Tag Archives: Blogging

Do you want to be financially and physically fit?

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I really liked reading advice about being financially and physically fit together on a recent online excursion. It seems that the two things can go hand in hand. So I decided to experiment with part of the article

Joining a Gym, or Leaving?

It seems really obvious that joining a gym and then not going every day isn’t really a financially sound practice, but I got so used to belonging to the gym that I basically stopped thinking about physical activity anywhere else.

It’s sort of like the dishwasher breaking and panicking that there are no clean dishes without remembering that you can hand wash dishes by hand. I just stopped thinking about physical exercise outside of the gym.

This article definitely broke it down into actual money I can save. So before terminating my gym membership which is actually cheaper than the $125 fee mentioned in the article, it costs $80 a month so it’s actually less than three dollars a day, I figured I’d try exercising outside of the gym, just to make sure.

Walking: The first thing that’s weird about walking rather than going to the gym is that there’s no machine telling me how fast I’m going or how long I’ve been at it or whether my heart rate has reached some optimal level. All that stuff is easy to readjust to for a few days just by committing to an amount of time you’re going to walk.

P1000663Taking a Walk, (c) 2012 TaipeiCityGuide.com, on Flickr, used with permission.

The second thing that took some adjustment was creating a walking route. For some reason it’s easier for me if I have a planned route. So I started with the whole around the block thing which didn’t take up the 45 minutes I know I should be spending walking. The simple solution for me was walking to some nature trails that are about three blocks away from my home.

The third thing I discovered is that I’d come to rely on the TV at the gym. Suddenly I was looking at my surroundings instead of watching TV. Trying to pick up some speed is a sure cure for the TV withdrawal. Paying attention to the ground also takes more focus than moving on a gym machine so I’m missing the TV less.

But I’m not an all-weather walker yet. If it’s raining, I’m not out there. Maybe I will at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet. When I start getting annoyed with myself on days I don’t go outside because of the weather, I think about the days I didn’t go to the gym either! Those were not a few, I can tell you!

Doing some exercises inside can fill the gap but I haven’t incorporated a great routine into my bad weather workouts yet. Also I found out my gym needs thirty days notice for me to terminate so if you’re thinking of doing this, you might want to find out the kind of notice your gym requires. And watch for any penalties that you may get, those contract clauses can come back to bite you!

Lunch Time

As far as the eating smart and saving money advice in the article, I liked the idea of purchasing gourmet meals from the grocery store. Still, I have to admit I like going out for dinner sometimes. There are some pretty reasonable places to eat in my area so instead of going to the most expensive places I can go to one of the less expensive places.

But if food variety is the issue for you, those gourmet meals in the food store sound like a great alternative to try. I do like the portion control (and calorie control) of pre-made meals which kind of force you to stop over-consuming, just make sure you don’t buy the double packs, or extra large servings. So I’m sure I’ll be trying them at some point.

Get a Life Cycle/Bicycle?

And you’ll notice I didn’t talk about the life cycle or bicycle. I’ll be damned if I actually know what a life cycle is! I did ride a couple of ‘special’ bikes at the gym, but I couldn’t remember if that was what they were called. And for bicycling, I’ve never been good at that, … I always get a sore ‘behind’ much quicker than my patience running out. So I’m not sure I’ll be trying either of those out any time soon!

Make Sensible Decisions

Sounds obvious, but there are times where we are spending money and we may actually be impairing our health. So look at your spending, check out the AceCashExpress Blog for some helpful financial advice.

Did you like this blog review? Are you financially and physically in shape in 2012? Or have you already broken your 2012 Resolutions? Share!

Zemanta LiveWriter Plugin Great little plugin for Live Writer

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Thought you bloggers out there would appreciate this little tool. A plugin for Windows LiveWriter that adds extra functionality right inside your blogging platform, with access to videos, images, stories and other stuff that you can search for and blog about if you are looking for writer’s inspiration.

Zemanta LiveWriter Plugin | Zemanta Ltd.

I’ve used their Zemanta blogging tool, but as a plugin to the popular LiveWriter, it could be pretty helpful to bloggers.

Success depends on a skillset, not just a skill: Blogging, Marketing and IM

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After yesterday’s post from J. F. Straw, I ‘d would like to share with readers a discussion I was having with a friend on this very topic:

Steve Sutherland, the "The Start-Up Expert" wrote:

I hear that all the time on WarriorForum – stick with one thing, choose one business model and persevere until you succeed. Unfortunately my business model involves content creation, copywriting, website development, article marketing, other SEO techniques and pretty soon email marketing etc! (Hardly getting good at one thing).

And in the same breath and email:

Sales are up anyway …!

So he was doing something right, for sure! However, I was turning this over in my own mind when I wrote my reply to him, and also to you:

I don’t think they mean get good at one (discrete) task, I can’t see how success could be based on one task, ONLY. I think they simply mean one business (this may involve multiple tasks) but keeping the focus on what YOU are good at. It doesn’t mean you have to be a MASTER of all trades! Obviously, you have to be reasonable at all of them and in some tasks you may have to be even better.

For example, when you buy a car, you could choose a Ferrari that excels in speed and acceleration. But the repair bills for simple things like oil changes are huge, AND, you won’t be able to drive it on less than standard roads. So you look for something more reasonable, say a Toyota. Toyota excels in producing great cars at affordable prices, but NONE of them will race as fast as that first car you looked at. However, that is their focus. And their customers like that. Toyotas are successful, not because they everything perfect, but because they do well in most important areas: engine capability, comfort, economy, efficiency, pricing, and repair service. They may not be the best, fastest, cheapest, MOST reliable, most comfortable, most powerful… but they are certainly successful. I think that’s the point.

I think the focus is what you said earlier: "The Start a Business Niche Expert". You’ve found a number of useful and sellable products, developed a marketing approach and put it into action more than 8 times already. Even better, you’re getting great feedback on sales/visitors on what sells, what is profitable, what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t. That is YOUR thing, isn’t it?

Even as a blogger, you have to know a bunch of skills, in some ways similar to Steve’s skill set, but you also have to know how to use WordPress, LiveWriter, and a whole bunch of skills. Being even a moderately successful blogger requires development of more than one skill, even though you may excel at one particular skill or subset of skills. Without some grasp of other skills, you will not achieve your aims.

What do you say, gentle readers?

site uptime vs. economic situation – how’s your hosting?

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I’d never have thought that the recent recession would have an effect on computer uptime, but one blog claims that is the case and they have good stats to verify that.

I have in the past used monitoring services when this blog had outages in December, but sometimes they reported false outages. So for my blogs which I visited daily, it was quite unnecessary. For sites that don’t require much maintenance, though, having a monitoring service could be useful especially if you’re doing Internet Marketing, and have dozens of sites.

Great Ideas: It’s easy to lose them, so don’t.

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Grahame Green, the famous English novelist, was in many ways an inspiration for many writers. Dare I say, bloggers, too. For me, he was an inspiration: he was reputed to keep a journal near his bedside so he could write down many of his ideas, some of which would work their way into his novels. I don’t know if this is true or not, a couple of cursory searches indicated that it was not.

Whether or not it is true, it highlights a problem I’ve been having recently: keeping a track of those flashes of insight, ideas for posts, quotes, and other memes that come to me, as the muse does. Whenever I have one of those flashes of optimism, I really try hard to remember it so I can use it in a post later in that day.

The sad thing is: I then sit down to blog about those very topics, only to find that the ideas are evanescent as the warm winds of September in Taiwan. What am I to do?

So I have adopted several means to help record them: I’ll use email to send notes to myself, it’s easy to open, and create, and save. If a computer is not available, then I’ll keep some notes in my little notebook, small enough to fit inside my own wallet. If not, I’ll find scraps of paper to write down whatever I need to remember. Then I’ll collate the notes into titles or first sentences, and save them in my blog.

The result can be quite effective, but if not done properly, it will fill up notebooks/wordpress with numerous headers. These are easily recovered but making sense of them later is often a challenge, especially when the original mood is gone.

For example, I wrote a long half post about frustrations dealing with our photocopy company, then I saved it. A month later, the original mood is gone, facts are half-remembered, and I wonder if I will ever write it. At least I have the basics that I could write or re-write as needed. If I didn’t have these, I wouldn’t have the choice to develop the post or not.

So, if you are stuck for ideas: remember – your best ideas will often come to you at very odd times. Find a way to take some notes so that you will have a list of topics that you can write about when things are a little dry.

Tools I no longer use: on InvestorBlogger

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Hyder really got me going when he posted a list of tools he’d never use again, I’ve installed and removed dozens of scripts and I keep testing stuff out…. My list is surprisingly similar.

Tools I do not use much any more

  1. SocialSpark*
  2. PerformancingAds (they lost my money)*
  3. Alexa (for increasingly inaccurate stats)
  4. TopSpots*
  5. BlogCatalog (too much like MyBlogLog)
  6. Dreamhost Referrals (never had one successful referral)
  7. TTZMedia*

Tools I would never use again

  1. Scribefire
  2. Widgetbox
  3. Sitemeter
  4. Smorty
  5. Blogsvertise*
  6. Blogitive
  7. SponsoredReviews
  8. AdBrite*
  9. AdToll*
  10. NewsRoom*
  11. Picasa Online
  12. CafePress
  13. A GuestBook or Hit Counter (so 1990′s!)

*these sites marked all owe me money (in some cases more than $10). In total, I’m owed about $60 which would be better in my bank account than theirs.

These are the tools I can think of right now, but I’m sure that the lists could be much longer if I thought about it.

Lost Posts: Five Values for Blogging: Learning, Voice, Authority, Integrity and Audience

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Lost Post Series: Posts that have otherwise been forgotten, accidentally deleted or blogged elsewhere are reposted here. Enjoy!

This is a repost from blogging Charlatans: I re-read the original post and felt the content of this stood better as a single post than attached to that.

Five Values for blogging: Learning, Voice, Authority, Integrity and Audience

So what should the budding blogger do to save their blog? Actually, it’s quite simple: I think there are five qualities that will ensure you do get back links, traffic, money, and whatever your definition of success is.

1. Learn to Write.

Sounds simple enough. But it’s amazing how many bloggers fail at this first hurdle. Learning to write is a skill that takes time, effort and practice to develop properly. Of course, your average blog Your Way To Success PDF will not tell you how much of each you will need. It will take you much longer than you first suspect, certainly longer than you hope, and likely will end up being far longer before, as an accomplished blogger, you actually dare to call yourself a ‘good’ writer. I’m somewhere in the second stage right now, most likely nearer the beginning than the end. Where are you?

2. Find your voice.

That’s been the hard step for me. But finding a voice in the hundreds of millions of blogs out there with many blogging on similar themes as I do. How do I define my blog in relation to all the others? By finding my voice. A voice can be defined in so many ways, none of which are exclusive. Your voice could be your blog’s niche, or your blog’s choice of topics. It could be the way you treat your topic. Or it could even be the way you write about dull subjects and inject personality, enthusiasm, and a sense of humor. It could even be as simple as your posting schedule or mix of posts through the week. Have you found your voice yet?

3. Build your authority.

No, I really don’t mean anything to do with another of the web’s charlatan’s: Technorati’s Authority Measure. I don’t even mean ‘pagerank’. Neither of these is a measure of your authority, rather it’s a measure of their decision making vis-a-vis your blog and its readership. As such, it’s subject to arbitrary adjustments up, down and sideways. Your authority is your ability to be thought of as someone who has understanding, insight, learning or skill and which achieves a greater degree of respect from your readership. That is your authority: do people approach you for advice (as readers or as emailers) or help when they come across issues that you have faced?

4. Keep your integrity.

With many companies out their encouraging bloggers to blog for dollars, it’s easy to sacrifice all of these qualities that you need for a few dollars in your PayPal account. Very easy. There have been times when I have sacrificed my own integrity for a few dollars. I regret it now. Now, I don’t tailor reviews to advertisers’ whims and unspecified needs, I try to tell the story as I see it, I try to keep readers informed of my conflict of interests, I try to keep my words honest and pure. I still do reviews, I still do buzzes but I will not write something that is dishonest or shortsells my readers. Do you feel you sold your integrity?

5. Connect with your audience.

That’s always the hard part. blogging, for me and many readers, started out as an expression of personal and private writing that somehow managed to garner a small audience. If I’m always caught up in my own little bubble, and it’s pretty easy for me living where I live, doing what I do and seeing things from an “Asian” or “European” perspective, I will fail to connect with my readers and their interests. I’m trying to remind myself that I should be striving to connect more with my readers, wherever they are. How do you connect with your readers?

While I can’t guarantee that these alone will lead you to success in blogging, I feel strongly that success in blogging without these values will be fleeting.

Serving Notice to Entrecard: A steady hand… respect your EC users…

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One of the reasons I pulled Entrecard from my blog before was because I couldn’t see its value, couldn’t see where it was going, couldn’t understand why things changed… Now it seems we’re all in for a new ride: EC has changed things AGAIN without providing any advance notice.

Any business needs a steady hand… If you don’t have a steady hand at the tiller, you get this situation: sudden changes to the system without notice, promises that go unfulfilled, new users barred, old ones excluded, parameters changed without notice, …

EC, this is why I dropped your card before from ALL my blogs; don’t make me drop you again! PLEASE.

Keep a steady hand, announce changes, keep people informed… I have still no idea why you did what you did. But one thing is sure: you depend on your users, not the other way around. If you didn’t have users, you wouldn’t have EC. And the web is littered with failed dot coms for the same reason.

So, try to respect your users, even if you disagree with them. Remember: you can disagree and say:”This is my website. We’re going to do things this way or that, please understand.”

But don’t do this. Don’t suddenly pull features, concoct half measures that don’t work properly, and treat your EC users like dirt.

If you treat us like this, then that is what you will get.

Kenneth

On a forum, one of the worst things that you can do to members is to reset the forums, remove all the posts or reassign privileges. It is the fastest way I know of to kill an entire community.

Take a look at the GeekySpeaky Boards to see what I mean. These boards have been around for over two years, but last year the owner cleaned out the forums, reset the users and set everything back to zero. It’s nearly a year later, and of 10,000 members, there are ONLY 436 articles.

A forum used consistently over a period of several years becomes a valuable source of wisdom, information, support and community among its users; a group of people who become involved and will give back to the community far in excess of any monetary gain they may have; and the SEO benefits of having a large inventory of posts, searched, stored and organised in Google bring residual traffic for years.

Unfortunately, all of this is user-contributed; and as such, they members become co-shareholders in the ‘community’. Their opinion counts, as does their support. To ride roughshod over users as EntreCard has done.

Other posts: EC founder fakes his own posts.

Blog Editing Tools: 3 great tools plus one.

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These days there are so many good blogging tools it’s hard to know which one to use. But there are three that are worth mentioning.

Qumana: a blog editor that allows you to use their adservice, too! Of the three tools I like, it’s the ONLY one available as a cross-platform blog editor!

BlogDesk: a simpler tool that I use for most blogging that I do. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with blogger at all. WordPress and Movable Type are fine.

LiveWriter: Of course, my favorite application is LiveWriter because it seems to be the most powerful. Unfortunately it isn’t supported on older installations of XP.

And for those who like integrated applications: Flock, which includes a browser, social media tools, and a blog editor in one package.