Jo Linsdell

Friday, 24 January 2020

Book Review: The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri

My thoughts about The Shape of Water (Commissario Montalbano #1) by Andrea Camilleri

The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano.

The goats of Vigàta once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes - refreshingly unusual for Sicily.

But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case - even though he's being pressured by Vigàta's police chief, judge, and bishop.

Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.

The Shape of Water is followed by the second in this phenomenal series, The Terracotta Dog.

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You might also like: Book Review: We Don't Talk About Her by Andersen Prunty

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Wednesday, 22 January 2020

Book Review: We Don't Talk About Her by Andersen Prunty

Jo Linsdell 07:00:00

My thoughts about the audiobook We Don't Talk About Her by Andersen Prunty

Narrator: Brett Schumacher

Clint is a laughable stalker who lives in a hoard with his decaying mother. Stella is his current fascination, but Clint has no idea what kind of woman Stella is. She’s playing a lifelong game and only she knows the rules. Now she’s made a wrong move and finds herself at Clint’s house, victim to his perverse attentions and bizarre behavior. Is it the perfect place to hide from her past or an insane prison from which she may never escape?

Amazon

Goodreads

You might also like: Book Review: The Girl Before by JP Delaney

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Friday, 17 January 2020

Blog Audit Challenge 2020: January Challenges

Jo Linsdell 07:00:00

Blog Audit Challenge 2020

Welcome to the first month of challenges for the Blog Audit Challenge 2020!

Each month we'll concentrate on a different area of our blogs.

The Challenges:

January- Plan of action

February- Information pages

March- The trimmings

April- Design

May- SEO

June- Links

July- Quality content

August- Content gaps

September- Developing readership

October- Get social

November- Press and collaborations

December- Know your stats

Monthly link ups

In order to keep us all on track, and give us a way to see each others progress, I'll be hosting link ups on the first Saturday of every month where participants can share their links and discuss their progress.

#BlogAuditChallenge2020

January Challenges

Our focus for January is on strategy. Before we jump into updates, tactics, and the more technical SEO aspects of our challenge, we need to lay the ground work and create a plan of action.

The January challenges will help give us direction and serve as inspiration for the following months.

The January challenges:

1. Create a mission statement for your blog

Sometimes we lose focus of what our blog is about. We drift from topic to topic and can lose sight of our main theme, and in some cases even the reason why we blog.

Creating a mission statement for your blog will help you remember why you decided to start blogging and what you want your blog to offer it's readers.

2. Do a SWOT analysis of your blog

If you want to improve your blog you need to look at it like a reader would. What are your blog's strengths and weaknesses? Now look at opportunities and threats. What tools could help you improve your blog? External things that could help you achieve your blogging goals? What external things could be stopping you from reaching your blogging goals?

3. Research

Research others in your niche and see where you can improve. What blogs do you like to read on a regular basis? What is it about them that keeps your interest/do you like/makes you visit? Build an inspiration list of things you could try out on your own blog.

4. Create a content schedule

When it comes to planning your content schedule you need to be realistic. Whilst you might love the idea of posting fresh content every day, or even multiple times a day, that might not be practical for the life style you lead. It's a LOT of work! Two or three posts a week might be more doable. Take into account your other obligations (job, kids, etc...) and work out how much time, and when, you'll have to work on your blog. Once you know that it's much easier to work out a content schedule.

From the above three points you should have a pretty good idea of the sort of content you want to be publishing on your blog. Now you know how many posts you're aiming for each week put the two together and try to work out a rough calendar for your blog (at least a month worth of posts).

Task number 4 is particularly important as it will help give you an idea of what sort of things you need to work on within your older posts during the rest of the Blog Audit Challenge.

Free download

To make the tasks easier I've created a pdf that breaks it down. You can grab copies of all the extra materials for the Blog Audit Challenge 2020 for free here.

You can grab copies of all the extra materials for the Blog Audit Challenge 2020 for free! #BlogAuditChallenge2020

There's even a button you can use to promote your participation in the challenge:

I'm taking part in the Blog Audit Challenge 2020 #BlogAuditChallenge2020

Save the Date:

The monthly link up post for sharing your January progress will be on 1st February. The February challenges will be posted on 3rd February.

You might also like: Ways To Write More Creative Book Reviews

Wednesday, 15 January 2020

Blog Audit Challenge 2020

Jo Linsdell 07:00:00

Blog Audit Challenge 2020

With the start of a new year it's the perfect time to work on making your blog even better, and setting your goals for the coming months.

As we move forward in our blogging journey (I hope) we all improve. We get better at writing content, learn to leverage our SEO, and grow our skills with graphics, using keywords, reader engagement etc...

But what about our older content? The stuff we created before we grew and improved?

Too often we get so caught up with creating new content that we neglect (and full out forget) about our older content.

Enter the Blog Audit Challenge!

I did a Blog Audit Challenge back in 2018 and it proved to be a good idea. It was also fun to connect with other bloggers as we all worked on improving our blogs. This year I want to turn it into a challenge to make it even more of a community event.

You might also like: 60 Blog Post Ideas For Book Bloggers

So why do a blog audit?

1. Make sure you're legal

2. Make sure your brand is clear and consistent

3. Improve your ROI

4. Increase reader retention

5. Identify areas of improvement

6. Evaluate the quality of your blogs content

7. To check readability

There are of course, lots of other reasons for doing a blog audit but you get the idea. The general purpose is to improve your blog. Take a good blog and turn it into an awesome blog.

As you can image, this is a huge, on-going job. Unless you're a newish blogger you probably have a lot of content already published on your site. Updating years of blog posts is not going to be possible in a short frame of time.

With the Blog Audit Challenge I'm going to break it down into smaller monthly challenges you can do, and give you some tips and advice along the way.

Each month we'll concentrate on a different area of our blogs.