Linda Parkinson-Hardman's Blog, page 6

How to be a rockstar blogger – part 3

Create content for your audience, not yourself

Even though you are on a mission to become a Rock Star Blogger your blog is not, and never will be, about you. You may have your photo up there somewhere and possibly an ‘About Me’ page, you may even write posts about your life and experiences in the context of your subject matter, but writing only about yourself or your business is not going to win you any friends or influence people unless you are already a rock star of course.

Remember what I sai...

Playing with vermillion

Over the last few weeks I’ve been offering up a weekly writing prompt and this week is no different. The challenge is to expand our vocabulary and think about what words mean to us. The one I’ve chosen this month is ‘vermillion‘ because it seems to symbolise the state the world has found itself in.

Merriam Webster tells us it is a vivid reddish-orange and a bright red pigment consisting of mercuric sulfide broadly any of various red pigments

I could use it to describe everything from the colo...

Easter word square

Did you know that pretzels were originally eaten at Easter because they symbolise the cross or that dancing is illegal on Good Friday in Germany?

While I was creating this week’s Easter-themed word square I happened across all sorts of weird and wonderful traditions. I wonder what you might find if you went digging online?

The word square is below, and for those of you who have never seen one, the idea is to take one word from each column and use them in the first sentence, paragraph or stanza o...

Ice pool

As you already know I love strange and unusual photos and I will often carry a camera or my phone to capture something that intrigues me. Ice is one element that always has the power to surprise me as this little pool shows which had formed in a puddle on my favourite dog walk.

What does the picture invoke in you? How might you craft a story or a poem that uses this as your muse? Write quickly and without self-editing as you go along, see just how far you can get without stopping to think over w...

Life and death on the social web

Benjamin Franklin certainly made a point when he said “‘In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” With the help of a good accountant, tax can certainly be mitigated. But death, now that’s a different matter altogether.

The reason I got to thinking such gloomy thoughts was an article I was writing about LinkedIn which referenced the number of UK professionals who had an account on the network. Did you know there are over 15 million of us, that’s a quarter of the e...

5 things to think about when submitting to a writing competition

Warm greetings to you from the slightly chilly dressing table I write at in our flat. Not quite a room of one’s own, but it does the trick. If you saw the interview Linda did with me a month or so ago you’ll know who I am. If not, I’m El Rhodes, I’m an archaeologist and writer of both long and short prose and occasional bits of poetry.  

Over the last two years, my work has been published in a lot of journals and anthologies and I’ve now placed in seventy competitions (fiction, nonfiction, poetr...

Fooling with fools

It’s All Fool’s Day which is traditionally marked by the custom of playing jokes (usually on friends and colleagues) and engaging in frivolous activities.

So it seems only right that today’s writing prompt reflects such hilarity and it seems fitting to try out a sentence or two of nonsense verse. By the way, I am not a poet, would never claim to have such skill, but this was fun to do as it just let me work with what came into my head without editing!

Fool’s a fool in Anyone’s eyes and
Anyone co...

Hysteria Readers 2022

The Hysteria Writing Competition couldn’t take place each year without the help of my wonderful volunteer writing competition readers. You can find out more about this year’s team below. Each reader reviews all the entries in their category. This gives them the opportunity to really see what makes a good entry.

As you know fashions and tastes change and the unique review form allows the teams to be as unbiased as possible when it comes to the individual entries. Your entry will be judged against...

What the humble bowerbird can teach us about marketing

Why is Apple like the bowerbird?

The bowerbird, an inhabitant of Australia and Papua New Guinea is a great marketing metaphor that every business owner would do well to learn from. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if even the late, great Steve Jobs himself had been secretly influenced by this fascinating avian character.

In essence, this little creature has developed a marketing strategy that is as extraordinary as it is helpful to us here in the human world. It has harnessed the power of...

The new rules of marketing automation

I’m a big fan of automation, particularly as I hate having to do the same thing twice. I’ll go out of my way to avoid that scenario, which is why when autoresponders and email marketing came along well over a decade ago I decided that it would be a ‘good thing‘ to use them in my other business.

They’ve worked well over the years and continue to serve my clients regular doses of useful information that help them make sense of issues they have. They appreciate it and the business benefits.

But her...