Tag Archives: Blogging

Blogging

What Do You Want For Your Blog?

21 Comments

Last week I was reading a post on Mike’s Life blog titled Why Businesses Should Blog Outside The Box. It was written well, and it made an interesting point in saying that once he was able to convince a friend of his to find a way to convince people who didn’t know they needed him and his business that his friend’s business skyrocketed once he figured out how to reach that particular market.


Dream On
by Gisela Giardino

It was interesting to think about because I believe most of us really are searching for those people who we believe need us or want what we have to offer in some fashion, and we don’t really think as much about reaching out to those people who may not know they need us. Of course, that really would be thinking outside the box, and I’m unsure how we’d get it done.

Actually, that’s not true at all; at least for me. I find myself always trying to convince people I meet to stop by my blogs. Most of them aren’t really interested in many of the things I talk about… at least that’s often my first thought. Then I start thinking that there are people who visit this blog because one never knows what the heck I might be talking about, and I invite people to stop by once I’ve had a chance to talk to them. I often find that I’m talking to someone that mentions something I’ve written about on this blog, and I’ll say to them “hey, I wrote about that; you should check out my blog.”

Of course, just because I get people here doesn’t mean I know what I want for this blog. It’s something I’ve been thinking about as we get towards the end of the year, and as I start the creep towards post #1,000. Some think I should talk more about myself; some think the path I’ve undertaken in the previous posts over all these years is sufficient. Frankly, I haven’t fully come to grips with what I want for this blog.

So I dream and think, and in sharing it maybe you’ll dream and share. I’m not about to lay out my goals for 2011 on this post; that’s later. But here are things I’m thinking about. Do I want to make money on this blog? Do I want to increase my overall influence through this blog? Do I want to keep increasing all my measurable numbers, as in more subscribers and a lower Alexa ranking? Do I want to talk more tech or talk more blogging and writing or share more stories or add more motivational stuff? Do I want to add more video (can’t just yet) or audio? Do I want to use this blog to get more business overall?

What do I want for this blog? I’ll be thinking about that over the next few days. What do you want for your blog? Have you thought about it, and if not, will you?
 

Blogging

Why I May Not Comment On Your Blog

57 Comments

It seems to me that there’s enough information online and people talking about this subject that other folks might start listening to it in some fashion. Alas, it’s not the case, so I’m here to be the guy to bring it up, popular or not. It’s probably going to come across as a harsh post, and that’s not its intention. Sometimes I just have to be real; this is one of those times.


Comments by Boltron

I comment on a lot of blogs; I visit a heck of a lot more. It still surprises me that so many people have set things up that discourage many of us from commenting on your blog. I mean, it’s not hard; it’s not rocket science. All that’s needed is a thought about where your blog is, how your blog is set up, and what you’re hoping to get out of your blog. Making it easy for people to comment on your blog, no matter what; is that too much to hope for?

Okay, some of that might not be fair, but then I haven’t gotten into any details yet. I guess that’s where I should start, so we can get a discussion going.

1. If you’re moderating comments, you’re getting on my nerve. Moderated comments tells me that you care more about spam than about thanking people for wanting to comment on your blog. If it worries you so much, then put up a disclaimer up front that you’re moderating comments and I won’t waste my time. But then, if you did that I, and maybe a lot of people people, won’t comment on your blog. That’s somewhat disingenuous, isn’t it? The other thing about writing a comment on a blog that moderates comments is that suddenly you’re getting bombarded with a bunch of comments all at once in email, and if the owner of the blog isn’t putting any names in, you have no idea which response is to you, if there’s one to you at all. I hate that, but it leads to point #2.

2. If you’re not responding to my comments, you’re getting on my nerve. I didn’t just stop by and write “good post” and move on. It might not have been the theory of relativity but I at least gave you a response that showed you I read what you had to say. Now, do I expect a response all the time? Actually yes I do, but if you miss one or two I won’t mind. But if you seem to exhibit a pattern of not responding to my comments, I probably will stop coming, and I don’t want any complaints about it, whether you visit me or not. Goodness, I’m as busy as the next person, and if I’m responding to almost every comment I deserve knowing that you appreciated my taking the time out to respond back to you.

3. Are you still using Disqus, or one of those other services? Haven’t you realized yet that you’re losing comments? Obviously you didn’t see Sire’s poll, which is still ongoing by the way. I mean, 45% of people said they wouldn’t leave a comment on one of these blogs; are you really getting enough comments that losing 45% of potential visitors is okay for you? And, by the way, if you read the post, you’ll see that some of the people who said they’d still leave a comment overwhelmingly said they didn’t like it, and didn’t do it on all blogs that run this service, but most of them. So, add at least another 25% to the mix and then ask why you don’t have lots of comments. By the way, you’re a dying breed; so many people lately have jumped on the CommentLuv bandwagon and found other ways to block spam and they’re starting to thrive. One guy told me his comments jumped threefold; how’s about that!

4. Are you verifying that people are receiving your responses back to them? This one’s dicey because of you folks running free blogs on WordPress.com. It doesn’t give you the ability to set things up so you can make sure people are seeing that you’ve responded to them, and that’s a shame. Since I’m someone who won’t subscribe or login to receive comments when I get that email (after all, I already checked the box on your blog that asked if I wanted to subscribe to comments), I’ll only revisit blogs of those of you I happen to like; you know who you are if you’ve seen my comments on your blog. If you’re answering a lot of people and rarely hear back from them, this could be an issue for you. But I’m not the guy who can tell you to spend your money on self hosting and a domain name; spend your money your way. However, I am the guy to tell you that it’s the way to go if you get serious about blogging.

5. Some of you know I don’t like Blogger/Blogspot blogs. I don’t like them because you have to create a login name to comment so that you’ll get responses back. I have one for my business name, and I’m still trying to figure out how that happened, but not for any of my other blogs or websites, including this one. Some blogs I want to comment on aren’t appropriate for my business account, and thus I’ll either skip it or comment using the email for this blog, but of course Blogger won’t let you put in an email, and thus you never know if you got a response or not. This fact impeded a lot of blogs I wanted to check out when we had that network meme a week or so back. On this one, same answer I gave to the previous point; I can’t tell you what to do, but if you’re serious about blogging, think about it.

That’s it; that’s my rant. I’ve actually ranted on all these things in the past, as you can see from some of the links, but I guess it’s been awhile. People forget, and thus I figured I’d bring it up again. If you don’t really care, then that’s fine; if you do, well, at least think about it.

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Buffalo Bills Red-Navy Blue Pleather Varsity Team Tall Sizes Full Zip Jacket

Blogging

Will Paying The Price Get It Done?

45 Comments

Last week I read an interesting post on a blog written by a lady named Jacqueline Gates titled The Price Is Right ~ But Will You Pay It? First, that’s the first time I’ve ever typed a squiggly line, and I didn’t even know I had that key until I went looking for it. Second, it’s an interesting article that also has an interesting, if long, video complimenting it.


by TheTruthAbout

If you don’t go check it out, the basic premise is that everything is attainable if you’re willing to pay the price for it. She talks about weight loss, being monetarily successful and something else that’s slipping my mind. In her view, we all have the capability to do and be these things if we’re willing to do what it takes to get there. The question now is twofold; one, do we believe it and is it really true?

Y’all know me; I’m of two minds. One, I believe that anyone can achieve anything if they can get beyond circumstances, whatever those circumstances are. Two, I believe there are some things that are unattainable, not because one doesn’t work hard enough for them but because, well, they’re just unattainable. In my comment on her post I mentioned that no matter how hard I work, even if I do the same thing 24/7, at this point in my life I won’t ever be the starting guard for the Los Angeles Lakers. But in my past… okay, let me have that pipe dream for a moment. 🙂

Based on my beliefs, question number one has limits to it. I used to be a pretty good piano player but I haven’t played in years now. If I started to practice every day for at least 20 hours, I might be able to get back to where I was. However, I couldn’t reach the level of Rubenstein even when I was playing between 6 – 8 hours a day in the past; would that really be attainable now, no matter how much I practiced? Sorry Charlie (who remembers old tuna commercials?), but it’s just not going to happen. But can I be pretty good, maybe even better than I was before? Sure.

So, not only are there limits, but there are modifications we might have to deal with. Can we all be rich? Absolutely. Can we all be Oprah rich; ain’t gonna happen. Do we need to be Oprah rich to be happy and content? Nope. Is it still a nice goal to shoot for, as long as we’re still realistic about our overall dreams? Yes.

Okay, on to question two, and I think I’ve already answered it. If it’s not always attainable, and thus not believable, then it’s obviously not true. At least not across the board. Let’s look at blogging, my favorite subject here, and talk about it a little bit.

Can any one of us be really successful at blogging? Since there’s lots of criteria, sure. But let’s look at two criteria in particular. One, can we all make money with our blogs; two, can we all get our blogs ranking high wherever we want them to rank high? Let’s take these in order.

We can all make money with our blogs. I’ve made money with this blog and my other two blogs as well. Have I made “big” money; that’s a much different question. I don’t think I’ve made $100 total with my blogs in the full existence I’ve had them, and one of my blogs is more than 5 years old. Actually, let me take that back; I haven’t made $200, since I did make some money when I accepted text ads early in 2009. I haven’t made any thing significant, though. Could I? Truthfully I don’t know. Since there are a few folks who’ve made it I could say “yes”, but since that number is less than the number of millionaires in the United States (which is actually a much higher number than you’d believe), I’d have to say probably not. Doesn’t mean I won’t try, but it’s highly unlikely.

So, number one says “no”. What about number two? This is one where I believe Ms. Gates rule on “price” is spot on. With this one I really do believe everyone can be really successful if they’re ready to pay the price. Ah, but what is that price?

Two weeks ago my blog finally cracked the magical 100,000 number on Alexa. I believe it cracked that figure because of the sweat equity I was putting into it. I’ve written a post a day for about a month; I even had two posts a day two weeks ago, though that second post was more about marketing. Tomorrow’s post will be my 900th post in just under 3 years. And I’ve visited lots of blogs and commented, shared, retweeted their posts and my posts, and really worked the community. In essence, I’ve been willing to pay the price to get to this number, and all without page rank (y’all don’t really want me to go there again, right?).

However, I know everyone can’t afford to do this. I work from home, so I have more freedom to diversify my work and my blogging. Not everyone can do this, so I have a small advantage. But this is where paying the price differs. I give up vacation time and time to just sit and watch a lot of TV or play video games for this. I might be missing something, but I don’t know. But y’all do, and if you enjoy doing what you do, then you’re not missing a thing. You’re paying the price in a different way; that’s okay.

In conclusion, we all pay the price for whatever we have. We can decide to pay the price for other things or continue paying the price and getting what we have. But paying the price for something else doesn’t necessarily equate into ultimate success. Yes, you’ll be more than you were, and that’s great. But trying to be more than what’s possible will leave you depressed. Do the best you can, achieve the best you can, and be happy with that. Now, get in there and blog!


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Mailwasher Pro

 

Business

How Can I Be Useful To You?

32 Comments

Last week I was honored to have Chris Brogan stop by this blog for the first time and leave a comment. Of course, I’d been talking about his post regarding ways to write multiple posts in a day. He stated something interesting in the comment: “The qualifier might be USEFUL posts a day”.


Young “ME”
being real useful

It got me to thinking about how often I’ve been “useful” to those who visit this blog. I know that my business blog is useful, if tough for some people to get into, but what about this blog? Is it supposed to be useful or entertaining? Can it be both?

As I get close to post #900 I decided that I would take just a quick look at topics I’ve written on over the past 3 years, but I’m going in a different direction. For instance, I’ve written around 55 posts on entertainment topics. Out of all those posts, only one could be considered as useful, that being when I spoke on how to create playlists on Windows Media Player. Certainly a post like Saturday’s top 20 sports movies isn’t useful, but it’s fun and, in my opinion, is the type of thing where some folks might enjoy comparing their favorites to mine; an outlet for expression that anyone who likes movies can comment and know that there are no wrong responses (that is, unless someone actually thinks The Fish That Ate Pittsburgh is a top 20 film).

I then looked at personal posts, where I get to talk about anything I want to, sometimes things that have nothing to do with my norm here (do I even have a norm?). I’ve written around 50 of those, and I have to admit that determining what’s useful or not is a little bit harder. For instance, my update post on my gym workouts might not be useful to a majority of people, but if there’s someone who’s been thinking about joining a gym to lose weight and reads my post on my travails, have I given them something useful to think about, since I mention it also takes changing one’s diet? Personally I’d have found something like that useful before I joined the gym, but what about anyone else? Anyway, based on my own criteria, I think at least 7 of those posts were fairly useful; the others, well, at least half are subject to interpretation.

And of course there’s the Sunday Question, which may or may not be useful to people. Its intention is to get people thinking most of the time, and to me, that’s useful. However, I’m not sure people learn anything from it, unless they’re learning something about themselves that they never thought of before.

Anyway, based on the quick review, it would seem that I’m useful at least 80% of the time on this blog; I really hadn’t expected that at all. I’ve talked about blogging, writing, software, plugins, product review, health, social media, motivation and posted some interviews. There are more topics, of course, but you get the drift. For me, it’s been an interesting mix of things over time, and I hope to continue it.

Still, I figure it’s time to ask this question; how can I be of more use to you? Are there topics I haven’t covered that you might want to see me tackle, if I’m able? I’m not going to ask what you don’t want me to talk about because, well, I’m going to write what I want to write about, even when it’s a tough topic to discuss like issues of race. And I will tell a story or two here and there, like my story about The Keys. But I figure why not ask, as it’s the holiday season, I’m on the cusp of 900 posts, and who knows, there might be other posts in your questions as well.

Go ahead; let’s see what I do and don’t know as far as helping you out. But if you ask me how to build a car; ain’t gonna happen! 😀
 

 

Business

Don’t “Stink”; Not Quite A Rebuttal

29 Comments

Last week, Mitch Joel wrote a post on his blog titled Don’t Suck. It’s a tongue in cheek yet kind of harsh statement on what you shouldn’t do if you don’t want certain negative things happening to you online or with your products.

Whereas I kind of like it, and I understand its purpose, I have to kind of counter it in saying that I don’t believe that it necessarily means you or me, well, stink (yeah, I changed up the word; so sue me, but I just don’t like that term) just because you have difficulties doing certain things or achieving certain results. True, there might be something lacking here and there, but that doesn’t mean you stink.

For instance, this missive: “If no one “like”s you on Facebook…” I’m not sure one thing has to do with the other. I see lots of things I like and comment on that I forget to “like”. I have many posts on this blog that people don’t end up “liking” for whatever reason. I see many things on Twitter that other people write that are very good with very few “likes”. I’m just not sure that a Facebook “like” is the end all – be all of one’s popularity or competence.

Another one is “If no one is leaving comments on your Blog…” I’ve talked about it often, as has Sire, in determining that some of the best writing we’ve seen will show up on blogs where almost no one comments, mainly because bloggers haven’t quite figured out the community part of it all. True, there are some folks that have no real sense of community that will do very well, but I tend to think that’s more of a fluke than the norm.

Finally there’s this one: “If no one is clicking on your banner ads…” Almost no one clicks on any of my banner ads, and I think that pertains to lots of other people who blog. Does that mean we all stink, or does it mean that people just aren’t clicking on them because it’s not why they’re visiting your blog, or even website, if you have a sales website, so to speak? Even if I happen to write about a product and add the link to it at that point, and no one clicks on it, does that necessarily mean I stink, or anyone else stinks, because no one clicks on it? And, by extension, does it mean I stink if no one visits any of the products I posted last week on this blog, even if none of those products apply to the audience I’m writing to? Or do I stink because I know the folks visiting this blog aren’t the market for those products and I wrote it anyway?

As I said, I really do understand the premise behind the post, which is this; “be good!” Heck, it’s probably “be outstanding”. Those who exceed will achieve better than those who are just middlin’, who don’t give full effort, who leave the public wishing for more. If you can go over the top with what you do and people see it, they’ll flock to you and your products and you’ll do well. If you don’t give your all, or you present something lackluster that people feel they were cheated on, not only might they ask for a refund but they’re going to spread the word about you and, unless you’re really big already, you’re going to suffer. That’s never good.

I hope you read Mitch’s post (yeah, I like the name :-)) because overall it’s pretty good.


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