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Photos in Blogging Your Guide

Posted on by Ashley
When using photos in blogging, there are a few guidelines that need to be followed in order to use them in the right way. I'm here to help you use photos in the right way and to give you a few tips on the way.

 

Last week, I wrote about graphics and blogging, today it’s all about photos and blogging. I feel like photos/images are very different from graphics. Graphics are something that you can create in a program like Canva, PicMonkey or Photoshop from scratch. Photos/images have to be taken with a camera and then if you want you can add graphics or text on top. There are a lot of things that you have to know when dealing with using photos in blogging. If you’re going to add photos to your blog there are a few main areas that you have to be aware of.

               Where did the photos come from?

     If you pulled the photo from a google search. You need permission from the photographer, it’s not good enough to just put who took the photo underneath the photo or at the bottom of the post or what site you found it on. The photographer could still come back and ask you take it down if they are nice or they could serve you with a notice of some sort saying you don’t have permission to use that photo, I will use legal action if you don’t take it down. Having permission to use a photo is very important. Permission can come in a few different ways – you paid for it, the photographer said it was ok to use it with or without credit, you took the photo yourself.

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Blog Launch Promotions

Posted on by Ashley
Promoting your blog or business launch before it goes live is a great way to tell people that you're launching a blog and/or business and to follow you and you'll tell them when the blog launches. Blog launch promotions are very important. I'll show you how to promote your blog.

 

I believe in promoting your blog before your blog officially goes live. If you can get on social media and build up a following, you will actually have someone to share your blog posts to once the blog goes live. This is important so that you have followers when your blog launch happens and you can share it with others besides mom. There are many different ways to get people to follow you online. I’m only going to slightly touch on them in this post.

When to start

You can start sharing on social media as soon as possible. Whether you’re promoting a blog or business the sooner you start, the sooner you will start getting followers interested in what you have to share. When starting a blog or business, you’ll want to snag the name on the social media platforms as soon as you can. If it’s not available you’ll want to find the best match and/or change the name of your blog or business, if possible.

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Content Marketing – What You Can Do Before Your Business Starts

Posted on by Ashley
Content marketing is a great way to promote your business and/or blog. It can also help you become a thought leader/expert in the field you are sharing about.

Content Marketing – What is it?

Content Marketing. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in the business/blogging circles. So what exactly is content marketing? It’s the idea that when content is produced in the form of educational information, the author is getting promoted as an authority on that subject. In order for it to really work though, you need to be consistent in producing content. Content can come in all sorts of forms – blog posts on your blog or someone else’s, tweets, Instagram posts or stories, Snapchat, Youtube videos, live streaming, newsletters, and more. Any way that you can communicate content, your information, is a form of content marketing.

Why?

Content marketing is great because you can start sharing your expertise before your business has gotten off the ground. It’s a great way to establish yourself as an expert on the topic. If you’re unsure about your blog/business, you can just dip your toe in by starting to share content. You can easily share on Instagram or Twitter without much commitment. To get noticed on Twitter, be sure to add an image with your tweet. Continue reading “Content Marketing – What You Can Do Before Your Business Starts” →

What Every Blog Needs

Posted on by Ashley
What Every Blog Needs

 

Every blog is its own creation and inherently unique in that way. But there is a formula for the look of blogs. Below I’ve listed what every blog needs, plus some additional sections that you may want to think about when creating or updating your blog.

Navigation Bar

     When it comes to your navigation bar, less is more. You don’t want the navigation bar cluttered with too much stuff. If it’s too cluttered, people will have a hard time finding things. Keep it simple. You probably don’t need a button that says home because clicking on the header sends you home. If you can put some of the stuff you were gonna put in the navigation bar in the sidebar that’s a great option. Only the most important info needs to be in the navigation bar. Make the navigation bar easy to understand, don’t put different names for things. I have a small navigation bar and one sort of odd name, The List currently, but I am thinking about changing it to newsletter because that’s easier for people to understand. When you see The List what do you think? Leave it in the comments below.

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Blogging Tools

Posted on by Ashley
 The blogging tools I use to get organized, remember ideas and plan for the future.

There are so many different online tools that help me with blogging. I’ve talked about a few in the before post prep blog post. There are blogging tools that help me write posts, research posts, create graphics and communicate with other bloggers. So let’s go through some of my favorite blogging tools and without them blogging would not be much less organized.

Brainstorming Blogging Tools

First, let’s start with research. I always get ideas from other bloggers, either I agree with them or I disagree with me. Ideas I get can come from something they’ve written about or something that I thought should have been written about in a post that I read. There are three tools I use to help me with research and brainstorming.
Pinterest – this gives me inspiration, whether it’s the way a post was written, the graphic, something said in the comments or the topic itself.

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