Chris Blackwell’s Domain

I’m finally back from vacation today. Well actually I got back yesterday but I needed a day just to unwind. I also needed a day to read over all the news and articles that got built up in my Google Reader over the week, or so I thought. I had flagged over 30 articles to read later during the week. When Sunday came, I deleted all but a few of them, and you know what, I didn’t miss a thing. Sure, I may not have read the latest technique to market your blog and focus on your niche more, but how many different ways do I need to read about that?

I thought that every day I had to read every article posted on Problogger, Zen Habbits, Daily Blog Tips, or Dosh Dosh. I ended up deleting all of the articles from them that had built-up over my week away. By seeing how many articles I normally read in a week, I got a pretty good idea of how many I read in a day. I must read about 10 - 15 articles a day during the weekdays. How much productivity is lost in reading all those articles? Sure, they all might have a great tip here, or an idea there, but taking away all that extra time will cost me money in the end. Where was that tip?

While I do think it can be good to read other blogs, and learn about new marketing techniques or strategies, I also think that you should keep in perspective how much time you are spending and how many articles of the same content rewritten in a different way. My week off was just that, a week off. No Twitter, no Blog Catalog, no email, no instant messaging, and a significant reduction in the amount I read via RSS. Give yourself a break and try it out. You’ll be surprised at what your NOT missing.

I am now taking new submissions for this week’s “site of the week”. If you would like your website to be featured on Friday with a small review then please submit your site now. To submit your site please go to my contact page, fill out the form, and put “Site of the Week” in the subject line. Include your URL and a small description of what your site is about. I look forward to seeing all the submissions and best of luck to everyone!

This week’s site of the week award goes to April’s Thoughts & Inspirations. This blog is a simple yet powerful little personal blog that inspires and helps with general day to day life. April provides small tidbits of inspirational help everyday and mini-articles that discuss dealing with situations and reducing your overall stress level. You can see all of April’s thoughts at http://aprillaw.wordpress.com

I am starting a new feature this week called “Website of the Week”. I love promoting small blogs that are starting out or haven’t hit a good number of subscribers yet. I want to hear about your site so I can showcase it on my website. Every week I will pick the best (hand selected) of all the blogs and/or websites that are emailed to me. I will post the best from each week as a featured review on this site every Friday.

To participate, go to my contact page and fill out the contact form with the subject “Site of the Week”. The winner will be posted Friday morning. If you are not selected one week, please resubmit your site for the next week. Good luck to everyone and I can’t wait to see all the exciting websites that you will be sending to me.

I have officially launched the Novo Emporium (www.novoemporium.com) website today! Novo Emporium is a site that I have been working on for a few months. I always wanted to create a website dedicated to business and marketing, and now I have. The design of Novo Emporium is not the greatest and I am going to get one of our designers to put together something better as soon as possible. My main focus was (and always will be) the content.

Novo Emporium? What’s in a name?

The name Novo Emporium is the latin phrase for “new market”. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to call this website. I knew that I wanted the site to be new and fresh, and not talk about old style marketing strategies, because that’s not my thing. I spent weeks playing around with different domains with the words marketing and the word new. Finally it came to me that the web uses a lot of latin phrases. In fact, place holder text, that most web designers use, is latin (Lorem Ipsum). I finally decided on Novo Emporium a few weeks ago and I haven’t looked back since.

Since it took me several months to finally decide on the name for the website, I was able to build up a good amount of content for it. I will talk in another post about the necessity to build-up content before launching a new blog or website. Please take a look at the site and let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing your comments.