 You're good to go. All right. Well, good morning everybody. Good morning. Thank you for being here at the first session of the morning. How many of you guys are morning people? Like, love to get up early? A few? Okay. The rest of us just nudged the people that didn't raise their hand if they fall asleep. So, I might be wonderful. Who knows? Anyway, so, special thanks to Scott here. My computer decided not to work at all. So, I'm using his laptop here. So, thank you. If anyone needs to know anything about WooCom, let's go talk to Scott. Get him to be a plug. So, he knows what he's talking about. He knows what he's doing. So, cool. So, I'm going to go ahead and just share some five steps today for publishing content that gets noticed. There's a lot of content that goes around the internet right now, and that happens when you have problems. There's two main factors that we're kind of fighting against right now in the world. We're getting a lot less visibility. Earlier this year, actually, Facebook made a huge change to their news speed, which almost, like, killed a lot of people. It did, like, organic marketing on Facebook in general. Myself included. I had a lot of content I'd send out. Put a lot of time into it through one of my pages. And I went from getting decent exposure to getting zero organic reach. I remember, like, right after they made the change. I'm like, we'll see how bad it really is. So, it wasn't just me sharing a link. It was me actually putting some time into sharing something that was really well thought out. And I went back the next day and it said it reached zero people. So, that was after their change. Most social platforms have kind of changed to that type of thing. Kind of the agenda, I guess, you could say that they have is to keep you on their platform. So, anytime you share a link that's going to take people away from it, it's going to get a lot less visibility in today's world without you paying to share it more. So, that's one of our big factors we're kind of fighting against right now. The other one is increased number of publications. So, WordPress, the end of the year 2017, WordPress.com announced that they had 2,000 blog posts go live every minute. So, every one minute. And that's just on WordPress.com. So, not all WordPress.org users and people that are using other platforms aside from WordPress, it's not including any of those. So, it's kind of crazy to think about, right, that there's actually thousands of blog posts having every minute. So, when you hit submit or you hit publish on your article, there's also 1,999 people doing the same thing. So, that's a lot of competition that's out there. Thankfully though, there is a solution to this. There's something that we can all do. That's kind of what I'm wanting to share today. The first thing is creating an irresistible call to action. And we're going to get deep into these things in a little bit here. But basically, it's going to be, this is what's going to drive more traffic. So, it's kind of developing a way that, you know, like here's my call to action, which is going to be your title, your featured image, and your meta description. Having those things really solid are going to be what help you to be able to stand out among those other 2,000 posts that are having the same time. It will get you a click for somebody else. And also just publishing excellence. When you're writing an article, it's really, the quantity of articles you put out is important, but what's more important is something that's really quality. You've got to make sure you put a lot of time and energy into it. That it's something that people, when they read it, they decide, you know what, I want to read more from this person. I know for me personally, there's a couple of places that I actually follow and I love to read there. Everything they publish, because I've read 2 or 3 things on there that were just so well done, so well thought out, I'm like, like, man, they really put a lot of energy into this. So for me, that's been a good thing. So that's kind of our solution here. So all my examples today that I have throughout the rest of this are going to come from one of my projects, dailyps.com. The PS stands for Paranime Shift. We share positivity in the world. That's a multi-authored blog. We've got 70-plus authors on it. We just hit over 1,000 original articles to the website. And we got ranked on a Top 100 website, one of the most well-known for being a Top 100 Christian blog, which was a huge honor. We're pretty low on that list. I will say that. But it's just cool to be on the same list as people like The Christian Post, Christianity Today, Relevant Magazine. I thought that that was really awesome to be able to be on that same list. It's honestly a huge honor for all of us that write on it. So I really enjoyed just writing it in this way. So for us, we're just there to share faith, love, positivity with people, anything that leads people closer to Jesus as a solution in today's really negative world. So that's what we're all about. So any example you see today that I share is going to actually come from that platform. And also real quick before I move on, if anybody has any questions throughout this, please raise your hand. The last thing I want is for you to have a question in 5 minute 5 of this talk, and you wait until 45 minutes later to ask a question. I love to answer questions along the way. So anything that you guys are wondering or want me to comment on, don't feel like it's going to be a question that I'm not going to answer. Talk afterwards. So everyone good? Cool, all right. And half the room here is awake, right? So that's great. So the first thing we're going to talk about here is actually our website. I'm going to go through this pretty quick because that's not really the main part of the talk we're going to do here, but it is very important to talk about here at a WordPress event. So you're going to talk about websites. So there's kind of four main areas that affect your website traffic if you're going to be able to get more traffic or not. The first of those is your speed. Quick load times are extremely important for bloggers, for anyone who has a website. If your website loads in more than three seconds, takes more than three seconds forward to load, you're going to lose quite a bit of traffic. It's over 50% now. Somebody actually had this stat yesterday in their talk. Not sure which one it was. I attended a lot of them, which I remember being awesome. I was like, man, that's crazy. Over three seconds, you're losing people. So it's a lot to ask someone to wait more than three seconds for you in it. So people aren't really going to wait that long. And a great website, I like to check speed on is tools.pingham.com. And you can go there. There's a ton of places to check website speed. That's just one that I really like. I like the way that it kind of spits out the information. So this is actually a real example of dailyps.com. It loads in less than one second, as you can see kind of in the middle here, which for us, that's great. Don't pay too much attention, performance grade. I always ask my host, I'm like, why is my performance grade C? You know, I used to always ask him, why is it not great? And truthfully, you go to any of them, type that up to an A on this website. It says your website's great. You go to another speed testing website and they'll give you a D. Just because it's not the format they would want to. Really, if your website's running quick, it doesn't have any major flags. If it says it's really bad, then maybe you should check it out. But a C is a good grade for us. We're loading as quick as we want you. The page size is down. So we're really happy with that. So website speed is very important for you to consider. The next one is your navigation. I do a lot of reading on WordPress.com. So I'll actually go over to the WordPress.com website. Just do random searches for things I may want to read. And when I go to actually read the content, I don't use the WordPress native reader. I actually go directly to these people's website. So I get kind of an idea of some inspiration for what they're doing. The most common issue I see is people don't have their website navigation on every page. So I click on a blog post and there's no navigation. So I finish reading it. There's no real place for me to go. I always have to click the logo. It takes me back to the homepage where I can find navigation. You want to make sure your navigation is on every page, on every post. It's everywhere for people to see. So for us, if you scroll down on our website anywhere, that navigation will follow you. It's the same on every page. It's got all of our categories. It's got all of our pages. There's not any other pages that are hidden that you're not seeing right there. We've got everything visible. So it's a really important thing to do. Just check your blogs, your websites. Make sure that you've got that navigation really kind of in a way that everyone can find it and see it really easily. Next is our static content. This is kind of like a pet peeve of mine here. Also overpress.com will go find a blog post. It's great. Sometimes I really get inspired by it. I love it. I want to see a little bit more about the author. This was a real example of that. It was a good article. I scrolled down the bottom. It was by The Washington Post. This wasn't The Washington Post's website. I don't know what this website was, but that's not what it was. There was no bio. There was no image. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to go find the about page. I couldn't find the navigation. I finally ended up finding it back on the homepage and went to their about page. And it said this is an example of a WordPress page. That's not a real about page. That is the most common one I find on websites. I'm like, oh great. So there's not even any information about who this person is on the post. And the company itself or the website itself doesn't have any information either. Take the time and make the effort to really narrow, like get your about page done really nice and put your author bio. If you don't want to put a picture yourself, it's still great to have some sort of picture, not just this person here that is on most people's websites. So the next part here, this kind of last part of the website and we'll get more into the actual content itself. Mobile readiness. So more than 50% of searches are now done on mobile devices, which means people are reading your content on a mobile device. It's important for you to know what it looks like. So again, I'm using Scott's computer. This was actually a video that was moving, but it is what it is. So it's all good. This was just an example of what Daily Kiss looks like on a mobile device. It looks exactly the same. The content is easy to read. The last thing you want for somebody to do is when they go to your website, you have to be scrolling left and right to read the content. You want to be able to format properly and be optimized basically for mobile use because that's kind of going to be the future of this. So you can test this in a pretty easy way now. I actually just found this when I was making this presentation. If you just Google mobile friendly, right under the search bar, Google will just pop up with a... You can type it right there on their search result page. So you don't even go into another website. And then it'll tell you it's mobile friendly. And that's Google's official tool. If Google says it's mobile friendly, I'm going to go ahead and trust that it is. And they had to submit to Google button. They didn't explain what that meant, but I'm guessing it means they crawled your website. You can upload it and somehow submit it to Google saying that you do have a mobile friendly website. So that was an easy way to do that. Again, you just Google mobile friendly and you'll be able to format. Can I see something moving? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The whole thing about Google and it being mobile friendly is so crucial. My friend was making over $10,000 a month on her website and one website, plus a couple thousand on another website. She didn't have a mobile ready in time for Google. She sounded like one to two thousand a month. Oh my gosh. So she's literally had to go find another job until she gets a fix. Oh wow. Well, there's a great lesson for everybody right there. That didn't happen to all of us, but my goodness. All right, cool. So we're going to get into this next part. Does anyone have any questions so far? Cool. All right, I'm going to keep on going. So we're going to actually get into publishing content that gets noticed now and kind of go through the five steps here that I believe are very important for all of us. So the first one is actually our, the draft of our content is very important. So it's all going to start with an idea which is going to really spark your inspiration. And so when I say that, the first thing you want to do is if you have an idea of some sort or something you know you want to write about, don't trust yourself and say, I'll remember that later and I'll write it down later. Go ahead and pull out a notepad there. For me, I have a notepad on my phone. It's strictly for ideas I get of writing. I'll be like mid conversation until someone to hold on a minute and I'll like write it down because for me I know, I know like my limits. If I wait 10 minutes, I'm not going to remember what my great idea was. So write down as soon as you have the idea and also for just writing in general, I encourage you to set aside time, actually schedule it to write your content because that's extremely important to be able to, to not just do it whenever you have time but set some time, lock it off in your calendar. For me, I have a time every week that is reserved for writing. I protect that time with everything that I can. I make sure that I'm intentional about that and that's where I go to the ideas folder and I start actually writing some of it out. So it's important along with that to find the atmosphere that works well for you and don't think about the atmosphere when you're, you know, you schedule the time, you're like, all right, where am I going to go today and what am I going to listen to is important as well. For me, again, at that time of schedule in that calendar event on my calendar, I have the location and I know exactly what I'm going to listen to. I have a few pre-made playlists that are especially good that are just good for me to write to. So I'm browsing around YouTube and stuff for the first 20 minutes of my reserve writing time. So that's a really important thing to do. And then also, anyone here type A personality, like super little OCD maybe, anybody? There's a few of us, all right? So for me, I have that desire to edit as I go along. I want to edit, like I write a sentence and I'm like, oh, that wasn't very good. I want to go back and edit it and fix it up and then I want to put some full text here, put some full points there and things like that. Don't do that while you're writing your initial draft. The thing is if you're like really in an inspired mode and you're writing really well, doing that's going to kind of throw that off, fight that desire. I'm probably only talking to a few people right now. The rest of you guys are like, now that's easy. But for me, that's always been a struggle. So I encourage you guys make sure that you're really saving that for an edit, which is a later part of what I'm going to talk about. And then ask yourself, this is an important question to ask this last part. Is does it add value to people's lives? Or does it fix a problem? That's a really important thing to ask. What is the point of what you're writing? What is it going to do for the world? What is it going to do for somebody else? That's just a really important thing for us to ask and to remember. So this next part is, this is a fun part of the conversation here. So your title and meta description, they're both extremely important. They're both vital to the success of your blog post. It's going to get you extra clicks. So if somebody saw those 2000 WordPress blog posts all in one screen, this is what's going to determine whether they click on yours or on somebody else's. If they did look at what it was about or anything, just what's going to get you to click what's not. So you don't want to mislead anybody with a title. I know I've seen some people that made some really awesome titles, but it has nothing to do with the content. It's just a title that's going to get a click. If people can't trust you, because that's going to create some distrust in people's mind if they had nothing to do with it, they're probably not going to come back and read any more of your content. So you want to make sure it has to do with the content that you're writing. Along with that, this was a funny story. Again, WordPress.com, I like searching around there a lot. So I was looking for a certain blog post on a pretty specific topic. I clicked on one and I saw a title, and it literally said, I might be messing up a little bit here, but it says something along the lines of, I don't want to write titles, I just want to write my content. Can somebody please help me? I thought it was hilarious. I was like, that's great. So I'm going to click on that because I know it's going to be about writing content, getting good titles, and nothing to do with titles at all. They never even referenced the weird title they made. It was actually like a well-thought-out post about the topic I was looking for. They legitimately didn't want to write the title. It was a terrible cop-out. I wanted mess-upers to be like, hey, great content. Why don't you make a title that worked with it or some sort? It's important. I felt misled, by the way. That was not what I was expecting. The next thing is when you're actually thinking about a title, it's a bit of a gift or an art form I could almost say. It's not always easy. There's an e-book I actually got from a very big company, and they gave me permission to send it out to everybody. At the end of this, along with the slides, I'll have a link where you can download that e-book for free. It is the best resource I've ever read on creating titles. I reference it all the time. I'm having lack of creativity. If I just can't find anything creative to write, I'll go there and just kind of read through some of the most popular ones that have ever been shared or some good strategies for doing it. It's awesome. I encourage you guys to get that. You can get that at the end of this. Like I said, I'll have a link for it. It's a good call to action. It'll give you a good idea for how to do that. In the meta description, this is like something that might be foreign to some people. Meta description is basically when you go to Google, you'll see the title, and then right under it, it's that sentence that comes up right under it. The easiest way to make one of those is to get an SEO plugin. I recommend SEO Yoast. It's what I use. Right under your content, there's a section where you can actually write your meta description. That's SEO Yoast. They actually give you a section for that. If you wanted to hard-code it, I guess you can. I wouldn't recommend that. It's a lot more work. Yoast makes it really simple, and it's a free plugin. It helps you with SEO and to be able to do things like that. When you're thinking of your meta description, think of it as an engaging preview. What's popular in a movie that's coming out soon? I'm not like a huge movie guy. Thank you. That's what I was saying. Have you been anymore, right? Who said that? You're second. I saw it. Cool-looking movie, right? You see that title coming up on TV. You're going to get quiet. You want to watch the preview. What if the preview was just the first 45 seconds of the movie? It's kind of like, you know, you're like, all right, well, I'm not really getting anything here. Then when you go see the movie, you're like, all right, I've already seen this. A lot of us have that desire to do that with our meta description. We just make it the first few sentences of our post. The problem with that is when we read it, even if they feel a little bit engaged and go to it, they're reading that same copy again in your actual post. Think of it as a movie preview where you're actually putting some highlights in. You're not giving everything away just enough to get people excited to read it. So kind of think of it that way. That's what it's about. It shouldn't be anything that's in your post. If you're really stressed for time, I understand I've done it before. I'm like, well, I'm just going to pull this part of the post. It's great. But if you have the extra time and you put in the extra effort, make it something to be really engaging and encourage people to draw them in to want to see a little bit more. And like I said, yes, I don't use that first paragraph. Any questions so far? Cool. All right. So this is an example of a great title. It's so shared 67,000 times on Facebook alone. It says 70% of Facebook users only read headlines of science stories before commenting. Super interesting. 67,000 shares. I want to go read the post. The first paragraph was just kind of references, shared a little bit about it. The rest of it was actually just that weird pig Latin. I don't even know if that's really what it is. How do you all say it? More. More. I wouldn't even try. It was way off. I was actually going to say that, but it wasn't way off. But that's all it was. So I read the content. It actually was just, it didn't make any sense. It didn't even have like real words in it. So it was like this long post with only one line that actually had real text. It got shared 67,000 times, which proves people didn't read it. They just went ahead and shared it because it sounded like a great title, right? Well, it might have been a joke. It's like they only read the title commenting. So it's like title, some filler text. Yeah. Laura Mipson is known for it's taking up space. Yeah. And then comments. That's it. Yeah. Laura Mipson. Pretty funny though, right? Yeah. They purposely put the Laura Mipson. Oh, for sure. Reinforce like, you're not going to read this article. Yeah. It's a title. Yeah. Laura Mipson. The actual article itself is just filler. Yep. You don't care about that. So I don't recommend writing articles or just filler. You can read the title. Let's not try this. It's not really writing. That's okay. Yeah. I don't think it's a good idea. If anyone becomes like a, like a, you know, a published author because of it, let me know. I'd love to hear that since that story. So here, this was pretty cool. I got this off of HubSpot. Actually, this is the most shared titles on Facebook. And it's crazy to see that most of them start with will make you or have that somewhere in it. So that's kind of like a, something that's like maybe three things that will make you more money. Somehow or, you know, three things that help you sleep better or anything like that. That's kind of like the most shared thing. So again, I'll have these slides. I don't feel like I get the right of these things down. But I thought it was pretty interesting to see what people were sharing the most of. Google is a great resource to be able to see that, especially before just a couple of months ago when they made their huge change. It's a good way to see, it's like half the internet is using it or something like that. So it's cool to see what's getting shared the most on there and things like that. It's a great way to figure out what kind of titles you want to write. Yes. There's a great book by Anne Handley called Everybody Writes. And she's got a couple pages where she's just showing those top ways to start titles. Oh, really? It's pretty cool. Like 16 ways to, or the worst thing, or all of those that are catchy, which are okay to use as long as it is relevant in the end. And what you just said there's so important. It's got to be relevant. So you can't just try to fit one of these in because it's going to get you more views. It's got to actually work with the content. I'd love to actually talk to you after and find out what that is. I usually write things down. I'm not going to write them out. But I'll talk to you after and get that book. But yeah, so this is one of my formatting issues. Gage, we kind of disappeared over there. Anyway, so again, it's got to be relevant, but this is like a good resource to be able to see. Cool. So featured image is the next part. So your image is the first thing that's going to catch somebody's eye. You've got to make sure you have a featured image on any of your content that you're going to be writing. It's extremely important to have that there for people to be able to see. People will mindlessly scroll, you know, it goes. Instagram people are scrolling so fast. They only stop when they see something that peaks their interest. So you've got two people to find something, some sort of image that's going to peak that interest to get people to stop. And that's when the headline comes into play. So this is kind of like your first defense to see if you can get someone to even slow down in the fast, crazy way of just scrolling through things. So you want to make sure again, just like I've been talking about, I'm always going to say this, it's got to add value to your content. Everything we do is got to add value to content. Cannot mislead people. So you want to make sure your image is really well, fits well with what you have. It requires a little bit of creativity, but there's, you know, we can all do it if we put a little bit of effort into it. Or you can always recruit somebody to help you out with that. So the images that are actually converting the eyes to clicks are images with a few words in them, or images are like close up of a face. So I don't, the words one, I've never used that. I'm not a huge fan of words in pictures, but it's like usually a really pretty picture with just like a few words that go with the topic really well seem to, people click that a lot and it works well. The other one is actually faces which I find more interesting. I end up using a lot of close up of faces in my posts. I will say this, if it's your own face and people you know or who's reading it, they're going to click it probably automatically because I see somebody that know in it. But even using somebody you don't know is a pretty cool way to do it. So each of us, this is kind of a cool thing just about the human race in general I guess, we're all programmed to look at other faces. Whether you do this consciously or subconsciously, when you're scrolling through things on Facebook, Instagram, anywhere social, if there's a close up of face, you subconsciously stop whether you realize it or not because you see another human face and it drives that inside of it. Somehow we're hardwired that way to be able to slow down and stop. So that's one of the reasons you can convert way better is because you see a close up of face, even if it's not somebody you know, you're going to slow down. So it's kind of an interesting way to be able to look at an image. And then just make sure that the image is using your high quality. I think a lot of us want to use our own images we've taken, which is fine if they're really good quality and they go well with the post. I had one author writing for me a while ago and he's kind of changed since then but he was a photographer, self-proclaimed photographer, I don't know what to call it. But he liked taking his own pictures. He had a picture and it was nothing about like, you know, have something to do with like faith in general. He has like a picture of a vote that he took. And it's a nice picture, but there was nothing referenced about a vote in the whole copy. Nothing at all. So I'm like, man, that was like, it's a cool picture. Like you took it, I get it, but it has nothing to do with this. You can't just use a cool picture because it's a cool picture. It's got to be high quality. It's got to go well with the post. You sure you didn't say CLI? No. No. So before uploading a picture, this is kind of a comment. Images, especially of the cameras, they come out with a very generic title. You want to go ahead and name it with the title of your actual copy is or something to do with it. And then after you upload it you want to utilize the title and the description, all text, all that. It's good for a lot of reasons. I'm not going to get into, but if you rename an image before you upload it, it actually will rank higher in Google, which means if people are looking at Google images for a certain topic that goes with that image, they might come to your blog post or your website through that avenue as well. I had one post that did really well with that. I used an image on it that was a really cool image. And it fit really well and it's not something that's searched a whole lot, but almost I get half the clicks come from Google images instead of actually from the web, which is pretty interesting. And there's three, there's a bunch of websites you can get free stock images because I know what everyone's probably a lot of you guys are thinking is like, where on earth do I get a good image from if I'm not taking it? Three places to get really good high quality stock images that are going to use are unsplash.com, pexels.com, and pixabay.com. I've got those three references up here. You can use those images, the people that are those photographers, I always recommend like, if you use a lot of their images, like donate something to them, they have like little links to like buy me a coffee and stuff like that, like give that because they freely give all these great images away to anybody. And I almost exclusively use Unsplash right now just because it's awesome. Super inspiring, cool images. So any questions on that? Yes. How do you choose to name your images that you get those Google image heads? So for example, would it be three or four words similar to your title? Would it be something catchy or two words? I'm not really sure the right way to do that. I use usually my entire title in it, or at least piece of it. Yes. Do you credit the photographer when you embed an image? No, not on these. If you read their policy, they don't require that. It's nice to do that. It's nice to do. Unfortunately, the theme I'm using right now doesn't play well with that. So I have not. But we always give credit back to those websites where that's where we're getting our images. And we, they all have trade parking built into it, and we're not changing that type of thing. So actually in the description of things of the image. So. All right. It's one of those you can like you don't have to. Right. Yeah. I think what they like better is when you buy them a coffee. Yeah. All right. So these are four. I'm going to give you a couple examples of actual posts that I've done on daily desk again. This is kind of like this person here. I used a list and I used a image that kind of screams friendship. So one of our most popular tags we use is friendship. They always get like a huge spike in views. It's important to know like what actually is converting for you. So I knew writing about friendship was going to help and people love lists for for secrets. He doesn't want to know for secrets. Developing stronger relationships. This picture, I really liked it because I was scrolling through on splash and saw this one and I recognized two people in it. I don't know them. They just looked like two people that I know. So I kind of was hoping that someone else would feel the same way. You know, they would see this and be like, oh my gosh, I might know these people. So this this posted extremely well and it was just like a good title with a good image and the actual description of it worked well with it. The meta description worked well with it along with it. Christian blog. That, you know, immediately sends up a red flag for everyone who's on there. Like what do you mean the problem with us? Like what are you talking about? And then the image goes well with it because I was talking about America. I didn't use a real bright color image. It looked like really happy and fun. I used something a little more washed. You kind of get the feeling of, okay, this is going to be something that's going to I'm going to have to read and get mad about. You know, it wasn't like that had a good, good image together. Um, this is another one where I'm just using a clear benefit in here. So it was one concept and I made better decisions because of it. Um, the image was hard for me to find. It took me like an hour to find this image if I'm going to be honest. But I finally found out I was like, oh that kind of looks like somebody's needed to make a decision and it converted well. It was another good post. Um, the title did really well for us. So, yes. What do you typically get your images from? Unsplash.com. Um, how to stop stressing about the future would have been fine by itself, but it was right before the new year. So, this will help you in 2018. So, I kind of used a how-to with a, uh, with something that was like a promised outcome, I guess you could say, along with it. Um, and then the image was just something with time, which I always find gives people the sense of urgency whenever you have anything with a clock or anything like that in it. In the mind, it's just kind of like, alright, this is an urgent thing I should read before the new year hits. So, it works really well. So, those are just four examples of actually staying all everything I've talked about in action here. So, a picture ain't worth a thousand words, but the right words are priceless. So, your image is going to give you the right words and it's going to be worth a thousand words. It's going to really help people get there, but having the right title is worth way more than that. The image is only going to slow someone down to actually look to see what the rest of what you have to say is. So, this is an example from WordPress.com. Um, we use WordPress.org and this was, the day I looked at stuff to make this, that post on, um, over here, where we saw that is for all you guys, left, yeah. Um, that post was actually the most recent one that got, um, submitted on DailyPS. Um, so I just typed in Stop Criticizing in, uh, in jeff and WordPress.com to see what came up. And, uh, that was the first post that came up under Relevant. So, it worked really well. So, I just kind of took a screenshot of that real quick and I clicked over to Most Recent without changing the search at all, and I found Logpost 4, um, on the same topic. Now, if these were the two posts that went live at the same time, on the same talk about, about not criticizing anymore, which one are you likely going to click? We're going to click the one that actually makes a little bit more sense, right? Um, that's an example of what we need to be thinking about when we're going to click yours versus somebody else's. So, and then, not that likes are super important, but one had 20, one had one. There's probably a guy who wrote it who liked it, who knows. Um, no judgment there, that's the one I would do it to. Um, so that's just a good way to see that it's really important to make sure that we're putting a lot of time and effort into this. Any questions? Cool. All right. So, now getting into the content edit, this is, um, being like a structured person. I like to have a good idea of where I'm, uh, where I'm going with my, my content and what I want to be kind of formed like. So, I often use this when I put it right in there. I've got my title, my lead paragraph, my image, uh, my experience on the topic. Um, any points, I'll have to do both points, um, and list with numbers, things like that in my conclusion at the end. Um, that's the way I like to write. It's not the way you necessarily need to. Something works well for me. I don't always use it. There's other times I'll use something way simpler. But, uh, that's normally what I end up going with. Um, right along with that when you're editing your content, do all your research. Um, for me what I'm doing a quick, my draft, initially, I'll write down some, some stats that I think are right. You know, I think I've heard of before, but this is when you want to go back and really like read the paragraph, uh, my featured image, my experience on the topic, and then my points, which are usually both points, or a list of numbers, and then my conclusion at the end. Yep, come on. Um, yeah, so I'm saying make sure you're researching the topic you're writing about. Uh, that's a really important thing to do. Uh, make every word and every sentence count. Uh, I know that Google does award longer content most of my posts don't ever reach that length. I just don't have enough to say sometimes. Um, and I don't want to have filler in there. I want to make sure that every word I'm using is important. I want to make sure that it's all going to really help somebody who's going to benefit. There's going to be a good, well-written sentence. Um, so make sure you're really doing that. The way I always like to say it is, uh, all buff and no fluff. Sounds pretty good, right? You know, it's good. Stuck my brain, so I use it. Okay, is that really what it's called? Is that what you guys use it on Apple? No, nobody knows. What do you guys use to proofread on Apple? So, pages... Grammarly. Grammarly. But Apple doesn't have like a native, like... So, so pages is the Mac equivalent word. Okay, cool. Alright, that's... Alright, so you write it in word or write it in pages. Got you. And then you run through Grammarly to make sure I know I'm using Grammarly is on anything. Yeah, oh yeah. So, I always run it through Microsoft Word first. That's the first thing I do. That's where I usually end up writing it. And then I go straight over to HemingwayApp.com is my next place I go to. And then I also go to Grammarly. All right, all the places that I go did actually edit my content. They all catch very different things and they're really good. You know, Grammarly and it were worth it. Does it really? So, yeah, killed to the word. Really? Learn something new. I love that. All right. Thank you. That's cool. And then the last thing that's super important is have somebody read your content before publishing. There's some things that will never, like the human eyes maybe only catches it. Perfect example is I wrote a blog post recently. I thought it was really good. I felt like I didn't need someone to read it. I was so confident in it. I messed up in the title and I got a text message from my grandmother. It's the one who told me. 15 minutes I published it. Oh my gosh, you're kidding me. That's what I get for not having somebody read it. 15 minutes later. That was pretty funny. Anyway, so make sure you have somebody give you some honest feedback and welcome that honest feedback. So for me, my wife is my normal editor. She'll kind of take a look at it and I've given her open, like give me honest feedback. If it's going to hurt my feelings, go ahead and give it to me. I'm not going to say anything about it. Sometimes, I need to be in here. Anyway, immediately I'm offended. I'm like, what are you talking about? I spent so much time on that. I don't actually voice that or she would never edit for me again. So she's editing. I kind of pulled myself out of the equation because I wrote it some emotionally attached to you. I'll read it and I'm like, oh, you're right. I don't need that in there. Recently, I pulled a whole paragraph out and was able to get into a whole other section of the post. It was just too long to add anything else at that point, but I pulled out a whole other section of the post. I'm also kind of before I move on to this next part that I didn't write this one down, but Google actually has a preferred voice that you can write with. It's actually going to rank higher. People have all kinds of different names for it. A passive voice is a no-go. They want something that's current, that's active, but also they look for two main things just in my own research I've found. They look for authority and transparency in your voice. Authority to me just means being confident shows it to Google shows that you don't have authority on that topic because you just think that maybe this is the way it goes and perhaps this will work. If you're somebody that has authority who knows the answer Google's going to rank that higher and also transparency. Google does not want it to be something that is just like a robot talking. They want it to be like, what's your story? Why do you know this? What's the emotion behind it? It's strange that they have an algorithm that can actually identify emotion and identify and then Google and found the answer to a question was somebody saying I think it's probably this that's never the first thing that comes up it's always someone this is the answer you're looking for right here and that's what Google ranks a lot higher. So, yes. I wanted to comment back on the reading with content. One thing that has worked for me is if you don't have someone readily available and you're eager to publish that content reading it out loud in front of an ear will surprisingly That sounds super scary. It sounds super scary But it works It works You catch a lot of things That's a good idea Very cool I ate too much at dinner You ate it? Well, also my Mac I just had my Mac read it back to me also Okay Yeah Oh, it's another guy You hear, like you said you hear it from the things and even the voice and things like So I'm used to do that also That's a good idea Cool idea I like that I'm going to implement at least the mirror one I'm not excited about it I don't know if my computer reads back again but we'll say that that's really cool All right So this kind of last piece of the puzzle here is the content the actual format of it This is the part that many of us kind of have the desire to skip maybe because at this point if you've written a great blog post and you've got a great image great title, all that great description to go with it you're kind of like all right, I'm ready to get this thing out there but we cannot skip out on the actual formatting of the post it's very important becoming more important than ever before I'd say Formatting can be as simple as using all the native features to WordPress just using the H font your quotations bold, underline different color text numbers, bullets anything like that they're going to make it kind of break up and not just look like a bunch of words on a page and so you want to kind of break up paragraphs wherever you can you want to not have long paragraphs the shorter they are the better because people will actually read them a lot more All of us grew up in a place where in school you were taught like a proper paragraph at least three to five sentences at least type of thing in school and you did a one sentence paragraph you're going to get that's going to get you in trouble you know but it's not the same on the internet one word or even sorry one sentence paragraphs are acceptable and even should be used at times I believe along with that like you want to make sure and break it up all you can a good way to do this for me is always add your internal external links somewhere within so I'll kind of be writing my post and I'll kind of go into a topic that maybe is just out and right under that I'll break up a paragraph even and put in the middle of it related post and something that has to do with that topic to just kind of be a call to action people would also break up the text a lot that Neil Patel actually shared this stat recently 79% of your audience will only scan your content so you need to create scannable content what that means is I'm guilty of it as well I'll be honest I'm a scanner when I see a real long piece of text without them breaking it up these sections that have you know they're using their H1, H2 fonts are a different color or like a really strong sentence or statement and often that's what I'll do I'll read it and I'll be like oh wow that's good I want to go back up and read it before that what led to this point and it caused me to kind of go back and read a full post and that's a really important thing to be able to do with it as well again that's 79% of people that's a lot Neil Patel is kind of a guru in the marketing world so I want to do this is to insert quotables and I'll explain what that is in just a minute here adding those within your copy I actually got this advice from Lika Alisa Terkers anyone's not familiar with her she owns a company called Proverbs 31 Ministries she might be one of the most influential women in the world of writing today and she's absolutely a genius I had no idea I ended up there by asking I was in the same room as her and listening to her talk and just kind of share how she's written books she's a New York and she credits all of it to these things what she calls quotables so an example of what a quotable is it's a strong engaging stand-alone sentence and it's what people highlight in books obviously most people aren't highlighting the text we're talking about in our blog posts or on content but if you kind of put away that it's separate that people can see it it's a really good way to do it so she shared this really what I thought was interesting is it almost 100% of best-selling books they're reading a whole book what they're looking for is something to highlight along the way it's what keeps them engaged and keeps them going when people stop highlighting they stop reading it's really true if you're reading a book it's just like a tough read if you don't have that mental break of wow I'm going to highlight this this is really good remember this it's hard to keep on going so we need to have that somewhere within our posts that we're doing our content publications aren't within it and then she had this thing where she was someone making it poetic or easy to read by no means I don't have to make any words rhyme together and so that didn't work well for me but I can make things that are fairly easy to remember or to read so that's a good point for everybody just to remember and think about it as you're writing and here's an example of that formatting is like the icing on the cake and no one likes cake without icing she's a fact so like I said I got these slides available so you can get them at the end as well but yeah feel free to write on that any questions on this I know I talk really fast I know any questions or anything like that yes ma'am what was the author saying to him Lisa Turquoise I had somewhere on there the lady said that right I think it's pretty slaggy on there oh it was wasn't it yes I'll just get down the bottom here right here L-Y-S-A-T-E-R-K-E U-R-S-T she spelled her name wrong her mom's spelled her name wrong I guess but I'm not gonna say anything I thought we said it's not alright so again going on to this next section here so no one likes cake without icing it's true right you want to the goal of all of our formatting is make it pleasing to the eye you want people when they read your post something I do when I know I'm short for time is I will scan an entire post before I read a single word on it I want to see how long it is if it's gonna be a lot a big commitment basically on a short amount of time I have yes huh oh yeah so the the thing that I found with this is like I'll go through and scan it it's just a bunch of paragraphs even if it's like three or four paragraphs there's nothing to break it up for me it feels like a bigger commitment than a longer post it's very broken up well it has like a lot of nice colors and stuff in it it seems like less of a commitment so that's something just to think about why while you're doing that yes I'm sorry I was just wondering I see in a lot of blog posts that people are like doing a picture at the top and then a picture in the middle you know several pictures throughout you might just have paragraph picture paragraph picture what's your opinion on that I think that's a really good a good thing to do I don't do a whole lot of it I don't again I'm not super image heavy on what I do but I do think that it breaks it up for the human eye again because it's a break yeah on that I I do certain posts where it is picture image picture image but it varies by the posts in my case it's like it's really important or if there's something step by step or if there's something relevant I wouldn't I personally wouldn't do images every other paragraph just for the sake of having them because if it's a fluid breed it ends up being more destructive true yeah that is right yeah it's good feedback anybody else alright so just to kind of to recap here we covered our content draft the first piece and then our title and then a description featured image the content edit that you're doing and then the content format and these are five steps I believe they really do help and make a huge difference in the world of in the world of vlogging it really is what kind of has helped me to stand out I've gotten a lot of traffic over the years and I say it with all humility I've put a lot of time and effort into it so it's cool to see some benefits come from it so a word of encouragement for everybody if you don't see an immediate change in action and your traffic you can apply all this seriously don't give up if you're running something that's helpful to the world or answering a question or just adding value don't stop it's not worth it to stop just because you're not getting a whole lot of traffic the truth is some of us may never but if we're doing something we know is adding value and it's changing a life it's worth it this last quote here is something I say to my team on dailyPSLI I say this to there's 70 authors I send my video every week I say it almost every week if your blog goes help one person it was worth it do for one which you wish you could do for all if that's the encouragement I want to give whatever you're writing if it really is going to change a life and help somebody make sure that you remember that if it's for one person if it only helps one person then it was worthwhile so that's a big important thing in all this just to remember I want to encourage you guys with that I know it's tough out there sometimes you write you pour your heart into something you feel like only a few people saw it just remember it it truly is worth it still so that's it my website alexandfalipo.com slash wc-jax you can get a copy of the slides I wrote an SEO ebook it's only 20 pages it's for beginners it's extremely simple it's very basic we have some SEO talks here that work great I want to go back and revise this book I'm not going to it right now but I'm giving that away along with that headlines ebook I talked about and if anybody wants to do any sort of coaching session I love to give back to this WordPress community I've gotten so much from this community of people learned so much anything I need to give back I'm happy with so there's a link on there that has access to my calendar you can literally reserve your own 30 minute slot and I'm not charging for that we can just kind of talk about blog posts or any business ideas you have I love doing marketing and stuff as well so again my desire is just to help this community of people I love what WordPress has done for me and I'm excited to get back where I can anyway that's it does anybody have any questions or anything like that yes do you have any insight on frequency how often do you post actually it's Monday through Friday so we do Monday through Friday on there I post once a month but there's a different author who writes every day I think if you really are a serious blogger two to three times a week is ideal that's a lot I do every other week on my own personal one so anyway time's actually up so I'll take more questions but I want to be able to dismiss so thank you everyone for coming I really appreciate it