Happy New Year’s Eve 2019 everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another 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 is a special yearly edition.

As we bid a final farewell to 2019, along with the second decade of the new millennium, we take a look back at the long year that was, and highlight the absolute best of the best in the world of blogging, writing, and content creation, courtesy of all the amazing writers, creatives and other talented individuals that our constantly evolving and expanding industry has to offer.

With over 500 submissions in the ever-growing BES Community this year, you can imagine it wasn’t an easy task to pick just a handful, or roughly three percent, to feature in this exclusive end-of-year post, especially with all the unique perspectives and wonderful styles provided.

But we did our best (with some major help from our invaluable community) and hope you enjoy reading them all as much as we did!

So without further ado, here are 2019’s most valuable posts from the /t/BES creatives community, in no particular order:

These Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
“Do we really want to continue chucking up cookie warnings to everyone and somehow expecting them to make an informed decision about the risks they present? 99% of people are going to click through them anyway.”

Who Are Online, Found by Advertisers and 4 Years Old? Kidfluencers
“Brands are giving lucrative endorsement deals to young children on YouTube and Instagram, raising questions about whether their young followers should be seeing that kind of marketing.”

Endure Long Enough to Get Noticed
“There is so much content being produced that we can’t possibly discover it all. If step one in building an audience is to create great content, step two is to endure long enough to get noticed.”

New AI Fake Text Generator May Be Too Dangerous to Release
“The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed “deepfakes for text” – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.”

BuzzFeed Laid Off Its Director of Quizzes Because People Are Willing to Make Quizzes For Free
“A very large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users. It’s kinda amazing how much revenue-generating traffic the site gets from unpaid community volunteers.”

Sam Altman: How To Be Successful
Although the post is focused more on entrepreneurship, rather than specifically blogging or creativity, Sam Altman lays out 13 points on how to build something important like a business or blog.

Op-Ed: Online Book-Selling Scams Steal a Living From Writers
“Counterfeiting, author “doppelganging,” title cloning, ebook piracy, cut-and-paste plagiarism and other rip-offs — many of which take place on digital platforms like Amazon, Ebay and Google. The variety and cleverness of these cons is breathtaking.”

At Every Milestone of Your Creative Journey Awaits a Faster Vehicle
“As you keep moving forward and progressing in your journey, you keep upgrading via countless faster bikes, then cars, then planes, then jets until you finally go far enough to reach a spaceship and can shoot for the stars.”

It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done
“I started writing this newsletter in early June. I’d come back to my meager Google Doc every few days, reworking the same few sentences, each time thinking I was finally ready to finish.”

How to Be Great? Just be Good, Repeatably
“Over the years, we’ve all encountered our fair share of successes and failures. As I’ve acquired more of both under my name, I’ve started to contemplate which experiences were truly “great” and why.”

How to Promote Yourself Even If You Hate or Fear Self-Promotion
“It is done! Your book, your article, your course, your product. After all your hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, the thing is finished. Now, it’s time to sell it. Get people to buy it. Read it. Adopt it.”

Goodbye to the Influencer Decade, and Thanks for Nothing
“On the 6th of October 2010, almost one year into a brand new decade, everything changed. That morning, a new photo-sharing app launched on Apple’s iPhone App Store: Instagram.”

19 Things You Should Know About Making Money as a Writer
“As much as I was studying the art of writing, I was extremely aware of the fact that a writer has to eat — and in order to eat, one must understand the business of writing.”

Happy 25th Year, Blogging. You’ve Grown Up, But Social Media is Still Having a Brawl
“The furore over social media and its impact on democracy has obscured the fact that the blogosphere not only continues to exist, but also to fulfil many of the functions of a functioning public sphere.”

You Don’t Suck, You Just Haven’t Put in the Time
“No one is born good at anything but bodily functions. Obviously, someone who writes for an hour a day is going to be a better writer than someone who spends an hour a day really thinking hard about being a writer.”

That’s all folks! You can view all the rest (500+) of the community’s 2019 submissions here.

Be sure to tune in next Friday (back to our regular weekly format) for another great weekend reading list that will make you a better, wiser, and more informed blogger, writer, and/or creator!

Don’t forget to bookmark this blog, or better yet, add us to your RSS reader if you use one! If you have anything awesome to submit that others might enjoy, feel free to do so — it might even end up on next week’s top five!

And don’t forget to help others find this nifty resource by sharing it around! Huge thanks!

PS: Run a blog, vlog, or podcast, or any other creative endeavor? Start an accompanying homebase/community (like ours) on Snapzu (a social sharing platform for bloggers/creatives) and utilize it to help you dominate your social media game using the immense power of content CURATION, and effortlessly create and send out awesome routine round-up posts/newsletters like this to help grow your audience (and newsletter) 3x faster. It’s free! More info here.

Header image credit: Christopher Rusev on Unsplash