A Valentine Video for my love @melonie

Looking forward to this Valentine Day weekend… starting tonight.

Igniting the Cycle of Interactivity on your own Web Site

Oh, the joys of having a web site. Like the cobbler’s children have no shoes… I am terrible at maintaining my own damn web sites. LOL! A key reason is I’m working on tons of other people’s web sites, coding or customizing, setting up and configuring, upgrading or installing. I enjoy being the guy people can turn to for all things Web related, and owning Web Wizards for the past 12 years has allowed me to work with amazing clients and sites.

However my own sites suffer from neglect sometimes, sad but true. I need to spend more time on them, but seem to have trouble motivating myself to focus on them. There are a few ways to change that, re-prioritizing things is the most direct way, but easier said than done usually. I’m also looking into outsourcing, partnering, and leveraging with others so that the ideas I’d like to make reality are moving forward at an increased rate compared to doing everything myself.  More news on that soon. But through changing the process of updating a site, and making the initial steps shorter, quicker, and easier, it makes it easier to get started yourself.

One method that seems to help get the content in your head to become content published on your site is to create many short draft posts, with just the outline of what your post is about. The main thoughts or ideas written down in short list format. Once a few drafts are written and saved, you can go back to each one and more easily write the content, replacing each outlined idea with the expanded content. Refine the body, then rewrite the title based on the clear message in your newly created post.

Once the post is completed, publish it to your site. If you have the time to do a few posts, schedule the others to be published on a schedule, spread out over a few days.  New content to your site regularly will generate traffic if you link your Twitter and Facebook sites to your site, and with traffic comes comments, and the cycle of interactivity begins, which can in turn create ideas and motivation for more posts!

I’m sometimes my own worst enemy at implementing the advice I give to clients that host their sites with me. I enjoy helping people with their sites, and it’s not work to me when doing so, but implementing it myself seems less fulfilling… mostly because I haven’t started my own cycle of interactivity yet.

Consider this ignition.