The Vandal – Derek Haines

The blogging alter ego of author, Derek Haines

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How Sociable Will I Be When I Die?

How Sociable Will I Be When I Die?

What happens to your online life when you drop off the perch? With so much interlinking, auto-sharing, auto-posting and re-tweeting I’m really wondering if I might just live on (socially speaking) for a few years without anyone noticing that I am actually quite dead. Perhaps I can plan for this eventuality by setting up some horribly clever automation that will have me bothering people from the grave and having a damn good chuckle at the joke from six-feet under. It wouldn’t take too much effort to link a few social media accounts and have them re-post to each other, ad infinitum, loop, loop, loop, laugh, laugh. With a WordPress blog,

How To Increase Blog Traffic

How To Increase Blog Traffic

How can you boost blog traffic to your site? There is not a lot of use slaving away on your blog if no one reads it. Every blogger would like to increase blog traffic, but where do you begin? While attracting subscriptions to a blog’s RSS feeds is still considered one of the best ways to keep your readers, times are changing. More and more blog readers are coming from referrals, searches and links. The best resource to use to analyse your blog traffic is Google Analytics. It’s a ‘must have’ tool. A check on my own blog’s traffic sources for the last six months led me to some interesting

Twitter Spamming And Selling Books

Twitter Spamming And Selling Books

Does Twitter spamming sell books? It’s no secret that spamming is a real no-no on social media and totally frowned upon. Then again, Then again, pop-ups on web pages are an absolute pain in the neck as well, but most marketing gurus say they work exceptionally well. Email campaigns usually end up in 1,000’s of junk email inboxes but they continue to be sent out in the billions every day. The problem is, that these techniques work when it comes to getting noticed, building an audience, and selling products, no matter how frowned upon they are. While I don’t use pop-ups or bulk email because I just find them totally obnoxious,

Social Media Fatigue

Social Media Fatigue

Are you tired of social media? As an early adopter of social media, I’m now finding it increasingly difficult to decide what I should be doing with it now. In the early days, it was a fun way to communicate and keep in touch with friends and family that I have scattered around the globe. Then, as I’m a ‘wanna be’ author of note, I tried using social media as a way of letting people know that I wrote books. However, with the sudden advent and popularity of ebooks a couple of years ago, I found myself spending more time letting people know about my books than keeping in contact