We had a mini blog masterclass – what did we learn?

Although I think the main thing that came out of my blog masterclass with another super-cool social media marketing mum is ‘never take a three month old puppy with you to blog masterclass’ (actually, perhaps the main thing should be ‘always insist on cake as payment’), I think we did go through some really good points that are worth writing down. Also, I get a blog out of it!
 
Content
The first one is, as always, what content are you offering? How is useful? Rather than writing down what you want to promote and how you feel, think about what your potential customers are searching for. What do they want to see? Check through Google to see some of the potential phrases that are coming up to about your product or topic to guide you into dropping in some phrases throughout the text.
 
Question
Try and start with a question if you can. Hopefully, your title can be the question that people will be asking themselves as they tap away furiously into their phones in search of an answer. How do you choose an estate agent? What is design validation and optimization? How will the National Living Wage affect my business? And other worthy questions like that.
 
Keywords
We also talked about keywords, and the two schools of thought – the using them to add value but not overwhelm the text group, and cram-them-in-everywhere-I-want-to-see-results-in-Google-and-I don’t-care-how-it-reads. You can tell which one I favour. It’s still worrying that people aren’t aware of their keywords, either on the client side or this being communicated to who ever is writing the blog. However, a little common sense (which is all marketing is) goes a long way.

Tags! Meta-Tags! Meta-Descriptions! Captions!
Confusing things, all of the above. Some elements search engines do use, sometimes (the description generally, but not always), and some they most definitely do not. For now. It’s the wonderful constant state of flux that generally exists in digital marketing and social media marketing. You can be very conscientious and fill in all the gaps, or pick and choose (do the description one). There is also all of the blog-specific categories and tags that are worth doing. Whatever you do, there is one aim – create interesting, useful and shareable content your readers will like and hopefully, just hopefully, want to tell their friends and colleagues about.
 
The cake was amazing.