A Journalist Unplugged-Beverly Mahone’s Blog Birth Story

My very first blog post went “live” in cyberspace in August of 2006. I wrote a piece called “Marriage: The Second Time Around.” I had just returned from a fabulous honeymoon to St. Lucia with my new husband Nate. It was also a self-promotional effort for my newly released book, Whatever! A Baby Boomer’s Journey Into Middle Age.

Blogging, for me, has been a wonderful way for me to promote my books but it has also given me the opportunity to express myself on a wide variety of subjects. Since I am no longer working in the established media, I can now say what I want -without being offensive of course.

I have several blogs with different themes. My babyboomerbev blog focuses mainly on family-related issues. BoomerWorld is a collection of my thoughts as a member of the world’s largest generation. MenopauseMama allows me to keep it real when it comes to the issues related to menopause and other women’s health matters. Talk2Bev focuses more on media tips from an Insider’s point of view.

I love being a journalist unplugged and, believe me, I’ll never run out of things to write about.

Seeds Of Success Grow Out of Adversity-Rita Morgan Shares Her Blog Birth Story

It started in 2000; my life as I had known it changed.

My father, the biggest cheerleader in my life passed away after suffering from a malignant brain tumor.
A few months later, I was returning home from Australia and got caught up in the wake of the 9/11
disaster. I sat on an airplane on the airport tarmack for five hours before the horrifying images popped up
on the monitors for all passengers to see. Some months later, I was offered an early retirement package from my
work of 26 years.

Fate was clearly pointing me to a new direction.

Both my sons were in the internet business and had kept me interested in its developments. With new found
time on my hands and the help of my “techy” son, in 2001, I launched my first website called “Ladybug”. It was
cute, with cartoon icons of a ladybug shopping, combing her hair and cooking. An internet advertising company
became interested and before I knew it, so did investors. It was an interesting time and it looked like I had hit
upon an exciting second career.

Not so fast… without even a hint, the dot coms began falling by the wayside. One by one, investors zipped up
their briefcases and ran.

So, I learned many valuable lessons. I was not defeated and continued to research my newly chosen field.
My other son by now was well ensconced in the sales development end of the internet business. With a “techy” and a “sales”
guru by my side, I launched a new website called “Not Just the Kitchen”.

This website was geared to Baby-Boomer women, since the advice I received was “don’t try to be all things to
all people. Stick with what you know best”. Being a Baby-Boomer woman, I felt somewhat qualified to start this project.

I worked diligently keeping up the content and enjoying the experience. Then in the spring of 2008, I made a switch
from a static site to a WordPress blog. This was a whole new set of challenges ranging from re-directs to designing
a custom Home Page. My son’s technical experience sent me on my way but once my demands took too much of his time,
I hired an experienced technical support person.

Now, almost a year later, we continue to grow adding new features as they are developed. We offer 300+ compelling
articles and since many of our visitors suffer from a degree of vision impairment, the articles are also offered
in audio versions. Our partnership with Divinecaroline.com adds further content by way of a widget. In a few weeks,
we will launch a widget by TiB Concerts that will allow the visitor to search concert dates and venues for their
favorite artists.

I continue to scour the web for new ideas and having found Blogging for Boomers, I visit often. I’ve received some great tips
and tons of encouragement from Rosie.

About the author:
Rita Morgan is the Founder & CEO of  Not Just The Kitchen. Her previous career was working for an airline in various
management roles. She attended both University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal majoring in Marketing.
She presently spreads her time between Canada and US working much of the time on an airplane.

How Martin Diano Gave Birth To His Blog

The Birth of Dianosphere– A Labor of Love

by Martin Diano

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.

How Betty Lynch Gave Birth To Her First Blog

Have you ever thought, “I’m in way over my head?” I knew I had to have a website for my business. I thought to myself, how hard can this be? Surely I can build a website. I tried several different places to build a website for My Country Kitchen. I worked for hours upon hours and still something would be wrong. I purchased book after book trying to learn how to build my website. Every day, I would check my website stats and I had very little traffic getting to my website.

Then I learned of this foreign term called SEO, and that I needed my website to be optimized so the search engines could find me. I studied and studied, and took an online class from one of the great SEO teachers on the web. I was so lost! I just could not comprehend what this SEO was all about.

I hired someone to work on my website to increase my rankings with the search engines. That cost a lot of money, especially when I kept messing things up on the website. I was starting to hear a lot about blogging, so I started a blog at WordPress.com, and linked it back to my website. I worked hours setting up my blog, adding content and ads, only to be told by WordPress.com to remove my ads or they would delete my blog. I was so frustrated!

Then I noticed that my blog was getting a ton of traffic, and my website was just sitting there. I asked my web designer about turning my website into a WordPress.org blog.  This self-hosted platform would allow me to place ads on the site. She said that was the trend.

She suggested that I change my static website into a blog. I knew I had problems with my WordPress.com blog, but I usually could figure it out in the end.  So I took the plunge and had my static website converted into a WordPress.org blog. I’m so grateful that I made this decision. My search engine stats are up, I can add recipes, ads, articles, whatever I want to add to my own blog. My costs are down because my web designer does the maintenance stuff, and I get to blog my heart out.

Betty Lynch, author of Back to the Table with My Country Kitchen, and owner of My Country Kitchen, Easy Answers to Bring Your Family Together. My Country Kitchen prides itself in helping family’s cook easy, convenient meals so that the family can save money in today’s economy. Recipes, tips and ideas for easy and nutritious meals are only a click away. You may visit her website  My Country Kitchen; Email at: blynch1490@gmail.com

Betty Lynch
Author – “Back to the Table with My Country Kitchen”

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How Kathie Thomas Gave Birth To Her First Blog

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.

You can follow Kathie on Twitter

How Joyce Mason Gave Birth To Her First Blog

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

You can follow Joyce on Twitter