Posted on
by

Meet Pablo, the easiest way to create engaging social media images. Here are 10 ways to get started using Pablo today!

Source: blog.bufferapp.com

One of the keys to social media mastery is adding attractive images to your posts. But finding the right image and adding text to it can be difficult and time-consuming, especially if you don’t create and edit graphics for a living! The folks at Buffer want to help you succeed with an image-and-text generator called Pablo.

My first attempt went pretty well, and should be appearing on Twitter and LinkedIn shortly (as I had Buffer schedule the posts, of course).

Choose from one of the background images, then add text (or edit the default). You can move the text block around if what you wrote doesn’t fit on the image.

This post gives you more ideas for using Pablo.

I haven’t tried Canva, a similar app backed by Guy Kawasaki, but Pablo is very easy to use. What do you think?

See on Scoop.it – Build Your Author Platform: New Rules

Posted on
by

Six Ways for Authors to Engage on Medium – The Story – Medium

You’ve just spent a year, two years, five, writing your book. Now you’re releasing it out into the world, and you just w…

Source: medium.com

Medium is becoming a very interesting space to post content, especially for professional writers. While it should not become your social home base (This should ALWAYS be a space you have control over), it is definitely worth hanging out in.

Since this set of good ideas for engaging with this platform, Medium has also made it easier to contribute more “blog-like” content.

See on Scoop.it – Build Your Author Platform: New Rules

Posted on
by

Excited to tell you that I’ll be speaking to the Independent Writers of Chicago (IWOC) on Tuesday, March 10th on “Building Your Author Platform.”

Freelancers Building a Platform

Build Your Author PlatformWhat am I going to talk about? Still working on it, but I intend to focus on:

  • The value of building a platform for freelance journalists
  • The value of writing books for freelancers of all kinds
  • An overview of the 14 steps to building a platform that Carole Jelen and I detail in our book
  • Reminding you why social media is critical in building that audience.

Of course, I’ll take questions, and give away a copy of Build Your Author Platform: The New Rules.

Networking and refreshments start at 5PM at the Gratz Center (Room 4A), 126 E. Chestnut Street, Chicago (just behind the Fourth Presbyterian church pictured below). My part of the program starts at 6PM.

English: Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago...
Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, taken from across Michigan Ave. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More information and advance registration for the event at the IWOC website.

Look forward to meeting more readers, and writers.

Related: Surprise from SlideShare

This morning I got an email from SlideShare telling me that my presentations were in the top 25% most-viewed on the site in 2014. The top two slide decks were:

Yep, you read that last one  right. My five-year-old talk did nearly as well in page views as my most recent outing. For that, I thank (again) my Aussie conference buddy Sarah Maddox. She was in my audience that day in 2009. Last February she was gracious enough to include the deck in her “Super Useful List” of technical writing tools. One of these days, I need to update that deck…

Let me also point out that the LinkedIn presentation also received a terrific boost from the Washington, DC chapter of STC.

All that to say that my IWOC slides will also be available at SlideShare after the talk. Feel free to share the deck with your readers too.