Archive for Blog
Wow. Website Grader Gives My Blog a Top Ranking
Posted by: | CommentsWebsite Grader is a HubSpot program and gives your site an overall grade. Today I received an email from the company that said: “Your Website Grade improved by 4 points, from 93 to 97.” That means writespeaksell.com scores higher than 97% of the 2,646,608 websites that have been ranked so far.
Now I’m going for a grade of 100! Don’t know if I’ll make it, but I’m ready to try, with the help of my blogging buddies and my loyal readers.
Here is what the program analyzes:
- Content: blogs, Google indexed pages and readability level
- Optimization: metadata, headings, images, and interior page analysis
- Promotion: how you rank on social media sites
As I read through the report, I also found that my Alexa Traffic Rank is in the top 6.38% of all websites. Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings.
Why is This Important to My Readers?
I’m feeling pretty good about my rankings. But here’s what’s important: apparently my content is helping my readers to solve a problem, learn something new or share my perspective on a current event. That’s my real goal: to provide value to people who take some of their precious time to visit my blog.
I’m blogging and writing for a living – having rebranded myself early last year as a Business Writer. I had held senior marketing communications positions with major corporations and agencies. But I felt it was time to re-invent myself. The world of social media was opening up and I wanted to be part of the action. I walked through the door into the blogosphere and I haven’t looked back.
I’m hooked. I love discovering new subjects to explore and I am very happy, dear readers, that you are visiting with me and enjoying what I have to say.
Thank you.
Blogging as the Centerpiece of a Company’s Social Media Strategy
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been blogging about twice a week for well over a year now. I gave my first update last summer about why I blog. Write Speak Sell would become the focal point of my thoughts about communicating ideas, which is at the heart of what I have done professionally for over 30 years. It’s liberating to say what you really think and believe, while always being authentic.
A blog is the centerpiece of a company's social media strategy
Since then I’ve also come to believe that a blog is the centerpiece a company’s social media strategy, both internally and externally. The CEO is where it all starts. Wise leaders are using social media because that’s where their employees and customers are.
The CEO needs to be talking directly to the company’s stakeholders regularly with quick takes on new developments. A blog is the perfect vehicle because the nature of a blog is to be informal and for it to express the personality and communicate the authentic convictions of the writer.
A blog liberates the CEO from his ivory tower and into conversations with employees and customers in the social media communities they populate. This is a big culture change for most companies.
With a keystroke, the CEO can distribute her blog to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites where people are getting their information now days. She can be out there first with the news, before the rumors and misinformation start flying around the Internet. There isn’t time for a press release vetted by a dozen lawyers before it’s distributed. Everything is transparent now.
Employee Engagement
The CEO can profoundly influence the company’s future success when employees to buy into his vision. But employees can’t march in step with a CEO who doesn’t engage them in a two-way conversation about his goals for them and the company. If he does that, they can become the company’s most important brand advocates and commit to providing superior customer service.
Once again, I cite Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh as the pioneer. In his blog last year he wrote a piece, “Your Culture” In it he said, “It’s a very different world today. With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter. The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost instantaneously as well.”
Good advice and a good example to follow.
Simplicity, Clarity, Singleness: Goals for Bloggers to Achieve
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Every day I receive an email with motivational quote from HeartMath and I’ve saved many of them because they resonated at a particular time in my life. Last week, I received this one and it seemed totally appropriate for bloggers, so let me share it with you:
“Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.”
—– Richard Halloway
As I originally wrote for The Bloggers’ Bulletin, these are the attributes that bloggers strive for in their writing. I know that I do. Sometimes I find myself including too much information in a post. And I especially think that trying to stuff a post with key words so the search engines can find you can ruin a post – from the readers’ perspective.
This applies to large businesses, too, that have the resources to research the information needs of their customers. Maybe the words customers use are not the words the company is using in its advertising and promotional materials — and this includes blogs. What is great about blogging by companies is that they can generate immediate feedback from customers, if you hit their hot buttons — or key words.
Whether you are writing for yourself or your employer, ask yourself these questions: Are the key words really relevant to your content? Are you writing for your readers with simplicity and clarity? Are you articulating one key idea in the post that is easy for the readers to understand? Is the idea likely to stir comments from readers?
It’s easy to get discouraged when a brilliantly written blog (in your view) falls flat with readers. Let’s all keep at it with a will to getting better and enthusiasm for our ideas. I will leave you with another quote that I hope will make your blogging a happy and productive experience.
“Begin growing from where you are – not from where others think you ought to be by now.”
—— Steven Douglas Lawrence
Why Can’t WordPress Tutorials Be Written in Language for Regular People?
Posted by: | CommentsI have a WordPress blog. I’m a regular person. That is, my technology skills are ordinary (actually, quite ordinary). That is why I find tutorials about WordPress blogs so confounding. Why can’t they use regular language for regular people? Today, I tried to add a subpage (or child, in WordPress-ese). I thought it would be simple, but no, I ended up with my subpage as my parent page on the tool bar of my blog and my other subpages had disappeared. Are you confused yet? So was I.
So, I Googled “How do I create a subpage in Wordpress?” I read a few of the search items that came up that were completely unintelligible. Then I looked at a tutorial from WordPress that must have been written for an earlier version than WP 2.8 because the first place they told me to go was not where they said it was. Here is what I found and how I thought it could be written so regular people like me could figure it out.
WordPress:
Just as you can have Subcategories within your Categories, you can also have SubPages within your Pages, creating a hierarchy of pages.
To begin the process, go to Administration > Write > Write Page panel, in the upper right corner of the panel and click the “Page Parent” drop-down menu. The drop-down menu contains a list of all the Pages already created for your site. To turn your current Page into a SubPage, or “Child” of the “Parent” Page, select the appropriate Page from the drop-down menu. If you specify a Parent other than “Main Page (no parent)” from the list, the Page you are now editing will be made a Child of that selected Page. When your Pages are listed, the Child Page will be nested under the Parent Page. The Permalinks of your Pages will also reflect this Page hierarchy.
Regular Person Version:
(Note: my parent page is Business Writing)
To add a subpage:
1. Under Pages click “Add page”
2. Write the page and give it a title, i.e., Branding
3. Look over to the right column under “Attributes”
4. Where it says “Parent” “Main Page, No Parent’ (in the little box), click on the drop down arrow and click on “Business Writing” which will now appear in the box
5. Publish page – which will now appear under Business Writing
Now, do you understand how it’s done?
