#Anyway does anyone want a link to the published version once I finish

[skhardwarevers1]

I have never put so much effort into anything ever (is writing book synopsis-esque summaries for my way too many stories)

[roseskiesandbutterflies]

Le Démon Déchu - Chapter 2: Réponses Et Plus De Questions

Summary: The summary is kind of long so please check a previous part or my masterlist if you want to read it.

Warning(s): threat, swearing

Word Count: 6.8k+

Inspiration: Do You Know What Eternity Is? by Elderly_Worm on AO3, Great Omens (The Big One) by falsepremise on AO3, Pray For Us, Icarus series by Atalan on AO3, Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach by Nnm on AO3, wasteland, baby by john1513 on AO3, Not of Us by ShesAKillerQueen98 on AO3, How to Win a Lifetime Achievement Award for Services to Television (and how not to) by GaryOldman on AO3, Doctor Who (don’t ask) and, of course, Good Omens itself

A/N: Okay I took a bit of a hiatus from writing literally anything for about five months so sorry about that but I’m back now!! That’s the main thing. Also, I’ve left high school now which is very exciting! That does mean I’ll have so much more time to write and I’m definitely going to try and use this summer to establish some kind of routine for writing so that when I start college, I won’t get too overwhelmed with both my studies and with updating my fics. That’s the plan anyway so don’t hold me to that lmao. With any luck, now I’ve actually said that it’ll have to happen. (I wrote that part of this note back in May when it was the start of the summer. It is currently September and I’m just about to finally publish this chapter and I assure you, I am cringing at my own optimism.) Sorry this took so long to post. This chapter has been in the works since May (yes, I know I’m terrible) but I actually got a lot more writing done in that time that what you just see in this chapter. All will be revealed soon. I just promise that I have been productive. Once you’ve read this chapter, you have my blessing to translate the title of this fic. Hopefully it will make sense.

I just wanted to point out something about the playlist I linked in the previous chapter. I am well aware that there are some rather problematic people in it, namely Sia. I want you all to know that I don’t support her in any way (I don’t like her at all I think she’s a complete ableist twat). Her songs are only on there because of how well they fit with the story (a lot of this will become clearer as the story goes on).

I also wanted to point out that I know that if angels do exist, then their true forms probably wouldn’t look anything like humans. I’m well aware of that, I’m not an idiot, I don’t know if any of you remember when people started googling ‘angel true form’ and some people got scared lmao. The point is, we’ve all seen the pictures. But for the purpose of this story, and honestly just to make it easier for me to describe what the characters are doing, we’re going to have to pretend that they did look like humans. Can I claim creative license with this one? Maybe it got lost in translation because there is probably no way someone could describe how an angel truly looks in any human language? I don’t know, just roll with it.I know that this chapter had so much exposition and explanation in it but I can promise you two things. One, there is still much to be revealed. Two, I promise this isn’t just bad writing on my part. Just trust that I needed to put this all in this early on.

And how is everyone doing after the season 2 announcement? I mean, at the time of writing this specific part of my notes, it only got announced about an hour ago lmao. I’m very fucking excited, oh my god. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since I found out I can’t lie. Catch me trying to finish this before it comes out in case things occur which means I have to change things in this story. I can’t be arsed for that. Oh well. Hopefully it’ll read like those Sherlock fics that people wrote in between series 2 and series 3 if that doesn’t happen.

Taglist: @briarrose26​

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Hermit (upright) + Five of Wands (upright)

Conflict. Reflection. Resurfacing memories.

************

Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

We know who our enemies are. We know.

– Richard Siken (Detail of the Fire)

************

“Fuck.”

The angel and demon exchanged glances of what could only be described as thinly veiled panic, while the woman in front of them just looked annoyed at the most.

“They couldn’t wait five minutes, could they?” she muttered, pinching at the bridge of her nose in frustration before standing up again, “Look, just stay down here, I’m gonna go sort this out. With any luck they won’t have actually realised you’re here too.”

“Wait, how do you know they’re here for you?” Crowley asked, suddenly curious as to what business Eloise might have with Heaven.

“Just a gut feeling,” she said before making her way to the spiral staircase behind them, muttering to herself, “If they were here for you, I feel like they would have at least used the front door.”

The other two waited until she’d run upstairs before exchanging a quick glance, an unspoken word, and following her up.

Meanwhile, Eloise was hovering outside a room at the end of the corridor which she could only assume was the bedroom. She was strangely hesitant, not out of fear of them, simply out of fear of the unknown. She hadn’t spoken to anyone in that room for millennia, and something told her that this wasn’t going to be a friendly chat. She took a deep breath, even though she technically didn’t need it, letting a wave of faux confidence wash over her, and stepped inside. Don’t crumble now. You’ve come too far to crumble now.

“Ah, Mariel, long time no see,” Gabriel smiled coldly, brushing the dust off his white suit. Flanked by two other angels, he stood in the wreckage of the bedroom without even acknowledging the damage they must have caused when they crashed in. Beside him were Beelzebub and Hastur, who both looked as though they had been dragged kicking and screaming to come here. Beelzebub in particular kept shooting metaphorical daggers at Gabriel, who remained perfectly oblivious. The entire ceiling had caved in from the impact of their crash, the setting sun painting the doorway where Eloise stood in a pale gold and casting a dark shadow over the others.

She’d grimaced at the use of her old name; it was too unfamiliar, too ancient. Mariel was the name of a long-dead version of herself. Once upon a time, she’d embraced it, but that was once upon a time. Once upon a time long gone.

“Almost like I’ve been avoiding you on purpose,” she muttered, leaning against the doorway as she stared intrusively at each person in the room, observing, assessing. She silently revelled in the blatant discomfort in each of their faces.

“No need to be so rude,” Gabriel said, doing anything to avoid her eyes, his previous confident façade now shattered.

Eloise stared at him in disbelief, “What exactly were you expecting? A fucking welcome party? I haven’t seen any of you in over six thousand years and you just crash through the roof of my house, unannounced and uninvited, so yeah, forgive me for being a little irritated.” She couldn’t help but feel a little bit guilty. She’d barely been in Aziraphale’s bookshop for fifteen minutes and she was already pretending she owned it.

She watched smugly as he squirmed under her gaze, desperately looking to the others to say something in response. A moment or two passed before Beelzebub’s head suddenly snapped up in confusion, “Are you alone?”

Shit. She’d hoped that they wouldn’t have noticed the presence of the two who were definitely not downstairs like she’d asked. She swallowed, trying not to let any kind of emotion show on her face, trying not to give the game up that quickly, “Yeah, I live on my own.” She watched the whole group of them squint in concentration, trying to sense any other beings in the house. She sighed, changing the subject before they could comment on it any further, “Look, what do you want? I don’t have all day so if you could make it quick then that would be much appreciated.”

Gabriel looked back at her, his suave exterior unfortunately making a return, “Hey, we just wanted to check up on you, see how you’re doing-”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” she snapped. She pushed herself off from the doorway, stalking towards the others, “You have had six thousand years to ‘check up on me’, don’t pretend you’ve only started to care now.”

She was met with only silence as Gabriel and Beelzebub glanced at each other awkwardly, looking very much like chastised children. Suddenly the latter groaned and cried, “You can’t just leave Hell!”

“Oh, here we go,” Eloise muttered, rolling her eyes, bored already.

“You can’t! You Fell from Heaven, so you go to Hell, there isn’t a third option!”

“Well, apparently there is,” she shrugged.

“No there isn’t!” they argued, face screwed up like a petulant child.

“Then what do you call this then?” she asked, unfolding her wings for the second time that day. She studied their reactions closely, scrutinising coal-black eyes piercing through their very souls. She was searching for any hint of shock, of recognition, of anything that could clue her in as to what was going on in their heads at that moment. All she could find, however, was pure, unadulterated confusion. Which was annoying when her wings were supposed to be an answer to their unasked questions.

Gabriel stumbled over his words, “Good Lord, how did you even-”

Eloise cut him off curtly, no longer having the patience to listen to his incoherent mumbles. She instead turned to Beelzebub who at least had the decency to look a little more composed, “That would be what you could sense then. I’ve got both Heaven and Hell in me, that’s a lot of energy to pick up on.” She stared right through them, daring them to say anything else.

“Must be,” they replied slowly, though they didn’t look at all convinced.

Gabriel held up a hand, his eyes darting about as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing, “No hold on, how did you even manage that?”

“I left Hell,” Eloise said simply, “Why should I have black wings? I’m not some demon who ran away from everything. I left. Permanently. I looked Hell in the eye and walked away. You know what? Fuck it, I looked Satan in the eyes and walked away.”

“You what?” he stuttered.

“Yeah, you heard me. You have a problem with me leaving Hell then go on! Take that up with the bloody devil,” she said, staring them down, daring them to retaliate. She smirked when she was met with pure, uncomfortable silence, “Except you won’t, will you? Because you don’t actually give two fucks about me. Just like I said, if you did then you would have chased me up a long time ago. Quite frankly, I think you must have been glad to have me out of your hair,” she sighed, half sad, half amused when they couldn’t even meet her eye. She paused for a moment, wondering how far she could push this, before asking, “You know what I think is really going on here? I think the pair of you are feeling a bit bruised after the absolute shitshow that was Armageddon last year, which, by the way, fucking hilarious. I think your egos are feeling a little sore after a literal child stopped you from ending the world, so you’re thinking ‘hmm, what would be an easy win so that we don’t feel like total shit? Oh yeah, what about that demon who ran away all that time ago? That should be easy to sort out.’. Well, love to disappoint, but you’re not getting me that easily, especially when not a single one of us actually wants me back, and Sandalphon, take one more step further I swear I will dropkick you back to Heaven,” she snapped, glaring at the angel who had been menacingly inching closer while she had been talking. He reluctantly stepped back alongside Gabriel, looking a little more than miffed that his plan hadn’t worked out. “You really want me back? Get your bosses to talk to me because I don’t actually see why it’s any of your business. No middle men. Just God, Satan and me. I’ll see what they have to say about all this. Questions?” she asked, tone snapping from one extreme to another, almost as if she had just been possessed.

Gabriel stared at her, mouth gaping like a fish, “You can’t just boss us around like that.”

“What? Like how you bossed us around all those years?” she replied without missing a beat, real rage, real danger seeping into her voice now, “I think we’re done here.”

“But-”

“I said, I think we’re done here,” she said, leaving no room for arguments. She gestured to the sorry excuse for a room around them, “Now, if you wouldn’t mind cleaning this up.”

“Why can’t you do it? You can miracle things too,” Gabriel said, desperate for any kind of leverage over Eloise.

“You’re right, I could, but I didn’t make this mess, and I personally believe that you should face the consequences of your actions, Gabriel,” she said pointedly, watching as he visibly gulped. In a matter of seconds, the room was restored to its original state and Eloise was left alone in the room, no indicators that she was ever with any other people remaining.

She sighed and all but collapsed into a chair that may or may not have existed a few moments ago, confident façade shattered completely. She breathed heavily in exhaustion, as if she’d just run a marathon; she supposed she had just run a mental one. Her emotions were bugging her to no end. It was strange. She wasn’t scared, per se. There was very little that Gabriel or Beelzebub could do to her that would frighten her anymore. She tried her best to compose herself, writing off the tsunami inside her mind as just plain old adrenaline, before calling out, “You can come in now. I know you guys are outside, it’s okay, you can come in.”

Crowley and Aziraphale walked into the room, one looking considerably more sheepish than the other. Aziraphale perched awkwardly on the freshly reconstructed bed, “We’re sorry–”

“No, you’re not.”

“No, we’re not.”

Eloise and Crowley exchanged a glance, amused looks on both of their faces while Aziraphale simply looked distressed. Eloise turned back to him and smiled sympathetically, “I told you, it’s fine. I would have done the same,” she admitted, looking away before collecting herself once again, “So, I’m guessing you have a lot of questions–”

“That’s the understatement of the century,” Crowley muttered as he took a seat beside Aziraphale, although it was a very loose definition of ‘taking a seat’.

Aziraphale glared at him while Eloise just sighed and reluctantly said, “I think it might be better if I just show you.”

Crowley cocked his head in confusion, “Show us what?”

She brought her chair closer to the edge of the bed and put out her hands, “Take my hands. Brace yourselves.”

Mariel was standing before a crowd of angels, dozens upon dozens of disgusted faces staring right at her. She couldn’t quite remember getting there. She had been in the pitch-dark holding cell and the next thing she knew, she was here. Blinding white light surrounded them, harshly illuminating her vulnerabilities before all of Heaven. She tried her best to keep her chin up even though she absolutely hated the fact that they could see the bruises from when she had been arrested that were now blooming on her face. She frowned as she noticed the lack of measures preventing her from escaping. All that was keeping her there was Gabriel’s presence at her side, cold violet eyes pointedly ignoring her. He really was an arrogant bastard for assuming that she wouldn’t even try to make a run for it. Just because he was right this one time, it didn’t mean that he shouldn’t have come prepared. Mariel sighed and looked up at the angels staring down at her. Michael was sat higher than everyone in the centre of the crowd, face void of all emotion as she said, “The Principality Mariel. You’re on trial today for betraying the will of the Almighty, rebelling against all that is good and light in the universe...”

Mariel blocked the rest of her pretentious speech out as she droned on about all the awful things she’d supposedly done to deserve this. It was all lies anyway. She knew the real reason she was here. There were a few things that stood out to her despite it all, things that nearly made her laugh. She’d known that they’d needed to conjure up some reasons for condemning her, but this was just ridiculous. Gabriel really had gone to extraordinary yet desperate lengths to slander her in her final moments in this Someone-forsaken place. She was surprised that the angels gathered to watch her downfall believed a word of this. She tried her best not to resent them, though. It wasn’t like they had anything better to believe in. Especially considering the amused smirk that had crept its way onto her face.

She returns to reality just in time to hear Michael ask, “What do you have to say to defend yourself?”

“I’ve done nothing I need to defend,” she said firmly, leaving no room for argument.

“Don’t make this worse for yourself than it already is,” Gabriel muttered dangerously from where he stood beside her.

Mariel turned to look at him in disbelief. “How the fuck could this get any worse, Gabriel?” she hissed, fury flaring up in her eyes.

He just looked back at her condescendingly, “Do you really need me to answer that?”

She pointedly refused to reply, turning back to face Michael, determined to ignore him.

The next part goes past in a blur for Mariel. Michael speaks again, though she doesn’t listen. Then suddenly there are shouts of anger, screams of rage, coming from the gathered crowd. They spit with venom as they hurl insults at her. She doesn’t hear a word. It’s as though her head is under water, completely submerged in the stone cold anger that seeps through her body, and suddenly Mariel is drowning in the realisation that this is really happening, oh God this is really happening.

Why? Why is this happening to me? You listening, God? Look me in the eye and tell me why this is happening.

She doesn’t get an answer, and though she wasn’t expecting one, it still hurts. Because she knows that she’ll never get an answer from Her again now.

Eventually she feels a tug on her arm from where Gabriel has been standing, dragging her away from the crowd and out her of current state of mind. She could feel her senses coming back to her as she stumbled backwards, but everything was crashing down on her too quickly, too harshly. She did her best to shove the rising panic as deep down insider her as she could. There was no way she would let anyone here see her in that state. She couldn’t let them think they’d won.

She didn’t even realise she had reached the edge of the ground she was standing on, the edge of Heaven itself, Gabriel no longer grabbing her arm. She nearly found herself peering over the edge, but stopped herself before she could lean too far. It may have helped her in the past but now was not the time to give in to her curiosity. And she didn’t trust Gabriel to not push her the moment he had the chance. She turned her head to glare fiercely at him, piercing holes in his very soul. She could slowly feel her anxiety being replaced by cool rage as she found herself saying, “Any institution that tries to silence anyone who opposes them is inherently corrupt.” She stared knowingly at his discomfort as he forced himself to face her. He knew what she meant by that. He knew.

He took a second to compose himself before practically scoffing in her face, “Don’t preach at me.”

Mariel cocked her head as she studied him. She watched as his eyes subconsciously flicked back to the crowd, to the other Archangels. He blatantly wanted nothing more than to re-join his fellow angels, the only beings who understood why he was doing what he was doing, or were at least supposed to understand anyway. Somehow she doubted they were all as cold-hearted and self-absorbed as the angel in front of her. She considered him for a moment before saying simply, “Your quest for power will kill you in the end.”

He furrowed his brows in somewhat amused confusion, “Is that a threat?”

“No. It’s the truth,” she blinked at him before leaning in and murmuring in his ear, “It will be your downfall.”

“The only one who’s going to Fall around here is you,” he said dangerously. Mariel leaned back and watched the lethal glimmer in his eye wither and die under the intensity of her gaze.

She just smiled. “We’ll see.” She let herself look at him for a moment longer before blinking away the tears and cautiously taking a small step backwards. She could feel where the ground ended beneath her feet and was sure not to step any further. She took one last look of the place she once called home, embracing how it felt for the last time though she knew she wouldn’t miss it.

She closed her eyes for a moment and fell back.

Mariel was Falling. That bit she knew, but much more than that? Everything was happening too fast for her to notice. And yet, it was as if she was existing in slow-motion. She worried for a moment that this was, in fact, her fate; doomed to remain in a perpetual state of limbo, of Falling, for all eternity. The only thing telling her otherwise was the view of Heaven above her, which she realised only too late was slowly shrinking into nothing. Mariel found herself reaching her own arms out, grasping for Heaven. They were opposite ends of a magnet being roughly pulled away from each other by an invisible force.

You hear that God? Why me? What did I ever do to deserve this? And don’t you dare tell me it’s all part of your plan because right now, the only thing I want is to be back where I should be and I can’t even have that.

She pulled herself out of her mind and back into reality; she’d have plenty of time in Hell to yell at a God who’d never listen, let alone answer. She only just started to register her surroundings, the fact that she was actually Falling, who knows how far and for how long, tumbling through the air at an unimaginable speed, plummeting towards a place that could be anything from seconds to hours away. The deafening wind that screamed in her ears, drowning out the screams which may have been coming from her mouth or her mind, who was she to say? Air whipped around her body, icier and more painful than any words that could ever be uttered by the angels above her. It wasn’t until she could no longer see any hint of Heaven on the horizon that she started to feel the tears finally fall, trickling down her face and floating slightly due to the force of the Fall.

Then suddenly it came. She felt it in the very tips of her wings first, a strange tingling sensation, as though hundreds and then thousands of pins were skirting the edges of her corporeal being. It spread over the rest of her wings, and then her body, at a faster pace than she could keep track of until her whole being felt as though it was burning. The pain grew, and it grew, and it grew, and she didn’t think she could physically take any more pain when she looked up in horror at her own freshly blackened wings. Her beautiful, holy wings which had once been the softest, purest white, were now stained with evil and ash. For the first time since she started Falling, however long ago that might have been, she let out a choked sob that racked through her whole body and through the ever-changing air around her. Nobody heard her cries. Nobody heard her screams as the searing pain in her chest grew stronger. She couldn’t even begin to work out whether it was physical or emotional but it was there and it burned a hole, a gaping wound, through her soul, leaving a scar fated to never heal and to forever haunt her-

Eloise was crying. She’d tried so hard to prevent the steady streams that were now running down her cheeks, but that was a memory that she’d never wanted to relive. She looked upwards for a moment, trying to regain control of her emotions and her breathing, before peeling her hands away from the two sat in front of her. She roughly wiped the tears from her face, and suddenly the only thing telling you she had been crying were the bloodshot eyes that Crowley tried to ignore as he said bluntly, “I’m still confused.”

“Crowley, give her a minute,” Aziraphale chastised him, furrowing his brows at the demon before he turned back to Eloise with kind eyes and a kinder heart, “Are you alright, my dear?”

She nodded without much hesitation, “I’m fine, it’s okay.” She certainly wasn’t fine, nor was it okay, but the last thing she wanted was to have to deal with her feelings in front of two people she was trying her best not to scare off. She looked back at Crowley, eyebrows raised in curiosity.

He looked at her in understanding, for if anyone knew her thought process in that moment, it was him. “Right, so you Fell and became a demon. Then what?”

“Well, you know what Hell’s like,” she started, looking pointedly at Crowley. She waited for him to nod before continuing, “Not my scene at all. I just point-blank refused to do anything they asked of me. Naturally they didn’t like that much. Eventually I was called in to see Satan about it. I remember thinking, ‘well, that’s that then. Terrible knowing you all.’, because I didn’t think I was going to survive that. Turns out he was just annoyed that I was being a bloody nuisance to everyone else, but he was too amused to really do anything about it, so he basically just told me to piss off. Leave Hell, don’t come back, and I won’t tell anyone where you’ve gone or that you’re even alive. Not exactly a deal I could refuse, so I left, came to Earth, been here ever since. I think everyone just assumed he’d killed me,” she shrugged as if she hadn’t just destroyed the whole idea of eternal damnation with just a few sentences. She smiled to herself as they gaped at her for a moment, though she doubted they realised they were doing it.

Crowley somehow managed to gather his senses quick enough to hold up a hand and say, “Wait, but when you were talking to Gabriel and Beelzebub and that lot, you said they had six thousand years to check up on you. Why would you say that if they thought you were dead?” He narrowed his eyes at her. He wasn’t altogether quite sure why he seemed to be so keen on finding any gaps in her story, but he needed to be able to trust that she was telling the truth. Or at least that’s what he told himself.

Aziraphale’s eyes lit up with understanding. “Yes, and they didn’t exactly seem surprised to see you alive.”

Eloise grinned. You two are gonna be fun, I can tell. “You’re both very observant, I have to give you credit for that.” She paused in thought for a second before starting carefully, “You see, the trouble with me is that I’m not really one for keeping a low profile. I’m too noisy, so to speak, and I don’t even realise it most of the time. This demon I hadn’t exactly been the nicest to back in Hell saw me in Babylon, gosh, it must have been eighteen thirty something BC? Anyways, he ratted me out to Beelzebub who must have told Gabriel all about it. I had about a decade of this bloody demon trying to discorporate me just to see if it would force me to go back to Hell, then one day he just stopped, and I never saw him again. Beelzebub probably told him to piss off.”

They were both quiet again for a little while. Eloise didn’t even think to say anything. It might be a rare occasion, but she did know when to keep her mouth shut when it mattered. She could see the cogs turning in their heads as if it was projected in the air above them. Eventually Crowley murmured, “I didn’t even know you could do that, you know, leave.”

She shook her head with a strange kind of sympathy that came from recognising an experience you had far too long ago, “Neither did I. It stills shocks me sometimes if I think about it too much.”

A few seconds passed before Crowley cleared his throat abruptly and said, “They called you Mariel. I thought you said your name was Eloise.”

She hesitated before answering. She knew exactly what he was doing, she’d been doing it for the whole of their conversation thus far, but just because she tended to bury her emotions, it didn’t mean that she liked it when others did it. She decided to ignore the hypocrisy of that thought, how ironic, she thought to herself, and instead explained, “It is. Mariel was my angel name. You know how it is,” she looked pointedly at Crowley again, hoping that Aziraphale would be able to put the pieces together. She didn’t actually know how much he knew about what it was like to Fall and become a demon.

“Oh, so is Eloise your demon name?” Aziraphale asked politely.

“No,” she said curtly, instantly feeling guilty when she saw the hurt that flashed over Aziraphale’s face. She grimaced and explained in a gentler tone, “I chose it for myself when I came to Earth. Hell tried to change my name after I Fell but I just refused.” She studied him for a second, watching his eyes dart about, before saying, “You want to ask something, I can tell. What is it?”

He looked a little startled at being caught out, momentarily glancing at Crowley for support, probably subconsciously, Eloise noted with a smile. “I, well, I couldn’t help but notice that you mentioned Armageddon. Back when you were speaking with, um, well, you know. H-how did you know about that?”

“I might have been there.” The words rushed out of her mouth in a much less casual manner than what she’d been aiming for, coming out in a sort of jumbled heap that took Crowley and Aziraphale a moment to decipher.

Crowley, the poor sod, could only think to lean forward and ask a simple, “You what?”

She jumped to defend herself, wanting to avoid the onslaught of questions if she could, “Not actually at the airbase, but I was in the area. I was living in Tadfield at the time.”

Aziraphale narrowed his eyes, although the hint of a smirk on his face told her it was more in amusement than suspicion, “How did you know it was at the airbase?”

Eloise couldn’t help but chuckle to herself because of course, they’d notice her choice of words, “I knew Adam and his mates. I ran an ice cream shop, would you believe it. He came and told me all about it the day after,” she smiled fondly before suddenly coming alive with excitement, “That’s actually how I found out about you two. That’s why I’m here. Because I thought I was the only one trying to stop the world ending, but apparently I wasn’t. I had to see for myself.”

A moment passed before Aziraphale asked quietly, “You were trying to stop it?”

Eloise, not noticing the newly subdued atmosphere, launched herself into a painfully over-enthusiastic explanation, “Yeah, it was quite clever really, if I do say so myself. I made sure Adam was swapped with the American baby in the hopes that he would have a human enough upbringing to perhaps change things. Seems to have worked,” she shrugged, before finally taking in the two shocked faces that were staring back at her. Her brows furrowed and her face fell as she asked, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You switched the babies?” Crowley asked blankly, although it came out as more of a statement than a question.

Her face screwed up as she tried to work out how best to explain herself. “Well, I say switched, it was more of a ‘made sure the demon dropping the antichrist off went to the wrong delivery room’ kind of thing. Feel sorry for the poor sod who had to deal with that but needs must.”

Crowley blinked at her and said bluntly, “I was the poor sod who had to deal with that.”

Eloise looked at him for a moment as about five different jigsaw pieces finally clicked in her head, before she threw her head back in realisation, “Oh shit, so you were. I knew your name sounded familiar.”

“You bastard, we spent six years raising the wrong child because of you!” he exclaimed, wagging his finger at her and jumping off of the bed at one point before Aziraphale tugged him back down. Eloise didn’t know whether to laugh or run for her life, for the menace in his words was betrayed by the disbelieving laugh in his voice.

“I’m sorry, you did what now?” she asked, only just processing what he’d just said, and she couldn’t help the laugh that escaped her lips at his dramatic antics. She knew not to push it when Aziraphale just lifted a finger and pursed his lips with the look of someone who’d rather never bring up said event again.

“Oh bloody heaven, I can’t believe this,” Crowley shook his head, chuckling to himself. Although part of him resented it, he couldn’t help but look at Eloise differently now as they laughed like little kids together. Maybe it was the fact that she seemed so much more like them now, so much more human. Or maybe it was the fact that she had been trying to stop the apocalypse and all the implications that came with the fact. Suddenly he just wanted to know more about her, but he quickly silenced that thought. One thing at a time.

She raised her shoulders with a confused look on her face, giggling as she said, “Sorry? Well, I didn’t know, did I?”

They locked eyes for a moment before bursting into laughter again at the sheer absurdity of it all, leaving Aziraphale slightly bewildered and more than slightly exasperated at the pair. It took them a few moments to finally calm down but once they did, Crowley sobered his tone of voice as he asked, “Right, back to what happened before we came in. Anything we need to keep an eye out for?”

Though he didn’t say it, Eloise could see the unasked question in his eyes. Are we safe? She smiled softly, “Nah, you two’ll be fine. Basically I told them if they want to talk to me, then they need to get their bosses involved, and somehow I highly doubt God and Satan are gonna pop down for a friendly chat any time soon. Even then, you two should be fine. I don’t think any of that lot clocked on that you were here.”

Crowley nodded in understanding, and it didn’t escape Eloise’s attention how the remaining dregs of tension visibly dissipated from both of their bodies. Aziraphale and Crowley looked at each other for a moment, the relief palpable from the pair of them. Eloise averted her eyes, giving them the privacy that they didn’t necessarily need but probably did want. She allowed herself a moment to ponder their relationship. They were very in tune with each other, very in sync, that much was obvious. Are they in love? The question sounded ridiculous the moment she thought it. Of course they are, look at them. She’d seen that look time and time again over the millennia. Although when she thought about the way they looked at each other further, that lead to another question. Do they know? The hint of yearning in their eyes was subtle but it was there. No, absolutely not. They’re too comfortable with each other. They’re a unit, that much she could tell. A unit that might not want to be disturbed.

Oh dear.

She looked back up at them hesitantly, unsure of what to say for the first time that evening. Eventually she said, “I’d better go. I think I’ve outstayed my welcome.”

Crowley frowned. Hadn’t she said she’d been travelling for a while? “You got somewhere to stay?”

Eloise paused. She’d definitely not been expecting that response. “Not yet. There is a flat I was going to rent but the people haven’t moved out yet because of the lockdown and it seems rude to miracle them away. I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

“Stay here,” Crowley said almost instantly, then pulled a face of confusion at how quickly he replied, “I mean, only if you want to.”

Eloise blinked at that. Surely, they wouldn’t want her there? What reason could they possibly have to want her there? “Wait, are you sure? I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

Crowley just shrugged, “It’s not a problem. What are your options anyway? No hotels are open, and you can’t stay with anyone.”

“Only if you’re sure,” she murmured, still wary for a reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She glanced at Aziraphale for confirmation; it was his bookshop after all.

He nodded firmly, “Of course. I’ve been told the sofa is remarkably comfy,” he added with a twinkle in his eye, to which she grinned broadly.

A short while and a few miracles later, the sofa downstairs had become a makeshift bed that was significantly larger and softer than it had remembered it being. Eloise was currently settled on it; all it had taken was ten minutes for her to completely crash out. Aziraphale and Crowley had left her in peace with a chuckle, heading up to the bedroom they shared (that wasn’t out of choice, mind you. Simply because there was only one bedroom in the bookshop. No other reason.) One slightly confused item of furniture aside, all seemed to be well in the bookshop.

Upstairs in the bedroom, an angel and a demon were sitting in the same bed. Neither of them had thought to turn off the lights, so they were sat in thick silence in the bedroom. Aziraphale didn’t usually come up to bed, not as used to sleeping as Crowley was, instead opting to read the night away downstairs. However this seemed impolite considering their new guest, so he’d come up with Crowley. And while Crowley was mulling this over he finally stumbled upon why he felt so uneasy.

Aziraphale hadn’t brought a book up with him.

As bizarre a concern as that may seem, Crowley could always trust Aziraphale to bring a book up to bed with him on the rare occasion he came up at night. That was one of the things he lo- liked about him. Liked. He looked at Aziraphale curiously, noting the slight frown on his face as he stared into space. How deep in his head must he have been to forget a book? “You alright, angel?” he asked as softly as he could so as to not startle him.

He looked at Crowley with wide eyes that darted away almost instantly as he started to play with his hands in his lap, “Yes, my dear, I’m fine. I just realised something, is all.”

Crowley cocked his head in interest, “Oh really? What was it?”

He was silent for a little while before saying in a voice no louder than a whisper, “I think I was there when she Fell.”

Crowley felt his eyebrows raise in shock, looking away for a second to try and compose himself. “Right. Well, that’s a thing.”

“Quite.”

He furrowed his brows as he tried to make sense of what this meant now, “And was she telling the truth? Did all that actually happen?”

“Yes. I remember it perfectly well. Clear as day,” he managed to choke out with a forced smile before going back to his routine fidgeting.

Crowley laid a gentle hand on top of Aziraphale’s, stopping what he was doing and getting him to actually look him in the eye for longer than a second. “You sure you’re alright?”

“I am quite well. Don’t fret,” he said, and despite Crowley’s concern, he couldn’t pretend that the smile on Aziraphale’s face wasn’t genuine, however small it may have been.

He reluctantly let it go, changing the subject quickly, “You alright with her staying here? I know it just sort of happened.”

The smile on his face only grew, much to Crowley’s surprise, “It’s alright. After all, wasn’t it you who said we’re on our own side now? I think she’s the first person we’ve met who might understand what that means.”

Crowley tried not to think too much about the fact that Aziraphale had actually listened to him when he’d said that, let alone remembered it, instead opting for a casual, “Yeah, I suppose so. Right, I’m gonna get some sleep. I, um, yeah,” he stammered out awkwardly, cursing his brain for not thinking of literally any other decent response.

Aziraphale simply smiled fondly at him, “Indeed. Goodnight, my dear.”

*************

Hello my love,

At the time of writing this, I do not know what the future holds. For me it’s an uncertain, unstoppable force, and it’s not one I think I can fend off for much longer. I’ve tried, please believe that I’ve tried. I’ve tried for your sake to prevent the inevitable. But it’s coming. I can feel it. It won’t be long now, I don’t think.

If you’re reading this, it means I was right, and I have Fallen. I know you’re probably confused and scared and that there is a biting anger bubbling inside you. I wish I could tell you why this is happening. I wish I could tell you that this is all a huge misunderstanding that will be resolved soon.

I wish I could tell you I love you one more time.

But I can’t. There are many things I can’t do now, and it’ll do me no good to dwell on this any longer than I have to. To survive we must focus on what we can do, and that’s exactly what I’m asking you to do.

If I know myself as well as I think I do, there are many things I would have liked to have said to you upon our final farewell, but didn’t because I wanted to make sure you were alright. Don’t feel guilty about this, my love. Think of it as my last debt to you being repaid.

I have a plan. Well, it’s more of an idea, and it might not work. And it’s because of this that I shan’t tell you exactly what it is. It seems cruel to allow you to hope for something that might never come into fruition. But please put your faith in me, and in our love, for we will prevail. One way or another.

I hope that you didn’t wait to read this letter because you were scared of its contents, though I’m sure this isn’t the case. You were always brave. It was always something I loved about you. Your quiet, beautiful, roaring courage in the face of such turmoil and anguish. You always had the courage to be kind and to love with all your being, even when everything was against you. No one would have blamed you if you had turned cold and bitter, and yet you chose not to. I admire you for it every day. My idea, should it work, will require us both to be incredibly brave. But more on that another day. It’s that bravery and that strength that you will need to rely on now. That, and the thought of me. Though I may not physically be with you, but I hope that my love’s own soul is enough.

I won’t sign off this letter, because this is not where our story ends. There is much left to be written. And I need you to remember that each day we are parted. Until the next time, my love.

[blaperile]

Homestuck From The Perspective Of - UPDATED FOR HOMESTUCK EPILOGUES

What does Homestuck look like from the perspective of its many characters?

It’s a question I asked myself a couple of years ago, and decided to try and answer.

I went through the entirety of Homestuck, the canonical Paradox Space stories (written by Andrew Hussie himself), and the snaps, and wrote down for every character each page in which they appeared.

Then I determined the total numbers, and created a full ranking, ordered from highest amount of pages to lowest amount of pages and published this.

Afterwards, I started publishing “adventures” on Mspfanventures for multiple characters, to demonstrate exactly what Homestuck would look like from their perspective.

Now, I’ve got a few updates for you:

1) I’ve gone through the Homestuck Epilogues, and done the same thing as I did BEFORE for Homestuck itself, PXS and the snaps!

This list has now been updated with the new totals, after counting all characters’ appearances in the Homestuck Epilogues.

Furthermore, the “adventures” I had already created for characters, have now also been updated to be up-to-date with the Homestuck Epilogues!

To be specific, the following adventures have been updated (because they’re the only ones of those 17 characters who appeared in the Epilogues):

- Be Caliborn

- Be Aradia Megido

- Be Davesprite

- Be Game Over Tavros Nitram

2) I’ve decided to update my terminology for distinguishing all those different versions of characters.

Previously, I used words like R0, R1, R2, R3 and R4 which I came up with to differentiate the multiple realities created by John’s retcons.

Now that the Meat Epilogue basically officially labeled the pre-retcon reality as the “Game Over timeline”, I decided to use that name for all characters originating from that, unaffected by retcons, reality.

Similarly, I decided to give more “user friendly” names to those other realities as well, to hopefully make it immediately clear exactly which versions of the characters I’m talking about.

Just in case certain things aren’t clear yet, there’s an entire legend at the top of the list to explain my terminology.

3) Homestuck^2 is not taken into account in these totals yet. But these totals will be updated for Homestuck^2 in the near future.

That’s the most important news I wanted to give you.

Other than that, for anyone interested, I’d like to explain my reasoning for how I counted the total amount of pages for characters in the Homestuck Epilogues.

I decided to count each separate block of narration or dialogue as its own “page”.

Why did I do it this way, and didn’t count... well, each PAGE of the Epilogue as one page per character?

Well, I have a couple of reasons for doing this:

1) I went for consistency with the rest of Homestuck, where every page also always contains JUST narration or JUST dialogue, never both at the same time.

2) An average Epilogue page is FAR longer than an average Homestuck page. Setting an Epilogue page equal to a Homestuck page gives a completely twisted view on how much focus there actually is on a particular character.

3) I went for (pre-emptive) consistency with (what I’ve read so far of) Homestuck^2.

And I don’t mean it in the sense of counting dialog and narration as separate pages, because Homestuck^2 does still occasionally contain both dialog and narration on the same page.

What I DO mean, if you check the Homestuck Epilogues log page, you’ll see each “page” is actually defined as a chapter.

Meanwhile, Homestuck^2 ALSO uses the terminology of chapters, where it’s used to group its many pages in separate blocks.

I think it’s better to consider both the Epilogue and Homestuck^2 chapters rather as “scenes”, like in a movie or tv series. Or the updates in Homestuck, in the serial experience.

They’re a succession of events, actions, narration, dialogue, that for the biggest part focus on a particular group of characters, and are usually followed by a perspective switch afterwards.

Thus, to me it makes more sense to count these as separate “pages” in my total amounts.

For some examples how I implemented this, you can always check out the above links for Aradia, Davesprite and Tavros, and check out the last few pages from their perspective where I detail the events of the Homestuck Epilogues. Or Caliborn, but you’ll have to go a bit further back because the Masterpiece panels are also in there.

A bonus, if I divide the Epilogue chapters into separate pages like this, the total amount of pages per chapter seems to be pretty consistent with the average chapter lengths in Homestuck^2 (that I’ve read so far at least).

So I’m pretty satisfied with this way of doing it.

Are there other ways to count these totals? Definitely, but I had to make a decision and this is the option I preferred.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

Finally, for anyone who read to the end of this post, here’s a little teaser for you. I’d like to reveal that I’m currently working on exploring Homestuck from Meat Kanaya’s perspective! Once this is finished, I’ll make a separate post about it. :)

Stay tuned for further updates!

[theonyxpath]

Our next Kickstarter is for the Legendlore RPG, and starts on this Thursday, March the 12th, at 2pm Eastern US time!

From the Kickstarter:

Legendlore was originally a comic, first published by Arrow Comics in 1986 and since procured by Caliber Comics, about four people who fall through a Crossing into the Realm. The Realm is home to fantasy creatures from elves to dragons, and the characters discover they too have ‘fantasy powers’ – the jock becomes a Fighter, while the bookish one becomes a Wizard, and so on. They go on adventures and some of them eventually find their way back to Earth.

This is the basic premise of the Legendlore RPG. You Cross into the Realm, where you become a hairfoot Bard, or maybe an elven Sorcerer. You can change any characteristics you like. For example if you have hay fever and glasses, you choose if your Legendlore self keeps or drops those. Your identity might not always match your outward physique, but your Legendlore character does. We’ve also updated the 1980s setting so Realmborn characters represent all ethnicities, genders, and sexualities. No one in the Realm will bat an eyelash at your agender panromantic self.

This comes hard on the heels of our fantastic Kickstarter campaign for Hunter: The Vigil 2e, which ended up at over 500% of the funding goal and just a couple of folks away from 2000 backers! Truly, the Vigil was a rewarding one, and we’re thrilled so many folks came along with us on the hunt.

Even though we’re jumping right into the new KS for Legendlore, Hunter 2e‘s campaign left us with a number of Stretch Goal projects to continue with, and, for us, Legendlore is such a different kind of project that creatively it is a nice break in our recent string of Kickstarters in the Chronicles of Darkness and V5 game worlds.

Legendlore will also be our newest game line to use the d20 system for 5e fantasy gaming, along with Scarred Lands and (much-simplified) the Realms of Pugmire, so that also gives us a chance to stretch some system creative muscles we like to keep toned up.

If you’re a fan of D&D, etc. then I think you’ll find a lot of fresh spins you’ll enjoy in how Legendlore treats genre expectations and tropes while still providing a sweeping setting ripe for adventuring in. And if you aren’t so much, I still think you may find value in supporting developer Steffie de Vaan and her creative team’s 2020 take on this multi-decade saga and setting.

Like almost every one of our Kickstarters these days, Legendlore is pretty much finished in the writing stages, and backers will get sections of the finished text during the course of the KS campaign. Steffie is working with at least one Twitch streaming group to create actual play episodes showing how Legendlore plays at an actual gaming table, and we’re really looking forward to airing those (and they’ll be linked on the KS page).

So, anyone interested is going to have multiple chances to check this project out in a way that works for them, as we’ve been working to set up with each of our KSs. And, James Bell, our Kickstarter Concierge will be back for this KS to once again provide information and guidance, as well as his patented affable banter!

V5 Chicago Folio art by Felipe Gaona

Items From Our Monday Meeting:

In no particular order, which is a lot like our meeting style!

DriveThruRPG‘s massive GM’s Day Sale has another week to go, and hoo-boy are there a lot of our PDFs for sale over there! All of our game lines are represented, as well as offerings from the Community Content sites!

This was a Twitter note sent out during our meeting by Eddy Webb:

“Thanks to Justin Achilli, I got to be in a work meeting where we talk about the aesthetics of urine and throwing bears at the moon.”

Which is pretty much true.

Mighty Matt McElroy was scheduled to attend Emerald City convention this coming weekend, but the whole con was postponed due to concerns about the Coronavirus (COVID-19). He’d already had a bunch of meetings cancelled out from under him and was figuring on cancelling, when boop! the convention cancelled instead!

You folks all take care of yourselves out there! We’re a virtual office, so aren’t going to infect each other, and we don’t have anything currently being manufactured in China, so I’m just encouraging all our folks to stay in and work 20 hour days at their computers. (I’m kidding.) (But not really.)

Mirthful Mike Chaney wonders how that’s any different than his usual day, anyway?

They Came From Beneath the Sea! Heroic Land Dwellers art by Brian LeBlanc

We’re still getting folks asking about whether projects that come out as Advance PDFs will be released in PoD versions or if Backer PDFs will be sold to the public, along with PoDs, on DTRPG. First, we’re always glad to answer folks’ questions, and second, yes, our sales strategy has always been to deliver PDFs and PoDs of projects on DTRPG and so we have been releasing them that way for the whole time we’ve been in business.

The only caveats to that are projects we might do like printed Screens offered on Kickstarters, which DTRPG can’t create in PoD form, and recently with the V5 Cults of the Blood Gods Stretch Goal rewards which will only be available in PDF as the V5 managers at Modiphius do not want PoD versions made available.

We’ve scheduled a nice surprise for the backers of Exalted 3rd‘s Dragon-Blooded KS that should put some folks’s concerns to rest about getting their rewards. So keep your eyes open for that, DB backers!

I’m out next Monday, so Dixie Cochran will be in as our guest MMN blogger! Please be nice to her as she wrangles the rusty and arcane controls for this blog, and I’ll talk to you in two weeks about our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

On Thursday, March 12th at 2pm Eastern US Time we start the Kickstarter for Legendlore!

Onyx Path Media!

This Friday the Onyx Pathcast Terrific Trio take a deep dive into Vampire: The Requiem 2e‘s Spilled Blood! Messy, but fun!

As always this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast will be on Podbean or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

We’ve got a stupendous number of shows on Twitch this week! Tune in for V5, Chronicles of Darkness, Scion, Pugmire, Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition, Scarred Lands, MORE Vampire: The Masquerade, Changeling: The Lost, Mage: The Awakening, even more Scarred Lands, Werewolf: The Forsaken and a third Vampire: The Masquerade game! We’ve even got Eddy Webb’s Workshop, which takes you through the development process of our books! Hail Ming!

A big shout-out to our three Vampire: The Masquerade games running this week, which have been running week-in, week-out! You can subscribe to our channel over on twitch.tv/theonyxpath to catch up with any episodes you missed! This Ming’s a psycho.

Come take a look at our YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/theonyxpath, where you can find the following videos uploaded last week alone:

The Onyx Path News: https://youtu.be/zKo1h7bLPE0

Scion: Behind the Screen: https://youtu.be/v9Wo38rl5-Y

Changeling: The Lost – Littlebrook Reunion: https://youtu.be/hxSbemynBLs

Changeling: The Dreaming – The Last Faerie Tale: https://youtu.be/gKAm-zGxTW4

Even more Scion: Behind the Screen: https://youtu.be/QDSIS_ClFbE

A special shout-out to the Scion: Behind the Screen series, which has provided a wonderful entry point for people new to the game! Flying blind on a rocket cycle!

Do subscribe to our channel and click the bell icon if you want to be notified whenever new news videos and uploads come online! Spare me the madness.

In case you missed it last week, the Story Told RPG Podcast continue with their excellent Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition chronicle right here: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/the-78-laments-episode-3-riders-in-the-sky

And back once again, the Story Told‘s review of Trinity Continuum: Aeon http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/episode-40-trinity-continuum-on-overview

Red Moon Roleplaying‘s V5 Cults of the Blood Gods “The Family” chronicle continues on their YouTube channel, Spotify, their website redmoonroleplaying.com and everywhere else good podcasts and New York City girls might be found! https://youtu.be/J1qCIhMPn7Q

Now, the tributes from Ardentia.

Even more shows from Occultists Anonymous for all you Mage: The Awakening fans out there!

Episode 86: Risky Business Wyrd the Seer prepares to found a legacy and shape her soul. Songbird makes contact with the Carthian Movement. Atratus meets with the Phantasm Society who have a daring plan.https://youtu.be/9XWLaxl_B-Y

Episode 87: New Lives Wyrd the Seer pays the price for tying herself to the Rookery. Songbird makes himself useful at the Arrow Armory. Atratus kills Emily Miller.https://youtu.be/ZZklb6-fC7o

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

Update: the devs are working on the updates for the roller in both Android and iOS – here is the rundown from them:

1) Redo the UI for system for android.  It will look the same as the current design.  My goal is to have something ready by Saturday to send out to the Facebook users, asking them if this fixes the issues.  This will be a beta type thing.  This will break several of the fancy dice.

2) If the above worked out and the android users give all the clear, we’ll redo the graphics system to fix the fancy dice that got broken.  We’ll do another android beta through Facebook.  This might take up to two weeks, as my schedule allows.

3) If everything worked well, we’ll release to android for real at that point.

4) Port all of the existing stuff to iOS and release on that.

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero AND Trinity Continuum Core and Trinity Continuum: Aeon are available to order!

The massive GM Day’s Sale continues for another week with huge savings on PDFs from all of our game lines!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/rpg_gmsday.php

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we will be releasing the Advance PDF of Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed for Mage: The Awakening 2e AND the electronic, PDF, and physical book PoD releases of Haunting Shadows: the Wraith20th fiction anthology on DTRPG!

Conventions!

Assuming these conventions are not postponed due to plague, here is our current list:

UKGames Expo: https://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk/

GenCon: https://www.gencon.com/

Tabletop Scotland: https://tabletopscotland.co.uk/

Gamehole Con: https://www.gameholecon.com/

PAX Unplugged: https://unplugged.paxsite.com/

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

RUST (Working Title) (Scarred Lands)

Under Alien Suns (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Mission Statements (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Adversaries of the Righteous (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Novas Worldwide (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Exalted Essence Edition (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Clades Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

The Devoted Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

Saints and Monsters (Scion 2nd Edition)

M20 Rich Bastard’s Guide To Magick (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

Wild Hunt (Scion 2nd Edition)

Redlines

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hundred Devil’s Night Parade (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Assassins (Trinity Continuum Core)

The Book of Endless Death (Mummy: The Curse 2e)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Second Draft

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (They Came From!)

Development

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Manuscript Approval

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Post-Approval Development

Scion LARP Rules (Scion)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Editing

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Buried Bones: Creating in the Realms of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Post-Editing Development

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Indexing

They Came From Beneath the Sea! (They Came From…!)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIKE CHANEY!

In Art Direction

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant – Awaiting replies to pings.

Hunter: The Vigil 2e (KS)

Cults of the Blood God (KS)

Mummy 2 – Starting to contract the rest of it.

City of the Towered Tombs

Let the Streets Run Red – Some finals in.

Deviant

Legendlore (KS) – KS prep of bits.

Technocracy Reloaded (KS)

TC: Aeon Terra Firma – Contracted.

WoD: Ghost Hunters (KS) – Cover in, getting rest of KS art set.

Tales of Aquatic Terror

Pirates Extra Adventure – Loboyko lined up for this one.

Scion Titanomachy – Contacting artists.

In Layout

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad – Ongoing.

Contagion Chronicle – With Josh, interior proof coming.

Vigil Watch – Ongoing.

TCfBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers

TCFBtS! Screen and Booklet

Ex3 Lunars – Yep, pretty much my March right here.

Scion Companion

Proofing

Dark Eras 2 – Sending back to Aileen for errata input.

Trinity Continuum Aeon Jumpstart

Chicago Folio – Creating PoD files.

Pirates of Pugmire – Fixes in, working on cover.

CtL Oak Ash and Thorn – At WW for approvals .

Geist 2e fiction anthology – Backer PDF out to backers for errata.

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 – The Silence of Our Ancestors (Exalted 3rd Edition) – Backer errata being gathered.

Distant Worlds – Errata being gathered.

VtR2 Spilled Blood – Errata being input.

At Press

Geist 2e (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition) – Prepping to go live with PDF/PoD versions on DTRPG a week Wednesday (the 18th).

DR:E – Shipping to backers, PoD files uploaded.

DRE Screen – Shipping to backers.

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties

Memento Mori – PoD proof ordered.

Scion Mythical Denizens – PoD files uploaded.

Wraith20 Anthology – ePub, PDF, physical book versions all live Weds on DTRPG.

MtAw2 Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed – Advance PDF on sale this Weds on DTRPG.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Yesterday was International Women’s Day, and that’s certainly worth celebrating today as well! (Especially since here in the US we lost an hour from yesterday due to the return of our Daylight Savings Time. Typical).

Today, we heard of the death of actor Max von Sydow at 90. The man who played chess with death, acted in just so many roles in mainstream and genre films that I’m not listing them here, and, just for Matthew Dawkins, starred as Ming the Merciless.

[mysterioustransmissions]

My favorite comics of 2017

Keeping with my new tradition of posting this list super late, here, on the last day of 2018, is my best comics of 2017 list. I can offer excuses -- my wife and I remodeled our house and welcomed our first child into the world this year, and I’m also unfailingly lazy -- but 2017 was also a killer year for comics, making this a bit larger of an undertaking than usual. Both Koyama Press and co-publishers Retrofit Comics and Big Planet Comics had absolutely stacked lineups. You’ll see them listed as publisher for many entries below.

I always struggle with how to order this list. I got serious about organizing my comics collection in 2018, and am running into the same problem. There, I’m thinking of dividing it into two -- a single-author section organized by author name (which ends up being mostly minicomics and graphic novels), and a multiple-author section organized by title (which ends up being mostly traditional-sized comics). Here, I’m essentially doing that same thing, but mixing them together; some entries are by title, and some author name.

Comics I especially enjoyed are marked with an *.

Allison, Matthew; Cankor: Calamity of Challenge #2 and #3 (self-published).

Berserker 1, edited by edited by Tom Oldham and Jamie Sutcliffe (Breakdown Press). There was a lot of anticipation and very specific expectations placed on this book ahead of its release, but no one seemed to walk away from the finished product satisfied. But it’s got a killer cover, great production design, and strips by some of the best cartoonists going. I hope Breakdown does another one.

* Booth, Tara; How to be Alive (Retrofit Comics & Big Planet Comics). One of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Booth’s drawings are a riot to look at, that the gags are also great is pure gravy. About as big as crossover hits get in my house. (I.e., my wife also loved it.)

Cardini, William; Tales From the Hyperverse (Retrofit Comics and Big Planet Comics). Cardini’s sci-fi world is made bigger and more engaging by the rapid-fire pace of this short story collection. His wild experimentation with color is always an inspiration.

Corben, Richard; Shadows on the Grave #1 - #8 (Dark Horse Comics). Not my favorite of Corben’s late-period Dark Horse horror books, but there’s plenty to enjoy. I was stunned by the sheer efficiency of the storytelling -- there are entire stories told with a single image and a few word balloons. A lot of these books sport great covers, issue #1 here, seen at the link for this entry, is one of the best.

Darrow, Geoff; The Shaolin Cowboy: Who’ll Stop the Reign? #1 - #4 with Dave Stewart (Dark Horse Comics). I was so bowled over by the experience of buying Shemp Buffet monthly that I initially scoffed at Cowboy’s return to more traditional narrative, but it turned out to be no less wild and no loss at all.

Davis, Eleanor; Libby’s Dad (Retrofit Comics & Big Planet Comics) and You & a Bike & a Road (Koyama Press). You & a Bike & a Road does something that’s often attempted and rarely successful -- it beats the audience down so it can then lift them up higher. Its success is due in no small part from its origin as a real-life journal. The visceral and emotional pain Davis feels on her journey is sincerely felt, and the lack of cynicism the storytelling choices are made with allow the reader to feel it whole cloth. And listen; it certainly doesn’t hurt that Davis is an amazing narrative storyteller besides -- Libby’s Dad is no less affecting.

DeForge, Michael; mini kuš! #43 'Meat Locker' (kuš!). I sleep on DeForge. I take him for granted. I feel like I’m not the only one? I see some excitement when his books come out, but no discussion. Blame it on the high volume and opaque nature of his work, the dearth of comics reviewers, and me, obviously. Also obviously, whenever something of his does find its way to my hands, I’m never sorry.

Estrada, Inés; Alienation #3 - #6 (self-published). The bundled version of this series, seen at the link for this entry, has the coolest book packaging I’ve ever seen in my life.

Expansion by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward (AdHouse Books). I didn’t like this nearly as much as this same team’s previous Ancestor (due no doubt to its earlier and improvised creation), but damn, what a cover.

* Forsman, Chuck; Slasher #1 - #4 (Floating World Comics). I’d say the majority of my interest in Forsman’s work is in seeing how he presents his it and steers his career -- he’s among the best there is at that. Slasher is his first work I strongly connected with. It digs deep and gets wilder and wilder.

Ferrick, Margot; Yours (2dcloud). I’m a simpleton, so I was surprised at how deeply I was able to be moved by something this abstract. As always, grabbing 2dcloud’s whole line on Kickstarter expands my horizons and makes me a better reader.

Foster-Dimino, Sophia; Sex Fantasy (Koyama Press). I’ve actually only read the minis of this. This collection has the one I’m missing, plus some new material, but I love Sex Fantasy. It’s like a perpetual motion machine for thought -- you can just think about it forever.

Fricas, Katie; Art Fan (self-published). One of those things you dream of happening at a show -- picked this up at MICE not knowing anything about it, and was delighted by the artwork and knocked out by the “reviews of trippy art events”; particularly the first, about Duke Riley’s Fly by Night.

* Friebert, Noel; WEIRD6 (self-published), SPINE: I’ll Still Watch (Bred Press), Old Ground (Koyama Press). Sometimes when I have a fever, I can’t break loose of a single, circular thought -- I have the same thought over and over, only to realize once the fever’s broken that it was barely coherent. Friebert’s newer, decompressed work is like that. You turn page after page, and nothing happens. It’s the same characters still doing and saying the same things, again and again. You turn the pages faster and faster, almost in a panic, hoping to break the cycle and resolve the unease before you. But it’s no use.

* gg; I’m Not Here (Koyama Press), Valley (kuš!). I’m Not Here is one of a few books I recommended to people who were enjoying season 3 of Twin Peaks at the time. It doesn’t convey information so much as emotion, and rewards as much thought as you want to put into it.

* Hankiewicz, John; Education (Fantagraphics Books). I loved this so much I only read a few pages a night to make it last. Michael DeForge once called Noel Freibert an “astronaut” -- that applies to Hankiewicz also. No one’s ever done anything like this before, and if we didn’t have Hankiewicz I don’t think anyone ever would. Bringing poetry and modern dance (!!) into the language of comics, this was another book I recommended to watchers of season 3 of Twin Peaks -- you don’t understand the story by connecting facts, you understand it by connecting emotions.

* Hanselmann, Simon; Portrait, XMP-165 (self-published). XMP-165 was the first big payoff of the longform nature of Megg and Mogg, and it destroyed me. Also released this year was Doujinshi, Cold Cube Press’ gorgeous re-release of a Japanese Megg and Mogg fan comic.

Harkam, Sammy; Crickets #6 (The Commonwealth Comics Company). People talk about how good this book is, and I agree, but I’m not sure I could tell you why.

Haven, Eric; Vague Tales (Fantagraphics Books).

Hernandez, Gilbert and Jaime ; Love & Rockets Vol. IV #2, #3 (Fantagraphics). I made the terrible error after Love Bunglers to trade wait Locas, and for whatever reason they haven’t released one since. So I was way behind when this started coming out, but I bought and read it anyway. I initially found the story to be light, but I eventually realized I had a free ComiXology trial and caught up. It’s as great as ever.

Ito, Junji; Dissolving Classroom (Vertical, Inc.), Shiver: Junji Ito Selected Stories, and Tomie: Complete Deluxe Edition (Viz Media). Tomie may have come out in 2016 actually? I describe it to people as being about a beautiful woman who stands around until some total lech of a man inevitably murders her, then she comes back and annihilates him in the most unpleasant manner possible. Repeat ad infinitum. I don’t think the text 100% supports my reading, but that’s what it means to me.

Landry, Tyler; Shit and Piss (Retrofit Comics). The ephemeral, disjointed nature the single issue format served this story better, but it’s still extremely rad.

Loup, Celine; The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs (self-published).

Marcus, Ben; Crisis Zone 3rd Edition (Bred Press).

Mignolaverse and John Arcudi; Dead Inside #3 by Arcudi, Toni Fejzula, and Andre May, Lobster Johnson: The Pirate’s Ghost #1 - #3 by Arcudi and Tonci Zonjic, Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea by Gary Gianni, Mike Mignola, and Dave Stewart (Dark Horse Comics). Ignoring a few years in college when I was a lapsed comics reader, I’ve bought every Mignolaverse comic since I was about 13. That loyalty has slowly eroded over the last half decade about. I’m not alone in thinking the Arcudi-Davis run is one of the greatest of all time, and that the books started to go downhill after Guy Davis left. Beyond the departure of Davis, there are a few reasons for that, in my view.

First was the decision soon after to expand the line’s offerings. Doubling the line’s output and bringing in (inevitably) inferior creative teams was a no-win proposition for readers. Who wants more of something not as good?

Second, I think that Arcudi, a great writer, has shifted his focus from tightly-plotted five issue arcs to series-spanning character arcs. While I’m guessing this reads great in big chunks, it doesn’t spread out month to month, some months out of the year. I’m looking forward to a big re-read of everything after B.P.R.D. wraps in a few months, to see if this theory holds. Lobster Johnson: The Pirate’s Ghost came close to standing on its own, but was still rife with moments that I can only assume were big character payoffs because I didn’t remember enough to know. (Especially cool covers by Zonjic on these issues.) However, the non-Mignolaverse title Dead Inside offered the type of visceral, plot-based payoff his B.P.R.D. run with Davis hooked me with. I hadn’t been this thrilled by an Arcudi book since Killing Ground.

But third, and worst of all, has been the addition of writer Chris Roberson, whose books read like updates to the Mignolaverse Wiki. (The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed was okay, but pretty much solely due to Paul Grist’s fun art and layouts.)

I’m staying aboard the main B.P.R.D. book as it races to the finish line, and will continue to buy anything Arcudi writes, which seems to be mostly these Lobster Johnson comics. (Although even that’s looking increasingly, and sadly, unlikely to continue: https://twitter.com/ArcudiJohn/status/1075086925436874753) And I’ll certainly buy any more of these very sporadically-released Hellboy OGNs, like Into the Silent Sea, they decide to release -- the only real non-Mignola drawn Hellboy books anymore.

* Milburn, Lane; CORRIDORS (self-published). Sits comfortably next to Inflated Head Zone by Zach Hazard Vaupen, one of my favorite comics. They both forsake straightforward narrative in favor of theme-driven emotional impressionism, and do it with horror. This is catnip to me, and something I aspire to (although I’m far too boring to achieve it).

* Mirror Mirror II, edited by Sean T. Collins and Julia Gfrörer (2dcloud).

Now: The New Comics Anthology #1, edited by Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics Books).

* Providence #12 by Jacen Burrows, Juan Rodriguez, and Alan Moore (Avatar Press). It came out months after, but it’s a safe bet Moore wrote this before Trump got elected, right? A more accurate depiction of the shell-shock of being thrust into a post-facts world I haven’t seen.

Roberts, Keiler; Sunburning (Koyama Press). Another big crossover hit in my house.

* Shiga, Jason; Demon Volumes 2, 3, and 4 (First Second). Demon became a book I wouldn’t stop showing to anyone who would listen. Like Gina Wynbrandt’s Someone Please Have Sex With Me, its hook transcends the normal comics reading audience -- you can show it to anyone and they get it right away. Specifically I would show people this amazing video https://youtu.be/NRxCTeM5pyU, which would clue them into what Shiga does enough to get them to read Demon. Demon has a story, but it’s more about rules -- establishing them and playfully subverting them with a level of inventiveness that regularly leaves you in awe.

* Terrell, Jake; Extended Play (2dcloud). This delightful book took me completely by surprise, an experience made possible by 2dcloud’s subscription model.

Tomasso, Rich; She Wolf: Black Baptism #1 - #4, Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix #1 - #4 (Image Comics). The end of this second series of She Wolf approached the same hostile disregard for what came before as the end of Tomasso’s previous series, Dark Corridor. But where Dark Corridor acted on that impulse by simply burning it all down, She Wolf has enough respect at least to replace what came before by pivoting into a completely different comic. The freedom this affords the plot to dart in unpredictable directions is exhilarating. And it’s fun and beautifully laid out and designed, as always with Tomasso.

Tran, Thu; Dust Pam (Peow). Gorgeous!

Vaupen, Zach Hazard; Combed Clap of Thunder (Retrofit Comics and Big Planet Comics).

* Willumsen, Connor; Anti-Gone (Koyama Press). The part where the protagonists drive their boat past a window with a dog in it rewired my comics-making brain forever. This was another comic I only read a few pages of a night to make it last longer, and also recommended to friends of mine who were enjoying season three of Twin Peaks -- the plot is obfuscated in a similar way.

Yanow, Sophie; What is a Glacier? (Retrofit Comics and Big Planet Comics).

Yokoyama, Yuichi; Iceland (Retrofit Comics). Another comic I recommended to Twin Peaks season three fans. Similar to the residents of the Red Room, the characters seem truly of another world, their motivations and actions incomprehensible to us.

[asfeedin]

Here’s your stupid horoscope made by smart AI

Apparently there are still some people who believe that horoscopes are legitimate. I’d like to sell each of them a share in the Brooklyn bridge (and direct them to some of our science articles here on TNW). But now is definitely not the time to be pissing off potential readers. So I’m meeting them halfway instead.

I made OpenAI’s GPT-2 (one of the world’s most advanced AI-powered text generators) spit out horoscopes for all 12 zodiac signs. Accomplishing this was actually quite easy. I went to the Talk To Transformer website where programmer Adam King maintains an interactive version of GPT-2 and entered “What is my horoscope for” prompts for each sign.

It works like this:

GPT-2 isn’t always coherent. In the video above it’s generating nonsense and gibberish. And that’s why, when I was generating the horoscopes below, I was tempted to just keep smashing the “generate another” button until something funny, clever, or shocking came out. But, since literally anything GPT-2 spits out will be equally as accurate as any human-generated horoscope, I decided it would be a waste of everyone’s time to do that.

Instead, what you’re about to see are twelve completely unedited “horoscopes,” generated by entering the same “What is my horoscope for” prompt for each zodiac sign. The only time I pressed the “generate” button more than once was for Cancer, and that’s because it spit out some morbid stuff about disease that didn’t seem appropriate right now.

Anyway, we hope you enjoy this stupid horoscope made by smart AI.

Scorpio:

Horus (Scorpio), the lord of hell, is the number one wizard in this lesson. Does that mean he is the most powerful being in the universe? Definitely. Maybe in your life, too. But scorpio’s is the only alchemy of hope available to anyone of the twelve zodiacal signs.

Aries:

Author’s note: You’ll notice in the quote below that this is a horoscope for Pisces despite the fact I asked it for Aries. Apparently, if you’re an Aries, the AI‘s advice is to become a Pisces instead.

As the astrological sign of Pisces, you might be nervous about your relationship with your husband/wife, your feeling that your friends need attention and perhaps looking forward to the time when your self-esteem could recover a bit after a stressful week or two. This is normal, and this is fine!

As a Pisces, you are very close to others, you might feel a little restless and overwhelmed, and you are good at following people around in life. If you want to get more personal, read our article on the 13 notes of your birth chart.

Leo:

Leo is always looking for new things to be doing or have to do so it can further evolve as an individual. I feel it will be the time for a more intensive working load in the days ahead of me. I will be home-bound from March 8th. So until then I will do all my activities home based so you may not be seeing me for a few weeks.

Please do come visit, and to anyone who will be in my near future, this email is a prompt and dear request.

Yours Sincerely,

Author’s note: In the above quote, GPT-2 followed “Yours Sincerely” with a Twitter username that actually appears to belong to a real person. We purposely omitted it from this article, but thought it was noteworthy enough to mention.

Cancer:

See the sun after a period of deep darkness

Have a gift of comedy and take it out on others

Shout it from the top of your lungs

Bring forth as much pain as you think is needed

Put your faith in love and your faith in God

Treat people with kindness and don’t be rude

Shout your defiance from your rooster

Finish what you start. It’ll be easier to continue when you start

Get results with every first thing you do

Promote peace and unity wherever you can

By my hand I give life to everything, and every thing in turn gives life to me

Forget love, all that

Pisces

Due to the fact that my being a spiritual person, I have such a connection to other spiritual entities that for me the planets of the zodiac are a source of comfort for me. In the past I have a ‘relationship’ with Saturn and Venus. However I can’t justify having a relationship with other planets because they are not really in your field of vision. My life will only have meaning if the universe says my life’s work matters.

Aqours is all I can do for pisces – what does it mean to me?

I am your energy of hope! Let your touch permeate into my heart and radiates your love. I am yours and I am yours too.

Taurus

A horoscope means a glimpse into the future and depends on different factors like your birth date, the colour of the moon, the cycles of your moon, some life circumstances and your own values and temperament. Even the address on your birth certificate is a very important one.

For a person born under the sign of the Roman god Taurus, the phases of the moon are seen as more negative than for a person born under the sign of the sun, for example. Your last lunar phase, called the New Moon, is the moment that your Moon Phase indicates most strongly. (That’s why a crescent Moon will always represent the New Moon.)

What signs are associated with astrology?

Sagittarius

You are energetic and passionate about life and your deepest desires. Your powerful intuition and vitality are infectious. Feelings of worthlessness and arrogance exist within you. If you feel drained, do not hesitate to seek help. Some aspects of your horoscope are higher than others. The Ascendant means to create and nurture life. They will have a higher responsibility. Empathy, optimism, sociability, and a willingness to feel helpless are your best traits. Know yourself and your best self.

Capricorn

You value the gentle and approachable aspects of life. You are extremely intuitive, likely to feel thoughts and feelings as immediate as your breath. This part of your personality tends to express itself in relationships through the support of others. Because your ambition has always come first, you will not hesitate to let others have their way. In order to express your full potential in life, you will have to approach any situation with tact and skill.

Gemini

A major chart reveal or astrological revelation can never happen at any other time than at this age. It’s important to remember that since the age of 22, your horoscope has been preparing you for this date. If your total and life-long horoscope have released a forecast of having a boy as a partner, that could be because your high school sweetheart graduated, or if your future partner or future husband is still in high school.

Featuring so many unique qualities about you, it is the responsibility of the astrologer to bring to light these talents and talents worth experiencing!

How was your horoscope revealed?

It can be difficult for some astrologers to think.

Virgo

At this time, Scorpio is your ruler and Jupiter your friend, be they as great or as small as they may be. During the course of your life, you will have to turn and face both of them in order to remain self-sufficient. Fortunately for you, that can be done.

If the case arises that Scorpio is in conjunction with your Mercury – meaning Jupiter is in conjunction with your Sun – you should begin to look out for the influence that your Karmic tendencies hold for you. The placement of Jupiter in your sign may influence how important your personality is to you, as well as the strengths and weaknesses you have in dealing with other people.

Libra

The bright, radiant, adventurous personality of Libra is her greatest strength. Her loyalty and intimacy are palpable, and she is able to trust perfectly. Her heart is ruled by passion, but her emotions are often very tender, trying to find harmony. This allows her to know that other people matter and is the great strong master of balancing moods.

Libra’s desire to maintain balance and harmony and to be guided by the stars are very strong. A naturally good speaker and a well-spoken public speaker, Libra expresses her thought and ideas as accurately and subtly as she can. In practical terms, this means that Libra usually wants to improve the lives of others.

Aquarius

Cancer

Current position:

Starting vocation:

Potential aspiration:

Sign of passage:

Perception of negativity:

Self-actualization:

Constellation:

This is the Aquarian Age of Perseverance. You want to be a strong person, but you need to learn not to be too conscious about being a strong person.

Your greatest fantasies:

Dreams/Life goals:

They may be abstract ideas or life lessons.

Childhood personas:

Sources of inspiration:

Television, movies, books, newspapers, etc.

Consciousness’ side:

Sorry about that last one. Evidently being an Aquarius involves a lengthy acceptance process. On the bright side, at least you’re not an Aries right? They don’t even get a horoscope this week. Let us know what you think about GPT-2’s Zodiac prowess in the comments.

Published April 28, 2020 — 18:16 UTC

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Tags: AI, Heres, horoscope, Smart, stupid

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[littlehollyleaf]

Ask a writer!

tagged by @mysillylittlesoapbox (yes I do still write fic... sometimes :p I’m afraid it’s all Gotham now though!) ...I don’t usually do memes about my writing though so, this should be...interesting...

1. How did you come up with your username and what does it mean?

my name is holly, holly leaves are a thing, I wanted to just be ‘hollyleaf’ but it was already taken so I figured ‘well hey, I’m also small...’ and voila! (no, I’m so sorry, but the Warrior Cats series was not involved at any point, I still haven’t read them and only know a character has my username, or a version of it, because of all the asks I keep getting about it :P)

2. Which fanfic of yours has the most feedback? (bookmarks/favorites, follows/subscriptions, visitor hits, kudos)

So I had a quick glance at AO3 and this is something it looks like WAAAAY too much effort for my lazy ass to figure out, plus I dunno how accurate the AO3 stats would be for my stuff anyways because I only very recently put all my fic on there after having most of it posted (and therefore commented on and otherwise interacted with) solely over at LJ for years and years...

I would imagine it’s Imitating Life (spn, deancas), because that’s the one I remember getting the most feedback for. So I’ll just go with that!

3. What is your FFnNet/AO3 profile icon, and why did you choose it?

It’s the same as my tumblr one. Because it’s me and I already had the image saved in an appropriate size. I know, dull right?? (back on LJ I was OBSESSED with finding and/or creating SO MANY different icons to convey different moods and whatnot - they were basically an oldschool version of reaction gifs I guess - but on any other platform I’ve been just... meh about the icon thing... idk!)

4. Do you have any regular/favourite commenters?

@vampirebillionaire has been a regular for my Gotham stuff, notable for jumping ship with me into foxma :) (well not jumping... simultaneously enjoying :p), for which I am profoundly grateful xx but generally my fic style and content is a bit... eclectic I guess? so no, no one who is super regular

5. Is there a fanfic that you keep going back to read again and again?

Of my own? Nah. Well... not AGAIN AND AGAIN like on the regular. I HAVE re-read my stuff OF COURSE :p But usually it’s me re-reading previous parts of a series/set to get the feel for the story/characters again as I write new stuff. Though admittedly I have re-read Imitating Life more than most probably, to check it still reads okay.

As to other authors’ fics - I must confess that I read less and less these days, so there is def not a single one I constantly return to.

I have, however, re-read a few by depthsofgreen since I got into Gotham, as well as some by rissalf and silentsinger

Back in the day there was this one spn last unicorn AU I used to re-read the night before each premiere, because it was a deliciously angsty way to get me in the mood for a new season and pass the time while waiting - particularly notable because AUs are not really my thing, so it was an interesting choice for me to keep returning to! Alas I have lost my link to it however :( Should anyone know the one I mean drop me a line! (Cas was the unicorn, obvs, Dean was the Prince, Sam was Schmendrick, Anna was Molly and Meg was Fortuna)

6. How many stories are you subscribed to? How many do you have bookmarked?

I have ONE (1) story bookmarked - because it is a WIP I am following (and I just learnt how to bookmark the other month)

...what even is subscribing and how is it different??

7. Which AU do you find yourself writing the most?

None at all if possible. Although most of my fics end up being Canon Divergent in the end ofc they are generally canon compliant (based on my interpretation of the canon anyways) at the time of writing... Sometimes canon changes things while I am in the middle of writing stuff though ofc (*shakes fist at Gotham right now*), in which case I will unavoidably be writing something knowingly Canon Divergent/What If.

(aside - I tried to write an spn x-men AU once, but I got bored very quickly... full on AUs are just not me!)

8. How many people are subscribed and bookmarked to you in total? (you can view this on the stats page)

OH THERE’S A STATS PAGE?

*checks*

K - 34 subscribers and 423 bookmarks (whoa that seems a lot??)

hey there’s graphs and stuff with your top five fics based on hits too - that’s pretty cool - my top is in fact Holding On and Letting Go... probably because it was one of my last big spn fics and one of the first I published on AO3...

9. Is there something you’d like to write about but are afraid of people judging you for it? (Feeling brave? If so, share it!)

No... I mean... I don’t think so? If there ever has been it’s passed me by and I’ve forgotten about it.

...for a hot minute I was into Eddie/Isabella in Gotham, and that plot was ofc (understandably) received VERY POORLY by the fandom, so I may have at one point been hesitant to explore that idea (and the related Ozzie/Eddie/Izzy thoughts I had) because of that... but I never got as far as wanting to actually WRITE anything that I recall so... I guess not really?

10. Is there anything you would like to be better at? Writing certain scenes or genres, replying to comments, updating better, etc.

There’s a couple of dumb little grammatical things I wish I was better at remembering - like when it’s ‘passed’ and when it’s ‘past’ or when it’s ‘effect’ and when it’s ‘affect.’ Because I forget and have to look it up Every.Damn.Time!

11. Do you write rarepairs or popular ships more often?

Well, the ship I’ve written most for is deancas - so it’s def ‘popular ships’ I write most! (though I would like to point out that it WASN’T ONE when I STARTED :p). 

I’m not opposed to writing rarepairs as well however (she says, in the middle of a huge Gotham rarepair series!). I just write... whatever I’m enjoying most at the time.

12. How many stories have you posted on FFNet/AO3 to this day (finished and unfinished)?

I’ve got 39 works up on AO3. Never published on FFNet. Probably got a few little things that I’ve only ever published on tumblr (like my cracky spn/WtNV crossover :p), so total number published across the board is more like 40ish...

13. How many stories do you have saved in/with your writing program?

(not counting the abandoned spn x-men AU that will remain forever unfinished) Just one. I CANNOT work on more than one fic at a time.

14. Do you write down story ideas, or just keep them in your head?

In my head (my stories are never especially complex after all). Once I’m stuck into a fic though I do tend to start creating bullet points below the main text of certain things that are coming next - like specific lines or phrases/metaphors I might think up as I go that I want to make sure I include, or the order of certain scenes if there is a series of short ones on the way, or sometimes points with question marks if I haven’t quite decided on something (eg. ‘have Eddie take his hat off here or wait until Ozzie smiles at him?’ that kind of thing...)

15. Have you ever co-authored a story?

No. I came CLOSE to co-writing a DCBB with the lovely @takadainmate YEARS AGO but we never quite made it work (I got a distracted by involving Balthazar in a subplot and went on my own tangent, we had trouble even getting together to discuss it, the deadline started looming and eventually we wisely close to call it a day!). 

For a while there were VAGUE murmurings about returning to the idea... but the plot involved Dean and Cas getting trapped together in Purgatory you see aND THEN SEASON 8 HAPPENED!! So we decided to let canon run with it instead :P

16. How did you discover FFNet/AO3?

While I don’t use FFNet and don’t even read stuff there now, I did used to read fics on it early on. I discovered it while searching for info on my very first TV obsession Due South and was DELIGHTED to find a place full of stories about this thing I loved but had no new content for at the time :)

AO3 I remember being talked about and used a little by my LJ crowd, which is how I heard of it. I didn’t start using it myself until recently when I realised it had very much become the go-to hosting site used by tumblr fic writers.

17. Do you consider yourself to be a popular or famous author in your fandom(s) on FFNet/AO3?

Nah.

18. Do you have a nickname or fandom name for your readers?

...my personal readers? As in, not the general name for the various fandoms (like ‘spn family’ or ‘Gotham fam’), but for the people who read my fic specifically?

No... that seems... weird...?

19. Was there an author who inspired or encouraged you to write?

Actually... no... no one specific. Just... reading lots of fiction by lots of different writers, fic writers included, is what inspired/encouraged me to take a crack at it myself I suppose.

20. What writing advice would you give to a beginning author?

Do not listen to me!

21. Do you plot out your stories, or do you just figure it out as you go?

Um... both I suppose. Only... my plotting isn’t really... plotting. 

Because I just... daydream, you know? And after a bit I’ll realise that I’m coming back to one particular daydream more often than another. And adding to it. And adding to it. Until I’ve got something at least vaguely coherent. At which point I make a decision as to whether I like the scenario enough to write it down or not and if I do, well, it’s already pretty much there and fully formed in my head, so no additional ‘plotting’ necessary (just the ironing out and researching of a few details).

But while I’m daydreaming... well that’s me ‘figuring it out as I go’ I guess.

22. Have you ever gotten a bad comment on a story? If so, what did you do?

My first foray into writing fic was with a Clex re-write of S05 Smallville. It ended up being a sprawling, much too ambitious multi-chapter thing I had no hope of ever finishing. But hey, it kept me out of trouble :p 

Anyways, I was part of a sci-fi society at Uni at the time I was writing and each of us in the group developed these different fictional versions of ourselves over the course of our time together... because we were a sci-fi society and it was fun! And I thought it would be a laugh if, for one chapter, I put all of us into my SV fic. So I did (I made us all kryptonite infected characters who lived at Lex’s secret 33.1 facility - if any SV fans are reading) and prefaced the chapter with some disclaimer about how I was sorry if this part was a bit too self indulgent or ‘mary-sue’ or whatever, but that I couldn’t resist doing it for my friends, and that things would get back to normal next chapter.

And generally it was fine - I didn’t have many readers anyway :p 

But long LONG after the fact, when I had written many other chapters since, I got a comment on this one chapter from someone saying that they felt my self-insert characters came across as too obviously self indulgent and were unnecessary and that I shouldn’t have written them in.

And you know, it was a fair call. But since I’d actually prefaced the chapter with myself saying that’s EXACTLY what they were, it seemed a bit odd to me that this person would bother making a point of the issue. And to compound confusion - this person had actually already commented POSITIVELY on the chapter when I first posted it, so their comment read something like ‘I’ve been re-reading this and on consideration ACTUALLY I think you should know that...’

So... that was a bit odd. Not really bad, but notable enough that it’s stayed with me! Since I was many many chapters along in the story at that point though it was easy enough to just nod and shrug and move on.

I’m lucky in that I’ve never received any actual scathing or horribly negative comments otherwise. I like to think I’d be thoughtful and philosophical about any serious criticism I might receive...

23. Is there a certain type of scene that you have a hard time writing? (action, smut, etc..)

Hmmm. Exposition probably. My focus is typically on a character’s emotion at any given time, but when the only thing happening is characters discussing what’s happening and when and why there’s not exactly much strong emotion involved you know? So I struggle, because it’s boring to write and I constantly fear I’m not describing/depicting it in a way that is interesting to the reader and blah blah.

(part of the reason I don’t often write complex stories anymore perhaps - less narrative means less exposition!)

(smut used to be hard... now it is less so... though that doesn’t mean I think I’m good at it now! I don’t think I’ll ever shake the fear that my smut is actually cringe-worthy...) 

24. What story(s) are you working on now?

Just The Fox and the Scorpion :)

25. Do you plan your next project(s) before you finish your current ongoing story(s)?

No. Like I say above - I CANNOT work on more than one fic at a time. How do people do that??? I bow to you all!

I have in the past paused in the middle of longer spn fics (like my DCBBs) to knock out some quick ‘finished in the span of an evening’ FICLETS, usually in response to specific happenings in canon (like when Gabriel died and I just HAD to type something up as an outlet). But I don’t think that’s really quite what this question means? Because those aren’t projects OR stories, they are just... SCENES, you know? Also - I haven’t written a ficlet in FOREVER, so I’m not even sure I could do it anymore...

Having said this - I DO CONSTANTLY DAYDREAM. Which involves daydreaming multiple scenarios not exclusive to whatever fic I’m in the middle of. Some of which may well end up being part of the next fic I end up writing. But that’s hardly ‘planning’ I think? Because at that stage of things I’ll have no desire to make what I’m dreaming part of an actual story/fic.

26. Do you have a daily writing goal set for yourself?

Nah. I just write when I feel like it and keep going until I’m done.

If I’m writing for a challenge this changes ofc, because DEADLINES. So sometimes I’ve had to set goals because of that - usually it’s something vague though, like ‘you need to get to this point in the plot by tomorrow night Holly, come on!’ Nothing so regimented as a specific amount of time and/or words every day.

...generally when I’m in the middle of a fic I end up in a kind of... idk, natural momentum that pulls me on? Like there’s this constant FEELING in the back of my mind urging me to get back to the story. And not in a nagging guilt kind of way, in a ‘this is what I WANT to be doing right now’ kind of way.

Not that I end up easily writing every time I get back to the fic or anything! Sometimes I’ll get back to the page and just... be stuck, find I’m not in the mood or can’t think of the words or whatever. Which is frustrating because I still have that feeling of WANTING to continue the story, but I’ll know that I’m not in the right frame of mind so have to leave it for a bit (which can be anywhere from a few hours to a week). Generally the pull to keep writing draws me back in eventually though. 

27. Do you think you’ve improved as a writer since you first started?

Goodness yes. I think if you’re writing regularly you’re just ALWAYS improving, aren’t you? Naturally my fic today is better than my first attempts, but likewise I think some of my Gotham fics are better than my spn fics in some parts. It’s a constant process isn’t it?

28. What is your favorite story(s) that you’ve written?

Imitating Life remains one of the fics I’m most proud of. Not only did the main story hold up well AND stick to overall canon (when it comes to Dean and Cas at least), so I think anyways, I also wove in a couple of subplots I very much enjoyed seeing through to the end. PLUS I really enjoyed all the meta nonsense, including messing about with the format to make it like look (a little bit) like a screenplay. So yes, that one will always hold a dear place in my heart :)

For Gotham I don’t think I’m ever gonna do better than We Are What We Are tbh

29. What is your least favorite story(s) that you’ve written?

Generally unimpressed by ALL my SV fic now. And considering I spent SO MANY HOURS/DAYS/WEEKS/MONTHS/YEARS of my life on it all I kinda feel like I should feel bad about that but... you know I really don’t? Because if it wasn’t for all the time and effort (and love and fun) I put into those not very good stories, I wouldn’t be enjoying the work I’m proud of and writing today. So *shrug emoji* 

30. Where do you see yourself (as a writer) in 5 years?

5 whole years? Tbh I rather think I’ll have stopped writing by then. I’ve been winding down when it comes to fic for a LONG TIME now and writing for Gotham feels very much like a minor, brief resurgence of the hobby. Currently planning on calling it a day once I’ve finished Fox and Scorpion in fact.

31. What is the easiest thing about writing?

The part that doesn’t involve writing.

32. What is the hardest thing about writing?

Trying not to be repetitive.

Have I started a paragraph with this character’s name too many times in a row? Am I using ‘furrowed brow’/’bites lip’/’narrows eyes’/’insert stock descriptive phrase here’ too often? Did I use this phrase already or was that in another fic or in the book I was just reading? Is there too much alliteration in this sentence?  - to name but a few of the questions that inevitably pop up related to my paranoia about repetition.

33. Why do you write?

Because I’m insatiable and the stories onscreen aren’t enough for me. 

...well that was exhaustingly introspective so I’m way too tired to tag! Interesting one though, made me think! (and taught me some stuff about AO3 :p)

[tkwrtnewsfeed]

Newsfeed #86 August 13, 2017 (13 Úrimë)

ICYMI: Fantastic Credits and Where to Give Them.

I worked in Hollywood for 4 /12 years and one of my good friends is an intellectual property lawyer I’ve known since then--well over 16 years--with a client list that includes none other than Maurice (Kevin Kline) in the live-action film “Beauty and the Beast” starring Emma Watson.

Image: © 2017. Walt Disney Studios. Beauty and the Beast. All Rights Reserved.

(My attorney could sue anyone spreading salacious rumors about me and my work should he choose to do so, but I’m not a jerk. But he does know about it; he’s good at what he does--he’s successfully sued Google).

Translation: I’m at least 3-7 degrees of knowing how to give credit to artists. Otherwise, my attorney/friend would have me shot at sunrise. Would you like to learn how to do it without being a pain about it and spreading unscrupulous rumors? Let me explain Copyright © from a legal perspective from 30 years of working with copyrighted materials with an actual attorney that specializes in artistic intellectual properties with 40 years of experience that includes everything from visual art, music, film, books and has won a major copyright infringement case against Google (among other high profile cases) for major A-List celebrities.

1) Whatever you do is copyrighted from the moment you put it on paper by law. You don’t have to bitch about anyone stealing it perpetually. HOWEVER, you can’t complain about someone posting it anywhere in public (Pinterest, mostly) if YOU post it anywhere in public. If you share it, even asking people not to, it is already public and can go anywhere. What people CAN’T do is SAY it’s theirs. If they explicitly say “I did this” and they didn’t, you have a case. Otherwise, it is NOT copyright infringement if someone posts it anywhere. 

It would be nice if EVERYONE would give credit--I try to do it if I do or link back to the original place I find something and that is time consuming if the work is not located where it came from (dead-link) or it was digitally stolen--something my attorney told me about a couple years ago. I see it all the time. But, if you make it public, it is assumed to be public. It is NOT ASSUMED to not to be copyrighted. Put that cute copyright sign on it and let it go. You should have the original as collateral, I would think. That’s the only way no one can claim it and you can properly bitch about it w/o an official U.S. Copyright.

2) I PUT “Images: ©2012, 2013, 2014. Warner Brothers Pictures. The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies. All Rights Reserved.” on pretty much every post for The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy because the photos I use BELONG to Warner Brothers/New Line Cinema/Wingnut Productions. Altered by someone online doesn’t change this UNLESS the person altering got permission from WB/NLC/Wingnut to alter it. Otherwise, it is their property and they can sue anyone that alters their work and put their name on it if they so choose. I post this disclaimer to keep from GETTING sued--even though I don’t alter the photo in anyway. Gifs are the same way and currently seen as pirated these days and are subject to suit as with screen caps. 

The reason no one gets sued over screen caps and gifs is because no one is making $$ off of them. You only get credit for edit not the work of the camera guy that was paid to shoot a film and the studio that owns his camera work. Unlike Marvel that has begun digital copyrights on some photos (you post something on Facebook, it automatically gives credit). The minute someone charges for any altered screen caps, gifs or photos and calls it their own work, that is the legal definition of copyright infringement.

Without proper credit, you are open to lawsuit by the studios, photographers. I go out of my way to avoid altered anything because then I could get sued even if I didn’t alter it--even if I am not making money from it. Which brings me to the next point:

3) IF I was making $$ and using someone’s art, then I could get sued. That means I’m not paying the original person their due (licensing fees) for use of their work. THAT includes my original story that uses and will use a great number of canonical characters from Tolkien. If I want to turn The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy into a book, I have to do it the right way--which is get permission from the Tolkien Estate (I’ve had the paperwork since 2016 when it was shown to me by a member of the Mythopoeic Society--they are close to the Estate). They can allow me to publish after negotiations of paying for use of the characters or force me to put “not affiliated with the Tolkien Estate” and/or change names if they so choose.

Example of a Tolkien allowed to go to press with “non-affiliated” tag of Tolkien. It’s clean, so the Estate probably doesn’t mind so much. Not all of these “non-affiliated” books are bad or not liked by the Estate. The label is not exclusively a non-endorsement--there might be something unknown about as to why it’s there.

Example of a book with the coveted “Tolkien Trademark” and approved by the Estate--spoke with one of the authors; pretty cool.

You want this, you better have your %^$* together. Yes, they give them out, but they are particular--do it right: legal and above board.

I’m not making any revenue off of TKWR Trilogy but if I were, I wouldn’t be using film photos. I would HIRE an artist to tag along over to the final phase of getting this book turned into something sold on Amazon or in Barnes & Noble. Then, the artist of choice would get paid for their work properly. They could use the work from this book anywhere they wanted and it would be protected forever--example of this would be Ted Nasmith.

© Ted Nasmith. All Rights Reserved.

Due to all the rumors about people say I’m doing because they have nothing better to do with their time (regardless of the obvious), I decided not to share any Tolkien Fan Art, use and Tolkien Fan Art or consider any Tolkien Fan Art unsolicited by anyone on Tumblr, Pinterest, DeviantArt or anywhere else that isn’t done by anyone not represented by an agent or a lawyer. If I so choose, artists will have to go through my lawyer--not me. After today, there will be no artists’ works mentioned or shared by me anywhere again until I’m done with the entire trilogy--unless idiots stop spreading lies and rumors (they won’t so don’t hold your breath).

I discovered a lot of fan art pertaining to my book and I could say something, but I’m not a jerk and I’m not complaining. I’m also not making any $$ of the book. It is assumed to be public but not assumed not to be copyrighted--which it actually is (ask my attorney).

I will do something should I decide to take any number of offers to publish after a lot of legalities I will go through. For now, I’ll just watch to make sure no one’s claiming my work--my words--as their own (and some have which is why I sent the book to witnesses so I have a case and proof should I do something later on). The book will change in the final form as I edit; it already has with additions and changes in Book II: The Saga of Thranduil and Book I: The Epic of Eryn Galen and Book III: The Last Tale of Legolas Lasgalen.

I love artists here, but a few ruined it for everyone. I’ve had artists wanting to illustrate Book II: The Saga of Thranduil, but now that’s been narrowed to only one that doesn’t accuse me of salacious and reputation-altering deeds I’ve never done. Having a friend that’s a respected and experienced intellectual properties attorney with connections in the U.S. and Europe that has worked within the industry successfully for 30+ years with a stellar reputation protecting my works--all of them including screenplays, poetry, stage plays--makes it possible for me to help protect an artist of my choosing (and he’s already done wonders for clothing designer friend of mine in Florida that designed things for my film project HERETIC: THE LEGEND OF AKHENATEN*). He loves protecting properties and takes referrals. I’m not helping anyone spreading rumors.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. That was obvious.

I told someone once that I would, but they thought it better to insult me rather than allowing me to connect them to a publisher I knew that could have looked at their work without the long query process. You make connections in the business and it’s good to keep them and I do.

I live by the motto: “The ass you kick today may be the ass you kiss tomorrow” so I try to be nice and respectful to everyone--even I have to draw a line.

[By the way, there will be a LOT of versions coming for The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy. This one is the Annotated Version--complete with all the notes and references and explanations of the use of Tolkien to create the entire trilogy. Let’s just say it took 4 hours to do the first bibliography and I just added more books. This one (which will be done for both the original version and extended version) will take years.]

But if you don’t want to be seen as an artist, it’s a safe bet you won’t think pinning = stealing. Pinterest is nothing more than a bulletin board for what people like--it’s not supposed to deal in copyright protection like YouTube or Instagram where you are actually legally protected by copyright law. If they were, a lot of stuff they still allow would be subject to lawsuit against them--not the pinners. They blame pinners to keep themselves from being liable for allowing copyrighted properties. I’ve already deleted my Art page of potential artists for The Kingdom of he Woodland Realm Trilogy. I’ve gotten blocked on Pinterest by people here on Pinterest over pins I re-pinned years ago over what they don’t know--probably out of spite. I don’t mind and don’t care. My job is to finish my work to the best of my ability and move on to the next.

Writing has been my life since the age of two. Only an act of GOD is going to keep me from doing what I love. I write because I love it. If it’s liked, I’m happy. If its not, that isn’t a deterrent for me to stop. Like any artist, I want to protect my work--but I’m going to do it the right way and I’m going to give credit due when credit is due if I eventually use an artist for The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy. Full Stop--end of sentence. There is nothing left to say. I have to do it right because I have a too many people in the business watching me and if I’m not doing what is right, they aren’t going to want to work with me and that lessens the work I put in to write this and it will not be able to help a fellow artist along the way. My attorney acts as a free attorney for artists that can’t afford to hire expensive attorneys for protection because he believes in protecting the rights of artists and we often work together on helping artist connect with attorneys that work for free for all artists (Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts).

I know, that won’t keep some people from being jerks--I just wanted to put it out there.

*HERETIC: THE LEGEND OF AKHENATEN by Jaynaé Miller (me) is copyrighted by the U.S. Copyright Office. Any unauthorized use is strictly prohibited without prior consent for the next 100 years. In other words, I could sue a major studio if they don’t buy it from me. This is a wholly LEGAL and Recognized (and stamped) copyright. It doesn’t make the original copyright less potent, it just makes your work recognized by law and gives you further protection for your works. This includes photography, visual art, books, film, plays, videos, logos. Being a copyrighted work, it is also subject to the Berne Agreement (World Copyright Organization) guidelines for international use. With this, it wouldn’t matter where you work is posted, if someone said it was theirs, it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Once you put a stamp on it, by law, it is already protected by the government as it is being sent via the federal government--and it is protected from loss of materials sent as well (USPS is good and finding it, too; get a tracking number and it is found faster).

I know all this stuff because I work with copyrighted and trademarked things since I wrote my first opera and lyrics for which my music teacher taught me about this in fifth grade. I’ve written adaptations with permission of the original writers. The More You Know depends on how much you care to know.--J.

[endlessarchite]

How To Make Decorative Oars (And How To Not Almost Ruin Them Like I Did)

When we shared the duplex backyard makeovers last month, I promised more details about how we made the decorative oars that hang on each shed. So today I’ve got a detailed tutorial for you (including how NOT to screw up your attempts to make them outdoor friendly) along with a few other “hacks” you guys asked about.

The oars actually were not part of our original plans. But after the sheds were built we nixed our plans to run electricity to them (for cost reasons – and because they really don’t need it). But the empty space where we’d planned to hang a light above the door needed… something.

That something became oars after a trip to HomeGoods where we stumbled upon a decorative surfboard. Cape Charles isn’t really a surfing town, but there is plenty of kayaking and paddle boarding, so oars felt a bit more applicable for our little beach town. I went on the hunt for some on Etsy and found some really good options (like this, this, and the ones pictured below) but they all were a bit pricier than we had in mind. Just couldn’t justify spending $350+ on this project to end up with four cool looking oars to hang on the sheds.

We actually ditched the idea entirely for a couple of weeks, but then we stumbled upon two decorative oars at HomeGoods for $25 each. They weren’t the colors or design we wanted, but that can always be fixed with paint! So we bought them and took them to Cape Charles and held them up to make sure we were barking up the right tree. We wanted to make sure we liked the size & shape before altering them with paint (thereby making it impossible to return them).

With renewed excitement for this idea, we tracked down two MORE decorative oars (thanks to having two HomeGoods in Richmond). All four of them cost a little over $100, which was great… but they didn’t look the way we wanted. They actually looked pretty awful together at this point:

But I was emboldened by our luck at sanding down and refinishing the duplex dining tables, so I took to sanding each down to their raw wood. Here’s the orbital sander I used, which does the job really well.

It took some elbow grease, but the results were extremely encouraging. Here’s a side-by-side of the two most similar oars – one sanded, one not.

Once I had them all sanded down, I stained them all to get their varying wood tones looking more similar. It was basically trial and error of various leftover stain cans in our garage, but I am 95% sure it involved Rustoleum Summer Oak and Minwax Weathered Oak being layered over each other.

Before I stained them I also took a picture of them grouped on the ground and started Photoshopping various stripes and shapes on them. YES, THIS IS THE MOST ANYONE HAS EVER DONE IN THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTLY COORDINATING DECORATIVE OARS. I feel like I deserve a Bachelors of Science in Oarology at this point.

Anyway, we knew we wanted to use colors inspired by those found elsewhere in the duplex, like the mint green shutters, the white siding, and the muted pink and green found on the interior doors. So doing all of this in Photoshop helped us fine tune our direction before cracking open any paint cans. Also it earned me that highly esteemed Oarology degree. (*steps up to podium and clears throat*) “I’d like to thank my mom and dad, who instilled a love of oars at an early age…”

Right, back to the tutorial. Next we used the digital mock-up to tape off each oar using painters tape. We intentionally left a lot of wood “stripes” in our design (you know, the areas UNDER the tape) because whenever two colors touch, you have to paint one and let it dry before you can paint the other. So for efficiency we minimized these instances, but we didn’t completely eliminate them. The reason you don’t see any tape on the top section of that third oar is because I had to do a base of the mint color before I could tape and paint my next colors.

Once everything was taped, I primed each area first (this is our favorite primer) and then once that had dried, I painted each section – being careful to reference my rendering along the way (although we did deviate a little as we went). Except for the mint color (SW Pale Patina) we didn’t use the exact paint colors we used elsewhere in the duplex. The white was just an exterior white we had on hand (SW Snowbound) and the pink and navy were more saturated versions of the interior doors colors (SW Downing Pink and SW Riverway, respectively). You definitely should use exterior paint if you’re going to hang your oars outside, FYI. Also colors tend to wash out in exterior lighting (there’s more sun outside than inside) so you sometimes need to go darker or more intense with a color than you would inside your house.

The project was going great at this point. Things were drying quickly in the heat outside. We got that unmatched satisfaction of peeling off a crisp line of painters tape…

AND THEN THINGS TOOK A TURN. And this is where I want you to learn from my mistake.

After I had finished painting all of the stripes, my last step was to seal the whole thing so it’d be even more durable outdoors (these things will be exposed to the elements 24/7/365 (and that’s not just rain, it’s lots of heat and even snow). So we wanted to layer on an exterior grade polyurethane sealer, which are typically oil based – but VERY durable. Now, I should’ve tested the sealer I had on hand in an inconspicuous place first – but I was running up against a weekend that we were going to Cape Charles and I wanted to finish these and bring them with me. So I just WENT FOR IT.

Sherry described what happened next as “not a big deal” and “nothing to freak out over – John, you’re being crazy.” But I had gotten so pumped about how these were turning out so far that I was extremely frustrated at myself for messing them up on the last step. Here’s what happened:

Oil-based stains have a tendency to yellow. That’s why we use water-based ones in most of our projects. But again, exterior-grade = oil-based. And we didn’t want these oars to get ruined over time because we used the wrong sealant. But, I was bothered by HOW YELLOW it made the colors and because the oars are slightly rounded, the stain pooled as it dried in various spots – leaving brownish-yellow streaks and dots along the oars.

Sherry’s right that it’s a relatively minor issue – one that probably wouldn’t be super detectible from the distance at which they’d be seen anyways. But I was annoyed at how much more “rustic” the oars had become due to the yellowing and the streaking.

So I did the only sensible/crazy thing that a Certified Oarologist

could do in this situation. I sanded off all the streaky spots, taped everything off again, and repainted all four oars. It wouldn’t de-yellow the wood tone, but at least I could get back the crisp vibrancy of the original paint colors we had chosen.

Because here’s the thing we didn’t really think about when we started this project: we were using exterior paints on everything, so they didn’t actually need to be sealed. Only the wood needed sealing. Soooooo… if I were doing this again (or if you’re at home doing it right now – first of all welcome to the field, it’s good to have a fellow Oarologist in my midst) I would’ve sealed the wood (both sides, btw) BEFORE I painted any of the stripes or detailing onto the oars. Would’ve dodged the entire bullet and the entire oar would be durable and outdoor-safe.

In the end everything was fine (although the extra paint job meant we cut it a bit closer to rental season than we’d hoped when it came to actually hanging these up) and we really love how they turned out. Hanging them was simple too – we just drove a 3″ exterior screw through the oar and siding, right into a stud behind it (I predrilled a small hole in the oar to make it sink right through easily).

You can see the screw heads in the photo below (see the little dots). I tried to avoid putting them through painted sections when I could, since they seem to blend more into the wood tone than the lighter painted sections, but ultimately your eyes don’t really focus on them unless you’re actively looking for them.

This tutorial actually should hold up for anything that’s wood that you’re thinking of sanding, staining, painting, and hanging outside. So if you’re thinking about a surf board instead – or a sign with your family name or something – this process would work. Also, remember to always add string lights (these are the ones we use everywhere) because they make literally everything better.

To see the full reveal of our duplex backyard (with sources and info on the sheds, patio, furniture etc) click here – and if you haven’t seen the pink house backyard makeover, which we finished right after the duplex yard, you have to check that out right here.

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How To Make Decorative Oars (And How To Not Almost Ruin Them Like I Did) appeared first on Young House Love.

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[truereviewpage]

How To Make Decorative Oars (And How To Not Almost Ruin Them Like I Did)

When we shared the duplex backyard makeovers last month, I promised more details about how we made the decorative oars that hang on each shed. So today I’ve got a detailed tutorial for you (including how NOT to screw up your attempts to make them outdoor friendly) along with a few other “hacks” you guys asked about.

The oars actually were not part of our original plans. But after the sheds were built we nixed our plans to run electricity to them (for cost reasons – and because they really don’t need it). But the empty space where we’d planned to hang a light above the door needed… something.

That something became oars after a trip to HomeGoods where we stumbled upon a decorative surfboard. Cape Charles isn’t really a surfing town, but there is plenty of kayaking and paddle boarding, so oars felt a bit more applicable for our little beach town. I went on the hunt for some on Etsy and found some really good options (like this, this, and the ones pictured below) but they all were a bit pricier than we had in mind. Just couldn’t justify spending $350+ on this project to end up with four cool looking oars to hang on the sheds.

We actually ditched the idea entirely for a couple of weeks, but then we stumbled upon two decorative oars at HomeGoods for $25 each. They weren’t the colors or design we wanted, but that can always be fixed with paint! So we bought them and took them to Cape Charles and held them up to make sure we were barking up the right tree. We wanted to make sure we liked the size & shape before altering them with paint (thereby making it impossible to return them).

With renewed excitement for this idea, we tracked down two MORE decorative oars (thanks to having two HomeGoods in Richmond). All four of them cost a little over $100, which was great… but they didn’t look the way we wanted. They actually looked pretty awful together at this point:

But I was emboldened by our luck at sanding down and refinishing the duplex dining tables, so I took to sanding each down to their raw wood. Here’s the orbital sander I used, which does the job really well.

It took some elbow grease, but the results were extremely encouraging. Here’s a side-by-side of the two most similar oars – one sanded, one not.

Once I had them all sanded down, I stained them all to get their varying wood tones looking more similar. It was basically trial and error of various leftover stain cans in our garage, but I am 95% sure it involved Rustoleum Summer Oak and Minwax Weathered Oak being layered over each other.

Before I stained them I also took a picture of them grouped on the ground and started Photoshopping various stripes and shapes on them. YES, THIS IS THE MOST ANYONE HAS EVER DONE IN THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTLY COORDINATING DECORATIVE OARS. I feel like I deserve a Bachelors of Science in Oarology at this point.

Anyway, we knew we wanted to use colors inspired by those found elsewhere in the duplex, like the mint green shutters, the white siding, and the muted pink and green found on the interior doors. So doing all of this in Photoshop helped us fine tune our direction before cracking open any paint cans. Also it earned me that highly esteemed Oarology degree. (*steps up to podium and clears throat*) “I’d like to thank my mom and dad, who instilled a love of oars at an early age…”

Right, back to the tutorial. Next we used the digital mock-up to tape off each oar using painters tape. We intentionally left a lot of wood “stripes” in our design (you know, the areas UNDER the tape) because whenever two colors touch, you have to paint one and let it dry before you can paint the other. So for efficiency we minimized these instances, but we didn’t completely eliminate them. The reason you don’t see any tape on the top section of that third oar is because I had to do a base of the mint color before I could tape and paint my next colors.

Once everything was taped, I primed each area first (this is our favorite primer) and then once that had dried, I painted each section – being careful to reference my rendering along the way (although we did deviate a little as we went). Except for the mint color (SW Pale Patina) we didn’t use the exact paint colors we used elsewhere in the duplex. The white was just an exterior white we had on hand (SW Snowbound) and the pink and navy were more saturated versions of the interior doors colors (SW Downing Pink and SW Riverway, respectively). You definitely should use exterior paint if you’re going to hang your oars outside, FYI. Also colors tend to wash out in exterior lighting (there’s more sun outside than inside) so you sometimes need to go darker or more intense with a color than you would inside your house.

The project was going great at this point. Things were drying quickly in the heat outside. We got that unmatched satisfaction of peeling off a crisp line of painters tape…

AND THEN THINGS TOOK A TURN. And this is where I want you to learn from my mistake.

After I had finished painting all of the stripes, my last step was to seal the whole thing so it’d be even more durable outdoors (these things will be exposed to the elements 24/7/365 (and that’s not just rain, it’s lots of heat and even snow). So we wanted to layer on an exterior grade polyurethane sealer, which are typically oil based – but VERY durable. Now, I should’ve tested the sealer I had on hand in an inconspicuous place first – but I was running up against a weekend that we were going to Cape Charles and I wanted to finish these and bring them with me. So I just WENT FOR IT.

Sherry described what happened next as “not a big deal” and “nothing to freak out over – John, you’re being crazy.” But I had gotten so pumped about how these were turning out so far that I was extremely frustrated at myself for messing them up on the last step. Here’s what happened:

Oil-based stains have a tendency to yellow. That’s why we use water-based ones in most of our projects. But again, exterior-grade = oil-based. And we didn’t want these oars to get ruined over time because we used the wrong sealant. But, I was bothered by HOW YELLOW it made the colors and because the oars are slightly rounded, the stain pooled as it dried in various spots – leaving brownish-yellow streaks and dots along the oars.

Sherry’s right that it’s a relatively minor issue – one that probably wouldn’t be super detectible from the distance at which they’d be seen anyways. But I was annoyed at how much more “rustic” the oars had become due to the yellowing and the streaking.

So I did the only sensible/crazy thing that a Certified Oarologist

could do in this situation. I sanded off all the streaky spots, taped everything off again, and repainted all four oars. It wouldn’t de-yellow the wood tone, but at least I could get back the crisp vibrancy of the original paint colors we had chosen.

Because here’s the thing we didn’t really think about when we started this project: we were using exterior paints on everything, so they didn’t actually need to be sealed. Only the wood needed sealing. Soooooo… if I were doing this again (or if you’re at home doing it right now – first of all welcome to the field, it’s good to have a fellow Oarologist in my midst) I would’ve sealed the wood (both sides, btw) BEFORE I painted any of the stripes or detailing onto the oars. Would’ve dodged the entire bullet and the entire oar would be durable and outdoor-safe.

In the end everything was fine (although the extra paint job meant we cut it a bit closer to rental season than we’d hoped when it came to actually hanging these up) and we really love how they turned out. Hanging them was simple too – we just drove a 3″ exterior screw through the oar and siding, right into a stud behind it (I predrilled a small hole in the oar to make it sink right through easily).

You can see the screw heads in the photo below (see the little dots). I tried to avoid putting them through painted sections when I could, since they seem to blend more into the wood tone than the lighter painted sections, but ultimately your eyes don’t really focus on them unless you’re actively looking for them.

This tutorial actually should hold up for anything that’s wood that you’re thinking of sanding, staining, painting, and hanging outside. So if you’re thinking about a surf board instead – or a sign with your family name or something – this process would work. Also, remember to always add string lights (these are the ones we use everywhere) because they make literally everything better.

To see the full reveal of our duplex backyard (with sources and info on the sheds, patio, furniture etc) click here – and if you haven’t seen the pink house backyard makeover, which we finished right after the duplex yard, you have to check that out right here.

*This post contains affiliate links

The post How To Make Decorative Oars (And How To Not Almost Ruin Them Like I Did) appeared first on Young House Love.

How To Make Decorative Oars (And How To Not Almost Ruin Them Like I Did) published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[amidst-the-storm]

Sonic Unleashed vs. Gravity Falls

This is gonna be fun to explain!...

Essentially, I finished writing my Transformers bayverse fanfiction on Tuesday (it has 48 chapters and 337 pages). While finishing it up, I came across an abandoned project that I’d started a while ago with an OC called ‘Tempest’. At the same time, I was working on ideas for a Gravity Falls fanfiction.

So I decided to present a challenge to my readers.

They could read what I’d have up for both sets of stories, and from there, decide what they wanted to have done first. What I’m writing here is just me getting my thoughts for each story together as well as plotlines and what I want to happen at the moment. A lot changes with me mid-writing, so this is more of a ‘this is how I want it to go NOW’, not a ‘this is how it WILL go’.

SPOILER WARNING FOR MY FANFICTIONS IS NOW IN AFFECT.

This is the cover art for the first fanfiction in the ‘contest’ of sorts.

It’s about a girl- Tempest- who has the incapability to show emotion. She spends her whole life wondering what emotions are, why other people cry and smile, etc., but does manage to learn how to hide her lack of emotion fairly well. When Dark Gaia is released, she can see the Dark Gaia creatures and actually fight them. This leads to her meeting Sonic, and the adventure is meant to go from there.

I was hoping to make it through Sonic Unleashed and into Sonic 06, where it would be explained why Tempest is so non-emotional. Instead of princess Elise gaining the flame and being the Iblis Trigger, it would be Tempest herself. Since she wasn’t even born when she received the flame, it attached itself to her subconscious. It’s been feeding off of her emotions ever since and hiding deep within the recesses of her mind.

I do want to ship Sonic and Tempest (Tonic), but I figured that in the story I’d wait until Sonic X- probably that planet all about lucky charms and the moon and whatnot. I’d hint at Tonic for a while, but I’d let it really kick off in that episode.

Once again, this is all barebones work of what I really, really want to do in the story. Doesn’t mean it will be canon, and I doubt any of my readers will find it, so its here... If you are a reader of my stories, then crap. You just got majorly spoiled. But the warning was there so you can’t really blame me.

This is the cover art for the secondary fighter in the ‘contest’ of sorts.

This one is about a woman- who has no clue who she is. She wakes up in an oddball town in Oregon called ‘Gravity Falls’ with no memory of her past, her experiences in life, or anyone she should know. She quickly begins to notice that she recognizes and knows the people in Gravity Falls without having to think about it, leading to Dipper Pines often questioning if she’s a psychic due to her miraculous ‘guesses’ at names and events.

In this version of Gravity Falls, everyone has a soulmate. I use the term ‘soulmate’ loosely here since my character’s soulmate is far from normal. Guess who- oh yes. Bill. Cipher. The demon himself. Each bond is different depending on the soulmate in question, so for her and Bill, the bond is shared injuries/pain.

That bond is meant to tie into the very first night she appeared in Gravity Falls, as well as why she has no memories of her life. The pain from Bill’s death was meant to be so strong and destructive that it ripped his soulmate from her home dimension, obliterated her memories, and dropped her in Gravity Falls at the start of the summer. This also means that I am intent on killing off this OC at the end of the story, since Bill ‘dies’ at the end of the series.

Or at least gets trapped in stone. And since my character is Bill’s soulmate, her symbol on the ‘wheel’ is Bill himself.

There are a lot of ships that I intend to make canon, and several I’ll leave hanging with guesses and clues as to who is bonded to who. It’s pretty much a free-for-all of soulmate ship fanfictions.

And that’s all I have from the pit. My readers are meant to vote after reading the chapters- which story would they rather see come to life first/at all?

I do intend to focus on dark subjects like always, but I’m going to try to be careful. With Gravity Falls, it’ll probably focus around a hint of self-harm and understanding that death is inevitable. Maybe. Thinking about death gives me panic attacks. ANYWAYS.

The Sonic Unleashed/06/X story is going to focus on getting used to emotions, and knowing how/when to show them. I intend for the Sonic story to focus more on romance than the Gravity Falls story, since my character and Bill... Well... Bill would not care for her. Anyways.

It’s a lot of chaos, and I’m trying to wrap up a preview chapter for the Gravity Falls story so that people can start voting. If you want to vote, those of you who have read this far, then go read both previews before coming to a decision, please. And don’t spoil anything for people who don’t want spoilers.

https://www.quotev.com/MythMask/published

And yes that’s a link to my published page.

Regardless.

Thanks for reading this far, if you did.

Happy reading/voting!

And have fun being chaotic.

-Writer

[kristinejrosario]

213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know

10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging and Content Marketing When I Started

Today, I want to share the audio of a keynote I gave at a conference early last year about 10 things I wish I’d known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started.

In episodes 204 and 205 I shared some recordings of keynotes I’ve given, and the response from many of you was that you wanted to hear more of that style of podcast. So today I dug out a talk I gave at the Super Fast Business conference, which is run by James Schramko here in Australia.

James, who puts on a great event, asked me to share some of my story and give some practical tips on content creation.

I talk about defining what your blog is about, the three phases of creating great content, how to mix up the different types of content you feature on your blog, idea generation, creating ‘content events’ on your blog, and how to differentiate yourself in your content.   

I loved doing this talk, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Don’t forget to join the Facebook group

10 THINGS I WISH I KNEW ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING WHEN I STARTED

Further Listening on 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging (and Content Marketing) When I Started

059: What Should I Blog About? 15 Questions to Ask to Help Identify Your Blogging Niche or Focus

033: 2 Questions to Ask to Help You Find Readers for Your Blog

011: Create 10 Blog Post Ideas for your Blog [Day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog]

084: How to Come Up With Fresh Ideas to Write About On Your Blog

086: How to Get into the Flow of Creating Great Content for Your Blog

087: 9 Questions You Should Ask Before Hitting Publish On Your Next Blog Post

152: How to Use Embedded Content on Your Blog [Challenge]

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view

Hi there and welcome to episode 213 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience. You can find more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com.

In today’s episode, I want to share with you an audio from a keynote I gave at a conference early last year. The topic was ’10 things I wish I had known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started’. A bit of a mouthful, but you get the idea. Back in episode 204, 205, just a few episodes ago, I shared a couple of recordings from keynotes I’ve given at my ProBlogger events and I had so much positive response from that. People really enjoyed that format, a presentation, a talk. Longer form and also the slides from those talks as well.

I wanted to do it again because many of you wanted more of that style of podcast. We’re not going to do it every week by any account. I don’t give that many talks. But I did find this one from the Superfast Business Conference. It’s a conference that is run by James Schramko. Many of you will know here in Australia. It’s run in Sydney and it was a great event. I really enjoyed getting to that particular event.

James puts on a really good event, and he asked me at the event last year to share some of my story but also give some practical tips on content creation. Really, that’s what the focus of this talk is about. In it, I’ve given a few tips on defining what your blog is about but then we get a lot into content creation itself. I talk about three different phases of creating content. I talk about how to mix up the different types of content that you might want to feature on your blog. I talk about idea generation, some tips on creating content, finishing content, running content events and challenges on your blog and also how to differentiate yourself through your content as well.

I really enjoyed this talk and I hope you do as well. I’ll also put up the slides from this talk in today’s show notes. There are a few times during the talk where you probably will want to refer to the slides. Whether you do that as you’re listening if you’re at a computer or whether you want to come back to the slides later, you’ll be able to do that. I bet 95% of what I do talk about in this talk doesn’t rely on the slides but you might want to have them. The show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/213.

The only other thing I will note is that at the time of this talk, there was a tool that I was using called Blab. Blab is a live streaming tool that allowed multiple people to be on the screen at once. Now, that tool doesn’t exist today. But when I do talk about it, you can pretty much substitute most of the other live streaming tools that exist today. It’s only a brief mention during the talk but I did want to point that out.

Some of the points I mention in passing during this keynote were expanded upon in later podcast. At the end of the talk, I will come back on and suggest some further listening for those of you who want to dig deeper into some of the things I touched on during the talk. But again, I’ll link to all of those in the show notes as well. problogger.com/podcast/213. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy this talk and I will come back at the end just to wrap things up.

Host: Our next guest is a superpower in the blogosphere. In fact, I remember going to an event, my first event in the United States several years ago, and I found out he’d been to one before that, one of the early ones. I found a transcript of what he’d been doing and what he talked about. I read through it and I thought, “This is great.” He’s probably one of the seeds to my original direction towards content marketing. And then I recently saw him in the Philippines, presenting. I thought, “This information is very in line with what we do.” His version of what I talk about with OTR, but he’s been doing it a lot longer than I have. He can do things like write and spell. He’s prolific and he’s really, really good at it. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Darren Rowse.

Darren: Thank you. It’s really good. Who’s feeling like they’ve already got enough value from this and they could go home almost? I, literally in the lunch break, had to rewrite the opening story of my talk thanks to an earlier presentation. I put all my content onto an app, thanks Jared. I’ve killed my idea for the ProBlogger album and t-shirt range. I have been considering doing a pyjama range, ProBlogger workwear for bloggers.

I’ve had to call the team and tell them to put all the content behind a subscription. I’ve deleted all the apps on my phone and I just took a hot and cold shower. It’s been a busy lunch break. I hope you’ve had a productive one.

I want to talk about content marketing, and to help you understand the perspective that I’ve come to this topic from. I want to tell you a very brief version of my story. I got an email a couple of days ago basically saying, “We’ve got lines for speakers.” It was basically cut out all your story because people just want the tips. I’m like, “But that was the first 20 minutes of my talk gone.” I’m going to tell it to you in two minutes and it does skip over some of the stages of the format for storytelling before.

For me, it all started in 2002 with an email from a friend. I was sitting at a desk, one of the part-time jobs that I had, and this email pinged in. A voice said, “Master, you’ve got mail.” Did anyone else install that? I was the only one. Okay, It was 2002 and I got this email and it had four words in it and a link. The four words were, “Check out this blog.” I had no idea what a blog was so I clicked the link out of curiosity. I ended up on this site that changed the course of my life not because of the content on it, although that was interesting, but because it was my first discovery of blogging and of this amazing tool called a blog.

What I found on this blog was this tool that enabled this guy on the other side of the world living in Prague, to talk to me in a really powerful, personal way. It amplified his voice in a way I’ve never seen a voice amplified before. I’ve done some public speaking. I’ve never had my voice amplified in that way. Around his voice was this community. Everyone was getting smarter as a result of not only what he was saying but the fact that there was a community there.

These two things captivated me. Within a couple of hours, I decided I needed to start a blog. Now, unfortunately, I had no credentials whatsoever to start a blog and if I thought about it for any more than about five minutes, I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve had 20 jobs in the last 10 years, none of which had anything to do with blogging. The only qualification I had was a Bachelor of Theology, which hasn’t really helped a whole heap. I wasn’t a great writer. It was my worst subject in high school and I was incapable of making text bold on that blog for three months after starting it.

Back then, you had to know a little bit of HTML and I had no idea, technological. But for one reason or another, I started that blog and that was the best thing that I’ve ever done in business. This is what it looked like. It was ugly. I designed this myself. It was based upon my wedding invitation, which makes me doubt my wife’s choice in colors. But if you’ve seen her blog, she’s a very colourful person.

Anyway, I did meet some people who knew how to make text bold and they eventually redesigned my blog for me. It was a personal journal of sorts. I was writing about spirituality, politics, movies. It was pretty much an outward pouring of what was in my mind, which was quite scary. What was even more scary was that thousands of people a day found it and read it. I didn’t know why but I was quite happy that they did.

I became very quickly addicted to blogging and creating content, with no intent whatsoever of making it into a business. It was just a hobby. It was something that I did for pretty much seven hours every night when I got home. It was a big part of my life and it became an addiction.

I began to experiment with other blogs over time. My next blog was a photo blog. I was going to share photos of a trip I was taking to Morocco with my wife, with my brand new digital camera. Turns out no-one had looked to any of the photos but I posted one review of the camera I was using and it ranked number one on Google for that camera. The entrepreneurial lights began to go in my mind.

I transitioned that photo blog onto a digital camera review blog, where I wrote reviews of other cameras and aggregated reviews that other people were writing around the web. It was a good time to start a digital photography blog because digital cameras were just starting to really take off.

In 2004, blogging had become a part-time job. In fact, it almost became a full time job. With this particular blog, I started to put some AdSense ads on my blog and some Amazon affiliate links to earn those 4% commissions on those $10 books. I didn’t really earn a lot but it was the beginnings of a part-time job, which over the next year, became a full-time thing for me.

In 2004, I started ProBlogger. It was pretty much me saying to the world you can make a living from blogging and is anyone else doing it out there because no-one was writing about it. It was my attempt to find other people on this same journey to learn from and to share what I was learning with.

I transitioned my photography blog into Digital Photography School in 2007 and this is my main blog today. It’s about ten times larger than ProBlogger. ProBlogger is a bit of a side project for me, which pays a full-time living in and of itself. But this is the main thing that I do today. It’s a how to take photography-type site.

Thirteen years later, I’m not the biggest blogger in the world and I’m not the best blogger in the world. But given the fact that I had no idea what I was doing when I started, I’m pretty pleased with what’s happened as a result of it. There’s a whole heap of numbers there which I pinch myself at. But the thing that I really love about what’s opened up for me is the opportunities. The opportunities to write a book, to start a conference, to speak at amazing events like this, meet amazing people.

But the best thing of all is when people come up to me at a conference like this, as happened this morning, and say things like, “You wrote this post that changed my life. In some small way, it helped me to start a business.” Or like James said before, “Influence the way I do things today.” That is something that I get really excited about. That’s the biggest compliment for me.

Thirteen years later, I find myself as a full-time blogger. Blogging and content marketing for me really tap into this quote that you’ve probably heard a million times before at conferences like this. “People do business with those that they know, like, and trust,” and content has the ability to help you to be known. Who would’ve ever thought I would be known by four million people a month? To be liked.

Who would’ve ever thought that someone will walk up to me this morning in a conference and give me a hug? I’m an introvert. I don’t like hugs, but I love the fact that people actually feel like they know me and they like me. It opens up opportunities for you to be trusted. This is what content marketing, this is what blogging is all about for me.

I want to say right upfront, whilst I’m talking about content marketing today, I’m doing it as a blogger. A lot of what I share today comes out of that experience. Blogging for me is the center of the mix. These are all of the other things that I do with my time and I could probably add some more circles to that. This week, I started on an app called Anchor. I don’t know if anyone’s started playing with Anchor. It’s like an audio version of Twitter. It’s fun. You leave a message and then everyone else leaves a voicemail message effectively back on your message and a conversation happens that way. It’s a really cool tool.

Anyway, I’m always experimenting with lots of different things. For me, the blog is the center of the mix. Whether that’s the case for you or whether a podcast is that or whether it’s something else, I think pretty much everything that I want to share this morning and the ten things that I’ve learned since I started applies to pretty much any medium and most of the models that you’ll be experimenting with before.

I’m going to whip through ten things. The first two are fairly foundational and then we get a little bit more tactical as we go along. This is something you’ve probably already thought about but I think it’s something that you really need to come back to on a regular basis. Define what it is that your blog or your podcast or you are about. There’s a variety of ways that you can think about this. The most common of which is to choose a niche and to think about that niche.

Has anyone got a niche in the room that you would say you got a niche? I’ve got a photography blog. That’s my niche. I’ve got a blogging blog. That’s a niche. This is Chris Hunter. He’s got a great blog called Bike EXIF. It’s about custom and classic motorbikes. He’s the only male I know who’s got something like 400,000 or 500,000 Pinterest followers. A lot of people say Pinterest is for women only. No way. There’s a whole heap of men on there and they’ve got their own niches.

He has a niche. I’ve got a niche. A lot of bloggers though that I meet say, “I don’t really want to just write about one topic.” And so another way to define what you’re on about is to think about your demographic. This is Gala Darling. She writes about travel, horoscopes, tattoos, relationships, travel, all kinds of stuff. But they relate to the one kind of person. She thinks about her blog as a blog for youthful, alternative, unconventional, individual, eccentric women. Her words, not mine. That’s her demographic.

The third way I think is, you can add to these other two, and that is to have a fight. I think this is a particularly powerful one. ProBlogger, when I started in 2004, it was a blog about making money from blogging. That was quite a controversial thing to write about in 2004 because blogging was seen as a very pure medium. And so for me to say I’m making money from blogging and I’m making six figures from it back in 2004, that was quite a stir. People really reacted to that in one of two ways.

Some people said, “He’s lying.” Other people said, “You shouldn’t make money from blogging.” And other people said, “Yeah, I want to do that too.” For me, the fight of ProBlogger back then was that you can do it and you can actually do it in an ethical way. That was like me putting a flag in the sand and people either reacted against it or they rallied around it. A lot of people were inspired by that idea. A lot of people shared that journey.

Having a fight for what you do is a very, very powerful thing. My wife, she’s a style blogger. She has a niche. Style, fashion, homewear, that’s her niche. She has a demographic as well. She writes for moms. But she also has a fight and it comes out in a lot of the content that she writes. You don’t have to give up on style when you’ve got three little, I was going to call them brats, boys running around in your home who fight against their stuff. That’s her fight. That something that really resonates with a lot of moms and so she weaves that into her blog and people rally around it.

When you’ve got a fight, you give something for people to join and that’s a very powerful thing when it comes to content. What is it that you do? This is something I go back to quite regularly and think about. The other thing I’d say about choosing what you do, choose something that’s meaningful to you. You’re going to be at this for a while so you might as well do something you enjoy and something that’s meaningful to you. If it’s meaningful to you, it will shine through in the content that you create.

I’ve had 30 blogs over the years. I have to say 28 of them I started because I thought they’d be profitable and they didn’t really mean a whole heap to me. I couldn’t sustain them and people who came across those blogs could tell that they weren’t meaningful to me and so they didn’t come back again. Do something meaningful to you.

Number two, understand your reader and how you will change them. Most people have been through some sort of an exercise like this and have created something like this. These are the reader profiles that I created when I started Digital Photography School in 2007. Some people would call them personas or avatars today. I know some people like personas and avatars, other people don’t.

But what I would say to you whether you’ve got one or not, you need to understand who’s reading your blog. The better you understand them and what is meaningful to them, the better position you’ll be in to create great content, to find more of those readers because you’ll start to understand where they’re hanging out. You’ll also understand how to build community with them and you’ll suddenly get ideas for how you monetize as well. The better you understand who is reading your blog, the better.

But here’s the thing. Most people’s avatars, most people’s understandings of their readers ends at ‘They’re 34, they’re male, they live in these sorts of… ‘Their demographical information. That’s good to know but you need to understand these kinds of things. You need to understand their needs. You need to understand their problems. You really need to understand their desires, where they want to be, their dreams. Those things are really powerful things to understand.

You need to understand their fears. Their fears are the things that are stopping them to get to their dreams. Even if you just understand their dream and their fear, that’s a very powerful thing to understand. It will inform your content. Again, it will inform how you brand yourself, how you promote yourself, how you build community and how you monetize. These things need to be crystal clear in your mind.

Whether you’ve got an avatar or not, understand these things. Find out what is meaningful to them. When you understand those things, that is meaningful stuff. Understand what’s meaningful to them. You can do it in a whole heap of different ways. For us, we use surveys. One of the things I love about live streaming, Periscope or a tool like Blab, has anyone used Blab? It puts you into a conversation. A very real-time conversation with people. That’s great for broadcasting your ideas and for creating content but it’s even more useful in terms of understanding the needs of people.

I remember the first time I did a Blab. It’s like Google Hangouts but it works. It put me into a conversation with three of my readers. I’ve never heard of them before. I didn’t recognize their names but suddenly, I was seeing them on the screen, hearing their voices, hearing their frustrations, hearing their questions. I wrote the best content that afternoon, after that Blab, because it was written out of the pain of my readers and the real life questions of my readers.

Use these sorts of tools to understand who your readers are. I think the great thing about an event like this, if you have enough readers to hold an event, is that you understand, you meet those people. It will infect the way you create content.

But here’s something where you can take your avatar writing to the next stage. Most people don’t do this. They have an avatar. They might know their reader’s problems but here’s the question I’d ask you. How will you change your readers? How are you going to change them? Here’s a simple exercise that you can do. Actually, before I give you the exercise, great blogs and great podcasts, they leave a mark on their readers and so I want to encourage you to think about the content you create.

It’s not only getting people onto your list or getting them to know, like, and trust you but understand that that content that you create has the potential to change your readers. If you create content that changes your readers, that’s a very powerful thing because they’ll come back and they’ll bring other people with them.

Here’s the exercise. You can do this later. It’s a very simple one. You just need a piece of paper and a pen the draw a line across it. At point A, I want you to describe who your readers are when they arrive on your blog or your podcast or where it is that you have first contact with people. This will be your avatar of sorts and it should include their needs, their problems, their desires, and their fears, those types of things.

Most people do this when they’ve got a blog but hardly anyone does this, where will your reader be as a result of coming into contact with you? Where will they be in a year’s time? Where will they be in five years’ time? What’s your dream for your readers, for your audience? Describe that change. Very powerful to understand that change. It should inform everything else that you do. It should inform the content you create, the product you create, the way you engage with people. Get crystal clear on that change.

Digital Photography School, my main blog, the change is very simple. I want people to get out of automatic mode on their cameras and to have full creative control of their cameras. Most people use their cameras in full automatic mode but they don’t know the full potential of their cameras so I want to give them creative control of their camera. That’s a very simple change. I talked to a parenting blogger the other day. She was starting a whole membership site for parents. I got her to do this exercise. We were both in tears by the end of it because she described desperate families who couldn’t communicate, who are angry and dysfunctional and then she described the most amazing families that you could ever imagine.

What a change she is bringing. By understanding that change, she suddenly had ideas for content. She suddenly had ideas for products. She suddenly had ideas for what her community could be through this exercise, very, very powerful thing to do. Essentially, what you’re doing is creating a before and after avatar for your audience.

Number three thing I want to talk about is three phases of creating content. Most people have a content creation process that was like my one used to be. You sit down and you think, “Shit, what am I going to write today?” Has anyone had that moment? You spend the next two hours working out what you’re going to write about. And then you write it and then you bang, publish, and it goes out. That’s the way I used to publish content. It was thoughtless, it was sporadic, and I’ve very rarely built momentum from one piece of content to the next.

Great blogs take their readers on a journey. Great podcasts take their readers on a journey. They build momentum over time. They’re thoughtful. They’re consistent and they do build momentum. Have a think about those words. They don’t just happen. You need to be intentional about the kind of content that you create. I want to encourage you to be intentional in three areas of your content creation. I’m going to dig deeper into each of these.

The first one is idea generation. Most bloggers kind of understand they need to come up with good ideas to write about but most bloggers do it in the moment that they’re creating the content itself. I want you to consider doing that ahead of time.

Secondly, the content creation. First, most of us understand we need to put time aside for that. Here’s the one I think most people could lift their game in. That’s the completion of their content. Most bloggers I come across either have a whole heap of drafts that they’ve never published. I had 90 at one point on the ProBlogger back end, or they publish content that could be a whole heap better, that they could be completing better. I want to give you some tips in each of these three areas as the next three points of my presentation.

But before I do, I want to encourage you to put time aside for this. One of the things I loved in one of the earlier presentations was about separating your tasks out. James shared his weekly schedule before. I’ve got a little way to go to clear mine but this is how I structure most of my weeks. You’ll get these slides later and you can look a little more deeply into it. I put time aside. Every week, I make an appointment with myself every week to come up with ideas. It happens on Friday morning. I spend half an hour on it. That’s all. Half an hour and I brainstorm by myself.

Then my team shows up for the meeting and I share what my ideas are and they tell me which ones are good and which ones aren’t. They develop them a little bit further. We probably spend about 45 minutes in total on ideas and that type of thing. Friday afternoons, I spend time planning the content I’m creating next week. I find really useful on a Monday morning when I look ahead for creation of content, to know ahead of time what I’m going to create that morning. I don’t have to come up with the idea. It’s already come up with and I’ve already given myself the deadline of when it needs to be created by. Monday, Tuesday morning, I spend time creating. Whether that be blog post or podcast or webinars or whatever it might be.

In the afternoons, I’d spend time completing. That’s really important for me to do because that’s my natural tendency, is to publish half finished content. I just like to get it out there without really going to the next level and taking that content from being good to great. I want to show you how to do that in a moment.

The fourth thing I want to talk about is generating ideas. Really, I want you to return to this exercise. This is what I did in 2007 when I started Digital Photography School. I worked at this overall change I was trying to bring and then I decided to fill in the gaps. For you to take your audience from one point to the next, what needs to happen? What do they need to know? What mindshifts need to happen? What skills do they need to develop? What areas do they need to build their confidence in?

I started to fill in the gaps. Here are some of the things I came up with for my audience. They needed to learn about aperture, shutter speed and some of those technical things they needed to grow in their confidence. They needed to understand really basic skills of how to hold a camera. I came up with 207 things in this exercise. It took me a whole afternoon to do. I returned to it the next day, I came up with another 100 so right about 300 things that my readers needed to do to get from fully auto to creative control. That was my first two years content for the blog.

I turned that content, step by step, into cornerstone pieces of content that I gave away to my audience. I placed them in an order that would take my readers on a journey from being in fully automatic mode to having creative control of their cameras. These four pieces of content here were some of the first pieces of content that I wrote. I looked at the stats the other day. Each of those pieces of content has been read over two million times since I started.

To this day, it still gets thousands of people to each of these pieces of content. I’m constantly linking back to these cornerstone pieces of content. Every time I mention the word aperture, it links back to the aperture article. Every time I mention shutter speed, it links back to the shutter speed article. It’s because I mapped out the whole road map ahead of time that I knew with confidence that the end of those two years are the base of what I was wanting to teach.

Do that exercise. It’s very powerful. If you’re ever running out of ideas, again, think about the change you’re trying to bring and build a road map for your readers. Six more really quick tips on generating ideas. You need to keep a record of every question you’re very asked or every question you ask yourself, every problem you ever notice. Again, this is the thing I love about live streaming, Periscope, it’s the thing I love about webinars, coming to conferences. I’m constantly writing down the questions people ask me. If one person is asking them, other people are asking them too.

Set idea traps. This is so powerful. The best thing I ever did for coming up with ideas was to set up a survey. I did it on day three of Digital Photography School. When I set up an autoresponder, you sign up to our newsletter, two or three months after you’ve been getting these weekly newsletters, I send you an email saying, “Would you mind filling in a survey? It helps us to understand you better. It collects a little bit of demographical information about our audience but there’s an open ended question.

The open ended question reads something like, “Do you have any questions or problems you want us to write a blog post about?” It’s an optional question. We had about 200,000 or 300,000 people complete that survey since 2007. That’s a lot of data. About 50,000 of those people have asked a question in that survey. I never run out of things to write about because I just go to the SurveyMonkey and look at the latest questions that we’ve been asked. It also shows your audience that you are interested in answering that question.

Set idea traps. You can use surveys. Your Facebook updates every now and again. You can ask that same question. Is there something you’d like us to write about? I’ve come across a number of bloggers recently who set up Facebook groups and they run polls every week in their Facebook group to test five different ideas for articles that they’re thinking about writing and they get their Facebook group members to vote on which one they want them to write a piece of content about.

Set up these little traps to collect ideas. You should be monitoring every blog post you write, every tweet you put out to collect those questions. If you don’t have people reading your blog yet, and leaving comments, head to someone else’s blog and look for the questions. Someone who’s a bigger blogger in your niche. YouTube is the best place ever to come up with questions. The comments left on YouTube clips in your industry will give you ideas for blog posts.

Forums also, we used to run a forum on Digital Photography School. It was amazing how many people would set up an account and I never post one thing. It was almost always a question. People joined forums to ask questions so you need to sit in those places and collect those sorts of questions.

And then find a brainstorming buddy. I don’t know if you’ve got these but one of the best things I did when I started ProBlogger was to commit with two other bloggers in my niche to throw out ideas at each other and to give each other ideas to write about. We became writing buddies.

The last thing, this is something that’s very simple to do particularly if you’ve been blogging or podcasting for a year or two, is to look back on your archives and ask yourself the question, how could I extend that old post or repurpose it or update it in some way? I actually do this everyday. Everyday, I look back at what I published this day last year and this day the year before on this same date. I actually go back through the archives all the years that I’ve been writing, every single day, to ask myself the question is that post still relevant? Could I update it? Could I repurpose that content in some way?

That’s where most of my podcasts, for the first year of my podcasting, have come from. Just looking back at the blog post that I’ve written and repurposing them and updating them.

Number five, I want to talk about creating content. Five really quick tips on this, firstly, write to your avatar or write to people that you actually know who are readers. My best blog post almost always start out as an email, a question from a reader or a conversation that I had at a conference or something that happens on Periscope. I write with the person in mind and my content comes out more personal.

It’s amazing how many people come out and say, “I feel like you’re writing to me. Did someone tell you about me?” It’s usually because I know someone like them and I’m writing in a more personal way. Write to your avatar and consider a blogging template. If you’re stuck in your writing, sometimes, it can help to get out of that stuck place by creating a template.

This is a template that Michael Hyatt came up with. I really didn’t like this idea when I first came across it. He follows the same template in almost every post he writes. I was like, “I’d never do that.” And then I start thinking about my own writing and I realize I pretty much do the same thing without actually having a template. Most of us develop a style of writing so if you’re stuck, maybe look back at some of your old post and work out what your template is or maybe steal someone else’s like Michael’s. He’s put it up and you’ll get a link to that in a moment.

I tend to back track my content. I’d much prefer to sit down from morning and write three or four blog post than to sit down four morning and write four blog post. I’m very much about batching what I do with my time. I set deadlines. We use a tool called CoSchedule, which is a WordPress plugin. It helps us to map out our content plan for a month, sometimes two or three months in advance and to assign tasks. We work as a team. I know what I have to write at certain times and then I may have to pass it over to Stacey who edits my content for me.

I’m a really big believer also that if you want to create great content, you need to consume it. This is something that I fell short on for a couple of years. It’s only more recently that I’ve started to re-consume content. Sometimes, it’s very easy to get very busy and not fill your own cup. I think consuming great content, one, is good because you will learn more but two, you will also pick up production ideas.

I’ve started listening to podcasts recently. Most of which have nothing to do with what I write about but I always come away from those podcasts with ideas from my own show.

I want to talk about completing content. This is a big area that I think most content creators could up their game in. Firstly, get help if you can afford it. This is Stacey and Darlene who edits my blogs for me now. Since giving this to someone else to do, we’ve produced a lot more content and a lot better content. If you can afford to get someone in to help read your content out loud, it’s amazing how many mistakes you’ll find. I find it particularly good if you’re reading it out loud to another person.

If I’ve got an important piece of content, I’ll ask my wife Vanessa listen to it as I read it to her. I know she’s not really listening but just the fact that she might be helps me to pick out all the mistakes that I would’ve been making.

This is something I think we all could lift our game in and it’s in polishing and making your content more visually pleasing and easier to consume. We don’t publish a blog post, we don’t publish show notes anymore without an image. Every post has to have at least one. Most of our posts have several images.

That’s not just because I’ve got a photography site, that’s also on ProBlogger, we’ve tested it. The post that have images get read at least 40% more than the post that don’t have images. The same with all of our social media now. Almost every tweet I do now has to have an image in it. They get retweeted significantly higher. They get more responses to them. It just works. You just have to have an image of some kind. Whether it be a diagram or a chart. Over time, you get to see which images are working well as well.

Spend time crafting those titles. The title is going to be pretty much what determines whether someone reads the opening line of your post. And then your opening line needs to be something you really need to polish as well. These are two places that I’m spending a lot of time in my content. I usually write my content first and then come back to the title and the opening line and then craft those and spend significant time on those areas.

Pay attention to your formatting, particularly your headline. It’s really important as well. People do not read content online. They scan it first and so if you can use headlines to tease them, they will then want to go back and fill in the gaps between the headlines. So really pay attention to that. Draw their eye down the page with images as well at key points, anywhere you want them to look.

Add depth to your content. Every time I go to Hit Publish, just before I do, I always ask myself and I’ve trained my team to ask themselves, could they add more meat to it? Could they make it a better post in some way? Maybe by adding in an example, maybe by telling a story or using an analogy, maybe by adding an opinion. It’s amazing how many blog posts go out about new technology and they have no opinion. It’s just here are the specifications of the new MacBook Pro and here’s a picture. That’s it.

Tell us why we should buy it. Whether it’s any good, who would be applicable for it, add your opinion. This is what makes your content unique. People aren’t reading your content for specifications. They want to know what you think. That’s what gets the conversation going as well.

Suggest further reading. We have good SEO benefits mentioned this morning about having links to your own content but also links out to other people’s content. It shows your audience that there’s more to do, there’s more to learn and that you know where to find that. That’s good for you own credibility. Also, it builds relationships with other sites when you’re linking to them as well.

Add quotes. It’s so easy to tweet someone and say, “Do you have any thoughts on this?” And then embed that tweet reply into your content. I email Seth Godin all the time. He didn’t know me from anywhere but he almost always responds to those sorts of emails. “Do you have one line to say about this topic? Thanks Seth.” I’ll borrow your authority and I’ll plug that into my content. It makes my content more useful and adds another opinion, another voice and shows your readers that you’re going to the extra mile in gathering different opinion for them.

Suggest something for your readers to go and do. This adds depth. I’ll show you some examples of how we do this on Digital Photography School. This is something that is just so easy to do. It’s so easy to embed something else. We again heard good SEO reasons for doing that. If you can keep people on the page longer, it helps your SEO ranking, also makes your content better. Just look at all the places you can get embeddable content these days.

We all know you can embed YouTube clips. That’s easy to do. Just do a search for your topic and find a video that related to what you’ve got to say. But there are so many other places you can get embeddable content. I judged a blogging competition for social media examiner recently and the blogs that won all used embeddable content. They mixed it up. They were embedding tweets. They were embedding Facebook page status updates. They were embedding videos. They were embedding audio clips. This new tool that I mentioned before, Anchor, you can embed that anchors that you create and the anchors that other people create as well. Give your readers different things to do while they’re on your site. It’s so easy to do.

Mix up your content. I was talking to a restaurateur down in Melbourne, a very well known one recently who’s had a top level restaurant now for 10 years. I was quite amazed when I heard that he’d been going for 10 years. He’s been at the top of the game for 10 years. I was like, “This game of having a restaurant, it’s very fickle. There’s always the new cool place down the road that everyone’s rushing off to.” I asked him, “How do you keep at the top of the game?” He said, “Basically, I reinvent myself every year. Sometimes two times a year.” He’s had four fit outs in that time. He reinvents his menu every year, several times. He actually does it seasonally. He’s always reinventing things.

The people who have come to this restaurant know what they’re going to get. They know the sort of the food that he has. They know the level of service. But he’s always constantly experimenting with new things. I think this is really true in this place, in this time where so much content are being created. There’s always new sites springing up.

Your readers need to understand that quality is always going to be high and the type of stuff you’re talking about is going to be consistent. But you need to mix up the type of content that you’re producing. I want to encourage you to do it in a number of ways. One is to produce content that has different styles to it. This is what I say to my team, “Every week, I want you to create content that informs, inspires, and interacts.” If you look at each of those blog posts that I’ve got up there, they’re all on exactly the same topic. Long exposure photography.

We publish the first one on Monday. It’s information. It’s a meaty article, a tutorial. To be honest, hardly anyone reads it on Monday. You know when they read it? They read it on Wednesday, after we publish an inspirational post and we link back to it. The inspirational post is 15 beautiful photos that we’ve curated. That post has hardly any text at all. It’s all about showing what could be. It’s all about showing our readers the type of photos they could take. It gives them a reason to go and read the tutorial. Inspire them and then drive them to the information.

At the end of the week, on Friday, Saturday, we give them a challenge. We say, “Go and take a photo using the technique you learned on Monday, looking at the photos that you saw on Wednesday. Go and try it for yourself and come back and share the photo with us.” We use Discuss as a communing tool, which allows embedding of photos in the comments. This really works. Both of those posts drive traffic back to the informational posts. We got extra paid views as a result of it.

The best thing though is that our readers actually learn something because they learn information, they’re inspired to use the information. They’re given a chance to implement what they learn. We all know that people learn best when they do. Inform, inspire, interact. 90% of our content is information but we sprinkle it. We season it with inspiration and interaction.

Another way to mix up your content is to try different formats. You’ll find over time that your audience will respond best to certain types of content and we’ve certainly worked out that information content is our best, we use a lot of guides, how to’s, tips, tutorials but we sprinkle it with stories.

Storytelling is another way of inspiring and some of our best posts have been more inspirational content telling stories. But there’s a whole list of different types of content that you need to constantly be experimenting and seeing what’s working with your audience. The same with different mediums.

For us, blog posts have been a big part of it. But more recently, I’ve started to get into more visual content particularly through our social media, infographics, and cheat sheets have really been working very well for us lately and live streaming as I said before. Actually, what I’m finding is live streaming so Periscoping everyday is driving people to my podcast and the podcast is driving people to the blog for some reason. That seems to be the flow of our readers. Just experiment with where you can meet new readers and where you can take them as a result of that.

I want to talk for a moment about this idea of know, like, and trust that opened this quite before. People do business with people that they know, like, and trust. So if you want people to do business with you, you want them to know, like, and trust you. How do you create content that takes them through this process? It will be different for everyone of us but I want to show some examples of what we do. This is an infographic. We didn’t actually create it. We curated it. We always link back to the source.

We find that infographics work very well as a first point of contact with our audience on Digital Photography School. Our audience share these like crazy. They can’t get enough of them. That’s good at getting known. People share that kind of content. But in and of itself, that doesn’t really help because people generally would bounce away from an infographic very quickly. What we do and you can see that underneath a highlighter, that we have further reading based on that infographic.

We used to just post the infographic and that was great for traffic, getting the eyeball. But since we started giving further readings that relates to that infographic, we’ve seen a lot more stickiness to the sight so highlight and underneath it, you can’t read it. It’s three articles on how to hold a camera, which is exactly what the infographic is about. We give them a meatier piece of content. That’s the content that people like. They begin to not only see you and know you. They begin to like you and trust you.

Underneath that, we have other articles for beginners because this is a topic that’s very beginner-y. But we can’t post infographics all day everyday. We have to go to the next level. You have to start asking yourself, what’s going to take people to the next level of liking us? Again, this is where we have more of our inspirational content. This is where storytelling is very powerful. Content that’s going to make people grow in their desire, in inspiration and motivation. Sprinkle that type of content.

But again, you’ll see there, I’ve highlighted links further into the sight. We’re always trying to get people to the content which helps them to trust us. That helps them to build credibility and authority for us. This is another type of content that helps likeability. It’s any kind of interactional. This is one of our challenges. We do them every weekend. Here is something for you to go away and do. Show us your work. People like to show off. People like to talk. We give them an opportunity to do that. That gives them a sense of belonging.

And then trust. These are meaty articles. That post there on the right, The Ultimate Guide To Learning How To Use Your First Digital SLR is like 6,000 words long. That’s a big piece of content but it grows authority. We’ve actually found that long form content is outperforming anything else on the sight at the moment. I don’t know if you can see that but that post has been shared over 149,000 times. It took a lot of work to get that piece of content together but it’s paying off because not only is it being shared, it’s growing trust. It’s growing credibility.

That piece of content, we tracked it, is responsible for a lot of people buying our ebooks than buying our products as a result of that. Okay, we know, like and trust. What about buy? Because we all want the sale, eventually. How do you actually get them to buy? What we’ve found is that our blog posts are not a very good place to get the buy. For our audience, it just doesn’t work at all. We actually tracked this ebook that we launched last year. It was responsible for about 5% of our sales, our blog content.

We just don’t sell blog content anymore. We sell for our email list. We’ve got an email list of about 800,000 now and it drives almost all of our sales. Social media just doesn’t convert for us at all. We don’t use social media or our blogging content, or even the podcast to sell. We use it to drive people to our newsletter.

This is what most people do on their blogs. They have their blog and then they have a sight wide opt in on the side bar. Get our cheat sheet or get our ebook, whatever it might be. This works, this is good but what’s even better is to have multiple opt ins. One of the trends we noticed last year was a lot of blogs now are using a library of opt ins and they’re matching the opt in that relates best to a certain category of content.

What’s happening even more this year, this is another shift that I’ve noticed is that cool kids are now creating opt ins for every blog post that they do or every podcast that they do. I think James mentioned or alluded to this earlier. This is what Amy Porterfield did. She interviewed me for her podcast a few months ago and she said to me, “Can I take three of your best articles from the blog, put them into a PDF, and then add some of my own thoughts to it? She created a very simple opt in for that podcast. She wouldn’t be promoting it anywhere else except for that episode.

This is what RazorSocial are doing in Cleary. He actually gives anyone who comes to his blog a PDF version of every blog post. You can just download a PDF version of the blog post but it’s behind an opt in. It’s converting really well for him. It’s a very easy way to create an opt in.

This is Jill from Screw the 9 to 5. They’ve started creating checklists or swipe files the relate to blog posts. They don’t do it for every blog post but certainly the ones that are meatier, the longer form content. They’re adding blog-post specific opt ins to them. I think we’ll see that just well a lot more and more in the next 12 months.

Talking about content events, as I look back over the last 12 years of my own blogging journey, I quite often live in Google Ad Analytics and I love just to look at what happens when there’s spikes in traffic came, just a good habit to get into. I noticed recently that a lot of the spikes in traffic in my site have happened around events or content events.

The first one was back in 2005 on ProBlogger. I was sitting in bed one night at 2:00AM and I had this little idea for a 31 day series of content on the blog. I was going to give a little bit of teaching everyday and then a little activity to go and do for my readers. I couldn’t go to sleep so I got up and I just wrote this blog post and said, “I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to start it tomorrow and I’m going to call it 31 Days To Build A Better Blog.” Put no thought into that idea at all.

I had no idea what the 31 days were going to be. I think I may have had a couple of ideas and I just went to bed and I slept easy. I’ve got it out of me. Put the blog post up, woke up the next morning, there was more comments on that post than I’ve ever had on a post before. I was like, “Okay, what’s day one going to be?” Quickly, I came up with day one and it started this little series of content over the first 31 days.

Traffic was two or three times higher that month than I’ve ever seen before. I was like, “What is going on here?” Essentially, I was doing the same thing I was doing every other day. But because I called it something and ran it over a defined period, people wanted to join it. There was a sense of an event happening and people like to join events.

I did the same series in 2007. This time I put an opt in around it. I said you can get an email every day and essentially, it was the same thing, almost exactly the same content. It was two or three times bigger than the first year. I did it in 2009 again and this time, we had a little community area. Today, I’d probably use a Facebook group or something like that. People really responded well in not only getting the content and the task, but coming together and sharing their knowledge.

This event idea really took off. At the end of 2009, my readers said, “Could you give us this in a PDF or an ebook? We’ll even pay you for it.” I was like, “No, you won’t.” They were like, “Yeah, we will.” I put it into a PDF and I created 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, The ebook. 12,000 people bought in the first three weeks after launching it, at $20 each. I’m like, “What in the world happened?”

Events are very powerful. People like to join things. Any sort of a defined period is a very powerful thing. I’m going to let you work through this slide later when you get it but there’s a whole heap of benefits of doing an event. I was going to say I think it’s about joining. It’s about something social. It’s about doing something together, achieving something together that can be very powerful to do.

Here are a few examples. This is my wife. She does events. She actually did her first event two weeks into her first blog. She had no one reading her blog at all. I think there was like 10 readers. By the end of that week, she had 200 readers a day because she did this event. It was just a very simple event. She told her readers to take a photo of themselves wearing a certain color everyday for a week and post in on Instagram with a hashtag. It went crazy. She does these events now every three or so months and every time, it significantly increases her traffic.

This is one around fitness. You can do this in pretty much any niche. This is one around organizing your pantry of all things, an event that this blogger did. She had thousands of people to the pantry challenge together. This is a 52 weeks event on finances and saving up money. You can really do it in lots of ways. If you’ve ever been to Bali, this is the braiding your hair challenge. Literally, Kristina did. She does 30 days of braiding your hair and she turned it into an ebook at the end of it.

People joined in and then she used that as the launch of her new product. Any kind of an event worked really well. Again, I’ll let you read through those. I don’t like bullet points but I thought it would be a quick way of getting the information to you and allow me to get on to my last two points.

This is the biggest challenge I think, for us as content creators today. How do you differentiate yourself? We live in a time where, I think I saw the stats the other day, there’s around 74 million plus blogs on wordpress.com. That’s just the wordpress.com version and there’s the wordpress.org version, which is even more popular, then there’s Tumblr and Blogger. There’s so much content being created all the time. Looking at podcasts, app store, there’s so many podcast out there. There’s so much content being produced.

It’s probably one of the most important things that we need to really get our heads around as content creators. How do we stand out? Seven quick tips to do it. Firstly, and this is the hardest one. It’s almost impossible to choose a unique topic but it still is kind of possible. Firstly, you could be first and it was helpful to be one of the first people talking about blogging and making money from blogging. But this is pretty much impossible. There’s 1,000 blogs on almost every topic you can think about.

But you can be the first one to combine two topics together. This is Manolo, the shoe blogger. He started blogging in 2007 and there were thousands of blogs on shoes already back in 2007. But he was the first person to blog about celebrities and their shoes. He went viral. He went crazy. He was the first one to bring two topics together.

This is Jen and Jadah from Simple Green Smoothies. Jada spoke at our event last year. She told the story about how she had I think four or five different blogs, none of them worked whatsoever until she noticed Green Smoothies starting to take off. And so she started Simple Green Smoothies. They have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, hundreds of thousands of readers to their blog. They built a massive business around Simple Green Smoothies.

This is Donna Moritz, some of you will know, she’s an Aussie blogger. She had a social media blog as did thousands of other people. It was pretty much the same content, talking about all things social media. And then she noticed visual content was starting to grow and become more important. She noticed the post that she was writing on visual content started to really take off so she killed all her other posts and just focused on visual content. Jumped on that emerging trend.

Serve and ignore demographic. I think this is a very powerful thing because yes, there is a blog on every topic out there but there’s a whole heap of ignored demographics. Has anyone come across Nerd Fitness? This is a great blog if you’re a nerd. There’s tens of thousands of fitness blogs out there but they all look the same. They’ve all got chiselled guys with six packs on the front and they all speak in the same language that I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Steve Kamb decided to start a fitness blog for nerds. He gamified getting fit. Nerds want to get fit too but we’ve been ignored, we’ve been left out of that whole thing. Did I say we? Yeah. This is a great example of serving and ignoring. He’s really presenting the same information. He just changes the language and he’s branding it in a way that is relevant for the ignored niche.

There are all kinds of ignored niche, whether it be gender, disability, life circumstances, age that you are. I came across a few bloggers recently who’ve been creating blogs for seniors and retirees, who have felt left out of certain niches as well. There are all kind of ignored demographics.

Use a different medium or format. A lot of you read The Verge. When The Verge started, almost every tech blog had been successful the nerd, The Verge was using short form content. Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, they were publishing 10 to 20, sometimes 30 or 40 blog posts a day and they were almost all one or two paragraphs long The Verge came out now publishing 4,000, 5,000 word articles.

They stood out because they changed the format. This is Brian Fanzo. He was a social media expert as were thousands of other people but he spotted this live streaming trend going on and so he now is flying around the world talking about live streaming and he’s made a name for himself because he chained the medium that he was using to talk about the same topics.

Publish in a different pace. Everyone here probably knows John Lee Dumas. There are lots of entrepreneurial blogs out there but no one was doing daily. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how he keeps us but he changed the pace of publishing content. As a result, that’s one of the reasons that he stood out.

This is Dosh Dosh, a blog that was around years ago now. He started I think in 2007. It was a blog about making money blogging. This is three years after ProBlogger started and by this stage, there were thousands of blogs on how to make money from blogging, Macky from Dosh Dosh decided to slow it down. He didn’t go faster. He went slower and longer form. He was publishing at one stage, one piece of content every month. It was long, meaty content that everyone anticipated. When he published that post, it got shared like crazy. Macky’s down at it again. You’ve got to get his latest post that would take you a week to read it and implement the content. It was so meaty but he slowed it right down. It became a part of his brand. Now, he’s disappeared and no one knows where he went.

Right for a different level of expertise, this is what I did with Digital Photography School. There were thousands of blogs for photographers in 2007 when I started. It was a stupid topic, it was too late. Digital photography has been around forever. But most of those blogs have been writing for experts. Most of those blogs had this culture on them. If you turned up and asked a beginner question, you would get laughed out of the comment section.

It wasn’t because the bloggers themselves didn’t like beginners. It was because the audience had all grown up and become intermediate and advanced users. I started a blog for beginners. One of my first articles was how to hold a camera. The most basic thing you could think of. I almost didn’t publish it because it was so basic. I was embarrassed to publish the post. It’s now had over 800,000 people view the post.

People need that kind of information. That’s the kind of information that they’re too embarrassed to ask their friends. Those serve a different level of expertise.

Lastly, I want to talk about refining your voice. Something is really hard to teach on. How do you develop your voice? Partly, it comes from experimentation but it’s something that you can make some choices around as well.

Some of you might know Jeff Goins. He’s a blogger about writing and he’s written some great books. He says you can write in any of these five voices on pretty much any topic, any niche. The professor is someone who researches, who pretty much spends their whole life dedicating to learning about a particular topic and then they present a hypothesis and they really teach at a high level about a topic.

The artist is someone who’s not really interested in teaching, they’re just interested in beauty and aesthetics and inspiration. They’re looking for the beauty in a topic and you can probably think of bloggers who do that or podcasters. But I don’t really teach you anything but you just come away from it feeling motivated and inspired.

The prophet is someone who’s interested in telling you the truth. The cold, hard, ugly truth. They bust myths, sometimes they’re not that popular but you know they’ll tell it like it is. Sometimes, they’re not that sensitive in their language that they use but they just get to the point. I reckon someone in this room might be a prophet.

The journalist is someone who curates. They gather information from different sources and then presents that information as a story.

The celebrity isn’t someone who’s famous. They’re someone who’s charismatic. It’s more about the person and what they think about a topic or how they live their life, their personality, that’s big in that particular topic.

Jeff argues that you can pretty much take any of these or a combination of these as your voice. I reckon you could add a couple of more at least. You can be the companion. You can be the person who journeys with someone, who may be just a step ahead of them in the journey. You can be the mentor. You can be the entertainer and talk about the funny stuff that’s going on in an industry or niche. You can be the reviewer. You can be the curator. You can be the storyteller, the guide, the teacher, the thought leader or something else.

The more you do it, the better you’ll work out what your voice is and really, I would suggest that you look around at what everyone else is doing and try and find the gaps in that as well. It needs to be who you are and it’s hard to write in a voice that you’re not. But if you can find a gap that reflects who you are, that’s a very powerful thing.

Again, when I started Digital Photography School, I wanted to teach, I wanted to give people a how to, but I didn’t want to be a professor. There were plenty of them already so I decided to be the companion. I decided to be someone who’s like here’s what I learned, try this. I’ll be a friend who teaches you. Think about your voice.

The last thing I want to say, I’ve got a few minutes left to say it. I don’t need them, is to keep moving. This is just a general piece of advice I guess, for entrepreneurs. You’ve got to keep moving. Pay attention to the little ideas you get that keep you awake at night like I paid attention to, back in 2005, when I couldn’t sleep at night. And don’t just pay attention to those ideas, do something with them. Get up out of bed and write a blog post. Put it out there. See what happens. Look for the sparks that energize you and then test those sparks and look to see what happens. Look for the sparks that energize other people.

When I put that blog post out there about 31 days to build a better blog, I didn’t know what would happen but I followed the energy. I saw that my readers were responding and so I went with it. I went hard at it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it again. Now, I turned into the product.

You know what? The best thing, yes all those sales of that book, I think I looked a couple of weeks ago and we sold 60,000 copies of that book now. It’s going to be a profitable venture. I’m really glad I paid attention to that spark of energy and did something with it at 2:00AM that night. It also led to a whole other journey. Whilst ebooks may not be the best model, maybe we need to all move towards subscriptions, I don’t know, but ebooks and paying attention to that spark was something that really was powerful for me. I’d spend on a whole heap of other product ideas that I’ve created since.

We’ve now published about 40 ebooks. We’ve now sold almost half a million ebooks since 2009 when I first created that first one. It’s opened up this whole new way of doing things. I put it all back to the fact that I paid attention to a spark of energy and I enacted, I kept moving.

I love this little quote from Jadah Sellner that I’ll leave you with. “Take imperfect action.” It’s very easy to come to a conference like this and be overwhelmed by the people on the stage, telling you their stories of all the things that they’ve done and looking around you at the room and all the other people taking notes about the things they’re going to enact in hearing these stories. The thing that you’ve got to realize is that none of us really know what we’re doing and we’re all just taking imperfect actions and seeing what happens as a result of that.

There are plenty of failures that we all have along the way but somewhere in the midst of the things that we do comes life and comes profit. That’s all I’ve got to say today. Thank you for the time.

I hope you enjoyed that talk. I do recommend the Superfast Business conference. James Schramko also has a podcast. If you do a search for Superfast Business, you’ll find him. He’s a very smart, straight talking kind of guy. Another Aussie accent to add to your playlist if you’re not from Australia or if you are as well.

Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group, problogger.com/group.

As promised at the top of the show, some further listening for you. If you want to listen to a podcast on how to choose a niche, go back to episode 59. If you want to hear a podcast about avatars and thinking about your audience, go back and listen to a really early one, episode 33. If you want to dig into that exercise for thinking about how to change your audience’s life, go back even further to episode 11. That was part of our 31 day series. If you want to dig into more about how to come up with great ideas to create content, go and listen to episode 84, which was a part of a series that I did. It was followed up on episode 86 on how to create content. I really dig into some strategies for thinking about how to get into the habit of creating good content. Episode 87 was also about completing content, finishing things off.

Lastly, if you want to learn more about embeddable content, I’d go a lot deeper into that topic in episode 152. There’s lots more in the ProBlogger archives there so dig around and if you do want to get those links, go over to the show notes, which are at problogger.com/podcast/213.

Lastly, thanks so much for those of you who left reviews over the last week in iTunes and other podcasting apps. I am loving those reviews and a few good ones came in this week as well.

How did you go with today’s episode?

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The post 213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know appeared first on ProBlogger.

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213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know

10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging and Content Marketing When I Started

Today, I want to share the audio of a keynote I gave at a conference early last year about 10 things I wish I’d known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started.

In episodes 204 and 205 I shared some recordings of keynotes I’ve given, and the response from many of you was that you wanted to hear more of that style of podcast. So today I dug out a talk I gave at the Super Fast Business conference, which is run by James Schramko here in Australia.

James, who puts on a great event, asked me to share some of my story and give some practical tips on content creation.

I talk about defining what your blog is about, the three phases of creating great content, how to mix up the different types of content you feature on your blog, idea generation, creating ‘content events’ on your blog, and how to differentiate yourself in your content.   

I loved doing this talk, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Don’t forget to join the Facebook group

10 THINGS I WISH I KNEW ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING WHEN I STARTED

Further Listening on 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging (and Content Marketing) When I Started

059: What Should I Blog About? 15 Questions to Ask to Help Identify Your Blogging Niche or Focus

033: 2 Questions to Ask to Help You Find Readers for Your Blog

011: Create 10 Blog Post Ideas for your Blog [Day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog]

084: How to Come Up With Fresh Ideas to Write About On Your Blog

086: How to Get into the Flow of Creating Great Content for Your Blog

087: 9 Questions You Should Ask Before Hitting Publish On Your Next Blog Post

152: How to Use Embedded Content on Your Blog [Challenge]

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view

Hi there and welcome to episode 213 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience. You can find more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com.

In today’s episode, I want to share with you an audio from a keynote I gave at a conference early last year. The topic was ’10 things I wish I had known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started’. A bit of a mouthful, but you get the idea. Back in episode 204, 205, just a few episodes ago, I shared a couple of recordings from keynotes I’ve given at my ProBlogger events and I had so much positive response from that. People really enjoyed that format, a presentation, a talk. Longer form and also the slides from those talks as well.

I wanted to do it again because many of you wanted more of that style of podcast. We’re not going to do it every week by any account. I don’t give that many talks. But I did find this one from the Superfast Business Conference. It’s a conference that is run by James Schramko. Many of you will know here in Australia. It’s run in Sydney and it was a great event. I really enjoyed getting to that particular event.

James puts on a really good event, and he asked me at the event last year to share some of my story but also give some practical tips on content creation. Really, that’s what the focus of this talk is about. In it, I’ve given a few tips on defining what your blog is about but then we get a lot into content creation itself. I talk about three different phases of creating content. I talk about how to mix up the different types of content that you might want to feature on your blog. I talk about idea generation, some tips on creating content, finishing content, running content events and challenges on your blog and also how to differentiate yourself through your content as well.

I really enjoyed this talk and I hope you do as well. I’ll also put up the slides from this talk in today’s show notes. There are a few times during the talk where you probably will want to refer to the slides. Whether you do that as you’re listening if you’re at a computer or whether you want to come back to the slides later, you’ll be able to do that. I bet 95% of what I do talk about in this talk doesn’t rely on the slides but you might want to have them. The show notes are at http://ift.tt/2xRKOgN.

The only other thing I will note is that at the time of this talk, there was a tool that I was using called Blab. Blab is a live streaming tool that allowed multiple people to be on the screen at once. Now, that tool doesn’t exist today. But when I do talk about it, you can pretty much substitute most of the other live streaming tools that exist today. It’s only a brief mention during the talk but I did want to point that out.

Some of the points I mention in passing during this keynote were expanded upon in later podcast. At the end of the talk, I will come back on and suggest some further listening for those of you who want to dig deeper into some of the things I touched on during the talk. But again, I’ll link to all of those in the show notes as well. http://ift.tt/2xRKOgN. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy this talk and I will come back at the end just to wrap things up.

Host: Our next guest is a superpower in the blogosphere. In fact, I remember going to an event, my first event in the United States several years ago, and I found out he’d been to one before that, one of the early ones. I found a transcript of what he’d been doing and what he talked about. I read through it and I thought, “This is great.” He’s probably one of the seeds to my original direction towards content marketing. And then I recently saw him in the Philippines, presenting. I thought, “This information is very in line with what we do.” His version of what I talk about with OTR, but he’s been doing it a lot longer than I have. He can do things like write and spell. He’s prolific and he’s really, really good at it. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Darren Rowse.

Darren: Thank you. It’s really good. Who’s feeling like they’ve already got enough value from this and they could go home almost? I, literally in the lunch break, had to rewrite the opening story of my talk thanks to an earlier presentation. I put all my content onto an app, thanks Jared. I’ve killed my idea for the ProBlogger album and t-shirt range. I have been considering doing a pyjama range, ProBlogger workwear for bloggers.

I’ve had to call the team and tell them to put all the content behind a subscription. I’ve deleted all the apps on my phone and I just took a hot and cold shower. It’s been a busy lunch break. I hope you’ve had a productive one.

I want to talk about content marketing, and to help you understand the perspective that I’ve come to this topic from. I want to tell you a very brief version of my story. I got an email a couple of days ago basically saying, “We’ve got lines for speakers.” It was basically cut out all your story because people just want the tips. I’m like, “But that was the first 20 minutes of my talk gone.” I’m going to tell it to you in two minutes and it does skip over some of the stages of the format for storytelling before.

For me, it all started in 2002 with an email from a friend. I was sitting at a desk, one of the part-time jobs that I had, and this email pinged in. A voice said, “Master, you’ve got mail.” Did anyone else install that? I was the only one. Okay, It was 2002 and I got this email and it had four words in it and a link. The four words were, “Check out this blog.” I had no idea what a blog was so I clicked the link out of curiosity. I ended up on this site that changed the course of my life not because of the content on it, although that was interesting, but because it was my first discovery of blogging and of this amazing tool called a blog.

What I found on this blog was this tool that enabled this guy on the other side of the world living in Prague, to talk to me in a really powerful, personal way. It amplified his voice in a way I’ve never seen a voice amplified before. I’ve done some public speaking. I’ve never had my voice amplified in that way. Around his voice was this community. Everyone was getting smarter as a result of not only what he was saying but the fact that there was a community there.

These two things captivated me. Within a couple of hours, I decided I needed to start a blog. Now, unfortunately, I had no credentials whatsoever to start a blog and if I thought about it for any more than about five minutes, I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve had 20 jobs in the last 10 years, none of which had anything to do with blogging. The only qualification I had was a Bachelor of Theology, which hasn’t really helped a whole heap. I wasn’t a great writer. It was my worst subject in high school and I was incapable of making text bold on that blog for three months after starting it.

Back then, you had to know a little bit of HTML and I had no idea, technological. But for one reason or another, I started that blog and that was the best thing that I’ve ever done in business. This is what it looked like. It was ugly. I designed this myself. It was based upon my wedding invitation, which makes me doubt my wife’s choice in colors. But if you’ve seen her blog, she’s a very colourful person.

Anyway, I did meet some people who knew how to make text bold and they eventually redesigned my blog for me. It was a personal journal of sorts. I was writing about spirituality, politics, movies. It was pretty much an outward pouring of what was in my mind, which was quite scary. What was even more scary was that thousands of people a day found it and read it. I didn’t know why but I was quite happy that they did.

I became very quickly addicted to blogging and creating content, with no intent whatsoever of making it into a business. It was just a hobby. It was something that I did for pretty much seven hours every night when I got home. It was a big part of my life and it became an addiction.

I began to experiment with other blogs over time. My next blog was a photo blog. I was going to share photos of a trip I was taking to Morocco with my wife, with my brand new digital camera. Turns out no-one had looked to any of the photos but I posted one review of the camera I was using and it ranked number one on Google for that camera. The entrepreneurial lights began to go in my mind.

I transitioned that photo blog onto a digital camera review blog, where I wrote reviews of other cameras and aggregated reviews that other people were writing around the web. It was a good time to start a digital photography blog because digital cameras were just starting to really take off.

In 2004, blogging had become a part-time job. In fact, it almost became a full time job. With this particular blog, I started to put some AdSense ads on my blog and some Amazon affiliate links to earn those 4% commissions on those $10 books. I didn’t really earn a lot but it was the beginnings of a part-time job, which over the next year, became a full-time thing for me.

In 2004, I started ProBlogger. It was pretty much me saying to the world you can make a living from blogging and is anyone else doing it out there because no-one was writing about it. It was my attempt to find other people on this same journey to learn from and to share what I was learning with.

I transitioned my photography blog into Digital Photography School in 2007 and this is my main blog today. It’s about ten times larger than ProBlogger. ProBlogger is a bit of a side project for me, which pays a full-time living in and of itself. But this is the main thing that I do today. It’s a how to take photography-type site.

Thirteen years later, I’m not the biggest blogger in the world and I’m not the best blogger in the world. But given the fact that I had no idea what I was doing when I started, I’m pretty pleased with what’s happened as a result of it. There’s a whole heap of numbers there which I pinch myself at. But the thing that I really love about what’s opened up for me is the opportunities. The opportunities to write a book, to start a conference, to speak at amazing events like this, meet amazing people.

But the best thing of all is when people come up to me at a conference like this, as happened this morning, and say things like, “You wrote this post that changed my life. In some small way, it helped me to start a business.” Or like James said before, “Influence the way I do things today.” That is something that I get really excited about. That’s the biggest compliment for me.

Thirteen years later, I find myself as a full-time blogger. Blogging and content marketing for me really tap into this quote that you’ve probably heard a million times before at conferences like this. “People do business with those that they know, like, and trust,” and content has the ability to help you to be known. Who would’ve ever thought I would be known by four million people a month? To be liked.

Who would’ve ever thought that someone will walk up to me this morning in a conference and give me a hug? I’m an introvert. I don’t like hugs, but I love the fact that people actually feel like they know me and they like me. It opens up opportunities for you to be trusted. This is what content marketing, this is what blogging is all about for me.

I want to say right upfront, whilst I’m talking about content marketing today, I’m doing it as a blogger. A lot of what I share today comes out of that experience. Blogging for me is the center of the mix. These are all of the other things that I do with my time and I could probably add some more circles to that. This week, I started on an app called Anchor. I don’t know if anyone’s started playing with Anchor. It’s like an audio version of Twitter. It’s fun. You leave a message and then everyone else leaves a voicemail message effectively back on your message and a conversation happens that way. It’s a really cool tool.

Anyway, I’m always experimenting with lots of different things. For me, the blog is the center of the mix. Whether that’s the case for you or whether a podcast is that or whether it’s something else, I think pretty much everything that I want to share this morning and the ten things that I’ve learned since I started applies to pretty much any medium and most of the models that you’ll be experimenting with before.

I’m going to whip through ten things. The first two are fairly foundational and then we get a little bit more tactical as we go along. This is something you’ve probably already thought about but I think it’s something that you really need to come back to on a regular basis. Define what it is that your blog or your podcast or you are about. There’s a variety of ways that you can think about this. The most common of which is to choose a niche and to think about that niche.

Has anyone got a niche in the room that you would say you got a niche? I’ve got a photography blog. That’s my niche. I’ve got a blogging blog. That’s a niche. This is Chris Hunter. He’s got a great blog called Bike EXIF. It’s about custom and classic motorbikes. He’s the only male I know who’s got something like 400,000 or 500,000 Pinterest followers. A lot of people say Pinterest is for women only. No way. There’s a whole heap of men on there and they’ve got their own niches.

He has a niche. I’ve got a niche. A lot of bloggers though that I meet say, “I don’t really want to just write about one topic.” And so another way to define what you’re on about is to think about your demographic. This is Gala Darling. She writes about travel, horoscopes, tattoos, relationships, travel, all kinds of stuff. But they relate to the one kind of person. She thinks about her blog as a blog for youthful, alternative, unconventional, individual, eccentric women. Her words, not mine. That’s her demographic.

The third way I think is, you can add to these other two, and that is to have a fight. I think this is a particularly powerful one. ProBlogger, when I started in 2004, it was a blog about making money from blogging. That was quite a controversial thing to write about in 2004 because blogging was seen as a very pure medium. And so for me to say I’m making money from blogging and I’m making six figures from it back in 2004, that was quite a stir. People really reacted to that in one of two ways.

Some people said, “He’s lying.” Other people said, “You shouldn’t make money from blogging.” And other people said, “Yeah, I want to do that too.” For me, the fight of ProBlogger back then was that you can do it and you can actually do it in an ethical way. That was like me putting a flag in the sand and people either reacted against it or they rallied around it. A lot of people were inspired by that idea. A lot of people shared that journey.

Having a fight for what you do is a very, very powerful thing. My wife, she’s a style blogger. She has a niche. Style, fashion, homewear, that’s her niche. She has a demographic as well. She writes for moms. But she also has a fight and it comes out in a lot of the content that she writes. You don’t have to give up on style when you’ve got three little, I was going to call them brats, boys running around in your home who fight against their stuff. That’s her fight. That something that really resonates with a lot of moms and so she weaves that into her blog and people rally around it.

When you’ve got a fight, you give something for people to join and that’s a very powerful thing when it comes to content. What is it that you do? This is something I go back to quite regularly and think about. The other thing I’d say about choosing what you do, choose something that’s meaningful to you. You’re going to be at this for a while so you might as well do something you enjoy and something that’s meaningful to you. If it’s meaningful to you, it will shine through in the content that you create.

I’ve had 30 blogs over the years. I have to say 28 of them I started because I thought they’d be profitable and they didn’t really mean a whole heap to me. I couldn’t sustain them and people who came across those blogs could tell that they weren’t meaningful to me and so they didn’t come back again. Do something meaningful to you.

Number two, understand your reader and how you will change them. Most people have been through some sort of an exercise like this and have created something like this. These are the reader profiles that I created when I started Digital Photography School in 2007. Some people would call them personas or avatars today. I know some people like personas and avatars, other people don’t.

But what I would say to you whether you’ve got one or not, you need to understand who’s reading your blog. The better you understand them and what is meaningful to them, the better position you’ll be in to create great content, to find more of those readers because you’ll start to understand where they’re hanging out. You’ll also understand how to build community with them and you’ll suddenly get ideas for how you monetize as well. The better you understand who is reading your blog, the better.

But here’s the thing. Most people’s avatars, most people’s understandings of their readers ends at ‘They’re 34, they’re male, they live in these sorts of… ‘Their demographical information. That’s good to know but you need to understand these kinds of things. You need to understand their needs. You need to understand their problems. You really need to understand their desires, where they want to be, their dreams. Those things are really powerful things to understand.

You need to understand their fears. Their fears are the things that are stopping them to get to their dreams. Even if you just understand their dream and their fear, that’s a very powerful thing to understand. It will inform your content. Again, it will inform how you brand yourself, how you promote yourself, how you build community and how you monetize. These things need to be crystal clear in your mind.

Whether you’ve got an avatar or not, understand these things. Find out what is meaningful to them. When you understand those things, that is meaningful stuff. Understand what’s meaningful to them. You can do it in a whole heap of different ways. For us, we use surveys. One of the things I love about live streaming, Periscope or a tool like Blab, has anyone used Blab? It puts you into a conversation. A very real-time conversation with people. That’s great for broadcasting your ideas and for creating content but it’s even more useful in terms of understanding the needs of people.

I remember the first time I did a Blab. It’s like Google Hangouts but it works. It put me into a conversation with three of my readers. I’ve never heard of them before. I didn’t recognize their names but suddenly, I was seeing them on the screen, hearing their voices, hearing their frustrations, hearing their questions. I wrote the best content that afternoon, after that Blab, because it was written out of the pain of my readers and the real life questions of my readers.

Use these sorts of tools to understand who your readers are. I think the great thing about an event like this, if you have enough readers to hold an event, is that you understand, you meet those people. It will infect the way you create content.

But here’s something where you can take your avatar writing to the next stage. Most people don’t do this. They have an avatar. They might know their reader’s problems but here’s the question I’d ask you. How will you change your readers? How are you going to change them? Here’s a simple exercise that you can do. Actually, before I give you the exercise, great blogs and great podcasts, they leave a mark on their readers and so I want to encourage you to think about the content you create.

It’s not only getting people onto your list or getting them to know, like, and trust you but understand that that content that you create has the potential to change your readers. If you create content that changes your readers, that’s a very powerful thing because they’ll come back and they’ll bring other people with them.

Here’s the exercise. You can do this later. It’s a very simple one. You just need a piece of paper and a pen the draw a line across it. At point A, I want you to describe who your readers are when they arrive on your blog or your podcast or where it is that you have first contact with people. This will be your avatar of sorts and it should include their needs, their problems, their desires, and their fears, those types of things.

Most people do this when they’ve got a blog but hardly anyone does this, where will your reader be as a result of coming into contact with you? Where will they be in a year’s time? Where will they be in five years’ time? What’s your dream for your readers, for your audience? Describe that change. Very powerful to understand that change. It should inform everything else that you do. It should inform the content you create, the product you create, the way you engage with people. Get crystal clear on that change.

Digital Photography School, my main blog, the change is very simple. I want people to get out of automatic mode on their cameras and to have full creative control of their cameras. Most people use their cameras in full automatic mode but they don’t know the full potential of their cameras so I want to give them creative control of their camera. That’s a very simple change. I talked to a parenting blogger the other day. She was starting a whole membership site for parents. I got her to do this exercise. We were both in tears by the end of it because she described desperate families who couldn’t communicate, who are angry and dysfunctional and then she described the most amazing families that you could ever imagine.

What a change she is bringing. By understanding that change, she suddenly had ideas for content. She suddenly had ideas for products. She suddenly had ideas for what her community could be through this exercise, very, very powerful thing to do. Essentially, what you’re doing is creating a before and after avatar for your audience.

Number three thing I want to talk about is three phases of creating content. Most people have a content creation process that was like my one used to be. You sit down and you think, “Shit, what am I going to write today?” Has anyone had that moment? You spend the next two hours working out what you’re going to write about. And then you write it and then you bang, publish, and it goes out. That’s the way I used to publish content. It was thoughtless, it was sporadic, and I’ve very rarely built momentum from one piece of content to the next.

Great blogs take their readers on a journey. Great podcasts take their readers on a journey. They build momentum over time. They’re thoughtful. They’re consistent and they do build momentum. Have a think about those words. They don’t just happen. You need to be intentional about the kind of content that you create. I want to encourage you to be intentional in three areas of your content creation. I’m going to dig deeper into each of these.

The first one is idea generation. Most bloggers kind of understand they need to come up with good ideas to write about but most bloggers do it in the moment that they’re creating the content itself. I want you to consider doing that ahead of time.

Secondly, the content creation. First, most of us understand we need to put time aside for that. Here’s the one I think most people could lift their game in. That’s the completion of their content. Most bloggers I come across either have a whole heap of drafts that they’ve never published. I had 90 at one point on the ProBlogger back end, or they publish content that could be a whole heap better, that they could be completing better. I want to give you some tips in each of these three areas as the next three points of my presentation.

But before I do, I want to encourage you to put time aside for this. One of the things I loved in one of the earlier presentations was about separating your tasks out. James shared his weekly schedule before. I’ve got a little way to go to clear mine but this is how I structure most of my weeks. You’ll get these slides later and you can look a little more deeply into it. I put time aside. Every week, I make an appointment with myself every week to come up with ideas. It happens on Friday morning. I spend half an hour on it. That’s all. Half an hour and I brainstorm by myself.

Then my team shows up for the meeting and I share what my ideas are and they tell me which ones are good and which ones aren’t. They develop them a little bit further. We probably spend about 45 minutes in total on ideas and that type of thing. Friday afternoons, I spend time planning the content I’m creating next week. I find really useful on a Monday morning when I look ahead for creation of content, to know ahead of time what I’m going to create that morning. I don’t have to come up with the idea. It’s already come up with and I’ve already given myself the deadline of when it needs to be created by. Monday, Tuesday morning, I spend time creating. Whether that be blog post or podcast or webinars or whatever it might be.

In the afternoons, I’d spend time completing. That’s really important for me to do because that’s my natural tendency, is to publish half finished content. I just like to get it out there without really going to the next level and taking that content from being good to great. I want to show you how to do that in a moment.

The fourth thing I want to talk about is generating ideas. Really, I want you to return to this exercise. This is what I did in 2007 when I started Digital Photography School. I worked at this overall change I was trying to bring and then I decided to fill in the gaps. For you to take your audience from one point to the next, what needs to happen? What do they need to know? What mindshifts need to happen? What skills do they need to develop? What areas do they need to build their confidence in?

I started to fill in the gaps. Here are some of the things I came up with for my audience. They needed to learn about aperture, shutter speed and some of those technical things they needed to grow in their confidence. They needed to understand really basic skills of how to hold a camera. I came up with 207 things in this exercise. It took me a whole afternoon to do. I returned to it the next day, I came up with another 100 so right about 300 things that my readers needed to do to get from fully auto to creative control. That was my first two years content for the blog.

I turned that content, step by step, into cornerstone pieces of content that I gave away to my audience. I placed them in an order that would take my readers on a journey from being in fully automatic mode to having creative control of their cameras. These four pieces of content here were some of the first pieces of content that I wrote. I looked at the stats the other day. Each of those pieces of content has been read over two million times since I started.

To this day, it still gets thousands of people to each of these pieces of content. I’m constantly linking back to these cornerstone pieces of content. Every time I mention the word aperture, it links back to the aperture article. Every time I mention shutter speed, it links back to the shutter speed article. It’s because I mapped out the whole road map ahead of time that I knew with confidence that the end of those two years are the base of what I was wanting to teach.

Do that exercise. It’s very powerful. If you’re ever running out of ideas, again, think about the change you’re trying to bring and build a road map for your readers. Six more really quick tips on generating ideas. You need to keep a record of every question you’re very asked or every question you ask yourself, every problem you ever notice. Again, this is the thing I love about live streaming, Periscope, it’s the thing I love about webinars, coming to conferences. I’m constantly writing down the questions people ask me. If one person is asking them, other people are asking them too.

Set idea traps. This is so powerful. The best thing I ever did for coming up with ideas was to set up a survey. I did it on day three of Digital Photography School. When I set up an autoresponder, you sign up to our newsletter, two or three months after you’ve been getting these weekly newsletters, I send you an email saying, “Would you mind filling in a survey? It helps us to understand you better. It collects a little bit of demographical information about our audience but there’s an open ended question.

The open ended question reads something like, “Do you have any questions or problems you want us to write a blog post about?” It’s an optional question. We had about 200,000 or 300,000 people complete that survey since 2007. That’s a lot of data. About 50,000 of those people have asked a question in that survey. I never run out of things to write about because I just go to the SurveyMonkey and look at the latest questions that we’ve been asked. It also shows your audience that you are interested in answering that question.

Set idea traps. You can use surveys. Your Facebook updates every now and again. You can ask that same question. Is there something you’d like us to write about? I’ve come across a number of bloggers recently who set up Facebook groups and they run polls every week in their Facebook group to test five different ideas for articles that they’re thinking about writing and they get their Facebook group members to vote on which one they want them to write a piece of content about.

Set up these little traps to collect ideas. You should be monitoring every blog post you write, every tweet you put out to collect those questions. If you don’t have people reading your blog yet, and leaving comments, head to someone else’s blog and look for the questions. Someone who’s a bigger blogger in your niche. YouTube is the best place ever to come up with questions. The comments left on YouTube clips in your industry will give you ideas for blog posts.

Forums also, we used to run a forum on Digital Photography School. It was amazing how many people would set up an account and I never post one thing. It was almost always a question. People joined forums to ask questions so you need to sit in those places and collect those sorts of questions.

And then find a brainstorming buddy. I don’t know if you’ve got these but one of the best things I did when I started ProBlogger was to commit with two other bloggers in my niche to throw out ideas at each other and to give each other ideas to write about. We became writing buddies.

The last thing, this is something that’s very simple to do particularly if you’ve been blogging or podcasting for a year or two, is to look back on your archives and ask yourself the question, how could I extend that old post or repurpose it or update it in some way? I actually do this everyday. Everyday, I look back at what I published this day last year and this day the year before on this same date. I actually go back through the archives all the years that I’ve been writing, every single day, to ask myself the question is that post still relevant? Could I update it? Could I repurpose that content in some way?

That’s where most of my podcasts, for the first year of my podcasting, have come from. Just looking back at the blog post that I’ve written and repurposing them and updating them.

Number five, I want to talk about creating content. Five really quick tips on this, firstly, write to your avatar or write to people that you actually know who are readers. My best blog post almost always start out as an email, a question from a reader or a conversation that I had at a conference or something that happens on Periscope. I write with the person in mind and my content comes out more personal.

It’s amazing how many people come out and say, “I feel like you’re writing to me. Did someone tell you about me?” It’s usually because I know someone like them and I’m writing in a more personal way. Write to your avatar and consider a blogging template. If you’re stuck in your writing, sometimes, it can help to get out of that stuck place by creating a template.

This is a template that Michael Hyatt came up with. I really didn’t like this idea when I first came across it. He follows the same template in almost every post he writes. I was like, “I’d never do that.” And then I start thinking about my own writing and I realize I pretty much do the same thing without actually having a template. Most of us develop a style of writing so if you’re stuck, maybe look back at some of your old post and work out what your template is or maybe steal someone else’s like Michael’s. He’s put it up and you’ll get a link to that in a moment.

I tend to back track my content. I’d much prefer to sit down from morning and write three or four blog post than to sit down four morning and write four blog post. I’m very much about batching what I do with my time. I set deadlines. We use a tool called CoSchedule, which is a WordPress plugin. It helps us to map out our content plan for a month, sometimes two or three months in advance and to assign tasks. We work as a team. I know what I have to write at certain times and then I may have to pass it over to Stacey who edits my content for me.

I’m a really big believer also that if you want to create great content, you need to consume it. This is something that I fell short on for a couple of years. It’s only more recently that I’ve started to re-consume content. Sometimes, it’s very easy to get very busy and not fill your own cup. I think consuming great content, one, is good because you will learn more but two, you will also pick up production ideas.

I’ve started listening to podcasts recently. Most of which have nothing to do with what I write about but I always come away from those podcasts with ideas from my own show.

I want to talk about completing content. This is a big area that I think most content creators could up their game in. Firstly, get help if you can afford it. This is Stacey and Darlene who edits my blogs for me now. Since giving this to someone else to do, we’ve produced a lot more content and a lot better content. If you can afford to get someone in to help read your content out loud, it’s amazing how many mistakes you’ll find. I find it particularly good if you’re reading it out loud to another person.

If I’ve got an important piece of content, I’ll ask my wife Vanessa listen to it as I read it to her. I know she’s not really listening but just the fact that she might be helps me to pick out all the mistakes that I would’ve been making.

This is something I think we all could lift our game in and it’s in polishing and making your content more visually pleasing and easier to consume. We don’t publish a blog post, we don’t publish show notes anymore without an image. Every post has to have at least one. Most of our posts have several images.

That’s not just because I’ve got a photography site, that’s also on ProBlogger, we’ve tested it. The post that have images get read at least 40% more than the post that don’t have images. The same with all of our social media now. Almost every tweet I do now has to have an image in it. They get retweeted significantly higher. They get more responses to them. It just works. You just have to have an image of some kind. Whether it be a diagram or a chart. Over time, you get to see which images are working well as well.

Spend time crafting those titles. The title is going to be pretty much what determines whether someone reads the opening line of your post. And then your opening line needs to be something you really need to polish as well. These are two places that I’m spending a lot of time in my content. I usually write my content first and then come back to the title and the opening line and then craft those and spend significant time on those areas.

Pay attention to your formatting, particularly your headline. It’s really important as well. People do not read content online. They scan it first and so if you can use headlines to tease them, they will then want to go back and fill in the gaps between the headlines. So really pay attention to that. Draw their eye down the page with images as well at key points, anywhere you want them to look.

Add depth to your content. Every time I go to Hit Publish, just before I do, I always ask myself and I’ve trained my team to ask themselves, could they add more meat to it? Could they make it a better post in some way? Maybe by adding in an example, maybe by telling a story or using an analogy, maybe by adding an opinion. It’s amazing how many blog posts go out about new technology and they have no opinion. It’s just here are the specifications of the new MacBook Pro and here’s a picture. That’s it.

Tell us why we should buy it. Whether it’s any good, who would be applicable for it, add your opinion. This is what makes your content unique. People aren’t reading your content for specifications. They want to know what you think. That’s what gets the conversation going as well.

Suggest further reading. We have good SEO benefits mentioned this morning about having links to your own content but also links out to other people’s content. It shows your audience that there’s more to do, there’s more to learn and that you know where to find that. That’s good for you own credibility. Also, it builds relationships with other sites when you’re linking to them as well.

Add quotes. It’s so easy to tweet someone and say, “Do you have any thoughts on this?” And then embed that tweet reply into your content. I email Seth Godin all the time. He didn’t know me from anywhere but he almost always responds to those sorts of emails. “Do you have one line to say about this topic? Thanks Seth.” I’ll borrow your authority and I’ll plug that into my content. It makes my content more useful and adds another opinion, another voice and shows your readers that you’re going to the extra mile in gathering different opinion for them.

Suggest something for your readers to go and do. This adds depth. I’ll show you some examples of how we do this on Digital Photography School. This is something that is just so easy to do. It’s so easy to embed something else. We again heard good SEO reasons for doing that. If you can keep people on the page longer, it helps your SEO ranking, also makes your content better. Just look at all the places you can get embeddable content these days.

We all know you can embed YouTube clips. That’s easy to do. Just do a search for your topic and find a video that related to what you’ve got to say. But there are so many other places you can get embeddable content. I judged a blogging competition for social media examiner recently and the blogs that won all used embeddable content. They mixed it up. They were embedding tweets. They were embedding Facebook page status updates. They were embedding videos. They were embedding audio clips. This new tool that I mentioned before, Anchor, you can embed that anchors that you create and the anchors that other people create as well. Give your readers different things to do while they’re on your site. It’s so easy to do.

Mix up your content. I was talking to a restaurateur down in Melbourne, a very well known one recently who’s had a top level restaurant now for 10 years. I was quite amazed when I heard that he’d been going for 10 years. He’s been at the top of the game for 10 years. I was like, “This game of having a restaurant, it’s very fickle. There’s always the new cool place down the road that everyone’s rushing off to.” I asked him, “How do you keep at the top of the game?” He said, “Basically, I reinvent myself every year. Sometimes two times a year.” He’s had four fit outs in that time. He reinvents his menu every year, several times. He actually does it seasonally. He’s always reinventing things.

The people who have come to this restaurant know what they’re going to get. They know the sort of the food that he has. They know the level of service. But he’s always constantly experimenting with new things. I think this is really true in this place, in this time where so much content are being created. There’s always new sites springing up.

Your readers need to understand that quality is always going to be high and the type of stuff you’re talking about is going to be consistent. But you need to mix up the type of content that you’re producing. I want to encourage you to do it in a number of ways. One is to produce content that has different styles to it. This is what I say to my team, “Every week, I want you to create content that informs, inspires, and interacts.” If you look at each of those blog posts that I’ve got up there, they’re all on exactly the same topic. Long exposure photography.

We publish the first one on Monday. It’s information. It’s a meaty article, a tutorial. To be honest, hardly anyone reads it on Monday. You know when they read it? They read it on Wednesday, after we publish an inspirational post and we link back to it. The inspirational post is 15 beautiful photos that we’ve curated. That post has hardly any text at all. It’s all about showing what could be. It’s all about showing our readers the type of photos they could take. It gives them a reason to go and read the tutorial. Inspire them and then drive them to the information.

At the end of the week, on Friday, Saturday, we give them a challenge. We say, “Go and take a photo using the technique you learned on Monday, looking at the photos that you saw on Wednesday. Go and try it for yourself and come back and share the photo with us.” We use Discuss as a communing tool, which allows embedding of photos in the comments. This really works. Both of those posts drive traffic back to the informational posts. We got extra paid views as a result of it.

The best thing though is that our readers actually learn something because they learn information, they’re inspired to use the information. They’re given a chance to implement what they learn. We all know that people learn best when they do. Inform, inspire, interact. 90% of our content is information but we sprinkle it. We season it with inspiration and interaction.

Another way to mix up your content is to try different formats. You’ll find over time that your audience will respond best to certain types of content and we’ve certainly worked out that information content is our best, we use a lot of guides, how to’s, tips, tutorials but we sprinkle it with stories.

Storytelling is another way of inspiring and some of our best posts have been more inspirational content telling stories. But there’s a whole list of different types of content that you need to constantly be experimenting and seeing what’s working with your audience. The same with different mediums.

For us, blog posts have been a big part of it. But more recently, I’ve started to get into more visual content particularly through our social media, infographics, and cheat sheets have really been working very well for us lately and live streaming as I said before. Actually, what I’m finding is live streaming so Periscoping everyday is driving people to my podcast and the podcast is driving people to the blog for some reason. That seems to be the flow of our readers. Just experiment with where you can meet new readers and where you can take them as a result of that.

I want to talk for a moment about this idea of know, like, and trust that opened this quite before. People do business with people that they know, like, and trust. So if you want people to do business with you, you want them to know, like, and trust you. How do you create content that takes them through this process? It will be different for everyone of us but I want to show some examples of what we do. This is an infographic. We didn’t actually create it. We curated it. We always link back to the source.

We find that infographics work very well as a first point of contact with our audience on Digital Photography School. Our audience share these like crazy. They can’t get enough of them. That’s good at getting known. People share that kind of content. But in and of itself, that doesn’t really help because people generally would bounce away from an infographic very quickly. What we do and you can see that underneath a highlighter, that we have further reading based on that infographic.

We used to just post the infographic and that was great for traffic, getting the eyeball. But since we started giving further readings that relates to that infographic, we’ve seen a lot more stickiness to the sight so highlight and underneath it, you can’t read it. It’s three articles on how to hold a camera, which is exactly what the infographic is about. We give them a meatier piece of content. That’s the content that people like. They begin to not only see you and know you. They begin to like you and trust you.

Underneath that, we have other articles for beginners because this is a topic that’s very beginner-y. But we can’t post infographics all day everyday. We have to go to the next level. You have to start asking yourself, what’s going to take people to the next level of liking us? Again, this is where we have more of our inspirational content. This is where storytelling is very powerful. Content that’s going to make people grow in their desire, in inspiration and motivation. Sprinkle that type of content.

But again, you’ll see there, I’ve highlighted links further into the sight. We’re always trying to get people to the content which helps them to trust us. That helps them to build credibility and authority for us. This is another type of content that helps likeability. It’s any kind of interactional. This is one of our challenges. We do them every weekend. Here is something for you to go away and do. Show us your work. People like to show off. People like to talk. We give them an opportunity to do that. That gives them a sense of belonging.

And then trust. These are meaty articles. That post there on the right, The Ultimate Guide To Learning How To Use Your First Digital SLR is like 6,000 words long. That’s a big piece of content but it grows authority. We’ve actually found that long form content is outperforming anything else on the sight at the moment. I don’t know if you can see that but that post has been shared over 149,000 times. It took a lot of work to get that piece of content together but it’s paying off because not only is it being shared, it’s growing trust. It’s growing credibility.

That piece of content, we tracked it, is responsible for a lot of people buying our ebooks than buying our products as a result of that. Okay, we know, like and trust. What about buy? Because we all want the sale, eventually. How do you actually get them to buy? What we’ve found is that our blog posts are not a very good place to get the buy. For our audience, it just doesn’t work at all. We actually tracked this ebook that we launched last year. It was responsible for about 5% of our sales, our blog content.

We just don’t sell blog content anymore. We sell for our email list. We’ve got an email list of about 800,000 now and it drives almost all of our sales. Social media just doesn’t convert for us at all. We don’t use social media or our blogging content, or even the podcast to sell. We use it to drive people to our newsletter.

This is what most people do on their blogs. They have their blog and then they have a sight wide opt in on the side bar. Get our cheat sheet or get our ebook, whatever it might be. This works, this is good but what’s even better is to have multiple opt ins. One of the trends we noticed last year was a lot of blogs now are using a library of opt ins and they’re matching the opt in that relates best to a certain category of content.

What’s happening even more this year, this is another shift that I’ve noticed is that cool kids are now creating opt ins for every blog post that they do or every podcast that they do. I think James mentioned or alluded to this earlier. This is what Amy Porterfield did. She interviewed me for her podcast a few months ago and she said to me, “Can I take three of your best articles from the blog, put them into a PDF, and then add some of my own thoughts to it? She created a very simple opt in for that podcast. She wouldn’t be promoting it anywhere else except for that episode.

This is what RazorSocial are doing in Cleary. He actually gives anyone who comes to his blog a PDF version of every blog post. You can just download a PDF version of the blog post but it’s behind an opt in. It’s converting really well for him. It’s a very easy way to create an opt in.

This is Jill from Screw the 9 to 5. They’ve started creating checklists or swipe files the relate to blog posts. They don’t do it for every blog post but certainly the ones that are meatier, the longer form content. They’re adding blog-post specific opt ins to them. I think we’ll see that just well a lot more and more in the next 12 months.

Talking about content events, as I look back over the last 12 years of my own blogging journey, I quite often live in Google Ad Analytics and I love just to look at what happens when there’s spikes in traffic came, just a good habit to get into. I noticed recently that a lot of the spikes in traffic in my site have happened around events or content events.

The first one was back in 2005 on ProBlogger. I was sitting in bed one night at 2:00AM and I had this little idea for a 31 day series of content on the blog. I was going to give a little bit of teaching everyday and then a little activity to go and do for my readers. I couldn’t go to sleep so I got up and I just wrote this blog post and said, “I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to start it tomorrow and I’m going to call it 31 Days To Build A Better Blog.” Put no thought into that idea at all.

I had no idea what the 31 days were going to be. I think I may have had a couple of ideas and I just went to bed and I slept easy. I’ve got it out of me. Put the blog post up, woke up the next morning, there was more comments on that post than I’ve ever had on a post before. I was like, “Okay, what’s day one going to be?” Quickly, I came up with day one and it started this little series of content over the first 31 days.

Traffic was two or three times higher that month than I’ve ever seen before. I was like, “What is going on here?” Essentially, I was doing the same thing I was doing every other day. But because I called it something and ran it over a defined period, people wanted to join it. There was a sense of an event happening and people like to join events.

I did the same series in 2007. This time I put an opt in around it. I said you can get an email every day and essentially, it was the same thing, almost exactly the same content. It was two or three times bigger than the first year. I did it in 2009 again and this time, we had a little community area. Today, I’d probably use a Facebook group or something like that. People really responded well in not only getting the content and the task, but coming together and sharing their knowledge.

This event idea really took off. At the end of 2009, my readers said, “Could you give us this in a PDF or an ebook? We’ll even pay you for it.” I was like, “No, you won’t.” They were like, “Yeah, we will.” I put it into a PDF and I created 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, The ebook. 12,000 people bought in the first three weeks after launching it, at $20 each. I’m like, “What in the world happened?”

Events are very powerful. People like to join things. Any sort of a defined period is a very powerful thing. I’m going to let you work through this slide later when you get it but there’s a whole heap of benefits of doing an event. I was going to say I think it’s about joining. It’s about something social. It’s about doing something together, achieving something together that can be very powerful to do.

Here are a few examples. This is my wife. She does events. She actually did her first event two weeks into her first blog. She had no one reading her blog at all. I think there was like 10 readers. By the end of that week, she had 200 readers a day because she did this event. It was just a very simple event. She told her readers to take a photo of themselves wearing a certain color everyday for a week and post in on Instagram with a hashtag. It went crazy. She does these events now every three or so months and every time, it significantly increases her traffic.

This is one around fitness. You can do this in pretty much any niche. This is one around organizing your pantry of all things, an event that this blogger did. She had thousands of people to the pantry challenge together. This is a 52 weeks event on finances and saving up money. You can really do it in lots of ways. If you’ve ever been to Bali, this is the braiding your hair challenge. Literally, Kristina did. She does 30 days of braiding your hair and she turned it into an ebook at the end of it.

People joined in and then she used that as the launch of her new product. Any kind of an event worked really well. Again, I’ll let you read through those. I don’t like bullet points but I thought it would be a quick way of getting the information to you and allow me to get on to my last two points.

This is the biggest challenge I think, for us as content creators today. How do you differentiate yourself? We live in a time where, I think I saw the stats the other day, there’s around 74 million plus blogs on wordpress.com. That’s just the wordpress.com version and there’s the wordpress.org version, which is even more popular, then there’s Tumblr and Blogger. There’s so much content being created all the time. Looking at podcasts, app store, there’s so many podcast out there. There’s so much content being produced.

It’s probably one of the most important things that we need to really get our heads around as content creators. How do we stand out? Seven quick tips to do it. Firstly, and this is the hardest one. It’s almost impossible to choose a unique topic but it still is kind of possible. Firstly, you could be first and it was helpful to be one of the first people talking about blogging and making money from blogging. But this is pretty much impossible. There’s 1,000 blogs on almost every topic you can think about.

But you can be the first one to combine two topics together. This is Manolo, the shoe blogger. He started blogging in 2007 and there were thousands of blogs on shoes already back in 2007. But he was the first person to blog about celebrities and their shoes. He went viral. He went crazy. He was the first one to bring two topics together.

This is Jen and Jadah from Simple Green Smoothies. Jada spoke at our event last year. She told the story about how she had I think four or five different blogs, none of them worked whatsoever until she noticed Green Smoothies starting to take off. And so she started Simple Green Smoothies. They have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, hundreds of thousands of readers to their blog. They built a massive business around Simple Green Smoothies.

This is Donna Moritz, some of you will know, she’s an Aussie blogger. She had a social media blog as did thousands of other people. It was pretty much the same content, talking about all things social media. And then she noticed visual content was starting to grow and become more important. She noticed the post that she was writing on visual content started to really take off so she killed all her other posts and just focused on visual content. Jumped on that emerging trend.

Serve and ignore demographic. I think this is a very powerful thing because yes, there is a blog on every topic out there but there’s a whole heap of ignored demographics. Has anyone come across Nerd Fitness? This is a great blog if you’re a nerd. There’s tens of thousands of fitness blogs out there but they all look the same. They’ve all got chiselled guys with six packs on the front and they all speak in the same language that I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Steve Kamb decided to start a fitness blog for nerds. He gamified getting fit. Nerds want to get fit too but we’ve been ignored, we’ve been left out of that whole thing. Did I say we? Yeah. This is a great example of serving and ignoring. He’s really presenting the same information. He just changes the language and he’s branding it in a way that is relevant for the ignored niche.

There are all kinds of ignored niche, whether it be gender, disability, life circumstances, age that you are. I came across a few bloggers recently who’ve been creating blogs for seniors and retirees, who have felt left out of certain niches as well. There are all kind of ignored demographics.

Use a different medium or format. A lot of you read The Verge. When The Verge started, almost every tech blog had been successful the nerd, The Verge was using short form content. Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, they were publishing 10 to 20, sometimes 30 or 40 blog posts a day and they were almost all one or two paragraphs long The Verge came out now publishing 4,000, 5,000 word articles.

They stood out because they changed the format. This is Brian Fanzo. He was a social media expert as were thousands of other people but he spotted this live streaming trend going on and so he now is flying around the world talking about live streaming and he’s made a name for himself because he chained the medium that he was using to talk about the same topics.

Publish in a different pace. Everyone here probably knows John Lee Dumas. There are lots of entrepreneurial blogs out there but no one was doing daily. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how he keeps us but he changed the pace of publishing content. As a result, that’s one of the reasons that he stood out.

This is Dosh Dosh, a blog that was around years ago now. He started I think in 2007. It was a blog about making money blogging. This is three years after ProBlogger started and by this stage, there were thousands of blogs on how to make money from blogging, Macky from Dosh Dosh decided to slow it down. He didn’t go faster. He went slower and longer form. He was publishing at one stage, one piece of content every month. It was long, meaty content that everyone anticipated. When he published that post, it got shared like crazy. Macky’s down at it again. You’ve got to get his latest post that would take you a week to read it and implement the content. It was so meaty but he slowed it right down. It became a part of his brand. Now, he’s disappeared and no one knows where he went.

Right for a different level of expertise, this is what I did with Digital Photography School. There were thousands of blogs for photographers in 2007 when I started. It was a stupid topic, it was too late. Digital photography has been around forever. But most of those blogs have been writing for experts. Most of those blogs had this culture on them. If you turned up and asked a beginner question, you would get laughed out of the comment section.

It wasn’t because the bloggers themselves didn’t like beginners. It was because the audience had all grown up and become intermediate and advanced users. I started a blog for beginners. One of my first articles was how to hold a camera. The most basic thing you could think of. I almost didn’t publish it because it was so basic. I was embarrassed to publish the post. It’s now had over 800,000 people view the post.

People need that kind of information. That’s the kind of information that they’re too embarrassed to ask their friends. Those serve a different level of expertise.

Lastly, I want to talk about refining your voice. Something is really hard to teach on. How do you develop your voice? Partly, it comes from experimentation but it’s something that you can make some choices around as well.

Some of you might know Jeff Goins. He’s a blogger about writing and he’s written some great books. He says you can write in any of these five voices on pretty much any topic, any niche. The professor is someone who researches, who pretty much spends their whole life dedicating to learning about a particular topic and then they present a hypothesis and they really teach at a high level about a topic.

The artist is someone who’s not really interested in teaching, they’re just interested in beauty and aesthetics and inspiration. They’re looking for the beauty in a topic and you can probably think of bloggers who do that or podcasters. But I don’t really teach you anything but you just come away from it feeling motivated and inspired.

The prophet is someone who’s interested in telling you the truth. The cold, hard, ugly truth. They bust myths, sometimes they’re not that popular but you know they’ll tell it like it is. Sometimes, they’re not that sensitive in their language that they use but they just get to the point. I reckon someone in this room might be a prophet.

The journalist is someone who curates. They gather information from different sources and then presents that information as a story.

The celebrity isn’t someone who’s famous. They’re someone who’s charismatic. It’s more about the person and what they think about a topic or how they live their life, their personality, that’s big in that particular topic.

Jeff argues that you can pretty much take any of these or a combination of these as your voice. I reckon you could add a couple of more at least. You can be the companion. You can be the person who journeys with someone, who may be just a step ahead of them in the journey. You can be the mentor. You can be the entertainer and talk about the funny stuff that’s going on in an industry or niche. You can be the reviewer. You can be the curator. You can be the storyteller, the guide, the teacher, the thought leader or something else.

The more you do it, the better you’ll work out what your voice is and really, I would suggest that you look around at what everyone else is doing and try and find the gaps in that as well. It needs to be who you are and it’s hard to write in a voice that you’re not. But if you can find a gap that reflects who you are, that’s a very powerful thing.

Again, when I started Digital Photography School, I wanted to teach, I wanted to give people a how to, but I didn’t want to be a professor. There were plenty of them already so I decided to be the companion. I decided to be someone who’s like here’s what I learned, try this. I’ll be a friend who teaches you. Think about your voice.

The last thing I want to say, I’ve got a few minutes left to say it. I don’t need them, is to keep moving. This is just a general piece of advice I guess, for entrepreneurs. You’ve got to keep moving. Pay attention to the little ideas you get that keep you awake at night like I paid attention to, back in 2005, when I couldn’t sleep at night. And don’t just pay attention to those ideas, do something with them. Get up out of bed and write a blog post. Put it out there. See what happens. Look for the sparks that energize you and then test those sparks and look to see what happens. Look for the sparks that energize other people.

When I put that blog post out there about 31 days to build a better blog, I didn’t know what would happen but I followed the energy. I saw that my readers were responding and so I went with it. I went hard at it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it again. Now, I turned into the product.

You know what? The best thing, yes all those sales of that book, I think I looked a couple of weeks ago and we sold 60,000 copies of that book now. It’s going to be a profitable venture. I’m really glad I paid attention to that spark of energy and did something with it at 2:00AM that night. It also led to a whole other journey. Whilst ebooks may not be the best model, maybe we need to all move towards subscriptions, I don’t know, but ebooks and paying attention to that spark was something that really was powerful for me. I’d spend on a whole heap of other product ideas that I’ve created since.

We’ve now published about 40 ebooks. We’ve now sold almost half a million ebooks since 2009 when I first created that first one. It’s opened up this whole new way of doing things. I put it all back to the fact that I paid attention to a spark of energy and I enacted, I kept moving.

I love this little quote from Jadah Sellner that I’ll leave you with. “Take imperfect action.” It’s very easy to come to a conference like this and be overwhelmed by the people on the stage, telling you their stories of all the things that they’ve done and looking around you at the room and all the other people taking notes about the things they’re going to enact in hearing these stories. The thing that you’ve got to realize is that none of us really know what we’re doing and we’re all just taking imperfect actions and seeing what happens as a result of that.

There are plenty of failures that we all have along the way but somewhere in the midst of the things that we do comes life and comes profit. That’s all I’ve got to say today. Thank you for the time.

I hope you enjoyed that talk. I do recommend the Superfast Business conference. James Schramko also has a podcast. If you do a search for Superfast Business, you’ll find him. He’s a very smart, straight talking kind of guy. Another Aussie accent to add to your playlist if you’re not from Australia or if you are as well.

Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group, problogger.com/group.

As promised at the top of the show, some further listening for you. If you want to listen to a podcast on how to choose a niche, go back to episode 59. If you want to hear a podcast about avatars and thinking about your audience, go back and listen to a really early one, episode 33. If you want to dig into that exercise for thinking about how to change your audience’s life, go back even further to episode 11. That was part of our 31 day series. If you want to dig into more about how to come up with great ideas to create content, go and listen to episode 84, which was a part of a series that I did. It was followed up on episode 86 on how to create content. I really dig into some strategies for thinking about how to get into the habit of creating good content. Episode 87 was also about completing content, finishing things off.

Lastly, if you want to learn more about embeddable content, I’d go a lot deeper into that topic in episode 152. There’s lots more in the ProBlogger archives there so dig around and if you do want to get those links, go over to the show notes, which are at http://ift.tt/2xRKOgN.

Lastly, thanks so much for those of you who left reviews over the last week in iTunes and other podcasting apps. I am loving those reviews and a few good ones came in this week as well.

How did you go with today’s episode?

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  213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know

[bizmediaweb]

213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know

10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging and Content Marketing When I Started

Today, I want to share the audio of a keynote I gave at a conference early last year about 10 things I wish I’d known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started.

In episodes 204 and 205 I shared some recordings of keynotes I’ve given, and the response from many of you was that you wanted to hear more of that style of podcast. So today I dug out a talk I gave at the Super Fast Business conference, which is run by James Schramko here in Australia.

James, who puts on a great event, asked me to share some of my story and give some practical tips on content creation.

I talk about defining what your blog is about, the three phases of creating great content, how to mix up the different types of content you feature on your blog, idea generation, creating ‘content events’ on your blog, and how to differentiate yourself in your content.   

I loved doing this talk, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Don’t forget to join the Facebook group

10 THINGS I WISH I KNEW ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING WHEN I STARTED

Further Listening on 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging (and Content Marketing) When I Started

059: What Should I Blog About? 15 Questions to Ask to Help Identify Your Blogging Niche or Focus

033: 2 Questions to Ask to Help You Find Readers for Your Blog

011: Create 10 Blog Post Ideas for your Blog [Day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog]

084: How to Come Up With Fresh Ideas to Write About On Your Blog

086: How to Get into the Flow of Creating Great Content for Your Blog

087: 9 Questions You Should Ask Before Hitting Publish On Your Next Blog Post

152: How to Use Embedded Content on Your Blog [Challenge]

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view

Hi there and welcome to episode 213 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience. You can find more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com.

In today’s episode, I want to share with you an audio from a keynote I gave at a conference early last year. The topic was ’10 things I wish I had known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started’. A bit of a mouthful, but you get the idea. Back in episode 204, 205, just a few episodes ago, I shared a couple of recordings from keynotes I’ve given at my ProBlogger events and I had so much positive response from that. People really enjoyed that format, a presentation, a talk. Longer form and also the slides from those talks as well.

I wanted to do it again because many of you wanted more of that style of podcast. We’re not going to do it every week by any account. I don’t give that many talks. But I did find this one from the Superfast Business Conference. It’s a conference that is run by James Schramko. Many of you will know here in Australia. It’s run in Sydney and it was a great event. I really enjoyed getting to that particular event.

James puts on a really good event, and he asked me at the event last year to share some of my story but also give some practical tips on content creation. Really, that’s what the focus of this talk is about. In it, I’ve given a few tips on defining what your blog is about but then we get a lot into content creation itself. I talk about three different phases of creating content. I talk about how to mix up the different types of content that you might want to feature on your blog. I talk about idea generation, some tips on creating content, finishing content, running content events and challenges on your blog and also how to differentiate yourself through your content as well.

I really enjoyed this talk and I hope you do as well. I’ll also put up the slides from this talk in today’s show notes. There are a few times during the talk where you probably will want to refer to the slides. Whether you do that as you’re listening if you’re at a computer or whether you want to come back to the slides later, you’ll be able to do that. I bet 95% of what I do talk about in this talk doesn’t rely on the slides but you might want to have them. The show notes are at http://ift.tt/2xRKOgN.

The only other thing I will note is that at the time of this talk, there was a tool that I was using called Blab. Blab is a live streaming tool that allowed multiple people to be on the screen at once. Now, that tool doesn’t exist today. But when I do talk about it, you can pretty much substitute most of the other live streaming tools that exist today. It’s only a brief mention during the talk but I did want to point that out.

Some of the points I mention in passing during this keynote were expanded upon in later podcast. At the end of the talk, I will come back on and suggest some further listening for those of you who want to dig deeper into some of the things I touched on during the talk. But again, I’ll link to all of those in the show notes as well. http://ift.tt/2xRKOgN. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy this talk and I will come back at the end just to wrap things up.

Host: Our next guest is a superpower in the blogosphere. In fact, I remember going to an event, my first event in the United States several years ago, and I found out he’d been to one before that, one of the early ones. I found a transcript of what he’d been doing and what he talked about. I read through it and I thought, “This is great.” He’s probably one of the seeds to my original direction towards content marketing. And then I recently saw him in the Philippines, presenting. I thought, “This information is very in line with what we do.” His version of what I talk about with OTR, but he’s been doing it a lot longer than I have. He can do things like write and spell. He’s prolific and he’s really, really good at it. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Darren Rowse.

Darren: Thank you. It’s really good. Who’s feeling like they’ve already got enough value from this and they could go home almost? I, literally in the lunch break, had to rewrite the opening story of my talk thanks to an earlier presentation. I put all my content onto an app, thanks Jared. I’ve killed my idea for the ProBlogger album and t-shirt range. I have been considering doing a pyjama range, ProBlogger workwear for bloggers.

I’ve had to call the team and tell them to put all the content behind a subscription. I’ve deleted all the apps on my phone and I just took a hot and cold shower. It’s been a busy lunch break. I hope you’ve had a productive one.

I want to talk about content marketing, and to help you understand the perspective that I’ve come to this topic from. I want to tell you a very brief version of my story. I got an email a couple of days ago basically saying, “We’ve got lines for speakers.” It was basically cut out all your story because people just want the tips. I’m like, “But that was the first 20 minutes of my talk gone.” I’m going to tell it to you in two minutes and it does skip over some of the stages of the format for storytelling before.

For me, it all started in 2002 with an email from a friend. I was sitting at a desk, one of the part-time jobs that I had, and this email pinged in. A voice said, “Master, you’ve got mail.” Did anyone else install that? I was the only one. Okay, It was 2002 and I got this email and it had four words in it and a link. The four words were, “Check out this blog.” I had no idea what a blog was so I clicked the link out of curiosity. I ended up on this site that changed the course of my life not because of the content on it, although that was interesting, but because it was my first discovery of blogging and of this amazing tool called a blog.

What I found on this blog was this tool that enabled this guy on the other side of the world living in Prague, to talk to me in a really powerful, personal way. It amplified his voice in a way I’ve never seen a voice amplified before. I’ve done some public speaking. I’ve never had my voice amplified in that way. Around his voice was this community. Everyone was getting smarter as a result of not only what he was saying but the fact that there was a community there.

These two things captivated me. Within a couple of hours, I decided I needed to start a blog. Now, unfortunately, I had no credentials whatsoever to start a blog and if I thought about it for any more than about five minutes, I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve had 20 jobs in the last 10 years, none of which had anything to do with blogging. The only qualification I had was a Bachelor of Theology, which hasn’t really helped a whole heap. I wasn’t a great writer. It was my worst subject in high school and I was incapable of making text bold on that blog for three months after starting it.

Back then, you had to know a little bit of HTML and I had no idea, technological. But for one reason or another, I started that blog and that was the best thing that I’ve ever done in business. This is what it looked like. It was ugly. I designed this myself. It was based upon my wedding invitation, which makes me doubt my wife’s choice in colors. But if you’ve seen her blog, she’s a very colourful person.

Anyway, I did meet some people who knew how to make text bold and they eventually redesigned my blog for me. It was a personal journal of sorts. I was writing about spirituality, politics, movies. It was pretty much an outward pouring of what was in my mind, which was quite scary. What was even more scary was that thousands of people a day found it and read it. I didn’t know why but I was quite happy that they did.

I became very quickly addicted to blogging and creating content, with no intent whatsoever of making it into a business. It was just a hobby. It was something that I did for pretty much seven hours every night when I got home. It was a big part of my life and it became an addiction.

I began to experiment with other blogs over time. My next blog was a photo blog. I was going to share photos of a trip I was taking to Morocco with my wife, with my brand new digital camera. Turns out no-one had looked to any of the photos but I posted one review of the camera I was using and it ranked number one on Google for that camera. The entrepreneurial lights began to go in my mind.

I transitioned that photo blog onto a digital camera review blog, where I wrote reviews of other cameras and aggregated reviews that other people were writing around the web. It was a good time to start a digital photography blog because digital cameras were just starting to really take off.

In 2004, blogging had become a part-time job. In fact, it almost became a full time job. With this particular blog, I started to put some AdSense ads on my blog and some Amazon affiliate links to earn those 4% commissions on those $10 books. I didn’t really earn a lot but it was the beginnings of a part-time job, which over the next year, became a full-time thing for me.

In 2004, I started ProBlogger. It was pretty much me saying to the world you can make a living from blogging and is anyone else doing it out there because no-one was writing about it. It was my attempt to find other people on this same journey to learn from and to share what I was learning with.

I transitioned my photography blog into Digital Photography School in 2007 and this is my main blog today. It’s about ten times larger than ProBlogger. ProBlogger is a bit of a side project for me, which pays a full-time living in and of itself. But this is the main thing that I do today. It’s a how to take photography-type site.

Thirteen years later, I’m not the biggest blogger in the world and I’m not the best blogger in the world. But given the fact that I had no idea what I was doing when I started, I’m pretty pleased with what’s happened as a result of it. There’s a whole heap of numbers there which I pinch myself at. But the thing that I really love about what’s opened up for me is the opportunities. The opportunities to write a book, to start a conference, to speak at amazing events like this, meet amazing people.

But the best thing of all is when people come up to me at a conference like this, as happened this morning, and say things like, “You wrote this post that changed my life. In some small way, it helped me to start a business.” Or like James said before, “Influence the way I do things today.” That is something that I get really excited about. That’s the biggest compliment for me.

Thirteen years later, I find myself as a full-time blogger. Blogging and content marketing for me really tap into this quote that you’ve probably heard a million times before at conferences like this. “People do business with those that they know, like, and trust,” and content has the ability to help you to be known. Who would’ve ever thought I would be known by four million people a month? To be liked.

Who would’ve ever thought that someone will walk up to me this morning in a conference and give me a hug? I’m an introvert. I don’t like hugs, but I love the fact that people actually feel like they know me and they like me. It opens up opportunities for you to be trusted. This is what content marketing, this is what blogging is all about for me.

I want to say right upfront, whilst I’m talking about content marketing today, I’m doing it as a blogger. A lot of what I share today comes out of that experience. Blogging for me is the center of the mix. These are all of the other things that I do with my time and I could probably add some more circles to that. This week, I started on an app called Anchor. I don’t know if anyone’s started playing with Anchor. It’s like an audio version of Twitter. It’s fun. You leave a message and then everyone else leaves a voicemail message effectively back on your message and a conversation happens that way. It’s a really cool tool.

Anyway, I’m always experimenting with lots of different things. For me, the blog is the center of the mix. Whether that’s the case for you or whether a podcast is that or whether it’s something else, I think pretty much everything that I want to share this morning and the ten things that I’ve learned since I started applies to pretty much any medium and most of the models that you’ll be experimenting with before.

I’m going to whip through ten things. The first two are fairly foundational and then we get a little bit more tactical as we go along. This is something you’ve probably already thought about but I think it’s something that you really need to come back to on a regular basis. Define what it is that your blog or your podcast or you are about. There’s a variety of ways that you can think about this. The most common of which is to choose a niche and to think about that niche.

Has anyone got a niche in the room that you would say you got a niche? I’ve got a photography blog. That’s my niche. I’ve got a blogging blog. That’s a niche. This is Chris Hunter. He’s got a great blog called Bike EXIF. It’s about custom and classic motorbikes. He’s the only male I know who’s got something like 400,000 or 500,000 Pinterest followers. A lot of people say Pinterest is for women only. No way. There’s a whole heap of men on there and they’ve got their own niches.

He has a niche. I’ve got a niche. A lot of bloggers though that I meet say, “I don’t really want to just write about one topic.” And so another way to define what you’re on about is to think about your demographic. This is Gala Darling. She writes about travel, horoscopes, tattoos, relationships, travel, all kinds of stuff. But they relate to the one kind of person. She thinks about her blog as a blog for youthful, alternative, unconventional, individual, eccentric women. Her words, not mine. That’s her demographic.

The third way I think is, you can add to these other two, and that is to have a fight. I think this is a particularly powerful one. ProBlogger, when I started in 2004, it was a blog about making money from blogging. That was quite a controversial thing to write about in 2004 because blogging was seen as a very pure medium. And so for me to say I’m making money from blogging and I’m making six figures from it back in 2004, that was quite a stir. People really reacted to that in one of two ways.

Some people said, “He’s lying.” Other people said, “You shouldn’t make money from blogging.” And other people said, “Yeah, I want to do that too.” For me, the fight of ProBlogger back then was that you can do it and you can actually do it in an ethical way. That was like me putting a flag in the sand and people either reacted against it or they rallied around it. A lot of people were inspired by that idea. A lot of people shared that journey.

Having a fight for what you do is a very, very powerful thing. My wife, she’s a style blogger. She has a niche. Style, fashion, homewear, that’s her niche. She has a demographic as well. She writes for moms. But she also has a fight and it comes out in a lot of the content that she writes. You don’t have to give up on style when you’ve got three little, I was going to call them brats, boys running around in your home who fight against their stuff. That’s her fight. That something that really resonates with a lot of moms and so she weaves that into her blog and people rally around it.

When you’ve got a fight, you give something for people to join and that’s a very powerful thing when it comes to content. What is it that you do? This is something I go back to quite regularly and think about. The other thing I’d say about choosing what you do, choose something that’s meaningful to you. You’re going to be at this for a while so you might as well do something you enjoy and something that’s meaningful to you. If it’s meaningful to you, it will shine through in the content that you create.

I’ve had 30 blogs over the years. I have to say 28 of them I started because I thought they’d be profitable and they didn’t really mean a whole heap to me. I couldn’t sustain them and people who came across those blogs could tell that they weren’t meaningful to me and so they didn’t come back again. Do something meaningful to you.

Number two, understand your reader and how you will change them. Most people have been through some sort of an exercise like this and have created something like this. These are the reader profiles that I created when I started Digital Photography School in 2007. Some people would call them personas or avatars today. I know some people like personas and avatars, other people don’t.

But what I would say to you whether you’ve got one or not, you need to understand who’s reading your blog. The better you understand them and what is meaningful to them, the better position you’ll be in to create great content, to find more of those readers because you’ll start to understand where they’re hanging out. You’ll also understand how to build community with them and you’ll suddenly get ideas for how you monetize as well. The better you understand who is reading your blog, the better.

But here’s the thing. Most people’s avatars, most people’s understandings of their readers ends at ‘They’re 34, they’re male, they live in these sorts of… ‘Their demographical information. That’s good to know but you need to understand these kinds of things. You need to understand their needs. You need to understand their problems. You really need to understand their desires, where they want to be, their dreams. Those things are really powerful things to understand.

You need to understand their fears. Their fears are the things that are stopping them to get to their dreams. Even if you just understand their dream and their fear, that’s a very powerful thing to understand. It will inform your content. Again, it will inform how you brand yourself, how you promote yourself, how you build community and how you monetize. These things need to be crystal clear in your mind.

Whether you’ve got an avatar or not, understand these things. Find out what is meaningful to them. When you understand those things, that is meaningful stuff. Understand what’s meaningful to them. You can do it in a whole heap of different ways. For us, we use surveys. One of the things I love about live streaming, Periscope or a tool like Blab, has anyone used Blab? It puts you into a conversation. A very real-time conversation with people. That’s great for broadcasting your ideas and for creating content but it’s even more useful in terms of understanding the needs of people.

I remember the first time I did a Blab. It’s like Google Hangouts but it works. It put me into a conversation with three of my readers. I’ve never heard of them before. I didn’t recognize their names but suddenly, I was seeing them on the screen, hearing their voices, hearing their frustrations, hearing their questions. I wrote the best content that afternoon, after that Blab, because it was written out of the pain of my readers and the real life questions of my readers.

Use these sorts of tools to understand who your readers are. I think the great thing about an event like this, if you have enough readers to hold an event, is that you understand, you meet those people. It will infect the way you create content.

But here’s something where you can take your avatar writing to the next stage. Most people don’t do this. They have an avatar. They might know their reader’s problems but here’s the question I’d ask you. How will you change your readers? How are you going to change them? Here’s a simple exercise that you can do. Actually, before I give you the exercise, great blogs and great podcasts, they leave a mark on their readers and so I want to encourage you to think about the content you create.

It’s not only getting people onto your list or getting them to know, like, and trust you but understand that that content that you create has the potential to change your readers. If you create content that changes your readers, that’s a very powerful thing because they’ll come back and they’ll bring other people with them.

Here’s the exercise. You can do this later. It’s a very simple one. You just need a piece of paper and a pen the draw a line across it. At point A, I want you to describe who your readers are when they arrive on your blog or your podcast or where it is that you have first contact with people. This will be your avatar of sorts and it should include their needs, their problems, their desires, and their fears, those types of things.

Most people do this when they’ve got a blog but hardly anyone does this, where will your reader be as a result of coming into contact with you? Where will they be in a year’s time? Where will they be in five years’ time? What’s your dream for your readers, for your audience? Describe that change. Very powerful to understand that change. It should inform everything else that you do. It should inform the content you create, the product you create, the way you engage with people. Get crystal clear on that change.

Digital Photography School, my main blog, the change is very simple. I want people to get out of automatic mode on their cameras and to have full creative control of their cameras. Most people use their cameras in full automatic mode but they don’t know the full potential of their cameras so I want to give them creative control of their camera. That’s a very simple change. I talked to a parenting blogger the other day. She was starting a whole membership site for parents. I got her to do this exercise. We were both in tears by the end of it because she described desperate families who couldn’t communicate, who are angry and dysfunctional and then she described the most amazing families that you could ever imagine.

What a change she is bringing. By understanding that change, she suddenly had ideas for content. She suddenly had ideas for products. She suddenly had ideas for what her community could be through this exercise, very, very powerful thing to do. Essentially, what you’re doing is creating a before and after avatar for your audience.

Number three thing I want to talk about is three phases of creating content. Most people have a content creation process that was like my one used to be. You sit down and you think, “Shit, what am I going to write today?” Has anyone had that moment? You spend the next two hours working out what you’re going to write about. And then you write it and then you bang, publish, and it goes out. That’s the way I used to publish content. It was thoughtless, it was sporadic, and I’ve very rarely built momentum from one piece of content to the next.

Great blogs take their readers on a journey. Great podcasts take their readers on a journey. They build momentum over time. They’re thoughtful. They’re consistent and they do build momentum. Have a think about those words. They don’t just happen. You need to be intentional about the kind of content that you create. I want to encourage you to be intentional in three areas of your content creation. I’m going to dig deeper into each of these.

The first one is idea generation. Most bloggers kind of understand they need to come up with good ideas to write about but most bloggers do it in the moment that they’re creating the content itself. I want you to consider doing that ahead of time.

Secondly, the content creation. First, most of us understand we need to put time aside for that. Here’s the one I think most people could lift their game in. That’s the completion of their content. Most bloggers I come across either have a whole heap of drafts that they’ve never published. I had 90 at one point on the ProBlogger back end, or they publish content that could be a whole heap better, that they could be completing better. I want to give you some tips in each of these three areas as the next three points of my presentation.

But before I do, I want to encourage you to put time aside for this. One of the things I loved in one of the earlier presentations was about separating your tasks out. James shared his weekly schedule before. I’ve got a little way to go to clear mine but this is how I structure most of my weeks. You’ll get these slides later and you can look a little more deeply into it. I put time aside. Every week, I make an appointment with myself every week to come up with ideas. It happens on Friday morning. I spend half an hour on it. That’s all. Half an hour and I brainstorm by myself.

Then my team shows up for the meeting and I share what my ideas are and they tell me which ones are good and which ones aren’t. They develop them a little bit further. We probably spend about 45 minutes in total on ideas and that type of thing. Friday afternoons, I spend time planning the content I’m creating next week. I find really useful on a Monday morning when I look ahead for creation of content, to know ahead of time what I’m going to create that morning. I don’t have to come up with the idea. It’s already come up with and I’ve already given myself the deadline of when it needs to be created by. Monday, Tuesday morning, I spend time creating. Whether that be blog post or podcast or webinars or whatever it might be.

In the afternoons, I’d spend time completing. That’s really important for me to do because that’s my natural tendency, is to publish half finished content. I just like to get it out there without really going to the next level and taking that content from being good to great. I want to show you how to do that in a moment.

The fourth thing I want to talk about is generating ideas. Really, I want you to return to this exercise. This is what I did in 2007 when I started Digital Photography School. I worked at this overall change I was trying to bring and then I decided to fill in the gaps. For you to take your audience from one point to the next, what needs to happen? What do they need to know? What mindshifts need to happen? What skills do they need to develop? What areas do they need to build their confidence in?

I started to fill in the gaps. Here are some of the things I came up with for my audience. They needed to learn about aperture, shutter speed and some of those technical things they needed to grow in their confidence. They needed to understand really basic skills of how to hold a camera. I came up with 207 things in this exercise. It took me a whole afternoon to do. I returned to it the next day, I came up with another 100 so right about 300 things that my readers needed to do to get from fully auto to creative control. That was my first two years content for the blog.

I turned that content, step by step, into cornerstone pieces of content that I gave away to my audience. I placed them in an order that would take my readers on a journey from being in fully automatic mode to having creative control of their cameras. These four pieces of content here were some of the first pieces of content that I wrote. I looked at the stats the other day. Each of those pieces of content has been read over two million times since I started.

To this day, it still gets thousands of people to each of these pieces of content. I’m constantly linking back to these cornerstone pieces of content. Every time I mention the word aperture, it links back to the aperture article. Every time I mention shutter speed, it links back to the shutter speed article. It’s because I mapped out the whole road map ahead of time that I knew with confidence that the end of those two years are the base of what I was wanting to teach.

Do that exercise. It’s very powerful. If you’re ever running out of ideas, again, think about the change you’re trying to bring and build a road map for your readers. Six more really quick tips on generating ideas. You need to keep a record of every question you’re very asked or every question you ask yourself, every problem you ever notice. Again, this is the thing I love about live streaming, Periscope, it’s the thing I love about webinars, coming to conferences. I’m constantly writing down the questions people ask me. If one person is asking them, other people are asking them too.

Set idea traps. This is so powerful. The best thing I ever did for coming up with ideas was to set up a survey. I did it on day three of Digital Photography School. When I set up an autoresponder, you sign up to our newsletter, two or three months after you’ve been getting these weekly newsletters, I send you an email saying, “Would you mind filling in a survey? It helps us to understand you better. It collects a little bit of demographical information about our audience but there’s an open ended question.

The open ended question reads something like, “Do you have any questions or problems you want us to write a blog post about?” It’s an optional question. We had about 200,000 or 300,000 people complete that survey since 2007. That’s a lot of data. About 50,000 of those people have asked a question in that survey. I never run out of things to write about because I just go to the SurveyMonkey and look at the latest questions that we’ve been asked. It also shows your audience that you are interested in answering that question.

Set idea traps. You can use surveys. Your Facebook updates every now and again. You can ask that same question. Is there something you’d like us to write about? I’ve come across a number of bloggers recently who set up Facebook groups and they run polls every week in their Facebook group to test five different ideas for articles that they’re thinking about writing and they get their Facebook group members to vote on which one they want them to write a piece of content about.

Set up these little traps to collect ideas. You should be monitoring every blog post you write, every tweet you put out to collect those questions. If you don’t have people reading your blog yet, and leaving comments, head to someone else’s blog and look for the questions. Someone who’s a bigger blogger in your niche. YouTube is the best place ever to come up with questions. The comments left on YouTube clips in your industry will give you ideas for blog posts.

Forums also, we used to run a forum on Digital Photography School. It was amazing how many people would set up an account and I never post one thing. It was almost always a question. People joined forums to ask questions so you need to sit in those places and collect those sorts of questions.

And then find a brainstorming buddy. I don’t know if you’ve got these but one of the best things I did when I started ProBlogger was to commit with two other bloggers in my niche to throw out ideas at each other and to give each other ideas to write about. We became writing buddies.

The last thing, this is something that’s very simple to do particularly if you’ve been blogging or podcasting for a year or two, is to look back on your archives and ask yourself the question, how could I extend that old post or repurpose it or update it in some way? I actually do this everyday. Everyday, I look back at what I published this day last year and this day the year before on this same date. I actually go back through the archives all the years that I’ve been writing, every single day, to ask myself the question is that post still relevant? Could I update it? Could I repurpose that content in some way?

That’s where most of my podcasts, for the first year of my podcasting, have come from. Just looking back at the blog post that I’ve written and repurposing them and updating them.

Number five, I want to talk about creating content. Five really quick tips on this, firstly, write to your avatar or write to people that you actually know who are readers. My best blog post almost always start out as an email, a question from a reader or a conversation that I had at a conference or something that happens on Periscope. I write with the person in mind and my content comes out more personal.

It’s amazing how many people come out and say, “I feel like you’re writing to me. Did someone tell you about me?” It’s usually because I know someone like them and I’m writing in a more personal way. Write to your avatar and consider a blogging template. If you’re stuck in your writing, sometimes, it can help to get out of that stuck place by creating a template.

This is a template that Michael Hyatt came up with. I really didn’t like this idea when I first came across it. He follows the same template in almost every post he writes. I was like, “I’d never do that.” And then I start thinking about my own writing and I realize I pretty much do the same thing without actually having a template. Most of us develop a style of writing so if you’re stuck, maybe look back at some of your old post and work out what your template is or maybe steal someone else’s like Michael’s. He’s put it up and you’ll get a link to that in a moment.

I tend to back track my content. I’d much prefer to sit down from morning and write three or four blog post than to sit down four morning and write four blog post. I’m very much about batching what I do with my time. I set deadlines. We use a tool called CoSchedule, which is a WordPress plugin. It helps us to map out our content plan for a month, sometimes two or three months in advance and to assign tasks. We work as a team. I know what I have to write at certain times and then I may have to pass it over to Stacey who edits my content for me.

I’m a really big believer also that if you want to create great content, you need to consume it. This is something that I fell short on for a couple of years. It’s only more recently that I’ve started to re-consume content. Sometimes, it’s very easy to get very busy and not fill your own cup. I think consuming great content, one, is good because you will learn more but two, you will also pick up production ideas.

I’ve started listening to podcasts recently. Most of which have nothing to do with what I write about but I always come away from those podcasts with ideas from my own show.

I want to talk about completing content. This is a big area that I think most content creators could up their game in. Firstly, get help if you can afford it. This is Stacey and Darlene who edits my blogs for me now. Since giving this to someone else to do, we’ve produced a lot more content and a lot better content. If you can afford to get someone in to help read your content out loud, it’s amazing how many mistakes you’ll find. I find it particularly good if you’re reading it out loud to another person.

If I’ve got an important piece of content, I’ll ask my wife Vanessa listen to it as I read it to her. I know she’s not really listening but just the fact that she might be helps me to pick out all the mistakes that I would���ve been making.

This is something I think we all could lift our game in and it’s in polishing and making your content more visually pleasing and easier to consume. We don’t publish a blog post, we don’t publish show notes anymore without an image. Every post has to have at least one. Most of our posts have several images.

That’s not just because I’ve got a photography site, that’s also on ProBlogger, we’ve tested it. The post that have images get read at least 40% more than the post that don’t have images. The same with all of our social media now. Almost every tweet I do now has to have an image in it. They get retweeted significantly higher. They get more responses to them. It just works. You just have to have an image of some kind. Whether it be a diagram or a chart. Over time, you get to see which images are working well as well.

Spend time crafting those titles. The title is going to be pretty much what determines whether someone reads the opening line of your post. And then your opening line needs to be something you really need to polish as well. These are two places that I’m spending a lot of time in my content. I usually write my content first and then come back to the title and the opening line and then craft those and spend significant time on those areas.

Pay attention to your formatting, particularly your headline. It’s really important as well. People do not read content online. They scan it first and so if you can use headlines to tease them, they will then want to go back and fill in the gaps between the headlines. So really pay attention to that. Draw their eye down the page with images as well at key points, anywhere you want them to look.

Add depth to your content. Every time I go to Hit Publish, just before I do, I always ask myself and I’ve trained my team to ask themselves, could they add more meat to it? Could they make it a better post in some way? Maybe by adding in an example, maybe by telling a story or using an analogy, maybe by adding an opinion. It’s amazing how many blog posts go out about new technology and they have no opinion. It’s just here are the specifications of the new MacBook Pro and here’s a picture. That’s it.

Tell us why we should buy it. Whether it’s any good, who would be applicable for it, add your opinion. This is what makes your content unique. People aren’t reading your content for specifications. They want to know what you think. That’s what gets the conversation going as well.

Suggest further reading. We have good SEO benefits mentioned this morning about having links to your own content but also links out to other people’s content. It shows your audience that there’s more to do, there’s more to learn and that you know where to find that. That’s good for you own credibility. Also, it builds relationships with other sites when you’re linking to them as well.

Add quotes. It’s so easy to tweet someone and say, “Do you have any thoughts on this?” And then embed that tweet reply into your content. I email Seth Godin all the time. He didn’t know me from anywhere but he almost always responds to those sorts of emails. “Do you have one line to say about this topic? Thanks Seth.” I’ll borrow your authority and I’ll plug that into my content. It makes my content more useful and adds another opinion, another voice and shows your readers that you’re going to the extra mile in gathering different opinion for them.

Suggest something for your readers to go and do. This adds depth. I’ll show you some examples of how we do this on Digital Photography School. This is something that is just so easy to do. It’s so easy to embed something else. We again heard good SEO reasons for doing that. If you can keep people on the page longer, it helps your SEO ranking, also makes your content better. Just look at all the places you can get embeddable content these days.

We all know you can embed YouTube clips. That’s easy to do. Just do a search for your topic and find a video that related to what you’ve got to say. But there are so many other places you can get embeddable content. I judged a blogging competition for social media examiner recently and the blogs that won all used embeddable content. They mixed it up. They were embedding tweets. They were embedding Facebook page status updates. They were embedding videos. They were embedding audio clips. This new tool that I mentioned before, Anchor, you can embed that anchors that you create and the anchors that other people create as well. Give your readers different things to do while they’re on your site. It’s so easy to do.

Mix up your content. I was talking to a restaurateur down in Melbourne, a very well known one recently who’s had a top level restaurant now for 10 years. I was quite amazed when I heard that he’d been going for 10 years. He’s been at the top of the game for 10 years. I was like, “This game of having a restaurant, it’s very fickle. There’s always the new cool place down the road that everyone’s rushing off to.” I asked him, “How do you keep at the top of the game?” He said, “Basically, I reinvent myself every year. Sometimes two times a year.” He’s had four fit outs in that time. He reinvents his menu every year, several times. He actually does it seasonally. He’s always reinventing things.

The people who have come to this restaurant know what they’re going to get. They know the sort of the food that he has. They know the level of service. But he’s always constantly experimenting with new things. I think this is really true in this place, in this time where so much content are being created. There’s always new sites springing up.

Your readers need to understand that quality is always going to be high and the type of stuff you’re talking about is going to be consistent. But you need to mix up the type of content that you’re producing. I want to encourage you to do it in a number of ways. One is to produce content that has different styles to it. This is what I say to my team, “Every week, I want you to create content that informs, inspires, and interacts.” If you look at each of those blog posts that I’ve got up there, they’re all on exactly the same topic. Long exposure photography.

We publish the first one on Monday. It’s information. It’s a meaty article, a tutorial. To be honest, hardly anyone reads it on Monday. You know when they read it? They read it on Wednesday, after we publish an inspirational post and we link back to it. The inspirational post is 15 beautiful photos that we’ve curated. That post has hardly any text at all. It’s all about showing what could be. It’s all about showing our readers the type of photos they could take. It gives them a reason to go and read the tutorial. Inspire them and then drive them to the information.

At the end of the week, on Friday, Saturday, we give them a challenge. We say, “Go and take a photo using the technique you learned on Monday, looking at the photos that you saw on Wednesday. Go and try it for yourself and come back and share the photo with us.” We use Discuss as a communing tool, which allows embedding of photos in the comments. This really works. Both of those posts drive traffic back to the informational posts. We got extra paid views as a result of it.

The best thing though is that our readers actually learn something because they learn information, they’re inspired to use the information. They’re given a chance to implement what they learn. We all know that people learn best when they do. Inform, inspire, interact. 90% of our content is information but we sprinkle it. We season it with inspiration and interaction.

Another way to mix up your content is to try different formats. You’ll find over time that your audience will respond best to certain types of content and we’ve certainly worked out that information content is our best, we use a lot of guides, how to’s, tips, tutorials but we sprinkle it with stories.

Storytelling is another way of inspiring and some of our best posts have been more inspirational content telling stories. But there’s a whole list of different types of content that you need to constantly be experimenting and seeing what’s working with your audience. The same with different mediums.

For us, blog posts have been a big part of it. But more recently, I’ve started to get into more visual content particularly through our social media, infographics, and cheat sheets have really been working very well for us lately and live streaming as I said before. Actually, what I’m finding is live streaming so Periscoping everyday is driving people to my podcast and the podcast is driving people to the blog for some reason. That seems to be the flow of our readers. Just experiment with where you can meet new readers and where you can take them as a result of that.

I want to talk for a moment about this idea of know, like, and trust that opened this quite before. People do business with people that they know, like, and trust. So if you want people to do business with you, you want them to know, like, and trust you. How do you create content that takes them through this process? It will be different for everyone of us but I want to show some examples of what we do. This is an infographic. We didn’t actually create it. We curated it. We always link back to the source.

We find that infographics work very well as a first point of contact with our audience on Digital Photography School. Our audience share these like crazy. They can’t get enough of them. That’s good at getting known. People share that kind of content. But in and of itself, that doesn’t really help because people generally would bounce away from an infographic very quickly. What we do and you can see that underneath a highlighter, that we have further reading based on that infographic.

We used to just post the infographic and that was great for traffic, getting the eyeball. But since we started giving further readings that relates to that infographic, we’ve seen a lot more stickiness to the sight so highlight and underneath it, you can’t read it. It’s three articles on how to hold a camera, which is exactly what the infographic is about. We give them a meatier piece of content. That’s the content that people like. They begin to not only see you and know you. They begin to like you and trust you.

Underneath that, we have other articles for beginners because this is a topic that’s very beginner-y. But we can’t post infographics all day everyday. We have to go to the next level. You have to start asking yourself, what’s going to take people to the next level of liking us? Again, this is where we have more of our inspirational content. This is where storytelling is very powerful. Content that’s going to make people grow in their desire, in inspiration and motivation. Sprinkle that type of content.

But again, you’ll see there, I’ve highlighted links further into the sight. We’re always trying to get people to the content which helps them to trust us. That helps them to build credibility and authority for us. This is another type of content that helps likeability. It’s any kind of interactional. This is one of our challenges. We do them every weekend. Here is something for you to go away and do. Show us your work. People like to show off. People like to talk. We give them an opportunity to do that. That gives them a sense of belonging.

And then trust. These are meaty articles. That post there on the right, The Ultimate Guide To Learning How To Use Your First Digital SLR is like 6,000 words long. That’s a big piece of content but it grows authority. We’ve actually found that long form content is outperforming anything else on the sight at the moment. I don’t know if you can see that but that post has been shared over 149,000 times. It took a lot of work to get that piece of content together but it’s paying off because not only is it being shared, it’s growing trust. It’s growing credibility.

That piece of content, we tracked it, is responsible for a lot of people buying our ebooks than buying our products as a result of that. Okay, we know, like and trust. What about buy? Because we all want the sale, eventually. How do you actually get them to buy? What we’ve found is that our blog posts are not a very good place to get the buy. For our audience, it just doesn’t work at all. We actually tracked this ebook that we launched last year. It was responsible for about 5% of our sales, our blog content.

We just don’t sell blog content anymore. We sell for our email list. We’ve got an email list of about 800,000 now and it drives almost all of our sales. Social media just doesn’t convert for us at all. We don’t use social media or our blogging content, or even the podcast to sell. We use it to drive people to our newsletter.

This is what most people do on their blogs. They have their blog and then they have a sight wide opt in on the side bar. Get our cheat sheet or get our ebook, whatever it might be. This works, this is good but what’s even better is to have multiple opt ins. One of the trends we noticed last year was a lot of blogs now are using a library of opt ins and they’re matching the opt in that relates best to a certain category of content.

What’s happening even more this year, this is another shift that I’ve noticed is that cool kids are now creating opt ins for every blog post that they do or every podcast that they do. I think James mentioned or alluded to this earlier. This is what Amy Porterfield did. She interviewed me for her podcast a few months ago and she said to me, “Can I take three of your best articles from the blog, put them into a PDF, and then add some of my own thoughts to it? She created a very simple opt in for that podcast. She wouldn’t be promoting it anywhere else except for that episode.

This is what RazorSocial are doing in Cleary. He actually gives anyone who comes to his blog a PDF version of every blog post. You can just download a PDF version of the blog post but it’s behind an opt in. It’s converting really well for him. It’s a very easy way to create an opt in.

This is Jill from Screw the 9 to 5. They’ve started creating checklists or swipe files the relate to blog posts. They don’t do it for every blog post but certainly the ones that are meatier, the longer form content. They’re adding blog-post specific opt ins to them. I think we’ll see that just well a lot more and more in the next 12 months.

Talking about content events, as I look back over the last 12 years of my own blogging journey, I quite often live in Google Ad Analytics and I love just to look at what happens when there’s spikes in traffic came, just a good habit to get into. I noticed recently that a lot of the spikes in traffic in my site have happened around events or content events.

The first one was back in 2005 on ProBlogger. I was sitting in bed one night at 2:00AM and I had this little idea for a 31 day series of content on the blog. I was going to give a little bit of teaching everyday and then a little activity to go and do for my readers. I couldn’t go to sleep so I got up and I just wrote this blog post and said, “I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to start it tomorrow and I’m going to call it 31 Days To Build A Better Blog.” Put no thought into that idea at all.

I had no idea what the 31 days were going to be. I think I may have had a couple of ideas and I just went to bed and I slept easy. I’ve got it out of me. Put the blog post up, woke up the next morning, there was more comments on that post than I’ve ever had on a post before. I was like, “Okay, what’s day one going to be?” Quickly, I came up with day one and it started this little series of content over the first 31 days.

Traffic was two or three times higher that month than I’ve ever seen before. I was like, “What is going on here?” Essentially, I was doing the same thing I was doing every other day. But because I called it something and ran it over a defined period, people wanted to join it. There was a sense of an event happening and people like to join events.

I did the same series in 2007. This time I put an opt in around it. I said you can get an email every day and essentially, it was the same thing, almost exactly the same content. It was two or three times bigger than the first year. I did it in 2009 again and this time, we had a little community area. Today, I’d probably use a Facebook group or something like that. People really responded well in not only getting the content and the task, but coming together and sharing their knowledge.

This event idea really took off. At the end of 2009, my readers said, “Could you give us this in a PDF or an ebook? We’ll even pay you for it.” I was like, “No, you won’t.” They were like, “Yeah, we will.” I put it into a PDF and I created 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, The ebook. 12,000 people bought in the first three weeks after launching it, at $20 each. I’m like, “What in the world happened?”

Events are very powerful. People like to join things. Any sort of a defined period is a very powerful thing. I’m going to let you work through this slide later when you get it but there’s a whole heap of benefits of doing an event. I was going to say I think it’s about joining. It’s about something social. It’s about doing something together, achieving something together that can be very powerful to do.

Here are a few examples. This is my wife. She does events. She actually did her first event two weeks into her first blog. She had no one reading her blog at all. I think there was like 10 readers. By the end of that week, she had 200 readers a day because she did this event. It was just a very simple event. She told her readers to take a photo of themselves wearing a certain color everyday for a week and post in on Instagram with a hashtag. It went crazy. She does these events now every three or so months and every time, it significantly increases her traffic.

This is one around fitness. You can do this in pretty much any niche. This is one around organizing your pantry of all things, an event that this blogger did. She had thousands of people to the pantry challenge together. This is a 52 weeks event on finances and saving up money. You can really do it in lots of ways. If you’ve ever been to Bali, this is the braiding your hair challenge. Literally, Kristina did. She does 30 days of braiding your hair and she turned it into an ebook at the end of it.

People joined in and then she used that as the launch of her new product. Any kind of an event worked really well. Again, I’ll let you read through those. I don’t like bullet points but I thought it would be a quick way of getting the information to you and allow me to get on to my last two points.

This is the biggest challenge I think, for us as content creators today. How do you differentiate yourself? We live in a time where, I think I saw the stats the other day, there’s around 74 million plus blogs on wordpress.com. That’s just the wordpress.com version and there’s the wordpress.org version, which is even more popular, then there’s Tumblr and Blogger. There’s so much content being created all the time. Looking at podcasts, app store, there’s so many podcast out there. There’s so much content being produced.

It’s probably one of the most important things that we need to really get our heads around as content creators. How do we stand out? Seven quick tips to do it. Firstly, and this is the hardest one. It’s almost impossible to choose a unique topic but it still is kind of possible. Firstly, you could be first and it was helpful to be one of the first people talking about blogging and making money from blogging. But this is pretty much impossible. There’s 1,000 blogs on almost every topic you can think about.

But you can be the first one to combine two topics together. This is Manolo, the shoe blogger. He started blogging in 2007 and there were thousands of blogs on shoes already back in 2007. But he was the first person to blog about celebrities and their shoes. He went viral. He went crazy. He was the first one to bring two topics together.

This is Jen and Jadah from Simple Green Smoothies. Jada spoke at our event last year. She told the story about how she had I think four or five different blogs, none of them worked whatsoever until she noticed Green Smoothies starting to take off. And so she started Simple Green Smoothies. They have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, hundreds of thousands of readers to their blog. They built a massive business around Simple Green Smoothies.

This is Donna Moritz, some of you will know, she’s an Aussie blogger. She had a social media blog as did thousands of other people. It was pretty much the same content, talking about all things social media. And then she noticed visual content was starting to grow and become more important. She noticed the post that she was writing on visual content started to really take off so she killed all her other posts and just focused on visual content. Jumped on that emerging trend.

Serve and ignore demographic. I think this is a very powerful thing because yes, there is a blog on every topic out there but there’s a whole heap of ignored demographics. Has anyone come across Nerd Fitness? This is a great blog if you’re a nerd. There’s tens of thousands of fitness blogs out there but they all look the same. They’ve all got chiselled guys with six packs on the front and they all speak in the same language that I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Steve Kamb decided to start a fitness blog for nerds. He gamified getting fit. Nerds want to get fit too but we’ve been ignored, we’ve been left out of that whole thing. Did I say we? Yeah. This is a great example of serving and ignoring. He’s really presenting the same information. He just changes the language and he’s branding it in a way that is relevant for the ignored niche.

There are all kinds of ignored niche, whether it be gender, disability, life circumstances, age that you are. I came across a few bloggers recently who’ve been creating blogs for seniors and retirees, who have felt left out of certain niches as well. There are all kind of ignored demographics.

Use a different medium or format. A lot of you read The Verge. When The Verge started, almost every tech blog had been successful the nerd, The Verge was using short form content. Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, they were publishing 10 to 20, sometimes 30 or 40 blog posts a day and they were almost all one or two paragraphs long The Verge came out now publishing 4,000, 5,000 word articles.

They stood out because they changed the format. This is Brian Fanzo. He was a social media expert as were thousands of other people but he spotted this live streaming trend going on and so he now is flying around the world talking about live streaming and he’s made a name for himself because he chained the medium that he was using to talk about the same topics.

Publish in a different pace. Everyone here probably knows John Lee Dumas. There are lots of entrepreneurial blogs out there but no one was doing daily. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how he keeps us but he changed the pace of publishing content. As a result, that’s one of the reasons that he stood out.

This is Dosh Dosh, a blog that was around years ago now. He started I think in 2007. It was a blog about making money blogging. This is three years after ProBlogger started and by this stage, there were thousands of blogs on how to make money from blogging, Macky from Dosh Dosh decided to slow it down. He didn’t go faster. He went slower and longer form. He was publishing at one stage, one piece of content every month. It was long, meaty content that everyone anticipated. When he published that post, it got shared like crazy. Macky’s down at it again. You’ve got to get his latest post that would take you a week to read it and implement the content. It was so meaty but he slowed it right down. It became a part of his brand. Now, he’s disappeared and no one knows where he went.

Right for a different level of expertise, this is what I did with Digital Photography School. There were thousands of blogs for photographers in 2007 when I started. It was a stupid topic, it was too late. Digital photography has been around forever. But most of those blogs have been writing for experts. Most of those blogs had this culture on them. If you turned up and asked a beginner question, you would get laughed out of the comment section.

It wasn’t because the bloggers themselves didn’t like beginners. It was because the audience had all grown up and become intermediate and advanced users. I started a blog for beginners. One of my first articles was how to hold a camera. The most basic thing you could think of. I almost didn’t publish it because it was so basic. I was embarrassed to publish the post. It’s now had over 800,000 people view the post.

People need that kind of information. That’s the kind of information that they’re too embarrassed to ask their friends. Those serve a different level of expertise.

Lastly, I want to talk about refining your voice. Something is really hard to teach on. How do you develop your voice? Partly, it comes from experimentation but it’s something that you can make some choices around as well.

Some of you might know Jeff Goins. He’s a blogger about writing and he’s written some great books. He says you can write in any of these five voices on pretty much any topic, any niche. The professor is someone who researches, who pretty much spends their whole life dedicating to learning about a particular topic and then they present a hypothesis and they really teach at a high level about a topic.

The artist is someone who’s not really interested in teaching, they’re just interested in beauty and aesthetics and inspiration. They’re looking for the beauty in a topic and you can probably think of bloggers who do that or podcasters. But I don’t really teach you anything but you just come away from it feeling motivated and inspired.

The prophet is someone who’s interested in telling you the truth. The cold, hard, ugly truth. They bust myths, sometimes they’re not that popular but you know they’ll tell it like it is. Sometimes, they’re not that sensitive in their language that they use but they just get to the point. I reckon someone in this room might be a prophet.

The journalist is someone who curates. They gather information from different sources and then presents that information as a story.

The celebrity isn’t someone who’s famous. They’re someone who’s charismatic. It’s more about the person and what they think about a topic or how they live their life, their personality, that’s big in that particular topic.

Jeff argues that you can pretty much take any of these or a combination of these as your voice. I reckon you could add a couple of more at least. You can be the companion. You can be the person who journeys with someone, who may be just a step ahead of them in the journey. You can be the mentor. You can be the entertainer and talk about the funny stuff that’s going on in an industry or niche. You can be the reviewer. You can be the curator. You can be the storyteller, the guide, the teacher, the thought leader or something else.

The more you do it, the better you’ll work out what your voice is and really, I would suggest that you look around at what everyone else is doing and try and find the gaps in that as well. It needs to be who you are and it’s hard to write in a voice that you’re not. But if you can find a gap that reflects who you are, that’s a very powerful thing.

Again, when I started Digital Photography School, I wanted to teach, I wanted to give people a how to, but I didn’t want to be a professor. There were plenty of them already so I decided to be the companion. I decided to be someone who’s like here’s what I learned, try this. I’ll be a friend who teaches you. Think about your voice.

The last thing I want to say, I’ve got a few minutes left to say it. I don’t need them, is to keep moving. This is just a general piece of advice I guess, for entrepreneurs. You’ve got to keep moving. Pay attention to the little ideas you get that keep you awake at night like I paid attention to, back in 2005, when I couldn’t sleep at night. And don’t just pay attention to those ideas, do something with them. Get up out of bed and write a blog post. Put it out there. See what happens. Look for the sparks that energize you and then test those sparks and look to see what happens. Look for the sparks that energize other people.

When I put that blog post out there about 31 days to build a better blog, I didn’t know what would happen but I followed the energy. I saw that my readers were responding and so I went with it. I went hard at it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it again. Now, I turned into the product.

You know what? The best thing, yes all those sales of that book, I think I looked a couple of weeks ago and we sold 60,000 copies of that book now. It’s going to be a profitable venture. I’m really glad I paid attention to that spark of energy and did something with it at 2:00AM that night. It also led to a whole other journey. Whilst ebooks may not be the best model, maybe we need to all move towards subscriptions, I don’t know, but ebooks and paying attention to that spark was something that really was powerful for me. I’d spend on a whole heap of other product ideas that I’ve created since.

We’ve now published about 40 ebooks. We’ve now sold almost half a million ebooks since 2009 when I first created that first one. It’s opened up this whole new way of doing things. I put it all back to the fact that I paid attention to a spark of energy and I enacted, I kept moving.

I love this little quote from Jadah Sellner that I’ll leave you with. “Take imperfect action.” It’s very easy to come to a conference like this and be overwhelmed by the people on the stage, telling you their stories of all the things that they’ve done and looking around you at the room and all the other people taking notes about the things they’re going to enact in hearing these stories. The thing that you’ve got to realize is that none of us really know what we’re doing and we’re all just taking imperfect actions and seeing what happens as a result of that.

There are plenty of failures that we all have along the way but somewhere in the midst of the things that we do comes life and comes profit. That’s all I’ve got to say today. Thank you for the time.

I hope you enjoyed that talk. I do recommend the Superfast Business conference. James Schramko also has a podcast. If you do a search for Superfast Business, you’ll find him. He’s a very smart, straight talking kind of guy. Another Aussie accent to add to your playlist if you’re not from Australia or if you are as well.

Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group, problogger.com/group.

As promised at the top of the show, some further listening for you. If you want to listen to a podcast on how to choose a niche, go back to episode 59. If you want to hear a podcast about avatars and thinking about your audience, go back and listen to a really early one, episode 33. If you want to dig into that exercise for thinking about how to change your audience’s life, go back even further to episode 11. That was part of our 31 day series. If you want to dig into more about how to come up with great ideas to create content, go and listen to episode 84, which was a part of a series that I did. It was followed up on episode 86 on how to create content. I really dig into some strategies for thinking about how to get into the habit of creating good content. Episode 87 was also about completing content, finishing things off.

Lastly, if you want to learn more about embeddable content, I’d go a lot deeper into that topic in episode 152. There’s lots more in the ProBlogger archives there so dig around and if you do want to get those links, go over to the show notes, which are at http://ift.tt/2xRKOgN.

Lastly, thanks so much for those of you who left reviews over the last week in iTunes and other podcasting apps. I am loving those reviews and a few good ones came in this week as well.

How did you go with today’s episode?

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The post 213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know appeared first on ProBlogger.

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  213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know published first on http://ift.tt/2u73Z29

[teachergaming-blog]

Pirates of the Caribbean ToW Cheats, Hack, Tips & Guide

Increase Your Resources Significantly by Using the Pirates of the Caribbean ToW Cheats for Free!

How hard would it be to become the captain of your ship that is full of pirates and young talents waiting for you to lead them through the various adventures and the open sea, prepare yourself and your own crew to become the masters of the sea and force your power upon anything that passes by, but the fun does not end here, the game is packed with an interesting battle system and tons of communications protocols you will get to learn more about them the more you read about the game so it is totally recommended.

send invitations out for your friends so they would enter the game with you, sharing and enjoying the several features and fun factors together is something you will not get to find ay many other games out there, but make sure that you are using the Pirates of the Caribbean ToW cheats as it will be backing up your journey over here with the necessary goods and supply for a long run.

Pirates of the Caribbean ToW was created and published globally by “JOYCITY Corp” company and it is compatible with the Android and IOS devices.

Game Story.

The story is simply based around the Calypso reviving chatter as you and your fellow pirates were seeking to reach the eternity at any cost but it was stolen out by turner, but anyway the eternity sounds boring to be honest, anyone would much rather be on the handle part of the sword than the pointy one, and now your journey shall begin as the battle with the endeavor has begun.

Pick up your favorite character from the Movie depending on your own preference they all are equal in powers as the game developers been working on this game for long time in order to try to deliver it out balanced as much as possible, and you can find more information about the character’s pros and cons in our Pirates of the Caribbean ToW guide with more details of course.

Actually all of the Show characters are available to pick from them, they have not missed out a single one, and once you are done with the selection process, enter a name for your character between 3 and 12 letters, no spaces or special characters are allowed at all, only clean words.

The Next Step After Character Creation.

And now your character has been created let’s move to the next part when the real game starts and so does your first mission, repaired the gate of the island, repairing will usually come at a cost and that is why you should be equipped with the Pirates of the Caribbean ToW cheats throughout the different parts of the journey, and also the repairing process is not only thing that its cost, you will have to wait until the repairing is done or you can speed it up by spending extra coins and see it getting finished instantly.

Next part after repairing the gate is to construct some fields and lumber mills to have more than a single source for food and goods at the island, you are simply turning from being a random pirate at the open sea into someone whom is planning for something bigger and improved version of the piracy, someone whom is willing to become a true leader and king of the pirates at the end of the day.

So you will never achieve your goal without having alliances and a strong base to stand upon before you bring your plans and ideas into the light so work right from the bottom and follow the given Pirates of the Caribbean ToW tips carefully.

Raid The East Indian Company with Your New Ship!

Creating your first ship at the shipyard is a necessary move because without a ship everything would become so pointless and useless, and now that is a beautiful vessel! but a shop cannot be crewed by one hand, you need a fine band of pirates to stand up to the east India trading company and put an end for their rule, with the Pirates of the Caribbean ToW cheats your mission shall become much easier.

the best place to find an able bodied and willing crew is the pub, head right there instantly and hire pirates, I guess that 10 pirates will be more than enough as start for you but if you want to get more make sure that you are having the Pirates of the Caribbean ToW hack activated.

It takes time to hire a decent crew, but with the right incentives it can be settled up quick, so use the speed up item to hire these pirates right at the moment, the deckhand actually loves the sea, he loves sailing in ships even more, but the most thing that he loves the most is actually raiding the east India trading company and that is a good sign of having the right members in your crew.

Keep Track of Your Quests from Time to Tim.

Entering the quests menu to see what you have completed successfully and what is still waiting for you to be done, each mission you are accomplishing will grant you some number of rewards and depending on its difficulty level, the reward will increase or decrease, make sure you are receiving them once the rewards are available to be picked up.

do you see that? it looks like an attack just off shore, I would bet my last doubloon that it is the east India trading company, try to take part of this combat and eliminate the threat by taking down the ship, and now the crew that you have saved in this combat is in your debt forever and will try to serve you and follow you orders for ever no matter what you say to them.

But if your crew is idle at the port and not doing anything things will become messy and they will just waste the money in the pub or over the betting and that is why you need to work on them to improve their abilities.

Using The Pirates of the Caribbean ToW Hack Will Improve Your Game.

Get out to the open sea where you can find some challenges and real monsters to kill and loot, you should know that monster hunting will get you treasures which happens to be one of the things the pirate likes the most!

of course these treasures will not contain anything close to the items you will be getting from the Pirates of the Caribbean ToW hack but it is actually worth a try, and now let’s head back to the port and try to assemble things once again, try to keep your items safe as much as possible.

One last feature we must cover before we end this review is the alliance forming, when you send out invitations to your friends you can enjoy the opportunity of creating a one big alliance together and raid the east Indian company together and expand you terrify step by step and that is one fascinating feature.

The First publisher is : Games Park

Main Post Link : https://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/pirates-caribbean-tow-cheats-hack-tips-guide/

Topic : Pirates of the Caribbean ToW Cheats, Hack, Tips & Guide.

Re Shared on “WithoutWax” : http://withoutwax.tv/2017/05/11/pirates-caribbean-tow-cheats-hack-guide/

Re-Shared too on “WeAdvance” : http://weadvance.org/pirates-caribbean-tow-hack-cheats-gameplay/

French Version : “OsonslaFrance” : https://www.osonslafrance.com/pirates-caribbean-tow-cheats-hack-tips-guide/

[allcheatscodes]

fallout 3 xbox 360

http://allcheatscodes.com/fallout-3-xbox-360/

fallout 3 xbox 360

Fallout 3 cheats & more for Xbox 360 (X360)

Cheats

Unlockables

Hints

Easter Eggs

Glitches

Guides

Achievements

Get the updated and latest Fallout 3 cheats, unlockables, codes, hints, Easter eggs, glitches, tricks, tips, hacks, downloads, achievements, guides, FAQs, walkthroughs, and more for Xbox 360 (X360). AllCheatsCodes.com has all the codes you need to win every game you play!

Use the links above or scroll down to see all the Xbox 360 cheats we have available for Fallout 3.

Check PlayStation 3 cheats for this game

Also Known As: Fallout III

Genre: Role-Playing, First-Person Action RPG

Developer: Bethesda Softworks

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

ESRB Rating: Mature

Release Date: September 9, 2008

Hints

Easy Sniper And Items

This one is hard but outside and behind of megaton there is a group of three trees in between the trees there is a rock if you click on the rock you find its hollowed out and there is stuff inside like :a sniper, some caps, a note and other items. Note: there are two rocks that fit the description one closer to the entrance of megaton and one further on the one that is furthest is the right rock this is going to the left of megatons entrance around to the back the rock is near the wall.

Unlimited Caps

Go to anyone that sells leather armor, combat armor, or laser pistols. Make sure they have 2 of at least one of these. Buy the cheaper one. Sell it back. You should have lost money. Do it again and you will gain money because you are selling the trader the fully repaired version of the item you bought. Keep repeating this until you have gotten all their caps. Buy everything you want from them (leaving enough caps to buy the leather armor, combat armor, or laser pistol)then repeat the process now wait (press the select/back button) for 3 to 4 days. All their stock will be back including their caps. Repeat for as long as desired. If it doesn’t work you are doing it wrong.

Power Armor Without Power Armor Training

What you want to do is, go to the top right corner of the map. Then go to a small town SW with death claws. You want to go to the sewers. Fight your way to a corridor where there is a man with power armor and another body, loot both boodys. The power armor talks when there are hostiles around and applies stimpacks to you when you are low on health. AND you DO NOT need power armor training, and it has some air force decals on the shoulder pads.

Get A Discount At Craterside

Go to moria brown. She’ll ask you about the survival book that she wants to make. Once you complete the first chapter and tell her about the book and how she can get someone kill if she mess up. She’ll say your right well I guess I should’nt work on the book now. Once you ask about trading she will give you a discount and discount on repair. Its 25% off so enjoy as much you.

T-51b Power Armour Location

When you go to fort Constantine after you get all the keys from the quest you gotta shoot em in the head you will be able to open up a secret box or locker you have to travel to the very bottom of the fort which is hard because its infested with robots anyway after you go down to the last level there will be a door or a locker or a box that requires the keys that you got from the quest when you unlock it it will reveal the normal t-51b power armor the creators made this so that it would be more realistic from the one in operation anchorage because the one in anchorage never breaks but any way good luck with the new armor.

Unique Weapon: Xuanlong Assault Rifle (Chinese Assault Rifle)

To obtain this weapon, go to the Museum of technology and when your inside, find the three terminals

Terminal #001 – 19 (Ground floor, across the entrance room) (The same terminal needed to start the quest)

Terminal #002 – 53 (In the Museum West Wing, which is past the Vault tour)

Terminal #003 – 113 (Ground floor by the Delta rocket)

After you unlock the three terminals, go to the Diner in Jury Street Metro Station. In there you will find Prime’s body, search his body and he will have the Xuanlong Assault Rifle along with 500 caps, explosives, and ammo. (NOTE: if you make an error in the terminals, you will be unable to obtain the weapon. ).

Location Of A Fat Man

To find a fat man, go to the capital building which is located on the other side of the mall were he Washington Monument is go in side the fat man will be located were the behemoth is but be careful a bounty hunter has it (if you don’t kill him in one shot he will either use it on you or you will brake the fat man the fat man is expensive to fix).

Best Armor In Game

In the quest you gotta shoot em in the head get all the keys for Crowley and give them to him. He will get up and leave the underworld. When he gets to the main room where the T-rex skeleton is, kill him and take his keys. (NOTE: this will only work if you have not finished the quest yet). Head northwest until you get to a place called Fort Constantine (it is near raven rock). Go into the CO quarters and keep going deeper into the fort, when you get to a room with three doors and a dead body by one of them, go into the only one that doesn’t have lock level 100. You will find the best armor in the game called the T-51b armor in the stasis field, there is also a fatman and some mini nukes too. (be sure to explore the rest of the fort including the main building there is some extra goodies around.)

Pintsize Slasher Mask

At point lookout in a hotel room in a bathtub you find a sketlon with the pintsize slasher mask.

Free Pet Dog!!

On your way to the Minefield, you’re almost there, but keep looking at your left. If you see some big antenas, go behind them, and continue to the Minefield. You’ll start to see some big white ramps. Between two of the ramps, you will see a dead body, so it will let you know your almost to a dog. You are now in the Scrapyard! Go all the way to the left on a fence until you see the enterence. When you see the enterence, don’t open it. Just keep going straight until you get to a turn. Take a right, and you’ll see another turn. Turn right. Now keep on going straight untill you enter a train yard inside the Scrapyard. Now you’ll start to hear shooting, hurry and follow the shooting. You’ll see a raider killing a dog. Kill ONLY the raider! When the raider is dead, but the dog is still alive, talk to the dog. When you say the right words, the dog is your friend, and it will follow you. So now you earned a dog.

Survive Fall

When you fall from a high distance just hit b on your controller and go to your pip boy then hit b again and you land a fall from a high distance. NOTE: I always do this when I’m on a quest and I wanna get out.

Aromory In Megaton

In megton there is a armory where lucas simms keeps his weapons. The lockpick is very hard 100. If you break in, a robot like mister gutsy will start shooting you. Ths is what I did I unlock and ran to my house where deptuy sheriiff attack my robot wadsworth and he is dead now let wadworth wound the robot but he will die if you do. Go back to armory and you will see chinesse assault rifle and a hunting rifle and combat shotgun its up to you if you want to sell them. NOTE: some of the guns are horrible condition.

Alien Crash Site

Right next to the MOLP-13 power station a crash site is up 2 grid lines then turn right you should get a new radio signal or a beacon the beacon sounds like someone is speaking alien. You see a alien on a floor and a alien gun with 10-110 shots. NOTE: if you get the beacon signal its call the recon draft ship and if your fall your lose the signal so good luck.

Enclave Telsa Armour And Plasma Rifle

This is simple. After you escape the jefferson memorial and go to the citdal go to the arliton library right next to the alexandra arms. Go inside the library and go back out. Go to where the raiders are when they hide and you will hear two enclave helicopters droping off the enclave I recemend not to attack. Just wait a hour or attack and if you wait you will see 3 enclave kill. One by getting hit by steel. Second, they got shot third, the got shot by the mark4 laser turrent.

Going To Vault 87 Through The Radiation

When you have to get the geck, you have to go through little lamplight. But there is a easier way. First get rad radiation perk fully then get a advance radiation suit that moira brown got then you shoud be able to go through without getting poison. NOTE: if you do, get the brotherhood of steel holotag and then give it to scribe jameson.

Two Eugenes

When you finish the quest Rileys Rangers, she asks you if you want a minigun or armor. Take the minigun then kill brick. The minigun Riley gives you is called Eugene and brick has Eugene.

People Giving You Free Suff

When you reach level 8, 9, or 10 (I forgot what level) a girl in Megaton will start to give you free items like ammo, chems (like stimpacks and all that) food, and 10% weapons. But when she gives the items to you, you have to wait like a week in the game so she can give you more.

The Gatling Laser

If you find a Brotherhood of Steel person, and if they have a big battery on their backs, they have the Gatling Laser. The Gatling Laser is a Laser that shoots straight, has nice accuracy, and does a lot of damage. Find it, try it, love it.

How To Rack Up XP

Simply walk up to a single person (its to hard to do with a group) draw a weapon that will almost kill them but doesn’t. After getting them close to death, pause the game and raise the difficulty to hard. Then kill them, you get almost double XP! Good Luck!

Deathclaw Follower

This is actually only available to those with the broken steel expansion. On the quest where you need to get the tesla coil you have to talk to rothchild and ask him about something that can help you with old olney. He will send you to another scribe that gives you a device called a deathclaw scrambler control. (or something close to that) it makes it so all enclave mind controlled deathclaws are friendly to you and will protect and follow you. NOTE normal deathclaws are still hostile and when fastraveling while having a deathclaw follower, it will die. (reasons unknown).

Easist Way To Kill Any Enemy

The way I kill all my enemy is I get out my dart gun and terrible shotgun (or combat shotgun). First you need to make dart gun if you don’t have 1. Then you can find the terrible shotgun at evergreen mills. )ok back 2 the hint. All you have 2 do is shot your enemy with some darts. Then you shoot’em in the face with the shotgun.

Ultimate Operation Anchorage Cheat

When you download Operation Anchorage, you know the infinite ammo cheat right?

With the ammo dispenser, get full ammo, drop it then refill, then continue, but, what happens if you bring all those ammo and weapons to the capitol wasteland?

Well you can! Before you get in the simulator pod in the outcast base, kill someone, and everyone else if you want to. Then drag his/her body to the pod and put it in the pod seat, so if you sit down in it, you can search him/her.

Save before going into the simulator, then play through until you get to the part after you blow up the artillery cannons.

Make sure you did the lots of ammo! Or infinite if you call it that cheat!

When you get to choose your loadout, ( picked the close combat loadout first) preferably your favorite weapons like the 10mm pistol, combat shotgun, power fist, assault rifle, sniper, 10mmsub. , missile launcher. Those are, I think, all the weapons you get from the loadouts.

Then do infinite ammo cheat lots! Then drop your loadout in the armory, change your loadout (only can do once so pick wisely)!

Go back to the armory, pickup your new loadout from the man, grab your previous loadout you dropped, then do the infinite ammo glitch with all your weapons.

Play through until you pass the electro minefield, and save before entering where the Chinese general dude is.

Then go inside with the t51b dudes, and kill or persuade the Chinese general.

General chase appears, talk, then the simulators over, but on the loading screen keep pushing A and pointing down if you put the body earlier down like me.

You may have to try a few times, but, if succeeds, you search the dead body.

Then put all your weapons, ammo and awesome winterized combat armor in the body, then you get out of the pod, which then you search the body for the invincible weapons, and armor.

You heard me – invincible!

Now loot the armory, and go outside, make sure you have a follower, so you can store heavy weapons and armor that he/she will carry!

The Abraham Lincoln Action Figure

When you are at the museum of history go down the hall and turn left until you get to a a wooden door not the giant skull door but. You can not easily find the figure go inside and it will take you in the lower levels of the building be prepared there is 1 glowing one and about 30 feral ghouls kill all them and loot the area then go into a room with book shelves this is the treasure of this area then go inside behind one of the book shelves is a action figure of Abraham Lincoln this is just a easter egg that does not sell for a lot but it makes a unique house decoration. NOTE:this area is always found when doing the head of state quest when you have 2 find the large poster of the memorial.

To Get A Dog Follower

Go to the scrapyard east of paradise falls in the east part of the scrapyard you will find a dog fighting raiders talk to him and he will start to follow you he can find food ammo and guns.

Location Of Agility Bobble Head

Go to minefield and up two grid squares on the map and one to the right and at the top middle of that square will be GREENER PASTURES DISPOSAL SITE go in the building and it will be right there on a desk next to a computer.

Unique Weapon: Zhu-Rong V418 Chinese Pistol (Chinese Pistol)

To obtain this weapon, travel to L. O . B Enterprises. It is found behind a Very Hard locked door (requires 100 lockpick) in the CEO’s office in the case on his desk. The key for the case is inside his desk. It is also possible to reach the case by working your way around the edge of the destroyed top floor until you are on the other side of the locked door.

SWAT Sheild

This is the same as a MEATSACK. But instead of just a shopping cart, bodies can be used as a bullet catcher! Just decapitate the body (to make it lighter), pick it up (the body) and keep it pointed at the enemy. NOTE: this will NOT work on melee opponents or heavy weapons, mini guns excluded. But laser based or bullet based will be absorbed by the dead body in front of you. This is a good tactic against raiders and super mutants. Not lurks or ferals. You can’t fire while doing this so get close and slash and gash is this technique!

Alien Crash Coordinates

On the Word Map, Zoom to where you can easily see the grid. Starting from top left, go to the 3rd grid down (not intersections), then grid 12 to the left. I t should be near the center or top of the grid.

Unique Weapon: Victory Rifle (Sniper Rifle)

To get the Victory Rifle, go to Rockbreaker’s Last Gas in the Abandoned Sniper Shack (where you will find Keller transcript 4) in a locker that requires 100 lockpick skill. If you do not have 100 lockpick skill, it is still possible to obtain it

1. Bring Jericho or Star Paladin Cross or Clover since they will want to shoot Fluffy and Jitters, the radroaches.

2. Have Dogmeat and tell him to find a weapon, he will eventually retrieve it

3. If Talon Company Mercs or Regulators spawn outside the hut to kill the player. Go back into the hut and keep shooting out their weapons.

Fisto!

To get Fisto! You have to have discovered Minefield. The power station North of it is where ya need to be headin’. It’s the bigger building not the tiny one. This was easy for me because I had my GhoulMask from Tenpenny Tower. If you don’t have this, get ready to fight four Glowing Ones and like 20 Ferals. But Fisto! Is on the top floor in the big generator room.

Keller Transcripts Locations

For obtaining the MIRV, you will need all 5 Keller transcripts. Here are the tape’s locations.

Tape 1: Go to the VAPL-58 Power Station then head North following the electric/hydro towers and it’ll be at the base of the last one (third tower). The tape is on the bookcase at the bottom shelf.

Tape 2: Go to Hallowed Moors Cemetery North of Big Town. Going in at the front entrance, the second Keller tape will be on the left on top of the podium.

Tape 3: Go to Grisly Diner and head inside, then go to your right and out the back. The third Keller tape is located on a desk at the back.

Tape 4: Go to Rockbreaker’s Last Gas and turn to the west. You will see the Sniper Shack at the top of a cliff, Enter the shack and the tape will be on the workbench on the left (You will also find the Victory Rifle there in a locker that requires 100 lockpick skill).

Tape 5: Go to Anchorage Memorial and head to the north. Across the river there is a truck on its side and a tent behind it. Inside the tent on the table is the fifth Keller tape.

These tapes are used to open the door in the National Guard Depot in the armory.

Unique Weapon: Experimental MIRV (Fat Man)

To find this, go to the National Guard Depot, go to the armory and there is a terminal. However , it cannot be hacked so you need all 5 Keller transcripts (some reason, I got in there with only using 4 transcripts). When you have all 5, you can enter the room. The MIRV is on a table along with 5 mini-nukes and 1 nuka-cola quantum under the table.

Get Two Followers

OK so first off in order for this to work you need to go to megaton and talk to Jericho and ask him to follow you (you need to have under 1000 caps)he will tell you he can’t and he says comeback when you got the caps. Now leave and go to underworld and get Charon by killing the other clerk. Take Charon to megaton and talk to Jericho again you should get a different dialog option Ex. I got the caps now want to join me. (you must have at least 1000 caps now) and he should reply sure I want to get back out there again. And that’s all there is too it. (NOTE if you leave the main dc ruins to do an expansion you will lose the capabilities to have two followers at once).

Unique Sword

The unique Chinese officers sword is tricky to get, you have to do the Blood Ties quest, when you meet the family, you have to pickpocket Vance, he has a sword cabinet key and he is almost impossible to pickpocket. To do this right save just before picking his pocket then try if you fail re-load and try again. His room is on the top, first door on the left, it has a big nice white bed.

Unique Weapon: Vengeance (Gatling Laser)

To find this, go to deathclaw sanctuary and go southeast of the cave and find a pool of blood and you will simply find it laying there. (note: the deathclaws are powerful so I recommend you have either Lincoln’s Repeater, The Terrible Shotgun, Alien Blaster, or Firelance. Or you can have Fawkes and let him mow down the deathclaws. ).

Giant Teddy Bear

In SatCom Array NN-03d, go to NN-03b-B by underground from NN-03b-A. You will see the section of the room that looks like a laboratory. Right next you can see a passage been blocked by nailed up plank wood. If you take a look inside, there is a giant teddy bear lock up by the barricade. It is possible to take the teddy bear. To obtain it, you need 15 frag mines and a BB gun. Throw the 15 frag mines on the table (if they fall on the floor it will still work) equip your BB gun and shoot the mines, the giant teddy bear will glitch through the wall for you to take it, they can be used as unique decorations for your house. (note: once picked up, keep it til you get to your house and drop it, if you take it again, it be back to a normal size teddy bear).

Unique Weapon: Smuggler’s End (Laser Pistol)

To get this weapon, go to the citadel. And go to Elder Lyon’s room in ring B. Its in the wall safe (requires 100 lockpick skill) and lockpick the safe and you will find the Smuggler’s end (laser pistol) and other stuff. There is no karma loss for lockpicking it.

Overseers Ammo (10mm)

When you get in the room where the overseer is interrogating Amata when you kill the overseer and the police officer search the weapon lockers and lockers there should be police armor, police helmet, and 41 bullets for the 10mm.

How To Obtain Both Ant Sting And Protectron’s Gaze

During the Super Human Gambit quest, get at least any kind of power armor (most likely Telsa armor) and the helmets (telsa helmet). Pickpocket both of them first and place the telsa armor and helmet. Then go out ant go back in and pickpocket them again to obtain both of there costumes, once you get both of there costumes, talk to both of them and give the costume to them and they will give you there weapon (results in bad karma) if you want you an kill both of them to get the costumes back. Note: be sure you have about 8-10 stealth boys (or chinese stealth suit if you have operation anchorage) or good sneak skill and save before attemping to pickpocketing both.

Easy Unique Clothing

This works best if you have 100 sneak. To get a kids unique clothing simply pickpocket them and add a suit of armor to their inventory then enter another area then leave that area go back to that child pickpocket them and get their clothing.

Overcumbered Use A MEATSACK

A meat sack is a dead body that you pick up by pressing down on the right stick while pointed at the body then search it and put stuff inside you will move slower than normal but still faster than if you were overcumbered. NOTE:you can’t take a body through a door to a new area so take every thing out and find a new body on the other side.

Double Eugene’s

To get double Eugene’s you have to do the Reilly’s Rangers quest, make sure Brick dies then loot her body and take her Eugene then complete the rest of the quest and go to the Rangers compound and when Reilly asks what you want for a reword take the Eugene. Then check you inventory and you have two Eugene’s.

Easiest Way To Kill Characters Without Losing Karma

To kill a character without losing karma, all you need is a follower (preferably Fawkes the friendly supermutant because he is nearly invincible). Just shoot the character one time with a weapon that will NOT kill them in one shot. The character will turn on you and attack. Then find a place that is safe and let your follower finish them off. You never lose karma, but you do put your follower in danger of being killed. (doesn’t happen often).

Two More Bobble Heads

Perception- Is in the republic of daves the republic of dave museum on the book shelf.

Big Gun- is in the basement of the cottage next to fort constitine (the fort at the top of the world map) when in the basement there is a door to the fort bunker to the left is a safe and insde the safe is the bobble head.

Three More Bobble Heads

Charisma – Is in Paradise Falls in eulegy’s pad over on the table next to the computer.

Energy Weapons – Is in raven rock find colonel automs room it will be locked and you need a skill of 100 to unlock it. (also in the room is the destruction code for the base).

Melee – Is in a building to the south of girdershadethe building has three sections the first is the building the second is the buildings ruins and the third is the valence or something like that but its in the third section at the top of a metal stair case in a pile of nuka cola and empty whisky bottles.

Acheive Kills Without Losing Karma

Wedge a barrel between you and the person you want to kill and then just walk forward. Repeat as needed. Sometimes it takes more than one time to do.

Tranquility Lane; Abandoned House

In Vault 112 you go in the “Tranquility Lounger” and into Tranquility Lane. You have to activate the Fail Safe by entering the Abandoned House and activating the items in a special order. The order is; Radio, Pitcher, Gnome, Pitcher, Block, Gnome, and the Cola bottle.

Click on the items in this order and a computer will appear. Activate the Fail Safe and go back to the playground and talk to Betty. Exit and you will find Dad.

Unlimited Caps For Bad Karma

Travel to the town of Arefu. Near there is aroaming trader named Crow. Kill Crow and take hiskey. Then Head to Canterbury Commons. Go into themayors house, up the stairs and second door on theright. This room should contain all of thedifferent traders supplies. Find and open CrowsLocker. Inside there should apparel and a pencil. The Pencil weighs nothing and has a value of 1which means an unlimited number can be held. Takethe Pencil out and close the locker. Now open thelocker and again and inside should be anotherpencil. There will always be a pencil inside nomatter how many you take. Keep doing this untilyou get the amount of pencils you want. Now sellthe pencils to any merchant for caps. Repeat theprocess to get unlimited Caps. (NOTE: EACH TIME APENCIL IS TAKEN, YOU LOSE KARMA).

Find The Alein Crash Sight

When you find minefield, head up the hill behind it (try not to use Arkansas if you want a good person you’ll need him for the “Just Buissness” Quest).Up the hill you will find a power station. You can go into the power sub-station, but don’t go into the bigger building – there are so many feral ghouls that its hard to fight them all so get the ghoul mask then go in. But on the world map, if you zoom in enough you will see grid lines. There should be and intersection of lines above the station its not the first intersection but the one after it is where the crash is along with 110-120 shots for the alien blaster which is also at the site.

Locations Of Five Bobble Heads

Strength – It is in the sheriff of megatons house on his desk. Endurance – Is in the DeathClaw sanctuary use the (easier Deathclaw kill hint) to get to it. Repair – In arafu the dude who shoots at you when you first get there it is in his house on his desk. Medical – Right before you take the goat your father is examining you when you are done talking to him look on his desk and there it is. Charisma – Is in Vault 108. It only has 2 areas so it isn’t hard to find. Unload all your stuff before you go down there. There’s a lot of armor and weapon parts. But look out for the clones I recommended using a combat shotgun because they only have lead pipes and knives.

Easy Death Claws Kills

First you need the dart gun V2 or higher. When you spot one or the more likely one hits you from behind do the following: 1. Shoot it once with the dart gun wherever you have the highest chance of hitting it. 2. If you have one, pull out a combat shot gun and let it get as close as you feel comfortable. (Let it get pretty close because it can no longer charge at you (the dart gun will kill it’s legs).Then aim for the head. You should be able to get in 3 shots in vats if it’s not dead from that. Then it should only take one more shot, which you can do normally.

Use Auto-Save

One of the nicest things about this cool game is the auto-save function. But what I really like is the ability to pause then save and load at anytime in the game. For example, right before you use up your last bobby pin to open a “very hard” safe save (if it breaks just reload before you used it) This function saves you from possible gameplay disasters. Just remember to ck which save you are reloading so you don’t lose good stuff.

Get Fawlke The Friendly Super Mutant To Follow You

While in vault 87 you will come to a room and hear something that sounds like a Super mutant talk to you. That will be Fawkle. He is in a medical cell to the left of the door. Use the intercom to the right of his cells window to talk to him. He will ask you to let him out – be as nice as you can be in your responses and use all the intellect options you see. He will tell you that he knows where the G.E.C.K. is and that he will get it out of the room full of radiation for you if you let him out. Ask how to let him out and he will tell you that there is a fire alarm down the hall (To the right of the window) in a maintenance closet. Go to the room but don’t press the alarm if you can hack average computers there is one behind the alarm that opens individual doors to the cells. Hack it and open all but room #2 and #1 (these have bad guys in them – a guy named Sid in 1 and a centipede in room 2) All the others have ammo and a pearl in them and maybe some food. Now go back to Fawlke and talk he will then lead you to the room filled with radiation he will tell you to stay here and be on guard for more super mutants. He will then go get the G.E.C.K. and bring it to you. He won’t follow you just yet. ask him to come anyway when he says no. Leave before you get out you should get ambushed by the enclave (there is nothing you can do about this because it’s a cut seen). You will wake up to being questioned by the enclave. The president will let you go to come and see him but as soon as you step outside the door a guard alerts every one close that you got out you have to fight your way to the president. About half of the way there the president says to stand down and let you pass then a couple seconds latter the guy who was questioning you says to ignore the president is orders use the time between the 2 to make some distance without resistance. When you get to the president, accept the virus so that he will help you get out using robots and turrets placed on the way to the exit. When you get out side you should see Fawlke with a Gatling laser mowing down some enclave. Talk to him ask about his new toy and then ask what he is doing here then ask him to come with you this time he should accept if you did it right. Now you can talk to him and have him carry items that make you over weight and change his fighting style and how close he follows you. You can also fire him but after all that hard work do you really want to!

Return To Vault 101

After you have been playing for a while go to megaton and look for radio signals. If the time is right there should be a vault 101 distress signal. listen to it and you will get a message from Amata through it she will ask you to come back because her father is mad with power. (she changed the vault password to her name) Go there and the first person you meet should be a guard. Don’t cause trouble just be nice and then ask if he can take you to Amata. He will and you get about half way there when he tells you to stay back some old guy will fire at butch then butch will run away ask the guard to take you to Amata again and follow him. He will lead you pretty far then, stop and tell you he can go no farther or he will get attacked go up the stairs and Butch will run at you – don’t shoot him. He will stop and ask you to take him away. Tell him that your here to help the vault. Then talk to Amata she’ll ask you to talk to her dad. Tell her that violence isn’t your thing at the end. Next, go to the overseers office talk to him be polite and use the speech command when ever it pops up. If your speech is high enough he will see the error of his ways and go find Amata and make her overseer she will then ask you to leave until she sorts things out in the vault because there are still people who blame you for what happened. Say you understand and leave. You should get good Karma for it.

Unlimited XP

You can gain infinite XP if your speech skill is high enough. (At least about 30).Go to “Big Town”, located north of Vault 101. If you speak with a girl namedBittercup she should tell you about her dating exploits. After speaking with her,go into the house marked “Common House” and speak to a man named Pappy. Thereshould be a speech skill dialogue option that says “You came here with Bittercup,right?” You will get XP every time you click it. Continue to do this and you canrack up XP in mere seconds.

Unlocking Computers

If you’re hacking a computer and you only have one more chance left exit out by pressing the B button this resets the computer so you get another chance. You can do this as many times as needed.

Survive A Long Fall

If you’re falling from a bridge, or some other high area, just save your game just before you hit the ground and re-load the game from there.

Charon’s Contract

To get charon as your teammate, go to the underworld, and talk to the owner of the ninth circle. Ask him about the dude in the corner and he will say that’s his employee, and ask him about giving you his contract. He’ll tell you 1000 or 2000 caps, or just do a mission, and then he gives you his contract.

Friendly Ferals

To get Feral Ghouls to become friendly and even help you should you fight a creature or another you made hostile, help the ‘friendly’ ghouls in the mission ‘Tenpenny Tower’ and Roy Philips will give a mask that will, while worn, calms Ferals. Note: To get the mask, you MUST gain good Karma, so if you are making an evil person, try to gain a lot of evil before or make it up somehow, also, you should just kill Tenpenny beforehand on his balcony to get his suit, caps, and Sniper Rifle, which will not get you attacked because it was not in the building HOPEFULLY and you need a key for another quest.

A1-23’s Plasma Rifle

To get this special variation of the plasma rifle, do the quest “The Replicated Man” and convince Harkness to go to Zimmer. As a reward he will give you his rifle. It does 52 Damage at full condition and 100 weapons skill.

Finding Dogmeat

Dogmeat is found in Scrapyard. On the world map, Scrapyard is in the top right corner of the square that is two squares directly below Minefield. Follow the clear triangle on your compass if you are having problems finding it. Go into Scrapyard and look/listen for fighting. Your will find Dogmeat fighting a Raider. Once the Raider is dead you can talk to Dogmeat and ask him to join you.

The Replicated Man Quest: Get Both Rewards

When you discover the identification of the android and are deciding to turn him in or warn him, go to the android first. Convince him to go to Zimmer on his own and he will reward you. After that, go to Zimmer in the science lab. Tell him about the android’s identity. He will also reward you. Note: You will still get bad karma

Cheats

Currently we have no cheats or codes for Fallout 3 yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Unlockables

Achievments/Unlockables

Vault 101 Citizenship Award (10) Got the Pip-Boy 3000The G.O.A.T. Whisperer (10) Took the G.O.A.T.Escape! (20) Complete "Escape!"Following in His Footsteps (20) Complete "Following in His Footsteps"Galaxy News Radio (20) Complete "Galaxy News Radio"Scientific Pursuits (20) Complete "Scientific Pursuits"Tranquility Lane (20) Complete "Tranquility Lane"The Waters of Life (20) Complete "The Waters of Life"Picking up the Trail (20) Complete "Picking up the Trail"Rescue from Paradise (20) Complete "Rescue from Paradise"Finding the Garden of Eden (20) Complete "Finding the Garden of Eden"The American Dream (20) Complete "The American Dream"Take it Back! (40) Complete "Take it Back!"Big Trouble in Big Town (20) Complete "Big Trouble in Big Town"The Superhuman Gambit (20) Complete "The Superhuman Gambit"The Wasteland Survival Guide (20) Complete "The Wasteland Survival Guide"Those! (20) Complete "Those!"The Nuka-Cola Challenge (20) Complete "The Nuka-Cola Challenge"Head of State (20) Complete "Head of State"The Replicated Man (20) Complete "The Replicated Man"Blood Ties (20) Complete "Blood Ties"Oasis (20) Complete "Oasis"The Power of the Atom (20) Complete "The Power of the Atom"Tenpenny Tower (20) Complete "Tenpenny Tower"Strictly Business (20) Complete "Strictly Business"You Gotta Shoot 'Em in the Head (20) Complete "You Gotta Shoot 'Em in the Head"Stealing Independence (20) Complete "Stealing Independence"Trouble on the Homefront (20) Complete "Trouble on the Homefront"Agatha's Song (20) Complete "Agatha's Song"Reilly's Rangers (20) Complete "Reilly's Rangers"Reaver (10) Reach Level 8 with Bad KarmaMercenary (10) Reach Level 8 with Neutral KarmaProtector (10) Reach Level 8 with Good KarmaHarbinger of War (20) Reach Level 14 with Bad KarmaPinnacle of Survival (20) Reach Level 14 with Neutral KarmaAmbassador of Peace (20) Reach Level 14 with Good KarmaScourge of Humanity (30) Reach Level 20 with Bad KarmaParadigm of Humanity (30) Reach Level 20 with Neutral KarmaLast, Best Hope of Humanity (30) Reach Level 20 with Good KarmaWeaponsmith (30) Made one of every custom weaponDoesn't Play Well with Others (20) Kill 300 peopleSlayer of Beasts (20) Kill 300 creaturesSilver-Tongued Devil (20) Won 50 Speech ChallengesData Miner (20) Hack 50 terminalsKeys are for Cowards (20) Pick 50 locksOne-Man Scouting Party (20) Discover 100 locationsPsychotic Prankster (10) Place a grenade or mine while pickpocketingThe Bigger They Are� (20) Kill all the Super Mutant BehemothsYes, I Play with Dolls (10) Collect 10 Vault-Tec BobbleheadsVault-Tec C.E.O. (30) Collect 20 Vault-Tec Bobbleheads

Easter eggs

Currently we have no easter eggs for Fallout 3 yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Glitches

Unlimited Smg Ultra Glitch

In order to to do this glitch you have to meet with Sydney and help her get the decloration of independence. Once you do make sure she gets out alive and back to abraham, in rivit city. After that she will be in underworld in the ninth circle bar. NOTE: to get sydneys gun you have to have a holo tape explaining why she was abandoned and what hapened to her father. If you have the tape go speak to sydney and talk about her past then talk about her father. A speak choice appears that says you have a holo tape from her father. She recognizes the voice and give you her ultra smg with ammo. You can repeat as much as your little heart desires. Enjoy :).

Elder Lyons Glitch

This is for the first fallout 3, I don’t know if it works for the expansion packs, but you have to start the ‘Take it Back’ end quest, then when Elder Lyons is on the railing next to the big holder thing that held the robot, shoot him in the head and make sure he falls off the railing. (the other people shouldn’t shoot at you, they only attack you if you attack them) it will say he’s unconscious, and jump down after him, when he wakes up he will glitch out and shoot back up to the railing, it’s funny to do over and over again. :).

Guides

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Currently no guide available.

Achievements

Currently we have no achievements or trophies for Fallout 3 yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.