I’m Just Sharing

November is National Diabetes Month, and it’s something I care about wholeheartedly. If you’ve gone back into my blog, you know that I’m diabetic, and I’ve written on diabetes a couple of times, including my battles every once in awhile. Luckily, since I’ve been home, I’ve gotten my glucose numbers back under control.

Unfortunately, though I’m not considered an insulin dependent person, I am on insulin, and though it’s not as bad as I’d thought it would be, having to give myself injections twice a day isn’t much fun. I don’t have to start spouting numbers of new diabetics every day. It’s not always something you can easily control, as it runs in my family, but it’s something that we can keep from getting way out of control with knowledge, exercise, and communication.

To that end, I’d like to direct everyone in America to this link of activities taking place across the country this month highlighting this terrible disease. For everyone else, there’s this link talking about World Diabetes Day, which is November 14th.

Can diabetes be solved? Honestly, I don’t know. But I’ll never give up my fight, and I’m sure someone will eventually figure something out, with the help and funds of others.

One of the weirdest things about blogging is that not everyone wants to leave comments on the blog. Sure, I’d love that as much as anything, but what sometimes happens is people will send you an email to tell you things or to ask you questions. I take that as a compliment, especially since no one has sent me anything bad yet.

Anyway, there’s one question I get more often than any other. The odd thing is that I get this same question outside of this blog. I get it on my other blog. I get it from my newsletters. I get it from people in organizations I belong to. I sometimes get it from people who have been forwarded things that I’ve sent to others. And I always get it from my friends, because I tend to chronicle my life and then share my stories with all my friends. I’m betting some of you would have loved to have been on my personal mailing list when I talked about the day the plane I was on that was trying to take off hit a deer. Or, if that’s not good enough, how I, as a five year old child, walked away from a crowd in downtown Japan and went on my own adventure, while teachers scrambled to find me.

Anyway, that question is: “How can you be such a prolific writer?” Well, it’s just what I do. As some of you may know, I’ve actually written a book on leadership called Embrace The Lead, and an ebook called Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, two books that have nothing in common with each other except the fact that I wrote them. I’ve also got 5 other books in the works, but who knows when I’ll finish any of those. I’ve written tons of articles in multiple places on a variety of subjects, and I’ve been published in a few national magazines and newsletters. Frankly, I wish I could get more people to pay me for writing, because there’s nothing I’d rather spend time doing, other than playing poker (yes, my wife knows this, so go ahead and tell her).

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Okay, enough of the self promotion. How does one go about being a prolific writer? How does one come across so many ideas to write about?

I like to think of myself as someone whose real business is the accumulation of knowledge. Other than geography and entomology, I have this insatiable thirst for knowledge. I just want to know things. I also like to think I have kind of a discerning eye for being able to step outside of a situation and view it as a story. On this blog I posted something short, with videos, on how I felt after Barack Obama was elected president. I’m not sure how many of you saw this accounting on my other blog of what went on with my wife and I the night he was elected, but I’m happy to share it here.

Anyway, after I’ve accumulated some knowledge, or after I’ve had time to digest an event as a story in my mind, I love sharing my thoughts and happenings with others. Maybe my goal should be in storytelling, because I just love to tell my tales and share information as much as I can.

So, getting back to the point, which is how you can become a prolific writer yourself. Here are five ways you can become a prolific writer:

* Write like you talk - I see many blogs where people seem to be trying to figure out how to write rather than just writing. Most of the time when I sit down to write, I write directly into blog, real time, and I don’t stop until I’ve written the entire thing. Most of my posts take between 5 and 10 minutes to write; that’s about all. Now, it takes a little longer to finish if I’m adding links, which is always a smart thing to do if you can, but otherwise, my posts are usually done fairly quickly. Even most of my very long posts have been written that way. This post is being done differently, as I’m writing it in Word (word to the wise; if you compose something in Word, then transfer it to an HTML based program, you need to remember to change all the quotation marks so your coding will be recognized; maybe Microsoft will fix that one day) and then I’m going to transfer it over. I’m taking a little more time with this one because it’s a listed post.

Anyway, when you write, whether it’s short or long, ask yourself if you’ve written in your voice. With short posts, ask yourself if that’s how you would present yourself if someone was sitting with you and talking to you. If you’re writing a long post, do the same thing.

* Think of every situation as a story - Who doesn’t love hearing or telling a good story? The truth in life is that almost every moment of interaction with someone else can be told later on as a pretty good story. Right now, I have a story in my head about the adventures my wife and I have had over the past two weeks with a chipmunk that’s somehow found its way into the house, and how even the exterminator has seemed to have lost this battle. I don’t have a place to put it, however, but it’s a story I can tell friends. However, when it comes to your blog, telling your story about an implementation you did with new hardware on your computer or new programs you’re trying to run are all stories that you could probably tell on your blog.

* Don’t niche yourself into a corner - There’s a lot of talk on the blogosphere about selecting a niche and sticking to it. However, there are also thousands of blogs that have been abandoned because those people couldn’t continue thinking about what they wanted to write about. People who write financial blogs seem to run out of things to say because they think their niche is finite, but it’s not. Right now, I’d be writing about the price of gas, the bad news about the car and housing industry, credit cards and their changing of interest rates and top dollar limits, why keeping health insurance is important in a bad economy. There are thousands of ideas related to finance that aren’t directly related to the stock market that they could be writing about.

One of the issues I’ve had with many blogs I’ve been reading lately is that it seems many of us tend to keep writing about the same issues over and over, and at the same time. Days ago I wrote about commenting on blogs, only to discover later on that four other blogs had written on the same topic on the same day. When we talk about blogging, we tend to stick to specific niches that help drive blogs into prominence, hopefully. That’s why I break out into other areas from time to time on my blog, throwing up a video or two, giving a personal opinion about something, or sometimes going in directions that don’t have much to do about blogging at all, but are important to me at that moment. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I believe Sire’s guest post on why he loves blogging was a very important post because he’s someone who refuses to be locked into a corner as to what he can write about on his blogs, even if they have a specific focus.

* Don’t worry about perfection, but check your grammar here and there - There is no such thing as the perfect post. I’ve written some that I think are pretty good that get few writers, and some things I thought I was just putting up to have something to write about that have touched a lot of people. People sometimes worry what someone else is going to think about what they’ve written, and that can help to paralyze them and stilt their writing. I’ve never had that issue; I write whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, trying to offer something pertinent or personal, and that’s that. I don’t use profanity because I don’t use, and never have used, profanity in my real life (I’ve also never had a drink in my life, smoked cigarettes, taken illegal drugs, or, for balance, gone to church since I was 11 years old).

At the same time, I have to admit that there are times when it’s hard reading a blog post or an article where the grammar is choppy and sentences don’t flow in some fashion. I make allowances for people for whom English isn’t their first language, because I’ve seen how some of the posts I’ve tried to do in other languages (thanks, or kind of thanks, to Babelfish). And by grammar, I don’t mean using a word like “y’all”, which is a part of my language, and I don’t care how many people tell me it’s not a real word. I’m talking about major misspellings of easy words (it’s easy to tell a typo from a misspelling), picking the wrong words (”there, they’re and their”, as examples), or missing words throughout someone’s copy. I wrote a post about a new book called Secret Google Tactics, and whereas there was a lot of pretty good information, it was a little hard to read because the grammar was so bad; take that as the one negative on a pretty nice ebook, and if Dylan reads this, write me and let me help you edit it; for pay, of course. A missing word here or there every once in awhile isn’t a bad thing; multiple missing words or typos or incoherent speech is a major turnoff.

* Write about what you love and like - I love blogging, and it goes well with this blog. I love finding all sorts of things on the internet, which I can write about on this blog. I love writing about the things I do on my business blog. I have some kind of passion towards everything I write about, whether it’s positive or negative. When one has a passion, one can do a lot of things and talk about a lot of things. Everyone has a passion, and many people are hesitant to release it to the public. Trust me, there’s so many more things I could talk about on this blog that would make people’s heads spin, but that’s not what this blog is about. I have a place for that sort of thing, but I’m not sharing it here, so don’t ask. As I was listening to Lynn Terry on a conference call earlier today, she was saying how she has multiple outlets of expression under pen names that she doesn’t tell everyone about because sometimes she just needs to step out of being Lynn Terry for a few minutes. I’m the same; every once in awhile I just have to be someone other than Mitch Mitchell, or T. T. Mitchell, my business name, or whatever my wife feels like calling me at a particular moment. Still, being passionate about something, and adding a passion for writing into the mix, is probably the most important thing about blogging, and something I cover in my blogging series.

If you can put all of those things together, you can be a prolific writer. Some of them might seem like it’s a lot of work, but trust me on this one; if you’re doing something you love, it’s never work.

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Man, it seems like I just can’t stop myself these days. Here I am, pimping another product that I’ve also purchased, and if it does what it claims to do, I should be able to increase my overall Adsense revenue by leaps and bounds.

As you already know, I’m already a customer and an affiliate for Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets, although I learned last week that I’m not overly crazy about his products. I’ve mentioned many times that when I implemented some of the things I’d read about in the book, my overall Adsense revenue jumped by more than 400%; just not on this blog (cough).

Well, tonight I’ve purchased what I hope is the next step in the process, an ebook written by a guy named Dylan Loh called Secret Google Tactics. I tell you, so far it looks like it might help me out a little bit, as I’ve never been a big success when it comes to Adwords, and there are a few Adsense tips here that I’m going to try out on a couple of my sites, and I may even try something on the blog.

Here’s a few of Dylan’s own words:

With Dylan’s ‘Secret Google Tactics’ you can:

:: And so much more…

And there you go. If you’re interested, you can click on the link above, or click on the banner below. Stay tuned, because you know I’m going to talk about it later on.

As if I’m not already into too many things, now I’m a part of the CommentLuv contest, which you can learn more about here. It seems to be a pretty easy contest to join, but of course there are rules.

Rule number one is that you have to be a registered member of CommentLuv; check.

Two, you have to have your registration number put into your settings if you have the CommentLuv plugin; just did that, so check.

Three, you have to write a post about it with a link to the contest; this is it, so check.

Four, you can tell readers about the contest, tell them that a big part of the contest is writing posts on other blogs that have CommentLuv on them, and tell them not to spam comments. Heck, that should go without saying, especially if you’re a regular reader of my blog, because I delete comment spam. Check!

The only thing that confused me is that the contest rules say you don’t have to have the CommentLuv plugin to compete, but if you don’t have the plugin then I have no idea how you put in your registration number.

What are the prizes? I have no clue; don’t really care right now. This is a fairly easy contest to play in, so I’ll just do my thing, and we’ll see what happens on the back end. The last time I won a prize in a contest I ended up not being able to use it because I wasn’t registered for the site; I don’t even remember what it was. But I love competing; isn’t that a shame?

So, there you go; I’m in!

How do you write? I find it an interesting question, especially for blogs, because, for most of the time, I tend to write pretty quickly about pretty much anything.

I know that some people take a lot of time to think about what they want to write about, then write it over the course of a few days. I remember Steve Pavlina saying some time ago that he likes to take two or three days putting his posts together, but he tends to write posts between 5,000 and 7,500 words. Of course, he’s not doing that right now, as he’s doing some test with some kind of drink and talking about his results on a daily basis. Darren Rowse of Problogger fame said he likes to write at least one post a day on all of his blogs, and these days it’s much easier for him since he’s pretty much turned himself into a corporation, so that when he’s on the road someone else steps in to write posts for him. However, if you look back into his archives (which I did, of course), you’ll find that he used to write multiple posts a day, very short posts where he’d state a topic, write something relatively short, then have a link to the person where he got the idea from in the first place.

By the way, I find it oddly comforting that it took him about as long to start getting visitors and readers to his blog as it’s taken for me, and he also had many posts at the time that got either very little or no activity, just as I sometimes do now (although I am pimping this post of mine again because it was pretty personal, and I’m thinking someone should have commented on it for some reason).

Even when I’ve researched something first, I tend to write pretty quickly afterwards. But you have seen some of my really long posts, and every once in awhile I’ll put up something that’s pretty short, just to communicate something. For instance, the day I posted the quick little blurb about the end of BlogRush, which I got to post as kind of a breaking news story (posted after immediately being written by John Reese himself) was one of the shortest posts I’ve ever written, and it still got a lot of comments.

That proved a couple of things. One, current news counts a lot if you can be one of the first to help break the story. Two, sometimes you can spend a lot of time on something, or put your heart into it, and it won’t merit nary a comment; Wordpress doesn’t tell me how many page views, so to speak, a post gets (but Google Analytics does, and that’s a shame; y’all go back and read that post!). I wonder if there’s a plugin for that, and if it would separate how many times I saw it myself. And three, sharing information that someone else comes up with can be greatly appreciated, which is why I’m going to share this page that has a lot of information on page rank, something that a lot of you have been talking about a whole lot lately, which means it’s not only something you seem to care a lot about, but also says y’all need to find a new topic (check this one also).

Enough of this for now. So, how do you write? How do you decide what to write about? How often do you write? Share with us; who knows, maybe there will be a car as a prize for the most creative post,… nah!

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For those of you who read this blog and some of the comments on it, you know that John Lessnau has been pimping his product all over the place, LinkXL. Actually, it didn’t look like such a bad idea, so I decided to go sign up.

Basically, it’s like most of the other affiliate programs one can sign up for. They ask for all your information, including your Paypal address (by the way, if any of you are trying to make money online and don’t have a Paypal account, go get one; you get your payments much quicker if you do, from, well, almost everyone), set up a password, then hit enter and wait for the confirmation email. Once you do that, you’re all set to get your ads. If you have a Wordpress blog, you can download the plugin for LinkXL, which will work much better than having to copy and paste code all over the place.

One thing I thought was intriguing about them is they tell you up front that none of their ads will show on your homepage, so if people come in and don’t go to a specific ad, they won’t see the links. I think that’s customer friendly, so I applaud them for that.

So, now we’ll see how it all works out. It’s good to have different programs competing against each other to see what works and what doesn’t. Y’all can try this yourselves, but, as you know, I’ll be reporting on it all come December. Read on.

From the original,…

To now; I don’t care, because I feel good tonight!

President Obama; sounds pretty good to me.

Change We Can Believe In by Barack Obama

For about two weeks now I’ve been trying to figure out why Google Desktop wouldn’t index any of my email in Mozilla Thunderbird. I searched all over the place, and just couldn’t figure it out. I’ve finally figured it out, with some serious searching online and some testing on my own, and I’m going to tell you how I did it.

The first thing you do is close Thunderbird. The second thing you do is open up your Explorer window. Then go into your Program Files, Google, and then whatever is next; on my computer it’s Google Desktop Search, but on some computer it’s Google Desktop Directory. Once there, highlight whatever files you have that say “GoogleDesktopMozilla“; you probably won’t need them all, but copy them just in case. Then go to the Program Files for Mozilla Thunderbird, and paste whatever you can into the Components folder; if a file is already there, you don’t have to copy over it.

Then you go into your Thunderbird profile, which you access by C:\DocumentsandSettings\(username)\ApplicationData\Thunderbird\Profiles\(unique profile). Once there, delete a file called “compreg.dat“.

That’s it. Open up Thunderbird, and Google Desktop should start indexing your email files in the background. You can check it by opening it up to see if it says it’s indexing. If not, just start the indexing process. Of course, if you’re starting from the beginning, indexing could take a long time, which means while you’re doing things your computer might slow down. But I love Google Desktop, and if you do also, give this fix a shot.

And there you go. By the way, if it’s not indexing your Firefox files, you can do the same process, only go into Program Files and then Firefox.

Man, I wish I’d written this. I came across a post on a site called One Cool Site that was titled Wordpress Blogging Tips. I have to say that it’s probably closest to the perfect article on this topic of making money by blogging that I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t even talk about monetizing, affiliate ads, promoting products, or anything like that.

In essence, the article has 18 points that should be considered as ways to help your blog make money. Most of the 18 points links to another article within the site, and that’s actually one of the tips, deep linking within one’s own site. I touched upon the topic of optimizing old blog posts by internal linking myself, and y’all have seen how often I link to other articles I’ve already written. Something else I do that I don’t see as many people doing as I do is linking to other things that aren’t a part of my site, as well as authority links on topics that we’re addressing in our posts. You saw how I linked to Keral’s post on future Wordpress posting because it was truly authoritative.

One place where I may be very deficient is his point #13, developing a brand. I’m not sure I have a specific brand that someone might qualify me with. I mean, I talk about blogging, internet marketing, affiliates, websites, web design, books, finances, health issues, motivation, and even a bit of silliness from time to time; I’m not sure. How would y’all classify me as far as brand goes, those of you who’ve checked out at least 3 posts of mine?

Anyway, I recommend you check out that post above, and click through to the articles it’s linked to. If you want to learn way more about blogging and monetizing than you know how, it’s great. And, do I have internal linking down, or what?

Today I thought I’d highlight one of my niche sites, the type that many people talk about when they say that it’s another way for us to make money online. Oddly enough, I was just online listening to Lynn Terry’s weekly seminar, and she was saying how she stopped telling people about her niche sites and where they were and what they were because people would go by and copy exactly what she had as their own. Well, I’m thinking that, with this niche, there could only be so much copying, and if someone decides to steal the layout and colors; more power to you.

Anyway, this particular niche site is called Medical Billing Answers. Luckily, this is something I know a lot about as a health care finance consultant. I oversaw the billing operation of many hospitals before I went out on my own, and I’ve consulted at hospitals regarding billing and other revenue cycle issues ever since.

The initial issue for this site was trying to write it so that it didn’t overwhelm people. One can sometimes get too technical in their own niche to a point that they can’t communicate with those who aren’t in the field. So, if you go through any of the initial page categories, you’ll find that I haven’t written anything too deep, but hopefully it gets across what these things are.

Where the meat of this site is, though, is in the articles and the answered questions areas. Both of those areas give me the opportunity to add new content on a regular basis, which actually has worked out for me. Not as much for the articles, but people will send me questions, and I can answer them, and if it looks like I can get at least 200 words out of it, then it becomes another article. What it will also allow me to do at some point is make it a part of my consulting business, because I obviously can’t allow one person to dominate my time without getting paid for it eventually, right?

Now, here’s the big thing. This site, out of all my sites, makes the most money in Adsense revenue. Because it’s a niche site, the targeted traffic that this site gets means that I get paid more money if someone clicks on one of the ads than I get on any of my other sites. Supposedly, that’s what niche sites are all about, concentrating on one topic, then hammering that topic to death.

And here’s the neat thing. The world of medical billing online is pretty big, so getting to the top of the search engines isn’t the easiest thing in the world. No, I’m not in the top spot, unfortunately. But here’s where I rank for my top 3 search terms:

I don’t know what’s up with MSN, but I’m not worried about it. I launched this site at the end of May, so it’s just over 5 months old, still in its relative infancy, and it’s got a lot of room to grow. There’s some people who believe that one shouldn’t launch a website unless you have at least 100 pages of information, and others who believe you need even more. However, I was talking to one of my friends who works for We Build Pages, and his take on it was that if you believe what you have to say can be done in even 5 to 10 pages, then go to it, as long as the page is well optimized. I tend to agree with him on that one, plus I see so many people never start anything or never show anything because they can’t finish, at least in their minds. Think about Microsoft, people; they’ve been messing up for years, but do you think we’d have all this stuff if they had waited around for perfection?

Oh, on the site I also list different books concerning medical billing in some fashion. Many of those are a specific affiliate group I belong to that only deals with medical billing books, so the affiliate payout rate is higher. However, no one has purchased any of those books yet, but they’ll come; I know they’ll come!

Anyway, there’s my one big niche site. I may end up with more if this one succeeds in the way that I’m hoping it will. I’ll just have to think about what niche to talk about next; details, details,…