Tag Archives: stumbleupon

Facebook Advertising: Is It Worthwhile for Writers?

As you may know, the effectiveness of Facebook as a social media platform has recently changed for those of us who don’t usually pay for it but maintain a social media presence in order to publicize ourselves. It’s hard to find a good overview of what’s happened, but it boils down to several things.
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StumbleUpon Resources (For the Spring 2012 Blogging Class)

I’ll be posting several pieces over the next week with information gathered for the Bellevue College blogging class, whose second session takes place this Saturday. I teach\an online class for writers interested in building an online presence; the next one is July 23, 2012.

In this Saturday’s class, we’ll be talking about social networking and social bookmarking, which are two related but different concepts. Social bookmarking sites include Delicious, Digg, and Reddit along with the largest one of them all: StumbleUpon. Here I talk about what StumbleUpon is, why you might be interested in it, how to use it effectively to drive traffic, and what to watch out for. Continue reading

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Links from the Blogging 101 Class – Stumbleupon and Other Bookmarking Sites

As I noted in class, I don’t agree with the methods talked about in that first link, but I do think bloggers shouldn’t overlook the power of Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites to drive traffic to their site. I’ve seen a significant amount of traffic come from such sites, particularly Stumbleupon and Delicious. Continue reading

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Plotting and Re-Plotting Stories

Here’s another example of using a Stumbleupon-discovered post to spur a rewrite.The story I just finished, whose working title is “Villa Encantada,” is one whose beginning I wrote over a year ago. I picked it up last summer and added a couple of scenes, but something about it has felt wrong and it’s been just lumpy scenes stuffed full of description of a balcony garden. I was pretty sure it didn’t begin where it was supposed to, and also pretty sure that the best thing to do would be to start it again from scratch, write it, then mine the previous efforts to see what should get folded into it. Continue reading

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Using Random Tools Like StumbleUpon for Rewriting

The Internet may be a sometimes maddening easy way to lose track of time, but it’s also the source of a lot of useful tools for rewriting, making it possible to justify a little time spent poking at it. I love tools for finding random things that I can inject into my writing. A favorite tool for rewriting using random input from the Internet is Stumbleupon. Continue reading

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