“Keep yer eyes peeled!”

My father used to have a saying when we were out hunting. Well he had a lot of sayings, but for the most part they wouldn’t pass as family friendly. One thing he always said as we drove around the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest at daybreak opening day (and every day thereafter) was, Keep yer eyes peeled!. Which of course was always followed by a reason. Usually they would be something like the following.

• Because those bucks will move so fast they’ll be gone before you can even blink
• If they duck behind that manzanita you’ll never see them again
• You have to see them before all the other sonsabi…

Of course to a boy of 8 riding in the back of a pickup, holding a compound bow he could never hope to pull while his father drove the truck it never made much sense. Until now, and in ways my father never intended.

This is really a post about spotting an opportunity. It’s about keeping yer eyes peeled and jumping on chances before anyone and everyone else does. Face it, opportunities are a lot like deer. They are fast, they are fleeting. When they duck behind the brush (e.g. disappear) you can never be certain of them reappearing. If you haven’t readied your bow before you see them you’ll never get the chance. More than that if you haven’t practiced your shots you’ll never hit the opportunity.

In my short tenure as a blogger I’ve seen many opportunities that I have passed by. I won’t lie and say I didn’t know they were opportunities, but in my own defense I will say I wasn’t aware of the importance of them. Poor excuse I know, but it’s all I have. I wanted to share a few of the opportunities that I’ve seen with you.

Guest blogging

I’ve passed by at least 3 guest blogging opportunites because I didn’t believe my writing skills were good enough. I rectified that to some extent by writing this post about Paint.Net for Topsecretblogger.com, but I can’t calculate how much further along I would be if I had taken on a few other guest posting opportunities before.

The other way I’ve let the guest blogging opportunity pass me by has been by not allowing it on this blog. In fact I’ve just agreed to let someone post a guest article on here. Hopefully that will be up sometime tomorrow. The reason I say it was a missed opportunity in not allowing others to guest post has everything to do with exposure. They would have linked from their blogs to this blog, and their readers would have potentially become my readers.

Community sites

I don’t generally jump into things with both feet. I stick my toe in, stir the waters a bit. Too hot, I’m out. Too cold, I’m out. But I’ll sit on the riverbank until eventually I’m compelled to jump in. That’s kind of what happened with things like www.mybloglog.com and Blogcatalog.com. I joined them but rather than diving headlong into the opportunity I did nothing. I didn’t make contacts, I didn’t talk to people. In short I didn’t participate at all. I’ve set out to correct that, but once again I can’t help but wonder where I’d be had I done it right from the beginning.

Other online communities

I’m a member of several online forums and never dropped my link to any of them. I didn’t want to upset the moderators, didn’t want to be a spammer, blah, blah, blah. I’ll just say this, since I’ve begun to link to my site and my full RSS feed things have started picking up pace.

The point of all this being that if you don’t have yer eyes peeled no matter how great the opportunity is you’ll never take it, because you won’t ever see it.

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