Paloma Cruz

Assuming that you’ve made the decision that you want to be a successful blogger, Darren Rowse (the six figure blogger) has added his tips on How To Market Your Blog in 2007. The shortlist:

Get Your Own House In Order

• Write well, write consistently, don’t give up
• Become an expert on something
• Design is more important than you think
• Get Your SEO On
• Publish full feeds
• Do interviews with other bloggers
• Break important stories
• Have a contest
• Publish original research
• Put out Press Releases
• Work your long tail
• Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog
• Spend time to create links and trackbacks
• Get Your MyBlogLog widget and work it, work it, work it (in a nice way)

Getting the Word Out

• Join a blog carnival
• Join blog network
• Participate in forums
• Participate on larger blogs in comments
• Join Blogburst
• Participate in Darren’s contests
• Submit to blog directories
• Submit to Google sitemaps
• Submit to article directories
• Get interviewed
• Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator
• Create free stuff for yourself and give it away
• Create free stuff for other people
• Pay for pub

Connect, Connect, Connect

• Make friends with other bloggers
• Guest blog
• Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces
• Get hired
• Network in person
• Join virtual groups
• Cross promote

Make Social Media Work For You

• Facebook
• Join Helium
• Yahoo Answers!
• Create a Squidoo Lens
• Use MySpace Marketing
• Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon

Oh, wow! I can’t even count the items listed that I never would have thought about. Of course, that means I’m not doing them.

Providing full feeds? I wasn’t doing that, I am now. I think I’m going to go through this post, item by item, and start some positive new activities.

General

Need some help getting your 8 hours of sleep? Try one of these 10 foods. According to Yahoo they “relax tense muscles, quiet buzzing minds, and/or get calming, sleep-inducing hormones – serotonin and melatonin - flowing.”

• Bananas
• Chamomile tea
• Warm milk
• Honey
• Potatoes
• Oatmeal
• Almonds
• Flaxseeds
• Whole-wheat bread
• Turkey

For doses and suggested combinations, check out Yahoo! Food.

(Found via LifeHacker, who found it via lifehack.org.)

Health

Thank you, ShopGirl, for giving me an alternative activity for Super Bowl Sunday:

[snip]

The Robbins Bros. jewelry store in Webster will host a party for the ladies on Sunday (Feb. 4) with manicures, champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries and other treats. If football and beer are more your thing, well, they will have that, too. At the end of the night, one woman will win a diamond ring.

That’s certainly something to cheer about.

Details: 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 4). 1251 W. Bay Area Blvd., Webster. 281-316-9933.

News

I recently found four new blogs to monitor, written by educators:

• Libby Nicole Ingrassia at www.notesgirl.com
• John Pearson at learnmegood2.blogspot.com/
• “Mike in Texas ” at educationintexas.blogspot.com/
• “Ms. H ” at moldingyoungminds.blogspot.com/

Found via a Houston Chronicle article discussing how teachers are using blogs to vent, anonymously.

Resources

Texas Governor Rick Perry recently gave additional details on his plan to increase border security. As reported by the Houston Chronicle:

Gov. Rick Perry gave more details today on his $100 million plan to crack down on drug and human smuggling along the Mexican border by enlisting hundreds of armed National Guard forces and thousands more agents from other state and federal agencies.

Perry described “Operation Wrangler” as a second phase of an initiative to use state resources to fill security holes left by the federal government.

[snip]

Perry said the plan piggybacks on last February’s Operation Rio Grande, which he said helped border sheriffs reduce crime by 60 percent by helping them buy more equipment and pay officers overtime. Since October 2005, the state has spent $20 million on border security efforts.

Operation Wrangler will send 604 National Guard troops throughout the state, he said, “covering the coast, the rivers, and the interstate highway system.”

The troops will work with agencies totaling more than 6,800 personnel working for 11 “joint operational intelligence centers,” all guided by a control operations center in Austin. Five centers were to be at Border Patrol offices along the border and others were to be along smuggling corridors.

The guard members will operate in platoons accompanied by a Border Patrol member. A Border Patrol spokesman referred all queries about the program to the governor’s office.

Perry said state and federal agencies are much more cooperative since the 2001 terrorist attacks, which he said changed the old atmosphere of “turf protection.”

He said the operation will put more than 2,200 vehicles, 48 helicopters, 33 fixed wing aircraft and 35 patrol ships to the task of catching and deterring smugglers.

Along with the state and federal law-enforcement agencies, others in the operation include the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Texas Civil Air Patrol, the Texas Cattleman’s Association, the Railroad Police, the U.S. Postal Service and University of Texas Center for Space Research.

[snip]

News

The Houston Chronicle ran a story yesterday that asks the question: is the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce losing its focus?

But since August 2003, when President and Chief Executive Officer Richard Torres stepped down after nearly seven years at the helm, three successors have come and gone.

The most recent chamber head left in September. As the search for a replacement continues, the chamber increasingly is challenged by an upstart organization that has some of the chamber’s own members fearing it has lost sight of its mission.

Membership has stood at around 1,200 for at least the past decade.

The chamber bills itself as the “premier resource for and about the Hispanic business community.” But according to the U.S. Census, Harris County has 62,000 Hispanic-owned businesses.

So, if the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce isn’t serving the other 60,000+ business, who is?

Some of these enterprises are opting to join an alternate chamber with a notably Spanish name, Cámara de Empresarios Latinos de Houston, founded just 12 years ago.

It conducts its affairs in the immigrant-friendly language and may be more grounded in the Hispanic business community, circa 2007.

Since I’m not a member of either, I can’t really say if anything in the article is on target (about which organization is serving Hispanic businesses better). I am, however, glad that there are options.

News

UTEP’s degrees don’t add up
Formula misses bigger picture at predominantly Hispanic school
– reported by the Houston Chronicle

[snip]

Less than 30 percent of UTEP undergraduates complete their coursework in six years. The graduation rate is among the lowest in the nation, drawing the ire of state lawmakers who look closely at the numbers when allocating money.

But how relevant is the “graduation rate” for a university where 54 percent of students receive need-based financial aid and many work jobs on the side? Isn’t earning a degree enough, especially in a state that needs more Hispanic graduates?

How should colleges and universities measure success?

Those are the kinds of questions that have stumped higher education, state and federal officials. U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently called for universities to report how well their students learn, and Gov. Rick Perry has floated the idea of an exit exam for college students.

For now, lawmakers place great weight on a university’s ability to keep and graduate its freshmen within six years. With limited resources, they want students to complete their coursework on time rather than taking space at crowded campuses.

[snip]

The formula may work for ivy-covered universities, such as Princeton, where many students come from wealth and the best high schools. They are on an “express train” to graduation in four years, while many at UTEP ride a “commuter train” that makes many stops, with students getting on and off at different times and for various, but mostly financial, reasons, Natalicio said.

[snip]

Natalicio would prefer to focus on the total number of undergraduate degrees awarded each year. UTEP conferred 2,106 bachelor’s degrees last year, up from 1,715 five years ago. The increase outpaces enrollment growth over the same period.

What’s more, UTEP graduated more Latinos than all but two universities nationwide last year, according to Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education magazine. The university also produces more Hispanic engineers than any institution.

[snip]

She is hardly unique at UTEP, which draws 82 percent of its 19,842 students from El Paso County, one of the state’s poorest areas. More than a quarter of the county’s 720,000 residents live in poverty, only two-thirds of adults graduated from high school and three-quarters of residents speak a language other than English at home.

Ten percent of the university’s students live across the Rio Grande in Juarez, Mexico. And while many people in this border region believe higher education is the ticket to a better life, few know how to obtain it.

Cash flow is a real problem for many students, and too many are averse to taking loans, so they may leave school for semesters at a time to work or take fewer classes because the textbooks are too expensive, campus officials said.

UTEP’s students graduate with the lowest average indebtedness among the country’s public research institutions, according to the Institute for College Access and Success’s most recent data. In response, the university is trying to educate students and their families about the long-term advantage of borrowing over taking more time to graduate.

[snip]

News

In what I consider a baffling move, Friendswood City Councilman Chris Peden is pursuing a proposal that attempts to institute an official language (English) for official city business.

As reported by the Houston Chronicle:

Friendswood City Councilman Chris Peden intends to pursue a proposal that would let voters decide whether English should be the city’s official language.

Peden said he plans to ask City Council in February to approve having the measure go before voters as a potential amendment to the city charter during the May 12 election.

If City Council approves Peden’s request, the proposal would be placed on the ballot.

On Jan. 15, the city’s charter review committee presented 16 potential amendments to City Council, none of which related to making English the city’s official language.

Mayor David Smith said he expects City Council to discuss in February the charter amendments that will be presented to voters.

Smith and councilmembers Laura Ewing and Mel Measeles oppose Peden’s proposal, which states that City Council and city employees shall conduct official city business in English. The proposal, however, does not prevent them from using another language when doing so.

[snip]

The proposal says that every person in Friendswood is entitled to be able to communicate with City Council or city employees in English, to receive information from or contribute information to city employees in English, and to be notified of official orders in English.

“This says that 100 percent of the business of the city of Friendswood, the municipal government of Friendswood, will be done in English,” Peden said. “If it needs to be done in another language for any purpose that the council or administration deems necessary, it will be printed in that additional language, but we will never do anything in let’s just say Spanish that we haven’t already done in English.”

Additionally, the proposal says it is not to be used to discriminate against or restrict the rights of any person, or to discourage or prevent the use of languages other than English in any nonofficial capacity.

[snip]

I didn’t learn to speak Spanish until I was ten. My parents wanted me to be bilingual, and so I was educated in Spanish. I speak, read and write in both English and Spanish. I am bilingual.

Though my mother was born in Mexico, she moved to the US when she was three. Her Spanish is laughable. She only learned when she married my Dad.

My Father was a migrant worker when he was a kid. To the day he died he spoke with a heavy accent and there were words he just never was able to pronounce correctly. But he built a business, a successful business, and he never let language be a stumbling block.

No one in my immediate family would be affected by this… but I don’t understand this proposal. It makes no sense to me.

News

The Houston Chronicle reports that “A train engine crashed into a bus loaded with contract workers at Shell Oil Co.’s Deer Park plant today, sending 29 people to area hospitals with unspecified injuries, officials said.”

Where was the bus going? “The workers on the bus — just a few dozen of the 3,000 contract workers Shell officials said are involved in maintenance and updating work at the huge plant — were being transported to workplaces from satellite parking areas when the crash occurred, Oberton said.”

The good news is that the “accident did not cause any releases of chemicals or oil products.”

News

Book Diva says she spends too much money on books. I know what she means. I’ve put myself on a money diet this year. As part of preparing for that I tracked every cent I spent for two months. I was shocked by how much I actually spend on books. And into the first month in my money diet, I’ve already exceeded my book budget by 50%. I anticipate that this is going to be one of the problems in my budgeting goals this year.

The other problem is eating out. I’ve exceeded my monthly budget by 100%… and the month’s not over yet. For those of you paying attention, that means I’ve spent twice as much on this as I intended. Now Boston Gal points me to an article in US News that, for Americans, eating out is the thing they splurge on most.

Well, at least I have company.

Finances, News