Journalists. Public relations professionals. Frenemies of the highest order. No doubt you’ve seen journalists and bloggers complain about bad PR pitches. You may have even seen them here (like this lazy pitch from Upwork). Despite the tendency of writers to call out PR folks, the truth is many of us need them. We need their clients and employers as sources for stories. We need access to events.
Every week I receive dozens of guest post pitches across all of my blogs, and it’s not uncommon for that to creep over 100 in a week (and those are just the ones making it past my inbox filters; imagine how many bigger blogs must have to sort through). Yet I respond to less than 10% of those pitches. Even fewer result in guest posts
When you work on your blog’s editorial calendar (or even a more general list of blog post ideas), do you ever feel stuck? While there are plenty of headline template lists and blog post idea lists available, and I’ve even provided some here, sometimes you just don’t know what to write about. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It happens to me too.
I was contacted several days ago by a fellow freelance writer and blogger. He was having problems on his WordPress site where his theme was no longer compatible with the WordPress core. It caused elements of his site to disappear. Another colleague pointed him in my direction, and thankfully I was able to find a patch. The problem? The patch was for a different version of
WordPress 4.3 was recently released, and if you haven’t upgraded yet you should. It has a great new feature for writers, helping you write blog posts faster while spending less time formatting your content. When we talked about using Scrivener for blogging, I shared a free Markdown cheat sheet with you. Markdown lets you use simple formatting shortcuts as you type so you don’t have
If you run a blog as an income stream, chances are that you’ve at least tried to earn some advertising revenue. But managing ads on your blog can involve a big time investment. Fortunately you don’t have to manually insert ad code in every blog post. Occasionally this makes sense, like when you want to insert an affiliate ad that’s relevant only to a specific post. But
Recently we looked at eight blog post ideas you can fall back on if you suddenly aren’t sure what to write about on your blog. Today I have another tip along those lines — something you can do on a regular basis to make idea generation a bit easier. This week’s quick tip for bloggers is to write post series rather than relying solely on
Whether you’re a freelance writer with a professional site, an author with a site to promote your books, or a blogger, website speed and stability matters. So for this week’s “short share” feature, let’s look at some tips for speeding up your WordPress websites. This infographic comes from MadLemmings.com. Courtesy of: Mad Lemmings How many of these tips have you used to speed up your website? I’ll
Do you ever get blogger’s block – feeling like you’ve already blogged about everything in your niche and you can’t come up with new blog post ideas? I do. I’d bet most bloggers do from time to time. No matter how much you’ve written, you probably haven’t really tapped your niche, even if it’s a narrow one. So when these dry spells happen, how can
Earlier this week, I went off on Elance / Upwork for their BS blogger outreach efforts that targeted me and several other colleagues (I’ve heard from at least six others now who were a part of this supposed “handful” of targeted blogs). In that post, I shared a simple infographic highlighting the three big mistakes Upwork made, in the hopes that other businesses would see