Content Relationship

I cannot speak for you, but as I blog and create content I do not think about the relationships between my content as much as I should. I try and categorize content best I can, but these categorizations are hard to do because some of our information might belong to the same category but it can be so different than the other information within that category. I’m sure most of you have seen “Related Content” or “Related Topics” widgets that will recommend other articles. These are great tools, but these tools are dynamic and most people install them and ignore their results. If leveraged properly the relationships that content have with one another can create a usability heaven.

How Chain Blogging Can Fix Common Usability Problems

One key to creating a successful website is your ability to keep your visitors on your site. Some things that make or help visitors leave are:

• Articles that are too long.
• Unhelpful articles.
• External links.
• Poor internal navigation.
• No reason to stay.

There are more things that help visitors leave, but those are the things I want to focus on. I want to recommend some strategies and a technique that may help promote better readership, longer visits, more content consumption, and better usability. I call this technique “Chain Blogging”.

Issue 1 – Articles are too long.

Think of someone who smokes. Most internet surfers are addicted. When they have some free time they have to get themselves some internet. They find themselves with an extra five minutes. They want to find something fast and be able to read something quick. Cigarettes are only so long and only have so much that can be smoked out of them. Well these internet addicts are the same way. They have limited time and need some satisfaction. Short and to the point information is very satisfying to readers. Leave out the fluff. The fluff can make a great topic for an additional or supporting blog post.

Issue 2 – Unhelpful articles.

This one is pretty self explanatory. If your article isn’t helpful in any way, don’t expect much traffic. I know at times you find yourself blogging to blog, but try and make every little article that you make helpful in some way.

Issue 3 – External links.

When I read blogs I will click on links that help with the details. If you are smart about things, you can replace those external links with internal links to pages where you can offer the same information. This allows a “series” type of relationship between blog posts. Many of these series can relate one to another. You may think, this is starting to sound like a wiki. Well duh, it is organizing your blog or content in the same way that a wiki does. Remember to give credit where credit is due, but you can do this with footnotes or create an external resources section referencing these articles, much like wikis do.

Issue 4 – Poor internal navigation.

Poor internal navigation can lead visitors to dead ends or information that doesn’t help support the initial article that lead them to your site in the first place. If you can feed the topic and support the topic that is on their mind, you will have a better chance at keeping them on your site. Issue 4 can be resolved by implementing the same strategies alluded to in Issue 3, creating article relationships. By linking to other internal pages you encourage users to stay on your site. They become aware that your site contains many resources when it comes to the specific topic they entered your site seeking.

Issue 5 – No reason to stay.

I think you probably understand this issue. If you have done things right by resolving all the previous “Issues” we’ve discussed, you’ll find Issue 5 resolved. Giving good relevant content will keep visitors on your site every time.

Search Engine Benefits

Since we discussed the benefits to our users for resolving these issues for site usability, I thought we could discuss the search engine benefits of resolving these issues.

• Great relevant internal linking strategy.
• Gives you the ability to focus each article on a single keyword phrase.
• More content to crawl creating a broader search reach.
• Easy linkable resources for others to link to.

Benefit 1 – Great relevant internal linking strategy.

Relevance is a major element in link building. This strategy when done properly can make for extremely relevant links. The search engines were created to help people find what they are looking for, this strategy helps promote that right within your site. It helps to keep visitors on your site and create an impression that your site has a lot of relevant information on the topics it covers.

Benefit 2 – Gives you the ability to focus each article on a single keyword phrase.

I have found that a majority of my search engine rankings tie directly to the phrases that are used in my “title” and in my URL or “slug”. When you try to create content focusing on too many keywords you aren’t given the ability to nurse all the keyword phrases as they a need to be. By writing multiple articles with a single keyword focus it allows you to do this. It allows you to make sure that every keyword you are trying to focus on appears in both the title and URL.

Benefit 3 – More content to crawl creating a broader search reach.

More content can equals more results. This can help to get the desired “double” search engine listing results that many people seek after, along with Sitelinks in Google’s listings. It’s a matter of more is better in this situation. Remember you can always write other articles that piece it altogether after you have put together all the pieces.

Benefit 4 – Easy linkable resources for others to link to.

When I link to external resources I like to link directly to articles that are straight to the point at explaining what I need help explaining. When you create short to the point articles it makes people that link like I do more likely to link to you.

Operation

I thought I would discuss operational benefits to following this blogging/content management strategy but there are a few difficulties in managing it this way too. So I’ll discuss them all at once.

Quicker Blog Postings

By focusing on shorter, more straight to the point blog posts this allows you to publish and create blog posts more quickly. This is great because it can allow you to create a lot more blog posts in a day.

Easy Topical Decisions

If you have a hard time trying to figure out what you are going to blog about, this strategy should make things easier. By continuing off of the previous blog posts topic, it makes it easier to decide what to write about. While writing some blog post you’ll even discover other ideas you’ve missed and may want to link to later when you write supporting articles.

Requires More Upfront Organization

Using the “Chain Blogging” strategy does require a lot more upfront planning. You have to think a lot further ahead up front on what direction your blogging is going to go. What is going to be discussed. Things of that nature. You can always drop a random blog post here and there but it’s best to keep to the strategy.

Requires a Better Understanding of All Your Content

If you are going to be referencing other articles you’ve written it will require you to know your content and where to link to. It will require good planning while writing your articles.

May Require Retroactive Edits

It would benefit web masters to retroactively find articles that they can add links to. You may find yourself creating additional content that relates to previous articles that have been written. Creating retroactive links can help your new articles because old article already have credibility and have rankings in the search engines. Locating articles can be easily done through your site search.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve learned from this big long article. I know this article goes against all that I wrote above but I thought it would be easier all at once. This strategy may not work for every article, but where it will work, it can help out tremendously. So the key things that I hope you’ve gotten out of this article are that even though it may require better management of content, you can use large quantities of relevant posts using relevant internal linking strategies to influence your site credibility and web relevance.

Input Anyone?

Please leave your input and feedback below. What has worked for you? Are you already doing something similar? Are you a better SEO than me and have better suggestions about this strategy? I am no SEO prodigy and I’m sure I can learn a lot from you as readers. Please contribute by commenting to help increase the value of this article.

Brainstorm | Keywords | Research | Hook | Write | Publish | Share | Moderate | Your Input

1. Brainstorm Topics

My first recommendation is to try and determine what you would like to write about. Writing a blog post is much easier if you are excited or interested in the topic you are writing about. I recommend writing about things you’ve always wanted to know, things that have been on your mind lately, things that you have a lot of experience with, things that are in the news, pretty much anything you won’t fall asleep researching or writing about.

2. Identify Keywords

If you are looking for specific ranking then you need to use specific keywords. Identify 3 keywords you would like to get ranking for based on your keywords research. If you need help researching keywords I recommend reading an interview by Nate Moller with Mat Siltala about Keyword Research.

3. Research Topics

I recommend reading at least 3 to 5 articles about the topic you have decided to write about. Often time a good blog post does nothing more than connect the dots. Then when writing your post you will have some references that you can refer back to and potentially create some connections through trackbacks and/or commenting.

1. Reference these articles when you write your own, if the blog supports trackbacks, the blog post will create a link directly back to your article.
2. Reference the authors by name giving them credibility and also creating a potential friendship for the personal credit.
3. Leave comments and reference the site you are writing the blog post on when it ask for your website.
4. Create a link in your comments when it makes sense and doesn’t present itself as spam.

4. Choose your Hook

If you plan on doing any type of link baiting, determine what type of link baiting hook you are going to use. (The Art of Link Baiting)

1. Resource Hook
2. News Hook
3. Contrary Hook
4. Attack Hook
5. Humor Hook

(What is Link Baiting – Fishing For Traffic)

5. Write your Post

This is my recommended way to write the actual post.

1. Write a draft or write it in Word or another word processor.
2. Write it as if you are talking to someone in simple terms that make it easy to understand. (Some blog posts are nothing more than translated blog posts that others have written.)
3. Don’t worry about length, just understand what you are trying to explain and explain it until it makes sense.
4. Correct spelling and grammatical errors.
5. Reference other blogs as discussed in “Research Topics“.
6. Determine if the length of the article is too long.
7. “Chop it Up” into series if it’s too long and makes sense to.
8. “Incorporate” your “Identified” keywords.
9. Create Anchor links in the page to make it easy to skip to specific sections if it’s a long article.

(Effective Business Blogging)

6. Publish your Post

1. Identify when you would like the post to be published.
2. Enter the post into your blog, (WordPress).
3. Format the text to display as you would like it to.
   1. Bold words that make the article easy to scan.
   2. Emphasize the words that make the article easy to scan.
   3. Use heading tags where it makes sense, (h1, h2…)
   4. Link all words and phrases that need to be linked.
4. Find a related image to create more appeal and to also help with the social networks that like to pick up thumbnails when promoting.
5. Publish

7. Share with Friends

Share with all your friends and associates within the different networks that you are a part of. You don’t necessarily need to “digg” them yourselves, but it doesn’t hurt if done in moderation.

8. Comment Moderation

Moderate the blog’s comments and reply to the comments that are left thanking them and answering any questions they might ask. Reply to any feedback that may be left. Modify the blog post or create a new blog post based on information that comes out of the post’s comments. A blog post can be evolved or can be improved upon with a different blog post.

What do you think?

This post is open to scrutiny and feedback. Please play devils advocate and/or leave your comments. What has worked best for you when posting blog articles? What would you do different. This post if based on my personal experience along with others that I have read and referenced above.

For example, I use Twitter and am connected pretty much all day to Twitter whether it’s on my phone or at my desk.  When someone Twitters a website, my tendency is to ignore that link.  I have found that if I go and read the article and I’m able to leave comments on that post, there are quite a few other people that are reading that post from Twitter and other social networks that have picked that article up. Next thing I know I’m getting traffic from all of the social traffic that the blog post has been receiving.

So not only do I gain traffic from Twitter itself, I’m able to leverage the followers that Tweet has, but I’m also able to push it on to Digg and/or Reddit and/or other networks and create more traffic for that post. It’s amazing how much traffic you can generate if you follow good quality commenting rules and promote articles that you have commented on.  I read two really good articles about quality commenting.

The first article was  4 Effective Ways to Comment on Different Blogs and the second one Formula for Effective Commenting state a lot of great tips. This is the condensed list of what I gathered from them both:

1. Find similar blogs so you can create relevant links and/or relevant traffic.
2. Add to the conversation, don’t just say “Nice Post”.
3. Only link to your blog or site when it makes sense.
4. Be different or intelligent when you comment.
5. Ask questions when commenting.  .
6. Answer questions that are asked.
7. Object appropriately, remember comments are moderated.
8. Join the conversation.
9. Keep comments short.
10. Be early in the comments.
11. Respond to comments about your comments.
12. Be funny.
13. Be real and genuine when commenting.
14. Keep commenting.
15. Keep a consistent identity so that you can build a reputation and people will recognize and trust your comments.

So the key to effective commenting is to comment in conjunction with social networking.

If you leverage other peoples friends and users by commenting on the things that they share, you can also gain a tremendous amount of traffic and potentially a larger following.