On course
How many different directions can the most powerful jet fighter fly in at the same time?
How many different directions can the most powerful aircraft carriers sail in at the same time?
How many different race tracks can an Olympic sprinter run on?
So why do you insist on trying to be everything to everyone? Figure out what you’re best at, set course, and go full speed ahead.
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Recommendation: Anticipate Plugin for WordPress
If it isn’t obvious from the multiple ads around the site, I’m both a fan and affiliate of Elegant Themes, Nick Roach’s great little development house. His most recent WordPress utility, Anticipate, is something worth talking about. If you’re in the middle of redeveloping a WordPress site (be it corporate, personal, whatever) and you want to work on it and preview it while giving the outside world something else to look at, Anticipate is the awesomesauce you’ve been looking for.
What it does is put up a nice, highly customizable countdown page on your WordPress site’s home page. You can configure the clock and counter and all that, plus have some sliding content that will act as a placeholder so people have something to read. On top of that, you can slap up your newsletter signup, social media stuff, etc., all the usual things you’d expect of a site in pre-launch mode.
What makes this plugin awesome is this, however: while the rest of the world sees the landing page with all of your coming soon fanciness, you’re able to log in and work on your new WordPress site, screw it up, break the existing theme, etc. and no one will ever know. You can submit it to the rest of your team and as long as they log into your WordPress site, you can collaborate and hack your new WordPress site together. You’ll preview it live on your web host as if it were actually live, which means you can test all your plugins and other functionality. Heck, your site can remain permanently stuck in committee redesign as long as someone remembers to keep adjusting the clock on the Anticipate plugin.
Anticipate is part of the Elegant Themes membership, so you get all their blog themes as well as the plugin for $40/year. I can’t recommend this plugin enough if you’re going to be doing any kind of WordPress-based site launch. Go buy it.
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Evergreen 5: What 5 blog posts did you miss?
If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, chances are you’ve got some hits. You’ve got some articles that have performed amazingly well, articles that people have loved, read, shared, and printed out to staple to their bosses’ heads. The blog posts you’ve written that have taken off have given you that sense of pride and happiness that makes blogging worth it to you.
Chances are, you’ve also got some posts that you think should have been hits. Maybe you wrote them on Super Bowl Sunday when people were distracted by a football game. Maybe you wrote them on the day the iPad came out and the buzz from Cupertino drowned out everything else that day or that week. Maybe you wrote them early on before your blog became noteworthy and they’ve languished in obscurity ever since.
Take some time and go back through your analytics data. If you’re using Google Analytics, go to Content > Top Content, set the time range to the history of your blog, then set the view to 500 rows. Create an advanced filter that specifies any page with greater than 5 pageviews, and then look at your content.
Find 5 blog posts on the bottom of the stack, 5 blog posts that are evergreen, that are worth sharing, and bring them back to life. Go back, tighten them up, tune them up, remove stuff from them that’s not relevant any more, and give those posts a second shot at life by featuring them in an Evergreen Five blog post like this one. See if there’s stuff that is just as important now (perhaps even more so) as when you wrote them.
Here are 5 posts that my analytics says you missed that are still relevant:
- Noren: your reputation on a sheet of cloth
- What’s in common: a simple Google Reader heuristic
- How powerful is your social media?
- In troubled times, community is everything
- How your mobile phone can make your inbox more productive
Feel free to tag yourself or tag others to post an Evergreen Five. Use the #evergreen5 hashtag if you like. Bring back some of what could have been your greatest hits for a second chance!
Tagged for an Evergreen 5: Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel, Julien Smith, Amber Naslund, Tamsen McMahon, DJ Waldow, Greg Cangialosi.
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You can share too much
There’s an old adage that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic. One masterpiece on the wall is a study, but a wall full of masterpieces is expensive wallpaper. One diamond is a beauty, but a table full of diamonds obscures the brightness of any one. We lose the ability to discern effectively when we’re swamped.
As it is with life, so it is with new media. When you share a link, it’s useful, worth looking at, worth paying attention to. When you share 129 of them? It’s just so much more noise, even if every one of them is a diamond.
What we value in the information overload age isn’t more information but curation, selection, distillation.
There’s a reason why I do #the5 – it forces me to take a careful look at everything that’s of value in front of me and pick the 5 things among them that are the most valuable. You don’t need #the25 or #the450, and chances are you wouldn’t read it anyway. I wouldn’t.
If you want to be known for something in social media, be known as someone who has the good stuff and who packages it up neatly. You’ll make more short lists of people to be followed than someone just vomiting every shiny object that crosses their desk.
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Key Performance Indicators
One of the most difficult things to understand in strategy is the key performance indicator. Lots of people have a fuzzy idea about what performance is, so it’s not a terrible surprise to realize they can’t measure it, either. Let’s take a short trip down memory lane; please recall diagnostic versus objective metrics. Goals are objective metrics. They answer the question of whether you’re there yet in the road trip of life.
If goals are the answer to “are we there yet?”, then key performance indicators are your top diagnostic measures, the most important answers to the question of “how is the trip going?”.
Earlier in the year, I discussed shatterpoints, or points in any system that are so critical that if they broke, the system would stop. These are your key performance indicators – parts of the system that have an outsized influence on the system as a whole. In the example of a road trip, there are many different things you can measure, but relatively few that will make or break your trip. If your speed drops to zero, the road trip is effectively over. If the fuel gauge drops to zero, the road trip is effectively over. If the kids run out of movies to watch in the back seat and the new movies meter drops to zero, the trip will still be fine, albeit with more complaints.
Ask yourself this when developing and understanding key performance indicators: if the number you’re measuring dropped to zero, how imperiled would your business be? For example, if the number of web site visitors dropped to zero, would your business be out of business? For some companies like Amazon, the answer is an unqualified yes. For other companies like the local plumbing store, the answer is no. They might feel the impact if they’re web savvy, but it won’t immediately be game over. For most companies, if the number of customers dropped to zero, it would immediately be game over.
Each department in a business will have its own key performance indicators as well. If a department has a goal, then the key performance indicators are the critical factors that contribute to that goal. The simplest way to distill a given department’s key performance indicators is to think of them as a self-contained business unit, a miniature company within a company. If, for example, you’re an inbound marketing shop, then qualified leads are your product, and web site traffic might well be a key performance indicator for manufacturing that product, even if it isn’t a key performance indicator for the company as a whole.
The most dangerous trap a company can fall into with regard to key performance indicators is to have incorrectly sized performance indicators. Your dashboard should be commensurate with the size of your organization. If you’ve got a company or organization the size of a car, it should have a car-sized dashboard of key performance indicators. If you’ve got a company or organization the size of a jet airliner, then it should have a jet-sized dashboard. If your car has a jet’s cockpit, chances are you’re measuring too much unimportant stuff. If your jet has a car’s cockpit, chances are you’re overlooking something important.
Remember, at the end of the day, key performance indicators are the ones that, if they drop to zero, you’re going out of business. Keep that in mind to help clear the air of confusion and distraction and you’ll distill out the essentials of your company, business, or organization.
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