WordPress or SBI revisited

January 6, 2012 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Business, Marketing, Sitesell and Site Build It, WordPress 

First, let’s get this point out of the way: Yes, this blog is powered by WordPress.

I enjoy blogging, even though I make little money from it. As I’ve said many times before, I make more money from a couple of websites than I do from all my other sites and blogs. Since I do this to earn a living, it’s the profit that’s important to me.

Yes, it’s easier to write pages on WordPress than using SBI. I throw up ad hoc pages on my blogs all the time about topics in which I’m interested at the moment, with very little pre-planning. I come here to share what I’ve learned and to recommend dependable products and services that produce results month after month.

It’s a fact that I’ve closed most of my WordPress-powered blogs and I rarely post on any of my blogs, any more. I’ve left a wasteland of abandoned blogs in my past. Why were they abandoned? Because they were not profitable.

As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I am going back to focusing almost all of my attention on two things: local marketing for a select group of small business owners and a very limited amount of consulting. It is going to be very hard to become one of my clients. I’m getting pickier as I get older.

I’ll be using SBI for most of my marketing in 2012 and beyond.

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool WordPress fan and have no intention of changing your mind, then, the show’s over. There’s nothing to see here. Move along. Don’t waste your time on this blog.

If you’re a marketing wannabee, but you’re not willing to invest money for the tools that do a reliable job of earning profit, I’m not for you, either. If you invest all your time and energy in using only the free tools you can find, I’m going to argue that you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

That’s my position. Agree or disagree, it’s your choice.

On the other hand, if you are a business owner and you want to grow your business, serve more clients and customers, and earn more, then you may want to take a few minutes and read some of the things I have to say.

No, I’m no “Internet Guru.” In fact, I tend to avoid anyone who refers to himself as a guru.

I’m a guy who’s been in the marketing trenches, off and on, for over three decades and I’ve learned some things that work well and some that don’t.

Am I right all the time? I doubt it, but I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and have learned what to avoid and what to do. That’s part of the learning process. Maybe I can help you avoid some errors along the way.

Okay, now that the preamble to the post is out of the way, let’s turn our attention to the subject at hand: building a business by marketing online.

Whether you sell a product or service, online or offline, I think you’ll agree that marketing is a very important part of the process.

If you don’t have a steady stream of interested prospects, it’s going to be hard to have a steady stream of happy customers who buy from you over and over, and that’s a business. Not one time, here and there, sales. Multiple sales to the same person, over and over, year in and year out.

That’s my goal for 2012. To build a marketing system that does just that: attracts thousands of prospects, tells them how to scratch an itch or avoid a pain, and then recommend products and services and processes that work.

Most of this system, I’ll be building for my clients and myself and I’ll never talk about it here, but I’ll be using the tools that I write about in this blog. If you look in the right column of almost any page on this site, you’ll see the tools I recommend and use all the time to attract prospects and turn them into customers.

(Note: I’m basically starting over after a long illness, so most of the systems I’ll be building are not yet in place, but I’m working on them every day. They will be.)

So, I’ve said all of that to say this:

Do not confuse busy-ness with business. They are not the same.

A business is based on results and that usually means profit. The goal of a business is to increase wealth. I would add this, “while providing the best services and products that are available to your customers.”

I know from experience that I’ve been busy with blogging and it has been a distraction. It has taken my attention away from building a real business and has cost a lot in terms of missed income, because I didn’t keep my eye on my goals.

I was enjoying the process of playing with the technology, rather than focusing on achieving specific business goals.

Blogging — for me, at least — has been a huge shiny object that diverted me from my business for several years. Yes, it was a valuable lesson, but I’m happy that I learned the lesson and have time to rectify the problem.

Harsh words? Maybe.

But, they’re true.

I can look at my own stats and accounting reports and I know that I earn far more money from several websites than I do from all the blogs I’ve built.

I’m thinking, and have no proof, that the main reason is that people come to blogs with a different mindset and different intentions than they do when going to an information rich, niche-focused, hierarchically organized, traditional website.

People bounce into a blog, scan the latest article, and bounce right back out — mostly. That’s why bounce rates tend to be higher on blogs than websites.

At least, that’s what my stats tell me.

I’m not saying that blogs are bad. For some specific niches, they are great. If you serve a niche where the latest news and developments is important and you focus on covering those topics day in and day out, then a blog may be the best approach for you.

If you want to write about a wide range of topics and don’t want to try to organize those topics as you would have to do with a website, then a blog may work, but I’m betting you won’t get very good results from it.

What are you selling?

You have to sell something to have a business. Your income has to exceed your expenses if you’re going to have a real business.

Over a decade ago, I quit computer consulting. I became an artist blacksmith and specialized in making roses that never wilt. I was enjoying that business until Mom became ill. Following her battle with cancer, she could not care for herself, so I brought her home and cared for her for the next several years. Since I could leave her alone for no more than an hour or two at a time, I took up affiliate marketing as a way to earn a living while staying home to care for her.

It worked.

But, the main problem was this: I had no customers nor clients. I had no products to sell. None.

I earned a pretty good living by writing about things that people were interested in and then recommending products via affiliate links. I’m still doing that. I love that business.

The problem, however, is that the people who purchase (or click on the Google Adsense ads) are not my customers — they’re someone else’s customers.

So, my job has been to attract hundreds of thousands of readers and hope that enough of them would purchase so that I’d earn enough to live well.

I did all the work up front and hoped for an income. It’s been great for me, but I know a lot of people who have tried it and have not done nearly as well as they want.

Part of the problem is that it’s a flawed business plan.

We do all the work of promotion and building interest and then pass the customers off to the merchants.

We’re helping the merchants increase their herds, but we’re not building and nurturing a herd of our own.

(If you’re wondering, that’s the term Dan Kennedy uses to help remind us that a good business has a group of satisfied customers and it’s our job to provide what those customers want so that they’ll buy from us over and over. He calls it building a fence around our herd. Then, he advises that we market to our herd over and over, every month, in a way that helps them get what they want.)

That whole process has been perverted, to a degree, in the “internet marketing” business, where people who don’t have a herd of their own, are always selling, selling, selling to anyone who wanders by, and that just does not work.

Someone visits your website or blog, clicks a link, and then they’re gone, possibly never to return. Next!

You may be able to earn a few hundred dollars per month with this approach, but you can’t live on a few hundred dollars per month. At least, I can’t, and I enjoy living a relatively simple life.

So, not only do you not have a herd of your own, you don’t have anything to sell to them. All most bloggers do is try to get visitors to click on affiliate links or click the ads.

Some bloggers offer a lot of quality content; some don’t. Most don’t earn much. Most don’t attract many readers and even fewer buyers.

So, they become enamored with the process and the technology and don’t invest the time, energy, and money to build systems to corral and nurture a herd of their own.

In fact, I know a few bloggers (myself included for a few years) who actively avoid building a herd and nurturing them, even if we know better. It’s a trap that is easy to fall into.

What do you sell? To whom do you sell it?

If you have a traditional business, you have regular customers and clients.

If you own a restaurant, you have regular customers who enjoy your food and they tell their friends. They eat there off and on. If you do a good job of marketing, you can get them to eat more often and to bring their friends along, too. This increases the number of purchases and also increases the amount of the transactions, and that means more income. If your marketing costs less than the increase in revenue, it means that you have higher profits — and that’s the goal. (At least, it’s one of the goals.)

When I was a computer consultant, it was easy to focus on my business. I wanted people to find me, hire me, pay me, and call me back the next time they needed my services. This was before the Internet, so most of my marketing consisted of giving free presentations to groups of potential clients and publishing a newsletter every month.

(I wish I had one of those old newsletters to look at. They were produced with a typewriter and were cut and pasted with real scissors and glue, before cutting and pasting meant clicking a button.)

They weren’t nearly as pretty as the newsletters I’ll create this year, but they were effective.

When I was a blacksmith, the Internet was just starting to flourish, and I used one tiny section of one website and was able to sell all the steel roses I was able to forge.

But, when I closed my blacksmithing business and started caring for Mom, I lost my direction. My main interest was caring for her and my secondary interest was earning enough money to continue caring for her at home. Affiliate marketing served that purpose, well.

So, during the time I cared for her and then fought my own battle with cancer, it means that I’ve spent almost exactly a decade of selling to random people who were attracted to my various websites.

Since I had no clear target markets and no clear business goals, I drifted and experimented with the technology. I was fascinated and I enjoyed it and I learned a lot.

But, now, for the first time in a decade, I’m able to work full-time at what I enjoy doing and I have a couple of products of my own that I can sell.

That makes it much easier to define the target market and to create ways to communicate with those people. As time goes by, I’ll attract them into my pasture, feed and nourish them, and tell them, over and over, how I can help them get what they want.

Since I have some highly-developed skills in this area and enough experience to know what to do and what not to do, I can sell my services in several ways. Each of those will have its own herd and I will nurture and care for them month after month after month, until I can do it no longer.

That makes it much, much easier to focus.

It’s also why it has become so obvious to me that I need to decrease my blogging activities and focus on other means of marketing and attracting clients and customers.

Yes, I still enjoy blogging, or I would not take the time to write this post.

I don’t know if you enjoy reading it. That’s for you to decide.

Affiliate marketing will always be a part of my business, but it has moved into second place this year. It will move into third place in 2013.

Even so, I intend to earn more from affiliate marketing in the coming years than I ever did in the past, because I’ve stopped promoting anything that doesn’t work very well. I’ve narrowed my focus on tools I use and I’m promoting only the best of breed in each category.

I’ve taken that philosophy and adapted it to one of my service businesses, and I’ll only work with one person in each category — and that person will be the best I can find. Life is too short to waste it on working with people who aren’t focused on doing the best they can.

Why build a website instead of a blog?

This brings us back to the original topic: WordPress and SBI, revisited.

Here’s an interesting page you may want to read:

SBI! Do The Math

I think the conclusions that are drawn are valid — but it is a limited data set.

I suspect, but have no proof, that the majority of self-hosted WordPress blogs attract many more readers than the average number reported by WordPress blogs that are hosted by WordPress.com.

I have a blog there that I rarely write to, and I doubt it gets any visitors.

I post a lot more frequently to this blog and put a lot more work into each post.

So, I believe that the actual average number of viewers for WordPress-powered blogs is higher than shown, but there’s no way to know for sure.

The numbers for SBI sites, however, are valid and true. SBI keeps these stats for all sites hosted on their system, so we can be sure that they are accurate.

And, as with any “average” number of anything, there will be sites with far fewer visitors and a few sites with many, many more.

I believe one of the key differences is that SBI has a process that includes an education and set of steps that we follow to make our sites as good as they can be — if we take the time to follow those steps properly.

I admit that I have not done a good job of that, so I’m basically starting over with both my sites and will systematically rebuild them using the plan I created over the last few months.

Even though I’ve mostly ignored my two SBI sites for the last couple of years, they still outperform my blogs — including this one.

Now, will that be true for you? Honestly, I don’t know, but I think the odds are in your favor.

I also want to quibble with one point on that page. It says, “The more traffic you receive, the more income you earn, whether you’re selling ads or aardvarks.”

All things being equal, that may be true. It probably is.

However, I don’t think things are equal between blogs and websites. I think people have a different mindset when they visit a blog and bounce back out than when they visit a website and read several pages before leaving.

I think that gives a well-organized website that is full of high-quality information a real edge over most blogs.

I’m not positive about it, but I think it’s true

Building an online business is not for everyone. It requires a number of skills, and two that are very important are being able to research a topic and then write what you know about it. I don’t mean paraphrasing someone else’s work, I mean truly original writing. That takes work and talent.

Not everyone can or will do that.

It’s a little easier if you have your own business with your own products and services and you want to promote them online. A well-planned and organized website will outperform a blog.

While I can’t conclusively prove that statement, I think it is accurate.

Do you have to use SBI to build such a website?

Of course not.

There are many ways to build a website and there is a lot of information scattered all over the Web on how to do it. Without any doubt, that is true.

But, none of those includes all you need to know to build your online business in the way that SBI does, all in one place.

Will SBI work well for every site? No. SBI does not offer things like PHP scripting and database access. If you need those features, or even if you just want them, SBI is not for you.

However, for the majority of people who don’t want or need such things, SBI puts the technology in the background and lets you focus more of your attention on attracting and nurturing your herd.

No matter what system you use, however, if you’re new to building websites, there is a LOT to learn. But, with SBI, you don’t have to figure it all out, all you have to do is follow the time-proven method to identify, research, and build your site. That makes it a lot easier.

Especially if you’re a busy business owner who isn’t interested in learning a lot of technobabble.

You want to tend your herd and have them buy from you again and again. That’s the goal. SBI makes it easier. Not easy, but definitely easier.

What kinds of businesses are people building with SBI? Find your business.

If you’re not sure if SBI is right for you, you can ask your questions for free. No obligation.

When you’re ready to start, SBI offers a 90-day full-money-back guarantee, if you decide it isn’t what you need.

Why am I so insistent?

Is it because I earn a commission if you subscribe to SBI through one of my links?

Yes, that’s partly true.

However, I’m also an affiliate for HostGator, 1&1, and others, and you don’t see me promoting them. I’m also an affiliate for several domain registrars and I’ve stopped promoting them.

I like, use, and recommend Weebly to some people for building some kinds of websites, but not if your primary method of attracting prospects is via your website. For that purpose, I recommend SBI.

Weebly does make it easy, however, if you want to build a website and blog that provides some information about your existing business and you promote it mainly by links from other places, rather than relying on attracting lots of visitors through the search engines. You can do it and it works well for some people, but it is not my top recommendation.

By the same token, I could join the affiliate programs to recommend premium WordPress blog themes and even promote WordPress consultants and specialists.

You don’t see me doing that, either. (Although I’m sure I could earn a lot of money, if I did.)

Why?

Because, for most business owners, and people who want to own their own business, SBI is the right choice.

Act on your dream!

JD

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My love affair with WordPress is slowly dying

March 20, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, WordPress 

At one point, several years ago, I fell in love with WordPress and converted all my blogs (at least those I chose to keep active) from various other blogging platforms to self-hosted blogs on my own domains.

I don’t remember how many weeks I spent on that project. It took awhile.

Now, the three blogs I intend to keep active are hosted on my domains and are powered by WordPress. You may be doing the same thing.

Over the intervening months, I’ve looked at a lot of plug-ins for my blogs and have tested a few. Now, I’ve settled into using about a dozen.

I’m still not thinking clearly enough to tackle real projects, but today I decided to update the plug-ins I’m using. All of them have been well-behaved in the past and I had few, or no, problems with them. That’s why they’ve survived the cut.

It’s been bugging me lately whenever I log into my dashboard and see plug-ins that need updating. Today, when I sat down to write a new blog post (on a topic that I have completely forgotten about now), I saw that nine plug-ins needed updating.

In a fit of uncharacteristic trust that computers and software can be modified without any side-effects, I updated all of them at the same time. After 30 years of programming and using computers, you would think I’d know better.

I was actually going to write about the topic of this blog — affiliate marketing — and that was shot down.

After the system did its thing and updated the nine plug-ins, my blog immediately started loading pages incredibly slowly. The pages have been taking two or three seconds to load, but all of a sudden, it was taking half-a-minute, if they even loaded completely.

So, I turned off all my active plug-ins. (At least, I was thinking clearly enough to stop, pull out a pen and paper, and write a list of all the plug-ins that were activated. I have about as many that are not activated, but which I want to test when I’m up to it.)

The pages loaded very quickly, on the order of a second or two.

So, over the next hour, I activated each plug-in separately and observed the load time of the home page and a long blog post. With each plug-in that I activated, the load time slowed.

I tried prioritizing them. I deactivated the lowest priority and activated those at the top of the list. Still too slow.

Eventually, I found a mix that more-or-less works. In the process, I lost some functionality I wanted, but have a blog that is functional and not too slow. It’s slower than I want, but it’s workable.

I know better.

Really, I do.

Did I back everything up before updating.

No.

Silly me.

Did I set aside a few hours, in case I ran into problems?

No.

Did I do the updates on an impulse, knowing I had to leave home and run some errands?

Yes.

Did I get the blog post written that I originally set out to write?

No.

Is it the fault of WordPress? Partially.

Is it the fault of the plug-in programmers? Partially.

Is it my fault? Partially, but I accept full responsibility for making and implementing the decision.

It is a never-ending cycle of upgrading WordPress and the plug-ins I choose to use. It is getting tiresome. I don’t find it interesting these days.

It’s getting in the way of getting real work done.

After a couple of hours of working through this, I’m actually a couple of steps behind where I was before I started. In other words, I took a couple of steps backwards today.

That will not get me closer to achieving my goals.

I didn’t write the post I set out to write. That won’t get me any closer to earning more money.

It has been a wasted opportunity.

Sigh.

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Site Build It! or WordPress? Which is Best? Why?

January 16, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 87 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Opinions, Sitesell and Site Build It, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter, Webhosting, WordPress 

This is a question that I have been asking myself for months.

Today, I created a new TwitterStorm (Twttrstrm.com) asking Which is better for building an online business? Site Build It! or WordPress? Why?

What’s a TwitterStorm? This is a new site powered by Squidoo. Now you can ask a question of your Twitter followers and easily gather all their answers in one spot.

I know that the majority of people who will see this post are probably happy WordPress users. I’m one, too.

Still, after years of building websites and blogging on a lot of platforms, I still keep coming back to thinking Site Build It! is a better choice for building a business website.

Is it better to blog or build?

When Ken Evoy first raised this question, I was leaning towards blogging and disagreed with some of the things he said about it. Now, however, after months of blogging, I’m not as in favor of WordPress as I once was, especially when building multiple blogs.

As part of my goals for 2009, I’ve decided to do more to promote local businesses in Murphy, NC. I already have several blogs and websites related to Murphy and Cherokee County, NC. I’m really not happy with any of them.

I’m considering mothballing all of them except for my Murphy, NC 28906 blog, which needs serious updating. First off, I have to upgrade to WordPress 2.7, change the theme, add plugins, add widgets, and then I’m faced with finding things to write about, in addition to updating the blog software whenever necessary.

I can probably get the blog to where I want it in a couple of days without too much of a problem, because I’ve been doing this a long time and know what I want to do. I’m going to change it and fashion that blog after this one.

One of the problems with blogs is always having to manage the software and that takes away time and energy from actually writing content.

My Act On Your Dream! site is powered by Site Build It! and has been sadly neglected over the last year or more. Now that I can devote full-time to building my business, I can put more effort into building it into the site I have planned. Still, even with little work on my part, it continues to attract visitors and makes a nice profit.

There are lots of things wrong with that site, however. I’ve only built a small fraction of what I have planned for it, and there are a couple of main reasons for that.

For over six years, I was my Mom’s full-time caretaker and the duties associated with that took precedence over everything else. I am happy that I was able to care for her so long when she needed it.

The second reason is that I wasted a lot of time and effort testing a lot of different ways to build websites. I’ve lost track of how many different blogging platforms and content management systems I’ve tested. What do I have to show for it? A lot of neglected or abandoned blogs in my wake. Of all the blogs I’ve started, there are only two or three that I’m going to continue updating.

What do I do with the others? Some of them get traffic and even earn a profit. Do I delete them and redirect the domain to a page on a site I’ll keep? Or, do I just throw them out with the rest of the clutter and delete them and then let the domain expire?

It’s hard enough to build traffic to a site. I really don’t like the idea of just deleting a site that actually gets visitors.

Is it better to keep the domain and put up a static page explaining that the blog has been taken down and link to one of my related sites, or is it best to just let the domain expire and forget about it?

Being a packrat, I tend to want to do the former, but I’m thinking this is a good time to declutter my online life as I unclutter my offline world.

I continue asking myself this question: Why do I have so many blogs?

I think the main answer is that the cost of entry is so low that it’s easy to throw up a blog on the spur of the moment and just as easy to lose interest in it somewhere down the line.

I already have a reseller account on HostGator, so I can add a new domain for basically no cost, except for registering the domain. So, there’s little to stop me from testing an idea.

But, I look at those blogs and consider that I am paying over $500 per year just for domain registrations. For that amount, I can get two subscriptions to Site Build It!

I’ve already decided that I’m going to buy a new subscription to SBI to build a new site promoting businesses in Murphy, NC, because only SBI provides all the tools I need to do it right. That means that I’m going to be deleting several sites that I started over the last few years. I hate to do it, because they’re ranked well in the search engines, but I’m sure I can get page one listings on the keywords I want with a new site powered by Site Build It. I know, because I’ve tested it.

So, all of this boils down to my dithering over deciding what to do this year. When it all boils down to the essentials, the only real sites I have that I should keep and maintain would be this blog, Act On Your Dream!, Murphy, NC 28906, and a new SBI site for Murphy.

I’ll probably keep JohnDilbeck.com, but it will be trimmed to a much, much smaller size.

Of course, I’ll continue to maintain my brother’s site, Georgia Drag Racing. There’s not as much to do on that site now that he’s unable to continue building it as he wants. Still, it gets a lot of visitors and there are a lot of people interested in the subject.

I’ll also keep a couple of communities I created on ning.com.

I have a couple of forums that I’ve been trying to build for a couple of years, but they aren’t gaining any traction, so now may be a good time to shut them down, too.

So, in looking at all my sites, blogs, forums, and communities, I can probably drop the number from over 60 to just a half-dozen or so and actually accomplish more with less effort. I don’t know this for sure, but that’s the direction I’m leaning.

When I build a site with Site Build It, I make a commitment to my own success by paying the $300 upfront for an annual subscription. I just don’t have that commitment when I create another free site somewhere.

I often wonder how many other people have gone through these same experiences. Have you?

I’ve read many messages on the members-only SiteSell forum where SBI webmasters tell their stories of floundering around until they find Site Build It and finally concentrate on building a successful business website.

On the other hand, I’ve read many posts on blogs and forums from people who feel that WordPress offers them the best set of features for the lowest cost.

All I know for sure is that I have gone through my testing and learning phase, and I’m ready to implement what I’ve learned.

One of the keys to success is to focus on what you want to do and then put all your effort into manifesting what you imagine. I just don’t believe that can be done when we try to do too much.

I’m really having a hard time making this decision. Part of me wants to simplify everything and focus on affiliate marketing and promoting local businesses. Part of me doesn’t want to lose all the other sites I’ve started. I have to make this decision and implement it, soon.

I welcome your comments, advice, and suggestions. I value the opinions of the people who read this blog.

Who knows? I may have a bunch of domains to sell or give away.

What do you think? Join the Site Build It! or WordPress? twitter storm and share your opinion.

Leave any other comments you’d care to share here.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are you using SezWho on your blog?

July 31, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 22 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Communities, Social Networking, WordPress 

This morning, while registering this blog with BlogCatalog, I discovered something new called SezWho. It looked interesting, so I did a little more research and decided to implement it on 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

What is SezWho?

From their FAQs page:


SezWho is a universal profile service that engages your community and enables content discovery. SezWho is all about making the Social Web truly social.

SezWho enables content rating, universal user profiles, and reputation-based content discovery to be added to any social media site. The SezWho service works with blogs, forums, wikis, video/picture sharing sites, discussion boards and anywhere else where people contribute content and engage in conversations.
SezWho is focused on delivering benefits to all participants in social media interactions:

* Readers can easily distinguish credible content and commentary, and they can follow contributors as they participate on social media sites across the web

* Contributors gain web-wide recognition for their insights and expertise, with a universal profile that accumulates a record of all their contributions, across all communities

* Site-Owners and Publishers can spotlight and leverage informative, high-quality content to engage their communities and drive traffic

Since this blog is powered by WordPress 2.6 and uses a widget-enabled theme, installing SezWho was easy and quick.

After downloading the plug-in from a link on BlogCatalog, it was just a matter of uploading it to my server, activating the plugin, adding the key for the API, and setting some preferences. Since I went with the default settings, it took no time at all once the plugin was uploaded.

I experimented with adding the two widgets and finally settled (for now) on showing both the Red Carpet (people who have left comments) and the Badge (information about me) in the left column.

Now, when you visit the 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog, you are able to rate each post I write. I invite and encourage you to do so. I appreciate the feedback.

Also, whenever anyone leaves a comment, other readers can rank the quality of the comment.

(You are not allowed to rate your own posts or comments, of course.)

I’m hoping this will encourage more high quality comments as I blog more frequently. It has taken some time to get this blog configured as I wanted, so now I get to write more. I hope you’ll feel free to rate any posts and comments, and to leave comments of your own.

Together, we can learn more about affiliate marketing in the 21st century and when you leave a comment, you’ll get a link back to your site and a link to the comments and posts you’ve made elsewhere, based on information SezWho has gathered across the web.

For example, if you look at the comments to a post, each commentor will have their name listed with a link to their site (if they entered it when making the comment). Following that is a link that says “Who am I?” If you hover your mouse pointer over that text, or click it, you’ll learn more about that person’s postings and comments across multiple blogs.

I think that’s going to be useful – at least, to me – because I like to learn from people who are well-informed.

I don’t know for sure, since SezWho has been installed for only a few hours on this blog, but I think I’ll find it interesting and helpful.

If you want to add SezWho to your blog, just log in to BlogCatalog.com and click the Manage Blogs link. If you have multiple blogs listed, click on the Manage link to the right of the Blog’s name.

That opens a new page where you’ll see a link to SezWho just to the right of the Edit Your Blog heading.

Follow the directions in that section to register for SezWho and to get the plugin. I can’t guarantee it will be as easy for you to install as it was for me, because I held my mouth just right, bit the tip of my tongue, and all the stars were aligned just right when I went through the process. (grin)

Will SezWho make a difference with how you interact when you visit this blog? I don’t know. I hope it encourages more interaction.

What do you think? I hope you’ll comment on this and see how it works for you, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Should you tweet your blog? Part 2

July 24, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Business Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter 

After installing TweetMyBlog a couple of days ago and testing it, I found some things I like and dislike about it.

While I still feel comfortable recommending it as a useful tool that works exactly as advertised, I’m not sure it’s the tool I want to use for notifying my Twitter followers about new posts on this blog.

So, based on a recommendation by thefluffanutta, I’m now testing Twitter Tools to see if it does a better job of what I want.

So far, I’ve tested three widgets to show my Tweets in the blog’s sidebar. I’ve used the code provided by Twitter, the widget from TweetMyBlog, and the Twitter Tools widget. Of these three, I think the Twitter Tools widget is much better.

This post will be the first one that is automatically tweeted by Twitter Tools, so I won’t know what I think of it until I’ve used it more.

I’ve expanded my Squidoo lens, Should You Tweet Your Blog, a great deal today. Now, rather than just focusing upon TweetMyBlog, I’m thinking more about the process of automatically having your blog post to Twitter whenever you post to your blog.

Is this a good idea or not?

So, I’ve added several new polls and another duel where you are free to express your opinion. I’ve also added a Plexo link list so you can link to your blog, in addition to the link list that was already on the lens for linking to your Twitter profile.

If you have a few minutes, I hope you’ll visit Should You Tweet Your Blog and post your opinions and comments.

I’m still not sure which tool I’ll use to tweet my new blog posts, if I use any at all.

I may revert to tweeting manually. I don’t know, yet.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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