Just a fun little poll today to see what time everyone gets up during the work week. I’d love to know because of late I’ve been getting up earlier and have been enjoying the morning banter on Twitter and am wondering how many of you are up nice and early enjoying the banter too.
Loading ...I’ve been in Stellenbosch for a company retreat, and whilst being here I managed to snap a few photographs that I wanted to post. Andre snapped some really great ones, which I’ll bug him for when we’re back in the office on Monday.
I unfortunately didn’t get any pics of lunch, dinner or the poker game, but I’ll see what I can capture tomorrow!
The place we’re staying at: Auberge Rozendal
I’m sitting outside falling in love with the cool breeze that is gracing Cape Town with its presence, trying to figure out how on earth it’s the end of the weekend already. Although it’s been an incredibly busy week, I can’t understand how we got from Monday to Thursday evening this quickly – don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s my first full week of work this year so I’m dying to hit the weekend, but wow.
I landed a new client at work, a well known brand in fact and I’ve been tasked with managing all their SEO, so today was spent doing just that. My main focus today was some serious keyword research and a competitor analysis which lead me to a great set of keywords that I’m going to be working with, next step is updating all the meta data across the pages on the website.
Sidenote: SEO lesson:
I don’t want to bore those of you who aren’t into SEO, but seeing that I did everything today, I wanted to share some of my approach with you as it’s an effective approach.
The first step is to create a good basket of keywords, the way I do this is two fold: brand (or Andre coined the phrase ego keywords) and lead keywords. Brand keywords are those ones you want to rank for to be better than your competitor, lead keywords are keywords that actually lead people to your website who then get converted into customers. So, determining brand keywords is often best done by asking your clients what keywords they want to rank for, these keywords are then combined with a list of keywords that you come up with. So, for example, you might be doing SEO for a plumber, some brand keywords would be: best plumber, top plumber and so forth, whereas your lead keywords could be hire plumber cape town, plumbing service cape town and so forth – not the best example, but it exaggerates my point. Once you’ve got this basket of keywords, it’s time for the next step.
Fire up Excel or another spreadsheet program and create a column with all your keywords. Create several more columns:
I also create a column where I put the sum of the results found in (3) and (4), this gives you some kind of strength prediction because title tags and backlinks are two of the big factors for ranking. Now, there are lots of other columns you could create, including more backlink values, page ranks and so forth, but I don’t like to go overboard too much because I get carried away with formula’s. There are lots of tools on the Internet that can assist you with finding out values for other ranking factors and you can add these in. A good column to have is actually the average daily (month/30) searches a keyword might receive.
Once you’ve create your document, it’s fairly easy to look through the columns and note which keywords have fairly high search volumes, but low title/anchor values, if you play around for a little you could sort the columns and isolate several keywords that might be worth targeting.
It’s a cool trick to find some worthwhile keywords to target – it’s worked time and time again for me.
Right, enough SEO talk!
Had a good time last night though, as I arrived home from work I received a message from the Harfield Village gang inviting me over for a wine ‘o clock, now if you remember, it was like 40 degrees in Cape Town, ever had wine in such heat? You have! Ok, then you know how the evening went ;) Was a lot of fun, catching up with friends, reflecting on the new year and just enjoying some down time. We’ve also booked a weekend away to do some camping in early March so I’m looking forward to that – 12 people, lots of tents, two cabins, rock pools and thousands of stars hopefully.. bliss.
So yeh, it’s been a good week both work wise and socially, but I can’t wait to sleep in on Saturday – oh yeh, that reminds me, I’ve got a guy coming to quote on putting a shower in, so perhaps I won’t be sleeping in too late, sigh
Have an awesome Friday everyone!
A good friend of mine sent me an interesting link this morning to an article entitled, “Stressed? You need a holiday“. This is such an interesting topic, one which I’ve been discussing with people for a good while because it interests me. People who work in the online work don’t necessarily work harder than anyone else, but there’s a tendency to feel more burnt out or exhausted due to the sheer quantity of information being thrown in your direction. The multiple chat streams, email addresses and messaging services add to the normal duties required to operate in a job. Contrary to public belief, I don’t sit at work in a pair of pajama’s playing around on Facebook and Twitter – I attend internal meetings, client meetings, I write proposals, I do market research, I do some development, I strategize and an assortment of other things, but then on top of that, I have to manage Twitter accounts, update websites, communicate via instant messaging and other messaging services. So, I have a fairly normal job, with that layer of social on top – this is the point I’m trying to make when it comes to those who operate in the online space. It’s difficult to understand the sheer quantity of information if you have never worked in such a roll, but take my word for it.
Anyway, the point of this article was not to moan or say that anyone works harder than anyone else, the point was to communicate the huge importance of taking a break. I have plenty of friends and colleagues who rest seldom and I have seen people end up really ill because of it. I look at myself, I don’t rest at all, jokes aside, I really don’t rest and it’s definitely taken its toll on me many times. I find it hard to detach from the Internet and work, I’m a full blown workaholic – “Hi, my name’s Christopher and I’m addicted to the Internet”.. you get my drift. So, we identified that a lot of us work too hard and we’ve identified that we are aware of this and that holidays are important, but what I (and I’m sure many others) don’t seem to be able to do is detach! I would consider myself a fairly intelligent chap, yet the intelligence can’t be self inflicted, if I could listen to myself, I would take more holidays. What’s the deal with that? Why is it so hard to detach? Is it a full circle – working too hard makes us anxious and being anxious doesn’t allow us to let go? A control thing? (I sound like Carey from Sex and the City when I say that, haha).
The article starts like this:
Two weeks by the sea in the summer used to be enough to leave us feeling rejuvenated and ready to take on the world. But not any more.
Long hours and heavy workloads mean we now require six holidays a year to avoid burning out, according to a study.
To stay fresh and focused, we need to pack our bags and take a break at least every 62 days with those who wait more than two months between holidays more likely to become anxious, aggressive and ill.
In a survey, quarter of workers said they are under so much pressure that they feel desperate for a getaway every few weeks. But reaching the healthy holiday quota may be easier said than done, with only one in five of those questioned managing a break every couple of months, and 44 percent going without a holiday for half a year or longer.
I do remember being able to “detox” with just a few days of holiday, but I don’t remember taking 2 weeks off to park off at the beach though – who said we had permission to do that exactly?!
When last did you speak to someone who didn’t announce that they were tired in the first 2 minutes of chatting to them? The cliched.. “How are you? Fine Thanks” has turned into “How are you? Tired”. Is it the economy that is pushing us all so darn hard? Is it the want to be bigger and better? There’s no doubt that the world’s changing and I have to tell you, I’m not sure if us humans are cut out for the changes! I’ve spoken to a number of folk from older generations and they’ll admit that they worked hard, but they aren’t scared to admit that these days people work far harder and the progression of busyness has certainly increased – picture it as a fairly linear graph bolting up into an upward tangent.
What are we do do? How do we combat burnout? How do we ensure that we stay healthy? These are all questions I ask myself and my friends on a regular basis. Nobodies come up with a solution yet, but I hope someone certainly does, and soon!
The irony is that I must work now!
Information provided by: Medical Billing and Coding
March rolls in tomorrow and it’s time to update our wallpapers accordingly. This month we’ve got a cracker of a wallpaper, called Tagged. There are two versions, there’s one with a calendar and one without, so choose the one you like most, give it a click and you’ll be taken to the download page:
Or
I’m using the calendar one, which one are you using?
I came across an awesome new web app called AdVirtus; AdVirtus is a great web app for people who are interested in getting things done – streamlining their lives and ensuring that their day is used efficiently. The application works like a calendar with tasks and is like a number of other task management apps, but there are a few differences.
The app remains fairly simple which makes it easy to learn and you can get started right away, this is refreshing as I find most task management apps to be full of things which will never be used by the average user. Another cool addition is that when you add a task, you are presented with a list of tasks that were created by other users of the application – this is quite interesting. I created an account to look at this and had a good laugh when the most popular task used by others was “I didn’t look at porn today”, haha. The app is very much about repetitive tasks – it’s important to realise this now before potentially signing up.
You can naturally create your own tasks, so it’s not all about what others are doing. I love that is runs with a lot of jQuery, so there’s not much refreshing of pages and it functions like a proper web application.
Here’s a screenshot of adding a task to the calendar:
Once you’ve added several tasks, you can look at your overview and see what’s due when and so forth. Sadly, the application is clearly receiving too much traffic as I couldn’t add tasks or do much, it kept timing out. A simple Google search revealed that it’s been mentioned on some large websites today and no doubt can’t handle the huge inflow of traffic – saddens me because it seems like a great application which deserves recognition, but they’ve not put enough time into their servers clearly :(
Anyway, it’s worth a peak and you can do so here.
I do a huge amount of emailing, I always have and I’ve found various ways to manage it. Every now and then I come across something that I add to my list and today it’s a Firefox plugin called Boomerang.
In short, boomerang adds some really useful features to GMail, the most notably – scheduling of emails. That’s right, type out your email, choose when you want it to send and click schedule! I’m amazed that Google dropped this functionality (I’m pretty sure they used to have it), because I can only imagine how many people would want it.
Another fantastic feature is the ability to hide messages until you need them. For example, if I get an email, which is only important closer to the weekend, I can simply flag it and tell boomerang to show me it on the weekend. Seriously, think about this for a second and tell me that it’s not hugely useful!
There are several other features, but I won’t spoil it, rather click here, head on over, install the plugin and enjoy an even more organised inbox!
Haha, I came across a seriously brilliant website this evening called “Do nothing for 2 minutes”.
Honestly, there’s literally nothing to it, you visit the website, a two minute timer starts ticking and all you have to do is relax and enjoy two minutes of peace and quiet.
The clever part is that if you move your mouse or press a key, it says FAIL, meaning you’ve not relaxed for two minutes.
Love it! Check it out here.
I read a blog post the other day entitled “Email Etiquette for the Super Busy” and I think it’s a brilliant article.
Fred Wilson is a venture capitalist and he said the following: “Every time I make a productivity gain, the volume eventually overwhelms me.” It’s a familiar problem. We’re all extremely busy, and we all get too much email. So what to do?
I can relate to what Fred says, I’ve spent years mastering ways to handle my email and many of them have worked, but none of them have perfected it and that’s where The 99 Percent‘s email cheat sheet comes into play.
In the cheat sheet, 10 tips are offered to assist you with managing your email even better. Some of these are obvious, some aren’t and the reason I’m posting it is because I think everyone could learn a little something. Please note: I’ve rewritten the explanations behind each point form my own opinion, if you want the original explanations, please feel free to read the original article.
So ye, that’s the list of 10 things to assist you when emailing. I agree with 8 of them and urge you all to think carefully about these if you send a lot of email.
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