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Archives for August 2013

Attention to detail

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stylish

I had a date day with The Surfer the other day and we thought we’d see a movie.

We sussed out which one we’d see, knew which time and which cinema it was on at so off we went.

However, when we got to the cinema neither of us could remember the name of the movie but as we knew the time we picked a movie showing at that time.

We sat through the ads for other movies and saw an ad to the movie we thought we were going to be seeing – Now You See It. That’s when we realised we’d stuffed up.

We ended up watching The Way, Way Back instead. I like Toni Collette so it was an immediate winner for me.

It could have been a lot worse, but luckily it worked out.

It’s this lack of attention to detail that sees me park my car in a multi-storey carpark and not remember which level I parked on.

However, my attention to detail springs to attention when I am getting dressed in the morning.

I usually start thinking about what I will wear to work the night before so I have a clear picture in my head of what needs preparing. I’m an iron as you go girl which I find much less fussy than having an ironing basket staring at me letting me know that I’m slack. Everything gets put away ironed or not. And in winter I don’t tend to iron as much.

When I get dressed I’m pretty neatly turned out with accessories to match or complement. And I often get compliments on what I’m wearing. One woman I used to work with recently even made an effort to tell me that she liked my style.

So who cares if I see the wrong movie because I didn’t pay enough attention, at least I looked good while doing it.

By the way, in the photo above, this wasn’t how we dressed to see the movie.

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Brainstorming content ideas for your website

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I think everybody who’s ever launched a website, blog or social media site has every intention of keeping it up-to-date and fresh but all too often this doesn’t happen.

Here are some ways to expand on ideas you have in regards to your online content.

Brainstorm

I’m using Evernote to add ideas for this website. I can access it via their website, and also via the phone app. Of course you could use a paper notebook too.

Online tools for expanding on your ideas

Once you have a list of ideas you can use some online tools to help develop these ideas, and see what’s also of interest to others who could be searching for your topic area.

Google trends

Google trends will show you what’s trending on search around the world.

google trends

You can select the country you’re in to see what’s a ‘hot search’ on any given day.

You can then narrow it down by putting in some search terms

I’m on the lookout for a dog at the moment and I’m interested in a rescue dog so I thought I’d see the interest in that.

Google trends search terms

I used ‘rescue dogs’ and then added ‘pet rescue’ to compare with it. See the spike above of the search term ‘pet rescue’. You can drill down to see why a term has the results it does and turned out that there’s a game called ‘Pet Rescue Saga’ which is most likely the reason why that search term has risen recently.

See the letters over the line graph in the results? Hover over those to see the news around that search term at that particular time.

You’re also able to search regionally. For example ‘pet rescue’ is used more in certain countries than others.

Question and answer websites

Yahoo answers

Type a question into Yahoo answers. You’ll get loads of inspiration and you’ll see what questions others are asking that might fit in with what you can also write about.

yahooanswers

Google search

Good old Google search is one you can start typing a question or search term into and it will suggest things for you as well.

google-search

Quora

Quora is another one to check out, although you have to sign-in to use it. You can create questions yourself and add answers to questions. You can also follow people so it’s more of a search/social media site which you need to invest a bit of time into to make the most out of it.

Now that you’ve got a bunch of great ideas for your site, now you’ve got to implement them. That’s the harder part.

Where do you get your content creation inspiration from?

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Finding time to do your singing practise

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Band practise minus the singer (photographer). Day 280/366.

I’ve been doing singing lessons again. I used to do them in the late 90s and then stopped and thought I’d probably not do them again because I already had spent two years paying for lessons.

Since then I’ve been singing in choirs and doing a semi-organised thing with friends and more recently The Surfer, a friend of his and I have made a little band – two guitarists and me, the vocalist and occasional ukulele player.

I’ve got a reasonable voice but thought I could do with some polishing. Add that desire, and the location of the nearby music school it was a no-brainer to go and try it out.

So I’ve been going for about three terms now. My singing teacher is young enough to be my child but she knows her stuff and she likes similar types of music to me so we get on quite well. My last singing teacher kept bringing up artists that I’d never heard of or couldn’t stand – mostly the latter so it was a bit of a struggle to find common ground with song choices.

However, I need to practise during the week. This time round we don’t tape my lessons. Last time I used to tape the lessons and listen to it during the week while driving to work so I’d practise then.

I’ve put the songs I’m singing, or have sung onto a playlist on my iPhone and while I’m washing the dishes or preparing dinner I put that playlist on and practise. It’s a good way to not have the words with you although sometimes I need to momentarily stop cutting up onion and get out the words so I actually know what to sing.

I’ve also bought a contraption for my aging car so I can listen to the music, and practise, in there as well.

I should probably practise more but I figure I’m doing what I can.

 

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Where to start?

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Swimming in a sea of content

The inaugural blog post on a new blog. Where do I start? Afterall it’s not like I’ve never written anything before so it should be easy, right?

So what are my plans for this blog?

I’ve brainstormed a bunch of ideas around content to include here which revolve around digital content and how to plan for it, maintain it, and how to create it.

I’ve been working on websites both professionally and personally since the mid 90s and  have learned a thing or two during that time. And added to the mix is social media which has has had a huge impact on the digital content space and diversified and created jobs.

It certainly impacted me when I had a job revolving around websites only then all of a sudden there’s Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter accounts to look after.

However, I still see websites which are created and left, or worse, websites that are added to but not properly maintained. Afterall it’s dead easy to create a new webpage and not properly consider how it fits into the overall communication and business objectives of the business. And I won’t get started on the dead webpages that are still available because they’ve not been removed.

In an ideal world there would be enough resources to maintain websites so that they’re easy to use for their intended audience. Most organisations I’ve worked in have people to put out the daily spot fires but there’s never enough time to plan and act more proactively around digital content. That’s a pity because if it was an ideal world I’d have more work than I could possibly do.

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