 Welcome to this Girls in ICT Day webinar, Blogging 101, where we're going to give you some tips, tricks, and technical tools to start your own blog, tell your own stories, and hopefully change the world. My name's Tia Mills. I'm a communications officer here at ITU. Previously, I've worked at Journalists for Human Rights and the Canadian Center for Diversity, doing social media and blogging. Hi, my name is Katya, and I also work as a communications officer at ITU. And I've spent, I've worked for the last 15 years as a communications officer and writer at a number of United Nations agencies. Hi, I'm Rajini Vepa. I'm the webmaster in ITU. I've been working here for the past six years, and I've been in Geneva working around international organizations for more than 14 years in the information technology field. And we're joined remotely from Kingston, Jamaica with Shoshana. You want to introduce yourself? Thanks, Tia. I'm Shoshana Richards, the regional project manager of the Girls in ICT Day Caribbean Hackathon, and I'm happy to be here and learn about WordPress. Great. Well, we can't wait to get started, so let's go. So this webinar is going to be all about giving you tips and tricks and tools, and hopefully inspiring you. So things we're going to cover today is what is Girls in ICT Day? What do we mean when we talk about the power of digital storytelling? And then I'm going to walk you through a technical tutorial for blogging 101 on WordPress. Katia will give you some expert writing tips, giving you seven tips for better blogs. And Rajini, the webmaster, will talk about how to get found on Google, how to use tags, and other great resources to help you promote your blog and to learn more. So let's get started. So what is Girls in ICT Day? Girls in ICT Day is the day to celebrate the power of technology to impact lives. And today, everyone everywhere needs tech skills, no matter if you're going to go into medicine or law. If you want to be a teacher or a writer, you need tech skills to get ahead, and they're going to be essential for jobs of the future. And now to just give you an idea, these are 10 jobs that didn't even exist 10 years ago, and you can see up there, social media manager, blogger. These jobs didn't exist 10 years ago. And these are very high paying jobs that you can get if you have the right tech skills. And now almost every organization has a blog, has a website. So having tech tools will really help you get ahead. And don't get left behind. The best way to be part of the future is to create it. And we hope today that we will inspire you to help create your digital future. So we live in an amazing time. We have digital tools that nobody could have imagined before. And just like how the printing press enabled people to print their own books, we have digital tools today that allow us to tell our own stories and change the world. Let me give you just one example. I was working at journalists for human rights. And in Sudan, a journalist found that girls were dropping out of school because their school fees were not being registered at the school. So what did they do? They wrote a blog about it. Lawmakers found out about this blog, investigated the school and helped girls get their school fees back and return to school. Now that's just one example of thousands and maybe millions of stories that are helping to change the world. So we hope that you will find interesting stories in your local schools, your communities that you can help to raise the issue and hopefully change life for the better. So I have a great privilege of working at the International Telecommunication Union as a full-time corporate blogger. And I get to tell stories about how are ICTs improving lives of women and girls, but improving lives of everyone everywhere. And I mean, just last week, I got to work with NASA to ask them, what are they planning for Girls in ICT Day? I would talk to Plan International to find out how they're going to run programs in so many different countries. And I'm very privileged and very lucky to have this role. And I hope that I can give you some inspiration to maybe start your own blogs and start your own careers. So let's get started. You need to decide what platform is right for you. And there are many out there. These are just two examples of free and very popular platforms. One is Tumblr and one is Medium. They allow you to reblog and easily share posts from other contributors. But today we're actually going to focus on WordPress. So why WordPress? Well, actually, it's one of the most trusted web platforms. It's estimated that about 30% of all websites are powered by WordPress. So it's a very powerful tool. If you have WordPress skills, not only can you be a personal blogger, but corporations really need these skills as well. So if you go into corporate writing, you will definitely need likely to know how to use a function on WordPress. So now let's get into some of the more detailed technical parts. So in 20 minutes or less, I'm going to give you three tips to get started. I'm going to show you how to customize a theme, how to organize categories, how to write your first post, tag it and publish in 20 minutes. So let's go. So the first place you have to go is wordpress.com slash start. And you're going to have to make an account and log in with your email. So let's just pull up here on WordPress. So I've logged in and it says let's create a site. So I'm going to walk you through. These are just three steps that you need to create a site. So what would you like to name it? I'm going to name this one. What is it about? It's about women. And I have a quick question for you. So you said that WordPress is really good for whether or not you are a personal blogger or whether or not you are working for a corporation. And I wanted to find out from you, what is the learning curve on WordPress as a personal blogger? Well, I think for Johnny as a webmaster could also speak to this, but if I just scroll down, so WordPress has great tutorials for beginners and all the way to experts. And also it has a lot of free plugins and different teams that will help you customize and learn very quickly. Okay. Thank you. Great question though. Thank you. Okay. So let's start again. So step one is name your site, choose what it's about and what is your blog going to be doing? So for this blog, I think we're going to share ideas and experiences, updates, stories and photos, but there can be lots of other ones. Perhaps you want to launch your own business. So WordPress has options to sell. You could also host webinars like we could post today's webinar on the blog, but this one's all going to be about sharing stories. So now we have to choose a URL and this is quite important because this is how people are going to search and find your blog. So for this one, I'm going to put girls in ICT day, 2018 and it's available and it's free. There are other domains that you might have to pay for, but there's many, many free ones. So just click one that's free. And again, there's different payment options. Again, just go for the one that's free. So if you believe it or not, we've already started our blog in just three steps. Wow. So congratulations. Your site's been created. But now I'm going to take you through a little bit more of the technical part. So what I'm going to do first is show you how to customize your theme. So Shoshana, you were asking how difficult is it? It's actually quite easy. I actually had no idea that you could get free. Can you say that again? You broke up. Oh, it seems like Shoshana's videos a little bit interrupted. So we'll just continue while she gets back on you. So we were talking about how to customize a theme for your site. So actually it's very easy. You just go to this side banner and click themes. And that will bring you through dozens, if not hundreds of free themes. And each theme can be further customized, giving you unlimited options for your blog. So you can search through and find one that appeals to you. I like this one. I like the colors. I think it's interesting. It has a really nice photo. So I'm going to choose this one. So the theme that I chose is called Corona. And then all you have to click is activate this design free. And it'll just take a minute. Oh, Shoshana, I see your videos back. There you are. I'm back. I had a question. So I see that you chose Corona, which is seems like a really simple design. And I wanted to find out if you had any tips for which is, maybe the easiest design template to choose. Sorry. What's the easiest design template? These are already made. These are the building templates that you can use. So you don't need to make any changes in the website because there are different templates based on the team that you want. Like if it's a new site, there are different teams. If it's a sports website, then it's a different team. So there are a lot of free options online on the WordPress. Okay. Perfect. And really the only reason I chose this one is I like the photo. So really, I think it comes down to your own sensibilities and what the subject area of the blog is going to be. This is obviously about women. So I chose one of women in a very powerful position, very inspiring. So make sure that the theme you choose goes well together with your subject, which is, I think what Rajani was saying. So already we have created a blog, we've chose our theme. And now the next thing we're going to do, which is really important is create a post. So I'm going to walk you through just a few simple steps to create your first post on your blog. I actually have to move you. So here you have a little button and it's usually in the upper right hand corner and it says right. So you would click on this. So the first thing I want to talk about a little bit is organizing your blog into different categories. And it's best to do this before you begin is to brainstorm and think what might be the different types of posts that you're going to write about. And then you can categorize and this will save you a lot of time later when your blog starts to look a little bit messy. This is a great thing to start. So because this blog is going to be about women, I've chose three different categories that I might write about. I might profile different women bloggers that inspire me. I might write about women in computer science and tech. I'm also interested in health. I might write about women's health. And let's add a new category. Girls and ICT day. So here you can have an unlimited number of categories. And every time maybe you get a new interest, you can choose to create a new category. So that's the first thing. Now let's write a post. Three tips for blogs. How about three tips for your blogs? My first tip is to choose images that are compelling and interesting, engaging. Every blog should definitely have a photo. So how do you add a photo? You click on the add button and you go down. And the great thing about WordPress is it has a free photo library that you can choose from. And it's powered by Pexels. And you can search from thousands of free photos. So what do we want to look for? Maybe a photo of a woman. Maybe she's happy. Maybe she's a writer. There she is. So we'll choose this one and insert. So that's my first tip is always make sure that your blogs have a really great photo. And then you would just include a little bit of text. You know, you've probably already worked on this text. Maybe you've done some interviews and you'd write it up here. So I would say that every blog. Should include photos. Be inspiring. And engaging. So there's my three tips for blogs. And when you've proof read it, edit it, look, make sure there's no typos. All you have to do to publish your first post is up here on publish. And it will ask you to publish immediately or you can schedule a post, but we want to publish it right now. So you go ahead and click the green button. It'll just take a second. And now your post has been published. So already in less than 20 minutes, I showed you how to start your blog, choose a theme and write a post. So maybe we'll stop here. Shashana, do you have any more questions about the more technical aspects of starting a blog? So I'm pretty amazed at how easy WordPress is. I had a question about choosing tags. So I know you said that we should choose tags before we start the blog, but I wanted to know if you had any tips for, you know, how I could think in my head about how I categorize my work. Sure. Well, I think there's two, two overall principles. So you can either choose the subject. So, you know, women's health, women's fitness, women in tech, or you can choose the type of post. So if you think that you're going to be doing a lot of videos or podcast, or maybe you're a photographer, you might want to categorize it as type of post. And then you can categorize that if it's a video type, categorized as a video. So there's two different ways either by subject or type. Okay. Thanks for that. Okay. You're welcome. So I think that brings us to the end of the more technical elements of the presentation. So I'll just head back to the PowerPoint. And so I really thank everyone for your attention. And now I'm really excited to pass it over to Katia. So Katia, can you give us seven tips for better blogs? Thank you so much. There's really helpful tips. I indeed will give you seven tips for better blogs. And first I'm going to start with why I understand that you will be using digital storytelling to solve a high priority challenge that's faced by your peer group. And that's great because digital storytelling is a really effective way to make a difference. Stories move us, they change the way they view the world, and they can inspire us to act. And technology has made doing this a lot easier. We can tell stories and fight for change from the comfort of our offices or our classrooms. And we can reach people we would never be able to reach and influence them. And so I just want to say also that nobody expects you to change the world all by yourself. But if you create an online community who support your cause, you have more power to reach politicians who are empowered to make decisions on your behalf. And so we're moving on to my first tip. My first tip is once you've identified the issue you're going to work on, brainstorm and strategize. Decide what the goals of your blog are. Is it, for example, do you want your, the readers to write a letter to your MP, to their MP, or to crowd fund a project? Or do you simply want to know that you've raised awareness about the issue? Once you decide what your goal is, it becomes easier to decide what your audience and key messages are. For example, if you decide that what you want to do is help to reduce road death by getting people to use more seat belts, you might decide that your audience is the wide public. And one of the messages is wear a seat belt because it will save your life. It's that simple. Or you might want to decide that your audience is decision makers and you want them to create stronger regulation on wearing seat belts. In that case, your message to them might be using seat belts will save 15,000 lives in a year or that kind of thing. So your blog can be either poetry, spoken word, photo essay, songs, videos or opinion pieces, news articles or stories. And think about what sources of information you'll use. You can go to the library and look at, get lots of really useful information. You can also get really great websites that use, that have reliable statistics. But I also want, it would be great if you could also interview people. It's important to talk to policy makers or artists or activists or people working in the government or maybe, you know, somebody you meet in the park has an important story to tell about your issue. And then next thing you can think about is how will you measure your impact. And this goes back to your goals. So for example, if you want to raise awareness, you might measure your impact by counting how many views your blog gets or how many shares and how many likes. So the other tip is include the elements of a good story. So to, if you're doing a video or writing a story, you want to appeal to your reader's eyes, head and heart. So storytelling is about, especially when you're writing, storytelling is about showing. You want to write about people, things and events using, talking about colors, images and sounds. There's many ways to bring your story to life. You can also think about tugging at the reader's heart strings by telling about how a real person had a problem and solved the problem. I'll just give you an example from my own personal experience. I was working at the World Health Organization in the area of malaria and I was sent to a village in Africa to talk about one of the access to medicines initiatives we had there. So I interviewed mothers and how they were able to, their children's lives were saved because they had access to medicines. I found that myself really moving because I got to know the mothers. I wrote about them. They had names and stories and hopes and fears. And for me, that was very moving. And the next thing that you might want to think about is connect the individual story to the larger problem. In this story, for example, I talked about malaria. Malaria kills one child in sub-Saharan Africa every 60 seconds and that amounts to up to 1 million children per year. And I think that's an important to talk about the extent of the problem, but it's also interesting to talk about the impact of the solution because it's tiring just to hear about a problem if you don't know what you can do to make a difference. And here, the solution is if you have $6 billion per year for the next 20 years, you can get rid of malaria. And so I think it's important for each story to talk about what your reader can do specifically to make a difference. They can contribute maybe to a fund or they can sign a petition or write to their MP. We're talking about the power of digital storytelling. So I want to talk about what I saw from my experience as a communications officer going back to malaria. Between 1980 and 2000, malaria was a disease that was neglected by the international community. There was no funding. There were no effective medicines and up to 3 million children were dying every year in sub-Saharan Africa. But then they created advocacy groups in 1998 and those advocacy groups told the right stories to the right people and then malaria got more and more funding, more and more attention. And when I was working in malaria between 2007 and 2014, every year we got more money. We, malaria, got more money, malaria control. And every year, more and more lives were saved. So I think with good advocacy and good storytelling, you could really make a difference. So my third tip when you're writing a story, grab attention from the beginning. You need an effective headline. One way we do this at ITU is we have our blogs,we have a tool that sets up indication that people can promise a certain numbers lists of takeaways. For example, we had one blog that was five tips to plan your girls in ICT day. Another good headline would be starting with trigger words like what, why or how. But if you're in doubt, keep the headline simple. Another important thing is having a good first grade unique message do you have or how would you summarize your article or story in one sentence? My fourth tip, keep it short. Short words are better than long words. You want to keep your sentences short. The best practice typically for the website is 20 words per sentence. You want to keep your paragraphs short with just one idea per paragraph. And usually a nice length for a blog is between 300 and 600 words. Tip number five, use active English. It's better to use the active tense. So rather than saying A, B was hit by A, say A hit B, or you want to use simpler expressions that are more dynamic like try hard rather than maximize their efforts. Be as visual and concrete as possible. And write as you speak if you're writing a personal blog. My sixth tip is to use visuals. Apparently researchers at MIT and the University of Arizona found that apparently 40% of people respond more to visual information rather than text. And so one way we can convey visual information is through infographics. This is one infographic we used at ITU on an e-waste, electronic waste blog. And we also want to use photos and you want to prevent the reader from being visually taxed by breaking up your text and using headlines and pull quotes within the text. And this is where you can get photos for your blog. You can get free photos from pexels.com or unsplash.com. And the other two websites, you have to have great photos but you have to pay for them. And my last tip, tip number seven is be sure to edit. You can put your story aside and then with fresh eyes look at it again and you might be surprised at the number of problems you see with it and then you can rewrite it. You can get a second person to look at it as well. And you want to make sure you check your fax. You accurately reference any information. You make sure that if you're quoting somebody, if you're quoting them verbatim, use quotation marks. And you may also need to get consent to use a quote or photograph. So that's also an important thing to think about. Okay, now passing it on to Rajani, our web, sorry. Oh, sorry, do you have any questions? Thanks so much for those tips, Cathy. That was very helpful. I want to ask from the writer's perspective, all very great tips. How do I get over the nerves in the writing and creation process? Do you have any tips for that? I think that's a great question because I always feel a little bit nervous myself. And the way I do it is I just, I just, I try to brainstorm, I come up with keywords. I let all my ideas come in a really haphazard fashion and I write them all down and I don't try to have any structure or any, I just let my feelings guide me. And then once I've got like a bunch of points and ideas together, I put it aside for a bit. And then I see, it makes sense the second time I see it, it starts to, I'll see a structure in it, I'll see a larger point I want to make that maybe it starts to make sense once I basically, my answer is brainstorm first. And then I would also say is having a trusted editor, someone that you trust that you can share your first draft, because it's very nerve wracking to share that first draft. Maybe it's the first time you've ever written a blog and you're very nervous. Have a close friend, a family member, someone that you wouldn't be embarrassed to share things with. So have a trusted ally. Katya and I edit each other's work quite often. Yeah, it's really important. So I think having a trusted friend or editor is also a really good one. So sorry, now moving on. Do you have any other questions? Sorry. I don't. Thank you. That's really helpful. The brainstorming tape. Great question. Now, our webmaster, Rajani, will give you tips on how to get more readers to get to you to find your blogs. Thanks, Katya. As Tia and Katya explain how to create a blog and how to choose the appropriate content for your blog, here I'm going to explain how to promote your blog and why you should promote. Firstly, since you have published your blog, it's very important to reach your audience to have more views and also hits comments from your audience and so on. Secondly, to have more visibility on the search engine and have high ranking on the search engine results. Now, in order to have a proper web strategy, you need to define categories, tags, and relevant titles for your post. The categories, they are mainly the subjects, the main subjects where you can define at the start of your blog. And then tags are the little keywords that describe in detail each post. And these tags are very important because these tags are going to help the search engine optimize and retrieve your blogs. I give you one example for tags. For example, if you want to post a recipe for a walnut brownie, but in this case, you can organize your website as like categories will be your deserts, baking recipes, and the tags could be walnut brownie, chocolate brownies. And when you're posting your blog, these tags can be attached to your text, videos, photos, the same text can be used at various places within the blog. And this same blog, this, this related this tag that we have attached to different elements inside the blog will help us retrieve related blogs from the search engine. So that means it gives more visibility when you're searching your blog on the internet. Further, furthermore to promote your blog, we use social media channels like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and to have also these each of these social media have their own optimization elements. So it is very important for us to continuously learn the different elements and their optimization methods. For example, a tutor uses hashtag, Facebook uses ad words tags, all these are different optimization tools that are used by the search engine to give the visibility of your blog. Last but not the least, we should continue learning and here are some more links to the webinars that will give you more knowledge on the WordPress. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great point to end on Rajani. I think about all these technical tools is about continuous learning and because the technology changes rapidly and we need to upgrade our skill sets. Agreed. I learned about search engine optimization for my first time at ITU, so we were always learning. So that brings us to the end of today's webinar and I hope that this has helped you learn and at least helped inspire you to create your own story and to take up these tools to create your own future. So thank you everybody for joining us. Yes, and sorry, Shoshana, did you have any additional questions? I did and I'm just really liking the webinar and just how easy it is to do WordPress. I've always been a little intimidated by it, but I think all three of you have done a really great job at breaking it down and just showing how simple it is. So thank you. Thank you. Well thanks for joining us and have a great Girls in ICT Day.