Blogging 101
13 Tips To Create Remarkable Content
Everywhere I read, I see this word, “remarkable.” I believe it’s launch into stardom began with Seth Godin; I’m giving him that credit anyway. In a book I’m reading on Inbound Marketing by Hub Spot, the authors substitute “remarkable” for “unique.”
Be remarkable = be unique.
We’ve all spoken about the echo chamber. Today, I read four iterations on the same topic in re Instagram and Facebook. Each was different, but were they remarkable? I think remarkable is in the view of the reader; I’ve not seen a checklist for remarkable writing, have you?
Producing My First Video With Animoto
I just got a tip about Animoto from Scott Quillin (am I giving away your trade secrets, Scott?) of New England Multimedia. As part of our package to redo my site and integrate the blog inside, he was going to take all my cool world-travel snapshots from the website and package them into a slide show/video.
I had no expectation what that would look like; in fact, it made me nervous. Late two nights ago, Scott turned me loose on Animoto. I first attempted the free unlimited :30 clips; then I upgraded to Plus and finally took the nosedive to the Pro version (all in 30 minutes) to create this video below — Hire Soulati Media.
Eight Key Learnings About A Blog’s Back End
It’s been dark here for about a week as I decided to give myself a birthday gift (yep, it’s today!) and finally integrate my blog into my website – kinda like an all-in-one package, It’s only taken me two years to complete this phase of the journey – what do you think? Thanks to New England Multimedia for all the hard work to make it happen, too.
This redesign and integration of the blog with the website (so each has the same look and feel) doesn’t happen overnight – unless you’re absolutely brilliant and can jump ahead about 10 growing pains.
Understanding your back-end or the inside of a blog is important to knowing how to build your blog. You need to consider the following as you grow and take your blog to the next level:
Hosting. When bloggers start out, it’s really easy to jump onto WordPress.com, Blogger, or other free’ish platform and begin blogging in five minutes. I did that and had my first post published in 20 minutes, but it felt wrong. I didn’t want to market a third-party platform while I was blogging; I wanted to brand myself in my own house. That means you should self-host your blog on a domain name you own and purchase a hosting package alongside. You can do that on Posterous or Tumblr, too.
Bloggers Have Influence
Late last week, the nation watched the Susan G. Komen public relations debacle unfold. Bloggers I know held back before writing; others decided not to write at all. As the situation became stickier, it was the responsibility of bloggers to dive in and report, communicate, address the problem, and suggest solutions. Communities responded in droves.
Whether you blog for business, personal, or just to rid your head of too much chatter (as I do), bloggers have influence. The influence I speak of is not based on Klout score or being paid to endorse a product. This type of influence is about words online with communities commenting and furthering debate.
Late last week, the nation watched the Susan G. Komen public relations debacle unfold. Bloggers I know held back before writing; others decided not to write at all. As the situation became stickier, it was the responsibility of bloggers to dive in and report, communicate, address the problem, and suggest solutions. Communities responded in droves.
About Negative Blog Comments
A boatload of bloggers has been following Mitch Joel’s lead and talking about how they blog. There have been some wonderful posts that look inside many bloggers’ strategy from Mark Schaefer, Gini Dietrich, Jason Konopinski, and others. From what Ken Mueller discovered over at Inkling Media when he posed that question to some of us, people seem to get out the keyboard and just write already.
Me, too. No notes, just thought processes in ideation all the time taking up valuable brain space. Since blogging began for me two years ago, everything is a story, everything has an angle, everything is blog fodder. It’s maddening, and I read science fiction at night to shut down.
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