Tools for Bloggers Who suck at Grammar

Growing up, I was more of a creator than a meticulous person. I'm a butterfly chaser and it took me a while to embrace that. Several people made me feel terrible about it and I felt pretty ashamed.

I mean sure, it's 'just a mistake' but when you work in social media that can cost you your pride and sometimes your job. It's ok to be a bad speller, it doesn't mean you're not as smart as everyone else, it means you're smart about other things.

Here are the tools I use to trick people into thinking I'm good at spelling and grammar.

Hemmingway App

I love the Hemmingway App. Insert an entire blog post into this tool and watch it pick it apart faster than America's Next Top Model judges. It helped me shirk my use of passive voice and overuse of adverbs. And run-on sentences...I'm using to write this post it right now!

Grammarly

LIFE SAVER! I love using Grammarly in my day-to-day. Emails, blog posts, tweets...it all gets corrected. The only issue is the Google Chrome plug-in doesn't work in Google Docs. Instead, I've started writing my posts in the Hemmingway App or Squarespace. My friends text me less about little mistakes in my posts and it's a breath of fresh air.

Capitalize My Title

I totally forgot how to capitalize titles. Which nouns to capitalize and words to drop to lower case eluded me after I graduated middle school. I used to use Titlecapitalization.com but it disappeared so now I use this one. If I ever have a title in the middle of a blog post or even for titling full posts I always double check.

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UpWork

If you have the budget, hire a copyeditor! You can hire a copy editor to help you take your posts to the next level. Several of your favourite bloggers don't even write their posts anymore. Instead, they have copywriters and editors who piece them together. For a fraction of a cost you can too. I've used UpWork in the past to help me develop my own team for photos and graphics. Next up for me will be copyediting.

Did I miss anything? Comment down below with your favourite tricks and tools to show off your spelling skills. 

5 Ways to Step-Up Your Instagram Game

A while back my girl Dominique Bennett-Bouchard messaged me on Facebook that she admired my Instagram. My response was pure glee! My hard work had been noticed by a fellow creator who I admired. She then asked me for some tips.

Find Inspiration (not imitation) There are so many Instagram accounts that are artistically curated to perfection. I'm working achieve at least a fraction of what some of them have someday! For now, I'll admire from a distance. One of my favourite accounts is Amy's aka @BrattyB. Her aesthetic is bomb and so is her style. She may not be your cup of tea (pft not possible), but take notes. She'll be going places.

Pick Your Colours I only use one filter, and one filter only. Sometimes I brighten my photos or add some heat to them, but generally, they all have the same kind of feel. I also realized what main colours I should have in each shot so that my grid flowed easily on the eyes.

Surround Yourself with the Right People For those of you not privileged enough to not have an Instagram husband you've got to surround yourself with the right people. I begged my friends and relatives and got the pictures I wanted. However, when I surrounded myself with bloggers and photographers who wanted to work and collaborate with me on my vision and see it through.

Draft a Plan After detailed research and how I saw my favourite Instgrammers reach success, I decided I would post almost every day on my Instagram.  Twice a day for special occasions and at select times. I don't always stick to it, however, I know what will help me succeed and I'm working towards it.

Get the Right Apps I was never a fan of Later.me and Schedugram. I used them on the corporate level and then personally and we just didn't really match up. Desiree from A Desired Journey introduced me to Planoly and I was in love the user interface was way prettier than any other Instagram scheduler I had worked with in the past.

What are you doing to step your Instagram game up? Did I miss anything? Share with me in the comments.

(Photo by BrattyB)

5 Ways to Slay: Pinterest

Ah! I'm excited to feature my first guest post on the blog from a marketing maven I really admire, Dominique Bennett-Bouchard. This woman is a powerhouse on Pinterest and I wanted her to share some tips with us on how we can capitalize on one of the most underrated social mediums. Without further ado...

As a creator I’m sure you’ve come across a number of ‘essential tool’ lists, advising you on how to market  your content. Yet, despite all of the email newsletters I’ve sent and Instagram images I’ve spent way too much time figuring out a caption for, Pinterest Marketing has been the largest source of traffic towards my website.

Pinterest can come across as a massive collection of DIY crafts you’ll never have the time or skill for and pretentious fitness quotes, (I mean come on, there are a million things I can name that taste better than skinny feels.). But as one of the fastest growing social platforms with almost 85% female users, chances are, your target audience is in perfect range (did you get that? That was a shooting joke. I don’t think I delivered that well…)

Here are a few tips on How you Can Drive Traffic From Pinterest to Your Blog

1. Show off The Goods Pinterest recently introduced a rotating showcase that appears at the top of your profile. Show off all of your best ideas by choosing your top 5 boards. Don’t forget to keep the rest of your profile organized. Make sure the first row of boards (first 5) on your profile are related to your brand. For example, Frugal Fanatic, a well known financial blog, organizes her first 5 pins to include ‘MAKING MONEY’, 'FRUGAL LIVING' ‘POPULAR PINS’, ‘MONEY SAVING TIPS’ and ‘WORK FROM HOME’ - all completely on brand with her site.

2. Use Rich Pins Using rich pins in your Pinterest marketing strategy helps you to appear more professional and gives viewers more info on why they should bother clicking. There are 5 different types of rich pins, depending on the type of content that you create. Food bloggers can benefit from Recipe Pins that include serving info, ingredients and cooking times. Travel bloggers can create Place Pins with maps, and Article Pins share headlines, author info, and descriptions.

3. Take Advantage of Pinterest Widgets It’s one thing to share your own content but having viewers share content for you provides reach to a whole new network. Pins with a call to action are shown to get 80% more engagement than those without. Get your website Pinterest ready by adding share widgets, like a ‘Pin-it’ button that automatically appears on images, follow buttons and board/profile previews. Pinterest > Tools > Widgets

4. Design Pinterest Optimized Images Your Pinterest marketing strategy is going to be heavily dependant on the images that you share. There are tons of weird stats about the types of imagery that get the most action on Pinterest. Did you know images with mainly red or orange get 200% more repins than those mostly blue? Starting with the basics, just make sure that you have at least one image in your post that is portrait shaped (735px x 1102px). Another great way to optimize your images is by automating your Pinterest captions for anyone who pins them. Edit your website images to include the caption in the alt-text. Anyone who hits the ‘pin-it’ button will automatically have your original caption.

5. Get in with the Popular Crowd One of the easiest ways to increase your reach is by participating in group boards. Pinterest is filled with collaborative boards that allow other users to share pins about a specific niche and often have large audiences, with thousands of followers. Find group boards that cater to your brand’s subject by using PinGroupie.com. Search by category, group size, keywords, etc.

Do you have special technique that works for Pinterest? Share in the comments below! Also, please check out my personal blog where I share digital marketing, career and all around lifestyle tips at: DominiqueBennett.com

PS you should totally follow Dominique on Pinterest. Look out for my next post on how you can step up your Instagram game with a few simple tweaks!

Does Every Blogger Need to Upgrade to the iPhone 7?

Many bloggers have been wondering whether they should upgrade to the iPhone 7. In an industry that throws around "price per wear" to justify $5,000 purses, I figured, why not do some investigating on the ROI of the buzzed about iPhone 7? Keep reading to see whether the iPhone 7 will be worth it for you!

Airpods? I get why everyone is up in arms about it, but I don't care. Wireless headphones are the future. Deal with it! The way Apple dealt with it was to create a product that won't depend on tech that will be obsolete in the near future. I've been using wireless and wired headphones for years now and frankly, I'm excited to say ' boy bye' to detangling my buds.

Camera Who else hates needing to carry around a camera? I stopped bringing mine to press events out of frustration and function. First, cute bags (to me) are smaller. Second, the benefits of lugging my camera around like image stabilization and better image quality (with the 12MP back-facing camera and 7MP front-facing camera) are available on the new iPhone 7. Sure I won't get as good of a shallow depth of field (the phone isn't rocking a 50mm lens), but it'll save me time from uploading pictures via wifi to my phone (and  save my shoulders from carrying a camera around).

Battery Life At the reveal event, it was boasted that the iPhone 7 would add '2 more battery hours into your day' for 6s owners. For anyone who is tired of bringing a portable charger around, that extra 2 hours is everything.

Water Resistant My phone is the most important piece of technology in my life. When my computer was acting up this year, it was a mild inconvenience to get my work done. When my phone decided life wasn't worth living after I dropped it in a lake (for half a second), I was irate. My phone was my source of revenue and efficiency. That could have totally been avoided had my phone been water resistant. You can't go deep sea diving with the iPhone 7, but quick submerges in water shouldn't harm it.

Speed Since 3D touch and other interactive features are maintained in this OS, it adds extra strain on older processors to perform. However, the iPhone 7 was made to run iOS10 smooth as butter. With the new A10 fusion chip, it's speedier when running iOS10 than older models.

If you were already going to upgrade this year, don't hesitate and get this baby. If you weren't going to upgrade hold out until the iPhone 7s comes out (like I'm going to). I buy my phones outright, so I've got to rejig my budget to be able to afford this one.

Are you getting the iPhone 7? Did you get it already? Tell me in the comments below.

4 Ways you Can Make Your Blog Inclusive

I've been sitting on this post for a while. In the wake of the Marc Jacobs criticisms, I think this is the perfect time to publish it.

When I started to blog, I noticed that content from bloggers and influencers seemed very segregated. I didn’t write this post to dive into the politics of why the blogging world isn’t inclusive (read up on the difference between inclusivity and diversity). Instead, I want to give actionable advice to bloggers so they could develop content that is more inclusive!

Read Different Blogs For some, it all starts with making a point of reading blogs written by people who sit at different intersections as them (here is a 2-minute read on intersectionality). Subscribe to new people on Bloglovin’! Follow different users on Instagram. Really read through and take the time to comment on their posts. Look out for my post featuring my favourite black bloggers soon!

Guest Posts Did you notice that all of the guest bloggers you received submissions from were all white? Instead of requesting guest posts from your audience, try reaching out to bloggers-of-colour you may not have worked with before.

Stay in your Lane How-to beauty and fashion posts that appropriate other cultures are a big no-no. Influencers and Bloggers who get defensive instead of listening to rightfully offended groups about appropriated fashion and beauty practices lose the chance to engage with an awesome audience. Not sure what counts as appropriation? Read this.

Add a ‘lil Colour to your Content When I noticed my Pinterest featured mostly white women, I changed it up. I filled my entire ‘Style Goals’ board with only women of colour and started a natural hair board. It took extra time to find many women of colour in street style roundups and features. However, it was worth it since those were my most popular boards on my Pinterest!

Let’s keep the comments section constructive! If you have questions or suggestions please do share.

5 Apps Every Blogger Needs on their Phone

Happy Thursday! I thought my site was due for a facelift, both in content and look. What do you think of the new theme? To celebrate, I wrote a few posts for all of you bloggers out there who want to take your blog to the next level with a few tricks.

Buffer App Content Scheduling I signed up for Buffer as soon as soon as I saw the low monthly price and that I could schedule on Pinterest and Instagram! I used the app religiously to monitor my scheduled content and ensured that everything went over well while I was on the go.

Bloglovin’ Blogger Feed I consider Bloglovin' similar to Feedly (another fave of mine). The RSS feed of blogs you follow updates  found the experience of reading posts from my favourite blogs more enjoyable on the Bloglovin' app than on my computer.

A ColorStory or Afterlight Photo Editing After I downloaded these apps I was able to get the perfect edit on Instagram. They allowed my picky aesthetic to be imagined with a few adjustments to whatever photo I wanted to quickly post or schedule.

Apple Music Music Library The perfect playlist wasn’t unreachable after I downloaded the premium version of Apple Music. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of their set playlists, I was able to make my own much easier than on other apps since their catalogue was on another level.

Asana Task List Organizer I used Asana to get stuff done, and it worked. I was able to collaborate with my assistant and complete assignments for my clients way easier than I would have ever thought.The alerts on my mobile kicked my butt into gear when I was slacking off. I also used it when revamping my blog to get better content out to you guys!

What are your favourite iPhone apps? Comment below to let me know so I can try them out!