Your first blog – tips and advice

I’ve noticed as more and more people are proceeding into the final year of their studies – they’re also getting more involved with their subjects. With most of my mates being in Marketing and Advertising, it’s only natural that setting up a blog would be one of the ways to get involved with the cutting edge of the industry.

So – I thought i’d construct a guide to making the most of your blog ranging from getting your content picked up by the search engines to plugins and SEO. Enjoy.

Why a blog?

I’m sure you already know the answer to this as you’ve made one. If you’ve made one simply to keep up with the latest trend or of you’re contemplating making one then there’s lots for you to learn about why blogs are the cutting edge of ‘web 2.0. – and how you can get the most out of what you publish, understand the benefits of publishing it and the after effects.

Blogs are different to websites – in my opinion, they are the evolution of the hard coded website. Blogs allow for maximum customization ranging from visual templates to cool widgets in your sidebar. You can really customize your blog to exactly how you want it to look to fit in with its purpose. They can be professional sites for massive businesses or fun places for your rants and thoughts.

Blogs allow for extensive feedback methods. With social media fronting the development of marketing and the Internet as a whole – this means your in the best place to engage your readers. You’ll notice that after every post you make people are able to write comments. This is highly valuable in order to gain feedback for your content and encourage discussion.

The more user interaction that there is for your posts, the higher value that these posts become within the search engines – but we’ll go into that later on. For more info on blogs, read my Blog Optimization post.

What is your blogs purpose?

Do you want maximum readership? Do you want to cause controversy? Do you want to target a niche audience? Do you want to make money?

Depending on the purpose of your blog, you’ll want to grow it differently. For example – this blog is all about Social Media & Digital Marketing – I write frequent and quality posts in order to inform, gain feedback from others and learn myself – it’s about content that is professional and is very open to interpretation, allowing for discussion and conflicting ideas.

If your blog is designed to make money, then you may publish content that is very broad and falls under many categories in order to gain maximum readership and therefore higher conversions through affiliate marketing or Google Adsense.

Overall, the content of your blog needs to reflect its purpose, you need to think about the people who will read it, where they hang out on the web, the writing style they will appreciate and the design that they will find most attractive.

I recently overhauled Wrigged Media’s blog design to present higher clarity and a cleaner design – to fit in with my content and feedback from readers.

The search engines

The search engines are the most powerful gateway to your blog. Google is the biggest search engine in the world – so it’s crucial that you take steps in order to ensure that Google picks up your blog in the correct way.

Google crawls the web constantly picking up new websites and listing them in their search engine, findable when people search for certain keywords.

You’ll want to choose what keywords Google pairs with your blog In order to control your targeted traffic. For example, Wrigged Media is searchable with the key words ‘social media’ ‘social media marketing’ ‘marketing blog’ ‘digital marketing’ etc.

The benefit from doing this is that you can control the traffic that visits your site from the search engines by controlling what keywords people find your blog with. I’ll know that if people have found my blog when searching for ‘social media marketing’ that they’ve come with an interest with what I’m writing about.

The first step to make sure that you’re being searched for the right things is to make sure the title of all your posts are concise, accurate and contain keywords. This post is titled ‘Your first blog – tips and advice’ so when this post gets idexed by Google, people searching for ‘blog advice’ or ‘first blog tips’ will hopefully find me and find this post useful.

In order to appear higher up the search results that Google presents is to have more contextual links pointing your way – but that’s quite advanced for now, but I’ll do a post on that later on.

The ways to make sure that your blog is picked indexed by Google in the correct way is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. It’s all about ensuring your titles are accurate, your headings in the body text are accurate and that the body content is unique and engaging.

I’ll actually write a full Blog SEO post in the near future with lots more detail.

Social Media Integration

So, you have your flashy, shiny, Web 2.0 ready blog – but how do you integrate it into peoples Digital Doorsteps?

A lot of you will know what Twitter is. Twitter is a real time ‘microblogging’ site  -allowing for users to publish short, real time updates as to what they’re doing. It’s an incredibly powerful marketing tool, which is explained further in my Twitter Marketing post.

Making sure that your content has the best chance of being ‘retweeted’ and published on Facebook is a great way to bring in new readers. Install a‘Tweet me’  or ‘Facebook’ plug in – which allows for readers to ‘tweet’ and ‘publish’ your post at the simple click of a button.

Also, integrate a social plugin, allowing for people to instantly socially bookmark your content, publish it on Facebook, Digg it, Furl it, etc – there are loads. It’s basically all about making sure your content is as shareable as possible with as little effort needed as possible.

However ultimately it comes down to you writing content that will be worthy of sharing. You can supply the reader with as many ways to share it as you can, but if the content isn’t that great, the people won’t share it. So make sure the quality is there first.

To Finish – for now

I’m kinda putting my neck on the line here – as I’ve bashed out a post on how to optimize your blog, do this, do that bla bla – so I’m kinda hoping that this post and my other content is also worthy of my words.

Wrigged media my newest project, so I’m still carrying this all out for this site – however, I’ve done it all before for my previous blogs.

I’d like to say right now that if anyone would like to know anything extra about each category I’ve briefly covered here please email me at info@wriggedmedia.co.uk – or sit tight, as individual posts will be published soon covering each heading discussed in this post!

If you found this remotely interesting, please feel free to tweet it, comment, disagree, agree – I’d love to know your thoughts!