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12 Ideas for More Productive Blogging

Blogging can take a lot of time. Time that’s hard to carve out of from all your responsibilities. Day job, family, writing–well, life. Here I’ll give you some tips on how to be a more productive blogger. More blog posts in less time.

Idea file and folder on computer

  1. Keep an idea file on your desktop so it’s one click away from adding an idea. Jot down ideas and titles for blog posts.
  2. When you’re reading other blog posts, or your RSS feed reader, skim the posts for ideas for your blog. Use the above mentioned file to quickly jot down an idea.
  3. Disconnect. Turn off the phone, email, twitter, IM. Sit down and write.
  4. This goes against our writer personality, but don’t obsess over every comma, typo and word choice in your posts. If you are spending tons of time polishing up every word, you’re spending too much time on your blog posts, and not enough on your life.
  5. Write extra posts when you’re feeling creative, these will come in handy when you’re too busy to blog, go out of town, or just need a bit of time off to refill the well. Store them up in your drafts in Wordpress or a folder on your computer.
  6. [Read more →]

Blogging Outside the Box

Who are you blogging to?

If you’re a writer and you’re blogging about writing and/or your books, who is your audience? Other writers and readers. And probably, they already knew who you were. That’s how they found your blog. You may influence some of them to buy your books more often, but they were likely to buy your books anyway. You’re preaching to the choir. Blogging inside the box.

How do you expand your audience and increase your traffic outside the box? Here’s how: [Read more →]

My Secret to Increased Creativity

Are you looking for a way to be more creative? Feel less stressed? Be more successful? I have two words for you. Brain Sync. Brain Sync is brain wave therapy. Have you heard of this? I’ve been using Brain Sync tapes for over ten years. (though now I have CD’s and MP3 downloads of them). What is Brain Sync? Brain Sync programs are brain wave therapy programs. They are based on biofeedback research. You listen to a CD or MP3 with stereo headphones to get your brain waves into certain defined states.

From the Brain Sync Website:

“With our technology you can reliably and consistently enter profound states of consciousness that unleash your power to learn, create, heal and change.”

Defining Different Brainwaves:

  • Gamma and Beta brainwaves are associated with cognition and concentration.
  • Alpha brainwaves are associated with relaxation, visualization and creativity.
  • Theta brainwaves are associated with, hypnotic trance states, heightened receptivity, increased memory, and advanced meditation.
  • Delta brainwaves are associated with healing, detached awareness, and sleep. They affect you at a very deep subconscious level.

“The only way to experience the brain optimizing effects of the frequencies is when they are delivered through headphones.”

For example, I have the Increase Creativity CD. This CD puts your brain waves in theta stage. I love to listen to this while I’m out on a walk. Thinking over some stumbling block on my book. Or when I’m trying to come up some new plot twist.

I’ve had the 3 following tapes for 10 years. Still great.

Total Relaxation–targets Alpha frequencies in your brain. So nice. Really works for me. If I’m totally stressed out, this one goes on my walk with me. Or I sit in my rocking chair and list to it for awhile with my eyes closed.

High Focus–focuses on beta and gamma waves for alertness, concentration, clarity, and perception. Great for those times you just really need to focus.

Brain Power–harmonically layers the alpha, beta, delta, gamma, and theta frequencies. Their blurb on this one says it allows you to access more of your untapped ability to learn, recall and create new ideas.

Brain Sync also offers CDs or downloads that have guided meditations with them such as:

  • Guided Relaxation
  • The Secret to Attracting Love
  • Healing Mediation

Brain Sync also offers Brain Wave Subliminals. A way to re-pattern thoughts. They offer such titles as:

  • Stop Smoking
  • Release Guilt
  • Positive Thinking
  • Weight Loss

Brain Sync also has some new ones that I’m looking at trying, such as The Secret Universal Mind Meditation, The Secret to Attracting Wealth, and Create Success.

When you find one you like (or if you’re like me, several you like) you can click on a sample that will download to your computer so you can listen to it.

Most of their CDs are $14.95, the tapes $11.95, and instant downloads are $9.95. (my favorite is instant downloads. I’m a instant gratification type gal with things like this). Their MP3s can be played on any computer or MP3 player such as the iPod. Remember you’ll need stereo headphones with your Brain Snyc CDs or MP3s. Have you tried these? If you do try these, come back and leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Romance Writers Blog Carnival, First Edition!

Welcome to Dandelion’s first Romance Writers Blog Carnival! Wish you were here? Submit your blog to the next Romance Writers Blog Carnival here. Deadline is February 15th and the carnival will be posted February 18th. Don’t know what we’re talking about? Read our What is a Blog Carnival article so we can help you boost traffic to your blog, too!

Check out our first edition’s fabulous submissions: [Read more →]

Optimize Your Site For Google Image Traffic

Google Image Search
Looking for another way to get more traffic to your website? Optimize your blog for GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH. Many people use Google Image search to locate pictures and images for a wide range of topics. From what’s in the news, to cat pictures, to how to knit a purl stitch. Here are some tips to help optimize your site and your images to tap into this traffic.

My personal website, a Baby Boomer Blog, Wine on the Keyboard, gets quite a bit of traffic to my images that are listed on Google Images. I get traffic to posts that are years old from Google Image Search. A post about my old couch. A post about the last flower of fall. You never know what pictures, if done correctly, might bring in traffic–traffic that wouldn’t have come to your site otherwise. How can you set your blog up to attract this kind of traffic?

Google Image Search Optimization:


1) First off, use a descriptive name for the picture. HerMantoRemember.jpg is better than img000-0776.jpg or whatever your camera generates. Cover.jpg isn’t going to bring in anyone looking for your book by title.

2) Make sure you are using the Alt text with your images. For instance your image code would look something like this:
<img scr=”http://yoursite.com/NameofYourFile.jpg” alt=”good description of picture”/>

3) The text surrounding the picture should give clues as to what the picture is about. Make sure to include the keyword that you think people will search on directly before or after the image. If you do a search on Google Images for a term, you’ll see the term you searched for highlighted in bold beneath the images listed.

4) Make sure your images folder on your website is accessible to search engines. If you’ve limited access to some files with your robots.txt file, make sure you allow Google Image Search. Google suggests adding the following to you robots.txt file to allow the Google-Image bot permission to find your images.

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:

5) Make your images standards compliant. Images need:

    title
    width
    height
    alt text

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/folderwithimages/reallygreatimage.jpg” width=”400″ height=”200″ alt=”Image to attract Google Image bot” title=”Really Great Image” />

6) To see if your images are being listed in Google Images go to Google Images. Enter this in the search bar:

site:www.yoursite.com
(or site:www.yoursite.com/blog if your blog is in a separate folder on your website)

See what images come up. If your site is fairly new, it may take awhile for your images to show up in Google Images. You can go back to older images on your site and edit the posts and add the alt text, width, and height, for your images. At the very least, add the alt text.

It takes a bit more time to make sure you add all these things when you add images to your posts, but the benefit is increased blog traffic by way of Google Image Search.