Are you starting a new blog? What should you include in your blog if you want to use it to attract clients?
I’ve been talking about how to start a blog in my recent series of posts. Your next step is to look at your design – content is king, but if your design stinks, visitors won’t get past the banner. They won’t stay, they won’t get to know you and they won’t subscribe to your blog. Read More→
How do I start a blog?
I hear it all the time: smart professionals, who are great at what they do, don’t know how to start a business blog, and probably wouldn’t have time to blog even if they did start one.
Last fall Kris and I spent some time interviewing clients. We really wanted to know how we could best be of service.
What we learned is that while business continues to improve for our clients, and many are having tremendous success with their blogs, others had let their blog lag. Sure, they had started blogging with great gusto – they put in a lot of time – but somewhere along the line got stuck, and never went back.
I hope this never happens to you. But if it does, or if you are considering starting a blog, please allow me to share this story…
Several years ago, I took up needle work, you know, cross-stitching designs on canvas with yarn. One day as I was completing a big canvas, I was listening to a motivational speaker.
All of a sudden, I heard these words:
“Most people just start doing things without reading the instruction manual.”
Loud and clear. I looked down at my needle work and like a shock, it hit me. I’d been doing them all backwards.
Sure enough, a quick reference back to the user manual clearly showed that I was inserting the needle backwards, and not producing the right effect. I put down my work and never went back to that hobby ever again.
My point is that I see many professionals who are pretty smart at what they do, but they start blogging without reading any instructions at all. Later, when they get stuck, they complain about not having “enough time” to blog.
It’s the rainy season here in Mexico – a great time to do a lot of reading, writing and recovery – at least, that’s what I told myself when I scheduled my shoulder surgery. But I’m having trouble with my blog writing. And now I’m stuck. I’ve got Blogger’s Block. (Yes, even experienced bloggers can get stuck from time to time.)
So I pull out my bag of great blog post tricks, and determine where I’m stuck in the process. And that’s it. I had altered my writing process. But that shouldn’t matter… should it? Read More→
When it comes to business blogging, how do you save time and still get results? How do you make blog tasks so easy your cat could do it?
It’s the dog days of summer but around our house that expression isn’t acceptable. Doodles and Buster would have a cat fit. Here in Mexico we’re in the rainy season, when the heat of the Summer is tempered by the cool nightly rains. Which brings our year-round average temp to a mild 73. Not bad when you’re a tennis enthusiast and enjoy time outdoors. Which is why it’s even more important to me to save time when blogging.
Over the years I’ve purr-fected my blogging system. And as a thank-you to all my content marketing blog clients (shout out to all my new and renewing content subscribers who took advantage of our sale last week), I want to share it with you all. Plus I figure it will be good Kitty Karma – maybe it will even help keep the cats off Facebook. They want their own pages now… Read More→
A few years ago I polled readers and asked what their biggest blogging challenge is. Turns out, it’s not lack of time, it’s lack of inspiration. Does your blog writing lack inspiration? Is it hard to get really fired up when starting to write a post?
I get that. When I was just starting out as a blogger (was that really over 15 years ago?!) I could just feel that screen staring right back at me. What can a blogger blog about to other bloggers?
Lack of inspiration comes from not being sure you’re doing it right, or doing it well, and lack of confidence that it will be worth it… in other words, fear and doubt.
Fear and doubt go away when you know what you’re doing, and have a system that will allow you to move forward confidently.
Here are two ways you can side-step fear and doubt, and write frequent, consistent quality posts and develop a blogging habit that will grow your abilities over time. Nobody starts out writing well. Yet, everybody’s got a piece of genius within them, so it’s a question of finding it and putting it on paper, quickly, before any demons get in the way. Read More→
What goals have you identified for your blog and website for 2015? Have you created a map to help you reach your goals?
It’s true, I don’t believe in making new year’s resolutions. But after 15+ years working with executive coaches and consultants, I know that having clearly defined goals and expectations for a business blog or website is critical to help you get found, get known, and get clients; it will improve how you show up on the Web.
I’ve found that many professionals are vague when it comes to setting their business blog goals. They haven’t clearly identified their expectations, or what they want their blog to do for their business. If you fall into that category, and you haven’t identified your goals (or you want to refine the goals you’ve set), consider this checklist: Read More→
Is your blog focused and on track? Do you find yourself saying, “I don’t have enough time to blog,” or “I don’t know what to write about?”
Guess what? These two questions are related to the same problem: not enough clarity about blog goals. Here’s how I help my clients solve this problem of clarity:
Don’t underestimate the time it takes for all the peripheral upkeep of blogging. Maintaining a successful blog takes more time than just writing a post. And it almost always takes longer than the 30 minutes required for writing.
Here’s a checklist for editing your blog content before you publish. For any content that is vitally important, i.e. sales content or articles delivered to clients, I use Barbara Feiner, a professional editor. She not only corrects errors, but evaluates for clarity and flow.
But for blog posts and everyday content creation, I put on my editor’s visor, and act like a grumpy newspaper editor with a red pencil. Here’s what I look for:
1. Common typos like theirs for there‘s, your for you’re, that or which for who, and all those pesky things a spell check won’t pick up.
2. Grammar goofs: The most common ones are when the verb doesn’t agree with the noun, as in “Here’s my mistakes…”
3. Review for commas, semi-colons, ellipses and em dashes. The important thing is for it to read well, read clearly. Helps to read it out loud.
4. Review for paragraph and line spacing, since I like to break up long blocks of text.
5. Review for bolded words and insert subheadings where needed.
6. Separate a blog post after 2-3 paragraphs so that it goes to the extended post feature (“read more…”
7. Review for eye-candy: Where would an interesting photo clip add interest to your blog post? I always start a post with a photo, usually from iStockPhoto.com.
8. Review for external link opportunities. I always link to a person’s name (to a page on the web where you can learn more about them), to a book, or to a Wikipedia definition when useful. This is really important for building relationships with the people you respect.
9. Review for internal link opportunities. Surely you’ve already written more than once about something; you should link the keywords to that post on your own blog or website.
10. Review for keywords. Do you make it easy for search engines to know what this is about? Come on, help the poor little spiders out, they’re not exactly geniuses.
11. Review your headline for how compelling it is. Does it draw the reader into the post to learn more? Is it keyword-rich?
12. Description. If you’re using a Scribe SEO Optimizer (you are, aren’t you?), make sure you’ve created a short description using the All-in-One SEO Plugin (160 characters maximum) containing keywords. Be sure to check your tags and categories, too.
What else?
You tell me: what other things do you check for before you hit the publish button? Hit the comment link and leave me your ideas.
I’ve been using Alltop.com to find blogs in niches. And I really enjoy their aggregated lists* of top blog personalities, or as they call them, Ego Blogs.
I have no idea what their requirement is to get listed as an Ego Blog, but looking at the individuals who are included, I’d say these are all big names in the Blogosphere and they have big readership followings.
Heck, some may even have big heads, but for sure, they all write with larger than life personalities.
It’s worth studying their blogs to learn the ways they write and include their personalities. These blogs are completely different, in various fields of expertise. But they are all strong personalities.
Here are a few of my favorites:
This is a little story I share with new blogging clients who get hung up about keywords. One client in particular (let’s call him Ted) had written about 10 blog posts which were saved as drafts because he was worried about keywords.
Let me say that there’s a learning curve involved in writing for your blog, and there’s no way around it. The only way to learn to write good blog posts is to write and publish blog posts—a lot of them. Saving them as drafts won’t work.
Being that it’s U.S. Open time, I was thinking about how this relates to tennis (of course!). You can practice your serve on a tennis court by yourself too. But until you serve the ball to someone on the other side of the net and keep score in a game, it really doesn’t count. You can’t learn from your results.
Here’s what I told Ted, “When you sit down to write a new post, focus first on these steps:
7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords
- Write to deliver valuable information that solves a problem for your typical reader
- Grab their attention and make it interesting to them through stories or examples Read More→
