Your blog is your ultimate compilation of great stories. It’s what brings people to your door and compels them to stay. In addition to creating your content on a frequent basis, you also need to manage your blog effectively. If you are a little unsure on how to do this piece of the puzzle, read on.
Blog Apps and Tools Make a Difference
In his Social Media Examiner article “Blogging Tools: Apps to Better Manage Your Blog,” Michael Stelzner interviews Ian Cleary, creator of the RazorSocial.com blog and founder of the Digital Influencer Club, also known as the “social tools guy.” Cleary helps outline some great blogging marketing tools, and we’ve summarized them below in key categories.
Editorial Tools and Plugins
Cleary says that regardless of your team size (whether it’s a one-man show or a ten-person operation), you need to map out your blogging. His team relies on Edit Flow, the Status feature of a WordPress plugin. This tool streamlines the chain of people in the creation of a blog, seamlessly moving posts between the writer, to the image person, to the editor. Within this tool, under the “Pitch” status, his team also stores rough blog post ideas to have on hand when the writing inspiration strikes. He will also be checking out a well-known calendar tool, CoSchedule in the coming months. If you don’t use a fancy tool or app, rely on Microsoft Excel to track the editorial process in the interim.
SEO and Research Tools
There are always ways to improve a piece of content, and it centers on SEO. Cleary names the Yoast SEO plugin as an easy way to optimize your content. He also likes the BuzzSumo or Uprise research tools to access lists of content from across the web-based on keyword searches. These lists identify the most shared posts, providing key insight into what works for great content.
Cleary also suggests using Ahrefs to find links to high-ranking articles that are similar to your blogs but are out-of-date. He encourages bloggers to connect with these authors and ask about replacing the outdated links with links to their own newly published content.
Cleary mentions a predictive content analytics tool called InboundWriter that helps determine the likelihood of getting organic traffic to your content based on specific keywords.
Lastly, he references SEMrush. Here bloggers can see which keywords their competitors rank for in Google search results, helping bloggers write better and more targeted articles using those same keywords to pull traffic back their way.
Social Promotion Tools
Relevant influential people are the bread and butter of the social media world. Include these people in your content, boosting your chances to get seen by them and shared by them. Cleary says the first stop in this process is checking out Topsy, which easily identifies the influencers that are talking about the content you care about. When you find these important people, link to your own content, and start up a discussion. To enhance the ease of sharing, Cleary suggests tools like Social Warfare or Flare. He also reminds bloggers to make sure their sharing plugin is optimized for mobile. This way they won’t miss out on shares from people reading content on their various mobile devices.
Blog Post Scheduling Tools
Cleary says Facebook and Twitter reach is low (Twitter is worse), so bloggers need to schedule content multiple times. He uses the Queue and Re-queue features in Post Planner for scheduling content on both these specific social media platforms. For LinkedIn and Google+ he relies on Edgar for scheduling support done via a bucket system content categorization platform.
Other Blog Tools
Remembering a statistic that 70 percent of website traffic never comes back, Cleary says it’s critical to capture contact details, specifically the email address. He likes the OptinMonster plugin that has a number of different opt-in options.
As for analytics, he prefers Google Analytics, especially utilizing the goals functionality. Easy to set up, you can quickly see how many people subscribed from a particular blog post, and even how many people came from Facebook or Twitter and then subscribed as the final step.
How Do You Manage Your Blog?
Do you also rely on these tools and apps discussed in this article? Are there others that you like more? What additional effective blog management tools would you like to share with other small business owners? And, what resources do you follow for the latest news on the latest blogging strategies? The more we all collaborate, the better bloggers we all will be!
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Reference: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/tools-apps-to-better-manage-your-blog-ian-cleary