Content Development: WordCamp Orange County 2011

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.

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

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