Social Publishing

Free images for your blog or design projects

If it's on web it's free. Many people seem to think that anything they find on web is free for them to use. There's lots of legally free stuff out there, but most of all there are lots of things you can use to get yourself into all sorts of trouble. For instance photos and other images you don't have a permission to use. Fortunately alongside the photos you took yourself and images you created there are free options to use. Unfortunately it's a bit of a Wild West. Some of the licenses are vague or too restrictive. There are people who upload photos online under Creative Commons licenses with...

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So, did you actually read it?

Once again it happened: Someone read my last blog post and got upset about it. Well, read and read. They kind of read half of it, made assumptions and didn't give the text a chance to tell the full story. I received an angry and awful email. Most people online don't bother to read articles through. They bounce around, check the headlines and skim the texts. It appears that most share links without really reading the content they are sharing. This of course doesn't always lead to the situation I described above. I often see comments on blog posts and web articles that have very little o...

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What to do when blogging stops working for you?

Many of us bloggers hit that same question at some point: Where to go from here? I have asked it, Nadine asked it recently and maybe you are asking it right now. We have other responsibilities and if the blog we are currently running isn't bringing the bread to the table it can be difficult to justify spending time on it. Whether your blog is successful or not things can turn stale pretty fast. Something changes (or nothing changes) and it stops feeling right at all. Did you run out of subjects for new posts? Or did your old subjects just start to feel old and not you in your current s...

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What happened when I didn't comment on Facebook for a week

Do you want to get your blood pressure high? Try reading some comments on Facebook. Especially on public posts of politicians and others alike. Or just the comments some of your Facebook friends write on your posts. Hmm. Maybe I need better friends. Add to it writing your own comment and then someone replying something snarky to it. Oh yeah, it's a vein ready to pop in your head. This is why I decided to make a little test. I like to test people on different social media platforms. If you are my follower, friend or otherwise involved with my social media presence you are likely to take par...

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10 misconceptions about social media and marketing

1. Social media marketing is free There's no free marketing. Even though many social media platforms are free or enable free usage, marketing with and in social media isn't free. Using different social media platforms effectively for marketing efforts takes time, skill and often other resources. In an organization you must either hire new people to do the social media marketing or to train the current employees and divide their time with or move them completely to social media marketing. For personal marketing or small business marketing you must at least give lots of your own time to the...

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How to kill your blog with overthinking

If you are a regular in this part of the web you may have noticed a certain decline in amount of blog post here this year and especially through the summer. I have a "good" reason for it besides of a bad one. The "good" one is that I've been busy with Stylebook. Stylebook was launched during spring and ever since I have spend a lot of any spare time in tweaking the site, creating materials for it, checking comments and all sorts of stuff like that. As I mentioned above there's been a bad reason too. The usual, I had run out of will to blog. Call it lack of inspiration, call it something...

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Does Pinterest drive sales and traffic?

Today someone on Twitter was asking for data about Pinterest driving sales. I did what he could've done in the first place: Fired up a search and wrote in some magic words. The results of my search were much more interesting than I thought. According to different sources of data Pinterest was driving e-commerce sales and giving bump in traffic. I've noticed the similar effect: Pinterest does drive traffic even to my small blog. The pins don't even have to be repinned over and over again, it's quite enough I share my blog posts to those who follow my boards on Pinterest. Pinterest driving...

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