There are a lot of things that about writing you can’t automate. But there’s also a few that you can. So far, no cool robot is going to help you form the structure of your argument. And while you can get the internet to generate your metal band’s name or corporate gibberish boilerplate, you probably can’t…
Today’s post is about writing tips, to be sure. If it weren’t, I’d have just treated you to some pretty disingenuous clickbait. But I want to be clear that these are writing tips for blogs that have a mission. Why make that distinction? Well, because if you’re writing for personal fulfillment, then you should write…
Alright, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. Hit Subscribe’s mission involves helping companies with their blogs, prominently including writing posts for them. So if you ask us whether you should outsource blogging, you can probably predict our opinion on the matter. But here’s the flip side to that. We didn’t just randomly decide out…
Long before the concept of “interlink” or “blog” ever came about, we had newspapers and magazines. As I grew up, my taste in these things changed. Sports Illustrated replaced kids magazines, and then Time, local newspapers, and Popular Science replaced those. But the way I consumed the periodicals remained largely the same. I had columnists…
Images. You know your blog posts need them. But they’re sure a pain to whip up, aren’t they? You can craft things by hand with various levels of effort, using anything from Canva (excellent for non-designers, if you want to take time) to GIMP (powerful and free but a steep learning curve) to Adobe Spark (easy to use…
Blogging can seem deceptively easy. You write a blog post about whatever’s on your mind whenever you feel like it. Then, you sit back and wait for the inbound marketing to happen to you. Heh, I wish. Instead, reality intrudes. Writing about whatever you feel like (which is often yourself) doesn’t work very well for…
At Hit Subscribe, we’re facing a bit of a problem. Here’s some background. We have a team of authors who write for our growing number of clients. A few of our authors are specialists, and they pair well with clients who want their blog to focus on niche topics. But for clients who just want to pull…
I make an earnest effort to fight the curse of knowledge. Truly, I do, because it’s essential for any decent blogger. But I struggle with this when new bloggers and aspiring bloggers approach me with the following sentiment. I don’t know what to write about because bloggers I follow have already covered everything I know.…
In this post about a mailing list, I’m going to depress you and then make you feel better. And I’m going to depress you about how others consume your social media and blog posts. Don’t worry. I’m not going to depress you in an existential, Kafkaesque kind of way. Think more of a cognitive-bias-busting kind…
This is a question I’ve now received from a variety of parties, in a variety of circumstances. Hit Subscribe clients with serious revenue, freelancers, and employed individual contributors have asked this. Simply put, they want to know if they should guest post. First off, what is a guest post? That’s pretty easy. A guest post…
We’ve arrived at a mission statement for the Hit Subscribe blog. As an aside, I recommend this to all of our clients, our followers, and our authors — your blog should have a mission statement that explains who you’re helping and what you’re helping them do. Here’s the Hit Subscribe blog’s mission statement: We help techies…
When people think of blog comments (or any comments) in the abstract, they tend to think of humanity’s worst offerings. They think of a despicable YouTube comment troll or someone stalking a blog and endlessly nitpicking. But when it comes to our own blogs, we view the situation a bit differently. Our blog comments are…
The mission today? To teach you to add Google Analytics to WordPress. In pursuit of that goal, I have a video below showing you exactly how to go about doing this. But if you’d like a deeper understanding of all of the whys and wherefores, I’m going to cover some background as well. What Do…
I have a personal blog. It’s about literature, a lifelong love of mine and my main area of study. For many years, this blog was a geeksplosion of shop-talk, assumptions, and general thinking aloud in the area in which I’d consider myself an expert. Want posts about zines at the crossroads of art and craft?…
You’ve probably heard at some point or another that your blog post needs an image. But why? Google the question, and you’ll get a lot of wishy-washy reasons and unsubstantiated claims. This post’s number one reason you should include image is because “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Then, rather than explain why this is relevant,…