Archive for April, 2009

Today’s challenge from problogger is one I like – Asking questions of your readers! I am a huge believer in interaction and participation (if you haven’t noticed on twitter), so I find that asking questions of my readers is a great way to learn. I have written a few ‘questioning’ posts in the past (I’ve asked readers to act, and test their creativity) and almost every post I write ends in a question. Actually, now that I look back through posts, I end every post with a question!

Anyway, back to the challenge. Of course in problogger’s traditional matter, he gives long descriptions on 10 reasons to ask them questions and 12 tips for asking those questions. The brief overview of why to ask? Interaction with your readers! Of course there are couple other reasons, like incoming links, answers can create new post ideas and they are fairly easy to write. The brief overview of how/what to ask? An answerable question that will benefit both you and you readers.

So, what question did I decide? The question that haunts the minds of all of us:

MAC or PC?*

My choice?  A PC. I love Vista (I am not crazy). I love my Sony Vaio (pink of course). I can run all the programs I need to run. And most important?  It was half the cost of a comparable mac!

So what is your choice? MAC or PC? Oh, and if you have a thought on the commercials, feel free to add those thoughts too.

*Hey, I could have gone with coke or pepsi, but I figured I should keep it tied to my blog topics.

How many times have you said this (or at least thought it) when someone asked/recommended that you do something? I did it when I read the problogger challenge for today: Using a magazine to improve your writing. It’s a great idea, and probably a really beneficial challenge, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it.

So what do I want to do? I really want a deep tissue massage on the beach in Hawaii while sipping a Mai tai.

But that doesn’t benefit my blog, my readers or my business. The reality is, just because you don’t want to do something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Especially if the person suggesting you should do it is trying to help you improve. I know that problogger isn’t writing this challenge specifically for me, but I can’t deny the fact that doing the challenges every day has helped my writing and my blog. With that said, attempting to do something that you can’t wrap your mind and your passion around is difficult, and can be counterproductive. Don’t work past your creative breaking point, and don’t force yourself to do a task that you know will be done poorly.

In my case, I don’t want to do the challenge, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to write for my blog, it just means I don’t want to do that challenge for my blog. Now that I have determined the issue, I just have to find something else to write about that can benefit my readers and my blog, without having to do the challenge.

Oh, wait – I just did!

All joking aside, there are a lot of roads that lead to the same place, you get to choose which one you take to get there.

What don’t you want to do today? Which road will you choose?

Problogger is worried about passive readers. I was too, so I asked all my readers to de-lurk. A lot of them did But problogger says de-lurking isn’t enough, your readers need to act and they must be called into action by you (okay, by me, but you get what I mean).

For his challenge today, he offers a solid list of ways to get readers to act, including asking them to donate to a charity, purchasing a product you support, writing a comment (de-lurking post covered that!), hiring you for services or even asking readers to visit someone elses blog.

So I had to think about it. I get once chance – one shot to get you to listen and ask for you to do something. But what is it that I want you to do? Well, I could use it selfishly and ask you to donate to my goal to get to BlogWorld 2009 (it’s that green widget below recommended blogs) or to ask that you send out a tweet, recommending my work to someone you know (or hiring me yourself). But I trust my readers and know that if you could help, you would be (or at least I want to believe that so I will!).

So, I decided to use my ‘ask for action’ in a way that would benefit someone else (hopefully a lot of someone elses).

Here is your call to action:

Post a link in your comment to a blog or twitter profile of someone that you respect and enjoy reading, but that doesn’t have a lot of traffic/recognition. Tell us a bit about them, and why they deserve us to visit them. Then, visit at least 1 other commenter’s recommended person.

Lights! Camera! ACTION!

Hello to all the readers of Wright Creativity! I would like to introduce you to Kyle Reddoch, the new weekly web/code guru. He will be writing weekly post to help my readers on the more technical side. He is not only a great resource, but a good friend who I rely on for all my coding work. Enjoy (and check out his bio at the end of the post)!

The first step in getting your website up and running is picking your domain name. You want to pick the right one that best portrays your business, industry, or relevat to what your website is.

Company Website

You first will want to try seeing if your company’s name is available as a domain name. If so, great then you are on the way. If not, you will have to do a little more research. What does your business provide? What is your industry? For example, my company does web design, hosting, maintenance, domain registration, etc. everything a person will need to get a website up and running. Now, luckily my business name was available as a domain name! I currently have registered; www.theeverydaywebexpert.com and www.kylereddoch.com, both of which goes to my company’s website.

Let’s say that my company’s name wasn’t available. What would I do? Well I would have to look to what my company does. Maybe even the region where my company is located, or town. I would then put all those together and find the right domain. Here are some possible domains that I could use for my industry:

• www.yourtexaswebexpert.com
• www.texaswebexpert.com
• www.mywebsiteexpert.com

Just take some time to search available domains and find the right one that fits your company.

Personal Website / Blog

If you are creating a website for personal use or a blog, you might want to go a different route to decide your domain name. For personal websites or blogs, you can have your name as the domain name. For instance, www.kylereddoch.com is a great one for me . You can also have a domain name that suits what the purpose of the website or blog is about.

You want to make the domain name easy to remember though. You don’t ever want a person trying to remember your domain name…because in all reality, they won’t.

There are thousands of possibilities for domain names out there, you just have to find the RIGHT one!

Kyle Reddoch is the Owner of The Everyday Web Expert, a full service web design firm located in Amarillo, TX. He is also a featured writer on many blogs. He loves every minute of his life with his wonderful wife and two kids at their home in Amarillo.

Today, problogger challenges us to pay special attention to one (or more) of our readers. The point of paying special attention to an individual reader is 2-fold. First, it benefits the person that you recommend by showing your other readers more about them and it shows that you value them. Second, it shows your readers someone new and interesting, and that you value your readers.

The problem? I want to pay attention to ALL my readers! So, I chose one of the techniques he recommends for paying attention to a reader, that allows me to pay attention to a lot of readers.

1. Run a Reader Poll and Highlight Answers in a followup post

The Question: What makes someone a creative expert?

Your responses to the poll will be put into a post later this week, with your answers (and links) and my thoughts on the questions as well. The question is one that I have wondered throughout my experience on twitter (as many claim to be one) and through my writing (as I believe I am fairly creative). So, what are your thoughts?

Not all of my writing is perfect. I know, *gasp*! But in all honesty, it isn’t. The biggest culprit? Laziness. I have written a few lazy posts. The idea was there, the execution just wasn’t up to par. Yesterday’s task from problogger was to breathe life into an old post – to fix it up and make it better. It would have been done yesterday, but I traded blogging for spending the entire day with my hubby and our families. A much better choice I thought

Anyway, the goal of breathing life into an old post is to correct errors, improve on the writing, and beef up the research. I chose to work on a post that I wrote about doing things, rather than just waiting for things to happen (click for the original post). The post has a good basic idea, but wasn’t well thought out. I talk about the easiest and the hardest parts of creativity, but not many details on it. The title is boring and the sentence structure could use some work. I could have also done a bit more research and shared some good links. After re-reading the post and making some much needed changes, here is the new version:

Is creativity easy or hard?

Creativity requires effort, it requires time and patience, and it requires doing something. Creativity is a double edged sword. It can be easy and it can be difficult (and often can be both at the same time). Let’s take a look at both sides of creativity by answering a couple questions:

1) What’s the hardest part about creativity for you?

2) What’s the easiest part about creativity for you?

I’ll go first:

1) Getting started is the hardest. How many times have you wanted to write but haven’t been able to come up with an idea? It is often difficult to get motivation staring at a blank page. A blank page is unforgiving. It stares back at you, daring you to type that first word or put in the first picture. It’s just waiting to see what you do so it can tell you it doesn’t work.

2) Getting started is the easiest. On the other side, sometimes the easiest way to be creative is to have  the complete freedom of a blank slate. For example, re-writing this post is difficult because I am trying to keep some of the original text in it. If I could just delete the entire thing and start from a clean slate, it would be much easier. There would be nothing to contend with, no structure I had to try to keep. I could just let my creativity flow.

The moral of the story is creativity can’t exist if you do nothing. Whether you are working from a clean slate or an already created design, just do something with it. Do something, anything, and creativity will follow.

Share your thoughts, what are the hardest and easiest parts of creativity? Do you believe creativity can come just from making yourself start or continue the task?

What do you think of the new post? Did I improve it, or just change the words? What can you do to improve some of your past writing or do you think you should just leave the past posts alone?

I have been following Ori (@couchsurfingori) for awhile on twitter and then we connected through our blogs. I thought his stories and his travels were unbelievable interesting, and very creative (plus, he is pretty hysterical!). I also thought my readers would love to hear about what he is doing and why. So, a few days ago, I asked if he would guest post about his experiences traveling the country on couches. After we chatted on the phone, he decided to share via video (and has required that I create a video soon too, watch the 12 minutes mark,…argh!). The video is long, but well worth the watch. And not just because he created it for me.

But most importantly – watch this video and think about what it can teach you, or what you can learn from it. For me, it has given me a lot of motivation to keep doing my freelance work, because I love it and want to!

Anyway, here is Ori’s story:

*favorite moments are at .33 seconds (really Ori? A tiger? lol), 6.22 minutes (answering the phone? Well…if it leads to another amazing story, why not!) and lastly, 10.30 minutes (because not everything is hunky-dory, you’ve gotta have the bad too.)

And hopefully next time he is in Southern Cali, he can surf my couch!

We are up to day #20 of problogger’s 31DBBB challenge and I am excited to say that I have made it this far. Not every day was right on time…but I was pretty close! Today’s post is about commenting on other blogs in your niche, or those of your readers. He lists a few benefits of commenting, but I think that he is missing one big one: You are working on improving your writing skills. The reason? It is easy to ramble for 500 words, even easier when you are the first one talking about the subject. But, when you have to comment about what someone else wrote, and there are already comments on the topic, it can be hard to come up with an original response. Which is where the ‘writing skills’ come in, and get improved. The more that you comment on blogs, the more creative you have to be. You want to be able to extend the conversation, give the person after you something else to think about or maybe give the writer something else to think about.

Just a few words of warning before you run off and start commenting on the blog of everyone you know…only comment if you can add value. Just writing ‘good point, liked the post’ does no one any good. If that is all you can say, don’t say it. Save your time for a blog that you can write a strong comment on, something people will be interested to read! Oh, and lastly, make your comments personable – get yourself a gravatar so people can see who you are (you’re not a grey box are you?).

With that, I am off to find some posts worth commenting on today – are you?

*thanks to D. Norman on Flickr…I loved this photo!

First: What is followfriday? If I’m not mistaken, it was started by @micah (Micah Baldwin) with one simple tweet. He catalogues what happened next…

Of course, since it was picked up by some of the big dogs on twitter, it got going pretty quickly. So quickly that it spawned a series of websites, top among them:  followfridays.com and topfollowfriday.com.

Today, @bigheadasian questioned whether the trend of followfriday was wearing out… and since today’s problogger challenge post was all about opinions, I figured I should share mine as well. First and foremost? I’m thinking I need to go buy boycottfollowfriday.com as all trends come to an end, and it might be a really good url to own! Second, I am getting a little sick of the people that offer up 20-30 people every week as their followfriday list. The more and more I see followfriday, the more and more I want to be like @swoodruff who has has boycotted it! Instead of putting tons of names out on twitter, he created a segment on his blog just for his followfriday recommendations. In his first post, he explained why he chose to eliminate the recommendations on twitter, and take them to his blog. I love his reasons, they make perfect sense. Just seeing a list of peoples twitter names with no explanation why is not beneficial to anyone. Social media is about communication, connection and community – so lets work on recommendations with reasons so the community can understand them better! I have made it my goal to only recommend one or two people each followfriday and include a little reason why. Not only does it make it easier for people do decide whether to follow them, but it is more special for those that I recommend.

What do you think of followfriday? How can we make it better or should we all boycott it?

Oh, and for those who think this opinion is due to a lack of followfriday’s for me, that isn’t the case. Also, I do appreciate every single one of my followers that does recommend me!

We all know what a squeeze page is – those irritating one page sales letters that start out ‘dear friend’ and end with something like ‘it will change your life’. But problogger’s challenge today teaches us about sneeze pages. He explains it is a term that he created in the 2007 31DBBB challenge.

The way that a blog works is simple – the newest articles are at the top. So what happens to all your archives? Most likely, they rarely get looked at unless you link to a specific post in a new post. A sneeze page fixes this problem. Basically, a sneeze page is a page on your blog with a collection of your top posts about one topic, or from one period of time (he uses the example of his ‘How to make money blogging‘ page) to make it easier for people to find past archived articles.

He recommends to think about the top questions your readers or clients ask, or a type of post that you write a lot – then create a sneeze page for that topic. I did a bit of brainstorming and came up with a couple topics. I finally decided that the best option was to create a page that answered the most common question I get from clients and readers: “how can I improve my writing“?

What can you create a sneeze page about?