Tag: Blogs

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Helping Your Blog Writer Do A Better Job

Blogging is a core business for my firm, McCord Web Services. I have found that website owners that take a little bit of time to help our writer get their footing, help us to do a better job delivering what they need for organic search placement and development of web authority.

Here are a few tips to help your blog writer when you start blogging.

  • Make sure to let your writer know your audience – age, gender, typical demographics.
  • Supply a short list of about ten keyword phrases that you think people will use to find you.
  • Offer a short selection of links of blog sites that you like for style and content.
  • Let them know which two or three blogs you read in your own industry.
  • Be patient, it will typically take four to eight blog posts for the writer to hit a stride in writing for you.
  • Make sure to read your own blog and help the writer to understand what you like so that they can do more of that particular topic or style of blog post.
  • As you browse the web send them links of content that you think would make a great background for a blog post. This actually helps them to know what you like.

The more initial interaction you have with your blog writer the better and more effective the blog posts will be for your personal business needs. That doesn’t mean that you need to do these steps beyond the initial break in period, but for the first week to two weeks your input will be hugely helpful and will shape the future of your blog post content.

If you are looking for quality blog writers for your own blog, I invite you to review our services.

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New Levels for Blog Writing and Specialty Blogging

With seven talented writers working for us, we’ve blogged for a wide variety of business sectors. Based on client needs, we’ve developed some new programs that cater to difficult to blog for client needs.

Here are just a few of the new blog programs in specialty areas we’ve developed:

  1. Diamond Level by Sue – $50 per post
    Diamond Level blog posts are written exclusively by our most experienced  blogger, Sue Guirl, a graduate from the University of Missouri’s School of  Journalism. As a professional journalist, Sue has a unique style of writing  that is both informative and engaging. She knows how to craft a blog post,  turn a phrase, and paint a picture with her words that provides for an exceptionally  fine level of writing. With many of our client’s asking for her by name, Sue  is our most popular writer. Due to the mastery of her craft, Sue writes exclusively  at the Diamond and Platinum Levels for blogging. She also writes website content and feature  articles for web and print publications.
  2. Platinum Level by Sue – $60 per post
    The Platinum Level is priced to provide a  longer word count than the Diamond Level blog post and is recommended for more difficult topics or those that need more research time by our writer.Platinum Level blog posts are  written exclusively by our most experienced blogger, Sue Guirl, a graduate from  the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Sue has a very unique  client-pleasing style of writing that is both informative and engaging. She  knows how to turn a phrase and research a topic that provides for an  exceptionally fine level of writing. Sue is by far our most popular writer. As  she is in such demand, Sue writes exclusively at the Diamond and Platinum  Levels for blogging. She also writes website content and feature articles for  web and print publications. She also writes website content and feature  articles for web and print publications.
  3. Medical Practice Blogging – $40 per post
    Medical  Practice blog posts are written by only our most experienced and educated  bloggers. Catering to doctors, dentists, and plastic surgeons, our medical blog  writers write about your specific services in an engaging, informative style. With this blogging level you have one writer for the life of your blog project with us. This  allows our writer to develop strong experience in your topics, lean the style  of writing you like, and helps them to become knowledgeable on your topics  allowing for more effective writing. As writing for your specialty requires  more time to research and write, our preferred frequency and lowest pricing is for  writing three days a week. We can write less frequently but at a slightly  higher writing rate.
  4. Bed Bug & Pest Control Blogging by Rhonda – $40  per post
    Bed bug and pest control blogging is done exclusively by Rhonda Crehan, a  seasoned pest control writing expert. Rhonda has over four years of writing  experience in the pest control industry. She has strong pest control experience  writing and has over two years of specialized in writing about bed bug control,  prevention, identification, bed bug dogs, and pending bed bug legislation.  She is extremely interested and knowledgeable about the pest control industry  and this interest and passion shows in her well written blog posts for clients.

You can read samples of blogs at these new levels on our specialty blog services page.

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My Preferred Blogging Frequency

A blog is not a blog if you never update it. From my experience the best scenario is to update your blog daily and at the minimum three days a week. Blogging one day a week or just several times a month will add content to your blog or website, but will never create the return on your time investment that regular blogging scheduled will.

I know this from personal experience. I have blogged for years on my own blog. Over the years, I have some blog personnel issues, one of my blogger’s father was in a slow decline and I ended up with some very serious blog coverage issues. I needed to blog for my writer on a regular basis but typically without any advance notice. As a result, my own blog suffered. I posted infrequently or sporadically. I saw my blog readership drop from nearly 40% of my website to under 5%. I saw a huge crash in my website traffic that was very concerning.

It took over eight months of consistent blogging, without fail, to rebuild my blog base of regular commenter’s, blog visitor traffic, and website traffic. It was very hard work and it was slow to regain what I have built and then lost.

Blog visitors will typically not come back to revisit a blog that is half heartedly maintained. I know I don’t. So if you want to get into the blog game, make the commitment to a minimum of three days a week and stick with it. Your traffic will build and your blog and website will benefit both.

As a side note, the exact same holds true with Facebook Business Pages and Twitter. Don’t lose the fans and visitors you have by dropping your regular updates. It is a very hard road to travel to rebuild once you lose momentum.

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Trouble with White Space for Paragraphs in WordPress

We’ve recently had one of our writers upgrade his computer and move to IE9 and then nearly go bald pulling his hair out with blog control panels not holding his line breaks or white space between paragraphs. When he clicks save for the blog post, WordPress is removing all paragraph white space.

Here’s what we found and then recommended to him to fix the problem. This may help you with your problem too.

First I see tags in the code and some have a tinymc paste reference. This may be from copying and pasting your blog post directly from Word.

This is what I recommend that you do as we need to get a handle on this.

1. Write in Word so you can spell check and do grammar check. Copy your post and then paste it into Notepad. Copy from Notepad and then paste into the “Visual” tab view.

2. Do not flip back and forth between Visual and HTML view as this can cause a problem.

3. Add your links while in visual view. Do your publishing.

Although you may have been able to paste directly from Word to the control panel, something has changed and you should no longer do this.

To correct the problem, I went to HTML view, then I deleted all tags. Added the proper white space by clicking enter. Then saved the post, then previewed the post. All were corrected.

If you continue to have trouble, I would recommend that you work in Microsoft’s Live Writer. I use it sometimes and like it. You just add your blog login to the application and you can set up multiple blogs. Just make sure you post to the correct blog when you click publish. You can change the date at the top right corner.