Fi Phillips

Creating quality images for my blog posts and website has always been a bit hit and miss for me, so when a friend introduced me to Canva I was delighted. Canva is a "free graphic design tool website". You can create all kind of  graphics on there, such as social media images, letterhead, certificates, books covers, and marketing flyers. What's more, it also provides royalty free images and photographs for no charge, along with shapes, frames, layouts, fonts and backgrounds. Having said that, if you can't find exactly what you want then you can pay for additional items. Of course, you can always upload your own images, which is what I've mostly done. There are a lot of Canva tutorials  available, both on the website and posted online by users too, but I found Canva easy to pick up with a little trial and error. So far, I've created images for Pinterest, photo galleries, email headers, and blog posts, along with my 2017 vision board. It's fre...

This is a little different - not an actual, physical gift but something incredibly useful for a writer. Why not set up a blog for your writer friend? A Blogger blog can be set up for free. There are numerous templates to choose from, also free. Visit www.blogger.com Using wordpress.org or wordpress.com , you can set up a blog with the downloaded Wordpress software. Any expense comes in hosting the website, buying a domain name, and if you want to use a template (or in Wordpress-talk, a 'theme') that isn't free, although many of the free themes are perfectly workable. Again, you can set up a tumblr blog entirely free of charge. Tumblr is what they call a 'microblogging' platform. It suits blog posts that are smaller such as photographs, gifs, quotes etc. You can find more information here .

How do you promote yourself online? Or do you? For a long time, my online presence was purely the website for my murder mystery script writing business - no blog or Facebook page, just the website itself. What this prevented me from sharing, however, was the people behind the business - the personality of myself and my co-writers. My existing clients knew who I was through our communications but anyone coming fresh to the website had no idea. There was no connection and hence no reason to choose our scripts over anybody else's. That changed when  I set up a blog for Murdering the Text. Suddenly I could talk about why our plays and ways of operating would suit customers over other companies. I could chat to my customers, share our and their successes, and let them know of new scripts and so on. This created a whole fresh level of communication. What I also took from the new blog was the realisation that I wanted to share more about my writing in general so I set up this blo...