lamiki

Today I’m giving a talk at WordCamp Portland on how to blog every day. I wrote this talk based on what I learned from blogging every day for a month in November 2010 and November 2011 and I’m excited to share it with the Portland-area WordPress community.

Live stream — All of the sessions will be live streamed, here, and follow along with the hashtag, #wcpdx. I’m in the Bergen Dining room at 2:15pm.

Once I get a recording of the video, I’ll post it here. For now, here’s a copy of my slides and additional resources that I reference in the talk. Feel free to download and share this presentation as you’d like!

How to Blog Every Day

The secret to blogging every day is easy—just write. But the process of coming up with an idea is hard. Then it comes the excruciating part of putting words to the page, editing it, finding the perfect photo to accompany your post, and formatting it on your site all before you can press that beloved “Publish” button.

Oh, and if you’re writing every single day, you do it all again tomorrow.

Resources to help you Blog Every Day

Here is a list of blog posts and resources I reference during my talk, and here’s a link to the video of my talk so that you can catch what you missed at WordCamp Portland.

Where to buy my t-shirt

• I’m not a player, I just blog a lot from Raygun (unisex and ladies)

What I learned from blogging every day for 30 days

• 2010 recap: When Creativity Flows, Don’t Turn off the Faucet
• 2011 recap: NaBloPoMo Goals and Milestones

Examples of how to create a content or editorial calendar

• How to Put Together an Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing on Content Marketing Institute
• How to Create a Successful Editorial Calendar on Unbounce
• How to Create an Editorial Calendar on Spin Sucks

Tools to help you capture your ideas

• Favorite note-taking app that syncs with your phone, computer, tablet: Evernote
• Favorite tool that helps you start writing: 750 Words
• Favorite non-battery-powered option: a journal

Examples of different blog formats

• Standard: Today is Sunday
• Epic: Book Publishers are Not Tech Companies
• Response: How to be a Hipster and 500 Words or Less
• Single Paragraph: How to Impress your Customers and Create Lifelong Fans
• Photo: Nobody Tells this to Beginners and Picturing My True Identity
• Link Roundup: Musings on Adulthood and Ambition

Ways to beat writer’s block

• Choose a different topic on your content calendar
• Get inspired by going for a walk, watch a video, hop on Twitter, read something, talk with a friend
• Take a day off (it’s okay, but tell us what you’re doing instead of blogging)
• Help Me Be Fing Creative

Examples of posts I wrote when I had writer’s block

• In Observance of Date Night
• That Blog Post About My Cats
• Writer’s Block and the Muppets

What to after you publish your blog post

After you have that out of your system, sit back down, and promote your blog post like crazy. If you need help, check out the presentation I did for WordCamp Seattle on just that: How to Promote Your Blog without Losing Your Soul.

Why I wrote this talk

I’m not expecting you to start blogging every single day. But if you only blog once every other month and really want to blog more, this presentation and ideas should help you get started. If you blog once or twice a week and want to start blogging three times a week, this will help you even more.

Blogging every single day is not for the faint of heart; it takes time, lots of time. Plus you have to strike a careful balance between planning what you’re going to post and letting your muse run away with you. However blogging every single day for thirty days straight will teach you more about your writing style and how you blog than you could from anything else. I highly recommend it.

Psst, a recording of this talk has been posted here: How to Blog Every Day: Video of my Talk and More Resources to Help you Blog.

I’m still riding the wave that started from my WordCamp Seattle talk (Did I mention that talk was featured on the homepage of SlideShare.net?), and this week I found out that I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Portland on August 18th!

That’s right – lamiki’s appearance at WordCamp has turned into a Pacific Northwest tour and the next stop is Portland!

This time I won’t be talking about marketing (tragic, I know!), but my first love, writing:

How to Blog Once a Day

Creating a blog is ‘easy’ – you pick a theme, add some custom design assets, install it on your domain and you’re done. Right? Sure, except that now you have to actually write and publish something on it. We’ll talk about how to figure out what your niche is, where to look for ideas, different types of blog posts you can write, how to write the first draft, if you need an editorial calendar to keep consistent, and what to do if you get writer’s block.

If you’re a regular around here, then you already know part of this story. But don’t worry; there will be new juicy tidbits (And, of course, the slides will be posted after the talk!)

Join me at WordCamp Portland?

First, block off your calendar for Saturday, August 18th.

Then, go here and buy your ticket. Every ticket includes a daylong adventure in all things WordPress with content for WordPress beginners, experienced bloggers, designers, and developers. Plus a pint glass, which must mean there’s beer…

There are twelve pre-planned sessions (I’ve already made my list of the ones I hope to attend) and there will be some time available for unconference-style sessions to be organized by attendees on the day of the event.

And it’s located in the amazing city of Portland. Do you need another reason?

But let’s be real here, I had a lot of fun at WordCamp Seattle as WordPress has built a very warm, friendly community of people (yes, people) who love what they do online. There are developers, bloggers, and regular people who are curious and want to learn more about how they can use this platform to do more of whatever they want to do.

And you’ll learn something new, I promise you that.

And if not, at least you’ll be able to meet me, and that will be something new. 🙂

Will I see you in Portland?

Photo by Toy Confidential

There comes a time in every bloggers life when then come out from behind the computer and take the stage and become a speaker. That time came for me last weekend when I presented at WordCamp Seattle. I’ve been on panels before, but this was the first time that I actually took the stage and shared my own ideas solo.

WordCamp is a locally organized conference that covers everything related to WordPress with sessions ranging from basic WordPress tips to very advanced development tricks. This was my first time attending and speaking at WordCamp, so I had no idea what to expect. But what I discovered was 300 people who were all very passionate about using the WordPress publishing platform to get their ideas out there, which makes for a very friendly community.

Slides: How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul

My talk was in the afternoon and in one of the smallest rooms. But even so, I counted somewhere between 60 and 70 people while I cleared my throat and anxiously waited for when I was supposed to start.

My talk was called, “How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul.” It offered an overview of why you should build a community for your blog before you need to promote your blog and a checklist for how to get the word out about a post after you publish.

I came up with the idea for this topic after knowing a bunch of bloggers who write really amazing posts but are horrible at marketing themselves. Usually it’s because people who have a blog are writers, not marketers. And while marketing is a skill, a lot of it is a process that you repeat and iterate on as you go. Plus a lot of this methodology comes from what I’ve learned running and promoting my own blog and that of my employers (current and former).

Here are the slides from my talk – and here’s a link to a video of my talk on promoting your blog.

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I’m en route to WordCamp Seattle for my talk this afternoon. Here’s the final checklist from my talk – I will post the full slides next week and a video as soon as it’s available.

Can’t make it? Here’s a recording of my talk on how to promote your blog without losing your soul.

See you soon!

What’s the one thing that most bloggers hate to do? It’s a verb that starts with the letter “p” and has a lot of work in between.

If you guessed, “promote” and are cringing on the other side of the screen, then keep reading.

This Saturday I’ll be giving a talk at WordCamp Seattle 2012 about how to conquer your fear of the big, bad “p” and learn how to promote your blog without losing your soul. Here’s what I’ll be talking about:

Congratulations, you have a brand new blog! But how do you get people to read it? ‘Promotion’ is something you need to learn if you want anyone to see the website that you’re putting a lot of time into working on. We’ll talk about how you can leverage social networks and social bookmarking sites to gain readers and how to build relationships with other bloggers who will help you out along the way. By the end of this session you’ll know how to market your blog without losing your soul.

Unfortunately WordCamp Seattle is already sold out. But if you’d like to attend, you can try and snag a ticket that people are posting for sale over here on the registration page and also on Twitter.

After my talk, I’ll post a recap with a quick-and-dirty checklist of how to promote your blog posts (in a non-self-promotional way) after you press “publish.” So stay tuned!

If you are a blogger, what tips do you have on how to promote your blog posts after you publish?

Leave your tips in the comments and I’ll give you a shout-out during my talk and in the recap.

Update: Slides from my presentation are up — plus what it was like to lead my first solo talk.