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For the Love of Fairies, STOP the Freaking Auto-DM’s

Dear Auto-dmer’s,

fairy zombie See her? A few moments ago she was flitting about petting butterflies in my garden. Now she is dead. I hope you’re happy.

You see, every time I get an auto dm on twitter asking me to like someone’s FB page, a fairy falls over dead. Your DM’s annoy me so much that a fairy has to leave her peaceful flower garden to sprinkle me with pixie dust so that I don’t reach through my laptop and punch you in the throat. In her gallant effort to rush here to save your throat, she invariably suffers heart failure and falls to the ground dead shortly after.

And for what? REALLY? Do people actually rush over to facebook and follow you? Do you get responses like:

Oh, thank goodness, I was looking all over facebook for a link to like you & could only find your twitter account!

or

If I follow you on facebook, can I please get more spam messages like this?

or

I know we just met but I can tell in your last 140 characters you feel the connection too. Let’s FB chat!

Cause I am kinda thinking you don’t. Or if you do, you may want to look into places that provide bulk restraining orders.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope that somewhere in some social media ‘class‘ some ‘guru‘ told you this was a great idea. Or perhaps you read an article on building social media presence that was written in 2008. It’s OK. We all make mistakes. I admit I had my fun with an auto-dm too. Then this decade started.

But now that you know you have made one? Stop doing it OK?

I promise that besides needlessly killing fairies you are most certainly harming any chance you have of building ‘trust capital’. 

Sincerely Yours,

@chaotic_barb

and if I dm’d you this link in response to yours, know that I am only trying to help you. I followed you because I thought you were interesting but then you blew it with a horrible first impression. Buy me a drink and we will be good.

 

 

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Mom Blogs I Think You Should Know

Friends. We all need them. Sometimes more than others.

The great thing about these friends of mine? They are there whenever I need them. Sometimes that’s a call, or a drink, or a facebook post. Or sometimes that is just crawling through their blogs late at night when the insomnia monster rears its ugly head.

Some of them blog about adoption, some special needs, some local events, and others education. Some just randomly blog. But the one thing they all have in common? The writers are my friends.

So, here is my Mother’s Day gift to all of you. My Colorado blogging friends…..read them, love them, laugh with them and enjoy them as much as I do!

Bantering Blonde

Casual Perfectionist

Imagination Soup

Projects for Preschoolers

Two Hands Two Feet

The Social Joint

Mom In Management

Denver Bucket List

Half Past 40

100 Directions

Mile High Mamas

La La Girl

Sugar Loco

ColoradoMoms

Moose and Tater

Denver Parent

Write Mind Open Heart

Misty Montano 

Mama Bird’s Blog

Crazy Blogging Canuck!

Crunchy Green Lovin’ Mom

Bodhi Bear

Clumsy Gourmet 

Evolving Mommy

New Life Focus

RajeanBlomquist – Because I said so

Lifenut

Age of Melissius

Get Clued In

Mediamum

Special Happens

Guessing All The Way 

Aurora Macaroni Kid

Broomfield Macaroni Kid

Highlands Ranch Macaroni Kid

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The Case For Being Clickable VS Pinable #pinterest

Last month, I gave a presentation on the Disney Fantasy Cruise on using Pinterest to gain traffic for your blog and increase brand recognition. The crux of my presentation was sharing the discoveries I have made through trial and error pinning food, lifestyle, and  DIY photos for the purpose of driving web traffic.

I cautioned people to learn from a mistake I made last month in trying to make our photo’s pin-able. What I found is that being pin-able does not always translate to being click-able. Which is the goal of most people trying to use the pinterest platform to drive traffic. Mind you, I use Pinterest for many reasons other than traffic building but as pointed out all over the web, for some lucky sites Pinterest now drives more traffic than google +, linkedin and youtube combined.

Case in point are two DIY posts that I orchestrated the social media behind (a relationship that has since ended)

 

Comparision of traffic from two DIY food photos pinned on Pinterest

As you can see from the graphic, the Skip The Frosting post was repinned approximately 62,000 times and resulted in 89,000 pageviews while The Lorax Dinner Makeover had a great Pinterest showing of 48,000 repins but only 9,000 pageviews.

Looking at a sample of these two pins it is easy to see why.

Lorax Dinner Pasta Pin SnapshotSkip The Frosting Pinterest Snapshot

The pasta pin tells you everything you need to know in the description. The cupcake pin gives you a reason to click on it to see what is happening in this photo.

One is pin-able. One is click-able.

We can’t control how other people describe our photos when they are pinning but more often then not, people tend to just hit the “repin” button and leave the original comment. Start your pins off right and don’t give it all away in the description. Just a teaser will do if you want to earn the click through to your site!

At Organized Cook we use the Pin It plugin to help us gain a little control over pins generated from our site by allowing us to pre-select suggested images and descriptions. Would love to hear if you have any other suggestions!

 

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Investing In Your Blogging Career #blissdom At HOME

Through the years, I have tried to write posts that help new bloggers reach their goals. This is a hard business to break into and few bloggers truly make a living at it…..well, a living that includes more than Tide coupons and free movies. But I would say for most ‘mom bloggers’ the goal isn’t to make a full time salary- we do it for more personal reasons. One of those being, we find our bliss in it.

Last month I was able to go to the Blissdom Conference in Nashville. The level of talent among the speakers there was amazing. But I couldn’t be everywhere at all times and there were plenty of sessions I missed, most regrettably the Photography Track with Me Ra Koh. Thankfully, as a Blissdom Community Leader I was given the gift of a membership to Blissdom at Home so now I can take my time and work through all of the sessions at my own pace. Blissdom at Home is just like being there. All the sessions were taped and you can watch the videos of the presentations, listen to the audio (I fell asleep last night listening to Shoot Like a Woman session) and have all the handouts and slideshows as if you were sitting there.

This year Blissdom at Home is trickling the information in and I won’t lie, at first I was totally annoyed by this. Mostly because the one session I REALLY want to see is 3 Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to Grow Your Facebook Fan Page with Melanie Nelson. I have already seen people reporting back some real quantifiable results from tips they picked up here. According to the schedule that one won’t be released for weeks. UGH! I have since realized that this is probably a good thing. My brain would skip right to that session and I would gloss over things that I thought weren’t relevant to me and I would miss such amazing nuggets of knowledge about things I didn’t even know I needed to know.

For those of you that are always asking me “Should I go to a Blog Conference?” this is your answer. Blissdom At Home isn’t “cheap” but for $99 you get access to ALL the sessions until the 2013 Conference. Plus a forum to ask questions and discuss what you learn. That is a heck of a lot cheaper than flying, hotel, the conference pass (which was $199) and owing your hubby for watching the kids for the weekend!

Blissdom At Home.

I don’t recommend a lot of things on this blog but this is truly something I think is valuable to mom bloggers looking to take things to the next level. Full disclosure that my link to it is an affiliate link. If you buy it, I am getting 20%. BUT if you buy it, and like it, you can recommend it to your readers with an affiliate link.Which means if 5 of your readers get it, you basically got it for free. Pretty sweet deal they have going on there.

BlissDom ’12 – Opening Video from Blissful Media Group on Vimeo.

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Connecting Offline-The Importance of Blog Conferences

Nothing makes me as insecure as a blog conference. The time when your online personality meets the offline. The time when you can’t hide behind an avatar. The time when you have to make conversation in more than 140 characters. The time when you can’t draft and edit your thoughts before publishing.

I obsess for weeks before: how much weight have I gained since the last conference? What are my latest successes? How many people know about my latest failures? Was everyone reading my twitter stream that one day I just went off? Will I be the only one wearing a dress? Are jeans OK? What if everyone in the room ignores me?

UGH! Why do I do this to myself?

And then I take a deep breathe, put on my spanx enhanced big girl panties and get on with it.

Facebook T-shirt from BlissdomAnd something amazing starts to happen. After the first few hours of squeals and delights and big hugs to everyone, I settle into my calm. I find a comfy couch in the corner of the room and even though I may know half the room, I connect with just a few people on a deeper level. I catch up with old friends, make some new ones, really listen to what is going on in their lives. That is where I find my bliss.

I find my bliss in making connections that will last for years with both bloggers an PR reps. I remain conscious that my goal is not to drop my card in every fish bowl, which isn’t a bad thing to have as a goal. It’s just that I have been there, done that. My goal is reconnect with those brands I work with, remind them of my evolving brands, let them know what new I am doing so we can continue to partner together in ways that work for us both.

My goal at these conferences is to listen much more than I talk. Learn about the current themes, hear the buzz and then bring it all back and decompress it into something actionable.

Which answers the question: Why do I do this to myself?

Because stepping out from the virtual world reconnects me with the real people behind all those gorgeous avatars. It re-humanizes this digital world I spend so much of my time in. It reminds me of why I started all this in the first place: to connect with others in a way that expands the boundaries of my little bubble.

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