This article will look like it’s all over the place; it just might be. What I’ve found in life is that even a rambling post has lessons for everyone to learn. Thus, I’m going to share things about scams old and new, promoting oneself and of course social media. Let’s start with promotion.

We be promotin’

Not all of us are lucky enough to have someone recognize us for something good, something that could possibly make us feel better and show that we’re actually doing something positive in the world. In this case, I’m not talking about this blog but my business blog. It seems that my business blog, Mitch’s Blog made the Center for Management And Organizational Effectiveness’ Top 100 Socially-Shared Leadership Blogs of 2018. I’m sitting in position #99… at least I made the list! 🙂

They informed me about this on my Facebook business page, which taught me a lesson because I didn’t know anyone could leave a message on a page they weren’t following. Still, that was pretty cool. What’s even cooler is that Mitch’s Blog was also on the 2016/2017 list (85th) and the 2015 list (90th) as well. I wish I’d known that because it would have been great to promote it, and then use it as a way to encourage others to share my posts from that blog, especially on LinkedIn.

I really need to push it more this year so I don’t fall off the list; if you’re interested in leadership, diversity or business issues please check it out. See, this is part of promoting part of a business from a different source, something many of us are reluctant to do or are bad at.

Next, let’s talk about scams for a minute. I’ve talked about scams here previously, the last time in 2017 when I asked do you know a scam when you see one and shared a couple of scam letters we received via regular mail, and I also linked to a lot of other articles I’ve written on the subject.

In this case, over the past week I’ve recorded two videos about scams of sorts, which I’m going to paste below. I say “of sorts” because in the first video I actually got my money back but I think the seller was running a scam. In the second video, I tell a story about something that happened to me in 2006 and, because I’m “me”, I ended up getting what I paid for but the majority of people would have easily been scammed. Check these out:

Once again, a lesson in promotion, this time cross promotion. I’ve already promoted the first video on Twitter, Google Plus and Linked In, and the second video on Twitter and Google Plus, and now I get to promote it again here on my blog, hoping to increase views and possibly subscribers. You might also learn something from these videos instead of just listening to a story… at least I hope you do.

I have another video I thought about sharing, but I think 2 is enough. The video I was going to share was the first video I did this month. Back in January I challenged readers to try to write a blog post every day for a month. There were no takers but lots of excuses; I’m used to that, because I’ve acknowledged in a lot of articles that blogging is actually hard for most people.

You know what’s not really hard but scares people? Doing video. People are scared to be in front of the camera, just like they’re scared to speak in front of audiences. In my opinion video is pretty easy to do; being perfect isn’t easy, and editing… I’ve never learned how to edit videos. But I can sit in front of a camera, even if it’s on my smartphone, and I can record and upload a video.

This month I’m doing a video a day for the month of April; at least it’s my goal to do it. This is something started years ago by Amy Landino (I’m not sure if she’s doing it this year) and I never participated in it, but on both of my YouTube channels I’ve done it in the past. I thought it was time to jumpstart my productivity in some way and this is what I’m going to be doing this entire month on my non-business YouTube channel… the same channel those videos above are on.

Once again, this helps with promotion because: first, I’m mentioning it here; second, I mentioned it on my YouTube channel; third, I’m sharing every single video with both my Twitter and Google Plus audience; fourth, some of those videos will be something I can share on both my Facebook and LinkedIn pages; fifth, I expect to create more sharable content that I can use on my blog posts, as well as sharing it on multiple social media platforms I’m on. I also know that some people will share some of my content on sites I don’t participate with suck as Pinterest and StumbleUpon; that doesn’t trouble me one bit.

By the way, have you noticed how many times I’ve linked to my old content on this site? That’s called internal linking, and the purpose of it is to help keep people on your site by linking to similar content that your visitors are currently reading. It also helps your SEO, or search engine optimization, because search engines track visitors (sneakily lol) and love seeing them sticking around on a site for a long period of time.

Imagine, all of this because I found my business blog on a list not based on someone liking me, but because of the content and how it ranks among my peers as it relates to sharing. I’ll take a moment for myself! 😀