Author Archive

Get Your Blog On: Janice Croze, Cofounder of “5 Minutes for Mom,” on Success and Getting Noticed by Being Genuine

on December 20, 2011

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Janice Croze and Susan Carraretto, identical twins, launched 5 Minutes for Mom in early 2006 as a site to help promote small businesses (“mom and pop shops”) and the online parent community in general. Back then, web directories and blogrolls were the main method for growing traffic and creating community; social media hadn’t yet managed to make much of a splash. Pageviews came quickly, but not without a lot of hard work.

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Get Your Blog On: Julia Roberts of “Kidneys and Eyes” Talks About Building a Community

on October 11, 2011

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Kidneys and EyesKidneys and Eyes, the moving blog run by a mom and marketing executive who happens to be named Julia Roberts, was started to help keep friends and family up to date on her two kids, who were three and five years old at the time. This wasn’t just a place to post the occasional snapshot: both her children had been diagnosed with a rare form of polycystic kidney disease, a genetic condition for which there is currently no cure or treatment.

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Get Your Blog On: Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras of Atlas Obscura Talk About Staying Focused and Inspired

on August 8, 2011

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The world's wonder, curiosities, and esoterica.Atlas Obscura is a travel site that avoids the sunny beaches, “edgy” restaurants, and hip nightclubs that make up so much travel writing. Its founders, Dylan Thuras and Joshua Foer (author of the recent book about memory, Moonwalking with Einstein) have other sights in mind . . . . They aim for the surprising, the odd, and the unjustly unknown. In other words, they seek “places that expand our sense of what is possible and tell us something about ourselves, and about the wider world in which we live.”

For this installment of Get Your Blog on, Joshua and Dylan talk with Bill Brazell about how they developed their site and how they balance the wonders of crowd sourcing with the need to create a site that remains on-topic and accurate. They also cover the places they personally loved the most—as well as the ones they can’t wait to see. Check out the globe-trotting interview below:

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Get Your Blog On: Meredith Phillips of “Church Avenue Chomp” Talks About Making Room for Grief

on July 11, 2011

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Life in Brooklyn South of Church AvenueLife rarely stays on the path any one of us could or would predict, and for a blogger, it can be hard to talk about life-changing events with readers who only know one small slice of your life.

When Meredith Phillips began Church Avenue Chomp, the idea was to write mainly about the food scene in her neighborhood in Brooklyn. “That’s how it started,” she says. “That is not how it has progressed….”

Meredith talks about her decision to write publicly about her sister’s untimely death from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; aka Lou Gerhig’s disease), as well as the one thing that every grieving person wants from comforting friends (it’s probably not what you think). After all, loss and grief are universal concerns. As she puts it, “Loss is the kind of thing that you can either tap into, because you’ve experienced it—or that you’re so afraid of, that it’s of interest to you.” See what else she has to say by listening in below:

Listen to internet radio with Bill Brazell on Blog Talk Radio
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Get Your Blog On: Deane Barker of Gadgetopia on Finding Your Audience and Why Narcissism Is Your Friend

on June 6, 2011

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Bill Brazell has worked closely with popular sites that include Dooce, Boing Boing, and Behance. For our series of podcasts, he interviews some of the stars of blogging and uncovering tips and tools that the rest of us can use to grow our online presence.

Gadgetopia, the group blog that Deane Barker founded, has impeccable geek credentials: it’s run by five programmers and two sysadmins. In our 20-minute talk, Deane covers tips for growing your audience, the right (and wrong) way to deal with controversy, and how your blog can help you grow your career and take it in unexpected directions.

Listen to internet radio with Bill Brazell on Blog Talk Radio
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Get Your Blog On: Scott Beale of Laughing Squid on Building an Audience

on April 27, 2011

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For the second of my interviews with blog movers and shakers, I didn’t have too far to look–I’ve known Scott Beale for many years. As the creator and founder of Laughing Squid, a web hosting company and “online resource for art, culture & technology,” Scott’s an amazing source for finding out about the rise of blogs and blogging platforms. We discussed his company’s origins (including its unusual name), the backwards way he got into blogging, and how to grow a blog when you want to write about all sorts of things, not just a single niche. “Not everyone’s going to like every post, and that’s the way it should be with us,” he says. Check out the rest of our half-hour talk below:

Listen to internet radio with Bill Brazell on Blog Talk Radio
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Get Your Blog On: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends Talks Strategy

on April 14, 2011

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We’re proud to add Bill Brazell to our site. As the first director of author services at Federated Media, a current senior associate at WIT Strategy and blog wrangler at collectivecontext, he’s worked closely with popular sites that include Dooce, Boing Boing, Behance, and many others. He’ll be interviewing some of the stars of blogging and uncovering some tips that the rest of us can use to grow our online presence. So take it away, Bill!

With a few exceptions, bloggers are fun, interesting people. In this series of monthly podcasts, I’ll be talking with a few of the most outstanding ones, asking them to enlighten the rest of us on what makes them so influential, what kept them going in the early days when no one knew they existed, and what blogging has enabled them to do that they might not have been able to do otherwise.

First up is Anita Campbell, editor in chief and founder of Small Business Trends — an award-winning blog for entrepreneurs.

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Product Management, User Experience, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability Testing

Project Management, Program Management, Production, Content Production

Animation, Art Direction, Creative Direction, Corporate Identity, Flash Design/Dev, Graphic Design, Web Design

Content Strategy, Editorial, Copywriting, Copy Editing, Research, Blog Outreach

Brand Management, Business Development, Sales, Product Marketing, Event/Conference Planning, Promotions, Marcomms, Corporate Comms, Direct Marketing, E-Marketing, Public Relations, Market Research

Account Management, Account/Brand Planning, Media Strategy, Communications Planning, Media Planning/Buying, Social Media, Search (SEM, SEO), Web Metrics & Analytics

Web Development, Front End Development

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