How To

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The anatomy of a blog post

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We’ve been talking about blogging a lot lately because we believe that a blog is one of the most valuable tools a business can use. Here’s a great post from the archives on how to create good, sharable, clickable content for your blog!

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I don’t know about you, but I’m a blog post skimmer.  I wish I could promise that every blog post I open gets all of my attention and I take the time to read it all - but I don’t.

Here are some tips on what I find makes a blog post easy to read, skim, and decide if I want to spend more time reading all the words.

1. Clear content

Introduce what you’re going to be talking about and what the goal of the post is.  I did this by introducing the topic by saying I need blog posts to be easy to skim and saying I was going to give tips on what I find works to achieve this.

2. Section headings

If the post is broken down by section headings that jump out at me and give me a feel for the topics in the post, I’ll have a better sense on whether or not the post is hitting points of interest for me. It lets me quickly skim the post to see if it’s what I thought the post was about and whether or not I want to keep reading what the person has to say.

3. Bullet points

  • skim-able
  • succinct
  • don’t require full sentences
  • people don’t like to read long paragraphs of text

4. Photos

Photos in a blog post make your post more readable by:

  • giving a visual relating to what you’re talking about
  • breaking up the text making it more appealing to the eye
  • making your posts more clickable

Here’s why: When posting to other sites (like Facebook) it will pull in a few lines of text as well as an accompanying image. It has been proven that having a thumbnail image in a link update increases click thrus.

5. Questions

If you want to make it easy for people to engage, ask a question so they know you want their opinions and input. The more specific and easy to answer the question is, the more likely you are to get a response.

What additional tips would you give for generating good blog posts?

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The single most effective way to maintain a flow of ideas

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I love to read. Books and articles, for me, are the key to filling a giant blank journal in my head.

A number of years ago, I was sitting at my desk with a huge book in my hands - I think it was a version of the MS Access Bible. A co-worker walked by and asked me if I liked what I was reading. He happened to be a fairly pompous fellow, so I braced myself and replied that I did like it. Then he asked me if I understood it. (Really?) Yes, I understand it. He seemed amazed and commented that he prefers Shareholder Agreements. I told him I could read those too and he walked away without really commenting.

That Access book and the two or three others I had piled on my desk at that time weren’t the most interesting reading I’ve ever done. Sometimes it took me a few tries before what I needed to do finally worked. But the reading I did gave me so many ideas. It gave me ways to make my projects work better and do more for our office. I was able to glean ideas by reading about functions in those books that I didn’t already know.

I’m still getting ideas from the content that I read, but these days I do the majority of my reading in an RSS reader or Kobo rather than a software brick, er, manual. I’m currently subscribed to 171 blogs, many of which are news blogs and that is how I keep up-to-date with what’s going on in social media, tech and gadgets.

What that means is that I have roughly 3-4,000 posts each week that I flip through to either discard immediately, scan to determine value and discard, or spend a tad more time reading. It’s a lot of reading, but it’s worth it because it’s professional development. I don’t need to know all of it, but I need to know a lot of it.

Essentially, other people’s work gives me inspiration for my own. It generates ideas and thoughts and opinions. I can’t think of a better way to have a continual flow of blog ideas than to read others’ blogs. There is always something you’ll have a comment on or disagree with or support and want to add your own perspective. That’s one of the great advantages of social media - the ability to have discussions that are in-depth on our own time and terms.

So, next time you’re stuck feeling unsure about what to write, go do some reading.

What other strategies do you use to keep ideas flowing? 

Tips for making your blog posts shareable

I wrote a blog post awhile back called the anatomy of a blog post where I outlined what I believe the layout of your blog post should be for ease of reading online. In short: Keep your posts brief and scannable.

Here are a few tips on things you can do to make your blog posts as easy to share as possible:

1) Enable social sharing  

There are many plugins (AddThis, ShareThis, and Shareaholic to name a few)

I’m a big fan of the layout that allows people to share to the most common networks with one click. 

 

2) Use a photo or video in every post  

This makes the posts more visual on Facebook, Google + and especially on Pinterest.  People won’t share a post on Pinterest if there is no image or video to accompany it. 

What entices you to share a post?

Simple social media tips: Linking to status updates

One of the loudest messages we tell people about social media is that we don’t believe that your channels should be automatically feeding into each other.  Don’t let your Facebook feed into Twitter, don’t let your Twitter feed into LinkedIn and don’t let anything feed into your Facebook.  Different audiences deserve personalized messages.

We do however, encourage you to send people from one channel to the other!

If you’re having an interesting conversation on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+, by all means, select that specific post and link to it from one of your other channels: 

 “We’re having a great discussion about Google+ on Facebook, come tell us what you think: <insert url>”

But how do you do that?

Click on the timestamp

Every post you make, on any of the channels, tells you when it was posted.  If you click on that it will bring you to that specific post.

Copy the URL

Select the URL at the top of your browser and copy it.  You can now paste it anywhere and have people come to that specific post.

It’s simple and a great way to point people to your different networks.  You can also use it to screen capture posts to use in blog posts :)

Do you send your audience to your other networks?

The process of curating content - where, how and why

This picture may seem funny, but this genuinely happens more often than I like to admit.Every once in a while, I get asked how I find so much good content to use for reference - particularly because of the weekly post I do here on The Media Mesh summarizing the week’s top news and general brilliance. What I do with the Buzz and Brilliance is content curation.

What is content curation?

This definition from econtentmag.com sums it up well:

Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter.

We’re all content curators. Check out your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Blog feeds if you don’t believe me. (You DO share stuff that isn’t your own, correct?)

Today on Twitter, @PamInOttawa asked:

I started by throwing out a couple of ideas that came to mind - Alltop and Facebook Interest Lists. But Pam came back at me and asked what my process is, which isn’t easy to explain in 140 characters, so I said I’d write a blog post. I don’t use Alltop, though I think it’s a really interesting tool (and seeing it again today has piqued my interest). I haven’t really jumped into using interest lists much, though they show up in my Facebook newsfeed and I really like the idea of them, too.

RSS is Alive and Well

My process is far more basic and lives mostly in Google Reader. I keep hearing that RSS is dead, but I rely on mine to keep up with reading all 161 blogs I’m subscribed to. Within Google Reader, I’ve set up folders by subject, from General topics where things like Lifehacker reside to Social Media where I get my SM fix every day. I also read blogs about blogging, business, technology, photography, web design, SEO and my free-time fun blogs are the ones that are about everyday life. I try to read through the unread posts daily so it doesn’t get too overwhelming, but in a pinch, I can weed through well over 1,000 in an hour or two.

How do you find blogs to follow?

When I first started subscribing to blogs, I subscribed to a few big names first. Then I checked out their blog rolls and subscribed to everyone they listed. I visited each of those blogs and checked out their blog rolls if they had them, though I did get pickier about who and what I chose to follow. I wanted a good mix of news stories, commentary and general business insight. I’ve achieved that balance to my satisfaction, though I’m constantly tweaking what I read - subscribing to new content and unsubscribing blogs that I’m not getting as much from. Chris Penn once wrote about finding five new blogs to subscribe to every month and I’ve been doing just that ever since. I even subscribe to more than five occasionally.

I find new blogs and content from Twitter. When I see one that’s really good, I’ll favorite the tweet or clip the article to Evernote. How I decide depends on how I want to use that content. Sometimes I want it for reference - that always goes to Evernote, in the applicable notebook with tags to help me find it later. I clip stuff all the time because it’s triggered a blog post idea. It sits in my Evernote until the idea fizzles out or I get around to writing it up. I have dozens of post ideas and the list keeps growing.

If something catches my eye on Twitter when I’m short on time, I will favorite the tweet. I have If This Then That set up to send all of these tweets to Evernote as well. Twitter Favorites are a bookmarking tool for me that can mean anything from idle curiosity when I have no time to genuine interest with intent to act.

What do you do with all that content?

At the end of each week, I take all the posts I’ve starred in Google Reader and sort them. A handful go into the Buzz and Brilliance. A handful I’ve starred to go back and comment, Stumble or Pin. A handful I star to clip to Evernote. A handful get tagged into topics I collect right in Google Reader for reference later. Anything that’s leftover after I’ve finished those tasks gets unstarred and I’m reset for the next week of reading.

It’s an involved process, but I’m learning so much every single week and part of the learning is streamlining the overall process as I go. The Buzz and Brilliance now takes me half the time it did when I started it, but I can get through more content now. It’s all about learning to spot the good stuff quickly and efficiently.

Most of all - be nosey and ask these questions when you want to find more content:

 

  • Who do the people you respect follow?
  • Who are the experts in your field of interest learning from?
  • What blogs and websites do they quote or link to regularly?

 

The beauty of social media is that you don’t even need to ask. You can just observe and get the answers.

What tools do you use to curate content or generate ideas for content?