Happy Friday (And National Ravioli 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!

Mary Dash, Chief of the Congressional Correspondence, provides excellent general advice in tidbit form on a number of important writing topics including active/passive voice, compound words, personal pronouns, “gobbledygook”, redundancies, problems words, and more. Although these tips are based on her governmental writing experience, much of them apply when writing professional content, such as documents and sales copy. This must-read piece earns our top placement this week!

Next, we find a familiar name in Nicolas Cole, who shares some useful tactics on how to make some additional income writing from home with all those extra hours many of us will now have during these darker and more uncertain times.

And topping off the podium in third is Jamie Cattanach, a full-time freelance writer, who expands on how to avoid passive voice as much as possible, and explains in detail why it’s bad (but not exactly wrong) to keep doing.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Mar 14 – Mar 20, 2020 →

Happy Friday (And National Good Samaritan 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!

David Robson, author of “The Intelligence Trap” and writer at the BBC, starts us off this week with his report about new research focusing on the massive advantages of possessing passion and a “growth mindset” on the long road to a successful creative career, and earns the top spot on the podium!

Next up, we get to Ayodeji Awosika, self-improvement author and speaker, who reminds us that we’re in it for the long run in our creative journeys. It can take five, or even more YEARS of hustling and grinding to build enough momentum to reach the “promised land”, but unfortunately most burn out or quit way too early.

Capturing third and the final spot is Naomi Pham who shares her top tips and advice on how to regularly pump out content at lightning speed, using an easy-to-follow and doable approach that actually yields results.

Just below, Sergey Faldin, prolific Medium writer, shares his views on the importance and building blocks of superb storytelling, and how to do it properly in different formats such as written, audio, and video.

And finally we arrive at Josh from Money Life Wax blog, who describes his 30-month blogging journey, documents his successes, mistakes, and fails, and details out all the things he would have done differently had he had today’s knowledge when he was just getting started.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Mar 7 – Mar 13, 2020 →

Happy Friday (And National Day of Unplugging) 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!

We begin this week with Lynn Steger Strong, who writes on The Guardian about how “there is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – and these things cost money” as amply summarized by the sub-header. Lynn, a writing teacher, shares her own personal background and experiences, and resonates on how tough and cut-throat it actually can be to even just reach a living wage, a piece that earns the top spot in this week’s list.

Just below her, we’re greeted by Maggie Archibald, who dives into the popular but difficult subject of the importance of creating a well-thought out post title that maximizes the chances of getting clicked on, and details some tried, tested, and true tactics that you can try next time you find yourself writing your own.

Capturing our final podium spot, and the digital bronze, is George Nguyen who reports how since just a few days ago, Google has started treating the nofollow link attribute as a hint, instead of than a directive like before, when crawling and indexing links and pages. In short, the main point is to give more content control to bloggers and website owners.

Kelly Burch, a freelance writer, shares her personal success story of how she climbed from zero to making six digits in her freelance writing career, in a detailed and transparent post that earns her fourth place!

Finally, wrapping up the list is Eric Goldschein with his piece on the topic of membership walls/gates, the pros and cons of utilizing them on your blog or website, along with some tips that may help you out if you’re considering this content strategy.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Feb 29 – Mar 6, 2020 →