Articles Tagged with Blogging

I’ve Joined State Of Digital’s Blogging Team!

State Of Digital logo
I am freakin’ excited to announce that I’ve been added to State Of Digital‘s Blogging Team as a regular contributor!

Here’s a link to my author profile, and here’s one to my first post: Repurposing Unsuccessful HAROs

A few years ago, StOD (formerly known as State Of Search) decided to stop allowing guest blog contributions and now only accept certain authors to write for them, so it’s a real honour to have been asked to contribute – and especially on an on-going basis.

So in addition to blogging here on my home of SEOno, expect to see regular posts from me over on StOD’s blog as well. I’ll probably save my more serious posts for StOD and publish my more off-beat, tongue-in-cheek and silly posts on here (but given what I’ve published on here before, that shouldn’t really be a surprise now, should it?) 😉

25 Posts in One Month: Co-ordinating a ‘Content Blitz’ Campaign on the Cheap – My BrightonSEO Talk

Speaking at BrightonSEOHaving previously been to BrightonSEO 4, 5, maybe 6 times (I’ve genuinely lost count), it was an absolute pleasure and honour to be given the opportunity to speak about my recent CR 25 campaign, as part of the Content Strategy segment.

From the BrightonSEO website (which I’m copying-and-pasting as well, just in case it gets removed from the site at some point):

In January 2015, I helped my parents’ IT recruitment agency to launch a ‘content blitz’ campaign, posting 25 posts in one month to mark the company’s 25th anniversary.

6 months in the making, we created and co-ordinated a plethora of content types beyond the usual bog-standard blog post, including guest posts, crowdsourced posts, a timeline, a list of local events, a list of local co-working spaces… and even a quiz.

Utilising free/cheap resources and WordPress plugins as much as possible to keep the budget nice and low, the campaign was intended to boost their site’s SEO as well as the company’s branding awareness, PR, social media followings and ultimately help them to earn new clients and candidates.

Here are the slides:

Someone let me know that the talk was Periscoped (is that a verb yet?) as well – here’s a screenshot. Really exciting!

As I said towards the end of the talk / on the penultimate slide, I’m hoping to do a full write-up of the campaign – its good, bad and ugly moments – which would cover everything from the talk and more stuff that I would have liked to have covered if I had more time. I’ll most likely submit it as a YouMoz post – keep an eye out for it over the coming weeks/months.

I’d also like to say a big thank you not only to @kelvinnewman (BrightonSEO’s organiser) for allowing me to speak, but also to @MUmar_Khan, @krystianszastok, @ichbinGisele and @Tony_DWM for taking the time to give me feedback on an early draft of my slide deck. Tony especially was incredible, giving thoughts and feedback on every single individual slide. Top bloke.

[Main speaking image credit – @octink (from Twitter)]

The Launch of CR 25 – 25 Blog Posts in One Month

Happy New Year everyone!

January is going to be a busy start of the year for me…

CR 25 Cake logoI’m really excited and proud to announce the launch of CR 25 today. To celebrate my parents’ company’s 25th anniversary as an IT recruitment agency (which became a recruitment agency in January 1990), Computer Recruiter are publishing 25 blog posts in January 2015: one each day from the 2nd to the 30th, excluding Sundays. It’s been over 6 months in the making, culminating in me running around like a panicked headless chicken in December in order to finalise and sign-off on everything in time…!

Coming up during the month we have guest bloggers, crowdsourced content, interviews, an event list, an infographic (because if you’re doing 25 posts, there has to be an infographic…!), a historical timeline, a live-blogged local event, helpful resources for jobseekers, nostalgic posts… and even a bloody quiz. Guest bloggers and other contributors include Computer Recruiter’s past and present candidates and clients as well as some well-known figures in the IT/Web/tech or jobseeking/recruitment sectors in South Wales.

For me personally, I’m really intrigued to learn what performs well content-wise. What will get the most tweets/RTs? The most Facebook Likes? The most links? Whether the campaign ends up being a successful or a failure, I’ll be talking about it at BrightonSEO April 2015, by which time I’ll have a clear idea of how everything performed a few months on. I’ll probably also write up a case study about it for YouMoz, too…

To find out more, please feel free to read the introductory post (published earlier today – “Post 1 of 25”), the About page and the press release.

Let the fun begin! Wish me luck…!

2-3 WordPress Plugins For Reducing Comment Spam (From 100s To <10 Per Day)

Want to know how I reduced WordPress blog comment spam significantly, using just 2-3 plugins, with no need for a CAPTCHA? Then keep reading, friend…

STOP imagePeople who know me well (especially on Twitter) will know that blog comment spam has been a major bugbear of mine for a while. I’ve tried multiple solutions, including CAPTCHAs (such as Animal Captcha, Sweet Captcha, Math Captcha, other more normal CAPTCHAs…) but experienced no joy. I also followed the steps in this guide, downloaded the plugins that were recommended and followed its instructions, but found that it just didn’t have the desired effect…

Unfortunately it’s not simply a case of purging the Spam section in one go without checking it. I get a lot of false positives (genuine comments that get filtered into the Spam section by accident), so I have to trawl through it all. One. By. One. Bearing in mind that I used to get about 100-200 spam comments everyday. Ouch. I also help to manage Cardiff Blogs (also built on WordPress) and while they don’t get as many spam comments as SEOno does, if left unchecked for a few weeks, I’ll have to filter through a few hundred…

Desperate for a solution, I stumbled upon 2 plugins and thought that I’d give them a go. The number of spam comments I receive now has reduced dramatically: from 100-200 per day to about 10. Much more manageable.

Click to read more!

How Many Times Should You Tweet a Blog Post? Experts Weigh in…

To tweet or not to tweet (three times)…

A few days ago, I tweeted these two tweets via my Twitter profile (try saying that when you’ve had a drink or two!):

Here’s a recent example:

I was curious to know if people thought tweeting about a new blog post three times (instead of just twice) would be considered overdoing it. On the one hand, it’s very easy to miss a tweet in a busy stream, but on the other hand, if someone does happen to see it three times, is it going to annoy them?

The responses I got back were pretty surprising, which you can see in the Storify Wakelet story below…

Click to read more!