All posts tagged: writing

Blogging and the Honest Truth About Running Ads

The topic of ads is one I always find interesting. There seems to be a fair bit of negative stigma attached sites that run ads, and that’s what I wanted to discuss today. I wanted to clear the air on the subject and explain it from the perspective of the blogger, or website owner. Thor from Creative Twilight is back with more insight on hobby blogging. To check out more tips on improving your blog, check out the page here. I tend to use blog and website interchangeably when writing. For the sake of discussion, I mean no difference between them. Bad Ad Setups Ever been to a site that ran like eight different ads all over their site, plus one that floats at the bottom, and often a pop-up when you leave, or a pop-under as you’re visiting? Hell yes you have; we all have. Those sites are often so slowed down by the amount of ads they are delivering that you give up on reading what you went there for, and you just bail out …

Book Released! Learn How to Build Miniatures and Improve Your Skills

Technically, my book, How to Improve Your Hobby Building Skills, was released on Kindle June 3rd, but now it is available as a paperback as well! If you wanted to learn more about the book, or how you can help, this post is for you. When I was writing the series on How to Improve Your Hobby Skills, I kept trying to balance between going too deep, and thus blowing up the size of a blog post, and covering enough details to make it helpful. This spawned the idea that I could take each part (building, painting, showcasing) and expand it into a full-sized book. It’s a crazy idea for a guy who struggled in English class! But the more I dug into what it would take to self-publish a book and all the tools to get it done, the more excited I got. What is in This Book? When I started writing this book about building miniatures, I started with thinking about what are the things hobbyists struggle with. Many of these ideas came …

I Wrote a Book! Start of a New Series

After writing on this blog for a few years now, I’ve realized that I kind of like writing. And some of you kind of like reading it. So writing a book about the hobby would make sense then yeah? So that is what I did, I wrote a book. Well, two books so far. A Free eBook If you enjoyed the How to Improve Your Hobby Skills series of posts, I hope you will like these books. Especially since the first is the three posts (Building, Painting, Showcasing) and formatted into PDF, Kindle, and eBpub books. I struggle to read books as PDFs, especially on my phone. So I felt stupid for providing only a PDF for that series of posts. Now, you can get the book (still for free) on nearly every eBook platform. Kindle, iBooks, Nook (still around), Kobo, and a few others. Even more stores through this link. Improve Your Building Skills So, getting the free book published on all these different stores was an adventure (one I’m still figuring out). But it got me …

Thoughts on Why Do We Hobby Blog

Why do you Hobby Blog?

The people who paint miniature wargames is relatively small. And those who choose to take the extra time to write and share pictures is even smaller still. To these, I ask the simple question: why do you hobby blog? Last week I posted this question: “Why do did you start  your hobby blog, what motivates you, and what frustrates you.” I wanted to get a sense of why others choose to write and share their work. And what keeps them going. Below you can see some of their responses. I also added my thoughts about why to start blogging about the hobby, frustrations along the way, and ways to stay motivated. Reasons People Start a Hobby Blog I started what is now Broken Paintbrush in 2008 as a way to log my painting progress of my Iron Warriors. With no idea what I was doing, how to find other hobbyists, or how I “should” blog. I just started writing and posting pictures. @brknpaintbrush I blog to try and make sense of what I'm doing – kind of …

40k Humor and Short Stories

Good Reads 2016 – Humor and Stories

Be it the Grim Dark Future or the Chaotic Realms of Age of Sigmar, they all need a bit of extra humor dashed in there to tone down the madness right? Or perhaps it’s a great short story that adds a bit of depth to a new force. These are my collection of Good Reads 2016 Humor and Story Articles pulled from my bi-weekly Good Reads post, emailed in links that I missed, and a few posts of my own. Click through and check them out, bookmark it for later, and don’t miss the other Good Reads 2016 Collections: Good Reads 2016 Main Page Good Reads 2016 Building Articles Good Reads 2016 Painting Articles Good Reads 2016 Inspirational Articles Good Reads 2016 Gaming Articles Surviving a Death World Games Workshop is coming out in a big way on social media and non-standard marketing such as The Regimental Standard. Adding some fluff around the Catachan’s fighting style, a Captain helps a new set of recruits with the rules of the jungle. Actually, I could post up nearly every one of …

Cool Tool: Canva

Cool Tools: Canva – For Awesome Blog Headers and Social Shares

I’ve had a couple of people ask me how I make the blog headers and other images I use. When I shared Canva with them, I’ve had nothing but positive feedback. So I figured it was time to share it with all of you: use Canva (a free tool) to make awesome images with pictures and text. Before we get too far along, I want to clarify that Canva is a free tool (with paid upgrades of course) and there are no affiliates, meaning I get nothing for sharing this tool with you. It’s simply a tool I have found super helpful and want to share with you. What Is Canva? I found Canva as I’ve dived into the how-to-blog world. Amongst all the bloggers-selling-to-bloggers crud I have found a few gems worth sharing with hobbyists. With Canva being one of them. As an online web app, Canva is super easy to get started, create images from anywhere, and use them for anything. It prompts you to create a new design based off of a ton of different pre-configured …

Guest post by Thor on how to keep the attention of your readers

How to Create Articles that Keep Readers’ Attention

So, you’ve created an eye-catching title that will drive visitors to your article, and hopefully, search engines, but now you have to keep the reader there to absorb your content, right? I would have to say that of all the things I’m hoping to cover in this series, this one may be the most important one of them all. Thor from Creative Twilight here again, back with another tool for your blogging arsenal. Use that First Paragraph to Grab the Reader A lot of people will determine if they want to read your article based on your opening – that first paragraph. I’m sure many of you did it with this article. So, it should come as no surprise that you need to grab the reader’s attention from the start. How you go about that is entirely up to you, and there’s no wrong way to do it. A common technique will be to tell the reader what the article is about. Basically, summarize what you’re about to talk about. Another common method is to …

Status 6 Weeks into having Guest Authors

Guest Post Status – Six Weeks In

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

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

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

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!

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. …