You can’t please everybody, so don’t even try.
Be honest with yourself when you decide what, how and why you write in your blog or on your website or even in your marketing materials. You will want to be genuine with your audience and the only way to do that is to own it. You can try to fake it, but I don’t suggest that because it will make your life harder than necessary. It may even cause you to put…

You have a great product or service and you know who your audience is (or have a vague idea). The problem is that you aren’t quite sure how to capture their attention with heart tugging headlines or a spicy sales pitch. That is because your approach is all-wrong. You aren’t using the words that elicit a reaction, create an instant attraction or peak their curiosity. You aren’t writing for them at all- you are writing for yourself.
This may seem…

In today’s SMM post, Mike talks about branding with social media. Mike talks about 3 important factors in branding: personality, association, and attention. Really good stuff, check out the video:

Ever see one of these name drop posts?:
“What Richard Simmons Can Teach You About Blogging”
“What the Ghost of Christmas Past Can Teach You About Social Media”
Basically, these boil down to someone who has nothing to do with the post’s topic….teaching you….about…the post’s topic. That’s clever and fresh, right? Wrong.
Everyone’s done one of these posts. ProBlogger’s done it. David Risley’s done it. Copyblogger’s done it about a dozen times (my personal favorite? Johnny B. Truant and the…

Success is in the mind of the beholder.
Measuring the success of a blog can be quite ambiguous and it should be based on the long term and short-term goals of the individual or business.
Consider how you measure the success of your blog.
Is it by…

the number of visitors?
the number of comments?
the Retweets?
the links from other bloggers to your posts?

How you assign a value on any one of these items depends on WHY you…

As I floated around the blogosphere this morning, enjoying my coffee, commenting on a few articles, tweeting, cleaning out my inbox, you know…. my usual morning rituals, I found that a particular site I left a comment on tried to add me to their email list just because I left a comment. Bad move in my eyes.
I left a couple of comments on a site that I hadn’t visited in a while. I have cut way back on my…