Category Archives: Blogging

Do You Need A Certificate To Prove Your Blogging Worthiness?

Last week was the final meeting I had with University Hospital here in Syracuse. I was part of a diabetes study, the results of which I’ll hear about sometime in 2014. It was in its own way a 12-week study that lasted 12 months; figure that one out. lol

At the end of the meeting, the lady handed me an envelope, which contained the certificate you see to the right. She congratulated me for not only getting through the entire study but showing an improvement, and then maintaining most of the improvement. Everything stayed the same except my glucose readings; I have to work on bringing that down again unfortunately.

In my last post I talked about dealing with our irrelevance and how we’re not all that irrelevant when we think about it. And yet, sometimes we still feel that way in our lives, in our blogging, in our careers. Sometimes we feel that need for validation of some type from someone else; it doesn’t always feel like it’s enough when we validate ourselves.

What am I getting at? I’m going to ask 5 questions. If you can truthfully say that you are or have done these things, then I award you the certificate at the end of this post. All you have to do is print it out, put your name on the line, and put it… somewhere, anywhere. You can scan it and put it on your blog. You can put it on your wall or on your computer. You can copy it and just leave it on your computer; whatever you want to do. Or you can ignore it if you don’t feel you need it. Still, the questions, which are thus:

1. Do you see yourself as trying to contribute to the overall community in some fashion with your blog? In other words, are you writing your blog because you feel you have something to share, as opposed to only trying to make money from it? Nothing wrong with making money, but if those are your only motives then your reason isn’t pure; my rules today.

2. Do you get comments on your blog that you respond to? Even if you’ve written 100 posts and only have one comment, did you respond to that comment if you determined it wasn’t spam? Spam comments I understand; delete those things and move on. But if you got at least one good comment, did you respond? Do you try to respond to as many comments as possible, especially if the comment was a good one (heck, sometimes if you get a one line comment there’s nothing to respond to; I’ll give you that one).

3. Do you ever comment on other blogs? You might not understand what that really has to do with your own blog but you’re not really part of the community of bloggers if you’re willing to entertain guests who come to your blog without checking out what others have to say. Did you know that I did a little research project and proved that commenting on other blogs drives more traffic to your blog than anything else?

4. Do you promote your blog in other spaces? Blog commenting is only one way to promote your blog. You ever heard of social media? Have you heard of newsletters? Have you heard of linking to your blog via your email signature line? Often people say they don’t get many visitors on their blog, to which the question “what are you doing to promote your blog” always comes out.

5. Do you write your own content without plagiarizing, come up with topics that no one else may have written on, stay true to yourself no matter what you write about, give the best effort you can every time out (no one hits a home run every time), not fear controversy when it’s needed, and don’t believe the hype when someone tells you that you’re not good enough?

If so, then you deserve to be rewarded. I’m not giving you money (You buy my book? Of course you didn’t, so I don’t have money to throw around like that lol), but I will share the certificate you see below. As I said, it’s yours if you want it, but don’t lie to use it. Congratulations; you deserve it. 🙂


 

Innovation And Blogging

Why yes, we have video and I’ve still got something to say.

You hear it said all the time; everyone’s blogging about the same thing over and over. That may be true; after all, how many posts do I have on this blog about blogging?

Well, here’s a news flash; everyone has shoes as well, but not everyone has the same shoes. Even if the color and style is the same the size probably isn’t, and they were probably made by different designers.

The truth in life isn’t that maybe there are no totally new ideas of things no one else has seen (there are, but go with me here), but that even if that’s true there are always different ways of presenting something.

For instance, let’s take blogging. We can write; we can have pictures; we can have infographics; we can have audio or podcasts; we can have video. Even if the same message is delivered it can come at you in different ways. Both Marcie Hill & Brian Hawkins like the little thing above that says “read” so you can listen to what I’ve written if your eyes are too tired to read, especially if I’ve written a long post.

In any case, I’d love you to watch the video, which is just over 2 minutes; come on, you can’t give me 2 minutes of video love? 🙂 After watching it, let me know your thoughts on innovation, blogging or otherwise. What ideas can you come up with to separate yourself from the rest?


 

Why Breaking Through Locally Can Be Hard To Do

Last November I addressed the issue of how lackluster most of our blogs are when it comes to getting local people to view them. I put up some stats, and I linked to some other articles in that post that I’m not going to link to again; check that one out because it’s different than this one, even though it touches upon the same theme.

Theodore Scott via Compfight

Last time I pretty much lamented the situation of breaking through locally. This time I’m going to talk about why it’s harder to do than we think it is. I’m going to do it as kind of a list post, which means my explanations will probably be sort of long. But I’ll try not to make them too long; maybe if I get to 5 I’ll stop. 🙂

1. Too little local competition. This one seems strange, but go with me for a moment. If you live in a small community people already probably know who you are. If you’re putting up information on a blog but you’re the only game in town, most people are either going to just drop in or call you on the phone. It’s only when there might be more options when someone actually goes online to find information or businesses.

2. Too much outside competition. Once again, this one might seem strange until you think about what it is you do and if there are lots of other people doing it.

On my SEOX Blog I talked about one of my clients, an accountant, whose site is the highest ranked accounting site locally. While that sounds great, if you look for the major search terms that I’ve worked on for her the site only cracks the top 100 on Google for one of those terms. She beats every other business in town, but all the other businesses that show up aren’t local. They’re national, which means they have the dollars to dominate the local markets in most communities throughout the country, potentially the world. That hardly seems fair but what to do about it?

3. No one really needs what you do locally. That one’s hard to deal with so let’s explore it. Let’s talk about my SEO/social media site and business. I battle national companies for a lot of services and lose pretty badly. But I’m ranked in the top 5 for some things, even at #1. Those things are:

central new york article writing services – Google, Bing & Yahoo #1
central new york blog writing services – Google #2; Bing & Yahoo #1
syracuse article writing services – Google, Bing #4
syracuse blog writing services – Google, Bing #1
syracuse search engine optimization consulting – Bing #5
syracuse search engine optimization consultant – Bing #2
using your website as a marketing tool – Google #2, Bing #1

I’m not even sure where Yahoo’s mind is if Google & Bing have me ranked but it doesn’t really matter. I worked hard on making sure my site was ranked well locally, and for those terms above, out of the 36 I track, I’ve succeeded. Yet, I don’t get any calls or email from anyone. I think there’s only 2 local people who have ever visited it, even after I gave a big presentation locally that garnered a lot of interest… at least on that day.

What this says is that no one locally needs or wants these types of services. The site and the blog get very little traffic in total, even with the blog (averaging 3 1/2 visitors a day) and in the last month there were 10 visits from all of New York state, 6 local visits; that’s kind of pathetic isn’t it? So, sometimes if you can’t break through in the big picture, you can’t break through locally either; that’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?

I’m going to stop at those 3 because I need to ask this question openly; should we care? That one depends on what you do and what your hopes are. I talked to my accounting client to determine if she still wanted me to write content for her this coming year. She said yes because she actually got a couple of clients this year because of both the website (which I created for her last February) and the blog, which, as I said, makes her the highest ranking accounting firm online in this area. People are always looking for accountants, and if they want someone local, they’ll dig deeper to find that person. I’m happy for her because it’ll cost me nothing to do my taxes. 🙂

For me, it’s a more difficult question. I’m not going to advertise SEO or social media services anymore because there’s no market for it, and I can use my time otherwise. I’m cutting back on what I write on that blog so the wealth of articles that are there will have to carry the day more than new stuff. I’m also not going to advertise writing services anymore, at least not through that site or blog, since that doesn’t seem to be how people are finding me anyway. And, if I’m not getting national or international business from that site, and it’s getting few visits anyway, why bother with trying to do local business, or at least advertising for it?

This article makes it seem like it’s all about me but it’s not supposed to be. I ask you to put yourself in my place when evaluating what you’ve been doing online and try to make the determination as to whether it’s working for you if you’re local. Having a presence is one thing; that’s always important. But at some point if the benefit isn’t equating to the business, you might have to make some evaluations of it all.

If you’re not trying to get local business then this entire post might not mean much to you unless you extrapolate it into just who you’re hoping to do business with, and how you’re doing with that. It’s not always about business for everyone, but if it is what do you see when you look at what’s happening for you?
 

To End Or Reduce Blogging – The Conversation

Just to get this out of the way, if you care about this blog don’t worry, this post isn’t about I’m Just Sharing. However, it was a point of consideration when I was initially giving this particular topic some thought.

Sophisticated Blogger
Mike Licht via Compfight

Lately I’ve been asking the question as to whether I’m doing too much blogging. I love blogging, so much so that I’ve spread it across 5 blogs. Each blog has its own purpose, which is a good thing because if all the blogs were on the same topic there would be too much redundancy.

Two of my blogs are for business. One of those I’ve been writing for 7 years now, Mitch’s Blog, and most of the articles there are on leadership. The other blog, SEOX Blog (gone as of 9/2014), is my social media/SEO blog, and I started it in August 2011.

The purpose of each of those blogs was to highlight expertise of a sort so I could generate business. Another purpose of course was in its SEO properties; the most new content one has on a site, the more search engines stop by and thus your sites will rank higher. That part is proven, so no debate there.

The question I’ve asked is if the effort I’ve given those blogs equates to how much business I get, or even traffic. Truth be told, not even close. I’ve never generated any business on SEOX Blog, and almost no comments. I’ve generated very little business on Mitch’s Blog when you consider that it’s 7 years old; a couple of speaking engagements, a podcast, and requests for reprints and for me to write guest articles elsewhere, non-paid of course. I don’t think I’ve ever even made a book sale, or a sale of any of my other products, from that site, and that’s a shame. No sales from either site; ugh.

At the same time, I have other sites, and one of them actually generates the bulk of my online money. That’s my medical billing site Medical Billing Answers. In December it generated $199.25, moving up, as I’ve started adding a little bit of new content to it. Frankly, one should spend more time on what makes money, don’t you think?

I’ve written often that the worst thing in the world is having a blog where you’ve stopped writing and it just sits there with nothing to show for it. Suddenly here I was, thinking about ending a blog or two, and that’s counter to everything I’ve ever thought. At the same time I think I’ve proven that I can still write tons of content, as I’ve already written tons of content. What to do, what to do…

Thus, I share the video below with you. It was my weekly Google Live Hangout with Brian D. Hawkins of Hot Blog Tips and Sheryl Loch of Fuzzy Wuzzy Anipals, and the topic of the video is “Should I Stop Blogging Or Slow Down?” They shared thoughts with me as I brought up the issue then got their positions on it, since both have had blogs and websites that they’ve either let sunset or killed.

Watch the video, and then give your opinion either on the video on YouTube or right here. As I said, no decision I make will impact this blog at all because I love this one, but others… well, we’ll see.
 


http://youtu.be/ur3MPLFrmNY

 

12 Things “I’m Just Sharing” Addressed In 2012

A couple of weeks ago on 12/12/12 I wrote a post titled 12 Things For 12/12/12. That one was more a post about stuff I believed in, more of an opinion piece. This one is something quite different.

Grandfather and Me

I decided to do a post on things this blog addressed in 2012. This particular post is #199 on the year, and since we all know I’ll have at least 2 more posts, if not 3 more, by 12/31, it’s easy to say that I’ve written more than 200 posts this year, which is actually down for me and yet has made for a more comfortable blogging year, especially since I added 2 more blogs last year.

I talk about multiple topics in the video, and to get you to watch the video I’m not going to necessarily tell you what all those topics were. However, I did have these 12 titles and links that I briefly mentioned in some fashion, which is what the video was based on. So I’m going to give those links beneath the video. It’s about 20 minutes long; I was shooting for 10 minutes but there’s no timer! I did it using Google+ Live Hangout, which means anyone could have been watching, except I started it around 12:45 or so in the morning, so I doubt anyone saw it live, and that’s just fine. Hey, at least I know Brian will watch it, though I mentioned Sheryl, Ileane, and Holly. 🙂

 

 

And now, the links:
 
Our Reluctance To Market Ourselves

Post 1,300 And On Friday To Boot

Black Web Friday

5 More Lessons About Blogging Learned From A Poker Tournament

Social Media And Your Familial Obligations

11 Lessons Learned From 11 Years In Business

Blogging Tips – Will People Like Your Blog?

Dream It And It Will Come

100 Things About Me

Don’t Lie About Your Health

I’m Just Sharing 10 Things You Must Have For A Happy Life

Google Authorship – Pretty Cool