Thinks I find along the way
I’ve shared before that mindmapping is one of the single most important tools I use. I use freemind which is complete cross platform and free as well as Mindmeister and Mindmanager Pro which are not. Have you tried it yet?
Yes, this is toddlohenry.com — I just moved my domain to a WordPress.com site instead of Posterous. It’s all still Posterous driven — it’s just that I’ve become convinced over the past six months that Posterous is not ready for the enterprise [unless you are Guy Kawasaki]. I still use it to curate content and autopost, but not as a destination site. Comment or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization or your social media workflow…
If I only had one tool to use for blogging, it wouldn’t be WordPress and it wouldn’t be Blogger [although both are great tools that I use every day] it would be Posterous. I’m currently scripting my own screencast on the subject of Posterous, but in the meantime, here are a couple of other good Posterous videos to whet your appetite…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oluAciipZU
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxeFOD5lZ4k
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6iYxbcGqNo
…and use Google Apps! I had a chat with a business owner yesterday who was still using a pop mail account to run his business — scheduling meetings with his partners is a nightmare! Enter Google Apps! Here’s a quick overview…
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Setting up a blog is not that difficult. In fact, most people can easily use WordPress or Blogger to set one up in a matter of minutes.
With the sheer number of blogs today, estimated at 126 million by BlogPulse, only a very small percent of them are actually active and good. The vast majority of blogs are dead or dying on the vine.
Like a garden, you must tend to your blog; water it, give it sunlight and proper care.
So how do you ensure your blog will grow like a healthy garden?
Avoid these 7 causes of blog failure and you are off to a great start. Check out the tips for correcting the mistakes and then see how other bloggers have expertly done so and have planted their seeds to successful blogging.
I don’t know why your blog is failing until I take a peek at it. I do know, however, that this blog is succeeding thanks to our ‘e1evation workflow’. It’s currently ranked very highly by Alexa as you can see…
The best part is that the success is all a part of a repeatable process so we can help your blog succeed as well! You can follow the ‘via’ link above if you want to know more about the 7 reasons but if you want a successful blog, comment or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…
In December of last year, I embarked upon an experiment to see if I could leverage a website with a blog combined with social media tools to increase traffic to a site. In that month, my sandbox site had a grand total of 670 pageviews. In the month that ended yesterday, I had a total of 15,985 — an approximate 25 fold increase in traffic! This morning I got 670 pageviews by 10:00. Here are some other statistics… Continue reading “Is your website a ‘billboard in the desert’?”
In the past few weeks, I’ve had numerous conversations with colleagues, partners and in some cases, clients, about blogging and the challenges of keeping a blog up and running.
Most of those conversations come down to one thing: Content.
Do you have enough to say to sustain a blog? Do you have strong enough opinions and takes to cut through the massive sea of clutter that is the open Web these days? And, maybe most importantly, do you know what to look for when it comes to content your customers or audience might be interested in?
That last one is the key point I want to focus on today. So many brands, when they start blogging, think too myopically about blogging. I need to talk about my product or service. I need to talk about my company. I need to talk about what my product or service can do for my customers.
Sure, that’s part of the mix, but in my view, it’s actually a pretty small part.
The much larger portion of your blog’s content should focus on everything AROUND your product or service.
It never ceases to amaze me that many of my client buys the logic of purchasing a blog enabled website but falter when it comes to actually producing content. After all, what is a blog post but an email to the world about who we are, what we do, why we do it and the ‘world’ in which we do it? You can follow the ‘via’ link above to get ideas for thinking like a blogger. Comment or ‘connect’ to discuss how this applies to you and your organization…
…on the Top 10 Tactics and Tools for Social Media. Here’s my mindmap. What’s missing? You can grab the map and move it around or make it full screen if that helps by using the menu bar at the bottom of the map…
…according to John Jantsch…
One of the most common questions I receive is “how do I get started blogging?” Some might find it a bit odd that I suggest a three step approach and the first two steps don’t have much to do with directly working on your own blog. No, I think you get started blogging by working on your blogging mindset and blogging presence. So, here’s my 3-step blogging start-up plan.”
Click here to read more…
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I use 4 out of the 5 platforms daily. WordPress is the hands down favorite of most people in this poll, but the real winner is anyone who uses both Posterous and WordPress together to drive traffic…
When it comes to blogging, executives have a unique problem. It has to do with the fact that the risk and cost of failure for executives are greater than they are for other employees.
Blogging is a personal affair. The learning curve requires the blogger to open up to the world, create content, build relationships, develop readership, get feedback, make modifications, and repeat.
That can be a lot of risk for anyone. But for the corporate executive, the pressure to “nail it” right out of the gate is more extreme…
Follow the ‘via’ link to go to the source if you’d like to read ‘the rest of the story’…
I recently came across this post from my Internet buddy Brandon Henak and I’ve been thinking about it all week. It was about using Plaxo for unified contact management and it went like this…
“The people in your network and the relationships you develop with them are some of your most valuable assets as a young professional. You look to them first for advice, job opportunities or just to discuss the latest events in your life. How you keep track of all the contact information you have collected in your personal and professional life is crucial to your success.
Contacts Everywhere!
In the poll we took earlier today we saw an interesting breakdown of contact management solutions, from relying on a cell phone to store contact information to using Microsoft Outlook, Facebook and other online sites. Each one of the solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. I have tried every one of the solutions listed with various degrees of success but, what if you could use each of them where they work the best, Outlook at the office, Mac Address Book at home and Plaxo online, without having to manually update each? I recently found a way to centralize and standardize all my contact and calendar information across all the services I use, automatically!
Sync them up!
Enter Plaxo 3.0 beta with Sync Points. After setting up an account, all I had to do was click on the “Add Sync Point” link for each of the programs I wanted to use (in my case Google, Mac Address Book, Outlook, and AIM) and it walks you through the process of putting in your login information for Google and downloading small add-ins for Outlook and Mac Address Book. Now, all of my sources sync together and I can sync all my contacts to my phone through Address Book. Any addition anywhere flows across the systems and is easily accessible.”
This was particularly interesting to me because I’m a Plaxo subscriber, but I’ve experienced a lot of problems with contact management. So what’s the problem?
A little background info…
I’ve been in marketing, sales, and technology for 25 years now and I have collect over 5,000 vcards and thousands more business cards that aren’t documented. I use 7 computers spanning three platforms and I want to access my contacts on all of them.
The answer?
The answer for me, like Brandon, starts with Plaxo for the following reasons:
So if Plaxo is the answer, what’s MY problem? In a nutshell, using Plaxo was causing, not eliminating duplicates. Or, better said, using Plaxo with ActiveSync was causing duplicates. When I made the decision to stop using two synchronization tools simultaneously, my problems went away and I got closer to the promised land that Brandon was describing…
More background. I’m currently in the process of moving to Linux; I don’t want to pay ransom to Microsoft anymore and although I’m a former Apple account executive, I don’t want to pay for Apple’s industrial design when I can have the benefits of a Linux based operating system on inexpensive Intel hardware. The answer for me is Linux.
For now, however, my solution set consists of Plaxo, Microsoft Outlook 2003 [I only said I didn’t want to pay anymore – I’ll still use what I have], Gmail, Google Calendar and a Treo 700wx. I see myself moving off Outlook to Thunderbird/Lightning [Mozilla’s answer to contact and calendar management – Mozilla is only going to get better at this!] and off the Treo onto either a Blackberry or the Google Android platform. Thankfully [?], Sprint is forcing me to keep my current phone until September when the outlook on Google’s approach to cellphones should be known…
A big part of solving my problem was also to realize [thanks to David Allen] that some contacts are context sensitive, namely, that I don’t need to be able to call all 5,000 people from my cellphone – some I only need to be able to access when I’m sitting at a computer. I was actually synchronizing contacts for which I didn’t have a telephone number to my phone! Why? Because I was going to send them an email from the phone? Unlikely. In reality, I have found that after careful analysis, I actually need to synchronize less than 200 contacts between my phone and my computer and if I really were honest with myself, there are probably less than a hundred people that I call on a regular basis. So, I copied all my contacts to a folder called ‘Master’ in Outlook and deleted all contacts that I either hadn’t called or didn’t anticipate calling this quarter [there’s a copy of the deleted contacts in Master, remember?] As a result, I’m only synchronizing what I have to now. This is a HUGE savings of time and energy and silly as it may seem, actually represents a massive epiphany for me. Call me Captain Obvious?
The underlying idea here is getting closer to a world where it doesn’t matter what computer or platform you’re using – your information is accessible from anywhere! Plaxo can get you a good part of the way there…
By the way, if you’re not using Google Desktop, start! It can unify all the computers you’re using and allow you to search your Gmail and your computers in the same way you search the internet now…
Though the Internet has no set guidelines for how to provide attribution, one rule is clear: Links are the currency of the Web.
If you use someone else’s content, whether licensed directly or through fair use, it is important to be sure to provide a clickable link to the original site if at all possible. This not only helps visitors to your site find the original work, but also provide SEO benefits for the creator of the content and guards against your site from being mistaken by the search engines as the original work.
With that in mind, let us take a look at several common situations many bloggers find themselves in and the way most feel is appropriate to attribute them.
- Quoting: If the original work is part of a larger work, for example block quoting part of another article, an inline link is usually all that is required. Typically, when inline linking, you mention the person’s name and/or the site they write for and link to the original article. This can be done very easily in any blogging application and takes only seconds to do.
Many of my students ask me about my curation style. My understanding is based on articles like the one I quoted here. To date, only two people have ever complained about being quoted on my blog; John Maxwell and an obscure blogger from South Dakota. With over 2,700 posts I’m satisfied that I’m compliant with internet standards. Questions? Feedback?
Are your blog posts just “okay”? Want to make them great? If so, keep reading.
A great blog post respects the needs of three distinct entities. It educates and informs your audience (your subscribers and visitors), optimizes for the search engines and sufficiently energizes you so that you do a good job creating it.
Every blog post should address the following five components to ensure it hits the mark for your audience, the search engines and you.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…
I remember back to early 2008, when I’d just started blogging, that even though I had great ambitions, my knowledge, expertise, and confidence as a blogger was sorely lacking. I stumbled through my blogging career for over a year before I felt I had a really good grip on things, and even then, there were many things I struggled with.
But more than anything, through all of the struggles I faced, there was one enemy that kept popping up time and time again, each time in a different form than the last. This enemy was fierce, determined, and relentless, and eventually I had no choice but to either confront it, or forever commit to a life of running.
Finally, in a Bruce Wayne moment of clarity, I decided to turn-around, face this enemy, and obliterate him. His name was fear, and there are seven ways that he tried to take me out. Here are the tactics I used to fight back.
A couple of weeks ago, the brilliant guys at Posterous started an even more brilliant marketing campaign to tout the efficacy of their Posterous platform against other blogging tools. They culminated their campaign with a post on the ‘Top 5 reasons to switch from WordPress to Posterous’ by saying…
“We’d be crazy to declare war on WordPress. It’s the most popular blog platform in the world — gazillions of bloggers have custom WP installations with plugin functionality that Posterous won’t touch anytime soon.
But WordPress isn’t for everyone, a fact supported by the thousands of WordPress users who have switched to Posterous in the last two weeks. So we thought we’d let some of them tell you why they switched.” Source: Top 5 reasons to switch from WordPress to Posterous – The Official Posterous Posterous
I encourage you to follow the link and read the 5 reasons. They conclude by saying…
“We’ve made it easy for you to make up your own mind by making the move from WordPress to Posterous hassle-free. We’ll copy over your blog content, URL slugs, comments and tags. Just go to posterous.com/switch/wordpress and enter in the url of your blog and email address.
We’ll take it from there. You don’t even need to set up a Posterous account. We’ll email you when we’re done copying your blog. And don’t worry, your WordPress blog will still be there.” Source: Top 5 reasons to switch from WordPress to Posterous – The Official Posterous Posterous
Here’s where I’ll add my two cents — which I think is actually worth quite a bit more! While I have used Posterous alone to take down website competition with much bigger staffs and budgets, the point I’d like to make here is that the answer in business is rarely either/or — many times it’s both/and. IMHO, WordPress still reigns supreme when it comes to the ability to theme a site and leverage plugins — they said it themselves: “custom WP installations with plugin functionality that Posterous won’t touch anytime soon” but Posterous handles some of the more difficult WordPress tasks automagically. So, why not use BOTH?! Posterous can automatically post to over 25 different internet platforms so I post to my Posterous blog and then autopost to my WordPress site. That way, I can leverage the 5 reasons to switch while still using my powerful WordPress site with the theme, the plugins and the seo that I’ve come to love AND generate valuable seo links from my Posterous blog to my WordPress blog as well. As you can see below, it’s working like crazy…
My ‘e1evation workflow’ leverages the simplicity of Posterous and the publishing power of WordPress in one, easy to use approach. I used this workflow for the 2nd quarter of this year and my traffic increased 590%. What’s even better is that thanks to Posterous, it’s drop dead simple to teach. Comment, call or use the contact form to discuss how we can apply the ‘e1evation workflow’ to your business…
This is why they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. The Oatmeal has communicated volumes about how the world perceives your email with one image:
You can move to the top with one simple tool: Google Apps! Google Apps allows you to attach Gmail and other powerful business apps to your internet domain in about 10 minutes…
Use it if you don’t want the world to think you’re a Yahoo!
The two tools I use to grab relevant eye candy are Posterous and Zemanta. What’s your secret?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_hJ3R8jEZM&feature=player_embedded
You can read about all the new improvements here. Just a reminder! If you’re already using Google Apps for your organization, these improvements to your product have already been made free of charge…
Let’s start here…
“Without question, blogging provides an effective way to market your business, be a valuable resource and build your personal brand online. And most folks know that, generally, the more frequently you blog, the higher your traffic. But does that mean you should follow the advice of many to create a new post every single day?
Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.” Source: Just How Often Should You Blog? – WebWorkerDaily
Go to the source for some good thoughts on ‘how often’ — it’s really good stuff! In the meantime, I’m heading in another direction…
I just closed out my best blogging month ever traffic-wise. What was significant to me was that I did it in a ‘short’ month with no speaking engagements. Usually, when I have a chance to speak, my traffic spikes because all the seminar attendees check out my site — it’s usually good for a couple hundred pageviews. In February, however, I did it all on my own, post by post by post. I’ve already laid out all my tactics and tools in the series “Top 10 Tactics and Tools for Tightening your Tribe” and yes, I used them all this past month. I did make two significant changes, however. #1 I redesigned my site using the ‘Thesis’ theme which promises some kind of magic SEO foo and really seems to have delivered for me. #2 I experimented with spreading my posts out throughout the day. Instead of posting 3-5 posts at 6:00 AM, I spread them out every two hours or so throughout the day. Whether it was one, or the other, or both, my traffic’s going nuts!
HubSpot gives me a grade of 96 on my site, Google tells me I have 6,076 pageviews over the past 30 days and Alexa tells me my site is ranked 484,123 in the US. Not much left to prove from my perspective and the thing that excites me most is that my success is the result of a systematic process I can teach to anyone. I usually benchmark myself against local radio station WTAQ because I like to see how I fare against ‘old’ media in my market. They have an Alexa ranking of 116,615 which is really awesome. It thrills me that I’m actually ranked higher than local social media wunderkind Dana VanDen Heuvel [a good friend to e1evation], although I’m sure that won’t last long. He’s at 520,219…
I’m certain my traffic will drop some during the upcoming month as I’ll be directing a great deal of my creative energy toward three projects I announced in February. They are the Social Media Academy — an online training class on the top tactics and tools for effective social media, The Damn Good Social Media Guide — the accompanying ebook, and last? A weekly podcast. I’m currently looking for beta testers for the Social Media course. If you’d like to save yourself the $499 fee and get all the content in a rough format for free, comment, call or contact me and let me know. As always, thanks for reading…
Are you a blogger?
“As bloggers, we put a lot of effort into telling our readers how to do things.
We believe that if we can just give them enough informative content that they’ll subscribe to our blog and never leave. We try to become the best teacher we possibly can, instilling wisdom down into short, usable posts that our readers can put into action right away.
But what if that’s not what they really want?
What if they don’t want a teacher to tell them what to do?” Source: The Mr. Rogers Guide to Blogging from the Heart | Copyblogger
Go to the source for the rest of the article…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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