Find Your Voice, Find Your Audience - WordCamp Salt Lake City 2014
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If you own a website you likely want to be remembered. But finding the balance between getting found and sounding human seems impossible. In this session, explore what it means to sound like yourself on your blog without sacrificing your visibility online.
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Find Your Voice, Find Your Audience - WordCamp Salt Lake City 2014
- 1. Find Your Voice, Find Your Audience
- 2. Hi, I’m Missy missybunnie.com Writer Blog Coach Gamer (they do exist) Reader Fairy Tale Addict @missybunnieo
- 3. Survey Time
- 4. You want others to see your content
- 5. But You Want To Be Yourself
- 6. How do you be yourself online? Find your voice and apply it everywhere
- 7. Forget every writing formula you know
- 8. “There is no one way to write — just as there is no one way to parent a child or roast a turkey.” Ann Handley - Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide To Creating Ridiculously Good Content
- 9. Instead Read books Study other blog posts Avoid passive voice
- 10. Accept That You Are Good Enough To Write
- 11. “If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” Steven King - On Writing
- 12. Instead of doubting Practice writing every single day Give yourself time to edit anything you write
- 13. “Write like crap if you have to. But write everyday. Keep the streak alive.” Beth Dunn - User Experience Editor for HubSpot
- 14. Think of it this way Would you become more fit by lifting weights 5 hours on Saturday or 30 minutes every day?
- 15. You now have the tools to write for your audience. But how do you find them?
- 16. Text SEO But not at the cost of content
- 17. Text Recommendation: WordPress SEO by Yoast
- 18. Text Do Your Research Keyword Research and Testing
- 19. “I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” Bill Cosby
- 20. Text Talk to a real person Create your ideal reader/client persona
- 22. For help creating your ideal persona: https://www.missybunnie.com/wcslc14
Editor's Notes
- How many developers? How many designers? How many SEO experts? How many business owners? How many writers? Put your hand down when one applies to you: Write regular blog posts or comics; put out a vlog (or video blog); do a regular podcast; have posted a blog post in the last year; have posted a photo or drawing in the last year; have posted anything on social media; Think about your blog post/videos/podcasts/tweets/facebook posts/whatever that you create. How many of you try to keep it all to yourself?
- You want to sound like yourself and you want to reflect your personality. NO BORING
- Learn to be yourself whether writing a blog post, posting a tweet, or presenting in front of a crowd.
- How many of you remember the 5 paragraph essay format from school? There are no rules that dictate how you must write, aside from basic grammar and spelling rules. And even those can be broken.
- Take the parts out of books and blog posts that you enjoy and run with them. Doing this will make English easier to work with and will help you find structure in a flexible and workable way.
- Those who identified yourselves as writers earlier please raise your hands again. Keep your hand up if you write amazing first drafts that you instantly publish to your blog. If any have hands up ask them to keep their hands up if you don’t write those posts daily or anything outside of those posts.
- You may be a weak writer now but that can change quickly as you practice writing and read.
- As you write daily you will find the voice you’ve had along and you will figure out how to show people the best side of you every single time you put anything out to the web.
- And how long before you quit exercising all together
- You want to optimize all the content you put online so that search engines will help people find you. SEO efforts must not be done to the detriment of your content. That will make both readers and search engines dislike you. So write for your readers first then go back and make tweaks to help search engines promote you.
- This plugin recommends a lot of little changes you can make and gives your content a score for search engine friendliness. The photo in this is for a post that has a good SEO score and as you can see it doesn’t do everything as some things are marked yellow or red.
- This is a screenshot of Google Adwords which shows you terms you may want to use, how often people search for them, and how many other people are using those terms. Between this and testing how your audience responds to certain messages, you figure out how to reach your audience better and help them to pass your good name along.
- One of the worst things you can do is to write to an ambiguous group. When you do, you start to lecture. How many people in here like to be lectured?
- The image above is on of my client personas. He is a developer who creates web applications that he truly sees as awesome but he knows he doesn’t have the time and skills to document his cool application the way he wants it done. He decides either to have me walk him through documenting or to document his product for him. He has a 5 year old daughter and a wife to take care of at home. He likes to joke on twitter and unwind at night with a cold beer. His name is Todd. By defining who my ideal reader is, I can be less preachy and more helpful.