blogging Archives - Triple Canopy Media

How to get dozens of social posts from one blog post

05SepSeptember 3, 2019 By Paula Maggio

You’re writing a blog post. And you plan to share it on your social media accounts by posting the link with a photo and hoping your followers will click and follow you there. But there’s another way, one that will allow you to generate a month’s worth of social posts from just one blog post.

Below are some ways to do just that, as shared by Josh Barney on Einstein Marketer and Kylie Fennell on MavSocial.

Get a month of social posts from one blog post

Share a teaser. Create interest in an upcoming blog post by posting an image, an excerpt, or a quote.
Share a fact or stat. Your blog post is likely to be full of them. Pick the most intriguing and share them on social.
Pull a quote. Make sure your blog post includes a few lines that are quote-worthy and they can provide fodder for social.
Ask a question. Make it thought-provoking.
Make a bold statement that connects with your blog post.
Mention – and tag – your sources.
Create a visual slideshow. Choose the most valuable sub-headings from your blog post, place them into a slideshow that provides a post summary.
Turn your blog post into an infographic.
Think quizzes and polls. Figure out an angle that connects with your blog post and post it on social, possibly as a story.
Got a good photo in your blog post? Post it on social. By itself.
Try a meme that picks up a point from your blog post. Make it entertaining.
Add a GIF to a short piece of copy from your blog post.
Create a video post from your blog post.
Summarize your blog post in a list. Post it on social. Include a hashtag.

Reap the rewards

Doing all this – and more — will help you reap the rewards of social media. You’ll engage your customers by delivering interactive and professional content that will help improve your online visibility and expand your customer reach.

TCM can do it for you

If you’re not sure how to do your own social media, reach out to Triple Canopy Media. At Triple Canopy Media we would be glad to show you how it’s done. Or do it for you.

Here’s what we do:

1. We assess your needs, determine which social media platforms will best serve them, and set up a regular process for sharing carefully crafted content about your business via selected platforms.
2. We create a cohesive strategy and measurement plan.
3. We integrate the plan across the organization.
4. Finally, we use metrics to monitor content marketing performance and ROI.

Want Your Blog to Work for You? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions

22AugSeptember 3, 2019 By Dale Kiefer

Yes, of course we understand. You want more clicks, more traffic on your site, more eyes on your blog posts. Perhaps you want to sell more of your company’s products or services, or maybe you dream of cornering a niche in your industry and leveraging that to become a major online influencer.

Whatever your motivation, or your most favored outcome, a good solid blog can help you get there.

But building a blog that works for you or your business doesn’t just happen because you want it to. (Obviously, right?) It happens through planning, persistence, and a bit of strategy.

How can you get more eyes on your blog posts and reap the benefits? Ask yourself the questions below!

Am I Focused?

You should always focus your sights squarely on your subject matter. Pick a niche and stick with it.

If you run a business, then this choice has been made for you to some extent. Blogging about your industry is not just a logical thing to do; it also draws on the considerable experience and expertise you have to offer in your field.

On the other hand, if you’re an individual hoping to raise your profile or make a living through blogging, picking your niche could be a bit more challenging.

Above all, your blog should be focused.

If you want to just chronicle your random thoughts from time to time and call that a blog, then you certainly have the full freedom to do so. But the result of doing that will be more of a fun diversion for you and your friends than it will be evidence of why you should be a major influencer.

Focus! Yes, you should pick a well-defined subject area that you know fairly well. In addition, you should have enthusiasm for your chosen topic. That way, you’ll be more motivated to stay in touch with the hottest trends in the field. Plus, your excitement will shine through and your readers will feel that and want to read more.

Speaking of readers…

Do I Know My Audience?

Your blog should hold your interest, certainly, because you’re going to be the one writing it. But it’s actually much more essential that it covers what readers want to learn about if you’d like for it to be a part of your business strategy.

You’re welcome to occupy online space by writing about your cats or your favorite 1980s TV shows—feel free! But if you believe that this will bring you a lucrative payout or result in you getting calls to give TED Talks, you’re likely to be disappointed.

If you really aren’t sure what you should be blogging about, but you hope to make a living with your writing, think about the marketplace first. Prioritize your audience. Consider the needs of your readers and cater to their interests. Think about their pain points and drill down on that.

Cornering your niche in the blogosphere involves writing about something that can be monetized. It may also center around subject matter that is highly-technical. If your chosen topic is one that very few people can write about, and you’re one of those people, then there’s a possibility that there’s a lucrative future in it for you.

Can I Post Like Clockwork?

Dependability is a great quality not just in real life, but also online.

If you want people to read your blog posts, work on posting them regularly.

Perhaps you have enough material to post every other day? Schedule a time to go live and stick to that. If you feel like you will only post something once a week, try to have your post up on the same day every week, and at the same time of day if you can.

Again, post regularly. People will then come to expect to see your posts at that given time. And, if your posts are enthralling, informative, or entertaining enough, readers will make seeking them out a regular part of their weekly routine.

You can write posts ahead of time, too, of course, and schedule them to go live in advance.

Can I Make Social Media My Blog’s Friend?

While we’re on the subject of getting your blog posts on a regular schedule, we should talk about using social media to promote your posts.

Short version: you should do it. After all, in the United States, 77% of people have at least one social media profile.

You can set your post to go live at a particular time and day, and then, for example, schedule a tweet to go out at the same time which summarizes the post and provides a link that your followers can click on to visit your blog and read your post.

If you don’t have your social media posts scheduled to run at regular intervals already, you should strongly consider doing so. You can manage multiple social media accounts using tools like Hootsuite. You can then dedicate a portion of your workweek to composing all of your social media posts but still have them see the light of day gradually.

Will I Be Able to Change with the Seasons?

Naturally, users search for content relevant to their needs. And those needs, of course, are not static.

For business owners, their needs may change as their businesses grow. For users of all types, their searches are likely to vary with the calendar.

This concept is easier to understand in relation to some business sectors more than others. For instance, if your business involves selling apparel, you’re probably going to be getting more interest in boots in the wintertime than you are in the summertime.

Similarly, the holiday season is going to witness spikes in all sorts of retail sectors, and you’re going to want to stay on top of those trends.

But every business, even those that aren’t seasonal (or don’t seem seasonal at first glance) will have to respond to the pages flying off the calendar. Spoiler alert: In December, or thereabouts, you can look forward to a TCM blog post highlighting “SEO trends for 2020.” Feel free to set up an alert for it.

In Conclusion

Choose your blog post subjects wisely. Make them about things that your potential readers will find useful, informative, and valuable.

Post as frequently as you can, and always according to a regular, predictable timeline.

Stay up to date with the latest trends in your industry and be mindful of the date on the calendar when thinking about what’s “hot” right now for companies of your type.

Use social media to drive more traffic to your blog and, by association, your website and your company.

And, as always, write the very best content you can!

How Long Should Your Blog Post Be? Is There an Ideal?

16MayMay 16, 2019 By Dale Kiefer

If you’re a blogger and you’re serious about your craft, you no doubt spend at least some of your time pondering how to compose that perfect post. And assuming that you’ve developed a suitable answer to that most basic query—What should I write about? —then you’ve probably moved on to trying to answer some other key questions. These may include the following: How should my blog look on the page? Who’s the blog for? What’s the ideal length for a blog post?

It’s that last bit of soul-searching that we’d like to focus on right now. Model blog post length. You’ll never be alone in trying to seek an answer to the question of how long a blog post should be. In fact, everywhere online you’ll find the Knights of the SEO Round Table off on that never-ending quest for this Holy Grail. The search for this ideal piece of writing is not exactly like the pursuit of that famed chalice of yesteryear. But still, wouldn’t you love for the “ultimate” blog to give your business eternal life? And if you could just land on the formula for that perfect post, you think, you’d finally know infinite abundance in the form of unrivaled website traffic.

Perhaps it’s best to save the Arthurian Romances for another day. Let’s bring this discussion back to the 21^st century. Does a perfect blog post length actually exist?

Laying a good foundation for your post

Before we can begin to tackle the question of blog post length, we have to address some blog post basics.

What’s the point? Sorry if this seems too basic or sounds, perhaps, too existential. But before you can rightly know how long your blog post should be, you need to land on what it’s going to be about. Are you blogging about hot topics in your industry to raise your company’s profile? Would you like to use your blogging platform to transform a hobby into a business? Are you, personally, striving to become an online influencer? You could have several, overlapping reasons for taking to the blogosphere. The only wrong answer is no answer at all.

Who’s it for? Next, you need to figure out your blog’s primary audience. To a certain extent, this will be linked to your subject matter, and you should always be writing primarily for readers, not search engines. Are you hoping to have a lot of direct engagement with your potential audience in the form of comments on your blog? Will you benefit the most from having people share your blog insights on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or some other social media platform? Or, do you want to win Google’s heart through SEO? Whether it’s comments, shares, or rankings you’re after, you may want to adjust the length of your blog post accordingly. (More on that below.)

Quality is job 1: Regardless of subject matter and readership, you need to make sure that your writing is good. The rules that we all learned back in fifth grade haven’t gone out the window. Don’t confuse “your” and “you’re” or “to,” “too,” and “two.” Be mindful of run-on sentences that meander forever. And remember that passive voice is to be avoided. Were you paying attention just now? Let’s try that again: Don’t use the passive voice, especially when making a call to action.

Keep it lively and engaging: It’s not enough to simply consider the mechanics of your writing. You also need to make your blog posts enjoyable to read. After all, who’s going to add a positive comment to writing that’s boring or incomprehensible? Write for people, even if SEO compels you to think that Google is actually your primary audience. Search engine algorithms are sophisticated enough these days to differentiate good writing from bad. Think of your blog post as a chance for you to have a direct conversation with your readership and you’ll stay ahead of the curve.

And now let’s move on to blog post length

So, now that some of the groundwork is out of the way, let’s get to why you’re really here: blog post length.

Sorry if this is slightly unsatisfying, but there is no simple, straightforward answer.

There are, however, guidelines, based on what you want the primary function of your blog post to be. In general, longer content is better than shorter content, but don’t sacrifice quality in order to achieve length. If you can say what you need to say in fewer words, do that if you believe that people will still want to read it.

Here’s a detailed numerical breakdown showing the word count range you should strive for based upon the result you’ll most want your blog to generate:

Comments: An effective blog is a conversational blog. Write as though you’re speaking directly to an audience, make your argument easy to absorb and digest, and you’re much more likely to gain engaged readers. If your goal is to elicit very direct and visible responses from them, then a shorter blog post—meaning under 1,000 words—might be the best way to do this. After all, if it’s short, then it’s more likely that busy people will read it all the way through and want to say something back. Blog posts this short are not the best when it comes to SEO, but if that’s not your main purpose in writing, and your audience will like it, then it’s fine.

Shares: If you’re writing a blog post hoping to get readers to share it on social media, you’ll probably have to make it longer. Medium-length pieces—at least 600 words, but preferably beyond 1,000 words—are the ones that are best equipped to give you that result. At that length, readers may do some skimming, and not linger over every word, but they will usually be able to come away from the post with enough confidence to know whether or not they want to tweet it on to their followers.

Rankings: If SEO is your driving force as a blogger, then you’re going to want to make sure that your posts are even longer. Ideally, according to recent data, your posts should be around 2,500 words long if you really want them to rank high. Google views longer posts as being more authoritative. This is consistent with the idea that lots of content is going to cover lots of territory. And the more you write, the more you have a chance to get those keywords out there into the blogosphere. (We don’t think, in 2019, that we have to point out the difference between keyword stuffing and incorporating keywords into a well-written blog post, do we? Good.)

Above all else, your blog should serve its purpose

Most of all, remember that you should write your blog posts to be read by people. A blog post should inform, illuminate, or inspire. And it should be as long as it needs to be in order to do just that. Plus, any rule that experts might sell as “universal” today simply won’t be set in stone. After Google performs another major overhaul on its search algorithm, all of us will have to reassess what we know about SEO once again. Content will have to keep up.

If your post sets out to answer a particular question, and you can do that in 300 words, then that’s fine. This is especially true if there’s not going to be that much competition to answer a particular query, whether because the answer is fairly straightforward or because the field is quite specialized. The scope of responses to the question, “What’s the difference between a bowline knot and a running bowline knot?” is going to be quite different compared to what’s given in response to the query, “What are the biggest SEO trends of 2019?”

In conclusion

There’s more to think about when composing a blog post beyond just the word count. Keep not just the composition of your audience in mind as you write, but also what you hope they will do in response to your words. Above all, in blogging, as in life, you should always do your best work.