 Thank you for your time for attending this session. I'm going to introduce Helen Rittersporn and first before I Make an introduction this young lady is a very dynamic speaker. We met last year and She is so dynamic the information the content is very engaging So she will hold your attention and provide some relevant content information So rest assured it's to be an awesome session all of them are awesome But this is my personal. This is my personal plug. Thank you. Thank you Helen is a project manager extraordinaire She has certifications and project management from the project management Institute She has been blogging daily for over three years at her website anchored scraps com Encouraging old-style correspondence letter writing Helen uses digital technology to reach other analog Kindred letter writing souls Furthermore, you can hear Helen being interviewed on guest podcast appearance of episode 11 of the blog you want in the time you have podcast if You find the idea of blogging on a regular basis Is elusive and or wonder how you sustain blogging ideas then this word camp Birmingham presentation is for you You will want to join Helen for 12 lessons for daily blogging for over 1200 days and still counting Wow It will include a look back at previous 2017 and 2018 word camp Wilmington presentations sharing lessons from blogging over 900 days and 600 days respectively Helen's presentation will help inspire you to increase your blogging frequency and With confidence so I give you Y'all this is coach Jackson and As he said we met last year at word camp Wilmington and Here when is your presentation? Tomorrow morning and this guy helps tell you how to promote yourself as social media You want to see coach coach Jackson you do a lot of work with a lot of kids. Don't you yeah, you want to you want to See him. Thank you okay, there's several things and We are going to be a little different for you I know that you've already had your morning diet coke coffee hot chocolate Your drink Pardon Loading caffeine does okay, so we are going to be doing some things First of all, I want to let you know that what I'm showing you today. I Have a handout for you at the end of the presentation You don't have to write all this down Okay, I Want you to think about how this applies to you? Okay, and I'm only doing one word per slide With the exception of a quote And can y'all hear me okay? Okay, good. All right, so we've got a couple of things to do and I'm going to be referring to my I'm an analog lover okay so We're going to be doing We're going to do a drawing at the end, but I want to start with some drawings at the beginning and It may take we can get it in the queue, but what I would like is your business card in here If you don't have a business card You can have one of my Anchored actions So to-do list there's 11 items on it not 10 because you're probably the one who wants extra credit for writing an extra thing down And then crossing it out So I'm going to pass this around if you don't have a card write your contact info on here If you think you might like to pen pal with me I mean, I really will write you back and coach Jackson will tell you I wrote you didn't I I did Okay, so I'm going to go around and Business card or contact info But I'd like it for the drawing. So let me show you what you get for the drawing that you're participating with Word Camp Birmingham Has offered they had this with the speakers last night, but it's a lovely set of Wordpress coasters Okay So that's in the queue and we also have My of course I would have one anchored scraps is the name of my blog address book Old style Some of you may admit you still have one It's okay But we're doing this in the drawing Okay, so those are the two things in the drawing. I love letter writing and one of my blog posts was on the Star Wars these are a Panoramic postcards Don't get too excited. I'm not having one person get this what I'm doing is we're going to unseal it And we're going to send it around and you get to pick one postcard And I'm hoping you'll put it in the mail to someone and you can even send it to yourself Okay, I was at Word Camp. Okay notice my idea of postcards here But I'm going to have you break the seal and you can pick out the first one and then we'll pass it around and I Am going to ask that we hold our comments. I'll do you know questions at the end and I am doing a table talk at lunch on blogging ideas Okay, so if you're making the rounds at lunch, I will have a table talk Okay Thank you so much for being here this morning I have no idea what it took for you to get here this morning The car may have needed gasoline. It could have varying on you when you were getting the gasoline You may have had family obligations that you had to work extra to be able to be free today you may have had to do some bartering with time with a spouse or Significant other to be able to be free for the day So I'm really honored Thank you so much for being here. Okay, so I just want to let you know I really appreciate it so We are going to Start Guess what 12 lessons means There's 12 letters The first one is W This is according to Helen Okay, so W is for wordpress and What I want to mention here is I love wordpress.org You may have your site with a through the wordpress.com and How many of you here are first-time word campers? Fantastic, okay, I cannot stress enough to you the importance of Coming out to those meet-ups for your local word Press meet-ups and if you have the opportunity Volunteer with the word camp room in your local area and how many are here from the local area? Okay, and How many are from out away? Wow Okay, you'll make sure when you put your address down if you don't have it on a card Make sure you tell me a zip, okay? The other thing is is when I presented at word camp Wilmington last year well, I now have two pen pals from word camp Wilmington and One young woman was just getting her master's degree and Wants to launch her blog and so we just been corresponding and it's you know encouragement Okay So Continuing I've got a lot to cover Aris for Ritter Sporn. It's my last name. It's my married last name proud of it What this means is for you I? Want you to? Insert your name here and what that means is when I started blogging It said blog post by Holland Well now it says Helen Ritter Sporn and So what I'm stressing is Declare yourself Now My my blogging has been sharing a passion and a hobby that you know, I love Your application may be for work or for business your company may have some policies about how they want to show It's who but I'm just saying you know if it is your company try to make it a little more You know sometimes I've seen where they'll do the initials on a tweet of which person at that company was that voice and The reason I want you to insert your name here is this is for branding yourself. I Started my blog when I was Back on I was on contract with IDM and I was blogging every day You know I'm a project manager, but blogging every day, but this is branding me So you may even have a company and you're blogging for your company, but you may want to consider Having your own blog and just be yourself. I is for identify and the first one is as in attribution on my blog posts I You can see the progression. I used to within the blog post say oh And this photo is from what? Kignity of Commons and it is by the da da da da da and it's very distracting So what I do is at the bottom of my blog post I have a thank you to the following who are referenced and the attribution area and I list everybody and That's where depending I try not to do a lot of links inside the body of the post But I put everything I do reference it, you know Sources the other thing on this is I'm having to identify I'm one of these people that found it very helpful to have a monthly recap So the last day of each month because I blog daily. I have a monthly blog post. It's a summary and I had to I started numbering on my blog posts before I hit a hundred figured out I started having to tie some reference number to them So it's been very helpful if you're at my website on the left if you're not on the mobile view of it you can go and view monthly milestones and milestones the milestones shows every hundred blog post and and You know, it was a really big deal when I hit a thousand so that you can go over there and It's a signing of the category T is for tell and The most important thing on this I want is for you to tell your stories If you've got a hobby that you're most interested in We'll talk about mission statements and coming into focus with what you want to blog about But the T is for tell your stories. It's also for instance. I have on Twitter I'll do a post cross-referencing my post and Some of the things I blog about are with letter writing our fountain pens Typewriters, I had one manual typewriter when I started I now have six Postage stamps and a new stamp comes out Well Because I cross-reference on Twitter. I chose that channel Well, I put At USPS postal service. Well the first time they retweeted me. I about passed out and It's taken a couple of years, but they now follow me on Twitter, which I'm just the static bout but I'm just saying you start building your audience and On Twitter there is a hashtag of blog chat Are any of you involved on Twitter on Sunday nights? If how many of you tweet? Okay, if you do a Hashtag blog chat Matt Collier who's here in Alabama? He hosts on every Sunday night. I think it's nine o'clock Your time it's nine o'clock Eastern But they'll have different people and I was one of my milestone posts I was interviewed there for my one thousandth post, but he's been doing this for Over eight ten years It's very impressive, but you'll meet other bloggers who are also very social So it's just something to think about encouragement I really think people like being around someone who's positive and You're going to choose to have an RSS feed You're going to choose to have an email blog subscriber from me or wherever you go, and I just find that I Have I've even if you do a search on encouragement There's blog posts on it. I just think everyone's trying to do the best they can and You're and again with this being a daily journey So just think about what you have you may have some really specialized subject matter expertise and You know, I remember thinking oh Everyone knows how to take Excel there and everyone knows how to take their address book and export it into a CSV Everyone knows how to do that Well, I thought well, maybe they don't so I did a two-part blog post on it and I have people like thank you Thank you. Thank you now. It's really basic But it helped By the way, the email blog subscriber service I use is called feed blitz. They're just wonderful Alice for legacy and This This gets personal fast as it did with my first blog post my first blog post does three things and And In there I give my mission statement I also reference the four W's of why you're blogging which credits Matt Collier with blog chat and I had decided I started blogging in February of 2015 and I had decided two months before that that I was going to blog and I Was still struggling with what my voice was Well, what am I gonna talk about? You know and Very unexpectedly in January of 2015 My dad passed away unexpectedly and I remember I Did his eulogy and I remember having the Family photo made afterwards and I was sending a photo to everybody and a letter to every person And I said I know you can look at a digital picture But I really think seeing it is gonna help anchor our memories So I always that attribute my naming of my blog as my dad's lovely parting gift Okay, anchored scraps. He was in the Navy Just it just all worked for me the other thing with this is I I do love analog and I'm looking at long term and pictures I take of and showing some of these old typewriters, you know, I think of Things we take for granted that just will not have May not be commonly seen in time. So I just like for me having a legacy This is probably why you're here Blog topics are everywhere I'm driving down the road to go to the beach How many of you driven down the road and there's a guy with all this tie-dyed t-shirts It's out on a clothesline for sale Guy looks like he tied that up So you're like hmm something in about tie-dyed t-shirts. Well, I have a blog post on tie-dye stationary No kidding. Someone makes it So that was my inspiration Okay, and we'll talk about this at the table talk at lunch, but you really think about I Do with Because I have a theme of everything related to letter writing. I do Have it under an umbrella of topics and main categories. So think about what it is you're passionate about It could be a hobby it could be a sports car It could be a collection you have it could be a nonprofit organization You're involved with it could be just something you're really passionate about and think about all the different things related to it For instance Typewriters there's a wonderful California typewriter. It's a documentary that came out this last year Tom Hanks is in it with his collection He has an app and when you type on your Your mobile it has a typewriter's hand Okay, it's related. It's under the umbrella trust When you're reading my blog You trust that if I have a link that I have vetted it You trust that you know, it's okay If I have a I'll take a Snapshot of an image and then bed around and embed it like of a embedded YouTube Well, they're trusting that when they watch it. It's what they're expecting and they've come to trust me for Everyone has a different style, but you can Find out pretty quickly what your audience is and I would suggest if you think you might want to change it kind of warn people But there's just no surprises. I'm not trying to go for shock value or anything So just you know, just think about you want people to trust you time You may decide that I would really like to blog and I want to blog on a weekly basis. I have come from word camp. I'm gonna do it once a week. That's 52 weeks Let's go Okay It's coming up on a week I'm gonna next week blog every day once a week. Okay, but make a commitment of whatever your frequency is You may decide you're going to do it monthly Okay, you're gonna write 12 this year. Okay, that's that's really good I actually think for a long-term viewpoint. You'll then be able to see you post to something every month You know when you look at my category, they'll see gosh this person posted every month Now when they open it, you may have only posted once but you posted every month instead of wow They started out strong and never heard from them again Okay, you know what I mean? So better to like I'm gonna blog twice a month I might could do that and You could blog on the first and the second you could blog on the 28th and the 29th But then you're gonna show two because they put a little number next to it if you view it that way Okay, but you want your time You may decide I'm only going to do it quarterly. I'm only going to do it once a year or Nope, I don't want to do this fine, but declare it Okay, and with your time There's some things that come with this and that's realizing Um Making that is when I decided after I'd been blogging and was still going every day and then I thought well I'm gonna make it to a hundred I realized that It meant other things didn't happen and From Dave, you know from day one. I had made the decision. I You know working full-time Um Everything going on. I said I'm sorry, but I do not have time to curate comments So I have never had comments enabled on my site but the Example I was using was Seth Godin. He just doesn't So, you know my decision was And he had said he had the choice he could either curate comments or write So I don't have comments enabled you may want the comments enabled that's your choice, but realize the time factor it's going to take and The other thing on that is It is going to take you some time and so there have been weak weekends when we do a day trip and I Remember the day before I changed smartphones But my husband just so nicely we'd pull in the McDonald's so I could use the Wi-Fi to upload my blog post that day Okay, it took some time out of our day But you know I had the commitment there. I wanted to do it. So just just realize that The time it's going to really take you you may maybe This is my quote. I had this I think on my I started posting it every time on my 200 300 400 Daily blog post and this is my viewpoint on procrastination Any tendency for procrastination must be contained to within the 24 hours each day Because the timestamp is going to happen regardless and there are days, you know, it's You know 10 30 at night But I've gotten everything else that I had to get done You know, you may have started with a 6 a.m. Conference call to some other country But you know I did post but there's that timestamp. So, okay, you may say I'm gonna blog every week Okay, well, what's your commitment? Just what however you bind it that timestamp is going to happen Okay You may be a bit surprised by this statement from me about enthusiasm. I have found that How you feel about things it does convey on how you write Okay, and so it is I Am passionate about letter writing When I realized That This was at the same time I wrote my first blog post when I realized I Had a pen pal when I was 10 years old with a young girl in England and my mother and her dot her My mother and her mother had been pin pals and I just have always loved this well What I realized That my whole focus in writing my blog would be to connect with I'm gonna use technology to connect with 50 5-0 other kindred letter writing souls in the world and Everyone else is welcome to come along And they're all welcome to read with me but that's my focus and I now have 30 pen pals and I got a When I had my thousands blog post one in Cal California and one in Canada something the most beautiful handmade cards with this milestone And well their penthouse they love writing letters You know so my point to you is Whatever that passion is you have figure out if there's something that you really get excited about and Has the thing made it away around the room yet with all the cards? Okay Has it gone all the way around with everyone? Oh Okay, I'm trying to honor that I'd say I'd do the drawing sooner Okay, well, we'll do the drawing when this thing gets back. Okay Redundancy how many of you run backups on your site? How many of you have a backup so that if you left your host provider you could still start your site? How many of you are going what? Okay We're not going into that here, but I use backup buddy which I learned about it my local WordPress meetup Okay, I I use them as a premium service but I run backups So I've got down there redundancy Also, how many you have have you How many of you blog how many of you have a printout of every blog post you've ever done, uh-huh? hmm, I Am I am exploring a service that I'm very excited about because you can imagine my mom My aspiration is to give her every blog post Well, so far 2015 or two books this thick okay because of every day, but we're but anyway, I'm exploring a plug-in Because the way my site is designed it has a header image and that makes it more unique and doing the export But we've tackled it. I think and so how many of you have a printout of at least what your current site looks like How many of you have ever taken a picture of it just so you could say yippie? Okay, I would like to challenge you with the idea of When you wherever you are like back to school come September 1, okay? Take a snapshot take a printout and then Next six months from now Do another snapshot and you can just see how you've changed your look and feel My tagline has changed a little bit You might go. What did I say? Okay, again, this is where I'm not suggesting you kill a lot of trees. However I'm also one of these people that I Just you know having an IT background. I like backups Okay Y'all gonna remember this Okay All right Seth Godin how many people here read him? He has blogged over seven thousand posts Seven thousand He just his website just got updated a little bit on the look and feel and now I'm having to re figure out where things are I Reference him in my first blog post. I read this man Every day for ten years and you know what he said he talks about the lizard brain. He talks about fear and his point was Do something Don't think about it and this whole time. I'm reading it and it's the round to it. So I'm gonna get around to that One of his books had just come out at the time. It's in my first post and and It's in there, but his books are just phenomenal. I've probably got like five and His giant coffee table book Adam. Do you have the 800 page one? I was one of the early Help supporting that thing and my name is in the book. I was just ecstatic It was very it was just you know if he comes out and says I'm gonna publish book. You just here I'm ordering You you you want to do that? 17 I don't know how many books with marketing genius. Yes From tight pad to WordPress and I Every time I reference him I Strive to Send him a handwritten letter sharing it with him and he'll actually email me back. It's just Go hell and go, you know But I'm telling you you read them every day and it just it was get up and get over your fear I'm a scrapbooker and Have done over Like 58 scrapbooks and I'll never forget Being at a scrapbook event and usually, you know, you'll be there. This was before we had the digital cameras You had to take your 35 millimeter Come back with your packages of prints Lay it out old school. Okay Now I do a hybrid where I do a combination of digital pages that I print 12 by 12 it insert them in a traditional album Okay, so I Will share with you something Cut me to the core. I was at an event one time and this person was there and her viewpoint was this was something She had to slog through she really didn't want to be doing this, but she's doing it for her family And she looks at me and said well, you don't have any children. What do you possibly have to say? And I was just sorry about my I was like And I just thought well that tells me what she thinks about scrapbooking It's a chore to her. I love it and I have a lot to say and I'm the cool and And I pin pal with my nephews and it's just such a joy Okay, so What that means to you is? Each of you have something to say You really do you have something in you in your heart at Easter each year from Mondi Thursday through Easter Everything is related to Easter Christmas. I do I do share and But like I said be you That's what my acronym spell my acrostic spells write letters Did you see it coming did anyone write it out? Yeah so With that That's the words for each one if I run out. I had 50 of these made and on the back you if you want to show up on September 1st, I have a soft launch of my Wp Olympia training where I was strongly encouraged by a fellow Word camp person to it was time for me to start my own business And it's to train others on how to navigate the WordPress and you know, you've got it installed But now what do I do? So that's what I'll be doing These are and may I ask a favor? Can you hand these here for you and coach Jackson? And if you can do that side Okay All right, do we have the thing back for the door prizes? Okay, we got it Okay Have the postcards been making their way around? the Star Wars Okay, and so that's my last slide also encourage you to be a presenter at word camp because you know my guidelines for presenting today was I read a blog post by Seth Godin on how to be a presenter and He said minimize how many words per page have a handout at the end So, you know my thank you Sincere thanks again to him Okay, did everyone Okay, so we're gonna do the drawing and Is that Chloe? Chloe, can you come up and draw please and The first thing are the coasters circling. Ah, ha ha Okay, the first thing we're going to draw for are the WordPress coasters. Oh, you want okay? Okay, so the envelope the envelope Mark Griggs Hey, congratulations. Yeah, I'm gonna do one more. Thank you. Stay up and we're gonna do one more and This is for the anchored scraps address book Okay, and I'm gonna have Chloe draw one more Melissa Miller Congratulations Okay, so That's it That's it. Are there any questions? Which app? I'm actually looking at a plug-in a Service that's helping me do my when I do my export it takes my export from WordPress and lets me Format it. So then it's not doing a print style sheet. It's helping me not have to do that I Have to look it up. I've got his email with me. I'll be glad to get with you Yes, and you'll see over time. I'll have these different from others day this year I'm gonna try to get the book for mom. You know, you just kind of see me Going on this journey Other questions. Yes Yes Yes, I I do use the fountain pen on special occasions and one of my favorite pen pals He'll share this is with the nib Da-da-da and this color ink. I just adore him. He's wonderful. I learn a lot from him. So yes real fountain pens Are we good? Thank you so much for being here