What’s the one thing that most bloggers hate to do? It’s a verb that starts with the letter “p” and has a lot of work in between.

If you guessed, “promote” and are cringing on the other side of the screen, then keep reading.

This Saturday I’ll be giving a talk at WordCamp Seattle 2012 about how to conquer your fear of the big, bad “p” and learn how to promote your blog without losing your soul. Here’s what I’ll be talking about:

Congratulations, you have a brand new blog! But how do you get people to read it? ‘Promotion’ is something you need to learn if you want anyone to see the website that you’re putting a lot of time into working on. We’ll talk about how you can leverage social networks and social bookmarking sites to gain readers and how to build relationships with other bloggers who will help you out along the way. By the end of this session you’ll know how to market your blog without losing your soul.

Unfortunately WordCamp Seattle is already sold out. But if you’d like to attend, you can try and snag a ticket that people are posting for sale over here on the registration page and also on Twitter.

After my talk, I’ll post a recap with a quick-and-dirty checklist of how to promote your blog posts (in a non-self-promotional way) after you press “publish.” So stay tuned!

If you are a blogger, what tips do you have on how to promote your blog posts after you publish?

Leave your tips in the comments and I’ll give you a shout-out during my talk and in the recap.

After responding to all of the sweet, awesome, and thoughtful messages my friends left for me on Facebook last year, I had this wild idea – what if you woke up on your birthday, logged onto Facebook, and no one left any birthday messages for you?

That would be the worst birthday ever, right?

As I learned from my parents when I was younger, if you have a bad dream, tell someone about it so that it won’t come true.

Thank you to my amazing husband, John Kimball, who drew this comic and helped me bring this concept to life.

P. S. Today is my birthday.

It’s Sunday and you know what that means — it’s time for your weekly reading list curated by me! Woo!

The Sunday Serial is a list of the best articles I encountered and read during the previous week. Sometimes they have a theme, but most times they do not. This week, it’s all about startups, becoming an entrepreneur and one thing that we all need, a little humor. Enjoy! And since the world revolves around reciprocation, leave me a link to the best thing you read last week down in the comments. Seriously

Links for the Entrepreneur in Training

Considering a Start-Up? Think Again. by Oliver Segovia on Harvard Business Review

Read this because: You’re attracted to startups, addicted to the culture of innovation, and addicted to doing something that no one has done before. And while you help build out other people’s ideas, you’re waiting on the sidelines, anxiously, for your own idea. Or you’re startup-curious and can’t wait to trade that 9-to-5 lifestyle of clocking in and checking out for something that will be much more exciting, you’re sure of it.

But are you? This is a great article with questions to ask yourself when it comes to figuring out if the startup lifestyle is really for you.

3 Reasons Why Every Smart Startup Is A Digital Media Company by Brian Clark on Forbes

Read this because: The word “startup” gets thrown around so much these days and I’m kind of confused – are all “new” businesses considered startups or do they have to have some “tech” element? And if they have to have a “tech” element, does an ecommerce site count?

Brian Clark, who’s most famously known for his Copyblogger empire, does not answer that question, but he does explore an opportunity that all entrepreneurs can take advantage of no matter what their product is, and that’s becoming a content producer.

Content drives everything. It’s marketing, a channel to your audience (customers), and gives you an unfair advantage over your competitors if you do it right and keep your audience first. This article is pure gold and worth reading.

How to Become an Overnight Success by Lisbeth Darsh on CrossFit Lisbeth

Read this because: Lessons that we learn in sports can be applied to business, and this is a good one.

Disillusionment of an Entrepreneur by Prerna Gupta TechCrunch

Read this because: First-time entrepreneurs believe that as they start to build their first startup and work towards making it real, someday they will sell it for millions of dollars and then get to retire. But as Prerna Gupta describes, as soon as she reached what she thought was her end goal, she came up with another one and kept working.

I don’t have my own business yet, but I’ve helped build three businesses and I’m on my fourth. Working every day with entrepreneurs is exciting, and knowing that what I’m working on will directly impact the business makes the long hours and the ambitious goals worth it. But at the end of the day, there’s always more to do. Good to know that I’m not alone in feeling like I’m never satisfied or “done” when it comes to work.

Three Years of Kickstarter Projects as an infographic on The New York Times

Read this because: Crowdsourcing has become a viable way for entrepreneurs to fund their projects thanks to websites like Kickstarter. It’s been three years and almost 50,000 projects since the site launched on April 28, 2009 and The New York Times put together this great visual about which categories of projects were funded and how much has been raised. It’s a fascinating diagram to study if you’re considering running a campaign on Kickstarter.

Bonus reading material:

• Start-ups Look to the Crowd by Jenna Wortham on The New York Times

• The 6 Variables Behind a Kick-Ass Kickstarter Project by Slava Menn on GOOD

Links for the Entrepreneur Who Needs a Break

I apologize, but the following two links have everything to do with being human and nothing to do with entrepreneurship.

#WelcomeToSeattle

Read this because: I love Tumblr, and every week I find a new meme that rocks my world. This week I discovered #WelcomeToSeattle. It reminds me of #WhatShouldWeCallMe, but appeals to my Seattleite sensibilities.

24 Life Lessons, Courtesy Of My Cat by Georgia Perry on Thought Catalog

Read this because: You have a cat or know someone who does. And yes, this was definitely written by a cat owner.

What’s the best thing you read this week? Leave me a link in the comments.

Photo Credit: cobra libre

Every few months I take a look at my blog and start asking the following questions:

• How do I get more readers?
• Should I figure out what my blog is about?
• Should I redesign my site?

And the list goes on and on…

See here’s what I always forget – lamiki.com is not, nor was it ever intended to be, strategic to the level that a business blog needs to be. And while I have gotten jobs and business from my blog, it is not a business.

Your First Blog is Your First Blog

As I experienced this crisis last night and wept, dramatically, to my husband, he brought up a good point – your first blog is like your first AOL screen name, dedicated to whatever you’re obsessed with at the time and once you grow out of that phase, you get a new one.

My husband is smart. And, ironically, the name lamiki was derived from my first AOL name.

Goals are Great, but Make Sure You Want Them

Five months ago I outlined my goals for the year and my blog, twice. I also outlined a very detailed plan of everything I was going to focus on with my blog for the year. Things like guest posting, a redesign, and a tighter content strategy – things that are included in that first list and much, much more. (Did you know that I’m ambitious?) And then in March I set a new goal:

Now I have one achievable, measurable goal. One that does not require the content calendars that I love to create, yet love to hate. One “must have” goal every single month when it comes to my blog and everything else has been demoted from the “required” list to the “would be nice” list of things I want to do.

My blog is not a business. It’s a passion project created to give me a place to write and share how I see the world. There is no monetization strategy and if I decide that’s something I want to do, there will be a new domain.

In the end, we all have an enormous amount of stress and responsibilities that we juggle every single day. And if something in your life that’s supposed to give you pleasure and a break from it all starts giving you stress, you need to make a change.

Photo Credit: Snapies

What’s a quality blog without bestowing some lessons about life and the pursuit of happiness on you? Exactly. So here are four blog posts with a total of 46 lessons and things to enrich your life.

Day 200: 5 Lessons from the part-time writer by Harmony Hasbrook on 100 Days or More

Read this because: You love writing and think that it wouldn’t be too bad to do on a daily basis. Except that passion always changes another shade when it goes from the “passion” bucket into “work,” unless you make a conscious effort to make sure that it never loses its appeal.

How to Live Vicariously through Yourself by Steve Kamb on Nerd Fitness

Read this because: Someone that you used to know did some amazing, ballsy thing that you never expected them to or went somewhere awesome and it completely changed their life for the better.  And every time you think about what they did you think, “I wish I could do that!”

You can.

I really like Steve’s approach to live vicariously through yourself as a way to stop wishing that you could do something and start doing it. Going to try this one out myself.

25 Years of Havoc Making and 25 Revelations or Things I Wish I Did Differently – A Quarter Life Crisis in Review by Alexandar Heyne on Milk the Pigeon

Read this because: Everyone is or has been in that weird 20-something phase of trying to figure out what the heck we’re doing on Earth and how we’re going to make the most of our lives. One of my favorite bloggers, Alexander, just turned 25 and has shared a list of 25-things he wished he knew before this birthday. Unfortunately you can’t help not knowing what you don’t know, but according to this list, he’s got big plans for how he’s going to use this knowledge now, and you can too.

15 More Things You Should Do Before You Turn 30 by Ryan O’Connell on Thought Catalog

Read this because: You’ve just turned 25 and there’s a whole lot more mischief you can create before you turn 30.

What did you read this week?

Photo Credit: inju

Sunday Serial is a semi-regularly weekly installment of the best articles written and read around the Internet during the past week or so. I try to introduce each article so you know what you’re getting in to before you click, though sometimes my synthesis goes a little bit deep. You can read previous Sunday Serials here.

20 phrases you can replace with one word by Laura Hale Brockway on PR Daily

Read this because: I’m a fan of brevity, and you should be too. As George Orwell said, never use a ten-dollar word when a five-dollar one will do. Whether that’s in every day speech or in your writing.

What I Learned From Quitting My Job…Twice. by Amber Nashlund on Brass Tack Thinking

Read this because: You’re on a path few have traveled. You are ready to shake things up, you’re ready to say “I quit,” but uncertainty is holding you back. Here are some great lessons to move you away from “un” and closer to “certain.”

I hereby (fictionally) resign by Reginald Braithwaite on raganwald’s posterous

Read this because: Last month, recruiters and hiring managers starting asking candidates for their passwords to their personal Facebook accounts. Why? So they could do a more thorough background check on the candidate’s personal life.

Then Facebook came out and publicly stated that asking candidates to give out their passwords is an invasion of the candidate’s privacy and that of their friends. And last week, the state of Maryland became the first state to ban employers from asking for Facebook passwords.

Don’t HR managers know to keep their hands off of our personal Facebook pages?

If you’re reading this, mouth agape, wondering “WTF?” read the above post. While a fictionalized account, it’s a good story about “what if.”

Bonus: Here’s what you should do (in the real world) if your employer or hiring manager does ask for your password.

Publishing is no longer a job or an industry — it’s a button by Mathew Ingram on GigaOm

Read this because: It’s no secret that I come from the book publishing world, so the advent of blogs, eBooks, online publishing, etc., anyone can be “published” and the assets that the old book publishing world used to bring to the table are no longer valuable. Digitization has killed this industry and turned it into a button. And I’m left wondering, would it have been better to be outsourced to China or replaced by a machine than a button?

But there’s hope – yes, the industry is dead. The mystery, allure, and “secret sauce” of what makes a best seller still exist, but the tools for production and sales channels are accessible to all. It’s not so much that publishing needs to disappear, but pivot. Instead of being the “process of distribution,” become the services that authors need – editorial, marketing, access to readers, and design.

Texts from Hillary on Tumblr

Read this because: It’s not every week that a meme is started and the subject of the meme, memes herself. As the final post says, “It turns out that memes really do come true,”

• The Submission from Hillary Clinton

• Story about the real text from Hillary

• My favorite: Ryan Gosling texts Hillary Clinton

What did you read this week?

Photo Credit: f_where

Writers see the world differently. We analyze every word that you say, every move that you make, and every thought that you barely breathe. We piece stories together when there aren’t any to be told. And we create a world out of the pieces that we see in our own.

And yet, with as much as I love this part of myself, being a writer is hard. It takes practice. The great Haruki Murakami wrote an entire book about how being a writer (especially of epic novels) is like long distance running, it takes practice, endurance, and a lot of training.

I’ve been writing stories my entire life. In elementary school I would sit along the wall while the other kids played foursquare (the game, not the app) and scribble stories in my notebook with a felt-tipped marker.

One day, a girl in my class saw me writing and came over.

“What are you writing?” she asked.

“Oh, just a story,” I said, and curled the spiral bound notebook up in a way so that she wouldn’t be able to read it. But of course she did. And she noticed exactly what I didn’t want her to, the name of one of the characters.

“Ohhhh, do you like Tyler?”

There were three boys named Tyler in our class, and it was perfect for one of my characters. We were nine years old. Even if I tried to explain it, there was no way she was going to understand how writers work.

As my husband, the illustrator said one day, he creates art out of nothing, and I create art out of what I see. That is the difference between the illustrator and the writer.

My first fiction teacher told me that his wife used to read his stories and would always find the character that resembles her. Shortly after I wrote the best short story of my life and the protagonist was modeled loosely after my best friend.

That’s the magic and the danger behind being a writer, we don’t know how to separate the two worlds apart and we don’t want to. That’s why process of writing is scary and personal, we write about what we see in the world in order to understand it, we write for us and at the same time for you. We write because we have to, because we need to, because the world needs us to.

And sometimes that’s enough.

When I was seven years old my bedtime was 8pm. A time that is tolerable during the winter but excruciating in the spring after daylight savings time.

On Easter that year as I was getting ready to go to bed, I peaked out of my bedroom window and saw the neighbor kid across the street in her front yard hunting Easter eggs. And the worst part – she was two years younger than me! Talk about not fair!

It’s around that time in life that many kids learn how to say, “You’re not the boss of me” and ache for a day when we will be able to make our own rules about our own life.

Well, judging by the popularity of content on the Internet, general professional knowledge – generally people become overwhelmed when presented with too many choices.

Why? For a number of reasons that all boil down to being afraid about making the wrong decision and missing an opportunity. Often times it’s called the paradox of choice.

That’s right, fear.

Don’t worry; I’m in this boat too. It’s why I ask my husband if I should do something instead of the other so that if I make the wrong decision, I have him to blame (his words, not mine).

So, this week, here is a collection of articles with advice on things that you should do, things you shouldn’t do, and one more to make life a little easier.

Things You Should Do

Ten Things I Want To Tell Teenage Girls by Kate Conner on Lily Pads

Read this because: You were a teenager once, know someone who is a teenager, or who will be one soon.

You are beautiful. You are valuable. You are enough.

Six Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs by Jay Goltz on The New York Times

Read this because: You’re like me and have big plans to be a founding entrepreneur some day. But you’re scared (see above) that you don’t have the character profile or, hell, the DNA to be one. But all soft skills can be honed and the way you look at the world can be finessed. View this list as six things to work on while you wait for that some day to arrive.

10 Rules for Brilliant Women by Tara Sophia Mohr on We Unite

Read this because: You don’t know who Tara Sophia Mohr is and have never read her “10 Rules” before.

I first read Tara’s 10 Rules shortly after it was first published on the Huffington Post. After that, I got to know her through The Girl Effect Blogging Campaign and had the pleasure of attending one of her salons last spring when she was in Seattle. Tara is a writer who is dedicated to coaching women leaders on how to sit at the table, speak up, take bold actions in the world.

Bonus reading material: Here’s the post I wrote as part of the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign this past year: Change the Statistics.

A little bit is a lot. By Sarah K. Peck on It Starts With

Read this because: We all procrastinate a lot. We turn small tasks into daunting affairs that paralyze us and if we just change our perspective, we can get it down. Sarah K. Peck does an amazing job of illustrating exactly what procrastination looks like, and how to overcome it in a way that’s not so scary anymore.

How to Influence People: The Most Overlooked Secret by Cody Goins on Goins, Writer

Read this because: I love it when bloggers of all shapes and sizes share their “little known” secrets, and this is one that could change how you approach life.

Things You Should Not Do

3 Words That Guarantee Failure by Geoffrey James on Inc.com

Read this because: You love brainstorming big ideas and setting goals, and what’s better is you’re into meeting them. But there’s one thing you can say after setting a goal that will determine if you will succeed or not – three words that you might say that will subconsciously put you on the path towards failure.

For the record: You can say those three words when it comes to something like eating food or learning a new skill.

The 5 Silent Career Killers For Women by Lauren Carlson on Women 2.0

Read this because: Whether you’re a man or a woman, there are things that you might be doing to sabotage your career. (Confession: I do 4 out of 5 of the things on this list on a daily basis, in my career and otherwise). Check out this list and start altering your behavior now. Carlson goes into more detail about each “silent killer” on her own site and in this blog post.

15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly by Brian Clark on Copyblogger

Read this because: If you can’t write or talk good, than you just look silly. And that will do more damage to you then anything written above.

Now View The World Through the Eyes of Calvin and Hobbes

Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else by Edd McCracken on Book Riot

Read this because: I’ve given you a lot to think about. And when the world is overwhelming and you need to take a break on self-actualization, go back to the basics and learn how Calvin and Hobbes made sense of the world better than anyone else could.

What did you read this week?

Photo Credit: Pepsix
Kung Fu Calvin fan art illustrated by John Kimball

I was born and raised in the Seattle-area (read: suburbs) to parents who migrated West from the great cornfields of Iowa (or something romantic like that). I spent many summers crossing the Western United States on various pilgrimages to-and-from Grandparents houses and I can name all fifty states in alphabetical order and lay them out on a map from memory.

I spent my college years studying hipsterdom first-hand in the great city of Portland, Oregon, but made the journey back “home” to Seattle upon graduation.

I am – and always will be – a native Seattleite.

But as another Seattleite pointed out to me this past weekend – we are “rare.”

So today on Twitter I jokingly asked  –

How long must one be a resident to become a “Seattleite”? – asks the native Seattleite

— Laura Kimball (@lamiki) March 27, 2012

Because, in all honestly, I don’t know where being a “Seattlelite” starts and ends if you’re (gasp!) imported. And got the following responses –

@lamiki I always say 10 years. #native #seattle #seattleite

— Keridwyn Deller (@keridwyn) March 27, 2012

@lamiki Isn’t it a state of mind more than a length of time?

— kalen (@kalenski) March 27, 2012

@lamiki I considered myself a Seattleite after a year. Something about that city just clicked. Took much longer to call myself a New Yorker!

— kat selvocki (@shinyredtype) March 27, 2012

@lamiki 1 day

— Ken (@kenfucious) March 27, 2012

@lamiki well it takes nearly 20 years to be local in Colorado:) Everyone else is just passing through

— Kendall Ruth (@iamkendal) March 27, 2012

@lamiki When they can walk by the Space Needle without taking a photo of it.

— David Hoang (@davidhoang) March 28, 2012

My question to you  – when do you officially become a local?

Photo Credit: Laura Kimball (me!)

This morning as I was doing metrics for my own social media handles, I noticed something very, very odd when I went to bitly to check how many people clicked on the links I shared on Twitter last week:

My tweets get an average of 300 clicks per week, so 300 in one single day is outrageous!

It took me a little digging to realize that it came down to this one tweet…that Harley Davidson retweeted.

How to get People on Twitter to Retweet and Click on your Tweets

When it comes to being successful on Twitter, most people talk about how many followers a person has and how many more you can get, fast.

This is because you can easily see how many followers a person has on Twitter (very transparent), so the challenge has been how to get more followers on Twitter fast. Building a large following on Twitter is easy (just Google it). But there’s no point of having thousands of followers if they don’t respond or click on what you tweet.

I spend an enormous amount of time curating what I share on Twitter and Facebook each week. I love content, read a lot, and I want to provide value, not noise to this mess called social media. But it’s not just what you tweet, it’s how you tweet it.

Based on the basics of content curation and how I wrote the Harley Davidson tweet, here are three things that I found that help get my tweets read, clicked on, and shared.

1) Use a hashtag

Hashtags were created for people to follow conversations about certain topics. Some hashtags, like trending topics and city hashtags barely get followed because there’s so much noise. While hashtags that are created for specific communities and events get followed, read, and retweeted – as proven with this tweet above.

Hashtag responsibly. Don’t add a hashtag to your tweet if it has nothing to do with what you’re talking about. And for the love of all things social, never, ever use a hashtag in the title of your blog post.

2) Write the tweet in your own words that tell your followers why they should care

When it comes to sharing anything online, your job is to write something that people will read and take some kind of action (click, retweet, respond, etc.). One thing that works the best is to tell people on Twitter exactly what they’re about to read and why they should care. The best way is to stop being lazy and write the tweet in your own words.

Sure, you can just copy and paste the title of the article you’re linking to, but I have found that I do not get as many clicks or retweets as when I write a tweet in my own words that express some kind of opinion about the content I’m sharing.

3) Make it timely

There are two kinds of content: evergreen and time sensitive.

Evergreen tweets, blog posts, and articles are “how to’s” that can be written today and published, shared, and promoted today, tomorrow, next week, or even next year and still be relevant. Then there’s the time sensitive stuff – the “breaking news” tweets and articles about things that are happening now, as in if-we-publish-this-next-week-it-will-be-irrelevant.

Sure, I could have tweeted that article next week or next year, but the fact that this is a current campaign really helped built traction around it.

I’ve noticed this when blogging, too. If you write a blog post about something in the news that people are already talking about, you will increase your chances of that blog post read, tweeted about, commented on, and found via search. This happened when I wrote a response to a boss that is offering his employees a $50,000 bonus if they stay on for 5 years and, more successfully, hipster entrepreneurs.

Evergreen content is great, but timely is hot.

Whatever you do, track what you tweet

The only way to figure out how many people actually click on your tweets is to shorten every single link using a URL shortening service like is.gd, bit.ly (my personal favorite), ow.ly, awe.sm and plenty of others.

Many of these URL shortening services allow you to create an account that will track your data as opposed to just shortening it. And most play nice with third party apps like Tweetdeck, Timely, Buffer, and HootSuite so you can shorten to your heart’s design and track your links as you tweet them.

Even if you don’t analyze your clicks, track your data so it’s there when you want it to be.

How do you make sure people read what you share on Twitter?