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The Passing of Dooce, and Why Social Media Has Failed Us All

If you joined social media in its early days, say 2005-2009 or so, there’s certain words and phrases that will resonate with you, that others who started using social media later just don’t understand.  Such as:

  • Friendfeed
  • Technorati
  • The Summer of Plurk
  • Fail Whale
  • Dooce (also “You’ve been Dooced!”)

Dooce is the online name for Heather Armstrong. Heather was one of the first ‘mommy bloggers’ and for a period of time around 2008 or 2009, she was likely the most popular blogger on the planet.

Earlier this month, Heather passed away. According to her boyfriend, the cause of death was suicide.  Heather was 47 years old.

I wasn’t a regular Dooce reader. But you didn’t have to be to immediately see that Heather had a very acidic wit. She had personality, she had flair. She could write in a way that captivated the attention of her readers. And she cussed a lot.  It seems pretty obvious that she was using her blog as a way to attempt to cope with the issues she was facing in her everyday life. I think all bloggers do this to some degree. She bared her struggles and triumphs for all to see, and that generated a lot of attention for her, a lot of fans, and a lot of success.

And with success in social media, comes criticism. The AP article I linked to about Heather’s death doesn’t specifically state this, but it heavily implies that the hate she received over the success of her Dooce site contributed to her issues. It’s an insanely weird thing to see people that have no idea who you are, criticizing you. Leveling personal attacks at you.  Based on nothing more than simple jealousy.

When I announced I was writing Think Like a Rock Star back in early 2012, the amount of criticism I got for simply announcing I was writing a book was stunning to me. I suddenly had industry peers attacking me. I wasn’t qualified to write a book, I was copying my idea from another author. I had one industry guy I was following specifically tell someone on Twitter to NOT buy my book, that I wasn’t qualified to write on the topic. My first thought was ‘Buddy, you have no earthly idea what you are talking about.  You have no idea what clients I have now, which ones I’ve already worked with or what work I’ve done for them.”

And he didn’t. All he knew was that I was writing a book, and that made him jealous cause he didn’t have one.

I’ve watched this same scenario play out countless times on social media over the last 18 years with countless people. When you are building your network, there will always come a tipping point at which you suddenly become ‘big’ enough to attract detractors.  These people reach a point where they have achieved more success than they should have.  Now they are open to criticism.  Because someone decided that they didn’t ‘deserve’ that much success, and that opens them to criticism.  From strangers that have no idea what they are talking about.

The AP article above says that Dooce.com had 8 million monthly viewers at its peak. I can only imagine the amount of criticism and attacks she would have to endure from strangers, at that volume.

From strangers. Anonymously.  On the internet.

I started blogging in 2005. What really attracted me to blogging from the start was the idea that blogging gives everyone a voice. If you have a blog, then you have a way to share your voice with the world.  When I first started blogging, every day I would track new links using Technorati (see the list at the start of the post). One day in late 2005, I saw a link from what appeared to be a Chinese site. I did some investigating, and the link was coming from a 13 year-old girl in China that had linked to my blog from hers. That alone opened my eyes to the potential of blogging. That people of all ages, locations, and backgrounds, all around the world, could connect and engage and share ideas and build friendships.

At least, that was the promise of blogging and social media. But over the years, I saw that promise increasingly give way to a reality of spite, anger, trolls and harassment. Strangers attacking other strangers just because they could.

We never fully realized that promise of blogging and social media as a way to bring the world closer together, to support each other. In fact, we missed that mark so badly that many people now question if we would have been better off if we never had social media.

But social media didn’t cause this, we did. Blogs and social media are just the tools we used to be bitter and jealous towards each other. Ironically, as I am writing this, a friend has PMed me on Facebook about an instance of them being attacked on FB because of their opinions.

We are better than this. I made a mistake in the title of this post, social media didn’t fail us.

We failed each other.

Goodbye, Heather. You are one of the pioneers of blogging and social media, and you opened doors for many more who came after you. I’m sorry for criticism you had to deal with, but I would like to think that you were aware of the impact you had on this space.

There will never be another Heather Armstrong. But right now, there is a blogger who is about to get her big break. Maybe she’s about to get her first sponsor, or her first job due to her blog, or maybe her first book deal.

When that happens, let’s be happy for her. Let’s assume she deserves it, and let’s not give in to any jealousy we might want to entertain. Instead, let’s cheer her on, and let’s try to learn from her and apply it to our own efforts.

Because with any luck, we might be the next blogger that makes it big. And when success arrives, let’s hope kindness and congratulations accompanies it.

Because we deserve it. And we deserve to be the person who is good enough to treat others as we would want to be treated.

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New Research Reveals How Content Creation is Changing For Bloggers

My pal Andy Crestodina conducts blogging research annually to give us insights into what’s working for bloggers when it comes to content creation. He just published the results of this year’s survey, and I wanted to do a deeper dive into some of his findings.

Successful bloggers spend 4-6 hours on each post

According to Andy’s research, the average blog posts takes 4 hours to write in 2021. This makes sense as more bloggers are moving toward creating long-form content, and we will see that reflected in the survey results.
Additionally, bloggers were asked if they felt their posts were delivering ‘strong results’. Bloggers who spent 6 hours or more on a post reported the highest levels of ‘strong results’ by far. So if you want to write successful blog posts, be prepared to invest at least 4 hours per post. If not more.

The average blog post in 2021 is 1,416 words

And according to Andy’s blogging research, that number has grown every year. I was just discussing this very topic with a colleague. A big reason why longer-form content is more appealing is because it’s harder to write long-form content unless you are an expert on that topic. Longer posts and articles are a key indicator of expertise.
Andy also broke down the length of blog posts, and asked bloggers to rank if their blog posts were giving ‘strong results‘. For instance, for bloggers who wrote posts that were less than 500 words, 16% of them said their blog was delivering ‘strong results’. For bloggers who wrote 500-1000 words per post, that percentage increased to 17%, and for bloggers who wrote 1000-1500 words a post, those bloggers felt their posts delivered ‘strong results’.
Here’s where it gets interesting; For bloggers that wrote 1500-2000 words per post, the percentage who felt their posts delivered ‘strong results’ shot up to 30%. Bloggers who wrote 3000+ words per post felt their blog delivered ‘strong results’ 36% of the time.
Longer content gets better results.

Blogging frequency is down slightly

Not surprisingly, bloggers who are writing longer posts, aren’t blogging quite as often. The average blogger tends to write 1-2 new posts a week. That’s pretty much in line with what I try to shoot for.
Think about the type of content you will be creating. If you are publishing more thought leadership pieces, then you want to go longer, and that means fewer posts. If you are publishing more news or industry-roundup posts, those can typically be shorter, and take less time.
In general, I think you should commit to at least 1 new blog post a week. In a perfect world, I think 2 a week, perhaps Tuesday and Thursday, would work best. But every situation is different. What’s most essential is that you pick a schedule, and stick to it. Consistency is the name of the game, and how you build an audience over time.
Remember, blogging is a marathon, not a sprint.
blogging research

How are bloggers promoting their content?

So I wanted to close with the survey results on content promotion. What’s interesting to me is that social media was listed as the most popular promotion channel, used by 90% of respondents.
But only 20% of respondents said social media was an effective promotional channel, in fact it was the least successful. Isn’t that interesting? Social media is by far the most popular promotional channel and also the least effective.
Why is this? I think a great part of the reason why bloggers aren’t seeing good results from social media is that most bloggers simply tweet or share a link to their new blog post, with zero explanation or context explaining why the post is worth our time. I am the worst about doing this, I need to get better about adding context to ALL links I share, my own, and the links of other creators.
So check out Andy’s blogging research, there’s a ton more of useful information.

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10 Simple Ways to Boost Engagement on Your Business Blog (For Free!)

business blog engagementBlogging, especially for a business, can often feel like a very lonely endeavor.

Ten years ago, blogs were where conversations happened on social media. I could write this same post in 2010, and it would likely have 30 comments in a week. This one will be lucky to have a tenth of that in a week.

It’s just the nature of the beast. Blogging has changed, how people engage has changed. Those of us that blog for our business, need to adapt to meet those changes.

 

What does ‘engagement’ mean for a business blog?

There’s a big misconception about what engagement is in terms of business blogging. Many people view engagement for a blog, personal or business, as simply being about comments. Nothing could be further from the truth for a business blog.

For a business blog, engagement is defined as any action that a reader takes that creates value for your business. This could be leaving a comment, but it could also be sharing your post with a colleague or signing up for your newsletter.

So don’t limit your view of engagement on a business blog as simply being about getting more comments. In fact, before we talk about boosting engagement on your business blog, let’s list some of the types of engagement that we want to boost:

  • Comments
  • Shares of your post or article with colleagues
  • Signing up for a company newsletter
  • Leaving your business blog to visit the company website or a product specific area of the company website
  • Emailing or calling your company to ask a product-specific question
  • Downloading a white paper

Now we have an entire list of ways that visitors can engage with the content on our business blog. We can now structure our content to encourage one or more of these types of engagement.

10 Simple Ways to Boost Engagement on Your Business Blog (For Free!)

1 – Simplify your content. Content that’s easier to grasp and understand, is more likely to engage your audience and hold their attention.

The easiest way to do this is to is to focus on topics that are written at a more 101-level than advanced. That’s because its easier for people to form and share an opinion about 101-level content than it is say 401-level content.

Case in point, which question do you think would receive more comments?

  1. What’s your favorite movie night snack; burgers or pizza?
  2. Who was the better military strategist; Alexander The Great or General Robert E Lee?

Obviously, more people would feel confident engaging with content around the first question, than the second. Ultimately, you want your audience to feel comfortable engaging with your content. So creating content that’s easier to digest and understand, will lead to higher engagement rates.

2 – Focus on improving the readability of your content. Content that’s easier to read is easier to understand. Simply organizing your content so it is clear and easy to read will enhance understanding, and that improves engagement.

This is where I want to share one of my content creation secret weapons with you. It’s the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Yoast SEO has a Readability checklist it creates for each post you create. That checklist gives you a list of items you need to do in order to make the post easier to read. It’s been a huge help to me and if you compare this post to ones I wrote even a year ago, you can see a stark difference in organization and readability.

3 – Make it clear how you want readers to engage with your content. Do you want more comments? Then ask for them. Do you want more newsletter signups? Then include a signup form in or around your content (There’s one at the end of this post). Do you want them to download your white paper? Then include a link where they can.

Think about how you want readers to engage with your content, then craft your Calls to Action so that you encourage those forms of engagement.

4 -Reply to comments. This one is so simple it hurts. If someone leaves a comment on your blog, answer them! It’s incredibly hard to get anyone to leave a first comment. If they do, and you respond and engage them, that increases the chance that they will comment again.

5 – End your post with these three words; “What do you think?” That encourages the reader to engage you in the comments. You can make it even easier by asking them to leave a comment OR email you any thoughts they have.

6 – Write about your audience, not your company. Remember that your business blog is a great tool for building brand awareness. Awareness is at the top of the sales funnel. To get customers into your sales funnel via content, you want to create content that focuses almost completely on the customer.

Write about what your customer goes through every day. Talk about the problems and issues they face in their lives, without talking about how your company solves those issues. At least not yet. You want to focus completely on the customer in order to get their attention and engage them. Then, once they are on your business blog and engaging with you, then you can create content that helps the customer understand how your company can solve the problems they are facing every day.

7 – Use social sharing buttons on every post. Not every reader wants to comment, but many will want to share your article with friends and colleagues. Giving them social sharing options is an easy way to encourage more visitors to your site. When deciding which buttons to add, always remember to add a button to share via email. Old school still works!

8 – Add Related Content to the end of every post. This is an easy way to help the reader find more content you have written on the same topic. It works perfectly, because if they read the entire article, it signals interest, then you include Related posts at the end for them to read next. I use the Jetpack plugin(Affiliate link) to add three Related posts at the end of each post.

9 – Write good headlines. Your post headline should be engaging, interesting and even a bit provocative all at the same time. But above all, your headline should make a specific promise to the reader, and that promise should compel them to read your post.

Too many bloggers use the post headline to simply summarize the topic of the post. Understand how your content will be spread: It will show up in search results, it will be shared on social media feeds. In most cases, your headline is all a person will read before deciding if they want to click your post and read it.

Spoiler alert: Boring headlines don’t get clicks. I’m using the Headline Optimizer Test from Thrive Themes to create the headline for this post. I entered multiple variations of the headline, the Headline Optimizer serves the headlines randomly, and the one with the best engagement ‘wins’ and is chosen as the headline for this post. So as I’m writing this post now, the most engaging headline hasn’t been chosen yet! You can get the Headline Optimizer Test for your blog as part of the Thrive Themes Suite(Affiliate link), which I also use on this blog.

10 – Publish new posts when your audience will read them. Think about who you are writing for, and when they will be reading blogs. For instance, if your business is a B2B, you likely want to reach customers who are at work, so publish new posts during the workday. Publish new posts when you think your audience might be free to read them, such as in the morning before lunch, or in the afternoon before they leave for the day.

 

So there’s 10 easy (and free!) ways to start getting more engagement on your business blog as early as today! Want more advice on how to grow your business blog? Check out all the posts under the Business Blogging category.

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The Shift Back to a Decentralized Social Web Has Begun

In 2018, I wrote this post about how I felt we were a year or two away from beginning to shift back to a decentralized social web experience. At the time, the primary reason I cited was a severe degradation of the overall user experience on centralized social sites like Twitter and Facebook.

When trying to understand the difference between a centralized and decentralized social web experience, look at it this way:

Centralized: Twitter and Facebook. A lot of people, talking about everything. Control rests with the platform, not the content creator.

Decentralized: Blogs. Far fewer people, talking about just a few topics. Control rests with the content creator since it is their blog.

 

So in 2018 when I wrote the above post, the ‘control’ issue hadn’t yet raised it’s ugly head like I knew it would eventually. As we are now all aware, Twitter and Facebook have gone to great lengths to remove content it feels is objectionable on its platforms over the last few months. Some people feel what Twitter and Facebook has done in removing content is completely just and acceptable, others feel it is outright censorship that must be addressed. My view has always been that once a platform starts making judgement calls on what content is or is not acceptable for its community, then we have started down a very slippery slope. And the angle of that slope is completely dependent on the objectivity of the humans that moderate the content on their platforms.

But more than anything else, it has long worried me that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are acting like publishers and exerting increasing amounts of control over the content that can be published on its platforms. This concerns me not only as a content creator, but also as a consultant who works with companies on building and executing digital strategies. My advice is simple:

I recently discovered that former Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger shares some of those concerns, and is working to address them, in his own way:

What Larry has done, in essence, is take back control of his tweets. He’s built a way on his blog to ‘tweet’ from his blog, then send the content to Twitter. So if Twitter decides to remove his content, that just removes it from Twitter, the content will still exist on his blog. Here’s an example of a ‘tweet’ he created on his blog, then sent to Twitter.

To be fair, this attempt is painfully crude. But it does work. What this could lead to eventually could be a scenario where content creators post short 140/280 character thoughts on their blogs, which are then sent to Twitter in the form of a tweet. Over time, a sort of ‘reader’ could be developed similar to the blog readers that pull in a blog’s RSS feed, so that we could subscribe to the ‘microblog’ feed from our favorite bloggers and viola…you could subscribe to the ‘tweets’ from your favorite content creators and bypass Twitter altogether!

The momentum toward a decentralized social web where the individual content creator has more control over their content is growing. And in an evil scientist sort of way, guess who is jumping in and trying to get in front of the decentralization parade?  Twitter.

 

Twitter can sense that a lot of its users are upset with its recent censoring of content, and are moving to other content creation tools. So the company tries to get in front of that rush, and secure the tools and functionality that it feels users will move to, such as newsletters.

The tug-of-war over a decentralized vs centralized social web is also one of control vs convenience. Right now, the pendulum is swinging back toward control for content creators, especially businesses that create content. When you are building your content team, focus on hiring managers that have a proven track record of developing engagement and community around content. This will make the process of detaching from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook far easier for your business.

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November’s Blogging Recap

November is the 3rd month of my ‘blogging relaunch’ that I started in September. Over the Summer, I decided that with changing work patterns due to covid, that it was a good time to double-down on blogging as a content creation tool. Plus, I fear that heavy regulation is soon coming to social media sites regardless of who is in the White House come January 20th. So all of this together prompted me to get serious again about writing and creating content here.

So here’s how traffic did in November vs October:

Sadly, traffic was down 11.45%. First, there was one more day in October, so that accounts for a bit of the drop.  And last week was Thanksgiving, that also accounted for a little bit of the decline. But the biggest reason for the decline was I went from 20 posts in October, down to 10 posts in November. Real life and work got in the way and I didn’t write as much as I should have.

When I first relaunched the blog in September, the goal was to write 6 posts a week. I kept that up for about 5 weeks, but I’ve now decided that I would like to settle in on a schedule of 4 new posts a week, Monday through Thursday.  Occasionally I might have a 5th post on Friday or Saturday.  Monday’s Marketing Minute is the post series I can stand by, and that results in one post every Monday.  I announced yesterday that I would be launching #ContentCircus on Tuesday. The goal is to have a recap post on every Wednesday that covers what we discussed the night before in #ContentCircus.  That will give me 2 posts a week.  The post on Tuesday will usually be an ‘opinion’ post, and the post on Thursday will be a ‘thought leadership’ or instructional post.

More than anything else, it’s so important to strive for consistency in blogging. These first 2-3 months of the relaunch here were mostly about me developing a schedule that I can set, and stick to. Nothing is worse than a blog that goes weeks or months with no posts. I started out shooting for 6 posts a week. I’ve now figured out I really can’t maintain that volume, so I’m going to try dialing it back to 4 posts a week. But again, the main point is consistency.

Thanks for reading, I hope this is helping you plan your own blogging strategy. I’ll be back here in a month to share December’s results.  And there WILL be more than 10 posts in December!

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October’s Blogging Recap

October was the second month of this blog’s ‘relaunch’ as I like to call it. I started blogging here in 2009, and during that time I had a very inconsistent posting schedule. I would go periods of months where I would post 2-3 times a week, then go months when I would post 2-3 times a month. It was mostly a function of my work schedule and I always felt if a choice for my time had to be made, that work would always come first.

But earlier this year, I saw the massive disruption that covid was playing on all our everyday lives, and I made an assumption that since more of us would be spending more time at home, that blog readership would increase. So I decided to double-down on my blogging efforts.  Over the Summer I worked to figure out what my content calendar would look like, and decided on an ideal schedule that would let me post up to 6 new posts a week.

Now, I have to be honest, when I started this, I figured I would hit a wall after about 2 weeks, and by now I would be down to 2-3 posts a week. For October, I actually averaged 5 posts a week, so I’m very proud of myself. I did have a couple of weeks recently where I only had 4 posts, but I haven’t gone below that, and really don’t want to. I’m trying to balance the perfectionists curse of wanting to write an amazing post every single day (which is impossible) and wanting to write SOMETHING every single day. I’ve given myself permission to write more as opposed to only writing when I have something ‘awesome’ to say.

So the main takeaway from October is:

Traffic up 7.8%! For the first 2-3 months, I mainly wanted to see traffic increase and get that moving in the right direction. As time goes on, I’ll get more dialed in on boosting keyword and page traffic.  Speaking of which, search traffic had a big jump, up over 30% in October! Pretty surprised it took that big of a jump, will be curious to see if that continues.

My goals moving forward are to commit to at least 4 posts a week.  The posts on Weds (Marketing and Movies) and my posts on Friday (Any topic I choose) and Saturday (Toolbox Saturday) are proving to be the hardest to write every week.

Thank you all for reading, I greatly appreciate the emails, messages and comments on social media. I’ll see everyone tomorrow!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Online Holiday Sales Spike, Top Brands For Loyalty, Turn Blog Posts Into Tweet Threads

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you have a wonderful week planned, cooler weather is here, and Halloween is right around the corner. One of my favorite times of the year!

 

This is very believable. If you sell products or services online, you need to be auditing your website to make sure the purchase process is as smooth and frictonless as possible. Also keep in mind that even after the country completely reopens, many shoppers will continue to purchase more online, so building your website to handle eCommerce sales should be a priority moving forward.

 

So there’s two brands that I wanted to focus on for this list of top brands customers are loyal towards; Amazon and Dominos. First, I wonder how much of the loyalty people have for Amazon is associated with the brand itself, and how much is loyalty for the fact that it offers a level of price and convenience that its competitors cannot. I ask because I am constantly hearing from Prime users that lament they dislike the Amazon brand, but keep buying from it simply because it’s faster and cheaper.

As for Dominos, we all suspected that the covid-related slowdowns and more people staying at home would create opportunities for fast food brands in particular to win big business. It seems Dominos is one of the big winners in scoring loyalty from customers.

 

This is a feature that raised some eyebrows in the blogging community. WordPress has added the ability to turn blog posts into tweet threads. Honestly, I’m not a fan of this feature. As the author of this post points out, this seems to do a better job of drawing attention to your tweets than it would the blog post that the tweets are being created from. My advice would be to test ideas for blog posts as tweets on Twitter. For instance, if you have a topic you are thinking about writing a blog post on, bring it up on Twitter first, and see what the reaction is from Twitter users. You very well may find that you can then create a wonderful blog post from the conversation that happened on Twitter.

So there’s a few stories that caught my eye over the last few days! Just a reminder that we are headed into election season, just 15 days away! Be very mindful that there will be a LOT of very unbelievable and inaccurate ‘news’ being shared. Look at everything with a skeptical eye, and if something sounds too crazy to be true, verify the information with sources you trust. Have a wonderful week, see you tomorrow!

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Toolbox Saturday: Writing Better Headlines

One of the best skills you can learn as a content creator is how to write better headlines for your content.  It can be a blog post title, a YouTube video title, a title for your Twitch stream. The headline you give content is vital to grabbing attention and then letting people quickly know what your content is about, and why it is interesting.

When I first started blogging, I wrote horrible headlines.  I’m fair to middlin’ now, as we say in the South. At first, I would write my post, then when the post was done, whip up a short headline that basically summarized what the post was about. The problem with this approach is that the headline is often the only thing someone sees about a post when it is shared on other social media sites. So as sharing on social sites became a more important way to boost awareness for your content, I began to get more serious about crafting better headlines.

What you want to do with your headline is give readers the most interesting parts of the post so they are compelled to click that link and read your post. If you write a boring headline or one that simply summarizes the post, your content can quickly get lost in a sea of links on social media homefeeds.

Let’s look at a few post examples and then talk about bad and good headlines you can write for that post.

1 – You are writing a post on the last decade in college football.

Boring headline – A Brief History of Modern College Football

Great headline – Rising Tide: How Alabama and the SEC Have Dominated College Football For Over a Decade

 

See how specific the second headline is? The first headline is pretty bland, it gives you a general sense of what the post is about, but by adding specifics, you can spark greater interest. Also note that with the second headline, we are honing in on a story within a story; we’ll look at recent college football history, but more specifically how Alabama and the SEC have dominated. This will interest fans of Alabama and the SEC, but it can also interest fans of programs like Clemson, who may think their program should be talked about more.

 

2 – You are writing a post financial planning.

Boring headline – Creating a Retirement Plan From Scratch

Great Headline – The Four Things Financial Experts Say You Can Do Today to Increase Your Retirement Nestegg By Up to 500%!

 

Again, the second headline is much more specific and gives the reader a better idea of what content they will be reading if they click the link and go to your blog. With the first post, you really have no idea how in-depth the post will be or how helpful.  The second post tells you there’s four things you can do, and doing those four things can increase the amount you have for retirement by up to 500%.  A slightly less effective version of this headline could be “Financial Experts Say Doing These Things Could Greatly Increase Your Retirement Nestegg!” That’s better than the boring headline because it’s slightly more specific, but the ‘great’ headline is even more specific, so it works better.

 

Now, the one thing you don’t want to do is go overboard with your headline and make it too ‘interesting’. You never want to make a promise with your headline that your post can’t back up. There’s nothing worst than clicking on an amazing headline, then finding out that the post itself is an ad for a product or a post that’s completely different from what the headline promised. That’s the quickest way to ensure that I never click on your links again.

So when you’re writing headlines, look and post and ask yourself ‘why is this post interesting?  What’s the HOOK that will grab readers attention and make them want to click the link and read the post?’  Again, make the headline as specific and interesting as possible, but make sure your post delivers on the big promises that the headline makes. Do both those things, and you’ll see your content getting more views and more exposure!

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Toolbox Saturday: Using Topic Buckets to Create Better Content

You’re at a conference (pretend it’s 2019 back when we went to conferences), and you’re leaving the breakfast area to go up to the 3rd floor where the session you want to attend is about to start. A guy runs on the elevator with you and you both are on your way.  He asks what your company does. Now what do you say?  What are the 3 or so things that your company does that you would mention to this stranger? What do you want your company to be known for?

Those are your topic buckets.  Those are the areas you should focus on when you create content. Typically it’s best to pick around 3 areas that relate to your company, that you want to be associated with your company.

For instance, I have three main topic buckets for my content here; Customer experience, customer service/support, and customer loyalty. I want every piece of content I create to touch on at least one of those areas or buckets.

By using this system it makes it much easier to not only create a content calendar for your blog, it also makes it much easier for you to focus your content. The more defined your content is, the easier it will be for your readers to understand what you are writing about AND it will be much easier for search engines to understand what content identifies with your site.

For instance, when someone asks you “Hey what’s a good site to learn about Chinese cooking?”, then you will point them toward sites or blogs that you know cover Chinese cooking.  When someone goes to a search engine and asks “How do I get started with Chinese cooking?”, the search engine will point that person toward the website that it thinks best answers that question. In other words, it will be a site devoted to Chinese cooking.

Topic buckets can also help you fill and set your content calendar.  Let’s say you have committed to writing three new posts a week on your blog. If you have three Topic Buckets you want to focus on, then simply write a post for each Topic Bucket, once a week! Bam, three posts a week!  You can follow this schedule and over time you can track the performance of the posts in each Topic Bucket.  You may find that the posts in one of your Topic Buckets usually perform much better than the other two. This is likely a sign that your readers want to see more from you on that topic.  So you can adjust your content schedule, maybe write two posts a week from that Topic Bucket, then rotate your third post between the two remaining Topic Buckets.

 

I love using Topic Buckets because I am all about anything that simplifies the content creation process. Anything that we, as content creators, can do to create good content, faster, I’m all for it! Hope using Topic Buckets helps you with your content creation efforts! Have a great weekend, see you on Monday!

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September’s Blogging Recap: The Relaunch

So let’s talk about what happened here in September. I committed to relaunching this blog and boosting my writing schedule for two main reasons:

1 – More of us are going to be spending more time at home, and more time with our desktops and laptops. Covid is changing work schedules, leading to many of working remotely, and for some workers, those changes will be permanent. More time spent with laptops and desktops means, in theory, that we will be reading blogs more.

2 – Distrust in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter continues to grow. I honestly think that both sites will reach a point over the next few years where users will leave in droves. Additionally, both sites could be facing government regulation in the near future as they seem to be shifting from platforms to publishers. I think the migration from these sites will lead to an increase in blog readership.

So around August or so I decided to double-down on blogging. Looking back, I honestly should have made this move in May or so, but live and learn. I discussed this on August 31st when the blog relaunched, but I came back with a commitment to have 6 new posts a week. My only goal for September was to get 6 new posts a week up. A pretty ambitious goal when you consider that I had only published 12 new posts in the first 8 months of the year.

I met that goal, so for October the goal is to keep writing at the same pace, but also focus more on adding visual elements to the posts and work on implementing good SEO practices. Really for September I just wanted to prove to myself that I could meet the new posting schedule. I did, so let’s improve more for October.

Here’s what happened in September:

Traffic up 21.49% from August! I’m very happy with those results. As I continue to post more, search traffic in particular will grow very quickly and continue to push overall traffic levels up.

I started this blog in June of 2009. The traffic for the blog grew consistently every year. So much so that by early 2015, I was getting almost 1,700 visitors a day. The blog was starting to really take off. I decided in February of 2015 that I needed to get serious about the blog and take it to the next level. I made two changes; The first is I switched from ‘shared’ hosting to a dedicated WordPress host. This was a great move as it immediately cut the loading time for the site in half.

But the second change I made ended up having disastrous affects. Around this time, I read an article on an SEO site that said if you wanted to increase search rankings for your site, you should drop the www from your blog. For instance, instead of wwwDOTmackcollierDOTcom, have the site’s URL be mackcollierDOTcom. So I made this change, I switched it to mackcollierDOTcom. But what this article failed to mention was that this change should only be made if your site is NEW. Because making the switch screws with the SEO rankings you have already established otherwise.

Which, unfortunately, is what happened with this blog. My traffic for January of 2015 was 48,385. I made the changes in the middle of February of 2015, and my traffic started dropping immediately. Almost all of the drop was attributed to a decline in search traffic.  By April of 2015, traffic was already down to 36.481, and it continued dropping every month. for 5 years. By August of this year, I was averaging around 50 visitors a day, where I was getting around 1,700 a day in early 2015 before I made the changes. Needless to say, it was incredibly disheartening to see my traffic going down for 5 years, despite everything I was doing, and not know why.

So I really see this as my blogging ‘rebirth’, a chance to rebuild the blog to where it once was, and even surpass it. Yes, starting over sucks, but I’ve learned so much about writing and blogging that I didn’t know in 2009. So the process will be much faster.

I appreciate everyone who has read, subscribed and left me nice emails and comments on social media.

So the goals for October are:

1 – More emphasis on visual elements. I’ll have to dig back into Thrive Architect and see what I can come up with.

2 – More emphasis on good SEO practices.  This will mostly be on the backend and really won’t impact the actual content here.

3 – Traffic goal of 3,000 visitors. That would give me an average of roughly 100 visitors a day after averaging almost 80 a day in September.

 

Onward! Thanks again for reading and letting me know what you think, it is greatly appreciated!

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