Comments on: Dumb Blogging Mistakes and Bad Betas.

By: alease

alease — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 21:15:51 +0000

This is a great blog. I love the content of this page. I will add your blog to my favorites.Much appreciated :0).

By: Hawaii SEO

Hawaii SEO — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 08:38:05 +0000

No blood, No foul. LOL.

One of the benefits of having a popular and frequently updated Blog is you have so many great posts and positive comments that the bad ones get buried and forgotten about quickly anyway. Keep up the good work Jim.

Aloha,
Dave.

By: randfish

randfish — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:43:46 +0000

No worries, Jim. When and if you do launch it and it works, the SEO world will once again be afire with it. A great tool is a great tool - messing up one launch only makes you human.

By: Nick Wilsdon

Nick Wilsdon — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 14:43:52 +0000

Hey Aaron - hope you’re well

By: Aaron Pratt

Aaron Pratt — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 14:27:48 +0000

Hi Nick!

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 14:04:40 +0000

embrace failure. you usually learn so much from your mistakes that they are more than worth the hassle.

and i can empathize with the early release, but it is a tough call. if you wait until your product is “perfect” then you run the risk of missing the boat.

we launched the search functionality of the blog directory too early, and i spoke with robert scoble about it at SES NY. he blogged about it, and his readers slammed us. errors galore, and definitely not the first impression we wanted to make.

don’t beat yourself up about it.

By: Nick Wilsdon

Nick Wilsdon — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 08:38:58 +0000

Hey Jim

You have an informative and regularly updated blog here - that definitely cuts you some slack on a couple of bad days!

I’ve had worse. About 2 years ago we were running a very small (luckily!) PPC campaign for a client. After a dismal week of zero conversions the girls had been trying everything, changing the ad texts, landing page copy/positioning and increasing the budget. I took a look at it and asked if they had checked the landing page form worked…

I came clean with the client, refunded their money and gave them some free time with us (not a fun phone conversation, the marketing was for their conferences, this last one was now under-booked). However they came back and are now one of our most regular PPC clients. It was a very good lesson in the importance of testing

Cheers for the kudos on the article as well Jim, it was a pleasure writing it. Definitely made a change from covering the Russian search scene!

By: shandyking

shandyking — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 04:24:23 +0000

Jim,

I am new to blogging so I dont have many issues, but I did one stupid thing. I installed a Captcha plugin on my first day. I then posted my first blog and then emailed and told all my friends about it. Well, turns out the captcha plugin was not showing the fonts correctly and no one could comment. Duh! I saw your control panel the other night… I thought nothing of it.

I agree with GrayWolf on the the mistake comment. Live & Learn…

By: graywolf

graywolf — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 03:48:09 +0000

The man who never makes mistakes, is the man who is afraid to leave his comfort zone. He never takes chances and or tries something new, in short he never grows.

Heck this week I put up some posts with links to the wordpress edit versions of future posts. Why not just stick a big ole sign that says hey try and hack my password why don’t cha …

By: Simon Heseltine

Simon Heseltine — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 03:10:17 +0000

Don’t worry about it, I expected my comment to be deleted, I would have emailed it to you, but since there was already another comment about the issue I figured I may as well put a confirmation about the potential problem next to it.

As for dumb software release mistakes… too many to mention… but how about a demo mistake that another developer did at a previous company (3 or 4 companies and a couple of lifetimes ago)? He apparently thought it’d be funny to put some ‘bad’ data in while testing (and by bad - bad and inappropriate language). What he didn’t know was that a client came by at short notice, so the CEO offered to show them the progress on the demo… Needless to say the CEO didn’t find it funny and the aforementioned developer was out seeking new employment the next day…