The Maine SEO Blog

Five Keys to a Successful Blog

1. Identify target personas

• Know who you’re writing for
• Your content pulls in your personas
• What keywords will attract your persona?
  - Fill your post with them
  - Build an archive of content full of them
• Choose your keywords. (Hubspot has the Keyword Grader keyword tool)
• A word of caution:
  - Writing for your persona doesn’t mean talking about your products/services
  - Write about things your audience WANTS to know about

2. Plan a Mix of Posts

• Example: NY Times, mix of news, opinions, business etc.
• Use a lot of types of posts to get traffic
• Types of blog posts
  - Raisin Bran: basic, everyday posts
  - Spinach: healthy, thoughtful posts
  - Roasts: big, beefy posts
  - Tobasco: posts that start a fire (controversial)
  - Chocolate cake: the sweet stuff (entertaining and fun)

3. Write great blogposts

• You don’t have to be Hemingway, just write great content
• Use headings
• 500-800 words (or shorter!)
• Lists are ok (just not too many)
• 1 idea per post

Blog Topic Ideas

• List of 5 ideas, trends or thoughts
• Publish a list of links
• Take a recent experience and share it
• Answer questions you received recently
• Comment on other blog articles
• Turn a press release into a blog article
• Check out your email inbox
• Always add a photo
  - Flickr (make sure you use advanced search, check off the creative commons box)
  - iStockphoto
  - Shoot your own

Where do you get ideas?

• Everywhere
• Keep a list
• When you learn something new, flesh it out
• Ask your readers
• Write great headlines

How to write a great headline

• Write the headline before the article
• Imagine people won’t see the article
• Surprise people
• No spelling errors!
• Use your keywords

4. Sustain It

• Pick a publishing schedule
  - Once a week
  - Stick to it
  - The goal is to build up a body of keyword-rich content
• Different ways of doing posts
  - Email interviews
  - Video interviews
  - Guest posts from people w/ similar blogs
  - “Best of” lists
  - “How we do it” posts
• Should I hire people?
  - Pros: you don’t have to do the work, you hire a “professional writer”
  - Cons: your writer doesn’t know your business/audience as well as you

5. Spread it

• Why leave comments?
  - Karma
  - Get noticed by other bloggers
  - Get noticed by other blog readers?
  - Links to your site
• Tips on comments
  - Share an example
  - Agree
  - Disagree
  - Add a useful link
  - Ask a question
  - Use your real name (not company)
• Publish on social media (
• Where do you link to your blog?
  - Homepage
  - Press releases
  - Comments

How to measure your blog

• Subscription (RSS, email)
• Pageviews
• Comments
• Inbound links
• Conversions

Speaker: Karen Rubin, Hubspot
@karenrubin

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 11:03 am and is filed under Blogging, Expert Advice, Training, Conferences, Webinars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.