Hail fellow Catholic Writers! I want to use my first post in February to call attention to your best blog posts from January. (email me the link to your favorite January post by Feb 5: charoster ‘at’ yahoo ‘dot’ com) Don’t email other people’s posts…..your favorite from your own blog!!
Let’s start the New Year getting to know each others’ blogs and see how much we can develop the cross-linking and pinging and liking and sharing that are the life-blood of mutually supportive social and professional networks! I am watching Guild blogs to find leaders in best-practices so that newbies can learn from the top Guild bloggers, and so that great blogging can get some extra buzz. I’ve noticed we are a shy bunch about promoting our work, but here you are being asked to share some of your best. For the sake of your fellow Guild members, please cough up a post!
About those best practices.
Is your name prominent? (I frequently find myself wondering whose blog I’m on! I see the cute name, but not the blogger’s name and feel lost. If your name isn’t on the landing page, is there an ‘About You’ page handy?)
What’s your blog about? Is it clear from your tagline, or from a sticky post, or from your About page what your theme, or genre, or primary focus is?
Are you updating regularly? (I sometimes feel I’ve entered a ghost town. All the posts are home, but the person behind them has disappeared.)
Can I subscribe easily? (The Guild blog is guilty of being hard to subscribe to, but we’re working on it!)
Is there a Guild shield somewhere to let your followers know the Catholic Writers Guild exists??
Can I see a picture of you? Please?!?!?
Are your posts tightly written, well-edited, with great first-paragraph hookiness?
Are your titles interesting?
Have you cross-linked your posts and/or tagged and/or categorized them?
Can I search your site for key words?
Are you using visuals well with your posts? Is your blog visually clean and attractive?
We’re all in this together, learning, trying to find time for our own and other peoples’ blogs, improving as we go, and wishing we could just be writers and have great big cozy publishing companies do all the PR for us! It’s not every day someone begs for you to link up your post to theirs, so please, please take advantage of this chance to showcase your favorite January post!
Hi Charlotte,
Do I need to send the link to my favorite January post or do you have it already (since I sorta made you pick it for me….) Let me know 🙂
Kassie aka “Mom”
This is a great networking opportunity. Thank you. I’m in!
Nancy~ you’re right, it’s a great opportunity for networking. I just clicked your link and subscribed to all your writings. Thanks for sharing 🙂
“Is there a Guild shield somewhere to let your followers know the Catholic Writers Guild exists??”
Does the CWG provide a shield/badge for members to use? I contribute to PraytheMass.org and that site provides an easily added badge on its homepage. Where is the Guild’s? Thank you.
Stephanie, that’s a great idea. Let me ask you (and everyone), what is your preferred way to grab badges? I’ve seen them done with code you copy and paste onto your site. I tend to find it easiest to just copy an image source and do the link when I insert the image into my sidebar. What’s the vote?
And is there is anyone who’d like to take this on as a little project? I can make a spot for a badge-page, or one badge-to-grab in the sidebar, but I could use some help with the actual construction of the badges and instructions for users, since this is not an area where I have particular experience.
In the meantime, I see no objection to members grabbing the footer image from this blog, in order to display their membership status and link back to here or the website / FB page / twitter account.
Whoop! I even goosed myself writing that we should all have the Shield….here’s how I just went and followed my own advice: I scrolled to the bottom of the Guild blog, as Jen suggested, then right-clicked the Shield image and saved it on my desktop. Then I opened it with Paint and cropped the whole logo to get just the shield. I saved that as a jpg file as I seemed to remember having trouble with gif files once. Then, from my blog(s), I uploaded this image into my media library, titled it Guild Shield, captioned it, “Proud to be a Catholic Writer!”, then copied its unique URL before saving that image. Next, I went to my dashboard, clicked on ‘Appearance’, then on ‘Widgets’, and added a Jetpack Image Widget to my footer. The magic box opened asking for the url of the Image, and I had it ready-saved to paste right in. I also typed in the Guild’s link address so that the millions (ha!) who see my blog will click right over here to sign up. You can see it at the bottom of the page: http://www.chattycatholicdoll.com
Thanks for asking, Jennifer! I’d prefer what PraytheMass.org provides: “code you copy and paste onto your site” or on my blog. That way the Guild may be assured that a uniform image is out there for all to see!
Sounds good. I’m going to farm that out to a person more technically skilled than myself, and it may take a bit, because if we’re going to do official badges, we’ll want to make sure we’re happy with the design, test it it out, all that. But I’m sticking it on my list, Stephanie, thanks for the idea!
Thanks, Jennifer!
I am displaying the “badge” on my main blog. I show it on my “about” page, and also have a page I keep updated titled “Mom’s earned badges and awards”
I’m going to go check for links to your blog now so that I can follow yours as well.
Kassie aka “Mom”
Ouch! Charlotte I am guilty of so many of the listed “naughty blogger omissions.” I’ll try to be good. I’ll get a real picture of me on my “about” page, do a better job with my editing, and buck up and share my “January Best.” It’s gonna take me a little while
Kassie aka “Mom”
oh rats, there I go hidding behind that nom de plume again…I’ll get on that too!