Good reminders for those of us who work from home!
Get Out of Your House. The hardest part about working from home can be feeling a bit isolated from your community. So make it a point to get out a few times a week. I like meeting local clients and creative peers at my favorite coffee shop. I also like to get some fresh air with a morning walk before I begin my day. 

Hooooly useful. 50+ places to repurpose your content!

I’ve been busy circle-ifying headshots. Here’s how you can do it with Picmonkey - for free!

An insanely useful post from Paul Jarvis about how to grow your freelancing business. So much good stuff in there!
Start by getting into the head of the people you want to get hired by
Make a list of people that have hired freelancers that use the same skills as you have and have recently hired for it. Send them a quick email to see if you can ask them for their advice.

Would your blog posts be more engaging if you were using gifs? It’s easy to make your own with Giffysnap!

Have you ever failed at something? (Um, are you a human?) If you have, here’s how to get over it.

Before you contact a professional peer you haven’t talked to in ages and ask them to promote your stuff, read this.

I loved Jill’s post about how to get rich as a blogger.

A sneaky way to get more people to read what you write.

And some posts you might have missed: Collaborating your way to more traffic + clients and How to toot your own horn without being totally annoying.

Have you read or encountered anything super helpful lately? Leave links in the comments!

 photo by Martin Krolikowski //cc

If you’re just tuning in, dear reader, this is the last in a three-part series about hosting and coordinating your very own blog crawl. We’ve already covered why you’d want to do such a thing and how to find + woo people to take part in your adventures.

Today? Today, we discussing how one coordinates a jillion contributors, tweets, and guest posts without losing one’s mind. Here are five logistical things to consider while you’re making magic.

1. If your blog crawl is supporting a product launch, make sure your product sales page is live before the blog crawl starts
My blog crawl supported the launch of my Post College Survival Kit ecourse, so my sales page obviously needed to be up and ready when my contributors were posting and linking to me. This also means that I needed a permalink to that page waaaay before things went live. You’ll need to send your contributors a pre-written intro with links (that they can edit) well before the actual blog crawl starts.

Here’s what I sent my contributors:

Here’s an intro for the top of the post:
Notes To My Younger Self is helping spread the word about The Post College Survival Kit. We learned the hard way so you don’t have to! You don’t have to wait till your thirties for a better job, a cuter apartment, financial stability, better relationships + friendships. 

Of course, feel free to edit so it’s in your voice - all that’s really important is that it includes the link 😉

2. Create a big ol’ dorky spreadsheet for yourself
There’s a lot to remember and manage when you’re coordinating a blog crawl with 20+ contributors. I made myself a giant spreadsheet with columns devoted to who I approached, if they responded and how, which week they were scheduled to post, their email/url/twitter handle, and links to their post once it had gone live.

3. Make it easy for your contributors to promote each other’s work
At the end of each week, I’d send my contributors pre-written tweets linking to and promoting each other’s posts. I always made sure to point out that none of this was ‘required’ and they should feel free to write their own tweets and promote each other in a way that felt right. But most of us are busy and if I like you + trust you? I’ll probably be happy to tweet links to the smart, interesting people who are also involved in this project.

4. Ask your contributors to @mention you on social media when their post goes up so you can promote it
It’s hard to get 20 people to email you their blog posts ahead of time. It’s a lot easier to convince them to @mention you when a post goes up.

5. Make an ebook out of the blog crawl posts
Once your blog crawl has wound down, assemble all those amazing posts into a nicely designed ebook and give it to your contributors as a thank you. They can share it with their readers, use it to boost their own newsletter signups (like I did here and here) or just print it out and read it in bed with a glass of wine.

Of course (of course) I made just such a book out of all my contributors’ posts. You can get it (plus three of my most popular little ebooks) when you sign up for the Yes and Yes newsletter. (See what I did there?)

Whew! Are you completely overwhelmed with information? Convinced that your next launch needs a blog crawl? If you have any blog-crawl related questions burning a hole in your pocket, leave ’em in the comments!

photo by death to stock photo // cc

Last week, we solved the mystery of what a blog crawl actually is and why you might want to host one. Today, we’re talking about finding + wooing the right contributors.

So I’ve sold you on the idea of hosting a blog crawl.
Yes, it’s a bit of an undertaking.
Yes, it’ll increase your readership and traffic by leaps and bounds. And I can tell from all the way over here that you’re not someone who shies away from a little hard work.

The most important ingredient in your blog crawl pizza? All the outrageously awesome contributors, obviously. If no one’s partaking in your blog crawl, it becomes less ‘blog crawl’ more ‘me hopping in one place while my quads start to cramp.’  So let’s talk about how to find the right people for your blog crawl and  keeping them (and your readers) happy.

1. Approach people with whom you already have a relationship
This isn’t the time to email a huge blogger you’ve never talked to before. This is when you email that internet friend you’ve partnered with three other times. Or your designer. Or your client. Or your once-monthly coffee partner. When you’re putting together a blog crawl, you’re simultaneously asking people for a pretty significant favor and introducing them (with your endorsement) to your readers. You don’t want to take a chance on someone who will flake out or write something so deeply unlike you that your readers will question your judgement.

If you’re not sure how to go about befriending people on the internet, here’s a good start.

2. If you’re launching a product, partner with people whose audience would benefit from your product
If you’re blog crawling in promotion of a product launch, you (obviously) want to partner with people whose readership might like said product. My blog crawl was in promotion of The Post College Survival Kit, an ecourse designed to help 20-somethings navigate career, finances, dating, and domestic life after college.  So I left my fashion and food blogger friends out of it.

Before you invite someone to take part in your blog crawl consider their readership’s age, income, interests, and needs. If it doesn’t seem like a match for your product, keep moving.

3. Approach people who have a similarly-sized readership
As previously noted, this isn’t the time to email Jenna Marbles. Huge bloggers are less likely to partake in blog crawls and if you’ve got 6,000 Twitter followers (like me), someone with 38,000 followers isn’t really going to see a huge increase in traffic.

Reach out to people you know to have a readership that’s similar in size to yours. You can also use your blog crawl as an opportunity to point the internet in the direction of small, amazing, unsung bloggers. If you like someone and you know your readers will too, invite them. Period.

4. Make sure your contributors benefit from the blog crawl
Let’s make sure our blog crawls aren’t the internet equivalent of the friend who only calls when she needs a ride.  You can make your blog crawl extra beneficial to your contributors by tweeting each of their posts, sharing their posts in your newsletter, or aggregating their posts into one that you share on your own blog (like I did here).

5. Don’t ask your contributors to stick to a script
If you liked these bloggers enough to ask them to contribute to your crawl, surely you trust them to write their own stuff, yes? If you give them a pre-written intro, encourage them to edit it to fit their own voice. Don’t ‘require’ them to post a ‘badge’ or use graphics that don’t match their branding. Give them a loose outline of what you’re looking for in post (“300-500 words + helpful”) and let them create something that works for them + their readers.

6. Chose the right post topic
This, my friends, is the million dollar baby. When you’re asking your friends to write something for your blog crawl, consider topics that
a) compliments the subject of your blog or the product you’re launching
b) would be interesting/helpful to anyone who reads it - regardless of whose blog they usually read or if they’re the target market for your new product
c) is customizable to match your contributor’s voice/area of expertise

I chose ‘Notes To My Younger Self‘ because it’s something evvvvveryone can relate to and all my contributors could put their own spin on it. Rebecca McLoughlin put an interior decor spin on it. Braid Creative put a business spin on it.

Next week, I’m talking about the logistics + nitty gritty of running your blog crawl. Pre-scheduled emails! Spreadsheets! Auto responders!  If you don’t want to miss it, sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send it right to your inbox.

photo via death to stock photo // cc