How To Blog – Page 2

When It Comes to Content Creation Just Do It!

How To Blog, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Speaker

So, over the past week or so, there has been quite the conversation going on about what is considered good content. The discussion began on Twitter, and then moved over to a blog post by Rob Hahn, which brought out some really good discussion on the subject. To sum up Rob’s 1,761 words his main point was this:

“Create content that you find compelling and forget everything else.”

While I get the point behind Rob’s post, I don’t necessarily agree with it 100% and here’s why: Someone new to blogging doesn’t know where to start. I get the point of being yourself, writing about your passions & all, but when someone who is new to blogging, you aren’t going to start out by writing the best blog posts, creating the most awesome videos, and everything else. You may have stuff of interest to you and that you are passionate about, which I think are great topics to do, but the fact is that when you are just starting out, you have yet to find your voice in creating that compelling and amazing stuff alone. You content is hit or miss in the beginning. Just like in baseball, you are happy to get home run caliber content once out of every fifty tries.

When I am out speaking to people on how to get started with blogging, I always share this: Your first blogs will stink! The key is to just start. I then go on to tell them about one of my first posts I ever wrote. To save everyone the trouble of trying to find it, I’ve pasted the post in it’s entirety below:

Hot Donuts Now!!!

This Morning while just flipping through some of the odd headlines that pop up when opening up aol, I started reading a story about 23 Retail Stores closing. I mean some of the ones on the list are kinda no brainers, but one that caught my eye was Krispy Kreme!!! What is this world coming to? Instead of closing them up, they need to just turn on the hot donuts signs more often!!! Luckily only 25 stores have closed so far. Hopefully someone in KK will read this post and take my advice!!!

94 Words of waste with twelve exclamation points. The post had absolutely nothing to do with the profession I was in at the time, it was simply just something interesting to me that I thought would make a good topic to write about. If you go on to read many of the other posts that I wrote back at the beginning of my blogging career, they follow along the same lines of terribleness. Unlike many people that start blogging I just started doing it and put an effort into blogging no matter how bad I may realize those posts were in the beginning. That first month I wrote 38 blog posts. Of which maybe only 2 were worthwhile. But, I did not quit, I had decided I was going to do this and would not give up.

After about 6 months, I finally started to get the hang of it and my efforts started paying off as new leads came my way, business started to grow, and my blog was starting to be recognized. It wasn’t too long after that time that the local newspaper contacted me to write for them, major corporations contacted me for interviews, and my content was starting to be published on a national scale. That real estate blog which I have not written anything on the subject of real estate in over two years still makes my phone ring to this day. Now, my entire business model for 210 Consulting revolves around my blog and it is my main source of connections and leads.

The reason this has happened is that I took the same type of stance that Daniel Rothamel took in his response to the conversation with Rob and the others. Daniel’s stance is this: In order for content to be considered good content, it actually has to be created. If I had not started with writing those first blog posts as terrible as they might have been, I would have never made it to the point I am today. Finding your voice in your blog, video, or many other online avenues takes time for many. But, if they never actually start and give it a try, then they will never achieve success. The same is true for the person that starts it and gives up after only a few tries. Like anything in life, it takes time and hard work. I think what sums this up better than anything is a speech given by Art Williams:

So, don’t always worry about the compelling & amazing, just start creating content. There is someone out there that will find your content interesting and you will make connections. Trust me when I say this, I have seen some stuff that is just down right awful that has brought people business. Everyone has their own opinion and you will connect with at least one person if the content is created for them to connect to. Without the content it is virtually impossible to form those connections.

So, like Daniel said,

“There is one thing that ALL good content has in common– it was actually created. The only really bad content is the content that we never create. . .”

I tend to agree. I would love your thoughts and comments.

Photo: Nisha A Creative Commons 2.0

#GENBLUE Presentations For Coldwell Banker

Conferences, How To Blog, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

I just got back to the beach from Generation Blue, the national conference for Coldwell Banker agents. At the event I spoke on two topics that were highly attended and talked about. In fact, the classes were so popular we ran out of handouts for every class. I also was told that there was a fear of times of the Fire Marshall coming by. I promised those who attended I would put a copy of my presentations online, so they are attached to the bottom of this message.

While at Generation Blue I did two sessions. The first was on 50+ Tools to Enhance Your Social Media Strategy in which I shared various tools that I use on a daily basis to run my business. These are not all the options that are out there in social media, but rather are tools that I either currently use or have used in the past.

Genblue 50+tools

View more presentations from Jeremy Blanton.

The second topic I spoke on was regarding the fundamentals of blogging and 5 basic components to getting started. I shared basic tips on how to write the posts, what to write about and how to do it effectively.

5 Keys to Successful Blogging

View more presentations from Jeremy Blanton.

Hope everyone enjoys! If you were unable to attend or would like me to come speak on either of these subjects or anything else related to social media, feel free to contact me.

The Best of 2010- Year in Review

Custom WordPress Sites, Facebook, Facebook For Business, How To Blog, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

As this year comes to an end I always try to reflect back and see what successes and what struggles we faced as a company and reflect as we make our preparations for the upcoming year. One of the places where I start this is by looking at my Google Analytics to see what pages, what posts were the most popular of this year. This post will share what you the visitors of 210 found important and were interested in.

Here are the top 5 most visited posts from this past year:

5. Goo.gl Changes Link Shortening

The first week of October I wrote about Goo.gl releasing a link shortener how this could be used to build QR codes, track the traffic instantly to a specific link & also share that information collaboratively with others to view. One of the links shared via goo.gl has already received over 500 clicks in the last two months from over 8 countries.

4. Using Creative Commons Photos- For FREE!

This past year I was asked over & over how to get safe and legal photos to use in your blogs. I was spending so much time teaching people how to do this that I finally made a short video and wrote a blog post on how to do this. It seems that people really wanted to know how this was done by the amount of traffic the post has received. If you are looking to get good photos for free for your posts, check this one out.

3. Facebook Page of 47,000 Gets Shut Down Over Vanity URL.

The online community really shocked me by the power they posessed when Jonathan Rivera and the Real Estate Referral Group page was shut down. The reason it was shut down was over a trademark violation in the user name he chose for the group. Even though he tried to get Facebook to change the URL he was unsuccessful and the page was then shut down. However after the post we wrote here on 210 and the one over on Tech Savvy Agent and a massive online effort by thousands, the page was reinstated & the URL was changed.

2. Custom WordPress Sites.

This was an actual page of our site and was neck and neck all year long with #1 for the most popular thing on our site. While this is not an actual blog post and is a static page, I was amazed to see the amount of traffic it has received this year. What it shows to me is that people are recognizing the importance of having a powerful website. It also shows me that you have realized the importance of your site having a solid platform like WordPress powering it with their great plugins and blogging components.

1. Google Instant and How it Will Change Your Keywords

In September of this year Google release Google Instant. The day that it was released I wrote a blog post about my thoughts on Google Instant and what I thought it meant towards search engine rankings. This post was by far the most popular one of the year receiving 2 1/2 times the traffic of any other blog post on our site. People understand that while social is important, having a good grasp on SEO is huge. It also showed me that in the upcoming year we need to do classes and posts regarding SEO. I think one of the reasons this post received so much traffic was due to the amount of people sharing the content on both Facebook & Twitter. It was shared on Twitter 66 times and Facebook an additional 41 times.

So as we make our plans for next year, be on the lookout for a post this coming week where we will share about some of the things 210 has in store for next year & also a post regarding what we see as the hottest new things for 2011 that you want to jump on before everyone else.

Thanks to everyone for an amazing 2010 and for Jason & myself we want to wish each and every one of you a Happy Holidays and an amazing new year!

Is Your Sidebar Sending Mixed Signals?

Custom WordPress Sites, How To Blog, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors

After watching the game last night between the Green Bay Packers & New England Patriots, I noticed that as the game winded down to the last minute of play, the message being sent to Green Bay’s rookie quarterback must have been mixed. He played a great game last night until the final 60 seconds. It seems as though he became completely unglued in the final 53 seconds. I think that this was caused by confusion in signals which happens when you have inexperienced people running things. As you watched the final play of the game, Matt Flynn tried to at one point call a huddle, then a timeout and then finally rushed to just get a play off that ended the game.

While part of this fault lies on the rookie QB, I think more fault should be left with his coach that had called a timeout just before that. At that point he should have given his quarterback a clear and concise game plan as to what he wanted done. If that had taken place, there would not have been so much confusion and the Packers might have won the game.

This same type of confusion takes place daily on websites across the world. Consumers visit thinking one thing to be greeted by buttons and flashy objects that simply confuse them and divert their attention. In this post I am going to give you a clear and concise road map to making your site function better.

I talked last week about ironing only the front side of your shirt and the importance of looking at more than just the visual appeal of your site. We discussed the importance of your site being shared socially easily and also having a good foundation to the search engine optimization side. I mentioned in that post there was a third element that I would cover soon regarding the calls to action on your site.

What are calls to action? They are graphics or links on your site that you wish for people to click on and use. Normally you want to set these up to drive people to specific areas of your site where they can either purchase your products or services, hire you to work with, or subscribe to your site. If they are placed in the proper segments you can help direct your traffic to the exact places you want on your site.

Sorry What Were You Saying? I’m Lost In Adwords!

Have you ever visited a site thinking it was about a specific thing, but when you start looking at the site you get confused what the site is about? I see too many sites now where the sidebars are wasted on driving the traffic you worked so hard to get to your site right back off your site to somewhere else. Here’s a screenshot from a friends comedy website:

So they worked hard getting someone to come visit their jokes and they are instantly met by Google Adwords above the post driving them to school lunch programs, nutrition schools and more. The sidebar doesn’t look much better with ads driving them to natural healing school, eating heart healthy, and other fun places. While they do receive a little bit of money from people clicking on the links, I asked them how much revenue they actually created each month. He shared it was less than $20 per month. It boggles me when someone places these types of ads on their site trying to garner riches and glory. Unless your site is seeing major traffic, you will not see big money coming from them. Instead you drive your consumers away from your product and place them off your site on others.

Confusion In Content

Back in the late 90’s 2003 MySpace was king of the customizations and abilities to add all types of fun widgets to your profile. Unfortunately those days are over. Having a giant meez dancing or taking photos is no longer a popular practice. Also, you are once again driving your consumers off to other distractions instead of your products or services. Over on the right you can see the actual sidebar of another friends website. You can see they start off with some interesting content telling us that their site has “STUFF you NEED to know if you planning to buy or sell your home.” They do warn that they has a sense of humor by saying you will be entertained while learning. But, under the brief description we have a broken widget that should be for feedburner. It has sat like this since at least May 2009.

Following the broken widget is a PayPal Verified seal which baffles me even more. Last time I checked, consumers are not using PayPal to buy or sell a home. If they were selling an online product on the site and PayPal was their preferred form of handling transactions it would make sense. They the finish off the sidebar by adding their Meez of a girl with a camera taking photos. The sidebar to this site leaves me in complete confusion as to what the site is about. Is this a product site where I can buy things, is it a photography site, or is int an entertainment site. To the average consumer, this same confusion will take place. The search engines too are completely confused which hurts your SEO.

Creating The Dummy Button- My Top 3

The top two or three things you share on your sidebar are the most important. That is what will show up on the screen above the fold to a consumer visiting your site. This is your prime real estate space and you shouldn’t fill it with jibberish that does not help your business. Here’s a great tool to see what a consumer is going to see on their computer. I use it regularly as I work on my system with a high resolution 24″ monitor that most consumers do not own. So use Google’s simple browser size tool to test what content runs above the fold at different sized screens and resolutions.

So what makes your call to actions effective? The most effective call to action buttons are going to be catchy graphics that are predominantly displayed in prime locations on your site. I nickname them dummy buttons as I feel it is pretty simple to an consumer visiting my site they know exactly where I want them to go. On 210 we have three main call to actions. The first is to subscribe via email to our blog. Some may debate why I placed this button first, but I think this is huge to growing your readership, your influence and overall business. In just over 6 months of this being installed on our blog we have over 825 people subscribed and receiving every blog post we write directly in their email.

Our second call to action button is to one of the products we sell. By viewing my Google analytics, I found out quickly that most of the consumers who come to our site are looking for information about our custom WordPress sites that we design. So, I created a quick and catchy animated gif to place on our sidebar that linked directly to that page. I also added an image to the footer of every single blog post we write that does the same type of thing. By doing this, that page that page is now receiving four times more traffic than any other page on our site except the home page.

The third call to action button we found beneficial to our business was the button to hire us to speak. Why would I add this button? The reason was simple: The more speaking gigs we get, the greater exposure we get for our business. The more exposure we receive, the more business opportunities will arise. This button is in our sidebar and also in our main navigation to our site. Since the addition of the speaking button, our speaking page has remained in the top 10 pages for traffic on our site. It has also garnered speaking engagements in large arenas like the Coldwell Banker Generation Blue Conference in Las Vegas.

The Rest Of My Sidebar

These are the buttons that consumers have to scroll down to use. They still have good value and deliver your quality business but aren’t worthy of prime placement. This is where my lead generation button is to gather email addresses for my newsletter. I haven’t really pushed much yet with growing my newsletter list and still I get 2-3 new opt-ins daily. This is followed by our chat buttons which allows consumers to see when we are online and chat with us about anything. This chat function has been great in generating business as I have sold several sites directly through chatting with a consumer and answering all their questions directly and quickly. There was no delay in filling out a contact form and waiting for me to respond. Instant gratification is huge and consumers love it.

If you notice, our Facebook Page widget is well down our page and not as important for consumers to view. Why you may ask? To me it isn’t important to push traffic on my site off to another platform where I have no control. If Facebook shuts down tomorrow and I have all my business focused there, I would be in big trouble. I do want people to know we are on Facebook and give them the option to connect, but it isn’t near as important to me as the buttons that get space above it because I already have people on my site where I ultimately want them to end up.

Lastly you will notice we display proudly our official SOB badge. This award was given to us by our good friend Liz Strauss and was an honor to receive. It brings a level of credibility to our site so it is important to share. However we don’t want to place this badge at the top of our site as it does drive our traffic away from us and over to her site. I also place at the bottom of my page the link to affiliates I am connected with. As you notice, this is at the absolute bottom of my page under even the archive section of my blog. While I am happy when someone signs up for hosting with Bluehost through my affiliate link, I am even happier when someone purchases a Custom WordPress Site, books me to speak, or signs up for personal coaching because these are the primary sources of income for my business. Affiliates can be a good auxiliary source of income, but they should not overtake your primary source of income in terms of space given on your site.

What’s Your Sidebar Saying?

So now that I shared with you some advice on what types of things should and should not be in your sidebar, take a moment to look at yours. What does it say about you and your business? Are you sending mixed signals to your consumers? Are your call to action buttons clear as to what you want the consumers to do and are they driving the consumers directly to your services/products? Or are your sidebar buttons and widgets causing confusion and pushing your traffic away to other sites.

Remember, we work hard to get the traffic to our site to generate business, make it clear what you want them to do, and keep them with you not onto another site. If you need help with any of the things discussed, feel free to contact me for help.

Photo Credit: idovermani

Are You Ironing Only The Front Side Of Your Website?

Custom WordPress Sites, How To Blog, SEO, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins

The other day, I was at church and was listening to the message when the speaker mentioned that sometimes when her husband is in a hurry he only irons the front of his dress shirt. She said he does this because since he is wearing a coat, nobody will ever see the back half, so what does it matter? The only people who know it isn’t fully ironed is he and his wife. Unfortunately, I have seen on too many occasions that this is the same concept people place into their website for their business.

We all want the flashy designed and pretty looking site, but are not willing to put the time & effort into making the site useful. You can have the most beautiful site in the world, but if it is missing key elements like calls to action, SEO optimization & Social integration, you in essence have spent a bunch of money for something pretty but unproductive. In this post I am going to cover two of these three. I will save the calls to action & sidebars for another post in the very near future.

How Social Is Your Site?

I recently wrote about making your WordPress site more social for consumers. In that post I shared about some great plugins that are designed for WordPress Sites that allow consumers to share your content easily and quickly on social media platforms. As you can see, currently Facebook is sending more traffic to our site than Google. Also, you can see that Twitter has made the top five. The reason that Tech Savvy Agent is in our top five is that I write there on a regular basis with links back to our site. When you look at the analytics on their site, it too shows Facebook at the top of the list. Chris Smith shared with me recently that they see over 45% of their traffic from their powerful Facebook page of over 12,000 fans alone.

We are currently seeing almost 36% of our traffic on 210 just from the various social platforms we participate on. This traffic comes not because we just broadcast our content onto Facebook & Twitter. The traffic comes because Jason & myself engage our friends/followers on the social networks in conversations and build relationships with them. After this trust has been established we can then share links to blog posts and sections of our site and people will click on them and visit. Not only will they read our content, but they are also more willing to share it with their friends/followers after reading as well. Being the complete statistics junkie I am, I did an analysis on the past 30 posts that have been written on our blog to see how much social sharing is taking place. For the past 30 posts, on average, they have been re-tweeted 23.74 times and shared on Facebook 34.19 times.

They say the average person on Facebook as 130 friends. That means on average my posts have a reach of nearly 4,420 people just on Facebook each time we write a blog post. The same holds true on Twitter. This reach is in addition to the thousands of friends/followers that we have. By using an analytic type plugin I can watch when I send out a tweet or post on Facebook the traffic coming to my site immediately. Usually there is a big rush all at once and a few hundred show up within 10 minutes. If you don’t have a site that allows for the installation of these type of social plugins, it might be time to consider a site like WordPress.

How Does Your Site Rank in Search Engines?

Search Engine Optimization still plays a major role in how consumers find your site. The social platforms do a great job of directing those you are already connected with to your site, but the search engines is what can bring in those that aren’t connected to your sphere. Before the recent explosion of social media, sites would see close to 76% of their traffic come directly from search engines. I believe that sites that are optimized properly can still see a major chunk of traffic from Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. The problem however lies in what is set up on back end of your site that is never even seen by a consumer. Each page in your site has three basic SEO components that without the proper setup you are throwing away valuable Google Juice. One of my recent clients contacted me an asked why her static website was not showing up for anything in the search engines. She would search and sometimes find it showing up on page 7 for a very specific term, but it was not generating any business for her. I asked for her web address and immediately looked at the page source for the site. Here is what search engines saw for her site:

Page Source Code — click to view full size

The three main components that need to be filled out on every single page of your site and every blog post you post is the Title, Description, & Keywords. In that order of importance too. As you can see from the source code of her site, the first two segments were greatly overlooked. I cannot stress how extremely important these are to determining how your site ranks in the search engines. It is imperative that you fill in these sections with keyword rich content. This client had done a pretty decent job with keywords but their description and title was basically their name, where they are licensed and the name of the company they worked for. Unfortunately, not many consumers search for you by your name unless you are a celebrity and those searching for a company will land at the company page 9 times out of 10.

To help solve this problem, I always install on WordPress sites I build for clients a powerful plugin called All-In-One-SEO Pack. It works great and can really help take a page up the search engine results by giving you an easy way to add a separate Title, Description & Keywords for each individual page & post of content on your site. Make sure that when you add content to your page to take the extra few moments to fill it out. These simple steps can be the difference between your site ranking on page 9 for your terms or page one. A recent SEO overhaul we did for a client took her for her main keyword which she wasn’t found in the first 12 pages of Google to #4 on Page 1 in under 2 months. Since then she has reaped the benefits of increased traffic and increased income all because we went back and fixed the title, description, and keywords on the static pages of her site.

Time to Iron The Back Half of Your Shirt

So if you have been only ironing the front side of your shirt and focusing only on the visual appeal of your site, it’s time to flip the shirt over and start ironing the back half as well. 2011 is almost here and what a better time to get everything in order. Go set up the SEO & social side of your site now and start gaining the benefits as the new year comes in. If your current site does not permit you to add these components, it might be time for a change to a custom WordPress site that offers these types of things. As always, if you feel this is overwhelming and need assistance, feel free to contact us, we are here to help.

photo credit: banalities

Google Launches Instant Previews- What this Means For Your Website

How To Blog, SEO, Social Media Advisors

Today search engine giant Google is releasing a new feature on their searches called Instant Previews. What this does is allows consumers to get a snapshot view of what a website looks like without having to visit the page. They believe that by giving a sample view of the site before you click into it will help consumers to to find what they are looking for quicker and easier than having to click through various links. Personally, I think that this new feature will help websites to lower bounce rate as consumers can get a good feel of what the site is about without ever having to click into it. If you wonder what it looks like, here is a screenshot:

So How Does This Effect My Site?

I am glad you asked! I think that Google Instant Previews is going to cause us all to do some minor adjustments to our sites. The first thing I think this is going to cause us all to do is look at the current website design/layout we have and determine if it is truly attractive enough to entice consumers to want to view. If your site is 7 years old and is plain and boring, it might be time to upgrade to a new custom WordPress site. If you site is more appealing than the others in the preview window, you have a better chance of the consumer clicking in to your page.

Secondly, I see the use of pictures on your posts and pages becoming even more critical. I talked about the importance of photos and labeling them properly before for SEO purposes, but this takes it all to a whole new level. Now not only are the pictures important for SEO, but they are also extremely important to the visual appeal of your site. I once heard that adding just 2 photos to a blog post can increase the time on your page by up to 300%! Now not only will this help keep the consumer there, but these photos will actually help to bring them in.

The final piece that I see Google Instant Previews changing is the effectiveness of Ads run on Google. If you notice in my screenshot above, the preview window basically covers the entire sidebar of ads. I think that this will really cut down on the number of clicks that the ads receive. Thus making CPC and CPM advertising not as effective as it has been in the past simply because the ads are being covered over by the giant preview window. This also means that having a good online presence in search engine rankings is becoming even more important. Getting to page 1 is crucial for your keywords.

What Do I Need To Do?

So in closing, what should you be doing to help your site with this new feature? First and foremost, look at the sites design and appeal. Does your site have very clear call to action buttons installed? If not, you need to get them there ASAP. As you can see from the screenshot to the right, The calls to action are very clear. People can see at a quick glance what the site offers and what they want you to do on it. Secondly, the site has a very clean and clear look to it. The images are bold and easy to see. Seeing something like this would make me want to click in and view.

Next, make sure you are using plenty of photos in everything you do on your site. It is not only important for SEO, but now more than ever is going to be important on bringing in consumers to view the content of your site. On the other hand, I know someone is thinking right now, “I’m gonna go put 27 photos all over my site because Jeremy said photos will make more people come.” STOP IT NOW! That is not what I am saying. All things are good in moderation. Add one to two photos per page and it will be appealing. Add 27 photos to a page and you have major chaos. Keep it simple and easy.

So, take some time look at your site and get things prepared for Google Instant Previews. If your site needs a facelift, let us know, we would be glad to design a custom WordPress site for you.