Postcards from the Funny Farm

Owners do “walk-throughs” starting at the storefront. Then, they adjust and repair things accordingly. I have always seen a parallel in a storefront to the self.

When you enter a store, hopefully there is an owner who thinks about you, the customer. If you need something, he’ll guide you to that place. If you have a complaint, or if someone treats you unfairly, he’ll step in to make it right by you. Owners accept everything.

When I was an area coach for Pizza Hut, I used to love to see my managers out in front of the store picking up slips of trash and sweeping. It showed ownership. We as ordinary people seeking self-improvement need to step back and check our own storefront, which is “the self.”

Here are some points you might find on that sort of checklist:

Appearance: A big one. How do I look? The way we present ourselves to the world affects the way we are received. Success isn’t all luck as many failures would have us believe.

Friendliness: Do I look people in the eye? Do I show concern for their needs? Am I interested? Being friendly with the world outside the storefront develops our reputation person by person and often brings in to us better opportunities. Owners commit themselves to listening then finding solutions.

Service: Was I able to help people around me today? Did I steer people in the right direction? Did I engage in conversation that was helpful?

Relevance: Was I relevant? Have I striven to become effective in relevant areas of my work, my friends, my family?

If I am a storefront then how do I look? If I am the store, how am I inside and more importantly, how would others rate me? Ultimately we should mostly strive to pass our own rating since the crowd can be fickle. Still, let us never forget that every person’s view of us is, at varying levels, important.

Now, step back and look at yourself: If only for this day, own the storefront, the world will notice.

This is a continuation of my prior article on categories. It seems I’ve gathered more information on tags and I feel it would be helpful to my readers’ seo if I shared it. We are moving toward a tagging net generation more and more it seems. Wordpress now has internal tagging and I read about it being on other platforms. So what is the difference between tags and categries? The simple answer is: tags are a lot of work!

As a Problogger article points out: Categories are linear filing of your blog posts and tags are “granular.” This means your posts have better seo if you category and tag them as opposed to just categorizing them.

If you look at human communication from a distance you hear dissonant terms pop up within any given conversation. Someone may be talking about transportation and throw in Osama bin Laden as a related anecdote. Someone searching for a post on him might not reach that article in a transportation category unless it was tagged. I hope that made sense.

Since Wordpress 2.3 came out I have started the often tedious process of tagging all my old posts (well, the most popular ones anyway). The simple tagging plugin as well as the advanced tagging plugin are a big help for this since they generate clickable suggestions. From what I can gather, Google will crawl up to 50 tags without flagging. This means you shouldn’t worry about having too many tags. I would be concerned #1 in the tags’ relevance to the content. After that I would look for the most common tags both internally and externally as suggested by the plugins. Do you spend time tagging your posts?