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Everyone is born with natural talents but no-one is born with the skills needed to take advantage of these natural talents.

Natural talents tend to be associated with activities that are so easy for us to do that we do them without really having to think about them or make much of an effort. Natural talents include such attributes as: artistic, creative, entrepreneurial, detail oriented, mathematical, imaginative, innovative, mechanically minded,  practical, literary, persuasive, articulate, etc.

Natural talents on their own don’t really count for much. They are merely unfulfilled potential without the development of skills.

By developing a ‘skills portfolio’ you can identify patterns that can help you discover your natural talents, as well as help you identify skills that you would like to develop in order to fulfill specific personal goals.

What Are Skills?

I’m glad you asked that question. Skills are learned and practiced abilities. They are influenced by our natural talents. Skills are much easier to develop in areas we have a natural talent for. However, even without a natural talent, skills can still be developed for activities and topics that a person has an interest in.

As an example, if a person has  a natural entrepreneurial talent , they still need to develop specific entrepreneurial skills, such as developing a viable business plan, finding clients, marketing, etc., for the natural entrepreneurial talent to be of any value.

On the other hand, if an individual has a personal interest in becoming an entrepreneur but they don’t have a natural entrepreneurial talent, they can still become an entrepreneur by learning and developing entrepreneurial skills. The process of becoming an entrepreneur will take longer and be more challenging for a person who does not possess a natural entrepreneurial talent, but it is still doable.

5 Basic Skills Groups

For anyone interested in undergoing a major transition in their life, it is a good idea to begin by identify our current skills set, including those associated with our natural talents. Knowing our current skills set can help us identify activities we want to include in, for example:

• a new lifestyle we are trying to design (including a nomadic one); or
• a new career we are trying to break into; or
• a new enterprise we are trying to develop.

The catch here (and there is generally a catch with this type of activity) is that identifying skills, particularly those associated with a natural talent, is not an easy task.

In her book, The New Zealand Guide to Transferable Skills, Christine Dekker identifies and defines 5 basic skills groups that are very useful at helping people identify what skills they have developed.

These skills groups are:

1. Physical/Practical
   1. Working with things and the physical environment; using your hands and body skillfully.
   2. Examples of physical/practical skills include: assembling, building, fitting, fixing, installing, maintaining, repairing, restoring, ordering, using.
2. Creative/Artistic
   1. Working in a visual medium or with words or sound to express ideas/emotions; using imagination; being innovative.
   2. This group can be divided into: words and ideas; visual; performing.
   3. Examples of creative/artistic skills include: (words and ideas) writing, symbolising, interpreting, modifying, expressing, scripting (visual) color coordinating, decorating, fashioning, styling, forming, drawing, (performing) acting, composing, entertaining, modeling, role-playing, staging.
3. Communication/Interpersonal
   1. Working with people; any interaction or information exchange between people; using language; understanding.
   2. This group can be divided into: ‘key’ communication skills; teaching; relationship-building; facilitating/leading; problem-solving; marketing.
   3. Examples of communication/interpersonal skills include: (‘key’ communication skills) answering, briefing, articulating, writing, reporting, describing, enquiring, conversing; (teaching) advising, coaching, disseminating, explaining, training, instructing; (relationship-building) affirming, appreciating, nurturing, team-building, guiding, empowering, listening, supporting; (facilitating/leading) brainstorming, chairing, directing, motivating, stimulating; (problem-solving) arbitrating, conciliating, mediating, negotiating, reconciling, resolving; (marketing) advertising, representing, selling, convincing.
4. Organization/Management
   1. Bringing resources/people together; making something work together as a whole; using initiative and vision; having an overall picture or goal.
   2. This group can be divided into: to do with time; to do with resources; to do with people and tasks.
   3. Examples of organization/management skills include: (to do with time) forecasting, planning, predicting, scheduling; (to do with resources) allocating, budgeting, grouping, purchasing, sorting; (to do with people and tasks) administrating, coordinating, delegating, monitoring, networking, recruiting, reviewing, supervising.
5. Information Processing
   1. Working with facts, figures, concepts; using thinking/computing skills.
   2. This group can be divided into:‘key’ thinking skills; language and ideas; facts and figures.
   3. Examples of information processing skills include: (‘key’ thinking skills) comprehending, thinking, studying, perceiving, reading, judging, listening, identifying; (language and ideas) appraising, preparing, conceptualising, defining, reporting, editing, summarising, theorising, revising; (facts and figures) analysing, auditing, assessing, compiling, estimating, evaluating, recording, quoting, processing, mapping, measuring.

How do you know if you have identified a skill?

Skills can be so many different things. In the book mentioned above, the author listed over 300 unique skills. Each skill is identified as an action verb, and in the lists presented in the book each skill generally ended with an –ing.

To begin identifying your skills, try completing the following sentence:

I am good at _________________________.

Now that I have Identified a List of Skills, What do I do Next?

Use the skills you have identified in the 5 basic skills groups to develop a skills portfolio by identifying:

1. which skills you are best at;
2. which skills you enjoy using the most; and
3. which skills you would like to improve.

Now, using your skills portfolio, try answering the following questions:

1. Can you identify any patterns emerging from your skills portfolio? Any activities that you enjoy doing, have strong skills in, and can be used to enhance your lifestyle?
2. Are there a group of skills that you have identified that can be associated with a specific natural talent? Are there other skills that you can develop that will help you enhance this natural talent?
3. Are there skills that you can use that will help you identify activities you would like to try, new activities that you can use to help you design a new authentic lifestyle with?
4. Are there skills that you can build on in order to develop an enterprise with? One that you have already developed skills in so you know that you would enjoy doing, and feel confident you could turn into a successful money-making enterprise?
5. Have you identified any new skills that you would like to develop? Or old skills that you absolutely want to have nothing more to do with?

Tip: If you are having difficulties identifying your skills, ask friends, family members, co-workers, etc., if they can identify some of your skills for you, to get you started. We tend to devalue or overlook skills that are associated with natural talents because we find them so easy and effortless to do, whereas people who know us would easily be able to identify these skills for us.

TTFN

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Oh, there are professional associations where you can discuss professional issues, and meet other professionals either for monthly meetings, or during an annual professional’s conference. But nomads and location independent professionals tend to live either in remote areas or are relatively transient, so monthly meetings and annual conferences tend not to become part of their “To Do List”. However, having a group that shares a common mindset and can offer you support is not a bad idea. Today’s modern nomads can easily become members of today’s modern tribes.

A Second Life gathering of a Tribes party. source: retinafunk, Flickr, Creative Commons

According to Seth Godin, author of the book Tribes, “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” (p.1) So members of a tribe share a common interest or a common lifestyle ideal (like being a nomad or location independent professional), and share a way to communicate or be connected (like a forum, or a space in Second Life), and have collected around a leader (typically a change agent). There is much more to Tribes than this, issues like leadership and social change are important parts of Tribes, but more on those will be written in a future post.

For now, the important aspect of becoming a part of a Tribe is that they can play an important role in the success of any new virtual enterprise, or unconventional lifestyle — if you can find and connect to an appropriate tribe. Not a ‘good enough’ tribe, but a full-on appropriate tribe.

Finding a ‘full-on appropriate’ tribe takes a bit of looking. For example, I could look for a tribe that has developed around the idea of the impact that baby boomers are having on society, but that tribe wouldn’t be appropriate because a major issue that is important to me is the location independent lifestyle design integration of work and life. Or I could look for a tribe that has developed around the idea of the location independence lifestyle design integration of work and life, but doesn’t provide any focus on issues related to 50+ age groups. I could either make do with one or other of these tribes and try to integrate the issues that are missing, or I could begin to develop a tribe that integrates all aspects of what I am looking for and see what develops around me.

From a ‘full-on’ appropriate tribe, I should be able to obtain:

• support for the lifestyle, ideal, issue, that is important to me;
• feedback on how to do what I want to do;
• educational information on the common interest that connects the tribe; and
• a feeling of belonging to a community.

For anyone interested in connecting with a tribe of modern nomads/location independent professionals, check out:

• the Location Independent Website located at http://www.locationindependentcom

TTFN

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Do you want to:

• have a newsletter that is completely separate from your blog? or
  

  A Copy of Each Post can be Emailed to Subscribers through Feedburner

• email your blog posts to subscribers instead of creating a separate newsletter? or
• have your readers subscribe to your posts through an RSS reader?

And then there is the question of how to publish your subscription-based information:

• do you hire an emarketing company, like Constant Contact, http://www.constantcontact.com or FeedBlitz, http://www.feedblitz.com?
• or do you use a free service, like FeedBurner, http://www.feedburner.com?

After spending several days exploring where newsletters I received were being published from, I finally decided on using Feedburner for these blogs.

Feedburner is part of Google’s ever increasing family of services which, for me, helped keep things nice and simple.

The process of adding Feedburner to your blog is relatively easy. The theme I used has widgets, including one named “Text”. This widget is a blank widget, and lets you add code to your blog. I used the Text widget to add, not only the Feedburner coding, but also the coding for books available for sale on the blog through the Amazon.com affiliate program.

So, to add the email subscribe form, go to FeedBurner, http://www.feedburner.com, type in your blogs URL in the box that asks you to ‘Claim Your Feed’. This takes you to you feeds main page. Click on the “Publicize” tag, and then on the “Email Subscriptions” link on the left-hand side of the page, which will open up a drop-down menu. In this menu, you click on the “Subscription Management” link to open up a page that has a couple of windows with HTML coding in them. Simply cut and paste the coding that you find in the first window on the page into the text box of your blog’s “Text” widget. Add a title to your “Text” widget, then save the widget.

These Text widgets are great. You can move them and place them wherever you want to in the right-hand column of your blog.

Some finesses that you can make to your email feed through Feedburner include:

• in the “Email Subscriptions” drop-doen menu, there is a link called “Email Branding”.  There is a Hot Tip on the page stating that if you insert the code ${latestItemTitle} into the box at the top on the page, where it says ‘Email Subject/Title’, the title of your subscription email will be the title of your post. Otherwise, the title of each subscription email will be the title of your blog and will be the same for every subscription email.
• the “Email Branding” page also allows you to change the Font and font size of both your subscription email’s title, and body text and the color of the text. A window on this page provides you with a preview of what your subscription email will look like with these changes.
• the ’”Chicklet Chooser” link in the left-hand column lets you select which custom RSS feeds subscribers can access your posts through.
• the “Monetize” tab at the top of the page lets you connect directly to Google Adwords.

Once you have your feeds set up, there are other things you can do through Feedburner to customize the way people subscribe to your blog.

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So now you should have a fairly sophisticated blog up and running, one that is SEO optimized, includes great content, and can be subscribed to.

However, in order to develop a truly Nomadic, Location Independent Enterprise, other technologies and technological skills will need to be drawn on. These will be explored in future posts.

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Welcome to Technoland source: Baldheretic; Flickr, Creative Commons

Everything I had been reading recently had indicated how easy setting up a professional blog was on WordPress.org. And for the most part it is, but there are still things I am trying to figure out how to do that require a bit more than a beginner’s level of techno-literacy, like setting up a shopping cart.

In the meantime, while I was learning about SEO techniques I tried my hand at adding a few things to this blog. There are a few little gadgets that WordPress.com themes automatically come with, that WordPress.org themes don’t, and the most crucial of these (at least for me) is the Stats calculator. So off I went in search of how to add a stats calculator to my site and very quickly discovered the joy of plugins.

Plugins are great!! Most are easy to use and they enhance the functionality of your blog (how’s that for sounding ‘techie’ .  All you need to do is to go to the WordPress.org website, at http://www.wordpress.org, click on the tab labeled “Extend”, then click on the “Plugins Directory”, and then have fun searching for the plugin you want.

For this blog, I added:

• the wordpress.com stats plugin, so I can obsess over daily visitor stats;
• the WP-Print plugin, this puts the ‘print’ icon on every page and post, not as easy to install as the other two plugin as it requires you to go into the HTML coding and add a line of code. ; and
• the WP-Table Reloaded plugin, which is what I have used to create my e-book store until I learn more about adding a shopping cart.

Most plugins are straight forward. You just download the file to your computer’s desktop then go to ‘Plugins”, “Add New” in the column on the left hand side of your WordPress theme’s desktop. Upload the plugin into the Theme (same procedure as you use for uploading photos, etc., into your blog’s content), and then click the ‘Activate’ button. And voilà, a neat new function has been added to your blog.

Adding the WP-Print plugin was a little bit more difficult. Actually it was more scary than difficult. Just follow the instructions that come with the plugin and you should be fine. My problem was I didn’t trust the instructions so was a bit concerned about doing this. You need to access the HTML coding by going to “Appearance” “Editor” in your theme’s desktop. There is a list of file names down the right-hand side of your screen. You just click on the file name that the instructions indicate, add the line of coding (I had the instructions open in my browser and just did a ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ to make sure I had the coding correct) exactly where the instructions tell you to, save and exit, and you are done.

While plugins are generally listed in your desktop under “Plugins” “Installed”, the Table plugin locates itself under “Tools”.  To use the Table plugin, you have to go to your blog’s ‘post box’, the area where you type in your content and click on the ‘HTML’ tab (on the top right hand side of the post box). The ‘table’ button shows up in the line of coding buttons that run across the top of the post box.

The last two plugins I added to this blog were Tweetmeme and the plugin to the email ‘Subscribe’ feed. With ‘Tweetmeme”, you download the plugin from http://tweetmeme.com (to download the plugin, you need to go down the page — it’s located on the right hand side). You just download and install Tweetmeme as you would any other plugin. Tweetmeme allows readers of you posts to instantly publish the post on Twitter — great for marketing you site. Tweetmeme shows up under “Settings” in this WordPress Theme’s desktop.

The plugin for the newsletter was a bit more complicated to deal with than your regular plugin, so I will explain the how and what of adding this to your blog in my next post.

Two final words about plugins ~~ plugins can either be a great way to enhance your blog, or they can be a disaster. The trick is to be very cautious of where you get your plugins from. The one’s that I have used so far have either been from the WordPress.org’s website, or from very reputable sources. Plugins are code so can contain all the nasty viruses, worms, trojans, etc., that plague Internet users. Make sure that the plugins you are using won’t damage either your blog, or your computer.

The other point about using reputable plugins is that these plugins will generally be quickly updated each time WordPress is updated, so they will continue to work with your blog. For example, the recent update to WordPress 2.8 left a lot of plugins unusable — mind you, this is also a good reason not to update to the latest version of WordPress too soon after it is released.

TTFN

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Completed So Far:

So far, we have covered pretty much all of the basic information we need to know on how to optimize a blog so that search engine bots and spiders can find the site and rank it high on search engine results pages so that visitors can also find it. The final basic search engine optimization technique looks at the third type of link, incoming links.

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New Developments:

Of the three types of links (internal, outgoing, and incoming) incoming links are by far the most difficult to achieve, and, of course, are one of, if not the most important search engine optimizing technique you can have on a website/blog.

Incoming or inbound links are links that are made from someone else’s website/blog to your website/blog.  These links connect the two sites, encouraging visitors, and search engine bots and spiders, to travel for one site to the other. Like everything else related to search engine optimization, there are different qualities of incoming links.

The best incoming links are:

• from sites that are highly ranked
• are relevant to your topic, and
• use relevant and searched for keywords.

Incoming links that are not so great include:

• links from link farms
• link exchanges from sites that have no relation to the topic that your website/blog is about.
• purchased links. These can get very expensive and be quite risky. In fact it could backfire on you if you have to many of this type of link on your website/blog.

Techniques that you can use to use to generate incoming links are often referred to as ‘link bait’ and include such things as:

Use great ‘link bait’ to attract high quality incoming links. source: lalajean, Flickr Creative Commons

• creating great content. Useful, informative, well written content can generate interest in your site and encourage other website or blog author’s to link to your content as a way to enhance their content
• interlinking your own sites. If you write more than one website/blog, then you can generate incoming links to each of your sites from the other one(s). Be careful not to overdo it. Search engine bots and spiders can detect if too many of your incoming links are from the same server as your site, and they don’t take too kindly to that.
• using search engine directories. Most, if not all search engines have directories, lists of websites and blogs that have been accumulated and sorted into topics. Google’s directory can be fond at http://directory.google.com/. There is some question as to whether the effort of getting your website or blog listed in a directory generates enough traffic to you site t be worth the effort.

ProBlogger’s book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income lists some ‘link-bait’ techniques that can be used to successfully attract incoming links to your site:

• Tools: create a useful, fun, newsworthy or interesting tool.
• Quizzes: create quizzes, surveys, and tests.
• Competitions: organize a contest or drawing with a valuable prize.
• Scoops: be first with the news or to try something new.
• Awards: create an award for your niche.
• Lists: create a list of the 10 best blogs in your niche, or the top products, etc.
• Statistics: do a survey and release the results.
• Freebies: give away something of value.
• Interviews: interview a celebrity or someone popular in your niche.
• Resources: create the ultimate resource of reference for a topic.

By following the search engine optimization techniques and by updating your site regularly, you should be able to attract both searching spiders and bots, and visitors to your site.

There is a quick and easy way to check to see if Google’s spiders and bots have been to your site and listed all of the contents. Go to the Google search site and type: site:(yourwebsite’surl), which will generate a list of all the pages and posts that Google’s spiders and bots have located. So, for this blog, I would type site:www.agelessnomads.com to check out this site. You’re welcome to type that into Google if you’d like, see what pages Google finds on this blog.

You can also check to see if any other websites or blogs have linked to your site. Again, go to a Google search box and type in link:(yourwebsite’surl). This will generate a list of all the websites or blogs that have linked to yours.

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Next Step:

An extra step in Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog is to explore some of the more advanced options for adding keywords. These techniques take us out of the realm of WYSIWYG and into the realm of HTML and Meta-tags. Fortunately, this step is really not as difficult as it sounds.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog from the beginning by going to the Introduction post.

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