When I first started out as a business owner, marketing my freelance copywriting services, I was very aware of my biggest constraint: I was a lousy salesperson. When I was a kid, I had a hard time selling raffle tickets to my own grandmother. And all the books I was reading said that I had
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I’m pretty happy with my current writing process. Once you’ve accepted that you don’t need to convince anyone that your creative job is actually work, you’re free to focus on optimizing the processes that allow you to produce creativity on demand. And that’s exactly what I’m up to right now … although my creative process
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It happened again. You were out to dinner with your Writer Friend, and the waiter came over to see if you needed anything. This led to a short, friendly conversation with him, and as he walked away your meal companion apologized for reaching into her purse to get her phone. She opened her Notes application
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Great to see you again! This week on Copyblogger, we looked at how to make progress on projects and opportunities that might seem intimidating at first. Stefanie Flaxman showed us how to take that Big Idea (exciting, challenging, scary) and break it down until you discover your first (or next) move. She shared a process
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Remember the movie Sliding Doors? It’s a story of two parallel lives — one in which the heroine catches a particular train home from work, and one in which she misses that train and catches the next one. That insignificant event goes on to change everything about her life — and even the time of
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As you develop your traffic and conversion strategies this year, knowing how to appeal to your human audience while optimizing for search is vital. Luckily, Rainmaker Digital CFO Sean Jackson wrote an excellent free guide that you can download right now — and you don’t even have to enter your email address. There’s no silver
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You know when you get a Big Idea for a project that lights you up and derails your to-do list for the day? It could be a content series or a whole new business concept. You might even spend a few hours writing down why you’re qualified to do it and who it will help.
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An editorial calendar is where you keep track of what you plan to publish, how, where, and why over time. It enables you to think ahead, remember creative ideas, and plan your time wisely.
Most people have an editorial calendar of some kind, even if it is only their ideas for the next week in their head. However, not having an editorial calendar can result in missed deadlines, a lack of organization, and forgotten ideas. It can be damaging your blog and you don’t even realize it!
Thankfully, creating yours isn’t difficult and even if you start with only the bare bones, you will very likely find yourself adding more and more to it as you go along and inspiration strikes.
There are multiple platforms available to you for setting up your editorial calendar. You can use something within the platform that you are working with such as WordPress plugins like Coschedule, Edit Flow or Editorial Calendar or external sources such as editorial management applications or Google Spreadsheets. If you want to, you could even use a table in Word! What matters most is that you use something that feels comfortable and works for you.
Once you’ve chosen your platform, you should make categories for the different kinds of things that you post. You may want to color coordinate them for easy visibility at a glance.
It is very important that you decide what your calendar is for. Is it to help you post content consistently and on time? Do you want to make sure that you cover all of the areas you want to touch on for your blog? Do you want to set up a schedule for integrating a new form of media to your brand message? Whatever your goal is, clarify it and set your calendar up accordingly to successfully achieve it.
This may mean that color-coordinate your categories and make sure there is an even mix for each of them every month or you might add that every third Wednesday you publish a new video on Youtube. This is the skeleton of your calendar, the bare bones that helps you reach whatever your overall goal is.
As you add content to your calendar you will want to take note of relevant holidays or dates important to you topic because these can often be easily adapted into posts. You may also see that something you wrote once could be easily adapted into a recurring feature on your blog.
This kind of consistency breeds a loyalty in your followers because it is human nature to find comfort in stability. Knowing that your blog not only has great original content but also things that they can look forward to is going to earn you many more followers and comments.
Things to research when creating an editorial calendar:
Use color-coding in your editorial calendar management platform to identify and label the patterns:
The calendar is going to do you no good if you make it, then close the page and forget about it entirely. Make sure that you’re using your calendar, pulling it up daily or even multiple times a day to see what you should be working on.
Also make sure that you’re regularly adding ideas to it, like those ones that hit you at 3am when you should be sleeping!
After using your calendar for awhile, go back and look at your progress. Are you meeting your goals? Have you defined new ones? Are there things that you would like to add to it? The editorial calendar is an excellent snapshot of your history, what you’ve accomplished, and what you hoped to accomplish but might not be working as well as planned.
It provides an excellent opportunity to emphasize things that are working well and reevaluate anything that isn’t. Editorial calendars are meant to be fluid, meaning that you can go in and edit and change anything you want to when you need to. If something doesn’t work well for you or simply isn’t accomplishing what you want it to accomplish, change it!
Templates:
More tools and downloads: Content Marketer’s Resource Box: Free Ebooks and Cheatsheets
How will you use an editorial calendar to improve your own blog?
The post How To Create an Effective Editorial Calendar For Your Blog appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
Good to see you again! With the Monday Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, this was a short week on Copyblogger. On Tuesday, Kelton Reid kicked things off with a thoughtful look at impostor syndrome — with clues on how to approach it from different sources, including the famous Turing Test. And on Wednesday, I talked
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Do you get all the traffic you’d like for your site? Do visitors just keep pouring in, letting you meet all of your business goals with ease? Yeah, don’t worry, no one actually says Yes to that question. Getting new people to your site can be tricky, and changes in Google and Facebook algorithms don’t
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Have you ever had that nightmare where you’re sitting in an examination room in front of a panel of experts watching a timer count down to zero? You’re being asked a series of critical, complex questions, and you’re running out of time to answer. In fact, you haven’t answered one correctly, or at all, and
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The post How a Famous Robot Test Can Help You Beat Impostor Syndrome appeared first on Copyblogger.
Today is the U.S. holiday set aside to celebrate the life, accomplishments, and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. No marketing lessons, no promotional tie-ins, just our respectful acknowledgement of an American hero. We’ll be back on the blog tomorrow … looking forward to seeing you then. 🙂
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How’s your January going? I’ve been having a great time looking at our publishing themes and brainstorming cool new topic ideas with our editorial team. And I’m so glad you’re here starting the year with us. 🙂 This week kicked off with a discussion about habits (which are the super secret decoder rings that allow
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Nowadays we are all community managers to some extent (many of us own blogs, moderate Google Plus communities, participate in Facebook groups, etc.)
We interact with our readers daily trying to learn from them, we tweet to our mentors, we collect feedback, help to promote our friends’ posts while sharing our own, we kill spam, we do lots and lots of *tiny* things every moment…
What about if we do community management for a living? Can you imagine how hard it is to scale community management when it goes about a huge group of very active people who speak to you and your brand?
Creating and managing a community around your brand is the present and the future of the Internet Marketing but it’s also one of the hardest processes when it comes to scaling and measuring.
How do you do organize yourself? Here are my tips:
You need to have applications aimed at improving your productivity and keeping you organized. Evernote is a great one for collecting clips and leaving yourself little reminders. You can pull anything from the web and sort it using tags.
Another great one is DivvyHQ, a simple but feature-heavy editorial calendar application. A completely free one I like for curating content to share or even finding ideas for future posts is Pinterest. Since it can double as a social marketing tool it is a must-have.
Anyone who owns a community of any type, even a simple blog, needs a way to get yourself organized. An editorial calendar / plan is one of the ways to… If you are doing community management professionally, an editorial calendar is a good starting point to creating informative reports for your client or a boss.
It might contain:
DivvyHQ mentioned above, or simpler tools like Google Calendar, will let you set up alerts so you can make sure you always know what is going on and coming up on your sites. These are just as important when you are running a forum or other site as it is for a blog.
If your social media marketing revolves around your content (which it should), Coschedule is another great tool to create a social media calendar. You can set up a separate schedule for each content asset you are planning:
Most productivity experts will tell you: multitasking is killing your productivity. While I can’t help multi-tasking, I have to list this advice here because it may work for you… Try and dedicate yourself to one task at a time, finish it and move on. That includes checking social media sites, your phone, holding conversations, etc.
While I am still guilty multi-tasking, there’s one thing I found working especially well: Splitting DAYS of the week. It helps tons if you can come up with how your tiny things are spread across the week:
Scheduling tools should become your best friend. Whether it is social media status scheduling like Tweetdeck, or just writing blog posts and scheduling when they will be published over time, you can get things done any time you have more energy or time to do it.
You can also draft things like forum or blog posts for days when you just don’t feel like dedicating yourself to the site. That way you can just pop on, publish and go.
This is so important for a thriving community. You need to have people that you can rely on to make good calls for the site, handle members, and have your back when times are stressful. Maybe these are other writers, or administrators/moderators. Perhaps it is an editor or staff manager.
Build a strong team and you will be able to relax more. You will also be able to take breaks when needed while knowing things will be handled while you are away.
Have some tips for managing a community? Let us know in the comments.
Image Credit: community.
The post Useful Community Management Time-Saving Tips: How to Get Things Done! appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
The killer and the poet — ideally both in balance. That’s our theme for writers in 2018: To sharpen up your “killer” side with strategic, analytic, and technical skills, without ignoring your “poetic” side that has the talent to create fascinating content. Today’s post is about nurturing that inner poet — and adding more artistry
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If you know you don’t want to produce unicorn vomit (and I applaud you for that), you may have decided that your content will be “professional.” I was extremely preoccupied with “professional” when I started creating content 10 years ago. It was out of the question for me to reveal anything about my non-work personality.
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Last month, I wrote about how a goal-oriented approach to using technology can help you become more focused and productive. Using that guidance, I’ve now broken negative habits and built new ones that support my goals. Want to know how I changed my relationship with screens in ways I used to only dream about? Before
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Happy new year! I hope your holidays were good and that you’ve managed to re-find some semblance of your routine. (Or maybe even some cool new routines.) On Tuesday this week, Stefanie Flaxman gave us seven ideas for how to thrill your boss, editor, or clients with your writing professionalism. And on Wednesday, Brian Clark
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What brought you here today? What are you hoping to learn, be, become, do, or change by reading Copyblogger? We’ll be asking that question a lot in the coming year, but while we wait (feel free to answer in the comments below — we’d love to hear it), allow us to talk about why we
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Researching niche questions is a great way to come up with awesome content that spreads, especially when it comes to timely and seasonal content. Here’s an example of question research that will come in handy for your next year’s content planning.
Guys from Serpstat collected the most outstanding questions with the words “New Year” and “Christmas” for Google US. The data was obtained using “Search questions” feature which is something I described in more detail here.
The tool found 68.4K of search suggestions for keyword “Christmas”, including 3,7K of queries in the form of a question.
Also, there were 10.7K for “New Year” query, including 494 questions.
The question words were:
They went through all the queries in the question from of each group and chose interesting, a bit weird, and funny ones.
All the phrases are listed in a random order and aren’t sorted by frequency.
Here’s the full list of questions around [Christmas] for your amusement.
The post What Were Americans Asking Google on Christmas? appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
It’s common for non-writers to have trouble understanding how writing for a living actually works. They imagine bespectacled introverts pounding away at their keyboards, detached from social settings and business transactions. How is a reclusive life compatible with a sustainable job? Writing is solitary work, but professional writers know publishing is a collaborative process. And
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