I actually spent about 3 months to re-design the blog. Why did it take me so long? I have very little free time. The re-design included changes in front end, back end, as well as database. So, it was a lot of work.

Unfortunately, after two weeks of beta test, I decided to roll back the changes.

Can you guess what is the single biggest reason for my decision to revert back to my old blog design?

During the two weeks of beta test, the conversion for my digital product sales was ZERO. Prior to the redesign, I had pretty healthy conversion rate. The content was the same. The product was the same. But, the change in look and feel had significant impact on how people view the pages, make purchase decisions, and order products.

I went back to my Google Analytics data as well as sales data to understand what had happened. Below are several lessons I learned from my failed blog re-design.

• Keep it simple. My new blog design was very cluttered because I was trying to do too much. My intention was to throw a lot of interesting headlines and content at readers in order to keep them engaged and come back. But, the layout was quite heavy in text and cluttered. It resulted in bad customer experience.
• I didn’t do A/B test for my product sales page. I assumed it should work since I had the same content and check-out process. The only difference was the page layout, format and size of the fonts. Unfortunately, page layout, format and size of the fonts had huge impact on conversion.
• What worked for one blog didn’t necessarily work for another blog. Each blog is different. I modeled my blog re-design after a very successful professional blog. However, what I learned along the way was that blogging is a very authentic activity. It reflects the author’s personality, opinion and style. To be who I’m, I have to design my blog to fit my unique personality, and perspective. There is no common template for successful blog design.
• I didn’t have specific objectives for my blog redesign. My initial motivation was to make my blog look professionals. However, I never defined what it meant by "professional" — I just want to make it feel like professional. It’s funny — I was a product management professional for most of my career, but I didn’t follow my own best practices — i.e. I didn’t have a "Marketing Requirement Document" for my blog re-design.
• Professional look-and-feel is over rated in the blogging world. There are a lot of crappy looking site out there. But, some of them have done incredibly well because they provide genuine, helpful, and engaging content. Blogs are different from mainstream media. People like blogs because they’re real. I was "surprised" to find out that changing the look-and-feel to be more "professional" didn’t help my product sales at all.

What will I do  next? I still want to make another iteration to improve my blogs. Here is what I’m thinking right now.

• WordPress 3.0 will be released soon. It’s a major upgrade. I will wait until WP 3 to take advantage of many of the new features.
• I plan to remove all of the display ads currently showing on my blog. I had them on my site because I wanted to test different kind of online ad networks (because I used to work in that industry).  But, I really think display ads are distractions. 
• I plan to purchase a premium blog theme. There are tons of free themes, but the quality and support are simply not there. 
• I’ve been playing with a couple of open source software: BuddyPress that turns WordPress blog into a social network, and ClassiPress that add Classified functionality to a WordPress blog. Both are very interesting ways to add features to a blog. I’m intrigued by the possibilities.

What suggestions do you have for this blog? I’d love to hear from you.

My goal is to make this blog to become one of the most useful career development resources for professionals at the intersection of technology and business. Let’s work together to get there!

I’m not so sure.

You might have noticed that I recently made some changes to this blog. When I started blogging 18 months ago, I made the rookie mistake of using the default Permalinks Setting of “http://www.GeekMBA360.com/?p=123″. In case you’re not familiar with Permalink, it’s the permanent URL to individual blog post or page.

For example, a very popular page on this blog is Great Depression 2.0 Layoff Tracker. Since I previously chose the default Permalinks setting, the URL for this page was “www.GeekMBA360.com?page_id=235″. Although Google scans the entire page, it puts a lot of emphasis on the URL. Since my default URL “page_id=235″ is not descriptive at all, it is really damaging from SEO standpoint.

I recently changed the default URL to “%postname%” which automatically inserts the blog post/page title to the URL. So, instead of “www.GeekMBA360.com/page_id=235″, I now have “http://www.geekmba360.com/great-depression-20-high-tech-layoff-tracker-updated-daily” as the URL for the same page.

Within a couple of days, I see 10% – 20% increase in daily traffic.

You might ask me why I didn’t make this change earlier. I was actually very nervous about making the change because I had to figure out a way to safely redirect the old URL to the new URL. I don’t want to have any broken link as a result of this change. And I don’t want to give search engine the impression that I have duplicated content in which case I’ll be penalized by search engine. Fortunately, I found the Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin that worked brilliantly to address this issue.

At least from this example, I think Search Engine Optimization (SEO) still matters. Search Engine has not gotten to the point that they can figure out everything on their own. This reminds me of my college days of studying artificial intelligence — it’s a great vision, but we’re not there yet.

Related post:

• Is Amazon Kindle Publishing For Blogs Beta Program a good deal for bloggers?
• Why newspapers are dying and bloggers are winning
• My wish list of blogging software improvements

Recommended Search Engine Optimization books:

• The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization (Theory in Practice)
• SEO Warrior
• Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions

I recently started to aggressively explore my next career move. I will explain why I started job search in a separate post. It takes tons of time to research companies and prepare for interviews. Plus, I still have a full time job to do and two little kids to take care. Suffice to say, my life has been hectic and crazy at times.

So, I haven’t been able to write as frequently as I want.  In fact, I have been feeling pretty stressed out lately and had a hard time to sit down and write. I put a lot of pressure on myself to find the right job. It’s not easy to balance my desire to find the right job and my responsibilities to support my family. However, I believe it’s one of the most worthwhile undertakings for me. I have learned a lot about myself in the past four weeks. Although the process is painful at times, it has been a tremendous opportunity for my own personal growth.

Let me tell you what I learned in a nutshell.

• My past failures open doors for me. I worked at a couple of failed start-ups. But, the experiences were extremely valuable and relevant to a new start-up that cold-called me for an opening.
• I put a lot of pressure on myself, which made myself miserable. I even developed shoulder and upper back pain as result of stress. It was an alarm that I took seriously. I need to relax and manage stress better. I’m exercising five times a week. It’s more important than anything else I’m doing.
• This blog matters a lot to me. I realize that in the past one and half years, my happiest time were the time I spent on writing this blog, responding to your comments, and corresponding to friends I made via this blog. My ideal job is to make this blog a full job. I don’t mind to work eighty hours a week on this. I’m not there yet, but I’m determined to make it happen!
• Headhunters are hit hard during current recession. I have worked with several 3rd-party headhunters in the past. I got three jobs via headhunters. But, this time around, none of my headhunter friends was able to provide me with any meaningful job lead. These are very experienced headhunters who survived the dot com bomb. It’s different this time around. Companies are simply recruiting in-house, and not using 3rd-party head hunters.
• Warren Buffet said that being an investor made him a better businessman, and being a businessman made him a better investor. I have been reading and studying value investing related books and web sites. I cannot agree more with Buffet’s statement. I learned a lot about how to evaluate a company, which helped me prepare for interviews, and evaluate potential employers.
• The psychology of being the sole bread earner in a family is complex. When I was single, I switched job several times and I never felt any stress. But, when you have a family to support, the psychology and decision process are very different. I’m learning to deal with fear.

I will expand on each of the above bullet points to write separate blog post. I think the writing will also help me to sort out my own thoughts.

Also, I would like to share with you a few things about this blog:

• I have been working on a re-design of the blog’s look and feel. It’s almost done. I plan to launch it in the next week.
• I’ve been working on a "Young American Professionals In China" mini series. I recently interviewed two American young professionals who received their MBAs at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and who are working in Beijing. I might also have a guest post or two from young Americans who’re working in China. Stay tuned.
• I’ve been working hard on an online service that related to GeekMBA360 blog. I guess you can call it in "stealth mode", but I plan to reveal it in the next few weeks.
• "Real-time" play by play of my current job search. I’m not a professional career counselor, but I hope that my from the trenches experience will be helpful to others.

Cheers.

I still read a few old media newspapers and magazines. But, most of my readings are now done on the web. 

I do watch TV, but mostly for the entertainment value, not for getting information.

Below is a list of my favorite source of information.

Career and life advice:

• Harrison Barnes is a former lawyer, serial entrepreneur, and prolific blogger. Unlike a typical career coach who has never done any real work, Harrison has a lot of experiences and lessons learned from the trenches. And he writes in a very clear and compelling manner. He is easily one of my favorite bloggers in the career advice space.
• Marty Nemko: A veteran career counselor who is not afraid of speaking his mind. I don’t always agree with Marty’s political views, but I enjoy his honest and practical career advice. He also has interesting take on Men’s Issues. (Marty is the co-president of the National Organization for Men). 
• I’m very hesitant to include Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog on this list — I read Penelope’s blog regularly because I appreciate Penelope’s writing talent, her wits, and her ability to grab attention. But, I disagree with 75%+ of her career advice to generation-Y. Because Penelope’s view is so different from mine, I decide to include her blog on this list.
• The Blog of Tim Ferris: Some people loves Four Hour Work Week and Tim Ferris, while others absolutely dismiss his book. I think he is a brilliant marketer and a master promoter. I don’t fully agree with everything in his book, but I do agree with many of the principles embedded in his book. I also admire how he took a different path and succeed in doing so.

Venture Capital:

• A VC by Fred Wilson: I love this blog. My favorite post is I Got Lucky — how many venture capitalists have the humility to admit they got lucky, take the time to share and interact with readers, and have a deep understanding of both business side and technology side of his area of focus?
• Feld Thoughts: Brad Feld and Fred Wilson are friend. Brad’s blog is like a close cousin to Fred’s blog: equally insightful,  interactive, and down to earth.
• Both Altos Ventures Musings and Redeye VC have great stuff, but they don’t update their content that often.

Entrepreneurship:

• Blog Maverick: If you haven’t read Mark Cuban’s blog, read "Success & Motivation" series first.  
• infoChachkie: This blog was initially written under the mysterious pen name of "Uncle Saul". Lately, Uncle Saul has revealed his identify: start-up veteran and venture investor John Greathouse. When you read this blog, you’ll feel that you’re listening to a very wise man. 
• Summation: I’m a long-time reader of fellow Cal graduate, and serial entrepreneur Auren Hoffman’s blog. In fact, he started this blog in 1997 well before the term "blog" was invented. 
• Johnchow.com: John Chow is controversial, but it’s hard to argue about his result. He makes 30K+ each month by blogging about what he eats, who he talks to, etc. If you work in online marketing, you should pay attention to what John Chow does on this web site — a very shrewd online entrepreneur.
• Northwest Passage by Steve Murch: Steve Murch is a serial entrepreneur who sold his previous company to Expedia. His current project is really interesting: he has grown BigOven to one of the most popular recipe sites in a very crowed market. And it was a solo effort for the first four years.

Technology industry news

• Business Insider: I like its mix of news and analyst-style analysis. 
• VentureBeat Blog: This used to be my favorite tech blog. But, lately, I feel that they run too many long articles — I don’t have time to read all of the long posts! But, still, I love the serious journalism of VentureBeat. 
• TechFlash: a must-read for anyone who wants to follow the high tech scene in Seattle.

Economy and finance

• Calculated Risk: News and analysis about economy — better than 99.9% of the main stream financial media (if there is still such a thing called "main stream financial media".
• RGE – Nouriel Roubini blog: Roubini is not always right, but he has been right more often than not. More than two years ago he correctly predicted the current financial crisis. I suggest you to read his writing regularly to get a better understanding of our economy.

What do you read regularly? Do you have any recommendations? I’d love to hear from you.

Related posts:

• Who are making a lot of money from the economic downturn and where do they get their financial news and analysis?
• A great investment book that teaches you how to think
• A Book I always Turn To When I’m looking for a Job

I’m super excited and anxious at the same time. 

So, I would like to give all of you, my dear readers, a heads-up: I will try to write as much as I can. But, due to limited Internet access, I might not be able to blog as frequently as I would like to. Regular programming will return in early November. I can assure you that I’ll have a lot to report back.

I would like to share with you a few random things (or borrowing a term from Ben Casnocha‘s blog, "Assorted Musings"):

• This blog has been accepted into the 9Rules blogger network. I first learned about 9Rules from Penelope’s blog. I’m savoring the moment.
• Think about booking air tickets and hotels for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays? Use BetterBidding.com to find out the hidden airline and hotel identities on Priceline and Hotwire.
• Are you a product manager, software developer, business executive or entrepreneur who wants to learn the fundamentals of user interface design? I highly recommend you to download the practical and insightful Web Site Interface Design Theory: A Designer’s Primer, written by the award winning product and design expert Ari Feldman.
• I think there’re way too much hype now about "cloud computing". Is there a bubble? "Cloud Computing" is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Check out this hilarious talk by Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, titled "Why Larry Ellison Hates Cloud Computing".
• You can get almost the entire Microsoft back office and front office suite of products (e.g. Windows, MS Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, Visual Studio, etc.) for $100 if you have your own LLC or small corporation that meets Microsoft BizSpark program requirements. BizSpark is a very generous program that encourages entrepreneurship. Worth give a try.

It has been quite a journey. It has been a lot of work in this past year to blog consistently while balancing a full-time job and a growing family with two little ones. But, it has been incredibly rewarding.

I want to thank all of you, my readers!!! Without you, I’d be talking to myself.

Let me share with you some interesting statistics about this blog.

Who are reading this blog?

• Readers from 146 countries/territories have visited this blog in the past year
• The majority of the readers come from the United States. But, the following countries had at least 100 visitors: Canada, India, United Kingdom, China, Singapore, Australia, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Poland, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Russia, Taiwan, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa.
• The average pages/visit is 2.16 pages, and average time on site for each visit is 2 minutes and 23 seconds.
• This blog has become quite popular among professionals in China, receiving traffic from 91 cities in China! I want to thank formerly Shanghai based blogger and current first-year UC Berkeley MBA Student Freeman Ding for introducing this blog to readers in China!
• This blog has been visited by readers from 50 states in the United States. The following states have at least 1,000 visitors to the blog: California, Washington, New York, Texas, Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado, and Ohio.

What are most popular posts?

I wrote a total of 233 posts in the past year. That’s 4.4 posts per week. The top ten most popular posts are:

1. Seven things you should do immediately after layoff
2. Ten things you should do before layoff
3. Depression 2.0 Survival Guide — February, 2009 Edition
4. Microsoft laid-off employees spoke up! Layoff Satisfaction Survey Result
5. Cover letter for laid off worker
6. Seven Lessons I learned from attending business school during recession
7. The dirty secrets of performance review
8. What should you do if you’re laid off today? A 5-day Personal "boot camp" to beat layoff
9. How to increase your GMAT score from 650 to 730
10. Layoff Satisfaction Survey results: Sun Microsystem

How did you find this site?

The traffic sources are:

• 25.63% Direct Traffic
• 35% Referring Sites
• 39.37% Search Engines

Among the major search engines traffic, Google accounts for a whopping 92% of the search traffic to this site. Wow! Microsoft: you have a long way to go!

What I have learned?

• Blogging is a lot of hard work, but it’s tremendously rewarding.
• I enjoy interacting with all of you, my dear readers. Blogging is a two-way conversation.
• The more personal, real, authentic my voice becomes, the more comments and feedback I get from readers. Blogging is about being real and honest.
• Due to my lack of knowledge about Search Engine Optimization, I made several mistakes when I set up the blog. For example, my blog posts have SEO-unfriendly URLs. However, I was still able to achieve Google Page Rank 4. Producing valuable content is far more important than playing the SEO game.
• If you don’t have a passion for what you’re blogging about, you’re not going to be able keep blogging. Fortunately, I really enjoy the topic of my blog – career advice at the intersection of technology and business.
• In term of monetization, selling your own product is 10 times better than affiliate revenue. Affiliate revenue is 5 times better than advertising revenue. It’s also very important to diversify revenue sources. Relying on Google Ad Sense is very risky because Google provides publisher very little visibility into the internal economics of Google Ad Sense.
• To maintain blogging momentum, it’s very important to have at least 3 posts a week.
• Having a blog with consistent, quality posts can really help establish credibility in the marketplace, which will help open doors in term of career and entrepreneur opportunities.
• WordPress rocks.

What’s next?

• I’ll continue to write, write, and write.
• In addition to career management/development topics, I’ll expand my topics to two other areas: personal finance, and health. I believe that to have a successful career, one must be able to pursuing his/her passion and achieve reasonable level of income (job/career), manage the hard-earned money wisely (personal finance), and enjoy the fruit of labor (health is a prerequisite for any enjoyment.) So, I’ll focus on the “career success triads” – career/job, personal finance, and health.
• I’ll add more community based features and web services to the blog – one thing I realize is that blog could be an excellent hub for similar-minded readers to connect and help each other. I’m not building another one of those “social networks”. But, I’ll try to add more features to facilitate discussion and interactions.
• The publication of my first premium report “How to get a job at amazon.com” has been quite a success. I’ll continue to publish premiums reports, providing in-depth reports to help job seekers.
• Give the blog a face lift by improving theme and navigation.

What can you do to help?

• Let me know what topics you’re interested in. Send me any feedback you have about this blog.
• Introduce this blog to 10 of your friends who you think will benefit from this blog.
• Follow me on twitter. Connect to me on Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• If you like any post on this blog, please share the article with the world on StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, etc.

Look forward to another great year of blogging, sharing and discussing!

The business model is simple: if you have a blog with RSS feed, you can sign up for the program and make it available to Kindle readers. Amazon will charge a monthly subscription fees to Kindle readers for each blog. Amazon splits the revenue 70/30 with bloggers. Amazon determines the subscription price for each blog based on market demand. Currently, most blogs have monthly subscription rate of $1.99.

Is this a good deal for bloggers? Should you sign up for this program?

Let’s break this down into two use cases: you have an existing blogs, or you will start a new blog exclusively for Kindle.

Use case #1: you have an existing blog

Amazon Kindle currently has 1 million users. Although Kindle has very impressive growth rate, 1 million users is still a very small number comparing to blogsphere. Furthermore, I think most Kindle users will not pay for $1.99/month just to read a blog while the free version of the blog is readily available.

From a monetization standpoint, bloggers with existing blogs make little money.

However, there is one big advantage: this could be a great marketing tool for your blog. Through this program, you’ll make your blog visible to 1 million Kindle users. If they like your blog, they probably will visit your blog via their computers.

In summary, my recommendation is that you should still sign up for this program and use it as a marketing tool to attract more users to your blog, but don’t bet on it as a monetization tool.

Use case #2: start a blog exclusively for Kindle

The key assumption for this use case is that you can create such compelling blog content that you’ll attract a significant number of Kindle users to subscribe to your blog (since your blog is exclusive for Kindle and is not freely available.)

I think this might work, but you better have something really unique and compelling to say. And your blog is in a niche market that have large enough audience within the Kindle user community.

Let’s say that you can attract 5% of the overall Kindle user base, which is 50,000. The total monthly revenue from your blog would be $100,000. Amazon will get $70,000 while you get $30,000. You get paid at a rate of $0.6/user.

Is this a good revenue for your blog? Well, how much revenue do you think a regular blog with similar number of unique users (not on Kindle) will make? Johnchow.com had about 200,000+ unique users and it made about $40,000 a month (based on the most recent income numbers John Chow reported on his blog, which was several months ago.) And he monetized a hack out of his blog. He gets about $0.2/unique user. In fact, I think the actual rev/user number is lower since Johnchow.com also have a lot of RSS subscribers in addition to the 200,000+ unique users.

So, I would say that if you can convince enough Kindle users to subscribe to your Kindle-only blog, you could make good money.

Summary:

1. If you have an existing blog, sign up for this program and use it as a promotion tool
2. If you think you can create a Kindle-only blog that attract thousands of Kindle users to pay $1.99 a month to subscribe, you should give it shot. You might end up making good money, more than the income you’d have earned from ad/affiliate support revenue stream.

I want to share something that I’ve experienced since I started this blog six months ago.

The traffic for this blog has been growing 50%+ each month. As a result, I’m starting to get media requests for interviews. In the past few months, I have talked to reporters from “old media” outlets such as Associated Press, Wired Magazine, etc., as well as fellow bloggers.

I have to say that I love to talk to bloggers – they’re genuine, authentic, responsive, smart, and knowledgeable about the subject area they write about. They know what they’re talking about. Every time I talk to a blogger, he/she will follow up with me and let me know when the article is out.

On the other hand, the journalists from the “old media” tend to be “takers” – I try not to over-generalize here. But, I ran into quite a few journalists with almost identical behaviors:

1. they send a me a email saying that they’ve a very tight deadline for an article, and would like to talk to me ASAP
2. I juggled my schedule to talk to them. In most cases, the interview lasted about 30 minutes
3. Near the end of the interview, the journalist would usually tell me that the article would go out in x number of days.
4. I stop hearing from them. I emailed them and asked them for a copy of the article. It’s totally silent – no email reply, no phone returns. I then forgot the whole thing. One or two months later, I got another email from the journalist – they have some other questions.

I think you got the idea – when the journalist needs something, they’ll keep emailing/calling you. When they get what they need, they disappear.

Is this how you build relationships, create credible content, and attract readership? By the way, most of the journalists I talked to seems to be clueless about the subjects they’re writing – the questions they ask are very generic and un-insightful. It’s sad to say, but I think some of them are just glorified note-takers.

During the current financial crisis, my primary source of finance news and analysis are blogs, and they’re so much better than the traditional media. Today, I saw an interesting quote: “CNBC is essentially ‘porn” for the financial industry”. I thought there were a lot of truth into it.

I think the “newspaper/magazine” industry and journalist profession itself need some serious introspection – technology, blogging, and new advertising model are only part of their challenges. They need to learn from fellow bloggers – be genuine, authentic, responsive, smart, and knowledgeable.

Interesting reading:

• The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging
• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
• The IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie
• The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense