Seriously, it’s way too depressing.  I’ve been checking my analytics almost daily for a while now.  Typically I see my traffic go up, then down, then up a little more, then down a little, and so on and so-forth, but the last few days have been absolutely dismal.-

I knew when I first decided to pull a 30-day blog-o-thon that Thanksgiving would fall right in the middle of it and possibly affect my numbers, and that’s definitely been the case.  Here’s my advise to an every-day blogger.  Think about what you’re posting and post your best work on days that you know you’ll get more traffic.  This site typically sees the most traffic between Tuesday and Thursday and the least amount of traffic on Saturday and Sunday.

In the social media community, we often talk about authenticity in your online exchanges. I’m a bit of an idealist. I prefer authenticity in every aspect of life, though I don’t necessarily demand it (it’s a free country after all). One thing that really kills me as a musician, however, is when famous singers lip-sync to their popular hits in public appearances.

Such was the case at this year’s (probably every year’s) Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Is it too much to ask for these people to sing their freakin song!!??? Don’t these musicians have any respect for themselves? I realize it’s a long parade, but they could have at least sang during their televised appearance.

My advise is to be authentic. No one is going to care about your contribution to anything if you’re not doing it for real.

This is becoming more and more true and it’s only going to become more widespread in the next few years.  The ‘informational website’ is going to go away and give rise to websites that are a lot more like software applicationsand a lot less like press releases and informational packets.  Asp.net, php, ajax, and javascript will replace html web pages.  In this new age of complicated scripts and high-tech interfaces, people will come to your website to DO things instead of merely gather information.  They’ll get your information from your blog.

In the next few years business blogging will become ever more important.  In fact it will be critical.  There will simply be no way for anyone to find your business or organization without a blog that is updated relatively frequently.  Now is a golden opportunity to get ahead of the curve.  Right now it’s possible to jump on the bandwagon and enjoy a few years of success before your competition tunes in and eliminates your monopoly of the market.

So, what do you do with your website?  Be creative.  What services can you make available to your customers?  How can you make buying from you easier?  Do you do ecommerce?  Should your customers be able to view their account online?  These are questions that even the most technically backward companies are going to have to acknowledge in the coming years. 

The fact is that the only things that are valuable on the Internet are content and services.  Content tells people what they need to know and services let people ‘do stuff’ to make their lives easier or more fun or whatever.  My recommendation is to provide both, and to do it now and not in five years when you’ve already missed the boat.

The downside of having a 30-day blog-o-thon is having to post even if it’s a national holiday.  I decided to take it easy on myself and just share a link.  CSS-tricks is one of my favorite new blogs that I’ve discovered recently.  It’s a little more technical than a lot of the blogs that I typically read, and therefore it gives me a lot of information that I’m sure will be useful.

This week they’ve dedicated each post to wordpress specific tips and tricks.  Yesterday’s post was about what to do after you first install wordpress (plugins, settings, etc).  I attempted to install the auto-update plugin, but I couldn’t get it to work.  The XML site map plugin, however, installed perfectly and seems to be working great.  All in all it was a very informative post from a great blog.

I sincerely hope everyone has a very happy Thanksgiving, enjoys their turkey, and doesn’t overeat too much (I always do).   It’s one of my favorite days of the year.

Okay, it’s the day before thanksgiving and I’ve decided to pick on Google a little bit.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love Google despite the fact that a lot of people are currently calling it ‘The Wal-Mart of the Internet‘.  I’ll save that discussion for another day, because on this Thanksgiving eve, I’d like to examine how difficult it must be to have to write the parameters that decide which results you get when you do a Google search.

So what is Google’s main prerogative?  Well firstly, they want to make sure you use THEIR search engine, so providing relevant search results is high on the list.  If people start using another search engine, they’re not clicking on the paid ads on Google, Google goes under, and the end of the free world as we know it will very soon be upon us.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  Google needs people to click on the paid ads in order to stay in business.  I make it a point to never click on the paid ads unless I plan on buying something.  I know some people don’t know the difference between paid and unpaid search results, so they click indiscriminately.  My point is that the folks at Google are smart (really smart) and they’ve adjusted their algorithms so that blogs are favored for the organic search results so that if someone is primed and ready to buy, they will click on a paid ad.  It’s really brilliant if you think about it.

On a side-note, I’d like to thank the folks at Google for all the great services that I use and enjoy every day (Google reader, Google analytics, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Apps, Google Chrome, and hopefully soon Android).  They’re a truly unique and amazing company that continues to adapt their business model and stay ahead of the curve, as well as keep us all on our toes.  I hope everyone has a happy holiday, and your comments are always welcome.