The other night I was thinking of a poem and the words Blazing Minds kept buzzing in my head so I started putting something together on my blackberry and out came a poem inspired by poker tournaments. Since the poem was titled Blazing Minds I saw it more than fitting to donate it to this website as it was the source of inspiration for the Title.

Blazing Minds

Blazing minds and burnt dreams
a past sundered with intention
rocking fortunes gathered
plans starting to unfold

Witty games take no prisoners
a liars cheat easily revealed
mind too slow for this ensemble
another player discarded in cards

Handful of masters, left standing
blazing minds with toasted nerves
a bet is placed to call them in
a bluff or truth about to unveil

A savage hand ends with a fold
queens kissing a wounded heart
a flush of royal seals them last
end as satisfying as the beginning

Poem by Dragon Blogger

If you enjoyed my poem you can read more than six hundred original poems on my Wanderer Thoughts Poetry blog where I play the Random Twitter Poetry every weekday where I take random words and craft a unique poem including all words played.

So your blog site or hosting provider suffers an outage that lasts more than a few hours. What do you do to make sure your blogging time is as efficient as possible so that you can hit the ground running when your site comes back up?

In my case because my outage was caused by a Denial of Service attack that spanned several days I didn’t want to deliberately promote or encourage people to visit my sites, as this would cause them to hit page cannot be displayed, or time out errors from my blogs having outages. CommentLuv couldn’t contact my blogs to even display the latest feed article due to the outage, so it made commenting and leaving backlinks something that wouldn’t have been as productive.

Instead I turned to focusing on writing articles, using good old fashioned Textpad and just writing and writing, with the intention to just queue all the articles when my blogs came back online. I also used the time to publish a few haiku’s on associated content and write a guest article for some other sites. The bottom line is, even when your site is unavailable you can use the time to still be productive for your site.

Here are some top things you can do to still be productive with your site while under an outage (besides just writing as many articles as possible to queue for later).

• Network and build influence on Twitter by taking some time to friend people in like categories, be interactive and promote other peoples articles instead of your own for a little while.

• Repeat the above with any other Social Network like BlogCatalog, Plurk, Friendster, Digg, BlogEngage…etc.

• Read up on some of the latest articles submitted to BlogEngage or Twittley, and tweet, vote and promote those articles if you found them good and interesting.

• Tune some of your browser bookmarks or build a new favorites list of blogs you visit often and can easily access and visit by opening all links in the same folder.

What are some of your tips on being productive for your blog, when your blog is down or inaccessible?

-Dragon Blogger

One blogging tip I recommend is to save a few draft posts that are unpublished for a rainy day when you might need them.

Bloggers have to realize that there is really no “Waiting Game” with blogging, unlike the previous generations where “If you build it, they will come” mentality existed and worked for certain types of companies and services bloggers have to “Go Get” their audience.  There is just too much competition in virtually every category and topic on the web, just production quality articles and keyword tagging them alone is not sufficient to get you noticed and drive people to your site by itself.

You must immerse yourself in social media and every blogger is a sales person trying to promote their site and their opinions to the masses.  Sign up for every single social network you can find (Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, FriendFeed, Ping.FM, BlogEngage, HubPages, Zimbio, BlogCatalog and hundreds more).  Sign up and create a profile submit at least one or two articles to each social network, make sure your online “handle” is owned by you so your ID always associated on these networks is always your own.

If you are blogging with the intention to earn money from your blogs,  you should also invest in your blog and grow its traffic.  Very few bloggers are successful without putting some money into their blogs, this mostly should go toward promotion and advertising whether it is running CPC programs on AdWords, or running a campain on PayPerPost or SocialSpark to help get the word out.  You want to invest a little bit of time and money into promoting your site and by funding it you are paying for awareness.

Know that your investments are far less than opening your own restaurant or physical business and you only invest what you can afford, but remember above all else.  There is no waiting game in blogging, you must actively promote and sell your blog if you really want to get it recognized and successful.

You can read more of my blogging articles over at Dragon Blogger Technology and Entertainment Portal.

-Dragon Blogger

We all know some of the common tips and tactics for encouraging readers who visit your blog to leave a comment or interact in some way. These range from ending your post with a question, to hosting contests that require comments to enter or even implementing a poll in your blog just to have people produce some feedback and participate.

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