A very good boomer buddy asked me this question today, “Rosie, how do I delete my Wordpress.com blog.?” Actually, she stumbled on this site she started a very long time ago and had forgotten all about it. Of course, my desire is for her to try and develop it with the idea behind why she started it in the first place. It can have several good practice points.
But in case there is someone else reading this that has an old Wordpress.com blog hanging out there is cyberspace. This is what you do:
Sign into your dashbroad
Click on Settings in the Admin. Panel on the left
Click on the Delete Blog Option
But just remember, if you keep it you can always make it a private blog shut off from the search engines. You can choose the option to invite folks to view your posts. PLUS this is a good option if you were writing a book or collection of poems not ready for prime time. Think about it.
HTBB, you may recall from an earlier post this week, is a group I named called Help This Blogging Boomer. I am challenging my self and others to restore life to those neglected blogs.
So, I said I would start by identifying the blogs I have neglected. So, I am going to talk briefly about one of them. The site I am choosing to perk up is Crumbsnatcher.
This is a site that features the character, Crumbsnather(aka Mighty Care) from the storybook DVD, Crumbsnatcher Gets a New Name. I have neglected this site.
So, my next step is to RECALL why I created the site.
The site was created with my husband, artist Ray Horner, to gather comments and share updates about this special bird. You see, we had fun doing this storybook. I created the story and my husband created the pictures.
A very dear friend of ours, Kevin Thompson, is the voice of Crumbsnatcher. Now, believe it or not, just sharing this with you is perking me up to post something. But what will it be? Will Crumbsnatcher offer some insights on diversity? Will he reflect on how he got his name?
So the next step should be, how do you decide on what to post on a site you have neglected? What help can you give to blogging boomers who have neglected their sites.
And let this be a lesson for you also, always check your links. Also, sometimes when watching TV review some of the posts in your site to be sure embedded codes are still in bed and links are working. Thanks Rita for letting me know.
I can recall vividly the birth of my first blog. I decided to spend three months during the summer of 2007 in Greenville NY, where my wife, Annette, and I have a second home so we can be closer to our grandson. Annette, who works as an RN, would commute from Arizona, our primary residence, to New York during the same three month period.
Although I would frequently be visiting with my daughter, Michelle, and our grandson, Alan, I still had lots of idle time on my hands, which I had originally planned to occupy by reading. One evening at dinner, upon mentioning the possibility of boredom setting in because Annette would be away most of the time, my daughter said, “Dad, why don’t you create a blog. That will keep you occupied and you like writing.”
While I was certainly aware of blogs, and subscribed to several, it never occurred to me to publish a blog of my own. I had no clue how to begin. Where to host a blog, the cost involved, the time commitment required. Can I make money blogging? Michelle had a personal blog she began in 2006, where she wrote about motherhood and posted pictures of Alan, so she pointed me in the general direction to start my online journey.
The next morning I sat out in the back yard and mapped out a strategy for what would eventually give birth to Dianosphere.com.
I began my blogging journey by reading just about every book on blogging I could find? over a dozen books in all? and subscribed to numerous A-list bloggers on the topic. At first, it was a daunting task. So much to learn! Gradually, though, I developed a sense of what I had to do and took the plunge.
Two years and 199 posts later, with a few fits and starts, Dianosphere has seen a steady climb in readership. And the experience has been intellectually fulfilling.
I do not consider myself in a position to offer advice about blogging, preferring to leave that to the likes of Rosie Horner, I can say that blogging can be a very satisfying experience. Clicking the ‘Publish’ button on your first blog post for the entire online world to read is an exhilarating and memorable moment.
But I do have advice to offer. I have listed below two issues that you may want to research yourself, or confirm with a blogging consultant. The two issues I learned that are the most perplexing are: 1] the length of a blog post and 2] the frequency of posting. Blogging can be a very time-consuming adventure and these two issues are critical to consider.
With regard to the number of words:
As part of my research, here’s what I discovered some of the experts on blogging have to say about the length of a blog post: over 100 and under 500 words; 200-600 words; one pro blogger recommends 250-1000 words because that’s what SEO experts believe. “…anything longer than 300 words is not a post,” asserts a professional blogging consultant. And, finally, “Shoot for 500 words or less,” touts another expert. The question of the length of a blog post, as you can see, has no right answer.
It is my view that the length of a blog post takes second place to the quality of the content. If content still reigns as King and you have something particularly compelling to say, why should it be limited to an arbitrary number of words to convey your message? As long as there’s a take-a-way for the reader, something that he/she can put to practical use in their business or personal life and you need 595 words, or 870 words or 1275 words or 2,000 words to make your point, then just do it.
As to the frequency of your blog postings:
“If your blog isn’t updated regularly, why should people come back to it,” I read in one book. ”They don’t,” says the author, who suggests updating your blog at least two or three times a week. If you accept at face value the author’s advice, you would have to post to your blog even if you have nothing especially important or valuable to say because, according to the author, if you do not post two or three times a week your readers will not return.
What about the quality of the content, I asked myself? Why would readers return if I am publishing content, just for the sake of frequency, solely to ensure reader retention? If a blogger has nothing compelling to say for a week or two why then post unusable content that may very well have the opposite effect – drive readers away! There is a growing consensus that indicates whether you post once a week or not, the quality of what you have to say will always trump blog post frequency.
There are some terrific books on blogging, too many to suggest in this posting. Go to Amazon.com enter a search query and you’ll see all the bestsellers. Read two or three of these books. Subscribe to several A-list bloggers, like Rosie’s Blogging for Boomers or Chris Brogan’s blog. Many of the A-list bloggers also offer free eBooks and great tips.
Blogging is still in its infancy. Some advice and recommendations for new bloggers should indeed be followed. If you’re reading this blog, then you are well on your way to becoming a better blogger and enjoying the experience that much more.
About Martin Diano
Martin is a retired public relations professional living in Arizona and New York. His blogging experience with Dianosphere led him to create, in 2008, the Baby Boomer [Knowledge Center], a web destination for and about the baby boomer generation.
I was asked to investigate blogging for a client early 2005 but I didn’t really understand what it was about. So I set up my first blog at Blogger for my VA business to explore it. I had to put in a calendar reminder weekly to force myself to do it and I often had no idea what to write about – I would pick out a word from a jar of cards I had just for a topic.
Later that year I decided to set up a family one instead of my annual Christmas newsletter. I put up photos, wrote about my family but it wasn’t till I wrote about a cat of mine who had disappeared that suddenly something happened – people started leaving comments, asking about the cat. Strangers from the other side of the world reading about our family! That same cat passed away last week and I wrote a eulogy for him What you need to know is that I’m a writer – I have been writing since I was a kid. I love to see my name in print and a writer loves responses. I realised two things:
I had to write more in a more personal way, instead of stilted and formal like in my original business blog.
And I had to write to attract comments and return visitors.
Now, this doesn’t mean you have to be a writer too, but it helps if you enjoy it as it doesn’t become a chore then, but a pleasure, although an addictive one I might add!
My VA blog is now one of the highest listed VA blogs at technorati.com and I am listed in the Top 100 Australian Bloggers. That has come with time and effort. I get a lot of visitors to my main site via my blog – which is these days attached to my domain with a specially designed template to match. One of my other blogs, written in 2006 was turned into a book in 2007 and is now listed at Amazon – something I never anticipated or expected to happen.
I love Wordpress and that is my preferred blogging platform but I still have some blogs at Blogger just to keep my hand in, so I can advise clients. And yes, I own multiple blogs (over 15). Some are just mine, others I have multiple contributors so that I’m not the only one providing content. And one of the ’secrets’ to having a successful blog is to keep it theme related. If you write about anything and everything on the one blog, unless your readers are personal friends or relatives, you’re unlikely to keep them for long. So the blog needs to be targeted to your audience if you want to build a readership.
I have information about blogging at both Virtual Assistant Blog and Soho-Life just look in the categories list in the menu sidebars. And I encourage you to join a bloggers forum so you are mixing and mingling with others who are blogging regularly in different platforms. You can learn much from them. I’m very active at AussieBloggers and have made lots of friends there. And another I know of that is also quite active is Bloggeries.
A literary agent, the guest speaker at my local Sisters in Crime meeting in September 2007, encouraged me to blog. She suggested it as a way to begin to gain audience for my writing, while I completed my book. Now it’s done, and as I work on getting it published, I discovered in the last year and a half something quite amazing for someone who had to look up what “blog” meant when she first got started. I was born to blog.
My blog has the same name as my forthcoming book, a boomer memoir called Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights. I always wanted to write a weekly column (daily was too rigorous), and I had a many entries already written, itching to share the wisdom I’ve learned along the way in a feature I’d call Life in the Vast Lane. I knew this would be a hard sell in the print medium that’s more down- than upsizing these days. I was turned down once or twice, but before I picked up that thread, soon I realized that most of the Vast Lane material fits my blog to a “T.” I had some mechanics to figure out on how to blog, but as far as material was concerned, I’d already been blogging for years without knowing it. Now I had somewhere to publish it.
The hidden gold in this process are the friends I’ve made and how much blogging has fine-tuned my writing. I can’t think of when my work has evolved more in such a relatively short period of time. This alone is worth the effort to blog! I get to test drive concepts for future books, get audience reactions in the Comments, and I feel I am getting a pulse on the target audience for my memoir series—baby boomer women. –
Joyce L. Mason
Sacramento Area, CA – USA www.joycemason.com Author of the upcoming memoir, Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights
Visit my blog: www.hotflashbackscoolinsights.blogspot.com
Do you belong to Generation Jones, or the so-called Lost Generation? Do you still consider yourself a baby boomer? Does blogging come easier to you?
Generation Jones (the long-lost generation between the Boomers and Xers, born 1954-1965.
Read what Wikipedia has to say:
American social commentator Jonathan Pontell defined this generation and coined the term naming it. Generation Jones has been referred to as a heretofore lost generation between the Baby boomers and Generation X, since prior to the popularization of Pontell’s theory, its members were included with either the Boomers or X’ers.
The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including: a large anonymous generation, and a “Keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness borne from this generation’s populous birth years. The connotation, however, which is perhaps best known stems from the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, which means a yearning or craving. Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970’s made this slang word popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the optimistic 1960’s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the pessimistic 1970’s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.
In demographic terms, Generation Jones was part of the baby boom which ended in the early 1960s. However, the events stereotypically associated with generational discussion of Boomers, including protests over civil rights and the Vietnam war and the emergence of rock music took place while the members of Generation Jones were still children or early teenagers. This is the situation described by Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, who said that he had missed the Summer of Love because he was too busy playing with his Action Man. Thus the early life experience of this group was more similar, in many respects, to that commonly imputed to Generation X. Generation Jones is thus associated with such pop icons such as Pong, the “Walkman”, Rubik’s Cube and MTV.
This age group became politically active in the United States during the Presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, who was extremely popular among people of this age group. “The turn toward the Republicans was based very much on how the young felt about Ronald Reagan’s performance in office,” said Helmut Norpoth, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In the 2008 election, surveys found that fans of classic rock music, popular during this period, tended to favor the Republicans.
Generation Jones has been the recipient of extensive media attention. It has been written about in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and discussed frequently on TV and radio shows. Pontell appears regularly on TV networks such as CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC, discussing the cultural, political, and economic implications of this generation’s emergence.
In the business world, Generation Jones has become a part of the strategic planning of many companies and industries, particularly in the context of targeting Jonesers through marketing efforts. Numerous industries have created new products and brands to specifically target Jonesers, like the radio industry, which has created “GenJones” radio formats.
Politically, Generation Jones has emerged as a crucial voting segment in Western elections. In the U.S. 2006 Midterm and 2004 Presidential elections, and the 2005 U.K. elections, Generation Jones’ electoral role was widely described as pivotal by the media and political pollsters. In the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, Generation Jones was again seen as a key electoral segment, partly because of its large size as almost a third of all voters, and because of the high degree to which its members were swing voters during the election cycle. Influential journalists like Clarence Page and Peter Fenn] singled out Generation Jones voters as crucial in the final weeks of the campaign.
The election to President of Barack Obama, born in 1961, focused more attention on Generation Jones. Many influential journalists, publications, and experts pointed out that Obama is a member of Generation Jones, including Jonathan Alter (Newsweek),[David Brooks (The New York Times), and Karen Tumulty (Time Magazine
Well, I gues the next question is do you mind being called a baby boomer too?
When was the last time you went to Google’s blogsearch engine and just observe the varied blog platforms? Each one is different and can have more or less functionality. Yet, sometimes that does not seem to matter when you are just gleaning the impact of the message.
