January, 2010

One of my favourite film trilogies of all time is Back To The Future.  I can still remember watching Part Two back in the early 90s and dreaming of 2015 with flying cars, power laces and hoverboards!

Whilst I am not overly optimistic that I will be flying to my parents house on the Skyway within the next 5 years, I AM living in (the futuristic sounding) ‘Twenty Ten’, which is exciting enough to make the time travel dreaming kid which I was in the 90s feel like I am actually living in the ‘future’ . 

On realisation of my successful journey in to the future, I decided that it was a good point to reflect on recent years and come up with some resolutions based on my experiences.  I’m a big fan of regular life/work reviews, so I tend to make ‘tweaks’ throughout the year, meaning that my resolutions are actually a results of lots of tweaks to day to day life in recent years.  I will be starting off 2010 with the following in mind, but I have no doubt that each of these will have evolved if I re-visit this post in 2011.

OK, enough with the jabbering and retro sci-fi reminiscing, here are my concise bulleted resolutions for Twenty Ten…

1. Reading…
   Set aside between 45 mins to 1 hour every morning (over breakfast is fine) to read blogs, Twitter updates, social network feeds and relevant news
   
   
2. Watching…
   Exercise is boring, so… Subscribe to interesting online video feeds (e.g. TED, SEOMOZ, O’reilly Media, etc…) and watch them whilst running at least 3 times a week on the treadmill (did you notice how I squeezed in the obligatory new years ‘get fit’ resolution there?!)
   
   
3. Focus…
   Only use my home office for work. When I am not working, close the door of my home office.
   
   
4. Planning…
   Planning work requires a different frame of mind to doing work, so do not try to mix them
   
   
5. Growing…
   Seek as many opportunities as possible to get ‘outside of my comfort zone’
   
   
6. Relationships…
   Aim to ‘talk with everyone’, rather than ‘talk to everyone’
   
   
7. More on relationships…
   Always treat people as I would expect them to treat me (particularly the ones who do the opposite).  Perhaps more importantly, recognise when I do NOT do this.
   
   
8. Mentors…
   Identify gaps between my skills/values and those of my role models, and improve on them
   
   
9. Work/life…
   Only turn down dinner/lunch/drink invites if absolutely necessary
   
   
10. Tweet more…
    Or perhaps that should read 'Tweet better'.  Whilst I have made some great connections on Twitter in 2009 (I am @chrismdotcom), I am looking forward to dedicating more time and thought to my tweets this year.  I strongly believe this is important for work and social reasons.

SEOMOZ have published a great post about optimising customer conversions on their website.  Whilst SEO often focuses on getting more customers to a site, it is perhaps more important to make sure that customers are actually converting when they get there – whether that’s by downloading an app, buying a product or taking any other action define as a goal of the site.

I strongly recommend reading the SEOMOZ post, so I am not going to repeat it all, however there was one item which I found particularly interesting because I had not heard about it before, and it is incredibly easy to implement…

(appropriately you can click the image to access the full blog post)

A new page on Microsoft.com provides tutorial videos, step by step instructions and download links for using the IIS SEO toolkit to optimise the discoverability of your pages.  You can run the toolkit on Windows Vista and Windows 7 (as well as on Windows Server), and it’s crawler/analysis tools can scan your website to detect common SEO violations and generate data for detailed analysis of the site’s linking structure.  This new landing page provides easy to follow explanations of using the tool's interface, as well as detailed examples of using it generate raw data which can be used for advanced analysis in Excel...

http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo/