Digital Marketing + Communications For Creatives | Rewriting Life

8 Marketing Blogs You Should’ve Subscribed To Yesterday

Kaleigh — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:00:25 +0000

Last month, I fangirled like crazy when a woman visiting our offices for a few weeks told me about the online community she was building to help people find their purpose by connecting them with trained mentors (psychologists, for example).

(My passion is helping people help people, if you haven’t already guessed.)

We got to swapping stories. At one point, she’d been in the marketing industry, but this whole world of online marketing and community building was new-ish for her. She had the army of people and stacks of books, but wanted to know where I went to learn about marketing.

What blogs did I read on a regular basis?

I think I probably turned about fifteen shades pinker when I admitted I could rattle off a dozen or more without even thinking hard.

The truth is, the Internet has propelled us into a state of fear that we’ll miss something if we don’t devour everything. But in that fear, I’ve sifted out the bad and whittled my list down to the core resources for online marketing.

Here’s how it rounds out:

Duct Tape Marketing

Every Wednesday, John Jansch delivers a concise newsletter with a couple new digital tools, a few more articles from some of the industry’s best + brightest, and a sponsor (usually a book or course). To be honest, the newsletter has introduced me to some of the most useful marketing tools to date.

Hubspot

I’m an e-book addict. Send me to the support group. With downloadable guides to social media marketing to best examples of web homepage design to online lead generation, this online all-in-one-software company puts everyone else’s basic 101 guides to shame.

With Intention by Jess Lively

Jess was born to help creative business owners. Her weekly newsletter, “What I Wish I Knew Wednesday,” is a quick + informative read. I always skim them to see if they’re applicable and toss what I don’t need.

Social Triggers

You’ve got to love somebody with a little personality and no nonsense. That’s Derek Halpern for ya. He basis his marketing and social media posts on psychological research, so everything he does and teaches is backed by science.

KISSmetrics

I found KISSInsights, the software behind KISSmetrics, last spring when I was searching for an easy-to-use client survey tool. Since then, I’ve trusted the blog side of things with information about keeping clients happy + building better email newsletters + landing pages.

Help Scout

Things I love about Help Scout: the psychology of purchasing decisions + the guides to better client satisfaction and support (especially for product developers). The content is in-depth, but it’s worth the read.

Mashable

When I visit this site, it’s a cluster of technology information and small business news. Yes, you’ve got to sort through it. But if you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find a quality post on that topic. Everything has thousands and thousands of shares, comments, etc.

Content Marketing Institute

Content marketing is the wave of the future, um, present. It’s now. That’s why we blog, develop infographics and diagrams and videos and slideshows. It’s why we are consuming and consuming – so we can learn and teach others who then ask us to design their websites or manage their Facebook pages or write their brochure copy. CMI has ideas on ideas when it comes to all of that.

SEOmoz

Because SEO changes err’day. Because Google keeps it fresh. SEOmoz broke it down for me step by tiny step when I wanted to learn SEO from start to finish. My suggestion? Start with the all-inclusive beginner’s guide.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.

The Pros + Cons Of Creative Business Tweeting

Kaleigh — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:00:58 +0000

Let’s just say it like it is: Twitter is time-consuming.

It’s the reason some of us back slowly in the other direction while others of us don’t hit the sheets until three a.m. We are keenly aware of the ramifications of tweeting well, tweeting consistently, and choose to duck out or dive in.

I get that. In fact, I commend you.

There has been a backlog of times in the last two years, specifically, when I thought, “Gosh, this Twitter thing is a lot of work.”

But if you know me – especially in 140 characters or less – you know that Twitter has built friendships and collaborations for me that would never have existed outside of the World Wide Web.

So let’s talk about that. As creative, emotion-driven and passion-seeking creatures, that is a glorious attribute for a social network.

Finding handwritten letters of encouragement and support in your mailbox will make every unnoticed tweet feel like a grain of sand in the ocean of your life. (P.S. That’s what it is anyway.)

To be fair, it’s helpful to dissect both the pros and the cons of Twitter for creative makers and writers and designers and so forth.

(+) Twitter

+ Every response is direct; your customer service never ever has trouble defending itself after you publically address the good and the bad on a person-by-person basis.

+ Your PR strategy just got personal, too. You’d like to sit pretty on that homepage? By learning about the media outlet and its reporters, engaging with them in the least creepy way ever, pitch time doesn’t feel like Doomsday.

+ You know who loves you and why. When the same small army re-tweets you or responds to your questions, it becomes pretty clear which relationships to focus on. Before Twitter, we didn’t know who was passing along our work to their friends and talking about us over dinner; now, we almost do.

(-) Twitter

- The more it works, the more time it requires. When people engage with you, it’s in your best interest to respond to them in a somewhat timely fashion. But eventually, your engaged audience may grow beyond what’s humanly possible to address. And then, you’ll have to rethink how you react.

- It might not house your demographic. Twitter is a beautiful equalizer and powerful connector, but it requires a strategy. If your goal is to showcase visual content, you might be better off using a less text-heavy medium. It’s great practice for crafting swoon-worthy sentences though.

- It shouldn’t be, and can’t be, the only way you build relationships. First connections via Twitter are excellent, but it’s easy for those connections to fall off the map if neither party makes an effort to continue them. It’s the same as any other relationship: you can’t ignore your boyfriend for six months while you parade around Europe and expect him to meet you at Baggage Claim.

Where does Twitter fall for you on the social media spectrum? Are you a naysayer or a proud supporter and why?

30+ Facebook Content Ideas For Creative Fan Pages

Kaleigh — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:50 +0000

Sometimes, even us create folks like guidance.

Marketers often talk about the 70/20/10 rule when it comes to Facebook Page content. But what does that even mean?

70 percent of your posts should build your brand by educating, inspiring, informing and entertaining your fans.

20 percent of your posts should be shared content from other Facebook Pages.

10 percent of your posts should be promotional.

One of the biggest questions I’ve gotten from friends and co-workers is, “How do you figure out what to post? What types of content should I be sharing?”

Um, the content your audience eats up like free Costco samples?

In other words, it’s trial and error. As much as you may scowl at pages of numbers and charts and graphs, they mean something. Once you start using some of these tactics, or if you are already, dive in to your Facebook Insights report to see which posts had the most impressions, virality, shares, click-through rates and so forth.

From there, let your imagination + innovations take charge. Below, I’ve shared awesome examples for each of those three core content types.

The Main Squeeze (70%)

Quick Questions
An interior designer might ask for his/her fans’ go-to source(s) for inspiration.

Holiday / Seasonal Tie-ins
An illustrator might develop a free watercolor print as a spring-infused iPhone background.

Current Event Tie-ins
A graphic designer (especially a local one) might develop a fun graphic rooting for his/her favorite sports team in an upcoming tournament, like the Stanley Cup or the World Series.

SOS Calls
A newbie in the developer world might ask his or her programming friends for feedback on plug-ins to use or platforms to transfer to.

Just A Pinch (20%)

Q&A / Interviews
A photographer might share an article featuring a fellow creative in a niche publication.

Charities / Give Back Campaigns
A web designer might share a client’s recent press or fundraising efforts.

Welcome Mats
A writer might publicly cheer on another writer who’s recently been published or landed an agent.

Sponsor Stories
A fashion blogger might share an advertising sponsor’s giveaway or Twitter chat.

The Last Drop (10%)

Just Hit ‘Send’
A web developer might share his or her most recently completed project once the site goes live.

Educational Opportunities
A creative group with an upcoming webinar might announce the signup deadline and benefits.

The Seasonal Sale
A stationery/printing press might offer a discount on custom Mother’s Day cards during the month of April.

Spread The Love
A copywriter might highlight a client testimonial following a product release or public relations pitch.

Grab Bag Ideas

+ How-to Articles
+ Quick Tips (in visual form)
+ Product Features
+ Industry News
+ Friends’ Blog Posts
+ Friends’ Giveaways
+ Friends’ New Products / Services
+ Monthly Specials
+ Available Sponsor Spots
+ Monthly Roundups
+ Calls For Questions
+ New Blog Posts
+ New E-books / Products
+ Feature Articles
+ Work Samples

How To Make A Killer Facebook Page For Your Creative Business, Blog, Website, Store or Studio

Kaleigh — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:00:30 +0000

If you’re a creative professional, you don’t have to be on Facebook, but my guess is you’ve got a backpack full of visual content to share and promote. And if you’ve ever stumbled across a blog post about social media marketing, you know that Facebook is ubiquitous – it’s the most widely-used social network and brands are killing it on Facebook.

If you decide to ditch Facebook altogether or have a half-baked Page, that’s your deal.

But I can tell you this:

People. Adore. Facebook.

(For now, at least.)

So how do you rock it out?

Let’s get basic.

Facebook Page versus Facebook Profile

You + me? We’re friends. We added each other. Now, we can write on each others’ timelines and tag photos from our hiking trips and book club meetups and recipe swaps.

We each have own our personal profiles. We’re not brands, companies, websites or stores.

We’re human.

But your blog/Etsy store/LLC/freelance business needs a Facebook Page — not a profile.

Your Page is connected to your profile only in the sense that you log in to your profile to obtain access to your Page. Your fans can’t necessarily see your personal profile though.

This post gets into the nitty gritty on Pages versus profiles.

Categorize Your Page Appropriately

Before you can do anything, you’ve got to pick a category for your Page. The good news? You can change this once the Page is configured. The bad news? There’s no real stellar roadmap for picking the perfect category.

These are quick examples for each Page category:

Local Business or Place: Your mom’s Italian deli

Company, Organization or Institution: Nike

Brand or Product: Cheerios

Artist, Band or Public Figure: Justin Bieber and President Barack Obama

Entertainment: The New York Giants and Saturday Night Live

Cause or Community: Campaign for Cancer Prevention

Each of these categories comes with a laundry list of specialized options, so if you’re still stuck, click on one of the categories and scan the dropdown menu.

Show Us What You’ve Got

Just like your website, your cover photo and profile picture should heighten brand awareness. Use your visual real estate to convey what you do best.

Photographers might use a collage of portfolio shots for their cover photo with a text overlay identifying them and their core service or deal-of-the-month (e.g. 15% off Mother’s Day group portraits).

Graphic Designers and Illustrators might draw or design a cover photo to convey their attitude toward design for future clients.

Interior Designers and Architects might use blueprints or a photo of their favorite space to show off their personality and further their branding.

Fashion Designers might swap out photos of their sketches or dress forms based on the seasons and industry trends.

Application Developers might feature new app releases as they become available across carriers.

Tell Us Who You Are

Right below your Page’s profile picture, a tiny box sits pretty waiting for you. This is your one-liner, your elevator pitch, your 5-second chance to sell the eyes scanning your Page.

Make sure it conveys what you do and why you’re different.

“A new kind of marketplace for handcrafted, mousemade design content like icons, brushes, fonts & more.” – Creative Market

“Brightly-coloured designer nerd creating fun and colourful prints, cards and homewares.” – Sam Osborne Illustrations

“Codrops is dedicated to provide useful tutorials, insightful articles, creative inspiration and free resources for web designers and developers.” - Codrops

“Shine Christ. Soar above mediocrity. Live fully. Do entrepreneurship. // An online magazine for young Christian women entrepreneurs //.” – Shine & Soar Magazine

“Delivering a gorgeous + inspiring manifesto to you every day.” – Striking Truths

“The world is full of good people. We’re introducing you to them one interview at a time.” – Good People Of Earth

“where passionate crafters, designers, & artists connect, converse, and commune.” – Scoutie Girl

Get the idea? You know what your Page is about – but have you told anyone?

Get on it, girl.

BTW: Your Facebook Page should have a vanity URL (short, personalized and easy to remember). You’ll need at least 25 fans before you can create one, but once you hit that benchmark, I strongly suggest doing so. It’s super helpful for pointing people to your Facebook via print + digital materials (and they’re more likely to remember it).

Closing The Creative Gap + 16 Beautiful Examples Of Creative Websites / Portfolios

Kaleigh — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:53 +0000

Why are you chest deep in the business of creative work?

A few weeks back, I found this kinetic typography video to the audio of Ira Glass’s thoughts on creative beginners producing work and the gap between where we are and where we so desperately wish to be.

“Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me… is that all of us who do creative work, like y’know we get into it, and we get into it because we have good taste, but it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, y’know what I mean?”

Yes, Ira. I want to shake you by the shoulders and thank you.

I’m pushing myself to learn a whole host of disciplines right now and I look at what other people are doing and just think, “Man, to produce something that killer would rock.”

What he goes on to say is this: Don’t let the gap between where you are and where you want to be engulf you. Don’t quit. Bust your butt by giving yourself projects.

Today, I’d like to share a group of portfolios and websites by creative folks for which you can aspire to. For which I, myself, would wholeheartedly like to aspire to.

If you’re thinking of developing a website for yourself – and really, you should – then don’t fear studying beautiful examples. Dive into them; push yourself to swim to the other shoreline where your projects make you jump up and down and scream like a 16-year-old girl who just had her first kiss on her front porch on a hot night in the middle of July.

Your work deserves that love from you. You deserve that response to it. So let these fellow creative professionals inspire you. Let them motivate you.

1. Morgan Haines

2. Tara Whitney

3. Sarah Barlow

4. Casey Templeton

5. Jeremy Cowart

6. Rashi Birla

7. Breanna Rose

8. Luke Larsen

9. Jamie Delaine

10. Jennifer Pace

11. Hannah Nicole Martin

12. Joa Jean

13. Jessica Jones

14. Adham Dannaway

15. Jen Serafini

16. Sneh Roy

17. Jon Combs

The Creative Professional’s Website: 5 Core Components

Kaleigh — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:00:19 +0000

[photo credit: 1 2 3 4 5]

If Google isn’t showing you the SEO love, no amount of freshly baked gluten-free chocolate chip cookies delivered straight to its headquarters will change that.

Being found online requires significant effort; a huge chunk of which is your website.

Think of your website as your digital house. Even your favorite aunt, persistent though she may be, won’t scoot her butt up your driveway if she can’t find your house hidden behind ivy walls an unmarked mailbox; she’ll likely whip out her flip phone (I said she was your favorite – not forward-thinking) and call to say she’s been circling the same street for an hour now.

The difference between having a poorly identified house and a scatterbrained website is that your aunt will call; the one-woman flower shop looking for a new logo design won’t. If she can’t find you, or worse, leaves your digital doorstep more confused than when she first arrived, you’ve lost her.

And not just her, but employers + clients + networking opportunities + guest post offers + advertising sponsors + affiliate sales.

You won’t capture everyone who wanders around your site but gosh, girl; you’ve sure as heck got to make it easy for them to know who you are, what you do, and how to contact you.

Let’s look at the five core components of a creative’s website. This list is highly distilled and doesn’t cover SEO, social integration, contact forms, etc.

Numero Uno: Content Management System (CMS)

A CMS makes your job as a creative so much easier. It means your website is templated, so when you make changes, you won’t have to modify things like header images, sidebar widgets or site navigation on every single page.

You’ve got three main options here: WordPress, Joomla + Drupal.

The good news is that they’re all open source, which means they’re free as birds. The bad news is they’re not all created equal; some are more difficult to operate than others.

From easiest-to-learn to most sophisticated: WordPress > Joomla > Drupal.

The White House website operates on Drupal. For RWL, I use WordPress (self-hosted – not the dot com version for bloggers). I’ve been told Joomla is a great alternative to WordPress.

One the CMS is installed on your website’s FTP account (see WordPress’ Famous 5-minute installation), you can say “Hasta la vista” to managing the site page-by-tedious-page.

Step two is to download, and install, a theme (either to customize that baby like your very own Christmas morning wrapping paper or to stick with the standard color scheme, layout, etc.). I’ll dive into look + feel later on.

Numero Dos: Cornerstone Content

In a nutshell, this is your blog. If you’re a photographer specializing in captivating landscapes, you best be writing about f-stops and neutral density filters.

Blogging should complement your business. Cornerstone content covers the basics of your industry in a way that positions you at the forefront.

Let’s go back to the photographer example. Miss DSLR might make a how-to video on how to create Photoshop actions. Or write posts on the process of setting up a shot or interfacing with clients (if she does portraits). She might answer FAQs sent via her contact form.

The content centers on educating other photographers and giving Google a thick trail of breadcrumbs when searching for those same terms so that future clients find her, too.

Numero Tres: Email Newsletter

There are two schools of thought on email marketing. The first is that you are crazy to think anybody will read YOUR message in a pile of unread inbox notes a mile high. The second is that if you produce content that people willingly subscribe to, they will fawn over your words each time you hit the send button.

I’m a fan of Option #2. When done right, email marketing is permission marketing. In short, it means somebody asked you to sit in their inbox. They opted in via a form on your website.

Because of that, it’s crucial your email signup form be visible and captivating. That list is your golden ticket to new clients, new projects, new horizons, really.

(This is a quick intro, and likely I’ll circle back to elaborate on how email marketing works for creative professionals, but suffice to say it’s similar to cornerstone content.)

My go-to email marketing tool: MailChimp

(I’ve played with Aweber and Constant Contact, but in terms of look + feel, I always come back to MailChimp’s template options. Plus, the first 2,000 subscribers are free.)

Numero Quatro: Portfolio

Newly-minted creatives tend to fall into two categories: they either complain they don’t have any work to show or say they have some, but certainly not a volume of work.

Let me tell you something: a few great, swoon-worthy projects trump a volume of mediocre-at-best projects any day. And if you’re not proud of what you’ve got, you better hike up your belt loops and step into the sunshine and snap something awe-inspiring or load InDesign and go to work on a magazine layout rebrand.

Give. Yourself. Projects.

Your clients want to know what you’ve done.

So, with that in mind, your portfolio section should include only the projects you feel excellent about. If you don’t like it, don’t show it.

Numero Cinco: Branded Look + Feel

You are a creative. Your cells are buzzing with aesthetic understanding. You are critical. You are hardworking. You want to present yourself well, right?

The average website visitor spends only 8 seconds on a page before deciding whether to leave. Part of that decision is a clear understanding of the page and its purpose. Another part, especially for people in the business of making things, is the consistency in the way the site looks and the emotional appeal it evokes.

If a visitor arrives at your site and it’s a hot mess – hard to navigate, a myriad of eye-throbbing choices, none of which seem to mesh together – they’re out in 3-4 seconds tops.

It’s not so much that your site has to be stellar, or that you have to invest in a 10k design project, but color choice, font selection, etc. should match the logo, header images, social media icons, email signup forms, link colors, etc.

Creating a site like that will make your potential colleagues and clients sigh with relief because they can entrust you to create something for them that’s equally cohesive, fully developed and in tune with their own mission.

Bonus: Freelance Information

This is for the people who are ready to hire you. They’ve sifted through your site, subscribed to your newsletter, read your latest blog posts and decided you are their cup of tea when it comes to their wedding photography.

But they don’t know how much you charge or whether you just take the photos or edit them, too. And is that included or separate? Do you offer packages?

Is your head spinning? Yep. If you don’t want all of this front and center on your freelance page, at least consider providing a form for them to submit the scope of work or contact you for pricing and package options.

Questions? Email me at kay@kaleighsomers.com or leave ‘em in the comments section below.

Google Doesn’t Want You To Be Prom Queen

Kaleigh — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:00:45 +0000

Google doesn’t want you to own your title. But I do.

Please hold.

I need you to do something weird, something you probably won’t share with your dinner date between the coat closet and the wine selection. Something you really want to, maybe already do, like, every other week, but would never admit out loud.

Google yourself.

Trust me when I say it’s good for you; trust me when I say you need to know what the itsy bitsy Google spiders are digging up and spinning into a web of results. Trust, for the fifteen millionth time, that knowledge is power.

Because it SO is.

You’re hitting the ground running with your big bad blogging self or your Etsy shop skills and you think, “Well I’m snapshot savvy. I can create designs that build brands and tell stories and convey emotion so deep it cuts through your small intestines like acid. Who cares if Google knows about me? This isn’t high school. I’m not the prom queen. It doesn’t matter.”

C’mere for a second. Just a little closer. Lean in.

Google doesn’t want you to be everyone’s prom queen. Google doesn’t even want you to be your OWN social circle’s prom queen. But you’ve got to want your little design-loving, DSLR-wearing, typewriter-tapping self to wear that tiara when it comes to what you know.

The best way to do that is to know what Google thinks of you – it’s the one and only time anyone should tell you to dwell, for a itty bitty minute, on someone else’s opinion of you.

Google’s a shallow kind of guy. He teaches us to look at the first page, the first impression, and never dive deeper.

For strangers, you are your SERPs (search engine results pages). You are distilled to what Google weights as most relevant.

Let me tell you a tale:

I used to Google myself and find altar server schedules and gymnastics results and cross country race times and random guest posts on 20-something blogs, all mixed in with a ton of my own blog posts.

There weren’t any other Kaleigh Somers vying for my place on Google, but did my readers care that I was a tough cookie when it came to ripped palms and twisted ankles and hills so staggering they had their own bone-shaking names like Death Mountain?

Heck no.

May is about making you matter to your potential employers and clients and competitors by punching Google with a consistent online presence that threads itself neatly together to make finding you, the one-and-only YOU, easy.

So that when you take a second to search yourself, the little sidebar factoid box pops up that says, “Hey, this girl owns it. Look at her.”

Do yourself one more favor. Go to Google.com/alerts and add your name. Choose how own you want to receive your alerts and how filtered they should be (depends on how many others you might have floating out there vying for the top seat on the search results). Sit back and let your inbox take to telling you when your name appears in a newly crawled page. Magic, isn’t it?

It’ll make knowing your results easier and it feels good when you see the daily or weekly digest come through in the middle of a crazy day when you’re feeling like nobody in the world ever knew you tried to create something totally awesome.

Here’s a little sneak peak at what’s ahead:

+ core components of a creative’s website
+ social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn)
+ email newsletters
+ digital portfolios

The Cereal Aisle Is Full Of Blueberry Vanilla Almond Granola + The Internet Is Full Of Discordant Blogs

Kaleigh — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:00:01 +0000

Writers, right now, are vying for spots on cereal aisle shelves.

Last month, Jane Friedman, a woman I’ve regarded as the editor for Writers Digest (though she’s since moved on to the Virginia Quarterly Review), shared this post by L.L. Barkat on her blog.

In it, Barkat told writers to stop blogging.

The title cycled like a nasty Google Display Ad traveling from one webpage to another as I browsed my Twitter feed.

Of course I disagreed. Of course I believed in blogging the way engineers believe in calculus or truck drivers believe in the speed limit (emphatically, that is to say, even when the rest of us groan trapped behind the mammoth beasts crawling our fast-lane interstates).

What he was saying was maybe, probably, OK definitely true for experienced writers. They’d done the dance and shimmied and shook for the whole literary world and we just craved more from them.

But for those of us who cannot make a small booster seat out of our published works, blogging is still a core component of writing growth.

We Blog For Ourselves

Writing is a personal act of creative expression. If that definition hasn’t hit you over the head yet, let this be a reminder.

You write because you need to say something and it’s bottled inside you like a message bobbing through the ocean of your heart for a hundred years before making landfall.

But your publishing content online should never ever smack-me-over-the-head-if-it-does alter that fact.

Blog for you and watch yourself grow. Watch your ideas converge. Watch your self-expression refine.

You don’t have to blog to do that, and sometimes the criticism of a few measly pageviews at the start will be enough to make you click the red circled (or blue squared for my PC lovers) X at the top of your web browser.

(That’s a shame, kids. That’s a real big shame.)

But if you stick around because it’s for you — or at least the people you care about — and you’ve got direction and drive, you’ll grow emotionally and intellectually from the experience.

We Find Our Voice In The Abyss

There will always be a difference between those who start blogs and bloggers. It begins with dedication and follows through with a mission.

Imagine starting a new cereal brand. You’ve got a wacky name in a stiff all-caps serif typeface printed across the top of each box (all different sizes, too) and you’re wondering why Wegmans and Shop Rite and Giant and Piggly Wiggly and Krogers refuse to put that future household name on the shelf.

Because. It’s Not. Going Somewhere.

You could have the tastiest blueberry vanilla almond granola sitting fresh and crunchy in a tight sealed eco-friendly recycled plastic pouch but ain’t nobody got time for your discordant cereal dreams.

There are too many other product lines featuring blueberry vanilla almond granola for anyone to even dream of picking your hott mess off the shelf, even if you didn’t get shut down by the big guys.

The same thing happens when you load yourself up with blogging ideas that don’t meet in the middle with some larger goal.

You write about the final exam you failed and then about the time your grandmother walked in on you toweling off from a hot shower.

You write about the reason you love one-for-one campaigns and the art of mastering the Facebook page as an Etsy storeowner.

And ya wonder why nobody put you in their Google Reader (oh, sorry, forgot that that ship has sailed out to the Bermuda Triangle)?

The abyss of blogs is too great for you not to write with a common thread, a dedicated mission of sorts, and expect somebody to stick around.

When you get serious about blogging, you find two things: your voice (because err’body decided writing didn’t have to be boring but nobody wanted to write with a little fear in their bones) and your purpose (for blogging).

It’s a little bit magical when you don’t think too hard on it. When you do, though, you realize that all those shenanigans you’ve been pulling by messing around, treating your blog like a diary that the whole world is privy to, only prevented you from practicing writing as a thing you, like, get paid for?

Yeah.

Let Us Taste The Ice Cream

Kaleigh — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:00:35 +0000

I didn’t often listen to my mother’s writing advice growing up. She was full of it, too. Jamming my eardrums with steps for five-paragraph essays (which I still loathe) and red-penning the crap out of my school papers.

She made time, almost every year, for a visit to my English class where she would, inevitably, tell me later that night over dinner that that boy over in the back corner? He seemed nice.

So I tuned most of her lessons out.

Except, it turns out, one of the most important ones: to write like I spoke.

Doesn’t it suck when Mom knows best?

Maybe, but it’s the reason I’ve been able to craft a place for myself in the blogging world. And the reason I latch onto other bloggers whose hearts beat faster when they hit publish on a new post.

We were not born to write so that our words could fill trashcans. We were not born to kill trees or waste ink or stuff envelopes with empty thoughts.

We write because we are human beings with voices and those voices sit inside us like dormant volcanoes ready to erupt when something strikes us passionately or fervently.

It’s that lack of selfness, that manufactured voice, that pains me when I read a blog post or a magazine article written with so little personality it nearly fades into the background.

You’re a blogger; you understand.

We fear voice because it is vulnerability in the biggest way. We fear having our fingers on the pulse of our wrists because the minute we know what we want to say and how we want to say it? We have to.

To write well, you’ve got to have at least an ounce of reckless abandon in you. You’ve got to let go of the constraints a bit. You’ve got to stop forcing square phrases and overused idioms into your paragraphs and start feeling exactly what you want your reader to feel.

You’ve got to leave a chunk of your heart on the page.

It’s a massive risk; I get that.

It’s like calling your best friend to tell her your boyfriend didn’t get into the same college as you and she’s like, “Suck it up, man. Life’s tough.”

(She’s allowed to say that eventually, but not in between your heaving sobs.)

Or she said, “Cool, so what do you think of this dress? Should I buy it?”

You don’t know how your readers will react — or if they’ll react at all.

So you totter along writing “dear diary” entries about the ice cream shop you discovered last Friday night and the boy in anatomy class you’d like to offer your body to demonstrate.

But you don’t let us taste the ice cream on our lips. We don’t get a brain freeze. Our fingers don’t go numb. Our heart rate doesn’t increase.

That’s all we want from you — to feel your humanness so deeply it yanks us into a time where sitting in front of a computer is akin to opening an encapsulating novel.

Gosh, we want to dream with you.

Let us? Please, please let us. We will become insomniacs for you.

Writing Stellar Cover Letters: 5 Small + Mighty Parts

Kaleigh — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:00:05 +0000

You are not your resume. You are so much more than that, lady.

You might be your cover letter, though. (Sorry!)

It’s the only handshake you’ve got before somebody sweeps in and offers a face-to-face or voice-to-voice conversation about a job or an internship.

I know you’re a hardworking, passionate, busy-till-the-sun-comes-up-tomorrow kind of gal, but the world doesn’t yet.

Your cover letter is the window to your future job, so if you love what you do as much as you act like it, the best thing you can do is create something that showcases all you have to offer in a one-page letter.

A few years ago, I thought of these suckers as arbitrary top pages for short story submissions. I was a small fish in a big, loud, rambunctious crowd. My confidence in the publishing industry was miniscule.

In the wake of looking for an internship, an honest-to-God, get-my-hands-dirty internship, I hit the backspace button on that theory. That spring, I wrote nearly 90 cover letters.

Why Now?

A few weeks ago, I received a message from an old high school acquaintance who wanted some hands-on advice for her fellow college grads and undergrads. They were wading into the water, hesitant to jump into a career path, but even more so to begin putting themselves down on paper.

I could understand that. I could totally, gut-stirringly understand that.

That’s why I began writing passionate, but economic cover letters. Nobody wanted me to tell them in a 1,000-word essay why I had always dreamed of working for them (thank God I only said that, with total honesty, a handful of times – there are only so many ‘dream jobs’ we can envision at the ripe age of 21).

It boils down to one question: why should they spend more than five minutes reviewing my file before tossing it out – what can I do for them? Why does my experience matter?

Three words for you. Connect. Those. Dots.

Writing those letters becomes the art of dissecting apart our past to barter towards an ever-changing future. The best we can do is work hard, put our time where it best suits, and learn all we can to leverage it weeks or months or years down the road.

Let me propose a few alterations to the throwaway self-introduction.

Part One: You Love Them + They Should Love You Because ______.

You’re writing to inform them that you (really want this job, basically) because you have experience (in the same industry, in a similar industry, in a similar position, doing similar things) and, because of that (really think they ought to consider you).*

*Everything in parentheses is broad and/or slang for something professional and specific.

Part Two: You Told Me What You Need, So Here’s How I Own That

You’ve got the job description in front of you — use + abuse it for two things:

1) You’re sure this is the right fit for you? Sure you’d like to spend some time trying to win over a gaming company hiring a programmer when you have never so much as picked up a controller but always did know your way around HTML – close enough, right?

2) You’re writing this section with an armful of actionable “I can do this and this and this” phrases in your back pocket. Please hold—you already do 95 percent of what’s in the job description? Did you mention that or hope they would infer from the job titles?

Part Three: So Those Programs? I Am Like A Jedi With Those Babies

Creative job descriptions are unique in that they tend to list every program your eyes ever scanned as a requirement or preferred qualification. Depending on what you’re applying for, you’ll be waist deep in a bulleted list of coding languages or design software or customer databases or social networks.

(A great reason to start loving your MacBook Pro until it spits out a beautiful new graphic/website/story/advertisement/business card/logo design/email campaign every single week. People love samples. They also love honesty. So if you can honestly own the whole Adobe Creative Suite, that’s something to write about – in half a sentence, of course.)

Part Four: Here’s Why My Work Meshes With You, Part II

One last call for winning them over. Better tell ‘em who they’re dealing with. I tend to write that I work well in fast-paced, detail-oriented environments. And yeah, it’s like, “Suuuuuuure you do.” But then, if you look at the jobs I’ve had, you start thinking that’s exactly what was required of me in all of them. So it’s legit.

What can you say about how you work? Why do you really love them and this opportunity they’ve got waiting to be filled? What two sentences can pack a punch before you thank them and sign off?

Part Five: Thanks For Not Using This As A Trash Can-Bound Basketball (Yet)

Sincerity + gratitude go a long way. Finding a perfect candidate in a mound of 200+ resumes has got to be tough. So when someone does get your cover letter + resume and makes it to the final paragraph, please oh please thank them for doing so. Just make sure it’s with a little more confidence than that section header above.

I’ve learned that practice goes a long way – not just with writing cover letters, but with work samples too. Also: please, oh, please, tailor them to the individual (person, if possible; company and position, if nothing else).