Friday, April 22, 2011
Are You Ready for National Infertility Awareness Week? April 24th through April 30th
Monday, April 18, 2011
Egg Donors Verses the ASRM: Antitrust Class Action Suit Filed
So the question is do egg donors have a case against these parties? I am not an attorney but in general I doubt it. However, this case is bound to shine yet another spotlight on what an egg donor is paid and how the infertility 'industry" is going about self regulation. Comments have been made that egg donors need to be protected and that they might be exploited however there are a lot of educational tools available not only within clinics, agency's, and not for profit sites but all over the Internet as well. But how does someone put a price on their own genetics? What kind of guidelines are being offered? The reality may be is that no one wants to think about selling their genetics...that's why it's called egg 'donation'. The compensation comes into play for the medical trauma and inconvenience of the donation itself. At the end of the day the Intended Parents maybe the ones who need protection. They are the people, after all, that will have to pay the upwards of $10,000.00+ bill. Perhaps the word donation will be removed from the third party family building vocabulary. We will all have to wait and see......
Thursday, April 7, 2011
It's Time to Register for START ART (formally SMART ART)!!
Infertility is a challenging and rewarding field of nursing, and one that is evolving rapidly and dramatically, requiring nurses and other healthcare practitioners to constantly remain current with the latest state-of–the ART technology. Those in practice, as well as nurses in transition, accept that this ever changing arena requires an ongoing commitment to pursue new information, techniques, and best practices. And, equal in priority, is the IVF nurse’s sensitivity to parents’ quest to create families and the fragility of early embryonic life.
The Annual REI Nursing Congress: Scientific & Therapeutic Approaches To Assisted Reproductive Technology (STARTARTSM) provides a unique and comprehensive educational opportunity, featuring critical updates on the latest advances in reproductive medicine, from procedures and protocols to psychosocial and legal issues. The goal of this Congress is to provide late-breaking information and cutting-edge techniques to improve ART outcomes - a goal that is matched by the IVF nurses’ skills, compassion, and caring that make this field so remarkable. (This is a great educational tool for all agency owners too!)
SO if you haven't already heard, START ART (formally SMART ART) is scheduled for August 4-6 at the Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel in Las Vegas. The same place SMART ART was held last year. If you haven't experience this conference then I highly suggest that you consider it especially if you are a surrogacy or egg donation agency owner because I have always found the legal and mental health segments to be excellent. Its also great to know what some of the clinical aspects are in Assisted Reproductive Technology as well. Here are the program objectives:
- Summarize recent advances in hormonal treatments and regimens involved in assisted reproductive technology (ART)
- Distinguish strategies for modifying stimulation protocols to maximize outcomes
- Describe clinical and laboratory features that predict response and prognosticate outcome with ART
- Explain advances in laboratory techniques for oocyte preservation
- Review impact and strategies for managing male factor infertility
- Discuss strategies to preserve fertility in cancer patients
- Identify mental health, legal, and psychosocial issues encountered by infertile couples
- Summarize various psychosocial issues and support strategies that clinicians can employ in working with infertile couples
- Highlight recent advances in the fields of molecular genetics and proteomics as they impact the clinical practice of preimplantation genetic screening and diagnosis
- This activity is intended for the education of nurses, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals specializing in reproductive medicine and assisted reproductive technology.
I hope to see you in Las Vegas at START ART!
Sharon
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Don’t Use Twitter Like a Wet Cracker By Joshu Thomas
Twitter is a marketing bomb if used the right way. I have been using twitter for more than 2 years now and have been benefited only when I discovered the right way to use it.
Just like many of us I usually blindly do 2 things:
Blindly follow as many as suggested twitter accounts to follow.
Blindly tweet every single post on my blog using the retweet plugins.
I can for sure say these two are the biggest mistakes that could get your cracker wet.
The major pattern you could see on Twitter is:
You get followed back by many if you follow them
People subscribe to auto-follow tools to increase the follower counts
Your Twitter dashboard is flooded with tweets if you leave it un touched for 10 minutes
As soon as you tweet you see few new visitors from twitter landing on your website / blog
Is that what Twitter is all about – a few extra visitors, lot of blind tweets, flooded dashboards and huge chunk of followers to show off?
Now let me share what I learnt the hard way and something that could really help you benefit.
I created another twitter account and followed a different strategy that the one I used to use and many of us still use.
I had the new Ground rules this time:
Only follow who I really wanted to
Will try to keep the follower to following ratio unequal
Have a straight forward profile Bio (simple words about me and what I do)
Have a real profile pic (preferably not a graphic unless you are a huge brand)
Respond to direct messages
Visit / Reply to interesting tweets and if good, re-tweet.
Meet / interact with real people and build contacts
How this was different from my previous approach
With my old profile even though I had 8000+ followers on a retweet I used to get 120 -150 new hits on my blog posts. Then what are the 7850 followers for? Spamming you? I guess you have got the message I am trying to send across.
Here is a snapshot of my account: ( I have 60 people I follow and 1794 followers)
Take Home: Twitter is all about real people and real contacts – build them and you would be rewarded.
About the Author: Joshu Thomas is a Blogger from India. Blogging and web development helped him become independent, and that is why loves it. You can read more from him on his website, OrangeCopper.com.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
3 Ways to Make Your Writing Clearer and More Engaging By Bamboo Forest
The following three strategies will assist you:
1. Move confusing sentences to a clean page
Ever been whistling along with your blog post when suddenly you arrive at a thought you’re trying to express on paper, yet it’s being completely uncooperative like a toddler who refuses to eat his brussels sprouts?
If you’re dealing with a bratty sentence that doesn’t want to be clear and concise, don’t let it just sit there misbehaving. You have to discipline it. To do so, move the disorderly sentence away from your post, onto an empty page.
Once you’ve pasted the confusing sentence into clear, white space, begin formulating a new sentence underneath it. By moving the confusing sentence outside of your post and onto an empty page, you won’t be distracted by the rest of your writing. The singularity of focus gained will help you create a better, clearer sentence.
Sometimes it’s helpful when pasting the confusing sentence to include the surrounding sentences for context.
2. Replace a word used in consecutive sentences when it’s monotonous
I’ll use an example from a blog post I wrote that uses a river as a metaphor. Pay close attention to how the word ‘rushing’ is used in two consecutive sentences.
Here’s the original segment:
“Do you hear the sound of the water rushing over the rocks? Tell me… when you hear the rushing water, when are you hearing it; in the past or the future? Neither. It’s only possible to hear this precious sound in the now.”
Do you notice how the word ‘rushing’ used in these consecutive sentences sounds monotonous? Using this word consecutively dulls the delivery because it’s repetitive to the reader’s ear. Instead, it’s best to replace one of the usages of ‘rushing’ with a synonym or something close to it.
Look at the improved version with the second use of ‘rushing’ replaced with a new word:
“Do you hear the sound of the water rushing over the rocks? Tell me… when you hear the babbling water, when are you hearing it; in the past or the future? Neither. It’s only possible to hear this precious sound in the now.”
Much better sounding prose, no? In the aforementioned example, replacing one of the usages of ‘rushing’ actually fosters a more vivid picture in the reader’s mind. A thesaurus can help you come up with a good replacement for a word that’s detrimentally used twice in a row.
3. Don’t over explain
Our writing often gives enough information so that the reader will understand what you’re conveying even if you didn’t specify every last detail. If you’re determined to give information that your readers will discern without your help, you’ve bloated your writing and slowed its delivery.
In the book On Writing, Stephen King reminds us, “If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can’t you? I don’t need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown.”
The above principle applies equally to non-fiction.
Earlier I told you that when you’re dealing with a confusing sentence, you should move it onto an empty page and construct a clearer sentence underneath to take its place.
I also added this:
“Sometimes it’s helpful when pasting the confusing sentence to include the surrounding sentences for context.”
You’ll notice I didn’t specify how many surrounding sentences you should include because that’s something you’ll determine yourself, right?
When writing for your audience, always make clarity and engagement the highest priority.
About the Author: Bamboo Forest created Tick Tock Timer, an online timer that helps bloggers increase their focus and get more work.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
5 Ways To Network Your Way To Blogging Success By Steve Roy
We all know the vast power of social media and the role it can play in your success as a blogger. However, there are still many, many blogggers who are not taking advantage of this phenomenon.
When I say taking advantage of it, I don’t mean posting your weekend activities on Facebook or tweeting out random thoughts you have throughout the day.
What I’m talking about is using social media to build relationships with your peers and with those who are in social circles that you want to be a part of
The Power Of Networking
Networking is especially important for a new blogger. If you think you can go it alone and see the same level of success, then by all means try it. However, if you want to speed up the process of building traffic and gaining new readers and subscribers, then you need to leverage other bloggers audiences. This is where networking comes in.
Great content is the starting point for a successful blog, but when you are just beginning, nobody is going to read it because you have no traffic. Building significant levels of traffic takes time and that’s part of the blogging process, but why not help yourself and begin networking with bloggers who have already achieved what you want?
For example, I have a fitness blog which has been running since 2008. It has never received more than 300 visitors in any given month. Why? Because I have not networked one bit. I have written my posts and done nothing to get people to read them.
Now take my current blog, I have focused my attention on building relationships through networking and have had much greater success. Here some of the things I have done which have helped grow my blog quite rapidly:
1. Use guest posting.
We have all heard that guest posting is a great way to reach out to more readers and build traffic. A few important things to keep in mind when using this method are:
Find a blog in a similar niche.I see a lot of bloggers who want to submit their post to a high traffic site even though it is in a completely different niche. Big mistake. Even if you get some traffic from it, chances are that they will have little interest in your topic. There is no point to driving traffic to your blog if nobody wants to read it or opt in to your newsletter.
Interact with those who comment on your guest post. Don’t just reply with a “thanks for the comment”, ask them questions and get them talking to each other, that’s how you will get them to come to your blog and become your readers too.
2. Use Twitter.
For months, I was resistant to Twitter because I thought it was a glorified chat room. When I was finally convinced to get on board by a friend, I discovered its potential. In my opinion, Twitter is themost powerful of all social media streams. Just in the last month, I have been in contact with “A” list bloggers and gotten their radar, formed relationships with very successful business owners and bloggers, and made several friends in the process. When used correctly, Twitter can be incredibly powerful and can have a huge impact on your business.
3. Be Useful.
Anyone can self promote and send link after link promoting their own stuff, but the real potential for massive traffic is when others start doing it for you. I can send out 20 tweets about my own most recent post and get a few visitors.
One tweet from someone like Pat Flynn, Brian Clark, or Yaro Starak will send 50 or 100 times the traffic that I could promoting myself. How do you get these big names to promote you? You need to get their attention. Email them something that will interest them, sell their products as an affiliate, send them a personal and unique Tweet, but you HAVE to provide value.
Successful bloggers are incredibly busy people and inundated with emails, calls, and everything else all day every day. You need to stand out, be different, and NOT be looking for a handout. “Please RT this” will not work with these folks.
4. Make Friends.
I have been lucky enough to meet a few people on Twitter who I can now call friends. It just so happens that these friends have blogs that are MUCH more successful than mine.
My intention is to build on those friendships and hopefully learn some things about blogging along the way. If you have a hidden agenda and are just using your “friendship” for your benefit only, it won’t last too long and you will have burned a very important bridge.
If we constantly ask our network to promote us, it will most likely ruin the relationship. However, if we are providing a good resource for people and our content is high quality, we may find that we get promoted without even asking. Just being mentioned in a high profile bloggers blog can send hundreds or thousands of visitors to our sites. The important thing here is to focus on building a network of friends, not promoters.
5. Give, Then Receive.
If you can adopt the philosophy that you need to give before receiving, you will be in a much better position in the long run.
If you can consistently promote high quality sites and valuable resources to your network, you will find that you will begin to build credibility and trust. These two things are absolutely critical to a building a successful blog.
People love to share information. It’s our job to share high quality and valuable information. If you find a new blogger who seems to have great ideas, by all means, send out a tweet. If you come across a fascinating article, share that too.
Don’t worry about others promoting you right now, that will come in time (assuming you have good content). Your focus should be on providing helpful resources and offering that information to your network. Over time and with a little luck, you may get the attention of the people whose blogs you have been promoting. That’s when great things can happen.
If you are not building your network in some capacity every day, you are severely limiting the growth of your blog. Make a commitment to building relationships with those in your niche and start building mutually beneficial relationships today!
You will be amazed at the difference it can make.
About the Author: Steve Roy is the owner of EndingTheGrind.com, a blog dedicated to helping people get out of their miserable jobs, build an online business, and live with passion!
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Time to Move Your Clocks AHEAD one HOUR on Sunday!!
Its that "TIME" already! Day Light Savings time starts Sunday March 13th at 2 am! This is just a friendly reminder to "spring ahead" and start going to bed a few minutes earlier each night so you can remain as productive as possible!
Friday, March 4, 2011
How to Get Your Black Belt in Blogging By Bamboo Forest
It’s more craft than art.
If you can internalize what’s required to write a solid blog post, you’ll beat out the competition in the same way someone with a black belt will usually win a fight against someone who hasn’t trained and internalized fighting principles.
While getting a black belt in blogging doesn’t guarantee you’ll become huge, it does significantly increase your chances.
Let’s examine some of the fundamentals you’ll need to master to receive your black belt in the craft of blogging.
1. Use Metaphors and Similes
Using metaphors and similes will increase the quality of your posts in two ways.
It helps your audience to easily understand a concept since you’ll be comparing the new concept with a concept they’re already familiar with.
It paints a picture in the minds of your readers which will engage and please them.
A metaphor I recently used was comparing water to focus. I explained to my audience that focusing on the negative is like randomly pouring water out of your canteen when you’re lost in a jungle and really need that water for survival.
Do you see how the above metaphor not only paints a picture that makes reading more enjoyable, but also instills the lesson with much greater impact than mere plain language does?
2. Be Succinct
Saying everything you want to say in fewer words requires more time than conveying the same message to your audience without concern of how many words you use.
It may seem odd that a shorter post often takes longer to write than a longer one, but it’s not.
When you strive to limit your word count without compromising your message, you have to be methodical in how you express your message. Conversely, when you’re indifferent about word count, you don’t need to make as much an effort in how you convey your message.
Just as a good martial artist strives to make every movement as efficient as possible with no wasted energy, likewise, you should make every post you write as short as possible without your message being compromised.
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter. ~Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).
Your readership will love you for being concise.
3. Be Entertaining
As Jon Morrow of Copyblogger has mentioned before, if all people wanted was information they’d buy a textbook.
One primary reason people read blogs is because they’re looking for a diversion from the mundaneness of life.
If you want to compete with the competition, discover and practice as many ways as possible to make your blog entertaining.
Here are some ways to do that:
Use metaphors and similes.
Share interesting experiences and how they relate to your message.
Use quotes from books, music bands, movies and TV shows to help illustrate your points.
Be hilarious.
Be controversial.
4. Be Diligent
Unlike a black belt in the martial arts, once you get your black belt in blogging, it can be taken away from you within a moment’s notice.
In martial arts, once you get your black belt, you don’t necessarily have to spar with anyone from that day forward and you’ll always remain a black belt.
Not so with blogging.
You see, we’re fighting every day. Every day we’re fighting for people’s attention and trying to convince them that we’re worth staying subscribed to and that the competition can’t offer what we do.
There’s really only two ways to keep your black belt and it requires tremendous discipline.
1. Read like your life depends on it
I currently read an hour and a half a day and consider my reading more important than content creation for the simple reason that you can create all day long, but if it doesn’t shine, what good is it?
Reading diligently, blogs and books, will ensure that ideas are constantly coming to you and that they’re the kind of ideas that will keep your readers craving more of what you have to offer.
When I fall short in my reading regiment, fewer ideas come to me and the quality of ideas diminish.
2. Write like your life depends on it
While I definitely think reading is even more important than writing, writing’s a close second.
For starters, if you’re not updating your blog on a regular basis you can hardly be considered a blogging black belt no matter how much talent you have.
Writing is also the best way for you to practice all the techniques you’ve learned. Even in martial arts, any serious black belt never becomes complacent once they get to this exalted level. They just want to keep getting better.
What else do you need to receive your black belt in blogging?
About the Author: Tick Tock Timer is an online timer that helps anyone serious about getting things done be more productive, created by Bamboo Forest.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
5 Lessons I learned from Writing Almost 300 Guest Posts in One Year By Onibalusi Bamidele
1. Having Goals Matter
You probably have heard many bloggers say that having goals is critical to succeeding as a blogger; this same principle applies to guest blogging.
When I started guest blogging, I used the work hard approach instead of the work smart approach, I didn’t have a specific goal in mind and this led me to writing so many guest posts without tracking the results, it was after I have written so many guest posts that I discovered I’m not getting results.
Right from the onset, make sure you know what your purpose for guest blogging is because it will determine your approach. If your purpose for guest posting is to improve your search engine rankings your approach will be different from that of someone who wants to increase his/her blog subscribers.
2. Quality Beats Quantity
I wouldn’t have agreed with the above statement when I was still new to guest blogging, no wonder they say “experience is the best teacher”.
There were days I wrote as much as 6 guest posts and I write guest posts almost every day of the week, my main aim was to get my guest posts published on many blogs, which led to the quality of my guest posts suffering. I submitted most of these guest posts to small blogs and they ended up sending me very little traffic, some blogs didn’t even send me any traffic.
I didn’t discover the truth until one day, my guest post was published on an A-list blog which sent me thousands of visitors; it was then that I realized that quality beats quantity.
The bitter guest blogging truth many people might not want to hear is this, “submitting 5 guest posts to 5 “big” A-list blogs is better than submitting 100 guest posts to smaller blogs”. Most A-list blogs will send you thousands of visitors depending on the quality of your guest post while the majority of the small blogs will send you very little traffic, if at all.
3. Your Guest Post Will Determine How Much Traffic You Will Get
From my experience with telling people the benefits of guest blogging I’ve seen a lot of people who believe that writing valuable posts for other people’s blogs is a waste of time. They believe it’s better to have all their best posts on their blogs only.
The truth is, if you write an exceptional post on your blog it can go viral, but as far as blogs with little traffic are concerned, luck plays a very large role,
In order to get good results from your posts you must have a big audience, and one great way to do this is by writing for other, larger blogs. A guest post on a big blog can send you far more traffic than you’ll ever get in a week, no matter how great you think your blog posts are.
Another thing is that many people make a mistake of writing low quality guest posts for other blogs, as this ends up affecting them because it is either rejected or it underperforms on the blog they submit it to.
The better your guest post, the more traffic you get – and this factor might be even more important than the size of the blog you as publishing your post on.
4. It is Very Important to Work on Sustaining Your Traffic
When I wrote a guest post for an A-list blog that sent me thousands of visitors, I was so happy and I began to think I would be getting so many visitors from that period onward. How mistaken I was. A lot of factors will determine the percentage of visitors you’ll be able to sustain from your guest posts, some of these factors include the quality of your own content, your domain name and your design/user experience.
It is very important to work on getting as many visitors from your guest posts to subscribe to your blog because that is the best way to keep them returning over and over again.
5. Rejection Is Inevitable
One thing many people are afraid when they consider guest blogging is rejection. They wonder what will happen if the other person doesn’t like their posts. That is a pretty good question, but you should also know that being rejected is not the end of the world – as long as you will be guest posting you should always be prepared for rejection. What matters most is not the rejection but how you deal with it.
If a blogger rejects your guest post, try to face the reality and find out what can be responsible for your guest post being rejected. It can be because of your guest post’s quality, it can be because of too much grammar errors and it can be because your guest post is not in line with the style of that blog. If you can’t figure out what is responsible for your guest post being rejected try to get in touch with the blogger and ask him/her politely to tell you why your guest post was rejected so that you can improve on it in the future.
Share Your Thoughts
What do you think about guest blogging? If you were to start guest posting again what would you do differently? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.
About the Author: Onibalusi Bamidele is a 16 year old entrepreneur and founder of YoungPrePro, a site with practical tips on achieving online success.
Monday, February 21, 2011
How to Instantly Kill Laziness and Boost Blogging Productivity By Bamboo Forest
I got lazy and stopped attending to my daily writing and reading duties as an online entrepreneur. On one of my blogs I haven’t written a single post since December 2nd. To say I’ve dropped the ball is a massive understatement.
What the hell do you do when you have a few sites going that have tons of potential and are even gaining momentum, but suddenly, a mad scientist injects you with the lazy bug?
Do you just sit there and watch it all go down?
If you want to ensure your online properties have any hope for the future you can’t allow yourself to be sucked down the whirlpool of complacency and indifference. Doing so is guaranteed to make anything you’ve worked hard on go absolutely nowhere.
But that’s NOT what we’re in the game for, right? We’re not doing this for our health. Let’s be honest here, we’re writing post after post, reading books and blogs and all the rest of it so that we can gains tons of readers and make the bloody mula.
You with me on this?
Laziness can hit anyone
We may enjoy what we do. But that’s not enough. Let me tell you something… the lazy bug can infect any and all people regardless of passion. And if you let it, it can destroy your dreams. I wish I could say this laziness and complacency that overcame me was a result of my busy schedule, but the reality is, it was due to my lack of will.
To be perfectly honest, I hit rock bottom. Not on drugs or alcohol mind you. But on incessantly watching YouTube videos, reading tweets, and in general, wasting time like my life depended on it.
Hopefully you’ll never get as bad as I was. And luckily there’s a technique that can get you out of laziness and into productivity even if you haven’t reached rock bottom.
Overcome resistance to work with this technique
The solution to inertia is putting yourself in jail. Not the kind of jail you go to when you steal a Twix bar from the local 7-Eleven, of course. What I’m talking about is called the ‘jail of productivity’. This jail, my friend, will guarantee that you get serious work done. And the best part is, it won’t let you out until you’ve actually accomplished something.
All you need to do to put yourself in the jail of productivity is simply set a timer and work non-stop until it sounds. This technique permits no excuses and leaves you with nothing in its wake except hardcore productivity.
How setting a timer saved me from laziness
Realizing I was letting days go by without getting much work done, I committed myself to setting a timer every day and working non-stop until it sounded.
By doing the above, I eliminated all outs available to me. I couldn’t watch another YouTube video, I was on the clock! I couldn’t check twitter; that’s not allowed while the timer’s running. Using a timer took me from rock bottom laziness to becoming a diligent worker.
I began my laziness recovery program with setting a timer and reading important blogs for 20 minutes each day and writing 30 minutes each day. The timer guaranteed I got 50 minutes of focused work in every day. That may seem small to you, but it’s a testimony that I’m on my way to full and complete recovery from my laziness addiction.
Why setting a timer is the best way to get you to work
If you’re in the planning stage of getting to work, this can last for hours. “Preparation” can consist of watching YouTube videos, reading the news, eating, TV, almost anything.
But we all know the truth… the “preparation stage” to getting to work is nothing more than procrastination disguised as necessity. Setting a timer, on the other hand, kills preparation. Setting a timer gets you right to work!
It also makes the work you do concrete. If you merely say you’re going to work on something, you have no idea how much time you’ll be investing into working. When work time is undertermined, your mind gets discouraged because it begins wondering how long and dreadful it’ll end up being which leads to procrastination.
But when you set a timer, committed to working for an allotted time, you’ve created a time frame that’s absolutely concrete. There’s a glorious light at the end of the tunnel which continuously entices you toward completion of your goal.
Where to find an effective online timer
I’ve actually created an online timer called Tick Tock Timer.
It’s specifically designed to kill your procrastination and get you to work without all the nonsense. I know it’s ironic that the very creator of a tool to beat procrastination fell into a whirlpool of non-productivity.
But it just goes to show you, any tool at your disposal, no matter how effective, is useless when you’re not using it.
If you’ve contracted the lazy bug, putting yourself in the jail of productivity (setting a timer) just might be the solution.
Give it a try.
About the Author: Bamboo Forest created Tick Tock Timer, an online timer that helps you stop procrastinating, get to work, and stay focused.
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