Gettin' back

It's been a while since I've written at least weekly on this, but I am getting back.

Mainly because I have to write more on my Romanian blog.
Anyway, I'm getting back on writing on this blog, so there will be 3 main categories with information I like to share:

Web Development
General information, mostly PHP, web frameworks like CakePHP and Zend Framework, issues I face, tutorials  

eCommerce
Technical articles about platforms like osCommerce,  Magento, Prestashop.

ERP Consultancy
Lately I've been involved in some projects regarding the process of choosing and ERP, implementing an ERP system, business analysis and so on. So I will share this with you.

I will also post personal stuff, so please bear me.
Any feedback is welcome.

5 reasons for delaying a blog post

I sometimes ignore the fact that blogging means communication. It's a way to expose your thoughts, things you've achieved - brag :), narrate or just post articles...  
Interact with your 2 visitors (one of them got there by mistake mistyping a keyword while searching on Google). On my business related blog that's in Romanian (this supposed to be a personal blog and I hope it makes sense at least in Engrish) I have about a dozen drafts, and for some of them I've spent like hours composing/processing images for tutorials, criticism, sharing visions about how things should be, complaining about stuff (time, software, weather, mood, whatever)... So, you take a break and start to write a blog post... Then you realize that is gonna take you a lot more than 11 minutes to write it so you postpone it... If you don't publish it on the same day, you ain't gonna publish it...  

1. Estimate too less time to write a blog post  

2. You get interrupted Interruption leads to postponing / saving as a draft which will seat there for a long time.. There are some periods of time when you are overwhelmed with your daily tasks, projects, work and so on, so you don't take 5 minutes off to say how you feel... Looking back at some of my blog posts I remember how things were than; so that blog post is like a window to past.  

3. Overwhelmed with things to do, ignore blog posting Have you ever taken a picture with your phone/camera and said: "This is for my blog..." and never actually publish it; things happened: you don't have an usb cable at-hand, transferred the pictures to another computer. Time passes and you never post that on your blog... If it's important to you, then do it asap. So 4 is:  

4. Delayed action I don't have anything interesting to say... Well, there are no bloggers that write 100% high quality articles... And second, who cares? Your public/audience? It's a blog and the expect from you to say things. So I would say that this is:  


5. Lack of interest There are many other reasons that can be similar to the ones above, but for me these are the main reasons for not writing a blog post. In the last 3 months I had a really hard time... Overwhelmed with work, got sick couple of times, had to go to Copenhagen for a week and delayed some projects, now I somehow back on a rescheduled plan... But I am tired and so I am not as productive as I can be and my moral isn't so great. It's a good thing I have found my limits, but not very happy about finding them in the way I did... So, this years goes towards and end and 2008 is coming up fast... Hopefully what I've achieved in the last months will count for a 2007 balance, for me and my company. Will get back on that later...

Marketing on blogs

A Romanian online gift shop launched 2 days ago a campaign named “Blog this!” The main idea is to write an article on your blog which follows the rules: - the article must contain a link to Christmas Gifts category - the article must not look like and advertisement, but cannot be strongly negative nor defaming - after you publish the article send them an email with the link - the publisher must have at least 10 articles in his blog It’s a win-win situation. The problem is that one side wins more, other side less, exponentially less… This type of advertising can be included in the broadly defined guerrilla marketing, with some viral parts, also similar with a stealth campaign, buzz marketing & co (use of social networking – blogs, the prize – I doubt the actually paid for the ads they are offering, maybe it’s a joint-venture campaign )… The goal is obvious: achieve a better visibility for a category, create a buzz, get inboud links (from >100 blogs, with the condition to be indexed by google), increase number of visitors on the website, basicly promote the store using "word-of-mouth" and buzz. The effect: - in 2 days they got 27 winners ( and all the good or bad content and inbound links) - some good “Gossip” and buzz from Radu Ionescu, Zoso, Tudor Mateescu, Blogoree Blog and others It is nice to analyze the effect of the campaign in January 2007, maybe they will publish some figures… or not. At leat check google to see how many inbound links they got and from where, and position in google for some keywords (Christmas gifts :D ), number of visitors, referrals. What can I say more? it’s a campaign, and from the figures point of view I believe it is a profitable one. Moral and profit are not in the same league.