tips

Advice from the Pros: How Writers Should Use Blogging and Social Media

Recently I gave a workshop at Write on the River, a writers’ conference for North Central Washington.  My presentation was entitled Blogging and Social Media: What Every Writer Should Know.  I spent a lot of time preparing and had lots of great information for the talk, but one of my favorite parts was getting to show the power of social media directly to attendees.

A few days before the conference I had tweeted some of the most helpful and influential people who tweet about blogging and social media for writers.  My basic question to all of them was this, “I’m giving a workshop for writers about blogging and social media – could you give your 140 char. of advice about them?”  I received replies from everyone I tweeted, and all within 24 hours.

Thus one of the most powerful aspects of social media is displayed.  When else in the history could I get on such easy, instant, direct contact with someone who gets the respect and following of tens of thousands of people?

So without further ado, here is advice from the pros: How Writers Should Use Blogging and Social Media:

Ronnie Smith

Ronnie runs writersrelief.com, a great website with lots of tips, hints, and hot leads for submitting and publishing your books, poems, and stories.
@WritersRelief >10,000 followers

Advice? Proofread. Be consistent. Smile. :-) Sounds like a great workshop.

Dana Lynn Smith

Book marketing coach and author of The Savvy Book Marketer Guides at www.SavvyBookMarketer.com.
@bookmarketer > 3,000 followers

Blogging: Combine author blog & website; plan on paper first; keyword optimize; blog 3x/week http://bit.ly/BloggingResources

Social Media: Choose right networks; build effective profile; budget time; write effective updates http://bit.ly/SocialResources

Joanna Penn

Is the author of thecreativepenn.com, offering TONS of advice on writing, blogging, social media and how to get published. Tweets lots of links to great content for writers across the web.
@thecreativepenn >12,000 followers

get a distinctive blog, add great content regularly, be useful, use multimedia, stay in niche, focus hard on 1 social network

Alexandra Levit

Business/workplace author and speaker with 5 pubbed books and 2 syndicated columns. Featured in New York Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, ABC News, Fox News, CNBC, the Associated Press, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Fortune.
@alevit > 34,000 followers

Set aside an hour a day for blogging and social media.  Otherwise they will eat up time surreptitiously.

Leo Babauta

Started ZenHabits.net, one of the best blogs ever (in my opinion) and WriteToDone.com, a blog to help writers improve their craft and their art. He’s a true poster-child for noname-to-stardom blogging. With his great content he got over 100,000 readers of his blog in less than 2 years. He’s also published multiple books from his blog.
@zen_habits > 42,000 followers

Writing advice: Say less, choose carefully, clear distractions. And it’s all distractions, if it’s not writing.

Have more advice for writers using blogging and social media? Give it below in the comments and be sure to leave your social media links.

05/12/10 Comments (2) , , , , , , ,

Backup!

backup! Last week my hard drive on my iMac crashed. Died. Done.

When I called to tell my wife the news she said, “You sound much more calm than I thought you would.” That’s because the night before the crash my automated weekly backup (via the very nice iDrive) ran and all my client files were safe and secure in the cloud of the internet.

While I had always heard the importance of backing up your computer, that day’s calmness confirmed just how vital this task is to any business.  After using TechTool Pro I was able to boot the drive up for a couple hours and pull the few files that didn’t get backed up (of course, I back them up now), but all in all the crash was nowhere near the disaster it could have been.  Surprisingly the closest certified Mac technician is all the way down in Ellensburg, but in just a few days the awesome guys at CCS had me back up and running.  In the meantime I could keep working on my laptop and everybody stayed happy!

Two lessons from this story:

  1. Apple no longer has the shiny halo around it that it once did for me. (the hard drive was only 1.5 years old!)
  2. Backups are critically important.  The time they take (which, with automated backups is virtually none) is never wasted.
06/24/09 Comments (4) , ,

Be Good

they're great!Remember when i said that people notice when you’re bad?  But that people notice when you’re good too?

Well, some people have been noticing Apt’s new websites are pretty good.  The new site I finished up for Leavenworth Summer Theater has been featured on some showcases of great web design, including:

And the new E3 website I created showed up here:

Read More »

04/17/09 Comments (3) , , , ,

photoshop shortcut

so really, there are almost millions of photoshop shortcuts out there (no, really – take a look at all of these). but it seems you only learn new ones when you really start doing one task over and over and think, “there’s gotta be a faster way to do this.&quo{readmore}t;

well, one great shortcut i’ve found that you won’t stumble upon very easily deals with quickly running through the blending modes for a layer.

layers1.jpglayers1b.jpg

first, make sure you have the move tool (v) selected.

in your layers palette, click on the layer you want to change blending modes for.

now press (shift) plus (+) or (-) on your keyboard.

layers2.jpglaybers2b.jpg

viola! you can quickly scan through the blending modes and see what effect each one has on your layer!

12/06/07 Comments (0) , ,

What is RSS?

the apt design blog will now begin shifting its focus to its real purpose – offering graphic and web design tips, tools, ideas and suggestions; as well as connecting you to other interesting websites.

our first topic – rss. Have you heard the term RSS but really have no idea what it is or how it may make your life easier? read on for a brief introduction.

RSS in its current incarnation stands for Real Simple Syndication. As the internet continues to evolve more and more emphasis is being placed on website’s content being updated often. this is especially true in the realm of blogs which may be updated multiple times daily. other examples of constantly updated content include news stories, sports scores, photo albums, and forums.

now, if you are interested in getting multiple streams of current content often you could quickly find yourself spending all day going from site to site to check for anything new. this is where rss comes into play and can save you enormous amounts of time. instead of going to find all of this information, you can make it all come to you!

the first step is to download an rss aggregator. one of the most popular is google reader, though there are a variety of free aggregators. some customized homepages like igoogle and myyahoo can also be aggregators.

RSS iconafter you have an aggregator you need to subscribe to a site’s rss feeds. you will often see the rss logo or a ‘subscribe’ link to click on. this will automatically notify your aggregator when the content you have subscribed to has been updated.

now instead of visiting multiple sites, you can just open your aggregator and it will let you see which of your subscriptions have been updated, as well as show you the new content. don’t worry, if you need to go directly to the page that was updated you can do so easily from your aggregator.

finally the best news – real simple syndication is all free! so go ahead and subscribe to this blog for updated tips, ideas, and links – just click the ‘subscribe’ button at the top of the blog page!

09/27/07 Comments (1) ,