Before trying Quora I knew about it, but I’d never really used it. So why did I decide to give it a try?

My blog was up and running and that was great. I had also tried Linked In’s publishing feature, but I found after an initial burst of readership, the things I published on Linked In didn’t get continual traffic.

Here are some of the qualities of Quora that put in on my A-List for bloggers:

#1. It Feels Good To Engage With the Quora Community

Quora is built around a community. It’s a community that likes to ask questions, as well as a community that likes to write. The platform, its incentives and its feedback mechanisms are based on rewarding people (not in a financial way, but in an intrinsic way) for their ability to create responses to questions that are important to others. Because Quora is a content platform built on a community it feels meaningful. This is a subtle but important difference for authors. Authors on Quora aren’t posting purely to get likes and shares. They’re posting to get these things, plus direct feedback from their audience which is delivered through upvotes and comments. The content that is most useful to others gets rewarded by a quick rise to the top.

#2. A Great Way to Figure Out What Content Works

Writing is often a trial and error experience. When we publish posts on a blog we can receive feedback through readers’ comments. If you have a tremendously popular blog (like Michael Hyatt’s for example), you may receive comments thick and fast. But this doesn’t always occur. That’s where Quora comes in. As a platform it’s a great way for writers to test content ideas and get continuous feedback on them, because the audience for the platform is continually reading and exploring. Using this feedback writers can then evaluate which of their posts resonates most with audiences.

#3. Start Writing By A Question That Inspires You

Thousands of questions are asked on Quora every day. Writers can respond with a short paragraph or a long-form article. Unlike blogging, where it’s often encouraged to write a minimum of 300 words, this limitation doesn’t exist on Quora. Whether writers have five minutes or fifty, there’s always time to create a response. This gives writers more freedom to write responses to whatever question inspires them. Some of the articles on this blog started as Quora responses, such as 5 Ways to Learn and Remember Anything.

#4. Responses Are Continually Read

I’ve published on other platforms before, and have found that once an entry is published, it has an initial burst of traffic, then the traffic quickly trails away. My experience with Quora is very different. If you respond to a topic that is has many followers, your writing will continue to receive readers over long periods of time. You may get a big spike at the start, you may not, but you will have an ongoing readership if it’s quality content. This simply isn’t true of all platforms.

#5. You Can Republish Content

As a Quora writer, your content is your own. You can even select if the content you publish on Quora can be republished or not on other sites. Whatever you chose, if you publish something on Quora and then in six months wish to publish it on your blog, you are free to do so.

#6. Some Responses May Be Republished on Major Platforms

Quora has a content publishing team. This team is responsible for seeking out good content that is published on the platform, and considering this for editorial on some of Quora’s partner sites, which include Inc.com and Huffington Post. If the publishing team like specific content, they may contact the author to seek their permission for republishing.  Whether the author chooses to republish or not, it is always nice feedback to receive.

I hope you found this post useful in thinking about whether you might give Quora a try.

The post 6 Reasons Why Every Blogger Should Consider Quora appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

So I went overseas for 15 months. I remember backpacking through Turkey with a student archaeologist, walking through Alhambra in Spain before it became the set for Game of Thrones, the smell of Italian coffee in a small hostel in Rome. It was an incredible life experience.

When I returned I realised I had to work. So in my early twenties I started a job. I worked for the money.

A few years later I started thinking beyond a job. I wanted a career. I picked up some more study. I decided to specialise in digital. I did things to get ahead.

As social media boomed I started a blog. I participated on Twitter. I did all the right things on Linked In. Everything ran like clock work. I posted regularly. I shared regularly.

I scoured news feeds until late into the evening. I read ‘how to’ tips on Copyblogger. I learnt all I could about successful digital content.

Then several years ago I realised I’d settled into a routine. Lots of time writing. Lots of time scheduling posts.

When I thought about it, I realised the routine I had settled into could have easily been boring.  But it wasn’t. I always found something interesting in writing.

Yet there were people I knew who hadn’t found it inspiring it all.  Many of them had started a blog or ran an online business where digital content was important.  And after a year or two they told me writing content had become a real drag.

This is every blogger’s digital content dilemma. When we write online content for the sake of sharing or winning traffic, and not to express ourselves….we can easily find ourselves in a bind.

Suddenly in this scenario the content is driving us and we’re not driving the content.

It’s an easy trap to fall into.

My younger self loved to explore the world. He would wake up and decide where he wanted to catch the train to that day. So I try to do the same with my content.

I ask questions about what I write. Is this different or unique in some way? Will this content appeal to my audience? Do I want to write about this? Does writing this help me express myself?

The first two questions are relevant to the audience.  The second two are relevant to the content creator.

When we write like this our writing gives us energy, instead of taking it away.

It’s not always easy to answer these questions. But when we can answer ‘yes’ to all four, we know we’re on the right side of the content dilemma. Our content strategy will have the best chance of success because there’s something in it for the audience as well for ourselves.

When we write like this our writing gives us energy, instead of taking it away.  Energy is a strange thing to talk about when it comes to writing good digital content. Yet it’s fundamental for success.

The vast majority of blogs take years before they start to see real results from organic traffic.  A well executed content strategy full of great content ideas is more like running a marathon than a sprint. This is why its so important to be inspired by what we write.

The post Do You Face Every Blogger’s Digital Content Dilemma? appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

All of my blogs have run on WordPress. I’ve been amazed by the developments with this tool.  Wordpress has truly established a publishing platform for people to quickly and easily access to become authors.

Since I started my blog there have been 5 wordpress plugins that have exceeded my expectations. These plugins have delivered consistent value to me and thousands of other bloggers, so I thought I would share them with you. Whether you’re starting a blog or curating new content to extend your blog, these may be useful to you too.

#1: Yoast SEO

YoastSEO helps you understand and improve all aspects of your site’s SEO. The plugin conducts an analysis of the content of your posts and pages, and recommends areas where you can optimise this content for SEO. I personally find the traffic light system (shown below) incredibly useful, so that I can quickly prioritise what is needed to improve my site’s performance. As well as an auditing tool for SEO friendliness, the plugin provides a feedback loop to you while you create content, which influences the content you write so you can achieve better SEO results.

#2 Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security by ELI

This plugin automatically removes threats and back-doors from your site. With any publishing platform that is plugin based, there is always the risk for the platform or plugins to become outdated. When WordPress plugins are outdated they can be at risk of a malware attack. Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security will scan your site for known threats, automatically correct issues where your site may be compromised, and also quarantine any threats so they’re out of harms way. At the time of writing this plugin had over 100,000 downloads and a rating of 4.9 stars. It is well supported by its developer and, from my use over an extended period, receives regular updates..

#3: Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is free and open source software. The plugin will scan your site and compare the source code of your wordpress installation with official files, to see if any code has been maliciously changed. Wordfence Security also scans files, comments and posts for any URLs that may be listed in Google’s Safe Browsing list. The plugin will also monitor live traffic of your site, block specific IPs, and (very important) lock out IPs from attempting to login to your site. The plugin will even email you to notify you of important events relating to your sites security (eg. when it blocks an IP or a plugin is outdated).

#4: Jetpack by WordPress.com

Jetpack is created by Automatic and is a staple of many wordpress blogs. It integrates both with WordPress.com and can also be used on standalone, self-hosted sites (as I use it presently). The plugin has many customization, traffic, content, and performance features that make it very valuable. For example, it’s Photon tool will optimise the archival and delivery of images, to increase the performance of your site. Publicize will provide useful ‘share buttons’ to increase the likelihood for your posts to be shared. If you’re not using an analytics package (such as Google Analytics), Jetpack also comes with Site Stats, which will give you great analytics without the fuss of having to integrate code with your pages or verify your site.

#5 of WordPress Plugins: W3 Total Cache

One of the important measures for Search Engines these days is the speed of your site. According to the plugin’s creators, W3 Total Cache can improve site performance by up to 10x. That’s a pretty dramatic uplift for anyone viewing your blog posts! At the time of writing the plugin had over 1 million downloads, which reflects the popularity and trust the wordpress community place in this plugin to improve performance.

I hope these WordPress plugins are useful to you.  If you have enjoyed this post or have your own learnings to share, I invite you to leave a comment below.

The post Why Bloggers Love These 5 WordPress Plugins appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Tags on WordPress blogs are one of the tools available to do just this.

In this post we’ll look at several helpful techniques to help bloggers manage their Tags.

A Bit About Tags vs Categories

Much has been written about Tags and Categories for WordPress blogs.

According to Wordtracker, failure to use Tags and Categories correctly is just one of the more serious mistakes that can lead to poor Searcg Engine Optimization (SEO).

You can think about Categories like the Table of Contents for your website. And Tags are like an Index.

The benefit of an Index is that it allows you to reference connected themes across many difference types of content.

How I Use Categories and Tags on My Blog

I use Categories to create focus on subjects of interest. I have categories like Digital Marketing, Foresight & Strategy, Leadership, and Productivity. These are all subjects I like to write about on a regular basis.

I use Tags to highlight processes that cut across these subjects. For example, ‘How To Tips’ is a Tag that is relevant to the post “Warning: 7 Headline Techniques To Explode Web Traffic“. This article is under the Category of Digital Marketing. And I’ve also Tagged the same post with the term ‘Copywriting’.

That’s part of the value of Tags…you can create multiple references to the one post. In theory we could also assign multiple Categories to posts, but in practice we rarely assign a post to more than two categories. Tags are quite different….and I have some posts that have five or more tags.

WordPress automatically creates new pages for tagged content in the form of an ‘archive’ page. So any tag you create will automatically generate a new page of content that pulls together any post that is tagged with that term. Here’s an example of my ‘How To Tips’ page.

Search Engines see these pages, which is why they’re valuable for SEO. Here’s an example how the same Tag and  its Archive Page is indexed.

But people who visit these pages also want to be able to find relevant content that is appropriate for the tag.

For these reasons it’s worth thinking carefully about how we apply Tags.

Balance Your Content by Managing Your Tags

Rather than applying tags randomly to a blog, I find it helps to be intentional about how we apply tags.

I have about 30 tags I use regularly.

Now, you could have thousands of tags if you wanted to, and there would be nothing wrong with this.

Personally, because tags are very visible in the navigation of my blog, I’ve chosen to have a small group of Tags. This helps me focus on what content I wish to create. It also helps my audience, because these same tags show in the navigation of my blog and can be used to filter content.

How to track the Tags you Use

I track these tags through a content spreadsheet. So, for every post I write, I add the title of the post to the sheet and allocate tags.

This helps me know whether I’m biasing my writing toward specific themes. One of the benefits of this is that you can see in one place all the content you’ve written, and how this content spreads across a variety of tags.

Every week I look at this sheet to define what content I’ll write next. Basically, I check which tags need a bit more love, so I can intentionally balance out content on my blog.

Download the Tag Management Template

You can download the template I use to keep track of Tags.

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Use this if you’re just starting your blog to map out the tags you wish to use. Or, if you already have a blog and don’t yet use tags, you can use this template to create a list of tags for your existing posts. Then all you need to do is add these tags to your posts in WordPress.

I hope you found this post useful. If so, please consider sharing your thouhts by leaving a comment below.

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The post How To Use Tags To Boost SEO on Your WordPress Blog appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

You’ve been writing and publishing a post a week. Heck sometimes you’ve managed two a week.

But the cold of winter started, and so did all your content ideas. Suddenly that dance your fingers did over the keyboard is little more than a crawl. Yikes!

So what are some of the ways you can put that spark back into your writing?

Here are just some of the sources I turn to when I’m stuck for new content ideas. These directions have steered me out of more than one corner, and I hope they help you too.

1. Read Your Favorite Blogs for Inspiration

Over the years I’ve compiled a list of my favorite websites and blogs. These are sites I find inspirational, that have things I love to read. When I’m stuck, I read the content on these sites. It helps me draw connections between different sets of content. And this gives me directions for articles that I could write about to share my own perspective.

2. Read Your Favorite Books

With much of the world now virtual, it’s easy to forget how much value books held for us. There’s nothing better than diving deeply into a great book. I’ve got many books with dog-eared pages where I’ve marked something I read something that moved me. Sometimes I skim through these pages to re-discover those themes that inspired me…and then I write a post about a connected theme.

3. Search Your Experiences

We all have a wealth of experience. Whether we’ve become experts in our field, or have developed a wisdom through trial and error across disciplines, it’s easy to under-rate the knowledge we possess. Maybe you hiked a mountain?  Maybe you coach a project to success that was on the rails?  A useful exercise is to write down ten experiences that come to mind where you’ve learnt something personally or professionally that made a big difference to you. You’ll be amazed by what you could share with people…and what could be a great post!

4. Look Through Old Note Books

I’ve a stack of old note books. They have bullet points, and sketches, and notes about everything from business decisions to life observations. Sometimes I go through these note books and find general lessons that would be useful to share.

5. Observe What’s Going On, Right Now

When we find ourselves in those times when writing is difficult, it’s easy to focus our energy internally and wonder why we’re struggling with content. Instead, turn your energy outward, and use every sense you have to observe what’s going on around you.

For example, if you’re in a business meeting, observe the pace of the conversation, and interaction between people. This could be a great post about ‘7 steps to facilitating a meeting’.

If you’re on a train, watch how people are going about their daily life, and whether they’re working or at leisure. This could be a post about ‘how to work and telecommute all in one’ or ‘how to stay calm in crowded situations’.

Reality is an excellent source of ideas, whenever we can take the time to look closely.

6. Read ‘Question & Answer’ Sites

So often a great blog post starts with a good question. And we never need look further for interesting questions than sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers. I like to scan through these sites to get a sense for the type of questions others are asking. You can use these questions as inspiration for your own blog post. You could even respond to these questions as a first draft of your own article. Users on these sites are very active in their feedback, so it’s also a nice way to receive feedback on your writing.

7. Read A Conversation on Twitter

Twitter is a great place to do a pulse check on current or trending conversations. Use Twitter to do hashtag searches on topics of interest to help you define your next blog post.

For example, today I did a search for #UserExperience. Here is one of the results:

Rachel Hood ‏@Rach_Hood
Always nice to hear good user feedback on an app you designed over a year ago! #userexperience

Just reading this gives me several directions for new posts, like:

“Why User Research is Still Important, Even 1 Year After You’ve Launched Your Product”
“Positive Feedback – How To Keep Designers Connected With the Experiences They Create”
“10 Tools To Capture Customer Feedback Long After The Product Is Launched”

8. Go Through Old Presentations

Now I know not many of us write powerpoint slides. But in many organisations, we spend a lot of time writing presentations. It’s hard to believe many of us have stored some of our best ideas within the format of a landscape (maybe…oh no…animated) slide. So flicking through those presentations you’ve long forgotten about may just remind you about that inspirational model you dreamed up which would be just perfect for a blog post.

9. Check Your Own Social Feed

Our social feed is a history of what has interested us. Why not mine that data for content ideas? I post regularly on Twitter and LinkedIn. By going through the content I’ve shared on these social sites I can reflect on all the stories that captured my attention. Sometimes I find themes that give me great content ideas.

10. Ask “What Was I Doing X Years Ago”?

If you’re stuck for an idea, ask yourself what you doing 5, 10, or 15 years ago. And then ask yourself what you’ve learnt since then to get to where you are today.

Another way to think about it is to fill in the blanks of this headline:

10 Things I’ve Learnt In [Months/Years] In Becoming [What You Are Now]

It’s a simple but a very powerful technique to reflect on what you’ve learnt, and what experience you have to share with others. And it works effectively for shot or long periods of time, for example:

10 Things I’ve Learnt In 10 Weeks In Becoming First Time Blogger
10 Things I’ve Learnt In 20 Years In Becoming the CEO of a Multinational Business
10 Things I’ve Learnt Since Highschool In Becoming a Person People Count On

Get the idea?

If you’re stuck for content directions for your blog, I hope this post has been of use.

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The post 10 Ways to Create Content Ideas for Your Blog appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

In the last few years blogging has changed the media landscape, allowing individuals to distribute their own news and opinions to potentially massive audiences.

Maybe you’ve asked yourself if you should start a blog to share your specific knowledge and expertise?

Here are 7 reasons how you could benefit from starting a blog based on my own experiences.

#1. Fine-tune your interests

Blogging is a great way to hone our interests. When I started blogging I thought there were specific subjects I wanted to write about. But, just by creating a weekly blog post, I quickly discovered certain topics I enjoyed writing about more than others. By blogging we can learn more about what really interests and inspires us.

#2. Improve your writing skills

Effective writing skills are one of the most sought after skills today. So much of modern life is about writing – sending emails to friends or customers, writing reports, creating executive summaries. The practice of writing regular blog posts is an opportunity to refine these skills.

#3. Reflect on your most important learnings

Have you ever had a moment when you learnt something incredible?  You probably wanted to write it down and make sure you remembered it.  So often though we forget to record these learnings.

I keep a notepad of my big learnings (whether it’s a seminar I attended, or something a friend taught me). When I start a blog post, I look at these notes and select a big learning to write about.  Through the process of creating the blog post, I reflect on the learning, which then helps me remember it.

#4. Connect with others

So many people have immense knowledge and expertise to share, yet so often this information is only shared with a select few (work colleagues or family). Starting a blog is an opportunity to share this knowledge with many others. And you never know, this could become hundreds of thousands instead of a handful of people. Better still, if you run a business, setting up a business blog is a great way to stay connected with your customers.

#5. Build your profile

If you do work in a specific niche and wish to build a profile for yourself, blogging is a great way to do this.

As an example, Daniel W. Drezner teaches international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His blog was voted one of Time Magazine’s best blogs of 2012.

#6. Be surprised

By writing a blog, you may find yourself surprised by the feedback you receive. At a get together recently, someone I had never met before then told me they read one of my posts and it had given them a sense of calm and encouragement to tackle new challenges. The feedback surprised me and made me happy.  It’s a great feeling to receive a nice surprise now and then, isn’t it?

#7. Learn online skills

In just 20 years, 40% of the world’s entire population is now online. WordPress, one of the world’s best-known blogging tools, powers 17% of all internet websites. Just as you’re reading this you can be sure online will remain one of the fastest growing areas of all world economies in the near future.

By starting a blog, you’ll develop online skills which are useful for any career (whether you’re working for an organisation or running your own business).

Question: Have you ever thought about starting a blog or do you already run your own blog? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

The post 7 Reasons to Start A Blog appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.