I have never made it a secret that I’m not a big fan of the free blog sites like Blogger and WordPress.com. My main gripe has been how comments are handled; less freedom for those of us who want to comment on those platforms, which I really hate. WordPress.com fools you into thinking you have freedom, but if you ever want to see a response to your comment you either have to subscribe to the blog (each one individually, not to wordpress.com one time) or keep visiting the post to see if someone responded to you or not.

via Flickr

There’s also another reason I’ve never been a fan of sites like that. At a moment’s notice they can decide to censor you, freeze or delete your blog, and there you are, lost, without any real access to your content. I put it that way because you can always get your content by going to a search engine and looking up each individual post (I had to do that back in 2006 for one of my blogs, which I lost for a different reason, so I know it can be done).

Often you won’t know what it is you did that made them take away your blog or censor it. In this particular instance, Google is now telling people up front that for certain countries they will censor your blog if those countries have laws that restrict what people are allowed to say. This follows two previous changes, those being one, to start censoring search results in countries that have censorship laws, and two, the new Google Search+ Your World thing.

Now, there’s nothing you can do about the one in the middle, and the last one is interesting as to whether most people will fight it or not, but that first one is intriguing. Think of it this way; if you’re in a country that restricts freedom of speech and you have a blog in that country, do you really think you’re going to keep your blog if the powers that be decide you’re to be censored? If you’re outside that country and writing bad things about that country continually, do you really believe Google (oh yeah, Google owns Blogpost, or Blogger, whichever you prefer) won’t eventually just shut down that blog for being a nuisance?

That’s always been a problem with free blogs, although it’s not just restricted to them. Many of these blog promotion services that I also don’t trust all that much get people to help them out by saying that sharing their content through those sites helps you more than it helps them, but in a moment’s notice they can drop you like a bad habit and not ever tell you why. That recently happened to David Leonhardt, a commenter on this blog, and one of the reasons I never signed up with Digg was because I remembered the story of them dropping a very popular blogger, who had promoted them a lot, for whatever reason without giving him at least a warning that maybe something else he was doing violated their terms of service.

This is why I try to promote the concept that people pay the little bit of money and get their own blog space. Think about it; for possibly less than $50 a year (for hosting) you can add as many blogs and websites as you probably want (unless you’re a power creator; then it’ll cost you a little bit more) with little restriction, because of course there’s going to be some restriction. With shared hosting there might be issues of bandwidth (but if that happens it means you have so many visitors that if you haven’t figured out monetization at that point you need to go to internet school) and certain types of scripts (no hosting company wants someone popping malware and scripts within their servers, like it seems these people are doing. But censor what you have to say… none of them do, because online, if you pay for it, you can say it, no matter if it’s stupid or brilliant.

Just something to think about on a Monday morning in February.
 

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This is a sticky post, which means it will be up at the top of this page for a couple of weeks. Newer content after this one; check it out.

Well now, this is something new, at least for me. It seems there are these social media awards called the Shorty Awards that actually have people nominate them for awards in different social media categories and allow people to ask for others to nominate them. At a certain date, all the voting ends and there’s a winner, and they win… what? I’ll come back to that.

Click the image!

I decided to ask for some support in getting nominated for a Shorty; yeah, I’m linking it often in this post so no one can legitimately say they didn’t know how to get there. I want to be nominated, and I want to be nominated in the “blogger” category.

First, it seems you have to know my Twitter handle to nominate me; it’s mitch_m; remember that. And you have to have a Twitter account to vote, or at least that’s what it looks like.

Second, here’s my pitch for why I feel I deserve to be nominated and voted for. I just hit post #1,200 on this blog. I’ve written more than 900 posts on my main business blog, have more than 500 on my finance blog (okay, I didn’t write all of those, but most of them), and more than 50 posts on two other blogs, one of those which I just started in August. I blog for other people as well; one client I’ve been writing for about 2 1/2 years.

Three, writing diversity. Goodness, I’ve written on 35 different general topics on this blog alone; I don’t want to go back to see how many different categories total I’ve written about on my other blogs, but I know I’ve written on at least 20 different categories of blogs for other people.

I think that’s enough. Truthfully, I don’t expect to win a Shorty because I’m starting too late. The contest started on January 3 and runs through February 17th, so I’m already two weeks behind. The leader in the category already has more than 9,000 votes, and the closest competitor is more than 4 times behind him. However, right now the person in the 10th position only has 166 votes, and I think that one can be overcome by starting now. I’d love to finish in the top 10; why not, right? By the way, if you want to vote for me in the social media category as well, I won’t be depressed by that either, but I’m shooting for blogger.

Also, to vote, since it’s through Twitter, you’ll have to authorize it access to your Twitter account for awhile, at least until the voting is over. That makes sense as it wouldn’t know who you were if it didn’t do that. Maybe it cuts down on cheating, though I haven’t found anything yet saying you can’t vote for a person more than once, and you certainly can vote many times if you have a lot of folks you want to vouch for; it tells you that after you authorize it. I’m thinking it’s smarmy to vote for yourself, but I haven’t seen in the rules where you’re not allowed to do that either. Your vote won’t immediately show up, but it will eventually; I know that because it took awhile before the person I voted for in testing it didn’t immediately show up. Actually, I was surprised no one else had nominated her yet (nope, I’m not telling lol).

And there you have it. Yes, a little self serving, but if you don’t ask… Vote me in for a Shorty; thanks!

Update!!! Seems that indeed you can vote without having to go to the website. Here are the rest of the rules:

• To vote, send a tweet like this: I nominate @TwitterUser for a Shorty Award in #category because [add reason here]. You can do this using the form on our site, from Twitter itself, or from any Twitter client. (PS; all links above surrounding “Shorty” will take you directly to Twitter except for the first one)
• You can also send shorter votes like this: #shortyawards @username #category [add reason here]. This short format is helpful when you want to vote from a party, on the road, in a meeting, or on a boat.
• A tweet that ends in “because…” will not be counted.
• Vote for as many different people as you want in as many categories as you want, as often as you want.
• Only one person and one category per tweet.
• Voting for the same person in the same category more than once just replaces the text of your original vote.

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Goodness, we just keep plowing along in this little space, don’t we? The title says it all; this is post #1,200 on this blog, and like Post #1,100, it’s taken me 5 months. It would have been exactly 5 months if I’d gone ahead and written the two posts I thought about writing but I wanted yesterday to be about the King Holiday, which I wrote about on my business blog.

So, how well did I stick with the mission of this blog, if I can call it that? I stated that I’d probably mainly talk about blogging and social media. I ended up with 24 posts on blogging and 15 on social media; that’s pretty true to form. I wrote a 6-part series on affiliate programs I’m active with, which was something different. And what was pretty amazing, at least to me, is that I actually touched on 25 different categories, the most ever in one month.

I got personal these last 5 months as well, as I had to deal with my grandmother passing away and some other personal stuff as well. I talked about the 10th anniversary of the Twin Towers tragedy from September 11th, 2001. I talked about my first (and maybe last) colonoscopy. And I talked about my feelings as an older black man lost in a mission that sometimes feels like I’m the only one out there, as old radical if you will.

It’s that last one that I’m going to expand a bit more on over the next bunch of months, which I’m actually hoping to extend for the rest of the year. But I want to tell you why I’m going to do it.

Last year I ended up highlighting 58 black people in social media. That came about because I kept seeing lists of bloggers and social media “celebrities” and not seeing any black people on the list. The campaign did what it was supposed to do in a way, but in a way it failed as well.

Why do I say it failed? Last week there was a post by our buddy Marcus Sheridan where he talked about making someone’s top blogger list and how there wasn’t any real significance to it. Of course I’ve written here why there really is some significance to it, so I commented on his post.

The creator of the list wrote me there and it turns out she’d also written the list the previous year which got me going. We had a brief conversation in the comments where she owned up to the fact that she doesn’t know any black bloggers; heck, what was I? lol Anyway, she said that maybe it was something she should look at since her list only ended up having one person of color as well.

Then someone else piped in, saying I was looking for a quota (folks, if there’s not even one, talking quota makes you look stupid) and how it had nothing to do with race because there were a lot of people of color blogging. She then proceeded to name 2, and followed that up with “I’m sure there’s others”. Wow, if you can only name 2 you haven’t done your homework; did I happen to mention that I came up with 58 here last year?

So, my plan is to have what I’m going to call “Black Web Friday”, so that I don’t pigeon hole myself. The idea is that I’m going to highlight anywhere from one to 3 websites either written by, about, or for black audiences. This allows me to be as broad as I want to be because with the series last year, the major criteria was that each person I highlighted had to have a blog. My concentration will be bloggers, individuals, but it’s not all I’m going to share. You know that thing about niche and not limiting oneself? That’s the plan.

And it’s going to be a test as well because truthfully I’m not expecting those posts to get many visitors; heck, I don’t expect this one to get all that many either. But that’s not always the point is it? I was talking to our buddy Mitch Allen about it and he said if I felt strongly enough about it that I should do something, no matter what anyone thought, including the people I may write about.

So, that’s what I’m going to do. Now, I might mention some of the people I mentioned before, though that’s not the major plan, because last year I just listed people; this time around I plan on writing more than just a one line introduction. I want to bring these sites and folks to you in the hope that maybe some of the topics or conversations might interest you enough to go take a look. That’s the goal; let’s see how it goes.

One final thing. The post before #1,100 talked about not responding to all comments anymore because some comments just weren’t all that good. Then two weeks ago I was having a conversation with our buddy Adrienne Smith on her blog about the subject and she said that she responds to all comments because those comments from new people that she thinks are bad, suspect, or don’t bring anything to the conversation she just deletes. I had already been deleting any comments that didn’t follow the comment policy but she makes an interesting point. If a comment isn’t worth responding to, is it worth keeping, especially from someone you don’t know who may never come back? I’m going to be thinking about that one over the next couple of weeks but as a test to see how many people actually read this entire thing what’s your thought on this last point?

Enough; I love these milestone posts because they make me look back through my blog, and then share some other posts that I hope are somewhat intriguing to you, the readers. Let’s see what the next 4 or 5 months brings.
 

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For those of you who are relatively new to this blog, let me tell you something I hate: toolbars. That is, I hate them on websites and on blogs; I don’t mind if you want to have a toolbar on your browser because that’s not getting in my way, although I keep fighting the Google sidebar (a toolbar in its own fashion).

Of course I just led into my newest gripe; sidebar toolbars. In a rant I wrote last June on things that irritated me about blogs, I commented on these toolbars getting in the way of trying to read a post for a couple of reasons.

One, I like reading things a little larger than the norm. When I increase the size of the font, these toolbars increase as well, and suddenly they’re blocking all the content, making me bring everything down to size again. That’s irritating.

Two, you have your sidebar following me down the side as I try to get into some of your content. Now it’s not only big, but I can’t outrun it; that’s irritating as well.

You know, I get it. You read somewhere that you need to make sure people know how to share your stuff on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, etc. You’ve tried other things and you’re not sure if people are actually seeing these things because you have no idea if your traffic is going up or not. So you’ve figured “hey, if this thing is always in their line of sight, there’s no way they can miss it.

You got that right; what you don’t have right is that now people can’t read your content, and if they’re like me they’ll just leave and, well, so much for anyone sharing anything. And if I don’t like you I’m never coming back; so much for traffic as well. See the image above? That’s what I’m seeing with my text enlarged. Not only did it cover text, but as you can see the bottom part is cut off anyway, so if I’d wanted to share it via the final 3 options it gives me I’d have to reduce my text just to see it.

The funny thing is that what finally prompted this post is that someone I like recently wrote a post talking about how her traffic has dropped, and I can’t read it unless I make everything smaller because there’s this large sidebar toolbar blocking everything on the left side, and no matter where I go it’s there. I’m thinking that can’t help. And no, I’m not naming names; I’ll say something if she sees this post.

Of course, though I’ve been busting on sidebar toolbars, I can’t resist busting on those other little toolbars that follow you as you’re scrolling down a post as well. They’re sometimes on the bottom and sometimes on the top, and the purpose is the same as those moving sidebar toolbars; irritating as sin because it distracts you from reading. At least it distracts me.

I’m seeing these things starting to pop up on news sites as well, and it’s driving me nuts. I know I talked about our reluctance to market ourselves but this isn’t the way to overcome that if you ask me.

Folks, how many times does one have to state the fact that if you have things on your blog that irritates people and it’s not the content that you’re going to drive people away? Toolbars, popups, music playing when you get there, too much flash, people walking out from the side and talking to you (that always freaks me out)… stop it! lol

I know I can’t be alone on this one; speak y’all!
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

Most people don’t know about the connection between sleeping and eating. They think they do, and there are many tales of how eating one thing produced this or that kind of dream, or not sleeping on full or empty stomachs and the like. As it turns out, there are a few lessons one can learn about these two things, and how they’re related to blogging. Don’t think I can do it? Let’s find out.

by Jessica Merz via Flickr

1. Did you know that you could survive more than 60 days without food if you at least have something legitimate to drink? That doesn’t mean it’s great living, but it’s survival, which means you have a chance to overcome whatever problems you might have if that’s the reason why you can’t eat.

It’s like blogging; your blog can survive if you decide to write only once a month or even once every 2 to 3 months, but is it really blogging? Will your blog or website get much benefit out of it without more output?

2. Did you know that you wouldn’t survive more than a week without sleeping (although there have been some anomalies, but it’s uber rare)? For most people, even if you tried not to sleep for more than 72 hours your body and mind will overcome you and you’ll dose here and there. My record is 81 1/2 hours, and I can honestly say it was miserable, but I got through it.

This is like blogging once you get into it. For awhile at least you’ll find yourself having more things to say and feeling a need to write, even if you’re not in the mood to do so. Of course this presupposes that you’ve fully embraced blogging and all that comes with it.

3. Did you know that when you get older you’d rather sleep than eat, but how dangerous that is? From around the age of 45 or so people actually do start eating less, even if their weight doesn’t always show it. Inactivity has more to do with weight gain at that point than how much one eats. However, when there’s the choice between sleeping and eating, most people will choose to sleep, and the older you get, the less energy doing that gives you as far as waking up or wanting to do anything else. The act of sleeping stems the act of being hungry, which is fine when we’re younger, but not so much as we get older. Most times, when a person in a nursing home starts sleeping and won’t eat, it’s pretty much known that they won’t be alive much longer.

If you don’t love blogging, and you have the choice between blogging and doing something else, you’re going to do something else, and after awhile you’re not going to want to blog anymore. In this case you probably won’t expire, but if you thought blogging was necessary for your business you’re going to find reasons not to do it and your blog will die out. This is the reason why some people recommend having publishing schedules if you’re blogging more out of necessity than enjoyment. Of course, the real idea of blogging is to find something you enjoy talking about so that you don’t tire of it.

4. Eating can help you sleep, but what you eat will definitely affect how you sleep. All of us have different types of food that affect us positively or negatively, and how close we eat these things to when we go to sleep or fall asleep can mess us up.

For instance, eating a high amount of carbs will put me to sleep during the day within 30 to 60 minutes, no matter what it is. If I eat it late in the evening, close to when I’m going to bed, there’s no effect at all. But if I eat something with acidic sauce, like tomato sauce, and go to bed within 3 hours I’m going to be sick all night, probably wake up sick, and sleep horribly. If I eat a salad I tend to sleep well, but I hate salads that late at night so it’s not something I do all that often; yeah, stupidly stubborn that way.

How you decide to write your blog will have a major effect on how much you enjoy writing on it. If you tend to write long, boring posts that are more like textbooks than prose, you’re going to hate it. If you niche yourself so much that it’s a chore trying to figure out what to write, you’re not going to be encouraged to write. This is why so many people recommend finding something you enjoy talking about and why I recommend that if you’re going to write on a certain niche not to make it so tight that it limits what you can write about. Most people should be able to figure out what they like to write or talk about without needing someone else to tell them how to do it or what to write about.

I think that’s enough for now; time for a sandwich, then a nap.
 

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Back on December 21st I warned folks about updating to the latest version of Easy Admin Color Schemes because it had been changed to work with a higher version of PHP than most of us had access to. In essence, if you updated you probably lost your blog until you went through your PHP program and deleted the program entirely.

I thought it was time for an update and a tale; yeah, there’s always a story isn’t there?

After the post went live, I was contacted by the guy who created it, James Dimick, and we talked about the issue for a bit. He eventually went back and updated the version again, changing it back so that all of us could get back to using it.

That seems like it would be a great thing, but at the time it didn’t quite work out as well as hoped. Instead of coming back to work as one might hope, it took away all color and never showed up underneath the Settings tab, since he changed it to be more of a standalone plugin than having to go under settings. I was dismayed, as I did the update on a different blog than the one I’d originally had problems with. He said he’d see what he could find, and that’s where we left off.

But y’all know me; I just can’t let things go. The first thing I did was delete the entire plugin and loaded it again, as I’d just updated it on the second blog. Lo and behold, it worked doing it that way, with the listing showing up independently under the settings area. Unfortunately, it didn’t bring back my color scheme.

That actually leads me to point number two. What I don’t think James realized, as I re-read our comments, is that I had gone in and customized all my colors to be what I wanted them to be, instead of using what came with the program. It comes with 4 color choices but I’m one of those “under the hood” guys when I can be, and I wanted different colors for each blog. Anyway, when I updated things, because he had changed things so drastically. He’d even said that if you updated and had made changes to the original program that it wouldn’t recognize any previous changes and thus would remove them.

What to do? Well, with the one where I reloaded the plugin, I went into the CSS of one of the other blogs where I’d made changes and copied that specific data into a notepad document. Then I took a shot at adding my own custom color scheme, which it allows you to do, and I pasted that code into the box, changing the coded colors to something really drastic so I could easily identify what was being changed. Once I saw that then I went and found the color codes that I really wanted to use and things look pretty good. It’s not exactly what I had before, but it’s pretty close, and the image below is what the admin area of that particular blog looks like now (click on the image, then click again when it opens elsewhere to see a larger version of the image):

So, here are the recommendations:

1. If you’ve made any color modifications at all, copy the entire code and paste it into another space; Notepad works well.

3. Either paste your entire code into the “add new” area or only add in the code you actually changed before; all else will work if you don’t post everything in.

That’s about it. Thanks for changing things back James, and I hope people will continue using this plugin because overall it’s pretty neat.
 

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I debated many things when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to talk about with the last post of the year. Did I want to talk about blogging again? Maybe writing? Maybe a rant on some social media event that irked me?

While I was conflicted I decided to address some comments, and there’s where I found what I was going to talk about; comments! But not just any ol’ thing. I was going to talk about the number of comments, as in more than 20,000. Yesterday I hit the 20,000 comment mark on this blog; yay! That’s a lot of people. Now, about 40% of the comments are mine, but I think responding to the comments of others is pretty important, especially when they’ve put some time and effort into it, and that still means that at least 12,000 of those comments are from y’all, so I thank you for it.

I tend to think that comments are kind of the life blood of a blog. True, some people could care less about comments, and they either block them altogether or never respond to any that they get. I think that’s discourteous, and I can’t see myself doing anything like that. I look to things that turn out to be milestones as a way of motivating myself to do bigger and better things. And even though I’m expecting my traffic to slip some over the next month or so, I hope that by keeping up with my content on a regular basis and controlling what my topics will be better that I’ll turn the corner and progress further in the new year than I did this year.

It is in that spirit that I thank all of you that commented and visited this year, and I hope for more as time goes on. And I hope you enjoy the little video below, as this ends up being one of my shorter posts of the year (ever); love ya all!

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A recommendation I’ve made on this blog when it comes to finding things to write about from time to time is to write about an article you read somewhere else and give your take on it. In this case it works well for me because the blog in question has a comment system I don’t feel like dealing with and yet I have something to say.

Gonna be on fire in 2012!

The article is written by Dorie Clark on the Harvard Business Review site and it’s titled Five Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012. I loved the article for the most part, and because I think you should check it out I’m not going to repost everything she wrote. But I am going to post the specific topics and address them in my own words. Remember, these are things to stop doing:

1. Responding Like a Trained Monkey. I’d have to say that this is the hardest thing for me. I trained myself years ago to stop answering the phone if I didn’t know who was calling, even for business calls, and that’s eased my mind a lot. However, I still find that I have certain online habits that I wish I could break, and other habits I need to create to make a healthier me, such as eating better, resting more, and coming to grips with the reality that I don’t have to try to produce something new every few minutes, or respond to chess moves or any of the few other games I play online, just because someone has made a move. Ridiculous thing to be addicted to; I need to go back to counting things. lol
2. Mindless Traditions. I’ve been cutting back on Christmas and holiday cards over the years because I can connect with so many of my friends online these days. In the past it was a necessary evil because I might only talk to these folks once a year, that being during the Christmas holiday. As it pertains to traditions in general I’ve given some up that impede what I want to do with my life, while sticking to others because, well, I just have to do it. lol But I don’t find myself stressing over any of them, and that’s the major point here. My mother used to get sick at every holiday when I was a kid; her life is so much healthier now that she’s given that kind of thing up.
3. Reading Annoying Things. In September 2010 I wrote a post talking about de-stressing my life by not commenting on some blogs and also not reading some things that I knew would irritate me and rile me up. Sometimes you just can’t help reading certain things because they draw you in like quicksand, but for the most part, I’ve been able to stop myself from reading things I knew would either depress or anger me. I don’t like to get into arguments just for the sake of it, but I also know I won’t back down and will offer my opinion when I feel strong enough about the topic. But I also know I don’t know how to let go, so it’s best most of the time to not even go there.
4. Work That’s Not Worth It. Ten years ago I went into business for myself and celebrated my 10th anniversary in June. I’m not gonig to lie and say that everything has been easy. I will say that working for myself has been pretty satisfying in that I don’t have that daily pressure to perform so someone else can reap all the benefits. I don’t have anyone hanging the risk of being unemployed over my head. I don’t have to deal with making sure I get along with all the other people working at my company. I get to work with whoever I want to, turn down things as I see fit, and all the other benefits that are associated with being independent. Of course I also have to scramble for clients here and there but overall, it’s worth it to me because I get to do what I like.
5. Making Things More Complicated Than They Should Be. Talk about timing being everything. I had just written an article on my business blog yesterday titled Simple Solutions where I talked about how we tend to look at problems as these major things and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to fix things when sometimes simple solutions are sitting right in front of us. This is one of those things I talk about all the time as it pertains to blogging. Sure, if you have a niche blog maybe things are slightly complicated, but look at how I just got an entire blog post from an idea someone else started. How hard was this?

Wow, that was interesting for me; what do you think? How would you respond to each of these? Hey, why not make this kind of a meme; give your answers on your own blog and invite people to check it out. Or just respond here; I’d love to know how you feel about it.
 

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A few days ago I came across a blog written by Robert Dempsey of Dempsey Marketing and read a post titled Is A Blog Really Meant For Engagement? His overall premise was that blogs indeed were for engagement and that social media offers many ways to help create that engagement and that it can be measured using Google Analytics through one of their new options titled, appropriately enough, Engagement.

No, we don’t mean this lol

As it figures, the first bit of irony I came across is that you have to log in to leave a comment on his blog, and that took me 3 or 4 minutes to find. So much for easy engagement, since y’all know I don’t log in to anything to leave an opinion.

First, you have to find it. It’s listed under Audience, then social, and it’s your first choice. What you’ll immediately notice is that it looks just like the overview page; what the hey? Well, that tells us nothing. Under mine for this blog there are two listings, one saying “not socially engaged” and the other saying “socially engaged”; that one has only 19 visits under it, while the other is well over 6,500.

That meant nothing to me so I clicked on the one that said socially engaged to see what that 19 represented. What came up is a listing of just what socially engaged meant, and it meant that 19 people either liked it or gave it a +1, as it’s associated with Google Plus. So, it’s not counting Twitter or Facebook or anyone else? Okay…

I went back and clicked on the not socially engaged link and nothing comes up. Actually that’s not quite true; it says it has no information to share with me. The actual words are “There is no data for this view.” Four years worth of data and it has nothing?

I went back to the socially engaged group because there are other stats you can glean from them. If you click on a tab that says “secondary dimension” it gives you choices of stuff you can find out about the folks you’re engaged with. Mine says these people average around 25 minutes on my site; oh yeah! And my bounce rate is only around 34%; not bad. Finally, those 19 people visit an average of 3.3 pages on every visit; not depressing.

But it’s skewed. For one, it’s including me somehow, even though I’ve never come to my own site via G+; just wouldn’t make sense. Then someone from Abuja (where?) came by, looked at 2 pages, and stayed for more than 2 hours. That kind of thing will really play with one’s numbers. And I couldn’t figure out what anyone had viewed; ugh.

So, let’s start with this. Engagement is pretty fancy for “look at how Google+ is helping you… or not.” That doesn’t quite help.

Next, let’s talk about the topic in general, that being engagement and whether it’s what we want. Of course it’s what we want; if not, I wouldn’t write all those posts about making it easy to comment on your blog! I wouldn’t talk about comment systems. I wouldn’t bust on Seth Godin so much if I didn’t believe in engagement. I wouldn’t have given love to so many people if I didn’t believe in engagement.

Is there anyone, other than Seth Godin (heck, I did it again), who doesn’t believe in engagement when it comes to blogging?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

This was quite an intriguing year for me. There were some changes I made, some changes I will be making, some things I won’t be changing, some things I wrote about here that worked and some that didn’t. In essence, it was an incredible year, and unfortunately I can’t say it was all good or bad. But it was honest, and on this Christmas day I’d like to share some thoughts, feelings, and ideas with you to see what you think, what you’ll do as well, and what you think might just be nuts.

by Don O’Brien via Flickr

1. I learned that I am better live than on video. This was the year of video for me as I got my first camera and made my first 11 videos ever. I even learned that I had a YouTube channel that I knew nothing about. I gave 3 live presentations this year and got better feedback from all of those than I did for at least 9 of my 11 videos, but that’s okay. Live I get to move around and laugh with people; on video, I have to sit at my desk and just talk. Yes, I’ll be making more videos this year as I endeavor to get better and to just create more content; think about subscribing to my page, although I expect I’ll be embedding those videos on my blogs as well. Oh yeah, a major lesson; if you’re making videos to drive people to your website or blog be sure to tell them what the link is; ugh!

2. You never know what’s going to catch on with people or how it’ll manifest itself. Would it surprise anyone that the top 5 visited posts of mine in 2011 were written before 2011? Well, that’s not totally true; post #5 was written this year, which is pretty cool. My number one post is that tongue in cheek post about “cleavage” that I wrote in January 2010, and it’s so far ahead of all the other posts that I’ve decided it’s time to remove it from being viewed anymore.

You might ask why, or maybe you don’t care, but I’ll tell you why. It’s been viewed 4 times more than the next closest post, and that’s just ridiculous. At the same time, I think it throws off anything else this blog might be about. The number one search term for this blog is “cleavage” with “cleavages” coming in at #8; I didn’t even know that was a word. So it’s gone. I expect my traffic to drop a bunch over the next few months but as my friend John Dilbeck recently wrote, it’s about ethics and integrity sometimes.

3. That post at #5 that I mentioned above proves that there’s not only a lack of attention for some groups of people in social media, but that some people are ready and willing to help make inclusion of others a part of their mission. That of course was my post on 21 of the top Black Social Media Influencers. That one touched a nerve and sparked a lot of interest, and I saw where there were posts from others having lists of folks that weren’t the same as what big media lists all the time, which is often devoid of persons of color. Of course, it also got quickly forgotten, which pretty much helped to lead to my post about feeling like an old black radical, which was one of my most commented works of the year.

4. People love to hate what you love to hate. That’s a strange thing to say but it seems to be pretty true. When you don’t like something it seems to touch a nerve for a lot of other people who have hated the same thing but either couldn’t figure out how to say it or didn’t want to say it first. My post on the Top 21 was my most commented on post of the year, but the next 5 were all from some kind of rant I wrote about concerning either blogging or social media. The top commented on post was when I avowed that I wasn’t registering to comment on other blogs and a few other things I didn’t like, with 60 comments. Yeah, that may seem pitiful when many other bloggers have hundreds of comments on their posts but so be it. Maybe this does mean that being controversial does work; still, you’d best be ready for it.

5. Sometimes your worst isn’t so bad while other times it really is. I had 15 posts in 2011 that didn’t even get 10 comments, and since I respond to most comments, that’s pretty bad. Actually, it’s less than 5%, but I still don’t like it. The post that tanked the worst for the year was when I wrote about AffinityClick, an affiliate program that everyone else must have already knew was pretty bad before I wrote about it since not even the 2 people that commented on it referenced it. Now that’s a real shame, as it ended up with only 5 comments. The next one surprised me, that being when I asked people what makes you smile and included the cutest video of a penguin being tickled that just made me smile a lot. This last one didn’t surprise me all that much as I gave a CPAP followup; if you don’t have sleep issues why would you care?

Having said that, some posts that seemed like they didn’t do well did okay in other ways. For instance, I wrote an Easter post where I shared some Peanuts videos, and though it only go 10 comments my bounce rate was only 46%; that’s not bad, though I wonder where people went. Also, the second part of my better blogging series only got 9 comments, yet it averaged 6 minutes and 18 seconds per visit, which means people actually read it.

6. You can get people to stick around to read a post when you’ve got their attention. This year I had 3 posts that people stayed for longer than 10 minutes reading, and even commenting on here and there. One was motivational: Only Concern Yourself With What You Can Control, 10 minutes 14 second. One was controversial: Penn State & Joe Paterno – My Take, 10 minutes 25 seconds. One was a rant: WordPress 3.3; It’s On My Nerves Right Now.

7. You can write posts that drive people to other posts. Bounce rate refers to whether a person will visit another page of your blog or website after reading the one that got them there in the first place. My average bounce rate on this site is 73.13%, which is probably normal for most bloggers, even though some will try to tell you they have phenomenally bounce rates; yeah, right. Anyway, I had 16 posts this year with bounce rates under 50%; these 5 were phenomenal though:

Some Blogs To Share 33.33%

Affiliate Programs I’m Connected With – Part Two 33.33%

An Important Blog Page If You’re Looking To Do Business 27.27%

Twitter Mix Of Sociability And Business 22.22%

Check Your Blog Commenting System 12.5%

8. I’ve learned how to handle grief way better than I ever thought I could when I was younger. I lost my grandmother this year and a great friend from college, and as tough as each was, I realized that none of us are getting out of this existence alive and thus we need to make sure to live for the moment. When some bad things happened I didn’t feel the crush of any of it, from what I mentioned above to having to sue someone for payment to having my first bouts ever of not wanting to do anything at all, even though I pushed on. There are fears we all have and the ability to push through them and learn that, for the most part, none of them are close to being as bad as we thought they’d be is a great lesson to learn.

9. I learned that I’ve become one of the great survivors. I celebrated my 10th year anniversary in business on my own, and when you consider that more than 90% of small businesses fold within 5 years I’d say that’s not a bad accomplishment. Of course I’m still learning great lessons almost daily and I’m not close to being Bill Gates rich, so I have a long way to go. I’m hoping for a great start to 2012; actually, I already have, but I’m not talking about it.

10. I learned that others value loyalty as much as I do, whether they’ve thought about it or not. “If loyalty is to mean anything, there must be a risk attached“. – Frank DeFord

Loyalty is at the top of my morality and ethics list, and I believe that loyalty deserves to be rewarded if it hasn’t been abused. There are some people who were commenting and participating on this blog at the beginning of the year that are still commenting and participating. I’d like to give them some love as my final act on Christmas day, although the first person I’m going to mention doesn’t have her blog anymore, or will be transitioning to a new blog, or something. lol Anyway, here we go; I thank y’all with a big thumbs up (from a tiny baby) and wish you and everyone else a great Christmas and great success as we move towards the new year:

Val from Absurd Old Bird

Beverly Mahone from Beverly Mahone

Sire from Wassup Blog

Rummuser from Ramana’s Musings

Allan Douglas from Simple Life Prattle

DeAnna Troupe from Learn Small Business

Melinda from Finding The Humor

Mitchell Allen from Morpho Designs

Charles Gulotta from Mostly Bright Ideas

Carl from Webmaister Pro

Ajith Edassery from Dollar Shower

Scott Thomas from Views Infinitum

Gebriele Maidecchi fro Esimple Studios

John Dilbeck from 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

Vernessa Taylor from Local Business Coach Online

Ileane from Basic Blog Tips

Evelyn Parham from Evelyn Parham

Althea Garner from Treasure Coast News

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell