Hot Blog Tips
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 22, 2011
Back in August, Brian Hawkins of Hot Blog Tips put out a call to arms, literally, in a post titled A Call To Established Bloggers – Lets Partner Together. His idea was simple; to put a newsletter together that some bloggers could contribute short articles to that hopefully people would subscribe to that would not only give them, well, blogging tips, but also enhance the presence of those who were writing articles and also give them the opportunity to drop a sales link of some type in there.
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The article was well received, and a number of people said they thought it was a great idea. Some people even said they were going to participate. Yeah, right! lol People tend to say a lot of things but when it’s time for action…
In any case there is a weekly newsletter that’s been around for 2 1/2 months now, and at the moment the contributors are myself, Brian, and the very shy, yet overly entertaining, Sheryl Loch of Fuzzy Wuzzy Anipals (I just wanted an excuse to write “fuzzy wuzzy”); very cute stuff I must say.
So far, Sheryl’s tips have been about using video on your blog, and she’s come up with some pretty neat things. My contributions are all about traditional blogging. Some ideas I’ve written here before, others are totally brand new. Those posts are short and to the point, maybe 200 – 250 words if that. After all, they’re supposed to be blogging tips, not long conversations.
This is both an advertisement for the newsletter and a call for a couple more writers. For the advertising part, if you’ve ever wanted shorter tips on the process of blogging rather than having to put up with my online tomes then this is the thing for you. Not only that but Brian offers a free copy of his ebook “Niche AdSense Blogging Modus Operandi“; come on, free stuff!
For the writing part, you get your picture on there, a link back to your blog and you get to select an affiliate link of some kind that he’ll also highlight. I’ve used it to highlight my book and CDs on management, and I actually sold a book last week; oh yeah! We’re not looking for lots of writers, just a couple more, and I’m betting that if Brian got a lot of offers that some kind of rotating schedule could be set up so that everyone gets a shot.
What are you waiting for? Go check out the newsletter sign up page, get the newsletter, get the free book, and be entertained by myself and others once a week in your inbox.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Synergy Of Business And Blogging
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 10, 2011
Well now, this is something a little different. Michele Welch of New Biz Blogger has put together a free ebook for everyone to enjoy that contains articles from 31 bloggers on the general subject of blogging for business.
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The name of the ebook is The Synergy of Business and Blogging, and it’s around 100 pages of tips that anyone might enjoy reading. I’ve already read it (y’all know I’m like that) and I think you’ll find it pretty good overall. Michele put it together very well indeed, and there are specific topics so you can decide if you want to jump to something you’re most interested in. The general topics are:
Search Engine Optimization
Tools & Tips
Traffic Generation
Blogging
Social Media
Technology
So, this is a very good deal. A free ebook, about 7MB so if you have slow download speed it could take a bit, and if you happen to download it from the link above or here, and you happen to get to page 67, you’ll see yours truly with a feature article as well. I’m really honored to have been selected to be a part of this collection of folks, which includes our buddy Sire (whose article is just before mine; how’d that happen?), Jimi Jones, Kristi Hines, DiTesco, and Dennis Edell, folks who have commented on this blog.
And a short post at that; y’all have made out for a Monday!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Blogging Step Seven – Staying Motivated
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 27, 2010
Seems it’s been a little while since I wrote my last “blogging step”. Of course, if you want to see the other steps you can click on the blogging tips at the top of this blog, one of the special pages I created to highlight when I write about blogging specifically.
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In this case, it’s the topic of staying motivated. The one thing I hate seeing is a blog that was going along fine and suddenly there’s no more posts, or else a post once a week, once a month, etc. Actually, I don’t have a problem with those folks who only post once a week, but anything less frequent almost begs the question why you’re bothering.
There are usually 3 main reasons why people stop writing a blog:
1), they can’t think of what to say
2), they’re not getting much feedback and thus are discouraged
3), they’re tired
Let’s take this last one first. There are some people who have written for years, and they’re just plum tuckered out. I have that feeling every once in awhile. Maybe this blog is only about to celebrate its 3rd anniversary, but my other blog is more than 5 years old. I still have plenty to say, but you know, there are times when my mind just feels really tired. Some big time bloggers quit in 2010, though I can’t recall any names as I’m writing this. They announced it, then moved on. There’s really nothing to do with those folks except thank them for their service and try to move into their slot.
The next two are workable, though. Let’s start with not being able to think of what to say. To me, every day there’s a new topic of something to talk about. But this isn’t a niche blog. I’ve often cautioned people not to make their niche so finite that they have nothing to talk about anymore. Dead blogs are embarrassing, and blogs that only have a post every 3 to 6 months aren’t worth anyone’s time.
Almost any topic lends itself to something else one can write about. Almost, that is. Early this year I was writing a blog for a chiropractor in another state. I knew that if we stuck with just that I’d be out of topics within a week. That’s a topic where it probably takes a chiropractor to find new things to talk about that keeps it fresh. However, what I was allowed to do was write about controversial medical subjects as well as maladies people suffer that could be addressed by a chiropractor. This opened the world to many possibilities and I wrote about things that I’d heard about but never had a reason to research before. It was pretty fun, and it’s too bad it only lasted 3 months.
Also, there are no real rules in length of posts, and nothing saying you can’t divide a long post into two posts and link them to each other, which I’ve done with other blogs on occasion. No one is going to beat you up for that; it’s all about figuring out ways to be creative, both for yourself and for others. If you feel something, you’ll be able to express it and show it, and your readers will feel it as well.
Now, this brings us to the last point, which is getting feedback. You folks who visit here hear this over and over; blogging is a community. This isn’t Field of Dreams; if you build it, they’re not just going to come. We all need to show others that we care about them as much as we hope they care about us. Yes, blogging takes time, but it doesn’t necessarily take work.
It’s not work if you’re visiting blogs that offer something you’re interested in. There are wonderful writers out there writing on your topic, as well as off topics you might not have considered before. If you need to find blogs on your topic, go to Google, click on “more”, go down to blogs, type in your topic and you’re good to go.
Or join a blogging community of some sort to find blogs to read. I belong to both BloggerLuv and P50 Allied Bloggers. Not that I needed to join a community but it was both a fun thing to do and a way to expose my blog to some people I wouldn’t have met otherwise.
And, by the way, let me dispel this old saw you’ve probably heard. Just because a blog might not have any comments or no indication that it’s not well visited doesn’t mean it has no value to you. Every blog you want to comment on has value of some kind. One good comment can earn many more in return. You might even get someone to write a post thanking you for being one of their early commenters.
Remember, everything you see or do is a potential blog post, possibly on your main blog topic. Just be alert and willing to see things as a story unfolding before your eyes. And work on engaging with others; we all love that.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2011 Mitch Mitchell
How To Be A Prolific Writer
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 7, 2008
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.
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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).
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.
* 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.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Blogging Step Five: How Often To Post
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 7, 2008
It’s been almost 3 months since the last post of the blogging series, so, before I go further, let’s list the other four:
Step One: What To Write About
Step Two: Where To Create Your Blog
Step Three: How To Create Your Blog
Step Four: What And How To Write
So, if you want to start at the beginning, and if you want to think about it some more by reading this post, we’re ready to move onto the next part.
A question that’s often asked is how often someone should write. Kelly McCausey, substituting for Alice Seba as she has a baby, wrote on Alice’s blog that she recommends to her coaching clients that they write at least 2,000 words a week, and finds that clients seem to not only appreciate the advice, but end up writing more often.
I subscribe to a lot of blogs, and I find that there are some people who will post 3-7 times a day, some who try to write one post a day, and some who try to write 2-3 times a week. Occasionally there’s one who writes once a week, and if they write less than once every couple of weeks, unless they’re friends of mine, mine, I don’t stay subscribed for long. When I’m home, I write one post a day on this blog. Actually, let me clarify that; I make at least one post a day. Sometimes I’ll only post something, like a video of something that’s caught my fancy, even if it’s something old and odd:
Okay, I watched that when I was a kid; I admit it. 
Anyway, you may not know this from reading this particular blog, but in my real life I’m an independent consultant, so there are times when I’m out of town a lot, like right now. I stay in hotels, and not all of them have the best internet service, so posting something daily becomes problematic. So, right now, I post more on the weekends, yet still try to get at least one post in during the week. If you’re hoping to attract visitors, and keep those visitors, then you need to post new content on some kind of regular basis to encourage people to keep coming back. If you write once a month, no one’s going to remember to come back, but if you write regularly, and you’re entertaining or informative, then people hopefully will come, and keep coming.
Then, if your purpose is to show you have some kind of knowledge that will help you get contracts or work later on, or your purpose is to make money with your blog, you’ll have better chances to do both. And, let’s face this fact; why have a blog in the first place if you’re not going to write anything to begin with?
Oh yeah, let me be clear about my terms. What’s in this particular post, for the most part, is writing; the video is just a red herring. Some people post only pictures; some videos, and some others post sound files. In a way it doesn’t matter as long as you’re consistent, but in another way it does matter. If you’re posting videos, one has to hope you also have something to say, and that every once in awhile it’s you in the videos saying something because you hate typing. Videos can be nice, but if that’s all you post, people won’t like it too much because watching videos takes time. The same can be said for audio; great stuff every once in awhile, but they take time to listen to. Posting pictures goes the other way; if that’s all you do, it gets boring after awhile because you’re not really giving something of yourself. So, there has to be a mix of media if you’re going to do it at all.
And there you go. I hope some of you have read the series and taken to blogging on your own. I’d love to know how it’s working out for you thus far. And I’d like to highlight someone else who writes a great blog on blogging ideas, and that would be Barbara Ling. She offers a lot of great stuff.
Happy blogging!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
