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9 Methods and Places To Advertise Your Blog

By Lynette · Comments (0)

Thursday, September 11th, 2014

Starting a blog is easy. Getting people to visit and visit regularly – well… not so much. Some people will tell you traffic is a piece of cake and it might be – to them. As a new or somewhat new blogger, this may not be quite so easy. So perhaps you may be considering advertising. Before we move on, allow me to first define advertising. Yes, we all know what it is and what it means. However, from my experience, when people ask the question where can I advertise my blog, the are usually looking to get free exposure. Free Exposure If this is what you are looking for, then these are a few things you can and should try. Guest Blogging – despite some scare stories about Google not liking it – guess what? Sometimes, Google doesn’t matter (that) much. People do. So what blogs do your target reader frequent? Where do they get their news from? Identify those blogs and find out if they are open to guests authors. Write a solid, meaty post and pitch it. Answer Questions – There are tons of places where you can answer questions. Facebook has plenty of groups you can

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Write A Blog Post That Converts

By Lynette · Comments (2)

Thursday, August 21st, 2014

6 Things You Should Be Doing On the Back End to Boost Your Posts

When talking to bloggers who have some interest of earning some income from their blogs, one the of major things they struggle with is selling. WHAT? Did you say Selling? Of all horrors. Bloggers don’t sell. That’s slimy. Unethical – ick! I’m not one of those. That doesn’t apply. I don’t sell. Or do you? Listen. We ALL sell. We sell our kids the idea of finishing their broccoli (okay, sometimes we resort to threats but that’s a whole other story) We sell our spouses on the vacation to Europe we’ve been dreaming of We sell our boss (if we still have one) on our project idea We sell to ourselves when we are trying to decide whether to buy that dress We sell to our best friends on going to the party Sell is not a four letter word. As bloggers, we need to look at it as our friend. Because it is. It is crucial to beginning to see profits on your blog and crucial to retain and grow those profits. So what separates you from a slimy, smooth talking sales person? It’s all in the how. The end goal of selling on your blog is to convert

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Why You Need To Write Shorter Posts

By Lynette

Thursday, June 19th, 2014

Early in the year, I took a piece of advice from a very successful blogger. That’s to write shorter posts. It’s been tough. Every time I focus on a blog posts, it tends to end up in the 700 – 1000 word range. I’m not accepting defeat yet because there’s lots of good reasons we should all write shorter. 1. Conserve Your Mental Energy Since shorter posts tend to be less intensive, they are faster to write and publish. This leaves you more brainpower to focus on heavier, more thought provoking stories that are longer. 2. Challenge Your Writing Skills I used to be a copywriter at an ad agency. Each time I presented the senior copywriter with my work, he’d take a pen and start crossing things out. Then, he tells me. Good, but shorter. Our copy winds up on product labels, print ads, posters, billboards and TV. You don’t have the luxury of time nor space in any of those mediums. It was downright challenging but I enjoyed it all the same because it truly forces you to become a better communicator. 3. Your Audience Doesn’t Have The Time Recent surveys show that 60% of Internet access is mostly

4 Wonderful Tools For Creating Link Worthy Content

By Lynette

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

When your blog is bare and you feel pressured to create content, there are a number of ways you can brainstorm for ideas, like hitting photo sites, your RSS readers or review your notebook. Or… you can use these four tools. They are fun to use and you’re going to come away with more than one idea. Upworthy Generatory This is not owned or affiliated with the real Upworthy but they do have sensational headlines that make you want to click. Very cool but sadly most of those titles don’t work for my current blogs. It could for you and so Upworthy Generator is in the list. Portent’s Content Idea Generator This is a simple tool but I love the way it is presented. Each title also gives you hints why this title works and funny quips. Also nice that you can keep hitting the generate button and get a new title. Linkbait Generator This is the first tool I ever found way back when but forgot about it. Very similar to Portent’s and they all sort of work on the same idea. Topical Brainstorm Perhaps the most comprehensive of all, once you enter a keyword, you’ll get this long list

The 2 Minute Blog Post

By Lynette

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

This is a tip I’ve shared with BlogEnergizer subscribers – among many others – if you like it, go get on the list ;). Every week, an email comes in from SlideShare with the week’s hottest presentations. I always look forward to these because they’ve done a ton of the content curation work for me by narrowing down the popular ones. This way, if I share one from this list, it’ll resonate because it’s proven to be popular. I’ll review to see what is topping the charts. 90% of the time, I find the top presentations relevant to our audience. I suppose because SlideShare is rather business-centric, but there are also a lot of general life stuff there so don’t let this turn you away. Also, if you go to the home page of SlideShare, they tell you what is Hot on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These are ripe for picking. Once I zero in on the one that is relevant to our audience, I’ll grab the embed code. Then, I’ll create a post, paste the embed code, add a paragraph with key thoughts of my own and voila! Blog post in about 2 minutes. Then came the problem. You see,

Blog Post Ideas – There’s An App For That

By Lynette

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

This is just how crazy things have been for us around here for the last month. We’ve been working hard on plugins, pushing them out, scheduling more to be developed in the pipeline AND we’ve also been creating… an app! If you’ve been around for a while you may know we have a fantastic free blogging resource over at BlogEnergizer. We send you blog post ideas, tips to motivate, encourage and move ahead regularly. Every year, around the end of the year, you will also receive a fresh yearly blogging planner and calendar in PDF format. Go sign up now. Well thanks to our content savvy friend Alice Seba who suggested once we create an app for it. We finally dug in and did it. Introducing… the BlogEnergizer App for iPhone and iPad. It is a very simple app (for now). When you get stuck what to blog about, check out today’s idea for a fresh topic every day. If that still doesn’t do it for you, tap Events to see what people are celebrating today. Almost every day, week or month, there is a type of celebration or awareness event that you can use to jump start your blogging. Have an

Two Terrific Graphic Tools For Web Content Publishers

By Lynette

Saturday, November 24th, 2012

It really is no wonder Pinterest is wildly popular because no matter how you think of yourself, humans are, by and large visual creatures. This post is not about Pinterest though you could definitely use these tools to help you create Pinterest graphics. What I’d like to share today are two first-rate image tools I’ve been using for a while. First up – PhotoScape. This is a neat little software that is actually a collection of 13 tools in one. Here’s a list of the 13 features: Editor Batch editor Page (for creating collages) Combine Animated GIF Print Splitter Screen Capture Color Picker RAW image converter Rename Paper Print Viewer The features I use the most are Editor, Page, Viewer and in lesser degrees combine, batch editor. While the editor feature is far from PhotoShop or even GIMP, it lets me very quickly spruce up an image with text that looks great. Check out this post about WordPress widgets to see an example how I used PhotoScape to make an image from Morguefile look nicer and tie in better with the content. It’s also an added bonus the software is fairly lightweight for an image editor which means I don’t have

Send Email Broadcasts With Latest Blog Posts Automatically

By Lynette

Friday, October 12th, 2012

In an earlier post about Aweber, reader Mathea asked a most interesting question. How do people add the last 4 or 5 blog posts to their emails automagically? I love that question because it really made me pause, think and figure out a solution. The only down side is, she didn’t say what tool the sender uses. Since we were discussing Aweber, that’s what I’ll assume in this answer. You must first know that Aweber doesn’t actually support this. Well, not in the manner most of us think it should. You cannot assign a global snippet to pull in the latest content from your blog. However, you can do this in a roundabout way that is somewhat automatic. This is how I’d do it. First, add the feed to Aweber using the Blog Broadcast feature. You’d enter the feed, select your template or create a new template as usual. In the template, you will want to leave space for your regular weekly message. Make sure the merge codes to grab content from your RSS feed is somewhere in your template. Next comes the 2nd, actually the most important box. Send automatically. I’d make sure it is NOT checked. This is

HotKeys For WordPress

By Lynette

Monday, January 30th, 2012

Moving your hand between the keyboard and mouse gets tiresome when you have to do it every few seconds. Thankfully when working with computer bound apps, there are plenty of hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts built in. The trouble with getting used to hotkeys – you begin to wish they were everywhere including web based apps. Which is why I really appreciate them when writing a blog because they help me focus. The longer I keep my hands on the keyboard busily typing away, the faster and more often I write. That’s a good thing when you’re working hard to push out posts regularly. Even if you aren’t the keyboard shortcut type by nature, give it a go just on WordPress and see if it improves your blogging speed. It might be clumsy at first trying to remember them but use them often enough, it becomes a habit you don’t hardly notice you’re using them. Here goes. Ctrl+A – Select All Ctrl+B – Bold Ctrl+C – Copy Ctrl+I – Italics Ctrl+U – Underline Ctrl+V – Paste Ctrl+Y – Redo Ctrl+Z – Undo Shift+End – Select text from cursor to end of line Shift+Home – Select text from cursor to beginning of line Shift+Left – Selects text

Remove Spam Bait From Your Blog

By Lynette

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Today, I received the dreaded email that notifies me of a comment awaiting for moderation on a site where WordPress is used as an opt-in page nothing more. Needless to say this type of site is not one I’m in daily or monthly, sometimes not even in 6 months. I know many people use WordPress like that and it’s great because it is so versatile and there are such wonderfully easy plugins like MarketerCMS and WPSalesletter that make it incredibly easy to put up an attractive, effective opt-in page(s). Unfortunately as I mentioned in my interview with Kelly on Detoxing Your Blog, this is also this type of sites have a huge potential to leave security holes and be spam bait because they aren’t in the forefront of our minds. So save yourself some time. If you’re building an opt-in where you know you will unlikely review the page regularly, get rid of obvious spam baits before you finish the project. Delete, trash or un-publish the Hello World post Close all comments and trackbacks Check individual posts to disable comments and trackbacks If you’re a bit more techie and truly will never need comments, nor trackbacks either rename or remove

9 Methods and Places To Advertise Your Blog

Write A Blog Post That Converts

Why You Need To Write Shorter Posts

4 Wonderful Tools For Creating Link Worthy Content

The 2 Minute Blog Post

Blog Post Ideas – There’s An App For That

Two Terrific Graphic Tools For Web Content Publishers

Send Email Broadcasts With Latest Blog Posts Automatically

HotKeys For WordPress

Remove Spam Bait From Your Blog

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