First off, what is a Meta tag??? A meta tag is text that describes your site or individual post inside of the HTML header. It was designed so search engines can quickly index your site and use the “key words” in those tags to provide more relevant results. Here are a couple of examples:
I just updated this blog to WordPress 3.5 and I also enabled the ImageMagick plugin for my image re-sizing for better quality. I don’t really post high resolution images (photos) but I figured I would check it out and see how it works. I then re-sized all of the images with the tool and saw little change – I am sure if they were photos there would have been a big difference. Here is a high resolution image that I sized with the new tool. The original image was 2848×4272, this was resized to 500×750.
A few weeks ago my youngest son Nathan and I talked about creating a game review blog. I figured this would be a great learning exercise for him and make “gaming” into a positive by applying critical thinking. The idea is he gets a new game on the xBox, Wii, iPad, etc and he has to write a review of the game in a notepad I gave him. So far he loves the idea and has written up some pretty impressive reviews. I do minor edits to his reviews but in general he does most of the writing behind them.
One major problem I have with base WordPress is while it does a good job giving you stats around views (the number of hits you get per post) it does not do a good job for post counts. In the previous post I had to create a chart that showed how many blog posts I wrote in the months and years past. I am sure there is a plugin out there for this so if you know of one please mention it in the comments!
In the spirit of reading others posts about “how much they are blogging lately” I decided to look at my own statistics in this space. I will admit, in the past year or so I consciously decided to blog much more specific information to my job, programming, etc. and a lot less about personal stuff where as I decided to use other channels like Facebook to put more of my personal posts. One thing I have been consistently watching is “views per day”. I feel as long as I can keep a readership then that is good enough for me. I have also noticed a lot more hits from search engines and other sites mentioning my site in the past two years. With that approach, it clearly looks like less is more – if the quality is there. So now with the stats!
The first chart shows some monthly counts spanning the years my blog has kept stats. I had to put the views in thousands (K) so it wouldn’t skew the chart so much. As you can see, the average day pretty much reflects the number of posts in that month – so I guess if I did blog more the views would go up. However, if you look at the total views in K for each month it is pretty level at around 20K per month. I did notice that 2010 and 2011 were big years for views so it has actually skewed some of the numbers (see the annual chart) from reality.
The annual chart does show a steep decline from this year and the past two years, however, I still have 14 days left! Once again, notice how the number of posts have dropped considerably but the views in K and Average Views per day only dipped slightly. I think this is because of my first statement about getting more referrals and showing up in more searches.
Google60 – Search Mad Men Style
Wow, this actually worked! I searched “Bob Balfe”, and is it sad that I could actually read the punch card?
Last week I promoted a post on Facebook just to see what it did. According to Facebook my advertising results “are in” and as you can see below the post received 99% more paid views than “regular” views – I have no way of validating that by the way. I guess that means 99% of the views were from it being in the right side bar and only 1% of the views were in the regular feed.
Some observations, almost everyone that replied to the thread didn’t even see the post in the right bar or in their feed in the first few hours. It makes me wonder how many people actually see any of my posts. I think the $7 ad fee was worth learning how it works, however I think that is a bit high. I also think I should have received a message or something that the results were in. I had to go search in help and find out how to get the results, which was even more disturbing. The directions told me I had to go to my feed, find the post and look at the results. This really should be somewhere under my page (at the top) or in my account screen. I shouldn’t have to go look for the original post. What if I want to compare to another post results?
My own stats show the post has had 53 hits in about 5 days and only 3 click referrals came from FB. I actually don’t get a lot of clicks from FB because my friends on FB don’t really care about my technical blog.
Some things I could have done better:
Those are the most obvious ones I can think of, not sure if anyone else has any other ideas. I really wanted to see what a basic post would generate and the results were not really that good. Now, I am going to test another post with an image and a catchy title. Let’s see what results that will bring. More to follow.
Hello? You play to win the game.You don’t play it to just play it. That’s the great thing about sports: you play to win, and I don’t care if you don’t have any wins. – Herm Edwards
When Herm Edwards said those words last year to the press the NY Jets finished the remainder of the season by winning seven of their last nine games. This isn’t just about sports but just about anything you do in life. Giving it your all and playing to win is key, you don’t necessarily have to win at everything but working like you will win is very important. This just means you are giving it your all and tells others a lot about your character.
I read an interesting article this morning, What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Their Work Day. The article is a great reminder for how to prepare your mind to take on the day in positive way. My two favorites are “Don’t check your email for the first hour of every day” and the following snippet:
“Hour of Power,” “30 Minutes to Thrive,” or at least “Fifteen Minutes to Fulfillment.” Part of it involves light exercise, part of it involves motivational incantations, but the most accessible piece involves 10 minutes of thinking of everything you’re grateful for: in yourself, among your family and friends, in your career, and the like. After that, visualize “everything you want in your life as if you had it today.” – Tony Robins
Each and every day is an opportunity, make sure you seize them.
I installed the Lightbox Plus WordPress plugin from here. Go ahead and check out the feature by clicking on the image below. I love how simple this plugin was to install and get up and running, very cool and easy to use feature!
Lightbox Plus implements ColorBox as a lightbox image overlay tool for WordPress. ColorBox was created by Jack Moore of Color Powered and is licensed under the MIT License.
I joined LinkedIn in December of 2005. This was at a time when MySpace was King and Facebook was a college only thing slowly getting into high schools as a social network. At first I didn’t think the concept of LinkedIn would be successful but at the same time I did believe it had a lot of potential, boy has it changed (for the better) over the years. Let’s get to some tips for effectively using LinkedIn.
Tip #1 – Your Profile
You must complete your profile with a picture. Think of this as your online resume. Fill out as much information as you can but keep it professional. You should not include anything personal like hobbies, sports, etc. I think of my LinkedIn profile as a business tool, to confirm my credentials when customers or business partners look me up. Oh yes, and they will look you up. Complete your profile, education, work experience, awards, etc. You never know what kind of contact you may meet by simply having all of your information on there or what group may ask you to get involved base on your information.
Tip #2 – Join Groups
There are many types of groups on LinkedIn, professional, hobby, government, social groups, alumni, etc. Get involved in the groups. One of the things I really do not like about many of the groups are they end up being job boards. So unless you are looking for a job post relevant information to the groups and add value. The more value you add the more likely you are to attract a future employer or business. You can even promote your own products or brand on these groups but keep it more informational and less selling, establish yourself.
Tip #3 – Link to others
If you are in a business meeting and you introduce yourself or get a business card make sure when you get back to your computer you find that new “link” and get them into your network. This will be a sure way to get “remembered”. And if you end up getting connected, they can see what kind of influence you have by what you post and share on LinkedIn. I make it a point that when I get a business card I always attempt to link with that person, it solidifies my interest in them and their business.
Tip #4 – Recommend and Get Recommendations
You don’t need many, but getting recommendations on LinkedIn hold a lot of water in my opinion. The reason is someone looking at a recommendation can quickly see who that person is doing the recommendation and see what their reputation is very quickly. You should also recommend people. I wouldn’t just recommend people for the sake of recommending, make sure you truly would recommend this person in real life, because that is exactly what it is. It quickly builds a list of references and is always available online.
Tip #5 – Be the expert your profile says you are
If you are a rock star manager then make sure you post often about being a rock star manager. Make sure you are a thought leader in your area of expertise. This will clearly attract more connections and raise your profile credibility. The newly introduced “skills” endorsements is a great way to get others to see that you are what you say you are. I recommend blogging or sharing key stories or news articles that are relevant to your industry.