I’ve been secretely helping some of Polished Promotions clients with their blogs for a number of months. Helping them clarify their content and consulting with them on what they can do to advance their blogs.
Today’s theme - commenting. In order to illustrate how commenting works, I walked my client- Cathy Clark -business coach extraordinare - through how to leave a comment. And we did so on my “work in progress” blog.
What was interesting to hear Cathy say was that she was a reader of some blogs, but had never commented. It made me think - wow! I preach it but I’m certainly not doing it for myself. So, in an effort to get started - I found a new blog called Blog oh Blog and left a comment - like just now.
And now I’m leaving a trackback on my post here.
For my client’s following me along on my blog up-start, don’t worry - we’ll get to trackbacks soon. For anyone else who stumbled upon this entry - please feel free to comment 
and use a trackback - it will give me an example to show my beginner bloggers when we get to that lesson!
However you celebrate your holiday season, I hope you have a very merry time with family, friends and all of your loved ones.
This morning started with a “Yippie!” I had figured out how to change my background! Accomplishment for me – just another quick fix for anyone on my web team right now.
So, if I have a team to do this, why on earth would I be attempting to build my own blog?
It’s actually a very selfless act. Over the last year I’ve worked with a lot of small businesses. And I’ve noticed that the same challenges come up time and time again – lack of time and lack of knowledge in some areas. Like finding out the bookkeeper hasn’t been on top of your expenses at the end of the year because you didn’t know they weren’t doing their job.
Gaining constant knowledge about the world online is enabling me to educate those who haven’t had the luxury or stamina of learning all of this web stuff while giving me better communication skills to work with my web-ers. Don’t worry – the only blog I’m designing is my own. All of my clients are in good hands with the amazing web team I have working behind the scenes.
So I here I sit, struggling away to figure out my latest challenge - why I can’t seem to get my visual editor to work. I assume I’ll hand this task off to someone else, but at least for the moment, I’m consumed with plugins that don’t quite work and a great feeling that I’m learning a lot from all of these mistakes.
…and I must be learning a lot, because every consult I do, I am able to troubleshoot something new for someone that I wasn’t able to answer last year at this time.
It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to underestimate the amount of time things take – getting the groceries, explaining to a new client-the merits of creating email newsletters or learning to build a blog (3 hour look at a css sheet – and not knowing what I’m doing wrong!).
I am fully putting it out there. This is my first attempt to build a blog from scratch. (Disclaimer: I’ve been helping small businesses create content for blogs, providing necessary research for articles, helping them find contributing writers etc)
More on point, this is my first crack at self teaching myself how to add widgets, plugins and layout parameters. Having said that – now that I’ve tried to work some image functions into my css – I’ll be handing off the troubleshooting to my favourite Internet helper – but at least I can say I gave it the good ol college try…now back to marketing related endeavours
