Random — Comments Off
21
Feb 12

Why is my blog not being updated regularly?

I fully intend on blogging more, eventually, and making this a routine habit. However, for obvious reasons, I have been quiet on my blog for a while due to some family drama. Luckily, my family isn’t making headlines – it’s only my in laws. However, there is a world of difference I’ve discovered between your father-in-law being Vice President and President of a country. My kids both became the topic of discussion on twitter at one point, which re-affirmed Widhadh’s stance on privacy for our family. I’m not sure what a “normal” childhood is for anybody; I know I didn’t have one, for many reasons. How many kids get to travel half way around the world with their dad and learn the import / export business? Not many.

If you want more of the story, she’s the best one to tell it. For the foreseeable future, I’m not going to be blogging much, as I’m  content to support my family during this time of transition. Besides, it’s entirely possible that I might end up dragging the public discourse way off topic and that wouldn’t be helpful for anybody.

Marketing and Sales — Comments Off
25
Jan 12

Killer presentation on social media strategy

This was a pretty amazing piece of work Widhadh did on social media strategy.

Check out the post or download the powerpoint.

Books — Comments Off
31
Dec 11

Review The Vampire Hangover, get a FREE excerpt of the sequal and a FREE review copy

A few days ago, I put my novella, The Vampire Hangover, on sale. The promotional price? Free – pay nothing, as long as you’re a member of Amazon Prime. My goal with this test was a few things:

  • Figure out if people would want something for free, rather than 99 cents – they do, in spades.
  • See how much demand, if there was increased demand, there would be – lots more, I’ll explain more in a moment
  • Calculate how much exposure it would take to get more reviews – the only two I got were honest, “friend” or network reviews, by real people who read the book. However, it’s been a lot harder to get reviews from people I don’t know (at least virtually) than I would have thought.

The novella, sadly, was not selling any copies for the last few months. I realized today my error is, in large part, that I said I was working on a sequal with the same characters. However, that was last summer, I’ve made no progress and instead written other things. Well, there will be a sequal, it’ll be even more awesome and I’m happy to say that in two months, those who get the FREE ebook now, will be able to get the first half the sequal in a month. This will be a full length novel, over fifty thousand words when I’m finished. The novel is more than a quarter done already, revised and improved above and beyond what it was a few short months ago.

So if you want to get a free copy of the first half of my debut novel, Ninja Vampire Hunter, drop me a note via my Amazon page. The title is a work in progress, after doing some research, there was a cable TV show that may have had the same name. If this is an issue, it’ll be a different title – and if you have suggestions, I’m open to feedback. I figure if one person returned a FREE ebook (sorry) then the other people either were too lazy to read it (please read – it’s awesome) or they did, and just aren’t the type to review. That’s okay, but, if you review it, you’d be doing me a massively huge favor, I’d be forever indebted to you. If you can help me generate enough reviews, I’ll also figure out how to do an “auction” of sorts to insert a name of your choosing into the next novel. I can’t promise a leading character, but they will be part of a classic and comedic scene ;)

Tomorrow is the last day to get the ebook for free for the next few weeks…after that, it goes up in price to $2.99.

Startups — Comments Off
15
Dec 11

Widhadh is looking to partner with a rockstar programmer

My wife is working on a new project and has need of a rockstar programmer. While she’s looking, I thought I’d throw it out there to the blogosphere that she has a few very awesome ideas and a novel way to help self fund after the first quarter of work gets done.

Skills she’s looking for:

Ruby on Rails

Redis

MongoDB

Communication skills, ability to follow a spec and of course, interest in building some incredibly awesome stuff are all important things.

Uncategorized — Comments Off
08
Dec 11

Being real online – one advantage: you’re *really* real

I’m not a public figure. Neither is my wife. However, my father-in-law, her dad, is the Vice President of a country. Every time I think about that, well, I get concerned about what I put out there and how it’s perceived.

Here’s the deal: my business partner, Widhadh and I have started nine businesses, sold two in 2004 and we’re now trying to sell the last one, FunAdvice. If it works out, we’ll both be able to move on from what was an interesting learning experience that also developed into a profitable business.

From being quoted in the Wall Street Journal, to being recognized by Emarketer in 2009 as one of the fastest growing social networks in the US (second only to Twitter), it’s been an honor and a privilege to work with the team building out the features, functionality and product. Without Ericson programming for the last two years, since the site first hit 3 million visitors, to now, he’s lead the effort to build, improve and maintain the FunAdvice infrastructure.

The turning point with the whole business was in 2006, when Widhadh re-designed the product. At that time, the site had 70,000 visitors per month. As a result of her bold, grandiose vision for the site, we grew more than 5% monthly for the next few years, culminating in our best month ever, 6.8 million visitors in July, 2009. Her work in the product was instrumental in where the site is today and even more importantly, in illustrating how much the site could grow, given the right amount of development.

Anyway, I’m exhausted. Thanks for reading and if you’re interested, FunAdvice has a ton of potential. For the right buyer, it would be possible to invest only 100K and easily multiply that investment by 10x in less than six months.

Startups — Comments Off
06
Dec 11

FunAdvice is for sale, officially

So we’ve put it up for sale. Take a look at the auction here.

Startups — Comments Off
12
Oct 11

Networking for a day, BrightEdge Share 2011

After a full day spent networking, learning, discussing, engaging and ultimately presenting on SEO and social at BrightEdge Share 2011, I can say that I’m both inspired and exhausted. The event was jam packed with excellent speakers, insightful dialogue from Microsoft, Facebook and TinyPrints and wonderful people from BrightEdge and many other companies coming together to make a wonderful event.

As I told more than a few attendees, I had two very specific goals in mind with the event:

* Recruiting – by the end of the day, I’d met with former clients, people I had interviewed, former colleagues and others who have shaped the SEO industry for more than a decade. It was very impressive to be surrounded by so many that, frankly, I’ve only read about online before today.

* Relationship building – as social starts to influence search more and more, I can’t help but consider the foundation of every successful business. It’s the people, as we say at Intuit. I just finished sending a personal note to more than a dozen wonderful people I met, and people I reconnected with.

Now, sleep crazy and exhausted, I have to add “share notes with team” as a follow up after learning about and discussing the impressive social capabilities of BrightEdge and their S3 platform.

Marketing and Sales — Comments Off
02
Jun 11

Testing, 123: how many multivariate and a/b tests you should run

When you run a lot of tests on a website, you start to see patterns emerge. Some things that should generate results (changing colors, button placement, stock photography) will consistently yield bigger deltas than other things (shuffling the deck chairs on the titanic, the footer text color, the company logo color, etc). Even though a lot of emotion is invested into the company logo color, look and feel, it’s not the logo that closes a sale. It’s the content, the beating heart of the page that sells, or fails, with the end user. After running enough multivariate tests, most smart marketers get a decent handle on what does and does not drive performance.

As a result, it is very worth asking at what point do you stop testing?

For most marketers the answer will be simple, you stop testing when you achieve the desired result. However, I firmly believe that we are all chasing moving targets. In that sense, we are never really “done” with testing. The end result could always be improved and as long as we have the time, energy, budget and resources available the next test should be queued, measured and analyzed. If we purse this never ending horizin with the mindset of Lexus, “the relentless pursuit of perfection” then we are far, far better off as a company than if we decide to iterate through to some short term goal, hit it and call it done. Continue reading →

Books — Comments Off
27
May 11

Three down: an infinite number to go

Three months and two weeks ago, I started on my first novella. The result was a mixture of relief, anxiety and angst while checking my Amazon sales stats daily. After publishing a second and uploading the pair to Barnes & Noble, I started checking the sales stats on both sites, truthfully, more often than is probably healthy for me. I’ve cut my Adsense / Analytics addiction down to once per day which makes sense, at least. When you’re only selling a handful of works per month, checking stats daily is OC/DC at best and at worst, counter-productive in the extreme. Distractions aside, I managed to finally finish off my third novella just yesterday and as I write, my amazing wife and business partner is finalizing the cover art. Did I mention she’s amazing?

What’s the optimal number of works to produce as an author?

Continue reading →

Marketing and Sales — Comments Off
26
May 11

AdAge agency guy gets beaten by Coffee Shop Kid, co-founder of Huhcorp

First I read this and then I wonder why it all sounds so familiar. Huhcorp! That’s why it sounded like a familiar tune to me. Funny story (when you really think about it) because when I was in college, I started my first agency. Not as successful as my third one but we had a few clients. Sold some websites. And really, truly, didn’t know enough of what we were doing. The upside? Neither did any other web design and development firm back in the crazy days of 1998. Sure, there were some that launched back then and still do business today. Do they operate the same? Does the stack of services work similar? Nope, nowhere close. These days, you’ve got wordpress, you’ve got facebook fan pages, twitter feeds, social toolsets, SEO analysis dashboards…everything has evolved. The agencies that I knew about, then, and are still around today are very different animals in how they work, what they put together and more. Continue reading →

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