Some Social Media Housekeeping Around The Explorer

I love that you come here and read what I have to say. I’m always humbled at the number of comments, traffic, etc. For some, my site is a gnat on the windshield. But I know there are others who would love to have a blog that has the same amount of visitors, visibility, etc.

I’m making a couple of changes that you’ll notice soon. I’ve got to clean up that side bar and get rid of the NASCAR approach to affiliate ads that I’ve slowly let leak in. If you’re a regular reader, you know I don’t accept advertising from companies or tools I don’t fully endorse, use or support. What I recommend to you is qualified and unbiased. If I don’t sell a single thing and profit exactly zero, I still endorse great products like ScribeSEO and the Social Media Policies Toolkit. If I’m able to do so and also get an affiliate fee in return, thank you for the consideration.

But that mess has got to go. Sorry for the clutter.

Another change you may not notice is that I’m adjusting my PR pitch policy. I simply don’t have enough time to handle all the pitches. I can’t give them my full attention, so I don’t want to keep anyone hanging on. The key changes are:

• I’m not going to respond to everything anymore.
• I’ll only consider pitches that are one paragraph or less.
• With an average of 10 relevant pitches per week but only three standard days of publication, plus other things I want to write about, there’s not much chance you’ll get covered anyway. Don’t expect a post. Make that one paragraph really good.

Please know that I want to hear about your tools, platforms and the like. If they really are good and compelling, and you’ve kept the pitch brief, I may just Tweet you up or even follow up to learn more and blog it. I also have a pretty active newsletter, so do reach out if it’s relevant. But I just can’t tame my inbox and respond to the volume the way I have in the past.

I’m also going to be less active in responding to every comment. I’ll still do a good job of answering questions and the like, but have to budget my time to do so once a day rather than continuously. Clients pay my bills. I can’t camp out on comments all the time. I’m not ignoring you, but need to control the commitment a bit.

And you may also notice a decrease in posts over the next couple of months. I’m working on launching something very important for the non-social media world and want to devote a good deal of attention to it. I’m not going away, in fact will back in full force once this launch happens, but I’ll probably be on a one to two posts per week schedule for a while.

Thank you for reading SME. I’m honored you do.

IMAGE: Clock by Cloki on Shutterstock.com