 Good afternoon. Welcome back from lunch. This is making content part of your company culture. If you're trying for something else, now's the time to get up to work. It's really popular for Taylor. So, Taylor Wollett is a content writer at GiveWP, which is a WordPress product company that makes products that help nonprofits do their thing. She's making sure that she got yelled at earlier. So, please join me in welcoming Taylor Wollett. Can you guys hear me okay? So, like I said, I'm going to tell you how to make content part of our company culture. That actually starts with my story. So, I've been blogging pretty much since I discovered computer. I discovered WordPress when I was really young also. And I've been blogging ever since. So, in college, I worked for the Boozer's company on the college campus and I got the opportunity to be their marketing intern. At this point, I've never done anything any writing professionally. So, my first project with them was actually to address a PR issue with the blog. They had issues with studentating them in their Boozer's company on the college campus so that wasn't good. And I said, hey, let's start a blog. Let's address this from the inside and tell people to be more transparent about what we're doing. And it worked. So, that was my first experience starting a blog and it was super successful and it was great. Part of that was that I had a team on my side who cared and they wanted to help contribute to the content. Us for like a few years, I was in grad school and I started freelancing. And every company that I worked for was like, it was like pulling teeth to try to get content from them to write for them. And it just wasn't fun. But those companies that I did have on my side who did help create the content with me, it helped a lot more and the content was better and it was successful. It actually did what it was supposed to do. Then I started working for Give, where content is already part of company culture, which was awesome. I had never been in a company before where people like contact creation was actually part of something that they wanted to keep doing to make sure it was done on a regular basis. Cher, how did you comment on this topic? But why did you publish your process, getting your team invested, readjusting your process and then reporting to your team? All of us are really important when you work with the team for your content. So, the first and most important question is why do you need to publish content on your website? Like I said, getting content from people when I was freelancing was like pulling teeth and didn't understand the importance of it. But truthfully, the most basic answer is how people find you and if it provides transparency it gives people trust in your company. So, the other reason is that the data study content are dead. Google doesn't like you to have just one thing on your website all the time constantly. Your SEO score is going to go down because nobody is visiting your site and they are going to respond. And also, social media has just turned us into content like machines. We just see content constantly, all day, every day. And it's constantly changing. So, our attention span is really small. So, we need more content because somebody is going to see one thing and get bored in five seconds and move on to the next. When you publish a content regularly and often it actually, I let people know what to expect from you and if that didn't help you, like new people find you easier because if you're publishing it regularly then those people who are regular readers who love your content will share more and will be more invested in it also because they know it's coming from you and they're already looking for it. But it actually helps bringing new readers because they're sharing your content. And of course, content helps with your organic traffic to your site because that's how Google finds you. It's just for the words on your site. Like I said, publish regularly. You don't have to publish every week. You don't have to publish every day, but publish regularly because it's like a long-term company and you don't have time to blog. Publish every other month. Just put a post up. Something to keep your content moving on your site. Of course, there's no time. I hear this all the time. I don't have time to write that. I don't have time to blog. But nobody has time to blog. If you create a process you will actually save yourself a lot of time. So the first step in working with the content team is working by yourself creating a process and knowing how you want it done. Knowing what you're going to publish and how. So first, start with the workflow. Pick a timeline. This is a few days before publishing as planning. We actually plan our content like months in advance and then write it later on. This is not our timeline. This is just an example. But pick a time to plan. Know what you want to publish ahead of time and then write it and then walk away from it and then go back and edit it. Know when you want supporting graphics done and what you need done, plan that in advance and then make sure you go back and format it. Check your formatting. Make sure it looks good on your site. And I recommend editing one more time after you format too. Because once it's on your site you'll see different things. So go back and edit one more time and then publish. So know when in your process that way you never miss a deadline. Also you're going to save yourself time because you already know what tasks you have to do beforehand. This is my content matrix. So this is how you're going to basically determine what you're going to publish at all times. On the top is these are some different examples of voice that you can use. We use, again we are educational and approachable and with WP Business Reviews we're more informative and a little bit more casual. So they're different, they're very similar but they're different. In the actual matrix itself you have sales tips on the left and avatars on top. Some people call those personas so I like to start with the sales tips. Determine why somebody is going to use your product or service over another. So why would somebody use your plugin that does the exact same thing with another plugin does or why would somebody use your product or service when there's hundreds of others out there. What do you have to offer that somebody else doesn't? One that's not up here is actually keeping up with the Joneses so we have really expensive services or products but they're really cool and awesome. You can actually exploit that in your content and talk about how somebody is better than their friends because they have your product. Once you have your sales tips you're actually going to build personas. So don't just say you're a customer. Business owners look completely different depending on who they are. You might have an ideal customer who's a business owner that's not tech savvy. That's a key point right there. Who's not tech savvy and has different interests from a business owner who might be tech savvy and you're going to talk to them differently. So knowing who you're talking to down on that level is really important. I like to actually create names and people it's almost like a fake profile and you're talking to that specific person. What do you have about the craft key messages? So this is kind of the hard part like how do you alter what you're saying for the same concept and in our ways. So let's say you're a long-time company and you're trying to sell to like a 22-year-old male and you're also trying to sell to a 35-year-old single mom. The 25-year-old male is going to be on the go and he's going to want to hang out with friends and he's going to be probably more invested in going out and doing things when he is a staying at home and hanging out. The mom's going to want to spend time with her family and she's going to value trust and she's going to want to make sure she hires somebody with their quality. So you would probably talk to them differently or use convenience. If you wanted to use convenience for both of them you could but you would say to the 25-year-old male hey spend more time with your friends and let us take care of your mom. You're not going to say that, you're going to say hey spend more time with your family go do something fun, let us take care of your mom. So just the way that you say that is different but it's the same concept. You're talking about convenience. Once you decide all of the background you're going to also build a template. So we have a template that looks this is exactly what's on our template and I fill this out every single time and whether or not I'm writing a post or somebody else's they have this in front of them to know where they're going with it and why they're doing it. It's important to have three things on here that are really important. Your offer and value is probably the most important. That's why you're writing this. Why are you writing this piece? What's the point? Your target audience is important to pick that persona which one you're talking to and talk to them specifically. And then the keyword. Keyword is important but it's important to remember not to stuff it and not to overthink it. Pick a keyword, keep in mind use it but do not force it. The rest of them are important they just kind of help us organize but if you create something like this every time you sit down to write a post you're going to save yourself time because you're not coming up with the same stuff over and over you already have an appointment and you're making selections based on what you've already done research on. Lastly on this section is organizing all of that. So you have all of these things they're everywhere keep them in a folder and you don't have to organize your calendar. The free way to do that is to use Google Drive and use calendar and Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs and everything. We used to do this and when you have a fourth one brand it's actually almost impossible to keep up with. So I recommend co-schedule because it integrates with WordPress and you can schedule your social media posts and it functions as a full project management system basically for concentrating. You can assign tasks plan out content you can even plan marketing campaigns but it's a little bit more pricey. So no matter what make sure you're organizing it. If you're using an Excel spreadsheet great do that but just make sure you scan top of it. If your calendar looks like mine you need co-schedule. And that's actually pretty light compared to normal. So you did all the heavy lifting you know what we want to publish, how you want to publish it you've got a workflow down, you know how you're going to work maybe you've written a couple posts yourself now you need to be your team involved because you're not the expert on every single subject that you might want to write on. You're somebody on your team might be. I used to I used to sit down at the counter and wait for the cashier who was the only person who needed anything but our products to be free and in between his customers I would sit there and say and ask them about something they just told them about or a new product and get all of the information and go write a post on it and bring it back to him and have him edit it and tell me what was wrong with it or what verbiage sounded dumb because I'm not a plumber and writing that sounded weird. And so that right there is why I emphasize working with a team because if you have written that yourself and then I edited it it would have put out so much time. Everybody does need a leader just because it's a team effort doesn't mean that somebody's on charge. Somebody does need to organize your calendar somebody does need to figure out what topics you're writing about how you're writing about that and how they're going to be distributed and then of course publishing, posting and distributing. Somebody needs to do that. They really can't do it all like I said when I was working at that plumbing supply store I was running literally running back and forth between offices which was pretty far because it was a really big warehouse and it wasted a lot of time. So this is our team. So Ben writes tutorials videos because he's on our support team. So he knows the plug-in inside and out and he knows how to do all of the things that I might want to teach somebody to do and has all the tools to do it and create the screen jobs. So he knows that I edited and then Michelle I had a customer success. So she knows a lot about fundraising and nonprofits and she talks to them on a daily basis so she knows what they're thinking about and she counts up with a lot of great lot ideas for nonprofits. So I think that outside the box users forget because she uses it so much that she'll be like, hey this is a great way to use it and she'll write up those on that. SEO and marketing. So she has helped a lot with our WP Business Reviews blog and she's written a lot of content there but she also wrote an SEO guide for nonprofits. While I probably could have written that Amanda knows a lot more technical things than I do and using her strengths there was perfect. Kevin knows a lot about development by the way. He writes all over, not all over He writes a lot of development based blogs stuff about boot and bird and WordPress kind of similar to the content that Matt writes. Matt writes community and product and he's head of support and he's also head of community outreach so he writes a lot of things about WordPress our product, some more tutorials and things like that. So it's to take all of these people and hurt them. I hate to hurt the cats. Because it's not part of their daily job or their normal job to just write a blog. So I might have to poke them six times and even get them to start writing. Hey, did you write the tip? Did you write it? No? Okay. Can you write it though? Let's do it. And because of that nothing's going to stay on the same timeline that you established in the beginning. So go back and figure it out. What works with your team? Your ideal timeline is not going to be your timeline. Especially if you work with a development. Okay, so then to keep your team invested report back to them. Nobody's going to care if they're giving you stuff and they never care back about it. They don't know anybody cares about it. They want to hear what their content did. Did they write a great post that somebody commented on and said something awesome or that was shared on social media and really helped somebody? Let them know. Use numbers. Put a chart in front of them. Show them what the content is doing so that they're still invested weeks go by and people forget keep them invested, report regularly. Use all of the data. So website analytics, you don't want to look at news your time on the page, your bounce rate and your exit rate your time on the page is really key for content because you want to know if they're actually reading it. If they're not and you have like two seconds on the page and you have like a thousand views then there's really no point because they're not staying on the page because they're reading. Social media, you want to know about engagement make quick shares and reach. It depends on your goal which of these is more beneficial or more important for your company but for when you're operating your team they want to know how much their posts were shared or how many people liked it because that makes them feel good. I'm in email statistics let them know how the email did when you send it out to subscribers that's part of your stats too understanding how many people liked it and how it's doing on social media. My whole point is teamwork is the key to a successful content strategy. Really you can try to publish it all yourself you can write it all yourself you can do it all yourself but the reality is it's probably not your main job you're probably doing something else and in order to actually make it part of your culture it has to be a team effort and I also recommend hiring a writer if you're not a writer hire a writer to help you at least organize it it's not grant money will be your best friend because it will tell you when you write something down and I love grant money but it's not always right either so keep that in mind I don't really fast again do you have any questions? I'll put it on my last slide this time I just wanted to get people to say but it was planned outside of the event do you have any confidence to help with that? Yeah, so I think I left it out on my template but the call action keep in mind the purpose of what you're writing and so if you want to send them to an event put that as a whole action in post keep in mind your final where are they coming from where are they going to and where do you want them to end up? because you can draw to our site and you have to do that thing and then keep on talking to them I would say put a call action and even there's a lot of I want to say pop up but really we want an accident intent an accident intent plug in so that if somebody goes to leave it'll pop up and be like hey before you go go sign up for this I love this question no I don't I do I do I think between 500 and 1500 words I know about a thousand now since Google changed something recently about a thousand I've heard is better I've written posts that have been 2500 words and I've written posts that have been 500 words you don't want it to be you want it to be point across and you don't want to have stuff in there that doesn't need DNA I'll answer your question What are your tips for putting the content into an infographic and then when you do do that how does Google that is a question that I don't know the answer to I do have recommendations for putting an infographic but I don't know how Google reads that like I said the main is my technical SEO expert I know about writing but putting an infographic is great I know that Google people will interact with that more and I think that if you do it in a PDF format and it is readable and you can still read the text on there I think that Google can still read that but most likely you're going to have an image so that will just have people stay on their page longer which will help with Google being this they read that you don't necessarily alter the same content just alter your message so people on Facebook like stories they like they can interact with share with their friends people on Twitter want me to click that they can comment on click on and scroll past LinkedIn is great for business stuff because people do actually read articles on there other than that always have it on your site because you want to own your content for sure originate your content on your site and then post it on Twitter sorry for first do you have any new content that you're trying to add to this do you want to fill in and if they aren't at your venue what are your sex strategies you're never not going to feel like that just so you know you're never not going to feel like you're annoying but I like using Slack tell them to set themselves a reminder and then we also with co-schedule if you have a team planner I think it's like both plan is when you can start having more than one user and you can assign people tasks and they have due dates and things like that so it'll remind them that they ain't not so if you don't want to be annoying, a private manager it's not hard it kind of depends on your customer base so who do you have more of that you need to talk to who do you have less of you might want more of and who is kind of for your customer base that you should publish content for sometimes but maybe isn't your primary audience it goes in that ratio so exactly as you would want people coming in is how often would those traits work sorry I went so fast to get