Blogging for business and content marketing training course by Opace

Blogging for Business Bournville College

What we hope you will

achieve today?

Understand the benefits

of business blogging?

Identify keywords and

create blog content

Set up and configure a

basic WordPress blog

A brief history of blogs

• Web journals / personal

• Techies

• Marketers

• Politicians

• Business

How blogging can help

business

• Support SEO

• Improve customer engagement

• Build authority and brand

awareness

• Boost sharing and social media

content

Some ‘facts’

• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors (source: Hubspot)

• B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not, while B2B companies generate 67% more leads than those who don’t blog (source: Hubspot)

Some ‘facts’

• Companies with more than 51 blog articles experience a 77% lift in median monthly leads (source: Hubspot)

• 40% of US companies use blogs for marketing purposes (source: Hubspot)

• The average company that blogs gets 97%

more inbound links (source: Hubspot)

Creating a basic

blogging strategy

1. Research – competitors and target audience

2. Set objectives and align with business goals - comments / shares / website referrals / Google

rankings / sales / sign ups, etc

3. Create a team

4. Set guidelines

5. Decide on frequency and word count

6. Decide on the technology / platforms

7. Identify the keywords and develop content

8. Set up reviews, analyse and measure

8 Key Steps

• For point 8, make sure you have a good analytics tool installed on your blog – Google Analytics is free and easy to integrate - www.google.co.uk/analytics/‎

A note about analytics

• 43% of “less than monthly” business bloggers yielded a customer from their blog, compared to 92 percent of businesses who blog “multiple times per day.” (source: Hubspot)

A note about frequency

Deciding on the right

tools

There’s lots of choice

Which blog should I use?

• We often get asked which is better

WordPress or Google’s Blogger?

• It’s personal preference but we

love WordPress and even

Google’s most visible SEO

spokesman Matt Cutts

uses WordPress over Blogger.

Types of blogs

• On-site blogs e.g.

www.opace.co.uk/blog

• Off-site blogs e.g.

www.opace.wordpress.com

On-site Blog Off-site Blog

Pros

• Increases indexing of your website

• Helps website SEO

• Keeps fans up to date

• Draws people to the site domain

• Additional exposure

• Two domains can rank twice for

keywords

• Easy and quick to install

Cons

• Harder to implement

• Can’t‎rank‎the‎same keywords twice

• Might lower the rank of other pages

• May take longer to get traffic

• Twice the marketing effort

• Less control

Which is better for your

business?

We’ll focus on on-site blogs

Understand your keywords

• Why do we need to think about keywords?

• For each blog, think about your audience

• What would your readers search

for and different variations?

• Brainstorm ideas with your team

• Use the Google Keyword Tool –

https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool‎

Keywords – example

• Lets identify some for today's

session and see how many

searches they get on Google

Setting up a simple

WordPress blog

WordPress glossary….

• Theme – design of your website

• Plugin – pre-made functionality

that can be installed

• Widget – areas (blocks) on your

website where plugins or

content can be placed

What we’re going to show…

1. Install WordPress

2. Install a theme

3. Install 3 critical plugins

• SEO plugin

• Social sharing plugin

• MS Word style editor

4. Publish the blog

5. Show an optimised blog

List of plugins…

1. Async Social Sharing

2. Ultimate TinyMCE

3. All In One SEO Pack

4. Google-Maps-GPX-Viewer

We’re filming….

So don’t worry if you miss anything,

and we’ll publish it to our blog

afterwards.

It’s as simple as 1 2 3 – example

• Live demo

• Alternatively can be downloaded

from http://wordpress.org • Example blog can be found at

http://businessofblogging.co.uk

Using your blog with

social media

Why should I care?

• Socialising your blogs will help with brand

awareness and SEO:

22% of all time online

Over 600m social users

Impacts credibility

Impacts SEO

• The best thing you can do is make

your blog pages socially sharable –

and encourage engagement and

sharing by others!

Using your blog for

SEO

Why should I care?

• Google’s looks for all kinds of signals

when ranking websites and blogs help:

Encourage social engagement

Keep your website fresh

Add relevant content & interlinking

Increase the amount of content

• Make sure you include relevant meta

data (this is another topic) and write

the content around your keywords,

but always with the visitor in mind

and not Google.

20 brilliant ideas for

content

1. News

2. New products or services

3. Topical-themed items

4. Editorial blogs

5. Thematic blogs (Summer’s here….)

6. Top 10s

7. Best, worst etc

8. Reviews

9. Customer care

10. Top tips

11. How To….

12. Staff profiles

13. 10 things you didn’t know about…

14. Testimonials

15. Community-based

16. Latest sector research

17. News or updates

18. Useful resources (websites, social media, etc)

19. Competitions and giveaways

20. Comparison of two or more products/services

• When writing content always go

back to the keywords and make

sure these are aligned

• Consider longer keyword phrases

(long tail keywords)

A note about keywords

• 40% of people respond better to visual

information than text. Viewers on average

spend 100% more time on pages with videos

on them (source: Hubspot), so vary the type of

media used and get creative!

• Words

• Photographs / infographics

• Video (a whole new seminar)

A note about media

Next steps

Devise your strategy

Brainstorm keyword and

content ideas

Choose your blogging platform

Advanced topics

Google+ and Content Authorship

SEO and Writing Search

Engine Friendly Content

Video Blogging and Video SEO

Social Media Marketing

For further support from Opace

please visit

www.opace.co.uk/blog

Thanks for attending