The Benefits of Blogging for your Business

Did you know having a blog on your website is one of the best ways to increase your SEO? It’s basically a virtual high-five for Google and other search engines. Google reads your content and places you in the rankings for that content by way of the keywords you used.

Google also loves it when you add new content to your website on a regular basis, and it especially loves it when visitors interact with your content (i.e. leaving comments).

Blogging also helps you develop a following and keeps people coming back for more. What happens is that by blogging consistently, you build trust with your audience and this positions you as an expert in your field. If you’re blogging about your service or product, your readers are going to see that you know what you’re talking about and feel more comfortable buying from you.

Here’s a little personal story about blogging: I had another business 10 years ago that was product-based. I manufactured a line of women’s accessories and sold them online, in retail stores and at craft fairs. I also blogged on a regular basis. My blog posts covered the spectrum from what I was working on (behind the scenes), new products, in the field at fairs and any other kind of creative inspiration that I loved. My blog was the most visited page on my website, and countless magazine editors found me and my products through my blog. This led to features not only in magazines but also online on other blogs and magazine websites. My profile is still up and searchable on the Country Living Magazine website 11 years later!

That, my friends, is the power of blogging! So why wouldn’t you do it? Sure it takes time and sometimes you don’t know what to write. But like exercise, it gets easier with time and practice.

Staying On Brand With Your Team

 If you're running your business' social media and have employees who post about your product or service (to your business account, or their personal account), there are some guidelines they should follow.

Remember, it's your brand. And if you've spent the time defining your target audience, style and aesthetic, it will be important to have a style guide that they can follow.

Keep in mind, this is a great way to get your product & service in front of more eyes, and these are people that you normally would not have as an audience, so 👍🏼👍🏼

Here are some tips to staying on brand:

✅ If they're using any logos, make sure they are approved and the same across all of your platforms.

✅ Kindly ask that they tag you in both the caption AND the image.

✅ Request that they stick to your color scheme and use the same fonts.

Questions about branding? Ask me in the comments!

Why Should You Hire a Dedicated Social Media Manager?

Why should you hire a dedicated social media manager? Because there’s more to being a social media manager than just posting pretty images every once in a while. And if you’re relying on one of your employees to do this, every once in awhile won’t cut it.

Because here’s the thing, a dedicated social media manager doesn’t just post pretty images. And you can’t expect that sometime-employee to be consistent, do the necessary hashtag research, stay current with the social media trends & changes to each platform, engage with your online community and still do their job. Because my job takes a LONG time to do!

I take the time to educate myself on your business and your audience. I’ll research the best platforms for you to be on, and develop a consistent posting schedule for those platforms. I’ll style and photograph your product, edit the photos to maintain a consistent aesthetic on your feed and post accordingly. I research hashtags instead of just throwing 30 on a post and calling it a day. And I spend the time engaging and interacting with your target audience and client base.

If you’re ready to focus on more important things, like running your business, head over to my contact page and we’ll chat.

Tools & Resources I Use on the Reg

Happy 2020! 🎉 I’ve already written 2019 about thirty thousand times in the last week, but I’m really excited about the new year and (gasp!) new decade.

Here we are already in the middle of the first full week of the year, and reentry has been hard! But, if you're anything like me, January is the time to organize and get all the processes in place for a successful year.👊 I thought I'd share the ride-or-die tools that help me stay organized and on top of my game.👇🏼

🎨 Canva - you don't have to be a graphic designer to create beautiful graphics, banners or flyers. This platform is available online, and there's a phone app too (perfect for on-the-go), plus the free version has everything you need for professional graphics. I actually just started using this application last year, and it’s already saved me so much time & energy.

🖌 Adobe Photoshop - this is the industry standard and takes a little more time & effort to master. I'll admit right now, I'm not an expert in Photoshop, but I’ve been playing around with it for many years and have taught myself the basics. If you get stuck, there are some great tutorials online that are helpful.

🗓 Later & Planoly - my love of scheduling tools is a topic of great discussion on my Instagram. If you don't do anything else to get organized this month, do this one thing. Your future self will thank you every week.

🏦 Dropbox - for file & image storage as well as sharing documents & files with clients. This is another free platform, although you'll have to upgrade if you’ll be storing a lot of images & videos (it's worth it!).

💾 Google Drive - another cloud-based storage platform. It allows you to access documents from any computer or device, so if you get a blog post idea on the go, you can just start writing.

💻 Squarespace - my website building platform of choice! It's beautiful & easy to use, and I love that it includes hosting as well as domain parking so everything is in one place.

I'm trying out a few new productivity tools this year, and I'll share & review them soon. Meanwhile, what are some of the tools you use on a daily basis that help you stay organized in your business?

Planning your Content for 2020

We are two weeks out from a New Year and a NEW DECADE! Are you tired of hearing about that yet? 😂 But silliness aside, I’ve been working the last couple of months to get all my ducks in a row so I can start the New Year organized and on point. I’ve been organizing my business files and processes to help make my customer on-boarding and workflows better. I’ve also been thinking about how to help my clients and followers to organize themselves and their content for an easier work/life balance. Check out the video below with tips to make creating & sharing content easier and what you need to do to get your content in front of more eyes. And Happy Holidays!

Common Social Media Insight Terms & What They Mean

It’s all fun and games on social media until you get serious, and then it can get confusing, #amiright? If you want to take your social media to the next level, there are a few insights to look at that will help you set your course for better engagement, and hopefully a better return. I made this infographic with the 4 most basic social media terms, let’s go over them, as well as a few others that should be on your radar.

Reach

This is the number of times an account has seen your post, even if they’ve seen it multiple times. What this means is that if someone saw your post and then maybe came back to it later to read it again, the visit is only counted as one visit. This is an important metric for calculating and understanding how large your audience is. 

Impressions

This metric measures how many times your post has been shown in a users’ feed. So if that same person saw your post and then came back to it later, it’s counted as another visit (impression). Because of this reason, Impressions are usually higher than reach. 

Engagement

Engagement tells you how much people are interacting with your post (likes, comments, shares). It’s the number of people who engaged with your post / number of people who saw your post X 100. A higher engagement rate is a good thing and means people are reacting to your post and content. 

Audience

Your audience is the group of people you’re trying to reach on social media. This includes your followers and anyone else who sees and/or interacts with your posts on their feed. Growing your audience is one of the best ways to promote brand awareness.

Analytics

Analytics is the combination of data found in your social media metrics that helps you interpret how your content is performing. You can use this information to discover patterns of what is working for your brand, and what isn’t, and then using that information to improve your content strategy. 

Cross-Channel

In social media, each platform (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) is a channel. A cross-channel strategy is using your social media posts across each platform that your brand is active on.

Direct Message

A direct message is a private message that can be sent to your inbox on a social media platform. These are not comments that are left on posts, which are private but are sent directly to users. On Instagram, you can also share posts via direct message to people, and this is actually considered a good form of engagement for that post!

Disappearing Content

This refers to content that expires after a certain amount of time, usually 24 hours. This is something that is seen on Instagram Stories or Snapchat. The only time story content does not disappear on Instagram is when it is added to a highlight in the user’s profile. Disappearing content can be useful for covering events when you want to post some ongoing content to share but don’t want to overwhelm your audiences’ feed.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen Content is content that stands the test of time and is great for repurposing and reusing on social media. It’s important to have a balance of evergreen content and more specialized content for feed diversity. As an example, this post will still be relevant a year from now, but how the Instagram algorithm works will likely change.

Hashtag

A hashtag is a word or group of words strung together with no space, and the # in front of it. It’s basically the way to search a subject or group on social media, and also links your content to other posts on the same subject or topic. Using hashtags is the way to get your content in front of other audiences that are not your followers 

Platform

A platform is a social media channel or network. 

Traffic

No, I am not referring to the 405! 😂 Traffic is the number of people, or users, who visit a website or page on social media. If you’re managing a social media channel or platform, your goal is to drive traffic to that page and you do this by targeting your audience. 

User-Generated Content (UGC)

This is the term that refers to using content other than your own in a social media post. If you’re working with a brand, or using a brand’s product, using their content on your own feed is a form of promoting that brand. Brands also use content posted by their users in the brand’s feeds, and this can be a great way to drive traffic to a smaller brand. It’s very important to make sure you credit the original poster, however. 

Vanity Metric

A vanity metric is a metric that looks like a large indicator of performance but actually means nothing. An example of this having a large follower count but a low engagement rate. Many times this is the result of using bots or third-party apps to grow a following to make it look like your account is popular, when in fact it is not. You can discover this by checking the posts; if an account has 10,000 followers but only 50 likes per post, there is a good chance the followers aren’t authentic. 

Viral

A post that goes viral is one that is very popular and is shared, or liked, many times. Viral content is golden chalice of social media. 

There are many more social media terms but these are the most basic and what you need to know to understand the analytics in your account. By the way, analytics are only available on Instagram for a business account. 

How To Write Your About Page

There are five basic pages all websites should have: home, about, services, portfolio & contact. The addition of a portfolio depends on your industry; it could also be a process page or ‘how it works’. But one of the most important pages is your ‘About’ page - this is your introduction and your virtual elevator pitch to a potential client or customer. With so much business being conducted over the internet, it is often the only way someone can get to know you, so it’s important to make it count. Here are some things to include:

A Photo or Headshot

This helps to personalize the experience and lets them visualize who they are working with, plus there is an element of trust-building. It doesn’t have to be a professional photo, but try to use a clear image with a friendly smile.

A Story About Your Background

No need to dive deep here, but talk about how you started doing what you do and if necessary, include your education and professional affiliations. Keep it short, concise and to the point - we all have terribly short attention spans these days!

Links To Social Media

In the name of transparency, include links to your social media channels as another way for a potential customer or client to connect with you. And on that note, keep your social media clean and professional. Social media channels have become the new reference checkpoint, so don’t post anything that might be construed as racy or inappropriate.

Call to Action

Otherwise known as a CTA, this could be a request that they contact you for more information, a direction to your services page (where you should have another CTA for them to contact you!) and possibly an invitation that they join your newsletter list.

Be Yourself!

This is perhaps the most important piece. Use your voice and let your personality shine through! You can have a little fun with it with some quick tidbits as I do at the bottom of my about page, or talk about your hobbies and what you do when you aren’t working.

It might take a little time and tweaking to get it just the way you want it, but it will be worth it, and when it’s done, it’s one page that probably won’t need updating as time goes by unless you change direction or rebrand. So if you’re in the beginning stages of writing content for your website, use these points to help you outline your page. If you need a refresh, it’s a helpful starting point too. Let me know if there’s anything else you think should be included in an About page in the comments!

Researching & Using Hashtags

Let’s talk about hashtags! #️⃣ Are you being intentional with your hashtag strategy? This is the best & easiest way to increase your reach on Instagram & get your posts seen. But how do you know the right ones to use? Research! Full stop here: Don’t just slap a bunch of hashtags in your caption and call it a day. You can use up to 30 hashtags per post, so use them wisely.

I spend considerable time researching hashtags for the best performance. It’s easy but soooo time-consuming! Using a spreadsheet for each client, and a sheet for each batch of hashtags, I can easily find out what is performing, or not.

Here’s how I do it: that’s one of the spreadsheets that I use - in this case, I’m sharing @skyeretriever account.
There are 3 columns - hashtag, position, and notes. I list the hashtag, and then search on Instagram for its’ position, which is the number of posts attributed to that hashtag; too low and it’s too narrow & not getting noticed. Likewise, too high (over 1,000,000) and it’s likely getting lost in the feed quickly.

This is also a great way to find new hashtags to use, related hashtags will appear at the top of the hashtag you are viewing. Be sure to click on those hashtags, if they’re relevant, and see what their position is before you add them.

Sort the hashtags by position so you can see where they fall in popularity & if you want to continue using them. Highlighted hashtags are usually new ones that I test, and there are always tags that get retired because they’re too popular.

By the way, this is an ongoing process! You just don’t do the research and call it done. This is something that has to be done every few weeks or at least once a month. As I said, it’s time-consuming!

This brings me to another point: are hashtags relevant on Facebook? Not so much. Hashtag use on Facebook could be detrimental to your brand. A study by BuzzSumo determined that tagged posts performed worse than untagged posts. I know, mind blown.

People don’t use the search bar on Facebook the same way they use it on Instagram. This doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t use them. They can be used successfully to promote an event or a campaign, and a branded hashtag may turn up in a Google search. If you’re going to use hashtags on Facebook though, I would recommend only using one or two and not populating your post with a slew of hashtags, it takes away from the message.

Organic Followers vs. Paid Followers

Being a social media manager, I sometimes get the question of buying followers from potential new clients. Most of the time, they’re just starting out and don’t really know the ins & outs of social media. This is a great opportunity for me because I can educate them and hopefully get them off on the right foot from the beginning.

In a nutshell: NO! You don’t ever want to go down that road. I get the attraction. Way back when it was easy to get noticed on social media. There was so much less noise! These days, everyone and their dog (literally. And I can’t really complain because, yes, my dog does have an Instagram account!) has an account on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. It’s hard to stand out and it takes A LOT of work to be noticed.

So here’s my take: fake followers are the bane of our existence. Fake followers may give your account a high follower number, but that is a vanity metric. No matter how much a seller promises ‘high quality’ followers, fake followers won’t like, comment, or share your content, which will keep that engagement score low.

Engagement is the name of the game and is based on likes, comments, saves, tags, shares and DM’s, all of which signal to Instagram that your account is important to that user. The algorithm uses these signals to prioritize the content it displays.

That means that the account owner, user or manager has to get in there and get busy. It means using relevant hashtags for your content and then engaging with those people by liking their content, commenting, saving and following. An organic following doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time and it takes dedication. That’s why I do what I do. Because most businesses need to run their business, not spend hours on social media.

How can you tell if your favorite Instagram account has fake followers? Check out their posts. If they have 10,000 followers but only get 25 or even 100 likes per post, they probably bought their followers.

And another word about fake followers: buying followers goes against Instagram’s community guidelines and terms. So when Instagram finds an account that uses or has used (even in the past) fake followers, the account is likely to be purged. Removed.

Fake followers are not the way to go.

Web Design: Legends & Legacies

Where did summer go? It went by in a flash and was a whirlwind. I’ve been getting back into website design and to say I’m so excited about that is an understatement. If you’ve read my about page, you’ll see that I started freelancing in website design 20 years ago. So much has changed since then and I’ve been having fun getting back into the groove.

I completed the site for Legends & Legacies in August, and it was exciting because it was a full branding job from beginning to end. So many businesses come to me when they are already established and it was fun to help build this brand from the ground floor. This included brainstorming with my client on color schemes, font preferences and image selection.

Legends & Legacies is a personal history business, for individuals and businesses who want to memorialize their history for the future. The inspirational imagery we were using was classic and vintage, using soft colors for a relaxed and comfortable feeling. The challenge my client has is that she has to make her clients feel comfortable right out of the gate because they are sharing intimate family stories and antidotes.

It was a very fun project to work on and I’m thrilled that my client is already getting inquires into her services so soon after the launch.

Do you have a website project languishing? Contact me!