Be above average at 2 or more things

Scott Adams gives advice on how to be really successful:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

See full article.

How to improve your Google ranking

Although there is a lot of information on the internet on this topic, I found this article to be particularly interesting, since it did mention techniques that I hadn’t heard of earlier, and which seem quite reasonable and useful. For example:

When I started work on Aerobed they only had a handful of links, so I had some serious link building to do. After looking at their competitor’s backlinks using a link command on yahoo “linkdomain:www.domain.com –site:www.domain.com”, I set a target of 2,000 backlinks. Here is the 6 point plan I adopted:

1. Link mining following by 300 email requests – This was fairly straightforward, I simply looked at the backlinks of their top 15 competitors. Then email any suitable websites with personalised email, which either suggested Aerobed.co.uk as a suitable site for their resources page, or offered a small payment for a link. Below is a sample email:

See full article. Worth reading if you have a website and want to improve its ranking.