Punxsutawney Phil Sees Shadow
By · CommentsInteresting Facts About Groundhogs
* Woodchuck and groundhog are common terms for the same animal
* Scientific name: Marmota monax
* Woodchucks can climb trees and also swim
* Groundhogs in the wild eat green plants, such as dandelion greens, clover, plantain and grasses
* They feed heavily in summer, storing fat for winter hibernation
* By February, hibernating woodchucks have lost as much as half their body weight
* So how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? About 318 kg
This morning Punxsutawney Phil came out of his winter slumber from his oak stump and saw his shadow. Phil sees his shadow.
Another 6 weeks of winter will there be!
A Perfect Day – Where Would You Live
By · CommentsI was over on Chris Hughs blog, (definitely check it out WhosChrisHughes.com ) and he asked as the title of one of this blog posts, “What’s Your Perfect Day”?
This is a very subjective question and we all have different answers. So to help with “MY” and maybe “YOUR” introspection, here is the answer to the first question. And even though I’ve seen this question asked before out here on the web, I’ll answer his. Remember, it’s a “Perfect Day”. I will get to several other questions of the set in later posts. So I ask you to also answer this and let someone know what it is either here, on his site, or your own.
So for now…
Where would you live?
I am a novice traveler but only because I’ve not spent time in been to places that most people haven’t even thought about going to. So my definition of a novice means that being or spending time in Paris, London, Rome, or Berlin, I’ve only gone through their airports. Yes, one day I will be going to Katmandu. I’m one that ALWAYS like to take the path that is least traveled. I enjoy being a rebel. I don’t choose paths because there is less resistance, but because I’ve taken a comprehensive critical look at the facts. This doesn’t stifle any of curiosity nor does it say I’m predictable. I’m number one, an individual. (This information really prefaces all my answers to all of Chris’s questions as well.)
I would like to have homes all around the world. They also are not all going to be in the cities either. I may give locations that are large cities or are a country, but only because either I have not been there yet, or would always have to explain where they are located. The places I have got to live that were outside the United States are limited but I’ve been lucky to spend weeks at a time in may places.
I would like to have a home in Moscow Russia. It is quite expensive to live there but I enjoy the strong, (and I mean STRONG), will of the Russian people. There is no worry about NOT feeling politically correct. They feel and live life for what it is and nothing more. There is no alternative euphoric reality. They make it their own. Family is very important as is history.
I would like a home in Bucharest Romania, a city that lived under the worst of the prior Soviet empire under Nicolae Ceauescu. Ceauescu was the Communist ruler put into place that allowed the country to fall into socialist ruin. He later was executed for crimes against the state and humanity in 1989 during the collapse of the Soviet empire. The people were held under thumb for so long that when I visited many times and spent weeks there, they were a joy. They were now free. They welcomed me into their homes and were proud of their families.
I would like a place in Hayward Wisconsin. The area is home to what I consider the best fishing and wildlife in the world. It is basically a city in the north woods of Wisconsin. It is not uncommon to see bears, deer, every kind of fowl imaginable, as well as elk around any corner you happen to drive.
I would like a place between the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks for some of the same reasons though it is up in the mountains.
I would like a place on just about any island in the Caribbean. I would like the amenities of a classic luxury resort but be within 5 miles of a white sanded secluded beach.
A high rise overlooking Chicago would be nice as well. I enjoy the diverse neighborhoods of Chicago where I can go and feel like I’m in Warsaw or Prague. I love the food.
I would like a home situated somewhere between the Pacific Ocean and the tallest mountains of New Zealand. I picture this as a serene place overlooking a flock of sheep and watching the dogs keep them in line.
So I like the variety of between people and seclusion, county life and the big city, of oceans and beaches, and of snow and sun. I’d like to have the freedom to move around anywhere and stay long enough to learn and enjoy the culture, landscape, and climates of many places whether it be Brazil, Copenhagen, Prague, Saigon, Atlanta, or Bismarck. Each are different and unique.
Of course this kind of lifestyle is only possible is you have a way to generate the income you need to live by that is not determined by where you live. This typically is by business that you create on your own as an entrepreneur, and online. You might find that it is actually cheaper than having to live in the United States 12 months a year. In fact, you may be able to live off of 60-70 percent of your U.S. income. If you haven’t read 4 hour work week, I highly recommend that you do. Tim Ferris explains a lot of this in great detail.
Till the next question…
Traffic – Circa 1972
By · CommentsWell I’m all for creating web traffic but here’s some Traffic of a different kind, and maybe time as well.
Live from Santa Monica in 1972
Dear Mister Fantasy play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar
Make it snappy
You are the one who can make us all laugh
But doing that you break out in tears
Please don’t be sad if it was a straight mind you had
We wouldn’t have known you all these years
Enjoy!
Recipe For Successful Branding
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We all know that blogging and other marketing campaigns can really help us build up the buzz behind our brand. We know our goals are also similar in that we want to get people talking and spreading the story about our products and services. But it is going to take more than just blogging and marketing to make this kind of effort pay off. There are three main ingredients that help build and establish our number one goal for personal branding, Trust! We want to establish the kind of trust that will create a positive reaction in our clients and customers. The products and services that we offer need to have:
Quality
While branding builds the recognition for your product, that product or service must have superior quality needed to evoke strong positive emotions in your customers. Your brand cannot gain positive brand recognition if your products and services are don’t offer the kind of quality needed to elicit strong trust in your customers and clients.
Excellent Service
We recognize that customer service is everything in business and know it has been for a long time. When building a strong personal brand, customer service can increase word-of-mouth advertising. So this, in turn, boosts referrals and helps your brand to grow even that much more. Even in businesses that have no product or service that is sold directly, like blogging for a living, remember that customer service still is extremely important. The bottom line is that people will trust the authority of your blog if the posts are written with authority and integrity. A way that you can also build authority and integrity is with timely and well thought out responses to comments from the readers of your blog.
Value
And finally comes value. Value is a growing buzz word with customers and clients these days. If your product or service comes at a price, you have to make sure your buyers get the value they are after. Value should not mean cheap. It should mean quality for the price point. Even the information that you provide for free should have tremendous value. The information you share and provide needs to be accurate, informative, or entertaining. You want your readers to feel like they have gained some insight and have not wasted their time by visiting and reading. If they like the value, whether it is for free or purchasing a product and service from you, they will visit and buy from you once again.
Personal branding builds on all these important and key ingredients in a successful business and puts them in a package that your customers and clients can readily identify with. When you offer rock solid service, impressive quality and value, your products and services will begin to speak loudly. So later down the line when you have new products or services, they will be much more likely to have strong footing in the marketplace solely because of the brand you have built. This personal branding thus enables you to build on your previous successes and allows you to grow your customer and client base. Once this strong personal brand it set up, launching new offerings will become much more effective.
If you’ve found this post helpfull, can you please share it with your Facebook and Twitter followers.
SEO Page and Site Optimization with Wordpress – Part Two
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Well I’m continuing my three Part series on Page and Site Optimization with Wordpress. Today I’ll discuss a few more Wordpress plugins that can help your SEO but are little known.
SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress plugin that will automatically update your new images with the correct ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have (ALT and TITLE) already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them based on the options you set in the settings. This will also make the post W3C/xHTML valid.
ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.
TITLE attribute will have a lessor role but is important for visitors as this text will appear in the tooltip when mouse is moved over the image. It can actually be quite verbose if so chosen. In fact as an example, check out the image I have in the upper right hand corner of this post.
SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links searches for keyword phrases that match the titles of your posts and pages and these phrases are then turned into the links. You also have the option of creating links for your tags and categories. The matching is case insensitive and the original case is preserved. There are examples in the first paragraph of this post. The words Site Optimization and Wordpress plugins are also links to tags of this blog.
Everything happens transparently and you can be edited in the options from the administration settings panel.
SEO Super Comments
The complet concept behind this plugin is presented in Presenting SEO Super Comments Concept which explains it in much more detail.
For each user comment that gets created a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information will be generated. This page will not actually exist in the database, but will be created dynamically using this WordPress plugin.
This then makes the site’s comments visible to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawlable, indexable and rankable content! So by just implementing this plugin, your comments will get crawled and indexed.
All three of these plugins are written by Vladimir Prelovac. You can check out his site at www.PRELOVAC.com
I will finish up with the plugins I now use for SEO within the next couple of days. Till then, have a remarkable day!
SEO Page and Site Optimization with Wordpress – Part One
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I had promised that I was going to provide you with some Wordpress plugins I use for page and site optimization. Instead of having a huge list I thought I’d give a few of the 6-7 plugins that I use for SEO purposes each of the next few days or so. While most of these are no-brainers and will never have to worry about again, some will have to work in conjunction with a few minutes of extra time per post. I will explain each in detail. These plugins are for on-page and on-site SEO Optimization. Because the nature of SEO is always evolving, the use of these plugins sometimes go obsolete because they get incorporated into other plugins and sometimes into the Wordpress base product itself. So feast your eyes on these first two:
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer The ability to PING is what makes blog software highly favorable to static sites. So what is the definition of the word PING?
What Wordpress does is it PINGS or notifys various web servers/sites that you have published a new blog post. These PING sites then do a variety of things. Some add your blog to their directory. Some notify the search engines to come and index your new content. Some add and update blog directories. Basically pinging notifies sites that there is new content. By default, Wordpress give you ONE site that does the pinging. That is http://rpc.pingomatic.com . To be honest this site then notifies several other sites, but I prefer a more comprehensive list. I use 147! Here’s the list. (Do a right click Save As)
So if your like me, right after you figure you’ve got your post completed and hit the Publish button, you go to look at what it looks like. Firstly you should be using preview to see what it looks like, but I know we still forget something, discover a mis-spelling, want to add boldness to a phrase, create space between a paragraph, you name it. So when you hit publish, you are pinging to the list. Then when you bold some text and click update, you are pinging your list. When you add an image and updating you are pinging your list. In fact every time you publish or update you are pinging. This tends to create several pings within a very short time. What can end up happening is the ping sites can BAN you for excessive pinging. Not if you install MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. With the plugin you can limit excessive pinging and control how many times you can ping in a given duration. I have mine set at 1 every 15 minutes is the maximum. You do have to register to get the plugin. You can find it here.
SEO Slugs
Wordpress has come a long way since it early versions with the use of permalinks and url structures. As great as using %postname% is, there is still something that you can do to even further optimize your urls. Enter SEO slugs. What does SEO slugs do? This plugin strips several of the common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slugs appear optimized for SEO. As an example, a post titled “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” will become http://www.chriskilber.com/immediately-higher-rankings/. You still have the ability to override it by editing your url slug.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a few more.
Enjoy and have a remarkable day.
Psychology of Personal Branding
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Personal Branding
We’ve all heard about Personal Branding. It is your unique selling proposition that will differentiate you from all others. The great thing about Personal Branding is that you don’t have to pretend to be someone your not. In fact, it doesn’t have to perfect either. You will attract people as long as you are genuine in your message.
Psychology
There are a lot of psychological factors in play that cause people to be “Attracted” to you. I don’t mean strictly physical appearance here, though that can have a factor. If you can figure out what these psychological factors are and feature or accent your strong points and identify where you can improve in the others, you will be able to separate yourself from all the others. This may take a bit of introspection on your part. The number one reason people are attracted to someone else is that they feel that they are just like them for a host of reasons. They are looking to try to identify themselves with others.
Characteristics
What makes people identify themselves with others is different for everyone. It can be a combination of many things. It can be, and not limited to, age, gender, physical characteristics, experience, vocabulary, exuberance, and presence. It can differ from day to day as well. It depends on each person’s frame of mind. So no matter what your brand or what your strengths or weakness are, there will be someone who will connect with you, start following you, and start studying what you are doing. In a nutshell, you can’t be everything to everybody, nor should you try. You just need to be YOU. However, there are things that you should try to do though that will attract more than just a narrow band of people.
Your Voice
In your writing, your video, and communications you need to sound confident and sure of yourself. People are attracted to confidence, plain and simple. You need to be honest. If you need to write about a concept that you are not totally unsure of, let your readers know. By being honest and admitting some of your shortcomings people will feel an attraction because they know they are not perfect as well. You can divulge these with a pact to learn more about them and a promise then to write about what you learned. This will provide your readers with a sense of belonging while you discover together.
Where To Go From Here
Personal branding isn’t something that occurs right from the get go. It is something that evolves. You will need to take the time to learn to write better. We all do. What’s the best way? By writing of course. You also will need to read the writing of others, especially successful writers and bloggers. Try and see how they frame their ideas and concepts. Try and isolate how they involve their readers and try to start incorporating those concepts into your own writing. I know I tend to write more in an expository manner and it can become a little dry at times. So these little tips, which actually aren’t so little, will provide you with the means to create a Personal Brand that will shine above the rest.
Others Moccasins
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My friend Steve has a post over on his blog called No Comparison… that got me thinking quite a bit. Truth be told, just about all of Steve’s posts do. He has a gift of “waxing poetic” as they say, in a very understandable and genuine way.
In the post Steve tells us of someone he knows that is going through financial difficulties. He eventually tells the person about a financial loss he had incurred at one time dwarfing theirs. He doesn’t go into exact detail as to what happened or what was said other than at the end there was hope for this person. Hope.
So no matter what our human frailties, what our shortcomings, what we may think we are lacking, most of us have walked down a few paths that many may not have. We have walked in others moccasins, so to speak. You see we all do have experience and vision that we are able to convey to others. Not all of it is going to be something we are proud of. But as Steve points out, It won’t be your frailty that will be exposed, it will be our authenticity.
Thank you once again Steve.
Questions:
1. What have you gone through that could help someone?
2. What types of relationships could you foster by being authentic?
3. Could you incorporate this into your online business?
4. What would your business do if you worked with a lot authentic people?
Have a great and safe New Year.
New Motivate Wordpress Plugin
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I know I know, Some of you hear the famous voice of Louis Armstrong singing Hello Dolly when you read the default message you find on all Wordpress installations in the Dashboards. Unfortunately, not all of us hear good ole Louis. I hear Carol Channing! Maybe all of you don’t know who she is but she did a release of the song as well.
So as a New Years gift to all, I am releasing a plugin called Motivate! So instead of seeing various lyrics of the song, Hello Dolly, you will see a random quote that will Motivate you.
Find it over at my Tribeware Site.
Get Away – Stopping Stress In Your Life
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So I’m continuing my series on how to reduce stress in your life. So today I’m writing about “Getting Away”. I love getting away. In fact, shh… don’t tell anyone, but I still sneak out to go on country drives on small county roads close to my house, all by myself. I get to go slow and enjoy the nature. It usually about a twenty mile drive. You see, I’m literally only one minute from being out in the country. Also, I’m only 5 minutes away from a state park where I can walk down to a cool waterfall. That’s what I enjoy doing to relax.
Now I know there are many people who plan on relaxing. They work their butts off for fifty weeks a year and think the two weeks will replenish them. Many also work themselves into stressful situations planning for those two weeks. Planning is a good thing, especially if you do it early enough, but last minute planning creates stress. If you do create a checklist well enough in advance, you can manage to take a task at a time and complete it. If you do start feeling stress working on the tasks or if you did wait till the last minute, take a break. Get away. Close your eyes. Take a big breath. Take a relaxing drive or a walk in the park. If you put it in perspective, you’ll wonder why you were in a stressful situation to begin with. Remember, most stress is brought on by yourself and is based on a premise that something will occur that is unpleasant. Nine times out of ten, it won’t occur. Why? You planned.
New Media Business Opps
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Chris Brogan has a simple but powerful message to small business people, in this case a Realtor.
It is simple in that all he is saying is if I were a Realtor I would:
I’d write a blog about the location where I was selling. I’d take tons of pictures and post them on the blog. I’d shoot walking tour videos all the time with a Flip camera and post them. I’d shoot interview videos with people from my community. I’d host meetups and tweetups for local residents, inviting people who are house hunting. I’d find various niche communities (developers, stonemasons, parents) and start community platforms for them on Ning. I’d empower as many local businesses onto the Net as I could, and help them get successful. I’d encourage as many people in my community to join Twitter as possible, and I’d bundle them into a list.
Great Advise Chris!
So if your reading this right now, if I were a gambling man, I would bet that you are also an entrepreneur or are contemplating being one. I’ll guess you also know about Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and other Internet sites useful to business.
There is one thing I can almost guarantee, is there are local businesses that for one reason or another recognize that social media is viable for expansion of their businesses. In fact, it can be much much more effective than printed advertising. In some cases they may already have some type of local networking going on right now and all that would be required is to plug in the social media portion. But they may not know exactly how to implement it.
What I’m driving at is it could be YOU that shows your local businesses how to go about doing this. Show and teach them about attraction marketing. Show them that VALUE means a lot to people. Teach them that Personal Branding will separate them from their competition. Teach them how to blog, how to set up newsletters, how to tweet, how to set up a Business Fan page. You see if they already have an advertising budget, all you have to do is say, “How would you like to learn how to cut your advertising budget almost in half and eventually double your business.” Make sure you have a business plan to be able to present to them, make it a fair price, and you will get customers. You can make money on the training and coaching, on potential products related to internet business, and the business model will not be much different from business to business. So once you get it under your belt, it will be easy! So for 2010, what say you? How many businesses will you help?
Exercise – Stopping Stress Your Life
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The first thing that comes to mind with ways to minimize stress is exercise, plain and simple. So the number one excuse is time. So whats the best way. Well I’ve been doing some research on someone named Tabata. Dr. Izumi Tabata is a former researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Fitness and Sports. In a study he found that someone training in HIT (High Intensity Training) vs some LIT (Low Intensity Training) that the time it took for the HIT to achieve more benefits than the LIT subjects was a factor of 72 to 1. That is not a typo. This was preformed over 8 days. This found that 8 days of HIT lasting only 280 seconds elevated both GLUT-4 and the maximal glucose transport activity to that of the people preforming the LIT.
A HIT cycle consists of doing high intensity exercise for 20 seconds and resting 10 then repeating it. The workouts I’m now doing last 6 simple minutes. If that type of exercise isn’t for you, going hiking, or rowing, palates, and yoga can also accomplish the same thing, but will require much much more time. I plan on alternating between the two on off days and resting on Sunday.
So as the new year is coming, if you want to learn more about Tabita training check out http://www.squidoo.com/tabatatraining. I’ve been an advocate of using Kettlebell training and Tabita Training fits hand and glove with Kettlebells. You can find out more about Kettlebell training at www.DragonDoor.com. Remember, it will reduce stress in your life and give you much more energy!
Till next time.







