Daniel Dessinger

Month: August 2010

  • Turn That Blogging Hiatus Into a Contest!

    I hate to break it to you, but you look like I need a break. 🙂

    If the idea of a break from blogging doesn’t resonate with you at the core of your being, you don’t have a pulse. Especially if you’ve been doing this full-time for more than a couple years.

    Feeling a little claustrophobic? Chained to your blog? Believe it or not, you CAN get away. We all need a break from the norm. Even bloggers deserve vacations, sabbaticals, and moments of solitude. But it takes too much extra work to have posts ready to cover a vacation!

    So let your readers write for you. Why should you have to work extra hard before your time off just so you can be too tired to enjoy it?

    Turn that Sabbatical into a Contest!

    We’re experimenting with this idea right now on my wife’s blog – Mommypotamus.com. We’re expecting baby #2 any day now and my wife doesn’t want to lose steam during that first tiresome month with our new baby. She also doesn’t want to scramble to write extra posts beforehand… that’s not relaxing! So we’re doing a contest. We’re putting her readers in charge of the content during that first month and giving a pretty major prize to the winner.

    Getting to Know the Readers

    My wife blogs on many overlapping niche topics – real food, organic lifestyle, attachment parenting, full-term breastfeeding, family vision and purpose, etc. And since the majority of her readers are mommy bloggers, we know for a fact that many of them are still blogging on no-cost solutions like Blogspot, WordPress.com, and Typepad. These women are passionate about their families and lifestyle choices, and some of them are burgeoning small business owners. But with almost no startup funds, it’s tough to justify making the switch to a self-owned domain and content management system.

    Since I have set up nearly 30 different blogs on the self-hosted version of WordPress, we’ve taken my talents and offered them up to the guest blogger who gets the most comments. Whoever wins this guest blogger contest will receive a free domain registration, free year of hosting, import of all content from current blog platform to self-hosted WordPress, and a premium theme. Winning this contest will take one blogger from the rank and file of amateur bloggers into a force to be reckoned with.

    The Premise of the Contest

    Her readers are encouraged to submit a guest post along similar themes to the typical daily content on Mommypotamus.com. The winner of the contest will be determined by the most unique commentors on a guest post during my wife’s time off. This motivates each contributor to tell their friends and family and followers in hopes of winning the prize.

    There are so many benefits to this approach that I can only thank God for the idea.

    Benefits of Guest Blogging Contests

    1. Free content – each person who enters the contest writes and submits one blog post. Heather doesn’t have to write anything if she doesn’t want to after the baby is born. I can edit and format the posts for her and take the blogging burden off her shoulders.
    2. Spreading the word – each guest blogger will send their friends, families, and neighbors to the site to read their post and leave a comment. More people will become aware of the site.
    3. Comments leads to return visits – when you visit a blog for the first time and you see 20 or more comments on several of the most recent posts, you get the point that this blog is somewhat popular. If other people find it useful, you might too. So you make the mental association that this is probably worth revisiting sometime later.
    4. Engaging the community – you might think that the regulars would check out if there’s an extended hiatus from the blog owner. In this case, I think we’ll find that readers visit more often, to check out the competition’s posts and to keep a tally on blog comment totals. They’ll need to know if there’s a reason to find more friends to comment if they start losing to someone else.
    5. Promote the community – you build loyal relationships when you give your readers a voice and then promote their blogs at the same time. Each guest blogger will get a bio and link to their current blog on the post.
    6. Builds business exposure – I don’t actively promote my blog consulting and building services. But this contest will make everyone who enters or considers entering aware of what I do and what it can turn their current blog into. Whether anyone entering this contest ever requests my services or not doesn’t really matter. Each of them knows potentially dozens of OTHER people who they might refer to me. And this is purely an additional benefit. I couldn’t care less if this generates revenue or not. It’s really all about getting guest posts for my wife and making it fun.
    7. It’s just plain fun – As I just mentioned, there’s nothing better to unite a community than to get everyone in on fun activities. A little sense of competition with the underlying motivation of helping out a new mommy is a winning combo! Who wouldn’t want to help out a woman with an newborn and gain some exposure at the same time?

    The Challenge: Too Few or Too Many

    One of my concerns was that we wouldn’t get enough submissions. If I give my precious time away to set up a blog for someone and my wife only benefits one week off, I’ll be disappointed. I want all sides to win on this one. But in the same vein, if we were to somehow get 30, 40, or 50 submissions, we’d have ourselves another quandry. I don’t want the contest to drag on forever, and I don’t want to turn anyone away.

    Keep it Simple

    I think we’ll limit the contest to the first X number of entries. Then we’ll cut it off. If our goal is 20 posts, I might accept 30 just in case 10 are really bad or off topic. Everyone will lose steam if the contest lasts longer than a month and my wife will forget how to blog if it turned into a two month hiatus. Okay, probably not. But you get the point.

    I’ll report back in a week or two with an update on the contest.

  • Reclamation Projects Push Construction Into Art

    I love what companies like Barnwood Inc. are doing with old building materials. Taking aged wood from dilapidated barns, fences, and other structures and transforming it into rich, gorgeous custom furniture and housing is such a noble enterprise. Waste not, want not.

    Can’t you feel a deep appreciation for taking something with history and repurposing it into something both stunning and useful? Reminds me of the drive I used to make to my grandparents’ house in Tulsa. Along the way, we’d see old farm structures rotting and tilting to one side. Obviously no one had used these buildings for decades, and it made me sad to know that so much history is going to rot.

    While each child or grandchild might not be able to fix up the historical family barn and put it to good use, who wouldn’t want a custom bedroom set or dining room table made from the wood their great grandparents trusted to keep their livelihood safe and warm?

    And while these may be high dollar items, I won’t begrudge the affluent a chance to do their part and recycle, rather than chopping down more trees when existing lumber will suffice.

  • Today is “Scrape Your Heart off the Floor With a Spatchula Day”

    I fought myself to write this today. Lately I’ve found myself sharing less and less online. It could be discretion. Or it could be isolation. But I’m here to share because I think I should.

    My family is heartbroken right now. We were looking at closing on our house a week or two after the baby will be born. And that seemed to fit just fine. We knew there would be no more showings or last minute frantic cleanings. It was time to break out the baby stuff and let Heather do her best to nest with whatever time remains.

    And then it all fell apart.

    I’m going through that whole second guessing phase. Did I come on too strong? Was I a fool to share personal information? Was it worth taking a stand to lose this contract? To my surprise, the buyer opted out of the contract with us via text message. We’d just had a discussion the day before about the home inspection report. She wanted us to do a series of things that could cost more than a $1,000. I told her we were taking a loss on the house and she was getting a bargain price on the home, and she should expect to handle any of these minor repairs herself. After all, we signed the contract after stating we were selling AS IS.

    She went home to think about it. I expected her to call me back and try to get me to agree to a little more. But she didn’t. Instead, she opted out. And left us hanging. And now the baby’s coming. And the house isn’t sold. And we’re not moving. And we’re stuck in a house that was more than adequate for newlyweds but not so great for a family of five and two cats.

    My wife is very generously not blaming me at this point. She says she’s proud of the way I handled it. I appreciate that. Really. I want her trust in me to continue growing. But I can’t get beyond the fact that we could be on schedule right now if I had agreed.

    This is the point where you need some clarification. When you find yourself in our situation, there are at least three different approaches you can take to sell your home:

    1. Determine how much you want to make off the house, set your asking price and negotiations creatively, and hold out for the buyer who gives what you want.
    2. Give the prospective buyer anything it takes to get the deal done. State your final offers, but in the end, if you can bridge the gap of difference, do it to get this over with.
    3. Negotiate both buyer and seller into a win/win situation, where nobody takes a hard hit. Insist on a respectful buyer.

    What you choose will be based largely on how desperate you are to sell. If you simply cannot imagine living in your home for another three months, you’re more likely to give away the farm. If you’re selling based on financial principle, you’ll look for a respectful buyer. If you’re a tool, you won’t negotiate at all and you’ll hold out until the end of the age.

    We fit into the first category. My wife and mother-in-law hand prepare every aspect of every meal we eat. It’s their choice and their insistence. Everything possible is organic and local. Grains are soaked overnight. Kefir is “percolating” on the counter. And sliced fruits or nuts are dehydrating for snacks. It’s the most active home kitchen I’ve ever seen. And this kitchen simply doesn’t meet our needs.

    I could go on and on about how there’s no room for a rocking chair / glider unless I put my home office desk in storage… How we have to keep a bed in the spare bedroom for mommy and daddy time… How my daughter has nowhere to pull out her toys without blocking the only walkway through the living room. It’s frustrating. We bought our house in 2003, and it suited our needs just fine for the next four years.

    Then our daughter was born. That beautiful, amazing little girl. With new baby furniture slung around the house, we were cramped, but we made it work.

    Then my mother-in-law moved in. It was supposed to be for a short time. We were going to look for a bigger house on some land together. She sold her house so we’d be prepared to buy with a down payment when the time came. But the time hasn’t come. We still haven’t found a house. A year later, we don’t have any solid leads.

    As soon as this house sells, we are prepared to move into her rent house, which is significantly larger than my home with a much larger kitchen. It’s a move that would allow us to liquify assets so that when the right house does appear, there’s no losing it for lack of selling our home.

    That’s where we are. Not sure if you needed this much detail. Nonetheless, here it is.

    I’m still in shock. I am now 2 for 2 when it comes to serious life complications occurring right before the birth of a child. Coincidence?

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