June 24, 2010 By 5 Comments

The Reality Challenge

If you are not aware of  Ed Dale ‘s The Challenge (formally the Thirty Day Challenge) then please check it out so you know what I am talking about.

For those that have participated you probably know who I am, a short refresher.  I have completed the last 4 challenges and have been a moderator for the last 2 years. I am usually the naughty one, making inappropriate comments and heckling Ed. The one that looks like she is having a great time (which I am :) ) I am also a mad keen believer in not TALKING about working, but actually working. This year I want to try something new with people who are completing the Challenge in Sydney, Australia (keep reading if you are from other places because you can try this out too).

I am looking for people who want to focus their Challenge work and get it DONE. They need to be able to make a commitment to at least one weekly 2 hour session in a work space environment . We will work for 90 minutes  (3 x 25 minute sessions with 5 minute breaks) on the Challenge and then 30 minutes on coffee, cake, chat.  The venue will be in the Hills or Parramatta depending on numbers.  Depending on numbers and commitment there will be 1 to 3 sessions a WEEK on a Wednesday Morning, Friday Morning and Saturday Morning. You only need to come to one but can come to as many as you want as long as you commit to those days EVERY week.

Unable to commit? Well forget completing the Challenge, you won’t with that attitude.

Dates, times and venues are non-negotiable when announced. If you want to succeed this will be the first of the sacrifices you need to make.  No apologies from me, work is hard and inconvenient. Makes the rewards from that work so much sweeter.

I can guarantee you that you will get more done in that time then you will ever get done by yourself. FULL STOP.  I will also tell you I am like that bootcamp trainer, I am NOT going to accept lame half arsed excuses as to why you CAN’T. I am an ugly unfit overweight woman with Multiple Sclerosis, a full time job, and Sphynx cats, I have damn good reasons why I can’t…. but I still TURN UP and DO.  And so shall you.

If you really want to do this thing  (and I KNOW you farted around last time, wasted time, enjoyed all the warm fuzzies and kumbaya without putting in the hard yards to deserve them!) then fill in your details below.

If you are NOT in Sydney then why not set one of these up yourself. Drop me a comment if you have questions and I’ll email you back.

What’s in it for me? Well a couple of things -

1) I love to help people succeed. So yeah I’ll be getting my jollies helping you do good work.

2) More people will get to know who I am and then will pay good money for expertise/time with me.

3) I LOVE being creative, and leveraging work with creativity, and so I will be filming the whole thing to make an online reality TV show (you can opt-out of appearing on that, or you can become a STAR)

Filed Under: Projects
June 19, 2010 By 11 Comments

Niche Wars

If you are positioning yourself as a market leader then you are bound to hit some negative people along the way. Whether you are the brazen “newcomer” or the entrenched expert, there will be someone, sooner or later, who is going to disagree with you.  So what do you do?

Be Professional, Always

One thing that you will have over 99% of the people in your niche is that you are deliberately there. Most people in your niche are just following their passion, enjoying the attention and rewards that come with being a market leader and have not cultivated any kind of professional demeanor to go with that position. When someone seems to be cutting in on their action, they can get quite nasty. Alas, the least professional will get the most nasty.

Currently, in one of the niches I move in, there is discord between one person who has created and run a forum for the last 18 months, and a member of that forum that was banned for giving her professional opinion (she has years of professional working experience and is studying to formalise that experience into recognised qualifications).  She has now set up her own forum focusing on that part of the niche and is moving to become a market leader, after all she does do this for a living outside of the niche.

Rather than get snotty in her new forum and cause issues with the old, she posted her forum philosophy and went on her way building her own community. Professional.

This seems to have incensed the guy who runs the other forum and he has posted his own “philosophy” that is neither professional or pleasant.  Guess whose community is going to benefit most from which leader – a community that is lead by a true professional in the field who is not engaging in mud slinging and is sharing her knowledge, or a community that is led by a leader interested in only keeping this part of the niche “for himself”.

Because you know why you are there as a market leader, have a plan and know where you are going, then you will be able to keep your cool if a situation like this crops up for you. Have an opinion, maintain that opinion if it is something you feel strongly about, but allow others to have theirs too. Do not engage in mud-slinging, rather put on the pretend business suit and turn your attention to what is best for your followers, niche and your business (and if you are doing the right thing whatever you do will benefit them all).

Niches Are Not Ladders

If you are moving to become a leader then you really need to grasp that a niche is not a narrow ladder that only one person can be at the top of.  There is not one niche where there is a single “leader” in that field – not one – none. Sooner or later there will be someone that comes along that is just as passionate, or focussed on a slightly different part of that market, and they create their own following.  You don’t need to “bump” someone off the ladder, you just need to keep moving forward and up.

If you think there is only one spot on the top then you will be focussed on the people that are already there, and not on the community that you are building. Remember you are a professional, not a prize fighter.

One of the quickest ways to expand your following is to hook up with someone else in your niche that has a following. I talked about the folly of that first forum owner ignoring the business opportunity of working with me in a previous post .  Combine my list with his list and there would have been a larger JV playing field and we both would have profited.  No matter, I shall work with the new forum to help build and expand so I can JV there.  I don’t believe there is only one place at the top, and neither does the other forum owner. We are in it for the betterment of people like us, not to make sure we are the ONLY ones to profit from our knowledge.

cats ladders

Thanks to Kevin Steele for the picture

Filed Under: Distractions
June 17, 2010 By 4 Comments

Just Keep Swimming

One thing you need to run an internet business is occasional access to…the internet. Alas that was sorely missing on my almost week away, with a massive degradation in wireless signal reducing access to less than dial-up speeds.  Rather than get pissy about the whole thing, I spent the time thinking through how I could further increase my offerings to the Sphynx Cat world.

I soft launched another part of the Sphynx Cat Network that went quite well and has opened the door to several other opportunities. It is possible, though still not banking entirely on it, that there’s enough of a market to maybe, just maybe, earn some money from it.

We shall see.

Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: ,
June 10, 2010 By 4 Comments

Setting Up A Business In A Weekend

A long weekend that is.

A stray comment from Kim McGuiness (managing director of Network Central) at a networking lunch this week has prompted me to try a little experiment. Kim was talking about how she sees me on Twitter  doing my Twitter thing and how “good” I seem at using it to communicate and network.

That started me thinking about how long I have been communicating on the internet. I was more than shocked to realise it’s …*ahem*… over 20 years!   I have definitely put in my 10,000 hours and can claim my expert badge in the field. But how to make a business out of something that comes as second nature to me?

social branding iron

hint hint

The plan is to see if I can get the business up and a customer signed up before I head back to work next Thursday. Oh and I will be working from our place in the bush which has it’s own set of challenges.

Can it be done? Let’s see!

Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: ,
June 8, 2010 By 8 Comments

Are You A Stupid Business Owner?

This week showed me that there are still people out there that do not get how collaborating within their niche is a win-win and not something to be feared.

Currently I am working on creating a  Sphynx cat site network because, I hope you know, I just love the breed . One area I have steered away within the niche is creating a forum. There are a couple of reasons why.

  • Forums are a lot of work dealing with people
  • There are already a few fairly good forums out there
  • I have products to create that I need to spend my precious time on

I mention this because I want to emphasise I am not a competitor with the guy this post is about.

I used to advertise my Sphynx cat book on one of the forums. Paid advertising that I tried for about 4 months as it wasn’t really working and I didn’t have time to screw around with split testing ads. Recently a question came up in that forum, “are there any good Sphynx cat books out there because everything I have found is written for children”. I left a post saying I had written one and if they searched in Barnes and Noble online store under “Sphynx Cats” they would find it. No links, no spam. The owner of the forum, however, chose to delete my post because I had ceased advertising with them.

Can you see how shortsighted that was?

I was a contributor to the forum, as well as a member. Instead of celebrating that one of their members had written a book, they stamp on something that would link them to a book (good for them). They killed a post that told a member to how to get exactly what they wanted (good for me, good for the forum).

They also have pushed a button with me that means I will not mention their site favourably ever again, I will recommend their competitor forums over theirs as well as spend my advertising dollars elsewhere. I am doing a podcast series about people in the Sphynx cat world, do you think I feel like including them at the moment?

It really is a stupid move to not even consider working with someone in the same niche as you, the benefits go way beyond whatever it is you are. I wonder if someone had recommended my book with a  straight link, what the owner would have done.

sphynx cat network teaser

Filed Under: Distractions Tagged With: , ,
June 6, 2010 By 6 Comments

Choked (Part 2)

Yesterday I left you wondering what could possibly go wrong with my blog’s Google Page rank when I hadn’t touched the blog in any way at all in over six months.  I gave a huge clue in the post because the issue isn’t about the drop in Google Page rank at all, though it is a symptom of the problem.

The real pointer was the “only 1 page indexed” statement. How does a blog that has been around in the same format for 6 months at least, end up with only 1 page indexed?

Here’s what happened and it could happen to you too if you have set up you blog the same way I had.

Blog Before

blog beforexml sitemap link

Blog After

blog after

xml sitemap link

So what changed? Well in the sidebar came a link to categories…”But you have a sitemap Allison, why do you also need links to categories?”

Because I didn’t think too hard about what would happen if the sitemap plugin decided to just “die”. No sitemap means nothing for the search engine spiders to follow links from and so they deduce “there’s nothing there”. Simple isn’t it? I broke one of the rules that I screech at in my day job as a manager of network technicians. “Where’s the redundancy?!?!?!” If it is important, like a path for spiders or DNS servers (you hear me India network architects *shakes fist*), make sure there is a backup route should the first option become unusable.

Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: , , ,
June 5, 2010 By 2 Comments

Choked

I was running my website stats (using the bestest tool in the world Market Samurai )when I noticed something really odd. This blog’s Google Page Rank had taken a drastic tumble, from 4 to zero. I silently went crazy inside. WTF had happened? Sure I hadn’t been posting as much as I sometimes do but apart from that there had been no change to blog itself.  I had never seen a blog just fall off the ranking like that without something drastic happening..but I had made no changes that would make such a drastic thing happen.

I check backlinks…still around 6000 incoming links and no major drop there at all. Steady as a rock actually.

So I then spotted something that just DID NOT MAKE SENSE.

Google had only 1 page indexed for this blog. I let loose a string of OMGs and WTFs. 1 page!!!…Google was WRONG it had to be WRONG, how could I go from several hundred pages of indexed and backlinked content-  to 1 page?

Before I tell you the answer I really have to point out a very important point. If I wasn’t tracking my stats using the handy dandy awesomest web stats tool in the world – Market Samurai –  I wouldn’t have had a clue anything was wrong.  Soon my site will be falling off the #1 spot for “Allison Reynolds” and I would be tearing my hair out blaming Google for it’s recent change in algorithm and my site would have just…disappeared out of the search results. If you rely on your website for your income then you, or whoever does your blog work MUST use Market Samurai to ensure something like this doesn’t happen you you.

So what was it that caused the problem?

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post to find out. You can take a guess in the comments section if you like (apart from Brent Hodgson who I told the answer to when I figured it out ;) )

Filed Under: Tools Tagged With: , , , ,
June 1, 2010 By 8 Comments

The Quality of Rest

I was listening to the latest Harvard Business Review Ideas Podcast on the way to work this morning. This podcast is one that would be dear to the hearts of all those productivity specialists out there because it is an interview with Tony Schwartz, author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance (could that title be any longer?)

Tony talks about his experience with introducing work cycle rituals into corporate work places. Now like most productivity people he talks about how to get the most out of the time working BUT he also focuses on ensuring that what is done during the rest cycles is the most beneficial to the person performing the cycles. When asked directly was there anything that works for everyone in their rest cycle to regenerate energy quickly, he had to say nope.

He did point out what is NOT good in those rest periods. Doing email is one, and anything that is too close to the work that you are performing.

I had a quick think about how I rest during my cycles and I really think I can get more from doing something else. I know that if I get up and put the washing on and then come back to the desk that I feel more energised than if I open my Google reader. the combination of getting up and doing something physical gives me a better boost that slumping back in my chair and “resting”.  How do you rest in your “down” cycles?

This post contains affiliate links and traces of nuts

Filed Under: Me-anderings Tagged With: , , ,