With all the ups and downs on Home with Heather over the last several months, I’ve been really wondering what is the best use of the hours I have available to devote to blogging.  A few days ago, I wrote about Daily Posts. Are you Wasting Your time?  It’s a question that has really peaked my curiosity.

I’ve decided to do a bit of testing in February, and then share my results at the end of the month.

To date, as I write this post January has shown the following on Home with Heather. Again, please keep in mind that this is my slowest blogging month in a long time but I do need some numbers to start with…

• Unique Visitors - 2603
• Number of Visits - 6203
• Page Views - 46288
• RSS Subscribers - 90
• Posts written - 11
• Tech Authority - 166

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Action Plan, blog traffic, Goals and Plans, managing your blogging day, time mangement

Totally off topic.

My mother phoned this morning. Seems she’s decided it’s time to start cleaning and purging out her basement. Keep in mind she has a 6 bedroom house and has lived in it for close to 30 years. There is A LOT of stuff to go through.

So she’s been finding ‘treasures’ all day. Some of the stuff I’m sure is not anything to keep, she just doesn’t have the heart to throw it out. But some stuff was good…

She found a box FULL of my school year books!!!!! I had her bring them over right away.

OMG - I thought I had lost those books 20 years ago, and I thought they were gone for good. When I first moved out, I moved many, many times inside of a year and I just thought it was a box that had been lost because I haven’t been able to find it in that long. In fact, I thought I had looked in mom’s basement years back. Guess I must not have looked in the right spot.

So instead of getting any kind of meaningful work done this afternoon, I’ve been going through all of these old yearbooks from the ’80’s.

I have to say…

What the hell were we thinking?!? What was with that HAIR and those glasses… they covered your whole, entire face!!!!

It’s one thing to see the 80’s hair in old movies. But seeing it on my friends, and me!!! Holy crap, it’s a good thing that was just a trend and that it stayed in the 80’s.

It was really fun to spend some time going through the books. Certainly something that I will treasure.

I’ve said before on this blog that “I didn’t do school much”. It was more fun to go to school, pick up my friends (I was the one with the car) and go for coffee, or to try and get in some sort of trouble for the day!!

After high school I didn’t keep in touch with most people from school. I had forgotten many of them. It was really cool to see the books, brought back many memories.  Some good… some not so good.

So that’s it for my break, better get back at it.  If you want a good laugh, go pull out your old yearbooks, grab a cup of coffee and have a look.

Expect the Best,

80s hair, highscool, memories, Taking a Break!

This is just a really quick post to say “Don’t Do This…”

I’m finding that I really quite like Blogging Zoom as a place to display my content. Also I’ve found many great articles there from other bloggers. One bad thing about Blogging Zoom is that I’m finding myself spending a fair bit of time on it. I think I’m gonna have to start setting the egg timer.

Of course, I haven’t had any content to submit up until the last few days. Being in a hurry, I didn’t follow “the rules” and could have got myself banned for it.

When you submit new content to BZ, it has bolded, in caps, with a red font (basically you can’t miss it) [ DO NOT COPY PASTE ] I thought, not a big deal. I’ll take the time next post… Turns out it was a big deal.

You can read the full post here, but basically what you’re doing when you copy and paste is really hurting yourself.

Every time you copy and paste your content in a submission let it be here at Blogging Zoom or any other social voting site you are giving yourself and Blogging Zoom a duplicate content filter penalty with Google.

I never really thought of it like that before. Needless to say, I’ve gone back and corrected the error. And all is good again.

In an upcoming post, I will be doing a review of all of the social networking sites that I have been using, and tell you what is working for me and what isn’t. In fact, after that post, I will be adding/removing networking buttons on my blog to reflect more accurately what I use.

Until then…

Expect the Best,

blog, blogging zoom, bz, copy and paste, Social Networking, zoom, zooming

I’ve been changing a few things around on the Home with Heather’s side bar the last few days. Change can sometimes be a good thing, keeps things fresh. The first thing that got the boot was the Blog Rush Widget.

I was one of the very first on the band wagon with the BlogRush Widget back in September of last year. It was really exciting at the time. John Reese had the whole blogosphere talking and adding it to their blogs. The promise was that it would bring traffic for the “little guy”. In October, it actually did bring me a small bit of traffic - about 2 % of my unique visitors were brought in through the widget. In November and December combined, it was about .6 of a percent. That’s it!!

Now, I’ll take traffic from any source that I can get it… BUT that widget was taking up a huge amount of my most valuable real estate on the sidebar for 12 clicks in December. That’s just not worth it.

I have found many other sources that bring me much better targeted traffic than the Blog Rush Widget. I even played by the rules, displayed the widget ‘about the fold’ on my sidebar so that it would always be seen.

I really respect John Reese and what he has to say. Generally it’s bang on. Why did the widget fail so miserably? Not sure. My original thought was that all the credits were being given to the blogs with more traffic. I don’t really think that is the case because of read of some of the bigger blogs taking the widget down as well. Blogs like Problogger, and Clicknewz.

Are you still using the Blog Rush Widget? If so, is it bringing you in traffic? If not, why do you think that it failed?

Now I guess I’m curious about what others are thinking, so leave me a comment won’t you?

Expect the Best,

blog real estate, Blog Rush, Blog Rush Mistakes, blogrush, free traffic, john reese, side bar, Social Networking, traffic, Web 2.0, widget

O.K. - I don’t mean to be a whiner… but it is really freakin cold here!! Highways are closing, travel not recommended. Right now outside it is -28 C but with the wind it is -44 C

The snow is drifting all over the place. My driveway is one place the snow really likes to go.

Most of the schools in the area are closed. My kids schools didn’t close, but I’m not sending them anyway.

I guess on a brighter note, I should be very thankful that I don’t have to go out of the house today to a ‘job’ . I felt really sorry for the radio annoucers that had to be into work for 5:00 this morning… they sounded pretty cold.

Good day to stay home keep warm, and keep blogging. I can’t get out of my driveway right now anyway…

Alright, I’m done my little hissy fit… Not a really fun way to spend a birthday though Anyone want to come and shovel for me??

Expect the Best,

birthday, blizzard, rant, Whats on my Mind?, yuck

How crucial is making a daily post to the overall success of your blog?

In the past, my goal was to post a new blog each and every day. If not a minimum of 5 days each week.

Sometimes that is very difficult.

I like to put up content that is going to bring some kind of value, but some days it felt like I was just blogging about anything and everything just to put up that daily post. And of course one of the ‘golden’ rules of a successful blog is Quality Content.

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blog success, Blogging, daily posts, game plan, rss, traffic, unique visitors

I haven’t done a Sunday funny post in what seems like forever.

I do hope you are enjoying your weekend wherever you’re reading this from.

Here in Alberta where I’m located we are having a heck of a storm blow in this afternoon. I actually just got back from a highway run to pick up my youngest son. Is is ever nasty out there!!
Blowing snow and the temp has dropped about 25 degrees in the matter of a few hours. The weather is forecasting temps of about -45 C for tomorrow with the wind chill. That will sure make me want to get out of bed in the morning… not!!

Anyway, I like to put up these posts as a way to show my appreciation for you my readers. My sister has really gotten me onto this guy lately. I just love Jeff Dunham, think he’s hilarious. Looks like Peanut was having a bit of a bad day

Enjoy!!

Expect the Best,

hilarious, jeff dunham, peanut, sunday funny, Taking a Break!