I really get turned away from posting comments on other blogs that have “you must log in to comment” at the bottom of the post. Why put up a barrier for people interacting to you and your work? If you are getting a lot of spam or trolling, just install a plug-in to deal with it, like akismet. But with millions of other blogs out there, the last thing you want to do is make it just that bit harder for people to connect and communicate with you.

Some of these “must log in to comment” people are probably doing it for another, more tactical reason. They don’t want people to be able to put a link back to their own blog inside the blog comment. To get around this they make everyone that wants to comment a “user” of the site. An interesting tactic, but one that really goes against the ideas of Web 2.0
The other thing is, that if you have a blogger based blog, please allow comments from users, rather then just blogger registered users.

Turning readers away is also about trying to engage them at all times. So I put this out to my (quite modest it is to be said) readership.

Is there anything, based on what I have written, that you want me to research / write about?

Is there a problem that you are currently having that I can help with?

The best thing about online marketing is the amount of freely available statistics and reporting about a campaign if you know where to look. It’s always good to study what others are doing in a constructive way, looking at data from a number of different sources before you adopt a strategy.

I think that bloggers can add value to this information , while avoiding the practice of just reciting the facts in another form. By analysis of the data and looking for common trends, we can start to develop some real intelligence about these campaigns, and develop more effective sales tools and monetization strategies in the future.

Getting paid reviews for your e-product can be a great way to get traffic to your sales page. If you feel like you have a product that is revolutionary and makes a big difference to the way that people will conduct business online, then getting the message out fast,hard and with as much reach as possible will work to your advantage. I think that Alvin Phang had a bit of a different experience in getting his Atomic Blogging program reviewed recently on John Chow.com. He paid the standard $400 for a John Chow review, for which he hoped to get traffic to the sales page for atomic blogging (which shows all of the standard sales page hype, coloured font and testimonials by the truckload) and convert them in sales.

The PDF report of the Atomic Blogging program on John Chow is here http://www.gathersuccess.com/downloads/GatherSuccesscom-JohnChowReview.pdf

And here is my analysis of the data.

What did his $400 get him :

Qualitatively : A not very favorable review which points out the weaknesses of the system.
Total number of clicks : 349
Total number of sales : zero! = (
Return of Investment: -$400
Cost per click: US$1.14

Lesson to be learned : If your product is mostly for newbies, and does not offers something new, why give it to an expert to publicly pick holes in it, at your expense! Don’t have an inflated view of what their product is worth, and truthfully measure the value it provides to the consumer.

Recommendation : I would think that it would be wiser to spend $400 to buy up some banner space on forums where people are looking to get into blogging. The whole tone of John Chow is wrong for this type of product I would think. He is a No BS type of guy, so demonstrate some real value and you might do OK.

It was a goal of mine at the start of the year to spend at least a day a week working from home. In reality it has turned out that it more like a day every 3 weeks, but I am gradually starting to finish up a few contracts, and set the terms of the new ones coming up to give me a bit more discretion over my time. It’s great to be busy, and have a lot going on, but I have found the importance of staying in control of your schedule, otherwise your schedule will control you. At the moment I am also doing a wide variety of tasks for different clients. Web development, marketing, business development, seo consulting and some general IT consulting are all taxing different parts of my brains, and often have deadlines competing with each other for my attention. Not an ideal situation, but it is paying the bills and I have kept up with the challenge.

Even though I have little kids and the house is always busy, I really enjoy the variety of working from the home office when I can. It all depends on the type of work I am doing, how often I need to be on the phone, or really concentrating. Just breaking the routine of going to the office everyday gives a some variety to the week and breaks it up. You get more done and everything feels a bit more fresh.

Ideally what I want is to have work that is :

Non Time Based : Work that I can do at anytime, whenever there is time that I have allocated. I don’t want to be constrained by the 9-5 (or 8-6 in reality) of the regular work week. Sometimes I get my best work completed between 6am and 9am, sometimes between 8pm and 12pm if I have the free time. I know that there are times where I can get a ton of work done in an hour, and some where I am really pushing it to get anything done at all. Not often, but it happens.

Hopefully, as businesses move beyond the idea of keeping everyone on a digital leash, they will get more behind the idea of using the technology to free their workers and help to make them happy. Having a workforce of well rounded human beings will be just as much a part of company culture as making a profit. As long as people make the deadlines then they should have the freedom to set the hours when they work. This will also allow people more flexible time to be with family, participate in community activities and reduce the amount peak hour commuters going to work etc.

Non Location Based : Same as above, but not having an actual “workplace” where I have to be everyday. At the moment the contracts I have dictate that I am in the office of the business’s I work for about 75% of the time. I have made it a goal to reduce this by moving away from client based work and towards product based business activities. From a societal point of view, we need to decentralise the way we work. A lot of our tax dollars go towards infrastructure that must be constantly upgraded to allow everyone to work in a central location, the city. Sure, there is something to be said for working with a team, but I know in my current work that I am constantly meeting people in various locations other then the office, or over the web to have meetings and strategise, co-ordinate and collaborate.
I want to be able to take the family away for 3 weeks at a time to various places around the country, and still be able to work a few hours a day maintaining my business.

Even 5 years ago, if you talked like this people would say that you are an idealist, that you were living in fantasy land if you thought that this was possible. But modern technology, changing attitudes and just the realities of modern life are making these things possible. These practices are good for peoples mental health, good for society, good for the environment.

Start putting your plans to make them happen in action today. I know that I am.