The Wax Blog

When you are incorporating news stories into your blog content, your approach truly matters. You are never going to successfully compete with the large media sites, so re-stating industry-relevant stories will never captivate your readers.

You can use the news information in a number of different ways and your approach really depends not only on  your industry, but also how you’ve positioned your blog. You have to ensure that your blog posts contain news in a way that makes sense to your readers, not just for search or backlink reasons.

Here are a few ways to incorporate news into your blog posts:  (more…)

As a small business owner it’s easy to find yourself pulled in six (or six thousand) different directions. As a result, when you decide to start blogging it’s hard to know how much time you really need to invest.

 Problogger Beth Hodgson hails from Canada, aka the Shizzle north of Hizzle. 

We always worry about how often to post and sticking to a consistent schedule.  But consistency and frequency are not the only issues when you’re managing your time as a mompreneur, small business owner, author or any combination of the three. There’s another  problem – everyone does things at his or her own pace. It’s hard to pinpoint the right number of “hours”  blogging should take. There’s no set recipe.

Instead, it’s important to make sure you’re maximizing the time you do have, no matter how large or small the bucket. Here are six ways you can make the most of your time for the smallest investment possible. (more…)

By Beth Graddon-Hodgson, who is from Canada.  Which may make her opinions rather suspect, if not subversive. 

With constantly evolving demands in social media, it is interesting how there is such a high frequency of social media conferences when techniques almost can’t be taught.  Why do so many people feel the need to share their expertise on something when there are no real rules?

The question is on my mind because there are a number of social media conferences popping up around the Toronto Area. The 140 Characters Conference is on a North American tour and just happened here.  Blissdom Canada is another conference coming up this fall. Here are a few thoughts of mine about why these conferences are important and also some words of caution for those trying to learn from them.  (more…)

By Beth Graddon-Hodgson

Last week’s post was all about techniques for pushing your blog articles on social media. This week, we’ll keep going on a similar direction and talk about how hard you  should have to work to market your blog. It’s a question I’m asked all the time – people hire me for the writing but don’t have a budget for  social media, guest posts, sourcing etc. However, they also aren’t interested in trying these things themselves,  believing that the blog content will do all of the work.

If you’re only going to invest your money and time in one marketing arena and you’ve got a lower budget, a blog is your best step. However, it is part of a bigger puzzle – you can’t always expect to have 10,000 hits per month if  you just focus on great blog content. When determining your priorities for marketing time, consider the following: (more…)

Looking at many of the job postings for writers, I see a lot of people saying that they don’t want ‘spun’ articles. Obviously, the term is being used in a negative context, which I find interesting, because I’ve always looked at it in a more positive way.  Once again, with the evolution of web content we’re seeing one term being used in a variety of ways, which can lead to serious confusion. (more…)

In my last post, we looked at some of the different ways of defining original content that you may not have considered when writing your blogs. I introduced the idea of using Copyscape to ensure that there is no duplication within your posts, and this week we’ll look exactly at how you can use that tool to your advantage.

Copyscape is designed primarily to prevent plagiarism.  Often, websites use it to ensure that no one else has stolen their original content.  It is also a great tool to use as a writer. When I’ve discussed this with other writers in the past,  I’ve received looks like I’m crazy using Copyscape on my own writing – because it should be pretty clear to me whether or not I’ve plagiarized the content.

That may be true, but as we covered last time, there are other definitions of ‘original content’ and if I want to ensure that I meet the criteria for one of those – ensuring there is  ZERO duplication within the content – Copyscape is the best option.

Want to know more about using Copyscape to ensure your content is original ? (more…)