How to Organize and Optimize Your Blog

Got a Company or Personal Blog? Four Tools to Organize and Optimize...

If you're trying to figure out how to make that company blog more than just a chore--check out this article and these tools suggested by business author, Janine Popick:

"At my e-mail marketing company, VerticalResponse, we've got a very active marketing blog that my content team writes, edits and manages. We've got a dozen internal folks and a handful of guest writers, plus a few freelancers contributing content. We post daily and, sometimes, even two to three times a day.
With all that content to manage, I asked our content marketing director how she keeps it all together and consistently delivers quality results. Here are some of her team's favorite tools that your business can start using today:

WordPress, WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin

About a year ago we did a massive redesign and moved our blog from TypePad to WordPress. (You can choose between WordPress.com which is hosted for you, or WordPress.org which you need to self host or find a third party to host for you.) Ever since we've been lovin' WordPress for its ease of use, cool themes and the massive amount of plugins that allow you to do just about anything you can think of.

Speaking of plugins, because the team has to keep track of daily posts, they recently installed the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin.The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

Cost: Starts at free for WordPress.com and WordPress.org is free without hosting fees.

Evernote

Evernote is an uber, power-packed note-taking app and I wanted to know how my content team was putting it to use. Turns out, they often use Evernote when they're away at conferences and blogging from the event. They use it to write their blog post outlines while listening to speakers, and then later they go back to fill in the details. What's great is that they can quickly copy their post right into WordPress and hit publish.

They also are big fans of the Evernote Web Clipper, which allows you to save anything you see online--including text, links and images--into your Evernote account with a single click. This is really useful when you are gathering ideas, research or curating content.

Cost: Free, or $5 per month for Evernote Premium

Yoast

Every good online marketer and blogger knows that in order to get your content found you need to optimize it for search engines and easy reading by humans. Yoast is a handy WordPress plugin that allows you to do just that. According to their website, "It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between."

Don't worry if that's a bunch of lingo you don't quite understand; Yoast will tell you exactly what those terms mean and what to do. You and your team can use the tool to optimize the heck out of your posts to make sure they are found by the search engines. My content team loves Yoast because in just a few seconds they can fill in the fields and see any changes they need to make. Simple and super effective.

Cost: Free

Scribe

Scribe (from the good folks at Copyblogger) helps you deliver the trifecta of content, search and social. According to their website, "Scribe makes content marketing effective and efficient with three essential actionable functions: Research, optimize, and connect."

The first function, research, allows you to do keyword research to see what terms are most popular, as well as how competitive they are. It also lets you optimize your content for sharing. This is really useful for the team to see what conversations are happening around topics they are creating content for, and ensure that what we're producing is shareable. Scribe's optimize and connect features help you build your site authority and Google PageRank, and connects you with other sites that have authority so you can establish relationships with them. It's good stuff when you are trying to get your content to stand out from the masses.

Cost: Ranges from $27-$97 per month based on plan."
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JANINE POPICK is the CEO and founder of VerticalResponse, a leading provider of self-service email and event marketing, online surveys, social media, and direct mail solutions. The company was ranked No. 2,802 on the 2012 Inc. 5000.
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MITTONMedia provides consultation for employee recruitment programs that lower costs and get results. Contact John Mitton for more information.

Use "Doughnut Engagement" for More Effective Recruitment Messaging

How a box of doughnuts can help you recruit higher quality candidates...

One of the ways we help our recruitment clients get better results in a hurry is to remind them to use the strategy of  "Doughnut Engagement." Employers sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a corporate branding program. Which is helpful for getting everyone on the same page but can also inadvertently lead to sabotaging recruitment efforts.

Why? 

As a result of gathering up all that employer branding research, subsequent recruitment messages often end up spitting out talking point after talking point focused solely on providing information about the employer.

What's missing?

"Doughnut Engagement"

Someone once wrote, "People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care." In other words when quality candidates are looking for a change of scenery, one of the most important questions to be answered is "What's In This for Me and My Family?" How will their lives be improved by going to work for you and your company?

Here's where the "Doughnut Engagement" strategy comes in handy. We all have different tastes, right? When you go out to buy a dozen doughnuts, what's most important to you? Knowing everything possible about the bakery or knowing that the bakery will have your favorite flavors of doughnuts in the display case, ready to be consumed?

At MITTONMedia we use in-house surveys to help employers identify which of their  "flavors" seem to be attracting the highest number of quality candidates. The resulting hiring messages then focus almost exclusively on showcasing this "What's In It for Me" information.

Our in-house surveys also check out "flavors" that might be inhibiting results for the recruitment program and try to remove them from the menu as quickly as possible.

When it's time to create your next round of hiring messages, remember to blend employer-of-choice branding information with the strategy of "Doughnut Engagement." Or call in MITTONMedia. We'll bring the coffee.
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MITTONMedia provides consultative services for a number of HR-related areas, including how to design recruitment programs that lower costs and get results. For more information, send an email to MITTONMedia President, John Mitton, at jmitton@mittonmedia.com.

At MITTONMedia, we do the work. You get the results...and quite possibly a promotion!