Blogging has become a crucial part of having a successful web presence. In the BMGChat on Wednesday, November 2nd at 7:30pm EST, we discussed a few key areas of blogging: content, word count, keywords, and publishing tools and platforms. Here’s a summary of the chat!
Content: Content should be “less about your client’s product, and more about the “culture that surrounds” your client’s product. Hubspot, a company that offers inbound Internet marketing software, is a prime example. Its blog offers up creatively packaged, practical information that appeals to its very own target audience. Readers will find witty, educational posts, videos, guest contributions and even cartoons that cover everything from SEO and lead generation to Charles Darwin and cupcakes…//…You should ask two key questions: Who is going to read it? What kinds of topics and issues do they care the most about?” There are a million ways to steadily produce thought-provoking content for your audience. Ask your audience what they’re interested in hearing about! After you’ve written a post, end it with questions that solicit their feedback. “Don’t be afraid to pull in experts for Q&As, give spots to guest authors, respond to news and timely topics, share the spotlight with partners and customers and provide educational how-to’s. And of course, we all love lists.”
Q: What type of content draws you to a blog? What drives you to actually comment or give feedback? What are some of your favorite blogs?
BMGChat response:
- This website has excellent blog posts and articles http://www.npr.org/
- Focused content (nothing too random)
- Strong, well worded opinions
- Current content
- Facts plus personal opinions
- Added value to the topic of discussion encourages feedback
Word Count: The best writing, in my opinion, is intriguing content with zero rambling. Every single sentence should count. When writing content for a client or for your own blog, be sure that you aren’t forgetting the most important thing about blogging: your audience. Will they be interested in the topic? Ask for feedback! Foster comments and communication. Don’t mindlessly pump out tons of content that lacks relevancy to your audience. When thinking about word count, develop the subject as much as you need to, but don’t ramble on just to try to make it to 400 words. Simply put, word count is a matter of quality over quantity.
Q: What is a reasonable word count? Do you typically enjoy reading short (150 words or less) or long (400+ words) blog posts?
BMGChat response:
- 200-400 words is reasonable
- Up to 1500 words is acceptable if very developed and tightly focused
Keywords: “Your SEO practices should have a very simple goal: rank high in search results for the things that your client’s customers are looking for. [Rich Brooks] recommends starting with a keyword analysis service like Raventools, WordTracker or Google Adwords‘keyword tool. You want to pick one keyword topic per post, mentioning it once in the post title and once in the body of the post. Be sure to link important words to past posts as well, but keep it to one or two internal links at most. Beyond that, make sure you’ve got the WordPress SEO plugin installed and place the rest of your focus on working with your client to create engaging content.” I would recommend adding the keyword multiple times throughout the blog post to get a solid keyword density rating. However, make sure the blog post does not sound awkward or forced because of the keyword. It should still have a great flow and sound very natural.
Q: What are your suggestions for inserting keywords? What keyword density to you strive to hit?
BMGChat Response:
- Add pictures, keywords in ALT text and file sources as well
- With Yoast you can easily manage meta robots tag, sitemaps, robots.txt & other SEO elements
Publishing Tools and Platforms: I, along with many others, recommend WordPress (http://wordpress.org/). It’s free, extremely user friendly, and has thousands of plugins that will help you accomplish your unique blogging goal. Mashable also recommends WordPress: “With a bit of help, WordPress’ initial set up process is simple and fast, and yet it offers a huge range of customization and configuration options. And with thousands of plugins, there is one that will satisfy any need that you can think of, often for free. For those who are coordinating blogs for multiple clients, WordPress also offers admin features for easy management across the board.” http://mashable.com/2011/04/28/pr-pro-blogging-guide/ There’s many others, however. Another popular site is Google’s publishing platform, Blogger (which got revamped this past spring ).
Q: In your opinion, what is the best publishing tool? Why is it your favorite?
BMGChat response:
- It’s definitely the most popular, user friendly robust CMS available
- WordPress has impressive SEO and social features
To conclude the chat, I announced some big, exciting changes coming the the BMGChat. Next week (Wednesday, November 9th) we’ll be switching things up a bit. Instead of having an hour long live chat, I will write a blog post and publish it at 7:30pm here on the BMG website blog. All of the BMGChat participants will comment on the post throughout the week and have our BMGChat in that form.
What we would like to accomplish with this change is an in-depth, on-going discussion throughout the week–not just once a week. Our goal is to do two live twitter chats per month, and two blog posts per month. Ultimately, we’d like to have a space for immediate, live connection (the BMGChat on Twitter), and a space for deep, more thought-provoking interaction where you can read, comment, post related links, and keep the conversation going throughout the week!