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Thinking About My Blog’s Direction

September 9, 2010 in Personal with 10 Comments

I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about the direction of my blog recently. I’ve kind of drifted around in what I’m writing about between tech, sports, church, religion, and my personal life. I don’t really feel like doing that anymore. I’d like to focus more on one or two topics, but I haven’t landed on what that would be yet.

So, I’d like to hear from you. If you’re a reader of my blog, the few of you out there, what do you think I should do? Let me know in the comments.

Image by Milind Alvares.

Learning to Pray From a Two Year Old

August 30, 2010 in Personal, Religion with 1 Comment

Almost every night I put my two year old daughter to bed. It’s about an hour long process between bath time, brushing her teeth, reading a book and Bible, prayer time, and singing songs. It’s honestly one of my favorite parts of my day, because I know she will be doing these things on her own in the not too distant future. I remind myself that I’ll miss these moments, so I’m trying my best to relish every moment.

Last night God taught me a lesson on prayer through my daughter’s prayer. I usually lead her through a series of things to thank God for. After a few regular items (family, friends, etc.) I prompt her to say thank you for whatever she thinks of. Typically she will look around the room and say thank you for the things she sees. This usually includes her butterfly mobile, toys, and the flowers her aunt painted on the wall.

Usually I just smile and think it’s cute that she’s just praying for what she can see, but last night God really convicted me that I should be truly thankful for every little thing I own. Sadly, I usually take these things for granted and skip on to the “bigger” things in life. But the life and faith of a two year old doesn’t allow the small things to be skipped over. And so I was reminded again of the importance of coming to Jesus with a childlike faith.

Thank you, Emory, for teaching your daddy one way to be more like Jesus.

Image by Josh Kenzer

Uno, Dos, Tres, Taco [video]

July 14, 2010 in Humor, Personal with 0 Comments

Kids say the funniest things:

7 Highlights & Mistakes From My 5,000 Tweets

June 1, 2010 in Personal with 8 Comments

I’ve been sitting up against a milestone in my life. I’m about tweet for the 5,000th time. In fact if I time things right, this blog post announcement auto-tweet will be my 5,000th. It’s not really that life-changing of an event, but I figured now would be a good time to reflect on some of the highlights and mistakes I’ve made using twitter.

Here are some of my highlights looking back:

  • Announced the birth of both of my girls via twitter.
  • Shared numerous links that I liked or found interesting.
  • Helped my dad sell his iPhone 3G.
  • Met some new friends.
  • Gave away a Mavericks ticket (or two).
  • Learned some cool stuff from others.
  • Publicly affirmed friends and family.

And here are some mistakes I’ve made along the way:

  • Tweeted about some monotonous details of my life.
  • Complained about being in boring meetings (and later called out about it).
  • Paid too much attention to my phone when I should have paid attention to the people around me.
  • Spoke more than listened.
  • Gave TMI quite a few times.
  • Ignored twitter for large chunks of time.
  • Felt like having more followers somehow made me more important.

Ultimately I’ve decided that the reason I tweet is to add value to the lives of others. That might be random thoughts I have throughout the day. It might be sharing a link to a site I find useful. Or it might be just to share a little bit more about who I really am so people can know the real me a little better.

Those are just a few thoughts I’ve had looking back. What are your thoughts about twitter? Do you have any tweets you’ve regretted posting? If you follow my tweets, what do you like best? What should I stop doing?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

 

Three Lessons I Learned About Blog Traffic This Past Month

March 1, 2010 in Personal with 2 Comments

I think everyone who has a blog goes through stages in his or her blogging. Inevitably a blogger hits a wall. The inspiration to write disappears and you feel like you don’t really have anything valuable to offer the blogosphere. I hit that wall this past year big time, but over the past couple weeks I’ve been blogging more regularly. Over the past few weeks I’ve learned a few lessons about how blog traffic fluctuates right along with how frequently you write. Here they are.

More posts = More traffic

Take a look at the above graphic. It’s a chart from Google Analytics of the visits to my blog over the past 30 days. See the peak right in the middle? That’s the day I decided to get back into regular blogging and posted three new posts that day. I linked to the posts from my twitter and facebook accounts and traffic jumped. It jumped quite a bit, in fact.

New traffic doesn’t come automatically

You can also see over the week or so that followed there was a drop off again. It lines up perfectly with a fall off of blogging again. For some reason I had thought that my bump in traffic would keep up. It didn’t If you want more readers you have to write more.

Writing about popular topics will generate new traffic

One of the posts I did this past month was about Ed Young, pastor at Fellowship Church, and the news story that the local ABC affiliate ran about his salary. That post generated a comment from a person I’m pretty sure I don’t personally know. Also, my blog is the number seven Google search result for Ed Young salary and number eight for mega churches in Dallas. Those stats won’t really general much long term traffic, I think, but it does show that hot topics, either nationally or locally, will bump your traffic.ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett

Those are just a few things I’ve learned over the past month in blogging. What are some tips you have about generating traffic to your blog? Share in the comments.

You can also find a lot tips in Darren Rowse and Chris Garret‘s great book on blogging ProBlogger. I’ve read it and highly recommend picking one up if you’re interested in becoming a better blogger.

 

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