Tag Archives: blog posts

Blogging

Now My Word Is Gold?

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A funny thing has been happening over the last couple of weeks, and I’m not quite sure why.

I have people writing me and asking me to look at their blog posts, then either write about it on one of my blog or actually post the entire thing into my blogs as a guest post. These are people I don’t know and have never heard of, and frankly, coming out of the blue the way it did, initially kind of freaked me out.

Then I got a little upset because I didn’t know these people. I’m sure every once of us has written something and wanted to share it with our friends who don’t follow our blog, or our wives and other family members. But I can’t conceive of searching for someone and asking them to go through all those hoops without building some kind of relationship first. And the idea of reposting an article from someone else’s blog; can’t conceive of that either.

One guy even told me how to do the entire thing; how presumptuous. To his credit, I did decide to go check the post out, and man, you think I write long posts sometimes. It was nearly 4,000 words, with pictures and graphs; almost more of a white paper than a blog post. When I told him I wouldn’t know what to do with that, because it was overwhelming, he wrote back to tell me how I could do it. After I wrote him saying that I didn’t know him, he’d never written anything on my blog and never participated in a discussion, and wasn’t following any of my feeds. He did say that he went through Google Blogs looking for folks who write things on his particular topic and my blog came up, so he was just submitting to everyone.

By the way, it’s not for this blog, but it’s definitely been for my other two blogs. I hadn’t thought my opinion on health care had gotten all that much further than just my own business blog, but I guess the word is starting to spread a little bit more than I had anticipated. And my finance blog is hitting kind of a renaissance as well. That one, by the way, now has all sorts of people wanting to advertise on it; but that’s the next post.

What’s your thought on someone you don’t know reaching out to you, asking you to read their stuff, then write about it on your blog? Do you find it intrusive or flattering?

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Research

Post #601 – Time For More Changes

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Wow, 600 posts, and I’m still going relatively strong. I didn’t quite hit the date I had expected to hit when I wrote post #501, but I’m close to that date, and I feel good about where I am, so it’s all good.

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Look tired don’t I?

When I wrote post #500, I said I was going to start being a bit more personal on this blog, and it seems that I have been. It’s translated to more visitors, which makes me feel like it was the right way to go. Here were my top 5 topics for the last 100 articles:

Blogging – 30

Personal – 10

Product – 8

Entertainment – 7

Research – 6

It’s the first time entertainment has shown up on my top lists, but I enjoy those posts, though they take the longest to do, what with my looking for videos and products to shill. It does seem to be true, however, that list posts get a lot of attention, even if not always a lot of commentary. This leads to the topic of my most popular posts during the time period, and once again, most of the most popular were posts written beforehand. As a matter of fact, one that’s popped out of nowhere was written in April 2008! Here they are, and, for a change, when they were written:

Getting Google Desktop To Index Thunderbird 406 visits, 12/2008

Top 100 Singers Of All Time 272 visits, 01/2009

WordPress 2.9 Upgrade; My Issues 120 visits, new!

Watch Out For Secret Shopper Scams 119 visits, 4/2008

Isn’t that incredible? I wonder what’s going on that so many people still need help with that older stuff. Next, my most commented on articles during the last 100 posts:

My Top 10 Favorite TV Shows – 41

Trying To Understand Squeeze Pages – 40

Beyond Blogging – 36

It Pays To Be Bad Sometimes – 32

Limit Login Attempts – 31

Those are the stats I wanted to share with you. I could look at plenty more, but I want to go in a different direction, to let you know what’s coming.

I don’t make money off this blog; that doesn’t mean I can’t. However, what’s a bit more important is streamlining a few things and promoting some other things better. So, here’s what’s coming, if I haven’t already made the changes when you read this.

A lot of the banner ads are going away. I’m probably keeping the one at the top and maybe one on the side, but that’s it. My hope is that some of my remaining real estate will look like a prime place for advertisers at some point, but initially it’s going to clean up the page a little bit. The books are going to remain, but I might repackage how they look on the site, if it fits.

I’m going to add an area where all the products or things I positively review will be listed, with a link to that review. I think those things deserve to be sitting out here more prominently, especially a product like Mailwasher. Usually when we write about these things they only remain prominent for a short period of time, then get lost in the abyss of newer posts. That seems like a smart business move.

I’m also probably going to add back Google Adsense to this blog, which I removed a long time ago. I’ll probably go with a smaller ad than that long one I’ve had before, just to have something here. If people are looking for topics I hadn’t thought about before on this blog, maybe they’ll be the ones who’ll find what they’re looking for on Adsense, right?

And some of the “trinkets” things to the right I’m probably going to remove as well. Not all of them, but some, like the one presently saying my blog is ranked #254 on Winning the Web, will be gone, mainly because if you click on it and go to their site, it pops up this book thing that sometimes won’t go away even when you hit close, and if it’s irritating me then it will probably be irritating others as well.

I appreciate every one of you for checking in with me from time to time, and I hope to find even more things that add value to your online or offline experiences. Most of all, I want to be at least someone entertaining; nothing worse than a lot of boring stuff. Now, it’s still my blog, which means I’ll put on here whatever I want to put on here, but it doesn’t mean I might not entertain thoughts here and there; just be ready for me to debate you on them. 🙂

Onward and upward, as we head towards #700.
 

Blogging

Blogging Step Five: How Often To Post

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It’s been almost 3 months since the last post of the blogging series, so, before I go further, let’s list the other four:

Step One: What To Write About

Step Two: Where To Create Your Blog

Step Three: How To Create Your Blog

Step Four: What And How To Write

So, if you want to start at the beginning, and if you want to think about it some more by reading this post, we’re ready to move onto the next part.

A question that’s often asked is how often someone should write. Kelly McCausey, substituting for Alice Seba as she has a baby, wrote on Alice’s blog that she recommends to her coaching clients that they write at least 2,000 words a week, and finds that clients seem to not only appreciate the advice, but end up writing more often.

I subscribe to a lot of blogs, and I find that there are some people who will post 3-7 times a day, some who try to write one post a day, and some who try to write 2-3 times a week. Occasionally there’s one who writes once a week, and if they write less than once every couple of weeks, unless they’re friends of mine, mine, I don’t stay subscribed for long. When I’m home, I write one post a day on this blog. Actually, let me clarify that; I make at least one post a day. Sometimes I’ll only post something, like a video of something that’s caught my fancy, even if it’s something old and odd:

Okay, I watched that when I was a kid; I admit it. 🙂 Anyway, you may not know this from reading this particular blog, but in my real life I’m an independent consultant, so there are times when I’m out of town a lot, like right now. I stay in hotels, and not all of them have the best internet service, so posting something daily becomes problematic. So, right now, I post more on the weekends, yet still try to get at least one post in during the week. If you’re hoping to attract visitors, and keep those visitors, then you need to post new content on some kind of regular basis to encourage people to keep coming back. If you write once a month, no one’s going to remember to come back, but if you write regularly, and you’re entertaining or informative, then people hopefully will come, and keep coming.

Then, if your purpose is to show you have some kind of knowledge that will help you get contracts or work later on, or your purpose is to make money with your blog, you’ll have better chances to do both. And, let’s face this fact; why have a blog in the first place if you’re not going to write anything to begin with?

Oh yeah, let me be clear about my terms. What’s in this particular post, for the most part, is writing; the video is just a red herring. Some people post only pictures; some videos, and some others post sound files. In a way it doesn’t matter as long as you’re consistent, but in another way it does matter. If you’re posting videos, one has to hope you also have something to say, and that every once in awhile it’s you in the videos saying something because you hate typing. Videos can be nice, but if that’s all you post, people won’t like it too much because watching videos takes time. The same can be said for audio; great stuff every once in awhile, but they take time to listen to. Posting pictures goes the other way; if that’s all you do, it gets boring after awhile because you’re not really giving something of yourself. So, there has to be a mix of media if you’re going to do it at all.

And there you go. I hope some of you have read the series and taken to blogging on your own. I’d love to know how it’s working out for you thus far. And I’d like to highlight someone else who writes a great blog on blogging ideas, and that would be Barbara Ling. She offers a lot of great stuff.

Happy blogging!

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