I’m Just Sharing

Today is Blog Day, but this year I have two blogs with different focuses. So, I’m going to recognize some blogs here that have to do with one type of thing, then some blogs on my other blog that have to do with what I talk about over there. I’m not sure it’s cheating or not, but hey, recognizing people is always a good thing in my opinion. And, just like last year, I won’t be highlighting any blogs of my friends, so I can be objective.

There’s no way I could even think about starting to write about blogs I read without beginning with Problogger. One of the first million dollar bloggers, I’ve seen very little coming from him that’s not quality stuff.

Another top blogger who I follow is John Chow. I have been impressed with how, every month, he shows just how much money he’s made with his blog, and I find him entertaining and informative at the same time.

I’ve known about Lynn Terry for years, but this past year started following her blog Chicknewz. She talks a lot about marketing online, and also has a forum that’s well visited. Lots of great tips here.

Build A Better Blog is about just what it says. The two ladies who write it, Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman, only write about blogging and making money blogging. One feature they do a lot is the interview series, which is always a lot of fun to check out.

Lockergnome is about way more than blogging. It’s been around for a long time, talking about all things computers for years. My mind still sees Chris Pirillo as this brilliant kid who knows lots of things about computers, but it’s a full fledged business, and he has lots of people helping him discover all these things on and around the internet, and of course he’s now gotten into blogging just as much as everything else.

And that’s all I have for the day. Another year down; man, this is a lot of work!

I wrote a similar post on my business blog, but here, I’m just going to post a video from the cartoon series back in the day. Michael Jackson said he loved the cartoon and watched it every week, since it wasn’t really them in the cartoon, just their music. For the uninitiated, the mice are named Ray and Charles, the snake is named Rosie:

The Ultimate Michael Jackson

Thursday I had two appointments. The first was to take my wife’s SUV to have the brake pads replaced. The second was to take my computer in for servicing. My wife actually made the appointment, though I hadn’t known she’d done it, but I figured she was so tired of hearing me complain about my computer shutting down and not working properly that she did what she had to do.

Lucky for me, both places were right next to each other, so I had no problems getting my computer there, even though my wife did schedule them an hour apart, so I had to bother the brake people to lower the vehicle so I could get my computer when it was time to take it in.

First, a little bit of history, and I’m naming names. Back in 2004 I decided, because I work so much with my computer, to have one put together. I went to Comp USA and I picked out all the separate components, based on their recommendations, and had them put it together. Overall, it cost me around $2,500, but I figured I was putting together my version of a monster computer, one that would work well for me over a long period of time.

Almost immediately, when I got it home, I started having problems with it. I should have seen it coming, because, while it was being built, they had called me to tell me that they were having problems installing the second CD drive I’d wanted to add, as in they couldn’t get it working, and I told them not to worry about it, since I hadn’t had one before. I got the blue screen of death on the very first day; of all things. I did what I could for a few days, since I do know some things about computers, but it just wasn’t happening, so I took it back for service.

In essence, I ended up taking it back for service six or seven times. Each time they would say they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. They said they tested everything; they kept wiping out my hard drive and reloading the operating system, and nothing. Of course, I griped because I would show up, they’d actually let me go into the back room with them, and I would say “you haven’t loaded anything on the computer, so how do you know it won’t lock up?” By that, they said they’d put on the operating system then let the system run for 48 or 7 2hours to see if it would lock up; what the heck was that? However, I also had bought from them a new game, at the time, Civilization IV, and it wouldn’t run on the computer; most of the time it shut the computer down with that same error message, and these guys saw it also. weird.

Anyway, after paying even more money and going lots of time without my computer, and being dissatisfied with Comp USA (I’d even sent a letter to the corporate office, but of course never heard from them), I decided it just wasn’t meant to be, so I stopped taking it in and decided to just live with it. The shutdowns kept coming, and I stopped using more and more programs that would shut it down. However, within the last couple of months, it would start shutting down if I’d been doing a lot of things without a reboot in a couple of days; lucky thing that Word and Excel save everything, but that was the final straw. I started thinking about buying a new computer, but didn’t because I don’t want Vista just yet, and hence, the appointment my wife made.

The name of the place where I’ve taken my computer is Comp-U-Soft, and they’ve been in the same location for about 11 years now. Where other computer repair places have opened and closed within months, these guys have stayed viable and right in the same place. I pass by it all the time, and I even took a computer in there about 10 years ago for repairs. They do good work, but it doesn’t seem to be fast work. That’s because they’re thorough; they were back then, and they are now. I will admit that, because of how long it seemed to take back in the day, I decided to learn more about computers myself, which is how I learned to fix a lot of things, but I’ve never wanted to mess with a motherboard, knowing how sensitive they can be.

The computer guy, named Bob, took the computer and hooked it up to an old CRT 17″ screen; these guys, for all their technical expertise, are really throwbacks to the old days. If you look at their website, you’ll see what I mean; they certainly could use some SEO on the site, that’s for sure. Heck, maybe I need to make a pitch. Anyway, he hooks my computer up and types up the invoice that I have to sign so they can start working on it. Over the next hour we talk about theory of safety and online security, email, virus protection, and computers in general. I told him my story, and told him I’ve always thought my problem was the motherboard, and he was dumbfounded, especially after I mentioned what happened with the CD drive. He said that any computer business worth its weight in salt would never allow a computer to leave their shop without passing all certifications, and if they couldn’t even get two CDs working, then it was their problem to diagnose and fix, period.

Then, because we were talking about Comp USA, I told him about the time I bought a hard drive from their Westchester NY store that was supposed to be 100GB and, when I installed it myself, turned out to not only be a 4GB drive, but a used one as well, as it booted up before I loaded the operating system and someone else’s information and all his files were on it. He said that was the most incredible story he’d ever heard; that is, until I told him about the time my plane hit a deer while trying to fly out of North Dakota (yup, that actually happened). It wasn’t computer related, but every once in awhile you want to top yourself.

So, at this point, they still have my computer, but there are many differences between 1998 and 2008. For one, I have a laptop now that’s quite capable of running as my main computer for a long as I need. Two, we have external hard drives now, and I was able to copy over every single thing I wanted to from the other system; nice having 300GB of extra storage. And three, even at this juncture, these guys don’t charge a lot for service, no matter how long it may take them to figure it all out. The guy even said he would quote me on a new system, just in case, and that it wouldn’t be more than $1,500, probably less than $1,000; that works for me. Technology has been kicking my behind this year (don’t ask about the cell phones for awhile), but maybe this time around I can get on top of it in some fashion.

Sometimes we just have to acknowledge that our knowledge stops at a certain point on certain things; I’m glad guys like Bob are still around to handle the big jobs.

Apple MacBook Pro, 17-inch, 2.5GHz

Oddly enough, I think this blog is starting to get more and more popular. Actually, the numbers from Google Analytics say that things are fairly steady, but I’m not buying it. After all, it seems the spam has grown by leaps and bounds.

Things were actually going along pretty well for me as it pertained to spam. I didn’t have much at all, maybe 4 or 5 a week, and life was looking pretty good. Then suddenly, I wrote that post on Compete Rank and the spam came out of the wood works. It’s not the Russians anymore; it’s someone else, seemingly sending it all from one IP address on a consistent basis, and in large numbers; what the hey?

Initially, some of it was making it through the Askimet filter, and I thought that was odd. However, after deleting it a couple of time, Askimet got its act together and is sending it all to the moderation area, so I don’t have to deal with deleting it from my posts. Frankly, I find the relationship between the post, which was not positive, and the spam, interesting, and if I were a conspiracy theorist type of person, I might think I was being deliberately attacked; nah.

So, some “thing” is giving me attention. Reminds me of something my friend Sue said once about not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention while still wanting to dress nice. I guess I’ll just have to deal with it, but at least I hope this blog is dressed nicely.

Back in April, I launched my latest ebook, a short little thing called Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool. The target audience for the book is mainly people who have their own business websites but have no idea how to use them to help market their businesses. It’s not a deep book, but it’s not supposed to be. Most people don’t need deep; they just need a little bit of information.

Friday night, my wife and I went to Barnes & Noble after dinner, and going in, I ran into one of the few people who actually bought the book on launch day. Scott, of Agile’ Marketing Services, helps businesses with all of their marketing issues, including helping them come up with creative names for their advertising purposes. So I asked him what he thought of the book, and he said that he thought it was written well and was perfect for the target audience I was shooting for. I thanked him for that, because one doesn’t always get feedback from things they create, let alone actually get to talk to someone in person.

Anyway, I could talk more about the book, but why not just click on the link above to read more about it, or click on the book itself and just buy it; I won’t be mad.

Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool by Mitch Mitchell

Close to two years ago now, my wife and I went to Turning Stone Casino to see Mariah Carey live in concert. I hadn’t been to a live concert in years, not counting classical concerts. I loved it, whereas my wife, also a Mariah fan, couldn’t stand all the screaming and such from all the girls. Why do girls scream for other girls anyway?

I love Mariah Carey’s singing, but lately she’s not doing as much real singing as, well, performing. That may seem like an odd statement to some, but there’s a marked difference between singing and just entertaining. For instance, her last big hit from earlier this year was Touch My Body, a nice song, but she didn’t really give us a full performance, a true accounting of her talent. Maybe after so many years she’s figured out that many of today’s kids can’t quite keep up with real singing and real songs. Yeah, I said it!

So, what do I really mean about real singing? First, put Touch My Body in your mind for a couple of seconds. Then watch and listen to Mariah kick the behind out of the song Vanishing, here done live, and learn what real singing is:

The 1’s Mariah Carey

I was going about my business, checking my business site, and decided I wanted to compare it to some other sites that do some of the same types of functions I do in my main business. Google Rankings is my preferred tool because I can compare search terms against each other to see where we all rank for those terms.

After doing that for a few sites, I realized that, on my main site, something had caught my eye. So I went back to my site, and at the bottom I noticed something called “Compete” that I really hadn’t paid much attention to before, even though it shows up right next to this tracking for Alexa. No, I don’t have the Alexa toolbar; I use a Firefox plugin called SearchStatus, which tells me my Google page rank, my Alexa rank, and this Compete Rank.

The thing is, on my business site, which is ranked nicely, it said I didn’t have any Compete rank at all; that didn’t sound quite right, but at the same time, I didn’t know what it was. So I went to the site, and I see it’s a lot like Alexa. I decided to do a comparison of my site with a couple other sites that are in the same industry as mine. What it came up with was disturbing. It showed that, in the year between last July and this July, I only had 714 visitors. Since I know that’s not accurate, nowhere close to accurate, I’m pretty much discounting it. However, it also said people find my site through the search term “backing an animal into a corner“; what the heck is that? It did say that it didn’t have much information on any of the sites, and recommended that I load its toolbar; that’s the same thing Alexa asks for.

Most SEO people discount Alexa because it’s rankings seem to be skewed towards people who download and use their toolbar. It would seem to be the same thing for Compete. But I at least have an Alexa ranking; one would hope so, after 6 years on the web and all the optimizing I’ve done on the site. To not even be included in Compete rank, well, that’s almost insulting. I did learn, through research, that it only compares U.S. companies against each other; that makes me feel even worse.

No, I’m not going to be loading toolbars just to get rankings. I loaded Google Toolbar because I use Google, but I also know it had no effect on my page rank. I will continue to use SearchStatus, mainly because it doesn’t hurt to see figures of any kind, but I won’t be thinking much about Compete any time soon. By the way, this blog even has a rank, and I only started it in December; sheesh! Compete seems more incomplete to me.

Though this blog doesn’t get as many overall visitors as my business blog, at least for the moment, it’s ranked higher on Technorati, and, in general, some of the posts here get much higher readership that most of my posts there.

What is amazing to me is just how many posts get either no or very few comments. One would think that, with so many readers, you’d have a certain percentage who would make some kind of comment. But no, it just doesn’t happen.

For my business blog, every once in awhile I post something that I feel is an important topic that I want to share with a good number of my friends. So, I’ll send them the link to the blog, giving them a brief synopsis of what it’s about, hoping that they’ll add their opinion to it. I know many of them go to it because I always see the spike in visitors for those posts, but many times not one of them will post a comment on the blog. They will send me comments back through email, though, and when I ask them why they didn’t put it on the blog, they often say they’re too self conscious to put something out there for everyone to see.

That’s kind of an odd concept in the internet world of 2008, people not wanting someone else to possibly poke fun at something they wrote. Whereas I can understand why people wouldn’t ever want to be ridiculed, and understand that’s why many people never start blogs unless they can remain anonymous, truth be told, there are almost 90 million blogs out here, and I would bet that probably 88 million of them lie dormant, or will be dormant within a month or two, because people tend to start blogging, then either get self conscious or lose the motivation, and just leave their blogs to sit forever on the blogosphere.

Well, if people aren’t writing in their own blogs, then what makes us think they should write in ours? Because people still visit, that’s why. However, if you’ve been online for any period of time, and have done anything with social networking, you know that’s just how it is. I used to run my own group on Ryze some years ago, and I had almost 160 subscribers to the group. However, I may have had 4 people who consistently commented or wrote an original post, and probably 140 of those subscribers never said a word. I don’t even know if they came by to read everything either, but one can check statistics on a post to see how many reads it got, and sometimes a post got a good number of readers, but no one would comment on it. Strange.

Or is it? I subscribe to almost 160 blogs, and yesterday I spent a few hours catching up on all of them. And I posted on a good number of them, on topics I felt I had something to say, but at the end of the day I might have posted on 12 or 13 posts, though I perused or read well over 200 posts (I speed read, so I can tell pretty quickly whether I need to put more time into something or not). That’s not a high ratio, and of course it helps bump up the readership numbers on the blogs of those folks I visited, but since most of them didn’t get any feedback from me they don’t know it was me who visited, and therefore aren’t sure whether they gave me any value or not. And, for me, I can get value and not comment many times, so if it works that way for me, why wouldn’t it work that way for others?

I think that’s why many of us are amazed at bloggers like Problogger, because it seems he can pop in a throwaway post and get 75 people to write something; not that he does that, by the way, but if you take a look back at some of his posts, you see high numbers of commenters on most of his posts. I guess that’s how you become a millionaire by blogging, right?

Anyway, I don’t have any definitive answers, but I do know this. Hopefully I’ll continue writing content as good as I can make it, and entertaining as much as I can, and hopefully, on both blogs, people will start feeling more and more comfortable, and will share with me their thoughts and feelings. And, at least here, if you click on something every once in awhile, I won’t be mad at you.

Something a little different, and yet something related at the same time. Kieron Donoghue, on his blog called Here, has a post titled Internet Stars And Their Cars. In the article, he asks specific question to many people who’ve made big money on the internet about the first cars they bought when they started making the big money, then what kind of car they drive now.

Talk about impressive. I’m someone who really doesn’t know a lot about cars, either the inside or outside of cars, but I know what I like when I see it. On this page, I like the Audi R8, the dream car of David Holmes of Holmes Media; the Masserati Quattroporte, dream car of Neil Patel from QuickSprout; and the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, the dream car of Shakil Khan from Advertising.com. However, my favorite car out of all of these is the Buggatti Veyron, the dream car of Gaj from Gaj-it.com.

Oddly enough, I don’t really have a dream car. I live in central New York, where we have pretty bad weather 7 out of 12 months, and the thought of my buying a dream car that I wouldn’t get to drive all that often has never really appealed to me. Maybe I’m thinking small; not sure about that. However, I do drive this car, which is luxurious enough to me, a Kia Amanti:

That’s luxurious enough for me right now. So, what do you drive?

This is going to be a relatively short post, for once. I’ve always had problems centering images on this blog, which has limited me to always having to have the banner ads below my posts, plus not allowed me to add any image ads to the side of my blog.

I went online to do lots of research, and learned that a lot of people were having problems centering anything on Wordpress 2.6, so I wasn’t alone. I read lots of tips, but none of them applied to my situation, and I realized pretty quickly that all these blog templates are pretty different because all the creators did something just slightly different than everyone else. And I realized that my problem was contained within the CSS file, which many people probably shouldn’t try to mess with.

But I’m not “many” people, so I went searching. I tried a few things here and there, always remembering what I did so I could take it back. Finally, I saw down near the bottom a tag that said “Images”, and saw that it was left justified. So, I changed that from “left” to “none”. Lo and behold, my image centered, and all life is grand once again.

Doesn’t mean I won’t continue posting banner ads, but now I have more choices of what I can do. This may not work for everyone, but if you decide to go looking and find something like this, it just might work for you. Good luck, but be safe and always remember what you did.

Muppet Show Season Three