04Feb 2020 by Colleen Casey
How to Organize Your Blog Posts with Categories

How to Organize Your Blog Posts with Categories

Blogging, Content Planning, Grower, How-Tos, Top Posts, Wordsmith
Blog post categories let you group your content, for you and for your audience. Learn some tips and tricks to get started with categories. Blog post categories group your content to help your audience find what they’re looking for. You can display the categories on your blog to guide viewers to the right place for them. You can also keep some categories hidden so you can build out and test smaller categories or deliver content for each segment of your audience. In this post, you’ll learn how to: Decide what categories to use for your blogSort your posts into the right categoriesCreatively display your categories on your websiteUse categories alongside email marketing to help segment your audience and deliver relevant contentSet up categories in Wordpress Decide What Categories To Use…
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03Nov 2019 by Colleen Casey

How to Make an Editorial Calendar: The Ultimate Guide

Beginner, Blogging, Content Planning, Grower, How-Tos, Top Posts
An editorial calendar helps you plan your content and stay ahead of deadlines. It's a useful tool for any entrepreneur or online creator because you always know what’s coming next and you can plan around big events, launches, and holidays.  One of the worst places to be as a content creator is in the “what should I do next?” state of mind. Your energy should go towards your content, not towards all the decisions you have to make before you can even start creating. Your editorial calendar lets you make those decisions ahead of time so you can focus on your content. In this post, you’ll learn how to make an editorial calendar using the following steps: Start and maintain a backlog of content ideas to fill your editorial calendarSet…
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20Oct 2019 by Colleen Casey

How to Edit Your Writing Like a Boss

Blogging, Books and eBooks, Grower, How-Tos, Podcasting, Video Content, Website Copy, Wordsmith, Writing Skills
Editing is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be tedious. This post walks you through how to edit your content without losing your mind. Editing is the hardest and most time-consuming part of writing. When you hear the word “editing,” you might first think of copywriting, when you’re looking for typos, misspelled words, misused punctuation, and other granular fixes. But, editing entails much more than the tiny details.  Editing is the entire process of shaping a draft into its final form. It involves looking at the entire work, then at each chapter or section, page, paragraph, sentence, and word. You’re looking at how things are working on a deeper level than spelling. (But spelling is definitely part of it!) So, let’s talk about how to edit your content without losing…
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06Oct 2019 by Colleen Casey

How Focus Shapes Your Blog Posts

Blogging, Grower, How-Tos, Wordsmith
Focused blog posts give readers your knowledge in a neat package. Asking the big questions helps you shape your ideas into great content. A blog post’s focus comes from the big-picture questions that drive it. When you define your focus, you answer the big questions that determine what information to share, what order it should go in, and why your message is important to your readers. To illustrate how important focus is to your blog content, I’ll be creating a sample blog post and shaping it up as I answer some big-picture questions. What Are the Big Questions? You’re probably wondering what the big questions are. I explain these in my post 9 Skills That Will Instantly Improve Your Writing: Ask yourself:1. What am I trying to accomplish with this…
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06Sep 2019 by Colleen Casey
How to Write an Amazing Blog Post: A Hands-On Guide

How to Write an Amazing Blog Post: A Hands-On Guide

Beginner, Blogging, Grower, How-Tos
This post won’t just tell you what goes into a valuable blog post for your audience—I’m going to unravel this very post step by step so you can see how a post is built from zero words to a thousand-plus.  Blogging Isn’t Easy  You’re a blogger, or you want to be. You might even have some regular readers (nice work!). But maybe your views and interactions aren’t where you hope for them to be.  It’s not enough to write something good enough, click Publish, and wait for the traffic to come flowing in. You have to add value that no one else can, and you have to make sure that your readers know exactly what that value is.  So how does a simple idea become a beautifully-crafted blog post that…
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31Mar 2019 by Colleen Casey

How to Make and Use a Content Plan

Blogging, Content Planning, Grower, Podcasting, Video Content
Last time, we talked about content plans and why you’d want to go through the trouble of making one for your content. Today, I’m going to share with you my best tips for how to make and use a content plan. Before you start, think about how far into the future you want to plan. Do you want to plan the next month, two months, six months, or more? Consider what you hope to achieve with your content plan and what works for your content type. For example, for a personal vlog channel, video plans might change constantly as your life influences your videos, but for a podcast, you can plan subject matter ahead of time (and you should, especially if you’re conducting interviews). When you’ve got an idea of…
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04Mar 2019 by Colleen Casey

5 Reasons Why You Need a Content Plan

Beginner, Blogging, Content Planning, Podcasting, Video Content
Content plans are a vital tool for entrepreneurs and content creators who want to make and share content regularly but don’t want their lives to center around the question: What should I post next? Whether you’re an entrepreneur, blogger, vlogger, podcaster, or another kind of online creator, you’ve likely faced this question. Along with it comes the stress of feeling left behind because someone else is always making something better, faster. You know that the way to stand out is to be yourself and create content that you’re passionate about, but you can’t be yourself when you’re overwhelmed by the never-ending cycle of coming up with original ideas and producing great content. This constant state of stress is often called the content treadmill. You’re always running, but you’re getting nowhere.…
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21Jan 2019 by Colleen Casey

The Top 4 Ways to Make Money Online

Beginner, Blogging, Creator-ship, Email Marketing, Grower, Podcasting, Video Content
Lots of people want to make money online as a content creator, influencer, or entrepreneur. But how do people make money online? Can a blog make money? How much money can someone make on YouTube? It can be tough to figure out what’s possible when you’re starting out. It’s even tougher when you’ve been creating content and have started to grow a following, but you’re not making money consistently, or at all. In this post, I’ll show you the four main ways that you can make money online and earn a real (and honest) living. Ads The first money-making strategy that comes to mind for many people is, of course, ads. You can place ads on your website or blog through services like Google Adsense or Amazon Affiliates and make…
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13Nov 2018 by Colleen Casey

5 Planning Strategies That Will Make Your Content Better

Blogging, Content Planning, Grower, Podcasting, Video Content, Wordsmith
Some people are natural-born planners, while others prefer to take it moment by moment. I happen to be a planner, so I want to share with you five strategies that I use to plan my content. Whether you like to plan ahead or not, read through these planning strategies and try them out. Content planning doesn’t look the same for everyone, but it can save you tons of time writing and editing later on. 1. The Brain Dump Often, the first step in planning is to get everything that’s floating in your head down on paper (or typed neatly). This strategy involves taking a blank page and jotting down everything that comes to mind about your content idea, whether it’s a video, blog post, series, podcast, or something else. This…
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30Sep 2018 by Colleen Casey

9 Skills That Will Instantly Improve Your Writing

Beginner, Blogging, Books and eBooks, Email Marketing, Grower, Social Media Copy, Website Copy, Wordsmith, Writing Skills
Writing, like everything else, requires practice. It may not seem that way because it’s something we all learn how to do in school. But that’s precisely why it’s important to work to improve your writing—it’s hard to see the nuance in something when you’ve been doing it for so long that you do it on autopilot. So, what’s the best way to get out of that mindset and make a conscious effort in your writing? For me, it’s looking at a few tips that can make my writing better and measuring them against something I’ve written. I recommend that you find a blog post or something else you’ve written and see how well you incorporate these tips on your own. In this post, I’ll show you my top nine ways…
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