ProBlogger: What My Wife Has Taught Me About Blogging After Just 3 Months

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What My Wife Has Taught Me About Blogging After Just 3 Months Posted: 14 Nov 2013 08:44 AM PST Next week marks the 3 month anniversary of Vanessa (my wife) starting her first blog at Style and Shenanigans. It’s been a fascinating process to watch her plan, launch and grow her blog. Some might imagine that being married to ‘the ProBlogger’ means she’s constantly being told what to do and being given secret tips and advice – however I’ve been remarkably restrained in my involvement and very impressed by what she’s intuitively built already. While she’s not got a huge readership – it continues to grow and it has already opened up some pretty cool opportunities for her. In fact having watched her over these last 3 months I have been somewhat inspired and learned a lot and in this post want to share some of the things I think she’s done well that have helped her to grow her blog’s traffic and profile already. My hope is that in doing so it’ll help others at the beginning of their blogging journey to get their blogs rolling. 1. Focus Upon Community Management Perhaps the #1 thing that I’ve been impressed with so far is Vanessa’s commitment to engaging with her readership. This has shone through in a number of ways including: writing in an engaging style – most of her posts end with a question that invites comment every comment on the blog is responded to every comment on her Facebook Page is responded to every incoming Tweet to our Twitter account is responded to This is partly just who Vanessa is (she’s very engaging and inclusive in real life) but was something that probably stretched her a little too. I remember in the early days when she would get comments from people she didn’t know for the first few times it was certainly a bizarre feeling for her to engage with them – but she’s fully into the swing of things now! Interestingly she’s now well and truly passed the tipping point of having more ‘strangers’ reading her blog and following her on Facebook and Twitter than she has ‘real life’ friends. 2. Personal/Personality Driven Content I wrote a few weeks ago about Vanessa’s first foray into including a few ‘selfies’ on the blog. These more personal posts have continued and have been received well (they’ve been the most commented posts on the site). Other experiments with a more personal style of content included a post about a dinner party we threw for a few friends and a couple of posts about a short trip we took. And then there’s Facebook…. this for me has been one of the most fascinating parts of the journey because her blog Facebook Page has gone ‘off topic’ and into a more personal space than I would have predicted. There are certainly the predictable updates that are links to new posts on the blog – but mixed in are plenty of slightly more personal updates. Photos from things she’s doing, questions, funny family moments, personal quick tips and random off topic humorous posts. The result is that she’s got a page with pretty high engagement – in fact if I had the engagement she had on my pages relative to how many people were ‘liking’ my pages I’ve be over the moon! 3. Helpful Content The other key thing that I think is going to work in Vanessa’s favour is that the bulk of her content on the blog is ‘helpful’ and solves problems for readers. V is what Malcom Gladwell would describe a ‘Maven’. She is a gatherer of information, a watcher of trends and LOVES sharing what she finds. She’s been doing this on the topic of style in her friendship circles since before I met her and her blog is an extension of that. The bulk of her content reflects that and is basically her curated collections of different themes of fashion and home wares. Her typical posts feature a collection of suggested products on a colour style or brand theme and the comments I see on them are often people saying thanks for the suggestions. Also of interest to me is that I’m starting to see readers leave messages asking for advice on particular areas based upon her posts. 4. Understanding the Audience Her 7am post – got decent engagement. This morning Vanessa was posting an update to Facebook at 7am and I suggested that it might be a bit too early in the morning for her readers to be checking Facebook. She responded that it was one of her best times of day and that when she posted that early she often got a lot of responses by 8am as people checked their phones over breakfast. I had my doubts but as I ate my porridge I watched the comments come in on Facebook and the blog and realised she had her finger on the rhythms of her readership perfectly. Also of interest is that she’s already noticed that some days of the week seem to get more comments on posts than others and that certain types of Facebook updates at certain times of the day get more interaction. This is golden information! 5. Getting OFF her Blog I’m always talking here on ProBlogger about how important it is to ‘get off your blog’ if you want to grow traffic and to monetise your blog. Vanessa has intuitively started to do this without much prompting at all. It is a challenge – she’s a busy person with 3 active boys (two home during the day), working a day a week, involved in a variety of community activities etc – but she’s going beyond just writing content and responding to comments. This has happened in a variety of ways including: when she’s mentioned brands or other sites in her posts she lets them know (this has already led to one brand suggesting that they might like to work with her and others linking up to her blog!) reading and engaging on other relevant sites/Facebook pages involvement in a small Facebook group for other bloggers in her niche responding to opportunities that other bloggers and media have already offered her to guest post on them By no means is it easy to get everything done (and there will always be more that you can do) but I’m always amazed at what happens when you push open doors and get active about engaging off your blog with others. The key lesson here is to not just build a great blog and expect good things to happen to you. You need to take some initiative and get off your blog to see those good things come into being! 6. Involving Others It was several years after I started blogging that I even considered the possibility of other people writing content on my blogs. That’s not the case for Vanessa. Just 3 months in she’s already had two guest posts. Both have been submitted by the one person – a good family friend – but both posts have added something to the blog that V couldn’t have written herself. The key is that she’s found someone who writes in a similar voice and that the posts have complemented existing content on the blog (for example this post from Mandy on toys for Girls was a follow up to one V wrote on toys for boys). 7. Visuals and Creating Content for Social A couple of weeks ago I shared some great image creation tools that I use to create visual content for my blogs. Vanessa is also a convert to PicMonkey and Canva and a regular feature of her posts are collages of the products that she’s talking about. I suspect that the visual element of her blogging will only evolve in time but these simple collages have been really popular with readers and I think are a big part of the reason that her Facebook Page has had great engagement. Visual content is gold – particularly on social!!! Lots More to Learn By no means am I suggesting that Vanessa has arrived or is a poster child of blogging. She has a lot more to learn (as do I). I just have loved watching her growth and development in these early months. What did you learn about blogging in the first few months that has stuck with you ever since? Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger What My Wife Has Taught Me About Blogging After Just 3 Months

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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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Help just getting started with SEO Posted: 14 Nov 2013 06:58 AM PST This ShoeMoney Question was sent in by Leroy from Atlanta, Georgia. Because Leroy's question was chosen he will receive a ShoeMoney Shirt and a signed copy of my best selling book "Nothing's Changed but my Change – The ShoeMoney Story". To submit your question just email questions@shoemoney.com and if yours is chosen we will ship you out a shirt and book at our expense anywhere in the world In general SEO (search engine optimization to rank where you organically are not) is like a mystical thing. That is why there is so much money in providing these services. Everyone thinks they know what Google is doing but any theories they have are all bullshit. You really can only go off of your personal experience. The funny thing is in the Google guidelines they specifically state that if you try to make your site rank higher than it naturally should then that is in violation of their guidelines and you could be penalized for it. Note: I don't consider myself a SEO professional. I have done some basic stuff over the years and dominated search terms. And I have been doing so for 11 years. There is a fine line between optimizing and spamming the search engines and you need to be careful. I am semi friends (probably more categorized as an acquaintance) with Google's lead spam engineer and have been invited to some interesting back room meetings at Google and had access to some amazing insight. Google likes to pretend they have this secret formula that auto detects everything… that's simply not true. When Google launched its founders said that if there was spam in their search engine then they needed to build a better search engine. By 2003, they threw up the white flag and allowed people to submit sites they thought were spammy… Then in 2006, they started a huge campaign to hire people to actually do nothing to review highly competitive and high dollar terms. My dates on these are off the top of my head and probably a little off… So now, Google spam detection and ranking is determined about 75% by humans (in my opinion). Ok so things you need to do before attempting to do any "on site" SEO: Register the site with Google Webmaster Central – http://www.google.com/webmasters/ – webmaster tools will give you Google's perspective on your site, alert you of any pages that have errors and pages that are linked but no longer existing. It has a ton of other stuff to to show you regional rankings. Just because YOU see the site rank 1 in Google doesn't mean someone in California does, too. Register the site with Google analytics - http://www.google.com/analytics/ – this has a lot of features that you may or may not use, but it will show you what keywords are bringing in what traffic. More importantly which ones are leading people to your end goal (if you have one). Depending on what those results yield and if there are any issues you will want to fix them first. From my experience they have a drastic impact on your ranking. Make sure you have a privacy policy and terms of use on your website. This is REALLY important. Google wants to see you have made it easy for users to see what you are using their data for. There are tons of examples around the internet. I don't want to go into everything you need cause it would be lengthy but it's easy and you can copy and paste items that are out there. Once you're prepped then you can being optimizing the pages doing these minimal things: Each page you want to rank needs to have its own page. The page should be named KEYWORD.html or whatever extension you want to name it. Each page has to have a unique description meta tag and should read like a description of the content of what the page contains. No stuffing in keywords here. Use Bold and Italics when appropriate on your keywords. Every image on each page should contain an alt and title tag containing the keyword in a phrase. Each page should have a "navigation" at the bottom that interlinks the pages. The link text should contain the keyword. The Title tag for each tag needs to have the keyword as the first word and a short phrase after. The pages should not all be similar. You should mention the keyword on the pages as much as often but in context and various phrases. You should run a keyword density check on the individual pages to make sure your keywords are mentioned frequently on the page and you might need to get rid of some fluff. Here is a great tool for that – http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ Your sites should be VERY focused on value added. Something that someone should want to read and can get value from. Your sites should all have easy to use social media sharing buttons. From my experience social sharing is an indication to Google that your site is worth reading and there for bumps up its Juice. Think of your site as a bucket of Google Juice. The more sites that link to your pages the bigger their bucket of juice. If you link to an outside source then you're putting a hole in your bucket and giving them some of your juice. Now Google provides ways to "link shape" called no follow. Here is Google's official page on how that works and how to do it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en . The basic rundown is when you use this attribute it tells Google that it should not count against your Juice. The no follow attribute was originally designed for a couple reasons: To mitigate risk of websites linking to sites with questionable content. To comply with FTC guidelines of linking to a site that you have been compensated for (if I were to pay you a monthly fee to link to my site to game Google cause your juice is so big). But you can also use this to tell Google not to give any juice for crap content like terms of service, privacy policy, etc etc pages you might have linked. Google has publicly stated they penalize sites that abuse this and no follow ALL outbound links… Proof is in the pudding, this is not the case. Wikipedia ranks for EVERYTHING and they no follow 100% of outbound links. Another thing to think about is what they call reputation circles. For a given keyword lets say your site is about echo. The more sites that rank for "echo" that you link to or link to you the better. It's a high reputation circle or category for a given keyword. Google has said reciprocal linking cancels each other out…. BUT if your site is better optimized than the other then you win. Also I've found that whole thing to be bullshit. Get links from everyone in the field. Now that covers the "on site" SEO. There is another big factor that comes into SEO called "off site". These are places that link to your site and gain your authority. First thing is you should get a game plan on how to get links to your site and build your Google juice. There are a bunch of free and paid tools that will do competitive research on your site for a keyword… then show you what the top 10 results are doing vs what you are doing. So like if a competitor is getting a bunch of links from various directories then you should submit your site to those directories. You can use these combined to get a great game plan. This also helps you remain in the circle of trust… if you will. 'Cause other people in your field are doing it. Overall just be really careful. Look at your site and ask yourself if the site reads like you're just trying to stuff in a keyword or if it's value added content. That should be plenty to get you started. Let me know if you have any other questions. Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?

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