Comment Friday received a cool 24 comments. I know I posted it late, but thats alright.

This weeks topic seem to surround the weather. It’s hot for you, but cool for me!

This week I have chosen a new blog to be our Blog of the Week. Blogging4Everyone obviously seems to be new, so I figured they were in need of some link love.

They have some pretty decent articles, and posted a great comment. Too bad it was late in the comment friday for anyone to respond, it would of been a great topic starter.

Hope to have you all back next week!

Our RSS Feed Competition is CLOSED. We will be announcing a winner in the next few days, including a video of who won. Make sure to claim your prize in 48 hours or I will be drawing again! We may even have a 2nd prize winner!

A few rambling thoughts on life …

All we have is now. The measure of our peace of mind, and the measure of our personal effectiveness, are determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment. Regardless of what happened yesterday and what might happen tomorrow now is where we are. From this point of view, the key to happiness and contentment must be focusing on the present moment.

One of the beautiful things about children is that they absorb themselves fully in the present moment. They manage to stay completely involved in whatever they are doing, whether it’s watching a beetle, drawing a picture, building a sandcastle or whatever they choose to devote their energies to.

As we become adults many of us learn the art of worrying about several things at once. We can allow problems and future concerns to crowd into our present so that we become miserable and ineffective.

We also learn to postpone our pleasures and our happiness, often developing a notion that sometime in the future everything will be much better than now.

The High School student thinks, “When I’m out of school and don’t have to do what I’m told, everything will be great!”

He leaves school and suddenly recognises that he won’t be happy until he has left home.Â

He leaves hope, starts University and soon decides, “When I have got my degree, then I’ll be really happy!” Eventually he gets his degree at which time he feels that he can’t be happy until he has a job.

He gains employment and has to start at the bottom of the heap. You’ve guessed it. He can’t be happy yet.

As the years roll by he postpones his happiness and peace of mind until he gets married, starts buying a home, gets a better job, starts his family, gets the kids out of school, retires … and then he dies before he allows himself to be blissfully happy. All his present moments were spent planning for a wonderful future which never arrived.

Living in the now is about expanding our awareness to make the current moment more delicious. Each of us has the choice, moment by moment, as to whether we really want to live and allow ourselves to be touched and affected.

Whenever we are living in the present moment we drive fear away from our mind. Essentially fear is the concern over events which might happen sometime in the future. This concern can be paralyzing to the point where we find it impossible to do anything constructive.

We are, however, only open to intense fear when we are being inactive. The minute we start to take action and actually do something our fear subsides.

Living in the now is about about taking action, without fear of the consequences. It is about putting in our effort for the sake of involvement, without worry as to whether we will get our just rewards.

Time doesn’t really exist, except as an abstract concept in our head. The present moment is the only time we have.

 It’s up to us to make something of the moment.

Good luck,
Mike.
Mike’s Money Making Mission

Trying to get back on track with our Comment Friday, I am aiming for 25 comments!

If this is your first comment friday, it is a fun and simple idea. Just leave us a comment about anything you want, and we can get our own little discussion going.

Each week we will chose one lucky commenter to be featured as our Blog of the Week and that blogger will get a link to their blog, and a spot on our blog roll for the week.

If you are hosting your own comment friday let us know.

There’s so much information we have to deal with nowadays. It’s hard to keep up with it all. By improving our reading skills we could save a lot of time and spend what we save on things that matter most, like family.

Spreeder can help you.

The interface is very simple as it should be because it’s only designed to accept the text you paste into its window and then shows you that text one word at at time for you to read.

Why one word at a time? The short answer is: subvocalization. It’s when we hear ourselves “speak” the words we read in our head. This results in slowing down our reading. The solution is to be able to recognize the words we read without having to say them in our head. So reading this way trains us to read faster.

When reading a book, the solution is simple: just trace your finger or the eraser-end of a pencil along the words as you read them. Make it go slightly faster than you normally read so you can make your eyes catch up a little.

When reading online try using this bookmarklet. Having this in your browser’s toolbar makes it easy for you to select text on a web page and have those words shown to you in the same fashion described above.

Inspired by zenhabits.

Brought to you by Family WebWatch Blog | Fave FWW | Subscribe to FWW

For those keeping track, we have reached our goal of 150 RSS Subscribers. Not only did our contest help, but so did a few feed exchanges via forums. Not only will I be writing how we got 150 feed subscribers, but I can finally give away our Mini Fridge!

One lucky person will be getting our fridge, just for subscribing to our feed! We are getting some last minute entries thanks to Kumikos great review of our blog, as well as some forum postings. I am also planning a full review of Kumikos review. I hope you take advantage of her reviews, she’s great at them!

I am happy that Blog about your Blog is doing so well and I know it will continue to do so with such great authors. Just wanted to mention that Jennifer’s post about Increasing Blog Traffic by Using HTML in Comments of Other Blogs received 37 diggs and counting! If you haven’t dugg the article yet, please do so.

We are also exploring ways to start paying our authors for certain blog posts, but thats in the works. More on that to come!

With our great success in Feed Subscribers I am looking to add some sponsored links to our feed. You can purchase links at 6$ a month via paypal, or we can exchange advertising. Please use our contact form if you are interested.

Lee hasn’t been able to pick winners for the previous two comment friday’s due to his demanding schedule. Since it’s already Tuesday I won’t be picking any “blogs of the week” but I do want to give out some link love.

Next Friday we will be back on schedule with Comment Friday hosted by me, and the winner will be picked on Saturday.

Last friday we suffered a shortage of comments, but I am sure we will pick it back up to about 30-40 this week!

First I want to notice Jason Spence of Blisslogs. He has been an active Comment Friday participant. Last week he said:

“What’s up with only 15 posts at 8:30PM CDT on Comment Friday? Heres number 16. Lets get this going to get them to their goal for the day.”

Obviously we didn’t reach our goal, but every comment counts! Blisslogs are currently looking for guest bloggers and blogging about the new version of WordPress.

The previous friday our topic was what song gets stuck in your head. Our first commentor (who hasn’t been featured before) was Snapshots of Life with Cheng Leng. I have never seen them post on comment friday, it’s always nice to get a fresh face around here. Especially a snapshot!

Speaking of new faces it’s also nice to see all of our regulars around here. A previous winner, Windy, never seems to miss comment friday. Blog about your Blog would like to wish her a happy belated bday, and to keep on cooking.

If you would like your blog to be featured, make sure to come by on Friday and leave a good comment. You may just win some link love yourself.

Introduction: Who is Garry Conn?

Hello, my name is Garry Conn. I run a personal blog site titled, Garry Conn dot Com. I help thousands of readers by delivering successful blogging tips. I have been an author here on Blog about Your Blog coming up on a month now. I have been wanting to publish my first post here since the day I registered. But, you know how that goes… wanting to be at multiple places at once. Life just doesn’t work that way, I wish it did! 🙂

From the first time I ventured into this community it was really love at first sight. What an opportunity to gain more readers to your site. The concept is simple. Provide excellent content here, which helps this community grow and the content being published here has a direct reflection on yourself. Meaning, if people don’t like what you write here, then it can generally be assumed that the readers won’t like what you write on your main site too. So the incentive to write good quality posts here is extremely high… and it should be! The end result couldn’t be more perfect. You have a handful of highly skilled and creative bloggers who collaborate onto one site where we all create a prefect experience for the blog reader. In my opinion, this is one of the most insightful and creative concepts I have seen in awhile.

It’s Not Always About Traffic:

I have mentioned this on my site many times. While getting traffic to your site definitely is important, what is more important is what you do with the traffic that does come into your site. Meaning, what is your conversion rate? If you have 100 visits per day, how many people do you convert into regular readers? My focus has never been on scoring tons of traffic to my personal blog. I knew that in due time, traffic would naturally increase. Today, there isn’t a day that goes by where another blogger doesn’t mention me on a post or add my site to their blogroll. Why? Because, since day one I have written articles that are intended to help just one person. If I can end the day knowing that I have helped just one person, I feel great. When you read my articles, I am speaking directly to you… the article was written specifically for you. When you are done reading, if I haven’t made you say, “wow!” then I have failed.

So, for me… I would rather have 10 visits per day knowing that I have a 100% conversion. Because in the long haul, I will have more traffic coming into my blog compared to another blog who focuses on volume. In other words, I would rather have 10 visits per day @ 100% conversion compared to having 1000 visits per day @ 1% conversion. The numbers equal the same and far as the total number of regular readers converted… but the difference between the two stats is simple: One site is so in tune with their readers interest, it converts 100% of the traffic into permanent readers while the other is failing because only 1% is being pulled in. 99% of the people come and go… and don’t look back.

How Do I Convert Traffic Into Readers?

• Rule #1 is to be yourself. There are so many people out there that live double lives. Typically after spending about a week on these sites I can start to see right through them. FAKE! The most important thing you can do to be successful blogging and convert traffic into regular readers is to be yourself.
• Rule #2 is to allow people to learn who you are. This can be done by publishing an about me page. An about me page should be a page where you simply put your cards on the table and spill the beans. You should express the things that are important to you, talk about your interests and also explain about what your site is about. If readers don’t know the purpose of your blog, they will have no reason to continue to visit.
• Rule #3 is to interact with your readers. The easiest way to do this is to reply to their comments. If a reader has taken the time to comment on an article that you wrote, be polite and comment back. Also, when you do comment back, try to pick the reader’s brain a little bit… ask for additional thoughts and encourage your new reader to elaborate more on their thoughts. Another way to interact with your readers is to visit their own blog and comment on their articles. Not only doesn’t this encourage the reader to come back to your site, but it also plants seeds for other readers to come over and check your site out. Lastly, having a contact page as well openly accepting blogroll link exchanges are very useful.
• Rule #4 is to be a leader and an expert. The whole foundation of the Internet is information, in the mid 90’s “The Information Super Highway” was a popular coining of the Internet. And still to this day in our wonderful world of Web 2.0, not much as changed. People seek the knowledge of others. And with blogging, people are pulled to leaders and experts. If you author a blog, you are an expert in what you write and talk about. Do not publish weakness about your topic. People expect you to take the lead and follow your advise. If you illustrate to your readers that you are not a strong leader, they will flock away to someone else who can lead them.
• Rule #5 is to reward your readers. Publishing your top commenters high up on your sidebar and offering different ways to help promote your readers gives them incentive to stick around more. Not only do you help your readers by writing quality content but you also help them by sharing the link love and traffic. Don’t be selfish. Give back to your community because without them you would be nothing.

Summary:

To sum things up… having a ton of traffic to your site is important. But converting all your traffic into regular readers is more important. Focus long and hard on keeping the traffic you do get instead of focusing on getting more. If you maintain 10 visits per day and convert 100% everyday, by the end of the year you are looking at having 36,500 visits per day… all of which are regular readers and contributors.