 I'm going to go ahead and get started. My clock says 130, and I have a lot of materials to go through, so I don't want to miss anything or get you hung up on your next. Because I know there are still some really great presentations. Come on in. There's some really great presentations that are still happening after this one. And I'm the lucky one that gets everybody right after lunch. So you've got full bellies and carbs, and I can take a nap because it's nice and dark in here. So my topic is, does your business need a blog? So we're going to talk about blogging. I am pro blog. I love blogs. I've been blogging for about 10 years, give or take a year or two, in a variety of ways, and usually always on WordPress. So WordPress is just an amazing community. So you guys are investing in a good weekend here. So a little bit about myself, so you kind of know who I am and why I'm talking about this. I have about 20 years of experience in corporate America. I worked at Tribune Company for about 10 years in the online part of the business doing news and some niche websites that did a travel website and an entertainment website, community management and engagement and all that kind of good stuff. And then I got lured away to NBC Universal where I worked on an interactive, live, daytime, women's talk show that didn't make it. So I quit this job of 10 years and I went to go work for NBC. And it was a really great experience. It was just very short. And we did interactive television where the show was aired live on 10 markets, the 10 big markets like LA, Chicago and New York. And then the other markets that it wasn't on, it was online. So we aired it live, streamed online and this was really before TV was streamed live. There was a lot of issues with advertisers and things like that, so it was very cutting edge. And then when that show tanked and didn't make it, I went to Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida. I'm a Floridian, almost native Floridian. I'm new to Asheville. I've been here about two years. But when I was at Full Sail University, I managed their learning management platform. So I did a lot of online higher education, helping adult learners. The school is kind of interesting. They have 5,000 campus students, but they have at least 15,000 students that are online only, 100% online. It's not where they go to the classroom some and then they do some online. It's 100% online. We ship computers around the world where students can go and take classes and get full degrees. They can get bachelor's degrees and master's degrees. And an interesting little story here that kind of segues into my presentation is that when we started the online program, we didn't know if the students would want to know about the campus at all. We didn't know if they care. They just wanted to learn about their degree and their specialty, and they wanted the certificate at the end and the diploma. And the school was building a $10 million new facility that was gonna be for community. It was gonna be for really amazing events. This was a technology and entertainment school. So they were bringing in like the WWE to do their wrestling at the studio and then students were gonna get to film and record and do music all for these big events. And we thought, well, maybe these online students aren't even gonna care about that and they're gonna be jealous. So we strategized and we were like, let's do a test. Let's run the story and see how it does and the traffic just completely spiked. We were running a lot of stories about time management, how to go to school as an older student, family work-life balance, tips for studying, apps for studying, and then we started running these more community-related stories that for them, think about it, if you're in Asheville and you're taking an online course for a school that's in Orlando, what do you care if they built a new building? But they did care. So it's a testament to us telling stories. We told a story about the school, why we were building it, why it cost so much money. And then we got the connection with the students and they wanted to feel connected to that school and this is how we got the connection. And the other part, so we did storytelling and then we tracked it to see if it worked. And so those are kind of two key components of what I'm gonna talk about today. Well, it wasn't necessary, blogging per se. It was storytelling in a way, in short form, which is essentially what blogging is. And then we moved here. So I got my MBA and then my husband and I decided that we wanted to move our little family somewhere where it wasn't quite as hot in August. So we came to Asheville and to the mountains. And then I started taking my blog, Balancing Motherhood, a little bit more seriously. I've been blogging on that for several years and I realized it could be a business. It's a blogging can be a business. And so my presentation today is more about corporate blogging and business blogging, small business bloggers. And the idea for it started when I do some consulting for small businesses, solo pernoers. How many of you are solo pernoers? You are it. Okay, so I meet with a lot of people that have their own business and we talk about social media. Everybody knows they need to be on social media. Not everybody knows that they need a blog. And so every time we talk about Twitter and Facebook and what platforms they need to be on, every single person always asks me, oh, do I need a blog? So thus I thought it would be a great topic to expand on. So we're gonna answer that question today. I should also say I'm one of the committee members that brought WordCamp here for the second year and that's how I started meeting people in Asheville and one of my big tips for WordPressers, especially you solo people out there, if you're gonna be using WordPress, you need to go to the Meetups. Meetup.com, it's .com I think, not .org. Meetup.com and then search Asheville WordPress Group. You'll find out, you can join it for free, join the group for free and then you'll get an update every time we have a meeting. Right now it's the third Wednesday of the month. At six o'clock it's usually about two hours and it's at Mojo Cool Working. You can network and meet with bloggers, designers, entrepreneurs, artists, photographers, I mean SEO people, social media people, they are all there and we kinda funnel in and out as the topic is but that's how I started to meet people and we decided we needed to bring WordCamp to Asheville. So in that committee we decided we needed takeaways for all these presentations to kinda help us vet and decide what topic to go over. So today you're gonna learn about comment blog mistakes. There's a lot of them and it's easy to make mistakes. Where can you find content resources if you don't have a blog? If you decide you don't have the resources or you don't wanna do a blog, how can you still market your company and share information without a blog? And then I'll give you some tips on how to hire what's called a virtual assistant. I don't really, I'm not a big fan of the term virtual assistant because I think it downplays some of the services that they offer. There's social media consultants, virtual VA's, virtual consultants, it's someone that can help you. That's all you need to know, it's someone that can help if you can't do it all. So let's talk for just a couple minutes about the value of a blog and what that will mean for you. So in my definition, I was gonna go look up a formal definition, but in my definition of a blog, it's something that's updated regularly and something that you can rely on that you want to go back to. That's really what a blog is. Everybody knows what a blog is, everybody has their own definition. A lot of people think it's informal and so businesses, I think sometimes shy away from blogs because when they started they were live journals and people just writing about their cats and what they ate and then suddenly those people got really smart and they started food blogs and now they're supporting their whole family on their blog. So businesses can really benefit from a blog so don't shy away because it's sometimes I feel gets a bad rap, but it has to be updated regularly. So this is a way, what is the value, why should you do it? It's a great way to stay connected to your customers. You can be known as the expert in your field. Let's say you're a dog groomer. You can write about not only dog grooming, but you can talk about dogs, shampoos. You can kind of get, expand your area and become an expert and you can write about whatever you want. You own this site. This is your piece of content. It's your domain on the internet and it's your way that you can be known as an expert in that field. And we're gonna talk a lot about this throughout the presentation today. It's sharing your story, your business story. I meet a lot of people and they talk to me about their product or their business or their service and in talking to them, I'm like, well, so I've met with a couple of people that are making a physical product, a widget. Let's call it a widget. And they're telling me why they made this widget and why they wanna bring it to market and what they're all the things that they're doing to get it to market and all the struggles that they're having and the excitement and it's serving a certain niche and a certain purpose and in just chatting with them and talking to them about this product, I learned so much about them as entrepreneurs. I learned why they're doing it. They have this adventurous side of them that their product is useful for. We came up with like five or six different additional things that they could blog about and talk about in their marketing that's not just pitching their product. This is also a blog is also for a way for you to be proactive. You do not have to wait for the news media to write about your product or service. You don't have to wait for anyone else to tell your story. You can tell it first and you can get the information out there. And if you do that, other people may pick up on it and then relate to it. I just had, I worked for a small commercial real estate firm in town and we do an e-blast and send it out to people and sometimes we put little snippets of about the property that's sold. Well guess what, the media reads that and sometimes they wanna do a story about the property that's sold cause it's got a really interesting back story and then they tie in the company that we helped close that deal. So that's all from blogs and social media and email. And then search engines like content. And I was so excited because in the two presentations I went to today, one on SEO and then the last one I went to was local SEO. They both said that search engines love blogs. So if you learn one thing from my presentation it's search engines loves blogs. It's just a great way for you to get not only people to your blog but if they come to your blog you can get them to opt into an email newsletter and then you've captured their name and their information and that becomes a lead and you own that. Google changes their algorithms. Facebook changes their algorithms all the time. Sometimes that is really hard to keep up with but if you have a blog and you're capturing email addresses those are leads that you own and you can then do what you want to with it and send out information that way. Okay, what are some of the mistakes that people make? Businesses make. There are a lot. There's a ton. There's way more mistakes than I have in here but here's some of kind of my favorite mistakes. Lack of resources. This is kind of when the boss comes to whoever they see first and you're like we need a blog, Bob. And Bob's like well okay you're my boss so I'll go make a blog and there's nothing else around it and they think that only one person can handle it when they have five other things that they're already, five million things probably that they're already doing. They're already wearing too many hats and then now you're asking them to do a blog and they may not even have any blog experience. Inconsistency. This is probably, I didn't rank any of these because they're all just big problems that people need to pay attention to but inconsistency I think is one of the biggest blog problems. One of my favorite bloggers early on was called bigarella.com. She invented cake pops. You guys know what cake pops are? So cake pops are these little round pieces of cake that are dipped in chocolate and they're on a lollipop stick. They're delicious and sinful and she makes them really cute. She makes them look like ducks and cartoon characters and she was the very first one that started doing it and it became this like national phenomenon. She's got a book, she's in like all the craft stores selling all of her sprinkles and so anyway, I used to go to her blog every week and cause she's got amazing photography and super cute content and then I would go there a few days later and I'm like, oh gosh, she hasn't updated. And then I'd go back. She still hasn't updated. What's up with her? And then I'd go back again. Oh my gosh, she's got her new post. This is so exciting. I go back. She doesn't have anything again. And then one day she said, I post every Monday and I'm like, oh my gosh, she does every Monday. I now know in my head, she's one of my favorite bloggers. I'm just gonna check every Monday and she was super consistent and then that got me to follow her. I was losing trust and losing interest because I didn't know her schedule and I'm not saying you have to kind of write out your schedule or tell everybody what your schedule is, but it needs to be apparent to your users. So if you have these really long bursts in between your posts, people may not come back. You need to trigger them and know that you want them to come back regularly. This leads into no strategy. The Bob comment, Bob create a blog. Someone told me that we needed a blog. We're a business and we need a blog. You also need a strategy if you're gonna have a blog. A blog can be expensive. It can be very time consuming. You need to know what you're doing and you need to have a plan. I like this one in particular, no champion. So you can't just have someone do it and have a resource, but it would be really amazing if you could have a champion. Someone that's a cheerleader for your blog. This is a person that's going around your company and they love the blog so much and believe in the blog so much that they are being proactive to get the story. So let's say you make widgets and you have a blog. So the blog or champion, the cheerleaders gonna go to all the different departments and talk to people about what they're doing and they're gonna kind of cherry pick these little stories and they're gonna go to the production line and they're gonna find something unique about that and they're gonna share that on the blog and then because they did that with the production line those people are like, wow, we're on the blog, we're on the company blog and the next time they have something interesting they're gonna go to that champion and they're gonna say, you know what? I have this other new thing that you haven't heard about that might be good for the blog. So you need someone that owns it 100% and believes in it and they can get the rest of the company on board. If you're small and you're only one or two people you've gotta be your own champion and that means you just have to prioritize it and make it important. So no leadership support, this could be yourself. If you're just a small entrepreneur, well, entrepreneurs are not small but if you're a one only person entrepreneur you have to believe in it yourself and believe in the value, that's the leadership support. If you work for a larger company you need support from your manager and that manager needs to have support from the top. If the support isn't there you've gotta champion it yourself you have to get the funding and you have to make it a priority. When I was at Full Sale they decided to have a blog on the marketing side. All of my blogging and content related things there were school to student but they did have something that was for marketing purposes and they hired a staff. They got a couple of people that wrote blogs. They were writers, photographers and a viagrafer just dedicated to the blog. Now that's a big company that has a lot of resources but it became valuable and they understood but they had the support from the top. Okay, I love this quote. I got this from ink.com and at the end of the presentation I have a list of like all places where I got a lot of these quotes and things I have lists for you. Don't say what everyone else is saying. Try to be unique. This goes back to the storytelling. You need to tell something that's interesting and unique find something that's different about your business and there is something different. I don't care if you're a web designer and there's 50 million web designers in town you have something unique to say that they don't have. You're the only one with your voice. So a blog is a great way to get your voice out there to talk about maybe your niche. Maybe you're a web designer and yeah there's other web designers but maybe you have a special niche that would be interesting to me and that's why I would hire you and not hire all these other designers. And I love the disruption in here. So other common mistakes. Giving up too early. So if you give up too early means one I don't believe in ever giving up but sometimes you just have to call it quits. If it's taking too many resources you don't have the time it's just really not working. I'll give you permission to give up right. I don't want you blogging if it's a chore and it's just not working. Don't have a blog just to have a blog. I see so many companies that have blog up in their navigation and you go there and it like died six months ago and they just never took it down because they want to say they have a blog. But giving up too early is a mistake. You need to have a strategy of what is your goal? What is your return? Do you want to sell a widget? Do you just want brand awareness? Do you just want to be able to get more press and share your content? There's a lot of different strategies you can have and goals for a blog but you need to know what they are. And then you set a timetable and at that timetable you review it and assess. You make some changes and you go again. And so at the end of your long-term tale there you can stop it if you want but just don't do it too early. And you've got to use your analytics. I know a lot of people they're like, my boss just told me we needed a blog so we had a blog but they never look at any of the analytics. This goes back to my story of when I was at the university and we did this story about the building, the really expensive building. We weren't sure it was going to work but we looked at the analytics. Now if the analytics would have told us that no one read it we probably wouldn't have continued to do those stories but you need to constantly be monitoring your traffic and then tweaking your strategy in your editorial calendar. This is the set it and forget it model and I think a lot of bloggers do this and there's two kind of components here. One is you got a blog and then you have to get it out there. You can't just expect the search engines to pick it up. If you keyword it and you follow a lot of the social media I mean the search engine optimization advice that we got here today and where you can get another place is if you follow that people can find your individual blog posts. They can get to your website but there's so many other ways you can promote your content these days. So there's all these social media channels that you can post your content on and you need to do it for not just your content today but your content from last year. You can repurpose all that content and continue to get it out there. I really like this one. This one was not mine. I have this one in the source notes but it's not leveraging the voices of the executives whoever owns the company. Those people are really valuable and people 82% of consumers trust the CE trust it when a CEO is on Twitter and Facebook unfortunately a lot of times they're not there or someone else is doing it on their behalf and so it's not authentic. If you can get authentic voices from the top and this is even if it's only you or it's only you and our partner you have stories to tell and tell them from your personal perspective and get that other angle in there. Okay, so those are all the mistakes. I'm sure there are a lot more mistakes that bloggers make in corporations but let's talk about some tips that can help you. Okay, use an editorial calendar. This is critical. If you do not have some kind of editorial calendar it's likely that you will fail in blogging. It's true. You cannot just sit down on Monday morning and say well I got a blog post, I have a schedule and I schedule every Monday and every Wednesday but I don't have a calendar. At some point that Wednesday afternoon that Wednesday morning is gonna come around and you got a flat tire going to work and you forgot your coffee and the kids are screaming at you and the boss wants a report and you're not gonna get that blog post up because you're gonna be sitting at your desk going oh my gosh what the heck am I gonna write today? If you had an editorial calendar you would know exactly what you could write and if you're really organized and following the calendar you can write ahead so that you don't ever get into that position. So having a calendar is critical. Setting a schedule, this is kind of what I was just talking about is having a schedule and sticking to it. Now I'm gonna say a couple of things about this but I'm not gonna tell you what your schedule should be because only you can determine when you should post and how often you should post. But think about it in these terms at the end of the year how many posts do you wanna say you have on your site or say your business has completed. If you post once a month you will have 12 posts at the end of the year. Not bad. But if you up that to two times a month maybe you post every other Monday you'll have 24. If you post every Monday you'll have 52 pieces of content and that's not just 52 pieces of content regular content that people can come to every single week to hear about your business and your company and your stories but now you got 52 things that next year you can repermote. So you'll have 52 new ones in the second year and you'll have 52 old ones unless they're event based or time sensitive but you'll have 52 old ones that you can promote repermote in your second year. So think about that when you're talking about the timing but whatever it is determine what your schedule is and stick to it. Be consistent and I put the builds trust because that's where someone comes to you and they're relying on you and they like you. They like what you're writing they like what you're saying they like your posts and they're kind of relying on you for this content and then they go there on that Monday and you don't have anything and they're like, this kind of sucks. And so now you've taught them you've trained them to not come back next Monday because they don't want to be disappointed. And then promote just you got to have this mindset of promoting your old content. Blogging is not just I'm writing something today and it only lives until my next post because that's the theory with blogs. That's what people think about when they think of a blog is just this funnel. It just goes it's like your Facebook feed, right? And you're never going to see the feed from two weeks ago someone put a post about their dog and you want to go see it and you got to dig, dig, dig, dig. In blogs that content lives forever if you want it to. It can really live forever and you can build and build upon it. You can use tags and categories. If you, let's say you have a food blog part of my blog is about food. So I have categories that say breakfast, lunch, dinner and then and dessert. Dessert is like the most important. So dessert I put tags chocolate is one of my tags. Well I can pull up my tag that says chocolate and I find that I have 25 posts that are all related to chocolate. Well now I can make a new post that says Alicia's 20 best chocolate cakes. And I've got a link in that post. I've got like maybe I do a new picture. I've got a link in that post with a link to every 20, every post that I ever did on chocolate cakes. And I can put that thing on Pinterest and that's going to go crazy. So you can leverage all this old content and promote it in a thousand ways. Okay so talking about the editorial calendar. I wanted to get a little bit deeper in this. Let me check my time for a second. Perfect. Okay Excel is your friend for an editorial calendar. I don't care what you use though. You could use Word, you could use sticky notes. You could just have a list somewhere. Computer can there. But I use Excel and it's kind of old school but hear me out for a second. So I have a column that says like blog name, chocolate cake. Blog title, the best chocolate cake ever. And then I have description. This is the chocolate cake that I made for my son's nice birthday. It contains milk chocolate, dark chocolate and the very best icing. And that's my like little trigger of what I'm going to write about. And then I have other columns on when this post would be good to run. And so you create that and your very first column is actually your months. So you put January, February and however often you month. So let's say you do once a week. So I've got January week, one week, two week, three week, four. And I put a title in for each of those days. In that column with all your months and your dates, you also put in holidays. If your business is around events and you go to trade shows, you put all those key trade shows in there and that's your mental trigger. I need content that's surrounding and related to that trade show. So I'm going to have a before trade show piece. I'm going to have an after trade show piece. I'm going to have a conference I went to and I'm going to have a recap about that conference. You put all that in there. When you're done writing the post, you're then going to go put the URL in there in a new column and you're going to put your own little keywords. And these are not SEO keywords. These are just keywords for yourself so that you can sort in Excel and find your old content to promote. So keywords for my example would be cake, chocolate, icing, party. So if I did a search, I'm like, oh, where's all my party content? I didn't tag it in WordPress. I can look here and I can pull my content out that way. But it's also just in the proactive approach in writing, it's just great to have it written down somewhere. You can also, in your spreadsheet, and this is really kind of key in helping do the, I've got content and I need to promote it, in your spreadsheet, when you write out your title after you write the post and you put the link in there, go ahead and write out your Facebook post and your Twitter post and keep it in Excel and that way you can go there and grab it. And if you're super-duper organized and wanna get really ahead, write three versions of that Facebook post right then and there. So you just wrote your long form blog post. Now you got your little spreadsheet, you're gonna have three different Facebook posts that are completely, say, completely different things. But they're all gonna relate back to that one post and you're gonna promote those at different times. You can preschedule them or you can just save them for later because your mental capacity probably isn't gonna handle, ah, I gotta write, I know I've got this great cake post but I don't know what to say about it now to re-promote it. Well, if you did that work all when you were in the mindset of that one post, that's the set it and forget it model. So use your own little keywords in there to kind of trigger that. In WordPress, there's two plugins that I like to recommend. One that I personally use and one that I've just heard of and I've read a lot about but I haven't actually used it because I kind of like this spreadsheet model and I have other social media scheduling tools but this is editorial calendar. It's got a really fancy name. And it shows up right here in your post when you install it, it becomes calendar. So you come over to your calendar and here's May 1st. We come in peace for cats and mice everywhere. That's just a title and a draft post. So instead of keeping everything in Excel, you can just do a brain dump and on every day, Wednesday, Thursday, you know however often you're posting, you plug in your topic that you wanna write about for that day and then when you have time and you're writing, you write directly into WordPress and you keep saving it as a draft. So let's say Friday the 4th comes and goes and you have a draft but you never scheduled it, it just skips it. So it won't ever publish something that you have in draft here. This is just a repository that nobody sees but you. But once you hit publish, it schedules it to that day. So publishing when you use the editorial calendar is like scheduling it. And so if you don't ever schedule it, it doesn't go away, you just have to pick it up and move it to another day. So let's say we missed the May 4th deadline, you would pick that up and you'd move it to May 9th if you want because it looks like there's a blank there. This is a really great tool. It's kind of a way to keep you in WordPress if those of you like having a spreadsheet or doing things on the side is gonna distract you from blogging and you'd rather just have this one all encompassing tool. This is a great one to use. The other one is called co-schedule. It, editorial calendar is free. Co-schedule, I think it's like $10 a month last time I looked. It is very similar to this but it has a couple of really cool add-ons. You know how I talked about in the Excel worksheet to put your face, to go ahead and rewrite out your Facebook posts and your Twitter posts because you just wrote the posts? That's what co-schedule will do. It gives you a space, here's your posts and then go ahead and write your Facebook posts and upload your picture and go ahead and put your Twitter posts and then you can, in the tool, in the plugin, you can actually schedule those to go out. So you're scheduling your posts and your Facebook and your Twitter and I don't know if it does more social media. I don't know how many options it gives you but it schedules everything all for you, all through WordPress. Okay, so blogging, one of the big benefits of blogging is it gives you a way and resources and content to use in your marketing plan. So content marketing, here's a really solid definition from the Content Marketing Institute but I highlighted valuable, relevant and consistent and there's that word consistent again. And so your content and your blog needs to be valuable and relevant and you need to do it on a regular basis and that's what content marketing is. It's also sharing other people's stuff more than yours. This is the Pareto principle of share 80%, it's kinda like the closet when you're in your closet and you have, you really only wear, did you know this, you really only wear 20% of your clothes that are in your closet. Is that true? It's like you wear 20% and then you're like, wow, I don't have anything to wear and you go look in your closet, you've got 80% more clothes in there that you never touched. Same theory, give 80% of the time, only ask 20% of the time with your content. So with content marketing, a big part and why I love blogging is because it gives you an opportunity to do storytelling. And with storytelling, there's so many different ways to do it and I'm gonna give you an example. I'm gonna give you two examples. The first one, I don't have a picture of but her name is LisaLennard.com, I don't know her. She is a blogger, she's got a blog, she's on Instagram, she's on Facebook. She's a mom with two kids, one kid, one of her children is the older child, I think he's 11 or 13 but he's the size of an elementary age child, an elementary school child and he was born with some disabilities and so she writes about the challenges of that and the challenges of being a mom and how they deal with things as a family and she's very fashion forward and she takes pictures of this is what I wore today and that's her blog post. And for me that's like, I'm her target market so I follow her for that. And then every once in a while on her Instagram feed she's got a necklace and it's this really awesome hand stamped silver necklace that you can get your kid's name put on or you could get your burst stone in and really amazing stuff. Her business is selling jewelry but she very rarely sticks that jewelry in there. It's all these posts about her family and her sons and all these really pretty images and then bam you get this picture of the jewelry and I'm like I have to have that necklace right now and she's got a 20% off code so I'm gonna go buy it right now. And she's very savvy with seasons. At the holiday time she does ornaments and same thing they're all hand stamped and so she's telling these stories that are totally unrelated to jewelry but that's how I buy into her and then I believe her and I trust her and then I go buy her product. The other example is someone that I don't know if she has a blog or not but I actually haven't looked but it's called A Little Pet Inn and this is a former coworker of mine who went off on her own and decided that she wanted to be in the business of doggy daycare for small pets. She does an amazing job on Facebook and Instagram and she talks about like here's a story. Skipper is one of the founding members. This is a doggy daycare right but he's a member and she talks about that member and gives a story and oh my gosh isn't this a little cute? He's the IT department and then this is the little bed where they take naps and she's got so her Facebook feed is full of these cute sweet adorable pictures and who, I don't live there anymore. I don't have a small dog but if I did I would want to take it there to her shop, right? So I've been telling my friends in Orlando if you need care for your dog or your cat you need to go see her. So she's telling a story through these photos. She's being really creative with her wording but then she's also being very, very smart. So at some point in her feed she had an article, a link to an article that said this is why a little pet in our dogs have rest time in the afternoon and it was a story, I can't remember specifically but it was an article about aggression and dogs and so what she did was she took someone else's content and she shared it. So that was pretty good enough just to kind of share content relative to her business but because she put that little note at the top that showed she has this level of expertise that frankly I didn't know that this business had because I see these cute happy things all the time in the feed but then they throw in every once in a while something more interesting. They also had a post about essential oils and did you know that essential oils can kind of calm dogs down and pets down, not just people? I never knew that but guess what? They sell essential oils for dogs and so they're doing it in this roundabout way through storytelling and just really easy and great visuals and so the message here is that you can share other people's content and create your own and this is without a block and you can still have a really great impact but you have to add the value you've got to have something valuable there and I kind of take that to mean and one of my big pitches that I tell people is don't just pitch me your product you need to do more and give me more than just telling me you have some product. Anybody that is just pushing their product and peddling their product on Twitter or Facebook they're gonna get unfollowed immediately. They may follow you once because it sounds interesting but then if all you're doing is saying buy my product, buy my product, my product is amazing. We have a sale today on my product, zero results. You've got to have this other input. A really great book that I like to recommend it's become a little cliche because you guys heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. He is a social media expert. He started in the wine business and he is a leader in social media. He wrote a book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook and the message of the book is give, give, give, ask. So it's kind of like some box, I'm not a boxer but it's a boxing metaphor of I guess you gotta hit with this hand and then hit him with the other but only ask every so often. You have to give, you have to give your information, your content and ideas and your stories and then you can ask like that example where she, she's not asking me to buy her jewelry, thelisalenard.com. She never says, it's just not pitchy. It's always presented in such a wonderful way that it just is inviting. Okay so where can you get some of this content if you're not gonna have a blog and if you don't know, you don't have the resources to blog. You've gotta follow your industry websites. You've gotta set up a reader, you've gotta go to these every day and you've gotta find the articles that are relevant to your industry but when you're doing the content curation I will warn you to or warn caution, advise, I like advice, would advise you to pick the best content. Something I've been experimenting with on Pinterest is I used to use Pinterest just for fun and you know you get lost in it and then I started being very strategic on Pinterest and then just in the last week I started only pinning really beautiful images. Even if I want to pin something that, wow this is beneficial to me and I like it, I'm not pinning it because it's not pretty enough and now that I've been pinning the ones that I know strategically get more traffic, the longer ones, the one with the beautiful photos, the beautiful fonts, I'm getting more, slightly more followers and that's just been like a week but it's the point is you become, because you're this expert in your industry they're relying on you to give them good content and I cannot understate this enough the value of you pumping out other people's content because let's say you do it on Twitter and you're sharing all these other content, people don't have time to go looking at all these sites that you're looking at. I used to think well everybody knows this, I don't need to share it, everybody knows this, I don't need to tell them about that, I'm just gonna look redundant. They don't, they do not have the time to be doing that. So if I do it and I'm putting all these wonderful and great things in my feed that happened to me on Twitter when I started really sharing more on Twitter about social media, I got a ton of people following me that were interested in social media and it wasn't because of what I was saying, it was because I was sharing really great information and so then they rely on you because they're like wow you go find the best stuff, they don't care if it came from you as long as it's something great and valuable that they can use. Use your hashtags and your lists on Twitter, this will get you a greater reputation and connect you with those people that you wanna be connected to. And then there are sites like LinkedIn Pulse, Medium, Sway is one that I was using for a while and they're actually converting to a different name but Sway is a site that you can put in your own keywords and then all these visuals, it's kinda like a Pinterest but it's more for just content you want and then you can re-pin it, you can pin it to Pinterest or you can share it and it's just a great way to aggregate good content. And then sign up for industry newsletters, follow your friends, I don't know if you'd wanna do that with your competitors necessarily but I actually heard one of the speakers say in Asheville a lot of people are competitors but they share so much information that it helps them all get business. So sign up for the email newsletters and there might be something in there that you can click to the website and then share that. Okay, now we are onto the last section which is hiring help. So what do you do if you just can't do this at all? You believe in a blog, I've convinced you to blog but you still just don't have the resources. There is a lot of help out there but there's a lot of cautions. So you need to decide what you're gonna outsource and you can do this in a variety of ways. You can outsource just your social media strategy. So I've done this for businesses where I've met with them and consulted with them and I've just determined, I've decided what they should blog about and what they should do on social media and I've written in a huge document outlining their hashtags in time of day and what type of content and places they could go to get content and it was a collaborative effort but then I pulled in all the extra information that they didn't do and then they took it over and they implemented the plan. You can hire someone to do your content creation for you and to curate all this content that we were just talking about. You can hire someone to do that for you and they can send it to you or you can have them also to do all the posting for you too and I'll give you an example of how that might work. So what I would typically do would be, I'd get to know you and your business and we'd kind of work together and then we'd say we're gonna come up with a social media strategy and plan out your posts for the week. So I'm gonna do all the legwork and I'm gonna go grab all the 80% that we're gonna share of other people's content. You're gonna kind of lead me to the 20% of internal stuff and I'm gonna find it on my own from your website and other things but you might give me some hints on what's coming up and then I'm gonna create that lovely spreadsheet for you and you're gonna go approve it and then I'm gonna schedule it all. So all you, the business owner is doing is approving content and kind of having this back and forth with this VA or consultant. So you're involved, you're always involved but you don't have to do the legwork and then it gets scheduled and then you can analyze it. You can have people monitor it for you and write back to your customers or if a customer writes in, they might need to tag you. You've gotta figure out that relationship. You can outsource your writing, you can outsource the posting, you can outsource all of that individually or as a whole. And then I would be selective in hiring a VA. You can hire one person to do everything and I caution you to be skeptical of that. There are a lot of people out there that can do everything, that have experience and know how to do a lot of things but there are a lot of people out there that say they can do everything and they really are writers or they really are social media and they kinda say they do SEO because you're supposed to know about SEO but they're not really the SEO person. You need to go hire a separate SEO person. So you have to figure that out with the individual so you just need to ask questions, look at their resume, look at examples and figure out, do you need one person or do you need to separate it out? And you can hire people for project basis by the hour. You can split it up based on your budget and what you need. So don't be afraid that it's gonna be too expensive to hire more than one person. So the best places are referrals, of course, always. Facebook groups is another interesting place that I have learned to find VA's. Caution on the Facebook one though and you can type in like VA's, virtual assistants, there's probably a million other terms and you can ask to join the group and you can post in there. I'm looking for a VA to do X. You will get a hundred people commenting on that thread. Didn't cost you a dime. You will literally get like a hundred people call me, PM me, I sent you my resume. Put a little bit of more specifics in there if you're gonna do an ad type of thing. If you have a budget, go ahead and say the budget so that you don't get people that are either overpriced or underpriced and I'll talk about that in a second. You can do a local search to find a local person that you could actually meet face to face with if you want. And you can also do Google searches just to find, there's a lot of like virtual assistant companies out there and they hire and subcontract the work out to individuals. So you can look for one of those companies and kind of have a consultation and then they will farm the work out to one of their people. And you can just place an ad on Craigslist or somewhere. Again, you're gonna get hundreds of resumes if you place an ad. So I would stick with the referral first. So how do they know that you're business? You're gonna have to train them on your business. Some VA's specialize, like maybe realtors. That is a specialty. You need to know some of the terminology. There's a lot of people that maybe were realtors before and they just don't wanna sell houses right now but they have this new skill. You can find, there's a lot of niches that you can find someone that already has experience. But I would say do your onboarding process. You need an onboarding process and a good VA will have their own onboarding process. Well, they'll interview you. They'll meet with you. They'll do their own research. They won't necessarily pay you for all that research because they know they need to get up to speed on your topic also. But then you build a level of trust. And this is where you've, that's where you decide how much or how little you really want to do with them because at some point you have to trust them. You're gonna let them schedule things. You're gonna give them access to WordPress to post everything. That means they have access to your statistics. They have access to things. So you gotta trust whoever this is. A great way to start is to start small. Start with a project. Give them a few, you know, test them out for a week or a month and get to know them without giving them access. Have them write the content for you and you post it before you give out all your passwords. You can build that trust up through time. You don't have to have it immediately. You can kind of build in these barriers of entry to get to the next level until eventually if you really, really trust this person they can be your right hand with all this type of content creation. And then you can also have a hybrid approach where they do some things and you do some things and you work together and work collaboratively. A lot of bigger businesses do that like they have marketing department has a budget they can't hire another person but they can outsource some things. And so sometimes we'll do this internally and we're gonna outsource this internally externally and then you can kind of match it up from there. So this is the big question is like how much does this cost? And this is just a wild, you could throw a dart at the wall and pick a number. But I'll tell you a little story about an experience I had to give you some more insight as a business owner when you're hiring someone to know what happened. So I was, I found a lead of someone one of these bigger agencies that wanted to outsource some of their extra work. They had too much work and they needed someone to do. It was what I consider some of the higher end work in social media. And we got to that, well, how much do you wanna make? And I said, well, you know, do you have a budget or what are you gonna pay? And she's like, well, we're paying $6 an hour for this work. And so I said, no, I'm sorry, you know, sorry I wasted your time in my time. So the lesson there is if you're hiring people, especially if you're using someone like in an intermediary of some sort. And I'm not talking about necessarily an account executive. A lot of times in agencies there's an account executive that's the person that interacts with the client and then they farm it out to a designer and a developer. But these days you should be able to have access to the person that's doing the work for you. And you need to know who that person is. That's a question to ask. Who's going to be actually doing the work? Who has access to my accounts and this password? Are you going to share it beyond you? So this is the difference of hiring an individual versus hiring an agency. And I'm not saying agencies are bad in no way. Agencies can be awesome, but I've just found in this particular industry, sometimes it gets a little hairy because there's so many of them and there's so many people that just want work and want experience that they're willing to work for very little money. So if you're interested in knowing that, there you go. Okay, so another thing I'm going to say about VAs is how they charge that I've seen lately. There's two ways that you could get a project-based VA where there's a package or you could buy a bundle of time. I buy 50 hours at this rate and if I buy 60 hours I get a better rate. And then you send them whatever you want for the month based on the hourly package you bought. But one thing that people do differently, there's tracking to the minute and then there's an hourly rate. And so people do that differently. So this would be a question if you want to know. Some VAs, and I read this on a thread, there was a big controversy about should a VA charge to the minute or should they just charge by the hour and kind of guesstimate their work. So some people have software that tracks exactly to the minute that they're working on your project. So I'm working on your project and I need to go get some coffee. So I'm going to pause and I'm going to go over and get my coffee and I'm going to come back and I'm going to hit unpause and I'm going to sit and work. And then I just got text message. So I'm going to pause, I'm going to go read my text message and I'm going to unpause. I'm going to pause, unpause, pause, unpause for every single thing that is not directly related to your hourly rate. Personally I am not a fan of that. I think it takes a lot of time to pause and unpause and kind of is an interrupter of its own more than just the getting the coffee. But there are many people that only want to pay that and they are only going to pay for the time that you're spending because they don't want people wasting the time and it's a way for them to have accountability because a lot of these people work from home. So that's just a question to ask. The other way is just like a typical hourly rate and then some people round up to the half hour or the quarter hour or do different things. So that's just kind of a question to throw out there if you're interested in knowing how they do it. Okay, to wrap up. So should you have a blog or should you not have a blog? So if you, yes to have a blog, you have the resources, you can hire someone if you don't have the resources. So you either have them internally or you're willing to do it or you can hire someone if you don't. You can commit to the consistency of blogging and this says have a story to tell but it's really needs to say you're willing to dig deep and find your story. And one way to do that is talk to somebody else. A lot of times as small business owners you can't get past the work and the drudgery of every day and you're just trying to make your business grow and you don't know what the heck your story is, right? But if you talk to someone else and they're like, wow, what do you do and how are you doing this and how are you building it and when are you launching it? They may be able to find your story and that might not even be hiring someone. That's just talking, getting someone and having coffee and talking to them. So you're willing to tell your story and you have the leadership support. If you're in a bigger company you have the leadership support. So if you can say yes to those, you definitely should blog. It is so beneficial, search engines love it and it gives you great content to market. So if it's not a great idea and you don't have all those, remember, you still can tell your story. You can still market your business and your service. You can leverage social media. So you can do long form Facebook posts and they don't have to be long form. It could just be Facebook posts because people don't need Facebook to be consistent. They just need to see you. So the more consistent you are the more you'll come up in someone's feed. So it's good to be consistent but it's not that people are going there saying oh, I didn't get that three o'clock feed from them. But you can leverage Facebook to do longer posts and I don't see that as much but when I do I kind of pay attention to it because I think they have something to say. Share our content from other sources. Guest posts on other blogs. Find friends in your network. Find national blogs that you can guest post on and write industry articles and get posted in your local magazines. All these local things want articles and so this isn't about getting paid to write your story. This is just getting free press. So those are all really great ways to share your story and your content. Okay, so at Alicia Lewis Murray that's me.com there's this red button that that's a gift for you. That's a gift for you. It's a PDF but it was like a Word document and it's got 10 to 12 articles on there that I've kind of collected. I like to collect social media and blogging resources and I use some of those for the presentation. So go check those out and read those. They're really inspirational and they kind of dig a lot deeper into some of the topics that we talked about today. So you can just click that. It's a PDF and download it. So do we have any questions? Yes, sure. Sorry. Yes, so she's asking about that when I was talking about tagging some of my posts with a tagged chocolate. So in WordPress you can choose a category or a tag. And so the category for that was dessert and then I tagged it chocolate. So then I can look and I can click on that post. I can click chocolate and it's gonna give me every post that I ever wrote about chocolate. So then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go create a graphic that says Alicia's 20 best chocolate desserts. And I'm gonna write a blog post and put that graphic in the blog post and I'm gonna put a link and tell a little new story about each of those pieces of content. And I'm gonna share that image and that blog post on Pinterest. And it's like brand new content. But it's really just rehashing 20 things that I've already written about. But if you get in the habit of categorizing and tagging it makes it a lot easier to do that. And I see that all the time with bloggers especially like lifestyle bloggers and but even businesses can do that. You can take all this old content, find three things that are similar that you wrote about in the past, add a new graphic, create a new post with a title and then that also kind of helps your interlinking if you guys went to any of the SEO panels today or topics today, the interlinking. That means you're linking to yourself on your blog and a blog is a great way to do that to boost your SEO. Yes, and I think we have about five, less than five minutes. So I can answer like two more questions. Yes. Mm-hmm. My personal opinion is around 500 words. I will recommend, there is Sarah is giving a presentation next, right? Or four o'clock about the length of a blog post but I kind of think it's around that five, three to 500 number, sometimes 1200 if it's super great and really wonderful but I wouldn't do it that long every time. That's a different type of thing. A blog is, you shouldn't take you that long to write a blog post. And then if you're already saying you're verbose you're probably writing too long and need to just shorten it up a little bit. Anybody? Yes. And what it really means is like leverage as a blogger leverage their story in the blog. Talk about the leader's blog but in that quote was more specific to if they have a Twitter account it needs to be personable and updated and regular because people will trust it. And then if you could get them they have to tweet to your blog even better. You kind of, I think the answer to your question is both represent their voice on the blog in some way, interview them, talk to them, have them do a guest post maybe get their story in the blog but if they have a separate account, that's even better. If you're, then that's just your personal story you need to do it in Twitter and on the blog. No, but you would set up a business page on Facebook and tell it there. Yeah, yeah. Someone else had another question? Okay, I have cards up here and I'm here if you guys want questions. It's time for the next session. Thanks.