Matthew Gates https://www.notetoservices.com 5m 1,315 #annsmarty
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Recognizing Ann Smarty For Content Marketing
There is a woman who I have admired ever since I began Confessions of the Professions. Publishing this article marks our seventh year as a community blog. We began this website with a simple idea: what do you do at work? Surely a question you have been asked in your life! Having listened to friends and family talk about the good and the bad at work, the idea for the website became a reality, after writing down all of their stories, and turning them into articles.
The website has since evolved into something more than just ranting about backstabbing co-workers or tyrant bosses or overlooked promotions. It became a place for everyone to write about jobs, careers, and the workplace, in general which spans across hundreds of thousands of different topics. Aside from having the upper hand and starting with over 20 confessions, we also solicited on Craigslist and received quite a few submissions, before our listing was flagged and taken down. As the site progressed, we moved to Fiverr, where I invested about $600 paying writers $5 each to tell us a story about their jobs.
While I would have loved to keep hiring people to write, it was not sustainable for me and I ended up writing hundreds of articles from my own experiences at work. Having held over 15 jobs in a 20 year span, which equates to an average of about 2 years per job, I had quite a bit of experience in security, fast food, retail, office secretary, public speaker, technician, software engineer, web designer, web developer, freelance writer, and a few others, I was able to write a few hundred articles of my own accord.
This continued to give Confessions of the Professions the success it has had. However, the issue with this was that most of the confessions were now from my point of view. I wanted to have other people also contribute to the site, and share their perspective. To this day, I still write plenty of articles, but have a somewhat strict policy of “guests before myself” which has worked out great so far and continues to remain the publishing policy today.
What I had not realized was that this would mean that most of my articles would not be published for nearly three or four years, with many still pending to go out. To seek out contributors who wanted their articles published on the site, I found an online community created by Ann Smarty in which writers were seeking websites for their articles, while bloggers were seeking permanent articles for their websites. Best of all, it was free, with the option to join the subscription service, which granted access more priority articles.
You could say she is partly responsible for the success of this website. Without her creating the community for which we have been able to thrive, and in our early start, provided many of our articles from guest contributors, we probably would not be where we are today. Ann Smarty is the creator of MyBlogGuest and MyBlogU, both of which are very strong communities of bloggers who are just as passionate as you and me. Her name is Ann Smarty.
MyBlogGuest exists solely for the purpose of helping guest authors find relevant blogging platforms for which they can publish their articles and helping bloggers find guest authors for unique content they can share on their websites. Why is this so important? Ann Smarty is largely underrated and underrepresented, and she may be even misunderstood by the “larger powers” of the Internet, but she gets it. She is an advocate for influential blogging and leadership in blogging. She has a strong following to those who do see and understand her message and her vision of what blogging is and what it should be about.
Blogging is about sharing information, about helping the message get out there. With the Internet as vast as it is, it is impossible to reach the planet, but if you can reach a few other people, who are interested in what you are talking about and agree with your ideas and opinions, and share it with their own following, than that is the power of blogging and what blogging is all about. We are all in our own worlds, telling our stories, but giving people insight and perspective into the things we do in our everyday lives. Aside from many of the confessions we published, MyBlogGuest is also hugely responsible for helping provide a ton of infographics that we have published. Without the confidence of knowing there were some great infographics and even summaries to back them up, our infographic section would not be as popular as it is today.
MyBlogU is a slightly different community of people, who are looking to brainstorm, and get ideas for things they are interested in doing. It is also a fun place to contribute your own ideas and thoughts to others. There is a similar effect to donating to charity (especially if you donate your time to help others) as is with the time spent on MyBlogU. You feel good afterwards and you also learn something. Every single time you visit MyBlogU and you spend time helping others, you are ultimately helping yourself, because the whole “brainstorming” effect goes both ways: You might be helping others, but in essence, you are getting additional ideas for your own blog just by writing out your ideas.
So I try to visit at least once every week to see whats new and respond to those who are just looking to get a different perspective from someone. Often times, bloggers just need that little extra push or idea to help them along their way. Without MyBlogU, the Interview section of Confessions of the Professions would probably not exist or be smaller than what it is now. Both MyBlogGuest and MyBlogU have given me the confidence I need to run this website and to also understand what blogging means and what community means.
Ann’s other project, although I have only experienced the benefits of it from using MyBlogU, is Viral Content Buzz, a content and social media promotion platform, which aids in your efforts to get viral traffic. Watch this video to find out more about what Viral Content Buzz can do for you.
Ann Smarty is a very intelligent woman, who is simply trying and continues to help every blogger connect and reach their audience. For those who have heard of her, and are members of her websites, you know what she is trying to do, and in some way, she has helped you, whether it was the launch of your website, or she helped connect you with bloggers who were interested in publishing on your website, or she helped connect you with bloggers who were interested in publishing your article.
Everyone at Confessions of the Professions, whether they have heard of Ann Smarty or not, is in some way, effected by the communities she has created. You see, it is not just about publishing one article and then it is done. Those people and companies that Ann has brought together tend to help each other out as well, by visiting those blogs and commenting and sharing their own articles, even promoting them through Google Adsense, Facebook, and Twitter, which helps attract even more attention and bring in more traffic. Ann has played a huge part in defining what Guest Blogging is and should be.
Ann continues to work on new projects and offers educational lessons to help bloggers and companies with understanding the important and power of content and SEO. Ann Smarty has been an online marketing consultant for 10 years providing high-quality digital marketing consulting through her services and both paid and free online courses. If you’d like to learn more, you may find additional information about Ann Smarty at her website: http://www.seosmarty.com/
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