blogging

It’s my blog and I will write what I want to!

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I love driving down old Route 66 in some of the less populated areas over by Amboy. Shout-out to Roys!  We always stop by the roadside and just sit and listen to the silence. It’s pretty weird. So quiet. No crickets or birds. Rarely a car. Even the wind is on mute. You feel weird, almost oppressed by the silence but in a good way. We are so used to noise, that the lack of it is almost too much to bear.

You may be wondering if all these posts  are going to be about NaNo. Good question. Probably not. But the future looks hazy, shake again. 

That was part of the problem, and one of the reasons why blogging was so hard. I was trying to think about all of you. The potential readers. What did you want from me? You are not very good at letting me know. The silence was deafening. 

I spent so much time worrying about what to write and just knowing that I was going to be wrong and people would hate me and gamergate shit would happen. Somehow I would be doxed and put my family in danger. Yes I am very good at catastrophizing. Creative people create no matter what. 

This is different. I still care what you think. I would like you to like me, my writing. But for now I am going to focus on what I want to write. Buckle up, it’s going to be a strange ride. I have a lot of different interests. 

So the goal is thirty days of posts. Any kind of posts. (It would have been 31, but I missed the first day of NaNo. 

Ideally at the end of thirty days, I will find my feet, my voice, and perhaps some other wanderers out there looking for a place to hang for a little bit and this can go on. We’ll see. 

PS If you NaNo and want to connect search for Paula1849. 

Quick Link: Blogging as a Writer

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Taking a quick trip to Elizabeth Spann Craig land where you can learn why it is good for writers to blog and she even has some helpful hints included!

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Blogging as a Writer

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

My first blog post was in August of 2008.  Along the way, I’ve tweaked the content and changed from Blogger to WordPress.  I’ve also played with the number of posts I run a week.  Aside from that, the blog is pretty much the same as it was nine years ago.

But along the way, I’ve seen lots of changes: some writers who used to blog no longer do.  Some folks never started. Some rarely post at all.  Which leads me to this post.  🙂   Should writers blog?  If you decide to blog, how do you keep it up?  And how do you get a blog started?

Why should you consider blogging?

Read the full post at Elizabeth Spann Craig!

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: How To Best Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

You have probably heard about SEO, and even know that it means Search Engine Optimization and that having good SEO means your site gets better traffic. However, SEO is a tricky thing, even for professionals. Over at Bad Redhead Media, Rachel Thompson shares some great tips on how to optimize your blog posts to get the most you can out of them. 

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How To Best Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

By Rachel Thompson

When I talk with authors about optimizing their blog posts for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), most look at me as though I’m speaking in tongues. And maybe I am: SEO is a different language when you think about it. Authors aren’t socialized to learn this stuff. It’s only through understanding the importance of book marketing, and how SEO fits into our author platform, that we realize, “holy shit, this optimization stuff truly does have an impact — maybe I should take it more seriously,” and so we do.

Well, some of us anyway.

What is Blog Optimization?

According to Hubspot:

When you optimize your web pages — including your blog posts — you’re making your website more visible to people who are looking for keywords associated with your brand, product, or service via search engines like Google.

Once I got serious about this publishing career thingy, I studied, took classes, hired a professional (Barb Drozdowich of Bakerview Consulting who is amazing) and switched to WordPress.org (from Blogger — if you’re an author, WordPress.org is, by far, the preferred publishing platform of the industry). My decades in Big Pharma didn’t prepare me for the enormity of the multitude of tasks required for online publishing, but it certainly helped me to embrace it.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

The First-Person Industrial Complex

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This article by Laura Bennett originally appeared on Slate on 9/14/15.

The Internet prizes the harrowing personal essay. But sometimes telling your story comes with a price.

A few months ago, Natasha Chenier submitted a piece to Jezebel about her sexual relationship with her dad. She described meeting her biological father for the first time at age 19 and being gradually overtaken by lust for him. She recalled being so wracked by disgust and shame after the second time they had oral sex that she dry-heaved over the toilet in his bathroom. “He lay on his bed looking aloof during those episodes,” she wrote, “spouting empty assurances like, ‘You’ll be fine.’ ”

Writing that essay, she recalls now, was “terrifying.” But in a way, it felt inevitable, too. Chenier, now 27, had always kept a diligent journal and had been reading Jezebel for years. “I had this story I’d always wanted to tell,” she says, “and suddenly I felt like the world was ready.”

Jia Tolentino, Jezebel’s features editor, contemplated the draft. It was sure to be a blockbuster. It had graphic and devastating details, yet a matter-of-fact narrative voice. It would feed the Internet’s bottomless appetite for harrowing personal essays. But she tried to explain to Chenier just what airing this story could mean for her life: “Since she was new to writing, I just wanted to confirm—was she ready for this to be on her Google results forever?” Tolentino gave her the option of publishing under a pseudonym. But Chenier seemed confident that she knew what she was getting into. “She was sure she wanted to build her writing career around this,” Tolentino says. When Jezebel published the piece, titled “On Falling In and Out of Love With My Dad,” it ran with a bright red illustration of a bed between the words “I” and “Dad.” Of course, the essay went viral.

 

Read the full article on Slate.

 

15+ Ways to Create New Content from Old Content

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This post by Kim Garst originally appeared on Boom Social on 12/5/14.

As a busy business owner, you likely don’t have time to create new content at the rate at which your audience demands it. Yet, with content marketing now being the #1 driver of search rankings, you can’t afford not to be constantly publishing new content.

Fortunately, there are ways you can take your existing content and feed it to the content marketing beast. With a little bit of elbow grease and some creativity, you can edit and re-use what you already have, and turn it into something your audience can’t get enough of!

 

1. Create a ‘Best Of’ blog post:
This one is great, both as a way to repurpose old content and as a way to boost your search engine rankings. Create a blog post that lists all your other blog posts or articles on a particular topic. Name it “The Ultimate List of _________ Resources”.

 

2. Turn a blog post into a Slideshare:
Take key points from a popular blog post and convert them into a powerpoint presentation or PDFs. Upload to Slideshare for free and potentially reach a whole new audience! “15 Ways To Create New Content from Old Content” for example !

 

3. Quote yourself on social media:

 

Read the full post on Boom Social.