I keep noting down some useful thoughts, but they never expand enough to become a whole post. Every so often, I’ll be posting a small collection of the best of them.
A time-saving tip for your WordPress posts
As a Writing For SEO reader I hope you make sure you put h2 tags around your subheads.
When do you add them, though? If you wait until the text is in WordPress, it can be a bit fiddly trying to find the subheads to put in the tags. So here’s how I do it.
If you use a text editor or Evernote to write your blog entries, try putting the tags around your subheads as you write your entries. When you’re happy with your writing, highlight all your copy and copy it.
Then go into WordPress and then choose Add new post. Your main writing/editing window has two tabs at the right hand end – Visual and Text. Select Text.
Click in the window and paste your text there. Now click on the Visual tab and you’ll see your subheads in style and, if you use two Returns at the end of each paragraph in your text (or Evernote) file, WordPress will even sort out the linespacing for you.
Now, all you need to do is to put your headline into the Title window, and most of your formatting is sorted.
This may well work with other blogging platforms, but I’ve not tried any since I started writing my posts in Evernote and realised I could publish this way. Perhaps you could try it with your blog or CMS and help us all out by publishing the results here in the comments.
Get more value from your old posts
This one came up in the Q&A Session after my talk last week. I was asked how much time I spend Tweeting my content. The answer, thankfully, is very little!
One of the challenges with Twitter is that anything you post is transient. Consequently, few of your followers will see what you’re Tweeting about, and may well miss valuable content on your blog.
That’s of little use to you, as a blogger, or them, as people who could use your stuff.
I’d seen some bloggers recommend constantly Retweeting, but that would consume vast amounts of time, and contrary to what some people think, I don’t spend all day on social media.
Looking at some people’s posts, I noticed some Tweets were being made with something called WP Old Posts, which I confirmed as a WordPress plug-in. What it does is to pick out an older post at random every set number of hours, and Tweet it for you.
Now, this is a real win if you’re posting largely timeless content – you are aren’t you? And, incidentally, if you have some posts that for some reason won’t stand the test of time, you can exclude them from being Retweeted.
Now, all I post is when I have a new post on Writing For SEO, and spend my social media time engaging with my followers.
How do you get maximum value out of your blog posts?
Thanks to Anne Hornyak for letting me use her image.