Margie Clayman

Once upon a time, I was noticing that my blog traffic was kind of going the opposite direction from where I wanted it to. I was feeling kinda frustrated, kinda down. Let’s face it, when you put a lot of work into a blog site, you hate to see your traffic numbers go down. At around the same time, I came upon some pictures of a person who had been really important to me who had passed away rather suddenly. The thought went through my head that I could write a post about that person and how that had all gone down. I knew that such a post would do well. As everyone states in the blogosphere, people dig the personal. But what would that really have been doing? I would have been using the death of a very real person to boost my traffic numbers for a day. I deleted my drafts and went in a completely different direction.

I needed to be able to sleep at night.

[Read more…] about How do you sleep at night?

Inevitably, you are going to run into a person in the world of Social Media who just drives you nuts. Everything that they say seems, for lack of a better word, really dumb to you. With every tweet, they dig deeper under your skin. But you know that lashing out at someone is probably inappropriate. Still, you find yourself drawn to their blog posts to see what they are saying. You are part of the silent masses.

Then, one day, it all comes to a head. Your coffee was gross AND spilled all over your car. Your sweet and sour chicken came without the sweet and sour sauce at lunch (this really happened to me once). And then, to top it all off, your favorite person wrote a post that goes against everything you believe. It’s all just too much. You decide to leave a comment on this once, and all of a sudden, you become the comment equivalent of a screaming banshee. Upon later reflection, you might even wonder who that person is. Damage done though. You just went from silent to troll.

[Read more…] about From Silent to Troll in 60 Seconds

When you start out in the blogosphere, there are two words that you hear over and over again.

1. Content – Because let’s face it, if you’re not writing anything, your blog is going to be pretty lonesome

2. Traffic – The rationale being that if no one is visiting your content, you can’t do much, including make money

I’d like to toss something out there though that not a lot of people seem to talk about, and that’s quality in your content and in your traffic. You see, if you are blogging for any particular reason, whether it’s to build your brand or to fill your wallet, you need to build a community of people who will actually support your content, click on your affiliate links, and buy your very first e-book. Right?

[Read more…] about How to get 25% of your visitors to take an action on your blog

So on Saturday, while I checked back periodically on the #care4Japan stream, I engaged in spring cleaning activities. As you might imagine, after I was done, I was more than happy to sit in a stupor in front of the television for awhile! My Cleveland Indians are little more than putrid stinkyheads, so I decided to do some channel surfing. I came upon an episode of Project Runway, and since I know SO many people who rave about that darned show, I thought I would give it a try.

It actually taught me something interesting, believe it or not, proving that you can really get inspiration from anything 🙂

The episode was “Design a costume for a drag queen,” and RuPaul was the guest judge. One of the designers created a gown that was actually kind of pretty, in my opinion, but for the judges and for that given challenge, it didn’t do the trick. It wasn’t ostentatious enough. It looked too normal. “It looks like a regular dress,” they said. The designer got kicked off, but he was clearly perplexed. For him, the gown had been a pretty loud departure from his norm.

There are three important lessons you can learn about online engagement from this silly television incident.

[Read more…] about The Project Runway Factor: Three Tough Engagement Lessons

This post is by Kat Caverly. In 2005 photographer/graphic designer Kat Caverly founded NoEvil Productions with her husband Thomas Hudson Reeve, a filmmaker. Together they have created over 1000 ecard designs, also producing the voice, sound effects and music. In 2009 Kat proudly gave birth to Greetums.com, her very first own greeting card company.

A few days ago, I wrote a post called The Case Against Twitter Lists and Facebook Filters. A few people agreed with me, but several other people said, “Are you crazy? I use lists all of the time!” One of those people was Ms. Caverly. So I asked her to write up why she likes lists for engagement. Here is what she wrote!

I came to Twitter to meet and greet people. Striking up conversations and engaging strangers is one of the things I did best when I was photographing people on the streets of Manhattan, and this skill translated quite well online, particularly on Twitter.

But my main timeline became a nightmare when I reached over 300 accounts I was following. By the time I surpassed 500 I was no longer able to keep track of anyone in particular. Fortunately I hit this milestone around the same time as the introduction of Twitter Lists.

I had already started to use TweetDeck, one of the most popular 3rd party apps for tweeting and I soon learned that I could use it to display List columns, as well as mentions and direct messages. But it took me a few months to grasp a subtler tool —private versus public lists.

[Read more…] about Making My Lists and Remaking Them Twice