Hey there! Sorry for the break. I’ve been hip deep in tons of stuff. I have been active on Twitter though.

Hopefully, this will help to make up for the long silence. You may have seen a video series I’m selling for a very low price on http://worldify.com/offshoring101.html. Well, for a limited time, I’m giving this away for free to people who become a fan of Worldify on Facebook. It’s my way of saying ‘Thanks for being a fan!’.

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Yes, there is much about the TV show Survivor and other reality TV shows that is not real. Then again most experiments, surveys, data, and statistics are flawed in some respect. Just as with these things, I believe there are nuggets of truth we can glean from shows like Survivor despite the flaws. Here’s what I think I learned from the most recent season:

Bad times and struggles seem to bind people more tightly than good times, fun, and ease. Galu’s early victories motivated them, energized them, and gave them a certain esprit de corps. However, after the merge it was much easier for them to turn on each other where Foa-Foa remained fiercely loyal…until near the end when Jaison was voted off.

Beware of fair weather friends. Along the same lines, I’ve noticed that people we hold as good friends are not always those who defend us or come to our aid when we are in need. Friendship based on good times only is tentative and untested. You don’t really know who your friends are until they are required to walk with you through bad times. Bad times bind friendships as well as tribes like Foa-Foa.

You are not better than others. Friends who talk badly about others in your presence probably talk badly about you outside your presence too. However, we prefer to believe we are somehow special and that people make exceptions in our case. As people like Dave were told lies about why they were being kept around they tended to eat it up. This propensity to think overly high of themselves, along with desperation, made them gullible; willing to believe anything that enabled them to stay longer. I appreciate players like Monica who you may not like too well in the game but when voted off they take it in stride and get over it quickly while not holding grudges. Then there are players like Jaison who when they are betrayed become bitter and, to use Mick’s metaphor, can’t seem to understand why the snake who bit so many others has now bitten them too. Perhaps Jaison thought he was special and untouchable.

Others do not assess value the same way you do. Many, including me, agree that Russell Hantz technically outplayed and outwitted everyone including Natalie. If Jeff had instructed the jury to vote based on who outplayed and outwitted the best, Russell might have won. Indeed, Russell banked on the jury valuing his accomplishments in these areas. He thought they would value what he valued; what the show professes to value. I think we all fall into this trap very often. Because we’ve spent a lot of time coming around to our values, we believe them to be not just our values but correct values. Surely, other intelligent people who have given the same matters equal thought will come to the same conclusions right? Nope. The trick is to learn what people value and play to that rather than assume they value what you value. Because the jury was not instructed by Jeff they were left to use whatever criteria they wanted to cast their vote. When left to ourselves, and especially when we are not required to divulge our criteria, we can be quite petty. Some jurors may have been swayed by Jaison’s comments about ‘who is the most needy’. Perhaps some jurors actually considered that to be a proper criteria for casting their vote though I wonder if the same would hold true if they were in the final three and the other two with them were more poor. Perhaps some jurors were swayed by Erik who suggested that Natalie’s strategy was just as valid as Russell’s. We do tend to value those who go out of their way to make things happen more than those who wait quietly in the back hedging their bets in case they need to switch strategies later. Did the juror’s really buy into Erik’s or Jaison’s arguments or were they just petty. Perhaps they were still miffed about Russell’s offensive tactics, open arrogance, and knack for finding immunity idols without clues and not yet able to look beyond their hurt to reward the best player.

We are heavily influenced by the voices around us. I was surprised when Shambo showed remorse for being a big part of the undoing of Galu. She didn’t seem to care before she was voted out. Did she believe her betrayal earned her special dispensation; a higher position with Foa-Foa? It always amazes me when we expect to receive something good for doing something bad. After being voted out, she was no doubt pounced upon by upset Galu jury members who apparently awakened her guilt. Does she think she would have made it further in the game by being loyal to Galu?

Morality and immorality don’t mix. Ever try to follow a map and the GPS in your car at the same time? It doesn’t work for me. I find you need to pick one or the other. I like the saying, “I might be right or wrong but I am not confused.” It’s uncomfortable for me to watch Survivor players who play like bad guys while trying to convince others they are good guys. It’s like watching politicians trying to pander to whoever they are talking to at the time. Their morals get conflicted. They do what they feel they must to win while professing guilt when later confronted with their tactics. I admired Russell who decided up front that Survivor was a game and not real life. That freed him to commit fully to his strategy without second guessing himself along the way. After so many who are wishy washy, or just pretend to be, this was very refreshing.

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Most of the info in this rather long post comes from three sources:

• Startlogic.com’s Marketing Services How To Guides. BTW, they are an excellent webhost, great service, and inexpensive.
• Hubspot.com – Lots of SEO and related products. They give a lot of really useful info away for free as well including a Website Grader that grades your site for free.
• My own, amateur experience to date.

The information below is what I feel is most beneficial. I’m beginning to see you can get carried away with many aspects of SEO and so I’m trying to filter on the things that will have the greatest impact for the least effort. A lot of this still looks like voodoo to me; i.e., you should do it because it might help. You can pay companies a lot to help with SEO but as you can see below, there is much you can do yourself.

More about metadata. I say ‘more’ because my last post contained information about this as well.

• Check metadata of competitors. Use variants of keywords and related keywords on your own pages.
• More metatag voodoo: http://www.startlogic.com/knowledgebase/read_article.bml?kbid=4764

Flash. There are many pro-Flash and anti-Flash people out there. Most agree you shouldn’t make people wait for something to load before seeing your site; especially if it’s an e-Commerce site. At the same time, if your site is boring you lose their attention. My happy medium for Worldify.com is to include Flash but to minimize its impact by limiting when it loads, optimizing its size, and creating a non-flash version of the site.

Register with as many directories as you can. Some are free and some are not. You’ll pay a few hundred for Yahoo! to list you plus an additional yearly charge. Is it worth it? Hard to say. Yahoo! gets 20+% of internet search traffic if that helps you decide. Also, you’d need to consider the value of any extra traffic. Here are some of the directories:

• DMOZ
• Yahoo!
• AltaVista
• Excite
• Infoseek
• HotBot
• Lycos
• WebCrawler
• Other Open Directories

Inbound and Outbound Linking

This refers to links on your site that go to other sites (outbound links) and links on other sites that go to your site (inbound links). Where your site places in a search result has a lot to do with your page rank. Part of your page rank depends on how many people link to you. This is very important for most search engines. Here are a couple ways people accomplish this:

• Exchange links with other sites. A simple link exchange works like this: “I’ll put a link to your site on my site if you will put a link to my site on your site.” The older and better the site that links to you the better. Convincing ‘important sites’ to link to you can be difficult but it can’t hurt to ask. Webmasters are supposedly receptive to these requests.
• Affiliate programs. As opposed to a simple link exchange, this refers to a more formal relationship where affiliates are compensated for providing links, and click throughs, to your site. You can see who is linking to your site by searching for “links: yourdomain.com” in most search engines. Google Analytics will tell you which of these is most productive in referring people to your site. You can also use this method to find out who’s linking to your competitors. Sites that link to your competitors might be willing to link to your site too.

Blogs on your site are important because:

• The more content search engines index for your site the better. Blogging provides an easy way for you and others to regularly add content.
• Blogs often attract inbound links which help with your site ranking as noted above.
• Blog entries that use your prime keywords are best. As noted previously, these keywords should be used everywhere you can justify doing so.

Establishing Credibility. Because you don’t usually meet the people you work with online or buy stuff from, credibility and trust are big issues. Here is what several sources say for establishing credibility:

• Offer a free sample, a free product, or a free service. Targeting freebies to a specific customer or customer type is even better.
  
• Share your knowledge via blogs, discussion boards, etc. that your customers visit. Become a regular contributor.
• Testimonials. Get permission to post customer testimonials; even if you have to offer them something in return to get them.
• Guarantees. Whenever possible, offer a money back or satisfaction guarantee. Studies show the better the guarantee, the less likely people will invoke it…which is counterintuitive but true and useful. Though some customers may take advantage, the increase in business more than compensates.
• e-Commerce. Offer secure online ordering. If people don’t see ‘https’, a lock icon on the status or other logos or signs showing the site is secure, they won’t buy. Many, like me, get around this by diverting customers to a third party service, like PayPal, who takes care of all the payment and confidential data stuff on their secure servers.

Marketing

• Advertising. A mention in the editorial of a magazine is believed to be worth more than a paid advertisement as it is more respected and meant to be unbiased.
• Press Releases. There are many sites that offer free and paid press releases and there is a lot of voodoo out there regarding press releases. Here is a sample:
  • A headline is not meant to advertise the business; it’s meant to advertise the advertisement. It’s the ad for the ad.
  • Develop different angles to use in a press release.
  • Develop a good tagline to be used in all promotional materials. Presenting a consistent face to the press and to customers adds credibility.
  • Only provide enough information to generate interest; don’t tell everything. This pulls them to your site.
  • Be unique. News organizations receive hundreds of press releases each day. Make yours stand out.
  • Be personable. For example, address the reader as “you” as you would in a casual conversation.
  • Readers don’t care about you or what you think; they just want to know how your product or service will benefit them.
  • Vary the length of sentences. No sentence should have more than 12 words.
  • Use the pain-pleasure principle which says the avoidance of pain is superior to the search for pleasure. A headline that communicates a negative situation or problem will be understood by your customers who will continue reading.

Other Hints and Tricks

• Search engine robots should be able to find any page on your site within 2 clicks/links of your home page. One way of accomplishing this is via DotLinks which are periods on a page that links to other pages. Though not usually seen by humans, robots can follow them which helps them find your pages more easily.
• Link text or anchor text matter. According to Hubspot, the following is bad: “We’ve got a previous article on SB2 that talks about how to improve your organic search results on Google. You can click here to read that article.” This is much better: “We’ve got a previous article on SB2 that talks about how to improve your organic search results on Google.” The anchor text should contain keywords describing what the link is going to.
• How to make favicons. A favicon, aka favicon.ico, is the little icon you see in the URL field or in the bookmark list preceding a URL or bookmark. For Worldify.com, it looks like . These are little branding icons that are easy to make:
  • Create a 16X16 pixel graphic you want to use as your icon.
  • Convert it to an icon. There are many tools and websites that do this. I used Favicontool.
  • Copy it to the main folder of your website. That’s it. Clear your cache, reload the page, and you should see the icon in both the URL window and in the bookmark list…assuming you have bookmarked the site.

These are some of the cooler things I’ve come across lately. Please comment if you have advice along these lines.

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Having obtained my PMP twice over the years I have developed some BKMs for getting it quickly and cheaply. Yes, I said twice. The first time I got it, my employer didn’t care much about it so I let the certification expire. Years later, they started caring and so I re-certified. I had to start from scratch. Below are some tips that worked for me…twice:

1. PMBOK® – Read it several times. For me, it worked best to read it quickly to get a feel for the format, content, and language. Then, I reread it a couple more times more slowly making sure I understood everything. Memorize all the Process Groups, Knowledge Areas, and each individual process with its associated inputs, tools, processes, and outputs. That’s the hardest part of preparing for the test. You can obtain the PMBOK® digitally for free from pmi.org…if you are a member of PMI. Otherwise, you can buy it or borrow it from someone. Make sure you have the latest edition.
2. Charts, tables, and graphics – Familiarize yourself with each of these contained in the PMBOK®. You need to understand what they are saying and practically memorize them.
3. Classes and books – Many people spend hundreds or thousands of dollars taking classes to prepare for the PMP test. If you are a new PM and the concepts are new to you, this probably isn’t a bad idea. However, if you are a seasoned PM who knows and has experienced most of the concepts in the PMBOK®, then you can save a lot of time and money by avoiding this step. I skipped this step myself…both times.
4. Test questions – There are many sites that sell sample PMP test questions. Many of these sites offer a few questions for free. The purpose of these questions is to make you feel stupid enough to buy the other questions. In other words, these questions, in my view, are often harder than those you’ll see on the test. If you can get a mediocre score on these you’re probably good to go. Some sites even provide free questions with no strings attached.
5. Subjective questions –  Some questions on the test give a scenario and ask you what you should do next. Often, the choices are all good ones and what you would really do might depend on details not included in the given scenario. It is difficult to prepare for these other than to become sufficiently familiar with the ‘culture’ of the PMBOK® that you can guess which answer they want you to choose.
6. Formulas – I actually encountered a couple formulas on the test that I couldn’t find in the PMBOK® and so I gathered the following formulas. Memorize these and you should be OK:

Earned Value

• PV – BCWS
• EV – BCWP
• CV = EV – AC
• SV = EV – PV
• CPI = EV/AC
• CPI^C = EV^C/AC^C
• ^{SPI = EV/PV}
• ^{ETC = BAC – EVC (atypical variance)}
• ^{ETC = (BAC – EVC)/CPIC (typical variance)}
• ^{EAC = ACC + ETC (using a new estimate)}
• ^{EAC = ACC + BAC – EV (using remaining budget)}
• ^{EAC = ACC + ((BAC – EV)/CPIC) (using CPIC)}

# Communication Channels = n(n-1)/2, where n is the number of stakeholders

Summary

• Become extremely familiar with the concepts, culture, processes, charts, and formulas of the PMBOK®. Read it several times. Make a study guide consisting of just the charts, processes, and formulas and commit it all to memory. I’d give you my study guide but PMI says I can’t since it contains excerpts from the PMBOK®.
• Memorize the formulas above.
• Check yourself with some free sample test questions. You can Google to find them.
• Take your time on the test; especially with the subjective scenario questions.

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Click here to see the Press Release.

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I believe the time has come for the GILT industry to improve the way it moves forward. There are many huge challenges to meet like satisfying our increasingly flat world’s appetite for more, better and faster translations. Many have cited metrics showing how the demand is greatly outpacing our ability to supply translation. Our industry has a lot of bright people with good ideas but we lack the cohesion, systems, and processes to move forward quickly on things that might help…like creating standards for instance. Conferences, online discussions, and thousands of personal interactions all help but fall short of what could be accomplished with tools that are available to us today.

• Wouldn’t it be nice if you could quickly find the best .NET person in our industry when you needed them? Better yet, wouldn’t it be great if you had access to them?
• Wouldn’t it be great to have a place to ask a question about something you are working on today? Better yet, rather than lobbing the question into an ocean of people from all walks of life, wouldn’t it be better to direct the question at the select few who are established experts in that area?
• Wouldn’t it be great to have a place where you could float ideas or initiatives, find like-minded people, and move them forward…all the while receiving feedback from stakeholders that help you create a truly useful tool, process, or standard?
• Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk into a very cheap, always in session, virtual GILT conference and leave anytime you want?

These are some of the ideas that sparked the L10NCafe.

Pieces of this dream already exist on sites like Multilingual.com, ProZ.com and LISA.org. LinkedIn.com has discussion groups, events and awesome tools for finding and connecting to people. They even have a feature to ask questions. However, these solutions tend to be light on functionality and are too narrow or too broad in terms of the scope of their audience. Ning.com is a free service along the lines of what is needed but lacks rich collaboration features. It is more of a social networking site like Facebook with some MySpace capabilities rather than a focused, maximized, collaboration tool optimized for the GILT industry.

To move forward more quickly and efficiently we need something that is more functional and easy to use, cheap so more people can participate, and inclusive of all industry segments while allowing specific groups to collaborate privately when needed. Again, these are the ideas behind the L10NCafe.

An example of what could be

All of the sites listed above post Events on their sites. Most allow users to add events which is good. ProZ allows people to indicate whether they will attend an event and offer advice to those attending. That’s great. These are all good attempts going in the right direction. However, the technology exists for us to do much better. For example, as shown on the L10NCafe, we could:

• Enable people to request alerts when events are created.
• Allow anyone in the GILT community to create an event. This helps ensure all events are listed and not just those relating to a specific segment or interest group.
• Enable filters so people can view only the events they are interested in. Maybe I just want to see the events in the USA or Germany. Or perhaps I’m only interested in events sponsored by a specific organization.
• Allow people to designate whether they plan to attend like ProZ does.
• Automatically generate blog categories dedicated to each event so people can blog about them in a place everyone has access to and knows how to find.
• Enable people to set reminders to tell them when event deadlines approach like registration and early bird discount deadlines.

Of course, Events are just one aspect of a full collaboration solution which might include member-driven webinars, wikis, Q&A, podcasts, subsites dedicated to specific groups and initiatives, etc. Really, the sky is the limit here. We could have a place where the community suggests new features that get implemented quickly.

Once we have everyone’s attention, we can do some wonderful things like:

• agree on a process to codify standards
• direct the development of tool providers so their efforts are applied more efficiently
• enable people to find like-minded peers to work with on initiatives
• give a voice to the thousands in our industry who cannot attend conferences but who have great ideas and stand ready with expert skills to help us move forward, etc.

Do you think something like this would be useful?

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I’ve finally done it. I’ve started my own company after years for threatening to do so. Let the fun begin!

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I’ve learned a lot about social networking sites and getting new websites noticed over the past couple weeks. Here’s my working list of things to keep in mind when you create a new website; especially an ecommerce site though most of the items apply to other sites as well:

• Title, description, keywords, and alt tags. Create these and use the same keywords over and over…to the extent it makes sense.
• Use the same keywords in headers and filenames.
• Register your domain for multiple years.
• Get setup on Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Adwords.
• Get experts to help with Adwords at first to figure out best keywords. There’s science and voodoo involved here. My goal is to get help at first and then take it from there myself.
• Get other sites to link to you; i.e., Directory Listing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is what put my site on the map. Before this, if you searched for ‘worldify’ you would get a couple things; one of which was only remotely related to me. Now, the first few items all relate to me.
• Create a sitemap and submit it to search engines.
• It can take weeks if not months for all engines to register everything so don’t change filenames very often.
• Use 301 redirects when renaming a page or moving it, changing the domain, etc. This preserves the history of the page including its ranking. Google Webmaster Tools can help here.

I’ll edit this post as I learn more and as I see what really makes a difference. Let me know if anyone out there has further advice along these lines. Now, my attention turns to other marketing efforts…

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