Duration: One day course: 9.30am – 5pm, including lunch.
Available Dates: TBC - contact Jon for details
Venue: Reed Media offices, London
Tutor: Jon Reed, founder of the blog Publishing Talk
Includes: Two free books, 20 pages of handouts, slides
Also available in-house - contact Jon for details.
Includes a free copy of Jon Reed’s book Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing PLUS a PDF download of Jon Reed’s forthcoming ebook The Publishing Talk Guide to Blogging.
Whether you plan to start a new blog or want to improve your existing blog, this practical one-day workshop will help you with the technicalities and strategies required. It covers how to set up your blog using WordPress, what to write, and how to manage, market and monetize your blog.
Aims
Blogging is the essential starting point for your social media strategy. It powers the content engine needed to engage people on social networks and drive traffic to your website. You will come away with your own blog created during the session (or improved, if you already have one), plus a strategy for managing and promoting it, and lots of ideas for blog posts that will keep people coming back to your site.
What you will need:
- A wireless-enabled laptop to make the most of the practical exercises. Free wi-fi is provided.
- No experience of blogging or social media is needed.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the session participants will:
- have created (or improved) their own blog
- understand how blogging fits into their online marketing strategy
- be able to enhance their WordPress blog with plugins and widgets
- have a plan for managing and promoting their blog
- understand enough basic HTML to improve the look of their posts and create bespoke widgets
- have lots of ideas for blog posts – and the confidence to write them
Your Learning Package includes:
- one-day workshop
- FREE copy of Jon Reed’s book Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing
- a PDF download of The Publishing Talk Guide to Blogging as soon as it is available
- 20 pages of PDF handouts, planning tools, templates and cheat sheets to help you get up and running with your blog quickly – and strategically
- online access to PDFs of resources, worksheets and slides
- follow-up support via an online discussion board
- a Certificate of Attendance that may be used as evidence of training to count towards your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) target.
Agenda
MORNING
The morning session will look at the strategy and technology involved in creating a successful blog.
- 09.30 - Welcome and Objectives
- 09.45 - Blogging Strategy – Where does blogging sit in your online marketing strategy? Which blogging strategies will you use? How will you manage the workload? How will you measure your success? We will return to the topic of blog management in the afternoon session.
- 10.15 - Introducing WordPress – an overview of WordPress, the most flexible and powerful blogging platform. ACTIVITY: Setting up your WordPress blog. If you don’t already have a blog, a wordpress.com blog can easily be set up during the session. Guidance will also be provided on self-hosting your own blog using wordpress.org.
- 11.30 – Enhancing Your Blog – adding images and video to your blog; using widgets and plugins to enhance the functionality of your blog.
- 12.00 – HTML for Bloggers – WordPress has a powerful text editor, but you can also edit the code of your posts - and it’s not as daunting as it looks. We will look at some basic code, and a cheat sheet of code snippets will be provided.
12.30 – 13.30 LUNCH
AFTERNOON
In the afternoon session we will look at what to do with your blog once you’ve created it: what to write, how to promote and manage it – and how to make money from blogging.
- 13.30 - Writing Blog Posts – You’ve got a blog – great! But now what do you write? We will look at finding topics, choosing titles, writing for your audience, length and frequency of posts, and how to write engaging posts.
- 14.15 - Managing Your Blog – We will look at planning your content with an editorial calendar, managing the workload and managing multi-author blogs.
- 15.15 - Marketing Your Blog – A blog is great for increasing search engine visibility; but to make sure your blog reaches the widest possible audience you also need to promote it with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
- 16.00 – Monetizing Your Blog - Is it possible to make money from blogging? Often revenue will come from sales of your product or service generated via your blog; but we will also look at other business models such as advertising, sponsorship, membership sites and ‘freemium’ models.
- 16.30 – Questions and Discussion – Wrap-up, discussion and action points.
- 17.00 END
Follow-up
Participants will have access to a secure area of the Reed Media website, where they will be able to download slides and handouts. Handouts will be made available in advance of the session, and slides uploaded after the session. Follow-up questions relating to the session may be submitted via the online discussion board.
About Jon Reed
Jon Reed is a social media consultant who previously worked in academic publishing for 10 years, including as publishing director for McGraw-Hill. He runs several blogs, including Publishing Talk, is a key destination site for authors and publishers interested in social media. It has around 275,000 followers on Twitter, making it one of the most followed Twitter accounts in the publishing world, and the most influential according to Twitter directory WeFollow.
Jon lectures on social media on a number of courses, including at Birkbeck, Brunel, Bath Spa, City and Kingston Universities. He is also running a week-long course on Online Writing for the Arvon Foundation in November 2012, which focuses on building an online platform with blogging.
Jon’s bestselling book Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing: How to use websites, blogs, social networking and much more was published by FT Prentice Hall in 2010.
Follow him on Twitter at @jonreed or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Selected Blogs
Publications
- The Publishing Talk Guide to Blogging (Reed Media, in preparation)
- The Publishing Talk Guide to Twitter (Reed Media, 2011)
Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing: How to use websites, blogs, social networking and much more (FT Prentice Hall, 2010)
- “Small and Mighty”, The Deal: The Official Magazine of the London Book Fair, Spring 2009, pp12-14
- “Time to Talk”, The Deal: The official magazine of the London Book Fair (Spring 2008), pp12-15
- “Selling Yourself Online”, The Writer’s Handbook 2009
Booking
Cost: £347 +VAT per participant. Includes:
- refreshments
- lunch
- PDFs of resources, worksheets and slides, which can be accessed online
- copy of Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing
- PDF download of The Publishing Talk Guide to Blogging
- follow-up support via the discussion board on the resource site.
Places available: this workshop usually runs with a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 10 participants, but may occasionally run with fewer.
Booking: Book online with PayPal, credit card or by requesting a traditional invoice.
Cancellations: You can cancel 4 weeks or more before a workshop for a full refund. For cancellations of 1-4 weeks before a workshop, a charge of 50% of the course fee will apply unless we can re-fill the place or you can substitute a delegate. We cannot issue refunds for cancellations within 1 week of a workshop, and the full fee will apply. We reserve the right to cancel workshops at short notice if dates are under-subscribed, in which case you may opt for a full refund or a place on another workshop. Please check with us prior to making travel arrangements, unless we’ve confirmed the date by sending you a login to the workshop resource site.
This workshop can also be run as an in-house training course. Contact Jon for more information.
