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Today’s blog is brought to you by our preferred content writing partner Amanda Silva of Cast Iron Content. Take it away Amanda! Blogging benefits your business and brand — there are plenty of numbers to prove it. While those statistics are valuable, blogging just to check the box as a business owner isn’t a strong strategy. Compelling blog posts provide a point of connection with your audience. More than half of businesses believe blogging is critical to accomplishing their objectives. Not only is blogging a boon to SEO but blogging establishes a brand as an authority within an industry. Blogging…

What does it really mean when you use someone else’s image without copyright credit? An important aspect of social media management is understanding your usage of images. Images are an important tool when it comes to promoting yourself; people are often times very visual and are drawn to articles with images, as well as posts on feeds that have images versus posts that don’t. The thing with images is that you can’t use any old image you find on the web. To do so can be social media suicide. I remember a case of a restaurant that was soon to…

Creating and editing website pages may seem like a daunting task for those of us who are a little less tech savvy. Fortunately WordPress makes this task easy. If you can edit a Word document, you can certainly edit a webpage or blog post on a wordpress site. Start by logging in to your website. You can do this by going to www.yoursite.com/wp-admin (replace “yoursite” with your real domain name) and entering your WordPress username and password. You are now on your site’s Dashboard. There is a menu to the left where you will see options like posts, media, links, pages, etc….

Welcome to the slightly-delayed (thanks, holidays) fourth installment of my Organizing Your Blog series. Previously, we covered why you should organize your blog, how to set yourself up for success, and best practices for categories and tags. Today, we’re covering elements that improve the user experience on your site, keeping your readers around for longer and making them happier. Blog Organizational Elements to Improve User Experience Sidebar links: Now that you have good structures in place, make them work for you and your readers! Putting the tag cloud, category list or date archives in a sidebarthat appears on your blog is…

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about blog organization. I’ve covered why you should bother organizing your blog, the basics of setting up your blog, and today I’m covering the ever misunderstood Categories and Tags. Categories Categories are the filing cabinets of the blog. You should define a reasonable set of categories that do not overlap, are not overly specific, and will cover most if not all of the content you plan to have on the blog. Six to ten is plenty for the majority of blogs, and it’s often good to define only a couple of…

Last week I discussed why you should spend time organizing your blog. This week I’ll start telling you how to go about organizing your blog, starting from launch. Is a Blog/Has a Blog If you’re launching a new website, think about the overall structure at the beginning to save yourself time and hassle later. Do you want the home page to be a static page, or do you want it to have your most recent blog posts? Is this a blog site, or a site with a blog? The answers to these questions will determine the information architecture of your blog;…

There are many, many reasons that people write blogs. A few of the most common are personal blogs, blogs for the purpose of drawing in traffic to a site,  informational blogs and photo blogs. While personal blogs may have the luxury of not paying attention to organization, the majority of blogs do not. Why is Organizing Your Blog Important? You certainly can choose to not make use of categories, tags, date archives and URL structure to organize your blog. You have that option. However, even for a personal blog I wouldn’t recommend it. You might want to be able to…