To tell you the truth, I haven’t paid much attention to the Facebook Ticker until I watched a webinar this week. I had absolutely no idea how powerful this little gadget is. It blew me away!

Here is what I learned and why I will be paying closer attention from now on to the updates rolling by in the Ticker while I go about my business on Facebook.

First off, what is the Facebook News Ticker?

When you look to the top right after logging in to Facebook you will see the activities of your Friends roll by. These are LIVE updates of what your Friends are liking, sharing, commenting on or doing.

The first of November logically always follows the spooky night of Halloween. Did you have many trick or treaters knocking at your door? It seems like every year we get less and less here in our community. Not even all of our neighbors’ children visited … or maybe I just didn’t recognize them in their Halloween costumes.

The first day (or first week) of the month is also traditionally the time when I acknowledge and say thanks to my top commentators. At least it’s been like that for the past year or so.

Where has this year gone? A few days from now we will be celebrating Halloween, one of the biggest holidays (at least where candy sales are concerned) here in the U.S.

There are 36 million kids ages 5-13 in the United States, and more than 93 percent of them report going trick-or-treating, according to the Washington Post.

Do you realize that all of those little ghosts and goblins who will be coming knocking at your door for some tricks or treats can help you spread the word about your business?

Absolutely! Halloween presents a great opportunity to get really creative and think outside the box as far as your marketing is concerned.

I had oodles of fun this weekend painting our deck with my husband and one of our sons. Well, let me specify, I had fun Friday and Saturday.  Sunday was alright, but Monday it wasn’t fun anymore at all. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t wait to finally be done.

It would have been nice if we had a couple of extra days to spread the job out a bit more, but unfortunately that wasn’t an option because the deck had to be finished before our first major snow stormed arrived. It started snowing last night and it’s still going strong.

So we were putting in eight hour days, getting up and down that ladder, standing on footstools or just crouching down. Oh our achy bones! This morning, admiring the fine work we had done, my husband and I looked at each other and agreed, “We will never do this again.”

FreeArtisticPhotos.com

Finding free images for blogs is not as simple as performi­­­ng a Google Image Search. As a matter of fact, doing that might land you in hot water because you could be violating copyright laws.

Many of the images that will show up in your browser when you do a simple image search on Google are actually copyrighted and belong to whoever upladed them to their website or blog.

See, when you upload an image to your blog, it will be indexed by the Google search bots.

For example, if you do a search for anti “spam plugin” you will find that an image I created for a previous blog post will show up in the search results.

I am very honored to have been nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award by my friend and fellow blogger Stacy Claflin. Thank you so much, Stacy for thinking of me!

To be quite honest with you, I had to look up the word “versatile” in the dictionary as I had no clue of its meaning. Cross-checking various online dictionaries as well as my trusted Harper Collins German-English dictionary I came to the conclusion that it means…

1. Capable of doing many things competently. 2. Having varied uses or serving many functions.

Pretty cool!  Now that I know what it means I’m even more delighted and only too happy to pay it forward.

This weekend I was just leisurely glancing over my fellow bloggers tweets in Hootsuite, when I noticed a tweet by my friend  Adrienne Smith. I can’t remember exactly what it said but it definitely caught my attention. As it turns out Adrienne had come across a great new resource for bloggers, a free directory for dofollow blogs.

Always on the lookout for high quality blogs I couldn’t resist clicking on Adrienne’s tweet and boy am I ever glad I did.  I would have missed a big one.

I was deeply saddened when I heard of Steve Job’s passing yesterday. He left us way to early at the young age of 56 leaving a huge gap in the world of technology that may never be filled. Who knows what incredible innovations he would have come up with would he have had the chance to work another 20 -25 years.

The world has lost a true visionary, a creative genius. The shear mention of his name made us “think different!”

Steve Jobs changed the life of millions of people around the world. He certainly changed mine. My first computer was a Mac and just two weeks ago thanks to a great birthday present from my family I’m back on a Mac. iPods, iTunes and Pixar movies were all part of my children’s lives. That wouldn’t have been possible without the great mind of Steve Jobs.

Today I need to get a couple of issues off my chest. Honestly, I really don’t like writing this post, and have been avoiding it for quite some time. But it has become necessary for me to step up and address these issues. So here it goes…

First: Faceless Blog Commenting

I have addressed this issue before in my post “Invasion of the Face Snatchers,” but it’s time to do it again.

Blog commenting is one of the best strategies I know for not only getting quality backlinks but to build profitable and long-lasting relationships with like-minded people as well.

Wow! Another month has gone by and the calendar on the wall is starting to look pretty darn skinny. Only a few more weeks to Halloween, then Thanksgiving and we all know that between that feastful  (if that’s not a word it is now) holiday and Christmas the time only flies by even faster.

Well, for us adults anyway. For the children it may still seem endless before they will be allowed to unwrap those shiny presents underneath the Christmas tree.

But let’s not get to far ahead of ourselves … Back to September.

Changes, changes and yet more changes. Just when you thought you had it all figured out, Facebook comes along with yet another one – Facebook Timeline.

Change is good! Of course it is! And especially now that Facebook is in direct competition with the newest kid on the blog where social networks are concerned …Google+ … you can expect a lot more changes coming down the pike.

The gloves are definitely off! And it seems one is always trying to outdo the other. Yes, the saying “the competition doesn’t sleep” is very true.

If you missed the first part of this post, you can read it here … Thanks, For Not Dying Mom! – Part 1

As I was lying there on that uncomfortable gurney looking at my husband’s concerned face a lot of thoughts went through my head…And a lot of “What Ifs?”

I had just scared the heck out of him. What if I had really died back at that stop light?…and never got the chance to do the things I still wanted to do?