I think resolutions are probably a good idea for the most part (lose weight, exercise more, smoke less/no more crack) but, psychologically, they just don’t work. Still, it’s never a bad thing to think about how you want to change your life. Since I’m neck-deep in technology and since my personal life is immaculate (chuckle), I figured this might be a good time to think about how I’d like to change how I use technology in my own life.

I’m done selling tangible objects on Craigslist, I’m done using eBay, and I’m through with PayPal

Between PayPal’s ridiculous user agreement and business practices and all the unscrupulous people out there, I’ve been ripped off 3 times in the last year. In the end, the money lost has not been crippling by any means (probably about $300) but it has been frustrating and makes me think less of the human race in general.

Selling things on-line is tricky. My advice to anyone using eBay or Craigslist is to cover your butt completely. If you use PayPal (I wouldn’t recommend it), make sure you completely understand the user agreement and you don’t leave your money in there for longer than a few days if you can help it. If you ship anything, get a tracking number always (that should be obvious but I guess I needed to learn my lesson the hard way). All my advice comes down to not leaving yourself open to anything. I hate to say it but assume that everyone you’re dealing with is trying to rip you off. That way, when you think “I’m sure this guy will send my stuff back, I’ll just reverse the payment” you’ll immediately laugh and ignore phone calls and emails until you get your stuff back *cough*.

My first step towards avoiding any future screwings is to cancel my PayPal account for good. These guys make so much money for doing next to nothing and involve themselves in transactions when they aren’t needed. In an attempt to appear to protect buyers and sellers, they move money around, take money away, and will sick collection agencies on you before you know it. PayPal sucks and I won’t use them ever again:

eBay too:

I’m going to finish targeting/optimizing my website, clean up all the static content, and style all pages

It’s a bit sad that me, a person who helps other people build their on-line presence, has an un-optimized, incomplete, unsatisfying website. I still haven’t picked and optimized for keywords that I use, there are a few pages (like the search results and my 404 page) that aren’t styled, and I change my mind about the page content on a weekly basis.

Just like the lawyer who gets a DUI or the personal organizer with the messy car, I just don’t make time for my own projects because, well, no one is paying me for them. The problem comes when I miss out on work because someone doesn’t want to hire a web designer with an unfinished web presence. As such, here is my to-do list:

• The Portfolio page is going to be changed into more of a client presentation than a list of things I’ve done. It makes more sense to concentrate on the client, their needs, and how I helped them than on the individual projects I’ve completed. I see myself as much more of a consultant and an on-going resource than just a guy who builds sites and emails and then moves on.
• The Resume page needs to be updated and new testimonials need to be added. I’m putting together a list of questions that I will be sending to current and past clients about their experience with me and how they liked the outcome.
• The Hire Me page is going to be more of a list of products/services that I offer rather than a meandering list of stuff I can do. I want to offer 5-8 different products, each with its own base price (website from scratch, SEO analysis, page content re-tooling, full web presence package). I think this will go a long way towards showing people what I can do and what they might be missing.
• I need to pick out keywords and write for them, period. I made a few small changes and watched my traffic from search engines grow by about a third. Each post should be optimized and targeted or I’m just wasting my time.

I’m going to use Adobe Illustrator for design and layout more often than Photoshop

Unless you’ve used both programs, you might not understand the benefit of one or the other. I’ve been using them for almost a year now and, while I understand, for the most part, the benefits of one over the other in various realms, it just never occurred to me to use Illustrator for web design and layout.

The main and most obvious difference between these two programs is that one works in vector artwork (infinitely scalable and very flexible) – Illustrator – and one works in pixel artwork (only one true size but displayable anywhere) – Photoshop. When possible, you always want your artwork or logo or layout in a vector format and exported to pixel format (like a JPEG) for use on the web.

I’ve always assumed that since the web is displayed in pixels that you should probably design in a pixel program. What didn’t occur to me is that creating everything in Photoshop really limits you in terms of future changes and expansions. Since you can’t really “finalize” anything in Illustrator (make into pixels which can’t, for all intents and purposes, be changed), your designs are much easier to change and adapt later on when minds are changed or goals are modified.

On top of the many benefits of using AI to do layout, it’s also going to force me to use it more and get better at it. I like using Illustrator but I’m not very good at it and I want to get better. Practice makes perfect!

Who cares?

Search engines are complicated, proprietary, heartless machines that chew up poor, unsuspecting websites and spit out a category based on what it tastes like. These categories are used to literally rank a site’s individual pages based on their relevancy for particular word or phrase. The rank, as it is referred to, is the key to getting more people coming to your website (called traffic) which can lead to more sales/appointments/contacts (called conversions).

Unless you don’t actually care if anyone goes to your website, you should be concerned with how findable you are on-line. Studies show that unless you’re on the first or second page (mostly just the first), you won’t get clicked on very often, your page will get minimal exposure, and your time and effort creating the site in the first place will be for naught.

Your rank in a particular search engine for a particular word or phrase is, simply, a combination of the following (more or less in this order):

1. How many other sites point to you as a reference, particularly for that word (known as incoming links)
2. How regularly that word is used on your page and where it appears (page titles, meta information, content)
3. How “good” your site is (lots of focused content, continual updates, age of site)

If you want people to see the information you have, if you want to turn web browsers into customers, and if you want to take advantage of the biggest marketplace of potential customers, you’ll give more than a second thought to how you are seen by a search engine.

Why is SEO important?

Consider what it would be like if no one could easily find your place of business, or even your telephone number. Most businesses could not continue for long in such a situation. The same thing can happen with your web site if people cannot easily locate it. Traffic volume, if it existed at all, slows to a crawl. Potentially valuable customers never even know you are there.

Key word strategy & generation

I’ll start off by saying that this is the single most important thing that needs to be done for a site… and, of course, it’s the hardest thing to do, the easiest to get wrong, and the most lengthy process. There is a lot of information available online about keyword strategy so this description will be brief.

Keywords are the words for which people are searching. Keywords for your own website are the words that people are searching to reach your website. Picking the right keywords is partially an exercise in putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and partially in avoiding words that are too common. Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes means that you’re thinking about words that your customers would use to find you. Avoiding common words means that you’re not competing directly in search results with sites that have a very strong presence and might be in a totally different industry.

Here are three simple steps towards picking keywords that can work for you.

1. Choose words that you think people might be using to find your site. Come up with about 20. These are probably not the words you’re going to use.
2. Go to google.com/keywords, type in your words, allow synonyms, and search. You should have a list of potentially hundreds of different words.
3. Pick about 5-8 words that have low-ish advertiser competition (under half), a good amount of searches but not too many (different for every situation but I usually pick words that are under 10K monthly searches), and a flat or upward trend (current month is higher or the same as the average).

These keywords should be used as-is throughout the site, it’s structure, image descriptions, and the text content.

Each step comes with it’s own set of complexities but, if you’ve walked through these steps, even if you’re confused by the end of it, you’re a step ahead of many, many people on the web.

Building a functional keyword strategy is not something you just do once. Seach engine optimization is something you need to do on a regular basis. I see it as a scientific process. You start with an idea, a hypothesis (”my clients will find me by searching ‘eye care’ and ‘cataract correction’”). Then you design an experiment to test your original hypothesis (”We’re going to write a few pages of content, each one concentrating on a different part of the keywords we chose”). Data is gathered and analyzed and a new path is chosen (”Our traffic went up 30% with these keywords… are we getting all the benefit that we can?”). Time and culture will change search patterns so what used to be a golden word for you, may become stale and unpopular. Keep checking those analytics reports!

Need help?

If you’re looking to increase traffic on your business website and need some help with all of this, give me a call (contact info on the top left of this site), I’d be glad to help. SEO techniques are important and confusing and it helps to have someone there to guide your efforts.

Yeah, seriously.

What brought this up

I’ve been doing, inadvertently, a lot of thinking and reading about search engine optimization (SEO) lately. For the company I’m contracted with, we’re trying to come up with a solid strategy to rank better in our industry, get more online attention, and attract sales leads. For a couple of my clients, I’m trying to implement some simple changes and add information to get them as visible as possible. For my blog, I’m always looking for ways to help my ranking.

Working for other people and helping them build an online presence is a whole hell of a lot easier than doing one for myself. I can help someone easily summarize what they do, help them pick keywords, and put them all in the right places. For myself, however, when trying to pick a niche, I find myself in these very existential moods. I’m picking 8 words or phrases too some up everything I can do for people. Wait, I have to sum up my professional interests in 8 words?! How?

Keywords… those effing keywords

The problem isn’t finding things to write, thinking of relevant tweets, titling my blog posts, filtering what I want to write about versus what I should write about, the problem is picking keywords.

To rank well in a search engine, you have to write content targeted at a certain audience of people. Think about who you want to sell to and get to work, right? Wrong.

First, you have to summarize the things that people are going to search to find you. In other words, what headings do you want to be found under? This isn’t too hard, I did it and came up with 50 things. We already have a problem.

Now, put those things in a keyword generator like Google’s and see what else comes up. Not only will you add 50 more words that never occurred to you in the first place, you’ll find that the words that were the most interesting to you are the hardest words to rank for. Not only that, once you start picking words that you have a chance in hell of ranking with, you find yourself limited and a bit off-center from what you actually do or want to do.

I want to do it all and I want to do it from right here

So what do you do? No really.

I do a lot of different things... some of them don't even involve a computer

Searching for keywords for something as important and, dare I say, intimate as your freelance work (or writing or anything) puts you in this terrible position between passion and pragmatism. I want to write about art and science and the internet and web design and email and writing. I also, however, want my writing to help me reach people that need what I have to offer.

Part of my problem, in a business sense, is that I don’t have a well-formed “elevator pitch” for what I do. The value proposition (I hate that phrase but it’s relevant), the text at the top of this pitch, is about as close as I get. I help people build a web presence for their business or their own personal endeavors. That’s cool, sums it all up, right?

But I also help people with writing projects, advertisement design, document layout, and self publishing. I alter photos, help people write resumes, layout print ads, teach HTML and CSS, customize email templates. I teach people about social media (what little I know), explain technology concepts to friends and family, and fix computers. I set up printers, cure slow-running computers, and answer questions. I do it all, Josh Can Help, dammit.

Good for you. Now prioritize

That’s the key, prioritization.

First, I’m going to need to think about the work that I want. The most important reason I have a website/blog is to build a reputation, display my work, and get more clients. If I was guaranteed not to get any clients or feedback from my website, it would look worse, be updated far less often, include a lot more boring personal junk, and have less people who read it. Already, I’m making a pragmatic choice by centering it around my professional life.

I want to work with people to build or repair their website. I want to help them make it as visible as possible to all the major search engines. I want to show them what else is out there that can build a more robust presence (social networks and media, blogs to read, online resources that are valuable). I want to explore advanced web development stuff like PHP development and Javascript coding on my own time, implementing interesting functionality for people who never thought they could have one of “those websites.”

The people I want to help are small businesses and individuals. I love helping people in the art world because it keeps the right half of my brain active. I also, however, really want to get into the industry that I’m going to school for, chemistry. I want to help small technology companies do great things with the web and reach more people. I would love to work for a green technology company, either as an employee or a consultant.

Endgame

Off into the sunset...

In the end, I want all of this to lead to something amazing, something massively fulfilling, something that I can be proud of. I want to look back at a long list of people and companies and know that I did something great for them. I want to write a book, I want to help people do what they want to do, I want to make things easier for people, I want to work on a broad spectrum of things for a broad spectrum of people.

I want to bring people together, help them work better on things they are passionate about. I want to help people concentrate on what they’re doing because they want so bad for it to work. I want my name on something. I want to be accountable for something.

I want to work with a team of people that can’t be stopped. I want to work long, long hours, not because I’m forced to do so but because I can’t help myself. I want to collapse into bed with a smile on my face, mind racing, a million more things to do tomorrow.

I want to help you because I can help and I want to help. What’s the keyword for that?

The folks over at Young Entrepreneur’s blog (YEB)have been kind enough to review the structure of my blog in exchange for a review and link to their blog. Happy to oblige!This is a blog I subscribe to and read on a regular basis because of their solid content.

Why I read this blog

I started reading YEB because I am young (ish?) and an entrepreneur, for the  most part. I figured, hey, this thing must be written for me.

From what I’m read, I’m guessing that the staff don’t have a long history of starting and raising successful companies. I don’t say this because the advice is bad, I say it because it had more of a “hey, let’s get together and figure this out” feeling rather than a “I’ve done this and this is what works for me” feeling. Nothing wrong with that at all, it’s a great way to build community.

After a while, I really wanted to read about people who had really made it and how it all came together for them. Coincidentally enough, YEB started interviewing experts more and posting words from famous business starters from all different industries. Perfect!

I read the blog for the interviews and the Entrepreneur University section, for the most part. They include write-ups about other things but the unique content they provide me are the sound bytes.

Thanks YEB! Keep it going!

Tools and resources for entrepreneurs and business minded individuals who are growing their business at the Young Entrepreneur’s Blog!

Ha! I thought forgot about the last one, huh? Nope.

On Friday, I posted the 5th step to a great resume, writing a “final” draft.

Step 6: Lay it out as you go through it again (and again [and again])

blueprint by dog on wheels on flickr

This is the final step and possibly the most important one. This is called “checking your work” or “avoiding the if-only-I-had’s.”

If you haven’t formatted the document, now is the time. You’ll probably want to check out my guide on simple typography in any document to give you an idea on how to keep it simple and effective. Remember to style for the position. If you’re applying to a law firm, keep it tight, simple, and classy. If you’re applying to a graphic design company, spice it up a bit, use some color, and show them you know a thing or two about alignment.

I like to style as I read - as long as it is the first re-read of many. Reading concurrently keeps the flow of the document in mind as I put it together. It also breaks things up because reading, re-reading, and editing can wear a little thin, especially if it’s your writing.

Read it through normally once or twice, then mix it up a little bit:

• Read it out loud to yourself or someone else. If it sounds awkward, it’s probably wrong. If it’s awkward to you, the person who wrote it, imagine how it will be to someone else. Toss the sentence out and re-write it or consider breaking it up. Sometimes, the only problem is a missing period and another capital letter.
• Read it “backwards.” Start at the end and read each sentence in opposite order. This is annoying and a bit frustrating but it does work. Since you wrote this masterpiece, your brain knows what is coming next. If you read it in the wrong order, it forces you to think about each sentence individually. This is a good thing.
• Give it to someone else to read. This is a critical step, especially for resumes. It’s improbable that a second set of eyes WON’T catch something that you missed. Bite the bullet and hand it off to a spouse, friend, or parent.

If you’ve read it more than 3 times, tried all three tips above, and feel good about it, then it’s time to get it ready to print.

Final steps to get ready to send these out

I said six steps but here’s a few bonus ones that bring this process home…

Save a copy of each document with some kind of indication in the file name telling you the position to which it corresponds and the date it was finalized. Obviously keep an editable copy but also make sure you’re making PDF versions and sending those out. A PDF will look the same on every computer in every program without exception and that’s a good thing. Get yourself a free PDF maker (CutePDF works great if you don’t have the Word plugin or Adobe Abrobat) and make yourself some PDFs.   Make sure to review the PDF before you send it to make sure nothing changed during the translation (rare but it happens).

Keep a copy on a USB drive if you have one with you, in online storage if you use it, or email it to yourself so it is always accessible. There’s nothing worse than needing your fresh, amazing resume and not having it. Plus, keeping it in your email makes it easy to forward out at any time. Google Documents now allows PDFs so you have no excuse to have this important document handy.

Finally, make sure you have some printed copies around. Go to Kinko or FedExko’s or whatever and have them print it out on nice paper. Don’t go crazy with the marble-finish, 98% cotton paper, just get something nice, relatively thick, and nice to touch.

Following this process to a “T” will make sure that your resume puts your best attributes forward. If you need helping writing or deigning your resume or want to put together an online presence to promote yourself, please get a hold of me!

Yesterday, I went through the fourth step in my resume-writing process, creating a rough draft. We’re in the home stretch!

Step 5: “Final” draft time… buckle down

Greyhound Racing: Home Stretch by sombraala on flickr

OK, you have a resume, you’re about 80% there. Now it’s time to bring it all together.

First, lay it all out. Personal statement is first, then what? Education? What is the most important thing about the job you’re applying to? If you’re applying to be a web developer, your skill set is probably more important than your BA degree from a few years ago. If, however, you’re applying to be a college professor, your education is probably pretty darn important. Don’t stress too much about the order, however, because there’s plenty more to do.

Once you’ve got everything in place, it’s time to start collecting, cutting, and collating. In your skills list, group similar skills together and cut out parts that are non-essential or just distracting. Use commas, connectors, and creative words to cut down on length and content.

Next, take a hard look at your positions and do the same. You want to reduce the length of your resume as much as possible but include the most important things. This is a delicate balance and it might take a few iterations to get it right.

You also want to be telling an interesting story about your employment. Stop laughing, I mean it. It’s all connected and you had the jobs you had for a reason. For each position, you want to show your progression and why you were important at each step of the way. Just because you did the same thing everyday for 3 years doesn’t mean you weren’t an integral part of the process. Make sure that the progress and the story you’re telling ALWAYS relates back to the job for which you’re applying.

A few tips:

• Watch your tense. If it was a previous job, then use the past tense (you “were responsible” for this and “facilitated” that). If it is a current position, then use the present tense (you “are responsible” and “facilitate” this and that).
• Go easy on the stock “jobby” words (like the two I used above). You can only say that you were responsible for so much before it gets a bit repetitive. Be creative in your speech and color it up a bit. Say what you need to say but inject your personality in there.
• There is no absolutely correct way to write a resume. One place might look down on a super-corporate, dry, humorless resume while another might expect it. The only thing you need to be sure of is the grammar and the punctuation. If you suck at either or both of these, there are services out there that can help you for cheap. It’s worth it to spend a few bucks to make sure it’s right instead of ending up in the “no” pile just for a mis-key.

Get it written, make sure it’s not over a page (unless it really needs to be [show-off]), then give it a rest. The more you work on something so boring and important, the more you’re going to hate it. Crank it out and put it down for a day.