How-Tos Archives » Empower Writing

04Feb 2020 by Colleen Casey

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…

26Dec 2019 by Colleen Casey

How to Set Business Goals for 2020

Grower, How-Tos

Learn how to set business goals for 2020 that you’ll stick to. Good goals align with your priorities and can be broken down so you can hit your weekly, monthly, and quarterly targets. Wherever you are in your journey as an entrepreneur or creator, you’ll always have new goals to achieve. But, it’s all too easy to start comparing yourself to the countless success stories around you instead of focusing on your own journey. So, how can you refocus that energy towards excitement for your future? For me, setting clear, measurable goals that I can break down into manageable steps sets me back on the right path. Sure, I still have my insecurities about my path (for example, I feel like I’m navigating my way through the business world slower…

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…

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…

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…

29Sep 2019 by Colleen Casey

The 2 Types of Emails You Should Know How to Write

Beginner, Email Marketing, Grower, How-Tos

You need two emails to engage your audience and share your products. Use them to build and convert your list of interested people into loyal customers. There’s a ton of content to write as an entrepreneur, but little is more fear-inducing than email marketing content. When you’re sending emails to your email list, you’re walking a fine line between turning your audience into engaged customers and alienating them with constant pitches. Your email list is the bridge between you and your audience. It’s the most direct channel you have to both reach them and hear from them. And because they’ve opted into being there, you know they think that what you’re offering is valuable. But what's the best way to connect with them? How do you deliver content regularly that…

15Sep 2019 by Colleen Casey

5 Ways to Boost Views on Your Videos

Creator-ship, Grower, How-Tos, Video Content

Ditch the idea that clickbait and trends are the only ways to get more views on your videos. Get your focus back to creating valuable videos that fulfill your creative drive. Creators are constantly faced with conflicting advice: keep on being the unique, creative mind that you are, and follow all the rules to appease The Algorithm. I’m talking rules like: post at least once per week, create clickable titles (even if it’s clickbait), encourage likes and comments to keep your content seen, and add all the right keywords to your video descriptions. It’s hard to stay creative in an environment that’s all about getting results and monetizing every moment of your life. When you’re on a platform like YouTube, you’re also reminded just how much content is out there,…

06Sep 2019 by Colleen Casey

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…

30Jan 2019 by Colleen Casey

How to Look Natural on Camera: Advice from a YouTuber

Beginner, How-Tos, Video Content

Countless new creators face this moment: They’re sitting alone in a quiet room. Their brand new camera is balanced atop a tripod or stack of books, red light blinking anxiously. They felt so confident before this moment—they’ve seen thousands of videos online before and have maybe even found a handful of other creators who inspire them. They were exhilarated by a flood of ideas and giddily set everything up. And now, they’re wondering how they’re supposed to look natural when they’re basically talking to themselves. I know this because I’ve been there. I’ve been making videos on YouTube since 2014, and I’m still learning better ways that I can be more myself when I’m filming. In this post, I’ll offer my best tips to getting past the hurdle of trying…

Category: How-Tos