Hopefully this will be a big month for me.  We're starting some really cool projects at Zane Benefits and we're expecting to see increased returns from some of our old ones.  It's hard not to get excited about the momentum building both at Zane and the healthcare system as a whole.

I've also got two weeks left to finish the freelance project I started last month.  Then I need to start full time on cbBlitz, the fantasy football site I started with my brother last year.  There's a lot going on.

Ok, so to avoid getting too emo with this post, I just want to mention something interesting I've noticed as my work load has gone from reasonable to OMG HOW WILL I FINISH IT ALL!!!!

Every time I take on a side project I worry that it might hurt my production at Zane.  Oddly enough, I think I get more productive at Zane the more work I have waiting for me at home.  I think I've boiled this down to two things:

1. Fast Pace - It's kind of hard to go back and forth from leisure to discipline.  It's easier to wake up early every day rather than just one day a week and I think the same thing applies to the rest of your life.  The past couple of weeks I've been doing things non-stop (a trip to St. Louis, a trip to Zion, work, side-project, blogging, mountain biking...) and it's a piece of cake to keep it going once I have momentum.
2. Cross Training - In sports, athletes train outside of their discipline to help keep themselves balanced.  I'm finding similar results by working on dramatically different projects all at the same time.  When I finish programming, I'm refreshed and ready to blog.  Then I'm ready to design.  By taking on extra work, I'm making my day job less monotonous.  I've also learned some really great things from side-projects that I've started incorporating at Zane.

My point is, I'd be less productive if I only focused on my full-time job.  I work slightly fewer hours than I would without the other projects, but I get a lot more done with the hours that I do spend at Zane.  I hope to start a company one day.  If that ever happens, I'm going to encourage every employee to take on projects outside of work.

What do you think?  Have you had similar experiences?

It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that the majority of people don't use the right tools in their professional lives.  I can understand that most people aren't as excited about trying out new technology as I am, and it seems reasonable for these people to stick to what they know in their personal lives.

There is no excuse for this when it comes to your job.  Even if you love what you do, it's still work and the main point is to either make as much money as you can or to make enough money while having little impact on the rest of your life.  In either case, what excuse do you have for not using everything at your disposal to increase your production?

I know a number of people who do nothing but sell things to consumers all day.  They work mostly independently and are responsible for their own processes and operations.  These people for the most part use some combination of excel, post-its and notebooks to store all their important information.

These people could without a doubt be much more effective sales people if they upgraded their tools.  Whatever the cost is of leaning a new system, it would easily be worth it given the opportunity cost of the current system.

Anyway, I just think we should all stop and think every once in a while.  Think about the ten most tedious, error prone, or inefficient aspects of your work life.  Chances are good there's a way to fix a couple of them by simply changing your tools.  

I'm not exempt either.  I need to figure out how I can get SVN version control and FTP deployment out of my life for good.

A few months ago I tried starting a blog for Zane Benefits which was quickly abandoned due to other pressing issues.  Now I'm getting back on that project and I'm serious this time.

We've got a new look, new platform (based loosely on my personal blog) and better topics.  So if you're interested in the healthcare reform going on, or you just like reading things I write because you're closely related to me, check it out here.

One of my focuses at work this month is online marketing.  That includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Analytics, Social Networking and Google Adwords.  I've just barely gotten started, but I'm going to go over a few things I've learned.

Subdomains of the same master domain aren't treated as the same website

For a few days, we had blog.zanebenefits.com pointing to the location of our old blog and www.zanebenefits.com/blog going to the new blog.  They both go to the same place now, but for those days where they were different, Google ranked the new blog higher than the old one even though the new blog had exactly zero posts on it.

The reason this happened (as far as I can tell) is because "www.zanebenefits.com" is a domain name that google knows about from our corporate site whereas "blog.zanebenefits.com" only had the blog on it and was not a highly ranked domain as a result.

So if you're making a site, I suggest keeping all the important stuff under one domain (and not subdomains) at least until you get some clout with google.

Google loves constantly changing content

This site (tylerking.net) ranks pretty highly among many different Zane Benefits related searches.  The only reason I can come up with for why this might be the case is that the content on this site is constantly changing.  ZaneBenefits.com is more or less static text and I think that's hurting its page rank.

That's actually one of the main reasons I've rededicated myself to updating the blog over there.  Whether people read the blog or not, the page rank for ZB should go up.

It's hard to track analytics on blogs

A lot of blogs force you to click a "Read More" link to read an entire article.  I think that's incredibly annoying, and I always assumed it was just to get more ad impressions.  Now I realize that it also seriously improves reporting.  Right now, the ZB blog has an exit rate of 78% which means that about three out four visitors leave the site after seeing the blog.  That might seem like a problem, but they're spending an average of six minutes on the main blog page.

So what does this mean?  I show a bunch of posts in their entirety on the main blog page (just like I do with this blog).  People go to that main page and spend a bunch of time reading, but I have no idea exactly what they're reading.

This would be a good argument for making people click through to read entire posts.  I'm not going to do that because it's annoying, but I'll certainly have to keep it in mind if the traffic grows considerably.

That's it for now.  We're still early in the month of July so I'll probably learn a lot more about all this before too long.  I'll keep you updated.