Wyndham

A successful dieter sets themselves a clear target and a rationale for acheiving that target.  Any ambiguity in those targets and they fall off the diet wagon quicker than Augustus Gloop in a chocolate factory.  It is not enough to say that you ‘want to lose weight,’  instead you have to be specific.  You want to lose 6lbs, about 2.7kgs for the Europhiles out there.  It is even better if you also frame the reason for losing that weight, 6lbs means that you can actually take your t-shirt off on the beach this year.  Armed with this you can plan what is needed to acheive your diet.

A lot of my work is spent establishing KPI’s with clients on web projects, life’s a lot easier if you know what success looks like.  One of the reasons that 90%* of blogs never make it past 6 months is the lack of goals and mechanisms to measure whether they are being acheived.  Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere reports 71%** of people start a blog to have a voice and  70%** measure the success of their blog through personal satisfaction.  Once the initial glow of having your own lonely corner of cyberspace to rant in is over and with your friends and family’s interest and encouragement waning there’s not much satisfaction in writing with nobody listening.  There is no satisfaction in just having a blog, the challenge is in making it work for you and your audiences.  Like a diet this is a lot of hardwork and where goals and milestones can keep you going.

So my goals for this website.

GOAL 1: Be the number one search result on both Bing & Google by July 2011 for my name.  This is the main purpose and the reason for the experiment.

The second part of the experiment is what is the impact of an individual being more visible on Google.  Like my work with clients better visibility and traffic is one thing but what does it mean, does it reward the investment in activity and is it the best use of my time?  I have decided that my rationale for getting to the head of the rankings should deliver these additional goals:

GOAL 2: Make the site self financing.  I want to be able to pay for the hosting, domain name and the coffee that is required to stay up late creating content.

GOAL 3: Increase the number of searches for my profile on LinkedIn.  At the moment I am searched on 7 times every 15 days.  http://uk.linkedin.com/in/wyndhamlewis.

GOAL 4: Be cited as an example of how to control your personal brand on the web.  Individuals are realising the need to manage their identity and privacy on the web, when people are sacked on the basis of their Facebook antics you know this is going to be a hot trend.

GOAL 5: Generate a conference speaking opportunity.  I really enjoy presenting and its been too long since I’ve done a conference tour.  So if I am right and this is such a hot topic I’d like to entertain and inform people about the experiment.

The next step is to develop the plan that will help me acheive these goals.  Each month I plan to review how I’m doing against these goals each month so that I can see whether the blog plan is going in the right direction and ensure that we see it through to the end.

* Bogus stat made up at the water cooler with 8 of my colleagues.  All of them have created a blog and all of them except for mine sit gathering dust in some server.  You are more than welcome to use it but you should be ashamed if you are happy with a sample of 10.  If you have a better source or statistic please tell me.

** Good statistic as it has already proliferated the web and is from an annual survey with a large enough sample to give you better confidence.  http://technorati.com/state-of-the-blogosphere/

Hi my name is Wyndham Lews and welcome to my site: Wyndhamlewis.com.

This is the start of a year’s experiment to see whether I can get to the top of the search engines for my name.  The tricky bit is my Wyndham Lewis namesake was a far more notable author and artist.  There was also a politician but he has slid into obscurity.

The reason for this project, is that a stalker resides in all of us.  When people plan to, or have just, met you they can’t resist a quick Google to see what the web says about you.

At the moment unless you search for something like ‘Wyndham & tmg/mobileYouth’ you could take me for a vorticist with a pencil moustache.

The advantage I have is that I am still about.  The disadvantage I have is that my namesake has people writing about him and links.  The experiment’s started 15 June 2010, lets see whether we can get ahead of Wikipedia.

The vorticist, but not the author of this blog