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Showing posts from March, 2018

The Best Free Stock Photo Sites: How to Get Royalty-Free Images for All Your Creative Projects

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  We’ve all been there before. You’re working on a crackerjack creative project, but something’s missing. Maybe you’re designing the cover of your next self-published bestselling novel. Maybe you’re laying out a website for a client’s business. Maybe you want to add a splash of color somewhere in next week’s blog post… but you just can’t seem to find the right kind of imagery for the job. The Internet has made finding unique and compelling images simultaneously ridiculously easy and deceptively difficult. Millions of photos, drawings, and other renderings are available at the click of a mouse, but figuring out which ones you’re actually allowed to use is the key to avoiding costly legal action. Of course you want the best, boldest, and most beautiful images around—but you also don’t want to run afoul of sticky copyright laws . What’s an enterprising professional to do? 7 Great Sites for Great Stock Images Stock photos have been an integral part of design for quite a while

How to Make a Content Calendar for Blogging Success

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For many, many , MANY writers, the process of blogging begins like this: Step One: Realize you promised yourself you’d write a blog post today. Step Two: Sit down to write the blog post. Step Three: Stare at an empty screen and struggle to come up with an idea to write about. Step Four becomes one of three things, for most people in about equal degrees of frequency: Give up and go do something else, skipping that day’s post entirely. Write a tepid blog post about something you finally come up with. Get inspired and write a pretty good post. This, to use a technical term, sucks . But what if I told you there was a better way? What if I told you that way not only prevented that kind of blog blocking, but also helped your entire blog perform better on search engines? What if I told you it would even save you time while writing? I’m going to tell you all of those things. Welcome to the brave (not so) new world of: Content Calendars. What Is a Content Calendar? A content ca

179: Write a Bestselling Memoir: The True Story that Became a New York Times Bestseller with Regina Calcaterra

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Regina Calcaterra is the New York Times best-selling author of Etched in Sand . It’s a true story memoir about five siblings who survived an unspeakable childhood on Long Island. Why She Wrote a Memoir Regina was inspired to write her own memoir in part because she read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls when it was published in 2005. It was the first memoir Regina had read about someone wrote about a horrible tragedy without being a victim. Etched in Sand is Jeannette’s memoir about growing up in poverty with parents who are mentally ill. It tells the story of how she and her siblings coped and grew up in that environment. Jeannette’s memoir can be difficult to read because of what happens to her and her family. It struck Regina that Jeanette’s memoir was written without pity or victimization. How She Got a Memoir Published Once Regina had the idea to write her memoir it always stayed with her. She decided to take the plunge years later, and she signed up for a workshop put o