Marriage & Depression

Fibromyalgia & depression seem to go hand in hand. There was a new study that asked does marriage help depression? Upon reading the article I thought “Yes, all I need is someone to pick up after and take my TV time, that will make me happy”. The study gives no thought to the added stress of marriage, or the long term effects a bad marriage can have on someone. The study showed a decrease of 8 points in married people.  However, this is on a scale of 0-84, I really don’t know how someone decides yes I’m just an 82, not an 83. Eating a candy bar might gain you 8 points on that scale. Plus, the article doesn’t look at the fact that maybe single people appeared slightly more depressed because of the stereotype against being single. A stereotype that is further propagated by headlines such as “Depressed? Marriage may help”. So many single people seem to view marriage as the solution to all their problems, and that they are failing by not being married. So the study itself is worth a read, the article wasn’t my favorite, but it’s an interesting concept. The final conclusion was that marriage decreased depression because the depressed person was given a feeling that someone cared about them. Don’t run out & buy a wedding dress just yet, maybe it’s not really marriage, it’s being cared about, this could also be accomplished by a concerned friend, family member or therapist. So what do you think? Has marriage helped your depression, or do you think it would?

Day 7: Technorati

Now that you have your keywords, it is technorati time. Technorati is a blog search engine.  You put your keywords in “tags” at the bottom of your post and then ping technorati either manually or automatically and they come and include you in their index. I use this free tag creator it really speeds up the process. Technorati is great because it used to take weeks to get a page indexed, and to start getting traffic from your keywords. Now it is almost instantaneous. Experiment with different keywords to see what works best for you. Have any questions about technorati? Leave a comment and let me know.

Day 6: Finding Keywords

Keywords are well, the key to everything.  Yes I wrote that and I’ll even admit that it is lame, but keywords are important. They are the entire structure for your blog. As simple as possible, search engines like keywords, and we like search engines. How do you find what keywords you should use? Overture is your new best friend. It will tell you how many searches were done on each word per month. You will want to use these keywords in your technorati tags, titles, and posts. Plus they tell you what to write about.

What should you write about? I keep a notebook of all my keywords for each blog. Then I have what I call command central, which is really just a bulletin board with sticky notes on it. So whenever I have a brainstorm I write down future posts ideas so I don’t forget. When I’m stumped, I just look at command central and there are my topics. So the next step in starting your own business is to make your first post. You should post at least a few times a day, if not several times a day.  Post as much as you can without compromising your content, which will differ for every blog. Feel free to post a permalink to your first ever post in the comments.