Ylliks

Not so long ago I wrote about how I thought a company went about it all wrong with their communication so it’s only fitting that when I have an experience that is completely satisfactory I should write about that as well.

For a while now I’ve ordered items from Avanti Sport which is a large online sporting goods retailer. Orders I’ve placed in the past have been shipped as confirmed and I haven’t had any trouble whatsoever. So when it was time for a new gym bag, since my heavily used one of 3 years was beyond mending, I ordered one from the site. To be honest, I didn’t really look at the specs, just the dimensions. That was a mistake. It proved to be one of those football players use with a hard bottom and spinning wheels. Not what I wanted, but my mistake. Still, I wanted to see if there were any option to return the bag. And there were plenty.

First I had a choice of returning the bag with a full refund or exchange it for another product (for both, items had to be in original package and unopened, which mine was). I choose the latter and picked another bag. The system immediately recognized that the newly picked bag was cheaper than the original one, so it gave me a choice to either order something else to make up the difference or have it reimbursed to my bank account. Again, the latter was my choice and then it was just a matter of picking the shipping method. I could either bring it to a Kiala point and shipping would be free, have it send to their postal adress and have a few euro of administration costs or have it send to their shipping address and have the shipping costs on me. Since the Kiala point was close by I opted for the first. I confirmed the new order and received an email confirming the exchange. I dropped the return parcel at the collection point, got a receipt with a tracking code and went home.

With the tracking code I could see the parcel had arrived at Avanti a few days later and that same day I received an email with the shipping tracking code of the new order and the amount difference was transferred to my bank account. Next day, new bag arrived.

As positive as I was about them before this, I noticed that I turned into an advocate for them, telling friends and family this story and how much I’m impressed with their service. Perfect example how a customer experience like this can create great word of mouth. I will surely order from them again.

First of all may I wish you all the best for the new year.

As I have been doing for a couple of years now the new year for me means getting some perspective on the year before and identifying the things I want to focus on in the upcoming year.

Last year the 3 words I focussed on were: Social, Experiment and Execution. I have been fortunate to meet some new people through work and new activities. And although none of those new relationships have grown into the kind of friendships I have with some of my older friends they certainly have improved my life. Experimenting and execution have come together in my new online income experiment. The beauty is that some of these experiments have become lifestyle choices (such as the primal/paleo diet). I have to be honest and confess that in some areas execution still is a bit lacking, but overall there has been a significant improvement on that.

Now on to my 3 words for 2012!

Relationships

As was the case in 2011 I’m more open to meeting more people. But on top of that I want to spend more time with the people I love spending time with, whether those are new acquaintances or people I’ve known for years. I don’t feel I’m neglecting people, but I find that I love spending time or doing things with certain people. I want to make more time available for spending even more time with those people, while spending less time with people that feel like a psychological drain.

Health

I’ve been around the same weight for about 8 months now, which is about 10-12 kg away from my goal. So this should be the year that I reach the goal of my weight loss journey which has started a couple of years ago (yes, I was that overweight). In order to do that I will be focussing on being stricter on what I eat (read: more strict with Paleo) and increase the number of times a week I will Crossfit, something I started about 2 months ago, and keep on spinning. Crossfit is something I really like to do, despite the fact that my muscles have been extremely sore after every workout and I’ve been called crazy by a couple of my friends for even doing it. And since I hate people telling me I can’t do something without me even trying, it’s just a bit of extra motivation. It’s also about more than just the weight issue. I want to improve my overall health, cutting down on sick days and appointments to doctors and dentists, but also being more agile and flexible. This means I have to take (even) better care of my body (and all aspects of it) than I have been doing previous years.

Entrepreneurship

Although I consider myself to be far from an entrepreneur, I think the word represents what I will try to achieve in 2012. As part of ongoing experiment I think it’s important for me to learn what running an online business entails. It will certainly mean more learning but also testing what works and doesn’t work. I’ve started a blog a couple of months ago and the information I’m getting from running it has already helped me in understanding what it means to run a site where the ultimate goal is making money.

I’m looking forward to 2012. Beside my 3 words I’ve just started a new job which seems to be a challenging one and I’m looking forward what the year will bring. Hope it will be the same for you.

This week I saw Anonymous. In it, it is suggested that an actor by the name of William Shakespeare got to take the credit for the writings of Edward de Vere, thus creating the illusion that it was him, and not De Vere, who wrote some of the greatest plays of our time. Historical accuracy aside, it was a perfect example of someone being comfortable with claiming credit for work that wasn’t his purely for financial gains.

In todays internet world this kind of behavior happens more than you could imagine. People like Chris Brogan and Tim Ferriss have used their Twitter accounts to point out people who have used their work and claimed it as their own in products or blogs. So I was aware this kind of thing happened, but never saw it up close. Until recently.

As I’ve mentioned before one of the people I follow on Twitter is Aaron Lee. Besides being a solid resource for social media news and information, he’s just a great and approachable guy. We’ve been having short conversations for a while now so I wasn’t exactly surprised when I saw (at least I thought) one of his tweets mention me. However, it was one that he send me a couple of days earlier. I hadn’t really paid attention to the Twitter handle because I recognized him from his picture, but then I saw that another name was mentioned. Since his name has become somewhat of a brand I found it strange that he would change it. So I took a look at the profile that send the tweet and I was stunned about what I saw.

Here was a profile with Aaron’s picture, his description and look and feel. It was the same but for a different name and (at that time) 3 tweets. I DM-ed Aaron to ask if he had seen it, but he was as surprised as I was and decided to take action against this. Luckily Twitter has a procedure in place for this kind of thing. In other instances you might not be so lucky.

When somebody copies your work on the web, there’s not much you can do. Of course you can go the legal way and send a seize and desist letter, but if they refuse and they’re in another country your options are limited. Because of this it’s easy for scammers to do this and ride the success of others.

I never understood why you would want to make money by copying what others have created. If you want to make money on the web there are numerous ways, but I’m guessing some just want to take the easy route. And it’s a shame there’s not much that can be done about it.

One of the reasons I started this blog is the fact that I wanted to have a place where I could have an outlet for my writing. A place to improve it. I think there’s truth to the saying that you can only become a better writer by writing a lot, so that is what I have been doing during the recent weeks. Just not on this blog.

As part of my experiment in generating online income I’ve been starting up another blog and have been writing for that. The blog has been launched on November 1st (yes, 3 months later than expected due to some issues) and since then it has published 7 posts. Not a whole lot you would say, but I’ve also had to create an about page, a disclaimer, a privacy statement, a disclosure and other pages. I’ve also written some drafts for upcoming posts.

Furthermore I’ve been going back to something I did a while ago and that’s creating Squidoo lenses. I came back to them in order to create some backlinks to the new blog, but I had some ideas for some new stuff and started to create new lenses. I still have some ideas for some other ones so I set myself a goal to get to at least 20 lenses, with 50 being a long term goal. With 50 lenses and some good content I believe this can also become an online revenue generator, albeit not a big one.

So yes, I’ve been busy writing, but because that writing has taken up most of my time I haven’t been coming back to where my online writing has started: this blog. So see this post for what it is: not as an excuse to why I haven’t been writing here for a while, but a simple update on the experiment I’m running.