re-test these same software applications when you updated Windows 95, or for future versions of Windows such as Windows 98, etc..
However this simple, very simple, idea of just letting the software developers take home the software they properly tested created great excitement and energy on the team. I have no doubt that if Microsoft had to re-buy all the software afterwards, they still would have been ahead financially with all the extra effort, energy, and goodwill they got.
Frequently in business trying to scrape the bottom line financially isn’t always the best thing. Often it’s worth looking at alternative options. Simple acts can sometimes be more valuable than giant acts.
It’s common knowledge that you should work on things you’re not so good at. If you’re a star baseball pitcher who can throw the ball faster than anyone else but can’t throw a curve ball to save your life then you should improve your curve ball. If you’re really good at math but can’t write worth anything then you should really try to improve your writing skills. You should try to improve your weaknesses so that you can do everything. Basically you should focus most of your energy on improving your weakest points.
I completely disagree! Spend most of your energy improving the things you exceed at, not your weaknesses.
If you’re a great baseball pitcher that can throw a ball faster than anyone else, being able a throw a curve ball becomes less and less important. Not only that, but if you don’t improve on your main skill (throwing an amazing fast ball) than you’ll just be like everyone else. A pitcher who can throw a decent fast ball but with a limited repertoire of pitches. Nobody will really care. But if you throw the fastest and meanest fastball people will care. You’re skill will be rewarded. You will get attention. You will succeed!
If you can do math like no one else people will pay attention. You will succeed. People will overlook the fact that you can’t write. They’ll care that you can do amazing mathematical feats. They’ll focus on that. You’ll be rewarded for that. Only few people can achieve the heights off any skill.
Another example is basketball. Look at Shaquille O’Neal. He’s a very famous basketball player but he continually struggles with free throws. Something that’s considered a standard skill in professional basketball and he can barely do it. The reality is that it doesn’t matter, he’s focused his time and energy on improving his greatest strengths rather than working on his biggest weaknesses. Do you think people would care if he could get a decent free throw percentage if he hadn’t built up his other basketball playing skill? I doubt it.
I’m not saying that you should ignore your weaknesses, what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t worry too much about it. Put some effort to improve them but instead focus the vast majority of your effort and energies on improving what you excel at. Focus on your strengths. If you’re beyond amazing at something success will follow. People will overlook your weaknesses.
I’d rather have a Shaq on my basketball team than an all around average player. I’d rather have a team of Shaq’s, each with a very different expertise than an all around team of average players.
As Joel Spolsky says:
“The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas who can hit the f6 in Mozart’s Queen of the Night is vanishingly small, and you just can’t perform The Queen of the Night without that famous f6.”
Seeing as the year 2007 is about to come to a close I thought now would be a great time to go back and reflect on everything I’ve accomplished throughout the year. Like I always like to say, reward your successes and learn from your failures.
Successes
LandlordMax
FollowSteph
- Traffic to FollowSteph has greatly increased!
- RSS Feed subsribers is growing at a very good rate
- Increase the direct revenues of FollowSteph by about 800% (from advertising, affiliate links, etc.)
- I was interviewed on StartupSpark.com
- Many articles have had very high search engine placements
- Many articles have received high numbers of comments
- Many articles rank very high in the search engines
Others
- I started to write a book interviewing several of the most prominent bloggers online (for which I’m almost done compiling all the interviews and will be sending it off for editing very shortly). A lot of very prominent bloggers accepted to be part of this project which is great (I need to update the list). After reading all the interviews and compiling them, I can tell you this is definitely going to be an amazing book to read. There’s lots of great advice!
- I’m in the process of creating a new website called FindYourWeddingDress.com. We’ve already hired one part-time person to assist us in this task. We’re hoping to fully launch it within the next few months.
- We released the website WhichJar.com
Failures
- We had an issue with our SSL certificate on the LandlordMax purchase page. We always maintained 100% security, it’s just that we somehow didn’t renew our certificate on time and therefore weren’t officially certified for a few days. This was quickly rectified. It won’t happen again!
- Although we released the website WhichJar.com, there is currently not enough data in the database to really make it viable (we only have a few hundred open source projects stored so far). Therefore this project has been sidelined for now until I have the available resources and time or until I can find someone to partner up with. The failure is that I didn’t appreciate the data population effort that would be required
- I started an Online Sales and Marketing book which I didn’t complete. The good news is that it successfully transitioned this effort to the blogging book, which is a great success! I’m hoping to return to it sometime in late 2008 if time permit but for now it’s on hold.
- I had quite an experience with Telus with my cell phone service
This is what I can remember by just going through the blog. All in all a pretty busy year. For next year I expect to achieve even more.
Here are my goals for next year:
Goals:
- I expect the book to be available in bookstores such as Amazon.com by the Spring of 2008.
- I expect to sell over 100,000 copies of the book by end of year 2008
- I expect to more than quadruple LandlordMax sales revenues by the end of 2008
- I expect to multiply my RSS feeds on FollowSteph by end of the 2008.
- I expect to release a new major version of LandlordMax by spring/summer of 2008
- I expect to release the Mac version before the end of 2008
- I expect to release the networked/multi-user based version of LandlordMax by fall/winter of 2008.
- I expect to release the browser based version of LandlordMax by end of year 2008 or early 2009
- I expect FindYourWeddingDress.com to be fully functionning by spring/summer of 2008
- I expect to appear several more times in the media (newspapers, tv, etc.) for LandlordMax by the spring of 2008
- I expect to multiply the traffic of FollowSteph.com by at least five times before the end of 2008
- I expect to break several LandlordMax sales records this year, and again receive more testimonials than all previous years combined.
- I expect to fully complete the LandlordMax website redesign before the end of 2008
- I expect to give FollowSteph.com a significant face lift before the end of 2008
- I would like to release a cash flow analyzer software application as a complimentary product to LandlordMax before the end of 2008. We currently offer a free online cash flow calculator on the LandlordMax website, but I’d really like to expand this offering.
This is my list of successes/failures for 2007, and my goals for 2008. And because I publicly stated them here today, I’ll review them same time next year.
What about you? What are your big successes? What are your goals for next year? Did you know you increase your odds of achieving your goals if you publicly state them, especially if they include concrete terms and timelines.
Many people thought the housing market crash wasn’t coming anytime soon, that prices would continue and continue to rise. I even heard people saying that they had to get in now otherwise they could never afford a house at the going rate. Like any other boom, people forgot to look at the fundamentals.
Well today the fundamentals are right in your face. There’s no escaping them. No Ponzi scheme can save you. CNN has just reported a 6.7% price drop in prices from last year. If you adjust for inflation, that’s closer to 10%! The largest drop recorded since the index began in 1987. It marked the 10th consecutive month of price depreciation and 23 months of decelerating returns. With no end in sight.
I hate to soapbox, but as far back as 2004-2005 I was already suggesting that the market was overpriced. The numbers no longer made sense. It had to stop and prices had to come back down. I even wrote on ways to protect yourself. For example in December 2005 I wrote: The Simplest and Best Way to Protect Yourself from the Real Estate Crash. If you followed that advice you’d be significantly protected from the current housing market crash right now.
Knowing that there was a shakeup coming, I personally prepared. I followed my own advice, I ate my own dog food. For example I locked the mortgage on my personal home at 5.4% for 25 years! Yes that’s a fixed rate of 5.4% for 25 years. I had the option of 4.8% for 10 years, 4.3% for 5 years, or a variable for 3.9% if memory serves me right. Back then when I told people how excited I was to get 5.4% locked for 25 years I was continually shocked by their reaction. They couldn’t believe I was willing to pay that much interest. 4.3% was a lot better. And why not variable, interest rates were low and dropping.
This is when I tried to explain that interest rates can’t keep going down anymore, and definitely can’t stay at those rates. That we were just above inflation. It just can’t stay that way forever. Over time rates have been closer to 8-10%. They would climb back.
I also kept telling people how I didn’t want to be part of the upcoming mortgage refinancing storm. As rates increased people wouldn’t be able to refinance when their mortgages came up for re-financing. Basically the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. This is basically what’s happening now, and why we can expect to see a continuation of this housing crash for at least several more years. At least until the last of the 5 year fixed mortgages that can’t be refinanced dwindle away.
The good news is that unlike what the media portrays, there is an end in sight. It’s just a few years away.
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Disclaimer: This is a personal blog about my thoughts, experiences and ideas. The contents of this blog are for informational purposes only. No content should be construed as financial, business, personal, or any other type of advice. Commenters, advertisers and linked sites are entirely responsible for their own content and do not represent the views of myself. All decisions involve risks and results are not guaranteed. Always do your own research, due diligence, and consult your own professional advisors before making any decision. This blog (including myself) assumes no liability with regard to results based on use of information from this blog. If this blog contains any errors, misrepresentations, or omissions, please contact me or leave a comment to have the content corrected.
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