Blog Hop 101
Hi there! Before you join us for our monthly blog hop, please take a few minutes to read through these guidelines. The Exhale Blog Hops were created to encourage the writing you are doing on your personal blog. We believe your stories are worth telling and that your personal blog is a space to be celebrated. It is your own little corner of the internet, your online home. Our monthly blog hops are meant to keep you motivated, build community, and celebrate the stories unfolding in our lives in this moment.
Theme: Each month, we generate a word or phrase to guide the writing you do for your blog hop. You are welcome to take the theme in any direction that you desire, but for the sake of continuity, we ask that you use the theme to generate the piece. In other words, please don’t take a blog post you were already planning to write and frost it with a little “theme-ishness.” (But totally write that post anyway! We want to read it!)
Scheduling the Post: One of the most important features of a Blog Hop is that all posts are published simultaneously. This allows the posts to be read one after another like dominoes falling. If your post doesn’t publish, the reader can’t read yours and can’t get to the next post in the series. It impacts you and all the women after you who worked hard on their post. In order to avoid this, please write your post and schedule it to publish at 8 am Eastern on the day of the blog hop. Most likely, when you set up your blog you designated what time zone you are in, but if you’ve moved or aren’t sure, please check this in your settings.
Sharing Your Link: Several days before the Blog Hop, we share a Google Form to collect the URL for your scheduled post. At this point, your post is still in “draft form,” it hasn’t been published yet. If you need help locating the link to your draft URL, please reach out on Facebook or email for help! It varies by platform, but we can help you find it.
Embedding the Link to the Next Post: The day before the Blog Hop we will send out a list of URLs for those women participating in the post. Copy the URL beneath your name on this list and embed it into your post. Again, this part is really important - it’s what allows the reader to “hop” from your post to the next.
Blog Hop Goes Live: On the day of the blog hop, check to see that your post has been published and that the link to the next post is working. We encourage you to cheer each other on through comments, likes and shares. We’ll be doing the same - your words will be featured on our Instagram Stories as well!