ProBlogger’s Guide to Blogging for Your Business

PROBLOGGER’S GUIDE TO

BLOGGING FOR your Business

Written by Mark Hayward

Blogging For Your Business Publication date June 2011 Written by: Mark Hayward Published by: Darren Rowse www.problogger.net Producer: Jasmin Tragas Graphic Design/Layout: Naomi Creek www.starfishblue.com.au Version 1.0 ©Copyright 2011 Darren Rowse All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without prior written consent from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. You may store the pdf on your computer and backups. You may print one copy of this book for your own personal use. Disclaimer: The information contained in this book is based on the author’s experience, knowledge and opinions. The author and publisher will not be held liable for the use or misuse of the information in this book.

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Contents

A word from Darren Rowse_____________________________________________________________ 5 About Mark Hayward ___________________________________________________________________ 6 Introduction_____________________________________________________________________________ 7 Chapter 1—Defining blogging and how it will benefit you_______________________________ 9

Why blogging is good for small businesses, nonprofits, and individuals___________________ 11



Tutorial______________________________________________________________________________ 14

Chapter 2—Defining your goals________________________________________________________17

Developing your blogging goals________________________________________________________ 18



Tutorial______________________________________________________________________________ 20

Chapter 3—Getting started with blogging______________________________________________22

Define your customer________________________________________________________________ 23



Determine if your blog should be part of your existing website___________________________ 23



Choosing a blogging platform_________________________________________________________ 25



Tutorial______________________________________________________________________________ 29

Chapter 4—Deciding on and registering a domain name_______________________________ 30

Choosing a domain name_____________________________________________________________ 31



Registering the domain_______________________________________________________________ 33



Website hosting_ ____________________________________________________________________ 34



Tutorial______________________________________________________________________________ 36

Chapter 5—Installing WordPress______________________________________________________39

Optimizing WordPress________________________________________________________________ 43



Setting up categories_________________________________________________________________ 45



Creating pages_ _____________________________________________________________________ 46

Chapter 6—Intro to WordPress plugins________________________________________________50

Eight plugins to help optimize WordPress______________________________________________ 52

Chapter 7—Developing a content strategy and editorial calendar______________________70

Blogging fear________________________________________________________________________ 71



The strategy_________________________________________________________________________ 72



Alternatives to writing________________________________________________________________ 75



Tutorial______________________________________________________________________________ 76

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Contents

Chapter 8—Developing content ideas and fighting blogging frustration_ _______________78

52 Blog Post Ideas___________________________________________________________________ 83



Dealing with blogging frustration______________________________________________________ 86



Tutorial______________________________________________________________________________ 89

Chapter 9—Publishing your first blog post_____________________________________________92

Drafting a blog post__________________________________________________________________ 93



Crafting a title_______________________________________________________________________ 94



Finding photos_______________________________________________________________________ 94



Creating the post____________________________________________________________________ 96



Optimizing with All In One SEO_______________________________________________________ 102



Publishing the post_________________________________________________________________ 102

Chapter 10—Finding readers and traffic for your blog_______________________________ 104

Finding readers and increasing blog traffic___________________________________________ 105



Tutorial____________________________________________________________________________ 111

Chapter 11—Optimizing Flickr and YouTube for your blog’s online presence__________ 114

Using Flickr to expand your web presence___________________________________________ 116



Using YouTube to improve your blog’s online presence________________________________ 124

Chapter 12—Creating your social media footprint and measuring your blogging ROI___ 128

Expanding your online footprint______________________________________________________ 129



Measuring your blogging ROI________________________________________________________ 131



Tutorial____________________________________________________________________________ 137

Further Reading – Small Business and Nonprofit Blogging Leaders___________________ 139

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A word from Darren Rowse In 2002 I started my first blog as a way to express what I was thinking and connect with others with similar interests. That blog was what we’d probably call a “personal blog” today. In the early days of blogging, many blogs were an online expression of the things going on in an individual’s mind and life—personal to the extreme. In fact blogs were thought of as personal to the point that they were often described as “online diaries”. But they were more than online diaries—blogs gave individuals a voice. They built authority, credibility, trust and opened up relationships. Over the next couple of years the potential for blogs became much more than “personal”. The possibility for them to intersect with business—and even become a business—grew. In the same way that blogs were helping individuals, we began to see businesses also developing an online voice, credibility and trust with their customers. Today many businesses depend on blogs at their very core to do these things and more. I’ve long wanted to publish a resource for business owners wanting to use blogging and social media to do this for their businesses, so when Mark Hayward and I explored the idea I became very excited. While blogging has become my business, Mark has used blogging and social media to build up his own bricks and mortar business. He’s the ideal guy to teach others how to create and develop a business blog, and he’s developed this ebook to be your definitive resource to achieve successful blogging and business results.

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About Mark Hayward Mark Hayward is a bricks-and-mortar business owner who has spent the last four years learning how to leverage social media and online marketing to not only drive an unending wave of customers through his front door, but also to attract a good deal of traditional media coverage. Having had the lifelong dream of owning and running a business in the Caribbean, four years ago Mark purchased a defunct small business on Culebra Island that had no customers, no cash flow, and certainly no online presence or existence. With a hefty monthly mortgage payment to meet, he set to work learning everything he could about creating a comprehensive social media footprint via blogging, media creation, and search engine optimization. His efforts have landed his business feature stories in Conde Nast Travel, Islands Magazine, and the Boston Globe. Today his business sits atop most review sites as number one, and is frequently listed on the front page of the search engine results for his primary keywords. With a deep understanding of the need to balance running a real business or nonprofit with the desire to implement cutting-edge social technology to drive more revenue or donations, Mark works with clients to create online strategies with tangible goals, benchmarks, and measurable real-world outcomes. Mark holds a Master’s degree in International Development and Geographic Information Systems. Prior to owning a business in the Caribbean, with his wife Terrie and three dogs, he worked in Papua New Guinea, Samoa, and the British Virgin Islands as an IT consultant.

Connect with Mark at: mark-hayward.com via email updates and on Twitter @mark_hayward

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Introduction Blogging is one of the most powerful mediums of the twenty-first century, granting you the opportunity to be the brand manager, chief storyteller, and vice-president of marketing for your small business, your nonprofit organization, or your life. With the advent of blogging and social media, the world is changing rapidly and there are now more opportunities than ever before for you to reach out, connect, and engage with your customers and donors. Effectively, for small business owners, nonprofits and individuals, traditional advertising such as expensive print ads, costly marketing agencies, and the “noisy” sales promotions that only project out and do not allow for interaction have been removed. A well-thought-out and successfully implemented blogging strategy will allow you to better promote your products and services, raise awareness for your cause, or help to spread your individual message while at the same time allowing you to attract, engage, and interact with new customers, new donors, and new fans. But in order to take advantage of the boundless possibilities that blogging can provide, you must be willing to put in real energy, real effort, and real commitment. Sometimes the technical side of blogging can be enough to prevent you from taking action; sometimes it is the paralyzation of not knowing what to write about on your blog. ProBlogger’s Guide to Blogging for your Business was written from the bottom up to help you remove the technical barriers to entry and to inspire you with ideas and confidence to help kick-start your content creation. A little over four years ago I was sitting exactly where you are today. Having just purchased a stagnant business in the Caribbean, I vividly remember how I felt on the flight home, hyperventilating and nauseous about having just committed myself to an enormous amount of debt on a business with no customers, no cash flow, and absolutely no presence on the Internet. Clearly, if I was going to attract customers and not go bankrupt, I needed to get the venture online as quickly as possible so that I could develop a trusted business reputation and a high ranking in the search engines. I was aware of the power of blogging and the potential benefits it could offer a small business like mine. However, I had no idea where to start, what to blog about, or even how to register a domain name. Every time I sat down to try to write a blog post, all that I accomplished was the waste of a tremendous amount of time staring at a blank computer screen with the cursor blinking back at me. Along with this frustration came all the usual excuses to make myself feel better for not taking action: • What is web hosting, anyway? • How do I even name my blog? • I don’t have the time. • I have no idea what to write about. • Other than my mom, nobody would come to my site. • Blogging is stupid.

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Nevertheless, when the phone didn’t ring and I struggled to make the monthly mortgage payments, I knew I had to devote my energy towards learning, in a hands-on manner, how to blog. I was determined to deploy blogging as the core strategy for creating a social media footprint and developing a comprehensive online presence for my business. Today, thanks to a well-planned and consistent blogging approach, my business now has a constant stream of customers and my blog’s content is almost always on the front page of Google for my targeted keywords. Most nonprofit leaders, small business owners, and motivated individuals are do-it-yourself kind of people. In my experience, this attitude is vital to a successful online presence—blogging as an effective means of marketing requires a long-term commitment. It’s important to accept at the outset that you need to be thinking in terms of months and years, not days and weeks, before you see results. This guide will take you through the exact steps required to get your blog launched and to feel confident and comfortable with blogging. Whether you need guidance with setting up your blog, tips for creating more content ideas, suggestions on how to find readers, or assistance with developing a social media footprint, you’ll find it in this book. Most chapters are structured around two parts: 1. Chapter content: This covers general blogging concepts, technical know-how, and implementation of strategy. 2. Tutorials: Key tasks are presented for you to complete to get you moving and keep you focused as you undertake your new blogging mission; also included are descriptive examples based on a hypothetical business owner who’s new to blogging. (In chapters that provide step-by-step instruction, tutorials are not included.) Congratulations! You have the motivation, determination, and will to be consistent in your blogging strategy, and now you also have the book to act as your guide. Without further delay, let’s get ready to learn how to blog in such a manner that you educate your clientele, develop relationships, and build trust, which will in turn attract more customers and donors. So, enough with the excuses. Your day is now. Tomorrow is today!

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CHAPTER 1

Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

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Chapter 1 – Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

The term “blog” has come a long way since it was first coined back in the late 1990s, condensed from “web log”. With the recent advent of many different forms of social media appearing on the scene, its actual definition becomes more uncertain on an almost daily basis. For our purposes, whether personal or business-related, a blog is essentially an instrument of communication that can be used to record information, share knowledge, and develop community. Unlike the old way of promoting your business, via print ads and expensive marketing campaigns where you noisily project your sales message out and hope to be the loudest, marketing today is about engaging with your customers, developing relationships, and earning clients via mutual respect. The definition of a blog truly depends on how you choose to define your promotional goals and what you’d like to accomplish via blogging. • Do you want to improve your search engine optimization (SEO)? • D  o you want to let your customers know about your backstory and how you came to own your business? • Do you want to share blog posts that educate your potential customers? Depending on how you answer the above questions, a blog can be an SEO machine, a storytelling engine, or an educational tool—or it can be all three, plus much more. Simply stated, your blog is the backbone of your online presence, web marketing, and trust-building initiatives; it’s where you’ll grow your business directly through the content and media that you provide on it. The most powerful aspect of a blog is that it allows you to answer the simple question, “How can I best serve my customers?” through your actions and effort. According to the world’s foremost authority on blogging, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, a blog can be defined as: “A type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent ‘post’ (or entry) at the top of the main page to the older entries towards the bottom. “Blogs are usually (but not always) written by one person and are updated pretty regularly. Blogs are often (but not always) written on a particular topic—there are blogs on virtually any topic you can think of. From photography, to spirituality, to recipes, to personal diaries to hobbies—blogging has as many applications and varieties as you can imagine. Whole blog communities have sprung up around some of these topics putting people into contact with each other in relationships where they can learn, share ideas, make friends with and even do business with people with similar interests from around the world.” See blog post “What is a Blog?”. For the small-business owner, nonprofit manager, or motivated individual, a blog is a tool that can be seen as a never-ending blank canvas where you can chronologically post relevant information, useful tips, descriptive videos and photos, and stories designed to gain the trust of potential and existing customers, donors, or fans. Used in addition to your static website, a blog provides an incredibly powerful means for you to communicate your message to the world, to educate struggling novices in your area of expertise, and to improve your organic search engine rankings. Unfortunately, some people feel that blogs are nothing more than spam set up by Internet marketers in order to scam them out of their hard-earned cash. While very occasionally that might be true, when used properly by honest individuals and organizations, a blog is an influential platform for cost-effective and legitimate marketing.

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Chapter 1 – Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

One way to conceptualize a blog and its possibilities is to imagine that if your regular website were the front door to your home (that is, your small business or nonprofit), then your blog is your comfortable living room where stories are told, ideas shared, questions answered, and trust earned. Another way of thinking about and defining a blog is as analogous to a very basic but much-needed tool, such as a hammer. In the proper hands, a hammer has the ability to craft a solid foundation for a home that will provide shelter for years to come. However, just like a hammer, an unused blog will sit there online like an inanimate object, not achieving anything. A blog that is updated with valuable content on a consistent basis will help the small-business, nonprofit, or individual blogger to form the cornerstone of their social media footprint and their online presence.

Why blogging is good for small businesses, nonprofits, and individuals If you’re willing to embrace change and commit time to making it over the initial learning curve of blogging and social media, a vast new opportunity to advance your business, nonprofit, or individual growth in a helpful and cost-effective manner awaits you. Prior to reading this ebook, you’ve probably asked yourself, “What can a blog do for my small business?” You might feel that blogging is for young teenagers, computer geeks, and people with too much free time on their hands. In fact, most of the people you might have heard about with a newsworthy blog are likely blogging as their primary business and strictly as a money-making venture. That is, they’re what we term a “make money” or “blogging for dollars” blogger. Whether you’re a small-business owner, nonprofit manager, or enthusiastic person with a story to tell, initially you should not be concerned solely with making money from your blog. But you do want to make money because of your blog. Your blog will become a vehicle to strategically market and promote your venture, which in turn will drive more customers through your door. Certainly, in today’s world everybody is busy and time is stretched to maximum capacity. On a daily basis you’re likely dealing with customers, ensuring that products are stocked or services rendered, handling inquiries from donors, perhaps even scrubbing the toilets, which doesn’t leave much spare time. Indeed, a lack of available time seems to be the topmost complaint from the majority of people interested in blogging but who have yet to take the plunge. Combine this with the fact that, like many people, you may be hesitant to invest energy into activities which lack guaranteed results, and the prospect of blogging can seem infinitely uncertain and intimidating. Some typical thoughts are: • Where do I begin? • Blogging is too technical. • What software should I use? • I’m not a computer programmer. • What on earth will I write about? • How much does blogging cost?

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Chapter 1 – Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

However, even if it all seems too overwhelming, before you throw your hands up in disgust and move on, you should seriously ask yourself: • Who knows your story better than you? • Who can explain your services better than you? • Who can personify your commitment to excellence better than you? You will almost certainly find yourself answering: Nobody. In fact, you are more uniquely qualified to blog about you, your nonprofit, or your business than the most seasoned online writer. All you need is the confidence to realize that you are capable, and possess the willingness to leap in and do the work required. Perhaps you have an empty piggybank instead of a marketing budget; to rectify this, you need some way to let your market know you exist so you can get customers through the door or build your donor base. One of the major benefits of blogging is that it levels the advertising and marketing field for the little players, who might not have bountiful budgets, but are seeking a cost-effective means of promoting their venture and helping their customers. A cautionary note, however; although a blog may appear to the budding blogger to be a free opportunity for a bunch of posts that extol the virtues of the business, if the posts convey nothing beyond how superb you are, they amount to spam. This blogging strategy is guaranteed to fail, and will repel potential customers. There’s a tremendous difference between using your blog to talk to people by constructively telling your story (why you’re passionate about what you do, how you came to own the business, and so on) and talking at people (cramming down their throats the message that they should buy your products or services because you’re awesome). In order to derive real benefits from your blogging efforts, you need to always remember that what you publish on your blog is not about you. It’s about your market, and the delivery of valuable content to your market. While it is okay to focus on your greatness every once and a while, such as when you’ve won an award or raised funds for a worthy cause, your goal should be to publish content that both educates and gains the trust of current and potential customers. With the need for excellent content understood and out of the way, the top seven benefits of blogging for a small business, nonprofit, or individual can be summed up as follows:

Cost-effective marketing With a financial investment of approximately US$40 to register a domain name and obtain shared hosting space, you can develop your own marketing platform.

Education of your customer Even though you deal with your product or service every day, people are always going to have questions. The blog lets you take all of those frequently asked questions (or not so frequently asked) and deliver the answers easily online.

Provision of customer service Have you had an issue with an employee, a product, or a promotion? Honesty is always the best policy when handling a crisis, and your blog provides a convenient way for you to tell your side of the story.

Development of trust The story of who you are, what you do, and why you do it is important. It humanizes you to the world.

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Chapter 1 – Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

Improved search engine optimization (SEO) We’ll deal with this subject in much more depth in a later chapter but suffice to say that search engines like to crawl websites with frequently updated content. Additionally, if you’re producing and posting helpful information, other people will link back to your blog, giving you credibility from the perspective of the search engines.

Establishment of you as a thought leader Your blog can set you apart as a thought leader in your niche. Most customers out there in need of a product or service tend to frequent the business that appears to be at the head of their industry.

Networking opportunities Getting to know the other people in your field is a benefit of blogging that can lead to new opportunities for collaboration, idea creation, and lead generation . As a final thought on the benefits and costs of blogging, when it comes to considering the required commitment and a timeframe for a return on investment, the short-term, rapid-results thinkers may not find the concept of a long-term blog strategy a compelling one. To be sure, even though blogging and social media are extremely powerful tools, they’re not an effortless magic bullet. As you embark on your journey, be prepared to be persistent, consistent, and proactive if you want your blogging activities to have an impact and ultimately lead to a profitable return on investment.

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Chapter 1 – Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

TUTORIAL This book is designed to help you grasp concepts, overcome technical obstacles, banish the frustration of creating content, and ideally establish your own blog as a final outcome. With this in mind, the end of every applicable chapter includes action items and helpful tutorials to keep you focused and to provide you with goals to accomplish. The tutorials center on the example of the PB Bike Shop, a hypothetical business that we’ve just started in New York City. The action items are designed to get you thinking further about setting up and using your blog for the benefit of your customers, donors, and readers. They’re also structured to help you determine whether you really want to take on blogging as a marketing strategy.

1. Conduct an Internet search to determine what the competition is blogging about in your particular niche.  he first action item is designed to give you a preview of what others in your industry are doing when T it comes to blogging. Depending on your niche, whether it’s a bakery, camera store, swamp restoration nonprofit, shoe shop, or even a bike shop, go to your favorite search engine and type in your venture’s sector (e.g. bakery, wetlands, jewelry) followed by “blog”.  ob, an intrepid cyclist and brand-new owner of the PB Bike Shop, really wants to connect with the B greater New York City cycling community by providing unsurpassed service for bike problems and maintenance issues. Bob thinks the Internet is a good place to start with his dedicated marketing efforts. He also hopes to develop a web presence in order to educate existing and potential customers, to share the story of how he came to own the PB Bike Shop, and for better search engine rankings.  logging seems a natural choice for Bob as he gets ready to create his comprehensive social media B footprint. The problem is, he’s not technically inclined, doesn’t feel as if he has anything to say, and is very short on time, but he is willing to make a commitment and get started blogging. Out of curiosity, Bob types “bike shop blog” into Google to see what types of results are returned and what other bike store owners are up to with respect to blogging.

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Chapter 1 – Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

2. From the search results, choose five blogs that are in your niche (you might have to go on to the second or third pages) and write responses to these questions:

• What do the blogs look like?



• What are they posting about?



• Is the information helpful to potential customers?



• Are they using photos and video too?



• Are their posts long or brief?



• Do the blogs provide you with any content creation ideas?

While looking at the blogs, think about the commitment it takes to be successful and how blogging might fit into your existing schedule. Bob has a look around some of the content on the blogs ranked on the first and second page of Google (as shown below). He feels inspired by the number of bike shops that appear to be blogging successfully.

With just this tiny bit of research, Bob is excited and motivated by all the possibilities, so he jots down ten ideas that have the potential to become blog posts. Now, more than ever, he’s determined to give a blogging strategy a concerted effort for at least a year.

3. Are you willing to commit the time and patience that is required to implement a blogging plan? Bob originally thought that if he could publish one post during the first week of having a blog, it would be on the front page of Google and PB Bike Shop would have an onslaught of new customers lining up outside the door. While he has yet to spend any money on advertising and has no marketing budget, Bob is beginning to realize that even though the act of blogging is free, there is a real time cost associated with doing it effectively and well.

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Chapter 1 – Defining blogging and how it will benefit you

4. Which days are you willing to dedicate to your blogging efforts? Though he’s extremely busy, Bob acknowledges that he’ll need to invest time and energy to become successful at blogging. He’s determined that, no matter what happens, he’ll work for an hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to create content for the blog—Bob knows that setting specific times aside will aid commitment and help with sticking to the plan, rather than merely hoping to get around it whenever there’s nothing more pressing to do.

5. What are some frequent questions that your customers, donors, or followers have? Bob decides to base his initial blog posts on the frequent questions that he hears daily about bestvalue bikes, bike maintenance, and the local riding routes. He’s planning to draft some educational and informative posts about the bikes that PB Bike Shop carries, as well as shoot some videos that will show his customers exactly how to change a tube, clean a chain, and adjust a shifter cable.

6. What is it about your nonprofit cause, business, or idea that you’re passionate about? Potential customers and donors are interested in your story, and the more they feel they know about your background, the easier it will be for you to establish a basic level of trust with them. Spend some time thinking about why you love doing what you do, and contemplate the struggles and challenges that led you to where you are today. Bob has been a fervent cyclist ever since he started his paper route at twelve years of age, and has had an interesting progression into cycle retailing. He became a professional road bike racer straight out of college, but sustained a career-ending injury during his first professional race. Not sure what to do next, he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Kenya to volunteer for two years. When Bob returned to New York City, he knew he wouldn’t be happy with a corporate desk job, and decided to pursue a dream: owning a community-focused bike shop that offered fair prices, knowledgeable staff, and a friendly environment.

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CHAPTER 2

Defining your goals

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Chapter 2 – Defining your goals

Whether you’re a plumber, baker, bike shop owner, or education nonprofit manager, one of the primary tasks that you need to undertake before you move forward with blogging is to assess your business, define your goals, and determine how you’ll achieve success with your blog. With over 150 million blogs online, the generally accepted hypothesis is that 85-95% of people will quit blogging within the first two to three months. Starting a blog is much like starting a new fitness plan. The barriers to entry are deceptively low and may seem easy to pull off in the short term, but long-term consistency and dedication is often an issue. Likewise, when you start your blog, there is a very good chance that you’ll feel joyous on the first day. Your enthusiasm for blogging will be sky high; you might even feel as if you could write for hours, and that you have enough ideas for ten years. Heck, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start sooner. As the days go by and you reach the middle of the first week, maintaining your commitment might get a little tougher due to unexpected events. To continue the analogy of your fitness plan, you might skip a workout altogether or cut your session short, telling yourself it’s okay because you’ll make it up tomorrow. And since it’s early in your blogging life, even if you hit a slight roadblock you’ve most likely planned ahead— you have that draft post ready to publish. By the time your first week’s over, you’re still enthused with all the possibilities that blogging offers, although you can’t help but notice a little bit of the luster is gone. When week two comes around, perhaps you’ve taken the weekend to recharge and refocus and feel as though you’re back at it! However, when you do your Monday workout you’d rather be just about anyplace else. Similarly, when you start the week at your business, there’s a customer service issue that needs to be dealt with. You’d planned to work on your blog, and even with the interruption, you manage to get a post done. But the ideas and topics to write about feel as though they’re flowing to you through a cement wall. To finish off the analogy of the fitness plan, by the middle of the second week you’re frustrated because you haven’t dropped the twenty pounds you’d planned on. You order a large pizza for lunch, and the workouts fall by the wayside. Many new bloggers face the same fate. At the end of week two, when the flood of new customers hasn’t shown up, it’s an enormous challenge to muster the time or desire to continue. Even though they can see how blogging might have some benefits, it’s inevitable that, eventually, many fledgling efforts will end up in the vast wasteland of long-forgotten and abandoned blogs on the Internet. Don’t let this happen to you! With that sobering scenario in mind, let’s see some strategies for keeping your blog on track from its inception.

Developing your blogging goals Here’s one question: What are you hoping to achieve with your blog? Your answers to this seemingly simple query will help to shape your goals. A concrete action plan is crucial to the long-term survival and success of your blog. Well-defined goals that are created in the early stages help to make the blogging process more manageable for you, and will eventually help shape your content strategy. Most importantly, goals provide a what, why and when structure for your intentions, which will allow you to conceptualize a road map so that you can determine how you’re going to get there. Your goals can be anything you want them to be—and they’re meant to be fluid, not hard-and-fast rules. Here are a few examples to illustrate what your “what,” “why”, “when,” and “how” may look like.

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Chapter 2 – Defining your goals

What: • Be on the front page of Google results for your keywords. • Increase your customer base. • Sell more products and services. • Develop your brand. • Educate the public about your industry. • Pass on specialized technical knowledge.

Why: • Better rankings mean more web traffic. • More customers should equal more sales. • More sales are better for the health of the business. • A well-defined brand can lead to greater trust by the general public.

When: Once you come to the “when” segment of the goals equation, it can be difficult to develop tangible timeframes. At the bare minimum, allow a three-to-six-month timeframe for your efforts. Make a firm commitment and pledge to yourself that no matter how dispiriting your perceived lack of blog-derived benefits, you will not give up.

How: • Draft pertinent content focused around relevant keywords. • Create posts that don’t sell, but teach—craft informational tutorials and how to’s. • Publish anecdotes about your story. • Reach out to potential customers. Another benefit of having defined your goals early is that you’ll be able to measure and monitor what you’re doing right, what’s working, and perhaps what needs to be changed. In effect, the objectives you create will help you track your success by asking the following questions when you review your blog’s performance at the end of each month. • Have you increased your web traffic? • Are sales up for the quarter? • Do more people seem to have a better understanding of your story? • Have daily customers increased? In closing, remember to keep it simple. Your goals needn’t be elaborate schemes. Rather, they should be just a few lines of where you are, where you’d like to be, and how you think you can go about getting there with your blog.

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Chapter 2 – Defining your goals

TUTORIAL Fantastic! If you’ve made it this far, it means that you’re dedicated to starting your blog with a well-thoughtout strategy.

1. When it comes to branding and marketing your venture, what do you want to accomplish with your blog? Remember, your goals can be anything that you want them to be, and can and should be refined over time as you grow and become more confident with blogging. Bob has started thinking about his long-term marketing goals and what he wants to achieve by implementing a blog. He recognizes that PB Bike Shop is a new venture, and other than some foot traffic and word of mouth from fellow cyclists, nobody knows that the business exists. As such, Bob wants to increase his customer base, get on the radar of the major search engines, and to make a start on building a cycling community by offering helpful bike tips, providing information on group rides, and dispensing information on the latest cycling industry trends. The simple goals Bob hopes to achieve with blogging are: • increase the PB Bike Shop brand awareness for greater visibility in the neighborhood • become a thought leader and develop trust among the local biking scene • achieve better organic search engine rankings

2. Why do you want to pursue your branding and marketing objectives? It’s important to clarify what you and your business stand to gain by blogging. The key reasons Bob hopes to meet his stated objectives are because he believes that improved branding will help potential customers discover PB Bike Shop. As the local cycling thought leader, he intends to become the go-to guy for people with questions and concerns regarding their bikes. And, of course, better search rankings for targeted keywords should provide greater online exposure for the shop.

3. Realistically, when would you like to see results, and how long are you willing to put in the work that’s required? Before you even consider blogging, ask yourself if you are truly ready to commit a certain amount of time per day, no matter what type of other issues arise, for the next eight months to a year in order to achieve your goals. At present, the PB Bike Shop is a new business with no online presence at all, so Bob is willing and dedicated to giving his blogging activities at least a year before he makes any decisions about whether it’s been a successful endeavor or not.

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Chapter 2 – Defining your goals

4. How are you going to accomplish your desired goals with your blog? Thinking about achieving goals and taking the necessary action steps to actually complete the tasks at hand are two very different things! When it comes to creating a more visible brand, Bob is going to maintain consistency with his blog and all of his professional activities. Initially, he’s thinking about doing a weekly blog post where he discusses his backstory, industry trends, maintenance tips, and how he got into the bike business. Further, he resolves that if he ever feels disillusioned with his business and considers giving up blogging because it seems nobody is paying attention, he’ll continue to publish blog content based on his pre-established editorial content. Bob now knows that in order to become a trusted thought leader in the local cycling community, he has to provide information on his blog that’s both helpful and at times challenges conventional thought, such as why training with a heart rate monitor is better than power, and suchlike. He’s going to start off by doing a weekly podcast series that provides tutorials on basic bike maintenance. With respect to search engine optimization, Bob is beginning to understand that it’s part science and part art. He’s read that, in determining site rankings, Google “follows people”, prizes backlinks from high-authority sites, prefers frequently updated content, and favors domain age. Bob will do his best to keep all of that in mind as he plans his organic (non-paid advertising) search strategy.

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CHAPTER 3

Getting started with blogging

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Chapter 3 – Getting started with blogging

By now, you’re well aware that a blog can improve your search engine rankings, increase awareness of your brand, and ultimately bring you more customers and donors. However, for the neophyte, getting a small-business blog up and running can seem more of a challenge than creating the actual content. To some, blogging and its technical aspects come as second nature; however, many people struggle with the basics and find themselves wondering: • What’s a domain name? • What blogging software should I use? • Do I need a completely separate website for my blog? If the pre-launch homework is done properly, addressing these questions now can save you from unrealized blog traffic, a poor return on investment, and a world of other potential problems. So we’ll start on that work now.

1. Define your customer At some stage during the evolution of your business, you’ve probably already identified your ideal customer and target market. Even so, if it’s been a while, or if you’ve never done it, now is the time. • Who are you selling your product to, or who is your ideal donor? • What is your typical customer’s profile or demographic? • What are the general habits, hobbies, and interests of your customers? Not only will determining your ideal customer help you to narrow down the characteristics that makes your clientele unique, but it can also help you to determine if you even need a blog, and whether or not it should be integrated into your existing website. Furthermore, as we progress in the book, knowing your ideal consumer will make it much easier when it comes to creating valuable content and it’ll also help find readers for your blog. After you’ve visualized and defined your ideal customer, consider the following questions. • Do your existing customers and potential new clients spend time online? • Are your customers already familiar with your business’s website? • Where do your potential new customers hang out online?

2. Determine if your blog should be part of your existing website Note: Things are going to get a little technical here for a while. If you feel as though you’re not technically inclined, do not give in. It’s designed to be clearly understood by even the least techsavvy, so hang in there and you’ll get through! Before going any further, you need to make a choice about whether you want to include your blog within your website, or if you want to create a completely separate site for your blogging activities.

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Chapter 3 – Getting started with blogging

To explain the difference, if you have an existing website and web address it would look like http://yourbusiness.com, as shown in the example below.

And if you decide to assimilate your blog with your existing website, you’ll have a URL similar to the following: http://yourbusiness.com/blog.

• If you have an existing website, can a blog be easily integrated? • Can you think of any advantages to keeping your blog separate from your business site? • W  hat are the benefits to you if you create a small business blog that’s integrated into your website? • Could you get a blog that’s separate from your website to rank quicker in search engines? • Do you plan to launch a secondary business from your blog? To integrate or keep separate your website and blog is a serious decision that could have lasting implications for the success of both; consequently, you need to give it quite a bit of thought. To help you to make an informed choice, let’s break down the positives and negatives of both scenarios.

Integrating into an existing website When deciding whether or not to integrate a blog into your existing website, there are a few important points to consider. • Domain age: have you had a popular product or service website for a long time? • Authority: are there leaders in your industry who’ve already linked to you? • E  ase of assimilation: does your website host provide scripts that allow for straightforward installation of a blog? The main reason that business owners choose to include their blog with their website is because it’s natural for their site visitors to look for it there. Moreover, in the online world, your website can be considered the front door to your business. If having an integrated blog can attract visitors, while at the same time drawing them to further investigate your products and services, you’ve accomplished two major goals. Similarly, in terms of improved search engine optimization, having a blog with regularly published posts incorporated into your existing site could certainly improve your results in the organic search rankings and win more potential customers. As a final key point, if you’ll be using your blog as the major branding tool for your nonprofit or small business (and most people will), undoubtedly you’d be best suited to the integrated blog and website option.

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Chapter 3 – Getting started with blogging

Creating a separate site for your blog Sometimes there can be benefits to keeping your blog completely separate from your existing website and in those instances it might be best to make the decision to develop your blog independently. (Please note: even if your blog is separate from your website, its main purpose is still going to be to get potential customers to your business!) One of the main reasons that you might keep it separate is if you have an existing site but want to establish your blog to rank in the search engines for competitive keywords that aren’t in your primary website’s URL. In that case, you certainly might consider getting a domain name with some semblance of the keywords in it. For example, let’s say our PB Bike Shop has a site already with the web address of pbbikeshop.com. However, our shop happens to be located in the highly competitive New York City market with people typically searching for terms such as “New York”, “New York bike”, and “bicycles New York”. Depending on the search competition, in this instance it might behoove us to see if a web address like newyorkbikePB.com or bikenewyorkPB.com is available as a home for our blog. One other situation where it might be beneficial to keep your blog separate from your business website can be demonstrated by the following scenario: let’s assume that you own a tourism-related business such as a hotel. In addition to running your hotel, perhaps you want to create a blog that could serve as an informational resource for your destination in the hope that you can eventually sell ad space to generate some side income. In this case, it could be a little strange to have ads for competing hotels on a blog that’s directly associated with your hotel’s website.

3. Choosing a blogging platform Whew! You never realized that there was so much to think about before you could actually blog, did you? We just need to get through a couple more technical items, and then you’ll be hitting the Publish button and blogging before you know it. Next up, you need to decide what software to use as your blogging platform. Seasoned bloggers all have their favorite blogging platforms for various reasons, and it seems as though there are new software choices released on a weekly basis. Here are a few of the more popular software options (you’ll find full descriptions at the respective websites). Blogger: a free weblog publishing tool from Google, for sharing text, photos and video.

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Chapter 3 – Getting started with blogging

Tumblr: a feature-rich and free blog hosting platform offering professional and fully customizable templates, bookmarklets, photos, mobile apps, and social network.

Posterous: the easiest publishing platform around. If you can email, you can manage a website and share it with small groups—or the world.

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Chapter 3 – Getting started with blogging

WordPress.com: provides free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software. Includes custom design templates, integrated statistics, and automatic spam protection.

WordPress.org: a semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

The primary difference between all of these options is that Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, and WordPress.com platforms are free. Essentially, all you have to do is provide an email address and password and that’s it—you’re off and running as a blogger. On the other hand, with WordPress.org you have to have your own domain name and web host.

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Chapter 3 – Getting started with blogging

Initially, it might seem easier to go with a solution such as Blogger, and indeed this might be true. Once you’ve registered, all you have to do is come up with a name, choose one of the many free templates for your site layout, and start blogging. The only trouble is that you don’t own the site, and you don’t have full control. Google owns Blogger, so you are limited to Google’s terms and conditions, and left with what is arguably an ugly Blogspot web address, which in this case might look something like http://newyorkpbbike.blogspot.com. In addition, as another potential branding downfall, some people perceive Blogger sites as not being as professional as a self-hosted site.

Comparison of free blog platforms & WordPress.org Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress.com

WordPress.org

• easy setup

• slightly difficult setup

• you don’t own it

• you own it

• terms & conditions

• limited to your own terms & conditions

• just need email address

• need domain and web host

• many free templates

• many free and premium themes

• ugly URL

• branded URL

If you’re thinking about sticking with blogging for any length of time, then you’re definitely going to want your own site where you own the domain, the blog, and the content and are free to publish whatever you like. For that reason, for the rest of this book we’ll focus on examples based on the assumption that you’re using Wordpress.org software. Don’t panic! Most web host companies today provide a “pushbutton” install of WordPress, and you’ll be walked through the steps—we’ll register a domain name, get a web hosting service, and install WordPress in the next couple of chapters. For a little technical pain now, you’ll be very happy once you begin to blog and see the advantages of having your own site. Additionally, according to Matt Cutts of Google, in his presentation ‘Straight from Google: What You Need to Know’ WordPress has done a great majority of the technically challenging SEO work for you, which means that your search engine optimization will be much easier.

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Chapter 3 – Getting started with blogging

TUTORIAL 1. Do your existing customers and potential new clients spend time online? Discern whether or not your customers or donors typically go to the Internet as a first stop when seeking information. Having been around the cycling industry for a long time, Bob knows that many of his customers actually start their search for general biking information and for new equipment pricing online. They are comfortable on the web, and would expect a web presence for the PB Bike Shop.

2. Do you already have a website? If so, find out from your web host if you can easily add a blog. Bob is starting completely from scratch, since his shop is brand new. He sets out to do a bit of research on web hosting and registering domain names.

3. Once you’ve reviewed the blogging platforms, which one will you use? If you’re going to use WordPress.org, you can spend some time reading about it here and we’ll also cover it thoroughly in the chapters to come. Or if you choose another option for your blog platform, then make sure you truly read and understand their terms and conditions. Bob has reviewed all of his blogging software options, and chosen WordPress.org. He chose WordPress.org because the software has a very strong user community, plus it seems to offer the most favorable options for his goals and what he hopes to achieve once he can get beyond a slight technical learning curve.

4. What type of keyword-relevant, creative title can you think of for your blog? Hint: a good title is short, descriptive, and contains your keywords. Before Bob installs any software, he spends some time thinking about what to call his blog. He comes up with ten different ideas to choose from, so that his blog’s name can help with his overall branding and also have pertinent keywords in the title.

5. Give yourself a BIG pat on the back! You’re doing great. Next up, we have an all-important decision: what to call your blog.

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CHAPTER 4

Deciding on and registering a domain name

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

Are you ready? The real work begins now! This chapter is designed to help you through the initial steps that you need to take in order to get your blog all set up and ready to go. Together, we’ll go through step-by-step instructions on: • choosing a domain name • registering the domain • getting web server space When you’re done with the above, we’ll undertake a couple of tasks to improve search engine optimization in WordPress, and then you’ll be ready to blog!

Choosing a domain name In the previous chapter, we touched briefly upon the fact that the domain name is going to be the web address of your blog. Not only is the domain name critical to your overall branding efforts, but it can also have an impact on your search engine optimization. For our first step in the search to secure a quality domain, we’ll start with the free Google keyword tool. The keyword tool is designed to show you the search volumes for specific terms on which people are searching, and the results can be filtered by any number of criteria. Simply stated, the keyword tool can show you how many people search per month for “bike shop,” “Maui vacation,” “health education nonprofit” or whatever your niche happens to be.

To help illustrate the function of the keyword tool a little better, let’s conduct domain-name research for a hypothetical landscaping business in Melbourne, Australia. The name of the venture is Ultimate Landscaping Services, and it offers residential lawn care, garden maintenance, and general construction services in the metropolitan Melbourne area. In order to narrow down what our domain name will be, we’ll use the keyword tool and insert various words and phrases related to our business to determine what exactly people are searching for when it comes to landscaping in Melbourne, Australia.

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

As a first step, we’re going to conduct a keyword search for our exact business name, “Ultimate Landscaping Services”. You can see in the figure below that nobody has searched for the business name, so it’s worth playing around with a few different wording combinations to find out if more search volume can be found with other phrases.

Since the business is local to Melbourne, it makes sense to check on the search volume for “Melbourne” and “landscaping” to see if that might be a little more popular. Note that when you do a broad search for popular words (for example, “Melbourne” and “landscaping”), if you don’t filter and better define the focus of your search, the results will reflect many different phrases and words only semi-related to your terms. The results below, with over one million searches for “gardening”. demonstrate this nicely.

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

Luckily, we can reduce the number of erroneous words returned by making the keyword search a little more specific to our needs. To start, we’ll check the box that says Only show ideas closely related to my search terms, which is located directly under the field where you enter your search terms. This will help to weed out terms unrelated to our research. Next, we don’t need to see the search volume for the entire world, so we’ll narrow down the geographic location. In order to do this we need to access the advanced options, which can be found by clicking on the Advanced options link. The following are what the keyword search volumes look like after filtering for geographic location and removing broad terms.

Bingo! It looks as though our new phrase “Melbourne landscaping” has a monthly keyword volume of 3,300 local monthly searches. That’s a lot of potential targeted customers, and since we already have “landscaping” as part of our branding, it would be really beneficial to fit “Melbourne” into our domain name.

Registering the domain Before spending any money to register a new web address, you should seek a domain that: • is brandable and easily recognizable • has the potential to rank well in various search engines • sets you apart from the competition • is as short in characters as possible To be sure, you can’t always get the exact combination of easy recognition, SEO-friendly, and short as possible. In fact, naming your domain can be a give-and-take compromise, but try to use the four recommendations above as a starting place and guideline. Once we have a general idea of the words we want to use for a unique name, we can go to a domainregistering website such as register.com to see if the name we’d like is available. (As a tip, no matter who you register with, always check for discount codes to save a little extra money.)

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

As we saw above, “Melbourne” and “landscaping” had over 3,000 searches per month, so we’ll start by checking whether melbournelandscaping.com is available. Unfortunately, as you can see below, that domain is already taken.

After reevaluating some of the keyword research we’ve already done, we determine that another good way to help our branding would be to include a portion of our name along with “Melbourne” and “landscaping”. Even though it might be a little longer than desired, we go ahead and check for ultimatemelbournelandscaping.com. Fantastic—it’s available! All that’s left for us to do is to pay with a credit card to register our new domain name, and then we can move on to the web hosting.

Website hosting The process of getting a web host is pretty straightforward. Your web host is where your files will reside for your website, similar to how you have files on your hard drive. Some reputable web-hosting companies include HostGator (which we’ll use as our setup scenario in the following chapter), Bluehost, and Dreamhost.

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

Most small businesses, nonprofits and individuals can get by with what is known as a shared hosting plan. Shared hosting plans are much less expensive than the alternative of dedicated server plans, typically have limited bandwidth, and don’t always provide full control over what you can do with the server space. As of the time of writing, you can get a shared hosting plan with a company such as HostGator for around US$66 per year, which breaks down to US$5.50 per month. If you anticipate that at some point you’ll have more than one domain that you’ll need web space for, then it’s probably worth spending a little more for one of the shared plans that allow you to host unlimited domains. If you want or need full control, you can pay for a dedicated hosting plan where the server space is all yours—though even they tend to have some restrictions. Dedicated server space can be purchased for approximately US$219 per month, but for the small-business and nonprofit readers of this book, that’s probably overkill.

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

TUTORIAL 1. Use the Google keyword tool to conduct a broad search for some terms and phrases related to your venture that you’d like to set up for your domain name. At this point you’re not overly concerned with what you think your branded domain name will be, so just enter some words or phrases to determine the overall search volume. Just like you, Bob needs a domain name for the PB Bike Shop that he’s recently opened in New York City. He’s been thinking of some possible names, but decides to conduct a bit of research with the Google keyword tool to determine what his potential customers are searching for. First up, Bob runs a general query on the word “bike” and is shocked to see that in the United States alone it receives more than 24 million searches per month; “bikes” and “bicycle” are sought 11 million and 5 million times respectively.

2. Based on the initial broad search results, narrow down your keyword search by adding more specific terms or by including the name of your geographic location. What are some of the search volumes that you get back? Could some version of the search terms be used in a brandable domain name? In an attempt to narrow the focus of his search volume results, Bob now decides to run a query that will include his geographic location. He also filters what the keyword tool returns by showing only the results closely related to his new search term, “bike New York.” The results below supply Bob with a much more targeted search volume of keywords that his potential customers are searching for, and help provide a guide for choosing the PB Bike Shop domain name.

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

3. Take your top three or four domain names. Starting with your favorite, check with Register.com, GoDaddy.com or Namecheap.com to see what’s available. Don’t get too discouraged if your first choice is not available. Domain squatters have been around for a long time, and it just means you’ll need to be more creative. After a bit more keyword research, Bob comes up with three possible domain names that he feels are brandable and have SEO potential: pbbikeshopnewyork.com, pbbikenewyork.com, and bikenewyork. com. He thinks that bikenewyork.com is a good option, because it’s an exact match of a phrase that gets searched over 30,000 times per month. Unfortunately, the domain is already taken.

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Chapter 4 – Deciding on and registering a domain name

4. When you feel as if you have a suitable domain name candidate, go ahead and undertake the steps to purchase and register it. With respect to his other two choices, Bob likes pbbikeshopnewyork.com, but feels it might be a little too long. He decides to investigate pbbikenewyork.com. To his surprise and delight, the domain is available, so he registers it immediately. As he readies himself to purchase web-hosting space, he’s already thinking excitedly ahead to installing blogging software.

5. With your domain registered, decide on a web-hosting plan for your blog. Keep in mind that a shared plan should be fine for your purposes, and consider whether you’ll likely be hosting more than one domain in the future. If yes, favor a hosting plan that allows for multiple or unlimited domain hosting. After some initial thought and price comparison, Bob decides to get a shared hosting plan from HostGator.com for $8 per month, which has unlimited domain hosting, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited disk space.

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CHAPTER 5

Installing WordPress

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress does not have to be difficult or time-consuming. It’s truly sad that many would-be bloggers give up at this point, when perceived technical barriers to entry appear. With this book as your guide, be confident that you can work through this process. To the many non-techies in the world, the thought of wrestling with software is intimidating. However, if the idea of doing a manual install has you feeling panicked and discouraged, don’t worry—all the web-hosting providers covered have scripts that will allow you to install the WordPress software with a couple clicks of the mouse. For the more technically able, doing a manual install of WordPress blogging software is not overly difficult. The primary difference is that you set up your database first, as opposed to letting the script do it for you, and you upload the WordPress files to your web host using FTP software. If you prefer this method, you can download the latest version of the WordPress and get a quick guide to installation. Note that as WordPress software is free, there’s no emergency helpline or customer service number that you can call, but there is a very active and supportive community in the WordPress forums should you run into trouble. Without further ado, let’s walk through an example of a WordPress install, using the Fantastico script and based on HostGator hosting. As this chapter has a very practical step-by-step orientation, our usual practical tutorial won’t be needed at the end. We’ll also be looking at images that use Bob’s WordPress setup by way of example throughout the process. This will be a simple and straightforward process, but a note of caution: As you progress through your setup, if you do become discouraged with the installation because you’ve never done it before, don’t even consider skipping any of the installation steps. Try to remember that you could be creating the best content in the world, but if your site’s not properly optimized for the web and your targeted keywords, it’s going to be very difficult for your potential customers to find you. You’ll have organized your web hosting according to the previous chapter. Now, log into your web hosting administrative control panel. This is known as the cPanel http://yourwebsitename.com/cPanel in HostGator; if you’ve chosen a different host, it should be possible to readily identify the equivalent. If this presents difficulties, check the setup emails you’ll likely have received from your web host. Once in the cPanel admin area, scroll down to the Software/Services heading and click on the smiley Fantastico De Luxe icon (note that your chosen web host might use Softaculous or another install script). This will take you to the page with the WordPress installer.

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

Now, in the left-hand menu of the Fantastico page, under Blogs, you’ll find the WordPress install link to click on.

You should now find yourself on an intro page offering a short description of WordPress. From the options listed, select New Installation.

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

You’re almost done! Nothing’s broken, and the world’s still rotating! However, for the next step you need to fill out all of the options carefully, so stay focused for this. • Install on domain If you have more than one domain associated with your hosting plan, make sure you choose the correct one from the dropdown list for this WordPress installation. • Install in directory As per the default offered, you can leave the install directory blank unless you’re setting up your blog in a subdirectory such as http://yoursite.com/blog. • A  dministrator username Provide an administrator username (this can be your name or the word “admin” or whatever you like) that you’ll use to log in to the WordPress control panel. • P  assword Try to make your password at least eight characters long, with a mix of letters and numbers. (Hint: write down or email yourself your admin name and password in case you forget them during the rest of the installation and blog optimization process.) • A  dmin nickname Choose a nickname if you wish, or you can leave this blank. • A  dmin email This step is critical. If you should happen to forget your password, WordPress will email a “reset password” link to the admin email address that you provide. • S  ite name Add your site’s name here (e.g. PB Bike Shop). • D  escription Add a brief, keyword-rich description of your business (e.g. “New York’s best bike shop”). Double-check all of the completed boxes, and then click on the Install WordPress button at the bottom of the page.

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

You did it! Hit the Finish installation button and that’s it, you’re done.

You can check out your new blog by going to your web address http://yoursite.com, but don’t be shocked by how little there is to look at just yet. We’ll work on that!

Optimizing WordPress WordPress is a good blogging platform freshly installed or just out of the box, as it is. However, in order to make it a great blogging platform, you need to take some steps to enhance it for improved search engine optimization, a better link structure, and overall functionality. Before we do the tune-up, log into the WordPress admin panel. You can access it by going to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin (where yourdomain.com is your actual website address). The graphic below displays where to log in with your username and password.

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

General WordPress settings When you log in, you’ll find yourself in the Dashboard. Scroll down and click on Settings >> General in the left-hand menu. In the boxes provided, add your site title and tagline (your site’s tagline is just a brief description of what your site is about). Check the image below for reference, and make sure that the site address and email address you entered are correct. Note that even though the site title is very important in terms of search engine optimization, at this stage we’re not overly worried about it—we’ll override the setting later with the All-In-One SEO plugin.

Your blog is going to thank you for taking such good care of it, and for spending the time to set it up properly!

Permalinks With the General WordPress settings out of the way, we now need to address permalinks. These, in simple terms, will be the permanent web addresses of your individual blog posts, pages, and categories. These URLs are what you might email to someone as a link to your post, or what other bloggers might use to link to you from within their posts—hence the need for these permalinks to be permanent and unchangeable. The way you set up your permalinks is also extremely important in terms of your blog’s search engine optimization. If you look at pages or blog posts on a WordPress blog, you’ll notice that sometimes the web address can look “ugly” (bad for SEO) or “pretty” (good for SEO). Ugly permalinks use code to display your blog post or page address, whereas pretty permalinks allow you to use keywords in the title. Here’s an example of an ugly permalink: http://culebrablog/?p=4196. Do you notice anything descriptive about the post that this links to? What might the blog entry “?p=4196” be about? If you can’t tell, neither can the search engines or your potential customers. However, with the pretty and SEO-friendly permalink structure, you get a web address for your blog posts, pages, and categories that can include descriptive keywords. Consider http://culebrablog. com/2009/02/20/culebra-youtube-video—if I asked you to hazard a guess as to what this blog post might be about, you could at least tell me that it’s probably a video of Culebra. Being able to discern this much at a glance is good for both human readers and search engines.

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

Thanks to WordPress, it’s very easy to opt for the generation of pretty permalinks. To do this, log back into the WordPress admin panel, scroll down, and click on Settings >> Permalinks.

With respect to all of the common permalink choices shown above, for maximum search engine optimization benefit, I suggest you choose either “Day and name”, or “Month and name”. Alternatively, you can set up a custom permalink structure, which can create a link that will only have the post name, such as yourbusiness.com/sample-post. You can do this by simply putting this exact bit of code /%post name%/ in the Custom Structure space available. AWESOME! You’re optimizing like a ninja now, and there’s no stopping you. We only have a few more adaptations to make before we get to content creation!

Setting up categories Next, we need to set up some categories for your blog. If you think of your blog as a never-ending book, categories can be conceptualized as a book’s table of contents. You can file each of your blog’s posts under a category, in which you’ve chosen to group posts that contain similar content. This then allows the reader to single out posts you’ve organized under a category of interest. For a descriptive example, let’s assume that you own a bakery. If you plan to create weekly blog posts on recipes, products, best customers, weekly specials, and the story of how your bakery came to be, then you might set up the following categories: • bakery recipes • bakery products • bakery customers • bakery story • bakery specials

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

Whenever you draft a new post, you can assign it to the corresponding categories that apply to it, thereby making it easy for your blog’s readers to discover your content. You’ll find categories on the left-hand side of the dashboard by clicking Posts >> Categories.

In the space where it says Name, type the name of your category; e.g. “bakery specials”. If you want something different than the full category name, you can change it in the Slug field; for example, to change “Bakery Specials” to be a shorter URL, you could just put “Specials”. (Note that if the category name is longer than three words, you should put a shortened descriptive version in the slug location.) Wow! Your blog is going to hum online smoother than a peanut butter shake. If you need a break, now is a good time to take one.

Creating pages If you’ve spent any time looking at websites or blogs, you may have noticed that most sites have pages with relevant information to help you get acquainted with them or to contact them. Typical pages that you might see include the About page and the Contact Us page. When it comes to your own blog, WordPress makes it almost effortless for you to create such pages. We return to the WordPress dashboard and, again on the left-hand menu, scroll down to click on the Pages link. Since we want to create a new page, click on Add New.

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Chapter 5 – Installing WordPress

You should now have a blank page to work with, as shown below. Regardless of whether you’re creating your pages for About, Contact, Location, and so on, you’ll start with these same steps.

When you’ve entered and double-checked all of your business information, you’re ready to hit the Publish button and send your pages out to the Internet. Nice work! Taking all of these preliminary steps now will save you headaches in the future. Go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done so far.

WordPress themes If you have a look at your website right now, it might not be very exciting; it probably appears similar to the image below.

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The great news is that the appearance of WordPress sites is easy to change, thanks to the availability of themes. WordPress themes are site designs for your blog which are essentially wrapping paper for your website. There are minimalist themes, colorful themes, industry-specific themes. In fact, there’s an almost limitless number of themes to choose from for your new blog. You also have the option of free themes or premium themes. The major difference between free and premium themes is that the free options typically don’t offer any type of support if you have questions or queries, whereas the premium versions may offer you support with installation, layout, and sometimes even best practices for search engine optimization. You can check out some of the free themes available on the WordPress.org site. Alternatively, after you’ve logged into the admin control panel, scroll down to Appearance and click on Themes. In the center of the page you’ll see an Install Themes tab. Clicking this will bring up a page with all kinds of options to check off, and WordPress will find a free theme for you based on your criteria.

In the event that you don’t see any free themes that you like, you can consider paying for a premium theme. Premium themes are designed by developers who create, sell, and support themes that are meant to be feature-rich, SEO-friendly, flexible in layout, and supported by active user communities. Some terrific premium themes are Thesis Theme, Genesis Framework, and the Headway Theme. As an additional resource to dig into if you feel so inclined, the design website Smashing Magazine does a thorough yearly roundup of some of the best WordPress themes. If you decide to purchase a premium theme (and occasionally this applies also to free themes), you might need to download the theme to your hard drive and upload it to your WordPress site. If this is the case, fear not—it’s simple and straightforward. Before getting started with the theme installation process, ensure that you’re still under the same Install Themes tab—from here, you can click the Upload link in the top sub-menu, pictured below.

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Now it’s as simple as browsing to the location (on your C or D drive, or whatever your hard drive is called) where you saved the zipped theme folder that you downloaded, and then uploading via the Install Now button.

As the final step, after uploading your chosen themes or selecting them from the checklist options, you can change which theme you want to use by returning to Themes, clicking the Manage Themes tab up the top, and choosing your theme from all of your available selections.

Wow! We covered a lot in this chapter, but with just a few more technical tasks to go, you’ll be all set to start creating content and blogging. Next up, we’ll streamline your new blog by adding some plugins.

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CHAPTER 6

Intro to WordPress plugins

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Chapter 6 – Intro to WordPress plugins

Yeehaaaw! Now you’re moving and shaking. The last technical subject we’ll touch on is WordPress plugins— and then we’ll be ready to create a content strategy for your blog. WordPress plugins are apps developed to help you seamlessly extend the functionality of your blog—and you don’t need to know one word of programming code. For example, do you need to create a contact form? There’s a plugin for that. Or perhaps you’d like to add YouTube video to your blog? Yes, there’s a plugin for that too! In fact, thanks to the robust WordPress user community, over 13,000 have been released as of the time of writing. You can access them all on the WordPress.org site. That’s far too many plugins to cover in this book; however, we’re going to discover eight must-have WordPress plugins to help you get started with everything from your blog’s SEO to creating an easy-to-use contact form. If you haven’t done so yet, log into your WordPress admin panel http://yoursite.com/wp-admin with your admin name and password. From the dashboard, scroll down and click Plugins >> Plugins. Once on the Plugins page, click on Add New, as shown below.

To install a plugin, follow this process: • Download the plugin from the developer’s site to your computer’s hard drive. • Click on Upload and browse to the location where you saved the plugin folder on your computer. • Once the folder has been selected, click on Install Now. • A  fter you’ve uploaded and installed a plugin, you’ll need to activate it. We’ll see that process in the examples below.

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Was that difficult? Did you have to write any code…? Let’s get this plugin party started.

Eight plugins to help optimize WordPress WP Backup WP Backup allows you to easily back up your core WordPress database tables, protecting all your hard work in the event of a website crash or other catastrophic event. WordPress makes it so easy to get the plugin that we don’t even have to go to the plugin’s official website. Simply click Plugins in the menu on the left-hand side of your screen, and then click Add New. In the middle of the screen, you’ll see a Search Plugin button. Type in the name of the plugin you want—in our case “WP Database Backup”—and then hit the Search Plugins button, as shown in the figure below.

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The search will return a page of plugins. From this list, click the Install Now link located next to the one you’re interested in, as shown below, and click OK when it asks, “Are you sure you want to install this plugin?”

Then click on the Activate Plugin link shown below.

Great work! This is the same process you’ll use for further plugins described in this chapter, so bookmark this page. Now that you’ve uploaded and activated the plugin, navigate your way to the Tools link as shown below, and click on Backup. The first option you’ll see is Tables; as you can see, we’ve also opted to back up the files from wp_contact_form_7. Everything else listed is backed up automatically.

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Next we have some Backup Options to take care of. Select whether you want the backup file to be saved on your server, emailed to you, or downloaded to your hard drive. You also need to schedule how frequently you’d like the backup to occur: hourly, twice daily, once daily, or once weekly. If you aren’t making a ton of changes to your blog, the simplest and most practical way to do the backup is to have the file emailed to you once weekly.

Finally, click the Schedule Backup button.

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All In One SEO Pack The All in One SEO Pack optimizes your blog for the search engines—search engine optimization, as it’s commonly known. After you install and activate the plugin by following the same process as for the first plugin example above, you’ll get a message similar to the bright red one in the graphic below telling you to configure the settings. Don’t panic—you’ve made it this far without writing one letter of code, and I won’t make you start now.

When you reach the All in One SEO admin page (you can also reach it from the left-hand menu by clicking Settings >> All In One SEO), scroll down past the ads and you’ll come to the options section. If you’d like additional information on any of the options listed, just click on them—for example, Plugin Status, Home Title, Home Description, and the like—for a brief description.

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With respect to search engine optimization, the first two blank fields in the All in One plugin, Home Title and Home Description, are extremely important. You’ll recall from Chapter 4 that we spent some time using the keyword tool to search for domain names and related phrases and words that your site would be structured around. The words and phrases you select for Home Title and Home Description are the means by which the search engines initially figure out the who, what, and where details of your site and determine what it’s about. Do not leave these blank. Keep in mind that the Home Title is the title of your blog site (you also filled this out in Chapter 6 under General Settings), which would be “PB Bike Shop” for our hypothetical example. The Home Description is just a brief snippet about what your blog is about, so for our PB Bike Shop example we might put something similar to “New York’s best bike shop”. (Note the thoughtful use of our targeted keywords “bike” and “New York.”)

Until you become a more advanced WordPress user, the rest of the plugin options can be left with the default settings that come with the All in One installation, so go ahead and hit the Update Options button at the bottom of the page.

There’s not much more to be done before you can become a blogging machine!

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Akismet The Akismet plugin is such an important tool for fighting comment spam that it actually comes with the WordPress installation. If you need a plugin and installation refresher, just turn back to the steps for the first plugin we walked through. Akismet works by checking your blog’s comments against the Akismet web service to evaluate whether they look like spam or not, and it also allows you to review the spam that it catches under the Comments section in your WordPress admin screen. After you activate the plugin, sign up for an Akismet API key by clicking the Sign up for an Akismet API keylink.

Once you have the API key, go to your Akismet configuration page, which is located under the Plugins menu shown below, and copy and paste it into the space provided.

Congratulations! You just eliminated about 99% of the comment spam that your new blog would have been susceptible to.

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Google Analytics The next WordPress plugin, Google Analytics, allows you to seamlessly integrate your blog with the free website stat tracking program Google Analytics. Google Analytics can help you to track various statistics on your website, such as how many site visitors you’ve had, the number of pageviews a visitor makes, and which websites referred them to your blog. Before you can use the plugin, you must first sign up for Google Analytics. To sign up, go to the Analytics home page, click the Sign Up Now link, and follow the instructions.

After signing up, fill in the requested information as shown below and click Continue.

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You’re almost done! Enter your name, select your country and click Continue. On the next screen, accept the terms and conditions and click Create Account.

When you come to the next page in the registration process, you’ll have the opportunity to choose whether you’ll be using analytics on one domain or one domain with multiple subdomains. Hint: if you’ve only registered one domain, you’ll be running analytics on the default “single domain” option.

Copy the UA code (which looks something like this: UA-22747713-1) in order to paste it into the plugin back in WordPress. Click the Save and Finish button.

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Now that you’ve registered for Google Analytics, go back to WordPress and scroll down to Settings >> Google Analytics. Paste the UA code in the space provided. With a click of the Update Google Analytics Settings button, you’re done!

Note: After setting up your Google account and activating the plugin, check in with your Google Analytics page in a day or so to make sure it has begun tracking activity on your site.

Google XML Sitemap Generator The next handy app in our plugin arsenal is Google’s XML Sitemap Generator plugin, which creates a special XML sitemap to help the search engines (such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo) to better crawl and index your blog. In order to submit the sitemap, you’ll also need to sign up for, or log into, Google Webmaster Tools with the Google account you created for Google Analytics. We just created an account for the Analytics plugin example, so you can log in with the same user account information.

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After you’ve signed in and arrived on the Home screen, click on the Add a site button in the bottom-center area of the page. Put your website address in the Enter the URL popup window and click Continue.

Choose your verification method and click Verify. Since you’ve just created a Google Analytics account, your easiest verification option is most likely to choose Link to your Google Analytics account.

Once your site has been verified in Google webmaster tools, open another tab or window and bring up your WordPress admin area. Choose the link for Site configuration and then Sitemaps, to allow configuration of the XML Sitemaps plugin to create and submit the sitemap of our blog. Before we return to the Google webmaster tools page, we need to activate the XML-Sitemap plugin in WordPress in order to create and submit the sitemap. When you reach the screen below, leave the Basic Options set with all of the defaults.

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For now, you can also leave the default advanced options as they are. If you decide that you want to manually build your sitemap at a later date, or you’re curious to investigate further, you can always come back and dive into the Learn more link in each section. Scroll back up to the top of the page, just above where it says Basic Options, and click the Click here link, which will generate the sitemap for your blog for the first time.

For the last step with the sitemap generator plugin before you go back to Google Webmaster, scroll down to Location of your sitemap file and copy the filename of the sitemap (it should be something like sitemap.xml, as shown below).

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Finally, switch back to the Google Webmaster Tools tab or page that you left open earlier, and click on Submit a Sitemap. In the popup box, paste or type in “sitemap.xml”.

Another one down, and only three more to go! Get up, have a stretch, drink some coffee or tea, and come back ready to finish.

FD FeedBurner The FD FeedBurner plugin allows hassle-free integration of FeedBurner into your blog. FeedBurner is a free service that allows blog or website owners to distribute their site content such as blog posts as an RSS (real simple syndication) or email feed, meaning that the content that you publish on your blog can be subscribed to by your readers. People who want to subscribe to your site and its content can choose to have the blog posts delivered via an RSS reader, or they can have it sent direct to their email address. Many blog owners choose to set up a feed for their site; it means that beyond having visitors come to your blog manually and in their own time via a browser, RSS and email feeds permit instant distribution of fresh content, such as new blog posts. Further, it provides you with a simple solution to make your content subscribable and more easily accessible for your readers. If you’re still having trouble understanding and visualizing the RSS concept, watch this fantastic three-minute video, “RSS in Plain English”. After you download, install, and activate the FD Feedburner plugin, go to Plugins >> FeedBurner Configuration within the WordPress admin area to provide the information required to set up your feed.

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On the FeedBurner Configuration page, you’ll see that before you can add any information you must “burn” (create) your feed with the FeedBurner service. Click on the First go to FeedBurner.com link pictured below.

When you come to the FeedBurner login screen, simply log in with the same email and password that you used for the other Google sites we activated above. After you’ve logged into FeedBurner, if you’ve customized your permalinks since we discussed them in Chapter 5, you can go ahead and type http://example.com/feed (where example.com is your website address) in the space labeled Burn a feed right now, then hit Next.

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When you come to the next screen, your new feed address is http://feeds.feeburner.com/yoursite (where “yoursite” is your actual website address). You’ll need to copy and paste this into the FeedBurner plugin. Click Next and switch back (or open in a new window and log in) to WordPress.

Back in WordPress, under Plugins >> Feedburner Configuration, simply paste the new feed address in the area labeled Redirect my feeds here. Click the Save button, and you’re done with another plugin.

Don’t give in to the temptation to quit just yet; you’ve only two more plugins to go!

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Smart YouTube Smart YouTube is a plugin that allows you to insert YouTube videos into your blog posts. After downloading and activating the plugin, click Settings on the left-side of your WordPress admin area, then the link for Smart YouTube, which will bring you to the plugin’s option page. You can leave all of the defaults as they are, but at the top of the page, click the link that says Usage [view instructions]. When the instructions display, notice where it shows “httpv://”—the “v” inserted after the http:// is what you want to include with your video link when inserting video into a post (see graphic below).

One of the nicest features of Smart YouTube is how easy the plugin is to use. For an illustrative example, let’s suppose we run a nonprofit organization that supports the preservation of birds in Costa Rica. At present, we’re drafting a blog post that needs a video of Costa Rican birds, but unfortunately our offices are located in Washington, D.C. We can conduct a YouTube search for Costa Rica birds and find all kinds of videos.

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If we click on the first one listed, “Costa Rica Birds 2010”, we’ll go to the video’s YouTube page as shown below, and while we’re there we’ll copy the web link from the address bar in order to paste it into the post when we use the Smart YouTube plugin.

We simply paste the link into the text area where we want the video to appear, then add the “v” after “http” in the link address.

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And here’s the resulting post with the video seamlessly added into it.

After Google, YouTube is the second-most-searched website on the Internet. As you begin to create your social media footprint and online presence, adding video to YouTube may become part of your work, so we’ll cover this subject in depth later in the book!

Contact Form 7 The Contact Form 7 plugin helps you to create a simple contact form so that people can email you. Once you have the Contact Form plugin activated, the various user settings can be found all the way down the bottom on the left-hand menu of your WordPress admin window or directly from the list on the Plugins page, as shown below.

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On Contact Form’s Settings page, copy the code [contact-form 1 “Contact form 1”].

Next up, we’ll create a New page in WordPress, which will become your contact page for your blog. From the menu on the left-hand side, choose Pages >> Add New. Type “Contact” in the blank title space provided. Note that you can call the page anything you like, but it’s typically “Contact” or “Contact Us”.

With your Contact page created, paste in the bit of code we copied earlier [contact-form 1 “Contact form 1”] right at the top of the new page, and click Save Draft and then Preview to see your handiwork.

Amazing! Do the moonwalk and give yourself a pat on the back, because that was a lot of setup work. Next up, we’ll start thinking about your blog content!

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CHAPTER 7

Developing a content strategy and editorial calendar

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Chapter 7 – Developing a content strategy and editorial calendar

At last! Now that you’ve completed all the technical background work, it’s time to start thinking about creating actual blog posts for your site. Whether you’re a beginner starting from scratch or an intermediate who’s started and given up on numerous occasions, a content strategy will provide a focus and create a structure, which will lead to a blogging habit. When you’re feeling frustrated and close to giving up, there’s no better motivator than having a schedule laid out for you to provide direction and just the right amount of stimulus to get you going. The one vital point I want to get across in this book is that you are in charge of representing your brand, your business, your nonprofit, and your individual message! You have the power. There’s no gatekeeper or middleman whom you have to pay to promote your business anymore. However, in order to promote your small business or nonprofit with blogging, you must post on a consistent basis. Realistically, you might only have the time to post once or twice a week, but you must ensure that it gets done every week. As you grow your reader base, they’ll come to expect regularly updated content and reliability, which is part of the trust-building strategy. Many would-be bloggers think you need to post to a blog every day, but that’s just not true. You can, if you like, but it’s more important to avoid blogger burnout, which can lead to quitting altogether. To be effective, you must put blogging into your schedule as firmly and unwaveringly as tasks such as answering emails and attending to customers, or you’ll be at greater risk of abandoning it after the first week. When you get started, blogging is a lot like a New Year’s resolution to exercise. Everyone starts off January 1st with a bang, working out and eating right, but by the end of the second or third week the sneakers are put away to collect dust for another year. When thinking about your strategy, remember that you want to put together content which educates the consumer, shares your story, and helps you to gain the trust of potential customers or donors. Also, avoid posting negative content about anyone, resist running down the competition, and certainly don’t publish anything that might embarrass you later. A blogging strategy, combined with a well-defined audience and clear goals, will make it much easier to create posts and content that your readers will find valuable.

Blogging fear Perhaps you’ve never before published anything on the Internet because you’ve never considered yourself a writer. This might even be your first foray into writing content since college or high school. But don’t worry if, growing up, you weren’t one of those people who kept a journal—you’re not alone, and help is at hand. To be sure, publishing blog posts can be intimidating—you may fear that your words will be judged, and chances are people will tell you that you shouldn’t be wasting time with that “blogging thing”. Telling yourself “I’m not a writer” is a very convenient excuse not to blog, isn’t it? However, if you don’t start educating your customers, delivering valuable content, and telling your story, then someone else—such as your competition—just might, and then you’ve lost control. Wouldn’t you rather be in charge of something so important? For professional bloggers such as Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, and Brian Clark, blogging is a full-time job, a primary source of income, and most importantly, a real and profitable business model. Most likely, you’re in a different camp. You’re looking to promote and support your business via your blog. But even though your primary interests lie outside of blogging, you still need a content strategy to give you focus and structure.

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When it comes to creating your social media footprint, your blog’s content is going to set the tone for how the outside world perceives your business. Blogging is a task and needs to be treated as such. Stated simply, without any content, your blog is actually quite useless. To tap into the possibilities available to you via blogging and social media, you must have a plan of action and stick to it.

The strategy We saw earlier that when it comes to blogging, the three biggest complaints tend to be: • I don’t have the time. • I am not a writer (or I hate writing!). • I don’t know what to write about. That’s it. Three little obstacles keeping would-be bloggers from reaping improved search engine visibility, attracting new customers, and engaging existing ones. Regrettably, there’s no writing fairy who’ll magically publish blog posts for you, so you won’t be able to avoid some of the hard work that producing content requires. But to make the process more manageable, here’s a couple of strategic suggestions to assist you.

Start with your goals We worked through identifying your goals in Chapter 2, and now it’s time to have another look at them in order to inform your content strategy • What are you hoping to achieve through your blogging? • How can you make it onto the front page of Google results? • How can you develop your brand? • How can you educate the public about your industry? Once you’ve identified your goals, you can create your content strategy around them. • What information is missing from the web with regard to your market? • A  re you looking to become a global thought leader in your niche, or do you want to attract local customers with targeted keywords? • Are you hoping to build a community of online fans?

Set out a timeline In determining your editorial calendar, you need to make several decisions: • How often will you publish? • When will you publish? • Will different days have a specific content focus?

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Consider this in deciding your schedule: if you plan to publish three times a week, at the bare minimum you’ll require a half hour per post, which means you’ll need to dedicate a total of an hour and a half to completing the work. A simple three-days-a-week posting plan might look something like the following:  onday M Blog posts designed to educate potential customers about your product or service, based on common inquiries you receive.  ednesday W Blog posts that include a photo of an employee or customer of the day, along with some background information about their story or an interview.  riday F Blog posts that provide background details on your small-business story.

Get started No matter how long you stare at the blank computer screen, no one will magically show up and start writing for you. You have to make a commitment to getting started, and, at the very least, get your ideas down on paper. Make a pledge to yourself and set a specific date with your computer (or pen and paper) to begin.

Write your titles Drafting your titles before writing your content might sound counterintuitive, but creating them will give you a simple base from which to structure the rest of your blog post. Additionally, the title is your blog headline and it’s meant to draw in readers. With all of life’s distractions, the average person’s attention span is a couple of minutes if you’re lucky, and a bland title will not do you any favors when trying to attract readers. Try to make your titles catchy and interesting—they need to stand out. For example, if you were a bakery owner, here’s an example of an uninspiring title, and a compelling title: Try our delicious blueberry muffins. 10 reasons why our blueberry muffins will change your life! A great place to look for title examples is magazines. Check out one or two of those, and you’ll have headline ideas for a year.

List bullet points Bullet points allow you to capture your ideas quickly and easily. If you’re having difficulty getting started, listing bullet points of what you want to convey in your blog post can be tremendously helpful. The items that you list can be structured into formal paragraphs after you get your ideas out. As an example, if you’re struggling with writing a post about your story, try listing everything that’s unique about you or your business. From this list, you can proceed to craft your sentences and paragraphs from the “idea inventory” you’ve created.

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Write in a human voice When it comes to the voice and tone of your posts, you don’t have to be anyone but you. There are a lot of impressive writers online (refer to our further reading addendum for some examples) and it’s a great idea to draw inspiration from them. However, while reading their content can be inspiring, on another level it can also be intimidating, and may even tempt you to mimic them. A simple trick when drafting blog posts is to try to imagine you’re having a conversation with someone, and that you’re trying to explain a concept or task in the most simple, straightforward language possible. Writing in your own voice adds a human element; this will go a long way towards meeting the primary objective of developing a social media footprint, which is to develop trust.

Keep it simple You don’t need to use fancy language or intricate syntax. Write your posts as if you’re drafting an email. Additionally, focusing on one specific concept, thought, or idea in your blog post keeps it as simple as you can get and makes it easy for your readers to digest your message.

Read your posts aloud Before you publish your blog post, read it aloud. Does it make sense? Try to imagine that you’ll be giving a presentation on the subject. After going through all the steps above, what you’ve written should be clear and easy to understand. Keep in mind, a good rule to follow is to NEVER publish anything that you wouldn’t want on the front page of the New York Times for millions of people to read.

Organize file storage If you’re intending to use photos and videos in your posts, get yourself organized and put all of your relevant files in one central location. With all of the new content that you’ll be creating, it’s important to have consistent access to the media you’ll be using for your posts. If you don’t have a computer with enough hard drive space, consider using a service such as Dropbox to store your photos and videos.

Don’t give in if you lose momentum No matter how you choose to blog or what your editorial calendar looks like, always remember, if you skip a week, two weeks, or even a month, don’t give in to the temptation to quit altogether. Just get back at it, don’t apologize for not posting. When it comes to blogging and keeping a schedule, it’s very easy to be distracted by your business. Use your available time effectively and consistently to keep from getting frustrated and burned out.

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Alternatives to writing For those of you unwilling or unable to write one word, amazingly, you can still educate your readers, share your story, and appear on the front page of Google even if you never write one blog post. But you still have to be willing to do some work—there’s no way around that part.

Use speech recognition software Do you have trouble with putting pen to paper, but like to talk about your business, your customers, or your amazing product? Speech recognition software allows you to speak into your computer and create blog posts without ever typing a single letter. The program will capture your words and create a text file that can be published on your blog. There’s even a speech recognition iPhone option.

Use photos exclusively Have you ever done a Google search and noticed photos on the front page? If you refuse to write but love to take pictures, photos are a great way to provide content for your small business blog. You can upload them to a site like Flickr (which we’ll look at extensively in Chapter 11) and seamlessly add them to your blog.

Shoot videos If photos are good, videos are great! With video, you can provide really useful blog content in the form of tutorials or even customer interviews. Remember, though, that people have limited attention spans, so keep the videos to about 1–2 minutes in length.

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TUTORIAL 1. Review your goals from Chapter 4. Your goals will be the cornerstone of your content strategy. When you’re frustrated and telling yourself “I hate writing” and “I don’t know what to write about”, it will be your goals that keep you focused on what you hope to achieve through your blogging. Bob’s feeling a bit nervous about his first post, but he knows he has to start somewhere. So he reviews his goals and decides that since his business is a new venture, and nobody knows that it exists, he wants to increase his customer base, get on the radar of the major search engines, and build a cycling community by offering helpful bike tips via his blogging efforts.

2. Develop your blogging timeline and your editorial calendar. In order to complete this action item, you need to ask yourself three critical questions: How often will you publish content to your blog? Which days will you publish (will you publish on the weekend?)? Will different days have a specific content focus? Bob is a lot more motivated after reviewing his goals, so he decides that he’ll publish content to his blog five days a week and take the weekends off. In order to maintain focus, he’s created a theme that he’ll follow for the days he publishes: Mechanic Monday The posts on Monday will cover some aspect of basic bike maintenance. Tutorial Tuesday Content delivered on Tuesday will be a video tutorial aimed at educating existing and potential customers of the PB Bike Shop. Wicked Wednesday Posts on Wednesday will list a sale item exclusively on the blog. Review Thursday Bob wants his customers to have an understanding of the quality and cost of the goods he carries, so on Thursday he’ll provide honest reviews of products in the store. Family Friday On Friday the content will focus on highlighting customers and along with interviews and photos, he really just wants to thank them.

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3. Set a date to get started with your blogging, come up with at least five titles for posts, and from the titles list bullet points that can then be structured into full sentences. You have your goals and editorial calendar all set, and now it’s time to swing into action! Remember, catchy titles will grab a reader’s attention and draw them in. Bob removes all distractions and sequesters himself in a coffee shop for an hour to create five captivating titles: The Ultimate Bike Buyers Guide Ten Tips to Tune Your Bike Like a Pro How to Change a Flat Faster Than a NASCAR Pit Crew Why PB Bike Shop Customers are Amazing 5 Tips to Take Your Cycling to the Next Level From the titles above, Bob then drafts a list of bullet points that he can turn into complete sentences later and which eventually will be turned into properly structured posts.

4. From the titles and bullet points, try to draft a simple post of 300–500 words. It doesn’t matter if this post is never published! The main objective is to get you started and to provide you with a blogging direction to prove to yourself that you can do it. Sitting in a quiet corner of the coffee shop, Bob takes a deep breath, thinks about all the work he has done just to reach this point, and then gets down to writing the post, “Why PB Bike Shop Customers are Amazing.”

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CHAPTER 8

Developing content ideas and fighting blogging frustration

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Now that you have an editorial calendar and a good idea of what you’ll post when, let’s focus on where most people stumble and quit: creating content. Whether you intend to post once a week or once a day, having a content cushion built up before you launch your blog, as well as carry you through the first few months, can make your entry to blogging much easier. As we all know, unforeseen events and emergencies pop up at the most inconvenient time, and having a stable of ideas and posts ready to go can ease the pressure a lot. Writing blog posts for a small business, nonprofit, or personal interest niche site can certainly feel unglamorous. The posts don’t necessarily generate huge amounts of traffic or garner tons of comments, and the reward for your efforts can be difficult to quantify. However, the importance of posting consistently as part of your overall social media footprint creation strategy cannot be stressed enough. Consistent posting to your blog can lead to improved Google rankings, increased authority in your niche topic, and additional avenues to reach your potential customers. Unfortunately, many “would-be bloggers” get hung up on how to go about creating web content that simultaneously promotes their venture and is: • helpful • non-spammy • trust-building To help you get started with some strong blogging topics, and to keep you focused and motivated, let’s look at seven content creation techniques.

1. Keyword tool One of the best semi-secret sources for relevant content ideas are the free keyword tools that are available, such as Google Keyword and Wordtracker. If you remember, when we were seeking a domain name in Chapter 4, we used the keyword tool to determine a brandable and relevant web address. As a refresher, you essentially type in a word or phrase related to your small business or nonprofit, and the tool reports to you what people—your potential customers—are searching the Internet for. This simple technique can offer you hundreds of new blog post ideas from a couple of keyword searches. For example, imagine you own a real estate office in San Diego, California. You might start by keyword searching the phrase “San Diego real estate”.

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Running a keyword search like this is a very effective means of generating targeted ideas for blog posts respond to what your potential customers are searching for. You can get an idea of what people are searching for from the results shown below.

From the keywords returned above, if you wanted to do a blog post around the phrase “San Diego real estate appraiser”, you might create your own top-ten list of appraisers with whom you work or write a resource post on what real estate appraisers are inspecting when determining the value of a home. Though it requires a time commitment (but you’ve scheduled the time, right?), the information gathered from running targeted keyword searches is extremely valuable when it comes to writing posts that are specific to your potential customers and helpful to your readers.

2. Useful content What on earth does creating “useful content” actually mean? This piece of advice is commonly given to new bloggers as a means of creating valuable content for their readers. But it can seem like an abstract concept if you’ve never had to write blog posts before, let alone useful ones. The easiest way to clarify what being useful is (in a blog post) is to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers, donors, or readers. What common questions of would-be patrons or supporters can you answer? That’s useful content! • D  o you sell a product that requires a lot of maintenance? A sample post might be titled, “How to maintain XXXX.” • D  o you provide a service such as search engine optimization that’s not easily understood by the layperson? A sample post could be, “A beginner’s guide to search engine optimization.” • D  oes your nonprofit assist a cause that’s frequently heard about but not really well known? Your sample post might be, “Ten things you don’t know about malaria.”

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Essentially, useful content solves a problem, answers a question, sheds light on a concern, or fulfils a purpose served by your niche. If you intend to put in the hard work and long hours that it takes to write something well, then focus on a subject matter of importance to your targeted customers. Remember, you are the specialist when it comes to your nonprofit or small business and you have knowledge to assist people all over the world who are using the Internet to learn. What can you teach them?

3. Your story Potential customers want to know about you and your business; it’s a cornerstone of trust building. Think about it for a moment. Don’t you prefer to give your money to a small business with a truly unique, authentic, or inspiring story, and one that you feel a connection with? One of the best ways to familiarize your customers with your business or nonprofit is to blog about your backstory and personal history. When it comes to creating blog content, many people have trouble writing about themselves. The main thing is to just get started. Backstory topics could start from responding to any of the following basic questions: • Who are you? • Where did you come from? • Why did you choose your business location? • What is it that makes you passionate about your small business? • What have you done in your life that makes you unique? • What struggles have led to the creation of who you are today as a business owner? Here are several deeper questions to ponder: • What makes you exceptional? • What challenges have created the person you are today? • Why are you infatuated with bread-making, bike-riding, or assisting Sudanese refugees? • H  ow did you become the proprietor of a real estate office, small-town theater, or dog-walking business? • Why do you help or volunteer in the community? • H  ave you done something astronomical, such as completing the Hawaii Ironman or climbing Mount Everest? When creating content that highlights your backstory, one caution to keep in mind: you really don’t want to embellish, or worse, outright lie—you will be caught out. It might not be during the first week or even the first month, but it’s almost certain to happen eventually. Stay authentic, be genuine, and be yourself.

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4. People-focus People love to read about other people. Within your nonprofit or small business, you probably have an endless supply of inspiring individuals to write about. When developing your social media footprint with blogging, it makes sense to regularly have people as the focus of your content. • Who has inspired you? • Who are your employees? • Who are your customers? Customers and employees not only supply appealing post material, but anyone likes to feel special and appreciated, and blogging about them is a great public relations tool. Telling their story can also help to establish a customer-based community around your blog. If you initially have trouble finding participants, you could give customers ten percent off their purchase for their willingness to participate.

5. Resource posts Resource blog posts commonly provide solutions to frequently asked questions by delivering tutorial-based blog posts. As noted earlier, your donors and customers have questions and you have expert knowledge. Do not take this knowledge for granted. If there’s a specific set of questions that customers seem to ask on a daily basis, turn those queries into individual blog posts. A few ideas for resource posts include: • How to Bake the Perfect Muffin • Why and How You Should Back up Your Computer • Simple Tips for Flu Prevention A list-type post is one very effective format for presenting resource posts: it’s simply information designed to help inform your audience quickly. Here are some examples: • 5 of the Best Ways to Install a Toilet • Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Join the Fight Against Cholera • 8 Tips for Better Barbecue The real beauty of list posts is that they have a tendency to draw in a lot of readers, they are easy to digest, and they’re easy to write.

6. Comparison posts Review posts and comparison posts allow you to provide your readers with a critique of the products that you sell, the services that you offer, or the development initiatives that you support with your nonprofit. The easiest way to go about writing comparison-style posts as a business owner is to take two similar items that you sell and present a side-by-side assessment of the benefits, cost savings, and overall value of each. For instance, if you were Bob with his bike shop, you might consider a comparison post between a Cannondale over a Trek. Or, if you owned a flower shop, you might spell out the similarities and differences between roses and sunflowers.

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Reviews are equally informative and helpful to blog owners looking to create content. Product reviews that present your goods in an objective manner allow you to explain the cost differences of different levels of items (for example, you might break it down into budget price, moderate price, and high-end price) in your business. You can explain why the budget model is good value, what upgrades are offered by the moderately priced version, and why customers might consider spending ten times more for the high-end item in the category.

7. A-day-in-the-life posts Blog posts that feature a day in the life of your nonprofit or small business can make a great blogging series that can run for weeks for months. Many small business owners find it difficult to write about themselves, but your daily activities are truly unique and worthy of a blog post. • What is a day, a week, or even a month in your small business like? • Do you get up at five o’clock in the morning and work until ten at night? • What do you do during the workday at your small business? • Are you using a piece of software that makes your day easier? The bottom line is that the real power of blogging is not the hard sell, but rather in helping you to connect to your existing and potential customers on a more human level. Whatever topic you are posting about, you should be asking yourself whether your efforts are truly providing value and helping you to develop trust with your audience.

52 Blog Post Ideas As small-business owners, nonprofit leaders, and individual bloggers, sometimes we’re too busy to do anything but act as customer-service managers, webmasters, and chief toilet-scrubbers. The following 52 Blog Post Ideas, one topic for every week of the year, are offered to assist you on a weekly basis as you commence your blogging and creative growth and begin providing practical information to your readers. The 52 blogging subject suggestions are intended to provide you with a guideline and to help you avoid spammy missives, such as the underwhelming “My business is great”. It’s been said once or twice before, but it’s worth repeating: the most successful blog posts allow your readers to learn something new and provide some type of value. If you should find yourself lacking in time to come up with creative ideas for blogging during the next 52 weeks, the topics below should help to get you started.

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1.

Why did you decide to start blogging?

2.

What allowed you to move beyond fear and pursue nonprofit or business ownership?

3.

Interview an industry leader in your nonprofit or business niche.

4.

How is the reality of running a business different from what you expected?

5.

 hen you arrive at your office today, write down the first five questions you’re asked W and turn them into blog posts.

6.

What are you passionate about?

Chapter 8 – Developing content ideas and fighting blogging frustration

7.

 ave you done something memorable such as complete a marathon, serve in the H Peace Corps or the military, or backpack around the world?

8.

 ow did you manage to start your business? (You might focus on practical points such H as securing financing, required permits, and so on.)

9.

 here have you visited in your travels? How are the places different from where you W base your venture?

10. What causes do you care about? How has your business supported your favorite charity? 11. A day in the life of…your bookstore, shoe store, marketing firm. 12. R  espond to a critic head-on. Don’t be confrontational, but explain your point of view in a professional manner. For example, if you’ve had a customer service issue, explain what you are doing to remedy the situation. 13. What makes your business different? 14. Define your customer service philosophy. 15. D  raft a post that describes your editorial calendar and the type of content you will be publishing on which days. 16. Conduct a photo or video walking tour of your business. 17. Write about the top five or ten blogs in your industry. 18. Did you encounter any barriers to entry when you tried to open your business? 19. What are the challenges you face on a daily basis? 20. H  ow is your business or service conducted in other cultures? For example, are there any differences between carpet cleaners (or whatever your venture or nonprofit is) in New York City and Afghanistan? 21. Interview your customers. Where are they from? What do they like or dislike about your nonprofit? 22. What software or online tools do you use that make your life easier? 23. Highlight a new product that’s proving helpful to customers or draw attention to a new program that your nonprofit is undertaking. 24. Announce a contest on your blog for a free giveaway. 25. W  rite a humorous post about something that occurred at your business or nonprofit. If other people are involved, ensure that you get their permission, and never publish anything that’s hurtful or embarrassing. 26. Why do you love doing what you do? 27. How does your business cope during a tough economy? 28. Highlight some monthly specials, promotions, or clearance items.

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29. F  eature any eco/enviro-friendly products or infrastructure that you have (such as low-flow, high-volume shower heads). 30. P  rovide the most convenient routes to get to your business and perhaps list any unique or historic landmarks around you. 31. Boil down a critical but difficult-to-understand concept in a resource post. 32. Describe any improvements or upgrades you have made to your business. 33. C  omparison post – if you sell sneakers, who would find Nikes more suited to their needs than Adidas, and vice versa? Or why which customers might want a WordPress site as opposed to a Flash-based one. 34. C  reate a tutorial post specific to your industry, which might be a trivial task for you but could really help the readers (it might be programming an iPhone, or how to make the perfect pizza crust). 35. If you’re comfortable doing so, explain why you carry one maker of a product over another in your business. 36. What do you do during your time off? 37. D  oes your family have a history in the business? For example, was your shoe store, marketing firm, or bike shop started by your great-grandfather? 38. Highlight a special client. 39. When do new shipments arrive? 40. Draft a helpful post or tutorial specifically to help others in your industry. 41. D  efine the origins and shipping procedure of your product. How did that coffee get to your café? Where is it grown? 42. E  xplain the requirements of entry into your line of business. What type of training is required to be a web designer? Do you need certain skills to run a B&B? 43. What is your personal history and what are your qualifications? 44. What are the top ten mistakes you’ve made while running your nonprofit? 45. Why are you located where you are? 46. W  hat are ten ways money donated to your nonprofit is spent? Or what are ten must-have items in your business? 47. D  o a real-life product review where you use one of your services or business items for a week and report back on your findings. 48. W  rite a personal post and invite your customers or donors to comment or provide their thoughts. 49. P  ost a survey seeking input from your customers about how you can improve their customer experience.

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50. Highlight the businesses and nonprofits that you support in your area. 51. Write about your Facebook and Twitter profiles. 52. Thank every single person who has helped you along your way. Congratulations on the progress you’ve made so far! From installing your blog, coming up with a unique web address, and to drafting valuable content for your readers, you have come a long, long way since you started. However, sooner or later blogging frustration happens to everyone, from the pros to the person who launched last week. We’ll deal with this issue next.

Dealing with blogging frustration Seemingly, blogging frustration comes from nowhere. You have your small business blog up and running, you have a dedicated time during the week when you draft posts, and you consistently publish content on a daily or weekly basis. Then, unexpectedly, three weeks, a month, or two months into your blogging life, after doing everything right, you find you’ve lost your blogging mojo. It’s a strange phenomenon—you have tons of ideas one day, but the next day you find yourself staring at the computer screen without a clue. And as a means to keep your mind occupied you set about doing busy work, such as incessantly checking your email, aimlessly perusing Facebook updates, and gazing at your Twitter stream, just to make you feel that you’re accomplishing something. Finally the realization that you’re getting nowhere becomes unavoidable. We’ve all been there. Do not give in and quit. You can overcome this feeling and live to blog another day. If you prepare yourself for the time when inspiration fails to visit, and have a plan for how you will combat it, you have a much better chance of not giving in to disappointment and self-reproach. Here are eight ways to help you plan for its arrival.

1. Don’t panic Blogger’s block happens to everyone at some point. This can be especially true if you don’t consider yourself to be a creative person and feel as though you run out of ideas on a daily basis. When this happens to you, remember to breathe consciously and try not to let panic set in, or it can paralyze you. Sometimes using an online timing tool such as E.gg Timer to set a predetermined period of blogging time in which to consciously focus and get ideas down can help tremendously. Or you might consult with someone else and have a brainstorming session with them. Even if they’re not involved with your blogging, it can stimulate ideas that refuse to come while you’re frozen in isolation.

2. Ban all distractions When the blog post ideas and enthusiasm dry up, if you have a tendency to check your email compulsively as though you’re waiting for a message from the President of the United States, shut down all your browsers and anything else unrelated to your goal of completing a blog post.

3. Walk away A consistent approach to blogging for your nonprofit or small business is vital to your social media footprint success, but sometimes you need a break for a day or a week. In truth, unless you’ve been blogging for a couple of years, chances are that nobody is out there waiting with bated breath and finding it difficult to go

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on because you’ve not written for a week or so. The key, though, is to commit to coming back after your day or week of rest. Fight the inclination to just stay on permanent hiatus. Write the date on your calendar for when you’ll continue, and stick to it. Additionally, when you do come back, don’t apologize to your readers for the fact that you didn’t post for a week—this will only act to draw attention to the fact that you weren’t actively blogging. Just get back to creating helpful information for your readers.

4. Peruse some magazines We’ve discussed using magazines for inspiration. When it comes to drafting blog posts, headlines are a key component. Not only do they give you, the writer, a starting point, the titles also have an incredible ability to draw in or repel readers. Magazines are like having your own open source, headline-producing factory. The following (starter) headlines were garnered from just one magazine in less than two minutes: • Must Read X, Y, and Z • Instant Classic… • Ultimate Guide To • Top Trends For • The Secret About “X” That’s Too Good To Be True • 25 Reasons Why You Should…

5. Look at unrelated blogs If you find yourself struggling, one helpful course of action is to dedicate some time to looking at blogs completely unrelated to your subject area. When done properly, and not as a form of busy work, this method should help to get the creative energy flowing and provide you with some new ideas. You could also venture into some forums that are only semi-related to your niche to seek stimulation. For example, if you own a restaurant that specializes in steak, and that’s what you typically blog about, you might visit a vegetarian forum and find new inspiration for topics to address on your blog.

6. Get some exercise Exercise is perhaps one of the best secret weapons in the war against blogger’s block. Even if you hate to exercise, at the very least take the family dog for a walk and get some fresh air. It can help you come back recharged and with a renewed sense of focus.

7. Talk with your customers Talking with customers is a great way to gain inspiration, and it can remind you why you’re blogging in the first place—to help your potential customers, remember? Additionally, on a daily basis your customers will have questions or concerns that can easily be turned into a blog post. When you’re battling the frustration dragon, get out from behind your computer or desk, and go speak with your customers.

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8. Try mind mapping Mind mapping is a brainstorming activity that can help you to push beyond blogger’s block. In essence, you create a mind map diagram by linking associated words, ideas, or tasks to a central keyword, which helps to generate and organize your ideas. If you’d like some excellent extra resources on mind mapping, Darren Rowse has published some terrific articles here, here, and here. To create blog post ideas with mind mapping, start by drawing a square in the center of a piece of paper and write the name of your business or nonprofit in the square. Begin jotting down ideas, working out from the center. Don’t stop to over-analyze or critique; just get your thoughts down on paper and you can refine them later.

WHERE DOES YOUR PRODUCT COME FROM? WHAT IS YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE PHILOSOPHY?

WHY IS YOUR BUSINESS UNIQUE? YOUR BUSINESS

CURRENT SPECIAL OFFERS

WHO ARE YOUR EMPLOYEES?

You can continue to carry out your ideas from the above with more refined thoughts. Keep going until you’ve come up with some new topics to write about.

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TUTORIAL Creating ideas to blog about might seem like wasted time now, when you’re motivated and excited about beginning your blogging adventure, but it will make a tremendous difference in a couple of weeks or months when you’re facing frustration and beginning to question your efforts.

1. Use the Google Keyword Tool to come up with five targeted blog post ideas. If you find yourself seeking post ideas, the keyword tool really is an amazing free resource that you can use when you want to create content that’s targeted towards what your potential and existing customers are searching for online. Though he’s not struggling with his blogging just yet, Bob decides to use the keyword tool to come up with five blog post ideas that will become helpful content for his customers, targeted at what they’re searching for online. Knowing that people typically have many questions when they go to buy a bike, he runs a keyword search for the term “bike buying” to gain an idea of what people are looking for on the Internet.

From the results returned, Bob can see that people are searching the Internet for bike-buying guidance. Wanting to help potential customers in what can be a challenging and expensive purchase, he decides to create five content ideas around the theme of bike-buying tips: what you need to know when buying a road bike, what they don’t tell you when buying a mountain bike, what to look for in general when buying a bike. Bob’s going to write the ultimate bike-buying guide.

2. Develop five post ideas that will be useful and helpful to your customers, donors, or blog readers. Solving your audience’s problems with your blog content is an enormously productive way to attract and retain readers, and for building trust.

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Bob knows that many people don’t understand how to properly care for their bikes, so he comes up with a series of helpful how-to posts, which will include: How to Properly Clean Your Bike Chain How to Install New Brake Pads How to Adjust Shifter Cables How to Adjust Your Seat for Basic Bike Fitting How to Prolong the Life of Your Tires

3. Craft five post ideas around your background story, such as: who are you, why are you or your business unique, and what struggles have you faced? You might feel that your story is not important, not worth telling, and that people just don’t care. However, all social media (including blogging!) is about connecting on a human level, and with respect to your blog’s readers, telling your story makes you much more relatable and real. Bob certainly has faced some serious obstacles in his pursuit to open the PB Bike Shop, so he comes up with some blogging ideas that will let his customers know about where he is from, why he chose the location that he did for the shop, and his struggles after an injury forced him to quit professional bike racing.

4. Prepare five content ideas that will focus on the people of your business: your customers and your employees. Without people, your business, nonprofit, or individual blog has no real reason to exist, and you couldn’t operate your venture—no people means no customers and no employees. The PB Bike Shop is a neighborhood-focused store, and people are the backbone of the community. Bob plans to write post outlines for customer interviews, employee appreciation, neighborhood cycling activities for residents, and Customer of the Day articles.

5. Draft five list post ideas that are also resource-focused. Again, people want to read useful content that can help them—list posts are an easy way to dispense helpful information that’s also easily digested by readers. Bob is really short on time today, but he focuses for a half hour and comes up with five list post ideas that would make for great blog content. 4 Ways Not to Get Ripped Off at a Bike Shop 10 Reasons Why You Should Always Wear a Bike Helmet 6 Tips for Teaching Your Child How to Ride a Bike 5 Tune-up Tips for Your Bike 20 Health Reasons Why You Should be Biking

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6. Put pen to paper and write five thoughts or titles that will become comparison blog posts. Random Internet surfers and even regular readers of your blog might not always understand the pricing structure, quality difference, and durability of your various products, so review type posts are a fantastic way to further educate them. The PB Bike Shop carries four different bike brands with price points aimed at different consumers. Bob’s going to write some blog posts about what makes one bike better than another, and why some bikes are so expensive. In order to be transparent about the reason behind what a bike costs, he’ll construct five comparison posts that highlight the value (cost) versus expected lifetime for the bike models that he carries.

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CHAPTER 9

Publishing your first blog post

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You’ve accomplished an amazing amount of work to get to this point. You managed to get WordPress installed, optimized your blog with plugins, and you’ve even drafted an editorial calendar! But you might have reached this point and still not written a single post. This chapter is going to help you tie all of the previous lessons together. Throughout the chapters, we’ve discussed using the free keyword tool, serving your niche, fulfilling a purpose, and developing trust with your readers. Now it’s time to put the theory into practice. The basics are what’s important, and the core goals of blogging are: • providing value • sharing your story • ranking well • promoting your business Are you ready? It’s time to create a blog post from beginning to end!

Drafting a blog post When you create a blog post, you’re free to write about whatever subject you like: a bit of your background story, an amazing customer, or a tutorial about your product. However, for the purposes of this example, we’re going to put the Google Keyword Tool into action to come up with a blog post idea. The sample blog post that we’re going to create will be based on the premise that we own a website, CulebraBlog.com, aimed at promoting a small island in the Caribbean called Culebra. This website exists to provide information about the island and to give potential visitors a taste of the beaches and attractions that Culebra has to offer. When creating content for this site, it’s obviously important to generate posts that can become a resource for people seeking information about Culebra.

Keyword Tool For the first step, let’s reference the Google Keyword Tool to see what people are searching for with respect to Culebra. (Note: Whether you run a nonprofit or own a shoe store, your process is the same. Just plug in the keyword or phrase, such as “malaria Africa” or “London shoes”, and hit Search.)

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The search results returned for “Culebra” provide many helpful ideas and suggestions for blog posts. We’ll focus our post on the phrase “Culebra Beach”, which as you can see below is searched over four thousand times a month.

Crafting a title Now that we have our phrase in hand, we’ll create a post that has a catchy title to draw in readers, photos so people get a sense of the beauty of Culebra’s beaches, and incorporates the keyword we researched. It cannot be understated just how important your blog post titles are! In today’s world, people are constantly bombarded with information competing for their attention. Generic headlines are going to have difficulty drawing people in to read your blog post. To create a catchy title, start with your post concept, keyword, or phrase and build around it. • 10 of the Greatest Customers Ever • How I Almost Died on Everest • 15 Cakes Worth Fighting For With respect to our example, from the researched phrase “Culebra Beach” we need to come up with an appealing title and catchy hook that will gain the attention of potential readers and draw them in. While “Culebra Beaches” as a title is okay, we’ll spice it up a bit and create a short list post that’s also a resource, entitled “5 Culebra Beach Photos that Will Make You Want a Vacation”.

Finding photos Most small-business and nonprofit bloggers don’t have a lot of time to create volumes of written content. A great way to develop posts and have a textual and visual element is to include photos along with your written information. As the title promises photos, we’ll need pictures to include in the post. As a starting point, Compfight is a fantastic tool for finding photos for your blog posts on Flickr that are licensed under Creative Commons—meaning you’re free to use them in your blog, with attribution.

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Search on your term in Compfight.com to see all the photos related to your phrase that Flickr has available. You’ll need to filter your results by Creative Common license, which you can do simply by clicking the Creative Commons link on the left-hand menu.

Creative Commons images from Flickr allow you to use the photo as long as you give the photographer proper attribution and a link back to the original picture in your blog post. For the “5 Culebra Beach Photos” example, we’ll download five Culebra beach pictures that work for our post, and get ready to put them in WordPress so we can create the written content around them. (We’ll deal with how to put images into WordPress below.)

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Creating the post With the photos secured, we’ll now give our post some structure by creating an interesting intro, and captions for each of the pictures. Our goal for the post is to get people excited about coming to Culebra Island for a holiday, and to provide some superb pictures that can give readers a visual break and a mental vacation.

Log into WordPress You can prepare your posts right in WordPress and then save the drafts to be published at a later date. Or if you’re more comfortable in another text/word processing platform, you can draft your blog posts in any software program you like—MS Word, Notepad, Google Doc, or Windows Live—and then paste them into WordPress for publishing. As a refresher, to get to the admin panel, simply put your website URL http://yoursite.com in the address bar and add wp-admin to the end so that your full address would look something like http://yoursite.com/wp-admin. This will bring up your login screen.

Add a new post After you log in, from within the Dashboard on the left-hand menu, select Posts >> Add New.

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Write the title and edit the permalink Now that we have our New Post page up, we can get to work and add the title and content. As you might guess, the field Enter title here is the place to write your title.

Although for search engine optimization purposes the title is very long and we run the risk of diluting our keywords, fear not, because before we publish the post we’ll amend the title’s permalink for improved SEO.

Remember that we’re interested in gaining search engine visibility for the terms “Culebra” and “beach”. Fortunately, WordPress provides amazing flexibility for customizing many SEO-centric items before you publish your post. Just under where you typed the title, you’ll notice a Permalink field indicating the URL of your post, and an Edit button. Clicking on the Edit/OK button allows you to customize the blog article’s permalink (as we covered earlier in Chapter 6) by effectively shortening the link of your post title without affecting the message.

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Editing the title’s permalink to just read “culebra-beach-pictures” is a helpful way to improve your SEO while maintaining the original title’s message. From the very lengthy “5-Culebra-Beach-Pictures-that-Will-MakeYou-Want-a-Vacation”, we’ll customize the title so it only includes our targeted keywords “culebra-beachpictures”,

Write the intro and add photos Fantastic! We’ve created a catchy title and edited the permalink to help improve our search engine optimization, and now it’s time to write the content for our post. Within the text area, we’ll type our blog post intro, write the photo captions, and insert the pictures.

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When writing the post introduction, it’s vital to make your opening statement strong and focused on building the need to read. One good way to draw in your readers is to open your blog posts with a question. It should also be emphasized that keywords are important when it comes to using blogging as part of your comprehensive marketing plan. However, some people become obsessive and only focus on words and phrases in their strategy, which can lead to unreadable content that comes off as SEO-speak. You should always remember that the keywords that you’ve centered your blog and posts around are important, but maintaining compelling and regularly published content is even more essential. We then need to add the photos with captions. To insert pictures into blog posts, navigate to Upload/ Insert above the text-entry field and click on the graphic that represents photo/video/music/, whichever you’d like to add to your content.

After you select the picture to upload, there’s some very important information to fill out to make your images search engine-friendly. The title of your image, especially the alternate text aspect, is extremely important and these areas should never be left blank. The Alternate Text section and what you write in it is how the search engines determine what your photo is about. Since we’re trying to improve our search engine visibility for “Culebra beach”, that’s exactly what we’ll put in the Alternate Text field. As a final step, choose whether you want the picture to appear on the left, center, or right of your post, and click the Insert into Post button.

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After you insert the photo into the post, you can resize the picture by grabbing any of the corners with the cursor and dragging out to make it bigger or pulling in to make it smaller.

We’ll undertake the exact same steps for the remaining four images, and then it’s time to add the post to a category and add some tags before we publish to our blog.

Add Tags and Categories When adding new content in WordPress, before you publish a blog post, the software allows a couple of ways to easily group your blog’s topics (categories) and a convenient way to describe a post in more specific terms (tags). Your blog’s categories are analogous to a book’s table of contents—they allow you to list your content in an orderly manner. The tags are a way to descriptively classify each post via relevant terms. Before hitting the Publish button on the Culebra Beach post, we need to add it to a category and provide it with some pertinent tags. Within the Add New Post page, you’ll find the Categories and Tags area in the right-hand menu.

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Because our example blog is brand-spanking new, there have been no categories and no tags created yet. We’re sure to have many more posts centered on the beaches of Culebra, so let’s create a category called “Culebra beaches”.

With respect to tagging your posts, typically you want to have Post Tags that provide a few well-chosen words that describe what you’ve written about. With the “5 Culebra Beach Pictures” post, the keywords are “Culebra”, “beach”, “vacation”, and “Caribbean”, so we’ll put those in the Add New Tags area.

With tags and categories added, and since we’ve taken the proper time and energy to create this sample blog post, let’s squeeze as much search engine optimization juice out of our efforts as possible— the final step before we publish will be to fill in the options for the All In One SEO plugin that we installed in Chapter 7.

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Optimizing with All In One SEO If you remember, the All In One SEO plugin optimizes your blog posts for the search engines. The fields that need to be filled out for the plugin can be found at the bottom of the content creation area (next to Add New Tags). For our example, we’ll fill out the Title, Description, and Keywords options as shown.

After filling in the All In One SEO options, and before clicking on Publish, it’s time to give your post a thorough proofread. Everyone’s busy, and you might often find yourself in a rush to hit the Publish button to get your post live. Nevertheless, if you can hold off for a few minutes to give what you’ve written one final scan, or even better, get someone else to proofread it for you, the more confident you can feel that you’ve caught any typos or grammatical errors.

Publishing the post Drum roll, please—now it’s time to hit the Publish button! Let’s get this blog post out to the Internet.

After publishing your post, take a moment to go to your blog, read through the live version, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

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Amazing, right? It might seem like a lot of work this first time around, but once you become comfortable and familiar with the process, you’ll be creating blog posts like a pro!

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CHAPTER 10

Finding readers and traffic for your blog

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By now you’ve probably published a blog post or two, and are well on your way towards creating a blogging habit. Alongside all the hard work that goes into maintaining your blog, at times finding traffic and readers for your site can be extremely wearisome. In fact, in the beginning there’s a good chance that you’ll feel like the TV show that nobody is watching, or like the street corner performer that everyone just walks by. Blogging and social media are not a silver bullet. Developing a following and a reputation takes time, consistency, and real work, and you should try to remember that everyone struggles in the beginning. But stick it out for six months, a year or even five years, and you’ll be way ahead of your competition. Here’s the key struggle: blogging and using social media for your nonprofit or small business is about giving, helping, and providing real value to whichever community you happen to participate in, whether it’s publishing blog posts, engaging on Twitter, or gaining new fans on Facebook. However, your efforts also have to help bring customers through the door or increase the number of donors that support your organization. Otherwise, you’re just blindly swinging at a piñata and not getting any return on your efforts. And therein lies the dilemma. When it comes to blogging and finding readers, if you want to do it right you can initially expect your trafficseeking activities to be a time-consuming part of your comprehensive marketing strategy. There is just no easy way around the fact that your blog will grow slowly via one connection, one Google search, and one satisfied customer at a time. Keep in mind that one of the primary objectives of your blog is to be there, online and in the process of being filled with killer content, when your potential customers go looking for an answer about your specific product or service. If you’ve been regularly providing solutions in your blog posts, the targeted traffic will find you. If you’re struggling with the concept of finding traffic and visitors for your blog, think about websites you like to frequent. Try to analyze what excites you about them, and what keeps you coming back. • Are they updated frequently? • Are the sites laid out in an aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-follow manner? • Do they provide you with useful information? • When you visit, do the sites teach you something? • Do they have a community vibe? • Do they make you feel good or happy? Well, those are most likely the same elements that are going to keep visitors coming to your blog.

Finding readers and increasing blog traffic Finding traffic for your blog is synonymous with increasing awareness of your brand to the greater world and connecting with individuals who want to hear your message. When combined with a well-rounded business or nonprofit survival strategy, blogging provides a tremendous avenue for cost-effective—or even free—marketing, advertising, and promotion, so here are some tips to help you start building your online network and finding readers.

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Add your blog URL to your email signature If you’re a small-business owner or nonprofit manager, you probably send many emails on daily basis. Don’t waste the space directly under your name by leaving it blank. A very simple but effective blog promotion strategy is to add your blog’s URL under your name and, if you can, include a brief description such as “Find killer product info and deals on our blog”.

Start with existing customers, donors, and friends When you’re just getting going with your blog, one way to find traffic and readers is to start with your existing customers and spread the message out through them. Author Seth Godin has written an excellent marketing post called, “First, ten” in which he recommends: “Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you...Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.”

Conduct an email campaign If your nonprofit has been in operation for any length of time or if you’ve owned your business for even a year, chances are you’ve accumulated quite an email list (you have been building an email list, right?). Send out a short email to let people know you’ve launched a blog and that if they mention it next time they come in you’ll give them a free gift or 20% off their purchase. The email can be sent to regular customers, friends, and family and should most definitely not be spammy. In fact, you might consider sending the email out on an individual basis, as opposed to an impersonal group email, and be sure to make your message compelling, brief, to the point, and professional. As an added bonus, you could create an opt-in email newsletter to send to customers, donors, and individuals who choose to join.

Make it personal Remember the ideas we had for YouTube or daily photo blog posts? Consider doing impromptu interviews on a weekly basis with three or four of your customers or donors. The interviews could be funny, serious, opinionated, or strictly about the individual’s experience at your venture. Once completed, the videos are easily uploaded to YouTube and in the name of blog traffic, surely the interviewees have friends, so encourage them to share their discussion (and the fact that they’re now famous). The videos might not create rapidfire word-of-mouth blog traffic, but it’s certainly cost-effective, if not free. If video presents technical difficulties, perhaps you could do a Customer of the Day or Weekly Donor photo. The key to success with this strategy is that you have to make it worthwhile for the interviewee to talk about it. Of course, you have to follow up with them once the video or photo is posted, and get them to share it with their friends.

Guest-post or write for a local newspaper “Guest-posting” is writing a post for a prominent blog that’s within your niche. You might have to do some research and develop relationships with the people for whom you’d like to write, but it can be a good source of traffic and new readers for your own blog.

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A similar activity would be to write a weekly column on your area of expertise for a local newspaper. A column is a fantastic way to develop your reputation, and a means to find traffic for your blog, especially if your business has a local focus.

Comment on other blogs Commenting on other blogs is an old-school method of generating traffic for your blog. Many blogs on the web have a field at the bottom of each post where readers can leave a comment, thought, or input about what the author has written. You might select ten or twenty blogs that are within your area of interest and drop by the sites every couple of days and add insightful, not spammy, comments.

Link to other blogs It’s common practice to link to other blogs that might have relevant information that supports what you’re writing about. For example, if you have a small watershed preservation nonprofit blog, you might link to posts published on the blogs of the prominent figures within that niche. No matter how big, powerful, or well-known they are, most bloggers will check in their blogging control panel, typically under the pingbacks or in the comments area, on a daily basis to see who is linking to them. If you’ve written something worthwhile, the person you linked to might either link back to you as a thank-you or share the post that you’ve linked to them, thereby driving their traffic to your site.

Visit related niche forums Online forums related to your niche are your friend. If you’re not familiar with any forums, ask your customers or do a simple Google search ([your niche] “forum”) to find out where your customers are hanging out online and pay a visit to those sites. Be aware that the forums are like any real-world social situation—you can’t just show up there on the day you launch your blog, make a huge announcement, and expect to be taken seriously. Building trust within forum communities is a time-consuming process and is generally determined by how long you’ve been a member and the value you’ve provided. For the best results, spend at least a couple of weeks (or preferably a couple of months) helping, engaging, and supporting fellow forum members. Promoting your blog within a forum as a way to gain traffic and readers works best when you approach it in the spirit of truly wanting to educate and help the consumer. The act of gaining member trust has to be done well before you can start endorsing your business; otherwise, you’ll be seen as a troll or as someone who’s just spamming the community. The most successful forum strategy is to determine the top three or four forums within your niche, visit them on a regular basis, and be as helpful and participatory as you can (contribute, answer questions, point people in the right direction, and the like). The nice thing about forums is that it’s a place where you can really begin to build a targeted audience. Making an effort and helping people in forums can be the first step towards gaining the faith of your online community. In the online social world, trust equals capital that can be cashed in at a later date.

Reach out to key influencers All niches have leaders who act as key influencers within that sphere. These key influencers can have a large, active, and passionate following. If you do a bit of research and determine who are the key influencers in your sector, and take the time to develop relationships with them, they can assist you with getting the word out regarding your blog and by helping to send you traffic.

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Nothing is easy and instant, so if you are going to seek the assistance of influencers, getting to know them and helping them first has to be done well in advance of you ever asking for help. As with all your online activities, trust is everything. Would you promote the product or blog of someone that you didn’t know?

Register your social media accounts By design, this book has not focused on other forms of social media because its chief concern is blogging. However, if you haven’t done so already, go ahead and register for your social media accounts. Places you might start include: • Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • YouTube • Flickr • Google (create your Google profile) • Foursquare When you’re doing your registration on each of the various sites, keep your profile consistent across all the platforms. If you register as Sally’s Fish Shack on Twitter, make sure it’s the same on Foursquare and Flickr. Most importantly, don’t forget to include your blog’s web address and a brief description of your venture as part of your profile. Successfully using social media as a method to find traffic and readers for your blog takes time and effort, just like blogging. It’s virtually impossible to cover all forms of social media well—the best strategy is to pick two or three social media sites that you enjoy using, or the ones where the majority of your potential and existing customers are, and focus your energies there. Many beginners on Facebook and Twitter have a tendency to do nothing but promote their business and blog on a constant basis and post messages that amount to nothing more than, “Hey, check me out, I’m awesome!” Be aware that engaging exclusively in promotional activities is a surefire way to fail at social media. A better social media posting strategy is to frame a question around one of your blog posts or one of your frequently asked questions, thereby seeking input and making your tweets and messages about your customers and not you.

Host small-business and entrepreneur roundtables There are many people out there who would like to become entrepreneurs, small-business owners, or nonprofit leaders, but they don’t know where to begin or how to go about it. If you’ve started a nonprofit or own a small business, it means that you’ve had the life experience of pursuing your vision, achieving your dream, and undertaking the necessary hard work that comes with any worthwhile goal. Most likely you’ve secured funding, created a business plan, sourced materials, and dealt with staff and government agencies. A nice way to increase your local blog readership base would be to offer a weekly entrepreneur roundtable discussion where you educate wannabe entrepreneurs on the process of starting a business. Not only would this idea be of tremendous value to people and assist you in potentially gaining new customers, it would provide fantastic material for your blog, which in turn would attract more traffic and readers to your site.

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Start a blog club Most certainly there are other struggling bloggers around you locally and globally. Consider creating a blog club that can meet on a regularly scheduled basis. Similar to the idea of a book club, you could initially solicit local bloggers to attend (and encourage them to write about it), and review and discuss two or three blogs a week. Not only does this offer an amazing support system, but you then gain access to the wider reader network of your fellow bloggers. You could share readers by writing about each other, linking to each other, and pointing each other’s traffic to the other blogs in the group.

Hold contests and giveaways Contests and giveaways can be a great way to draw in new readers. The trick here is getting the new traffic that comes to your site to learn about the contest to stick around and continue visiting your blog even when the giveaway is over. As opposed to running just one contest on one day, you might consider having the contest stretch over the course of a couple of weeks or a month and encourage participants to blog about it or spread the word on other social media.

Conduct organic search rankings and targeted AdWords campaigns We’ve spent quite a bit of time in previous chapters focused on finding keywords for the naming of our website and creating blog content. If you can manage to rank well for your keywords in the organic search rankings, you have the chance to acquire targeted traffic and readers for your blog. Only Google knows the exact algorithm that determines where a particular website is listed in the search engine results, but a common belief is that backlinks play a significant role in determining rank. Backlinks are links to your blog from other websites; the more authoritative the site that’s linking to you, the stronger the backlink is believed to be. In simple language, if you own a shoe store and blog frequently about sneakers, a backlink from the Nike blog would presumably be more authoritative than one from a blog about hang-gliding. In conjunction with relying on organic rankings to bring readers to your blog, as part of your marketing expense you can also choose to pay the major search engines to advertise your site whenever people search using one of your pre-selected keywords. Google AdWords is a good example of this advertising strategy, whereby you choose the search terms and phrases that trigger your ads to display. The advantage of paying to advertise is that the ads will appear purely on the basis of your chosen words or phrases. Strategically speaking, the ads typically appear in the top of the returned search results, or in the sidebar of related blogs and websites; you are charged on a “pay-per-click” basis, meaning that you only pay if someone clicks on the link to your site. Paying to advertise can certainly result in new targeted traffic for your blog, but of course, the downside with AdWords is that you have to pay for it. Along with the financial cost, in order for AdWords to work properly you have to do quite a bit of testing to determine which words or phrases are converting to new blog readers and potential customers. For in-depth coverage of tracking conversions, you should refer to this article from Search Engine Journal.

Compose a web-optimized press release Have you ever written a press release? You no longer have to be on staff at a major PR firm to draft and submit your own press release to the news agencies. If you have some incredible news to share with the world or if you time a big event such as a contest or giveaway well, it can be a great way to spread information about what you’re doing and to draw traffic to your blog.

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One example that would certainly warrant a press release would be to take on a community-related project such as cleaning up a park, volunteering at a road race that’s supporting a worthy cause, or committing to walk shelter animals that are waiting to be adopted. In addition to being great news for a press release and the chance to increase your blog readership, working in the community helps to expand your network, provides you with further content to write about, and effectively builds your brand in a positive light. Pitch Engine and PRWeb both offer a free, as well as paid, press release submission service. For help on how to write an effective press release that’s also optimized for the web, it’s well worth looking at “How to Write Social Media Press Releases” by Brian Solis. Additionally, you should consider signing up for the free service known as Help a Reporter Out (HARO. HARO is a website that, via a daily email, is designed to match up expert sources (such as you!) with reporters who need to file a story and are looking for people to interview. Whether you’re a sole individual blogger, own an auto shop, or run a nonprofit that works to improve education, being a news information source can provide many publicity opportunities that you might otherwise never hear about.

Advertise on customer review sites Small-business owners tend to have a love/hate relationship with customer review sites. Nevertheless, due to the large volume of information and web traffic that the larger review sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp receive, they tend to be at the top of the search results for service-oriented or hospitality businesses. For a fee, some customer review sites will allow business owners to display their web address along with their basic business listing. Using TripAdvisor as an example, if you break down the price on a monthto-month basis ($500 per year / 12 months = $41.50) the fees don’t work out to be too pricey. You’ll need to do a cost–benefit analysis to determine if it’s worthwhile for you, but this form of advertising is an effective way to get exceptionally well-targeted traffic to your blog.

Listen online Millions of people are on the Internet every day, potentially talking about your business, discussing your nonprofit’s niche, and discussing what you’re interested in as an individual. You have the ability to monitor and “listen” to what’s being said online about you by using free resources such as Google Alerts and Social Mention. Developing a listening strategy with social media monitoring tools is a tremendous way to establish a strategy that searches the web for mentions of various words and terms based on your choice of phrases. You can set the alerts up so that whenever your business, your nonprofit, your areas of expertise, or any other phrase about you is mentioned online, it can be tracked and reported back to you, typically via a daily email. If mentions or questions related to you are highlighted from forums, on blogs, or other social media channels, you have a fantastic opportunity to provide your input, engage potential customers, and offer value. Which, of course, attracts people to your blog. In closing, truth be told, there are myriad ways to draw in readers and drive traffic to your blog. The tricky part, though, is making it worthwhile for first-time visitors to your blog to stick around and come back again. And we’re not yet finished with making sure they do!

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TUTORIAL Finding readers and traffic for your blog takes real work, real energy, and real commitment—there is really no way to take shortcuts. You have to put your head down and get to work. The following action items should help put you on your way to attracting traffic to your site and finding new readers of your blog.

1. Add your blog’s URL to your email signature today! Hint: If you can’t find where to add a signature in your template, check under the email options section and it should be there. Now that Bob has the PB Bike Shop blog up and running, he commits to finally adding the site’s web address to the bottom of his email signature: Bob Smith PB Bike Shop NYC Check out our blog http://pbbikenewyork.com for killer deals & helpful info

2. Tell ten of your friends or existing customers about your blog. Get yourself in gear and get over your fear. Make it a point this week to tell at least ten people about the blog you’ve recently finished, and what your plans are going to be for your site. Today is a big day for Bob—he’s going to approach ten of his loyal customers and tell them about the blog project that he’s been working on. Moreover, Bob is going to ask them for their honest input about the site and to help spread the message that he’s now blogging. To reward the customers for their efforts and generosity, Bob has decided to give them each a $20 gift card to his store.

3. Draft a brief, professional email about the launch of your blog and send it out to your email list. Remember, your message cannot be spammy; it should include some form of value to the email recipients. Bob knows that Tuesday is a typical workday for most people on his email list and, since he is on the east coast of the United States, he decides to send his announcement out at about 9:00 a.m. He could have sent the email on a Friday afternoon or the weekend, but he understands that many people don’t check email messages or take action during those times.

4. Use your smartphone or other video recording device to shoot your first Customer of the Day interview, upload it to YouTube, put it on your blog, and follow up with the interviewee to let them know it’s available for viewing online. Try to make your video lighthearted, and keep it to no longer than 1–3 minutes—viewers have short attention spans. For this method to be most effective, encourage the interviewee to share it with their friends and family.

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Today is Bob’s lucky day—he just purchased an iPhone 4 and is eager to fool around with its video capabilities. After working up the nerve, he goes and interviews one of his regular customers about what the shop is doing well and where it could use some improvement.

5. Identify one or two blogs in your niche that accept guest blog post submissions, or a local newspaper, and write one or two of the best articles of your life so that you can submit them for publication. Remember to keep the focus on quality content and don’t submit any post that you wouldn’t want showcased on your own site. Also, make sure to link back to your own site a couple of times if they allow it, and at the very least, ensure that you can include your blog’s link in the author bio. Bob is a little stressed at the thought of doing a weekly newspaper column, but he knows that there’s a popular weekly activities newspaper with about 2,500 subscribers and an online version specifically focused on his neighborhood, which could be a terrific traffic source for his blog. He’s not sure if his idea will be accepted, but Bob decides to pitch a weekly column to the newspaper’s editor teaching readers how to undertake simple bike maintenance.

6. Find 3–5 online forums relevant to you. Spend at least half an hour in each just lurking around the posts and researching if you feel as though you could add value to the community. If you create user accounts on the forums, make sure to brand your user profile with your blog name and maintain a naming consistency in all the communities you choose to participate in. Additionally, many forums will allow you to include a link to your site in your signature; find out if any of the forums you research allow this, and if so, make sure to add your URL. Fortunately, Bob is not a total technophile, and he’s spent time perusing some of the larger cycling forums on the Internet. When Bob didn’t gain instant results from his efforts, he became dismayed and quit participating in online forums. However, this week he’s determined to renew and recharge his commitment and to get out there and help at least three people a day in the forums by responding to questions and providing input.

7. Strap yourself to a chair and register for your social media accounts. You’ll already have the Flickr and YouTube account for your business we set up earlier. Go ahead and set up your Facebook page, Twitter account, Foursquare, and so on, remembering to include some of your important keywords in the description field and to include your blog’s link in the URL area. Most importantly, remember that, just like blogging, social media takes time, patience, and effort in order to succeed. Bob has had a personal Facebook account for about a year now, but he’s been procrastinating setting up a fanpage for PB Bike Shop. He decides to dedicate a half hour every morning during the next week to register his business on Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and yes, even to set up his fanpage on Facebook. Recently, Bob has been learning a lot about trust and the commitment it takes to develop it in the online world, so he’s dedicated to learning and understanding everything he can about how he can use each site to develop relationships, engage customers, and assist those who may be struggling with something in his area of expertise.

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8. Write a web-optimized press release to announce your participation in a newsworthy event and to promote your blog’s existence. If you’ve never written a press release before, have a look at this resource and structure your document in a similar manner. The employees of the PB Bike Shop are volunteering on a fun-day bike ride to help support cycling awareness and improved bike safety legislation. Bob is going to draft a press release about the day’s activities and submit it to prweb.com’s free service and he is going to make certain to link to his blog.

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CHAPTER 11

Optimizing Flickr and YouTube for your blog’s online presence

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When you first start laying the foundation of your blog, one post at a time, the sum of your content can look a little insubstantial and lonely. A terrific strategy to help you create the beginnings of a comprehensive social media footprint and expand your blog’s search engine visibility is to regularly upload photos to Flickr and video to YouTube. Without question, incorporating both forms of media into your efforts can be of tremendous benefit as you start to develop a social media presence, with your blog as its anchor. By capturing relevant photo and video material and uploading it to sites such as YouTube and Flickr, you gain the additional benefits of improved search engine visibility. And that’s not all; consider these bonuses: • it’s simple to do • it’s cost-effective to undertake • it helps to humanize you to readers It couldn’t be easier to produce both photo and video if you have a camera that can handle both, as many do these days. When capturing still images, why not also shoot a one-minute video? Then, with pictures and movies in hand, you can take advantage of the media on Flickr, YouTube, and your blog. There you have three effective web-presence-creation options for the effort of one, and there’s still Facebook and Twitter to go. And with a smartphone and an app or two, you can do your uploading while out drinking coffee. Now that’s what’s meant by developing an online presence and building additional portals for your content. When you start blogging, for all intents and purposes you don’t really exist—you’re starting from the bottom and working up. You need to harness various content channels to brand your activities and draw potential donors or customers back to your blog, where you can then develop the trust and confidence to build a relationship and convert them into supporters and customers. Developing the beginnings of a well-distributed online presence with Flickr and YouTube, with blogging as its cornerstone, can facilitate more chances to rank well in the search engines, an opportunity to share your helpful content on different sites, and boost your blog, which in turn creates more interest in your message. Using Flickr (and YouTube) effectively to assist in the development of your blog’s online presence actually starts well before you post one image or video. At the time of user-profile setup, you have the chance to provide a description of your venture and blog, the name of your site, and to include a valuable link to your blog. All of this costs you nothing, but it has tremendous worth when establishing a web presence. However, you need to take a strategic approach according to numerous best practices to make sure that your efforts are as effective as possible in producing maximum value for your hard work. When you’re using Flickr and YouTube to increase your blog’s online visibility, you need to update your media frequently; at least a couple of times per week. People typically search for various content on both sites, and the results are generally sorted by “most recently added”—freshly uploaded videos or photos that are seen first in the results. And, of course, you want your business, nonprofit or personal interest to always be visible. At this point, it should be stressed that when you’re integrating photo and video, your progress and return on investment are going to rely on taking small steps, not upon getting your media to go viral.

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Using Flickr to expand your web presence A primary benefit to using Flickr is that, although it discourages direct sales, it does encourage organizations and businesses to post photos. Flickr provides “Best Practices for Organizations using Flickr” list for guidance. Examples include a nonprofit sharing photos of their disaster relief efforts, a surf shop owner posting photos of customers living the “surfer” lifestyle, and a clothing retailer providing behindthe-scenes photos of a fashion show. As a comprehensive example of how to use Flickr as a tool to help build your blog’s footprint, let’s imagine that you just started a personal blog for people who are interested in learning how to juggle. At present you have no site visitors, you don’t appear in the search engines, and nobody’s downloading your “Ultimate Guide to Learning How to Juggle”. So you decide that you want to use photos and video to improve your online presence. We go to Flickr and get ready to work!

Personalize your account As Yahoo, Google, and Facebook allow for interconnectivity with Flickr, if you already have an account with any of them you can sign in and get to work on your profile. If you don’t, you’ll need to create a new Yahoo user account—a fairly painless process.

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Once you’re set up with Yahoo and signed in, click on Personalize your profile on the initial screen.

The next page you come to is crucial for your SEO: it’s where you enter your profile information, including the description, site name, and blog link that the search engines will pick up. As such, the most important sections are the Describe Yourself, Your website address, and Website name areas. If you’re having trouble deciding what to put in the Describe Yourself area, refer to what you used for the WordPress description of your blog and use that.

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You don’t want to waste your hard work, so be sure to hit the Save button when you’re done. Next, we create a custom URL for our Flickr photo account, so click on the You link at the top of the page and select Your Account from the dropdown menu.

Flickr allows you to create a custom URL for your photo account, which means that instead of having a meaningless, non-branded web address that looks like http://www.flickr.com/photos/46476383@ N04/4268480456, you have the opportunity to include your blog’s name to create an address that makes a lot more sense: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yournonprofit.com.

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With the profile information filled out and our Flickr account established, we’re now ready to post our first juggling pictures, and begin our mission of strategically using photo uploads as part of our social media footprint creation. Yes, you guessed it: we’re going to start with that Google keyword tool. Note that you don’t always have to begin with the keyword tool before you create media or written content! But if you’re just getting started or have given up on blogging in the past, it’s an excellent idea to provide constructive content that people are searching for. And the keyword tool can help you to discern what that targeted content should be.

Start with keywords To begin with, we’ll investigate what people are seeking on the Internet with respect to the term “juggling”.

After querying and analyzing the returned results, we decide to concentrate on creating photos around “how to juggle”. For a juggling blog, basing a photo upload effort around “how to juggle” is perfect—we could create a whole series of pictures progressing through the proper juggling technique and then upload one photo per day for a month. Now it’s time to concentrate on uploading the photos properly.

Upload photos With the phrase selected to create our photo content around, it’s now time to get down to the business of uploading the first of all those juggling pictures we’ve amassed. Within the Flickr interface, go to You and select Upload Photos and Videos.

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After clicking on the Upload Photos and Videos link, the photo and video upload screen will come up with the following options: • choose the photo (to upload) • upload • add titles, descriptions, tags or add to a set We’ll start with Choose photos and videos and browse to the location on the computer where the juggling photo is stored.

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Next, to get the picture onto Flickr, go ahead and click the Upload Photos and Videos button. You can upload multiple pictures at the same time, but you should take caution not to upload ten 1GB images at once or it might take all day.

Once the photo has finished uploading, you’ll see a screen with a link asking, “Finished: add a description?”

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Describing the photos that you upload gives you the golden opportunity to add a title, tags, and an actual description; this is one of the highest-priority areas to put effort into when uploading photos. It’s a very good idea to utilize all the describing options provided by Flickr—fill them in with relevant information that’s focused on your keyword in order to gain search engine visibility. You can see the three options for adding descriptive content in this image.

As we saw when we published a blog post on WordPress, tags are keyword labels such as “juggling”, “how to”, “skill”, and “bowling pin”. You separate your tags in Flickr with a space, or if you need to join two words, “beach sunset,” for example, then you put them in quotes. After you’ve entered the tags, hit the Add button.

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It’s then time to provide a title and the picture’s description. Remember, our example is centered around the phrase “how to juggle”. For the title, we simply write “How to Juggle”. The description will be “How to juggle bowling pins”, since the sample photo shows a person doing exactly that. We hit Save, and we’re done with the upload.

Let’s take a look at our handiwork.

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Flickr has a colossal database of images, added to by thousands of people every day, so you need to be constant in your efforts when beginning this strategy. Ideally, you should try to post at least one photo a day for a couple of months with your keyword or phrase. It might not look like much at first, but maintain consistency and, before you know it, you’ll have fifty, then one hundred well-tagged, well-titled and well-described images that are designed to be helpful, rank in the search engines, establish your online presence, and direct targeted traffic to your blog.

A few final tips on Flickr: •  Y  ou can include a link to your blog when you’re writing the photo description, which can be especially useful if you’d like to refer people to your blog for more information. •  Y  ou can brand your photos with a logo or your website address to improve your visibility even more. •  If you want people to be able to use your pictures for their own use (with attribution), remember to include the Creative Commons license. • Make sure to use your Flickr images when you’re searching for pictures to use in your blog.

Using YouTube to improve your blog’s online presence YouTube is another fantastic and cost-free content outpost for the development of your blog’s online presence. YouTube is the most-searched website on the Internet after Google, so if your uploads are done properly, that means a lot of potential targeted traffic for reaching donors and customers and driving them to your blog. In fact, YouTube has its own keyword discovery tool for you to use. With both YouTube and Flickr, it’s beneficial to your efforts to think like a potential reader of your blog. If you’re trying to use YouTube as part of your strategy to create trust gateways and an online presence, you’ll have to do some thinking to ensure that your video upload efforts are well targeted. Consider this: have you ever gone to YouTube to purchase a car? Probably not—but you might have gone to YouTube to see video of the car you hope to purchase. This example demonstrates that you really need to make sure that your videos are focused on providing a resource for helping people with queries about your niche. For example, if your business is car stereo sales, or your nonprofit focuses on coastal wetlands, or your personal blog is all about cardio fitness, your videos might reflect the following: • install car stereo • mangrove restoration program • how to run properly Notice that these hypothetical YouTube searches aren’t necessarily conducive to purchasing something, but rather for the end user to find resources for a concept that they may be having difficulty grasping. In short, they’re seeking an answer. And if your video provides helpful solutions to their question and gains their trust, you stand to increase targeted traffic to your blog by way of your videos.

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Upload videos for maximum benefit For the YouTube account creation and video upload illustration, we’ll assume that we’re an education nonprofit organization called “Education is the Way”, which supports charter school education in large cities. We’ve just launched our blog, and we want to use video to help potential donors to better understand how our educators use manipulatives in the classroom, as opposed to traditional rote learning, to enhance the student’s educational experience. Just like Flickr above, the information that you enter during the YouTube user profile creation process and at the time of video upload is important, and you should choose your descriptive words and phrases wisely. Again, think like your end users, and consider what they might be searching for on YouTube. When creating your user account, fill out the general information required and click Accept to agree to YouTube’s terms and conditions. Once completed, you should come to a page that looks like the one pictured below. Click on the Profile Setup link to optimize the profile of your blog. Once again, be as descriptive and keyword-rich as you can when filling out the fields.

This time, in setting up the YouTube account for “Education is the Way”, we’ll upload a copy of the organization’s logo as well—this is much more endearing than the default silhouetted head. We’ll provide a targeted description, and add our new blog’s URL. Once completed, make sure to hit the Save Settings button at the bottom of the page.

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When done, the profile is shown in the graphic below.

At the top of the same page, click on the My Channel link and then go to the Settings tab to add tags and a title for our YouTube channel. (Note: you can also customize the look of your channel’s background under the Themes and Colors tab, which is next to the Settings tab.)

With our profile taken care of, it’s now time to upload some video. We’ll start by clicking the Upload link at the top of the page.

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When the new page opens, hit the Upload video button to select our “Education is What Matters” video for upload.

When the upload is complete, a screen is presented in which we can add a title, description, tags, and a category. After providing the relevant information, click Save Changes.

You’ve done it! In the pursuit of creating and establishing your blog’s online presence, you now know how to upload and optimize your Flickr photos and YouTube video. Now you have no excuses for not being able to easily use photo or video for your blog, as you’ve conquered any technical barriers to those two sites. The only problem is that you have to be willing to do the work—the pictures and videos will not shoot and upload themselves. As a final note, of course you can always share the photos and video on your Facebook page or via your Twitter account for even greater exposure. The scope of this book is concentrated on blogging and doing a couple of associated techniques and strategies well, but there’s no reason at all for you not to take this further with related social media.

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CHAPTER 12

Creating your social media footprint and measuring your blogging ROI

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Amazing! Remember when you started this book, and you barely knew what WordPress was? And now look at you, creating your comprehensive social media footprint. By now you have a professional-looking blog and are consistently publishing content at least a couple of times per week. However, like many new bloggers, you might be feeling frustrated—based on your initially optimistic blogging and marketing expectations, the customers just aren’t coming. To be sure, it can be disheartening on a daily basis knowing that you have a mortgage and bills to pay, yet your blogging efforts aren’t currently providing a solid return based on the benchmarks that you defined, such as gaining new readers for your blog and an increase in customers coming through the door. Like an imprint in the sand, creating your social media footprint is the work that you undertake to develop your blog’s imprint on the web. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with all of the new platforms that are launched, and do all of them well, and be on every social media site at all times. The plain and simple truth about marketing your small business online yourself is that there’s much more to Internet promotion and gaining social media traction than a stellar website and blog. This is not in the least meant to discourage you, but rather to get you fired up to invest the time required in exchange for what can be significant cost savings in marketing expenses and increased earnings. With the web being almost infinite in scope, we’ve discussed the necessity of positioning your online presence in the locations where potential customers can “find” and “discover” you. When getting started, you shouldn’t be intimidated by the myriad online choices you can make—try to remember that ultimately there really is not a concrete right or wrong way to delve into social media promotion. Feel confident in knowing that we’re all just learning as the social media possibilities grow by leaps and bounds; as long as you get the basics right, you’ll be fine. Try to keep in mind that it truly is the little things, the basics, that you do over the long term on a daily basis which can help with the promotion of your nonprofit or business.

Expanding your online footprint When expanding your online footprint efforts beyond blogging, Flickr, and YouTube, a simple and beneficial strategy is to experiment. Try a couple of sites like Twitter and Facebook; the ones that you enjoy using or get some promising initial results from can be the social media locations that you stick with at the outset. After you spend some time developing a consistent strategy, sooner or later you’ll figure out what works best for you and which actions are providing measurable results. A key point to remember, no matter which social media sites you choose to participate regularly in, is that all of your activities are meant to act as “trust portals” and to create a connection with the participants and your business, nonprofit or individual blog. What’s a trust portal, you ask? “Trust portal” essentially means that you’re using various social media channels on the web, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and suchlike, as portals where you establish your reputation in an effort to develop trust. The diagram below demonstrates the hierarchy of your social media efforts and the various trust portals as you develop the online presence of your blog.

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Increased referrals, sales and donations

Direct Gateways Website Tell your story and Define your customer

Blog Helpful & educational posts

Relationship Building Email, Forums, Twitter, Facebook, Niche Blogs One on one interaction – listen, engage, educate, be helpful

If you spam and fail to provide value in the first levels then your friends, followers and fans will not move up in the hierarchy.

Content Dissemination YouTube, Press releases, Social bookmarking, HARO Mostly outgoing from you to the consumer or donor

No social media marketing or real online presence Source: mark-hayward.com

This diagram demonstrates a hierarchy to keep in mind when you’re just getting started. If you interact, are helpful, and work to build relationships in the first three levels appropriately, and act as a genuine member of a community who is truly trying to listen and provide assistance, then potential customers will move on to level four, where they invest a little more emotional capital and check out your website and blog. And all of this is designed to lead to increased referrals and sales. However, one key point impossible to show by diagram is that it’s drastically important to remember that with every new interaction online, the hierarchy begins all over again until trust has been established. You should always keep it at the forefront of your mind that all of your hard work developing trust can be erased with one belligerent comment or hostile interaction. It takes a lot of work!

Goals to think about Similar to the blogging goals you created early on in Chapter 2, think about some overall social media goals and action items for drawing people to your blog: • Where do my potential donors or customers hang out online? • How can I provide value to their online communities and develop relationships and trust? • What is the best method for engaging with my niche—perhaps it’s Facebook, or Twitter?

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Social media footprint development plan When it comes to creating your social media footprint, sometimes just trying to keep up can leave you feeling overwhelmed and intimidated at the thought of trying to be on all the sites all of the time. It helps to create a simple plan of action to give your efforts some focus and to help you to stick with it consistently. A simple five-day-per-week plan might include the following: Monday Draft and publish a helpful article to your blog. (Remember, Google loves fresh content so don’t give up on blogging!) Then, on your Facebook fan page, ask a question framed around the content you just published and include a link to your blog. Tuesday Upload three or more photos to Flickr. Make sure they are well tagged and have a complete description. If you’ve used the images previously in a blog post, include the link to the particular article in the photo’s description. Wednesday Shoot one or two minutes’ worth of video (hint: get a smart phone) and upload it to YouTube. Again, describe and tag your video in order to take advantage of the primary search engine visibility benefits. Thursday Visit the top three or four forums that are prominent in your niche, and get involved in the conversations going on there. Try to be helpful by answering some questions and educating members. If the forum rules allow it, and if it can be done in a non-spammy way, link back to some of your blog posts if they provide further relevant solutions. Friday Check customer review sites to see if you have any new reviews or mentions. Respond professionally to anything negative, and send a personal thank-you to any customers who have posted a positive comment. This could certainly be done on a daily basis, but if you’re extremely busy, you need to make time at least one day a week.

Measuring your blogging ROI Welcome to the last area of the book! Here, we at last weigh up the fruits of all our labors. With respect to measuring blogging success, many would-be business bloggers are extremely concerned about the time that they’ll have to dedicate to producing content in order to gain a return on their investment. For both large and small organizations, effective blogging and social media measurement starts with well-defined goals and objectives and ends with analyzing the impact of your efforts as measured by relationships built, trust earned, and an increase in sales. Keep in mind that publishing one blog post or posting one YouTube video will have no impact on your overall ROI. Developing a proper foundation that can be measured takes time and a consistent effort. For example, if we carefully place one brick on the ground in just the right location that’s perfectly level, is that a foundation? How about two bricks? Or twenty? No! But it is the basis of a really solid foundation and, eventually, a complete structure.

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When it comes to blogging, the more relevant question to ask yourself is: Am I laying the foundation to a blogging strategy that stands to drastically increase the value and trust of my relationships with existing and potential customers? Similarly, you might think about ROI in terms of: • What’s the ROI of providing great customer service? • What’s the value of humanizing your business or nonprofit by sharing your story? • W  hat’s the worth of creating fans that spread the word about you because you provide helpful content that’s targeted towards educating them? Unfortunately, many would-be bloggers struggle because they don’t want to lay the proper foundation before they start measuring the return on their content creation activities. Here’s where the subject of blogging ROI can become fuzzy, and it’s what keeps the experts arguing; how many blog posts do you have to write before you can start to measure success via the foundation you have developed? As a blog is a portal that’s meant to develop trust and help you to build relationships, it can be hard to put a number on its value. But it also has to be a tool that attracts people who eventually convert to real, cashspending clients.

Measuring blogging ROI: hard numbers Outside of monitoring and tracking how people are hearing about your blog and your venture, it’s natural to want hard numbers. If this applies to you, you can track that information by analyzing the following.

Tracking the number of comments left on your blog posts Comments are a way for a potential customer or donor to let you know what they think about your content and if they find it useful or a waste of time. Do you seem to be getting more comments as the weeks go by?

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Tracking the number of RSS and email subscribers to your blog If you remember from when we installed the FeedBurner plugin in Chapter 6, RSS and email subscribers are people who choose to sign up to receive a notification every time you publish a blog update. Are your subscribers increasing?

Tracking Google analytics for page views, bounce rate, and traffic referrers Stat tracking is certainly important as a means of gauging how many people are visiting your site, how much time they’re spending once there, and what sites are referring visitors to your blog. However, some people become obsessed with monitoring analytics data. Ultimately, the only important figure is how many of those blog visitors are converting to paying customers or donors.

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Examining the search engine rankings of your keyword-rich blog posts When you first start blogging, it can take a while for your content to be indexed by the search engines. But after a while you should start checking to see where your keyword-rich blog posts are ranking and if you’re attracting targeted traffic to your site.

Tracking social mentions As you build your online presence and become more involved on the web in general, people might start mentioning your business or your blog more and more. You can monitor the web and keep track of those mentions by using a free tool such as Google Alerts.

When it comes to blogging and the hard numbers, it’s not uncommon to have to put in many months’ worth of hard work laying the content-creation foundation before you derive any benefits. The first argument of blogging skeptics is, “Sure it seems like a viable tool, but we don’t use it because we can’t measure a return on our investment.” To a point there’s truth in this; managers of businesses and nonprofits who blog need to see a return for their efforts. But a lot of blogging and social media endeavor, especially in the beginning, relies on you being consistent in your efforts every day, and not being afraid of using some trial and error to determine what is working.

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Measuring blogging ROI: not-so-hard numbers When you initially begin your blogging activities, it can be most effective to make it a habit to ask everyone you come in contact with how they heard about you, to critically monitor your actions. Specifically, ask your customers or donors how they heard about you. Did they discover your blog via a post, a Flickr photo, or a YouTube video? Which one? How many pages did they view, and what did they find interesting and helpful? In fact, it’s a smart idea to set up a simple spreadsheet to help you keep track of how and where people are finding your blog. A simple and effective way of monitoring success is to reflect on the goals you originally set out for your blog: • attract more customers • increase revenue • disperse knowledge and expertise • rank well in search engines • promote and build a positive brand image for your venture With these sample objectives, you then need to think about what the benchmarks were that you originally set out and consider whether you’re achieving measurable results based on them. • H  ow are people hearing about your blog and your business or nonprofit during its first month, six months, or first year? • W  hich of your efforts are bringing you the most blog traffic (niche blog commenting, forum activity, and the like) when you post blogs on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday? • Is your content attracting the right people to your blog and business? • Are you selling more products or increasing supporters after three months of effort? • After eight months of blogging, what are the hard sales numbers? Have they gone up? Another benefit to tracking, learning what works, and seeking answers to the questions above is that it will help you to discover what content is connecting, what content is falling flat, and what targeted keywords are driving the most people to your blog. Certainly, blogging is time-consuming, but given you no longer have to pay someone to create your ad and then pay an agency to place the ad for you, consider how much that saves. For example, if you paid $20,000 for an advertorial to be placed in a popular magazine, how would you measure the return on that investment? Via an increase in the number of email and phone inquiries? By keeping track of how many more donors and customers are coming through the door?

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Revisit, refine, redeploy Once you’ve gathered information and analyzed how effective your blogging strategy is, it’s then time to look at what’s working and what isn’t. Every couple of months you should review your benchmarks and measured results and determine what you might be doing well, where the majority of your customers are coming from, and where you need to improve your blogging strategy. As emphasized throughout this book, blogging is a long-term commitment and you should plan on dedicating at least six months to a year to the effort. You need to keep in mind that some elements of blogging and social media are just not going to be measurable or that results might take two years. Most importantly, if your goods or service are lackluster, blogging ROI is the least of your worries—no matter how much quality content you are creating, it won’t improve an inferior product. In closing, as a final critical thought, always remember that once you are beyond the content frustration and technical barriers to entry that can come with blogging, there are no mysterious secrets to success. You just need to get started today, maintain consistency, and provide value. Best of luck to you as you begin your blogging and social media journey! Please keep us posted and let us know what you create by visiting Problogger.

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TUTORIAL 1. Register for your social media accounts. You should have done this already, but if you haven’t, go ahead and sign up for your accounts now. Remember, you can’t participate in the conversation and engage potential customers if you’re not a member. Bob finishes joining his chosen social media sites by setting up profiles for PB Bike on Twitter and Facebook.

2. Create a social media footprint development plan. Be mindful throughout your social media endeavors that social media can be a tremendous timewasting activity, and it’s all too easy to squander hours reading Facebook updates or Twitter tweets without accomplishing anything constructive. Stay focused! Bob is keen to start developing the social media footprint for the bike shop, and to that end he creates a simple plan to ensure that he keeps his efforts targeted and focused.

3. Create a spreadsheet that you can use to record your customers’ responses to your questions about how they’re finding your blog or business online. When getting started with your blogging efforts, keeping a spreadsheet as a way to measure how people are finding you online can be very effective. Your spreadsheet does not need to be an elaborate affair, just a simple log that allows you to track responses so that you can discern what is working and what needs more effort. After a couple of months of posting blog content, photos to Flickr, and videos to YouTube, Bob decides that it’s time to start measuring the effectiveness of his efforts, so he creates an Excel spreadsheet to help him keep track of customer responses.

4. Google your keywords or phrases and see where your blog posts are listed in the rankings. Try not to get too discouraged if your blog is not moving as fast up the search results as you would like. Depending on the competition within your niche, it can take quite a long time before you see any movement. Bob doesn’t expect to be listed first on Google, but after a solid six months of blogging he decides to run some searches to see how his posts are faring in the rankings.

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5. After six months, and not before, have an honest internal conversation with yourself or a discussion with a trusted colleague, and truly evaluate whether you’ve met your benchmarks, objectives, and goals. By now you know what you’re doing, and you’re probably creating content like a pro. If you determine that your strategy is working to develop relationships and is bringing in more customers or supporters, continue doing what you’re doing. Conversely, if it’s clear that people just aren’t connecting with your blog or finding you via your online presence, it might be time to reevaluate and then deploy a slightly different strategy. After six months, Bob finds that his blog content that connected most with his customers was his basic bike maintenance tutorials and posts on how-to buy a bike. For maintaining a consistent strategy, Bob can afford to feel proud of the work he’s done and the results he’s earned with his blogging and social media efforts.

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FURTHER READING

Small Business and Nonprofit Blogging Leaders

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Further Reading – Small Business and Nonprofit Blogging Leaders

If you’ve been around blogging for a while and consider yourself to be at an intermediate level, you may have heard of many of these people and be familiar with their work. However, if you’re a beginner—perhaps you’re an overworked small-business owner, time-constrained nonprofit manager, or stressed individual— and you’re seeking to find additional guidance beyond this book about how to properly develop an online presence, this is the resource for you. This selection of bloggers is not a popularity contest or a best-of list; it simply highlights some exemplary people who have spent many years helping small businesses, nonprofits, and individuals understand how to provide real value to their customers via blogging and social media. In today’s competitive online marketplace, there’s a lot of peddling of too-good-to-be-true snake-oil solutions and promises of quick results with little work. By contrast, these professionals are blogging and marketing industry leaders who have all managed to achieve this status with a commitment to complete honesty, a dedication to excellence, and by unselfishly sharing their knowledge and expertise to educate readers. The posts recommended alongside their writers are a mix of blogging, marketing, and general business acumen and should provide you with a well-rounded understanding of how to effectively develop an online presence.

Seth Godin sethgodin.typepad.com Seth Godin’s blog is a tremendous resource for business, nonprofit, and individual bloggers who want to learn how to share their unique stories. Seth consistently provides content that will challenge you to think about the way ideas spread, online marketing and leadership, and how to effect change. • “How to be remarkable” • “Creating stories that resonate” • “First, ten”

Darren Rowse problogger.net If you Google the highly competitive terms “blogging” or “blog”, one site is sure to be on the front page: ProBlogger. Darren delivers blog posts for every level of blogger, from complete newbie to the most hardcore blog fanatic. He educates people daily on the reality that blogging does not have to be complicated, time-consuming, or difficult, but that it does require a consistent effort and a willingness to provide content that’s of value to your readers. • “Using Stories in Blogging” • “Writing Blog Content – Make it Scannable” • “How to Blog: Blogging Tips for Beginners”

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Brian Clark copyblogger.com Copyblogger is perhaps the best resource on the Internet to advise you on how to properly structure the content on your blog. Brian regularly offers techniques that will help you to draft sharp, relevant, and well-written targeted content that’s worthy of a professional copywriter. • “Copywriting 101: Your Guide to Effective Copy” • “SEO Copywriting Techniques That Readers Love” • “How to Write Magnetic Headlines”

Chris Brogan chrisbrogan.com In the online world, whether you run a nonprofit or own a small business, developing trust among your donors and customers is critical to your success. To that end, Brogan’s blog is a treasure trove of information that will facilitate your understanding of how to develop and nurture a community around your blog. • “Starting Points for Online Presence” • “25 Ways to Build Your Community” • “How to Put Your Small Business On the Web”

Liz Strauss successful-blog.com The convergence of blogging, social media, and traditional marketing concepts are currently creating a true paradigm shift in the business and nonprofit sectors. Liz helps businesses and aspiring bloggers to remove what customers don’t want, to enhance what customers love, and to add something unexpected that customers would die for by showing them how to consistently add value. • “Why Your Request for Help Isn’t Going Viral” • “Why It’s Smart to Own Your Content URL” • “Love at First Write: 5 +1 Steps to Your Authentic Writing Voice”

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Chris Garrett chrisg.com/blog If you’re looking to further understand the business side of new media, blogging and online marketing, you’ll find Chris’s blog a fantastic resource. His posts consistently deliver inspiration and are designed to educate you on creating compelling material for your blog, providing your audience with more value, and the best methods of building trust and loyalty. • “How to Generate Post Ideas When You Are Stuck” • “What is Your Website’s Clear Purpose?” • “What Makes Real Blogging Success?”

Becky McCray smallbizsurvival.com Small-town entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders can sometimes feel as though they are completely alone and working in a bubble as they try to tackle blogging and social media to promote their venture. Becky McCray is passionate about helping you get your message out to the world by being authentic. • “The narrower the niche, the wider the opportunity” • “Tools to get to know your customers” • “Simplify your small business marketing plan”

John Jantsch ducttapemarketing.com/blog Sometimes known as the world’s most practical small-business expert, John consistently delivers marketing ideas and strategies that will have you developing an online presence like a consummate professional. • “5 Tips for Getting More From Your Blog” • “Give Yourself Permission to Suck” • “How To Be Really, Really Good at Everything You Do”

Glen Allsopp viperchill.com Glen is a blogger and Internet marketer whose value-packed content provides techniques to help you to better understand critical web promotion concepts. • “How to Create Viral Content (The Key Element Behind Every Successful Blog)” • “How to Really Build Backlinks and Dominate Google” • “The Most Effective Way to Increase RSS Subscribers”

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Further Reading – Small Business and Nonprofit Blogging Leaders

Beth Kanter bethkanter.org If you run a nonprofit and are interested in blogging as a way to connect with your donors, help to spread your story, build community, or engage potential and existing supporters, you will find tremendous value in Beth’s blog. • “What Tools Are You Using for Listening, Engaging, and Social Media Management?” • “9 Ways Nonprofits Can Excel Using Social Media” • “Actionable Listening: Learning from Watching Other Nonprofits”

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