We start this week’s speedlink with a very special announcement from Raul Pacheco-Vega. The Hummingbird604 blogger is celebrating the 8th anniversary of his site by announcing that he will start blogging again. As you may recall, he went on an indefinite hiatus a long while back as he wanted to focus more on his academic duties. He says his “lifestyle” blog won’t be quite the same as before, though, as he’ll be doing it all on his terms. Welcome back!
Next, we look at more of the logistical side of things with Jennifer Mattern. Most of us use WordPress to power our blogs, but Jennifer says that we shouldn’t be writing our blog posts in WordPress itself. Instead, we should be doing it offline through some other tool to avoid revision overload and another problems. Most of the nearly 3000 posts on BTR were written through WordPress, though I tend to write my client posts in Notepad.
Social media plays an increasingly big role in the life of the professional blogger and that’s why so many of were quite peeved when Facebook decided to only show posts to a small percentage of people who “like” a page. Buzz Bishop decided to find out for himself whether it was worth paying to boost Facebook posts. While he did get more eyeballs, the click-thru rate was quite bad and he concluded that the best way to get better engagement is simply to provide your audience with content that they actually want.
Going through a whole series of questions from O Magazine, Daree Allen discusses exactly what it means to be strong. Despite popular opinion, asking for help doesn’t make you weak and neither does feeling afraid. Instead, strength comes from asking for help when you need it and persevering through challenges even when you’re scared. Life is hard and you have to do “what’s right even when everyone else tells you you’re wrong.”
And finally, we have Jeremy Lim. It’s not a new blog post in the traditional sense of the word, but Jeremy has just released a new song with Anna Toth that you should check out. It’s called “I Can’t Sleep” and it’s being offered on a “name your price” basis through Basecamp, meaning it can be free if that’s what you want to pay.
Thanks, Michael! Happy to be back.