Adam McFarland

I was having dinner with a friend and fellow entrepreneur the other night when the topic of accomplishment came up.  He’s in the process of moving to a new city to help grow his audience (he’s a musician) and was telling me how sometimes he doesn’t feel like he achieves as much as he should.  I told him to stop and think where he was a year ago.  Then to think about where he will be a year from now.  Then to compare and contrast that to some of our peers that have achieved a 3% raise and 2 weeks vacation each of the past two years.  He rocks their world - his laundry list of achievements would trump almost anyone else our age (or any age for that matter).
I’ve now been out of the corporate world for a few years now, and I’m pretty sure I’ll never work for someone else again.  If you look back at the 2+ years of this blog you’ll see the immense professional growth and accomplishment I’ve had.  Hell, Pure Adapt is still less than a year old and I can rattle off a list of accomplishments we’ve had in our first year that would boggle the minds of an outsider.  And I’ve grown to know several other entrepreneurs in the same boat.  So what do I/we do differently?  From what I’ve seen it’s pretty vanilla - we focus on achievement every day and we block out anything that gets in our way.

I have my personal goals for the next year.  Our company has its goals for the next year.  Both are very lofty and not easily achievable.  However, I’ve always set lofty goals and almost always achieved them.  The key is that we don’t harp on those lofty goals.  We break them down into monthly goals.  Then we break those monthly goals down into a set of tasks that need to be accomplished to meet those goals.  Then each person further breaks down their tasks into a list of what needs to be accomplished each day.  I have a list of goals that I make up EVERY MORNING for myself for that day.  If I cross off each item on that list 90% of the time I’ll meet my monthly goal and I’ll eventually hit that lofty goal.

I think if you take a look at anyone you know that you think is successful, you’ll find that they do the same thing (whether or not they realize it).   I’m not sure what goes through the minds of the other people - I’ve always been this way.  My guess is that they get distracted by sports, drinking, TV, video games, etc and procrastinate goals until they seem impossible and they give up.  Don’t mistake me - I love each of those things as much as the next guy, but I use them as rewards for myself after I achieved my goals for the day.  Many times, especially on weekends, my goals only take an hour or two and I spend the rest of the day having fun…but at least I make progress.

Simple? Yup.  Obvious?  Probably.  Something that a lot of people do?  Nope.

Remember MyLiveSearch, the company that Google supposedly has had their eye on since its inception?  They’ve taken a lot of crap the past few months for delaying launch and for garnering a ton of hype without anyone actually seeing what they’re working on.  They promised “real-time indexing” of the web as you search.  Naturally with a claim like that we’re all pretty curious and a bit skeptical at the same time.

Well supposedly today they are supposed to launch so I figured I’d give my $.02 on whether or not I thought it was worth using.  I’ve been a beta tester for a little less than a week now, and I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing:

What they claim to be:  “The world’s first true live search engine.  Searching the internet will never be the same.”

What they actually are:  A browser plug-in that starts with search results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN (your choice) and then indexes the pages on the domain of the top results “live” using your computer to expand upon and re-order the results.

What I like:  It’s an interesting way to look at the web.  For example, a Google Search for “Custom McFarlane” returns 2 results from SportsLizard and 3 results from articles linking to SportsLizard that I wrote.  Clearly we dominate that niche.

A search on MyLiveSearch starts with SportsLizard at the top, but ends with eBay dominating the rankings because there are hundreds of custom McFarlane figures being sold on eBay. SportsLizard is the second site that appears, but it takes a bunch of scrolling (or some refining of the results) to find SL.  As MyLiveSearch crawls the sites “live” it re-orders them based upon what they find.

You’ll notice that it does a poor job of sorting which pages are most important.  Clearly the Custom McFarlane home page is most relevant to the query, but it shows other SL pages ahead of it when I narrow the results to only show pages from our site.  MyLiveSearch also shows you who indexed the site and when - so they start with a page Google indexed a few days ago and then index and sort the rest “live”.

I personally think they did a bad job on this query, ranking eBay ahead of us because of the quantity of content.  However, it’s still pretty cool to watch and I can at least relate to where they are coming from and appreciate their attempt at innovation.   There are a handful of features that allow you to focus results more on news results (i.e. Google News) and group the results by site, but nothing that really does much for me.  Overall for other queries I got solid results, but nothing I’d say that was that much better than Google.

What I don’t like about it:  In order:  installing a plug-in to run a search sucks, having to login to perform a search sucks, the time to run a search is annoying (I had searches take up to a minute to complete…eh), and the false promise that you actually index the web live doesn’t sit well with me.  I suppose you are technically indexing live, but it would be a lot more convincing if the live indexing was being done on a central server and not on my CPU.

Bottom line:  MyLiveSearch is  creative and different, but not so creative and so different that Google couldn’t copy it in a few days.  I’m pretty sure that if you gave me a few months I could program something similar…and I’m not even that great of a programmer.   In the end, the login and plugin crush any chance I have of using it with any regularity.  Fun to toy with, but Google still rules.

One of the things I’m interested most in regarding the move of this blog is the SEO impact that it will have on both SportsLizard and on the blog.  SportsLizard ranked very high for key terms related to both sports collectibles AND entrepreneurship, and both are clearly at risk by moving such a large part of the site.  All of the old posts are now 301 (SE friendly) permanently redirected to their counterparts in the archive on this site.

For this domain, I’m hoping to FINALLY get that boost I need to rank #1 for “Adam McFarland”.  The old blog ranked #3 behind the dork that has Adam-McFarland.com.

I also am hoping to not lose the #3 ranking for the term “entrepreneur blog”.  I get a lot of great traffic that way, and countless people searching for an entrepreneur like themselves have found me via search and dropped me encouraging emails.

Here are the different scenarios I can envision (each of which I’ve seen happen to clients/friends):

1. All of the links pointing to the old YE blog will be correctly applied to Adam-McFarland.Net and it will retain its rankings, as will SL.
2. Adam-McFarland.Net will retain its rankings, but SL will suffer because it will appear to be losing ~30% of its inbound links.
3. Adam-McFarland.Net will suffer in the rankings (after all, it is a brand spanking new domain getting all of these redirects from a sports collectibles site) and SL will suffer for dishing out all of those redirects and the loss of inbound links.
4. Search engines (I particularly could see this happening with Google) will rank both sites HIGHER because the topics of the domains will be more clearly defined.*  There may have been some confusion in algorithms seeing a site as both a sports site and a YE site (two distinctly different niches).  Adam-McFarland.Net will be seen as the business/entrepreneurial site, and SL will be solely sports and sports collectibles.

#4 is what I hope will happen…and I think will be the end result, it’s just a question of whether or not there will be a step back before a step forward.  It will be interesting to see.  I’ll write a post updating you once it’s been a few weeks.

*If at any time you want to see what Google thinks the topic of your domain is, you can log into Google Webmaster Tools and read the page analysis.  It will tell you what words Google finds prevalent on your site, and the anchor text of your internal links and external links pointing to your site.  Having a clearly defined domain topic will help a search engine rank you appropriately, and is particularly helpful in helping you rank high when you launch a new section of your site that follows in-line with other content on your domain (that’s how the Price Guide on SL ranked extremely high in a matter of days).

If you’ve stumbled upon this blog, odds are you’re coming from the SportsLizard Entrepreneur Blog. This is the new-and-improved version of the blog formerly known to many as the SL YE Blog. I still plan on providing the same type of raw and candid content, and hopefully will be able to use this fresh copy of Wordpress to stretch the limits of what I provide to the next level. If you want to go back and re-read any of the old SL YE Blog, which spans from 11/2005 until this morning, you can do so in the archive. There are nearly 300 posts, and it’ll likely remain some of my best writing in my entire life, so I encourage you to take a peek back at the past two years of entrepreneurial ups and downs I experienced. There’s a wealth of information that should help out any aspiring web entrepreneur.

As for the future, this blog is just a small part of the rapid change I expect to occur for us at Pure Adapt in the coming year. I think I’ve lulled everyone to sleep a bit the past few months because I’ve been off programming the new Detailed Image site and not much exciting has been happening. We’ll be launching the new DI in the next few weeks, and after that the fun will begin. It’s going to free up an estimated 75% of our collective time, so we’re going to be attacking new and exciting projects (and of course growing what we’ve already got).

The first subtle but interesting change is the change to the Pure Adapt site that I put up yesterday. Gone are our client services. Right now there is just screenshots and links to all of our sites, a short mission statement, and pics of all of the owners. That’s just temporary - we’ll be re-launching our development and SEO services on 10/1 on a separate domain with some distinct improvements in what we provide. I’m pumped for that, I’m pumped for this shiny new blog, and I’m pumped to see where our company will be this time next year (tip #1 for this new blog - if you’re not pumped about life, it’s time to re-evaluate what you spend your time doing).

As for SportsLizard, the Price Guide should surpass 15,000 registered users by early September. Not bad for an application that launched in May! Growth has been so steady and so consistent that I’ve barely even mentioned it…but it’s definitely exceeding my/our expectations and requiring less and less work (probably about 45 minutes/day), can’t beat that!

Thanks for reading, I promise to keep it fun!