I hope we are all wrapping up another successful home inspection year.
I love this job, and my journey has been more successful than I could have hoped. Not as financially lucrative as I’d dreamed, but more successful.
I still don’t get as many calls a week as I could, but the free time that leaves allows me to enjoy family and friends and hobbies and more.
My Christmas shopping is done! Imagine that.
Anyways, I could have done better at the blogging this year. I was planning on setting a goal of weekly blogging in the New Year and figured, why not start now.
It’s been a while and I’m a little rusty.
I remember running some of my blog posts by this forum in years past and getting excellent tips to improve them, from typos to errors. The talent in this pool amazes me. The support is amazing.
Anyway. No pressure. If you are interested in a read:
Too long, too complicated with too much trade descriptions.
This was yet another case where a prospective buyer in St. Catharines, was happy to hear that the roof was newly installed. But as is commonly the case, the install had some issues that the new owner needed to be aware of to keep their eye on. No home is perfect and this is just another typical find. This rear addition roof has a very low slope to begin with and the framing was either poorly installed or has deteriorated to create a varying pitch. Snow and ice will likely cause water to back up underneath the shingles, which then may penetrate to the sheathing and framing elements below. Take a look at the next photo to see what we found in the space below these shingles.***
You get an A for writing such a long article but your sentence structure is odd in places.
Eg. No home is perfect and this is just another typical find.
Eg. the install had some issues that the new homeowner needed to be aware of to keep their eye on
Needs to be shorter, less trade talk, don’t refer to pitch as slope in one area and pitch in another.
I write often and I always edit as I’m working and right before publishing.
How many of you blog real often and can folks interact or leave comments. does it benefit the ratings on you whole site of just the page it is on then you links give folks the option to learn more or not. I had a blog but am considering putting one in my new site but was wondering if it is worth it or not. Regular search engine spiders find them while crawling your site or what?
The search engines love active blogs (it’s called “fresh content”), so the more you blog, and the more interaction you get, the more the search engines will love you.
During my four years (2008-2012) at ActiveRain, I learned a lot about blogging for the search engines, and it all works. Thus I post 1-3 blogs per day at my Photographic Art blog (http://russelrayphotos2.com) and, yes, the daily fresh content and interaction with 50-200 people per post keeps the search engines coming back within minutes of me posting something.
Additionally, I get a lot of views per day, so I added WordAds to my blog. Pays me enough each month to enjoy a few weekly margaritas…
You are brilliant and absolutely correct. I didn’t do much editing beyond correcting the underlined spelling mistakes as I went. I’ll attempt to be more concise in my next post.
Frank,
Good point. I’ll try to keep it more natural. Blogging like I speak gives me a pretty clear goal of what I can do better.
Bob,
Thanks for the tablespoon of sugar. It was pretty quick and easy to write because I enjoyed doing it. Editing it is far less fun
Michael,
Blogging is said to help with search engine ranking…and if you can really attract actual people to the content too… it is said to make a real difference.
Unfortunately, home inspection is just a tad less entertaining than what’s generally on offer around the internet. Blogging seems to be more for the search engines than for real people in this case. Their are times when one of my clients seems to have sifted through just about all my online content and were impressed. But I think most of my clients find me online, scan my website to make sure it looks credible and then call up to make an appointment. The average time spent on my website seems to be about two minutes per visit.
If you are struggling on your ranking for specific keywords, try writing a blog dedicated to them. It can’t hurt and it might help.
Russel,
Great story. Your photography website looks great. Your blog seems quite successful. I was thrilled to see you teach chess. My nephew called me a few weeks ago wanting to learn the game. We’ve been playing online at chess.com It’s a great site with great resources.
Here is a site I started when I was a contractor. I don’t have time to do much anymore but look at some of the blog articles I wrote. I won “Best contractor blog the first year I published this site.” http://www.remodelcrazy.com/
I used to have a huge profile at chess.com. At one time I had the expensive paid account and was playing 512 games concurrently. Then I had to pay some bills…
I used to play competitively along the Gulf Coast from 1969 to 1993 but could see that with my poor memory, I would never be a Magnus Carlsen, or even make any money playing chess. I sure enjoyed it though, although it did interfere with some of the jobs that actually paid my bills…LOL
I haven’t played competitively since April 1993 when I disappeared from Texas and, two weeks later, wound up in San Diego. Didn’t even start playing chess again until late 2007 when I discovered the new chess.com. The old one just sold chess stuff.
After I quit hanging around NACHI in July 2008, trying to help home inspectors, with their marketing, I resorted to chess to take up all that spare time I had. Finally ended that in January 2012 when I launched my Russel Ray Photos WordPress blog.
Russel likes humor and my post was fun to write. We both get something from sharing.
Russel, I was an avid chess player in my youth and when I was 16 I beat the president of the University of Connecticut chess club in 14 moves. He was an arrogant SOB and I got lucky, but I beat him fair and square. He asked for a rematch but I said no! Served him right and I still remember how sweet victory over a too confident opponent can be.
We live in a microwave time. People don’t want to read 4 pages about why a free quote makes no sense. You get one paragraph and sometimes only one sentence to tell the story.
When you guys write 4 paragraphs for a post, I skip it. Who has the time or desire to read that garbage?
Think of it this way. How many TV commercials are 10 minutes long? How many newspaper ads are more than 20 words? Not many.
When I post on Google plus or FB, my posts are always short and include a photo or Youtube video.
especially now days .