Distraction and being spread too thin… is not a good thing and is super ineffective. When doing the start-up company thing it is almost a given that being spread too thin is going to happen. The reason is that for the most part, nothing is set up and you have to start from scratch. Ugh… Also, like in my case, I have to grow and stretch every single day in about 10,000 ways and get out of my comfort zone regularly. In fact I would say I live outside of my comfort zone. Now, you will hear a lot of public speakers say how great living outside of your comfort zone is for you! I agree, however, it is certainly not the easy way and I am not the biggest fan of discomfort. Straight up, sometimes outside of my comfort zone sucks! But the value of stretching and growing and living outside of my comfort zone is that I get to have things like personal satisfaction, joy, pride, trust, success, accomplishment… lol you know little things like that!

There is a difference between living outside of your comfort zone and being distracted or spread too thin. I like to control things, that isn’t all that great sometimes. I tend to want to take on everything because “I can do it the way I want it done!” Good thing I have a brain or I would do stuff like that all the time. Spreading myself too thin keeps me: 1. super stressed, 2. totally ineffective at everything, 3. guilty like nobody’s business because I can’t actually do everything in a timely manner and well.

So this is what I do (note: I am SO not perfect at this, also don’t expect perfection from me, it won’t happen, in fact I don’t even want to be perfect I would rather be effective so if you feel like telling me I’m not perfect, stuff it!):

1. Educate myself on what I’m doing. This doesn’t have to be super hard, just go online and read about it.

2. Do it myself the first time- This I learned from E-Myth by Michael Gerber- that way I know what it is that I am getting myself into when I pass it off to someone else.

3. Pass it on! Find people to do take this on. Ok here is the other part of this though, because finding good staff isn’t always easy. Manuals! Create manuals so that anyone stepping into the job is clear on what they are doing. Give them freedom to think, people have good ideas, often better ones than you.

I have two Facebook pages that I currently manage, because I want to not because I have to mind you. One is my mother, Ania Stewart’s, and the other is mine. I also have two Facebook pages, one for my business Salsa Dance Underground and the other is for the internet TV network my mother and I started, Woman Anew.

That is quite a bit to manage, but Twitter and Facebook came to the rescue of many who have both types of accounts and linked them! Brilliant guys!

That means that when I go to Echofon (the iPhone app I use to update and read my Twitter accounts) and update my status it posts directly to one of my Facebook pages (each page is linked to it’s appropriate Twitter account, ie the Woman Anew Facebook page is linked to the Woman Anew Twitter, genius right! lol).  Thank you Twitter and Facebook, if only the rest of the internet were this efficient! Since in many cases different people follow individuals on different venues it allows me to give the same, quality information to two groups of people at the same time. Wicked cool.

I found a really helpful blog post by a guy named AJ Vaynerchuk, the brother of esteemed wine and tech guru, Gary Vaynerchuk, that provides links as to how to link twitter to facebook.

Enjoy!

A friend of mine, who is a brilliant Generation Y marketer, Elysa Rice (her website is GenPink.com) turned me on to a blogger/author by the name of Chris Brogan (his website is ChrisBrogan.com). His blog has some extremely interesting articles including a recent blog post on the called “Charge for the Right Things.” This is of particular interest as we figure out how exactly to make money from our TV Show The Naked Truth Show (TheNakedTruthShow.com). Chris talks about the value of offering free content but charging high prices for ads and gave two example of companies that are doing just that successfully.

The first being GigaOm, let me interject for a moment that every site I hear about in a blog that I find interesting I now check with Compete.com because I want to see how well they are really doing. Compete.com allows me to see how many unique visitors (my metric of choice) these sites really have had over the past year. I enjoy thoroughly checking out the fact myself. In this case GigaOm checked out for me because in the month of March 2010 they had about 720,000 visitors. That is sufficient in my opinion to be considered successful enough to mimic.

The second one he suggested is Huffington Post. Based on Compete.com’s data, they had about 8.5 million unique visitors. That is surely enough visitors to be considered successful. What is difficult to tell, for me at least, is how many of those visitors click on the ads and the actual data that they use to measure their own success.

So am I 100% sure that free content with high priced ads will work, no. I am 100% sure that I personally hate paying for content, absolutely.

If it works for people who are able to do more testing and analytics than I can, I surely think it is worth a try.

I am not a very analytical person by nature. Out of the four behavioral types, Controller, Analyzer, Promoter, Supporter, I am a Controller, Promoter. That means that I am:

• High energy
• Enjoyable to be around
• Creative imagination
• Initiates relationships
• Motivating
• Competitive spirit
• Goal oriented

On the Promoter side… and

• Task accomplisher
• Bottom-line results
• Self-motivated
• Forward looking
• Fast decision-maker
• Initiates activities
• Disciplined

On the Controller side…

I am not naturally:

• Defines, clarifies
• Concerned with accuracy
• Gathers needed data/information
• Tests data
• Rigor

Those are some qualities of an Analyzer. About a year ago I started doing leadership trainings with www.Millennium3Education.com (by the way I STRONGLY believe in leadership and developmental trainings, there is nothing more important you can invest in than yourself). It became quite clear to me during one of the leadership trainings that rigor was seriously lacking in my life. In fact, many of the qualities of an Analyzer were lacking, and that in many ways they account for a lot of the trouble I was having accomplishing my goals.

So, a little less than a year ago I began working on developing my analytical side (with the other three at the same time, though I have a natural inclination towards the other three making them easier for me). I would now say that I am mediocre at analysis, on a scale of 1 to 10 I would put myself at 5.5. That is worlds ahead of where I was at a 1 less than a year ago.

Because I love to grow and hate being idle in any area of my life, I decided to do something that stretches my boundaries on the growth of my analytical side. I purchased and have begun reading and implementing the ideas and actionable steps outlined in the book Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. His blog Occam’s Razor can be found here.

My desire to read Web Analytics 2.0 stems really from the fact that I, as well as many people far smarter and more educated than myself, believe that the web is where everything is headed and that I can create something truly wonderful for myself, my businesses and the world, entire via the internet. Nice. But the web has become a complicated place, maybe it always was and I just didn’t know how complicated it was. I want to educate myself as much as I can so that I can succeed to my fullest desire and potential.

Really, what an exciting adventure on this wonderful new frontier. I’ll keep you posted.