 for the introduction. I am excited to be here. This is my second year at WordCamp Phoenix, but my first time speaking. And the October comma is not optional, so I'm glad that I have some fellow enthusiasts in the room. So I'll start with a quick introduction we have a lot to go through. First, I'm Michelle Thomas, as she stated. I'm the Bluehost Content Manager. I live and reside and dream all things of life in the breakfast taco capital of the world, also known as Austin, Texas. And I'm a writer and photographer. Also have worked for Starwood Hotels. I'm sure one or two of you have stated a Sheraton, a Weston, a W. I wrote content for all 11 brands there. And I also am a social media and content strategist. So let's get started quickly with what content is. I like to think of content as the number one relationship builder between you and your customer. It's your way to engage and have an emotional connection with your customer. And if you think of this as information, experience, and engagement, you're able to analyze how to write that content to them. So think of all things form text, image, video, or audio as content. So what is good content then? That's simple. Good content is compelling. It's concise, and it's clear. So compelling content is meaning you have something worthwhile to say. It's something that someone would want to read. It's pretty simple. Concise meaning that it's clear. It's well thought out. It makes sense. And it has consistent tone and voice. And clear is, is your message well thought out? Have you written your words to flow properly? Do they make sense? Is there a lot of jargon, wordiness? So removing those things from your content. And again, since relationship is important with your customer, we know that we want to give them accurate and compelling, concise, and clear content. So what was content originally? When content was originally, when you think of content, you think of the written word in most cases. And that was the case in the early 2000s. However, things have changed. So actually, if we can get the screen down. So back then, content was newspapers, billboards, magazines, things that were in written form. So now that these mediums have evolved, content has changed as well. So major magazines and newspapers were forced into a new era of WWW. And instead of their content being on a piece of paper, it's now on a piece of the web. So now content looks a little bit different. Now content is 150 social media channels. It's YouTube, it's Facebook, it's Snapchat. It's all these different ways that people can spread their message to society. So each of these forms of content can be used individually. They can be used as a business. And they provide a unique opportunity to connect with your customer at 100 different touch points at the same time. And we can use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to share these. You can easily write a blog post on WordPress, hit publish, and share it with 10 social networks at the same time. So now if we ask ourselves, with all these different options, all these different ways to get our message into the world, how do we know which medium is right to use? And the answer is simple. You have to understand your audience. So understanding your audience is the way that your business can continue to grow. If you're writing content to me and you're writing it for the gentleman here, I'm likely not going to purchase your product. So understanding your audience is the first way to write that content. So the first question I like to ask myself is what problem are we solving? And if you think of this as your audience, if I'm selling wrinkle cream, the problem is likely wrinkles. OK. And the solution is the cream to get rid of said wrinkles. So that is an easy way to figure out your audience, right? It's likely someone who's a little bit older, maybe, who has wrinkles or fine lines that they want to get rid of, but who purchases wrinkle cream? Is it me? Don't answer that question, by the way. I want us to remain friends, so don't answer that question. But the idea is that it may be simple to identify your target audience for wrinkle cream and for maybe baby food, which would likely be a mother. But something like camping gear can be a little less easy to figure out. And market research may be necessary in order to get that information. So if we think of market research, we know that we have to begin to understand these people. And I like to think of it as putting them into personas. Personas are a personality or a person who digests and consumes your product or your service. So a persona is an easy way to think of the different types of people that you may sell a product to. So camping gear, again, if we go back to that option, it could be someone like Dave, who is 35 and is a free thinker and a travel enthusiast. But it could also be someone like Manuel, who's a nature lover and a college student. They may consume their content in different ways, but they are still purchasing camping gear. So in my experience at Bluehost, obviously, most of you have met us already. We're a web hosting company. And everyone can use web hosting. So my customer could be a graphic designer who is looking to get their portfolio online. I'm sure there are a few graphic designers here today. Any? We have a few. OK. It could also be a bakery on the corner that wants to start selling cupcakes online. So I have to be able to write content for each of them at different times, not necessarily in the same piece of content. But I do have to write for each of them individually in order to get their business. So these personas are a good way to identify your audience, put them into a category, and understand how to better serve each of them. So if we go back to finding this audience, how do we know where to find them? So if we go back to wrinkle cream, do you think that you would find someone to buy wrinkle cream on Snapchat? Anyone buy wrinkle cream on Snapchat? No, probably not. OK. And the reason for that is because most people have identified the demographics for Snapchat do not meet the criteria for the audience of wrinkle cream. Snapchat users are over 85% under 34 years old. So it's not really the right platform to sell that product. So one of my favorite speakers, Gary Vaynerchuk, he has a saying that says, if you're not putting out relevant content in relevant places, it doesn't matter. You don't exist, and you're not able to sell your product or your service. So we have to identify the need for your product or your service. And a need in content is a little bit different than a need, let's say, for survival, like basic shelter, food, water. The need for content can be something that entertains like a meme, right? I may search for content for the reason for entertainment. I may want to see a puppy video to laugh on a bad day. I may want to read a meme to laugh, like why don't you blog? I don't understand. Do that. Blog, always blog. Or it could be that you're looking for an answer to a question, like what is Bitcoin? What is net neutrality? How does that affect my business? It also could be something to where you're looking for information or insight from someone who's a professional in that industry. So if you have a recent diagnosis of heart disease or of diabetes, you want to understand how to better serve yourself in that situation, you go to Google to find this information. So we know now that targeted content engages. It resonates, and it informs the customer or of your product or your service. So resonating basically means that you're meeting someone at an emotional place. You're meeting them somewhere where it matters to them. You're engaging with them, means that you're wanting them to learn or to read more, and you're informing them of information that they're lacking currently. So what kind of content can sell as products or services? Ironically, negative feelings incite engagement. So you can say something positive, like why are these puppies now free, right? And someone could be excited to read about, I like puppies if you didn't notice. I've mentioned that a few times now. But it also could be something negative, like why did someone blow up a building? You're interested in that content because you want to understand the reasoning behind that. So anything that resonates or builds a positive or emotional reaction will create engagement in your content. So how do you know what to feed your audience? How do you identify what your target audience is? You can use a lot of different tools, like Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics even that can tell you who's actually engaging with your website or your brand or your social media network. And you can also observe your competition. If you're selling woodpeckers, then you know that other people who serve woodpeckers may be serving it in the same platform that you need to be on. So following and emulating that information is a great way to stay on top of what others in the industry are doing. You can also ask your audience. This can be something like a focus group. It can be a survey that you send out after a purchase. It can also be just meeting with them on the social media network, engaging with them and saying, hey, I heard that you had a complaint. What is it that you need from us? How can we better serve you in our product or our service? And staying up to date on trends. So Google is a great place to find information, obviously. On Google you can easily look up trending topics, trending news, and using that to keep up to date. In social media, any business, whether you're working by yourself or for a corporation, should have a social media network. You should have a platform that you post on regularly and you should be engaging with your customers. So what are the benefits of content? Content builds brand loyalty. It builds a relationship with your customer by giving them helpful, useful, entertaining information. It also helps with your SEO efforts. So you're putting out content on a regular basis and you're staying up to date with your grammar spelling and your punctuation. So you're allowing these search engines to crawl your site and to get higher rankings through Google. You also have brand awareness. Brand awareness is basically someone being able to identify with your brand. At this point I can't see a check mark without thinking of Nike. So clearly they've done a great job of building their brand awareness and we could all use that type of brand awareness as well. Lead generation basically means your ability to get people on the door, your way of prospecting, of leading to a sale by dropping hints of information, by asking, you may have seen something like this on LinkedIn where they say, hey, you give us your email address, we'll give you an e-book on how to do X, Y, or Z. And you download it, that's lead generation. They now can market you in other ways. Social media presence, again, is a way for you to stay in touch with what's in the now, what's going on with your customers. And backlinking, I think someone mentioned this earlier, is basically you linking to another site or another site linking to your website which builds trusted websites on Google. So your website linking to another trusted site builds your SEO as well. So backlinking is a great strategy to have if you don't have that already. And the golden era of this is brand authority or thought leadership. Thought leadership means that you're now the person to go to about information. You're the person that someone leans on to get information about a product or a service in your industry. So just a few quick SEO tips. Oh, bless you. A few quick SEO tips. So making sure that you are having title tags and meta descriptions on all your pages and your blogs, these are great ways for search engines to identify what your website is about and what your blog post is about or what your webpage is about if it's not a blog. Adding title tags to images on your website, also a great way to keep tabs on what's going on on your website and Google to better identify who you are. Using keywords that are popular or in your industry is also another way to do that. So keywords are something you can look up through Search Console, which used to be known as Webmaster Tools, but it's a great way for you to put in your industry and say what things are people typing in. It can be long form like, how do I know when to go to the doctor versus something like what is a doctor? That's a short search result. But using those keywords that matter for your ranking in your title, in your image descriptions, in your meta description, and also in your content without keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing basically is a search engine telling you that we don't trust you. You put words in here that don't make sense. You're clearly trying to rank and not trying to give out relevant information and Google will penalize you for that really bad and you don't want it. So SEO and WordPress is, WordPress has Yoast SEO, which is the number one plugin actually and also super helpful when starting this SEO journey and learning to start getting your website to rank. Yoast actually allows you to get this little grid here to the left that will tell you on your blog post or on your page your ranking. So red means that you are not doing a good job at all. Orange means you can be doing a little bit better and green means that you're succeeding in whatever you're trying to write about. So some of the things on there are, it will review things like your image having a meta tag in a description, the length of your post and whether your title is in the first paragraph of the blog or the page. And then also you can use this to tag your images. So in the image you can put your alt text, your description and your title. The title could be the same as the title of your blog or the title of the page and all these things help build your SEO strategy. So also one of the other things we wanna talk about is backlinking in WordPress. It's super simple in your WordPress dashboard to go into a page, highlight a text copy. In this case it's the time of the most, I can't read it, I'm sorry. Two of the most common options, highlighting it, choosing to insert a link, inserting that link and then hitting the blue button to actually add it. And now you see that it's live on your site and now if you're linking to somewhere that's trusted again it's building your page authority in Google as well. And so the last part of this section we wanna talk about is becoming a thought leader. So we already said that being coming a thought leader is the golden area, it's where you wanna be, it's the good area of content. We know that you can work with influencers, you can build a niche, you wanna make sure that you're not too broad. If you're talking about travel, maybe be a little more specific, maybe you want to specialize in Thailand travel or travel in the woods and making sure that you are building authority in that area. Also blogging and building a network and working with other influencers are ways to become a thought leader. And so essentially if you don't remember anything else about this presentation, remember that you want to resonate with your customer. So you always wanna have purpose driven marketing. And purpose driven marketing is basically marketing that bonds with your reader on an emotional level. Okay, so sharing a content, a content, a interest with your writer, with your reader will allow you to become a purpose driven marketing company. Some of these I can think of are Toms for example, they give away shoes. So many shoes a year it's crazy to small countries or countries that are, have gone through a disaster or something like that. So their purpose is to empower the world through shoes, to have every child have a shoe. And so that's their purpose and they've built this community around that purpose. All of their content is built around that purpose. So again, this purpose driven marketing, it builds a culture with your reader. It also allows customers to interact with your company again on an emotional level. So essentially after all of this, you get brand loyalty, right? They now have agreed with you, they support your thoughts, your thought leadership in this sector and they are now loyal to your brand forever hopefully. But that's up to you to make sure that they continue to have the same compelling, concise and clear content that helps them to grow in their business or their day to day life, okay? So if your content isn't driving conversation, what is it really doing? If people aren't talking about it and aren't sharing it with their friends or on social media, it's dead content. And we wanna have content that is being shared that's going viral. That type of content keeps you relevant and especially in this ever changing society where the internet is constantly changing and evolving and things are becoming more popular and less popular every day, you wanna make sure that you're always staying consistent and you're always doing it the right way and causing conversation. So the last part of our conversation is gonna be about headlines and subject lines. I know many of you may be read in the description that we talk about how to get click worthy headlines. I like to follow three rules. If you're gonna write a headline, make it pose a question, make it be a how to or name drop. And that sounds probably a little silly but we'll talk about those a little bit more. So a how to headline basically is telling your audience how to do something they're interested in doing. So now that you've identified who your audience is, you know where they are, now you know where to put the content and you know how to write the headline, okay? So you're gonna say, how do I know that a student wants to learn how to lower their debt? So how to lower your debt while in school, right? That would identify the audience. It calls them out immediately and it gives them something that they're interested in learning about. So it's a simple, I like to think of it as a simple formula, how to, action and benefit or solution. How to lower your debt in 10 days or 10 years, something like that. 10 days is probably not accurate. But potentially 10 years, maybe 30 at this rate in the world, but 10 years to lower your debt. And this is a formula that you can follow for any topic really. The next one is name dropping. That can be Facebook. It doesn't necessarily mean a celebrity. So we're not gonna write Chloe Kardashian, X, Y and Z. We're gonna say something that's relevant to our audience. If Chloe Kardashian is relevant to your audience, do you wanna use that? But in this case, it could be something as simple as Facebook 101. Learn how to master it today. Learn how to build your social presence today. So we've identified something that we know our audience wants to use. Someone who wants to learn Facebook now knows that you're giving them the information that they need in order to grow in that area. Okay, so again, formula, importance or well-known name plus Benefit or Solution. So learn to build your Facebook website today or Facebook social presence today. Today, okay? And then posing a question is thought-provoking, right? It's saying it may be negative. Usually this is negative. Wanna get out of debt, drowning in debt? We can help you. We're offering you a solution of helping you with your problem. So question that targets the specific audience you're talking to and the promise of a Benefit or Solution. So you're getting the emotional or negative response that you're looking for and they're clicking to say, oh, okay, now I know I'm drowning in debt. I may feel sad about that, but I now have a solution to that issue or that problem. So the one issue with clickable headlines is that you easily run into click bait, right? So you click on something and you say, this is not what you told me this was gonna be, right? And when that happens, how do you feel? You automatically don't trust this company anymore. You automatically say, I'm not gonna click on anything else I see because they're likely trying to draw me in with a lie to get web traffic or to get a sale on a diet pill even though they told me it was about my debt, you know? So avoiding clickbait headlines is a great way to also not get dinged by Google. So if people are leaving your site, they're bouncing your site really quickly, Google's gonna say something's going on with this, right? These people aren't really talking about what they say they're talking about. So some of these are sponsored ads where they're actually like ads, like 17 discount singers didn't know they could get, but then you click on it and it's about a diet pill. Literally, I checked it, it's a diet pill. So try to avoid these at all costs. While some clickbait is good if it's accurate, again, make sure that we're always being honest because we're trying to build that relationship with our content. So again, in everything that you do, think about that relationship building that you're looking for. Okay, so email subject lines are a lot more lighthearted, right? For the most part. So simple charts to get a clickable email headline is to say, put a sense of urgency on it. Bless you, this deal is only available today, right? Today only, get this 10% off or 20% off this thing that you've always wanted, that they've probably already found that you want from Facebook or from another service that's crawling your websites. So make them an offer. Like we're offering you 10 free days if you do this. Make it in the headline. So we already know that about 47%, 48% of people click based on the email subject line because you're scrolling through your email on your mobile phone and you're seeing what interests you and that's what you click on, right? So making sure that your email subject line pops is a great way to ensure that people read your actual message. You can have great content, but if no one wants to click it, no one will ever see it. So segmenting your list essentially means that you're separating it by those personas. So my headline to Carl, who's 55, may be different than my headline to Margaret, who's 26. So making sure that you're identifying what to write for each person or each audience is a great way to get your content read. And so also make your subscriber feel important, right? So here's a few examples. So free email training for you, just for you. Like you're the most important person today and we're gonna make sure that you get this deal. The sense of urgency, grab this deal now. Like today only, grab this deal. And this is the last day to save big and then you're solving a problem. Hiring a writer, use this. This is how you can get the service that you need or the writer that you need by doing these things. So a few quick ways to get started. There's a thousand tools out there and I'm sure you guys know more, possibly different ones than I use. But it's important to know how to get started with all these different things that you're working on. So the first thing is a plan of action. You wanna establish your goals. What is your strategy? What is your company's mission or vision? And identifying your audience like we talked about, putting them in personas if it's important to do that or identifying your target market and also creating content. So putting content out on a schedule that works for you. So we wanna make sure we have quality over quantity. So if you're writing five blogs a day and you're putting out five pieces of content a day, if you have a team, that sounds great. If it's just you, it's probably not gonna be attainable to continue to do that. So you wanna set an expectation and keep that expectation met. So if you put out a blog every Tuesday, put out a blog every Tuesday, your customer will subconsciously begin to realize that on Tuesdays, they're looking for your blog. This podcast do this a lot now where they drop their podcast on the same day. You know what to expect. You log into iHeartRadio. You log into whatever SoundCloud, whatever you use and you know to start listening to your podcast on that day. So building that expectation with your customer and then you wanna make sure that you scream it from the rooftop. Tell everyone on social media that you did this thing. I did a thing, right? And I'm gonna share it with you and I want you to share it and I'm gonna potentially give you a price for sharing it, right? Giveaways are great for social media. I do them a lot. So make sure you follow us if you wanna get a deal that way. But screaming it from the rooftop is a great way to get your message out and consistently have your face in front of your audience. So here are a few tools that I use or that I have used for all the different things that we talked about. Buffer being something that you use for scheduling your social media. It can be like, I use the Chrome extension where you can just click on it and it automatically will send it to whatever social channels you have plugged in. Snappa you can use to create images or create graphics if you're not a graphic designer and you need ways to get content out in different easier forms. That's a great thing to use. It's the same with being Canva. You can create a few different images that way. BuzzSumo is an app you can use or plugin you can use through WordPress that connects to your social channels and it allows people to subscribe to your blog or to your website. Grammarly checks your grammar spelling and punctuation because content is important and good content is even more important. Google Analytics, again, this is how you can identify your audience, where they're coming from, what they're doing on your page, how long they're staying on your page and you can use this to get really in-depth analysis on your website. So these are just a few that I use. I know you guys probably have a lot more and I'd be happy to hear any questions that you may have or any concerns, anything that's come up for you during my presentation. Absolutely. I know we went through that fast. I was trying to get through it. Sorry. Absolutely, yes ma'am. Yes. Okay, so the question was back-linking. Should you also back-link to your own site and does that help with your Google rankings? Yes, it can. The reason why most people back-link to other websites is because the other website is larger. So for example, if you're back-linking to a website that is well-known like Facebook, for example, Google knows that's a trusted site. So if you're back-linking to a site that is potentially shady or potentially has a bad ranking with Google, that does not benefit your SEO. Back-linking to your own site is great because it keeps people on your page and it also tells them that you're a thought leader, right? So all these different points that I'm bringing out in my blog post, we already have information about. We already have all this information that you need here. You don't have to leave our website. So that is a great way to ensure that you're maintaining yourself as a thought leader in that industry. Any other questions? Absolutely. Okay, so the question was, how do you identify personas? Is there a certain number that makes sense and how do you make it digestible for your team? So generally, personas are not more than five per company. In my experience at Starwood Hotels, for example, we had 11 different brands and they were all for a different type of lifestyle. So the W Hotel was for the younger, the people who liked being out late at night, nightlife and traveling on a whim. But the West End was more for people who were health conscious or wanted to relax. And so all the messaging was separate in that way. If you have multiple clients within your company, that's one way you do it. If you have multiple personalities that you're selling one product or service to, you wanna stick to three to five personas. And a great way to make it digestible is to identify the top purchasers, right? So you don't wanna say this is everyone who purchases our product, but if the top 60% are one of these three personas, you wanna focus on those three, right? So then you identify a demographic, so an age group, a gender if possible, and what they do. So as simple as saying this person is a free thinker or this person is meticulous. And so you know that all of your content needs to match that type of attitude. If they're not on Snapchat and they're not a free spirit, it's probably not a good idea to say, to you slang in your content, for example. So just making sure that you narrow down on the highest amount of traffic and making personas based on that and not every customer that you have. Well, that can be either one. So for a blog, for example, they don't necessarily care who the traffic's coming from potentially if they're not selling a product. But if you're selling a product, then it needs to be the traffic that you're going for. Okay? Any other questions? Yes, ma'am. I wanna make sure I understand. You said tagging a post, tagging a, are you talking about, oh, a photo within a post. So you're asking how you should name a photo in a post? Okay, so you're talking about this. Is that right? Right here? Oh. Okay, so if you're tagging an image on your post, you wanna make sure that you're tagging by the description. You wanna write a description and you wanna name it after your post or something close to your post. Is that what you're talking about? It could be both, right? So if I'm wanting to rank for Bluehost, then I might write Bluehost and then hyphen and then the title of the post. So it could be both potentially. It depends. If you have a long name and a long title, then maybe that doesn't make so much sense, but it can be whatever you're trying to rank for is what you need to write in that description and as the title. Does that make sense? Rank for it. So I don't know how many of you were in the SEO talk earlier, but the, okay, sorry. In that talk, they talked about tags and categories. So in a one post, for example, you have your page, the actual page that you're looking at, you have the description for that page, you have the title for that page and you have different headlines within that page, right? And also in that page, you have images. The images also have a title and a description and then you can also tag each of those posts in WordPress under a tag and under a category. So in categories, you wanna say, let's say we're writing about fish in Alaska, okay? The category would be fish, right? And then the tags would be wild salmon in Alaska, tuna in Alaska, I don't think it's there, but whatever fish, that could be the tags that you're wanting Google to pick up. Does that make sense? So the tags, the image, the page. So there's three different ways to get your tags, your keywords and your descriptions on your page, on every page. I know it's a little complicated, but WordPress makes it easy by walking you through that because in every post that you have in your dashboard, when you're looking at all of your posts, on those columns, it'll say tags, it'll say categories and you'll know if you're missing any because it'll be empty, right? And so you can take a quick snapshot of looking at it and see what you're missing. Any other questions? Yes, ma'am. So the question was there's a current conversation going on with back linking on whether you should have that link open in a new tab or in a new page and my opinion will always be in a new tab. You don't ever want to drive someone to another page. If you're wanting to sell a product or service or keep them interested in you, you can give them additional information, but they should be opening it in a new tab. So when you're back linking, it'll give you the option to say open in a new tab or open in a new window. So if they open a new window, they're gonna get another page that potentially is away from your site if you backlink to someone else and now you may have lost that interest or that reader. So my opinion will always be open in a new tab. Any other questions? Yes, sir. Absolutely, he asked for a recommendation on word links for a blog post. The current standard is 800 to 1250. I try to stay somewhere within a thousand. If your content is very technical, again, you need to know your audience. If it's a very technical topic and you need to give them detailed information, go longer. If you're talking about something that's a little more fluffy, a little more lighthearted, it's better to keep it shorter so that you keep their interest since they're not learning something. If it's for entertainment, think shorter. If it's for education, think longer. Yes, sir. Anyone else? We have two minutes. Yes, ma'am. Okay, so the question was when writing a description or a tag on your image, does it make a difference to have spaces and or other punctuation? Is that right? Okay. No, you need to get the words on there. If you don't wanna have comma, comma, comma, comma after each thing, but having one hyphen or semicolon is totally fine. Google will still recognize the words. Well, I appreciate your time today and I hope you guys have a great night. Thank you.