Erich Stauffer

Tag: Michael Hyatt

  • Are You Overwhelmed?

    I thought I’d answer these questions Michael Hyatt asked of himself about being overwhelmed and I encourage you to as well. My name is Erich Stauffer and my answers are below the questions.

    1. Are you ready for a change?

    2. What is it that only I can do? Where do I add the most value? What is really important as opposed to merely urgent?

    3. What are your three biggest productivity sinkholes?

    4. Record your most common activities and tasks into categorized lists and determine what can be eliminated, automated, or delegated.

    5. What do you make an hour (inside and outside of your 8-5 job)? Could you be more financially productive (and a better steward of your time) if you delegated to a paid assistant or service? Have you ever considered a VA?

    6. How much of your calendar this week is dedicated to high payoff activities/important tasks? Are you putting the big rocks in your metaphorical jar before putting in the sand and water?

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  • Comments Sense

    There are as many ways to run a commenting system as there are ways to comment. In this post I talk about some of the main strategies and how common sense sometimes doesn’t apply.

    There are main choices to a comment system:

    1. Turn comments off or don’t use them.
    2. Turn comments on with a website, but filter for spam.
    3. Turn comments on, but if a website is added, don’t allow.
    4. Turn comments on, allow all comments with or without a website.

    Michael Hyatt, a popular blogger and public speaker, uses Disqus for his comments system and encourages people to not just comment, but to backlink as well. This means that he falls into the 4th category of allowing all comments with or without a website. Michael knows this helps the commentor with their SEO and yet he still allows it.

    Douglas Karr’s site, DKNewMedia also uses Disqus for it’s comment system, but he falls into the 3rd category which doesn’t allow comments with a website. Doug is a social media guru and knows a lot about SEO and blogging so he probably doesn’t want his Google juice spilling out all over the Internet’s floor.

    I don’t use Disqus, opting for the standard-issue WordPress commenting system. I use Akismet to help filter for spam and I manually approve or decline comments. I will allow links to websites in comments as long as they are relevant and not obscene. This puts me in the 2nd category.

    And instead of giving an example of the 1st category of no comments at all, I wanted to mention Ed Dale‘s commenting system of choice: Facebook comments. Ed believes in the transparency that Facebook comments provides. He likes knowing exactly who is making the comment. In Facebook comments you don’t have the opportunity for a website backlink, just a link to your profile. (more…)