Do It Myself Blog – Glenda Watson Hyatt

G’morning blogosphere! After a great party, minimal sleep, I’m here for another day.

Fantastic keynote from Technorati – watch for their State of the Blogosphere on Monday.

G’day from Vegas! We’ve had a great time, so far – more later. Today’s b5 Media sessions; I’ll share nuggets in point form. Please bear with me – typing on my laptop isn’t great.

Search Engine Optimization:

• keyword-rich titles w/o overdoing
• image descriptions
• subheadings w/ keywords
• categories
• tags – no more than 2 lines per post, more specific than categories

Tips on Interviews:

• Why?: free content, more credibility, become more of an expert, plug for subject, might get an exclusive
• How? PR agencies might approach you – more for celebs, good to be different/unique angle, be prepared w/ blog details, start locally/small
• Process? Do research, original/interesting questions/theme, tell a story, be professional, stay w/ your time limit, don’t show till final draft, act natural and have conversation
• Follow up? Keep contact, cultivate relationships, send links, keep any promises

Attracting Readers:

• Darren Rowse, ProBlogger – kicking myself for forgetting his book!
• what need is my blog fulfilling?
• content =unique + useful
• i00ndividual attention to readers you already have – feature readers
• create a sticky blogs – ‘sneeze’ them thru your blog
• identify your ”doorway" posts – optimize
• build anticipation – series, highlight past posts, competitions, newsletter about blog news/stats
• where are potential readers gathering? how can I participate?
• guest posts, feed into twitter, forums, pitch other bloggers – careful, leverage online presence, contests, awards, meet ups, submit to local media/newsletters, present at workshops, squidoo, free report, newsletter, preempt stories, interview, swap blogs, socnet, writing projects, promote posts v blogs, use names
• Muhammad – writing for social media
• know your audience
• create original and  evergreen content
• thank& linkers
• 10 second rule – diagonal readers
• prepopulate social media buttons – how?
• be the definitive resource

Lunch = cheese danish + mocha frappuccino from Starbucks. Just what this athetoid needs right now…sugar = even more shaky!

b5 Advisory Board Q&A:

• blogosphere is changing, more specific/niche-oriented; twitter more liberating
• links are a social gesture
• friendfeed =decentralized moderation

Demos by b5 partners:

• OutBrane – widget for readers to rate posts and to provide recommended posts – some external links, 2-way traffic op – your links on other blogs [question: if send readers away, how does that create stickiness?]
• Widgetbox – allows anyone to create widgets, very cool way to increase traffic [note to self: check pets channel]
• Lijit – search application, results appear in overlay window [how accessible are these things?]
• picapp – free access to visual content legally, eventually will include ads under  pics

Copyright & Image Use:

• images are copyrighted = can’t use, owned by photographer
• exceptions: public domain, creative commons license (i.e. flickr – read terms!) to enhance posts not for sole content
• ask for permission – keep a record
• fair use – no standard definition, only guidelines, not w/ images
• plagiarism rules still apply

Social Media Tools & Tips:

• 1/2hr per day, need to experiment
• not all content is submit worthy
• participate!
• each site has its own manners
• Redditt: submit to sub-redditt, low engagement
• StumbleUpon – great way to leverage to other media sites
• Digg – more effort/strategy
• socialmediaanswers.com launches next week
• [note to self: follow @pointlessbanter]

Staying Focused & Healthy as a Blogger:

• set goals to maintain clear vision
• why do you blog, what do you want from blogging, who are you blogging for, what do you bring to it, how do you measure success
• blog calendar to track multiple blogs
• take time off – yep, 4 days offline in Vegas, baby!
• celebrate milestones and achievement – create a work log, keep a kudos files [i.e. emails], start a rewards journal, make it public, celebrate others’ success

Seen: Suzie Cheel, Des Walsh, Jim Turner, Rick Calvert, Liz Strauss, Chris Brogan, Wendy Piersall

Party time! More tomorrow…

For the past several weeks, I have been playing with StumbleUpon – a great tool for discovering new-to-me website and blogs related to my interests. StumbleUpon is also for social networking and meeting people with similar tastes. Finally, if used correctly, StumbleUpon can also dramatically increase traffic to one’s own blog.

Getting Started with StumbleUpon

Getting started with StumbleUpon requires two simple steps:

1. Join StumbleUpon – you will be ask to set your username, other information and to select your interests (there are 501 to choose from!). Selecting your interests determines which pages StumbleUpon will show you. Pick a few for now until you get the hang of stumbling. You can always change them later.
2. Install the toolbar. (available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, a workaround exists for Opera and Safari)

Using StumbleUpon for Discovering Sites

With the toolbar installed, you can now begin stumbling by clicking on the Stumble! button. StumbleUpon will show you a page based on your interests.

Using the Stumble! button, I have recently discovered:

• Probably the Funniest Cat Video You’ll Ever See (no captioning, only audio is music)
• 10 Blogging Mistakes / Why Your Blog Struggles
• How to save money at your next conference
• 100 Web Tools for Learning with a Disability
• 10 Words to Avoid When Writing

Stumbling can be addictive yet quite educational!

When you come across a page you particularly like while stumbling, give it a thumb up!

If you particularly do not like a page, give a thumb down:

However, use the thumb down sparingly, for example, on:

• slow loading pages
• non existent or error laden pages
• ad-heavy pages
• voting pages from other social media
• pop-ups & pop-unders

If you do not have a strong opinion either way, it is best to move onto the next stumble. Save your thumbs up for the best content.

Using StumbleUpon for Networking

StumbleUpon is great for connecting with people with similar interests. To get started, feel free to add yours truly!

Submitting Pages to StumbleUpon

With StumbleUpon, you aren’t limited to thumbing up (or down) pages presented to you. You can also thumb up (or vote for) pages that you come across by other means, for example when reading your favourite blogs.

However, if you are the first to thumb up a page, you’ll be presented with a submission form:

To submit a page:

• Clean up the Title field – you want only the post/page title here
• Write a couple sentences about the page in the Review box.
• Select the most appropriate topic. There are 501 to choose from, including those from the dropdown menu.
• Add up to five tags, separated with a comma, either chosen from the topic list or keywords from the page. For example, tags appropriate for posts from this blog may include: activism, blogging, books, disabilities, health, humor (the American spelling, unfortunately), internet, technology, social-media, society, writing. Unlike with search engine optimization, the key here is to use broad terms for tags.
• Indicate whether content is adult content.
• Click on Submit This Site.

Caution: If you are the first to discover a page and you choose not to submit the form (say, if you are in a rush or if you aren’t sure what to write for a review), hitting your Back button or moving on to the next page can send that page into the StumbleUpon graveyard, which is not good! When presented with the Submission Form, please complete the brief review process.

To check whether a page has been reviewed, click the Comment button:

From there you can add a review if you wish.

One Final Tip

From your profile page, viewing My Favorites in the grid display provides thumbnails of pages you have stumbled. This is an easy way to see how many times you have stumbled pages from the same domain (e.g., www.doitmyselfblog.com). Over stumbling a domain can have a diminishing effect in terms of traffic, and can actually ban the domain and your account from StumbleUpon, which is a not what you want!

A good rule of thumb is one in twenty-five stumbles for the same domain or blog. Looking at this screen shot of my own stumbles, I did not do Disaboom any favours with these stumbles. This is another reason why learning how to use StumbleUpon correctly is so important. Doing the wrong thing, despite good intentions, can have disastrous consequences.

The occasion thumb up and review for yours truly, the Left Thumb Blogger, is very much appreciated! Too many will result in the opposite affect than you intended.

Additional Resources

I have found there is much more to using StumbleUpon than I realized. Here are a few resources to help you get started:

• StumbleUpon Guide
• StumbleUpon: Beyond The “Stumble” Button
• StumbleRush Course (I highly recommend this course. Note: the videos are not yet captioned.)

Happy stumbling!

If you have been wondering why I disappeared last week, I can explain!

The Story of how an experiment was born and how it will make a difference in the world goes something like this….

Suzie Cheel had set herself a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and was on Open Mic Night over at Liz Strauss’s Successful Blog on Tuesday, May 20th. The topic was Great Turning Points. Being herself at a great turning point in her life, Suzie readily joined in.

Glenda: Hey Suzie, how goes your BHAG?
Suzie: BHAG – still a bit scary – launched my studio online today with a sale.
Would love if I could get all of you to help me promote this – I am giving prizes etc starting tomorrow, onmy Abundance Highway site, to people who promote me and my BHAG. Some will be LOA (Law of Attraction) stuff! I also plan to have tele-classes and a program to help bloggers use LOA to take your blogging to be really profitable, etc.
Liz asked Suzie: Tell us what BHAG stands for. 🙂
Suzie: As far as I can work out, the term scrawled on a million whiteboards by corporate trainers, Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), was coined – or at least first publicized – by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras in their now modern business classic, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.
Glenda: What do you need, Suzie? Hey, could we do a tweet-a-thon or something, assuming the bird stays awake?
Suzie: Great.
Glenda: Suzie, thinking out loud, if we put together a team of core tweeters in different time zones and we each tweet for an hour or so to send your message around the world. What do you think?? I’ve wanted to try something like for a while. Perhaps some would blog about the experiment too. Yes? No?
Liz: Suzie, I think the world-wide tweet might be an idea. 🙂
Liz Williams then said she would tweet too.
Glenda: Suzie, should we try it? I can help mobilize/organize Team World after Friday. Then we set one day to tweet. What do you think?

So the idea was born.

Suzie later added:

“When I set first gave myself this BHAG I planned that my Attraction plan would continue on to attract $$$$ for The China Library Project. This is for schools and kids in China who have no books and my friend Lonnie Hodge is passionate about doing something to remedy the situation. Did you know that for $1,000 we can equip a primary school in China with its own library?”

That is where I have been for the past week: planning the Team World Tweet-a-thon, a worldwide event on Twitter, to help Suzie attract the necessary resources to come to Vancouver next week! If you use Twitter, please join Team World and be the Law of Attraction in action!

The Accessibility 100 series will resume shortly.

I became aware of Twitter, yet another social networking tool, early last year. At that time, I resisted the temptation to answer “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. I had decided it was the time in my life when it’s now or never to become financially sufficient. The last thing I needed was yet another distraction to exacerbate my technologically-induced ADHD when I really needed to focus my energy and attention. But, at one of Liz Strass’ indescribable Open Mic Nights last summer, my friend Susan Reynolds enticed me to drink the juice and I became a tweeter.

Initially, my opinion was confirmed: Twitter was instant messaging on speed. It was like being in a room full of people talking and overhearing bits of conversations. Some bits are useful, others are interesting, some are downright bizarre, and, occasionally, a bit is directed at you, drawing you further into that particular conversation momentarily. It was intriguing and addictive, but I didn’t see the value of all this tweeting. Several times I thought of leaving, but being one not to leave a party early, I hung around to see what would happen next.

Slowly, a few more tweeters began following me and I followed a few more, which is a good thing. When I would tweet about my latest blog post, a few fellow tweeters would pop over to read it and leave a comment. And tweeting from a BlogWorld session was kinda cool. I finally felt part of the in crowd. I began getting to know people beyond their avatars and handles.

Twitter limits tweets (messages) to 140 characters, which is such a great equalizer for me because I’m not expected to give lengthy responses; the system doesn’t allow it. So, I can pretty much keep up with my left thumb. And, it is in my medium: the typed word. Perfect for me!

In early December, Susan Reynolds discovered she had breast cancer, and openly shared in her tweets and new blog Boobs on Ice her journey from diagnosis to biopsy to surgery. She shared how a bag of frozen peas was more soothing on her battered chest than a brick-like ice pack.

Overnight green peas began appearing in tweeters’ avatars in support of Susan. It was then that I began noticing something – and I’m not sure if it was because Twitter was growing and reaching its potential more fully or if it was because I finally saw it: Twitter had morphed from IM on speed to a supportive community right before my eyes.
More and more tweeters creatively added peas to their avatars and words like please were spelled as PEAS. A Frozen Pea Fund was then launched to raise money for cancer research. As we don our peattire for the third Frozen Pea Friday, the fund has already reached more than $7,000 and continues to steadily grow.

Like with any community, the Twitter community’s strength is based on the contribution of each member. In return for the support that I received during my Blog for a Year campaign, I would like to support the community’s fundraising efforts. With each I’ll Do It Myself: Ebook Edition purchased between now and Friday, January 11th, at midnight (pacific time), I will donate $5 – the cost of two bags of frozen peas – to the Frozen Pea Fund for cancer research
Grab a good read and some good will be done. Thanks.

Twitter, I will be around for a while yet to participate in this vibrant, supportive community.