This is a question specific to products, not services. I mainly provide services but I have some products, as well as belong to some affiliate programs that allow me to offer products. I’m going to tell you what I do and then leave the rest open for you to share with everyone else. And yes, to the right there is one of the products I market, which is also to the left but looking much different than what I shared in 2010. Chick on it to take a look; trust me, it’s not a hard sell.

Actually, that’s one of the ways I market products on this particular blog. Sometimes the image I have to the right in my posts is actually an advertisement for something. Most of the time no, but if it’s a specific product or even a painting it’s probably a product. Sometimes I probably should mention that it’s a product because putting a painting in is almost like putting an image in, so I should say “selling on Imagekind” or something like that; I’ll need to work on that.

Obviously from my sidebars you know that I market products that way. However, I keep asking myself if it’s really marketing just sitting there. I may write specifically about my products once a year, if that often, and that’s for all my blogs.

Every once in awhile I toss out a product link on Twitter. Those don’t get much traffic but you never know who’s watching, right? I’ve never done it on LinkedIn or Google+, but when I created my business page on Facebook I advertised my products early on; haven’t mentioned any of them since.

I have one website which is mainly geared towards marketing my affiliate programs, which is kind of my version of a directory. It’s called Services and Stuff, and I’ve made few sales over the years from it, but I’ve also not marketed it all that well. It takes a lot of maintenance that I don’t always have time for because you know how affiliates are; here today, gone tomorrow.

Finally, every once in awhile I write a review about something, or a post that mentions something, and I include a link to the product. Most of the time I don’t mention that it’s a link to a product, but long time visitors know that if a link is underlined in blue that leads to a product, whereas most of the time my links are just a burgundy color without a line.

That’s all I do; trust me, it’s not very effective. I don’t have a list because, as I always ask, what the heck would I push to anyone with a list? Now, I do have a newsletter for my business which I guess one could say is an email list, and it has links to my products on it with every issue, so maybe that’s another way I market, ineffectively of course. lol

Your turn; what do you do, and how effective is it?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

I’m sure this guy’s suffering greatly

There’s one thing that’s come up time and time again, and I feel that someone has to actually write about it to dispel it as a reason, so it might as well be me. That one thing is that grammar can be used as a reason why many people took a hit.

Come on folks, really? Actually, let’s break this down because when most people are thinking “grammar”, they’re not really thinking grammar at all. Per my Webster’s New World College Dictionary, grammar means:

“that part of the study of language which deals with the forms and structure of words, with their customary arrangement in phrases and sentences”

Is that what most of you using the word have been thinking? Nope. You’ve been thinking about misspellings, capitalization, and typos for the most part. That’s a part of grammar but it’s not grammar. But we’ll let that one go for now.

Grammar is terrible these days. Forget that people can’t figure out which “your” or “their” they should be using. There are phrases like “these ones”, which grates my nerves, and things like “I <3 you”, which I just learned what it means (yeah, I’m slow sometimes) that people use, to the point that some kids actually write these things in papers in school, and teachers are allowing it; I’m shocked! Okay, no I’m not, but I am greatly disappointed.

Still, let’s be reasonable here. If Google was going to penalize people for grammar, just whose grammar would they be penalizing people with? Folks in the south use a different grammar than folks up north, and I’m betting out west people say some things differently than we do. What about people in other countries that know English as a second language? Wouldn’t an overwhelming majority of their sites be penalized drastically?

Let’s go back to misspellings, capitalization, and typos. There’s so much of all of these, even on prominent news sites like CNN and MSNBC, definitely on my local newspaper, that one would expect these site would take a much bigger hit than those of us writing our little personal blogs because it’s much more pervasive there, yet they’re not suffering at all.

Does this mean one shouldn’t try to work on those things so they minimize errors? Absolutely not. Does it mean that one’s traffic might not drop if there’s so many errors people can’t understand the content? Nope; it most certainly will drop. But it’s not because of any updates by Google, or any other search engine.

So allay your fears; you will not be tested any time soon on your grammar, spelling, or anything else. That is, unless you’re still in school, in which case study!
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

Yesterday I was checking in on this blog I write for an accounting firm. I went into the Admin panel and went to posts, where I discovered that two posts didn’t publish when they were supposed to. That was bothersome because, as I do with my own blogs, I tend to write posts ahead of time and if I wasn’t going to be able to do that there it was going to really complicate things.

The first thing I did was publish both posts. I actually had to “fake” change the date by changing the time a few minutes, then the Publish button came up and I was able to publish them for the dates they were supposed to show up.

Then I went online to do some research into the issue; y’all know how I like to research. I came across something that recommended adding something to the WP-Config.php file, as it stated that some themes were missing this particular code. I added the code, then went back to write a new post.

Only when I clicked on the link to the blog, it had reset itself back to the beginning. I was horrified; I hoped that maybe when I typed in the username and password and went back to the theme I had selected for the blog that everything would be as it was; nope. Oh the horror (some of you know that line)!

Now I was stuck. The lucky thing is that this is still a relatively new blog; the unlucky thing is that I’d never gotten around to backing it up. What to do, what to do, what to do?

I went to Google to pull up the cache of older blog posts. Only Google doesn’t seem to have that link anymore that gives you the cache of old posts or pages; what the hey? I looked everywhere, even did some research on that, but nothing worked. I then tried Bing, and they didn’t have anything either.

Yahoo did the trick. I put the blog’d address link into the search and it pulled up the one entry, but it also had “cache”. Through that link I was able to recover all the older posts, but not the two posts I’d done earlier in the day. Hey, I took what I could get, and that was a lot. I was able to post all those articles back for the same date that they originally were posted, then three posts, one to replace a post that was supposed to be for next month, then two more that are supposed to go this month.

I’ve scheduled one to go live today, but it’ll be after this post so I don’t know yet if it’s working or not. Either way, it’s reminded me of the importance of backing things up before making radical changes, even though I hadn’t thought that was a radical change. I’m just glad that I can write fairly fast; I’d have hated to spend a long time having to rewrite those articles.

Yes, please learn from my mistakes; don’t do them.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

The truth is as I get older, I realize that there’s no way I can appreciate my mother as much as I should. She’s not quite the same woman I grew up with, and I don’t mean how our relationship has changed, although it has.

My mother didn’t have much of a sense of humor when I was growing up. Sure, she liked a few shows on TV, but she never said anything funny and didn’t laugh very much otherwise.

My not being the typical kid had to be interesting in its own way as well. I didn’t get into trouble, and I didn’t do bad things. I wasn’t perfect by any means, taking some chances with my life that have made me, as an adult, extra cautious. But parents always told my mother how nice I was; teachers always told her how smart I was, and I tried to live up to that as much as possible. The worst thing my mother ever found to say to me was “your room is a pig sty”; are there mothers still using this phrase?

What I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that my mother has always had a great sense of insecurity, which led to her always worrying about family, which definitely included me. I know I got my sense of taking care of my friends from Mom’s sense of taking care of me. My mother didn’t play the “every child gets punished because I don’t know which child did something bad” thing when it came to school. Every school got to do it once; Mom made sure it never happened again because she knew I never did anything wrong. Strange as it seems, my mother changed policy in two schools I went to because they couldn’t apply that policy to any classes I was in.

She was strong when she felt she had to be; otherwise, she’s a worrier. She worried back then and she worries now. She worried about my dad when it was needed, and she worried about my grandmother when it was needed. She worries about some of my cousin’s children because that’s just how she is. She worries about some of the mail that comes to the house. She worries about how much she eats and when she brushes her teeth and so many other things. At least I’m not that bad, thank goodness; I don’t sleep well as it is.

What she doesn’t worry about as much is her health; that’s my job. And as she gets older, being in her mid 70′s, I worry way more now than I ever have. Some people might remember that my mother had her own medical emergency back in 2009 when I wrote a post on my other blog about preparing for family emergencies and on this blog about lessons on health care. I still help her deal with her issues with blood pressure and slight memory issues, and now I deal with her arthritis.

In her life she gained so much weight that at one point she probably weighed what I weigh right now and she’s only 5’1″ tall, and now she weighs what she weighed when she graduated high school, way less than half of her highest weight. Neither the way she gained the weight or the way she lost the weight was healthy, but the way she’s maintaining it now is. At least I was able to help her there.

I have to deal with her doctors and some of the other things that go on in her life. It’s not easy because we don’t live in the same city, and she doesn’t always tell me everything until I think to ask her about it.

And yet she still worries about me as well. She worries about my financial status. She worries about my health issues. She worries about my happiness and whether I’m eating and exercising and sleeping. In essence, she lives her mother role, and now I’m living a mother role as well.

But it’s her mother’s day, and as I reflect on all the years, all the travels, all the adventures, all the stories, all the advice, all the help, all the worries, and everything in between, and I acknowledge that she’s aging and I’m aging and our time together grows shorter and shorter, I know that I love my mother in ways that I would never and could never love anyone else, and I could never tell her or show her enough.

I hope most of you can do the same with your mothers on this day; Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mother’s out there.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

I started the series with a specific purpose, that being to help bring to the forefront the reality that there are websites and blogs written by people of color. It’s been a glorious and fun journey, but in looking at things now I don’t think I’ve been able to achieve the purpose I wanted to achieve.

What’s happened is that most visitors know what’s coming on Friday, and since overall it’s not their cup of tea they’re just skipping these posts. The initial hope had been that folks would at least take a look, see the topics black folks might be writing about, and decide if the topic was worth looking at. Instead, not only are they bypassing it, but most of the time the people and websites included here are bypassing it as well. Since there’s no real way to achieve its purpose as a live event, so to speak, I think it’s time to put it on hiatus.

But the hiatus isn’t today. The hiatus will be May 25th, the last Friday of the month, heading into Memorial Day weekend. That means 2 more weeks after this one, unless they’re suddenly an outpouring of people clamoring for more; yeah, like that’s going to happen. It’s been fun, but all good things must end.

With that said, let’s get into it.

This is definitely something different. The blog Beyond Black And White is managed by Christelyn D. Karazin, and is more of a consortium of bloggers with a common goal. There are 5 other black women and one Asian male that write on the site, which means there are often multiple posts on the same day. The topic are pretty general; they can be fashion, politics, technology… pretty much just like every day life, with one exception. There are also lots of articles about interracial relationships and race relations in general. As I said, it’s something different and I like it, so check it out. It’s a Livefyre commenting system.

For once I’m highlighting a new blog, but there’s a reason for it. It’s called The Money Chat and it all about financial issues. Dorethia R. Conner is the owner of the blog and she has other contributors that help her out. She gets a mention because she just went the self hosted route in April after writing on Blogger for a long time, so there are a lot of older articles there that I assume she’s not going to move to the new space, yet are worth checking out. Unfortunately the new blog is also a Disqus blog, so I might read but obviously won’t be commenting.

Stella Anokam‘s eponymously named blog talks about internet marketing, something I know a lot of people love to read about. She talks a lot about blogging, getting traffic, business tips, building mailing lists, and social media. There’s a lot of good stuff there and it’s written concisely and well. One topic in particular that I bet a lot of you would like to check out is this post titled Profit Financially From Blogging In 9 Simple Strategic Steps, For Beginners. And it’s a standard commenting system; can’t beat that.

Finally today I present another black news and commentary source, Your Black Bloggers. Multiple writers comment on the topics of the day, which includes President Obama saying yesterday that he now endorses same sex marriages (about time). Let me warn you; everything here isn’t necessarily warm and fuzzy, since some of the opinions and topics will be perceived as controversial. But being a little bit edgy hasn’t hurt that many people, has it?

That’s it for today; two more weeks to go.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

via Flickr

The comment system used to look exactly like the one we employ, for the most part, on WordPress software oriented blogs. The issue was that we had to subscribe to comments by responding to that immediate email we received after each and every post if we wanted to know that someone had gotten back to us. Since I’m not a subscribing kind of guy, especially not every single time, I wasn’t doing it.

Then within the last few months, WordPress.com changed up some things. One, they changed the look, which wasn’t so bad since it kept everything we were used to. But two, they also changed the ability to just leave a comment and go on with your life.

I just had it happen to me again; tried to leave a comment on a WordPress.com blog only to run into this:

Please log in to post your comment.

WordPress.com or Gravatar.com credentials work.

For the first time last week, I noticed the Gravatar connection and wondered about it. So I did some checking and realized that WordPress.com had purchased Gravatar back in 2008; nope, never knew that before. They had never connected the two services, and other than a press release there was no notification on the Gravatar site, so it wasn’t something commonly known to a lot of people, since I’d never seen anyone else write about it.

So I decided to try a different email address; nope, not happening. It seems that if I have a Gravatar account hooked up I’m not going to be able to leave any messages on any WordPress.com sites without signing in. Frankly, I know it’s a minor thing to a lot of people, but I’ve kind of stuck by this mantra since the beginning of blog commenting way back when and I’m not suddenly changing over now.

Just to verify this by the way, I finally left a comment with an email address that doesn’t have a Gravatar, and it accepted the comment just fine. I did get the standard email saying I had to subscribe to receive comments, but that’s okay because at least I got my comment through.

This is irritating, and I don’t know if WordPress.com users can change that setting, even if they know it’s happening. Overall, it looks like it’s another blog platform that I probably won’t be commenting on all that often, and that’s unfortunate. Why are these things so keen on restricting the ability to comment? Yeah, I know, worried about spam; bah!
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

Enter HARO, which stands for “Help A Reporter Out”. Its main purpose is to connect reporters with people who might have information they need and the urge to gain publicity. From our end, the non-reporters, we can sign up to receive email 3 times a day with requests from both news and magazine reports to respond to any of the multiple links that may be something that describes us. This isn’t like a job where you respond to things that don’t quite fit what you do but you have the skills for. The needs are very specific, and thus if it’s you, you’ll know it.

This is my second foray into HARO; I don’t even remember when I was a part of it the first time around. I also don’t remember why I signed up to try it again, but somehow I’m thinking I have to blame Beverly Mahone in some fashion because of her talking about PR and getting publicity for your business. After being with it for the last 3-4 weeks, it’s time to ask the question “Is HARO for you?”

As I mentioned, you get email 3 times a day if you sign up for it. The email always starts off with an advertisement, but it’s totally text. I don’t have a problem with that, and you shouldn’t either. Next comes the requests, and I’ve seen as few as 25 and as many as 60. They’re categorized to help you get through them quicker, although it’s possible that you may be able to address the interests in categories that aren’t specifically geared for your business. For instance, I once responded to a query from someone looking to talk to dependents of military personnel who traveled a lot, since I certainly lived that life.

What’s my issue? Including the first time I was with HARO I’ve never had one person ever respond back to me. Now, one could surmise that they found what they were looking for beforehand, and that’s obviously true. Still, how do you feel when you visit a lot of blogs, leave what you think are pretty good comments, and never get an acknowledgment?

You feel like you’ve just wasted your time, that’s what. And that’s how I often feel with HARO. I’ve tried it a couple of different ways. A few times I responded and gave my story entirely, thinking that if they saw everything up front they’d at least contact me to ask for more, whether they used it or not. A few times I’ve gone minimalistic, giving some information but not going into any details, seeing if the “tease” was enough to get their attention.

Nope, nada, zip. Now, the site tells you that all these big time news sources use their services in looking for people to talk to and get information from, which is pretty enticing. But when you look at the emails, the majority of what you get certainly isn’t coming from big media. However, I didn’t sign up expecting NBC to come calling to ask me about anything. My hope was to possibly get into a couple of magazines, where people can read what you have to say and hopefully like it enough to look for you online.

So, is HARO for you and me? I’m not really sure yet, but I remember I had the same feeling the first time I left, and I’m getting that same feeling now. I mean, going through potentially hundreds of links and responding to some via email only to hear the sound of a vacant room without the echo as a response… is it worth the time? I’m thinking I learned better methods from Bev’s book How To Get On The News Without Committing Murder, and have made a couple of local contacts because of it.

Still, I’m not ready to let go just yet, so I’m going to give it another couple of weeks to see if I’m getting more irritated or whether I feel it’ll all work out in the end. Right now, I know which way I’m leaning, and I bet you do as well.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

by Gord Webster via Flickr

The other thing I’ve been doing is fixing broken links. Well, that’s not quite accurate. What I’ve been doing most of the time is killing links and every once in awhile fixing a link. I have the plugin Broken Link Checker, but I had turned it off some time ago because it can slow your blog down if you’re doing things in it and that was irritating me. I also really hadn’t paid all that much attention to broken links, figuring it was all stuff in the past; seems that’s not quite true.

As I was griping last week about the loss of traffic I started looking around for answers. Two were actually provided by a comment on that post by Lisa, who mentioned two things. One was the sitemaps thing, another plugin that I’d deleted from this blog, and the idea of broken links. Although I didn’t see a lot out on the search engines talking about sitemaps and traffic, I did find a lot of people have written about broken links and traffic, especially search engine traffic.

I decided that I did want to clean up the blog, so I turned on the plugin and let it do its thing. I was hoping it wouldn’t do what going online and doing a search did for someone else, which was to alert him to over 18,000 broken links on his blog; ouch! I got lucky; I came up with just over 750, and I didn’t think it was that bad.

What was surprising is just how many of those links actually came from people who had left comments on the blog, and now those blogs or websites don’t exist anymore. Initially I was looking at a bunch of them, and that was time consuming and frustrating so I decided I wasn’t going to waste that much time.

However, there were still some I did decide to look at, and those are the ones I’m going to talk about more because I still talk to some of you. What I found is that you either changed your permalink structure or the location of where you put your blog or blog posts, or you’ve changed websites or blog locations and either didn’t remember or decided against bringing some of your old content with you. In one case one of you has started a new blog space and left more than 3 years of content elsewhere that can’t be accessed anymore; that’s a shame because it was great stuff.

Any time you change how your information has been put out there, if anyone has linked to you it suddenly becomes a bad link. If you’re keeping your content, at the very least you need to make sure there’s a way for people to find the new link if they care to try. For my purposes if a few people were using the Archives widget I could have easily found what I was looking for. However, so many people decide to use either that one or Categories and not both, as I do, and thus I had no chance to find the posts I wanted and just gave up.

In any case, it points out the importance of doing maintenance every once in awhile and in making sure people can find your content in whatever way they deem easiest. And look, my traffic has gone up; whoopee!!!
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

There you are. By the way, I’m now down 14 pounds and with the doctor reducing the amount of insulin I inject twice a day, we’re both hoping it helps my weight loss goals. So, now that you’ve heard my tale, I hope you do the right thing for the right reason for yourself, your family, and of course your overall health.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

Are you looking for ways to save money? If so you might want to visit the blog called Frugalista written by Natalie P. McNeal. She’s a journalist who did an experiment, saw how great it worked out, and turned it into a quality blog of ideas that she shares with everyone. There are a lot of articles geared towards women but many that are open for everyone, so take a look to see if there’s anything there that might address an issue of yours. Standard blog commenting system.

Marcie Hill’s blog Marcie Writes might make you think it’s a new blog, but in actuality she moved to self hosting in January, leaving behind her WordPress.com blog; good for you! Her blog talks about writing, publishing and business, and she has a lot of interviews with other writers on her site. This is a very accomplished person and you could learn a lot by checking out what she has to say if this is an industry you’d like to break into. Standard blog commenting system.

Lynnette Khalfani-Cox is known as The Money Coach, so of course her blog Ask The Money Coach.com talks about finance issues. Truthfully, her blog covers a lot of topics my finance blog covers, only she’s writing all the articles herself, and they’re really good; I’m jealous! Anyway, it’s geared towards American audiences, though there are some articles which are universal as it pertains to things like using credit cards. She also wrote a book called Perfect Credit: 7 Steps to a Great Credit Rating, which proves she knows her stuff. Standard blog commenting system.

Finally, we needed some male perspective here besides just mine, so I introduce you to Andre Blackman, who writes Pulse + Signal, which is about public health issues. I’ll admit that this one isn’t for everyone, though for someone like me who also works in health care it’s great seeing someone tackles these topics from a social perspective. And there are general articles such as when he wrote about Food Day 2012, which happens to be October 24th every year and highlights hunger and other food issues. And yes, you guessed it, standard blog commenting system once more.

That’s it; some good stuff here, and I hope you go take a look at all of them. Be sure to tell them that Mitch sent you.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell