Archives for July 2016

How to efficiently manage your small business blog

Peter Shilling · Jul 14, 2016 · Leave a Comment

I get it.

You’re running your small business. Perhaps it’s just you or perhaps you have a small team. Either way, you know someone needs to work on your WordPress blog. That someone is you.

In this post I try and setup some ideas for you to help in getting the job done, efficiently.

Before I get into these ideas, if you’re still struggling with the ‘why do I need to run a blog’ question, check out this post where I’ll convince you it’s a good idea in just 3 points. {link to other blog post}.

WordPress blog management

Instead of writing a blog post and publishing it immediately, we want to leverage the platform to use the little time you have to get the best result. Let’s get you familiar with some ideas that can not only save you time but get your blog content in front of more readers.

Setup time to write material for your WordPress blog

It might be once a month, better if it’s once a fortnight. Whatever the timeframe try to be disciplined about it. Block out a time in your calendar and stick to it. For me, I like Friday afternoons. I currently spend a lot of my week working on other people’s projects. So I like the feeling of ending the week working on our business marketing. The point is, choose a time that works for you.

Prepare content then schedule its release

WordPress makes it very straight forward to schedule content. In your regular sessions aim to knock out as many blog posts as you can. However, don’t publish them all right away. Using the scheduling tools in WordPress you can set the publish dates to be once a week, or perhaps fortnight. Daily? If you’re a true writing machine!

Capture your ideas

To succeed in the two points above, it’ll help if when you sit down to write you have a list of ideas that you’ve thought of during the day to day operation of your business. It could be as simple as a spreadsheet, a note taking app on you phone or perhaps a dedicated tool like Trello.com.

If possible use something that you have with you all the time. So when the ideas strike you, you’re able to capture them, right there and then.

Setup a system around WordPress

This is a topic that I love to preach about.

Stick with me, because I think this method of working can make a significant difference to your blogging and marketing. It’s all about using your time efficiently.

WordPress is excellent at integrating into other systems. If you set things up correctly you can build yourself a simple to use publishing platform, that sounds fancy doesn’t it? This platform can be centered around writing your content in WordPress, when you hit publish, the automation kicks in. That blog post can be cued up to be eMailed to you email list, scheduled to be sent to your Twitter account, shared on Facebook, published on LinkedIn – all automatically and all triggered from WordPress.

Sounds like a bit of a time saver huh?

WordPress and Mailchimp together

Let’s begin with the sending of blog posts automatically via email.

MailChimp is our favourite eMail list management and distribution tool. It’s continuously developed, adding new features regularly. However, for what we’re looking for here, MailChimp has been able to do this for a long time now.

RSS Feed campaigns

If you’re not sure about RSS it’s stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s part of WordPress and offers a ‘feed’ of your blog content that other online system can read. If you visit your domain name with /feed appended to the end (eg. blah.com/feed) you’ll see your RSS feed. Don’t worry if it looks a bit strange, it’s not for humans to read, it’s for other online systems to read.

If you’re familiar with MailChimp you’ll know that it allows you to create a number of different types of campaigns. You have probably used the “Regular old campaign” that is its default.

However you’ll see that along with that there is the option for an RSS campaign. This is going to setup something that is a little different. It’s not going to send just one email out to your list. Instead it will listen to your RSS feed and when it sees new content it can trigger an eMail to be sent to your list.

If you step through the setup there are many options that can be configured. For example it does not have to send an email immediately that it sees a new blog post. You might prefer it to send an email once a month with all of the new blog posts that have been published in that month. That can be done too.

If you’re not super familiar with MailChimp take a look at their documentation they have a couple of good tutorials on the management of RSS campaigns.

Automating social media sharing with JetPack

JetPack is a WordPress plugin that provides a number of different features. It’s made by Automattic – the company behind WordPess.com (this hosted version of WordPress). Each module inside JetPack provides a different service, we won’t get into them all here, instead just the one – Publicize.

Begin by connecting each of you social networks to your WordPess site. JetPack supports many of the common networks that your likely to want to use (Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn etc…). Connecting a network involves authenticating with your account and approving access to your WordPress site.

Once this is done you’ll see in the WordPress post editor that there is now some new functionality in the Publish meta box. Here you can customise the way JetPack sends messages for you blog post. Using the post title as the message a message will be sent to each your connected networks. JetPack will create a hyperlink back to your WordPress site.

Go nuts with a full featured WordPress editorial calendar

If you’re keen to really publish a lot of content on your WordPress site, considering an editor calendar is a good idea. The one that we use is CoSchedule. It is very tightly integrated into WordPress and is easy to learn.

To begin with it provides a calendar view of your scheduled content. Showing you when each of your scheduled posts is set to publish. It then allows you to write customized messages that will be shared on your social media networks, linking them back to you WordPress site.

Because the two are connected, blog post and social messages, you can move things around and the tool will happily reschedule everything related.

CoSchedule also supports collaboration in team environment, if you have multiple authors on your WordPress site then look into these features as well. Features like a review process, commenting and assignment of tasks are all possible.

A WordPress centered publishing platform

The ideas presented here are focused on getting the most out of the little time you may have to work on your blog. If it’s just eMail alone or eMail and social media, MailChimp and JetPack can help you get your content in front of more eyeballs. If you’re in a small team or publishing several times a week then a tool like CoSchedule can really save you a lot of time.

Links to services

If you’d like to learn more about these tools, here is each of the websites. Take a look at their tutorials or product features. If you have a quick question that you’d like to ask here go ahead and leave a comment

Got a question?

Leave a comment here, happy to help where I can!

3 reasons why you should run a WordPress blog for your small business

Peter Shilling · Jul 11, 2016 · Leave a Comment

You’re time poor. You run a small business. As well as actually running your business you’re the one responsible for marketing it too. If you’re reading this you probably have a WordPress site. You know that you need to blog, you read that advice everywhere. Why though? What’s the point? What should you really expect to gain by spending your valuable time taking on yet another commitment?

In short: why do you need a small business WordPress blog?

There is a lot of noise online in the marketing world. Loads of ‘experts’, lots of hype – probably a lot B.S. too. Do not loose faith. Today I’m going to lay out why blogging on your business website is a worthwhile exercise and answer the above question as go.

Let me sum it up for you. In just 3 individual ideas. I’ll convince you to get blogging for your small business.

Blogging improves your SEO situation

Google loves fresh content. Regularly adding new material for the search engines to discover inside your site is very well regarded. It will improve your position. Particularly if your blog posts are publish with a good SEO structure; adding 3 – 4 new blog posts a month will undoubtably improve your rankings.

An increasing number of blog posts means you can also link to your cornerstone content and overtime teach Google where the important content in your site is.

Steadily improving your SEO status and therefore your rankings in search engines is a cost effective long term marketing strategy. If you stick at it you will succeed. When you do, traffic coming from the major search engines can be the life blood of your website. Read more about WordPress SEO here on our blog.

Be a leader

Ok. You may think this is a little daft. However it’s a valid reason to publish great content, it’s an opportunity that awaits you. Regularly publishing new material on your blog puts your name, your business and your product / service in front of your audience. Over time your name can become synonymous with your area of expertise.

Publishing solid content gives you material that you can share on your social media networks. Subtly, placing you and your brand in front of your audience regularly. When it comes time to buy, you’ll be top of mind and their first port of call.

Solve problems with your blog content

This idea is often missed but I think it’s invaluable.

If your sales people regularly hear the same pre-sales questions, if you clients commonly need answers to questions, use your blog to supply this information. For one thing is creates efficiencies inside your business. Next time your sales person is asked the same question – ‘sure, that’s a great question, can I eMail you a link to our website where we really explain that in detail’. A good result for the sales person and great for the prospect. They can see in detail that your business is organised and your team really know their stuff.

The idea does not have to be restructured to pre-sales situations. Over at HelpForWP.com – our WordPress plugin business, we regularly have situations where our users ask the same questions.

‘How do I get the plugin to do X’
I’ve installed the plugin, done XYZ and blah happens

Each of these situations can result in a great blog post for your WordPress site. Similar theme as before, your support team can save time by referring the user to a link on the website, no need to write out the answer again. Of course a great result for the user too, assuming your blog post answers the questions, pictures, screen captures whatever it takes to get the message across.

Have I convinced you?

I hope so. If you have a question, perhaps you’d like some more tips, or you’ve got a blogging success story you’d like to share. I’d love to hear from you, post a comment below.

If you’re are convinced on the why, check out this post where I set you up with some tips on how to work efficiently on your WordPress blog. If you’re the time poor business owner I mentioned in the opening of this post you’ll enjoy the tips I share.

How to structure your WordPress content for SEO success

Peter Shilling · Jul 1, 2016 · Leave a Comment

Here at The DMA we train people in SEO for WordPress. Lots of techniques and things to remember when you’re writing on you blog. Sometimes it can all be a little too hypothetical. Today I’m going to share a very simple and practical method to ensure that your On Page SEO and ideas around Semantic Keyword Research are taken care of for every blog post as you write it.

Sometimes I write directly in WordPress or I write in a Word Processor or Note Taking app and then transfer it to WordPress later. It does not matter how you work you can implement these ideas.

How to structure a blog post for SEO

What I like to do is create a simple outline of the blog post that is to be written. Here’s the format that I use.

The outline should cover these 4 items:

the draft title of the blog post
one or more themes (subjects) to be covered
keywords that relate to each of the themes
questions that will be answered

It doesn’t have to be complex, perhaps you simply write it out on paper or type the ideas at the top of blog post as you create it. Either way works, I think the import thing is to have it with you to refer to as you write. This process makes you stop and think a little about what you’re creating. In doing so you can get much of your blog post’s SEO ideas pulled together quickly, as you write it.

While each of these items may be obvious, let’s dive into them in a little more detail.

Blog post title

I deliberately put the word draft in that point. Reason being that I find that sometimes as I write more I may change direction a little. Meaning that the original blog post title needs a tweak to ensure it’s reflective of the content.

While I’m advocating simplicity here you might at this stage look at some tools that help you write titles. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyser is a great tool to help you craft better titles for your posts.

Semantic Keyword Research – setting your themes

Modern SEO is not just a matter of lucking on the keywords that Google likes. Google understands the meaning your content, the context that those keyword find themselves in.

Taking a couple of moments on this allows you consider your options, perhaps conduct a little research on related topics / themes that would work well with you subject matter.

If you’re not that familiar with this concept in an SEO context check our WordPress SEO training course, we cover this in detail.

Here’s a quick example for a fictitious blog post, titled “How to avoid buying a lemon car”.

Covering all of these topics in the blog post would really set the scene for Google to understand what the blog post is about.

SEO keywords

Now, for each of the themes that you have, you’ll create a list of keywords. These might be from previous research that you’ve done for your site as a whole. There might be some new ones in there specifically for this blog post. Perhaps a quick Google search can reveal some ideas that are specific for this particular post.

Again, you’ll then have this list to refer to as you write, keeping you on target as you go.

Questions that will be answered in your content

A lot of searches conducted on Google are questions.

Why is the sky blue?
What is on page SEO?
How to structure a blog post for SEO?

Google wants to solve problems for its users. Understanding this is how search works in the real world is important. Then working on your WordPress blogs so that they answer questions, solve problems for users, this will benefit you site’s rankings.

A real world example

I am writing this on the way back from WordCamp Europe, words from 35,000 feet! Even so, I followed my technique, the same one that I have documented here for you. Take a look at my blog post outline below, check it against the content of this post, you’ll see how it relates.

Use this method for you writing, over time you might tweak it little to fine tune a system that works for you.

Good luck!