Morgan Timm

Blogging + Business

Blogging

My Brand + Branding Tips

Happy Tuesday, everyone! Today I’m talking a little bit about my branding process for this site. I tweeted out the other day asking for suggestions on posts to write, and Megan gave me a great idea! In the past I had written a super in depth post about branding, but I really didn’t dive too far into talking about my own brand. 

MY-BRAND-BRANDING-TIPS

I fought for forever when it came to deciding on my branding colors. I battled with trying to strike a balance between my personality and looking professional. I was afraid to settle on colors that were too ‘girly’ as the advice I’m giving here on MT is great for any online trailblazer, and I didn’t want to isolate any demographic.

Ultimately I ended up throwing caution to the wind when it comes to the visual aspect of my brand, and just went with what made me happy. Is it a bit girly? Sure. A little less professional than I was aiming for? Maybe. But I think it really fits who I am as a person, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

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The Blogger’s ULTIMATE guide to Pinterest.

Ok, guys. It is no secret that Pinterest is a blogger’s BFF. I’ve been preaching about Pinterest basically since day one and that’s because it is a massively effective platform where bloggers can see major traffic. Personally, I found out about the wonders of Pinterest by accident.

I’d been using it since I started blogging because I was told that’s what I needed to do. And then about six months in I had a pin go viral. Now I’m not talking baby viral, I’m talking the real deal. I went from getting 500 views a day to over 30,000. All from Pinterest.

Now this spike only lasted around a week, but my eyes were opened to the powers of Pinterest.

At that point I started diving in and taking things seriously. I pored over every Pinterest resource I could find, I pinned like a mad woman, and I learned what worked and what didn’t. And now, because there is plenty of Pinterest love to go around, I am going to be sharing my best Pinterest secrets with you.

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Ways to make money blogging.

Happy Thursday, everyone! We’re almost through the week! Today I wanted to talk to y’all about a hot topic in the blog world: how to make money blogging. Before I get into sharing how you can monetize, there seem to be two very different misconceptions regarding monetizing a blog floating around the blogosphere that I’d like to dispell:

  1. Only huge bloggers getting hundreds of thousands of pageviews are ever going to make money blogging. If you haven’t been blogging for forever you don’t have a chance.
  2. Once you start a blog and publish a few posts the money will start rolling in!

Neither are true, I promise you that. Any blogger can make money if they are willing to put in the work and the time. It’s not easy, but it’s nowhere near impossible, either. It took me five months to monetize my first blog, but if I were to do it over again with monetizing as my goal I could do it in a few weeks (and you can, too!)

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How bloggers are wasting their time. (And what to do instead)

Alright blogging beauts, I’m about to dish out some tough love: You are probably wasting your time. Not in general. In fact, having a blog in itself probably means that you have some awesome time management skills to begin with (not everyone can balance running a kick-butt site on top of the craziness of life!) but I’d say that the majority of new bloggers are wasting their time promoting their site to the wrong people.

how bloggers waste time

If you’re a blogger, then you are probably aware of the amazing blogging community and the Facebook groups that go along with it. I’m a member of around 25 groups, and active in maybe five. You see, I learned a while ago that a lot of those groups are a waste of time.

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How an editorial calendar will change your life.

I’ve been blogging for nearly two years, and in that time I read a lot of successful bloggers preach about the wonders of an editorial calendar, and then I would promptly ignore them.

It’s not that I didn’t think that it was good advice or anything, I simply assumed that  I wasn’t responsible enough or organized enough to follow through with one. And to an extent I was right. It took me a few tries before I came up with a system I could follow, but I’m finally there.

At first I was trying to get too fancy, too in-depth, and too complicated to actually want to use the system. Intricate systems work so well for a lot of people, but I’m just not one of them.

All of you tech savvy people may roll your eyes when I say this, but I use Google Calendar to make my editorial calendar. That’s it. I’ll get into my exact process later on in the post. (It’s nothing to be too impressed with, but just in case anyone’s curious I’ll go over it.) For now let me outline why you should be using an editorial calendar if you’re looking to get more serious with your blogging.

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