Well, if you tuned in to this blog on Friday then you know that I’ve decided to participate in the A-Z Blogging Challenge. And you will also know that I am supposed to be posting every day except for Sundays but here it is on Sunday and I’m posting. That’s because I already fell behind and forgot to post yesterday! Glad to have an extra day at the beginning of the challenge to keep me on track.

So today’s letter is B and for me B is blogging.

WHERE I BLOG

I work as a professional full-time blogger. I have my own blogs but I make my living writing and promoting blog posts for various types of businesses across different industries. So I thought for today I’d share some of the places where I blog:

• Crochet Concupiscence. This is my baby – the place where I blog for passion about crochet. I write 4-5 posts daily M-F and a couple of posts on weekends and I never get tired of it. If you’ve ever had any interest in crochet then this blog is for you.
• Real Words. This was my first personal blog and it was intended to be all about my writing experience. I enjoyed blogging about that for awhile but then I got tired of blogging about what I did all day – blogging! So now what I do is help other bloggers and writers out by featuring their guest posts on writing here.
• Dialaphone. This is a UK blog about mobile phones that I’ve been blogging for going on four years now. I write about mobile phone news, provide how to guides for mobile phones and specifically enjoy writing about tech advancements in this industry.
• Financial Highway. This is a blog where I write about personal finance. I write here about once per week and enjoy sharing tips on getting out of debt, increasing your financial literacy and other every day finance stuff.
• Discount Coder. This is a blog I only recently started writing for. It’s on a discount codes site so here I write about different ways to save money (with coupons but also in other ways). This is a UK site but I also write about the same topic on other blogs for a U.S. audience.
• Yellow Brick Road. Here I write about resumes and job hunt tips primarily for a college-aged audience. I write for a similar audience (but on different topics) for a site called Classes and Careers.

So that’s just a few places where I blog. Maybe some of them will interest you?

BLOGS I READ

I think it’s also important to mention on this “B for blogging” day that I read A LOT of blogs. I use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feeds for the blogs that I want to follow. There are lots of other tools that can be used, of course, but I like Google Reader because it’s a well organized option that allows me to easily share what I like with my Google Buzz contacts and then with my Twitter and Facebook friends from there.

I read crochet blogs every single day. I love them, I devour them, I couldn’t even list all of them (although lots are in the sidebar of my crochet blog if you’re interested). Other types of blogs that I read regularly include:

• Design blogs (fashion, interior, architecture)
• Weburbanist and Webecoist
• Strange news blogs
• Science news blogs
• Blogs about San Francisco
• Friends’ blogs
• Blogs about writing, SEO and blogging
• Tech new blogs, specifically mobile phone news

And then lots of random other blogs that I just fell in love with for one reason or another. I read blogs more than I read anything else although I try to read books daily as well. What can I say, maybe this post should have waited for R for Reader.

Tags: a-z blogging challenge, blogging

A few days ago I came across a site that mentioned the A-Z blogging challenge. This is a challenge to write on your blog every day except Sundays throughout the month of January. That’s 26 days and each day corresponds to a letter of the alphabet.

A is for About

So today is the first day and that means A. I chose to do “about” so that I could let you know what the blogging challenge is, where to find out more about it and why I’m doing it.

Why I’m Doing the A-Z Blogging Challenge

I think that challenges like this are a great way to make a blog fresh and new, to connect to a community of bloggers and to get some new eyes on your blog. At first I was planning to enter my crochet blog in the blogging challenge. However I already blog there 4-5 times daily so it seemed like the A-Z challenge posts would get lost. Plus I’m participating in Knit and Crochet Blog Week over there right now so it seemed ridiculous to add another challenge to that blog.

Then I started thinking about this blog. I love this blog because it allows me a place to talk about all of the weird different things that interest and intrigue me. However I’ve been neglecting it. A lot of the reason for that is because I started the crochet blog in January and I’m super passionate about that blog so it gets most of my free time. But I do love this blog, too, and I think the challenge will be a great way to kickstart the goal of writing more regularly here.

I hope you enjoy it!

More about the Challenge

There are more than 700 people who are doing this challenge! That’s a lot of blogs to read and it’s going to be tough to keep up but if you check out a few each day then you’ll still get a lot out of it. Learn more about the challenge and find links to all of those blogs here.

Tags: a-z blogging challenge, april blogging, blogging

I have been thinking about offering some sort of summer promotion for my writing services. I’d like to get some new clients. I want to spread the word about the blogging and social promotion services that I offer. And I really just want to be trying out some new personal marketing techniques.

Summer promotions seems like a great way to do this. There is a bit of downtime in the summer so I can focus on creating a cool promotion. The people I’d be interested in reaching are people who are probably spending hot summer afternoons checking out blogs and social networks anyway. And since it’s seasonal, I can try it out without committing to it for a long period of time.

I’m not sure what type of summer promotion I want to offer. I’m kicking around different ideas. I’d love to hear some thoughts from you about good summer promotion ideas for bloggers. Leave it in the comments or drop me an email!

Tags: blogging, business, freelance, kathryn vercillo, marketing, self-employed, summer promotion, work

It’s been awhile since I participated in a blog carnival but I saw a good one that I wanted to be a part of. It’s the Social Networking Tips and Tricks blog carnival. The post I included was a post on how to streamline social networking to increase productivity in the office which I wrote for the productivity blog over at Cyclope Series.

Other posts of interest in this carnival were on related topics including:

• Small business social media questions
• Twitter stuff like getting targeted followers
• Bum marketing (an interesting topic)
• Making online beats
• Dumb businesses that did well

Lots of good social media information there. Happy reading!

Tags: blog carnival, blogging, blogs, links, Social Networking

I just wanted to let you know that you can see more of my work now on the news site Elites TV. It’s an interesting site which has been around for awhile but which as recently relaunched and is not starting to gain attention as a great place to get current news. There is news here on all types of different topics and it should be interesting to see how this develops.

My first two articles on the site are about:

• How the Recession is Changing Productivity. As you know, this is a topic that I’m really interested in right now so it’s something that I keep trying to learn more about. As I learn, I’m trying to share what I learn with others.
• How Easy It Is To Stop Snoring. I recently wrote about this issue over at HubPages and was surprised about just how easy it can be to quit this problem. I think that’s newsworthy, don’t you?

I’d love to know your thoughts on the news site and on my participation there!

Tags: blogging, kathryn vercillo, news, work, writing

One of the posts that I wrote about in the not too distant past on this blog was about serving drinks as a career. There are a lot of pros and cons to being a bartender but it’s definitely one job choice for a lot of people. Employment is a big issues for a lot of people right now and it’s discussed intelligently through the many different articles submitted to the Career and Internships blog carnival where my own post was featured.

The other articles that were included in this carnival were on different jobs, careers and job issues. These topics included job interview tricks and tips, looking for and finding a new job using today’s technology, working after retirement, working for love vs. money and the issue of boring employment. All quite important topics for the working world today I think.

What other topics do you wish would have been covered here? It seems that we’re talking a lot about how to get or keep jobs in today’s recession but are there other employment issues that are also pressing which aren’t being covered by your favorite blogs? Tell me, I’d love to know!

Tags: best blogs, blog carnival, blog roundup, blogging, blogs, Careers, diary of a smart chick, education, employment, information, kathryn vercillo, work

I’m still trying to get the hang of using Twitter. I really didn’t like the site when it first came out. However, since it was the online social networking tool that everyone was using, I realized that I needed to get on board if I was going to keep staying in touch with the people who I communicate with online. I signed up for an account and started playing around with it.

The truth is that I’m still adjusting to Twitter and I don’t know if I like it much yet. I feel like I don’t quite “get it”. I have a hard time staying on top of conversations with people on the site since updates are so frequent. But the more I use it, the more I get used to it so it gets easier to understand which makes me like it a little bit more.

One of the things that made me feel like the site had gotten easier to use was discovering TwitterFeed. Before discovering that tool, I was trying to update Twitter manually with all of my various blog posts and articles. It was time-consuming and kind of felt like a waste of time.

Now that I use TwitterFeed, the posts update automatically to Twitter. This way, I can use my time on Twitter to actually respond to people and to post updates that I actually specifically want to share with my Twitter friends.

I’m still learning the best tools for communicating on the site. I’m still playing around with when to use @Replies and when to use direct replies. But I’m getting there. Anyone who has specific tips on the use of Twitter in conjunction with blogging is more than welcome to comment here!

Tags: blogging, internet, online networking, rss feeds, Social Networking, twitter, twitterfeed