3
Blogging: Telling Your Story
If you’re an artist, you’ll upload photos of your work to your blog. If you’re a consultant, you’ll share your thoughts about your industry. If you’re looking for a job, you’ll write about industry issues to demonstrate that you understand what your potential employer is dealing with. And if you’re a nonprofit, what better way to keep donors up to date with different research, political developments, and current events than by blogging?
It’s not impossible to have a personal branding campaign without a blog, but it’s difficult. You need a central place to showcase your thoughts, ideas, and work.
Remember, two of the personal branding universal objectives (see Chapter 1, “Welcome to the Party”) are to tell your story and to be bold. You need to tell people about yourself, and a blog is the best way to do it. You can keep a record of what you’ve done, where you’ve done it, and what you were thinking when you did it. It’s a journal of your professional accomplishments that show your value to an employer, a client, or your industry in general.
What Is Blogging?
To begin, you need to register on a blogging platform, like Blogspot or WordPress. Today’s blogging platforms make it easy for anyone, even non-programmers, to share photographs and videos online and to post articles for the world to read.
Before these different blogging platforms, any web updates had to be done via HTML coding. If you wanted to post a new article, you had to place your new article above the old one, format it via HTML, and upload it via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). If you were really good, you could add a new pre-written article in about 1520 minutes. Now, it’s just a matter of entering text in a window that looks like an email window, formatting it, and clicking the “publish” button.
Take a look at Figures 3.1–3.3 for examples of what an email window, a Blogger window, and a WordPress window look like.
Most blogging platforms are just as easy to use as your email. Your subject line is your headline, and you type the content in the body. You format the text with the formatting buttons, which look an awful lot like the ones at the top of any word processing program. In an email, you click “send,” and the other person receives your email in seconds. In blogging, you click “publish,” and your post is published in seconds.
Note
In the second edition of this book, we said there were more than 40 different blogging platforms. Now, in 2017, it’s closer to 100, including emerging new sites like Medium and Ghost, as well as LinkedIn and Facebook, that provide publishing space. Still, we’re going to stick with the most popular ones: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and (now) Medium. We’ll mention others at times, but when we discuss blogging, we’re primarily thinking of these four, and especially WordPress because it’s what we use for our clients.
Figure 3.2 A Blogger.com window. Google owns Blogger and Gmail, which may explain why these two look similar.
Figure 3.3 A WordPress window. Whether you use WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress. The window looks like this.
A Clarification of Terms
There is a difference between a blog and a post. People use the terms interchangeably, but there are actually two strict definitions. A blog is the collection of blog posts. It is not a single article or post. An article or post is a single entry in a blog, similar to an entry in a diary.
• Wrong: “I wrote a new blog today.”
• Right: “I wrote a new post today.”
• Also right: “I blogged today.”
• Really wrong: “The dog blogged on the floor again.”
The first one means you created an entirely new blog. The second one means you just published a new article on your existing blog. The third one sounds like you picked up a virus somewhere, but it’s still okay to say. The fourth one we slipped in when the editors weren’t looking.
Why Should You Blog?
There are as many reasons to blog as there are blogs. People have their own reasons to start one, but they can usually be boiled down to a few major categories. See if one of these fits why you want to start a blog.
• You want to establish your expertise: You could start a blog to help your chances in a job search, to launch a public speaking career, or to show all those jerks from high school that your knowledge of mollusk mating habits was not useless.
This is also a good way to improve your own knowledge in your field: You need to keep up with your industry in order to tell your readers about it. So, if nothing else, blogging forces you to stay current on your knowledge, and establishes you as an industry expert.
• You want to market or sell something: Businesses use their blogs to engage directly with their customers and help them make buying decisions about their products or services. This is called content marketing, and it’s all the rage in marketing circles.
You may not sell anything on your blog, but you can sell things because of it. You can showcase your products and drive people to your website to increase sales. Many businesses have embraced blogging for marketing, which is why we know it isn’t going away any time soon. When the business world picks something up, it’ll be around forever. (It’s 2017, and plenty of businesses still have fax numbers.)
• You have something to say: Whether it’s personal observations about life, political beliefs, or knowledge you want to impart, you want a place to publish your thoughts. Even if you write your blog for just three people, it’s important to have a platform to stand on. We know bloggers who started out writing for only a few friends and now measure their readers by the tens of thousands each month.
It’s worth noting that sharing personal beliefs on a blog for professional branding can backfire. Potential employers may read your blog, and getting too personal or too controversial can keep you from getting the job. So if you want to use your personal blog as your platform to talk about the current political climate, just be aware that your employer may think differently than you.
• You want to share your passion: Many blogs are about someone’s passion or hobby. Photographers, collectors, and writers have all showcased their talents or acquisitions through blogging. Whether it’s the photographer who uploads her best wedding photos or the antique tractor collector who’s showing off his latest steering wheel, bloggers have shared their passions with other people like them.
• You want to be a part of a community: The great thing about sharing your passion is that people who share that passion will soon find you. If you write about marble collecting, other marble collectors will find you on the search engines and any networks where marble collectors hang out. You can share information via your blogs, talk about upcoming events, and eventually meet face to face at the Marble Collecting Convention. (Yes, there actually is one. Erik gave a TEDx talk about it once.)
• You want to make money: You can make money from blogging, but it can be difficult. There are three basic ways: ad sales, freelance blogging, or affiliate blogging. Our good friend, Douglas Karr (MarketingTechBlog.com), is one of the most widely read bloggers in Indiana, and his blog has been one of Ad Age’s Top 150 blogs. But he makes just a small amount of money from ad sales each year.
Freelance blogging or ghost blogging, is writing blog posts for other companies, and they pay you for it. Erik’s company is a ghost blogging company.
Affiliate blogging is selling things for other companies through your own website or blog. For example, you set up a system in which you are an affiliate of Amazon.com. You create a page that has a link to this book in Amazon’s system. If a visitor to your page buys our book, you make a small commission.
Some people, like Heather Sokol, have built small businesses that do nothing but affiliate sales (see Figure 3.4). They create several blogs, write posts about different products for them, and then promote them via search engines and social media so people will buy their affiliate products or services.
Figure 3.4 Heather Sokol runs Inexpensively.com as part of her affiliate blogging network. This is one possible way to make money from blogging.
PERSONAL BRANDING CASE STUDY: JONATHAN THOMAS, ANGLOTOPIA.COM
Jonathan Thomas loves England, even though he lives in Indiana. He’s dreamed of living in Britain for most of his life, so he and his wife started the website and print magazine Anglotopia for Anglophiles, people who love the United Kingdom, its history, and its culture.
Jonathan started the website in 2007 and had actually just celebrated its 10th anniversary when we asked him to participate in this case study.
“I started Anglotopia because I couldn’t find a website that ticked all my Anglophile boxes,” said Jonathan. “I needed extra money, so I thought I could make money at this newfangled blogging thing.”
Jonathan started Anglotopia with two goals in mind: to make extra money and to return to England somehow. It’s worked out—he and his wife have since made ten trips to England, some paid for by others, most paid for by them. And now running Anglotopia is his full-time job.
Although he hesitates to use the word “blog”—he thinks of each installation as a publication—he has two, uhh, online publications: Anglotopia, which focuses on British travel, culture, and history, and Londontopia, a site dedicated solely to London.
Erik first got to know Jonathan back when they were both travel writers for the state of Indiana, and Erik, a mild Anglophile, has been a fan of Anglotopia ever since. Meanwhile, Jonathan took what he learned as a Hoosier travel writer and started using it in Anglotopia.
“Visit Indiana was my first real experience as a blogging superstar, as local tourist authorities were happy to host me and I got paid to do the blogging,” said Jonathan. “I got to see some really cool parts of Indiana.”
Anglotopia has opened up a few travel doors for the Thomases too. Jonathan said he’s taken some trips with support from someone else. Most recently, a major airline arranged for him and his wife to fly free in business class on a research trip. They were also given a tour of the airline’s heritage museum that’s normally closed to the public.
“We were treated like VIPs, and it’s a great feeling to be taken seriously. Even after ten years, it still feels good to be taken seriously,” Jonathan said.
The site once even led to a job offer and a chance to move to England permanently. The fact that he had built the blog from scratch and did all the marketing himself was a big boost. He had just started following the CEO of a London startup on Twitter, and the CEO tweeted about a digital marketing job at his company. Jonathan asked if they would be willing to sponsor a visa. The CEO said they would and encouraged him to apply.
He and his wife flew over (another airline flew them for free in exchange for writing about the trip—a common travel writing exchange), Jonathan worked in the office for a week while he did a series of formal interviews, and at the end of the trip, he was offered the job. Sadly, he turned it down when he and his wife discovered she was pregnant, and they wanted to have the baby in the U.S.
A few years later, Jonathan was laid off, so he made Anglotopia his full time job (he was already making more money at it than he was at his actual job), and he hasn’t looked back. He’s been working on it full-time since 2011, and he has no desire to work for anyone else. Social media marketing has always been important to Anglotopia’s success, but Facebook has been the biggest help.
“A few years ago we exploded from a few thousand fans to over 100,000. Now we’re at 225,000 fans,” Jonathan said.
One important lesson Jonathan has learned is that advertising to high web traffic is no longer the way to make money. It used to be that Google would pay a lot of money for clicks, but Facebook changed its algorithms as a way to force businesses to pay to promote their posts, which slowed their Facebook traffic (and thus, their Google payments) to a trickle.
So Anglotopia’s biggest product now is its audience. Jonathan sells access to a very specific niche that is valuable to advertisers. As one of the leading Anglophile websites, Jonathan is reaching an audience of devoted fans, and advertisers are willing to pay for that access. He markets their products across all of Anglotopia’s social media channels and in an email newsletter.
Through it all, and by focusing solely on his blog, Jonathan has created some great opportunities for him and his family.
“There’s the big advertising/marketing deal with a huge international company. There’s getting offered your dream job because someone can clearly see what you’ve done on the Internet,” said Jonathan. “There’s being flown for free to Britain or getting comped free hotel rooms or discounts on car rentals. All because you run a publication.”
He sometimes wonders whether a real job would be less stressful, but he wouldn’t want to give up what he’s doing.
He said, “This is so much more rewarding.”
Choose Your Blogging Platforms
All of the platforms we discuss in this chapter are completely free to use, including WordPress.com and Tumblr. Some of them have additional upgrades you can buy, but they’re optional, and you can run your blog without them.
If you’re not technically savvy or don’t know anyone who is, we recommend that you start your new blog on Blogspot, WordPress.com, or Tumblr. You can set one up in less than 30 minutes, and the hardest part will be choosing which theme you want to use (graphic design elements, such as background, colors, and photos). But after you’re up and running, it’s a breeze to add new content.
Blogspot.com/Blogger.com
Blogspot was called Blogger before Google purchased it in 2003. Now, typing in either URL will get you to the same place. It’s one of the most widely used blog platforms around the world. It’s easy to use, and it integrates seamlessly into other Google properties like Picasa (photo sharing), YouTube, and Google Analytics (web analytics software).If you’ve signed up for a free Google account of any sort, whether it’s Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Drive, or even YouTube, you have a Blogspot account.
Blogspot is also a hosted blog site, which means your blog lives on Google’s servers. You don’t have to mess with server storage or updating and maintaining software, and it doesn’t cost anything.
Although many advanced bloggers look down their e-noses at Blogspot, it’s one of the most widely used of all the blogging platforms because it’s easy. However that also means it’s limited in what it can do. It doesn’t have the add-ons and plug-ins that WordPress does, although it does allow users to create separate pages.
Note
Let’s define a few terms:
Add-ons and plug-ins are features you can add on or plug in to a blog to increase its functionality. Pages are extra pages you can add to a blog, which are accessible from the front page. This lets it work more like a website than a traditional blog. This is a fairly new development in the blogging world, so it is not available on every platform.
The URL for your blog will look like “http://bobscrumrunner.blogspot.com” (or whatever name you choose; this is one we created for the book. You can actually visit it.), but Blogspot has a feature that lets you cloak your blog behind your purchased domain. (See the later section “Purchasing and Hosting a Domain Name” for more information.) The upside of cloaking is that your domain, BobScrumrunner.com, is always visible. The downside is that there are no specific URLs, like “http://bobscrumrunner.blogspot.com/2009/12/18/my-trip-to-the-twine-museum.html.” The original domain is the only one to show up in the address bar. This means you can’t copy the longer URL that sends someone to a specific post.
Erik runs his humor blog, ErikDeckers.com, on Blogspot.
WordPress.com and WordPress.org
WordPress is a more advanced, powerful, and sophisticated platform than Blogspot. WordPress is open source software, which means a community of users and developers are freely working to improve it and add new features. You can choose from two versions of WordPress, depending on how much effort you want to put into it: WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (also known as WordPress.org).
• WordPress.com is a hosted blog site, like Blogspot. You don’t worry about server space, paying for usage, or maintaining a server. WordPress.com is a little more basic than WordPress.org, which means it’s suitable for the beginning blogger who is happy with using templates and having limited functionality. WordPress.org is a better fit for more technically inclined bloggers who want to learn new software.
A WordPress.com URL looks like: “http://bobscrumrunner.wordpress.com,” but WordPress.com will also, for a fee, let you choose your domain name (but won’t cloak the longer URLs, which is good), buy extra storage, post videos with a WordPress player, and eliminate ads. But other than those options, it’s free. (If you have a WordPress.com blog already, go to the dashboard and click the Upgrades button for pricing. There are currently three options, Personal, Premium, and Business, which let you add more features, customization, and even storage space.)
• Self-hosted WordPress/WordPress.org, on the other hand, is software that you download and install onto your server—it’s self-hosted. This takes some technical know-how. If you’re technically savvy, have the patience and willingness to learn, or can bribe a geeky friend with a nice lunch, you can tackle this version. If you plan to become a blogger of some note, or plan to have a lot of features, you need a self-hosted WordPress blog (you can download the software at WordPress.org and install it on your own server, or use a web host like GoDaddy which has “one-click installation.” You don’t have to start here, but you’ll want to get here sooner rather than later.
WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress both let you create pages. Rather than writing code to create different pages, you can click buttons to create a new page for any topic or subject, like speaking videos, photos of your art, or any products you sell. Creating a new page is as easy as creating a new blog post.
Note
Posts are regular blog posts listed in reverse chronological order on the home or blog page. Pages are static and not listed by date. An About page is a good example of a static page.
A self-hosted WordPress post will have its own URL—such as “http://www.bobscrumrunner.com/blog/2010/04/12/I-met-Elvis-at-conference”—and the long URLs won’t be cloaked. This is crucial to help your blog posts be found more easily on search engines.
The great thing about self-hosted WordPress is that it’s fully customizable and has literally thousands of plug-ins and add-ons for your blog. With these plug-ins, you can do all this and more:
• Block spam comments.
• Ask readers to take a survey.
• Optimize your blog to be found more quickly by search engines.
• Integrate your Picasa or Flickr account.
• Create an e-commerce site.
• Create your own shortened URL based on your domain name.
• Show visitor locations and stats.
• Post your workout results.
• Post the Turkish lira exchange rates in your sidebar.
Basically, we could write an entire book with nothing but WordPress plug-ins, and it would be out of date the second we sent it to the publisher. That’s because new plug-ins are constantly developed and released, and old ones are dropped by their developers all the time.
Both of us use self-hosted WordPress. for client blogs. We also have our work blogs on our own servers using the self-hosted WordPress software; Kyle’s is at KyleLacy.com; Erik’s is at ProBlogService.com.
Other Blogging Platforms
At least 100 other blogging platforms are available. All of them are free, although some of them offer premium upgrades as WordPress.com does. Several are increasing in popularity.
Tumblr
Tumblr (no “e”) lets you post text, photos, and videos just by uploading or emailing them to your blog. Unlike the other platforms, however, users can follow each other and see their posts aggregated on their own dashboard.
Basically, if Kyle follows Erik’s blog, both blogs appear on Kyle’s dashboard. If he follows a third blog, his dashboard includes that one as well, but Erik’s does not. You just need to click the “Follow” button in the upper-right corner (see Figure 3.5) to follow someone’s blog.
Figure 3.5 A Tumblr blog. Note the “Follow” button at the top right of the window. That’s how you follow a Tumblr blog.
Tumblr has been embraced by younger users as an acceptable substitute for WordPress—it’s great for anyone who wants to have a blog presence but doesn’t want to bother with a self-hosted WordPress site.
Tumblr lends itself to the rapid response, on-the-go blogging that a lot of mobile phone users want without all the hassle of messing around with something bigger and more complicated like a WordPress blog. If you snap a photo on your mobile phone or have a random thought or even write a short article (100–200 words), it’s great for Tumblr. There’s even a dedicated mobile app, and you can email any text, audio, video, and photos from any mobile phone.
Another reason Tumblr has been embraced by a lot of younger users and social media pros is that it’s a community. Like we mentioned, it’s easy to follow each other’s blogs (just like Twitter), which lets you connect with other users, building your own community of favorite Tumblrs. And as you follow other Tumblrs, you can see their own blogs in your feed. However, there’s no way to divide Tumblr feeds into separate groups like Twitter (see “Chapter 5, Twitter: Sharing in the Conversation”), so if you follow a lot of people, you’ll be overwhelmed by the resulting feed.
You can also integrate your Tumblr blog into your Google Analytics app, auto-promote new posts on Twitter and Facebook, and fully optimize it for search engines.
On the downside, Tumblr is not a great fit for long-form writing, and it doesn’t have any plug-ins. It’s intended to be a simple micro-blogging service, rather than a full-blown blog or extensive communication tool.
If you want something for short, pithy comments and lots of photos and videos, Tumblr is a great tool for the beginning blogger. But if you want to write longer blog posts, it can’t handle the posts very easily. And if you decide to export your blog to another blogging platform, such as WordPress, it can be rather convoluted.
Actors Wil Wheaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Felicia Day are famous Tumblr users, as is David J. Peterson, the guy who created the Dothraki and Valerian languages for Game Of Thrones.
Medium
Medium has just sort of burst on the scene over the last few years, becoming a major publisher of notable writers, artists, and thinkers. Large publications began shifting their written content over to Medium and sharing their work there rather than on their own websites. Even President Obama pre-released his 2015 State of the Union Address on Medium.1
Medium is different primarily because it does something no other blog platform does: It emphasizes the quality of writing over the most popular (that is, most read) articles, to ensure the site’s readers only get the good stuff. The editors will often pick their favorite articles, called—what else?—Editors Picks. These are often based on Total Time Read, reviews, and total engagements.2
If you write an outstanding article, but someone else writes a schlocky article and gets 5,000 friends to read it, your article can still be placed higher because it’s better. So Medium forces you to really polish up your writing skills and bring your A-game.
Medium has an enormous audience with millions of visitors each month. Think about what that can mean for your brand if you got only a tenth of a percent of that.
Those millions of visitors can also lead to better search rankings for your Medium articles than your own blog. (But if you publish on Medium, be sure to publish on your own blog a few days earlier, and then post a link back to the original article. That’s so your blog will be recognized by Google as the “canonical” or original source of the article.)
Medium also has a strong community of fellow writers. Not only can you find potential collaboration partners, but you can link back to each other’s articles, which will also contribute to your overall traffic.
Bottom line, we don’t recommend Medium as your primary publication. It’s a great publishing platform because it’s widely read, but as the old saying goes, “don’t build on rented land.” What will you do with all your original content if Medium ever goes out of business? More importantly, why would you put more effort into getting traffic to someone else’s blog over your own?
Remember, you want traffic to your blog. That’s your reputation, your readership, your thought leadership, and that’s all that counts if you ever want to review products, get sponsors, or attract a conference organizer’s or editor’s attention. So publish to your blog first, and then republish to Medium.
Which Platform Is Right for You?
So which platform is best? We’re going to give you one of those maddening answers that people give when they don’t want to make a choice.
It depends.
It depends on what your level of commitment will be, what your level of technological expertise is, and how much time and money you want to spend on your blog. Table 3.1 shows a few questions to ask yourself before you choose your blogging platform.
Table 3.1 Choosing Your Blogging Platform
Issue |
Platform |
Money is a concern. You want free. |
Blogger, WordPress.com* |
You want stability and ease of use. |
Blogger, Medium, WordPress.com |
You need convenience and speed. |
Tumblr |
You want to customize. |
Self-hosted WordPress |
You want to use your blog as an e-commerce site. |
Self-hosted WordPress |
You need multiple pages, like a website. |
Blogger, WordPress |
*Self-hosted WordPress is free as well, but it’s your server hosting that actually costs money.
Setting Up a Blog
Setting up a blog can be quite easy. Blogging platform companies want to get as many people to sign up as they can, so they make it as easy as possible to use their services. Basically, if you have ever set up another social network profile, even Twitter or Facebook, you can set up a blog. Like we said earlier, the hardest part of the process is choosing a theme to use.
Just go to one of the blog platforms we listed, or any of the others we didn’t, and follow the step-by-step instructions. No programming, no coding, no dealing with technical issues (unless you choose the self-hosted WordPress option). Just fill in the blanks, and you’re done. But we can give you a few hints to make your blog more successful.
• Choose an easy-to-say URL: When you tell people where your blog is, you want something you can actually pronounce without difficulty. No special characters, weird spellings, or special abbreviations. When Erik set up his Blogspot account, he made the mistake of getting a URL with a dash: http://laughing-stalk.blogspot.com. After a few years, he got so tired of telling people “laughing dash stalk dot blogspot dot com” that he had to purchase his name as his domain name—ErikDeckers.com—and forward it to the website. Of course, now he has to make sure people spell his first name correctly, but it’s a lot easier than explaining that stupid dash.
• Choose a professional-looking theme: If you keep the default theme that comes with your new blog, you’ll be branded as an amateur or a poseur until you change it. Pick something you like but is easy to modify. Depending on which theme you choose, this can actually be one of the hardest parts about blogging. Not because you need any technological know-how to make it happen, but because there are dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of choices, depending on which platform you pick. (Self-hosted WordPress has the most.) Find one you like, and stick with it. If you’re going for a serious, professional image, be willing to spend a little money on a theme. They’re professional looking, well-designed, and optimized for search engines, making them well worth the cost.
• Set up an RSS feed: Regardless of which blog platform you choose, we recommend FeedBurner.com as a way to measure your RSS feed. (RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s the way you get your new blog posts to your readers, who can see them on an RSS reader, like My Yahoo! or Flipboard.)
Tip
All WordPress blogs come installed with an anti-spam plug-in called Akismet. Follow the directions on your blog dashboard for installation. Even if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you still need a WordPress.com account to activate Akismet.
Purchasing and Hosting a Domain Name
Your domain name is crucial when setting up your blog and your personal brand in general. This is the first thing search engines key in on when they index a website or blog. If your domain explains what it is you do, who you are, what you sell, and so on, you get a lot more search engine juice. (That’s one of those technical terms we use to sound cool.)
You don’t need to purchase a domain name when setting up your blog. But you may find that as you get further into this and become more proficient, you want to have a special domain name. You can purchase this before or after you set up your blog.
For example, if you sell abstract French art, you should get a domain that has some variation of those words in it, like “LesliesFrenchArt.” That will tell the different search engines what your site is all about, and they’ll know how to index the site. They’ll know what keywords and hyperlinks to look for, and they’ll make sure the “best” hyperlinks to your site have something to do with either art or France.
Note
Generally, it’s a good idea to purchase your name as a domain name. That makes it easier for people to remember, helps you when you try to showcase yourself to hiring managers, and even helps you be found more easily on search engines. If you share a name with someone famous, add your middle name or initial to your domain name to set yourself apart.
We strongly recommend that you use a domain registrar like GoDaddy (GoDaddy.com), Network Solutions (NetSol.com), or other independent registrars, as opposed to purchasing a domain through a blog hosting provider. You could run into a couple of dangers with the latter:
• They charge more than your typical registrar for a domain. (You can get them for $9.95 or less from GoDaddy.)
• They may try to keep your domain if you ever try to switch to a different provider.
If you work with a reputable domain registrar, you can avoid those problems.
Getting Inspired
First, if you’ve never considered yourself a writer, now is the time to start thinking of yourself as one. You’re writing blog posts, therefore, you’re a writer. And writers have processes. They have procedures. They have their favorite places to think, their favorite ways to find ideas, and their favorite ways to get inspired.
Pay attention to where you get your ideas, and start writing them down. Maybe you like to come up with ideas sitting in a coffee shop with a Moleskine notebook in front of you; so get a latte and buy yourself a notebook. Maybe your ideas come in the middle of the night; keep an index card and pen on your nightstand, and write down ideas when you wake up. (Do not try to remember them the next day. That never works.) Maybe you get inspired in the shower, so get a low-flow shower head and take longer showers. Or maybe a meeting with a colleague triggers an idea, so send yourself an email, or write in your notebook, as soon as the meeting ends.
Whether it’s music, exercising, or meditation, you need to find the things that inspire you to write, and then you need to start doing them. Combine those with your preferred sources for material, and you can start creating more blog posts than you’ll know what to do with.
What Should You Write About?
You’ve got your blog set up. You’ve followed most of the advice we’ve laid out so far, and you’re ready to start writing. Maybe you even wrote the obligatory “This is my first blog post” post. (Go back and delete that. That’s amateur hour. Also, we both did that on our blogs.)
Hopefully you’ve figured out what to write about before you set up your blog. If you didn’t, and you’ve waited this long to figure it out, we’d like to commend you on following our advice so closely.
We’d also like to ask you to buy five more copies of this book.
Figuring out what to write about can be what makes or breaks your blog. Although your subject matter is up to you, we can tell you that having a focused, specific topic is going to make your life much easier than if you have a broad, general topic. That seems rather counterintuitive, but it’s true. You will have much more to write about if you narrow your focus to something small than if you write about something huge.
Say you want to blog about marketing. What’s there to write about? Well, for starters, there’s advertising, direct mail, marketing campaigns, marketing strategy, billboards, and Internet marketing. Most general bloggers we know can generate 10–20 posts about marketing, and then they’re tapped out. The topics are too broad to cover without either going overboard and writing 50,000-word textbooks or getting stuck after writing their “this is my first marketing blog post” entry.
But if you make your blog about marketing strategy, you’re getting somewhere. Your blog can be about creating strategies, critiquing other strategies, and even doing case studies about a company’s strategy. Drill down a little more. How about “social media marketing strategy for nonprofits?” Even better. Now you can focus strictly on that one small niche about how nonprofits can improve their marketing efforts and raise more money. And because you’re so tightly focused, you’ll have an endless supply of topics to discuss.
By focusing on this niche, you’re also more likely to catch the attention of nonprofits who want to improve their fund-raising and marketing. And—get this—they will want to hire the person who told them how to do it: you.
That’s right. You’ve been giving a certain nonprofit all this free advice, and the management figures there must be a whole lot more rattling around in your head. That’s why they’ll pay you a lot of money to show what that “more” is and to help it get better at what it does.
Tip
Check out the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson for an explanation of why giving stuff away for free will end up making you more money than if you charged for that same information in the first place. Believe it or not, if you blog about social media marketing strategy long enough, you’ll be asked to give talks at conferences, get hired to consult at $100 per hour, and be asked to write a book, where you package your blog posts and your conference talks into easy-to-carry book form and sell it for $29.95…uhh, we’ve said too much.
Heather Mansfield writes the Nonprofit Tech For Good blog (NPTechForGood.com; see Figure 3.6), in which she tells non-profits how to use technology to reach members and donors. She writes about several different topics, all centered around non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and how they can use social media technology to increase their reach. She also holds webinars, offers training, and travels around the world teaching her nonprofit and NGO clients how to use the plethora of technology out there.
Figure 3.6 Heather Mansfield writes the Nonprofit Tech For Good blog as a way to promote her personal brand as a social media trainer, author, and speaker.
Heather owns a company that specializes in training and consulting, so by writing constantly about topics in this area, she also establishes her own expertise, which makes her an attractive option to nonprofits that need her help using social technology.
By focusing on this very specific niche, Heather can plumb the depths of the topics that matter most to her audience: nonprofits that need help raising money from donors and volunteers.
Table 3.2 General to Narrow to Niche—Finding Your Specialty
General |
Narrow |
Niche |
Cooking |
Italian cooking |
Gluten-free Italian cooking |
History |
American history |
Civil War history |
Business |
Sales |
Selling to large corporations |
Marketing |
Internet marketing |
Email marketing |
Finance |
Personal finance |
Personal finance for Millennials |
Writing |
Journalism |
Running a weekly newspaper |
Use these examples in Table 3.2, which compare a general topic to a narrow topic to a tightly focused niche, to help you figure out how to find your own niche.
If you’re not sure how to focus your niche, ask your social networks what areas they think you should focus on. This is especially helpful if you’re following a lot of people in your chosen industry.
Finding Subject Matter
One of the best places to find subject matter and writing topics for your blog is other blogs. This is especially true as you try to establish your place in your field. You want to be noticed by other bloggers (so they’ll write about you and introduce you to their audiences), and the best way to do this is to write about them.
If you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, writing about the latest developments in your chosen niche will show you’re keeping up with the advancements in thinking and technology. You can become a resource to your readers by being the first to tell them about all the great stuff you’ve been reading. Not only should you share those articles via Twitter, but you should blog about them. This lets you add your own thoughts to their ideas and helps you set yourself apart from the Me Too crowd who only repeat what they’ve heard.
Here are some other places to find blogging ideas:
• Newspapers
• Trade journals
• Questions from customers
• Comments on previous posts
• Something you heard on the radio or saw on TV
How to Write a Blog Post
When you find your niche, figuring out your subject matter is very easy. But your blog is more than just an opinion column. Use different formats that can drive your topics and determine what you write about:
• Personal versus professional topics: Many bloggers who try to create a professional image worry about whether to write personal posts. They don’t want to put too much information about themselves in public or confuse their personal life with their professional life. We don’t think that’s an issue. Social media has blurred the line between our personal and professional lives anyway, so there’s nothing wrong with letting some of your “public personal” life bleed over into your professional life.
As dreadful as some people may think personal blogging is, it’s going to make you more accessible and likable. People will get to know you and feel a closer connection to you by reading what you think about personal topics like your favorite TV show or your adventures in finding a babysitter to watch the kids on a Friday night. Although this may not seem as important—because it frankly doesn’t do squat for your credibility and expertise—it lets people get to know you. When they get to know you, they’ll trust you. And when they trust you, they’ll want to be a part of what you’re doing.
Remember, as part of your personal branding objectives (see Chapter 1), you’re creating relationships. To create relationships, you need to be personable in order to build trust, which leads to the opportunities you’re trying to create.
• List posts: This is a big favorite with readers, and it seems to generate more blog traffic than any other type of post. “Five Secrets to Successful Blog Writing” always gets more attention than “How to be a Successful Blog Writer.” People are attracted to these because they’re finite, they hold the promise of being short, and they’re an easy read.3 You can spend a little time on several topics and explore a few ideas at once. Later, if you’re ever stuck for another article idea, you can come back to your list, pick an item from the list, and expand on it.
However, the list is starting to fall out of favor with some people, especially thanks to sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy with their “27 Secrets About Your Favorite Movie. #18 Will Amaze You!” posts. So, if you’re going to use a list post, do so sparingly, keep it brief, and avoid trying to amaze us.
• Authority posts: These establish your authority on a particular topic as your “messages from on high.” Here, you can pontificate, philosophize, and predict. Talk about industry trends. Predict what issues your industry will face in the coming year. Review new books or technology, and give an opinion about whether you think they’re great or they suck.
• How-to posts: These are more specific and factual than authority posts; they’re for teaching processes, while authority posts are about expounding on viewpoints. For ideas, check out message boards for questions in your field or industry. Answer customer emails, especially ones you have to answer over and over. (In the future, you can just send customers a link to that post.) Write out step-by-step instructions whenever you can and include diagrams or photos, if possible.
• News article and blog responses: Find a post by someone in your field that you can respond to. State whether and why you agree or disagree (be polite), and present your own thoughts. Don’t just say, “Here are five reasons why entrepreneurs should outsource your bookkeeping” and then repeat the five reasons. List a couple of reasons, but then add a couple of your own. Now you’ve contributed to the original author’s conversation and maybe given him something to think about. You’ve also added to the body of knowledge about entrepreneurship.
As an added benefit, if you link back to the original post, the author will see the link, which can increase the chances of him linking back to you and participating in your conversation as well. And that can introduce your blog to his readers.
• Product reviews: Review new products, services, restaurants, companies, software, tools, whatever you happen to be involved in. Because you’re the expert, you’re going to teach people about what’s out there. Introduce people to the new offerings in your industry, and give an unbiased opinion about them. If you’re a restaurant reviewer or travel wrier, review different restaurants and travel destinations. If you’re a woodworker, talk about the new tools on the market.
Writing for Readers vs. Writing for Search Engines
A few years ago, there was a big debate in the industry about whether the quantity of posts was more important to search engine rankings than the quality of the writing.
Generally, people who write a lot of posts are concerned with winning search engine rankings—how high they rank in Google or Bing—because higher rankings mean more visitors. People who try to write better posts are more concerned with winning additional readers.
That argument was put to rest in 2011. Google wants quality writing over quantity. If you have to sacrifice quality to produce a lot of mediocre, poorly written content, save your time. Focus on producing the best writing you can and forget trying to produce as much content as you possibly can. The Google staff have said over and over again in the last six years that they want high-quality content and do not want anyone resorting to search engine optimization (SEO) trickery anymore. They’ve begun ignoring a lot of the old tricks—keyword stuffing, anchor text, putting the keywords in the headline, and so forth—and look at things like how long people spend reading your posts, whether people link back to your site, and even whether it’s mobile-friendly and loads quickly. They’re no longer concerned with the things that worked even two and three years ago, and some of those tricks can even get you penalized.
It’s About the Quality of the Writing
You can tweak your blog’s SEO to win search all day long, but if people don’t like what you have to say or you say it poorly, they won’t stick around, let alone come back. Just because they showed up once doesn’t guarantee they’ll show up again. That’s where quality writing comes in.
It is true that people come to your blog through search engines, where you can hook them with good writing. But there are so many additional ways to bring them around: Twitter, Facebook, speaking opportunities, networking, and so on. Bringing them in via search is great, and it’s still the most popular source of website traffic for both of us. But we focus more on writing great articles and sharing great ideas.
Bottom line: This is a fine line to walk. We don’t think you should ignore search engines because that traffic will be a big part of your audience. But don’t ignore writing well for the sake of tricking search engines.
Google Expects You to Write Good Stuff
In early 2011, Google updated its search engine algorithms with a new version called Panda, and with it, it started paying closer attention to a website’s quality. They wanted to make sure that people were writing good copy and designing attractive sites. Plenty of search engine spammers—also called “Black Hat SEO”—were trying to trick the search engine into ranking their sites first, and one of the telltale signs was poorly written or very short copy—100 words or so, also called “thin” content. To combat it, they began blacklisting all sites that used these black hat techniques, and began rewarding high-quality content instead.
They have released several updates since then named Penguin, Pigeon, Pirate, and Possum. They’ve even released several updated versions of Penguin since then.
In short, Google is always changing and updating its search algorithms to punish cheaters and ne’er-do-wells and to boost people who create high-quality content. If you want to keep up with the changes, pay attention to sites like SearchEngineLand.com and Moz.com. Those are SEO professionals who understand the minutiae of Google’s changes. But unless you want to become an SEO pro, just focus on the things you absolutely can control, like the quality of your work.
But how do they measure quality? While Google can’t tell if your writing is any good or not, their algorithms have a few factors they look at, and those are things you can control.
There are more than 200 signals Google checks, but just three make a big difference (and they’re things you can control), according to most SEO experts. They are: time spent on a site, bounce rate, and click-through rates.
• If people spend only a few seconds on a site, Google assumes they didn’t like what they read. So Google assumes the content is poorly written and lowers the page’s search rank. It counts when people click a link to visit a site and then hit the “Back” button to return to the search results. They conclude the shorter the time, the worse the site must be.
• If people bounce on a site (visit one page and then leave again; visiting a second page means they did not bounce), Google assumes the site wasn’t easy to navigate or wasn’t good enough. Again, they measure whether a user hits the “Back” button. (However, don’t fret if you have a high bounce rate on your blog posts. That’s normal.)
• If people don’t click a site when it’s near the top of the search engine rankings, the Google bots assume the description wasn’t even interesting enough to get people to visit the site. (It’s like having a store that wasn’t interesting enough for people to walk into.) Because Google can measure whether people click a result, they can also tell when people don’t click a result.
So, if you want your site to do well on Google’s search engine, make sure you write great content. Make sure it’s beautiful and easy to navigate. Include photos, videos, and other content to get people to linger on your site. Include “Previous Post/Next Post” links to help people get around as well as “Related Posts” links. (There are WordPress plug-ins to help you do this; there aren’t for most of the other blog platforms we discussed.)
In short, be a good blogger, and you’ll be doing good SEO. You don’t even have to be awesome at it. Considering most people do not do a great job of blogging, you can do a passable job and surpass most bloggers out there.
How Often Should You Post?
Basically, we recommend posting new content once a week for most blogs, and as much as two or three times a week. Anything less and you look like you can’t commit to a simple blogging schedule, you don’t have good follow-through, or you’ve just abandoned the blog completely. And because you’re trying to create a positive personal brand, this is something to avoid.
Regular posting makes it easier to be found in the search engines for your particular search terms because search engines want fresh, new content on a regular basis. The more you post, the more they visit your blog. The more they visit your blog, the higher your possible ranking.
More important, you need to post consistently. If you post once a week, publish on the same day. If you post daily, post it at the same time. That way your readers will know when and how to find you, and your readership will build more quickly and reliably than if you were to post every 715 days, without rhyme or reason.
But don’t feel like you have to publish something when you don’t have anything to say. We both tried that, publishing every single day, and while it did have a positive effect on our traffic, the quality of our work suffered. We both fell into the trap of writing about anything just so we could keep up that crazy publishing schedule.
Plenty of people publish every single day, and we can tell you that the quality of their content suffers greatly. Not only are they scrambling around for ideas, but they’ll give the bare minimum of time to their work.
We even know a few bloggers who boast that they write all five days’ worth of content in a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon. And it shows. It shows that they spent roughly 20 minutes on a single blog post, with another 10 minutes the following morning for a quick edit. As a result, their work has deteriorated, and their readers take them less seriously because they’re not coming up with anything new or they’re singing the same songs over and over.
How Long Should Your Posts Be?
A few years ago, we would have told you a decent blog post should be in the 350–450 word range.
“350 words?!” new bloggers would exclaim. “I can knock that out in a quick email.”
Except this has changed. Now, while 300 words is still an acceptable amount, we’re writing blog posts that are 500–700 words; Erik frequently writes in the 1,000–1,200 word range, and he still has plenty of readers.
When you consider that the average newspaper column runs about 550 words, you can see why blogging has become so popular among readers: your average blog reader is like your average newspaper reader. They have the reading level and attention span of a sixth grader.
This isn’t true of everyone, and we’re not suggesting you dumb your work down. We’re also not suggesting that readers are dumb. (Not all of them anyway.) Rather, people have grown to expect most text to be written at this level.
Think of it this way: When you’re jogging or riding your bike, you can probably run or ride one or two miles per hour faster than your usual pace, but you don’t because it doesn’t feel comfortable. You want to stick with a rate that feels good so you can keep doing it.
Our brains work the same way. Yes, we can read at a higher level. We all learned to read, and most of us graduated from high school at least. But that doesn’t mean we want to read at a high school reading level all the time. Thanks to years of journalists and marketers writing at the sixth grade level, we expect it. The reading is easier and requires less mental bandwidth; we’re more likely to stick with something at our accustomed reading level.
So if you want to make your posts readable, write them like a newspaper article. Not only are they at a sixth grade reading level, they’re written for someone who gets impatient and abandons an article halfway through it.
Newspapers are also readable because of the tone and voice the writers use. Many newspaper columnists have regular readers because of their particular writing style. Adopt your own style, but make sure you’re friendly, conversational, and factual. Your style can be anything from your frequent choice of certain words, to the length of your sentences, to the complexity of your words. It can be the tone you take when discussing certain issues or even ending every question with “huh,” because your “?” key is broken. Find a style that suits you, stick with it, and hone it until it’s something you and your readers enjoy.
Newspapers figured out a long time ago that people abandon articles around the halfway point, so they started putting the most important information first, second-most important information next, and so on. Most newspaper articles get boring about halfway through because they’re giving nothing but background information, so you can skip that part. Likewise, when you’re blogging, just stop writing when you get to the less important information and you’ll be around 500–700 words.
Be sure to answer the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” of each article, which is standard on all news articles. (Read several news stories in your local newspaper. Nearly all the news stories will answer the “5 W’s and 1 H” in the first couple sentences.
Now, there’s no magic number of what a blog post should be. We recommend 500–700 words because that’s what people will typically read these days, especially if they’re reading your blog on a mobile phone.4 But even then, there are plenty of people who want 300-word posts, and plenty who want 2,000-word articles. Just pay attention to your analytics and see what’s performing the best on your site.
But My Posts Are Too Long!
This is another frequent problem we see: What do I do if my blog posts are too long? In some cases, bloggers want to cram as much information into a single post as possible, as if they’re trying to make up for lost time. They try to make several points and cover several ideas at once.
Don’t worry about lost time. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to get your information out to people. But if you want to write longer posts, go ahead. Like we said, there’s no hard and fast rule about how long a post should be. You just need to make sure your writing style and your subject matter are compelling enough to keep people engaged to the end.
Still, if your posts are too long, the problem may not be too many words; it may be too many ideas in one post.
In our blogging talks, we recommend that people follow the mantra “one idea, one post, one day.” Talk about one idea, not two or three, put it in one post, and publish once per day. If you try to double up on any of those areas, you’re going to have problems keeping readers interested because your posts will become cumbersome and complex.
As you’re writing, see if there is a natural “crease” in your writing. Is there a place where it would be easy to break the post into two places? Maybe you’re talking about the importance of getting durable, hard-wearing luggage for business travel, and you start talking about choosing the right kind of luggage for vacation. If you look closely, you could probably split the post into two different ones: one for business luggage and one for vacation luggage. There’s no need to combine the two, so just split them into two separate posts, which takes care of two days of writing.
SEO Through Blogging
SEO is the art of making your blog appear at the top of the search engines. By focusing on a few keywords and optimizing your posts for them, you can improve your chances for appearing at the top of Google and Bing.
We may have come down a little hard against SEO earlier, but we still think it’s important. You don’t want to ignore SEO completely, but you also don’t want to focus so much on it that your writing sucks.
These factors have largely fallen out of favor with Google, although they still give some weight to them. If nothing else, these help Google understand what your articles are about.
• Keywords: Everything is based on keywords, or the words or phrases that each post is about. That’s the thing the search engine zeros in on. Choose your keywords carefully, but don’t go for the big, generic keywords, like “history” or “marketing.” You’ll never win that search. Instead, go for long-tail keywords, like “19th century Midwest agricultural history” or “email marketing best practices.”
However, Google is more concerned about topics than specific keywords these days. Their bots understand language better, and they understand synonyms.
Seven years ago, if you wanted to write about your cheeseburger restaurant, you might write a post about “Minneapolis cheeseburgers,” “cheeseburgers in Minneapolis,” and even the “best Minneapolis cheeseburgers.” Then you’d have to do it all over again for “hamburgers.” Now Google understands that “cheeseburger” and “hamburger” mean the same thing and that putting them in an article about Minneapolis means it’s about that topic.
Note
The term “long-tail” is from Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail (LongTail.com). It’s the 20 percent in the 80/20 rule. Or as Anderson says, the two percent in the 98/2 rule.
Think of it as a special sales niche: 98 percent of people want to buy a big generic product, and every store is fighting to be #1 in that market. But by appealing to the two percent who don’t want the generic product, you can expend less energy and comfortably sell to them. So, this means that if you can win enough long-tail searches, you’ll do as well or better than the one person who tries to win a single search for the 98 percent.
• Headlines: This is the first place to put your keyword. If you’re writing about direct mail response rates, your headline should be something like “5 Tips for Improving Direct Mail Response Rates.” (Notice we used the 5 tips list post idea.) This tells the search engine what you’re writing about and tells the spider what it should be looking for when it crawls your site.
• Anchor text: Search engines also pay attention to whether you put your keywords inside your hyperlinks. Warning: If you do this too often, or if you’re too on the nose, Google will penalize you. When we published the second edition of this book in 2012, this was an important tactic; now, it can cause you a lot of trouble. Instead, they want you to use “editorial text” inside your links. That means they’d rather you link a sentence like “A recent state of the email marketing industry report from Emma,” rather than linking “email marketing best practices” every chance you get.
• Body copy: The actual text of the blog post needs your keywords. If you’re writing for SEO, you want to shoot for about a one percent keyword density. That is, out of every 100 words, you should use your keyword one time. But don’t stuff in the keywords, and don’t make it obvious that you’re trying to cram it all in.
• Backlinks: This one is important for SEO. The more links that point back to your blog, the more important Google thinks your site is. However, these have to be high-quality backlinks. One of the things that prompted all the Google changes in 2009–2011 with Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird were people creating link farms, single pages with thousands of backlinks on them. Now, they want high-quality links on pages and websites that are related to your own site, such as a link from a bed-and-breakfast site to your travel blog. But links from restaurant supply stores? That can cause you some problems.
How Does This Apply to Our Four Heroes?
We’ve been saying blogging is important, and that it’s for anyone who wants to build their personal brand. So let’s see how our four heroes would use blogging to find a job or further their career:
• Allen (influencer) spent 14 years as an account manager in a marketing agency, so he has a lot of expertise in account management, marketing campaigns, and ad creation. He’s also looking for a job. Blogging is going to be a great benefit to him for two important reasons. First, hiring managers use search engines to research candidates. Allen wants to make sure that hiring managers find him instead of finding absolutely nothing. Second, Allen wants to show that he knows a lot about account management and agency life. We would also suggest that he interview different professionals about agency life and issues in the industry. People like to talk about themselves, so this strategy will put him in touch with people who might otherwise ignore him if they think he’s only calling them about a job.
• Beth (climber) wants to be the CMO in the insurance industry, possibly at her current company, but not necessarily so. Insurance marketing is a specialized niche, which makes it ideal for blogging. Beth can’t write about insurance specifically, which violates all kinds of industry rules and laws. But she can write a variety of posts about things that insurance touches, like safe driving tips for teenage drivers, ways to reduce the risk of a home fire, and how to protect your family while traveling.
• Carla (neophyte) has left a career in pharmaceutical sales and wants to become a program director or development director at a nonprofit. Although the for-profit and non-profit worlds are quite different, some of the ideas are the same, like getting people to give you money in exchange for something. Carla can use her blog to explore the connections between sales and fundraising, which will be of interest to other fundraising professionals. And because there are so many openings in fundraising, Carla can use this blog as an introduction to potential bosses, as well as a selling point when she’s asked an interview question like, “So how can selling techniques help you with fundraising?”
• Darrin (free agent) is an IT professional who spends his days troubleshooting computers, and he moves from employer to employer every two or three years. He’s almost a commodity in the IT field, so he needs to distinguish himself from every other IT professional. A blog is the best way to do it. Darrin can write about things like balancing the need for network security and the growing use of social media in the corporate setting or providing basic computer security information for non-IT personnel. By adopting a style that’s friendly and easy to follow, Darrin can become the computer troubleshooting expert, which makes him more attractive to larger corporations with IT professionals who do nothing but fix computers.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Blogging
We asked our Twitter friends to give us some do’s and don’ts about blogging for newbies. (See, this is the kind of thing you get if you follow us on Twitter: We ask you to help write our book, and you might be put in it!) Our friends came through for us. They gave us a lot of great advice, which we include here.
What’s not so surprising is that we got more do’s than we did don’ts. More people have good advice for things to do rather than things to avoid. Either that, or we just know some really optimistic people.
Do’s
• Resist the urge to talk about the blogging itself. “Well, it’s been a while since I last posted.” Just get to the point.—@JuneCasagrande
• It’s a long-term play. Stay committed. Integrate it into your day-to-day schedule and routine.—@RosserJobs
• Have the same attitude as a shooting guard in basketball: When you’re on shoot it. When you’re off, shoot until you’re on again.—@thechuckchapman Write from the heart.—@dave_kellogg
• Write about something you have passion for!—@mandyboyle
• Blog often. Don’t worry about perfection. Just get your words out there!—@robbyslaughter
• Invite guest bloggers and submit guest blogs to others.—@edeckers
• Always check a twitter handle or blog URL before mentioning; it might not be the right business or person. (Learned myself the hard way.)—@kellyjknutson
• Maintain a consistent posting schedule. Readers and search engines both love fresh, interesting content.—@mandyboyle
• Blogging is about community. Don’t expect people to read your blog if you aren’t reading and commenting on theirs.—@JustHeather
• You will not be making any money blogging nowadays. Advertising is a shell game. Running a blog is now about the opportunities it creates.—@jonathanwthomas
• Re-read each post before you click “Publish.” It will save you some embarrassment.—@4ndyman
• I try to sit on a new piece for 24 hours then re-read, but I still post mistakes.—@randyclarktko (response to @4ndyman. Conversation abounds!)
• Unless you are a copy editor, use and trust one.—@randyclarktko
• Use alt text with images. Most people forget to. It can boost SEO and help when browsers don’t display images.—@mandyboyle
“Alt text,” or “alternative text,” was originally created so people who used screen-reading software (software that lets people who are blind use a computer) could tell what was in a photograph. If you post a photo of your daughter riding her bicycle, you would write an alt tag that says “My daughter riding her bicycle.” That way, the screen reader users would know what this photo is about.
However, search engines also use alt text, so you can give yourself an SEO boost by including alt text inside your photo descriptions. However, don’t go nuts and try to cram keywords and search terms into each photo.
Putting “Kyle Lacy talks about social media, social networks, social marketing, blogging, Twitter, and Facebook marketing at his KyleLacy.com blog” into every alt text of each photo may trigger alarms on the search engine, and you’ll be penalized for keyword stuffing. Also, your blind readers will hate you.
Don’ts
• Don’t assume people are as informed as you are. Spell terms and ideas out once in awhile.—@sunnysocial
• Don’t think of topics all by yourself. Find help from Google Reader, StumbleUpon, guest posts to share the load/inspire.—@DanOnBranding
• Don’t leave spam or half-hearted comments.—@edeckers
• Don’t make your blog one big commercial.—@edeckers
• Don’t neglect grammar and spelling.—@dave_kellogg
Tip
One problem that Microsoft Word users have is that copying a post from Word and then pasting it into a blog window adds a lot of extra HTML characters that are viewable when published. One way to eliminate this is to copy the Word version, open Notepad (the free word processor on Windows), paste the text into Notepad, and then copy it again. This strips out all the extra HTML, and you can then paste it into the blog window.
Our favorite tip came from our friend and fellow blogger, Meghan Barich, who summarized this entire chapter in one tweet.
• Do be social. Do ask questions. Do have a sense of humor. Don’t be boring. Don’t blog at people. Do blog to engage.—@meghanbarich
A Final Note on the Rules of Blogging
When we were first writing this book in 2010, Erik met with Jason Falls, a noted social media consultant and writer (and Erik’s eventual co-author on No Bullshit Social Media), on the day he was writing this chapter. Erik asked Jason, “What’s some advice for blogging newbies?” Jason is a seasoned blogging expert, so we’ll just let him speak for himself:
Take all of the “rules” with a grain of salt. I’ve seen not only with my own blog, but with some of the most notable blogs in the world, that sometimes the rules don’t apply. Until recently, I’ve never tried to win search terms, so there’s never been a concentrated effort to optimize my blog at all. I win a lot of important search terms, but I’ve never focused on that. I focus on providing great content and let everything else take care of itself.
In other words, as Jason said, you can ignore everything we’ve advised in this chapter. As long as you’re writing with passion and providing well-written content, people will come to you. Even seven years later, this is still great advice.
Or as our friend and popular Hoosier aficionado Tony Troxell (@IndianaGeeking) put it, “If I had listened to the tips, I would have given up back in ‘04.”
1. https://medium.com/@ObamaWhiteHouse/president-obamas-state-of-the-union-address-remarks-as-prepared-for-delivery-55f9825449b2
2. https://medium.com/@yourfriends/how-we-curate-guidelines-and-principles-fdcf43e049c5
3. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-list-of-reasons-why-our-brains-love-lists