All posts tagged: Blogging

Status 6 Weeks into having Guest Authors

Guest Post Status – Six Weeks In

Published by Joe B

About two months ago I put a call out for guest writers on Broken Paintbrush. I wanted to add some diversity of thought to the site, new perspectives on the hobby, and give others a chance to write. We are now six weeks in and I wanted to share the guest post status and do another call out for anyone interested. To date, I’ve had four guest writers and five posts (Thor has gone twice already!).  I’ve received emails and ideas from five more writers who I hope to post soon as well. My hope is that after showing you what other guest writers have done, it will get you to think about writing as well! Thor Talks about Blogging The first guest I had, and now twice, is Thor from Creative Twilight. He started a series where he will discuss how to improve our blogs, tailored specifically to us hobbyists. His second post dived into the importance of writing a strong title for your article. While Thor has his own awesome blog, he decided to …

Adding pictures metadata so they get found and shared

Adding Pictures to Your Blog – Uploading, Editing, SEO

Published by Joe B

In the greater blogging world they speak of the importance of adding pictures to posts, the get more readers, shares… blah blah blah. In our hobby community, adding pictures isn’t the problem (we are sharing our painted miniatures after all) but rather may don’t understand the importance of the metadata associated with the image. As hobby bloggers, we are often uploading our images or WIP models, finished collections, or battle reports to have readers enjoy, critique, or even find us. It’s that last point I wish to speak on today as I’ve noticed many of my fellow bloggers miss out on new readers by not adding a description to their images. The Might Google Image Search If you go to images.google.com right now and type in your army, faction, character, does your miniatures pop up? Perhaps that doesn’t matter to you, but if you spent time creating a post on your conversion or a fantastic painting tutorial, having new people find it would be good yeah? While the Google is smart (scary smart sometimes) it still can’t …

See How to Write an Effective Article Title

Published by Thor

There are a lot of stats explaining the value of an article title. I won’t bore you with them, but suffice to say the article title plays an enormous role on people choosing to read the article or not. We all do it, choose to pass on an article because of its headline, or opt to read it. It’s something we know about, at least subconsciously, but very few take it into account when creating their article. Thor is back for improving our blogs. Why? Because with some simple adjustments, it can significantly improves who finds you and how long they stay. Thor’s experience has given him insight for what works for hobby bloggers. Why Bother? As noted above, the big reason for taking the time to write effective, eye-catching headlines is to get your article read. That may seem obvious, but let me explain. Do you use Facebook? How about Twitter? Many of us have a large feed of stuff we scroll through every day on social media. I don’t have the time to …

Site Updates and Why it is Important to do

Published by Joe B

If you visited Broken Paintbrush over the last week, you might have noticed a bunch of server errors, dead robots, or broken pictures. The reason is simple: I have been attempting to upgrade my blog services with site updates. For many of you this article will be a bit more boring as you may not care about server performance and what not, but I’ve always tried to be as transparent as possible with Broken Paintbrush and my hobby blogging journey. So below I’m going to share what I changed, why, and what’s still on my to-do list. Perhaps this is a bit of a self-reflection post, but I hope that you might also glean something off for your blog. At least give you something to think about as you grow. The Background Ten months ago I had declared I was making some changes to Broken Paintbrush. In summary: I was focusing on your experience on my site, adding more tutorials, and improving the articles provided to you. While I have been working on the articles …

Mistakes

Hi. I’m Thor. Let’s Chat About Blogging!

Published by Thor

Where…where am I? I must have stumbled into the wrong blog. Hello everyone. I’m Thor. Joe was looking for some guest bloggers, so I told him I’d see what I could do. Let’s see if I can write about something interesting and different from my usual stuff. I know. I’ll write about blogging! I do want to welcome and thank Thor for writing some articles for Broken Paintbrush. I’m looking forward to his articles on blogging for hobbyists and how it can help us improve our digital works. If you are interested in guest writing as well sign up below or read more about it. A bit about me first. I run a blog of my own, Creative Twilight. Some of you know me (hi, Greggles and Rory), others of you may not. I’ve been blogging for seven years now, which is a lifetime in the blogging world. I’m an avid Warhammer 40K player who loves Chaos Space Marines, despite the dated codex. Most often I blog about my hobby work and my 40K gaming. …

Be a Guest Writer on Broken Paintbrush

Guest Post on Broken Paintbrush

Published by Joe B

So I’ve got to a point I want to add guest writers on Broken Paintbrush. In part, this is because I realize that I can’t keep up with everything else going on in my life, but I want to turn this site into something special for all my readers. Why Guest Post? So why would you want to guest post here? I put some common reasons to guest post below, so if you are wondering why you would even bother to write on somebody else’s blog (like mine), check them out and perhaps I can convince you to give it a try. 1. You don’t have a blog of your own For those who don’t have your own blog, guest posting is the easiest way to try it out. You can skip trying to build a site and audience and just write something cool. 2. Want to reach a bigger audience For new bloggers, it can be hard to get noticed, even with the great communities we have in our hobby. One way to do this …

Cool Tools: Grammarly

Published by Joe B

This week I have a Cool Tools post that, while it doesn’t directly relate to our hobby, it is a great tool for us hobby bloggers – or any writing you may do. It’s an online extension named Grammarly, and it has significantly improved my writing. Spelling has never been my strong point, and grammar has always been a struggle. I have become to rely on Word’s spell checker and doing Google searches just to check spelling. Why does it matter? If you spend time writing online, be it a hobby blog or on the forums, using proper spelling and grammar can make a huge difference in your readability and credibility. This may not be as much of an issue with our niche of the internet, being very visual in style, but there have been many posts that I’ve glazed over due to rough writing. A misspelled word here and there can be glazed over, especially if we are showcasing our latest project or tutorial. But think of bad spelling/grammar as missed mold lines on a …

Advanced Photo Editing with Gimp

Published by Joe B

In the last article on Basic Editing with GIMP, I talked about cropping and using auto white balance tools. For many of my pictures, this gets me 80% of what I need. Today I will be going into more advanced photo editing using some of GIMP’s other tools. While I call them advanced, they are still relatively simple to do but require a bit more time and focus -thus adding in the advanced title. But I hope to display the steps in a fairly straightforward way that any of you could try at home and see what it does for your pictures. Watch the Video As I attempted to write up this tutorial and take screenshots, I realized much of this would be better suited to video, so I welcome you to the very first Broken Paintbrush video! All the text notes are written out below still so if you aren’t able to watch the video now, still feel free to read. As this is my first video tutorial, I would love your thoughts, either …

Cool Tools: Feedly – Feed Reader Review

Published by Joe B

Today I bring a review of a non-hobby product, but one I use every day to keep up with my favorite blogs: Feedly – an awesome feed reader. This free tools pulls in the latest posts from all the blogs I follow and keeps track of which articles haven’t been read – which saves me a bunch of time from opening each site up just to see if anything is new. What are RSS Feeds The magic behind feed readers is tech almost as dated as emails: Rich Site Summary, or just RSS. Blogs use RSS to publish a simple text descriptor of each post and push it into a feed that other sites can subscribe to. Many sites include the icon like the screen shot below which has become the universal icon for RSS. The link itself will often take you to a page full of text that isn’t very pretty, but others, such as this blog’s feed at https://www.brokenpaintbrush.com/feed/rss/ use tools to help you subscribe using feed readers. What a Feed Reader Does Back in the …