 Thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you. My name is Nathan Young. I run the website Geek Alabama. I am on the autism spectrum. So one of the things that wanted me to start Geek Alabama behind me was because a lot of autistic like to be very creative. We like to be very creative. I'm going to show this off quickly. One of the creative things I can do, I can make road signs. So Geek Alabama runs off, one's on her breast, right? We're here, this is a work camp, right? I'm going to put this away, but that's fine. So this presentation is called Ways to Increase Your Work Respawn Traffic. I've been running Geek Alabama for over 10 years now. I've got over close to 2 million readership now because I have a tracker and I got a lot of social media followers so I'm around the world. During my last Christmas coverage, I sent my own Christmas cards to Australia, to the UK, Canada, and a lot of states around here. So this is some ways I've learned over the last 10 years how I've increased my blood traffic and now hopefully some of these tips will help all you out. Maybe you're new, maybe you've been doing this for 10 plus years. So you're thinking about starting a WordPress blog. Some of you have already done that. Some of you might be here thinking, hey, I want to start a WordPress blog. I think this is a great thing I could do to be creative, to show up my talents. So you get in front of the computer and you work to create your brand new blog. And there's two versions of WordPress. There's the dot com and the dot org. I tell a lot of people, if you're just getting started, use dot com. It's great. It's easy. You can start for free. They've got great plans on there where it only costs 100 a year. Maybe the premium one where you can put the pluggins in is only 300 a year. Get a lot of data. Dot org, you have to find a host. You have to download the software. If you're not a very technical person that knows all your technical stuff, you're gonna get confused with dot org. So I would start with dot com. You can always migrate to dot org later. So congratulations. You just launched a WordPress blog. So how do you get people to come to your blog? Because you can launch your blog. You can submit it to Google and being webmaster. So the search engines know you're there. You can commit open social media accounts saying, hey, this is my blog. I'm ready to do articles, do coverage, and put it online. So how do you get people to come to your blog? These are some of the great tricks and tips to get people to visit your website or blog. And this is what I've done over the years. Blog the right way. So what I've done, every post I've put up on Geek Alabama has a header. So for my Sembits, I do a crowdsourcing morning post every weekday morning. I've covered up the logo because the work hand folks told me I had to cover it logo. But Geek Alabama, so there's always a banner on top for any Semin I'm doing. I do animation Monday, Roadscapes Wednesday, Trainscapes, you name it, it's a different banner. And then that gets indexed into Google Images, Bing Images, and that way people can see that when they're searching for something. Now, if it's not a Semin, if it's an individual post, if it's a post somebody submitted me to post, I do a custom banner like that. It's different, so I do the words, I find something unsplash, free warranty image, and then I attach it to the top of the article. And I'm happy because sometimes when I'm doing new articles, I see some of my past ones that I've done in the Google, you know, the free warranty. Excuse me, free warranty. That way, because people can see the image like that either on social media or on Google Bing Images, and they might click on that. So that's one of the best tips I've done over the years is to have a custom image for every post. And if it's a Sembit, like ask me reviews, I'll put it next to that as well. So I just put that up last week, and that's gotten pretty good traffic. I was saying somebody sent me a mental poster to review, so there was an article attached to that as well. Let me go back up. Okay, this is the next best thing. It's more than just using images. You have to use categories, tags, and a feature image. That little image I told you, I always put that as part of the feature image. You need to have categories. I mean, you need to have categories for what you do. You can see, that's just a bing in my list there. I do animation talk, ask me recipes, ask me reviews, book talk, it goes already down. I also get categories on Google and Bing search engines and all that. And you also have to use tags for every post. For my Sembits, I have five tags that I just copy and paste, and then I add more tags to what that post is gonna be about, whatever that story video I'm posting, whatever it's gonna be about. Tags are very important. For example, when you post something on the Tumblr, those tags get as part of the post on your Tumblr post. They just started doing that recently. Plus the tags get on index to do Google Bing and all your search engines. So when somebody's searching for something on Google or Bing, they'll find your article. You have to use tags every time. If you leave it blank, it's gonna be harder for the search engine to find that article that you put up. They might still find it, but it's not gonna be categories as good. So tags are extremely important. Same for the categories. Definitely use that every time. Search engine optimization is also very important. So plugins, there's Yoast SEO, that's a pretty important, there's others out there. But search engine optimization is also very important. You see the focus key phrase, and there's a meta, say please private meta description. Search engines use that, especially Google. They're Bing on that. Bing does too, Yandex, every search engine uses this. This makes it easier to, there's a search engine to index your article. You post it on the internet so people can find it. So SEO, if you just started WordPress, they have a good SEO built into the system already. But having a plugin also makes it better. Makes it a lot better for your articles to be searched so people can find your article. So I would recommend every time use that SEO plugin. So these are some of the semits I do. This is not all of them. I covered a little bit of them. But I do crowd sourcing. Animation Monday is one of my original semits. I started 10 years ago. It's still going very strong. You got about pets, gaming, roadscapes, disability, awesome. So these are my seven manners. There's two summits every day I do. And this could be an article, could be a video I found. These summits, you know, when you do a summit every week, like Monday I do science Mondays and animation Monday. When you do it every single week, people are gonna know, hey, it's Monday. I'm gonna post something anime and I'm gonna post something about science that week or Tuesday. I'm gonna post convention Tuesdays. It's about conventions coming up that next weekend or a pet relay and post. So on, so on, so on. So if people know you're gonna do that every week, they'll come back to your blog. Plus the search engines know you're doing that too. They'll learn that over time. So it makes it better to be searched by the search engines. So you don't have to do some of this. You can do wherever you want. But I find this has helped my traffic a lot. I would stay on a set schedule like I do my summits. I do a crowdsourcing post every Monday for Friday. I started a new one called Rise and Shine Music, which I do every morning. I'm posting a music video, any genre, it doesn't matter. I do an eating post every weeknight, which is a video, like a trailer that came out or something interesting I found. A lot of people like that. That's a set schedule that I do every single day, the eating post and I'm Rise and Shine. But along with the summits, I like to stay in a set schedule and it's simple, you do the content calendar, you can write it down, take notes. But staying on a set schedule keeps you on track. It keeps the blog on track, keeps the search engines on track because the search engines like blogs that stay on the same schedule all the time. You're not missing, you're skipping things. Every once in a while, I might miss an animation Monday by my post on Tuesday. Just post it, you know, don't skip a week, unless you're in a hospital somewhere or you're having a health emergency or family emergency, sometimes that happens. But staying on a set schedule, posting the same summits each day each week, keeps your SEO good, keeps people coming back to your blog, social media, SEO, you name it. Plus readers know what to expect throughout the week. I do the summits throughout the week. I do different types of posts every day. Some people send me posts I can put up. I might do a review, might go cover an event with pictures and video. That's another way to track traffic, go cover an event. If you're a good photographer, a videographer, people like weren't covering your 5K or your Christmas parade or your bicycling events, any event, people expect me to do that. I've done this for every 10 years in East Alabama. A lot of people like my pictures of photos and when you do pictures of photos, I post them on my profile photos on the blog, on Google images and my Facebook page as an album. Videos, I put them on, I don't put them on the blog because it takes so much data, but I put them up to YouTube and Facebook video. The more you put it up, the more places you put it up, the more traffic you can get. Social media, you have to use social media if you're running a blog. If you're not using Facebook, we're on here, Facebook is king. Facebook is the number one social media app around here and here in Alabama. There are others, Twitter, there's LinkedIn, there's Tumblr, there's YouTube, but Facebook is king. There's the most communities around here. Reddit's not as popular or the others are not popular around here. I've found Facebook gets the most traffic around here. It's just an Alabama thing. It could be different and maybe in a bigger city, Reddit might be more popular, but around here it's Facebook. Like I said, you must use social media. If you're not posting your articles on Facebook, and not just Facebook, but Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress on Tumblr now, so I'm definitely posting on there, you're missing out. People know, it makes it harder for people to find your blog or website. See, people can read your blog from anywhere now. They just don't have to read on computer anymore. Everybody's got a phone, so they can read your blog on your phone. They can see the link you're posting on Facebook. They can open it from your phone or you're from Twitter or from Reddit. So my blog, my website, if you read it from the browser, it's normal, but I've set it up where you read it from the phone, it's an easier format to read. So you don't see all the sidebar stuff or anything when you're reading an article or anything. But I would optimize your blog so you can read it from desktop, laptop, phone. So post links, photos, and videos. So obviously post links to your articles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the Tumblr and all that, but I don't just do that. You can post individual photos, but like I said, you just covered recently or a short little video, something you just covered recently or maybe a short reel. I mean, Facebook reels, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts are huge right now, same for TikTok. So I do a little video series. I try to do two every weekday. I post it on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. So I post it on TikTok first, I just copy the words I post and I just post it on everything else. So I would not stick to one social media app. Like you've heard they're trying to ban TikTok. You've seen the mess going on with Twitter, with Musk and everything. Don't rely on just on one social media app. Just don't, because tomorrow TikTok might be banned and nobody can use it anymore. Tomorrow, Twitter might be bankrupt and it's gone. That could be happening soon, but our new ones, Master Don, our Sprottable just opened up. There's post news. There's new ones popping up all the time and I don't use the new ones often yet. For example, I have a plugin where all my articles, there's getting all posted to Master Don now. So when I post a new article, it goes up to my Master Don as well now. There is a plugin for that on your press. Yeah, and I'm hopefully Sprottable and post news will get one of those soon. Like I said, don't rely just on Facebook. I mean, I know Facebook is king around here. Most people use Facebook. There's the Facebook groups in the communities, but there's a lot of good communities on Twitter. There's a great disability community on Twitter. Tumblr is growing because a lot of people looking for alternative to Twitter. LinkedIn's getting popular because people getting laid off again. YouTube Shorts is getting huge. Just don't rely on one social media app, use multiple. And one tip I use is that I use a social media scheduler. Buffer is a great one. There's others out there. What you could do is schedule each night, post you want, post for the next 24 hours or for the next two days. Like if you're going on vacation, if you're gonna have a weekend event happening, you're gonna be waving to the computer. You could schedule stuff in the next few days. Buffer has Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and they have TikTok now too. But you can schedule stuff way ahead and they'll post for you where you don't have to be in front of the computer or in front of your phone, they'll all magically go up. And they can tell you metrics and everything on there too. I locked in to a $10 a month plan before they changed everything. So I'm only paying $10 a month. But the one plan I have, you can link up to 10 accounts. So I have the Geekalbema pages and I have the Geekalbema Pets social media pages. And I can just post a picture, link, short video, anything, and then I'll go up automatically. There could be an issue here and there, but I have the app on my phone too and you can resolve that. Covering events. So these are some of the pictures I've taken. James Van, Pets, oh, sorry. Let me go back down. It's hard to scroll down to do this. There we go. So I've covered numerous events over the years. James Van knows me pretty well. The local meteorologist around here, if you don't know him, you might want to look him up. He's a great meteorologist. I think it's Amy Coppinser's name. I've done events, horse carriages. I've done numerous, numerous, numerous events throughout the years. And then I edit the photos. I name each folder by what event it is. Yeah, what I do is I'll copy all the photos, name that event, and then I'll pull them up online. That makes it easier for Google and being able to search your images for somebody searching for something. So like I said, all the images I take for any event, I'll put them up on the blog, Facebook, and Google. Google photos, you can put it as an album and everything. I used to do Flickr, but they wanted to charge me for it. Videos, I'll put the whole video up on YouTube and Facebook. You get a lot of games been on Facebook for a long video. Like last weekend, last Monday, I covered a dog park type business opening in Aniston. So I did a whole video of new owner speaking, put it up on YouTube and Facebook. The owners love it, the community. And I took photos of the new facility and the pets there and everything. And of course, it's getting a lot of good games with my line already, because I've already gotten a text message from the owner saying thank you for doing that. Stuff like that, maybe go open, cover a new business opening in your community. Maybe if it's a restaurant, try to food out. You know, post how their food was tasting. Stuff like that can get attracted to your blog. And I've done plenty of that over the years. I think that's a good way to get community and gain a bit to your blog or website. It's to cover new things, cover existing things. Like maybe a business that's been there for a while, you might want to try. You know, go try it. It's a restaurant or a store or anything. Just go try it, take a few photos. Maybe talk with the owner of it. Do a little written thing and put it online. People read that stuff. I find that better than doing Google reviews or Yelp. Because people, you know, you can go on Yelp and Google's reviews and read the business, review that business. But sometimes it looks better on a website, you know? I think so. All right. Next thing is podcast. Podcasts are huge now. I find websites with a big following. You have to do a podcast. I mean, you can do it once a week. And most people don't have time to do a daily one, but maybe once a week. It's not too expensive or time-consuming to start a podcast. It's not. I mean, there's free software out there, all the cities one where you can record for free and record and edit and all that. But the microphone's not that expensive. Hook up to the computer, USB port. And there's free web hosting online where you can host your podcast. But I find podcasts is a new way to get a conversation to your website and blog. Now you can do anything, any type of podcast, depending on what you post online. So I'd say choose a podcast provider, set a schedule and start your podcast. So over the Christmas season, I did Christmas from the North Pole Christmas countdown. So I did a daily short under five minute podcast talking about something for the North Pole and Santa Claus, the elves, something like that. Just something fun. I mean, people love that. I've gotten thousands of engagements on my podcast provider. And I'll definitely do that again next Christmas. I do a ton of Christmas coverage every season with photos, parade coverage, attractions, all over on them. I was very busy last December. I finally just got everything up. But I'm watching a few new ones here soon, a road one. I find there's hardly any podcasts about roads and infrastructure out there. I'm a road geek. So there's one coming. When you do a podcast, there's four main providers to submit that podcast to. Apple is the king. Apple Podcasts is the biggie. I mean, when you submit your podcast feed to Apple Podcasts, it takes it to most of the providers, like Cast Box, Pocket Cast, which are where persons, where people can listen to it, download it and listen to it. There's another one is Google Podcast. Now I'll submit there too. Spotify, many, many people have Spotify on their phones. And a lot of people listen to podcast through Spotify. So definitely submit it there too. The other one is Amazon. You can listen to podcasts for your Alexa device now. And you know, or they have the music app too that you can listen to. So those are the four main ones. If you submit to those four, it's pretty much gonna be covered everywhere. Presentations. I have done quite a few unique presentations over the last 10 years. 15 life lessons from classic board games, 20 phone life lessons from Saturday morning cartoons. I didn't want to walk the back, the future got right in the future as an anniversary gift. 21 things geek nerd characters do so you can be successful in your life. There's many more than that. But I've done these presentations where I put them up on SlideShare. I'm eventually moving to probably speaker deck. SlideShare has kind of died off. But I've done quite a few of those. And a lot of people like them. I've had people send me photos from under conferences. I did one about the walking dead. Life lessons for the walking dead. And people loved, I got a photo of somebody sharing that presentation. People love those. And I got a few new ones coming. But I've done tips and advice and stuff from TV shows and movies. I like to. Oh. I think that's, sorry about that. I think that's the first time that's happened to anybody, right? But presentations, I upload them on the blog as a separate blog post so people can read that, find it on Google and Bing and all that as well. Plus I put it up on SlideShare and also put it on social media as well, Facebook, link it to Facebook, Twitter and people love these things. And then I've gotten people to share them. I've gotten sends down the views on those. And I got more coming. So in closing, hard work and plenty effort can make your blog succeed. It's gonna take a lot of work if you're just starting one. You got to design your website. You have to get everything right. You gotta come up with segments or things you wanna talk about. You do what you like to do. What is your interests? What do you love? Everybody's different. Everybody has a different thing they like. I like roads and geeky stuff. That's what I do. You might like fashion. You might like classic movies. You might like, you know, Marina, boat stuff, cars. Do what you like to do. If you do something, if you're gonna do something where you don't like, you're gonna get bored, your contact's not gonna be good and you're gonna fall off pretty quick. So what I've learned is do what you love. Do your geeky passions. Everybody has something they like to do and just do it. It's gonna take a lot of time to get your blog. You're not gonna get a million views in one day. It's gonna take time. It's gonna take some time to build your audience, you know, but don't get, don't stop. You know, if you get out there, talk to people in the community, post on social media, do videos, photos, written articles, do a mix of everything, you'll get your traffic. And that's what I've done. I mean, I've done pretty well over the years and I'm gonna get in here. I'm not gonna stop. So thank y'all, if you have any questions, I'd like to start. We have a question here. They're pretty good, it's real fun. It was an amazing talk, thank you so much. Thank you. So how are you really interested in your presentations? My question is, how do you set that up? Is that on your blog? Is it on your YouTube? Is it on your podcast? How do you do that? The presentations I set up as a power port presentation, just one at a time, you set up all your pages and then you can save as a PDF, like I just did with this. And then save as a PDF and then upload it to Slide Share or Speaker Deck. Yeah, I like to have a cover. And then at the end, I like to have something about you, about what you do and everything, so people can log on to your website, know what you're doing and everything. So it's like a separate piece of content from your website. Yeah, okay, gotcha. And then you can bet it to your blog and website or what you upload to Slide Share or Speaker Deck. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, you can do that. That's what you do, yeah. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, we have another question. Thank you, it was great, thank you. How do you make money from going to all these different events? I just do it. There's a couple of articles I get from submitters that pay me a little bit. It's basically just, some events might pay me a little bit for the gas and stuff, but I just go cover it, you know? You don't have to go do notable every week, maybe once a month, once a month maybe. But a lot of events in your community are probably free. I mean, it's not gonna, a lot of your events in your community are probably free. Like a five K or a charity or something, you don't have to pay anything to go into it. You have to just take your camera and, you know, and take some photos and talk to the people. Okay, thank you. We have some more questions. Hey, Nathan, thanks for your time. On the Google SEO page, when you're talking about tags, what is that supposed to be? Like let's say you're making a blog about your life lessons from The Walking Dead. What would you tag that? I would tag it Life Lessons, The Walking Dead, Life Lessons from The Walking Dead, Presentation, Zombies, anything from that genre I would tag. Just the more tags, the better. So don't go overboard. The WordPress has a limit of, could you add categories of tags together at 15? So don't go over 15 together. But don't go too overboard. Seven to eight will probably do the trick. So are your tags usually the same as your categories? Most sometimes no, sometimes yes. It depends on what kind of content I'm putting up. Okay. Are there any more questions? There's one over here. There's some, there's one there too. Okay. Great job, Nathan. One question about the blog post. Do you do all the categorization tags, SEO? Do you do like, do you automate any of those or you just do it by yourself? I don't do much automation to it. I do use IFTTT for some things to automate some of the social media stuff. But every post I'll put the tags and categories in by myself and put everything scheduled together. Like Friday, I scheduled everything for the weekend on the blog. So everything is scheduled out. So I don't have to worry about it again on Monday. But every post I've written and done, I've clicked the category or what that content's about. Add some tags due to SEO on the bottom and your post or schedule wanted to do. This might be a stupid question, but about the podcast about submitting them to Apple, Spotify and everything, is there any costs associated with it? No, it's free. Okay. All the podcast browsers are free. But you have to, if you're gonna do a podcast, you have to put it, Apple is the king. They're the ones that got started and you gotta do Apple, Apple, but Google, Spotify and Amazon too. That'll get you pretty much anywhere. Hi, thank you. When you tag your articles, do you use the same type of tags that you would use when you're posting it out to social media? So do your social media tags match the tags you use on your blog? Yeah, I will. When I post the tags, when I post it to Tumblr, it'll automatically show up on Obama Tumblr now. Now, Facebook, I put it on Facebook and Twitter. I don't use the same tags. I'm not gonna copy and paste because Twitter has a limit on how many characters. I might add one or two tags just to get the social media searching going. But if you're putting eight tags up on your post, I don't copy and paste the same eight tags on the Facebook or Twitter. That looks too clunky. Makes it look a little ugly, you know? Are there any other questions that I missed, anybody? Well, I have one outside the technology. My question is how do you maintain those relationships that you have with the people that request you to come out and cover things? Or if you go out on your own, how do you maintain those friendships and those relationships? It's both. I've got a lot of people, friendships, people that know me that fall on Facebook and Facebook's the king around here, so Facebook mostly. There's a little bit of Twitter and Instagram, but it's mostly Facebook. And sometimes I'll meet new people, they'll email me or email's another good way too. But sometimes I'll just email. If I see a new event popping up next weekend, something new, I might message that person. I'm a messenger on Facebook or email. That's another good way, messenger. Facebook Messenger, that's another good way to contact people. But sometimes people know me, sometimes it's new. It's mixed up both. Does anybody have another question? Am I missing anybody? Okay, I just have one more. This question relates like mainstream media. When you're posting, obviously some of them are probably following you. How do they reach out to you to ask you to share your content with them? If they do, what kind of strategies do you have to maintain or build a relationship with television stations or newspapers? Yes, I've had some TV networks share out to me to share some of their content before. A lot of times, maybe like a new TV show coming out or a new series or some book or something. So for anybody that comes out to you like that, they're gonna maybe send you a media hit. That's usually how it works. They tell you if you could watch the show privately but don't talk about it until a certain date because they wanna keep it under wraps until a certain date. So if you get contacted by a TV network or a magazine or website or podcast or whatever, listen to what they say. Don't talk about something early before they say you can talk about it because that will make them angry. But that's a great opportunity. If you get somebody big contact you saying, I want you to talk about our show or something, definitely reach out to that because that's gonna help you traffic. Thank you, anybody else have a question? All right, let's give them a hand. Thank you, Mr. Young, appreciate it.