#I’ll see if I can find a guide online I can share a link for | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kyra45 · 1 year ago

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Keys guide to scam spotting (v2)

Hi! I’m Key (Or Jess depending on which blog you know me from) and I’ll be telling you some better information and detail on how to spot a scam account be it a pet scam or a donation scam. All information is based on my own experiences and I’ll try to keep this post accessible so the only big text is the title. This information should help in understanding how these scams work and how to spot them without having to do too much work. As always, if you appreciate what I do and want to show it, sharing these info posts helps other users see it and learn about blogs that might send them asks.

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What is a donation scam? - A donation scam is when someone is being deceptive to get money by claiming they need mutual aid or support. For example, they are using the story from someone else’s fundraising post in order to get donations and won’t tell anyone their lying. This is called a donation scam. While the story may be legitimate, it is a story stolen off someone else and means the real person isn’t getting the support they asked for because someone else is using it. These stories are often stolen off Facebook/GoFundMe or even Instagram and could come from a private account or group so searching wouldn’t come up with a source. The images may also be stolen from somewhere else too.

How do you spot a donation scam? - Donation scams are usually easily spotted if you take a closer look at the information being given. Stolen stories will often have certain parts removed and replaced with the information the scammer added themselves. Sometimes the post may be composed of two different parts and won’t sound right if you pay close attention. For example, part of the story sounds fine but then the second part of the story seems out of place and doesn’t match up with the beginning. Another thing to check is how old the account is and if you have timestamps on you can see if an older post is backdated. You can also check to see if the account has tagged certain blogs in their post though this isn’t always a sign of a scam.

What is post backdating? - Post backdating is changing the dates of a reblogged post to look older then it really is. While this can be used with good intentions, scammers often use this to trick people into thinking their account is years old or even a few months old. The one way to find this is by turning on timestamps in dashboard settings and checking ‘other notes’ in reblogs. This is the only way to see the true date something was shared. Accounts who backdate posts will often claim someone told them to do it or they’ll say they didn’t know it was bad. However, you can not accidentally backdate a post.

Did the account contact you first? - A common occurrence is that you will get scam asks if you share a popular or trending post. Usually these accounts send asks to anyone they find without care of who it is and might lie as well if you ask them how they found you. In general, a brand new account shouldn’t easily find you unless they were watching the notes of popular posts. Occasionally these new accounts will even send asks to certain accounts they shouldn’t know about unless they have seen the account before. If your DMs are closed, the ask may ask you to message them because it’s urgent but all they will do is ask for money or ask you to loan them some money.

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What is a pet donation scam? - A pet donation scam is where someone has went and looked around for vet fundraisers online and then took it for themselves by saving the images and story while erasing any links that would lead to the real pet getting support. They will then repost it to tumblr and say it’s actually their pet needing urgent care with the post title being very large and in red text for a sense of urgency. Sometimes they’ll say they can’t use GoFundMe because it has a fee or something else. This is a scam because they are not the owner of the pet and have stolen everything meaning no funds sent will be towards the actual pets care.

How do you spot a pet donation scam? - A common way of a pet donation scam is by how old the pinned post is and how many posts are reblogged on the account. Usually there is only a few posts shared and always shared around the same time and then no more. These posts all come from a trending topic, a fandom, or are popular posts. Another thing is checking the bio in Google search and seeing if it’s been took from someone else as the scammer never makes their own bio. Reverse image search their pfp to see who it really belongs to in case they stole it. Another important thing is to check their link and see if it matches up with the vet bill. Since most pictures are stolen off a private group, reverse image search won’t find them. The name they may have is likely not their real name and is stolen.

Did the account send you an ask? - Regardless of what the ask says, it usually requests you to answer it privately or message them so they can tell you thanks. These asks may have several emojis in them as well but their always just copy/pasted and sent to multiple users all at once on a daily basis. The private answer is so the ask won’t show up if someone is looking it up. If their post is public, there shouldn’t be a reason to need a private response to an ask you have sent to many people unless you are trying to hide it. Messaging these accounts is useless because they’ll lie to you when you ask them questions back or just ignore you.

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What is a fake check scam? - A fake check scam is when a generally blank account with no pfp will message you after you used certain tags and ask you if you still need help. Even if you have links to send support, these accounts will ignore that in order to ask for your personal information such as phone number or banking details. They will then offer to send you a check. This is a fake check and cashing it won’t be scamming the scammer. You will lose money instead and the scammer will already move on to someone else. Never give them your private information.

Are there any other scam types? - When you tag posts, you’ll often get messages from accounts claiming they can help you get more attention on your campaign but you have to pay them money or go off-site to contact them. These are fake support accounts and they always use stock images while pretending to be officially affiliated and act like their Digital Marketing title means their not trying to scam you. They get defensive when called out and may start insulting you when they figure out you are already aware they aren’t legitimate.

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What is a funeral donation scam? - A funeral donation scam is when an account posts saying someone has passed away but the images they used are actually took from someone else and may be photoshopped. Bills may be edited to suit their story and names may be changed to someone else’s. This isn’t a real common scam! But it’s happened a lot lately but the basics are the account will steal someone’s pictures and pass them off as theirs and when caught will say they were forced to or know it’s wrong but did it anyway.

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In closing, this is information regarding common scam types you’ll find on tumblr. It’s always suggested to pay close attention to asks you get it they fit the criteria of being sent from a scammer. Answer the asks publicly and call out the blog. The scammer may block you as a result, but it’ll help your ask be seen it someone has looked it up. I suggest never spamming asks to share your pinned aid post because unfortunately scammers do this and you shouldn’t ignore people saying to please stop spamming. Always check to see if someone is comfortable getting these kinds of asks too because it won’t look too good if you have sent them an ask when they say please don’t.

As always, not everyone asking for support is a scammer! Legitimate people are out there. It’s just unfortunate scammers have made it harder for them to get help. You can always do your own research and compare it to what others have given and come to your own conclusion.

#scam #donation scam #pet donation scam #how to spot a scam blog #psa #important information #long post #longpost #pet scam

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foxyyaoguai · 1 year ago

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The antis have been all over my posts in the last few days, so I wanted to share my experiences and write a guide on how to deal with them.

First off: Our ships and character preferences are valid, no matter how hard some people try to demonize them. We are part of fandom and allowed to post about the things we enjoy, just like everyone else. Our fanfics, fanart, video edits, photo edits, etc. are all works of love and they deserve to exist and be explored by others.

✨ Strategies for dealing with antis ✨

Don’t engage. I have checked the bios of all the antis that left comments under my posts, and the majority of them are minors. You don’t want to talk to minors in fandom spaces!! And a conversation based on logic or reason won’t be possible either.

Delete their comments. Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube allow you to delete comments, DO IT!! You created something with love and hateful comments have no place underneath it. Even if the comment just makes you uncomfortable and isn’t outright hateful, it is perfectly reasonable to delete it for your own sanity.

Block generously. Not only the people who target you specifically but also anyone who engages in character- or ship-bashing. People who do that for one ship will do it for other ships too and it’s extremely bad fandom etiquette. When you see a character or ship-bashing post, block everyone who liked it and then the poster.

Report people for harassment. The rules vary by site, but especially threats of violence should be reported. Also, if someone follows you to another social media site after you’ve blocked them, that is called block evading and you should report that too.

When you see other people getting hateful comments underneath their posts, leave a nice comment to offset some of the negativity. Your being supportive can make the difference between this person never posting again and them being motivated to keep going. People are always welcome to send me links to a post that is getting targeted by antis and I’ll like it and leave a nice comment. 🥰

Don’t let the bad comments outshine the positive ones! Every time my post gets enough traction for antis to find it, it also gets lots of lovely reactions. Many people have told me that my content and recommendations made them ship my OTP, and that is the single thing that makes me happier than anything else. Take a screenshot and look at these kinds of comments when you feel down. This is the real reason you should keep posting.

Most hate comments are exceptionally uncreative. It helps to laugh about it, preferably with a friend. ✨ Remember, you used your energy to create something and you should be proud of it!

When you see a creator you like, but they also display obnoxious behavior towards people who like other ships, characters, or dynamics, at the very least don’t give them a platform by sharing their posts.

Stay safe. Don’t post personal information online.

It’s completely valid to step away from social media for some time. Private your accounts, turn off notifications, do a canon reread, read some fanfics in peace. Whatever it takes to remind you why you love the things you love.

Bonus Tip: Watch videos of cute animals to destress. Bunnies nose-booping each other can (and will) cure anti-induced anxiety. :)

✨ Platforms sorted by least to most toxic and my advice for using them ✨

1. Discord

Discord is great because you can join servers specifically for your favorite characters and ships. If a server doesn’t already exist, consider setting one up! Pro tip: only invite people that have positively interacted with you in the past. A small server consisting of nice people is a lot more fun than a large server consisting of members that can’t get along or are only marginally interested in the topic.

Fandom Discord servers have clear guidelines on what you can post. As long as you follow the rules, people have no grounds for calling you out. In my experience, moderators are quick to respond to harassment.

When you join a server and you see they heavily restrict certain types of content, it is a red flag. Proceed with caution, even if you plan to only talk about “safe” characters and ships.

2. Tumblr

I have rarely gotten hateful comments on Tumblr, and the few times I did they were easy to delete.

A lot of the older fandom generations use Tumblr and they are more mature and accepting of all kinds of content.

3. Twitter

Twitter makes it easy to curate your own fandom experience. You can mute words you don’t like to see on your timeline, mute and block users, and most people have their ship preferences in their bio.

4. Instagram

My Instagram posts about Jadecest get a lot of positive interaction, even more than on Twitter. There are unpleasant comments once in a while, but they are easy to delete.

Blocking a user will delete all their comments from your posts.

5. YouTube

People who don’t like your ship will downvote your videos and downvotes lead to the algorithm not recommending your videos.

I have gotten a few negative comments, but they are easy to delete.

6. Reddit

When you post in a fandom subreddit, everyone will see the post, independent of their ship preferences.

There are a lot of minors on Reddit.

You can’t delete comments.

Most fandom subreddits are poorly moderated.

7. TikTok

I have gotten the most hate comments on TikTok. They can be filtered or deleted, but antis interacting with your video by leaving hate comments will lead to the algorithm recommending your content to even more antis. It can get very ugly.

If you post on TikTok consider turning off comments, stitches, and video replies. You can also mark your content as 18+, so it won’t get recommended to minors. (Again, antis tend to be underage.)

Platforms are more toxic the more they show your content to people outside your bubble. Discord, Tumblr, and Twitter keep your content relatively well contained to your circle of friends. Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram heavily promote your content outside your bubble, which is good, because more people are going to see it, but also bad, because it reaches more antis.

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Antis are loud and obnoxious, but it’s important to remember that they are a minority. Ship and let ship still exists, especially among the people who have been in fandom spaces for more than just a few years. Don’t be afraid to post your content and express your love for your favorite characters and ships! I, for one, would love to see your creations, and many other people would love to see them too.

What are your experiences and strategies for dealing with antis?

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kate-bot · 7 months ago

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OKAY SO I've gotten two asks about my Noisette cosplay AND THANK YOU SM FOR THE KIND WORDS !!!!!!!! It was sm fun to make this cos, so I will gladly explain everything I did in hopes that it might help someone else!! also both anons please share your cosplays with me when theyre done i would love to see them....

I've tried to link everything where I can, where I got stuff etc... I only rarely cosplay (although I am thinking of going as the noise in May Comiccon) and this was my biggest ever project so!! It's very trial-and-error! But without further ado

KATES EXTENSIVE(ish) GUIDE TO COSPLAYING NOISETTE FROM THE HIT GAME PIZZA TOWER!!!!!!! (warning its kinda long)

THE HAT

Okay i’m gonna be real my mum helped me so much she basically did all the sewing for me. Sewing is the fucking bane of my existence I hate doing it so much so we planned it out together and she basically executed it. Props to her for that she’s so real… She also wrote down what she did!! So i’ll just paste and colour that in for you to read!!

“The black material (seen in the above image) was originally a beanie hat that was picked apart to use as a template…

This was game changing basically. We had experimented with making the hat from scratch but it was far too difficult and we were both too stupid so we just unstitched a pre-existing hat and stole the template. The hat we cut up was one we had lying around for years so i cannot tell you where to get one from, but any beanie that is stitched together will work i guess! So I would recommend finding a hat that fits you snugly and doing the same thing!

…and the wool fabric that was utilised gave the finished product was stiff enough to be structurally sound.

I just got this from my local fabric shop, I would recommend wool over something like felt because it’s super sturdy and I was pulling on my mask a LOT.

Once sewn together, I attached a stiff card facemask to the front to help provide some structure, and to locate where the eye holes should be cut.

I think this picture shows it pretty well, my mum was able to curve the shape of the fabric to fit a pre-existing mask- we got ours from Hobbycraft, just one of those stringed white template masks yknow. We cut off the string, made the eyeholes a little bigger and just stuck it straight on!! I should mention this was pretty much all done with a sewing machine as well!

After that, we made two ears from a paper pattern, stuffed them and put some wire inside to allow them to be positioned, before sewing them onto this headband, which was then sewn into the hat. The bottom of each ear was also stitched to the crown to give it some additional stability and to secure the headband correctly in position (having fitted it on the wearer).

Yeah it was actually less of a mask and more of a headband!! That was what gave it most of the support and meant the ears would stay up, I’m not sure how it would work without it!! The ears were the only part that I could actually help with LMAO i just freehanded a little template, stuffed it, and then put in some modelling wire to make them able to be posed :)

Then it was a lot of hand sewing, and glueing the eyeholes to the mask to create a cohesive look.

AND YEAH that’s pretty much all it was! I also attached some little felt eyelashes to add to it as well. Honestly I could never come up with a step-by-step guide for the process because it was such a trial and error thing (i’d made two test-hats before we even came up with the method) but it was so fun!!

I would 100% recommend if you want the ears to stay UP to stuff them AS MUCH AS U CAN and/or put wire in them!! :) I also made some cute little bows to clip into my wig in the same fabric to make it more cohesive!! I also put a bow (and a bunny tail heheh) on the back of the dress too!!

THE DRESS

Super simple! I just found one online (okay for some reason the link has been taken off of the website, but just look up "overall dress" on google shopping and you will 100% find something super cute)- I made sure to buy the dress first, and then take it to the fabric shop to try and colourmatch the mask fabric as best as I could. Then it was just buying some big ol buttons off eBay and sewing them on!! (I could actually do that bit by myself, I'm bad at sewing but im not THAT bad)

EVERYTHING ELSE

Cute patterned knee-high socks cuz shes cute like that. Leg warmers, I think I got them both off of Amazon... Converse I got from Depop and I had wanted to buy a pair anyway so I was super stoked to get them cheap!! I chose converse over a pair of high-heels or Mary Janes just for comfort reasons, I was walking around loads at the con so... Everything else apart from the shirt was from Amazon or just. Somewhere online(I have no idea where to get fancy white gloves LOL) and the shirt was from Depop as well! I liked how frilly it was, re: Noisette is cute like that!!

oh yeah and the wig. I hate wigs it was awful. I have no idea how to style them. underneath the hat was the most awful bowl cut ever I just. It wasn't my best moment. Dont ask me about wigs please .

Also I should mention I got this bag for the cosplay (which I now use all the time cuz its so cute) because i needed space to store shit and I wanted something on-brand with her cafe... this isnt the exact link I used but I just got it off of ebay :P

PROPS

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of WIP pictures of my props but they were pretty simple to make!! The coffee cup was literally just spraypainting over a reusable coffee cup and using POSCA pen to draw on the front! Fun fact the cup says "To Peppino" because originally my boyfriend was gonna go with me as Peppino before the Cruetly Squad brainrot got to him so. YEA

And the tip jar was also pretty simple, I just painted on the lid a plastic jar (can't be glass, not allowed at ComicCon) and cut out a bit of vinyl to work as the sign. The cobweb was just hot-glued 3D printer filament, and the spider was made with foam modelling clay (literally the best thing ever if you're making small models like that) and i stuck him to the lid of the jar with Kandi string so he'd bounce around :]

AND I THINK THATS IT!! i may as well post a pic of the full cosplay since I dont think many people would have made it this far.... But I think it turned out pretty cool!! I got recognised a few times as well which was amazing!! (cropped out my bf cuz idk if he wants his face on tumblr gfhhfg)

SO YEAH!!!! if anyone has any questions please let me know.. but GOOD LUCK IN UR COSPLAY MAKING FRIENDS!!!! :D

#ask #pizza tower #noisette pizza tower #noisette cosplay #pizza tower cosplay #Yes this is very longwinded! But I really wanted to include all the details!!!#also second anon im so sorry it took me so long to reply i completely blanked on its existence #I HOPE THIS IS HELPFUL TO SOMEONE... ANYONE #re:noise cosplay in may? i'd love to try out making a mask (like out of paper-mache of his whole face) rather than a fabric one #might be fun? not sure #also face reveal ig i hate How i look in the cos cuz i rely so much on my hair to look half decent but.#IN THE NAME OF HELPING SOMEONE... ough #anyway ill stop rambling #thank u for the asks!!!!!

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elinorasims · 3 months ago

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Sul Sul!

| hi my loves,

i’m elinora, or el. i’ve been playing the sims for 25 years (what), and this is the first time I’ve ever joined the online community. *deep breath* HI!

the sims is a passion, as we all know, and it can be a labour of love (and hate lol). i’m an audhder, and although the sims has been a special interest since i was around 6 years old (yikes), the dopamine hit sure runs dry sometimes! i recently took a year off playing with some yucky burnout - joining tumblr is a big part of renewing my love for ts4.

this simblr is for sharing the journey of my ultimate passion project: creating a custom save from a fully empty world.

the plan is to kinda post the journey as it unfolds and hopefully end up with a fully populated custom save file (featuring my own creations, alongside builds from my favourite creators) that you can download if you like when i've completed it! Warming: this might take actual years lol.

i am sUper excited to share my progress with you guys! i’ve never shared any of my Sims life publicly before but i’ve seen so much love and connection in this awesome community - i honestly can’t wait to get to know you all more here on tumblr.

feel free to check out my pinterest board for this project, too! you can also find me on the gallery @eliwils. i also run a wordpress blog for my non-sims art and poetry.. if you’re into that kinda thing check it out here :3 it's.. sporadic at best rn lol.

| dag dag fn. <3

WCIFT?

You’ll find pages for my resources (mods, defaults, etc.) and downloadable tray files for all my personal builds and households here.

My builds (and lots by other Simmers on the gallery) will not contain CC. Despite my experience, I am still learning to build more creatively. I’ll be using real world architecture as inspo and IRL floorplans as a guide to give a sense of realism and 'liveability' aha. Hopefully during the course of this project my build quality and aesthetic will continue to improve!

My Sims, however, will showcase my favourite CC and the creators I adore. I aim to include lookbooks for each Sim in a household and links to download individual CC items as well as feature my favourite/most used creators.

If you see something you love and I haven't mentioned it - please shoot me a message!

ETC..

I try to create Sims with varied personalities, styles, and individual stories relevant to their home world/neighbourhood! Hopefully this means the population will be vibrant and diverse, with a little whimsy and excitement thrown in for gameplay fun.

I mostly use maxis match CC, but there are some alpha textures in my game too, particularly for hair. I try to keep styles fairly consistent so the blend of MM and alpha isn’t jarring - but I am trying to transition more towards MM only CC.

I’m aiming to keep to the 'original’ intended themes for each world as much as possible, but making them more stylised, detailed, and interesting, with some cross-pack elements included to update the worlds slightly and create a more cohesive overall .. universe?

There will probably be quite a long list of CC required for the households in this save once it’s complete. I get that it might be a bit of a pain to get everything I've recommended.. but this is a save I actually intend to play with, and it’s my personal love letter to the game I grew up with.

I’ve always been a huge fan of the creator community. They are incredible, generous and talented humans, and I’ve been an avid CC shopper since The Sims 2. I’d like to show my support for creators I adore in a CC Finds tag. I’ll also post about build/buy items there from time to time even though I'm not using them in this save specifically.

#ts4 #custom save #the sims community #the sims 4 #simblr #intro post

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payoutgigs · 3 months ago

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🌟 How I Made $1,000 in Affiliate Marketing (and How You Can Too!) 🌟

Hey Tumblr fam! 💻✨

I’m so excited to share a story that’s close to my heart—how I made my first $1,000 through affiliate marketing! And yes, it’s 100% real. I know you’ve seen countless “make money online” posts, but this one is different because it worked for me, and I have the receipts to prove it! 📸

🚀 The Start of My Journey

Let’s rewind to a few months ago—I was just like you, scrolling through the internet, skeptical of all those “make money online” promises. But then I stumbled upon a course that claimed to teach affiliate marketing in a way that anyone could understand, even if you had zero experience (yep, that was me). I thought, “Why not give it a shot?”

📚 The Course That Changed Everything

The course wasn’t just fluff—it was packed with actionable tips, step-by-step guides, and real-world examples. The instructor broke down everything in such an easy-to-understand way that even someone as clueless as I was could grasp the concepts. And guess what? I wasn’t the only one who succeeded—tons of other students were sharing their wins in the course’s community group! 🏆

💸 My First $1,000: How It Happened

Now, here’s where it gets juicy. After completing the course, I started implementing the strategies—choosing the right niche, selecting high-converting products, and crafting content that resonated with my audience. Within a month, I started seeing commissions trickle in. And then…BOOM! 💥 I woke up one morning to find that I had made $1,000! Seeing those four figures in my account was a feeling I’ll never forget. 🎉

🔍 The Secret Sauce: What Worked for Me

Picking the Right Niche: I chose a niche I was passionate about, which made creating content so much easier and authentic.

Choosing High-Ticket Products: I focused on promoting high-ticket items that offered generous commissions.

Leveraging Social Media: I used platforms like TikTok and Instagram to drive traffic to my affiliate links. Social media is GOLD if you know how to use it!

Consistency is Key: I stayed consistent, posting content regularly and engaging with my audience. The more I put in, the more I got out.

📸 Testimonials & Proof

Still not convinced? I’ve got testimonials from others who took the course and saw similar results. And just to show you I’m not making this up, here are some screenshots of my earnings! 💰 (Check out the images below!)

Another Person making money from this course,

Just today this is Joseph balance,

🌱 How You Can Do It Too

If you’re ready to take control of your financial future, I can’t recommend this course enough. It’s the real deal. You don’t need any prior experience—just the willingness to learn and put in the work.

Interested? DM me for the course link or check out the link in my bio to get started. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

🎉 Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing has changed my life, and I’m just getting started. If I can do it, you can too. Let’s make those money moves together! 💵✨

Happy earning, and here’s to your success! 🍀

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moneyallthetime · 8 months ago

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What Affiliate Marketing Make Money Online

affiliate marketing is where it's at for making that coin online! It's like the ultimate link between sellers and buyers, and you, my friend, are the magic maker in between. When you promote products and services for a brand and make those sales happen, you get a piece of the pie - cha-ching! Affiliate marketing is all about connections. Picture this: you, the influencer, linking your peeps to awesome stuff on your blog. They click, they shop, and you cash in. It's a win-win-win situation for the brand, you, and your audience. Now, sis, let's talk about how you can kickstart your own affiliate marketing gig. I'll walk you through setting it all up, finding your niche, and creating killer content that's gonna make you shine. Let's get that success rolling, 💪🏾✨ Setting up for Success: The Basics of Starting an Affiliate Marketing Business Success in affiliate marketing doesn't just happen magically. It's all about laying a solid groundwork. Let me walk you through the key steps to set up a strong foundation for your affiliate marketing business. First things first, finding the right niche is super important. Your niche choice should blend what's in demand with what you love or know best. Balancing your passion with what customers are looking for is key to building an engaged audience. Then comes picking the best affiliate programs and products to promote. Go for programs with good commission rates, trustworthiness, and relevance to your niche. This can really boost your chances of turning leads into sales. Crafting a content strategy is all about matching user needs with what you offer. If your content addresses your audience's problems, you're on the right path. Kick off with keyword research to see what your audience is after. Lastly, having a user-friendly platform, like a website or blog, where your audience can engage with your content is a must. A smooth experience can keep visitors around and possibly turn them into buyers. A well-optimized site is a game-changer in affiliate marketing success. Leveraging Content to Drive Affiliate Sales Creating content is the core of a successful affiliate marketing strategy, honey. My goal ain't just selling; it's about providing content that answers questions, solves problems, and eventually leads to my affiliate products as real solutions. Having top-notch content ain't luck, sis. It's about understanding search engine optimization (SEO) and how to use it to reach the right audience. I focus on keyword research to match what potential customers are looking for and tailor my content to fit their needs. To find the sweet spot, I blend promotional info with educational insights. This keeps my readers informed and, most importantly, coming back for more. Regular updates keep the content fresh and ensure it stays high in search rankings. Social media and email marketing help me expand the reach of my content. By sharing articles, reviews, and special deals on different platforms, I connect with a bigger audience. Email lists are a gem for driving dedicated traffic, building relationships, and directly promoting offers to interested subscribers. Next up, I'll dive into advanced affiliate marketing strategies that can skyrocket your earnings, girl. We're talking about analyzing what works, focusing on successful tactics, and adjusting what ain't cutting it—all to maximize your coin. Maximizing Earnings: Advanced Affiliate Marketing Strategies In the realm of affiliate marketing, those who stay ahead of the curve with innovative strategies often see the most success. I've tested a multitude of tactics and can guide you through some advanced strategies to enhance your affiliate marketing earnings. Understanding the different affiliate marketing models is crucial. Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Pay-Per-Lead (PPL), and Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) are three common types you might encounter. Each type requires a tailored approach; for example, PPC focuses on driving clicks, while PPS hinges on conversions. Knowing which model aligns with your niche and content can significantly affect your income. Analytics are your best friend. Tools like Google Analytics provide insights into your audience's behavior, allowing you to optimize your campaigns for better engagement and conversion rates. Make sure you're analyzing the right metrics to gauge the success of your efforts. Moreover, don't overlook the power of A/B testing. Whether you're tweaking a call-to-action button, changing up a product description, or testing different content formats, small changes can lead to notable differences in your earnings. Keep what works, and don't be afraid to discard what doesn't. Networking with other affiliates at conferences or online communities can lead to sharing valuable insights and strategies. Building relationships within these communities can also open doors to new opportunities and partnerships. Stay tuned for the next section, where I'll talk about the importance of adhering to ethical standards and compliance regulations in affiliate marketing, two aspects that could make or break your success. Cementing Trust: Ethical Affiliate Marketing for Sustained Success In the world of affiliate marketing, let me tell you, integrity is not just about doing the right thing, it's a must for your business to thrive. By sticking to ethical practices and following FTC guidelines, you're not just safeguarding your reputation, you're protecting your business. Your credibility is your golden ticket in this game. Now, let's talk about the traps folks fall into in affiliate marketing. It's usually when they're not upfront or just chasing a quick buck. Steer clear of those shady shortcuts that can wreck your relationship with your audience and search engines. Remember, if you mislead your peeps, you'll lose their trust and, in the end, your affiliate cash. Always be upfront about your affiliate connections, loud and clear. It's not just about respecting your audience, it's the law. This way, your content won't be mistaken for unbiased advice, and you'll keep that trust you've worked hard to earn. And here's the real deal with ethical affiliate marketing - focus on bringing real value to your audience. Recommend stuff you truly stand behind, stuff you know is top-notch. It's about putting your audience first, not just chasing those commissions. When you play it straight in affiliate marketing, you'll build a loyal tribe that values your input and trusts your recommendations. That means a steady stream of affiliate earnings and the peace of mind that comes with knowing you've built your success on truth and honor. If you would like to start making money from affiliate marketing check out my recommended side hustles. Read the full article

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stampwithtami · 10 months ago

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Bee Mine Card [Diagonal Pocket Fold Series #3]

BEE MINE DOUBLE POCKET CARD With Valentine's Day just around the corner, what better way to express your love than with a handmade card? Today, I'm thrilled to share with you an adorable card-making tutorial featuring the charming stamped bees from the Stampin' Up! Bee Mine Valentine Stamp Set and Bee Builder punch. Bee-themed Delight: Create a buzz with this Bee Diagonal Double Pocket Tag Fold Card. It features delightful stamped bees and honeycomb patterns from the coordinating Bee Mine Designer series paper, setting the perfect tone for Valentine's Day. Versatile Design: While perfect for Valentine's Day, this card design is incredibly versatile and can be adapted for various occasions throughout the year. Whether it's a birthday, anniversary, or a simple thank you, the charming bee-themed elements and interactive design make it a delightful choice for any heartfelt message. So, feel free to customize this card to suit any occasion and spread joy to your loved ones all year round! Interactive Design: Pull up one of the two tags on this card to reveal a special message tucked inside. Not only does this add a fun interactive element to the card, but the tags themselves can also be repurposed as bookmarks or gift tags after gifting the card. Bee Mine Cascading Pleats Card: In the photo above, you'll see another creative card tutorial using the same Bee Mine Collection – the Cascading Pleats fun fold card. It's a testament to the versatility of these Stampin' Up! products and the endless possibilities they offer for crafting. Click here for the Cascading Pleats Tutorial Detailed Instructions: For those eager to recreate this adorable Bee Diagonal Double Pocket Tag Fold Card, fear not! Detailed step-by-step instructions are available in a convenient downloadable PDF. This includes precise measurements, a helpful template, and a list of all the supplies used in this project. Video Tutorial: Prefer a visual guide? Look no further! I've also prepared a video tutorial from my recent Diagonal Double Pocket Tag Fold Card Class. It walks you through every step of the fold, ensuring that even beginners can follow along effortlessly. Series Continuation: This bumble bee-themed card marks the third installment in my ongoing Diagonal Double Pocket Tag Fold Cards series. Be sure to check out the tutorials for more creative card folds in this series, which you can find below in the SERIES section. Stay Tuned: Excited to dive into more crafting adventures? Stay tuned for upcoming tutorials and projects, where I'll continue to explore new techniques, designs, and inspirations to fuel your creativity. Happy crafting! INSTRUCTIONS, TEMPLATE & VIDEO INSTRUCTIONS PDF ⬇ The instructions include measurements and step by step directions to create this card. There is also a clickable supply list. DOWNLOAD PDF VIDEO ⬇ DIAGONAL DOUBLE POCKET TAG CARD VIDEO UPRIGHT Z FOLD VIDEO CLASS SUPPLIES I USED TO CREATE THIS CARD ⬇ Click the thumbnail links to view and purchase in my Online Store. MORE TUTORIALS IN MY DIAGONAL DOUBLE POCKET SERIES Click the thumbnails below for more free tutorials in my series. STAMPIN' UP! CATALOGS CURRENT SPECIALS PHOTOS With Valentine's Day just around the corner, what better way to express your love than with a handmade card? Love these charming stamped bees from the Stampin' Up! Bee Mine Valentine Stamp Set and Bee Builder punch. Pull up one of the two tags on this card to reveal a special message tucked inside. I used the coordinating Bee Mine Designer series paper to create the honeycomb cardbase. I created this card base design in the traditional Diagonal Double Pocket style with just the Bee Mine Designer Series Paper. Special messages on the tags for added delight. Here's a view of the tags and card base individually. I used the Stampin' Up! Something Fancy Dies for the tags and the rectangle word labels. These can be used as bookmarks or tags after you've gifted the card. The Stampin' Up! Bee Mine Valentine Bundle features the stamp set and Bee Builder punch. Want to save these ideas for later? Pin them to your favorite Pinterest board. Have you tried these designs? I love to see your creations! Be sure to share them on #shareyourcrafts post every Saturday on my Facebook Page Read the full article

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lakelandseo · 2 years ago

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How to Create an SEO Strategy [Plus Free Tools & Templates]

Starting as the SEO Director role at Moz has been a bit daunting. As a search engine marketer, how can I add value to an organization that has been a thought leader in the search marketing space and built industry-defining SEO tools for over a decade?

When taking on a new role or client — from local businesses to niche online retailers to enterprise-level Fortune 500 companies — the first thing I do is put together a new SEO strategy and organic search measurement plan. I lead this process with data, which highlights opportunities for improvement and instantiates goals to rally your organization around common objectives. Even with Moz being the team of data-driven SEO rockstars it is, strategy is still where I began my new role, And today, I’ll share the process.

What is an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy aims to improve a website’s visibility in search engines such as Google and Bing. An SEO action plan, on the other hand, typically involves a combination of on-page optimization, technical SEO fixes, content strategy, link building and SEO reporting.

A strong SEO strategy will:

Improve your website’s rankings for any existing keywords for which you are currently ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Increase the awareness and influence of SEO within your organization. Consider budget and resource challenges to get the most value and SEO improvements out of your team.

Prescribe some combination of SEO initiatives, potentially including:

Widening the scope of your ranking organic keywords through content marketing.

Fixing any technical website issues that could be negatively impacting page load times (ex. PageSpeed), search engine crawlability or user experience.

Increasing the number of backlinks from high quality domains to your site, through effective social amplification and digital PR strategies.

Imply or explicitly state priorities or beliefs that guide future action — especially what you will not do.

Whether you’re a website owner that is new to search engine optimization or a seasoned SEO taking on a new project or client, creating and following a clear SEO strategy is absolutely crucial for improving your site’s organic traffic and conversions.

10 steps towards a better SEO strategy

Like any other kind of strategy, to form an SEO strategy you need to understand the state of the game, set attainable goals, and plan to iterate. Below is a 10-step plan for finding those opportunities and insights to get you started.

1. Crawl your site to identify on-page and technical SEO issues

The best place to begin an SEO strategy is by initiating a website crawl to see if there are any issues that you need to remedy in order to maximize your SEO visibility.

There are many options for technical auditing tools that will emulate a search engine crawl of your website, and most SEOs have a favorite. Of course, here at Moz, we have our On-Demand Crawl. Moz’s tool will allow you to view all detected technical SEO issues on your site, and all of the impacted URLs. The data you will get from the On-Demand Crawl can be viewed within the UI of Moz, or exported into a CSV. This focuses on essentials to help kickstart your SEO strategy.

Initiating your site audit is a good place to start because it can take some time to complete. While your crawl is running, you can begin your competitive research.

2. Assess your competitors’ SEO strategies

This is crucial, and often overlooked, at least this early in the process.

Analyzing competitor SEO strategies will help you set realistic goals for your website. After completing this exercise, you’ll have a sense of your competitors’ most valuable keywords. These are some of the search terms you’ll want to compete for by optimizing your key site pages. This step can also be thought of as a “market analysis” task.

You’ll also want to leverage a research tool for competitive analysis. I recommend an SEO tool that offers a “gap analysis”’ functionality, Which will be the backbone of comprehensive SEO competitive research.

Within Moz Pro, the Keyword Gap feature will highlight prominent competitor keywords for which you have room to improve in the rankings. Keyword Gap will automatically sort the results to prioritize the keywords where your site has the highest traffic opportunity if you were to overtake your top-ranking competitor.

Once you’ve identified some keywords where the competition outranks you, investigate why that might be. If you were Google — or better yet, a searcher — which site would you prefer to see?

In addition to looking at the keywords that competitors are ranking well for where you have opportunity to improve, examine the types of content they are regularly producing. Do they have a blog? How much content are they publishing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? How are they showing their expertise?

When it comes time to align the necessary teams within your organization and rally them around your SEO goals, you’ll need to understand the competitive search landscape of your company. How much effort are your competitors putting into SEO? If they don’t appear to be optimizing their site for search, you’ll have an opportunity to pull ahead. If they have been actively involved in content creation and their core technical SEO is solid (you can even audit their sites to determine what they’re doing well), then you can use their strengths to guide your SEO roadmap.

3. Create SEO goals and align your teams

Despite the fact that there are professional SEOs who specialize in driving business goals via organic search optimization, SEO is a team effort. A good SEO strategy builds buy-in from web developers, content teams, and company leadership, as SEOs often straddle the intersections between teams. For example, you may need to collaborate with your editorial team to create a blog post that was ideated by data-driven research, and your web development team to create the page. Or, after you conduct your SEO audit, you may realize that you need the assistance of your developers to remedy several technical issues.

As mentioned in the section above, even if SEO is not a new endeavor at your company, I recommend thoroughly investigating competitors’ SEO strategies before attempting to get buy-in from other teams. If you can frame the need to optimize your site for organic search through the lens of deficiencies your site has against your competitors, you’ll be able to make a more powerful case to your leadership and cross-functional teams.

4. Create an effort vs. impact matrix [FREE TEMPLATE BELOW]

Now that you’ve completed the research steps of your SEO strategy, you’ve reached a good point to create an itemized list of all of the tasks you want to accomplish. These can include on-page or technical SEO fixes resulting from the audit you did at the beginning of the process, blog posts to write, existing site pages to optimize for search, and more.

My recommendation for outlining these steps is to create an effort vs. impact chart that organizes each item. Nobody knows your business better than you, so the effort required to complete each item will be highly personalized to your company. Sometimes finding the internal resources to write and publish a new piece of content can prove to be a larger endeavor than, say, fixing a redirect loop, or vice versa.

Whatever the dynamic of your business, an effort vs. impact matrix can help you organize your seo strategy into tactical jobs to be done. Here’s a link to a free template.

More often than not, running a crawl of your site using a tool like Moz Pro will highlight a ton of SEO issues you probably weren’t aware of, which can be overwhelming. Moz Pro can offer some guidance on working through these issues by flagging certain items as “critical”.

If you’re looking for a place to get started on prioritizing your SEO action items, I always recommend looking at your site’s meta titles first. Meta titles are one of the primary factors Google considers when deciding where to rank a page, with respect to how relevant it is to a given keyword. They’re also what users read when they’re deciding where to click on the SERP, and thus can have a significant impact on click-through rates. Moz Pro will find pages for you where meta titles are missing, or below Google’s recommended 60-character length.

If you’ve never optimized your meta titles, I recommend manually reviewing all of your core site pages to ensure that your titles are optimized for the keyword you want to target with each page. After you’ve done the keyword research and determined what your meta title should be on core pages, they’re typically relatively easy to update in your CMS or the backend of your website.

5. Build an SEO report or dashboard

After thinking through your priority list for optimizations, you’ll want to establish a baseline of current SEO performance and create a method to track your progress.

Moz’s Campaigns feature allows you to track a list of keywords for your site on an ongoing basis. Moz Pro will automatically build a dashboard for you that visualizes position improvements for your key organic search rankings. Google Analytics can also be integrated into this dashboard so that you can monitor your site traffic along with rankings and your site’s Domain Authority.

Setting up a Moz Pro Campaign will also automatically run a site crawl for your domain once a week so that you can track the number of outstanding technical SEO issues on your site as you work on fixing them.

6. Iterate through technical SEO fixes

The SEO process is a bit like building a house. There will be plenty of time to add window dressing and furniture, but first, you start with the foundation. Your website’s solid foundation is its technical SEO frame.

Using the SEO audit you completed in step 1 and your effort vs. impact matrix, begin identifying issues that are contributing to critical crawl issues (as identified by Moz’s Site Crawl tool, for example).

This is also a good point in the process to establish a baseline of your site’s PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. After running your domain through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, you’ll be presented with a list of opportunities to speed up your website. These can include tasks like image caching and JavaScript reduction.

PageSpeed Insights is an important tool to leverage because:

It’s free.

The recommendations on improving your site health and technical SEO foundation are coming directly from Google.

7. Optimize existing content for search engines

Now that you have your progress tracking infrastructure in place and your list of SEO opportunities to attack, it’s time to start optimizing your content. Use the effort vs. impact matrix to guide your priorities, beginning with low-effort/high-impact items such as meta title optimization.

After completing this work, I also recommend taking a closer look at all of your sites’ core pages. A tool such as Moz’s On-Page Grader will help provide even more detail on how well-optimized a page is for a given keyword. For example, AT&T is doing an above-average job at optimizing its wireless page for the “cell phone” keyword, but there are still optimizations that can be made:

8. Identify new content opportunities through topic research

The best way to close keyword gaps is by publishing targeted, SEO-driven content on your site. The list of keywords that you get from a tool like Moz Pro’s Keyword Gap can be used to ideate on topic ideas.

Hub-and Spoke content model

A good SEO strategy will often use a hub-and-spoke content model. This is the practice of creating “hub” pages that will rank for high-volume keywords and convert Google searches into customers through CTAs. These hub pages will be supported by “spoke” pages containing related content, generally living on a blog or resources section of your site.

For example, let’s say one you’re AT&T, and one of the keywords you want to improve rankings for is “cell phone”. Your first step is creating a URL on your site that targets the “cell phone” keyword. After this page is created, SEO focused, and conversion-optimized, you will want to create a series of supporting content pieces that link into your main ‘cell phone’ page.

Using a keyword research tool such as Moz Pro’s Keyword Suggestions feature can help you quickly identify topics related to your primary term. As opposed to guessing at topics that people might be interested in, dedicated SEO tools allow you to use data to power all of your decision making. For example, these are questions that Google searchers have related to “cell phone”.

9. Amplify your content on social media, and investigate backlink opportunities

Even in 2023, high quality backlinks are an important part of SEO. The number of backlinks a site is receiving from high authority pages is a major component of Moz’s Domain Authority score, which is the industry-standard KPI for measuring the overall ranking ability of a domain.

The best way to increase your Domain Authority is by creating high quality content that people want to share. In addition to creating the content and publishing it on your site, creatively promoting it on social channels such as TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or additional platforms where your customers (and prospective customers) spend their digital time will help drive brand awareness and can increase branded search volume.

There are also ways to engage in manual link building efforts that aim to gain links to your site from high-quality site publishers. This is an especially important exercise for newer domains with low Domain Authority scores.

10. Measure, optimize, and test

Your competitive landscape will evolve, and so will your company. Even within the scope of a year, an SEO strategy for 2023 may involve unexpected priorities in November that you didn’t account for in March.

But despite the constant state of change in the digital world, it’s important to continually track your high-value keywords using an SEO tool like Moz Pro, and to monitor the traffic growth of your content in platforms like Google Analytics. Over time, you’ll notice areas of topical strength and weakness for your site. You can continue to play into the strengths of your site and publish content related to your strongest topics, while simultaneously identifying keyword gap opportunities and improving areas of weakness.

Get started on your SEO strategy today

There are several free SEO tools on the market that can assist you in kickstarting your search engine optimization strategy. Moz even has free versions available of our own Keyword Explorer and Competitor Research, which can help you find opportunities for your site’s search engine visibility and help you set SEO goals.

Whether you’re an experienced SEO taking on a new client or a website owner approaching SEO for the first time, it��s crucial to create a roadmap of defined tasks and actionable goals. Having an action plan will help keep you focused on your goals, and prevent aimless work and incomplete projects. In search engine marketing, it pays to be methodical, yet adaptable.

0 notes

bfxenon · 2 years ago

Text

How to Create an SEO Strategy [Plus Free Tools & Templates]

What is an SEO strategy?

A strong SEO strategy will:

Improve your website’s rankings for any existing keywords for which you are currently ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Increase the awareness and influence of SEO within your organization. Consider budget and resource challenges to get the most value and SEO improvements out of your team.

Prescribe some combination of SEO initiatives, potentially including:

Widening the scope of your ranking organic keywords through content marketing.

Fixing any technical website issues that could be negatively impacting page load times (ex. PageSpeed), search engine crawlability or user experience.

Increasing the number of backlinks from high quality domains to your site, through effective social amplification and digital PR strategies.

Imply or explicitly state priorities or beliefs that guide future action — especially what you will not do.

10 steps towards a better SEO strategy

1. Crawl your site to identify on-page and technical SEO issues

The best place to begin an SEO strategy is by initiating a website crawl to see if there are any issues that you need to remedy in order to maximize your SEO visibility.

Initiating your site audit is a good place to start because it can take some time to complete. While your crawl is running, you can begin your competitive research.

2. Assess your competitors’ SEO strategies

This is crucial, and often overlooked, at least this early in the process.

Once you’ve identified some keywords where the competition outranks you, investigate why that might be. If you were Google — or better yet, a searcher — which site would you prefer to see?

3. Create SEO goals and align your teams

4. Create an effort vs. impact matrix [FREE TEMPLATE BELOW]

Whatever the dynamic of your business, an effort vs. impact matrix can help you organize your seo strategy into tactical jobs to be done. Here’s a link to a free template.

5. Build an SEO report or dashboard

After thinking through your priority list for optimizations, you’ll want to establish a baseline of current SEO performance and create a method to track your progress.

6. Iterate through technical SEO fixes

PageSpeed Insights is an important tool to leverage because:

It’s free.

The recommendations on improving your site health and technical SEO foundation are coming directly from Google.

7. Optimize existing content for search engines

8. Identify new content opportunities through topic research

Hub-and Spoke content model

9. Amplify your content on social media, and investigate backlink opportunities

10. Measure, optimize, and test

Get started on your SEO strategy today

Whether you’re an experienced SEO taking on a new client or a website owner approaching SEO for the first time, it’s crucial to create a roadmap of defined tasks and actionable goals. Having an action plan will help keep you focused on your goals, and prevent aimless work and incomplete projects. In search engine marketing, it pays to be methodical, yet adaptable.

0 notes

ratmonky · 4 years ago

Text

Tangible Phantom

Word Count: 3.2K

Warnings: non-con, invisible smexy time, stalking, breeding, mild gore

AO3 Link

The internet was a magnificent invention of humankind. It made everything easier. At the same time, it was accessible to almost anyone and it brought people together.

There were so many things one could find by typing some letters on a browser and with a click of a mouse.

Whether it be cute animal videos you could share with your friends, porn to watch late at night as your fingers slid inside your panties beneath the sheets, or disturbing images of people who had or were taking their last breath. You could find it all on the internet.

Morbid curiosity led you to the furthest parts of the internet like on strange websites where you could find pictures of deformed bodies.

There wasn’t any explanation on why they had been deformed like that but their death cause was all the same, heart failure.

Although you weren’t anything more than a normal citizen, you felt like what you were doing was wrong. Looking at those images and scrolling down to see more of the distorted faces of what used to be people who had a family, a life, and goals that you would never know about should have been enough to make you click away. Yet, you always found yourself logging into your laptop every night to check if there were more.

It wasn’t illegal nor it was hurting anyone. It was just… unethical. Somewhat felt like you were feeling guilty of what happened even though you had nothing to do with any of these people.

Nevertheless, it made you wonder if you would feel the same way if those people were someone you knew. Or if it were you.

Pfft.

As if that would ever happen.

~~~

It was a late night when you were walking the same route to your place with your mind clouded by what to eat once you got home. The streets were rather silent at this time of the night, no cars passed or a single soul was outside, so the only noise was your footsteps that echoed in the empty street.

Although you were only about a full two minutes away from arriving at your place, you suddenly stopped in shock when you saw a dark figure sitting in the dark under the bridge you had to walk through.

Alone at night, standing stiffly in the dark, looking desperately down at your phone screen and then to the man, you considered turning back and walking to the nearest bus station. You could stay at your friend’s place again rather than take your chance to walk past someone who looked like a predator waiting for its prey.

You considered calling one of your friends and being on the phone with them until you arrived home. Decidedly, you called your friend’s phone but they didn’t answer. If it was them calling you, you would answer right away, they knew how you didn’t call anyone without a reason.

While the phone was ringing again, you kept muttering under your breath about how much you were going to yell at them once they answered you but they never picked up.

Your other friend wasn’t in town and you could never call your friend to ask if her brother could escort you to your place again, you only made everyone question your sanity when you asked for favors like that.

You made everyone around you uncomfortable, they think you were out of your mind. Why were you so scared of walking past a possibly homeless man?

This was why most of your friends hated you, this was why they didn’t answer your calls anymore.

Huffing in annoyance and disappointment, you put your phone against your ear to pretend to be on the phone with your father as you started walking again.

The man noticed you, you saw his head moving when the sound of your footsteps alarmed him of your presence, all of his attention was on you now.

You tried ignoring the instincts that told you to turn back and run away.

It was probably just a homeless man.

There was no way that he would try to do anything to you.

You were just overreacting like you always did.

You refused to acknowledge the man’s existence as you increased your speed to pass him as soon as possible and go on with your night like you weren’t already having a panic attack.

The man was doing nothing but watching you intently, he hadn’t moved.

Yeah, you were just overreacting before.

“Yes, I’ll be home soon, dad! I’m walking!” you started basically yelling, hoping that your acting was believable.

Maybe not.

The man got up, blocking your path.

Startled, your hand gripped tighter on your purse and you started yelling to your phone. “Dad! Can you come outside the building and wait for me?! I’m right around the corner once I pass the bridge!”

You were scared to look at the man. As if you didn’t notice him getting up, you ignored his presence and tried to walk around him but he stepped to the side to block your way again.

This time, your lips started trembling in fear, you actually were believing you were talking to your father. “Dad, I’m scared, please come get me!”

“I can see that you’re not on the phone,” a husky voice said. “Your phone screen is lit up.”

You shrieked upon him talking to you. When his hand reached for your face, you jerked away and took a couple of steps back.

“Don’t touch me!” you screamed, your eyes finally meeting his eyes that were sparkling with vicious intent. “I’ll call the police!”

Ignoring your threat, he took a step closer towards you which only made you panic more.

You looked for an exit. To your right was a concrete wall and to your left was the large sewer gate. Running past the man was impossible.

“Stay away from me!” You turned on your heels to make a bolt towards the sewers but the man was faster than you. He grabbed you by your hair and pulled your back flush against his chest.

You started to scream as you struggled in the man’s hold. It was barely midnight, someone would hear your screams for help.

Normally an attacker would chicken out if their victim was struggling and screaming this much but your attacker seemed to not have a care in the world if he would get caught or not.

As he started dragging you towards the sewer gate, you shook your body violently, kicking helplessly in the air and yelling on top of your lungs.

He started shushing you and clapped a hand over your mouth to keep you quiet while proceeded to drag you further inside the sewers.

This was the end, wasn’t it?

~~~

On a regular night, Mahito usually read his book to the sounds of the rats or the water splashing sounds in the sewers. The steady and faint noises were enough to lull him to sleep but tonight his peace was disturbed.

A woman was screaming for her life. Something he heard more often than regular since it was usually him who was the cause of their screams. This woman’s screams were echoing in the sewers, being muffled by something as a man’s voice kept shushing.

Out of curiosity, he put his book down and walked to the source of the loud noises.

It took him barely a minute to find you and your attacker. The man had you under him, his chest pressing on your back as he was hastily pulling his pants down.

“Oh, how amusing,” Mahito chuckled, getting closer to watch your face stained with tears.

He crouched right next to your face, humming cutely. “You’re quite adorable,” he said, his hand reached to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. “Really my type.”

“Help!”

Your sudden yell made Mahito pull his hand back. Whew, you had startled him.

“Nobody will hear you,” the man assured with a breathy laugh, his hand rubbing guiding his cock between your thighs.

Mahito pouted his lips and tilted his head to the side. “It’s no fun when I’m left out, you know.”

The man was busy pulling your panties to the side.

“Please, please, please don’t!”

“Don’t ignore me,” Mahito furrowed his brows and tapped on the man’s shoulder.

You were still struggling under the man’s weight when he suddenly stopped moving. With a burst of an adrenaline rush, you pushed yourself up from the concrete and threw your attacker tumbling back.

Almost immediately you got up on your feet and swung your purse at the man, hitting him in the face with your eyes closed shut in fear.

The impact made a splash sound as if you had hit something soggy. What? Your eyes hesitantly opened and it took you a long moment to register what you were seeing.

“Wow.” Mahito stood beside you with a smile on his face. “He looks nice like that, don’t you think?”

You dropped your purse.

Your mouth opened to scream but what were you going to gain from it? You closed it back again.

It looked unreal, nothing like the photos you had seen online. You wanted to look away but you couldn’t.

“Heeeeyyyy~” Mahito stood in front of you, waving a hand to your face. “I don’t even get thanks?”

The man’s disfigured body and face were covered in blood. The sight was enough to cause trauma and make any normal person collapse on their knees, heaving. His body was twisted to the point you couldn’t tell if he was a human or not.

What you were seeing wasn’t human.

You couldn’t tell if it was a human.

Your brain disconnected it from your mind that he was a real, living, and breathing person only a couple of seconds ago.

The fact that you couldn’t even process what you were seeing right in front of you made you burst into a peal of hysterical laughter.

Mahito took a step back. “Ah, you’re one of those who goes insane…” He shrugged, watching you lose your sanity was fun too. His eyes landed on the panties which were halfway down on your thighs that you hadn’t even bothered to pull up and then his stare landed on your unevenly hoisted skirt. A grin spread on his face.

Your laughter died down quickly and sobbing replaced it. You couldn’t stop your tears. Your vision was getting blurry from your tears and you tried to revive your brain to think of what to do next.

Could you just leave this man here?

Even though he attacked you with full intention to rape you, it… it was wrong to leave him like this.

He was dead. Disfigured. Not human.

There was nothing you could do. Whatever caused this man to turn into this inhuman thing could have happened to you.

You felt a shiver run down your spine and up your shoulders. As if the cool evening breeze had hands, the chilly air caressed your skin.

A quiet sob left your lips and you lifted your hand to wipe your tears but stopped when something firm pressed on your back.

“You’re definitely my type,” Mahito snickered, pulling his hand back.

With a shriek you jumped forward, whipping your head around to look behind you. There was nothing.

You had to be going insane.

You put a hand against your forehead and looked around the sewers. The most logical thing to do was to leave. This rapist deserved to rot here, you didn’t care. You wouldn’t care. You knew you couldn’t care less.

“Heeey~~ I’m Mahito, your savior.” He poked your nose and you itched where he had touched you. “You should thank me for saving youuuu!”

Once you got home to your bed, you would browse on the websites to stare at disfigured humans like him. This was nothing. You had seen worse on the internet. You didn’t care.

Mahito crouched down to open your purse. He looked around your stuff and tried to find something that had your name on it but it was futile.

You weren’t going to wake up tomorrow and think about its face.

“Hey, what’s your name?” he asked.

No, you weren’t going to remember about this thing the day after tomorrow.

“Hellloooo~~ What’s your name?”

Definitely, you weren’t going to think about this thing whenever you closed your eyes.

“What’s your name?” Mahito put his hand on your shoulder. You reacted to his touch and flinched but didn’t answer him. “Ugh! This is the third time I’m asking, sweetheart.”

You were being paranoid, that was for sure.

It felt like ghostly hands were touching you.

“Let’s see how far we can go before you see me.” Mahito grabbed you by your shoulders and pushed you down.

Fear came rushing back and you started screaming. Something you couldn’t see had tackled you on the cold concrete. This wasn’t a figment of your imagination, this was real.

“You know, a friend of mine said that humans can see curses when they’re in a life or death situation.” His large hands massaged your shoulders as he spoke. “I wanna see if we can have fun together even when you can’t see me.”

Your breathing became uneven and you started struggling against the unknown force holding you down.

Mahito moved his hands to your shoulder blades and slid them lower until he grabbed you by your hips. You gasped when he pressed himself against you. “Oh, so you can feel this .” He slowly grinded against you.

Your hands balled up to fists and you pressed your forehead against the cold concrete. There was something on top of you, something firm and thick was pressing on you. You were rocking back and forth with a very familiar feeling of a cock on your ass.

Mahito’s grinding became harder to get a reaction out of you. He pushed his growing clothed erection against your ass to explicitly stimulate the movement of fucking you.

You bit your lips to hold back a moan. You hadn’t gone insane yet, there was something humping you. There was a small moment where you tried to move and crawl away from this entity but your body became frozen when you felt your skirt was getting hiked up.

“You’re so cute~” He pulled his own pants down. “Very pretty.”

The weight on top of you disappeared, taking the opportunity you tried crawling away but your body got flipped around.

Now, you were facing the ceiling of the sewers with nobody in sight yet there were hands fondling your tits.

“Stop,” you whimpered. “Please.”

Mahito smirked, getting his face awfully close to yours. He let his tongue loll out from his mouth and licked your lips.

You let out a startled scream, you tried kicking your invisible attacker but it was useless to even try. You couldn’t fight something you couldn’t see.

“Mm, you taste so sweet,” he whispered. His lips pressed against yours experimentally and bit your bottom lip. You reacted by turning your face to the side.

Boring.

Having had pulled his pants down before, Mahito grabbed his fully erect cock. He stroked it from the base to the pink tip glistening with precum as he relished on your view.

“I really wanna know the name of my cute new doll.” He used a free hand to spread your legs, although you tried fighting back, he quickly outpowered you. He pouted when you didn’t say anything regarding what he had said.

“Please,” you whispered, starting to pray for whoever was listening. Your hand went between your legs to cover yourself but it stopped midway when you felt something firm press and move against your clit. An involuntary moan left your lips.

Mahito chuckled at your reaction and tapped his cock on your clit before dragging the tip between your folds to cover it with your juices. “You’re wet only because of me, right?” he asked, smirking.

Your lips parted as he lined himself up on your entrance. He waited until your tense body relaxed and shoved his cock inside you in one go once he caught you off guard.

You let out another moan but it got muffled by Mahito’s lips. While you were tensing and yelping because of the girth of his cock stretching you out, he was snaking his tongue inside your mouth with dark amusement.

Whether it be because of fear or pleasure, your gummy walls were clenching around his cock. It was more than enough to let Mahito know that he could move now.

Pulling his hips back and face back, he slammed into you abruptly to force a moan out of you. However, you didn’t make a sound. He looked down at you to notice how you were pressing your lips together, refusing to make it fun.

He sighed but didn’t let it ruin the mood. Instead, he frantically started fucking you. His hips surged forward with frenzy, he was whispering praises but you heard none of them.

Your pussy was being forcefully stretched by something thick and firm, you didn’t know exactly what it was but you also knew. You just didn’t want to acknowledge it.

It moved in and out of your pussy, stroking only the right spots and massaging your gummy walls enticingly. Your juices were gushing out of your hole that was being fucked, making disgustingly wet sounds.

One of your hands went to your pussy, unable to fight back the entity, you tried blocking it with your hand from ravishing you.

A sharp thrust of his hips was all it took to make you squirm and fall back on the concrete.

Mahito put a hand on your clit and started rubbing tight circles on your nub as he continued his animalistic pace to hammer into your pussy.

Arching your back, you moaned. Your pussy was spasming around his cock, begging for more.

“At least your body is honest.” Mahito watched you convulse in pleasure with a chuckle. He pushed your legs up to your chest and began pounding deeper in your pussy.

Your eyes rolled up, hands trying to grab onto something to steady yourself but there was nothing on the concrete. This was it, you were close.

“Do you think a cursed spirit and a human can make a baby?” His pace slackened, your clenching walls had caught him by surprise. He chuckled before languidly answering his own question. “Let’s try and see, yeah? Whaddaya say, sweetie?”

You quivered when his cock kissed your cervix. Your mouth gaped open in a silent moan as your orgasm shook you to your core.

“Haha, you look so needy and dumb!” Mahito’s cock twitched inside you, he groaned loudly. He tried holding himself back and stealing a couple more thrusts into your pussy before the fun ended but his thrusts had started becoming shaky. His hips lurched forward one last time, pushing as far as he could to spill his seed deep inside your womb and filled your pussy until it overflowed.

Mahito pulled back and held your hips up to hold his seed inside you without letting another drop go to waste. This was going to be one of his experiments, he decided with a sickening smile on his face.

You were far too exhausted to feel anything other than the warmth that filled your tummy.

The rest… was a blur.

~~~

Although what happened that night was supposed to be traumatic, nowadays; you found yourself feeling a lot safer walking home at night. Whenever someone followed you or someone with malicious intent tried getting near you, there was a guardian angel that stopped them with a small price of you letting it indulge in your slick heat.

#i suck at writing endings but whateva #tell me what you think #i literallt wrote this after i posted that commission fic and just finished it #mahito x reader

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boldlyvoid · 3 years ago

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ain't it fun? | part 4

Summary: reader just needs an NA meeting before they have a meltdown, they end up with the best friend they could ever make.

Warnings: chronic illness, hurt/comfort, drug use**! spencer and reader smoke weed together; talks of relapse and recovery. Also, a case involving child abductions, getting engaged, love confessions

word count: 2.4k

a/n: not sure how long this is going to keep getting but I am enjoying adding to it

P1 P2 P3

Days like today suck.

She can’t get out of bed, she’s so hungry her stomach is swirling and screaming and there’s a pain in her intestines that feels like someone is eating her from the inside out but she can’t move… and she has to pee but her legs hurt and her head is pounding from the light. It’s 6 am according to the alarm clock, Spencer hasn’t left for work yet and she’s already missing him.

She manages to make it to the bathroom, sitting there for too long after because she can’t find the courage to stand back up.

“Why?” She whispers to herself before the tears start.

Covering her face as she cries, she’s still sitting on the toilet with her underwear around her ankles, sobbing as Spencer walks in.

He helps her up without asking, he’s seen too many bad mornings now to ask if she needs help, he just knows she wants to go back to bed, so he fixes her underwear and picks her up.

When he finally lays her down with all her pillows, he lowers the temperature in the room to relax her bones and gets her a ginger ale to help with the nausea from the pain she’s in. It is a regular occurrence for her to wake up and feel like she’s dying, but Spencer was wonderful when dealing with it.

He’s in the kitchen for a while, she’s worried he’s making something for her to eat that she’ll have to lovingly turn away because she can’t do it right now. Her throat is too tight and it hurts to swallow or talk.

She can hear him talking… he’s on the phone with someone.

When he comes back in, he cuddles into her the way he knows she likes. Soothing his hands over her back in a way that helps the pain while also helping her feel like she’s not alone in all of this. He’ll never understand; but he loves her, so a part of him feels it too.

“You called out?” She whispers against his chest.

He nods, his cheek resting on the top of her head as she feels the friction. “I don’t feel good when you don’t feel good.”

“I’m sorry you had to help.”

He’s told her time and time again that he doesn’t mind.

He would kill for her, he’d clean up the mess if she killed someone. He’d even dig the fucking grave if she needed him too… he wasn’t opposed to being there for her no matter what that entailed.

She just hated the fact he had to, he knew her apology came from her hatred of herself and not the fact she felt sorry for him. She loved the help, it made her feel loved until she felt disappointed in herself for needing it.

“Do you want your medicine?”

She smiles finally, “if you mean my secret joint stash— yes, but if you can’t handle being around me like that, then I don’t need it today.”

“I think I’d like to try it,” Spencer whispers. “If you can smoke weed and not relapse then I think I can too?”

“Probably, but if you can’t, I’ll support you however you need me to?” She smiles up at him, he kisses the tip of her nose as she kisses his chin.

Getting high with Spencer is… interesting to say the least. He doesn’t want a full hit, he just wants a taste and so she takes a drag and blows the smoke from her lungs to his. Sharing a part of themselves in a way they never expected before, this is his most vulnerable moment and he was trusting her with it.

The sunshine hits his face in such a perfect way that as they lay side by side, she can watch his pupil devour his iris as he gets high. Their breathing is steady and their fingers are interlocked. They’re content just blinking together, in the sunshine, quiet. In love.

Her body is so calm, and her mind is slow as she takes it all in and he looks so relaxed. He’s not jittery or caffeine-deprived like most mornings; he’s not anxious or stressed or trying to find a way to pretend he’s fine before leaving for work again, only to come home sad.

He’s okay.

She’s okay.

“It's nice,” he whispers, “but it’s not as good as you.”

She smiles, trying not to laugh at how his thoughts are going to be all jumbled for the next few hours. He’s going to be smart yet stupid at the same time and she couldn’t fucking wait to hear all the things he thinks of.

“I know what you mean,” she agrees.

“This is like a tidal wave..." his ramble starts and she is so excited to see where it takes them. "A tsunami that rushes and relieves just as quickly." His eyes are closed as he talks, visualizing his feelings and it makes her giddy.

"You’re like a volcano; there are so many stages before mass destruction, and even then there’s still the ash cloud and the debris and the lava dries like rocks… the destruction is total and the cleanup will be brutal.”

“I’m addicted to you," his eyes are closed as he talks, visualizing his feelings and it makes her giddy. "Drugs are boring and you’re not,” Simplifying his meaning as his eyes open again.

“I love you,” he says with the same certainty as the first time.

“I love you, too, Spencer,” she didn’t think they’d go down this path when she was blowing into his mouth, she expected him to panic or get horny.

“I don’t think I’ve ever really told you how much.”

He shakes his head lightly, “I wouldn’t be opposed to knowing.”

If she thinks it over, she’ll abandon ship before she can tell him, so she just jumps into it.

“I was a little scared to ask you to help me lock my door that first day because I thought you’d think I was just some junky who couldn’t get their shit together. But the second you asked if I had a local group and you helped me; that was the moment I knew I wanted you in my life for forever.”

He smiles, silent so she can keep going. He’ll take his turn when she’s really done.

“And then when we got to talking it was like I knew you already. Like I had your memories in my mind and as you told me things I was like well duh! Yeah, that’s my Spencer! I don’t know how it happened so fast. One minute you’re a stranger and the next you’re the only person I ever want to see for the rest of my entire fucking life,” it’s more passionate than she expected as she rambles on.

“I can’t get married on paper without losing my disability, but I don’t give a fuck about a piece of paper or someone officially giving us that title one day, I’m content just staying in this bed with you for the rest of time and never moving again.”

He looks like he’s about to explode with love as he presses his lips together in the softest smile. He can’t keep quiet any longer, “are you asking me to spend the rest of my life with you but not marry you?”

She laughs at the realization, “I think so?”

They’re trying to kiss but it ends up more like laughing with their mouths touching and teeth occasionally clashing. It’s hysterical because of the marijuana, sure, but they’re high on each other. It’s everything they’ve ever wanted.

To find something better than drugs; that little purpose in life comes back, that drive to see tomorrow because there are good memories to be made with their favourite person. She’s not afraid of the darkness or the unknowing anymore, Spencer’s her guiding light.

He's holding her close to his chest after a while, "are you feeling better?"

"Of course," she smiles, "I've got my weed and my reid."

His laugh is everything as it fills their space again. This was how the rest of her life was going to feel, and it made her excited for tomorrow.

—

She’s feeling a lot better later and they need Spencer to help Penelope back at work, but he doesn’t want to leave her. She’s in sweats with a blanket on her lap in the corner of Penelope’s office, a book in her hand and a coffee on the table beside her as she listens to them bicker back and forth.

“If you hack the NSA we can no longer use all this as evidence if he’s brought in alive, Penelope!” Spencer whisper shouts at her, afraid to raise his voice at her but wanting to get his point across.

“Hotch needs the aerial shots like yesterday, and the NSA won't get them to us in time for this kid!” She yells back.

“Call google…” Y/N suggests, flipping through her book.

“What?” Spencer looks at her like she just said the dumbest thing ever.

“They’re taking photos constantly for their maps program, my mom was saying our new roof is now on the updated map. They might have all the photos saved up, if the FBI asks nicely they might work with you…” she explains, pressing her lips together in a tight smile.

“You’re a genius!” Penelope shouts, dialling the phone and getting JJ to work his media magic for contact at google.

Spencer's smile is one she hasn’t seen before, he’s not only proud of her; he looks a little turned on. She just cracked the case by knowing all the little hacks about the internet as part of her day job. She lived online, and now she was saving lives because of it.

It was a good case to help on, she got to see 3 kids go home to their parents and know a terrible man was going to rot in prison for the rest of his sad and pathetic life. The hard part was seeing them go through months of footage of this guy's yard, seeing the child-sized holes he dug up. The disrupted earth and the knowledge of what happened when there wasn’t picture proof.

—

They go to a meeting after work.

They sit side by side, her leg is crossed and resting over his knee as their arms are linked and fingers interlocked. They really couldn’t be any closer if they tried. They just wanted to listen today, to know they were in a room of people who were trying, people who understood and battled every bad feeling they did.

“Y/N,” the group leader calls her out just before the end of the meeting, “it’s nice to see you back here with Spencer, we heard you found another group but it’s nice to see you here for the support.”

“Thank you,” she smiled. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay, but as you can see he is distracting.” She gestured to how they were sitting with a small giggle. “I like coming here if you guys don’t mind me occasionally dropping by?”

“By all means,” another member, carol, spoke up. “Spencer is a great sponsor, it’s nice to see him happy.”

She didn’t know he was a sponsor but he thanks her for the compliment, it turns out almost everyone in his group turned to Spencer for support. It was comforting to everyone there to know the real, chemical and biological reasoning behind their addictions. Spencer provided a sense of calm for all of them, like a younger brother; they all loved him dearly.

They’re still holding hands as they walk home, the sun is still setting and it's barely even 7 pm. All the lights on the street are on, shops are closing and the sidewalks are bare. One store is still open however, across the street, she can see the big storefront window, illuminated with the brightest lights to show off a new collection of rings.

“Do you want one?” He notices her eyes darting to the light like a moth to a flame.

“What?” She zones back in when he stops walking.

“A ring, do you want to get one?” He clarifies with the softest voice.

She nods softly, “you should get one too though, seeing as I asked you and everything.”

He grips her hand tighter and they dart across the street. Giggling like children running to the playground, they’re almost out of breath from laughing as they open the shop door with a ding. Smiles on their faces, joy in their hearts, it makes the shop owner swoon as she sees them.

“Did you just get engaged?” She pries with a knowing smile.

They nod, “we just need some rings,” Y/N adds.

She waves them over, “well I’m going to need our sizes first, here try these on.” She hands them what looks like a thin ruler with holes spaces out.

Y/N attempts to find the right one, fitting the best into the 9 and a half. Spencer fits into the 11 on the first try like he knew already and the woman just laughs at the way Y/N glares at him with love.

“What kind of rings are we thinking? Do you have a preferred cut, style, size, or colour?”

It’s a lot all at once and she’s never really thought about it, “I love my grandma's ring, do you have any vintage styles?”

“I have vintage-style rings as well as some restored rings from the '20s and '30s,” she brings out a jewellery box from under the counter. “These are all appraised and unique.”

When she takes the lid off, Y/N’s eyes widen at the view. There are at least 50 rings in their velvet beds as they wait patiently to be tried on; all different shapes sizes and colours like she said. It feels a little overwhelming at first but then her eyes land on a green one. She takes it out slowly and slides it over her ring finger.

It’s perfect.

Spencer picks out a nice gold band to match, he pays and the lady is so happy to watch them leave hand in hand with their new rings. Dedicated to each other forever and ever, he was her person for the rest of time because he said so and that’s as good as a piece of paper.

She’s a completely different person from who she was when she woke up; twirling down the street with the love of her life, high on loving him as he makes her laugh and holds her hand. He stops in the middle of the street and places his hands on her cheeks, drawing her in closer.

“Loving you is so much fun.”

“Ain’t it fun?” She agrees with a smile before pressing their lips together.

taglist:

@g0lden-cth @doctorspenceryeet @samuel-de-champagne-problems @reiding-recs @ssavanessa22 @spookyspence @shemarmooresfedora @spencers-dria@reidsfish @manuosorioh @mochionly @jswessie187 @k-k0129 @calm-and-doctor

#spencer reid #spencer reid smut #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x you #spencer reid self insert #spencer reid request #criminal minds smut #criminal minds imagine #aint it fun #drug tw

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obviouslygenuinely · 4 years ago

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Free Resources For Writers & Creators

This is a quick post of free resources that may help fandom creators (or creators in general). I’m sure many of these have been shared before. However, it doesn’t hurt to spread the word. A few quick points:

As a professional writer, I think this post will cater mostly towards writers.

I’m also a freelance photographer, so digital photography/editing/art sources are included, too.

I chose not to use any affiliate links in my post. I don’t want to profit from this, and I’m not sure that’s allowed on Tumblr anyways.

If I’ve listed a resource I haven’t used myself, I’ve made sure to state it.

Masterlists and/or huge resource compilations are marked with asterisks.

Alright, here we go! I hope you all find this post helpful. Happy writing/creating!

Research

All of these are free resources for research. I use most of them for my writing jobs because they are extremely credible. These are great for making accurate references in your fics/creations.

1. ***Research Resources For Writers***

Writer’s Write has an enormous database of research resources for writers. They are divided into 20+ categories such as:

careers

historical research

crimes and forensics

religion

Each category contains 10+ resources like websites, articles, tips, databases, and so much more. It’s the most comprehensive and organized free research tool I use.

2. PubMed

My go-to source for citing medical studies. You’ll find 30 million citations related to numerous physical and mental health issues.

3. BioMed Central

I don’t use this website as often, but I keep it in my bookmarks. It’s similar to PubMed - great for discovering current and former medical research.

4. Drugs.com

If you need to name a medication and/or refer to medication side effects, Drugs.com is a straightforward resource. It’s easy to navigate and understand.

It also has a tool that lists potential medication interactions. This is really useful for accurate descriptions of med combinations.

5. Merck Manuals Consumer Version

Merck Manuals started out in 1899 as a medical reference guide for professionals. This consumer version is really comprehensive and updated regularly. It includes definitions, studies, and more.

6. FindLaw

If you’re writing about legal topics, FindLaw is useful for learning about laws/procedures in reader-friendly language. Categories include:

accidents/injuries

criminal law

family law (divorce, custody, etc.)

Keep in mind that laws vary based on location! You’ll often find additional links to state-related laws within articles. I do recommend double-checking state/location-based legal resources for accuracy.

7. APA Dictionary of Psychology

This psychology dictionary is provided by the American Psychological Association. It covers 90+ areas of psychology and 25,000+ terms/definitions.

You’ll also find links to additional psychology databases, resources, and so on. The website is updated frequently to provide updated information.

8. U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics

If you’re writing about a character’s job/career in the United States, this is a great source for accuracy. For any job sector, you’ll find details about

education requirements

positions in the sector

average salary for positions

what the positions entail

I imagine there are alternatives for other countries, too!

9. Investopedia Financial Term Dictionary

My area of expertise is personal finance; all of my writing published under my name is in this niche. I still refer to Investopedia’s dictionary for help. It’s excellent for understanding/explaining financial terms in a way that your reader can understand.

10. MedTerms Medical Dictionary

This is the medical version of Investopedia’s dictionary. I use this source less frequently, but I find that it’s accurate and helpful. There are many similar references online if you search for “medical glossaries” or “medical dictionaries”.

11. Domain Authority Checker

I’m not sure if this one is too helpful for fic writers, but it’s one of my most used tools. Domain authority “a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs)”.

The Wikipedia page for domain authority (DA) explains it clearly and simply. To sum it up, websites with good DA scores are considered reliable and accurate. If I cite sources in my work. I always link to sources with good DA scores.

Writing/Editing

This section is the most thorough one. All of these are completely free tools for writing and editing any type of content. I currently use or have used all of these at some point in my career.

1. ***List Of Free And Open-Source Software Packages***

This Wikipedia page applies to multiple categories in my post. It’s a masterpost of free and open-source software for anything and everything. Software is divided up into categories and sub-categories. Some relevant examples include:

media

networking/Internet

image editing

file management

There are hundreds of free software links on the page, so you’ll need to do a bit of browsing. Start with the categories above to find software geared towards writers/creators.

2. OpenOffice

This is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. I’ve used it for nine years and love it. OpenOffice software includes free applications for:

text documents

spreadsheets

presentations

drawing

templates

There are many more tools with OpenOffice that I haven’t used. If you write offline, I cannot recommend it enough. Tutorials are readily available online, and the software is pretty user-friendly.

3. Evernote

I briefly used Evernote and found that it’s very user-friendly and helpful. Most of my colleagues use Evernote and recommend it for taking notes/staying organized.

(I’m personally not a fan of note-taking software or apps. My method is messy text documents with bullet point lists.)

4. Google Drive

This might seem like an obvious one, but Google Drive/Docs is my writing haven. It has the tools included with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and then some. It’s great for collaborative writing/sharing documents, too.

5. Grammarly

I use the Premium (paid) version of Grammarly, but I also used the free version for years. It’s helpful for detecting simple spelling, style, and grammatical errors.

There are numerous ways to use it - desktop, copy/paste documents, and so on. I’m not a huge fan of how well it works with Google Docs, but they’re improving it/it’s moved out of beta mode.

If you’re interested in the paid version - which I highly recommend - wait to buy until a holiday pops up. They offer a major discount on the software for almost every holiday/special occasion.

6. Plagiarism Detector

This website is handy for scanning for plagiarism. You can scan your own work to ensure uniqueness, too. My clients are big fans of this tool.

(I no longer use this resource; I use a paid tool called Copyscape Premium. The low cost has a big return on investment for me.)

7. TitleCase

The name says it all. It’s free and simple! I’ll be honest - I’m terrible with proper title case. You’d think after a decade of writing I’d nail it. However, I use this tool pretty often.

8. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is an online and desktop editor. It’s excellent for scanning your writing to check for:

readability (a grade-level score is listed)

adverb usage

passive voice usage

complex phrase usage

estimated reading time

This tool is color-coded to make editing easy. For example, adverbs are highlighted in blue. I don’t use this as often as I used to, but it was essential for my early writing career.

9. Polish My Writing

This tool is very straightforward. You paste your writing into the text box. Spelling errors, grammar suggestions, and style suggestions are highlighted in red, blue, and green.

It’s great for double-checking your work alongside Grammarly or Hemingway. When using free editors, I recommend using at least two for higher accuracy.

10. OneLook Reverse Dictionary And Thesaurus

I’m going to use the definition directly from the website:

“This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be anything at all: a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words.”

To put it simply, you can use the reverse dictionary/thesaurus to find those words/thoughts that are on the tip of your tongue. Use the tool to:

find a word based on the word’s definition (i.e. search for “inability to feel pain”)

find synonyms and related concepts

generate a list of category-specific words (i.e. search for “cat breeds”)

answer basic questions (i.e. search for “what is the capital of France?”)

The results can be hit or miss, but I usually find the information I’m looking for. It’s a solid resource any writer regardless of genre.

11. Word Frequency Counter + Phrase Frequency Counter

I cannot emphasize how much I love these tools. Repetition is the bane of a writer’s existence; it’s simply inevitable at times.

These two tools count the number of times you use a single word or phrase in a text document. Just copy/paste your document, hit submit, and you’re all set!

For the phrase frequency counter, you can scan for two-word to ten-word phrases.

12. Thesaurus.com

This is another tool that might seem painfully obvious. Combined with the word frequency counter, it’s such an essential resource for me.

It’s especially useful if you’re writing about the same topic multiple times (i.e. love, getting drunk, sex, etc.). I always use this combo of tools to ensure uniqueness.

13. Lists Of Colors

Are you stumped when trying to come up with unique shades of blue? Is describing your character’s hair or skin color difficult? This Wikipedia page has you covered. It contains:

lists of colors (alphabetically)

lists of colors by shade

lists of Crayola crayon colors

lists of color palettes

I typically use this resource for product descriptions, but I also used it for creative writing many times. It’s a lifesaver for all things color-related.

Free Photos/Images

Tons of creators need free photos/images for numerous reasons. All of these sources provide 100% free photos, illustrations, etc. that have a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means there’s no copyright whatsoever on them.

You can edit the images however you’d like, too. All of the images in my post are from the first source listed below. I made them black and white and added text.

(A lot of these sites have donate buttons for contributors. Donating a dollar here and there goes a long way!)

1. Unsplash

Unsplash is my personal favorite for high-resolution photos. It’s easy to navigate and has over 2,000,000 free images. Downloading an image is a one-click process, and you don’t need to create an account.

2. Pixabay

Pixabay is my go-to site for illustrations and vector graphics (they have photos, too). There are 1.9 million free images to choose from. You don’t need an account to download images, but I recommend creating one. It’s free and with an account:

you don’t have to complete a CAPTCHA every time you download an image

you can access higher-quality/larger/etc. versions of images

I often use graphics from Pixabay to create overlays and masks for mixed media art pieces.

3. PxHere

I’ve never used PxHere, but one of my writing clients recommends it. It seems very similar to Pixabay, and the interface is user-friendly.

4. Pexels

In my limited experience, Pexels seems to focus on “artsy” stock images/content. I found great high-quality images the few times I’ve used it.

5. Burst by Shopify

I haven’t used Burst, but it’s another free image site that a writing client recommended to me. It seems a little limited compared to the other sites, but it never hurts to add it to your toolbox!

Digital Art/Photo Editing/Etc.

This section seems brief, but the tools listed are pretty comprehensive and diverse. They are geared towards many creative needs/projects like:

Creating manips of people/etc.

Adding text to images.

Creating collages.

Digital illustration.

Advanced photo editing.

There’s something for everyone. In my experience, finding your favorites among these will take some trial and error.

1. Pixlr X and Pixlr E (app available)

Pixlr X and Pixlr E are both versatile free editing tools. Pixlr X is ideal for less experienced creators. Pixlr E is comparable to Adobe PhotoShop.

I’ve used both software formats for personal and professional art projects.

The Pixlr app is handy for making collages, adding filters/overlays, adding text, and so on. I’ve used it for creating fanfiction collages and similar projects. It’s super easy to use.

2. Remove Background by Pixlr

This is one of the easiest/fastest tools I’ve found for removing backgrounds from images. It’s perfect for creators who make manips using photos of people.

It takes literal seconds to use. The tool automatically removes the background. If you spot any mistakes, you can refine the results with brush/erase tools. Then you download the cutout and you’re all set!

Unfortunately, this feature isn’t available on the Pixlr app. There are a lot of smartphone apps for removing photo backgrounds.

3. GIMP

If you need a full-fledged Photoshop alternative, GIMP is excellent software. It’s not an online tool like most I’ve suggested; you’ll need to download it to your computer.

There’s quite a learning curve for it, unless you’re familiar with Photoshop already. Fortunately, the free video/text GIMP tutorials online are endless. I no longer use/need GIMP, but it’s a personal favorite of mine.

4. Paint.NET

Admittedly, I haven’t used Paint.NET, but my art/photography colleagues commonly mention it. It’s comparable to Photoshop and GIMP. It’s a web-based tool, and a quick Google search returns several tutorials for it.

5. Photopea

This is more or less a Photoshop clone, but it’s free and web-based. If you watch Photoshop tutorials, you can usually follow the same steps in PhotoPea.

I’ve only used it a few times; I have Photoshop so I don’t need it. Still, it’s very impressive - especially for a free tool.

6. PicsArt (app available)

PicsArt is a photo editing website and app; the app is much easier to use in my opinion. It’s a “fun” editing tool for photo manips, collages, and fan art in general. A lot of users post their art in the app, and I’ve noticed tons of cool fandom edits.

Some of the features are Premium (AKA cost money), but I don’t think they’re worth the extra cost. PicsArt also has a digital drawing app. I haven’t personally used it but it may be worth checking out!

7. Adobe Photoshop Express (app available)

(I’ll preface this by saying I have an Adobe subscription, so I have access to the “locked” features. I’ve used the free versions, but my memory of it is a bit hazy.)

Photoshop Express is a free web-based tool and smartphone app. The app is very user-friendly and can be used for detailed editing, adding filters, adding text, and so on.

I’m less familiar with the browser version; I only use it for the cutout tool when I’m feeling lazy. It seems to be a good fit for quick edits - filters, cropping, and so on.

8. Make PNG Transparent by Online PNG Tools

This tool is awesome for removing solid colored backgrounds. I use it to create graphics for mixed media art pieces. Here’s how it works:

upload an image

type the color your want to remove (name or hex code)

type the percentage of similar color tones you want to match (for example, 25% will remove your chosen color plus similar warm/cool tones)

the removed color is replaced with transparent pixels

If you want to make a JPG transparent, start with the website’s JPG to PNG Converter. There are a ton of useful free tools offered, but I haven’t tried out most of the others.

Wrap Up

That’s all I’ve got for now! If I think of additional free tools, I’ll add them to this post. Feel free to reblog with your own recommendations or message me if you’d like me to add anything.

I hope my fellow creatives find these too

#writer resources #writing #writblr #fanfiction #fanfic #creative writing #writing reference #writing resources #writer reference #obviouslygenuinely #creators #artists on tumblr #fandom #fan art

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sunnyrinusstudies · 4 years ago

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Going FOSS: An Intro to Open-Source software for studyblr (and also some privacy related bits)

Source for Header Image

Intro & attempt at TLDR

Hey everyone! Today I’d like to tell y’all something about Open Source Software, and also Why this should matter to you! This’ll probably be the first post of a series I intend to do, because I believe the Studyblr community, even the non-nerd folks, could really benefit from switching some things out in their digital environment. Since this is a long post, I attempted to summarise it below, please do read on if you have the spoons tho!

TLDR?

FOSS stands for “Free and Open Source Software” the “free” part doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free as in free pizza, but mostly means free as in freedom.

There’s a humongous amount of variants on this concept, but the core of FOSS specifically is the four freedoms:

1. To run the program however you want and for whatever you want

2. To study how the program works and to change it in whatever way you want

3. To be able to share it with whomever you feel like

4. To be able to share your modified version with whomever you want

There’s a whole host of software licenses built around these concepts, you can check those out at the Open Source Initiative website, or at Choose A License. Both have a good summary of what they all stand for.

Open Source software is used for a lot of products, nearly every single webserver is an Apache Linux server, Google chrome is built on top of their open source chromium (google is still the devil, but y’know, it’s an example), and even deep deep down, Apple computers run on top of a Linux Kernel. Many more can be listed, but I won’t do that otherwise this isn’t a TLDR anymore.

Now, Why is this important for you? The Open Source Initiative summed it up real nicely already, but heres a short paraphrase:

Control & Security. If software is open source then you can check if it really works the way it does, and to make sure it’s not spying on you. Even if you don’t have the skills for it, someone else who does will be able to check. Also if you don’t like how something works in a program, then you’ll be able to change it or find someone else’s changed version that you like more.

Training. People who want to learn programming can use the code to see what makes programs tick, as well as use it as a guide for their own projects.

Stability. Because everything’s out in the open, that means someone else can take up maintaining a project or make a successor of it, in case the original developers suddenly quit working on it. This is especially important when it’s software that’s absolutely critical for certain tasks.

Community. It’s not just one program. It’s a lot of people working together to make, test, use, and promote a project they really love. Lots of projects end up with a dedicated fanbase that helps support the developers in continuing to work on the software.

I’d like to add one more tho: Privacy, which ties in a lot with the security part. Nowadays with protests going on and everything being online due to the pandemic, folks have been and will be confronted much more with the impact of privacy, and lack thereof. Open Source software means that if any company or group tries to spy on you, then you and anyone who feels like checking, will be able to know and take action on it. Here’s the EFF page on privacy and why it should matter to you

If that got your attention then read on past the readmore button! Or, if nothing else maybe check out the Free and Open Source Software portal on Wikipedia? Or maybe the resources page of the Open Source Initiative?

Terminology: Let’s get that out of the way first

Open Source: The source code that a program is made up of is freely accessible, anyone can look at it and check whether it works well enough or to make sure it doesn’t spy on you.

FOSS: Free and Open Source Software. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to pay for it, it’s free as in freedom and free speech, not free pizza.

There are four freedoms associated with FOSS:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).

By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

FLOSS: Free and Libre Open Source Software. This time it is “free” as in free pizza. The “libre” is french for “free” as in freedom.

GRATIS: Sometimes people use this word to mean “free” as in free pizza. Usually alongside “FOSS”

Licenses : A license is something that tells others what they can or cannot do with your code. Licenses also apply to art and literature, those are copyright licenses. There are many different software licenses and I’m not going to be able to list them all.

The biggest players however are:

Apache License 2.0

The 3-Clause BSD License

GNU General Public License (also known as GPL)

MIT License

Mozilla Public License 2.0

There’s even more and you can find a list of them Here on the Open Source Initiative site There’s so many licenses that there’s even a Choose A License site, where you can pick a license depending on what you want it to achieve

Who and/or what even uses open source software?

You don’t need to be some nerd to benefit from Open Source software, in fact, you’re using open source software right now! The biggest example is the whole entire internet. Websites are stored on servers, and nearly every single webserver is a Linux server. The second biggest browser Firefox is open source, and even google chrome is built on top of “chromium” an open source base. If you dont use an iPhone, then you’re probably on an Android phone. Guess what? Android is part of the Android Open Source Project, which is then built upon a GNU/Linux base. All Open Source. Chromebooks? Built on top of a Linux kernel (like a non-patented engine you could put into any motor vehicle you’d like). Heck, even Apple computers are, at their core, built on top of a Linux kernel.

Neat apps you may wanna check out!

I’ve made a little list of apps that might be especially useful for studyblr folks, but depending on how well this post does I’ll probably make some more posts for specific apps.

TiddlyWiki, has a bajillion different ways to organise your thoughts, and also a lot of variant builds out there. Check out their table of contents if you feel lost! There’s versions available for most big browsers, as well as windows, linux, mac, android, and iOS.

AnyType, is an app that looks and almost exactly like notion, but is much more decentralised. They’re currently still in development but if you want to support them, sign up for early access and give them some feedback so they know what works and doesn’t! They’re still in closed alpha, but are intending to give beta access to about 100 folks at a time throughout 2021, so please sign up if this looks interesting to you!

Trilium Notes, is slightly more like a “notebook”, however you can arrange your notes in nearly infinitely deep folders. You can use things like Relation Maps & Link Maps to visualise your notes and how they go together. There’s even more they do and I just cant list it all, so go check out their stuff for a more comprehensive overview! Works on windows, linux, and (unsupported) mac

LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE are two office suites that function just as well as micro$oft office, often Even Better in my experience. I’ve used LibreOffice for years now and honestly? never going back. OnlyOffice is technically free (as in pizza), but it’s a slight hassle to get everything set up, cause you need to set it up on a server. They have a paid and hosted version available with educational discounts, but honestly i’d go with LibreOffice.

OnePile, is an app I haven’t used myself since it only runs on Apple stuff. But I’ve heard a lot of good things about it so that’s why it’s in here. It looks like it works similar to most general “note taking notebook” apps. Looks really pretty too honestly.

EtherPad, is similar to ONLYOFFICE, however this one’s a lot more focused on specifically text documents. Works with real-time collaboration which is really neat.

Anything that FramaSoft has going on. They’re a non-profit organisation, dedicated to promoting digital freedom. A lot of open source cloud related things are not really useful to people who don’t have the time and/or money to set up a whole-ass server. That’s where FramaSoft comes in, they do it for you. Just about everything they offer (here’s a full overview) are free (as in free pizza). They also have a separate site to help you get started!

It’s not free to run it all on their side, so if you find yourself interested in using their services please try to support them any way you monetarily can! (they even have a “minetest” server (not minecraft, deeeefinitely not minecraft))

Joplin!! Which is also what I used to write this post so I wouldn’t have to use The Tumble’s post writing thing. It’s good for taking notes, has a bunch of neat plug-ins, and can also sync with a variety of cloud services!

Nextcloud For if you want to go just that little bit further on the open source and the privacy. Nextcloud has honestly way too many features for me to list, but the important parts are that it’s a nigh perfect replacement for office365, and probably even GSuite. The one caveat is that you either gotta host it yourself, or get someone else to host it for you. Framasoft (mentioned above), has a nextcloud instance. It works on just about every single platform, and can integrate with an absurd amount of services. Here’s a list of providers that work with nextcloud, and what different apps they have installed on their server.

I personally use Disroot, because they’re a local (as in, my country) non-profit that offer about 2gb of free storage, and then for about 15 cents per GB per month you can get more storage if you want. They also have an email service which is hella neat. Their one main rule is Do Not Use For Business Purposes, because they’re here to help the individual folks, not companies.

Neat Links you may also want to look at!

Here are some sources, and also resources that I used for this post. There’s also some stuff here that I think folks may be interested in in general.

General Wikipedia Article on Open Source Software

The Free and Open Source Software portal on Wikipedia

Resources page of the Open Source Initiative

Free Software Foundation definition of “free software”

itsfoss page on what FOSS means

itsfoss page on the history of FOSS

Open Source Software Foundation list of projects and apps they really like

Open Source Initiative on “the open source way”, and how it goes beyond software

Check out literally anything the Electronic Frontier Foundation has going on maybe?

TED talk on privacy and why it’s important

The Surveillance Self Defense project by the EFF

This EFF page on privacy for students

ExpressVPN article on privacy (not necessarily endorsing this company, just a good article)

What’s next?

I’ll probably make some more posts on specific kinds of software that I think folks may like. Or maybe a general overview on the more privacy forcused reasons and solutions for doing all of this.

Future post ideas, none of these are set in stone:

Open source Note taking apps

Replacements for just about Every Single google service I can think of

My personal setup

Open source / privacy conscious social media that studyblr folks may be into

Chatting, Calling, Videocalling: Discord and whatsapp alternatives etc

??? More studyblr apps that could do with a FOSS alternative??

How to support open source when you’re not a big fudgin nerd

How to be better at digital privacy and security, while still maintaining that studyblr aesthetic

Apps, software, other stuff, for specific areas of study maybe?

Feel free to suggest other ideas! Or leave feedback! This is my first big resource post so I wanna know if/how I can do better when I make another one!

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superlinguo · 4 years ago

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Practical advice if you want to start a podcast

I wrote a post for the RED team at La Trobe with some general advice for podcasting, but I’ve found there are some recurring questions that I get about setting up a podcast. This post is here to answer those questions.

If you’re not interested in starting a podcast, but want to listen to more linguistics podcasts, I’ve got a list for you!

I last updated this post in June 2021 - if you find this post a few years after this you might want to search for some more up to date specs. I’ll continue to update this from time to time as new questions (or answers) come up.

Picture your audience

Before you make any decisions about your show, know who it is for. Your topic might be incredibly niche and have an audience in the hundreds, which is very different to a potentially larger but less engaged audience. See the classic blog post from Kevin Kelly on the power of 1000 true fans. Knowing your potential audience, where they hang out online, and how they’re likely to support you, will help your decision making. I have a self-guided slide set for refining your project before you start working on it. It’s also ok to know who you don’t want as your audience, and make choices that don’t actively include them. Do this early and clearly so people aren’t disappointed. For example, having a show with clearly noted explicit language selects away from young kids and their parents.

The length and format of your show are a product of your aims

I personally like shows in the 25-35 minute range. But, having said that, I love Shortwave, which regularly clocks in at 10 minutes, and I’m disappointed when an episode of You’re Wrong About is less than an hour.

Know your audience and the level of depth you want to explore a topic in. The frequency of episodes and the amount of time you have to prepare and edit will also affect how long episode end up. Record a few episodes first and share them with people you trust will give you good feedback.

The best interviews are conversations

Good interviews are just conversations that are intentionally lopsided, and good interviewers make the conversation feel like it’s not lopsided. Do your homework, write out some questions, and then take a step back and actually listen to the person you’re interviewing.

Anyone who has done even a few interviews has already faced most of the questions you first think of. There are some fixes for this: push through your initial brainstorming, think about the specific angles on their topic that are most relevant to your audience and (again) listen to what the person is telling you. Like many podcasting skills, good interviewing takes practice, and you can practice by staying curious about humans you interact with in any area of your life, not just your podcast guests.

Use the best mics you can, but don’t over-invest

You don’t have go and buy the fanciest tech. If you have access to a studio, great! If you don’t, then decide what your budget is. When we started Lingthusiasm, Gretchen recorded into her phone, because we were running the show on no budget and had no idea if we’d stick it out more than 6 months. When we started making money we got Gretchen a Zoom H4n to match mine. It’s still not the fanciest, but it’s rugged and adequate, especially if you make sure you’re in a closet with some blankets. Do I regret the earlier episodes of Lingthusiasm don’t sound amazing? Not as much as I would have regretted investing hundreds of dollars in a podcast that had 4 episodes.

Edit your show

Even a light edit will make the show easier for your audience to listen to, and show respect for the people you interview. I know people believe there’s an aesthetic of authenticity that comes with not editing, but all podcasting is a performance. Editing is a politeness to your audience.

Editing means a very wide range of things. You can do full production editing, including the addition of music, multiple different voice-overs and voices reading parts (e.g. getting someone else to read author quotes to bring them to life) and additional sound effects. Or you might just edit out the start and end of the recording, and any false starts and errors throughout the show. A lot of the pauses and fillers we use in conversation are designed for an audience who is in on the conversation and can reply, and can feel like they’re holding up a conversation when you’re a passive listener like a podcast audience. Many of the best conversational podcasts are given an edit to make them easier on the ears.

I use audacity to edit

Audacity is free to use. It takes a little longer to learn than something like GarageBand, but once you know how to use it, you’ll be much faster at editing. I appreciate that it has stayed pretty much the same since I started using it almost 15 years ago.

Get your levels right

Once you’ve edited your show, making sure there aren’t too many loud laughs, or your two hosts aren’t unbalanced in loudness. You’ll also need to make sure your podcast isn’t too loud or soft compared to others in people’s list. You need to regularise it. A lot of podcasts regularise to -16 LUFS. A few other numbers bounce around (-14, -18), but this is what we use and no one complains. Audacity can’t do it. You can process a certain number of hours of audio for free each month using the web-based Auphonic. It’s great.

There’s lots of great free music to use

You want to look for music that has a license that’s free to use. Even if you don’t plan to make money from your podcast, make sure the license includes commercial use so you don’t limit your future options. SoundCloud and YouTube have lots of options, as does Kevin MacLeod - who has created royalty-free music in a massive range of genres.

Web hosting is different to getting your show on iTunes

We use SoundCloud to upload and share our audio. It’s fine. I have no complaints. Once you’ve uploaded a few hours of audio you’ll have to pay annually for a pro account. Anchor seems to be a good new competitor, it’s free - I assume they make money off people choosing to run ads on their podcasts. You then generate an RSS feed, which is the thing that points all the podcast players to the place you’ve uploaded your recording. You’ll then have to add your show to major podcast platforms (Apple Podcast, Google Podcast), smaller ones will pick it up from there.

It takes a few days for your show to get picked up on all the podfeeders

Launching a podcast is a bit of a mess - it will go live on your hosting site but then you’ll have to set yourself up with iTunes, Google Podcast etc. and that can take a few days to update and populate. The sites that are popular, and the process of linking into those spaces, changes often enough that you should just google advice when you’re ready to launch, and give yourself a few days. This is part of why some podcasts launch a short ‘episode 0′ or a trailer, it gets the show set up.

Transcripts should be one of the first things you fund

Not every podcast has the time or funds to make transcripts. I do think they’re important though; for people who can’t or don’t want to listen, for discoverability and for your own record when you can’t remember when you talked about a specific story. If you have any time or money and want to be taken seriously at all, this should be one of your earliest priorities. This is even more true for educational podcasts, where a transcript ensures all students can appreciate the content of your show.

You don’t neeeeed a website, but it’s handy

You can run a show using a hosting platform and some social media. Having a website does allow you to add more information about the show and yourself. The Lingthusiasm page has grown over the years as the show has; we made a page for our liveshow events, we provide a list of episodes by topic, information about our Discord community, and our marvelous wall of supporters. The website was much more minimal when we started, but compared to just having a SoundCloud it gave the show room to grow.

You probably want socials, but be selective

You need to make your podcast discoverable by people who are likely to be your audience. Social media is one way to do this, but it’s better to be actually engaging on fewer social platforms than overextend yourself. Focus on platforms that are the intersection of where your possible fans are likely to be and where you enjoy being.

Funding a podcast takes time, and takes work

There are three main revenue streams for podcasts: advertising, crowdfunding and merch. A fourth option is institutional support (through your university or business), but then you’re beholden to the funder. Whichever revenue options work for you, think about them and plan towards them early. Part of that is making sure your podcast gets in as many ears as possible. Most successful podcasts spend as much, if not more, time on marketing, audience engagement and business planning as they do podcasting (it’s just not very glamorous to admit that!).

Choose whether each episode can stand alone

Some podcasts build a narrative over multiple episodes. Others allow listeners to jump in at any point and listen in any order. Whatever you choose, make this clear to your audience. This choice is going to influence a range of choices around what information to include in the opening and closing, how topical to make the show, and how you promote your podcast.

Seasons are a great structure to keep a podcast manageable

Regardless of whether your show runs in a sequence, planning a season with a fixed number of episodes allows you to take some time off, to maybe change some things that weren’t working, or to step away from the project with a podcast that hasn’t been left hanging.

#podcast #podcasting #podcasts

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harryhandstan · 4 years ago

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washed away in you

I don’t have much to say except I appreciate your patience with me as I worked on this piece! I apologize again for all the confusion with posting and deleting and now reposting. This is the third part to my Dad!Harry series. Once again you don’t have to read those to understand this one, but I’ve linked them below in case you would like to revisit them. :)

Thank you to @taintedwonder for reading over part of this for me!

word count: 4.2k

needles tw // (small mention towards the end)

I Want Your Belly (part one) | Wonderful and Warm (part two) | writing tag | masterlist

y’all have already been so good to me but as always likes, rbs, and comments are welcome!!

Of all the weeks to be put on bed rest, it had to be the week that Harry started filming for his new movie role.

Technically you were on modified bed rest, which meant resting as much as possible but still moving around as necessary, but the phrase terrified Harry enough that he was doing whatever he could to keep you still. It hadn’t been an easy task, you were in your 8th month of pregnancy, quickly approaching your due date, and there still seemed to be a mountain of important things to get done before your son’s arrival.

It had only been two days since you’d started having what you thought were contractions. It had forced you and Harry to realize just how unprepared the two of you were when you had to rush out of the house at 2 a.m. with nothing packed for what could possibly be the night of your child’s appearance into the world. Just the two of you with disheveled hair and rumpled pajamas under the harsh lighting of the ER exam room. 8 hours of tests and scans and a visit from your doctor later, you returned home to fall back in bed and catch up on the sleep you had missed.

“Listen you’re both new to all this..I get it. But you’re putting too much stress on your body and that’s what caused this tonight. I know it’s hard but, take a week, relax, bed rest as much as possible. I’ll see you in my office again in a few days just to make sure everything is progressing along like we want. If there’s still too much stress on the baby, we may have to push your due date up a little earlier. But we don’t want to do that if we can avoid it.”

Currently you were in the nursery, where most of the last minute things to do remained. You were standing at the changing table, folding a set of onesies to be put away. Harry had been urging you for the past 10 minutes to sit down.

“Harry, I have been in bed all night, or as much of it as your son allowed me to be without kicking me in the ribs or pressing on my bladder. I just wanna get these folded and put away and I’ll be done.”

“Well you can at least sit while y’doing them. Or, let me finish ‘em.” His hands fall on your shoulders, gently guiding you towards the rocking chair in the corner. You gesture for him to bring the basket closer, “And why is he only my son when he’s causing you trouble?”

“Maybe cause it was your birthday treat that got us into this mess. Or because he already likes to tease us so much. Besides, you can’t do them, I have a system.”

“Yeah, a birthday treat planned by you. And I know the system, you showed me two days ago.”

“You knew the system, we changed it.”

“We? I’ve barely been home how’ve we..”

“I may have called your Mum again.” You shrug, propping your feet up on the small ottoman positioned in front of the chair, “She and I agreed it’s better this way.”

“You didn’t think it was important to notify me of this system you and y’new bestie have thought up?” He’s turned to lean his back against the changing table, arms folded across his chest. As much as he wants to be upset, he’s over the moon that you and Anne have become so much closer over the past few months. Between his mom and yours, plus your sister and his, he was thrilled to see you had so much support for days when he couldn’t be there. Anne had offered to fly out to spend the week with you, as did your mom, but you put them both off, promising you would need them more the few weeks after the birth.

“Been a little busy growing a human here, Harry. May have slipped my mind. I would’ve gotten around to it eventually.”

“Right, you can just tell me where everything goes then.” He’s already worked his way through folding the last of the pile, smiling proudly at you as you lean your head back and close your eyes, sinking further into the chair.

“Socks in the second drawer to the left, hats in the middle. If the onesies are newborn sized, they go to the right. Anything bigger than that gets tucked in the baskets by size there in the middle shelf of the closet, if you can find room.”

Between the two of your families and your group of mutual friends, you’d been given 4 baby showers over the past few months, combining with the items you and Harry had supplied for yourselves. People had been more than generous in helping stock the nursery for your little one.

“All done. How ‘bout some breakfast now?”

“You don’t have time. You have to be on set in less than an hour. I’ll make myself something in a bit. I may go back to sleep for a while, just got up to see you off and wanted to put those things away.”

“Always have time for you, angel,” He offers his hand to help you lift yourself up, “Maybe a smoothie?”

“Alright, if I let you make me a smoothie, will you take yours to go? Don’t want you to be late because of me.”

“Deal. But only if you let me tuck you back into bed before I go.”

“Deal.” You lean up slightly to accept the sweet kiss he offers before shuffling off to the kitchen together.

“Harry?”

“Hmm?”

“I’ve decided. You’re not allowed to look.”

You knew he wasn’t listening, trying to maybe, but not really. He sits across the room at the desk in the corner of your bedroom, glasses perched on the end of his nose, guitar in his lap, journal open in front of him. He’s in writing mode, something that usually takes you at least 30 minutes to coax him from and convince him to come to bed. Not that you ever wanted to interrupt his process, but tonight you’re feeling anxious about your impending delivery, dread slowing working its way through your body.

It had been only a few days since your follow up appointment with your doctor. She had deemed you fit to come off bed rest, but urged you to continue to try to keep your stress level to a minimum as much as possible. Easier said than done, but you were finding small ways to relax yourself when you could; meditation, music, reading. But tonight you just wanted Harry for reassurance.

In your nightly scroll through one of your recent favorite mom-to-be blogs, you had come across an article on the difficulty of delivery. You appreciated moms who were brave enough to share their stories online and this person in particular had included a video. Despite your anxiety, you clicked to watch, curiosity overriding any fear rising in your chest.

When he finally puts away the guitar and the journal and sheds his soft purple robe to swim up the bed to settle next to you, he asks, “Were y’sayin’ something earlier, m’love? Got lost there for a bit, m’sorry.”

His writing sessions were normally done in his office or the studio, but the past few weeks he’d preferred to do them here. Liked the idea of you trying to softly hum along to a new tune he was working through, occasionally offering your opinions about what you liked or didn’t. It was rare that you disliked anything, but he liked that you didn’t shy away from being honest with him. His favorite though? The sight of you, an open book, hand always resting on the side of your belly while you read. It was just as much a comfort for him to be near you these days as it was for you.

“Yeah. I’ve decided. You’re not allowed to look when I deliver this baby.”

His head rests on your thigh, only the side of his face visible as he looks up at you, but it’s enough to see the disappointment flash before he composes himself, not wanting to upset you.

“Alright. What d’you mean by that? Like..you don’t want me in the room or..”

“No, no, I want you in the room, that was never a question. You’re just not allowed to look when I’m pushing. I watched a video and I’m traumatized and I just..”

He sits up quickly, “You watched a birthing video? Without me?”

“Yeah, earlier when you were zoned out. You’ve never seen one?”

“Never been curious enough to watch one ‘til now. Not ‘til I thought of you having our babe. Show me the one you watched?”

You’re hesitant. Truly you’re touched he’s so curious and wants to share this experience with you, but right now the thought of him seeing your body change like that is scary. He senses your unease, almost reads your mind; he knows you so well.

“Babe, s’your body. If you really don’t want me t’look, then I won’t. Just..at least show me what you watched so I can see for myself what it’s like, what you’ll go through. S’all m’askin’ for now.”

“Okay, fine,” You pat the bed next to you and he scurries up to sit, his head on your shoulder while you navigate through your browser history to find the video. You start it, but your eyes stay focused on his face.

“Y’not gonna watch it again with me?”

“No,” You drape your arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer so you can rest your head on top of his, “I’d rather watch your reactions this time around.”

You’re curious to see how he reacts to certain parts; his little gasps and winces as the video progresses. When it ends, you’re not surprised to see tears have fallen down his face and made a small wet spot on the front of his t-shirt.

“Harry, you’re not upset with me, are you?”

“‘Course not, meant what I said earlier. If you really don’t want me t’look, then I won’t..but I don’t want you to think I’ll look at you any differently after. You’re givin’ me one of the greatest gifts anyone ever has, if anything I love you more than I ever thought I could. And that’s only gonna grow once our boy’s here.”

You run your hands through his hair, not sure what to say. You’ve never had a love this big, one that envelops you so fully. The past few months have shown you just how deeply he cares for you, and just how much your own heart could stretch to fill with your overwhelming love for Harry and now the baby growing inside you.

He doesn’t take offense to your silence, just stills your hand and brings it to his lips, kissing each of your fingertips. He slumps further down the bed, head level with your stomach. He pokes it softly through your shirt. He doesn’t even have to ask anymore, you know what he wants and you’re glad to give in to him. You scoot down to rest your head on your pillow, pulling your shirt up and tucking the fabric under your breasts.

Instantly his head rests on your tummy, a hand reaching around to lay there on the other side of it, wrapping himself around you. You reach over and turn the lamp on your bedside table off, sleep drifting it’s way through your body and mind. You let one hand fall to his back, the other one joining his arm to wrap protectively around your belly.

“Harry?”

“Hmm?”

“You can look. If you want.”

“Y’don’t have to decide tonight. We still have a little time to plan.”

“No. I don’t want to take any of this experience from you. The whole thing’s just a bit scary though.”

“I know it is, m’terrified too. But everything’s gonna be alright. I’m gonna be there for every second of it.”

“I know you are. You’re the only thing that’s kept me sane through all this. You’ve been so good to me, H. Putting up with all my mood swings and late night cravings and whatever I needed.”

“I haven’t had to ‘put up’ with anything. Just want to make you and bub as happy as y’both already make me.” He turns to kiss the side of your stomach before looking up at you, “Comfy? Am I squishin’ you?”

“No, it’s nice. Don’t see how you can be comfy though.”

“I’ll move to my pillow in a bit. Just like being close to you and bub,” He yawns, “Goodnight, babe. Love you both so much.”

“We love you too, Harry. More than you’ll ever know.”

Sleep had been pretty much non-existent in your third trimester. You were lucky if you got a few hours each night and cat naps throughout the day were rare.

Tonight is no different. It’s 3 a.m and once you get up for your fifth trip to the bathroom, you know there’s no point in trying to get comfortable again. Harry will be up soon, and as much as he tries to stay quiet during his morning routine, he always found some way to unintentionally wake you. You couldn’t even sleep through his soft kisses to your forehead to say goodbye anymore.

Normally you take yourself down to the living room to find a mindless tv show or movie to carry you through your insomnia, but Harry also seemed to be infected with your curse of being a light sleeper these days. Most nights he would attempt to join you, sweet enough to not want you to be alone, stubborn enough to not listen each time you urged him to go back to bed. He always paid for it the day after though, dark circles under his eyes and nodding off to sleep throughout whatever he had scheduled.

So in hopes that you wouldn’t wake him by leaving tonight, you reach for the remote to the bedroom tv, muting it so the noise won’t disturb him. You would almost be content enough to stare at him for the rest of the night. The sharp outline of his jaw, freckles scattered across his face that would rival the constellations in the sky, all softened by the moonlight illuminating his face perfectly. As much as you don’t want to wake him, you can’t help but reach out to run the back of your hand over the smooth skin of the man you admire so much. You adore the way even in his sleep he molds to your touch, soft snores and deep, even breaths never stopping as you move up to brush his curls away from his face.

You almost make it through 20 minutes of a movie before his eyes flutter open. You know how much your false contractions from before weighed on him, alarm is quick to flood his face before he has a chance to take in his surroundings.

You answer before he has a chance to let worry take over, “It’s alright. We’re okay. Just the usual..couldn’t sleep.”

He rubs his eyes to clear them, “What time s’it?”

“4:30.”

He squints slightly at the movie playing before chuckling, “How many times y’think you’ve watched this one? Know it’s been at least a dozen or so in the last month.”

“It’s my favorite. One of them, anyway. It’s always been soothing to me.”

“Bet you could quote the whole thing by now, even with it muted.”

You glance up at the tv and it only takes a second for you to pinpoint the exact part. You take his comment as a challenge, pushing yourself up out of your nest of pillows to rest your back against the headboard before quoting, “Faith is a bluebird you see from afar. It’s for real, and as sure as the first evening star. You can’t touch it, or buy it, or wrap it up tight. But it’s there just the same, making things turn out right.”

Your voice breaks as you say the last few words. Maybe it’s the combination of exhaustion and all the new fears and hormones running through your mind and body. Nostalgia of watching this when you were younger and now sharing it with your child when they are old enough touches your heart and you can’t stop the tears continuously streaming down your face.

“Baby,” He pushes himself up to rest next to you, tugging you until you're pressed close to his side, “Please don’t cry.”

“M’miserable, Harry. I’m as big as the moon and I can’t breathe and my feet always hurt and I’m just..ready for him to be here. Ready for him to be out so I can hold him and kiss him and put him in his own bed so I can rest in mine again.”

You know you sound childish and whiny and somewhat ridiculous, but being so sleep deprived means all sense has left and so the words come spilling out, a jumbled mess you doubt he even understood.

“I know you are, love. Hate to see you so upset,” He kisses the top of your head, “Certainly as bright as the moon, but not as big. Your body’s as exactly as it should be. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but that’s only cause you’re tired. He’ll be here soon and we’ll have so many people here to help, yeah?”

All you can do is nod, you know he’s right and you know once you have a nap things won’t feel so overwhelming. You pull yourself away from him to wipe your face on your t-shirt. A smile stretches across your lips as the thought enters your mind, “If I’m as bright as the moon, you’re as golden as the sun.”

“Yeah?” He’s blushing now, looking down at his hands before his eyes dart up to meet yours, “Guess that makes bub our little star, huh?”

You giggle before shrugging, “Guess so.”

“By the way,” His hand rests on your thigh, “We gonna keep calling him bub or we gonna pick a name?”

“Bub’s cute. Bub Styles.” You wrinkle your nose at the thought, “I just want it to be perfect for him, you know? I feel like I need to see his face before I just blindly pick a name. We could definitely narrow down some options though and see which one suits him best.”

“We’ll think of something special, eh? Somethin’ just f’him.”

“Yeah, we will,” You suck in a sharp intake of breath at a particularly hard kick from within your stomach. Harry’s head snaps to look over your face before looking down to where your hand lays on your belly.

“What’s wrong?” His eyes are wide, on edge as he waits for your answer.

“It’s fine he’s just..ah, being a little rowdy this morning.” You take his hand from your thigh and press it to where the kicks were landing, “Right here. Think that’s his butt, his head’s down here, and..ah, his feet are right about here. Can you feel him?”

His palm lays flat across the front of your belly, “S’amazing, never gets old. Bet it feels so..weird to you though.”

“At first, yeah, but got used to it pretty quickly. It’s comforting now, like he’s saying hello or contributing to our conversations when we talk.”

He puts his mouth almost right against your tummy, so close his breath tickles and you feel the vibrations when he speaks, “Take it easy on mumma, little one. Just a bit longer, yeah? Can’t wait to see ya face. Bet y’so handsome like daddy, just gotta be a lil’ more patient like mummy, alright?”

“Think maybe he’s ready for his pre-breakfast snack?”

“Dunno..I’ll ask him though,” He bends again, “That why y’bein’ such a brat to mum, huh? Woke her up early cause you were hungry? Alright, daddy’ll make your usual.”

He kisses your stomach, before straightening to where he’s level with your face, “That sound good?”

Your “usual” was a bowl of what had been your biggest craving throughout your pregnancy; fruit. On nights like this when sleeplessness couldn’t be defeated, the two of you normally gave in pretty quickly and had breakfast together. On days when you were able to sleep through Harry’s departure, you would always wake to the bowl already prepared and ready for you. Oftentimes there would be a quickly scribbled note with the words “Love, H” stuck to the top or the side of the bowl, like you didn’t already know who had left it for you.

“You’re spoiling him already, Harry.”

He smacks a quick kiss to your cheek, pulling back just a second before diving back in to peck another one on your other cheek, “Tryin’ to spoil you too, angel.”

Contractions, real ones you were sure this time, had started 30 minutes ago. As much as Harry wanted to rush you out of the house in your pajamas, you had insisted on at least 5 minutes to change and pull your hair into a quick ponytail before gathering your bag and dashing down the stairs.

Just as Harry’s hand lands on the doorknob, you tug on the sleeve of his jacket, “Harry, stop for a second.”

“Why? Are you having one now?”

“Kiss me.”

“What?”

“This is one of our last moments before we become parents. I want you to slow down, take a deep breath, and kiss me.”

“You’re impossible, you know that? Active labor and you stop me for a kiss.” He rolls his eyes but you can see his shoulders drop, relaxing just enough to press his lips firmly against yours. You reach your hand up and around to the back of his neck, deepening it for a moment before drawing back to scan his face.

“Better?” Your hand continues to work through his hair, happy to watch his face relax slightly at your touch.

“Much. How are you so calm?”

“I don’t know, really. I thought I would be scared, and I am but..I’m ready. So ready to meet him.”

“Me too. Let’s go.” His hand falls to the small of you back, leading you out the door and to the car.

Once you arrive at the hospital, he doesn’t leave your side, not even when the nurse suggests he do so while you get your epidural. She agrees to let him stay, but makes him sit in a chair in front of you and sternly tells him not to look.

He holds both of your hands, squeezing them tightly as an attempt to distract you. He knows how much you hate needles, how the thought of this procedure alone had scared you almost as much as the idea of labor. You release a deep sigh of relief when they announce it’s done, and he helps you settle back into bed, tucking the blanket around you.

“So proud of you, baby. You’re already doing amazing.”

Things progress much faster than you ever thought they would, and it’s only three hours before you’re ready to push. Harry’s there for every second of it, hand behind your back and small encouragements in your ear when you think you can’t go any further.

“M’tired, H.” The room is full of people, your doctor and a set of nurses, but his focus stays on you; simply existing together in that moment. Small pieces of hair have come loose from your ponytail, clinging to the sweat now covering your forehead. He sweeps them away before resting his hand on your shoulder.

“I know y’are, lovie, but you’re so so close. Doin’ so incredible,” His smile is so wide, beaming at you when he leans closer, “Y’look gorgeous too, never seen you look more stunning than now.”

That has a laugh bursting from you, still breathless when you reply, “You’re such a bad liar.”

“M’serious! Know better than to lie to you.” He winks just before working his arm around behind your back again, giving you the motivation you needed to keep going.

It’s not long before you hear what you’re certain is one of the best sounds you’ll ever hear, the sweet sound of your baby boy’s cry as he enters the world.

An hour later, both of you are still in awe of your little one, sleeping peaceful now in their dad’s strong arms. Harry’s wedged himself next to you in the hospital bed, long legs stretched in front of him. He keeps looking between where your head is propped on his shoulder and the baby.

He breaks the silence first, “Definitely think he has your hair. S’nice and soft.”

“Think it’ll be darker like yours though. Maybe he’ll have your eyes.” You reach over to run your finger along your baby’s nose.

He looks between you and the baby again, a prideful smile brightening his face. He smushes his lips against your temple, and you close your eyes as the feeling of adoration combined with the exhaustion of the day washes over you.

You hear him whisper just as you’re drifting to sleep, “My moon and star, together at last.”

#harry styles imagine #harry x reader #my writing #dad!harry #still not perfect but I like it so much more #hope you all enjoy it!

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