Blogging

Supplemental Savior: SEO-Wordpress plugin rescues you from Hell!

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I was contacted by Elizabeth from http://www.elizabethadamsdirect.com who told me about this great plugin called SEO_Wordpress which you can download from http://www.utheguru.com/seo_wordpress-wordpress-seo-plugin which should help a great deal with the problems I was discussing in the SOS series here.

uguru

There sure to be a lot of other good stuff, but this is the best news I’ve had in ages! I’m trying it out now, and I’ll let you know. My previous changes have made almost no improvement in the supplementals. It will probably take months to get out of there, so I guess patience is the order of the day.

Personal Development: Are you imprisoned by “Duality Disorder”?

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I was reading a recent posting on John Chow’s Blog that looked at the issue of Getting It Done. I’m not going to rewrite John’s post for him, but I was reading the comments that were attached. I don’t know if it was just me but I saw a lot of posters using Duality Disorder (the sometimes inappropriate habit of putting everything into two categories) to explain away situations without examining the situation further to find out its complexities, intertwinings and range of possible outcomes.

Examples of Duality Disorder

I’ve listed some examples of this: See if you recognize yourself in any of these duality thinking modes.

Good Bad/ success or failure / ugly or beautiful / now or never / Do or Die / to ‘crash and burn’ or succeed / plan or act / nothing ventured, nothing gained / Wisdom vs. planning / Impulse vs. drive.

How many more dualities are we going to trot out here? There are hundreds: is he gay or straight? is she labour or conservative?… the list is endless.

There is surely more than just duality in our world. Yet from the time of “Adam and Eve” (another duality) we’ve sought to divide the world into convenient dualities. This has to be one of the laziest thinking strategies out there. Why?

Complexity in Duality?

Life is far more complex than good or bad. Common sense examples will demonstrate this to you. A husband is a dutiful husband! He provides for his family! Is he good or bad? He does this by robbing a bank? Is he good or bad now? Could it be that he is somewhere between good and bad, depending on the circumstance? Could it be that he is in fact good at the same time as he is bad! He’s providing for his family (good) by robbing a bank (bad).

There are many situations in life where simplifying problems to dualities does NOT work. It can’t. It won’t. No matter how much we strive. AIDS is one of the problems. Starting a business is another. There are countless more.

Intertwinings.

Success or failure? Which is it going to be? Who knows? If you are starting a business, then you’d like to know the answer to that! But, truthfully there are few situations where success or failure is absolute. Most of the time it is shades between the two. We’re planning a promotional activity for our business tomorrow. Who knows if it will work well or not? It could be a disaster.

But we have success built-in, as we all agreed, that at the very least we’d have fun, a story to tell, and some good pictures for our business blog, whatever happened! So failure isn’t going to happen tomorrow. It’s just we may not be as successful as we would like! There are so many grades or shades of possibility, that simple duality cannot encompass. Moreover, in some cases, the things we get done will be intertwined with the things we did before. And the activity tomorrow will be intertwined with what happens in the future! So, who could say it is a failure in absolute terms?

A Range of Possible Outcomes.

Could it possibly be that we are using these to cover our own excuses? Could it be that there are a myriad of outcomes that are between success and failure or any of the other dualities we’ve written about? Could it be that we may not be a complete failure on day #1, and that is JUST enough for us to go out and build next $1Billion business. Could it be? The results we get from business activities may not be what we expected, true. In fact, they could vary vastly from what we set out to achieve. We may not achieve anything at all that we wanted. Did we fail then? Well, only if we don’t think about what went differently from our expectations? That experience of vastly varying results could lay the solid foundations for success the next time round.

So the next time you are given to duality disorder, catch your thinking for a moment, and just wonder a little at what other outcomes there might be. You might surprise yourself.

Blogging 24/7 – Should bloggers have guest bloggers when they are too busy?

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So you’re away on holiday! This happens! You get sick – it happens, too! How do you keep the blog posts up? How do you not let your readership down?

Well, guest blogging is one option that the itinerant or holiday making or sick blogger has. It brings new talent, new points of view, may attract new new readers from the guests’ own blog. For the guest blogger, it will provide extra exposure for themselves, drive more traffic to their own blogs, and challenge to reach new readerships.

However, for the blog’s readers you need to analyze if the situation will benefit your readers carefully. I was watching John Chow’s blog over the past few days while John was over here at Computex 2007. Now, naturally, he couldn’t blog as much as before: he was busy! So he invited Alex Shalman, Jane May and Michael Kwan to guest blog for him.

I think that it may have been a bit of a mistake, oddly enough not because of the quality of the blogs or the bloggers themselves. In fact, their posts were of a high standard, a very high standard. It’s just that page views and comments seem to have declined while John Chow was away from his website.

Alexa graph

I can’t quite tell but it’s much easier to get in the comments top ten than previously. Also a quick look at Alexa’s page shows dropping page views. Comments per posting have decreased too. They used to be in the 60’s but now many are in the 40’s or so. And many of the guest blog comments are the ones50 and under.

I think the results may reflect something of a downdraft in John’s audience figures as he has drifted from posting his own thoughts to posting lots of posts about Computex, beer, babes and so on, that are less relevant to his readers’ interests! Perhaps his readers are tiring of his postings as much as they are not warming to the postings of the guest bloggers. Of course, this is John’s blog: he can do whatever he wants… but he may need to get back on topic. The good news is his RSS readership is still expanding. So perhaps the Alexa and comments don’t tell the whole story.

But what is a busy blogger to do to keep her or his readers happy? Suggestions.