Essential tasks when starting a blog

Following from an old post of Rajesh Setty that I am not able to find right now, I have gathered a very important list of tasks that you must perform when starting a blog. And when I say "you", I certainly also mean "me". I think I have been a little too caught up in making my blog look really nice (no shame in that) as well as creating enough interesting content for people out there to read.

I have realised that there are many factors that will determine if what I am trying to transmit to the world (not literally, it's just a figure of speech) is not buried underneath a massive pile of Internet junk. The time has come to dedicate some of my efforts to publicize my blog (makes no sense to link there I know) and so I hope this tasklist will be as helpful for you as for me. Any feedback on how it served to other people would be appreciated.

So here are 17 Essential Steps to... Starting a Blog:

1. Register a domain name with your name and redirect to your blog.
2. Get a “Creative Commons License”.
3. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner.
4. Implement subscription chiclets.
5. Enable search.
6. Claim your blog at Technorati.
7. Allow users to get your blog via email.
8. Link to your profile.
9. Link to your photo album.
10. Announce your blog to the world.
11. Provide a way to contact you.
12. Link to your bookmarks.
13. Create meaningful categories and chunk content.
14. Put your photo on the home page.
15. Ensure that your RSS feeds are OK.
16. Geo-tag your blog at Feedmap.
17. Include a blog link in your email signature.

Here are some other things to do that I have collected around the web:

• Add a tag cloud to show which categories are most popular.
• Have a custom favicon. This allows subscribers to your blog to see this custom icon in their newsreader.
• Post a Flickr badge on your blog. You can use the badges supplied by Flickr.
• Install an industrial-strength comment spam plug-in into your blog, such as Akismet or Spam Karma.
• Give your blog a boost in link popularity. Link to it from your home page and ask customers, suppliers, business partners, and colleagues to link to it too.

This is quite a good collection of tasks to accomplish in order to get people to get to know your blog, appreciate it and come back to read it again. I have already completed a few things, even as I was writing this post. What have you done up to date?

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A Symphony of Lights

Hong Kong is a city that I have my eyes fixed on. As I have already mentioned before, I spent 3 months working in that energy filled city. The night I had to fly back to the United Kingdom, I decided to go and see the Symphony of Lights show that occurs everyday at 8pm. Surprisingly I had not seen it in the whole time I had been there for many different reasons but at last I would be able to do so, exactly 5 hours before I left.

I had been told by several people that the show was nothing too special, even boring and not worth watching. I decided that it was something I had to see before I left Hong Kong, so I took a ferry from Victoria Harbour to Kowloon's side and positioned myself on the front line as a giddy little kid.

What happened next I am not too sure as I was left amazed by what was occurring before me. An all-round vision of coloured lights, laser beams and searchlights were synchronised with unbelievably placid music which almost brought tears to my eyes (maybe one or two actually did come, why lie?).

When this exquisite spectacle came to an end, I remained on the cold stone I was sitting feeling surprisingly positive. That day I had been extremely sad as I would have to leave Hong Kong. Although I had faced incredible cultural differences during my stay, I had somehow found a place where many things just fell into place within me. It was then that I realised that I would be back there, but not before becoming a better student, entrepreneur and specially, human being.

Information and photos on the Symphony of Lights can be found here .

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Korean mothers no longer prefer to have sons

Korean mothers prefered to have sons due to the following reasons:

1. To have personal satisfaction - 67%

2. To ensure family happiness - 51%

3. To keep the family lineage - 19%.

A survey taken every three years during the last two decades showed these results concerning mother's preferences:

- In the year 1991, 40.5% of mothers said they must have a son.
- In the year 2003, just 14.1% needed a son.
- Last year the percentage arrived at its lowest yet, a pathetic 10.1%.

However, the upside on this is that women living in the countryside are more likely to still want a boy compared to the urbanite moms.

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Negotiation

I have extracted a few tips from property dealer Neville Spiers on how to negotiate. On my opinion these are concise and thought provoking, and that used correctly they can be of great use. They allow you to throw your "opponent" off balance and so allowing you to confuse him into where you want him to be.

Here are 10 Easy Tips to... Negotiation:

1. Do your homework. Know your subject well, understand the rules of the game, the people you are playing with and the people you are playing against.
   
2. Get your questions in order. Ensure your questions are in a logical sequence.
   
3. Watch the body language. Watch how they react and also watch your own body language, so that you don't give away more information than you intend. Listen carefully especially on the telephone.
   
4. Be prepared to lose. Know what you are prepared to give up in order to get the final results that you desire.
   
5. Keep your opponent off balance, until you can throw him/her. This is based on judo priciples. Don't let your opponent settle and think of the strategy they prepared beforehand.
   
6. Lull your opponent into a false sense of security.
   
7. Be flexible. Be prepared to change your tactic depending on how the situation evolves.
   
8. Be illogical, if necessary. For example, don't give round numbers but odd numbers. This will drive your opponents absolutely mad and completely unnerve them.
   
9. Use set pieces with care. The other side may work out what your strategy is, and do something to unsettle you.
10. Don't be afraid of opposing armies, even if you are alone. Look for differences between them, tap your wedges into those differences and use that to divide them.

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Seniors in college look for husbands instead of jobs

There is a fierce market in China within the job hunting industry. That's why local dating companies are becoming good use to girls that are about to graduate from college. There is such high competition within the industry that seniors in college are more concerned in finding husbands before they graduate instead of jobs. Whoever fulfills their shallow expectations will have the luck to share their life with them, if they agree to such easy and uninteresting proposal that is.

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Donald Trump slashes against Rosie O'Donnell

A clip from a while back that still surprises me everytime I see it. In my last post I discussed Branding and this video clearly affects it. I would think that there would've been negative implications towards de Trump brand but I am not quite sure how the matter followed-up. For me, the shining image of a business icon has clearly been diminished.

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Branding your name

One of the most important steps in business is Branding your name. It requires an ongoing effort and is often referred to as the "good will" portion of your busines. A carefully built brand is worth more in actual $ than all the tangible assets put together. They have incredible selling power as they inspire respect when mentioned.

Here are 10 Easy Tips to....Branding your name

1. Decide on the brand - quite easy? Not always. Be imaginative. Whatever it is, remember to stick to it everywhere you want to brand yourself.
2. Start a Blog - it will give people an insight into your personality and what you're passionate about. In a way, it's like giving an interview to anybody who will listen. If you're going to talk about personal stuff, just be careful about what you say. Some sample pages to get started are Blogger or Wordpress.
   
3. Register your brand as a domain name - give people an easy way to get to you. It's your online business card. Nurture it and take care of it.
   
4. Actively comment on ideas and other people's news stories and blogs - I advise on NOT leaving spam comments. It will ruin your reputation. Try to add something constructive to the discussion. Take your time to do it too.
5. Put your portfolio online - If you are a musician, put your music on Myspace. If you are an artist, put your work on VoodooChilli If you are a professional, put your CV...where?. I believe the best professional site is http://www.linkedin.com/. Present yourself in a good manner and let people see it.
6. Update a page with all your collaborations - this can be done within your blog. You don't necessarily have to own the pages you link to, but make sure that you have something there.
7. Submit articles to online news sites - this can be within your local newspaper or a web site you usually visit. More commonly in the online world however, these are some sample sites : Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, Tailrank, Technorati or Netscape.
   
8. Answer people's questions - this is quite similar to posting comments. The difference is to actually address a query another person has made. It will get you a lot of credibility if you answer questions correctly and it will get you on the path to becomeing a subject matter expert in a certain area. Your opinion will be important to other people.
   
9. Learn about Search Engine Optimisation - learn about what makes the search engines tick so you can at least make an attempt at optimising your blog and your sites to rank higher. A few sample sites that deal with SEO are as follows: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Search Marketing Standard.
10. Monitor what the search engines say about you - Periodically perform searches about yourself, both on websites and on blogs (some sample sites are Technorati, Google Blogsearch and Bloglines). Use variations of your name and expertise in order to search this. Some search engines give you the ability to get alerts when something new relating to your search term appears in their index. An example of this is Google Alerts. If you can't find anything about yourself, you may want to join a few social networking sites. Doing this allows for there to be more online entries about yourself. Don't forget, most people still use search engines if they want to find you online. The more there is out there, the easier it is to find you. In the longer term, it may become a hassle to keep all your profiles up to date, but what you ideally want initially is to get your brand name out there. It's probably a good idea to not have embarrassing materials about yourself on the social networking sites you join, but leave enough information so that people can at least figure out that it's you. Some sample social networking sites are : MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn.

To write this material I have used various recommendations throughout the internet and have also added my personal views on the matter.

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Disturbing US poll answers

Last night Zogby International and 463 Communications released the results of a very interesting poll concerning the attitudes of around 10,000 US adults on the internet. This was a completely serious poll although the obtained results may mislead people into thinking the validity of its users, or even sanity.

Summarizing conclusions included, a solid high percentage of people:

• are open to brain implants that will allow them to connect to the internet with their minds and that will also allow track their children's location at all time.
  
• believe that governemnt censorhip of online video content is completely acceptable.
  
• say that the internet makes them feel closer to God and that it could replace their signifcant other
  

The results obtained from this poll are clearly frightening to me. I wonder what concept of the internet and future technologies some people have. How far are we ready to go?

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Business ideas

Here's a few business ideas for you to think about!

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Me and Technology

Even though I have always been interested in technology all of my life I have come to realise that I have drifted apart in the recent years. I have developed a taste for what lies behind the commercialisation of what is out there and have become disconnected with what is actually on the market.

Over the past three months I have been furiously involved in a one way relationship with the internet, realising how development within it is so much easier. I think when people talk about the internet and how much it contains, they don't really assume what they are saying. The vast amount of places I have visited during this time is just unbeliavable. At every corner, new webpages with companies offering new useful services appear. New amazing and interesting possibilities are emerging and most of us don't even know it.

At the moment, it seems all this information, all these wonderful services that we believe we don't need, are scattered on a 3 legged table about to break. It's all chaos. But the truth is that the big puzzle has already begun to be completed and the big players in the game have started to take sides. The key element to deliver high quality services at the moment lies within " Information Integration".

I myself have begun to use iGoogle after reading several reviews on competitor Netvibes. I find this tool extremely helpful as I can hover over matters and take everything in just with one glance. It's as if I had someone quickly reporting a summary of the vast amount of information I don't have time to read. I you haven't tried it yet, I advice you should. Also if someone is using or starting to use Netvibes maybe they can give feedback on it too.

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New look

I have given the blog a whole new look as you can obviously see. After quite a while of playing about with templates and layout I decided to give the html code a go. I had never done anything with html and have to say that after crossing the inital stage of perplexity it all got increasingly easy. Obviously I am no programmer (I like fresh air too much) but I feel a slight sense of accomplishment with this minute task I have just done.

The page now looks like a web page, which means there are different areas you can access. The top menu has new areas you can dive in and explore. I have also placed a page for a forum for the near future. I believe that me talking all the time in this blog can only bring me a certain improvement. Apart from having my voice heard through this, I am also looking to hear other voices, as open discussion can be the key to great realisations within oneself.

There is also an "Enjoy" section where different amusing things will be posted for people to....enjoy! This week I have started with a few business ideas from a great marketer, Alig G.

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On the way!

To tell the truth, I have to say that this whole thing is taking more of my time than I expected. Not necesarily because there's anything complicated to it, but because there are so many things that can be done with it. I am beggining to find that the this whole process might just be worth it. At every small thing that I try, a handful of other possibilities appear before me. The good thing about it is that most of them look pretty interesting.

Ultimately, what really counts is content. That what I can write will be of use to other people. But, I find myself playing about with most of the other possibilities at place within the blog. For example, making it look good. I do not dislike the given templates from blogspot. I think they are simple but smart. At the same time though I would like to give my blog a higher touch of class combined with my own orignality. I want it to be unique (just like everybody does, which in fact makes us "not" unique; that's another story though).

I also do know that there are most probably hundred of thousands of blogs using the custom blogspot templates. If I offer something different, it might catch their eye and pull them closer to reading my extraordinary content ( Well, I think it's extraordinary, don't you? Don't answer that. Although I know you agree with me. Silence.)

Jokes aside, I am completely aware I have a long way ahead of me as respect must be earnt through hard work and patience. Even so, I am flooding with emotion as I embark on this prosperous journey.

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