Mark W. Shead

I have been reading John Chow for awhile. I can’t even remember how I originally found his site, but he is quite good at generating a community.

In February ReviewMe was having a 50% off sale. Normally they split their revenue with the blogger, but for February they were giving up their half. I had a contest I was running at www.productivity501.com to try to get some feedback, more readers and some inbound links. Since I was specifically targeting bloggers, I though John’s site would be a good place to advertise. After all, many of his readers were there because they reviewed John’s site in exchange for a linkback. I decided to go ahead and pay the $125 review fee and see what would happen.

The day the review went live, I got a modest spike in traffic as shown below:

So I got an extra 500 visitors which wasn’t anything too dramatic. A nice boost to be sure, but very temporary. However there was something else going on:

Notice that while the JohnChow post sent me 12.24% of my traffic, in the same period downloadsquad.com sent 19.51%. The DownloadSquad traffic was from a comment I left on one of their pages just as it was getting popular in Digg. My comment went live 3 to 5 hours after John’s review. The DownloadSquad post ended up getting about 600 Diggs, so it was popular, but not one of the bigger stories of the day.

Now another question is which site gave the most value over the long term. So if we look at Visits by Source from Feb 28 thorugh March 22:

So in the period of almost a month, John Chow sent me 284 visitors and DownloadSquad sent 418. The 284 visitors from John Chow cost $125. The DownloadSquad traffic was free.

Oh and the traffic from JohnChow was probably overstated slightly because I also comment on his site, so some of the visitors could have been from my comments. (Right now I’m listed in his top commentators links because on a whim I decided to see what type of traffic that would produce–not much.)

Now there were some differences in the traffic, John’s readers visited an average of 2.5 pages each visit. DownloadSquad readers only visited 1.3. However the real thing that would matter is conversions–how many people decided to review my site and enter the contest. I don’t know exactly where everyone came from, but it wasn’t many.
The contest hasn’t taken off as I had hoped, but that is ok because I’m using the data to help me refine the way I do contests. I was hoping for John’s review to spark a bunch of reviews in his readers. I think I made a mistake in matching my contest to my audience. John Chow readers do have blogs, but are focused on making money online. They are not necessarily writers, so a contest that is based on their writing skills isn’t necessarily appealing to them. They think “others can write better reviews than me, I shouldn’t even try.” A contest that targets their linking “skills” would probably be more appealing and attract a larger audience.

I am considering modifying the contest to try to make it rely less on quality writing to see if that helps. (The contest lets me change the terms if we haven’t reached 150 reviews by the end of the month.) I’m also working on getting some traffic from a larger blog that seems to cater more to people who like to write.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about John’s review. He did a good job. I’ve just learned a little more about how to refine my audience targeting and I’d rather do that with a $125 investment than a $5000 one.
John is very good at marketing. He is pushing the fact that he is in the top 100 of Technorati as making a link from his blog very valuable. I guess it might be if you have a brand new PR 0 site, but even with a link on his sidebar today sent me only 14 visitors (so far it is 9pm). This is the same number of visitors I received from a small blog I’ve never heard of that happened (and definitely isn’t in the Technorati 100) to linked to one of my stories this morning.

John’s expertise is at trading people something that costs him very little in exchange for something that is worth a lot to him. For example, putting the top commentators on his blog is pretty inexpensive. He markets it as something that really helps the bloggers promote their own blogs. For him, it keeps people rabidly commenting on his posts. (I know because I sat down and wrote about 75 comments yesterday evening just to see how much traffic it would send.)

Basically what John has done is created all the impressions of where he wants to be:

• Reviews and links from a bunch of different blogs - by offering a “valuable” link back in one of his posts.
• Massive amounts of comments - by offering a “valuable” link in the sidebar.
• Being listed as a top 100 blog - by getting incoming links and manipulating Technorati. I would expect a top 100 blog to have more than 3779 RSS readers.

By creating an image of what he wants his blog to be, he will probably achieve it. He likes to call this “being evil”, I would call it “being smart”. I see people on his blog moaning that they don’t have the money to pay John for a review ($500 as we speak) because they think it would really help their blog take off. It probably wouldn’t. They can get more traffic just by being quick to comment on Dugg stories.

So what do I think of my $125 investment in a John Chow review? From a traffic standpoint it was a flop. From a conversion standpoint it was a flop. From an educational standpoint, it was a bargain.

By the way, if you are interested in an iPod Shuffle, you should consider entering the contest.

Michael Gray has an interesting, but very un-informative post about how to change your thumbnail on You Tube.  Basically he tells everyone that it can be changed, you need a stopwatch, but he doesn’t tell anyone how.  In the comments he specifically says that he doesn’t want to tell anyone how to do it because he wants to “teach a man to fish”.

I subscribed to he blog the other day because I thought he might have something to say that might be useful and actually save me some time.

For anyone trying to figure out how to change your Youtube Thumbnail, this is what you can find from his video.  The thumbnail image occurs at 37 to 32 seconds from the end of the video. The video is 66 seconds long, so there are three possibilities:

1. You  Tube grabs a frame between 29 and 34 seconds from the beginning of the video.
2. You Tube grabs a frame 37 to 32 seconds from the end of the video.
3. You Tube grabs the center frame of the video.

I would guess option 3 which would explain the extra second of staring at the camera on his video.

A much more helpful post reaches the same conclusion here.

If this is the case you should be able to add a single frame to You Tube to control the thumbnail.  It might even be short enough that it wouldn’t even show up in the video. (Of course you’d need to get something more accurate than a stop watch. )

Shawn from www.zoomstart.com left a comment here so I went and checked out his site.  It is definitely worth a read.  He covers a range of topics.  His discussion of how search engines implode, was an interesting read.  I particularly liked the post about how to make 300% return buying cereal. It reminded me of the guy who tried to turn in a bunch of Pepsi UPC symbols for a Harrier Jet.

Anyway, Zoomstart is worth checking out and possibly including in your RSS reader.  I definitely added it to mine.

I’ve been running a contest at Productivity501 to give away an iPod Shuffle. In the next few weeks I’m going to have a guest post over at Problogger.net that talks about how to run blog contests–especially on small blogs where the goal is to get more readers.

I’ve started getting emails from other people running contests to let me know about their giveaways as well.  Brock from Existential Ventures is giving a way a printer to his readers. You have to join his MyBlogLog community.  I haven’t done anything with MyBlogLog, but it looks like it might be a good way to run a contest.

The ideal contest is one where you reward people for reading your blog.  Normally you don’t have any way to see exactly who is reading your blog and no way to contact a winner.  That is why most competitions make you leave a comment, signup for an e-newsletter, or something else that will give the blog your email address.  I’m going to have to look into MyBlogLog as a way to run contests.

Good luck to Broc on his contest.  I hope it works out well for him.

Google has gained prominence by offering services for free.  They are now making use of the same infrastructure to offer business class services.  For $50 per year you can get a 10Gb email account.  That will hold a whole lot of email.

Along with their online wordprocessor and spreadsheet, this could be a pretty compelling option for small businesses.  If your staff never uses 75% of the features in Microsoft Word, the online Google versions are going to be pretty attractive.

Concepts of Leadership Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent. Leaders carry out this process by applying their leadership attributes, such as beliefs, values, ethics, character, knowledge, and skills. Although your position as a manager, supervisor, lead, etc. gives you the authority to accomplish certain tasks and objectives in the organization, this power does not make you a leader…it simply makes you the boss. Leadership differs in that it makes the followers want to achieve high goals, rather than simply bossing people around.

I thought this was a pretty good definition of leadership. I like how it focuses on creating an environment where people want to follow instead of slinging authority around to try to force people to do what you want.

“Managing by walking around” is a popular idea with managers, particularly those with no management skills.  The idea is sound–get out there and mix with the people you are trying to manage so you understand what is going on and can hear the issues they have.

This isn’t a bad thing, but some managers take this and make it into what I call “wet dog management”.  They come into a room and shake responsibilities and edicts at whoever happens to be nearby.  Then they go to another room and do the same thing.  There is no clear strategy to what they are wanting to accomplish.

I had this happen once when I was working as the IT director for an organization.  One of the vice presidents came in and asked me to take care of maintenance issues at another site.  I said I’d be happy to do it, but I thought it might make the maintenance department feel like I was stepping on their toes.  I just happened to be the nearest person when he thought of something he wanted to have done.  It wasn’t part of a strategy or even a reasoned plan, he was just shaking the letting the responsibilities fly to whoever was closest.

Just as management by walking around has some value if used correctly, so does leadership by walking around.  If you want to lead people, you can go a lot further by letting them see your example.  If you walk around and remain aloof, they will probably follow your lead.  However, if they see you getting involved with customers and practicing the principles you ask of them, they will be much more willing to follow your lead.

I was looking at some of the definitions of leadership online. It was interesting to see how useless some of them were. For example, from wiktionary:

leadership (uncountable)

1. (dated) The office of a leader.
2. The characteristics of a leader (one who leads).

Not particularly thought provoking. The definition of leader is a little better, but fairly disorganized.

On the wikipedia side, things are a little better. The entry for leadership is fairly substantial and seems to cover a lot of ground. Overall it reminds me of a collection of random notes, but there is quite a bit of information in there.

Robert W. Lane (the CEO of John Deere) made some good comments about integrity in a speech at Yale.

Many of you have some corporate experience. You have tested yourselves on the field of competition. You know the critical importance of passion, commitment, teamwork, perseverance and imagination. But without integrity—that moral compass to do what is right, not just what is expedient—these important traits lack a “bonding agent.” They require integrity to make them truly adhere to business goals.

You can read more of what he said here.

Eric at AdventureLogue posted a link to my article about why you can’t drink the water in Mexico. This is based on our experience living in Durango Mexico as well as some trips to Mexico City. Quite a few people really seemed to enjoy the article. I’ve been a little surprised at how popular it has been. I guess everyone has heard that you can’t drink the water South of the border, but most people don’t really understand why.

From other people I’ve talked to it is fairly rare for you to be able to drink tap water in most countries. I’m assuming that England and Germany and the larger countries in Europe have water that you can drink, but the largest percentage of countries have water that isn’t safe for drinking. It will be interesting to see if Mexico continues to develop and if the water becomes drinkable in the next 50 years.