Fear of Public Speaking

1 Reply

I will be speaking on two panels at Blog World Expo in a few days, and I am absolutely wrought with fear. I did plays in front of hundreds as a child, was always the main speaker for group presentations in class, sung in grade school at a provincial competition and earned silver, organized a session at Moosecamp in Vancouver, and have done many videos and podcasts both live and recorded, so you wouldn’t think that speaking in front of a group of my peers about the things I have learned over the last three years would scare me, but it does.

I guess the biggest thing for me versus the things I have done over the last three years that are public is that I couldn’t immediately see the reactions of those taking in what I had to say, and so if they didn’t like it, I didn’t find out until afterwards, thus allowing me to remain confident.

Thankfully, I am on a panel, and so I will have others that I can rely on for the hard questions, but I feel that I don’t have anything amazing to bring to the table. I don’t make ridiculous amounts of money while talking about the food I ate for dinner, I haven’t published a book, nor have I built up the attention of a million subscribers.

As I write this, I am sure most of you are thinking that I will do fine, and I am pretty sure I will too, as the worst thing that can happen is someone decides to point at me and go “boo”, but I wanted to remind all of you reading, thinking that you can’t do what I do because I have something “special” that I am not special, but instead passionate, and fortunate.

If you want to make working online, in whatever capacity, your full time career, there are so many ways to get there. If you want to build your personal brand up to the level where you are asked to speak at events, there are so many opportunities to do that, so don’t be shy, instead, be passionate as passion is infectious and no fear of anything should stop you form sharing what you most enjoy.

Originally posted on September 14, 2008 @ 7:15 am

College Crunch Progress

Leave a reply

With over six hundred pages created, and around one hundred and fifty filled with some decent content, College Crunch is growing rapidly.

While the design has been recognized by a few different sites, thanks to me taking some time to submit it around, I am still waiting for people to really recognize the content, but there aren’t really any “content” galleries.

There is still a huge amount of work to be done in building out the content and even more in building out the Gazette, the actual blog section of the site.

It is a little difficult to meet the expectations of others as this site requires much more research and organization than any site I have done previously, as I don’t have the same experience with the subject as I usually do when writing online.

I am always looking for new ways to promote the content, build it out faster, and increase the advertising revenue that it brings in so that I can continue to work on this site for years to come.

Originally posted on October 8, 2008 @ 10:06 pm

Gary’s Blog World Expo Keynote in More Formats

Leave a reply

For those of you that have been complaining about the huge file, or the bad quality of the Viddler upload in my previous post, a friend of mine, Tom Leroux, has created some more great ways for you guys to have access to Gary’s great keynote speech from Blog World Expo.

A nice compact 230MB Quicktime Movie version.
A MP3 version and a M4A version as the audio is the most important part.

Very cool stuff for those that haven’t checked this out yet.

Originally posted on September 29, 2008 @ 8:17 pm

Updated the Uber Blogs List

1 Reply

If you hadn’t previously heard, I started my own list of ranking blogs about blogging, and there was a bit of a Google PageRank update lately, and so I have updated all of the rankings to display the most recent results. I have been pretty consistent about updating the Uber Blog List about twice a week, so you are always getting the best results.

I am thinking of tweaking it though as currently, each of the rankings are equally weighted to give a final score to place people. I am also thinking of capping it at fifty sites, so that only the top fifty are displayed, though much more would be tracked, but not displayed, in order to link to the best sites consistently.

Check out the Uber Blog List and let me know what you think. If you aren’t on the list, please add your site, and if it fits in with the topic of blogs about blogging, then I will add it to be ranked.

Originally posted on September 30, 2008 @ 3:54 pm

Lesson Learned: Keep One Consistent Home

1 Reply

One of the biggest lessons that I learned over the past month is that I should really keep one consistent home on the web, and having not done so over the last three years has been to my career and personal branding efforts detriment.

I have moved from site to site, from place to place, and from company to company, and while many people know me rather intimately, in the more general sense, I am relatively unknown.

Attending Blog World Expo, I assumed a few people would know me outside of my normal social circles but that really wasn’t the case. Some people knew the sites I had written on, but most people didn’t know me by name.

If you want to do well online, it is smart to create one place where people can always find you, even if you are working as a blogger for other companies or blog networks. Don’t do as I’ve done and move from place to place or it can become difficult to remember who you are.

Hopefully, over time, I will be able to rectify this error on my part through continued brand building in a wider variety of mediums as those that were doing video podcasts were the most recognized, second came those that did a variety of audio podcasts, and third came us primarily text-only bloggers. So if you want to be recognized, a second tip would be to get your face and voice out on the web as much as possible.

Originally posted on September 28, 2008 @ 11:18 pm