All posts by Mitch Mitchell

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

Yes We Can Be A-List Success Stories

January 3, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 17 Comments

The other day, I read a post on a blog called WordPress Theme Customizations written by a guy named Costa on the topic Are You Still Dreaming To Be Famous Blogger. His point is that people will read what these A-list bloggers have to say, buy what they put out, and often you’re not only left with a product that didn’t really tell you anything you could use to try to get where they are, and not only are they not really even blogging anymore as much as managing, but you will never reach the level these guys got to, and that maybe it’s time for you to just be who you are.

He makes some interesting points, and I hope you click over and read what he had to say. I, being me, do take some exception to some of what he had to say, but not because of the reasons he chose. Here’s my take on it all.

Any one of us can be an A-list blogger. What that means, however, is that at some point you’re going to need one of two things. One, you’re going to need a major break of some kind. Two, you’ve got to be set up to capitalize on that big break when it comes.

This post isn’t about any of that, however. What it is about is not giving up on a dream, no matter how big, no matter how small (yup, now I’m channeling Horton the elephant). Anthony Robbins once said “if you have nothing to live for, you die.” If you’re not trying to accomplish something with your blog, why bother with it at all? If you’re willing to be less than your potential, why bother?

True, based on reality, everyone can’t be an A-list blogger. Does that mean you can’t be? Not at all. You could be a famous blogger without being an A-list blogger. You could make a lot of money without being an A-list blogger. You are whatever you are, and you can potentially be whatever you strive to be. Even if you never made it to the A-list, you will always feel secure that you have gone all out to be the best, and you can never take anything but pride in that. And there’s a lot to blogging; just check out these stats from The Future Buzz.

I do agree with Costa on one point that says a lot of what you purchase doesn’t end up giving you exactly what you want. For instance, that Beyond Blogging book on the side there isn’t a book that’s going to give you step by step instructions on being a better blogger. It’s tales of how some bloggers who have made a lot of money did it. It’s motivational; nothing wrong with that.

It’s like networking, for those of you who work for yourself; it is what you make of it, and if you leave a networking event without meeting at least one person, most of the time it’s your fault. Some people join organizations thinking those organizations are going to help them make business contacts that are going to bring money into their pocket. But that’s not what most groups are about, so it’s their fault for thinking that.

Now, if you want some free ebooks that may or may not help you, you can check out this post of mine offering some ebooks on affiliate marketing, and then this other post with more ebooks on affiliate marketing. These are free; go for it.

Back to my premise. I’m shooting for great success in 2010. After all, I’ve just been named one of the Top Baby Boomer Men of 2010, thank you very much. 🙂 After that other post of mine on publicity, this is a nice start to the new year. But I don’t have to be the only one shooting for the stars. The world is big enough for all of us to try to be as big as we want to be, whether it’s A-list blogger, famous movie star, or just rich person without any notoriety whatsoever.

Just don’t give up on your dreams because it seems like a hopeless cause. Now let’s get out there and conquer the world!

Blogging

Clearing Away Irritations In 2010

January 2, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 18 Comments

Back in September on my business blog, titled Mitch’s Blog, I wrote a second post on the topic of tolerations. The original post on that topic was only about a paragraph long, so I wanted to boost it up some more. On that post there’s a link to a pdf file called 1001 Tolerations, which pretty much means things we put up with instead of getting them out of our lives and making us feel better about things.

Well, this is a new year, and I think it’s time for me to clear some things out of my life that have been irritating me in some fashion. Actually, most of us should think about doing that from time to time because we all tend to allow certain things to drag us down, even if it’s only occasionally. For instance, you have someone who you call a friend, yet you avoid them because they bring you down whenever you talk to them. All they talk about is themselves and their problems; they never ask you how you feel or even listen when you try to talk; it’s all about them.

I don’t have anything like that in my life, but I do have some things that I will be eliminating. One is going through my email address books and eliminating anyone who hasn’t responded to anything I’ve sent in at least a year. I think that’s not a bad place to start, but I might even go back further than that; I’m not sure yet. I go through my email all the time, and I see these email addresses of people I send stuff to that never write back. I tolerate that, but no more; they’re gone. Well, kind of gone; I’ll save the email addresses in a file, but at least I won’t be seeing them anymore.

Two, remember my post against Disqus? Well, I’m now resolving that any blogs I’m following that has Disqus on them, or any other blogs I go to that send me a message saying I have to subscribe to find out if someone has commented back to something I’ve commented on, I’m deleting from my blog reader and moving on. Any new blogs I come to that has Disqus I’m not even reading. Now, I know some of you have it on your blogs, and if I like you, I may not delete the blog, like our friend Peter; we go back a long way after all. But Peter, sorry, I’m not commenting anymore because I hate getting that email every time asking me to subscribe.

Three, I’m going through all the blogs in my reader and I’m going to make sure I’m following people who are talking about stuff I really care about. Also, I’m going to drop anyone who hasn’t written a post in 3 months. And, while I’m doing that, I’m going to find the time to get to Twitter and release people who I started following a long time ago, who either aren’t talking anymore or aren’t talking about anything I care about. I follow nearly 1,400 people, and I’m not going to say that’s too many, but I am going to say that I do listen to a lot of folks, rather follow a lot of folks, who aren’t really talking to anyone, but instead are always selling. Twitter isn’t supposed to be a one way conversation, just like blogging isn’t supposed to be a one way conversation either.

You know what? At a certain point, we all deserve to have more positivity in our lives. And sometimes, heck, all the time, it’s up to us to make our own happiness and get rid of those things that help to make us unhappy. It’s time for me to do that; what about you?

Interview

How Can You Prosper Through Publicity?

December 29, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 12 Comments

Talk about an interesting issue, at least to me.

This year I’ve probably been a part of more interviews than ever before. Some have been online live interviews. Some have been in magazines. Some have been articles I’ve written. No matter; I’ve been out there, working things as I had hoped I could.

However, when all is said and done, I’ve gotten some publicity, but haven’t figured out how to fully capitalize on it. That’s not quite true; I haven’t figured out how to capitalize on any of it. I think that’s a major issue, as I’ve been getting publicity for years and haven’t yet capitalized on it.

Part of my problem is that I haven’t fully directed myself into one arena, which makes it hard for people to figure out just what it is I do. One wouldn’t think it would matter, but it probably does. My health care crowd has no idea what social media is, just as most of you who visit this blog have no idea what a revenue cycle consultant does. Throw in leadership and SEO and some other things and one might consider themselves as being renaissance, but others might not have a clue what to think.

Even with all of that, I think it’s been interesting over all this time to learn that publicity on its own doesn’t mean anything. Yeah, you get a minute or two of a bounce from some quarters. A newspaper article I was in back in May is on the wall of one of my favorite breakfast restaurants, which is very nice. I also got a free meal out of it at a local steakhouse; loved that as well. But business; none.

In any case, this was a pretty good year, and I’d like to share the links to some of the things I did this year as far as interviews or publicity went, since some of what I did isn’t producible. I wonder how most of you would have found a way to use any of these things to generate new income; I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My most recent magazine interview, though my participation is short, in Oswego County Magazine.

A radio interview I did on a subject called Men Have Issues Too.

A radio interview I did on the subject of Reinventing Yourself.

This is only a link to my business blog talking about my first national podcast on a diversity topic, Celebrating Differences.

An interview I did that ended up on a blog called Ramama’s Musings, where I talked a lot about dealing with diabetes.

A radio interview I did on the subject of blogging.

A radio interview I did on the subjects of social media and SEO.

A newspaper interview with my picture (in my red room) on Staying Positive.

An interview I did with Murray Newlands on affiliate marketing and business in general.

A health care interview I was a part of on Persuasive Compassion.

Finally, I’m listed as one of the top Baby Boomer Men of 2010 by Boomer Diva Nation.

So, did I put myself out there enough in 2009? Nope; I need to do even better in 2010!

Research

My Online Goals For 2010, And A Look Back At 2009

December 28, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 21 Comments

It’s been a year since I wrote about my online goals for 2009. Let’s take a look at those goals and see what happened.

1. Earn at least $2,500 online. Nope, I didn’t make it, but I did make a little bit more than half, coming in at $1,384.65. I had 7 months over $100, including one month where I was over $225. I think I’ll need another year to see if history has anything to do with sales, as the last two months and the first two months of this year period were the worst for me.

2. Revamp my Services and Stuff site. I looked at it all year and in the end, just didn’t have my heart into changing it around. I did make some minor updates here and there, but nothing dramatic in any way.

3. Work my way up to 500 subscribers to my blog. In January I had 54 subscribers. My best day for subscribers was one day this month where the number showed I was up to 126 subscribers. That’s more than double of what I had, but far shorter than where I was. Oddly enough, things jumped drastically when I said I was going to start writing more personal posts than technical posts; I’ll take that to mean that folks were actually more engaged than they had been before, and I thank those of you who have subscribed to this blog.

4. Determine at least three series to write on this year. I ended up the year with only one new series, but I’m thinking about creating another one because I’ve talked about it enough, such that it’s probably going to be an upcoming post. The series I created was SEO, and the topic that might turn into one is Twitter. Twitter doesn’t quite fit as a series, yet I think by now I’ve written about it in some fashion at least 20 times.

5. Get into Technorati’s top 60,000. This one I didn’t even have a chance to do because at some point this year Technorati totally changed how the numbers worked and looked.

That was a look at where my mind was last year at this time and what I had hoped to accomplish. My mind is in a much different place this year, and yet there are still some major goals I want to reach. I have been reading many other blogs lately that have talked about their 2010 goals, as well as how they did last year. I’m on the failed end, as I didn’t achieve a single one of my goals. And with what I’m about to put up, I’m not sure I’ll hit any of these goals, as they’re going to be somewhat audacious. Sometimes, it’s not hitting the goal that’s as important as the process for improvement. Let’s take a look at my five goals for 2010.

1. Earn at least $15,000 online. Yeah, I know, I didn’t even hit $2,500 last year, so what makes me think I can do even better this year? One has to have a goal, and one has to make plans towards that goal. I’m going to be changing some things up on this blog, and probably my other blogs. I know of some changes I’m going to make on at least one of my sites. In essence, I figure it’s time to set myself up for the possibility of making more money. I need to start putting together more of these things that I’ve learned rather than waiting around for the big epiphany to hit me. I’m not about to change up the frequency of my blogging, but I hope to make some of it better.

2. Reach those 500 subscribers. I had a nice increase this year, but it wasn’t my goal. When I wrote about that fine line between blogging success and failure I recognized that making small changes can sometimes have drastic results. This will be year three of having this blog, and I’ve got a lot of content that I might think is pretty good, but it’s not reaching as much audience as I feel it needs to reach. The same goes for my other blogs and websites, but I’m concentrating on this one for new subscribers.

3. Increase real visitors to this site to 3,000 a month on average. Yeah, that “real” word is there for a reason. If I believed the numbers that my host is telling me, I’m getting more than 25,000 hits a month on this blog. Well, hits aren’t actual visitors, and we all know that. My real visitors has come back up from the hit it took after I left town last year for a consulting assignment, and I need it to keep increasing. I’ve noticed, as many others have noticed, that when I write more, I get more visitors. However, now that I’m making a part of my living doing writing, I’m not sure I can get to a point where I can write two posts a day for this blog. In this past year I only had one month where I wrote fewer than 20 posts for the month, but I didn’t hit 30 once either. I’m going to be doing more of that, and if one of those two posts a day is a sales post of some type, well, that counts as well. I’ve noticed that there are some internet marketers who make sure they mention things more than once that they’re marketing in their blogs; heck, you see how this campaign for the Beyond Blogging book has gone. If I made even 3 sales I’m going to consider that a success for me; if I make more than 5, I’m going to consider it a lesson learned.

4. Get even more publicity this year by guest posting. In 2009, I did a lot of interviews and ended up in both print and online radio. What I haven’t figured out is how to turn any of that into major benefits for myself. The one thing I didn’t do in 2009 was any guest posts; I did my guest posts in 2008. I wasn’t asked, but I also didn’t put myself out there in saying that I would write any guest posts. I’m doing that now; anyone who wants guest posts, write me at the email address on my About page and let me know what you’d like me to write about. Heck, for that matter, if you’d like to write a guest post for my blog on any appropriate topic, let me know that as well.

5. Get my Alexa rank for two of my blogs into the top 100,000. This one is going to be harder than I think it is, but it’s got to get done. This blog is right now sitting at 142,467, which isn’t all that bad, but back in March it was 127,242. My Top Finance Blog was only created last December, and it’s got an Alexa rank of 361,787. My business blog is tied into my entire business website, and I’m not sure if the blog can help the entire website move any higher, but if it can, it’s sitting at 382, 865 as of today. With the two blogs, getting ranked into the top 100,000 means asking for advertising is a legitimate prospect, even though this blog has a 0 page rank because of previously having those nofollow Text Link Ads. I’ve asked Google to evaluate me, but I guess they have better things on their mind so I’m not pushing the issue.

Anyway, those are my 2010 online goals. What do you think, and what are you hoping to achieve in 2010? By the way, if you’d like some help in setting goals, download this free gift from Paul Myers on goals.

Blogging

My MySQL Upgrade Battle; The Short Version

December 24, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 8 Comments

Goodness, what I’ve been going through with my business blog!

It all started when I tried to upgrade it to 2.9. My business blog is my oldest blog, which I began in March 2005. It was created in MySQL 4.0. To use WP 2.9, you have to be on MySQL 5.0. This meant I had to upgrade my blog to the new database.

The first thing I did was to export a file of all my posts. I did it straight up instead of as a zip file; do both, which I eventually did, just to cover yourself. Then I went to my host, 1&1, and I exported my current database to my computer, then created the new database. All good thus far.

They I tried to import the new database, but there was a problem; my file was too big. You can only upload a maximum of 2 MB on most hosts, and my file was 3.5MB; lots of data over 4 1/2 years.

So I had to contact my host to ask them to do it. They were hesitant, and instead walked me through a process of uploading it myself through a special SSH program. That process didn’t work, though they didn’t know why and I did. I had to use the unzipped file to upload and it only allowed a maximum size of 16MB, but my file was 29MB; you’d think they would have known that.

The next step was on their end. They ended up finding a way to get my old database files into the new database, though it took them half a day to get it done. I went in, changed the WP-Config.PHP file to the new database settings, and all was a go.

Nope, not quite; nothing works that easily. All my posts suddenly didn’t work anymore, and that was problematic obviously. Nothing was coming up, but the strange thing is that I could get into my dashboard without any problems, and I could get into the editing area of each post. This was freaking me out.

My blog was down for two days, as tech support looked at it and determined they didn’t know what to do. They told me they had gone as far as they were allowed, and that maybe I should hire someone to fix my database. Hey, this is me!

The first thing I did was go online to see if anyone else had my problem. I couldn’t find that specifically, but I did come across this video called How To Fix WordPress MySQL Crashed Tables, on a blog called WonderHowTo. I thought that might be the issue, so I logged back into my host control panel and went through that process. One of my tables, WP-Options, had a lot of stuff that I had to run the “fix tables” process on, but it worked almost immediately. I went back to the blog; nothing.

I decided to see if upgrading to 2.9 would work. I tried the automatic upgrade, which has never worked before, and viola, it worked! Well, the upgrade worked; now I have at least one blog where that works. I still didn’t have any of my posts, though, and that stunk.

Still thinking, I decided to try deactivating all my plugins to see what happened. Nothing. However, something stuck out in my mind that I had seen while going through my searches. There was a lot of conversation about permalinks and checking the structure of those things. I went there and didn’t see anything out of place, but then remembered that, on that blog, I had a unique plugin called Dean’s Permalink Migration. I had added it to that blog to remove all the dates from my posts, which get in the way of SEO efforts.

I reactivated that plugin and went to check its settings. Then I hit update options, and all my posts were back; whew!

Then I went back to the plugins page and added the most important ones first and tested; all worked perfectly with the dashboard. Then I added the other plugins one at a time; all worked perfectly once more. Then I thought I’d try something and I added the WP Database Backup plugin, which used to shut all my blogs down; works perfectly.

I decided to go one step further. I went and found All In One SEO to see what would happen. And, of course, it loaded, my dashboard works perfectly, and all is right with the world.

At least on that blog. It seems that by upgrading the database that blog works the way it’s supposed to. As for my other two blogs, I’m still confused because they’re already on 5.0, so I shouldn’t be having any problems with anything. For now, I’m not going to worry about it.

What are the important lessons here? First, always make sure you back everything up, just in case. Export whatever you can to your computer for your protection. Second, if you have to, contact customer service and let them handle some stuff, even if they seem somewhat irritating. I’ll be writing a post about that on my business blog. Third, don’t panic if things don’t go correctly. Fourth, verify to see if you have your blog database first. If you can actually access your information in some way, you’re still running good. Five, test and question everything you have, and you’ll probably figure it out.

And if none of that works, go through forums, or, of all things, mention it on Twitter, and you might get a response or an offer of help. I’ve licked this one; whew! Since I probably won’t be posting on Christmas Day, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday!

I'm Just Sharing