And if you’ve got a great blog post or article to share, drop the link in a comment below. Maybe we’ll share your AmpliFIND next time!

Here’s What We’re Reading This Week

• Looking to optimize your blog for Pinterest? Wanna know ways to monetize your Pinterest? Check out Pinterest: A Guide for Marketers to learn more from all of us at Seer Interactive.
• Break out the selfie sticks, everyone! Influencers can, and are, profiting from taking selfies to show how products are being used by using Tomoson from the Social Times.
• Blogger pain points: What Every Blogger Wishes You Knew About Blogging! from Fitness Fashionista.
• See how Blogelina keeps track of her blog in binder format. What are YOUR methods for keeping your blogging on point?
• Blogging: 6 Things I Didn’t Know & What Non-Bloggers Should Know from A Perfect Little Happiness.
• If you’re looking to brand your blog, here’s a great resource (+printables!) on creating a style guide from The Nectar Collective.
• When it rains, it pours. Take a page out of Wonder Forest’s book to tackle touch situations when they come your way.
• Planning for your next summer getaway but still want to keep in shape? Check out The Blonde Abroad’s exercise essentials for travel.

And Here’s What Happened on AmpliFound this week

• 5 Lessons Bloggers Can Learn from Romy & Michele

The post AmpliFINDS – May 22 appeared first on AmpliFound.

Online: Guest Post Opportunities

Sure, you spend most of your time brainstorming and creating content around your own blog – but you can also take time to put your name out there and guest post on other blogs. Guest posting is a great opportunity for you to have your own blog promoted, shared with people you might not reach otherwise, and develop content that will be helpful for another blog’s audience.

But keep in mind, guest posting is a 2-way street – use it also as an opportunity for others to guest post on your site. It can be beneficial to add other voices to your own blog as a way to diversify your content and give others an opportunity to promote their blog. Many bloggers are protective of their blog content (as we should be!) so a better route than simply reaching out by email is to be engaged with the blogs where you’d like to guest post. Read, comment, tweet, share their content and they will be more apt to collaborate with you!

Pro Tip: Looking for a list of guest post opportunities to start off with? You can use an advanced search query in Google to find blogs that are actively looking for guest contributors:

• [keyword] + intitle:“write for us”

• [keyword] + intitle:“contribute to”

The key here isn’t quantity but quality. Take time to find opportunities that are a good fit for you and your blog’s brand, and strive to create thoughtful, engaging content.

Online: Twitter

I love using Twitter for outreach and relationship building. It’s so quick and easy to just shoot a tweet to someone you admire or to give kudos on a post you enjoyed, and it can mean a world of a difference.

Here’s an example of someone who reached out to us via Twitter.

Through Twitter, we met Jenn – who runs an awesome blog called Hello Brio, where she shares her experience in designing, illustration and branding. Now, Jenn has contributed to AmpliFound, regularly supports our blog, and we’re huge fans of hers!

Twitter chats are also great for meeting new people and gaining further insight and tips into blogging. If you’re not already familiar with Twitter chats, they are live events that are hosted on Twitter, and usually moderated by an organization or group of people. You can find these events through hashtags, and easily follow along by following the hashtag feed.

WebJess.com has a great resource listing a bunch of hashtags for bloggers to use, broken up by general blogger tweet chats to chats that are specific to blog niches that should be a great jumping off point!

Offline: Meetup Groups

If you haven’t already heard of Meetup, take a minute to sign up! Meetup is a community of events broken up by cities, where people start and participate in meetup groups around specific interests. For example, if you’re a fan of web development, art, or consider yourself a foodie – there are plenty of groups that you can join (for free!) to meet people and get together to talk about your interests.

We’ve actually participated in The Philadelphia Blogger Group before and it was great to meet people locally and learn about things you may not have known if you hadn’t stepped out from behind the figurative walls of your blog.

Offline: Conferences

If you really want to meet a ton of bloggers, conferences are the place to be! There are a few conferences that are specifically for bloggers, but don’t feel limited to just those.

Blogging is more than just writing words on a page, it involves ideation, strategy, design and promotion, among many other things. Each of those aspects independently have conferences around them. So, if you feel that you need a lot more help and advice on content strategy above anything else, then you can look to sign up for those conferences over general blogging conferences.

To help start you off, check out this list of blogging conferences around the country: The Ultimate List of Blogging Conferences. If you’re looking for conferences around digital marketing in general, here’s another resource: 15 Must-Attend Marketing Conferences in 2015.

Offline: Workshops

Through following local blogs, you’ll likely come across workshops or events people will run around anything from blog design to social media tips. That’s how we came across the last social media workshop we went to at The Hive, a coworking space in Philadelphia.The founder, Melissa Alam, holds monthly events on topics that are helpful to entrepreneurs, bloggers and small business owners.

What’s your favorite way to meet your fellow blogger? Do you hold your own events? Let us know in the comments below, you might see us at a meetup sometime!

The post Networking for Bloggers: Offline & Online appeared first on AmpliFound.

Lately, you may have noticed that a lot of blogs are taking to sponsorships, which brands will usually offer to top influencers in a given vertical to help spread the word about their products. You can usually find evidence of a sponsored post when the blogger either a.) fully discloses that a particular post is sponsored by a company, or b.) pointedly snap photos of a product with the same brand clearly visible throughout the post. There has been some backlash for such blogs, as readers can be very sensitive to blogs that oversaturate their content with sponsored posts. But up until recently, blogs were the primarily route brands would take for sponsorships until Vine and Instagram took the stage.

How Can Your Blog Get In on the Sponsorship Action?

For the sake of today’s post, we’ll start with Instagram, but if you’re interested in learning more about Vine as well, feel free to say so in the comments below! According to TechCrunch, Instagram is the 3rd fastest growing social platform – right behind Tumblr and Pinterest. In fact, as of 11/26/14, Instagram boasts the following stats:

200 million active users – that makes up almost the entire population of Brazil, the 5th largest country in the world in order of population. With that many people actively participating in Instagram, it’s an ample playing field for brands to take advantage of the platform to spread brand awareness.

So, what do these sponsored Instas look like? Ali Jardine, a popular Instagram user with over half a million followers, is one of the pioneers of monetizing Instagram through working with brands. She has had gigs with Dos Equis, and is currently working with Travel + Leisure. In turn, Ally has the opportunity to get paid for traveling and taking photos by tagging Travel + Leisure in all of her posts while she’s on location.

But Ali didn’t simply start out with half a million followers and sponsors at her door when she first started her account in 2011. Originally a painter, she started off using Instagram as a way to show her creativity without having to use paints. Instead, she posts aesthetically beautiful photographs that usually feature her children or landscapes as subjects, with all editing done on her iPhone. By simply using her iPhone as her main medium, Ali explained in a Business Insider interview that she is now able to make more money now than she would from a steady full-time job.

So, how can you start off down a similar path and begin making money using just your blog, your creativity, your smartphone, and your Instagram app? Here are a few pointers!

Consistency is Key

You can’t expect followers to just flow through without producing great, visually appealing content on a regular basis. You’ll notice that many popular Instagrammers post daily at the very least, to help appease their large audience and keep them waiting for more.

Keep it Natural

People can smell fake from a mile away — even on social media. Avoid peppering posts with multiple hashtags targeted towards sponsorships or promoting a brand. Keep it natural by posting only what you believe in, and simply tag the sponsor or use the campaign hashtag. Some Instagrammers even disclose which posts are sponsored.

Take Note of What Takes Off

As you grow your following and start posting more frequently, keep tabs on what content you post, when, and why. By taking a step back and think through why certain pieces of content did better, you can more accurately create content that your audience will enjoy and engage with, which translates to your success.

Take Advantage of Apps

As they say, “There’s an app for that!” Instagram already includes several filters to choose from to add an extra polish to your photos. However, some folks choose to use third-party apps for their photography. A few popular apps include:

• VSCO Cam
• Facetune
• Afterlight
• Pic Stitch
• PicLab HD

Encourage Engagement

Posting a bunch of photos that aren’t receiving any attention from other ‘grammers won’t garner you enough popularity to land a sponsorship opp. Be creative with promoting your account by participating in different contests. Or perhaps start one of your own. Engage with other Instagram users and strategically use hashtags and tagging to get the attention of the people/brands you want to work with.

Remember that communication isn’t a one-way street: be sure to reply to your followers! It takes time to keep an IG account up and active, sure, but if you can pull through and gain a following – you may find yourself joining the ranks of other IG celebrities and making some bank for your work.

Have you noticed an influx of Instagram sponsorships? Drop your thoughts below or tweet @marianna_morris about this new monetization strategy. We’d love to hear from you!

The post Right on the Money: Instagram & Money-Making Sponsorship Packages appeared first on AmpliFound.

Twitter cards allow you to attach media (images, galleries or video) to tweets that link to your content. For example, this is an example of a normal tweet, before Twitter cards.

The Lowdown

Using Twitter cards, you can break through the sea of text that usually makes up the average person’s Twitter feed by simply embedding a small bit of code into your site and validating it via Twitter Developer. This will allow your tweets to feature photos, videos, and even drive sales to your online store. You can tell if a tweet utilizes Twitter cards when you see the view summary link.

A major advantage of using Twitter cards is that it can increase the number of Twitter followers you have through content attribution. More often than not, people will tweet links to your content without giving your proper credit (e.g. not mentioning your Twitter handle). For example, if I retweet a post from @amplifound without including the Amplifound Twitter handle, and then someone else retweets me @marianna_morris, people are more likely to follow me rather than @amplifound, who is the original author and, rightfully so, deserves the attribution.

Now with Twitter cards, when someone tweets out an Amplifound article and neglects to mention @Amplifound, that tweet will automatically show up as a Twitter card and give Amplifound full credit.

Card Types

There are 9 types of Twitter cards, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll use the summary card as an example. The summary card, which includes the title of your content, description, thumbnail image and Twitter account, is the most popular choice for bloggers.

How to Install Twitter Cards via WordPress (Self or Third Party Hosted)

While you can hard code it yourself, the easiest way to integrate Twitter Cards into a WordPress site is to take advantage of a downloadable plug-in. There are three different plug-ins you can choose from: Jetpack, JM Twitter Cards and WordPress SEO by Yoast. For demonstration purposes, I chose to go with WordPress SEO by Yoast.

1. Login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard

2. On the left sidebar, click on “Plugins” and select “Add New”

3. In the search bar, type in “Yoast” and install the “Wordpress SEO by Yoast”  plug-in.

4. Once Yoast is successfully installed, you should see a new entry in the left sidebar—“SEO”

5. Click on “SEO” and navigate to “Social.”

6. Click on the Twitter tab at the top of the page and check the box next to “Add Twitter card meta data.”

7. In the box next to “Site Twitter Username,” type in the Twitter username you would like to associate with the Twitter cards e.g. your blog or personal Twitter account. Save changes.

8. Once you’ve saved your changes, you’ll need to navigate to your user profile page.

9. Under “Contact Info”, enter your Twitter username without the @ symbol. If you are running a multi-author site, then advise each of your authors to complete this part in their profile as well. This way, each author gets credit for their work.

10. Test your site with Twitter’s Card Validator tool.

11. Validate and apply. In the application form, you don’t have to submit the actual summary card URL, simply submit an example–which can be any single post (not the homepage) on your website.

How to Install Twitter Cards via Blogger

1. Log into your Blogger account

2. In the left sidebar, navigate to “Template→Edit HTML”

3. Click on “Proceed” to bypass the pop-up window (if one appears)

4. In the editor pane, search for <b:includable id=’post’ var=’post’>. Pro tip: you can speed up your search by using ctrl + f and typing in “b:includable.”

5. Right below the <b:includable id=’post’ var=’post’> tag, add the following sample code (so the sample code is “nested” in the b:includable tag:

6. Make sure the @mytestsite above specifies your site.

7. Click “Save Template”

8. Test your site with Twitter’s Card Validator tool.

9. Validate and apply. In the application form, you don’t have to submit the actual summary card URL, simply submit an example–which can be any single post (not the homepage) on your website.

Have you ever used Twitter Cards? Have additional questions/tips?  If so, let us know in the comments and we’ll be sure to get back to you!

The post How to Use Twitter Cards to Boost Blog Engagement appeared first on AmpliFound.