[MUSIC] We are back with Andy Crestodina, founder of Orbit Media. Andy, here's the challenge. Our participants will be writing their first blog. Can you give them some good blog tips to really make it a success for them? >> That's a great question. It's super important, because if you miss this, nothing else is gonna work. So what I would say, is to break it down into five main aspects of blogging. First we need to make sure that we're going to hit the topic that our audience cares about. And here's a great trick to make sure that you're on target with your topic, that it's something your audience really cares about. There is a tool called keywordtool.io, that scrapes all the content out of Google Suggest. So in Google, you type in a question word plus your topic, and it's gonna suggest other things to you. It's long and slow to type in the next letter of the alphabet to see more and more suggestions. Just type it in to keywordtool.io, it will give you hundreds of topics that your audience is likely to love. But even better, is to listen to your audience, and talk to them directly. Lots of customer service people, lots of sales people, they're interacting all the time. They know what that audience cares about, because they're getting the question. They're answering it over the phone, and sometimes over email. This is funny, but a lot of people are almost blogging all the time in their email. They're writing an answer to an important question to that audience, but they never think to publish it. They never move it from their email to the website. Social media marketers have been saying, never waste a good conversation by having it in private. Never answer an email more than once without publishing that topic on your blog. Next, headlines. We've gotta make good headlines, because really, it's the headline that's getting shared. It's the headline that gets clicked, and it's the headline that has to compete with all the other headlines in social streams, and in email inboxes, and in search results. So we have to make sure that the headline is two things, it's both very specific about the benefit you'll get, but not too specific that you give away all the meaning. We have to leave a little bit of a curiosity gap, and companies that do this are getting amazing click-through rates. Finally, numbered headlines, put that numeral. The number stands out against the letters in a line of text, but it also tells the reader how much is there. It reduces the inhibition to click, and it gives people a sense that the article is scannable. If they don't like one of those ten things, they might like the other nine. >> One of the things that we're doing in the blog, is the participants will identify three action items for their target market. So we should put the number three in the headline, and tell them that? >> I absolutely would. It's going to compete better against other headlines when you use numbers, indicate that it's scannable, and when you do three things, you have a chance to use the serial position effect. This is a cognitive bias, it's psychology. People remember things at the beginning, and at the end. So you have the chance to order your content such that you get higher attention and retention by using primacy, whatever appears at the front, and recency, whatever appeared most recently at the end. Next, formatting. Now, we need to make sure that our content is formatted, or else people just aren't going to get through it. The Niels Norman Group did a study, and found that at most, 28% of web content gets read. It might be closer to 20%. Think about that. 80% of this blog post you're writing, might not get read at all. How do you get people to stay with it? Formatting. Write for scan readers. Use headers. Use subheaders. Use bullet lists, and bolding, and internal links. And write short paragraphs, no more than four lines. I don't care how many sentences, but make sure that you don't write paragraphs longer than four lines. Because short paragraphs get read, long paragraphs get skimmed, very long paragraphs get skipped. >> In fact, we're going to put that limit on writing our blog, no more than four sentences per paragraph is a great way to go. >> Don't hit them with a wall of text, it's not gonna work. And the words you choose are important too. We can use short paragraphs, we can also use short words, right? We wanna use words that are punchy, direct to the point. Not those long, romance language based, Latinate words. Some examples include acquire, transmit, construct, resist, deposit, imitate. There's shorter words for all of those. These are the terse, Germanic based words, the Anglo-Saxon type words, like get, send, build, stop, put, mock. These are the same meanings, it's just in a shorter way to say it. >> In fact, what we're gonna do, is in the action items, we're going to restrict, or at least challenge the participants to put an action item into three words, and just keep it as short as you possibly can. Not only because it's easy to read, but we also tend to remember that. >> Exactly right. The great taglines of the world always have short words, there's a good reason. They go straight into our brains. Don't make them think about it, just give them the meaning. Finally, images. It's not obvious, but as we write our content, we have to spend a lot of time formatting images for our content. So blogging is a visual format without question. So image, even if it's a stock image, just make sure that to use some image. Format it so that it's landscape, like twice as wide as it is tall. It's gonna look good in social streams that way. And I'd also recommend putting the headline into the image. Open up Photoshop, or just canva.com is a good way to do this, and you can just type in the text. And that way, when it gets shared, the image is a self-contained chunk of meaning that the person knows what they're going to get, even if they just look at the image. >> What was the name of that site again, Canva? >> Canva.com, C-A-N-V-A .com. And then also, faces, you know this. Faces are unique among all types of images, and people, from the time we're babies, we tend to look at faces more. So I would put a face and a headline in there. You can also create a little bit of an effect, if you make sure the eye direction of the face is pointed toward the headline. That invisible arrow will guide their attention. I would recommend putting more than one image too if you have the time, because for those scan readers, like formatting, when an article has more than one image, you're gonna keep people from leaving. There's never going to be a scroll depth on that page, where they're just looking at all text. >> When I recently heard you speak, you also talked about the importance of mission, and I really love that idea. Could you go through that as well? >> Sure. I learned this trick from Joe Pulizzi at Content Marketing Institute, and it's very simple. It's the cornerstone of any content strategy. And all you need to do, is write your editorial mission statement, and it's very simple. Your website, and your content, and your social streams, and everything that you do as a brand, speaks to audience x, where they get information y, for benefit z. Just fill in those blanks. Our website is where audience x, gets information y, for benefit z. If you document that much of your content strategy, you are statistically more likely to say that you're successful in your content marketing. >> That's fantastic. Can you go through the five tips again, so we make sure we remember them? >> Sure. Every blogger needs to make sure they're using a topic that connects. A headline that triggers curiosity with a click view rate. Using formatting for scan readers. Word choice to not make them think, to go straight to the point. And finally images, blogging is a graphical image based format. >> Those are great tips, thanks so much, Andy. >> My pleasure, Randy. [MUSIC]
