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Introduction To CSS

Have you’ve been stuck on designing your site using Dreamweaver or some other WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page maker? If you’re ready to step out of the shadows of table based layouts, and discover CSS design then this article is for you. This article doesn’t aim to give you CSS code that you can copy to put on your website, instead teach you about the nuances you wouldn’t find in a general CSS tutorial or code.

What exactly is CSS?

CSS stands for cascading style sheets. Ok, what does that mean? Look at it like this, XHTML contains the data/content to display, CSS decides how the content looks, and Javascript determines how the web page interacts. CSS provides not only structure to the web page like a table would but also stylization the content like background color and font size.
CSS goes hand in hand with HTML. If you’ve used Dreamweaver or a similar application, then just learning CSS won’t help you that much. While you might be able to fly by the seat of your pants, learning & knowing HTML will prove to be vital. Clean and valid HTML will not satisfy avid web designers, it will save you tons of time when your design breaks and doesn’t look right. This article won’t delve into each attribute, instead the best practices of implementing attributes to the elements of the web page.

How to apply attributes to different elements

Attributes are instructions of how elements in the HTML should look. Attributes can be anything from font-size to background-color, but this section describes how to effectively apply certain attributes to different elements.

ID’s
ID tags in HTML (<div id=”header”>) are tags which should only be used once per web page. Generally, you want to use an ID to denote the page structure, so you might have id’s for a web page of “header”, “content”, “sidebar” and “footer”, because you’re not going to have two headers or two footers for any one webpage. To assign a style to an ID tag in CSS, use:

#idtagname{
/* assign attributes here */
}
Class
Unlike ID tags, class tags can be used multiple times. This is great when you want different parts of the design to look the same.
To assign a style to a class tag in CSS use:

.classname{
/* assign attributes here */
}
HTML elements
You can apply a style to a particular HTML tag with CSS without using an id or class. For example, if you wanted to change every list (ul) to change from a dot to a square, you could simply do:

li{
list-style:square;
}

Generally you don’t want to apply a style to an element like this. One exception though would be the body tag because it only appears once. In the next paragraph though, you will see where using the general HTML element is appropriate.
Combining All Three
If you’ve played around with CSS before, you’ve probably created HTML like this:

<ul>
<li class=”x”></li>
<li class=”x”></li>
<li class=”x”></li>
<li class=”x”></li>
</ul>

If you have a lot of li elements, you’ll know it can get very annoying to type out class=”x” every time. But there is a way to simplify this. Instead use the following CSS,

.y li{
/* CSS attributes for class x here */
}

And your HTML can become this:

<ul class=”y”>
<li></li>
<li></li>
<li></li>
<li></li>
</ul>

The CSS applies the attributes for define in “.y li” for the li elements embedded in class “y”. Thus you get a cascading effect where you can affect elements inside certain elements. You can use this cascading affect for any combination of ID’s, class and elements. For example, you might use:

#content .post ul{ /* style attributes here */}

Print vs Screen

Believe it or not, you can create a CSS for when someone prints out a web page which is great for a visitor because usually if you print you just want the primary content. Generally, you want a very different style sheet as compared to the “screen” version. Using the attribute “display: none;” you can and should get ride of ads, a sidebar and any other information someone wouldn’t want to print out. You also want a black text on white background design, otherwise you’ll make people print too much ink.

You link to the print CSS file almost exactly the same except for the ‘ media=”print” ‘ part.

CSS Default

When you load your HTML file in any web browser whether it be Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari, the browser will render the web page with certain style attributes already assigned. You can of course override these attributes with CSS, but if you don’t specify differently, the browser will render the page with certain attributes already applied. Each web browser has subtle difference in how they render a web page under defaults, but in general a web page will look the same.
For example, the dots for a list item or the font family is a default style of the browser. You have the power to make that dot into a square or that font from Times New Roman to Verdana. But if you don’t specify, the browser will assume it. Another default attribute that always fools a beginner is the body tag which has a margin.

Save lines of code, be efficient

From time to time, you’ll notice your coping and pasting attributes from one id or class to another. If you find yourself applying the same attributes to a few elements, then you can combine attribute assignments so that multiple classes, ids and elements share the attributes. Lets take the attributes for the left and right arrows on the javascript image gallery. I originally had this as the attributes:

#moveleft{
	margin:0px;
	height:58px;
	color: white;
	width: 16px;
	text-indent: -2000em;
	text-decoration: none;
	z-index: 1000;
	display:block;
	cursor: pointer;
	float:left;
	background: url('left.gif');
}

#moveright{
	margin:0px;
	height:58px;
	color: white;
	width: 16px;
	text-indent: -2000em;
	text-decoration: none;
	z-index: 1000;
	display:block;
	cursor: pointer;
	float:left;
	background: url('right.gif');
}

This is silly though because the two are essentially duplicates of each other except for the background image. We can though apply one set of attributes to both ids (using a comma to include more elements) and set the background to their respective urls:

#moveleft, #moveright{

margin:0px;
height:58px;
color: white;
width: 16px;
text-indent: -2000em;
text-decoration: none;
z-index: 1000;
display:block;
cursor: pointer;
float:left;

}

#moveleft{background: url(’left.gif’);}

#moveright{background: url(’right.gif’);}

Conclusion

The mark of a good CSS designer is one that creates the CSS for the HTML. If you start designing your HTML around what you can do with the CSS, you still have more to learn. In the future, I’ll delve into the basics of taking a design in Photoshop into HTML web page. If you have any questions or sub-topics you would like me to discuss, please leave a comment below.

Link & Meta Tags in HTML

The most important tag in the head of a web page is the title tag, but the link an meta tags can tell a lot of information about your content. These tag can tell important information to search engines, and provide a handful of usefulness to a visitor. HTML is not simply intended to hold content, it contains data to describe itself and reference more content. Text on the web is not just linear, its hypertext. It wants to quickly branch off like a textbook with chapters, pages, indexes and glossaries. The web is intended to be consumed in different ways by different people. The link and meta tags tell how a web page fits in the hierarchy of a website.

Link Tag

The link tag is used for directing to other documents. In the case of a link to a stylesheet, it might display with the current web page, but for the most part it links to other documents pertaining to a collection of information. “rel” is used to describe the type of link. I describe the types of rel links below. Like a link in the body of a web page, use href to show the path to the page.

Style sheet: Link tags are most commonly used for link to style sheets. What you may not know is that there are various types of media you can specify with a link tag.

Screen – This is what your web browser uses to display the content
Print – The browser uses this style sheet whenever a web page is printed. Generally you want this page to be black text on a white background.
Handheld – for mobile devices
More media types include: projection, braille, aural, tty & tv

Alternate: You can specify different forms of a document using the rel=”alternate”.

Languages: You can specify the web page in a different languages. You can use this form:
<link rel=’alternate’ lang=’fr’ title=’La documentation en Français’ type=’text/html’ hreflang=’fr’ href=’frenchversion.html’ >
RSS Feeds: Not only can you specify different languages, you can link to things like RSS feeds:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Tutorial Dog RSS Feed” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/TutorialDog” >

Appendix: Links to an appendix document. What is an appendix? It’s supplemental material.

Start: Refers to the first document in a collection of documents. This link type tells search engines which document is considered by the author to be the starting point. For example, if you had a article which was broken up into many page, you would want page one to be the “start”.

Next / Prev: Refers to the next or previous document in a linear sequence of documents. Sometimes browsers may pre-load the next document to reduce load time.

Contents: Refers to a table of contents page. <link rel=”contents” href=”tableofcontents.html” />

Other link types include index, glossary, copyright, chapter, section, subsection, help and bookmark.

Meta Tag

The meta tag describes information about a document. Like a digtial photo holds meta data about the camera, date, exposure, so does a web page.
Keywords & Description: Meta tags are most commonly known for specifying description and keywords. They are know to help search engines identify and the content of the web page. Though no one knows how much these play in to search results, they can’t hurt to include.

Refresh: You can have the webpage reload itself without any javascript.

Content Type: Tells what type of document the web page is. The example is pretty standard.

Generator: What software made the web page or website. For example, wordpress includes the generator for stat purposes and to credit their software.

For WordPress Users: All in One SEO Pack
If you’re a WordPress user, you can use the All In One SEO Pack plugin to add tags to the meta keywords & descriptions. The SEO pack automatically takes care of suggesting keywords and descriptions. The keywords it suggested are pretty accurate too.

The Effective Marketing Plan: Marketing Action Plan

In previous posts we discussed how to start your marketing plan and how to analyze your target market. Next, in the action plans section of your marketing plan, you’ll develop a detailed marketing “to do” list. It’s a task list that describes what will be done, when each task will begin and be completed, and who is responsible for accomplishing it.

Your action plan

Once you SWOT analyze your marketing objectives, the marketing action plan picks up where the objectives leave off. For example, let’s use the objective, “Increase market awareness by 15% by December, 31 2010,” from my previous post. How can you attain that? Here are a couple of action plans to get things rolling:

Article marketing

Ongoing: Develop topics list [Ralph and Jane]
July 1–5: Identify publications and sites and pitch articles [Ralph and Jane]
July 7–8: Draft first article [Ralph]
July 9: Proofread [Jane]
July 10: Revisions and corrections [Ralph]
July 11: Submit article [Ralph]

Presentations/Speaking

August 1–3: Develop topics [George, Ralph, Karen, and Kim]
Ongoing: Identify possible venues, make contacts, and pitch [Mary and Chris]
August 4–25: Write content and develop presentations [George, Ralph, Karen, and Kim]
August 25–31: Proofread [Jane and Mary]
September 1–3: Corrections and revisions [George, Ralph, Karen, and Kim]
September 4–10: Rehearse presentations [George, Ralph, Karen, and Kim]

Your marketing calendar

You’ve looked at where you’re at and how you managed to get yourself there, got a take on your competition, defined your audience, defined your product and/or service offerings and pricing, set your objectives, and created your action plans. Good job! Give yourself a pat on the back.

Now you’ve got to create a way to implement your plan and keep moving forward. Trust me, it’s really easy to put all this stuff on the back burner when things get busy. But the time to do your most aggressive marketing is when you’re at your busiest. It ensures that you stay that way and that you can start to pick and choose those clients and projects that interest you. In other words, do what you enjoy, rather than do whatever comes in the door because you need to pay the rent.

Enter the Marketing Calendar. Although you can use a printed calendar for this, I highly recommend using a software calendar. Windows Outlook has a nifty one. Macs come equipped with iCal. Other options are ACT!, a very robust full contact manager, and of course there’s Google Calendar.

Wrapping up

When all’s said and done, going through this exercise will not only help you run a tighter ship, it will take your marketing efforts out of the “mysterious and overwhelming” arena and put it in the “doable” one. With a well-thought-out plan, you know what needs to be done, when, and how much it’s going to cost. It will put you in a much better competitive position, especially against the guy or gal who didn’t take the time to plan.

Beyond this, marketing becomes loads easier and over time you’ll learn what works for you and what doesn’t. When that happens, you can easily duplicate your efforts and kiss the feast-or-famine monster away forever. And that, dear reader, is a wonderful feeling.

How to Write an Elevator Speech

Step into an elevator (or lift as the English like to call them) and chances are you’ll hear piped-in music designed to soothe and relax, though repeated renditions of Fur Elise can prove to do just the opposite. What you’ll rarely find are animated conversations between complete strangers, which is why it’s ironic that an elevator speech has been given this particular name.

An elevator speech introduces you in the short span of an elevator ride. The theory behind this is that the introduction you make to a stranger, and potential client, needs to be short and concise, and an elevator ride is simply the best example of the time one should spend delivering this kind of speech.

What it is

An elevator pitch should give your audience immediate knowledge of who you are and what you do so that they don’t get off at the next floor, but rather hit the stop button to hear more about what you have to say.

Ideally, you would memorize not one but several variations of your speech, so that depending on the situation you are ready to launch into it at a moment’s notice. This comes from carefully crafting what you have to say and practicing it in front of a few people, preferably not family and friends who would applaud you anyway.

The one place you probably won’t use speech this is in an elevator, but being prepared allows you to meet people under various circumstances and capitalize on the moment; something we often fail to take advantage of because we’re unsure of what to say. So if a person asks you what you do, rather than say “I’m a freelance writer/editor,” you can launch straight into your short yet captivating speech.

Obviously, the more you practice your speech, the better it will get. You can weed out any weaknesses and hone it to perfection. And always be prepared to modify it as your business expands and your areas of expertise widen.

How to write it

Don’t worry about implementing all the elevator speech tips you find. Begin by finding a core message. This is what you’ll work everything around. Once you’ve figured out what your message is, such as “health and wellness writer” or “corporate communications consultant” or “ezine specialist,” you can build your speech around it using this formula:

Introduce yourself.
State your type of business (freelance writer, novelist, editor, etc.).
Describe your niche client (small business owners, online web owners, dental associations and dentists, etc.).
Explain how you differ from the rest? What is your “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP)?

Your speech…

Includes the above mentioned points.
Is not a hard sales pitch.
Is concise and on track: a 30-second elevator speech is ideal, but definitely shoot for under 60 seconds.
Is memorable, leaving your audience with something valuable to take away from your conversation.
Has a hook to entice your listeners to hear more.
Needs to be practiced so your delivery doesn’t sound forced.
Feels friendly and enthusiastic, and sincere.
Must be delivered slowly, so it doesn’t sound rehearsed.

You should…

Breath, pause, and smile where appropriate.
Maintain eye contact.
Speak clearly, even when nervous.
Act confidently, no matter the circumstances.
Stop, if you feel you’ve lost audience interest.

While those of us in the writing business can be very confident when it comes to writing complicated documents, we can be equally nervous when it comes to talking. The words that flow out of our minds and onto our computer screen seem to dry up when faced with an opportunity to brag about our skills.

If this is the case, a public speaking class might help. Once such organization is the Toastmasters, with chapters in most large cities and towns. Another excellent public speaking site to browse is Art of Great Speaking, which offers plenty of tips and hints to get you started.

And once you’ve got your speech down pat and have begun practicing it on potential clients, don’t forget to ask for their business in the end. You could do this by exchanging cards, offering to do a full presentation, or asking for a referral. Everything about an elevator speech has to be subtle, without losing sight of the end game: to get more clients and expand your business.

Envato’s 2010 Birthday Bundle – $20 For $400 Worth of Value

Happy Birthday to us! It’s Envato’s 4th Birthday, and to celebrate, we’re giving away a Birthday Bundle packed with $400 worth of files for only $20.

The bundle includes four Tuts+ Premium tutorials, a $50 MediaTemple hosting voucher, five blog and website themes, five Flash and Unity3D files, six code packages for CSS, JavaScript, WordPress and PHP, seven motion graphics projects, sixteen PSDs and vector files, three CG models and textures, six royalty-free audio files and a $10 voucher for Rockable Press. When you buy the bundle and open it up for the first time, you’ll be amazed at the value inside.

The bundle is on sale for 5 days, starting now. This is a limited time offer that ends on Tuesday, August 24 at 12:00pm Melbourne, Australia time (check the current time at Envato HQ!). Visit the Birthday Bundle website, purchase the bundle now, or learn more after the jump!

On our birthday, we like to give presents more than get them. We hope you love the Birthday Bundle!

Tuts+ Premium

In amongst more than 50 files you’ll find four wonderful Premium tutorials. If you’ve never been a part of Premium, this is a fantastic opportunity to get a sneak peek! You’ll get:

Gorgeous Graphics!

The bundle also comes stocked with background textures, Photoshop add-ons, a flyer template, Vector laptop, textures, a gorgeous font, web graphics, design templates and icons!

Themes, Hot Outta the Oven!

You’ll get a WordPress theme, two site templates, an email template and a PSD website ready for building!

A Pinch of Code!

When you buy the bundle, you’ll get a gorgeous jQuery slideshow, CSS Griddler pricing grid, Twitter widget WordPress plug-in, AJAX contact form, Simple User Counter and a jSocial JavaScript counter.

Sweet, Sweet Flash

When you buy the bundle, you’ll get two Flash site templates, a Flash video player, a gorgeous preloader, and to keep you on the cutting edge, a Unity 3D starter pack. Each file is royalty-free and ready to use in your own projects!

Beautiful Motion Graphics

When you buy the bundle, you’ll get seven logo reveals, transitions and project files ready to use with your own projects, royalty-free.

3D Loveliness

When you buy the bundle, you’ll get a hyper-realistic High Armchair 3D Model and a gorgeous Game-Ready AWP Sniper Rifle. You’ll also get a pack of elegant sun clouds CG textures for realistic reflections.

Visit the Birthday Bundle Website

Purchase the Birthday Bundle

The Effective Marketing Plan: SWOT Analyse Your Market

A SWOT Analysis is a chart showing those things within and outside your business that will make you swim or sink. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

What does is take to SWOT analyse your marketing objectives? Let’s look at the four components, picking up from the target market analysis we covered last time around.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths and weaknesses exist inside your company, and will require some hard core honesty on your part. What are you good at? What do you stink at?

For instance, maybe you’re well-educated, have a boat load of experience, and are fairly well-funded. On the other side of the coin, you’re disorganized, shy, and have a haphazard marketing strategy.

Threats and Opportunities

What things present potential opportunities for you from outside your office walls? Perhaps there’s a new office park under construction that will be filled up with juicy prospects in a year. Maybe your local economy has just had a major shot in the arm and is beginning to prosper.

On the other hand, what threats are there to your success? Are there new government regulations that present a potential problem? Maybe your key competitor just launched a new product or service? Does your industry have a low entry barrier that allows new competitors to crop up overnight charging a buck and a quarter?

Finally, take all these points and pop them into a SWOT chart. A review of the chart will enable you to get a better view of the big picture and formulate a strategy to play up your strengths, combat your weaknesses, seize opportunities, and thwart threats.

Links

To aid you in your SWOT strategy, here are links to SWOT Analyses for a few companies you may have heard about, collected by MarketingTeacher.com (Please note, these were not developed by the companies named):

Marketing objectives, goals, and strategies

Goals can be thought of as broad-based intentions. They’re often somewhat abstract and aren’t prone to being validated. Objectives, on the other hand, are narrow, precise, more tangible, and can be validated. In a nutshell, goals and objectives are what you’re trying to accomplish. Action plans are how you’ll reach those goals and objectives.

For example, let’s say your goal is to increase sales. (A reasonable goal for most businesses!) What are the objectives to reach that goal? The trick with objectives is that they should be clearly stated, obtainable, measurable, and have a time frame.

Here’s a few example objectives:

Increase market awareness by 15% by December 31, 2010.
Decrease the length of the sales cycle by 30% by September 15, 2010.
Add at least five new clients per month.

If you have multiple objectives, make sure they are consistent and not in conflict with each other. Also, be sure that the remainder of your marketing plan components (the marketing strategy, budget, action plans, controls, measures, etc.) support your objectives.

Setting your marketing objectives and finalizing the remaining components of your marketing plan may serve as a reality check: Do you have the resources necessary to accomplish your lofty objectives? Or are you going to need to tap into additional resources such as capital, staff, office space, etc. This way, your marketing objectives can also become a business management tool.

The four Ps of marketing strategy

The marketing strategy section of your plan outlines your game plan to achieve your objectives. It is, essentially, the heart of the marketing plan. The marketing strategy section should include information about:

Product: Descriptions of your product(s)and services
Price: What you’ll charge customers for products and services and how you will leverage pricing strategies to attract customers
Promotion: How you will promote or create awareness of your product in the marketplace
Place (distribution): How you will bring your product(s) together with your prospects

Let’s take a look at each.

Product/service descriptions

Describe, in detail, your products or services in terms of the features and benefits they offer prospects. Also, describe what you need to have or do to provide your product or service (how it’s produced).

Pricing

List the price of your products and describe your pricing strategy. List price ranges for each product or service and how that pricing impacts your positioning. In other words, will you be a low-price, high-volume provider or a high-price specialized provider?

Describe any price flexibility or negotiating room. Outline any discounts you’ll offer for long-term customers, bulk purchases, or prompt payment. Also, include the terms of sale, such as “net due in 30 days,” extended payment plans, and whether you accept credit cards, Paypal, etc.

Promotion plan

Promotion is what most folks think of when they think “marketing.” But, as you’ve seen, it’s only one of several aspects. A promotion plan describes the tools or tactics used to accomplish your marketing objectives.

There are lots of different marketing and public relations activities out there to choose from. Many come with aggressive salespeople who are more than happy to tell you why theirs is the best. They’re also tickled pink to take your money.

Choosing your activities can be tricky. You’ll need to find those tasks that are a good fit with your personality and reasonably easy for you to implement. Plus, it’s important that you enjoy doing the. Trust me, if you don’t, you’ll find a way not do them.

For instance, I’m an introvert. As such, I don’t do a lot of schmoozing at networking events. Ironically, when I do go, I’m the guy who starts the conservation at a dead table. I also don’t have any problem with public speaking. I’ve learned to “act as if,” and it works for me. I act as if I’m an extrovert at a networking event. I act as if I’m a public speaker. But this is really a topic for a different report or article. (If you are interested in public speaking and making presentations, you might consider the book Rockstar Presentations.)

Some promotion tools are:

Websites and blogs
Social media
E-newsletters and email marketing
Writing articles
Press releases
Interviews
Speaking engagements
Brochures, postcards, and other collateral
Print advertising (newspaper, magazines)
Cold and warm phone calls
Trade shows and business expos
Yellow Pages ads (If you think anybody still uses them)

Placement (sales and distribution)

In this section, describe how your products and prospects get together.

Describe your sales philosophies and methods. Do you employ an aggressive sales method for a large number of quick sales, or a relaxed method where the emphasis is on having customers feel comfortable to come back another time even if they don’t buy now? Do you use contract salespeople or employees? Or are you the lone wolf who’s an expert juggler? Explain your approach to sales issues.

Describe your distribution system – how customers receive your offerings. A few points about distribution to address in your marketing plan for products are:

Is the exchange of the product made in an office or store? Online? Through the mail? Through a direct sales representative? Do you go to the customer’s location?
What are your production and inventory capacities? (How quickly can you make products and how many can you store?)
Are there cyclical fluctuations or seasonal demands for your products? For example, if you produce Christmas decorations, how will you manage peak production and sales periods as well as slow periods?
Do you sell to individuals, companies, distributors, or to re-sellers? Your company may use more than one method. For example, you may sell directly to customers who place large orders but also sell to customers who buy small quantities of your product through retail outlets.

The same general idea goes for services.

Summary

Once you have a handle on the four Ps, it’s time to draft your objectives. While going through the four Ps exercise, you probably found some weak spots or places where you can improve your position. Those will be your first objectives – those things you can do, or need to do, to clean up and optimize your business.

As previously mentioned, two things to attach to your objectives are some quantifiable number and a time frame. Without those, objectives move back to the “nifty goal” area. Once there, they tend to get put on the back burner, if addressed at all. Dates and numbers help keep you on track. If you know something needs to be done by a certain date, it’s easy to work backwards when creating your action plans. For example, if C needs to happen by a certain date, then B needs to done by a previous date, and A before that. Pretty simple, eh?

Finally, ensure that your goals and objectives are attainable. A little loftiness is good to stretch your abilities, but keep things out of the stratosphere. Let’s say you are a solo designer working out of your house. Landing the entire Procter & Gamble account by the end of the month probably isn’t going to happen. No, allow me to re-phase. There’s no way it’s going to happen. But making a contact there by the end of the month just might. Landing a gig by September could happen too, with the right marketing.

Jared Goralnick Interview: AwayFind

Recently the Netsetter had the opportunity to speak with Jared Goralnick of AwayFind and Set Consulting. Check below the jump for both audio and text versions of Thursday Bram interviewing Jared about himself, his business, and his advice for you.

Listen now:

Download the interview. (Right-click and “Save link as”)

Transcription:

TB: Today I’m here with Jared Goralnick who is the creator of AwayFind, as well as the consultant behind Set Consulting, and a couple of other cool projects. Jared, the first question that I want to ask you is, what is AwayFind?

JG: Well, thanks for having me here Thursday. AwayFind is a web application that helps people to not get interrupted constantly by their email. When there’s urgent messages, it’ll notify you via SMS, voice, or IM-things like that so that one can close their inbox for a good portion of the day and focus on what they want to.

TB: Where did you get the inspiration to build this sort of web tool?

JG: Over the past 8 years doing productivity training and things related to that, I saw that communications was taking up more and more of people’s day. It got to the point where it was about half of people’s days were spent in programs like Outlook and email and true general collaboration. But at the same time, we were trying to advocate batch tasks, where you go through one thing, you go through all of it, then you move to the next thing. And interruptions are really killing people’s days and those interruptions were coming from email. So, that was a big part of the inspiration behind AwayFind.

TB: And is AwayFind your first entrepreneurial venture? What sort of things were you doing before AwayFind?

JG: Well, I started that consulting business that I mentioned about 8 years ago, so I guess I would call that my first “real” entrepreneurial venture short of selling CDs or something at school, in high school, things like that. So it was the first real thing I ever did, or Set Consulting was.

TB: And have you noticed a lot of differences between running a business based on consulting (Set Consulting) and running a web application?

JG: Oh yeah. It’s very different running a service company versus a product company. With a service company, you’re essentially billing by the hour, which means if you spend your day wisely, you can start making money right from the get-go, whereas with a product-based company, there’s a lot of energy, time, money, and everything thrown in right up front. And if you’re lucky, you’ll make some or all or more than you’ve spent back. But at least with the stage we’re at right now, we’re still spending more than we’re making so it’s a very different dynamic to essentially front-load all of your work, but also be able to reach a much larger group.

Whereas with consulting, I kind of knew where the funds were and when I was hiring people, it was because I had more work than I could handle, but that was always a good thing because I was getting paid more, whereas with a product company, when you’re hiring new people, you’re essentially just spending more money and hopefully you’re making more. It’s just a very different dynamic.

TB: And did you have to make any changes to the way that you do business? The way you run your day when you started up AwayFind?

JG: I think the biggest different was that my day is, well, I guess there’s different stages of any company, so there are times where you need to interact more with investors or with legal, you know, there’s various logistical things that happen in the creation of a company. But, in terms of a typical day, the main difference is a lot of my time is more inward-focused than outward-focused. And part of that just has to do with the size of my team, but before, in the early days of my consulting business, I wanted to get billable hours in myself, so I was working elsewhere a lot. In later days of Set Consulting, I was able to push more of that towards my team.

But I would say as a business owner, you have to adjust your roles to whatever is the most pressing or what you’re best at. And at different times in both of those companies, those roles were very different. I’m not sure if I completely answered that question, but I’m just thinking through it. With Set Consulting, you’re constantly trying, or with any consulting business, you’re constantly trying to have a pipeline of customers. That you’re continually getting people who will hopefully be customers next month and the month after, and bigger projects and smaller projects. And there’s a lot of direct sales going on. There’s a lot of relationship maintenance going on.

Now, of course that could still happen with products. You could be selling a $100,000, or whatever it happens to be, but at least at the current stage of AwayFind, we’re doing a lot more along the lines of direct sales, so I’m more interested in partnerships and more interested in direct marketing than I am in trying to pursue an individual sale. Before if I was spending a lot of time with one customer, that was always a good use of my time generally because most of those customers were very highly profitable for me. But at this point, most customers, especially since we’re not charging, we have to take care of them because it is a different dynamic, because we’re certainly not getting paid for that.

So essentially, you have to rely on different scales of efficiency and you have to have to consider how you’re spending your day because it’s a very different thing when you’re charging by the hour, in which case you’re actually encouraged to spend more time on something versus when you’re sure you can reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people with something you’ve done once, where you definitely want to do it right, but you also have to be careful how much time you spend on it.

TB: Definitely, definitely. You mentioned that you’re working with prioritizing different tasks because you’re not charging for AwayFind, yet how do you decide where’s the best time to spend you’re money when you’re working on a product that isn’t necessarily bringing in a lot of revenue yet.

JG: Even companies that don’t take in revenue have a stakehold in investors. So, for example, we have some investors, so we have certain bench marks, certain milestones that we do have to reach that relate to what we’ve told them, but I’d say that’s the least important of the milestones because we’re both in the same place where we want to be charging and want to have certain numbers that we’re hitting and so there are certain metrics you need to focus on and that’s how we decide things.

So, for us, we have a strategy in terms of where we are with the different distribution networks we have. We need to get into certain distribution networks, that’s one of our big milestones. Of course, we need to put in a payment system so we can make more revenue. A few people are paying right now, but generally speaking there isn’t a public-facing way to pay. We are also working a lot on testing. So, for us, it’s all about getting users to be active and join the product so that when we do turn on the payment features, we’ll keep those customers, as well as building relationships that can put us in a place so we can amplify our message.

Those are probably the two biggest priorities, but again every day you have to choose a lot of different things because there’s time spent on marketing, time spent on fundraising, time spent on managing your team. Difficult product decisions, moving your architecture around, security. There’s all these different things and there isn’t one right answer. There are certainly different fires to put out at times, but at the end of the day, it’s all about if you’re not making money, what is the quickest path to getting there, and the most reliable path to getting there.

TB: Definitely. Can you talk a little bit about who’s on your team, how you put your team together, how you found the people that were right to work with your product?

JG: Oh, that was a long process. I started AwayFind as sort of a side project of Set Consulting, so I probably did a lot of things wrong because I just relied on my existing team and just outsourced it to some country far away from here and see how they go and that was a learning experience for me. I think the thing I learned in the outsourcing process was if you’re having other people working on something that you’re not super familiar with in terms of developing languages or methodology that you don’t traditionally work with, you need to have somebody who does work with those kinds of things to evaluate.

And I think that was the biggest mistake that sidetracked us a lot in the beginning, working with people we couldn’t evaluate, whether they were some of the best or some of the worst. Obviously we could tell when they were delivering, but we couldn’t tell whether what they were building was functional or build for the future. So I think we went in a lot of circles for a little bit of time, but eventually I hired folks through relationships and some of those were looser relationships, some of those were stronger. And the first, I mean I had a designer already on my team who was really, really strong from Set Consulting and he stuck around.

I had a front-end person on my team who was doing a little bit with Set and a little bit with AwayFind, but I think the real big step for us was bringing on a full-time engineer and somebody who could be a jack of all trades, that understood from how to set up servers all the way to AJAX and stuff that was in between. Initially we used PHP and eventually we used Java.

But I think the first, for me, having a full-time person really dedicated to the project who understood the entire process of building commercial web applications was really the first big step. Then, overtime, we hired people who were a bit more specialized. So, for example, at this point, we have a system man if you want to talk about the far end of the severs, then you’re moving all the way up to front end. We have a few back-end engineers, we’ve got 3 of them. And they focus on slightly different things. We have a couple mobile developers. We’ve got a front-end developer. And we’ve got that same designer. So, we’re now at 8 full-time people, as well as a couple part-time folks. And as we grew, roles became more specialized.

TB: Wonderful. Now you mentioned that you outsourced at least in the beginning. Do you feel like it works better to be in the same place as your team or do you feel comfortable working with a team that is decentralized?

JG: My team is completely decentralized. We actually are in different countries, so there’s people here, there’s people in Argentina on my team. The thing that’s biggest to me is that you know when people are working and ideally you’re in the same timezone or as close to it as possible. Working with some people in Argentina for example, they’re one hour ahead right now. Occasionally they’ll be two hours ahead depending on the time of year. That’s really reasonable. There’s plenty of overlap in the day and it’s more a question of what time you get up than anything else. Working with people who are 10 or 12 hours ahead though is miserable.

So, for me, unless you want to spend all your time writing amazing specifications with zero room for question, it makes a lot more sense to be in the same time zone, then over the course of the day you can ask these other questions, and then also over the course of the day, you know that they’re working. And it’s not that you don’t trust your team, but there’s something to be said just for that comfort of being able to ask a quick question when a customers has one and knowing that they’re there at least most of the time. So, to me, time zone is the biggest factor for where people are located. And, of course, English.

TB: Yeah, English can make a huge difference, I think.

JG: Yeah, you want everyone on your team to be absolutely perfect, or as perfect as necessary to have conversations at the speed we’re having right now.

TB: Well, one of the things I found very interesting is that everything you work on seems to be connected in some way to the field of productivity. How did you get started with it?

JG: Sure. My background was software engineering and I worked for a bunch of start-ups and I worked for the government, and I saw that the technical people at the Federal Trade Commission where I was working were particularly inept at the basic applications, like Word and Excel and Outlook and things like that. So I had this premise that if these really technical people can’t use these seemingly basic applications, then what about people who use this all day long?

And what I started realizing was that regardless of the tool, there are usually people who are learning it along the beginner, intermediate, advanced axis and very rarely along the “if I use this all the time, what is the most practical way of doing it?” If you take the same route to work every day, chances are you’re going to explore the shortcuts and the backroads, but most people never did explore that on their computers. They didn’t explore it with the Office Applications, unless you were taking a course that was specifically designed to be the most practical way of doing something if you’re doing it every day, which is usually not the easiest way to teach things, then usually people didn’t have the best methodologies and ways that they could use their applications.

So that was kind of the premise behind my previous company. And over time, that process that I called software efficiency training kind of moved to a higher level of productivity in terms of a lot of time management and things like that. Now, how that factors in with me personally is I was always someone who struggled with focus, I’ve always had a million different things going on and I’ve found myself struggling sometimes to stay on task. I always get things done on time, but like anybody else that is in front of the Internet and social networks and I was susceptible to that.

So, as time moved on, I moved to a higher level of time management and wanted to tackle things that I felt were challenges for me and I also was noticing around me that more and more people, who may or may not struggled with it at a younger age, were becoming more susceptible to information overload and issues around tension management. I basically just realized that there are good ways to deal with this stuff, much of the ways you blog about Thursday, there’s a lot of great ways to deal with email overload and with a lot of things coming at you, and I wanted to build more and more tools that could help people with that. Either from a training perspective or from an actual software perspective.

TB: Well, I assume that you use AwayFind yourself, but what other tools have you found really useful?

JG: I don’t know if they’re all productivity tools, but I live off of Skype, where we’re having this call, I live off of Basecamp. There are neat little tools that I use like TimeSnapper, which keeps track of what you’re doing over the course of the day so you can play it back and see how much time you spent on specific things.

I like using RescueTime, which is very similar, and what I like about RescueTime is it lets you block specific applications, or specific websites. I guess actually it just blocks specific websites now that I think about it. That’s what most of our applications are these days. I mean I use SnagIt all the time, I use Google Apps and a few of the plug-ins for it. I use Yammer to talk to my team. There’s a lot of things that I use on a daily basis.

TB: Ok. I know that you’re involved with Bootstrap Maryland. Would you mind telling us what that is and what got you interested in it, and that idea?

JG: Bootstrap is a group that helps young entrepreneurs, usually people who are in college, or usually in their 20s, sometimes early 30s to learn the best methodologies for building tech start-ups. It’s a combination between inspiration, like a “Yes! You can do this, even if you’re an engineer you can start a business” and providing the tools. A lot of tools that I just don’t find in the Washington D.C. area.

What I mean by that is if you were in San Francisco and you were starting a business, there would be a “culture of risk” surrounding a lot of the universities. If you go to Standford, a lot of your friends are probably starting businesses, particularly if you’re in engineering or technology. So you recognize that the risky path of starting a company is a possible path. People here don’t see that as a possible path, so we’re trying to inspire them and show them it IS a path and then giving them the education and the tools that are kind of really contemporary.

You hear about lean start-up a lot from Eric Reese and Dave McLauren and folks like that, people who I’ve gotten to know and spend more time with and read their books and blogs over the past few years, trying to pass on a lot of that information that doesn’t make it outside the valley or the tech hubs in the US. So I wanted to give both the education and inspiration to these younger folks, who when they usually learn about entrepreneurship are listening to a bunch of 50-year-olds, gray-haired white men, who are talking about a million-dollar this and a million-dollar that and insurance and law and all this stuff that basically just scares people away from starting businesses, when in reality you can be a few guys in a garage, eating a few bagels a day, and working hard, and there’s at least a good chance that you can build a prototype even if you haven’t found your market. And I think that that’s more realistic in today’s world.

You can start a business with $10,000. You don’t need to worry about all those other details that are often preached in entrepreneurship courses and clubs.

TB: I think that that image of the older entrepreneur talking to younger people and the rest of the start-ups really resounds. It really is an issue that the idea of an entrepreneur from 50 years ago is very different from the one today. Would you say that there are characteristics of a great entrepreneur today that are different from what they might have been 50 years ago?

JG: I don’t think that the characteristics are different, per se, but I guess it’s easier now to be an entrepreneur because, well it depends on what type of entrepreneur we’re talking about. I would say that a long time ago, there were a lot more people who could run small businesses. If you wanted to open up a small convenience store or something like that in a small town, that was much more common. There were fewer big box stores, so generally speaking, more people had small businesses. I’m probably wrong on that, but it was probably easier to start a small company doing traditional things once upon a time, whereas our product companies were always very hard to do because there would be a lot of up-front costs.

Now, there is still some up-front time, but it’s not as much as up-front time, particularly when you’re talking about software. And it’s certainly not anywhere near as much investment because for $30 a month you can get access to a virtual product server and that would be all you would need until you have a fair number of customers, that you can just play with and have an environment dedicated to you.

With all of the open-source software, with all of the documentation that’s available online, with the community that’s available online, as long as you have enough to live these days, with just a couple people, or you, or however many people you have on your team. Really it’s about time. It’s not about huge up-front costs, whereas once upon a time, it really was about the up-front costs. And for product companies today, it’s just so much more accessible and available for people to start their own businesses because it’s just not that expensive.

TB: Ok. If you had a group of entrepreneurs, maybe the Bootstrap Maryland crowd in front of you, is there one thing you would tell them they need to do before they start their businesses? One piece of advice that you can offer?

JG: Oh gosh. I would suggest that they spend a lot of time on the idea and bouncing it around, not necessarily accepting what everybody says, you know, “no, this is a stupid idea and you shouldn’t pursue it,” because surely a lot of stupid ideas are possible, but I think it’s important to let somewhat of a maturation process of what it is that you’re going to work on and what it is. And also, just the fact that you let it sit in your mind and some people disagree with this, but I think that letting it sit inside your head for a few months and recognizing whether it’s something that you really want to do.

I think it’s just advantageous to be able to say “hey, I have this idea and I think it’s going to work.” And then the next thing along with that is to really find ways to test that idea, whether it be running AdWords campaigns, running a little website that’s just one page and asks people “are you kind of interested in this?” and asking their email address and things like that. There are a lot of ways to test an idea, so I think that you really need to test yourself to see if you’re really comfortable with that idea and you need to test the market, if there is any market, for your idea before you invest too much of your time in it.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. I guess deciding if you should be an entrepreneur is another thing entirely, but before you get too far down the path of whatever it is that you’re going to build or start, you need to get comfortable with it and you need to get comfortable that there is some market for it. Chances are that market will evolve and change as your product progresses.

TB: Wonderful. Well Jared, that’s all the questions I have, is there anything that you would like to add?

JG: No, I think you’ve given me a chance to share a lot so I think appreciate that. I do hope this is of some value to your readers or listeners.

TB: All right, wonderful. This was Jared Goralnick. You can find Jared at Awayfind.com, as well as technotheory.com, which is Jared’s blog.

JG: Well, thank you so much for your time, Thursday. I look forward to checking out the other interviews.

TB: Ok. Thank you.

Like the Netsetter Page on Facebook

We’ve finally gotten around to it–The Netsetter now has a Facebook page! Come and help us out by Liking the page.

Don’t forget, while you’re at it, to check out the other Facebook pages for blogs in the business network:

Conducting Market Research for New Business Ideas

So you think you have come up with a winning business idea. Do you find yourself telling anyone who will listen about the merits of your product? I’m sure you are already dreaming about that big day when you can quit your day job. But are you ready to go it alone?

Coming up with new business ideas is easy. But the hard work that follows can stop budding entrepreneurs in their tracks. You actually have to start taking action and get the ball rolling with your business idea – dreaming about it doesn’t count! So it’s time to conduct a little market research for your online business.

I find that gut instinct and logic go hand-in-hand when planning an online business. First I have a gut instinct that an idea will work, and then I do some market research to substantiate that instinct. As I continue with fact-finding and research, logic starts to take over from my intuition. It’s a combination of heart and logic that helps me to assess the merit of a business concept.

Before taking the plunge, you will need to do some market research to assess the viability of your idea. Many web entrepreneurs struggle at this stage because they want to find a business idea that is guaranteed to succeed. My own experience has taught me that taking action with a pretty good idea is better than waiting until you have a perfect plan.

So let’s do some market research to assess the viability of your business idea.

What is your market?

First, determine what market your business is in. Start with the broad market and narrow it down further from there. There will be many sub-markets within your broad market, and you are looking to identify which of these sub-markets your business will service.

I like using the Q&A approach to narrow down your market. Have a partner or friend ask you questions about the intended market for your business. Who are they? What do they want? What do they do? Answering their questions will soon make it clear what market you are aiming for. Continue the Q&A process until you clarify your sub-market(s).

The traditional approach in the brick-and-mortar world is to spend time on R&D developing your product, and to then look for a market. When starting up an online business, it is usually better to assess whether there are hungry customers in your market, and then develop a product for them.

Here is a list of good resources to get those creative juices flowing when brainstorming a business idea:

Chat in person

I know it’s a novel concept, but even as a web entrepreneur, it’s a good idea to step away from using the Internet and chat to others face-to-face: your family, friends, colleagues, and business peers. Whenever I visit my local cafe or restaurant, I take the opportunity to chat to local business owners. I enjoy asking about how business is going and talking about everyday things in that person’s world. That’s my approach to informal market research while I enjoy a coffee at my local cafe!

Books and magazines

Go to your local or online bookstore and browse the books and magazine categories. Look at the kinds of topics that are showing up in the best seller’s list, scan through magazines, and read articles to stimulate your own thoughts and ideas.

Google tools

I like to use a tool like Google Trends to investigate trends in your subject area. Google Trends indicates the search volume and key news items, by region and by language. Ask yourself the following questions: Has the topic been trending up or down in recent years? Is it a product that has seasonal trends? What are the hot topics and hot searches occurring on the Internet?

Google Insights for Search, which is currently in beta mode, is another useful tool to use. Google Insights is an advanced tool that is able to provide more detailed information about search terms, geographical information, and seasonality trends.

Between the two, I find Google Insights a more useful tool over Google Trends.

43 Things

43 Things is a social media site whose community has a focus on sharing each other’s goals. I enjoy browsing 43 Things because it’s sociable and light-hearted, while still triggering a business idea or two.

Springwise

Springwise has spotters scanning the globe for smart new business ideas to help entrepreneurs come up with inspiring plans. I enjoy browsing Springwise to get my fix of entrepreneurial brainwaves in a range of industries and to keep up with the latest in innovative ideas.

Get to work

Coming up with a great business idea was only the first step. Now it’s time to take action and research your potential market. When you really understand your customers and their needs, you’ll be that much closer to launching a successful business.

Just How Popular are List Posts?

Magazines have always known the power of a good list. Look at the covers on your local newsstand and you’ll see plenty of “5 tips to shed your winter pounds” or “10 ways to save on your home loan” type headlines. This style of content just works, and if you’re a blogger, you’d be wise to pay attention.

Today I was looking through the traffic on our app review blogs AppStorm, and decided to make use of a handy Google Analytics feature called Content Drilldown which lets you view stats for content by the directories they sit in.

So on AppStorm we publish lots and lots of app reviews, some how-to posts, and a weekly roundup or two. Knowing how popular list posts are, I figured our roundups would be the most trafficked. Here’s an example of our most recent roundup of 5 Places to Find Free Mac Software.

A typical AppStorm Roundup Post

Thanks to category permalinks in WordPress, the three types of content sit in /reviews, /howto and /roundups, so they are perfect for comparing traffic. Over the last month, here are the numbers:

Roundups: 843,024 Pageviews
Reviews: 126,161 Pageviews
How-To: 95,905 Pageviews

In other words, on AppStorm, list posts average almost SEVEN times as much traffic as the blog’s mainstay of reviews and almost NINE times as much as our how-to content! Here’s the screengrab:

Why not publish only lists?

Of course when you see these kinds of numbers you’d be forgiven for wondering why we don’t publish only list posts. After all, assuming they are less than seven times as expensive to write, they are clearly the most cost effective posts to publish.

The reality is that list posts don’t build a great blog. The problem with lists themselves is that they tend to lack a voice. When a publication has no voice, there’s really nothing to differentiate it from another publication that publishes similar lists.

Rather I think of them as traffic traps to catch new readers and to introduce them to our regular content types: reviews and how-to posts. Of course some readers will also stay purely for the lists, and even the people who love our reviews will also be enjoying the lists. But it all needs to be in balance.

Building a Successful Blog

If you enjoyed this article, then you can read more about AppStorm in the case studies section of my new book: How to Build a Successful Blog Business! It comes with two other case studies and a lot of how-to material based on how we have built our successful blogs here at Envato.

The Best of the Business Blogs, July 2010

At the start of every month, we’ll be rounding up the best posts from the business network of blogs and directing you to them. Here’s the best of business in July, including articles from WorkAwesome, the Netsetter and FreelanceSwitch.

The Netsetter

50 Netsetters You Should Know About

There are thousands of people operating many sorts of online businesses around the world, but we couldn’t tell you about them all. So we’ve narrowed it down to fifty.

How to Choose a Domain Name That Works

One of the first things you need to do when launching a new web business is choose a domain name for your website. Having your own domain name gives you the ability to brand your business website and will help create a long-lasting asset for your business. The process of coming up with a domain name is fun and creative, and is also the first step in announcing your business to the whole world.

Site Review: Create an Ecommerce Store in 15 Minutes with Vendr

Vendr promises that, using its tools, you can have a store added to your existing website in less than fifteen minutes. It offers a store that will work with an existing website, without requiring a knowledge of HTML or CSS. But does it deliver?

13 Ways to Better Monetize Your Blog Posts

Making money by blogging is difficult, but it isn’t impossible. If you do what successful bloggers did, work hard and give it the time it takes, there’s no reason why your blog shouldn’t make money. Here are the 13 keys to making money from your blog, according to me.

Why Outsource?

When it comes to owning a successful small business, one of the hardest things proprietors face is dealing with all work that comes with wearing all the hats. As a sole proprietor or even in a partnership, it can be very difficult for business owners to relinquish any control, especially to someone they have never met.

WorkAwesome

The Complete Guide to Going Paperless

There are a lot of reasons to go paperless – other than being able to label yourself as an “environmental crusader.” Abhijeet Mukherjee outlines not only why you should go paper-free, but what tools and tricks you’ll need to get there.

Managing Your Personal Brand Online

While putting your best foot forward in the real world is still a great thing to keep in practice, your online persona needs to be managed with the same kind of care and due diligence. This article by Georgiana Cohen is chock full of tips to make sure you’re as well-groomed online as you are offline.

4 Simple Steps for Letting Go of Stress

Sarah Nagel offers some helpful ideas on how to step back and relax during the hustle and bustle of our busy lives. With just 4 simple steps you can go from “ticking stress bomb” to “pure inner calm” in no time.

Music at Work: Necessity or Nuisance?

Music is a great motivator for some and a massive hindrance for others, while some can just take it or leave it. Sara Hodon explores the “ifs and whens” of the music-productivity partnership.

Inspirational Quotes for Work

There are plenty of ways to get motivated – or inspired – and while music is what does it for some, others find that words of wisdom and insight does the trick for them. Bob Bessette shares some of his favorite inspirational quotations and how each has impacted his life.

FreelanceSwitch

Permalancing: Full Time Freelancing

A growing trend for some companies is to hire freelancers for a full 40 hours (or occasionally more) per week. These freelancers have to show up to the office on time, handle whatever work is on the agenda, work on an indefinite basis and generally act like employees.

What is Your Ideal Client Profile?

The ideal client profile is simply a very clear description of the type of client you would love to have more of. It may be an exact replica of a client you’re working with today. Or it could be a combination of qualities you’ve seen in past and current clients.

The Swiss Cheese Method of Project Scheduling

One of the things that comes along with the freelance life, especially early in the game, is a “feast or famine” cycle, both in terms of revenue, and in terms of time. Sometimes you are scrambling to keep up with your work, pulling all-nighters to keep several projects on track. Two weeks later you have little to keep you busy.

6 Personal Productivity Tools Guaranteed to Up Your Game

We at FreelanceSwitch have offered many tips to increase your productivity, but these tips can only take you so far. Sometimes you just need a good tool or two to keep you on the right track. Here are some personal productivity tools guaranteed to enhance your performance.

You Know You’re a Freelancer When…

Here’s a celebration of all the ways we are uniquely freelancers… set apart from our cubicle counterparts, yet aware that we are perhaps still not so different. Or are we? Enjoy!

Does More Posts = More Traffic?

Yesterday in a post discussing the popularity of list-style posts in blogging, a commenter asked me to look at the frequency of post types in relation to the traffic they bring. Following this comment I put together some statistics and ended up wondering a slightly different question, does having more blog posts mean you end up with more traffic?

In the previous post I pulled up some statistics from Google Analytics to reveal that on our AppStorm blogs we had the following distribution of traffic to our different post types:

Roundups: 843,024 Pageviews in July
Reviews: 126,161 Pageviews in July
How-To: 95,905 Pageviews in July

Following on from Martin Ansty’s question in the comments, I checked and we have published the following quantities of posts:

288 Roundups
339 Reviews
159 How-to Posts

Doing the Math

So in other words, not only are list-style Roundups generating way more traffic, there are less of them. If you combine the results:

Average Review nets 370 pageviews p/month
Average How-to Post nets 600 pageviews p/month
Average Roundup nets 2900 pageviews p/month

So by this math, if we can add, say, another 300 Roundups to AppStorm in the next year then this time next year we’d have added 300×3000 pageviews p/month = 900,000 pageviews p/month! 300 Roundups over 3 app review blogs over a year means just 2 a week – that seems very achievable, and adding 900,000 pageviews would be a 60% traffic increase!

Does this really work?

Of course whether adding more posts really brings new people seems very debatable. After all it seems equally possible that the same traffic just gets spread over an increasingly large pool of blog posts.

So what I did was to go back in time to get some historical data from December 2009 which is about 8 months ago. At that time on just the Mac Apps blog there were 57 Roundup posts, and that month they netted 161,000 pageviews. In other words each Roundup post brought in 2850 pageviews on average. That is almost EXACTLY the same traffic to post ratio! So this observation sounds very promising for our hypothesis!

Taking this logic to the extreme

So let’s take this logic all the way to see if it really does hold up. Imagine instead of publishing 300 Roundups over the next year, we published 300,000 Roundups! Forget about the impossibility of such a feat, and let’s just focus on the numbers here.

By my previous logic, every one of those Roundups should bring in about 3,000 pageviews. So by publishing the huge number of additional posts, we should end up with a whopping 900,000,000 pageviews a month!

To give that number some context, according to Google’s list of the top 1000 Sites in the world, this would place AppStorm in the top 20, and make it easily the largest blog in the world.

This doesn’t really seem very realistic as it completely ignores the fact that there is a finite limit to how many people are interested in reading about apps!

So surely at some point adding more posts does NOT equal more traffic.

This makes intuitive sense, and when I think about another blog of ours, FreelanceSwitch, it also makes empirical sense. While AppStorm is a fast growing site, FreelanceSwitch has remained very steady for a couple of years now. Is that because we stopped posting? Nope! In the last two years we’ve added hundreds more posts to the site, so by my earlier math we should have grown our traffic by a huge amount – which we haven’t.

So clearly in AppStorm’s case the post to traffic ratio is only holding because the traffic happens to be growing on the site at the moment, and it hasn’t reached its full potential yet.

Increasing Frequency

Another question is in regard to frequency of posts. Sites like Lifehacker, Mashable and TechCrunch all post many, many times a day. I’ve definitely read in places (that I can’t remember now) that one of the biggest reasons they post more frequently is because it means more traffic.

An increased frequency of posts definitely equates to more traffic if the same number of readers end up reading more posts. It also makes sense that there would be some benefit to having that much more content on the site, simply from the point of view of search traffic, chance of being linked to and chance of hitting a topic or post that goes viral or popular.

Conclusions

So to sum up my little bit of quick and dirty analysis, I would say that more posts, particularly more concurrent posts, does have a relationship to traffic. However I would not believe that it’s a linear relationship, at least not for any serious length of time because there are definite ceilings to how many people are interested in a particular topic.

As for AppStorm I do have a feeling that we’re going to have to increase the post frequency on our blogs to put all these hypothesis to the test soon!

Building a Successful Blog

Blog Business Book If you enjoyed this article, then you can read more about AppStorm in the case studies section of my new book: How to Build a Successful Blog Business! It comes with two other case studies and a lot of how-to material based on how we have built our successful blogs here at Envato.

2001-2010: A Mac Odyssey

Apple have come an incredibly long way over the past decade. From the release of the very first version of OS X, right through to the iPhone 4 and iPad in recent weeks, the change we’ve seen both in technology and Apple as a company has been remarkable.

We’re paying homage to this fascinating journey today with our very own infographic, highlighting the rise of Apple over the past ten years!

MacTastik Weekly #73

Embedding this MacTastik strip elsewhere? Please provide a link back to this post and to NCWinters.com

How to Put Your Mac on a Diet With Xslimmer

Everyone knows that apples are a healthy food—hence the saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor way”. But people rarely think to ask what Apples eat. When your Mac starts gobbling up too much fattening hard drive space, it’s time to call in a different kind of doctor. One that goes by the name of “Xslimmer”.

Xslimmer is a simple, effective application for safely reclaiming the surprisingly large amounts of hard drive space that can get taken up by parts of applications you don’t actually need. It’s not a compression app, although its developer LateNiteSoft also makes a product called Squeeze that compresses your files in place. Instead, Xslimmer frees up hard drive space by stripping unneeded translations and binaries from your applications.

A Look Behind the Scenes

Confused? Feel skeptical about being able to delete parts of software without blowing something up? I don’t blame you—I felt the same way the first time I used Xslimmer. An understanding of exactly what’s going on may help you feel a little bit more relaxed.

Language Files

Most applications, both those made by Apple and those made by other developers, come packed with everything they need to survive in any environment they may encounter. For one thing, they often include as many translations as the developer can afford or find volunteers to create. That may mean there are help and interface files for—in the case of Apple applications—up to eighteen languages. If you only use one (or even two or three), Xslimmer can delete the files for the other seventeen or so without endangering your application at all.

Universal Binaries

Another feature of many applications is that they ship as “universal binaries”. While some new Apple fans may be more familiar with “universal binaries” referring to applications that can run on both the iPad and the iPhone with a different interface on each, the term is rather older than that.

A few years ago, when Apple switched its entire Mac lineup from the PowerPC processors that were quickly becoming obsolete over to incompatible Intel chips, Apple started encouraging developers to ship their applications as two separate binaries (one to run on PowerPC Macs, and one to run on Intel Macs) jammed into the same app.

That way, users wouldn’t have to worry about which kind of processor they had—they could just download one big application and be sure it would run, no matter what.

32 & 64 Bit

A few developers even went a step further—they optimised their code separately for 32- and 64-bit PowerPC processors, and again for 32- and 64-bit Intel processors. The end result can be applications that are nearly four times as large as they need to be to run on one particular computer.

Xslimmer can strip out any binaries that aren’t needed for your particular machine. Doing this kind of cleaning up can be dangerous to certain applications, but for the most part the hard drive space savings make up for the few reinstallations you may need to make.

How Does Xslimmer Work?

Xslimmer has a very simple interaction model: you drag applications into it, you tell it to slim them, and it slims them. Really. That’s about as complex as it needs to be.

The Launch Screen

You can either drag apps directly into Xslimmer from Finder, if you have just an app or several you want to slim, or you can take advantage of Xslimmer’s genie feature. Genie does a once-over of your computer, finds just about every application that isn’t required for the system or part of Apple’s Developer Tools, and offers to slim all of them at once.

Xslimmer Genie

There are certain applications that, for one reason or another, Xslimmer can’t slim. Some are blacklisted applications like Dropbox and pretty much everything by Adobe; those are applications that will break if Xslimmer tries to slim them.

LateNiteSoft does a pretty good job of blacklisting breakable apps and Xslimmer has been around for a good while, so you shouldn’t have to worry too much about it accidentally breaking any applications unless you’re using something brand new that it hasn’t seen before.

You may also encounter apps that “cannot be slimmed further”; that should only happen if you’ve used Xslimmer or a similar tool before. Finally, there are certain applications that require an administrator password to slim. These are almost always Apple applications or apps placed by an installer rather than dragged and dropped into the Applications folder by a user. This is just a side effect of how installers work on OS X; those apps are no more likely to get broken than any other.

Next to each application there is a globe or set of globes, showing whether that application has languages that can be trimmed, and a “universal binary” or processor icon indicating whether there are unnecessary binaries that can be stripped.

By default, Xslimmer will try to strip both of these from each application, although it can be ordered to leave one or the other alone in the Preferences. You can also choose to get info on any app, to get a clearer picture of exactly how much space will be freed by slimming it, as well as how it will be freed.

Application Information

The clear button will handily clear out apps that can’t be slimmed. You can easily add or remove apps from the list using the plus and minus buttons at the bottom left, and then you’re free to start slimming.

The first time you hit the Slim! button, you’ll be confronted with a warning that offers to make backups of all of your applications before slimming them:

First Slim Warning

This is potentially useful, but it does sort of defeat the purpose of clearing out hard drive space. I’ve come to trust Xslimmer pretty completely, and I no longer make backups before slimming.

Slimming Complete!

Once Xslimmer has freed a gig or two of space for you, your slimming history lives under History (shock), just in case you ever need to know—for example—exactly when you stripped down Firefox. That’s almost the end of what the app can do.

Using the preferences, it can also automatically compress newly slimmed apps using Snow Leopard’s transparent compression technology, choose which binaries you want to trim (all except the native ones, or all except the very best ones), exclude certain apps and folders from having their content slimmed, choose where backups are kept, and pick which languages you want to keep around.

History

Why Xslimmer?

There are several applications with similar features to Xslimmer. First is Monolingual, a free and open source app that accomplishes the same goals, but in a less well-designed interface. Trimmit can only handle one application at a time, but trims out some things even Xslimmer misses. Unfortunately, it takes approach of drag-and-drop simplicity even further, to the point where there’s no blacklist or other feature protecting your apps from being nuked by a careless trim. Trimmit is best used in concert with Xslimmer to cut slimmable applications down even further.

Xslimmer is a brilliant and quite safe (and at $14.95, relatively inexpensive) standalone method of putting your Mac on a diet and regaining some lost hard drive space. If your hard drive space is at a premium, or if you often make fresh installs, Xslimmer can be an invaluable maintenance tool.