Tipsheet to Prevent Blogging Burnout

Tags

collaboration

Krupal, Rocky, Jessica, Juliana

• Topic should be broad.
• Keep a list of ideas that you could possibly write about.
• Less text based.
• Guest blogs sometimes to get new perspectives.
• Be flexible with a schedule.
• Remind yourself of your long-term goals.
• Interact with your other bloggers to encourage one another.
• Try to reply or acknowledge comments that other bloggers provide.
• Hashtags are your friends!
• Check your stats once in a while.
• Utilize other types of media to entertain or get the attention of your audience.
• Spread the word to your family and friends because those are people who matter and will encourage you.
• If you get sick of writing, put up videos/photos/audio instead.
• Take a break for a few days for a breather.
• Crowdsourcing for ideas.

 

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Disclosure of Information with Blogging

Tags

collaboration

1. When bloggers receive free items from companies, they should disclose it if the company is ok with that. If the company does not want the blogger to reveal the fact that they sent the item to the blogger, then the blogger doesn’t have to say anything.

2. Bloggers, like journalists, should be responsible for fact-checking to avoid spreading false information. If a company send you a product to write about, you don’t want to say anything that could be inaccurate or misleading.

3. The Pen Addict is a blog aimed at reviewing different pens and how they write. The website has a “sponsor” section where pen companies can sign up to sponsor. During that time, they can send free pens, have a website displayed on his blog, and receive a thank you post thanking them for sponsoring his blog at the end of the week.

This blog has been updated for years and continues to post pen reviews, videos, and podcasts. Regarding disclosure, the Pen Addict posts a message at the end of each post stating who sponsored it and concludes each week with a thank you message to the sponsor.

The blogger also set up a page dedicated to the sponsors where you can read more about who they are and which products represent.

By Rocky, Krupal, Juliana

Hyperlocal blog: Indigenous community

Tags

basicallybeyondbasic, collaboration, creative blogging, Jadegilliard, jessclark33, julianasuelee

This takes place 100 years from now. It will be a globalized world. In the community, we will provide them an iPad and install them where they can see what is going on.

Deep within the Amazon jungle, there is a community of 50 indigenous people.

The community consists of tribe and the blog will talk about each tribe in that community.

The community is very simplistic. They use the resources they have to sustain life. To gather food, they would hunt and fish. Also, they use herbal medicines to treat themselves with diseases.

We’re going to start a blog to raise awareness of the community. In our blog, we will display topics of the different aspects in their life such as religion, social dynamics, food, health, language, and clothing. For example, in religion we will talk about their daily worships to their gods. In the health section, we will talk about the herbal medicines they use to treat themselves if they have any discomforts.

Each tribe speaks different languages. On the blog, we will have a history of their language. Also, in order for communication to take place we will have a page where we will educate our language to one or two people and where they will teach us also.

-Juliana, Jade, Rocky, Jessica

Rutgers Students Hyperlocal Blog

Tags

classwork, collaboration, in class assignments

By: Hector, Jeremy, Justin, and Seyvona

At Rutgers, sometimes the student population feels underrepresented and unheard. Our hyperlocal blog would get the concerns of the Rutgers community out.

Our community includes off-campus and on campus students, international students, first year students, transfer students, and the other students on track to get their degree. The blog will cover concerns of undergraduate students and graduate students to cover a wide range of the Rutgers population. About 40,000 people are included in this community.

The first aspect about the Rutgers community that is noticed by many is the diversity of the community. Many different cultures, beliefs, and values are in this community. The common ground despite all of these differences is the fact that we are Rutgers students and every student may have a concern that they feel is not getting to those who have high positions on the University board.

Our blog would post the concerns and questions of the community that those feel are being unanswered. There would also be tips put on the blog to answer questions that may not need to be addressed by authority figures. The design will include a forum and chat rooms so the community can comment and discuss concerns and tips posted.

Cute Desserts!

Tags

assignment, collaboration

Valeriya, Seyvona, Jeremy, Hector, Justin

Our group decided on a dessert catering business. We can start in our individual kitchens               with basic goods like cupcakes, cakes, and cookies. As business grows we can expand to a bakery headquarters and have an official building.

We can use any of the social media including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, etc… We probably will focus most on Instagram as our main outlet for the rest of the social media because we can upload that content to the rest. We will advertise our baked goods with visually stimulating pictures as well as maybe some recipes for desserts. We can then interact with customers regarding any kind of information relating to our business through facebook and twitter.

We can even take customer requests through our twitter. We can also ask consent from satisfied customers and people to who we’ve catered too and post that as content for our social media.

We will most likely give access to our social media to specific employees that would be able to post quality content to the networks (e.g bakers/chefs that can take pictures of their baking etc…)

RU a Good Blog?

Tags

analysis, blog design, carmenaliu, classwork, collaboration, discussion, group blog, rebeccarice93

This post was done by Rebecca and Carmen.

Posting wise we didn’t like the format for posting. An easier to use/writer friendly interface would encourage more and easier posting.

A second thing pertaining to format that we didn’t like is how a post looks when you first click on it. Before the page loads completely the post can be very hard to read because of the color of the font on the background. Looking at the post while it is loading may deter people from actually staying on the post and reading it.

We believe that there should be preview of posts or a synopsis. The only thing you have to go off of when looking at the posts on the main page is the title, person who wrote it, and the date of publication. These things may not always be able to tell a reader if they may or may not want to read the post. A preview of the post or a brief synopsis would allow the reader to gauge if they actually want to read the rest of the post or not.

Categories should be displayed on a side bar so that readers can easily find posts that pertain to the subject that they are looking for. Categories would help organize the whole site and make it look cleaner.

We found that tag cloud needs to be cleaned up. There are so many tags and many of them are not helpful. Over all the tag cloud is simply overwhelming in its current state.

When we went to subscribe to the blog we found the “subscribe button” was broken. The point of a blog is to get returning readers and if a reader can’t subscribe they’re not going to return. The button needs to be fixed.

The archives were a bit of a mess. The archive categories need to be bigger, it was difficult to distinguish the categories from the posts within each category. We also thought that the categories should be more specific, one category was family, grades, and winter break. Each of those things in that category could have been its own category and that would have made a much more organized and easy to navigate site.

RU Admissions Analysis

Tags

analysis, blog design, blogging, collaboration, opinion, Rutgers

Group: Seyvona, Jeremy, Erin, Hector, Justin

The admissions blog isn’t really well known or advertised. Our group didn’t know about the blog until this class, and many of us feel it would have been nice to see it before or during the admission process. Maybe having a link to the blog at the top of the application and as part the the acceptance packet.

The mobile layout is frankly terrible. Looking at the page on an tablet or smart phone deters the reader from continuing. Most younger people use mobile devices, and the lack of a visually appealing mobile page is a huge problem.

Tag cloud is pretty large and ambiguous. It’s not helpful to the reader at all, and it’s size is visually unappealing. For an admission blog, some of the tags are inappropriate, such as “fr3sh”, and several repetitive tags such as “precalc” and “precalculus”.
Since the blog is written by various students, it’s hard for the writers to maintain a coherent tag cloud, so it would be better if the admissions blog administrators were to occasionally filter through the tags.

The last thing we noticed is that on the home page, the reader cannot see any part of the post. While a whole post would be too much, it would be nice to see the first 3-5 lines of the post to let the reader start reading it and therefore be more inclined to click “more”. A title is not enough to get a reader interested in clicking into the whole article.

Just Sell it!

Tags

analysis, article responses, collaboration, homework, justinwong99x

Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to publicize your own blogs to increase readership. That’s where the power of guest blogging really shines. Not only can it introduce a new perspective and a deviation from your usual posts, but it can also help the guest blogger achieve more readership with their blogs. So it’s a win win right?

The Beginners Guide to Guest Blogging offers a lot of great tips on guest blogging when it comes to doing your research, giving your pitch, and writing your post. I immediately noticed that one of the really big concepts this article kept bringing up was the thought process. You really can’t dive into guest blogging and recklessly try and throw yourself out there. Some of the big tips the author generally involve taking things one step at a time and thinking things through. One excellent point I noticed was his idea to put yourself in the receivers shoes. As the receiver of a blog, you wouldn’t want a guest blog post whose pitch is very sloppy, and or time consuming to read/understand. Therefore, if you can think what the blogger would like to see in a guest blog request email, your pitch will definitely be greatly enhanced.

Some of the key tips that really stood out to me for these emails include

• Being clean and proofread (not sloppy and lazy!)
• Referencing something on their blog to show you have an interest and took the time to read their blog
• Being patient and not coming off as too aggressive or desperate

Overall, you really just have to think things through and take your time because after all you are the guest and the blogger isn’t 100% inclined to allow just anybody to guest post on their blogs, so make sure you really give it your all.

The next article, 7 Essential Ingredients For A Successful Collaborative Blog, really hammers down on the keys for unlocking the door to a great collaborative blog.

A collaborative blog involves multiple authors all working together and contributing to the posts and maintenance of the blog. One of the biggest aspects that popped out to me from the 7 tips is the teamwork aspect. It’s really crucial whenever you have a team that you set yourselves a goal, and all work together to achieve that set goal. This involves equal distribution of work, strong communication, a variety of talents you can bring to the table, etc… You can all be great individual bloggers; but at the end of the day, for a collaborative blog to be successful, you need to have the teamwork aspect.

I also really liked the 7th tip they gave, which was to have fun into the mix. This really applies to all of our blogs whether it be collaborative or non collaborative. We need to have passion and enjoy the posts that we take the time to create everyday or every week. If blogging starts to become more of a chore than an enjoyable experience for you, make sure you take your blog into the right direction where your passion truly lies.

Erin, Carmen, Brooke, and Rebecca’s Dream News Blog

Tags

blog design, collaboration, discussion, group blog, rebeccarice93, social media

The site would provide all types of news, categories: entertainment, local, political, health, tech, national news, world news, live broadcast, news of the people, and video. We want to provide a little bit of everything so that our readers can be well informed on all fronts. Categories can be seen on a side bar no matter where you go to within the site.

Social media buttons, on the home screen to like the actual site, and on individual articles to share to Facebook or Tweet immediately without having to leave our site.

Bold colored header and side bar to site. the bold colors will catch the readers attention and draw them into the site and also allow the reader to always know where they are while on the site.

The articles would appear to look more like magazine articles than articles on other web based news sites. It would be broken up by block images and videos. Pictures will appear in blocks within articles.

The tone in the articles with be attractive to readers. It will be casual without being like TMZ but also not too formal like what you would read on the cover of the New York Times. It would be a blend of casual and informative.

Video section would be brief synopsis of current stories. There would be playlists where you could watch the videos from all the categories that day or select a specific section or two and only watch videos from those, i.e. politics and world news.

Crowdsourcing component where readers can also write posts and submit them for publication. All submissions will be read and the best will be chosen to be posted to the blog.

Our Awesome Blog That You Will Visit Everyday

Tags

collaboration, creative writing, group work

This is our new blog. Upon typing in the URL, viewers will see a big image behind the title of the blog. On the right hand side, there is a column with menus and advertisements for stores like Target. Everyone likes to shop at Target. Posts will line up one by one and can be sorted by popularity or most-recently-published. However, only 2 sentences will be displayed so that readers are forced to click on the post. When the reader tries to leave our blog, they will be faced with a pop up ad that displayed upcoming content and begin 24 hour countdown until the next time they should return.