You don’t want to publish any piece of content on your blog that isn’t screaming to be read.
But it can also be hard to keep churning out new, insightful content every month.
That’s why we’ve put together this concise, 7 step guide to help you craft awesome, readable content.
If you’re marketing using a blog, or if your blog is a large part of your business, then chances are you’ve heard of keywords.
Keywords do what they say on the tin – they’re the essence of what you’re writing about, and they’re also what Google uses to decide how and where to rank your content.
Now, the old way of thinking was very much “the more keywords the better” … but this doesn’t make for very good reading for humans, and Google has started to realise this. It’s already made changes to its algorithm to prioritise blogs that write for their users, and not for search engines.
Here are 5 tips for keeping your blog content keyword-rich, without ruining the reading experience and landing yourself a hefty penalty:
Now anyone with a passion for radio will know that if you sat behind your microphone and read straight off a script all day, your listeners would be bored as heck.
That’s because writing a blog and actually doing a radio show (or podcast) are two wildly different things.
When we speak, we make fun little inflections with our voice and odd sounds as we pause and try and remember the word we’re looking for.
When we write, we’re doing it at our own time and at our own pace, (and we can totally just Google that word).
So why on earth then are we telling you to combine oil and water into a Blogcast?
Blogging sometimes feels like you’re just shouting into the void. You write some super awesome content, get some fancy-looking images together, hit publish.
And then nothing happens.
And you wonder, what did I do wrong?
Well, in theory, nothing. But there are two things you need to think about before you hit that tempting, tempting ‘publish’ button and check it off your list.
You might be up writing at 2am on a Tuesday morning, but chances are people aren’t reading blogs at 2am. Or if they are, they’re over the other side of the world (and probably not your client base, your audience, or the people you want to reach.)
So you need to think about when to post your blog.
Now, WordPress can do some of this work for you. It has a neat feature in ‘Insights’ that tells you exactly when the best time to blog is. So head on over to ‘Stats’, and then ‘Insights’ at the top and scroll until you see this beauty:
Voila! You have the time and the day you should be posting your blog. So if your current schedule doesn’t match up to this, consider changing it.
The important thing is: check this every week! Because it changes
Now you’ve sent your blog out at the perfect time of day and maximised all of the chances that people will stumble upon your site, what about the people who already know you exist? Those you have on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the people you see down the shops?
You need to promote your blog. And that means sharing it on social media.
More than once.
You can set up WordPress to auto-tweet for you, and it can also auto-post to your other channels, but that’s not all.
You want to keep drip-feeding your content.
So once you’ve written something awesome, be prepared to share it once a week for the next 5 or so weeks, providing you’ve got enough tweets/posts in between to cushion that (otherwise it will look like all you’re doing is yelling about your awesome blog post, which most people will then spitefully ignore.)
You can use a tool like audiense to see when your Twitter followers are online and post it at the best time for them too.
Social media is all about good timing. And don’t forget to check out our previous post about social media tools that will make your life easier, because these will help you with the whole timing thing, too.
Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.
Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com
This May, new Data Protection laws will be coming into place, specifically, the Data Protection Act will be replaced by the General Data Protection Regulation.
What’s the difference? The GDPR will have new rules around the storage and handling of personal information and there will be stricter punishments in place for those who fail to comply.
Why the new law? The short answer is because hackers are more easily able to access data from small to medium businesses than they are to hack huge, well-protected corporate networks.
At the moment it’s sufficient to ask someone to tick or even to untick a box in order to consent to the storage of their data.
Under the new laws, consent means active agreement. This means you cannot pre-tick a ‘subscribe me’ button.
Not only this, but companies need to be able to show a clear audit trail of consent, including screen grabs or saved consent forms.
Individuals also have the right to withdraw consent at any time, and it has to be effective and efficient. When someone withdraws consent all of their personal data must be immediately and permanently erased. It is not enough to remove them from the mailing list.
If you are subject to a data breach, you also have to inform the relevant authorities immediately and you must notify all individuals affected within 72 hours of the initial breach.
If you have a newsletter that people subscribe to, or if you send e-mails to a database of people on whatever basis, this concerns you.
And it doesn’t just concern all the new data you might collect. It concerns all the data you currently have.
Any kind of personal data you keep has to follow these rules and you and you alone are responsible for being able to prove that someone has consented to have their data kept on file by you.
This means you can no longer capture e-mails through a competition and then add them into your mailing list, or you cannot auto-subscribe (for example) people that have bought a ticket to your show to your newsletter.
The GDPR applies to all enterprises. So if you run a business from home, or if your blog/website is engaged in “economic activity” i.e. you use it to make money – this applies to you.
It does not apply to people processing personal data in the course of a purely personal or household activity. I.e. if you have your plumber’s email address on file, that’s fine. If you’re sending your plumber an email telling him that you have a new kind of product available for sale, that’s not fine.
For every e-mail address in your system, you need to go back and seek explicit permission from the person to continue to send them whatever communication you are sending them.
If you cannot provide evidence of consent, you cannot send them emails and you must delete their data permanently.
This means you will need to launch a re-permission campaign and bring your entire database up to GDPR standards.
Fines. These are tiered based on the level of non-compliance and the severity of the violation, and they are capped at 4% of an annual turnover of €20million.
Ouch.
Check out our next post on how to run a GDPR compliant re-consent campaign.
Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.
Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com
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