Ultimate Visibility Vault Course

Blog Marketing

Lesson Slides

The first part of increasing your visibility is making sure that your immediate network knows what you’re doing and how to learn more. And this is simple, and doesn’t involve anything like shoving your blog in friends’ faces or messaging old friends to ask them to check it out.

This video gives you a thorough and practical checklist to make sure that you’re not hiding your website and blog, and to make it easy for people to follow along who are interested.

What we are covering:

Blog link
Bio
Socials
Shares
Interest

Sharing Your Blog

Slides

In this lesson, I'm talking about how and why to share your blog and new posts.

The internet is a noisy place, and in this video I'm going to give you some guidelines for how to tell people about your content.

Simply saying "I wrote a new post!" isn't enough to grab them. We want to make sure people know what's in it for them if they click through.

Writing Compelling Posts for Social Media

Social Media Overview

Instagram Training

Twitter Training

Setup & Best Practices

Launch Your Group

Nurture Your Group

75 Ways to engage your group

Why Care About SEO – Search Engine Optimization?

It’s easy to put off SEO.

Online content creators are busy people, and when we are starting out, we’re often bootstrapping 100 different things – with a million things to learn.

So, it’s natural to focus on the quick wins – and that is completely reasonable, because we need those quick wins. We need the cash flow, sure, but we also need the boost to our confidence that those wins bring us.

But it’s also critical to balance quick wins with a long term plan and strategy that will, in the long run, take off some of that pressure and boost bigger wins down the road.

The two best sources of traffic for blogs are, usually, Pinterest and search engines. Pinterest is a traffic powerhouse, and most every blogger should use it – but you don’t want to rely on just Pinterest forever. There’s a few reasons for that:

One: Diversification

Just like diversifying your income streams, diversifying your traffic streams will contribute to your business’ security.

If you are relying on a single source of traffic for your whole business, you are placing yourself at the mercy of a single company over which you have no control. Whether it’s Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or even Google – there have been many small businesses that saw their traffic evaporate overnight because of a single algorithm change.

Can you pick up the pieces and start over when that happens?

Sure. Of course you can.

But if you have several diverse traffic sources, you probably won’t ever have to.

That’s a huge reason to take the time to master SEO.

Two: Volume

Search engines kinda make the world go round, and the traffic potential there is enormous.

You can get huge volume from Pinterest, too – but if you can attract quality traffic from multiple sources, well, you just get more traffic.

Three: Passive Traffic

Once a blog post is optimized for search, you have done that work one time – but you will reap the traffic rewards forever. Pinterest traffic will decline over time if you don’t maintain your account regularly, but if your blog has a strong overarching SEO strategy, supported by correctly optimized posts, your search engine traffic will just grow with age.

Basic Setup

There are a few basic pieces that need to be in place to get started.

First, be sure that Google Analytics is set up on your blog or website.

If you haven’t done this, follow the directions here to take care of it: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en

Also, here is a more comprehensive tutorial, for those who have more complex programming to deal with: https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-set-up-google-analytics/

Next, set up an XML sitemap.

This sounds intimidating, but many websites do it for you. If you are on WordPress, you can take care of it through a plugin like Yoast. Refer to this article for in-depth instructions to get this task done: https://neilpatel.com/blog/xml-sitemap/.

Finally, understand and install SEO plugins or applications that are appropriate for your platform.

On WordPress, the Yoast plugin is the gold standard. Many other platforms have their own version of this. Essentially, this type of plugin helps you analyze each post and offers suggestions to improve the post’s optimization. While these types of tools aren’t strictly necessary for a strong SEO, they are a huge help, saving time and helping get the best optimization possible.

That being said, it is also important to understand SEO best practice for yourself, because while plugins are great, they also don’t always nail the user-intent, more organic and human side of the equation – and Google cares about that.

So, use Yoast as a helpful tool, but don’t use it instead of understanding SEO for yourself.

To install Yoast on WordPress, follow the instructions here: https://yoast.com/help/installation-guide-for-wordpress-seo/.

For a comprehensive list of SEO plugins for all the major platforms, go here: https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/22077/best-seo-plugins/

Building a Keyword Strategy

Your keyword strategy will consist of two main pieces: your longtail keywords, and seed keywords.

Your seed keywords are the high level concepts that you want your site to rank for; you will not usually use them as the keywords in your actual posts, but rather as the “seed” to discover more narrow, detailed keywords – the longtail keywords.

Called “longtail” because it is usually a longer phrase of at least two or three words rather than a single word, these are also referred to as “keyphrases.”

For example, say you have a food blog, and you focus heavily on, oh, soups. You want to rank for “soup recipes.” That is a seed keyword – but you can improve it by adding one more modifier. Do you like to write about healthy soup recipes? Vegan soup recipes? That is about the level of specificity that you are after.

Now, your longtail keywords will be things like:

Healthy soup recipes for winter
Squash soup recipes with kale
Vegetable soup recipes in the crockpot

See? You want your longtail keywords to be very narrowly focused. There won’t be huge volume for these searches, but you will be able to serve the people who are looking for exact thing you are offering.

When you have many posts, all with longtail keywords directly related to your high-level seed keywords, that is when the real SEO magic starts to happen.

Choose your longtail keywords carefully!

While choosing keywords that relate to your seed keywords, and are topics that interest you and your audience, is the first step, the next step is critical if you hope to rank well.

At the same time, don’t get so caught up in research that you end up dreading this process and abandoning your SEO efforts altogether. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Go here for a Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research.

How to Optimize a Blog Post

Check out this tutorial for a thorough tour of creating SEO-optimized blog content. The tutorial will take you through 12 steps to excellent optimized content.

It can feel complicated to get started, but you will quickly get used to taking care of these critical details in your posts, and the rewards down the road make it well worth the initial effort.

Some Additional Tips

Once you have the basic steps in place, and are understanding how to choose great keywords and optimize your posts, here are some additional tips to really make your SEO sing:

Use powerful headlines. Optimize your headlines for keywords AND clicks with power words and styles.
Use related keywords. Yoast doesn’t always get it, but use organic, natural variations of your keyword in your post (you can find these with Google’s related searches or with a tool like SEMRush, but a natural variation in your language also works fine). Google sees this as a sign that you are a real writer and not just stuffing keywords. Your main keyword should still dominate.
Readability. Readability matters for search rankings! If you use Yoast, it has a built-in readability analyzer that is helpful to be sure your posts are providing the answers and experience your visitors are looking for. And when visitors spend more time on your site, and don’t bounce back to Google to continue their search? That tells Google you are the real deal. (Don’t have Yoast? Check here for Yoast’s 5 Tips for Writing Readable Blog Posts.)

Nitty Gritty Details: Little Things to Improve Search Rankings

Site speed

While most bloggers would prefer to focus on creating content and connecting with readers and clients – making sure your site speed is up to par is important if you want good search rankings. It doesn’t need to be the first thing you take care of – but it shouldn’t be the last, either.

Mobile responsiveness

This isn’t optional – mobile devices account for nearly two-thirds of all web traffic, so it’s important to make sure your site is mobile friendly.

The 3 most critical ways to do that are to:

implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on your site (use the Official AMP Plugin on WordPress)
compress your images (For WordPress, I prefer Smush)
Use a responsive web design

If you want to really go to town on optimizing for mobile, this article by Neil Patel is an excellent source.

Broken links

Over time, pages and websites that you link to from your blog may change or be shut down, resulting in a broken link on your site. We’ve all come across these, from time to time, and they are annoying to your readers! Google will pick up on broken links, and it will ding your rankings, so it’s good to regularly check your links.

There are plugins to do this job for you; one good option for WordPress is Broken Link Checker. Once activated, it will crawl your site regularly, and send an email when it finds broken links.

Shorter URLS

There are a lot of things that you can do with URLs to optimize them for search, but the main thing to keep in mind is to make sure that your slug is fairly short and easy to read.

The slug is the part of your post URL that follows your domain name: www.yourdomain.com/this-is-the-slug. You can edit this on the page where you create your posts on most platforms.

Updated content

Google loves fresh content! Don’t let your site go stale – add new content regularly, and periodically update older content as well.

The Key to SEO: Patience and Persistence

SEO can feel intimidating – no way around it. But it doesn’t really need to be. SEO is one of those tasks that can be as complicated as you make it, but you can also choose a few simple takeaways to start out, and implement more as you learn more.

Eventually, SEO becomes just another part of your writing routine, and just adds a few minutes to your process. The benefits are more than worthwhile!