Freelancers: Don’t Let Work Kill Your Relationship

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Working from home. It’s the dream, right? Never again will you have to wake up and drag yourself to the office. Since you’re around the house all the time, your family obligations will be a cinch to take care of. When you work remotely as a freelancer, it’s much easier to manage your work/life balance, right?

The unfortunate reality is that working from home is hard work, indeed. Sure, you don’t have to wake up and drag yourself to the office—but that convenience comes with a price. In our quest to be successful, sometimes we create the inverse scenario: the office never leaves us. As it turns out, your work/life balance may actually be more difficult to manage when your workplace and home are one and the same. It’s hard to keep up with things when you work all hours of the day and night, only sometimes finding time to eat and sleep. [Read more…]

What Changes Your Mind About Leaving a Blog Comment? Some Criteria

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In my article, “What Changes Your Mind About Leaving a Blog Comment,” I talked about some of the issues around debating where and when to leave a blog comment on a blog that hosts information or opinions you don’t support, or is filled with blog clutter, a clue that something isn’t right. About how your comment may be seen to support the blog, and impact your reputation by association.

As I wrote that post, I looked back over all the WTF Blog Clutter articles in the series and realized that many of these issues are ones that impact my willingness to comment on a blog. Sure, they impact my ability to even read the blog, let alone return and tell others, but they also impact my willingness to endorse a blog with a comment.

I started thinking about all the blatant, subjective, and even unconscious reasons that prevent me from leaving a comment on a blog. Here are some of my self-discoveries, most of them associated with various aspects of blog clutter. I’m sure you have more you can add, but these are big clues that this is a blog that doesn’t deserve my participation. [Read more…]

Twitter is a Public Way to Have a Private Conversation

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeMy husband was doing his best to explain Twitter to non-techy friends of ours. As the experienced web user and teacher, I was fascinated to hear how he would explain something he’s never used.

Twitter is a public way to have a private conversation.

He’s very right. In “Silly Out-of-Context Tweets — Can They Hurt?” brings up the “elephant in the room” that describes much of what Twitter is, does, and can do, especially when meets search engine, exposing your tweets to the world. [Read more…]

Exploring Social Media: Promoting Your Link Backs to You

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeYesterday in Exploring Social Media: The Power of the Link Needs Content, I introduced the most powerful social media tool in the world, the link, and explained that unless you have make the link direct people to valuable and useful content, you are shooting blanks. The link makes a lot of noise with nothing to show for it.

The impact of linking to yourself is magnified in value. When you email or publish a link to something you wrote, recommending it, you are telling the world:

  • I know that which I write about.
  • I am an expert in the subject.
  • I have the experience to back up what I’m writing.
  • This is the best I can do.

Do your links qualify?

When you contact a blogger or anyone to encourage them to link to you, do you keep these things in mind? Are you offering your best work? Does your blog or social media tool show the world you are an expert in this?

If you have the proof behind your link, then maybe your failure is in the presentation of that link, especially when directed towards bloggers, the most capable of spreading the word far and wide about you and your blog. [Read more…]

Exploring Social Media: The Power of the Link Needs Content

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeIn The Power of the Link and Don’t Guest Blog Until You Have Content, I talk about two very important subjects that apply to our ongoing discussion and Exploring Social Media Series.

First, a link is a door people open to your world, be it a world within your blog, social media tools and services, or a recommendation to visit another world, one you hope your fans will enjoy so much, they will return to your world with joy, eager for more and telling the world about what you have to offer.

Second, if you link without anything worth linking to, without anything positive to offer people, without anything worth recommending, without anything worth returning to, you have lost the power in social influence within the modern online world.

If you link to yourself, then these two characteristics are magnified. You are offering people a gateway into your world, one they expect is worth linking to, deserving of attention, exciting, and worth telling others about.

The link is the most powerful social media tool of all. [Read more…]

Exploring Social Media: Social Means Personal

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeIn “Duke DesRochers: Future Social Media Renaissance Man,” I introduced my cousin, Duke DesRochers, highlighting his fun cooking show audition tape as a great example of how to market with social media in mind.

With the advent of blogs, YouTube, podcasts, and online social media tools that allow anyone to publish anything they want within the law, everyone could become their own entertainment production company, putting the masses in charge of not only being the entertainment, but providing it.

With inexpensive video equipment and software, and an innate sense of comedy, drama, and style, Duke DesRochers has an intuitive way of bringing the “common man” into his audition video that I hope will gain the attention of the judges. It’s time to go back to the real people, rather than the exaggerated people, to find the humility and fun in entertainment. We need to get people thinking, “Hey, that’s me! I can do that!”

Another part of Duke DesRochers I want to celebrate with you is how he took two fairly diverse passions, and molded them into one specialty to totally redefine himself for this video audition for the Food Network: handyman in the kitchen.

As part of this ongoing series on Exploring Social Media, I want to talk a little more about the important points that Duke’s Food Network audition efforts brought up: getting personal and brand identity. [Read more…]