There’s been some conversation I’ve been reading lately about the effectiveness of adding images into one’s blog posts. Many people think it’s absolutely essential to add an image of some kind to break up all the white space of a post. Others think that if the images don’t match the content then what’s the point.

I have to admit that I’ve always belonged to the latter. I’ve rarely added images to my posts unless I happened to be talking about something in particular. Mainly, it’s because it’s just one more time consuming thing to try to do when I could be doing something else, like internal linking or eating dessert.

I decided to try something new. For my next seven posts, I’m going to be posting an image. The image probably won’t have anything to do with anything I’m writing about, because, well, most of the time what I’m writing about doesn’t have an appropriate image. Of course, me being me, I’m doing something a little bit different than many of the other people.

Y’all should know by now that one of my affiliate programs is Imagekind. That image to the left underneath my two books is from their site. People put up pictures on that site to sell them as prints, framed or not. They have all sorts of different prices. It’s actually a pretty neat little deal. I’m not a photographer, but I know what I think looks pretty cool. So, every image, or at least every image unless I say differently, for the next 7 posts, which includes this one, is going to be from their site. If you click on the image, it’ll take you to their site, where you can purchase this image, or search around and find something you like. I’m going to be posting some images I thought were particularly cool.

I’m only doing this initially for 7 days. I want to see if images really do bring more traffic, drive traffic away, or has no effect whatsoever. Also, I’m hoping that someone at least clicks on a few pictures, and who knows, might even buy one. Not only me, but the people who created the pictures will probably be extremely elated.

Of course, I’m also going to have to tweak the sizes of these images from time to time, because I need to make sure they don’t overwhelm the page. This one fits right into the middle of the content. I’ll have to figure out if it should be at the very top of the content, where I see a lot of images, or maybe shrink it some and make it a part of the content in some way, like I usually do. What do you think about this one, if you’re inclined to share?

Anyway, enjoy the images; it might be a recurring thing later down the road, or it’s a 7 post experiment. Let’s see how it all goes.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote a post titled Starting A New Eating Plan. I knew it was time to do it because I had lost control over my diabetes numbers. The problem with diabetes isn’t one bad day; it’s many bad days in a row, because that’s when bad things start happening to your body.

Something I didn’t talk about in that previous post was where my numbers had been, compared to what I needed to shoot for. Here’s some figures for you. The American Diabetes Association says one’s glucose level should be between 80 – 120 mg/dl, or milligrams in a deciliter, which is 1/10th of a liter. Too much information? Well, let’s just stick with the numbers then. Anyway, the high figure used to be 140, and I like to try to shoot for between 110 and 140 because I just feel better in that range. When I start getting too close to 100, or lower than that, I start shaking or getting light headed; that’s never fun.

Anyway, the day I started on this new plan, which was two days after my diabetes clinic, the Joslin Center, had told me to increase the amount of insulin I needed to inject twice a day from 30 units to 40 units of 100 milliliters. That’s a bunch, because when I was first injecting, I was only at 15 units. My glucose figure had a 2-week average of 225. Just a few nights earlier, I had recorded a reading of 365; that kind of thing is scary, and it was after I’d eaten pasta earlier in the evening.

The eating and exercise plan started Monday the 26th. By the 29th, my afternoon reading was 110; 30th, my morning glucose reading was 130. I even lost two pounds. I felt pretty good going into the weekend, as my wife and I decided I get Friday nights and all day Saturdays off. After all, it’s hard to stick to a tight eating plan without a break here and there. I ate whatever I wanted last weekend, but I didn’t overeat, and I didn’t do much damage to myself, which was nice.

That Sunday, I went back on the plan, but I changed up some. Instead of straight chicken and mixed vegetables I added hamburger and salmon and spinach into the mix. I also added some ham slices for a sandwich instead of a full meal, and also allowed myself a quick snack, if I needed it, of a piece of wheat bread with peanut butter on it, and a much thinner layer than I would have had before the eating plan.

Last week my glucose numbers continued to fall, to the point where I had to cut back on my medication. One morning my reading was 110; phenomenal for me. Two days, though, my readings were under 100, once at 87, the other time at 97. Remember those shakes I mentioned earlier? I knew on those days that I needed to cut back on my medication, but I also had to eat sooner than 3 hours, and mix in some of the snacking I’d talked about. I didn’t lose any weight during the week, but as I said in my initial post, the goal really was about reducing my glucose levels. My average for the last two weeks had come down to 151, and I’m happy with that since my readings were a little higher over the weekend. But during the week, I only had one number over 140; wow!

So, this does prove that, when all the chips are down, one can modify their diet and bring down glucose levels. It also says that people can probably find some of their own maladies and, by changing their diets somewhat, modify some of their issues. Kind of like how, by changing my mother’s diet a few weeks ago, we were able to reduce her high blood pressure to almost normal.

Of course, I’m still not off the hook here. All I’ve done is given the medication a chance to work with me. But being able to reduce how much of the medication I’ve had to take, it means that my program is working, and probably if I decided to give up my fun nights, I could probably reduce it further. But I’ll never eliminate the medication completely, and if I gave up my one night, I’d probably have problems sticking to the plan as well. For now, I’m a happy guy.

By the way, notice I call it an eating plan rather than a diet? I think the terminology is important as well. People have problems sticking to diets, but having an eating plan, which includes some “free” days, makes it quite tolerable indeed. It may only be semantics to some, but I see dieting as something much different than what I’m trying to do. I may be crazy, but I’m getting the results I want, so it’s working for me.

Earlier today I was checking out one of the many blogs that I follow called Online Social Networking. I’m not sure where I originally met Larry online, but we started our blogs around the same time.

I was reading this one particular post, which was pretty good, but that’s not what caught my eye. For the first time, I noticed that Larry has a lot of links in each post. I’d never really paid much attention to it, though I’d clicked on a link from time to time, but tonight it really drew my attention. I decided to hover over some of them, and what I discovered has lit something in my mind.

Before I tell you what, let me mention these couple of things. Larry’s blog has a PR of 4; as I always say, I don’t overly care about page rank, but it’s a number so we’ll use it for the moment. He has an Alexa rank of 52,170. He has 703 RSS subscribers. He doesn’t write as often as I do, his posts aren’t as long as some of my posts are, and he has very little in the way of marketing items.

What he does have, though are those links. And what I noticed today was that many of those links aren’t just internal links, but are links to his tags.

As I’ve said, I’m relatively new to tags. I’ve done more tagging on my finance blog than I’ve ever done here. I have categories here, but not as many tags. Still, I could recognize the importance of the internal linking even more than I have up to this point. I link to much of my content when I think about it. However, there’s nothing wrong with doing some of that internal linking to either tags or categories. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen, and I wish I had thought of it before now.

Of course, I don’t think that’s the only reason his blog is ranked better than mine. He sticks to his one particular topic, which is pretty much anything that has to do with social networking and social media, while I kind of dabble in, well, pretty much whatever I want to dabble in. But one of those things we all need to remember with our blogging is internal linking and SEO, and this is one brilliant step that I’m going to start doing, just as I hope to start tagging some of my missives a little bit more also.

Oh, I still won’t have PR for awhile, but I’ve been wondering if there might be ways to increase my Alexa rank, since they still like me, and this might be the next step in helping to put me over. Also, something else I’m going to start doing is paying more attention to other articles I’m reading on other blogs, and if something fits an old post of mine, I’m going to link to it. Anchor links are important to do, even if the content isn’t on your own site. And other people deserve some love also, as I got this week from Kristi’s Fetching Friday post.

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Yesterday I was going through some of the forums with my little bit of advertising on my writing services. When I’m posting those articles, I always include a link to some article samples so people can see that I can write different ways on different topics. None of them are overly long, as it’s only supposed to be a sample.

I ended up getting a response from one guy on one of those forums. He wasn’t looking for a writer; he was looking to basically be a jerk. He wrote that he didn’t like my presentation and that no one would ever hire me as a writer if that’s all I could do.

What did I do? I went back to that forum and thanked him for his comment, and moved on. I figured there was no reason to get into a back and forth with the guy because, after all, what would it have solved? My articles are what they are, on my website that I really market the writing services from, and that’s that.

Now, what he could have been griping about is my website, and if that’s the case, well, then that’s only one person’s opinion of what they expect certain websites to look like. Now don’t get me wrong, because something I’m known to do is look at websites and judge them on how well I think they look. However, what I look for is more balance and readability than whether I overly like something or not.

There are things that put off many people, and one of those things is a lack of balance from page to page. Another is multiple fonts on a webpage, and images that suddenly show up without any rhyme or reason. Or content with lots of spelling mistakes. Or a lot of flash or too little flash or, or, or… you decide it.

The truth is there are many different websites, over 120 million at this juncture if we include blogs. Many that look the same are template websites, and many of us hate those because, well, they’re template websites. There are also websites on free platforms, although many of those are starting to go away. There are people who put a website together using programs like MS Publisher, which isn’t really a website tool, and, well, you get what you get. Usually those people haven’t studied some of the nuances of what might make a good website, but still, it assaults your senses.

With that being said, not every webpage is going to be pleasant for everyone. And not every style is supposed to be the same either. My SEO website looks like it does because I wanted it to look that way. Every page is outlined the same, and the menu is in the same place on each page. I marked a couple of my products on each page also; that’s fair, since they’re my products.

No, I’m not asking people whether they like that page or not. I probably should, since it’s supposed to be a business website, but I’m not. It is what it is, just as your site is what it is, and your blog is what it is. I like it, it’s doing okay, and until I get sick of it, that’s just how it’s going to look.

Because, in the end, everyone has an opinion; how often are we supposed to bend to everyone else’s opinions?

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In my last post, which was kind of brief, I mentioned that I was trying something new. That was to see if I could create HTML pages and attach them to this blog in some fashion.

The immediate answer turns out to be yes. I don’t know why I’d never thought about it before, but just because one has a blog, what would have prevented me from uploading HTML pages? Nothing, it seems. After all, I’ve uploaded pictures and files before. That part was actually very easy, as I just added a pretty much nothing page with one line, and it worked just fine.

The next part wasn’t as easy, though. I thought about it, and wondered how easy it would be to make at least the header look like the blog header. The first thing I realized is that I couldn’t just look at the source code and get what I needed because much of what you need is coded into the CSS files, along with the PHP files.

But I’m not so dumb; where there’s a will, there’s a way. It took me about an hour, but I figured out how to get the image to do what I wanted it to do so at least that looked like the blog. Then it took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to get the blog name onto the image; that was just stupidity on my part, and that’s one of the problems with trying to do things really late in the evening, or early in the morning, since it was almost 1:30 at this point. I did get it on there, though, got the font correct also. What I can’t do, though, is get the spacing correct. So, it’ll look like the main page, but the name will jump if someone comes to the page. That may or may not be a minor issue for some people.

The next thing I wanted to try was to see if I could get my brief content to look like it does on the blog. I spent 25 minutes on that before I decided either I was too tired or there’s something I’m missing. When I got the font and color to look like it does on the blog, it also added this line in front of the content, looking like some emails do when things are repeated and people aren’t using the > sign to indicate it. When I didn’t have the font color looking like my blog everything defaulted totally to the left. I tried adding the “blockquote” attribute, and things went, well, weird. Seems the blog software, even if it’s an independent page, just doesn’t like that one.

In the end, I’m left with some conclusions. One, can it be done; yes. Two, is it worth trying to make everything look like the rest of your blog? No. Three, is that a major deal? Probably not, but I’m troubled with some of the formatting issues I was having, especially everything defaulting totally to the left. I’d hate to get into having to add that “nbsp” thing all the time (I didn’t type the code in correctly because then you wouldn’t see it here) to add spaces for every line; that’s ugly coding, and way too much work if you want to have a long page with lots of content and products on it. At some point it might be worth it to do things that way. For now, though, I think I’ll continue sending people to my S&S blog to see my weekly specials. So much easier to deal with.

This is going to be a relative short post because I’m working on a project, mini project, that I want to see what happens with it.

This blog is actually the domain, as you can probably figure out. I’ve been wondering if I could add a HTML page to my host, link to it, and have it show up as a page off this site. I’ve never thought about it before until today, and I’m thinking that, if it works, I just might add a few sales pages, with specific products from specific affiliates, and see how that all works out.

This should prove to be interesting; stay close to see how I report on this one.

Oh yeah, one more thing I want to mention. Seems I won a contest on Sire’s Wassup Blog, and I now have a 125×125 badge as one of the prizes; neat!

See, short and sweet; this definitely isn’t my norm! lol

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Writing a blog is pretty much like doing your own marketing and advertising. I say kind of because if one is always blatantly selling, some people eventually get turned off or just tune out, and suddenly you’re only writing to and for yourself. Whereas I always believe most of us should be writing for ourselves anyway, because we love to write, in the long run we write because we’d love people to read what we have to say, possibly buy something from us, or hire us to do other things for them.

November is going to be my month for figuring out how to better market myself, to make myself famous, if you will. I don’t want to be infamous because that might mean I’m either going to jail or getting bad press in the news; nope, that just won’t do. To that end, I’ve submitted myself for two interviews. The first one was posted on Saturday for me, but November 1st for him, that being on Ramana’s Musings. This was definitely something different, as we talked a lot about my diabetes and how it possibly affects me. I’d never been asked that before, and I’m always glad to share and spread the word about how bad diabetes can be.

The second interview isn’t out yet, so I’m not going to give that one away, but it’s another great opportunity to share my thoughts with people, being presented to an audience that might never have heard of me. And there’s plenty of those people, that’s for sure.

One thing I’ve been lucky for is to become kind of a regular participant in the interviews of Beverly Mahone, who does an online radio show every Sunday at 7PM called Passions, mainly geared towards women and social media, but really about social media, baby boomers, and anyone else who wants to glean some information. It’s not always just me, like it was when I spoke to her on reinventing oneself, but that’s okay because if it was always about me then it wouldn’t be a special thing, now would it?

I’ve talked about being able to get positive publicity through interviews, which is cool, but marketing oneself takes a bit more than that. I’ve thought about making a push for more Twitter subscribers, but that seems smarmy in light of the fact that there are all these people who keep pushing these products about gaining more Twitter subscribers, some even lying (yeah, I said it) by saying you could average 500 new subscribers a day. Trust me, only if you’re a celebrity is that going to happen.

Anyway, thinking about better ways to market myself, and my affiliate products, is going to be the thrust of November for me. I’m not promising this will be the only time I talk about my blog writing services, one of many I can provide folks, but it’ll be the only time I mention it this week; how’s that for a promise? And I’m not going to advertise most of the services that I provide in my main business here either, because the two don’t really cross over all that well with each other. I will, however, talk about my services as a business and executive coach, as well as share resources to find other coaches who might be more suited for what someone might be looking for, because I really do believe coaching can work wonders for anyone looking to make positive changes in their lives, business or personal.

That’s that for now. You’ve all been warned. Marketing, promoting, here we come!

Well, the numbers are in for October, and I can’t say they’re all that pretty. I didn’t do a lot of marketing in October, though; not that I ever do all that much really. But as we rush towards Christmas now, I’m going to see if I can spark some things up in some fashion. Without further ado, here’s the modest numbers:

Adsense – $63.57
Commission Junction – $6.49
Infolinks – .46
Voxant Newsroom – .01
Grand Total – $70.53

And there you go. Nothing spectacular, but a little weird. Adsense was off drastically, and it seemed like there were days in a row when I earned nothing, which hadn’t happened before. But that’s not bad, so I’ll run with it. Also, that Voxant Newsroom thing made its first pitiful money, but at least now I know I will earn something if people click on it. This is actually a video thing on my finance blog, something I picked up from Sire, that I have set to play financial news headlines if someone decides to take a few moments to catch the news. If they do, I get paid for it. It actually has lots of different video things you can select from; I just decided not to put it on this blog because there’s already so much here. If you’d like to see what I mean, go to Top Finance Blog.

There were a few of changes I made this month which may have affected the numbers here, or not. One is that I finally came up with my own comment policy, which basically is that people have to leave me a real name or nickname that I can call them rather than keywords names, otherwise I’ll edit the name to an initial. Some folks are still missing that one, and if there’s no name in their email address I respond to them with the letter only. If you check out the comment policy, I link to the post that explains why I went that direction.

Also, now above every individual post, I’d added a Commission Junction rotating banner, which means if you visited the same post multiple times you’d see multiple ads. What that’s going to do for me is allow me to now add some banner ads from some of my other advertisers to this page, to hopefully promote some of those advertisers here. I recognize that I push CJ products more often than all the others because it’s just so easy to access, but there are quality names and products from some of the other sites as well, so I just need to get to them. One of these days I’m going to list all the affiliates I belong to, just to show you how spread out I am. I know, someone’s going to say I should concentrate on just one affiliate to see where that will get me. I think I’ve done that, in a way, since CJ probably accounts for 90% or more of everything I have on all my sites.

And finally, I started underlining links that led to products in my posts, which in a way might look like Infolinks or Kontera, only I don’t have either of those on this blog anymore. I wrote about doing that in last months income report post. The gurus all say that their best sales come from text links; I’ve had none so far, but it’s still early.

And traffic overall for the month of October was down. Only my main business site and my anti-smoking site went up in traffic. Of course, once I discovered that I forgot to move the code on my business blog, which accounted for that number to drop drastically, I knew why that figure had fallen so much, so hopefully it’ll come back up to at least the average it was before.

Anyway, that’s the month. I’ve had a blast with my writing in October, and I expect to have even more fun in November.

Tuesday night I did something that I’m betting almost no one else ever does. Probably most people don’t have to do it as much as I do, but it’s something that they should think about doing in some way every once in awhile.

I spent a few hours doing maintenance on this blog. I think this is post #540, and I went through every post on this blog, looking for my ads that might be missing or that might have been altered in some fashion. As you know, I have either an affiliate link or a product at the end of almost every single post. I put products there because I’ve tried to figure out the types of things visitors to this blog might like every once in awhile. The thing isn’t so much that they might want to buy that particular thing as much as they might want to buy something similar to it. They, or you, can still click on that product link, look around the site for other things, and I still get paid from that.

However, what happens every once in awhile is one of three things. One, those advertisers are expired, which means those links are dead. Two, the images have changed and, though the link would still work, without a visual product who’d even think about clicking on it? And three, that product is discontinued, and therefore I have to change products.

So, I spent some time doing that. The next maintenance project will be activating Broken Link Checker, just to check all the links on the site, then deactivating it again. Some of you might remember when I wrote about that plugin and others that kept giving me server errors. It works great, but I don’t keep it running all the time on any of my blogs.

How often do you go back and check things on your blog to make sure they’re still working properly? It might take you some time, but most of you don’t have close to as many posts as I have, so go ahead, take some time, and while you’re at it, think about optimizing or monetizing your old posts in some fashion. Remember, the entire product of your blog helps your blog to rank better, and better rankings means potentially more visitors.

Meanwhile, I’m putting this product up for Sire; her name is Candy.

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Maybe not everyone knows this yet, but Technorati changed how they do their rankings. And the way they’ve gone, I’m not sure whether it’s better or not overall, but it’s certainly drastically different from what it used to be. And it’s a way to track our blogging proficiency, even if we don’t understand it.

Back at the end of December, I posted that I was hoping my Technorati rating would move up into the top 60,000. At that time I was sitting at 88,000 or so, which was great, and I actually knew that that number meant. Now my number is 491, and initially it meant nothing to me. Even now, I’m not totally sure what it means to me. With the original number, I knew that my blog was in the top 90,000 blogs in the world, which wasn’t bad. Now… 491?

Still, it’s a number to use for comparison, if nothing else. Here are 18 numbers for you. The first set of numbers are the numbers for my other blogs, some of the people who post comments here (check out their blogs), and a couple most of us know pretty well. The second set are some of the top ranked blogs on Technorati that you may have heard of, and I’ll give you their ratings also.

Top Finance Blog – 120

Mitch’s Blog – 415

Wassup Blog – 482

Kikolani.com – 453

HSH Associates – 134

Ramana’s Musings – 125

John Chow – 429

Problogger – 657

Huffington Post – 963, #1

Tech Crunch – 888, #3

Mashable – 883, #4

Gawker – 483, #12

Lifehacker – 817, #19

Official Google Blog – 806, #25

White House Blog – 792, #36

Perez Hilton – 771, #74

Freakonomics – 763, #85

NME News – 754, #99

Actually, that last one I’ve never heard of, but it’s last on the list of the top 100, and it’s tied with another one, but it’s last on the list and I wanted to show the number that, if we’re looking to be big time, we want to aim for.

As for how Technorati works? I have absolutely no idea. One thing they’ve supposedly changed is that they don’t only go off the 6 month rule anymore, which is something that irked a heck of a lot of people. Instead, it’s supposed to be a combination of both current activity and its historical strength. I figure that’s the only way that my blog Mitch’s Blog is so close to this blog in rank, since I have more than 65% more readers for this one than the other one. Oh yeah, it also seems that Technorati, when looking through the estimated 112 million blogs (ouch), also now ranks them in categories based on the tags we put on our blogs. I just started using tags without realizing this; talk about timing.

So, we take it for what it’s worth, another measuring tool of some fashion, and we aim for higher ground. Hey, at least we have numbers, right?

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I’m a member of a local Chamber of Commerce. Once a month it has breakfast networking, usually at one of the Chamber member businesses. Once a month it has a lunch networking, moving around from a few different restaurants. Then every once in awhile it’s part of helping to host an after hours networking event, always at a Chamber members place, sometimes big, sometimes small.

I can’t say that I’m the master networker. I’m someone who won’t interrupt a conversation if there’s one going on, even if I know the people. If I don’t know them, I’m certainly not stepping into the middle of anything. Sometimes I know people who are there; something I don’t. It seems strange that there are times when I don’t know someone, especially since I’ve been a member 4 years now, and have been to enough of these things.

I’m starting to learn a few things, though. One, the breakfast networking events are, for the most part, useless. Yeah, every once in awhile I meet someone, but there’s no business I’m ever going to get out of it. Sometimes not very many people show up; that’s actually most of the time. The things officially start at 7:30, but people will trickle in until around 8:15 or so. I usually get to these things around 8AM; y’all know I don’t go to bed all that early. This doesn’t give much time for talking to anyone, but truthfully, I’m not much of a talker that early in the morning anyway.

Then it’s time for things to begin. The executive director talks for a bit, then everyone goes around saying their name and the name of their business. No one remembers anyone’s names; it’s kind of a waste if you ask me. Then the host gets at least 15 minutes to talk about themselves and their business; that’s fair. There’s always something to eat, but usually nothing I’ll eat, and something to drink, but nothing I’ll drink. I don’t think I’m going to any more of these.

The luncheons are pretty much the same. You get maybe 15 minutes to try to talk to someone before everything gets going. I’ve shown up early, only to realize that I might be alone because most people aren’t going to show up until around 15 minutes before the meal is served. Anyway, almost every lunch meeting, we end up going around the room introducing ourselves and the name of our business; no one remembers any of it. Then we have a presentation, and often it’s, well, a third class presentation. It’s not really anyone’s fault; not everyone is a professional speaker.

I also have a problem with most of the lunches. I can’t eat pasta or many carbs at lunch time because it puts me to sleep. I understand chicken is relatively inexpensive, but at every meal? I don’t eat the salad because there’s never a dressing I like. And dessert; rarely anything I’d eat (not that I’m supposed to be eating it, but if lunch is lousy at least have a good dessert). I’m considering not going to any more of these either; at $12 a shot, it seems like a terrible use of my time.

Where am I going with this as it relates to the title of this post? Facebook has tons of groups. If they don’t have at least 50,000 groups, I have no concept of how it works. There’s a group for almost anything your heart desires. Yet, for the most part, there’s no real conversation going on in any of them. I don’t always think it’s for a lack of trying; it’s just that people either want controversy, or they just want to lurk, or they join because they’re looking for something, not finding it, and moving on.

Right now I belong to 7 groups; two are groups I created. I used to belong to 13, but I killed the others. I’ve also joined groups, stayed a little while, then left. My reasoning is simple; no one was saying anything. And I don’t mean people were talking but saying nothing; I mean nothing at all.

Out of the groups I belong to now, there’s only one that has even a modicum of conversation, and it’s political. Almost everyone who’s joined the group believes in the same thing; that’s because those who don’t believe have been tossed out. It’s not that the group can’t handle people disagreeing; it’s that the group doesn’t want people coming in with an opposite point of view and suddenly going postal, which they have. They have their own group for that, so the moderator kicks them out. However, that leaves the rest of us without much to talk about all that often; that’s kind of a shame.

With my own groups, I have dismal participation. I’ve come up with enough discussion topics, but no one wants to say anything. I’ve posted links, and posted things on the wall, but without almost any response. It’s like I’m talking to myself; heck, I do that already in my own home, so I’m starting to think I don’t need to do that in public.

There’s this thing about some folks. They like to join stuff, but they don’t want to show themselves. It’s kind of like blogs. If you’re lucky, you have people who are reading your stuff on a consistent basis, but few of them write comments. But many people who don’t see any comments ever coming their way will stop writing entirely; that’s a shame, but it happens.

So, is it that the groups on Facebook are lame, the owners lame, the people who join lame, or am I just being unfair because I’m looking for something that’s just never going to happen? I do know this; I’m going to drop at least 3 groups I’m in now, and then we’ll see about the rest of them. Even my own groups; if no one’s really interested, then why keep it going?

Better uses of time; isn’t that what we all strive for?

On Friday night, while my wife and I were having a general conversation, and I asked her if I could tell her something without her going too far one way or the other in her reaction. She said yes, knowing that, because it’s me, it wasn’t going to be anything overly dramatic, but that I was serious about something.

I told her that I hadn’t been feeling all that well lately. As a matter of fact, it’s probably been since just after my birthday in early September. I’m diabetic, and over the past couple of months I’ve struggled with my glucose. I had been okay, not great, but okay, until my mother got kind of ill, and I had to go take care of that. I’ll admit that I’m also under a lot of stress, and that certainly didn’t help things any.

So, no, I haven’t been feeling all that well. And I know why I haven’t been feeling well. See, there’s two things I have to do to feel well, and if I’m not doing both of them, then I don’t feel well at all. One is I have to eat right. The other is I have to exercise. Oddly enough, I can actually eat well and feel pretty good, but I don’t lose any weight. However, exercising doesn’t overcome feeling bad because I’m eating badly; that’s not fair, but that’s life.

We agreed that, starting today, I would go back to an eating plan, with caveats. Breakfast will be some kind of eggs. After that, every meal I eat, when I’m home, will be chicken and vegetables. And the amount of chicken has been measured. I know because I cooked everything Sunday and put it in containers. The plan is to eat every 3 hours or so, hoping I’ll be able to hold out at least that long before eating again. I’ve done this twice before in my life. Once, I lost a lot of weight. The last time, my glucose came down, but I didn’t lose any weight, even though I exercised twice a day. I’m thinking I can track it to the alfredo sauce, which is what I mixed the chicken with when I did this same eating plan in March of 2008.

One thing that hasn’t happened is that I haven’t gained any weight. But things are shifting, and I don’t feel good. What that means, from a diabetic, is that I feel my blood coursing through my body. You’re not supposed to feel that. You’re not supposed to feel the pounding of your blood when you try to go to sleep. That means your heart is working too hard to pump the blood through your body. When your glucose is up, your blood thickens, and thus it’s harder to push through. Also, if it’s high for a long time, that will start messing with other areas of your body. One day, back in July, my eyesight was affected when my glucose shot way up; that was scary.

So, here’s the eating plan. Sunday through Friday afternoon I stick to my eating plan. Friday night, since we usually do something, I get to come off it, but not to overdo anything. Same goes for Saturday; controlled behavior, but I can eat foods outside the norm. Then on Sunday, back to eggs for breakfast, and chicken and vegetables the rest of the day. That’s mixed veggies now; I don’t eat weird veggies now. And, at some point, I might have to mix some rice in there, for a little bit of carbs. We’re not supposed to totally take carbs out of our diet, though some of those mixed vegetables should count.

As for the exercise, the guarantee is to exercise at least once a day for at least 15 minutes. I have a trampoline, and if I watch one of my documentary DVDs, I can get it done. I put on the timer to make sure I get there. And, as I get used to it again, I should be able to do a bit longer after awhile. Actually, for me, it’s usually mental; just can’t wait to get back to work. But I’m going to follow my 4- week work plan, where I’ve given myself a special permission to take care of my health. It’s part of the Get Clients Now program by C. J. Hayden, but I’ve modified it to help me get other things done.

So, there you go. By the time you see this I’ll hopefully have eaten some breakfast, and I’ll be ready to start my trek towards feeling better. If the past is any indication, I should start feeling better by Thursday, and my glucose should start responding in a positive manner. I can do this; anyone want to join me?

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Here’s a truth; I want to be famous. I want to be well known. And I want to make money from it. I don’t want to be infamous; I don’t want to have to do something illegal or be outed for something bad to get that fame. I like to think my integrity is higher than that.

I’ve given this a lot of thought and come to this conclusion. The best way to get positive publicity is through doing interviews. This, of course, presupposes that you’ve done something that’s worth getting interviewed about. However, if you have this part covered, it’s the best way to go.

To get interviewed, you just might have to contact someone and make a pitch about why you would make a good candidate. If you’re lucky to have done something already, someone else might ask you for an interview. When this happens, you at least know that someone knows about you, which helps make things go easier later on.

Being interviewed is also a big part of marketing. It’s the reason movie stars go on talk shows when they have a new film coming out. It’s the reason musicians show up in places they wouldn’t want anyone to ever see them, because they want to promote their new album (heck, do people still call it that?). I’ve talked about marketing often on this blog; this is one of those most positive things anyone can have the privilege of doing to help promote themselves.

Basically, there are three different types of interviews, and they help you, or hurt you, in different ways. Let’s look at these three.

The first type of interview is as a part of a piece that will have other people’s opinions at the same time. The best part about an interview like this is that you have the chance to not only focus your message in a short period of time, but if the interview goes well you might get your business name mentioned in the piece as well. The bad thing about an interview like this is that you never know which line the interviewer will use of yours, so it’s possible that they’ll use your line to highlight something negative. An example of this type of this interview I was a part of, which I found while writing my article on searching for your own name on search engines.

The second type of interview is a written interview of some fashion only about you. This can be in a magazine, blog, or newspaper article of some sort. With most of these, you may have the same problem as with the first type of interview, that being that you could say a lot of things that you felt makes you look good, only to find that the interviewer decided against using most of it. The best part, of course, is that it’s all about you, and if the interview is positive, you look good and, hopefully, your business and reputation gets a nice boost. An interview that could help highlight this is this interview I did for another blog. And, actually, this recent interview I did with Jim Turner on this blog.

The third type of interview is the best, that being a live interview. This can either be on live radio or television. If you’re confident enough to be in front of a live audience, you can be an instant hit if you come across well, and your message will be unfiltered. The downside, of course, is if you’re uncomfortable, or look uncomfortable, and give one or two word responses instead of coming across as easy going and someone people might like to work or talk with. This type of interview can make or break your career. An example of that is an interview I did with Beverly Mahone of BAM Enterprises, which, if you’d like, you can listen to, as I talked about the concept of reinventing oneself; this is an MP3 file.

Sometimes the person doing the interview isn’t all that good, so you take risks with your reputation in those instances. Still, most of the time people will understand if you were good and the other person wasn’t up to snuff, and if you handle it all well, then your message will still come across properly and you’ll be better off in the end. Nope, not giving any examples there.

Getting interviewed means you’ve at least made some kind of dent into the consciousness of another person. If you handle it properly, you could be on your way to great things happening in your life and career. I love being interviewed, just as I like getting other people to allow me to post interviews with them here. I think everyone can learn something from an interview, and some of us can gain something from being interviewed as well.

So, who else wants to interview me?

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Last August, I started noticing that I was getting a lot of Russian spam all of a sudden. I have no idea why, but at that time I had someone register to post on this blog with a Russian email address, which I immediately killed. After about a week, it stopped, and things were quiet for a long time.

In the last two weeks, it’s popping up again, a lot of it, on all 3 of my blogs. It seems like the oddest thing, but there you go. I still can’t figure out what these people think they’re getting out of spam. When I wrote my post on hating spam, I listed a statistic showing how there might be a possibility of some of these guys making upwards of $9,000 a day by sending all that spam out, then followed up less than a week later with another post on an article that showed that some of these spammers were probably getting less than 30 clicks a day, making almost no money at all, even with the volume of email going out.

Of course, we all know that, in general, many of these spammers are only looking for the links on blogs where the bloggers don’t care about their blogs anymore. That’s why I wish someone would pay me to go around the internet and kill all dead blogs, so these spammers won’t get what they’re hoping for.

Oh well; I’ll keep dealing with it, and hoping that it ends pretty soon. Glad I have that Askimet protection.

Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site in the world today. As with most new technologies, rules for proper use are written on the fly, and Twitter rules are no different, except, in this case, the rules aren’t quite written, and it’s the users that make the rules.

There are ten things that many Twitter people do that are generally considered as bad manners. Some of those things are:

* Not having an image of some sort with your profile. Unless people know who you are, they’re reluctant to follow anyone without some kind of image to give people an idea of who they might be.

* Using a tiny.url as the link to your website. Hiding a link to your website makes people suspect that you have an ulterior motive in putting it there, and if people don’t trust you from the start, they won’t follow you.

* Writing about every single step of your day. No one is interested in following every second of anyone else’s life, yet that’s how some people participate on Twitter. If that person isn’t your friend, you’ll probably drop them because they’re taking up too much of your time and space when you have other people to follow.

* Only posting links or quotes and not talking to anyone. People love information, but we hate being ignored when we want to talk to someone. If a person has 30,000 people following them, or if they’re a celebrity, they might get a break, but for everyone else, if you don’t ever engage anyone openly, people will unfollow you pretty quickly.

* Posting the same links over and over. Many people are on Twitter only to market themselves. If someone is following you and sees that you only post the same content all the time, you can bet they’re going to drop you as soon as possible.

* Using a lot of bad language. This is the bane of modern existence, people forgetting how to be courteous in public, but being consistently bad mouthed will get people to drop you like a bad habit, even if they use bad language in their real lives.

* Following a lot of people but only having a few follow you. This is a big red flag for most Twitter users, because it’s the tactic employed by spammers. Though there are often these big pushes towards increasing one’s followers, it’s better to increase both in a more organic fashion.

* Not having any posts. If you never write anything, or almost never write anything, why would you expect people to follow you? Twitter is all about people interacting with each other, and if you’re not interacting, or you have one or two posts and they’re both talking about the latest product you’re marketing, you’ll never get any followers.

* Getting into an argument with another person. It can invariably happen to anyone, but it’s considered bad practice because the participants never know what they’re going to say, and at some point they might say something that offends a big number of people. It’s usually best to try to let it go as soon as possible.

* Saying something in the open that you’d never say in person. Last year, a reporter for the Chicago Sun Times wrote a negative post about too many fat people on the train he was on. Within an hour, he had been vilified worldwide, and many people had already sent letters to the newspaper demanding that he be fired. Back in January, another person lost a job he’d just been offered because he made a derogatory comment about taking the job without realizing that the person who offered him the job was following him on Twitter.

These are just some things that people need to think about when they’re going to participate on Twitter. Avoiding these ten things can make your Twitter experience a pleasant one.

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