So you might have seen my tweets about making green juice, or getting green juice. I keep getting asked “what is green juice?” or “what do you put in your green juice?”

So I thought I would make a video to show you what I make every morning.

Since I redesigned my blog I have gotten a lot of great compliments on it. But a lot of my friends have asked how I keep up with writing.

I admit it can be very hard at times but you have to come up with ways to get over the blogging blues.

One of my favorite blogs, Style Me Pretty, just launched a supplemental blog called Backstage, where they write about the in’s and out’s of blogging as a business. The blog is a great read and recently Abby Larson wrote a post about Blogging Blues that I really wanted to share with you guys.

I’ve been noticing that a few of my favorite bloggers have been getting the burnout blues these days. And I totally get it. In this industry, it’s really hard to stay on top. To stay fresh and innovative and to approach each new day with a different set of enthusiastic phrases. And although I love what I do, the blogging blues can bite you when you least expect it. So today, I thought I would remind myself and all of you how to bring back that sparkle to the job that you know you love…you just might have forgotten why you love it.

1. Keep a gratitude journal. Sounds big time cheesy, I know. But writing down the reasons that we are grateful for our jobs, for our creative brains, for our lives…will remind us all as to just how lucky we are.
2. Take a break from the mundane and for one day, make it all about the fun. What does this mean? Well…if you are a florist and are bogged down in the business of being a florist, set aside one day to design flowers for your closest friends. Totally YOUR designs, influenced only by your love of your craft. For a wedding blogger this might mean spending a day with a cup of hot chocolate, sifting through all of your favorite vendor sites, finding inspiration in back copies of domino magazine, poring through galleries of your favorite weddings. Even reading your OWN blog to rediscover your voice, your passion.
3. Reserve a day just for housekeeping. It will be a brutal day…paperwork, number crunching, computer cleaning…but in the end, it will free up your brain space to get back to what you love.
4. Reserve a day just for brainstorming. Tait and I had a 2 hour meeting the other day to hash out all of the little details we needed to in order to move forward. It was hugely fulfilling and definitely reignited my motivation and excitement. Getting together a brainstorming meeting with your team will definitely bring back a little buzz. By encouraging everyone to participate (interns too)  in your session, you’ll inspire them, you’ll potentially discover a different perspective, you’ll get the fun brewing among everyone.
5. At the end of the day, shut the computer off, swear off emails and grab a glass of wine or a hot cup of tea. Take a moment to think about your day and to find the bright spots, the spots that make your stresses all worthwhile.

I know that these aren’t particularly mind blowing ideas, but these are little things that I do to give myself a pick-me-up. Of course, we all struggle with different parts of our lives. Running a family, keeping a nice home, maintaining relationships with our friends, running a business. It’s basically impossible to do all of these really well but it isn’t impossible to fall in love with the journey.

A few things I wanted to add to this list:

1. Don’t be afraid to re-blog. If someone wrote a post that you like, if it’s something you think your readers would benifit from, or if you feel like you have something to add to that post, don’t hesitate to re-blog the post. As long as you give credit to the original author and don’t try to claim the ideas as your own.
2. Read more. If you are feeling like you are in a blogging rut, read more blogs. And start reading blogs that might not fall into your “category” of blogging. Technically Random Sarah is my personal blog, but it focuses on social media and web 2.0. But I read a lot of food blogs, fashion blogs, friends personal blogs, tech blogs, local blogs. It helps me see what is out there and really reflect on how I am writing my own content.

You have to love your blog, if you don’t know why you are blogging maybe it’s time to take a break from it and reflect on why you started blogging in the first place. Let me know what helps you stay motivated to blog in the comments.

About a year ago I posted a presentation by Marta Kagan called What the F**k is Social Media?. This morning I came across this slideshare presentation that is her follow up, one year later. It explains “social media”, which is a term that I am trying to use less and less, in a very simple and straight forward way.

I would encourage you to read through the whole thing and then send it to whomever you think needs to see it. (Which in my opinion is everyone)

The other day I came across someone tweeting about a site called Topsy.com which is calling itself “a search engine powered by tweets” and it’s pretty cool. Unlike twitter search, when you search for something on topsy it is going to show you results as webpages, not tweets.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about. The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses and the wonderful people who write them.

This is what a typical search page on Topsy looks like. You see the website and underneath in the speech bubble are the number of times that link has been tweeted. On the right hand side you can see the twitter users who tweet about this topic the most, and on the left side you can narrow down your search down to the last hour!

Another really useful way to use Topsy is to find out more information about people on twitter. Topsy has a page for every person it listens to. Tracking all the links that person tweets.

I was surprised when I looked up my twitter name. Topsy had determined that I was “highly influential” and had already added tags to my tweets.

And if that wasn’t enough to blow your socks off, take a look at this. Topsy has “trackback” pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing.

I am not sure if Topsy can see who tweets what links if they are bit.ly or tinyurl links, because if it can, then this is a much better way to track the reach of a tweet or a link on twitter, regardless of what url shortening service people are using.

So that’s Topsy. Let me know what you think about it.

I arrived at Laid Off Camp NY yesterday morning bright and early, eager to give my session on Networking 101. However, after I put my session topic on the board, a few people asked me if I was going to do a session on Twitter. So I decided to do an extra session on Twitter. In the spirit of Laid Off Camp I am going to post my session notes here.

So Twitter…What is it? What’s it all About? (shameless show plug)

Most of the people in my session yesterday knew what Twitter was, but they were having a hard time finding value, or an effective way to use it.

Of course I got asked the now age-old question: Isn’t twitter just like facebook status updates? Why do I need twitter when I have facebook?

Twitter IS NOT the Same As Facebook Status Updates

Let’s start with some simple twitter terms:

Followers = the number of people who have chosen to receive your updates in their twitter stream

Following = the number of people who’s updates you would like to receive.

Unlike most other social networks, because twitter does not work on a ‘friends’ model (which requires that you accept someones ‘friend request’ before you can communicate with that person), someone on twitter can be following you and you are in no way obligated to follow that person back.

Twitter has been categorized as a ‘micro-blog’ which give the misconception that someones twitter stream can be read like a blog, from top to bottom. Chances are if you were to try and read someone’s twitter stream like that you would become very quickly confused because the stream would simply not make sense.

You would come across updates like

All you see is a lot of @‘s and #, it can look like a foreign language sometimes.

@ replies = when you see and @ followed by a twitter username, that tweet is a response to another tweet. This is how you have conversations on twitter.

# hashtags = when you see # followed by a word or acronym, it is called a hashtag. Go to search.twitter.com and type in the hashtag to see what all the fuss is about. (some twitter clients turn these hashtags into twitter search links already but twitter.com does not as of yet)

Passively reading twitter is not a great way to get started using it. I suggest you start following people who you find interesting. Do not start following only celebrities, because to be honest, they don’t really know how to engage in conversation on twitter. Check out WeFollow.com, it’s a twitter directory. You can add yourself and search for people based on tags. It’s a good place to get started.

The next thing I recommend is turning on SMS with twitter. (only do this is you have unlimited text messaging, and if you don’t have unlimited text messaging, get unlimited text messaging)

I know a lot of people who only really use twitter via SMS and it works great. It’s fast and easy.

I recommend testing out some twitter clients for your computer. Some people might disagree with me on this one, but I feel like if you really want to start using twitter you need to put some filters in place. There are a TON of twitter clients to choose from but I recommend trying tweetdeck or tweetie.

One thing a heard a lot yesterday was people that had signed up for twitter, looked at it for a few days, and never touched it again.

I say, give twitter 30 days. Really make and effort to use some tools, and engage in the conversation. You won’t be sorry.

If you have more twitter questions, or I am missing something that I talked about yesterday, please leave it in the comments and let’s continue the discussion.

Taking a tip from some great presenters I have seen in my life I am going to publish my ideas for my session at LaidOffCampNYC tomorrow as a blog post.

On the one hand, people who are at my talk can come and see what I said once it is over. But what is even more important for me, is having a discussion with the community about what I plan to say and getting feedback before I go and say it.

So here goes:

I am titling the talk ‘Networking 101‘

One of the first things I always try to do is ask people why they came to the session. What did they want to get out of it, what challenges are they currently facing with networking?

This will help me to understand how to skew the tone of the talk and make sure that people get what they came for (or at least try)

I have steps to getting started with networking. When I first started in this space I knew no one.  I went to my first event, I brought a friend with me, I walked around a few times and I didn’t talk to anyone. That was a complete fail.

The next event I went to (a few months later), I went alone. Still a little shy, I introduced myself to a few people while we were all waiting on a line to get in. Then those people introduced me to people that they knew, and before I knew it I was building a little network.

In less than a year a have built a strong network of people in this space, I have more people that consider me an ‘expert’ than I could ever know what to do with, and it all started with these few steps.

Step #1: get out of your house!