NBT Link Love for April 11th, 2008

I like to take the weekends to go through my RSS feeds and share the posts I thought might be the most helpful or enjoyable for this community. I hope you take some time to share some great blogs with your readers too!

Here’s what I’m reading this weekend:

 

Have a great Sunday!

Deb

This post was written by Deb

May 11, 2008 | Filed Under Link Love | 1 Comment 

Dealing with Trolls and Negativity

Troll with His Pet Frog Meets Two Long-Tailed Creatures

Yesterday I put the question out on Twitter: How do you deal with trolls? I thought I might share the advice and expertise of other bloggers in the twittersphere, but mostly I got a bunch of smart assed replies. “Fight them off with Dwarves” was one, “Add a little salt and cook until well done” was another. There were more but I’m sure you get the picture. Dealing with trolls, or people who comment on your blogs in a negative manner for the sole purpose of stirring up trouble is really no laughing manner. I have one regular troll who likes to visit all of my blogs and troll in the comments or through email, plus several occasional trolls. All are dealt with in matter befitting the individual troll. The truth is you don’t want that kind of negativity to spill over into your community.

Don’t Feed the Trolls

If there’s one thing I learned in nine years of writing online, it’s that trolls dig controversy. In fact, they come by for the reaction and hope it’s negative. Indeed nothing makes their jeans tighter than to create dissension. Still, there are ways to respond to trolls. Here are a few of the more serious answers received from Tweets:

The most common advice for dealing with trolls is to ignore them and they’ll go away. This is true in most cases. Because trolls live for a reaction, silence causes them to die out or move on. Some of the more adventurous trolls need to be dealt with differently.

Calling Out the Trolls

Sometimes I give the trolls the attention they crave. I take their negative emails or comments and post them on a blog with my very nice response. I don’t engage in name calling, vulgarity, or rudeness, I just address the remark in the sweetest manner I can muster. Using what I call the “sticks and stones” method of dealing with rudeness, I never, ever let them see me get angry or upset. Then I let my community have at ‘em. They don’t get angry or rude either. It’s my hope that by posting the comment or email for the world to see, I’m showing the troll how ridiculous he or she comes off. Usually trolls have such a high opinion of themselves they don’t get it, either that or they’re just too dumb to see what’s going on.

Dealing With Negativity on Your Blog

If you have someone coming to your blog and leaving mean or vulgar comments, you have several recourses.

Must.Not.Engage

When it comes to trolls, consider your community first. How will they feel about a bunch of negativity and mudslinging? If this is the constant atmosphere, you’re going to turn off many visitors and even some of the regulars. Ask yourself if you’d rather have a hostile community or a productive community. It’s my experience that the best blog communities are those where the regulars are helpful and respectful and the trolls are few and far between.

Image: Buy at AllPosters.com

This post was written by Deb

May 10, 2008 | Filed Under Community Building | 6 Comments 

Twitter - Not Quitting Anytime Soon

This week I’ve been talking about time wasters. So far I’ve covered personal time wasters, email time savers, and my editorial calender.

Today Twitter.

This post will be real short. Twitter does waste some of my time. Some tweets on twitter are totally useless. Will this be a time waster I cut?

No.

Twitter sends a fair amount of blog traffic my way. Also I stay current on many of the blogs I enjoy via Twitter, which translates into less time spent clicking around, visiting my favorite blogs to see what’s new. Overall it’s a positive service with some time wasting qualities, but it gives enough back so that I feel it’s justified.

What do you think of your Twitter time?

This post was written by Jennifer

May 9, 2008 | Filed Under Blog Traffic, Time Management | 5 Comments 

The Argument for Posting Ahead

Whenever I talk about posting ahead, the biggest argument not to is time. "I don’t have that kind of time, Deb. I only have time to do my daily allotment each day." I’m here to tell you posting ahead can be a huge time saver, and can also save you from having to play a catch up game later.

Let me explain…

Recently I accepted a lucrative offer from one of my clients. The money was such that I couldn’t refuse, but my workload, of course, grew. And by grew I mean more than doubled.  Though I made some minor adjustments (dropping a difficult client, for instance) I kept all my network blogs. The problem is that it’s hard to post once or twice a day when you’re working almost full time for someone and maintaining your own busy blogs. So I took a few hours over the weekend to post ahead to my b5 blogs ( I have four of them). On Monday there was no denying the benefit of this as it enabled me to fulfill my other obligations without having to worry about finding the time to post to my other blogs. By Tuesday I was learning another major benefit to posting ahead.

Expect the Unexpected

The flu caught me by surprise this week. I started feeling slightly under the weather Monday night but by Tuesday morning I couldn’t function at all. Tuesday and most of Wednesday were spent on the couch or in bed. Though I probably would have taken a sick day today if  I worked in the real world, the truth is I can function in the blogosphere. Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t post ahead of time. Trying to catch up on four blogs for two or more days would have put me far behind. Taking the time to post ahead proved to be a very good investment.

Now before you bombard me with comments and emails telling me there’s no time for posting, I have a few suggestions. Perhaps one will work for you?

Finding the Time to Post Ahead

Wake up an hour earlier or go to bed an hour later: You know why I get so much work done? Because I wake up a couple of hours before the rest of my family. I know waking at four doesn’t appeal to everyone, but for me it’s only temporary. School is a full day next year and then I won’t have to wake so early. My partner Jennifer Chait likes keeping very late hours, by the way.

Switch off with a spouse: My husband and like to switch off on the weekends. I’ll take our son to the park so he can get some work done around the house, and he’ll take him for a hike so I can work as I need to. This also frees us up to spend time as a family.

Make a sacrifice here and there: Give up on that hour of reading or tv watching one day a week to get a little extra work done. When you see how much time it saves during the long run, you’ll be happy you made the effort.

Posting ahead saved me this week. If I didn’t do this on Sunday I would be in a panic because I’m so far behind. Even one or two posts can save you in the event of illness or an emergency. Do think about it…

This post was written by Deb

May 8, 2008 | Filed Under Blog Tips, Time Management | 5 Comments 

So, How Come You Don’t Respond To Comments?

I’m dead serious.

If you work for a network, any network, where say team work is sort of encouraged by networks heads and editors, yet you refuse to respond when readers leave you comments, I’m just curious why. I’m not talking the random no response. I’ve done that. I’m talking about when I’ve left at least 10 comments at your blog in the span of a year, and you’ve never, not once responded back.

I have some ideas.

Basically I’m curious because there are a couple of network blogs I like a lot. I’ll read, comment, nothing, and yet still return. Which one, I’m done with, because it’s getting old, and two this goes against everything I’ve ever heard about traffic. I.e you should respond back to readers.

I guess I’ve always thought responding is a good plan. I’ve never heard an argument against responding to reader comments. If you happen to be a network blogger who never responds I really am curious about how come (not in a mad way, in a very real curious way).

Maybe you can offer some ideas about this in the comments.

This post was written by Jennifer

May 8, 2008 | Filed Under Blog Traffic, Social Networking | 15 Comments 

Save Time By Finding Your Perfect Topic Schedule

The other day I posted my personal biggest time wasters while blogging. First I posted some possible time-saving email solutions and today I’m posting some solutions related to my issue of not knowing what to blog about first.

Notice I did not say “I have no idea what to blog about” - it’s actually very rare that I have no clue what to blog about. My brain is always on idea overload. However, too many ideas, can be just as bad as not enough.

I actually realized I had this issue a few weeks ago, and started a plan that has helped immensely. I made a darn editorial calender.

For a long time, at numerous blogging blogs, I’d see the following tip,“Make an editorial calender for your blog to speed things up.” I never listened because I’ve always been more a spur of the moment blogger. Free to blog what I want, no topic or editorial schedule to speak of. I thought an editorial calender sounded sort of lame. But, with no topic schedule, my brain is always hopping, “What to blog first! I’ve got 100 topics in mind! Hmmm….”

Waste. Of. Time.

I decided to make a weekly editorial calendar. I already have a normal weekly schedule so I simply added topics to it. For example, on my schedule I always list all my blogs plus the numbers of posts needed per day. Now with topics added my schedule looks like this:

thf-schedule.jpg

Above is a clip of my schedule - this is part of my week-long schedule for Tree Hugging Family, but all the rest look the same. The post topics in non-bold font never change from week to week. The items in bold do. When I first tried an editorial schedule I made it too rigid. It had no free post times and I felt overly confined (what if a news story pops up?). That said, I now leave 2-3 free spots per day. If I have a special feature going on I add it in bold. As you can see we’re doing a weekly special on green feminine products and a month long green wedding event.

I do detour sometimes from a topic, but overall, just having to look down and see a topic is way easier. Now I just glance and think, “Oh, it’s time to blog about natural gardening.” I can blog anything about natural gardening I want, but knowing my goal is to get a post on this exact topic done helps.

But my blog’s not so diverse. I can’t have all these topics…

It doesn’t matter. With the green blog, I can have a lot of variety but with say, my organizing blog, I don’t go by topic so much as space. Take a look:

orgsched2.jpg

If you had a baking blog, you could do topics by item; cookie, cake, muffins, etc. Or if you have a blogging blog you could do it by tips; traffic, how-to, comments, etc. This sort of editorial schedule works for any blog. One last thing. What you see above is from this week’s schedule (no holidays) on a week with a holiday, I’d add that for the week on whatever day. I also add contest announcements, theme days, and general issues like that.

By the way, if you have no clue where to start when developing topic themes, I’ll tell you how I got mine. One from stats. The topics you see in my schedule are the most popular I write on. Two, at both these blogs I had polls up that asked readers what they wanted to read more of. The winning topics are also included on my schedule.

In any case, I’m kicking myself for not listening to everyone sooner. This has saved me more time than any other time management trick I’ve tried so far, because I’m not always wavering about trying to focus on a topic theme.

Give it a try, I bet you’ll save time too. Just don’t forget to leave a little flex room.

Have you tried a blogging editorial calender? What did you think?

This post was written by Jennifer

May 8, 2008 | Filed Under Time Management | 4 Comments 

Spend Less Time On Email & More Time Blogging

The other day I posted my personal biggest time wasters while blogging. Today I’m posting some solutions I’m considering for email and moderating blog comments. I’m tacking these two time wasters together, because blog comments are one major source of email for me.

How I already save time on email: 

Have decent email: I use Gmail for my major email account. I.e. anyone that matters gets my Gmail account. Gmail is very good about clearing spam (knock on wood) and so far I’ve never had an issue with them, like I have with other email providers. At first it was tough for me to get used to the whole forum-like thread on Gmail, but now, I really like it. If you have an email account that passes too much spam through, consider changing providers.

I don’t respond to everyone: I used to respond to everyone, even if it wasen’t that useful to me personally, like a PR person with a tip I couldn’t use. I’d email to say thanks anyhow, but no thanks. Now I’ve pulled back a bit on email etiquette. I respond if it’s important, if you’re a friend, and often if it’s someone with a question about blogging, but that’s it.

New ideas I have to save time on email:

Don’t answer every email right away: There are some people who say that you should only check your email if you’re ready to respond. I used to do that. Problem was I’d check my email 3+ times a day. Now I don’t answer all my emails right away. I’ve been saving them up. I still do check my email maybe 3 times a day, in case there’s some sort of client emergency, but I’ve been trying to answer the bulk of them at night.

Check your email once a day only: This is too hard for me to do, but I’ve been considering bucking up and trying it. The issue is that on weekdays I’d have 100s by nighttime if I didn’t do a sweep a couple of times a day. What I do currently is fly in, and scan for unimportant emails , which I delete, and toss everything else into labeled folders.

Delete all blog comments right away: It’s not always up to me whether I get comments emailed or not; sometimes my clients or networks have them sent to me. However, what I’ve found is that if I read and respond to comments when I see them in my inbox, it wastes a lot of time. My new system that I’m working on is simply reading my comment panels once a day at all my blogs. I’m not too good at this yet. I like to read comments as they arrive, but it does waste more time than dealing with them all at once.

Deal with special groups of emails once a week only: I get lots of emails from people asking me to do product reviews or giving me tips on topics. I’m saving all these in a PR folder that I sort, read, and answer once weekly. I’m also part of a stumble email group, so I’ve been labeling and saving these as well.

I started working on my email problems last week and so far it’s been better. It takes time to develop new habits though, and most days I really want to go comment at my blogs right away, or respond to stuff that’s not a dire emergency. If I follow through, I think the above ideas are really going to help me.

Obviously I’m not the best person to be giving email advice (it is one of my issues) so I decided to search out a few links you can read that address email nightmares:

12 Rules for Getting a Grip on Massive ProBlogger Email - great tips, some I’ll be trying out.

Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload - an older article, but had some nice tips surrounding how to send better emails, and how to let people know that you’re not an email slave.

10 Tips for Managing Email Effectively - excellent pointers about all areas of email management.

20+ Firefox Plugins For Managing Email - extra plugins tend to make my world more difficult, not easier, but these may work well for you.

What’s your best tip for managing email overload?

This post was written by Jennifer

May 7, 2008 | Filed Under Blog Tips, Time Management | 8 Comments 

Wasting Time While Blogging

We all waste time at work sometimes, and usually a little time wasted does no harm. However, I literally have no time to waste. I get two full days to work, period, each week. I’m a single work-at-home mama, who homeschools, so time is tight. My son’s dad has our son Friday evenings through Sunday evenings which is when I do the bulk of my work – that by the way means; I try to get everything done for the upcoming week (currently about 3 articles and enough posts for around 10 blogs). It’s near impossible. Actually it is impossible. I’ve never, not once, had a week where I get it all done on the weekend.

Partly, this is because I’m working with a small amount of time, but also I waste some of my time. Last week I made a list of all the ways I waste time.

Some of these problems are larger than others. I also jotted down some solutions, including some solutions directly related me only having two days to work in the first place.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be posting my solutions – and how they’re working. I put some into motion this weekend. If you’re wasting time in the same ways that I do, or if you’re a single work-at-home parent maybe my solutions will help you to improve your productivity too.

What ways are you wasting time during work hours?

This post was written by Jennifer

May 6, 2008 | Filed Under Blog Tips, Health & Wellness, Stress, Time Management | 8 Comments 

Payment is Late: When Should You Worry?

For the first time in years, the first few days of the month have gone by without payment from any of my clients. Normally at least one client can be counted on to pay on the first day of the month, the rest will come within the first week. It’s been a long time since a client tried to rip me off, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t worry. Still, I’m not in the habit of contacting my clients on the second day of the month if payment isn’t received. Before you start panicking and sending around "hey I’m being ripped off" emails, consider the following:

If You work for a Big Network You’re Safe

If you work for a large, high profile network, do you really think they’re going to rip you off? Consider this: If the most prestigious blogging network in the world hasn’t paid you yet, do you think they want the world knowing or do you feel it’s in their best interests to keep you happy? The last thing they want is for the press or other bloggers to think they’re deadbeats. Of course they’re going to pay you. Every now and then there’s a rare occasion when payment is late.I can only count one such occasion in the year I’ve been working for networks and it wasn’t late by much. Networks have money. They’re not in the business of ripping off their bloggers. Before you start emailing everyone in the network, talk to your editor. There’s probably already a note of explanation on the way.

What Does Your Contract Say?

Though you might be paid on the first of the month, your contract might state you’re to be paid within the first two weeks or fifteen days of the month. Your client or network doesn’t have to pay you on a specific date, though it’s a nice courtesy. Read your contract, if it says you’ll be paid within the first week of the month, wait until that week is up before you start sending out the emails or making the phone calls.

When to Bug Your Individual Clients

Individual clients are different, especially ones you just started working with. First check the terms of your contract and wait until the promised payment time has passed. If your agreement says you’ll be paid within the first of the month, wait a day or two after and send a nice note of inquiry. If it’s a trusted client, I usually give it a week or two past due before I start to get a bit nudgy.

Instant Gratification

When I freelanced for print, I received payments months after my piece was published. The web has made us spoiled because of the instant gratification of immediate publication and payment. Still, it’s best to be reasonable. Your client has no intention of stiffing you and probably has a good reason for paying later than normal. Be patient, wait a few a days and send a nice note asking if there’s a problem. Keep it on good terms, as you don’t want your client to be put off by a nasty tone. I know there are ripoffs out there, but I haven’t encountered any in the blogging world.

I hope you don’t either.

This post was written by Deb

May 5, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging Compensation | Leave a Comment 

Take Advantage of Network Wide Promotions

At the network I blog for, we have channel wide and network wide promotions. Most involve a specific day where everyone in the channel participates in blogging around a particular topic or theme. Here’s why it’s in your best interests to participate in the events:

Participation in most events isn’t mandatory, but it’s good blogging juju. When you blog, you need all the good karma you can get.

This post was written by Deb

May 5, 2008 | Filed Under Be A Team Player | Leave a Comment 

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