Welcome Back to Aliventures: Here’s What’s New

It’s taken me a little longer than I’d hoped … but the new Aliventures is now here! Hurrah! (And welcome back.) 🙂 If you’re reading this on the website, rather than in your inbox or RSS reader, you’ll see that things are looking quite different! This is what the front page of the site used to look like: Pretty familiar, right? Well, this is what it looks like now: (You can take a look at it here.) Apart from the front page of the site, one of the biggest design changes has been to the layout of individual blog posts – which are, of course, at the heart of what I do. In the past, the blog posts looked like this: I felt that the sidebar and the various sharing links at the top didn’t add much (except clutter!) to your reading experience. So I did away with them! The blog posts now look like this (well, the most recent handful do, I need to go and update all the old ones still…): Hopefully, the posts are now as easy and engaging to read as possible. At the bottom of each post, you’ll find a horizontal bar with useful links, before the comments section:

What Hasn’t Changed About Aliventures

The fundamentals are the same, and hopefully I’ve kept all the good stuff intact. J The Aliventures blog will still have a post every Monday. The email newsletter will still come out every Thursday. I’m still running online courses (though more on that in a moment!) and selling the self-study seminar packs and my Blogger’s Guides. If you’re a newsletter member, you can still download my free mini-ebooks from the secret library (the password is the same as always; you can find it at the bottom of any past newsletter). You can still find me in my usual places on social media: as @aliventures on Twitter, and on the Aliventures page on Facebook.

What Has Changed About Aliventures

You know how, when you edit one part of a story or book chapter, a dozen other things suddenly need to change too? That’s a bit how this redesign felt! I’ve made quite a few tweaks to how different parts of the Aliventures site work. Other than the design itself, here are the main changes:

The Online Courses Now Have a Single Index Page

All my online courses are now listed on the Courses page, so they’re easy for you to find. Start Freelancing is currently open for registration (until 12^th Oct); with the others, you can see when they’ll next run and join the waiting list for any that you’re interested in. Each course will soon have a detailed page where you can see the full course schedule and more. (I’ve only got that in place for Start Freelancing so far.)

The Blog Posts Are Now Emailed Through the Newsletter List

My blog posts now go out by email through the newsletter list, so (a) you don’t have to sign up twice (once for the newsletter, once for blog posts) and (b) I can send you nicely designed blog posts, rather than the automatic feed where most of the formatting is stripped out. (If you’d prefer not to receive the blog posts, that’s fine; you can opt out of those and choose to just receive the newsletter. Or you can opt out of the newsletter and just receive the blog posts. Full instructions at the bottom of every newsletter!) Important: If you’re reading this in your inbox and you do not receive the Aliventures newsletter, you won’t get next week’s blog post by email, as I’m going to turn off the old mechanism for delivering the posts. You can sign up for the newsletter here. (You’ll receive both the newsletter emails AND the blog posts by default, but you can opt out of either of those simply by clicking a link.)

The Pricing of Everything is a Little Different

The pricing of my ebooks and online courses has changed. During the redesign, I had a rethink about pricing. I wanted to give all my products a round number price (which makes it easier to offer the 35% discount that newsletter members get, and just looks neater). Blogger’s Guides Each Blogger’s Guide is now $25 not $29, and the four-pack of Bloggers’ Guides is $60 not $66. Note that newsletter members still get a 35% discount, making individual Guides $16.25 and the four-pack $39. If you purchased a Blogger’s Guide or the four-pack at full price at any point in the past, I’ll be happy to give you a special $5 discount on any other Guide or seminar pack. Just email me your receipt (or tell me your PayPal email address so I can track down your payment) and I’ll send you a discount code. Self-Study Seminar Packs The self-study seminar packs have only changed very slightly: they are now $20 instead of $19.99. This makes the maths easier on discounts, and brings them into line with my Blogger’s Guides and the online courses. Again, newsletter members get a 35% discount on these, making them $13 each. Online Courses The biggest change is to the online courses, which are now $60 rather than $39.99. Blog On worked really well in the spring with extra support from me via the Facebook group, and to make that sustainable for all the courses, I need to charge a little more per member. I’ve also rejigged the courses so that they have six weeks of material rather than eight weeks (as eight weeks was proving a bit much for people to manage), but I’ve added a four week support period after each course itself ends – so you get ongoing help and support for ten full weeks now.

What Else is New?

Now that my youngest is in nursery school, I finally have time to get back to a couple of things that have rather fallen by the wayside over the past five and a half years of having small children! Firstly, I’m going to be posting on other blogs a lot more. For months now, I’ve been writing occasionally for Craft Your Content and ProBlogger, and regularly for Daily Writing Tips, but I’ll be popping up on a lot more blogs over the next few months. In the weekly newsletter, I’ll send you links to any of my posts elsewhere. Secondly, I’m going to be a lot more active on social media than I have been! You’ll find me tweeting a few times a day at @aliventures, and I’ll be posting useful links, writing tips, discussion questions (and occasional funny writing memes) on the Aliventures Facebook page. I’d love to connect to you there.   I hope you’ll have a great time exploring the new Aliventures. If you happen across a typo or something that displays weirdly, do let me know (you can email me at ali@aliventures.com, or give the new contact page a try here). I’ll be back next Monday with a blog post as usual. 🙂