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Performancing Blogosphere Roundup – May 18, 2010

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You might already know that social news and voting site Digg is undergoing some changes that’ll be rolled out in the near future. But if you want a glimpse of what the changes might be, TechCrunch has an annotated version of a picture that Digg CEO Kevin Rose tweeted over the weekend, with a bit of an analysis. The picture is of Rose’s MacBook Pro screen, though the sun’s glare makes it a bit difficult to see much. (An updated picture, albeit smaller, shows the screen more clearly.) From TechCrunch has gleaned, it appears that the new Digg will be even more social, with user avatars showing more prominently, embedded status updates related to story items and more. [Image courtesy of X64bit.]

Do you do a lot of downloading, screen captures, podcasting, video blogging or screencasting? Well then Seagate has a monster hard drive for growing data storage needs. Thinq is reporting that Seagate has confirmed an upcoming 3TB drive for later this year. That’s TeraBytes, as in 1,000 times a GigaByte. My MacBook Pro’s 500GB drive is filling up awfully fast, but that’s due to photo and video work I’m doing with my wife, a filmmaker. I have a few internal drives in my blogging setup, though one is for backups and the other requires two USB ports and gets whiny sometimes and simply doesn’t function. While a 3TB drive does sound tempting, from a purely mechanical point of view, I’d much rather have three 1TB drives or six 500GB drives. This would allow you to assign drives for different purposes, and if one fails, you don’t lose all your data.

Postrank is reporting that traditional hosted blog platforms such as Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad are still way ahead of supposedly popular microblogging services such as Tumblr and Posterous. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a bit of an analysis of the Postrank report, showing that Blogger is the king of comments. But while hosted blog services serve their purpose, if you’re trying to build a brand, you want to host your own blog, using WordPress, Drupal, Moveable Type, Joomla, Expression Engine, etc.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has published a report (PDF, 19 pages) on their findings of a experiment to study browser signatures. It appears that even if you have cookies turned off, 8 in 10 browsers still leave a unique, trackable signature, like a fingerprint, that could be used to track your surfing — especially if you have Adobe Flash or Java plugins installed. That doesn’t necessarily mean the government is watching you, but rather that it would be a boon to marketers. Of course, there’s an inherent violation of privacy if your browser is ratting you out. On a related note, even the speed and rhythm with which you type in a site’s password could give you away.

Do You Disclose Relevant Info in Your Blog Posts?

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If you’re an American blogger, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) might be watching you, to see if you’re disclosing any information in your blog posts that suggest you received some benefit, whenever you mention some product, service or company. That’s due to their blogging and new media disclosure guidelines that went into effect last year. Yes, it’s more work for a fast-paced workflow, but it simple once you get into the habit. The basic rule of thumb: don’t keep secrets if you’re trying to influence readers.

Now by disclosure, I don’t mean things like, “I had sauerkraut on a hot dog today. With lots of French’s Dijon mustard. And liked it.” Well, actually, if your blog is about food, for example, and you regularly mention a particular brand, the FCC maybe analyzing what you write. Presumably they’re wondering, “Is French’s giving this blogger freebies?” If you only mention a brand in passing here and there, no sweat — unless all the brands are from one company. But if you do a full on review of a brand, or write about them so often that you raise a red flag, they might want to talk to you. Then, if they find out you indeed received a lifetime shipment of free mustard in return for occasionally or regularly blogging about their product, you had better have disclosed this information to readers at some point.

How to Disclose Relevant Info in Blog Posts

Disclosure can be awkward, but you do have a few fairly simple choices. Now the following tips are only suggestions, based on my common sense, and what I’d want other bloggers to disclose to me on their blog. I haven’t read the reportedly ambiguous FTC disclosure rules that have been in effect for bloggers since Dec 1, 2009.

1. Disclose relevant info.

Disclose only what is relevant to the post in question. If you own shares in multiple companies but only mention one, what does it matter? If you received free products from different companies, no one cares unless you’re mentioning the products in a blog post.

2. Disclose information when necessary.

Disclose even if it means repeating yourself from post-to-post. If you’re always writing about a company, product or service in every single post and have received some benefit in consideration, then find a better way to disclose such info, such as prominently in a sidebar. Or you could create a Disclosures page for your blog and link to it either from your sidebar or from relevant posts.

Keep it simple.

Try to summarize your benefits, not go into great detail. For example, I spent a few months being lead blogger and inbound marketing manager at YourVersion, a real-time Web discovery engine that I think is a great tool for bloggers trying to find the latest references for one or more topics. My work with YourVersion was unpaid but I’m entitled to some share options, though I don’t get any extra benefits in continuing to promote the company — unless of course the company goes public in a few years and I’ve exercised my share options. If I do additional work for the company, outside of tech evangelizing, I could be eligible for additional share options.

Sounds pretty complicated, right? Since it’s awkward to disclose the exact details of this info without rambling, I usually just say, “Disclosure: I’m an unpaid tech evangelist for YourVersion and have share options.” (While we’re on the topic of shares, I should note that PF — aka Personal Finance — bloggers have the tendency to disclose most often. If they talk about a stock, they’ll mention ownership of shares. Some even mention lack of ownership in companies mentioned, just to be above board.)

Separate disclosure text.

For one-off disclosures (even if they’re a repeat), you have a couple of options:

  1. Place the disclosure in brackets, close after the mention of a product, service or company.
  2. Place the disclosure at the bottom of your post.

Disclose on your personal blog.

Sometimes clients don’t want disclosures of other products, or at least not on a repeated basis. What I’ve done in the past is published a disclosure within a review on my own blog, which I use to write about my clients and topics relevant to the Web and Mobile blogging and consulting work I do.

For example, I bought a copy of Mindjet‘s MindManager 6 mind mapping software back around early 2007. Mindjet loved the fact that I loved MindManager and wrote about the software extensively. In spring 2007 and late 2008, they gave me free copies of V7 and V8, respectively. I disclosed this in two reviews of MindManager published on my personal site, and on select client blog posts where I was reviewing the produt positively. If I simply mention Mindjet or MindManager in passing, I don’t disclose the freebies.

Note: I will be writing an upcoming Performancing post on using mind mapping for writing, but will only disclose the freebies if I’m overly favoring MindManager.

Where and When Should You Disclose

Yes, disclosure can be a PITA, but even if wasn’t an FTC requirement, doing so builds trust with your readers. Now, sometimes it’s pretty obvious when you’re getting freebies. Back in the early to mid-90s, when I was publishing a printed monthly entertainment review magazine in and around Toronto, we were getting as many as 30 music CDs a week and all were freebies. There was no issue about disclosure in those days, and thank goodness because we’d have run out of print space.

If a music reviewer bought a CD, they might say something like, “I love this band so much, I ran out and bought their new CD.” On the other hand, we never received movie passes; that came out of the operating budget, and as result we covered less of them. My film writers were hardcore film fanatics and just reviewed films for me because they wanted the experience, and to share.

Of course, when it comes to blogs, display space isn’t as much of an issue as for print. You’ll have to decide on your own if and when you should disclose some benefit you’ve received. (Or maybe read the FTC guidelines; BuzzMachine has a post on how the FTC is regulating our speech, and has a bit.ly link to the 81-page PDF document.) By the way, the rules also apply to new media, so you’ll want to disclose relevant benefits in podcasts and video blogs. Ultimately, use your common sense and be on the up and up about any benefits you’ve received from a person or company, if it’s relevant to a blog post.

Disclosure: I like long walks on the beach, with the sand squishing beneath my feet. And French’s has never given me free mustard, let alone contacted me about any of my cooking blogs.

Image: Flickr.

Blogging Effort vs Return on Investment

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Problogger’s Darren Rowse has a great article [link below] on the “unsexy truths” of monetizing your blogging. A lot of the truths that he mentions apply whether you’re monetizing directly or indirectly, whether you’re running advertising or selling products or services. Overall, I think that purpose and persistence are two of the fundamental keys of blogging success.

Why or For Whom Are You Blogging?

What Darren says, in a nutshell, is that persistence offers the potential (not the guarantee) of success online, but this often is the hardest aspect of blogging: that the return doesn’t come fast enough (item #2). This could be either because a blogging niche is difficult to monetize, or because not enough effort is made to promote, or several other reasons, including really sloppy or poor content. When you couple lack of ROI in a desirable timeframe with the loneliness (item #7) of blogging from home — which I’m guessing most bloggers do — and the challenge of long hours (sometimes, not always) and the lack of human contact together often mean one thing: giving up fairly quickly, if you’re blogging for yourself.

On the other hand, if you’re blogging for clients, then you suffer the “feast or famine” phenomenon, where you sometimes have too much work and at other times you have none. Too bad you didn’t budget for that. Now it’s time to find “a real job” to pay the bills.

If you blog for a business, as part of your job or for your own business, you might have it the easiest of all bloggers, in general. You’re more likely to have a steady salary, and you might even work in an office, which means human contact. Then again, you might be an entrepreneur blogging because you have to, but you still have a stronger “purpose” in blogging than if you’re blogging for yourself to “earn a living.”

Persistence and Purpose are Fundamental

I’m not sure what I can tell you in regards to persistence, because it really does depend on your personality and discipline as well as your situation. The fact is, if you quit, you won’t succeed at blogging. But if you persist, there’s still no guarantee (item #4) you’ll succeed in any fashion.

Blogging suits me because not only am I a long-time writer but my programming career was in transition and I actually had very little choice for the past 4-5 years. I had to persist, and I’m still persisting, but now use blogging as a means to an end, integrated with my mobile apps startup and other types of client work. The irony is that now that I’m also blogging for business reasons, there’s all the more need to persist. My non-client mobile blogs, for example, are eventually to be a marketing vehicle for my mobile apps and those of my clients. However, blogging is no longer my only hope for a career and it doesn’t feel as much of a chore as it sometimes has in the past.

Ultimately, then, you have to find your own purpose for persisting in blogging. If you don’t know why you’re blogging, or you have no unique reason for it, you’ll probably find persistence fleeting. Here are a few tips to consider:

  1. Define your purpose for blogging. If you’re just blogging for yourself and have no other expertise to promote, it’ll be a difficult road, but not necessarily an unfruitful one. You can build your expertise as you go.
  2. Have a plan. Depending on your objectives, a blog business plan may come in handy. Include an editorial calendar in the mix. A plan just serves to remind you of where you want to be headed and actually helps you to focus as well as find it easier to filter distractions and find inspiration.
  3. Get to it. Planning is easy, persisting much harder. You’ll want to regularly monitor your site metrics, leverage your time, and revise your plan and purpose if necessary. Bootstrap your site success if you have to.

Good luck!

Notes: Problogger. Image: Flickr.

Multi-Screen, Multi-Computer Configuration Options for Bloggers

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Do you need to run multiple computers and screens, to satisfy the blogging and social media marketing work you do for multiple projects or clients? Configuring such a setup can be a major headache, but it need not be. If you’re in this situation, here are some tips on managing a multi-screen, multi-computer, multi-OS workstation. (Warning: this is hard core hardware/ software geekery.)

Sample Gear List

Because of the type of work I do, it’s a necessity to have multiple computers running multiple OSes. But due to home office space restraints, external monitors need to be shared, and I’ve had to get creative doing so. Now most bloggers will probably do just fine with a single computer or laptop. Some even work on netbooks if they tend to be mobile. Me, I work with various clients throughout a given year, and more of them lately expect me to have a variety of web site and social media profiles, and it’s sometimes just easier to use a second or third computer.

For clarity, let me list my computing and monitors setup, then I’ll talk about how I share the screens, mouse, keyboard:

  • Acer 15″ laptop, Win XP. Can’t remember the screen res, but I think it’s 1680×1050. It will drive an external monitor.
  • Dell Studio 17″, Win Vista, screen res 1920×1200. Can drive an external monitor.
  • MacBook Pro 17″ (aka MBP), Mac OS X Snow Leopard, screen res 1920×1200. Has one video output port but can drive additional monitors using a special converter, discussed below.
  • Dell Zino desktop (mac mini style form factor, but larger), Win Vista. Shares a monitor that is usually used by the MBP. I have VMWare running on this with a Linux VM (Virtual Machine).
  • iPhone 3GS. Besides typical iPhone use, I initially used this to check up on my MBP (temperature, free memory) through the iStat app, and also used VNC to “peer” in on my Mac when I was in another room. Then the iPad came out.
  • iPad WiFi-only. I use this for various purposes, including replacing what my iPhone was doing, as well as occasionally composing blog posts.
  • 2x Acer H2333H external monitors. Screen res 1920x 1080, unless I’m using HDMI, in which case I get 1920×1200.
  • WiFi-enabled printer. This is tethered to my MBP, but the other PCs can print to it wirelessly.

For easy access, I recently switched to an L-shaped desk that works just perfectly, but I’ve already outgrown it. As for my gear, much of it is actually an investment in my mobile apps development startup business, but I also use all of it in various capacities for client computing, blogging, social media campaigns, monitoring and more. While I generally blog on my MBP running the two external monitors, I occasionally use the two PC laptops in the blogging process. Some client work also sees me using the Dell Studio 17 regularly for one client, and for monitoring of multiple Twitter accounts (mine and clients) via Tweetdeck. My mind maps are built on the Studio 17 because my two fave mind mapping apps, Mindjet MindManager and XMind, just seem to have a better workflow on PCs over Macs.

Hardware Sharing Options

The average blogger probably won’t need such an elaborate setup, but if you have many long-term clients for whom you run social media campaigns, you might find the necessity for multiple systems and screens in the near future. It’s good to be aware of some gear-sharing options for optimizing such a setup, to minimize the number of screens, mice and keyboards in use, thus minimize your workspace. With that in mind, here is the multiplexing infrastructure, both in terms of hardware and software.

1. USB-based KVM Switch.

I’m running an IOGear 4-plex hard KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch that looks a bit like a Mac Mini, is stackable, and uses USB ports for the shared mouse and keyboard. In fact, I have my Dell Zino sitting on top of it, to save space. (Neither is visible in the picture above.) This KVM switch lets me share one keyboard, mouse and external monitor between up to four PC or Mac computers.

The way I have things configured is that I use a mini-display port converter to VGA, then send that to the KVM switch, which then shares the main external monitor amongst the four computers. In the picture above, it’s the large monitor on the middle right. In the schematic diagram below, it’s the one labelled External Screen 1.

I also like to use an Apple mini Bluetooth keyboard and a Dell Bluetooth mouse when I’m working on the MBP. When I want to extend the desktop of either the Acer or Dell laptop onto External Screen 1, I use the originally configured USB keyboard and mouse.

Note: The old-style KVM switches did not offer USB support. Make sure you get the right type of switch.

2. Diamond USB-to-VGA converter.

This very useful device lets me add extra external monitors to my MBP (though I believe it’ll work on PCs as well). The MBP has only one mini-display (video output) port, and I want two screens to supplement the laptop’s native screen, for a total of three screens. The Diamond converter lets any USB port on the MBP, or via a USB hub, become a supplemental video out port. So in the diagram below, the primary monitor, External Screen 1, is powered by the MBP’s mini-display port, but via the KVM switch. The secondary monitor, External Screen 2, is powered through the port of a USB hub attached to the MBP, using the Diamond USB-to-VGA converter.

This idea came from Danny Sullivan, who actually has two of these converters on his MBP, for a total of four screens. He wrote extensively about his multimonitor setup and how you can duplicate it.

3. VNC software.

VNC software allows desktop sharing between two computers, even if they’re running different operating systems, and providing they’re on the same wireless network. One computer can control the other, and the controller is interchangeable.

I use Mocha VNC on the iPhone and iPad, TightVNC on my PCs, and the native VNC software on my MacBook Pro. You run a VNC server app on the computer that will be controlled, and a VNC viewer app on the computer that will do the controlling. I don’t use VNC from computer to computer as often as I used to, after coming across Synergy, discussed in the next item. However, I do still use Mocha VNC on the iPad to “peer in” on the MBP from another room.

Alternately, you can also use TeamViewer software for desktop sharing, and it also works between iPad and a PC/ Mac computer.

4. QSynergy/ Synergy Plus.

QSynergy/ Synergy Plus is brilliant software that beats VNC in some ways. It lets you take your mouse and run it across the screens of multiple computers — even if they’re running different operating systems — and controlling the currently selected computer with the main mouse and keyboard. (You configure one computer as being the primary one, and then use its mouse and keyboard to control the others.)

The nerd in me loves firing up all three laptops and swooshing the mouse across all five screens, just for fun. But seriously, it’s great because it’s kind of a hybrid solution between a KVM switch and VNC software. It knows which computer the mouse and keyboard should be applied to. So in my setup, if I move the main mouse off the MBP’s three screens and over to the Dell Studio 17’s native screen, any mouse movements or keystrokes are then applied to the Dell while the mouse is within its screen. So in the schematic configuration below, there are three computers, and Synergy knows at all times which one is currently selected based on the main mouse’s position, and the configuration settings.

The configuration settings allow you to specify the virtual positioning of computers and screens, including left/ right, above/ below and four corner locations. For example, if computer B is configured as being “above” the primary computer A, then moving your mouse upwards off computer A’s screen should mean that you can now control B with A’s keyboard and mouse. This positioning can be virtual, or can mimic how you actually have your computers arranged on your desk. (The latter is less confusing, when it comes to hand-eye coordination.)

If you’re running Synergy to be able to easily copy/ paste text between computers, you’re in luck, as this is supported. However, if you’re throwing a Mac computer into the mix, things get a little confusing about when you have to use Option-C/ Option-V (Mac) or when to use Ctrl-A/ Ctrl-V (PC). (Can’t remember how it is on Linux, but I think it’s the same as a PC.)

You can also copy/ paste across screens, though I’ve found it quirky and inconsistent, possibly because I’m switching between Mac and PC and my fingers get confused.

Notes:

  • This software only works on computers that have their own screen, and which are on the same wireless network. Since my Dell Zino shares a screen through the KVM switch, it can’t run Synergy.
  • Lifehacker discusses how to use QSynergy (which is necessary for Macs), and links to a previous article that extensively discusses how to setup the older Synergy software.
  • The Synergy Plus software is available from Google Code.

Overall, I do have redundancy in my multi-screen, multi-computer setup, but it comes from trying one solution above after another and finding some feature or other lacking. The way I have things now might seem like inviting information overload, but as long as I stay focused, my setup works very well for my blogging and social media campaigns.

5 Tips For Building Expertise Through Blogging

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How much time do you need to put into a niche before you can declare yourself an expert? Well, many bloggers seem to disagree, judging by their self-proclamations after only a few months, but once upon a time you were classified as an expert if you had spent roughly 10,000 hours on a skill, in a focused, structured manner. If we’re referring to a career job, at roughly 40 hours/week, that comes out to about five years. But when it comes to working online and establishing your expertise, the Web doesn’t wait around. Five years is too long, since Web technology is always changing.
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7 Tips for Bootstrapping Your Blog Traffic

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Any time you start a new blog, the biggest concern tends to be “how do I build traffic?” Unless you’re hiring or have a crack team of web gurus who know the tricks for building up your blog fast, you’ll just have to do it yourself. However, if you haven’t luxury of a big budget and have minimal time, one recourse is to bootstrap your blog traffic with the same general principles with which entrepreneurs bootstrap their startup businesses with minimal funds and resources.

Here are some tips for leveraging your publishing and promotional plan to build initial trickles of traffic into much more.

  1. Write content and publish consistently. It’s easy to come up with a plan, even create an editorial calendar. It’s much harder to actually stick to a consistent schedule. This is a common area of difficulty for bloggers, but important to master. Let’s just say that search engines and readers both love consistency of frequency. Unless you’re running a news site, you don’t necessarily have to publish tons of content daily.
  2. Tweak your content to searches. You don’t want to cater entirely to site visitors’ searches, but do focus on search keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. If visitors are reaching your site via a particular search but the “bounce” (leaving) rate is high, then they probably didn’t find the content they were seeking. Mine your site metrics for the most popular search terms for the recent past, then see if you can write content to match, while staying within your site’s niche.
  3. Build up your posting frequency. Start small, build up your content as time, resources or budget permits. Additional content will bring additional readers, especially if you’re leveraging your social media channels.
  4. Build your social networks.  There are a variety of social networks, including social bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon, Delicious), social voting sites (Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller), Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, other blogs, forums, media sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare) and so on. Don’t forget to factor in the time it takes to build your social networks, so work at it daily if possible. Of course, having these networks is useless unless you leverage them to promote your content.
  5. Promote content on at least two social media sites. There are a variety of ways to promote your content, including the social media sites mentioned above, as well as a variety of non-social profile pages that are free for use. These methods differ in the amount of Web traffic they each bring, though collectively they can make a tremendous difference to your site. You don’t have to use all of these methods, especially when you’re starting out. Bloggers differ on what they feel is most important, but if you have to pick just two to start with, a few of my blogging colleagues have variously suggested the following pairs as being “most” effective, in their experience:
    • Stumbleupon and Digg.
    • Stumbeupon and Twitter.
    • Twitter and Facebook.
    • Twitter and Digg.

    Personally, I’d pick Twitter and Facebook, but it really depends on your content and your social networks. Promoting content successfully online really is about who you know and whether they’ll share your content. If you can get them to do it regularly, even better. Your Facebook Wall or a Fan Page serve as great reminders. Just don’t overdo it, and learn to balance promotion and social network building tasks when you’re not writing.

  6. Deep link to your older content. For each new post that you write, you should try to link to at least two older posts in your own site’s archives. If your post is sufficiently long, you can link to more than two. Remember to link with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. The cynic might say that this is a cheap way to get more page views for your site, but linking to your own existing content from each new post serves multiple purposes
    • Keep readers on your site. Yes, that gets you more page views, but is there really anything wrong with that if you’re giving readers what they want, possibly in your archives?
    • Expose older content to readers who might have missed it.
    • Build authority for your site for the keywords and variations used in link anchor text (more on this in a later post). From a search engine perspective, keep in mind that they all want relevant links to give to search users. If your site happens to have relevant links, why not emphasize that by deep linking? This potentially helps to reduce the waiting time it takes to rank in search engines.
    • Throw a whammy at site scrapers who grab your content. They might steal your content but having a link to your own posts means you’ll at least know who did it and be able to take action, if desired.
  7. Use target=”_blank” in your hyperlinks. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry for now. If you do know, then use it for any links that go outside of your sites. This way, the main browser window/ tab stays on your site, hopefully keeping readers there longer and potentially building traffic.

If you are bootstrapping with limited resources and funds, you can ease into your publishing and promotion plan. Though the more effort you put in early on, the sooner you hit the point of exponential growth. If you have a blog for your business,  build it steadily, keep costs to a minimum, bootstrap your way to higher blog traffic to gain leads and sale. If you get too overwhelmed, hire an intern until you can afford to hire staff or an agency such as Performancing Services.

Image: Flickr.

Blogging Workflow and Productivity: Alternate Bookmarking Tip

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If you have a Mac or PC computer, there’s a simple way to locally bookmark Web pages that you’re browsing or researching en masse that keeps you browser-independent: file folder shortcuts. This method keeps you from having to open multiple Web browser tabs or bookmark all the URLS or worse, copy and paste links into some sort of list. It is a simpler former of bookmarking, but avoids some of the other methods’ limitations. Note: I haven’t tried the following tip on a Linux system, but it might work similarily. I tested on a Mac (10.6.x Snow Leopard) and a PC (Win Vista).

First, let’s look at the objectives we’re trying to achieve:

  1. Browse lots of pages daily, to find ideas and references for blogging.
  2. Locally bookmark web pages independent of any browser, to preserve them for that day and beyond, if necessary.
  3. Minimize the number of open browser tabs, to save the amount of RAM memory your computer is using at any given moment. This saves an immense amount of wasted time.
  4. Reserve the ability to group links as necessary, and move links around for regrouping.

Sources that I refer to daily for finding blog post ideas and references include:

  1. Favorite sites you’ve previously bookmarked.
  2. RSS readers (e.g., Google Reader).
  3. Portals and aggregators (Alltop, Techmeme, Megite, WeSmirch, etc.).
  4. Social voting sites (Digg, Mixx, etc.).
  5. Social bookmarking sites (Delicious, Stumbleupon).
  6. Microblogging sites (Twitter).
  7. Social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning).

Typically, I’ve used mind mapping software and other tools for bookmarking or recording interesting links for later use. Specifically, I’ve tended to favor Mindjet’s MindManager on a PC for about three years, and particularly love this tool. However, when I switched my main laptop to a MacBook Pro last December, I was hugely disappointed to find that not only is the interface for MindManager different than on a PC, but the workflow is different. That’s also true on the Mac for all the other mind mapping tools that I tend to use regularly, such as XMind.

I still love MindManager and other mind mapping tools, but for now, they don’t work for me on a Mac. After wasting a lot of time going back to opening up multiple browser tabs while researching, I managed to crash my Mac (yes, a Mac!!) too many times. Purely by chance, I accidentally discovered a simple trick: drag Web page links from your browser to Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac) applications to create a link shortcut. I’m honestly surprised that I never knew this before, and actually have Mac OS X’s general interface to thank for the discovery.

What happens is that both apps store link information in the form of a “shortcut,” which you can later either drag into a browser or double-click on to open the content page. It’s really quite simple and I’m actually surprised not to have discovered it in the past. Note that with Macs, clicking on a link stored in a Finder folder opens the Safari browser, and that as far as I know, this cannot be changed. If you prefer a different browser while using a Mac, you can use your mouse to drag shortcut links from Finder folders and drop them into your browser of choice. With PCs, you can configure the default browser, so clicking a saved shortcut will open whatever browser you’ve configured.

Caveats
You can end up still accumulating far too many link shortcuts that you’ll never use, and create multiple daily folders, thus finding yourself just as overwhelmed with information overload as with other blogging research methods. So discipline is independent of blogging workflow, and something you’ll need to discover for yourself.

The fact is, I still open far too many browser windows and tabs. For example, at the time of this writing, I have probably 60 tabs open overall in Firefox, Chrome, Flock and Safari. It may seem like a bad habit, but is often a necessity when working with multiple clients and using multiple Web profiles for social media and other services. Using the “bookmark-within-file-folder” trick simple reduces the number of browser tabs I need to open. As a result, I’ve managed to be more productive again for two key reasons. One is that my browser windows hang less often because of more free memory. The other is that I now focus on one browser tab at at a time. Overall, this means less time spent researching/ browsing and restarting browsers and more time for writing.

6 Tips to Make the Most of Your Blog Writing Time

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Have desk, will writeBlogging can be an enjoyable experience or it can be a draining time-suck. Which would you prefer? Whether you’re blogging for your own reasons, freelancing, or doing it for your business, finding the time to write can be difficult if you’re juggling it amongst other work. Here are a few tips to leverage the time that you do have.
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