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My Own Press Release: 1000 Unique Visitors this Month!

Dear Reader,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for reading my blog. This is really the only incentive I need to keep writing! The number of unique readers grew pretty consistently since I started blogging in late December and I hope the trend will go on in the months to come.

As some of you reminded me, I will make an effort to keep writing original posts that will hopefully be useful and interesting, rather than regurgitating press releases and PR pitches.

Please keep sending me feedback and ideas of topics which you would find interesting.

Sincerely,

Julien

My Compensation Framework

I received a few emails with recommendations to improve my blog – I have tried to implement them but however, I must say I ignored one of the most relevent comment I received.

It was recommended to me to try to streamline and “bucketize” my posts. There is so much to talk about, I must admit it could be hard to see the common thread between my posts. Today I finally sat down to think about what exactly I wanted talk in my blog, and came up with this high-level plan:

As you can see, the “niche” I found for this blog is for the following topics: Compensation fundamentals and theory, benefits of incentives and variable compensation, and how incentives can be correlated to performance and motivation. I also want to cover industry news and discuss success stories, write about different hurdles with respect to choosing a solution and implementing it. Finally I will write about some personal experiences and opinions, research done on these topics as well as anything else I find relevant.

I guess the target audience is probably whoever is reading this, most I think this will be most relevant to HR, Sales and Compensation pros or anyone with an interest in variable compensation. IT Pros and other employees may also find this useful…

Let me know what you think. When I get the chance I will reorganize my labels as per those categories I described.

Tagged I was…

I have been tagged by Ann Bares, who has a wonderful compensation related blog. Compensation Force is one of the first ‘business related’ blog I started to read regularly.

The rules:
• Link to the person who tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
• Tag at least three people at the end of your post and link to their blogs.
• Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

So here are my 6 truths and no lie:
• My native language is French. I’m also fluent in English and Spanish. I’ve been studying Chinese/Mandarin on and off for the past 3 years but the wall is higher than I expected!
• I have a second degree black belt in karate. I have never had to use this skill in a business meeting… yet.
• I love to travel. Last year, while canoe camping in the middle of the jungle in Peru, I was attacked by two wild boars. In a prior jungle trip it’s an alligator that almost got me for breakfast.
• I play piano when I get to spend some time at home.
• My favorite book is the Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I have read most of his books and enjoyed each of them, but this is my favorite.
• As my client figured out today, I can easily be bribed with donuts, chocolate and M&Ms…

Here are some blogs I read regularly, in no particular order:

Think IT Services by Jeff Kaplan
Passion, People and Principles by David Maister
The HR Capitali$t by Kris Dunn
Incentive Intelligence by Paul Hebert
The Happy Burro Blog by Joe Raasch

And of course, don’t forget to visit Compensation Force.

FeedBurner and Blog E-mail Delivery

In case you haven’t notice, I added FeedBurner to this blog; FeedBurner will enable you to view my incentive compensation management blog as an RSS feed (for example my blog entries can easily be delivered to your Google customized home page).

Feedburner will also have the possibility to subscribe to my blog to receive each post in your e-mail automatically. Hopefully this will make it easier to read me, without having to constantly check the blog for updates.

To get started, click on the “Subscribe in a reader” or enter your e-mail in the text box and click on “Subscribe”. These links are located on the right hand side of the blog, below the “View my profile on LinkedIn” button, and above the “Links” section.