Have you ever picked up a book that you really wanted to read, and then you open it, only to discover the font is smaller than an infant ant and you'd need a magnifying glass just to read it?
Most people will simply decide that it ain't worth reading – which is to say, font matters.
The same is true for websites and social media, so today, in honour of Twitter's recent font change, we're going to look a little bit more in-depth at fonts.
For bloggers, email newsletters are one of those things you either love or hate- there is often little room in between.
If you are on the love it side, odds are good it is because you have a huge list as well as products or services for sale such that you are able to make a profit with each and every email. If you hate it (a category that I fell into for the longest time), we'd guess it is because you think newsletters are expensive to operate, are hard to generate direct ROI relative to their cost, and you are only doing it because you've been told it is one of the only marketing avenues you can truly “own” on your site (no battling crazy social media algorithms here!).
I had originally stumbled upon Mailerlite when I was firmly in that latter category and made the switch because it was a cheaper alternative to Mailchimp (and a virtual carbon copy) that I could use to send out my latest and greatest articles with ease.
Purely from a cost-savings standpoint, I was happy with Mailerlite on its own for quite some time. I was only just starting breakeven from my list (sometimes even netting a small profit), but I was simply happy to no longer be hemorrhaging money outright. It wasn't until I really started to dive into the powerful program that it became worth its price even more and it truly made me a fan of email marketing outright.
So in this Mailerlite review, I thought I'd break down the functionality as well as the financial elements as to why this newsletter should be on your radar.
Newsletters are often a very love-it-or-hate-it thing for most bloggers.
Some find it a bothersome chore without much ROI for the time and money involved, while others shout from the rooftops how email lists are among some of the most lucrative things you can have in your business.
While we may be biased here since This Week in Blogging is a newsletter series first and foremost, we do have to admit we see both sides of the spectrum when thinking about newsletters in the context of our own outside blogs. Sometimes these newsletters work great and other times, well, not so much.
In this one, we wanted to share a few blogging newsletter best practices you should be engaging in, discuss what they are, and why they're so important for those who go down this marketing avenue.
Note: We should note up front that we use Mailerlite for our newsletters. The features discussed below are in the context of this service outright (where to find the feature on the dashboard, how to use it, etc.). While most newsletter services tend to offer the features discussed below, we cannot guarantee this for all of them. As such, your mileage may vary if you are on a different platform.
Recently, I was at an event with a few friends who were looking into getting into blogging more and I was asked what seemed to be a fairly simple question – how do you blog as much as you do?
My normal go-to answer is that since blogging is my full-time job, I have a lot more time to dedicate to writing. But, to me, that is a copout. Even amongst full-time bloggers I still somehow am able to write far more than most and routinely crank out anywhere between 5-10+ articles a week (split up across several blogs).
I took a moment to think about it before answering in this instance, and I realized that I actually engage in a number of writing techniques that help me crank out articles with a fair bit of speed. In this one, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites.
So if you're looking for some writing techniques to help you publish more blog posts or perhaps simply need a new way to keep yourself motivated, these may help.
There are few topics in the blogging world that people are more opinionated on, and less sure of, than blog post frequency. Of course, the quick answer is the obvious one – the more content the better. However, that sentence really should read the more quality content the better. In the early days of blogging, “the daily blog” was a thing, and with little to no competition … Read more
Wherever there is originality and creativity, there's bound to be copying.
We're going to double-click on that idea today, and look at how it's affected the trajectory of social media, but also offer some tips for finding and going after folks who think your blog might be a nice place to do a little copying (and subsequent pasting).
Copying in the blogging space is all too common, and at This Week in Blogging, we'd love to take a moment to arm you with the information you may need to do something about it.
It seems like we find a news story every week that is one big tech company copying another.
Facebook launching a Clubhouse clone. Facebook getting in on the Tiktok game. Spotify making moves to take on Clubhouse. Twitter launching a copy of Instagram stories called Fleets. LinkedIn even got into the stories game. We could go on.
Whenever a great new idea comes out on the scene, it is pretty safe to assume that every major player in the industry will throw a bunch of money at creating their own competitor. Why innovate when you can reverse engineer someone else's idea outright? Unfortunately, lack of originality happens just about everywhere and big tech isn't the only industry guilty of this.
This even cascades down to bloggers and social media users too. While verbatim copies of websites and social accounts can be remedied somewhat easily, imitators that are close but distinctly different (like all the tech clones mentioned above) are a problem for just about everyone- be it the biggest tech company or the smallest blogger.
In this one, we wanted to share a bit more on maintaining your originality online as well as protecting yourself when the imitation is literal theft.
There's something about a profession that beckons you to spend countless hours stationary in front of a screen that doesn't exactly scream wellness. That being said, there's plenty of ways that we can be proactive about our health in the coming year. And, as you might imagine, an article on wellness tips for bloggers in 2023 is going to cover precisely that.
While it's true that blogging and content creation in general does lend itself to cliches about a sedentary existence, it's also true that it's a career that affords people a tremendous amount of flexibility. In many cases, deadlines are self-imposed, and that means you can also talk to the boss (ie. you) when it's clear that you need a break or a breather.
More than anything else with wellness, it's about intentionally creating a rhythm and schedule that prioritizes your health. It's actually much easier than you'd think it would be, and it's not about changing everything all at once. Rather, it's about slowly but surely incorporating a few wellness strategies and seeing what works for you.
Blogger burnout is a thing, that's for sure, but you don't have to be its next victim. So what as bloggers can we do?
Well, hello! If you found this article from a Google search, odds are good you just received a DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice from your host.
This typically means only one thing: you stole some content, got busted for it, and are now frantically trying to figure out what to do!
Don't worry, we are here today to help you out.
While we have not received DMCA notices ourselves, we have sent them to those who have stole from us. This article is our way of letting you know, from a content creator's perspective, what you should do. And that is pretty simple: remove the content as per the DMCA notice!
We weren't joking when we said it is simple, and in this one we're going to go into detail why that is.
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and the below does not constitute legal advice. This article is our opinion based off of our experience filing DMCA notices against content thieves only and our understanding of copyright law. If you have any doubts about what to do after receiving a DMCA notice, contact an attorney.
Many long-time bloggers are opening focused, niche blogs these days, and some may find that existing content on their first site may be much more relevant for their newer ventures. But if these articles are already receiving traffic on your main site, it certainly brings up a number of possible concerns on the best course of action to pursue.
This certainly happened to us.
On our travel blog, for example, we had many articles about wine tasting around the world (and tangential wine topics as it has always been a hobby of ours). When we started our wine blog, these were a better fit for the story we wanted to tell and we were left with the options of writing a new variant of the articles outright or simply copying them over. The same is true for my blogging advice articles on my travel blog as well. Now that I write here at This Week in Blogging, many of those articles simply make much more sense for them to live here.
Ultimately, the question we're tip-toeing around here is all about branding- specifically whether or not you are more likely to get more clicks on your original domain or on a more niche-specific one (especially in search results). It doesn't take a big leap to understand that my general travel blog called Living the Dream simply doesn't make sense to be home for blogging topics when a site like this one has better branding for it.
I opted to go the route of copying articles over to my new sites outright, and I have to admit I was a bit skeptical about what would happen. I ended up being pleasantly surprised.