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!

International bestseller and a multi award-winning author Jana Oliver captures our top spot this week with her guest post on The Write Life that digs into the important topic of stress and how it affects our writing, along with our creativity in general, and how to deal with it to minimize its effects.

At spot number two freelance blogger Dana Sitar points out how the concept of blogging (and other online writing) is very different that what we learned in English class, which mostly consisted of essays and other technical writing. Times have changed and so did expectations.

Next up at #3, Jasmine Garsd from NPR investigates the growing trend of paid advertising posts on Instagram masquerading as regular organic content and how young audiences have a difficult time distinguishing between the two.

Moving on down the list, we get to an insightful piece by David Lazarus, a Los Angeles Times columnist, about the various types of deceptive “dark patterns” found on blogs, websites, and social networks that confuse readers/viewers in order to increase metrics, opt-ins, collect data, or all three.

Last but not least, long-time blogger Anne R. Allen shares her experiences over the past ten years of her blogging journey, organized into ten insightful tips she learned along the way. Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: June 22 – June 28, 2019 →

Happy Friday (and National Selfie 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 belongs to The Cut’s Katie Heaney with her very compelling and remorseless piece about how emotionally challenging and draining it can be to write on a regular basis and how being afraid of failure plays a major role.

Up next, Writer Dorothea Lasky “ruminates on the nature of creativity, witchcraft, and the eternal nobility of being an artist.” as explained in the sub-heading on her insightful post. We’re also  treated to an extremely detailed web comic about the daily routine of a writer in 26 parts, starting from A and ending with Z, Illustrated and created by Grant Snider of Incidental Comics.

Finally, Christian Mihai from The Art of Blogging lists nine common and useful tactics to increase readership/traffic to your blog, and an unidentified author from the WonderShuttle blog gives us a deep-dive investigation into Slack’s (Yes, the one that was just all over the news about their 20 BILLION valuation) content strategy that helped catapult them to get where they are today. Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: June 15 – June 21, 2019 →