6 Easy SEO Tips I learned from Dave Taylor

Posted on January 7, 2009 by michelle.mack

Back in September I went to Blogworld & New Media Expo 2008 in Las Vegas.

The number one best thing about going to the conference was the connections I made there; I even got to rub shoulders with few blogging/social media/internet rockstars including Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Darren Rowse, David Alston, Dave Taylor, Steve Hall, Lee Odden, Rohit Bhargava, Gary Vaynerchuk and local superstars Rebecca Bollwitt and Linda Bustos.

The next best thing was some of the useful tips I learned from one of the sessions: Dave Taylor’s “Ten Things You Need to Know About Search Engines & Findability”.

For those unfamiliar with social media and blogging, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, blogging is often considered a great way to market your company website if, in fact, you have a passion and a plan for doing so.

Key takeaways from Dave Taylor’s blogging SEO session:

While Dave’s session focused on 10 things about SEO, the following 6 points stood out to me and are very simple to implement no matter what blog platform you use.

1. Write as often as you can
This tip didn’t come entirely from Dave Taylor’s session; it was addressed by Richard Jalichandra’s Keynote on Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere. The most popular blogs are written to 10 times a day or more. While you don’t need to write multiple times a day for your blog to be effective, you do need to write regularly to keep the search engines pinging your site. The more often Google pings you, the higher up you’re going in the search results for keywords contained within your writing. People will disagree on how often you need to write to produce results; I would suggest a bare minimum is 2-3 times a week if you’re going to bother blogging at all.

2. Write your keywords in to your content
It’s a good idea to be aware of the key words and phrases you want your site to rank for. Make sure you use those words and phrases whenever it is appropriate in your writing. It’s a balancing act between having your blogging sound natural and having it sound like it was written strictly for keyword density, but use your judgement. The more your keywords are located in your writing, the higher you will rank for those words. This is especially important if your goal is to draw traffic and customers to your primary business.

3. Link your keywords rather than meaningless words
This is probably one of the most important things I’ve learned: Link relevant keywords. Search engines read code. They see what has a link and look at the content of that link more closely than the other text within your site. So rather than say, “I found this great article on SEO for blogs on this website,” you should write “I found this great article on SEO for blogs I want to share with you.” In the first example, you will rank for the word “website”; in the second example, you will rank for “great article on SEO for blogs”, which is a way more useful phrase, and one that is much more likely to be searched. No one needs to rank higher for “click here” or “more”. No one.

4. Use header tags to emphasize sub-headings
I didn’t know this one at all. When you use header tags like <h1> and <h2> to highlight important sub titles within your posts, the search engines will also see that text as more important again, in the same way it sees links as important. See above where I titled this list “Key takeaways from Dave Taylor’s blogging SEO session”? That’s an <h2>tag and it sends a signal to the search engine’s little electronic brain centre says “oh this is a heading; this page must be about this topic.” Just simply bolding your headings won’t have the same effect.

5. Optimized photos
Photo file names and titles are also used by search engines. So rather than leaving your file names as whatever they were when they came off your digital camera… “IMG_2008-01-07_001.jpg” for instance, rename it. Name it with relevant keywords that people may search for. Be honest about it. What is the photo displaying? If you’re writing a blog entry on your trip to Disneyland and you take a picture of Mickey Mouse in front of the Disneyland castle, call your photo “mickey-mouse-disneyland-castle.jpg”. If you’re writing a blog entry on a restaurant you visited and you’re including a photo, name the photo “restaurant-name-city-styleoffood-dining.jpg”. Then, your images have their very own chance of getting ranked by Google.

6. Tag your posts
Tag your posts. All blogging software allows you to add relevant tags to your posts. If you’re writing about how to bake an angel food cake, you might tag it with the following keywords: baking, bake a cake, angel-food cake, cake, angel food, baking instructions, cake instructions. Think for a few minutes about what words someone might plug into a search engine if they were looking for exactly what you’re writing about. If you were looking for your post, what would you search for?

How to promote your business or company on Facebook

Posted on September 21, 2008 by michelle.mack

Judging by the crowd of people sitting on the floor in the “How to Market Your Blog, Business & Brand on Facebook” session at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2008, people want to know how to promote their business or company on Facebook.

Facebook is one of the world’s fastest growing social networking sites and facilitates some of the easiest, most comprehensive sharing strategies within any single online community. Here are some stats from the Facebook Wikipedia Page:

According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008.[69] ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008, compared to MySpace, which attracted 117.6 million.[70]

According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th.[71] Quantcast ranks the website 15th in US in terms of traffic,[72] and Compete.com ranks it 14th in US.[73] The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily.

Blogs, businesses and brands all want to get seen by those users. Today’s session from Shama Hyder on Facebook Fortunes (even if, as she admitted, the term came from Mari Smith) attracted a crowd. And Shama’s advice was good IF (and this if is HUGE) you ARE your company. If you and your company, business, brand etc. are one and the same, i.e. you are a public figure, artist, internet rockstar, performer, realtor, author or you own your own business that you never want to sell (along with its identity), everything Shama said is golden. Do it. Follow her advice.

***If, however, you are an employee of a company that you do not own and may not be a part of forever, I don’t recommend you do it.***

Companies can use Facebook as a complement to their online and offline marketing efforts in a number of ways. I’m going to outline some of the ways I use Facebook to facilitate sharing of information about my company by our most loyal of followers as well as how to use the built-in marketing tools Facebook provides. These methods have made Facebook my company’s #1 referring website since we launched the redesigned grousemountain.com last December.

A little disclosure so you understand the bigger picture for me: 50% of my traffic comes via search engines and 36% comes direct. Referring sites in total make up only 13% on average, so these numbers matter, but they’re not everything. Facebook is not referring the bulk of my traffic, but Grouse Mountain is an established business with a membership component so the majority of our customers already know where to find us. We have huge brand recognition within our industry. For smaller, newer or lesser-known companies, I think the interaction you can create with Facebook can be very valuable, and that goes beyond just click-through-rate.

Facebook tools that I’ll discuss include groups, fan pages, event listings, targeted social ads and share widgets. This is going to be a bit long, so please bear with me. Other tools that I’m less familiar with and will not discuss include marketplace listings, polls, applications and beacons.

Before I launch into what you need to know, I’ll start by saying join Facebook. Join as a human being. Upload a photo of yourself, put in a little information, go find your friends and family members and connect with them. It’s fun and you’ll like it. Now that I’ve said that, reconsider before friending everyone you’ve ever heard of or met for business purposes. Again, I’m saying this as an employee of a company. It’s not that I don’t want to connect with some of my business contacts, but I don’t want to share my personal life with everyone I know and I DO want somewhere to share my personal life with my friends. Not only that, but my friends don’t really care what I’m up to at work though most of them understand I will occasionally spam them with the latest thing I’m working on. They understand, though… they’re my friends. My real friends. Well, most of them are.

Building Facebook Groups for business conversations

Facebook Groups are mini communities centred around a specific topic. When you build a group, your personal profile is listed as the creator. This is where people will be able to see who you are and, if you’ve left your profile open at all, a little about you (more on profiles at the end). I think the best use of groups is for something that’s ongoing (best not to build a group for a one-time event – there are event listings for that) but maybe not your entire corporate identity.

Groups are great for specific promotions, products and shared experiences. One of the ways I have used Facebook Groups is with our Build Your Own Park project, where we decided to engage our terrain park riders to tell us what features they wanted to see in the park and how they thought it should be set up. For more ideas, just Google “innovative Facebook groups”.

Facebook Groups allow users to share without hesitation. They can blast it out to everyone on their friends list with one click. This is the fastest way to share info if the info is worthy of sharing. Groups include photos, posted items, discussion boards and walls; each item can be removed as the administrator sees fit or set to ‘admin only’, which means users can’t post items (that’s a strategic decision you need to make depending on your goals). They aren’t customizable with applications (yet) but allow for multiple editors and you can message all members direct to their inbox. The only downside here that I know of, is that groups are limited to 5000 members (that I didn’t know – heard it from Shama Hyder; my groups have been more niche than that so I’ve never reached the threshold).

Building Facebook Fan Pages promotes identities

Fan Pages are ideal for many companies, celebrity personalities or specific products or product lines. Two very important things to note with regards to fan pages:

1) People cannot share fan pages to their entire list of friends
Promoting a fan page is harder than a group – you need to put more effort into getting the word out. The only sharing mechanism is for posting to profile (where the item shows up under someone’s posted items) or sending to a friend as a message (it arrives at the friend’s inbox, but can only be sent to 10 friends at one time). And, while your friends will get a note in their news feed when you become a fan of any particular Fan Page, this sharing limitation makes Facebook Fan Pages much harder to grow.

2) Fan Pages include a mandatory ‘Reviews’ application
With the Reviews application, people are free to review your product and the reviews cannot be taken off a fan page. If no one reviews it, great, no reviews. If they do and they didn’t like your product, tough. You can, however, set the reviews to only show based on a person’s friends i.e. if I visit the page I see only reviews written by my friends but even when that option is exercised, I can always click ‘see all’ and get the rest if I want them.

Fan pages don’t limit membership and include discussion boards, a wall, posted items, photos, videos and many applications can now be added to fan pages, which makes them way more customizable. Also, if you’re a blogger or internet rockstar, or you have a corporate blog, you can use the Notes application to import each entry as a note so each time you post to your blog, your fan page gets updated. This is not an option with a group.

One of the benefits to larger companies that may have multiple administrators (or employee turnover, for that matter) is that when the administrator posts anything on the page it posts it from “Fan Page Name” instead of from your personal profile. If you have multiple people administering a page the fans can’t tell who did which part. This can be good or bad and I’ll leave it to you to weigh the pros and cons for your company. One point to note: If you comment on a note in your own Fan Page, the comment WILL show up from your personal profile. So when you write the note, it’s the corporate identity and when you write a comment on that note, it will show up as your own.

You can message all fans, but it goes in an area called ‘updates’ within the message centre (click on your inbox and you’ll see a tab for updates) rather than the actual message inbox, so it really comes in as a ‘marketing’ type message. That isn’t all bad, though, because most people only become a fan of companies and people they really want to hear from and, as many have said before me, people don’t want to be friends with companies anyway. When a new update is sent, the user gets a notification and link on their home page when they log in.

Using Facebook Event Listings to promote events

Event listings are exactly what they sound like. Use Facebook Event Listings to create and share event information surrounding a single date (I’m not a fan of using these for multi-day events because they don’t show up as “upcoming” once the start date passes). Events can be structured in such a way so you can show the invitation list, see how many people have been invited and who they are, how many people haven’t responded, how many people have RSVP’d yes and how many declines you get. People can share events to their entire list of friends or post to their own profile.

An example of an event listing on Facebook is The TechSet Presents: Poolside in Vegas though in this case they chose to show only ‘yes’ responses and ‘maybes’ (sometimes it’s better not to show how many people declined – again, a strategic decision). Events use photos, videos, posted items and walls and all of these items can also be removed or set to ‘admin only’. You can also set events to private, public, invite only or open so anyone can invite anyone else. Lots of options here.

Note: You can post an event as an individual or as a business with a Fan Page. If you post it from the Events link on your home page you will be considered the host. If you post it from within a Fan Page, the company/identity name will be the host.

Facebook’s targeted social ads are simple to use

Facebook has made placing ads so simple, anyone could do it. Now, it’s not appropriate for everyone, but most B2C companies can find value here. In fact, after this, I’ll probably devote an entire blog entry to targeted Facebook social ads. Very cool stuff.

Facebook ads are the small ads that appear on the right hand side of a person’s profile pages (see sample, right). With the new Facebook design, users are now served up two ads on almost every page they visit (except their home/news-feed page). Those ads are served up based on carefully selected targeting options; often they’re so well targeted I love getting them because they’re entirely relevant to me! With Facebook social ads you get a tiny headline (25 characters), a tiny photo (110 x 80px), and a very small space for copy (~135 characters with spaces). These need to be written with the precision and skill of text search ads, but Facebook gives you all the metrics to see which ones are more effective so you can switch out the less effective ones (though it doesn’t do it automatically like Google does).

You can target by geographic region, gender, age, marital status, education level, sexual orientation, workplace and keyword. Most of these are self-explanatory; workplace and keyword are very interesting. While I’ve never targeted ads based on workplace, this has huge implications for HR professionals and B2B companies. Many large organizations have Facebook networks devoted to their employees; these are part of the targeting criteria. For instance, you could target employees of Intel, Microsoft, Google, Buzzlogic, or any number of other organizations – there are hundreds to choose from.

Keyword targeting, however, is where you can fine tune after you get past all that demographic info. You can target people by any keyword they may have put in their profile, be it a favourite band, movie, sport, religion, book, interest, activity or cause. Anything anyone may have included in their profile is game. Furthermore, you can also add social actions to your ads: You can choose to have your ad served up, whenever possible, with a photo of a friend who is a fan.

Example: My Grouse Mountain ad is getting served up to Bob and Bob is friends with Joe. Joe is a fan of Grouse Mountain’s Fan Page. Because of that, Bob gets that ad with Joe’s photo and a note saying “Joe is a fan of Grouse Mountain”. That makes it all that much more relevant because now when Bob sees it he thinks “hey, Joe is a fan, let me check it out…” See how that works?

You can buy Facebook Social Ads on a CPC or CPM basis and even my most targeted campaigns have worked out to roughly $0.30/CPM or around the same per click. You set your daily maximum and your time parameters and start the campaign. I could also get into the whole strategy aroud where your ads are linking, but I won’t. I’ll just say I think in most cases I think it’s better to send the ad clicks to your website rather than your Facebook page, group or whatever.

Facebook Share widgets promote your web content

Finally, Facebook has a widget that’s easily added into any web page that allows a person to send the page to their profile as a posted item. I am going to start this section by saying I can’t find the share code on Facebook anymore… it seems they aren’t promoting this as an option any longer, however, it still works (probably because many have used it when it was promoted). They also, incidentally have a bookmark for this too. This code (pardon me if it’s messy – I’m not a coder), embedded in your page, will allow your customers to post the page to their profile:

And it will look and work like this:
HTML .fb_share_link {PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 20px; BACKGROUND: url(http://static.ak.facebook.com/images/share/facebook_share_icon.gif?57:26981) no-repeat left top; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 2px; HEIGHT: 16px}
Share on Facebook

Note: It can be a little trickier with a blog entry because the URL inside the code must be the exact code of the page you want to share, so presumably that’s the post permalink. You will need to either know exactly what that permalink is ahead of time to put it in there, or go back and edit it once the permalink is generated.

About Facebook Profiles and Privacy

You can control the privacy level on just about every item of your profile – your contact info, your ‘about’ info, your employment info, education info, interests, photo albums, videos etc. based on who you want to see what. As a corporate person who has a private life, I highly recommend you consider who can see what. Any portion of your profile that you leave open to everyone, or your network, or friends of friends can, well, be seen by those groups of people. You can pick and choose who can see what and I highly recommend you take some time to get to understand these privacy settings. I can’t begin to explain them all here. If business networking is important to you, leave a limited profile available to everyone and use the messaging feature to communicate. You don’t have to be friends with someone to message them back and forth, but if you’re not friends it’s harder to keep track of them – there isn’t a non-friends contact list option. Once you’ve set up whatever you want public (either entirely public to the world or public to your network/geographic location), set the rest to ‘friends only’. Then, when someone tags you in a photo at the bar or doing something you’d rather your business contacts didn’t see, there’s no fear. You can choose to have some stuff available to ‘friends of friends’ in case you want old friends to find you – education info for instance. You can choose to put your home address and telephone number on your profile and make it visible only to your friends or even to selected people. Again, so many options here so go and have a solid look through the privacy section – you’ll find it at the top right of every page you see.

With that, I’ll leave you to digest the above info. If anyone has any additional feedback, ideas, comments, or just wants to tell me they think I’m plain wrong, feel free to leave a comment. Alternatively, if you’d like me to go into further depth with any of the above topics, let me know and I’ll do that too. I’d love to hear from others who are using Facebook as well; I’m one of the crazy fans who leaves it open all day so I can see what’s going on there. At the same time, please don’t be offended if I don’t accept your friend request. As I said, I use Facebook almost exclusively for personal relationships, so if you’d like to connect professionally, please follow me @seeking_balance on Twitter (I’ll more than likely follow you back), connect with me on LinkedIn, or find my friendfeed and connect with me that way.

BlogWorld & New Media Expo Mayhem

Posted on September 14, 2008 by michelle.mack

Next weekend is going to be busy. Very busy.

On Thursday I leave for Las Vegas to attend the BlogWorld & New Media Expo. It is so full of excellent speakers and exhibiters I won’t actually be able to attend every session I’d like to. In fact, in a couple of instances I’m going to leave the decision until I’m actually there, see who I meet, and see if anyone has any opinions on what I should attend.

Friday, September 19th is the Entrepreneur and Executive conference day. It’s sort of an extra day for us non-blogger types who are really trying to figure out how to use blogging and social media for business purposes. Here’s my agenda for the day:

8:45am – 9:45am | Opening keynote speaker Dave Taylor
10:00am – 11:15am | Corporate blogging myths and reality
11:30am – 12:45pm | Micromedia: The next big, small thing
12:45pm – 1:45pm | Keynote luncheon (a girl’s gotta eat, right?)
2:00pm – 3:15pm | Finding your new media voice
3:30pm – 4:45pm | Implementing blogs and social media for business
5:00pm – 6:00pm | Closing keynote speaker Gary Vaynerchuck
6:00pm – 7:00pm | Get myself ready for a night on the town
7:00pm – 8:00pm | BWE Tweetup at the Hilton
8:00pm – 11:00pm | TechSet party at Bare at The Mirage

Um, yeah… that’s a full day and will likely require the use of some Full Throttle – 2 or 3 cans ought to do it. I am super excited and fully intend to seek out a few specific people that I’d love to meet, whether at the conference itself or at the TechSet party.

Chris Brogan – social media guru from CrossTech Media
I subscribe to his blog and like to read just about every word he writes. It fits right in with my morning news. Love it! He’s also leading the Bloggers & PR session I want to attend.

Geoff Livingston – CEO of Livingston Communications and writer of the Buzz Bin
Another interesting social media expert I follow on Twitter. He’s also all about his ducati just recently. Seems like an all ’round nice guy too.

Lee Odden – CEO of Top Rank Online Marketing
He’ll be leading a session on SEO, SEM and Social Marketing for the Executive track. His blog is ranked one of the top online marketing blogs by Advertising Age

Darren Rowse – aka Problogger
Darren is all about blogging for a living and teaching others to do the same. That’s all there is to say. He often has profound and interesting things to say on both his blog and on twitter. He also takes a mean photograph. I’m hoping to get to his session on How Not to Use Social Media.

Deborah Micek – aka coachDeb
Deborah just came to my attention recently. She is a new media consultant, author and entrepreneur – co-creator of blogi360.com – living in Hawaii. Rough life.

Rebecca Bollwitt – aka Miss604: Vancouver Blogger
Miss604 is, from what I can tell, the most influential Vancouver lifestyle blogger. She is also very involved in the Vancouver tech scene.

Shannon Yelland – Online Marketing Manager for Sitemasher
Sitemasher is a Vancouver based company offering a CMS on a SAAS basis. I’m interested in their product, even though it seems to be a little difficult for my non-programming mind to grasp.

Brian Solis – Principal of FutureWorks PR and social media agency
I subscribe to Brian’s PR2.0 blog and plan to attend his Bloggers and PR session.

Arieanna Schweber – Entertainment Editor, b5media
Another Vancouver powerhouse, Arieanna is a full time blogger I follow on twitter.

Rohit Bhargava – Blogger, Author and Digital Media expert
He’s just super interesting and has a lot of great things to say. He’s actually the keynote speaker for Sunday morning, so I hope I’ll get out to hear him.

Lisa Bettany – Blogger, MostlyLisa
Another Vancouver blogger who has interesting things to say. I follow her on twitter too.

Mark Davidson – Social Media Manager/Internet Strategist
There is too much to say here. Mark is just an all-round interesting guy I follow on twitter. You have to check him out to see what I’m talking about. He’s like the cool kid in school.

Jason Billinglsley – Co-founder of Vancouver-based Elastic Path Software
Elastic Path is the e-commerce provider for VANOC and the publisher of the #1 E-Commerce Blog: GetElastic. I won’t be attending his session on monetization, but I’d like to meet him just to say Hi. I regularly attend Elastic Path’s webinars.

Linda Bustos – Emerging Media Analyst for Elastic Path Software
Linda, aka @roxyyo, is a brilliant mind and writer for Elastic Path’s blog GetElastic. I love reading her blog. Everything she writes just makes sense in a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that kind of way. I also happen to know her IRL and look forward to getting to know her a little better if time permits.

There are also plenty of other folks I’m excited to meet. Especially those I “know” from twitter. It’s cool to put a real life face to a screen name.

Then Saturday, the actual BlogWorld & New Media Expo begins will look like this:

8:45am – 10:00am | Opening Keynote on exhibit floor
10:00am – 11:00am | Check out the exhibits
11:00am – 12:00pm | Twitter: Connections that drive traffic
12:15pm – 1:15pm | Bloggers & PR
1:15pm – 2:45pm | More exhibits and lunch somewhere
2:45pm – 3:45pm | Search engines and findability
3:45pm – 5:00pm | More exhibits
5:00pm – 6:00pm | Creating customer loyalty with social media, OR
5:00pm – 6:00pm | SEO, SEM and New Media (totally torn as to what to see)
6:00pm – 7:30pm | Eat something and get myself ready for another big night
7:30pm – 9:30pm | BlogWorld Conference opening night party
9:30pm – 11:00pm | Check out a little more of Vegas and lose some money

Yeah, I have to do a little gambling while I’m there. I’m super stoked to have just received a surprise cheque in the mail from my health insurance company. Oh yeah… there’s my mad money. I’ve also been told I have to check out the fountains at the Belagio.

Sunday, the final day of the expo, will be just as jam packed with super speakers, but I’ll probably be ready to drop dead by then. I’m going to do my best to get through these sessions, though I may just not get started until the 11:00am session… that would mean I’ll just miss one keynote.

9:00am – 10:00am | Opening keynote on exhibit floor
10:00am – 11:00am | Exhibits and networking
11:00am – 12:00pm | High performance business blogging, OR
11:00am – 12:00pm | Marketing on Facebook, OR
11:00am – 12:00pm | Social Media in the Newsroom (no idea which)
12:15pm – 1:15pm | Maximize ROI on corporate blogs
1:15pm – 3:00pm | Networking reception on exhibit floor
3:00pm – 4:00pm | Avoiding disaster: How not to use social media
4:00pm – 7:30pm | Late check-out, wait at airport
7:30pm – 10:20pm | Flight home

Monday I plan to sleep. A lot.

Photo: wili_hybrid on Flickr

The Beauty of Twitter

Posted on September 7, 2008 by michelle.mack

I have to say, I’m in LOVE with Twitter. I just discovered it a few months ago and already I’ve gained more knowledge from the people and events I follow there than I have from any other single source ever.

I think it gives me the opportunity to feel like I’m on the leading edge. It puts me among the first to hear about some of the coolest, funniest, most shocking or most interesting news and events in the world and on the web and I’ve NEVER been that person before. I was always the awkward kid trying to get in on the conversation but walking in the road to hear what was going on on the sidewalk.

I logged in last night (well, opened the window – who am I kidding? I never log off) to find out that an earthquake had just taken place in San Francisco… 4 minutes ago! I also followed Twitter Search last weekend for #Gustav and saw minute-by-minute accounts of those people who were actually there on the ground in parts of Louisiana. How cool was that?! I realized then and there that by the time the newspapers are printed, what they’re telling is no longer news.

Twitter is where I heard about the BlogWorld & New Media Expo that I’ll be attending in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. Twitter is where I’ve heard about BarCamp Vancouver, which I’m waitlisted to attend at the moment. Twitter is where I hear from and even interact with some of the greatest minds in Social Media today such as @chrisbrogan, @mitchjoel, @briansolis and my local favourite @roxyyo, blogger for the #1 e-commerce blog in the world, GetElastic.

I only hope one day I can contribute as much to those who follow me as I’m getting from those I follow. In the meantime, here’s a little vid to get you laughing:

Thanks everyone!

New Squidoo Lens: Blog World & New Media Expo

Posted on August 30, 2008 by michelle.mack

This morning I created a new squidoo lens for the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, taking place this year on September 20-21 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I’ll be attending this event, along with the E&E Conference on the 19th. I love squidoo because I can see all the relevant information about the event on one page… google news, blog mentions, twitter stream, flickr photos, youtube videos and other random comments about the event without having to search various locations.

Here it is, enjoy!

Not much of a blogger

Posted on August 10, 2008 by michelle.mack

Well, it’s official: I’m not much of a blogger. It’s funny, as much as I think I have great things to say every now and again, I don’t actually have time to write them down at the very moment I think them up. I have the attention span of a flea, and thus there are no entries in my blog.

I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with this blog, to be honest. When I started it, I was just looking to ramble some random thoughts as they arose. I still think that’s sort of what goes through my head, but it doesn’t much make for good reading. There are so many topics I’ve thought about really pursuing to make me stand out from the crowd:

- Marketing – so many people do it, and many better than I could
- Online Marketing/New Media – see above
- Parenting – with one 2 1/2 year old I’m hardly an expert
- Christianity – well, it’s hard to really share those deep places with the world
- Music – I only know about praise and worship music and artists

I’m also thinking of starting to build more Squidoo lenses. They’re my latest obsession and I just earned a whopping $0.07! I know… totally thrilling.

Anyway, I’m currently waiting to hear back from my General Manager to find out if I get approved to go to BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2008 in Las Vegas in September. If I do, I’m sure I’ll have far more ideas after. Until then, if you find yourself reading this blog, you’ll have to make do with my random thoughts in no particular order and with no particular regularity.

Thanks for reading.

im.seeking.balance

The Life of Michelle Mackintosh | Faith, Family & Fulfillment

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