A while back, I told a story about what I learned at recess. I was a teacher and my kids continually taught me about what it means to be human. One lesson was that it is much easier to find the bad in someone than recognize the good. At the end of my post, I…
Guest blogger Tony Hastings of The Top 10 Blog measures bloggers by seven key values. How does your favorite blogger stack up?
Besides producing the most inspiring content in the world, what are the best practices of highly successful bloggers?
1. Calls himself a social media expert. Sometimes people who call themselves an expert are the very ones who turn out not to be one. In the Internet Wild West, especially particularly in the new frontier of social media, “experts” are popping up like weeds in a vegetable garden, in places and situations where they do more harm…
I love my readers. You challenge me all the time. A smart, inquisitive bunch you are. Soon after I hit “publish” on last week’s post, I heard from some of you. “Don’t just tell me how to wake up an old blog post,” you said. “Show me.” Okay. That’s a fair request. I went fishing through my old posts….
I didn’t grow up with Mr. Rogers, but my daughter did, and, man, did he did know about people and relationships and, well, etiquette. “Etiquette? What’s that?” you say. I’ve been thinking about etiquette lately. You know, that word that describes treating someone with respect, integrity, sensitivity. With empathy? Anita Campbell, the highly respected Editor-in-Chief of Small Business…
I just hung up the phone. Lost a writing job. Actually, I turned it down. And I’m smiling. “I’d like three articles written about my business,” he said. “And I need to place them in newspapers. Maybe in online directories, too. How much would you charge for that?” I used to be the Ninja Copywriter. I could do…
It was a brilliant September day in 1973. What people in Spokane, Washington, call an Indian summer. Now I think we would call it a Native American summer. It was the first day of my first year as a teacher and I was tied up in knots. Hadn’t slept much, wondering what exactly I would do all day with…
At first I thought I was just weird. I don’t fit the norm. Okay, I guess I’ve always known that. I have a highly tuned BS-o-meter. I can smell phoniness a mile away. So last week, when I got 12 personally addressed e-mails from perfect strangers with my name neatly inserted with some program’s merge function, I was…
He didn’t have an MBA. In fact, my dad had to quit high school in the 11th grade to take a job to help support his brothers and sisters. He worked at the Grays Harbor Chair Factory in Aberdeen, Washington, a small, blue-collar lumber town in the Pacific Northwest. Then he got as job as a cement…
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