This week was a crazy one to say the leat. I found out that i've been black listed on twitter because i have too many friends and following even more people which is not ok by a small group of unknown geeks. What's even crazier is the fact that i've become even more popular because i disliked the spam label the black listing people gave me so i went on a ranting. I've been receiving twitter messages, private messages, emails and etc... reacting to my "rantings"

So here i am at a cross road. till now i've been writing about some intelligent and informative articles in which a lot thinking and research goes into and while the readership is growing at a slow pace but the reaction is simply none existent. On the other hand i start talking my heart out by rating about a silly twitter issue and i get not only a lot readership but also a great deal conversation and reaction.

My dilema is i wanted to turn this site into a very smart and resourceful site, but i also wanted to grow the traffic to beyond 100k hits per month by end of July.

I'm going to do some deep thinking this weekend. I have to figure out a way to do both. I simply do not want to lose the respect of the people who have been following me to date and would like to keep them around for many years to come.

You know the Cliche "Time is Money", now a days seconds are even more money. Regardless of who you are or where live there is only 24 hours per day. The art of time is about putting every hour, minute and second into productive work. So lets do it...

Due to Health lets give our bodies a 5 hour sleep period. That's right 5 hours, you are young and can do this, unless you're not then you can sleep for 6-7 hours max. The point here is that sleep is a good thing, it refreshes your body and with no activity your brain power can rest. It is important to have a great sleep while you sleep because of have i have in store for you.

So we are left with only 19 hours now, so much for 24 hours of productivity! Lets make this 19 hours really work for you. Before you jump into filling up you daily schedule with lots of tasks lets take a step backwards. Look back to the past week or so, what are the most important things you need to for the FUTURE. If you have immediate tasks and responsibilities coming up then they take the higher priority so make a list of them. Now, try to come up with a LONG list of everything you think you should be doing for today. A long list is a very detailed list in case you didn't know. Divide each task into smaller elements, for example, if you are going to write a blog post then dividing it into little tasks mean counting research, inspiration, draft write up, image creation, factualization, link baiting, to finalizing draft and publishing it. Knowing the little details allow you to dedicate a certain amount of time to each task this way if you thought writing a post would only take an hour would not end costing you 2 hours on researching alone. Keep doing this for all the tasks you have to do for the day.

Listing all the stuff in your time sheet is not enough, you have to actually stick to it and perform each of them to the second, so if you assigned yourself with 20 minutes of research as soon as your 20 minutes are up stop the research and move on to the next task. Don't worry if your research sucks, you don't expect to become extremely efficient in just one day did you???

Practice makes perfect! The first a few days are going to be rough but after that your brain and positive energy adjust themselves to your new routine. The trick is not to go back to the old you, it's like quitting smoking for 2 days but picking it up again, you won't live cancer free because of those 2 days.

When your level of efficiency picks up you'll realize that before you were spending 2 hours on research like tasks that were getting you no where to now that you can do resulting research in just 15 minutes. Now just imagine with your new level of efficiency if you had 2 hours to do tasks you normally do in 15 minutes, imagine the glorious results. This is actually how quality and innovation happens. You can apply this to almost any task you can imagine. I personally even analyze my driving, shopping, online surfing, books and magazine readings and everything else you can imagine.

I only started to really care about my time since mid last year and it has done wonders for me in terms of my performance at work, my side projects and running multiple sites and managing couple of web projects. Without managing my time i would have never been able to take care of 2 projects let alone the things i do now!

Time Management is one of those important elements that contribute to any type of success. Manage your time effectively and efficiently and you'll be managing a huge bank account!!!

here are some great resources for managing time that would help you get going:

BOOK - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

BOOK - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

BOOK - Time Management for the Creative Person

SITE - Mind Tools - Time Management

ESSAY - First Things First  < Very important Essay

SITE -  Time Scheduling and Time Management for dyslexic students

Software - ToDoList  or something similar

It is obvious that business is about managing money. You'd be surprised to know that majority of Online Businesses, web developers, designers, advertisers and bloggers cannot manage money. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why web 2.0 sites go after funding the VC firms look into management and want to see a manager with at least MBA running things.

Managing money is about what you can, cannot and should not buy. Just because you have money doesn't mean that you should spend right away. Sometimes the biggest mistake a starup makes revolves around spending money at the wrong time towards the wrong thing.

Managing Money is about being smart and thoughtful with money, here are a few ways to be smarter with money

Expenses

No matter who you are or what you do you've got expenses whether you like it or not. Being smart with money would allow you to analyze your expenses, take out the unnecessary ones or bargain for better deals. For example, there are hundreds of options for having a cell phone plan, but researching a little about you talking habits allows you select the most appropriate plan that over time saves you money. You can apply this to cars payments, office lease, Internet and tv bills, computers equipment, starbucks coffee, lunch and dinner.

Employees

If you are working on your own then you are your own employee and not your own boss. If you are in the online business and you're making money then the chances are that there multiple employees working in that company. Most startups, as soon as they come in contact with money they go crazy with hiring thinking that the same money they're making this is going to continue to next year and year after that. Not so fast, in the online work you can be on top one months and at the bottom by years end. Never estimate or speculate when it comes to online. Keep you team small, and hold on tight to your money.

Hosting

Hosting can be very cheap or very expensive, but did you know that it doesn't matter what kind of hosting you start with for as long as it is flexible enough to grow as you grow. If you have a blog, or thinking of starting one, think for a second what is your blog going to be, if it's a hobby blog then a cheap shared hosting with $5-10/month hosting is good enough, but if you intend to really promote the site and make a bit of income on the side while holding your day job then stay away from shared hosting and go with a small Virtual Server for $30-50/month and as the traffic to your site grow so can your server resources this way you don't have to spend more that you need.

I know a few startups that before they even had a decent application on their hand they were going around shopping for servers and co-location options. As a startup stick with small, go with a small Virtual Server, this way if you hit big you can easily upgrade to fully dedicated servers and multi server with load balancing options but don't blow the money you don't have right from the get go, what if you're doesn't pick up at all, all that money wasted!!!

Marketing

Every business, website or blogs needs to be marketed otherwise how would people find out about it. But did you know that in this day and age the most effective marketing doesn't actually cost a penny? all it costs it time! in the next article i will be talking a great deal about this.

As a designer i was trained to look past the beauty and aesthetics of any given project but for me to believe that beauty has nothing to with the attention and respect a design gets would require the entire world to be educated to look past beauty as well. For as long as people/businesses believe beauty and aesthetics equal to quality and performance who am i to go against the tide, yet i still do it because i BELIEVE!!!

I was reading couple design magazines the other day, Communication Arts and Print Magazine, each month they select a series of project dubbed as "creative and inspiring" and showcase them in their magazines. I enjoy looking at them and depending on the type of projects i have i may even get inspired by them but i couldn't help notice that from a functional and real creativity point of view almost all of the featured projects where severely flawed. Nothing is perfect in this world and i'm the first to admit that but these magazine are the primal voice in advocating real creativity yet many of the featured projects are based on beauty.

The best type of design is when you don't notice it at all!

Our biggest problem is that we don't really know what the definition of CREATIVITY is, and we can't help but to confuse it with beauty. I follow 15 web design and CSS gallery sites among hundreds of other feeds in my RSSFeed, each day i get a list of some 50 sites that are chosen by the editors of the site based on their beauty, most of them are not functional and if you look a bit deeper into their HTML code you'll also realize that everything is disgustingly put together and there is no more room for flexibility and expansion. What these gallery sites don't realize is that they are influencers and the new designs they publish inspires many other ones. In calculation if 9 out of 10 sites showcased is beauty without creativity and functionality and those 9 inspire another 20 sites to be the same then you do the math, that's right it's no wonder why this Internet is so chaotic, nobody can organize it, nobody can categorize it, nobody can help but to make it even worse than what it is now!

To me beauty is when i look at a site and say "hmmm, that's nice but how do i find the information pages" but a creative site to is when i say "i'm glad i found this useful site, lets bookmark it!"

a creative site can be very beautiful, sometimes the simplest sites that have no graphics or images are more beautiful than the ones packed with color, texture and images. It's how you use design to help people find the right material that ultimately makes you creative. Unfortunately we are creative so that people can notice our designs first, everything else is secondary!

These are the sites that keep advocating beauty for blogs rather creativity:

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://performancing.com/
http://www.copyblogger.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://cssmania.com/
http://cssremix.com
http://www.webcreme.com/
 

We use names to identify with People, object and subjects. Brands names are basically the names that have become popular. To come up with is rather simple, if you want to name a baby all you have to do is to go to a baby names website and pick the one you like best, but making brand names are not only tough in practice but even tougher from a scientific point of view. Brand names are in fact scientifically made, coincidentally or not.

The Logical Definition of Brand Names:

Brand Name = Name + Brand Positioning + Strategy + Marketing

Naming:

No matter what your business is everybody needs to identify you some how. But just having a name is not enough, your name should be easy to read and understand; it also has to be memorable and friendly.

Unique names tend to be special since they are new words people have never heard before and any sort of definition you give to it has the tendency to stick. The biggest problem however is unique names tend to be easy to forget unless you have the resources and money to keep repeating it until it becomes a part of natural language. It's hard to come up with unique names, you can mash up a few alphabets together but names also have to make sense. Web 2.0 sites have exhausted the idea that a misspelled word is still a unique name, in my opinion if there is a spelling error in a name it just shows the dumbness of its creators. Flickr was a clever name because it was among the first but every other similar name that came after was really dumb and since the idea was no longer unique and clever it lost its appeal.

How to find a good name?

To find a good name first make a list of keywords. By keywords i mean words that mean want your name is trying to represent. Categorize each keyword into definition groups, so if you have a whole bunch of keywords but 5-6 of them basically mean "inventive" then create a group called "inventive" and put all the keywords associated with that meaning under that group. Next find as many COOL words that are also synonymous with "Inventive" by looking into thesaurus part of dictionary, also don't forget to look into other languages to find cool translations.

When you have lots of words that seem to be cool enough start the word play. Playing with words involves mixing up words that are in the same category or in the contrasting category, manipulating words, cutting words into pieces and matching them with other pieces from other words. The list goes on. The goal is to come up with at least 50 new words.

To make sure your new names are easy to read try to read them out loud your self and ask others to read it out loud as well. If you find that you have to correct others in pronunciation then there is something wrong with that name. Forget fixing up words at this point. you have lots of names to go through. The words that pass the "read" test move on to "understandable" test.

To see if your new name is understandable, ask people to see if they can guess what the each word suppose to mean. Better yet, ask them what is the first thing that comes into their mind. Narrow the list down to those words that convey the some what original meaning.

You list should be very short by now, i'm guessing we are down to about 5 to 10 from 50. You next goal should be to narrow it down to 3. Sometimes it's a matter of taste or a hunch, no matter how you decide to narrow down the list the important thing is that you as the new owner of the name can totally relate to them name.

When you have you top 3, it's time to do some more research. If your name is going to be a global player then it has to have safe meanings in all of the popular markets. I have my own way which is a proprietary way used in the industry and i can't disclose it yet, i can't bite the hand that is feeding me. But i will give you an example, There is a clothing company in Canada and it's called ROOTS, when the Olympics was held in Australia, ROOTS was the clothing sponsor for the Canadian Team, Little did they know in Australia ROOTS means having sex. The ROOTS name was ridiculed all over the world, it was a disaster for the brand name because it was opening locations in Europe and Australia and after what was thought to be a great investment ended up forcing the company to abandon its plans and invest in only North America.

Back to conclusion, After you've done your research on all your top 3 names then now is the time to pick one. But before you pick that 1 special name consider the following:

• make sure .com domain of that name is available
• finalize any changes to the alphabetical structure of the name
• search the trade marks database to make sure the name is available
• search google to see if anybody else is using the name and what are they using it for
• make sure the name has a clean, safe and trusting meaning

Now you have a name, good luck!

Brand Name = Name + Brand Positioning + Strategy + Marketing