Last week we typed out a post about how to continually come up with blog topics for posts if you are on a tight blogging schedule.  This week we are going to continue on that track and talk about how formatting a post can not only help turn an idea into a full blown post but it can also help make the post more desirable for readers (and search engines at times).  As a Denver marketing company we have come to terms with each of these steps and their benefits and embrace them. 

1. A 5 step program: For some reason people like numbered posts.  There has probably been research done on the thought process behind why people do, but we don’t have that.  We simply know that if you can sit down, look at your article idea and put 5 steps to it, not only will it give you more paragraphs to talk about, it will be something that a reader enjoys to see. (It doesn’t have to be 5, it can be 2, 3, 4, even 10 or 12 whatever fits for the post.)
2. Bulleted Points: Obviously 5 steps doesn’t solve everything.  However blog posts typically have some structure to them.  If you can pull key thoughts out, elaborate on them and highlight them this will expand your post rapidly. The unique thing about  bulleted points (and more so of bolding) it makes the post look different.  A change in text size and boldness can actually be detected by search engines and those phrases can be chronicled as the key topics for the post.  This also helps with readers knowing what to share about the post and remembering what they read from it.
3. Typing with an end in mind: Bloggers can be creative (that’s right, give yourself a pat on the back) but that creativity can get the best of us.  A great blog topic comes to mind, however it’s way too elaborate to fit into one post.  This is when you sit down, brainstorm, and determine how to get the topic out in a clear and concise message (all the while expanding the amount of posts you are developing).  All the sudden a blog idea that seems impossible has turned into a six part blog series.
4. Pairing like concepts: The exact opposite of the last point, sometimes there is a blog idea but you can only think of 100 words.  If you can’t implement one of the first three strategies then employ this one.  This happens often when we write posts, if we aren’t typing with the end in mind, then we are pairing like concepts.  A great example of this comes from our PR Principles blog series when we wrote about both Video News Releases and Micro-blogging.  In the PR world both of these are just starting so the information on them is very limit.  So we simply combined them under the PR Principles umbrella.
5. Examples: Sometimes there is a complex concept that doesn’t need to be expanded upon into multiple points however it needs to be explained.  This is where you can take a fun topic that you enjoy blogging about and make the complex become simple.  We did this when we wrote out our Inbound Marketing for Business series.  We used everyday social media examples to help understand deeper subjects.

We have provided with five different ways to format a post in order to get the most from it, if you have any more suggestions please leave them in the comments below!

How about a cool web site?

Now that we have discussed ways to expand blog posts and make them top notch how about some information on how to have a top notch web site?

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As a Denver Marketing company we spend time writing blog posts.  After many years of typing up posts on a weekly basis we began to wonder how other people continue to come up with weekly blog topics.  We even took to LinkedIn and asked three different professional groups how they continued to generate blog topics and keep readers coming back for more.  Sadly, no one took the time to answer any of the questions we asked, so we will be putting this article together on our own.  However, we believe that we have a relatively comprehensive guide here that can help generate post content for years to come.

Blogging about updates

One of the easiest things to blog about are updates in relation to your business.  Whether it’s technological updates, pricing updates, or government updates, updates allow for instant blog topic material.  The great thing is that as a person blogs about updates they become even more highly recognized as experts in their field.  This causes people to continue to return to the blog every time there is a new update, leading to more traffic coming to your site.

Blogging about your expertise

We are all in business for a reason.  One of the best ways to avoid typer’s block is to blog about what we know best.  Not only does this  make a business seem more reputable, but they also can stand out as an expert in their field.  This definitely makes it easy to come up with topics to blog about and it also can help generate leads for business.

Blogging about your services

Yet another great topic of knowledge for a business is the services they offer — very easy to write about and a great way to keep customers updated whenever services change.  Being open about the services offered allow for potential clients to feel that the company is going to work well with them and not hide anything from them.

Blogging about lessons learned

The saying “You learn something new everyday” applies here.  We are constantly learning in business.  If there is a certain aspect of your job or company in which you learned a lesson, share it.  Even though “history may repeat itself,” posting lessons learned can help shorten the learning curve.  Being able to relate a lesson learned back to a particular aspect of business or experience can also help people remember the lesson learned better because people remember things better in story form.

Blogging about research 

We all do research in business.  Granted, some research we want to keep to ourselves, but some research is great to share with the online community.  Sharing research can be a great conversation starter.  It can also help readers see that your business is dedicated to staying current as well as continually searching out the best way to do business.

These are five great ways to generate blog topics. Are there ways that you generate topics that we didn’t list here?  Please share them with us in the comments below!

Take it to the next level!

Now you have a great blog, full of great posts.  Now it’s time to spruce it up with bleeding-edge web typography. Come find out how in our new e-book:

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As a Denver Marketing company we work to market companies in the most efficient ways possible.  A key part of marketing online is done through Search Engine Optimization.  We talk a lot about SEO here at our company because we believe in it, we blog about it, and we use it.  SEO can never be minimized and there are constantly being new ways added in which online marketers can increase SEO for their clients.  This week we will look at SEO inside of blog articles specifically.

Links

If you travel back and read our series on Search Engine Optimization (or simply download the e-book at the bottom of the page) you will see some great information about links.  The short of it is, it’s extremely helpful to have at least one, if not multiple links inside a blog post.  Typically we only link to other articles on our site.  Though this doesn’t quite increase the rankings like an inbound link to from site would, it still increases the overall SEO because search engines are searching out and reading each individual post to determine the inter-related aspects.

Categories

The automatic default post category for articles built in WordPress is to be “Uncategorized.” Creating a keyword specific category 0r categories for your blog posts not only help keep it organized but it also gives a category for search engines to place your post under.  Though it may not weigh heavily as a single SEO aspect, using the categories function is one of a many options within WordPress to help increase the visibility of a post, thus making it easier to be picked up by a search engine.

Tags

It is beneficial within WordPress to tag your posts (this is different from the myth of meta tags, which we discuss in our e-book below).  We have pulled in an image of our most-used tags from one of our personal blogs.  It is key when branding a blog to make sure that you are using tags and keywords that are relevant to your brand.  Even though these tags carry very little SEO rankings, they do help search engines determine what categories to place the posts in.  They also do carry weight in how WordPress presents the blog through their site.  It is definitely worth the time it takes to lay out the tags.

Keywords

Most of the time a meta tag denotes a keyword.  This is something that is key for building SEO into a blog post.  The more a keyword is presented in a blog post the higher a search engine will rank that post related to the keyword.  So making use of keywords should be top priority for any blog post.

Excerpt Function

A script is used to write a small synopsis about the blog post.  This is what will appear when the link is shared on Facebook and other social media platforms.  This is another place to type keywords to help catch the eye of both readers and the search engines.  An image of the script box has been attached below.

Image SEO

Finally, Preparing your images for SEO is extremely helpful.  Whenever someone goes to search for images, due to the lack of SEO built into the images of many sites right now, your site could be the one the person finds.  All that you have to do is enter some text related to the subject of the image as the alternate text of the image.  The other benefit for a blog of placing images in the post is that people are more likely to click through and read a blog post that has an image than they are one without.

Learn about SEO

We told you we’d offer it. Here it is.  Our e-book about SEO Fundamentals.  This is key for any company looking to build their Search Engine reach.

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“The cloud” has become a vogue topic these days. Apple has their iCloud, Amazon has their new Amazon Cloud Drive, and “cloud computing” is all the rage in business circles. But what exactly is “the cloud” and “cloud computing”?

Basically, “cloud computing” basically means doing your computer work through web-based software than runs on an internet server, rather than your own computer. For instance, rather than writing this blog post using Microsoft Word and saving it to my computer hard drive, I’m currently writing it in Google Docs, which is an online writing program that I use through my internet browser. After I have written it in Google Docs, we will use another piece of cloud computing software — WordPress — to publish it on our company blog. The entire process runs online, and I access it all through my web browser.

So what are the advantages of cloud computing? There are several:

Accessible anywhere

Gone is the need to be tied to your desktop PC to get your work done. When all you need to do all your work is an internet browser and an internet connection, you can literally do your work anywhere. You can start a project on your office computer, make some edits to it on your mobile phone while you’re out and about, and finish it up on your laptop at home. Don’t want to sit inside on a nice summer day? Take your laptop out to the park and finish up your work with the summer breeze blowing through your hair.

No tech support needed

We’ve all been there: the software program we need to get a project out the door in a hurry suddenly crashes, and you’re suddenly set back by several hours. Incompatible software drivers, buggy software patches and a myriad of other things have the potential to wreak havoc on your computer. But when you’re working “in the cloud,” all your software tools are on one centralized server system, with its own dedicated team of professionals watching over it constantly. They do all their software updates and debugging automatically and behind the scenes, so you can continue to go about your work without being slowed down by buggy and inconsistent software configurations.

Automatic saves and backups

You know the feeling: you’ve been working on your report for an hour, only to have the power go out and you lose everything. Or you save it to a USB drive only to have it fall of your pocket on the way to the client meeting. Or your hard drive suddenly goes bad and half of your work files have become corrupted and require an expensive restoration specialist to be saved. But when you’re doing your work in the cloud, everything is saved and backed up automatically. If your power goes out, just turn your computer back on afterwards and pick up right where you left off. If you lose your USB drive, it’s no problem because the file is accessible online anyways. You don’t have to worry about losing your data on any one of your devices again.

Getting started

“Well that all sounds great, Chris,” you might ask, “but how can I get started using some of these tools? Great question. Here are some of my favorite cloud computing tools:

• Google Docs
  This is a fantastic alternative to Microsoft Office and other traditional office tools. You can write and edit documents, calendars, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and more. Additionally, you can share documents so that multiple people can edit them — even simultaneously!
  Price: free for individuals and small organizations
• Remember The Milk
  Tired of carrying around your grocery list, your to-do list, and your miscellaneous notes on wrinkled scraps of paper shoved in your pocket? Switch them out for this handy online task list software. Create multiple lists of tasks and reminders, set due dates on them, and check them off when finished. Remember The Milk can also send you daily email reminders of your tasks for the day so that you’ll never forget.
  Price: free for the basic version
• WordPress
  Over the past several years, WordPress has become one of the most popular tools in the world for building and managing websites. And it’s no surprise why: it’s super-easy for new people to pick it up and learn how to use it, but peek under the hood and there’s a lot of power for more advanced developers to tap into. It’s the tool that powers my own company blog, for example.
  Price: free

These are just some starting suggestions to help you dip your foot in the water of cloud computing. As time goes on, you can start experimenting with other cloud-based tools to use — pretty soon you’ll start finding a good collection of them that you like, and they’ll become an indispensable part of your workflow. So come on and give cloud computing a try! You might just find that your bloated, buggy desktop software starts to become little more than a distant memory.

Free Resource: Website Fundamentals

With more and more of our software tools running as web-based services, it’s essential that you know the fundamentals of how a website works. Come find out what you need to know in our free e-book.

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As we continue our Inbound Marketing series we will be looking dually into parts of Content and SEO by seeing how companies can use Blogs and Keyword Traffic to bring in potential leads.

As a Denver online marketing company we have written several different blog posts for businesses, about blogs.  Before we begin to look specifically at blogging and using keyword traffic we figured we would share these previous blog posts in order to maximize the information we provide for you and your business.

We have written about how useful Tagging is for blog posts, why a company should blog regularly, why blog posts should be interesting, and  how blogs relate to social media and business.

Above are listed four quality articles that line out several pieces of how blogs should be put together.  One thing however that we have yet to cover and fits with our current Inbound Marketing series is using Keyword Traffic inside of Blogs.  This is something that is extremely useful not only for a blogs SEO but for a website as a whole’s SEO.

When writing blog posts, there are several opportunities to build keyword traffic.  First is tags, (which can be seen more in depth in the post above) tags are one of the first things that search engines look for, a consistent tag across several blog posts will build presence for keyword tagging.  Another is keyword linking, this is something that we will dive deeper into as the series unfolds but a big part of Keyword Traffic.  This is because when placing a specific link to a keyword, this increases the SEO of that link, making it easier to find in search engines.  We do this when we link our online marketing page in each blog post.  This is enabling us to use the same keyword in our blog to bring traffic to our site. Which is what using keyword traffic in a blog is all about.

The unique thing about keyword traffic is that it can fall into two deeper levels as well.  When building keyword traffic into a blog there are some other parts that can be used as well: photo and link titles.  On WordPress specifically each specific link and photo can be given titles, these titles can be found by search engines leading to higher SEO.

So in short using the same words, like “Denver online marketing” (what we have been using recently) tags the blog posts, then included in the photos and links tags those as well, leading to a widespread keyword base for SEO.  That is how keyword traffic can be used specifically in blogs as inbound marketing.  Above we have provided other useful information on blogging for business for resources as well.

Still not convinced?

We have compiled stories and case studies of customers and their Inbound Marketing experiences.  Take a read today to see the real results we can provide through Inbound Marketing.

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