Nerdy Organized

TURBOCHARGE YOUR TRAFFIC

Want more pageviews, boo? 🤔
Join my FREE 7-day email course and learn how to write awesome content that attracts your ideal audience!

YAASS, SIGN UP!

Make Money Blogging: How & Why to Choose a Niche

If you want to make money blogging, it’s really important to choose a niche for your blog. When I say choose a niche, I mean choose a very specific topic (or small group of related topics) to write about, and stick to writing about just those things. You’ve probably heard this mentioned a few places before, but it really is so important. FO REALZ.

Make Money Blogging: How and Why to Choose a Niche

The main reason you want to pick a niche for your blog is to attract the right audience, and to make them stick around for the long haul (i.e. hopefully convert them into subscribers and customers later on, if you plan to sell products).

The “right audience” means the specific target market you want to attract.

Who do you help with your blog? For me, I help new to intermediate level bloggers grow their blog and business, and provide marketing tips for solopreneurs, or aspiring solopreneurs. So that’s who I want to attract. In order to do that, I write posts specifically about topics those people want to know (like how to make money blogging!).

That means that when one of those magical unicorns comes along that I want to keep, they see my content is written for their benefit, read lots of it, (hopefully) like it, and decide to stick around and subscribe to my blog. Great!

Without a clearly defined niche, it’s super super hard to build any sort of engaged audience at all. Unless you’re like a Kardashian or something, aka the popular bitch.

CONTINUE READING

10 Things Your Small Business Website Needs

If you’re trying to grow your home based or creative business online, this post is for you!

As a freelance writer, I spend most of my time working on website projects. My clients cover a diverse range of industries, but there are common elements among them that make their small business websites successful.

Whether you are a creative freelancer, or a local small business, these ten things apply to everyone looking to attract and convert more customers online.

10 Things Your Small Business Website Needs to be Successful and Get You Clients

Sure, you might be thinking the obvious things, like a contact page, or a newsletter subscribe box.

Those are great, but you need a few more things to ramp up your success.

So this post is going to cover each of those items, and some examples from around the web from businesses who’ve done a great job implementing them.

CONTINUE READING

How to Make Awesome Content Upgrade Worksheets with Canva

Wooo, are you ready for this? This is going to be a game changer for you fellow bloggers out there if you’re not already making sweet ass content upgrades like a pro.

 How to Make Awesome Content Upgrades with Canva

If you’ve been blogging for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard how important having quality content upgrades are to growing your blog’s following, and your email list… which helps grow your blog’s following. You get what I’m saying. And yes, it’s so true, content upgrades are truly the best thing since sliced cheese on sliced bread.

Let’s cover a few basics first before we dive right in…

What’s a Content Upgrade & Why Should I Care?

Valid question, pal. So a “content upgrade” is something that your visitors can download (or access) in exchange for their email address. So you get their contact deets, and they get some sort of cool THING. Like this shameless example:

The key here is to make the content upgrade not only valuable to your visitor to make them want to give you their email address to get it, but also to make it relevant to the original post it’s in. So for this post, I’m offering a five point checklist you can download to ensure your content upgrade is on point and ready to conquer the world. Easy, right?

CONTINUE READING

The Difference Between Digital Strategy and Digital Project Management

My name is Michelle, and I’m a recovering Digital Project Manager.

The Difference Between Digital Project Management and Digital Strategy

 

You see, I was a digital PM for awhile, back in the heady days of 2015, a distant blur now. And then I became a digital strategist. “Cool,” I thought. “A totally different job, how exciting!” And then weeks and months went on and I found myself thinking, “Hmm. This seems an awful lot like what I was doing before. What gives?”

Months turned into almost a year and I became more disillusioned and confused than ever.

cat confused gif

So what is the actual difference between a digital PM and a digital strategist? It’s taken me awhile to learn.

CONTINUE READING

Losing Your Way on A Winding Path (This Is A Metaphor for Getting Shit Done)

Oh, hello.

Remember when I said that when you feel like you’re fed up, and burnt out, you should connect with other humans that remind you why you love what you do? Wellllllll, that worked for me once. But now I have new advice: be a hermit.

How to Get Shit Done (fo realz!)

 

Seriously. The best advice I received for dealing with feelings of burnout was a few days ago, and that advice was: when you are so fed up that you just don’t care anymore, actively attempt to care less. Like just really get all the giving a shit out of your system. Stop caring at a molecular level. Split the atoms of the fucks you do not give, and then split them again. Create a nuclear meltdown out of all the energy that you’re not caring with. Enough metaphors for now…

In my situation, I could never focus on what I was supposed to be doing, due to a number of factors, some of them complex and one of them just being that I am an insane, quality-obsessed, control freak bitch-ola. I was so used to responding quickly to everything that came my way — emails, Slack messages, carrier pigeons — that people expected it of me, and I felt like I owed it to them.

But then my boss told me something radical. Like some life-changing shit right here. She said, “Just… don’t.” That’s basically what she said. There were more words and it sounded better than that, but that was the gist of it.

CONTINUE READING

Embracing Failure as a Digital Project Manager/Human Being

It’s difficult to accept failure. I think that’s part of human nature — to be proud, defend ourselves, survive, and dislike failing. But sometimes we fail as human beings, and as project managers. And sometimes, spectacularly, we fail at those two things at the same time.

Embracing Failure as a Digital Project Manager (and Human Being)

 

I’ve been a total failure over the past few months.

  • I started this blog, intending to keep it going with new content twice a week. Fail.
  • I transitioned out of project management recently, but didn’t actually transition out of it because I’m a total control freak. Fail.
  • Even though I didn’t transition out of it, I still failed at doing a bunch of PM stuff properly. Fail.
  • I couldn’t think of new content ideas to save my life. Fail.
  • I lost my focus, my energy, my drive, and my love of what I do (temporarily). Fail.
  • I ate an entire tray of four cinnamon buns and washed them down with an entire bottle of wine. Fail (or… win?).

Cinnamon Bun GIF

I think the important thing to remember here is that cinnamon buns fix all failures until you step on the scale and feel like a failure in an entirely new way. Not as a project manager or a human being, but even worse, a failure of a woman for not fitting into your pants anymore.

CONTINUE READING

When What You Love to Do Gets Shitty: Fighting Creative Burnout

Hustlin’ be hard, bitches.

How to Fight Creative Burnout - When What You Love to Do Gets Shitty

 

Whatever your hustle may be — design, coding, strategy, project management, writing, something unmarketing related — you started doing it because you loved it. You continued because you loved it. You can’t imagine yourself doing anything else with your life, but yet, you hit a point where you just want to quit. What’s going on?

It’s not a lack of passion for your work. It’s not because of boredom. It’s not because you want to do something else.

So whyyyyyy.

But Why GIF

When you feel that feeling of loving what you do and being convinced that you’ve never been more connected to and passionate about your work, coupled with a feeling of absolute dread about going in the next day or doing any of the tasks on your list, congrats — you’re in creative burnout.

CONTINUE READING

What Your Worst Project Ever Can Teach You About Good Digital Project Management

Everyone has had a “worst project ever”. Mine has been recent and is still ongoing. I don’t mean it’s the worst because the work is bad or the client is bad, quite the opposite with this one. Our team has created amazing work and everyone really cares about this project. The client is fantastic and smart, willing to think outside the box when it comes to design and to take our input. When it finally completes, it will be a great piece of work out there in the world.

But that’s the problem, when it finally completes.

 

What Your Worst Project Ever Can Teach You About Digital Project Management

It’s easy to blame others when things don’t go as planned but project managers need to be bigger than that. If it didn’t go according to plan, it means your plan didn’t work. Why not? Where were you? Why weren’t you paying attention? Or if you were paying attention, why did you miss the clear red flags that things were going awry and your plan was not working? How come you didn’t fix it?

CONTINUE READING