Web Worker Daily

Michelle LaBrosse believes she knows how to motivate people. After all, the company she founded — Cheetah Learning — trains people to achieve their project management credential, the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional or PMP. She says that 97% of the people who attend one of Cheetah’s classes will pass their exam.

That focus on motivation trickles through to how she runs her 20-person firm, a totally virtual operation with people in Ohio, Connecticut, Nevada, California and Alaska. “I run a boss-free zone,” she says. “We don’t like people who want to micro manage. We also don’t want people who want to be babysat.”

How motivated is the staff? One person who had surgery wasn’t making plans to give herself time off for recovery. After all, the thinking goes, if we’re working from home offices, why can’t we do it while lying in bed? So LaBrosse offered her $5,000 to take off an entire week and let others pick up the slack. “She said it was the hardest week of her life,” reports LaBrosse, but she got the payoff.

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Although we’ve shared a multitude of project management tools with you since the start of Web Worker Daily (including, since just the beginning of the month, “Organize Your Life With Jott,” “(Mostly) Free Resources for the Web Worker Who Works on the Web,” and “QuickBase Goes Enterprise“), actually doing the job of project management requires — above all — simple common sense. At least, that’s the take of Kimberly Wiefling, author of Scrappy Project Management.

“In the real world, things go wrong, things change, people don’t do their action items, and everybody knows what’s going to happen on day one on the project, but nobody admits it,” Wiefling said.

Here are the three things to master, according to Wiefling, that will get you 80% of the way to project success.

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Are you a web worker whose business involves web sites? If so, how often do you think about Hispanic consumers? According to a recent report from Forrester Research, this segment of the population is 44.3 million strong — 15% of the United States as a whole — and 49% are online.

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What do you use to monitor the page ranks your sites have in search engines? You could — as I have done — enter the term into a given engine and count where a particular site appears; but that can be tedious when the site isn’t in the top 10 or 20 let alone the top 50.

Randy Zlobec, search engine marketing expert and author of SEM Gorilla, who offered his advice two weeks ago for hiring a search engine marketing expert, shares three tools he has found invaluable for monitoring page ranking — one that’s free (with a caveat) and two that cost.

First, the Freebie: DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker

DigitalPoint.com’s free Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tool can be used to check Google, Yahoo and MSN and other engines for ranking of keywords over time. According to Zlobec, “You create an account, then the tool follows your activity. It shows you your keyword placement from when you first started using the tool to where you are currently.”

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Gen X? Old fashioned. Gen Y? Obsolete. Let’s talk about Generation V.

My son, who’s 5 years old and searches The Wiggles web site for new movies, is a member. So is your 70-year-old aunt who sends you an Amazon gift certificate for the holidays and leaves book reviews every time she logs in. As defined by Gartner, Generation V — for Virtual — represents the blending of behavior, attitudes and interests that happens in an online environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Figuring out how to optimize your web sites is a job best left to the pros. After all, they’re the ones who should be spending a lot of time trying to understand how the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) operate and how to boost your site’s rankings against their algorithms. But if you’re running a small business, how do you find somebody who can really help you do the job?

We asked Randy Zlobec, a search engine marketing (SEM) expert, to share his advice for hiring a consultant. Zlobec is the author of the upcoming book, Search Engine Optimization, due in December, which is intended to give small website owners the opportunity to “grasp what SEM is and to implement it in their own marketing.”

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Sure, this is a topic we’ve explored before from multiple dimensions (see “Yet Another Reason to Build a Case for Telecommuting” and “Challenging Telework Myths“). But here’s your chance to get advice for building a case for telecommuting directly from Chuck Wilsker, the president and CIO of The Telework Coalition, who has probably heard more excuses from managers and executives for not allowing workers to do their jobs from home than any other person alive. The Coalition’s mission is, “enabling and supporting virtual, mobile and distributed work through research education, technology and legislation.”

Lay out the reason you want to work from home. Wilsker suggests something along these lines: “I’ve been an employee for three years. I get top reviews. You tell me how important I am to the company. I need a little work-life balance. My kid plays soccer. Even if I leave the office at 4 o’ clock, I can’t guarantee I’ll be home for that game at 6. I’d really like to telecommute.”

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Imagine a work life that includes two or more days a week of working from home and a compressed work schedule that gives you an extra day off every other week, covers half the cost of installation and service fees for home broadband, and the ability when you are in the office to take up to three work hours a week to attend on-site fitness instruction. Does the Department of Defense come to mind?

You might not believe the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) would be a hotbed of telecommuting, but it is. The federal agency, made up of 5,000 civilians and 1,600 to 1,700 military personnel, provides information systems support for the DoD.

According to Jack Penkoske, the director for manpower, personnel and security, about 40 percent of the highly technical workforce is doing what the agency calls “teleworking” either on a regular basis or ad hoc.

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