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Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’
Tele Class How to Make Money with Holiday Gift Guides UPDATE
Our live Tele Class How To Make Money With Holiday Gift Guides was a huge success! Thank you so much for everyone who participated.
I was in the telesales conference, thank you so much for doing that. Since I am new to doing reviews, it was very helpful, and not just for setting up my holiday gift guide.
Sheri, Unexpected Bliss
Since the class was so popular we are now offering it as a recorded version you can take any time.
Here is more information about the Tele Class:
Delivered as a downloadable MP3 file and an information full email.
You will learn in this class:
- How to build a Holiday Gift Guide
- How to use Wishpot.com for making it easy to build your guide and promote your guide
- How to use affiliate programs
- Why pictures are important
- What is the difference between a Shopping Guide and a Gift Guide
- How to promote your Holiday Gift Guide
We are hosting a Virtual Holiday Gift Guide Party on Cyber Monday and all class participants will be featured.
Cost: $20
PAY NOW:
You can pay securely through PayPal, make sure we have your correct email address. The recorded class and the information packed email will be sent to you within 12 hours of your payment. To speed up the process - send a direct message to @katjapresnal or comment here.
Tele Class for Bloggers: Make Money with Holiday Gift Guides
Me and Christine Young of the successful blog From the Dates to Diapers and beyond are offering you a fun and useful tele class on how to make Holiday Gifts for your blog and how to make money with them.
Social shopping site Wishpot.com makes making holiday gift lists easy for anyone, but Wishpot wish lists are also a great tool - let us tell you how we use Wishpot in building our Holiday Gift Guides!
We are not just sharing you all our best tricks and tips how we make money with Holiday Guides, but we also will help you to sign up with right affiliate programs, and help you to promote your holiday gift guide. We will be hosting a Virtual Holiday Gift Guide Party on Cyber Monday, when all the participants of the Tele Class will be hosting a giveaway to promote the launch of the Holiday Gift Guide.
Here’s the UPDATED kicker:
we will help you to find a sponsor for your giveaway! We guarantee a giveaway prize for your blog. AND *just in* your Holiday Gift Guide will be featured in Wishpot.com!
Here is more information about the Tele Class:
WHEN: Thursday November 13, at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST
You will learn in this class:
- How to build a Holiday Gift Guide
- How to use Wishpot.com for making it easy to build your guide and promote your guide
- How to get paid for your Holiday Gift Guide
- Why pictures are important
- What is the difference between a Shopping Guide and a Gift Guide
- How to promote your Holiday Gift Guide
Included in fee: promotion for your holiday gift guide, inclusion for Virtual Holiday Gift Guide Party with giveaways and a free giveaway gift to give to your readers!
We are hosting a Virtual Holiday Gift Guide Party on Cyber Monday and help you to find a giveaway gift to give out to your readers on a giveaway starting on that day.
Cost: $20
PAY NOW:
You can pay securely through PayPal, make sure we have your correct email address, the details for the tele class will be emailed an hour prior the event.
The event will be hosted at Conference Call University.
And make sure to tell your blogging friends too - the more bloggers we get to our Virtual Holiday Gift Guide Launch Party, the better visibility we all get! Get the banner code here!
Is Your Copy Sloppy?
“Our handemade cards are awesome. Seriously!
We put so much work into these cards and we have sooooo many colors.
We can do custom orders to. Just email us for an estimate by email.”
I recently saw this on a web site I won’t name. The site design was eye-catching and the product was unique and beautiful, but I felt myself hesitating to order it. It took me exactly one nanosecond to figure out why. This description offers almost no information, is full of errors, and sounds like it may have been written by a seventh grader (and that is almost an insult to seventh graders).
Of course, this is an extreme example, but take a little surf around and you’ll see—there is a lot of shoddy writing floating around the intertubes. Which is unfortunate, because engaging, readable web copy is one of the most important tools you have for promoting your product or service. And it really isn’t that hard to create.
Technology has changed the way we access and distribute information, but the information itself comes to us the same way it always has—through the written word. After putting so much work into driving traffic to your site, the last thing you want to do is frustrate and annoy your visitors by burying important information in a lot of unnecessary text or misspelling the name of your own product (yep—I’ve seen that too).
Do yourself a favor and take a second look at the copy on your site.
We editor nerds talk about the three Cs when we’re working to improve a piece of writing:
Is it clear?
Can a visitor determine with a quick glance what exactly your product or service is? Sometimes when you spend a lot of time talking to other people who do what you do, you get in the habit of using short-hand phrases and insider talk that can be confusing to a newbie. Has that sort of thing crept into your web copy?
Make an outline or a bullet-point list. What are the highlights? What absolutely must be included? What kinds of questions can you anticipate visitors will have, and how can you answer them right off the bat?
Is it concise?
Does your copy get right to the point or is it a touch on the wordy side? Almost no one can write tight, clever, effective copy on the first draft. Did you spend much time paring down your words with some revision? Are you trying too hard to shoehorn keywords into sentences where they don’t fit?
The best writing is concrete, lean, and vivid. Put your copy on a diet. Cut out the fat (boring adjectives, passive voice, long or complex phrases that could be replaced with something short and snappy). Keep only the words that are doing work. You’ll be amazed at how much better the writing sounds when the ideas aren’t cluttered up with a lot of unnecessary filler.
Is it correct?
For the love of Pete, people—crack a dictionary. It was made for something other than propping up that wobbly table! Spell check is a good tool, but you can’t rely on it completely. Wikipedia, however, is a great electronic tool for grammar and punctuation questions. And please save the emoticons and chat-speak for…well, if you want to know what I think, you should save them until I depart from this planet, but that’s neither here nor there. In any case, they do not belong on a professional web site. Period.
Read over your copy before you post it. Read it out loud so you can hear how it sounds (this works like a charm to catch those errors your eye skips right over). Have a friend read it, or pay an editor for a half hour of her time. It will be worth every penny.
One final note that speaks to all three of the Cs: take a look at your design. Is your page bursting at the seams with information, images, and seizure-inducing graphics? Less is more. White space helps a reader isolate the piece of information he or she needs and digest it without getting distracted.
You work hard—represent that work to the world with professionalism and style! Happy writing, Ladybugs!
Guest Blog Post By Kelly O’Connor McNees
Kelly is a writer and editor. Check out Word Bird Editorial Services to see how she can help with projects big and small: www.wordbirdedits.com.
Want to Guest Post? Contact Katja Presnal
Six Tips to Take Your Vlog from Blah to Va-Va-Voom
Guest Post by Wendy Stetson from Babies Gotta Have It, where she blogs and vlogs about must have products for babies. Wendy’s blog is one of the most unique baby product blogs out there, and her video blogs make her site to stand out. See the difference yourself. Would you rather read the text or watch the video?
I haven’t been vlogging for long. Just a couple of months, in fact. I have, however, been standing up in front of people and saying things for small amounts of money for more years than I’d like to say, and on occasion I have been filmed not saying things for larger amounts of money. So I have given some thought to the way in which a person presents herself to the world. What I mean to say is I may be a newbie to vlogging but I’ve got some game.
So here is what I’ve learned about vlogging in the last four months.
1. Shorter is Better. There’s just no way around this. Edit yourself when you speak as rigorously as you would when you write. I struggle with this one on every post because I’m so convinced that what I have to say about bottle cleaners is vital to the nation. But nine times out of ten, I choose the shortest take to publish. Time is money, and in the age of the 60 second sound bite no one wants to listen to you drone on for thirteen minutes about potty training. Which leads me to…
2. Content Matters. You may be terribly charming. You may be drop dead gorgeous. Your friends may even think you are funny. But when you put yourself out there in the world and ask people to listen to you speak, you better have something to say. At least until you’re a celebrity. Then you can talk for hours about very inane things and people will nod their heads earnestly and call you brilliant and insightful.
3. Wear Makeup. Unless you are Rosie O’Donnell or Grace Kelly you need to slap on some lipstick and concealer before you break out the video camera. It takes a lot of product to make it look like you just stepped out of the shower looking like yourself.
4. Pay Attention to Lighting. And setting. And sound. We can’t all have professional lighting and camera equipment. And perhaps that’s part of what we love about vloggers. They look like they just pulled out the camera, held it in front of their faces, and started to rant and roll. But if you the viewer can’t see you, or hear you, or focus on what you are saying because of the cat throwing up a hairball on the sofa behind you, then the viewer will go elsewhere. And there are so many places to go in this big bad internet we’re creating, that you can’t risk giving your viewers one more excuse to leave.
5. I Talk Out of the Side of My Mouth and Squint My Left Eye Weirdly. Especially when I’m not totally relaxed. There is nothing like seeing yourself on camera to make you feel so self-conscious, so inarticulate, and so riddled with bizarre tics that you feel you must commit yourself to some kind of center. Take a breath. Remove hands from in front of face. And look with a generous heart. So you talk out of the side of your mouth? Is it so odd that it makes it difficult for the viewer to concentrate on what you’re saying? Yes? Then work to relax and let it go. Is it just charming and unique and part of what makes you you? Then embrace it. We can’t all be Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s ok. That would be an awfully blonde and boring world.
6. Be Yourself. This is the hardest one. Speak with your voice. Not to get all oogley-boogley and Oprah on you, but say your truth. You know when you watch a TV show or a movie and you think, “dude that guy is such a bad actor. I could do better than that any day of the week, and I haven’t acted since the third grade!” At that moment, your inner truth-meter has gone off. We all have them. It’s why we all are critics of TV and movies but maybe not art or music. We know human truth when we see it. And we know it on the web as well. Vloggers: be yourself. As fully and truthfully as you can. And stop trying so hard.
So there you have it. Six basic tips that will make you more watchable, your vlog posts more compelling, and hopefully increase the number of viewers who “just watch it”. As a vlogging newbie I cannot say that I execute all six of these commandments with any kind of consistency or aplomb. I’d like to work to make all my posts three minutes or less. Okay two minutes or less. I’d like to talk out of my entire mouth and open my left eye on occasion. And I could sure as heck use a lot more concealer and much better lighting. But when all else fails, vlog with an impossibly cute baby on your lap, wiggling her toes and saying “baa.” That’s one way to ensure that no one will be looking at you!
