There has historically been a bias against money-makers among intellectuals. Being an academic, I inherited this bias without really thinking about it. It’s only recently that I began thinking about it again - and as normal I got there via a weird route.

I’ll spare a lot of the historical details, but I’m not saying that intellectuals historically weren’t wealthy. In fact, they were. But they rarely made their wealth by actually working - they had land, family, or positions in society that paid for their lifestyle.

I can trace this intellectual bias all the way back to Plato - who proposed that good men, and by analogy, good cities, would fall by concerning themselves with making money, and Aristotle’s disdain for the working class is well documented.

So what? Plato and Aristotle are but two philosophers that no one reads. Wrong - Plato and Aristotle’s ideas has infused the intellectual climate for the last two millenia. It’s no accident that democracy only became respectable after the Enlightenment placed such a high value on the quality of the “average” person. The idea that the “average” person was fit to have any say in ruling a nation before then was unheard of.

The underlying fear that the intellectuals had was that the desirous elements of humanity is uncontrollable by reason and that this element is only concerned with pulling value from the world to the individual. As long as people ruled by their desires had power, their greed would continue to pull and pull value from the community such that the community would collapse. Communities require relatively reciprocal flows of value.

So much for the historical background. Trust me, it has a point. Continue reading →

Want to know how to become an SEO Ninja? Want to know how to do that without searching and reading for two months or buying a book that requires you to buy four other books to understand the first one?

Look no further: Naomi from Ittybiz has written the ebook you’re looking for. It’s fifty pages of no bull-shit content that will get you from not knowing what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to being able to put content up on your blog or website without shooting yourself in the foot in the search engines.

I was originally going to give a cursory review, reading through for useful snippets and such. What actually happened is that I couldn’t stop reading once I started. And I had a good productivity brainstorm going, too…

For those of you who don’t know about Naomi or Ittybiz, I’ll give you the 30 second primer. She’s a marketing coach for businesses with less the five employees. She’s funny. She’s potty-mouthed. She knows her stuff and has a rockin’ blog where she entertains and teaches at the same time.

All of that is evident in the book. It’s entertaining. It’s funny. But it gets you from zero to 60 in SEO.

It’s at this point that I must give a disclaimer. I’ve been heckling harassing helping Naomi with getting this ebook completed. I had nothing to do with the content and likely would have made it worse had I done so. I’m proud to have been a part of the process of getting such a great product to the floor, and man, have I wanted to tell you guys about it.

To tell the truth, I was surprised at how much I learned from the book. Not because I doubted Naomi’s ability, but because I’ve done a lot of research on SEO stuff before and I thought I knew enough to get along pretty well. Turns out I didn’t know as much as I thought.

Here’s what I learned from SEO School:

• I understood what “long tail” keywords were. I didn’t quite understand how to use that information. SEO School showed me how to do it.
• Even when you offer free content, you still have “competitor” sites that are offering their information for free. SEO School gave me a few easy tools and ideas on how to analyze my “competition” so that I can rank better.
• Naomi made it clear to me just how bad I am at writing good text for links. I’ve been working on it, but man, I have a long way to go.
• I’m horrible at picture tags, as well. She gave some really helpful tips on that one, too.

Keep in mind that I’ve done a lot research into SEO, so there’ll be a lot more there for people who haven’t.

Summary: SEO School is a one-stop shop for people who want to learn SEO without picking up an associates’ in Computer Science. The ebook is accessible but doesn’t make you feel stupid, informative but not boring, and funny but not slapstick. Purchasing the ebook will be the best $39 you can spend on improving your knowledge of SEO and your ability to create online content that ranks well in the search engines.

SPECIAL DEAL: Purchase the ebook before July 1st and save $9! Type “MovingDay” to claim your discount when you order SEO School. Click here to find out more about SEO School. Get it now while it’s cheap!

If you don’t like the book, Naomi will refund the entire cost of your purchase, no questions asked. You have nothing to lose, but a whole lot to gain.

One of the best things about blogs is that they evolve through time. One of the worst things about blogs is that they evolve through time.

That said, I’ve added some pages that I hope add value to you and make this site more interactive. I wanted to take a second and highlight these changes, as it may not be apparent for those of you who have been reading the RSS Feed but not visiting the site.

I also wanted to highlight this to explain my slower rate of creation and completion of some of the series and planners I’m working on. Rather than trying to do everything at once, I put those projects on pause and finished the makeover of this site.

Here’s the new stuff, handily linked in case you’d like to check it out from your reader. I hope you take a few minutes to stop by:

• A revised “About” page

I never really liked my old about page, so this one’s been reworked. For once, a quick and clear statement of what this blog is about! I hope you like it.

• A “Free Planners” page

Rather than having to jump through posts, or keep track of what post is related to which download, I’ve added this page to keep track of all things having to do with the planners. If I change or create anything planner- or tool-wise, it’ll all be changed here at the top so you can grab it quickly.

(Shameless appeal for help: Please “like” the free planner page on StumbleUpon and “tag” it on Del.icio.us. I’d like to continue to work on these projects and provide them to everyone freely, and the additional traffic from these sources helps me gauge interest and motivates me to work on them a bit more. Thanks a ton!)

• A Most Popular Post Page

I’ll go through every couple of weeks and add/arrange the most popular post on PF here. The value-added feature here is that each post will have a quick excerpt to let you know what it’s about.

• A Friend Me Page

I use a few of the social media services pretty regularly and would love to see what you’re liking, digging, tagging, reading, and tweeting. I’ve added the services I use and my username in case you’d like to share with me. Friend Me!

• A Skribit Widget (in the sidebar)

The skribit widget allows you to post and vote on things you’d like me to write about or work on. I currently have a list of five questions, but I really encourage you to use this widget to help motivate me to work on the things you’re interested in. I’d much rather be part of a dialog, and I appreciate you all guiding me and expressing your preferences.

So, with those projects completed, I can begin anew on some other fallow projects. The highest priority for working projects will be the Productivity Planners, especially the recreation of the Weekly Productivity Planner and the Monthly Productivity Planner. I’ll also be picking up the Practicing the Virtues series. If you’d like to see anything else or are just really interested to see anything in particular, drop a comment and let me know.

As always, I appreciate your support. Thanks for helping me add value to the world in my own way.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming…

I’m going to jump on the meme suggested by Chris Brogan and take it one step further. I’m an active commenter, but I haven’t done as many link travologues as I’d like to, so I’ll make up some ground today.

• 8 Ways to Be Ruthless With Your Time - Lifehack

Thursday Bram, who I have no reason to suspect is otherwise ruthless, gives sound tips for getting your time back.

• Mama’s Girls - SHE-POWER

Another installation of the fiction series that Kelly is running. She’s great at giving you enough information for the story to evolve while having that same bit of information prompt more questions. Her non-fictions is just as good.

• Madonna and Freelancing: An “Ah-Ha” Marketing Moment - Quiet Rebel Writer

Amy deftly moves from a mini-rant on the “madonna versus whore dichotomy” to “you’re either valued and attractive, or you’re not (as a freelancer).” It’s not what Amy says, but how she says it, that has me return to her blog everyday.

• Is Alltop.com Jumping The Shark Already? - MonkMojo’s 1000 Cuts

MonkMojo and I go back a long ways, and I’m really proud that he, too, has been added to Alltop. Have I mentioned how much I love Alltop? Great job, MonkMojo - and keep the infotainment going!

• Awaken Your Inner Storyteller, Part 1 - Writing Power

Loren’s series on storytelling was really helpful and timely, as I was then considering how to spruce up my narratives. Pretty soon, I’ll have to start paying her tuition for the lessons she continually gives.

• Why You Should Roll Your Own Time Management System - LifeDev

Francis discusses something near and dear to my heart: Time Management Systems. It’s time to start rolling your own systems, and we’re here to help.

• Important vs. Urgent: 5 Ways to Focus on What Really Matters - PickTheBrain

Jonathan Mead’s at it again on Pick the Brain. Detangling the urgent from the important is hard to do, and Jonathan’s post delivers ways to split the two. Great work, as usual, Jonathan!

• On Eating Contexts for Breakfast and The Price of Radical Growth - The Growing Life

Clay Collins, my more talented alter-ego, really reached down to my core with this post, as I’ve been experiencing a lot of tension from radical growth here recently. The follow-up discussion is amazing, as well.

• The Small Business Happiness Scale: Where Are You? - IttyBiz

Jamie takes the reins (or better yet, is gracefully given them) from Naomi over at IttyBiz and writes a great post about adjusting one’s happiness scale when you’re running a small business.

• Keep a Journal to Solve Tough Problems - Scott H Young

I’m a big fan of journaling and writing to get myself out of complex problems. Scott Young has written a great post on how to do this.

• The Art of Not Finishing - David Seah

David Seah writes some of the best posts on productivity that can be found on the blogosphere, all mostly by accident and through honest introspection. His recent goodness starts with

The road to productivity is paved with clear steps leading to an act of completion; essentialy, it’s finish what you start. However, as I sit here contemplating the rather large list of difficult-to-break-down tasks I’ve given myself, I’m thinking that there might be another approach. That is to relax and not worry about finishing. Or, perhaps, restart constantly.

It’s a longish post, but it’s one of those that I will no doubt read a few times, peruse some of his other posts, and come back and read it again. Yes…I’m still his young Padawan.

On other notes, the Weekly Productivity Planner is taking shape! It will be out by Friday - unless I get bogged down in student papers for longer than I think I will. Stay tuned!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!

The other day I mentioned that Clay Collins made it on Alltop’s Lifehack page. I didn’t do a great job of explaining what Alltop was then, but I wanted to take a second and do so now.

Alltop has provided such a great explanation of what they do that I’ll just give a sample from them:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation.”

The way I’ve related to Alltop is that they’re much like the New York Times Bestseller List. They do the work to find good reads from different niches and help readers find those sites by displaying them on a single, aggregated page that lists the latest five stories on those sites. It’s a great way to check out your interests without managing a ton of blogs and sites.

What I like is that they really do help people discover new sites. Rather than just focusing on the old and known sites and blogs, they give new quality blogs a chance, since they have the expressed goals to “shake things up and urge people out of their comfort zones”, promote “sites that provide such high-quality information that we feel it’s our moral duty to tell the world about them,” and “help out underdogs and undiscovered gems.”

As a case in point, they’ve added Productive Flourishing to their Lifehacks page. They have really stuck out their collective neck for me, and I really, really appreciate it.

If you have a minute, run over and check Alltop out.

Will, Kathryn, and Guy - thanks for adding me to the Alltop family!

I just found out today that your friend and mine, Clay Collins, made it on Alltop’s Lifehack page.

I wanted to take a second to cheer him on and give him some gratz love.  For those of you who haven’t been following this blogging phenom, his first blog post on TheGrowingLife was on January 24, 2008.  That’s not a typo - 14 weeks (if I’m counting right) and the man is on Alltop.

I’ve been following him personally and professionally and can tell you that he’s been working his butt off and doing all of the right things to get visibility of his brand and his blog.

Am I envious (in the good way)?  You bet.  Am I proud? Absolutely.

I’d encourage you to cheer him on, but recognize that he may not be able to reply.  He’s currently fighting through the hellstorm of the Digg Effect.

Attaboy, Clay.  Attaboy.

Many of you have probably noticed that my pages load really, really slowly.  I’ve been doing some research on the guts of my system, and I’ve been able to determine why.  Some of it is due to my ignorance, and others go way beyond that.

While doing speed tests this morning, I came across something very interesting.  The old theme I was using was really, really heavy on file weight and server load.  When I switched away from that theme, my file size went from 60.91KB to 48.29 KB.  Yes, my file size is now 21% lighter - just from switching themes. Speed tests were comparable and between 20 and 30 percent faster.

However, after playing around with some other stuff on the blog, I broke some of my widgets and things generally went to hell.  I hadn’t completed the blog theme I wanted, but I wasn’t going back to the old theme - so I compromised and modified an old favorite…the Copyblogger theme.

It is not complete yet, but I wanted to get something workable back up.  I’m trying to balance minimalism with navigation at the moment, and the color scheme is supposed to evoke an old woodsy, earthy theme - imagine an old forest that’s thriving with old and new life. It’s a work in progress, but it at least works without bloating my file size.

Please check it out and let me know what you think.  I’m particularly concerned about ease of reading - if I’ve broken functionality for aesthetics, please let me know so I can fix it.  Also, the color scheme is meant to calm, focus, and refresh - if it depresses and frustrates, let me know.

As for the other things that cause this blog to be so slow, I’ll be fixing what I can and will document it after the fix.  I’ll quickly say this-if you’ve been looking at a good domain host for your blog, avoid Dreamhost’s shared service.  I’m in the market for a new host, though I don’t at all want to have to make yet another move.  <Sigh>

I’m at an all time high for RSS readers (don’t laugh at my meager numbers, or do if it makes you smile), and I think that’s probably one of the only measures to determine how well a blog is doing.

Some think that traffic is the real way to measure how well your blog is doing, but I don’t. There are all sorts of ways to increase traffic to your blog…some credible, some not so credible. Merely getting traffic is not what I’m interested in; otherwise, I’d simply talk more about sex, sports, or celebrities (the latter is probably just a conflation of the former two, in reality).

What I’m interested in is sharing ideas with others, and yes, having other people interested in the stuff I’d like to share. So that some of you have decided to pick up the RSS feed indicates that there was something here that led you to think it’d be worth your while to read about in the future.

Before I get to the question you know is coming, I’d like to say a few things:

• First, I really appreciate the time you’ve already taken to read and subscribe to this blog.
• Second, your readership, comments, and impressions will continue to mean more to me than the trail of people that may follow. You are the ones who are really giving this blog a chance.
• Third, I will likely lean on you more than others with feedback, since your judgment is not influenced by fads or popularity. Simply put, you’re not here because of a blogstorm.

All that said:

What is it about this blog that enticed you to subscribe?

I wish there were a convenient way to pay you for your comments, because I’d probably give away $.50 or a $1 for your feedback, which would be the physical equivalent of buying coffee or a candy bar. However, I’m willing to pay you back by (a) answering a similar request or (b) picking up your RSS feed and reading it. Note that I have no way of tracking (at least that I know of) your subscription back to you, or else I’d pester you by emailing you.

Feel free to comment on this post or by going through my contact page if you’d prefer to keep it private. I really appreciate your consideration.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or submitting the post to StumbleUpon or Digg. Thanks for giving me a little slice of your time.

I’ve been looking around for different plugins or widgets that created a Most Popular Posts space on my blog. I spent some time looking and never found anything that seemed about right. But I wanted to get that space up on my blog so that I could point new readers to posts that other readers liked.

I tried the Popularity Contest widget and liked the amount of data that it provided, but a) I’m too dumb to get it to work properly, b) it doesn’t capture the full spectrum of what I think makes the posts more popular. Maybe once I figure it out a little more I’ll activate it.

Until then, I’ve created a simple text block in my sidebar that does the job. If you’re new to blogging and want to do the same type of thing, here’s how to do it:

Compile the data from whatever sources you use.

I like Wordpress’s Stat counter because it doesn’t log your activity, which throws off a lot of other counters. When you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of readers, your activity on your blog can skew your results dramatically (which is one reason Popularity Contest currently doesn’t work well for me.)

Determine which five of your posts are the most popular

Why five? Three posts are not really enough, but ten is a bit too much for young blogs. Plus five is a really easy number of great posts to focus on, which is likely why Darren at Problogger recommends Five Pillar Posts.

Create a lists of those posts in your html editor

It should look like this:
<ul> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/most-popular-page.html/"title="Title of Most Popular Post">Display Name for Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/second-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/second-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Second Most Popular Post">Display Name for Second Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/third-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/third-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Third Most Popular Post">Display Name for Third Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/fourth-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/fourth-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Fourth Most Popular Post">Display Name for Fourth Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/fifth-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/fifth-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Fifth Most Popular Post">Display Name for Fifth Most Popular Post</a></li> </ul> <p>

You should be able to copy the text above and fill in your domain name, urls, and Title. Save this file and keep it handy so that you can make easy updates without recreating the whole file.

Create a Text Widget in Wordpress

• Go to your admin page, Click on “Presentation” in the top bar, then Click on Widgets in the Buttom Bar.
• Scroll down and create another Text Widget. You may already have some in your Sidebar, but this should create another in the “Available Widgets” section on this page.
• Grab that new text blog and place it in your sidebar where you want it. I recommend that it go either before or after your recent posts somewhere within the top two or three of your widgets. Having it at the top like that means that your readers see it without having to scroll down, thus making it more likely that they’ll click on it.
• Click on the box that appears on the widget after you place it in the sidebar

This creates a box that has a title box and a code box. In the Title box, enter “Most Popular Posts” or whatever you want to title of this box to be. Copy your code from above into the code box.

• Exit out of the widget by pressing the “X” on the widget. Don’t worry, it saves what data you put into it.
• Press the “Save Changes Button.” This is important, because otherwise Wordpress won’t apply your new widget to your webpage. You’ll get a dialog that says “Sidebar Updated. View site >>”.

Click on the “View site >>” hyperlink to make sure it worked.

This will take you to your home page. You might have to click on a page that you don’t have cached, since cached page may not immediately display.

You’re done!

Doing it this way is not the easiest, most efficient way to do it, but it carries with it some advantages:

1. It places your human judgment to the forefront.

Sure, there are programs that can provide the data for you, but in the end I think it’s best to consider that but then make the decision yourself.

2. By not automating the task, it makes you pay attention to some nuances that you may miss if you have a program do it

I learned which titles and trends made some posts more popular than others, so that now when I review what I write, I consider what made other similar posts popular.

3. It allows you to assess information from the many different sources that a single source may miss.

For example, having your feeds run through Feedburner may alter the stats from one particular program or script.

4. It allows you to move posts higher if there were unrepresentative periods of activity.

Some of my earlier posts from last year have pretty high page counts, but I don’t necessarily want those pages to now represent what I’m doing.

One last thing to consider is that your most popular posts will likely stay static for a long time if you post them above the fold. Readers will continue to click on them and read them, which means they’ll continue to do well on all of the different measures you’ll be looking at. Of course, one post that gets Dugg or Stumbled will change all of that, but those types of occurrences usually have pretty dramatic effects blog-wide.

I’m starting to focus more on getting new readers for this blog, and I’ve run into the same wall that new bloggers often run into. It goes about like this:

In order to get traffic, you have to be start getting links and readers. But to get links and readers, you have to have traffic.

It’s as messed up as trying to get loans from banks: if you actually need the money, they won’t give it to you; but if you’ve already got the money, then you don’t need them to give it to you.

rssHugger may help out with this problem. Like most social bookmarking sites, they have a registry where you add your blog and list what it discusses. Helpful, but nothing new there.

They also have a Top100 list that shows how many people have viewed your site using their service. That one is a bit more helpful with gathering the snowball traffic. Blogs at the top of the list get more views because people want to know what’s going on at the blog, and since they’re getting more views, they’re getting ranked better. The same snowball effect, except this time it’s working for new bloggers rather than against them.

rssHugger comes in two versions: a paid version (for $20) or a version that you get for reviewing their site on your blog. Both versions are the same, except one costs time and the other money. You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m doing the review.

If you’re needing some more readers, or would just like to try out a new service, head on over to rssHuggerand give them a look-over. Help out rssHugger, and let them help you out.