LAVISH: Our blogging tricks and tips!

Recap/Cheat sheet for our Lavish session:

Erica of Design Blahg and I sat through 2 days of sessions on building a brand, creating trust with your readers, developing a voice and the importance of creating “original content” … So we decided to take the literal approach to our “Best Tips and Blogging Tricks” (This was all Erica’s idea and it’s brilliant!). The other stuff has been said ad nauseum by bloggers who are way better at that stuff than we are, so we thought we would give you tangible tools to take away from our session.

Welcome to:

Let me just say that Erica is the techie of the two of us… And I learned A LOT by even doing this presentation with her.

More efficient blogging skills will help you a. Post more often, b. Source your resources c. Create “Original Content” more easily. So here they are :

The tools you need to make blogging easier, more efficient and BETTER!

1. Pinterest – Lets you pin your favorite photos to one place and create little sets of them. Also a great tool for searching photos- plus you dont lose your sources.

2. Olio board- Lets you make really hot mood boards, its like polyvore for design. Everyone and their mother loves a good mood board, might as well make a pretty one… and FYI, creating a great shopping list or design scheme for a room is “Original Content”. Plus everyone wants to buy something and click somewhere… So lists of products you love will do well. People follow your blog cause they like your style… and they may buy what you tell them to buy. I also use Pages from Apple’s iWork to create moodboards and roundups.

3. Skitch- lets you take screen shots, write on pictures and do a whole lot of cool stuff… I always wondered how Erica was drawing that funny stuff on the Design Star photos… this is how!

4. Feedly- best blog reader ever … I looked at it with Erica and I NEED to get on that, thanks for the tip Erica!

5. Evernote – An organizing tool that lets you organize your life, your desktop, your stuff. (Another thing I need to get on top of.)

6. Linky Tools – Having a linky blog party is a great way to involve other bloggers in your blog… Lets your readers post an image with a link to their site. Great for contests or other cross/blog promos. Erica and I did the Blogger Tag Sale a while ago using Linky Tools. It gave me a lot of traffic and introduced me to a ton of new blogs that I now read, and bloggers who now read my blog.

7. Etsy- You may not believe this, but people may want to buy something your selling! Even if you tell someone how to make something, SOME people would STILL rather buy it than make it. I reccommend setting up regional shipping prices, because I have actually lost money shipping things to Australia.

8. Canon G11 +  Eye Fi- I have an awesome point and shoot camera called a Canon G11, I carry it with me EVERYWHERE. I used to have an SLR, but it was so big and clunky – and took really crappy pictures sitting in my closet:)  Always having a camera that can take a great picture  combined with my EYE FI card, a memory chip that sends the pictures automatically to my computer, makes taking great pictures easy and awesome. You never know where you are going to see something you need to take a picture of for your blog.

9. Flavors.me – Most bloggers do a lot of other stuff too. This is like an online business card that lets you post all your stuff in one place. People can read your blog, twitter feed  on it, see your etsy shop… its great.

10. Moo cards –  A great resource for making cute little business cards quickly and cheaply. And they look awesome. The second you start taking your self seriously as a blog, you should make some of these. It’ll be much easier to convince a shop owner to let you take pictures if you have a business card…

11. Camera bag + Instagram – two iphone apps that will make your iphone pics SOOOOO much better!

We hope you got at least one little tip that we had to learn about the hard way – by doing it wrong for so long!

Thanks for coming, joining, reading and thanks to LAVISH for having us! What an awesome weekend!