Here we are, its Monday and once again the to do list I had for the weekend didn’t get completed. 

It wasn’t as if I didn’t work over the weekend, of course I did. But that to do list is still there and is still almost full. Why? Well because every weekend I go into it thinking how much I’m going to get done. For whatever reason in my mind I think the weekend will have endless time that I’ll never be able to fill. Sadly it’s only 48 hours and during some of that I do have to sleep… no matter how much I try not to.

Still, the idea of being able to accomplish a lot over the weekend seems like it could happen. You don’t have all these emails coming in or clients calling you. Even if clients do call and email you can wait and answer them back on Monday. After all, it’s the weekend and people don’t really expect you to get back to them as quickly as you would during the week. 

Typically I start the weekend with big goals of getting so much done, anything that I wasn’t able to wrap up during the week and then maybe some other fun project I’d like to work on. Maybe some drawing, reading, or blogging because I also have to find some time to relax. It is the weekend and you need a break no matter how small of a break; you have to recharge somewhat. 

What always happens is Sunday rolls around and I feel way behind, I end up stressing out over what I didn’t get done. Some of it I needed to get done and some of it didn’t matter. 

What it really comes down to is time management, or my lack of it on the weekend. Or maybe I should just be enjoying the weekend and not trying to cram it full of work because that’s what I do during the week. Ha, right! Of course, I’ve already started adding things to my to do list for this weekend. Cause ya know, I’ve got 48 hours to fill. 

Beware of what you post and put online because someone is watching. Just because you’re small and think you’re flying under the radar, doesn’t mean someone isn’t going to find or see your work. And if that work you create is a rip-off of someone else’s or a copy of a tutorial you’re trying to pass off as your own work, someone is going to notice.  

These days it can feel like we need to be making and creating new content all the time whether it’s blog posts, videos, images or audio recordings. And it can get hard to come up with something new and different. It’s often a lot easier to just follow a tutorial or rip-off what someone else has done than think about it yourself. All throughout school we were taught not to copy or plagiarize when writing papers and essays. Today it’s incredibly easy to post a couple sentences into google and see if it was stolen. Where it’s easy with text, it’s not as simple with video and images. It’s often harder to get picked off or called out because someone would need to have seen both works. Depending on how high profile the work is you might be able to stay hidden but trust me you can’t work that way for too long. Someone is going to see the work and call you out.  

Working with so many different businesses and startups at LooseKeys, we want to make sure each one of our videos has a unique look and that can get hard. How many different ways can you show someone holding a smart phone or showing how you can import your friends from Facebook. I try to pull inspiration from all kinds of sources when I’m working and sometimes the work can look similar to the original and sometimes is can look like something totally different and unique. Which is what you want. If I have to stop and think twice about if this thing I made looks too much like what I was pulling inspiration from, that’s the moment I have to go back and make adjustments

My first goal when working is first to make something I’m proud of and if I were to copy something straight out, I can’t be proud of that. My second goal, which is the hardest and often is rarely achieved, is to make something amazing that will get recognized and stand the test of time. I don’t think that’s really happened yet but it might be something you have to look back at in 10 or 20 years to realize it. Simply imitating what someone else created won’t be lasting and won’t be recognized.

Alfred Tennyson said, “Great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.”

Meaning, bad artists or in this case poets deface what they steal. While the great ones take or steal an idea and turn it into something better or at least something different. Pull the best ideas from your sources and you’re going to make something outstanding. 

Everyone draws inspiration from others but there’s a difference between being inspired by someone’s work, learning new techniques and just ripping it off. Original work stands out and cuts through the noise. So next time your working think about what you’re doing, are you happy with this? Would you be proud for this to be the last thing you did? 

So you started a blog, congratulations! It’s fun, right? You have all kinds of plans and dreams for what you’re going to post and share. Soon everyone will be reading and sharing what you have written. You’ll be the go to expert in your niche. 

Fast-forward a couple weeks and the blog that seemed like the greatest idea is just sitting there. You only posted one or two times and now… nothing. This sound familiar? 

Just like that diet you started in January and shortly ditched; your blog is kind of like the digital equivalent of that. You tried and now you’re over it. No one is reading it anyway..

You only have a couple posts and one of those is that you’re starting a blog, so really why should anyone care? 

That passion you had when you first started now just feels like a chore, something that has to get done; it’s work and you started this for fun. 

I totally understand blogging is hard, it takes time to come up with content and even more time to come up with quality content. There are times I find myself wondering why I put in the effort and whether it’s worth it. But I’ll keep writing and sharing. Why? Well because I want to get better, improve my writing and share my knowledge and experience but more importantly I’ve come this far with it and I don’t want to stop now.

Blogging should be an enjoyable experience both for the reader and you. If you do not enjoy blogging then your audience will not enjoy reading it! Shut it off or maybe invest in a faster, lower-effort option like Tumblr.

The whole point of a blog is to update your audience on what you or your business is doing. It’s a lot easier to make sure your personal blog has a personal touch. You’re sharing information about yourself and how you are handling things. When you start blogging for and about your business it is often tricky to make sure the posts are personal and helpful. To humanize your business don’t just post content about your company; it shouldn’t come off as a press release every time you post.

With the LooseKeys blog (which I don’t update nearly as much as my personal blog), I try to include not only our success but also what music we’re listening to during office hours, great places to eat and industry news.

The goal with your blog is to maintain engagement between you and your audience. The more that audience sees a personal connection with you and your business, the more engaged they are going to be.   

It seems like everyone has a newsletter lately that offers special content or a recap on what’s been happening on their blog. It’s a great way to have direct communication between you and your readers.

Blog posts and videos you upload can sometimes get missed with the amount of content getting shared but newsletters go right to the people that are interested in what you or your business has to say. The easier it is for people to get your content, the more likely they’re going to read or watch it.

I’ve been having some really great success with the Chicago Motion Artists newsletter; I’m sharing quality work from members and keeping everyone updated on upcoming meetings. I also have one for the Hop Cast that recaps the last month. With those two newsletters up and running, I figured it was time to get one going for digitalhitchhiker.com and maybe LooseKeys in the future.

I found this awesome service called Chimplr (MailChimp + Tumblr). It adds a button at the top right of the blog under the follow button. This gives anyone the option to follow you on Tumblr, like a post or sign up for the newsletter. When someone clicks the button they get a little popup to add their email address. Making it really simple.

I’m still working on what I’m going to include in the newsletter but you can count on the same great quality you find here and don’t worry I’m not going to fill your inbox with spam.

I’ve been using Tumblr as my primary blog for the last few months and I’ve been loving it. The only issue I have noticed is that posts don’t seem to appear in the search engines as well as they did with the Wordpress blog. Now Tumblr is search engine friendly but it isn’t really that well optimized and well ranked. If search engine optimization is really important then you then might want to go with a more flexible and complex platform like WordPress. But I’d rather keep the ease of posting then build the community. So I’ve been trying to focus on doing everything I can here to improve my SEO on Tumblr. A few things have been working so I’d thought I’d share a few of them.

First let’s look at the titles of your posts, there are four things you can do here to make some big improvements. Let’s start with reversing the order in which titles are displayed on individual post pages, so that the post title displays first, followed by your blog name, i.e. “Tumbr SEO Tips | Digital Hitchhiker” To do this, Go to Customize > Theme > EDIT HTML; Search results for:

<title></title>

and replace it with

<title>{block:SearchPage}, Search results for: {SearchQuery}{/block:SearchPage}{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary} | {/block:PostSummary}{Title}</title>

By putting the post summary first, it makes it more likely to show up on a search for the content than the blog title. While you’re editing the HTML you might also want to adjust the tag, this way the title for your post shows up on this tag. In the Custom HTML look for the <title> tag , that ends with </title>. It should look like this;

<title>{block:SearchPage}, Search results for: {SearchQuery}{/block:SearchPage}{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary} | {/block:PostSummary}{Title}{block:PostTitle} &bull; {PostTitle}{/block:PostTitle}</title>

Now let’s adjust a few more things with the titles. Let’s make sure they are h1’s. Find the {block:Text} area and change

{block:Title}<div class=”title”>{Title}</div>{/block:Title} to {block:Title}<h1>{Title}</h1>{/block:Title} 

You might have to edit the CSS for your h1 after you do this since it will likely mess up the look of the titles. 

Finally we just made the post titles h1’s, so now make the {Title} links a permalink link, this way someone can always click on them to see the post. Your line of code now should look like; 

{block:Title}<h1><a href=”{Permalink}”>{Title}</a></h1>{/block:Title}

Next, just like on any blog if it’s Tumblr or Wordpress you need to make sure to always include a description for your images, photos and links. You should see it in your Tumblr pop up window. Make sure you set custom posts URLs. This is pretty easy to do but its often over looked when your posting in a hurry. But it’s right there in the right sidebar when you’re creating a new post. It can’t be too long but with a five or six word title you should be safe and don’t worry about those spaces, Tumblr automatically replaces them with hyphens for you.

For the last tip, be sure to put a link back to your site and blog in the footer. Your Blog Name

These small changes will help improve your Tumblr SEO, but really having your own domain and website is really the way to go if you’re really need better results. 

You still don’t have that blog up and going? Why not? It’s not like it’s 1998 and blogs are this hot new thing.

Are you afraid no one is going to read it? You shouldn’t worry about who reads or doesn’t read it, blogs are really about what YOU want to produce. I think most people read and look at personal or business blogs to find an off the cuff or personal perspective on a topic that their passionate about.

For the most part, I blog for myself. I’m not concerned that people won’t read it. I’m writing and sharing because I want to create this content regardless of how many readers show up. More or less it would be the same content if it’s 100 readers or 100,000 readers.

Getting these ideas help me get better at my job and hopefully inspire or help someone else. I might have an image I’m proud of or an idea in my head about my work or life that I need to get down. If I’m having these struggles or questions it’s very likely there are others having these same thoughts. If they are having them at the same time I am or years later, they can read about how I handled it. Blogs have a long lasting shelf life, they exist on the internet until you decide to remove them. Which makes it a great marketing tool for yourself and your business if you are writing valuable content. Plus, writing and creating content for a blog keeps you creative and your mind active.

So the answer to “Why Blog?” is “Why Not?”

I’ve finally had enough of my wordpress blog. The constant need to make sure my site and plugins were up to date as well as all the hackers and spammers, finally pushed me over the edge. So I’m now using Tumblr as my main blog. I know many people in the social media space say you shouldn’t use a free service like Tumblr or Posterous for you blog because it takes people away from your main site. But I think since they already have a great community built into these sites you have the chance to reach a larger audience. If your readers like what you’re posting and saying they will take the time to make that click over to your main site and see what it is you do or sell. Sure I could have continued using Tumblr the way I was, as basically a trash dump for funny photos and links back to digitalhitchhiker.com and hop-cast.com. Frankly, it was a mess… I felt as through my brand was getting fragmented and I needed to figure out some places to cut the fat. Since I was using the blog on digitalhitchhiker.com for just my work and my thoughts on the industry, I could easily just move that to Tumblr rather than having two blogs. Here on the new blog you’ll find the same stuff that was on digitalhitchhiker.com but you’ll also find quotes, inspiration, links and viral videos. Tumblr makes it simple to post and stay engaged with the community. They make it very easy for members to share content with one another quickly. This was something I think was lacking on the old blog since sometimes it would be weeks before there was new and interesting content.

Right now I’m in the process of moving, removing and fixing old posts that weren’t formatted or imported correctly. Sadly comments bit the dust from the old site and permalinks from the old site might be broken (I’m trying to clean that up). Since most people found my site from Google searches I don’t think it will be a big deal. Sure Tumblr has some issues… the archives don’t always function or behave correctly and I need to make sure everything is tagged correctly to show up in the search, no solution seems to be perfect. Please bare with me as I update the blog over the next few weeks and you’ll also begin to see a more unified branding look across the board. Here is the new RSS feed if you’d like to update your readers.

The lastest book I just finished from audible was Rework. This book is full of some great advice for those who are planning to start their own business, or currently have their own business. It’s a new business book with a fresh, down-to-earth approach. The core concepts of the book are about creating something people want and doing it as simply and quickly as you can. Because you are better off shipping half a product rather than a whole project that’s been half assed. Jason Fried talks about some of the core strategies they use and live by at 37signals. As always with these sort of books it’s a lot of great ideas that seem good on paper, but it’s always about finding how you can make some of that work in your own life. Topics including, meetings being a waste of time and interruptions ruining the work day are things everyone loves to fight against. My biggest problem I had with the book is that it is really just a rehash of a lot of previous blog post and talks, which is the same issues I think many people had with Gary Vaynerchuk’s, Crush It. If you’re familiar with Jason Fried’s work already the book is just a rehash of the same stuff. As a fan of 37signals, I’m a frequent reader of their blog and listen to the podcast whenever I can. So most of the ideas in the book I’ve already read and thought about and I hope are core concepts I possess. I’ve also seen Jason Fried speak recently and pretty much everything he talked about when I saw him was what was in the book. Which makes sense since it’s his thoughts, concepts and ideas, in the book and on the blog. But my hope was that they would expand on the ideas frequently discussed in their blog and elaborate on some more of their personal experiences in running a very successful small company. Still it’s a nice re-cap in an easily digestible package; the audio version is just over two hours which makes for a quick listen. Most people I’ve talked to that read the book also finished it in about the same amount of time. So if you are not familiar with 37signals or their blog, and you have any plans of starting your own company, or heck even if you don’t this book is filled with great advice.