Hello everyone. Welcome to the first use of Thursday for announcements. Please let me begin by letting all of you know that if you have any suggestions for improving any of my social media or website pages please feel free to let me know. With so many devices and operating systems and software it can be a bit of a trick finding what works best for the most people.
If you’re new to the blog and you’re enjoying the weekly meditations and you miss having one on Thursdays, please do know that the facebook page always uses Thursdays and Saturdays to post older blogs relevant to that week’s meditation. They’re timeless, so you’ll find those just as useful. The links hit the facebook page two or three times each day. To save you some time, here’s this weeks: The Double Whammy.
For those of you actually interested in booking sessions, feel free to call or write. Whatever your needs are your consciousness is always involved, so whether it’s motivating a large group, training a small group or doing individualized training with one couple or one person, it’s always a very natural thing to adapt to your needs. I’m also often asked about long distance training and that is also possible–people have travelled to me, I have travelled to them and I have successfully worked with a large number of people via telephone and even locals often find the phone even works better for them that in person. My presence isn’t required, yours is. 🙂
For those who don’t want to miss all of the quotes I post, the Tumblr and Pinterest feeds are best. If you’re looking for some added mental distractions or relevant postings from science or culture or art or politics, the facebook page is your best bet, and for daily reminders of mindfulness the Twitter feed will periodically interrupt you to get you to check in with your consciousness.
I have been asked about starting up group classes again which I haven’t been able to do due to time constraints lately but since it seems to be a format that a lot of local Edmontonians would like to have available, watch the page for notice of when those will run. You can also feel free to organize your own group of between four and six–anyone who does can either attend free of charge or they can share the thousand dollar discount with their group.
Many of you may have noticed some changes to the site recently. There will be additional pages becoming active over the next few weeks. These are ongoing and are being added as they are tested as fully operational. If you find anything not working properly on any of the new pages please do let me know.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss programming etc. please feel free to call me in Canada at 780 . 439 . 0341 or by email at scottis@relaxandsucceed.com
Have a wonderful day everyone.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations around the world.
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Hi Scott. I am a web designer and I do have a couple of suggestions, they may or may not be practical for you.
Anything you upload to Pinterest should be large. They do resize to a point but I’ve found that 500px by 750px is just about right. If you start with your blog images that size you can make a Pinterest widget so others can easily pin them along with that post.
You might consider searching out similar interests and following more like minded people on Pinterest. You don’t have to follow all their boards, pick the ones you like.
The Twitter game is also played a certain way. Rather than post all links to your own content, like and comment on others stuff every other tweet at least. Consider following more with like interests there as well.
Another thought is to occasionally post photos of strange and/or beautiful things found on the web that relate to your post, or you can write a post around it. If you can try to resize to your needs and optimize for the web, huge, high resolution images can take a long time to load and people have limited patience.
Here is a perfect example. The monkey selfie original is way bigger than necessary. But the story in itself is hysterical and a 500 x 700 resized image with a Pinterest widget would be very cool.
LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie
If you ever need help I have Photoshop and other image editing software and I’m home a lot until motorcycle season begins again in March. Just ask.
(Probably more than you wanted? LOL)
Both kind and generous of you Mike. Yes, I’m aware of a variety of ways I could do more in terms of marketing but the truth is I only have so many hours in the day to write, do and learn new things and, as my blog suggests, I do my best to be quite peaceful for the vast majority of life. Right now I’m finalizing the plan for a podcast and a short video series. Once that’s done I can look at other things.
With low oil prices and local clients lower than ever due I do have more space than usual so if I had any free time I might do a bit of marketing–although I don’t like selling myself, but you’re just talking about making me easier to find (and I do have additional plans regarding that too). Unfortunately anything additional is not an option right now with elderly parents and my other professional responsibilities. But I do appreciate the excellent advice. I have tried to keep the Pinterest images I control to a size very close to what you recommended but most of them I find on the web and have to take them the size I get them. I believe it’s relatively rare they’re too big. Certainly Pinterest has been one of my top recommenders to the blog. Anything that helps me reach an audience I could help is welcome to me so I appreciate you taking the time.
I’m glad I have you as a resource for any questions. Thanks for being one of my readers. Here’s to an early start to riding season.
peace. s
Podbean is very good for a Podcast. Its relatively easy to use and you can use your own domain name if you choose to.
As I said if you ever need help let me know. I happen to have a photo of a chicken and made this up in about two minutes. If I save it for the web or reduce size the file would be much, much smaller.
http://mikerosswd.com/Patience.jpg
Thanks for all of this Mike. I do have a friend who usually helps me with this stuff but he’s gone of a couple weeks. I did understand your points about Pinterest etc. and I will look into how I can adjust things. I can now see why having the photos embedded at a size is an issue whereas before people could get to the full sized versions if they wanted to. I’ll make a plan. Thanks for your help in making the blog better. 🙂