This blog, pauldavidolson.com/blog

Original goal: This is my main venue for sharing my opinions and testing things out.

What I’ve learned:

• Reddit has been a good source of traffic to my blog, but it’s a finicky bunch. I get accused of posting my own content (which I admit to). I prefer Reddit to Digg, but it will be interesting to see how Digg tries to evolve.
• When I write for Dappered, I get a bump in traffic to my blog. It’s good to get your name out.
• I love WordPress. It’s a great CMS. Mediate and TheSmokingJacket.com are two new and notable sites that agree – both are run on WordPress.
• With SEO, timing is key. My Blake Lively SNL booty dance post got good traffic. I beat a lot of other sites to this one Sunday morning after the clips went live on Hulu.
• I first experimented with Feedburner here – I really like their service.
• I first experimented with Disqus and Facebook Connect here. I’m less in love with Disqus lately. Comments are necessary, but they are certainly no path to success.

ProlongedInsult.com (RIP)

Original goal: Create a user-generated content site for all frustrated writers – with a focus on fiction, poetry, and travel writing.

What I’ve learned:

• Attracting authors to a user-generated content site is a lot of work. And even after you attract them, keeping them around is even tougher.
• Maintaining a customized CMS isn’t worth it. WordPress is the way to go. I’m curious to try Pligg.
• Fiction and poetry get very little search traffic.
• It’s tough to build community … even around the ‘frustrated writer’ rallying cry.
• Eventually it became more of a liability than an asset and I shut it down.
• User-generated content takes a lot of effort – it’s not something where you just set it up and watch the money roll in.

WhyYouAreStupid.com

Original goal: Test the theory that controversy brings readers.

What I’ve learned:

• Incendiary / controversial content isn’t a surefire way to build an audience. It’s better to watch and anticipate trends.
• My most successful post was about Kathy Ireland’s baby bump on Oscar night. Again, this shows the value of timeliness regarding SEO. All traffic came via Google searches. I was the first to post about her possible pregnancy. Riding trends is good, but being first is better.

Dappered.com

Original goal: Blog about men’s fashion and earn money via affiliate sales and advertising.

What I’ve learned:

• Having a secondary revenue stream is important. Ad-support alone isn’t enough.
• The audience has grown steadily for the last year. Last month was the first month with over 100,000 pageviews.
• Each one-off traffic success seems to leave behind long-term residual gains.
• RSS-powered Twitter is good enough. @dappered has 80 followers now and has seen consistent growth without any human intervention.
• Joe averages 3 posts a day. Most returning visitors appear to come back daily to check things out.
• 45% of all traffic comes from Google organic searches. Dappered does really well because many products are only featured on one other page on the entire web – the store’s page – unlike the news which is rehashed everywhere.
• The above-the-fold 300×250 ad is the best performing ad on the site.
• Big buttons don’t lead to big sharing. We added the Sharebar plugin to the site, and sharing activity hasn’t been influenced visibly. The most important factor in creating viral content is … content.

SarahPalinWillFixEverything.com

Original goal: Just a joke and an attempt at an intentionally viral site.

What I’ve learned:

• It basically worked. Site was very successful on StumbleUpon, getting 4,000 visits the day after it launched. 500 people Facebook ‘liked’ it as of this writing.
• The site performed poorly with Google – might not even be in the index.
• Nobody donated. I should have went with ads instead.
• Would have performed better as a WordPress site filled with Sarah Palin RSS feeds. I may still do this. Or maybe I’ll try out Pligg.
• Site continues to get traffic, but nowhere near the level of the first few days.
• All sites should have a wavy American flag.

Bartannica.com

Original goal: Publish bar reviews, get more traffic than Yelp.

What I’ve learned:

• Bartannica suffers from lack of content. A site needs regular updates to survive.
• Linked site to Flickr – all pictures are Flickr images. These cross-linked images seem to help search rankings.
• Bar reviews don’t go viral and don’t get shared much.
• Hip new bars get a lot of press initially, so it’s tough to rank high on these searches. Old, divey bars with little recent press do much better on Bartannica – like the Sky Ride Tap.
• Originally tried affiliate t-shirt sales to generate revenue, that didn’t work. The Dappered approach is much better.
• Maintaining multiple WordPress themes means more work.  I changed Bartannica’s design to match my blog’s design to make things easier.  I like the Thematic theme.

I’ve been lucky — I worked at a failed business and lost my job on 1 day’s notice.  That was nearly 3 years ago.

The reality of modern employment is that we should all be prepared for job changes.  Here are 5 things I’ve learned to help you respond to unanticipated job changes.

photo credit: markhillary

Learn New Skills

Are you a developer that’s never touched an iPhone or a systems administrator that avoids Linux?  It pays to toy with alternative technologies in your free time.  At the very least, you’ll be able to speak more knowledgeably about their strengths and weaknesses at interviews.  And you’ll have a few more bullets for your resume.

Reconnect With Old Associates And Friends

LinkedIn and Facebook are great for this, but it’s also worthwhile to take a more traditional approach.  Meet old co-workers for drinks.  Have lunch with an old boss.  Hell, consider planning a vacation around this type of social networking.  Have a buddy in New York who loves his job?  Check it out.  Learn what he likes.  Can you recreate his luck where you live?  Consider relocating.

Start a Side Project

I started ProlongedInsult.com before my old employer folded.  And while the site never took off, it helped me find my current last job.  Side project can be very valuable career stepping stones because they allow you to gain experience doing what you like before trying to convince somebody to pay you to do it.  Dream of working in a brewery?  Start home-brewing beer.  Want to write the next best-seller?  Start chapter one today.

Keep Your Head Down … Or Up

If things are rocky at you current job, this can be a tough call.  Sometimes, sticking your neck out just isn’t worth it.  Maybe it’s better to lay low and suck it up for a few months to see how things pan out.  When fingers start pointing around looking for somebody to blame, you probably want to lay low.

Other times, taking a risk may lead to more career fulfillment.  Have an idea to cut costs?  Share it.  Smart businesses will reward those that contribute to success.  When it comes time to tighten the business’s belt, the valuable employees should receive incentives to stay on board.

Evaluate Your Bills

When uncertainty grows, consider your bills.  Should you renew your iPhone contract for another 2 years?  Should you spring for a new car at the end of your lease?  Do you really need HBO?  Take the time to find out where your money goes each month and evaluate what’s necessary and what’s not.  When I lost my company-provided phone, I switched to pre-paid.  Little changes can lead to significant savings.

How about you — have you gone through a career change?  What did you learn?

The younger generation… [has] burst in and seated themselves in our seats.  The air is noisy with their shouts.  Of their elders some, by imitating the antics of youth, strive to persuade themselves that their day is not yet over; they shout with the lustiest, but the war-cry sounds hollow in their mouth … The wiser go their way with a decent grace.  In their chastened smile is an indulgent mockery.  They remember that they too trod down a sated generation, with just such clamor and with just such scorn, and they foresee that these brave torchbearers will presently yield their place also. — W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpense

photo credit: steews4

Jumping Ship from iPhone to Android: A Switcher’s Guide (Lifehacker)

Hopefully it’s temporary and not some evil plot against the Gawker network masterminded by Steve Jobs.

UPDATE: Gawker and Gizmodo are down too.  What gives?

1. Focus on higher-paying ad sizes. The 300×250 ad size is your friend.  The one above the fold on Dappered.com is the best performing ad slot on the site.  Thankfully, the Arras Theme Joe uses has room for a 300×250 in the sidebar.  In addition to the 300×250 size, we use a 728×90 in the footer.  There’s no 728×90 in the header.
2. Add text ads where text ads make sense. For Dappered.com, that meant below the post, under our share buttons.  Text ads are relevant to the content on the page, so it makes sense to put them under the post where they will be in a reader’s line of sight.  Text ads off to the side or in the footer are never going to get clicked (which means they’ll never earn you any money).
3. Remove poor-performing ads. 200x200s, 125x125s — don’t waste your time (unless you have some sort of direct deal).  Don’t slow your pages down with extra ads.  If an ad unit isn’t performing (like a text ad in your footer), get rid of it.  Your readers will thank you with additional pageviews (because your pages will load faster and they’ll come back more often), which means you’ll get more ad impressions.

What about pop-ups and pop-unders?  Probably not worth it.  If they annoy you on other sites, they’ll annoy your readers on your site.  Instead, create a good experience and become so valuable that advertisers will seek you out directly.

Yesterday, the early reviewers raved.  The public has “sniff[ed] out a winner” … the display is “gorgeous” … it’s a “major leap” … it was simply so awesome, that David Pogue of the New York Times asked, “What’s the point [of this review]?“  Turns out, the point was to ensure that Apple keeps advertising its products in the New York Times.  Because the real reviews started coming in shortly after people started turning their phones on, holding them in their hands, and looking at their screens.

Mashable sums it up: Critical iPhone 4 Issues and Complaints Are Mounting.  This story currently has about 2,500 tweets and 1,500 Facebook shares.  And the complaints are against both the iPhone 4′s major strength and its major weakness.

The iPhone 4 had one thing going for it: pixels.  “Retina” display is the one thing no Android device has responded to (yet).  Sure, nearly every Android phone has a higher resolution display than the 3Gs, but the iPhone 4 beats them all … but it has yellow spots.

Then there was the iPhone’s weakness: AT&T.  Everybody whines about poor coverage, dropped calls, and weak data service already.  How could it get worse?  Well, put your iPhone 4 in your hand and watch the bars drop.  The solution so far?  Use the headphones or buy a rubberized case.  Goodbye sleek design.

Oh well, it had to happen … putting all your eggs in one basket an all that.  That only works with late-night television.

This is a tricky problem. Online realtime streams can only of course be downloaded as fast as your broadband connection and the content provider allows, so it’s impossible to fast forward beyond the latest downloaded (and transcoded) point in the media. It’s analogous to watching a live broadcast with a DVR — pausing and rewinding work fine, but fast forwarding can never go beyond “right now”. Additionally, many of the devices aren’t set up very well to handle when the intermediary end of the media stream is reached. In these cases, they may just give up, and exit playback with an obscure error, instead of waiting and buffering. In any case, we are working on solutions and improvements to this issue, but it’s technically very challenging.

And yeah, it’s a tricky problem, if you’re trying to make it work as fast forward.  But if you just make the progress bar work — a feature of every media player — you solve the problem.

photo credit: Newhaircut

Here’s what I do whenever I try to watch a Hell’s Kitchen episode on PlayOn: I watch the first 20 minutes on my TV, something happens and the image stalls, I monkey with my Wii and my laptop, PlayOn gives up so I restart the video, I can’t fast forward, and I end up watching the last 20 minutes on my laptop.  And I can watch the last 20 minutes on my laptop because I can click the damn progress bar.  I can start watching at minute 21.  Implement that, PlayOn.

People will say the iPhone 3Gs was old at that point and all the new, sexy phones had Android. And I say: EXACTLY!  Apple’s one-size-fits-all models (updated every two years) isn’t going to work in the long run.  When it was G1 vs. iPhone, yes, Apple won.  But now there are too many good phones available on better networks, and they are tailored to better-fit different segments of the market.

And others will ignore the fact that Wal-Mart was selling off iPhones for the bargain-basement price of $97.  All while Verizon was selling the Droid Eris for $0.01 and offering other 2-for-1 incentives.  Apple can’t compete on price with Android, just like they couldn’t with Windows a few decades ago.

Steve, you had a good run.  But it’s done.