Starting a new blog and need it to be a success? Begin by taking your blogging mobile and avoiding these pitfalls:
1. Plagiarizing Photos
Copyright infringement is a huge problem with blogs, and most beginning writers don’t recognize its importance and don’t know how to find infringement-free images. Thankfully, there are at least two websites and apps that can help with this:
Flickr
Flickr allows you to search for images limited by creative commons license, so you won’t be guilty of copyright infringement. The advanced search options let you limit results by image, video, screenshot, date and creative commons license, among other things. With thousands of images available, you can easily find whatever you are looking for.
Instagram and Followgram
Instead of looking for a picture from someone else, create your own with Instagram. The Followgram app allows you to favorite and browse your own photos or those of your friends as well. Upload photos on your computer or browse them on your BlackBerry z10 smartphone to discover the images you want to use.
2. Ignoring Social Media
One of the best ways to gain an audience is by taking advantage of your fans on every social platform. Ignoring your pages on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest is one of the worst thing you can do. Instead, try:
Facebook and Twitter
Whenever you post a new article, create a post about it with Facebook, then continue to feed off the content from your article on your Facebook page. Ask questions, upload pictures, or find other ways to bring attention and interaction to what you are doing on both your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Facebook also has a scheduling option so that you can create awesome posts in advance and have them go out when you want without needing to worry about them.
3. Running Out of Ideas
If you are blogging a lot, it can be easy to run out of things to say. There are books written about how to generate ideas, but these two apps can help, too:
Evernote
Made to keep you organized, Evernote allows you to take notes, save pictures and even record voice messages across multiple devices. You can save links to articles you found on your laptop and store them with notes you wrote on your smartphone. The best part? The whole app is searchable, so you can find exactly what you need.
bMind
One of the best ways to come up with new ideas is through brainstorming. The bMind app lets you create a non-linear brainstorm no matter where you are. Let your mind run wild as you draw new lines and ideas from your central thought. Not only can this app help you brainstorm ideas, its mind mapping aspect helps you immediately organize your thoughts into a great article.
What other beginner mistakes have you seen in a blog? What apps or tricks did you find to avoid them?