blogging for business and content marketing training course by opace
DESCRIPTION
Blogging is used by many organisations to help them engage with new and existing customers, develop a “voice” to educate and inform visitors and also to boost visibility on search engines and social media. This business-focussed blogging taster seminar from internet marketing specialist Opace will provide a practical approach to blogging for business. Event hosted at Bournville College on 30th May 2013.TRANSCRIPT
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Blogging for Business Bournville College
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What we hope you will
achieve today?
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Understand the benefits
of business blogging?
Identify keywords and
create blog content
Set up and configure a
basic WordPress blog
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A brief history of blogs
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• Web journals / personal
• Techies
• Marketers
• Politicians
• Business
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How blogging can help
business
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• Support SEO
• Improve customer engagement
• Build authority and brand
awareness
• Boost sharing and social media
content
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Some ‘facts’
• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors (source: Hubspot)
• B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not, while B2B companies generate 67% more leads than those who don’t blog (source: Hubspot)
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Some ‘facts’
• Companies with more than 51 blog articles experience a 77% lift in median monthly leads (source: Hubspot)
• 40% of US companies use blogs for marketing purposes (source: Hubspot)
• The average company that blogs gets 97%
more inbound links (source: Hubspot)
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Creating a basic
blogging strategy
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1. Research – competitors and target audience
2. Set objectives and align with business goals - comments / shares / website referrals / Google
rankings / sales / sign ups, etc
3. Create a team
4. Set guidelines
5. Decide on frequency and word count
6. Decide on the technology / platforms
7. Identify the keywords and develop content
8. Set up reviews, analyse and measure
8 Key Steps
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• For point 8, make sure you have a good analytics tool installed on your blog – Google Analytics is free and easy to integrate - www.google.co.uk/analytics/
A note about analytics
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• 43% of “less than monthly” business bloggers yielded a customer from their blog, compared to 92 percent of businesses who blog “multiple times per day.” (source: Hubspot)
A note about frequency
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Deciding on the right
tools
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There’s lots of choice
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Which blog should I use?
• We often get asked which is better
WordPress or Google’s Blogger?
• It’s personal preference but we
love WordPress and even
Google’s most visible SEO
spokesman Matt Cutts
uses WordPress over Blogger.
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Types of blogs
• On-site blogs e.g.
www.opace.co.uk/blog
• Off-site blogs e.g.
www.opace.wordpress.com
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On-site Blog Off-site Blog
Pros
• Increases indexing of your website
• Helps website SEO
• Keeps fans up to date
• Draws people to the site domain
• Additional exposure
• Two domains can rank twice for
keywords
• Easy and quick to install
Cons
• Harder to implement
• Can’trankthesame keywords twice
• Might lower the rank of other pages
• May take longer to get traffic
• Twice the marketing effort
• Less control
Which is better for your
business?
We’ll focus on on-site blogs
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Understand your keywords
• Why do we need to think about keywords?
• For each blog, think about your audience
• What would your readers search
for and different variations?
• Brainstorm ideas with your team
• Use the Google Keyword Tool –
https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool
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Keywords – example
• Lets identify some for today's
session and see how many
searches they get on Google
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Setting up a simple
WordPress blog
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WordPress glossary….
• Theme – design of your website
• Plugin – pre-made functionality
that can be installed
• Widget – areas (blocks) on your
website where plugins or
content can be placed
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What we’re going to show…
1. Install WordPress
2. Install a theme
3. Install 3 critical plugins
• SEO plugin
• Social sharing plugin
• MS Word style editor
4. Publish the blog
5. Show an optimised blog
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List of plugins…
1. Async Social Sharing
2. Ultimate TinyMCE
3. All In One SEO Pack
4. Google-Maps-GPX-Viewer
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We’re filming….
So don’t worry if you miss anything,
and we’ll publish it to our blog
afterwards.
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It’s as simple as 1 2 3 – example
• Live demo
• Alternatively can be downloaded
from http://wordpress.org • Example blog can be found at
http://businessofblogging.co.uk
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Using your blog with
social media
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Why should I care?
• Socialising your blogs will help with brand
awareness and SEO:
22% of all time online
Over 600m social users
Impacts credibility
Impacts SEO
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• The best thing you can do is make
your blog pages socially sharable –
and encourage engagement and
sharing by others!
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Using your blog for
SEO
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Why should I care?
• Google’s looks for all kinds of signals
when ranking websites and blogs help:
Encourage social engagement
Keep your website fresh
Add relevant content & interlinking
Increase the amount of content
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• Make sure you include relevant meta
data (this is another topic) and write
the content around your keywords,
but always with the visitor in mind
and not Google.
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20 brilliant ideas for
content
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1. News
2. New products or services
3. Topical-themed items
4. Editorial blogs
5. Thematic blogs (Summer’s here….)
6. Top 10s
7. Best, worst etc
8. Reviews
9. Customer care
10. Top tips
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11. How To….
12. Staff profiles
13. 10 things you didn’t know about…
14. Testimonials
15. Community-based
16. Latest sector research
17. News or updates
18. Useful resources (websites, social media, etc)
19. Competitions and giveaways
20. Comparison of two or more products/services
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• When writing content always go
back to the keywords and make
sure these are aligned
• Consider longer keyword phrases
(long tail keywords)
A note about keywords
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• 40% of people respond better to visual
information than text. Viewers on average
spend 100% more time on pages with videos
on them (source: Hubspot), so vary the type of
media used and get creative!
• Words
• Photographs / infographics
• Video (a whole new seminar)
A note about media
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Next steps
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Devise your strategy
Brainstorm keyword and
content ideas
Choose your blogging platform
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Advanced topics
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Google+ and Content Authorship
SEO and Writing Search
Engine Friendly Content
Video Blogging and Video SEO
Social Media Marketing
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For further support from Opace
please visit
www.opace.co.uk/blog
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Thanks for attending