Kristen Fischer: Creatively Self-Employed: How Writers and Artists Deal with Career Ups and Downs
Gail McMeekin: The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women: A Portable Mentor
Rice Freeman-Zachery: Living the Creative Life: Ideas and Inspiration from Working Artists
Meg Mateo Ilasco: Craft, Inc.: Turn Your Creative Hobby into a Business
Do you have a Facebook Fan Page for your business and/or blog? Are you experiencing any frustrations while you build and improve your Fan Page? Did you see something on another Fan Page, and you want to know how to replicate it on yours?
I am compiling some tips on Facebook Fan Pages, and I want to know what you need help with. Leave a comment here, or send me an email at colleen @ freshvintagestyle . com.
Thanks!
Colleen
I finally did it! I bullied my mother into blogging! I might regret it later, but she is having so much fun thinking of new stories to share. You can find her wreaking havoc at BoggleMama.com.
Helping my mom create her new blog gave me a chance to think about the things I would do if I could start all over again. Here is the advice I gave her (applies to newbies as well as seasoned bloggers):
1. Get your own domain.
If I could do it all over again, I would have used my own domain name for freshvintage. It is not too late for me to switch over, but it will be a lot of work to move my photos. And I am afraid to lose Google traffic, since 32% of my traffic comes from search engines.
2. Install Google Analytics (or equivalent statistics program) on day one
How the hell do I know that 32% of my traffic comes from search engines? The stats on typepad certainly don't tell me that. My mom is obsessed with looking at the stats on Google Analytics, and her blog is only a couple of weeks old. The charts and graphs are practically empty, but she is optimistic that traffic will build.
If you haven't installed it yet, it is never too late. And it's totally free.
3. Write a few posts before you tell anyone about your blog
When I started freshvintage, I made the mistake of sending an email to a bunch of my favorite bloggers after I wrote my first post. And my first post was not anything special. At the very least, I don't think it convinced anyone to keep returning to my blog. In hindsight, I should have waited a while before I jumped into "cold emailing" other bloggers.
4. Create a theme for a series of posts
My parents have met some interesting celebrities because of my dad's past involvement in politics. My mom and I came up with the idea of having Famous Fridays. If she starts suffering from writer's block (highly unlikely), she can easily come up with a post for her Famous Friday series. Whether it is just a funny photo or a brief story about a brush with stardom, it is a no-brainer for her.
I have a similar series on freshvintage, called freshfind. These are short posts that focus on just one of my vintage finds, instead of the heaping piles of junk that I normally write about. The freshfind posts don't need a lot of preparation, and they keep my family from bugging me about writing a new post.
5. Don't apologize for not blogging
Sure, I haven't written a post
for freshblogtips.com for several months. Do you know why? Because I had way too much stuff going on in my life. And I had
nothing substantial to say. I even had to remove my BlogHer Ads because I wasn't posting as often as required by their advertisers. But I didn't want to write a post that said that I was sorry
for not writing a post. Boooring. Only write when you have something to say.
6. Make each post stand on its own
No one wants to be the loser at a party who doesn't know anyone and doesn't understand the inside jokes. If you refer to a project or event or even a person in your blog, be sure to link back to a full explanation of it on a previous blog post. Give a little background info to help new readers. People will stick around longer if they know what you are talking about!
7. Encourage family and friends to casually proofread your posts
If anyone finds a grammar or spelling mistake on my blogs, I want to know about it as soon as possible. I know that some bloggers don't care about small errors, but I do. Tell your friends to let you know when they spot a faux pas. Case in point: on the About Me page on this very blog, I made a major spelling error that drastically changed the meaning of the sentence. I had NO IDEA about my error until a friend told me about it recently. The page had been live for eight months. Damn you, bitches! This was the error:
Original sentence with misspelling:
In addition to being a mom of two preschoolers, a loving and gentile wife, a blogger and an antiques dealer...
I didn't mean to say that I am a Gentile! Why in the world would I ever point the fact that I am not Jewish on my About Me page?! I was trying to be ironic by saying that I am genteel - as in "free of vulgarity and rudeness". Oops.
One year ago, I wrote a post on freshvintage about my blogging goals.
Here's the rundown on the results:
1. Quadruple the daily visitor count
My daily visitor count definitely increased since the beginning of 2008, but nowhere near four times. Closer to double. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. It is good to have big goals, but if you don't take any actions to reach that goal, it ain't gonna happen. I didn't do anything monumental on freshvintage that would result in a quadrupled visitor count. Sure, there were a few posts and mentions on other blogs that brought the daily count up much higher than normal, but those high numbers didn't stick around for more than a few days.
If I ever plan on quadrupling my visitors in 2009, I'll have to come up with a detailed action plan. A plan that includes vintage sex tapes and pictures of celebrities in compromising positions at flea markets. That would definitely drive up the numbers.
2. Write more tutorialsI wrote two new tutorials during 2008: Displaying Vintage Paper Labels and Creating Fabric-Covered Corkboards (with an additional follow-up post).
I've mentioned before that the small number of tutorials on my blog drive a huge chunk of the Google traffic that I get. It is the 80/20 rule: I get roughly 80% of my traffic from 20% of the posts on my site.
Since I wrote the Corkboard tutorial, freshvintage received 2411 visits from people doing a corkboard-related search on Google. Which is strange for a blog that isn't centered around my undying devotion to corkboards. Now can you see why I wanted to create more tutorials? They usually bring a nice stream of traffic.
And let me tell you this: you'd all better not write a bunch of fabric-covered corkboard tutorials or else the shit's gonna hit the fan. I kid, I kid. My point is that we all have ideas, whether they are totally original or a fresh take on an old idea, that could use a step-by-step, fully-photographed tutorial. And those tutorials could potentially drive a lot of traffic to your blog.
3. Drop more f-bombs
I totally effing failed on this one. But I think my mother-in-law is happy about it.
4. Get Tina Fey to read my blog My sister has a friend of a friend who is a close friend of Tina. Friendly enough that she has Tina's email address. Let's call her Sally.
Sally copied & pasted my blog post about Tina Fey into an email to Tina. It didn't include a link to my blog, but, hey, it is way more than I ever expected. I love Sally almost as much as Tina now (even though I never met her and that is not her real name).
Here's the rub: Sally sent the email to Tina the morning after she won the Golden Globe award for Best Actress in January 2008.
So, I'm not sure Tina actually read my blog post, since she was probably in a champagne-induced haze. But I like to picture her reading my post on her Blackberry and laughing uncontrollably while she keeps Oprah on hold.
2009 Goals
And what are my goals for 2009? I'm still mulling them over. I'd definitely like to bring in some guest posters for freshblogtips.com. And I'm seriously thinking about attending a blogging conference like Blissdom in Nashville or BlogHer in Chicago. Anyone else thinking of going to these conferences? Does anyone want to get trashed with me after the keynote?
What are your blogging goals for 2009?
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When I first started this blog in August, I promised that I would post a list of all of the wonderful readers who decided to start blogging because of a little push from me and my blogging tips. Here's that list, along with a few other unlucky bloggers who had the pleasure of being bullied into blogging by me IN PERSON (in their shop, at their antiques sale, etc.). I will be keeping this list on a separate Bullied Into Blogging page, so if you have a new blog and were inspired by freshblogtips.com, send me an email and I will add you to the list on that page.
The Roux (also inspired by her friend, Mary from pretty good)
I created a Frequently Asked Questions page to answer some of the common questions that I have been receiving through email and comments. I'll add to the page whenever I write new answers. You should take a look...I'm answering totally relevant questions, like What wine do you drink?
There's one question that I would love to hear your answer: Why did you choose the blogging platform that you are using? There are many creative people who are ready to start blogging, but don't know whether to choose Typepad, Blogger or Wordpress (or many of the other platforms).
Here's my answer that I included in the FAQ:
This blog and freshvintage are both hosted on Typepad. I originally selected it because it appeared to be more professional and flexible than Blogger. I'm very happy with Typepad and I have no complaints because it is very easy to use and to customize. But, sometimes I think about switching to a self-hosted Wordpress blog (for even more customization and better Search Engine Optimization features). Then I remember that it would be a huge pain in the ass to transfer 175+ posts and hundreds of photos to a new platform, and I snap out of it.
Since I haven't tried all of the different platforms, it wouldn't be fair to tell you which platform is better than the next. I'll leave that to the experts:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050714gardner/
Make sure you take a look at the chart that accompanies the post. It gives you a quick feature comparison.
Edited to add: Jeannie from On the Corner Vintage Inspirations just let me know that the chart is outdated for Blogger. Blogger now has categories and blogrolls/lists. Here's a list of all of Blogger's Features.
Here's where you come in: Tell us why you picked the platform that you are using now. And let us know if you have any regrets about the one you chose.
I was afraid to start my freshvintage blog because I was stuck on the first post. In my mind, it had to be SPECTACULAR. Hands down, the best blog post ever written. Otherwise, no one would ever come back to my blog. I hemmed and hawed for weeks, trying to come up with a compelling, original post that would knock my readers' socks off. I forgot one small detail: I didn't have any readers.
The truth is, the only people reading your first post are your family and friends. And they already know that you are totally awesome, so you don't have to prove anything to them. By the time you start networking with other bloggers, you'll be on your fifth post. Or your tenth. Or if you aren't very social, maybe your 157th post. Your readers might not feeling like going all the way back to your first post, so it is likely that you are fretting over nothing (much like I did). And if they do go all the way back to your first post, then you must be doing something right, since they are reading your archives.
So don't put too much pressure on yourself to make a dooce-worthy first post. I guarantee, once you publish the first post, every one after that will be easier.
Other than the requisite "Who Am I?" and "Why am I blogging?" topics, you may want to add a little bit more meat to your first post. Here are a few topics to get you started:
1. Select one thing that you collect, and take pictures of it. Educate your blog readers (aka Mom & Aunt Sally) about the collection by sharing some information, such as rarity, value, who made them, where you can typically find the items, etc.
2. Snap a photo of your studio. What, no studio? What the hell is wrong with you? Then I guess you can just share a picture of the place where you like to create. Maybe it's the spare room, the basement or the dining room table.
3. Share photos of something you made. Anything. It could be last night's dinner. Or the gold macaroni frame from second grade. If you are so inclined, give some instructions on how to make one, or share links to instructions on another site.
4. Write a list of the blogs that inspired you to start your own blog. This is such a cop out, but we won't hold it against you.
5. Dig deep into your family's video archives, and post a video on your new blog. It has to be your own video - not something you found somewhere else. And it should be embarrassing. Kind of like this one of my kids (that shall henceforth be played at every graduation party and wedding). Who knows - maybe you'll become the next viral video star.
6. Tell your readers that Colleen from freshblogtips.com told you that you needed to get off your ass and start a blog. You don't have to use those exact words. You can say "tuckus" or "posterior" if that makes you feel better.
Relax, have fun and just write it, dammit!
Oh, and here's my first blog post on freshvintage. Not exactly Pulitzer Prize-winning, but at least I finally got over my fear.
P.S. If this actually convinced you to write that first post and start blogging, then send me your link. I will post your blog on my upcoming "People I Convinced to Blog" page. (Not kidding!)
