This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 23 – Nov 29, 2019

Happy (Black) Friday everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

Our top story this week is WordPress announcing a new way for bloggers to earn money on their blogs as reported by Bijan Stephen of The Verge. The idea is to make it super easy to accept recurring payments for private access to content.

In second place we have Tom Kuegler, a familiar name in these circles, who contends that writing shorter blog posts is better and much more do-able than writing long posts, listing his pros and cons, along with his personal experiences.

Ian Sample of The Guardian captures the third and final podium spot with his reporting of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s launch of his “Contract for the Web”, a global action plan to “save the web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other malign forces”.

Next up we find Stacey Corrin with her lengthy but informative piece about how to utilize popular formulas to write all kinds of blog posts which can help avoid burning out or getting lost.

Last but definitely not least, we arrive at Emma Lombard, historical fiction author, who shares her experiences with Twitter as a promotional tool, along with her top must-do tactics on how she built up her follower count to over 20 thousand followers.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 23 – Nov 29, 2019

This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 16 – Nov 22, 2019

Happy Friday everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

In the top spot, Tim Denning provides us with some useful personal tips of how he managed to publish over two THOUSAND blog posts over the past several years, how he mostly maintained a positive mindset, and how he never handed off the blame when problems arose.

Next up, Lydia Davis takes us on a journey into her top ten recommendations for creating and maintaining good and positive writing habits, which can and will significantly help in the entire process.

Topping off the podium we find Shaunta Grimes, fellow writer and entrepreneur (founder of Ninja Writers), who shares her most impactful books (and a couple videos) that helped her get to where she is today.

Just below is Joe Saul-Sehy of Stacking Benjamins podcast who does a Q&A about his his experience about podcasting, and includes some useful tips on how to get started and get keep better along the way.

Lastly, Konrad Sanders shares his favorite social media tricks for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and provides a few useful general tips to rock on those (and other) social platforms.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 16 – Nov 22, 2019

This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 9 – Nov 15, 2019

Happy Friday (and National Philanthropy Day) everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

This week’s top spot is awarded to Sarah Blake, who in her lengthy and insightful piece for Craft Your Content blog writes about the psychological hardships of procrastination, and what to do when it affects you personally.

Next up we have Kaila Hale-Stern of Gizmodo who shares and reports on a short video of Alan Moore, the English writer best known for blockbuster hits Watchmen and V for Vendetta, who publicly lashed out his frustrations with big publishers and encourages new aspiring writers to go around them.

Just below we arrive at Blake Thorne, product marketing manager at Atlassian and successful web writer, who shares his daily routine and system of how he successfully managed to write an average of one article per day for several years that still rank well and accumulate generous amounts of traffic via search.

Tim Denning captures the fourth spot with his Medium piece on how to successfully build a social media following, and provides various strategies and tactics that worked for him to build up his own six digit combined follower count.

Finally, we wrap it up with a useful resource compiled and provided by Write Hacked listing three helpful tool types for writers that can help out and make life a little easier and more manageable.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 9 – Nov 15, 2019

This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 2 – Nov 8, 2019

Happy Friday (and National Cappuccino Day) everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

Kaitlyn Tiffany, technology writer at The Atlantic captures our top spot this week with her wordy and insightful article about the history, present, and future of digital newsletters, and the ever-increasing utilization of them for marketing and growth strategies.

Taking home the digital silver this week is a neat little web comic by artist @thunkfool on Instagram that perfectly and humorously illustrates how leaving tasks for another day is usually a bad (and unproductive) idea.

Rounding off the top 3 is a lengthy 40+ minute video of the State of the Word 2019 keynote address, where Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, summarizes the highlights of 2019, and what he looks forward to in upcoming release 5.3. Worth watching, even if just in the background, if you are a user of WordPress and want to catch up on new features and functions.

Number four brings us a Medium piece by Aytekin Tank who provides us his personal outlook on the psychology of motivation, its two different “types” and how to build sustainable systems to not rely on it as much in his creative endeavors.

And finally, wrapping up our list is an article in The Economist, by an unspecified author that reassures us that artificial intelligence will never (not for a loooong while anyway) replace the human touch of writing. A.I. may be coming for many of our jobs, but definitely not complex and creative ones like writing.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Nov 2 – Nov 8, 2019

This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2019

Happy Friday (and National Author’s Day) everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

Bijan Stephen of The Verge captures our top spot this week with his deep dive into one of YouTube’s most successful channels “Hot Ones by First We Feast”, it’s origins, and recipe (pun intended) for success. A well researched and highly informative read that should not be missed.

In a close second we have Ryan Law over at Animalz blog who published a piece about what he explains as “a copycat crisis in content marketing”. He interprets that it’s no longer worth utilizing the overused skyscraper technique, and makes a solid argument to put more effort into experimentation and trying new things. Agreed!

Topping off the podium is writer “Yanyi” on the “realities of leaving your day job, the complicated relationship between being creative and being truly productive, and the value of sometimes changing your mind” as is adequately summarized by their sub-intro.

Next up we find a post by Deanna Ting from Digiday who examines how a handful of major online publishers are trying out and jumping on young and growing social platforms in their attempts to reach their younger audiences, and to get their “foot-in-the-door” advantage as early as possible.

Last but definitely not least, Medium writer Shannon Ashley provides her personal knowledge and experiences in her short but sweet piece about how to never run out of ideas and how to find inspiration.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2019