So first of all blogging is SEO.
SEO if you do not know this term is
search engine optimization, and it sounds big, and techy,
and scary, and like you have to know things
about the back end of Google,
and try to game a system and all of those things.
But blogging is actually natural SEO.
Again, if you are doing it right, because more blog posts
equals more content for Google to index,
equals more keywords for people to find you through.
Every time you create a blog post you create another set
of keywords, and another opportunity to get found.
Blogging is also the perfect companion
to Pinterest marketing.
You guys have been hanging out in any of my other classes
you know that I love Pinterest, it is my favorite platform,
it is the number one way that I market and drive traffic
to my business, at least from a social media standpoint.
But here's the thing, Pinterest isn't actually
a social media platform, Pinterest is a search engine
and that's why blogging works so well with Pinterest,
because those same keywords that people are searching for
in Google, they're searching for in Pinterest.
And I have personally found that as a visual person
I have a much easier time thinking through getting keywords
found on Pinterest than I do on Google,
because there's pictures attached, so much easier.
So if you took my Pinterest class or if you didn't,
I do have a Pinterest class here in Creative Live,
if you took that and you're like,
"Okay, I built up my followers but it's still not giving me
"the traffic that I want"
it's because you're missing this blogging piece.
That's the piece that brings the Pinterest traffic
to your site, and the reason for that is really simple,
so 59% of active Pinterest users usually click through pins,
to blogs, photos, or articles rather than 27%
that click through to brand or shopping sites.
So if you're only pining your products from your
online store, you're missing out on a lot of traffic,
so adding in blog posts is gonna give you
many more people clicking over from Pinterest,
many, many more people in my experience.
The other reason that blogging grows traffic
is because it gives your social media followers
a reason to visit your website.
So if you're like, "Hey guys you should go to my website,
"cause it's got stuff on there to buy"
some people might, but it's so much easier to say,
"Hey guys there's a new blog post up about X,Y,Z.
"Go to my site to read that."
Plus, does anyone feel like on their social media platform
you struggle with not wanting to seem overly pushy
and salesy, and not being like,
"Hey just go buy my products." Right?
So you're not actually making enough calls to action
on your social media platform,
this is a big mistake I found, right?
You don't want to seem pushy or salesy
so you never actually tell people to go to your site.
Having a new blog post, or having a good old blog post
is a much friendlier way to bring people
to your site from social media
and it also gives your followers something to share.
You post a great article on Facebook,
or a great you know a link to a great blog post on Facebook
and it gives people a reason to hit that share button,
"Oh I think other people I follow
"might like to see this too."
So it gives your followers something to share,
and obviously on Pinterest gives them lots and lots
of things to share because Pinterest is all about sharing,
and collecting, and passing those things on.
Now I wanna be really clear about something up front,
blogging grows traffic over time, not overnight.
It's not like you're gonna write a blog post today
and have floods of traffic tomorrow,
that can occasionally happen it you hit on something
super viral, but generally what happens
is blogging grows traffic over time.
But here's the beauty of using blogging to grow your traffic
blog posts have a longer life span.
I love Instagram don't get me wrong,
but I always feel like Instagram and Facebook
and Tweeter they're like a hungry beast
you gotta feed them all the time, right?
Because your content doesn't live very long.
And blogging because of search, because of Pinterest
your content works for you all the time
years, years after you've created it.
So it takes a little while to gain traction
but once you gain traction it pays dividends
for a much longer time than any social media post ever will.
The other thing is blogging drives sales.
Traffic without sales is useless, let's be honest, right?
We don't want just any on traffic, we want traffic
from people who are going to buy our products.
And you can absolutely use blogging to do that,
it does that in a couple of ways,
it builds trust and connection,
so when a stranger lands on your website
and you're a brand that they don't recognize
you're actually asking them to take
a pretty big leap of faith with their credit card, right?
You're saying, "You don't know me at all,
"but please give me your money in the hopes
"that I actually send you this thing."
That's actually a pretty big deal, right it needs some trust
and of course there are lots of ways to build trust,
three's testimonials, there's secure buttons
that tell people they're gonna be safe, blah, blah, blah.
But your blog also does that,
because a: it shows that you are a human,
that you're a good person who's not trying to rip them off,
but also if you're blogging regularly it shows
that this isn't a website that was built five years ago
and then completely abandoned, right?
Which is also why if you start blogging
we're gonna keep blogging so that we don't scare people with
"She hasn't written a blog post in like 12 months.
"Is she alive?"
[Audience Laughs]
"Is she gonna send my thing, right?
So blogging builds trust and connection.
So there's a couple of ways that it does this,
so first of literally traffic lands on a blog post
for whatever reason that blog post makes them feel like,
"Yeah. Cool, this is a person that I want to buy from."
They're gonna click over to your product,
they're gonna buy it.
It's really awesome when it happens, right?
'Cause it's like short sweet and to the point,
and it happens.
The other one that happens sometimes more often
is, they land on a blog post, it builds trust,
maybe they read one, maybe they read five whatever it is
and they end up liking you enough
that they join your mailing list,
and then eventually at some point
an email ends in their inbox and they buy.
So obviously in this class we're not talking
about email marketing because we just did a class
on email marketing, but if you took that class
and you're like, "Okay but now I need more traffic
"to get more followers, to get me more subscribers."
This is how blogging plays into that cycle.
So when it comes to promoting your products
not all blogging is created equal
not every blog post, not every type of blog
is going to bring people through this trust cycles.
There are blogs that work and blogs that don't work.
And one of the things to keep in mind is that
advice aimed at bloggers and infopreneurs
isn't always the right fit for a product-based business.
So as you guys know I talked about an email class,
I love infopreneurs, but the advice about blogging
that applies to them, that applies to someone
who's selling a service, or an online course
is not the same as the advice that applies to those
of us who are selling products.
And the other advice that you're gonna see online
is advice that's geared towards bloggers
who are actually running whether it's a lifestyle blog
or whatever where their job is to blog,
right that advice doesn't always apply to us either
because in that case they're trying to build traffic
in eyeballs so they can sell advertising
and sponsored posts and things like that.
We're not trying to do that,
we're trying to bring in traffic that buys our products.
And so it's important to understand
that not every piece of advice you see about blogging
is gonna be the right fit for your business.
So we talk about who this class is for,
so you're artist, you're a designer,
you're a maker, you're a crafter,
if you're any of these types of people
anything that's a you know really a creative business owner
were you've got some kind of product, visual,
tridimensional, whatever it is,
this class is gonna be for you.
It's gonna work best for you if you got a physical product
you're trying to sell online.
'Cause that's the goal right, we wanna bring in traffic
and send them with something to buy.
And if you want to use blogging
to attract your customers and not your peers.
Who feels like that is happened to them?
Whether it's on your social media or your blog, right?
You're like, "It's just my competitors."
So I wanna teach you guys today how to use blogging
to bring in your customers,
because we don't care, we're not trying to help,
I mean okay, we're trying to help our competitors
'cause if we weren't I wouldn't be standing up here
teaching you guys, let's be honest.
(laughs)
But in this case we're not trying to attract our peers
and competitors, we're trying to attract customers,
the people who are going to buy our product.
And you're here because you want to learn
the right kinds of blog content to help you do that.
Who feels like, "I know I should be blogging,
"but I literally have no idea
"what I'm supposed to be blogging about."
Yeah, everyone in our audience is like aha, yep, yeah.
So what I'm gonna do today is I'm going to help you
discover the right kinds of blog content to attract
your customers and sell your products.
And I'm gonna do this from a ton of experience,
so I have literally been blogging since 2006
which feels like a million years ago at this point
because it kind of was.
(audience laughs)
And I have made every mistake in the book
as far as writing a blog for my jewelry business.
I have attracted my peers a lot of the time
but I've also done a ton of experimentation,
I have really seen first hand what does and doesn't work
to bring in traffic and sell products,
and in that time I have produced
well over a thousand blog posts.
So not only do I have a lot of experience
and a lot of information that I can share with you guys,
I'm also living proof that you can run a full-time business,
you can make your products yourself, and still have time
to create a ton of blog content that drives traffic.
'Cause that's the other thing,
I am not gonna give you guys some strategies
that are gonna take hours and days to implement,
I'm all about like fast marketing
so that I can get back in the studio.
I feel the same way that you guys do, I don't want to sit
on my computer all day and write blog posts,
I wanna go in my studio and make stuff.
Right, you guys feel like that?
You didn't get into this business because you wanted
to spend all day at your computer, I certainly didn't,
and so I'm all about showing you this quick strategies
so you can put up blog posts that work
and get on with your day and make your products.
So here's what we're going to accomplish in this class today
we're gonna choose a blog platform
if you don't already have one,
and we're going to get started blogging today.
By the end of this class you will have published
a blog post, you may have even published more than one
blog post by the end of this class.
That's not bad for about six hours right?
We're gonna knock stuff out today.
We're also gonna identify the ideal customers
you want to attract for your blog,
'cause it's really hard to attract our customers
if we don't know who they are.
So we are going to go ahead and work on our ideal customers
and we're gonna talk about how to choose the right
editorial mix for your blog based on your customers
and your needs.
I do not want you guys choosing types of content
for your blog that are unsustainable for you,
because if you do it's not gonna happen
you're never gonna do it, and I know that from experience
I'm gonna show you guys some examples
of where I totally set myself up to fail,
so that you guys don't make those mistakes.
You're gonna learn how to create great post titles
and images that help your blog content get found,
because non of these maters if people
aren't finding you through your blog.
And you're gonna come up with a plan for blogging regularly,
you're gonna learn how to quickly promote your blog content,
and get the most out of your blog.
It's a lot right?
We're excited?
Ready to get going?
All right, so just a reminder if you've never been
in a class with me before, I love interaction,
you can always tweet me, or tag me on Instagram,
I'm @meganauman and you can use @creativelive
we're the same on both platforms.
So I want to hear from you guys.
But we're gonna start right now
with our in studio audience and you guys can share online
I wanna know why you're here,
I wanna know what you're hoping to accomplish in this class,
and I also wanna know what's been holding you back
from blogging in the past.
Because at this point blogging is a marketing strategy
has been around for a while,
like I said I've been blogging since 2006
so we're 10 years of blogging.
So this is not actually a new strategy anymore,
some of you might not have been doing it yet
because you're brand new, but some of you
have been in business for a while,
so what's holding you back from blogging?
So I wanna know why you're here
and what's been holding you back.
You're on the end so you get to start,
you get to start today Tracy.
Sure. Well, I have a personal blog
that I feel comfortable updating three, four times a week.
But for my jewelry business I don't even have a blog.
And what's been holding me back is trying to
I don't know, have content that feels natural,
and something that I know I can be consistent with updating.
Tanya, you've been blogging a little bit more.
Yes, I restarted my blog after a many year just last year.
But I want to become more effective at bringing traffic
and converting that traffic into sales.
Yeah, I've dabbled in blogging on and off in the past
but I always have a hard time find just the right tone
of you know being personal and business like,
you know like I don't want to constantly promote my products
but I don't wanna get too personal either, so it's hard.
Yeah, so finding that balance
it's really been challenging for you. Michelle.
I've started and stopped a blog three times,
because it just takes so long I would agonize for days.
(laughter)
Ugh, it makes really quakes my heart
when I hear that. That never should take days,
it shouldn't even take hours.
All right.
We're gonna fix that by the end I promise.
Chelsey.
I'm here, I'm new with my business
so I haven't really had a chance to start.
I don't really know where to start, so...
Perfect. Yeah.
The same. Same.
I don't know how to do it.
Perfect. We're gonna solve your problems,
and we're gonna solve your problems,
and we're gonna solve everybody's problems
in the course of this class regardless of where you are.
We're getting anything from our online audience?
Yes, Kelly says, "I've been blogging once a week
"for over a year and I haven't seen any increase in traffic,
"I'm clearly doing something wrong. I'm here today
"to figure out what it is that I'm doing wrong."
Let's see, and Red Scorpio says,
"As a jewelry artist I honestly have no idea
"what to blog about, I know nothing about fashion
"or other things beyond jewelry.
"What should I be talking about in my blogs?"
So I think people are just looking for
the content that they want to--
Perfect, yeah. And hi Michelle,
Michelle's often in the studio audience,
I'm sad that she's not here,
but I love that she's tuning in online.
Awesome, any other questions?
Or comments I mean.
Let's see, we've got another one.
Well, another one from Retro Girl Design says,
"I've a pretty successful craft blog,
"but it's not under my business name.
"Should I keep my craft blog and start a new blog
"for my business, or should I maybe rename
"my current blog to my business's name?"
So it's about combining the brands.
Oh that's an interesting question,
and we're not quite gonna talk about that
we're gonna talk about a little bit about what to do
with old content, but I would say it's one of those
where if your business name lives on a different website
you want to probably just start blogging
under that website with your business name.
And there's no law that says
that you can only have one blog.
I have, I mean I probably have like eight blogs
if we're really counting, but at the moment I have three
that I'm actively dealing with,
because I have a couple different branches of my business.
So there's no law that says you only have to have one,
you just have to know that if you have more than one
you have to give yourself a little bit more time
to actually make it happen.
That's a great question.