Category: ARWB Info

We Want YOU to Write for Arkansas Women Bloggers

We want YOU to write for Arkansas Women Bloggers!

One of the easiest ways for you to get involved in the Arkansas Women Bloggers community is to write for us.  We have said this before but I want to remind you that ARWB is about YOU, our members. Our goal is to provide a community where you can connect with other like-minded women.  We want you reading each other’s blogs and a great way to let everyone learn about you and your blog is to write a feature article for us!  Hopefully we can offer some answers to the questions you may be having about writing for ARWB.

Why should I write for ARWB?

In every article you write for Arkansas Women Bloggers we will provide a short bio of you along with links back to your blog.  Many ARWB readers will click through to your blog.  This helps to build your personal readership.

Guest writing for another blog can also help to build your writing skills.  When I (Julie) began guest posting on other blogs I brought my writing to a whole new level.  I became more aware of my ‘voice’ and more aware of my writing style.  I wanted my pieces to be their absolute best.  This
new found quest for ‘perfection’ carried over into my own blog and I found myself writing more meaningful pieces all around.

What can I write about?

Write about what you love. You don’t have to change your style or your preferred genre to write for us.  Write in your own voice, make it
authentic.  We are open to myriad topics but will also provide you with an editorial topic each month to help you get started.  We intentionally leave the topics slightly vague to allow you to interpret it in your own way.  You can find the list of upcoming topics in the sidebar of our website.

Upcoming editorial topics:

Handmade Holiday (December)
New Year, New You (January)
Love Story (February)

Other topics you might consider:

Photography Tips
How-to’s and Tutorials
Great Blogging Tips
Cool Apps
Recipes
And many more!

Can I publish something I have written before?

We’ve done some research on SEO and how Google and other search engines rank pages.  It turns out that duplicate content is really detrimental to BOTH pages on which the content appears.  Since our goal is to drive traffic TO your blog we have made the decision not to post duplicate content.  We will ask you to refrain from posting the content you submit on ARWB on your own blog or in any other online source.  However, each Wednesday will be Retro Wednesday on ARWB.  We will provide links to your favorite posts for others to enjoy.

How can I submit a Guest Post or a link for Retro Wednesday?

Before submitting a post, please check out our Guest Post Guidelines.  Everything you need to know is outlined there.  Once you have
completed the checklist you can email guest posts to Julie@arkansaswomenbloggers.com with the words ‘Guest Post Submission’ in the subject line.

If you would like to submit a post for our Retro Wednesday feature please email a short excerpt (300 characters or less) along with a link
to the post to Julie@arkansaswomenbloggers.com with “Retro Wednesday” in the subject line. Please be sure to also include your name and blog title. Please note that we will keep an ongoing list of Retro Wednesday posts and may not be able to notify you regarding the specific day on
which your link will appear.

Please help grow our community by writing a guest post for us! Any questions can be directed to Julie@arkansaswomenbloggers or any of our
other lovely ladies.

Welcome to Arkansas Women Bloggers (Again)

The Arkansas Women Bloggers Leadership Team has been eagerly anticipating this moment: the debut of our new site! We have grown up and moved over to WordPress, mercy, help us now girls, we are loving it and learning something new constantly.

While the Arkansas Women Bloggers launch year, 2009, was not that long ago, it is amazing to realize how much we have grown and evolved. With 430 women bloggers throughout the state of Arkansas hopping on board, a fantastic conference held at the Ozark Natural Science Center this past June, and a wonderful meet-up in Little Rock under our belt, we wanted to have a site that will help all our members to have a place to Gather, Grow, and Connect in this bloggity world.

We cherish every one of you who has been with us along the way! We are excited to meet any newbie bloggers and those who were not fortunate enough to have heard about our amazing group of women before. Please invite all your bloggy friends to hop on board! Everyone needs to sign up (or re-sign up for all our existing member gals). It is free!

Hop over here and fill out our form and voilà, welcome to the gathering place to make friends with other Arkansas women bloggers, share stories and experiences and be inspired! Oh yes, there is more,  The Pioneer Woman generously donated one copy of her cookbook and one copy of Black Heels to Tractor Wheels, yes, both signed by her (Ree), for a giveaway. Go join the NEW ARWB and you will be entered.

Our MISSION: To be an Arkansas-based blogger community dedicated to growing women by gathering them into a common space with common objectives and by connecting and empowering them for the greater good.
In summary: Gather. Grow. Connect.

Our VISION:
-Gather: provide a gathering place, a sense of community and sisterhood and connections that yield results.
-Grow: offer education, tools, resources and connections delivered in a balanced manner to allow every woman to grow her blog and her voice.
-Connect: supply opportunities, professional connections, platforms and networking to help our bloggers build their personal brands.

Remember gals, go sign up now! Don’t delay, you need Ree’s cookbook to plan your holiday meals.

The AWB Leadership Team

One Blogger’s Revelation

July has been a very bloggy month.
It started when I picked up the July issue of Little Rock Family and saw blogger Kyran Pittman on the cover.  As far as I am concerned, Kyran isLittle Rock’s most famous blogger, and I’m completely in awe of her. As I gazed at her cover shot, I noticed another cover story headline floating above her head: “*13 Local Blogs You Should Be Reading.”  I quickly flipped right past Kyran’s story to the blog feature (some fan I am!).  By the time I got there, I had come to terms the fact that I would not be one of the featured bloggers, but my feelings were still a little hurt. I rationalized that most of the bloggers who were featured are leagues above me in their blogging “career”. The thing that did bother me a bit was that there were no guidelines as to how the blogs were chosen. Several of the bloggers work for the company that publishes Little Rock Family magazine. And that got me to thinking, Is blogging a popularity contest? What makes one blog better than another? Is it really all about who you know?
I ruminated over the 4th of July holiday weekend, and then jumped into my turn as “Managing Editor” (a self-assigned title) of the Arkansas Women Bloggers website.  I had two main goals: one, line up some guest blog posts, and two, visit as many blogs as I could and invite them over to join and enjoy the site.
To add to July’s blogginess, my awesome husband began migrating my personal blog from a free wordpress blog to a self-hosted .com blog.  I anguished again as I watched him spend hours and hours doing battle with servers and files and domain names.  Is all his work worth it?  Am I a serious enough blogger for a .com?  What will happen to my stats and comments?  I hadn’t exactly asked my husband to migrate me.  I had simply mentioned a blogging project that I would like to do, but which would require me to be self-hosted, and he took the project and ran. I am super appreciative of all the work he did for me, but at the time I felt sort of like a student who had struggled to graduate high school and was being forced to go to college.
Meanwhile, I was still ruminating on the blogging popularity thing.  I questioned the time I’ve spent blogging and the value of what I get out of it.  Particularly glaring was the ratio of published, paid writing gigs to blog posts for the year, which is roughly 1 to 55, unless you count that one blog post that won me a non-cash, randomly-drawn prize.
As I started visiting blogs from all overArkansasto invite bloggers to the Arkansas Women Bloggers Site, I was amazed at the diversity among these blogs.  I laughed and I cried. I heard some really bad “background” music and a few songs that brought back memories. Some blogs had layouts that were true works of art and others I nearly went blind trying to read. I learned about vintage high heel shoes, snagged a recipe that I’ve already made for dinner (a chicken enchilada ring), was inspired by a smartly decorated back porch, saw tons of kids enjoying summer fun, and got a hankering to add blackberries to my garden next year. I shared a few bits of knowledge where I could via blog comments, but I definitely reaped more than I sowed.
And then it hit me.  This is what blogging is about.  It’s about making connections with people you wouldn’t normally get to know and learning from one another’s experiences.  It’s about sparking inspiration and creativity, and sharing what is important to you.  It’s about expanding your knowledge through a network of information that you can customize to fit your needs thanks to RSS feeds and email subscriptions.  Blogging serves a different purpose to each blogger and blog reader.  It takes a certain something to want to put a little piece of yourself out there; that is the thing that links bloggers together.  I am super proud to be part of the blogging community, and I’m so excited to see the Arkansas Women Bloggers community growing. I don’t even care how popular I am.
Fawn Rechkemmer blogs about her sheer lack of domesticity and all the things she does to avoid washing the dishes at http://insteadofthedishes.com (thanks to her husband).

We Want MORE!!!

Hello Women Bloggers of Arkansas! I wanted to take a moment to let you know about some changes going on here at Arkansas Women Bloggers.

As you know, a few months ago, Stephanie of http://theparkwife.blogspot.com/ started Arkansas Women Bloggers with the intention of uniting women across the state. We have had 86 Women Bloggers join us so far and we are continuing to grow slowly but surely. Stephanie is amazing and is involved in a lot of different projects (just read her blog!) and recently asked myself (Julie of http://www.eggsandherbs.com) and Fawn of http://insteadofthedishes.wordpress.com/ to help her out with the site.

Likely the only change you will notice as a reader is MORE POSTS! We feel that in order to grow this site it is important to keep it updated and growing. We hope to feature more and more members and in turn increase traffic not only this site but to our members sites as well!

So where do you come in? We need you to submit ideas and posts! We would love to have ALL OF YOU write for us! You can write something original or send us a link to a post you previously placed on your own blog and we will republish it here. If you are not comfortable having a post on here, you are also welcome to submit ideas of the types of stories you would be interested in seeing on here. We are pretty laid back here. Don’t let the fear of grammar or spelling keep you from posting! I can only imagine how many red marks I would see if an English teacher got a hold of my posts!

I know that several of our readers emailed us early on about posting. I have tried to make sure all of you were contacted but if you were overlooked, please let us know. If you didn’t express you interest before but would like to now, we would love to post your material! You can leave a comment with an email address so we can contact you back or you can email us directly at arkansasblogger@gmail.com. Have a wonderful day, and who knows, maybe YOU will be our next featured writer!

P.S. Don’t forget to tell all your friends about arkansaswomenbloggers.com