Abby, explaining "Blogging 101"
This edition was meant to be a wrap up of Abby Gilmore’s (@abbygilmore follow her!) Blogging 101 presentation given at our most recent meeting this week. (The full presentation is available for viewing here). It’s got a smidgen of advice seasoned in as well…
Assuming you’re working with people who are familiar with blogging, you know that sometimes a little nudge is needed for them to see the true value in it. Perhaps you yourself don’t know where to start or what you bring to the table in creating your own blog to share with the world. So why bother to do it at all? Here’s 5 reasons why:
1. Personal or Company Branding
2. Increase Traffic
3. Connect with people
4. Position yourself as a thought leader, or expert
5. Create content worth linking back to (for other bloggers, which in turns leads back to #1-5)
Bottom line, using a blog is a direct way to demonstrate who you are, your personal brand. By sharing the unique perspective that only you can provide on a certain subject creates content that connects you to like-minded people, or people who have something to gain from your expertise or passion.
Blogging also creates a higher profile for you, your company on the web. By keeping fresh, updated content and using valuable keywords, you drive traffic to find you/your website. More eyeballs on you means more potential for the growth of your business. And that in itself is priceless.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is built in to blogging platforms such as WordPress (check out these 20 WordPress plugins to help enhance your SEO). It’s paramount to not skip a single step that precedes publishing and taking your blog live. It might take a little bit of time and effort to learn the back end of WordPress, but once you do, it becomes muscle memory moving forward.
A very valuable lesson you should take with you from the get go is including KEYWORDS relevant to your topic in the title and content of your blog. Should someone Google search for your topic in particular, you want the strongest keywords (check keyword rankings on AdWords) to appear in the beginning of your title. Google only displays the first 40-60 characters of a subject line, so you need to make those words count and grab your target readers right away.
Some helpful tips for do it yourself SEO:
1. Keep your content fresh and new
2. Write with your keywords in mind
3. Build links to your blog post (comment on other’s blogs and they will lead back to you)
4. Link to internal pages
5. Think KEYWORDS when creating your title
6. Do your homework, learn what all of these mean and USE them: title tag, alt image text, headline tag, meta description, meta keywords
7. Submit your stories to Google news!
Once you’re comfortable and blogging is second nature, spread your elbows out a bit and offer to guest blog for others. There are a number of reasons to do this. It gives you the opportunity to create new relationships within your niche while creating another platform to demonstrate your brand – to show what makes you tick. The readership of the blogs of others will likely become your readers when they’ve recognized your reputation as a thought leader in your field, thus increasing your traffic. Linking back to your blog creates further exposure never hurt anyone either…
Some pearls of wisdom from the most recent AZPRC meeting attendees:
Michael from VallyoftheSuns.com: “Write about what you’re passionate about. Find your niche, familiarize yourself with all aspects of it. Reach out build relationships with others within your niche.”
Elise (@RedlinCook) : “Content doesn’t stop with the written word. If you don’t have something to say, you might have something to show.” (i.e.: a PPT presentation, etc.).
Members of AZPRC share the passion for learning and sharing ideas to better ourselves professionally. We blog with this in mind. It is a mistake professionally to assume you have nothing to teach or nothing to learn from your peers. Our goal is to reach new potential members in the community of communicators in Phoenix, specifically PR/SEO. Our meetings are free and the doors are always open! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@AZPRC).
