Simply Social Media
To video blog or not to video blog?
That is a big question a lot of bloggers face. But sometimes your face might be the issue on why you are staying behind the camera and in front of the keyboard. In this vlog I discuss, and demonstrate, why our own appearance might be influencing our choice in blog format.
Search engines are used by billions of people every day, helping them find products to buy, stores to buy them from, information on anything imaginable or the directions to their grandmother’s house. Because search engines are such a huge part of consumers’ lives, they have become a huge part of how companies do business. Users are often unaware of the existence of businesses because they don’t show up on the first page of search results, creating the need for business to employ search engine optimization (SEO) in order to gain a wider audience and generate profitable conversions.
Having an official blog is an effective method of gaining rank in various search engines, particularly since Google’s Panda update was rolled out, favoring pages with high quality content over weak, shallow pages. As part of both a social media marketing campaign and a service being provided to customers, a well-maintained, attractive blog featuring informative, useful content can provide tremendous support for a business.
By emphasizing valuable content and displaying the knowledge of the company’s employees in their field, a corporate blog can build relationships with customers while gaining the positive attention of Google and Bing. Integrating the blog into social networking initiatives and making it part of a cohesive brand will increase the likelihood of being ranked highly in search results and of increasing customer retention and brand awareness.
Content is King
Google’s Panda update made it clear that the search engine values quality content over anything else, particularly the overuse of keywords. While websites could formerly get away with havi
ng long pages of machine-generated, mostly incoherent text that included repetitive uses of the same keywords, the method for gaining ground in the post-Panda world revolves around well-written pieces that match the context of the site. By writing content with customers and potential customers in mind, businesses can satisfy both their intended audience and search engine bots.
Show What You Know
In addition to providing well-written, pertinent information on their blogs, companies should provide useful information for consumers. Blogs should not be used to advertise a company’s products (though a short post announcing a new product is okay) but should instead educate customers on frequently misunderstood aspects of their business or field. For example, a heating and air conditioning repair company could feature blog posts concerning tips for homeowners to keep their HVAC systems running efficiently or posts describing the various heating and cooling options available to homeowners, along with their strengths and weaknesses. By providing valuable information to consumers, businesses have an easier time maintaining brand awareness with potential customers and being seen as leaders in their field.
Get the Word Out
Every blog post should be accompanied by social buttons that will allow readers to share the post with their friends and colleagues on the most popular social networks, such as Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. Integrating the company blog with other social platforms can increase the visibility of each post–and the blog as a whole–to both consumers and search engines. By keeping the user experience integrated and as seamless as possible among the various social platforms and the company’s website, users will be able to recognize the company and its brand more readily and search engines will notice the uniformity and rank the site more highly.
I read a lot of blogs. I am sure this does not surprise you. In reading blogs I often pay attention to the writing style of the particular post. Some people are very analytical, some are casual, some write like they are in the middle of a conversation with you. When I come across good writing style, I appreciate it. I like that witty play on words or a nice turn of phrase. I appreciate cleaver alliteration and enjoy the feeling when I understand an obscure reference. But there is more to style than writing.
Writing style is more than the words that flow out of your fingers. The visual impact of words are also important. Maybe it is my background is graphic design. Maybe it is my obscure interest in typography. Maybe it is that I just read a lot of blogs and want them to be easy to consume.
One of the more common style issues in a post is literally the paragraph format. Some people write blogs where nearly every sentence is its own paragraph.
Sometimes they will even have more than one line of space separating the individual sections.
Some people do this because they feel that it makes their post look more substantive. They think that blocks of dense text is hard to read and unwelcoming. In a way they are right. If a paragraph is nearly the length of your screen it can feel a bit daunting.
If the words are too dense then we are disinclined to read it. However if they are too far apart we feel the same way.
It is not a matter of creating white space to make your post feel longer and easier to read. It is matter of writing in a way that makes your post easy to consume.
This means that you need to make it easy on your reader to read. Don’t you remember in school that a traditional paragraph is 4 sentences long? Now 4 sentences is not to much to take in. In fact, you can write more than for sentences. Lets make it 4 lines. Four lines is a nice block of text. It is not so dense that it is overwhelming. But it is not so spread apart that you are having to scroll down every two lines just to keep reading.
Being easy to read is more than just the words that you use. It is also the way in which they are presented. It is like TYPING IN ALL CAPS. WHEN YOU DO THIS PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE YELLING AT THEM. If you want to make your point, do it in the words you use not the capitalization. Too much white space is a pet peeve of mine because it makes reading the post difficult. I don’t want to have to scroll down every couple of lines to continue reading, it makes the post feel disjointed in my mind. Often times I have to reread to to make sure I absorbed all of it, and if that’s the case then I am not likely to do it.
So keep in mind that traditional writing styles have prevailed for a reason and make sure your blogs are both good to read and easy to read.
Understanding your audience is an important part of marketing strategy. Who are they? What are their age ranges? Are they predominantly male or female? Unfortunately, you can know everything about the demographics of your audience and still not reach them. An important factor that is often overlooked is: when are they active?
Knowing when your audience is online is important for a number of reasons:
1. If you want to be sure your target audience is reading your posts, then you want to make sure you are posting when they are online.
2. Posting relevant content at relevant times shows them that you are part of the group, participating in the conversation, rather than someone from the outside trying to broadcast information
3. Work smart not hard. If you don’t get traffic on the weekends, stop posting on the weekends.
People are always trying to figure out how to drive more traffic. The best way to do this is to thoroughly understand your audience. By knowing when they are likely to be most active you can optimize your time by using it effectively.
There is no shortcut for this. You can read all the stats you want and see when people tweet the most, and what days are best to post to your blog. Ultimately every audience is unique. What works for one person might not work for you. Keep track of your stats, watch your traffic, monitor your engagement. Pay attention to when your audience is paying attention. Once you know them it will be easier to get them to know you.
I was doing some basic maintenance on my blogsite and suddenly realized that my RSS feed subscribers dropped down to zero. You can imagine my “WHAT THE F*%$!!!!” reaction. Once I got a grip, I decided to leave it for a day to see if maybe it was just some horrible dream. So I came back and checked and nope, it was real. All of my subscribers were gone.
I checked my RSS address and it was no longer registering my RSS feed, which was totally confusing and frustrating. I actually had to go into my wordpress site and eliminate my custom feed. Then I deleted my feed on Feedburner and reclaimed it. THEN I had to assign a new feed url and redirect my wordpress to the new feed address! Thankfully I did not have many subscribers…
Ok, wait, not really - I am thankful for every subscriber! What I mean is that I just offered a subscription box on this site, so I hadn’t yet gathered many subscribers. But for people who have been managing subscribers for a long time, having your feed url get tanked could be devastating!
I hope that by fixing the RSS feed the subscribers I had will find me again.
Of course after I did all this I started doing some research on feedburner, specifically for this post. I originally wanted to talk about what feedburner counted and what they didn’t, and why it is not always the most accurate form of traffic stats for blogs. I found out that Google has been doing some algorithm adjustments and my RSS tanking was most likely because of this. A post was written talking about feedburner possibly being one of the sources to people having RSS issues. Apparantly Techcrunch and Mashable both had issues with their feeds because of this update.
If it can happen to Mashable, it can happen to me! and you!
So go out and check your feed and make sure that all is well in your blogoverse.
Blogs can be a source for – or a source of – inspiration. Blog writing is something we come to in many different ways. Some people write out of a deep interest in a topic; they have a passion about a subject that they want to share with others. Others have expertise they want to pass on. Some people do it out of professional intrigue or professional necessity. The reasons for blog writing can be as varied the topics covered.
Regardless of the reason for writing, sharing is one of the key elements that unites bloggers. One of the things they most want is for others to read it. We all want to acquire an audience.
There are various ways to promote our blogs, drive traffic, and build revenue and subscribers. But before you can focus on these things you have to face some primary technical questions – like how often are you going to post?
How often can you write on your topic? How frequently can you find sufficient inspiration?
Is once a week enough? Twice? Three times? What about daily? Oh my god, daily! Yowza. Let’s not even talk about the nuts who post twice daily (ahem…Chris Brogan)
If your goal is to drive traffic to your site, then Brogan summed it up nicely when he said, “the more you post, the more traffic you get.”
So now you are blogging three times a week, or maybe you have even gone hell bent for leather and are blogging daily. So how do you do it? How do you find motivation? How do you find your topics?
The more you write the easier it will become. When you first ramp up your frequency it can seem really daunting. But the old adage is true; the more you write the more you will be able to write. If you focus, the inspiration will come!
What inspires you? Tell me about it!
Nut-Up or Shut-Up
I am a business person. I work out of my house because I work in a virtual environment. So sometimes I work in restaurants, or coffee shops. Sometimes I work from other peoples houses or offices. The point is I can work anywhere I can get internet. The problem with this is that I can also work any time, which is code for all the time. My workaholism tends to run rampant.
As an independent business woman one of the biggest challenges is not justifying procrastination through information. What I mean is, there is so much out there. There are blogs and webinars, videos and news feed. Twitters and polls and feeds. I can spend an entire day doing nothing but reading about business development, cutting edge tech, what to do, what not to do, what I am not doing, what I am doing better than you. I can spend so much time reading that I spend no time doing.
Stop thinking about doing it. Stop reading about doing it. Stop talking about doing it.
In the immortal words of Woody Harrelson from Zombieland: It is time to Nut-Up or Shut-Up