Uh Oh Somebody is Listening

Maybe I understand the appeal of diaries a bit better now. Blogging here without any readers was somehow liberating.

But wait. Somebody is listening.

Imagine my surprise to find two comments when logging in today.

• One from Paul who obviously has his reputation management sorted and is courteous enough to thank me for commenting on the service he is offering.
• A second from Sue, who is very complimentary — thank you Sue!

Thing is: the idea was to start building up content and get into a reasonable blogging routine as I got the site to version 1.0 and then start actively trying to build traffic. Cunning plan: have a reasonable amount of content before sending people here — furnish the house before you ask people in, sort of thing.

Seems all that is needed to get noticed is a few links to other blogs, etc. We’re definitely not talking traffic to write home about [Ahem. What am I doing now? :-)]. But people are reading what I am writing.

Second thing is: um, duh, isn’t being read the whole point. Yes all I am saying is there was something liberating about writing down comments that would previously have been part of some sort of internal dialogue.

I often find the act of writing helps me discover what I think about something. [Interlude to scramble round the web confirming the Oliver Goldsmith quote about knowing what you think after you've written on a subject. Discover the quotation that follows has been attributed to a few writers but Joan Didion wins the prize on the basis of most results on major search engines. Well established misconception corrected.]

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”
Joan Didion

S’pose I can still discover a lot of my own thinking with an audience… [Internal editor: "Get over yourself; judging by the analytics your audience would fit in a small lift."]

And the lesson/point is: if you are struggling to create content around a product/service/idea, it’s worth just writing down what you think, to start fine tuning your thoughts. Thought can be viral and the thoughts you explore often generate others that can be revised to suit your content’s goal.

Need Graphic Design? 99designs Works for Designers & SMBs

99designs.com offers SMEs/SMBs* and designers a very worthwhile opportunity. It takes the “put client with a need and expert provider together” business model of sites like Guru.com and Elance.com to a new level.

The Web is above all a communications medium bringing people together. Any number of sites seek to put freelancers and service providers, wherever they might be, together with potential clients, wherever they might be. Great for both parties:

• freelancers cut time looking for prospects down by getting access to people with a defined need for their services — doubly great, no more direct mail and advertising to prospects who may or may not actually need their services.
• SMEs/SMBs* get access to any number of providers via one ad and can then choose from proposals submitted with reference to freelancers’ profiles on the site.

99designs.com is a Sitepoint project spun off into a separate business. It allows you to post design jobs/contests with a declared price/prize and invite entries from the design community they have built up.

The new twist comes in people submitting finished designs, rather than proposals. No need to vet providers and chose one or two.

Designers who think your prize is worth the effort submit a design for rating and feedback.

The approach might not work so well for other types of work — small copy jobs, yes, lengthy projects, no, for instance. And you could find yourself inundated with amateur designs. You can check profiles for designers’ credentials but you probably need to know a little about design and be pretty sure what you want.

Having said that, running a logo design contest through 99designs has allowed me to see a large number of designers’ take on my brief and refine what I need as the entries have come in. The effort involved in achieving the same effect via a Yellow pages/Web search>contact>vet>decide>give brief, more-conventional, process are pretty daunting. And I can’t see an easier way to work with a number of designers simultaneously.

The folks at Sitepoint have done some smart stuff over the years — their site is a great resource. 99designs.com is another smart and useful application of the Web’s ability to bring people together and circumvent traditional channels. Definitely worth checking out if you need some graphic design or a small Web design project done.

*”Small & Medium Enterprises” as per UK commonwealth usage / “Small & Medium sized Businesses” as per US usage