Writing Advice from Web Wine Writers

30 Jun

At this year’s Wine Blogger’s Conference in Walla Walla Washington, I attended an advanced blogging session with Joe Roberts winner of the best wine blog award 1 Wine Dude, Jeff Lefevere of Good Grape which won two wine blogging awards, and RJ Hilgers. What follows is advice from Jeff Lefrevre at Good Grape. His four main points are:

1. Work Smarter Not Harder
2. Work on your writing
3. Develop your brand
4. Capitalize on trends.

Here’s some details and specifics according to Jeff:
BRAND. You don’t have a brand until you have your own domain name. Make sure the carpet matches the curtains. So make it match. Make it look as good as you want your site to be. Online resources include: www.semrush.com and for stats www.quantcast.com

To see who’s linking to you try  http://www.iwebtool.com/backlinkchecker

To be more productive and work smarter, try these tools:
1. to manage social media www.digsby.com
2. to monitor sites http://addictomatic.com

WRITE BETTER He recommends these books to improve your writing:
William Zinsser On Writing Well
Strunk & Whites Elements of Style

To strengthen the research for your blog posts, he suggest you use this paid subscription service www.highbeam.com

As a community college teacher, I know how much valuable research material is available to you there and for little or now cost so I recommend you visit and see. Local libraries also subscribe to services like these which you can use from home using your library card.

For grammar help, try www.grammarly.com

To increase the quality of content, he suggest you use Microsoft Word and then cut and paste into your blog post. Use the tools on Word including Grammar check, reading ease, grade level, etc then post directly (a trick I need to figure out!)

To brainstorm creatively, try www.creativewhackpack.com

TRENDS

Trend #1 –mobile
is huge and will continue
make sure your site is mobile capatible

Trend #2–lifestreaming

Trend #3–social graph & facebook fan pages
Nutshell mail
DivShare
Sprout

Trend #4 personal brand
Visual CV aka LinkedIn on steroids
Wix
Weebly

To understand trends and grow your site, try www.vocus.com and www.cision.com

To sell stuff, use www.vendr.com.

To syndicate your site, try www.blogburst.com which offers no money but traffic.

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