Month: July 2014

Blog roundup: Live Write Thrive, Buffer & The Poetry Shed

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One of the joys of blogging is reading other people’s blogs, and this week I thought I’d do a short blog roundup and share some things I’ve been reading lately, on blogs which you might like to add to your blog roll.

C S Lakin's blog Live Write Thrive

C S Lakin’s blog Live Write Thrive

First up is a blog post on author C. S. Lakin’s blog Live, Write Thrive. If you don’t subscribe to Susanne’s blog already I recommend it. This is actually a guest post by Dana Sitar: Crowdsourcing your self-publishing project without asking for money. My own view is that crowdsourcing is only going to grow in popularity as public funds for the arts dries up.

And incidentally, crowdsourcing may be a trendy name for it but it’s been around for centuries. Composers such as Handel and Purcell published a lot of their work by public subscription – that is, asking people to pledge they would buy a copy of their work before it had been written. In Victorian times in the UK it was common for public buildings and works to be financed by subscription – of course that was in the days of philanthropy and before all the tax-funded public services we now have. I believe the idea of philanthropy is still alive in the US though.

The Buffer blog

The Buffer blog

Over on the Buffer blog, this is interesting – How and why to write persuasive, research-backed content. A small experiment resulted in 40% more click-throughs to a blog when the headline mentioned a statistic. The piece goes on to give other examples and suggests how to make your blog posts stronger by backing up what you say with stories and statistics – as long they’re genuine stats, of course. Although I’m from the ‘statistics can be used to tell any story you want’ school of thought (it’s the marketer in me!) Again, the Buffer blog is one worth subscribing to for web marketing news and ideas. Plus they’re very nice people, which goes a long way in my book.

Abegail Morley's The Poetry Shed

Abegail Morley’s The Poetry Shed

Poet Abegail Morley blogs at the Poetry Shed (and yes, there really is a shed, I’ve seen it!) and although this post isn’t brand new, it’s a bit of a keeper – Helen Ivory talking about online poetry courses. Abegail’s blog is a mix of news, interviews and observations on the poetry world and is a good example of how to sustain interest and variety for her readers. Worth following.

 

 

Seven things to do on Twitter this week

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There’s so much more to Twitter than just posting links to your blog posts or tweeting the odd ‘what I’m up to’ update.

I’ve found Twitter to be a fantastic tool for connecting with all sorts of people I wouldn’t otherwise have met. OK, so it was easier in the early days, when there were fewer of us using it and before the marketers and scammers had moved in!

If you’re wondering how on earth to unlock the real power of Twitter then let me tell you there are no quick fix ways of doing it, but take it one day at a time and in six months you’ll wish you’d started a year ago.

It’s about small things … and they all add up. To give you an idea what I mean, here are seven tasks to set yourself, one for each of the next seven days. Come on, how hard can that be? Just remember a general point – when you refer to another person or entity in a tweet, reference them by their Twitter (@) name, because that way they will see your tweet. If you don’t know their Twitter name, use the Twitter search box to find it.

So here goes…

1) Do something nice for someone

This might be, for example, answering a question, or retweeting a question you can’t answer yourself, but one of your followers might. You might tweet how much you enjoyed someone’s latest book, or review, or poem in such-and-such magazine. Or how about starting a conversation with someone who’s new to Twitter or not very active, to encourage them along?

2) Retweet something useful and say why

If you’ve just learned something useful, or come across a resource you know your followers will find useful, or a news story people will want to know about, tweet a link to it. Add your own comment or endorsement.

3) Find THREE book bloggers/reviewers to follow

You can use the Twitter search box to search for names or keywords, or do a general search on Google – look for people who actively review work in your genre. You might find one, and then from their lists of followers or followees you might find more. Don’t follow more than three at a time, for now … if you stumble of a rich seam of people to follow, go to point 4 –

4) Start a new list

Remember you can add someone to a list without actively following them as an individual. You can then follow that list. If you’re using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, create a new column for that list and voila. (See this post about Lists if you’re not sure).

5) Find a writing-related hashtag and use it

There are so many great writing hashtags, many of them are ‘slow chats’ – in other words, it’s an ongoing conversation around a theme. Well-used ones are #amwriting, #selfpublishing and #kidlitchat. But there are many, many more –  here’s a mammoth list of Twitter hashtags for writers!

6) Take a long hard look at your profile page

When did you last refresh it? Could it do with a makeover? The new profile pages allow for a wonderfully big header image – make the most of this space. Look at how other people are using it, get some inspiration. What about your profile picture? Looking a tad tired? And your bio – are you making the best use of your 160 characters, with key words for people to find you by?

7) Thank someone

Ah yes – we so often forget to this. Who doesn’t love to be thanked? Just think for a moment – is there someone you follow on Twitter (who perhaps you’ve never met) who often tweets useful things, or answers questions, or retweets other people’s posts? A ‘thank you’ out of the blue from a relative stranger is a wonderful thing.

Have a great week on Twitter – who knows, you might set yourself another #7things for the week after, and the week after …

Buying a domain name – don’t make this mistake

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I’ve recently had two clients come to me with a similar issue, to do with their domain names. It’s a problem that’s been around ever since I’ve been working with the internet, and it makes me angry that it’s still going on, even in 2014.

The problem is to do with domain name ownership. Who owns your domain name? I’m not talking about web hosting, or blog platforms or anything like that. All those things are easily changeable. Domain name ownership is not.

If someone else has registered your domain name on your behalf, it should be in your name, not theirs. Too often I see clients’ domain names have been registered in the name of the web designer or developer who has set up their website or blog. There is no other word for this than WRONG.

Hosting packages for blogs or websites quite often will include a domain name. Once you sign up, you should get access to your web hosting control panel and the domain name control panel. These are two very different things.

If you go to a third party (typically a freelance web developer or any small web design firm that offers to do it all for you) then they may or may not offer you access to both control panels. In fifteen years I’ve not yet come across a client who has been offered control of their domain name as a matter of course.

If you buy into this kind of ‘all in’ service then you need to do a bit of due diligence. Will the domain name be registered in YOUR name, or THEIRS? Where will the domain name be registered? Will you have access to the domain name control panel? A domain name owner is different from the technical contact. So if your web designer /developer wants to put himself down as the tech or admin contact that’s fine. And if you’re happy with the service and never want to change hosting or use another web developer, that’s fine too.

But what if you decide you want to move to a WordPress.com hosted blog? Or you fall out with your developer for whatever reason? Or feel the hosting fees are too high and want to change? That’s when you need to get into your domain name control panel.  If you don’t have access to it, it’s up to the web developer to change the name servers for you, so that they point to your new hosting service. They might be happy to do that.

But you may not want to be beholden to them in the future whenever you need to access your domain name hosting. And they may not be interested in helping you once they’re no longer collecting your web hosting fee.

Worse still, if you’re not the owner of the domain name, it is very difficult to get it back from the registered owner without their co-operation.

If you’re not sure, you can check who owns your domain, and the name of the registrar, here. (For Top Level Domains (like .com or .org) scroll down the results to ‘Registrant Name’.)

I would always advise registering your own domain name independently of any firm offering to do it for you. It’s quick, easy and cheap to do.

I feel very strongly that people are being taken advantage of over this, and I’ve seen it cause a huge amount of inconvenience and upset, yet it still goes on.

I’m planning to create a download about this, because it’s clearly a subject that’s important but often played down.

Meanwhile if you have any stories you’d like to share of good or bad practices you’ve come across in domain name registration or ownership issues, please let me know.

Why images matter in blog posts

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Should you, as a writer, be concerned about using images in your blog posts? It’s a fair question. Maybe not every post needs an image – it can be worse to shoe-horn in an image just for the sake of it, than to have no image. But there are several reasons why pictures are a good idea.

Three things to know

1) The eye is drawn to images – research has shown how we linger over pictures on the screen, and go back to them. Even split-seconds make a difference when you’re trying to keep someone’s attention. Striking images can help keep people for longer on your site.

This heatmap shows where people look longest on a Google search page - at the images

This heatmap shows where people look longest on a Google search page – at the images. From Kissmetrics.

Heatmap showing where people look on a Facebook page. From Kissmetrics.

Heatmap showing where people look on a Facebook page. From Business Insider.

2) Great images get shared on social networks, so bringing your photos (and your blog) to the attention of people outside your own social circle.

3) Tag your images and it’s more likely they’ll be found in searches –  it’s another way of people finding your blog, bringing you greater visibility.

Editing images

Size – even if you take photos on your phone they may be enormous – great for printing out but you don’t need them to be that size for the web. A lot of big images can slow down the loading rate of the page.

Blogging software gives you the option to re-size images proportionately into small, medium or large versions, but you may want more precision over this. Cropping allows you to focus in on the part of the image that matters. Think also about how the images will look in your chosen template. Full column width images have more impact that smaller images aligned left or right with the text around them. if you are posting images side-by-side, make them the same height, for neatness, or the same width if they are stacked vertically.

Brightness – you may want to lighten up your photos before posting them. A great (free) tool to use is Pixlr Editor  – it’s got all the features you’re likely to want for basic photo manipulation. If you take photos on your phone, check out all the image editing options you have there – you may be surprised!

Things to remember

Don’t just lift pictures from around the web for use on your blog – they may well be copyright. Google Images is a great search engine, but always check before copying anything. Good royalty-free images sources are Flickr (many photographers make their images free to use as long as you give them a credit and a link – but do check with the individuals first) and museum and art gallery websites (look for their ‘free image library’ or similar). Sites like iStockphoto and Dreamstime offer a large range of royalty-free images for a small fee.

Tag your images with key words, and give them an ‘alt’ text as well – which gets seen even if the images aren’t showing. Include a keyword or two (the words you want to be found for) in the alt text and any caption, if possible.

Add ‘share’ buttons to your blog, to encourage people to share your posts and your images. If you use Buffer, for example, you can add a ‘share’ button with the update text already pre-populated (this is where you would add your blog URL).

The Buffer share button

The Buffer Button – configure your share button to make it easy for people to share on their social networks.

Creating a share button on Buffer | Social media for writers by Robin Houghton

When people click on your Buffer share button they can share your content to their social networks with one click.

Take a look at Pinterest, if you haven’t already. Create boards around specific topics and pin your blog images there. Give each image a description – use keywords again – you have up to 500 characters so make the most of it, as it will help people find your images. Include your blog URL so that the images lead to your blog. You might think writers are not interested in visuals, try searching for ‘writing’ and other writing-related topics on Pinterest, and you’ll find there’s plenty going on. Even if you don’t use Pinterest yourself, add a ‘Pin It’ social button to your blog, to encourage others to share your images on Pinterest.

There are plenty of boards on writers and writing at Pinterest.

There are plenty of boards on writers and writing at Pinterest.