Welcome to another edition of Sites Weekly.
Last week, I teased a fun bit of news: we are launching a new podcast.
And that podcast has now launched!
It’s called Sites, and it will allow us to deliver weekly bits of audio insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website that we also cover here in Sites Weekly.
So, like wine and cheese, Sites and Sites Weekly pair quite well together.
Click here to subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes).
You can also check out the first four episode pages here:
- The Simple 3-Step Process to a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
- How Great Design Can Help Your Content Marketing
- Is WordPress Hosting Really That Important?
- The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy
If you decide to listen, let me know what you think.
Now on to this week’s links …
Content: Could you deliver more to your audience?
Do you like short blog posts? I like short blog posts. Especially when they deliver a cutting, essential point in only a few words.
Seth Godin writes short blog posts that do that. 🙂
Below, I’ve linked to one that is just 42 words. It’ll take you about 16.5 seconds to read. And it will deliver an important lesson about how to make the content part of your content marketing as effective in the long run as possible.
Side note: My description of Seth’s blog post is now longer than the blog post itself. And nowhere near as profound. That’s the way it usually goes …
Design: Want to design better? Write more
This is yet another example of the overlap between content and design.
In this post, UX designer Alana Brajdic outlines 10 reasons why all designers should actually spend more time writing.
Here is the reason I found most compelling:
“Not only is writing useful for internal communications, but it’s a UX role in itself. Companies such as Google and Amazon employ UX writers. It’s their role to create copy that helps a user understand the task at hand.”
Which of her 10 reasons speaks the most to you?
10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More
Technology: Need some help getting more out of Google Analytics?
I often feel like I do.
Despite having used Google Analytics for the better part of a decade now, I still don’t always feel fully comfortable in its interface. I always wonder if my methods are woefully inefficient or even wrong.
So I found this post by Alex Birkett helpful. He outlines several important basics for how to get the most out of Analytics itself, and then how to add a few simple free tools (Google Sheets and Data Studio) to improve your reporting.
Google Analytics Reporting: How To Communicate Insights With Dashboards
Strategy: Hitting “Publish” is just the beginning
The reason why you create content is so that people see it and act on it. If you already have a huge audience, then you may get a lot of action simply by hitting “Publish.”
But what did it take to get there?
And what will it take to continue growing your audience?
You have to continue to reach new people with your content. And that means having a defined strategy for what you will do with content after it’s published.
The link below contains a SlideShare presentation (only 37 slides, so it’s a breeze to go through) with a series of eight tips, any one of which will help you distribute your content further and wider.
Check it out and see which of the tips you could apply to your own content right away.
8 Distribution Tips That Will Help Your Content Soar After Pressing Publish
Also, here is an additional article I found that may not be of immediate importance, but is important to read nonetheless: Is retargeting dying?.
And finally, one last reminder, don’t forget to check out the just-released Sites podcast. New episodes come out on Tuesdays (although next week’s will be on Monday, ahead of the July 4th holiday).
Click here to subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts.
I’ll be back with a new edition of Sites Weekly next Wednesday.
Keep building.