Fun with Facebook Fan Page Creation

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Dave

Having stopped by a few blogging forums for advice on best practices, I noticed many people mentioning Facebook Fan Pages as a good way to go as far as encouraging traffic to check out your blog, so this weekend I set out to create a few for my sites.

The first fan page you make, apparently, can be created complete with a custom URL without needing to gather up a fan base first (you have to like it yourself to get it up and running though), but I found when I created the next two pages for Mindbla here and my pictures blog lulzJapan, I was unable to get an official “vanity” URL unless I had “more fans”. What I didn’t realize at that point was that the official fan count for creating more than one fan page is 25 fans, so after wondering for a while why I wasn’t able to get my URL when I had a handful of *likes* I delved a little deeper and discovered that particular requirement.

I must add here that Facebook doesn’t put all the info out there in an easy to find place (like perhaps on the page where you’re supposed to click to get your URL, for example), they seem to like making people hunt around for it, or perhaps they just don’t want us to know what the requirements are, in order to keep people guessing perhaps and, I suppose, keep them more busy and active on Facebook. Crafty folks, those Facebookers. In addition, I was also disappointed to learn that there no longer seems to be a way to include an RSS feed on the pages in order to keep them updated automatically, apparently the only way to update them with current blog postings is to do so manually upon each blog update. I’m not sure why they’re against having an easy way to keep your fan pages updated, but in any case I guess there’s no way around it at present. Perhaps if Facebook receives enough complaints about it they’ll switch back, I did notice quite a lot of people complaining about it while I was searching (to no avail) for a way to set up some sort of an update feed.

So anyway, armed with all this new information, I gathered together the forces of my personal Facebook page, and within 24 hours or so I had my legions of fans onboard and was able to snatch up the official URL’s for all three pages. If you’d care to, please feel free to check them out and join the party by liking one or all of my brand new Facebook fan pages!

http://www.facebook.com/mindbla

http://www.facebook.com/lulzJapan

http://www.facebook.com/UpbeatRhythms

Thank you for reading this latest update on Facebook Fan Page Shenanigans and, as always, thank you for checking out the Mindbla blog, talk to you soon in the next installment.

I Squidoo, do you Squidoo too?

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Dave

Here on the Mindbla blog we’ve discussed Twitter and assorted Tweet-related sites, what Tumblr is all about (hint – think Facebook for the Younger Generation) and all of its glorious insanity and peculiarity, then there are the giants like Facebook and Google Plus that occupy so many peoples time and attention including ours, along with all kinds of other new and interesting (and confusing!) social media websites available for our enjoyment these days. Today I’d like to talk about another interesting, though quite puzzling, social media site out there which is another quasi-blogging platform with some mildly interesting twists. It is known, strangely, as Squidoo.

On Squidoo you create mini-blogs, known as lenses, where you write posts, add links, upload pictures, and do all kinds of other stuff that you might do on a regular blog like Mindbla here, but the twist is you publish this lens as a sort of stand-alone site (although you can link them up as well), and it gets ranked and people can search for it and you can actually make money from the ads there. A very nice feature is you can opt in for donating your money to charity rather than simply collect it yourself, which can be nice if you’re not making much and would rather simply donate it to various charities. In fact, that seem to encourage that, since it’s the first option in the setup, and actually getting the money is further down on the list.

There are some other fairly amusing twists, such as receiving points for your various activities such as creating lenses and liking and commenting on other people’s lenses and a bunch of other stuff. It seems as though you are able to get points for pretty much anything you do, so it can be rather addicting and fun to see what earns you points next. On the other hand, it’s really tough to see the relative value in gaining all these points, you unlock some mildly interesting new features that don’t seem particularly special and aren’t anything to write home about, but I suppose that’s all part of the game to keep the people all engaged-like and happy. Welcome to Web 2.0 style, right? There are also some feature known as a ‘quest’ which I gather is just a way to encourage people to create lenses of one particular type or another, or read other people’s lenses, and other money-see monkey-do type stuff like that. Seems more trouble than it’s worth but then again I haven’t really been using Squidoo for all that long yet, maybe it’ll grow on me over time.

Thanks for reading!

The Mindbla blog is now officially a blog!

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Dave

Or at least, according to Technorati it is.

I applied for a Technorati link a few weeks ago and received a rather cryptic rejection, something along the lines of “your blog doesn’t appear to be a blog”. Huh?

But apparently I’ve made it nice and bloggy now, as I was approved for membership today by the powers that be over on Technorati. I dunno why I should be so psyched about that, except I suppose that it adds some tiny measure of validity to my efforts here, not to mention the fact that any and all links back to the site improve matters from a search engine optimization perspective. I certainly wouldn’t complain about a little more help on the search side of things, it’s nice to have people actually be able to seek out and find this blog after all.

So, I guess that makes Mindbla.com official in a way. On the other hand, I think my ranking is somewhere South of blog number five million or so, which means I have a ways to go before I make their vaunted “top 100″ list of important blogs out there. But I suppose it’s always good to have goals to strive towards.

Thanks for reading!

Forex Trading Game vs Stocks & Bonds Game

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Dave

So I was thinking about trying to come up with an interesting and topical board game for the 21st Century, something like Monopoly on steroids or something but more geared towards adults but still lots of fun to play.

I’m trying to decide between straight up money style Forex buying and selling versus more of a Stock Market oriented game where people invest in fictional companies, with perhaps an Apple clone or maybe Microsoft or Google in my version of the “BoardWalk & Park Place” zone, maybe cleverly disguised as Mapple & Goober or something like that. Maybe we could work in some of the failed banks and mortgage lenders in there as well, either as dirt cheap properties or perhaps as fodder for the penalty round or something.

The real question is, do people even bother with traditional board games anymore these days? With all the emphasis on online gaming and computer stuff, I wonder if board games are just too quaint and passe to be bothered with. As a kid I used to love playing Monopoly and Clue and Life, most of the other kids were into Risk but I never quite got into that one for some reason. Anyway, there’s something fun about taking that box down from the shelf and spreading out the pieces and setting up the board and all that jazz. It was even more fun if you had a decent sized herd of kids hanging out and you could play rounds, or at least several player games, which was always more fun than just one on one. These days, the kids all just jack into their own little devices and “play” together, although I don’t really think it much matters whether or not they’re actually physically together or not, it’s just as much interactivity if they’re all sitting around their individual homes for all the “playing” they do when their brains are hacked into the game systems, eyes glued tightly to the screens.

But on the other hand, maybe I should be thinking along the lines of an online game, although when it comes to Forex or Nasdaq or the other exchanges, who needs a game? Anyone can just open up a brokerage account and ‘play’ the real thing right? So there needs to be an angle that would attract players to the game the way old Monopoly used to capture everybody’s imagination, or Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit after that. I can’t remember the last time I heard about a “hot new game”, although maybe there is one and I’ve just not been paying enough attention. Although a hasty Google search didn’t turn up much of anything of interest, even though I specifically typed in “hot new board games” the second search result was for “best Nintendo” and the third for “best PC board games” (maybe that count’s, though). A glance at the first result, “Amazon Hot New Releases” offers up, well, Monopoly (the national parks version..*yawn*), Sudoku (who wants to have to think!?), and a new board game version of Angry Birds. Perhaps I might have a chance after all, the playing field seems wide open, assuming anyone even cares about getting together to play some games any more.

Isn’t Social Media supposed to be Fun?

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Dave

I’ve been working hard making use of Social Media sites in an attempt to promote my blogging efforts, but I must say the advice I’ve received from so many quarters insisting that it’s a great idea to add your new blog content to a bunch of Social Media sites has proved to be quite a grind. A downright drag, really. Playing around with Social Media for fun once in a while is amusing, trying to keep up with all of it and make sure you continue to update your content on each page and make sure to add fun headlines and thank people who liked it and reciprocate all the friend requests that come along? It really does start to feel like an actual job after a little while. The idea of having a blog and trying to promote it is something that I thought would be lots of fun, but at least this particular aspect of it has turned into much more of a chore than I really ever thought it would be.

Fighting for Page Views

I have been relatively pleased with the amount of traffic I’ve been receiving for a newbie blog, but it absolutely feels like like I’m having to do a lot of work just to keep things on an even keel. FIghting for each and every page view, as it were. I hadn’t realized just how difficult it is to maintain even a small but steady flow of traffic to a blog, although given the amount of content out there and how many bloggers are trying to do exactly the same thing, I guess it’s not all that surprising.

On the few days I’ve put up some new content but done nothing to promote it, the results have been disappointing to say the least. Over on upbeatrhythms, for example, I’ve had several days when I got no visitors at all! Clearly that’s a bummer when you work hard to come up with some new content to share.

One Blog off to a Good Start

On the other hand, I do feel as though I’m still getting my feet wet, and I’ve not really gotten into the flow of putting up some really valuable and useful content and spent the requisite amount of time talking it up, so if I can keep at it I’m sure things will pick up.

Here on Mindbla I’ve been pleased to see a steady stream of visitors, and the third site which is my funny pictures blog has been doing gangbusters for such a new space, I had over a thousand visitors on a few occasions which is fun to see and makes me feel as though I’m at least heading in the right direction.

Part of the ease of that project is the fact that it’s much easier to upload a picture or two per day with a small blurb or comment. I’ve found it quite easy to stick to a schedule and then send out a few tweets and put up the links on Delicious or Digg or wherever, the pace and rhythm of it works well. It’s not so easy when you want to do some writing and come up with interesting topics or, in the case of the music site, to pave the way for some bigger projects such as a video tutorial series that I really want to get done but it takes a lot of time and effort behind the scenes before I’m even ready to publish anything. I did manage to get that video series off the ground last week, so now I’ve just got to keep at it. But it’s a lot more work and preparation than a pictures blog, that’s for sure, and that’s even before factoring in all the Social Media promoting I should be doing for the site!

*sigh* – now where did I put that password for StumbleUpon again?

Take Time to Set Up Your Title Tags for SEO Purposes

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Dave

The Importance of Proper Tagging

Over this past weekend I’ve done a little bit of research on the importance of H1 and H2 tags in HTLM, sometimes thought of as “title” and “sub-title” tags although here in WordPress you can select anywhere from H1 all the way down to H6. What I didn’t realize until looking it up, however, was just how crucial these tagged bits of text are when it comes to what the search engines recognize and respond to. Over on my other blog I played around with the tags and suddenly I noticed I was getting a lot more targeted visitors from Google searches. This took place literally within the space of a few hours and I was fairly flabberghasted to think what I might have been missing over the past month or so by not paying enough attention to something so relatively simple.

Of course, it could very well be coincidence. I’m hardly getting floods of traffic from keyword search results (yet!), but I didn’t really do anything partiularly different with the site. I’ll keep a close eye on it over the next few days of course, along with some more research, and if it turns out to be just a fluke or something I’ll be sure and mention it once again here on the Mindbla blog, but in any case it’s worth looking into.

What I’ve learned so far

As you can see above, I used a sub-heading (in this case, H3) which is supposed to be a good way to break up blog posts and give the spiders some sense of direction. So you can probably expect to see more of this in future from me. It looks nice anyway, and helps with the professionalism of the blog so it’s perfectly fine with me. I’m not so over-the-top that I’ll start gearing my blog posts to perfectly coded SEO keyword algorhythms or anything silly like that, but if learning to use the proper headings is useful I’m all for it.

I also learned that the title on a single post page should not be H1 (the blog title I mean, not the title of the article which should be H1 in fact), essentially you should have only one H1 per page and that’s it. The rest should be broken down into subheadings. My Coraline theme seems to take care of that automatically though, which is nice because I was just fixing to delve into all my past posts and switch all the headings around when I realized it was already automatically taken care of within the theme. So before you do anything drastic make sure you check out your single.php and page.php and style.css files to see what your theme is already taking care of for you, before committing to any sort of major adjustments or changes.

If You Need a Hosting Company, Look No Further than HostGator

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Dave

I’m not really the kind of guy who gushes or throws out random ringing endorsements, I’m more likely to be the complainer that the call center gets sick of hearing from lol.

But I’m sufficiently impressed with HostGator to want to devote an entire blog topic to their company. First of all, their plans are quite reasonable, it’s even fair to say they’re service is downright cheap. And as a newbie blogger, I spent a lot of time stressing over whether I should go with such a “discount” company but I read lots of good reviews online and I ended up going with HostGator. And I am very glad that I did.

Since starting up this whole blogging adventure I’ve had a good number of problems, mostly of my own creation being so new at this whole thing, and I’ve used their live chat on numerous occasions at this point. Besides the fact that they held my hand and fixed my mistakes quickly and professionally, I have to say that their friendliness and genuine attention to good customer service is nothing short of stunning.

To put it into perspective, I worked at Disneyland in Japan for many years. And I used to think that Disney had a lock on the number one spot as the very best at superior customer service out of any company out there, big or small. But now, for the first time, I can say without question that the HostGator company matches or even exceeds Disney in terms of genuine customer care. I think that’s about as high a compliment as I can hand out, and they certainly do deserve it. Each and every time I got off the line with their service center I was tempted to send an email to the CEO asking him to give whichever staff person helped me a big raise and a bonus.

So in any case, if you’re looking for a company to host your blog or website, or considering switching out, I can not recommend HostGator enough Just for the record, this isn’t a “paid endorsement” or anything like that (I know such endorsements for pay do show up on blogs from time to time), just an honest review from a very satisfied customer.

A Warning to all the Would-Be Bloggers Out There

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Dave

As much as I’ve greatly appreciated all the folks who’ve stopped by to check out my new online “homes”, I was really starting to wonder whether it was just a huge waste of time and effort given all the headaches I’ve had with crashing websites and that sort of garbage. If you’re looking to fire up a blog or two, and hoping for a huge amount of engagement or a herd of readers right off the bat, lemme tell ya it’s not all that easy and there are lots of pitfalls you have to watch out for. Hopefully in this article and future ones, I can help you to avoid a few of them.

First of all, be prepared for a lot of disinterest if not outright rejection. Starting out, I was worried that I might get a bunch of negative comments on my writing or my newbie attempts to “fit it”, but the deafening silence is far, far worse. I appreciate the heck out of my old friend Candice for chiming in from time to time, if not for her I think I’d wonder if anyone was even reading this blog at all lol.

For the most part, all three of my blogs have ramped up a lot more slowly than I’d expected.. I’ve not received nearly as much traffic as I’d hoped for, though I think that was just naive enthusiasm on my part rather than a realistic outlook. I must say I’ve been totally busting my ass trying to get the word out and build a little enthusiasm and it’s a heck of a lot more of a grind than I realized going into this whole site-ownership business.

At times it can be a good deal lonelier being a website owner than when you’re just a user and occasional poster on other sites. There’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff to take care of which sucks up loads of time, so you don’t really spend as much time on creating content as you’d like to, and even when you put something out you end up spending more time trying to tweet it up or mention it on other sites than you do hanging out on your own site having fun with it. Not to mention you spend a lot more time in the “back of house” part of the site than you ever do “out front” greeting guests and showing off your new digs. I guess in that sense being a website owner is a lot like any other business, there’s always something else that needs to be taken care of before you can get around to the fun stuff.

In any case, it’s worth keeping this in mind if you’re considering starting up a blog or website of your own. I don’t mean for this article to be discouraging, all negatives aside I’m still having a lot of fun setting up my own spaces and being more of an active online participant than I’ve been in the past. Blogging is certainly worth doing, if you’re interested in going for it, it’s just there’s a lot of peripheral junk to be taken care of that you might not have considered before jumping in and trying it out for yourself. The internet really is the Wild West in a lot of ways, put out quality stuff and do it consistently and even then there’s no guarantee you’ll be a smash hit so you just have to keep at it week after week, article after article, and hope that somewhere along the line you’ve got some readers out there who are appreciating what you’re trying to do and getting a little something out of your efforts.

Thanks for reading!

What you Need to Know about Tumblr

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Dave

One of the sites I’ve been playing around with and trying to figure out in my efforts to become a “social networker” these days is Tumblr. The more I learn though, the more confusing this particular space seems to become.

At first glance it seems like a blogging platform, similar to Blogger perhaps. But although when you sign up the first thing that seems obvious is to write a post, when you browse around to other Tumblr pages you start to realize that not many people over there are doing any blogging in the traditional sense.

It’s a weird sort of mix, in a way it’s like Twitter on steroids. There’s no particular 140 limit or anything, but people don’t write much in a post, if anything at all. Mostly people seem to put up pictures, gifs and videos in a long stream of consciousness sort of way, and not many people seem to really engage or comment on each others’ posts. There’s a lot of liking and re-blogging, so each page turns into a sort of amalgam of the posters’ own personal contributions along with content they’ve ripped off from other peoples’ spaces.

Some pages look a lot like Pinterest, some blogs carefully crafted collages of images along with others which are little more than just a bunch of random pictures, and there’s also a YouTube element that I don’t quite understand yet that seems to involve telling the world incredibly personal stuff via video where you write your innermost thoughts on pieces of paper and hold them up for the camera while playing some seriously Emo sounding music of some kind.

Then there’s TumbleTrain, which is not actually on Tumblr but somewhere off-site and seems to be a sideshow focused on getting more Tumblr followers, which is apparently the holy grail of the whole Tumblr thing. If you have a lot of followers you’re cool. Or something.

Anyway, I don’t quite ‘get’ Tumblr yet, but perhaps it will come to me over time. At the moment, it hasn’t really hit me so I find myself frustrated trying to figure it all out and wonder why exactly the communication age has turned into such a multi-media, random seeming cluster that people use to try to explain to the world who they are and what they’re all about. Somehow, even Twitter seems rather quaint and simple in comparison!

Five Bloggers You Need to Know About

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Dave

As I’m extremely new at this blogging game, I’ve found myself in need of helpful information and tips pretty much every step of the way. At this point, around a month or so into my WordPress experience (add a few more weeks if you could my writings on Blogger), I thought I would step back and evaluate some of the information I’ve found and point out some of the folks around the internets who provide tons of great value and informative tips that can really help new folks to find success early on in their blogging efforts. So here’s an article mentioning just a few of those helpful folks, I’m sure I’ll come up with many others and so I’ll probably dedicate more than one article to this type of recognition.

Gideon Shalwick

Gideon is one of the premiere video blogging experts, and shares his knowledge freely with bloggers around the world through his excellent video tutorials and lessons. His videos can be seen all over YouTube and other video hosting services, and he also provides tons of free content on his blog GideonShalwick.com. He is involved with several large-scale projects including BecomeaBlogger.com, RapidVideoBlogging.com, and FreeMagicLive.com.

Bob Lotich

Bob Lotich is the founder of ChristianPF.com, a personal finance blog with a Christian perspective. I happened upon his blogging tips section very early on in the game and reading his helpful hints motivated me to abandon the Google blog and jump into the deep end of “for real” WordPress blogging, mostly because he laid out the groundwork so thoroughly and made the daunting task of setting up your own domain a very straightforward and achievable task.

Yaro Starak

Yaro Starak is the founder of Entrepeneurs-Journey.com and a widely known blogger online. His website has helped countless bloggers and he offers up a very professional and detailed approach to blogging and the industry of becoming a professional blogger, along with strategies for creating a successful and profitable blog.

Ileane Smith

‘Ms. Ileane’ is a force of nature in the blogosphere, through her helpful videos and commentaries on BasicBlogTips.com. Her friendly nature and keen understanding of what it’s like to start out in the sometimes daunting world of WordPress blogging makes learning from her fun and informative at the same time.

Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse is a real heavy hitter, the founder of Problogger.net and a wealth of great info. The reason I selected him, though, isn’t so much because he’s a big name in the industry but because I noticed that he has put forth a great effort to appear for interviews and information sessions with all kinds of other bloggers both “big” and “small”, and I thought that was cool. Plus, his website is absolutely a goldmine of information for anyone trying to figure out how to blog successfully.

If you are in search of tips and information, I can almost guarantee you that amongst the five main sites I’ve included above you can find the answers you are looking for, and if not any one of these folks will more than likely help you out if you leave a comment or a question on their sites.