This interview from Rand at Mixergy is quite fascinating, particularly when it ventures into one of the main things I’ve been thinking about: how much you should grow your business to a scale where you’re mostly managing a company instead of its product or service:
Rand: Well, for me at least, and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs who love the early stage, we’re the same kinds of people who love artisanal things in the world. Artisanal things in life. And that can be, you know, hey, this shirt was handmade in Scotland in this store that I stopped into, and I met the owner. And that’s the same woman who designed the pattern and sourced the fabric. God, that’s so cool.
Andrew: Yeah.
Rand: Right. Or the craft cocktail movement. It’s like, yeah, this drink was invented in this bar last year when this crazy guy came up with this thing and, by the way, he also won the world beer championship two years in a row. That artisanal style of creation is something that’s really beautiful. And it doesn’t scale tremendously well. Or let me put it this way, it’s really, really hard to make it scale well.
The point is: being a true CEO is not for everyone. For that entails running a large scale business and not just a product or service. And not every product/service is adequate to scale up to the point of even having one, despite so many people calling themselves CEO of this or that.
Still, well done Rand! You might not have enjoyed the CEO role so much, but you built a business to that level, and that’s something to be proud of.
Leadership is the one competency that cannot be learnt in management school. A manager is trained to do things right; a leader does the right things. It is not a matter of training and preparation, but one of instinct and conscience.
Photo Credit: [phil h]The world of Search Engine Optimization is being rocked again by Google. With most searches now being done securely over the HTTPS protocol, some valuable referral data is being lost by traffic analysts. Now there is no way to know whether a visit to a certain page, coming from Google, is due to a search about X or about Y or Z. We can easily know we have visits to certain pages, and we can estimate how our pages are ranking, but not what kind of searches our visitors were doing exactly.
There was a lot of commotion about this, but there’s no point in resenting Google nor even eagerly gathering keywords another way. The truth is that referral keywords are overrated because they lead to optimizing for search visibility instead of goal completion (user conversion). Why? Because you only get data for stuff that is ranking.
It’s time to look ahead and realize that the fixation on keyword data is actually restrictive and blocking the evolution of Search Engine Optimization. Professional SEOs need to adapt in order to remain in business, but not on a wild goose chase of keyword data, wasting valuable time trying to micro-manage Web Analytics. Instead, the same time could be applied on actually improving the site, its popularity and (consequently) its backlinks.
Then what should be done on the Analytics side?
Predictive research is of the utmost importance. Getting keyword research done thoroughly beforehand. Investigating all possible searches that users are doing and that aren’t too competitive to rank for.
When unsure about focusing your pages on keywords X or Y, we can always make small changes later and test their impact. Instead of working passively, based on what we think our Analytics software told us to do, we work actively and measure the traffic impact later.
Optionally use AdWords with broad queries and specific keywords, in order to test which specific keywords drive more goal completions. Some say we’re falling prey to the conspiracy theory that Google is driving us to spend more in AdWords, but the truth is… it’s a great method to choose from a few specific keyword variations that we identify in predictive research. It can be done much quicker and probably with less chance of skewing than using Analytics for this purpose.
But what really, really matters?
SEOs should already be broadening their perspective and strategies, even before today, and now more so. We should all view Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, general Online Marketing and Social Media Management as a holistic field that can be explored for the benefit of clients. The goal of any of these marketing sub-fields is to make your clients richer, more successful. Not simply to make them visible to search engines and people. For this, an online strategy should have multiple defined goals for the business it applies to, and performance indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of that strategy at some point.
Now, with keywords not provided, the experience of good SEOs becomes invaluable because they know what works… this at a time where it’s more difficult to prove what works. So, the future is in the hands of those who know what they’re doing and are confident in their abilities to drive targeted traffic. More than ever, reputation and experience will be key values, and so will be the ability to convince clients about the added value of our SEO.
In the light of recent news about N$A practices, you may wonder how to take a little more control of your Web presence and experience. Here are some steps to consider if you value privacy…
Email:
Make sure the connection to your email provider/server is a secure connection. Webmail providers (those where you check your email in your browser) usually are. Others (server-based) should be double-checked to be using SSL/TLS connection.
If you’re in Europe, consider using an European provider, such as ProtonMail.
For an additional security layer, if you’re not using ProtonMail, consider encrypting your messages. Thunderbird users can use the Enigmail add-on. For Webmail, there are some browser extensions for encryption. Click here for more guidance on this.
Encrypted Searches:
Use encrypted.google.com as your default search engine, thus preventing eavesdropping from random people when browsing in unsecure connections. Better yet, try DuckDuckGo — a search engine that doesn’t focus on personalized results.
Note: this won’t prevent your Internet Service Provider (a.k.a. ISP / your Internet access company) from knowing the sites you visit and the terms of your searches. Google might also keep track unless you turn off their web history. For this, you’d need to setup custom DNS servers (in your browser or internet connection settings) or use a VPN.
Proxies/VPN [advanced]:
Prevent your ISP from knowing the websites you visit by doing your web browsing via proxy server / VPN.
You’ll need to try some example services to figure what works best for you, e.g. torproject.org or AirVPN
Enable HTTPS / secure browsing in Facebook’s privacy settings. Double-check your other settings there, in case Facebook sneaked in another “feature” with dubious purposes. Better yet, avoid facebook altogether.
Blocking ad trackers, social plugins (and any scripts):
The absolute best privacy extension is uBlock Origin, period.
With this ad blockler active, you don’t even need to worry about browser cookies much, as the advertising cookies used to track you won’t get set on your browser.
If you don’t use an adblocker, however… see next.
Hold your cookies:
Control the “cookies” stored by webpages (and their ads) on your computer. For example, you can configure your browser to keep cookies only until you close the browser. I suggest doing a complete cleanup of all cookies once before you configure this. Be ready to remember the passwords you have used in the past, because…
You will need to login again to any site requiring login on your next browsing session. You can counter this by letting your browser save passwords. Personally I prefer that to having all that cookie data on my computer, as I trust browser developers more than advertisers.
The privacy options of web browsers usually provide a Do Not Track setting, which in theory it can help prevent advertisement tracking. Google Chrome also provides prediction and spell checking services which you might not really need.
Personal mentions and profiles:
If you’re being mentioned on the web and would like to disappear, SafeShepherd can help with that.
Online Storage:
Avoid storing all your personal files in the cloud, at least with companies from countries with snoopy governments.
2013 must be the year of third-party commenting systems. Facebook’s comments were already popular and integrated into several sites. This year I’ve seen Disqus take over the comment sections of some websites, apparently increasing their lead over Livefyre, while Google is already deploying their Google+ comment integration in Blogspot.
These solutions might be interesting for the business owner / novice webmaster who wants to save some time on implementing comments on a plain, non-CMS site. On the other hand, I don’t really understand why many CMS-based sites are dropping their native CMS option in favor of a solution with so many drawbacks. This is what’s happening…
Third-party commenting systems own the comments. They feed them to the webpages through scripts that don’t actually make the comments part of the source code or (in other words) visible to search engines. It gets worse with Google+ where many comments are actually not comments, but Google+ shares of the webpage. Sometimes you can’t even follow a proper line of discussion in the original site.
External systems can fail independently of your site being up and running. I’ve personally experienced a case where externally hosted comments just wouldn’t load. It also happened that I lost my comment for failing to realise that I needed to log in.
3rd party comment systems track comments of a user across all the sites using the same system. Just the kind of centralization that your favorite government intelligence loves.
These systems also force the user to either create another account (adding complexity to the user’s own account/password management process) or to give them access to some of your social profile data.
They can simply not work on mobile devices. With smartphone and table use on the rise, you’re losing valuable interactions with your site.
I wonder if there’s any study out there that measured user engagement before and after the switch from native to third-party comment systems… So far I only found similar opinions. [1,2,3]
