Finding sufficient inspiration to fuel a daily, weekly or even monthly blog post can prove a struggle – and choosing a subject that will also attract traffic is an even tougher call. Here are some simple tips for planning a content schedule that will take the headache out of blogging.

1. Blog Planning: Using
Content Trending and
Social Analytics to
Overcome Corporate
Writer's Block
by Rowan Stanfield & David Preece - April 2010
DON’T PANIC!

2. Contents
• Best Practice Blogging
• Blogging 101
• Writing for the Web
• Content Tactics
• Promoting Your Blog
• Broadcasting
• Engaging
• Weekly Actions
• What do I do each week?
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3. Best Practice Blogging
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4. Blogging 101 - What is a Blog?
• In the words of Blogger.com, a blog is "...a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A
political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos
to the world"
• Popular and successful blogs are updated regularly, and maintain a good dialogue with their
users to ensure a loyal readership
• Blogs are often viewed as separate to the mainstream or ‘traditional’ media, but are no less
influential or powerful in their spheres
• Technorati.com - a popular blog search engine - currently tracks more than 100,000,000 blogs
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5. Blogging 101 - Who Blogs?
• Most blogs focus on a single topic or specialist area of interest and are primarily
mixed media, but blogs dedicated solely to photo, video and music are also
common
• The ease of use and popularity of free blog hosting sites such as Blogger.com
and Wordpress.com means that almost anyone can start a blog on any subject
they wish
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6. Blogging 101 - Being a ‘Social’ Blogger
• A sense of community and camaraderie is prevalent
amongst bloggers - this collective community of blogs is
sometimes referred to as the ‘blogsphere’
• Sets of public reciprocal links called ‘blogrolls’ allow blog
authors to drive traffic to each other’s sites
• The vast majority of blogs allow users to comment on
postings and start discussions on-site - this is an important
part of the concept of blogging
• Our aim is to encourage commenting on our blog posts, to
engage with our audience and generate discussion, which in
turn will attract more comments and drive traffic to/
awareness of the blog
• In this way, blogs and Social Media are inextricably linked:
both share an emphasis on decentralised, user-generated
content and networking to sustain them
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7. Blogging 101 - Writing for the Web
• There are several key differences between writing for the Web and writing for print
• The most important function of writing for blogs is that it allows authors to embed rich media
content (video, images, etc.) directly into posts:
• This adds value to posts and helps the written content engage with reader in a far more effective
way. Embedded images can also act as thumbnails when being aggregated by news or Social
Media sites, so the more interesting the better
• Linking to external and internal sites, blog posts, Social Media profiles and other content on the
web will again add value to posts. If it is an external link, this will also encourage the recipient to
return the gesture, thus helping to drive more traffic to your blog
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8. Copyright Issues
• When utilising third party content, it is essential to heed the copyright restrictions
listed on that content
• YouTube videos are fair game, whereas Vimeo videos and Flickr images have
tighter controls on usage
• Always make sure any content you are embedding is licensed for commercial re-
use and check whether it needs attributing to the creator (this is polite in any
case)
• When searching for new Flickr content to add, do an advanced search and make
sure to tick ‘Creative Commons-licensed content / to use commercially’:
• If the content you want to embed is not copyright-free, you can always approach
the creator directly to ask for their permission
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9. Blogging 101 - Writing for the Web
• It’s important to use the right language when writing blog posts, too: the
goal of any good piece of writing is to inform or entertain, but blogging is
also about generating discussion in the form of comments and/or backlinks
• The ideal place to pitch the tone of your writing is just on the friendly side
of informal, and as far away from formal or corporate language as possible
- readers will not want to hear the official company line or reinterpreted
press releases, they can go to other sources for that information
• Ask questions of your readers, invite discussion or debate (i.e. “What do
you think about this? Let us know in the comments section below”),
reference previous posts or comments and let your natural personality
shine through in whatever you’re writing
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10. Blogging 101 - Writing for the Web
• When formatting text for blog posts, you should always bear in mind the medium and
how it will display on the page
• Break your text up into short paragraphs to make long posts less daunting for the
reader. You can also give each paragraph a subheading to aid readability and increase
keyword optimisation opportunities
• Make important or topical words bold to draw more attention to them and make the post
easier to scan for the casual reader, but be careful not to overuse this technique (once or
twice a paragraph at most)
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11. Content Tactics
• Social = make good, shareable content
• Good content = good SEO
• Good content and SEO = good conversions
• Goal = good distribution
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12. Content Tactics
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13. Content Strands
• Before you start blogging, it’s worth establishing some strands around which your individual posts will be based.
• These should obviously reflect the nature of your business or venture, but there are some common strands that
are applicable to almost anyone:
• PRACTICAL: Deconstruct industry practices, offer advice/recommendations and ‘How Tos’
• CURATION OF THIRD PARTY CONTENT: Showcasing third party content by embedding
• EVENTS: Identify and write about key industry events/conferences. Live tweeting from events can also be
made into post-event blog posts
• CASE STUDIES: Interviews with key industry people - this could be via an embedded video or podcast, or
a plain old-fashioned written piece
• CHALLENGES: Respond to common industry problems, encourage customers/potential customers to
interact
• NEWS: Staying on the pulse of related online content and commenting on high profile news pieces/articles,
adding your own thoughts on a subject via blog posts/tweets
• SURVEYS: Encourage customers and general public to participate in area/event/topic focused online
surveys and use the results to create blog posts and stimulate conversation
• PERSONALITY PIECES: Individual blog posts with more personality (i.e. ‘The team recommends’, opinion
pieces, fun stuff)
• COMPETITIONS: The place to talk about our competition and encourage participation
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14. Content Generation
• Here’s that boiled down into a handy diagram:
1) Curation of Third
Party Content
Embedded third party content Photos Videos Slideshows Responses
and responses to other etc.
bloggersʼ content
2) How Tos & Tutorials
Think: “utility”
3) Opinion Pieces Case
Your own views, news and News Studies Events Challenges
insights
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15. Optimising Content
• Blog posts can be made more findable by incorporating search engine
optimisation (SEO)
• There are a number of free online tools you can use for working out the best
keywords around which to optimise a post, for example, Google’s free AdWords
Keyword Tool can show you how popular certain words or phrases are
• To find out how much competition
a search term has, simply go to
Google and search for it. The value
beneath the search box represents
the amount of sites returned for a
search on that specific phrase
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
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16. Optimising Content
• Now you have your keywords, you can optimise your blog post with them
• The best places to use your optimised keywords are as follows:
• Post title
• Post category (if possible)
• Post tags
• Post headers
• Conservatively throughout the bodycopy
• With the use of sensible optimisation, posts are more likely to rank for given
terms, increasing the chances of appearing in Google results and attracting more
traffic
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17. Optimising Content
Title
Tags
Sub-headers
Body Text
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18. Promoting Your Blog
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19. Broadcasting Beyond the Blog
• Our aim is to get people reading the blog and interacting, leaving comments,
sharing, bookmarking etc.
• By writing about popular topics and optimising your posts, we can attract a
certain amount of organic traffic
• But there are also opportunities beyond this for driving people to the blog
• Utilise your other Online networks for ‘broadcasting’ the blog, e.g:
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Forums
• Yahoo/Google Groups
• Email contacts
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20. Your Platform
Social Profiles =
Engagement/Distribution
Web Sites / Blogs =
(Re)Publishing
Social Properties =
Content/Publishing
Content & Keywords
(& Tags, etc)
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21. Directories
• By adding your blog to directories, you can make it more visible to a wider
audience, as well as generating traffic and backlinks
• Here are some of the more popular blog directories:
• Technorati
• Bloggeries
• Blogged.com
• Blog Explosion
• Super Blog Directory
• Bloggapedia
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22. The Dashboard
• Use alerts or a feed aggregator such as Netvibes to keep tabs on web content
relevant to you and for finding opportunities to engage with the wider web and
promote your blog
• This will also help you spot trends and tailor your new content to meet demand
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23. Alerts and Search...
• You can also find relevant content with which to engage by using custom
‘Social’ search engines such as Addict-o-matic and Social Mention:
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24. Engagement Tactics
• Drive people to the blog by engaging with them in their own spheres
• Leave relevant, useful comments on the blogs of target influencers, with links to
applicable blog posts on your blog
• Reference other people’s work in your posts - link to blog posts, embed videos/
photos - and tell them you have done so
✘ ✔
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25. Engagement Tactics
• Engage with other bloggers/influencers by acknowledging and referencing their
work
What should the BBC do
with @BBC? consider it
reblogged and discussed -
⬊ http://is.gd/7uMvY in light of
http://ow.ly/11Qkg
⬉
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26. Engagement Tactics - Summary
• Goal 1: find your communities
• Goal 2: participate productively
• Goal 3: give them something useful
• Goal 4: give them something shareable
• Goal 5: give them something for free
• i.e. become more sociable and interesting
• Outcome: your communities start reciprocating
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27. Researching Influencers
• Here are some useful tools for finding fellow
bloggers:
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28. Researching Influencers
• There are a number of tools for
finding out whether a blog is
influential and therefore worth
interacting with
• Technorati gives blogs an ‘authority’
rating
• Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to
see how many backlinks are
pointing to a site
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29. Weekly Actions
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30. A Content & Engagement Schedule
• You may be thinking at this point “Help! How am I ever going to do all this
stuff on top of my daily responsibilities?”
• But fear not, our handy content and engagement schedule breaks down
your actions into manageable chunks
Daily Weekly Monthly
Tweet/respond to Write blog posts Curate user-
tweets generated content
Respond to blog Promote new blog Research trends and
comments on your posts on other keywords, plan next
blog channels - month’s blog content
Facebook, LinkedIn
etc.
Monitor your feeds/ Leave (relevant/ Analyse blog’s
alerts for useful) comments on performance using
opportunities to other people’s blogs Google Analytics
engage
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31. Further Reading
C&M Blog & Resources Page
C&M Content Optimisation Guide
http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/resources/quickstart-guide-to-content-optimization-better-seo-content-writing/
C&M Online PR & Optimisation Research Tools
http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/resources/content-optimisation-tools-cm-whats-in-your-handbag/
C&M Guide to Google & Effective SEO
http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/resources/papers/a-practical-guide-to-google-seo-in-30-mins/
C&M Social SEO Through Clever Content Creation
http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/resources/social-seo-search-engine-optimisation-through-clever-content-creation/ -
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