 So without further ado, please welcome Ellen Jenkins. Thank you. Today we're going to be talking about rethinking blogging for businesses. So I was explaining a little bit before we were just chatting, I didn't actually officially meet you, but we were chatting beforehand about the different types of blogging for businesses. So there are some people who blog for their business and they actually make money just straight from their blog. So that's the people that maybe they make money from affiliate links or they make money from selling ad space on their blog. But then there's the... Someone's talking to me. There's also the types of people who have blogs that attract customers and so people are blogging for the sake of putting content out there that ranks in search engines and it performs on social media and they get customers interested in their business from that. So the latter is what we're going to be talking about mostly today. So before we dive in I just want to introduce myself again just briefly. I know thank you for introducing me. My name is Cameron. If you would like to tweet about the session or anything like that my handle is at the bottom there as well as the hashtag for WordCamp Santa Clarita. So you can do that. That's going to be at the bottom of all of my slides. So yeah definitely don't feel like you have to rush to write anything down. You can tweet about the session or ask me any questions or anything that you want or just comment on it and I think we'll also have time later. I can answer any questions later as well. So I know no one came here to hear me talk about myself. I definitely don't want to belabor this point but I think introducing my background will help with some helpful context for the rest of the presentation. So a little bit about my background. I have been in the digital marketing world for about eight years. A bulk of that time has been spent at Scorpion. So if anyone is local to Santa Clarita hopefully I think some of you probably at least are. Scorpion is local to Santa Clarita. They've been in the area for a long time. So I was there for about six and a half years. My job there was leading a team of search engine optimization professionals. So some of them were content developers. Some of them were local SEO specialists. Some of them were SEO strategists. But what does that mean? So I want to err on the side of explaining everything because I know it's beginner's day. I don't want to assume that anyone does or doesn't know anything. So if I feel like I'm belaboring a point it's just I want to err on the side of explaining everything. So search engine optimization and content marketing what does that all mean? Now it essentially means that I was responsible for the team that was trying to get people's websites to show up in Google. When you perform a search you know you want to be able to find relevant helpful information. There's two sides to the search engine. There's the paid side where you pay per click. That's PPC. And then there's the organic side which is what my team was responsible for. So after Scorpion I went to work at Moz. Moz is an SEO software company so it was pretty cool to get to work there because I used their tools when I was at Scorpion. So then I got a chance to do content marketing in SEO for Moz which is awesome. And now as my contract with Moz is winding down I'm working for my own business that I started Soapboxly and we're doing the same thing. So we're doing SEO and content marketing and doing all of these things producing content so that our customers get to attract their ideal customers. And then I also blog for industry publications like Search Engine Journal and LSA Insider. So why do I mention all of that? So I mention all of that because I have spent a lot of time blogging for businesses. Like an inordinate amount of time. So after a while though I kind of started to wonder like is this even making an impact? Are people even reading these blogs? And if so, if they are reading them how does that even help my clients business? You know when I first got started in digital marketing it was pretty soon after college, soon after I graduated. And I don't know if you all remember how you were back in that stage but I was just happy to get paid. And I was happy that I had a job. I was happy that someone was giving me a paycheck. I didn't really question why I was blogging. Our clients were paying us money and I was like this is great. I'm getting paid to blog and I'm not questioning why. But then after a while I started to think I was like okay these clients are paying good money for these blog posts and what are they getting out of this? And I started to think like are people reading this stuff is it performing like any good business owner or marketer you're going to have to start asking the question are you making more money on this than you're spending on it right? Because otherwise you won't be in business for very long. So who is this talk for? I think hopefully this talk is going to hit on all different types of people. It's going to be relevant to a lot of different groups. So I think number one it can be relevant for business owners. So if you own your own business or own your own maybe side house or side project hopefully it's going to be relevant for you because blogging can really help your business attract potential customers whether you're doing the blogging yourself or maybe you're freelancing or hiring out and having someone do the blogging for you. It's also helpful for marketers people who are in the marketing industry. So if you're responsible maybe you work at a business doing the marketing you can feel free to go in. No it's okay hi welcome. I know it's always awkward to walk right in but no that's the easiest way. Don't no don't be sorry that's the easiest way to get to your seat. So it's also for marketers and it's also for bloggers obviously. I mean this talk is rethinking blogging for businesses so it's going to also be helpful for people who are getting paid money to write blogs for businesses. Hopefully we can do it smarter and better and hopefully have a better result. And it's also for people who do search engine optimization so these are the people maybe they're not doing the content directly but they're in charge and responsible for making websites show up prominently in search engines like Google. So I think it could be relevant for any and all combination of these types of people. So this was my hypothesis when I started putting this presentation together my hypothesis was that business blogs are broken. So how business blogging typically works it's pretty simple this is usually my experience with clients they will hear somehow that blogging is what they should be doing. So maybe they're talking to a friend their friend says hey man I've gotten a lot of I've gotten a lot of potential clients from blogging people are finding my blogs in search engines or on social media I'm getting a lot of attention that way or maybe the business owner is struggling to get new customers and they're doing a lot of googling and get new customers how to get more clients I'm struggling I need help and they'll probably stumble on a blog on Forbes or something like that and has a list of these things you should do to get more clients and more customers and blogging is usually on them I mean you've probably all heard that blogging is a good thing to do but not a lot of us know exactly why or we can't really articulate okay here blogging is important but why exactly is this so important. So a business owner usually hears that it's important then they decide okay I'm either gonna pay a blogger to do it maybe I pay you know someone on elance or whatever text broker all those different freelance platforms are today or someone who just wants to blog for the business or they decide you know I know my business best no one knows my business better than me so I'm gonna do it I'm gonna reserve some time in my day to blog. So regardless of who's doing it blogs start to go up on the website. Adam a regular cadence or maybe a spotty cadence depending on you know how much time you've left for yourself I know me it's kind of hard to get you know regular blog posts up just because we're all so busy that's it's a thing that takes a lot of effort and a lot of time so that's how it typically works but is this even doing anything so I decided to test it now before I get into the details of the test that I ran I wanted to kind of explain why I ran a test so throughout the course of all the time I've been in digital marketing I have been asked by lots of tech clients why am I not getting any traffic so I usually end up getting pulled into these situations where a client is saying I have been blogging or I've been paying your company to blog for me for 3 months or 6 months or 12 months or even longer sometimes and they're just frustrated they're wondering why after all this time exchanging money to get these blog posts among other things why they're not getting the traffic that they thought they would get and so usually what I end up having to do is I perform a content audit so what I do is I go into their Google Analytics I try to see if it's true because sometimes clients you know if you all work with clients sometimes they freak out over small things we all have our that could be a talk in and of itself on managing clients oh my goodness but definitely one of those situations where you want to corroborate it you want to make sure that the data backs up what they're saying so you go into Google Analytics and you try to see okay is this actually true are they getting any blog views if so where are the blog views coming from how popular is their blog you know what have we been doing for them is it successful and usually what I find is sadly no sadly it's not been successful they have maybe one or two blog posts that are performing well in search engines and the rest are just falling flat no one is finding them maybe they got a couple hits on social media the first day it was posted and then it kind of trails off if you've ever seen like Google Analytics you know posted on social and then it just dies after that and there's no traffic so that's been my experience in the past and that's been my experience in the past so I wanted to test to see if this was true on a broad scale if this wasn't just my personal experience I wanted to see if this was true of most business blogs so this is the result so the test that I ran I found that 65% of business blogs don't get any organic traffic now again by organic I mean specifically visits originating from a search engine like Google and not the ad portion the organic portion so I have this shortened link up here if you want to visit it you can view and I'll post my slides too so you could grab this link later as well but essentially it's just like a longer write up of my methodology behind the study it's not something where I evaluated millions and millions of business websites that would take time that no one has but what I tried to do is grab a representative sample so I grabbed you know a bunch of different websites from offices across the country all different types lawyers and plumbers and dental offices from all different cities throughout the US like the qualifying factor was that they had a blog I wanted a true sample of the state of business blogging today and what I found is that 65% of them they don't get any organic traffic and I thought that was really sad and 85% get low or no organic traffic that's so much people are spending so much money on these blogs and if not they're spending their own time on these blogs what's the deal what gives what is the problem here well I think I can chalk it up to three main things and these are at least the theories that I've come up with over the course of you know my years in the industry I think these serve as like the three kind of main pillar problems so number one I think business blogs tend to not get the organic traffic that they could be getting just because they're thinking of their blog the wrong way people do consume business blog content people can find it and enjoy it and want to read it and it can perform well but people tend to think or businesses tend to think that their blog is a publication like the signal or the New York Times or something like that and we'll dive into each of these sections a little bit further so number two I think the other thing that's wrong is that business blogs tend to either oversell themselves or they kind of use their content to undersell themselves and they don't talk about themselves at all and then the third main problem I think is that business blogs tend to be a little siloed they tend to be a little too separate they're disjointed they're not really connected to a main business goal so these are I think the three main problems and by diving into each problem and then exploring the solutions I think we're going to be able to start blogging smarter rather than harder for a higher impact so that's going to serve as kind of like the outline for the remainder of this so number one I think business blogs need to realize that you are not the New York Times and that sounds maybe a little bit harsh but it's not meant to be it's definitely not it's just meant to say that people don't consume business blog content the same way that they consume content in like the New York Times or the signal or whatever you read so businesses tend to have these assumptions based on how they think people find their content so the number one assumption that I have experienced with business owners is that they believe that people are going to find all of their business blog content from their homepage so the idea is something like you know someone wakes up on a Sunday morning and brews their coffee and sits down with their tablet and they go mmm let's go to Joe Plummer's site and find the blog and let's just peruse and let's have a good Sunday morning and just browse through all of these blog topics so that's how you would read the paper but it's not how you read business blog content it's a little bit different so no people tend to not consume business blog content that way second of all people tend to assume businesses tend to assume that people are finding all of my blog content through like an RSS feed or sign up to subscribe and there are some business models that lend really well to this I mean those people that have just general interest blogs and people sign up to receive all of their content and that's great but if you're talking about a business like a law firm or a dental office or a hospital or something like that people aren't going to be like oh can't we wait to see what my dentist posts next on their blog so people tend to not find it that way either so the third kind of way the assumption is that people will find my business blog content through social media and now this is definitely not a knock on social media it's not meant to be at all because social media is a valuable way I think to get exposure and to engage with your audience to engage with your community but it tends to be that organic reach on platforms especially like Facebook and Instagram is going way down those types of platforms are really trying to emphasize content that's posted by you know friends and family and people that you tend to engage a lot with rather than a business so that tends to be a little bit different and it's also usually the fact that people are following you and seeing your content on social media if they already know about you they've liked your page they're already aware of you so these businesses if they're posting on social media they're not going to have as good of a chance of reaching new people new potential customers it's usually those people that have already known about them and engaged them so no usually not so how do people find business blog content there's got to be some way people find your business blog content so people will find your content via search via search engines and that happens when they need it so when you have a question who do you turn to I mean I personally like probably most of you turn to Google I mean I could be sitting on the couch right next to my husband and have a question and I don't ask him I pull out my phone and I and I Google it I mean not always I mean I you know I talk to him sometimes but I Google a lot of stuff and I think the numbers kind of corroborate that I mean Google says 5 billion you guys 5 billion queries per day are searched in Google and that's 2 trillion per year and that's insane so if you think about that even if your business say you're you know I keep using the same examples just for ease but like if you run a dental office or whatever you know not all of those queries are going to be related to dental offices and dental related things but even a small sliver of billions is still a lot there are still people asking questions about what you do and what your business offers so this is the difference between inbound and interruption when it comes to the different types of marketing inbound says I'm going to create really relevant high quality content that performs it's always on it's always accessible it's always available to my potential customers and then when someone has a question you know they Google something and if your content is optimized well and it's you know relevant and high quality they're going to be able to find it so people your potential customers are finding your content when they need it whereas interruption marketing is a little bit different interruption marketing kind of sounds negative again there's a time and a place for all of this stuff this is definitely not an organic search only kind of kind of a talk but interruption marketing says that I'm going to put my message in front of you whether you're asking for it or not that's an ad right whereas inbound you're posting content and people are finding it when they want it so the people that are visiting and viewing this content it's they're viewing it on their time so they're more qualified they're more likely to engage with your business and be interested in what you have to say because they find they found it it was their idea rather than an ad that you're kind of you know putting in front of someone when they weren't asking for it or prepared for it or they didn't even want it so they changed the way our businesses blog well I have some tips hopefully this is going to be actionable so the first group of tips kind of centers on writing content that answers questions your ideal customers are asking so in order to be able to do that you have to know who your ideal customers are now I talk with a lot of businesses and depending on how mature the business is or maybe they're just getting started a lot of times people don't know they just say well everyone is my target customer and that is not the right answer so you have to narrow and it's okay if you don't know yet it's totally cool if you don't know yet just work on getting there work on identifying who your ideal customers are how old are they what do they like where do they live ask questions like that and if you do already have a business start to kind of focus on maybe you've never thought about what all of your customers have in common just look at your your customers that you've had before and try to identify common themes well my customers tend to be you know between the ages of 25 and 36 and my customers tend to be you know it's always the men calling me and you know you just want to be able to identify who your ideal customers are so that you can talk to them because if you want to create relevant content you got to know who you're creating content for so the next question you'd want to ask is what problems does my business solve for them so I can use myself as an example you know my clients come to me behind when they're facing a problem of let's say for example they just started a business and they have no idea they know that you know organic and search engines and all that stuff is important but they have no idea where to get started with that and so they come to me with that problem like I have a business and I want to get attention to it this is my I need help so that's the problem that my business solves for people so if you have a business or you work for someone you know a business owner and you're blogging for them you're going to want to try to ask this question what problems does that business solve and from that you're going to be able to create a lot of or find a lot of great content ideas just from thinking and focusing on the problems that the business is solving and if you're having trouble with this go through your emails and contact forms to identify common questions I think this is a really underrated tactic and tip so the times I've done this before it's been really interesting I've gone through my you know my clients contact forms just because you know we're it's always a good idea to go to there for blog posts ideas so I go through there and like man everyone who's contacting them tends to ask the same question and that's addressed nowhere on the website so bingo that's a great idea for a blog topic things that people are commonly asking so if you have a CRM or you you know however you keep track of your client or potential client communication definitely go through that go through those old logs of all that old information and see what common questions and pain points people are asking you about think about what's most misunderstood about your industry you guys are probably all in a in an industry where you know if you explain it to a friend or a family member there's a misunderstanding like oh no that's not what SEO is like you probably all have that thing that people just don't get about what you do and they just don't understand it's really confusing to people who aren't in your industry so think about those things think about the things that people just commonly understand about your industry and use your blog posts as an opportunity to clarify that for people say okay people don't understand you know this particular thing about SEO well cool no one tends to understand that I'm going to write a blog post about it that's immediately relevant content because you know that that always confuses people it's a perfect idea for writing a blog post think about what the biggest barriers are to someone seeking your product or service so there's a lot of different industries obviously and there's a lot of different problems in that each industry solves but it's definitely a good idea to think about those things about your industry that people just tend to not like right off the surface so you know oh I don't want to go buy a car because I don't want to have to haggle with someone or you know those common barriers that someone has when they think about a certain type of business so use your blog post as a chance to kind of you know talk about those things in a way that's like I'm going to I'm going to raise your objection and answer it and address it before you even have a chance to raise it so use that just think about these in terms of creating blog topics and thinking about ideas so the next group of tips is going to surface or center on how to focus on things that people are searching so you not only want to know your customers and you not only want to get to know who they are and what they do and how they act and the questions they have you also want to understand the exact words they're using to search for what you offer because I know for me I mean there are definitely things that I assume about my industry you know I say oh everyone knows what SEO is or everyone knows what content marketing is and that's not the case so there's probably things in your industry that you assume like oh everyone knows what blah blah blah is that specific thing in your industry but you realize later like oh that's jargon my potential customers don't actually know what that is so keyword research is a great way to actually find out how people are searching the exact words and phrases people are using to kind of find information about your business so one way to do that is just using Google itself now it's pretty cool I typed in an example here of auto detailing so there's no boring industries you can even blog if you're you know have an auto detailing business so in this example I typed in auto detailing and on the Google search results page itself there's this thing now called people also ask box and it's just such a great idea for like getting ideas for blog post ideas these are related questions to what you typed in so it's amazing you can do this with pretty much any word or phrase and a lot of times Google will surface this kind of accordion list of questions related to it and these are great ideas for coming up with blog posts so another cool thing if you see this you can click on these and it will just keep expanding so if you click on one it will show you like five more so there's a lot of different questions that can serve as good ideas for blog posts and another tool it's a free tool I love it it's called answer the public if you've never heard of it it's free up to a point I think it's like a freemium type of product but if you go to answerthepublic.com and do a similar thing what you can do is type in I use the same example auto detailing I typed in auto detailing and what you get is a bunch of questions people have typed into a search engine that include that word so if you're a dentist type in dentist and see you know what things people are searching related to dentist if you're you know whatever you are type it in and answer the public will give you a huge long list of a bunch of different things and it gives you two different formats this is like the pretty format that everyone's like really impressed by but it's so hard to read so I would switch over to the data version and just get like the list version so if you're going to impress a client yeah use the right hand side one I use that one for clients but the left hand side is like the actual readable version so answer the public it's awesome another one that I love another free tool it's called FAQ Fox and if you Google search FAQ Fox it'll come up with the URL for this tool so what you can do is you type in again to use the same example auto detailing so what I did was type this in and what this tool does is it scans a bunch of forms like Reddit and Quora and it's great because it'll come up with a list of forum threads where people are talking about that topic whatever topic that you put in so this is a great place to go and find blog topic ideas because usually people use forums and they go and ask people stuff on forums when they can't find their answer on Google so that's like bingo that's a great idea for blog topic ideas because no one has answered it yet you have no competition that's amazing so use FAQ Fox to go and find blog topic ideas based on what people are searching about your industry in forums and then so we've kind of moved on to this third pillar here even though SEO is what I do I'm like spending the least amount of time on like the technical aspect of it because so much of performing well in search engines is about just having high quality relevant content that your audience wants to read and that's the most important part Google has gotten so much better surfacing content that's actually good instead of just matching a list of ranking factors so SEO is still important though because Google is still a machine Google is not a human even though it's trying to be Google is trying to replicate what a human searcher would pick but it's still a machine so there are certain things we have to do to make sure our blogs are accessible and that Google understands them not just our audience right so what I would suggest is using one of these plugins if you're not already I personally used Yoast I think it's great it's one of those other freemium type of products I think the free version is totally sufficient but what it does is it makes it a lot easier to do those things that make your blogs more accessible for search engines so things like title tags and descriptions and things like having a site map all of those things are a lot easier with a plugin like this so I definitely recommend doing that so essentially you can create fewer blogs that have a higher impact we can kind of stop spinning our wheels and churning out content that doesn't perform because what I've seen so many times is people just like ah man we need to do five more blog posts for this client this month what do we do this sounds like a fun topic idea and we just spin our wheels and we keep like just churning out this content based on ideas that we had and maybe some of them will stick but because we didn't research and because we didn't actually look into what our clients actual customers want to read and want to know about a lot of them won't end up performing because it doesn't hit the mark for the audience so the second kind of pillar here is you oversell or you undersell on your blog so if you picture like a pendulum on one end you have the people that say if they learn from us they'll buy from us and I don't know if you've seen any of these blogs but it's been pretty prominent in the industry lately where a lot of these like consumer brands like Home Depot or like Casper mattress they have launched their own blogs and their blogs are essentially they barely talk about the business at all they're just general interest pieces and they get a lot of traffic but guess what they all shut down because they're total cost centers and not profit centers they're not making any money for the business because they're just interesting and they're not actually doing any selling so that's one end of the pendulum and then the other end of the pendulum you have these people that say well to get the sale you need to be a little pushy or you read them and they're like we have x years of experience and we buy now and click here and all of this stuff and we've all read those kind of blogs but that's a total turn off right when the company's just bragging about themselves and when they're being really pushy that's the same reason we don't like used car salesman right it's sorry if anyone's a used car salesman I realize that such a negative you could be a good used car salesman anyway on the other end of the pendulum you have those types of people and that's just that's not right either so like with most things there's a happy medium right I like to say that the sweet spot for blogging for your business should hit somewhere between writing for sales and writing for enjoyment so you have this content that's really interesting and it's helpful and it's useful and people actually really enjoy reading it but it also is used as a vehicle to sell your product or your service I also like to talk about business blogging in terms of bringing someone from problem aware to solution aware so the kind of dumb example that I decided to use I don't know why but so a couple of weeks ago my car was making this really like awful dinging noise as if like someone's seat belt wasn't plugged in and no one's seat belt like we were all buckled and it was driving me nuts I'm like why is this happening every time I get in my car the seat bell is ding ding ding for a good minute or two and then it would stop and I'm like uh so I had this problem I was aware of a problem and so what you do when you have a problem a lot of times is Google it so I googled up like why the heck is my master making this dinging noise like what is going on so although this didn't the next part did not happen to me I'm going to use this for the sake of example so say I found like a local mechanic and they blogged about like this this dinging problem that can happen in your car and cool because they wrote a relevant blog that people are actually you know that addresses a problem that people actually had it cool I found it in search engines and I'm reading about it and as I'm reading I'm becoming aware that there's a solution to my problem how cool now I know that there's a solution to my problem and I'm learning more about how to fix it that's awesome but you can't stop there if you're a business who's blogging you can't stop there because someone's going to be like cool now I know that there's a solution to my problem bye and then not even buy from the business so what what the mechanic should do in the situation is say here's a solution to your problem this is a common thing also we can help also we've seen this a lot before also contact us here's an easy way to contact us and bring your car and we'll be happy to take a look at it boom that's how you bring someone from aware of their problem to ready for your solution another way to visualize this is just with the sales funnel right so if you think of that pendulum this is like what it looks like to only focus on selling selling selling you're only focusing on the bottom of your funnel but I always like to say that if you only focus on the bottom of your funnel if you're only focusing on buy from me buy from me and you're not actually informing your audience it's like asking someone to marry you on a first date it's like I don't know you yet I'm doing my research still okay but then you have those people who are only focused on the awareness stage and they never actually use the awareness and all the interesting content they have on their blog to actually drive people to actually make a purchase from them whether that's you know you're an e-commerce store and you're trying to get people to purchase on your website or you are a service based business and you're trying to get people to fill out your contact form or call you or you know do the chat bot or whatever you have on your site so you're trying to get people from awareness to conversion think about it in terms of the whole sales funnel so if you inform on the problem and you inform on your solution as well you have the recipe for business blog success now the last kind of point is the shortest but I think it's really important because I think a lot of business blog content is siloed I think it's pretty fragmented and it's not really attached to any larger business goals you kind of have blogging over here and then you have business goals and they don't really connect so I think we need to be thinking of blogging a little bit more holistically and when I don't understand something I try to make a visualization because that tends to help me so hopefully it helps you all as well it took me a really long time to to understand this like I said in the beginning when I first started when I was right out of college I was just happy to be getting paid I did not understand how my blogging actually contributed to my client's bottom line I'm blogging but what is that actually doing for the business so hopefully this helps number one businesses need to write content with a goal of ranking and search engines because that's how people are going to find you it's one way a really good way you can connect with your potential customers but I think a lot of businesses at least a lot of the ones that I've worked with I tend to want to stop there they say get me ranking on page one and that's all I care about and then they stop and celebrate when they hit page one and it's like cool but like your customers are way over here you have not you're only ranking you there's a long way to go so after your ranking you need to actually get that traffic think about the fact that you're on page one you're sharing page one with nine sometimes more other URLs what is going to make your stand out you still have to win that traffic right so let's assume that you did win the traffic cool I'm ranking on page one with my blog posts and I won the click now I got the traffic now you actually have to convince those visitors to convert you have to actually convince them to contact you so we can't just that's why we can't just write for machines right we can't just write for SEO because when we do read or read that SEO content that's not pleasant to read because someone just stuffed it with keywords and it's kind of short and it's not very it's just not interesting it doesn't hit on what you need as a consumer to be ready for making a purchase so our content also has to be compelling and it has to turn those website visitors into potential customers who are so interested in your content and they're so glad to have read what you had to say that they are willing now to sign up and fill out a contact form and become your customers and then what someone submits a lead form and this is assuming that you're not an e-commerce site and the purchase is done at that point but let's assume then that people have contacted you and they filled out a contact form and called you or whatever people are now you have the chance to actually make those leads your customers so what started as a blog ranking way over there has now made its way all the way to a customer so I just think it's important to not forget what it's for we tend to think of blogging over there I want to rank I want to rank but we forget the fact that we're trying to we're trying to actually get the business some customers so to kind of wrap it up business is blog for three main things in this universe so business is blog to rank for relevant keywords we want to make sure that our business blogs are actually getting surfaced in search engines that people can find them we also want those business blogs to engage the reader we want them to be interesting enough to be compelling and persuasive and we also want those business blogs to convert they need to convert readers into customers in order for you to make a positive impact on your clients bottom line and have a positive ROI from blogging thanks that's all I had and I don't know if there is time for questions yeah sure until someone tells me no I'll take questions yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I think that's a really important point that you brought up I think that's totally true I think if you are blogging you don't always have to blog directly about I do this so I can only blog about like if you're a dentist for example I can only blog about like dental implants like no one wants to blog only about dental implants so finding those interesting things where there's areas of overlap with something more interesting definitely try to latch on to those things that are maybe areas of overlap that are that make you more interesting but it's still relevant to what you do in some way yeah that's a great point yeah what would you say is like a healthy ratio between blog content like we've discussed in your talk versus blog content it's not necessarily going to get you a sale but it's relevant and interesting yeah I think it just depends on your goal for your website so if your goal like I said in the beginning is to maybe monetize some of your traffic and sell like you know ad space or do affiliate links or something like that then just raw traffic is a fine goal because raw traffic is what's going to get you money but if you're talking about using your blog to actually get business you want people even if it means less less traffic if it gets you more conversions and gets you more customers that's what you want so you want more customers if you're kind of operating on that model so more traffic isn't bad it just more traffic doesn't always equal more customers so if you blog about the more relevant things you blog about the greater your chances of getting really qualified leads and actual customers rather than just generally interested people yeah cool cool cool yeah what about membership organizations where members have is a yearly membership and their membership has lapsed and you want to bring them back in so this is more interruption versus I forget the other term inbound versus inbound but you want them you want people that were part of your organization to see your inbound traffic you want to make them inbound I guess so you're using interrupts to do that so how do you I guess get that group of people yeah like to re-engage and get more loyalty back from those people that were customers I think while organic is a totally fine option maybe that person has another question and then they find you through you know doing a Google search and they go yeah I've used them before so you can still that's still relevant but it's not as targeted it's not as if you can say to Google like okay only show my blog to people who used to be customers that's more like ad targeting and what what you're talking about so I think what you can do with that is you could even you know send an email to those people if you know that you do some type of email marketing and you can say like hey just a reminder like here's a discount coupon or something that kind of coaxes them back in to be re-engaged with you or something like that so maybe email and something more targeted than inbound would probably be good if you're specifically setting out to re-engage past customers yeah cool that's a really good question cool okay I think that's it but yeah feel free to tweet at me or tweet at me sounds aggressive you can just talk to me after I'll be around for a little bit yeah oh my website my website is soapboxley.com and I don't have that on here but I will I will definitely post it if you go to my Twitter profile I have it linked there as well so that that's my Twitter handle and you can go to that and you can see my Twitter profile page and I'll have a lot of like I'll have the link to the deck you guys didn't see the deck up there if you want it and I'll have a link to my website and things like that so I'll try to make all of that available yeah I use Google Analytics I think Google Analytics it just depends kind of yeah what you want to do for sure so if I'm doing a blog content audit and I want to see how people are engaging with all of the content then Google Analytics is perfect because that's a way to see engagement but if you're trying to see something like how many links have I earned and that's getting a little bit more technical but there are other platforms that can show you that I mean Google Analytics you can see referral traffic and that's kind of a roundabout way of viewing that but there are some platforms that are easier ways excuse me to see what you want to see Google Analytics yeah that's what I was referring to when it comes to like page views yeah sure mm-hmm do you use those for two different things or yeah yeah no that's a great question there's a lot of different tools that do a lot of different things so it kind of gets confusing to keep them all straight for sure Yoast is you know a plug-in within WordPress to help you recognize your post which is another jargony word that just essentially means make sure it's really accessible and findable for search engines so it's going to kind of guide you to do things like here's where you put in your title tag and it helps you do all those sorts of things whereas Google Analytics is more of like a not how to create your page but how to see how your page is doing yeah it's more performance and reporting rather than Yoast is helping you do the work yeah mm-hmm yeah oh sorry yeah I kind of bypassed over that there were like two things is that what you're talking about yeah so I personally used Yoast or I use Yoast the other one is called all in one SEO pack and I've heard that's good from a lot of people I don't personally use it so I can't like advocate it for it one way or another but I like Yoast so I would check that out I can recommend that one personally but the other one yes all in one mm-hmm cool I don't know like what time but or who's yeah two more minutes okay cool yeah if anyone has any other questions I'm available stuff yeah sure good yeah that is I love I should do a whole presentation just on I really like going in Google Analytics and do you use Google Analytics yeah is that what you so usually it just depends on what I'm looking for so if I'm looking for something like pure like popularity like we were talking about here how is it performing in search engines what I would do is try to go to that report that shows me all of my channels and I would want to see the source medium I would want to see what traffic is coming from Google Organic specifically and so I look at probably page views from Google Organic so that would be a metric I would look at if I wanted to just see how it was performing in search engines but if I wanted to see things like you know how how are people engaging with my site and like are people using this to view other pages on my site then I would look at things like Bounce rate and average and you know pages or pages procession and things like that so it really just depends what you're looking at but yeah there's so much data it's like ah what do I do with all of this but I think if you can isolate a goal and what you're trying to see and what you're trying to evaluate then it's a lot easier to kind of navigate analytics because you're only looking for one thing and not like all of the things and all of the metrics yeah and I don't know if you've used analytics now I don't know if it's still in beta but it has that cool like actually just type a question into it and it'll jump you to the report so if you yeah type it in there because they know it's overwhelming that's why they put it in there this is too much so if you just google or google if you just put it in the analytics search box up there and you say like hey can I how many sessions did I get last month it'll jump you to the report instead of having to like go through the navigation and throw all the data to find it so I don't know if it's still in beta I have it on at least the properties I look at maybe check that out be helpful it's not oh cool cool that's good to know so it's definitely helpful use that it's a little search bar jumps you to the right report it's awesome I love it cool last question oh yeah ah sorry I'll talk to you later I saw your hand go up first sorry are you writing all your content yourself for these customers so you have to you're studying their business and you have to really get with their business I guess and yeah yeah definitely if you're a if you're a blogger or a marketer that's going to become like your biggest skill I would say is your ability to kind of put yourself in the shoes of multiple businesses so it's hard enough to like get to know your own customers right but then when you're a blogger or marketer you really do have depending on how many clients you have you have to really put yourself in the shoes of lots of different businesses so I have clients who are software companies and psychiatrists and all kinds of and you really have to kind of step step into that role and that's how you create relevant content because we've all probably seen blogs that were written for you know different types of businesses where they go this is not written by someone who knows what they're talking about like the business owner did not write this oh yeah yeah that's a risk for sure yeah I I definitely out sort like as my company is growing for sure and I'm you know this is pretty recent but as my company is growing definitely I have some people that I used to work with at my agency who are like kind of already pre-meditated because I know them and who I'm using to help with writing that content but yeah it's definitely a risk because as someone who's managed those teams of writers who have had to write for all different kinds of companies that was the biggest struggle was people who it's not like writing well and being able to string a sentence together is honestly not the biggest battle the biggest battle is making sure your content doesn't say something inaccurate about the business because we've had that a lot of times where they say like you know hey here's a blog client and they're like we don't do this like that's not right and so yeah they're getting blogs but man like that's that's tricky it's definitely tricky you have to get to know the industry really well that you're writing for yeah I think yeah yeah okay cool thank you guys thanks yeah thank you really appreciate it it was fun this was fun