Welcome back from the weekend!
First off, I want to thank Ryn G for her stellar fill-in guest post while I was away on vacation. She did an excellent job, and she introduced me to some great new sites to look at for blogging and content marketing articles—some of which I’ll be using today!
I know that I opted to pass off my blog to a guest poster while on vacation, but Blogtrepreneur is trying to take that “I’m at a casino in Vegas!” excuse away from us bloggers by writing about blogging on the go. I have two things to say about this: I’d like to keep that vacation excuse, please, and my iPhone, while amazing, is still too small for my stubby fingers to punch out much more than a chatty text message. I’m in the camp that vacation should be a time away from blogging, using other methods to keep it on track without your constant input (see WriterAccess’ blog post from Friday). My family is already annoyed that I use my phone as a flute at gatherings (try it, app store), so I think more time-consuming efforts would be just the worst to put up with.
Plus, a guest post goes hand-in-hand with establishing an effective community base—especially for niche sites. Say you have a knitting, stamp collecting, or scratch-n-sniff stickers fan club blog (first post: “Why Black Licorice Stickers Smell Like Gasoline”), having a community of like-minded bloggers commenting and guest posting on a regular basis can only strengthen your readership. This post from ProBlogger details steps to take to build that community, using a real world example. Plus, I’m on board because it advocates for “insider” T-shirts. “No duh” takeaway: People use Facebook.
This blog post about finding your blog’s heartbeat (hint: community) actually directs to some tools to use, which is always more helpful than just the “rah, rah, community!” blather posts.
When I think of summer, I think of food trucks. Mashable has a post about great social media campaign examples for food trucks; and look, getting a cherry frosting–filled cupcake from a truck in Austin, Texas, called Hey Cupcake! was one of my favorite life moments ever, so if these social media campaigns can get me prizes and cherry frosting–filled cupcakes from a truck, I’m a happy person.
This post will tell you how to use your blog to get you money for vacation and cupcakes.
Finally, I completely understand that I’m going overboard on these ProBlogger links this week, but I can’t help it that I feel they’re in my head. I’ve been editing a lot (read: eyeball-falling-out a lot) of product descriptions for houseware lately. And if I have to read another description that says something like “the throw pillow will compliment the couch perfectly” I might have to go on another vacation. Compliment? I wasn’t aware that the pillow was flirting with the chair. This post will set straight these homophone issues and assist with many, many other great writing tips.
How about everyone else? Post any relevant or interesting links in the comment section and maybe I’ll feature them in next week’s Round-up!
