Hello everyone, in today’s weekly bloggers tips post from me, I want to share a really handy tip that bloggers may find useful: Fiverr.
In case you don’t know it, Fiverr is a micro task site, whereby hundreds of thousands of people offer jobs and skills for just 5 dollars (around £3 in GBP).
Each seller offers what is known as a “gig” for $5, and there are literally thousands of gigs out there which may help.
Tasks that bloggers may find useful include: Read More >
Branding & Your Blog
Your blog, if you have a personal or business blog, is your online mirror of your personality. So are your tweets, Facebook updates, G+ updates and Instagram pics.
Think carefully how you want to present yourself online, and the image you wish to portray to your audience as it grows.
Of course, as you grow and evolve so will your blog and your brand; this is only natural and you can tweak and change your branding as you go, but be mindful of your blog tone of voice and what you want to communicate.
Some tips on blog branding:
Want more blog tips? Sign up top right for my free e book and these bad boys come directly to you. This is an archived one as I am away on hols. Lazy? No. Efficient? Yes…
I love Instagram. Or at least I did, until today when the Facebook-owned visual life casting platform announced (rather misleadingly, at the back of their “preview” terms and conditions), that things are changing.
The things that are changing are, primarily, that from the 16th January 2013 Instagram will have the legal rights to your images, lock, stock and two smoking filters. They can sell them, profit from them, use them as their own global bank of imagery to license as they see fit, and we cannot do anything about it.
Other than delete our accounts, that is.
Why would you even hesitate to delete an account, then? Because, for many of us, Instagram has become as much a way of social media life as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Visual lifecasting has it’s own merits and it’s own community and associated culture; it’s not just about the lomo lense you know. We like to share things and comment on other people’s imagery; it is a well established community of users, particularly among the blogging, fashion, beauty and crafting set, and this blow has evoked a backlash from the grass roots users who feel, quite frankly, shafted by the big boys.
So, what to do?
You could delete your account to play safe. In this instance, Twitter’s well timed filters release may tempt you to use an existing social platform visually. Yes, I know it’s not the same but still…
Hipstamatic may suddenly become appealing again, as will other Insta-esque apps who aren’t likely to sell their soul down the $1 billion pound river anytime soon.
Failing that, you could hold fire and see what happens next; InstaBook/Facegram may still re-word their oh-so-intrusive t’s and c’s following the backlash, but hey, they are HUGE so it’s not a cert that they should listen to the little guys.
In playing safe you could limit what you take images of to anything non-personal. So, no pics of kids and family or nudey rudey shots in pants etc…you never know where they may end up.
I am going to play safe and see what rolls out from this. It is an interesting landmark in social media’s changing landscape, and yet another reminder that we are being watched more than we know.
What will you do?
UPDATE: 19th December 2012. Instagram say they are listening to user’s complaints and that they will update their t’s and c’s. Lets see!
Today I am absolutely delighted to welcome the lovely Kate Neary to guest blog for me on Dex Diva. Kate is an endo warrior too, and also has to contend with Crohn’s disease. Kate tells her story of dealing with life one day at a time, and I am grateful to her for sharing her story with us. Over to you, Kate….
After years of being in incredible pain, being bounced between doctors in my home country (US) and the one where I lived (England), it was one afternoon in a sterile medical office that changed my entire life. I was looking at images of my intestines riddled with ulcers and I was overcome with relief. Odd, I know but I was elated. Read More >
Kickstarter is a brilliant crowd-funding website which I occasionally have a peep at. Miles was having a browse last week and found this amazing company called Lumi; when he sent me the link I immediately backed the project and have been excited about it ever since.
Lumi have created a dye to paint on substrates with just light; by taking pics on a smart phone you can then create negatives really easily, and simply paint onto your desired object or fabric and await the finished result. The dye develops wherever the negative is clear, and in the dark areas it remains white. The beauty of this process is that no screens need to be made up, it can be easily done at home as opposed to renting a workshop space, and it’s EASY!
Although I am now “officially” a designer, writer and blogger, my degree was in 2 dimensional design and a lot of my time was spent in textiles workshops screen-printing and messing around with fabric and paint, so this type of work really gets my juices flowing. I can’t wait to receive my kit and show you what I get up to with the paints.
This video explains really well ow the process works:
What do you think, would you give Lumi a try? I can’t wait!
(images via Lumi)
Pinterest has been on a boom and bust cycle at the start of 2012; from huge user uptakes, articles declaring it the next big thing, to a hasty retreat as the blogosphere feared for their copyright pursued purse strings. Instagram remains a visual social media platform we have a lomo love affair for, so what happens if you combine the two?
Enter Pingram. Read More >
I always love to have a nose at where people work, so I am sharing with you my workspace in the same vein. I work at home in Cambridgeshire for most of my writing and design work, and also have a base at the Bhive in Covent Garden which I love. ♡ The perfect thing about my work is that I don’t need to be anywhere in specific, the perfect model of working for someone who loves to travel and really handy for being a mum! More on designing your perfect career in another post, but for now, here are my workspace pics ♡
Note the essentials in my workspace at home are inspiration boards both on the wall and on Pinterest, my ubiquitous Pantone mug, JOTTR pad, Wacom tablet and Macbook. At the bHive it’s so nice to rock up and plug in to the iMacs or settle down with a cuppa and my laptop. I have met some luuuuverly people there too! (images of me taken by Caroline Briggs at the bHive).
Where do you work, and how does it inspire you?
Image counts. We can’t avoid the simple fact that we love the aesthetic, and if things look nice, you want to look at them. Sex sells, as we all know but how about a sassy blog so your readers want to stay? Visual is all over the social media trends right now - Pinterest is booming, instagr.am is huge and lifecasting visually is where we are, at the start of 2012. That aside, I like to read blogs that look fabulous, and I am sure your readers do too.
Whether you know you way around a CMS back end or not, here are my top tips for keeping a blog looking beautiful, the easy way:
1. Keep your image width sizes consistent. This is a really, really simple way to keep your blog looking lovely, and you don’t need Photoshop to do it. Work out how wide you want your images to appear on the blog (mine in the posts are 540 pixels) and simply edit your images before to post to make them consistent. Picnik is now free until 12th April when Google’s own image editor Creative Kit in G+ takes over, and you can easily edit image sizes before you post online (you can already see some of the Creative Kit features in G+ now). Keeping a clean line as you scroll, particularly on blog themes which have a central blog scroll area makes it all look neater, easier on the eye, and it flows better.
2. Use font add ons but don’t go crazy: Add-ons like Typekit (which has just been acquired by Adobe) are an easy way to add different fonts to your blog without having to know code geekage. My advice is: just don’t go crazy. Remember fonts are there to be read, and a blog full of lots of odd looking typefaces will look confusing. Pick maybe one to use as your headers and a nice body text, then leave it there. Be individual but not over the top 
3. Blog headers can make or break your blog. If yours is run of the mill, why not make your own? Find out the size of your header (you can do this in most themes by right clicking on the header, or control click on a Mac, and select “inspect element”. Under the section marked “Metrics” you will see the size of your header. On some blogs you can drag and drop your existing header and open in an image-editing application to find out the size. Now you can create your own in GIMP or Picnik, and replace in your theme. Sound confusing? I will do some tutorials on this on the blog soon, but you can always get a quote for a designer to do it for you and it will be a lot less than you think! Email me for a quote, or look at blogs you love and often you will see the credits at the bottom for who has done the design.
4. Add some character. Copypastecharacter is such a useful tool, and I use it daily in both design work and blogging. It’s a brilliant website allowing you to access characters that usually require a twister-type movement of the fingers to get the right key combination to access certain characters. You can create your own sets easily and refer back to them when you wish.
5. Images are the soul of a blog, so get some great ones. Remember, copyright is not to be messed with online, so either access Creative Commons images which allow you to use and attribute, purchase from iStock, or why not make your own? With iPhonography taking off there are lots of fantastic apps on both iPhone and Android you can use to make fab imagery; instagr.am of course being one of them, but you can also edit plain old mobile images in Picnik or Google now as I mentioned before, so the creative juices can flow to make your pics blog-worthy. Most of all, they are all yours and individual to you. Perfect.
6. Highlighting some text as a pull-out headline can be easily done to add emphasis and another visual element. If you have a regular set of posts, consider designing your headlines as images that can be dropped into your blog (of course for the SEO savvy out there make sure you use alternative text when you place the image so you don’t miss out on the meta tags). Again, use simple online free software to pull out your quotes, and bring a personalised emphasis to your blogging.
So there we have it; a few tips to have yourself some sassy looking posts.
Tutorials and more free images and blog goodies to follow – make sure you sign up for my updates so you don’t miss out!
I always take my camera on my travels, and I love to snap away. I created these images using snaps I took on my travels collaged with some paint and layered imagery on a typographic book.♡ You are welcome to download the images and use for your design and artwork for blogs or printed media.
(As usual, the links appear below when you “like” the post ♡ Enjoy!
Right, you lovely lot.
Project Endo is starting to take shape and I would love YOU to get involved.
For the very first campaign I would like to use some imagery that depicts Project Endo and what it is about, and how endometriosis affects women, their lives and families. Read More >
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