All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Black Web Friday

Black Web Friday – 5/18/12

6 Comments

Greetings, and welcome to the next to last installment of Black Web Friday. It’s been an interesting ride and it’s almost over. I hope some folks have gotten out of it what I hoped for. But when it’s time to move on, then it’s time to move on. With that said let’s get right into it.

Black Web Friday

Evelyn Bourne writes The Productive Pen, and she writes about writing, marketing and personal development. She’s been writing about these things for 3 1/2 years now and she’s got a lot of great information there. It’s a standard WordPress commenting system blog.

Denene Miller writes the blog My Brown Baby, and she’s, in a much different way, a mommy blogger if you will, but only in the sense that she’s a mother that writes a blog. She writes about parenting, entertainment and politics from a black woman’s perspective, and it’s really entertaining, even if I skip the parenting stuff, not having kids. She also has a few other contributors that bring a different feel to the blog, each person having their own unique voice. It’s a standard WordPress commenting system blog.

Ponying off the last one, Lamar and Ronnie Tyler both write Black and Married With Kids, and most of what they write concerns raising black children in this world and looking for positive role models, as well as all the things that parents go through anyway. A post that really caught my attention in the last couple of days was their decrying the show Basketball Wives, something I’d never seen until I was changing channels the other day and stopped on for a brief moment, and thought exactly the same type of thing they’re talking about. It was a horrible example of what many people think black people are, and they captured their frustration well. It’s a Typepad style commenting system, which means your gravatar might not show up.

Walethia Aquil writes the blog Grace and Charm, and this isn’t a blog about etiquette, but about marketing, organization, business and working together in positive ways with others. In essence it’s a business blog and that’s what’s impressive about it. She’s an entrepreneur helping others grow, and that’s kind of what I try to be about as well. There’s a lot of great information here if you’re looking to grow your business either online or offline, so if you’re looking for different types of business tips, you should check it out. It’s a standard WordPress commenting system blog.

That’s it for this week; one more to go!
 

Motivation/Inspiration

What Do You Do When You Don’t Want To? You Just Do!

32 Comments

All of us fall into a malaise here and there. Sometimes it’s called depression. The general feeling is that you don’t want to do anything, nothing at all. And yet, nothing at all is sometimes something as well; it can get confusing.

You folks who read this blog and maybe some of my other blogs see how much I write. Sometimes I think that I might just up and stop writing altogether, one because I may not be in the mood, two because I sometimes wonder if it makes a difference, and three because I wonder if I write for me or for others and can’t really answer the question.

Do you know what I do when I don’t want to do? I just do, plain and simple. By the way, that’s not grammatically correct on purpose, in case someone wants to bring up my post from two days ago. It is a type of speech I’m used to, and thus I decided to use the phrase.

Getting back to the post, as I said, I just do. When I question my writing I just write more. I change topics and write on it. It’s lucky to have 5 blogs, and it’s lucky to write some blogs for other people. It’s lucky that I’ve started the second edit of what I hope will be my next book. It’s lucky that I have a detective story that I can work on here and there. It’s lucky that I have other writing projects that I’ve started that, when I really need something else I can work on.

Something else about writing is that, when I’m in the mood when I don’t want to, I can take a break, read, walk, or just lay down and do nothing for some time and think or rest. When I do any of these other things, it gives me time to think, time to explore, and inevitably I come up with more to write about.

Of course I don’t only write for a living, and yet I find that the same processes work when I’m doing pretty much any other project. The things I mentioned that I do are, in essence, their own way of doing something. Even on those days when I feel like I’m having trouble focusing, which does happen, I can find a way to “do”. I might grab the smartphone and work the crossword puzzle if I need to stimulate my mind. I might read the comics and laugh at that. I might check on my chess moves on one of the two chess sites I’m a member of. I might go through email. I might leave the house, go to the gym, a restaurant, the lake…

But I “do”. I know that everything I do might eventually become an inspiration for something to write about. I know that I must “do” because if I don’t, there’s no reason to stick around and live. I know that I must “do” because one never knows what’s coming later in the day, or the next day, or the next week or year.

As I acknowledge the 15th year that I’ve been married today, I recognize that it might not last the day, it might not last the week, it might not last the year, it might not last years. So I have to “do” today, “do” now, because now is where I am; now is where you are.

So if you’re thinking about doing nothing, if you’re depressed and not feeling the urge to do anything, just “do”, and “do” with a purpose, even if it’s just to sit down and cry. By having a purpose, “do” always inspires.
 

Marketing

How Do You Market Your Products?

29 Comments

Today I’m asking the question more than offering suggestions because I think that sometimes we learn from each other, rather than from one person. And trust me, the last thing I should be offering advice on is selling products.

This is a question specific to products, not services. I mainly provide services but I have some products, as well as belong to some affiliate programs that allow me to offer products. I’m going to tell you what I do and then leave the rest open for you to share with everyone else. And yes, to the right there is one of the products I market, which is also to the left but looking much different than what I shared in 2010. Chick on it to take a look; trust me, it’s not a hard sell. 🙂

Actually, that’s one of the ways I market products on this particular blog. Sometimes the image I have to the right in my posts is actually an advertisement for something. Most of the time no, but if it’s a specific product or even a painting it’s probably a product. Sometimes I probably should mention that it’s a product because putting a painting in is almost like putting an image in, so I should say “selling on Imagekind” or something like that; I’ll need to work on that.

Obviously from my sidebars you know that I market products that way. However, I keep asking myself if it’s really marketing just sitting there. I may write specifically about my products once a year, if that often, and that’s for all my blogs.

Every once in awhile I toss out a product link on Twitter. Those don’t get much traffic but you never know who’s watching, right? I’ve never done it on LinkedIn or Google+, but when I created my business page on Facebook I advertised my products early on; haven’t mentioned any of them since.

I have one website which is mainly geared towards marketing my affiliate programs, which is kind of my version of a directory. It’s called Services and Stuff, and I’ve made few sales over the years from it, but I’ve also not marketed it all that well. It takes a lot of maintenance that I don’t always have time for because you know how affiliates are; here today, gone tomorrow.

Finally, every once in awhile I write a review about something, or a post that mentions something, and I include a link to the product. Most of the time I don’t mention that it’s a link to a product, but long time visitors know that if a link is underlined in blue that leads to a product, whereas most of the time my links are just a burgundy color without a line.

That’s all I do; trust me, it’s not very effective. I don’t have a list because, as I always ask, what the heck would I push to anyone with a list? Now, I do have a newsletter for my business which I guess one could say is an email list, and it has links to my products on it with every issue, so maybe that’s another way I market, ineffectively of course. lol

Your turn; what do you do, and how effective is it?
 

Blogging

Is Grammar Powerful Enough To Ruin Your Blog Rankings?

32 Comments

I can’t believe how many blog posts I’ve read in the last week on reasons that many of us bloggers, and a heck of a lot of websites, lost ranking over the last month due to Google’s Penguin update, and then the Panda 3.5 update as well. Most people didn’t know there were two updates; well, there were, and they were within days of each other.


I’m sure this guy’s
suffering greatly

There’s one thing that’s come up time and time again, and I feel that someone has to actually write about it to dispel it as a reason, so it might as well be me. That one thing is that grammar can be used as a reason why many people took a hit.

Come on folks, really? Actually, let’s break this down because when most people are thinking “grammar”, they’re not really thinking grammar at all. Per my Webster’s New World College Dictionary, grammar means:

“that part of the study of language which deals with the forms and structure of words, with their customary arrangement in phrases and sentences”

Is that what most of you using the word have been thinking? Nope. You’ve been thinking about misspellings, capitalization, and typos for the most part. That’s a part of grammar but it’s not grammar. But we’ll let that one go for now.

Grammar is terrible these days. Forget that people can’t figure out which “your” or “their” they should be using. There are phrases like “these ones”, which grates my nerves, and things like “I ‘heart’ you”, which I just learned what it means (yeah, I’m slow sometimes) that people use, to the point that some kids actually write these things in papers in school, and teachers are allowing it; I’m shocked! Okay, no I’m not, but I am greatly disappointed.

Still, let’s be reasonable here. If Google was going to penalize people for grammar, just whose grammar would they be penalizing people with? Folks in the south use a different grammar than folks up north, and I’m betting out west people say some things differently than we do. What about people in other countries that know English as a second language? Wouldn’t an overwhelming majority of their sites be penalized drastically?

Let’s go back to misspellings, capitalization, and typos. There’s so much of all of these, even on prominent news sites like CNN and MSNBC, definitely on my local newspaper, that one would expect these site would take a much bigger hit than those of us writing our little personal blogs because it’s much more pervasive there, yet they’re not suffering at all.

Does this mean one shouldn’t try to work on those things so they minimize errors? Absolutely not. Does it mean that one’s traffic might not drop if there’s so many errors people can’t understand the content? Nope; it most certainly will drop. But it’s not because of any updates by Google, or any other search engine.

So allay your fears; you will not be tested any time soon on your grammar, spelling, or anything else. That is, unless you’re still in school, in which case study! 🙂
 

Blogging

Back Up Your Blog; Another Lesson

23 Comments

Sometimes I think my reason for being on this earth is to mess things up so I can warn you not to do it. In this case it’s specific to blogs, at least WordPress self hosted blogs, although I think it’s a general lesson for everyone.

Yesterday I was checking in on this blog I write for an accounting firm. I went into the Admin panel and went to posts, where I discovered that two posts didn’t publish when they were supposed to. That was bothersome because, as I do with my own blogs, I tend to write posts ahead of time and if I wasn’t going to be able to do that there it was going to really complicate things.

The first thing I did was publish both posts. I actually had to “fake” change the date by changing the time a few minutes, then the Publish button came up and I was able to publish them for the dates they were supposed to show up.

Then I went online to do some research into the issue; y’all know how I like to research. I came across something that recommended adding something to the WP-Config.php file, as it stated that some themes were missing this particular code. I added the code, then went back to write a new post.

Only when I clicked on the link to the blog, it had reset itself back to the beginning. I was horrified; I hoped that maybe when I typed in the username and password and went back to the theme I had selected for the blog that everything would be as it was; nope. Oh the horror (some of you know that line)!

Now I was stuck. The lucky thing is that this is still a relatively new blog; the unlucky thing is that I’d never gotten around to backing it up. What to do, what to do, what to do?

I went to Google to pull up the cache of older blog posts. Only Google doesn’t seem to have that link anymore that gives you the cache of old posts or pages; what the hey? I looked everywhere, even did some research on that, but nothing worked. I then tried Bing, and they didn’t have anything either.

Yahoo did the trick. I put the blog’d address link into the search and it pulled up the one entry, but it also had “cache”. Through that link I was able to recover all the older posts, but not the two posts I’d done earlier in the day. Hey, I took what I could get, and that was a lot. I was able to post all those articles back for the same date that they originally were posted, then three posts, one to replace a post that was supposed to be for next month, then two more that are supposed to go this month.

I’ve scheduled one to go live today, but it’ll be after this post so I don’t know yet if it’s working or not. Either way, it’s reminded me of the importance of backing things up before making radical changes, even though I hadn’t thought that was a radical change. I’m just glad that I can write fairly fast; I’d have hated to spend a long time having to rewrite those articles.

Yes, please learn from my mistakes; don’t do them. 😉