Blogging |

Are You Curating Yet?

April 24, 2012 By Debra Simpson 1 Comment

Debra Simpson on Content Curation In this blog post, Too busy to blog? 3 tips for curating social media, from the Nashville Business Journal, blogger Dov Hirsch offers three tips for curating social media.

The most important tip is #2, Don’t steal. It’s very important that you give appropriate credit for the content you’re curating. You should always link back to the original post or article. If you decide to pull some content to highlight, you should put that content in blockquotes to show it’s lifted from the original site.

Lastly, tip #3, make sure you add value by making thoughtful comments in reference to what you’re curating.

I hope this gives you some idea of what curation is and how you can use it to bring valuable content to your readers.

Filed Under: Content Curation Tagged With: Blogging, Content Strategies

Increase SEO Juice for Your Website with Internal Linking

March 26, 2012 By Debra Simpson Leave a Comment

Via Scoop.it – Blogging with WordPress
Via www.1stwebdesigner.com (original post)

I have three online talk shows (podcasts) a week. On one of my shows, Syndicating Your Content, my podcasts are 15 mins long. Why? For SEO (search engine optimization) reasons.

I can take a broad topic and chunk it down to 15 min segments. I have blogs that support my shows, so chunking my podcast allows me to link, internally, on my blog. Search engines love internal links.

So what does that mean? Each week I create my blog post about the upcoming episode of the show. If the show is part of a series, I can provide links to the previous episodes in my blog posts. Those links would take my listener to any of the previous episodes through “internal links.”

Make sure when you use those internal links, you try to use one or two keywords in the phrase you’ll be highlighting and linking. The search engines really love that!

Filed Under: Content Curation Tagged With: Blogging, search engine optimization, SEO

Is WordPress a Blog or a Website?

November 11, 2011 By Debra Simpson 2 Comments

Debra Simpson programs WordPress Blogs

I hear it all the time, “isn’t WordPress a blog, not a website?”

When I first started programming WordPress blogs in 2007 the only design, or theme as we call them, were standard, recognizable blog layouts. You saw the most recent post, piled on top of the next recent post, etc. WordPress defaults to 10 posts on the page. And, of course, there was that sidebar.

That was the biggest push back, WordPress site didn’t look like a website, but looked like a blog. It didn’t matter that a blog is infinitely more search engine friendly, not to mention how easy it is to get fresh content up to a website. There’s nothing search engines love more than fresh content.

Nope, none of that mattered….it looked like a blog.

Premium Themes

WordPress has matured through the years and so have the WordPress Themes. Here are some examples of websites that use WordPress and have a more traditional website look.

One of the most versatile themes is WP-Remix. There are 10 different homepage designs and an incredible variety of inner pages. As with other premium themes, you’ll be creating a page that you’ll title Blog and that’s where the blog posts will land.

The other site I love is Elegant Themes. Some of their themes follow the traditional blog layout, but as you can see their newer themes all feature beautiful layouts.

Other Theme Benefits

A popular feature for WordPress themes is how the themes allow you to “feature content.” You create the blog post and assign it a specific category. It’s the same category you told your theme to pull from to feature on the home page. You can also assign a “featured image” for the post and what you’ll see on the home page is a beautiful visual display (the photo) with a caption that contains about the first 50 or so words of your blog post. It’s a great way to showcase your finest posts.

WordPress is the perfect answer for the small business owner looking to save time and money. If you can open a word processing document and create a letter, etc. you can create a page or post on a WordPress website. Give it a test drive. Go over to WordPress.com and create an account. See how easy it is to manage your site.

Let me know what you think by adding a comment!

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: Blogging, Blogs, small business

Creating Your Social Media Hub

September 4, 2011 By Debra Simpson Leave a Comment

Often small business owners tell me it’s hard to incorporate social media into their day. I’m sure you have felt that way at times too. There just don’t seem to be enough hours for all that we already have to do, like checking and answering emails.

With so many people around us telling us what we should be doing with social media, it’s hard to know exactly where to start. Then when you do decide to jump in, you feel overwhelmed with the prospect of creating a profile, or page.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can Learn from Deb all you need to know in language you understand, plain old english. Join me Monday, September 19th from 9:30am to noon in Oceanside at Quantum Learning Network. I’m going to show you how to create a page for your business on Facebook, how to add your company to LinkedIn’s company pages, and the tools you’ll need to make your social media marketing effortless.

I’m starting the four week series (there are individual class prices too) with blogging. If you have a WordPress, whether it’s self hosted using WordPress‘ software or a free blog at the shared site WordPress.com, you’ll:

learn how to hand feed the search engines with the information you want them to have so your site is found easily.
learn how to add video and audio to your blog.
about different sources for content.
discover how to monetize your blog.
play with widgets to add extra content to your blog.

Of course, you’ll have me right there with you to answer any questions you have about using your blog.

After the first week and WordPress we’ll jump into Facebook. In this seminar we’ll be:

creating and/or optimizing your Facebook business page.
setting goals for your page.
importing your blog content so that it is automatically shared on your page.
customizing your page to help you achieve your Facebook goals.

We’ll move on the LinkedIn the following week. In our LinkedIn seminar, you’ll be:

optimizing your LinkedIn personal profile.
adding your company to LinkedIn’s Company Directory.
discovering new ways to meet your target market and interacting with them.

In our final week together, we’ll visit Twitter and put a social media plan together. Your blog will do the heavy lifting for you, leaving you to engage your followers and connections. You’ll see how your Social Media Hub works together to deliver your message, show your expertise and entice others to find out more about you and your business.

If you’re ready to go for it now, here’s the registration button. If you want more details, visit Learn From Deb.

No, I’m ready to register now!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Blogging, Content, Facebook, How To, online marketing

Driving Traffic to Your Blog

July 7, 2011 By Debra Simpson Leave a Comment

Debra Simpson offers tips on driving traffic to your blog The simple truth is that a blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action.

Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Most bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic. Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.

Get social!

Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to you blog. Update your Facebook status with a link to you new blog posts. Submit your stories to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.

Get noticed!

Find blogs in your niche and start following their posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.

Get good use out of your RSS feed!

RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail to your feed so it will pull in new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back to the blog again.

Get articles in directories!

You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.

Get backlinking!

Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.

These simple ways of building traffic can be used over and over again to help build traffic to your blog and increase your readership.

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: Blogging, How To, Tips, traffic