3 Pro-tip for Pro-blogging

Are you a casual blogger like me? Or are you making serious bucks out of your blog? If you're the later, please oh pretty please share some of your tips with me cuz I could use extra cash >.<

In any case, if you have a blog of your own, then you'd understand how gynormously huge a task writing a blog post can be! Add a deadline to it, then you're in for some serious slaving hours in front of the screen. 

No worries though! I have a thing or two to help you out with the bits and pieces of what makes a blog post great, regardless of the blogging platform you're on!

1. Storage, schedules and connectivity

Here's what most bloggers do when they're on a generic blogging platform i.e. Blogger and Wordpress - Draft a post, add a few photos here, another photo there, proofread, some final adjustments to the post layout, fonts etc. and hit "Publish". Yeap, your's truly is guilty as charged too. 

The thing is, a lot of us don't realise that the photos, and any multimedia content that were uploaded to the blog post, they take up space. With the use of DSLR camera, one photo can 'cost' anywhere between 5MB to 30MB. Add a video to that, you might be overlooking how much you're actually 'spending', in terms of capacity.. 

Wait what?! So you're saying that I'm 'paying' for the photos and videos? Yeap - although not yet. Even with your own domain and hosting, you are usually allocated a certain amount of storage capacity for your multimedia files. Let me introduce you to one nifty trick that I learned. It's called Google Drive. 

At this point, it is safe to assume that if you have Gmail, you have 15GB of storage space shared across your Gmail, Google Drive and Google Plus. If you inspect closely at Google Drive management screen, you'll notice under Google+ Photos - Photos bigger than 2048 x 2048 use your storage. Everything smaller is free. Yeap, that's right. This is the magic threshold that can save you a ton of headache in the future. Sadly, your videos will always take up a portion of the allocated space, but if you manage your photos right, you'll have more space for your videos - among other stuffs. 

This comes with the exception for photo bloggers who need to put up very high quality photos. But fret not! Another solution if you run out of space are cloud storage services i.e. Dropbox and Copy. Do check them out. They're also free - to a certain extent, of course. 

As for schedules and connectivity, if you're already on Gmail, do check out Google Calendar and Google+. They're both handy if you're blasting out your posts. One thing I have yet to figure out how is to simultaneously post to both Facebook and Google+. There seem to be no integration between these services yet - but correct me if I'm wrong (and please, do provide a step-by-step guide. Thanks)

2. Photo Editors and Manipulators

Remember what I told u about Google+ photo trick? Well, to execute it, you need some sort of photo editors. I highly recommend Photoshop if you have the cash, skills and patience. Wait what?! Patience? Yeah - editing a photo is a time consuming process, and probably the most wonderful yet dreadful experience in drafting a blog post. 5 to 10 photos are manageable with Phototshop, but what if you don't want to touch up the photos and just want to resize them so that they are free on Google+ photos? 

My tool - Image Resizer for Windows. Trust me when I say this tool has helped me tremendously. With as little as 4 clicks, you can resize one photo, or a whole folder of photos seamlessly! Best part - it does not replace the original photo (unless if you specify it to, but why would you want to do that?) You can then feel free to further edit the photo however you want to.  

Ok so you've resized your photo. There's still that daunting task of uploading it. Well fret no more fellow bloggers - Picasa is here to save the day! Simply sign in to your Picasa account using your Gmail, and you should be able to sync the photos (and folders) to Google+ Photos. From there you can change the permissions, and import it into your blog post. Easy peasy. 

3. Proofreading and post-publising
I am very particular with my writings - finishing every few sentence and then deleting the whole paragraph and restructuring them every so often so that I am able to get what I meant across in a manner and tone that I meant for it to be delivered. Honestly though, I can never tell if my tone of writing is delivered as I imagined it, because everyone has their own 'reading voice'. I do try my best though. 

In any case, I do want originality - and I do want my writings to be my own. Save for when I am citing or referring to another, then I may state my source and credit as necessary. Plagiarism is the last thing I wanna do, and so should you. Make your content your own. 

But how, you may ask? Try using Plagium. It will definitely ensure that your text is your own, or will tell you (and your possible readers too), otherwise. The first 25,000 characters - read characters not words is free, but if you're willing to fork out a few bucks, you can use the member benefits such as Deep Search and File Uploading. Why is it important? Well generally you won't need to submit your writing to a plagiarism checker, but say you're paraphrasing from another source, you might want want to do so. It's really your own call, but it's a nice to have option in my opinion. 

For post-publishing, I use a nifty tool called NetworkedBlogs. With a few simple setup steps, you can post your published blog post to Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, it does not put in the #tags to allow for more coverage. I can live with that - for now. Otherwise, I would actually go to my published posts and manually click on the share to social media buttons. Troublesome, but needs to be done. 

What if the title and URL is too long? Especially in cases of Twitter which only allows 140 (please correct me if I'm wrong) character limits per post? I think Twitter has it's own URL shortening feature and it is automatic (again, correct me if I'm wrong) but I personally use bit.ly to shorten my URL because it allows me to count how many clicks each of my URL has. 

So with these collection of blogging tools, you're off to a better and enhanced blogging experience. So go ahead and enjoy creating contents for your readers with half the worry and effort! Give me a shout out if you're already using the tools - any one or a few or all of them. Don't forget, if you have better tools other than listed above, do let me know in the comments. I'll definitely check it out!