The Thoughts And Ideas Of The Efficiency Coach » blogging

Follow Friday 30-9-9

Heather Townsend — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:50:49 +0000

It’s Friday again, and I’m in holiday mode… I even slept into 09:00. If I’m honest, I’ve mentally not surfaced yet today.

Today’s list is all about the people whose blogs I regularly read because they are well written and I either learn from them, or thoroughly enjoy reading them.

The first on the list is @hlsbs, my guest speaker for my teleseminar on the 25^th November, which will possibly save you thousands of pounds on your marketing and IT budget. Her blog is written in a conversational style and is friendly, warm and often very funny.

Helen Stothard’s blog

The next on the list is @bryonythomas. @bryonythomas writes a marketing blog, which is very much a marketing masterclass for someone like me. I have bookmarked some of her posts to help me with some future projects.

Bryony Thomas’s blog

@candocanbe’s blog is always short and sweet, but a very practical marketing guide for small business owners like myself. Well worth a read – and I normally retweet @candocanbe’s new blog posts, so watch my tweets for these posts.

Karen Skidmore’s blog

I like @duncanbrodie’s blog, it’s always focused on something about leadership or management, and worth a look.

Duncan Brodie’s Blog

This blog is normally very topical – and often inspired by a conversation between the two of us, or more often than not, ‘heated discussion’ with both of us trying to find consensus and the right way forward… yes, it is @neilryder’s blog. It was these conversations which launched The Executive Village. (places at the Swindon & Bedford tables are being booked up fast, make sure you don’t miss out)

Neil Ryder’s Blog

My next blog is exceptionally well written… and has already been commissioned by a publisher to turn into a book. (I am SO jealous) @lawyer_coach blogs about time management and other pertinent issues for lawyers. Whether you are a trainee, solicitor, associate, sole practitioner or partner, there is something in there for you.

Catrin Mills’s Blog

That’s it – have a good weekend.

Ten questions to help you achieve more with your blog

Heather Townsend — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:03:24 +0000

I’ve been reading a great book by Paul Thewlis called ‘Wordpress for Business Bloggers’ and working through its suggested tips and techniques. The observant ones of you will have noticed that my blog theme has changed to match my corporate brand guidelines.

To improve your business efficiency with your blogging, there are ten questions to bear in mind as you write:

How will this post interest my target audience?
How will this post add value to my target audience?
Have you got a beginning, middle and end to your post?
Are you posting frequently enough for your target audience?
Is your post too long for the attention span of your target audience?
Have you got links into other websites and blogs? (to improve your SEO)
Are you putting important keywords into your post?
Does this post sound like me? (Or does my ghost blogger sound like me?)
How does this post link to my objectives for my blog?
Can I add a question to the end of my blog to encourage comments?

I’ve been contributing to a discussion in The Efficiency Coach’s LinkedIn Group on the appropriate frequency for blogging. In the discussion Robert Killington – (Twitter ID: vatark) suggested that I ask my readership the question about my blog. That way I can tailor my content to more of what you enjoy and value.

So, my question to finish this post, is… are my posts the right length? Do I post regularly enough for you? Or should I lower the frequency of my posts? And finally, are there any subjects that I haven’t covered that you would like to see me blog more about?

Thanks for your help

Which Wordpress Plugins should you use?

Heather Townsend — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:30:25 +0000

I think it must be sheer bloody-mindedness on my part, but I have worked out how to use wordpress the experiential, and pretty tough way. In a way, this is good news for you, as I am about to share what plugins I use for my blog and why.

Before I carry on talking about plugins, I’ve just spent a heart-stopping moment when I thought I had lost all my content of my wordpress blog. Don’t let this happen to you… Before you press the ‘automatically update my wordpress blog to the latest version’ button, always do the following steps:

1) Make a complete off-line copy of your wordpress blog

2) Deactivate all your plugins

3) Then press the update button

Some of you may be wondering what plugins are – these are pieces of coding written by programmers that give your wordpress blog extra functionality. The open source nature of wordpress is what makes it great – but is also its major downfall. The myriad of word press plugin programmers often do not collaborate – why should they? Which means that sometimes one plugin uses a variable needed by another plugin and stops a plugin (or more fatally the whole blog) from working.

Whilst updating my new website I learnt that when wordpress is installed within your own website, your web needs to be hosted on a dynamic server – i.e one that can handle php scripts. After I moved my website to a dynamic server suddenly a lot of plugins started to work for me…

These are all the plugins that I use on my blog, and why I use them:

My first three recommended plugins are all included to help you with search engine optimisation for your website.

All in One SEO Pack

I am not quite sure how this plugin works or what it actually does. However, I am assured that it optimises search engine optimisation for your blog. Basically I dutifully fill in some extra boxes after I have written a new blog post and hope that this plugin does what it says on the tin.

Dean’s Permalinks Migration

Sometimes you may want to change your permalink structure. For example, maybe like me, you started off with the default permalinks (the individual URL addresses for each blog post), then someone nice like @sarah_arrow in my case told me my permalinks were not optimised for SEO… and I changed all the permalinks. The whole point about permalinks is that they are meant to be permanent. With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and, I’m told, it even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank. In case this is too techie for you, trust me, it’s a good thing.

Google XML Sitemaps

This is a must have plugin for your blog. I’ll just say that again, this is a plugin that you must have. Everytime you write a new blog, this plugin generates a new sitemap and submits in, in search engine friendly format, to all the major search engines. That’s efficient!

My next two plugins help your readership to easily share your content with their networks.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

This one is a bit of a no-brainer – it allows your readership to share your content on many different social networking sites.

Easy Retweet

I like this plugin as it allows twitter people to easily re-tweet your blog to their followers. It also keeps track of how many times a post has been retweeted. Unfortunately, a week or so ago when I changed the server that my web was kept on the totals all reset themselves to zero. Most frustrating!

My next 5 tools are all designed to help your efficiency on wordpress

Google Integrator tool kit

This seamlessly Integrates Google services such as Analytics with Your Blog. This way you can easily see how many people have been reading your posts and for how long etc etc etc

WP-Spamfree

I use this plugin to get rid of spam. It does what it says on the tin, and is a different option to the other main spam killer askimet.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This is a great plugin. It puts on the bottom of your posts (or the sidebar) related posts within your blog. This means that you don’t have to even think about putting related posts on the bottom of your posts.

MobilePress

Very simply this plugin turns your WordPress blog into a mobile website/blog.

Twitme

Every time you add a new post, this will automatically tweet a new blog post to all your followers.

WP-copy protect

I take my IP very seriously – which means that I use this plugin to stop people cutting and pasting my posts. It wouldn’t stop the most hardened of ‘thieves’, but every little helps.

WP-Cumulus

This is the best tag cloud plugin that I’ve seen. It’s small, neat and looks fantastic.

If you have any wordpress plugins that you wouldn’t be without, I would love to hear about them and what they enable you to do.

How to use your blog for good SEO

Heather Townsend — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:59:35 +0000

Four months ago I didn’t know what SEO even stood, let alone why I should spend most of my Saturday afternoon and evening sorting out my blog links for better SEO!

So let’s start at the beginning, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, what is it? Very simply it is the tasks, design or processes which enable your website to appear higher up the search engine’s rankings for your chosen keywords. Well it sounds simple doesn’t it? Do the right things and you will pop out on the first page of google’s results? Well, no actually. If 500 people want to be the top ranked site in google for a keyword, someone has to be first and someone has to be last.

A blog is a great way of encouraging people to visit your website (drive traffic in web speak). What you may not know is that a blog is also an excellent way of increasing your SEO.

Now, I am not a technie, so anything that I recommend to help you improve your SEO with your blog – will not require any knowledge of coding! Plus, I have learnt it the hard way…

1. Bring it in house

By this I mean, make sure your blog is hosted within your website. If you don’t have your blog hosted within your website, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend optimising your blog for SEO, it wouldn’t matter one iota…

Wordpress offers its blogging software for free for you to install into your website domain. The installation doesn’t require you to have much knowledge about servers, coding… but it will probably take you longer than the stated ‘famous’ 5 minute installation.

2. What’s important to you?

You need to identify what keywords are important to you. As much as possible these keywords need to appear, in decreasing level of importance:

Blog title, permalinks (the URL used to get to individual blog posts), tags and blog content.

3. Craft your permalinks

Wordpress by default gives you a permalink (or URL) for each post as something very similar to this: http://yourdomain.com/blog/?p=123. For good SEO you need to add in keywords to your permalink URL.

If your domain is hosted on a linux server, then this is what you need to type in the custom box in permalink settings: /%year%/%category%/%postname%.

If your domain is hosted on a windows server, then you need to type in /index.php/%year%/%category%/%postname%

Ideally keep your permalinks as short as possible – as the google robots prefer not to have to dig deep into the site.

If you do change your permalinks, then you need a very nifty plugin called Dean’s permalink migration. What this plugin does, is everytime someone clicks on an old link for a post, the plugin will automatically direct them to the new link. Thus saving you lots of broken links and annoyed google robots… Very simply change your permalinks, then activate the plug in and type in the old permalink structure. If this was the default wordpress permalink, then just type in /.

4. Categorise

Choose blog categories that contain important keywords to you. Then include the category name in your blog permalink.

5. Tag it!

Don’t skimp on your tags for each blog post. Make sure the tags are relevant to your blog content

6. Update regularly

To increase or just maintain your Google page rank you must regularly refresh or add more (and relevant!) content to your website. Google prefers dynamic content – i.e. a blog to static content (a page with .htm or .html file extension)

7. Measure it

There are some great wordpress plugins (Google Integrator toolkit, Google Analyticator) which enable you to integrate google analytical for your wordpress blog.

8. Promote your blog

The more people that link to your blog the better it is for your google page ranking. (so feel free to link to my blog…)

9. Increase keyword density in your posts

Google now has very sophisticated ways of determining keywords for your site – and actually looks for keywords within the content of the site – not just the meta tags.

Anyway, that’s it for a while. But if you could do with some help to increase your personal or business efficiency – why not give us a call?

Have you got a book in you?

Heather Townsend — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:58:57 +0000

Not only is a blog a great way of connecting personally with your target market, it is one of the best ways to optimise your search engine ranking. It appears that Google puts a greater weight on content in a blog than in a ’static’ website.

The point of a blog is to help people see past the commercial literature and help connect with you as a person. Then, the next stage is to build up trust & credibility with your target audience – showing them you understand them, and know what you are talking about.

So how do you go about setting up and writing a blog?

Here are our tips:

Before you start writing, there are three things you have to think about first:

1) why you are going to start a blog

2) The technical aspects of a blog – where and how to host

3) what you are actually going to write in your blog

why you are going to start a blog

If your primary goal is to share your opinions and ideas with the general public, you would want to use a different blogging tool than a user who was creating product blogs as a commercial sales effort.

A blog for search engine promotion would have entirely different requirements.

These different uses for a blog require different technical abilities.

I’m assuming (as you are reading this blog) that you are interested in a blog for commercial purposes.

Firstly, you need to take a step back and think about your target customer/client. What sort of things will interest them? What problems or challenges do they face in their everyday lives? What do they read? What websites do they spend time surfing on?

Technical aspects (the geeky bit)

If you are concerned about search engine optimisation, then look to host your blog on your website.

If you are not particularly concerned about search engine optimisation, and want an easy way to start blogging, then pick a free blogging host such as www.blogger.com or wordpress (which will allow you to put your blog on it for free) It’s worth checking your deal with your domain host, they may offer you a free blog service.

B2evolution, WordPress and Nucleus are three of the most popular open source (free) blogging software, and will allow you to put your blog onto your own website.

Wordpress: great for personal blogging (but functionality is developing rapidly)

B2evolution: robust enough for commerical needs

Nucleus: choose if you want to optimise search engine marketing and promotion of your blog

Remember that twitter is actually a micro blog.

I started blogging with a free service offered by my domain hoster. I tried to install both nucleus and b2evolution but had technically issues. I am now using wordpress in my blog and several plugins which increases wordpress functionality.

what you are actually going to write

This is probably the most important aspect of writing a blog. If you are using it for marketing terms, think what is going to interest your target audience, and then start writing about this stuff. Make sure you add in an element of the personal stuff. People don’t want to read purely commercial literature.

Some ideas to get you started:

book reviews
lists of great website or books that you think people should read
anything that highlights your personal credentials
any training events that you attend
anything that occurs to you, which may be of interest to your target audience
new products that you are starting to sell

Good luck with starting your blog – don’t forget that I would love to hear from you. Drop me a line at heather@theefficiencycoach.co.uk.