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A Whole Lotta Thoughts On Blog Network Success (bonus tips included)
Jul 31st
I realized recently that before I started b5media I was, as Aaron would say, a “talker”. Not that I didn’t “do”, but I spent most of my creative energy blogging, critiquing others businesses and thinking up really, really smart things to say (note the sarcasm, please).
Once b5 got up and running, and especially after we raised our first round of funding, I put most of my creative energy into “doing”. This meant less time for “talking”. Which is sad, since reflecting on a blog is a great way to distill learning and remember what’ important.
So, in light of the industry difficulties we’ve seen in the last month, and particularly this week, I thought it’d be good to add some perspective (at least from my experience) to a few disparate conversations happening around the blogoworld.
These conversations are:
- The closure of Know More Media (see here, here, here and here)
- Much gnashing of teeth around whether blog networks will/can survive or not (see here, here, here and here)
- Reflections on and thoughts about blog-based ad networks and why they’re so darned hard (see here, here, here and my previous post)
I want to draw particular attention to David’s post at XFEP (a fantastic blog, btw), where he says:
I assumed because there would be a great deal of higher quality, focused blogs that we could get some high advertising rates, and when you bring our traffic together, we have a fair bit of page views, but still the advertisers aren’t running to our doors. I’ve shopped around the network a bit to some companies trying to gauge their response, and so far it has been a really lukewarm response.
[...]
Everyone also seems to be forgetting the time and effort that needs to go into selling these companies on buying advertising from you. This can take an immense amount of time depending on the company and it can also be difficult when the coalition is young and thus the brand everyone is flying is unknown. I always thought 9rules should have done something to help its membership make money through a network advertising service, but I realize now, in working with Grand Effect, that it just takes so much time.
David was one of the founders (I think, if not he’s certainly incredibly key over there) at Grand Effect which was a fab idea that ended up being more work than they’d have thought.
With all this stuff going on (failures, talk of failures and talk of how tricky this industry is), I thought I’d share some perspective from in the trenches, as it were. Given that this is being written off the cuff, expect it to be fairly long (yeah, yeah, I know, it’s long already… just you wait!).
First, though, I want to enumerate some reasons why running a blog network, blog ad network or a blog “alliance” is harder than folk realize. But hopefully some of this post can help solve some of the stumbling blocks, as well as highlight the issues so folks go into these projects with eyes wide open. Put it this way, there’s a reason that out of the 8,000 networks out there, less than 50 have reached scale and less than 10 are truly successful (for the record, KMM would have been on that top 10 list).
10 Reasons Managing Bloggers (and Blog Ads) Is Harder Than Your Grandma’s Corns
- Analytics and traffic measurement are hard: The truth is, most people don’t know how much traffic they’re using. The term “pageviews” is basically useless. You need to ask “do you mean AWStats? Urchin? SiteMeter? Google Analytics? comScore? Compete? Omniture? Webtrends?” … Packages like AWStats and Urchin actually hurt bloggers looking to sell ads, because they vastly overcount pageviews. On the other extreme, off-site third party measurement companies like comScore and Compete vastly undercount pageviews. And the JavaScript stats have varying levels of trustedness in the industry (from least to most: SiteMeter, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture). People end up saying things like “real pageviews”. Here’s the truth, as far as pageviews that advertisers care about: the only pageviews that matter are real ones, viewed by real people, where an ad is shown. And don’t even get me started on how different companies count uniques ;-)
- “Scale” is larger than it used to be: When b5media started out, the point at which ad networks got interested was 1MM pageviews, and the point at which they started wetting their collective knickers was around 5MM pageviews. These days, you can’t even get a call with a respected ad network at less than 5MM pageviews. Remember, these are the “real pageviews” talked about above.
- There are “magic numbers” in the online advertising world: It’s sad, but it’s true. CPM levels don’t go up slowly as traffic goes up. There are clear watershed moments. 1MM pageviews. 5MM pageviews. 10MM pageviews. 2MM comScore uniques. 5MM comScore uniques. Until you hit these, and not just hit them but hit them in each vertical you cover, your traffic is basically only worth AdSense-level ads.
- In order to move beyond AdSense-style ads, you need to move up the food chain: Most bloggers or groups who are forming blogs together assume that if you grow traffic, you’ll be able to quickly improve the quality of your ads. It’s really not that easy. You need to “move up the food chain”. The advertising food chain basically works like this: some media buyer somewhere (in an agency or in a company) decides he want to buy ads. He convinces his clients to spend something ridiculous like 20$ CPM on the ads. He then farms some of the ads out to the ad networks he works with at 4-5$ CPMs (TribalFusion, Burst, etc). These networks then cross-sell and backfill their inventory to the point where regular bloggers are lucky to get a 1$CPM (if they can even get into the network). Boutique shops take the “high value” inventory and do the same cross-selling game, so that bloggers are lucky to get a 2-3$ CPM these days (it used to be 5-6$ CPM). And folk with direct relationships with media buyers get the rest (at 7-10$ CPMs). But if you thougt getting into the ad networks was hard, it’s 5x harder to get into the boutique networks and 100x times harder to get those direct relationships going.
- Real traction in advertising requires real resources: If you want to move up the food chain, you need “resources”. You need sales people (massive $, think 250K+ per good hire). Then you need a real adserver (3-5K/month plus 10K in setup). Plus you need real data (10-20K/year at the start, going up to 100K+/year later). And that’s before you do anything with your bloggers…
- Recruiting good bloggers is hard: It can, quite literally, take 20-40 emails to recruit a good blogger. That’s not saying that they’re difficult, but it does mean it takes time. Saying hello, introducing them to the network, finding a concept that works, picking colours and names… This can account for 10+ hours per blog. Running a big network is hard. At least 5x harder than you think it’ll be.
- Managing bloggers is hard: The truth is that in order for bloggers to want to join a network these days, there needs to be more than just a network bar along the top and some kind of unified feed. There needs to be cross-network promotions, contests, training… on top of regular things like figuring out stats, pay, reports, newsletters, community encouragement, trying to help individual bloggers maximize their potential, etc. These things typically require one or more people full time.
- Getting through the noise is hard: When b5media launched, there were only a handful of other networks (Gawker and Weblogs, Inc.). So getting noticed was a bit easier. Not “easy”. Just easier. These days, with thousands of networks, it’s hard to get more than a handful of posts from friends (nevermind TechCrunch/CenterNetworks coverage!). Now, I’m not really a fan of spending marketing dollars until you’re fully at scale and spending the $ will result in real advertisers signing up (we only started doing this in the last 6 months, and while it’s been great, we couldn’t have supported this earlier). Don’t spend on press releases. Don’t spend on AdWords. Don’t even print spiffy business cards. Do it fast, do it cheap, do whatever you do better than anyone else.
- Innovating is hard: The truth is that most everything that can be one in the blog / blog network / blog alliance world has been done. We see a dozen “new” network ideas every week from folk, and the only one that’s stood out recently is NewsGroper, which is a great little site/network/something that has fake blogs by all kinds of people. It’s really a great concept and it delivers on the promise. The Obama blog is particularly fun ;-)
- It won’t get easier: We’re in an advertising slump. Best case, it’s 3 months long and it takes another 3 months for ads to pick up again. So 6 months of “ouch”. And if you aren’t profitable now, it’ll get harder.
Mid-point thoughts
Now, the first half of this post might have seemed negative. Doom. Gloom. Shrooms. But the truth is, blog networks, blog alliances and blog ad networks can work. And here are my 3 tips for each of those worlds, along with a bonus tip:
3 Simple Tips for Starting a Blog Network
- Don’t rely on one type of revenue: It is sometimes very easy to become dependent on one “circle of life”: more google pagerank means more text links which means more revenue, etc. As soon as Google says “selling text links are evil”, though, things get… hard. And that sucks. Wendy’s post at Sparkplugging delves into this point more and better than I ever could.
- Do something totally different: When we started we looked at what was out there and put our spin on it. Whether you agree with the spin or agree on the innovation or even like us, the changes we made (structure, promotion of authors, importance of community, ownership of content, platform) worked. But these days so much as been done, that you need to really shake things up. PopSugar did it by focusing on women and then integrating social networking directly into the network so that for the longest time it wasn’t even seen as a “blog network”. Be geographically specific (Shiny Media has done a great job at this in the UK). Be audience specific, like Sugar. Come up with a unique concept. Use a unique template. Have a great pay structure. Hire the best writers possible. But don’t just be “this cool group of blogs”. That won’t work.
- Be ready for naysayers: We get our fair share of folk yelling from the sidelines (especially “after the game”). Be ready for this. It’s a crowded space, and people will mock you, say you’re an idiot, say you don’t know a thing about business. Some will even call you a criminal, a fraud, say you’re running a sweat shop. Anything under the sun will be brought up by folk who’ve never done what you’re doing. Ignore the bad stuff. Take the good stuff (cause there will be some) and use it. Always remember that your measure of success has to be internal. What drives you personally and are you succeeding there, is your community happy, what was your vision and are you fulfilling it, are you making a difference, are you having fun… Figure out what’s most important and what it will take to succeed, setup metrics for those things and then measure against those. Let the mockers say what they will. Be Apple. Be the Mini Cooper. Or any of the other companies that went against the grain and got rewarded for it. Hell, be Microsoft or RIM or any of the other “dying” companies that are actually truly success and who went against the grain and got mocked for it. Also watch out for constructive comments. Sometimes they won’t feel constructive, but they’ll actually have value!
3 Simple Tips for Thoughts on Starting a Blog Alliance
Disclosure: I’ve never started one of these, unlike the other 2 areas I’m covering today, so take all of this with a pound of salt and purely as my own thoughts, not judgements on anyone else who’s doing this (successfully or otherwise).
Actually, screw it, I hate when folk do this to me, so I’ll keep this as simple thoughts, vs advice from someone who hasn’t done what I’m commenting on. Here are my thoughts, as a blogger, real simple: provide real value to the blogger, don’t take them for granted, help actually grow traffic, make my ife easier, help me make money. Or don’t. Pick 2. But rock at them. Do them better than anyone else.
3 Tips for Starting a Blog Ad Network
A blog ad network is a unique kind of beast. There’s increasing competition here. It used to just be Federated and Glam, but now you have Performancing, Fortune, Oprah, Disney, SixApart… With more to come. So obviously differentiation is key. Here are my thoughts on what is required for someone starting something like this:
- Make it verticalized: If it isn’t, selling ads will be nearly impossible without a huge sales team. Cover just tech, or gadgets, or travel. And have real traffic (see waaayyyy above on “real” traffic).
- Have a single system: Don’t try and cobble one of these together. Cobbled systems are dangerous at the best of times, but with an ad network, everyone has to trust every metric. Traffic, performance, revenue shares, mailing payments, invoice advertisers… You need a single system that handles all of this if you’re planning on doing this for more than a few sites.
- Have a sales team that can sell the ads: It sucks, but as hard as it is to stand out as a content network to readers, it’s even harder to stand out to advertisers. It’s even more crowded. And your unique proposition has to be really clear. The real challenge here is that you have to be wide enough (ie: coverage) to accept crazy targetted campaigns (single mothers 18-24 living in new jersey with incomes of 50-70K and who like lindsay lohan) while also having enough depth (ie: traffic) to serve lots and lots of ads to those kinds of campaigns.
Final Tip(s) for Success for Everyone
Here’s my final tip for success: be simple. Have simple solutions. Have a simple pitch. Have a simple path to success. 9rules has been through many evolutions, and the reality is that each one succeeds because the concept becomes simpler and simpler. Sometimes it takes a few iterations to explain it, but the core change and new vision is very simple.
Bonus Closing Thought
The hard part of all of this is that, unless you’re doing it for the fun or love of it (which is cool), you’re going to have to make money. And going into a downturn, that gets really hard. Focus on your fundamentals. Spend where you will get return soon. Invest in the now. Keep your business simple and drop the extraneous stuff. If you can’t describe your core business in 140 characters, it’s too complex.
Running This UP the Flag
As I said, this was a long post.
My goal with this post wasn’t to criticize anyone. It was to share a bit of learning from all over the place. Hopefully some of it was valuable. At the end of the day, the reality is that running this stuff is way harder than anyone who hasn’t done it thinks. And anyone who says “why don’t they just…” or “why don’t we just…” or “I wish they’d just…” might consider that there are other complexities / issues / factors that aren’t immediately obvious to everybody. Which is a shame, because when you can find a formula that works, and keep in mind that your bloggers as the most important people (not always perfectly, but as much as possible!), this is an incredibly fun business. It’s an incredibly supportive industry. And there are few jobs that are more fun.
10 Reasons the "Ad Crisis" is a Myth
Oct 14th
To readers: Yes, yes, a REAL blog post. Hold your applause, cause this’ll probably be the only one this month!
Based on Beth Comstock’s remarks earlier this week, the web has been all afroth with news about how ad-supported startups are going to die because, to quote Beth
There are not going to be enough advertising dollars in the marketplace. No matter how clever we are, no matter what the format is.
The conversation frothed all over the Web 2.0 world for awhile before hitting some real mainstream media attention (this Reuters piece being the latest ripple). Everyone’s commented on it.
Now, I’ve basically taken the position that, largely, I don’t have time to comment on the first wave of frothiness for any given subject. But as this is the second wave, I’m gonna take a stab at it (kinda like I did with the Jeremy Liew “there’s no money in advertising” thing that went around earlier this year).
So, on this wave, here’s what’s going on.
- Reuters writes its piece, quoting Beth, saying that while more money will come online, most of it will go to big companies.
- Rafat David Kaplan (ed: David wrote this article, not Rafat, sorry Rafat!) @ PaidContent (who I have nothing but respect for don’t actually know at all) basically cites this as frustration amongst publishers
- Steve Rubel (ditto on the respect thing) says this is a supply and demand issue.
So, here are the facts. Massive amounts of new money is being spent every year online (on the order of 2-3B/year in totally new ad dollars), massive amounts of existing ad dollars are shifting online (on the order of 3-5B/year in shifting dollars), and people are surprised that the biggest brands are making the most money.
K, gotcha so far.
Yet, somehow, this has been extended to “there isn’t enough money to go around” – which is really the quote of one person at one media company (albeit a big one) who’s running into a very simple frustration: middle-sized fish in a very big pond, where she has an absolutely massive freaking budget to cover and she isn’t in the top 10 so she isn’t getting her “fair share”.
Taking that quote and extending it to web startups is kinda like me saying the Go Kart industry is dead because Chrysler can’t get its act together.
So, here are 10 reasons why this ad crisis is a myth – specifically to small to medium content creators and publishers.
- Ad repping distorts revenue perceptions. Of the Top 10 companies’ ad revenues, 7 of them rep properties outside their network. This, obviously, includes Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – but it also includes AOL and most other real “media” companies. Even MTV, Washington Post and the New York Times are doing it. What does this mean? That a significant portion of their revenues are bubbling down to content producers and publishers. Sometimes as much as 30% of their total revenue (no comment on which company in the list that applies to)
- The good side of supply/demand. While there is a supply/demand issue (this will be the first year in 5 years that average industry CPMs will remain flat (at about 1.25$)) – that issue is for untargetted, high-volume purchases. In “the biz” we call this remnant inventory. It’s what you stick in when you can’t find anything else. It’s guaranted revenue. On the flip side are the “gimme 20-25 year old single mothers living in a single ZIP with 2+ children, full-time income of 100K+ and a passion for fashion”. CPM’s on those? Rising like a … well, like a something that’s rising incredibly quickly. Those campaigns 5 years ago were 10CPM. Now? 35-60CPM. Why? Supply and demand. There is not enough supply (both because most companies don’t have the technology and because they don’t have the reach to deliver enough impressions to that audience to matter). Low supply, high demand.
- Branding isn’t dead. There’s been a focus lately on how much money is shifting to performance-based campaigns. While this is true to an extent (the classic line is that most of Google’s ad revenue is performance-based, so “most” people must want performance-based). Performance is good, but “performance” isn’t just CTR and CPC and CPA and CPL and any other acronym you have. The web is the first medium that allows you to mix a real branding campaign with real-time testing to see if the branding campaign is working, for example. Can you move the Index? If so, that’s even better “performance” for big advertisers.
- Lower costs. While big outfits like NBC and the NYT attempt to cover even 30% of their costs, they often take losses. Losses are bad. When the losses are on the order of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year, that’s really bad. But, web startups don’t have those costs. If an online publisher is doing less than 10M/year on costs of substantially more than 10M/year then something is probably wrong.
- Faster growth. Most companies in the 2-5M/year range see great growth. Growth of 5-15%/month. Basically seeing revenue and traffic double every year. To these companies, they don’t mind that Google has 20% or whatever of the industry’s ad revenue. The care that they’re doing more revenue per pageview, more revenue per visitor, more revenue per employee and more revenue per sales rep. They watch their core metrics like hawks – because that’s what really matters.
- There’s A LOT of money around. There is somewhere between 40-60B being spent every year on online advertising. Okay, so 80% of that goes to the top 20% of sites. But about 20% of that 80% comes back to “longer tail” sites through ad repping, ad sharing, etc. So 30-40% of online ad revenue is for the “long tail”. Yeah, 12-24B$. That’s a nice big pie, and it’s one that’ll only get bigger (likely doubling in the next 5 years). 50B$ just to the longer tail (non top 50). That seems like “enough money to go around” to me.
- Some of the money is being miscounted. One minor point on the IAB and other industry numbers is that everyone knows their low. Many media companies who do offline and online don’t report separate figures for mixed-media campaigns. Cause if you’re doing a 10M$ campaign for Coke and you run it in your newspapers, your radio stations, your TV stations and your web properties… How much of that was really “online”? Also, a LOT of these deals include third party sites, as I mentioned above, so even if they were reported properly there’s a skew in there.
- Ad repping is the new ad network. In the 90s and early 00s, the ad networks controlled a massive amount of the online ad dollars. They had reach, and reach was what mattered. These days, raw reach means low CPMs. If you’re getting more than 2CPM on average from a major network, across all your traffic, you’re doing incredibly well (and way above average). Ad repping shops are boutique shops that represent one vertical and a limited number of sites. Their pitch isn’t reach, it’s depth. Engagement. Audience quality. And at these shops you’re doing poorly if you’re averaging under 5CPM. And that’s for all your traffic. These shops will only increase in prominence over the next few years. In principle this means more ad dollars to the big fish, in practice it means that small-to-medium publishers do less work and get more money in the short term.
- Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Everyone has an angle, a spin, an axe to grind. When Facebook says it was worth 6B$, you know it wasn’t just dinner conversation – they were doing it to up their price for investors. Likewise, Beth Compton wasn’t really whining, she was pitching. “NBC has lots of inventory, NBC has a great audience, we only wish SOMEONE would pay attention to how great we are online!” Yeah, poor Beth. You just know she had 300 voicemails when she got back to the office with pitches inside. And yeah, as the CEO of a media startup, I have an angle too. That angle is that not only do I believe in a properly executed online ad strategy, but that I believe the startups that are able to properly leverage the strenghts of the current market will see phenomenal growth. And, yeah, I believe that we (as a company doing 30%+ growth per month) can be one of those companies.
- Lists suck. Ran out of things to say ;-)
All in all this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. There are lots of ad dollars going around. The majority of companies with actual long tail traffic are doing very well. The only place there’s a real pinch going on is with mainstream media companies with mainstream media costs who haven’t adjusted to the online world yet (both cost and revenue-wise).
Boo hoo. As I mentioned in my last piece on why the online ad market was alive and well, a solid strategy, properly executed will always win out over panicked reaction to fleeting market conditions. Especially if those “market conditions” are faulty and based on poor analysis.
50B$. 30% of that is going to the small-medium market. That’s at least 15B$/year. 25B$ by 2010. Sorry if that doesn’t make me all depressed. Personally that looks like an opportunity, not the death of an industry.
Life Management: Basics of Time Management
Mar 21st
Intro
If you’re anything like me, you naturally suck at keeping stuff organized. You try – in varying degrees at various times – to keep your life, time, mail, voicemail and inbox organized, but things press in and before you know it your efforts are overwhelmed and you’re behind on all kinds of little things.
I know that for me, my two biggest challenges are my email inbox and my physical mail. Physical mail will often pile up for a week or two before I have to sit down and deal with it. Email just comes so fast and furious that if I actually want to get stuff done, I often leave things sitting in my inbox for weeks at a time.
The reality is that time/life/task management is freaking hard! For most folk it goes against our nature. To us, it’s far more natural to DO than to ORGANIZE. And while we recognize that organizing makes doing easier, it’s often easier to just let piles get bigger and bigger until we either do a mass delete or we spend several days trying to get caught up.
Today is the first post in a series I’m writing on taking control. My hope is that together we can explore ways to take control of all of the information flying at us every day, that we can effectively filter out the junk and pure information from the useful information and stuff we will actually use. I truly hope that each day there are 1-2 key techniques, skills, thoughts that help you improve your life just a leetle bit ;-)
Goal for Today
The goal for today is to understand what makes time / life management hard and to look at a couple of simple thoughts and techniques that should help us to take a bit more control of our todo list and our email inbox. Today’s actual lesson will be fairly simple. Day 1 should always be easy to digest. It should still prove valuable though!
Key Takeaways
- Credit where credit is due
- The point of time management
- 3 phases of time management
- Taking control of your inbox
- Tweaking your todo list
Actual Lesson: The Basics of Time & Life Management
Before I get started, I want to make it abundantly clear that almost every idea in this series is not mine. Some of the smaller things are, the format of the series is, my notes are and the exercises and so forth by and large will be. But in spite of years of writing about time management and helping produce 3-4 separate courses on the subject and having delivered a dozen or so seminars on it, most of the core material is stuff I’ve picked up over the last decade or so of trying to make my life simpler, trying to overcome information overload and trying to be a productive member of society.
While dozens of people, books, courses and seminars have influenced my thinking, techniques and what I write about time and life management, I feel it is best to highlight the most influential of these: Marc Orchant. Marc’s been a long-time friend and introduced me to a whole new world of time management and personal productivity (especially using Outlook). It’s no exaggeration for me to say that Marc changed my world, and mostly in good ways ;-)
Marc’s a guru on this stuff, and he has a tonne of unique content of his own (including, hopefully, a new book in the next year or two!). If you’re interested, Marc wrote a FAN bloody TASTIC portion of More Space, a book for which I contributed a pithy fictional piece on corporate culture.
While Marc’s a genius at this stuff, he’d also freely admit to being influenced by a whole whack of people. Two of those people are on my list (I wouldn’t be surprised if Marc dropped by and shared his list as well): David Allen and Sally McGhee. David is the author of Getting Things Done, while Sally penned Take Back Your Life: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized.
Really, it was Getting Things Done, coupled with some of Sally’s thoughts on using Outlook specifically that led me to where I’m at today.
In addition, I’d like to note early influence by Stephen Covey.
Basically, if you find this series helpful at all, I’d highly recommend picking up books by any of the above folk!
The Point of Time Management
Personally, I see the point of time management as:
- Respecting yourself enough to take control of your life
- Respecting others enough to not add to their overload
- Respecting the information that comes at you enough to deal with it effectively
If you have a system that allows you to do these three things, then give yourself a big gold star, take 200$, proceed to GO and don’t wait on hold the next time you call your phone company with a problem. You’re doing better than 99.99% of the world! Oh, and while you’re welcome to read through this series, you probably don’t need it (though it rarely hurts) ;-)
Okay, that’s perhaps a little abstract, so here are some goals you can actually track to evaluate if your time management system is working. A successful time / life / information management system has the following key components:
- It gives you the information you need when and where you need it
- It allows you to know exactly what you need to do at a given time, in a given situation or location
- It allows you to feel like you’ve actually accomplished something at the end of a day or week
Each of these items gets to the core of why not having a time management system is such a bad thing. Without a time management system, you:
- Rarely have the information you need at your fingertips (specifically when your boss needs something like RIGHT NOW).
- You are often a slave to whoever yells the loudest. In addition, you often forget silly little regular things like taking out the garbage.
- It isn’t uncommon for you to stretch out at the end of the day and ask yourself where the day (or even week) went.
The Phases of Time Management
This would be one of those things that I’m happily stealing from someone or other. Probably David Allen in this case. I’m doing it because it highlights key weaknesses is poor systems or in not having a system at all. Also, it makes perfect sense.
The above diagram illustrates a few key things:
- This process doesn’t ever really end.
- Each step should be tackled individually.
- Effective management of your information, time and life isn’t as complex as some folk make it out to be.
There are basically 3 steps (or 6, depending on how you count it, but I prefer to count it as 3 so it seems less overwhelming, heh): Collect & Organize, Process& Prioritize and Do & Review. Heidi Renee from Redemption Junkie dropped me a line with how she processes physical mail, and it’s a perfect illustration of this:
I open every envelope that enters the house as it enters the house, unfold every important sheet of paper and throw away the envelope and the junk that comes with it. Staying on top of that makes bills, invoices & mail so much easier to manage and cuts the amount down to a 1/3 of the paperwork.
Since new information is always coming in, we never really stop processing, organizing, etc. We need a system that breaks the organizing, processing, prioritizing and taking action on information into manageable chunks!
That’s probably enough on this for now. It’s something we’ll refer back to often throughout this series. However it’s probably easy to imagine how this process might apply to creating todo lists, dealing with your inbox, etc! In fact, why don’t we take a quick look at a few tips and techniques to perhaps improve your inbox and todo list!
Quick Tips for Managing Your Inbox
Okay, if you’re anything like I was before I got into this stuff, your inbox is probably a mess. You probably can identify with at least 1 or 2 of these (if not all of them!):
- Have more items in your inbox than you can count (though the “items in this location” counter for your email app probably has at least 4 figures).
- You use your inbox as your “todo list”.
- You rarely file things properly.
- You always intend to get back to certain emails.
- Without using an advanced search tool (like gmail) you couldn’t find a specific email from a specific person about a specific issue in less than 1 minute if your life depended on it.
The harsh reality is that email sucks. As a communications medium, for filing purposes, in every way it absolutely blows. Sadly, for now, we’re stuck with it. A few new innovations are on the way down the pipes that will make email better and easier to manage, but for the next few years we’re basically stuck with a massive amount of email. So it’s no wonder that we’ve developed bad habits. After all, nobody ever taught us how to use it!
Later on in this series, I’ll be spending a whole day talking about email. For now, I want to share 3 quick thoughts on email that will hopefully help you make some quick headway:
- Most decent email programs will let you “transform” an email into something more useful. In Outlook, you can drag an email onto your calendar and it will automatically be transformed into an appointment. Just change the date and time and you’re set! No more keeping upcoming meetings in your inbox!
- Your inbox is just like your kitchen table. If your wife is anything like mine, she doesn’t appreciate having 15,323 pieces of mail on her kitchen table. And while some people think moving the file to a chair in the living room (ie: another folder) solves the issue, it actually just makes it worse when it comes time to fix things. So if you’re going to put things in a different folder, do it properly. 2 quick rules for folders: a) Put together a structure that makes sense for your whole life. 3 good top level folders include: Work Critical, Work Reference and Personal and b) whatever structure you use for email, mirror that structure in your “My Documents” (or wherever you store your stuff on your computer) on your computer AND in your filing system. This will ensure that if you know you received a “something” but don’t know if it was physical or virtual, that you can find it quickly.
- When you turn on the computer in the morning, doing “passes” through your inbox can often speed up your processing. I use 5 passes: a) delete junkmail, b) read short stuff that’s purely informational and then delete it (I know I probably won’t go back and read it later, but if I really want to I can file it under Work Reference), c) things I can reply to quickly (less than 2 minutes), I do, d) file away anything that doesn’t require you to DO SOMETHING and e) book appointments into my calendar. You don’t need to do it this way, or even do all of these steps. For me, this allows me to get through the 1000+ items in my inbox every morning in 10-15 minutes, often leaving me with just 5-10 “new” items since I last saw my inbox.
The truth is that managing your inbox is hard. Developing simple tools and techniques can have a huge effect on your overload. But the best tool for you is probably different than the best tool for someone else. I’ll try and leave 10-12 different tips for managing your inbox throughout the rest of this series so that you can hopefully find the right approach for you!
One quick note, implementing a new system like this does take some time. The first few days you’ll probably feel a little clunky. Personally, I have a 3-day test for any piece of software, time management technique or anything. It goes like this: if, after 3 days, I can’t either see a positive difference OR I don’t feel comfortable (ie: it’s started becoming a habit), I drop it. Most people would say it takes about 2 weeks to get used to a time / life / information management system. And it does. But with so many options, you don’t really have 2 weeks. If you spend 2 weeks evaluating something, you’ll probably spend so much time fighting with time management systems that you don’t end up saving any time!
Tweaking Your Todo List
I’ve decided to do this portion as a bit of a video. I’ve uploaded the video to YouTube for easy viewing, here’s the video (if you’re in a feed reader, you’ll need to click through to this post, sorry!):
The long and short of this video is that I’ve always felt a solid todo list was one of the best tools in the world. I know experts like Marc and David Allen have found better ways to manage tasks and such. And I’m a huge believer in those methods of doing things. For me, the todo list is still king, and I’ve found a few key ways to make my todo list work for me (your mileage may vary):
- Don’t just put big projects on your list, break them down into smaller chunks.
- Group larger tasks (especially tasks you’re dreading) with smaller, quicker, ones so you can feel like you’re getting stuff accomplished.
- Don’t be afraid to create a sense of balance in your list by adding personal items or things that keep you happy / healthy / whole.
- Schedule breaks to get refreshed.
Review of Key Takeaways
Okay, in spite of the simplicity of material, today’s lesson ended up being fairly long. Here is a far briefer synopsis:
- Lots of people are to blame for me having time management knowledge, none of them are to blame for my mistakes, foibles or silliness
- Marc Orchant
- David Allen
- Sally McGhee
- Steven Covey
- Point of Time Management
- Respect yourself
- Respect others
- Respect your information
- Points of a Good System
- Empowers you to know what you have to do
- Lets you prioritize effectively
- Helps you feel like you’ve “moved forward”
- Points of a Bad System
- Keeps you in the dark
- Gives up control of your life and schedule to others
- Makes you feel like your day flew by without accomplishing anything
- Phases of Time Management
- Collect & Organize
- Process & Prioritize
- Do & Review
- Process is natural, but often harder to implement electronically
- Tips for Managing Your Inbox
- Move items from your inbox to where they belong (calendar items, tasks, folders).
- File your items properly.
- When filing, mirror your email filing system everywhere you file stuff (filing cabinet, personal folder on computer, work folder) so you can find things quickly.
- Process email in “passes”: delete junk, read and organize/delete short informational things, reply to quick things quickly (no more than 2 minutes), file stuff that isn’t “actionable” away and book appointments as appointments
- How I Do Todo Lists
- Break bigger projects down into smaller chunks you’ll actually sit down and do
- Group larger tasks with smaller ones to keep yourself motivated.
- Add balance by putting in exercise, water, whatever to keep yourself going and feeling balanced
- Schedule breaks
Extra Points
As we close out today’s lesson, here are some Top 10 Tips on Time Management from a few other folk from around the web, with my personal favorites highlighted (click through to read all 10 from each source):
Linda Leigh Francis @ score.org:
- The key is not to prioritize what is on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
- Say “no” to the project, not the person. You cannot do everything everyone asks you to do.
- Learn how to effectively delegate. This means picking the right person, giving clear directions, setting benchmark and due dates, and then letting them do it.
- If you earn $10,000 a year, each minute is worth $.09. If you earn $30,000 a year, each minute is worth. $.26. Use these thoughts to help you prioritize your activities and to determine to whom you should be delegating. Any time you are doing work that someone at a lower wage could be doing, you are losing money.
- There are 1,440 minutes in a day and 29020 days in an 80 year lifetime. Take control of your time and make this year the year you do what you want .
Penelope Trunk @ Brazen Careerist:
- Check your email on a schedule.
- Know when you work best.
- Make it easy to get started.
- Organize your to-do list every day.
- Dare to be slow.
Greg Mankiw @ Greg Mankiw’s Blog:
- When I am involved in a big writing project, I keep to a very regular schedule.
- I like to attend seminars and take classes. It feels like goofing off at the time, but it often ends up productive.
- Travel is usually an inefficient use of time.
Conclusion
I hope today’s been useful. Please leave comments on anything, but specifically the following items:
- Was this post useful or not to you?
- How was the structure of the post? Suggestions to make it easier to both absorb EVERYTHING and to skim?
- Do you have tips or tricks you use?
- Do you disagree with anything I’ve said?
The Ensight Life Management Course: Introduction
Mar 19th
Over the last few months, the b5media team has been growing. Fairly quickly. In fact, it’s been growing faster than we’d projected. Part of this is due to the cold hard reality that none of us has run a company this large before, so it was easy to forget about a position like an Office Manager/Bookkeeper (our newest hire). The other part is that our growth is above every projection we’ve set, so we have extra resources to bring in more team members.
As a team grows, it develops its own culture, its own strengths and its own weaknesses. One of the great things is that most of us at b5 struggle with some of the same issues, namely time management, information overload, email etiquette, etc. Seeing as how I’ve developed courses on these things, and nearly wrote a book with my good friend Marc Orchant (/me waves @ Marc!) I felt I could probably add something to the discussion.
Now, I’m very aware that I’m not the best at these things. This was only reinforced last night as I reviewed notes, courseware I’d previously developed, presentations I’d previously given, etc. It’s easy to fall into bad habits with anything, and time/life/information management is no exception.
So, no, I’m not perfect. But I’ve taught and learned enough that I thought it’d be great to write a series of posts on the subject. Originally I’d intended for this to be private. However I’ve decided to do this in public partially because then there’s no hiding something that’s valuable and partially because I’m sure I’ll muck stuff up, and I’d appreciate being corrected by folk who know more than I do! ;-)
What I’m Doing
I’ve outlined 11 posts I need to write. Since this is basically my own little course, this here’s the outline:
post 1: what I’m doing and why (this post, fyi) post 2: Time Management 101 post 3: Getting It Together – Collecting Your Sh*t post 4: No More Piles! – Organizing Your Life post 5: Combating Overload – Processing the Junk post 6: Email Sucks – Processing as it Relates to Email post 7: The Dirty Little Time Management Secret – Next Actions post 8: Being A Hero – Review Your Successes & Failures post 9: The Story of Joe post 10: Critical Components for Success (big ass review) post 11: Systems I’ve Used in the Past & How I Do It
In addition, if you’re at all curious about this stuff, a brief intro can be had here: my time management seminar. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start. It’s a few hours long, though, so feel free to just skim.
Want to Help?
If you’ve ever thought about this stuff, if you have your own little system, if you have experience with GTD and want to point out tips, drop me an email (jeremy@b5media.com). I’d love to have a guest “sidebar” for each post.
What to Expect
Obviously, you shouldn’t expect perfection out of this. This is basically me developing a course using the blogging spirit. Fairly quick, fairly off the cuff and hopefully fairly valuable. I won’t have spent 100 hours on this (like I have previous courses). And I’m so out of practice that some bits’ll probably be out of whack.
However, for those who want to have a swing at this, here’s what you should expect. First, there’ll be about 3 posts per week, which makes this a 3-4 week course. I might do one a day, but I figure if I target 3/week I wont’ disappoint anyone (least of all myself!) ;-)
Second, I’m looking to incorporate the following elements and structure into each post (so you can skip, come back later, use the posts as reference material, and so forth):
- Goal for Today
- Key Takeaways (or: if you only hear 3 things, hear these)
- Actual Lesson
- Guest “Sidebar” / Testimonial
- Exercise to Reinforce Learning / Put it Into Practice (or: what’s the point of teaching spring cleaning if we don’t actually DO IT?!)
- Review of Key Takeaways / Lessons
- Customizing for You (or: everyone’s different, so here are some things you might want to switch up to make this work for you)
- Video / Audio / PowerPoint Component (not sure on exactly what I’ll do here, so this part might not happen, but I’d like to talk through perhaps just the key goals and takeaways, since audio/video can be a better reinforcer than just text)
Conclusion / Review
As I said at the start, this is primarily a tool for b5media, but one that I’m hoping will be useful to a few other folk who happen upon it. It won’t be perfect, but if it’s useful and not totally boring I’ll be happy :-)
Updates: Updated some broken links.
Why b5media Doesn't Have "Big Blogs" (or: playing to niches, giving readers choice)
Feb 7th
A recent post by Jason Calacanis reminded me that we don’t often talk about the b5media model.
Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker are the two biggest. Nothing else even comes close. I mean, B5 Media raised some money but can you name their top blog?
Part of that is because the first year or so was spent largely just building the network, getting technology right, growing… Really it was all about making the model work. Then there was 3-4 months of raising funding. Since funding, there’s been 3-4 months of getting the foundational stuff in place: growing the team, doing legal stuff, administrative things like insurance and benefits and a thousand other things that happen post-funding.
Over the last month or so, we’ve started coming out of our post-funding shell. We opened our forums, launched our toolbar, brought in some new high profile blogs and a bunch of other little things.
Really what’s going on is we’re going from being slightly introverted in our focus to being more extroverted. So, it makes sense that we’d (once again) start to tell the b5media story a bit more, and why we structure the network the way we do. I won’t go into every little detail (what our VC’s might call “the secret sauce”), but I do want to delve into some of the original decisions we made, why we made them, and how those are reflected in how you see b5media today.
Before I get into why b5media doesn’t have big blogs, I’d like to note that we do, in fact, have several “big” blogs. Some are big in traffic (like Snarky Gossip). Others are big in influence (like gobs of our science blogs, as well as our beauty blogs… each of these channels have blogs that are featured more than weekly in various MSM sources). Others are big, but just outside the realm of what Jason sees. And still others are prominent blogs in their space that are joining b5 as external properties. I don’t want to make a big deal out of these, as I know Jason’s point is “company owned blogs”, but blogs like CopyBlogger, LifeDev, MyCrimeSpace, Deep Jive Interests and Slacker Manager (and others) are all recognized leaders in their industries that have come alongside to help us figure out how our model applies to external blogs.
That said, what Jason noted is true: we don’t really have very many truly big blogs. You won’t find more than a handful of b5media blogs in the Technorati Top 100 or the Alexa Top 1000. And the truth is, that’s by design.
Why b5media Doesn’t Do Big Blogs
Now, I don’t mean to say that we don’t go after traffic and we don’t pursue growth. We do. I’m a metrics-driven guy. As the team will undoubtedly say, we spend a rather large amount of time ensuring we’re defining and hitting our metrics, and writing software to track our core metrics. So numbers are important. We just approach the numbers game from the opposite direction as Gawker / WIN.
When the 5 bloggers behind b5 (get it? 5 bloggers? b5? We’re so creative with naming…) first started chatting about joining our blogs together, and first started looking at launching new blogs, and first started making decisions, we consciously decided not to go the WIN / Gawker route. That’s not to say those routes are bad. I have nothing but respect for both teams and the brands, profile, audience and value each company brings. They created the industry, and deserve high praise for doing that.
But the truth is that both Nick and Jason came at this as a publishing play. Which is fine. That’s their background. It’s how they do things. It’s worked in the past, and it worked this time around. However, when you do things as a publishing play you are forced to make decisions in a certain way. The recent restructuring at WIN to get rid of sub-1M pageview/month blogs is one example of this. Certainly it’s not what Jason would have done (judging by his offer to buy the blogs back from AOL), but pruning “small” blogs – because it’s difficult to sell adspace at AOL’s scale on them, is an example of a publishing play mentality.
When we started b5media, we didn’t do it as a publishing play. We did it as a community play.
What Being a Community Play Means
Before I jump into this, I want to note that a publishing play isn’t bad. It has some great strengths (like creating mega properties). It has some weaknesses too. Likewise, doing a network as more of a community play has some great strengths (which I’ll look at in a bit), but it also has weaknesses (like, by and large, not creating mega properties).
Also, I want to note that some smart people will likely read the below (assuming I write it coherently, which definitely isn’t a given) and think that I’m using wording and phrasing that’s similar to how bloggers contrast themselves against mainstream media (MSM). And while that wording and phrasing will almost certainly appear, in no way do I feel WIN / Gawker are dead or slow-moving or anything (as bloggers would claim to feel about the MSM). This wording and phrasing is really just the way I see our strengths and shouldn’t be construed as anything other than a CEO’s passion for his team, community, idea and industry.
When you’re a community play, one of the biggest questions that needs to be at the front of your mind is “what about the people?”. The problem with being a community play in a publishing world is that defining “the people” isn’t easy. When I used to be a youth pastor, “the people” were easy to define: they were the youth we were serving. Likewise when I used to run mega IT projects, “the people” were easy: the folk using the software and services and platforms we built.
But in a blog network “the people” are 3 distinct groups: bloggers (ie: internal community), readers (ie: external community) and advertisers (also known as the folk who pay the freaking bills).
When we were crafting b5, we had to create value in a distinct way for each of these groups. Now while I won’t go into a lot of details on the advertisers side of things, smart people will likely pick up on the fact that b5media is effectively a network built to target the mainstream by stacking niches together in verticals. And niches produce distinct audiences. And advertisers love distinct audiences. They also love reach, though, which is why we grouped our niches into verticals – and when we sell, we sell verticals just as much as demographics and just as much as psychographics. So for anyone thinking that fragmenting your network this way means you’re trying to pitch 10,000 pageview ad buys, don’t worry. Fuggetaboudid ;-)
The single biggest decision we made early in b5′s history was to go niche. We did this because we had all been readers of blogs and writers of blogs for several years, and while we recognized the value of mega blogs, we didn’t like being forced to “drink from the firehose”. We didn’t like being just one blogger out of a group of 20. We didn’t like not having a defined audience.
So when we created blogs, we almost always chose to go deep vs wide. Our first fashion blog wasn’t a general fashion blog, it was a fashion tips blog for guys by girls: She Knows Best. Our first gaming blog wasn’t a general gaming blog, it was a gaming blog by girl gamers: Play Girlz.
Later, when we had several of each type of blog, we split them into what we call “channels”. Others call them verticals, magazines, whatever. We split them into logical groups of blogs whereby a reader would be likely to find other blogs they liked in that similar grouping.
By going this route, we offered our readers choice. The example I use a lot is Joystiq. It’s a WIN blog. A fantastic blog. Others might use Engadget as their example. I don’t, because I don’t read gadget blogs. I’m a gamer, so I use Joystiq. Now, I love Joystiq. Hell, I even have 4-5 stars and 100-200 comments on the blog. I’m subscribed, and have been for at least 2 years.
But the truth is I also hate Joystiq. Reading Joystiq, I’m forced to wade through 20+ posts per day to find the 2 (ish) posts I actually like. And I know I’m not alone in that. The reality is that because Joystiq covers just about everything in the gaming world (and they do a damned good job at it), it’s unlikely that any but the broadest and least affiliated and most diverse gamers will find anymore than 50% of the posts actually interesting and useful.
As a reader, I’d rather read 4-5 smaller blogs that each have 1-2 posts per day on areas of gaming I’m interested in: Xbox 360, shooters, recent developments in the industry, etc.
In addition, as a blogger, I’d rather write on that kind of blog because it gives me a defined audience that I can really have a lot of fun with.
So it’s on surprise that when we chose how to craft b5, we did it using this “niche” model instead of the mega property model. It gives readers choice. It gives bloggers a more defined audience. And it gives advertisers the same thing.
Why Community Works
Ultimately what we’ve done is to value people first. In the early days of b5 we had a saying: if our bloggers are happy, they’ll write good content and so people will come and traffic will grow. This was totally true, however we eventually extended it to say that if our bloggers were happy, people would come, traffic would grow and advertisers would come. And this was also true.
End of the day, valuing people means you make some interesting choices. Choices like not accepting ads inside posts (should be noted that Jason made the same stern choice, so this post is in no way meant to say that he doesn’t value his readers, because I *know* he does). And not accepting gambling or non-family-friendly ads (even when we could just about guarantee the ads wouldn’t be seen by minors).
But these choices work.
They create a sense of valuing our bloggers, they create hugely passionate micro communities, and they create incredibly valuable demo and psycographic sets that advertisers just love. But it isn’t always peaches and cream.
Sometimes Community is Challenging
The truth is that sometimes, putting people first can be more than a little bit challenging. And going for niches can be even more challenging. I mean, yeah being able to read just the 3-4 business channel blogs you want to read is great. But what if you actually like the firehose? Well, that’s one of the reasons later this week we’ll be unveiling feeds for the entire channels (like this one for the Business Channel: http://feeds.b5media.com/b5media-Business-Channel-Feed).
Oh, there are quite a few challenges with the model we’ve chosen. Most of them revolve around the strengths of a publishing-centric model, namely Reach. Because while we have a decent reach now, capitalizing on it can sometimes be challenging.
The great thing about the challenges of our model (ie: gong after the mainstream via niches) is that we can come up with some really creative solutions. Over the coming months we’ll undoubtedly be showing some of those off, but the truth is that when you’re producing 200+ posts of content per day, there are a whole lot of ways you can use that content beyond just blogs.
Pa Rappa the Rappa
So, wrapping up, Jason’s largely right:
Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker are the two biggest. Nothing else even comes close. I mean, B5 Media raised some money but can you name their top blog?
Can you name our top blog? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean we’re as far behind as Jason might think. It’s easy to compare WIN and Gawker: just compare Joystiq to Kotaku or Engadget to Gizmodo. But how do you compare Joystiq to 15-25 medium-sized gaming blogs? Not being able to draw apples-to-apples comparisons, though, doesn’t mean we aren’t succeeding. And it doesn’t mean we aren’t enjoying some kick-ass growth, fueled almost entirely by our kick-ass bloggers I might add.
Not understanding the model isn’t Jason (or anyone else’s) fault. It’s almost certainly mine. Hopefully this first stab at explaining it provides some context and background. As in explaining anything that you feel truly passionate about, it often takes a dozen tries before you boil it down to an essence that both communicates your passion and makes it easy for someone on the outside to understand.
So, what do you think? Does the above explanation make sense? Do you agree with the model? What would you change? If you were a blogger / reader / advertiser, which model makes more sense?
We’re more than happy to have your feedback (constructive or otherwise). 50M million heads are better than 205, after all.
