Man things are going well right now. So well that I am not spending much time looking for items to post on the blog. Instead, I’ve been writing articles for the Office Nomads to use to promote their business on work-life balance. Finding, and maintaining that balance is near impossible in today’s go-go-go world so it was really eye opening to look into that topic. I’m happy with the advice we came up with and encourage you to read the article.

I also had the opportunity to take part in a branding workshop with SCAN Community Access Media. SCAN is Seattle’s community access cable channel. You know, that anything-goes channel where you can watch Bong Hit Championships, bad local bands, and late-night topless talk shows. Well, in a few years SCAN has to become financially self sufficient and is changing its business model. One day soon, the shows will be moderated, they will add a ton of community-created and supporting content to the SCAN site and, of course, the whole thing is being re-branded.

It was so inspiring to spend the day talking about the goals of a media outlet with 13 people dedicated to the concept of locally produced media and ultra-local reporting. Not only that, but I also got to learn a lot about how to create a brand and how to deliver your business’ message, so the day benefitted us all.

That’s only a small part of what I’ve been working on over the past few weeks. I’ve been planning a fund raiser with some friends to support the efforts of Mercy Corps in Darfur, met a bunch of great indy business owners and may soon be adding one or two of them to my client list as well as writing for Seattlest and all the other publications and sites I work with.

Man, I love spring.

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Wow. It’s been much longer between posts than I ever meant to go. Apologies. Thankfully, it’s been really busy here at GhostBlog central with other, paying work, which is why it’s been so silent. I’ll try and keep up on this blog more regularly, but you have to understand that writing other blogs for pay is taking precednece, right?

Anyway, here’s a Friday afternoon link to a list of the 12 most influential Seattle-area entrepreneur bloggers for you. Tons of good sites full of wonderful writing awaits you.

(via The Name Inspector)

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Someone I share office space with at Office Nomads started a conversation on Biznik about multi-tasking. He used an article on TheAtlantic.com as a jumping off spot. I think that piece is worthy of sharing because it speaks so directly to an issue many of us in business have: Basically, multi-tasking seems to be the only way to get everything done, but multi-tasking is a terrible way to get things done.

I can hear you asking: “What?” But I ask you to think about it for a second. Do you get more done on a project when you focus on that project or when you work on it while also checking your e-mail, switching the laundry into the dryer and considering your evening plans? Even if you get the project done while also doing all that, do you remember the details of your work? Was it easier or harder to get that work done?

According to The Atlantic article, you probably don’t remember most of the details of anything you do while multi-tasking and it takes longer to get a project done too. In the case of the laundry, it’s probably okay if you don’t recall all of the task afterwards, but you probably want to keep some of the numbers from that report in your head or know why you said what you did in a blog post.

Chris, the guy who started the Biznik thread started talking in the office about working for 90 minutes and then breaking for 30. No matter what, he said, keep to that schedule. If you’re in the middle of a sentence at 90 minutes, no matter. Stop and go take a break. He’s also been turning off his email, his phone and even his computer’s clock lately when he needs to get some serious work done. It’s his new thing and it definitely seems to be working for him.

I’m not quite at that point yet, but tomorrow, when I have to write an article for one of my clients, I’m turning off the e-mail and planning to work in 90-minute blocks to see how it goes.

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I often get asked about the best way to set up a new Web site. By far the question I hear most often is, “Should I have a blog or a web site or what?”

What they should be asking me though is, “How should I manage and maintain my web site?”

To answer that, it’s important to understand the difference between a blog and a site.

A blog at its most simple, is a web page run off a platform that allows easy updates as often as you want. A web site, for purposes of this discussion, is a collection of web pages. On your company’s site at company.com, you can have an “About” page, a “Resume” page, a “Portfolio” page, and a page for anything else you want to put out in the world.

Now here’s where the dilemma comes in: A blog can be a page of page on your full web site and or you can use it as the interface for the whole thing.

Both options have their benefits. I use this blog as a piece of my site because I like the flexibility having a full-fledged site offers me. Individual pages can easily do different things, but all share the site’s look and feel. Adding pages may take a bit more work and I needed a web designer to make my site look good, but I am someone who likes to be able to control my web presence more than most so it was a fair trade off for me. Also, having a full site doesn’t obviate the use of a blog (obviously) and in fact, increases how it can be used (I feed parts of each post to my main page, for example).

On the other hand, using a blog to manage a site does have one huge advantage. Blog management tools are very user friendly. A user chooses what links to include, where to put them, what the basic design should be and clicks a few buttons. Voila! You’ve got a web site. If you choose to put a new page on your site, creating one is as easy as navigating to the right place, putting in the new content, and hitting “Publish.” Even adding graphics and other media to a new page is as easy as attaching a Word document to an email.

The biggest reason most people use a blog platform to manage their site though is design. Most blog platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have legions of users who create free templates that you can implement with just a few clicks. Throw in a bit of HTML know-how and you can even tweak that design to your heart’s content.

A full web site, on the other hand, lets you start from a blank page. That gives you all sorts of design and functional flexibility a blog can take away (serious coding skills and small programs called plug ins can return them), but demands that you know what you’re doing, or hire someone who does.

There is no right or wrong answer in the end. You need to ask yourself how you want to use your site and your blog, how you want them to interact and how you want to interact with them. Of course, I’m happy to help you suss these questions out personally.

Look for future posts on questions people have when starting their sites and feel free to ask me if you have a specific one.

Image comes from WikiMedia Commons and is credited to STyx.

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I’ve been slowly working my way through The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 1 which my mother gave me for Christmas in 2006. I recently read the interview with Ernest Hemingway. Without waxing too poetic about how amazing it must have been to sit down with such a legend (just reading what he says, verbatim feels like an honor), I’ll highlight one quote that caught my eye:

“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once it is written you have to stand by it.”

I’d like to take that quote and break it into two parts to address it. First of all, you have the fun of talk part. “Papa” hit the nail on the head with that one. When I walk out of a movie, finish a book, have a weird dream or get done writing an article or a post, the first thing I want to do is talk about it. It’s how I decompress and explore all the various and sundry thoughts milling about in my head.

The second part of the statement is what really caught my eye though. Exploring an idea through writing and all the different angles people take on it is what I do for a living.

Partially, I think he’s correct. Some of what one thinks should not be written down. Putting thoughts out into the blogsphere willy-nilly, as so many bloggers do, may quickly drive up traffic to your site because you make such controversial or unpredictable comments. That may be good in the short run, but even with the immediate nature of the Web, we still need to think in the long term about our virtual actions.

You may find that you’ve re-thought the premise of a post so you take it down or edit it. But other people agreed (or disagreed) with what you had to say, and put it up on their blogs with credit and a link pointing back to you. Now you’re aligned with that thinking for all of that site’s readers.

Turns out Papa was right.

Or was he? Part of the beauty of blogging is that when I write and post a thought, I consider it only one statement in a conversation. So often I take something that someone else wrote and jump off from there. In the hopes that they and others will see what I think and respond, I give a link back (I’m also giving credit of course). The point is to push conversation forward.

So maybe Papa would have changed his mind had he ended up blogging (which is not something I could see him doing, but hopefully you see my point). Had he lived, maybe it would be him reading this collection of interviews and he would have been moved to announce his change of heart in a blog post, albeit carefully.

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Wow. Well, if anyone had any doubt that using the web to market is worth the time and investment comes this news from an article in today’s New York Times (full disclosure: My close friend Douglas Quenqua wrote the piece):

As the first component of a yearlong partnership with Google, the company is holding a “Will You Marry Me?” contest to find the season’s most intriguing marriage proposal. Love-smitten users can log on to a special 1-800-Flowers.com YouTube channel starting on Monday and submit a video of themselves proposing.

Doug’s article outlines the reasons that 1-800-Flowers.com is holding such a contest, but they all boil down to one thing: The more people that post videos to YouTube for this contest, the more links the company has online and the higher they rise in search-engine rankings.

Of course, on a much smaller scale, that’s what bloggers are doing. I read something online, write about it and link to the original content. Then I comment on the original post and point readers of that comment to my post thereby giving the first poster a link, getting one for myself and, hopefully, enticing some new readers from the first site to mine. When I see companies as large as 1-800-Flowers.com doing the same thing, I know I’m on the right track.

A footnote: If this contest had taken place last year, I’d be a shoe-in for most unique proposal. I spent last winter working at the South Pole (it was summer there). While there, I proposed to my now wife who was 10,000 miles away via email.

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Words can be powerful things but only if used appropriately. Otherwise, they become overused and relatively meaningless. Every year for 33 years, the folks at Lake Superior State University have compiled a list of the words and phrases they feel are misused, overused or generally useless.

My favorite?

IT IS WHAT IT IS — “This pointless phrase, uttered initially by athletes on the losing side of a contest, is making its way into general use. It accomplishes the dual feat of adding nothing to the conversation while also being phonetically and thematically redundant.” — Jeffrey Skrenes, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Though I’m also pretty happy that “webinar” and “authored” were chosen for banishment from the Queen’s English. I think webinar is just a dumb sounding word and I hate it when people “verb” words.

(via)

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Every blog, when it is started, needs to be defined. Otherwise too many ideas make the possibility of posting seem overwhelming.

I know. I’ve had that problem.

I started my first blog back in 2003, when blogs first started to become a major part of the Web. I was excited to launch the first CharlesRedell.com as my personal blog (that’s the earliest iteration I can find in the Wayback Machine). It would be my playground with no focus except my life and the random thoughts and links I decided to throw up there.

Like so many other personal blogs, mine faltered after the flame of fascination dwindled to a softer glow. Then, after sitting idle for a few weeks, I’d pick it up again with a renewed “vow post” to post more often. Like the directions on a bottle of shampoo to “Rinse. Wash. Repeat,” the cycle went on and on and on.

I finally broke the pattern when I went to work at the South Pole in 2006. Traveling to such a remote, isolated and little-visited place gave me what I thought was a great story line to hook a blog on. Plus, since I’d only be there for four months, my Antarctica blog would be finite. A definite ending and a clear focus, I hoped, would give me a structure in which to work that would help me write a coherent story.

For different reasons, that blog did end up going through a short fallow period, but for the most part, I kept up with it because having one subject to post about (not to mention an audience since I did some marketing of the site) gave me much more drive to post.

I returned to the States full of intention to revive my personal blog and to keep up with it. Again, the same issues cropped up and it lay fallow. I looked around for another story to hook a blog on and even tried an experimental one that failed miserably. Again, the storyline (”My online life”) was too undefined.

About that same time I was starting life as a freelance journalist. I pounded the virtual pavement, started creating a network and building contacts through a local site called biznik. Biznik introduced me to a lot of independent business owners, many of whom seemed to be voicing a common theme when the discussion turned to marketing. They all had blogs and planned to use them as tools to build visibility and credibility. But most were unused and lay dormant because, “I should blog about that, but I never seem to get around to it.”

Oh how well I knew that problem. Then, it struck me: These people all have a clear, concise storyline to hook their blogs on, but can’t keep them up. When I have such an easy hook, I can blog with the best of them (much of my work as a journalist is as a blogger for other sites). Why not help these people out by blogging the things they can’t?

And a business was born.

But back to this blog. This post is the Ghost Blog’s first and as such, should be somewhat definitive. So I have developed two lists. Please feel free to remind me of these items if you see my attention drifting.

What this blog is

• This blog is an example of how I write on a blog.
• This blog is a tool I am using to help me define my business: Ghost Blogs.
• This blog is yet another link meant to increase the visibility of my business: Ghost Blogs.
• This blog is a site where I will examine words and how they are used.
• This blog is a place for me to experiment with web tools for building visibility.

What This Blog Is Not

• This blog is not a personal journal.
• This blog is not a playground (though it will be fun to write and read)
• This blog is not going to be just one voice. I hope it gains readers who are interested in having discussions in the comments.
• This blog is not going to be home to posts as long as this on a regular basis.

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