Tag Archives: blogging

Encore! 30 Sites That Will Boost Your Personal History Performance.

How many of you could use some further training to enhance your personal history skills? I know I can!

Whether you’re starting out or well established,  here’s a select list of sites that can help.  I’ve combed the Internet to bring you some of the best…Read more.

Monday’s Link Roundup.

Don’t miss Reflections in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. It’s a powerful reminder that behind every aged face there was once a younger self with dreams and ambitions. If you’re a serious blogger,  you’ll find some practical wisdom in 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging.

  • Robert Caro’s Big Dig. “Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms.”
  • Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love. “…when you are facing the unknown, they only way to know anything for sure is to act. When you are dealing with uncertainty — and whether you are going to make any money from your passion at this point is definitely an uncertainty — you act. You don’t think about what might happen, or try to predict the outcome, or plan for every contingency. You take a small step toward making it a reality, and you see what happens.”
  • Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now. “We need a new playbook,” says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. “The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true.” The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”
  • Reflections. A poignant reconstructed portrait series  where  older people gaze into a mirror at a reflection of their  younger selves . Created  by photographer Tom Husey.
  • Social media self-promotion scheme draws authors including Margaret Atwood. “As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold. With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend.”
  • Book Design: Choosing Your Paragraphing Style. “Anyone who wants to do their own book design can spend some very worthwhile time studying books that are old. I mean really old, like going all the way back to the beginning of printed books. Early on, I found these books and the book typography that’s used in them very stimulating when thinking about how I wanted the books I was working on to look.”
  • 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging. “Ever since I started in business, I’ve always loved Seth Godin. He’s a brilliant marketer and a great writer. In fact, he runs one of the most popular blogs…And while many people view him as “America’s greatest marketer,” there is a lot to learn from him about blogging.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

It’s Monday and another Link Roundup. This week I was struck by the wisdom in Post Secret. For those who’ve faced the challenge of interviewing some reserved older clients, this article is for you.  More food for thought in The Counter-Intuitive Benefits of Small Time Blocks. The author suggests there is a  way to get larger creative projects done by making the best use of small chunks of time.

  • Family Tree University’s Spring 2012 Virtual Conference. “At this weekend workshop, you’ll learn strategies and resources to boost your research—and because it’s web-based, you can participate from anywhere! Dates: 9 a.m. Friday, March 9, to 11:59 p.m. Sunday, March 11, 2012″
  • Writing With All Your Senses — A Learnable Skill. “…writing dazzling descriptions is a learnable skill. It takes practice and dedication and seeps into remote corners of life, but the results are worth the effort. In my experience, a three-pronged approach has worked well to hone description skills to a keen edge. One prong involves reading, another involves awareness of surroundings, and the third is deliberation.”
  • Post Secret. “After my mother died, my sister kept discovering fascinating things she had left behind, one being a do-it-yourself autobiography that must have been given to her.”
  • Five Tips on How to Write Biographies. “What does it take to be a successful writer of biographies? How do you choose a subject? Does it matter if the subject is dead or alive? Must you be objective? Should you even try?” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • Five Steps to Doing Genealogy Research Like A Pro. “I’ve been doing genealogy research professionally for almost a decade now. When clients are paying you by the hour, you learn lots of really great shortcuts to keep you moving along and focused. The big tip I shared on Thursday’s episode of The Barefoot Genealogist? (Drumroll, please.)”
  • The Counter-Intuitive Benefits of Small Time Blocks. “It’s a common assertion that doing hard, creative work requires long stretches of concentrated attention. And if you have the luxury of big, open blocks of time, it is a great way to get things done. But what if you don’t? What if you get interrupted left and right by clients and co-workers? Is there a way to push creative projects forward in this non-optimal environment?”

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30 Sites That Will Boost Your Personal History Performance.

How many of you could use some further training to enhance your personal history skills? I know I can!

Whether you’re starting out or well established,  here’s a select list of sites that can help.  I’ve combed the Internet to bring you some of the best. If you have suggestions for other resources that you’d like to see listed here, please let me know.

Interviewing

Producing an e-mail newsletter

How to build and use a blog

Marketing

Writing & Editing

Book production and design

Videography

Software

Social Media

Photo Scanning

Photo by Andrew

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Should I Have a Business Blog?

That’s the question that rattled around in my head three years ago. So I started reading everything that I could lay my hands on about blogging. I discovered, among other things, that blogging could be a very useful business tool. For example, in a 2008 social media survey, 93% of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, 85% believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media, and 56% of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

I decided to take the plunge and set up my blog. What I’ve learned might be useful to those of you still thinking about doing so.  I’m not a Web 2.0 expert and I’m not going to tell you that blogging will bring you fame and fortune. But I hope you’ll see that blogging can be an important part of your personal history business.

Seven reasons why you need a business blog.

  1. Millions of people every day search for information and services on the Internet. If you’re not there, they won’t find you.
  2. Blogs are easier and cheaper to set up and maintain than websites. I spent all of $20 getting my WordPress.com blog launched.
  3. Google ranks blogs higher on its listing than web pages. Search engines like activity and links. If you post frequently and people link to your blog, you’ll eventually be on page one of Google.
  4. Blogs are more personal and informal than a website. They allow for conversations  and in our business being personal is a critical part of who we are.
  5. Blogs can establish you as an authority. Part of this has to do with publishing content regularly. As Woody Allen said, “80% of success is showing up.”
  6. Blogs are a great way to connect with clients and share valuable content about life stories.
  7. Writing on a regular basis  clarifies your thinking and adds immeasurably to your learning about the many facets of personal history.

Has blogging worked for me?  I think it has. My blog is still a work in progress, but since I launched it in July 2008 I’ve  had over 56,000 viewers and 137  have become subscribers. I consistently appear in the top five Google listings for “personal historian”.

I’ve also discovered how much I enjoy writing articles and how it has limbered up my creativity and worked my “writing muscles”.  I’ve come to know some of my personal history colleagues better and expanded my network to include genealogists, social-networkers, and writers.

So what do you say? Time to take the plunge?

Photo by Sarah

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