Creatives are unique in the fact that we get to showcase our work on a regular basis to our audience. It is unique to creatives because, let’s face it, most people aren’t able to share what they do day in and day out at work in the same way we are. Whether it’s because of client privacy privileges or their firm’s policies, they simply can’t advertise their ‘wins’ in the same way creatives can showcase theirs.
Blogging also allows us to connect with our audience in deeper ways beyond showing the world a recent session. It allows us to share our hearts, to encourage others, and to give practical advice which are all reasons that we chose to take a leap and commit to blogging everyday. If you are a creative and you aren’t blogging regularly, we couldn’t encourage you any more strongly than to start today! And with that encouragement, we wanted to share some useful blogging tools that have helped us get the most out of our efforts and protect our brand from potential distractions!
Search Engine Optimization
In a crowded internet world, being found among the busyness can seem impossible! So taking steps to be sure readers interested in your content can find it is crucial to your blog’s success. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an industry term for optimizing your content to be found by the different search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Our blog is a WordPress blog. It is simple, easy to manipulate to reflect any design, and a widely used platform which means it receives updates and plug-ins regularly. One useful tool we have found through WordPress is an SEO plug-in called Yoast! Yoast analyzes your blog post once it is complete and gives you tips and advice on how to make it more SEO friendly and even analyzes how reader friendly your content is!
Anti-Spam Filters
Unfortunately, making yourself more visible on the internet also means you are now more susceptible to unwanted spam! Spam can be anything from harmless attempts to push a product or website on your blog by entering it in the comments section to something more malicious like linking to a website with viruses and bots that would try to steal your information! The last thing we want to have happen to our loyal audience is to allow an environment where they may be taken advantage of! Having an anti-spam filter on your blog is essential to filtering out the majority of unwanted interaction on your blog and to prevent most attempts to use your blog as a platform to promote other products or websites.
We use Askimet Anti-Spam, another resource offered through WordPress. Askimet scales from a free personal use subscription to a full enterprise subscription based on your needs. It will flag posts that have all of the characteristics of spam and make sure they aren’t displayed on your website.
Turn On Comment Approval
Admittedly, this may be overkill, but we’ve never been characterized as ones who do things halfway! Our anti-spam filter does a fantastic job at removing 99.9% of spam attempts on our blog, but there are clever people who know how to manipulate and bypass filters out there. Again, we want our blog to be a place for people to come and hear us share our hearts, to encourage others, and to give practical advice, so the last thing we want is a potentially toxic comment or negative or inappropriate content being posted on our blog! Because we care about protecting that experience for everyone, we take the extra step of approving comments before they are live on our blog.
We recently had a comment come through that was not caught and flagged as spam. It didn’t have the normal spam characteristics of an obviously fake name, lots of weblinks and strange characters. Instead, it was just an inappropriate comment from someone that we felt would have eroded the safe feeling our audience has on our blog. To our knowledge, it wasn’t someone who truly follows us or has a vested interest in our business. Rather, it was someone just posting random content on blogs that probably thought they were being funny. It reaffirmed our decision to review comments as they come in, to make sure that they are just as encouraging and uplifting as we want to be on our blog.
The nice thing about WordPress is that you can set it up for manual comment approval, but also to automatically approve future comments from that person after they’ve initially been approved. So it helps to cut down on the amount of times we have to manually click ‘approve’ on comments, while also making sure that the people in our blog environment have the same intentions as we do!
We hope this helps you as you start your blog adventure! If you’re already blogging – good for you! Hopefully these tips will help you implement something new to your blog to make it an even more enjoyable experience!
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