The Small Business Guide to Business Blogging
[30 Minute Webinars]
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Hello everybody and welcome to another 30 minute webinar by Flyte New Media. I am Rich Brooks and as you can see on your screen today’s topic is the small business guide to business blogging. One of my favorite topics actually, I love blogging, it’s something that’s been a cornerstone of all our marketing activity for over a decade now. I’m so glad so many of you could join us here today to learn a little bit more on how you can blog for your business. As usual we’re going to try to cram everything in to 30 minutes so you can get back to work. All content, no fluff! So let’s dive right in.
BARE Essentials
So as I often do, I just want to start off with the framework that all digital marketing comes under we call the BARE essentials of digital marketing. BARE is an acronym. The B is for build, building a platform that turns visitors into customers, this is your website but definitely includes you blog as well. A is for attract, or how do we drive qualified traffic to your website, a lot of that comes from SEO, social media, and digital advertising and all three of them touch on blogging, especially search and social. R is for retain, or how do we stay in touch with our customers after they’ve left our website. The E is for evaluate or how do we measure what we’re doing to make sure it’s effective. We actually have another webinar that’s strictly about the BARE essentials of digital marketing and once you have access to any of our recorded webinars then you have access to all of them so you can definitely check that out afterwards.
Who is this guy, anyway?
If you don’t know who I am, my name is Rich Brooks and I’m the president here at Flyte New Media. We’re currently celebrating our 20th anniversary. I’m also the founder of the Agents of Change podcast and annual conference which is all about how to reach more of your ideal customers through search, social, and mobile marketing. I”m the tech guru on 207, the evening news program on the NBC affiliates here in Maine. And I wrote a book called the Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing, so this is definitely something I’m pretty passionate about.
Why Blog?
So why is blogging so important? Why is it critical to our success and the success of our clients? For a number of reasons, the first being SEO and search traffic, so search engine optimization and search traffic. In other words, if I want to rank well for a specific keyword I’m targeting my first step is often to just blog about it making sure I work that keyword into the blogpost. As my search visibility and search rankings rise so does the traffic from the search engines to my website. Longevity. Although social media is an important part of any digital marketing campaign, you tweet something, you post something on facebook, you put it up on linkedin, how long does it last? How long does it stick around? An hour a day, a couple days at most. Yes, you can always find it if you dig deep enough, but a blog, I’m happy to say we have blog posts that I wrote back in 2008 and before and that are still bringing in a thousand visitors a month to our website. That’s longevity. Thought leadership, certainly if you want to establish yourself as a thought leader a blog is a great way to do it. Credibility, a lot of people when they come to your website and they’re checking you out and comparing you to your competitors and you’ve got a lot of great content in your blog, that builds your credibility. And that folds right neatly into press, in terms of getting press. Because of blog posts journalists have found me. I’ve ended up on cnn.com, huffington post, ink magazine and other places and local tv as well because of the blog posts I’ve been creating here at Flyte. Email signups, email is a great way of building your business and having a blog encourages people to sign up for the email version of the blog, so they don’t miss another issue. And ultimately lead generation, which is one of the tenants here at Flyte which is to generate as many qualified leads for your business as possible, and a blog is the perfect way to do that.
What’s Keeping you?
So with all that being said, why aren’t you blogging? What’s keeping you from blogging? The excuses I hear most often are time and I can understand that, many of you are overworked or you’re entrepreneurs and you’ve got a million things going on, time is just something you can’t get back. Skills, I hear a lot of times, “Rich I just don’t like to write”, or I’ve tried and I’m just not good. Well I’m going to say that for the first two, I get it. The bottom line is, it is difficult to carve out time. These days when I’m writing a decent sized blog post I can often spend 6 hours writing that blogpost, sometimes more. And skills, I like to write but not everybody does, it may not be the best way for you to do it. Does that mean your blogging is over? No, I’m a big fan of outsourcing that to a copywriter. We write the blogs for several of our clients, we have copywriters that create content either on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis for somebody’s blog. The days of saying that the owner or marketer of the company had to be the one writing blogs are over. Blogs are a marketing tool to improve your visibility, to drive traffic to your website, and to persuade people to take you seriously as a vendor. That’s the goal so if you don’t have the time or you don’t have the skills honestly just consider hiring a copywriter. And the third one is ideas. And this can be a struggle, we’ve all dealt with bloggers block in the past, so I’m going to give you some techniques and ways to overcome this as we go through today’s webinar.
The 5 P’s to Blogging
But first I want to just frame this up for you with the 5 P’s of blogging regimen. The first is to prepare. Do your research before you get started. Then it’s actually producing the blogpost, doing the writing. Polishing, something that not enough bloggers do. Publishing, which is in some ways the easiest part. And then promoting, something that is often overlooked but critically important.
Preparing is about doing the required research before you get started. It’s something that a lot of people just skip over and it’s a very critical piece. If you’re struggling also with what am I going to write about, then you definitely have to spend more time preparing your blog posts. Years ago you could succeed at blogging just by cranking out content, three to five hundred words, just putting it up on the web. That just won’t work these days. The most successful blog posts, the ones that get traffic, the ones that get linked to, the ones that get shared, they’re all over 1000 words long and have a lot of extra content like videos and graphs and all this other stuff. Be ready to do you research and make your blog post really stand out. And the place to start is, what questions are your customers already asking you? This is such an overlooked opportunity but your customers are asking questions of you, your sales reps, your customer service reps, everyone in your company. You can go around and start to collect these questions and every one of these questions might be one or several blog posts. Knowing what one person is asking however is not enough. You really need to do a bit of research once you start to really flesh out these ideas. We use a lot of tools here at Flyte to do this, I’m only going to mention a few of them because we are short on time today, but one of the tools I really like especially for blogging is google trends. This is a tool google provides for free that gives us search data over time. So let’s say you were thinking about writing about phishing scams or identity theft, two obviously related topics, and you wanted to find out which one has more search queries. As you can see right here, over the past five years phishing scams has overall had more search volume than identity theft and therefore there may be more need for it in the marketplace so I would definitely lean towards writing my phishing scams article first. And as I scroll down that page I can see related queries to phishing scams, these are the rising ones that are just emerging and this is the part I like the most because if these are the questions that are just starting to break out that means there’s interest and not a lot of people are writing on them yet. So I always look at the rising related queries. So here we see phishing definition, phishing scams definition, phishing scams meaning, facebook phishing scams, and how to avoid phishing scams and then there’s more on the following pages as well. These are all great ideas for blog posts.
Buzzsumo
You also might try buzzsumo which is a freemium product. As you can see here I typed in phishing scam and what buzzsumo’s doing is just telling me about the shares on content that falls under the phishing scam title. So here’s all the engagement scores, you can see down in the left hand column these are the top three most shared articles about phishing scams. You can see the facebook, linkedin, twitter, and pinterest shares on that particular piece of content and the total shares in that right column. This gives you a sense of the kind of content that’s been written about it and maybe part of your research is finding out what they’ve already said and figuring out what you can build on it to make your content even more shareable as well as getting new ideas or approaches of how to approach the topic of phishing scams.
Search Suggest
You can also go over to some of these search consoles and start typing something out. So here we’re at youtube and let’s say we have a cooking blog ‘how to grill’ ad then we can see based on their research, based on what’s happening over there, you can see all the topics you might want to blog about; how to grill chicken, steak, lobster tails, salmon, asparagus. These are a lot of different blog posts you can tackle if you’re a cooking blog. You can also go over to google, ‘how to swear’. Now I can’t imagine what kind of blog would use this, but as you can see there’s a lot of different topics here. How to sweat in german, roblox, spanish, french, sign language and so forth, this could be a series of funny blog posts. You can also get more search topics and blog ideas down at the bottom of google as you can see here I did a search on bathing suits because maybe I have a blog on bathing suits or fashion. I can see bathing suits target, obviously the store, one size, plus size, cheap, for girls, victoria’s secret, for juniors, for body types. All great topics that people are asking about so I know that there’s a need out there for me creating that content on my own blog.
More Research
But don’t stop there. There’s more research to be done, I know you love research, right? When I talking about more research I mean going and reading other blog posts. Finding news articles, watching youtube videos, all these things are going to be feeding into your blog. You can quote them, you can link back out to them, but this adds value to your blogpost. Google has an algorithm that really looks at what people value so these are going to be important to keep people in the page and keep people reading. Lastly, interview experts. If you can find some experts who are willing to go on the record this is going to be great because not only are you getting some unique content that’s only going to appear on your blogpost, but on top of that, once you go live with this you can say thank you and hey listen I launched the blogpost, thank you so much for your time and effort, as you can see I gave you a nice big fat quote there and I linked back to your website. Chances are, they’re going to want to share that content with their audience and you’re going to get in front of even more eyeballs.
Produce
So once you’ve done all your research it’s time to sit down and actually produce that content. Now you may have a really good idea on the content you want to create but maybe not sure on how you want to go about it.
Blog Types
I want to share with you a number of popular blog types. Once you know your keywords, the words you’re going to be targeting in your blog post, then you want to think about how do you want to frame this content. Some of the popular blog types we’ve used in the past are how-to’s and tutorials, lists, people say they hate lists in blog posts but they’re super successful, cheat sheets and checklists, reviews of products, this is also great if you want to get products from vendors and just writing reviews tends to get people to send you free stuff so that you can review their products, if you’ve got a podcast then definitely doing shownotes up into a blog is a great idea, sometimes creating an entire series like the 10 steps for getting into college but each step is its own blog post, just do a table of contents blog post when you’re all done with those, and then one of my favorites is a Dear Abby style post, you take a question you receive via email and generalize it, anonymize it, and then just answer that question. So there’s a lot of ways that you can take one piece of content, like phishing scams, and do a bunch of different blog types; how to avoid phishing scams, top 10 phishing scams of 2018, here’s a checklist to see if the email you got is likely to be a phishing scam, so on and so forth.
Creating your Post
Once you figure out what type of blog post you want to write, it’s just a matter of going in there and creating that content. This is a blog post in wordpress and you can see one of the first things I do is I create my content. Now normally I want to make this as search engine friendly as possible so I would start with something like ‘phishing scams: how to avoid being taken’, because I want to put my keywords right up front, that’s something the search engines look for. However I’m going to show you a trick using a tool called yoast in a few minutes, but for now this is the blog post title that’s most likely to get shared on social media. Let’s talk about what are people likely to share on social media and the ’one phish, two phish’, admittedly I stole that from somebody else, but I thought it was clever. Often, wordpress will create your own long url for you here, so I like to go in and type over it making sure I’ve got my keyword, in this case phishing scams, right in there. So I‘ve got phishing scams definition and as you can see I’m remembering from before that definition was one of those emerging trending words. Then I get to just writing the copy and what I like to do is write an introductory paragraph that explains what’s going to be in the blogpost and works in those keywords again. I’m also going to make sure that I’ve got h1 tags, h2 tags, header tags, and subheader tags within the blogpost and whenever possible based on my research I’m going to have those, the keywords in those h1 tags. So we’ve got phishing scams definition, we know people are searching for it, then we have facebook phishing scams which we know is another important thing as well. I’m basically creating content that my ideal customers are asking for and presenting it in a way that google says this is content that’s related to what people are looking for. Obviously I didn’t write out this whole blogpost I just wanted to show you examples of what it might look like. I’ve also got a link, let’s just pretend this is a real link and it goes to a page on my website because maybe I’m selling software that protects you from phishing scams, so this would then link to a page that talks through our software. So again, I’m trying to get people who are interested in phishing scams in general and lead them down the sales path to where they’re ready to make a buying decision. Then if I’m going to add images to this blogpost, which I strongly recommend, I’m going to make sure I put in an alt tag of phishing scam or something related to that. You don’t want to over optimize these pages but you do want to make sure that in more cases than not, you’re working your keywords in so google knows this page is definitely about phishing scams. So once you done all that writing, put your image up there, your alt tags up there, then it’s time to polish your blogpost.
Polish
So how do we polish the blogpost? It’s a much more competitive marketplace now, the internet, in terms of getting our content out there. There’s so many blogs out there and megablogs and group blogs and big media companies with blogs, we really need to go out of our way to make sure our blog posts stand out and this comes down to polishing them.
Editor
One of the first things you can do is hire an editor or work with somebody else to make sure you don’t have any grammar mistakes. The minute you use the wrong ‘there’ or you use loose when you meant lose or any of those kinds of problems, you’re going to lose a certain percentage of your audience.so even if it’s just you, take a break, sleep on the post, come back the next day and read it and you may find there’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t make sense, I can’t overemphasize this enough.
Images
You also want to find the right images for your blogpost. Blog posts these days really need a good number of images and definitely a nice big header image at the top of the page. I use a service called adobe stock photos, used to be dollar photo club but then they were bought out, even after adobe bought them it’s a great deal I think it works out to thirty dollars a month for ten photos. These are high res photos, incredibly detailed and well worth it. I often use different types of photoshop and also an app on my phone sometimes to add some text to these as well. I wrote a blogpost “the power of scarcity” with a photo of just one donut left and thought that was an appropriate metaphor. Or sometimes I’ll have images down the page that pull out one specific quote from the blog. One of the things you’ll notice on this one is I added our 20 year logo to this so if someone was starting to share this image around the web, we’d at least get a little branding going on. We’ll often do images for more than one platform. This is an example for a blog for our podcast and on the left you can see we’ve got a version that’s good for twitter, facebook, and linkedin and on the right we’ve got a version that’s good for pinterest. These days we’re also using a tool called wavve, so we pulled a quote from the podcast and used it on this to make it a little more interactive when we share this out on social media. Obviously that’s only going to work on blogs that have audio components, but it’s worth checking out.
Yoast for SEO
So another tool I swear by is yoast. Yoast is a wordpress plugin and it’s great for social, we’ll get to that in a minute, but as we scroll down the page after we’ve written it and we want to clean this up a little bit, a big way we’re going to get an audience for our blog is by making it as search engine friendly as possible. So here’s the default showing of what the post is going to look like and as you can see from here, it gets cut off and the quote and the description itself is cut off as well. So I clicked on edit snippet and I can see that the SEO title is already being created for me and the meta description is empty, which is why I just pulled some of my copy from the page. Using this snippet tool in yoast, I actually clean it up a bit. I give it a more search engine friendly name, phishing scams defined: how to protect your identity online, and i also go in to the meta description and give it a very succinct phrase and now I can see in the snippet preview that it’s coming across the way I want it to and hopefully more people will click on it. So even if I’m being beaten by another blogpost about phishing scams, hopefully mine will seem more attractive and more helpful, people will click on it more often and if people are clicking through to your website that’s actually one of the variables google uses to improve or decreasing you search engine ranking so that’s something to be aware of. It’s worth spending some time on your snippet. Also in yoast I can put in a focus keyword, in this case phishing scams, and get a whole bunch of information back on potential problems, some things I can improve, and where I’m doing good already. So I continue to improve my post to make it more search engine friendly.
Yoast for Social
There’s also a social tab in yoast, which is where if I want to have some specific information around facebook, or twitter, the title the image and the description I can put it in here. About half an hour before this webinar started, I started playing around with this new plug in that does not compete with yoast, but it’s called social warfare and it has a lot more social sharing tools built into it and honestly I think I’m going to lean towards that going forward.
Publishing
The next step is to publish it. After it looks the way you want it to, you’ve looked at the preview, it looks beautiful, it reads well, it has good SEO marks, click on the publish button, the it comes down to promoting our post. So how do we do that? The first thing I do when my blog post goes live is I make sure I’ve clicked on all those social share buttons down at the bottom. So I tweet it, I post it to my facebook page, i share it to linkedin, I pin it, I used to use the google plus but I don’t see any value in it anymore I don’t think it provides any search engine benefit anymore and nobody goes to google plus, but this is how people are going to share my content. I’m going to share it first because when you go to a blog and there are social sharing buttons there and the shares are 0 0 0 goose eggs across the top, it basically undermines that blog posts’ importance, it’s saying that not even the author of post wanted to share that kind of content so why should you. Just like a bartender puts a dollar, or a 5 or a 10 in the tip jar before their shift starts, the first thing you want to do is share it across those platforms using the social sharing buttons.
Links from other posts
Another advanced tactic you can use is find related blog posts you may have already written, that already have search traffic, that already have trust built up the search engines, and create links from your older posts to your new ones. So to find the best ones you can see here on the google search I type in search:takeflyte.com , obviously you’re going to replace that with your own domain, and the phrase, in this case google analytics and then I can see the most popular pages on my website for google analytics. I go to those posts and then if there’s an appropriate way to link those posts to my newest post then that’s going to drive more search visibility towards my blogpost and establish its credibility.
Promoted Posts
These days you really do need to throw money behind a lot of your blog posts. So I would recommend you can do some promoted posts on facebook and twitter, although our focus is mostly on facebook and twitter these days. And spending a little bit of money a week or two after the blogpost goes live, 5 bucks a day or something like that, it sucks that we have to spend money to send people to our marketing material, but that’s just how things are. So set up a budget for yourself, 5-10 dollars a day post it to facebook, you can do things like targeting people with a specific job title or targeting certain types of people, or targeting people that have already visited your website and maybe read other blog posts. These are important things in terms of just building awareness and building retention with your audience
Extra credit
Let me give you a few extra credit items before we wrap up here today. If you’ve done all these things and still want to dig a bit deeper.
Evil Twin
One is called the evil twin post ad this is a guest blogging technique. The benefits of guest blogging are A) you’re reaching a whole new audience you might not have reached otherwise and B) when you’re writing this guest blog post at a bare minimum in your byline you’re going to get a link back to your website and depending on the content you’re creating you might be able to create multiple links back to your website. That’s very beneficial for search engine optimization. It’s tough enough to make one blogpost so why would you want to make more blog posts for yourself, besides the reasons I just explained, well here’s a shortcut. If you wrote ‘10 ways to get into college’ you could write an evil twin post called ‘10 ways to make sure you’re not accepted by the college of your choice’. Basically just use an evil cracked mirror on all of your ideas, basically you’re just writing from the opposite perspective, same kind of content. It will take you half the time, if that, to rewrite it in that kind of mirrored approach. But again then you can go out and get it to other blog. If you’ve never tried to guest blog somewhere else, one of the easiest ways to do it is take your topic of choice and go to google. We’ll go with phishing scams and you can type in something like phishing scams + guest host. Google will bring back all the blogs that are most likely looking for guest posts on that topic, or around that category. So that’s definitely something worth doing.
Slideshare
Another way to get your blog to work for you, like I said it takes me six hours to write a good blog post these days, so I want it to get as far as possible, so I love a tool called slideshare. It’s kind of like youtube for powerpoint presentations. As you can see here, I used to have a blog called the marketing agents and we did a lot of list posts there and when I would do a list post we had a template for a slide deck and we would just create the slide deck as you can see here; facebook marketing, content marketing, blog marketing, and they were just lists. I would convert to a slide deck and we’d upload it to our accounted slideshare. One of our posts would look like this, this is one of nineteen, they’re short. There’s an introduction, there’s the list of thirteen, all I did was take the title, take the images I used on that particular part of the post and then advance a way to reach a greater audience on facebook. That was it, you put that up there, and look at that over ten thousand views. This, once we had the template in place, would take us fifteen, twenty minutes. Ten thousand views for fifteen, twenty minutes of work.
Linkedin Article
And another thing we’ve been doing lately is linkedin articles, you can do this for the blog or for the podcast version of the blog. Basically we take the image that we’re already creating for our blog, in this case you can see it up top, and we repost that article right to linkedin. It doesn’t even need to be an evil twin article necessarily, but this is reaching a wider audience, one that’s on linkedin. This is obviously more important for b to b because podcasts aren’t easily embedded here what I’ve been doing lately is taking the audio of my podcast and putting it with one of these promotional images we have, uploading that to youtube, embedding youtube back into my linkedin post, and then I’m literally copying and pasting that content that’s already been written up into linkedin’s article section. As you can see here in a few weeks I already got 254 views, 97 thumbs up, a comment, and eight shares. Again this probably took me fifteen minutes because we had to put the video together, upload it to youtube, and then embed it all in, but all the work was done. Again for fifteen minutes of work to reach that wider audience and just give them an opportunity to just know your brand and bring you back, this is a great way of leveraging your blog.
Take Away
So as we wrap up today I just want to reiterate those five Ps of building a successful business blog. Prepare, do your research, do your keyword research, find your blogs, find podcasts, and find experts who will give you quotes and then share your content when you’re done. Do the producing, do the writing. Polish it, use yoast, find images, spend time on this, make it look as good as the most professionally promoted piece of content that you can, publish that content, and then promote it; social shares, it should already be search engine optimized, use some of those advanced techniques that I mentioned. And that’s the way you’re going to use your business blog as an intricate part of the BARE essentials of digital marketing.
That’s the content that we have for today, I hope you find it valuable. If you have questions, if you haven’t asked them yet, leave your questions in the comment field or in the questions field and I’ll go ahead and answer those.
Q: How do you feel about breaking up the text of the blog with multiple images? For example: text, image, text, image, text, etc.
A: I think that’s a great approach. I think that if it makes sense for your particular post to do it then absolutely. I’m not a huge fan of throwing images in there for no good reason, but I do think images break up content and adds white space in its own way. I think that’s very valuable. I do a lot of how-to posts, so in cases like that I probably want to use images as much as possible to show what I’m doing. So I might explain something, then have a photo, then explain the next step, have a photo, that sort of stuff. I definitely think that’s very beneficial. Just make sure you’re using appropriate alt tags on all of those images.
Q: Should the meta description always be full sentences or can they be keyword phrases separated by commas?
A: You definitely don’t want to do that. Years ago there was a tag called meta keywords, literally people would just put in all the keywords they hoped would rank well for them and back in 1997 that worked, now no one pays attention to that, no search engine pays attention to that. The meta description itself is not really going to be something that’s going to improve your search engine ranking directly, it’s more about when someone sees your description is that going to increase the likelihood that they’ll click on your link. So if they just see a bunch of keywords, that feels kind of scammy and they’re less likely to click on it. I would use that 1-2 sentence meta description as more of a call to action, as a free advertisement, something like that. How do you make your short advertisement on the homepage of google seem more enticing to your ideal customer?
Q: Can I go back and change the SEO title and the meta description after I’ve already published the post?
A: Absolutely you can. That brings up a great point because lately I have been not creating a lot of new blog posts because I have already written over a lot of the topics that we at Flyte want to talk about. Google analytics, search engine optimization, email marketing, I’ve written blog posts, those blog posts have trust built up, they have links coming into them, I’d be competing with myself to create new content. So my new approach is to take a blog post that might be slipping from the search engine rankings or just feels old and out of date and rehab it. So if I rehab it I might go through the same process as if I was writing a new article for email marketing, for example, get some new keywords, new emerging keywords, rewrite that blogpost, keep the url the same, that’s an important thing, give it a better title, give it a better meta description, overhaul the images. A lot of times in the old days I didn’t put an image with every blogpost and if I did it was kind of cruddy, so I would say depending on the number of blog posts you have already, think about if you’ve already talked about this topic, maybe you want to find an old blogpost that just needs a little TLC. So you can absolutely change the title and meta description, and the content in that blogpost as long as you don’t change the url.
Q: Do you ever blog your own videos? Is this a good idea?
A: It’s a great idea, I love doing that. One of the things I’ll often do is create a video like how to set up google analytics the right way and I’ll take a video, upload it to youtube, I write up the transcript, put that into the description at youtube, then I come back to my blog, basically use that same description or I might summarize it or write it in another way and embed the video right into that blog post. That’s how I’m trying to optimize this particular page on the internet for how to set up google analytics the right way, I’m really trying to focus in on that phrase and between the video and the words on the page I’m hopefully doing a really good job of doing that. So yes, if you’ve got videos or they’re up on youtube or vimeo or some site like that, create a blogpost around that content if it serves your business purposes and add a transcript or a summary or show notes from that video.
Q: Best advice for guest bloggers
A: A lot of different ways I can go with this, if you’re looking to get more guest blogger opportunities, there are some services out there that are kind of like a marketplace for guest bloggers but my experience has been that the blogs there are very low quality and won’t give you the audience or the search visibility you’re looking for. So I’d start with, if you’re not established, the phishing scams, or whatever your topic is plus guest blogs or guest posts and see which blogs out there are looking for guest bloggers in your niche and that would be one thing. I’d also look to see who the industry leaders are in that particular area and then seeing if they’re going to take guest blog posts even if they didn’t mention it on their page. Then find out what the rules are, ask what the editorial guidelines are, how long it should be, create your best content for somebody else’s blog because you want to get them really excited about having you write again for them if at all possible. If you’re putting out mediocre content nobody’s going to visit your website, nobody’s going to click through, and at the end of the day that’s one of the biggest goals.
Q: In sharing our own post, if we use the sharing buttons to share them to all of our channels of communication are we overloading our fans and followers?
A: Probably not. We always think we’re overwhelming our audience but remember of all the competing messages that are out there. Chances are they’re not going to see your tweet, chances are they’re not going to see your organic facebook post, and chances are they’re not going to see your linkedin, so I would say maybe you should have multiple people from your office share it, not necessarily always on the same day, or you share it on facebook from your company page and then have employees share it to their particular personal profiles if they feel comfortable with that. Share that to your linkedin profiles, mention it multiple times on your linkedin, linkedin and twitter especially because the news feed moves so fast on those that I don’t see a problem with you posting about it three times the day you launch it and then putting it in some evergreen posting tool like edgar, or social, social sprout, or any of those kind of tools to continually raise visibility for those posts. One thing I think I forgot to mention is one of the most critical pieces of any kind of promotion of your blog is sending it out to your email list. The number one driver of traffic to your blog post is going to be your email subscribers, so make sure that is part of your regimen.
Q: A note on facebook boosting, I’ve had a lot of trouble recently boosting a new blog for my company when it turns out facebook had deactivated some of their job titles and inter subcategories but they still appear in the menus and they wouldn’t let me boost until I used an available category but they didn’t tell me which ones were valid, which ones weren’t. A little annoying.
A: That sounds more than just a little annoying. Right now facebook’s going through a little bit of self reflection so that could be part of what’s going on. I know right now you can’t create any new chatbots on facebook because they review their privacy issues, so that might be a temporary glitch, but I know facebook is famous for not always being the most helpful or the most transparent when it comes to reaching your ideal customer.
Q: What about polls? That wasn’t mentioned as a valid blog type but I like to think that it would be one to boost, to solicit response, and then there’s the opportunity to do a follow up post with charts analyzing the response.
A: Yeah I mean I haven’t really explored that, but if you’ve had success with creating polls, I find especially in blogging these days as opposed to five or ten years ago, you get less comments than you used to get. Most of that is social activity takes place in social media. So if it’s working for you, great, but if somebody said I need to write a survey or a poll post I would probably consider creating that poll in social media, especially on a platform like facebook where you can get that level of engagement, and then turning the answers into a blogpost and then going back to the original thread in facebook and saying hey thanks for everybody’s input, if you’d like to see the results and the analysis of those results you can click here. Then everybody who left a comment would get a little notification about that and hopefully come visit you.If you have any more questions that come up in the next couple days or after you rewatch the webinar, feel free to reach out to me as my information’s up there on the screen; rich@takeflyte.com I’m also @therichbrooks on twitter and everywhere else, I’m pretty easy to reach and of course I’ll be sending out an email follow up so you can just hit the reply button as well. If you have any questions about blogging or any other digital marketing, or if you need help with your own digital marketing to generate more leads from your website, I’m happy to help you out. Thanks everybody, have a great day.
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