Category: ARWB Events
Sunday Link-Up {Oct. 19, 2014}
Sunday Link-Up {Oct. 12, 2014}
#ARWB Recap: Coping With the Anxiety of Blogging
Photo Source: Google Images
Being a blogger in general is just anxiety provoking. You are doing something that most people would never do in a million years. Reveal things and then be evaluated over the Internet? To just anyone who might be reading?
You have got to be kidding.
There are different levels of anxiety of bloggers have.
1) The BEHAVIORAL Level: Disorganization and Feeling Overwhelmed
2) The SELF-CONCEPTUAL Level: Having Doubt About Yourself and Feeling Isolated
3) The LIFE STRATEGY Level: Indecisiveness and Waffling
All of this was beginning to sound very psychological so we broke it down. Real things you can do to help keep the stress and anxiety of blogging to a minimum. Especially if you are a new blogger. Or a blogger that is kinda stuck in a rut and is getting anxious about it.
First we looked at BEHAVIORS TO BUILD IN.
1) Write on a schedule so you don’t procrastinate. A huge source of anxiety.
2) Learn the technicalities of your blog so you can fix problems when they occur.
3) Get an editor! Which can help with the loneliness of blogging. Another big source of anxiety. And get someone who will be honest with you. So you will get better.
4) Network. Support other bloggers.
Above all : Keep you in your plan so it will work.
What I mean by that is – if you are trying to get back on track by doing something that you “hear” works for someone else, but just isn’t you? It’s not going to work. Stick to your plan. Your track. Use your editor to help you with fresh ideas. If you are shy, don’t play to go a conference by yourself. Take a friend. Accept who and where you are. It’s okay!
The second big area we looked at was SELF-CONCEPT.
1) Trust in the power of your voice.
If you are always putting yourself down, or even sometimes doing it, please challenge that. We are all insecure. All of us. But your voice can be strong. You can find it. It is unique.
We all talked about this in the session. How we came or were coming to trust our own voices.
2) Dare to not compare. Just step into the light that is yours.
Comparison with others is just not helpful. We all have to realize that we are all on a spectrum. There is always going to be someone who we can find that we feel has more going for her than us. And And believe it or not. There is someone who is looking at you. And wanting to be you. I promise you that’s true.
Then the third part.
LIFE STRATEGY ANXIETIES.
These are caused more due to not knowing the answers to questions about where you are going with your website or blog. What you want from it. What your goals are for it. You might be indecisive about advertising or whether or not you wanted to be featured on certain websites. Because you are not sure of where your own parameters are. Of who you are. Of what you stand for.
If you are clear about what you are creating, the reader will be clear as well. And seek you out.
Dr. Margaret Rutherford is a clinical psychologist who has been in private practice for over 20 years in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She began blogging in 2012, coining the term “NestAche” for her empty nest experience. She launched Dr.MargaretRutherford.com in April of 2014 and now can be found on the Huffington Post, MidlifeBoulevard, BetterAfter50, Boomeon, and here at Arkansas Women Bloggers!
Guilty Pleasures: Blogging Meetups! {Wordless Wednesday}
Photos by the Southwest Arkansas Women Bloggers. If you are in the Southwest Arkansas region of Arkansas Women Bloggers, join their group on Facebook to learn about future meet ups and events in Southwest Arkansas.
#AWBU Recap Still Life Photography, Styling, and Basic Photo Editing
By Mel Lockcuff
Great photos allow the memories of life to live on. Remember sifting through your grandma’s photo albums when you were a kid? Photos of family (both near and far), family pets, farm animals, babies, kids, vacations or trips to distant places, trees, flowers, school days, the family car, trips to town…
Photos are a window into the past. Photos allow us to visually share our story with the next generation. It’s important to think about the moments you want to capture, the message you want to convey.
Photos make your content even more visual for your readers. They bring an added measure of beauty to your writing. Good photos draw the eyes in and make readers want to click on that Pin or want to read more. They allow you to more visually promote a brand, but in a relevant way that also connects with your readers.
We had a great time in this session, covering the following points:
– Photography in Everyday Life, Travel, Blogging, and Working with Brands
– Positioning and Lighting
– Handy Tools
– Photo Styling and Props
– Mobile Apps
– Basic Photoshop and PicMonkey Skills
You can read all of the presentation and learn more by visiting the SlideShare for the presentation.
Mel Lockcuff is a wife and homeschool mom to 2 boys and a cat named Harold. She and her family are transfers to Arkansas and are loving life in Northwest Arkansas. They have 10 chickens and a lovely little garden in their budding back yard homestead.
Mel is a lifestyle and travel blogger at MamaBuzz, where her goal is to inspire life every day with creative inspiration related to food and recipes, travel and local places of interest, home and garden, crafts, DIY projects, back yard homesteading, awareness, and more. Mel is also a freelance writer, the founder of MamaBuzz Media, and has extensive experience as a community manager. Her work has been published on VisitRogersArkansas.com, OnlyinArk.com, and 66TheMotherRoad Magazine. She’s also the author of the eBook, Blog Design Elements of Success: How to Make Your Blog Stand Out.You can find Mel on Twitter @MamaBuzz, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
#AWBU Recap Take Better Pictures
By Sarabeth Jones and Whitney Lobber
First of all, think about:
- why are you taking pictures?
- why are you sharing what you share?
- why do you like to look at pictures?
Now. Pull up your instagram profile. Look at the grid of pictures under your name. What do you see? What story are you telling? Here is a random list of some of our favorites – they are telling a clear story with beautiful images, and they run the gamut from professional photographers to regular people who have simply learned some tricks to help out their photos. Take a look at:
- @abeautifulmessofficial
- @alisonchino
- @destinationeu
- @kjp
- @smileandwave
- @garethpon
- @taza
- @bobdavidson
- @ryanbyrd
- @christenbyrd
- @mooshinindy
Now that you’ve seen these, we hope you’re inspired to take better pictures. Here are some things you can do! While you’re shooting: What are you shooting with?
- iPhone camera (Whitney) I shoot 99% of my phone photos with my iPhone camera. No fuss, No frills.
- Touch the screen to control the focus and exposure (brightness).
- Lock the focus (helpful when your subject is close or hard to focus on) by holding down on the spot you want to focus until the yellow box pops up.
- Help yourself with the rule of thirds (more on this later) by turning on your grid, I think the default is off, but you can turn it on under settings.
- VSCOcam (Sarabeth) I also shoot mostly with my iPhone camera but I also like the camera in this app for a few reasons:
- Tap the screen with 2 fingers to separate your focus from exposure which gives you a little added control over brightness.
- Shoot in a square mode to help you see what you’re getting for Instagram – the full rectangular frame is still captured in case you want more to work with later.
- The whole bottom of the screen turns into the camera button – it’s just bigger and easier.
Don’t shoot in an app that’s not made to be a camera – like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. You just have more tools to work with and will get better pics using a camera app.
Things to keep in mind while you’re shooting:
- Why: take a minute to think about the purpose of the content. You wouldn’t share on the fly on your blog; remember that this is part of a bigger story. Pictures of your kids, pets, dinner, place you visit…all fine, but does it fit the story you are telling
- Where: look at your surroundings, how does your location play into the photograph,
- Light: Where is it coming from, and what kind? filtered sunlight, direct sun, interior light, backlighting, side light. Turn off your flash. Don’t be afraid to play with light, moving around to see how it plays in your photo.
- What (check background, etc): be aware of the entire frame, even the background tells a story. With food you want the water on the fresh produce to give the photo a feeling, same can be true of the surrounding/background. For example…if I’m (Whitney) taking a picture of my son on my couch I might get up and open my blinds to add better light or shadows and move laundry off my couch to give a clean look. It’s still true to a natural moment, but just a cleaner version. I am a photographer and I will set people up for a natural photo; it’s very rare for it to happen completely naturally.
- Angles: start by taking lots of photos. Don’t be afraid to move around and see what works. Shoot from above, get lower (on the level of your subject), straight on, from the side. Then, in editing, decide what you like best. Resist your urge to post multiples and only post one! Save the progression and full story for your blog.
- Color: pay attention to it in each photo as well as your total feed/story. Use it, don’t let it overwhelm. A note about black and white – make it black and white, lots of contrast, not just a bunch of gray.
- Rule of thirds, leading lines: imagine you take your frame and cut it in 9 equal parts, like a tic tac toe board. This is the rule of thirds. Use the intersections of those lines as points of interest, something the eye will naturally be drawn to. By placing a subject in the middle of the frame your eye is immediately drawn to it and then has no place to go. By placing your subject on one of these points of interest, near a side, your eyes follow the photo and linger longer. Another tool to lead a viewer into a photo is the use of leading lines. Often a road, bridge, straight line, path, but can also be a softer line that leads you deeper into the photo.
- Try the opposite: Always important to remember that sometimes we have to throw out all of these rules. Some of our favorite photos are real life, messy and all, or a photo off the grid. We can really love a photo in full center focus. or something with so much negative space.
- Take a LOT of pictures: It’s worth repeating. Take several, look at what you got, adjust. Try the opposite! Lather, rinse, repeat. J
While you’re editing (you ARE editing, right?):
- Cropping can make your picture stronger – make it look better, give it a stronger point of view. You can adjust to use leading lines or the rule of thirds, or can fix things you didn’t get quite right when you shot.
- Contrast & saturation: if I (Sarabeth) don’t do anything else, I always adjust – increase – these. Especially for these pictures that are viewed on small screens.
- Don’t over adjust – remember to keep a natural look, especially if you are going to share these at a larger size, like on your blog.
- Color: Would your picture be stronger if it were black & white?
- You can do all of this in Instagram, or you can try our favorite apps –
- Snapseed – we love the sliders for adjustments, mostly use crop, tune image & sharpening screens. You can vignette with the center focus screen.
- VSCOcam – also has same tools – I like the separate shadows/highlight tools here – but VSCO sliders have stops, so they’re not quite as flexible as snapseed. Easier to vignette because there’s a specific tool for it. Some really nice filters too.
This is a lot of information, and it’s a little hard to convey without visuals, but there are so many great tutorials on pretty much every aspect of photography – so if there’s a term you don’t understand, start Googling (or ask us)! Here’s to taking better pictures: Slideshare.
Whitney Loibner and Sarabeth Jones are framily. They love to take trips together, especially cruises. They love to have drinks on the patio together, especially margaritas. And they love living in Dogtown and taking pictures of it all. Whitney is quite adept at putting funny things in Sarabeth’s purse for her to find later, and Sarabeth is practically a professional at borrowing Whitney’s clothes. [whitneyloibner.com | sarabethjones.com, @whitneyloibner & @sarabethjones on twitter & instagram]
#AWBU Recap Pinterest Rockstar with Taylor Bradford
Hi y’all! Taylor here. In case you weren’t able to catch my Pinterest Rockstar session at #AWBU, you are in luck today!! I’m giving you access to my presentation and some notes to help you become a rockstar on Pinterest.First up….the link to my Pinterest Rockstar presentation. Okay, now let’s chat about Pinterest for a bit. The questions I was receiving during my presentation were great ones. The overwhelming theme, however, was this question…”How do I use Pinterest?” And when I say that, I mean that you are asking yourself that question.
This is a super important question to ask yourself because it will tell you how you need to proceed to becoming a Pinterest Rockstar. I use Pinterest to curate content. And by curate content, I mean curate ALL the content. Specifically, content that can fit into my pre-existing Pinterest boards. My method might not be your method. Let’s say you are building a brand based on a service. You might structure your pins towards that service. You might not curate all the content out on Pinterest. So figure out how to use Pinterest to best suit your brand. What I taught works for me and my brand. But gives you a great idea on how you can become a Rockstar for your own brand.
So what am I doing to gain followers? I am pinning every 10 minutes. And I use a service called Viral Tag to do this (something I pay for). I’m not going to get into the specifics of my Viral Tag account (that would be an entire post in and of itself! LOL) but it’s what I use to be able to pin that often. I also pin when I have free time. I work on pinning content to my own group boards to build them up!!
Group Boards…find them and get on them. Super important in order to get in front of new audiences. Most of the boards have the instructions on how to get on them (and the rules for the board…make sure you follow them!). If you don’t see instructions on how to be added, comment on one of the owners most recent pins requesting access. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Taylor Bradford is the owner/editor of PinkHeelsPinkTruck.com, a lifestyle blog with an emphasis on fashion, beauty, fitness, food, blogging tips/tricks, crafts/DIY and books. She is the Community Director of the Texas Women Bloggers, the founder and co-host of an online book club called the #LiteraryJunkies, and a co-founder/creator of the #NOEXCUSES Fitness Challenge Series. She is a shoe lover, fitness-guru, book hoarder, and wanna-be fashionista. She calls Texas home, Chai Tea Latte’s her go-to drink and time spent with her hubby and friends music to her soul. Her motto in the blogging world is to roll out your own red carpet and keep your big girl panties pulled up high. She’s an open book with blogging and has a passion for sharing everything she learns!!
#AWBU Recap Post: Becoming An Evernote Ninja, or Why You Need To Join My Cult
By Bethany Stephens
Earlier this year, Evernote announced that it had reached an astounding 100 million users worldwide. As a point of reference, Twitter has 271 million monthly active users. These numbers are interesting because despite its widespread popularity, Evernote still feels widely unknown and underused. The vast majority of savvy people I interact with are not familiar with Evernote, or they’ve heard about it and don’t really understand the big deal – it’s just another cloud-based note-taking app, right??
Image source: Evernote
The fun upside to Evernote remaining relatively foreign is that discovering another user in a crowd makes it feel like we both know where the fountain of youth is located, and we plan to meet up there later to frolic.
I discovered Evernote in 2009 and became an avid user in 2010, and I still find it ironic that the oldest note I have on file is a Far Side cartoon in which a student asks to be excused from class due to his brain being full. In April 2010, I got tired of looking for that particular cartoon online (apparently I reference it so frequently that this was a huge inconvenience in my life) and filed it in Evernote for easy access:
Credit: The Far Side
It actually couldn’t be more appropriate, because that Gary Larson snippet perfectly captures how I feel about Evernote: I use it because my brain feels full, and I simply don’t have the capacity or the desire to try to remember everything. I’d rather save my limited mental space for remembering which book my daughter is currently reading so that I can ask her about it after school, or for brainstorming big ideas and innovative solutions with colleagues and clients.
So, I’m on a mission to spread the Evernote love. Rather than finding that other user in a crowd and feeling smug together about what we’ve discovered, I want everyone to understand why I am so darn passionate about Evernote. Trust me, those around me hear about it ad nauseum, so I’ve had to resort to being an evangelist for unsuspecting crowds and people who aren’t tired of hearing about it.
Photo credits: Dining With Debbie, nwaFoodie (and apparently Jody Dilday and I swapped sweaters)
From training sessions for CPG companies based in Northwest Arkansas to serve Walmart – the world’s largest retailer and their top customer – to classes for small groups and teams to a recent session during the Arkansas Women Bloggers conference, I’ll talk about Evernote to anyone who will listen. Earlier this year I agreed to join the team at Kendal King Group in order to launch a new breed of retail marketing agency called Velocity, and we’ll be making Evernote and Evernote Business training and consultation available to many of our clients.
- Shameless plug: We’d love to have you follow the Velocity blog and our social accounts (Instagram, Pinterest & Twitte
r ), and we have many upcoming projects where we will collaborate with bloggers, social media users and freelance writers and designers! We’ll work directly through partners like Stephanie Buckley and The Women Bloggers, so stay tuned to the Arkansas Women Bloggers (and other state sites) for details.
After the recent session at the Arkansas Women Bloggers conference, I agreed to put together a recap post for those who weren’t able to participate in the Evernote session or just wanted a handy reference guide.
However, the thing about Evernote is that it certainly can be a game-changer, but there is a lot of ground to cover! So, following this “Convince You That Evernote Is Amazing” post will be a series of three additional posts to help you a) understand what the heck Evernote is b) cover the basics of using it and c) turbo-charge your Evernote use with pro tips and best practices.
So go ahead, jump on in – the water’s fine. Here’s one more nudge:
I’m accustomed to the look on someone’s face during an Evernote session at the exact moment where they realize what it is capable of and how it is applicable in their lives. At the Arkansas Women Bloggers conference, however, I mistook the perplexed looks on the faces of attendees as an indication that I was missing the mark or doing a poor job of representing the complete fabulousness of Evernote. It turns out all those furrowed brows and the silence in the room were actually indicative of their brains simultaneously exploding.
And hey, what can I say? That’s exactly what I’m looking for when I introduce someone to Evernote.
I want brains to explode.
The rest of this series is on the Magpie Marketing blog. Enjoy!
- Becoming an Evernote Ninja, Part 1: A Primer
- Becoming an Evernote Ninja, Part 2: Adopting The Ways of the Cult
- Becoming an Evernote Ninja, Part 3: Enabling Ninja Super Powers
| Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote. |
#AWBU Recap Freelancing 101: Writing All the Words and Making all the Money
Sometimes the hardest part of taking a new path is figuring out whether or not you can make it work. In this session, Laurie, Jamie, and Rhonda helped participants with information they needed to take the leap into the awesome, and sometimes scary, world of freelancing as a writer/blogger/social media professional. Finances, resources, good work habits, and continuing education were all part of this presentation.
Are you ready to take the leap?
General qualifications, expectations, and questions to ask yourself before going freelance.
Legal, Schmegal
Taxes and LLCs and expenses, oh, my!
Building a Portfolio
Portfolio options and building up your writing credits
Finding clients
Doing your research for online and print publications, taking advantage of networking opportunities
What am I worth?
Determining what to charge, increasing rates with experience and skills.
Resources
Bloggers, brand connectors, and continuing education
Laurie Marshall is a freelance writer and blogger from northwest Arkansas. In addition to her love for a perfectly turned phrase, she has a passion for reusing and repurposing, and may get a little too excited about power tools and the wall of paint chips at her local home improvement store. Laurie graduated from the BA program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas in 2007 at the ripe old age of 39, and after spending six years working at a desk job (that she loved!), she took the leap and began her freelancing career. Her work has been published on VisitRogersArkansas.com, TasteArkansas.com , NWAMedia.com, and in AY Magazine and Do South, among others. @LaurieMMarshall
Jamie Smith has been a blogger since 2005 and it has opened up many doors to her, including being the way she met her husband. A journalist by training, Jamie started her own freelance writing business after being laid off four years ago. Jamie’s Notebook is now her full time (sometimes more than full time!) job and her services include corporate blog writing, website, copywriting, and feature writing. Jamie is also active in offering workshops about the need for and process of corporate blogging.
A “work-at-home fur mom,” Jamie loves spending time with her husband and their four pets. She is also active in several nonprofit organizations, including Dress for Success Northwest Arkansas, Polina’s Promise, and Captivating Heart Women’s Retreat ministries. @JamiesThots
Rhonda Franz is a freelance writer, licensed teacher, home operations specialist, and domestic chef. She combines her professional background and mommyhood experiences to write on family, parenting, cooking, and education. Her articles emphasize the opportunities parents have in everyday experiences to teach children, and offer strategies and solutions for managing a household with an on-call, traveling husband. Rhonda’s work has been featured on the MSNBC Today Show mom blog and NWAMotherlode, and in Chicken Soup for the Soul. She is a contributor to Arkansas Gardener magazine, Peekaboo