 Hi, I'm Mitch Mitchell. Today I'm going to talk about blogging and Twitter, two separate things but I'm going to talk about both of them. The first one I'm going to talk about is blogging and I'm going to talk about pop-ups. You know, some moron had to write an article a few years ago saying that having pop-ups on your site gets people to sign up for your newsletters and that you will sell more products than not having them. Next thing you know, every person imaginable who's trying to make money online in some way has pop-ups on their site. Frankly, irritating. They're very irritating. I've never had a pop-up on my site. However, I will give credence to the fact that there are some people who at least have given you an opportunity to read the article. So as you scroll down when you get down to the bottom, maybe you'll see a little thing pop across the side or maybe now you'll see a pop-up but you at least got to read the content. What I'm seeing lately is these windows come from the top. So all of a sudden you're on the content. Next thing you know, everything is dropping down and now you can't read anything. You got this big thing in the middle. Or as soon as you get to the page, bam, the entire thing is gone for some stupid pop-up asking you to sign up for this or click on this to go to this page for that. You know, this is really irritating. I find that I am less enchanted to visit a lot of blogs these days where I haven't been going consistently because it ruins the reader experience. It definitely does. And these people care more about getting subscribers or buyers than they actually care about the readers. I mean, why write content at all? Just have a site there, put up a title, get people to come, pop them with a newsletter saying, hey, you want to read the article? Sign up for the newsletter. I'll send it to you. I'm thinking that's a lot more honest than what you're doing because you're not offering any value. I could care less what you have to, you know, say at that point. So I've basically wrote a blog post about this where I said, you know what, within a couple of months I'm not gonna share any more of your content on Twitter or anywhere else. If a pop-up shows before I've had time to read an article, I'm deleting it, I'm starting a list, and I don't know if I'll publish it somewhere or call people out, but that's just irksome. And anyone who has a pop-up who says they really care about the readers but it pops up before anyone gets to stop, you're lying. I'm sorry, I'm calling you out. Now I hope to hear from you. I'd love to hear how you explain that and how it's beneficial to the readers. And I know some folks may say, oh, but I'm offering this and I'm offering that if they just sign up for the newsletter. You know what? You show value by letting people see what you write first. You know, you give them something first. Now, having said that, let's talk about Twitter and DMs or direct messages. One, I absolutely hate these things when you're first meeting someone and you haven't even had a conversation in regular Twitter and they're already sending you something saying, oh, go to this page and download this free thing or go to this page and like my, you know, like my Facebook or sign up for my newsletter or buy such-and-such or whatever. You know what? Whatever happened to engagement? I wrote something else on someone else's blog where I said that in the last four years, I have followed two people. First, just two. And both of them this year. One is Neil deGrasse Tyson and the other one is Derek Coleman who used to play for Syracuse back in the 80s. He's one of my favorite players on the team. Derek is on Twitter. I love following the stuff Derek puts up. Two, which says that everybody else follows me first. And you know what? On my Twitter profile, it says do not send me a DM as a first contact. It's right there blatant and it happens every single day. Where, you know, I'm one of those people, if someone follows me, I will go take a look at their profile. I want to see what they're putting up. And if it's something that interests me in some way, then I will connect with them. And sometimes it's immediate when you get this auto-DM. I hate that kind of thing. And I immediately unfollow. Sometimes it may be a few hours, yet you know it's still not them sending anything. How do you know that? Because my name's not in it. I mean, if someone sends a DM and it says, hi Mitch, thank you for following me. I have this. You know what? I probably still hate it, but I might not be as vociferous in wanting to immediately unfollow them as I am when I know that they're sending it automatically. How do I know? Because that little thing shows up quite often. And it may say crowdfire, or it may say, what is it, a tweet jukebox, or whatever. I mean, it's automated. Maybe they've got it on delay, but it's still automated. They don't care. I had the conversation with this one guy this one night, and I just decided to ask him why he did it. He says, well, I'm connected with so many people, I don't have time to really talk to anybody. So I just offer such and such or whatever. I'm thinking, well, what the devil is that? So we had this conversation. I said, so in essence, what you're telling me is that you'd rather get the numbers than actually have any real engagement with anybody. And to his credit, we did go back and forth with this. And he said something about me being kind of prudish in my in my reaction to this, which I said, dude, I've been here since 2008. I've had plenty of conversations with people all over the world. I will talk to people. I've never sent an auto DM. As a matter of fact, I rarely send DMs. I mean, maybe every once in a while, but in which case, I talk to them openly first. Hey, I'd like to ask you a question, but I'm thinking it would work better in a DM. Can I send you one? And then they say yes. And then I send them some every once in a while. Someone I connect to regular on Twitter will send me an open message. Can I send you something on DM? Yes, you at least asked. I don't know. Maybe maybe I just take these things a bit too seriously. But I like to write and talk about social media engagement. I am not always selling something to people. And you know what? Every once in a while, I will put a link on Twitter talking about my books or my products, but it's every once in a while. I'm not sitting there marketing all day long. Yes, I will pre-program. I take the time to pre-program my blog post for the week. You know, I have my new post and then I have previous posts, but I take the time. I don't have some app automatically just selecting stuff. Have you ever been on Twitter and seen this tweet old post and someone is posting something from 2010 talking about Firefox 3.1? Which, you know, what's the point of that? So, I don't know. This is my rant saying that people need to be a little more courteous with each other. Let's talk. Stop doing all this stupid automation. Stop doing the pop-ups. Stop doing all that stuff and ruining the user experience. By the way, that's why Google has been so blatantly pushing everybody to, you know, make their sites mobile-friendly because they're saying that they're looking for the user experience. Well, pop-ups are not a good user experience. I don't know anybody who says they love pop-ups. Even the people who have them admit they don't like pop-ups when they visit other blogs. Really? Why are you doing that to other people then? This is my thought. So, like I said, I'm Mitch Mitchell. Let me know your thoughts. Y'all take care.