 In the meantime then, over to Claire. Thank you very much. Can everyone hear me? Yeah, great. So thanks very much for coming today to my talk on small business blogging. I love blogging and I hope that you will love it too after hearing my talk. And just a little word of warning, I'm going to go through quite a long list of plugins and tools, but don't feel you've got to write everything down. There's going to be a list in my slides at the end, so you don't have to get them all. I'll have the links. So I am a freelance web developer from Edinburgh in Scotland and I work mainly with small business and third sector charities and social enterprises and I started my business back in August 2013. So why should you blog? You ask, well, one thing is you'll get more traffic to your site because as we know Google loves fresh new content and blogs certainly provide that. And in general, the more you write, the more visitors you'll get and you'll get visitors from your older blog posts too. It also helps your SEO and certainly I find it easier to rank for SEO for posts because I can write longer articles and they're more targeted. And because you're providing valuable content and if you're consistent with it, you're going to build loyalty amongst your visitors. And by doing some blogging, you will show your expertise and you'll build your credibility and become that go-to person in your niche. And certainly that's worked with people who already know me to some extent that I've already networked with, it just gives me that extra credibility. Blogging is also going to help you educate other people because if you're writing about something, you obviously have to know about it first and I like learning something and then teaching it to other people. And funnily enough, you'll actually help yourself too because I've lost count in the number of times where I've wondered how to do a task. I've Googled it and I've actually found my own post in search. And finally, you'll get new business opportunities and that includes things like guest posting, it might be client inquiries or even speaking engagements like this one. So how are you going to blog? Well, you want to have some kind of schedule for your blogging and I use an editorial calendar, that helps. And I'll mention a bit more about that later on. Plus there are tools that will help you to blog and save you time putting together your posts and publicising your posts. Again, I'll show you. Groups are really good. Online groups or offline groups, they keep you going and they give you ideas and they give you encouragement for your posting. And you need to make the time to do it because if you don't block out the time like you would with client work then guess what, it's just not going to get done. And there's a specific way that you want to write your blog posts. You're not writing them like you were writing an essay. You don't want paragraph after paragraph on text. It's just dull and boring to read. So you need to structure them properly. This guy here, Rob Cubbin, at robcubbin.com is one of my inspirations. I came across him early on when I was starting off being interested in web design and development. And we've never actually met. I've emailed him a number of times. He did come to work at London in 2013 but he won't be here this year because he's currently off in Thailand setting it up. And he is a graphic and web designer. He turned more into a digital marketer and entrepreneur and he uses WordPress and the Genesis framework. And he started his blog back in 2006. He attributes a lot of success to running a blog. He's now moved into doing e-books and video courses and he's got these multiple income streams. He regularly publishes income reports so that you can see what he does is actually working for him. He's very much got down to earth attitude of well, if I can do it, anyone can do it and that's a really positive thing. So this was actually my first blog post and you'll notice the date. It was January 2014. Not when I started business. I was lucky and I got a bit busy and I didn't get around to building my site right away. I was posting one post a month and I thought, well, it's not really enough one post a month but at least it's consistent but I always seem to be playing kind of catch-up by getting to the end of the month and saying, well, I've got to put a blog out. But I thought, well, it's not really enough. I've got to do a bit more. And this is the tweet that changed everything. I don't know about you but I like getting free stuff and if I find something for free then it seems like a good thing to share with other people and this was an e-book that was free. It's given away every month or so and it's a collation of 30 different e-mails for a blogging challenge. So this started up a little Twitter conversation with the author of the book, Sarah Arrow. The book is called Zero to Blogger in 30 Days and I said, oh, I actually had got the book before and I thought, well, I said to her, I want to do more blogging. So she said, well, why don't you join in with our Facebook group? So I did. Not long after I'd actually joined Facebook because I was very suspicious of Facebook for years and I quite like it. Well, I like the groups anyway. And that led on to actually signing on to do the challenge and the challenge itself is run by Sarah Arrow and her husband Kevin, their company of Starkey Media. And I started it off in February 2015. It was a good time for me to take it on. I just left a difficult project. I was feeling a bit down and all of a sudden I had a purpose. I had to do a blog post every day. It gave me something to focus on. So obviously the aim is one post a day for 30 days and you get an email sent to you about six o'clock every morning, local time, giving you ideas of things to post. And some of this stuff I found, well, I know this already. I'm not going to pay special attention to keywords and things because I know a bit about that. I did, I have to say, before it began I actually pre-wrote about three of the posts because I thought this looks like it's going to be a lot of work and I wanted to just give myself a little bit of a head start. And like I said, you get a whole lot of ideas. I got quite excited when I came to the infographic day. I thought this is going to be easy. This is going to be great. It wasn't easy. It was actually quite time consuming to do. It's just researching all the bits and pieces. I quite enjoyed putting it together in Canva.com but it just took time. So this is the blogging challenge group, the Facebook group. And this is where everyone gets to share the posts and you can like and comment on other people's posts. And the great part is that everybody else in the group is on the same journey, all at different stages. So every day someone posts something and they put the day that they're on. And this is so important getting this encouragement to keep going. And it's also great to just discover new blogs out there that might have absolutely nothing to do with what you write about. So for example, I like cooking, I like food and I really like seeing all the food blogs because they all put gorgeous pictures of delicious recipes on them and I thought that's wonderful. I want to go and make that. And the rewarding in the group is really important as well. You get these little badges when you start, when you finish and every seven days you get a new one saying, well done, you've done seven days, well done, you've done 14. And that's just something that again just keeps sparring people on. And I did hear from the horse's mouth that they stopped doing that for a couple of months and the engagement went right down in the group. So it's really super important. And once you have completed the challenge, there's more. There's a group for graduates of the challenge. This has got about 200 people in it. I don't know if you can see the numbers that were in the blogging group but it's rather more than that. A lot of people start and not so many complete it. And being part of the graduates group, I can keep sharing my content in there and there's extra goodies as well. There's interviews and bonus content just exclusively for the graduates. So what did I discover from this challenge? Well, it's definitely time consuming and like I said, you need to block out that time. While I was actually doing it, I was finding myself writing into the evenings because I was finding it took a good few hours to put together a post. And certainly for the kind of post that I write, being mainly about WordPress and web development, it takes longer. If you're going to review product, if you've got like a new plugin or something, you can try out and use it. But if you didn't and you wrote about it, you wouldn't be terribly credible. And putting in things like videos, putting in screenshots, you have to take that same time to make an edit. Although I did find in the course of doing it, I found tools to take quicker screenshots which I thought was great because that did save me time. So I wrote a post about it. Once you start to see people actually liking and commenting your posts and you start to see your traffic increase, that makes it all worthwhile. And like I said before, you have to be persistent. A lot of people will try and not so many succeed. But having said that, life can get in the way. People kind of have to put the pause on the challenge for all sorts of reasons. I actually had to be persuaded last year. It was at World Camp Birmingham and it was the evening social. And I wanted to put a post out and I had to be persuaded. No, you are loud in the evening or if you are actually loud, enjoy yourself. So my audience seems to be a mix of people. I've got, for the more technical posts, I've got designers and developers reading those ones. I got a bunch of students come to a post I wrote on 2015, making a child theme. Thank you to my old uni for that. I've got some people who are just lay people using WordPress or the other tools that I write about. And I like writing event reports. It's a good record of what I've been to and a reminder of who's spoken and what they spoke about. So I'll get people who were at the same events coming. And I'll get a few potential clients in there too. So in terms of strategy, research is important. You have to think, well, who are you actually writing for? What's your audience? Do you know? And structure the poster in that. Know your topic really well. Find out everything that you want to know about it. Find relevant links that you can put in. And then think about the SEO side of things, the key words that people are actually going to be searching for to find your post. Long posts are good. There's some evidence that posts over 2,000 words actually make up the first top 10 positions in Google for a particular term. And I have to write in epics. I can't help myself. I find that I just write and write a certain amount and then I get like Colombo and I think, oh, there's just one more thing I could add there. And then obviously the longer you write, then the more likely they are to be found for any particular search term. You want to mark up posts correctly as well. You want to put headings in there and put them in the correct level order and there should only be one heading one per post, which should be the title. You want to put in alt text because not only is it good for visually impaired users and you should be doing that anyway, but it can also help SEO too. And the little bit of text underneath the title and the link in Google, the method description, fill that bit in as well and get keywords in. In terms of layout of your blog, don't use justified text. That's not good for people with dyslexia to read. And break up the text with things like bullet points, images, you could put lock quotes in, you could put tweet boxes in, just anything that means it isn't a big wall of words. So a little example of some of the actual code from one of my posts, just showing the different markups where I've got the headings in order, I've got a bullet point list and I've got some alt text in there too. So when it comes to the scheduling, make sure you are comfortable with whatever you start writing. Better to start small and build up. If you start three times a week and then give up after a couple of months, then it's just going to look sad. There's nothing sadder than a blog that's been abandoned. And at the worst, people might just think, oh, they've gone out of business. It doesn't look good. And obviously, a 30-day challenge is a bit of a commitment. It's a bit of a crazy one. Oh, did I mention, I didn't actually do it in the 30 days. I did it in 34 because I did have those days off. You do need to be regular as well to build attraction. And it just lets your visitors know what to expect. If you're randomly posting on different days of the week, every week or something, how is somebody going to know when there's something new? When you've finished racing, you once put some kind of call to action at the end of the post. You have to assume your audience is really stupid and they're not going to do anything unless you tell them what to do. So if you want them to share it on social media, tell them to do that. If you want them to leave a comment, tell them to do that. If you want them to email you tell them to do that. The publicity side as well, I think that's something I neglected when I was doing the blogging challenge and I've heard it said you need to spend as much time if perhaps not more time actually on the publicity as the writing. So you can use all sorts of things, social media, groups, forums. You can email people personally. You could just tell people when there's something that you've written out of interest. Ideally you should have an email newsletter and you should be emailing those people on it regularly and telling them, hey, I've just put out some more great stuff. Not everyone has comments enabled on the blog, but I do and I recommend having them. And if you reply to your comments, it's just showing that you're in touch with your readers. You can start off a little dialogue that way. And it's important as well to comment and share other people's posts. It's just good karma because if you do that for them, the chances are they'll reciprocate and do it for you. So here's a little selection of topics that you could write about, not an exhaustive list by any means. If you write about a problem and a solution, it's just showing off your expertise. You can ask your customers or you can find out from them what are those questions that they're always asking you and then you can answer them in a post or a series of posts. And you can write how-to posts. You could do that through texts, screenshots, you could do video and audio. I had one like that where I had the client. I was suggesting that she use Dropbox. She didn't know how to use it. So I just wrote a post going exactly through all the steps of putting a file on Dropbox and sharing it. And if you do a post like that, you're showing, well, I can do it. So some people will think, well, that's great. You can do it. Rather than me doing it, I will just get you to do it instead. Everybody loves list posts. You should put in list posts every so often because they're the most shareable type of posts. They do really well. Reviews or comparisons. You're helping people to decide on a particular product or service. Plus, of course, you're teaching yourself on it too. Event reports, like I said, it makes a note for yourself and for other people of what the event was all about. And something I just tried recently, a pricing post. That is supposed to build a bit of the trust factor because when someone comes to your site, they're going to be looking and wondering on price. You don't necessarily have to explicitly say, hey, this is how much I charge, but you at least have to talk a bit about the subject. So a couple of examples from my own blog. My WordPress plugin accessibility post has done quite well. It's had 89 shares and interactions, and it's a page you want to Google for WordPress plugin accessibility. And that one is still consistently popular when you're on. I've pinned it to my Twitter page though, so that might have something to do with it. And this is my short rating pricing post. It's had 102 shares and interactions, and most of them came from LinkedIn. And I've actually been told I need to push some traffic from Facebook ads. So is anyone here a Facebook ads expert? Could you come and speak to me afterwards, please? A little bit about blogging ethics. It should be obvious, but don't steal other people's content. Be careful when it comes to pictures. There are lots of good free stock sites. I particularly like Pixabay, which has quite a good selection for a number of things. Not everything, but not bad. You need to read the license terms carefully with pictures. Check if it's got creative commons, and you have to attribute anyone. Screenshots, perhaps... I use them a lot, but there may be a bit of a gray area. There is the fear of use doctrine. I think the key question is, are you actually profiting from the use of screenshots? If you are, then you might need to think again, but I'm not a lawyer, so don't quote me. I think outsourcing things can be a good idea in some cases. You could certainly outsource things like creating an infographic or creating an e-book. I would be a bit careful with stuff you can buy, what's known as private label rights content, which is content that someone's written that they sell to a number of people for reuse. If you decide to put that on your blog or whatever, there's a chance that if someone might have used it before and you might get a duplicate content, penalty, which means you might have to rewrite it, which means you're probably just better off writing your own thing anyway. So, onto the plugins. These are all on the repository, and they're mostly free. A couple of got paid services or upgrades, which I'll talk about. This is better to click to tweet, and it just puts a little button into the post editor with a little Twitter bird on it. When you click on it, you get a pop-up box, and you put your quote in, you can choose to add your own Twitter handle to it. It generates a short code, and then the better on the bottom is what it actually looks like on the front end, so you've got that little click to tweet link there. It just makes a little bit of interest and encourages more social sharing. Broken link checker. Guess what this one does? Yeah, broken links are not good for SEO, and they're not good for user experience. There's nothing more frustrating than have lots of links on your site that just laid nowhere. And this runs in the background for you and sends you an email every so often, warning you what links are broken, and often they can be comment links because somebody might comment at one point, and then months down the line, their blogs disappear, but the link's still there and it's broken. One thing to watch out for is that this can be a bit of a resource hog, this plugin, and some hosts have actually banned it. Co-schedule is what I use as my editorial calendar. This plugin is free, but the service is not. It's a paid service. And I use this to plan content and to aggregate ideas for content. It also shows me for each post that I put out, how many social shares I've had, and the real other big benefit for me is it's got the social sharing built in, so you can actually set up once you post something, you can say, right, I want this tweeted out a day from now, a week from now, a month from now, and once you've set it up, it's all ready to go. Jetpack. It's a bit of a love heat plugin. No, not everyone likes it. I happen to like it. There's a few features here. I've got on top left is the gravator hovercard, so that's just that little pop-up box when somebody hovered over a gravator on a comment. Underneath we've got the related posts. I think that's useful because if somebody comes to your blog and they're interested in WordPress and that you've got a category, then you can show them other posts in the same category to keep them on your site that bit longer. The sites that I think are probably a bit inflated, but I do watch them regularly. They're kind of fun. And right at the bottom right, we've got the subscriptions module. That allows people to subscribe to your blog and also to subscribe to comment threads as well. This is Sumo Mi, another one that's free, but some of the tools in it have got paid upgrades. This does a whole heap of things as well. It's mainly for email list building and for social sharing. You can see right at the top, I've got the heat map tool turned on, so that's actually showing me on a page what did people actually click on. It looked like they were clicking on the links, which is good. Underneath a tool called the highlighter, and that allows people to highlight text. And then once they've highlighted it, they can social share it out. Right at the bottom is the content analytics, and you might think, hey, I've got the best blog in the world, but this is actually showing you, if you set it up, how much of your post people actually read, so you want nice high scores on this. Above that is my opt-in box that pops up when you scroll right down to the bottom of the page, but they have a whole heap of opt-ins. They've got those ones that pop out right in the middle of the screen, which I personally don't like, but I understand that they are very effective, and they've got the one, pretty much someone lands on a page, and that's the first thing that they see, and then they have to scroll down to see your content. And finally, plug-in wise, who uses Yoast? Yeah, quite a lot of you, and I do too for all my own page SEO, and if you use it, the object is to get the green light on everything. They have gone and changed it around quite a lot lately, which has got a little bit annoying. The site map function is pretty useful as well. So now moving on to more web-based tools, writing headlines is really important for your blog post, because if you don't grab the reader's attention with a headline, then they're not going to click read through and read, so the top tool here is a tool I use for crafting better headlines, co-schedule headline analyser, the way this works is it comes up with a score for the headline. So it takes a number of things, it'll work out how many words are in it and warn you if there's too many or too few, and it will show you if you've got too many and it's going to get cut off in the search preview. It analyses the word balance of your headlines, so it does it on four different types of words, common words, uncommon words, emotional words and power words, and the latter two emotional and power words are the ones that are going to grab people and get them to click through. It tells you what kind of type of headline you've got, so if you start your headline with a number, it immediately recognises a list, and as we know, lists are insanely popular, and it also tells you finally what the sentiment of your headline is, so you want to be really positive or really negative, ideally, because that's going to get people more emotionally than if it's just neutral and flat. Underneath I have Google Analytics, which I'm sure a lot of you will use as well for tracking stats. The one thing I would say with that is watch out for referral spam. I discovered all about that last year. I hate to write in a blog post on it, because it's just kind of people manipulating and trying to boost their numbers and skewing all your results. Now we're on to Long Tail Pro. I've actually got the Long Tail Platinum version here. This is a paid tool. Platinum is like an extra upgrade. It links to your Google Keyword Planner, but it's kind of a slightly nicer interface, and it just shows you all sorts of metrics for search keywords. The Platinum version's got something called Keyword Competitiveness, which they've calculated, and what you're looking for with that one is to get a nice low score in it, and that tells you it's something good to write about. If you get under 30, that would be ideal. You can also use this to see what the top 10 results are for any particular keyphrase, so you can go and look at your competition and decide, well, if it's all really, really huge, massive traffic sites, you might think, maybe I'll not get much chance of ranking for this. Underneath we have SEO Edge, and that is an iOS app, and it's free to use for up to five keywords. You can track them in Google Rankings, and it produces a lot of graphs, so you can see that the positions can actually go up or down. I find that if you do get lucky enough to get something in the top 10, it does tend to stick there. There's another online rank checker, and that's called the search rank checker, and I'll use that one as well. These tools are more for actually putting together the content of your posts. I'm lucky, my mom's an English teacher, so I've been blessed with good spelling and grammar, but I still find it helpful sometimes to use tools. Grammarly is the top one here, which is Web App and a Chrome extension, and that corrects your spelling and grammar. It warns you straight away if you have got an error, which I find can get a bit annoying because my typing isn't always that good and I can just mistype things, and it immediately warns me. There is a premium version available from this, and I have to say I haven't tried it because it's quite expensive. Underneath we've got the Hemingway editor, and that is a Web App. You can also get it as a paid desktop app. That gives you a number of things like how many words you've written and the time to read. I quite like saying that on a blog post, you know, read in six minutes or whatever. The main purpose of it though is to simplify your writing down. So it warns you about if you've got sentences that are hard to read or very hard to read. I do think it could be a wee bit prescriptive. It warns you about things like you're using the passive voice. You're using adverbs. These are bad. So think those things are bad. For say, I think you just have to use your own common sense and judgment. So as far as blogging goes, don't just take my word for it that it's good. There's a few quotes here from Papel about how it's helped them. So for Rachel, she found that blogging has helped her get new visitors, and it shows off her expertise, and ultimately it's helped her to get hired. For Jo, if she blogs, then she's showing a helpful person, and she's building that no-unlike-and-trust factor with her readers. Paige, she was on the blogging challenge with me. Her big benefit has been to just get to know her audience. I started off pretty much like her, not really knowing who my audience was, and now she's got to that stage that she knows and she's developing her own products. So I hope to have some type of questions, and I have some time. Thank you very much, Cher. That was pretty exhaustive. The questions are coming thinking fast, so we'll get straight to them. Hi. Thank you for a very insightful presentation. I have a two-part question. The first part is do you happen to have a writer's blog and how do you fight it? Because as for me, blogging is something I'm yet to master, and I find it very hard to keep up with the schedule. So I created a rule for myself to write at least 50 words for a day. So do you have any secrets like this or overcoming ratios? Yeah, I think it's just making that time and just making yourself right, but I suppose if you're not really in the mood to do it, then put it aside, go off, do something else, have a cup of coffee, come back to it or something, because I think sometimes I can write something and then just get really sick of it and then it's like anything. If I come back to it, then I've got a fresher mind and I'm able to write on it more. Thank you. Hi. Our team was using Grammarly and because of the technical language you have to use in Internet and SEO world, it was driving us crazy. Have you got any tips about settings and stuff? We probably didn't give it enough attention but it started driving us mad so we had to turn it off. I think you can turn it off on individual pages and things like that. I haven't used it for probably long enough. I know it does sort of send you those reports and it sort of says how well you're doing overall with it and you are like 95% better at something than the average person. I would just say if it gets too annoying, then just turn it off for a time and maybe just put it back on right when you're at the very end and you're ready to edit. Good question. Thanks very much Claire. One of the most challenges I have faced with my blogs is the spam comments or the bogus comments. What would be the best way to counter those who send in spam comments? Well I use a kismet which is automatically installed for you with WordPress. You have to subscribe to their service. I think it's $5 a month although I've now done it for the year. There is another one I know of called anti-spam B which is a free spam comment plugin but you definitely need to have one of those in there. Kismet is pretty good. It catches most of the spam. I think very occasionally I have the odd comment that slips through and recently I actually had one where somebody told me they'd commented and I only knew that it had gone into the spam and they told me they'd left a comment but other than that I would say it's good I recommend it. Thanks Claire, great talk. You mentioned about knowing your audience, using the blogging to learn more about audience. I just wondered how you actually because you were quite specific on some elements there was it that you judge what they're doing from the comments that they make on your blog or is there some other insights that you use to get that information? Well I've had one or two people leave comments and that's maybe given me more ideas because I think I wrote about 2015 theme and then I thought the natural thing to do after that was write about making a child theme for it and I've had the same sort of thing writing about 2016 as well and yes I forgot to mention this is keep an eye on just what people are asking you and you can go to say like Quora.com and type in something that's related to your niche and you can see all the kinds of questions that people are asking about that and that could be quite fertile ground for you to find things to write about. Okay, thank you. Okay, do we have any more questions from the floor? Yes at the back there. I have less of a question and more of a helpful tool. It takes me ages to write blog posts because I'm constantly rewriting and re-editing as I write and a 500 word blog post could take me half a day. What I started doing was dictating it and sending the MP3 to a transcriber on fiverr.com so a blog post now takes me five minutes to write and five dollars to have transcribed. Brilliant, can't recommend it highly enough. Well that's the ultimate note sort of thing isn't it? Instead of sending it to fiverr.com there's a free dictation app on your iPhone and a very good dictation app for your iMac or your PC, it's Dragon dictation, it's unbelievable. So it works really well and you can speak this fast and it's faster than those ladies over there. Dragon dictation. Obviously not as good. So I had a little question so there was a thing about putting blogs live that I did hear from someone who worked in SEO and this was some years ago that it was actually could be really helpful to schedule the time of day that a particular blog goes up and I wondered if you'd sort of looked at that and whether you looked at different sorts of audiences for your posts and how you schedule maybe at the sort of microscale at less than a day. I don't tend to schedule a lot but I think it comes irrelevant when you're actually doing the sharing that I find that if I send out tweets like certain times a day I think I find between like eight and nine in the morning is quite a good time to do that because I think people are maybe committing or something and they just happen to be connecting their phones and seeing what's come up that kind of thing but in terms of publishing posts it tends to be just when I've written them then it's going to go out and at the moment I'm trying to stick to every Friday. Okay and the other one the blogging challenge looked particularly interesting you did touch on a few that have been harder were there any that you either got sort of picked a subject and really regretted having been it off or I mean this is like a general one as well like do you ever sort of post something sort of think it a week or maybe even later go back and you've changed your mind completely and want to rewrite it and would you do a follow-up post or would you actually edit the old one? I have had to revisit a few because I've written something like one of my popular ones is actually about networking groups and I've had to just go back and revisit that every so often because the information's got out of date and I think yeah that is something that you have to do periodically if it's not sort of ever green information then you have to just keep an eye on what's there. Would that be an edit of the original post or like another thing in a common category? Well I ended up just rewriting it and then just putting a little note at the top saying revised on but yeah I mean I think there are some people who actually don't put dates on at all on their blog which could be viewed as a little bit disingenuous because I think I like to know when it was written but I can see that there's some logic to that because if you don't put a date on then you know it's going to be seen as ever green. Okay your slides are basically going to have all the tools listed that you spoke about and I guess if we should keep visiting a bright clear web to see the new tools that you play with and read the reviews. Thank you very much indeed Claire, thank you and thank you for great questions on the floor.