Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Turn a Social Media Post into a Blog Post

So now I want to talk about a really nice little trick to get you started blogging quickly. I promised you guys that we were going to really start quick, we're going to dive right into it right now. And I'm going to talk about how to turn a social media post into a blog post. So one of the other things that I hear from people is like, I don't know what to do for my first blog post. All right, anyone who doesn't have a blog or hasn't been blogging, do you feel like that? Like my blog has to be amazing because it's the first one. Um, no, because let me tell you something, no one's ever going to read your first blog post. (laughter) This is my first blog post, that literally is crap. It talks about how I was on Yahoo and I moved to Blogger and it's like the worst image ever, but it's from 2006. So, first of all, it's not optimized for SEO or Pinterest or anything in any way, so no traffic is coming to it. And no one is taking the time to crawl all the way back to 2006 on my blog. And bec...

ause you guys are going to be blogging consistently, pretty soon that first blog post is going to get pushed so far down anyway, that it doesn't matter. So I'm going to give you guys an easy place to start and we can just get over the whole I need to like welcome people and whatever, it's fine, you know, you can just throw a first blog post up and move on because it really doesn't matter. So, a great place to start, whether you have zero blog posts or lots of blog posts, is to use your social media as a starting point for your blog. And there are a couple of reasons to do this. So, first of all, you own your blog, you don't own your social media platform. Who spends a pretty solid amount of time creating images for Instagram, right? You're spending a lot of time putting images on the Web and Instagram could close tomorrow, right? Facebook could decide, you know, we bought this Instagram thing and we're tired of putting money into it. We know it's probably not going to happen, but it could. They could decide they don't want it. And all of that content that you've spent all this time putting on the Internet just goes away. Doesn't that make you a little sad? It makes me a little sad. So you don't own your content on social media, but you own it on your blog. The other thing is your social media content, not optimized for search or really even Pinterest. Now you can finally pin things from Instagram, but they're not the best pins and then also now you're just sending people back to someone else's site instead of your own. So when you put something on your blog now you have the opportunity to optimize it in a way that you never could on social media. So one of the questions and one of the things to think about because I've talked about this in previous classes is should you cross-post automatically, between your social media and your blog, or should you just use your social media images to create blog posts? So I gave this example in a previous class of Marta Spendowska, who's a really amazing painter and Marta literally just automatically posts her Instagram posts to her blog. And it's not a bad strategy, if you are like super, super time crunched, it could work. But it's actually not ideal. Because, here's the thing, your social media posts are written for engagement and conversation. So this is a post I put up not that long ago. Nice image, but my caption is literally oh, hello, hoops! Another sample for my new secret project. I'm so close to being ready to reveal what I've been working on, but first, I'm off to meet my new nephew. Happy Sunday, friends! Like, it works on Instagram and look, tiny even commented. (laughter) Um, so it works, right, that's the goal. Because I'm not trying to sound markety and I'm not trying to drive traffic anywhere, I'm just trying to interact with people. So it's super conversational and casual. And if you're not writing like this on social media you're probably actually struggling to grow on social media because then you're sounding too markety anyway and no one really wants to interact with a marketer, right, they want to interact with humans on Instagram. So this is fine, but if I were to automatically post this to my blog, it's not really an ideal blog post. And your blog posts provide an opportunity for search optimization and a strong call to action, so two things that your social media post on its own does not do. So now it's an opportunity for search and an opportunity to give the people reading it a stronger call to action. So now, I took that same image that I used on my blog and this is literally an image that I took on my iPhone. Like I was like, oh, look, these are pretty, click, OK, done, like a little bit of editing, move on. So immediately I put in a title that's way more likely to get found, right? There's a possibility that somebody's looking for Matisse inspired earrings. (laughter) Or maybe Matisse inspired hoop statement earrings, look at all those keywords in there. I learned something when Tiffany Whipps taught in my class, too, right? So look at all these keywords in here. And then I'm able to repeat some keywords and add a call to action. So now I'm saying, OK, here's this thing that I did, this is what it's for, but you're going to want to join my mailing list to be the first to know when they're available. So now I've got some SEO and I've changed the tone slightly. Here's the thing, this is still pretty conversational, right? When I write on my blog, I still write like a human. I'm still talking about what's happening. Lately I've been working on a series of new jewelry designs inspired by Matisse's paper cutouts. That feels conversational, right? Look at all these keywords, new jewelry designs, Matisse's paper cutouts, so it's conversational but I threw in a little extra to help me out. So this right here is why I don't recommend just automatically posting. Because I can take a few minutes, shift the content and put it on there. And then the last thing I did and you don't have to do this, but I had taken multiple images. So this was a good chance to throw in a secondary image. On Instagram and, yes, I know Instagram now you can post multiple images, but you can also only post multiple images if they're square, which drives me nuts because I was so excited when I could use vertical images, so I don't use the multi-image feature because of that. So here I was able to show one, two images. So not only does this let me show my audience a little bit more, but now I have two images that I can then pin to Pinterest and then if that traffic comes back they see my strong call to action. So just taking a few minutes to turn my social media post into my blog post and I'm way more optimized and I'm way more likely to send my audience somewhere that I want them to go. So, really quick steps, I want this process to be easy for you guys, because guess what? In a minute you're going to do this yourselves. (laughs) But I'm going to talk about it a little bit more. So first of all, choose a well-received image from social media. So I generally like to look for posts, I don't post everything from social media to my blog, but you want to look for things that people responded well to. So what you can do is start to use like your Instagram or your Facebook as a chance to try out a lot of different content and see what people respond to. Oh wow, like this type of image got a lot of likes, I'm going to try that. Now a little caveat here, I have found that the same types of images don't always do well on like Instagram versus Pinterest, some do better than others. But it's at least a good chance to start to play around. So I like to pick something at least that wasn't a total dud on social media. And then you're going to upload that image to your blog post. And you're going to give your blog post a keyword rich title. Now, here's the thing, I am super lazy, so I'm not going to advocate that we do a ton of keyword research here because who has time for that? Now for your product posts, things like that, that's fine, we're going to use the strategy that Tiffany Whipps shared in some of my other classes. But for this, all I want you to do is think about this one question. What words would someone type into Google or into Pinterest, if they were searching for this image? I could have just as easily titled this, oh, hello, hoops, right, that was what I started my Instagram post off as. But, first of all, then it's not a long-tail keyword, right, it's just the word, basically the only keyword I have in there is hoops. And people are probably not envisioning this when they type in hoops into Google, right? So look at the image that you're using and ask yourself, if someone were looking for something like this, what would they type into Google? And use those words to create your post title. I have a hunch, I don't know this for a fact, but I have a hunch that that person who said they've been working on their blog for a year and not seeing a ton of traction, you're probably using post titles that look like things like, oh hello, hoops. I'm not judging you, I did it for years and years and years. But I want you to start thinking about, again, keyword rich titles. And if you want to take two seconds to do a little bit of keyword research, don't worry about Google. Type those words into Pinterest and see what comes up. Are you in the ballpark? And if not, start clicking on the related search in Pinterest and see if there's some other words that maybe work better. I actually hate keyword research on Google, but I find it so easy on Pinterest because I get to look at all the things and see if it makes sense. So if you want to take a minute and test the words that you're thinking, type them into Pinterest and see what happens. Then you're literally going to write a short paragraph or two or maybe just a couple of sentences with, again, a couple of well placed keywords in those few sentences because Google looks at those, too, right? They look at the post title, they look at those and they look at, they might look at your images, too, we'll talk about that in a minute. And then in that blog post, put some kind of call to action. A blog post without a link is a wasted opportunity. Then you might as well just post it on Instagram where you can't link to anything, right? A blog post without a link is a wasted opportunity. So, if it's a product that's already available in your shop, link to the product, directly to the product. If it's something that's not available yet, link to your mailing list, do a little call to action so that people can know when it's coming up. If it's a post that's not related to your products, then you're going to start to think about can you throw a link in another way? So is it something where you could put a sentence in that then directs people to a different blog post? Maybe, you know, you're like, lately I've been working on a series of new jewelry designs and maybe there's like another jewelry design post you can link to. Or maybe, worst case scenario, you send them back to your Instagram if you don't have anything yet. Send them somewhere, don't make your post a dead end. And then if you want, you can add related images. If you've got something else and again, I'm a huge fan of putting images in our posts, but if you only have one image, cool, fine with me, I have plenty of blog posts that only have one image. But in this case I had a second one that made sense, so I threw it in. You should actually be able to do this in und, we're not even talking about an hour because the photograph already exists, 15 minutes. So, in a second I'm going to prove that to you. We're going to do this right here live because I want to prove to you how fast this is. So, social media, all right, this is my Instagram. And just because I wanted to have my head in the game, we are actually going to turn two images into one post. So we're going to take this image here and we're also going to take an image, load more, that I shot a little while back which actually doesn't feature my product at all, but it's the inspiration for the design. So we're going to take those two images and we're going to go to my blog. All right, so let's just look at this image for a second. All right, so, if someone was looking for this image, what words do you think they would type into Google? Calder Jewelry? OK, what else? Leaf, leaf jewelry? How about statement earrings? (laughter) All right, so, and I'm going to get a little bit creative here just because I can. So I'm going to go, so I'm in WordPress and we are going to, I'm going to create a new post in WordPress, but I want to show you guys, let's open this up for just a second, so this is what this looks like in WordPress. This is what this looks like in Shopify. Not all that different, right? All right, so whatever platform you're on it's probably going to look something like this. OK, so, what I want to talk about in this post is how that one leaf inspired two different things. So I'm going to call this statement earring inspiration: Calder meets Matisse meets Monstera, that's the specific name of that leaf because someone, because that's a trendy plant right now, you guys, so someone might be searching for that plant. Now, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to put this in a category. You, we can talk about this later, but you should have some categories on your blog, so I'm literally going to put this in a category called jewelry. Because that means that when they're on that post, too, if they're like, oh, I want to see other things related to jewelry, I'm going to look there. Now I'm just going to upload my images. So obviously we did a smidge of cheating here so that this could happen really fast, but my work flow is if I take an image on my phone and I use it on social media, I then just pull it into my Dropbox and then it shows up on my computer. So that's the, how do I get my image from my phone to my computer question. I use Dropbox, any kind of cloud file storage program will work fine. Worst case scenario, e mail it to yourself, there's lots of ways to get it on there. All right, so I'm going to look for, I meant I have two images, so I'm going to point out the other thing that happened here. So this is a different image I used on my phone and you can see here I, when I sent this from my computer, that's the file name of my image. That's bad for SEO, right? So I took the two images that I'm using and I retitled them before I uploaded them to my blog. So I called this one calder-matisse- statement-earring-inspiration and I called this one monstera-plant-studio-jewelry-inspiration. So always change, we're going to talk about this later, too, but always change your image titles to have keywords in them because it's going to help you get found. So I'm going to go ahead and upload my image. And I'm going to, I'm going to change my title here, statement earrings inspired by and here I'm actually going to go a little longer, so statement earrings inspired by Calder Jewelry and Matisse paper cutouts. And I change my title and then I also put it in my Alt Text and I would just copy and paste this but I have something saved, something hidden on my Clipboard that I need in a minute, so we're just going to retype it, statement earrings inspired by Calder Jewelry and Matisse paper cutouts. And the other reason I'm doing this is because this will also then auto populate when I go to pin this on Pinterest., if I put that in my Alt Text. I'm going to put my image to just be centered and my image is going to link to nothing. Do not let your image link to a media file because then it links to a page of nothingness and then if someone pins from that page no one's ever going to end up back on your site. So if you don't have a product in your shop to link to, just make it link to None. I'm going to put it in here as Large. So then I'm going to write a little paragraph. Look at that magic, just a little paragraph here, what I want to talk about. And in this case, now I've got this little call to action, so make sure you're on my mailing list. So I'm going to turn, make sure you're on my mailing list, into a link that actually goes to a place they can sign up for my mailing list, slash list. I'm going to make that open in a new tab because I want them to stay on my blog and that's just the link to my MailChimp form. And then, because I wanted to, I'm going to add that second image, so I'm going to upload that file as well. I'm going to open this one. We're going to do the same thing, so we're going to say, we won't actually point out that this is a fake plant because I can't keep anything alive. (laughs) So we're going to say Monstera plant studio, studi-o jewelry inspiration, go ahead, we're going to put that in our Alt Text as well. We're going to insert into our post. I'm going to go ahead and just, boom, save draft. And the only other thing that I would personally do here is I like my images width-wise to be a little bit smaller than the default, so I'm actually, if I had a calculator up here I would do just a quick little math and make them 500 wide, it's just a personal preference thing, but quite frankly if we look at our preview, this is totally fine, the way it is, right, with that blog post. So I'm just going to go ahead and hit Publish. Look at that, we just made a blog post. It can be that simple, right? I mean you guys should still stick around for the rest of the class because we're going to talk about way more things like topic ideas and optimization, but literally it could be that simple. So any questions about that? See how magically easy that was? I have one, when I was on WordPress I noticed, I thought I read somewhere that having the Alt Text the same as the title, I was worried that Google might think it was spammy because they were the same, or like they say if you repeat stuff, but that's OK with that, it's not? I mean if you really want to change it. So I actually never even filled in the Alt Text for a long time, I just changed the title and then I noticed that Pinterest started pulling differently, so now I put it in the Alt Text. OK. So like if you want to use the phrasing a little bit different, it's probably fine. And it's possible, like Google doesn't like a lot of repetition, but at the end of the day, like, it's not. That big of a deal? Yeah, it's nothing I would stress out over personally. It's a lot of work. Yeah.