One of the first questions that people ask when they are setting up a blog for their website is, “Where do I get content?” The answer is often right in front of their faces, in the form of their existing press releases, brochures, and other printed materials. Mequoda.com has published an excellent style article for turning this printed content into a blog post or page. I am going to elaborate on some of their points:

Titling, categorization and tagging rules for online publishing with Wordpress blogs

When publishers pull apart their archived content and start putting it up on their blog, they have a variety of style options to choose from when posting.

We recommend taking a little extra time to optimize your old articles (whether they are evergreen or not) in order to make that content as valuable to your blog (and audience) as possible.

The following style guide for unleashing your print archives into a blog is specific to Wordpress in terms of folksonomy, but can be applied to any type of blogging platform.

Rule #1: Include at least one primary or secondary keyword phrase in your blog titles and subhead.

Why? Because blog titles are so specific, you might choose to use a secondary keyword in your title (like “repurposed content” in the case of this article) and a primary in your subhead (like “online publishing”). If you want to get ranked on a keyword in search engines (and you do), this is your prime real estate to display them.

Keywords are very important, and the search engines parse your posts looking for the most important words in the text. It is important to highlight them. Which leads to:

Rule #2: Make sure your blog is set up to define your title and subhead in H tags.

Why? H1, H2 and H3 are highly regarded by Google as defining what a page is “about”.

In your “writing page” in WordPress there is a button in the menu bar titled “Paragraph”. In the drop-down menu you will see Heading 2 and Heading 3. I recommend that you use Heading 2 no more than once per page, and Heading 3 for your sub-headings. Edit your CSS to make these headings “pop”.

NOTE: Never use H1 in your content! That tag is reserved for the title of the page and you will be penalized by the search engines.

Examples:

This is H2/Heading 2

This is H3/Heading 3

Rule #4: Assign posts to a single category.

Why? From testing, it’s become abundantly clear that assigning single categories to articles boosts ranking on the category title. Hopefully your categories (or topics) are named as keywords that you want to be ranked on. This can also avoid duplicate content.

You should also keep in mind that your blog should have a few, very focused categories. If you write about cars, for example,you might use categories like Sedan, Coupe, Convertible, then use Tags for more specific topics like Corvette, BMW, and so on.

This is really great information for people that are looking to optimize their online content, and for more information like this, including audio and video with step-by-step instructions and real-life examples, see Writing for the Web, Inside and Out, by myself and Brad Shorr.

Sorry for not posting in a while, I have taken on a new gig as a restaurant manager at Wolfe’s Tavern in Wolfeboro, NH. I have been in the hospitality industry for 15 years, and was not looking to go back to it, but they needed some help.

The good news is that my GTD system has survived the transition and I am pretty confident that I will be able to get back on track with posting and finishing up my productivity e-book by the end of the month.

Right now I am pretty busy training some new staff, getting expenses in line, and creating a community for the restaurant (follow us on Twitter at @WolfeboroInn), we will be Tweeting about our specials and other cool stuff.

Thank you for your patience and support, I am looking forward to having some good, real-world examples on productivity in the workplace for you shortly. Have a great day, and let me know what kind of tips you might be looking for in your own work-life situation.

Valeria Maltoni has a brilliant post inCreating the Desire for News

Creating desire is equivalent to creating demand. If there is one lesson in new media and our life online, it is that time and time over we go back to the places where we find value, we refer them to our network, we are more likely to become involved with those spaces, the people in them, and the services and products they talk about.

Are we still not making good use of the depth, that third dimension of the Web that opens us through links? How about mapping the user experience? Do we connect the dots? What are the longstanding facts behind your product’s story? How do you get to the product in the first place? We are fascinated by the exploration of the journey, aren’t we? Is the community involvement ready for that part we don’t know about?

In talking with an experienced technology product development professional recently, we were saying that no new technology product works perfectly on day one. The beta phase, the moment when the product is released, is when we start the real development.

Her post is inspired by this one at Newsless: The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more important.

Note that when I say “news stories,” I mean an ongoing news topic, such as “health reform,” not a particular article. In fact, health reform’s been on my mind a lot recently, so perhaps it’s a good subject to help illustrate what I mean. I’ll start with the part of most news stories we get in spades:

WHAT WE GET: What just happened

Take a look at this Washington Post topic page on health reform. As I write, it includes a list of headlines signaling recent events in the health-care debate: several Democrats called the public plan essential, key senators are pushing cooperatives as an alternative, patients want more transparency on doctors’ links to Pharma, etc.

This stuff is what most news organizations consider the foundation of journalism: the news. To the extent that any of the other parts of a news story get traction, they must fit into a structure where the news is the main attraction.

Of course, this is also the most ephemeral piece of a news story. …  By October, this story will lose most of its present meaning.

Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns

Both writes discuss the very important parts that are missing from news stories of today: transparency and honesty. I have maintained for years that the big, corporate news orgs have willingly gone off the rails of objectivity while pretending to be objective and mainstream. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my biased look at the news just like anybody else. The difference is that I know my news source is biased, I know which way they are biased, and I accept their reportage in that context. I also go looking for other perspectives on the issue at hand, especially if it is a complex one.

Matt points out what is, in my opinion, the biggest weakness in modern journalism – and simultaneously the reason for the financial collapse of print news – WHAT WE MISS (2): How journalists know what they know.

This is a component of every news story that journalists tend not to provide for two reasons: 1) explaining how we get information disrupts our institutional authority and 2) we think it makes stories less interesting.

I think both assumptions are wrongheaded. Understanding how a news story came together is often a vital part of both understanding and enjoying that story.

I agree with Matt, and I will tell you why. Take a look at this: (Ridiculously funny movie, BTW)

This DVD comes with two discs, the movie itself on the first and on the second, commentary, behind the scenes footage, and bloopers. “So what?!?” I can hear you now, “They’ve been doing this for years.” Of course they have. Because the studios have learned a lesson that journalism hasn’t. People like stories, especially the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stuff. They also like to see mistakes, out-takes, and generally embarrassing moments captured forever on film.

But, Journalism is Serious Business

So are movies. The movie industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. An enterprise that once thought it might get destroyed by home video. So, rather than sit around waiting for extinction, the studios embraced video, started pushing small, not-likely-to-be-successful movies straight to video and offering special features with theatric releases. ( I know that I am simplifying things a bit here, it’s an illustration.)

This is part of the solution for journalism, especially online journalism, where news stories that get 2 minutes on TV or a couple of column-inches in the paper can be updated, expanded, and crowd-sourced via comments. Good journalists that are also good writers, good listeners, can create conversations with their readers – creating a place where readers would willingly pay to go in order to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ skinny on a story that interests them.

Keep “News” free, Sell the Backstory

Imagine this scenario as a news item:

Work-at-home-Mom Has Bad Experience with Major Appliance

An area woman had some difficulty with her washing machine recently. A brand new machine that retails for over $1,000 broke down quite soon after she brought it home and it took more than three weeks and multiple visits from repair personnel to get it running again.

The unfortunate woman, Heather Armstrong, had a very difficult time with customer service which she wrote about in detail on her blog (personal online journal) and on Twitter (a text-messaging site where people write about what they are having for lunch). Luckily, a customer service representative from a rival company (@BOSCHAPPLIANCES) contacted Armstrong and offered to replace her old Maytag washer with a brand new machine of her choice.
As the old machine had (finally) been fixed, Armstrong convinced the Bosch rep to donate the new machine to a local charity.

You can read more about Armstrong’s experience here (subscription required).

Of course, I’m no journalist, what do I know. I think that a short, stubby article on a “news story” could be used to draw people in as subscribers. Paying subscribers. Or not. What do you think? Leave a comment.

I have a new post on Critical Priorities for Entrepreneurs at the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers site today:

Get Your Website Up and Running

Your website has to say “This is who we are” to the world in a way that is compelling. A great web design doesn’t have to cost a fortune. If you don’t have the HTML skills or graphic talent in-house, look for a young and hungry web designer who’s looking for a shot, as you are.

Expect to update your website regularly and improve it constantly over time. Having a website with months-old or irrelevant content is a real deal-killer. It makes your company look stagnant, at best.