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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Happy Friday (and National Greasy Foods 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!

We start off this week off with a piece by John Naughton, writer for The Guardian and author of ‘From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg’, who celebrates the blog’s 25th birthday, and takes us back into its robust and complicated history, along with how it gradually evolved into today’s modern social media and the modern problems it now entails.

Next up is Eric W. Dolan from PsyPost who shares with us a new research paper published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which investigates the psychological and interpersonal consequences of being creative, and breaks it down for us in an easy to digest format.

Shaunta Grimes lands in third with another quality Medium post about the importance getting out of the comfort zone, adding her personal insights and “blueprints” to a popular topic that inevitably affects the bulk of us creatives.

Just off the podium we find Nicole Peeler, professional novelist and essayist, who argues that the popular saying “trust the process” is grossly misguided, and explains that you must “engage with the process” instead — not just blindly trust it.

We conclude with an insightful and fairly short post by Cristian Mihai from The Art of Blogging, who writes about the difference between blog post lengths, and how there is no right or wrong, as long as you adequately tell the story you want to tell. It’s a great example of a short but effective post that gets it’s point across.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Oct 19 – Oct 25, 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!

Ernie Smith of Vice claims the top spot this week with his throwback piece about the rise, domination, and eventual downfall of Macromedia/Adobe Flash, and its effect on the creativity during that primordial internet era.

Just below is Macy Thornhill who’s guest post on The Creative Penn blog provides us with “6 Ways To Stay Productive In A Creative Slump” as the title establishes.

Next up, and in our final spot on the podium, is Kim Lochery with her extensive look into the art of Pinterest hashtags, and how to use them with maximum efficiency to maximize the chance of getting discovered on that social platform.

Elise Dopson lands in fourth with her analytical look into click-through rates on blog titles, arguably the most important element of any blog post, and shows us over twenty different examples of highly effective titles, along with comments/explanations from the authors of each.

Last but not least, we get to Charles Finch who provides us a unique glimpse into one of his personal tricks on how to write good mystery plots in his insightful and humorous piece for Vulture Magazine.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Oct 12 – Oct 18, 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!

This week’s top spot is captured by John Seabrook, a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1989, who penned an incredible look into how AI, and modern technology in general, is gradually changing the writing landscape, much like many other industries. A long one but a good one!

Next up we have a familiar face in Shaunta Grimes who shares her personal account of how she started making five digits every month writing on Medium and other online platforms. It requires a lot of work, or “going all in” as she puts it, along with patience, experimentation, and, of course, learning along the way.

Taking home the bronze is Priya Krishna from the New York Times who takes a deep dive into the world of the food and recipe publishing business, and explains why and how more and more authors in that niche are turning to self-publishing.

In fourth place we have Stacey Corrin who provides us with a gigantic list of forty different types of content ideas, perfect for any blog in any niche.

Finally, wrapping up our list today is Thom James Carter who writes a five-chapter blog post on the subject of digital storytelling, it’s lengthy history going back thousands of years, and how to utilize it to engage your audience and create an emotional connection with them.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Oct 5 – Oct 11, 2019 →

Happy Friday (and National Taco 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!

Landing on the prestigious top spot this week is Pete McPherson of Do You Even Blog? with his piece called “The Four Stages of Blogging” providing his personal input and speaking mostly from personal experience after interviewing countless bloggers and other creatives over the years.

Next up in silver territory is Matt Southern who reports that Facebook will soon be removing public post counts on Facebook, starting with Australia as the initial testing grounds, and expanding it if makes Facebook more enjoyable as a whole. It will be interesting to see how it all pans out, and how it changes the social media landscape as a whole.

Capturing the third and final place on the podium is Ayodeji Awosika who eloquently shares his insights on how to increase writing productivity and provides a useful six step process to help achieve maximum output in your writing.

Tom Kuegler is next with his Publishous Medium listicle that lists fifty bite-size lessons he learned in over four years of blogging.

Finally, wrapping up our list this week is Ellie Betts from Writers Cookbook who insists that age does not matter whether you are writing a book, short story, blog post or anything else, and provides us some real life examples backing up her views.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Sept 28 – Oct 4, 2019 →

Happy Friday (and National Chocolate Milk 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!

Securing the top spot is Shannon Ashley who shares her insights about about creativity, specifically how (like in business) execution is multitudes more important than worrying about having the perfect idea.

Author Kristen Lamb takes a lengthy deep-dive into the relationship between branding and human behavior, specifically the psychology behind it in her piece that lands in our 2nd spot.

Rounding off the podium is Jacob Kastrenakes of The Verge who reports that YouTube will be backtracking its decision to remove their verification functionality (that most top creators approve of), with the CEO personally apologizing on Twitter.

Up next is David Farkas who provides us a wholesome list of ten link-building misconceptions for bloggers and other website owners. The SEO landscape is always changing, as is the nature of the internet, so being informed and staying ahead is key.

Finally, Wendy Syfret of The Guardian gives us her opinion on how social media (blogging, podcasting, etc) has vastly helped to pave the way to the golden age of television that we’re all blessed to be living in today.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Sept 21 – Sept 27, 2019 →

Happy Friday (and National Pepperoni Pizza 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!

Claiming the top spot this week is Tina Jordan of the New York Times who rounds up personal tales of various habits of five professional and successful writers that helped them get where they are today (on this week’s best-sellers list!).

Just below in second place, Zat Rana takes a unique look at the difference between surviving and thriving from the perspective of success, focusing on the psychology behind living up to our potential and why it’s important to do more than just the minimum.

Up next is Stuart Heritage, writer at The Guardian, who explains that the most efficient way to dealing with online trolls and bullies is to actually use the muting and blocking tools provided. Engaging may seem enticing, which is what they’re hoping, but will almost always just make things much worse, similar to the “Streisand effect”.

In fourth, we get to Kiera Abbamonte’s lengthy but insightful how-to post about the useful and effective strategy of repurposing written content into various formats and platforms. If you put in the time to create good content, it only makes sense to do as much as possible to squeeze all the juice of out it.

Finally, we get to a familiar name here, Tim Denning, who writes on Medium about the importance of utilizing the strengths of curation, providing some real life examples, and explains how it builds trust from your audience which is priority number one.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Sept 14 – Sept 20, 2019 →

Happy Friday (and National Peanut 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!

Drew Duboff leads us off this week with his insightful look into how to start an interview series, and provides us with the (many) benefits that come with it. As a host of his own interview series, he speaks from experience and genuinely knows what he’s talking about.

Back in April, in an attempt to combat the growing propaganda and “fake news” epidemic, Facebook first announced that it may be launching a revamped “News Tab” section, but didn’t really provide any further details. This week, in 2nd place, Laura Hazard Owen shares some more details that have been trickling out about how exactly it will benefit readers, along with writers and publishers.

Next up is Franziska Eichler, a self-proclaimed wellbeing coach who’s had the chance to work with world-class musicians such as Skrillex, treats us with some some personal “tips to nourish your physical and mental wellbeing while you try to do it all” in her post for The Creative Independent.

Just off the podium in 4th is Rachel Thompson with some self-branding advice for authors, insisting that blogging is a must in today’s extremely noisy landscape and simply cannot be ignored if you ever want to be found organically by potential readers.

Finally, we conclude our list with Pamela Wilson’s post on CopyBlogger, who takes the entire process of creating a blog post (or anything else creative really) and divides it into a completely do-able 4-day process that stretches out and simplifies all the must-do tasks that come with it.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Sept 7 – Sept 13, 2019 →

Happy Friday (and National Read-A-Book 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 captured by Ana Andjelic at Fast Company with her psychological look into how “Self-promotion might not come naturally for some, but less outgoing people can use their natural strengths to create an authentic online presence” as she elegantly puts it, while laying out 4 main types of methodologies introverts can utilize to become more discoverable.

Up next is some major cyber security news rocking the blogging world involving WordPress whos CMS powers millions of blogs and websites. Davey Winder, Senior Contributor at Forbes, reports about how nefarious actors are leveraging vulnerabilities in certain third-party WordPress plugins to “create a new user with administrator privileges on the victim’s site.” If you’re on WordPress, you probably don’t want to ignore this.

Taking home the bronze is Tim Denning, a familiar name here being on our weekly round-up several times now, with his translucent piece about his personal experiences with writing for Business Insider, along with other major publications with massive viewerships.

In fourth, we find Kelly Gurnett who contends that language, grammar in particular, is constantly evolving, especially so in the modern day internet era. We 100% agree that different circumstances and audiences call for different rules and tactics, and recognizing that is a must.

Finally, we wrap it up with a little motivational web comic by Guy Downes from OfficeGuyCartoons illustrating how taking a detour in our creative journeys, departing from the standard in an attempt to be different, can be a winning strategy that help propel us to the finish line faster and with more wisdom.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Aug 31 – Sept 6, 2019 →

Happy Friday (and National Beach 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 was one filled with some major drama in not one, but two seperate stories, including one that captured our top spot.

With over 30 MILLION followers combined on Facebook and Instagram, buddhist monk turned life coach and influencer Jay Shetty is kind of a big deal. It’s also kind of a big deal that he was outed for giving himself credit on countless videos and pictures of quotes written by others.  Check out the article for all the details including the full video by Nicole Arbour who provides ample examples.

Up next, at #2, is Shaunta Grimes with her highly relatable piece about how to ethically but effectively market yourself and whatever creative endeavour you’re on. She wisely reminds us to just be ourselves throughout the process and remember that the eyeballs you’re trying to reach out to are also attached to humans. You have to make sure you blog, and often, as it’s the absolutely most effective tactic out there, and do the tasks that are required to be done to help spread your work far and wide.

Securing third place is a motivational webcomic shared by Gary Vee on his Instagram that shows how your surroundings can completely change any situation. Things like creative endeavours simply take time, and no one can predict the future or how it will turn out. But being around positivity and good vibes, and having people rooting for you, can make the journey, and often just a learning experience, more enjoyable and humbling.

In fourth, Lucrezia Iapichino from Blogging For New Bloggers, takes a legal look into the GDPR, or fully known as General Data Protection Regulation. Although it’s a European law passed in early 2018, it essentially applies to all blogs and websites, since a large part of internet users reside there and are bound to their laws. The only way to fully get around following it would be to force block that entire cluster of users from accessing your site, but that would be just a terrible and shortsighted idea.

Finally, in the fifth and final spot, we arrive at the second drama post mentioned earlier, this time involving an Instagram influencer getting involved in a motorcycle accident. Zoe Kleinman, Technology reporter for the BBC, gives us a glimpse of how influencers are using controversial and unsafe tactics and situations to try and build attention, which ultimately results in more followers, more sponsors, and more clout.

Continue reading This Week in Blogging, Writing, and Content Creation: Aug 24 – Aug 30, 2019 →