I recently joined a blogging community called Problogger.com.  This is a group of bloggers that range in experience full time proffesional bloggers to bloggers who are just starting out. There is a section in the Problogger forum to invite fellow bloggers critique your blog, so you can improve and produce a higher quality blog.  The feedback I received was very enlightening and provided me with several action items to help my blog improve.  Everyone who commented about my blog was very helpful.  I plan over the next couple of days to address those issues and then try again. ...

I have learned a new lesson related to my craft. Apparently, some websites practice what is called website scraping. This is where they grab your content and then republish it as their own.  Yesterday, I posted “9 ways to keep your mind sharp“.  On that very same day, another site took my post and posted it on their website.  No mention of my name, just a Read More link that pointed to my post.  I discovered this post because of this thing called a pingback.  Pingback: A pingback is a message that tells your website that they are linking to you.  The website doing the...

One of the goals I have for my blog is to be visited by someone from each of the 50 United States.  Tracking this data has been easy with Google Analytics.  My blog has been consistently visited by people from 45 states. The only states not visiting are: State Population Rank Rhode Island 43rd Montana 44th Delaware 45th Alaska 47th Wyoming 50th In my quest to meet this goal, I have been looking into the demographics of these states.  I am trying to figure out why I haven’t received any visits from these states.  So far, the only  thing I see in common are they have...

The first exercise in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is to write an elevator speech for my blog.  This has been a little challenging for me because I never though of trying to describe my blog to someone in an elevator speech before.  But this is a great exercise to try and put in words what this blog is about. The short elevator speech: Wes’ Words of Wisdom teaches through sharing life lessons learned. The long elevator speech: Wes’ Words of Wisdom is a collection of reviews, tutorials, technical guides, and inpirational essays usually anecdotal in nature.  The primary...

Familiarity breeds contempt – an idiom that basically says, the better you know something, the less you respect it.  A simple example is like when you first learn that knives are sharp, you’re very careful not to cut yourself.  After using them for many years, you sometimes get careless and misuse or abuse them.  The end result is you might cut yourself.  I have a few scars that show when I didn’t respect knives like I should. Sometimes, remaining in our comfort zone, repeating the same thing day after day can lead to neglect or disrespect of things we once valued. ...