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 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.

Over the weekend I changed the main domain for my blog from thechrisblackwell.com to chrisblackwell.org, and I have given everyone a perfect case study of what NOT to do. I originally registered thechrisblackwell.com because chrisblackwell.com was already taken along with a few other variations. However, I was starting to get too many questions on why I had “the” so I decided to go with a .org domain and simply have my name. The problem is the domain change, and how I went about switching them, was an absolute disaster!

I lost all my subscribers and comments!

When I made the domain change I immediately went to FeedBurner to update the domain and feed details. The next morning when I checked by feed subscription numbers, I got a big surprise when I saw a 0 staring back at me. I posted a small test post, waited an hour, then checked my Google Reader to see if the feed was still being updated. Nope! My Google Reader didn’t see the new post and was still linking to the old domain.

So I’ve lost all my subscribers to my blog that I’ve spent months building up. Well, at least it can’t get any worse, right? Wrong! As I started looking around my blog I started to notice something very quickly. No Comments! I still don’t know what happened to all my comments, but they got all deleted in the move somehow. I am very upset by this as I cherish all my comments and some readers had some very informative information and links.

Hopefully these are all the problems and nothing else will or can go wrong. If you have posted a comment on my blog before, you have my sincerest apologies. Please subscribe again to my blog and help me recover some of what I have lost. Thank you everyone for your kind patience and understanding.

I don’t really know why I’m blogging again. Actually I’m busier now then ever. So why would I choose now of all the times to pick it back up again? Well, the reason is if I didn’t start soon I would have probably never picked it up again (that would have been perfectly fine for some people out there). However, blogging really does help you with your writing skills and having the discipline to have to post something at least once a day week can keep you quite grounded. My writing skills (much like my math skills) are not exactly up to par, and I can really murder the English language at times, but I feel this is something I need to do and I hope some of you will even enjoy reading my rants from time to time.

I will try my best to keep this site as interesting as possible and to keep everyone updated on all the new projects I am bound to get myself into. Please feel free to participate in this site as much as possible and leave comments whenever you can. It is your comments that really keep this site interesting and alive.