 Thank you. Can everybody hear me? If for some reason I start mumbling, it's not because I don't like you, so just let me know. If this is what you're expecting, then you're in the right place. If not, you know where to go. Or maybe not. So my name is Mark Bloom. My company is Ray Access and my Ray Access is a partnership. I have a partner, so we write, edit and deliver website content and blog posts, press releases, online writing, basically. That's what we do. That's our niche. So I want to say right up front that if you have questions at any time, raise your hands and let me know and I will answer them. You don't have to wait for the end because I know and if I'm going to cover it, I'll let you know. But I know that sometimes you'll forget to ask and I don't want that to happen. I'm going to cover a lot of ground today. So a little bit more about me. My background is I was a technical writer for about 15 years and I successfully escaped. My partner was a journalist for a lot of years. So our skills really cross well. We do a lot of, we've learned from each other. It's been a great experience. But my family has a history of writers. I had an aunt who wrote a seminal epic piece about the South, in fact, but she wasn't very assertive. So her book was called Gone with the Breeze. And then I had a great, great grandfather who wrote the first book on a boy and his bicycle. It was called Huckleberry Schwinn. The rest of the presentation will be based on fact. I promise you that. I had to get that in, yeah. Okay, so this is what I hope to share with you today. We're going to talk about the purpose of online writing, website, content, blog posts. I'll focus more on blogging, but feel free to ask any questions about the interplay between them. I'll talk a little bit about writing and writing tips. Talk about keywords and how to use them, some best practices regarding them, and a little bit about plugins that will help with publicity. So let me just state that my philosophy on online writing for business, and I think there's some crossover for personal websites as well. The website, your website, is where you're building trust with your readers, with any visitors that come. You're establishing your authority. You're connecting. You want to make that connection with whoever's there. And that's the place where, in certain pages at least, you want to try to sell your product to services. That's where when people get to a page where, whether it's a store or product page, they're more interested in buying than somebody that just arrived on your homepage. A blog, on the other hand, is a place to reach out. It's a place where you can explore different keywords that aren't on your website. They build up your website as far as content goes, which helps with your page rank. But most important, it's a way to reach out to attract visitors that normally wouldn't come to your website, because you can explore much different topics in your blog posts than you can on your website. So there's lots of things you can do with a blog. All of them should be to add value. You're educating, you're sharing, whatever it is you want to do with your blog, you want to try to add value to that person's life that ended up somehow visiting your website or your blog post. One thing I will say is, well, I'll say a lot of things today, but your blog should be part of your website. It should be based in the same domain. If you're linking to a blog off in a blogosphere somewhere, that's not going to do you as much good as having your blog part of your website, because when you're attracting people, you want them to be on your website. You want to be able to count that traffic if you're keeping analytics. There's a lot of good reasons for having your blog on your website. And of all of these things that you can do with your blog, the one thing that you shouldn't be doing is the bottom one. The same with your social media posts. If you're trying to sell your product or services through Facebook, it's not probably or likely going to work. The idea of a blog is to bring people back to your website. So once they're there, they can look around and they can, again, that's where you're connecting with them. So this is the question you should be asking yourself all the time. Not just at the beginning, not just today, but next week, always refining who you think your audience is. In any kind of writing, whether it's online writing, whether it's technical writing, whether it's journalism, whether it's marketing, you always have to know who you're writing to. That defines what kind of language you use, how forcefully you can push, how forcefully you can sell your stuff. This is the number one question. If you don't know the answer to this question for you, then it's worth spending time finding out, because that's going to affect everything else you do on your blog and on your website. So always keep refining. Has anybody ever heard of the term persona? Does anybody know what that is? A few nods. A persona is a identity of a sample user or even the ideal user. It doesn't even have to be the ideal user. But you build a persona to give yourself that person to look for. It should have a name, a gender, job, income, family, anything that you can reasonably come up with that will define that person. A picture. And put all this information up on your wall. And then whenever you're writing, whatever you're writing, that's the person you're writing to. That's the person you are addressing when you write to you. And that's a really powerful tool to help you write, but it's also really keyed in to who you're writing for. It's not going to be a real person. It's going to be a representative person. And you can have more than one. But personas are really useful for writing and for sales. So no matter who you're writing to, make sure you know who it is. So the next question is, what value do you bring? I mean, what is it that you have to offer that only you can offer? That's another good question to ponder. There's competitive advantage is one way to approach this. So in my company, we have two writers, two editors. That means everything we produce is both of us see it and edit it. My partner writes something, I'll edit it. If I write something, she'll edit it. That's a competitive advantage because most writers, especially in this town, are single, a single people, not to put any of them down. There are some great writers. But I think my competitive advantage is that there's two of us. What's your competitive advantage? Think about that and how to work it into what you're writing and who you're writing to. So these are all things to keep in mind. Everybody with me still? Nobody's nodding off yet? All right, give me time. Anybody know what this stands for? Almost. It's not the World War II radio station, but this is what your visitors are asking themselves when they come to your website or your blog. Most people think that your website is your storefront or your corporate identity online that's going to be there 24-7 even when you're sleeping. And that's true to a certain extent. But your website has to connect with those people that are visiting. That's its purpose. Well, one of its purposes. Your blog posts should be doing the same thing. So the language that you use on your website and in your blogs should not be about me, me, me, I can do this for you and I can do this. And you should buy this thing and you should avoid that kind of language and focus more on your audience. If you buy this, you will benefit by this, by these things. You will get these things. There's lots of ways to go about this. But I think it's very important and it's a lot of companies get it wrong. Your website and your blog posts should be outwardly focused, not about your company. Even though it's your website and it's about what you do, if you want to connect with people, make it about them. And, yeah, even your website will benefit from this kind of language. Okay, here's my favorite subject. And I can talk about writing forever. But I'm going to try to narrow it down and focus on just some things that I think will help. And again, if you have any questions, just let me know. Okay. Does everybody understand, when I say rhetoric, what I mean by rhetoric? It's kind of an academic word that's not used very often. But when I refer to rhetoric, rhetoric is the use of language to persuade. So it's not sales. It's not narrative, necessarily. But it's a way of speaking to people so that you influence them. Sort of like what I'm doing here today. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm not trying to get you to write the next great American novel, because one's been written already. But I want you to, I'm trying to get you to understand the idea of the difference between online writing and writing for anything else. So that's what I mean by rhetoric. So all of these tips are useful and valuable and things that you should be doing for your blogs and for your website. Engaging writing is what will draw people in. That first line is what, okay, in any story, you know, that's the one that makes you say, what's next? You're blog should be the same way. There's a lot of tips for this. For example, you could start with a personal anecdote. Or you could start with an example. We recently wrote a blog for a recruiting company. And we started with an example of somebody that was looking for another position. So how does the manager of that person react? What is it that they can do to keep that person in the company? And so that creates a situation where now you want to read more about how that's going to work. What's the manager going to do? Or is it going to be ultimately successful? Or is it a failed experiment, no matter what he does? Or she? So there are a lot of tricks to engaging writing. And I'm sure you know a bunch of them as well. Again, writing for your, the people that you're writing for, if you know who your audience is, you can write directly to them. Find out like what they're interested in. And that's a good topic. Find out, obviously, if you have a website, if you have a website, you know your business. And you should be able to come up with a list of 10 questions about your business in less than five minutes that maybe the average person doesn't know. And those 10 questions are the basis for 10 excellent blog posts. If you're a realtor, how many questions are there about buying or selling a house that people have? Millions. Well, maybe not millions, but hundreds. As a writer, there are a lot of tips that I share on our blog. So whatever your business is, that's topics for blog posts. You want to answer questions, even on your website. Your website should answer questions, establish your authority in your industry, whatever it is, and share that expertise. Every business, every business has a personality. Think of the difference between an Apple website and a bank's website. I mean, there's a big difference, both in the language, the design, the way it's presented. So whatever your personality is, whether you have a big company, whether it's just you, anything in between, put your personality in there. That's really important. That's another way of connecting with people. Right long, right short. What I mean by that, everybody, maybe you haven't heard, but Google likes long content, long form content. So if you look at the top web pages, they're going to have pages that are 2,000, 1,500 to 3,000 words. That's a lot of words. The reason I think Google likes it is because somebody who's reading that website is going to be spending more time on your site and that's something Google likes. But having a page that's 1,000 words isn't by itself good content. It has to be still, it has to be engaging. It still has to be informative. It still has to be interesting. Something people are going to want to read. I can show you tips about how you can take an article or page that's that's that long and still have it engage people just through formatting and simple tricks like that. As long as it's, as long as the content is still good. But not every page should be like that. Not every post should be 1,000 words. 500 words is usually fine for explaining something simple. A lot of it depends on the topic. And I just heard a presentation yesterday where they were saying you could take a huge topic and break it up into a series. Series of three or four blog posts all related part one, part two, part three people are going to come back and read it. And let me take taking a side here for a minute. Do people actually read your posts? Do people actually read your website? Well, more likely to read your website, right? Because that's who you are. That's that's what they they're there to learn something about what you do or your services or what differentiates you between your competition from your competition. But think about how you go online. What's your behavior? Do you go on and find a website and then read that whole page and then decide if you want to go on or not? I don't I don't do that. So people scan and headings help. Bullets formatting helps. And so it doesn't matter that you write this carefully crafted article that you put your heart into and it's a thousand words and it tells everything about what you do. Yes, it matters. Still matters. Because number one, it's going to attract search engines. You know if you're using keywords right, it's still going to be effective for your placement, even if nobody else reads it. And if it's formatted, right, people will scan until they find something that's interesting to them at that moment. So if someone's searching for the best chiropractor in town, they may come to a chiropractic website and they'll read a few things and decide, well, this isn't really what I want. This isn't and then they'll go someplace else and they'll do the same thing until they find something that speaks directly to them. And that's probably the chiropractor they'll go with. This happened to me just recently. I had some physical therapy that I had to have done. I was given a list by my doctor of physical therapists in my area. Some of them were real close, some of them were far away. What I did was I went online and I looked for each one. I looked at each one and I ended up going with the one that had the best website, had the most informative stuff right there on their website. It seemed up to date. It was clear and they did a great job, I got to tell you. And I'll tell you their name later if you want it. But other websites didn't compare. They had blogs that were months or years old. Their home page didn't say anything about what they did. So think about that in terms of your own website and your own blog posts. And I would say never ever try to sell on your blog. It's probably okay every once in a while to advertise a sale that's going on. But that's going to be a very short-lived, useful blog. The best blog topics, as you probably know, I hope you know, are what we call evergreen. You've heard of evergreen, right? Tell me you've heard of evergreen. Okay. So those blog posts are going to be relevant for years to come and they're still going to bring value to your website years after you've published them. So that's that's the ideal blog post. And if you haven't started, if you haven't started your blog or if you're, you've stopped for a while and you want to go back, the best way to start is shorter articles. Just start with some simple things, pointed questions, you know, that you can address with with brevity. I'll get into that a little bit too. All right. So let me show you an example of what I mean. When I talk about formatting and lists, oops, I guess I'll wait until I get to that slide. So here's some, here are some tips and these all work. When you have a blog post, instead of writing a bunch of things in a big paragraph that nobody's going to read, break it up into into bullets and numbered lists and know the difference between why you should have them. It's a very good practice and makes the whole article easier to read and digest and scan. For topics you want to, you want to have a title that's going to entice people to click on it and come to your home, your your blog or your website. So how to's are very effective because that's what people are looking for often online. Numbered lists like the ten best ways to boil sausages, I don't know. I hope nobody does boil sausages by the way. And tips, you know, the ten tips for networking. And even if you write a long post, make sure every word needs to be there. On your website every page should have one focus. That's why those websites you see or used to see with that just had one page and if you clicked on a menu it would zip you down to the bottom. Those don't work very well with search engines because that page has no singular focus. It's all about whatever that company does. Everything that company does in fact. So each one of your pages should have a specific focus. Each one of your blog posts should have a specific focus based on whatever the topic is and whatever your keywords are using. And I'll get into keywords. We, I write and my partner writes this way as well with direct language. We address the reader or the visitor with, you know, we say you all the time. We don't say the visitor is going to be this or our customers do this. We say you, you're going to be our customer. So that's who we address and that's the that's the best way to engage people. If you're the type of business that has a person, an I, then you know, then use that. Don't say my, you know, the company or Ray XS is going to say, you know, like you were just talking to somebody. It's language that's very effective for connecting with people. And every way, every web page, every web page and every blog post should have a call to action at the bottom. This is very, or even scattered throughout, depending on how long it is. Very, very important. You're writing, like I said, to persuade people. It's retort, it's rhetorical, rhetorical writing. So if you don't give them something to do, you've wasted your opportunity. So I always give them something to do, even if it's, you know, it doesn't have to be by now. It could be get my ebook. It could be schedule an appointment. It could be find out more. It could be any of those things. It could be a whole lot more. But always have an option to continue the conversation that you're having with them. Okay. So here's a good example. This is just one blog post. It's gives you an idea. So the title has to be compelling. It has to be something that people want to know about. It has to be something that'll show up when people type in a search term. Like, how can I be more effective networking? This will show up. Subheads throughout. We usually use two to three paragraphs between each subhead. No more than that. And if you only have one subhead, then you're missing something. Because just like a list, you wouldn't have a list with just one thing in it. So each level of subheads, if you go to more levels, more power to you, I usually use just the main title and then one subhead level. But have multiple, have multiple ones. Make them so they're easy to understand. Those subheads are really important because that's what's going to people are going to be scanning when they're looking down your blog post. You need a great opening line. Just like a novel. You want to get them to say what's next? What do I do? You know, what's going to happen next? I use short paragraphs, nothing too long. A big, there's nothing worse online than a big block of text. It's very off-putting, even to people that read a lot. We've started using bolded phrases in each paragraph. You know, use your judgment if you think it's too much, then don't put it in. But I think it helps people scan the content that you have. Especially people that aren't going to just go through and read everything. And yeah, the other thing I've discovered recently, age makes a difference in the people that you're trying to attract. So if your target audience are younger people, they will scan more often everything that you put up there. But if your audience is an older audience, older than me even, they tend to read every word that you write. And they will read down the page and then if there's a call to action then they might follow through. But they will read every word. So make sure you know who your audience is. It's very, very important. Graphical elements like infographics, photos, graphics or gifts or whatever you want to put in, it really helps break up the text. But don't just throw anything in there. Make sure it's relevant to your content. Make sure it's tagged. I think it's all tags that search engines can see. Search engines can't see photos, but they can read the all tags. You can put your, you can put your keywords in there. But I would use, I would be subtle when it comes to that. But definitely you need graphical elements. When you look at this page you can see that it's pretty easy to scan. You get an idea of what it's about. When you're not sure there's the 60,000 foot or 10,000 foot test. Do you know what that is? Have you heard that? It's basically the sky level view. For example, if you were to take your printed out blog post and put it on the floor and stand on a step stool and look down on it, what's the things that jump out at your eye? Is it the graphic? Is it the photo? Is it the heading? Is it, you know, you should be able to, those are the things that matter most. So those are the things you want to spend the most time on. Obviously the content matters and delivering on your promise, whatever your title is, is important. But the 10,000 foot view is what's gonna, is what people are gonna notice first. And if all you see is a big block of text when you're looking down at your blog post, no one's gonna read that. So this sort of summarizes the art and the science of blog writing. Blog writing is an art, yes it is. You have to be a good writer. You want to engage people. You want to persuade them to do whatever it is that you'd like them to do, whether it's improve their posture or buy a new chair. But there's a, there's a science to it too and this is part of that. The next part of that science is the dreaded keywords. How many people think keywords are a necessary evil? Okay, a few. It is and it isn't because keywords work. Keywords have one purpose and that's to get people to come to your page. That's all they have to do. And they connect with people because people are searching for certain terms. This is the way the internet works, right? So I type in how can I effectively network better? Or what's, what are some networking tips? And if I'm not using keywords, even if I have the best article out there on networking tips, nobody's gonna find that, no one's gonna find that blog post. So that doesn't help them. It doesn't help me obviously. So using keywords is a way to get around this or use this system that we have in place called search engines. So I'm gonna spend a little time talking about how to get the right keyword. This is sometimes tricky but the best way to think about it is what are people typing into search engines to find you or find your blog post? Is it the best or is it the closest chiropractor? Or is it the best chiropractor? Is it the best chiropractor in Asheville? So the big key words, meaning the short keywords, like if you were to type in writing in your search engine, you would get millions of hits, right? Because everybody's talking about writing, including me. But what is it about writing that you want? How can you refine that? So writing is an example of a short tail keyword. Business writing in Asheville, that's an example of a long-tail keyword. That whole thing would be the keyword that you would use. And this is something I learned from Chancellor, is a short keyword, one that everybody knows, or writing, the competition for this keyword is going to be immense, right? Because you're fighting millions of sites that have to do with writing. But if you have a longer keyword like writing, business writing in Asheville, that's much more specific. There's going to be fewer people writing about that specific topic. Therefore, if someone types in that keyword, you might get a high listing, if not on the first page, right underneath it. Because there's less competition for that particular keyword. But bear in mind too that there may be fewer people looking for business writing in Asheville. But those might be more targeted to your business. So all of these things play a role in figuring out which keywords you should use. When I talk about interest versus advantage, what I mean is the interest of the people doing the searching versus the advantage that you have, that you offer them. So there's going to be, in this example, there's going to be a million people that are interested in writing. But there may only be a shorter, a shorter, fewer people that are interested in business writing in Asheville that you can, that you have a specific expertise of, that you can reach those people. So does that make sense? Okay, good. Everybody with still with me? I only see a few sleepers, so that's good. Okay, and blogs also, using keywords, you can use your blogs to attract a wider audience. So what do I mean by that? An example is, we used to have a gastroenterologist as a client that we would blog for every month. And I learned more about the digestive system than I ever wanted to know. But he was, he was pretty savvy. So if you remember a few years ago, there was an outbreak of viruses, an intestinal virus on cruise ships. Does everybody remember that? And it made the news and people were scared to go on cruise ships and everybody's getting sick. It wasn't fatal, but it was, you know, it took a couple days to get over. And if you're on a seven-day cruise, that's your cruise. So this gastroenterologist had us write a blog post dealing specifically with this outbreak. It was news at the time. He posted it and I'm sure he got lots of blog hits to his blog because people were searching for that particular topic. That's a way to tap into topical news. And it'll still be relevant years from now, but that was a good example. But you can also use your blog to hit keywords that aren't directly related to your business. There are lots of examples of this. And of course none of them come to mind at the moment. Oh, well, I'm a writer. We have on our blog post blogs about the holidays when the holidays come around. So people searching for decorating ideas or the holidays or something may hit one of our blog posts. And our blog post may touch on decorating your office or whatever. Whatever we wrote about at the time. So they're going to come. They will read the article and say, oh, that's interesting. And then they're on our website. So they may decide to look around. Everybody needs a writer and then everybody needs an editor, whether they know it or not. So our business can come from anywhere. That tip, though, can really help you expand your views. And every time I write an article like this, I can track the traffic. And it definitely goes up. Here's just a takeoff on a very famous quote, which was the difference between the right word and the wrong, the right word and the almost right word. And Mark Twain was a genius at that. Okay, so this just sort of shows you what I was talking about earlier. The more detailed you can make your keywords, the long tail keywords, the other ones are going to be most effective at getting at the people that you want to attract. A lot of people network, but not everybody networks in Asheville at Word Camp this year. So if that's the market you want to get at, then that's the keyword you should use. And always keep in mind what your audience is searching for. What is it that they are looking for that you can offer? And that's, those are the keywords that will attract them. So keywords play a role in helping people find your blog or your website. But they don't want to be hit over the head. Like I said before, your keywords have one purpose and that's to bring people to your website or your blog. Once they're there, your keywords don't matter anymore. So make them invisible. People don't want to be, you know, keyword stuffing doesn't work because it's annoying. And Google knows that. Your keywords should be invisibly placed in your page or your blog. We write, we write our keywords in so that they appear naturally. They don't jump out at you and yet they're still effective. So this is the industry standard. You can go a little more, a little less, but that's what your target is. Everybody get that? If you don't get anything else from this session, I hope that's what you remember. So the next step, once you have your keyword and once you know that you want to put them in, you know, where exactly should you put them in, in your website, in your blog post? To make sure that they're being used optimally by the search engines. And here's the list. You can't put it in your title every time. Sometimes your title is just twisted enough that you make it engaging. So if you do that, then put a subtitle in right beneath it that has the keyword in it. It's sort of like, it's sort of like a tag line or to a movie or, I don't know, subtitle of a book, you know, fear of flying, a woman's journey into the unknown or whatever it is. That explains what the book it is, is about compared to the title, which doesn't make any sense at all if you're a guy. So sorry, I didn't get that. Yeah, it's a good question. She said, do I create my keywords before or after I write my post? And the answer is most of the time I use the keywords. I know the keywords before I start writing. You can't, what you can do is write first and then you can add keywords later. It's a little more difficult to make them seamless, but it can be done if you're a good writer. I always try to have the keywords in mind when I'm writing. So I know the direction I'm going and I know what the topic is and what I need to cover. Yes, yes. The 1% rule applies to 1 through 5 here because this is the part of the content that's going to be visible to people. Right, so if you have it in your type, right, it includes the title. Yep. So when you think about that, five times isn't a lot. You're not using that keyword very much. Five times and one's in the title and one's in the first paragraph and one's in the subhead and then one's in the last paragraph. That leaves one and then just throw that one in somewhere else in a paragraph, somewhere where you can fit it in. If you have a thousand word article, you can use it 10 times. You'll be surprised. It's not, you don't want it too much. I mean too much is going to be, it calls attention to itself and that's not going to be good for readers, human readers. They don't want to be knocked over the head. Now the meta description, if you are using WordPress and you have a plugin like Yoast SEO, SEO Yoast whatever it is or maybe it's even in all in one SEO, you can, you get a field where you can enter the meta description and the meta description is the little blurb that appears if your website comes up or your page comes up in Google search page. So there's your title which is clickable right and a little blurb underneath it which is 160 whatever it is characters. I can't remember off the top of my head. That's your meta description. Your keyword should appear in that and it should just sum up what the article is about or the web page whatever it is right. Everybody get that meta description and the URL you can modify you can edit the URL. I mean WordPress gives you a an automatic one but usually you can edit it and you should try to put your keyword in there. Basically you want everything to match. You want the URL to match the purpose of the of your article which is reflected in your title, reflected in your content and reflected in your meta description. It all points to the same thing. What's your page about? Should be no question about what your page is about. Another thing you can do and this is something that's fairly new Google has started doing it is use synonyms. So you don't want to use your keyword more often than you need to but you can throw in synonyms that help strengthen what your page is about. So instead of networking and actual at WordPress 2015 you know play with those words use synonyms to to mix it up and it strengthens the the content it also helps the search engines. Okay all right with a few this is my this is my least competent topic but I'm going to cover what I know I'm just warning you ahead of time and these are just ideas there's a lot of ways to market your blog post you definitely have to market your blog post or your website and there there are ways to do that. Find out again if you know your audience where are they? Find out where they are and and reach out to them whether it's on Facebook whether it's on LinkedIn whether it's a hangout whatever it is um guest blogging which I'll talk about in a few minutes is another way of reaching out to your audience. When I talk about links what I mean is links from your page or your blog back to other pages of your website in your blogs that interlinking is very valuable both for the user experience because if you're talking about something but you have a page over here that explains it in greater detail they'll want to know and it's also good for search engine strength you know you're pumping up this page over here which is really the page you want you want people to go to. Everybody get that? The other thing it used to be SEO talked about back links back links where this directory over here had a link back to your site and it was really cool because even if nobody knew what this page the site over here was you know that link was there and it counted toward your page rank and and so people created these directories that would contain nothing but bad bogus uh indian english uh but it had a link back to your site well google stopped that years ago and it's really hard to get authoritative links back to your site so if you were to if you're a doctor and you want the Mayo Clinic to link back to your site that's pretty hard to do but you can link to Mayo Clinic and that still counts doesn't count maybe as much but it does count so if you have authoritative sites that you use for your research definitely include those links in there it helps the the visitors because they're they're saying oh you know I can go here and learn some more but always when you link to an external website open a new window open a new tab you never want to close your browser window because they may never find their way back you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find their way back um okay so go find them where they are um remember too that you can reuse if you're a blogger you can reuse that blog content in any way you want create a twitter link treat or or post go to you know go to google plus and and type in a a summary with a link whatever there's use it in ads you know that blog post that you put so much work into you could probably pick out little bits and pieces that are valuable to people like if you have a list of 10 things 10 ways to better network at an event you can use each one of those 10 as a separate facebook post or whatever and always always put a link back to your site because that's where you want to drive traffic back to your website back to your blog where the richness of you or your company is that's where you want people to be everything else is just enticement so here are a couple plugins i use social yeah i'm going to get to that like good question so i use social which allows me to take my blog post and when i publish it it'll automatically publish to facebook and i can edit it before i publish it in facebook it gives me a window i can molt i can publish it to multiple pages i think it allows me to do other social media as well i'm sure it does but i'm i'm not a twitter guy so i don't do that but check these out and there are others um i've heard i heard about buffer this morning and jetpack i think is the publicized it has a publicized part to it i'm not familiar with jetpack but these just make it easier for you when you blog to throw your content out there like i said you've got to market it or it's no one's going to find you so as a professional i have a linkedin account and i belong to a number of relevant groups whether it's professional groups or writing groups or whatever so when i publish a blog post i can go to those groups on linkedin and i'll write a short blurb an introductory sometimes it's the first paragraph of the blog sometimes it's something just totally different and then with a link back to the blog and i do this for every group that i'm in and that will generate traffic back to my website especially people and then people that uh that go to the website from those links are people that are interested in that topic so that's a sort of a self-selecting group that's good use all your resources okay guess blogging guess blogging by definition is when you write an article for someone else's blog or when somebody else writes a blog post for your blog it's a way of reaching out to the community an SEO ultimately is about building a community it's it's about it's not about tricking people into getting to your website that's what it used to be now it's all about building a community you want people like-minded people that are interested in what you do or what you have to offer an SEO is just a way to get there so you're building relationships with others that's a good thing you're finding other people in your industry and sharing information that's a good thing you're giving back to your community by you know providing this free information that's a good thing and each of your blogs each of your guest blogs allow you to put a link in there back to your website and that's a good thing so guess blogging is is the definite it's definitely effective especially if you're just starting out because it gives you a wider audience or access to a wider audience so I would definitely recommend it after you've built up your practice a little bit you can reverse the trend and have people guess blog for you because now you're too busy doing all your other stuff let somebody else take a week and or a day or whatever it is how often you frequently you blog and that gives them those advantages so I think I've bored you long enough I thank you for yeah okay that's good did everybody hear that so what's that comedy blogs yeah if it's personal then definitely go for it if it's for business what I would recommend is find somebody that'll edit it for you and I don't mean your mom or your boyfriend or your your roommate I mean find somebody who's a professional or semi-professional writer or editor and I I used to work for Lark books in town so I have that editing experience and I love editing books I do it on the side just because I like it so much working with an editor with with an author and the point I want to make is that a good editor not only will help you form an article and get the most out of that but a good editor will also improve your skills as a writer so you know the the language that you use and the and the cadence that you develop all these things are something that a good editor can help you develop um but you know don't necessarily hire me for that I mean I will be glad to do it but find somebody that will do it and do a good job on it and you'll know you should get feedback either uh laughter or you know sales depending on how effective you are does that answer your question yeah okay and yes my company is Ray Access and we do content writing and we do editing we'll edit for half price anything that you have but uh that's this is not about that this is about getting you better more effective blogging and the website content answer so yeah um yeah I didn't talk about pitching which is I guess part of the guest blogging process it doesn't always have to be but my feeling especially here in Asheville is that we're a community so the other writers that are in town they're not my competitors they're my colleagues so if I can help them and they can help me then we all benefit so if I decide to write a blog post about something that's going on in town and I refer to a person and maybe even put a link to their site about their perspective of it I will yes contact that person and tell them that I'm doing it and let them know that that link is there and that's why they're you know hopefully generating some traffic to their site that's a courtesy I don't expect anything after that if they decide to reciprocate that's fine but that's not why I'm doing it sometimes I'll write blog posts that I call shout outs which are I'm surfing the internet and I find a really interesting article about something that I care about which would be writing or blogging whatever what I'll do is I will I'll write a blog post about what I liked about the article I'll include an excerpt which is never more than a couple paragraphs usually less than that and then to see the whole article here's the link so that's a quick way for me to get a blog post up that maybe I don't have time to do but it's also valuable to my readers because it's relevant content and it's good for the person who wrote the original article because they get some traffic maybe out of it but that's another way of you know putting blogs together and it's totally valid and totally effective we good thank you very much for showing up I appreciate it I hope it was valuable I have some cards on the table if you want to take one and I will be at the wedge tonight if you're there