Several presentations from Dawn, Chris and Jonathan on the theme of blogging for this meeting!
Content ideas for blog posts – Dawn Fisher
First up was Dawn Fisher of Remedial Massage Treatment.co.uk/
Dawn has been using her site to find customers for around 10 years and her blog is an integral part of this. She spoke to us about the way she creates her blog posts.
The first step in a successful blog (and for each successful post) is to work out what the purpose of it is. You should aim to attract (and retain) people who are actively looking for your goods or services. Ask yourself what they might want to know, and write about it.
Using Google Analytics is also important – it helps you find out what search terms are bringing to your site: you can use these to write your blog.
Another useful technique is to ask your past visitors and customers what they found interesting on your site. You should also make note of what your customers ask you most: these are the sorts of questions people will be searching for online.
Dawn keeps a notebook of ideas for blog posts and suggested that, rather than writing brief notes or titles, you should write out as much of the post as soon as you can – short notes might not mean much when you come back to them! These notes might be about the day’s interesting challenges or questions or just topics which come to you in a flash of inspiration. Topics may also come from the things you read. Wherever the topics come from, it’s important to keep everything – even those unfinished posts – so you can revisit them in future if inspiration strikes. Returning to an old post and writing an updated version can also create new content for you!
One part of Dawn’s success is down to keeping a human side to her posts: not just writing technical jargon, but writing for your audience. It’s a hard balance: you need to be technical enough that other experts respect you, and that customers know that you know your subject, but not so technical that you’re not understood by the layman.
Regardless of where your inspiration comes from, make sure you check your spelling and grammar – nothing undermines your point faster than a poorly written post.
Cats and Tags – Chris McMahon
Next up was Chris McMahon of Very Simple Sites
Blog post covering talk – https://verysimplesites.co.uk/categories-tags-wordpress/
Chris talked about categories and tags and how you can use them to organise your blog’s content in WordPress
DISCLAIMER don’t just change cats and tags without adding 301 redirects
Content needs organising just like libraries
Yoast is a good example of cats and tags – easy to see the cats they have and the different content available
Don’t do it for seo so it for your readers
You need to think about and plan your websites structure before you start writing
Use pages and posts accordingly. Pages can be inferior to pages for content that is time based – getting content out there and seen as and when..
Cats can be broad and must be used, they are hierarchical
Tags are flat and optional
Cats is contents page (or umbrella)
Tags is index (or raindrops)
Did a group exercise to see what could be cats and what could be tags. There are actually many possibilities depending on your blogs focus.
Suggestions/best practice
Less is more – limit categories
Put post in one cat but there are reasons when you might put in more
You don’t have to use tags……….
You can have many tags but limit them to not look spammy
Do not have tags that only apply to one post
If you want you can use neither and just rename the default cat form uncategorised to something like general/updates etc
You can noindex the archive page for this term so it’s unused
Archive pages should be used as standalone pages – add an intro, some more info, you can even sticky posts on these pages sometimes depending on theme plugins etc.
Cat and tag pages can be used for seo
Yoast keeps it simple and well organised they use few tags and cats per article
Only a handful of cats for a clean site structure
Don’t forget your category archive pages! Fill out the fields provided by the Yoast seo or other plugin. Make them descriptive and relevant.
In permalink settings you can change your category base i.e. Decade instead of category.
The whys and hows of micro blogging – Jonathan Whiteland
Slides – https://whiteland.net/jonathan/static/presentations/micro_blogging.html
Click on the above and use cursor keys to scroll left and right… or visit https://whiteland.net/jonathan/static/presentations/micro_blogging.html
Last but not least was Jonathan Whiteland
It’s like blogging….. but smaller..
Think social media updates
Why?
Ownership
Independence
Control
How are people going to find it?
A platform like WordPress.com or a
Self hosted WordPress website on micro.blog
WordPress has support for this such as shorter post formats, post categories (separate from your main blog)..
Plugins
Jonathan’s plugin – A few micro blogging tweaks
Another – character count for post content and excerpt
Micro.blog “a new social network for independent micro blogs” micro.blog
Vision is to take feeds from people that have their own micro blogs and combine them (a bit like twitter).
You can cross post with services like twitter using apps like ifttt to push to twitter your micro blogs
Can do via WordPress app on your phone when out and about.
Json feed – similar to rss and atom but in json – check it out! Jsonfeed.com.
Aftermath
Simon talking about potentially moving the wp meetup to the bradfield centre.
Need a sponsor for tea coffee snacks