How To Improve Your Pet Blog
Why blog about pets? Whether a newcomer to the world of blogging or a seasoned veteran, this is certainly a question that ruminates now and again. Other than the obvious, to disseminate information to inform, educate, enlighten, or otherwise help folks learn, what are the advantages of blogging in the first place?
Dr. Lorie Huston is a veterinarian with over 20 years experience treating dogs and cats. She is currently practicing in Providence, Rhode Island. Lorie is an expert in pet health and pet care in addition to being a talented writer and blogger. She blogs at the Pet Health Care Gazette but is widely published throughout the web. She writes at About.com in the area of veterinary medicine and is the feature writer for pet care at Suite101.com. She is also the National Pet Health Examiner at Examiner.com and the pet columnist at Untrained Housewife.com. Pretty busy with all those blogs, isn’t she? When she spoke at the 2012 BlogPaws conference in Salt Lake City, Lorie had these blogging tips to share…
Blogging gives you a space which you own along with a search engine optimization advantage that a static website cannot. Lorie shared that according to HubSpot, updating a business blog just once a week can increase leads by up to 77 percent. Are you trying to monetize your pet blog in some capacity? Then you, indeed, are a business. According to Technorati, there are 158 million blogs (yes, million). A total of 70 million are on WordPress.
So how to find new traffic? According to Lorie’s fab presentation:
Know the different between organic listings and paid listings in SEO. Organic listing are determined by Google based on relevance to search inquiry and are free listings. Paid listings like Google adwords allow you to choose keywords, place a bid and the higher bids are placed near the top and pay per click.
Regarding SEO, did you know?
Once you’ve waded through the SEO rivers and get a feel for what works and what doesn’t, conquering social media should be a part of your overall blogging game plan. Lorie suggested not doing a hard sell. Start conversations, provide information and make friends online. Monitor yoiur stats and start determing the best times to posts along with types of posts. Lorie recommends Facebook insights and Tweriod.com for Twitter.
More Social Media Tips and Tricks
Don’t get overwhelmed by social media (and who amongst us hasn’t felt that way)? No need to maintain a presence on every outlet in the world. Be useful on things like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. LinkedIn works well for B2B and with peers. Take advantage of Google Plus with the Google Author Markup. Don’t know about it? There’s one for your to-do list courtesy of Lorie.
What About Guest Posting on Other Blogs?
Yes!
Finally, make your posts easy to read. Lorie recommends short posts of 400-800 words, short paragraphs, the use of subheadings and bullet points in an easy-to-read font. No one likes to visit a website or blog that is cluttered and hard to read.
Really great article! One of my clients is a pet store, and this is a great article to share with them on the why and how of blogging — thanks!
You are welcome. Lorie is a valued resource and very knowledgeable. Feel free to join our community, too.
Those are some great tips from Lorie’s presentation. One of the other blogs that Lorie writes to is Social-Savvy-Pets.com. If you follow that site Lorie gives out tons of great tips on how to improve your blog. They are great tips not only for pet blogs, but any kind of blog.
These are great tips. What would you recommend as a knock out combination for a pet blog’s social media presence? Just Twitter and Facebook, or is it a must to sign up to all of them?
San Diego Dog Groomer, personally I try to learn as much as I can and focus on a few social media networks rather than be small ripple in dozens of them. Really good question and one we hear a lot at BlogPaws.
Nice information.Keep sharing more information.
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great post .its really useful for me .keep it up
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