All posts by Mitch Mitchell

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

Michael Jackson – The Follow Up

June 26, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 38 Comments

Now that I’ve had some time to process things, I’m ready to write about them.

There I was yesterday, having just ran a test for my webinar next week titled Social Media, SEO And Your Business in 90 Minutes, when I saw an email come in saying Michael Jackson was being rushed to the hospital. Stunned, I immediately turned on the TV to see what was going on. Almost immediately, before I’d ever gotten to a channel, another email came through saying he’d passed away.

More stunned, I get to CNN to see the news, with CNN deciding that they would run a disclaimer because they hadn’t been able to corroborate the story. I went to Twitter, because I had a feeling there would be someone talking about it there. Man, I wasn’t even close; everyone was talking about it, and only it. It was amazing because just hours earlier the conversation had been about Farrah Fawcett, and not with quite the same volume that hearing about Michael Jackson had taken.

It was such a big story that Twitter actually crashed here and there. And, it seems, most other sites that had anything to say about Michael Jackson crashed for at least some period of time. There are already stories out saying this one man caused more disruption than any other single event on the internet since the 9/11 tragedy. That’s saying something; he literally shut down the internet.

I’m not going to write about what I consider as my special relationship with Michael Jackson here; I already wrote about it on my business blog. I will say this, though. As it relates to being online, it shows just how much the rest of us can make an impact on the internet just by our presence. Imagine what we could do if we could learn how to channel even a little piece of that for our blogs, and, eventually, our online success.

Wow. R.I.P, MJ; I’m really going to miss you.

Entertainment, Personal

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

June 25, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 13 Comments

Michael Jackson; I have nothing else to say right now, other than he’s been my favorite performer for over 40 years. Video; actually, not all that many. All the other videos have had the embed disabled; heck. Anyway, that’s all I have for the day, but as I find more videos, I’ll be adding them.

Diabetes

Sugar Alcohol Problems

April 20, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 34 Comments

Here’s a short story for you. As you know by an earlier tale, I’m diabetic, coming up on 12 years in September. It’s not always easy to know what to do if you’re diabetic, and I have to admit that I’m not the best diabetic in the world.

not healthy no matter what was in it 🙂

I have a sweet tooth, and these cravings are hard to overcome. There are times when I don’t even know I’ve left the house to get something sweet until I’ve started eating it. That may sound crazy to some, but it’s the truth. Every once in a while I get my mind in the right perspective just before I leave the house, and look to call someone to talk to, which usually helps me get past the craving. That’s the thing about a craving; if you can get past the time period when it’s really strong, then you won’t succumb to it… most of the time anyway.
Continue reading Sugar Alcohol Problems →

Marketing

Top Three Do’s And Don’ts

April 11, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 32 Comments

Earlier in the week I was reading a Tim Bossie’s blog, with his article titled 60 Quick Dos And Don’ts For Online Advertising. This is a great list, and I hope everyone goes over and absorbs this entire list, as it pertains to online advertising, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, MLM marketing, network marketing, email marketing,… well, you catch my drift.

Anyway, I decided that, out of this great list, I’d say what I felt were the three top do’s that he mentions, and then what I feel are the three top don’ts on his list. By the way, I’m not sure if that’s how and where one would put the “s” after “don’t”, but I did search on the internet and it seems this is how other people are doing it, so I’m going that route.

First, let’s do the don’ts first (wow, that looks weird, doesn’t it?), to get those out of the way:

1. Don’t comment on blogs with “Great Blog!” and leave it at that. It’s comments like that which makes it harder these days to determine what’s spam and what’s not. As you know, I hate spam, but I’ve also talked about how it’s getting sneakier and smarter these days. Our friend Peter talks often about people who drop by and leave lots of one line comments just to move up the lists of those people who have top commentator listings, like mine over there on the right (and look who’s at the top). Whether or not it’s truly spam, it looks like spam, and it’s disingenuous to the person who’s writing the blog.

2. Don’t limit yourself to just one advertising method. Y’all see all the things that I test here, then tell you about, but I know I still have a lot of methods that I’ve yet to try. There is no one way that will work for everyone; man, I’ve proven that! If you’re not making $500,000 a year, you probably need to change something around, keep tweaking, and keep learning. Yeah, I know that’s a super lofty goal, and most of us would be happier with a lot less than that from blogging, or from our websites, or from any other internet marketing in general, but I like to dream big.

3. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see overnight millions. Let’s face this fact; there are a lot of dead blogs and websites out there. A good number of those folks tried to make money online and failed. Some of those people participated in programs like Jeff Paul’s Internet Millions or Stores Online programs.

Think about it this way; just how many blogs are there out here that consider themselves “Make Money Blogging” blogs? Folks, in one way or another I’ve been at this for four years, and it’s not until this past year when I’ve actually started making any money at all. I feel it’s because of things I’ve learned since I started writing this blog. Obviously, it’s a long process. The best part about all of it is that it doesn’t cost a lot to try these things out, and to stick with it just a little bit longer. As Jesse Jackson used to say, “Never give up; never stop trying; keep hope alive.”

And now, the do’s:

1. Be persistent in continuing to learn advertising and marketing. Now that’s really what this blog is all about. I try to learn more and more about affiliate and internet marketing, and as our friend Steve says, I tend to process a lot of information.

Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of information that I probably don’t put into practice for one reason or another, so I’m not making the kind of money I should be making. That doesn’t mean I’m not always learning. If things so well, we’re going to get some specific questions answered from a big time internet marketer soon, which I think would help everyone out.

Still, you see me testing things and telling you about them; you see me sharing my stats; you see me sharing websites I find; and you see me sharing ebooks I’ve obtained here and there, free ebooks that I’m allowed to share with you. And I try to write something different than what everyone else is writing.

You saw my rant on this idea of massive traffic; well, since I wrote that, in Twitter, I’ve probably seen at least 20 new posts that have said the same exact thing as everyone else. Is there something new? I don’t know. But I do know that there’s always something new to learn, a different perspective, a different tactic, and I’m going to continue trying to learn more and more; I hope you keep coming back to learn, and to teach me some things.

2. Comment, Comment, Comment on other blogs in your niche. Actually, I want to extend this one further to say comment any place where you feel you can make a contribution in some fashion. I actually do understand the tactic of commenting only on blogs that fit your niche, in that it presupposes those people will see your comment, figure you’re some kind of authority, and decide to come by.

But I’ve had more fun and met some great people on blogs that have nothing to do with my niche; heck, do I have a niche anyway? I write three blogs, and this is probably the only one that doesn’t really have a niche, as much as a concentration. I have varied interests, so I comment on blogs every and anywhere. And I try to offer something with each comment, even if it’s only two lines. There’s a lot of great stuff out there; take the time to look at it, then comment on it, and finally,…

3. Spread some link love in your own articles and blog posts. Well, that’s what started this article to begin with, isn’t it, acknowledging the great job Tim did in writing his post, then expanding on a few points of it for my blog. For those of you who say there’s never anything to write about, you’re just not trying.

If I look at any five blogs, I can find something to write about, and probably get 500 words out of it. I’m a genuinely curious person, and I haven’t even brought up my interest in psychology, the universe, quantum physics, poker (well, I have talked about poker), history, music, and the like. But I’ve shared tons of links with y’all, even on this post; have you noticed that not all the links here are to this blog? Well, I’ve also done a lot of internal linking within my own blog, as well as this post. Internal linking is important to your own SEO (oh yeah, I’ve talked about that also), and it gives those who might like what you have to say more pages to explore if they like even a little bit of what you’ve written. Last night, for instance, I liked this one blog so much that I read 10 of his posts, though I only commented on one of them; I wish I could remember right now who it was, because I’d share it with you.

But there you go, my top three of each category. All that, and if you go to Tim’s blog, there are 54 more gems for you to absorb. Who could ask for more than that? Oh yeah, lots of links on this one, aren’t there? Well, I wanted to do something special for post #399; I hope you enjoy some of them; take care, and enjoy your Saturday.

Writing

Book Writing Series Part Seven – Contacting Publishers

February 11, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 2 Comments

As many of you know, I started a series of articles that I called the book writing series, for which I also have a link at the top. I went through some issues on planning, writing, then publishing. Well, some people still want to try to get a real publisher for their books, which is a laudable goal, but may not have any real idea of how to go about it. That’s what this article is about. Of course, I hope you go through the other issues first before you get to this one if you’re a new visitor, but you don’t have to.

the Pen

To begin with, if you’re going to try for publisher’s, a must have book is Writer’s Market, because that’s where you’re going to start looking for the names and addresses of publishers you’re hoping will accept your book. However, the book doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, so stay tuned.

To start off with, whether you submit your book by regular mail or email, you’ll need to supply an outline, or synopsis, of the book. My book was non fiction, so I supplied an outline of what each chapter’s topic was, along with its title, and an outline of what was covered in the chapter if I was touching upon more than one theme. Also, every publisher or agent either wants one of two things: a complete copy of the book, which, if you print it out, has to be on individual pages, double spaced (that’s kind of costly and wasteful, but if that’s what they want then you give it to them); most publishers only want a sample, maybe like the first 50 pages or so. If you’re sending something by email, you may need to contact the publisher first before sending an attached file. This is one place where having Writer’s Market helps, because it will tell you how the publisher wants you to contact them.

However, here’s the big part that no one ever tells you. Unless you’re already famous, you have to put in your greeting letter, and you must ALWAYS have a greeting letter, not only what the book is about and the characters and synopsis, but how YOU would sell and market the book if it were totally up to you. You have to tell them who the target audience is, and why that’s the target audience. And it needs to be a big audience, one that has the possibility of selling at least 100,000 books. That was one of my problems; my non fiction book might have had a big market, but books on management and leadership rarely sell that many books unless you’re a big name. The One Minute Millionaire really was a fluke (I met Ken Blanchard, by the way, and he actually read a copy of my book). Anyway, the marketing aspect has to include things like book signings, certain types of radio shows you’d try to get on, television interviews, how much travel you’d be willing to do, etc. The problem with that is that a lot of that stuff would come out of your own pocket; they’ll pay you something up front, but you then have to figure out how to fit everything else into place with that money.

The best thing to do then, obviously, is to try to get an agent, but they’re tough to get through to also. They don’t like signing what they consider as a “one trick pony”; in other words, they usually want to know that you’ve written more than one book, no matter how good they are, because they want to pitch the writer as being somewhat prolific so they can get multi-book deals. So, unless your first missive is just so fantastic that the agent knows you’re the next coming of J.K. Rowlings, it’s a difficult sell. She’s actually someone who’s a great example of how to do it. She got an agent not because of the first book, but because she had a full outline for the entire series of books, and the agent just loved that, even though she’d only written the first book at the time. Even then, he had a tough time getting it to someone initially, but that was then his concern, not hers, since agents still work on commission. I don’t think any of them are unhappy at this juncture.

If you’re looking for an agent, you pretty much have to go through the same process you do for a publisher. There are only so many agents, and because most of them are one person operations, they only have so much time to read only so many books. The reason you might shoot for an agent, though, is because some publishers will only work with agents, not directly with writers, and agents have access to many more publishers than you might on your own.

Now a little bit more on figuring out the categories for your book. Though I love the idea of a book falling into multiple categories, publishers won’t. In the Writer’s Market book, many publishers only market a few types of genres, so they’d need something specific. These days, more publishers are starting to get scared of “true story” books because of the ones that have been outed as fake recently, so if you reference anyone specific in the book they’re going to want to know who those people are, and of course want to obtain releases from those people, or most of those people, and that gets expensive. If it’s me, I’d probably want to market it as fiction based on your own experiences. In any case, deciding upon your genre will help you decide how to help market your book.

It can be a tough environment, but if you’re committed to trying, I hope those steps above help.

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