You need a first 1,000 users plan. This isn’t just about getting 1,000 users to try out your service. This is a plan about keeping those users.
How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users
How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users
April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
What To Do Next?
April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
While I’m getting back into publishing I’ve been thinking about what sites to do. My interests are varied, so I have to find a way to narrow down my focus. First, I need to figure out what criteria to evaluate potential ideas agains.
I have 3 primary criteria:
- Interest/Passion for topic
- Desire to Write about topic
- Ability to profit from topic
Publishing is work, so I have no illusions this will be all fun. I want to create sites that are rewarding creatively but also financially. This is my job, not just a hobby. I can not get paid doing something else with my time.
I don’t want to write about everything I love. For example, I love taking photos. I love learning more about my camera and I love teaching people. But I don’t think photography is my niche. It’s more something I do because it’s not doing this. It’s my escape. I do have some posts related to photography I want to write. Some for one of my sites and some guest posts for others.
One topic that seems obvious for me is web development. My experience in this area is pretty in depth. I’ve managed servers, web sites, people and code. I’ve done it all, programming, design, social media, copywriting, seo and more. I keep up with the industry, new techniques and technology and I love doing it. I could write about web dev, no doubt. I’m going to focus on the stuff that’s most fun to me, like WordPress, Social Media, Blogging and so on. I’m trying to decide if that should be here at Chrispian.com or on it’s own domain that could be branded.
The other site I plan on working on is Lit.Org. I created it, probably about 15 years ago and sold it almost 5 years ago to help pay for medical bills for Erin. A few months ago Mark and I were talking about the site and we ended up buying it back. I never could figure out how to properly monetize the site. It needs some major work. It was ahead of it’s time back in the day, but when you look at sites created the last few years, it’s grown stale. Even though the site’s about writing it’s difficult for new users to figure out what the site is and how to use it and search engines don’t know what to make of it. Most of the content is generated by users and is, by design, all over the place. A story about a small town killer to a poem about war and everything between. The site is the result of writing, not about writing. My plans here are to upgrade the main site and add more social features. There’s a good bit to do, but it’ll be small changes happening over time. I’m a big fan of incremental improvements vs a large scale upgrade. Next is a new section on the site (powered by WordPress, natch) that will be focused on writing. It will focus on articles to help writers improve, get paid and market themselves online. Since my expertise and focus is online, most of my contributions will be focused that direction but I’ll be looking for guest posts and eventually paying writers as well. This section is part of my plan to monetize Lit.Org. As it always has been, the site will remain free to users. We may put a few ads on the site here and there, but the main focus for revenue will be done via the new section.
Now I’m just ironing out the details and making plans. It’s interesting basically starting over and trying to figure out what to do next. It’s always easier to tell other people what to do on their projects. I never know what to do myself. I keep trying to treat myself as a client but I keep firing myself for being too demanding.
So True It’s Almost Not Funny: Tech Innovation Explaine
April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The Mountain
April 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Photo by michaelsking
First off, the hill was way steeper than I remembered. Getting down was pretty quick and easy, an I got back up the first time pretty fast. I should have gone slower. The next time, I took more time getting down and back up, but that was it. I knew I didn’t have another trip in me. I just wasn’t ready.
Luckily, I knew it early enough that I didn’t do any damage. I finished up my walk/jog on level ground and regained my breath and bearings.
Now that I’m getting back into publishing sites and content again, I have to remember to pace myself. Don’t try to get into too much too fast. Just like my lungs and muscles have to be conditioned to handle that level of activity, so does my mind.
So if you’re just getting into something, don’t rush in before you’re ready. Don’t let fear stop you, just don’t run the mountain before you can walk it.
Photo by michaelsking
Happy Anniversary and 30 Day Challenges
April 1, 2011 By 1 Comment
This month shares a couple of important anniversaries for me. Today marks my two year’s at my day job, working with some of the best people I’ve ever met. And later this month, on the 29th, Chrispian.com will be 8 years old. It’s not my oldest site by any means, but 8 years is a long time on the internets. So I thought I would start something new to help me get back into the swing of things.
I’ve seen a few people doing various 30 day challenges on their on blogs. I think the first time I saw it was on Matt Cutts site. The basic idea being pick something new and try it for 30 days. I’m just going to do a month at a time, just to keep things simple in my head.
To kick this off, I think I’m going to try blogging daily for the entire month of April. I might as well kill two birds with one stone and use this first challenge to help me jump right back in.
New Facebook “Like” Button iFrame Bug – Fixed
March 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Facebook has been updating their social grap plugin for some time. The social graph plugin is what powers the like button, commets etc that you see outside of facebook. We use them at work and I found an error I wanted to share. The new like button is pretty simple, but they forgot to put a slash on the closing part of the iframe tag. This will likely throw your page completely out of whack. For those who don’t know HTML they may miss this.
Notice that the ending iframe tag is missing the first slash, which tells it to close. Just change it to:
</iframe>
And that will fix it. Minor bug, but could be annoying for those who don’t know html.
Add Facebook Thumbnail Image to the Genesis WordPress Framework
January 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Just wanted to share this little code snippet. The facebook share widget that you see on most sites can also include an image. Most of the time it can find one from your site and you can just cycle through them. But I don’t use images on all my sites or on all my posts, but sometimes I do use featured images to show on the home page or in a featured slider.
This little snippet adds the first image from your post and puts the img src meta tag into the header of your Genesis theme. Put this in your child theme functions.php file.
/*********************************************
Add Facebook image src so share widget can see thumbnails
*********************************************/
add_action('genesis_meta', 'add_facebook_image_src');
function add_facebook_image_src() {
global $post;
if (is_single() && has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ):
$image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'single-post-thumbnail' );
echo "<link rel=\"image_src\" href=\"$image[0]\" />\n";
endif;
}
Distractions, Focus and The Paradox of Choice
October 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I’m a web developer, and a jack of all trades developer at that. I’ve managed linux servers, written enough php + mysql to fill up up a small library of it was printed out. I’ve done consulting, social media, seo, design, wordpress themes, plugins, content, and so on. At one time or another, I’ve been responsible for just about everything you can do with a website. At my day job, I still wear most of these hats. To say my interests in this business are varied would be an understatement, but most of it came out of necessity. I’m the only developer at work and have been for most of my career. Something I dislike very much.
I’ve also never had any training and I didn’t go to college. I’ve taught myself (along with help from time to time) everything I know about this. I’m a quick study and I absolutely love learning, problem solving and creativity. All these things play roles in web development. I got started in web development in about 1995. I wanted a website where authors could submit stories and get feedback and reviews on them. I tried to find one because I wanted to improve my own writing. I couldn’t find anything, so I started learning programming and I’ve been doing it ever since.
It wasn’t just because one didn’t exist. I’m not a control freak by any means, but I love doing things for myself. Recently I switched to using the Genesis them for WordPress. And what’s the first thing I want to do? Develop plugins and themes for it. But I’m not going to. The urge is still there. I love creating. But this phase of my life, it’s time to focus on the content. I don’t want to get down into the code anymore. That’s why the new site I’m launching (Strange Signal) is focused on teaching what I know and sharing my almost 16 years of experience. I hope to make some money along the way, but I also hope to learn more and have more time to breath and think things through. I feel like I’ve been cranking out code and projects so fast I’ve had no time to digest what I’ve done. All this data is trapped in here and it wants out.
One of the problems I’ve always had is having so many interests. I know I’m not alone in this, but I often admire people I see who seem to have a laser focus on what they’re doing. I’ve learned over time that even most of them have had to work at it. In the times we live in, we have so much choice that it’s actually a problem. I recently discovered this video called “The Paradox of Choice”. The video is by Barry Schwartz and was a talk given at Google and is based on his many, many years of study and the book he published. Here’s the video:
This was a major awakening for me. I immediately recognized the effect of so many choices in my own life, and after reading his book (The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
