Educational

To Niche or Not To Niche?

I have been working at this blogging thing for a whopping five weeks, give or take a day or two, as my first post was March 9, 2010.  From the beginning, I have racked my brain in search of a niche.  Everything I read says that you have to have a well defined niche and if you can be extremely specific in that niche, all the better.  Sometimes it’s hard to get these old brain cells fired up and working.  Of course, I thought you spelled niche as n-i-t-c-h.  Oh what an uphill battle I have.

I looked up niche on the computer to see what it had to say. Under the definition for niche, this is what it says:  pertaining to or intended for a market niche; having specific appeal: niche advertising.  So, I look at that and think, not too bad, this is what I was thinking.  Work with a specific target subject.  Then I read a post today off one of the biggest ‘how and what to do in blogging sites’, ProBlogger.net.  After I read the post off the ProBlogger site, I was somewhat troubled.  The person that wrote the article was a guest writer for the day.  What I gleaned from reading the post was you had to “push a product” to have a successful blog and make money at it.

To Continue Reading….

Are Girls Smarter Than Boys?

Come on, are you serious?  Maybe this is the case in Canada, but it can’t be that way here in the U.S.  This article that I saw in The Vancouver Sun, on line edition, raises some good points, but I believe it may stretch a few things out of proportion.

The article starts off by saying that boys are lagging behind girls in school when it comes to language skills and as a result are falling behind in their careers and even their relationship prospects are suffering.  Well, I’m not a scientist ( just in case no one was aware of that), but I am learning that there is something to the old adage, ‘with age comes wisdom’.  I have been around the block a few times, to put it another way.

To Continue Reading….

My “Sweet 16″ Wife To Be

When I last wrote about how I met my wife, I believe I left off with describing how I met her at Sears, while attending college.  I had just described how I made the phone call for the first date.  So, time passed and we went out on several dates.  I had been spending a lot of time at her house and when at work, we were always taking breaks together.  We had been having the usual dates, sometimes just us and other times doubling up with friends . Then I took her to what I had been told was the nicest, fanciest restaurant in town, The Cotton Gin.  See, I had fallen for the girl – hook, line and sinker.  There was no hope for me.  I asked her out on this night, to this restaurant, in a further attempt to woo her into feeling the same way.  Though we had been spending a great deal of time together, I had never asked her how old she was.

Come on, are you serious?  Maybe this is the case in Canada, but it can’t be that way here in the U.S.  This article that I saw in The Vancouver Sun, on line edition, raises some good points, but I believe it may stretch a few things out of proportion.

The article starts off by saying that boys are lagging behind girls in school when it comes to language skills and as a result are falling behind in their careers and even their relationship prospects are suffering.  Well, I’m not a scientist ( just in case no one was aware of that), but I am learning that there is something to the old adage, ‘with age comes wisdom’.  I have been around the block a few times, to put it another way.

I will jump on the band wagon that boys need to read more.  I have not always been an avid reader.  There was one year, though, (yes, only one year) when I was 16 years old, that I became an avid reader.  I could not find enough books to read.  There were many positive things that I gained from this year of reading.  My overall English skills increased.  I have always struggled with spelling, but I could see a dramatic improvement during this period in my life.

When I read in the article that careers and relationship prospects suffer as a result of lagging language skills, I thought, come on, what a miss characterization.  I think this is one of those stretchy parts to the article; it went a little overboard for me.  The article goes on to make the conclusion, or at least offer the hypothesis, that girls are marrying down since boys are suffering in this area so dramatically.  First of all, most of us guys, if we are man enough, will agree that we married over our head, but I don’t think it is so detrimental that we cannot function and cannot aspire to high career positions without the wife carrying us on her back.  Maybe I am just reading a little too much into this part.

I do like the part where he says even hands-on workers like police officers are required to produce complex written reports.  I can assure you that I have written every type of report there is and probably a few you would not think of.  I was a trainer/evaluator when I worked patrol, as well as being a sergeant for 15 years.  I have seen reports that I thought were written in a foreign language and reports that amazed me with their accuracy and detail from both men and women.

Is it just me or is it because I am a man that I had to look up what “dearth” meant as I read the article?  I could gather its meaning from the sentence structure, but come on, be real, is the writer just throwing in a 64 dollar word to make himself look like he is not one of us language-struggling men?  I have to simply copy this next portion of the article to express my unbelief that he would go this far, “but Whitmire believes the most damaging potential result of the academic struggles of boys isn’t economic at all, but personal: the “marriageable mate dilemma.” Women are usually reluctant to “marry down” in terms of education, he says, and the imbalance on university campuses means there will ultimately be a dearth of degree-holding men to be potential mates for all the female graduates.”  Whatever happened to the saying ‘love is blind’?  Does that only apply to looks and have nothing to do with intellect?  Pretty soon we are going to have I.Q. tests like there are prenuptual agreements before people get married.   I can see it now, the local news paper want ads,  ’Looking for future husband with an I.Q. of at least 130, must provide documentation from two reputable testing facilities before face to face meeting’.  I am so glad my wife loves me, but I am not going to ask her if she thinks I am smart after reading this article.

Source: The Vancouver Sun

You may have asked yourself, why in the world is he blogging and what is he trying to accomplish?  Make some money. Oh I really didn’t say that did I? I mean share some ideas, experiences, be a little entertaining, etc.

The vast majority of you that are reading this know that I retired from the police department a year ago.  I have been trying to supplement my retirement check by trading the market.  That has had its good and bad times.  I am so wanting to say, its ups and downs, but that is probably just my dry humor.  Then I started having this “itch” to write.  I wrote a couple of articles for an on line site.  Then I thought to myself, “Self, there has to be a way to make some money at this”.

Here we are, all my reaching out to you to subscribe and join with me along this journey, some begging and pleading on my part.  No, I really am not a proud person….not proud in the wrong way, at least, or so I think.

I would very much like for you to continue to read as I am now going to make an attempt to share how your following my blog can actually help me, and any others that you may read, on a regular basis.  Page views are very important to a blog.  Page views are the number of times a page or pages on a blog are looked at.  The idea is to get a healthy number of views on your pages or posts that you write on a regular basis.  I know that I have asked with great fervor for people that I know to subscribe to my blog.  I thank you very much for putting up with me and for subscribing, because it is very important to build up your subscriber membership.  What goes hand in hand with the subscriber and the page views, is when you, the subscriber, receive the email from the blog that you are following, to then visit the actual web site.  This is very easy to do from the email that you received. When you open the email, all you have to do is click on the title of the post in that email.  This will take you to the web site.  This is what counts as a page view.

Then, once you read that particular new posting, there are other factors that are important.  One is the time spent on that page and if you go to another link or another post from that page.  If you have a high bounce rate that is not seen as a good thing.  The bounce rate is when a person visits a web site and only stays a short time and takes no other action on that page.  A lower bounce rate is accomplished when visitors take some type of action on the initial look and read.  As stated earlier, they click on something else on the page or post.

If you have a Twitter account, it is nice for you to now “tweet or retweet” the post you just read.  If you do use Twitter, I am sure you know what that means.  This is nice since we all do not have the same friends and acquaintances, this way the post and web site gets to more people.  There are other social networks, Facebook, Digg, Stumble Upon, and others that I could go into, but it is the same with these.  More exposure is the key.

If I may put in a personal preference here, when I click on a link on a site or post, I like to right click the link and then open it in a new tab or window.  That way I do not have to press the back button.  I don’t have to worry about losing my place on the current post and I don’t get frustrated with going back and forth between pages and sites.  I can line up all the links in new tabs or windows to my little heart’s content.  That way, I can then go to each one and see what they have to say or offer.

Traffic is the key to getting any pay out from blogging.  The higher the subscribed readers are, the higher the actual visits to a web site and then the actions taken while on that site are paramount in making money from blogging.  So, if you want to share my site with all your friends and acquaintances, it will not hurt my feelings at all.  Then of course, there are those pesky little advertisements on the page.  They may be annoying, but I have come to a much greater appreciation and understanding of how I can help those bloggers that I have been following now for some time, since I am attempting to make a successful and profitable blog myself.

I realize that this may have been very elementary to the majority of you that are reading this post.  I also now know, after delving into this field, that I did not know how important it was to visit the site from the emails that I received and actually visit the site and look at other things on the page that are of interest to me.  I almost forgot, comments are great on a blog.

So with that, give me some feedback.  Let me know if you knew all of this already, or if you didn’t know any of it.  Please share other things that I missed pointing out.  Feel free to ask some questions.
Thank you again.  I hope this post was a little educational.

Now this post by Mister Good Guy, really goes into some good detail about how links work and the importance of them.

Tags: Mister Good Guy, Blogger Illustrated

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I found this interesting web site today as I was doing some reading.  I would encourage you to take a look and dig around it.

The link to the web site is;  www.ipl.org

It is a merger of the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII).  Bringing the library to you now.  You can now check out those resource books via your computer that you were not able to take out of the library in the past and so much more.

I did some digging in and around it.  Sure looks like you can put it in your bag of tricks as a great information resource. There seem to be some great tools that can be used by all age groups.  Lots of helpful tools and resources for school projects.

I hope this can be added to your list of resources and a tool in your academic belt.