 Thank you, and hello everyone. The last speaker asked how many content writers were in the room. I was going to say, you don't have to be embarrassed at the word, who's a blogger? Good, you're very, very people to admit it. Good, that's good, and how many people are blogging for business? There's like more of you are blogging for business than said you were a blogger. Interesting. Okay, the name of my talk was going to be Supercharger. How to revitalize your blog content for more exposure and sales. And then God, I was bored reading that title. So I came up with the new one. It's how I'm winning my war against this dude, the content-gramming. Same content, just a different title. A couple of years ago, I've been blogging for a long time. Before 2009, I was blogging. And a couple of years ago, I just sat down and I went, this is probably something you know about. I had this feeling that I was wasting my time in my business. This guy, content-gramming, got to me. He was sitting on my shoulder and he was making me say things like, blogging is a waste of time. He was saying, you're not making any sales from blogging, it's just a hobby and it's taken up your working week. He was saying, you're too busy to be blogging. Sound familiar? Somebody mentioned imposter syndrome earlier. It was a severe case of that. So what happened was I started losing interest. I started blogging a little bit less. I tried and rushed the process. I convinced myself somehow that I was wasting money. And what I was wasting money was wasting time. And I was wasting money. And then I had a life-old moment. I had a life-old moment. I was like, well, actually, all I need to do is be a little bit more strategic about what I do and be able to prove to myself that I'm not wasting time writing blog posts. One of the times I had 50,000 visitors a month, so I had a lot of visitors coming to my website. I had lots of content and a lot of good content. I'm boasting a little bit, but you know, it was pretty good. I had a small engaged social media audience, but I wasn't using it strategically at all. And that 50,000 people, I think it's like something like 50% of those people were coming to one post on my blog. They were coming, they were reading it, and they were leaving. They were never becoming customers. And what's worse, that blog post was full of bad information, but I was terrified to take it down because that was half of my website traffic, right? But I knew I needed to bite the bullet. I knew I needed to start being strategic so that my blogging would actually... I could prove that it was working. So, who wants to know how to use your blog content strategically? Okay, first things first. I'm not going to ask you to write any new content. If you've got a bank of content on your blog, already you can just do these few things and it will help you get there. But those of you that are starting out in blogging, sorry, you will have to write some content. So this is a process you can go through at any point. Okay, so firstly, what do we want? Oh, sorry, God! I killed the content trending. I've put all these animations in. I may as well watch them. There we go. I decided to get strategic. He's there to tell me I'm wasting my time. I should just go... I don't know how else I'm going to generate business, but I should just go to a Chamber of Commerce meeting or something. They're great, aren't they? Okay, so what do we want? We want more brand awareness. We want more people to know about our business because unless people know about our business, they can't buy from us. That's a fact. They don't know us. We want more referral, more people telling people to come to us because we are the people who know what it's about, hire us. And of course we want more sales because that's what drives a business at the end of the day. How do we get that? The biggest foe of gremlins, you might think it's water or... What is the biggest foe of gremlins? They mutilate in water. Some might. Okay, it's not. I'm telling you, I know for a fact that the biggest foe of gremlins is pirates! Pirates! Because pirates... And this is my pirate method because I just can't be serious for five minutes. This is my pirate method for getting rid of gremlins. Number one, you audit your blog content. Number two, you reformulate your blog content. Number three, you rehash your blog content. Number four, you re-purpose your blog content. Number five, you reignite your blog content. Then you've got to get evaluating. And then you've got half and face because I need an edge. So, let's go through the pirate method. Number one, auditing. Yeah, okay, we're all ready for it. Let's just give up on this blogging thing altogether. Auditing sounds like a load of hassle, but actually, this is kind of a nice refreshing thing, a bit like spring cleaning. I hate cleaning, but spring cleaning can be good because it's a great afterwards, right? So, audit your blog. List all your blog posts. There are tools that can help you do this. I tried screaming frog and then I just threw the Excel away and went and did it manually. Because actually I needed to go through each individual post and rank them. So I gave them ranking scores. Were they related to my business or my customer? Because not every blog post has to be about your business, but it certainly needs to be attracted to your customer. If that's a yes, you can give it one point. Are they good? Of course they're good. I wrote them. But sometimes you need to be a little bit more objective than that. Have a good look through it. Is it actually a good post? Show it to someone else maybe, if you're not sure. If it's good, that's another point. Number three then is to decide whether, if it's not meeting those parameters whether you should trash it or whether you should rehash it. So, to trash a post. Have a look at it and decide. Is it out of date? So that post that was bringing me in half of my traffic, it was out of date. It was also bad information. So I had to trash it. It was gone. 25,000 visitors overnight. Gone. That hurt, I had to say. At the end I had the happy face. I didn't write that. Bad reader match. Is the content just completely irrelevant to anything or maybe it's too technical for my reader? Is it too short? Is it 100 words with a few photos? That's not really going to engage your reader for long enough for them to know that you're interested in also is it the library? Does it go on a little bit too much like I might today? If it does, if you've just buffered it out somebody told you that blog posts for search engines have 3,000 words on actually 1,500 apparently 3,000 is even better. Wow, I'm just going to fill this all with rubbish. If that's the case, trash it. It's going to be too much of a rewrite. To rehash it, the ones that you can keep and just do a little bit of work on are ones that are still relevant. Not out of date, not bad information, actually good. Great advice. If you've got a piece of great advice and you're just reworking your word in it really badly you can keep that one. Is it matched to your ideal reader? Can it be made if it's too short? Could you make a 500 word blog post out of that? Now, that's totally up to you how long you want your blog posts to be. I think 500 words is long enough to engage someone enough with your content to remember that they're on your site and also it's not too long because we know people haven't got a big attention span they don't want to scroll through their phone for half an hour to get to the bottom of the post so I think at least 500 words is what you're looking for and is it to the point, does it say one thing one thing that you should take away from reading that blog post and that's a big mistake you probably all know your stuff here and it's very easy just to go into detail into every section of everything you need but for a reader that's confusing so try and find the one thing that you want people to learn from the blog post and focus on that so we're on to step two now we've got the information we need we just need to read that's me trying to do a pirate reformulate so what do you sell? make a list of what you sell and I'm not talking about that marketing stuff we talk about, I sell peace of mind that's not what I'm looking for I'm actually looking for what you actually sell what products and services do you sell make a list of those and once you make a list of those you can put them into your content bucket, you can find your blog post that relate to those different products and services and split them up into your different buckets cat picture, who's on the cat team cat I'm also on team dog just, my cats would kill me if I said anything else okay so Trello has been mentioned twice today already so I know you're all over it Trello is a great planning tool you can go in there and you can mark out your products so I've got dogs number one there you see cats, rabbits, hamsters and fish so now I just need to go and make a little Trello card for each of my blog posts that fits into those categories and then if I don't have enough I can put in some blog posts that I need to write the nice thing about Trello is you can tag stuff so you know which one you've done and which ones need to be worked on and then you've got a really good picture if it was me and my sole pet the cat column would be down here the fish column would have nothing in so you really need to think about how much content you've got for each of those and then map them out map them out into monthly things and this really helps you and it helps your reader too because when your reader sees that you're sharing out or writing content every day for a month about cats they know your thing is cats right? and then next month you do dogs and after a while they slowly get into this is what the different things that you sell if you try to scatterbomb it all at once this is a post on dogs one day on cats the next so it really helps you for a person it helps your audience focus but it doesn't have to be a month you could maybe do a week you could do a quarter that's based on something or you could do it if you've got very few products like me, you could do it on a launch by launch basis it's almost like relaunching every quarter maybe with a new product or a new course step three, rehash we identified the posts that we wanted to read a hash in the process now we need to look at the key things that we can improve on the posts that we chose to rehash is it on brand? is your headlight going to grab attention? another big problem I see so many great blogs with the most ridiculously bad blog titles and nobody is going to click through to read that blog post if it says the main title of the blog post I'm not going to bias it but if it says five ways your cat will annoy you before it's six months old I'm more likely to click that so the headlights are really important and do you need to edit it and I'm going to give you a hint here yes, you need to edit it yes, every time, however much you edit something it is never fully edited I used to be rubbish at editing I used to just give it a quick once over and publish it I now spend more time editing than I do writing and here's the thing it's more fun than writing editing is so much more fun than writing right, so is it on brand? your tone of voice this is something I've only started using in the last six months last weekend somebody read one of these back to me without me telling them what I was trying to do if you choose three words that represent your brand or your business print them out, stick them on a wall and just make sure that ties into everything that you write and sometimes this isn't an easy exercise so find yourself a blogging buddy sit down with your blogging buddy and work on it together sometimes somebody else is able to tell you what you don't know so I was able to come up with expert and helpful, that was what I was trying to get away with and my blogging buddy said to me well, quirky, I'm like you what what did you say I'm quirky no, I knew I was quirky but actually that's what makes me different loads of blogs that help for an expert if I can add a little bit of my and I can't help that, I'm a personal brand I'm a one person business I settle me so that totally works that's quirky I hope it's not just stupid right right okay, visual style guys is also important, people can see from the blog and they'll see from the layout of the blog from the colour scheme, the fonts in your images everywhere, the same consistent style, they'll start to know it's you even if they don't see the logo somebody said to me, oh I saw you were running across there I knew it was you because it was your balloon it's not like I've got like a pantone colour pantone, pantone's hair isn't it pantone colour I'm pretty sure my hairdresser could tell me my pantone colour it's not like I've got one of those but I do consistently use the same colours so you can use something mentioned earlier to grab colours as colour kicker tools extensions you can get for browsers you can just go, if you've only got a logo you can go in and do that or you can choose colours and you can identify the hex codes write them down you can use them in almost any graphic design tool that you use, something like Canva or whether it's like Photoshop and then find a couple of fonts consistently or typefaces I never know the difference you know what I'm talking about anyway and then I have a third Fancy font because when I'm doing my graphics I want to have something a little bit curvy that's not going to work, is it, on an internet browser but for a graphic that's going to work as well and if you're consistent with those things you actually don't need to put a logo on stuff people just start knowing your stuff the headline is my favourite headline so I want to show you loads I've settled in just the one that I use all the time it's really catchy name on this one we had some mentioned earlier but this one has a very catchy name it's called the AM Institute Emotional Value Headline Generator catchy husband and you can see talk about good design well actually design wise I suppose well it's not pretty looks like it was made in the 90s maybe it was but what this does is it will evaluate the headline that you put in there for emotional content we know that people react well to emotional content you don't have to put in words like crying laughing there's lots more emotions than those but if you can try and make the headline about something I've noticed if you put in the word you, you're a lot it would always leave you a higher score the score you're going for you put in your title you choose the industry and you're going for a score 30% or more 30% is good 40% is great 50% means you're a very gifted copywriter I don't often make 50% so you can gloat if you manage to get there I mentioned editing I do a lot of editing now so basically I just put my thoughts on a page and that takes me about research takes a while but that takes me about 45 minutes then I probably spent 2 hours editing because I just blurted out a load of rubbish but there are some tools that really help me firstly I'll do all the normal things I'll read it through, I'll edit it down I'll cut out bits and then I put it into this tool which is called pro writing aid and I go into that tool and it goes now this is rubbish mate get rid of all this fluff and it's sometimes hard sometimes you want to argue with it but it's just a computer program until back so it's a bit unrewarded but it will pull out loads of things that you're doing wrong if you've got too long sentences and it's hard to be quirky pro writing aid it wants to cut out my quirkiness but actually when I do cut out a lot of things it tells me to cut out and I read it back it's so much a better post now I told you about this and word camp TV will now know about this I'm not going to tell anyone else because that's my secret people keep coming up to me going your writing's got so much better is this pro writing aid and I don't go full on 100% you see I've got 77 there I'm happy enough with that there still needs enough quirkiness that makes it easy to read so if I want to fall root I can't do the root repurpose this is where you need to create content babies so now you've taken all your old pros to you decided which ones you're going to keep you've made them better now how else can you make little content babies out of that that will push people back into your blog that will push your blog further out to new people well things you can do harder now with GDPR I almost fainted earlier on when I started talking about Google Analytics I thought I had it sorted but it's a little bit harder now with GDPR but create a new book you read a blog post and I do this quite often gather them together in an e-book give it away you cannot under GDPR rules just give it away and use their email address so what I tend to do is you get that you get an email course when you download it and then I ask you if you want to join my mailing list after that I think she's not in the room I think that's GDPR compliant as far as I've managed to gather but still it is a good way to engage someone somebody has now got your e-book they have realised you're producing good content but let's move away from that quickly before she does arrive email sequences this is what I was talking about now you've got those different buckets of content could you make a sequence out though so I have a blogging course you can do I have an Instagram stories course you can do so if you download my blogging book you'll also get the course if you download I've got a freebie for Instagram stories you get the course and all that is I've managed to sequence out my blog posts that I've written on those topics so that they will have some sort of synergy for a course and then of course at the end of that I ask people if they want to join my mailing list and if they don't I unsubscribe it that's the process that we go through you can do similar with a Facebook ads funnel I've said social I've said social I do Facebook ads I do Twitter ads and I'm trying to try YouTube ads if anyone has tried them do let me know because I'm trying to get started but you can use that same content in a sequence a funnel that you send out to people on Facebook works really well all from the same content you haven't yet had to write one blog post you've had to edit but editing is fun and then the middle of content babies we can make videos from our blog posts now I know there's not going to be any sound on this so I can talk I think if I make that quiet no I don't think that's going to work so this is a video that John Murray headshots made it's a tool called Lumen 5 you put in your blog link and it will make a video from your blog link it has stock images that it will use you can change the stock images you can change the text the photographer so he's uploaded his own images but all he's done is it's taken the key points from his blog I don't know how it does it may be through star pedis and creates a video for you and now you can share that on site I'm really terrified to click in the next one now take it or not oh I'm distressed I tell you this is a video which pets of this island have made of their podcast it's the same with your blog post you can do a little audio trailer using this tool wait W-A-V-B-E you just put in the audio and it makes a little video out of this like that with the speech going up and down so that's another one more video I'm terrified now maybe I won't play so that's two ways that you can push it out you could make some images out of quotes key quotes from your blog post now this isn't a very good one because I made it but and also really I think square works better because square is kind of on all social networks it kind of works so just experiment with things if you've interviewed someone clever like I did here that means that you can take the quotes of the things they've said you can share those out on instagram you can share it out on facebook as an image rather than that you can share it on twitter you can share it on pinterest everywhere you can drive people in and actually stuff like this is important because I'm not sure if you're aware of the new evergreen rules about content on twitter I made it a lot harder for me to share the same thing over and over again so we need to start getting creative about the way we share it as long as it's not exactly the same text we can get away with it I'll talk about that more later on podcasts so this is I actually write for a gore post sometimes here you did mention that that's my disclaimer they pay me to write for them which means I get to use the tool for free that also means they come up in examples because I see their stuff a lot they launched a podcast last year but what I really like about this podcast is they didn't just put in a transcription because actually I really don't like reading transcriptions because they're usually quite rubbish so when they publish a blog post I like to think this was because of me as well because this is the way I live to take credit for everything I actually write a proper blog post to a company and it's interesting to read blog posts with all the uns and the r's taken out I don't know how that works from an accessibility point of view how you feel about that but for me I much prefer that and much more likely to engage with a blog post and read somebody's transcription you can use slide share which is like the youtube powerpoint presentations and this you could take those key points those key quotes from your blog posts put one on each slide maybe put a nice visual in there and then you've got a piece of content you can upload to slide share slide share is owned by LinkedIn so it's very easy to integrate it into your LinkedIn profile as well I'm a bit scared because I did this so that when I put my mouse over the closure is so you could make a little this week on the digital graphic no we can't be doing that anyway that's me look at that expression on my face I tell you so every week I do a facebook live show and I run a little trailer on my instagram stories about what I'm going to cover this week also do this with blog posts pick out the key things that are in the blog post on the blog this week if you're lucky enough to have 10,000 followers you can ask them to swipe up if you don't have 10,000 followers then ask them to go and visit the link in your bio number 6 reignite your content so what have we done so far anyone remember because I can't we've audited we've evaluated we've rehashed we've reformulated thank you now we're going to reignite the content and this is a problem a lot of bloggers have you write a blog post you publish it and it works and wait and then that's it if it ranks on google great you'll continue to get traffic from that actually pinterest is doing a bit of that now I'm not sure if you're using I don't even use pinterest I've seen my traffic it's still tiny but they're old from pinterest recently so definitely worth looking at that from a search engine point of view but unless you manage to rank in those search engines it's dead isn't it just sitting there so you need to have a plan to bring that content and also you can advertise that content because now you know that that content is related to a specific product you can build that into that ads funnel that I showed you earlier except for every time I set up a facebook ad I go into this mad panning oh my god I'm wasting so much I'm not wasting money I'm making sales for it does anyone else have that feeling or is it just me am I weird people told me that before right okay so you can re-share your content for three set up a re-sharing schedule so whenever I write a blog post I have this really ugly looking spreadsheet where I categorise each blog post there's more to it than this there's the title there's the link and everything and it will categorise each blog post for its re-sharing value so is it ever great that means I can just put it into a loop of content that I re-share if it's seasonal I need to set it up for Christmas Easter procrastination day whatever it happens to be is it topical if it's topical it's probably it is over quite quickly it can drive a lot of traffic write and while it's topical but in a week's time it's dead still worth having on your slate though because people will look for information about these historic events that happened and then I have this last section which is really actually named check for updates and that just means before I re-schedule it out again I'm just going to have a look make sure it's set up to date now that I have that I can work out how to re-share that a couple of tools I use first one you know my disclaimer about this agorapulse but they actually just launched this a couple of months ago they launched the bulk upload tool which they've never had before I've used the one on Hootsuite who's a Hootsuite user and I'm not just saying that because they paid me to blog for them either you can add your RSS feed to this and when you bring in your RSS feed it drags in all your content from your blog every single post and you can choose from those which ones you would like to share out on social media you can schedule them, you can change their headlines and that's the thing about Twitter it's kind of hidden away because I wasn't convinced of this when they made the change but they actually don't want you ever to post the same tweet twice you probably all know they don't want you to post it to two Twitter accounts at the same time but actually if you look hard enough you'll find they don't ever want you to post the same tweet twice if you want to fly by the seat of your pants as I like to I have a schedule that goes out like once every month so I'm kind of going well I can probably get away with that but there's no guarantee so the nice thing about this is that you could edit each headline to make it slightly different each time and then you can schedule it out so I'm totally in love with this I was still after years of using writing for a goal post I was still using Hootsuite for my bulk scheduling as soon as this came out and I tried it I quit Hootsuite don't tell any of this you work for Hootsuite co-schedule it's a plugin, again this is going to be difficult for the new Twitter rules but you can set up when you write the post you can set up scheduling for that to go out over a period of time and then finally we've got Facebook ads and waste the money apparently according to my grammar but no they're not now you've got your different buckets of content I use this plugin Pixel Caffeine it's from a tool called AdSpresso that are ironically owned by Hootsuite it collects audiences depending on which categories they visited on your blog, again check out the GDPR compliance on that because before watching that talk today I didn't think it was a problem, I'm not sure now but that's great isn't it because you know if people watch if people visited that blog content about that specific product or service that you sell there's somebody that now you can remark it to with the ads about less than a minute for me to tell you but there we go get evaluated because this is the one bit that keeps the content gremlin at bay he's not turning up once you start doing this stuff so two tools that I use regularly I could have gone through hours on Google Analytics but you don't know that nobody wants that is UTM tracking does anyone use that already so to both of you that don't basically what you do is you can create a version of your link that has some special code at the end that tells Google Analytics exactly where that came from so each time I write a blog post I create a different link for my Facebook page for my Facebook group for each of the Facebook groups that allows me to share content there because some of them have asked me to for Twitter, for Pinterest my email list, for my chatbop I can create all these different ones and then this is the URL builder then when I go into my Google Analytics I can see where that traffic came from so from here I can see that my Facebook ad is delivering good stuff at the end I've got a goal which is my Get Readers ebook I'll show you about goals in a second and I can actually see that even though only four links from link tree that I use is my Instagram link even though only four pictures are there my ebook has downloaded my ebook and I don't even link to my ebook from that link tree so they've gone to my site they've looked through a few pages and they've downloaded my ebook so to me this is a really valuable four pics from Instagram but one lead that's good huh so that's the sort of information you can get just by creating a list of other URL builders from Google that's how you set them up just by setting up that Google Analytics goal I can get that information and I can get that for every single freebie that I give away and I can get that even if you don't ask for an email address and I can get that for every single product by itself setting up Google Analytics goals it's in your settings goals and you set them up here it's a quite straightforward process if you Google it or if you want a link to show you how to do this stuff just drop me a DM on Twitter and I'll find you a link after I've done that and that is actually the most rushed face but the most important face I know I'm doing something right so I have a happy face briefly I have a happy face briefly because then I look at my results and my results are I lost loads of that traffic that I have on my blog that makes me sad it does make me sad but I also know that I was manufacturing a lot of that traffic from that one out of date bad blog post that was never going to send anything it was just vanity on good news I get more referrals so I'll get two or three referrals a week often from people I've never heard of and I'm really bad at remembering names so when somebody says oh I've got your name from my blog oh yeah yeah yeah and then I'll go and Google it Google them and realize I actually don't know them I've changed since I've changed my blog before that I would get referrals but I'd always know who it is from and it's because people are reading my blog and spending more time on my content and I also of course what it's all about at the end of the day is I'm making online sales I'm making sales through those referrals I've also launched a few products that you can only buy online and I've made sales from that for the slides I've made a page you don't get made a really bad page because I couldn't get internet access anyone it's just got one link on it no you don't need to give me an email I'm not going to even re-target you with ads not now anyway no I'm not going to re-target you with ads that's where you'll get my slides there are these on the side but are there a sign up for my newsletter if you want to do that