Lesson: Content Marketing with Neil Patel

Step #7 Blog Best: Blogging best practices

For social media platforms that have the best return, I would actually say it's either going to be Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Out of those three they tend to perform better than any of the other channels almost in every single vertical. Sure, other social network sites like Reddit may perform really well, but if you look at mass quantity of sites, they typically can't get on sites like Reddit because it’s community voted.

While Facebook if you share a link, your followers are going to see it whether they like it or not. If they don't like it, they can stop following you but you can control more so who sees it. And if you have talked about the first piece of social media platform that I would start up, it wouldn't actually be a social network. It would be a blog and I would just start a WordPress blog.

The problem with using a different platform for blogging other than WordPress, unless it's custom, it's hard for you to control. So if you go and start blogging on Medium, it's not on your own domain name. If you blog on Tumblr, you're restricted on what you can do. If you're going to spend all this time and energy blogging, you'd want your traffic to convert. So if you wanted to convert, you have to have a flexible platform and WordPress is not only the most flexible platform out there that cost to get a lot of stuff done on WordPress is almost zero.

The reason being is the community built a lot of the plugins, the tools, the add-ons that you would need. And if you are on someone else's platform, one, you may not be able to do those things. Two, if you wanted to and they allowed it, you probably had to pay a developer to build it. Well, with WordPress you just do a quick search. Someone's usually already built it, you just download it, upload it to your server, and you're off to the races.

In blogging design is really important. So typically the larger the content area, although this may sound obvious, most bloggers don't do it, the larger the content area and the smaller side bars and other areas surrounding the content, the better off you are. Why? Because it makes people focus on the content.

Two, the more white space you have, the better. Again, it makes things more easier to read. Three, the bigger the text like the font size, the easier things are to read. Four, if you use pretty headings that separate paragraphs and texts, again, they will make it easier to read. And then the last one is keep your paragraphs no more than five to six lines. If it's more than that it makes your content harder to read.

If you're going to blog, make sure your font color is black or gray or a really dark color contrast. You could try to use like blue and all these fancy colors but it's typically harder on the eyes. As for the font of your blog, just use one that's generic that is like Arial or whatever else is out there. Don't pick anyone that are fancy or like cursive or anything like that assuming the letters are all clear, easy to understand. You can tell the difference between a capital letter or a lower case letter, etc. That's a good font. If you can't tell the difference, then stay away from that.

So with KISSmetrics we write a lot of content, typically marketing content, a lot of it’s analytics based or conversion based because our customers are looking for solutions that help with customer acquisition, lifetime value of the customer, reducing churn or conversion rate optimization. So we what found this by writing this content, the blog actually generates most our traffic and leads. It's responsible for over 80% of our leads right now and what we do is when someone reads a blog post. Within that post, we give an option to sign up for KISSmetrics and we actually have the sign-up fields within a blog post whether it's a button and the button pops up the model where they can sign up right then and there.

But we actually don't drive them back to the site to sign up. And we found out this converts the best. The biggest thing that I see most people doing wrong with SEO is they mess up their URL structures and that's hard to fix. Most things in SEO you can fix overtime but URL structures, if you include two dashes in a row or extraneous characters like the & sign, exclamation marks within your URL, it actually hurts your rankings reason being it makes the search engine gives them a much more difficult time to actually crawl your website.

So in ideal world URL should only contain letters and numbers. It can have dashes but you don't want to put two dashes in a row. For example, if your URL slug was like “WordPress--blog,” that would be too many dashes. But you could to do “WordPress-blog-marketing” and that's fine. The rest you can fix from duplicate content to building links, etc. You can fix all those things.

But if you mess with your URLs, sure you can change your URLs and fix them and do a 301 redirect from your old URL to your new URL and the 301 redirect is telling the search engine, "Hey, pass the search engine just from one old URL to new URL," but you will lose a portion of your traffic by doing that.