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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) , , , , , , ,

The Power of a Personal Voice

For the past few months the Gold’s Gyms of the Wenatchee Valley have been doing a great job of connecting to their members in a variety of ways, and not only while they are at the gym working out.

The Gold’s Gyms have been updating their blog often with great fitness and nutrition tips, as well as lots of overall wellness advice.  But as the year began Melissa Schwab, a Gold’s Gym member, began blogging on the site about her experience trying to lose weight and get in shape as she participated in the Gold’s Gym Challenge.  Hits to the site and comments on the posts are way up as people are excited to hear about someone’s experience from the trenches.  They get to hear about the highs and the lows, the good times and the bad – told with the power of a personal voice.

At the same time Gold’s Gym staff ramped up work on the local Gold’s Gym Facebook fan page. And fan numbers and interaction there jumped significantly too.  Staff created contests like “Post a picture that best says Strength to you,” kept Challengers and members updated on important times and events, as well as just providing a space for members to interact and support each other online. Read More »

03/12/10 Comments (0) , , , , , ,

10 Excellent WordPress Plugins to Make Your Site Better

WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System) for building any type of website.  Web designers all over the world galaxy love WordPress for its simplicity in setting up, ease in customizing design, and for how simple it is for anyone to make updates to content.

What makes WordPress even better is the great variety of high-quality plugins that add all sorts of increased functionality to your website.  WordPress.org hosts a great database of thousands of plugins you can install with one click on your own site.  Most plugins are created for free by awesome coders helping make the world a better place.  They deserve serious thanks.  (So if you are a coder who has created a free WordPress plugin – THANKS!)

In my use of WordPress to create websites that connect my clients and their markets I’ve come across a few that are indispensable.  These plugins can be added to your site whether you are a professional developer or hobby blogger.  These plugins stand out to me because they:

  • Are easy to add to the site
  • Have customizable options
  • Integrate seamlessly with the WP admin panel
  • Are easy to add custom design to
  • Are easy for clients to understand and use (when needed)

(see this article about what makes a good plugin in general)

So, while not an exhaustive list, here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet

wordpress spam pluginSomehow the evil spam robots of the universe have even figured out how to leave spam comments on blogs.  This can get annoying if you are constantly being bombarded with comments that aren’t real.  Akismet is the fastest way to shut off the spam-flow.  After installation I’ve never seen a spam comment get into the system.  Nice!

Google Analytics

Okay, I honestly don’t use a plugin to add Google Analytics to my sites, I do it by adding code by hand.  The point is that you need Google Analytics on your site no matter how you get it there.  Analytics gives you an incredible amount of information about visitors to your site – where in the galaxy world they came from, what they were looking for, what they looked at while on your site, and much, much more.  If you aren’t getting in-depth reports on your website traffic you need to reconsider what you are even doing with your website.

Google XML Sitemaps

Ongoogle wordpress plugine key to ranking well in search engines is to make your website easy for them to crawl and index.  This plugin creates a sitemap for search engines to see what content you have on your site, then submits it to the search engines for you! How much easier can that get? Read More »

10/09/09 Comments (0) , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Now Twittering

tweeterToday I am growing my social networking tree a bit more.  I’ve signed up for Twitter and begun twittering.  Just the word “twittering” sounds fun anyways, we’ll see how it goes.  Much more informal than LinkedIn or even blogging, my Twitter posts will give a glimpse of the day to day workings of Apt Design.  You can follow me at http://twitter.com/aptdesign .  (Icon via Function)

On another note, following my rereading of Cameron Moll‘s old but good post at A List Apart (Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign), I am making some slight updates to the site.  You may notice a higher-contrast color scheme and a new menu that emphasizes the pages my visitors come for most.  If you have any feedback, leave a comment.

See you on Twitter!

02/24/09 Comments (0) , , ,