Some comments I have about Jay Chou’s concert. I’m not a big fan, but I do think he’s super super talented.
A lot of websites out there just measure traffic. Traffic is a quantitative number that is easy to measure and helps you see important trends and how successful campaigns are. However, especially for sites that need some kind of conversion like signing up or buying a product, undifferentiated traffic can be misleading.
Traffic is the amount of visitors on your site. When you say “visitors”, these are actually real people, and everyone has their own personalities, their motives, and their own wants. Yes, sometimes it’s just a numbers game where a small % of your traffic will convert. However, wouldn’t you actually want 100 people on your site that are looking to really buy things than have 1000 people who are just surfing?
This misconception in traffic-success is most obviously seen with StumbleUpon. When you get “Stumbled”, your traffic that day will increase gigantically. However, chances are your average time on site will decrease dramatically. That is because Stumble can get you a lot of traffic, but not a lot of quality traffic. Even if people did read your post or article, they’re in a pure surfing mode and will likely not signup or buy your services.
In that sense, I came up with three qualitative metrics that is important to consider when driving visitors to your site. These metrics are: Relevancy, Timing, and Trust.
Relevancy is whether this person is actually part of your target market. If you own a sports site that is looking to get subscription and merchandise purchases, but the visitor on your site is not really that interested in sports and never buys anything online, this person is not relevant. It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 people like that on your site. You won’t convert anything.
Everyone wants to be successful. Unless you are sick and perverted, you do not like failure. However, in order to grow and learn, you must not only be tolerant of failure, you must welcome it.
And when you do fail, you must learn to pick yourself up as fast as possible and carry on. The world only cares about what you have accomplished, not how hard you tried or how mopey you are. Every successful person in this world has one thing in common: none of them gave up.
Imagine if you gave up the first time you tried to walk as a baby. Where would you be today? Even though you fell again and again, and even though it hurts when everything else in the world is all about cushions, food, comfort, and care, you chose to stand up and walk again.
And you fell again.
CrowdBooster is one of the best Twitter Apps that analyze how your Twitter account is doing and how to make it even more effective. It’s the perfect balance between not having overwhelming statistics on every little ratio, and having enough depth that it actually becomes useful. A lot of tools out there are more like info-porn, where it’s fun to watch all the time, but you don’t really get anything out of it. CrowdBooster actually allows you to make info useful and do better with your campaigns.
In this interview, I talk a lot about the myths and misconceptions about Social Media, how to do social media marketing correctly….and how I got so many followers.
Have you ever had the frustrating experience where you emailed someone you didn’t know very well, and never got a response? Feels pretty bad right? No one really likes cold-emailing, but in order to strive for more opportunities that wouldn’t regularly show up at your door (customers, mentors, advisors, investors, etc etc), you are often required to contact people you’re not already buddies with.
But what if they don’t respond? Should you email them again? But haven’t they already implicitly rejected you by not responding? Aren’t you annoying them? The entire experience can be very demoralizing.
However, before you give up hope, I want to share a couple quick stories. In 2007, I went to an entrepreneurship event hosted at the UCLA Anderson School called StartupLA. I signed up for the spontaneous 1 minute pitch at the event. After the event, I was catching up with a lot of work so I only made sure I followed up with a handful of key people that I had to meet.
However, I got an email from a struggling entrepreneur that the judges didn’t really like during that time. He said it was great meeting me and wanted to catch food/coffee sometime together. Being in my stressful catchup mode, I felt warm about the email but ultimately ignored it (I didn’t want to appear like an asshole and reject such a polite and sincere offer).
A couple weeks later, I received another email from him, saying that he knows I am busy, but it would be great if we could catch coffee sometime. I actually did kinda mean to respond to that, but it sat in my inbox for almost a week, and it felt a bit awkward responding with “Sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier…” so I also kinda let it go…
LUCKILY, this guy had the persistence of the Uppercut (will talk about soon!) and emailed me again! By this time, there was no excuse for me and I was compelled to respond to him IMMEDIATELY. We then scheduled to get some dim sum together.
Before I start to write about this topic, I’m going to assume that you are a good natured, helpful, and considerate person who is not trying to suck out the life blood out of everyone around him. If you think my assumption is incorrect, go back to the post where I talk about how Integrity, Sincerity and Optimism are the first three cores of FD Networking (out of six).
In order to level up in the game of life, you need to always be prepared to help others. When you are aiming to become powerful, you are not just yourself, but the group of people you have influence over. When that’s the case, peoples’ business is your business, and you benefit if these business are going well. You should always take others’ welfare to heart and strive to make the group better as a whole.
Recently, I wrote a blogpost titled The Government should pay entrepreneurs salaries to save the economy. I wasn’t saying that this plan is 100% correct, but it seemed logical to me, so I wanted to put it out there to see what people think about it. At least I had some support from a Stanford Researcher and an Ex Venture Capitalist and BCG Consultant.
After a while, this professor from Belmont University Jeff Cornwallwrote a blogpost about how terrible and out of my mind I was. Shortly after, a lot of his readers started commenting on my blog and his blog saying they are “disgusted” and that I’m promoting socialism.
What do you do when that happens?
I have seen forum threads that were pretty much devoted to bashing me anonymously. I pretty much used these exact tips and dealt with the “trolls” straight on. After 2 long emails addressing every single person, I eneded up with only supporters in the forum and the bashers almost felt embarrassed to say more things.
Gary Vaynerchuck also had a crisis where his website got hacked and redirected to a porn site. He also managed it in a way that helped him gain more followers that respect him.
Your reputation is one of your biggest assets. It’s your job to guard it with your life.
Most of the time, a person’s role model or hero from a movie is the main character, his/her master, or the loyal supporting character (and sometimes the Villain).
For those of you who have seen Terminator 2 (If you haven’t, I strongly urge you to stop reading this blog and go watch it. Not for my sake but for yours), you might be a bit suprised why I chose Miles Dyson as the role model. It’s true, in a film that is action packed with robots killing each other with big weapons, Miles Dyson does play the role of the wimpy scientist that is powerless and unrespected.
But if you looked deeper into his character, you’ll find that he is actually one of the most respectable people you may know.
