February – What I’ve been up to

Posted: February 24th, 2013 | Author: Ryan | Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on February – What I’ve been up to

It’s been a month since my last update, holy cow! Despite the unintentional (though entirely forgiveable, right?) gap in coverage, rest assured I’ve been working on a few projects that I think will be great fun moving forward

New Food Blog

While I’m not yet ready to publicize the site yet, we’ve gotten a good share of the back-end stuff ready for launch and are working on

content for a local dining blog.  I’d like to say that this new site is a product of my previous local dining challenge, but really this idea has been kicking around for nearly two years.

New Podcast

While I continue to contribute to the long-running gaming podcast I helped start in 2010, episodes are become less-regular since last summer, and I still have the itch to record. Recently I reached out to my friend Ray and launched a 10-minute podcast that’s aimed at reaching our audience multiple times a week and giving them just enough content to enjoy on their way to work/school.

This project has been a lot of fun, and has provided me with a number of learning opportunities, especially given how many things have changed in both WordPress and iTunes set-up since my last podcast launched nearly 3 years ago. (“I don’t have to write my own RSS feed by hand and pass through feedburner anymore?”)

Teaching myself outreach

Right now I’m about half-way through Paddy Moogan’s book The Link Building Book, and within the first few pages I got inspired to teach myself how to do proper outreach for link building.  Actually doing outreach is something I’ve had internal struggles over for quite a while, going back to when I first pitched Taz to let me write for Blooming Rock. It’s about time I got organized and wrote down the lessons I learn as I go through this.  Plus, with two new sites coming out, what better time to work on getting some links and building good relationships?

When I feel like I’m ready to summarize what I’ve learned, I’ll be sure to let you guys know.  I may actually get “meta” about link-building and shop the summary as a guest post, or hopefully convince my boss to let us launch the inbound marketing blog I proposed a few months ago.

How am I doing on those goals I set out?

• Blog every day I’m not gaming twice a week for 5 weeks straight.
• Devise and complete at least 3 30-day challenges this year.

I’ve got an idea in the works to combine both of these; I’ll write more about that tomorrow.

• Either launch or put to bed the local dining blog I’ve been talking about for the last few years.

Think we’ve covered that.

• Build a sense of mind-share by leaving a comment on at least one of the blogs I read each day.

I’m not sure there’s a measurable metric for this, but I’ve been making sure to post a comment anytime I forward a link on to my friends or colleagues. This seems like a good way to make sure I’m not commenting for comments’ sake and trying sincere with my interactions.

• Finish the books I started in 2011 or 2012. This leaves Game of Thrones, Content Marketing for the Web, Boneshaker, and a few other SEO books I’ve forgetten the titles of.

As mentioned above, I’ve been drawn into The Link Building Book lately. Combine that with more industry blog reading and an upcoming guest post that required reading comic books as research (such a tough job), I’ve had to push this one off a bit. Plus I’ve come to realize that I’ll never read Song of Ice & Fire fast enough to catch up to the TV show, so that’s a bit less of an impetus.

Not Yet Addressed:

• Travel to at least three different places before next New Year.
• Write at least one guest blog each month.
• Apply for school so I can finish my degree.

Always more to do….

Related articles

• 2013 Project Ideas – (This was supposed to be my New Year’s Post) (relevantwit.com)

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