Writing posts for a blog can be daunting. Anyone that’s tried has been there, staring at a white page with your cursor rhythmically reminding you of your failure to produce any content.
You may very well be a strong writer. You likely had numerous ideas yesterday as you walked your dog or cooked dinner. But as often happens, when it comes time to actually write, you’ve got nothing.
Hopefully this post will help. Here’s a bunch of potential topics to spur your own creative process. READ MORE >>
You’ve likely heard plenty of times how beneficial a blog can be. But you’ve also probably experienced, or at least caught wind of how significant an undertaking starting a blog can be.
It’s no lie that launching and maintaining a blog can take a lot of time and energy. But it can also boost the effectiveness of your website in a wide variety of ways. READ MORE >>
You’ve probably heard a thousand times that you need to include photos on your blog posts or in your email newsletters. Maybe you’ve made some simple Google searches and didn’t like what you found, maybe you’re worried about the legality of borrowing someone else’s image, or maybe all the searching just took too much time. So where can you get all of these free beautiful images in one place? I’ve got you covered. READ MORE >>
Deciding to start a blog is no minor feat. In fact, if you’re ready to set one up, I’m sure you’ve debated whether or not your nonprofit should have a blog in the first place.
If you’re reading this post, I’ll assume you decided to take a shot at a blog. Well congrats! Blogging can be a lot of fun. But it’s also a lot of work. It’s my hope this post will help lay the foundation for your nonprofit to have a successful blog. READ MORE >>
I used to teach kindergarten. This is relevant, I promise. One of the highlights for me was getting to read the writing of 29 creative little minds, uninhibited by conventions or, at times, reality. It always amazed me that shortly after we moved past the basics of putting pencil to paper, genuine stories started to show up. These early stories were often linear, progressing from one major event to the next.
But after a few months working with various genres, we arrived at small moment stories; that is, taking a specific moment in time and “zooming in,” highlighting the details for your reader.
And something remarkable happened. READ MORE >>
Most of the organizations we talk to believe in the benefits of having a blog. The issue is rarely why they should have a blog. It’s more often a matter of how they can find time to maintain it.
Like many organizations, nonprofits are often strapped for spare time. And while a blog can seem like a great idea, we often see it fall into that “nice to have” category instead of something that’s deemed vital.
But maintaining a blog can be a significant boost to the success of your nonprofit’s website. By tapping into the support network you’ve developed, you can ask longtime supporters to write content that is not only valuable to your website visitors, but also takes the burden of content creation off of you and your staff. READ MORE >>
It’s remarkable how one simple question can have a profound impact on the effectiveness of your communication. Next time you sit down to write, regardless of whether it’s an individual blog post or your overall website content, ask yourself:
Who’s this for?
Establishing clarity as to who your audience is prior to writing can help you write the kind of content your readers are actually looking to find. READ MORE >>
Imagine this:
You walk into a library (farfetched to some nowadays but stay with me) in search of a book on dogs. As you walk through the stacks of the nonfiction section, you see Computer Science, Religion, Language, History. No dogs. You venture over to a nearby librarian busy with reshelving and ask where to find that dog book you’re after. Glancing up from the world of the Dewey Decimal System, she points you in the direction of a lesser-known section of the stacks. When you arrive, you see a simple sign – “Uncategorized.” READ MORE >>
If you’ve ever written for a blog, there’s a good chance you’ve felt the fear of the negative comment. Whether or not you’ve actually had to face a strong dissenter on a post you’ve written, I’ll bet you’ve at least thought about the possibility that someone could vehemently disagree with whatever it is you’ve written.
Truth be told, if you write enough, chances are you’ll come across someone that’s totally opposed to your ideas. But if you handle the situation with a bit of care, it’s not such a bad thing. Here are a few tips on how to react when someone writes something negative on your blog. READ MORE >>
I’m going to start this post with a confession. Until a few months ago we had some questionable categories on our blog. We had a category called “File Sharing” that I think had three posts. We had “Internet Browsing” which I can’t really define or justify. We had the inexplicable “Online Music” category that I remember creating. Our categories were numerous and not very useful.
But we decided it was time to clean up our act over here. We wanted our blog categories to actually serve their purpose:
to provide visitors with a way of easily navigating our content to find posts to match their interests.
Below are some tips to keep in mind as you develop (or revisit) your blog categories. READ MORE >>