The Blogger’s Guide to Brain Surgery

How many times have you heard about blogging: it’s not brain surgery? As in, it’s not supposed to be that hard. Problem is, most of what you read about blogging makes assumptions you don’t know. Imagine trying to read something about better blog SEO and you don’t know what SEO means. And in the post it talks about titles but it doesn’t tell you that titles are an HTML tag (and you also don’t know what that is).

So yeah, if you’re already web-savvy, blogging isn’t brain surgery. If you’re not a web whiz kid, I present the blogger’s guide to brain surgery:

• A website that uses blogging software for its content and management is a blog. What gets written on the blog are posts (not blogs).
• Blog software runs on the web server, where your website is stored by your web hosting company. The blog is not on your own computer.
• You access the blog’s management area by going to it in your web browser and logging in with a username and password (these are created when the blog was set up and you should have them in an email from sent from your blog).
• Blog software is also sometimes called a platform, like the Blogger platform, the TypePad platform, or the WordPress platform.
• You don’t have to have a blog on an existing website, you can have it at a different web address, especially when you’re first starting. A blog at Blogger or WordPress.com orPosterous or Tumblr will give you this. Later, you might want to move the blog onto your main site (more benefits that way).
• Blog posts are made up a headline (which is like a headline for a magazine article or an email subject line), the post content, tags (things your post is about), and categories(like a broader subject). Blog posts allow readers to leave comments. Oftentimes, comments are where all the magic really happens.
• Don’t be afraid of comments. Comments can be moderated, which means you can approve them before anybody sees them. They’re a great way to connect with your customers and learn about them (which helps you better serve them, which means you get more sales).
• Every blog post you write has a unique web address called a permalink. Since old blog posts drop off the main page and go into the archives, we need a way to find it again and link to it no matter how old it is.
• If you’re running a business, adding a blog to a website will increase traffic to your site, bringing more customers.
• One reason why is because search engines like blogs a lot. You have a better chance of being found in search with a blog than without (and no professional help). The art and science of improving your search rankings (are you number one… or number one thousand and one?) is called search engine optimization, or, SEO.
• One simple way to get your blog found in search is to use the questions your customers ask you a lot as the post headline, then answer the question in the body of the post.
• Otherwise, if you want to be found in search for certain words, make sure those words are in your headline and your post content (it really can be that simple, though there’s more to learn than that).
• Write about what your customers want to know (ask them). If you sell stuff, write about the stuff you sell: announce when new stuff comes in. Announce when stuff changes, goes on sale, or is running low (people love to buy stuff that’s scarce).
• Write about your customers themselves. Profile them. Make your customer the hero.
• Social media compliments blogging. Social media are web and mobile phone services that make it easy to share lots of information, pictures, whereabouts, and play games with other people. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are very popular. Blogging itself is also a form of social media, even though we often treat it like it’s its own category (that’s because blogging was here long before these other things we have come to call “social media”).
• A great book to learn tons is Chris Brogan’s Social Media 101.
• Social media sounds like a frivolous waste of time. It can be, but for businesses, it’s about marketing and getting leads & sales, not games. That doesn’t mean you act like a used car salesman. It means you drive traffic back to your blog and site (where the sales happen).
• When you get stuck for what to blog about, go here, here, or here.
• Your blog/website is the new front door. Pay attention to who’s walking in and where they’re coming from. This is called web analytics. Google Analytics is free and powerful. Learn how to use Google Analytics for your blog.
• The one thing people want more than anything is to get more qualified traffic to their blogs so they get more leads & sales. I created a free course you can take online for how to get more blog traffic. It’s called Blog Traffic Fisher.
• Blogging may not be brain surgery, but it can make your head hurt. Sometimes you need a guiding hand so you can end a frustrating problem or have a better plan. I help people with these problems with my blog consulting services. You don’t have to go it alone. Get the upper hand with professional help.

Did you find this list helpful? What else would you add?