I am beginning to really like the Skribit widget in my sidebar. It allows people to leave suggestions on topics I should write about. What’s interesting, is sometimes the suggestions are things that I either never thought of, or are topics that I have shied away from.

The other day, “what are the top reasons to use Lijit?” showed up. I cringed because I have really tried to keep my work life out of my blog. I dont want this to become a place where I shrill companies I am involved with, either as an employee (like Lijit), investor or advisor.

The right place for that, in my mind, is on those companies blogs.

But, I thought an interesting twist on the topic would be to answer the question of why I chose to work at Lijit. And, I might take the oportunity to list a couple of the top reasons the Lijit widget is a necessary tool for publishers.

After selling my company, I went to work for the acquiring company, with the intent to work there for approximately a year. Then we would evaluate the situation and figure out what the next best move for me and the company.

As the year came to a close, it became apparent that the best move was for me to walk away. Not because there was anything inherently wrong with the situation, but because I had provided all the value I could and sticking around was not helpful to anyone.

When evaluating opportunities (which ranged from starting a new company to joining a growing startup), I met Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit. To be honest, I met Todd through Tara, who reached out to me after installing Lijit on my blog. I had a client that I felt Lijit fit with, and we (Todd and I) spent some time together discussing the possibility.

After a little while, it became apparent that my skill set fit with Lijit, and Lijit was in need of someone with my skill set.

Initially, I balked at the idea of working for someone else (I had been on my own for 5 years building Current Wisdom), but at the same time, I was exhausted from running my own company, and was hesitant at the propsect of starting another company so soon.

Also, my long term goal is not to be a serial entrepreneuer. I dont want to start multiple companies over and over again. Rather, I have a strong desire to move to the investment side of the equation, and after talking with my mentors, it became clear that the best decision for me was to join Lijit. So I did.

To date, it has been a blast. I have been able to shape the product, bring in some decent deals (you may have read about one in TechCrunch), and really be a positive member of a growing team.

I have seriously learned a ton from so many people. Every day I wake up with a wierd mix of excitement to talk about Lijit both internally and externally, and straight fear that somehow I am not going to push the business forward that day.

How do we pitch Lijit? (you can skip the rest if you dont want to hear my pitch).

When I started to pitch Lijit to publishers, we worked through several messages, and it became quite clear as to what the real benefits of using Lijit for a publisher are:

1) The ability to aggregate all the publisher’s social content and trusted sources and make it searchable, creates a better search experience for the reader. Content that would be buried in Google is uncovered. After all, Google wants to index everything; Lijit just indexes what important to the publisher, and all that content is trusted by the reader.

2) The “re-search” function (do a search on google for “iphone flip” and click on my blog post. You will see re-search in action), helps to drive reader engagement by presenting additional content items, which reduces the times a reader clicks the back button.

3) Deep analytics around search behavior. My favorite is the section about “searches that return no results.” Similar to Skribit, I am learning inherently things that my readers want me to write about.

There are other benefits, such as our flexibility around the widget design itself, and the corresponding lightbox, but those are the three main items we discuss with publishers, and they are important, especially if you have a publication that gets a fair amount of traffic, as re-search and our improved contextual search drive more engagement and page views.

But, for me, there is one overriding reason why I like what we are doing at Lijit and why I think we are a perfect fit for all publishers.

Lijit understands that our purpose for existing is to increase the value of the publisher to its readers.

Meaning, for us to be successful, the publisher has to be successful. I see so many other widgets that really only provide value AFTER the publisher is successful. Rather than sharing in the journey, those widgets enjoy the spoils of success. This is why so many publishers hate widgets. The widgets provide no real intrinsic value.

So, the final answer as to why I work at Lijit is:

We are publisher focused. We understand that the publisher’s job is to provide value to their readers and Lijit’s job is to make the publisher’s job easier.

(And our shirts are comfy.)

If that makes any sense.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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I recently was engaged in a Skype conversation with my friend Aaron Brazell. Aaron recently left b5media where he was the Director of Technology, and has decided to change careers. Of all the things he could choose to do, Business Development happened to be on his list.

So, probably because I am the coolest person in the world (in addition to my status as the #1 douchebag in the world), I asked Aaron to try his hand at Business Development at Lijit Networks.

Its been fun over the past week or so talking to Aaron about publishers and Lijit, but more interestingly is the discussions we have had about business development.

So, back to the Skype conversation.

Aaron and I were discussing a plan of attack for a large publisher. One that neither of us had a warm introduction into. As the conversation continued, I began to explain to Aaron the difference between business development now and during the Great Dot Com Bubble of 2000.

In the “old days,” business development was more about strategic alliances, which was a silly way to say, “lets find a way to drive traffic to each other.” (Notice the word traffic. I didnt accidentally substitute that for the word revenue.)

Many companies owned a certain space and could demand many things for the access to their traffic or data. Business Development was really just sales with out the quota. It was all about traffic and eyeballs, and there was little to no focus on creating bi-directional relationships. As I just explained to another friend:

Business Development is about working with people who want to make your company better while you work to make their company better.

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference in todays world.

The world is smaller. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the like make it easy to interact with people all times of day and builds a level of understanding and connection that is unprecedented.

So, what advice would I give a new business development guy? What advice did I give Aaron? Here are my three rules to being a fantastic Business Development guy:

1. Be yourself. You are now intertwined with the brand of the company you are pitching. If you are fake, then the company will be seen as fake. Just be yourself.
2. Do what you would do normally. If you are not a blogger. Dont blog. If you dont like twitter, dont tweet. Basically, chose the communication medium that best suits you.
3. Look for connections. Not just between people, but between companies. Does it make sense for Lijit to work with hardware manufacturers? Probably not. So think of connections in three ways:
   1. Direct: These are people that you know directly or can be introduced directly. In this case, you are looking to directly pitch the person on your product or service.
   2. Indirect: These are tangential connections, where you want to pitch your product or service to someone because of the people that like, follow, respect the direct connection.
   3. Enhanced:  Dont really have a better word for this, but its basically a connection where there may be no immediate business to pitch, but since the two companies are like minded and the product or service is complimentary, that a connection will enhance both companies.

The first type, Direct, is the most like sales. You have something you want someone else to use or pay for, so you explain the features and benefits, and you are off to the races. The second, Indirect, is very much like a Direct connection, but your target isnt the initial person, its the intial person’s fans and friends.

Both of those are necessary for the growth of a company. As long as one is open and honest about it and straight forward, there is nothing shady about the practice.

The third type, enhance, is the most difficult and esoteric for most people. People that are successful at Enhanced Connections usually dont work for commission. They usually arent great sales people. But, they see the potential in both their company, and the target company, and understand that together they are stronger than individually. And most importantly, they understand its about sharing and giving, not just taking.

I also often joke that my title is VP, Favors and Introductions. 99% of my job doing favors, giving introductions or asking for favors or introductions. To me, the only capital I possess is my reputation and the trust my friends have that I will introduce someone that is worthy and wont waste their time.

The key to being successful at this is understanding one simple thing:

To get, one must give, and trust that the gift is compelling enough to have the other give in return.

And that one sentence, is what Business Development in a Web 2.0 World is. Its not wineing and dining, or business trips, or even expense accounts. Its being in a state of constantly giving, making sure that you have given more daily than received. And, most importantly, if, at the end of the day, what you are giving away (whether it is time, connections, a product or service, or even just an ear to listen) is not worthy of the people you are giving it to, and not given freely, you will lose. Every time.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Over at the Lijit blog we are running a poll around a new feature. Here is a repost of the post and the poll. Feel free to vote here or over at Lijit, either way it records your vote.

REPOST:

At Lijit, we are constantly developing and testing new features for the product, the search results and the re-search box.

Recently, we have begun to explore the concept of including Flickr thumbnails within the search results themselves. Pretty cool idea, right?

What we cant come to a final decision on is exactly where the thumbnails should be placed. So, we are asking our users for feedback.

Here are the choices:

Here are the thumbnails on the LEFT (click the picture to expand):

Here are the thumbnails on the RIGHT (click the picture to expand):

And, here is a quick poll to help us figure this out. The cool thing about this quiz, is you can cut and paste it onto your blog, and share it with your friends. Check it out and thanks for the help!

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