All posts by Mitch Mitchell

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

Too Many Tags And Categories?

November 29, 2011 Mitch Mitchell 35 Comments

A couple of days ago I was reading a guest post by a guy who wrote on the topic of bounce rates. He started that he only had a 2% bounce rate; every person that commented, including yours truly, found that hard to believe. Goodness, the best bounce rate I have on any of my blogs is around 66%. That may have been the most controversial point, but there was something else in that post that got my attention.

It was his mentioning tags and tag clouds and how, by keeping them relatively low, they can help shape what your blog is all about in a better fashion, as well as help reduce your bounce rate. That one caught my attention because I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. And, by extension, categories as well, which sometimes mirror the tags.

For the uninitiated, categories help people find content they care about quicker. If you look to the right sidebar of mine you’ll see it just before my product pages listing. I have 35 article categories on this blog; in a way that’s a bunch, and I know that some of these can be merged. Not all of them, but some of them; then again, I talk about a wide variety of things on this blog, so maybe that’s not so bad.

However, I also have 1,899 tags and counting on this blog; that might be a bit of overkill. The idea behind tags is to refine what you’re talking about in your blog posts. So, I might be talking SEO in general as a category, but on one day I might be talking about keywords, on another I could be talking about linking, etc. Therefore, one might tend to have more tags than categories.

But how many tags and categories are too many in general? I tend to believe it depends on what it is you’re writing about. Let’s compare this blog to 3 of my other blogs. The first business blog, which I’ve had the longest, has 19 categories and 919 tags. The second business blog, which I’ve only had just under 4 months by now, only has 6 categories and 50 tags. And my finance blog has 45 categories and 901 tags.

Do two of those above look excessive to you? On the surface they do, but in reality I tend to think not. Tags help you zero in on a topic, and search engines seem to take more credence in your tags than they do in categories anyway. I’ve noticed that categories seem to show up in blog readers more often, as they do in my Feedreader program. True, it might help if you could find ways to use similar tags over and over, but sometimes I think it’s imperative that you drill down further, be a bit more specific with your topic.

For instance, my last post was on video blogging. I could have just put “blogging” but that wouldn’t have really been sufficient. So I added “video blogging” to the mix as well as “vlog”, a term a lot of people use. I then decided to toss in a keyword phrase, “future of blogging”; after all, there might be people that search for that phrase, and with all the other keywords it might help make the post prominent enough to be found for that term by some people.

By the way, I will say that it’s possible that either tags or categories will help reduce your bounce rate. If people want to learn more or see more of what you’ve said in the past they might decide to click on your categories or, if you have them somewhere, your tags; I’ve taken mine down but I’m thinking about putting it back up somewhere, probably on the right sidebar again.

What’s your take on tags and categories? I know some people haven’t used them; why not? And while we’re at it, do you pay attention to tag clouds on blogs you visit?

Blogging

Where Is Blogging Going?

November 28, 2011 Mitch Mitchell 26 Comments

This is interesting. I’ve done 2 interviews so far and was asked the question above in both of them. I decided to do a little video on it; let’s see what my powers of prognostication are:

Here’s the interview I did with Brian Hawkins of Hot Blog Tips. Now, I’m not sure if this is the second shortest post I’ve ever written but it’s close to it; enjoy!

Networking

Interviews – What Prompted Yesterday’s Post

November 26, 2011 Mitch Mitchell 10 Comments

Yesterday I wrote a post telling people that I was available for both interviews and questions. It may have seemed like a strange post to some, and I mentioned in that post that I was looking to increase my influence and find more topics to make videos about. But that’s not all, and I thought I’d talk about the rest of it in a secondary post.

I’ve done a lot of interviews with other people. I’ve posted them on this blog, my Syracuse blog, and my business blog, Mitch’s Blog. The thing is that I’ve actually put out way more requests than that, and it’s that point where things have been a bit irksome for me.

As I write this I have 6 interview requests out there. Actually that’s not quite accurate. I have one interview requests and I’m waiting for 5 people with whom I’ve requested interviews from to respond to the questions so I can put them, well, somewhere. These are people that agreed to be interviewed, people I’ve already sent the questions to.

Now, I know people get busy, and I know I didn’t specify a time frame. However, when I sent the interview questions, I actually figured I’d get responses back in 1 to 2 weeks. This isn’t the case, though. Three of the interview requests are more than 3 months old at this stage, and I’ve sent them all followups. I figure it’s not going to happen, and that’s too bad because I think it would have been as good for them as it would have been for my blogs.

People are funny. They have these businesses and they say “I don’t know how to increase my sales or get people to know more about me”, and then an opportunity arises, it’s free, and they disappear. Months ago I put out a call to interview people for my business blog. In general it has a format that everyone has to adhere to, only 5 questions, and folks have to be independent or a small business for participation. I had one person who responded; now that’s a shame. I put it out on Twitter and I repeated it twice, and only one person? This from, at the time, almost 3,000 people who supposedly follow my stream? Even people I know didn’t pony up for it.

What does this say? To me it says people have no idea what an opportunity looks like. Sure, this blog might not have an Alexa rating under 10,000, but it is under 100,000 and that’s a pretty good accomplishment. According to Feedburner there are more than 250 people subscribed to this blog, and that probably means there’s at least that many people coming to the blog in other ways on a daily basis. Many of those people are consumers in some fashion, or looking for ideas, or are just interested in learning more about something or someone. And let’s face it, you never know when someone might reach out to you to ask for your services or products if they get to know you better, right?

This was on my mind when I wrote yesterday’s post. If others don’t want to jump on opportunities to get their name out there, to increase their influence and possibly affect their income, I’ll take their place. Strangely enough, a couple of days ago I was listening to an interview I did with someone 4 years ago talking about SEO and websites, and the good thing is that interview is still out there affecting someone’s life; okay, maybe not but I can dream. lol One just never knows.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled reading. 😉

Networking

Go Ahead, Interview Me

November 25, 2011 Mitch Mitchell 16 Comments

Well now, this is a different kind of post. The title kind of says it all, but I figure I should add a little bit of something extra.

My friend Kelvin
hates this picture

In August of last year I wrote a post about influence and social media. I talked about how I wanted to work on growing my influence and I talked about a few things I was going to try to do to achieve that goal. I talked about how I was going to work through Twitter and Facebook. I’ve gone that route, and I’ve actually had a little bit of success with it. I even talked about this blog and, at that time, my business blog and the number of links I supposedly had between the two. Now that Yahoo Site Explorer is gone I’ll have to check somewhere else to see the numbers again.

I’m also done with Klout, as you know, although using that to measure influence was really ridiculous. There really isn’t a true tool to measure clout that way. But I still want to increase my influence, and thus I’m asking for help while offering help; how’s that sound?

Here’s the deal. I’m putting myself out there to do interviews. You’ve seen examples of how I do interviews on this site and you’ve probably seen me being interviewed on other sites. This post on influence listed a bunch of interviews I’ve done with other people on this blog. This page to interviews are some I’ve done with other people; I think it needs to be updated.

Anyway, part one is putting myself out there to be interviewed. It can be through questions you send me by email (look at my contact page for my email address), or I’ll do your podcast, or even video interview. I’d like to do a lot of them, but any interviews would work nicely. I can speak on a variety of topics, but I’m not going to tell you what they are just yet.

That’s because I have part two. Last December I wrote a post asking how I could be useful to you. I got enough comments on that post and people were very nice, but no one really asked me for help on anything. I’m going a different route here. I need to create some more videos and what I thought I could do was see what people might be interested in asking me so I could answer those questions or address those topics by video. This time, instead of asking people to write their questions on the blog, I’ll ask you to go through the email route to send me your question. I started wondering if folks didn’t want to put questions in comments so everyone else could see them; by going the email route, maybe folks will feel more free in asking questions.

And now the topics. Y’all know I can talk about a bunch of different subjects, so maybe these will fit your qualifications for an interview, or give you an idea of things to ask me questions on that I might be able to answer. This certainly isn’t a comprehensive list, and frankly I know if I actually get questions that there might be some I can’t answer. Let’s see how all of this goes; if nothing else I got another unique blog post out of it. The subjects are:

Leadership/management; racial diversity; customer service; medical billing; health care finance/revenue cycle; SEO; social media; writing; budgeting; blogging; 70’s music (odd one, eh?); and speaking.

That’s what I know I know, but I’ve talked about all sorts of things on this blog over almost 1,200 posts so I know something about other topics as well that one might find intriguing. I’m game to try almost anything; almost, that is. 😎

Consider this a social experiment; at the very least you know you’ll end up with a link back to this blog if you interview me, since I always mention when I’ve been interviewed; let’s see how we can benefit each other. Thanks; enjoy your weekend.

Personal

Thanksgiving 2011; Is There Anything To Be Thankful For?

November 24, 2011 Mitch Mitchell 23 Comments

Wow, what an interesting calendar year. How things have changed or gone from Thanksgiving last year until now. I’m not only talking about this blog, but my life in general. For this blog, I wrote last year and put up an image of myself with a friend, and then had to tell people that wasn’t my wife; won’t make that mistake this year. lol

This is my wife and I

I’m finding myself wondering if there’s much to be thankful for this year. My grandmother first got hurt, and then passed away. I had to take a guy to small claims court, though I won. I worked on another project that took me more than 4 months to be paid for. The really big projects didn’t come through.

Had my first (last?) colonoscopy and then had a second one on the same day. I had to change diabetes doctors after 11 years. I had a few friends pass away that I wasn’t expecting it to happen to. The local symphony shut down, as well as a few of my favorite restaurants.

I had some issues with affiliates including one, Finish Line that not only didn’t pay me but then decided to drop me and threatened me while they were at it. And this year, for Thanksgiving, my mother is with her friend, my wife is with her friend, and I’m home by myself (at least for now).

Overall, it seems like it was a pretty hard year to deal with. Things to be thankful for? As I sit here trying to think of things there’s not all that much that comes up. However, one of the blessings of blogging is that you sometimes chronicle things that have happened that actually turned out to be a good thing. So let’s see…

I actually began the year by not only getting my first gig just days after the new year began, but I was named at a Fabulous 50 top blogger on the same day. Thanks Bev!

I created two new blogs this year. One is my Syracuse and central New York area blog called Syracuse Wiki. The other is my second business blog on SEO and social media for businesses called SEOX Blog. Both have done relatively well, even if they don’t get tons of comments.

I got to do some live presentations this year. I gave two presentations at a local library, one at a large conference, and one to my consulting group. I might be forgetting something but I’m not sure. I also got to be interviewed on a couple of podcasts and was in Bev Mahone’s real radio program one day this year.

I reached my 1,000th post on this blog and I started creating videos as well. According to YouTube I’m not breaking any records, but at least I’m producing something different.

We finally got Osaba bin Laden, and many other countries are seeing major changes as the people have realized just what kind of power they have… as long as the leaders of those countries decide not to just kill everyone that misbehaves, which also happened a couple of times.

I went to my first karaoke club this year and found it fascinating, although I doubt I’ll go again. I also got to go to Las Vegas for a conference and got a much different experience out of it than the first two times.

My online income started to increase drastically, not quite to the level I’d been hoping for but higher than any other year; that is, until this last Panda update, but even with that I’m going to have my best year ever.

I got personally reacquainted with old friends this year, going first to a reunion at my college, then to a memorial get-together for my friend that recently passed.

I also celebrated my 10th year in business this year; I never really thought I’d make it this long but now that I have I guess I should really learn how to do it better, eh? lol And I’m about to hit post #900 on my business blog, which is almost a shame for as long as I’ve had it compared to this one but hey, a milestone is a milestone.

If I have to be truthful, I’ve met a lot of new and wonderful people this year, both online and off. Even though it was under horrible circumstances I got to meet and get to know my grandmother’s brother, Uncle Bill. I’ve connected with relatives and old friends I never thought I would ever have the opportunity to interact with again via Facebook, so I’m not hating on that.

And finally, even though I continue to battle with diabetes and being tired all the time and vision and occasional short periods of depression and a few other things I won’t mention, when all is said and done I’m relatively healthy, still go to the gym on occasion, still get to go where I want when I want, and still have a lot of people that talk to me via social media, networking events, and just events in general; I even went to some parties this year (actually ate outside once this year at all; that’s Josh’s fault).

All that and the continuing visits from friends both old and new on this blog and my other blogs. I mean, weighted properly, I’d have to say that other than my grandmother not being with us anymore the year has actually given me a lot to be thankful for. With that, I thank all of you for putting up with me, I thank my wife and my mother (both of whom will never read any of this stuff) for hanging in there, and I guess I’ll thank me for not just quitting and going off into the wild blue yonder, however that would have manifested itself (nothing like suicide so don’t go there, but who hasn’t ever had a day when they just wanted to give it all up and go lay in bed forever?).

Thank you all, and have a wonderful Thanksgiving (and if you’re not from this country, I’ll just ask you to take some time and think about what you might be thankful for on this day as well). And just to see who actually reads all of this to the end, click on this link and mention what it is because I’m posting it just for you. 😉

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