Category Archives: Intelligent Blogging

September 19, 2012 · 12:11 pm

Blog Site-ing for Dummies | Putting On the Ritz


Putting On the Ritz: Using SM to enhance your post.

My friend, the displaced journalist,  has finally made a decision on Why he wants to start a blog, picked out the Neighborhood where he wants to host it, and made a decision as to How Often he’s willing to commit himself to write and post on it.

The final question he has for me is whether it’s necessary to use any sort of do-dads or outside links and  media to make it more interesting or eye appealing to the reader?

While I thought about how to answer that,  it occurred to me,  that making a post more interesting or eye appealing is a lot like decorating someone’s home or place of dwelling. First and foremost,  whatever they decide to use needs to be a reflection of them,  and not someone else.

When I was still working in the interior decorating industry,  I handled a lot of fabric for drapery, upholstery and decorating accessories.  Once or twice a year all the major drapery work-rooms  would go around the country, bring the local designers together and  put on work shops where we discussed industry related issues, as well as Oh’d and Ah’d over all the newest fabrics and next year’s trends.

“The bottom line is that blogging is like sex. You can’t fake it. You can’t fake passion. You can’t fake wanting to engage with the public. If you do, it will ultimately be an unsatisfying experience for both the blogger and their readers.” (Kevin Anderson)

Over time I learned to recognize certain styles, signatures and platforms of the various fabric houses, as each one had intentionally set about establishing themselves in a way that was unique to them. One of the most famous examples of this is the Ritz Carlton.  As part of their ‘elite’ platform development,  their furnishings, glassware etc. are very often made exclusively for them in-house, and  trademarked to further set them apart and keep their competitors  from being able to duplicate them.  So even if you went into one of their hotels blindfolded and didn’t know where you were, within moments of your being allowed to see,  their trademark designs and accessories would give it away.

Adding extra media to your post is just like decorating your home, landscaping your yard, piercing your ears, wearing a nose ring or shaving your head; it’s personal and it should reflect who you are.

So the question isn’t should you use it, but rather, will it enhance what you’re trying to say.

Just like the Ritz, you want people to recognize you for the things you say, and the way in which you say them.  Some bloggers like to spice their articles with pictures, podcasts and YouTube; while others like to serve their postings plain with little or no salt.  If adding links to other blog sites helps establish your point then do so. If embedding a video from YouTube or another bloggers Podcast highlights  or adds value to your post,  then by all means putting it in.

The blog site is yours my friend. It’s the place you can express yourself, expose yourself (in the most immodest way possible) and rant your views,  should you choose. It’s a blank canvas just waiting for you to fill in the landscape. You can share your life, build a platform, make your mark in the world or leave a legacy for your kids. It doesn’t really matter. It’s like Mahatma Gandhi said, “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” Insignificants (sic) is relative…creativity is imperative…go forth and create.”

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September 12, 2012 · 12:12 pm

Blog Site-ing for Dummies | How Often | How Long


How Often|How Long: Determining Your Posting Commitments

“In at least one way we are atypical bloggers. That’s because we just keep on posting. The typical blogger, like most people who go on diets and budgets, quits after a few months, weeks, or in many cases, days.” (Stephen J. Dubner)

So far in the journey of deciding whether to start up a blog or not, my displaced journalist friend and I have talked about some of the reasons why he would  want to start a one, and once started, what hosting sites are going to best fit his needs  and abilities.  The next stop  to make on our journey is deciding how often he’ll need to post, as well as how long each post should be.

As with any successful writing endeavor, understanding the amount of time and energy you are willing to commit to it is going to be an important factor in whether you’ll be able to achieve your end goal or not. For example, if you’ve chosen to create a blog site as a means of sharing your life, values, or thoughts in general or specific, then posting only five or six times a month would be ok. But on the other hand, if  your goal is to establish an online platform by which you are able to show off your wares then you’ll need to up the ante a little more; say two to three times a week.

Its import that beginning (and not so beginning) bloggers deal with any commitment issues they might have at the start of their endeavor  if they want to establish a following and keep it. When readers take the time to add your site to their RSS feed, or follow by email, they’ve done so because they value what you have to say and are looking forward to hearing more. Now they may be forgiving if you have the occasional moments when life just gets away from you and you missed a post, but if, for whatever reason, you begin to hit and miss with the frequency of your posting, you might find yourself un-followed in a not so distant future. I’ve seen it happen; I’ve done it myself.

So get the issue of how often your willing to commit yourself to writing-posting on your blog out of the way from the get go. See my post, Faithfully Yours | Blogging With Consistency, for ideas on how to develop a posting or editorial schedule.

The next item my friend and I talked about was how long the post should be.

Now I’ve read posts that were short and to the point, and I’ve read others that were longer, and in my non-humble opinion, should have been considered a novella rather than a post.  Did the author really need that many words? Yet be that as it may, the real issue isn’t how long the post is, but rather, how many words is it going to take to say what it is you want to say (keeping in mind that the average reader doesn’t have a lot of time to spend on just one post).

A good way to view this is, if your post were a writing prompt, and you were restricted to 500 words or less, you would need to find a way to write the story or essay within the guidelines of that word count.  And even though the creative artist within you demands to be heard at all costs, the truth is, less is often better than more.

C. Hope Clark has a great article on taking what you have to say, and paring it down to 700 Words.

So now that my journalist friend has determined what he’d like to say, found the right blog site to host it on and determined the frequency and length of content he can commit to, we’ll motor on over to the next item on our list; Putting On the Ritz

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September 10, 2012 · 2:34 pm

Spammers | Chipped Beef


And Other Assorted Unwanted Garbage

Garnering advise from other successful bloggers, authors, and who-whats, I try to be diligent about keeping up will the comment department of both my blog, and the ones I  am a ghostwriter for. And as you’ve probably already guessed, it didn’t take me long to discover that not all spammer’s get spammed. Oh the really nasty - this is worse than porn – your mother should wash your mouth|mind out with soap - spam does. I guess those aren’t difficult for Spam Blockers to pick up (but occasionally even one or two of those manage to get through). But after awhile, I start feeling like I’ve just waded into a chat room whose occupants are more like pubescent teenagers than adults.

Yet when I started to investigate how to block this kind of garbage from clogging up the comment stream, I discovered that often its the very spammers I’m trying to get rid of, that are the ones trying sell me the software to keep them out. Much like the notorious Kim Dotcom, it seems many of these dubious internet leeches get off on creating havoc and then selling its remedy.

Urban Dictionary: spammer; A clever, diabolical person who gets free non-stop advertisement across the globe in millions of people’s electronic mail boxes.

What is it about liberty and the right to be a jerk that fuels that kind of thinking? In a country where we haven’t yet taken up throwing our  dissidents into prison for being smarter than the average bear, it seems to me that abusing that freedom will eventually lead to self-destruction, ie; creating more and more laws to stop online mayhem,  which will ultimately leads to censorship, and big brother getting even bigger.

And it’s not just the twenty minutes I have to waste going through this stuff; it’s the whole, “What makes you think I would have anything to do with you now?” that makes me growl, and say very un-lady like things. Do they honestly think that spamming my blog site will generate some dormant need to buy whatever it is their trying to sell, or waste anther twenty minutes looking at theirs? Why would anyone in their right mind want to create links or association with individuals who only want to spam you? It’s like going on a blind date and discovering that the other party has no interest in anything that’s going to take longer than ten or fifteen minutes of their time.

Not only are they irritating, but a lot of them use our URL’s, Podcasts etc. to monetize their own sites, or generate more mischief on yours(should you make the mistake of clicking on whatever it is their trying to sell).

In my not so humble opinon, spammers are individuals who are either too lazy to invest in themselves and the community they’re so desperately trying to be a part of, or their demented twits who need to get another life. In either case, they’re intrusion into my email or  the comment stream of blog sites,  makes it harder for those who are legitimately trying to engage in the community to even get their comments read.

I’m not personally fond of censorship (I like my freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and the ability to make my own choice to just say no), but after spending the better part of my morning wading through this kind of stuff, I’d almost reconsider…almost. But since I refuse to forfeit my freedom over their lack of integrity, I’ll just have to keep doing to them what I’ve done with anyone who tries to feed me congealed meat in a can…politely say “No thank you”, and scrape it in the garbage.

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August 27, 2012 · 12:02 pm

Blog Site-ing for Dummies |Moving Into the Neighborhood


In my last post on beginner’s tools for starting a blog,  I shared about helping my transitioning – journalist friend with the process of deciding whether;  to blog | or  not to  blog. Now that he’s made a decision to go ahead jump in the pond, it’s time to put on the big boy panties and figure out what neighborhood he wants to move into.

Just like buying a house, establishing where you want to set up your blog site will depend on several factors such as; are you in a position to spend money, or is the landscape looking thin and you need to tighten the belt?

Are you the savvy-techno type, or more of a click- drag- drop?

Are you good at maintenance,  or would you rather invest your time and imagination elsewhere?

Is your idea of a good time writing your own HTML data in order to control how your site will be seen by rating software like Google’s Penguin or Panda; or would you rather dazzle em with your content and brilliant headlines?

When I first started my own foray onto the Highway of BS (Blog Site-ing), I had little or no money and just slightly more sense than a wounded pigeon in a room full of starving cats. The result was several misspent blog sites with not much more than my name on them. I had no clue about themes, widgets, menus or HTML;  let alone how to get my post from the laptop, to the site,  to the front page.

Finally I came across WordPress.com, and after a lot of coffee, nail files and laptops (yes, I went through 3, but in all fairness, I can’t really blame it on the blogsites) I finally manage to get a decent site up and running. So in this week’s post I’m going to help my friend, whose working on a pretty short budget, take a  look at a couple of sites in order to find the one that best suites him.

“The bottom line is that blogging is like sex. You can’t fake it. You can’t fake passion. You can’t fake wanting to engage with the public. If you do, it will ultimately be an unsatisfying experience for both the blogger and their readers.” (Kevin Anderson)

While browsing the net, I discovered that he had tons of options to choose from, and that websites like WebUpon,  and Mashable,  gave him over thirty different free sites to start with.  And if he could stretch the budget a bit, Hosting Review and Consumer Rankings offered a list of more than fifteen  pay-for sites that wouldn’t break the bank. But for the sake of time and brain cells, I narrowed our options down to five.

Hosted Blogsite: Free

Blogger: This is an easy site, hosted by Google, that allows the user to have limited control over theme, font and color. The draw backs are: no options to add video, imagery and share buttons. On a rating of 1-5, I’d have to give this a 2.5; easy to use,  but limited and not very practical for someone trying to build a platform or Personal Branding.

Tumblr: Here the emphasis is more than just the author blogging; it’s sharing all types of media, allowing the user to express their creativity with more than just words. It’s also a great site for re-posting other people’s creative efforts as well. Limited dashboard control, but an easy site to get your toes wet. I’ve given this site a 3.0 rate.

Posterous: For this site I went to Jill Duffy from PCMag.com. She recommends this as an excellent hosted site for people whose goal it  is  simple and quick. By keeping the theme and layout choices to a minimum, this blog site allows it’s user to concentrate on the type of content that can be upload from anywhere,  with a guaranteed easy interface with sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Linkedin. For the on the go short post, this site deserves a 3.5 rate.

Self-Hosted Blogsite: Free>Pay

Wordpess.com: Free>Pay. This is my personal favorite, so forgive this writer if I sound a bit biased. In my opinion, this is the Cadillac site for non-nerdy people like me,  who want more options than a few font colors, themes and lay-outs. Each of the more than one-hundred-fifty themes comes with lots of widgets; as well as the ability to create menus, pages;  and offers the user a great place to experiment. Another bonus is that at any point in the game, you can turn this into a domain name for next to nothing. And if you’re really adventurous, buy it and write your own HTML. As I said, I’m biased so I’m giving this one a  5.rating on hosted and a 4.5 rating on self – hosted.

Squarespace.com: Pay. As with Posterous ,  I’ll need to go to another blogger to get the low down on Squarespace.  So I hoped over to Sprye Studio and read Oleg Mokhov’s post, ‘Hosted vs. Self-Hosted Blog Solutions – Pros and Cons’

“Squarespace is a fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio. Think WordPress, but with more website-building flexibility but far less extensions, and hosted and maintained by someone else so you don’t have to worry about installing and updating yourself.”

Mokhov goes on to say that Squarspace is a more stable site than moste self-hosted; heavily guarded against malware-and high traffic crashes, and less expensive to keep than WordPress.com’s self-host. In all fairness, if what Mokhov says is true, then I’ll have to give Squarspace a 5 rating.

Whether you’re like me and just want to know where the on and off button on the remote is,  or your more evolved, there is blog site that is just right for you. And now that my friend has decided where he wants to set up shop, he and I’ll go over to Starbucks, get a couple of very tall Venti Breva Latte’s,  and talk about content.

So what site do you blog on? What made you choose that over others?

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August 20, 2012 · 12:28 pm

Blog Site-ing for Dummies | Why?


4 Reasons Why You Want to Blog

Anyone who has ever ventured out onto the Social  Highway of BS (Blog Site-ing) for the first time,  knows that within moments of Googling ‘blogs’,  you can become totally overwhelmed by all the possibilities. And if your anything like me, the moment details start rolling by like credits on a movie screen, your eyeballs do an immediate retreat to the back of your head;  leaving you with  no other option but to close the lid to the laptop (yes,  I still use such a dinosaur),  and go get another cup of really, really strong coffee.

Recently a writer friend of mine lost a long-held position writing a column for a local newspaper.  Now, many months later and still unable to find anything life defining,  he’s faced with the daunting decision of whether to jump on this ever-widening Hwy of BS; and if so, how to do it without getting lost in the process.

As several of us ‘bloggers’ jumped into the fray of discussion, I was not surprised to find that many of the issues he brought up,  were similar to those I had a year ago.  Let’s face it, when you’ve been doing the same job for over twenty-five years,  and you suddenly find yourself facing  a three hundred fifty foot drop to parts unknown, the whole process of first time blogging, social media, and Personal Branding can be a little frightening.

So,  being the information junkie that I am, I decided to treat this post as if my friend and I were sitting in Starbucks, drinking a fine cup of Kenya, and I was trying to help him navigate his way through least one lane change without getting run over.

Which meant we needed to start where all life defining questions begin;  Why?

Why do you want to start a blog? It may sound kind of childish, but didn’t God say that out of the mouth of babies… so before my friend can even begin  thinking about details like;  how to set up a blog, or what to right on it; he needs to start at the beginning.

So after cursing the net to find out what  bloggers thoughts on the matter,  I took a survey and narrowed it down to these:

4 Reasons to Start a Blog.

  • Sharing the Journey

One of the amazing things about having,  and posting on a blog,  is the ability to share whatever journey your own with others across the world.   A great example of this would be of my personal favorite Vanessa Katsoolis; a Kiwi from down-under, whose blog   Onethousandsingledays.com   journals her efforts to stay single (no boyfriend, no sex, no handholding, no dating etc.) for a thousand days,  while she finishes school and re-prioritizes her life.

  • Business Tool

As every business,  info peddling Blog site like Blogging Tips  will tell you; writing blogs | articles about your product or services,   is a must if you want to successfully drive customers to your web site.  By  submitting articles with good, knowledgeable, content on social sites like; Stumble Upon, Tumblr, Squidoo,  Technorate, Delicious and Linkedin,  you are putting your company’s name out on the internet where others can see and connect to it.

  • Personal Branding

This is one of my personal favorites.

In earlier posts on Personal Branding@ 3.0,  I covered five reasons why developing an online presence is absolutely necessary for writers, artists and anyone else who makes a living connecting with the human race. With the percentage of people competing in every area of society  greater than the national debt,  creating PB can make the difference between obscurity and visibility.

  • Creative Outlet

More and more people are using the www.com as the place to express their creativity and individuality. Several sites that immediately come to mind are: Coca J. Ginger ‘s blog for creative prose; Lynne Spreen  an author who shares about the joy of being over fifty, and Christine Friesenhahn , whose blog site,  Texana’s Kitchen  fattens us up on Texas style food,  while entertaining us with the secret lives of adolescent boys.

Starting a blog site is a lot like raising children. If you’re not willing to continually invest in its life, you’re better off visiting someone else’s and spend your energy elsewhere.  Next week my friend and I will take a look at Moving Into The Neighborhood: where and how to start your first blog site.

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August 15, 2012 · 12:07 pm

Writing Content | Adding Value


Four Keys For Creating Great Posts

Getting chosen to be on the first two or three pages of anyone of the Big Three SE’s , is becoming a lot like trying to make it onto one of the Olympic teams; you may look good  with all your fancy theme’s, widgets, share buttons and Twitter feeds;  but if you’re not posting quality content on a regular basis, you might as well pack up your gym bag and go home.

It wasn’t that long ago that all it took to find our posts on the first one or two pages of Google’s infamous SEO,  was stuffing it with mystical codes, popular tags and cleverly placed  hyperlinks.  Given enough fairy dust , elf runes and magical wands, even the worst blogger could make themselves appear on the first page of at least one of the Big Three.

But those days of technical wizardry  and sleight of hand are pretty much over. According to guest author, Rich Gorman  in his article,  “How to Write Online Content that Appeals to (Almost) Everybody“,  Google  has now made it nearly impossible for posers to get away with luring unsuspecting readers to their sites by using misleading information.

Now, with the help of nano-sized spiders, programs like Panda and Penguin are able to crawl over our web sites, read our mail, digest  our content and return  to their masters loaded down with all the information needed  for the powers on high to determine where  our sites and their posts get ranked.

So what is it that the Big Three are looking for? How do the powers that be determine which sites get chosen and which  get left in outfield? And even more important, what can you and I do to give ourselves a fighting chance so that we’re consistently  hit home runs?

“…write as if you’re sitting in the same room as those who read you, keep them entertained, 

and don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s you they’ve drop by to see.”

In reality, search engines are looking for the same things as readers; quality content, consistency in posting and eye catching presentation. In Heidi Cohen’s post on creating compelling content, she gives a lists of some of the key ingredients that can help us do that;  strong headlines,  strategically structured paragraphs, and well placed bold font.

But what are some of the things that will attract new readership as well as keep the ones we already have?  What will peak their attention, bully their thoughts and provoke their interest time and time again?

I started thinking about what it was that drew me to add someone to my own reader board. What was it about their content that made them interesting enough for me to copy that URL and drop it into my Google Reader board?

Here are the four keys I use to judge content.

  • Write posts that add value: If people are following our posts, then we owe it to them to write about things that gives our niche readership something  that add to who they are, and can be tucked away in a folder for their own articles or future posts.
  • Speak the language: Every niche has a language all its own. Techno geeks speak Techneez; journalists speak Journaleez and emerging authors ….well we’re still trying to learn how to speak Authoreez. Don’t waste the reader’s time speaking a language that has nothing to do with them. Whatever your niche audience is, write to that.
  • Know what’s hot and what’s not: Look for topics that are either filling Twitter feeds and Face Book, or ones that are just now breaking on the scene. Several months ago I came across a little blurb on the horizon about Amanda Havard and a new Ebook technology called  Immersedition.  At the time of my original posting, little to nothing was being said about the author, her book or the company her father founded.  Now she’s getting ready to publish her third book in the Survivor’s Series and she’s headline news.
  • Write for your audience: With all the information available at the click of a mouse or the push of a finger, it’ s totally unrealistic for any of us to try to write for everyone. So write as if you’re sitting in the same room as those who read you, keep them entertained,  and don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s you they’ve drop by to see.

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July 29, 2012 · 12:00 pm

Faithfully Yours | Blogging With Consistency


Five Reasons to Blog Consistently

Keeping up with the Jones’s of authorship and platform building can be an exhausting, and on some days, seemingly unprofitable way to spend a writers time. What with getting the initial story down, working through the  labyrinth of editing, plus all the SM  we need to  stay in  the loop, we all wish we had more time in  a day than God allotted for.

But since we don’t, how do emerging writers like you and I find a way to juggle our writing time, stay connected, pump out a stream of  intelligent blog posts, go on the occasional date and still remain sane?

Well the good news is that while researching for my post, Personal Branding | Creating Author Visibility, I came across  Five Reasons.

  • Time

Blogging on a consistent schedule actually frees up more of our time, rather  than posting sporadically or on impulse.   By intentionally setting aside time to research, write and link our blog posts,  not only are we managing our time better, but we are,  in fact, giving ourselves an opportunity to develop  better content, communicate it more succinctly, and potentially  appear  more brilliant than we truly are.

  • Discipline

By committing to regularly posting we are learning  how to produce  quality content under deadline, whether we feel inspired to or not.  It’s one way of  forcing ourselves to push past that first creative stall,  and dig down deeper. Author of Lowcountry Bribe,  C. Hope Clark  said during her podcast interview with Austin Moss, that learning to write under deadline is one of the major tools that helped her become a better writer,  by teaching her how to say more,  with less.

  • Personal Branding

I’ve already covered this in my post on Personal Branding | Creating Author Visibility. But let me just add,  that not only is  blogging an invaluable tool to building an author’s platform, but it adds worth to the community he or she has moved into.

  • SEO Rating

Part of  our SEO rating has to do with content and consistency.  According to Corey Eridon of  blog.hubspot.com,  blogging on a regular schedule is critical to the continued success of SEO’s. Without it  Google may no longer put us on page ranking that is higher than that found in the outer Siberia of Internet-land.

  • Value

When we’re posting quality content on a consistent basis, we add value to our site by assuring those that follow us,  that when they stop by for a visit, there is an excellent chance that they’ll find exactly what they’re looking for.

So what kinds of tools can we use to help us do a better job of blogging consistently? Here are two I discovered and began implementing in order to improve my own attempts.

  • Blogging Template

Using blogging templates for creating content aid you and I in keeping our ideas, resources and content flow more organized. The blog template works as a guideline by helping us stay within the perimeters of where we started  and where we need to end.  In his post ”Six Blog Post Templates That Highly Effective Bloggers Use“, Don McAllister shares where he gets  his own inspiration for blogging templates from.

  • Editorial Calendar

Another tool that helps is called an Editorial Calendar. Michelle Linn, Content Developing Director for Content Marketing details this in her post, “How to Put Together and Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing”.

Because of my need tactical visibility, I use Office Suite’s “Notebook” (a program that lets me create notebooks, build files, store source material, embed media and drop-drag whatever I’ve written or copied), Free Mind as well as good old fashion sticky notes.

So when should you and I start attempting to organize and schedule our posts, now.

If you’ve been neglectful and suffer from sporadic-posting-disorder; repent,  go and grab your favorite creative legal stimulant and get going. If on the other hand you’ve been a good writer and have tried and tried, but just haven’t gotten the swing of it yet; repent, go and grab your favorite legal stimulant and try it again.

Now for other A-Type personalities such as myself, a little humor along the way.

What are the things that inspire you to blog more consistently? What kind of tools have you discovered that have helped? Go ahead, start the conversation.

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June 22, 2012 · 6:00 am

Tag | You’re It


Do you remember as a kid playing a game called Tag-Your It, where there were no balls, bats, batons or objects of any kind involved.  Just a group of children  running around, touching each other and passing an imaginary tag of your ‘It’ on to someone else.  There wasn’t anything other than our own imaginations to signify what we were doing or who we were trying to reach.  

Unlike the imaginary tag we played as children the tags we use today on our web and blog sites are far more visible, but as with our childhood game, may not play as vital a role in where we find our web-blog sites, articles and press releases on a search engines list page as we are so often led to believe.  In the bigger picture of site mapping and  SEO rankings, what search engines like  Google, Yahoo and Bing are looking for may have more to do with  what they find in your profile, the title of your page or article, it’s opening paragraphs and overall style-content than with any particular tag or key word attributes.  

Back in the early to late 1990′s the use of tags and keywords played a vital role in how SE’s rated-ranked you on their list page of websites. But as more and more unscrupulous webmaster’s found ways to use this information as a means to nefariously woo reader’s  into their own sites, all the SE’s (except for Inforseek and AltaVista)  moved away from using this model. 

 In an effort to separate the wheat from the tares they began to spread the criteria net of ranking wider and wider by taking into consideration things like; overall appearance of your sites structure, ease of navigation, text anchoring, style and content.  And of course there was still the all powerful HTML, Meta tags, URL structure, sitemaps, schema tagging, rich data snippets, web crawling and indexing. 

On Google’s  Webmaster Tools site they clarified this even further by saying, Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines”. 

Now this may all sound really great to someone who see’s the world through code and syntax, but to the average writer such as myself, once you get past the part where we’re talking about content, style and anchored text, you have pretty much lost me. 

Oh I get the ‘tag’ part simply because it’s not that difficult to understand the need for words, phrases or ideas that help a reader connect the dots from one page to the next.  And if I really want to stretch myself, I’ll force my brain to try to partially wrapped  itself around the codes written into my site’s name (and even then it will take at least two cups of really strong coffee). But as soon as we start talking about ‘meta-data’, HTML, improved URL’s and creepy crawler robot’s rummaging through my web-blog site, you’ve completely lost me. 

So what is the solution? How does an emerging author or writer like myself get their web-blog site or article on the first one or two pages of SE’s such as Google, Yahoo or Bing where it can be seen and used? 

Do we go back to school and learn how to write code, design websites and use software such as Adobe Dreamweaver, HTML Editor or Web Studio 5.0? Or if that doesn’t float our boat, maybe we could hire someone to design our sites for us so that we not only dazzle our reader’s but meet all the criteria popular SE’s are looking for. 

What will it take to move our site or prose from obscurity to front page news? 

I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I had wanted to be a web designer I would not have taken all those creative writing classes, and if I had the money to pay someone to design the site for me, I’d be working on the edit to my book as well as strategizing on the best way to publish and promote it instead of researching this blog.  

So what’s the answer? We know that it’s important to be socially visible on the net. We also know that there are only so many hours in a day and being a writer of any kind will use up most of them.  And with the added responsibility of having to do the majority of the promoting and marketing of our literary wares,  how do we balance the need to do all we can to make our sites attractive enough to draw reader’s and SE,  without abandoning the central reason for having the site in the first place? 

In the process of digging out the answer for myself I’ve come across some great advice, and not surprisingly some of the best came from Google’s Webmaster Tool site itself. 

In Google’s help manual,  Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (originally written for Google’s own web teams),  Google not only cover’s the technical aspects for optimizing a websites best chance for getting on the first one or two pages of their list site, but they also give some really helpful advice on things that you and I (the author and finisher of our web-blog sites) can do that will not only improve the overall look and feel of it, but will actually (in this humble writer’s opinion) improve our credibility as writer’s as well. 

And the best part is, it won’t’ take us hours and hours of pouring over other sites to get what we need (though  it was the hours I personally spent doing just that, that finally rooted out an article where they gave me a link to one of Google’s site ranking tools ) In the guide they have a section on creating unique page titles, improving site structure,  making site navigation easier, incorporating images, optimizing content and using analysis tools so that you’ll  know where you are as far as real-time site viewing and link use etc. 

And for the geekier minded, there is still plenty of techie stuff to keep the blood pressure going. 

The bottom line? For just a few hours investment, people like you and me can create a pretty decent web or blog-site by combing an aesthetically pleasing site, great content and easy navigation. Through engaging content,  a site structure easy enough for my Granny Melba to use (and don’t think Granny can’t shuttle her way around a blog site)  and thoughtfully chosen words we can turn strangers into visitors, visitors into friends and friends into a community of followers that will help keep our names on the first two pages of search engines. 

So what steps have you taken to raise your list ratings? Are there any tricks of the trade that you’ve found that helped move your article from obscurity to visibility? Share the ride and post your comments here.

 From the laptop of an uncensored dreamer

SSpjut

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June 11, 2012 · 1:17 am

Blogging With Integrity


Recently I experienced something that I’m sure everyone who has ever used the internet for more than   e-mails has come across; the con of Manipulating Hyperlinks. 

You know what I’m talking about. That shiny blue or red  hyperlink embedded  in the article of the  blog your reading which  you clicked on in order to follow the rabbit trail to what you naively  believed was yet more of the same. 

If this had been an ad in the newspaper, or an insert in your favorite magazine, it would have been called a ‘leader’: an advertisement worded in such a way as to cause the unsuspecting consumer to shop ‘here’ to get the best prices. But when you arrived you would have discovered that the reality was something quite different (I’m sorry Ms but we seem to be all sold out>we don’t do rain checks>but we do have this other one for only $19.99 more>or yes and we take all major credit cards).  

And we all know how that turned out. A closet full of hats, shirts and electronic gadgets that weren’t nearly as impressive when you got them home as they were when you bought them. 

Well I may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but I’ve been in sales long enough (more than thirty years) to know when something is a shame and when it’s not. But on this occasion, I got suckered in by a blatant lie. Not a slight of hand lie. Not a “Click Here – Read This – And Give Me $29.99″ lie. 

This was far cleverer than that. No, this  Manipulator of Words, this Twister of Truth and Purveyor of Purse Strings told me up front that the Webinar and all information contained within, was Free and that the only investment required was my time, pencil and the paper I would need to take notes on. 

After siphoning off more than an hour of my time with personal testimony and sketchy outlines of what the event was all about, he then lets the Con pop out of the Box with, Would you expect a surgeon to spend all that money on medical school and then operate on you for free or a lawyer to invest all those years in law school and then take your case for nothing?  

I’m not sure whether I took the five seconds needed to actually exit the site or if I was so angry that I simply hit the ‘off’ button on the computer.  Whatever exit move I used, the result was the same. A simmering anger that this person used their influence with the first blog site as a means of suckering me (and other’) into their ‘Acquire My Knowledge For Free’ scam. 

Now you might be thinking, “Why is she getting all worked up over something that happens all the time?” 

You mean it’s not a big deal to fraudulently lead some one on? That I shouldn’t be upset because someone lied to me in order to lure into their monetary scam with the promise of Free Information from a person who claims to be a frequent guest blogger on some well-known site such as Copy Blogger (and that now calls into question the integrity of that site as well)? 

Well  I’ve seen enough manipulative advertising that I probably shouldn’t have been taken in. But the point isn’t whether I should or should not have seen past the scam, but that there are people out there who are using the integrity of someone else’s blog, article or website as a vehicle to exploit others.  

From 2003 until 2011 I worked for a company who contracted with Costco to sell Hunter Douglas Window Treatments. (Now for those hand full of people who have either never heard of Costco or are not close enough to shop in one, they are currently the largest warehouse chain in the United States, and as of July 2011 the seventh largest in the world.) 

Founded in 1983 in Kirkland, Washington by James (Jim) Sinegal and Jeffrey H. Brotman, the company set a precedent for sales and customer service by making sure that the products they sold were of the highest quality, at the best prices and that everything they did modeled the highest sales and customer service standards in the nation (if not the world). For more than eight years I watched Costco repeatedly demand (and get) the same quality customer care and service from its vendor’s and contractors as it demanded of itself. 

One of the most amazing things I learned during that time was that companies like Costco and Hunter Douglas, who made integrity and honesty a part of their core values (instead of the weight and size of their member’s wallets), were companies that were going to go through one of the worst recessions in American history and come out the other side not only financially solvent, but with better standards of excellence than when they first started.  

Time and time again Costco looked for better ways to sell their products in a manner which demonstrated not only a higher level of honesty (if you promised the customer you would deliver the goods on Tuesday – it would be best if it arrived on Sunday [Monday at the latest]) but how to improve their overall selling techniques to reflect a measure of integrity that would result in memberships for life. (A Costco member is one of the most loyal people you will ever meet.) 

Costco set the bar for You say what you mean, and You do what you say, so high that I have yet to see another chain beat them (That isn’t to say that other companies don’t have good customer service or that they are disreputable in the way they market and sell their products. Only that, in my opinion, the measure used by Costco surpasses them all.) , and that it is not Ok to tell the member one thing and do something else. 

They repeatedly demonstrate that long-term growth and success is about building a relationship of trust and integrity with its member’s that in turn, empowers them with an extraordinary sense of well-being and trust in the company. 

Costco believes that to even imply that a product or service might perform in a particular manner, actually then gives the member the right to demand that it do so.   

So my observation is this, if these two companies did not have to use ‘Leader’s', manipulation and false advertising to lure or dupe their customer’s and member’s into buy their goods and services, then why should you or I. 

Being honest and marketing our goods and services with the highest levels of integrity may mean that it will take us a little longer to acquire our first million, but in the long run, we will still be on the internet, enjoying customer loyalty and credibility long after the shyster’s of this world have come to the end of their quota of gullible audiences. 

From the laptop of an uncensored dreamer

SSpjut

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May 28, 2012 · 2:01 am

In Search of the Perfect News Reader


In Search of ……..

In my last Intelligent Blogging post, “Where Did That Blog Go?”  I began investigating the RSS Reader board tool, its use and why you and I, as writers, need to be found on someone’s other than our mother’s. 

But between my last post and this,  I’ve discovered that my current iGoogle Reader  tool is outdated and looks like it’s on a slippery slide out the back door of discarded technology, as Google once again morph’s into its newer version  Google+ in an attempt to make themselves more appealing and user-friendly (Ouch! I hate it when I get comfy with something just about the time the techno boys and girls start changing it out for something better.). 

Yet I am discovering that not all change is bad. 

Take this switch up from the old iGoogle Reader to the newer Google+ for example.  I may not be crazy about the way the dashboard looks (too many features on Home Page that gives it a cluttered feeling), but I have to say that they’ve made subscribing to RSS feeds, creating subject folders and moving subscriptions back and forth between folders 100% better and easier than iGoogle Reader does. 

 For starters, if I want to add a new RSS feed to my Reader board in iGoogle, I have to leave my Reader, find their Widget page and create a new Widget for each feed I want to follow.  And if I forget to create an initial file folder prior to adding the feed, I have to go through the very tedious process of creating the file, going back to each subscription, opening>copying the URL  and re-adding it to my new folder all over again. 

In the great big world of drag and drop, why they’ve created such a drawn out process I couldn’t tell you. For those of us who have allowed ourselves the maximum amount of one cup of coffee per new learning curve, it is highly unlikely I will get around to cleaning up the Reader Page any time soon.

So you can imagine my utter delight to have discovered that the Google+ Reader (you can access via your iGoogle tool bars More tab) is everything I could hope for. With this new and improved version I can add new feeds by simply copying thier URL, clicking on the file I want to put it in, open the Subscribe tab, paste  and it’s done. A new feed in my sidebar.

And  if I subscribe to a feed before I’ve created a file, no problem. I mosey on over  go to the  ‘Feed Settings‘ tab, choose ‘New Folder‘, name it whatever I want, then skip on down to  the left sidebar and drag my new subscription into my new folder.  If I want to rename either my feed or Folder>Tag, I can do that to0 by simply  going to the upper right hand quadrant of my Reader Page, click the Gear drop down Widget, go to Reader Settings then click on Subscriptions or the Rename cannister to the right.  

With just a few clicks, a couple of drag and drops, and presto change-o, I’ve subscribed to my favorite feeds, created folders to put them in and had a change of mind all within the time it takes to drink that second cup of joe.

 Matter of fact, it’s so perfect I may have a donut to celebrate.

Now before I leave off, I did promise that I’d let you know how my comparison RSS feed choice Blogline, measured against iGoogle and (now of course Google+).

Not good.  I like that it offers me several options as to how I can view my Reader Tabs (or Widgets), and unlike iGoogle and Google+, the Home page is clean and neat. Also the Blogline Reader board  offers a fabulous assortment of SM Widgets that puts sites like Twitter, FB, Digg, Delicious etcetera at your fingertips (another one stop shopping experience).

But that’s where cool ended.  After copying the RSS feed URL, I then had to import it onto a separate board and look at it before I could  add it to my folder (instead of importing the subscription directly to the sidebar) .

And if I accidentally put it in the wrong folder, well I never did figure out how to delete or move it, so there are still subscriptions filed under wrong folders. 

The cool Widgets I mentioned earlier? I was only ever able to get one (Twitter) to open up on the Home Page  but it said the connection was corrupt. The rest remain a mystery.

All in all,  Blogline Reader was a disappointing experience.

 At the end of the afternoon, both iGoogle and Google+ still had my vote for Most User Friendly RSS Reader’s.  Sure I’d like to have SM Widgets available on my Home Page, and yes it would be nice to have an uncluttered look. But if I have to choose between neat and ease of use, I’m going with ease of use every time.

Like everyone else working to hone their skills and talents as a writer, I have more to do in a day than I have hours to do it in, and if I have to waste my time finding something or struggle to add it to my box of blogging tools, then it’s time to let that bad boy go and move on.

 From the laptop of an uncensored dreamer

SSpjut

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