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January 1, 2011

Ann Handley changed my life by introducing the five food groups of blogging

Filed under: Social Media — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 10:32 pm

Something was missing in my blog
I have been blogging for years. But, I realized that my blog wasn’t that organized. Sure, I had lots of cool categories, and yes, there was useful content — but, something was missing. I just couldn’t figure out what was missing until I read Ann Handley’s (marketingprofs) blog about the five food groups of blogging.

They make their blog “comfy”
First of all, Marketing Profs does such a good job of making their blog writing style easy to read, informative, and also they make you feel comfortable reading their blogs. They always seem to integrate coffee, salsa & chips, pets, and other feel good, comfy, and relatable themes into their blogs which makes regular people (like me) want to read their content more often.

The five food groups
Yet another relatable theme was the five food groups. Something we all learn about as small children which is kind of fun, and also is taught using cool charts. I didn’t know that blog entries could be segmented into food types. I never thought of my comedy entries as “desserts.” I never knew that my technical how-to articles could be classified as anti-oxidant rich vegetables. I had no idea that my articles about signing companies could be considered the meat of Notary knowledge. Thanks to Ann’s fun and innovative writing, I was able to get this new concept into my head.

What about mustard?
Unfortunately, not all of my blog articles confirm to the various culinary categories. I was not able to find any condiments. Perhaps if I write a controversial entry, that might qualify as a habanero aioli. And what would be a type of blog entry that would be a bread category?

Here’s what I did…
After long thought, I decided that the important things that Notaries want and need include Marketing, Technical How-To, Funny, and they always like to read about Signing Companies. We publish stories, and other types of content too, but these were the types of content that I thought should be scheduled. So, to make it easier to keep it all organized and regular we do Marketing Monday, Technical Tuesday, Funny Friday, and Signing Company Saturday. It is all well organized, and I often pre-publish the posts months in advance. This also makes the writing process more organized because I know how much of each type of article to write.

The result in blog traffic
I am very happy with the results in my blog traffic. We went from around 15,000 visitors per month to about 20,000. Part of the increase is due to increased traffic from Facebook as we have raised our budget for Facebook advertising and promotion. But, the new organization has helped me optimize my posts in each category rather than just optimize post titles in general. This way instead of just deciding what is popular, I can identify what the most popular themes in the technical category are, and then have a completely separate comparison for identifying which marketing posts are the most or least popular.

So, to sum it up — what was that something that was missing in my blog?
Mustard!

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July 14, 2010

Social media – what we are doing!

Filed under: Social Media — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 6:51 am

Facebook and Twitter — what we are doing on these mediums.

Marketing introduction
The trends in internet marketing change so fast these days its hard to keep up without a good mentor. New avenues for marketing and socializing online keep popping up, and its difficult to know which ones will last, and which ones will work for us. Twelve years ago when I started as a mobile notary, yellow pages were the optimal way to advertise. Then, I learned how to advertise on the internet. That changed my whole life. To market 123notary.com, I then had to study how to effectively use pay-per-click advertising. The next step was to understand optimization. At that point, I spent close to a year investing and participating in reconfiguring our site to be optimized for better placement on google. As time went on, our webmaster recommeneded social media. We started a forum. The forum accumulated a lot of content, much of it very valuable as it included commentary about signing companies — who paid, and who cheated their notaries. This information is shared and is a means for survival for mobile notaries nationwide. Now, the popular forms of socializing online are Facebook and Twitter. Other popular sites are fading out, but these two seem to keep growing.

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/123notary  our experience
Facebook is a wonderful way to intereact with others. You can have discussions, contests, polls, and offer daily tips to your followers. I have learned that it is quite an endeavor to create good material for our Facebook profile on a daily basis. Tens of hours of painstaking work go into it. But, the rewards are that thousands can benefit from our daily tips and discussions, and we get a regular stream of new customers from this medium who are a lively bunch to work with. We know what are doing now with Facebook, but it is such a versatile medium, that in the future, we might innovate some new ways to use facebook. One idea I had is a competition for who can be a guest blogger. This competition could be in September. Whomever writes the best blog article could be selected to win a prize, and have their work published on our blog! That sounds really exciting.

Twitter – http://twitter.com/123notary – what we did, and what we plan on doing.
We used Twitter as a way to send out daily tips to notaries. We have many followers, and they really seem to like certain tips. Twitter is a great way to find out which types of tips notaries like the most, and which are not worth posting. We keep notes and files on which exact tweets and topics attract the most favorable attention. What we are doing in July 2010 is Tweeting only about topics that were found to be the most popular. We are hoping that will help us attract new followers. Additionally, we will be tweeting about our blogs, and hoping that helps drive enthusiasm.

What works and what doesn’t.
We found that social topics relating to the notary business are hits with our customers. They like folksy chatty types of topics the most. But, the notary career is filled with technicalities too? But, not all technical topics worked well. We learned that technical issues that are important on a daily basis were popular, and business issues relating to notaries not getting cheated were equally popular. However, more obscure technical issues that I feel notaries should know about, did not get the positive attention that I felt they should get. So, we will be shying away from oscure topics for the most part and focusing on what people like.

FORUM – http://www.123notary.com/forum
Visit our forum where we have many interesting sections.  We have a tips section where there are over 100 practical notary tips.  Read commentaries about over 400 signing companies.  Also, you can ask the experts your notary questions and get professional answers.  The forum is a great place to exchange ideas with other notaries.

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