The upside of being a hard boss
Of course my immediate goal as a manager is to get good results out of people, but my secondary goal is to give my staff bad-ass job skills that hopefully advances their careers in directions they want to go. Both these goals necessitate not dancing around it when someone’s failing. Not only do I do my own business a disservice when I put up with poor performance, but I see it as doing the staffer’s career development a disservice.
Walking the line between self-revelation vs. self-indulgence
I was talking this morning with Cat Rocketship (editor of Offbeat Home), about the delicate balance that many of the Empire sites walk between first-person writing and, well, self-indulgence.
How I deal with flouncing
Ah, the the flounce. The term refers to the almost-comical way that frustrated online community members will stand up and yell, “I’M LEAVING! No really, don’t try to stop me! I AM LEAVING. I’m done here. I’m going! I’m never coming back! Did you hear me? I am done with this community! Are you listening? DONE!” Here’s how we deal with them on the Empire.
Non-shady ways to mooooonetize your blog
For me, the biggest challenge with monetizing has been finding legit, non-scammy tools. There’s a lot of shady, scammy stuff that goes down in the world of online advertising, and it’s hard to trust information you find online about any of them. I like to feel good about the businesses I partner with, so I figure it’d be worth sharing some of the tools I use that don’t feel shady to me.