8 Big Blogging Mistakes You May Be Making

Blogging is tough. Like a potato chip, you can’t do one. One means that you tried blogging and gave up. It was too hard. It makes you look like a quitter. If you can’t sustain a blog, don’t start. I blog every week, then post the blog along with an image to my website, Linkedin page, Blogger and 4 social media sites. It’s a commitment, but if you make it a habit, you can do it.

Your blog becomes the workhorse of your content marketing program

Quality blogs will drive your whole content marketing program. Not only will you be providing fresh content to your website, increasing your SEO value, but you can repurpose that content to your newsletter and use extracts on social media. A blog is a workhorse. Set aside time to work on your blog and own it.

Here are 8 blogging mistakes—reasons why so many people fail. 

1. Setting an unrealistic publishing schedule. There are actually people who promise themselves they’re going to blog 3-4x/week or more. Forget it—this is a recipe for failure. If you can do one blog/week, you’re doing really well. Cut yourself some slack and try two blogs/month. You’ll soon find this is an aggressive goal.
2. Not using headers to break up text. This one kills me. When I see a big 6-inch block of text on my computer screen, there’s no way I’m going to tackle this. It’s a fortress. Break it up into manageable bites. Use subheads that guide the reader through the copy. Use bullet points to further delineate key points. Seduce your reader.
3. Using “Click Here“ in links instead of real keywords. The days of “check out our new website” and “click here” are over. Audiences have gotten a lot more sophisticated, and by using your keywords and inserting a link instead, you’re getting a lot more SEO bang for your buck.
4. Not Answering Your Comments. When someone takes the time to comment, you owe him/her a response. Remember that you’re doing this to build relationships.
5. Not Using Images. Big mistake. You may be an inspired writer, but the stats tell us that the average visitor will read just 20% of your content. The use of really good images that are relevant to your topic not only enhance your blog but draw in your audience. An estimated 67% of users say that images are more important than descriptions when making a purchase—and the whole purpose of your blogging is to grow your audience and get new clients, right?
6. Not Adding Social Media Sharing Options. I see this all the time. Time to integrate your messaging across all of your marketing channels. Make sure your website, social media sites, newsletter, business card and any other print collateral are all branded, integrated and connected. We’re looking for consistency of messaging.
7. Not Using Analytics. Do you know which posts your readers liked best? Do you understand how people are finding your information—what sites they’re coming from and if they’re clicking through your site? If you haven’t installed Google Analytics on your site, do it. Start using this to see what kinds of posts are getting the most attention. (Your comments will also be an indicator.) If you find that you’re getting a lot of response to one topic, you may—or may not—want to write more blogs on that topic and really promote them. Build a niche.
8. Not Showing Recent/Popular Posts. New visitors are often curious, so give them something to look at! If you’re clever about displaying your blogs, they’ll stick around to see what else you’re writing about. If there are places on your site to call attention to your blogs, by all means leverage them, such as a homepage banner with a title and a link to the blog. Many of the new website designs have tiles and other callout areas where you can post an image along with a message and a link—these are great places to showcase your blogs. On my site’s blogpage, in the righthand column there is also a list of my last eight blogs with their links.

Are you struggling with your blog or your whole content marketing program? We’d love to help you! Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts.

New WordPress Theme Streamlines Website Makeover

Websites have a shelf life. I’ve been busy with other people’s sites and neglected my own—pretty common for people in my industry. It had been four years, and while my site was built in responsive design, ensuring it would adapt across all devices, and I’d updated the content and consistently posted my weekly blogpost, the overall design was dated and stale.

Applying a new WordPress theme to the old site streamlined my project

For my site, rather than starting from scratch and building an entirely new site, I engineered a makeover–a facelift of my old site, which dramatically streamlined the project. The site was in WordPress, which has more than 2,000 themes, or templates. We identified a new theme that was modern but not too trendy, and applied it to my existing site. This was a fairly seamless process, requiring only some minor tweaking and a little customization. This was infinitely easier than starting from scratch with a new WordPress theme and building a new website.

New landing pages and images

I added three new landing pages under the Services tab and identified vibrant new images for every page, which went a long way toward upgrading the site’s visual impact. I also gave my logo a little refresh. We ported over all of my blogs—more than 250, believe it or not—and these required very little adjustment.

Areas for messaging or to showcase what’s going on in your company

One great feature of many of the new site designs is the areas for messaging or calls to action. My site design includes four tiles across the bottom where we can upload an image and a brief sentence—these are great for calling attention to events, new products, new blogposts, etc. Since I want to call attention to my 250+ blogs (!), I’ve added an image, a sentence and a link to four blogs. On the homepage, there’s also a banner that I can swap out, which I will likely also use to showcase a blog.

The result: For all intents and purposes, a new website

A new look and feel. Updated content. High-quality images. Today’s sites are simpler, there’s less drilldown and menus have collapsed. Today’s new website designs are slicker with more opportunities for messaging and calls to action. I’m delighted with the visual impact and the new functionality of my new website.

Is your WordPress website dated, no longer reflective of the company you are today? Contact us at Top of Mind Marketing today to talk about a makeover! We’re internet marketing specialists.

Tired of Fake News? Facebook’s Disputed News Tag Goes Live

Unless you’ve just crawled out of Sleepy Hollow, you know that there’s a bit of a controversy going on with the news these days—especially the news that’s coming out of the White House. We’re accustomed to never quite trusting our politicians, and while we’d like to have faith that our journalists are entirely objective, the times clearly have changed. The days of Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, are over. People these days are getting their news from the internet, and they assume that because they read it, it’s true. But scan the morning news, from Breitbart to the venerable New York Times, and you’ll begin to see that the “news” varies dramatically, depending on who’s writing the headlines.

As our journalists report on the news coming out of the new Trump administration, the White House counters the facts with what they call “alternative facts”. What? There are no alternative facts. If we do our due diligence, we find that the White House is just plain lying. Again. We’ve never seen anything like this, and it’s lowering the bar on truth and integrity.

Facebook responds to alternative facts

Facebook has decided that, as a public application that reaches more than 1.86 billion monthly active users, they have both influence and a responsibility, so they have created a new Disputed tag that will appear beneath news stories on the site that have been deemed inaccurate.

• Facebook has added a new Help page outlining how the system works.
• Stories flagged as fake by users will be reviewed by independent fact-checking organizations, including Politifact and Snopes.com.
• Those organizations will be signatories to a “Fact-checkers’ Code of Principles”maintained by the journalism nonprofit Poynter Institute. The principles include nonpartisanship and transparency in sourcing and funding.

Disputed posts and rankings

There’s no indication yet whether the Disputed designation will have a direct impact on how a story is handled by Facebook’s ranking algorithms. The thinking is that users will be less likely to share stories that have received the Disputed tag, reducing their likelihood of being spread.

A dependency, of course, is that the flagging process itself can take several days, which is plenty of time for a story to get plenty of attention. We all know that a story that is topical and sexy, accompanied by an attention-grabbing image, can go viral within a few hours. The internet and social media have made global communication immediate. One big dependency of the Disputed tag is its due diligence: it takes time to research the verity of a fact.

What does Facebook have to gain?

There’s another imperfection of this system that will likely satisfy nobody. Despite huge public pressure to tackle fake news, particularly from the political left, Facebook has no real motivation to tell its readers what to believe.

Potential for reduced user engagement

From a business perspective, filtering or flagging disputed news stories could reduce user engagement among those who had previously enjoyed a steady diet of alternative facts. The move has already invited scathing criticism from the right, potentially actively alienating a huge swathe of Facebook users who apparently feed on the fake news coming out of the White House.

A final thought: It’s an initial effort by a medium that reaches billions of users/month. While it may or may not be effective or completely successful, it may set the stage for other social media applications to look for ways to censor the rise of alternative facts.

Do you need help with your content marketing program? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts.

Case Study: A New Website for UpValley Notary

Bill Ryan lives in St. Helena, and like many people in the area, he came to the Napa Valley to work in the wine industry. Bill relocated from Rhode Island some 40 years ago, when there were fewer than 20 wineries, compared to more than 400 today. As the sales and marketing director for Beringer Winery, he helped grow the premium wine’s international footprint for more than 20 years.

As a mobile notary, he needed a web presence

Bill’s retired now, but he’s always busy. He fishes whenever he can and writes a fishing weekly column for the Napa Valley Register and another for St. Helena Star. He also has a little mobile notary business serving the towns of the Napa Valley—St. Helena, Angwin, Napa, Calistoga and Yountville. He’s not interested in being swamped, but he enjoys growing his business, interacting with his clients and meeting new people. Bill wanted a simple website—nothing elaborate–what can you say about meeting someone at his/her home or office to sign documents, after all? But if you’re in business these days, you need a web presence.

We discussed a few options and decided on Gutensite

I’ve build a couple of websites in this platform before, and was delighted with the results. The technology is responsive design and looks great across devices. It’s modular; the pages, such as blogs and testimonials, are autoformatted so they turn out looking polished and professional. I’ve tried using the so-called DIY, WISYWIG platforms like Wix and SquareSpace—they’re supposed to be easy and foolproof. I’m fairly savvy–I’ve worked in WordPress for years, but I think these applications are confusing, and I would never tackle a WordPress site on my own. Gutensite is very easy to use, and here’s the really great part: they have a responsive, courteous technical-support team who’s there for you to work through the small details that would completely sabotage you in other applications. Best of all, for a simple website, Gutensite’s price is hard to beat: $15/month, including hosting.

Do you really need WordPress’ 2,000+ themes?

The number of themes doesn’t compare to WordPress’ 2,000 themes, but if you look carefully, you will realize that each design distinguishes itself, providing significant options. By adding your own images, logo and text, you are going a long way towards customizing your theme. For those who need more functionality, Gutensite has more robust packages and also provides customized solutions.

For Bill’s site, we decided on just four landing pages

Home, About Bill, What to Expect from a Notary and Contact. I tried to sneak in a couple of modules at the bottom that would provide extra calls to action, but Bill wasn’t interested. He wanted to keep this simple, with just the relevant information. We purchased the domain name from GoDaddy, UpValleyNotaryontheGo.com and I easily managed the domain name transfer myself. I filled out fields for keywords and metadescriptions, made a few last-minute adjustments, uploaded Bill’s new headshot and we were live.

I literally created this site in a matter of hours. It helped that I had used Gutensite before, and I ran into a few issues where I had to reach out to tech support, but the process was seamless. Best of all, Bill now has a terrific new website.

Next up: I’m creating another Gutensite website for a retired banker who is a woodworker. He builds stunning customized tables for his clients. In addition to writing content and building the site, I’m going to manage a photoshoot to get professional images of his work that will flesh out the gallery section of his website. I can’t wait to get started.

Are you interested in a new Gutensite website?

Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing–we’re writers and internet marketing experts.

Rethinking Content Delivery: Big Brands Embrace Video

Video’s snagged a place in the Top 5 Trends for 2016

Take a look at any of the experts’ Top 10 Marketing Trends for 2016 and video has snagged a place in the top five. Sure, we all know we should be doing video—it’s great for SEO, it’s fun, engaging, informative and for certain demographics, this is the preferred way to receive information. But let’s be realistic. Good videos are expensive; they require scripts, perhaps a narrator, background music and professional videographers to create a polished product. And once you’re finished, it’s time for another one, and it takes time and money to keep producing high-quality products. You think they cost too much and have limited reach. Let’s take a look at a video that Marriott produced that’s been wildly successful.

Marriott’s 19-minute video: more than 8M YouTube views

Marriott released the follow-up to its Two Bellmen original short film earlier this year, with the sequel approaching 8M views on YouTube — more than the number of viewers who tuned in to see CBS’ premiere of Man with a Plan. This 19-minute action comedy, Two Bellmen Two, built its viewership over a period of months as consumers shared the content with friends via social media. This is important because it’s the result of consumers increasingly shifting their viewing habits from TV to smartphones and laptops. Savvy brands are creating content that makes an emotional connection with viewers andgets them in front of impressive numbers of potential new customers — in some cases, more than they could with a traditional TV ad.

“ If you deliver something that is valuable and they want to watch, they will actually engage,” said David Beebe, VP of creative and content marketing at Marriott International.

 Content production moves in-house as big brands build studios

This shift in the traditional content creation/delivery model was the topic of a panel discussion at the ad: tech conference in New York in December that featured executives from Marriott International and Charles Schwab. These two big brands are building in-house content studios to produce the kinds of content that today’s new consumers want. Make that millennials. They’re shifting away from TV to embrace a variety of digital content formats.

Demand for video is growing

As consumers look for compelling online content they can share with friends, the demand for video is growing. Brands need content that transcends traditional advertising, and this can be difficult for agencies to grasp. Two Bellmen was first launched in early 2015 and has received more than 5M YouTube views. A sequel came out in early 2016 and a third installment has debuted. Marriott’s efforts have proven successful enough that it is now licensing some of its content, turning its marketing into a revenue source. They’ve developed travel documentaries, webisodes, VR experiences and influencer-driven videos.

You have to be able to take risks; legacy attitudes can stand in the way

For marketers looking to jump into this kind of quality content, one of the biggest hurdles can be resistance from executives who are reluctant to make a significant investment when they don’t see a direct link to a sale. Legacy attitudes can hold companies back, so they must be able to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them. Charles Schwab, long recognized for clever advertising that reaches consumers on a personal level, created a small team three years ago that is focused on telling brand stories that connect with people. Previously, most of the content was focused primarily on traditional selling of products and services.

Today’s marketing is about telling stories

As brands increasingly become content creators, they need to consider new metrics that keep pace as they open the door to new relationships. At Charles Schwab, the content team demonstrated that the videos it created acquired new customers and drove existing ones to sign up for additional products. Brands embarking on a content strategy need to ensure that they continue to engage with their audience.

Are you trying to develop a results-oriented marketing strategy? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We're writers and internet marketing experts.