Category Archives: Review

6 Things to Cover In an Event Review

Getting the opportunity to cover an event can be the first big break for a blogger. While you are certain to be overwhelmed with excitement about the prospect of covering the event, it is also a lot of pressure. Putting out a polished review can reflect well on the event as well as give your blog valuable press-time; but it can be a complicated endeavor. Included here are a few things to incorporate and cover when you complete your first event review blog.

Be Punctual

Make sure you are on-time, or early, to the event so you can photograph guests coming and going at the venue as well as any featured items the event may be peddling. After the event, it is critical you write your review while the experience is fresh in your mind. This often means writing within the first 48 hours following the soiree, although some coordinators may want the article up even sooner.

networking-event

Include Important Statistics

This means you will have to be well-informed and able to go around shaking some hands. Find out who supported the event, who attended and for what cause. Include statistics like money raised, students supported, and how many celebrities were in attendance. Consider infographics, if applicable, as they are a surefire way to bring more traffic to your site. Continue reading

Originally posted on August 9, 2015 @ 5:45 am

Showcasing Your Linked Profile in Images

Among the top social media sites today, Facebook and Twitter have been exerting efforts to enhance their platforms. They make changes every now and then to the surprise of users the next time they log into their social media account.

Linkedin-icon

LinkedIn is fast catching up and after improving the look of its company pages, it has now launched a new look for the profile page of members. Those who love visuals will surely rejoice over this new development as LinkedIn now allows its users to showcase their professional experience through the use of images.

In a move being made for the first time, LinkedIn users can now show their professional achievements through images, videos and even presentations in the most innovative way they can. This is now the opportunity of graphic designers, aspiring film makers and other creative people to present their works on this professional networking site. Continue reading

Originally posted on May 6, 2013 @ 8:47 am

Latest Publishing Tools Worth Considering

Online publishing has never been as fast and easy as today. With all the advanced tools that exist and continue to be developed, anybody passionate about sharing information on the internet can publish his work on a wide variety of platforms today.

Whether you’re publishing content on your blog or creating ebooks and magazines, there are tools you can use and most of them are free of charge.

OnSwipe


For those into publishing magazines on the internet, the OnSwipe 2.0 can be utilized. This content distribution platform promises an out of the ordinary user experience particularly for those using the tablet. Through this tool, users can publish and manage their magazine at the same time.
Continue reading

Originally posted on September 16, 2012 @ 2:00 pm

Five Blogging Lessons from Julie Powell

I just finished watching the movie Julie and Julia as recommended by Juned in a previous post here in XFEP. Indeed it was a very inspiring movie – for writers and bloggers. Julie Powell may not be the best blogger in the world, but she definitely excels in one important thing that all of us bloggers should learn to do (if you’re not yet doing it) – talk to our audience when we write blog posts.

Taking the other important things that we can all learn from Julie Powell, here are five blogging lessons that we can learn from Julie Powell from the movie Julie and Julia.

Be Passionate About What You Are Writing

Julie adores and loves Julia Child. She was her hero, icon, semi-god. And like Julia, Julie loves cooking. At some point in the movie, when Julie was talking about blogging she asked her husband what she should write about. Somewhere in their discussion – the niche came out – Julie will cook all the recipes in Julia Powell’s cookbook and blog about it. So she did. Continue reading

Originally posted on November 9, 2010 @ 7:00 am

Review: Contextual Partnership Plugin

The Contextual Partnership Plugin For WordPress Provides Free Advertising To Help Promote Your Blog & Get You Noticed…

If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.

According to the developers the plugin is designed to;

    Drive more targeted visitors to your blog (or blogs) by strategically linking your blog to and from other bloggers participating in the network. The exact method used to achieve this remains confidential but apparently it’s not a basic reciprocal link exchange – nor the more common 3 way linking arrangement often seen between bloggers.

    Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).

    Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.

Not a bad indirect benefit at all.

To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.

This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.

That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.

You can find out full details and download the plugin below…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Or alternatively you can download the plugin directly from WordPress…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contextual-partnership-link-exchange-plugin/

Originally posted on August 7, 2009 @ 5:31 am