So you’ve got your WordPress blog set up and you are just starting to write – what you do?
Words are, in my opinion, the most important thing on a website. This is because the search engine robots that crawl the web every day can pretty much “read” what you’ve written, but they can’t look at your website and think “mmm, nice graphics!”
For me, there’s two things to think about when writing. One is keywords; the other is making sure you’re writing stuff that people are going to want to read.
Keywords in your content
Keywords are what people type into a search engine (Google, for example) in order to find websites. Now there are good and bad ways to introduce keywords into your website text for SEO purposes, but I’ll come to that in my next post. For the time being, if you are a designer for example, you should write about – guess what? – design.
But it’s not as simple as that. It’s virtually impossible to be found on the internet with just one keyword so you should think of your second most important keyword; for me it’s probably “graphic”. Your third most important keyword; for me, “freelance”. The fourth; “London”. And so on. Don’t sweat about choosing these you can always change them.
Use these keywords in the title and body of your articles with the most important being the most frequent. But, there is only one way to do this – naturally.
Write about the subject as you would normally, don’t struggle to add the keywords as many times as possible or even once more than is necessary. For one thing, search engines will penalise you for keyword repetition; for another, it will make your site very unpleasant reading for your visitors.
How would you rather read about a subject you’re interested in – in an ad or an article? It’s so much better to read the considered thoughts of an expert in a field rather than the hurried ramblings of someone who just wants to make money.
Here’s how you make money:
Write content that people will want to read
Write intelligently and lucidly about what you know most about.
Remember, you are an expert, we all are. You’ve spent your life doing something – it doesn’t matter what it is – that something is useful to somebody. This to me is the crux of what internet marketing is all about.
When you write about your specialities you will naturally attract to your website those who are your best customers. Let me explain, I do graphic design and marketing, now graphic design and marketing are huge fields, it would be nuts for me to market myself in this area and leave it at that. So I specialise – every organisation does. Web information about a niche area will draw in like-minded people and perfect clients through Long Tail keywords.
So I’ve written tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, blog posts about delivering advertising messages with graphics, articles about web and print production. Other articles have been solely responsible for melanding certain jobs. The subjects of these have been: interactive and rich media PDFs; pop art; creating countries’ map outlines and flags; WordPress for website creation. Quite a mixed bag. But if someone wants to ask me to do something I’m always grateful for the work!
When you are writing about what you know best, keep checking your facts. Constantly ask yourself when you write something if you really are sure about it. Very often in our professional careers it’s easy to believe certain things by hearsay or rumour. Use the internet and any other resource to back up your assertions thoroughly before you publish your post.
So when writing about your specialities, do you spill the beans and reveal all your trade secrets or do you hold back on certain information hoping to retain the power of knowledge from your competitors? I would always favour the former rather than the latter.
I would encourage anyone to put as much detail into their descriptive articles as possible. I’m sure it won’t harm your business to reveal the correct and best practices that you use. Transparency in governments is considered to be ethical so I would encourage anyone to be open as possible in their own organisation.
Your potential clients won’t have the time or the inclination to use this information to do the job themselves and this priceless insight will win you kudos for your generosity. (And, of course, valuable information on the internet will be linked to raising the profile of your site and have it appear higher in search engines’ results, more to come on SEO in the next post.)
I have benefited immeasurably for the community of designers and marketers who have explained techniques and solved problems in websites, blogs and forums. It’s only fair that I give back to the community.
For me this is kind of business karma. Take Matt Mullenweg, for example, the founding developer of WordPress – the most popular and best blogging software that has empowered millions of ordinary people to publish in a beautiful way for free. Matt is listed in Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, is in Inc.com’s 30 under 30 – America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs and his company Automattic Inc is 123rd in TechCrunch.com’s list of Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn. My point is that Matt’s initial and ongoing commitment to open source software – giving out good stuff for free – has helped him in his brilliant career.
So I would advise virtually anyone to get a WordPress site and start writing on the cutting edge of what they know best. The advantages you will see in your community, your networking and your client list will far outweigh the effort.
And in the area of the style of writing, here are ten tips for writing a blog post.
Some say write for a month when starting and then publish for the first time. Some say write every week once you’ve got going. Some say make every post no longer than 350 words.
I say … write!
Qick question. Your advice is extremely helpful and I really enjoyed reading your blog. I could probably find this out some other way but, since I’m here I might as well ask. What is the deal with the spelling of some word with s where a z should be? I know it’s adopted from Europe, but what gives?
Qick = quick
Great installment Rob. I myself have been tinkering with “normal” websites for years, but now I have witnessed the power of WordPress, I would never go back to a non-cms site again (speaking for myself and my own sites).
‘Cash Loan Lady’…funny you should mention this, I’ve just written a post about the American/English spelling issue here on my blog:
http://www.andrewkelsall.com/american-english-or-english-spelling-in-blogs/
I’ve liked the article. I agree on the style of writing tips, and my point is that accurate and useful content is key to any good resource. Though, i’ve seen websites brought up just with directories and dumb link spamming everywhere..
Nice explaination, easy english
But you are right ! A blog isn’t hard to promote and to do SEO because there are allot of little things and if you do those it’s very easy and fast
greets
One additional consideration: The quality of the writing.
Some people mistakenly believe that their writing is “good enough” when it’s barely interpretable.
These are the people who should be hiring ghostwriters and/or finding new vocations that don’t involve blogging.
Hello Cash Loan Lady, as Andrew has pointed out, I used British English spellings in this post so specialise, organisation, etc. There is an excellent discussion going on about this over at Andrew’s blog: http://www.andrewkelsall.com/american-english-or-english-spelling-in-blogs/
I have now decided to use American English in this site from now on, so specialize and organization, etc. I just figure that some Americans may think that I am making spelling mistakes and I don’t want to lose potential clients. On the other hand European and other people are more likely to know the difference!
Sid, accurate and useful content is key, you are 100% right about that and the useless dumb link sites you refer to aren’t very successful!
Hi, ruben, a little bit of effort plus a bit of patience goes a long way with SEO. Greets!
Hello Sara-Beck Cronny, your absolutely right about quality of writing. This is the most difficult point to articulate. With writing, practice does make a difference. On this point you can look at ProBlogger http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/30/tens-tips-for-writing-a-blog-post/
Thank you everyone for your comments!
good article, content is very important
Thanks Louie. Content, as they say, is king!
Big lists of things like resources, websites, tips, pros and cons etc are the best for blogs! Those will atract more traffic more comments and your users will link to your blog
Yes, Jimmy, top ten lists and resources tend to do well.
transparency is the best way to attract people to your blog or website.As they will feel that you truly wants to share and will definitely stay to read on. Its like welcoming people to your house.Giving them all your affections and warmth to make them fee like home.
That’s a good analogy, Jamine, about being welcoming and open. It’s good, in the same way, to have opinions which makes it personal – people like that. Thanks for the comment.
I think you should write about everything you like to, but I agree that niche websites are better, so it is entirely up to the webmaster to decide what to do.
Yes, write about what you love. The internet riches will really pour in then!
Hi Rob
Before I came to this post I was wondering how Transparent should you be in you blogs but now that I have read this I totally agree with sharing the knowledge.
Hi Darren, I would always be as transparent as possible. I’ve seen it work for others time and time again. All the best.
Hi, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam remarks? If so how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can recommend? I get so much lately it’s driving me mad so any support is very much appreciated.
Hello, Elanor, I don’t have too much of a problem with spam. I take it you use the Akismet plug-in? If that doesn’t work try searching the WordPress plug-ins for other spam busters. I know there are other plug-ins for spam that go further than Akismet.
Hey Rob!
What a great article you’ve written! It seems that WordPress is the way to go for ebook promotions, but what do you think about using Facebook as a blog cos I already have a big following and all I need is to create my website and link it to Facebook. Instead of using a new Twitter or WordPress account…can I just use FB as the blog?
Warmest regards
Boon.
Hello Boon, I’m not sure I entirely understand your question. But ultimately, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress.com are all great social tools for promotion of your WordPress.org website. You should put most of your effort and best content in the main WordPress.org self-hosted website as you have complete control over it. And the other sites should all point towards that. I hope this helps.
This came to a big interest for me as i am currently looking into installing a wordpress blog into my site keeping the theme the same as the actual website. I liked some of the statements you pointed out thanks.
Thanks, Anthony, and welcome to the site. Best of luck with installing WordPress, in my experience you won’t regret it but you will regret not doing it earlier!
Can you provide some knowledge or maybe a link to a tutorial that will demonstrate how i can keep the blog section to the theme of my website. I will be installing WordPress via cpanel thanks Rob.
Hello Anthony, I’m sorry I’ve missed this comment and I don’t really understand the question. 🙁
Excellent post. People have to remember that it’s not as big of gap between writing for search engines and writing for people as we make it out to be. Writing likable, sharable content that naturally contains the keywords will put you on the path!
That’s true, Matt, if you keep at it you will see results. Thanks for the comment.
We’ve just started our blog – so thanks for the useful tips 🙂
That’s good. Best of luck, Matthew.