If you want people to actually read your blog post and gain value from it, you need to make sure that it is of great quality.
In this episode, Mandy Osman shares how to create a kick-ass blog post that your readers will gain from. She also does a live blog post review.
She discusses:
Name: Maddy Osman
What She Does: She is an SEO Content Strategist
Company: The Blogsmith
Noteworthy: Maddy Osman operates The Blogsmith, an SEO content agency for B2B tech companies that works with clients like HubSpot, Automattic, Kinsta, and Sprout Social. She is also the author of “Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style”.
💡The Importance of Useful and Unique Content
Maddy stresses the significance of starting with a clear goal when writing a kickass blog post. The emphasis should not be on creating content for the sake of it but rather on delivering something valuable and helpful to the audience. She advises against copying existing content but rather creating something truly unique and distinct.
💡Using Statistics in Introductions.
The conversation touches on the question of whether statistics should be included in introductions, particularly for non-tech markets. Maddy emphasizes that the use of statistics depends on the topic and the writer’s strategy for engaging readers. While statistics can be effective in certain cases, they are not necessary for every type of content.
Maddy advises considering the context and purpose of the content to determine whether statistics will enhance the introduction or not. This insight highlights the importance of tailoring each piece of content to its specific audience and desired outcome, rather than adhering to rigid writing rules.
💡Engagement Techniques
Maddy offers various engagement techniques, such as creating a table of contents for better navigation, adding eye-catching featured images, and using concise, skimmable content to keep readers interested. These techniques help readers quickly find relevant information and maintain their interest throughout the article.
💡Finding Expert Sources and Filtering Authentic Expert Sources
For writers looking to find expert sources for their articles, Maddy suggests using platforms like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) or Help a b2b writer, where journalists can connect with experts who can provide valuable insights. She also advises curating a network of experts within one’s field of interest to reach out to for interviews or quotes.
Maddy acknowledges the challenge of finding authentic experts on platforms like HARO. To overcome this, she recommends setting specific requirements for expert sources, such as years of experience, revenue, or expertise level. Additionally, writers can verify responses for plagiarism using tools like Copyscape to ensure the content is original and reliable.
Expert Resources and Validating Claims
To create high-quality content, Maddy emphasizes the importance of backing up claims with expert resources and relevant, authoritative links. Utilizing the concept of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) from Google’s quality rater guidelines can help build credibility for the content.
Strategies for Content Ideation
Maddy provides various methods for generating blog topic ideas, including listening to podcasts, attending conferences, engaging in conversations, subscribing to industry newsletters, and investigating Google search data. She encourages thinking beyond the industry’s echo chamber to foster creativity and inspiration.
Utilizing Engaging Visuals
Maddy discusses the significance of including engaging visuals in blog posts, including GIFs, YouTube videos, branded statistics, pull quotes, and annotated screenshots. These visuals not only enhance the overall presentation but also aid in keeping readers engaged and spending more time on the page.
Title Analysis and Self-Editing
Maddy highlights the importance of engaging and relevant titles, suggesting the use of headline analyzer tools to improve headlines. She also advises writers to be mindful of the use of pronouns like “you” and to only use them when necessary. Maddy stresses the need for self-editing and consistency in capitalization and formatting for a polished and professional look.
The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice
Connect with Maddy;
Maddy Osman 0:02
All right. Hello, everybody coming in. We’re super excited to share this topic today. Um, should I should I just kind of like go straight into a Chima my guess? Is that?
Chima Mmeje 0:15
Yes, yes, please. Yes, please. So you can you can go ahead and share screen.
Maddy Osman 0:20
Amazing. Okay, cool. So let me get that queued up. Okay. So, several things to to go through today, primarily this presentation about how to write a kick ass blog posts, lots of different tips. There is a longer version of this presentation that there are just a couple of things in the description that we won’t be able to get to today, because there’s, there are a couple of things we want to add on to this like a live copy review and a q&a. So I sent Chima the full presentation in case you are curious about some of the extra information. But we’re gonna focus today on really like the most mission critical things. And I’m just trying to give you kind of like inspiration for what to do next.
And then on that note, so we are going to do a live copy review at the end of this presentation. And so if you can send us via chat, any like Google Docs that you’d want to be considered Chima, I’ll just ask that you pick one from whatever people send. And just make sure that you send it as click the share button, anyone with the link setting with the role of editor and that way I can add suggested edits for you versus just comments or something like that, it might be a little bit more impactful.
So we’ll go through that right at the end of the presentation. And then we’ll also have time for q&a. So I won’t take questions now. But go ahead and drop them in the chat if you have any. And we can get to them at the end. So we’re just gonna get straight into it. I’m Maddie Yasmin, I run a company called the blog Smith. It’s a data driven content agency. And we work primarily with b2b technology brands. I guess one other thing Chima is just I’m gonna keep an eye on the time. But once we get to 30 minutes, or actually, if we get to like five minutes before, so I guess 25 minutes in, just give me a heads up and I’ll wrap things up wherever we’re at. Johnson.
Sounds great, thank you. And then besides running the blogsmith, over the pandemic, I wrote a book that’s kind of like a modern day, homage to the Elements of Style. It’s all about how to create content for the web. So it’s called writing for humans and robots. And a lot of the stuff that I covered today is in the same vein as what’s in that book. And if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, it is available for free within that. So let’s just start with the basics. When it comes to writing a truly kick ass blog post, you want to start from a place of usefulness, that should be your goal, not to just kind of like add to what’s already out there.
But to create something truly unique, distinct and really useful. So keep that in mind, we don’t want to create content just for content sake, there should be some sort of business purpose, and there should be some sort of higher goal to that. So a couple of ways that I define a kick ass blog post. And this is just one definition. There are certainly others and, and different variables that come into play, depending on the purpose. But I think these things are true, almost no matter what, first of all, is being consistent with formatting. I’m going to share a link with you all to the blogsmith’s style guide, which has a bunch of rules for consistent formatting, but it’s stuff like, for example, like if use title case on one blog, then use it on the others.
And that way, there’s no sort of like inconsistency, whether perceptible or not to somebody, because they think inconsistencies sort of breed mistrust. And sometimes it’s subconscious. So you are even unconscious, you’re not super aware of it, but it does affect the reader. And so having rules for how you create content, not just with that with images with, you know how you handle bullet points. There’s, there are a lot of details in the blacksmith style guide that you can certainly dig into if that’s of interest. It’s also things like including engaging visuals, because I think written copy is one thing. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, but not everything content in general.
It’s more than just about the words and visuals. We’ll touch on these briefly. But it’s more than just about stock photos. It could be like YouTube video that you embed or GIF. And then I just find kickass content is being long form. And mostly because this is where people can argue with me. Mostly because long form content just gives you more opportunities to flush out concepts. We’re going to talk a little bit about an orbit media blogger survey soon that may have I’m drive this point home. And then I think really great content. Also, it aims to and it does answer readers questions. There are things you can do within your SEO research, like looking at the Google search engine results page for term that can help you come up with questions to answer.
And it’s important to be thinking from that readers point of view, how can you how can you help them satisfy whatever Curiosity made them type a certain query into Google, for example, or otherwise sought out to read your content? So orbit media, they’re a web agency. And Andy Crestodina is the leader of it, he he has a lot of great things to say about content. So definitely somebody to follow if this is something that you’re interested in. So he, he says, you know, when you’re creating content, try to create the best resource possible for the topic. When Google constantly changes their algorithm, people always scramble and they’re like, Well, what do we need to do in order, you know, to continue ranking Now that things have changed? And I think the one thing that never changes is that like good content wins.
It’s not about playing games, it’s really about satisfying the human. So what can you do to create something that that really helps them kind of like what we were talking about with, like answering questions. I think another thing that Andy Crestodina talks about is keeping tabs on the competition. I think this is an important part of keyword research. It’s also an important part of topic research. And, you know, it’s something I think doing sort of like a mini competitive analysis of what’s already out there is something that can really help you going into the outlining and drafting stages. So that you’re, you’re kind of aware, you don’t want to be overly inspired by the competition, you just want to be aware of it.
And then another thing I started to talk about was orbit media’s blogger survey. This is something they do every year, and it’s a survey about of about 1000 Plus bloggers, I typically participate in it. And it’s interesting to kind of look at the data year over year, because it does change, you know, sort of like the one trend that I’ve definitely noticed is that like longer foreign content blogs, they tend to people each year on the blog or survey are saying that they’re writing increasingly longer blogs.
So there’s a lot more to dig into that that I’d definitely recommend looking into. Um, I wanted to sort of start this off by talking about just the idea phase topics. And these are a couple of different places where you may find inspiration for a future blog topic. Things like podcasts, books, conferences, and not just the toxic conferences. But I think the talking that people are doing in the hallway, I recently went to WordCamp. us it was the first time that it happened in I think, like three years. And it’s a WordPress conference. And it was just interesting to see, after all this time, you know, what people were focusing on. And it definitely made me think about blog topics that I wanted to write to sort of address the community.
Things like conversations, if you if you have a traditional workplace, I know most of us are freelancers. But whether it’s with people that you physically work with, or just people that you meet up with networking and things like that, what are they talking about, and then other blog articles, you know, maybe subscribing to industry newsletters, and then also investigating Google search data for additional ideas. I think one thing that can be really helpful is to sort of get out of your own head, get out of your own industry, which can feel like an echo chamber sometimes. So another thing that I did recently was we have this thing called Denver Startup Week.
And so I went yesterday, it’s a free event. They do it every year. It’s like a week of different activities. And I went specifically to talks that were kind of outside of my comfort zone, they weren’t sort of like content talks, necessarily. It was more about like design and like how to create products and things that don’t necessarily affect my day to day, but I wanted to learn about and you know, it just helped my brain sort of think in different ways. I think that when you’re creating space for ideas, or you’re trying to be better about, like being methodical about it, you’re trying to find a way to generate them consistently. It’s important to have something to write on.
And a completely different note is if you do struggle with creativity, one of my favourite books is called the artists way. Highly recommend it. It’s all about kind of how to manufacture creativity. But once you have creativity, you want to make sure that you have a way to To capture it. And so I think like I use Evernote for most of my notes, if you’re a little bit more analogue, you might use a notebook, I think that’s totally fine as long as it’s always available to you so that whenever ideas strike that you can get it down. And then the other thing to think about is a system for your notes. And so Evernote is great because I can add things like tags, or I can put them in different notebooks, I could say like, this is a blog idea, or, you know, maybe this is an idea for a newsletter or whatever. What you’re seeing here is a notion, it’s an editorial calendar.
So that’s another way that you might organise ideas once once you sort of kicked them off. So what I can do is I can put ideas down, but I can also share with myself and with my team, sort of what’s in progress. And then like the update needed column would be something that I’ve already published. But you know, maybe I need to update statistics, or maybe I need to update my viewpoint, you know, maybe a lot has changed since I published it. So an editorial calendar is just a great way to sort of systematically to access those ideas, and to act on them.
So let’s talk a little bit about research. When you’re thinking of how to sort of validate claims that you make within content, I think it’s really important to bring it back to Expert resources, high quality links that you can include. And so Google has this concept called EA T expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This is something that was, I think, introduced in their quality rater guidelines, which is something that humans use to sort of judge the quality and whether a piece of content meets needs for the searcher.
And I think part of doing that is backing up your claims. And so you want to, for example, like this first point about industry authority, if I’m writing an article about SEO, then I might link to something from say, for example, Search Engine Journal, because I’m one of the contributors to Search Engine Journal. So part of it is also like pushing myself up as a contributor and, you know, wanting people to associate me with SEO authority and things like that. But it’s also because I know that there’s other really great contributors, who do their research and put together really high quality articles. And so that’s something that I can use to link to substantiate claims, and people will trust that and Google will trust that for the most part.
It’s also including timely information. So things like if I’m writing an article about Instagram stats, and I want to publish it tomorrow, I don’t want to use this stat from 2016. Because it’s already on date. So much has changed that stand in particular changes, probably on a daily basis, certainly on a monthly basis. But on the flip side, if I am, say, for example, writing about something and I want to quote like a landmark psychology study, I think things like that, and less significantly challenged, they have a little bit more staying power. And so I don’t need to be worried about things that are as timely for that particular purpose. And then reputation also plays a role into it, because there might be saved.
For example, I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but maybe there’s like an SEO resource that like has no authority, and they’re just making baseless claims. I don’t want to link to that over something like Search Engine Journal, for example. Um, we’ve already talked about this, but just like, be a student of your industry, follow newsletters, follow blogs, read them, I think that’s a great source of topic inspiration. Again, you don’t necessarily want to copy what’s already out there, you want to come up with unique topics, but it can get your brain going. And then another thing, especially if you’re pitching something like if you’re writing a guest post for another site, or if you’re working on a site that just has like a large body of content, it’s a good idea before you pitch a new idea to try to see if it’s already been covered.
And so you can use this search operator, for example, but the topic and the quotes, and then the site URL after that site, semi colon thing or colon. So we’ve touched on this a little bit, but when it comes to like competitor research, seeing what’s already out there, you definitely don’t want to copy another article. You want to find ways to add value and make it unique. I’m sure I talked about it at some point. But I think one great way to do that is to interview subject matter experts. That’s a great way to add something that it isn’t what like what’s already out there. You also before you consult, I think like any other piece, it’s good to come into the process with some sort of basic article structure.
You know, maybe it’s not a full outline, but it’s what you plan to talk about kind of like a brief even. And that way you’re not as easily influenced by what’s already out there and you can create something that is truly unique. And then when it comes to taking inspiration from other articles, I think for me I tried to focus more on like, what statistics and quotes did they use from subject matter experts that are interesting? Is that something that I could potentially use? Or is it like really too similar to what’s already been written about. But more so than being inspired by ideas, it’s sort of like the hard facts that may be useful for your writing.
We did talk about that. Okay, so let’s talk about outlining. So when I sit down to create an outline, my goal is to include everything you need to set you up for success while you’re drafting. Part of this is because I don’t want to get distracted when I’m drafting the outlining stages is my time to be distracted, because I’m kind of chasing down the competition, or the Google search engine results page. And what that tells me about this, I’m exploring all these different things. And that’s fine, because that’s the research stage. But when I’m drafting, I want to be able to just absolutely knock it out as quick as I can. Drafting don’t worry about perfection, it’s more about getting done.
Editing is where perfection comes in. And so one thing you know, I used to do is back when travel was more of a thing, we’re starting to get back into it. But, you know, I like to be really productive when I was in transit. And I wouldn’t always have internet. So I would try to get the outline to a stage where I didn’t need any additional resources to do it. And so this, this concept works well if you’re easily distracted, or if you want to be really productive, and sort of the in between of travelling when you’re on a bus, on a train at the airport, you know, etc. And so a couple things to include. This is an old brief, but it has a lot of important details, it definitely starts or definitely helps to start with a brief before you outline because it’s like the plan for the outline.
But you can work your way up to that if even an outline is like an additional stuff to drafting. But I think it helps it’s doing things like defining the goal of the top of the content, a specific topic focus, what information you want to make sure to include, you know, especially when you work with clients are usually points that they want to make sure to include. So having that easily accessible on the brief is the best situation. If you have any keywords, I mean, I think that you don’t want to start outlining without keywords.
Because they they help to shape the topic itself. That’s, that’s my opinion. And then you could also include things like specific research material to consult, maybe competitor content you want to beat, and also thinking about the stage in the buyers journey that you’re addressing with the content because you don’t want to focus only on one stage like the earlier stages, versus like the bottom of the funnel where people are ready to buy and not having enough content for that. So that’s why an editorial calendar helps too. It helps you plan evenly across different stages.
I love tools like freeze and clear scope. And one thing that I forgot to say is for any tool, I suggest there’s probably like a really excellent alternative. So don’t get too stuck on the tools themselves. But freezing clear scope are really great for briefing SEO content writing quickly for me, I find the expense to be worth it over the time that I would spend doing those activities. Another thing that you might include on the outline is metadata, you could certainly do that during the drafting stage too. Sometimes it’s nice to just get ahead of that. As far as creating an introduction, this simple formula might be helpful. So it’s like sharing a problem talking about the solution.
And the reveal is kind of like how you get to the solution and how the article is going to touch on that. Um, sections that you might have within are things like subheadings and bullet points. Within the outline, we’re just talking about like very basic structure, I tried to in terms of just like quantifying this, but it’s it’s like adding a section every about 300 words. So it’s a heading a couple bullet points, there’s your outline. And then just make sure that you’re including points that you want to cover in the final article. You know, if you want this to be really effective for when you draft so you’re not distracted adding relevant stats or links so you don’t forget to use them. And then another sort of formula of sorts you can use for the conclusion is to restate the problem. summarise the key points covered in the article and then ending with a call to action that brings it back to the goal of why the content was created.
So specifically a couple ideas depending on the nature of the conversions, you’re after things like tweeting, you know, tweet your thoughts about article at, you know, whatever the associated Twitter handle is or leave a comment and engage in the conversation. And maybe it’s a little bit more, you know, straight for that macro conversion, like buying a product, starting a trial getting in touch of your service business or booking a demo of your software business. This is my blog outline template, I will I will drop this link unless Chima, you could grab it in the chat as well, I could do it at the q&a. But this is something that we use at the blogsmith for all of our outlines.
So it very much, it very much follows our template and they’re just, you know, like some extra information. So you can kind of see, how are you doing behind the scenes. So that’s one resource that you can use that may be helpful, I’m going to very briefly touch on engaging visuals. And I’m mostly going to just kind of share the ideas here without expanding on them, just to give you some thoughts. But when it comes to including visuals, the goal is to not get sued by using something that you don’t actually have permission to use unintentionally or intentionally, and also to be compelling. And so that’s why things like free stock photos.
The thing about free stock photos is that they’re not really distinctive of any brand, because any brand can use them paid stock photos, you know, there’s a little bit more of like a gate to using them. So I found that like these sites, like Envato elements has a great subscription service with a lot of images. And it’s not things that I see on other people’s sites. So I My opinion is like don’t use stock photos at all. But like, definitely don’t use the free ones and some things that you could do. Instead, I’ll give you some examples, which I’ve listed here. But I have visuals to support that here. And this GIF isn’t going to play. But it’s things like including a GIF. And this doesn’t work for every brand.
And I think that, you know, it’s mostly for brands that have sort of like a funny tone of voice. That being said, if you’re a software tool, and you have more of a formal tone of voice, you could still use gifts of quick actions for how to use your product, for example. But again, like do gifts fit with the brand voice? That’s the question you have to ask and answer before you consider embedding them in your content. But that is one way to add a visual dynamic.
This one’s not gonna load either, I don’t think but it’s embedding a relevant YouTube video. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be your YouTube video. As long as it’s relevant to the topic, you know, and you’re embedding it, you’re not sort of like ripping the video and like reposting it or something it’s still has like that credit back to the author, including videos is a great way to increase a person’s time on page which helps with engagement. Things like using branded statistics. So whether from a place like statistics, which has statistics for a lot of think categories that people write about, like marketing, they have a tonne of marketing statistics.
And they have these nice graphics that you can just grab and use and link back to them. But you could also like if if you’re writing an article on behalf of a brand that did like their own study, then creating branded statistics for them can also be a great piece for social sharing, for getting people to maybe link back to that article, it’s I think that statistics in a visual form are a lot easier to understand them in a text form. That’s, that’s personal for me my learning style, but I think I think a lot of people who have trouble with numbers think the same way. So that is, I think an effective way to restate data. Um, another thing like if you’re interviewing subject matter experts, you might want to feature like a pull quote from them with a branded headshot, their name, their title, the company they come from. So this is one that somebody put together for a roundup that I contributed to, and they did kind of like a custom illustration that I thought was kind of fun.
And you just want to make sure that it’s on brand to whatever the brand is that sharing it because again, it’s another great potential social sharing image. And I think it’s important when it comes to content to be thinking about what other ways can this content go further than like, even if SEO is a tactic that you’re using to get people to see it, there are probably other effective tactics to consider. And you just want to make sure that you’re building that into the content, you create examples, we’ll talk a little bit about screenshots in general, but this is a specific application of that. So this is from an article about, like the first email that you get after making a purchase and how you can make that a fun experience.
So having examples having unique examples, I think is really compelling. And then this is just kind of on the same note, we write a lot about WordPress at the blacksmith. And so we’re educating users who may not know how to use a certain feature or how to use a certain plugin or something like that. And so to be able to sort of point like, exactly what we’re referring to annotate the screenshots is really useful. And I see that I have just about five minutes left. So I will keep that in mind and wrap up. Um, we try to avoid using tables at the blog Smith, I know there’s, there are questions in the SEO community like is this a deprecated? HTML element or not? I haven’t really been able to answer that question. But instead, I just created an image because I just want to avoid them. So that’s another thing that you could do. And we work with design pickle, you could also create templates on Canva that are branded and reusable. So that’s another thought that you know, maybe spending some time creating templates, you might be able to reuse them a lot over time.
Um, I’m going to skip this just in the sake of moving forward. But I did want to share a couple of like quick formatting wins. These are from the blogsmith style guide, which I think I shared next. So we’ll we’ll go back to that. But you can definitely dig into this a lot more if you want. But my quick wins for you are, first of all to write short sentences, because anything over two lines tends to get into run on sentence territory can probably be split into two. And then we try to avoid paragraphs over three lines to create whitespace. And to make things skimmable and easily readable, you might have your own opinions on that, that’s fine, just make a rule and be consistent with it.
And then make it skimmable in general. So things finding ways to add whitespace bullet lists can be a great way to do that too. So just things to think about using descriptive headings and anchor text so that screen readers, Google bots, etc. Understand the context of your visuals. And then the descriptive headings I think make it easier to skim and find, you know, whatever is most relevant to what you’re looking for. descriptive words also help describe your brand’s waist and tone. It’s important to also define and stick to a perspective. And what I mean is like first person like I’m ie words, or what we try to do mostly at the blacksmith is more like you words to sort of invite the reader and so it’s figuring out what makes the most sense for you and being consistent within a piece of content. And then avoiding cliches is another one that you can get into more in the blacksmith style guide, which is this link here.
And we recently updated this. So it’s it’s quite long, it’s a little bit overwhelming. But there are a lot of good tidbits in there. And then just a couple last thoughts here. I think that an important part of drafting is being a great self editor. And so a couple things that you can do are, first of all, just like finishing it and reading it through, and you’ll catch a lot of little things at that point. And then once that’s done reading it out loud, you can even use like a text to speech tool. So that when you read it out loud, you don’t have to do it from your own voice. It’s somebody else reading it back to you. That’s a great way to find a lot of like agreement issues.
And then I think it’s also just the test of like, is this really interesting? Is this something that the target reader would find interesting, and if not, you have to kind of go back to the drawing board. So I took this section out, but this isn’t the full presentation that I will share with you. So I’m finished up in record time here. But if you do want a copy of the book, it’s on Amazon, it’s in most like major markets wherever Amazon lets me sell it internationally. And at this point, we can go into the live copy review. And if you do have any questions again, send them over in the chat because we will go over those right after the live copy review. But with that I’m done with the at least main part of the presentation.
Chima Mmeje 29:10
Okay, that was a lot.
Maddy Osman 29:13
It was a lot to catch my breath.
Chima Mmeje 29:17
Oh, man. Right. So my the US suggesting that we ask someone to send over a copy right now. And then you review it. Okay, so for those who are who are listening, is there anyone who wants to share a Google doc to a document that he wants Maddie to review like right now? Oh, someone already? Raise your hand. Okay.
Maddy Osman 29:46
Yeah, drop it in the chat. Make sure that Yes. Okay.
Chima Mmeje 29:50
So while you can do that, we’re just going to pick the first person to drop a link to a Google doc in the q&a. Gets it So Christina, if you want Good to be you. You can put your hands down and you can just drop your Google Doc right now in the q&a. The first Google doc will get in the q&a. That is the one we are going with. Yes, okay. Does Emanuela have a question? Let’s see. If I know Allah, do you have a question? Or do you have a duck? Okay, we have we have a Google doc already. Yeah, I’m going to just disable for Emanuela. Okay, so let’s open that. Alright. Alright,
Maddy Osman 30:32
so would you like me to share my screen then on this?
Chima Mmeje 30:35
Yes, I think yes. I think you can just like, copy it. And then that’s
Maddy Osman 30:44
okay. Yeah, I’ll make a copy of you. And then I’ll share this back in the chat. So let me grab that URL. I’ll send it to you Chima, because it’s been weird when I tried to share it with everybody, but I’ll put I’ll
Chima Mmeje 30:56
put the Yeah, I think everyone can see it. Okay. You want to share the one you’re editing? Yes. Yes. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Maddy Osman 31:05
I’m just gonna drop it in chat for you. Okay. So let me let me blow this up a little bit, too. Does that. Does that look okay? Can
Chima Mmeje 31:13
you? Yes, yes. It looks better way better. Perfect. Okay,
Maddy Osman 31:17
so there’s a lot of like Google Chrome extension things happening. So just try to ignore that. Okay, so six surprising reasons your Instagram reels views are lagging. That seems like a pretty engaging title. I’m I don’t have any suggestions for it. I guess one thing that I could share in general is there are these really cool headline analyzer tools like CO schedule has one. And so that’s just a great like, if you don’t have somebody to kind of give you feedback on on your headings on that.
That could be a good like robotic way to do it, because they analyse like the emotional words like the action words and things like that. So that that might be one good way to self edit titles. All right. One thing that I’m noticing right away is when you’re talking about, like social media features, it can be hard to keep track of like, how do they like Instagram, for example, how do they refer to their own features, and I think reels is capitalised or I should do suggested edits.
And so at the blog, Smith, I don’t know if we link this in the public version of the blacksmith style guide, but we have a link to a social media style guide that goes through like Facebook, and like, you know, like their business manager, and like, what’s the proper capitalization of that and things like that. So if it’s an industry that you write a lot about, you might want to go through and kind of go to like Instagrams documentation and figure out how they refer to different features, because then it’ll just be easy. You don’t have to look it up in the future. But yeah, I think this is a proper noun. I think it’s an engaging opener, because it’s kind of like hinting at the problem.
It’s inviting the reader in. Real, this is one of Instagrams best features, which allows you to share short creative videos and deliver your message and a fun way to improve your visibility. Okay, so another thing that I’m noticing right away is a lot of like you, you, you and one thing in the blacksmith style guide is we have this thing, it’s called Yoto. And it’s one of our editors came up with it. But it’s you only own things once.
So you kind of want to try to cut down on how many times you say you in a sentence, challenge yourself to do it once or less. So let’s see if we can edit this. So we could say like makes it possible just to get rid of that you. And you could even say like deliver a message, maybe we could even get rid of this one actually, that’s nitpicky. But by having that idea that you too, you only own things once, it might make it easier to self edit that.
I feel like saying something like that’s how it should work might be kind of like stating the obvious. It’s, it doesn’t necessarily add value. So I might just cut that. And I’ll just say like it does, it doesn’t add anything in particular.
Chima Mmeje 34:23
Um, I think this is
Maddy Osman 34:26
relatable. So like anything you can do in the intro to be relatable to kind of like, bring people and that’s going to be really effective for getting them to read the rest of your content. So I’m just going to add that as an okay, again, we just want to make sure that we’re consistent and using sort of like and
Chima Mmeje 34:44
mighty hold on when you say related What do you mean, when I say what, when you say relatable, what does that mean?
Maddy Osman 34:51
I think it’s just the idea that like, we’re all content creators, right? And so, you know, we put a lot of effort into things And I think that this intro does a good job of creating like an emotional connection like, like empathy or sympathy. And so it’s just that idea that like, oh, wow, I put all this effort into creating something and then maybe I misread this real you spent hours publishing? Oh, I think I think I might have read it as like 100 views.
Chima Mmeje 35:24
So I figured as much.
Maddy Osman 35:28
So that’s a good question. Like, did you mean views?
Chima Mmeje 35:32
We can add that. Okay,
Maddy Osman 35:35
six reasons your Instagram reels are getting less views. This is another nitpicky thing from the blog Smith style guide. In particular, we have something in the style guide that says something like you don’t want to create like a listicle within an article. So I would get rid of the six and just leave it at reasons. Another thing that we’ve been talking about internally at the blog Smith recently, which is somewhat unrelated, but somewhat related, is when you’re creating like the URL for an article, you want to try to leave numbers out of it, because you might update that article.
Like, let’s just say the article is six reasons your your reels are getting less views, you would want to keep it without the six in there. Because again, like things might change in the future, you don’t want to be stuck on a certain number just because you kind of like grandfathered yourself into that.
Chima Mmeje 36:27
That’s a good one. So it’s okay to put it in the main title but not use it in like the h2 subheading.
Maddy Osman 36:33
Yeah, I think it comes down to personal style, but something at the blacksmith that I realised is it just starts to sound like a listicle within a listicle. So maybe I’ll add that no listicle within a listicle or within an article. Okay, so I love that. So far, like what I’m seeing with the titles and the subheadings is they’re all consistently title case. So that’s, that’s great. Again, consistency has, I think, a positive court relation with trust and that’s what we’re trying to gain from the reader.
So again, just like capitalising, I think stories is also technically capitalised. But that would be a good one to double check. So I’ll write that worth double checking. Designed to be viewed vertically on a mobile full screen, therefore, when shooting your videos, I’m sure to shoot this, this is reading like a little awkward to me. Um, so it’s just rephrasing it, I think. And then at the aspect ratio of nine to 16, using the recommended size, okay, so I think this is a really great opportunity to add an image that might showcase kind of like the measurements, and maybe also like, the like vertical versus horizontal. So I’m just going to add would be great to add an image showing dimensions, recommended dimensions. And potentially the difference between horizontal and vertical video.
Or maybe it’s a video you can make, I mean, that’s another thing to think about. If we’re talking about video, maybe you could could make a real and embed the real so or embed real because then you’re just kind of like demonstrating the topic that you’re writing about. Okay, as Instagram releases more updates, the site is subject to change as it would need to accommodate new layouts on the app. I think this needs to maybe be more specific or maybe take it out so as Instagram releases more updates.
They’re like their platform, maybe there’s something a little bit unclear or maybe being like repetitive about that. So just something to look at. Okay, shooting your videos and landscape and I would I would maybe even get rid of your I think in this case, it’s it’s maybe better to be concise. Especially if you’re not necessarily using your and other headings, so it’s not consistent with that, again nitpicky but I’m just gonna get rid of it. Uses that’s just a copy, Edit, Move on viewing Instagram Briones I think it’s a good idea in general to use contractions whenever possible. I think a lot of us learn in school, you know, just kind of spell it out.
You know, be more formal, but with online writing, you can be more casual and whatever we can do to improve the readers experience and make it skimmable I’m definitely here for so. I’m just going to say don’t be afraid to use contractions. reels are viewed vertically on mobile and full screen of According to Hootsuite, digital 2022, global overview report 92.1% of internet usage happens on mobile phones. So this, I would say, definitely add a link.
And I would probably link, like the report text. In the blogs MyStyle guide, we talk about trying to limit the anchor text of the specific part of the text that you add the link to, to about five words or less, because then you just start to content, you start to confuse Google about the context of the link. So I wouldn’t want to like, you know, underline all this and link it right. And I maybe don’t even want to add the Hootsuite thing in there, although that would be an alternative place to link instead of this. But I’m just trying to find like the shortest relevant anchor text. I’m going to write that too. Okay.
Chima Mmeje 40:47
Let me ask the question. When I link, I like to link on the stats itself, like I would think to like 92.1% of internet usage.
Maddy Osman 40:56
Sure. Yeah. I think you could definitely do that, too. I think from sort of like the Google perspective, it’s, it’s lacking. Like, where did it come from? You know, it’s like, that’s what it’s about. But it’s like, where did it come from? So I think there’s two different schools of thought, I don’t think either one’s right or wrong. It’s, whatever
Chima Mmeje 41:14
you’re thinking, I think I see what you’re saying. So you’re basically saying, If you link on the text of detail, 22 instead, then it gives like, more context for Google to understand where the start is coming from. Alright, that’s cool.
Maddy Osman 41:25
So yeah, I’m not 100% on that, but, but that’s, that’s what we do, I think, as a rule, cool, cool. Um, I mean, I love that it came from HootSuite, I think that that’s really authoritative for this topic. Um, you know, they definitely have great data. So I think that’s, that’s a source that you can trust. And that’s great. Um, internet. So some people think that you should capitalise internet, I think that has been an old school way of thinking.
But interestingly enough APA style, which is sort of the baseline style guide for the blacksmith style guide, it says that you don’t capitalise internet. So that’s, that’s totally correct. If somebody tries to edit that on you, I would say like, are you following APA style, that’s just worth bringing up. So then it looks like we have this image from the Hootsuite report that was referenced it is a little bit grainy. So if this was a writer on my team, I would say, you know, try to find a higher resolution image, you know, it might just be a matter of like blowing it up on your screen before taking the picture.
And then also just make sure that you’re you’re adding a source and I think it’s okay, I think it’s ideal to add that source link once if you’re referencing it multiple times. So you could even like, like, you might just add like a caption here. But you don’t have to necessarily link the source or just reference a like aka and HootSuite report or whatever. Okay, shooting your video and landscape mode will make them turn their phone, I guess it’s like who’s them? So this is just like, being very purposeful with words, not making assumptions about who the reader thinks you’re referring to. So them according to Hootsuite is what we want to say, we’re shooting your video in landscape mode.
No, we’re not. We’re not talking about Hootsuite. So that’s where the confusion comes in. Because we don’t really have a definition before we’re trying to refer back to them. So I think it’s just like your, your readers, your viewers, your followers, I guess. Make your followers turn their phone horizontally. Lots of people don’t have the patience to flip their phone that way when scrolling through their feed. I think the other thing about landscape video when you’re used to the vertical video, is that it’s just kind of jarring. I mean, I agree with what’s being said here but it’s a little bit more than that. It’s it’s a jarring experience because you’re used to when you’re looking at a real for example, all the videos going one way it’s the same reason why on Pinterest, you don’t want to have the landscape image because it sticks out like a sore thumb.
So it’s, it’s about more than patients it’s about a jarring experience. And you you could maybe use the example of Pinterest horizontal video, and I would also potentially add a visual example that just showcases this jarring pneus Okay, shooting in portrait mode. This is something I would double check if it’s capitalised or not. Because it’s like it’s an Instagram portrait mode. Is it just portrait mode in general? I think it’s just something to think about. Okay and make it makes it easy for people to watch your video when scrolling through their feed. that might be another thing like, what does what does Instagram called the feed? Is to capitalise?
You know, is it news feed on that’s just something to double check. Um, we talked about the algorithm will favour you I think whenever you make a claim like that you have to back it up. So one thing is the formatting is a little bit inconsistent, so I’m fixing that but the other thing is like be very careful about any claims you make. And try to justify them with the source. I think this is important, especially when like the blacksmith is talking about SEO, any claim we make, we have to back up with a very reputable source. And whenever I make a claim, I usually say something to the effect of like, this is what I know to like the the best of our knowledge right now.
But you know, like things change, and we don’t know, like exactly what the algorithm is. So a lot of things is guessing. And it’s using case studies and things like that. So, yeah, just just be careful of any claims you make, because people will challenge you want them and it could be something that hurts if like a human quality rater came and looked at this page and was like, Well, you know, that’s just a claim, but it doesn’t have anything to back it up. So okay, um, I think we’re at the 15 minute mark Chima. So do we have some questions? Do you want me to maybe answer any questions we have? And then if we have time, I can finish going through the document? Yeah,
Chima Mmeje 46:37
I think what would be really good is like, give some over head suggestions on what’s this? Right?
Maddy Osman 46:51
Summary?
Chima Mmeje 46:52
Yes. What is right I can do to like improve the post, like, Tip one, Tip two, Tip three, something like that.
Maddy Osman 47:00
Totally. Yeah. So based on what I’m seeing so far, like, it definitely looks like there’s a lot of support for the main idea, which is six reels mistakes. I love that it’s taking kind of like the contrarian view versus like things that you could do to make your reels better. It’s like things that I’ve seen, that didn’t work. And so I think what’s missing currently, it’s just examples and visuals, because this is a very visual topic. And, and you probably the person who wrote this, you probably have seen examples, right?
Like, that’s what inspired this. So it’s a good excuse to go through Instagram, do a little bit of scrolling and just, you know, try to kind of pick out, you don’t have to do it for every single point, I think that might be overkill, but maybe for every other point, every three points, something like that. And then also maybe including some of the visuals that I suggested to just flesh out some of the concepts where we’re talking about horizontal versus vertical video. I think like statistics, it’s just easier to see that than to try to read it and make sense of it.
Overall, I think that it’s an engaging post, I think that the author does a really good job of trying to connect back to the person reading it and like the things that they’re thinking about the things that they’re worried about. So I think it does a really good job of that. There are some instances of you know, maybe like, like, that’s how it should work, where you could just probably cut some content here and make it a little bit more concise. Tighten it up. But I mean, that’s a normal part of the editing process. So overall, I think really solid start, the biggest thing is add some more visuals, and I think that’s going to really drive the point home.
Chima Mmeje 48:44
Really good. Really good tips. I’m sure that whoever this is smiling right now at I hope so. At your edits. Right, so I’m doing just one of one question from the q&a, what makes an article engaging? I think that’s a loaded one.
Maddy Osman 49:02
What makes an article engaging? Yes. Okay, so, lots of things. I think that the central idea that you should be keeping in mind and asking yourself in order to answer that question is, who is the target reader? What are the things that bothered them? Like, like with this article, you know, like, oh, like, you spent all this time creating video content, and not that many people ended up viewing it like, you know, like, that sucks, you know, like that was a lot of your time and that was hard.
So it’s, it’s having empathy for the reader or sympathy you know, whatever, whatever makes sense based on your experience coming into writing the article, but it’s, it’s like caring about them and, and caring that you’re creating something that they’re going to find in a certain situation. And, you know, they’re going to be intrigued by the title enough to click through. So that’s one part of creating engaging title or engaging content is to come up with a really excellent title. That’s not only like, interesting, but relevant. And whether that’s in search, or whether it’s something that they find in social or somewhere else that link to it. It really starts with the title, it starts with how you merchandise, the article with the title with a featured image is another really important thing.
You know, making sure it’s not just a stock photo, because I think they’re just easy to ignore. But there are a lot of things that you can do without necessarily creating, like custom graphics that can be engaging. And I think it’s, I think an engaging article is really skimmable. And I think this one is, all of the paragraphs are pretty much in line with what we do at the blacksmith where, you know, it’s two to three lines, there’s a lot of whitespace it’s really easy to navigate with, like the titles, I think the titles are also skimmable, where it’s like, well, maybe this point isn’t relevant to me, but Oh, I see this one. And it is. You know, it’s it has like a clear roadmap for where we’re going. And I guess one other maybe pro tip that I can give is to think about adding like a table of contents.
So for example, if you go here, and you’ve used heading formatting, then under insert, and Google Docs and the Table of Contents section here. I think adding a table of contents is another great way to engage the reader and make things skimmable. The one thing that you have to keep in mind and with this is when you upload it to your content management system, or when the client uploads it to their their blog, their content management system, make sure that you’re not just directly copying this because it’ll link back to the Google Doc and not you know, the anchor text where people can jump. So
Chima Mmeje 51:51
yeah. Okay, I didn’t even know you could do this with Google Docs. Wow. And then when you when you put it on WordPress, you have to change the length of your see
Maddy Osman 52:00
if you have to redo them. But yeah, I think this the Table of Contents, I use it for so many things beyond just writing blog content, if I’m writing notes for myself, and I want to be able to jump to sections really quick. It just makes it so much easier to navigate along document.
Chima Mmeje 52:17
Interesting. Alright. This is heavy, but I wanted to just I’m going to ask this question. I just wanted to just give like some tips don’t do like, you know, don’t feel any pressure to like, go too deep. Okay, how do you get a spot interviews? When writing an article? I think that’s something that a lot of people struggle with finding experts authors to future in an article? And also what? And also, what kind of questions should you be accid during this spot interviews to get the insights that you need?
Maddy Osman 52:50
Good, great questions. Okay. So high level answer, help a reporter.com. Help a Reporter Out is like the full name, but it is like three times daily. Journalists queries where they’re looking for topics, and you can do it too. And that’s a great way to find a lot of people. The trick with that is to add requirements to say like, I’m looking for somebody with 10 years of business experience, or whatever you want to, you want to find ways to what’s the word I’m looking for, like, like discourage non good recipients from answering. So that’s, that’s a trick with Tarot. But that’s free. I’ve used it a bunch of times.
There’s also a new one called Help a b2b writer. So Elise Dobson, and Mike Keegan, they are Keman. They put that together, I think it’s actually Elise’s project. But it’s the same concept. And there’s different categories. And you can submit queries, and they connect you with different expert sources. So those are two really great like entry level ways to do it. I think it’s also important to try to like curate your own network of expert sources.
So like maybe other people in this group, you know, might be a good resource. If they’re an expert on a specific topic. That’s one place to start. But just think about who already exists in your network that knows a lot about specific things that you write about. And then as far as questions to ask people, when you have their attention, think about journalism, writing in general, like the five W’s and the H who, what, when, where, how you just want to, you want to come prepared. If you are doing like an interview over zoom or something like that. With HARO, you know, you can be a little bit more to the point and ask very specific questions because they’re going to be responding over written texts versus being on Zoom where you can kind of adapt things.
But just try to think about, again, your reader and like if they were here, what questions would they ask or if they’re looking through your outline And like the topic before you talk to an expert, like, what would they think is missing? What would they want to dig in deeper about? So I think I think that’s a good way in general to think about it. And then one last thought on that is you want to make it as convenient as possible for the subject matter expert, you also want to incentivize them by say, for example, like giving them a backlink, or like creating one of those, like nice branded, quote, images that they can share that also encourage them to want to share it. And when it comes to interviewing, just say, like, you could give me a written response, or we could do a zoom, you know, and, you know, all transcribe it. Or you might also have them record a response using something like loom or I use a tool called Voice form, just make it as easy for them as possible to contribute.
Chima Mmeje 55:52
Alright, so I’m going to dig deeper into that. And as something controversial, a lot of writers have been complaining that most of the sources they find on Harrow, tend to be people who are not really authority, or mostly digital PR folks like that. So making just makes it harder. How do you like shift through all of all that? What I call it people who are faking? Yes, yeah. How do you shift all of that to find like someone who is really an authority, someone who is not copying and pasting someone else’s answer? That was the fear of using HaRO?
Maddy Osman 56:27
That’s a great point. One is like, definitely run any answer through Copyscape. Plagiarism. That’s, that’s a good like, first step, if you’re going to use their answer, definitely make sure that it wasn’t already published somewhere else or stealing somebody else’s. But I think it comes down to adding very specific requirements, which you kind of just like learn with experience, like you figure out what those should be.
But like, I kind of, I kind of hinted at it, but we wrote some posts for like blue hosts a while ago. And we wanted to make sure that that was people who had some like business ownership experience, you know, they weren’t like new to business or whatever, because of the nature of the posts. And it was something like you’ve been in business for five plus years, you know, you make like a monthly recurring revenue of, I don’t know, $50,000, or it’s like something like that, where you kind of make it like a high bar to contribute, and not everybody’s going to necessarily pay attention to whatever your requirements are.
But it makes it easier for you to like push back if, you know, something seems like a good fit, but you have follow up questions or something like that. So just try to come up with relevant requirements that that do set a high bar, and you’re still going to get people you know, from all across the board, but at least you’ll get more, you’ll get less responses that aren’t relevant to you.
Chima Mmeje 57:52
Very good. I just want to touch on, like what you could do about sifting through data. Okay, good. So, one last question. We see our problem about the I just want to keep in time. This is good one as a self taught writer was okay. The most difficult thing is understanding voice tone of voice for new clients.
Yes, this is a very good question, because I think we talked about this during the last one with Erica Schneider having to jump between tone of voice for every new client that you write for, and how sometimes you tend to lose your own personal style of writing. So how do you like, start on a new project and immediately get into that new clients do not voice and then do that again, the next time we’re doing this on a new project that has another different tone of voice.
Maddy Osman 58:43
Okay, I’m gonna send this to you Chima. Maybe it could be posted in the chat. So and you could Google this to anybody who’s watching so Nielsen Norman Group has this really excellent resource about what they consider the for tone of voice dimension. So it’s things like funny versus serious, formal versus casual, respectful versus reverent and enthusiastic versus matter of fact, and they took like a tonne of different words and ideas and basically condensed them into these spectrums. And so my, my practical tip here is that you can go through as like an exercise with clients and have them define for themselves what their tone of voice is, and reference that document as you jump between different brands, you’re writing for different projects.
I like to take it a step further than just Where are you on the spectrum. So it’s like one to five, one and five are the extremes threes like directly in the middle, and then two and four are kind of like next to the extremes, but not the extremes. So that’s a great place to start. But what Nielsen Norman group’s spectrum does, is it generalises it doesn’t give specifics, it doesn’t give context. So one thing that you could also do with your clients is say, Okay, well Look, you know, maybe you’re, you’re kind of funny.
Like, that’s you’re funny versus serious. But can you give me more adjectives to describe the nature of how you’re funny? Like, are you sarcastic? For example? Are you self deprecating? You know, are you witty or whatever. And so by adding that extra layer, I think it makes it a little bit easier to use that data. But in either situation, it’s something that ideally, their client provides you, they’ve already kind of like done an exercise, it’s like this, or that you engage with them in this exercise before you start writing so that you have something that you can refer to and you don’t have to kind of like, make it up in your head to figure it out.
Chima Mmeje 1:00:42
Okay, that’s, that’s really good one. Mark, did you have time for one last question? Absolutely. Okay. This is like this, I wouldn’t go there. Because it’s kind of like this part. Do I have to use stats in my intro? What are your thoughts? Yes. When you see statistics on insurance, or when writing introductions,
Maddy Osman 1:01:05
I feel like at the blacksmith we tend to but I think a it really depends on the topic. Be it totally depends on your like mechanism for engaging people early. And so I think the answer is no, you don’t have to, if it is a topic like
Chima Mmeje 1:01:25
especially said markets, non tech. So those are what markets non tech. Hmm. That’s my take. Yeah.
Maddy Osman 1:01:36
It just depends. I think, you know, I think there’s there are a lot of potential use cases where the answer is yes, but I think there are probably several words no to so yeah, I think, for every rule are for every rule that you think exists. There are definitely exceptions to cyber rule. And so understand the rule and understand why it exists. But then understand when it makes sense to break it to.
Chima Mmeje 1:02:01
Okay, thank you. Absolutely. All right. I don’t think I understood that.
Maddy Osman 1:02:10
I think okay, so like, let me let me think about can give you an example. So okay, I have one. So in the blacksmith style guide. Maybe we say this, maybe not. I prefer sentence case for like a blog title. I think that that’s like the ideal situation. It’s easier to read. I think title case, you kind of stumble on every new word, it kind of stops you in your place because it’s capitalised and we’re just not used to reading texts.
It’s all capitalised. But on the blog, Smith blog, I think we started with title case. And so it’s like, I want to change it, right. But I don’t want to be inconsistent with what I’ve already done, you know, for 100 Plus blog posts. And so I know the rule for me, it’s I like title case, but I’m breaking the rule, or I like sentence case, I’m breaking the rule by using title case.
And it’s because I want to be consistent. So I think it’s just a matter of what if the rule is you have to use statistics in the intro of a marketing technology article. The exception might be one, it’s something that’s like a thought leadership piece. It’s more about storytelling. You know, it’s more about a founders opinion or something. And so that’s when you break the rule. You have the rule, but you have like a definition for when you would break it in that situation. Hopefully, that’s
Chima Mmeje 1:03:35
okay. Yes, that was that went over my head. I was processing everything you were saying? Yes.
Maddy Osman 1:03:42
Okay. Rules are meant to be broken. Just like that’s like what I was talking about with contractions. And how Yeah, academic writing, they would say, well spell out cannot versus us can’t, but it’s like, that doesn’t make sense for web writing. So it’s good to know the rules. It’s good to know why they exist. But that I think once you understand them, that’s when you can and should break them.
Chima Mmeje 1:04:03
Yes. Great. Great. Maddy, thank you so much for doing this. We Yeah, we stopped the time we stopped time. So thank you so much and good
