How To Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral Part Two

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Catherine Balavage

In the first post on how to make your blog, and your blog posts, go viral we covered content, social media sharing, titles, tags and keywords. Next up we have more advice for helping your hard work pay off.

Post at The Right Time

Doing a post on Christmas Day probably won’t get a lot of hits. Posting on a Friday evening is not ideal either. Have a think when people will be more likely to be online. You can research when people are on Twitter and Facebook. Use your Google analytics to find out when the ideal time is to reach your readers.

Share your post in your Newsletter

A newsletter is a brilliant way of making sure your great posts get another chance. Even your most loyal readers may miss a post or two. Build up the people on your newsletter list by doing competitions and having one of the entry requirements signing up to your newsletter.

Press Release

Writing a press release, and distributing it to the media, is a great way to get traffic and build on your reputation. The way to do this is to have an angle and then write about 500 words on that, along with a good pictures and then sending it out to the media. Channel Mum do this well by doing surveys and then releasing the results to the media, along with a statement. A lot of companies and publications do this. You could also write about a relevant subject, or have a personal story. It is all about the angle. Start building a media list. You can do this by signing up for Gorkana’s Consumer Alert or the Diary Directory. You can also find out who the editor of each publication is by looking on Twitter, the actual publication or websites. Getting a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook is also a good idea. It will be full of contacts.

Create Evergreen Content

One of the best ways to turn your blog into a success is to write evergreen posts. What is an evergreen post? It is a post that keeps getting hits. Even years later. These kind of posts tend to be informative or educational. Frost has a number of posts that are still getting hits up to seven years later. Imagine if you wrote an article and it still got thousands of hits years later. That is a great source of traffic and the only effort you had to put in was writing the initial post. Win win.

Get creative with Design

Creating pictures and graphics to go with your post is a great way to market them and improve engagement. Graphically engaging people can be done in many ways. You will get more pins on Pinterest and more clicks on other social media too. Frost writer Jane Cable uses Canva to great effect. Canva is a free design tool which is easy to use. You can also create banner ads, headers, marketing material, ebooks and documents with it. Other design tools to use include Piktochart, Venngage, Infogr.am and Visual.ly

Optimise Your Images

Optimising your images is one of the easiest ways to get more traffic and also one of the most effective. Give your images a title using relevant keywords before you upload them, then add in a few more for good measure. Fill out the Title and Alt Text. This will optimise your images and you will get a lot of traffic through sources like Google Images.

Write Long Form Content

Apparently long form content gets more shares than short form content according to Blog.visme.co in their article 10 Ways to make your content go viral. BuzzSumo did a study in which they found out that posts between 3,000 to 10,000 words were shared the most, while posts that were 1,000 words or less were shared the least. I am quite surprised at this but it is worth thinking about. It is a good idea to make most of your posts over 500 words.

I will be telling you all you need to know about blogging in a series of articles. You can also check out my book, The Ultimate Guide To Becoming a Successful Blogger which is available in ebook and print.

A Taste of Italy – Book Series by Richard Walmsley review by Dr K Thompson

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Margaret Graham

There’s a bit of Italian in all of us – don’t you think? Who of us hasn’t felt a little flutter at an Italian waiter’s wink, or, maybe an attractive Latin lady’s smile? Italy is sunshine, laughter, family values, beautiful people and the Mafia. Richard Walmsley’s series of crime/thrillers capture all of this, perhaps because he spent several years teaching English at Lecce University Southern Italy.

The Commissario Beppe Stancato series: The Case of the Sleeping Beauty, A Close Encounter With Mushrooms and The Vanishing Physicist are set in Abbruzzo, whilst the others are set in Puglia.

The books are all written in a typical and attractive Italian style – reminiscent of Giovanni Guareschi, for those familiar with Don Camillo, and with just a touch of Montalbano. The plots are clever with surprising twists and the books are downright funny as we experience life in rural Italy. Some of the (very likeable) characters reappear in the different books – Rosaria and family in the Puglia books and Beppe and his police team in the others, however each book can be read independently.

If you feel like a really good read – give them a try. Personally Leonardo’s Trouble With Molecules is my favourite.

Others in the series:

Dancing to the Pizzica

The Demise of Judge Grassi

Leonardo’s Trouble With Molecules

Dr K Thompson, author of From Both Ends of the Stethoscope: Getting through breast cancer – by a doctor who knows

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01A7DM42Q http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://faitobooks.co,uk

Valentine’s Day is on the horizon, so what gifts to give?

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Margaret Graham

I thought this Bath Gem Spa Light was fun. It is actually shaped like a gem and ‘the beloved’ floats it in the bath, but it needs 3 x 1.5v AAA batteries so make sure you buy those too. It floats on the surface and projects a light display across the bottom of the bath.

You can select various modes, from relaxing to all singing all dancing. It’s fun.

£12.00 from Hawkins Bazaar shops or www.hawkin.com

For those who’ve come a cropper, Valentine’s Day can be a gut grinding time, so be a friend, buy her/him The Ladybird Book of The Ex. Go on, raise a smile.

It’s £7.99 from Hawkin’s Bazaar shops or www.hawkin.com

A brilliant book by Rory Clements – CORPUS, could be a winner for anyone who loves Robert Harris, and who doesn’t. This is as good, of course it is, it’s Rory Clements after all, the award-winning Sunday Times bestselling author.

It’s 1936, the war has already begun and in Berlin a young Englishwoman evades the Gestapo to deliver vital papers to a Jewish scientist. She is found dead a few weeks later…

This is the first of a series: the atmospheric tension is superb, the research and imaginative range impressive. Loved it. So will ‘the beloved’ if they like this sort of book.

Corpus by Rory Clements. Hardback pub Zaffre: £12.99

The Story of our Lives by Helen Warner

I am preoccupied with friendship at the moment, after seeing someone I know being looked after by teams of her friends; meals cooked, people keeping her company to help her through the gruelling treatment. Unasked, but there for her.

Helen Warner has written a novel about the highs and lows of female friendship as she follows four inspirational women over the course of twenty years of friendship. But of course, that’s not all. There is a lie which could tear them apart – but does it? Read it and see.

Warner writes a pacey thoughtful exploration of friendship: whoever receives it will enjoy it.

The Story of our Lives by Helen Warner. Pub HQ on 8^th February. Hardback/ebook/audio

How To Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral Part One

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Catherine Balavage

So you have written your amazing blog post but how do you get people to read it? In fact, how do you get your blog to stand out and be successful by having your blogs go viral? Here are my tips for writing good content that gets read and shared. For more on blogging check out my blogging book The Ultimate Guide To Becoming a Successful Blogger which is available in ebook and print.

Content is King

If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up to date information that they can explore at will. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters to the editor pages of print magazines.” -Bill Gates.

These three words are the most important. In fact, these are the words your business should live by. Content IS king. Your posts will only go viral if your content is good enough. You have to write great posts that people will not just read but also share. You have to capture their imagination, or tell them something they didn’t know. You have to solve one of their problems or entertain them. You should write consistently good blog posts so people keep coming back for more. Your content should be good, well-written and sharable. But that is not enough, you also have to do the next step.

Tip: Be so good that they can’t ignore you.

Share Your Content

The more you share your content the more likely other people will see it, read it, and share it too. You can share your post on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and Tumblr. Phew. That is a lot of different sites and it can be exhausting sharing your post on all of them. The key is to find the ones that work for your content and then you can ditch the others. Of course, sharing on them all would be great, but you have to think about opportunity costs. Do what works, drop what doesn’t. Burning out never helped anyone.

Keep Your Title Short

It makes it easier to share on Twitter. People also have short attention spans.

Write Catchy Titles

Your title is an advertisement for your article. If it isn’t good, then people won’t click on it. The title is the most important thing because if you do not have a good one then your post will not get read. Take time on your titles and make sure they are catchy, suggest what is in the article, and pique people’s interest. It is also important that the title tells you, or at least gives a hint, on what the post is about. No song titles or vague descriptions. I know it is irritating, but magazines can get away with that, but online you have to let people know why they should click immediately or you will lose them.

According to Peter Sandeen 80% of people don’t read more than the title. So make sure you make it count.

Tag Your Article And Include Good Keywords

Tag your post with relevant keywords. Google don’t penalise for over-tagging anymore but you don’t need to. Just add the most relevant keywords for your article so people can find it easily. Also include the best keywords in your title and in the first paragraph of your post. For example, I would tag this article “blogging” “how to make your blog post go viral” and “blogging tips”. It is also a good idea to go through your old posts and put in relevant keywords in the title and throughout the article. Optimise your old posts and your new ones. You will be more likely to get traffic this way.

This is probably the point where you realise that writing great content and making it go viral is not as easy as it looks. Well it isn’t, but it is a skill to learn and you can do it. You just have to learn how and I will give you the knowledge. Keep an eye out for part two. You can also read my article on how to make money blogging.

Chris Pratt “My Son Thinks Acting is Stupid”

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Catherine Balavage

It can be hard to impress your kids. Parents are often thought of as uncool and poor Chris Pratt has found that even being a famous Hollywood actor does not help. Chris’s four-year-old son Jack thinks that acting is “stupid”.

The truth came out when the 37-year-old was doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything segment where someone asked if his kid thought he was a firefighter. “”He knows I’m an actor, but he thinks it’s kind of stupid. haha! I suppose he’s right!!!”

He also said his wife Anna Faris was his favourite actress and that he would love to work with her one day.

He also told Entertainment Tonight that his son was a natural behind the camera.

“Jack has been on set to visit me on every movie I’ve done since he’s been alive, he’s getting really comfortable with the idea of sitting behind the monitors. He’s like a little director! There was a moment when he was behind the monitors where the director and the producer sit, watching what’s happening on camera. He had his cans (headphones) on and he was looking through his little glasses at the monitor, and he just said, ‘Can I get a coconut water? And he wasn’t like talking to anyone necessarily, which is totally terrible behaviour that we do all the time, where you just like throw a random request into the ether and expect someone to deliver it cause we’re totally spoiled brat baby actors.”

Our Top Picks For Valentine’s Day | Editor’s Pick

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Catherine Balavage

Valentine’s Day is almost here and people are wondering what to get their loved ones. Well look no further. Frost Magazine’s favourite champagne house Taittinger has two superb choices. You cannot go wrong with a bottle of one of these rosé champagnes. Taittinger’s Brut Prestige Rosé

RRP £50.60 (Silver Decanter World Wine Awards 2017)

Waitrose, Asda, Wine Rack, Majestic, JohnLewis.co.uk, The Oxford Wine Company, North and South Wines, Bacchus Wines, Harrods.co.uk, Fenwick, Ann et Vin, The Leamington Wine Company, www.champagnedirect.co.uk

A beautiful, vibrant rosé which makes for a brilliant aperitif and is sure to be an excellent start to the evening. Vitalie Taittinger describes drinking the wine as the ‘sensation of having a big kiss of the wine’ – very fitting to the occasion.

This champagne has just the right amount of sweetness. It is instant happiness in a glass.. Fun and vibrant, it is a great way to start the evening. A gorgeous champagne that makes you instantly happy.

Taittinger Nocturne Rose ‘City Lights’ NV

RRP £54.50

Harrods, Campbell Moore, Ann et Vin, Edencroft Fine Wines, www.champagnedirect.co.uk

A voluptuous wine that will add a touch of sweetness to your Valentine’s day. This rosé is soft and mellow and is perfect to drink well in to the night

A luxurious champagne that lets someone know just how much you love them. Full of flavour and just the right amount of sweetness. Low-key with a big impact. This champagne is divine.

White Rose Bookcafe is bustling with brilliant ideas again.

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Margaret Graham

What a feast of literary events from award winning White Rose Book Café in this month of February. Such a great example of an independent bookshop, and the cakes are great too.

Following on from the highly successful Ann Cleeves evening the BookCafe is featuring a monthly spotlight on a particular genre, author, or selection of titles that take their interest – or why not make a suggestion of your own?

This month they are featuring New Crime Writers on the bloc, as recommended by Ann Cleeves (can’t get much better than that).

Emma Flint – Little Deaths. Abir Mukherjee – A RisingMan, Jane Harper – The Dry, Mick Heron – Slow Horses.

All of which are in stock from 2^nd February.

Poetry is not being ignored. Why not head for Sofas in the Café everyThursday from 8^th February. Just bring along a poem, explain why you chose it and read it aloud. I think I’d choose Vernon Scannell’s Walking Wounded which resonates profoundly, especially as I founded and run the charity, Words for the Wounded, which raises money for wounded and unwell veterans through providing opportunities for aspiring writers.

Timing: 2pm for 30 minutes.It’s FREE

Children’s Story Time is on Fridays, at 10 – 10.30. For pre-school children, and again this is FREE

Valentine’s Special in the café is Red Velvet Hot Chocolate or White Chocolate and Raspberry milkshake.

Can it get any better? Well yes, lovely Thirsk is playing host to the equally lovely Joanna Trollope on 21 February at 7.30 St Mary’s Church. The entry is £10 redeemable against a signed hardback copy of Joanna’s latest book An Unsuitable Match.

Tickets: 01845 524353 email: sales@whiterosebooks.co.uk

Margaret Graham also writes as Milly Adams for Arrow. Penguin/Random House UK.

Why do women love thrillers?

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Frostie

From the international bestseller The Girl on the Train to last year’s The Breakdown, the psychological thriller has become society’s favourite means of escape – and women have long made up the majority of readers. But their appetite for crime and suspense is no mystery, writes Rex Richards.

When it comes to literary thrill-seekers, women are at the front of the rollercoaster queue. But why the hunger for suspense when female characters are routinely killed off (or otherwise abused) at the hands of a male villain? To understand the attraction, let’s take a look at what makes a good thriller.

Lots of thrillers have the same basic plot: A beautiful young woman with the best years of her life ahead of her is brutally killed. Things go downhill from there until, finally, everything gets resolved at the end. Quite often, scary and perverted things happen in the interim, and in the most successful thrillers, there are insights into the killer’s mind that are just as chilling as the acts themselves.

I have to confess, in the new thriller I’ve written, The New Prophet, that’s exactly how it starts but not exactly how it ends. I see writing thrillers like baking a cake. There’s a basic recipe that it makes sense to follow, but why not sling in some chocolate too and maybe some chilli for a real surprise? Normally a thriller sets itself apart by the dreadful details of the killer’s acts. My book, The New Prophet is different to other thrillers because it’s also very funny in places, and full of social comment, taking serious digs at TV news and celeb culture. Of course, it’s got loads of suspense, amazing female characters and a seriously chilling bad guy who thinks he’s possessed by a living fire that tells him who to kill.

So, given the formula and the likelihood of a female victim, why are women so hungry for goosebumps? I think the obvious answer is because women are more creative thinkers than men. Men prefer to have things laid out for them, and see order restored. Women are more imaginative and artistic, and like to piece it all together themselves. In my book, The New Prophet, there are clues as to why the killer does what he does. I’ve written it in just such a way that your ingenious mind will start whirring early and wondering what the real truth about his childhood and background is.

Another reason is all the emotions. Women are generally more in touch with their emotions than men. The older men get, quite often the more rigid and closed-up they become, whereas women understand their emotions more as they travel through life. In my book, women can read the quiet despair behind my main character Jack’s life. Yes, he’s funny, but some men might just miss why he is that way; women will know. When there are moments of utterly concentrated experience, such as when The New Prophet kills his first victim, there’s an emotional intensity to it that some men might miss. Women won’t.

The final reason women love thrillers is because these twisted tales are so different to their own lives. Seeing the bad guy get away with something really naughty appeals to a side of all of us that wants to break the rules too. Who doesn’t want to escape from the monotonous routine of their day-to-day lives?

But it’s not just a spirit of rebellion that makes these stories so compelling. Reading about another woman coming to an unfortunate end plays on our own insecurities. We can lose ourselves in the intensity of it, imagine ourselves in that position, even wonder if the character deserved it, then we can come out the other side in one piece and back to our normal lives. Phew!

The New Prophet by Rex Richards is out now, priced £9.99 in paperback and £2.39 as a Kindle eBook. It is available for sale on Amazon UK

We have 3 copies of The New Prophet by Rex Richards to win. Just send you details to frostmagazine@gmail.com to enter.