blogging

How to be a Fortune Teller on Your Blog

By Donna K. Fitch on August 27, 2015

First, get a crystal ball. You can find it here: google.com/trends.

I’m probably late to this party, but I was introduced to Google Trends the other day during a training session. Is there anything Google can’t do?

Yes, it’s a cool website on its own. It presents what’s trending in popularity based on the number of searches done on that particular topic. You can specify broad areas such as Business, Entertainment, Sci/Tech, or type in a search term. For each topic, you’re given a graph of how popular it has been over the past few days, what region has shown the interest, and what those searches are.

Fascinating, right?

Get More Eyes on Your Blog

I heard that yawn. What’s very cool is its usefulness for writing blog posts. If you want to get more eyes on your blogs, try writing about a trending topic. Here’s an example.

Type in the term “adult coloring books.” Here’s what Google’s graph for that topic shows:

Zowee, that’s quite a spike! You’ll notice if you enlarge the image above (by clicking on it), there are letters along the line. Mousing over them will show you various articles written on the topic from various sources. Here’s an example:

You can also find maps showing where in the world the interest is in the topic, and what search terms were used. When you write your blog post, be sure to tag it with the same terms people used to search for the topic. It’s not guaranteed, but you might find your post appearing high in the rankings.

Nobody’s Searching for My Topic

But what if your topic isn’t popular? Try choosing one of the broad categories and look at the little graphs. For example, as I’m writing this, the top stories (main) page looks like this:

Note the graph on topic 21, OpenBiome. The line is still going up. That might be a topic to choose. But it might not. As I was doing some research and looking at other topics, OpenBiome had dropped to #33. If you click on the graph itself, though, it is still trending upwards. The idea is to write something you’re familiar with, but link it to the popular topic. You may have your own particular angle on it.

You aren’t limited to the United States, either. Choose another country, and see what searches are popular there.

Beware! Looking at Google Trends can become addictive. Before you know it, your original topic is no longer the hottest thing on the planet.

Have fun!

CoSchedule: The Way to a Website Snob’s Heart

By Donna K. Fitch on June 18, 2015

Spoiler Alert! How I feel about CoSchedule

I’ll confess right up front. I’m a website snob. It’s an occupational hazard.

That’s why, when I came across CoSchedule’s website, I was smitten. The site is everything a modern website should be—clean, easy to read and navigate, with a delicious color scheme.

But you know what they say about beauty being skin-deep? CoSchedule’s beauty is bone-deep.

[Tweet “@CoSchedule’s beauty is bone-deep. #blogging #editorial “]

Enough teasing. Let’s get down to the facts. If you want a preview, here’s CoSchedule’s own two-minute summary of the product:

Schedule Your Posts—and More

CoSchedule is a WordPress plugin and web app that lets you schedule blog posts. But that’s not all. You can also schedule social media right inside your dashboard. That’s one of the features that makes it so great.

The Calendar shows all your activity at a glance.

Let’s start with the Calendar. Click to the image on the left to see the details. The Calendar shows you at a glance everything you’ve got going. Tasks are indicated with a checkmark beside them. Scheduled posts have a colored line at the top of their entry, along with the title, the category, and a percentage of how complete its task list is. A past blog post has a number of how many shares it’s had instead of a completion percentage. Scheduled social media posts are listed by time, and have a symbol based on where the message will appear. Non-blog post items (called content) also appear on the calendar with their tasks listed.

Editing and Socializing and Tasking

CoSchedule-edit-post — More glancing–everything you need for a specific post

The Edit Post window is connected with your post in WordPress. When you schedule the post here, it sets the scheduling in the actual edit post area.

Tasks are a very useful feature, and probably my favorite part of CoSchedule. When you set them, you determine what tasks you need to accomplish and when, such as writing the actual post or choosing photos. If you have repetitive tasks that you do routinely for every post, you can create a task template, and apply it to each post as you choose. As we saw earlier, the tasks you create appear on your calendar. If you have other people who participate in your blog, you can assign tasks to them.

Speaking of other people participating, I don’t want to leave out that aspect of CoSchedule just because I do a blog alone. The program is designed with shared blogging in mind; in fact, CoSchedule uses their own product to schedule their (content-rich and delicious) blog posts. Features such as the ability to assign an author to a post, and the comments area, readily lend themselves to multiple bloggers.

Heart and Soul, I Fell in Love With You…

The heart and soul of what makes CoSchedule unique and wonderful is the social queue. Right alongside the tasks, you can schedule what posts you wish to publish to which social media platforms. CoSchedule connects with Buffer to send out these messages.

CoSchedule-choose-social — Set up your social media platforms in advance, choose them on the fly.

CoSchedule-create-message — An instant post, courtesy of CoSchedule.

You begin by selecting for which social profile you wish to create a message, from the list you made when you set up the plugin. As you can see in this image on the right, CoSchedule automatically fills in shortcodes for the title and permalink. At any point in scheduling these messages, you can type in your own words in addition to or instead of the title shortcode. Choose the date and time for the message to be sent, and you’re good to go. What thrills me about this is I can schedule these messages ahead of time when I’m focused on this task, rather than later when I’m busy with other tasks. The plugin even suggests a schedule for these messages: same day as publish, day after, week after and month after. You even have the ability to set a custom date. Once your post goes live, you can check social shares from within WordPress.

And then there’s Click to Tweet. Wow. This feature is what drew me to CoSchedule in the first place. It’s a free plugin that allows you to insert ready-made tweets for your readers to use in sharing your message. How could that be any easier? Look at the beginning of this post and you’ll see what I mean. Like everything else related to CoSchedule, it’s quick and simple. Click where you want the tweet to appear, click the icon on your toolbar, type in the desired tweet, and that’s all.

I could go on rhapsodizing about CoSchedule’s blog, with so much knowledge-goodness crammed into every pixel until each post might explode, but you get the idea. I encourage you to experience the wonder that is CoSchedule for yourself with a free trial. Whether you’re a procrastinating blogger (like the person writing this) or a super-motivated one, you’ll find something to like.

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Expressing Your Personal Brand on Your Blog

By Donna K. Fitch on October 8, 2014

Rahna Barthelmess is an expert in branding and personal branding and today’s guest blogger. She is a client of mine; I helped solve some technological issues with her WordPress site. She is celebrating the launch of her new book, Your Branding Edge: How Personal Branding Can Turbocharge Your Career with a virtual blog tour, and I am happy to host her next “stop.” Read on to find out what she said about blogging as an activity that builds your personal brand.

Expressing Your Personal Brand on Your Blog

My daughter is a digital native, but I am not. I have had to learn about technology because I understand the power of technology to drive our brands forward–particularly our personal brands. If you want to strengthen your personal brand and advance your career more quickly, then you need to embrace technology. The Internet has become a critical career-builder and a vital part of any personal branding plan for several reasons:

It offers a vehicle for self-expression through blogging and social media.
It offers a way to find others interested in what you are interested in.
It allows others to find you.

Those who contribute to the digital world benefit from its rich rewards. The number of technological tools available to us today to help us manage and stay current with all of our various networks is staggering. Social networking sites, the blogosphere—all these tools facilitate ongoing connections that help us deliver our brand to myriad audiences.

If you already have an established digital presence, take a hard look at your various social media and blogging profiles. These are areas that have a dramatic impact on your personal brand. As a good brand manager, actively manage your personal brand on the worldwide web.

That means you need to be mindful of what you post…anywhere. There really is no such thing as a separation of “public” versus “private” anymore (even with privacy settings!). Realize that if you are interviewing for a job, being considered for selection by a prospective client or just meeting a new networking connection for lunch, the first thing they are probably going to do is type your name into a search engine and see what they find. It may feel “stalker-esque” to you, but it’s how many people are making judgements today, so actively manage what they are going to see.

If you want to be known as an expert in your field, post something about that activity on appropriate social media sites. Write a blog or LinkedIn post to tell someone what you are doing. The beauty of social networking is the power of leverage, the power of one-to-many. You post something once, but it goes out to everybody that likes your Facebook fan page or those following you on Twitter

Consider starting a blog: If you don’t have a blog currently, you may want to start by posting a comment on someone else’s blog. Eventually, you are probably going to want to have your own blog.

If you are going to blog, you need to do so on a regular basis (or set up a system where others have joined you in creating content on a regular basis). You can’t let the blog go “stale.” That doesn’t mean that you have to blog every day; once or twice a week would be sufficient (at least to start).

The content doesn’t strictly have to be your own; sometimes just sharing an interesting article or post by someone else is just as helpful as writing something yourself. If you pass a long a great article, you are still seen as being a purveyor of interesting information. Anytime you add value, you build your personal brand.

You don’t have to have a technical degree to manage the blog. You can hire someone (like Donna!) to set up the initial blog and then just add words and pictures to your blog as you go along. That’s what I do…I know it’s important, but I don’t have the patience or interest in learning every little nuance or coding command needed to set the blog up in the first place. Many blogging/website systems are so easy to manage that you don’t need to know specific coding languages to manage the blog…they’ve made it rather idiot-proof (once it’s set up).

Whatever you do, infuse your own personal brand into everything you post. Relate things from your family life to your professional life. Yes, you need to be judicious about exactly what/how much to share (you probably don’t need to share the details of your “guys night out”), but your blog will be stronger if you talk about your frustrations, your celebrations, your fears and most of all, your passion. Many people think they need to be super-buttoned up and “corporate,” but the truth is, the more of you that you bring to your blog posts, the more interesting your blog posts will be and the more it will strengthen your personal brand.

Rahna Barthelmess is a branding and personal branding consultant and the author of Your Branding Edge: How Personal Branding Can Turbocharge Your Career. Rahna consults with small businesses and entrepreneurs and coaches professionals across the globe to help them make more money and have more fun by leveraging their personal brands. To receive your own special guide to personal branding and access the full virtual book tour schedule, visit www.YourBrandingEdge.com