CMOR Weekender #1 – You’ve been Zemified.

Reading time: Approximately 6 minutes

The CMOR Weekender edition of Code My Own Road. This is a regular column I do on a Saturday (Friday if you’re in the U.S.) where I talk about random interesting stuff that’s come across my plate during the week. Generally it’s off-beat and can sometimes be off-topic from our normal focus of creating multiple streams of income. Think of it as the lighter side of me and Code My Own Road

Welcome to the first edition of the CMOR Weekender

G’day and welcome to this little column I’m hoping will give me some time to breathe and exude a bit of the lighter side of Code My Own Road onto you, the reader.

Inspired by similar columns by such people as Karol Gajda and his sweet shit saturday, SEOmoz’s (SEOmozes?) always popular whiteboard friday, and Dave Doolin’s technical tuesday, I didn’t have a cool alliteration to use so I just call it the CMOR Weekender.

It’s all relevant information, but just stuff that didn’t make it into a blog post during the week or maybe even the week before. I’ll run it hopefully every weekend, but as you know I can’t guarantee I won’t have higher priority stuff to do. That’s why I haven’t dated any of my posts included these ones.

A highly recommended read

I came across this really cool article by Vincent Chan on the Primitus blog Power of Scale. It’s about the reasons behind why so many of PayPal‘s past engineers and execs all went on to create extremely successful startups such as You Tube, LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, and more.

They touch on some awesome HR issues that I think PayPal approach in a pretty unique way. Kind of Googley actually. It’s a bit of a phenomenon that all these people went on to inspire such great successes in their next companies and this article actually goes through and picks out the lessons to be learned.

I particularly liked this quote on using real data to inpire decision making. As far as I’ve experienced in my professional life as a programmer this sort of stuff isn’t really done enough:

So you never started a sentence like this “I feel like it’s a problem that our users can’t do X”, instead you’d do your homework first and then come to the table with “35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality…” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)

Experimentation

I’m planning on another experiment. Actually the wheels are already in motion. Some of you might have seen my article on Zemanta during the week. It was a quick technology review on this really cool plugin.

Anyway, I started thinking that I’m really interested in seeing if excessive linking out will lead to an increase in visitors, and not only raw visitor numbers, but an increased range sources of visitors in particular.

The thinking behind this is that I reckon the amount of trackbacks and pingbacks will increase quite alot as I’m not naturally a very good linker (call it laziness.. whatever I can’t be bothered to fight you on it.)

So if that means there’s loads more articles linking back to a post that is of related content on my blog, then technically I should see an increase in the range of visitors. This could in turn give some metrics behind why linking out so often is a good idea. We’ll see..

I’ll probably write that one up in a few weeks when I have some solid data, I’ve only been using Zemanta for about a half dozen articles so far including this one.

And one last thing

I’ve launched a newsletter and I’ve been plugging it like crazy. Here’s another reminder if you’ve missed it during the week – I’m giving away free copies of my Lowering Your Website’s Bounce Rate eBook. All you have to do is put your email in over there on the right hand side of the page and I’ll send it to you. You’ll also get a newsletter from me which at this stage will be roughly monthly (I don’t want to flood you, and I don’t want the extra responsibility (call me lazy… meh.)

So yes, free eBook, go.. put your email in… you know you want to

That concludes proceedings, as you were soldiers…

Well that’s about all I have to say right now, I have to leave some stuff for next week, can’t give it all away right now. Hope you’re enjoying the new format of CMOR. I’ve been having fun writing something every day so far for the past week and a half. I don’t know how long I can keep up the pace but we’ll see. I’ve got plently planned and it’s all good stuff. Sign up to the RSS feed if you’re that way inclined and it’ll come straight to your reader.

Have a good weekend!

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