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WordCamp Detroit 2011: Treating Your Readers Like Customers

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In his presentation at WordCamp Detroit 2011, Douglas Hanna, CEO of A Small Orange, discussed how the principles of customer service could be applied to blogging.

Hanna kicked off his talk with:

We have a responsibility to provide service to our customers.

and continued with sharing his thoughts on the differences between blogging and traditional media.

Here’s my quick summary of his tips:

  • Think of your blog as a small business.
  • Three things that differentiate blogging from traditional media: 1 Interactivity 2. The long tail 3. Speed
  • Find a blogger mentor, hold each other accountable.
  • Survey your customers. You can quickly create a survey using the PollDaddy plugin.
  • Make your key customers feel special. Send an email message to a client about a great resource you found.
  • Encourage loyalty. Make it easy for readers to contact you with easy to find (and use) contact forms. Let readers sign up to get updates by email. Add options for subscribers to get updates to comments.
  • Engage your customers. Use related post plugins to encourage your customers to view more of your content.
  • Engage your fellow bloggers. Read other blogs, comment on their posts, create a community of bloggers you chat/interact with regularly.
  • Educate your customers. Your mission is more altruistic than self-promotion.
  • Create trust. Build trust with your readers by treating them like your customers.

Content Development: WordCamp Orange County 2011

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In her Content Development presentation at WordCamp Orange County 2011, Kirsten Wright of Wright Creativity shared her strategies and insights for planning a WordPress blog as well as drafting and scheduling blog posts. Kirsten also provided recommendations for tools and plugins for sharing content and managing your blog.

WordCamp Orange County 2011 logo

Here are my notes from her talk:

  1. Know why you are starting a blog. Your blog is your chance to be an expert and tell others what you know.
  2. Know your voice. Are you sarcastic? Funny? Friendly? If you’re not sure of your voice, ask your friends to tell you.
  3. Know who you are talking to. We all like to think we’re talking to our buyers, but we’re actually talking to a wider audience. Identify the audience you want to focus on. If others like your writing, great!
  4. Identify your blogging frequency. Kirsten recommended at least twice a week.
  5. Build out your blog with categories. Limit it to six to eight categories.
  6. Schedule posts based on your categories. If you pick six categories and you blog three times a week, each category gets two blog posts a month. Each category would have 24 posts each year.
  7. Identify what you can tell your audience you do well. Without selling.
  8. Stop talking about you. Your audience wants to know “what’s in it for me?”
  9. Create a second Google or Outlook calendar to jot down your blogging ideas. Kirsten finds it easier to jot down ideas in Google Calendar than the WordPress Editorial Calendar.
  10. Add a transcript to your videos to add more content to your blog. The transcript is indexed by search engines and improves findability of your blog. (I didn’t hear any reference to how transcripts improved accessibility, but perhaps I missed it. I was surprised there wasn’t any mention of captions. This was the only time I thought accessibility would come up in the talk.)

Plugins for Sharing Content

  1. Social sharing
    1. Sexy Bookmarks
    2. Social Share
    3. Share This
    4. Sociable
  2. Comments
    1. Disqus
    2. Livefyre
    3. Intense Debate
    4. Built-in WordPress comments (be sure to add Comment Luv)

Plugins and Tools for Managing Your WordPress Blog

  1. Analytics plugins
    1. All-in-One SEO
    2. Google Analytics
    3. Feedburner
  2. Other recommended plugins and tool
    1. Blackbird Pie
    2. W3 Total Cache
    3. WordTwit
    4. NetworkedBlogs

WordCamp Detroit 2010: There’s a Plugin For That

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In his talk There’s a Plugin for That at WordCamp Detroit (#wcdet) in Novi, Michigan, Anthony Montalbano talked about the plugins that extend WordPress. Anthony’s recommendation for finding plugins: visit the WordPress Plugin Directory and use search. There’s likely a plugin for what you’re seeking. I was amazed when he said there were almost 12,000 plugins!

My head was spinning from all the plugins Anthony discussed, I couldn’t keep up. Here’s a partial list:

Anthony graciously shared his presentation online.

[prezi id=”http://prezi.com/47wh2rpbk59f/yup-theres-a-plugin-for-that/”]

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