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4 Fantastically Awesome Techniques for Authentic Blogging

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“You heard it here first! Yes, 4 fan­tas­ti­cally awe­some tech­niques to get you a gazil­lion read­ers and piles of pas­sive income cash! All you need to do are these 4 secret things that only I know about and have fig­ured out either by acci­dent or because I’m unusu­ally bril­liant. But guess what, you are so lucky, I’m going to tell you all about it, right now (prob­a­bly way at the bot­tom of the page so that I can get a bunch of killer key­words into the top of the page so Google will send me more of yous).”

Sorry about all that. Was it as painful for you to read as it was for me to write?

I hope you got my point. While we were all try­ing to improve our writ­ing and hop­ing for some read­ers who liked it, the Inter­net became pol­luted with “how to blog and make money” sites. While I truly believe blog­ging and earn­ing from it is a won­der­ful goal, don’t, for the love of God, get sucked into being a lem­ming for these sites. Be authen­tic. Be you! That is what will drive you to be pas­sion­ate and it is that pas­sion that will lead, ulti­mately, to an online pres­ence that matters!

I have been doing a lot of think­ing and research while I improve this web col­umn for myself and my cur­rent and future read­ers. With every­thing I’ve learned recently and over the 7 years I’ve been blog­ging, I do have some advice for you if you have a blog and want it to mat­ter. Iron­i­cally, I will orga­nize my advice into a list of 4 sim­ple items. I’ll let you decide if they are fan­tas­ti­cally awe­some and uber pow­er­ful killer and what­ever else are the in vogue mar­ket­ing words these days.

  1. Write posts from your soul and that con­vey your pas­sion for what­ever it is you’re writ­ing about. Each post should sat­isfy your need to write it and give value (mat­ter) to those that share your pas­sion. Long or short, fre­quent or infre­quent. It’s irrel­e­vant. Does the post mat­ter to you and to those that share your pas­sion? If the answer is yes, then hit the pub­lish button.
  2. Work on your site so that it loads quickly. We are all impa­tient online. If your site takes too long to load, it doesn’t mat­ter if you fol­lowed rule num­ber 1 above. There are many free tuto­ri­als out there about how to improve load speed so go do some research for your blog­ging plat­form. If you are using Word­Press, check into W3 Total Cache plu­gin. Test your site with YSLOW and Google Page Speed.
  3. Work on your site’s search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO). Advice 1 and 2 don’t mean any­thing if peo­ple don’t know you exist. As Google and other search engines use algo­rithms to iden­tify rel­e­vant sites, it’s impor­tant for your site to facil­i­tate being found. There is a right way too SEO and a wrong way (grey hat tech­niques and oth­er­wise try­ing to game the sys­tem and not pro­vid­ing value to read­ers). Don’t use the wrong way. It’s bad karma and sooner or later you will regret it.
  4. Be an authen­tic blog­ger. Please don’t fall into the trap that your posts need to fol­low a for­mula to be eye catch­ing, bite sized, etc. That takes every ounce of cre­ativ­ity out of you and your blog will become one more mean­ing­less, shal­low site that gets glossed over by peo­ple who share your pas­sion. Don’t do that to your­self or the world. We need your brilliance.

Join me in start­ing a move­ment towards authen­tic blog­ging. We will all be bet­ter for it.

 

P.S. Sadly, I searched for authen­tic blog­ging when think­ing through this post. Wouldn’t you know it, some­one has even taken the con­cept of authen­tic blog­ging and posted it using one of the for­mu­las! Really?Ugh!

Filed Under: Being Dad, Technology

Apple and why competitors don’t get it, yet

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Apple cre­ates “insanely great prod­ucts that change the world.” How do they change the world? Isn’t that pre­sump­tu­ous or just mar­ket­ing speak? Aren’t you just a fanboy?

I had a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend who seems to just not trust Apple. I shared with him why I thought Apple is a shoot­ing star now.

Apple’s genius is that they pro­vide me and you with tech­nol­ogy that fades into the back­ground and allows me to be more pro­duc­tive, knowl­edge­able, social, closer to fam­ily, and safe. I don’t have to think about how their tech­nol­ogy allows me to do all those things.

The future of tech­nol­ogy is stay­ing in the back­ground and just allow­ing peo­ple to do what they need or want to do with­out think­ing. I don’t care if the new iPad has 1GB of RAM. I care that it allows me to do what I want to do on it with­out slow­ing down. We’ve reached a point that the hard­ware is less impor­tant to the vast major­ity of peo­ple. The focus is on invis­i­ble technology.

Apple’s com­peti­tors don’t get that. At least, not yet. They are all about the specs, fea­tures and treat­ing phones and tablets like mini 1990s computers.

 

Filed Under: Technology

Google and your privacy (or lack there of)…

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OK, I admit I use Gmail and can’t imag­ine using another email sys­tem. So right up front I want to say “thanks” to Google for doing it for free.

I am also a bit of an Apple fan­boy as you may have noticed. My posi­tion is that when Apple starts to do things that I don’t like or don’t find use­ful, I will stop. Just like any other addict would with his drug of choice. Just kid­ding. /disclaimer

I have main­tained, and with this lat­est scan­dal, con­tinue to main­tain that the com­pany that began with the motto of “Do no evil” has lost its way.  In another exam­ple of how the quest for ever more prof­its can cor­rupt some com­pa­nies, news recently broke about how Google was pur­pose­fully cir­cum­vent­ing the pri­vacy set­tings of Safari users. Why? So they can bet­ter track you and use your habits to improve their ad-serving business.

It’s a tale of cook­ies, as our friend John Gru­ber of Dar­ing Fire­ball explains in his response to John Batelle, Google wrote code to over­ride Safari’s default pri­vacy set­ting of only allow­ing cook­ies from vis­ited web­sites.  As John writes,

“One com­mon use is by ad net­works; an ad net­work can set a cookie and then access that same cookie from any web­site that uses the same ad net­work. Google makes use of such cook­ies to dis­play its ads. Ad net­works that use cook­ies in this man­ner do so in order to track users across websites.”

This is not OK even if Google assumes that most peo­ple don’t care.  I bet you that if Google would have popped up a dia­logue box and asked if you were OK with them doing this, most peo­ple would have replied “no.” That’s why they didn’t tell you.  That’s why when this story broke, they quickly removed the code that was doing this.

Yes, they were caught and they con­fessed by chang­ing what they were doing.

I totally agree with John when he points out that Google now seems to have a sense of entitlement:

“What I detect in Google’s behav­ior (and Battelle’s more-or-less defense of it) is a sense of enti­tle­ment. That because in the past ad net­works could track almost all users via cook­ies, they are enti­tled to con­tinue track­ing almost all users across the web via cook­ies, even when a large (and grow­ing) num­ber of them begin using a web browser which, by default, tries to pre­vent it.”

Come on, Google! You were one of the good guys. What happened??

Filed Under: Technology

Dad Cam — Oh Yeah!

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OK, thanks to the non­stop CES news onslaught, I was able to find some­thing that every dad needs– Miveu or as I like to call it, “The Dad Cam.”

If you have an iPhone, get your­self this chest strap doohickey and start shoot­ing some awe­some­ness. Bet­ter yet, use those Dad Do-it-yourself skills and stap it on your tod­dler (teenagers will prob­a­bly object) and let the fun begin!

God will­ing, I will be zip lin­ing in Costa Rica in about a month and this thing is just what I need for the home video.  The pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less.  I won­der what the guys from How to be a Dad would come up with if they had this thing?!

YouTube video of it in action:

Filed Under: Being Dad, Technology

Why I Hate Android

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MG Siegler puts it very nicely:
 

Apple, for all the shit they get for being “closed” and “evil”, has actu­ally done far more to wres­tle con­trol back from the car­ri­ers and put it into the hands of con­sumers. Google set off to help in this goal, then stabbed us all in the back and went the com­plete other way, to the side of the car­ri­ers. And because they smiled the entire time they were doing it and fed us this “open” bull­shit, we thanked them for it. We’re still thank­ing them for it!

Filed Under: Technology