Which Domain Is Right for You?

This guest post is by Karol K of newInternetOrder.com.

If you’ve ever wondered about domain name selection, you probably already know that there are basically only three main types of domain names. And they are:

1. semantic names
2. unusual names
3. combined names

Which will be best for your next blog? If you’re not quite sure yet, read on! In this post, we’ll consider each of these options in detail.

A semantic name

This is a name created from one specific word, or several words put together. What’s important is that the domain uses existing, well-known words. Here are a few basic examples:

• Cars.com
• Pizza.com
• Toys.net
• VintageElectricGuitarBlog.com

There are a number of advantages to using such a name:

• It specifies the theme of the website/blog.
• It clearly defines the niche which the blog touches upon (everyone knows what they can expect to find at toys.com).
• It’s easy to memorize.
• It makes your job easier when it comes to getting good ranking in the search engines for the keywords that are included in the domain name.

Of course, there are some disadvantages to using a semantic name:

• Many basic semantic names are already taken.
• There’s often no direct connection between the domain name and your company brand, which can make the task of brand-building more difficult. Blogs using this type of name can be literally replaced overnight with different blogs on the same topic and many people wouldn’t even notice.
• A semantic name makes it hard to expand the theme of the blog to other areas. It’s very unlikely that we’ll see a catalog of garden furniture on pizza.com anytime soon.
• Semantic names don’t assist with building trust, since they don’t define a brand: they’re usually very generic. For example, if I name my website WeWillStripYouOfAllOfYourMoney.com, I probably won’t gain as much trust as I would have if I’d given it band named like BWin.com. The difference is similar to making a statement like, “we’re a sports betting site” rather than “we’re BWin.com, a sports betting site.”

An unusual name

Unusual domains usually employ a brand name. Think of domains like:

• Google.com
• Amazon.com
• Yahoo.com
• Mashable.com

To create such a name, you need to find or create a semantically empty word—a word that has no meaning among the target audience—and give meaning to it.

As you can see from the list above, some of the biggest players in the online game use semantic names.

So there are, obviously, some advantages to this type of domain name:

• It’s characteristic. It can’t be confused with the competition. Google is Google, and Bing is Bing—there’s no way of mistaking these two even though they both do the same thing.
• It doesn’t create a brand—it is the brand!
• It’s easy to get good rankings in the search engines for the name itself. And if the word you’ve chosen doesn’t already exist, the competition won’t be too strong for the domain name itself.

As you’d expect, there are disadvantages to using this type of name:

• It doesn’t define the niche, nor the theme of the blog. If this kind of name is attached to a new blog, and no one really knows about it, it can easily be overlooked by a potential visitor—even if they’re looking for the kind of content that the blog publishes—simply because they won’t be able to guess what the blog’s about.
• Since it’s usually harder to say or communicate the name orally, it’s easy to get it wrong. When my friend first told me about ebay.com years ago, I fired up my browser and typed “ebuy.com.” I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who made this mistake.
• It’s harder to gain good rankings in the search engines for specific keywords using an unusual name than it is with a semantic name. If you write about computer hardware, then it would probably be a little easier to get good rankings for the keyword “computers” if you had a domain like “computers.com” rather than “compunationgeorge.com.”

A combined name

• Facebook.com
• Problogger.net
• Friendfeed.com

…are all combined names. These domains combine semantic and unusual names. Although the name may have little meaning on its own, as soon as you visit the site, you grasp what’s going on—and recall the domain—very quickly.

I think that these are the hardest types of names to come up with. You really have to think outside the box to find an existing word or several words, and then give them a unique meaning that binds them somehow with the theme of your blog.

If you succeed, you can expect some benefits:

• A combined name defines the brand in a unique way that’s similar to an unusual name, only better.
• Visitors can quickly grasp the concept of the blog even though it’s not as obvious as it is with semantic names.
• A combined name clearly differentiates your site from the competition.
• It’s usually easy to memorize.

And as for the disadvantages:

• A combined name can make it harder to get a good search ranking for specific keywords (similar to having an unusual name).
• It’s easier for your competition to imitate this kind of name. This usually happens when we’ve used an obvious framework to  create the name. For example, if our car-related blog is called “4wheeldrive.com” then somebody could try to copy our success with a domain like “rearwheeldrive.com”.

Which one is the best for you?

Here’s my advice. If you want to create a small blog targeted at the members of a small, precisely defined niche, then I think it’s probably best to use a semantic domain name. You have a better chance that interested people will find your blog in the search engines, and that they’ll actually visit it, because the URL itself will tell them what the blog is about.

If you’re aiming at taking over the world with your blog, then you should probably choose an unusual or combined domain name. As I’ve already said earlier, the biggest players in the game use such names, and we can learn from them. There’s nothing better when it comes to building a brand than a good, unique name that’s easy to memorize.

So go on and try to choose one of these three types. And if you’ve already done it, congratulations. You’ve just started a marathon in which your domain name is the first step. This is just the beginning.

What do you think about this classification? What’s the type of your blog name?

Karol K provides blogging and marketing tips at newInternetOrder.com.

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8 Tips To Get Traffic From Online Forums

Forums have been around since the earliest days of the Internet, and people have been using them ever since to drive traffic to their websites. While they’re not hip and sexy Web 2.0 darlings like Twitter or Facebook, forums are still a great way to drive targeted traffic to your blog. Below are 8 things you need to keep in mind when using forums as a traffic driving strategy.

1. Pick the right forum

Choosing the right forum(s) to participate in makes a big difference. Hopefully you’re already an active member of a forum or two. If not, hopefully you’re at least aware of some of the popular forums that cater to your niche. If that’s still not the case, Google “YOURNICHE forum” or check out Big-Boards.com.

If there are multiple forums in your niche, you should focus on being active in just one forum at first. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin, and you want to be sure you become a prominent member of the community. That’s hard to do when you’re trying to post in half a dozen different forums. Once you’ve become established in one, then you can determine whether joining another would be best for you.

If you’re not already active in a forum and you have multiple forums to choose from, there are a couple points to consider. How large and active is the forum? You won’t get much traffic from a forum that has 30 members and the last post was six months ago. Do you like the look of the forum? I’ve chosen to participate in certain forums because I just like the way they’re designed. Does the forum allow signatures? Some forums don’t allow signatures, which will make it harder for you to get traffic (see the “Put a link in your signature” section below). And finally (and perhaps most importantly), do you like the community that has built up around the forum? You’re going to be spending a lot of time there, so make sure you like the kind of discussion that’s going on.

2. Choose your username carefully

Your username is your brand out there on the forum for everyone to see, so it needs to be chosen carefully. Ask yourself what message you want your username to send. Using your name as a username gives your interactions with others a more personal feel than if you just used the name of your blog or business. It’s important that you username fits in with your niche and the forum. For example, if you’re posting to a realty forum and the forum community you’re posting to has a very professional feel to it, you’ll obviously want to steer clear of usernames like “xfallenangel1987x.”

3. Put a link in your signature

Your signature is the couple lines of text that appear below each one of your forum posts. Putting a link to your blog or to a particularly good post is the backbone of any solid forum-based traffic strategy. This is how you’ll get the majority of traffic out of the forum.

A standard signature will include the name of your blog and maybe your blog’s tagline or what your blog is about. Linking to an especially informative or interesting post can also be a good strategy if you want to drive traffic to certain parts of your blog. Remember that you can also link to a newsletter signup page to help grow your list.

You can read more about putting a link in your signature in this previous Daily Blog Tips post.

4. Craft your profile carefully

Your profile is what people see when they click on your username, and it usually consists at least of your avatar, a short bio, and a link to your website. Most often, your avatar should be a picture of you. We like to know that we’re interacting with a real person, and a photo gives a face to the name and helps create a more personal interactive experience. If you prefer anonymity, then use anything you want as long as it fits in with 1) the feel of the forum, and 2) the image of your blog or business. Using the realty forum example again, you wouldn’t want your profile pic to be a funny animated .gif of a guy getting hit in his private parts with a baseball. Likewise, you wouldn’t want to use a serious, black and white photo of yourself if you’ve got a fun and colorful blog about funny YouTube videos.

Your bio should include relevant information about you. Again, make it professional, but don’t be boring and one-dimensional. Sure, talk about how much experiences you’ve got in your particular field, but also talk about any other interesting information about yourself. If you’re on a rock climbing forum, you could state that you’ve been rock climbing for 12 years, that you are an avid backcountry skier in the offseason., and that you love watching Lost. Give people more reasons for them to interact with you.

And while we’re on the subject of getting people to interact with you, be sure to include a line in your bio (preferably at the end) that you welcome people to contact you with any questions or comments. This can help people feel comfortable about coming to you for any additional help or information beyond what you provide in your forum posts.

Many forum profiles have a space for your website’s URL or the URL of your favorite website. Be sure to put your blog in there!

Finally, take advantage of any other profile features your forum might have. Some forums let you enter your Twitter handle, for example. Others let you enter your other interests. Use these elements to further differentiate yourself from others, to establish yourself as an expert in your field, and to set yourself up as a person people want to interact with.

5. Don’t be spammy

When you’re networking with people in person, you don’t shake their hands and immediately stuff a business card down their throats. You want to get to know the person a little bit before interacting with them on a professional level. To put it another way, you wouldn’t go all the way on a first date, right?

Sure, you’re using the forum to promote your site, but that shouldn’t look like the main reason you’re there. Stick around the forum for a while before you start promoting your blog openly. No one likes it when the forum user’s first and only post is, “Hey guys! Check out my sick awesome new blog!”

6. Provide quality content

We’ve all heard that “Content is king” for getting traffic to your blog and getting people to subscribe to your blog. The same applies to forum posts. For example, don’t just respond to a question by saying “Yes” or “No,” but justify your response with a clear, well-thought-out, informative, helpful reply. Provide the best content you possibly can. Link to other resources both inside the forum and elsewhere online to provide even more helpful content.

Another tactic you can use is writing content especially for the forum. Think of it like guest posting for the forum: you provide your own content for free to the forum, and in exchange you get more exposure for your blog. At the end of the forum post, you can include a line of text that says something like, “This was written specifically for the Whatever Forum. If you found this information useful, check out my blog at WhateverIsAwesome.com.” You’re adding value to the forum while at the same time giving people a reason to check out your blog. Win-win!

Having said all of that, not all of your posts need to be long and epic. Quality content can be as simple as posting a funny YouTube video that a lot of people in the forum community can enjoy.

7. Start new threads

If someone opens up a thread to read it, that person is obviously going to read the first post in the thread, right? The first post in a thread gets read more than any other, so being in that position is a great way to leverage your forum posting.

It’s important, however, that you start the right kinds of threads. If you’ve got genuine questions about something, then by all means ask about it. If you don’t have any questions, a great way to go is to ask people’s opinions on a topic that they all can have input on. If you’re posting to a mountain biking forum, for example, ask people what they’d do if they had $5000 to spend. Would they spend it on a new bike? Upgrades to their current bike? Travel to that place they’ve always wanted to ride? More examples can be asking people on a Corvette forum to post sweet pics of their ride, or encouraging members on a photography forum to post links to their portfolios.

8. Post often

Forum posting isn’t the best passive traffic strategy. You can’t just spend a week posting multiple times a day and then sit back and expect the traffic to roll in forever. The threads that you spend all that time and effort posting in will eventually be pushed further and further down the page until they disappear from page 1. It’s sad, but that’s just the way it is. Participating in – and getting traffic from – forums is very much an active process. To get the best results, you really need to commit to it and make it a regular part of your blogging process.

Above all, just try to enjoy the experience. Hopefully you’re talking about things you like, and you might as well be building blog traffic while you’re at it, right? In addition, forums are great way to get post ideas for your blog, so keep your eyes peeled.

Pick a forum, do your best to become part of the community there, apply the above 8 points, and you’re sure to see the traffic start to come. Good luck!

About the author: Tristan Higbee just launched Blogging Bookshelf, where he reviews books and ebooks specifically for bloggers. Subscribe to the Blogging Bookshelf newsletter and get his ebook, “101 Ways to Battle Blogger’s Block”, for free.

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Review: Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps

For the beginning blogger who has limited experience, but lots of enthusiasm, Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps makes an ideal primer.

Written by Annabel Candy, from Get In the Hot Spot, this twelve-chapter ebook (lucky thirteen, if you count the bonus chapter) touches on all the basics, from choosing a blog topic to using social media to support your blog.

I found the structure of the chapters very clear: each chapter starts with a goal — this explains in a single sentence what you’ll learn from the chapter. It’s followed by a discussion of the relevant information, and a series of action points — practical tasks for readers to complete. The checklist that ends each chapter ties together the goal, learnings and actions so you can easily identify what you’ve learned, and anything you need to research further.

Annabel’s skills in web design and copywriting give this ebook a richness that others lack. She discusses issues like branding, website design and layout, and the basics of WordPresss. She also offers three chapters on writing: writing your blog’s static content, writing blog posts (which pays special attention to the all-important headline), and writing for the web.

The author covers all the key blog-promotion techniques in chapters on social media, online networking, search engine optimization and guest posting. Importantly, she stresses the value of understanding your blog’s statistics, and using these to help direct your blogging and promotion efforts.

This isn’t a detailed how-to guide for those with some blogging experience under their belts: Annabel keeps things fairly general and approachable. Her writing is, of course, great, and the ebook has a friendly tone that makes her advice seem eminently doable. If you’re squaring up to the challenge of running your own blog — for fun or financial gain — this ebook is a sound place to start. For more information, visit Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps.

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SEO Tips And News

It seems there’s always something new to learn in the world of search engine optimization or, at the very least, something needs to be refreshed. This week I had a client who told me to reintroduce the use of stop words so my keywords sounded more natural in the framework of the text.

The funny thing about these stop words (which are the ‘fillers’ like the, and…etc.) are that they affect the strength of the keyword or keyword phrase you are using. For my money, it doesn’t matter whether I use them or not because I think a good content writer is able to skip over the problem by placing keywords in just the right circumstance and knowing which words he or she can place before and after so they blend in contextually.

Keyword Research

There’s always something brewing when it comes to keyword research. I found a helpful refresher article that dealt with long tail keywords and their implementation. Many people begin an SEO campaign by using generic keywords like ‘plumber’ when they should be looking at a more specialized version that has less opposition and will help them to rank higher in a specialty niche market.

For example, using the keyword ‘plumber’ might be deceiving because the average person setting up a website will see the number of hits and searches this keyword receives and think it’s the best word to use. That’s not always the case. When you are a smaller company looking to do well in a niche market, you might want to use a keyword like ‘residential plumber Toronto’, or whatever combination of words best describes your firm and will benefit from its ranking in the market.

Long Tail Keywords

Remember when you’re using these long tail keywords you don’t necessarily gauge your success by the same kind of criteria; these long tail versions are designed to help you attract customers in a very specialized and sometimes smaller market.

Here’s an interesting piece of advice to help you get better rankings regardless of the kind of keywords you’re using. I just read an article called 7 Advanced SEO Tactics that says you can actually increase the SEO juice you get from article marketing by linking to your sitemap rather than the home page because the result you’ll achieve is allowing the crawler to go deeper into your site than it would have otherwise.

Another great technique you can use is to register your website in a foreign language. It’s good to be aware of the fact competition in SEO is much less ambitious in other languages than American English. If you’ve got goods or services that are transferable internationally and you have other kinds of financial resources to allow this kind of enterprise, translating your website content into a foreign language is an excellent idea.

Finally, you should consider a recent innovation called GoogSpy and get the lowdown on the keywords your competition is using. However you arrive at your keywords, you need to remember to look for the links that point to quality sites so you don’t get penalized.

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The Dark Art of Product Pricing

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja — a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

One of the most common questions I get asked is how much I’d charge for a given product. I guess the reason I’m asked this so much is it’s one of the hardest questions to answer, but the importance of price should never be underestimated.

Here’s the process I go through when I’m trying to arrive at a product price.

1. Your existing readers

It doesn’t matter if it’s your first product, or your tenth. If you know your audience, you should have a feel for their propensity to pay for things—and to what degree. If you’re unsure about this, look at the sorts of affiliate campaigns that are more successful with your readers. Do low-cost/high-volume campaigns deliver your highest revenue? Or do high-cost/low-volume promotions boost your bottom line the most?

Outcome: My existing customers have a propensity to buy cheap/expensive products.

2. Market perceptions

The general public has trouble valuing things—and brands have been exploiting that for years. But what you need to determine for your specific product is this: is there a market-based status quo when it comes to the price people expect to pay? If you’re selling music, or books, ask if there’s generally an accepted price range for these products.

Outcome: The community perception is that my type of product will be priced between $____ and $____

3. Where it fits in your product/customer life cycle

If this is your one and only product, then this perhaps doesn’t have much of an impact, but typically, products fit into three key life-cycle categories: entry level, standard, and premium. Once you’ve slotted this new product into your product life cycle, you want to apply one simple rule: make the step from entry level to standard small, and the step from standard to premium high. For example, you might offer an ebook as your entry-level product, a webinar series as your standard product, and one-on-one consulting as your premium offering. An example price structure might look like this:

• ebook $19.95
• webinar: $49.95
• consulting: $5000

Outcome: This product is my Entry / Standard / Premium offering in my product portfolio.

4. Competitive market research

When building a competitive profile, aside from the prices my competitors charge, I document five key items:

1. Influence of the brand (High, Medium, Low)
2. Perception of the product (reviews, sales volumes)
3. Core problem the product is solving
4. History of discounting
5. My product’s key point of difference from the competition

What I’m attempting to find with this research is where there is an under or over representation in terms of high/low value and high/low price. You’ll also get a good understanding of the caliber of your opponents’ products in the particular subsection of the market you choose to enter.

Outcome: My product has (high/medium/low) value and a (low/medium/high) price, and my closest competitor is…

5. Defining the real cost of the product

Bloggers often fail to figure out the cost of selling the product. You need to factor in things like transaction fees, the likely overhead of affiliate payments, and, if you’re selling a physical product, delivery, storage and other costs. While you may be likely to sell electronic products, you’re still going to have to pay money for every sale that’s made. How much?

Outcome: On average, my product costs $____ to sell.

6. Correlating feature relevance with customer value

Things can get tricky at this step. You need to make a realistic assessment of how relevant your #1 feature is to the customer problem that your product solves. Don’t get caught adding up the ten different features your product might have—focus on the top one. Then, make a call about the value people put on the solving this problem.

Outcome: My product has a (low / medium / high) relevance to solving the customer problem (___________) and people are willing to pay (a little / some / a lot) to solve it.

Other considerations

Okay so that’s the first stage done. Since you’ve answered some critical questions, you should now have a feel for what the market expects to pay for this type of product, and where yours fits into that spectrum. Now there are just a few more considerations to keep in mind as you choose a price.

Don’t be the cheapest.

It’s easy to start a pricing war by offering the cheapest item, and if you’re after a short term windfall, then it’s and option. But rarely does the cheapest win when if comes to competition.

For me this was summed up when I heard a five-year-old kid say to his mother, “We need to get that one, it’s more expensive, so it must be better”. The innocence of youth — saying what we all think!

Discounting is dangerous.

Lately, many successful product launches have initially offered a special introductory price that’s discounted. That’s fine, but try to avoid any ongoing discounts. It’s actually more advantageous to offer outrageous 50-60% discounts than smaller 10-20% amounts, as the customers’ perceptions of returning value on higher discounts are a lot greater. But if you can, avoid discounting at all.

The smaller the price, the more important it is to get it right.

If you decide on a low-priced product, keep things in proportion! The difference between $5 and $10 is 100%. So if you price your product at $5 you’ll need to sell twice as many to earn the same amount of income as you would if you sold the product for $10. Worse, a product you sell for $5 needs to sell four times as much as it would if it was priced at $20. When working with small numbers, finding the sweet spot is extremely important.

Don’t get stuck in middle.

Those irrelevant middle prices do nothing but cost you money—especially at the high end of the market. If you’re thinking of an $800 price tag, and your product has a unique selling point, charge $999. For a $325 product, go for $399 or $499. Your competition might seem to drive your price downwards, however I’d be working the other way. If you’re competitor is $999 try $1499—as long as you can prove why your product is better.

Throwing caution to the wind

As this post’s title attests, pricing is an art. Pricing can be so hard that sometimes you just need go with your gut, pluck a number, throw it out there and see what happens. Remember though, that it’s easier to drop the price of something than to increase it.

What techniques have you used to price your products? Have you had any pricing disasters?

Stay tuned from most posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja — a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger.

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Productivity Systems: Do they Really Help You Blog Better?

More and more I’m noticing bloggers asking for advice on how to be more productive. We’re operating in a space where we need to produce great content consistently, but where we’re also being bombarded with input and having demands made upon our time.

I’ve grappled with this myself over the last few years and have tried all kinds of productivity systems and tools. But recently, I had the realization that all most of them really do is make me more efficient at shoving more into my life.

Perhaps there’s another way! This video shares some of what I’m discovering about myself—and being productive.

• View this video full size (in HD) here
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff)—here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

Transcription of “Productivity Systems: Do they Really Help? “

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about this idea of productivity. I’ve been Tweeting about this and so some of you have been hearing some of my thoughts today, and I thought I’d try and summarize some of them in this video.

You see, as bloggers we need to be productive. As bloggers, we are by necessity needing to create content: we need to be outputting something if we are to have blogs that people will read. To have a blog, you obviously need content. And so we need to be constantly coming up with ideas, and imaginative, creative, fresh content that will engage with people.

That by itself can be difficult, but we also need to do it in a very noisy environment—an environment where other people are creating content all the time. I sat at my computer today for just an hour or two this morning—I was trying to write this content—and I just kept getting interrupted by other people’s content.

Now I could have shut it off, but it was really interesting stuff, and stuff that I wanted to be engaging with. The blog posts that others in my niches were writing, the Tweets that people were doing, the comments that people were leaving on my post, the emails that readers were sending to me—all of this output of other people was interrupting my own output process. We’re constantly being bombarded with an avalanche of messages, but we’re also needing to produce our own in the midst of that.

As a result, over the last few years I’ve been experimenting with all these different types of tools and systems for being more productive. I’ve developed rhythms and little habits, I guess, in my own life to fit more into my day and to be able to manage my busyness more, and to be more effective in many ways.

And a lot of this has been really helpful to think about, you know, how to be more productive. But it hit me today that by having this goal of being more productive, and by developing all these systems and rhythms, all I really was doing was enabling myself to fit more into my day; I was creating a little bit more room in my day to shove more in. And whilst that’s good on some levels, and that’s been good for my business, I wonder whether I’m setting myself up for a fall. I wonder whether by shoving more and more in—even though it’s more efficiently organized—whether that’s actually a sustainable thing.

I traveled recently to the US, and my goal with this latest trip—I went over to BlogWorld to Vegas—my goal was to travel with one bag. Just one carry-on bag. And so I bought this great bag. It had three great compartments, and it was designed for carry on, and it was designed to fit a whole heap of stuff in. I bought these little packing containers that squash shirts down really small. And I got on the plane with that one bag, and I fit everything in.

The problem is that while I was in Vegas at BlogWorld, people gave me all this stuff. People were giving me books to read, people were giving me schwag. And I bought a few things: I bought some toys for my kids, a couple of gifts for my wife. And when I came to leave Vegas, I had this bag, and yet I had all this extra stuff that needed to go in. And of course as I started to put more and more in, and as I squeezed those packing containers tighter and tighter with extra stuff, there came a point where the bag reached its capacity.

And I only had a couple more things to go, and so I of course shoved them in, and there came a point where I heard this terrible ripping sound. As I was trying to pull a zip closed tooth by tooth, a seam on the bottom of the bag actually ripped. I’d filled it very efficiently, but I’d filled it to capacity and something had to give.

I wonder with all these productivity tools that enable us to fit more and more into our life, whether we’re perhaps setting ourselves up for that tearing, that ripping sound. I worry that that might actually impact us physically: perhaps that ripping sound’s our heart giving out. Or perhaps it’s an emotional ripping sound—perhaps it’s a ripping sound that’s symptomatic of a problem in a relationship, where we try and shove so much in we don’t pay enough time to our family.

I don’t know exactly what that ripping sound will feel like or what it would be, but it worries me that we seem to be obsessed by trying to fit more in. And by being more efficient with our time, we’re actually just enabling ourselves to fit more in and become busier and busier.

You see, as I look at my life, I know that the time and energy that I have to fit more in is finite. There’s a limit to it. And the busyness of life is infinite—it could continue forever, if I let it. Part of me wonders whether perhaps a better way would be to become more focused on fewer things, and rather than focusing upon fitting more in to be more productive, perhaps we should be taking things out. Perhaps we should be prioritizing those fewer things that are important and doing those things with excellence, and letting go of some of the other stuff. I’m not quite sure how it works, to be honest; I’ve got a lot of stuff in my bag at the moment, and perhaps it’s time to take a few things out.

But I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Are you someone who’s trying to shove more and more in, or have you actually had that realization that perhaps it’s better to take a few things out and to do them well? I’m interested in your thoughts.

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