I’m someone who has always said that there’s nothing wrong with using free themes for your blog because I don’t believe there’s any inherent SEO benefit to using paid themes. Some claim that they’ve seen their income go sky high once they switched, but the overwhelming majority of people don’t make a single dime more than they did using a free theme.
Overall, there’s no major difference between using free or paid except for three things.
Continue reading A Big Danger With Free Themes
Last week I did another one of my experiments. After what turned into a draining holiday week I decided that I was going to step away from social media for a week just to see what would happen. I pretty much thought I knew what would happen on one front; absolutely nothing. I even made a video about it and popped it up on YouTube that I didn’t promote, figuring almost no one would watch it and thus it wouldn’t matter that I announced it somewhere, as it’s the only place I did announce it; that sucker only got 5 views and it got 2 thumbs up; not a bad ratio. lol
I was chillin’
First let me qualify what I considered as social media during this time. It included Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Instagram, Empire Avenue and Twitter. I didn’t respond to anyone from any of those platforms, and I didn’t even go look at those pages, although I admit it was tough initially. After all, I did get email from many of those sources, although I didn’t get a single thing directly to me on any of them; that was somewhat prophetic.
Continue reading Stepping Away From Social Media; The Risks, The Rewards…
I must say it’s been an interesting last 4 months on this blog as it pertains to comments. I wrote a post back in March saying how I was changing how I accept comments here, and much of what was on that post is above the comments box.
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Yet, for some reason, comments still come in with those things that I said would send them to the spam box. And you know what… not one person who’s shown up in the spam box because of a violation of policy has ever written to ask about their comment. Those who have are folks who, for some reason, end up there even though they do everything correct, and I pull their comments out of there; I say sorry in public to Adrienne & Rummuser for that. Go check out their blogs because they’re very informative and entertaining; in that order. 🙂
What is this quest for good comments you might ask? And what makes bad comments?
The quest for good comments is because it makes interactions relevant. A bad comment is one where I talk about colors and you come back and say “looking at colors is important on a blog” or something like that, and that’s all you offer; ugh. I deleted 3 of those from my previous post on being a colorful blogger. I know those are people being paid to write comments or people who are cruisin’ and could care less about their comment being responded to; I mean really, what can you say in response to something like that?
The same goes for people who use “info” as the beginning of their email addresses. Once again, how do I know that the person leaving the comment is going to be the person reading the email? I’d bet that at least 75% of the time no one’s going to read the email because when I was letting those email addresses through in the past I think only 2 people ever responded to anything I specifically said to them. If this is you and it’s supposed to be legitimate let me teach you something about branding; that’s not how it’s done. You want people to trust you then you make sure you use “your” first name and the extension should be your website.
That’s another point. While we all let these things go through, addresses that use gmail, hotmail, yahoo or the rest aren’t great for branding. If you want people to take you seriously, use a website or blog extension as the email, with your name or nickname at the beginning in some fashion.
Let me say this; I’m not necessarily against people who write comments for a living. What I’m looking for is a bit more effort, an attempt to at least look legitimate as far as someone who might actually care about what’s been written. Yes, as a writer of multiple blogs, I like to think my efforts are being appreciated and not just a place where you get to drop a link to your client, or your own blog, with little effort. At least give people a reason to say “hey, that’s a great comment, let me go back to their blog to see what they’re all about.” After all, aren’t you really being paid for that, to help drive business, rather than just trolling for links?
A guy who’s pretty good at that is Carl, who comments here often. He gets paid for commenting, but he leaves true comments, will respond to some of my comments back to him, and still gets to drop links to his clients. I don’t mind that as long as he’s not linking to an affiliate program; yeah, don’t do that either because even if the comment is good I’ll keep the comment but remove that type of link. And don’t even think about dropping a link to an inappropriate site. What’s inappropriate? If I don’t like it, it’s gone; that’s inappropriate. lol
I’m not the only one who feels this way. Adrienne, whom I mentioned above, has a very strict commenting policy. My Hot Blog Tips buddy Brian has started doing the same thing and he’s even harder than I am. Sure, we all risk losing people commenting, our traffic going down, and our rankings suffering in some fashion. But those who are serious about things know that they can come here and, if they’re predisposed to do so, can even talk to others who have left comments because they’re pretty good, and yours truly has vetted them; oh yeah!
Still, if you think I’m a bit too harsh, let me know below, but don’t write something like “I agree; people should write better comments” and think I’m leaving it here. That will just prove you didn’t read the post. Let’s face it, I’m not getting any younger. 😉
Have you ever given thought about all the colors of your blog? You’ve probably given thought to the colors of your blog as you look at it but that’s not the only color on your blog.
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For instance, your font color is something to consider. Have you ever noticed that the font on this blog isn’t really black? It’s kind of a charcoal grey color; close but not quite black. The blog of one of my clients has gold print. There’s nothing wrong with changing certain things like that up as long as it’s still readable against its background.
What about language? Have you ever heard the name William F Buckley Jr? He was acknowledged as one of the smartest men ever, had a TV show that lasted 33 years, wrote a weekly newspaper column and multiple books. In one of them, which I can’t recall at the moment, on the same page he used the words proboscis, stentorian, and miasma of perfidy. There were words like that on every page as a matter of fact, and I only made it through 20 pages before I got tired of pulling out the dictionary so often. I have a pretty good vocabulary, but I try to temper myself, and instead look for synonyms that people know every once in awhile so I don’t sound the same over and over.
All of these things help to give your blog a fresh feel and helps to show what you’re made of. Sure, you want people to learn your style and get comfortable with it. But every once in awhile you need to be fresh, update things a bit, and try not to be so predictable.
In that vein we have the video below which talks about colors and blogging; yeah, I know, you’re not going to watch it, but I’m putting it out here anyway: