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Whether you blog to make money, influence people, share your writing, or a combination of all of these, there are some tools you should have in your toolbox to help you make the most of opportunities that come your way. In our latest podcast we talk about the business of blogging: rate cards, press kits, media kits, contracts, headshots, and more.
Should you post your ad rates on your site? What should go into your media kit? Which blog stats should you share with potential advertisers? The Blogging Angels – Nancy, Amy, Rebecca, and Heidi – answer these questions and more. And we bitch a little about Facebook, just because.
Mobile etiquette: is that phrase rapidly becoming an oxymoron? Are the little devices we carry with us everywhere turning us into anti-social jerks? Or are they just amplifying the jerkiness that already existed in some users? We discuss this and much much more on our latest podcast!
Here are some links from this week’s podcast:
Three of the four Angels attended a mobile etiquette event hosted by Intel, during which mobile habits were discussed.
Did you know that you can set your child’s iPod so that it can’t go over a certain volume? Directions are here.
Very exciting: Nancy and Rebecca recently launched KidzVuz, a video review site for kids.
Angel Rebecca gave horns to an article on BNet.com attacking mom bloggers, specifically mentioning “friend of the podcast” Momtrends. Go read Jennifer James’ response, but don’t give the original article any more traffic!
Angel Nancy had a big horn for the government wanting to shut down Planned Parenthood. Boo!
So that’s it for this week! What do you think about giving your kids mobile devices to play with in restaurants? And why is it considered so much worse to sit on a bench in the playground with your BlackBerry than with a newspaper or book? Chime in on Facebook.
Please note: the Windows phones mentioned during the podcast were given to the Blogging Angels free of charge by Microsoft.
If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. And if you do giveaways on your site, you’ve got to listen to this podcast.
We love answering listener questions, since it gives us a chance to act like know-it-alls. So please, keep those questions coming! You can tweet us, @BloggingAngels, or email us, BloggingAngels@gmail.com.
Nancy Horn, of TheProductMama.com, asked a question about what happens when a pr contact leaves a company.
Our second question comes from – we think – @MoreThanMommy: What do you do when a brand switches agencies?
Then, we moved on to a topic that affects a lot of bloggers, and we’re guessing that most bloggers don’t do enough to protect themselves: giveaways. Nancy and Rebecca attended a seminar run by a law firm dealing with giveaways, and shared their knowledge.
Be careful not to act like you’re representing a company if you have nothing to do with that company. We talked about this last week!
And now for this week’s Golden Halos:
@Marinka sent this Amy‘s way a couple weeks ago: Lost in the Chaos wrote about her fifth anniversary of finding out she had cancer. It’s gut-wrenchingly moving.
The Blogging Angels hit the Toy Fair at the Javitz Center in New York, and came away with some good info about business in general – because as much as we like to think of toys as happy products having to do with happy kids, it’s actually a 22 billion dollar a year business. Toy fair is a trade show, similar to CES but with more women (who are wearing more clothing), and happy primary colors.
Nancy and Rebecca went to hear Moshi Monsters creator and CEO Michael Acton Smith speak about entering the online kids’ world space, and both proclaimed his speech phenomenal.
We all love Melissa & Doug, although most of our kids are sadly out of that stage.
Amy was careful to preserve the correct memory of Big Pussy Bonpensiero, making this (hopefully) the first and only blog post about Toy Fair to include the word Pussy.
And of course we had to talk about the whole Toyota debacle. Heidi gave an early Golden Halo to Shelly Kramer’s crack investigative reporting regarding Toyota and how they were included – without their knowledge – in a PR disaster. Some other notable mentions were Liz Gumbinner’s take on the whole thing, and Dear Crissy’s post which got the ball rolling in the first place.
This week’s Golden Halos:
Heidi gave her Golden Halo to the Shelly Kramer piece about the Toyota mess.
Amy gave hers to a Gizmodo post about a prototype doll from Mattel. Creepy squared.
Nancy gave her Golden Halo to Blog Hop, which helps you get traction when you write about certain topics, and share the love for others writing about the same topic.
And Rebecca gave hers to a Kissmetrics post (shared by the good folks at Alltop) about the demographic break down of social media.
