Congratulations to Maria Rodgers-O’Rourke on her new site, MinutestoMoments.com. This new site includes great reflections for a mom’s busy life. Stop by and get inspired! (This is Maria’s second site with Your Blog Team… her first one is GreatChristmasBook.com).
I am so excited to introduce you to PathwaysforAging.com. Jeannie and her team have been coaching clients for a long time, and we recently decided to convert her old site to a blog-site…. In addition to the standard blog functionality, we also setup all the other functionality of a regular website, including an email newsletter, a store, and brochure-type pages to describe her services and her team.
One more exciting piece of news is related to the search engine ranking for her site. The old site didn’t appear in Google. I added the SEO functionality from the Wordpress plugins we use last night, and today Pathways for Aging is number 1 and 2 in the Google results. It doesn’t get any better than that!
Congratulations Jeannie and the entire Pathways for Aging, Inc. team. Check out the site at www.PathwaysforAging.com.
One of the biggest challenges for a new blogger learning how to blog is determining what to write about. We have a list of 15 different ways to blog that we share with our clients, and I’ll describe one of them here.
First, think about the question, “What is something my readers really need to know about?” Make a list of the 10 most common questions you get about your topic. Then do keyword research to see exactly what phrases are used most often in the search engines for that topic.
For example, one of the topics you need to know about when creating your blog is a “blogroll”. So I went to the Wordtracker keyword tool and determined that the most commonly typed phrase is What is a blogroll? So then I wrote a post with the title, Glossary: What is a Blogroll? and back when I created this post, I ranked #11 on Google for this phrase–and I got traffic from it.
The Wordtracker keyword tool will tell you the different phrases people type in and how popular each one is. The best way to start is by typing in a fairly general phrase (for example, I used “blog”) and then look at the list Wordtracker generates. Then you can pick a phrase that is used often and is easy for you to blog about.
So if you’re having trouble determining what to blog about, follow these three simple steps:
1) Go back to basics. What do your readers need to know?
2) Do keyword research with the Wordtracker keyword tool to see how they are looking for that phrase.
3) Create a post with a commonly-used keyword phrase in the title and in the post.
It doesn’t get much easier than that when you are trying to learn how to blog!
Congratuations to Maria Rodgers O’Rourke on her phenomenal new book, Prepare Your Heart for a Great Christmas! I just saw the book today and it is gorgeous. If you’re like me, and Christmas is always stress-filled and crazy, this book will help you stay organized and focused on what’s really important at Christmas. Check it out at GreatChristmasBook.com and get your copy today (the reflections start at Thanksgiving) so make sure you order before this year’s inventory runs out.
MyMangels.com promotes a new ebook by author Marjorie Wolter entitled My Mangels: The Men Who Erased the Myth. The site and ebook describes how the various men in her life became “man - angels” to her. You can find out more at MyMangels.com.
Congratulations to WellnessCoach.com (and it’s talented author, Erica Ross-Krieger) for ranking #12 in Google for her main search phrase in just a week! Her blog just went live last week, and I was so excited to see her on page 2 already. Be sure to check out her suggestions for Wellness for Entrepreneurs including my favorite post so far, “52 Ways for Entrepreneurs to Thrive.” I’ll keep you posted on her status.
