What You Don’t Know About Content Creation | Cecily Kellogg #TypeACon 2014

Cecily Kellogg is one of the first bloggers I ever met, and she remains one of my favorites. I would probably sit in on her session no matter what it was about. But this is a topic that is near and dear to me (and my paycheck) so it’s a win/win situation!

What You Don’t Know About Content Creation

Cecily sort of stumbled into blogging when she was struggling with infertility. The Fertility Friend crowd was not her thing, so she found some infertility blogs, and they were her people. Her blog, Uppercase Woman, is currently on hiatus, but her new project is called Women Speak Geek.

Online content is marketing content, regardless of whether you’re talking about your uterus or anything else.

How Web Content is Different

• Visual
• Surrounded by distractions
• Snackable

(but still good writing)

What is Good Writing?

“No sentence can be effective if it contains only facts…” (Who, what, where, when, why)

Tell a story with emotion, imagery, and a beginning, middle, and end. (I know I’m guilty of forgetting the end sometimes.)

Marketing Writing Needs to Be:

• Urgent
• Relevant
• Real
• Clear
• Concise
• Contains a call to action

Emotion Still Drives Marketing Content

Emotions motivate people, and marketing copy plays on these emotions:

• Peer pressure
• Self-improvement
• FOMO (fear of missing out)

Consider Treating Your Blog Like Marketing Content

What you need to blog like a business:

• goals
• strategy
• tracking
• optimization

Businesses will make a 5 year plan, and that plan can be re-worked every year. You can make a 1 year plan and take time each month to review how you’re doing as far as reaching those goals.

How are you going to reach those goals? Maybe it’s writing guest posts, or scheduling more tweets. You can set up goals in Google Analytics.

Setting Goals

Determine what a conversion is for your site. Do you want more comments? More likes? More pageviews? It’s easier to set up campaigns if you know what it is you want to do.

Strategy

• Create reader personas
• Editorial calendar
• Curate other sources to add value

About personas: Who is your target demographic? What are you doing to drive that type of person away from your site? Don’t get too super specific. Just describing the person you want to reach will give you a better idea of how to reach and accommodate them.

You can use your editorial calendar to make sure you’re reaching each different target regularly. Are you keeping your crafting fans and your Doctor Who fans happy?

Pro tip: use Google Calendar (or similar) to set up alerts to keep you honest about your editorial calendar. Dry erase boards work for some people who work better with low-tech reminders.

If you curate content to help keep your blog updated, make sure you’re crediting and linking to the sources. Add value by editorializing on the content you curate, telling your readers why you’re sharing it with them.

Track

• Set up goals in your analytics program
• Collect and evaluate reader feedback
• Check goals monthly or quarterly
• Measure conversions

Optimize

• USABILITY
• Ease of social sharing
• Go organic (don’t buy links. EVER.)
• SEO is no longer all that matters

If your site is not mobile-friendly, you’re screwed. Use HTML-5 with a responsive theme. Just updating your site to a responsive theme can double your traffic. (Anecdotal from the audience.)

Web traffic is determined more by social sharing than Web search results.

SEO

• Title
• Description
• Internal linking
• Schema markup works for some sites, such as crafting/recipe (there’s a plugin for that!)

Authorship vs. Author Rank

Authorship was for display purposes. Google killed it.

Author Rank is for determining trustworthiness of the author. This is based on bylines.

Story vs. Content

Key elements to good stories include:

• powerful opening and closing paragraphs
• story/journey with beginning, middle, end
• specific

Key elements to good content include:

• simple words
• short sentences/paragraphs
• active voice
• scannable (sigh)

For blogging novelists (like Cecily, or me) you need to remember not to lose people with their short attention spans

Marketing + Personal Blogging

Take-home message: Content needs to tell a story using short sentences and paragraphs, an active voice, be scannable, and have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

EDIT

Write a day in advance, let the post sit, and then go back and read over it with fresh eyes to fix the flow and remove parts that don’t work.

DON’T

• use fluffy words
• ramble (guilty)
• use cliches
• repeat yourself
• defend yourself (stand on your opinions and your thoughts; own it)
• overwrite (guilty)

Write for Free? Yes.

• To get byline for author rank
• Inbound links
• To establish thought leadership
• To break out of a niche

“I’m not talking about HuffPo.” Look for high quality sites either inside or outside your niche. Make sure the other site is going to promote you, share your post, have them tag you on each share.

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Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.