This is a quickie tutorial because I think everyone needs to have a plane blank square.  And it’s going to come in handy later on in my tutorials. I use PicMonkey for this, but of course, if you have Photoshop or something like that, this tutorial is unnecessary for you.   First, hop onto PicMonkey and open ANY photo.  Literally any photo will do, regardless of size or color. Then crop the image.  PicMonkey has present crops you can use, so select the square one and plop it somewhere on the picture.  Size doesn’t matter. Crop the image so that you have a square.  At this point, you can opt to resize it if you’d like.  I personally keep mine as a 150X150px since that’s a pretty standard size for blog use. Next, go to the Overlays section and select a geometric overlay.  Square works best.  And make the overlay Continue reading →

As nearly every blogger on the planet is aware, Passion Fruit recently switched how they are doing things and now charge a monthly fee.  Sure they offered a discounted annual rate to those who were already using their service, but if you are like me, the price wasn’t worth it, or, like many of my friends, you paid it even though it was too expensive for a lack of better options. I moved to Adproval, but it’s such a new service that I have found it still has far too many kinks to work out.  I also found that their set up was confusing for those who were wanting to buy my ads and it ended up causing a lot of problems.  I quickly saw my ad sales drop. Well, this month, I had had enough.  There just HAD to be a better option out there.  But I still didn’t Continue reading →

Welcome to my series “How to NOT Suck at Blogging.”  I decided to start this after numerous requests for written tutorials from bloggers I have helped.  The title is meant to be a joke, but if you suck at blogging (like I did when I first started) I hope you are able to find some useful and helpful information in the series. If not, well, don’t say I never did nothing nice for ya! I was originally saving this topic for later in the series, but after the week I had, I had to move it up.  So, let’s talk about your sidebar. Your sidebar is prime real estate.  Let me tell you that it can make or break whether or not someone wants to come back to your blog.  A cluttered and busy sidebar draws the readers eye to it and away from your content.  Given that your content Continue reading →

Welcome to my series “How to NOT Suck at Blogging.”  I decided to start this after numerous requests for written tutorials from bloggers I have helped.  The title is meant to be a joke, but if you suck at blogging (like I did when I first started) I hope you are able to find some useful and helpful information in the series. If not, well, don’t say I never did nothing nice for ya! So, let’s talk blogging etiquette: One thing that grinds my gears is blogging etiquette.  That seems really stupid, but to be honest, many of the etiquette rules we follow are for a really good reason.  Some are just you being courteous, but some things can have negative effects on SEO, numbers, or other things that professional bloggers (and semi-professional bloggers like me) rely on. I could write whole posts on commenting, guest posting and other individual Continue reading →

Welcome to my series “How to NOT Suck at Blogging.”  I decided to start this after numerous requests for written tutorials from bloggers I have helped.  The title is meant to be a joke, but if you suck at blogging (like I did when I first started) I hope you are able to find some useful and helpful information in the series. If not, well, don’t say I never did nothing nice for ya! Hootsuite is one of my favorite blogging tools.  I signed up for it ages ago and didn’t immediately recognize its brilliance in my life until much later.  But really, don’t we all want a simplified way to share our posts, images, memes and info across all our social media at once? My blog auto posts to Facebook and Twitter, but I never did find a great way to autopost to Google Plus, enter Hootsuite!  I mostly Continue reading →

I’ve been asked to write a series about beginning blogging.  I’ve decided to call it: How to Not Suck at Blogging. So you can consider this post “How to Not Suck at Blogging Part 1.” But really, here’s how I doubled my Pinterest Followers in three weeks. There is a lot of information out there about why Pinterest matters, not just for fun, but as a tool to help promote your blog or business. That also means that there are a million blog posts full of tips on how to get more pins, re-pins, likes, follows and comments.  And I have probably read half of them.  And nothing had really worked amazingly well.  So I decided to test out some other ways to go about utilizing Pinterest to gain followers. The following tips are the things I tested over a three week period of time.  Using these tips, I doubled Continue reading →