The Real Lance Brown

Facebook was giving away $50 in free ads to lure folks into trying Facebook Ads, and I took the bait. My ad’s not running yet, but here’s what I have so far:

I want to optimize the Hire Me page that I’m going to be sending people to before I launch the ad, but I hope to debut it next week sometime. I’m doing pay-per-click with a bid of $1.00 per click. So I should get 50 free visits to the page from this deal.

I was in a rush to get the ad ordered before the $50 coupon ran out, so this isn’t the most professionally-crafted thing I’ve done. I just used an existing pic…but I do like how the “Need a hand?” line happens to fit with my hand-waving self-pic. :-)

What do you think? I still have time to tweak or change it before it “airs”. (Before you ask, their limit didn’t allow the full word “with” in the headline. All I could fit was “wit”, so I went with the shorthand version instead.)

I’m currently working hard at my re-emergence into the world in many ways. I’ve had a very shaken year so far, but things are finally settling down, and now that I’m in the greater LA area, I’m just about ready to start busting out with a major new phase of my public life. Stand-up comedy will be involved, as well as podcasting, and my long-awaited (by me) entry into the collaborative world of filmmaking. (There will also be lots and lots of writing, but that’s not the most public of activities.)

It was in the spirit of re-emergence that I accepted a generous invitation by a new Twitter friend of mine, @Crobama, to be a guest on his Dylan Brody’s Neighbor’s Couch podcast. I think he may have thought I was someone. Which at one point I kind of was, at least by some measures. Nowadays I’m not totally sure who I am, especially in terms of presenting myself to the public. Just check out my About page–it’s OK, but it’s not very succinct, to say the least. And there’s no indication of where you should focus when trying to figure out who I am. (Which is probably a reflection of my inner state; we’ll get to that soon enough.)

To get to the point, Darren (@Crobama) asked me for a short bio to use for my appearance on his show. (It will be in late September by the way. On or after the 23rd.)  I don’t know what I’ll end up deciding to use, but I thought it would be a fun exercise to work up some bio draft attempts. Maybe I’ll use them for something someday, or maybe these posts will be the end game for them. We’ll have to wait and see.

Either way, with no further ado, here’s my first run at defining myself at this point in my life. It’s not very serious, but it is all true.

Lance Brown has taken on the FBI and the Project for the New American Century. He’s done local grassroots activism, and he has campaigned for president. He has herded peacocks, and walked over 15,000 miles with his dog. He was once suspended from school for reciting a poem about his math teacher. He saves insects from drowning with the delicate use of pushpins. He writes a bi-weekly column about seeking simplicity, has a comic strip with characters that have no faces, and saves all of his ideas on a digital voice recorder—amassing almost 9,000 audio files, with which he has done very little. He has brown hair, wears glasses, and puts his pets before anything else.

I’ll post more bio-experimentation soon. Let me know what you think of this one!

Better Facebook looks pretty cool. It adds like a zillion features and tweaks to Facebook. Facebook has interface issues, to say the least, so it’s nice to see there’s a way to make it work better without having to wait for Zuckerberg and Co. to make the site work well on its own.

Have you tried Better Facebook out? Any raves or complaints? I’m just installing it now; I’ll report on it if I have any problems, or if it dramatically changes my life for the better. :-)

The Atlas Shrugged movie people have released a short uncut scene:

I’m still impressed by the overall quality so far, considering the tiny budget and super-rushed production schedule. What do you think?

(By the way, you can request that Atlas be screened in your town here.)

Here’s the full trailer for the movie in case you haven’t seen it.

The Next Web has highlighted 5 things you didn’t know you could do with Twitter. in a recent post. the 5 things are: plan your meals, track your packages, post to Evernote, add to Google Calendar, and track your weight loss. Pretty neat.Check out the post for details on how those work.

I didn’t necessarily know that you could do these specific things using Twitter, though I do know there are a lot of little bots and tools like these that can be accessed easily if you know about them. For example: try tweeting “(sp?)” after a word in one of your tweets, and just wait–the spelling bot will reply with the proper spelling of your word. (Of course it probably won’t work for you now that I’ve mentioned it, but it is out there; I’ve seen it.)

Know of other cool bots and tools like these? Let the readers know in the comments!

Call me a cheapo whiner, but I find paid dating sites to be a pain. In a lot of cases, it’s not entirely clear who can message who in such a situation–i.e., it’s possible that you as a paid member are able to message someone, but they as a non-paid member can’t write you back. Which just means that paid members are effectively serving as salespeople, with each communication providing a chance for the site to tease the intended recipient: “You’ve received a message! Sign up for our paid membership so you can read it!” Or: “You’ve got a message! Go ahead and read it. Now, want to reply? Sign up for our paid membership!”

Pardon my language, but that’s bullshit. And that’s exactly how some of the paid dating sites work. Even the paid members get jacked. Some sites are more clear about this than others, but…hey, wait a minute! Who cares? There are 3 perfectly-functional and well-populated dating sites that let you communicate openly for free. One of them is even pretty good! So why not just use them, and leave the Match.coms of the world behind?

Here are the three sites, with my least favorite first:

Plenty of Fish
POF is plenty big and works OK, but I find their interface to be clunky and non-intuitive (it most likely still looks a lot like the site did when it started in 2001). I also don’t like their attitude toward vices (drugs, etc.), and they have been increasingly pushy about forcing you to answer certain profile questions just to keep using the site. Overall, I would say that if PlentyOfFish.com was a person, he would be kind of a dick, and annoying to deal with. I’ve been phasing out my usage of that site. That said, there are plenty of people there, and communication is free–if a bit censored. (Example: mention “OK Cupid” (see below) in a message to someone, and POF changes it to “another dating site” without telling you. Like I said – kind of a dick.)

DateHookup
DateHookup.com has a vibe kind of like what you might imagine from its name – though the people seem earnest and aren’t just looking for “hookups”. It’s just got a loose, social, slightly meat-markety feel to it. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The profiles here tend to be pretty short and sweet, and stylistically, there is a bit of a myspace-like decorative feel to some profiles. (Probably less so if you’re surfing guys’ profiles, I assume.) You will probably get the highest percentage of bathroom-mirror pics at DateHookup compared to the other two.

OKCupid
OKCupid is really great. I have nothing bad to say about it so far, and it has a lot of features that make it stand out from other dating sites, paid or free. It’s pretty aggressive in terms of trying to introduce people to each other, both directly via email match alerts, and indirectly via suggested profiles that run alongside the person you’re viewing. The interesting thing about these suggested folks is that OKCupid characterizes them in comparison to the person you’re viewing, with things like: “more conservative”, “more desiring”, “less spiritual”, “more adventurous”, “less organized”, “more pure”, “sloppier”, and so on. I’ve never seen anything quite like that, on the 10 or so dating sites I’ve scoped out over the past decade. Pretty neat. I’ve been using this site the least amount of time, but I’ve been more impressed, and have gotten more responses, than with any other site.

I could describe more of what makes OKCupid stand out, but it’s easier just to go and get a feel for it yourself. They seem to have tapped into the next wave of online dating sites in some way. Exactly the opposite of where Plenty of Fish is at. (with DateHookup being almost exactly between the two on that spectrum.) However, all three sites do have active memberships, with some overlap but not a ton. And OKCupid can’t match you up with someone if they are only a member of one of those other sites. So you might want to just try all three anyway. I’d be curious to see what happened if someone signed up for all three at once with the same exact profile–how the responses would compare. If anyone has a clean slate and tries that out, please let us know how it goes.

Do you of another good free dating site? Post a comment and share it!

I’m all about learning, and not so much about school, which means that online education is good cheese by me. I seldom go so far as to absorb whole courses online, but I’ve been educating myself on the web for 15 years now. And I’m pretty brilliant. So there’s that.

A site called Bachelor’s Degree Online has been kind (and savvy) enough to compile 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers–full-blown courses on a fairly comprehensive range of subjects, grouped into the various disciplines that a web worker might need to tackle.

About 75% of these courses are from MIT, which has been putting courses on the web for a while now. You may have heard of MIT. It purportedly does not suck.

So go get educated then already! And I don’t expect to hear “I’m bored” from you for at least a year.

Got more free education for our readers? Drop some knowledge in the comments!

I listen to quite a few comedy podcasts, all of which are included in Joe Berkowitz’s A Seriously Comprehensive Guide to Comedy Podcasts.

His guide starts out with a lot of detail, and then the size and depth of the reviews shrink as you get nearer to the end. I’m assuming this is because for Joe to truly listen to and fully review all these podcasts would take a great deal of time. As it is, I’m sure his guide is a work of passion that has eaten up at least a few minutes of his day. Because it really is seriously comprehensive. (Though I don’t see the Onion News Network’s hilarious podcast there, so it’s not completely comprehensive. Just seriously.)

I haven’t listened to most of these podcasts, so I hesitate to suggest my favorites as preferable to what may be equal or better alternatives on the list. I will say that I look for and look forward to new episodes of the following regularly: WTF w/Marc Maron, Doug Loves Movies, Pod F. Tompkast, Never Not Funny, The Nerdist, and most newly, Judge John Hodgman. All of which are linked to in Joe’s guide. (And the Onion News Network, of course, which as of this writing is not. Which doesn’t make my first sentence here false, BTW, because the ONN podcast is a video one, and I said all the ones I listen to are in Joe’s list.)

<demystifying>A “podcast” is simply an Internet show (audio or video) that you download, or view or listen to on the Web. The name comes from the fact that they originally grew popular via iPods, but they are just regular .mp3 files, usually. </demystifying>

I’m definitely not one of those people who sticks my nose up at folks posting relatively ordinary occurrences from their day on Twitter.

I’ve been on the Internet for a long damn time, and one of the things that makes it great is its ability to bridge the invisible divide that has grown between “strangers” in the world. (And between the haves and have-nots, and the powered and the powerless, and so on.)

As we become more distinctive and narrowed in our daily lives–honing in on what we know and love, and excluding the rest–it’s more important than ever to remember that we’re all still human beings, and we all have a lot in common. Including mundane things, like eating, dealing with traffic, flying on planes, watching TV, whatever.

Mini-mountain, yes...but self aware? Not yet-- maybe.

Especially with the flattening power of social media, where people who were formerly at a mythical distance from us are sharing themselves directly with fans and followers on a daily basis, it’s the mundane commonalities that help us to restructure our thoughts in a way that helps demystify the unhealthy societal hierarchies of the past. (Reality TV does the same thing in a way, but we’ll save that for another time.)

Put plainly, it’s a hyper-extension of the old mantra “we all put our pants on one leg at a time”. While I don’t know if there is a social media site yet that focuses on that specific mundane activity, people are sharing so-called “boring” details, vignettes, pictures, and snippets from their lives all the time…and while it’s popular and easy to sneer at such sharing, it’s also short-sighted and snobbish.

So don’t let anyone tell you that what you’re having for dinner, and how you feel about it, isn’t important. It is. I’ll explain more why that’s so as the year goes on, but for now, just trust me. You go ahead and share whatever the hell you want, and screw the haters. Send your frustrated partner, friend, or parent here if they have a beef with it. (If you’ve been sent here in accordance with that instruction: I know better than you about this stuff, and the person who sent you here is right about the sharing. Get off their case!)

Wow…I had no idea what was going to come out when I started to introduce my salad tweets from today, and the salad of which they spake. And I ended up creating a bridge of healing for divided couples everywhere. You never know what you’ll get when you tap into the Lance well!

Predecessor to the salad that will eat your family

Anyway…I’ve been on a major salad jag lately. I’ve always been a big fan of vegetables–I was one of those kids who was easy in that regard–but as a marginally-domesticated bachelor, I haven’t always managed to get salad into my life as much as my tastes would seem to support.

But, having decided to go the salad way for a while, I have been plunging in with earnest dedication–almost to a fault. (If we want to blame someone–and let’s assume we do–we should probably blame Robin Mallery and her call to create “6-color salads”.)

It takes about an hour to whip up one of my super-salads these days, and until today I was using a normal-sized wooden serving bowl and just ridiculously over-filling it, to the point where trying to serve from it, or toss or stir the salad, became a messy ordeal. And with my escalating madness, I was reaching the point where I ran out of space before I ran out of ingredients, so I’d end up with a giant-but-incomplete salad, with any new ingredients just spilling off the sides pointlessly.

So today I bit the bullet and went with the big plastic bowl–which, if I end up over-filling the way I did its predecessor, will be holding a salad that could potentially threaten a mid-size city, or more.

Such was the subject of a series of tweets from me today, as I realized the full consequences of my descent into Frankensteinishly hazardous food-preparation shenanigans.

WARNING: This is your last chance to back out before I pull away the curtain to expose the sad truth behind the inevitable hellscape future that I have unintentionally set into motion. You can still remain blissfully ignorant of your impending doom if you back out now. Read more…

Not much to be said here…Diana Adams at Ink Rebels has compiled a tremendous list of prompts to help you get unstuck if you ever don’t know what to blog about: 100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration

I’ve been planning on writing one of these “things to post about” posts myself, but it’s becoming increasingly unnecessary. Between Diana’s awesome list and the resources I linked to in this blog post here, the pool of potential content ideas is growing very wide and very deep. We may need to reclassify it as a pond soon.

Here’s a tip: bookmark this post, so you can find Diana’s list as well as my other post with three other lists on it. That should keep you busy for a while…unless you’re posting like 10 times a day or something (in which case you probably don’t need our help coming up with ideas anyway).

I hate to be a stickler here, but before I praise Heidi Cohen’s excellent list of affordable ways to pervasively promote your local business blog, I have to take issue with her title:

24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With NO Budget, NO Time & NO Resources

A reasonable person could think from reading that title that the “24 Ways” mentioned could be achieved with no budget, no time, and no resources. But that reasonable person would be getting deceived by hype. And upon discovering, after briefly suspending disbelief enough to think the title’s promise could be true, that in fact it is the exact sort of hyperbolic overstatement that the reasonable person quietly suspected it would end up being, the reasonable person would have his mass-media-cultivated shell of righteous cynicism hardened by at least one additional layer.

I’m the reasonable person in that scenario, by the way. As are you. And we shouldn’t be toyed with. That’s all I’m saying.

The reality of that title is as sad as it is obvious: there’s not a single one of those 24 things that can be done with NO budget, NO time, and NO resources. Each item on the list involves an action verb–which, as an editor, I applaud. But, as an amateur scientist, I can tell you that nothing which involves an action verb can be accomplished without using either time or resources, or both. “Make”, “Use”, “Work”, “Write”, “Offer to help”, “Place a computer”…these are not things that do themselves.

So I deduct major style points for the over-the-top hyperbolic title, and for reinforcing the cynicism of an already-cynical generation. It puts an unfortunate cloud over things–but I still think the list itself is worth checking out.

The true promise of the article is stated in the second paragraph, which has the more grounded and accurate heading “24 Low cost tips to promote your blog”:

“The most important step is to start looking for low cost/no cost promotional opportunities for your blog. It’s easy but it’s not always obvious. Here are twenty-four low cost ideas to help you get started.”

Low cost. Not zero time or money, which is impossible, but low cost, which is both possible and desirable. (But which does not make for as exciting a headline, unfortunately. Stupid boring reality!)

OK, good-natured (but serious) ribbing aside, Heidi’s article has some really great ways to up the ante on your blog promotion efforts. A lot of them involve putting a promo blurb about your blog in places you might not have thought of,  some others involve local outreach and partnerships, and still others deal with squeezing more win-win juice from your existing customers and foot traffic. They are 24 solid suggestions…and while every single one takes time or resources, and most of them will cost at least a little money (unless you own your own print shop), they are all definitely in the low-to-no cost range. And some require as little as a pen and a piece of paper.

Pick a handful of those things to do now, and make sure all the print-material-related ones get worked into your next print shop order, and you’ll have a lot less to worry about when it comes to promoting your web site locally.

Have more low–or-no cost ways for local businesses to promote their blogs? Might as well post them in the comments at Heidi’s post, since I’m suggesting we all go check that out anyway.

I might go post a comment about linking to your neighbors and getting listed in the web business directories, both of which I posted about here recently.

If you want to comment here, you could chime in on article titles that overstate their promise. Do you think I’m being too hard on Heidi regarding her hyperbolic title?

As long as it conveys something useful, informative, entertaining, or otherwise engaging, a blog post doesn’t necessarily have to be a full-length article.

It’s OK to post a short blog post sometimes.

Just a quick post to mention two resources I bumped into recently: MoreofIt and SitesLike. Both sites do basically the same thing, which is suggesting sites that are similar to the one you provide. I first stumbled onto MoreofIt when looking for alternatives to ToonDoo, the online comic creator that I use to make my comic The Little Things. (Turns out that Toondoo appears to be as good as the others, as far as I can tell. If you have a favorite online comic creator tool, let me know what it is and why you like it, please.)

I lost track of MoreofIt later that week (and didn’t remember the name), so I did a Google search to try and find it again–and that’s how I found SitesLike, which does essentially the same thing. Come to think of it, you could presumably find more of similar-site finders by entering either of these sites into the other one. ;-)

Aside from finding sites with these tools, if you have a website, there is another action item you can take: SitesLike has an add site tool.  (I couldn’t find one at MoreofIt; if you know of one for them, please let me know.) So you should probably take a second to add yours, if there’s a chance it might not be in there already.

David Garland at Small Business Trends has a nice succinct post about becoming a new kind of “celebrity” – the entrepreneurial niche celebrity (or “trusted resource”, which he suggests as a less hype-driven descriptor).

It’s funny – I’ve gotten so used to the list-style articles that are so popular these days, that when I discovered that David’s list ended after 3 items, I felt like it was abrupt or short. But when I looked back at the piece I realized he covers a lot of ground in his “short” list–each item has a lot of sub-points, especially the first two.

I read (or skim) so many articles these days that if I shared them all it would be overwhelming for both of us. So I’ve started using a rule of thumb that I’ll only post articles that taught me something, or moved me to action. David’s article gave me the final push to get my picture up on my site, and to work on infusing a little more Lance into things. (Stuff I tell all my clients to do of course, but you know, do as I say…) So maybe his quick run-through will give you a needed kick in the pants too…or provide you with a starting blueprint for your own rise to “celebrity” in your niche.

Author Julie Isaac put together the 2011 S.H.I.N.E. Online Blogging Challenge to help inspire bloggers to post more–so that they in turn inspire their readers. (Julie is the founder of the WritingSpirit Book Writers Community, so inspiring writers is right in her natural zone.)

I bumped into the S.H.I.N.E. challenge via Twitter, and it fit right in with the accountability festival I was drumming up early this month. In fact, I came up with the term “accountability festival”, which ended up being the title of one of my columns, when I was posting in the comments section of Julie’s blog about joining in on the challenge. Funny how things come about from small moments and coincidences. It’s synchronicity, or serendipity. It’s synchrondipity! (Which, sadly, is also the name of a chewing tobacco targeted at teenage drummers.)

Thanks to Julie and the WritingSpirit folks who are joining us in the 111-day challenge. I’ve only blown it one day so far! :-)

I was thinking about linking to all the other bloggers in the #SHINE2011 challenge, but there are a LOT of them. You can find them all in the comments section of the main 2011 S.H.I.N.E. Online blog post.

I have a pretty absurd amount of Twitter accounts at this point. Most of them are dormant–accounts I started tentatively, in association with a project that I have planned (or that is nominally underway). Having dealt ad nauseam with the frustration of searching for domain names and finding them taken, I have become pretty aggressive in staking out usernames and other official addresses for projects I have a vested interest in. (I have nearly as many inactive Facebook Pages as I do Twitter accounts–probably almost a couple dozen of each.)

I do have a few Twitter accounts that are actually doing something as of this writing, and I figure it was time to get them together and start promoting them. I will add new accounts as they become active enough to justify doing so.

I’m subdividing myself into these various channels because I recognize that different folks are going to be interested in different aspects of what I’m doing or saying or putting out there. It goes both ways, really…I don’t expect that people who have an interest in just one of my niches will necessarily find the other things I’m doing all that compelling. And I also don’t think all the people who follow my main personal tweets want to deal with playing receiver to every single thing I put out into the world. They already deal with an awful lot of random output from me.

So here’s the breakdown. Please follow whatever accounts you think will be of value to you. (Click on the account name to visit the profile page and follow it.) I look forward to seeing you there!

@FreelanceLance – Lance Brown

This is my first and main account. Despite the username being drawn from my business name “Freelance Lance”, these tweets aren’t official business.  They are so not official anything that I can’t really advise you of what to expect. I’m not a one-note, “value provider” type tweeter, who is obsessed with getting followers and retweets. Or I should say I am obsessed with those things, but I’ve adjusted to the fact that my best bet is to just do what feels right for me, and the rest will come when it does.

The result is that I will say almost any damn thing on my Twitter account, and am known to veer in many directions. But I try to always be entertaining, informative, or thought-provoking. At my best, I’m all three.

@1minuteofnature – One Minute of Nature

This would be a good account to follow for your health. One Minute of Nature aims to calm your harried mind. OneMinuteofNature.com is a site that is gathering short videos of soothing and otherwise fascinating nature footage from individuals all around the world. (Once I figure out the submission process, that is.) The slogan is “Bringing you back to nature, one minute at a time.”

It’s a newer project of mine–though, like a lot of my stuff, it has been percolating for some time now. I finally have videos up, and the site and Twitter account both are not shamefully incomplete anymore. (Great promo, eh?) And the YouTube channel is fairly stylin’, actually. The Twitter feed will consist mostly of links to new short nature videos, as they are posted. Follow and retweet…unless you hate nature!

@FreeWPAdvice – Free WP Advice

I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with the awesome website software WordPress since it first came out in 2003. I fell in love then, and have only fallen deeper with each year since. Now, WordPress is the hottest thing since pepperoni pizza, and I’m kind of an elder statesman of people who’ve been using it. So I know it pretty well.

The FreeWPAdvice Twitter account is part of my effort to give back to the WordPress community, and to help others get to know and love the software that has become one the true foundations of the modern Web. Ask and you shall receive free WordPress advice. I’ve been planning on more coordinated stuff, like a day-long workshop or something, but I need to get some followers on this account first. I’ll be doing mini-tutorials via tweets in the meantime.

@jokesonreince – Reince Priebus Jokes

The official Twitter account of America’s greatest hope for childish ridicule, ReincePriebusJokes.com. I still can’t fully articulate to myself why I started this site and Twitter account compiling jokes about the oddly-named RNC Chair, but there it is. It’s quite an array of humor…I’m not sure there are many other topics that have had such a wide variety of different kinds of jokes made about it, especially in such a short time.

Eventually, most or all of these various Reince Priebus jokes–of which there are hundreds, or more–will be catalogued on the site (which as of this writing is crushing the Google results for “reince priebus jokes” ;-)). A couplefew hundred  have already been posted at that Twitter account. At this point, expect a few more a day, unless Reince Priebus hits the news some more (or the site hits the news). There may be a contest or voting down the road as well. (There probably will be.) Priebus!

@ActivistStories – Activist Stories

This is the Twitter account for my planned podcast, Activist Stories. It will be a series of very personal interviews with activists of all sorts. From one activist to another, I aim to dig in deep and find out why we activists are the way we are, and why we do what we do. Both the Twitter account and website for this are skeletal right now, but Activist Stories is on my 2011 mindmap, so progress will be made on it this year. If it sounds interesting to you, you can get in on the ground floor by following now. (If you pass, don’t come complaining to me years from now, when we’re all rolling in billions of dollars from the Activist Stories IPO and you aren’t.)

Jeff Bullas has created a nice simple guide to getting started advertising on Facebook:

How To Advertise On Facebook In Ten Minutes For Less Than $10 A Day In 10 Simple Steps

I don’t have anything to add really, other than that it made me want to get started advertising on Facebook! :-)

If you have a locally-based business, this is a great and really easy way to get more local traffic to your site, and it can also be an excellent way to make nice personal connections with businesses that might become customers or referrers one day.

The concept is simple: if you have a locally-based business, make a place on your site where you link to all the businesses that are nearby (and that have websites).

Here’s how it goes:

1. Look around or walk around or somehow find out the names of all the businesses near you. How you define “near you” is your call. One local client of mine had about 40 businesses within a block or so. That’s a great start. You can reach out as far as you want—just have a sense of what “neighborhood” you’re compiling. It could be a block or an office building, or it could be a whole town or a county. You’ll want to do them in reasonably-sized portions, whatever your range.
2. You may want to narrow your list down, and pick your targets based on an estimate of their likelihood of “paying off”. I discourage taking that approach–though it couldn’t hurt to at least make sure you’re putting your best effort into the better bets. Still, you never know what might come from reaching out, even it’s to Grandma Smith’s Sewing Shop. And part of this exercise is about using old-school relationship-style marketing, and when translated to your neighboring businesses, that means being friendly to everyone you can. So if they have a website, I say keep them on the list unless there’s a good reason not to.
3. Find websites for all of the businesses on your list that you can. As you add them to a links page on your site (or a text file on your computer), note down contact info for the business in question. (Email, phone, address, owner or manager’s name, etc.)
4. Post the links on your site. There are two main ways to deal with that:
   1. The easiest is to create a links page and just add whatever links you want to it. (Or use WordPress’s Links function to add your links, and a links page plugin to display them.) If you use a links page, make sure you add a link to that page somewhere in the common navigation areas of your site. Some marketers might say you could just have your links page exist without cluttering up your menus with a “Links” button. Those same folks implicitly would be thinking that links pages are a thing of the past, and they’d probably think of your links page as simply a chance to bleed away visitors who will never be seen again.
      I disagree on all counts. It’s true that links pages have been around since the earliest days of the web, but this is still the Internet, and people still want to get pointed to other cool places. And the idea that you lose people from linking off of your site is 99% myth. So if you have a links page, make it a full partner in your site. You can stick the link to it down with the bottom-of-the-page links if you want, rather than up in your main navigation. But don’t just create the page and leave it lonely and untethered from your site. That’s cheesy, and it undermines the genuineness of the connection you are trying to make with these other human beings, your neighbors.
   2. Another option, if you a) only have a blog or b) have a lot of empty sidebar space, or 3) don’t want to have a links page for whatever reason, is to post your links “blogroll”-style–i.e., in a list in your right or left sidebar. If you have both sides available, do the right. And put it below other primary stuff in your sidebar. That will make it the least emphasized of all your sidebar stuff–but even still, you will be giving very prominent props to the folks on your blogroll.
      If you have a lot of links, or are concerned about giving up that much real estate, you could use a plugin to rotate your links on a page-by-page basis, showing just one or five or ten links at a time. (That could make it tougher for your linkees to go see their link, since it would be rotating randomly around the site, but if it’s a good fit otherwise, then it might be the way to go.)
      If you really want to get friendly with some other places with websites, putting them in a blogroll/links list that shows up in the sidebar on all or most of your pages is a very generous gesture, and if they are web-aware at all, they will realize as much, and most likely feel indebted or at least grateful.
5. Once you have posted the links on your site and your blogroll or links page is looking good, then you get in touch with your newly-linked neighbors. How you go about that is up to you–you could stop by in person, call on the phone, or send an email. You’ll have to go with your gut on that. Obviously each has a different time commitment, and will be received differently.
   I would go for at least a phone call probably, but it does depend on who you’re dealing with on the other end. It might be that an email is all you can do to try and reach the person who will care. But if you are looking for an excuse to get some face time with your fellow neighborhood business owners, I think this makes for a great opportunity/excuse to make it happen.
6. When you tell them about the link, do not ask for a link back. Do not try and sell them anything. Do not try and give them your card unless they ask. This is important. Break this rule and you risk spoiling the whole thing. You are not doing this for easily measurable cost/benefit-based reasons, so don’t bother trying to make it “pay off”. This doesn’t mean don’t engage in conversation or even strut your stuff if asked, but your mission is simply to drop by and let them know that you did something nice for them, “just because you’re my neighbor and we’re both business owners, and it was an easy way to maybe point a few people in your direction every now and then.”
   Paraphrase what I just said there, and if they don’t say anything else after they say “Thank you” or “OK”, then bid them a courteous goodbye and call it good. (Let them know how they can find your site and their link on it also, of course.) Don’t make sales moves of any sort on them, and don’t try and get anything out of it other than making contact with another human being. If they want to go forward in business with you, they will let you know.
7. Now, wait for the piles of money to start pouring in! Just kidding. You will get some links back, though. That’s pretty much guaranteed. (And those will pay off over time.) And you will definitely be more at the forefront of those neighbors’ minds for the next while. If they didn’t know you existed before, they will probably look for you, and if they did know you existed, they will think more vividly of you when they walk or drive by every day. Because you will be the nice neighbor who did a nice thing for them, just to be nice. And not that many people do that these days.
   Trust me, with a few of your neighbors, this little gesture will make a big difference in these modern times of detachment and increasing isolation. And while they themselves might not need a lawyer or hair stylist or whatever it is that you do, they probably know other people in the world. And some of those people will need your services (or will have what you need), and your neighbor buddy might be the one who is in the position to connect you when the time comes.

This is “Networking 101″ stuff here, but it can be easy to forget how simple it is to make a new personal connection that could help your business (and your heart and spirit and stuff too).

It can also be easy to forget that your website doesn’t have to always be focused on “way out there”; something as simple as a list of neighboring business websites on a links page can get you traffic, referrals, and maybe even new lifelong friends! (Remember back when people made friends with other people in their neighborhood? Me neither really, but it’s in all those old TV shows, so it’s definitely a real thing.)

By the way, most of these principles can be applied to making a links page or blogroll even if you aren’t locally-based. You just define your “neighborhood” differently–by industry (horizontally and/or vertically), or by common interests, etc. If you reach out this way to folks around the Internet, treat it just the same, in terms of making a real personal connection. Don’t make it generic and impersonal just because you’re emailing or calling someone far away.

And do not–I repeat, do not–ask for a link back. (Don’t suggest it, don’t half-ask for it–don’t even mention it.) It won’t increase your chances of getting one, it will increase your chances of not getting one, and it destroys all the positive vibeage that you are trying to manifest, because it turns you into someone who’s trying to use them under the guise of helping them, and that just feels slimy and lame.

Link freely and with genuine neighborly love, and you will get dividends back, don’t worry.

Or at least maybe a nice plate of brownies or something.

Do you have a neighbor-linking success story to share? Well then share it, yo! (In the comments, yo.)

I have to say, living alone for a very long time has made me really, really funny. To me.

-Tweeted by me, Sept. 5, 2009

It’s finally come time for me to admit something. It’s been out there in plain sight; people who cared to look would have immediately seen my dark and disturbing “secret”. But I need to say it. To own it.

Wow, this is tougher than I thought it would be. OK, here goes:

Phew! Man, do I feel better!

Sorry to burden you all with that. I know it’s sad, and the fact that you’re willing to stick with me and wade through such a disturbing truth is what makes you a true friend or unfortunate random reader. And I love you for it. (Unless of course you only favorite your own tweets. In which case, get away from me, freak!)

There’s a reason I don’t favorite tweets from other people, though: they would get in the way of my awesome tweets. So really, I just have your best interests at heart. (And by “your”, I mean “my”.)

In all seriousness–because there is literally nothing more serious on our entire planet–you can get those other people’s tweets anywhere. They’re laying around all over the place. But my own favorite things that I’ve said on Twitter? Where else can you get that? Answer me!!

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Nowhere, tough guy. That’s where. Now don’t you feel bad for implying that I was mentally ill or some sort of egocentric weirdo earlier in this post?

I really hope not, because if so you are very susceptible to persuasive rhetoric. Almost too much so. You did nothing wrong. And even if you did, it was coming from a good place. I know you only want what’s best for me, true friend or unfortunate random reader.

Now go read my favorite tweets, you easily-persuadable teddy bear! Here are a smattering of my favorite favorites to whet your appetite:

When I get on a rhyming kick, I start trying to will new words into the English language. The results so far have been sanguage.

I bet the guy who created “apostrophe s” has second thought’s about it now.

If you consider Beetlejuice as an existential pre-rendering of “Dirty Work”, Norm McDonald seems a lot more like a visionary. #thinkaboutit

P.S. – I did not waterboard those butterflies. And if I did, I didn’t know about it. And if I did know about it, I was misled.

…wondering if it’s a problem that every business plan I make, whether for my project or others’, somehow involves taking over the world.

DNKT = Did Not Know That, BTW. (BTW = By The Way, FWIW. {FWIW = For What It’s Worth, FYI. [FYI = For Your Information, in case you DNKT.]})

Little-known fact: I put the bop in the bop shi-bop shi-bop. But then I took it back out. It was so noisy!

Twitter’s like people-watching IRL–except the people you’re watching get a little note that says, “I’m watching you.”

Like what you see? There’s more of that, plus links to a bunch of cool resources, in my Twitter Favorites.

Do you have a favorite favorite tweet of mine? Post it in the comments! (<– a really clever scam to generate a big copyright infringement lawsuit against my fans) (<– a not-so-clever way to accidentally discourage comments) (<– ignore those two; they’re just being silly)

One of the simplest things you can do to put your locally-based business website to work for you is to add or update your information in the many free business directory sites on the web.

Taking advantage of free business listing sites offers a few benefits, namely:

• You get to make sure all the sites have your correct address, phone number, and web site. This is especially important if your key information has changed recently (obviously).
• While a lot of the local directories will already have your basic “phone book” info, they are less likely to automatically have your web address or contact email address. Since most businesses won’t bother adding theirs, if you add yours you will have an automatic leg up on the competition.
• While the value of links from these sites will vary, a lot of the business directory sites tend to be top results for Google “yellow pages”-style searches (like “hair salon”, “real estate agent”, “car repair”, etc.). If you get most or all of these mega-sites to link to your site, Google should take your site a little more seriously as a result.
• Not to mention, it means that when people land on these directory sites, they will be able to click and get to your site, rather than just seeing the dry “Name / address / phone number” listing.
• Also, some of these sites offer opportunities to rank or comment on a given business. (Some, like Yelp, are primarily focused on just that.) If you seek them out, you get a chance to respond to good or bad reviews. And if you keep track of them, or have a blog, you can send your customers there to help you get good ratings and reviews on those sites.

Now on with the sites!

NOTE: I’m only focusing on sites that list businesses for free, and I would recommend thinking twice before paying for any online business listing, unless you’ve heard from a solid referral that it pays off for them. Some of those directories won’t last or succeed, so paying money to them can be a gamble. But there are plenty of ways to get free listings and links.

• Yahoo Local
• Google Local
• Bing Local
• Yelp
• Craigslist (doesn’t have a business directory, but allows free ads)
• MerchantCircle
• Froogle Local (you can list retail products that you have for sale)
• YellowPages.com
• SuperMedia
• Foursquare
• LocalPages
• CitySlick
• LocalDatabase
• BrownBook
• Best of the Web Local
• Angie’s List
• HotFrog
• Kudzu

There’s an even longer list here; I wanted to check those sites out myself before I added them all here.)

Lastly, just search for your own type of business and town in Google or elsewhere, and you will probably find some directories I haven’t mentioned here, including some that are specific to your industry. (So one of my clients would search for “hair salon grass valley”, and look for all the local-business and salon-industry directory sites in the first couple pages of results. Or search for your business name and town, and see the places where you are already listed.)

I will dig into some of these more in the future; a few, like Yelp and Foursquare, deserve detailed discussion in their own right. But for now, making sure your business has a spot on those sites, and has all the info you’re allowed to list for free, is a pretty good start.

This list is by no means comprehensive; I’ll be adding to and updating it over time.

Do you have some free local business listing sites I should add? Have you had good or bad experiences with any of the ones I have listed?