Another Saturday, and with NFL training camps open; we are getting down to just eight to ten regular season Saturday’s left. After this weekend, we’ve got just two full months of the baseball season. And that’s sad.
But there’s still time to enjoy and soak it in. And that’s exactly what we’ll do. And exactly why this post is here each week.
Enjoy your Saturday everyone. Thank you for your continued support of Diamond Hoggers.
Am I a broken record yet about what a huge fan of Giveback Homes I am?I can’t speak highly enough of Blake and Caroline at Giveback Homes. I’ll keep beating the drum…
This week, they announced a new partnership with ReferralExchange:
current Giveback Homes member agents will receive a ReferralExchange submit license. ReferralExchange will also donate $100 for every closed agent-to-agent referral, up to $20,000. The goal is to raise enough money to host the build day in Sacramento and build 3 houses internationally. ReferralExchange will also sponsor one-year Giveback Homes memberships for a number of their top performing agents. Memberships provide Giveback Homes members with marketing services, branding, and an easy avenue to funnel donations directly to build projects around the world and in their local communities.
I was a fan of ReferralExchange before, now even more so. Job well done Lindsay, Myron, Scott, and team for partnering with an amazing organization working on bringing giving back into our industry in a big way.
PS: Use the discount code “geekestate” for $20 off your monthly membership to Giveback Homes. What a great deal, right? Go sign up.
The post Giveback Homes + ReferralExchange = A Lot of Good Vibes appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.
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Jsquad34’s first win of the year must be celebrated. It’s just been the week from Hell and I’m just now getting over a case of strep I got from my daughter which carried my fever to 103+. That said, I correctly predicted a few things about this past week’s gentleman’s game. Myself last (or first), and DStars45 in the one or two spot. But I didn’t correctly predict the JSquad win!
Your Gentleman’s game MVP is Lance McCullers. Goldy Bear is the turd of the week. Yearly Standings and winning lineup below.
Yearly Standings:
DStars45 – 62 points
t3bird04 – 59 points
Jsquad34 – 48 points
Diamondhoggers – 45 points
Swindaman3 – 39 points
And a much lengthier write-up coming next week!
You must publish thrilling content constantly to grow your blog. It requires interesting, trendy and intelligent ideas. So, how does one can come up with post ideas which people enjoy and want to share?
Speaking from my own experience, we are not always passionate. Sometimes passion runs low. You can not afford to sit and wait for inspiration to strike.
Here I’m going to share clever strategies on finding new content ideas for your blog. Use these tips to encourage new brain spark today and find fresh ideas for your blog. You will never get out of ideas again.
Google indexes millions of articles every day and it’s a safe bet that at least few of them have information regarding your business. You need to be aware of the latest happenings within your field.
Sign up for Google Alerts which allows you to add and remove alert topics anytime based on your interests.
Just add keywords relevant to your blogging goals and you’ll set updates on your email when this keyword is mentioned somewhere on the web. You might not come across these articles on your own.
For example, you may write about ‘social media marketing’, so Google Alert will notify you about news and trends in this niche every day:
Google Alerts deliver great content ideas to spark your creativity. Bedsides, this tool also can be used to find out when someone mention your name, your brand or blog around the web.
I’d like to share one more great tool from Google called Google Trends. Here you can search for any topic and figure out volume it’s receiving. To make results more targeted you can use country search or specific region search.
Keyhole is one more interesting service which works just like Google Alerts, but for social media sites. It tracks hashtags across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
You can insert a keyword and observe the topic in real time. This tool also can be used to monitor mentions of your brand on social media.
I don’t mean to steal other people’s content. Stealing is not cool.
However, you can learn a lot from seeing what other bloggers from your niche publish and create your own unique posts on this base.
I really like Ahrefs for it which is a backlink analysis tool for SEO professionals. It has really simply intuitive dashboard with tons of various data. You can insert any site’s name and get a lot of useful information, for example, here I’m going to analyse onextrapixel. Just add a site’s name and press Enter.
You can analyse any website using Site Explorer tool which has three awesome reports: best by links, best by shares and top pages by organic search. So click Site Explorer and then Best by shares.
This tab will show you Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, Pinterest shares and likes the posts have and total number of likes. So, now you know what content resonate with people. You can use the same post ideas for your own blog to gain likes and shares.
However, usually the content people like and share is temporary popular. You can find out which content is Best by links. Such kind of content attract links, - the more backlinks you have the more chances to appear on Google’s top.
Unlike ‘Best by shares’ content which will bring you traffic just a certain period of time, this type of posts will bring traffic from search engines all the time.
Also, there is one more useful tab you can use to find new content ideas - it’s Top Pages. This tab shows which pages bring the most traffic from Google. The tool will tell you top keyword, traffic volume and position in Google of a particular post.
You can also expand each post to see more details, such as a list of keywords bringing traffic, position, volume and results.
So, you can choose a few blogs from your niche, find out which pages and posts bring a lot of traffic and which keywords are used there, and then write some similar posts on your blog.
Ahrefs is a paid tool, but they have 2-weeks free trial which is quite enough to create a posts plan for a few months ahead.
BuzzSumo app does almost the same. Using a domain name, it can tell you which content is the most shared on social media and which content have the most number of backlinks. This is an awesome technique to create a list of blog topics which people are already interested in.
There are several Q&A websites which you can use to find questions from your target audience: it’s Quora and Yahoo Answers. These sites contain questions and answers with facts, opinions and interesting stories from people all over the globe.
Just create your profile, choose your niche and read through popular questions and answers. The nature of both sites means that they are useful for beginners and PROs.
The questions and answers can be voted by users, so you can quickly find the Best Questions of Quora. You can read about specific topics, brands or businesses there.
The number of followers in open questions shows which topic is hot and required an answer in your next blog post.
If you know your target audience, you most probably know where they hang online all the time. You can find out who are their influencers, who they follow on social media, what forums and communities they are involved in.
Twitter hardly needs an introduction. Twitter lists current trends on their homepage and profile pages. It’s one of the best ways to find out political and cultural news, and define the mood of a whole nation.
You can check global trends or country trends, and write a list of blog post titles on a base of these trends.
Reddit is one more popular site where people are having heated debates on many topics day by day. People vote or upvote the topics, so just one look at Reddit’s homepage can give you a good idea of what is trending at the moment.
There is one quick trick on how to find subreddits relevant to your blog’s subject. For example, if your niche is ‘web design’, then the subreddit you need is /r/web_design.
You can search within this subreddit (mark limit my search to /r/web_design) for some topics people what to know more about, for example, search for ‘how do you’. This way you’ll find some new topics for your blog within your niche, and then you can even share this post in this subreddit.
There are more communities and social media sites, I’ve shared just a few tricks with you here to give you an insight.
Influence as the ability of a person to inspire action within a community is a powerful thing, that’s why to find new blog post ideas you need to know what influencers in your area write about.
In order to find influential writers, you can use ClearVoice.com. Just type a name of online writer, blog, site or topic and you’ll get a list of most influential authors and their posts. There is no need to sign up, just use your phone number and email address.
For example, let’s say you search for ‘content marketing’:
You’ll see the most prominent blogs, authors and topics to get inspiration from. It’s the quickest way to learn top names in any field.
One more tool I’d like to mention here is followerwonk by Moz.
With focus on Twitter exclusively, this free service provides a useful search engine for influencers in your niche along with tool for competitive comparisons.
An authority filter allows you to filter and sort influencers, and even save reports for future references. This is one more way to find influencers and figure out what they do and write.
As a blogger you need to develop a habit to take notes about almost everything interesting you see around the web. You can handwrite your ideas in a physical notebook or create an ideas file in Google Docs, or just a spreadsheet with a list of all blog ideas that come to your mind.
Keep this file in a place you can reach from anywhere, like Dropbox, Evernote or Trello boards. Do this each and every time you read some blog or a book, or just come up with an idea by chance.
Ideas for new blog posts can come and go in a flash, so make sure to capture them the way you like it. The simplest way to beat the writer’s block is a well-organized ideas doc. Take notes while you do your research using the methods described in this article and you’ll forget about creative block for good.
It’s quite easy to find new ideas for blog post. The difficult part is to organize them the way you can begin acting. I hope this articles gives you some ideas on where to start out.
Now get yourself to work:
Do you have any creative methods to find new content ideas? Please share with us in the comment section below. And don’t be shy to help us spread this post around the web with your likes and shares.
Sometime about now in mid-summer we begin asking ourselves, "Why do things seem to be out of control? I planned on organizing my photos, painting that cute dresser I picked up at the yard sale last fall, and waking up without an alarm clock on Fridays. None of it has happened!"
This scenario is all too common - and yet there is good news. It’s never too late to get and stay organized for the remainder of the summer.
People tend to get busy with outdoor activities and become distracted by vacations, plus household schedules and routines tend to be different than during the school year. The most common areas that seem to spiral out of control are:
Here are my tips for getting and staying organized through the summer.
We’re conditioned to create traditions and rituals. We buy new outdoor furniture and decorations for our backyard barbecue, and bring friends and family together for camping trips chock full of new-fangled gadgets and equipment. We have family reunions and summer vacations.
We’re used to buying, creating, and preparing for events - yet we don't really have a method or system to deal with the aftermath.
It may be time to say goodbye to the stuff we buy “on the fly,” like walkie talkies for playful banter on road trips, floaties for the swimming pool, collapsible picnic tables for the beach, croquet sets for the backyard, and rain ponchos for the fast-moving and sudden rainstorm.
I recommend two steps for handling summer clutter:
Often we feel more disorganized or confused about our perceived "free time" during the summer months. This can happen because we spend the first half of the year postponing projects until summer vacation.
Each year we stack the projects-in-waiting for summer, and each year we seem to forget that we would really rather enjoy some time off in nature, traveling, or getting together with friends.
If you want to reduce the pressure for yourself, release yourself from too many good intentions, like repainting the powder room; reading the stack of books you've collected; and that wishful photo-organizing project.
Instead, pick just one project and focus on it. By making one project the priority, you can do little bits of it from time to time. So, instead of putting off the project and feeling badly that it isn’t getting done, break your priority project down into doing one small step per day.
Want to paint that dresser? Allow yourself 13 "moments" to complete the project and never miss a bit of summer fun. Use this project breakdown to make any project fit in around your unpredictable summer schedule.
Painting a dresser purchased at a yard sale
Most of us realize instinctively that sleep is important.
"You know that babies and children need sleep to grow,” says Val Sgro, a professional organizer and author. “You know that an injured body heals itself faster with good sleep. You know that if you don't get enough sleep, you become sluggish and cranky, and you have trouble thinking straight. That old saying, ‘I'll sleep on it,’ comes from the realization that the solution to a problem often seems to reveal itself after a good night's sleep.
“Contrary to common belief, your brain does not rest when you sleep,” she continues. “It is often more active than when you're awake. It's busy - busy making sure it stays organized."
And therein lies the key to getting and staying organized in the summer months. Though our sleep routines will likely be off kilter, it’s worth asking the question, "How will I be able to get seven or eight hours of sleep tonight? How will I fit it in?"
Maybe you need to grab a mid-day nap or put yourself (not just the kids) to bed an hour earlier. Getting more sleep will help you make better decisions when you pack (and thus have fewer items to "buy on the fly" while traveling).
More sleep means being more alert driving on road trips; consuming less sugar or caffeine for a mid-day boost; and showing up with an overall better outlook for the day. And in the middle of summer travel or hosting guests who are visiting for a week, that couldn't be a more welcome benefit.
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If you’ve rented a storage unit, there’s a good reason for it. Maybe you’re in the process of moving house or renovating your home and need a safe place to store your belongings for the time being.
Perhaps you’re going to a different state or country for a few years and need a suitable storage option for your things in the meantime.
Then again, you may need extra storage space simply because your current home cannot accommodate all your stuff.
Whatever the reason, if you’re willing to pay for a storage unit, then the items you intend to put in it most certainly have high practical, monetary, or sentimental value and you don't want to lose them.
To make sure your stored belongings will remain in excellent condition, you need to pack them as safely and efficiently as possible.
Here are some practical packing tips to consider when packing for storage:
Once you have safely packed your items, you need to organize your storage unit in a systematic and practical manner. Your goal is to optimize the available space and have easy access to your belongings in case you need any of them while they're in storage.
To avoid headaches and troubles down the road, make sure you store your cherished possessions in a secure, well-kept, and climate-controlled storage facility.
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Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or position of Zillow.
