July Newsletter!

So something was up with my email and I realized a lot of you did not receive the July newsletter!  I guess I tried to send it to too many people at once and my email didn't like that!  Here is the newsletter info from July for everyone who did not receive it in their emails!

Welcome to the July of the North East Bloggers Network Newsletter- aka "North East News!"  This is a once a month newsletter for the network members.  Here's all the news that's fit to print!

August Blogging Challenge

We are still seeking prompt ideas for our big August Blogging Challenge!  We need about 10 more ideas.  All prompts will be listed towards the end of July so everyone can see them ahead of time and have time to prepare their post.  Each prompt idea will be listed with the person/blog who submitted it so you will get credit for your ideas!  For more info and to submit your ideas click here!  Also, I would love some help spreading the word, since the link ups will be open to ALL bloggers!

 

Philly Meet-Up

News will be coming soon about the first ever North East Bloggers Network meet up in Philly!  It will be sometime in August- TDB!  Keep your eye out for more details!  I am also looking for goody bag sponsors for the event as well- please let me know if you are interested in contributing!

 

Blog of the Week

I recently polled everyone in the Facebook group and the results are in!  Blog of the Week will now be a randomly selected blogger each week!  I will email you ahead of time to let you know!  If you do not wish to be featured you can let me know at that time.

 

Photo Challenge

Don't forget about our monthly photo challenge!  This month's theme is "blue" and the link up will be posted on July 29th!  Click here for more information.

 

Opportunities

There are many opportunities available with us!  We are always looking for great guest posts, blogs of the week and posts for our new Friday Five series!  Please email us if you are interested!

 

Advertise/Sponsor

We are currently seeking sponsors for the network and have many options available.  If you know of anyone who might be interested in advertising with us, or hosting a give away, please send them my way!  Advertisement is done through passionfruit ads, which is a secure way to purchase ads online.  Money raised through ads/sponsors will be used to benefit the network on things such as give aways, goody bags at meetups and better network tools for us!

 

Don't Forget!

Have you liked us on Facebook yet?  Followed us on twitter and through google friend connect or bloglovin?

Thanks everyone!  I hope you are having a great July!
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I'm part of the North East Bloggers: Now What?

Welcome to all our new members this week!  I am so excited to see all these new faces and I hope everyone is excited to get this party started!

You might be wondering: what's coming up on North East Bloggers Network?  

Here's what's going on:

1. The Saturday Share Fest link up is going to switch to Weekend Wander and stay open for the whole weekend instead of just Saturday!  This gives everyone more of a chance to participate and "wander" through the blogs throughout the weekend!  I hope this switch will encourage even more people to participate!

2.  Weekly Linky parties:  On Tuesdays we will have various link up parties, a different one each week throughout the month!  We already had a our twitter link up last week: check it out and follow some fellow NE bloggers on twitter!  I am going to rotate the link ups every week so we will have something new to check out every week instead of just twitter or just bloglovin etc every time!  Tomorrow we will have a Facebook link up, so get your Facebook pages fancied up!

3.  Guest post and blog of the week:  If you want to write a guest post, have an existing post from your blog featured or be our blog of the week please email me!  All post need to be original content written by you and should be sent in html format.  Guest post should fit into one of the themes of this blog: blogging tips, networking tips, northeast living, northeast travel tips or one of our blog categories (example: food, parenting, fitness/health etc)  I would love to have more than one guest post a week so send them all in!

For example!

4. Advertisement!  If you know anyone (or you!) with a small business such as an Etsy shop, scentsy, Thirty-One gifts etc. please pass along our advertising information to them!  I'd love to have some giveaways for our members in the future and the more sponsorships we have the better they will be!

5. Pinterest:  the pinterest page for this blog has had a slow start but I would like to have some community boards on there for everyone to share pins as well as some boards where I will link up everyone's blogs!  If you want to be a member of any of our community boards let me know and I'll add you!  I will be working on setting up all the boards this week!

 

6. Last but not least- follow follow follow!  Don't forget to follow us on Google Friend Connect, Facebook and Twitter!  If you cannot request to join our Facebook discussion group please email me and I'll send you a request!

See you tomorrow for the Facebook link up party!!

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Google Reader is going bye-bye: What's a blogger to do?

As many of you already know (and some may not!) Google is closing their RSS Reader as of July 1, 2013.  For many bloggers this is one of the main places to keep our blog feeds together and organized, as well as one of the easiest ways to follow blogs, since GFC automatically uploads to the Reader!  So what's a blogger to do?  Never fear, there are many options for continuing to follow your favorite blogs via RSS and other ways, too!

This article from Life Hacker talks about several different types of RSS readers, both cloud based and desktop based.  It also tells you how to import your RSS feeds to your new reader.  One of the sites mentioned is NewsBlur, which I have heard about from several other bloggers as well, however there are limitations to how many sites you can subscribe to (up to 64 only) and if you want more you have to pay.  It's only $1 a month, but still.

Another option is to follow all your blogs through Bloglovin.  You can easily download all your RSS subscriptions from Google (Here are directions from Google's site) and upload them to your Bloglovin account.  If you don't have one of these I highly recommend getting it anyways because it's a great way to connect and find new blogs!

Lastly, you can begin following blogs through Hello Cotton.  This is a newer and smaller site for following blogs, but I like how it is organized by category and because it's smaller it is easier for your blog to be featured in the "up and coming" section!  Hello Cotton is great for discovering new blogs by category!

Of course there are the old standbys: Facebook and Twitter!  I don't know about you guys, but I tend to click over to blog posts a lot from these two!  Although July seems far away now, I am personally going to start cleaning up my reader and switching over my follows to another site so I can be prepared.  No word yet on whether or not this will affect GFC!

What's your favorite way to follow blogs?  What will you use after Google Reader is gone?

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This post was written by Rachel of Can't Google Everything.  Rachel is a lifestyle blogger living in the Philadelphia suburbs.  She is a wife, mom, teacher and lover of exclamation points!