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- How I Brought My Blog Back to Life with Tumblr
This guest post is by David Edwards of www.asittingduck.com.
Over the past few years I’ve had success with guest posting and uploading videos on YouTube, but the one thing I’ve struggled with was my blog. There were two reasons:
- Illustrations are very time consuming to make.
- Thinking what to write used to stress me out!
I’m not sure about you but I totally failed at blogging, I set a plan to produce a fresh post every Friday and before I knew it the next Friday was here already and I had nothing to publish! There are many minefields online when you’re using images and text content, and when I was blogging, I started to drift away from the main theme.
A lot of new bloggers could probably relate to this. When you start a blog, you end up trying to find out how to rank on Google, gain traffic, and so on. That leads you to websites like problogger.net, and you read them so much that you start to talk about their subjects on your blog. Why would a designer want to know about pay per click on my blog? He can come here for that!
A few months back I looked at my blog and I didn’t like what I had published. I made a quick decision to convert it into a squeeze page and build an email list. Then, instead of blogging, I’d send the occasional newsletter.It worked, but the traffic and community around the website lost its buzz. Back when I was publishing every Friday I did start to see that day was popular in terms of traffic stats, so I was getting that weekly return traffic. I knew that I had to get some more momentum on the website if I were to launch a series of products. The solution was Tumblr.
Why Tumblr works for lazy people
On joining Tumblr, you instantly become a member of a vast community of very creative people. You can select your favorite topics and hunt through fresh, quality posts. Within minutes I managed to follow 100 top bloggers and the five topics that I wanted to keep “A Sitting Duck” based around:
- art
- comics
- design
- gaming
- illustration
Once you have logged in, set your tags, and started following some relevant people, the dashboard shows you posts on your subject, and basically helps you become a curator for your niche! Through the re-blog feature, you can publish other people’s hard work straight to your blog instantly. They get exposure from their work being shared, and you have something for your regular visitors to look at. It’s a win/win situation.
I’ll continue to publish drawings and ideas, but the main benefit of Tumblr is that I always have the backup of the reblog feature, which makes blogging fun again, and a stress-free experience.
I’ve already started to see my traffic climb again and people are keen to see fresh blog posts, which is a huge boost!
Why reblog?
Tumblr has a one-touch button that lets all members instantly reblog a post from another publisher on the platform. I’ve seen posts that have been reblogged over 50,000 times in a day! Reblog is kind of like Twitter’s retweet function, only that it seems more permanent, as the post is actually published on the domains of bloggers who have reblogged it.
As a character designer myself, many people ask me if I’m afraid of letting my ideas getting stolen. As far as I’m concerned, you’re better off having people see your work and share it than hide it in a sketchbook. It’s always best to get copyright advice first, but I think you need to get your stuff out there to build an audience!
Tumblr: a good choice for relaunch
The best part about my relaunch is that I’ve owned my domain for over three years now, and I’ve built up stacks of great links. Relaunching the blog has given all my metrics a kick, and I’ve joined a community which has over 30 million members, so the opportunity to grow my audience is huge.
Is your blog going off track or dead? Would you rather become a curator for your site and keep the momentum going than leave it to stagnate? As always I look forward to your comments.
David Edwards is the founder of www.asittingduck.com and today has released a brand new video on YouTube called “Milkshake Cat”.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How I Brought My Blog Back to Life with Tumblr
Переслать - 10 Steps to Writing Mindfully for Your Blog
This guest post is by Sean Madden of Mindful Living Guide.
These past few months—in my summer and early autumn creative writing classes—I've not focused so much on the mindfulness aspect of my teachings. Perhaps this had to do with the energetic pace of summer, which only recently faded here in the South East of England. Just last week autumn seemed finally to arrive and with it the cozy, heartwarming smells of wood and coal smoke rising from the chimneys of local cottages. The end of our unseasonably warm Indian summer ushered in that back-to-school feeling of my childhood days growing up on the South Shore of Massachusetts.
And so it was just last week that I made explicit the intended theme of the six-week course which got underway in mid-September. That theme's perhaps best conveyed by the course title, Write Your Way into Autumn. I had everyone spend about ten minutes in class writing a list of autumnal-inspired words, phrases and snippets of language. We then read aloud the words we each gathered.
Image copyright olly - Fotolia.com
This brief exercise promoted a feeling of turning within, of slowing down, of simply witnessing the world around and within us. And this brought that sense of presence, that magical spark, back into our shared time together.
This week, in both my Monday evening and Wednesday morning classes, we read from Deng Ming-Dao's Everyday Tao, specifically the "Source" and "Return" entries of this book, which is chockablock with wisdom. Here's how Deng (last name) closes the former entry:
"If you want to know Tao at its most fundamental, go back to the source. If you do go back to the source of Tao, you will also find the source of all your questions."
To help my writing students better understand what Deng means by source, we then read the "Return" entry which closes thus:
"Our essential nature, our innocent self, is always in us. Everyone has one, and we need only return to it in order to understand it. Just as the spiral eddies toward the center, we proceed from outer to inner to find the ultimate source."
I then asked my students to write for ten to fifteen minutes on the following question: "What is our essence, our original nature, our innocent self?" As with last week's autumnal word hoard, this brought mindfulness back to center stage, and, again, the results were magical.
Here's what one of my students, writer-animator Carl Sullivan, said about yesterday's class:
“The last session for me had the most depth. To breathe into the now and find a moment of stillness before the pen starts moving gives you a chance to bypass the person who wants to be a writer, and to just write. Much as when I draw—I really don’t have an idea of what's going to appear. To approach writing from a no-mind 'now' point lets the words be as free as a doodle. To doodle words in playful creativity with just a gentle expectancy, no pressure, just wondering what's going to be revealed is as fun and free as drawing.”
What else is there to say, really?
Well, here's what Carl wrote in response to the aforementioned question about our essence, our original nature, our innocent self, this final piece marking the end of our six weeks together:
inner smile purity
the Adventure of the Heart in child felt wonder,
joy springs dancing inside,
still as Now
mind at rest—being at peace,
real eyes to see
releasing tears of
remembering
cleansing the wounds
to be
held whole and happy
grateful and true
home again10 Steps writing mindfully for your blog
- Find a still, quiet place within which to write.
- Before you begin writing, take a few minutes to ground yourself in the present moment by bringing a simple, uncomplicated awareness to the whole of your physical body.
- Simply observe what it feels like to inhabit your body, without mental comments or judgments.
- If you notice your mind wanders, that's fine. Gently return your awareness to your body.
- When you feel centered, relaxed, and reconnected with your essence, slowly begin to move your fingers, toes, and limbs, and with a feather-light touch begin—with all your senses—to observe your surroundings while positioning yourself comfortably to begin writing.
- As you start writing, promote a sense of doing so with the whole of your being, with the whole of your physical body, rather than purely with the intellectual, wholly rational mind.
- Allow for writing to flow in imaginative, playful ways. Be curious, childlike.
- Try to maintain a general, global awareness of your body throughout the time you're writing.
- Reawaken your mind, body and spirit by taking frequent breaks to stand, stretch and bring movement back into your body.
- When you've finished writing, gently take this mindful approach into the rest of your day.
As a Creative Writing & Mindful Living Guide, Sean M. Madden offers Writing, Literature & Mindful Living courses and workshops in the UK, and one-to-one guidance & mentoring worldwide. Sean invites readers to follow him on Twitter @SeanMMadden.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
10 Steps to Writing Mindfully for Your Blog
Переслать - Why Bloggers Should Meditate
This guest post is by Orna Ross.
If you're a blogger, you should meditate. That's the conclusion of a flurry of recent research from the fields of psychology and neuroscience.
Willpower, discipline, and hard work may squeeze your blog post out. But if you want to produce words and ideas with ease, if you want to revel in the joy that makes it all worthwhile, and if you want to be as good as you can be, you need to know how to nurture inspiration, detach from daily distress, and cultivate creative mind states.
For all of this, meditation is the best tool in your pack.
What is meditation?
A meditation is a moment—long or short—when the thought traffic that normally marches through our minds slows or ceases. To meditate, in the sense that most people interpret the word, is to deliberately focus attention in a way that makes this happen. We minimize surface thought to help our mind slip into stillness.
Meditation does not, as some people seem to think, make you withdrawn or oblivious. On the contrary, it fosters a deep awareness of what is being created in any given moment.
It moves us from being caught in surface thoughts and life circumstances towards the condition that Buddhists call Big Mind—an alert, relaxed, creative, present-centered awareness. This ancient understanding of how the human mind works is now being understood in a new way, and validated, by contemporary science.
Meditation offers enormous benefits for everyone—and particular benefits for those who are engaged in a creative activity like blogging.
1. Meditation opens creative space
Neuroscience is showing, through brain mapping, how meditation affects brain wave activity. The most striking difference is a shift, in the meditator, from the stress-prone right frontal cortex to the calmer left frontal cortex.
Regular meditation also shows increased brain activity in areas associated with the creative and the mystical.
This is the shift that Albert Einstein described as "the most beautiful emotion we can experience…the [underlying] power of all true art and science." What it means for the blogger is experiencing more ideas, insights, and connections—the currencies in which we trade.
2. Creates conditions for insight
Insight, perception, revelation: these are the qualities that mark out the good blogger from the mediocre, the great blogger from the good. Meditation creates the mental and emotional conditions in which they are most likely to flourish. For centuries, it was thought that such qualities were the innate gifts of a special elite—born not made. Now brain mapping shows them to be available to all who meditate.
3. Meditation eases blogger's block
It's not easy putting yourself out there, day after day, post after post. It can make us edgy—vulnerable, raw, a little crazy sometimes. Brain scans show that meditation reduces activity in the amygdala, where the brain processes fear. It blunts our edginess, creating a place of safety from which we can take risks. It allows us to become, as Flaubert suggested we should, steady and well-ordered in life, so we can be fierce and original in our blog.
4. Meditation gives us roots
With that steadiness comes what Buddhists call “solidity,” a calm acceptance of self (see also #5), and a centered belief in what we have to offer.
5. Meditation quietens the critics
This steady solidity makes us very much less vulnerable to critics and to the pressures and persuasions of others. And it also muzzles the meanest critic of ‘em all: the great fault-finder within.
6. Meditation claims the essential self
"Be yourself," Oscar Wilde once said. "Everyone else is taken." But it's not always easy, especially if you're trying to do it in print. Consciously quieting the chatter of our surface mind helps us to claim, and express, our unique self—the indefinable essence that makes us different from anyone else who ever lived.
Also, by detaching us from our surface, chattering mind and the sticky grasp of personalized emotion, meditation allows us creative distance to observe ourselves, others, and life itself with clarity. This makes our blogs more original and compelling.
7. Meditation improves attention and concentration
Essentially, meditation is focus. Practicing it daily helps us to have it and to be able to draw on it when needed—an essential when negotiating the distracted and distracting online world.
8. Meditation makes us mindful
Blogging is a never-ending game. As soon as we finish one post, we're thinking of the next. Regular meditation develops our ability to appreciate what we're achieving and getting right, as well as what still has to be done. To enjoy what we are making in the moment of its making. To value process as much as product.
9. Meditation fosters flow
For bloggers, flow is that delectable condition where words seem to appear of their own volition, where all we have to do is turn up at the page and dictate ‘em. Analyzed in depth by creativity theorist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and others, flow has been found to induce similar brain states as meditation.
10. Meditation makes us happy The transformations induced by meditation and creative activity decrease stress, early depression, and anxiety. This brings about a long list of proven physical and emotional benefits, from eliminating insomnia to easing addiction.
Against this long list (which grows longer as each tranche of research turns up new benefits) bloggers regularly cite one problem. They'd love to meditate but they "can't": they don't have time. For all the reasons outlined above, it's clear that for bloggers, meditation doesn't take time, it makes time.
What's your experience? Have you ever meditated for creative benefit? What happened? Would you like to try? What's stopping you?
Read Orna's ebook, Inspiration Meditation – A Guide For Writers Artists & Everyone.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Переслать - Fiverr Outsourcing Tips for Bloggers
This blog post is by Rhys Wynne of The Blogging Dojo.
Recently I’ve been a part of a great discussion on a few blogging forums where we’ve talked about Fiverr. Fiverr is a website where, for $5, you can get a variety of tasks completed. For bloggers, particularly those starting out, outsourcing some of your blog to a third party may seem to be a luxury you can ill afford. However, with Fiverr, you outsource for small tasks (known as “gigs”) to individuals.The forum and myself have gained results, some good, some not so good, from the site. As a result, here are the five things I’ve learned from Fiverr.com.
1. Use it to test software
There is a plethora of blogging software on the market, from ebook creators to social bookmarking software. How do you know which get results? I use Fiverr.
Use the search box to search for the name of the piece of software, and you will get a list of people who will offer to run the piece of software on your behalf. I use this with various link-building pieces of software (such as directory and article submission software). If I get a stream of links back from them, then I know the software is good, and I’ll probably buy it.
Secondly if you need to do something once or twice (such as create an ebook cover from a static image), it can be more cost effective to buy the work off Fiverr than purchase the software yourself.
2. Combine “gigs” to get what you want
A good friend of mine told me about this idea. Basically, a number of Fiverr gigs (particularly an audio track or a video message) are offered on a time-limited basis. Say you want a two-minute narration of a video, but the buyer only has one-minute slots. Simply buy two one-minute gigs from them.
Most are okay with doing two minute jobs; you can also contact the seller to ask if they’ll give you a bulk discount. I’d recommend this if you are need a longer piece done—say ten minutes or so.
3. Use it for low-level social proof
Here’s something I use Fiverr for when I’m starting a new project. I usually create a Facebook fan page along with a website, then pay through Fiverr to get 25 “likes” on the fan page. Why 25? Well, if I get 25 likes, I can secure a shorter, brandable URL.
Once I have that URL, it will never be taken away from me. I don’t care if I get unliked by those 25 people. It doesn’t matter, because once I can more effectively target people who would be interested once I have my branded Facebook URL.
4. You get what you pay for
Overall, you get what you pay for. A lot of things in life seem too good to be true, and often they are. My advice is don’t expect to get written blog posts that will go viral, or graphic design that will make your blog jump out, on Fiverr. However if you keep your expectations low, you should get exactly what you want.
5. The most important skill I’ve gained from Fiverr
The most important thing I’ve learned from using Fiverr is experience in dealing with people who you are paying to do a job for you. This skill will be transferable to more highly paid people associated with your blog in the future (such as contractors or even direct employees).
While I can’t give you a definitive list for dealing with contractors, here’s what Fiverr has taught me about managing gigs on the site.
- Specify clearly what you want: Use simple language to clearly explain what you want. A good idea is to use examples of previous work that’s similar to what you want to achieve. That way, there’s no confusion.
- Analyze failures: Often you won’t get exactly what you want back. Analyze where the communication breakdown occurred, and learn from your mistakes. It’s far better to do this when you’ve lost $5, rather than $500 (or more).
- Have fun with it! Fiverr is fast becoming a guilty addiction of mine, and I use it to prank people (such a record ranting videos on my mates, or getting them “Facebook Girlfriends” for a week). It helps the day go faster!
By learning these skills for such a small amount of cash, you’ll be more effective with outsourcing later on … and that’s worth a fiverr of anybody’s money.
Fiverr.com is one of the strategies of link building discussed in the free e-book “How I Ranked Page 1 In Google For Under $50“. In it, Rhys Wynne – the writer of this blog post – discusses an SEO strategy that can help you get a site running and earning in your blog empire. Rhys Wynne is a 7 year blogger and an SEO with over 4 years commercial experience, and you can follow him on Twitter at @bloggingdojo.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Fiverr Outsourcing Tips for Bloggers
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