Posted: 27th October 2015
Take one CV writer, one environmental consultant and a producer of fine curry. Mix well. Add a luxury Shropshire bed and breakfast and a large spoonful of WiRE at its best. A blog about my blogging journey!
Well – it was a recipe for success! And it came in the form of an excellent session which I attended with colleagues from WiRE at the Blogging for Business workshop in Newcastle-under-Lyme yesterday – one of the suite of free digital technology workshops available through the WiRE Women in Broadband Challenge. (Thank you, Fiona and the WiRE team.). Karen Thorne of the luxurious Hopton House Bed and Breakfast in Shropshire – and an expert blogger – did a brilliant job as our session leader (Thank you, Karen) in the three hours available to make sure we came away with plenty of practical and helpful advice so we could get started straightaway.
Workshop Content
We covered a huge amount including identifying your target market, types of content, structures, headings, keywords and phrases, photos and links – as well as how to make our blogs interesting for our reader. Also, and particularly important for all businesses, we looked at how to become more effective bloggers so that more traffic is driven to our website.
My Top Tips
Here are three of my favourite tips:
1. put links into your blogs as Google likes links (make sure the box is ticked that opens the link in a new window so that people don’t have to leave your page)
2. use photos – they draw people in to read your content
3. summarise with a call-to-action
Who else was there?
Apart from learning new skills, one of the great pleasures of attending a WiRE workshop is meeting other women in business.
I can introduce you to the two delegates sitting with me: Susanne and Lajina. In the photo above, I am on the left. In the centre is Susanne of 3 Green Rs, a Community Interest Company based in Newport, Shropshire, which works with businesses, schools and universities in the West Midlands, helping them with corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, community engagement, and providing practical advice to save money, waste, resources and time. Susanne also works with schools to improve their Ofsted ratings and to include sustainability throughout the curriculum.
Lajina, on the right, from Telford, runs Masala Magic which offers the wonderful Masala Magic Pots (“all the spices you need to create perfect curries in one pot“), Indian cookery lessons for adults and children, buffets and corporate team building events.
Whilst we work in very different businesses, we found we had similar needs and questions to ask about how to become better at blogging.
So what next?
My next job is to post links to this blog from social media. Wish me luck!
What do you think?
Well, this is my first attempt at blogging using my new knowledge and skills. I have struggled with WordPress and haven’t been able to get the headings in the sizes and colours I wanted so I need to find out how to do that. Another thing I am stuck on is how to get the Comments function to work!
I would love to know what you think and would be delighted if you could give me your feedback by emailing me at judith@judithpoulteney.co.uk.
