I did not write this… This is taken directly from Both Sides of the Table (includes video).

Here’s the summary:

1. Keep it Short – “It’s gotta be short. 30 seconds is good, 60 seconds is worse, 90 seconds is worse, people just do not want to watch long stuff.” Doh. I guess this video won’t go viral, then! Again, Jon, “I’m not just talking about video. If you want something to be shared virally on the web it has to be short.”

2. It needs to have an interpersonal, human angle – Examples he gives, “mothers & daughters, traits in your boss you don’t like or the perfect drinks on your anniversary. Everybody will send this to people and say, ‘isn’t this just like us?’ or ‘this is totally different than us’ – you need to start the conversation” I have to admit I get this all the time. I’ll write a post on how to give feedback to employees and then I’ll get emails from people telling me they forwarded it to their whole team. When it’s personal, it gets shared a lot.

3. People want rough content that feels genuine to them / authenticity – People don’t want highly produced stuff, they want stuff that feels genuine to them. “How-to” guides work well. Behind the scenes videos do great.

4. Create something people can engage with – Examples include videos you can put your image into. Or creating quizzes or games with your content. People want to engage with content, not just consume it. The more engaging, the more it gets shared.

5. Offer the ability to react / comment - In the blogging world it’s clear that having a good comment system like Disqus is critical. And you need to work your comments section if you want people to share your content and turn up again. Good comment community = viral blog. It’s called showing good service to your most loyal customers.

6. People like lists / images – Everybody likes lists. Try making your blog posts as lists and have it in your headline to drive clicks. How very meta of me, hey? If you want a great tool to create lists check out Ranker (I’m not an investor). Also, images are way more viral than video. Many people aren’t able to listen to videos in their office.

7. Give up page views – Many websites give you presentations or lists and make you scroll through 10 pages to see the entire list. Jon says don’t do this. You get a few extra page views but less people will consume the content and certainly less will share it and make it go viral.

8. Make sure you headline is compelling, a call-to-action or a list - We talked a bit about the need to make your title catchy. In an era of RSS, Twitter, Facebook & new consumption tools like FlipBoard – titles matter.

9. Make sure the content of your Tweet / FB Share isn’t something that is something people would feel stupid sending around to their friends & colleagues – we didn’t actually get to this in our interview, but I had seen Jonah Peretti (the founder of BuzzFeed & also of The Huffington Post) talk about this in a previous interview.  If the title of your post (or the content itself) is something that is likely to make the sharer feel embarrassed for sharing it then it certainly won’t go viral. Keep in mind that when somebody hits “share” they are putting their reputation on the line by sharing it with friends.

10. Tweet appropriately – OK, I’m adding this one to the list (also not in interview) but it’s a technique I have data on. First, make sure to leave 10-12 spaces in your Tweet rather than using all 140 characters. Sure, people can use new-style Retweets but many people prefer old-school ones. If you don’t leave enough space then it’s harder to share and many people won’t bother.

And I tell people all the time, it’s OK to Tweet more than once (full advice in this link). In particular I do an East Coast morning Tweet (5.40am PST) and a West Coast Tweet (8.40am). Each converts the same (e.g. if I hand’t sent the second tweet I’d get a lot less clicks / shares). I use a tool to set it up in advance so I don’t actually have to be ready to Tweet in real time.

If you keep a blog make sure you have ReTweet buttons prominently placed near your article. This will also drive a lot of shares.

A web browser is, “the internet”, as some people call it… other people call it the “big blue e”. This poses a problem to us as web developers. Here’s the short back-story. Microsoft back in the late nineties decided it would be a fun idea (as the company behind Internet Explorer) to be lazy in building it, and not keep up with web standards.

The web evolved, but IE didn’t.Every time we build an app, or a website we’re forced to do all these crazy checks to make sure something works in IE. The trouble is, is means we can’t push the envelope and challenge ourselves because IE forces us to scale back and do things the old fashioned way.

The point of this post…

My purpose behind this post is to explain to you that there are other web browsers on the internet which give you a better browsing experience, are more secure with your credit card details and won’t let you get viruses on your computer.

In today’s world, There’s Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is run by Microsoft – they’ve just released IE9, which is meant to be pretty good, but IE8 is so out of date, it’ll be 3 years yet before we no longer have to cater for it.

Mozilla produced Firefox – They’ve now overtaken IE8 as market leaders and is the most widely used browser in the world (We love Firefox)

Safari, which is Apple’s browser, this is also what you use on your iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone. (Safari’s cool)

Google Chrome runs on the same engine as Safari I believe so it’s more or less the same browser, with some extra bits. (Chrome’s quick)

What’s my point?

My point is, if you love IE, upgrade to IE9. If you don’t know what IE is, and thought you were just using “the internet” then I recommend you start using something like Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome.

One of our developers just said:

“Why would someone use IE? It’s like buying a car with square tires, then getting mad at the road for wanting round ones” – Antoine

I think he’s spot on!

Sometimes when we’re building our web based applications, doing things by design is often, in a way – limiting. Think about it – it’s just 1 person’s perspective, or 2 in our case, before it finds it’s way into a programmer’s hands. It’s almost impossible that we’ve thought of every possible scenario. Here’s an example from earlier:

To put it into context, this is about a Facebook style news feed on the home screen of our latest piece of software, AddBook.

Sabrina: “Should it show reminders on the news feed?”

Ads: “…………(thinking)…… Yeah”

Sabrina: “Good, because Antoine messed it up and put it there”

I hadn’t considered the idea of putting reminders in the news feed, neither had Sabrina, but someone else just assumed that it should be like that. It’s not always swirly whirly ice cream… Sometimes developers do things their way and it’s not as good.

The thing to think about when making decisions about features in software is:

“What are the customers going to think of that?”

I wonder if we’d have customers left if we took this approach with you guys and girls?

Okay, so it’s not your Birthday, it’s mine… And I’m going to be 26, which Ben, at Sussex Music kindly reminded me, is actually closer to 52, than it is to zero. Thanks muppet!

It also reminded me of when I was a kid… stay with me here. So when I was little, during the month of December, I had a pretty similar conversation with almost everyone I ran into. It went a bit like this:

RandomKidFriend: “Happy Christmas Ads”
LittleAds: “Happy Christmas to you too”

Come birthday time, around 3 weeks later, the conversations would go like this:

OnlyFriend: “Happy Birthday Ads”
StupidAds: “Happy Birthday to you too”

I would at this point, be reminded of my stupidity and told it’s not their Birthday it’s mine. Well, I’m 26 now, so I can make my own rules up, so today I’m giving you a present. It’s nothing major, but it is kinda cool.

I’ve learned a lot over the last few years, so while I was on my little retreat in Tenerife late last year, I wrote down all the things I wish I knew when I started out in business. I called it, ‘The Little Book of Glory’.

It’s not completely finished yet, it needs page numbers and stuff (Thanks Tim). I suspect you could skimread it in about 90 seconds. There’s some cool things in there, just 30 little tricks I’ve picked up over the years. Enjoy.

I do want to say thank you. A lot of you put up with my crazy ideas some of the time, which I hope are sometimes good. I’m grateful that I have a wicked client list, most of which I’d go out for beers with (except Gareth – he’s rubbish). You make my job fun, without you lot I’d be horribly bored, utterly broke and probably really good at Call of Duty.

Anyway, enjoy The Little Book of Glory.

Download it now

When it’s printed up, I’ll send you all a copy in the post.

Thanks for being awesome!

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Tim Coe from Hands-On Properties recently sat down with us to talk about his experience with Advantix. It’s only a minute or so long, but it’s worth watching!

Enjoy,

Ever had an email with THAT in the subject line?

We all get them… Thing is, what do you do about it? Personally, if someone sends me an ‘urgent’ EMAIL. I ignore it for at least 6 hours. Why? A number of reasons:

1. If it’s that urgent, they’d pick up the phone, which I ALWAYS answer.

2. People need to learn that everything is the new urgent thing.

What happens, is this: Client emails an urgent email, (which isn’t urgent at all). You stop what you’re doing (their work) and respond to it. Then another client does the same thing, and the phone rings and another email comes in, and before long – your day is gone!

It’s deadline time, your client is super excited to see your designs and his brand new site. You turn up and can’t really explain why it’s not done, but it’s not. He’s not happy and the relationship vanishes from there. We’re all busy, (unless you suck, in which case you won’t have any work) so it’s incredibly important to ma

nage “urgent” requests properly. So that begs the question, how do you respond to an urgent email request without acting on it.

Answer: You don’t!

It’s simple, don’t respond. There are a number of ways to do this, you can proactively tell people you’re checking email less (Tim Ferriss style). However, I tried this and got complaints for the annoying auto-responder. I’ve found the best way, is literally to only check email twice a day. It’s insane how much more work you get done! What’s better, I haven’t had a “complaint” or “stroppy email” in over a year and a half. I can assume the reason for this is, we get the work done when we say we’re going to do it.

Clients occasionally email with something urgent and I smile to myself and ignore it for half a day, knowing that if it’s that urgent, I’ll receieve a phonecall.

Last year I spent a month in Denia, Spain to test how well the business worked if I was only working a few hours a day. I learned more about productivity sitting by a pool in 27degree heat than I did reading books or working my ass off back home. People had urgent enquiries, they’d email through in the morning, because I didn’t respond immediately (who does anyway) they would solve their own problems!

Bottom line is, every one’s happier when you hit deadlines. Nobody will remember their not-really-urgent-but-i’ll-pretend-it-is email, they certainly won’t consider it a reasonable excuse for not delivering on-time.

Ignore your clients and make them happy!

I’ve got to be honest, this is a liiiiitle late. We launched the EasySite weeks ago! Someone asked me recently, what is the EasySite?

Answer: The EasySite is the easiest way to get your site online.

Within 22 minutes you can:

• Upload your logo
• Choose a layout and colour scheme that match your corporate identity
• Be walked through writing the ultimate homepage!
• Connect all your favourite social media accounts
• Submit your site to the major search engines in 3 clicks
• Be ready to promote your site and generate new leads, directly to your inbox!
• Connect it to an existing domain, or a new one. (example: www.mycompany.com)

You can sign up free at www.EasySiteHQ.com. It’s 100% free. There is an upgradable version, but you can still get a cool, wicked new site completely free, by going to www.easysitehq.com.

Enjoy,

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Many years ago, when I was single, I wasn’t that into approaching random girls in the street or that into clubbing so I discovered Internet Dating. After a year or so, I’d got pretty damn good. Very consistent results and lots of happy people later, I decided to write a few ebooks to sell and pass on some things I discovered.

During the time I was writing the books my results skyrocketed! More than I ever thought possible. This random occurance didn’t trigger any alarm bells at the time until now.

When you write stuff down, it goes in your head!

What are you great at? Could you internalise it that much more if you wrote about it? I could be miles off the mark here, but this is why I think writing stuff down makes you better.

1. In order to write anything you have to recall that thought, idea or sentence in your head, transform it into legible english and then write it down – further cementing it into your memory.

2. When you’re writing anything tutorial based, you often have to start with the basics and most people skip over the basics, learn a few intemediate skills and think they’ve sussed it. Look at the english football team – all incredible players (except Heskey) but they can’t play as a team or pass the ball for toffee. A BASIC football skill taught to 7 year olds on Saturday mornings all over the country.

3. You’re reconnecting with your old mistakes in order to relay them to someone else. In turn you’re learning from them again.

Bit of a random post this… if I convince one person to start a blog – Great!

Next post, I’ll talk about the things we have coming up – Exciting!