Iliyana's Blog

How Blogging Got Me to Publish a Book and How You Can Do It Too

[fa icon="calendar'] 06-Aug-2019 08:30:10 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Writing, Blogging

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When I was in my first year at university, I fell in love with marketing and communications and specifically, PR.

This was unusual as I was doing a BA in International Business and most students with such a degree tend to choose finance or consulting as a career.

But authors like Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott helped me make my choice.

I decided to follow their footsteps and set myself a goal: One day, I will publish a book about PR with Wiley.

Little did I know that eight years later, I'd achieve my goal.

How did I do it? By starting a blog in that first year of university.

As I didn't study PR, a blog was the best way to develop writing skills that are so crucial for PR. Also, social media and SEO are another set of skills you need so that you can spread the word about your blog and have a readership.

But what was crucial was that I didn't give up. It was hard, it was time-consuming to do on top of all of your responsibilities but 7+ years later, I still keep publishing content once a week.

It's discipline and persistence that are required for remarkable content.

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PR, Publishing Books and Building a Personal Brand

[fa icon="calendar'] 26-Feb-2019 10:00:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Public Relations, Brands and Business, Writing, Inbound PR

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I consider myself very lucky to have some super intelligent and talented friends. 

Kareem and his brother Aamen are among them. Kareem worked with me at HubSpot and Aamen was at Google. After gathering some great experience at those software companies they both set out to start their own business around content and are doing a terrific job at it. 

I was honoured when they invited me to participate in their sparerooms talk show. 

We chatted about:

  • public relations,
  • my Inbound PR book and how small business and entrepreneurs can take on some of the tips,
  • the writing and publishing processes while working full-time and how others can do it too,
  • building a personal brand online and offline, 
  • and building a partner program for smaller companies.

Check out the video for the full conversation, there are some fun moments as well!

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How I Wrote a Book in 2 Months

[fa icon="calendar'] 19-Jun-2018 10:00:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Personal Development, Writing

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You have a great idea in your head and you really want to share it with the world. You think you should write a book because you feel like you're an expert in a certain field but you have no idea how to get started and what to do.

Writing a book sounds like such a complicated process and it'll probably take you years but you can't afford that because the world moves so fast. How do you make this happen?

Since I published my book in April, that's exactly what a lot of people ask me.

I run a learning session at HubSpot to answer those questions and as always, I don't want to hide this behind closed doors but I want to share it with the world. 

Instead of writing a nice, long post I thought it might be cooler to record a video where I go through the slides I used at HubSpot for that learning session. 

I cover 3 things:

  1. Defining your book idea
  2. Developing the right habits to pull it off
  3. Choosing between publisher or self-publishing

Disclaimer: By no means do I claim to be an expert on writing and publishing books. I simply want to share with you my experience and what I've learned while I was going through this process.

How I Wrote a Book in 2 Months [Video]

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10 Essential Tools for Students Writing a PR Dissertation

[fa icon="calendar'] 14-Dec-2015 11:00:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Public Relations, Writing

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Dear PR students, how many of you are starting to work on your PR dissertations?

I'm guessing quite a few.

By now, many of you should have at least started planning the synopsis (i.e. topic, objectives, research methods and literature) and thinking abount the actual execution (i.e. doing the research and then the writing). I thought it would be a good time to share with you some useful tools to help you throughout that process.

In fact, the below tools are super helpful for any student or professional as they can be easily adopted into one’s daily life to improve planning, writing, productivity and creativity.

The list is not rank-based but aligned with the actual process a student goes through – from initial activities such as planning and research through to putting findings together and doing the actual writing.

Hope the tools help!

Top 10 Online Tools to Help with Your PR Dissertation:

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A Simple Tool to Use to Make Your Writing More Readable

[fa icon="calendar'] 05-Mar-2013 08:59:00 / by Iliyana Stareva posted in Writing

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A while ago I attended a webinar on Effective Business Writing. It provided some good advice on how to improve your writing by focusing on the three key stages of writing: planning, drafting and editing. For each of those, the experts offered practical tips and tools that writers can use to aid each of the processes. The one that grabbed my attention was the so called Gunning fog index, which measures text readability.

Admittedly, editing is probably the most important part of the writing process, but it is often ignored (I confess, I sometimes don’t put as much time in it as I should) or done as quickly as possible, only to ensure that there aren’t any spelling or grammar mistakes. However, it is absolutely crucial for writers to reread and rewrite their copy if they want others to read it and like it.

What I tend to do is to just put the idea and everything I have in my head on paper (or more precisely, to type it in Word). Once I start, I just keep on writing and don’t think so much about the phrasing or the right place for a paragraph because this distracts the flow of my thoughts. I prefer to just keep going. Once I have said everything I move on to the next stage – making my writing ‘perfect.’

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