BLOG CONTENT

If your like me and have trouble thinking of what to write, you have my commiserations. Unless you know a lot about a subject or are passionate about something[a hobby, sport, etc] it can be pretty hard.

So just ask yourself this, What to you makes good content?

It can be anything at all. It could be something your really good at or just a couple of paragraphs on an obscure subject that you think people might find interesting.

I read somewhere that the goal of good writing is to get someone to read your first sentence and once they have done that to get them to read the next one,etc, etc. Once you have caught their attention don't slacken off or they will slip away from you.

You can't expect to write good articles all the time, what you should try for is one or two good articles a month and use the rest as fillers. But you have to keep those fillers interesting enough so you don't lose your traffic.

Also remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you may write whjat you think is a killer of an article, but of the first 100 visitors to your site only 15 may agree with you, then of the next 100 60-70 might agree. So don't forget that as humans we are a fickle animal.

So throw those creative dice and see how they fall, if what you come up with dosen't work , just put your digits to work on the keyboard and try something else.

I remember reading a theory once about how if you had a whole lot of monkeys tapping away randomly at a keyboard long enough, one of them would come up with the complete works of shakespeare, so there is hope for us yet.

O,D.

BLOG TRAFFIC

There is one main ingredient you need to make your blog successful and that is TRAFFIC, how do you drive more traffic to your site you ask.

You can use social marketing as a tool to gain that traffic,i.e. getting out there and posting comments on other blogs or forums.
But that can be hard yakka sometimes trolling through the internet[ suffering from information overload is a hazard from this process] looking for sites relevant to your subject. Neil Shearing recently released a programme that lets you do thus with ease and creates a link back to you site at the same time.
A lot of sites have the nofollow tag in them, but this programme looks for those sites that don't .

I was recommended this programme by another professional blogger[more on him in a later post] who has been a big influence in my getting started in blogging. So I've just finished downloading this tool and spent a very interesting hour putting it through it's paces.

I was very pleased with the ease with which you download and activate using a key sent to you via email. Once you have activated it I suggest you increase the number of sites to search to 100, you also just have to enter your subject of interest, then enter your name[it pays to varie it abit now and then], email address and then your web address.
Once you have done all that just press the find button, sit back, relax and enjoy yourself.

You can download this programme from, www.reallinkfinder.com/ or go to Neils website at www.neilshearing.com

HAPPY BLOGGING - O,D.

HINTS AND TIPS

HI this is the old dog barking again.
In this post I would like to pass on some hints and tips that I found useful to me as I got started to explore the web, but first a little bit of history. When I was in high school only the bright kids got to play with the computors as there was'nt many to go around. So I finished school computor illiterate, but that didn't matter as all my jobs that I have held didn't require computors.

Now that i'm older I found my interest in computing growing and finally we aquired a decent computor that we were able to do something with, so we hooked up the internet and started to surf. When you haven't grown up with the terminology and lingo it can be a bit confusing at times, as it is my wife lets me do most of the computing work as she gets frustrated with it and is likely to throw it out the window [as has happened to a few saucepans and afew odds and ends].

This is where I come to my first tip on how to get to meet people and surf the web at the same time.

I looked at Facebook and Myspace and one or two others, but at the time they didn't appeal to me. You may find that your the opposite, but I found Stumbleupon suited me better. It's a site where you get to learn to blog, join groups for discussions on a myriad of topics, it is also where I taught myself html to use in my blogs.Stumble is also a amazing site to utilizing in a social marketing strategy but more on that in a later post.

The one thing I found is how easy it is to use, Once you have joined and installed the toolbar, you log in to your own site, click on the preferences tab and there you can click what sort of things on the web interest you most, also fill out your profile so other stumblers get to know a bit about you.

Then all have to do is select on the toolbar what sort of thing you want to look at be it hobbies or geography, or you can select everything from your preferences and once you have done that just press the stumble button and away you go ,your surfing. Heres a hint to get you started to meet people on stumble, join a few groups, leave some comments, let people know you are out there.

You can also stumble other stumblers sites, see their blog pages and their profiles. Stumble also provides you with the abilitie to download articles,photos to your site useing the thumbs up or down buttons, also you can reveiw sites and leave comments on what you thought of that site.

As you will probaly guess I am quite new to the game, so I tend to ramble a bit now and then so I apologise in advance, but I wish to share some of my experiences in coming to grips with the dreaded bogeyman called the internet.

P.S. I just tryed to download a picture to this site but all I got was a , sorry unable to complete this action due to a fault message,so now I will sign off and chase down why I couldn't download my picture, till next time SEE YA.

OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS

Who ever says you can't teach an old dog new tricks, don't have much respect for the older generation such as myself. I have been operating a excavator for the last two years, up till then i had never even sat in one, i got the job by knowing someone in management who i knew from my previous job[it's not what you know but who you know]. I gave myself my own on the job training. Just recently i taught myself HTML and general computer skills, now i'm teaching myself JAVASCRIPT. The younger generation has the advantage of learning computing at school, so they have the thought processes already installed, whereas we older folk have to really make our minds do somersaults to understand the terminology and processes of computing.
My wife is another example that we older folk are still capable of learning new skills. She is a few years older than me[she calls me her toyboy-HAHA], Lately she is joining a management course and also looking at learning REIKE.
So if there is any body out there that you know who think they are to dumb or to old to learn something new, Give them encouragement, don't laugh at them or say that it is to hard for them because you can give them some sunshine in their life and instill them with confidense to live their life to the fullest.