Jeremy Goodrich's Blog

After a month of internal testing (eg, sites owned / operated and or controlled by our team) we've opened up the FunAdvice Traffic Exchange to a GA beta release. GA meaning general availability...you don't need an invite code, you don't need special permission.

Simple go here to sign up for the traffic exchange and that's all there is to it. Every click *from* your blog or site generates one click *back* to your website through the exchange...so if you give out 100 clicks, you get 100 clicks back. Simple, brilliant, effective.

"wis.dm" is asking for donations...one of time's top 50 websites...raised $5 million dollars... asking the community for cash? priceless.

In all seriousness, I feel bad for the people that are about to lose their jobs at that company...*however*...the employees should be PISSED OFF at their president and board of directors. Why? With the free publicity they had (Time Magazine, techcrunch, various blogs, etc), WHY did these guys fail to take off?

Look, it's not often I write (here) to go read something I wrote, elsewhere, however the only appropriate place to stick it (cough) was in a subscription forum on WebmasterWorld. The classics never get old, and WebmasterWorld is certainly a classic.

If you do read there, then feel free to post (here) and let me know what you think.

Do you want to win? Take names, kick some ass and dominate the niche, vertical category or market for your company? Then do yourself a huge favor, learn about startup salaries and don't follow those guys. If you are a private company, bootstrapped or venture backed, why would you ever pay the CEO $237,000 per year salary?

Black or white, this or that, good or evil. Much simpler, cleaner and far more sanitary. However, people aren't always like that. The good news is: most of the time, if you boil it down to "good or bad" it's FAR easier to make the decision. So we have rules (on our site) and we have consistent application of those rules.

December (and November) were crazy for me. More so than any other year, between my wife traveling to Maldives, moving, getting sick, having a house full of two times the usual amount of family...countless visits by other family who live in the area, multiple weekend trips to see the sights...life was crazy.

Things are closer to "normal" and I'm almost caught up. I'll have more to say in about two weeks, when we're ahead of the curve (again) and I can take the time to share my rants with the rest of (well...whoever reads this, anyway).

Last week we had major issues on our site. Ugh. Nine days later, we still have an issue or two, however, those aren't "customer facing" as those all got licked in about five days. Things this outage has taught me (arguably, the worst in our history for a few reasons):

1) Have a plan to get things back on track
2) Over communicate what's going on with the site
3) Be polite, because not everybody reads the message the first time
4) Be honest, if you don't know the answer, don't give people a time line, as invariably, you'll guess wrong.

Everybody makes mistakes. We're human. However it just occured to me after a particularly bad incident this last week something very profound: if I make a mistake, I get to share with my team, so they don't repeat the mistake. Not saying it's good for the "boss" to mess up, however, if the team takes advantage of the knowledge, and avoids repeating the same mistake, then there is at least some value there.

So, do you pass on your failures? Or do you sweep them under the rug?

It's a funny thing when a plan comes together. Case in point: outreach, aka, promotion efforts. For our site, we've been doing outreach for more than two years. As I have a fair bit of experience, it's relatively easy to put in an hour (or two) and get somewhere. However, after eight years...well, I should have a clue, right?

Believe it or not, you sell a lot of stuff, everyday. Sure, it's not all for money but that doesn't change the fact that you're selling.

Examples:
"You look so young"
(my hair is going more gray, daily, so, NO)

"You're still so slim, why are you worried about what you eat?"
(I've gained more than 16 pounds since I started working from home nearly 3 years ago. However, due to the stress of starting the business, I lost 14 pounds when we began, so my "swing" has been a grand total of 30 pounds...that's not good.)

"No, it's not spicy at all"