I’m not going to get into the ins & outs of who is right or wrong – I’m finding it more interesting observing the fallout and impact that this is having on both sides of the table – business- and reputation-wise. Once again, it makes me breathe a huge sigh of relief that our disagreement with someone last year was carried out (on our side at least) behind closed doors and out of the public eye.

There are a few things that can be learned from what’s going on…

#1 Mud sticks

While the furore will no doubt die down, the reputation of those involved on both sides will suffer. It’s not just about direct sales of their products, it’s about who will likely want to partner or be associated with them in the long term.

Thesis has had some pretty big backers to date – Chris Brogan, Brian Clark – but you have to ask what these guys think of the way that Chris Pearson has behaved recently and whether it’ll give them pause for thought about associating with him in the future.

The moral of the story: Consider how your actions & reactions reflect on those with whom you work both directly & indirectly – and on those with whom you would like to work in the future.

#2 Dirty tactics harm everyone

One tactic being used is deliberately designed to directly harm and undermine the other person’s business – it’s ugly, mean and underhand. Matt is offering to buy a different premium theme for anyone who switches from Thesis. While Matt has come out looking slightly better than Chris in the battle so far, it’s this tactic which I believe is doing him the most harm.

He’s behaving like a bully of the worst kind and leveraging his considerable influence & support to co-ordinate a direct attack on Chris’s business. If this is what happens when you go up against the creator of WordPress, woebetide anyone who does. It’s guerilla warfare at its ugliest.

The moral of the story: Don’t use dirty tactics, even when faced with them yourself – they won’t just harm your adversary, they’ll harm you too.

#3 Egos are good; but only to a point

Chris Pearson has shown himself to have a massive ego…Quote from Chris: “I’ve been arguably one of the top 3 most important figures in the history wordpress“.

I personally think that any successful entrepreneur needs a healthy ego to succeed in the long term but when it starts to get in the way so much so that it prevents you from seeing sense, that’s when it becomes a problem. From the outside looking in, it seems that this is what Chris is experiencing now.

The moral of the story: Nurture a healthy ego but make sure you have structures in place to give you a nudge when it becomes a limiting factor. A mastermind group or advisory council are 2 such structures.

It’s a real shame that this argument is having such a divisive effect on what has always been an active, supportive community – both Chris and Matt need to find a way to resolve this (even if this means going to court) so that the community can get back to doing what it does best…building websites & blogs that work.

Maybe you too have multiple websites, diverse interests and various spin-off ventures which are all sort of related (or in some cases, aren’t at all) but which make up your online empire.

How do you tie them all together? How do you make people aware of all the things you do? Does your online empire hang together coherently or is it a jumbled up mess of too many sites?

You may worry that none of your sites fit together, that everything seems fragmented, disjointed and confusing and that, quite frankly, if you can’t get your head around them all, then how can you expect anyone else to?

I know how you feel. At one point in time, we had the following sites:

• A group of 4-5 sites to promote our professional services (web design, marketing consulting, graphic design and technology consulting)
• The original Location Independent blog
• A website for fitness professionals
• A personal travel blog
• Jonathan’s illustration site
• This blog

It drove me mad that they were all disparate, sitting separately, all alone with nothing to connect them nor a central hub to bring them all together. But I couldn’t see a way to bring them all together without it seeming random, odd and generally a little scatty!

Perhaps it’s the OCD part of me which felt the need to make those connections, to ensure everything fit together in the minds of people who we serve (even though the audiences are very different) and to find a way to make them all sit coherently under one banner together despite their very different topics.

But finally we found a way. Here’s how our online empire currently fits together:

• Professional Services (web & graphic design) are promoted on Jonathan’s creative site, Jonathan Woodward Studio
• Kinetiva is the parent organisation under which all the online communities sit (such as Location Independent, zero2illo & vibrapreneur)
• Individual sites such as FitnessProToolbox sit independently of everything else and function as true passive income sites not connected to anything else

For me that’s almost everything now neatly squared away in boxes. I feel much better, thank you very much!

If this is something you’ve also struggled with, you may find the following questions useful; they’re questions which we asked ourselves when we faced that challenge:

• Do you need a hub for everything you do? Why?
• Would a single hub site for all of your projects benefit your audience(s)?
• From a personal branding point of view, should you use a personal blog as a hub?
• Is there a common goal or aim of all of your sites which would enable you to group them together? (e.g. we realised that all our community sites had the common aim of helping people create lives/businesses from their passions).

You may wonder why or whether all of this really matters…does it? Good question!

Certainly from our experience of managing multiple sites, organising them into a logical, coherent structure helps us to manage and grow them. Rather than having to create a strategic plan, an individual product line, a marketing plan, a to do list etc. for every single site in our empire, we can leverage the fact that much of this can be duplicated for sites which belong to the same “family”.

For example, rather than creating separate product lines for each specific online community (which is the way we started out for the Location Independent community), we’re going to be focusing on creating resources and tools which will be useful to members across all the communities, much like the recently released DIY Design & Branding Toolkit.

That doesn’t mean we won’t create community-specific resources where necessary but it does mean we can be smarter about exposing this product line to a bigger audience by creating tools for members of 3 communities versus just one.

Another benefit of your online empire fitting nicely together in a way which makes sense for your audiences is what you might call “cross pollination”. You’ll likely find that people who are interested in one of your projects may well be interested in another, entirely unrelated one – we’re all multi-faceted human beings and we rarely have but a single interest.

There’s another benefit to having an online empire with multiple, unrelated websites…diversifying the risk. If all of the sites in your online empire are in the same industry, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket which is not a sensible strategy in my experience.

You never know what may happen and the unexpected often happens online, the speed of which could well take you by surprise. Building your online empire solely around a single industry may well be creating an inherent barrier to achieving your long term, future success. Not a mistake we’ll be making again.

So, I’m curious…how do you tie all of the sites in your online empire together? Does it matter? Does it help?

• Bringing up our baby toddler with no outside help
• Running our main design & branding business
• Helping people learn how to live & work anywhere
• Helping aspiring illustrators create a sustainable, profitable career
• Helping health & wellness entrepreneurs build profitable businesses
• Working on various other business & personal projects

Our typical modus operandus has been to spend our days looking after the babe and then working at night, once she’s gone to bed. This has worked but she’s never been the greatest sleeper (1 hour of naps a day & an average bed time of between 7.30-9pm, depending upon naps) which means our time to work has been 3-4 hours at best, assuming we actually want to get to bed at a decent hour and get some sleep before she wakes up again.

It’s worked but it’s less than ideal and from a health perspective is not an approach that I want to maintain in the long term. I recently came across the “one week on, one week off” approach which sounded intriguing, so we’ve decided to try it. The results so far?

I’m liking it a lot but perhaps that’s because we’re about to head into an off week and the last one we had was bliss (once we were able to switch off – it took a while).

How We’re Making It Work

We’re experimenting with the length of periods – so we’re not strictly doing 7 days on & 7 days off but sometimes 9 days on, 5 days off or vice versa. Basically we’re working to a 2 week/14 day time frame and adjusting the on/off periods as necessary based on other commitments, trips & plans we’ve already got on the calendar.

We’re leveraging deadlines – one of the reasons I think this approach works so well is that it creates deadlines. Most of you will know that when you’re working on your own projects, to your own timelines which has no externally set deadlines there’s a tendency for things to sometimes slip. The one week on, one week off approach creates (artificial) deadlines which for us have also helped create a sense of urgency. We know that if we don’t meet a deadline, our off week will be delayed and also shortened – that’s not what we want so we work hard in the run up to ensure everything’s done on time & we can head into an off week with nothing hanging over us (very important if you actually want to be able to switch off).

We’re creating mind space to focus – you’ll also probably be familiar with the feeling of never quite catching up with yourself when you’re juggling running your own business, running a household and sometimes travelling on top of that. In any given week, you’ve probably got 1001 things you need to do swirling in your mind. What’s working so well for us with this approach is the fact that we get all our personal admin cleared up in our off weeks which means we can head into an on week knowing that’s all sorted and there’s not yet another thing hanging over our heads to sort out. It helps create the mind space during an on week to focus on the tasks at hand and the mind space during an off week to relax, knowing your work is done.

We’re rocking the to do lists – I’m a list person, always have been & always will be. But you know when you’re not being effective or productive when your list(s) keeps getting longer and not shorter. At the beginning of each on week, we create an “ultimate” to do list of everything we need to complete that week before the off week. It’s divided into the following sections:

• Client work
• Product creation
• Marketing
• Technical tasks

We usually have one main product we’re working on during any given on week and this is where it’s making the biggest difference – once all the other tasks are out of the way, we can focus on nothing but creating the new stuff.

We’re leveraging our strengths & working better as a team – as a husband & wife entrepreneurial duo, it took us a long time to figure out a way to work which leveraged both our strengths. Once we did, it made a big difference. And then along came the babe and our working practices got screwed up again. With this approach, we have very clear responsibilities during an on week and one of us works during the day while the other looks after Mali. This isn’t set in stone and it sometimes switches throughout the day – but it means we’re already working 2-3 hours more every day as a team than we were doing previously.

Is it worth trying?

I really think so. We’re about to head into our 2nd off week having now had 2 on weeks and so far, we’ve been at least twice as productive as we previously were. It’s a massive improvement for us and works really well with our commitments and working styles.

But is it worth it for you? If you already work for yourself and tick any or all of the following, then I think it’s worth a shot:

• You can’t remember the last time you took any time off from your business
• You always struggle to get through your to do list
• You find it hard to stick to your own deadlines
• You want to take better advantage of the fact you work for yourself
• You want to claw back some “you” time & actually start having weekends & holidays again
• You’re location independent & want to make the most of the places you’re travelling too as well as continue to grow your business

If you already work like this or you’re planning on trying it, let me know how you find it…

Not personally nor directly but certainly en masse. It seems people are fed up with the clique, the guest posts from the same few people, interviews & teleseminars with the same bunch of people of and then of course, there’s the launch fatigue that’s been doing the rounds…

They’re all valid points and I think Jade touched on an important point when she noted that it wasn’t just launch fatigue but networking fatigue. If you’re a fan/admirer/whatever of one of the A listers, you very probably like them all – it’s become an incestuous, close-knit clique (both the A listers & their followers) which is why there’s the backlash: The pond is now too small to support so many big fish.

The criticism is somewhat unfair though…

• These guys all put out quality stuff . Ok, so much of it overlaps but they all have different experiences, different approaches and different strategies so there’s no doubt you can still learn from each of them.
• They’re all genuine and they *do* care (despite the deliberately provocative title of this post). Have any kind of personal interaction with *most* of them and you’ll see that they care, that they’re genuine and that they’re not about so throw some hissy fit diva if you don’t know who they are. Note: I say most, some are not “all that” IRL – we’ve experienced it first hand.
• Most of them are working to “expand the pie” and reach out to wider audiences, despite the seemingly incestuous network. Ok, so many of them could expand the pie a little more when it comes to joint ventures & collaborations but it’s tough to find the quality out there – I’ve tried for us & for clients and in some cases, it’s just not there (Good niche alert!!).

But there’s a reason why you haven’t seen any of them directly and publicly respond to this criticism: They don’t need to because they’re on their game.*

* A few of them have responded but in an elegant and measured way, not with emotion nor with haste.

They all have big visions, they all have a master plan – and they’re all working to their plan. This is what sets them apart from the less successful entrepreneurs online. It’s not that they’re not listening, nor taking note of what’s been going on around them and the criticism that’s being levelled at them – they most definitely are.

The difference is this: They don’t get derailed every time someone criticises them, they don’t change their master plan just because someone moans about an onslaught of launches and they all keep their eyes focused on their overall mission even when it feels like an uphill battle, which I’m sure it does at times.

If you don’t like what they’re doing, you have a choice – don’t follow them anymore, don’t buy from them anymore. But before you choose remember this, you can still learn a lot from them by watching what they do & how they do it.

You can watch & learn all almost everything you need to know for free…don’t relinquish that front row seat just because you’re annoyed at a current trend – watch & learn.

They’re the kind of people who bait you with comments on your blogs, who directly challenge you to take action & respond to them in forums, who write inaccurate posts twisting events to their own version of what happened. They may even encourage (some might say “incite”) others to leave negative messages & comments about you in various places. In short, they’ll spread their negativity across the internet without a thought for what it actually says about them.

Over the past few years online, we’ve had our fair share of haters. In fact one situation got to the stage where we consulted a couple of lawyers (including the libel lawyer for The Sun, no less). While it was decided that we undoubtedly had a case against this particular hater, who clearly thought that refraining from outright using our names made it “ok”, we decided we didn’t need to take things that far (yet, at least). Instead, here are a few ways to deal with haters & their actions:

Continue on your own path

Never let the haters distract you from your path; they’ll do their best, even going so far as to try & sabotage what you’re doing either directly or indirectly. Don’t pay them any attention or you’ll just give them more power. Instead carry on along your path, focusing on your own game and not theirs.

Take things to the next level

Even better than carrying on along your own path, aim to take things to the next level. Not only will this focus your attention even more on your game and not theirs, it’ll very likely exact the best revenge on your haters…growing, expanding and making more successful that which they want to destroy.

Maintain your dignity & professionalism

No matter what accusations are made, nor how much somebody tries to draw a hasty, emotional response from you, take a step back and breathe. Even if you’re threatened (we were), your haters lose all professionalism (they did) and they use language which should never appear in a professional relationship (they did), no matter what the issue is – maintain your professional behaviour. Even when you think no-one else is looking, how you behave online is important – you never really know who is looking or privy to your interactions or emails.

Rally your supporters

Nobody likes being criticised, accused nor threatened in any format. It’s important that you have some trusted advisors or friends to turn to. It’s easy to respond in the heat of the moment – don’t. Throughout all of our experiences, we’ve had our emails & responses reviewed by a number of people. What’s been even more surprising for me are the unexpected sources of support which have come out of the woodwork to support us in private, behind the scenes.

It’s hard dealing with people who don’t like you, whether that dislike is deserved or not. Most of us have a deep-seated need or desire to be accepted, to be liked. It’s tough when somebody actively dislikes you for whatever reason.

The best thing to tell yourself and to remember is this: You’ve clearly got under someone’s skin badly enough to incite such a passionate response. That’s quite the feat and is likely to affect them far more than it does you, no matter what they do to fluster you. Here’s a quote which sums it up best…

“Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head”

~ Ann Landers