Category: Internet

Starting Blogs: My Name is Trav

Since being on the road I’m always asked, “so what do you do?” Well, I do many things. One of those things is setting up blogs for creative types. In this particular case, My Name is Trav.

I have many friends who are talented artists, musicians, designers, writers, and athletes. Many of these friends know they should be blogging, but they don’t know where to start. That’s where I come in. I’m their blogging coach, so to speak. Their personal trainer. I get them onto the treadmill of content and show them how to spread their knowledge and awesomeness to the world.

This project is for my friend Travis Turner, a mighty talented drummer. Someday he wants to give drum lessons, but he doesn’t feel like he’s quite “there,” yet. So I told him, “start blogging now, so that when you are ready, you’ve got an audience to tell.” So that’s what we’re doing. We’ll see how it turns out.

Don’t Say “Follow Us on Twitter!” if You Don’t Use Twitter

If your business wants to abandon Twitter, that’s your choice. But maybe you should remove the cute “Follow us on Twitter!” messages from your ads in the local alt-weekly’s. Recently, just for the heck of it, I figured I’d look up a local business on Twitter from an ad and saw this – updated 238 days ago.

This reminds me of Van Halen’s “brown M&M” clause, about removing all the brown M&M’s from the bowl of candy backstage. If they showed up at a gig and saw brown M&M’s, well, that meant their rider wasn’t read very throughly. If the promoter shrugs off the M&M part, what else could they have skipped? The safety measures? The power requirements?

It’s not being pompous, it’s paying attention to the details.

If a business shrugs off social media thing like this (thinking perhaps,”it doesn’t matter, no one will notice!”), that’s your choice. But it’s my choice to consider what other details you’re skipping over.

(Note: title edited, editor fired)
(Note: there is no editor)

Set Up an Automated Daily Email List

Want to start a daily email list, like Chris Piascik’s Daily Drawing? I did.

I wanted a daily email list for my Seth W. Robots. It’d be one hand drawn robot, published everyday, then sent to anyone who subscribed. And I wanted it to be as simple as writing a blog post.

Now, because I didn’t want to fill the front page of this blog with daily robot drawings, I though of starting a Tumblr or Posterous blog, just for the robots.

But I really wanted to figure out how to do this in my current WordPress install! I just needed to find a way to keep the daily robot drawings from displaying on the front page.

This is how I set it up. Continue reading →

Can I Email You This Large File?

No, you can not. If you’re sending photos, audio files, video or anything else that is creeping over the 5MB mark, please, step away from your inbox, go to Dropbox, and open an account.

Once you’re set up, you’ll have 2GB of storage “in the cloud,” meaning, it’s not on your computer, it’s just somewhere else. Continue reading →

How to Rock Twitter

If you don’t rock Twitter, maybe you’re doing it wrong.

Some of my friends hate Twitter. They explain to me that when they started an account, they just “started following a bunch of accounts.” Like, 300 accounts.

Sports fans would follow ESPN, Yahoo Sports, MLB, the NFL.
Music fans would follow SPIN and Rolling Stone.
Pop culture fans would follow TMZ and People.

No wonder my friends don’t rock Twitter. Following that many accounts is like showing up at a bar, changing every TV to a different channel, and trying to pay attention to the person next to you. Good luck. Continue reading →

Preaching to the Choir

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Back in 2010, a MetaFilter user said, “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” (via Life Hacker)

Spending time on Facebook just makes money for them in the form of ads. Gmail skims your email to target ads. Both are free services.

And now two other free services, Path and Pinterest, are in the news today. Path supposedly uploads your Address Book from your iPhone (without telling you). And Pinterest is modifying affiliate links that users post.

If it’s free, you are the user product; plain and simple. These companies owe you nothing.

Do Better Work

Advice I gave a friend a bit ago:

Being able to say “I wrote content” instead of “I did various admin and back-end duties” wins.

As Seth Godin said recently,

If the work you do isn’t worth collating and highlighting, you probably need to be doing better work.

Can’t stress this enough – write content. Yes; I joke about “Top 10 lists” and cheesy posts all the time, and I’m quite aware that’s how Buzzgrinder became what it is today.

But that was 2008, folks.

It’s now 2012. Time to advance the web, right?

If your’re writing content that’s disappearing in 24 hours…
If you’re working hard on content that no one remembers…
If you’re basically churning out a tabloid 12 time a day…

Well, it’s time to do better work.

Sustainable Blogging

With all the talk about sustainable farming and coffee, what about sustainable blogging?

I’ve run a blog that pumped out 20 posts a day. On Buzzgrinder, we used to post every hour on the hour from 8am-4pm, five days a week. Continue reading →

Kill Your Blog

My first ebook, drawing on my blogging experience from the past 10 years.

Sections include:
Donʼt Compare and Despair.
Focus on Your Content Creation.
Stop Looking for Ways to Get Paid.
Stop Adding to the Echo Chamber.
Emails From Friends are More Important Than Emails from Google Analytics.

Can you email one of your readers right now and say, “Iʼm going to be in your town in two weeks, letʼs grab lunch?” How many times has a reader emailed you and thanked you for a great article? Have you gotten holiday cards in the mail (the real mail) from readers?

You Sit at Your Computer and Ask, “What should I write?”
You Shake Your Fist at Your Hosting Company, CMS or Design.
Youʼre Following a Map. Youʼre a Factory.
Social Media is a Waste (For Now).

If you want to sit on the computer every waking moment of your day, by all means, busy yourself with every social networking site and watch the constant stream of updates from your Twitter friends about the huge television event theyʼre all watching.

Your Inbox is Mostly PR pitches.
Comment Moderation is Dumb.

If youʼre spending any time in the comment que moderating, checking off boxes, marking spam and other nonsense, turn comments off. Kill them. Or ignore them.

You Donʼt Need Headaches.
Itʼs Midnight and Youʼre Blogging.
You Publish More Posts per day Than You See Your Friends.
Donʼt Blog if Your True Passion is Radio / Video.

Cost: $1

Add to Cart