Mitchell’s Top Ten Recommended Blogs
Posted by Mitch on Sep 2, 2010
One could ask “what makes you think anyone cares about what you think are blogs people should read.” The response would be “my blog, my opinion, case closed.” In actuality, I think that it’s a nice thing to recognize people when you enjoy things they do. And people like being mentioned, even if they may miss it. I’m going to say that I doubt everyone I name will notice that their blog has been mentioned here, and that’s okay. It’s just another list post; studies show that people love list posts. And if you’d like, copy the little badge I created and add it to your website, then wait for people to ask you if you’ve lost your mind. 
Actually, August 31st was Blog Day, where bloggers are supposed to name 5 blogs they recommend for others to read. But I had something else on my mind for that day, so I decided to go my own way and do it today.
 |
First, did I have any real criteria for what I was going to look for? Absolutely not! In this list are some friends of mine, some big time names, and some folks whose blogs I just have to make sure I check out as often as I can. I don’t always comment on all of these blogs, but I do from time to time. But I always make sure I read them, and I think that’s what makes them important to me. And two of the blogs on this list were on last year’s Blog Day list as well.
I put them in alphabetical order so I didn’t have to rank them. They are what they are; here we go:
Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online – As you probably know, I really respect Marelisa’s blog, and the interview I did with her should prove that. It’s just a quality blog, very deep, and one of the few blogs that I actually have to slow down to read. This blog was on last year’s Blog Day post.
Beautiful Summer Morning – Nick Grimshawe has a beautiful blog, very calming and motivational, and I actually have to give him credit for introducing me to Josh Groban, who I’d never heard of until Nick posted one of his videos on his blog. Nick also has the distinction of being on my 2008 and 2007 Blog Day list.
Click Newz – It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about Lynn Terry, but I still make sure I read her blog all the time. I ever wrote a post about her and how she makes money, as she’s one of the top internet marketers in the country. Lynn’s blog was also on my 2008 Blog Day list.
Kikolani.com – How could anyone not list Kristi’s blog as one of their favorites? I always make sure to go through her Fetching Friday blog, as she puts up a lot of blog posts she’s read through the week and is recommending others view. At one point I thought of stealing that idea, but man, that’s a lot of work! So young and so accomplished; great work!
Mostly Bright Ideas – This is actually a very new blog written by Charles Gulotta, and if y’all haven’t visited it by looking at some of his blog titles then you don’t know what you’re missing. He’s very funny and insightful, and his images are funny as well. To think, I convinced him to think about writing a blog, and look what he’s done with it; great job!
Problogger – Okay, a top guru who was also on my 2008 Blog Day list, but who can truthfully deny that Darren Rowse isn’t on his game? I like it best when he’s writing instead of the guest posts, but I sometimes learn from those as well. This is one of those blogs where if you’re looking to learn a lot more about blogging I suggest you go through his archives.
Solo Business Marketing – Shirley George Frazier’s blog on marketing is a great one, so much so that her blog was one of only two that made my 2006 Blog Day list. I must have been mad not to mention her again before today. I learn a lot by reading her blog, and I think it deserves a heck of a lot more attention that it gets.
Twist Image – Mitch Joel recently wrote Six Pixels of Separation, and it was through a conversation he was having with a friend of mine that I discovered his blog. He talks about marketing and communications in the social media age, and something interesting that he has are podcast interviews, which are pretty fascinating. I guess you could call him a guru.
View Infinitum – This is my friend Scott’s blog, and I have to say that he’s found quite the following over the past year. It’s a photography blog, and though I’m not anywhere close to a photographer, I will say that he gives a lot of great information on the craft, and I think I’ve even seen Sire popping in there from time to time.
Wassupblog – Speaking of Sire, his blog took a major jump over the past year, getting an Alexa rank as high as 65,000 at one point and still sitting in a pretty nice place. He covers internet marketing, blogging, and a host of irreverent issues that are funny from that quirky Australian point of view. I think if he were British his blog would probably be an even bigger deal; yeah, I said it! lol His blog was also on my 2009 Blog Day list, and I keep telling him that when I grow up I want my blog to be as big as his. Then again, it means I have to grow up.
There you go, my top ten list of blogs I hope you check out. Congrats winners!
Are You Sometimes Feeling Ignored?
Posted by Mitch on Sep 1, 2010
I tend to visit a lot of blogs. I’ve talked about it before on this blog, how I used to subscribe to nearly 250 other blogs, but at some point I got it down to around 104. Of course me being me I have added some more blogs to my reader since that time, and I’m given some of those an opportunity to show that they at least have something interesting to say on a consistent basis before I start whittling my list down again.
 by Beverly & Pack |
One thing that helps me determine I’m going to eliminate a blog from my reader is whether or not I ever get any responses from those blogs that I tend to leave comments on. Those of you who have seen me leave a comment on your blog know that I’m not one of those people who often leaves just one line responses. Sure, sometimes it may only be two lines, but you know those two lines are going to mean something and have something to do with the topic, and sometimes those lines are kind of long.
Sometimes you get the feeling you’re being ignored, and nobody likes that. I certainly don’t, especially if I’ve taken time to make a comment on your post. After all, as I’ve written many times on this blog, and many of you have written on your blogs, what’s the point in accepting comments if you’re never going to respond to anybody? If you’re going to do that you might as well just turn off comments, become Seth Godin, and move on with your life.
It’s not just blogging that sometimes leaves me feeling ignored. There many times on Twitter where I reach out to both people I know and people I don’t know and comment on some of the things they share. Most of the time you never hear anything back from those people, which once again leaves me wondering why I’m even bothering to try. At this point I pretty much know that almost nobody who’s using Twitter on a consistent basis is going to the website to post their comments or to read posts from other people. Everybody is using some kind of platform to check out their Twitter messages, which means pretty much everyone has created some kind of filter so that they see messages from people who write comments to them. If they haven’t done that then they’re idiots, and I doubt that people who are participating a lot on Twitter are idiots.
In my mind, people who do the two things I mentioned above are missing the point of social media networking. They don’t call it social “seminaring” or social “sharing whatever I have to say because I’m important and you’re not”. If they did then the word “social” wouldn’t be a part of it at all. I don’t like it when it’s people I don’t know, and I certainly don’t like it when it’s people I do know. There are a few people I have eliminated from my Twitter stream because I felt ignored, even if I’ve talked to them in the past. I don’t expect people to respond to everything I say to them, because sometimes there’s just nothing to say in response to a previous message. But I do expect some give and take every once in a while, and if I’m the only one giving then I’m getting out.
The one thing almost everyone knows if they visit this blog is that I’m going to respond to their comments as long as they’re more than one line. Of course, if we’re doing a back and forth at some point one of us has to end, and it could be me. Beyond that, I get to everybody at some point, and even if I don’t always respond to your comments, I always respond to a comment made by a new visitor, in hopes that they will return again and again. If anybody ever feels ignored by comments they leave on this blog, just let me know; but I don’t see it happening.
Are you feeling ignored by some of the blogs you visit? Are you taking care not to ignore people who visit your blog?
EzineArticles WordPress Plugin
Posted by Mitch on Aug 27, 2010
I’ve been a member of EzineArticles since 2008. I didn’t have a lot of articles on the site because frankly I’m still sort of skeptical as to just how much benefit I get from articles being posted to the site. I’ll come back to that in a few minutes.
 Writing Samples by Churl |
When I eventually reached 10 articles, some weeks later I received a gift in the mail. It was a mug from these folks congratulating me for reaching that milestone. I thought that was pretty cool, so then I decided that maybe I’d see what I could do to put more articles on the site. You know, a little bit of encouragement never hurts.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t rush into getting another article on the site, no matter what I felt initially. As a matter of fact, it pretty much took me 18 months to get another article on the site, and what helped to facilitate my getting that article, and others, to the site was the EzineArticles WordPress Plugin. I don’t even remember what brought it to my attention, but every once in awhile my mind says “hey, I wonder if there’s a plugin for ‘that’”.
I decided to load it onto my business website, since my account on EzineArticles is through my business, and of course it loaded seamlessly. Then I ran into an issue that I hadn’t expected, but I understood later. You obviously have to have an account on that site, but you then have to wait a day or two before it creates categories that you can see within your blog. I think the categories are already on the site, but you don’t see them in your blog until that point; at least I didn’t. So, I couldn’t immediately add articles, and I was irked because I didn’t know. A couple of days later I saw it was working, and I was on my way. In just the last month I’ve added 7 more articles to my account, and I’ll be adding more along the way. By the time you read this I might have added the same plugin to this blog under that same account, since it seems the site doesn’t totally pigeonhole you, as I have articles on web issues there as well.
One other thing you need to know is that you can’t submit any articles if you have a link in them. So, you can do it two ways. One, write the article first, submit it, then add links. Or two, if it’s an older article, remove all links, submit, then leave the article without updating it, and all your code will be there when you go back to check on it.
I said I was going to get back to this, and so I am. I said that I wasn’t sure that article submissions really does me all that much good. I preface this by saying that having external links coming to your site never hurts, so I’m appreciative of that. However, when I look at my stats over two years, I see that my articles have been viewed 919 times, which is pretty cool, with my best read article being one titled A Positive Story. What I also see is that only 16 times has anyone clicked on my link and followed it back to my website. That’s a rate of 1.7%; not a hearty endorsement for driving business to my site.
Still, I figure that these days I’ve been talking a lot about influence, and influence doesn’t necessarily mean driving people to your website as much as getting people talking about you for whatever reason. That, plus being able to find another legitimate use for articles I’ve already written and still having control over them is giving me enough reason for now to do this for awhile.
There does seem to be an interesting caveat, though. If your post looks too “bloggy”, they’ll turn it down. I’m not quite sure about that one, but it seems that if you decide to have any type of personality in a post they don’t like it. I sent one where I referenced a lesson I learned from my dad and they rejected it, even though it was a post on leadership.
Anyway, if you’re thinking about it, give it a shot, and let me know what you think.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
10 Posts That Deserve More Attention
Posted by Mitch on Aug 23, 2010
Something that’s hard for a lot of people is self critique. We’re either too easy on ourselves or too hard on ourselves.
 |
I’m no different, although my parameters change depending on what it is. When it comes to this blog, I know that there are a few throwaway posts, where the post isn’t necessarily important to anyone but was entertaining to write. That’s part of my quest to give visitors something different to look at.
However, there are times when I write something that, in my mind, didn’t get enough attention or enough visitors for whatever reason. Every once in awhile, I like to go back to some of those posts and share them in one specific post, hoping that maybe newer visitors will see those titles and say “hey, I must have missed that one”. At least that’s what I hope. So, here are 10 posts of mine over the last 2 months of 2009 and first 6 months of 2010 that didn’t get many visitors that I feel deserve more attention.
5 Ways Poker Is Like Blogging – This was my attempt at being creative by comparing two of the things I love doing most, one of which is playing poker.
An Interview With Marelisa Fabrega – Marelisa is one of the top bloggers in the world, and I was able to secure an interview with her. This needs to be read by everyone.
Twitter Marketing – Do You Have A Plan? – I found myself again some days ago explaining to someone what Twitter was about and how it could be used for business, and this wasn’t at my workshop either.
How Can You Prosper Through Publicity? – Everyone who has a blog needs to understand just how much more prosperous they could be, either monetarily or personally, by figuring out how to handle their publicity better.
What Do We Expect For Free? – We all like free stuff, but are we taking it to the extreme for some things?
Are Writers Taken For Granted? – As someone who’s been writing to make a living for the last year, it seems that people devalue just how much of a commitment it is, even when they can’t do it themselves.
Content Is An Electronic Emperor – This was my response to a comment made by Rupert Murdoch, partially one of the most hated men in the world.
Web Courtesy – Don’t We Deserve That Much? – With so much hate that people spew in blogs and especially when responding to news stories, I question whether there is any courtesy anymore.
Are You Using Social Media For Promotion? – I wrote this last year, way before I ever started thinking about doing workshops on the subject.
My 10 Favorite Blog Posts Of 2009 – Okay, this isn’t quite fair, but at the end of the year I posted 10 blogs posts I liked that I wrote in 2009; so now you have 10 more to check out if you’re interested. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
The Quest For Legitimate Images
Posted by Mitch on Aug 11, 2010
You know, there are times when you battle with ethical issues, and you’re either ready to give up on them or just move on. I don’t struggle with that issue often, but once I think about something that involves an ethical decision, I just have to work my way through it.
 |
This time, the ethical thing concerns images that I’ve been putting into this blog. Truth be told, for me there were two issues out there. One, those images that you knew belonged to someone else, and two, those that you couldn’t confirm.
Of course, there’s been the debates and the discussions I’ve seen online. My friend Scott, who has a photography blog, got me into a discussion one day on the topic. My point to him is that I have papers filed with the government proving my copyright, that I can put a symbol on any of my work (I’ve got music and my first book copywritten), and that by adding that copyright symbol at the end of my stuff (and, these days, that copyright thing you see at the end of most of my posts), show that I own the copyright. However, with images, if there’s no watermark, or no copyright symbol on a website, or no attribution anywhere, that it becomes very difficult to figure out whether an image has a copyright or not. His belief is that one can always find it; mine is that at times it’s literally impossible.
Regardless, the issue is still out there. Now, I’m not saying that I’m going to do this for every image, because I sometimes get an image from Imagekind, which I’m an affiliate for, and of course there are times when you know someone put together a mashup of sorts that, if there’s a copyright that’s been violated, so be it, but there is a way to help get around this type of thing.
If you notice, today’s image and yesterday’s image has attribution. It turns out that you can get images from Flickr, a site I’d never gone to unless someone sent me a picture they wanted me to send and it was there, and find images you can use. Seems there’s this search function you can select that will find photos based on a description you put in and, most of the time, they allow you to use the image if you give them attribution and link back to their Flickr page with the image.
I’m not going to portray myself as any kind of genius for figuring this out, however. I got the information from Hubspot’s story titled How To Use Creative Commons To Add Images To Your Blog. There’s a video there, and I’m really glad because I wouldn’t have figured it out without that. And there’s one other thing. Something they tell you that you can do in the video is actually something you can only do if you have a Flickr account, which I won’t because I don’t have any photos that I’m ever going to pop up on any site like that. So, I have to do it the long way, write my code and add the image in a much different way. But no matter; at least I’ve found a place where, if I use those images, I know I’m in the clear.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Do I Know Social Media Marketing?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 10, 2010
You know, often we think we know something but we’re never really sure. I did that workshop on social media marketing in July, and I have another one in 9 days. Still, I acknowledge that I have a shortcoming or two.
 |
Actually, my main shortcoming is that I don’t know about all the technologies that are out there. For instance, there’s probably 50 different applications that can access Twitter, yet I found one that I liked and I’ve stuck with that one. There are many websites that one can sign up for that can access all your social media accounts, but that type of thing isn’t quite my style so I haven’t kept up with them. In other words, some of my technological knowledge is lacking.
Last Tuesday I found myself at a business meeting with an organization that I’m putting together a website for. Actually, it wasn’t quite confirmed that I was doing it, but I went to the meeting thinking that we were going to be talking about something else. Instead, the website and I turned out to be the topic of the entire meeting, especially talking about social media marketing. For 90 minutes I held court, giving advice and answering every question that came my way, and finally the guy who’d invited me told everyone there that they had just gotten a large amount of free advice that I could probably have charged big bucks for. One other guy there said that I had given him more information in 90 minutes than he’d been able to learn in 3 years. I also got some other platitudes later on; I just wish businesses realized that not everyone drinks coffee, so I need to remember to bring my own drinks.
So what did I tell them? Wouldn’t you like to know? lol I’ll give away a couple of things. One, I told them that trying to do a social media marketing plan takes time, no matter what type of plan they go for, and as a consortium of independent business people, they were going to have to agree on a plan and who would be doing what.
I talked to them about blogging and how it’s kind of a community, but that there are many ways to build your community. In their model, they’ll be sending out a once a month newsletter and a once a week email, so they can put links to blog posts there. I also told them how they could post their own article via the “pages” option within the blog, and that I would take that link and add it to their articles page. The blog will be put into a subdomain on their website. I recommended at least one post a week, and when asked what would happen if all of them wrote articles on the same day, not only did I say I didn’t see it happening, but that when they went to write actual blog posts that they’d see the previous blog articles with date and time, and could postdate articles so they’d post at another time.
And of course we talked about LinkedIn, Twitter, webinars, forums, etc. I don’t see them doing much of any of these things, but one never knows. Meanwhile, I felt good about myself as I left; it seems that I do know some of this stuff, and I’m happy about that.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Formatting Your Images On Your WordPress Blog
Posted by Mitch on Aug 7, 2010
I’ve seen this often enough, and I decided it was time to say something about it.
When you add images to your WordPress blog, do they show up like this:
Notice, it’s sitting out there in its own netherland, not quite falling into place with the rest of my text? That has to be somewhat irritating, because it takes up space and, well, it just doesn’t look all that good. No matter the size of the image, having it pop out like this makes it seem like it’s not a part of the post. WordPress seems to do this as a default for many blogs. There are certain themes that will render the images properly, but for the most part I don’t see that happening with a lot of people.
|
You’ll notice that when I post images, they’re part of my content. it wraps around the image, and is under some kind of control. It’s integrated into things, and I can move it left, right, or in the center if I so chose, although I’ve never wanted to have an image in the middle as far as I can remember.
How do I do it? I add a little bit of HTML code to my posts, and whether or not you like doing it or understand it, I think by showing you what I do that you might like how it looks in your blog posts. And then if you can’t remember it, or even if you do, all you have to do is remember to go back to posts where you’ve used the code, copy and paste it into your new post, and then just change the image link. Having said that, I decided it was easier to show it to you as an image, and this time it’s intentionally in the middle so you can see the code without it disappearing:
As you can see, at least I hope as you can see, it’s not difficult code, but it’ll wrap your text around your image and thus blend things in better; at least that’s how I see it. I hope it’s a helpful tip; any questions, just ask.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 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! ;)
