If you’ve signed up for the Brand-Yourself service, you know that we strongly encourage you to start your own blog. It’s a foundation of the service for a very simple reason: we want to help you be found, and then impress the finder. We particularly target professionals entering or re-entering the workforce (college grads, military personnel, career changes) because a blog gives you an opportunity to shore up what you may lack in experience by showing an employer that you’re involved with the industry and truly care. A blog may be the most effective online reputation tool you have because it provides primary source information that can help validate or dismiss other opinions about you.
In the past month, I’ve had the opportunity to write quite a bit of content for the Brand-Yourself blog among others. In that time, I learned how to effectively research, organize, and write a blog post. I’ve detailed my workflow for you, and with any luck it will help you spur a thought or offer an idea that will help us both become more effective writers.
Where To Start: Google & Keywords
Where does my blogging all begin? Here at Brand-Yourself, we follow our own advice: if you want to be found, start a blog. We have a search engine optimization (SEO) team that uses tools like Google Analytics to determine what keywords our target demographic is searching, then passes that information to the blog team. We then build our posts around those keywords and links in order to help people find us.
Don’t misunderstand: CONTENT IS KING. However, all the best content in the world won’t do us much good if we can’t be found.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A brief introduction to SEO (skip to the next section if you already know it): search sites have complicated algorithms, many of which rank results in order of keyword density. The idea is that the more times you use a keyword, the more relevant your site must be. The natural response to that was for sites to spam keywords on pages in order to get a high search result, which in turn generated some worthless pages that ranked high and obscured helpful results.
Google changed the game by ranking sites primarily based on how many other sites linked to them. This was called PageRank (it’s a scale of 1-10), and adding links in a page in order to boost search results is Google Juice. In addition, sites with higher PageRanks would give more Juice to their links than sites with less PageRank. The idea was that the more popular your site was, the more weight a link from your site to another should be given in determining its usefulness.
What SEO does is determine how your target demographic is searching for you, then places those keywords in site and tries to get other high ranking sites to link to your page. That’s SEO in a nutshell, and if you’re good at it, there’s money for you. Want to see an example? Try searching “tire” on Google. SEO firms have successfully pushed Goodyear, Bridgestone, and Wikipedia down the list to place tirerack.com first.
The Big Idea
Once I have established my keywords, I need an idea. One way I generate ideas is to search my keywords in Google News or read blogs like Mashable, Lifehacker, or Wired to spin ideas. I am doing my best to put good content together with my keywords.
What happens if I have an AMAZING idea that doesn’t lend itself to my keywords? There’s a couple of things: I may put it on the backburner to see if there’s a way I can approach it while still fitting in with SEO. If it’s time-sensitive or it doesn’t work, I go ahead and write it anyway. My goal first and foremost is to write quality content. Readers aren’t stupid; they can tell right away when the goal of something is to pimp a product, and speaking personally, it puts a bad taste in my mouth for the writing and for the product.
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“Write A Better Blog” is a three-part series that will run Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
