Are you creating good habits or bad habits [ 3:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Well one of the things I was planning and have been lax about is a weekly rant. Part of it is finding topics and part of it is it is not currently part of my routine.

Habits are hard to start and can be even harder to break. This is one of the big differences between the people that are successful and the people that are not. Successful people create and use habits to increase their success.

They say that it takes 28 days to make something a habit or to change a habit. That means that most of us won’t change things without a very conscious effort.

For example commenting on blogs is a habit for me now. It has become part of my routine and allows me to do it almost with out thinking. (Well it does take thought to comment and add value but I don’t have to think about adding in time to comment on blogs. It is part of my normal routine.)

It does not take a lot of extra effort as I track subjects I am interested in on Google Reader to share quality items with my Friend Feed and Twitter followers. This is something I teach people to do in Twitter Time Saver.

So every morning one of the first things I do is open Google Reader to sort the wheat from the chaff and share the wheat with those that follow me. As a result I am finding lots of quality posts that I want to share and it is quite easy to comment while I am already there.

Habits are easy to create when they help you leverage things. There are probably things you are doing right now that you could add a new habit to to leverage your self.

Other than creating habits using leverage is another key of successful people.

Doing a weekly rant here on Sunday is one of the things that I want to make a habit but it will probably go in fits and starts until I start doing it regularly for a few months. I did the first one a few weeks past and have skipped it since then. See it has not become a part of my routine YET.

Now on another blog I do a Week In Review each week and because it has become a habit for each Saturday that usually Friday night I start putting it together before I end my day. With the exception of an occasional trip and the holidays I do it every week and it has become a routine. After almost three years of writing it it would probably take a conscious decision not to start it when Saturday comes around.

Now one of the reasons I am again publicly stating that I want to start the rants on Sunday here is to put pressure on myself. See telling myself I want to do it and publicly stating something changes the paradigm.

When I tell someone I am going to do something it has a lot more power than telling me. After all it is easy to let your self down or lie to yourself. After all this week I could say that having run to Philly yesterday put me behind so I’ll get to it next week. I almost did just that earlier before making myself sit here and start writing.

After all only I would know then that I let myself down. Now next week it will be harder to make excuses because I have told you that I will be doing this too. Also not doing it this week would be embedding the habit that it is okay to skip it.

So what habit do you need to develop and are you willing to publicly promise it to others? If so leave your comment below and share it with us. If not are you having the success you want? If the answer is no it just may be the habits you are not cultivating that are hurting you.

To continue writing a weekly rant each week

Technorati Tags: conscious effort, fits and starts, habit, leverage, twitter, twitter time saver, wheat from the chaff

Decided to start a new feature here for Sunday’s. Not sure if it will be an every week thing or not. It may just show up here on occasion.

The point is to ramble on about some of the things that have caught my eye each week and to rant on others. Let me know what you think in the comments.

First the danger with free resources. I opened my reader this morning and their were half a dozen items to a petition about Ning. Evidently Ning has decided that they will no longer be offering a free option. You will need to upgrade and all of their free communities will be disappearing shortly if they do not upgrade.

The point is that I an not ranting about Ning as they have a business model and what they choose to do is up to them. The problem is the danger you face when basing your model on free resources. If you are not paying you can get caught in something like this easily.

Now I feel bad for those that have invested a lot of time in their Ning sites but they never owned it and Ning can change things whenever they want. I love free sites like Ning, Squidoo, Hub Pages and numerous others but you do need to understand that you don’t own it and the rules can change at any time.

Not to say don’t use them but understand the risks if the rules change and that you have no leverage on what the new rules will be. Nuff said.

Now for a rant. I use Google Reader to keep track of numerous topics and it allows me to find lots of new blogs and other types of sites that I might share with people that follow me. This is really powerful for providing quality content to your Twitter followers and you can automate this through some tools as I covered in Twitter Time Saver. You just need to be the editor and sort the wheat from the chaff.

The problem is as I go through and start to sort and get to a blog that might be worth mentioning but it is unreadable. It happened this morning again as it does most days.

I click through and in this case the font size must be about 6 pixels. Now I am old, bald and not with the best eye site especially for reading teeny tiny letters on a screen. Hit the back key immediately.

That could have been the best thing I might read all day but…

If I have to work that hard to read it Fuhgetaboutit. Same thing for those that use those real dark backgrounds with light lettering. Sorry you may think that looks really cool but if I have to strain to read I am gone.

Which brings me to the next item in today’s rambling. I read Seth Godin’s blog regularly and there was a post this week you should read -When a stranger reads your blog.

You really should read that post if you blog but the key point is that you need quality through out because you can’t point people just to your good content and people will make a decision instantly as to the quality of your site.

That’s enough for this week let me know what you think about this new format for an occasional post. WordPress 3.0 is scheduled for next month and I am enjoying some of the new items and will start a series on some of the changes this week.

Have a great day.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blogs, business model, free communities, free resources, google, quality content

Okay I am pissed and will be stepping up on a soap box for a bit today. Usually I don’t tend to preach but what I have seen over the last few days has me pissed and it is not the spam bloggers that have done it. Well they have and always do piss me off but there is another party that looks innocent but makes a major contribution to it.

It may be YOU.

Before I really start raving let me step back and take a quick breath.

Now there are a variety of spam plugins for WordPress and generally they do a good job. Recently though I am seeing a huge increase in what I will call sneaky blog comment spam.

These are the ones that don’t look like spam initially. Here are some samples from this week end.

The article you have provided here is really cool…and i have gone through all the articles and posts you have posted in your site is pretty good…..great job

I really like this site. I use the same blog platform in 5 blogs of my network.

Thanks for the above post you have been provided here…its really good post….and the site is really great there is lots of stuff in this.

Thank you for your help!

Hello, found this through yahoo. just wanted to let you know that part. but um, thanks for the article. It’s good to know.

No those are not your normal spam and they do appeal to your ego. After all I know what it is like to blog and not get comments or get only the occasional comment.

If you have been blogging for a bit and not getting comments and this lands on your blog aren’t you excited? Sure you are someone is actually reading what I wrote. WRONG when it is this type of comment.

There is nothing specific in these comments about what you wrote. They are not made to take part in the conversation. They are made to generate a backlink.

Quite often someone took the time to actually post this. It may be a 50 cent an hour outsourcer because the spam plugins have become pretty good at catching the automated systems. This has led to people outsourcing generic commenting to generate back links.

Every time you don’t spam a comment like this that is made to your blog you add to the problem. That’s right! I know you want activity but if everyone spams these comments they don’t get links and soon they stop spending money to do this. Now this goes away but it only happens if enough people are not accepting these comments.

So the question is are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? Leave your comment below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: avoiding comment spam, blogging, comment spam, wordpress