Coming up with ideas for potentially useful content you can turn into blog posts or YouTube videos isn’t the hard part of content creation. The hard part is composing that blog post or video in a way that resonates with members of your target audiences. In this blog post, I offer a simple but proven solution to this problem.
Blogging
How to Make a Stale Website Fresh
Is your website stale? Has its content or appearance (or both) remained static and unchanged for too long?
If so, you might be giving your customers and prospects the impression that you’re missing in action. (Because, in a way, you are.)
In this article, I offer a number of suggestions for turning a stale website into a fresh one.
Blog Tags: What They Are (and What They’re Not)
The categories and tags you use to describe your blog posts are not about search engine optimization. Their purpose is to make it easier for the people who are already on your Web site to navigate around and find content they’re interested in. When you’re tagging your blogs posts, you’re not publishing a thesaurus or creating a search engine ad campaign — you’re creating signposts.
Make your Web Site the Heart & Hub of your Online Marketing Strategy
I see this all the time: people create Facebook business pages for their enterprises, and they post content to it rather than to their Web-site blogs.
In my opinion, this is wrong; it’s backwards. Read on if you want to know why.
WordPress Manual Excerpts: Why, When, & How to Use Them
Your blog’s landing page (aka Blog Archive) is like a magazine’s table of contents. Both have the same purpose: to grab the reader’s attention and to steer him or her to content of interest.
WordPress supports three methods for displaying blog post summaries on archive pages: automated excerpts; excerpts defined by the placement of the WordPress more tag within the body of a blog post; and manual excerpts. Which method should you use? In this article I explain why manual excerpts are always my go-to method.
Sharing Blog Posts on Social Networks: Why & How
If you have responsibility for online marketing for your enterprise, you might be tempted to focus most of your attention and energy on social media destinations like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on.
I get it. Sharing on social networks is a good thing. It’s fun. It encourages engagement and interaction and can be very reinforcing (gotta love those likes and shares and comments). And it’s easy. And you probably spend a fair amount of time on those social networks already.
If you view your social networks as the center of your online marketing universe, I’m inviting you to consider shifting your paradigm. I’m suggesting you consider the argument that it’s your Web site that should be the heart and hub of your online marketing strategy.
A Time For Storytelling
It might seem odd in these extraordinary times for a Web guy to be encouraging people to blog more.
People are dying. Families are being torn apart. Livelihoods are being destroyed. I don’t think anyone alive has ever experienced such overwhelming uncertainty.
I know I’m running the risk of sounding tone deaf and out of touch to suggest we use this time to post stories online. Yet that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.
The art of storytelling is as old as the human race. I can’t think of a better time to breathe life into that art with our own stories.
Help Your Blog Readers Find What They’re Looking For with the Search & Filter Plugin
This article shows how to use a simple, lightweight plugin — one I installed long ago, deactivated because I hadn’t followed directections, and forgot about — to filter blog posts and make it easier for you Web visitors to find what they’re looking for in your blog. After all, making our visitors’ experiences better is what it’s all about.
Read Blogs More Efficiently (and Enhance your Blog Reading Experience) Using Categories and Tags
Boy, if there isn’t a whole lot of junk out there on the Web! But there’s also a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately, finding the good stuff can be difficult. So much of that junk just gets in the way. Even if you’ve found a blog (or blogs) you like to read, you might be spending too much time sifting through articles that are of no real interest to you. At some point, you probably give up. This article is written for people who read blogs. If you’re one of them, the tips herein might make your blog-surfing time more efficient and rewarding.
Which Categories and Tags Should I Use?
For people who are new to blogging, the concepts of Categories and Tags can be confusing. The first challenge is understanding what they are and how they differ. The next challenge is using them effectively. The purpose of this article is to offer guidance in addressing that second challenge.