Finding Your Perfect ADR Blog Name

In Choosing a Perfect Blog Name, Performancing.com’s Chris Garrett suggested these six criteria:

1. Readable
2. Pronounceable
3. Spellable
4. Memorable
5. Concise
6. Unique

To which I’d add, though not as concisely as Chris,

7. Conveys Blog’s Purpose
[Read more]

Is your wi-fi safe from wardriving?

Recently, I found myself with a layover between mediation clients whom I was serving at their sites. I had about an hour and a whole lot of office admin work piling up, so I bought myself a cup of coffee, parked my car in downtown Keene, NH, and opened up my laptop. I was happily making use of this downtime when my computer made that little sound it makes when a new email has been delivered. Uh oh, I thought, I’m on someone else’s unprotected wireless network. I had forgotten to disable my computer’s internal network card.

My computer automatically searches for available networks when I power up unless I tell it not to. I looked at all the office buildings around me. Who’s network am I on, I wondered, and why haven’t they protected it in the midddle of downtown Keene? My very next thought was, I’ve got to get off of it now. I was simultaneously thinking about a recent news item on wardriving and moving my fingers to turn off my wireless device when a police car pulled up in front of me. I positively froze. I’m sure my mouth must have been hanging open in surprise. All I could think was, Whoa, they’re getting good here in Keene. And how am I going to explain that it was an innocent accident?

It was a meter maid and she couldn’t have cared less about me. I sat in my car and laughed hysterically. The woman who pulled up in the parking space next to mine looked at me as though she was considering a call to the local hospital.

If you have a wireless (or wi-fi) network in your home or office and you don’t know what wardriving is, I urge you to educate yourself now. Then take a look at these sites for advice about how to protect your network and the computers on it from someone pulling up on a street near you and helping themselves to your hard drive contents:

Complete Guide to Wi-fi Security
Boost Your Wi-fi Security

Choosing a Name for Your ADR Blog

The name of your blog may or may not be identical to your business name. Let’s take a look at the decision from several perspectives. First up is the question of keeping your blog and static site separate or converting your entire site to a blog platform.

Static Website and Blog Linked But Separate

If you have decided to maintain a static site for your business and have a blog that’s linked to it, then differentiating the main site from the blog may be important so that you don’t inadvertently confuse your visitors. You have, essentially, three choices:

• Your blog and your static site share the same title, which may be the same as your business name (or not—more on this later)
• Your blog’s title is the same as your static site with “Blog” at the end
• Your blog’s title is different but associated with your static site’s name

[Read more]

Taming Your Inbox Spam with Help from Lifehacker

Too much spam in your inbox? Emails you’ve sent getting caught too frequently in your receivers’ spam filters?

Lifehacker has a good list of short articles to the rescue: Email Roundup: The Anti-Spam Edition.

Making Mediation Your Day Job™ Part 6: Getting Started with an ADR Blog

If you’ve decided that blogging should be part of your marketing strategy, then this chapter’s for you. Before diving in, I want to say a bit more about what this section of the blook will and won’t include.

There’s a wealth of top-notch, excellent writing and guidance on marketing and blogging from professionals outside the ADR field. Some of them are big names familiar to many, and some of them are quieter pros simply doing excellent work and making it available in a variety of forms for consumers like you and me. You should read and listen to their work because they deserve the credit for their ideas and hard work. I do them, you and me a disservice if I simply try to adapt those good works for my own use here.

In that spirit, the final print version of this book will be accompanied by my insider’s guide to the best consultants, coaches, books and blogs for depth of knowledge. I’ll also offer [Read more]

Two More ADR Online Marketing Tools

In Part 6 I’ll offer you the steps I recommend for creating any new web presence for yourself, whether it’s a site that offers writing, audio, video or a little bit of everything. I’ll walk you through the basic steps to start a blog, from soup to nuts.

In the meantime, here are a few features and strategies you can use on your site and elsewhere to create buzz and dialogue with your target market. [Read more]

A Happy Mediator Thanksgiving

I’m taking next week away from the wired world and want to leave you with warm Thanksgiving wishes.

I’m thankful for your readership, your feedback, your support and your challenges. I’m thankful for the opportunity to try and do some good in the world. We mediators are lucky, lucky people.

I’m thankful for my mediation faculty colleagues at Woodbury College. They’re some of my most treasured friends and they keep me on my toes with their bright minds, compassion, humor and high expectations. And they send me funny stories, like this one that arrived in my inbox just a few minutes ago: [Read more]

What the Heck Is RSS?

Back in February 2006 I linked you to a quick little overview of RSS. Let’s slow down and take a longer look now. Even more importantly, let’s consider why you should even care.

Think for a moment about a syndicated columnist whose work appears in your daily paper. The columnist may well live in another state or country, from where they write their daily or weekly offering. When they write a column, you don’t have to do anything special to receive it…if you already subscribe to a newspaper that runs that column, you get it automatically as part of your daily reading experience. And you only see it when you’re good and ready to open the paper and read. It’s just there waiting for you.

RSS, also known as Really Simple Syndication, accomplishes the same thing via the Internet. [Read more]

I’m Ready to Blog…Where Do I Begin?

Whoa, Nelly! (But only for a brief moment.)

If you don’t yet read many blogs, watch vlogs or listen to podcasts, I recommend you start making these regular parts of your business development habits while you’re in the process of getting your own blog, vlog or podcast underway.

Finding and reading blogs will help give you a sense of how they work, how different businesses use them, the update frequency and what kinds of topics people blog about in the business world. This is true for podcasts and vlogs as well. [Read more]

ADR Blog Content That’s Compelling to Your Market

Mediators are smart, creative and savvy, so you’ll have little difficulty generating content for your blog (or podcast or vlog) once you get your feet under you. The key question is less “What should go on a blog” than, “Will my target audience find this useful and compelling?”

If you’ve already created material that’s been successful for other uses, then you’ll like the idea of “re-purposing” (yes, it’s a word now), or putting content to use in new ways. For instance, you can re-purpose articles or audio originally created for these uses: [Read more]

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