Episode 89 – Blogging 101 with Mike Allton
In this episode of Business Growth Time we talked about Blogging 101 with Mike Allton.
Listen to Episode via Podcast:
Watch the Episode on Video:
About Mike Allton:
He’s the blogger behind The Social Media Hat and he is the chief marketing officer of Site Sell http://www.sitesellinc.com/management.html.
He loves to help small businesses and organizations that are interested in using the Internet more effectively. He provides a comprehensive set of consulting services, which include Social Media, Blogging, SEO and Internet marketing.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
03:14 – How long does it take to construct a proper blog post?
One of the things that he wants to encourage to people is first of all that blogging is a skill that takes time to learn, how to do it takes time to learn, how to do it better and better and better, none of us are born expert bloggers.
- The second big point that a lot of people spend too much time chasing blog topics that they’re not experts on, they’ll come up with an idea for an article that requires you to spend six to eight hours of research just to become enough of an expert to write the article and if you’re having to do that much research you probably picked the wrong topic to write about.
- At least if you’re trying to create volume now, it might be that for your business it’s a really, really important topic that you need to cover and it just so happens that you don’t know so much about it, so you’re going to have to do some research on it. Don’t do those all the time, because it takes too much time.
06:47 – How do you really know perfection especially for your audience?
Mike said that “it isn’t real, it doesn’t exist, there’s probably no such thing as the perfect blog posts.”!
- If you’re limiting the scope to just yourself, is it possible for me to create the perfect blog post for me and for my audience. The answer is always no.
- The things that you want to do at least is focus on fixing the things that I know I can fix like grammar, spelling, structure and organization, those kinds of things that should be part of the normal editing process that we go through.
The second part is going through rereading a blog post and saying..” have I answered all the questions? or am I leaving things out that probably should be included in this and then the final question that I guess occurs to me is how much time I’m putting into this now, where am I at with my time?”
- Two, three or four hours or more on one article, start questioning whether it is getting out of the additional time real value, because his time is valuable and your time is valuable. There’s a dollar amount, whether you realize or not, that should be associated with every hour of your day.
- Each hour that you put into a specific piece of content, you better be able to get that back your ROI
- Mike gives himself the title of content marketing practitioner because he is always practicing, he is always testing and always experimenting
He said that if someone looks too closely at his content too, closely at his site, too closely at his social, they’re going to see some things that aren’t going to make sense to them.
- He just tells to himself over and over again that don’t blog about pop culture and try to connect it to business.!
- He is interested in these movies in this pop culture and marketing
- Mike said that some people when they hear blog post that means something to them, right or wrong it might mean something.
12:10 – Janet’s on re-purposing some content
- Janet comes up with topics for a Facebook Live and she re-purposes it to be put onto a blog post
You start with a live video like this and you spin that off into an audio podcast, in a transcribed article or blog posts on your site and maybe you turn it into a presentation and you put it on SlideShare and you slice up pieces of the video and you push those on into social media as posts, that’s all content.!
- Starting with live video is amazing when it comes to content re-purposing because it just it kills it particularly for doing Facebook live because then you get to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithm and reach so many more people.
16:05 – Three different kinds a blog posts
….And part of the bloggers mindset is first understanding that there are three different kinds of blog posts.
Cheater posts, Standard posts and a Pillar posts
*Standard posts – your standard blog post is seven hundred fifty to twelve hundred fifty words.
This may vary from blogger to blogger from business and business, but generally speaking on average that your standard blog posts usually teach a five paragraph essay where you’ve got an introduction, you’re making a few points and you’re backing up those points and then you’ve got a conclusion.
- That’s the kind of post that it should take you an hour or two, maximum to write.
- These should be fairly easy blog posts to create if it takes hours of research it, it probably shouldn’t be a standard blog post.
- If you’re blogging once a week, probably two or three of your articles per month should be in that seven fifty to twelve fifty length.
*Cheater posts – Is two hundred fifty to five hundred words and might be an embedded video.
- Another video that somebody else narrated and you write a quick introduction.
e.g: Hey I found this great video that Neil Patel did talking about email marketing and funnels and it’s brilliant check it out.!! and it’s almost like a social share on your blog.
- It’s a blog post and what you really want to do is add your own opinion add your own insight.
- That probably takes you a half an hour or less, really, maybe a little bit longer if it takes you to pick a video
- We find a video when we’re on another website and we’ve seen an Infograph, that’s another great way to create a cheater post
- You can take that Infograph and embed it, you can take a social post and embed it and just craft a quick blog post around that other piece of content
- Another example, anything that you can embed that hasn’t some rich content in and of itself that’s a great basis for a cheater post….So it’s not the kind of article that you’re going to want to do, but no more than once a month,
*Pillar posts – These pillar posts should be 2,500 words or more preferably 10,000 words or more. These should be massive, massive articles that are pillars of your business. that’s why we call them pillar posts.
- These are the kinds of articles that will end up driving tremendous amounts of traffic over time to your sites because they unequivocally with tremendous amounts of authority answer really important questions that your target audience has.
- What we find in articles that are that 2,500 word lengths and more over time get way more social shares and way more search engine traffic than the cheater and the standard posts..So, you want to aim to have four pillar posts per year, one per quarter coming out.
27:29 – Making your content spark
We can write five paragraphs and they can be brilliant but today people are looking for more, they want to make sure that they’re engaged, they’re interested, they’re excited and they’re emotionally impacted in some way by your content so give that to them.
- So every blog post that you write, every piece, kind of integration ,should have a featured image at the top that’s the image that should be set up so that if somebody, you or anybody else shares that content to social media that’s the image that gets attached automatically and there’s ways to do that.
- But also within the content itself, we need to break it up a little bit . We need to make it easy for people to read we want to make sure that we’re communicating to them on multiple levels through imagery, through text, so that we’re conveying emotion. We’re doing all those things as a good writer will do.
- Use things like white space- don’t be afraid to end a paragraph with a couple of really impactful words and actually move those two words onto their own line so that they really stand out and deliver some power.
- An audio example, break things up in that way use bullet points use, numbered lists, embed things like video and infographs like we talked about embed social media posts.
- Use things like click to tweet to get people to like it if you’ve got a great quote or a statistic or something like that, that you know pulled into the text of your blog post. You can use click to tweet, so that it’s really easy for somebody just click a button and it opens up a Twitter share window that already has that quote or statistic or great piece of text in a tweet ready to go and all they do is hit the tweet.
- You could use those even just five paragraphs read easier, read smoother, more interesting, hit people in different emotional levels, you know our brains our eyes, we all receive information a little bit differently.
- We all get information in different ways. We all can see an image is read some text and hear some audio and watch a video and learn differently that way but then each one of us individually can receive that information to one degree or more
- One of the ways that you can really make that powerful and help people no matter who your readers are, is to turn it into a video and turn it into an audio recording and have all three of those there at one place so they can read the whole article if they are a reader, they can watch you talking about it in a video or a presentation in a video format and then they can hear you reading it audio.
We hope you take some action on the Blogging 101 with Mike Allton.
Where to Find Mike Allton:
You can find everything you need to know about Mike Allton and he will teach you how to leverage content, to increase traffic to your website, generate leads, nurture leads through your sales cycle, and convert those leads into sales and customers.
His Personal Blog – The Social Media Hat
Official Twitter of The Social Media Hat
Connect with Mike on Social!!
Where to connect with Business Growth Time:
Join us in our Facebook Group: Business Growth Time
Ways to subscribe to the Business Growth Time Show or Podcast:
- Click here to subscribe via iTunes.
- You can also subscribe via Stitcher, Google Play & Libsyn
Help Us Spread the Word!
If you enjoyed this episode of the Business Growth Time podcast, we’d love a review!!! Please head over to iTunes, leave a rating, write a review and subscribe.
Looking for content ideas to post on your Social Media sites? Then you will love our Guide! You can Download the Ultimate Guide to Social Media Content Creation…and it is absolutely free.