Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
8. Format your blog post to make you look like an expert ............... 18
10. Add call to actions to get the most from your audience ............. 23
13. Build an email list from the start, and don’t forget to
send them stuf .......................................................................... 29
14. Stick to a theme for better SEO and a stronger follower base ..... 32
18. Leverage paid social media advertising for better reach .............. 41
21. Stop writing intros like high school research papers ................... 48
23. A little bit of maintenance now saves big problems later ............ 52
28. Add a FAQ section before your contact form to save time ......... 62
37. Don’t sweat over your Google PageSpeed Insights score ............. 83
38. Use Quora to really ind out what people want to learn ............. 85
Bill Widmer
A content marketing and SEO consultant.
Has 2,500,000-words of experience publishing content.
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And that’s for a very small niche – RVing and campervans. It’s
way more impactful with bigger niches, like any kind of business,
marketing, or travel.
Oh, and in case you come across it, I highly recommend white
hat SEO (valid tactics according to Google’s terms of service) over
black hat SEO (tactics that work, but are against Google’s policies
and can penalize your site).
Now, obviously, there’s a lot more to SEO than I can explain
in 250 words. But this gives you the basics, which really aren’t
difficult.
To lean more, Moz wrote an in-depth beginner’s guide to
SEO you should check out.
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2.
I put link building right after SEO because it’s really just an
extension of SEO. Backlinks to your website are one of Google’s
strongest indicators for ranking a site higher.
It’s a lot of work, but isn’t necessarily difficult or complicated.
It’s just a matter of networking, building strong relationships, and
targeting your content to the people who can provide links.
Here’s a quick and dirty overview to link building:
First, you need high-quality content. No one is going to link to
garbage.
Brian Dean actually recommends creating content specifically
for the people you want links from, rather than focusing on
keywords first. It’s worked for me.
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Once you have quality content, reach out to anyone you linked
to in your article. These people are the most likely to share and
link to it, since they have a stake in it.
(Hint: The better you make people look, the higher the chance
they’ll link to you.)
For example, here’s an email I sent out to all 30+ people who
contributed to the last post on my blog:
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3.
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4.
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I hope that helps you understand it. For more info, Andy
Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios wrote an excellent guide to
internal linking. Give that a read if you want to learn more.
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5.
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6.
Social media and blogging are two peas in a pod. You can’t really
have one without the other.
But, there’s nothing more frustrating than spending four
hours writing a blog post, only to see zero engagement. No
comments, no shares, and your one like is from grandma.
That’s because most people do social media all wrong. They
use is as a publishing platform where they just push out their blog
posts. Social media isn’t an RSS feed!
So, how do you use social media the right way?
By networking and being social. (You’ll start to notice that
almost everything in blogging revolves around networking.)
Let me give you a perfect example: I have a Facebook page
for my RV travel blog. Almost everything I post gets less than 5
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and build solid relationships. That way, even when just starting a
blog, you can still get a ton of engagement.
Pro Tip: While you shouldn’t automate everything on social
media (since people will be able to tell), you can use automation
to build a real, engaged following. For example, you can use a tool
like Narrow to interact with Twitter users that are talking about
subjects relevant to the audience you want to attract. Or, use a free
tool like Revive Old Post to get more eyeballs on your archive content.
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7.
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8.
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o Bold and italicize key points (but don’t use both at the
same time)
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9.
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10.
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11.
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12.
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o Always look for ways you can help people. Share other
bloggers content, comment on their blog posts, follow
them on social media, and send links and people their way.
Here’s a post in one of the groups I’m in that’s taught me a lot
and even landed me two new clients:
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(I found out, by the way, that Google hadn’t indexed the sites
that linked back to me yet, and that’s why I wasn’t getting credit
for them. To get around this, I submitted the URLs that linked to
my post to Google’s URL crawler.)
One last tip: Don’t let relationships fade. Make it a point to
reach out to your new network at least once or twice a month.
Shoot them an email with a cool article, or tag them in something
interesting on social media.
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13.
Over time, your email list will become your biggest source of traffic
– and sales – if you treat it right.
Imagine this:
You wake up, excited for the day. You put on a pot of coffee.
While you’re waiting for it to brew, you head into your home office
to check your email.
There’s over $1000 in sales from the email campaign you
sent last night.
You grab the coffee, and while you’re drinking it, write up
another email to be sent out on schedule. Then you go off and do
whatever you want – your work is done for the day.
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14.
One of the biggest mistakes I made early on, and see other bloggers
making, is not sticking to a theme for your posts.
I get it – people are diverse. We all have multiple interests.
You might be a photographer who also loves travel and
marketing. But your blog won’t benefit from talking about all
three things. Here’s why:
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o SEO will be more difficult. Google likes sites that are solely
dedicated to a single topic because it knows exactly what
that site is about.
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15.
o Reach out to them on social media or via email and just ask!
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16.
Most people usually post their new blog article on social media when
it goes live… but then they don’t share it anywhere else. This is one of
the huge mistakes people make when promoting their posts.
What else can you do? We already talked about email outreach
and working with influencers. But there’s so much more work to
be done!
Here are the best places to share your new blog post:
I. Niche-related forums
You probably saw this one coming after tip #15. Forums are a great
way to get long-term traffic because (if done right) your post will stay
there for a long time and even possibly show up in search results.
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But once you find the forum, you need to become a member.
This isn’t just a quick, “pop in and leave a link” strategy. You’ll get
banned pretty quick doing that.
I recommend leaving at least 20 to 30 high-value comments
before any self-promotion. (High-value meaning thought-provok-
ing and helpful, not just “Nice post!”.)
II. Quora
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17.
If you don’t have an about page, you’re doing it wrong. Building one
really is a must when starting a blog.
In the blogging world, people follow people who they know,
like, and trust. How can you know, like, and trust someone who
doesn’t show their face or have a compelling story?
When someone looks at your about page, what do you want
them to see? A crappy page put together as an afterthought, or one
built to draw users into your personal or brand story?
Check out these 12 about page examples for inspiration.
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18.
Paid ads aren’t just for selling things. You can use them to promote
your blog posts, too!
In fact, I recently promoted a post with affiliate links in a $5
Facebook ad test campaign. (The one I mentioned in section 6.) It
resulted in 740 people reached and 47 link clicks.
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o Facebook ads
o Instagram ads
o Twitter ads
o Pinterest ads
o LinkedIn ads
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19.
One of the most important metrics for SEO is your visitors’ time on
page. One of the easiest ways to increase time on page is by adding
video content.
Besides, not as many people are using videos on their blog
posts. It’s a great way to stand out from the crowd and increase
engagement.
The best part?
You don’t have to be a videographer genius or spend a
ton of money on fancy equipment to get started. In fact, your
smartphone is more than enough.
Well, getting a tripod and an external mic can help boost the
quality. But they’re not necessary.
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Note that you don’t need an expensive camera for this when
you’re just starting a blog for the first time. While it won’t be quite
as high-quality as Pond5’s video, most smartphones can shoot HD
video now that will more than suffice.
But what if you’re camera shy? That’s OK – you can create
animated videos so you never have to appear on screen.
Finally, the last option is to hire someone to create a video for
you. You can find video creators on Fiverr or People Per Hour.
Just be sure to check out people’s reviews before you hire them.
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20.
Colin Newcomer
Freelance writer.
Helps clients grow their web visibility by
writing primarily about digital marketing,
WordPress, and B2B topics.
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21.
If I had to pick one piece of content that’s had the greatest impact
on my blogging, it’s this one from Grow and Convert:
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22.
When you’re starting a blog, you have a whole world of topic ideas
available to you. As a result, it’s easy to fly by the seat of your
pants and still do just fine. But as your blog ages, two things start
happening:
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23.
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24.
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1 4.9
2 3.7
3 2.7
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25.
I might catch some flak for this one. But I’m not taking a shot at the
vast majority of WordPress developers – I’m just gunning for some
of the bloated monstrosities you’ll occasionally find on ThemeForest.
If you go for a theme that tries to handle everything and the
kitchen sink, you may just end up slowing down your site with
convoluted code and/or heaps of extraneous requests. Both those
things mean worse performance and more chances for things to
break.
All I’m saying is this:
Don’t pick a WordPress theme just because it looks pretty or
has a feature list longer than Infinite Jest.
When starting a blog, try to find something that’s, at a
minimum:
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o Regularly updated
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26.
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27.
Headlines matter.
Don’t miss out on clicks
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28.
When first starting a blog, you put up a contact form because you
think it’s something you need, even if you’re not expecting anyone
to use it.
Then, as you start to get a little bit of traffic, someone actually
uses your form and sends you a message. Hallelujah! A human
person cares about your content enough to use your contact form!
Then your blog keeps growing and suddenly you find yourself
inundated with a deluge of messages, many of which ask the same
thing.
Suddenly, you’re spending more time replying to emails than
you are blogging. And that’s not a good recipe for continued success.
But guess what? You can at least eliminate many of the
most redundant emails that you get by adding a FAQ (or
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29.
I still feel like banging my head against the wall over this mistake
that I made…
I switched contact form plugins on my site and, soon after,
started noticing a drop in messages (this was my portfolio site – so
the messages were important). Naturally, my first instinct was to
check for a problem with my contact form plugin.
But after sending test message after test message, I couldn’t
find a single thing wrong with my form plugin. I guess people just
didn’t like me as much anymore…
Eh, not quite. See – it turns out that I wasn’t testing my
forms the right away. There was a problem, but it was a caching
issue. Because I tested my form plugin via my admin account
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(which was excluded from seeing cached pages), I never ran into
the issue in my testing.
Don’t make my mistake. If you have any important pages on
your site – make sure to test them as your end users will see them.
That is, at least use incognito mode.
Wasting your effort because of non-working pages sucks…but a
little bit of testing can prevent that from happening.
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30.
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31.
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32.
Hosting matters!
Karol K
Editor at CodeinWP. Blogger, author of “WordPress Complete”.
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33.
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o “Keep and improve” – posts that are good on their own and
still relevant; might need some work to bring them up to
date or expand (new data, new insights); in other words,
we’re making them even better than they are now.
Once you have those, you can begin working on them, in this
order: start by deleting content, then consolidating, then improving.
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Doing an audit like this and reviving your past content is only
proof that you care about what people see when they come to your
website and begin consuming a random piece of your content. It’s
basically a signal to Google that everything on your site deserves to
rank since it’s all kept up to date.
How often to do the full audit? Probably once a year. But
there’s something you should be doing more often:
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34.
I’ve mentioned this briefly above, but it deserves its own spot on the
list, so here goes.
It basically comes down to this:
Your content isn’t evergreen unless you put in a conscious
effort to keep it that way.
Let me show you something; this is one of our list posts on our
blog – featuring some cool WordPress themes. We have probably
revised this post over 100 times over a span of 3 years.
This is an extreme example. We don’t update all of our content
this often. But still, the message remains:
Your content absolutely deserves to be updated on a regular
basis. There’s always new information popping up, new data, new
techniques, methods, products, or whatever else it is that you write
about. Your audience wants to read about what’s new. Google
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wants to see you write about it too. Literally, the world wants
you to keep your content up to date. If you don’t … goodbye your
Google rankings.
Updating your old posts is one of those techniques that
basically every blogger with experience speaks highly of. Neil Patel,
for instance, says that bringing his old posts back to life resulted
in 51% more traffic over a three-month period.
Here’s what you can do specifically:
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35.
Chances are that you really do not need all those 30 plugins currently
running on your site and especially not when you’re starting a blog.
And I know it’s easy to get carried away and lose yourself in yet
another list of “Top 10 WordPress plugins for X,” but that’s really
not the way to live your WordPress life, so to speak.
First off, not every little feature you want requires a plugin.
Many can be done with simple WordPress hacks or other quick
modifications. On top of that, other things you actually don’t need
at all – they’re just one more “shiny object” that looks cool but
isn’t actually all that useful.
Also, not all plugins work together that well. Sometimes you’ll
stumble upon things interfering with each other, thus making
your site crash (worst case scenario) or your performance drop
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o SEO,
o backups,
o caching,
o social media,
o contact forms,
o Jetpack … possibly.
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You know why you shouldn’t sweat over this? Because most of the
time you can’t even improve it by much anyway.
A while ago, we did a fun experiment. We wanted to
check what sort of impact you can have on your PageSpeed
Insights score once you get your initial grade. So we got two
hosting setups, did the testing, and then optimized the lower-
performing one via a couple of standard methods.
The results were kind of surprising (or not surprising at all,
depending on how you look at it). It turns out that having your
site on a fast host is much more important than doing any other
optimizations.
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Long story short, the faster hosting setup still got a better grade
right out the gate than the slower hosting even after doing a range
of optimizations to it. Here’s the complete experiment.
In the end, this all comes down to, again, getting a good
hosting setup. This is always the easiest and best way to improve
your PageSpeed Insights score when starting a blog.
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o You see the exact wording the person used to ask the
question – you can use that as your headline, even, or
part of it. Also, this gives you an indication of the type of
keywords that might be related to the problem.
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Key points:
o When building a post like that, make sure that you get to
the core of your answer right away. Like Colin said, forget
your intro writing like high school research papers.
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o Use images to make your Quora answer stand out from all
the other ones. Neat trick. Some examples of mine above.
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keyword for the entire site and then keep creating your content
around “whatever” loosely connected topic.
This also goes back to doing content audits. When going
through your past content and auditing it, ask yourself, “What
keyword is this post even targeting? Is it optimized enough?”
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good ideas is by having lots of ideas. And once those ideas start
having sex with each other this is when great things/products/
articles are born.
That’s why we need to expand. Read a lot. Watch a lot of
videos. Do a lot of stuff. Allow yourself to consume content
outside of your niche. This is perhaps the ultimate path to follow
when starting a blog.
Tim Ferriss – a guy you might have heard of – also sees
value in allowing himself some freedom in this regard. One of
his things, for instance, is reading fiction before bed. He’s not a
fiction writer. It would have seem that reading fiction should be
doing nothing for him. But still:
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Free, awesome stuff gets people through the door. When they
come, they start searching for more. They begin thinking, “damn,
this free resource is better than what other people charge for!”
That’s a win.
This is where you get to sell one-on-one consultation,
premium multi-part courses, speaking appearances, real estate …
you get the idea.
In a nutshell: Starting a blog? Give your best stuff away for
free. It has a huge ROI!
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(Except this one person who will point it out in the comments.
Don’t worry about him. He’s a jerk anyway.)
The core of the information is what truly matters. And I know
it sounds corny, but it’s just how things are.
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No one – and I really mean no one – will ever read your
blog because your grammar is spot on. If “good grammar” is
the only thing you have going for you, you’ve lost.
In other words, a badly written, insightful post is always going
to be better than a nicely written, sexless press release.
Ideas! Stories! Entertainment value! Raw information! Invest
in your contentmuscle first, and only then focus on your grammar
muscle.
However, with that being said:
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The goal when creating the first draft is to get as many words
as possible onto a piece of paper (or digital paper) and not worry
about how it all looks. I really mean that you should write down
everything that you can think of that relates to the topic.
The important thing here is to not stop yourself and try to fix
anything. Not even typos. Your goal is to write. To be creative.
Then, once you have the whole draft written, this is when
editing can take place. This is when you can go back to your draft
and start fixing it.
And I do realize that this separation is something incredibly
difficult to keep up with. I too catch myself editing this or that as I
write, but the key is to notice this and try snapping yourself out of it.
Lastly, there’s publishing, which is kind of its own thing
nowadays since most of what we write gets published online by us
(and isn’t sent to a third-party newspaper or something).
Blogs are unique in the way they work. I mean, apart from the
body of your article, you also need to prepare the headline, format
the post, add some images, set your tags/categories, add some
“click to tweets” maybe, and do a myriad of other things – all the
things that starting a blog involves. This is all in the “publishing”
bucket. Do this last. Work on making your post look great
immediately before you hit the publish button.
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Hold on! Please don’t skip reading this one! It’s important.
A keyboard is perhaps the most uznderrated piece of
equipment that we interact with on a regular basis. Most of our
interaction with a computer happens via a keyboard, right?
Yet, we rarely switch keyboards, and don’t usually track
what’s been going on in the keyboard market. We just get
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That’s a wrap!
This book has been a lot! In fact, you’ve just read through 11,000
words of advice on starting a blog. Thanks for still being here!
In the end, running a blog is one of those things that seems
simple in itself, but the gap between just doing it and doing
it to its fullest potential is actually huge. There’s just so many
moving parts! There’s WordPress itself, writing content, editing,
formatting, hosting, SEO, link building, social media, email lists,
networking, and on and on and on.
I hope this list has been insightful, and that it’s going to help
you avoid some of the early mistakes that most bloggers make.
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The Cheat Sheet
4 Add lots of internal links to your most important pages that you
want to rank in search.
31 Limit how much time you spend looking at analytics so that you
don’t waste valuable time.
39 Do keyword research for each and every new post you publish.
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On Promotion
6 When you share posts on social media, tag anyone you linked to or
involved. Even tag your followers.
41 Give your best stuff away for free – just like famous artists do on
the radio.
33 Do regular content audits to make sure that your website offers only
on-point advice and no filler content at all.
34 Update your content regularly - this benefits not only your regular
readers but also people coming from Google.
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On Publishing Content
3 Go for quality over quantity - publish just great content.
7 Use a tool like Canva to create high-quality, relevant images for your
blog posts.
17 Make your about page tell a strong story to increase trust with your
readers.
14 Focus all your articles around the major theme you want to rank
for/be known for. Don’t deviate too much from that theme.
15 Ask your audience what they want to learn about, then write about
their answers.
21 Write intros that connect with regular people, not high school
English professors.
38 Use Quora to really find out what people want to read and learn about.
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44 Get a good keyboard -> Try out blogging apps -> Experiment with
helper apps.
36 Keep your site safe with one of the popular security plugins;
options: Wordfence, Sucuri, iThemes Security.
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