Encouragements and inspiration for living life on your terms
It’s now a week into the New Year, and I’ve been blogging for about 7-8 months. I look back on those months in my entry to Middle Zone Musing’s Blogapalooza: “What I Learned From 2007”. A collection of the best few posts (in my opinion) from my blogging journey.
Ok, maybe not my literal house. But this blog, my “virtual home”, if you will, is yours as much as mine. And in the spirit of Christmas, I thought I’d mention this.
This blog is licensed under Creative Commons. Without going into too much legalese, here’s what it means for you. It means you can take my content, and use it in any way you want, with just two conditions. Firstly, if you give me credit by linking to the site. And secondly, if you’re using it for a non-commercial use.
Why this license? Because I would love for you to take my content. I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions on what I write. But I’d love credit and a link, not only for my ego (though it does play a part), but also to make it easier for me to track the conversations. So I can join in any conversations instigated by the things I write.
So please. Take my content. Reproduce it. Add your thoughts. It’d be an honor to have my content out there.
Yet another inspiring story about how social media can make a difference. Blogs, Twitter, Podcasting, etc aren’t tools being used to waste time. They aren’t just about being heard, and getting your voice out there. It’s about relationships. Connecting with people.
I personally haven’t gotten involved in this too much partly because I haven’t been on Twitter that much in recent weeks, and partly because I personally don’t know how I can really help (can’t donate online because I don’t have a credit card).
Susan Reynolds is an artist, author and just a really creative person. She’s been quite involved in Twitter and Second Life, and just building relationships in these digital realms. Recently, she has been diagnosed with cancer. After a “full afternoon and multiple stab wounds”, as she put it, she needed something cool to help keep bleeding down and relieve the pain, and finding traditional ice packs too heavy, she decided to use a bag of frozen peas. She took a photo of it, and shared her story on Twitter.
A few days later, Cathleen Rittereiser suggested that people donate the cost of a bag of frozen peas to fund cancer research. Susan’s friends took that off-the-cuff remark, and ran with it. And as of today, we now have the Frozen Pea Fund, which will be raising money for breast cancer research, in Susan’s name. Lots of people are contributing in different ways. Spreading the message by inserting peas into their avatars (pea-vatars as they call it), building the wordpress site, and many other ways I’m probably unaware of.
You can read more from Connie Reece. Or you can go straight to the Frozen Pea Fund and donate.
I just thought I’d try to help by spreading the word. Social media, all this blogging and Twittering and all, is about real people. It’s about real connections being formed. It’s about a real difference being made. Why don’t you join in?
A new, free ebook by Seth Godin. You can download the ebook directly from here.
It’s a short ebook, that will only take you 5-10 minutes to read. But it has a good message. It’s about how to gain traffic to your website (or blog/podcast/whatever content you’re creating).
Yes, there are a lot of articles on search engine optimization, etc. But I agree with Seth, that the best way to get traffic and clicks “is to create content that is updated, unique and useful”.
I can’t say that I’ve mastered this yet (I’ve got less than 60 subscribers). But hopefully I improve with time.
Those of you who don’t create online content might be wondering what you have to gain from this ebook. Well, the principles apply in pretty much any field. No matter what your message might be, and where your field is, you’ll probably want to have people listening to what you’re saying. And Seth Godin here shows us the best way to achieve that.
Yes, you can try to game the system. You can come up with all sorts of strategies for marketing and advertising. But at the end of the day, if you don’t create a good remarkable product (whatever that product might be), all the marketing and advertising strategies in the world won’t create a lasting impact. The best (if not only) way of getting attention in the long run, is to create a product that is unique, useful and updated.
As they say, the cream always rises to the top.
How are you creating content that gets people’s attention?