Monthly Archives: April 2010

Blogging

Now My Word Is Gold?

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A funny thing has been happening over the last couple of weeks, and I’m not quite sure why.

I have people writing me and asking me to look at their blog posts, then either write about it on one of my blog or actually post the entire thing into my blogs as a guest post. These are people I don’t know and have never heard of, and frankly, coming out of the blue the way it did, initially kind of freaked me out.

Then I got a little upset because I didn’t know these people. I’m sure every once of us has written something and wanted to share it with our friends who don’t follow our blog, or our wives and other family members. But I can’t conceive of searching for someone and asking them to go through all those hoops without building some kind of relationship first. And the idea of reposting an article from someone else’s blog; can’t conceive of that either.

One guy even told me how to do the entire thing; how presumptuous. To his credit, I did decide to go check the post out, and man, you think I write long posts sometimes. It was nearly 4,000 words, with pictures and graphs; almost more of a white paper than a blog post. When I told him I wouldn’t know what to do with that, because it was overwhelming, he wrote back to tell me how I could do it. After I wrote him saying that I didn’t know him, he’d never written anything on my blog and never participated in a discussion, and wasn’t following any of my feeds. He did say that he went through Google Blogs looking for folks who write things on his particular topic and my blog came up, so he was just submitting to everyone.

By the way, it’s not for this blog, but it’s definitely been for my other two blogs. I hadn’t thought my opinion on health care had gotten all that much further than just my own business blog, but I guess the word is starting to spread a little bit more than I had anticipated. And my finance blog is hitting kind of a renaissance as well. That one, by the way, now has all sorts of people wanting to advertise on it; but that’s the next post.

What’s your thought on someone you don’t know reaching out to you, asking you to read their stuff, then write about it on your blog? Do you find it intrusive or flattering?

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Motivation/Inspiration

10 Things that Lead to a Happier, Healthier You

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In my own way, to show that I do things for my own reasons and not for other people’s reasons, I’m taking on what I call kind of a meme, which is based off this article on a blog called TwitterMoms titled Share 10 Little Things that Lead to a Happier, Healthier You. Actually, the title is much longer, because it’s actually part of some contest where you can win a gift card and some Tropicana juice stuff. Frankly, I don’t care about all of that, which is why I’m not doing all the other stuff they’re asking for. Instead, I thought it would be fun to do this particular thing.

Why am I doing this? A few reasons. One, because I want to show some of the things I write about on my business blog, which includes motivational stuff here and there; I sometimes do that here as well. Two, because I want to show that I do know some things that might make me healthier and happier, even if I don’t do all of them.

And three, because I love some memes. I hope you clicked on the link above if you don’t know what one is. However, you can check out the other 3 memes I’ve played with: Passion Quilt; Soundtrack of Your Life; and 7 Things You Don’t Know About Me.

Anyway, here’s my list of 10:

1. Hug the people you care about at least once a day. I hug my wife multiple times a day, and when I see friends, I try to get hugs in as well. Had to learn how to hug my guy friends, but that only happens if they can handle it as well.

2. Find something that will make you laugh at least 30 minutes a day. I don’t do this one every day, but I find when I do it that I feel really good.

3. Eat in some kind of moderation so you don’t feel sick to your stomach. When I plan my meals I do very well, but a night like Monday night, when I was at a meeting, convinced me that I could break from my pattern and eat a lot of pizza, which I don’t eat at home; ugh!

4. Have at least one small sweet treat a day. If I don’t have a sweet treat every day I tend to get into a mode where I want a lot of it, and of course that’s not good for me. So my wife doles it out to me a little bit at a time, and I appreciate that she does that for me, even if I can’t figure out where she’s hiding it.

5. Find a reason to get at least 30 minutes a day to yourself in some fashion. I’m bad at this one because even when I take a break, I do it at the computer. I need to convince myself to get away from it here and there.

6. Find a way to get at least a little bit of exercise every day, even if it’s only 15 minutes. Yeah, this one I’m really bad at. I do something maybe 3 or 4 days a week, but when I can get myself into a good mode, I’ll try to do something longer and at least twice a day. When it gets warmer, if I’m home this summer, I’ll be at the lake in the morning and the afternoon walking.

7. At least a few times a day, do a little bit of stretching. What I’m learning is that it’s not necessarily that my being out of shape is what injures me here and there, it’s that everything is so tight. I’ve taken to doing some stretching exercises daily, and a few times a day I’ll just stop and stretch in a few positions for about a minute or two. It all helps.

8. If you feel bad in any way for 7 days or more, see a doctor. I refer you to my story of how I discovered I was diabetic back in 1997 by paying attention to some signs that many people ignore.

9. Try not to take yourself too seriously. Sometimes I have problems with this, but I also laugh at myself many times a day. I tend to view almost every situation as some kind of story, which means I try to recall it so I can tell it later on. If it ends up being funny, even better.

10. Feel good about yourself. When I talked about the movie The Secret, I mentioned this thing about the laws of attraction. If you feel good about yourself and think positive things, positive things come into your life. A motivational speaker named Zig Ziglar says “Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” I like to add “and you’ll feel pretty good as well.”

And there you go. Now, I always ask people to do their own meme based on my participating, and to date no one has ever followed me and given it a shot. For this one, I wonder who’ll step up to the plate and keep it going; maybe one of my Power 50 friends? 🙂

SEO

SEO Doctor

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From Kristi’s most recent Fetching Friday post came an article from Search Engine Journal on a Firefox plugin called SEO Doctor. In essence, it gives you a heck of a lot of information on how your SEO efforts are working on your website, and if you know how to dig deeper, might give you some indications of what you can do better.

After checkout out the article, I went to the page, downloaded the plugin, and of course added it to my browser, where it’s sitting at the lower left as I type. The biggies, as it pertains to what you want to know, are: the percentage, out of 100%, of effectiveness your page is in its SEO efforts; the number of external links and links overall on that page; and the number of visits that page has received.

When I go to my main business site, it’s ranked at 96% out of 100%; I like that. Some of my other pages on that site are perfect, and I like that even better. The worst page on that site comes in at 90%. It shows me I have 3 external links and 43 links overall; I had to go counting to find those links overall, but they’re there. It shows me… well, it shows me nothing as it pertains to visits. That’s because you have to belong to Compete, and you have to have an API key to pop in, and of course I’m not signing up for that. I wish I could change it to something else, but I’m stuck with that; oh well…

There are two other things on the toolbar as well. One is something called Flow, which measures the percentage of page rank you’re retaining on your site. Since y’all know I don’t particularly follow page rank all that much, I’m not worried about it, which is why it’s not in my top 3. However, on my business page it says I’m retaining 88% of my page rank. The last thing is this little green tab to the far right, which allows me to track nofollow links if I so choose; I don’t at this juncture, but it’s neat enough to take a quick look at.

Finally, you can right click on any of the information listed and get even more information, which you can download if you prefer in a .csv format. Of course, if you have nothing in Compete, that one won’t work.

Anyway, it’s a neat little tool you might want to check out, but of course you have to be on Firefox to use it.

Web Stuff

Formspring.me

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This is something different that I bet most of us wouldn’t really have the courage to use; at least I know I don’t.

It’s called Formspring.me. What it allows you to do is set up an account where people can anonymously ask you questions about pretty much anything, and you answer them. You have the opportunity to tell people the types of things you talk about so that maybe people will stay on topic, but they can deviate at any moment and ask you about pretty much anything.

How did I discover it? One of my Twitter friends, a local young lady, created an account that she’d heard of from someone else, and started promoting it there. She answers questions about sex, mainly about her own escapades, and no, I’m not going to link to it. Yeah, she’s pretty open about it on Twitter with people who follow her, and if she decides she wants to post something here about it then that’s on her.

Suffice it to say, she created the account, put it up on Twitter, and I tracked it there to see what it was all about. It’s eye opening stuff, and she’s really open about her thoughts and experiences. I didn’t know someone could experience so much before the age of 25; man, I’ve not lived at all!

Anyway, you’ll find it’s a pretty simple page. There’s no searching; you pretty much have to tell people you have an account once you create one, and you’ll probably have to keep telling them to keep them coming back. Actually, it might be a good thing for business sites; I might have to rethink this one for one of my sites. We’ll see.

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Personal

Do You Protect Others Better Than You Protect Yourself?

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Last night my wife and I were having a conversation about things that had surprised us about each other. One thing that came up was how, when the need arises, we tend to change our demeanor up in protecting each other, as opposed to when we’re protecting or supporting ourselves.


Safety and Protection

I’m not one who raises my voice in anger. When I raise my voice, I’m usually happy in some regard. And I’m generally a very easy going guy. However, I’ve noticed what when someone or something is not treating my wife well, I don’t yell, but I do go on the attack. And I don’t play nice, something that surprised my wife because she’s noticed I usually give people a lot of leeway when it comes to messing with me, although I do try to cerebrally castigate them if I have to.

My wife has done the same for me. We’ve been in restaurants where she’s made demands on stuff that I might not like. Not that I won’t say something many times, but how I address things and how she addresses them is much different.

I noticed earlier today that our friend Sire had a comment on his blog where the guy pretty much called him an idiot. Sire responded in his normally gracious way, and the guy didn’t quite apologize, saying he likes to speak directly with people, but was glad Sire took it in the matter in which he meant it. I didn’t; I thought it was grossly inappropriate, and I decided to take up the spear and thrust it back in my own way. You’ll remember that I wrote an article on web courtesy; you come into my house, I don’t mind that you disagree with me, but you’re going to respect me. And you’re going to respect my friends in their house, unless you want to pay the bills.

Am I sensitive? Sometimes I’ll admit that. I tend to believe you teach people how to treat you, and you also treat people as you wish to be treated. I’m so thankful that everyone who has participated on this blog has shown great deportment over the years, and trust me I appreciate it. I hope I treat everyone with the utmost respect because I hope to get that back. We can disagree; I’m certainly not perfect. But there are ways we can all support our beliefs without being rude.

Kind of like customer service, eh? 🙂

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